A/N: Just a reminder...

1) Italics are either a flashback (when lots of text is italicized), internal thought (brief bit of italicized text describing a character's thoughts) or mass singing ( italicized words surrounded by closed "parenthesis" --- like that)
2) I don't own the Labyrinth, or the characters there in. Any OC's are mine, and the descriptions in here are purely of my own imagination. I am doing this for fun, not profit. .
3) This is self-beta'd, as well as my friend is helping me out. If you see any problems, let me know please?

CHAPTER 1

Wiliam ran through the back allies, terrified.

I can't be a changeling, I just can't... He let the tears flow from his two different coloured eyes, down his angular face to hit the cobbled streets that where under his feet. The villagers where blaming him for the bad crop the season had produced, none of them truly trusting him because of those very damned eyes. He fell, tripping over some refuse that hindering his path, hitting his head hard. He felt panic raise in him, feeling his eyes droop closed.

Goblins where calling out to him, reaching for him. They asked him to come home, begging him not to stay away longer...

His eyes cracked open, and he scuttled backwards into the darkness that offered some protection. He sat huddled behind the pile of refuse, shaking miserably. He couldn't' be the atrocity they called him. So what if he did have mix-matched eye colours, sharp teeth, as well as hair so white he was forced by his own Mother to put ash into his hair to make it a darker colour, but that meant! The mob surged past, vile chants rising from them.

"Come to us, young King!" voices came echoing around him, strange voices that sounded unnatural. A hand then fell on his willowy shoulder, causing him to nearly yelp in fright.

"Shh… I'll not harm yeh," A soft voice crooned. A woman peered down at him, "Come with me…" She pulled his hand and quickly steered him out of the frenzied village, torchlight bathing the silhoutte ominously. It was fully dark now, as he and the woman crested the hill leaving the dreary hamlet, he chanced a look backwards. No one had followed. A sob choked itself out of his throat, the woman wrapping a protective arm around him.

"It's alright now boy," She murmered.

"My…my Mother," He choked out, the pain of the harsh betrayal setting in.

"None of that now. How old are yeh?"

"Seven... M'am."

"Too old to cry. What's your name then?"

"Wiliam," The boy whipped the tears that had streaked his face away fiercely.

"Hm, well I don't like it for yeh. From now on I'll call yeh Jareth."

"Who are you?" Jareth asked, a chill setting into his young heart.

"Call me Aunt Ophelia. Now come along Jareth m'boy, we've a lot of traveling to do afore we're safe."

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Jareth awoke in a run down cottage. Aunt Ophelia was cooking, dull stained rags clinging to her proud frame.

"Why?" His young voice sounded scared, and he instantly despised that.

"Did yeh want to die?" She asked serenely, no bothering to look up from her position.

"No."

"And what would yeh do to live?"

"Anything! Anything Aunt Ophelia!" He cried out, his face then contorting into a grimace at his own pathetic state.

" Then, m'boy, you must become the Goblin King," Ophelia turned now, daylight showing Jareth what he'd failed to see the night before. The woman appeared to be thirty one, but her eyes spoke of her truer self.

"Goblin King?"

"Yes. I am now the Goblin Queen, and I have chosen you to be my heir. You are a changeling dear boy, but that is not a bad thing. Your Mother didn't see how glorious that truly is! I'll give you a Kingdom to rival any mortal man's, I'll give you life immortal. You will be loved by all your subjects, you will be feared so as to never face such persecution again. I will groom you, m'boy, to be everything that a Goblin King should be. I will groom you to be my son," Ophelia smiled softly, standing to show her height. She was remarkably tall to Jareth, slender yet curvaceous, ringlets of copper hair cascading down her straight back. Luminous violet eyes looked at him, her soft mouth set into a strong smile that made her delicate features look fierce. Light glittered against a strange pendant that she had low on her body that seemed to call to him. Jareth's breath left him, and he nodded numbly. Ophelia smiled and embraced her new son, knowing that he would be terrifying in his beauty as she was, and all the more suited to the role from his Mother's betrayal.

"Aunt Ophelia, I will become the strongest, so that no other will ever question me, the smartest so no one will be able to trick me, and heartless so no one will ever be able to betray me. I will be the Goblin King, and I will make it so all forget there was any other but me!"

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Ophelia smiled as she looked at her protege. It had been nine years of grooming, nine years of seeing the scared boy become the noble Lord of the Goblins, a heartless man who was sharp witted, and strong beyond all her expectations. He never but ash in his hair to hide it's glorious platinum shade, and his features had become delicate and fierce as hers where. He was flashy and arrogant, cocksure while he was also a great stratagist. He was wearing black breeches, a billowing white shirt unlaced at the front, and knee high riding boots. Puberty had not marred him, only enhanced him, as if it where only natural that he should never be anything but perfect.

"Aunt Ophelia!" He cried out with false mirth. She sighed inwardly, painfully and yet amusedly aware that he treated her with the same cold distain as he treated the rest of the world.

"Yes, Jareth?" She lazily raised one of her eyebrows.

"When? When will you finalize what is to be mine?" His eyes glittered like shards of glass.

"In a hurry are you? What a pity. You haven't even experienced life properly."

"What is there in this life? Suffering! Agony! I would be happier serving the subjects that call to me! I hear them, Aunt Ophelia. They call me their Lord, they beg me to come to them! How can you deny them any longer? They've already waited for nearly a decade. I want to help children who have parents cruel enough to wish them away, I want to make it so they only know happiness. I want to make it so they never have to feel what it's like to know a Mother's betrayal, or a home's rejection, " Jareth's voice had risen in anger, but he simmered down and looked at Ophelia oddly as she nodded.

"Then I have only one thing left for you," She reached under her curtain of hair and undid the clasp of her necklace that sat just under her chest. Jareth's eyes widened marginally, and dropped to his one knee, posed as if to be knighted.

"You, oh my heir, will now bear my final curse. While you view it now as a gift, you will find it ever your bane, and will one day come to curse my name. I have stolen you from your true path as one day you will steal another. With me giving you this amulet, the one thing I've refused you in your training to even look at for too long, I give you the immortality, power, cunning and wisdom to rule over your subjects. It will coat your heart in ice so cold that your work will never bother you, never make you second guess your judgement. I give this to you now, relinquishing my title as Queen of the Goblins, and make you their leige, Jareth, the Goblin King," As as she called him the King, she placed the amulet onto his neck. It shone brightly as it touched his alabaster skin, then settled calmly. He looked up, to see tears in Ophelia's eyes.

"You must go now, m'boy. That light... the near by village already call me a witch. They'll come for me now. Before you lock yourself Underground, live a little. Try to love before your heart is iced over. My final act to you as your saviour and Aunt is to demand you leave me," The light had faded to twilight, Jareth looked at Ophelia horrified.

"I am the Goblin King now! I will whisk you away, save you! Why die here, now?"

"Because I've lived my life. I've known many things. It's my time," Ophelia smiled sadly, pushing past her psuedo son towards the haze of what could only be torchlight. Jareth looked ready to argue, but with what he vowed would be the last time someone sacrificed themselves for him, he turned and left his Aunt to her fate, tears sliding down his face unabashedly as he suddenly felt betrayed again.

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"M'Lord?" The young goblin trepidatiously shook him, rousing his from his languid position on his throne. He'd drifted off, and while that last memory bit into his steely heart he paused to contemplate why he was reliving his past. He saw the throne room full of goblins, all waiting for him to hear the petty cases they thought needed to be justified, the one that had awoken him holding up a ruined piece of trash.Another goblin stood behind the other, looking smug as though he'd won the case through Jareth's silence.

"Such a pity..." He muttered, not bothering to straighten up, "Its simple. That.. thing... has be damaged? Take two things from him as compensation," He pointed to the one who now looked shocked, "And next time, solve this between yourselves. This is too trivial for me, now go." The next set of goblins came to step forward, but Jareth sighed in annoyance. He stood up, raked his subjects with a baleful glare and then stalked off. Normally he kept his pretense of an arrogant, ruthless King up as it was easier to deal with his subjects that way, but even he could only handle so much. Not many wished their unwanted children away anymore, and the last that had defeated his labrynth. Only one other woman had ever done that, and he'd been very young then.

Damn... Toby would have been perfect! I could have raised the boy to be the next King, and I could finally rest! A sneer fell over his sharp features. Yes, he would have been perfect. So of course she had to take him back...

It had been a number of years now. Nearly twenty-one. She would be thirty-seven, Toby would be roughly twenty-two. He'd heard a number of years back - had it been seven? - that she'd had a child. Her goblin friends had kept an eye on her, even though she never contacted them anymore. But they visited the child, told her old fairy tales that weren't so imaginary. Fitting that even she now thought her daughter had an over active imagination when it was her who had been like that as a child as well. The pendant on his chest had been icy cold for so long now, only the belief of that one little girl stirring it occasionally to something resembaling warm againt his breast. Something that was no where near the searing heat it had been those centuries past. Nothing like what if felt like now. Jareth paused. His pendant wasn't cold. Infact, it was quickly passing warm and gaining heat. His eyes narrowed, an orb forming on his fingers as he saw a scene unfolding that was far too delicious not to watch.