Author's Note: So, who's already given up on me? You shouldn't! Last chapter was just practice! . See...I write dialogue. That chapter had very little dialogue. And I'm going to try and keep it that way, comparatively so. So, in this chapter we get to see Toby walk, wander, meander, and walk some more. We also get to hear Jareth be all enigmatic. And best of all, we get to have a brief encounter within the Labyrinth itself. Also, I'll explain more about Anna, so yeah. Yaoi soon! I promise!
Chapter Two
But that was once upon a time, very long ago.
-"Once Upon A Time"
The castle was old, much older than in his dreams...but in his dreams, there was much more noise, too, less of this all encompassing sadness. Toby still knew where everything was, though, all of the rooms he'd been to. The castle might be falling apart slowly around him, but it was still the place from restless nights and behind the bay window.
He should have felt out of place. He certainly looked it. Toby hadn't bothered changing for bed except to remove his shoes and watch...he was still dressed in the dark jeans and half-unbuttoned green shirt he'd been wearing when Anna threw him out. His socks were dirty from walking around the dusty halls, but he didn't stop. He had to keep moving. The swish of his jeans, the quiet thuds of his footfalls...these were the only sounds in the castle. If he stopped, it would all be silent again.
Sometimes he stopped to look out the windows, but it was silent outside as well. The labyrinth stretched out on all sides of the city as far as he could see. The sun was setting, sending strange shadows out over the maze. Toby never stopped for long. He meandered from room to room, peering in the different doors, finding places he hadn't already explored, looking for clues to his past here, keys to his memories.
"I wouldn't go that way."
The dark silk voice halted Toby in his steps. He glanced over his shoulder to where the goblin king leaned against the wall. Jareth fixed him with an amused gaze. "The way this place is set up, it's very easy to get lost."
Toby stared back at him, evaluating. "I have time. I doubt there's much work here for someone with my qualifications, so why shouldn't I explore?"
"What qualifications would those be?"
Toby turned to fully face the goblin king. "Psychology, strangely enough. Specializing in case studies...sleep disorders, phobias, that sort of thing." He paused. "Do you know what those are?"
"I know more about your world than you might think," Jareth answered wryly. "There isn't much work to be done around here anymore. Why shouldn't I observe the world your sister left here for?"
Toby narrowed his eyes, counting to ten slowly. "Touché."
"You're angry." Jareth stepped out of the shadows. "Why not show it? It was such an attractive characteristic in your sister, some of that must be in you as well."
Toby briefly restrained himself before giving in. "I'm not Sarah, and don't mock me. I really don't appreciate it. At all."
Jareth's lips quirked and he moved slowly backwards down the hall. "Be careful where you go in here. You don't have any shoes, and there's broken glass everywhere."
Toby watched him until he was gone in the lengthening shadows. He frowned, and continued on his exploration.
Jareth reminded him of Anna, in a way. Anna loved being in control. Even in psych lab their final year of college, she had run the show. She also laughed at Toby for being so emotional. The difference was, she hid her emotions even less than he did. And she expected him to do the same.
If she encouraged that, like Jareth...if she had let me experience my life instead of trying to suppress it, maybe I wouldn't have left.
It was a lie, and Toby knew it...he would have left no matter what. Anna was nothing to him, not anymore, not for a very long time. He might have loved her once upon a time, but he didn't belong in her world, the same way he didn't belong in his own world.
The light grew brighter. Toby froze on the threshold of a tall, circular chamber. There were windows everywhere, and the setting sun glared in through them and made it hard to see. Even so, these didn't explain the sudden brightness. It wasn't until his eyes adjusted to the light that Toby realized why. The entire chamber was riddled with holes larger than anywhere else in the castle, and the walls themselves were eroding away.
There were doors everywhere in the room, with staircases leading to each one. Toby was surprisingly near the top, despite having been on one of the lower floors moments before. The stairs were everywhere, connecting at the sides and underneath one another as they led into walls, the ceiling, everywhere in every which direction. It was like an Escher photo, or a truly dizzying optical illusion.
This was the room that haunted Toby's worst nightmares.
Toby didn't even try to enter. The shakes that suddenly gripped him told him he wasn't ready yet. Instead, he turned and started back the way Jareth had gone. The halls were growing dark, painted in grays and purples now instead of dying reds and yellows. At home, he could hear the roar of traffic from the road outside the window of his and Anna's room. Even at his parents', there was the occasional rush of air as a late night worker returned home and the ever present noise of crickets and the neighborhood dogs. Here, there was nothing, not even a breeze.
Toby found himself back in the throne room, and stopped reluctantly. He had no idea where else to go. But the silence was stifling. He paced in circles around the room, replaying conversations in his head, trying to fill the silence without actually speaking.
It shouldn't have surprised him to hear Jareth's voice from the throne as he passed it for the thousandth time. "I assume you're planning to stay the night."
Toby halted again, not looking at the goblin king. "I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
"Do remember that you are the one who wished himself here." Jareth's voice carried the barest hint of amusement. Anna tried to hide her emotions that well, but it always seemed false. Toby had a sneaking suspicion that Jareth wasn't hiding anything...he really didn't feel those extremes often. "Don't blame me."
"I wasn't." Toby tried in vain to make out the faded markings on the few tapestries in the room. "Do you even sleep?"
"I'm not a fairy tale monster, Toby." Jareth's voice was very close, nearly in Toby's ear. A gloved hand landed on each shoulder. "We don't stay awake waiting for you to drop off to dreamland so we can make our move."
"No," Toby muttered without realizing it, "you save that for Sarah."
The hands tightened on his shoulders briefly before Jareth released him. The goblin king's voice was expressionless again. "Follow me."
The room Jareth led Toby to was larger than the entire duplex he could never go back to. The bed alone was larger than any he had ever seen before, an enormous canopied creation draped in a blue so deep it was nearly black. The wall opposite where they stood was mostly an opening to a balcony facing south or north...Toby couldn't tell which, only that the sky was half darkness and half pinkish twilight through the doorway. A white robe was slung over the arms of a high-backed chair to one side of the bed.
Jareth gestured distractedly. "For sleep. I imagine tomorrow you will probably want to continue your exploration of the castle and the city." The faint smile on his face resembled a smug smirk more than a little bit.
Toby raised an eyebrow that spoke volumes. "Are you going to take me for walks in the maze in my stroller, too?"
"You are the one re-exploring your memories, Toby. Not me."
"They aren't memories to me. They're just dreams. This is just like being thrown into a waking dream. Don't mock me for not needing to see proof of that firsthand."
"Believe it, Toby. This is all real." Jareth's eyes glinted in the dark light like silver coins. For a moment, they seemed more real than everything surrounding both men, even Toby himself.
"I believe it." Toby crossed his arms. "I was looking for a sign that I was crazy for believing it." He tossed his head, indication the whole the room, the castle, everything outside in one gesture. "I haven't seen anything that goes contrary to what I...what I remember. Therefore, I must be crazy."
Not like that's a bad thing at all. I was plenty crazy before leaving Anna, why not now?
Jareth nodded. "Madness can be preferable to reality."
Toby wondered what would bring this man to say such things. Toby knew why he himself wanted this place to be real. It seemed as if Jareth wished it weren't.
"Have a pleasant night," Jareth said as he turned to leave. Toby lifted a hand in farewell, then sat on the bed. He didn't reach for the robe draped on the chair, nor did he start undressing for the night. He instead debated throwing what felt like a totally irrational temper tantrum at the now-absent goblin king.
He didn't like feeling like he was being babied, as if he couldn't take care of himself at all in this place even without having been back in twenty years. He didn't want to be seen as a child in Jareth's eyes, and he didn't want to be inseparable from the sister who had saved when he was too young to even know if he'd needed saving or not.
That was rational enough. What wasn't was the frustration and anger Toby felt at Jareth's hasty exit. They'd almost been arguing. Toby wasn't comfortable arguing...he always felt like his words didn't convey what he meant whenever it was important that they did. A faint breeze had picked up outside, so even the silence was no longer so absolute. There was no reason for him to want to rage at Jareth for leaving, no reason to want to scream and rain reproaches on his head to stay longer, or to at least finish their nonexistent discussion before leaving, but Toby want to all the same.
With supreme effort, he throttled the urge, and began to prepare for the night.
The morning brought more of that sickly sunlight, and the best view of the labyrinth below that Toby had yet seen. Yellow and dry, the stone walls beckoned.
Without bothering to ask, Toby began searching for a way into the labyrinth itself.
The city surrounding the castle was deserted, and in shambles. Half of the buildings had entire walls punched through, or roofs that were totally collapsed. He wondered what had happened to this place...the subtle aging and crumbling within the castle could easily be attributed to age, but the goblin city looked like it had been through a war.
Toby kicked a few stones and pieces of rubble from his paths as he wandered towards the tall wall around the city. As the debris became larger, he started to pick his way through smaller streets and alleyways. The city was surprisingly easy to navigate, and completely new...Toby had never seen it before, at least not in his dreams.
Although Jareth says they're memories...and that would make sense, wouldn't it?
Toby stopped suddenly. A large section of the wall before him had completely collapsed, leaving a gaping, rubble-filled gateway before him. Toby walked closer and peered out on either side of the wall. All he observed was a long, high-walled path with openings occasionally appearing in the walls until the path turned. Nothing more in either direction as far as he could see. Toby rubbed some of the dust from him nose, stretched his legs over the fallen wall, and headed down the left end of the path.
He was in the labyrinth.
There doesn't seem to be much to this place at all, he thought as he took the first left turn he came across. Just lots and lots of sandstone and turns. He counted the next two left turns and took the third. The walls aren't even than high, I bet if I jumped a few times I could pull myself up onto the top of them. Sarah had to navigate this? Some challenge.
Five left turns later, he took the sixth. His freshman psych class had done a unit on mazes and what they revealed about individual thinking and the minds of those who created them. The most common pattern was to turn left, and to have a mathematical equation for the location of the path. He'd noticed most complex mazes meant to keep people away from a tangible goal followed the same equation: take the first left turn, go two more, take the third, go five and take the sixth...the distance between each turn was the sum of the previous distance plus one. He assumed it would hold true for this maze. The whole situation came out of a story, after all, so if there was a time when formula would definitely apply, this was it.
Eleven turns, take the twelfth.
He turned the corner, and stopped. He should have been able to see the castle over the walls. Instead, it seemed to be behind him.
Toby's voice seemed too loud in the empty labyrinth. "What the hell?"
Suddenly, Sarah's quest didn't seem so easy after all.
Toby turned, deciding he must have somehow miscounted or taken a right turn by mistake, and found himself staring at a solid wall. His face creased with annoyance. "Oh. Great. Just peachy keen." He kicked at the stone like a sulky teenager. "Dammit."
"Life's just full o' disappointment, isn't it?"
Toby spun around at the laughter, and found himself staring at a set of two doors guarded by what looked like talking coats of arms in red and blue. He stepped back. "You weren't there a minute ago. There were more turns."
"No," one of the strange creatures, the blue one that was upside down, answered, "those are behind you."
Toby didn't turn. "That's a dead end."
"Oh, he got you there!" crowed the top red one. All four burst into another fit of hearty laughter.
Toby ran a hand through his blonde hair impatiently, and took several deep breaths. "Okay, look. This place apparently can't be counted on to follow any rules of logic, am I right?"
He didn't wait for an answer. Instead, he looked at the sky, then at the backs of his hands. "So no matter what I do, I'll end up lost without help. Well, this was a supremely stupid plan."
"No arguments here."
"Shut up."
Surprisingly, the door guards did so.
Toby crossed his arms and tapped his feet. "Well. You guys will just have to help me, then. I just wanted to explore, but I don't want to stick around in this maze forever, so you may as well tell me how to get back to the castle."
"Through one of these doors," Top Blue replied.
Bottom Blue peered out from underneath him. "But we should warn you that one of these leads to the castle while the other leads to..."
Top Blue sang out a series of doomed music.
"...Certain Death."
All four creatures let out an awed "ooo." Toby rolled his eyes. "Right, certain death or success, got it. Let me guess, only one of you can tell me which door is which.."
There was a moment of silence as all four faces looked at one another. After a stiflingly long moment, all four spoke in mild surprise. "That's right."
"Of course." Toby sighed. "Formulaic fairy tales. The real ones were better. I suppose one of you always lies, and the other always tells the truth, too?"
This time the silence was longer. Toby blinked, and raised his eyebrows. "I was kidding."
"You were still right," Bottom Red proclaimed sulkily.
Toby shrugged. "Not my fault?"
"Well then." Bottom Red sounded put out as well. "Which one is it, then? Which one will it be?"
Toby began to pace. This was so silly...but he hadn't intended to get lost, and regardless of if he figured out how to get past the dead end behind him, he doubted any of his other turns would be in the same place. He didn't seem to have much choice but to suffer these clichéd guards. "All right. Ugly Number One, the blue guy on the top there."
There was a series of indignant gasps, which Toby ignored. "Which door leads to the castle?"
Top Blue blinked, and exchanged glances with the other three before answering. "His does."
Toby let out a nervous breath. That was the only answer that could have helped him. "Right. I'm taking the other guy's."
The chorus of whispers between heads began again. Toby didn't wait to see what they would say to him. He wasn't in the mood for door guards who couldn't even think for themselves. He pushed against the red door, stepped through-
-and found himself standing before Jareth on a balcony high on the castle.
"Well, Toby." Jareth's lips curved slightly. "Did you enjoy my labyrinth?"
Toby looked deep into those eerily beautiful eyes. He was still annoyed at the goblin king from the previous night. The part of him that was still a young boy, the part that he hadn't quite lost after college, wanted to snap off some sarcastic retort. He thought about telling him it was a piece of cake, no problem, too easy by far.
Except that was something Sarah or Anne would do.
Toby stared at the goblin king straight on. "It sucked, and you cheat. No one could solve that unless you wanted them to."
Jareth's lips twitched again, and he leaned back against the wall to stare at Toby with mild amusement and something else Toby couldn't quite read as the sickly sun climbed higher over the dry and dying world.