So a bit of backstory and my own personal assumptions of the Labyrinth: Jareth is, himself, a changeling and is the only creature of his kind in the Labyrinth. He is the Goblin King, but only because he was the goblin Goblin King's adopted son. For all the people who think that there ought to be a Seelie/Unseelie Court aspect, I've thrown you a bone that he's an elf but that's the end of it. I actually really hate stories which incorporate elves and wizards and etc, etc. So here is this.
It's dedicated to a real cool Cat who helped it get written. He's an excellent writer.
Jareth's mother had never wanted him, she had always wanted a daughter. In fact, Jareth was not actually her son, but rather the stolen child of an elvish woman who had carelessly wished her son away—Jareth's father had offered an exchange of his infant daughter for the three year old boy, seeing a kind of magical potential in Jareth which he did not in his daughter.
The woman had chosen to adopt the little goblin girl in favor of her small blond son, and the Goblin King—barely a foot and a half taller than the boy—had wrapped the child into a relishing embrace before whisking back to the castle where his distraught wife searched for their daughter.
The memory of his parentage and the circumstances of it came to matter little to the Goblin King who delighted in every achievement of his son, rewarding him greatly when he excelled and sneaking him praises even when he failed—but it was a daily stand-off between the Goblin Queen and the little prince—who by 8 was taller than both of his parents—and she frequently spread mischief in the Labyrinth for the boy to get tangled in.
Jareth had learned to live with this, but it cemented a deep compassion for the wished-away children—empathy for their entire situation. Because Jareth's father was not often as entranced by the wish-aways as he had been with Jareth, and because of both his mothers—neither wanted him. When his mother died, refusing in her last days to see either Jareth (expectedly) or her husband (a bit of a surprise), his father had quickly followed.
Jareth, the little prince in nearly the entire kingdom's mind, was only just not a teenager. He was a goblin in all but form and name—his elven name (as best could be pronounced by Undergrounders) being preserved by his spiteful mother who refused to rename him a proper goblin name (Like Hoggle, which meant 'faithful to the end' in goblin). And he was expected to become the Goblin King whilst mourning his parents—however flawed each of them had been, they had been his parents.
And so, much later in his life—and it, he realized was going to be a long life, he was an elf after all, not a goblin—when he met Sarah Williams he couldn't help but love her. She didn't belong where she was, and she knew it—and she couldn't escape it. She had also wished so very selfishly—most often he arrived at the homes of young mothers at the end of their ropes, they literally could not feed their child or allow it to live in the conditions of their home. After that he got the too-much-too-young mothers (or fathers, or whoever, one did not have to be the child's parent to wish them away after all) who wanted to return to the lives they had led before. And then there were the so very selfish ones, like Sarah.
Really, he had mused as she pleaded, it had been a night of babysitting, and for a teenager who had so few other engagements it should have been a trifle…
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