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Wishful

Chapter I


"I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave."


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Toby Williams was having a rotten seven-year-old day—the juice was gone, his snack of slightly browned apples had been disappointing, and Kate was being…well Kate. Her round cheeks and warm baby cooing seemed to hold Toby's mother captive.

"Mama? Mama! MA-MA!"

When his mother responded distractedly he stamped his foot and shrieked, "I wish the goblins would come take away my sister right now!"

All he got for his trouble was a time out while Kate babbled happily on her quilt.

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Sarah was in the midst of a writing binge: the kind where she subsisted on coffee and cheese sandwiches and wrote as fast as her pen could fly across the paper.

The windows across the room were open to the summer wind and the curtains fluttered in the breeze.

She flipped the manuscript page and began a new line.

The shriek of an owl startled her and she turned to look through the window as the raptor circled the tree once before entering her room.

She barely had time to be frightened before Jareth, the Goblin King, stood before her.

"Oh god!" she gasped.

He was just as she remembered him—flamboyant in his sequined cloak, with the arrogant tilt of his head and his strange bright, mismatched eyes.

"Sarah—what a pleasant surprise. Who knew you could inspire such feelings from across town?" His voice was warm and he smiled a little, just the slightest curve of his narrow lips. At fifteen Sarah had thought his smile cruel, but at twenty-one she recognized the real laughter in his mismatched eyes.

"Feelings?" she murmured, a terrible thought beginning to occur to her.

"What's said is said." Echoing another conversation in another bedroom.

Sarah shivered.

"But I didn't call for you…"

"Mores the pity," Jareth smiled again cocking his head, strands of his wild wheat blond hair stirring in some magic wind.

He had been stern when he had come to her last time, intimidating and intentionally belittling. This time his stance was looser and he looked around them in undisguised interest.

"So this is where the Great Williams writes."

Sarah found herself blushing, "How do you know about my work?"

"I do read Sarah," his voice was faintly chiding.

"So uhm… why are you here?"

"I've brought you a gift."

"Is it a Crystal?" Sarah asked suspiciously.

"So defiant, still," Jareth growled. In another conversation she might have found it intimidating but his eyes were still lit with that strange private amusement. He took a step forward and she leaned back further into her desk chair.

"Actually it's a ticket," he extended a slender gloved hand palm up and a small golden square appeared in it.

When he extended it to her she took it against her better judgment. There was something so comforting, in a way, about seeing him again. There were times when she had actually considered that she might be mentally ill and creating the whole experience in her mind but Jareth was so present, so real that she was convinced anew that she was grounded in reality. A reality, it seemed, that had room in between its molecules for glimmering magic dust.

"One way ticket to the Underground?" Sarah read the elegant typography slowly, horror dawning.

Jareth smiled again, wider and fuller, showing all of his pointed crooked teeth. "Its lovely there Sarah, as you well know, and the Labyrinth has missed you." He reached out to touch one slender finger to her cheek. "Lets go."

"But how…" she protested. "Toby!"

Jareth rubbed his hands together. "The boy had his uses after all."

"But who is going to run the Labyrinth for me? Toby is only seven and it's dangerous." She shuddered to think of all the narrow escapes she had had as a teenager.

Jareth's smile widened.

"Will I—will I have to solve it again?" The thought didn't fill her with as much dread as she thought it should.

Jareth reached down and took both of her hands in a gentle grip, urging her to her feet. "I suppose you could name your own forfeit if you wish to travel the Labyrinth again—I can be kind. But no—no one is going to run the Labyrinth for you. I am—" here he paused meaningfully, "afraid you'll have to stay forever." He sounded anything but repentant.

"And if I refuse?"

"Such hostility Sarah, ought I to do something to actually inspire it?"

Another time, another conversation. 'I am exhausted from living up to your expectations,' he had said, looking so intense as he had searched her face as though memorizing it. He had offered her a Crystal and she had seen his angular face reflected in it.

Her room was fading she realized, and Jareth's hands were gently tugging her forward.

She took one step to regain her balance and immediately realized her mistake as the Aboveground dematerialized completely.

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Edited by Claviculae on January 15th, 2016.

Dedicated, in some small way, to the illustrious David Bowie (1947-2016).