AN:This will be dark. There will be foul language, violence, an ooc Sarah, and incredibly passionate sex involving Jareth. If you don't enjoy any or all of these things, then don't read this. If you are looking for a fairy tale, then don't read this. However, if you are in the mood for something different.....you will probably enjoy this. Oh, and if you like your Jareth badass then you have come to the right place.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Sarah felt rage burning within her. She had been annoyed, ticked off, angry, and all out pissed as hell before. She was a college drop out working as a waitress in a themed kids' restaurant. Take up a job where you have to dress up like a blue hamburger and sing to a bunch of snotty four year olds, smart ass preteens, and their sex starved fathers and all of those emotions are a given. She spent 11-6, Monday through Friday mired deep in one or all of them. However, it took only four little words to take her from her almost constant state of annoyance to a positively blinding rage.
"It was the goblins!" She looked from little Toby (who had strings of chocolate sauce hanging from his tawny hair and whipped cream in between his toes), to the refrigerator (which was dripping with a disgusting mixture of pickle juice, leftover alfredo, pepsi, and grape juice), to the floor (which was covered in skid marks and a disgusting mess of food. In order to contain herself she looked toward the one place which she hoped against hope would have just had to be clean: the ceiling. Not only was it splattered with ketchup, but knives, forks, and Karen's disgusting and excessively expensive high chi diet green tea bricks all stuck to both the ceiling and the ceiling fan.
Sarah closed her eyes. Perhaps if she denied it hard enough she would open her eyes and the kitchen would be clean. Perhaps if she just walked out and came back in a few minutes she would discover that she was having some sort of stress induced hallucination.
Yes. That sounded perfect.
She was halfway out the door when the little bastard had the nerve to say it again.
"It was the goblins Sarah! I swear!"
In a second he was being held up by the collar of his shirt, his little feet dangling in the air as sundae toppings dripped from them and added to the indescribable soup the kitchen floor had become.
"They wanted to play and they said it wouldn't be that bad and they said that we could clean it up in time and Frig and Norn brought all of the other ones and I couldn't-"
"Toby." She growled as she dropped him to the floor and he landed with a loud splash in melted ice cream against linoleum. "Shut up."
The child's lips quivered as he made one last ditch effort to explain himself. Sarah didn't hear a word of it. All she heard was the same sob story he used Every. Single. Time. he did something entirely ridiculous or stupid.
"SHUT UP!" She screamed. "Toby, you cannot keep doing this! Goblins are not real! They don't just show up throw hammers through car windows, leave toys on the stairs, pour soda in the television, or destroy fucking kitchens and then pop back to fucking Goblin Land like its all well and fucking good! And do you know why? THEY DON'T EXIST!"
Toby began to cry.
"You can't keep doing these things and blaming it on goblins! You are getting too old! Do you know what they are going to do to you if you don't cut the shit Toby? They are going to say that you are bi-polar, delusional, or all out retarded! They are going to put you on drugs, give you tests where doctors cut open your head! They are going to lock you away…" She regained herself upon seeing the tears pouring down her eight year old brother's face. It was then that the guilt set in.
"Toby…" She tried quietly and when he flinched away a knife went straight through her heart.
She had never seen such a betrayed look on the boy's face in her entire life. She reached toward him and he raced up the stairs, tracking chocolate sauce and walnuts behind him.
"Fantastic." Sarah muttered hollowly as she thought of him tracking it all over Karen's freshly steamed carpet. Karen was going to have a shit fit. She guessed that she better start cleaning it up, even though she knew that there wasn't a chance in hell she'd be able to have it done by the time her parents got back. She figured it couldn't hurt to have a smoke first.
She kicked her feet up on the one clean corner of the table and quickly lit up. She hissed in pleasure as she hollowed her cheeks and inhaled.
She was so lost in her brief moment of bliss that she didn't notice a single peach fall from the fruit drawer of the open fridge and dexterously roll through the wrecked floor, only to stop directly before her.
"God this sucks." She groaned as she finished her cigarette and tossed it unceremoniously onto the floor. Karen didn't allow her to smoke in the house, but Sarah figured that it didn't really matter. After all, it would end up in the same place as the rest of the mess anyway. She put her feet down on the floor only to step directly on the peach an inadvertently squish about half of it. She picked it up and threw it against the opposite wall, where it actually dented it. Sarah decided to smoke another cigarette or four before starting. God knows she needed it.
It turned out that Sarah had finished an entire pack before she actually even considered cleaning. Cigarettes littered the floor and the smell of smoke mixed with the already putrid scent of assorted rotting and drying foods was almost making her nauseous. It was 10:30 by the time she ever considered cleaning anything. She had just knelt down on the floor with a rag and a bucket and started wiping up a particularly nasty grape juice stain when she heard the lock click open.
"Sarah, honey!" she heard her father call from the parlor. "Sarah?" He called and Sarah prepared herself for the explosion.
"In the kitchen." She called back flatly as she dipped the rag back in the bucket. The closer their footsteps drew the more tense she became. She could hear Karen chatting incessantly and her heart dropped into her stomach when that chatter abruptly stopped and became indignant squawks.
"Sarah, what the hell happened?" She knew that the anger would come later and was thankful that at the moment her father was too shocked to scream.
"Toby was playing with the goblins again." She grunted dryly and continued to wash.
"Excuse me?" Karen asked and Sarah wondered if her father hadn't mentioned Toby's obsession with goblins to her as the concept of imagination was entirely foreign to the woman.
"Toby was playing with the goblins again." She repeated and it was then that she noticed the horrified look in her father's eyes.
"Sarah," He said slowly. "Who's Toby?"