Author's Note: I've been thinking about this for a while. I do have some chapters of this already written and an idea of where it's going, however updates will be incredibly sporadic. I hadn't planned on posting this anytime soon, but I can't go back to my demons right at the moment.
Disclaimer: I do not own Labyrinth or any of it's characters. I'm just taking a break and chilling in Jim Henson's sandbox for a while.
The Way Back
Chapter One
Sarah knew she was dreaming. The twisting turns of the Labyrinth she had traversed as a young teen were a dead giveaway to that. These dreams were nothing new. They had started a mere month after that stormy night and some ill-chosen words had showed another world. Right after her return, she was so consumed with changing that she normally fell into bed at night and didn't dream at all. Sarah had thought their absence was the cost of saving her little brother from her stupid mistake.
She'd wept the morning after her dreams came back.
Now seven years later, almost eight, she had seen the Labyrinth through every season and believed she had figured out the real punishment for her actions. To see the giant maze and its inhabitants, but not be a part of it.
It had at least given her a career before she even left college.
The series of books that followed the Labyrinth's creatures was a massive best-seller on the children's list and each volume was eagerly awaited. Several of the letters she received each week laid out how fans kept reading, even after they had grown out of the series age range.
Her mother's agent had been a little unnerved the first time she had spoken to him, he was used to selling actors not writers. Still, he had come through in the end and it had worked out well for both of them. Linda had also been a little surprised when Sarah wasn't breaking down her door to join her on stage. Sarah had just smiled and told her mother than she had grown out of that dream.
There was no need to act out fairy stories after you had lived one.
Mostly it was the unstoppable urge that filled her after each dream. The need to write it down and everything else fell away. With a Bachelor's degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing, Sarah planned to leave the glittery lights of New York behind and return to Upper Nyack. As much as she loved the city, the little apartment she had found after her first book sold, her friends; Upper Nyack was home and it always fueled her imagination. Being around Toby didn't hurt either. Her little brother and her new little sister, were always ready for a new story.
She also needed to not be so close to her editor. The woman was almost rabid for Sarah to write the story of the Labyrinth's king. And not as a children's book either. Her illustrator was waiting with bated breath as well. So much so, that the girl had dropped little drawings and sketches into the galley proofs of the last two books.
Sarah laughed as she walked through the garden maze, ivy in a vivid green not occurring in her world climbed the walls around her. She hardly ever saw the Goblin King in these dreams. Only twice in fact. That didn't mean that her daydreams weren't filled with him. One of her classes had focused on mythical creatures and Sarah had become obsessed for a while. He was a Fae, there was no other creature that made sense. With that realization and the further she dug into the legends of the Fae, came the doubts that everything had been an act, a means to distract her. Then again, what would an immortal creature of fantasy want with Sarah Williams?
She stopped as she turned a corner and the hall spread open to show a large garden. Hedges formed more turns but they were short enough to see over. Short enough for Sarah to see someone standing in front of a lifesize statue of a couple. Wrapped in pure white, the figure turned and the billowing fabric showed a feminine body. Sarah shook her head. Feminine was an understatement. Whoever the woman was, she'd make any other feel like a mill pony standing next to a thorough bred.
A graceful hand beckoned her to follow and the woman moved away from the statue. Sarah stopped for a brief moment to stare at the man and woman immortalized in stone. The aquiline features of the man were frighteningly familiar but just different enough. It wasn't him, but definitely a relation. A beautiful woman held his hand, the moment of accepting the crystal he offered frozen in time. Sarah backed away quickly, her hand to her throat as she remembered being offered a crystal of her own years ago and how it had burst when she touched it.
The dream rejected and shattered. Destroyed.
She followed the figure around the next curve and found another statue and another couple immortalized in stone. She couldn't read the writing at the bottom but assumed it was their names. Sarah kept going, following the billowing white cape deeper and deeper into the garden; passing two more statues as she went.
Sarah took the last turn into the heart of the garden and stopped dead in her tracks. She recognized the sharp lines of the cruel, beautiful face of the last statue. She moved forward without thought, her body listening to commands that were not her own. She stopped in front of the large stone and stared at the man depicted. He stood alone, the crystal held to his chest instead of being offered to a woman.
"He's the one you were looking for, isn't he?"
Sarah whirled around and saw the white caped figure behind her. The woman came closer, her hood covering all but her perfect lips and chin. As she came closer, Sarah saw the faint lines of tattoos on the woman's exposed arms and legs, a twinkling jewel set in her belly button. The slit skirt and train showed her legs while the top was twisted to cover everything but left much skin showing and more of the strange markings.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Do you think you can lie to me, Sarah?" The woman laughed. "As you journeyed to my heart, yours was opened to me."
Sarah jerked back with a gasp. "You're…you're the labyrinth."
"I created it, yes. With all my heart and soul."
"You're trapped here."
"No," the lips smiled. "I hide here." She looked up at the stone likeness of her current king. "As someone else does."
"I…"
"It's alright. I know."
"You know what?"
"What you're unwilling to admit." She moved past Sarah to gaze at the statue. "I love him, as I didn't all of my kings. Jareth is much like myself and sometimes in the same situation. Of course, sometimes it is his own making, but he is still learning."
"People are always learning."
"Well said."
The woman was silent, staring at the statue as her head cocked to the side. Sarah started to fidget.
"Why did you bring me here?"
"Do you not wish to be here?"
"You've been bringing me here for years. Why?"
"Why not?" The woman answered with a shrug as she turned back to Sarah. "You have made a living telling the stories of my peoples. It has made you happy."
"But what's the purpose?"
The perfect lips smiled at her, giving no answer. Sarah started forward but the dream shattered around her.
She sat up with a gasp and looked over to the alarm clock beside her little pallet of blankets. It was her last day waking up in New York. She slammed a hand on the button to shut it off and looked around the empty room. Everything had already been packed up and put into storage until she found a place of her own. The room was a blank slate and Sarah couldn't help but think that it reflected herself. She had friends, but no one she was really close to. She'd dated in college and even a few of her mother's friends. Sarah had even tried a girl, when no one ever interested her enough to make it past the first outing. Still nothing. Her mother was here, but involved in her own life.
Linda Williams was on her way to London right now. The summer was always time for Shakespeare in the Park. She had tried to get Sarah to come along, an offer that had been rejected to get settled back at home.
Besides, Sarah was sure it was going to be a while before she was ready to sit down and talk to the woman again, after their last conversation. Feeling the stress of leaving New York, Sarah had felt that she was leaving her mother again, for who knew how long this time. And this conversation wasn't going to wait another ten or twenty years.
Why had she left them? How could she walk away and leave her husband and young daughter behind without a word for years?
She was still processing the answer.
Sarah stood up and cracked her back. She had originally thought that the little bed of blankets would be fine for one night, like camping. Her hardwood floors said she was wrong. There was only her blankets and a couple boxes of clothes, her laptop and notes left in the apartment. She had already set up to turn her keys in after her car was loaded.
Several times, her mother had tried to get Sarah to move closer to her in SoHo, but she just didn't want to leave the little studio that was close to the NYU campus and the neighborhood she already knew, even though she had the money. Her school friends were just starting out and didn't have the money to live in ritzy neighborhoods. She liked being close to them. Like the ability to get a phone call at ten at night and run out to grab pizza with them.
The Labyrinth had taught her to live, that there was life outside of fairy tales, friends. New York had taught her to survive. She went home after each experience and it was time to go home for good.
Sarah wrapped the blankets in a messy bundle and set them with the rest of her things to be taken down and walked through the apartment she loved, making sure that everything was clean and nothing had been left behind. Picking up the last of the boxes by the door, she started down the stairs and on the road back home.
Upper Nyack hadn't changed much. The same shops still thrived on the main street through town and the stop lights still made drivers curse, thinking they weren't set up right. Sarah could see the clocktower in the distance and laughed at how she used to use it as a timer for her sessions in the park. Several people waved as she passed. More, the closer she got to the old Victorian her father and step-mother still called home. It was like people never left Upper Nyack. Those that did, tended to come back. Just look at her.
The house hadn't changed since her last visit. Karen's summer flowers were bright spots of color against the white siding and the blue-floored porch she had helped paint two summers ago. The house was happy, in a way that Sarah could appreciate after her trip through the Labyrinth. Before, she had been the one breaking the peace they all sought. The months just after hadn't been easy either. Karen wasn't quick to accept the radical changes in her step-daughter. She thought there was another explosion, perhaps nuclear this time, just on the horizon. Slowly, oh so slowly, Karen had become comfortable with the new Sarah and her father was finally able to take a deep breath.
She hadn't even taken her seatbelt off yet when the front door flew open and a blonde-haired boy flew across the porch, down the stairs and over the sidewalk. Sarah laughed as she got out the car and caught Toby.
"Sarah! You're here."
"I told you I was coming."
"Come on Toby, let Sarah get out of the car first," Karen called from the porch as the youngest Williams, little Mia with her bright blonde curls ran after her big brother.
"She is out of the car," he grumbled.
"Toby, be nice." Sarah shut her door and opened the back to grab a box. "Why don't you take this and help me get my stuff in."
"Oh, man."
She ruffled his hair as Mia came around the back of the car. She was always a little shy around Sarah and they all figured it was because she was born just before Sarah finished her senior year and moved to New York.
"Hey honey." Sarah knelt down as she smiled at the little girl. "You want to help too?"
Mia nodded and Sarah handed the small girl her purse. Her other boxes were too heavy. "If you could take this in, that'd be great."
"Okay." The girl, who was always a little small for her age, carried the tote bag concentrating on not dropping it.
Mia had been born a full four weeks early and with the imbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She was healthy, the doctors all said so, but her body was weak. She had always been small and didn't have the boundless amounts of energy Sarah could remember Toby having at her age. Mia was more content to color or watch the sky then run around the yard with the dog, a golden retriever named Arthur that Robert had picked up on a whim a year after Merlin had passed away. Sarah could hear him barking from the backyard now. He didn't like to be away from the children. Toby had explained that with Merlin gone, they needed a King Arthur to watch the house.
She watched the little four year old start on the stairs carefully. The whole family was always careful with Mia, even Toby. Instead of the usual fights they would be expecting with siblings, Toby was always trying to help his little sister.
Even now, he was waiting at the top of stairs and it was obvious he wanted to take the bag from her but Karen's hand on his shoulder stopped him. Carrying her laptop bag and another box, Sarah stopped at the top of the shallow stairs to lean down to Toby.
"You're a good brother."
Her room hadn't changed much since high school. During her junior year, Karen and her dad had made the decision to move her into the larger room that had once been a nursery for Toby. Decorating the larger room had been a treat, after she got over moving into the room where she had made the mistake of calling on the Goblin King to begin with. She had spent the first week barely able to sleep at all and the next waking up for the smallest sound in the house.
She could hear Toby complaining about the pot roast that Karen had planned on for dinner from the kitchen through her open door. Another thing that changed after her run through the Labyrinth. The door was only closed when she was asleep. It was never locked anymore though.
It was in this room that she started writing. That she saw one of the goblins that had been left behind as it shoved a fresh pack of pencils off the desktop. It had taken a few weeks to discover that they were ordered to watch over Toby…and her. It had terrified her at first, making her run to check on her brother every time she caught one out of the corner of her eye. After the first year, she started to relax. She had won Toby back, fair and square. There was nothing the Goblin King or any of his diminuative subjects could do about that.
Besides, there was a certain amount of safety in knowing that you were never alone.
It was a tiny goblin, the one that seemed to live in her desk, that had alerted her during class that something was wrong toward the end of her senior year. She had burst out of the room, running the entire way to the old, beater her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday and racing home. She had found Toby sobbing, trying to tell the 911 operator that something was wrong. Mommy was on the floor and wouldn't wake up. Sarah had swooped up her little brother and the phone, able to communicate more clearly that Karen was still breathing and was a high-risk pregnancy because of her age.
She had barely stopped herself from telling the little goblin to go get help while they waited for the ambulance. Sarah shuddered, wondering what help the goblin would have gotten. Two things she had learned over the years, the goblins didn't give her their names. Names had power. And they always ran to 'Kingy' if something was wrong. But everything with their 'Kingy' had a price.
The shadow of her mythology classes crossed her mind again as she flopped back on the bed. The Persephone Rule. To not consume any foods of the other side, lest you become one of its members. She didn't know if Jareth had fed anything to Toby during the thirteen hours he had been in the Goblin King's care, eleven hours actually. But he had not appeared again since that stormy night. The first year after her run, Sarah had called upon her friends often and they had never said anything about it either. They never said anything about the fact that she knew their names. Or that she knew the King's.
After they had studied that lore in class, Sarah had been consumed by dreams of the peach Hoggle had given her and the dream that resulted. Again, no one had ever shown up. They only thing she could gather was that when she made it to the center of the Labyrinth, she had won her and Toby's freedom, the rule broken by her triumph.
She hoped so, at least.