CHANGELING

Skin white as snow, lips red as blood and hair black as– wait, creepy otherworldly eyes? Oh, that sneaky Fae bastard has so much explaining to do.

"Sarah," Karen smiles sweetly one morning at breakfast, when her father is away for a business trip and Toby is still fast asleep. "Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

She can't know, right? Her stepmother can't possibly have found out about the whole Labyrinth mess; it's not like Toby has the necessary vocabulary skills to tattle on her (yet). Besides, it's been a year now – thirteen months, to be exact. This has to be about something else… but what? "I don't think so," Sarah shrugs.

"Are you sure?" Her stepmother persists with a sly, knowing smirk. "Something about a boy, perhaps?"

"What?" She demands, so taken aback by the mere suggestion that she nearly chokes on a bite of French toast.

Karen springs out of her chair to pat Sarah's back rather forcefully as the girl succumbs to a coughing fit. "Oh, dear," The older woman frets, handing Sarah a glass of water once she's settled down. "I didn't mean to- it's just, well," Karen shrugs as she returns to her seat. "You're glowing, Sarah. I thought maybe it was first love or some such."

"First-" Sarah echoes. "Oh, no," She assures Karen with a laugh, wiping away leftover tears from her coughing fit. "No, no, no. You and Dad won't have to worry about that just yet, Karen."

"If you say so," Karen shrugs, hiding a smile behind the rim of her glass. "But you really are glowing. A bit pale, but you haven't been spending that much time at the park anymore so that's to be expected."

Maybe she's a bit pale as Karen delicately puts it because she hasn't had a good night's sleep in a year - and most of it has to do with why she's stopped going to the park and play-acting entirely - but of course she can't tell her stepmother that. It'll only lead to more questions. "Well, you know I haven't had much time to go out lately. I need to ace the SATs if I want to go off to college."

That does the trick. Karen drops the matter entirely and goes on about college instead, telling Sarah once again how thrilled her father is that she's finally given up on her daydreaming and now plans to attend college. They're still not that happy with her chosen major (but what would you do with an English degree, Sarah? Teach? You know, your father would love for the firm to be a family business) but it's definitely an improvement.

Later that night, Sarah sits in front of her mirror and scrutinizes her reflection in a way she hasn't done since her return. She's given up on a lot of things in the last thirteen months, including her unhealthy practice of staring at herself for hours and trying to pick out the similarities between her and Linda. But tonight she looks, looks so hard she thinks she sees her skin turn porcelain-white and her lips turn blood-red and her bedroom turn into another world entirely.

She drapes a blanket over the mirror.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall," She sing-songs to herself, eyes flashing and lips smirking. "The Evil King can't see me now."

But even that assurance can't lull her to sleep.

"I should've just stuck with English," Sarah declares the minute Karen opens the door, welcoming her home for Christmas.

"Oh, honey, it can't be that bad. You're a bright girl; I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually," Karen offers supportively without missing a beat, ushering Sarah in and calling for Robert and Toby to come see what the cat dragged in.

Her parents had been overjoyed when Sarah announced she'd decided to pursue a career in psychology, spurred on by a burning need to understand people. How can someone walk out of their daughter's life and never look back? How can a young girl become so self-centered she's willing to wish her brother away? What kind of messed-up person sits around waiting for a summons to kidnap babies?

People (and other creatures) are confusing and Sarah needs to solve this puzzle just as she's solved every other puzzle she's ever encountered. But first she needs to survive college and if this semester is any indication, that's going to be one hell of a challenge.

Karen tries her best to get Sarah's mind off school, at least for a little while. She recruits her stepdaughter to help her with dinner and keeps Sarah's hands busy with preparations and her mind occupied with an endless stream of conversation.

"I love what you've done with your hair," Karen smiles when they've run out of Toby-related topics. "It's a bit dark, especially with your skin," Sarah's figured out that's just how some mothers are and she shouldn't take it personally that Karen can't offer her a compliment without picking at some part of her appearance in the same breath, "but I love the way it curls. I've always thought you would look better with something other than straight hair. This adds so much character. But how did you get it to do that?"

"Do what?" Sarah asks, wondering what Karen's going on about. She hasn't done anything with her hair, can't even remember the last time she had it trimmed. It's just been twisted up into a messy bun for the last three months or so.

"The curls, dear. You've got such a mix going on there: spirals, waves, twists. You know," Karen gives her a little smile, just the slightest bit wistful. "I always imagined a Faerie Queen would have hair like that. It's wild, but beautiful."

Sarah gives her a teasing grin to hide the uneasiness brewing in the pit of her stomach. Is Karen seeing things or is she undergoing another… change? "I thought you never imagined things like Faerie Queens and the likes. You were a very sensible young woman, remember?" She parrots back the same old words Karen must've told her a thousand times when she was younger and had her head in the clouds, too carried away with her fantasies to pay attention to her stepmother's efforts to ground her in reality.

"Oh, don't be silly, Sarah," Karen laughs. "All children believe in faeries. It's only when we grow up that the world becomes a less magical place."

A less magical place – how Sarah wishes that were the case. She excuses herself after dinner, claiming exhaustion after hours of driving. After a quick shower, she finds herself thumbing through an old collection of faerie tales while waiting for her hair to dry. It takes a while – she really needs to see about getting it trimmed while she's here – but three stories later, her hair's dry enough for her to quickly run a comb through it a few times before she goes to sleep.

Sarah's hair has been straight all her life. It stayed straight when her mother tried to curl it for a beauty pageant, it stayed straight when she used to attend sleepovers and her friends brought out the curling iron to experiment – hell, it even stayed straight when she spent a day running about under the hot sun in a place so humid the air was more water than oxygen.

Well, only some parts. The rest of it was dry as a desert and she can still feel the unbearably hot air, the sharp wind, the way her heart pounded so hard it hurt as he -

She won't mention the name by place, won't even think of its name or its king, especially not now. Instead, Sarah stares blankly at her reflection and finally sees what Karen has been going on about.

It's a bit dark, especially with your skin. That would be because her skin is white as snow and her previously-brown hair is now black as ebony.

Her eyes remain locked on her reflection as she tries to figure out just when this change took place. It's impossible to pin down; she's been so busy recently that she only lets her hair down to wash it and immediately twists it back up as soon as it's dry. She's been too busy to spare anything more than a single, fleeting glance at her reflection before she rushes out of the door each morning.

But it's only been three months; it can't be natural for her to have changed so much, right? Never mind. This is ridiculous. She's being dramatic. A girl her age should be growing up and slowly changing from the way she looked as a teenager. Besides, at least her eyes are still the same. There, the same eyes she inherited from her mother. During her darkest, loneliest days, Sarah would look herself in the eye and pretend it was her mother sitting in front of her, hold an entire conversation in her mind with a figment of her imagination.

She clings to that thought, looks herself in the eye and this time, pretends she's having a conversation with herself – her old self. It's not as easy as she remembers, conjuring up an apparition of a person she once knew. And her eyes can't help the way they keep flitting to her hair – it reminds her of…

I always imagined a Faerie Queen would have hair like that.

This time, she doesn't just see her bedroom melt into another world. She feels it: the harsh winds whipping her hair about, the dry air clawing its way down her throat and lungs, that maddening shiver that runs down her spine whenever he's near…

"Enough!" Sarah growls before he can speak, before it becomes real. She slams her hands down with so much force that the old drawers rattle and whatever forgotten trinkets they contain clink and thud within their hollow confines.

It's not enough to fling a blanket over the mirror this time; she pushes the entire vanity around so that it faces the wall. Hopefully no one will come up to question the muffled sounds of heavy furniture scraping against her carpeted floors.

She tosses and turns all night, gets no more than two hours of sleep. But she's been making do with two hours a night for more than a year now.

Sarah Williams hasn't slept since… oh, when was the last time she managed to close her eyes and block out the world for an hour? Three weeks ago? That sounds about right.

Right – so Sarah hasn't slept in three weeks. Clearly, that isn't normal. And clearly – clearly – she's seeing things. Because that's what happens when people don't sleep, right? They start seeing things, go a bit nuts; she's even heard of people dying from exhaustion.

(Never mind that she feels more energized than she ever has and exhaustion is such a far-away memory it's hard to believe she ever needed sleep. Going a bit nuts… well, that's debatable. Given what she thinks she's seeing in the mirror, Sarah would diagnose herself as full-on bat-shit crazy.)

So clearly her eyes haven't actually changed color overnight.

Well, eye. Her left eye stares back at her, perfectly (comfortingly, reassuringly) normal. Her mother's eye. A human eye.

Her right eye, on the other hand, is most definitely not hers. It's not her mother's. And it certainly isn't human.

Green – it's green. But it's emerald and it shines like a jewel and how can it be so familiar, his were blue –

With this emerald eye, Sarah sees things and worlds no mortal was ever meant to see. She sees these multicolored wisps streaking through the air and damn, it's distracting. She sees her own skin, glowing like a luminescent pearl while the veins just under the surface shine like liquid gold. She sees… a goblin?

"Hey-o!" The goblin waves at her as soon as it realizes she can see it. It smiles at her with the radiance of a hundred suns – maybe she's exaggerating or maybe not, who knows what this emerald (immortal, magical, not human) eye can see – and the only reason Sarah doesn't scream is because everything clicks then, it all falls into place and she's not scared, she's pissed.

She can't call his name because who knows what'll happen then and where she'll end up and what he'll do but – oh, screw it. This is already a worst-case scenario.

Her skin is glowing, her hair is curling itself (she can see the locks coiling like snakes), she doesn't even sleep anymore and there's a goblin in her room.

"GODDAMN YOU, JARETH!"

The room shines with the brightness of a thousand suns as all of those irritating wisps zoom past her to gather into a knot, a hovering ball of energy that slowly expands until it's big enough for a person (not a person, not mortal, not human) to step through.

His skin glimmers like hers and his blood shines like hers and –

"And hello to you too, my precious changeling."

Hello, fandom! It's certainly been a while but here I am, back just in time for the holidays! This isn't much but I wanted to make sure I included something from Labyrinth in my holiday collection and an early draft of this was just gathering dust in my file so… was it worth rescuing from the depths of my 'forgotten drafts' file?

I ended up writing two things for Labyrinth, actually, so check out Goblin Market (that should be up by this weekend) if you guys want something a little less… random? This one feels like a hot mess but I'm hoping it's good for a laugh or two.

This is part of a holiday collection I put together for Christmas. If you enjoyed this fic and would like to read more, please check out the rest of the collection. Who knows, we might have some other fandoms in common!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

E Salvatore,

December 2015.