a/n: A oneshot inspired by paper piper's "you're a tiny thing in the palm of my hand". I don't own Labyrinth, sadly enough, and I only play pretty lights with the characters and settings for funsies, not for pay. If I could then I would, but I can't so I shan't.

R&Ring is more delightful than a day off from school (which -ahem- is the reason this is being written).

ta, lovelies! -ACP-

Sarah was having a nightmare.

Only it wasn't like the nightmares she used to have, before she went to that other world, before life toppled and then righted itself and then toppled once more. These were less vivid, fuzzier and hazier and full of force and power. Memories of a life she had died in, and left behind as a new person. Well. Newer. Words toppled from her mouth as desperate eyes watched her and a large part of her soul screamed for her to stay. She felt compulsion, unreal and fae nagging only at the tail end of this strength: she wanted to stay, but couldn't. Sarah had to go home, because when she went home, Toby went home. Safety. That was her drive: love for something unloved and forgotten, kin and brother in the ways that counted to her now.

And it wasn't that she loved the eyes before her in those hellish bursts of light and courage, set in an ever sharpening face of gaunt paleness. It was that they loved her, and needed her that made her feel so incredibly wrong for leaving. She'd thrown her fits before these eyes and played her parts, but still when they looked at her, it was with a love that she couldn't understand. She had never loved like that. Even her parents, her friends, her stepmother, would send her away to her room or to the land of discarded rejects until she apologized or pretended she was sorry for being the way she was. Pretended to be something else for them. Those eyes knew what she was and the glorious love that lay beneath them did not dim.

They made her brave.

They made her afraid.

When she left he didn't crumble. He had her mind, and so he sat on his throne and put on a grim, brave face and waited for her to realize what she'd forgotten.

And in her own mind, locked away in the dark recesses of his, they both knew she hated leaving one more loveless thing behind.

She couldn't save everyone, especially the one that needed saving the most.

The one needing the saving, truly, went unsaved.

Because that was simply the way it was done.

The one who breathed for love.

And received

-none.