He Who Wonders…
By
Ming-Yue-Huo
Disclaimer: Labyrinth is not mine. Duh.
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Chapter 1: Candle Smoke
There was something tangibly moody in the room when Sarah blew out the perfectly-placed candles on her eighteenth birthday cake. -A certain tension; a listlessness that choked the merriment from the room's atmosphere.
They had all become used to it by now, though.
Perhaps it was merely the sensation of being older. Sarah smiled in response to every "Happy birthday!" she'd received that day, at the town library, at work, around town, but the meaning behind the words didn't fully hit her until her stepmother switched on the dining room lights, washing the room in the blatant light of banality. Beneath the hanging light fixture, grey candle smoke twisted languidly and faded into the air like a waking dream.
"Happy birthday!" Sarah's father grinned across the table, carefully offering the handle of a long cake knife. The reinforcement of reality curled inside Sarah's gut like a white-hot coal as she took the cake knife and served her family. Toby echoed his father's well wishes from his raised seat at the end of the dining room table. Usually his mother sat there, but on special occasions she allowed him to indulge in the kingly fantasies that that particular seat seemed to stir within him.
"Mmm, delicious." Sarah's father gestured to the cake with his fork. After a moment of silence, he spoke again. "I thought you would have wanted to have a big party with all your friends to celebrate, but I'm not complaining. More cake for us, right?"
Sarah responded with a quick smile and then returned her gaze to her slice, hardly tasting the cake that she had slaved over that afternoon. The scent of smoke and a sort of oppressive nostalgia lingered in the air as the family consumed their cake in relative silence.
Sarah could easily have had a large birthday party with her friends. She could envision the streamers, the loud voices, the laughter, the music… but when her stepmother, Karen, approached her about planning the event a few weeks back, she looked up from her book without a shade of uncertainty in her grey eyes and said, "I think just a small family party will do." She hadn't given the subject a single thought prior to that moment, but somehow she didn't have to. She already knew.
Even now, in the heavy silence broken only by the periodic clinking of forks on plates, Sarah felt no regret about her decision. Well to be honest, she didn't really care. She would have preferred to forget the event altogether, but that would be asking a bit too much. It was her last summer before college, after all.
"Sarah, dear." She heard her stepmother speak as if from a distance.
"Hmm?"
Karen, hand extended, carried a stack of dessert plates. Her expression bespoke utmost patience; she'd come to understand Sarah's spacey moments over time.
"Oh. Ha." The laugh echoed as falsely as the fork's clink against the plate, the dull glare of the dining rooms lights, and the lingering plastic smell of the perfect pink birthday candles.
Her stepmother did not appear to notice the sound's hollowness, nor Sarah's father. That was alright with Sarah, however. Only Toby, five years old and still clutching the worn teddy bear, Lancelot, looked up at Sarah's blank expression.
Well, children were just more attuned to things like that anyway, Sarah thought, dismissing his sudden attentiveness. When life was simpler, purer, there were fewer things to distract them from the occurrences around them. Sarah met Toby's inquisitive gaze with a light smile.
-But perhaps not, because Toby was now distractedly pointing at the last wisps of smoky haze curling around the light fixtures and holding up Lancelot so that the toy bear could see too.
Dark glass eyes gazed vacantly up at the ceiling, unseeing and unfeeling.
For a moment, Sarah felt a burst of compassion for her brother, who simply couldn't comprehend that Lancelot wasn't alive, couldn't talk, hear, see, or even vaguely care about the stupid candle smoke.
Poor sod… his imagination kept him so far from reality. Sarah bit her lip as she watched.
Returning to reality was harsh. The experience didn't sweep you from your feet or leap up in front of you, no. Reality slowly encroached on your hopes and dreams. It bathed your most fantastical delusions in artificial light and dissected them until they were nothing. Nothing but cold resolutions and empty ideas and-
"Sarah? Sarah, where are you...? What on earth is going on, Richard?" Dusting her hands on her apron, Sarah's stepmother returned in time to see the young woman disappear from the room.
Sarah's father looked wearily from the stairs to his wife's confused expression. "I think she just got a little tired. Maybe she's still recuperating from all the excitement."
Toby and Lancelot's eyes looked toward the staircase where Sarah had just exited, both expressions blank, yet full of knowing.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Sarah's bed creaked with age, whispering the endings to a thousand fairytales and bedtime stories as Sarah threw herself face first onto the covers.
And they lived happily ever after…
But how, exactly? How did they find 'happily ever after'?
"It can't possibly be that easy…" Sarah mumbled into her pillow. Heaving a tight sigh, Sarah turned onto her back and glared at the ceiling.
What happens when the heroine starts living in the present and finds that she can't forget the past?
The comforting scent of her blankets eased some of the tension from her body. However, without the tension Sarah could now feel that aching emptiness that came with the realization of reality. "The recognition of nada", as Hemingway might put it. This revelation had happened long ago for Sarah, but the scars remained, literally and figuratively.
Detachedly raising her right hand before her face, Sarah studied the crisscrossing lines of pale white that trailed down the outer edge of her hand. When she clenched her fist, the broken lines of scar tissue formed whole lines across her curled little finger. For a few moments, Sarah closed and unclosed her fist, watching as the many lines came together, shattered, and became whole again.
Just like magic, she mused sardonically.
Downstairs just now, she had shocked herself with the bitterness of her thoughts. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt such burning, melancholy envy toward her brother. Or anyone.
Toby could still see Lancelot wink at him when he woke in the morning, and hear the secrets in the birdsongs from the oak tree occupying the front yard, and just sitting in a booster seat at the end of a table made him feel like a king. Magic still existed in Toby's world.
Exhausted, Sarah released her clenched fist one last time, sighed, and sat up without feeling. Approaching her vanity dresser, she remarked upon how out of place it looked in her room. Wooden bookshelves lined the tiny walls of her room, rising above her head with solemn severity, and books lay everywhere, crammed in the bookshelves and lying in stacks –or drifts- on the carpeted floor of her bedroom. Added to the mess were various school papers; term papers, study guides, blank sheets of lined paper, and scattered pencils galore. Within this stoic mass of school paraphernalia, the vanity dresser looked… well, childish.
It served its purpose, however. A full wall mirror would have taken up useful bookshelf space.
Sarah hauled the chair from her desk by the window and plunked it down in front of the vanity. Dragging a brush through her hair automatically, Sarah eyed her dusty reflection. On the other side of the mirror, grey eyes stared back unsmilingly as their owner tugged at her nondescript brown hair. Nothing special, really. The grey eyes conveyed no real emotion, save a slight hint of bitterness. But that could just be a trick of the light. The reflection winced while Sarah worked a knot from her long hair.
After a moment, Sarah set down the brush and hesitantly reached into a drawer. Rummaging through a jumble of school papers, pencils, pens, and erasers, she withdrew an old, battered tube of lipstick. Maybe if she pretended to be like her old childish self, dressed herself in costumes, and read fairytales, the forces of nature might grant her one last… dream.
Not since her sixteenth birthday had she dreamed. Oh sure, maybe those ridiculously generic Oh-no-I-failed-all-my-classes-HOSHIT dreams, but nothing vivid; never the kind of dreams that inspired her to write stories late at night or the kind that left her smiling as she pondered their meaning. Nothing she could lose herself in.
But then there was always that one dream -it must have been a dream, she knew it had to be a dream- which remained even after all the others faded and her dreaming ceased completely.
It was that dream of a time and place where fairytales got turned upside down and the way forward was the way back –or something like that- and there was shrill barking, a low grumbling, a deeply bellowed greeting, and a pair of deep, dark eyes that watched bemusedly with every turn of a giant disconcerting maze.
The dream of the labyrinth lodged in Sarah's mind and would not die. Every moment of every day somehow reminded her of the amber sky and the damp, stone walls and the adventures that lay therein. There had to be some hidden meaning in it, she decided. It wouldn't linger at the edges of her memory if she wasn't missing something. Yet Sarah could only vaguely remember what had happened in the dream. She never saw the faces behind the voices; she could only recall the endless stony twists, a desperate feeling clawing at her stomach, and that eerie set of mismatched eyes that seemed to see far deeper than her own ever could.
The lipstick made a pathetic clanging noise as it joined the rubbish in Sarah's wastebasket. Sagging, Sarah sank forward and placed her forehead on the polished surface of her vanity dresser.
It was all a dream.
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A/N: Well, well, hello again!
I'm pleased to finally submit something again, after so long! (Although I'm not super-pleased with this ridiculously long, drawn-out chapter or the fact that I've been sucked into yet another fandom.)
I know I virtually disappeared this year, but I expect to make a comeback this summer. -Unless AP work kills me off first. We shall see. I hope to make some updates to "The Heart Within" soon, but right now my energies are focused on the upcoming chapters of this fic. (By the way, cookies for anyone who understands the significance of the title!)
Please leave a review! Feedback is, as always, appreciated. And feel free to message me about the story anytime. I'm always up for a conversation!
-MYH