A/N: Just a heads up: this is going to primarily focus on Jareth/Sarah, set in the Repo! universe. You might notice a couple of little nods towards other characters as we go on, but if you're looking for a voguing contest between Jareth and Pavi, then I'm afraid you're in the wrong place. Chapter titles will most likely all be lyrics from various Repo! songs. Enjoy!
Waking up from the sweetest of dreams can sometimes seem like the worst ordeal in the world. You're torn away from your heart's hidden desires, forced out from the comforting warmth of your thoughts and your bed to face the cold, cruel world. So, too, it would seem, that waking from a nightmare is always a blessing, when you're stolen away from whatever ghouls stalk the night and the relief floods through your bones. However, if the world you wake up to is far worse than any nightmare might depict, the picture each morning paints bleaker and blacker by the day, then you might find yourself in envy of your sleeping mind, whatever nocturnal terrors it chooses to curse you with.
Sometimes, reality can be the greatest horror show of all.
On what was to be the last day of her life, Sarah Williams woke from one such nightmare, squinting in the light of one more dreadful morning. Sweat-soaked sheets were her lone companion, and she shed them quickly, the same way she had cast off anyone else who might have shared her bed, or even her company. In her relatively short, lonely life, there hadn't been many to begin with. With the world the way it was, she found it hard to trust anyone but herself. She slipped out of bed, hissing to herself as her feet touched down on icy cold wooden floorboards. Heat was a rare guest in her apartment those days as well.
As she crept into her apartment's small bathroom to pee, she cast a wary glance at the ancient mirror over the sink, and deemed her long, dark hair worthy of one more day without washing. There was hardly enough left on the electric meter for a shower as it was, and there seemed little point in using up what small amount remained in her bank account to top up anyway, all things considered. The mirror, like its current occupant, had seen better days, scuffed and cracked in one corner, its bare edges pitted dark brown with age. Still, it covered up most of the patch of black mould which had cropped up on the wall months ago and still refused to be banished.
As always, Sarah diverted her gaze from the mirror as she undressed, eyes deliberately turned away from the silver line of scar tissue that bisected her chest. It had healed well since her surgery, but some wounds, despite their clean lines, continue to spread and fester beneath the surface. Sarah refused to acknowledge her own deep-reaching scars as she tied back her hair and slipped under the weak spray of a lukewarm shower.
The heart transplant that had saved her life had come at the expense of her mother's, and though Sarah wasn't technically to blame for the older woman's brave sacrifice, she had never quite forgiven herself for it either. The two of them had lived together in a place only slightly bigger than this, living from hand to mouth as Linda Williams' acting career stalled and stagnated, and the odd jobs she relied on to pay the rent grew harder and harder to find. When an epidemic of organ failures first swept the nation, claiming wave after wave of innocent lives, they had managed to fool themselves into thinking they had somehow avoided the plague. As it turned out, the two of them were just late to the party.
First came the breathlessness, the nagging pains and the non-stop sweating, swollen ankles and total exhaustion already at the advanced age of twenty-five. As much as Sarah tried to turn a blind eye on her own symptoms, she couldn't ignore her mother's, especially when the coughing started, thick phlegm laced with blood. Together, they had both bitten the bullet and found the money to have the relevant tests.
Heart failure. Already serious, already moving towards the final stages at an advanced pace, too far gone for any medication to touch. Surgery was the only escape. GeneCo, a company which had quickly risen up in the face of the organ crisis to become be all and end all of transplants – not to mention the only name in the business who offered financing – had said they would operate the same day. Customer comfort and satisfaction were their top priorities. The repayment plan for a new heart was insanely high, but Linda Williams had wasted no time in signing over the contract, urging Sarah to do the same.
Her mother insisted that Sarah went first: "What kind of mother would I be if I let my baby girl suffer any longer? You take today, sweetie. I'll be right behind you, once you wake up."
It was only after the operation, after the weight and cost of a new heart had been added to her chest, that Sarah realised it had all been a ruse. Linda had never intended to go ahead with her own operation. Between the two of them, the monthly repayments for one heart would be difficult; for two hearts, it would be impossible. After that little revelation, the pair of them had argued a lot, but that was then – back in the days before Linda Williams became too sick to do much of anything any more.
Sarah's whole world had pretty much gone to shit in the couple of years since then. Some days, she mourned that her mother had died so soon; others, she was glad that Linda had at least gotten out before things really turned messy. As GeneCo's profits sky rocketed, their ethical code continued to deteriorate. If you couldn't pay, they took it away – a fair enough business practice for any company that didn't deal in vital organs. If you couldn't afford the borrowed organ in your chest, then GeneCo took it back. From what Sarah had heard, the cold-hearted Repo Men they employed to reclaim their property weren't that picky about customer satisfaction, or even leaving their victims breathing. They were a looming shadow behind your back from the moment you missed your first repayment, paving the way to the grave for anyone stupid or stubborn enough not to sell their very souls in order to keep up with those gruelling payment plans. That morning, a full eighty-nine days behind with her plan, Sarah could feel those Repo Men breathing down her neck.
As she dried off with a threadbare pink towel, she wracked her brain to think of any way she could have tried harder. She had been marked as a flight risk the second she missed the first monthly repayment, and the first of the unforgiving late fees began to pile on. There was no chance of skipping town unnoticed. Her credit rating was already in the toilet. She had begged and pleaded with her boss for another advance on her salary, but as she was often reminded, the company she worked for was a bank, not a charity. If she died tomorrow, there would be plenty of other drones willing to take her place. She had torn her heart in two by pawning her mother's old jewellery, scrimped and saved on her groceries and on every other bill, and sold everything in her apartment that wasn't nailed down. The only thing she had left to cash in was her dignity, and even that wouldn't go for much. The sex industry was as fucked as everything else in the city, over-saturated with Zydrate junkies and other desperate souls who would do just about anything for their next hit, or even a hot meal.
Sarah's stomach took that as a reminder, grumbling louder than ever. Shivering, she dragged herself out of her stupor and into a white blouse, a charcoal grey pantsuit, and a pair of low heels. As she twisted her hair into an easy updo, she figured that she was far too sensibly dressed to sell herself on the streets that day anyway.
Breakfast was a quick and joyless affair: plain oatmeal and instant coffee served black. She ate slowly, tasting nothing, a growing weight in her stomach that oats just couldn't account for. When the meal was over, she rinsed off her dishes and snagged her keys from the hallway table, followed by her bag and jacket from the hook upon the door. She locked up the apartment behind her like any responsible, dutiful tenant who didn't have less than twenty-four hours to live.
Some people might have spent their last day on earth making peace with the end of their life, or visiting the places that held meaning for them one last time. Sarah didn't have the urge that day to do either. She had no family or real friends to say goodbye to, and no treasured possessions to give away; her only pleasant memories in that rat-infested city had died alongside her mother. She preferred to keep busy, refusing to wait out the day in a state of restless panic, and work was as good a way to kill time as any. Like any wage slave living on borrowed time, she was paid daily for the hours she put in, and nothing more. Today would be no different. At least the last small credit she received would cover a decent meal, and one last gift.
Work was pleasantly mundane, allowing her mind to wander but never too far. When Sarah emerged, the evening had already begun to close in, staining the streets in inky shades of grey and black, with only the infrequent street lamp to cast down its weak yellow glow. Her walk home was a slow one, hindered by dark thoughts and small, timid steps. Dead woman walking, she thought, and felt her dry lips creak into some vague semblance of a smile. At least she would finally be able to tell her creep of a landlord to get fucked, instead of having to keep up the polite, subdued woman act any longer. She could finally tell him to take his leering eyes and his wrinkled old dick and choke on them – the last highlight of a particularly shitty day. Huh, my mother always did say I was an optimist.
A sheath of colourful flyers had been spilled across the slick concrete, ground into mush in places by rain and footfall. Sarah stepped over the mess with only a brief glance downward, recognising GeneCo's latest prima donna smiling up at her, selling that month's Genetic Opera. As curious as Sarah was about the whole freak show, she refused to pump more money into the hypocrisy; the rich and glamorously grotesque came together over music and champagne to praise the incredible surgical skills behind their nose jobs and tummy tucks, while those truly in need of medical care went without. It all seemed repulsive to her. It also helped that even the cheap seats were well out of Sarah's price range.
During her grim walk, she stopped off to buy flowers for her mother's grave, choosing one of the few boutiques that still favoured real blooms over the sickly-smelling artificial alternatives. At the counter, she parted ways with most of the cash she had on hand for a decent sized bouquet, choosing pinks and oranges and purples – anything that might brighten up a cold grey headstone. Her mother had always been drawn to flowers; no matter what limp, glorified weed Sarah had brought her as a child, they had always been welcomed and marvelled at without a hint of false joy. Whatever pitiful graveside bunch she had received in the past, dependant wholly on her only daughter's struggling bank balance, Linda Williams was never one to complain. Sarah felt it was the least she could do to leave her with one last splash of colour in all her grim surroundings. She kept the flowers clutched to her breast, inhaling their sweet scent to block out the smoke and stink of the streets as she made her way to her mother's final resting place.
The change in volume was striking as she slipped away from the post-work crowds and into the almost empty cemetery. As Sarah passed through the wrought iron gates, the temperature seemed to drop, and she pulled her jacket a little tighter around her body, hearing the bouquet's paper wrapping crinkling against her chest. Only a couple of other mourners were in attendance that evening, and they paid her no mind as they attended their own loved ones. The place was lit sparingly, more so than the streets, and she found herself minding her footing more than watching the path ahead. She knew the way well enough by then. For a time, there was only the dull crunch of heels upon gravel, and the pounding of her borrowed pulse at her temples.
Linda Williams lay at rest at the end of a long row, positioned between a stone for Terrance Bousman, Beloved Husband and Father, and a massive stone mausoleum that left all the nearby graves in its shadow. The size of it screamed money, but in all of Sarah's past visits she had never once seen it visited. As she drew closer, it surprised her to see that one of the mausoleum's twin doors had been left open a crack.
A pair of half-crushed soda cans sat atop her mother's granite headstone, and Sarah set them aside with a frown. Security patrols came and went, always keeping mourners and any would-be miscreants on their toes, and yet the trash still managed to sneak through. With all their morbid beauty – the elegance and gothic romance of the elaborately carved monuments and sepulchres – the city's cemeteries were a popular choice for a cheap first date. Despite living in a world full of death, it was all a little too morbid for Sarah's taste. Thinking about being dead was bad enough, but the thought of doing it while teenagers tried to get to second base just above your head was pretty galling.
"I'm sorry, Mom. I hope they weren't too … never mind."
With a rueful smile, Sarah went to work. First she cleared away the cans, and then the dry, dead flowers from her last visit. Her mind was blissfully blank as she went through the familiar routine, tossing out the old water and refilling the small metal grave vase, before unwrapping the bouquet she had brought. As she knelt by her mother's grave, snipping the stem of each flower to size, it was actually a relief to realise no one would have to do this for her. Sure, there were a handful of colleagues and acquaintances who might care enough to notice she was gone, but there was nothing left in her account to cover a proper burial. Hell, even now that the annual death rate was finally starting to stabilise, it was almost impossible to find an employer who provided a decent funeral package. Mass graves for the poor might not have been a popular water cooler topic, but everyone knew they existed. For some of them, it was all they could hope for. As Sarah cut, and placed, and repositioned, she realised she had started to shiver.
With the flowers finally arranged to her liking, the gravestone itself wiped clean of dust and grime with an old handkerchief, Sarah sat back on her heels for a little family time. She talked to her mother about mostly trivialities: the new girl at work, the re-reading of one of her favourite books, and the new soup recipe she'd created. What she neglected to mention was that the soup had been made out of the dwindling remains of her mostly empty store cupboard, and that the book was one of the few that had been too dog-eared to sell. She omitted the fact that the new woman at work, the one with the kind eyes and the sympathetic smile, had no doubt already moved her things into Sarah's empty desk, ready to replace her when the inevitable happened. She talked and she talked, the occasional heavy tear leaking out from under her eyelids, until there was no way of putting it off any longer.
"This is … I guess this is the last time I'll be able to come here to see you, Mom. Things have been getting worse, and … and it's not looking too good right now. I've got until midnight tonight to pay up, and I just don't have the money. They're … they're going to take my heart. I'm sorry. I know we both … we both wanted more than this, but I've been trying so hard for so long, and I'm just so goddamn tired. There's nothing else I can do. I guess at least I'll be with you pretty soon." She swiped at her eyes and sniffled, before letting out a moist little laugh. "I just hope you're not too disappointed in me when I get there. I'll be … it'll be fine. Listen, I love you, okay? I hope you know that. I really hope you know."
As always when she was ready to leave, she pressed her fingers to her lips and then touched them to the place where her mother's name was engraved, sighing at the feel of the cold stone. Linda Williams was far past giving her opinion on anything. Unfortunately, the dead never talked back.
"Hey, you out there!"
The hissed salutation made Sarah jolt forwards almost fast enough to leave her shoes behind. A low cry left her lips when she found her hands resting on her mother's grave for support, and she stumbled upright in a hurry. When she went looking for its source, tossing her head left and right, she found nothing and no one, making her wonder if she had simply dreamed it. "Hello?" she called.
"In here," came a slightly louder hiss from her right. It seemed to be coming from the old mausoleum. "Listen, I'm sorry to interrupt your time with your mum, but I could really use your help in here. I think I can make it worth your while. We might … we might be able to help each other."
Sarah frowned at the grand structure. Only a fool would trust a hidden whisperer in a graveyard. Only a fool would feel some minuscule stirring of hope with death already looming on the horizon. Nevertheless, she felt her feet moving forwards.
Chapter title from: Things You See in a Graveyard