Disclaimer: I own nothing. I just play with the ideas, and put them back when I'm done.
Warning: This is the tip-most of the T rating, at least for me. Ye be warned. And...this got a little weird. And a little dark. I tried writing a dream, or a nightmare; I do hope it reads.
..oOo..
Whom Fate Has Marked
Sarah dreamed of sand.
A small pile of it at her feet in an endless white void of a room. Cupping it, impossibly dry in her hands, squeezing her fingers tighter and tighter to keep it from seeping through the cracks. Failing miserably, only to drop to her knees and scoop it into a pile and attempt to hold it again.
Sitting uncomfortably in an immense box of it, squirming as she dug with her bare hands to find the damp with which to build a tiny kingdom. Scratching and scraping until the sand exfoliated the tips of her fingers raw, the whites of her nails cleaned and dull. Never quite reaching the bottom of the box.
Trapped in a giant hourglass as it fell upon her head, sending her skin crawling as the grains worked into nooks she would never be able to fully flush. The heavy mass of the whole introduced in tiny, weightless particles. Standing still as time pressed in around her, drawing the bottom to the top.
Sarah dreamed of a dying world. For years following That Night, she wandered through it, companionless and in her pajamas. The piles of sand grew to sandboxes, then to desert landscapes.
Her teeth gritted uncomfortably behind the parched wall of her lips. Walking aimlessly beside a useless river, its thin slice through the ground running rusty with blood. Twisting black trees with miles long roots crisscrossing over the shifting landscape, searching for one singular drop of water.
This disheartening place is where her sleep took her.
Following the river, endlessly.
She continued, for she had no other choice. The river grew wider and, one night, it occurred to her to try crossing it. She knew she was being led somewhere; she had an idea where. It was not an all together pleasant thought, but she dreaded the notion of continuing this ceaseless pilgrimage into nowhere.
Armed in nothing but a long nightshirt fashioned from the shirt of a past boyfriend, she dipped a foot into the bleeding flow.
It was wretchedly warm.
As she waded across, she was relieved to discover that the current only reached to the tops of her thighs, staining the hem of her shirt. As she neared the far bank, she was only a little surprised to find the outer gates of the labyrinth wavering hazily in the distance. She climbed awkwardly from the river and glanced hesitantly at her legs. The red of the river ran cleanly down her skin, leaving little evidence, though the staining of her shirt remained. Sand stuck uncomfortably to her wet soles as she approached the gates and Sarah cringed at the thought of solving the labyrinth all over again in gritty bare feet. If the tufts of feathers and sparkling refuse littering her bedspread the morning following her original sojourn weren't evidence enough of the reality of her experience, the bleeding, peeling blisters covering her heels and the knuckles of her toes was painful proof of running stone walkways for hours on end. She longed for even those thin leather slippers now as she reached the gates, however. They seemed closer than before. Almost at the river.
She belatedly realized that these were not the gates she had begun her original journey through. They were much smaller and plain and just as she was wondering how to get them to open, they did. Though not, Sarah realized, for her. A small tributary of the river had followed her and was snaking through the creaking gates ahead of her, cutting its own path.
Sarah thought it was the heat of the surrounding desert, or perhaps the detachment of dreaming, that was revealing the dying Undergound to her in flashes. She saw as she walked through the open gates that, what was moments before a blank stretch of sandy dunes, was now the ruins of the Goblin City. It stood silent and decrepit, the destruction of the waves of boulders called by Ludo left unrepaired. Through the fluctuating haze, Sarah could just make out the twist of the castle. It blurred in and out of focus and appeared closer each time she set her eyes to it.
A wheezing, gurgling sound to her left startled her and she whirled to face it. The small stream of the river had flowed to the base of a massive, dusty fountain, long ago run dry. The oxidized wet sludged thickly through the plumbing of it and flowed in sickeningly slow rivulets out of the different spouts, first a flood of dirty, built-up junk, then the bloody waters of the river.
It turned Sarah's stomach.
How long had she been dreaming? she wondered. Surely she was close to waking. Though her nighttime visits to this place, was it the Underground? were frequent, they were rarely lengthy.
Though, she had never made it this deep before, either.
The mirage of the castle flickered again and Sarah tore her gaze from the gored fountain. Night was coming, more quickly than would be possible in her world where time had no master. She wasn't naive enough to think that taking shelter in the castle was her safest option, but she rationalized that she at least had some idea of what she might find there. The empty houses and bleeding fountain looked all the more formidable in the waning light.
She padded up the vacillating stairs, for there they were, a few feet from her. Life was much more sudden, within a dream.
Her panicked heart hoped she was still dreaming.
She walked higher up the stairs and let her mind wander- there seemed to be more steps than there had been moments before, and how is it that one moon hanging in the sky can be full while the other is only a sliver of a crescent and suddenly she was standing in a room she remembered not very well.
She thought it might have been the throne room, because his throne was in it, but so was her grandmother's massive wingchair and a stool from the breakfast bar in her apartment. A fire crackled in a hearth she wasn't sure was present at her first dash through the room. The pit at its center was free of molting poultry and tittering goblins, and the floor was meticulously clean. It was disarming.
Her eyes scanned the room for the missing king; surely he hadn't vacated this shade of a place as well. She stepped farther into the great room.
"You are tracking up my clean floor."
His voice came from behind her and she twirled around. She saw nothing but a blank wall where the doorway used to be. She looked to the ground to see that she had tracked bloodied footprints over the stone, an impossible byproduct of her traversing of the river.
"Sarah."
She turned again and he was there, so close to her. The Goblin King. Though in the dim room with stone walls and her furniture, he looked less a king than she remembered. Gone was his armoured waistcoat or fluttering cape; he was stripped to his snug breeches and billowing shirt. Less king, but no less dangerous. He looked hungrier now, more feral and raw.
Wild.
Beautiful.
"You've come to see, haven't you?"
His voice was graveled and hoarse, as if these were his first words spoken in a long time. Sarah absently wondered what his songs would sound like, now.
"Come to see what?" The room flickered, and it looked different, though Sarah couldn't pin down in what way. The fire flashed behind him and Sarah found herself growing warm. She, too, felt a little wild. Everything felt distant, and yet so acutely real and focused. She felt as if she might do something she otherwise would not.
He stepped closer.
"The marks."
It was as if they were already in the middle of a conversation, only Sarah had missed the beginning. There was another flicker, and she thought she saw the twisting of a pair of naked bodies over behind where her grandmother's chair stood, legs intertwined on the cold grit of the floor. A hand, it could have been hers, slapped against the near wall and drug nails gratingly down the rough surface. A man's back, though it looked strange, tensed in pistoning power. The fire shifted, and the vision was gone.
She looked back to the king, who had come closer still. His eyes were unblinking.
The weight of his gaze dried Sarah's mouth. She resisted the urge to wet her lips, fearing what she might spark if she did. She tore her eyes from his and looked instead upon the smooth sliver of skin visible at the long dip of his shirt's neckline. His skin was ghostly pale and though she did not welcome the thought, she imagined discovering the texture of it as she ran her dry lips over the plane of his chest. Something she might not otherwise do.
A chuckle clucked in the back of his throat as he watched her watching him.
"Shall I show you, then?" He settled his hands on his hips, posturing and widening the divide of his shirt fractionally. He seemed less crazed now, as if the dream had shifted a few inches to the left.
Her eyes shot back to his face, unblinking as she watched his thin lips curl around a predator's teeth. She felt the back of her neck warm as she realized her hungry stare must have been more telling than she hoped. She pursed her lips, in anger and not a little embarrassment.
"Excuse me?" She was more lucid now, too. She was she again, wasn't she?
"Shall I show you how you've marked me, dearest?"
Dearest. The word was queer. It almost had shape. It almost fell to the floor between them. It almost broke.
She blinked at him, not quite knowing what to say. "I—I don't understand."
He barked a laugh as he used his slanting teeth to tug his gloves quickly from his hands. The firelight did little to reveal the secrets the gloves covered, but Sarah had only enough time to register that his bare hands looked strange before he had pulled the hem of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers and pushed it over his shoulders. It fell silently to the floor behind him, and he stood before her, thinly naked to the waist.
Sarah's hands flew to her mouth as she stifled a surprised gasp. Or a scream. The Goblin King's skin was indeed the color of moonlight on smooth sandstone walls, but etched cruelly with thousands of quivering, fluxing, spindly lines. To Sarah's eyes, they brought to mind the sketched maps on the inside covers of old, cracking books, detailing a fantastical land in thin strokes of a pen. The marks curled blackest-black around each other, shifting and wavering in such small movements, they seemed to ripple over his skin. He stood stock-still, his arms tense at his side, as though prepared to defend.
Or strike.
His eyes dared her to look, to soak in the sight of his marred flesh, to come closer. Her fists clenched white knuckled, Sarah took one step, then two— closer to him, mesmerized by the serpentine movements of the brand.
The marks seemed to run deeper than a tattoo inked at a mortal parlor, staining his bones even, but as the tracks wound and twisted they seemed to hover just above the surface of his skin as well, creating a gauzy, blurring haze. Flickering. Fluxing. A dream. A vision.
It was a map of the labyrinth, running dark, thin black lines over the skin of its master. They covered every inch of him, save the thin slice of skin beneath his horned amulet. Down his arms, to the tips of his long fingers. Cleaving his fingernails. Up his sides and down, down, down over his shoulders to his back. They were closely grouped in tight black knots at some places and in others, widely spaced and arching. Then one spidery line would quake and the knots would loosen or the paths would close in on themselves into bold, kohl colored streaks. Dead end. Turn around. Don't turn here.
As she began to search for a beginning, a starting point on this twisted topography, he shifted, changing the angle of his body. It was then that she saw it. Snaking in and out from the cobweb thin lines was a singular, slicing crimson line, standing out like red letters on the thin pages of a Bible. He turned further and lifted his arm.
"Is that…" Sarah's hand lifted away from her mouth and reached as if to touch the red line tracing its way over the soft ripple of his ribs.
"Your path through my labyrinth? Yes, it is."
She drew her hand back but, striking as a basilisk, he grabbed her wrist and pressed her fingers into his skin where her path began. She stood surprised for a few heartbeats, her fingers clumsily curled against his side. Adjusting to the terror of his touch. Slowly, she unfurled her hand and began to drag it downward. He released her. His skin was scalding beneath her fingers as she trailed them down his side, following where she marked him. A long straight line leading to his hip, her hours long run through the outer gates before a worm informed her how narrow her sights had been. Her path curved and she walked slowly around him, seeing his back for the first time.
She flushed to see her path laid bare before her. She had woven around on herself so many times, great red slashes, like the lash of a whip, leading to the places she had already been, before finally meandering further up the Goblin King's spine.
Here and there other symbols would appear. A particularly large red blot coiled next to a craggy sketch of grasping hands. Sarah pressed her finger into the splotch and started when the muscles in Jareth's back flexed.
"Your oubliette."
A little noise hummed out from between Sarah's lips. She trailed her finger along her escape with Hoggle. Small, stony faces quivered as she moved her finger past them, speaking silent warnings as they blurred in and out of focus. Up, up his back her winding way climbed until she reached the peak of his shoulder. Just as she was drawing her hand away, he pivoted under the point of her fingernail, turning to face her. The quick movement threw her balance and she caught herself with the flat of her palm on the burning skin stretched thin over his collarbone. His hand steadied her at the dip of her waist and she shuddered at the closeness of him. They were nearly dancing now, save a holy palmer's kiss.
Sarah took a small step back, out of his embrace. His hand left her waist and flew to hers still on his shoulder, keeping it in place. His long,skeletal fingers formed a hard manacle around her wrist.
"Don't stop now, pet." His eyelids were hooded and heavy as he raked his gaze over her face, then her body.
Bold.
His look was dark and promising in a way that thrilled and terrified Sarah. He took a step to her, invading her comfort easily. She could smell him, a sharp tang of blood orange and freshly chopped cedar wood. Heat seemed to pour off of him in waves. Could you smell scents so vividly in dreams? she wondered. Feel heat so intensely? Sarah tried not to flinch as a peculiarly cold bead of sweat rolled from her scalp, behind her ear and down her neck. Jareth's eyes narrowed and his lips quirked in wicked delight as he watched the drip trace a wet path over her collarbone to the cleft between her breasts before disappearing beneath the neckline of her nightshirt.
"Do keep going," he warned. His words grew more lucid and his voice more velvety liquid by the moment. Squeezing the hand laid on his shoulder, he lifted his other hand to finger the damp track left on her chest. "Or I shall begin to trace a path of my own."
Sarah raised her chin at the challenge and softly bit her nails into the silken skin at his collarbone. Jareth grinned and released her, then lifted his arm as if to bow. Sarah's lips curved into a secret grin of her own as she trailed her fingers over his sinewy bicep, following the red line further. She took her time now, discovering the texture of his skin and enjoying the mounting frustration clouding his face. The line ran to the palm of his hand and seemed to pool there, next to the image of a gnarled tree and half eaten peach, before swirling into tight, crisscrossing spirals. Jareth suddenly pressed his palm to her own before firmly weaving his fingers between hers. He pressed his other hand into her back, bunching the thin fabric of her long shirt higher, exposing more of her bare legs to the heated air. And through the worn-thin material of her shirt, she felt him lace long, hot fingers through the notches in her spine, pressing her into the beginnings of a waltz.
They moved.
"You're stalling," Sarah commented as she countered the steps of her partner. Small changes of pressure on her hand or on her back led her into slow, graceful turns and dips, though she felt the dance more practiced than possible. Jareth took a small crossing step and brushed his leg pointedly against the outside of her naked thigh.
"Not stalling, dearest."
Dearest. Dearest.
"Only leading you. Guiding your way. You will find," he took a hopping side step that Sarah stumbled to match; "if you turn it this way," he pressed her to him and they twirled at a dizzying speed; "and look closely," he spun her away from him before abruptly pulling her back; "your line ends there." He dropped away from her suddenly, leaving her cold in the heat. He held up his hand, arm straight, palm out. Stop! it said. Inches from her face, long fingers, smooth palm, he held it, before turning it quickly back and forth and waggling the tips of his fingers against the skin beneath her right eye. The red line tangled in his palm and indeed did not reappear. He laughed at her.
Sarah jerked her face away.
"But I remembered!" She stepped away from him, and planted her feet. Her soles were still slick with blood. "You didn't fool me, Goblin King, with your waltzes and masks and pretty songs. I shattered whatever you were playing at."
His expression grew somber and stony.
"I play at nothing, little girl." His voice, the sound of a crumbling tower. He rushed her, backing her into the opposite wall. She fell against it with a thwack. Her head smarted and stars danced in her vision as he slapped his hands onto the wall, effectively bracketing her body.
"Do you really think I could not have kept you?" He ran his hands further up the wall, stretching his body and pressing his heat against her. The king leaned into her as she dug her fingers into the hard wall that trapped her. He spoke into her hair, lips against the tender flesh behind her ear. "You sought me out, precious. You allowed me to take you in my arms."
The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose as her skin crawled. She looked straight ahead, for shuttered eyes only showed her the memory of his face, so close to hers, as he sang into life the end of the world. But then she saw it anyway. They danced as phantoms over his shoulder in the dim. Her face young and wondering, his face too close and knowing.
"I frightened you, of course. I am frightening you now." He was pressing heavily against her now, their contours flush. Her heart hammered in her chest as she tried to focus on anything but the not-unpleasant weight of the Goblin King's body. Terror and something else equally wicked mounted within her. "But I think you like that, don't you Sarah? Being frightened."
She shifted, though the wall and the hardened king were no less forgiving. She tried wetting her lips, but her tongue stuck sickly dry to the chapped skin.
"Am I the only... Why is my path the only..." She trailed off, swallowing thickly.
He rocked his hips more firmly against her. She felt. "Do you really want to know?"
Sarah could hear his smile before she could feel his lips move on her skin.
"No."
He didn't move.
"Pity."
One of his hands trailed down the hard stone wall and buried itself in her damp hair. He tangled his long fingers into the slick roots of it and tugged gently, painfully, barely.
"It is an interesting tale, truth be told. Not wholly original in the outcome; the fierce, plucky heroine triumphs over the ploys of the dastardly villain in the end."
He tugged her head to the side and raked his teeth down the newly exposed skin of her neck.
"Whether he is ultimately defeated remains to be seen."
The mention of defeat roused her from her panicked paralysis. She moved shaky hands to the hard, flat of his stomach and drew them up to his chest. He groaned against her and loosed his grip on her hair to cup the back of her neck. She felt him smile against her skin before moving as if to kiss her.
She shoved him hard and darted to the side, intending to put some sort of barrier between them. In his surprise he stumbled back a few feet and she seized the opportunity to move away from him. She made for her grandmother's colossal arm chair near the hearth, but by the time she had made her way around it, he was upon her, flinging the huge piece of furniture out of his path.
"You maddening creature."
She was cornered with nothing to shield herself behind. She backed away from him, bumping suddenly into the wall again. The walls were always so close. The fire roared up in the hearth, reaching beyond the stone confides of the mantle, and set his lithe silhouette into terrifying relief.
"You never seem to learn, Sarah." Shadows and firelight flicked oranges and ochres over his naked flesh and he lifted his hands towards her. Power shuddered from him and the room pulsed with it.
"You cannot run from me."
She felt the slow ease of weight from her feet. She was gradually sliding up the wall, lifted by his unseen force. It did not feel like clutching, invisible hands; nothing so intimate. No, she simply felt moved, diminutive and terrifyingly frail. Consumed by colossal magic from the inside out, siphoning through her veins and sinuating about her bones, as her toes lifted from the floor. Just a whisper from the stones beneath her feet, she stopped. The fire was raking up the walls now, filling the room with stifling heat.
"Have you no concept how easily I could end you?" His voice, the sound of a tolling clock. There was another pulse of magic, and she experienced the uncomfortable sensation of compression.
She felt it then. The pressure change, the breathlessness, the sudden terribly clarifying and lucid realization of how near life dances to death.
"Why don't you?" she rasped, for only defiant foolishness kept her from falling into the maddening fear of her final moments.
His mouth twisted and she felt pressed all the harder. No dream, no nightmare. Life, or the ending of it.
"Isn't it obvious?" he sneered. Her body lifted a little higher before he dropped her. Though the fall wasn't far, it was unexpected and her knees gave from beneath her. She crumpled to the blessedly cool floor as he took long lazy strides to her.
He came to a stop not a foot from her and she looked up at him from the floor. She hated the position of power he had let him take, but she could not will herself to come any closer to him by standing.
She knew then. The vision of the twined bodies, her nails scraping over the stone wall. The strange looking masculine back. His, branded with a map of a solved puzzle, it's secrets marked in red. Then her nails marking it further, a fresher red, false starts.
"I should like to mark you, though not with elucidated riddles." He grasped the heel of one boot and tugged it from his foot. It was unblemished.
"No, I should like to mark you with purples and burgundies; the scrape of my teeth and the suck of my mouth." He pulled off his other boot and dropped to his knees, joining her on the floor.
"I should like to mark you, though not with elucidated riddles," he said again, though his mouth did not open. Her hands moved to touch him. His chest. The jut of his hip bone. His mouth.
Something she might not otherwise do.
His hands touched hers. Then the floor. Her hair. Then he was standing again, booted and tall. Again on the floor, eye to eye. Bare feet, dangling amulet.
This was real, Sarah rationalized. There was no way this was real, Sarah reasoned.
He pulled at her shirt, exposing her shoulder. He then grasped the amulet, so tight a sharpened corner pricked his palm. Blood ran down his wrist, parallel to the red of Sarah's path. He yanked, and the sturdy chain broke.
The black brand of his body flickered again, then, as rushing black water, filled the blank space no longer covered by the necklace. Lines slithered up the tense of his neck, over the hinges of his jawbone and up his temples, joining the winged marks of his eyes and brows, though leaving the majority of his face unscathed. Then, as a crimson tear, she watched her line appear from the corner of one of his eyes, and slowly drip down through map. Back down his neck, over his chest, to the crumbled picture of a castle at the center of his chest.
Dearest, dearest.
"I can never escape you." His voice, the sound of the breaking of a crystal.
A small noise whispered from her. She pulled her shirt over her head and clawed him atop her.
Something she might not otherwise do.
The shock of the cold floor. The shock of his hot body. The scrape of his teeth, the suck of his mouth. Purples and burgundies. Fingernails scraping at stone walls, at a marred back. Fresher red, false starts.
Dearest, dearest.
Her longest nightmare, and shortest dream.
And after, the black wiping from him as ink, smearing his clean floor, streaking the wall and the skin below her eye.
The blood river running dry and the fountain pumping clear water.
Her grandmother's chair righted and Sarah slung across it, in another room of the castle, reading a book whose cover isn't red.
The city filled again with goblins, the castle rebuilding, brick by brick.
His armoured waistcoat.
Clocks whose hands have been torn off as a king and queen's clothes lay rumpled about the foot of a bed.
They are on the floor, laughing and wiping black from his skin, though the red seems to be harder to remove, when she wakes.
Alone in her bed, in her apartment, in her nightshirt. She feels breathless and robbed. Too sudden, everything. Like cold water dashed upon her, from one world to the next. Dreaming, to awake. So many times before, though never as wrenching as this!
So real, so vivid, so long in the making. She kicks at the blankets, feeling tied down, feeling trapped. Angry because she believed it to be true. Angry that it wasn't.
She squeezes her eyes shut, hoping for a dream, even of sand. Then feeling all too awake, swinging her legs out of bed, wanting out of these mundane walls.
Dried blood caked between her toes and staining the hem of her shirt.
Dearest, dearest.
Relief.
Sarah knows then, that the time for dreaming, for nightmares that thrill her in ways they should not, has come to an abrupt end.
She scrapes some of the blood from her foot, the pads of her fingers blackened.
It is time for wishing.
Fin.
..oOo..
A/N: Thank you for reading. I would really love some feedback, if you are willing to give it. I was trying to make a pretty strong choice, style-wise, with this piece and would love to know what you thought, or how to improve. The title is a twist on a quote from Beowulf: "Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked."