A/N: This is a completely Het Labyrinth fic. I know, I'm surprised too. I'm never quite sure I understood the romance angle of the film, at least on the part of the Goblin King, so that's probably where this was born from. That and I enjoy relationships with twisted power dynamics. This version is slightly edited from the originally published version, because being your own beta leads to many mistakes in editing (Advice: Don't be your own Beta :p).

Warnings include: Major Squick for under-age goings on, consensual BDSM. Some NSFW language. As always if you prefer your cup with a different tea, I advise you to look elsewhere. Otherwise please let steep and enjoy.

The Babe

Tylwyth Teg, wee folk, fae, Goblin, Brownie. The class of creatures known as 'fairy' are wildly diverse though they do share a few elements in common. An aversion to iron or the trappings of civilization. A certain spirit that, if it is not malicious, is certainly chaotic, and all are especially fond of children. They are, in fact, most often seen by children and young maidens in addition to those who scorn regular human contact. Many of these creatures are accused of stealing human children, or of leaving one of their own changelings in exchange for the human child. Children are warned to stay away from hills the fair folk are thought to inhabit, and warned of wishing from Goblins, who are more likely to steal them away than grant any wishes. Stories persist too, of maidens kidnapped by faeries, only to return months later with child or carrying a babe of their own. They have no memory of, or at least no will to tell, where they have been. These, of course may simply be tales told to cover up illicit goings on in an effort to preserve the young woman's Chastity. Still it is more often the woodcutter's son who goes missing, rather than the woodcutter himself, despite perhaps more opportunity.

Why they prefer children above other humans, and infants above all other children is unknown. Perhaps they fulfill some great unknown need in the cycle of their lives. Perhaps it is just easier for them to convince the children to stay.

Her will was strong, and in the final act she had said her right words. Sarah Williams had won; She had defeated the mighty Goblin King. So instead of keeping her brother, he sent Sarah her dreams.

The very first dream came on the very next night. Sarah had barely rested her head on the pillow when a black room had appeared before her. A black void really, closely resembling the chamber of their final confrontation. There seemed to be be some sound that echoed round the chamber gradually getting louder. The Goblin King stood before her, back straight and shoulders squared, defiant and cruel. But his eyes told a different story, one that was frantic and desperate. The sound in the chamber echoed louder and louder, until it filled every corner of her being, bouncing round her skull, buzzing like a hundred thousand bees. The sound was only one word. The last one he had said to her before She proclaimed her victory over him. Slave it said, over and over. Sarah knew, as you do in dreams, that she need only deny him again to send the dream away. She could deny him and never dream of the Labyrinth again. But instead she found herself stepping through the blackness towards him. As she drew closer the echoing grew softer, to a gentle hum of anticipation. Sarah stood before the Goblin King, and he gently took her hand up in his. He turned it over to kiss the inside of her wrist, the tiniest flicker of a tongue whispered from between his lips tasting her. A hundred fine needles lanced up her arm, which left her drunk and weightless. The King dropped to his knees before her and kissed each of her feet in turn. Instead of embarrassment at the display, Sarah felt satisfied, as if this were the rightful turn of events. His head turned up and she could stare into his mismatched eyes. Her satisfaction faded then, as the defiance in his previous posture had fled to his eyes. They mocked her and dared her, and said that she was not worthy to be his master. Sarah felt fear.

She wanted to pull away, but instead she found herself putting her hand in his hair to grasp it by the roots, forcing his head back to bare his long, slim white throat. His breath came in long pants, and his feral eyes still looked at her through his long lashes. Before he had worn smoothness and humanity as a thin cloak. Now it had fallen from his shoulders, and she saw the twisted animal snear on his lips. The sound of his breathing seemed to echo the sound of his earlier speech. Sarah laid her other hand along his throat, her rough, labyrinth torn nails gently along his jugular.

In that terrible moment, she knew that he would let her rip out his throat if she so desired, despite that feral gaze. Somehow Sarah knew that if she wanted it, he would give her the strength to do it. In that terrible moment, it felt amazing.

Sarah woke from that dream with her fingers at her throat and a terrible pulsing ache deep in her chest.

She had other dreams that did not end so simply.

After five nights had passed in dreamless sleep, he sent her a dream where he again kissed her feet, but instead did not end there. He continued up wards, kissing her legs, her hips, the undersides of her breasts. Each touch of his lips felt like an attempt to swallow her whole. He stopped just below her collar bone, kissed the hollow of her throat. There his feral eyes all but demanded her permission to continue, that he might claim her lips with his. Her choice was left hanging when she was woken by the sound of her alarm, though she could have sworn the dream had hit when her eyes closed that night. She spent the day nervous and ill, as if she had forgotten an exam. She lost her jean jacket on the bus, and when she slept again he was kissing the inside of her elbow, nipping the skin with his sharp fey teeth. He pressed open mouthed kisses to the inside of her thighs and nipped at her toes, kissed her shoulder just shy of the base of her neck, still begging access to her mouth, though she did nothing save deny him permission. During the next day the sick feeling had migrated into something else. The sense of anticipation replaced the dread. Her jacket turned up in the school's lost and found. The next night his sharp teeth on her body painlessly drew blood, but the sight of his chin covered in red stayed with her. There was an angry red scratch on her belly the next morning, but if it came from her own nails or the teeth in her dream she did not know. On the fourth night he gently healed her dream wounds like an attentive lover, lapping the still fresh blood with his tongue. In the fifth dream she did not see him at all, and Sarah walked through the blackness with the sensation that he was always just out of sight. The night after that the blackness was filled with an opulent palace, with sweet fruits and delicate dresses that floated enchantingly at the slightest hint of a breeze. He lurked in the corners, looking thin and wan, his eyes glittering when she ran her hands along a banister, or fingered a bunch of grapes. She gathered some of the fabric in her hands to feel it, but she did not eat, she did not sit, and she did not dress. She would have mistaken it for a different dream (perhaps one of her own) save that the Goblin king had not yet re adopted his lightning charm or smooth voice, and the crackle of anticipation that had begun to build since the first dream was reaching a fever pitch. The dream ended as she walked out the doors of the palace and it crumbled behind her.

On the night of the seventh dream, sleep did not take her the way it had on the previous six nights. She swam through the murk of sleep to find the Goblin king already waiting for her, sitting on whatever served for a floor in this place. He looked so broken in that for a moment, Sarah thought that she felt pity for him. She had defeated him again and a spark that rippled through her was not the feeling of pity, but power. It lanced through her quicker than any of his dream kisses had. He raised his eyes towards her and he uttered one word in a voice like cracked vellum.

"Sarah..."

He was not asking her. He was begging her. She could taste her name on his lips and it was wonderfully sweet. Sarah allowed herself a moment to savor it, looking more a goblin king than a human girl. She let her hand fall onto his face, summoning him upward with her fingers under his narrow chin. His eyes swam with delirium and Sarah, in her majestic cruelty, smiled and pointed to a place at the side of her neck. He swayed and his lips came to rest gently there. She let him kiss her neck, her cheek, and her ear. His voice cracked again to utter her name and she owned him. Sarah bid him stay still and placed a gentle, chaste kiss at the corner of his mouth.

When she woke in the morning, the triumph had faded to a dull ache, and the manic smile faded from her face. She felt like the power should have made her sick with guilt at using him so, but it just made her sick with guilt about not feeling any guilt at all.

Her dreams continued.

She dreamt that she sat on his throne, and that they fucked on the floor of the throne room angst the filth and feathers and blood left behind by the goblins and their chickens. She dreamt that she bound him in a collar of iron and bid him follow her about like a dog, laughing at his pain and tending to the wounds she had caused as if he were an animal or a child. He dug the claws of his fingers into her thighs as she fed him grapes, and she punished him for it.

In her dreams he chased her through a dark forest as an Owl, his terrible yellow eyes and great wings flashing as his dark claws attempted to score her unblemished flesh. The terror of it followed her through to the next day, despite that the claws had never reached her in her dream. Every noise made her jump, prepared to throw up her arms to protect herself from tearing talons and rending beak.

She dreamt that she wore a crown and rode him like a stallion, his long arms tied with the purple leather belt she had worn to school that morning. She dreamt that he bit her shoulder and took her like a dog, forcing her head into the pillows of his bed. Once in her dreams they made love in her parent's bed while Toby wailed in the next room and her father shouted in to ask if she was quite done yet.

But Sarah was still a teenager, and the dreams came without context and without feeling. She woke always unfulfilled. She had never been kissed, never been held outside her peach drugged dreams in the labyrinth, and though she imagined what it would feel like to have the Goblin king burrow himself deep inside her, she knew it was nowhere near to reality.

She dreamed that she had sex with her high school English teacher in front of the king in chains. In the morning Sarah was careful to check that the man proved no more attractive than he had before the dream. But he complemented her on her essay as he handed it back to her, and she smiled at him a smile now a little bit too old for her now sixteen years. The teacher was very careful to never look her in the eye after that, to never be alone with the girl, because he knew what road those smiles were prepared to lead him down.

She practiced her smiles on others. She got a young man from another class to climb the huge oak in the schoolyard to fetch her scarf with a smile that promised more than she said. He fell and broke his wrist in the process. Casual cruelty in her dreams ran over into her waking hours and it made her ill. Not for the acts, but for how well she carried them out.

She dreamed that she took nettles in her hand lashed the back of the Goblin King bloody, their sharp spines stinging her palm with every strike. Afterword he turned away from her with the blood running down his hips, and she grasped the nettles to her to feel them prickle at her breast. He was back in her dreams the next night, and she punished him all the more harshly for turning away. Still he returned and Sarah wondered idly where affection met cruelty in her new world.

School came to a close and summer approached. Parties to celebrate the end of another wretched year sprung up like weeds, and Sarah went, danced to the popular music and drank illicitly aquired booze. She chose a boy with long limbs and sandy hair. He passed her a red cup filled with some red drink that stank of rum. She smiled her new practiced smile on him, leaned over his thighs to brush her hand near the zipper fly of his jeans to put the cup on an end table. Her long chestnut hair tickled his neck and her breasts brushed his arm as she whispered in his ear. Sarah drew him out into the woods behind the house, promise in the sway of her hips, acting the nymph for all that she was. The lanky youth followed her helplessly, and complied immediately when she forced his head between her legs, just as she had done in the dream on the previous night. His unpractised tongue filled in the gaps in her imagination, and she held the boy's hair until she had her fill. They hastily made love under the trees. Too quickly for Sarah - her discomfort had barely faded and her hips begun to flex when he jerked erratically and groaned. His head collapsed against her breast. They dressed and returned to the party. They snuck out twice more, and each time was better than the last. But it was not the same. That night she returned to her sleep and found the King waiting for her. She sobbed in his arms, weeping not, for her lost virginity, but for the lost opportunity to fill in the content her dreams. He whispered promises that the next lover would be better, and kissed her tears away; acting the man instead of the creature that howled for the hand of his mistress.

Sarah never saw the boy again. He was a cousin, someone explained, visiting from far away. She found others. Some were kind to her, and some were not. But none of them worshiped her like her goblin king. Each time he promised her the next would be better, would be kinder, or stronger, and there was something sharp and alien and hungry in his face as he said so.

In some of her dreams he was smooth as glass, attending like a royal courtier. In others he played the petulant child, practically begging her wrath and her punishment. But always she ruled through the strange farce of their power. He could snap her neck like a twig, drop her in an oubliette - but he would bare his throat with fear that she would make good on the promise of those first dreams. He would bring her the switch with which she could strike him in punishment, and shuddered under every blow. It was too much power for any teenager to wield, but she did anyway. In some of her dreams he was a terrifying figure - the beast that lay behind his tamed wildness became untamed, and her iron control of it wavered. She was left running for her life or begging for it. However, Sarah now spent more time asleep than awake. They passed a year this way, her dreams more real than her life, her human lovers as shallow, delicate replacements for the one in her dreams. They would not bleed for her.

But Sarah was not careful with her boys and they were all selfish creatures - too caught up in the fantasy to worry overmuch with the fairy creature they supposed to have caught. After two years of her dreams Sarah fell pregnant and told no one. She was perhaps lucky to have avoided it so long. The father was unknown to her but she secretly supposed it was the sandy haired long limb-ed boy in the woods that first night, despite how impossible the timing. For a while, she wilfully ignored it sinking further into the fantasy of her dreams which were now her life, taking the loss of her first monthly bleed out of the flesh of the Goblin king's back.

But as the babe grew, it took her dreams with it. To reach them she had to swim through a fog, which darkened and thickened with each passing week. When she reached them her Goblin King was cold, retreating even further from the man persona he sometimes wore. His eyes glittered as they had when she first came to the labyrinth, years ago.

Without her dreams she was left lost. Yet still she told no one. Not about the dreams or the babe. She became a mute, staring through her family as if they were air.

Then she stopped dreaming all together. She was eight weeks into her pregnancy.

A week passed.

Then two.

Three passed, and she had a dream of the normal variety, fragmented and unremembered. She floated in a great sea, and that was that. She wondered idly if she should cut the thing that was stealing her dreams from her belly, but a cold fear filled her at the notion. Still she told no one.

Week four was filled with a fitful sleep that did not lend itself to dreaming. She would wake to the screeching of owls outside her window where none had been before. She would sleep again in that vast ocean and be woken by the rattling of the wind at her window.

At the beginning of the fifth week since she stopped dreaming altogether, and the thirteenth week since her missed blood, something strange happened. The little red leather bound book made a re-appearance on her bed, and Sarah knew then, what she wanted. She knew what it was that she wished. Her voice was unused to words since her forced silence, so it came out a pale imitation of its former self. Still she could have whispered and he would have heard. The terrible screech of the Owl sounded and the wind caught the latch of her window to force it open. Cold air swirled into the room, tossing her brown hair and curling about her ankles. Sarah clasped the red bound book against the subtle curve of her belly, but did not turn when she felt the wild tang of free magik at her back. It breathed over her neck, and softly into her ear.

"Sarah. Give me the child."

Sarah shuddered and she felt the magik curl about her arms, probing and feeling for the life inside of her. The air thrummed with an electric anticipation. She knew the answer to the question before she asked it, but it needed to be said.

"What will you give me in return?" She was falling, falling back into a vast ocean, and the sights of everything she had gained and lost played back in her memory. The smell of power tickled in the back of her throat. She knew the answer, delivered in a voice smoother than glass and darker than chocolate

"Your Dreams."