Disclaimer: I do not own Labyrinth, and I'm not making any money off of it. This is actually my first Labyrinth fic, I just needed something quick to cleanse my palette from my other current projects.
Pomegranate
"You have no power over me…"
Sarah sat at the edge of the bed, taking the small hand and holding it tightly in hers. She tried to ignore the tubes and wires, the sensors that beeped off to one side. She tried to ignore the plain white sheets and the single, flattened pillow. She tried to ignore the sterile, blank walls and too-bright lights, the tingling smell of antiseptic, the soft tapping of feet just beyond the door in response to the muted intercom beckonings. Anything to make it seem as if somehow her little brother wasn't lying in a hospital bed dying.
She was dressed now, though she hadn't been when she took the call. With her other hand, she smoothed the dark blue jeans across her thigh, pushing away the imaginary wrinkles. The phone had jolted her rudely out of slumber, and for a heartbeat, she thought she'd missed her alarm, that they were waiting downstairs already. Then the unfamiliar voice had come over the line, given her the news that sent her tumbling from her bed to grope for clothing on the chair by her bed.
The door opened and closed with barely a whisper, a nurse nodding to her politely as she checked the vital signs of the boy lying in the bed. She left again without a word, and Sarah knew there was no good word to be given.
The police were still reconstructing the accident, they told her. Two cars had collided in the misty morning, with no survivors but the little boy in the bed to give a tale, and Toby wouldn't be telling them anything. Three of the victims had been on their way to visit her at school, driving through the early hours of the morning to spend time with her before attending her play that night. Her father and stepmother were dead, waiting in the morgue below the hospital. The family lawyer had already come to the hospital to talk to her, but there was nothing more to do for now, not until they knew if they'd have to stretch life insurance across another funeral.
"You have no power over me…"
"Stop it," she whispered, severely quashing the voice that kept murmuring against the back of her skull. She'd never wanted a little brother, never wanted her father to remarry after her mother had left them to pursue the lights of the theatre, but she had grown accustomed to it. She and her stepmother had reached a truce, and after overcoming so many obstacles to save her half-sibling from an ill-thought wish, she'd learned to adore him. Toby had cried for days when she went off to university
She smoothed his wispy blonde curls, still fine and soft. Half his head was covered in thick white bandages, his body hidden beneath the stark sheets. "Wake up, Toby."
The steady tick of the machines and the barely visible rise and fall of his chest were the only signs that he still lived.
Sitting alone in the hospital room with her dying baby brother, Sarah wondered why her mind kept traveling back to the labyrinth. To him. Seven years had not been enough to erase the maze and its inhabitants from her memory, though she'd never called them after that first night. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine being in her father's room, the goblins snickering beneath the bed and crib, the wind giving the sheer white curtains life of their own though the windows were supposed to be closed.
"I wish…"
Silence greeted her. Not the tense silence she'd half been hoping for, but merely the absence of sound and motion, shattered every thirty seconds by the reminder that her brother was barely living.
"I wish…"
"It's only forever…"
"Wake up, Toby," she pleaded, tears streaming from her gray-green eyes.
"Miss."
She turned to see a nurse regarding her sympathetically. "Yes?"
"One of us will sit with the boy-"
"His name is Toby."
The nurse smiled gently. "One of us will sit with Toby if you need to take a break. There's a cafeteria downstairs-"
"No," Sarah answered hoarsely. "No, I'll stay with him. He's my brother."
"As you wish. The offer is there, though, should you need it. Just let one of us know at the desk, and we'll stay with Toby."
"Thank you." Watching the kind woman walk out of the room, she stared at the door, her focus drifting. She shook her head and wrapped her other hand about Toby's as well, as if she could somehow push life from her veins into his.
She didn't want to sit this vigil alone, but there was no one to call. No close friends, no family, and she couldn't bear to have mere acquaintances about something so deep, so personal. She'd never been the most sociable of girls, but for seven years, there had been a vague sense of distance about her. She'd grown into her promise of beauty, raven-dark hair falling in a straight, shining mass to her hips. With pale skin barely marred by the lightest smattering of freckles, her expressive eyes had aroused the curiosity of many boys in her schools. They dared not approach her though, dared not speak to this sad-eyed, distant wonder.
She thought again of Hoggle, of Didymus, of Ludo…of him They were no longer hers to call. "I wish…"
"What do you wish, gosling?" She could almost hear the teasing in her mother's voice. Her mother, perhaps, but no….the once-famous actress had not been seen or heard in years, and if anyone knew where the woman had gone, they weren't saying anything to her only mildly curious daughter.
"I wish you were here, Jareth," she admitted finally, voice little more than a wash of breath in the stillness.
The heavy, plain curtains rustled strongly and she turned to the window, barely daring to hope. Framed by the blank white walls, he stood there, blue eyes dark with anger and something else she couldn't identify. "Come to ask my help and refuse my power once more, Sarah?" he asked, voice laced with bitterness.
"You have no power over me," she retorted automatically.
The Goblin King raised carefully sculpted eyebrows. "Don't I?"
She stared at him helplessly. "Please…"
"Please what, Sarah? Do you honestly think that I'll be so quick to help you now?" He stepped down from the windowsill, his polished black leather boots ringing on the tile. A flick of his wrist produced one of the crystal spheres she remembered so vividly. She didn't want to look in it, but as ever, was drawn into the rounded, glassy surface. Within the orb, she could see that final room, high in the tower of the castle beyond the goblin city, in the center of the labyrinth, could see the walls falling down around her. "I offered you everything, Sarah, and you turned your back."
"He's dying," she choked. "You wanted him once, so badly that you broke every rule of common decency to con him out of a fourteen year old girl. Would you not take him now, if it could spare him dying?"
"It was never Toby that I wanted."
Her eyes widened.
Jareth looked distastefully about the small room of clean, sterile white, feeling the steel within the building. His steps brought him to her side and he ignored the boy, reaching out to caress her damp cheek with one gloved finger. "I took him because you wished it. I gave you the chance to win him back because you wished it. Everything I did, I did for you, Sarah."
"I cannot ask you to do this thing for me," she murmured, her chest tight with the urge to weep. She didn't know why she'd called him, when she'd been able to resist the need for so long.
"You would truly see your brother become one of us, someone like me, rather than see him die?" he inquired curiously, intrigued by the fear she showed of mortality.
"He's only seven!" she cried. "He's not even eight years old yet!"
Finally, Jareth glanced at the small figure in the bed. It looked so very different from the red and white striped child he had dandled on his knee, had entertained with his goblins. "Goblins cannot stop the death of humans."
"But goblins themselves do not die. You gave me thirteen hours, and said he would then become one of you."
"You believe he has thirteen hours left."
She dissolved into tears, feeling the failure heavy in her throat, choking off breath and hope. Too, there was the headiness of just being around him once more. She'd been innocent at fourteen, and was innocent still in most ways, barely understanding the terror and delight that sliced together through her soul at the merest memory of his voice.
His gloved hand rested on her head, smoothing her dark hair pensively. "I will take the boy," he said at last. "If he lives the thirteen hours, I will make him one of us, and he will live forever. On one condition."
"You always have conditions."
"You must come with him."
Sarah didn't even open her eyes; she knew studying his face wouldn't give her any advantage. "A devil's bargain."
"A goblin's."
"Isn't life enough? Need I have hell as well?"
"You're already half caught there, Sarah, whether you admit it or not."
"You have no power over me…"
He tilted her chin to force her to meet his eyes, and she stared at the highlighted features within the shaggy fall of blond hair. "You forget, Sarah, I offered you only dreams that were already yours." His face grew pained through its mask of indifference, catching inexplicably at her heart. "You sought me out to dance with me."
"So for taking a single bite from a forbidden fruit, I'm lost to the Underground?"
He hissed and stalked angrily away from her. "I offered you a peach, not a pomegranate."
"So you admit that you're King of Hell."
His lips quirked in a brief smile at the bare touch of dark humor. She wasn't crying as she once had about it not being fair. She sat there, weeping over her baby brother's hand and wondering if she had a choice.
"Come with me, Sarah," he whispered. "Your brother may yet live, and you will be my queen. You have friends in the Underground, though you turned your back on them as surely as you did me." Guilt stabbed through her suddenly, and his smiled grew, though he was careful not to let her see it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling her to him so that his lips brushed against the soft curve of her ear. "I watch you in the stillness, keeping everyone away. No human leaves the Underground completely, and I would never have come to you if you didn't still feel that call. What would you leave behind, Sarah? With Toby beside you, what would you miss?"
She fought to breathe, hands closing almost too hard around the fragile foundation of wires and tubes. His hand caressed her cheek. "You have no power over me," she told him desperately.
"Just as you have no power over me. And yet, here I am, in a city of steel and a place of clean death, seeing if seven years have succeeded in teaching you that requests have prices and consequences.
Raising her gaze, she found another orb shifting alongside the first in his hand. Her eyes grew dizzy, tracing the motion, but she could see her baby brother laughing, playing a game of tag with goblins about the room of staircases that had, seven years ago, tested her determination. A third joined the carousel, showing Toby sleeping contentedly against a mass of dirty orange fur that could only have been the gentle Ludo.
"This is part of what I offer you, if you will only return," he whispered.
"Part?" she echoed, ears straining to hear the steady ticking of the machines through the pounding rush of blood in her head.
For answer, Jareth produced a fourth sphere, holding it out to her. "See for yourself," he told her.
Sarah eyed it warily, remembering her lessons. Things aren't always as they seem…
He frowned, holding it out even farther from him. "Sarah, I want this to be your choice. I will show you what I can promise you; I will not trap you into something you do not decide."
She still didn't trust it, but she took the orb in her left hand, feeling it grow warm against her palm. Gray-green eyes stared into its depths, finding a sweat-slicked blurring of skin, a cry of passion that pierced through the glass to light a fire deep within her. Shocked, she dropped the sphere, watching it fall lightly to the floor and roll a short distance away.
"Yet you cannot promise that Toby will live," she said finally.
"I cannot make such a promise," he agreed, shifting the remaining three spheres in his hand.
Sarah stroked the side of her brother's face not swathed in bandages, her white silk blouse and pinstriped open vest clinging to her back in damp anxiety. The machines continued their relentless vigil, ticking away her baby brother's life in their unceasing monotony. She met his eyes.
"I wish the goblins would come and take you away."
"Right now."