This is my very first fanfic, so constructive criticism is more than welcome! I do not own Labyrinth, Jareth, or Sarah of course.
How was she supposed to know that one little crystal, bursting like a soap bubble, could have such a devastating effect? Selfish, spoiled, little girl. One little all-consuming wish for the girl who couldn't decide what she wanted. At the very last moment, in the last strokes of the clock, she had reclaimed the babe that was stolen, had defeated the frightening villain, and had caused his kingdom to fall.
It would never be enough for the girl who craved a colorful life. At the last moment, as the Goblin King fell and the crystal barely brushed her hand she had thought a single word with such a ferocity that it burned her stomach. "Magic."
So she had wished, and so her wish was granted. But magic for whom?
She thought so little of it, taking for granted that her friends and former foes from the Labyrinth could come unaided into her room with little more than an invitation, that the wish masters could cross the boundary between the worlds without a wish. But perhaps one should not judge the girl harshly, after all, what fourteen-year-old ever truly considers something like consequence when it occurs beyond their line of sight?
Less than a block away, a little girl screamed in her bed as the shadow in her closet finally slipped beneath the door and coalesced into a towering figure in her room. She screamed until it descended upon her, fanged mouth gaping wide.
On a small New England college campus, a group of young women from the school's pagan coalition clung to each other in fear as the ritual they had begun half in play ended with one of their number being dragged by a great green something into the woods. Her screams would play out in their nightmares for years to come.
Two young parents watched in silent awe in the American Midwest as the dreamcatcher they had hung in their baby's nursery glowed white, a strange lump of shadow struggling at its center like a fly in a spider's web. Their baby peacefully slept on. A young woman less than three houses down from them found her hands burning with healing light as she bandaged her older brother's skateboard scrapes.
A Moroccan street performer suddenly began belching blue fire in uncontrolled bursts, burning the market place he earned his livelihood in to the ground. A young ribbon dancer found her ribbons whipping about of their own accord, until the whirlwinds of satin thread drew her steadily further and further from the ground.
All across the world monsters and guardians alike crept into bedrooms, sanctuaries and classrooms, from the meanest third world village to the highest security computer firms. Every culture had their monsters, their spooks and sprites, their urban legends. Stonehenge and the Bermuda Triangle practically exploded with mingled laughter, screams, and light as all the old weak spots in the Earth burst forth. Carnival psychics found that their "gifts" were suddenly real, wiccans found that their spells carried weight.
And Jareth's kingdom filtered like the sand in an hourglass into Sarah's human world, almost intimately, magic flooding back on the whim of a careless fourteen-year-old who couldn't be bothered to add "….for me."