Bwaaaah. As a note… since I'm going with the Tudor theme here Christianity and the church was a huge part of life at the time. References to church-y things are only included when I think it relevant and in keeping with the era. I am *not* sneaking some hidden Christian agenda into a pagan story, I just want to tell a fun fairy tale. Plus Sarah/Jareth is super squee.

This is a little short (but keep in mind this was originally supposed to be a oneshot so blurgh to my brain). I think two more moderately sized chapters should do it. I wasn't setting out to do anything epic, and this seems a reasonable jaunt.

Disclaimer: see part 1

Jareth made his way back down into the cave where he knew Sarah's body lay. The beast paced around her, flicking its tongue to bring warmth to her, but it couldn't stay like this forever. Once Jareth was close enough that the salamander began to show signs of alarm, he slowed to a stop and spoke to it in a commanding tone.

"You show concern for this mortal, and I swear to you as the Goblin King that I mean her no harm." The words formed easily, there was no hint of duplicity in them, and Jareth was surprised at how sincerely he meant it. Scare her possibly, enrage her for the fun of it probably, but hurting her was neither his nature nor his inclination. "Stand down, beast."

The creature didn't back away, but neither did it threaten him as he bridged the distance between himself and the girl. It sat on the ground, still but for its thrashing tail, and Jareth finally got the opportunity to examine the fallen woman.

Even through his gloves he could feel her emanating cold. The blue tint to her was made all the more obvious by how unnaturally pale she had become. A winter indoors could not explain her pallor, and Jareth suspected that the salamander had stolen the entire spring worth of sunlight from her skin. It acted out of instinct, not malice, but clearly it knew it could not fix what it had wrought. Jareth carefully removed her hand from where it lay in the water and noted the tip of her index finger singed black. Time would tell if that faded or healed, but he doubted it would ever entirely leave.

Sarah was so vulnerable like this, and Jareth thought that any other Goblin King would feel triumphant in the obvious opportunity to win. He could keep her like this until the day was up and claim his prize. It would be a legitimate strategy, and the calculating part of him urged the easy solution. However, something deep and shameful spiraled in his mind and he knew he could no more leave her to suffer for hours on end then he could abandon the call when a child was gifted to him. Perhaps this was what it was like to feel human, to have your emotions conquer logic and self-interest. Perhaps humanity was contagious.

Gathering her into a sitting position, Jareth watched her head limply fall to one side. Dirt cascaded from her hair, and her shivers were more severe than ever now that his own heat was reminding her tired body what it was missing. A low hiss was escaping the mouth of the salamander but it didn't move anything but its tail and its eyes as it waited to see what Jareth would do with the girl.

The easiest way to fix this problem had occurred to Jareth the moment he saw her twitching on the ground and he had delayed long enough. Life and warmth started with breath, and he made sure she was not conscious as he carefully observed her fluttering eyelids and felt her icy panting through her slack jaw. Only the salamander would be witness to this, and the beast could no more communicate this moment of weakness than recite poetry so he allayed his fear. This would change everything, but he felt there was no other way.

Sarah's lips were so cold as he bent down to meet them that he had to pull away at first. She burned with cold. He wasn't about to let shock get the better of him, and he met her frigid lips once more and softly allowed his breath to move through her, magically pushed ever so slightly to speed its healing progress. Jareth felt the cold begin to seep into him as nature sought to balance them out, and while he could not return the slight tan to her skin she had been stripped of he did feel her body warm as his cooled. He lost himself for just a moment as she became pliant and pleasant in his arms, making him feel something more dark and passionate than he had meant when this began. Once his blood quickened he pulled away abruptly before his body stirred against hers, and saw a reassuring rosiness to her cheeks. The desire she had sparked in him he tried to firmly clamp down and extinguish, but it sat like a hot ember in the back of his mind.

"The dwarf is not as he seems, do not cause him trouble on her behalf." He spoke to the salamander who was watching him silently. The blinking stare was blank, but Jareth felt his own sense of recrimination reflecting off of it all the same. Weak. A king couldn't afford to be weak, particularly over some mortal.

He picked up her still unconscious form and began a slow assent to the light. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the salamander stir and suspected Sarah had made another friend. She had an uncanny ability to draw others to her, even as she pushed them away.

"You cruel, beautiful thing." He murmured to her around an ungentlemanly grunt as he shifted her dead weight in his arms and ascended the stone steps into daylight.

The priest had told her, time and again, that God had a plan for her. Sarah hadn't had time to pray before her world went black, but she certainly had a blessing on her lips when she woke up. Bone weary, she forced open her eyes and came to two conclusions almost simultaneously: that orange midday sun meant this was not a dream, and Hoggle was even uglier when he was concerned than when he was angry. A wart on his nose loomed large as he bent over her and let out a sigh as she blinked back.

"So's you're awake." He leaned away and Sarah turned her head towards a flash of orange to see that on the other side of her sat the lizard. It was sprawled on a rock while Sarah lay exposed to the sun on the cracked path in front of the cave. At least she assumed it must be the same cave, because the runes had disappeared from the front of it. Magic was a lot easier to accept now that she had been exposed to it a few times.

"How long was I asleep?" The sun was almost directly overhead and that already told her she had lost precious hours as surely as if they had been stolen by the Goblin King himself. Drawing in a long breath, her sigh rocked her body.

"Long as you needed it, I s'pose." He acted dismissive but she noticed he picked up her dress from where it had been dropped earlier outside the cave's entrance. If he wasn't going to mention that kindness then neither would she, but Sarah felt a glow inside of her that allowed her enough energy to stand with only the tiniest stumble.

"I don't know how I can thank you. It must have been some chore dragging me from the depths."

"Don't mention it." Hoggle strode ahead, seemingly uncomfortable with the praise.

Rogue shivers passed through Sarah's body as she caught up with Hoggle, but she assumed it had been a chill from the cave lingering that would cause it. The lizard walked next to her, stopping when she stopped, keeping pace effortlessly on its short legs but always maintaining just enough distance to be out of reach. The comforting warmth it exuded made Sarah glad for its presence.

"I think it needs a name. I can't go around calling it an it, or lizard, that just seems unmannerly."

Catching up to Hoggle hadn't been hard, with his short legs and now burdened by the dress. Sarah picked dirt out of her hair as she went, having abandoned the thought that her kirtle would even be salvageable at the end, with its tears, dirt, and blood stains marring it. The weird green plant matter had dried on her stockings and she still felt the urge to itch at her ankle, so they were probably a lost cause as well. A keen feeling of loss jetted through her as she tried to seek comfort from her iron cross to remember it was lost to her in this place.

"Maybe things in the Underground don't like bandying about with names the way you humans do. Maybe down here naming everything is unmannerly." He huffed as they rounded a corner and began to walk up a slight incline that looked like it would grow steeper. Tree tops became immediately visible and Sarah tried to will her tired limbs to keep going.

"I mean no offense. What would you say it was then?"

"It's a fire elemental so… I would say it's a fire elemental." Hoggle acted like this was the only sensible thing to say.

"That's not very creative. Why can't you just call it a temporary name?"

Hoggle gave her a look over his shoulder that told her he thought she had empty air between her ears. "A fake name is too much like a lie. I says things like I sees 'em."

Trickery, manipulation, deception—all those things were fair game to these creatures but Sarah recalled now that they couldn't lie directly. Lies by omission were fine, but if you asked enough of the right questions you could still protect yourself from their false promises. It was hard to think Hoggle capable of such guile as he tromped up the small hill holding onto her green dress, but it was easy enough to imagine the Goblin King entrapping her in some web of deceit.

"What do you know of the Goblin King?"

Hoggle stopped in his tracks so fast she almost ran him over. The lizard hissed, not liking to get any closer to the dwarf than it could help.

"Now missy, you can't be askin' me to do anything treasonous."

It was a harsh word to throw around. "You could ask me what I think of my own king and I could tell you without it being treason. I want to know what you think of him."

"You first." Hoggle snorted and began to walk again, huffing a little as the incline finally steepened.

Sarah climbed and thought absently. "Polite. Intense." Her temper turned as she recalled her aching body and the danger to her freedom were all directly his fault. "I don't know, I barely spent any time with him! Maybe I'm nervous. Maybe I want to know what kind of life I'll lead if I don't—" The words had come out rashly and she hadn't realized what she was saying until they were spoken. Her heart clenched as they neared the entrance to the forest and her throat closed up in the precursor to sorrow.

"He's fair," Hoggle supplied in the silence. "Responsible, which is part of why he's here taking care of this domain. Not many would have the ability, either the power or the temperament."

"What is this place?" Sarah saw the lizard skirt the shadows, obviously displeased with the prospect of exiting the sunny path they had been following.

"The Labyrinth is an entryway. When a child is wished away the Goblin King must answer, and in the days when the veil was thin it used to happen frequently. Now that you have your Christian god, you people don't know what you ought to fear. The afterlife holds not even a tenth of the terror this place can offer the living in either realm." Sarah was starting to notice that sometimes Hoggle's speech was rough and sometimes it seemed fine. Her earlier thoughts about his simplicity would have to be reviewed.

They were silent until they reached the tree line, the lizard doing anxious circles nearby to Sarah, while Hoggle asked for a break. He set her dress down for a moment and wiped sweat from his brow with a dirty cloth he produced from his pocket. As Hoggle got his breath back from the long climb up the hill, Sarah had a moment of confusion followed by wonder.

"Hoggle," When he didn't immediately answer she said it louder. "Hoggle!"

"What?"

"I can breathe!"

"So can I, so what?"

She started to pace, the lizard matching her for a moment before settling on a nearby sunny rock pile. "You don't see, how would you know? That hill should have winded me immediately. Since the cave I haven't felt a tightening in my chest once, and just now I took in air so deeply that I couldn't believe my chest could hold it all!"

Hoggle shrugged, unsure of how to react to the suddenly beaming girl.

"All my life! I have never been able to run or play or climb, and now when I need it most my malady has been lifted. It's a blessing, a sign!" She rushed over and hugged him tight, like she would have with Toby if he had been here to see her joy. "I've never been so ready for this, and I don't know if you were a part of my cure, but my thanks to you all the same."

When she let him go he looked flustered, smoothing down his clothes and clucking at her for being out of her mind. There was no venom in his words, though, and she thought she might even have seen a smile before the perpetual scowl had fallen on his face again.

"You have no idea how many days I spent sitting in grassy hills watching the other children play. They tried to get me to come with but I knew I would fall down coughing and they would pity me." It hadn't taken much for a proud child to convince herself that if she couldn't play them, then the games others played couldn't be that fun. "When I get home the first thing I'll do is run to the chapel and thank God, and then chase Toby down and make him sit through his whole lesson for once."

While she was brave, she needed to keep this journey going. Hoggle grabbed the dress up and slung it over his shoulder while Sarah strode past the tree line into the increasingly dark forest. The lizard paced around the outside for a few moments before, at her call, it made its choice and entered the lush green space.

Six hours. Jareth marked their entry into the woods knowing that they had reached the outer edge of the inner ring. Elden had led her away from many traps, it was true, but he had done his job too well and she was still within striking distance of a win. Dumb luck had a hand in it, as not even he could predict how the Labyrinth would shift in any given moment. He had braced for this, telling Elden to lead Sarah into the woods should they make it that far and then simply move in circles until the time was up. Those forests were so dark and difficult she would never guess at the trick, and without being able to see the sun her urgency would be stifled. It would be a gentle loss for her, and Jareth could collect her without the drama of a confrontation at his home.

But it never hurt to have a plan within a plan, and Jareth loved schemes as much as the next fay. Secretly he hoped Sarah would make it just a little farther so that the contingency plan he had handed to Elden would be the only option. The drugged peach was an old trick, but potent. Mortals warned time and again that to eat fairy fruit was to be trapped, and in a sense that was true but like many fairy stories it was not accurate. The food of the underground was not any more or less special than the fruit of the mortal realm, with the exception being that the poisons frequently slipped into party food to test the lesser fay and amuse the higher could spin a human into a hallucination so deep and powerful they never emerged. Jareth, having grown up in a royal household, knew when he food was clean and when he needed to mistrust it and had quite a refined knowledge of dosages.

A Sarah lost in a vision would be a Sarah not conscious for the transformation the magic would work on her once she had exceeded her thirteen hours, and it was the kindest distraction he could think to provide her.

"Sire, your Praetor have arrived and been seated."

The guard stayed bowed, the distinctive pointed ears of the southern clans sticking out from the sides of his silver helmet. Guards cycled through a decade of duty, coming from all across the kingdom as a tithe to the High King. None of them wanted to come, but some chose to stay finding the less stringent rules of the Goblin Kingdom a rare taste of freedom from Court life. This guard must have been new because he did not rise even once Jareth had acknowledged him.

"I shall arrive at the hall shortly, you are dismissed." The guard backed away without meeting his eyes and quickly moved down the hallway in a clatter of armor. Jareth made a note to speak to the captain of the guard and remind him that the warriors that defended the Labyrinth within and without were best served by stealth rather than speed.

Jareth rose and prepared himself for the coming hours of reports on the state of the kingdom. Inconveniently, he would not be able to monitor how Sarah proceeded through the forest. This time, for all their sakes, he hoped Elden did not make another mistake. Memories of his mouth on Sarah's only strengthened Jareth's resolve to win. He was convinced this quirk of fate had been an answer to a question he didn't dare ask.