Title: "The Heart's Labyrinth"
Author: Pirate Turner
Rating: PG
Summary: In a dark future, Sarah has been taught not to believe.
Warnings: None
Word Count: 1,964
Date Written: 25 April, 2012
Disclaimer: Sarah, Jareth, Hoggle, all other characters mentioned within, and the Labyrinth are ﾩ & TM Jim Henson and any other respective owners, none of whom are the author, and are used without permission. Everything else is ﾩ & TM the author. The author makes absolutely no profit off of this work of fan fiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.
She likes to pretend, now that she's older, that the adventures, and misadventures, of her youth never happened, but the memories are still there, always lurking just beyond the thoughts with which she busies herself on a daily basis. Faces that her heart yearns to see again always lurk in her subconscious dreams, and in her daydreams too. She catches herself thinking about them sometimes even when she's busy. An old man will remind her of Hoggle. She'll hear rock music and think of the Fieries. A British accent always brings reminders of the little Worm, who was the third to welcome her to the Labyrinth, and almost every night, somewhere on her pathway home, Sarah will see an owl and think, as any girl who knows of him would, immediately of the King.
She felt so alone before they came into her life, but she knows no one will believe her stories. They have to be just that, she tells herself sternly whenever she finds herself thinking of them too much and her heart aching. What she dreamed when she was young could not possibly be real now. Goblins and gentle beasts do not exist, nor do strange, orange creatures who live to take off their heads. Nothing can live with their head removed, and Fairies, too, are simply figments of the imagination.
They do not exist. They can not exist. She is alone in this world even more now than she was then for she has finished growing up without her father, her stepmother, or even little Toby. Oh, she still hears from them from time to time - from the males in her little, so-called family, any way. She and her stepmother have nothing left to say to each other, but Toby sends her postcards from his journeys across the globe as a decorated officer and her father still sends her birthday cards, calls her when her stepmother is away, and even invites her to spend the holidays with them. She never goes, however. She knows she's not wanted, and Sarah will not be where she is not wanted.
It wouldn't hurt so badly, she supposes, if only she was wanted somewhere. Anywhere, really, would be nice to be wanted, but no one wants her. That's why she made up those adventures when she was younger, why she created the friends that she did have. It's the reason, too, that even now that she has a successful career as an actress, an actress of whom her mother would be proud, her room still shows signs of the imaginings that gave her the strength to survive her childhood.
Two old books, who contain the exact, same story and whose pages are worn from constant reading, are tucked away both here in her dresser at home and in her dresser at the studio. Her bed is littered with unique plushies that never have to be moved for she never has company, and on the nightstand by her bed sits a labyrinth, whose intricate turns are nothing compared to the one she'd thought she'd traveled when she'd been just on the verge of womanhood.
She stares at her face in the mirror, sees the lines of age beyond her years and the dark bags underneath her eyes that tell of the true troubles she feels. She watches her reflection as she smears lipstick onto her lips, and then for one moment more, she remembers. She sees herself with a crown sitting lopsided on her dark head and toys from her early childhood piled onto her back. She sees a little, old lady peering at her from behind her, hears her voice again, but knows she can not be real. She can not be real now, and she could not be real then for nobody has green skin.
Her hands shake. Tears well into her dark eyes. She sits her lipstick down, and then again she starts to hear a voice calling. It's old and craggily. She almost answers it, almost calls to a being that can not exist, but then she remembers the shock treatments that her stepmother forced her to endure until she stopped talking to Toby about the wonders they had seen, until she accepted that what she had thought to be real was only wild imaginings.
They can't exist, and she cries, sitting all alone in the harsh reality of a world in which she is stuck and does not belong. She hears what she mistakes to be rain pelting her window. She doesn't turn to look at it, so she doesn't see that it's not rain at all but rather a very insistent owl. Something moves in her mirror. She looks up but isn't swift enough to see what caused the movement. Everything looks still again. Everything appears still and absolutely, absurdly, horribly normal.
She wants to wail like the winds beating at her wall. Whispers ring throughout her mind, calling her name with urgency. They can't be real! All she went through, all the fantastic places she saw, all the wonderful friends she made . . . They can not be real! She opens her drawer, reaches for the pills the doctors say keep her sane, but the pills dance away from her hand. Then, before her rounding eyes, they slither, transforming into a scarf and then a little creature, who laughs as it runs away.
"Sarah . . . " The voices are still calling her name.
"If you need us . . . "
"If you need any of us . . . "
"Milady . . . "
"All you have to do is call."
"I need you," she remembers crying that first night. "Hoggle, I need you! I need all of you!"
She still does. She lowers her head and cries aloud. Her sobs echo through her empty house that is just that. It's a house. It isn't a home. It takes love to make a home, love and happiness, and she hasn't had either since she was a child.
She jumps suddenly as she feels a hand touch her shoulder. She looks up, her heart pounding in her ears. Her mind tells her that this can not be happening, and yet her heart, for the first time in years, feels a twinge of hope. Part of that hope falls for just a second as she sees who's touching her shoulder so gently and reassuringly, but then her heart soars as she turns to him and hugs him so tightly that her grasping arms threaten to cut off his flow of air.
"Hoggle!" It's not him. It's not Jareth. But it is Hoggle. She wasn't insane all those years! It did happen! Her friends do exist! Or maybe, maybe, after all, it didn't happen. They don't exist, and she's just been too long without her medication to still know the difference. Sarah realizes, however, that she no longer cares. The time she spent with Hoggle and the rest of their friends is the only time she's ever truly been happy since her mother died, and if it takes being insane to finally feel happy and love again, to have her friends back, then it's a small price to pay.
He smiles up at her, hugging her back almost as hard despite his usual determination not to show any feelings. The King let him come at long last, and he'll not make a mistake this time like he did the last. Jareth can command him to leave her again, but even if he does, he won't. He'll have to condemn him to the Bog of Eternal Stench first and keep him there forever, because the only friend he's ever had needs him more desperately than any one he's ever known needed anything else. He struggles to keep his tears inside as he scolds, "I told you to call."
She shakes her head, her tears falling freely at long last. "I'm sorry I didn't! But then, wait." Her face screws up tightly as she tries to remember the punishments they put her through in the asylum. "I did."
"You did in there," he agrees, "in that horrible, horrible, wretched place." He doesn't know that Jareth has since had it destroyed and the workers, the doctors, especially, who shocked the poor child, driven truly insane with the help of the Fieries the King released in that place that dared to call itself a hospital. "But we couldn't get to you."
"You were there?" she asks, her voice trembling. "Even then?"
He pats her leg. "Even then," he assures, nodding.
"Then what took you so long?"
"You didn't call for us again," he reminds her. "You told yourself we didn't exist. We can't come if you don't call."
"But - But I didn't - "
He hurries to make an excuse so that she'll not know that the King had had enough of waiting for her to accept their help. She might never love Jareth, but he'll never stop caring about her. She was a special case, the one young woman out of all the ones they've seen travel through the Labyrinth who needed their help the most. "Your heart did."
It's enough. It has to be enough. She's tired of excuses and tired of living a lie. She's tired of pretending that she's crazy and that the things most people don't believe in for they've never seen them, especially the best, dearest, and truthfully only friends she's ever had, don't exist when her heart knows they do. "Well, I do need you!" And then, holding him still and jumping to her feet, Sarah screams, "I NEED ALL OF YOU!"
Her room is suddenly alive. Goblins and Fieries hang from every precipice of every piece of furniture and crawl over the walls and floor. She hears the barking of the only friend she ever had in this dimension and whirls around to see a dog who she hasn't seen in years, not since he passed away from old age. So many tears are swiftly flooding from her eyes that Sarah can barely see to make her way to him, but she runs to Ambrosious nonetheless, still holding Hoggle, and throws her arms around them both. She pulls Sir Didymus from his saddle and hugs all three.
All of her friends are there! Everything she'd been forced to believe was a dream has proven to be a reality! She's happy again at long last, but still there's one missing. She peers one more time around her bedroom before being rolled by her friends, but there's no further sign of him other than their presence. She knows he's not coming.
What Sarah doesn't realize is that he is, in fact, still there, and he's been there all along, watching over his charge as she's grown through a world of hatred, fears, and lies. He's been waiting for a chance to help her, trying to wait, as the rules dictate, for her to ask him for that help, but finally, as a favor to an old friend, to the woman who owned the book before Sarah did, he broke his own rules tonight and intervened.
He watches from outside as his subjects party with their human friend. He watches the love, happiness, and friendship he'll never know as strongly until finally turning from his charge's window and flying back to the one tree left in this city, the tree that he has kept just outside her window all this time. He perches, folds his wings, turns his head around, and continues to watch, and though his own heart is still sad and Sarah misses him, too, but refuses to call for him, Jareth smiles. She's happy, and his kingdom is as complete as it can ever be without her mother's presence.
The End