Disclaimer: I don't own Labyrinth or any of the characters. Hell, I don't even own the movie.

AN: Whoops! Looks like this fic is three-parter now.

A Really Bad Morning

With the desperate optimism of someone determined to make it in the big city, dammit, Sarah knew her morning could get better. Just knew it.

Though it may have started out with the heart-stopping panic of waking up twenty minutes late, it was still salvageable. She hadn't gotten her assistant editor's job at an independent food magazine for nothing. Sarah knew deadlines the way Bo used to know baseball. She was going to push her hair out of her face, rub the sleep from her eyes until they were clear enough to see how depressingly small her bedroom was, subtract the current time from the time she needed to be walking out of her apartment, figure out what part of her morning routine she could fit in the difference of that time, throw back the duvet, swing her legs out of bed...

...And put her left foot in cat vomit. Correction: still-warm cat vomit.

One-footed, Sarah hopped out of her bedroom and into the hall with her mouth set in a tight, grim line. She could still save her morning. However, on her way toward the bathroom, it occurred to her to wonder how it was possible to have undigested kibble between her toes when she had given the stupid cat to the retired couple two floors down last week. No sooner had she finished her thought when she spied a giant ball of tortoiseshelled fur washing itself at the end of the hall, looking quite pleased with itself and quite at home.

"Don't get too comfortable, Gaspard!" Sarah yelled at it, half-in, half-out of the bathroom. "I don't know how you got in, but you're going right back out when I get off work. Understand that? Right back out!" She made a mental note to check the window by the fire escape when she got home.

Her shower was quick, but since there was no time to do her hair Sarah settled for a quick blowdry and a hair clip. Back in her room, she pulled on a black sweater, black trousers and painfully stylish black heels, and wiped up the cat vomit as best as she could. She looked at the alarm clock—only ten minutes late now; she could shampoo her carpet after work, after she took Gaspard back to the Goldsteins. She collected her purse (check!), her PDA (check!), fastened on the watch that said on the back: "Congrats on your promotion, Dad and Karen" (check!), and after doing the usual once-over at herself in the full length mirror by her front door (check!), Sarah, armed once again with the optimism she'd dropped in her bedroom, sailed out of her apartment and onto the streets of New York.

She was ready to drop it again, however, after the fourth cab she'd hailed passed her by. As she whistled and waved at the curb, several more went whizzing by, then several more, all with their lights on. Her morning had to get better. Just had to! Sarah looked at her watch, frustrated, and started off at a brisk clip down the sidewalk. It was 7:50. She had ten minutes to make the five-block commute. She'd have to skip Starbucks, but she could do this, dammit.

At the end of the block Sarah began to regret her choice of shoes. By block three, when she stopped to rub her mangled toes for the umpteenth time, she felt a large, wet drop hit her forehead. She touched it, expecting to find a white glob, but then another drop hit her. And then another. And another. Under the stylishly and extremely painful narrow tips of her shoes, the sidewalk was rapidly dotting up with rain.

"Ah, great," Sarah groaned, blinking up at the sky. Huge clouds had rolled in from nowhere and now seemed to be homesteading above her head."Great. That's just great." All around her pedestrians were snapping open umbrellas or ducking under store awnings. Sarah looked on in jealousy. "It's not fucking fair," she muttered under her breath. But she only had two blocks to go. She was so close to doing it, dammit, that she set her chin, shoved her shoe back on and limped for it.

By the time Sarah finally made it through the lobby, up the elevator and into the small suite where she worked, it was 8:07. But she was there; she'd done it, and surely this was the part where her morning got better, Sarah thought. Where else could her shitty morning go but up?

When Sarah opened the door to the small office of The Troubled Fork, Francesca, the receptionist, told her she was late, and that she looked like crap. As she passed by the photocopier, an intern called her "Mrs. Williams" and told her her nose was red. On the way to her cubicle, Herman, a divorced features writer, stared at the way her wet sweater hugged her nipples and told her there was a staff meeting at 8:30. When she finally sat down at her computer and brought it out of sleep mode, an e-mail from her ex-boyfriend Henry told her he had met The One.

Sarah was soaked. Her underwear had bunched in inappropriate places. Her hair was dripping into her eyes. There was a cramp in her side, a blister on the ball of her right foot, she was tired and sore and late, and now she wasn't The One. She no longer believed her morning could get better. She was ready to crawl under her desk and cry.

Her computer chimed. A new e-mail appeared in her inbox, bolded subject line: Travel Opportunity! Escape Awaits You!

Even a blind man would've known it was junk mail, and on a normal day Sarah would have called the sender a nasty name and deleted it. But today she wanted an escape. Today her girl-in-the-big-city optimism had failed her, dammit, and she wanted to see pretty photos of white sand and snow-capped mountains and sunny skies—or whatever the hell it was trying to peddle—even if just for five minutes. She still had fifteen minutes until her meeting. She could do this. Sarah reached for her mouse and clicked on it.

But there weren't any pretty photos. There was only a blinking green scripty text on a white background. "Terrific!" Sarah said. She leaned over the mess of scattered layout proofs and Post-It notes on her desk and grabbed for a tissue, then she read the words: Tired? Stressed? Unhappy?

Tired, stressed, unhappy and disappointed, Sarah sniffled and said, "Why, yes. How did you know?" She dabbed at her wet face with the tissue and scrolled down.

Want to get away from it all? Wish you could escape Underground? it asked

"Oh god, yes, I'd love to escape," Sarah answered. She tossed the soggy tissue in the waste bin under her desk and looked at the clock. Ten minutes to make it to the bathroom, to dry off and to prepare for a meeting that would probably last all morning. Sarah sighed, pulled the hem of her sweater away from her skin, sniffled again, and said sadly, "In fact, I wish I could escape right now."

Then it's your lucky day, the screen flashed.

And in the next moment, the world—as they say—fell down.

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