Between the Stars

Summery: Deciding to leave the wizarding world, Harry begins to read and write fantasy stories to fill the void. One story that he reads begins to haunt his mind. He becomes obsessed with it and it becomes obsessed with him.

World: Harry Potter/Labyrinth crossover

Pairing: Harry/Jareth

Warnings: slash, m-preg

A lot has changed in the ten (10!) years since I first came up with this idea. Though I walked away from it, it never really left me. And so the journey will start anew. The beginning is mostly unchanged, but you will start seeing changes before you get very far.

Chapter One

He lived near Hyde Park on an old estate that was far too large for him. It had been mere chance that he'd acquired the property. It was a simple case of being in the right place at the right time, because the elderly owner abruptly decided that he wanted to move away from the city.

The main house was disgustingly extravagant, but he rarely ventured there. Instead, he converted the ground keeper's cottage to serve his purposes and rented out the big house for special events like weddings and the occasional wealthy vacationer. He didn't need the money by any means, but it seemed a bit depressing to see the house empty. The agent he had managing the house, Mrs. Mary Marshal, was a shrewd businesswoman. He paid her handsomely and he was rarely bothered.

Mary was one of the few people that he had any kind of regular contact with. She asked him once why he bothered if he didn't need the money, and why he lived in the city if he wanted to be left alone. His half sarcastic reply had been that he didn't want to have to mow his own lawn.

The truth was that he didn't like silence. With the constant hustle and bustle of the house and city there was always some kind of noise in the background of his life. He could enjoy the relative peace of the park, the grounds, and his little house, but still feel the life of the city around him.

After so many years of war and death, the silence was inevitably haunted with nightmares.

More often than not his only companion was the glowing screen of his computer or the crisp pages of whatever books he had recently procured.

Some years before, not long after moving to London, he discovered a deep longing in his heart. It was a void that he would not allow himself to fill the conventional way, so he started to do it indirectly through books. He read more books in those first year than he read in all his time at school. At first the type of book didn't matter; fantasy, mystery, horror, science fiction, historical, and romance, they all became grist for his mental mill. It was the fantasy novels that he both loved and hated the most. They pulled at that desperate longing in his heart until it felt fresh and new. At the same time they best filled the void.

When the books were no longer enough, he tried his hand at writing his own stories. His first attempts were juvenile at best. Slowly though, so slowly, they began to evolve. He didn't show them to anyone, but he soon realized that he had a knack for story telling.

Time and again he found ideas spinning in his head. He wrote out fantastic adventures of a life he wished he could have lived. They were the wonderful life and trials of a happy families who faced impossible odds and made it through whole. If only his own life had been so well thought out. He might have come through his own childhood without the mental scarring that plagued him.

When his ideas grew few, or he found his grip on reality slipping he would venture into the streets of London. He rarely did more than watch the people, but it was enough. He made a point to browse the bookshops, walk through the markets, and feed the ducks in the park. It was the gentle touch of normality that kept him anchored.

His favorite by and by spot was a little cafe. He had stumbled in one day to get out of the rain and save his new books from ruin. The shop was always warm and comforting. The rich smell of tea and coffee permeated the air. He quickly became a regular customer. The servers knew him and all he had to do was sit down. He always had a cup of the daily special and a croissant. His cup was kept fresh and he always left a large tip.

On days when his house was too cold, too empty, he would go and sit in the little cafe. He spent hours reading or writing in booth next to the windows. Sometimes he would simply sit and watch the people in the cafe or out on the street. He never knew any of them, but his mind supplied a story for each face and he would turn to writing again.

One not so very special day he was sitting at the cafe scribbling away. In his newest adventure his characters were visiting Egypt. Every bit of magic he had ever heard Bill talk about from his time there was woven together into a mystery to be solved.

Harry paid no mind to the people going in and out of the little shop. He always nodded for a refill of his coffee when the waitress came by, but otherwise he was lost in his story.

He ran his fingers delicately over the hieroglyphs. He couldn't read them, but he knew that the large symbol in the center was the Eye of Ra. He tried to remember the Sphinx's words. "Ra will pass. The end is the beginning again. Ra will pass. I am the end but not the beginning. Ra will pass." Oh, how Jaime hated riddles, but the Sphinx's riddle was the only clue.

"I'd have Hugh come running around the corner chased by a swarm of scarabs," said a warm, American accented voice from behind him.

Harry looked up. The woman who had spoken was reading his story from over his shoulder. He wasn't sure what to think of her. Here was a perfect stranger who was critiquing his story; a story that he was writing for himself.

"I beg your pardon?"

The woman looked up from the tattered notebook. "Well, it seems like the kind of trouble a seven year old would find in a cursed pyramid," she stated as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Harry's eyes widened slightly. She reminded him a bit of Luna. It was odd. Just how long had she been reading over his shoulder?

"I do wish that Iris would simply explain the riddle to Jamie though. She seems like the type of person who would have figured it out by now."

Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, but…" He cut himself off. Though he was temped to give her a curt dismissal, he reined in his temper. "Can I help you with something, or do you make a habit of reading over stranger's shoulders?" Okay, so he couldn't rein it in completely.

She seemed startled for a moment. "Oh, I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. Perhaps I was being a bit rude." She had a light flush on her cheeks. "I was just curious because you have been sitting there for quite some time. I glanced at it when I walked by and got absorbed in the story."

Her reaction caused Harry to feel a bit contrite for snapping at her. "No, that's alright. Please have a seat. You owe me that much for reading it."

"Alright." She seemed a bit reluctant, but sat down regardless.

Harry took a moment to observe her while she sat. She was a rather attractive woman with dark hair and olive green eyes. Her long, dark brown hair was swept back into a braid. She looked to be in her early to mid thirties. "My name is Harry Potter." He held out his hand for her to shake.

She took his hand and smiled kindly at him. "Sarah Williams."

"So, Ms Williams, what brings you to my shoulder? Nothing better to do?"

Sarah chuckled. "Please call me Sarah. I'm in town to see my mother. She is playing in a show here. As for reading over your shoulder, well I'm simply a fan of fiction. What about you?" She asked propping her elbows on the table and resting her chin. "That is a rather good story, why write here? Are you published?" She spoke at a high pace and he had to wonder how she managed to breath like that.

"I would love to say that it was for the atmosphere, but the truth is that I just needed to get out of the house. And no, I'm not published. That is a very generous observation though," he stated a bit drolly, answering her rapid course of questions.

Sarah raised an eyebrow. His modesty seemed a little on the extreme side. True, the story was a little rough, but it was worth more than a second glance. "Oh? It wasn't meant as flattery. I just wanted to know who I had to steal you from." She dug into her wallet and handed him a business card.

"Doubloon Publishing? You mean all those fantasy and adventure novels?" Harry glanced several times between the card in his hand and Sarah.

"That's me."

Harry sat back and rested his limp hands on the table. It seemed to push the bounds of incredulity that in a small, out of the way cafe in London he would meet the head of a large and reputable publishing company because she was reading over his shoulder. "This is like something out of a book." He snorted at his own bad joke.

Sarah smiled, but she had to admit that he was right. It was exactly the kind of serendipitous fate that a writer would favor. "So, is there more? That notebook isn't very thick."

Harry wasn't about to tell her that the notebook was magical and thus never ran out of pages. So instead he settled for something less unbelievable and shifted her attention away from the pad. "Of this story? Not really. I have some others at the house though."

Sarah's eyes lit up. "You have more? Finished? Are they this good? Can I see them?" She was speaking rapidly again, and he had some trouble keeping up.

He blinked at her for a moment while he tried to sort out her questions in his head. "Um, yes, yes, I don't know, and your eyes look fine so I suppose you could. I think that those are the correct responses in order."

Sarah rolled her eyes after a moment. Leave it to a writer to correct an editor's grammar. "May I see them?"

Harry chuckled low in his throat. "Yes you may," he answered, his tone perfectly serious. It was only made more humorous by his obviously amused face.

"I think I'm gonna like you."

XXX

It was only a few minutes walk to his house and Harry couldn't remember when he'd had so much fun. Sarah's bright and playful nature reminding him of better days, before he had lost so many of the people he cared about.

She grilled him about his books and little else. It caused a weight to lift from his chest and made him realize that not only did he not have to tell her his life story, but that he couldn't. She was a muggle.

When they approached the park she started on a tangent about how nice it was and how lucky he was to live so close to it. He let her ramble on, not that he could have gotten a word in edgewise. Then she said something that caught his ear. "Toby would love it here. It is almost like you can feel the magic in the air."

She took a deep breath and was silent. "Toby?" he asked.

She looked over at him as they passed by the duck pond. "Oh, I'm sorry. Toby is my little brother. He's obsessed with fantasy and magic. He was extremely jealous when he heard I was coming to England. He would love it here. You would probably get along. You're what, twenty, twenty-one? He is just a little younger than you. He'll be twenty soon."

Harry looked away from her. Did he really look that young? He knew that he was on the small side, but if anything he thought that he looked a bit older than his age. "Actually, I'm twenty-six," he said bluntly.

Sarah stopped in her tracks. "Really? Wow."

She started walking again and neither said anything for an awkward moment. Harry finally decided to break the silence when he saw the big house looming in the distance. "I'm just up here."

Sarah was grateful that he let her rather rude presumption slide and looked up at the house as they approach the gate. "You live here? It's huge."

Harry snorted. 'Huge' was not the usually descriptor that most people thought of when they first saw the house. "I own it, but no I don't live here. I rent the big house for events and such. I live around back in the cottage. It's this way."

He led her around the fence to the back gate and showed her up the short walk. Just before they reached the cottage the landscaping broke for a view of the rear of the big house and its elegant gardens. He heard her whistle and had to grin. Very few people had been to his little house, but the few who had tended to have similar reactions. That was one of the reasons that he never blocked off the view from the start of the path that led from the cottage to the big house. He found it amusing.

By the time she had stopped gawking, he had the door open and was waiting for her to catch up. "Why on earth do you live back here?"

He smiled brightly at her. "I can't imagine myself rattling around in that place alone."

Sarah thought about it for a moment and decided she thought that she could understand. Really, she wouldn't want to be alone in a place that big either. Entering the cottage, she understood even better. It was small, but not cramped. It was well furnished and comfortable, she might even say cozy. She followed Harry through the small mudroom and then the kitchen. He took a moment to offer her a drink, which she declined, and then showed her to his spare bedroom come office.

Here she could feel the man's presence in every facet of the room. Where the rest of the house was neat and free of clutter this room was teaming with signs of constant occupation. There were various books lying about, dozens of notebooks, a waste basket full of crumbled pages, and even more loose pages scattered about on almost every available surface. Various fantasy scenes flashed across the computer's screen. There were several large bookcases lining the walls of the room. The one closest to the computer desk appeared to be various types of reference materials ranging from travel books from around the world, to a full set of encyclopedia, and even books on numerous languages. The other bookcases were overflowing with every kind of fiction novel you could imagine. For all intents and purposes it appeared that Harry all but lived in this room.

"Sorry for the mess. No matter how hard I try to keep it tidy, it always ends up a disaster by the end of the day."

"I've seen far worse. I work with writers for living, remember?"

Harry chuckled a bit and crossed to a small closet that she hadn't seen with all the other clutter. If the door had swung instead of slid, she wasn't sure how he would have managed to ever get it open. She looked inside past him and noticed that there were yet more bookcases. However, unlike the rest, these were stacked exclusively with folders, notebooks, and crudely bound volumes.

She wondered at him when instead of reaching for the shelves he pulled down a large box. He grunted when it's weight left the shelf over his head. It became apparent that the box was extremely heavy when he dropped it with a loud thud just outside the closet door. He pulled the door closed behind him and pushed out his desk chair for her to sit. He flopped down on the floor next to the box and pulled the lid off.

Her breath caught. Inside the box were numerous bound manuscripts. She tried not to get her hopes up, but he started to hand them to her one after another. "Kinko's is a wonderful place. I found it is near impossible to bind several hundred pages together without some serious equipment. Staples, rubber bands, and twine just don't cut it," he said jokingly. She had four of the manuscripts on her lap when he decided to just push the box toward her. "I have two copies of each of them bound like this."

"How many are there?" She was absorbed in pulling them out one at a time, but looked up when she didn't answer her question right away.

He looked like he was thinking and counting on his fingers. "Um, about fifty, I think. I doubt that most of them are any good though. I had no training and so most of the early ones are rubbish. I had them bound anyway just for posterity's sake. They're also really short. I figured that I might come back to them later and work them out."

Sarah blinked. "How long have you been writing?"

"Well, I moved here about six years ago and started writing shortly there after."

She blinked again. He had been righting less than six years and he had already done so much. If the ones he called rubbish were even half as good as what she had read from over his shoulder then they were publishable as they were.

She picked up one of the shorter volumes and saw that it was only a year old. She glanced at her watch. She had to meet her mother for dinner soon. She bit her lip and seriously thought about calling to cancel. She wanted to dive into the potential treasure trove before her. She couldn't do that though. Sarah was going to be in London for two more weeks and her mother was busy, so her time was limited. She looked up at Harry and took a chance. "Can I take one with me and call you tomorrow?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't really mind." He couldn't exactly tell her so, but there were protections spells on them. He was sentimental enough to want to protect them. "If you had a car I would let you take the lot with you so you didn't have to worry about it."

She smiled broadly at him. "Pick one for me, a good one."

Harry shook his head. She didn't get it. As far as his was concerned they were worth about as much as kindling to anyone besides him, but he searched the box anyway. He pulled out one that he had finished some six months before. It was not his favorite, but it was one of them. Even if it was a bit more somber than most. He passed her the rather thick volume. "I think this one is about as good as it gets."

She took it with reverent hands and held it tight to her chest. "I'll call you tomorrow and we'll talk."

XXX

Harry stared at the blinking cursor mocking him from its blank page. It had never mattered to him if someone liked what he wrote or not, because he never showed it to anyone outside of the people who bound the pages together. His stories were for him and him alone. At least that is what he intended when he wrote them.

So why was it that he was so nervous about what a complete stranger thought?

It wasn't that he was worried the books would give anything about the wizarding world away, because he never wrote anything telling about himself or his life. There was always a possibility, no mater how slim, that they could fall into the wrong hands. For the same reason he never used the names or incantations of real spells, the names of people he knew, or actual places from the wizarding world.

He turned and glared halfheartedly at the phone on his desk. It was wasn't the phone's fault that he couldn't write, nor was it the phone's fault that the minutes kept ticking by and it had yet to ring.

Finally Harry gave it up as a bad job and closed the blank document on his computer. She had probably gotten a few pages in and started wondering why she had bothered in the first place, before promptly losing his number.

He should have known better then to get his hopes up, but for a moment he had let himself think that he might have a purpose other then killing dark lords.

He crossed to one of the bookshelves and picked a novel at random. He settled into the large comfy recliner he kept on the far side of the room and started reading. He let himself become absorbed in the story.

This was his true release. While he wrote stories to bring magic back into his life, the ones he read had become about getting away from his life altogether. It took no effort on his part to delve into someone else's trials and tribulations. He was just an observer and no mater what he did the story would play out unchanged. Within the pages he had no control and needed no control. The world did not hinge on his every action.

He lost track of the time and was well into the book when the phone rang. It took a second for him to come back to reality before he crossed quickly to the desk. The world outside had grown dark with the coming evening and he realized that he had never eaten lunch.

He expected it to be someone from the house with a minor emergency that required his attention or Mary calling just to make sure he was still alive, as she did from time to time.

"Hello?"

"Harry, Sorry I didn't call sooner. I couldn't put it down. I had to finish it. I…"

He had truly decided that she wasn't going to call, but Sarah's voice sped on a mile a minute on the other end of the line. He was startled and off kilter. He was hardly registering her words.

"…so I need to meet you and talk about a contract."

"Huh?" was his rather unintelligent reply.

"Oh, good heavens. Never mind. I'm walking out of the hotel right now. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Get dressed and we can talk about it over dinner. I'm starving."

XXX

If Harry hadn't known better he'd have thought that Sarah knew magic, because the next thing he knew he was sitting across from her eating dinner. At least half of what she was saying was going right over his head in a stream of incoherent rambling. He'd tried to get her to calm down several times, but she would speak clearly for a moment before suddenly taking off again. He'd decided that he was best off just letting it run its course.

"...So if you have digital copies I can have this one ready for print in a few weeks. It will be a push, but I think I can have a the first run on shelves within sixty days. So what do you think?"

Harry blinked at her rather stupidly. "I've only understood about a quarter of what you've said," he stated bluntly.

She sighed before giving a deep chuckle. "First thing first. Do you have someone who can review the contract for you?"

Harry waved it off. "I have a someone on retainer who handles my contracts for the estate and various other things. I'll have him look it over. I'm not worried about negotiating for more money. I'll probably just set up another charitable fund. As long as I retain the rights, I don't much care."

Sarah just blinked at him. "Another?"

Harry glanced up from his tea. "Hum? Oh… Well, you obviously noticed that I am quite comfortably well off. I'm an orphan and ended the my godfather's heir as well, so I inherited a fair bit of money. I don't care much for luxury and my tastes have never been expensive. Various events led me to putting those idle funds to better use helping those in need."

It was all very mater of fact, the way he said it as if it were a common thing to do. Sarah couldn't help but feel a sense of awe at the man in front of her. He was truly one of a kind.

She shook it off, despite her desire to pry for more answers. "So, about those digital copies?"

He didn't look up. It was apparent that he was half lost in thought. "I have the files for everything that I've had bound. I can get them for you when we get back to the house."

She narrowed her eyes. She did love a good mystery.

XXX

The next several weeks were a blur. After extending her stay in London Sarah had walked Harry through the process of settling the contracts. After the contracts had been sorted out she got to work actually editing the manuscripts. The digital copies made her job much easier.

Twelve of the books only required minor work before they were ready for print. They would be restricting the release dates to once every six to twelve months. They wanted to make sure that each book had time to settle before the put out a new one. That took most of the pressure off of Harry. She told him that with a little bit of work that his earliest stories could be put together into volumes of short stories, but he declined. For the time being he wanted to go back through them and decided what he wanted to rework first.

The rest of the stories fell somewhere in the middle. They either required a good bit of revision or total reworking. She finally understood what he meant when he had said they were rubbish. It was not that the stories themselves were bad, rather that they were poorly constructed and had noticeable plot holes.

Being as his works were mostly independent of one another, and not a series, this proved not to be a problem. He could come back to them when he felt like it and work forward when he didn't.

Sarah was as happy as she could be. She was absolutely certain that he would be on the bestseller lists within a few months. She was so wrong.

Four days, seven hours, thirty-two minutes, and fifteen seconds after his first book hit shelves across the U.S., U.K., and Canada. the New York Times listed Avarice and Angels by R. J. Black as number ten on their best seller list. It would climb rapidly from there.

TBC

A/N: This first chapter is virtually unchanged from the original up to the cut off point. From here things will slow down. My biggest issue with the previous version is that I got in a hurry. A lot has to happen before I catch up with where chapter one ended in the old version.

Updates still wont be fast, but hopefully not as far apart as before.