Disclaimer- Two years of my life, gone, and I have still singularly failed to obtain the copyrights to the Labyrinth or even a halfway decent action figure. Hell, I don't even have a poster. You know, I really should have a poster….

Author's Note- Hello, my cheeky little hamsters! So, I kinda took a two year break so that I could work on my degree and a novel of my very own. But now, with only 3 months left before I'm awarded my bachelor's degree, I'm back, and I'm ready to slobber all over the other kids toys! And hey, Jareth, sorry I left you chained up and bleeding for 2 years. No hard feelings right? Right? Er… right then….

Rated T for torture, language, adult situations and eventually ADULT TYPE TOUCHING. (I reserve the right to up this rating at a later date).

Chapter 4- Or, The Way Forward, Well, You Know…

Sarah's feet were raw. She's been walking on hot sand mixed with courser gravel for what felt like hours now, and her feet felt like they were literally on fire. Since she had been getting ready to go to bed when she'd been unceremoniously dumped back in the middle of – well, she didn't actually know where- she wasn't really appropriately dressed for anything.

Her gray nightshirt covered the tops of her legs, and not much else. Her lower legs and feet were bare. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She'd had no pockets, nothing in her hands. She was quite literally as destitute and unprepared as a person could possibly be.

15 more minutes of walking made the difference between feeling like her feet were on fire and feeling like the skin on her feet was being peeled off. She looked around, but she was still in the middle of the empty, sandy land and that small copse of trees was a ways off.

The vegetation that was around was small, low to the ground and prickly and looked like it was used to living without water, but none of it offered any shade or respite from the growing heat of the day, nor did it supply her with a spot to cop a squat.

Finally, she plopped down in the sharp sand, legs crossed and pulled one foot up to examine the bottom of it.

It was worse than she thought.

She had long ago developed blisters. They'd already popped. The new, tender skin underneath had torn through as well. The bottoms of her feet actually were weeping blood. Which was not exactly conducive to walking around barefoot for 13 days…

Speaking of 13 days… 10 years ago, when she'd wished her brother away, she'd been given 13 hours to solve the Labyrinth. And when she'd been brought to the underground, she'd been able to SEE the Labyrinth. Sarah was getting a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that she was 12 and a half days walk away from the actual maze…. How on earth could she be expected to –

"Sarah Jayne William" She said her own name out loud. She wasn't asking the right questions. That had been the secret the first time hadn't it? To ask Hoggle the right questions? But if she asked a question and there was no one there to hear it, would it still work?

She straightened her legs in front of her and considered carefully for a few minutes. Then she leaned back on her hands, palms down on the ground and tilted her head up and asked aloud, in a pondering sort of tone-

"Where is the Labyrinth?"

~~~~~~Elsewhere~~~~~~

"Tell me."

He said nothing. He knew that he would pay for his silence, just like he had paid for his obstinacy and her madness, but he was hedging his bets.

She took hold of the back of his head and forced his face down into the ice water again. He kept his mouth shut as tightly as he could and tried to relax and just not think about the air. His lungs started to burn. She continued to hold him under. He started to struggle. Almost distantly, he wondered at how feeble and weak he had become. His body reached its breaking point and forced him to take a breath- a lungful of water- and she finally pulled him up. She let him choke and retch, spitting and coughing the water out all over the floor.

"Tell me."

She repeated her request in exactly the same tone of voice. It was as if she had all the patience in the world. As if she was a kindly motherly figure and was trying to coax a secret mischief out of him. He almost wanted to tell her. And he knew what was coming since he was going to refuse.

She grabbed hold of a fist full of his hair again and forced his face back down into water- scalding this time. He'd meant to hold his breath but the pain was such that he'd gasped and lost precious air, shortening his resistance time. It was even less time before he was choking and hacking, trying to clear the scalding water from his throat and lungs.

"I'm getting bored. But we'll continue."

It was the sixth or seventh time he was lying on the stone floor- he was losing track now- that he sensed her again. Sarah. He sensed the agitation of the Labyrinth. She was too far outside the active portions of the maze for it to send one of its denizens to help her. And there was something else… something was affecting the land. It took a few seconds of gentle probing to figure it out- human blood was seeping into the soil. Sarah was injured, and the land was being infused with blood from the injury. The implications-

"I grow tired of making this request. Perhaps I am not being explicit. Let me elaborate. You WILL tell me how to force the Labyrinth to acquiesce to my demands, or you will die. Is that not clear?"

He was jarred out of his thoughts, and he raised his eyes to meet hers. He had honestly been about to tell her to sod off, or something along those lines, but apparently, whatever she saw in his face was answer enough for her. She shrieked, high pitched, unintelligible and insane.

He found himself with his head down in the ice water again. He held his breath. He was still. He struggled. He breathed in the water. She didn't not let him up. She was going to kill him this time. His head started to pound, he could feel a new tightness in his neck, and he sucked in another lungful of icy water.

When she stabbed him between the ribs and the ice water leaked out of his lungs and into his chest, he did black out.

Sarah wasn't sure how long she rested there in the sun, but she did know that the longer she stayed there, the guiltier she felt. She had no idea how far she was from her goal, so she felt as though she were already far behind in this game. The last time she had visited the underground, the Goblin King had brought her to a hill top and given her a good look at how far she had to go to reach the Castle at the center of the Labyrinth. Not only did she not know how far she was from the castle at the center of the labyrinth, but she didn't even know if that was where she was supposed to be going.

Sarah reflected on what the mad woman had told her – "Tasked with finding the king and restoring him to his throne". She had never said that the Goblin King was in the castle.

There was nothing for it. She had to get moving again, and she had to do it with feet that were blistered raw and bleeding. Amazing how much she would give for a pair of socks, right at that moment. She glanced down at her night shirt. It was old, worn, and fell to just above top of her knees. If she tore the sleeves off, and pieces from the hem…

With the help of a handy rock, Sarah made short work of her night shirt. She removed it completely, since there was no one around for miles, and removed the sleeves, and about two inches of hem at the bottom. She tied this material around her feet. The blood soaked through pretty quickly, and it wasn't perfect, but it was amazing how much of a difference having that small amount of fabric between her and the sand made.

"Ok feet." Sarah stood up carefully, oriented herself once more towards the strand of trees and started walking.

Not having gotten any answer the with the first question she'd posed to the Labyrinth, she didn't figure that talking to it was going to do much good, but the position of the sun indicated that she'd been walking a good portion of the day, as it was now into the late afternoon, and looking behind her only revealed a trail of rust colored, blood stained foot prints. The silence was too heavy. She didn't have to be talking to an inanimate locality… she could be talking to herself.

"If I was, say, walking in the wrong direction, that would be the kind of thing that would be super helpful to know." Profound silence.

"It's pretty hot, and also empty, out here". No animal sounds even, that was weird.

"I bet Peanut eats the bread off the counter." She'd literally lost her filter. And man did her feet hurt. From now on, she was sleeping with shoes on.

"Man, I wish I had some water." And then, she was completely thrown backwards off her feet.

The earthquake was felt in literally every corner of the underground. Its cause was not immediately apparent to most people but it was jarring enough to shake the foundations of every building in the Goblin City and break quite a few dishes in the castle kitchen.

Jareth, who was nowhere near the castle kitchen, but who was actually a lot nearer to the epicenter of the quake was tossed about like a broken rag doll. He awoke to a searing pain in his chest that hit him with every breath he took. Remembering what had happened, he was surprised he had awoken at all. Stripped of his magic, he was afflicted with mortality. Crippled by it. Such a wound was grievous enough to cause death. He was surprised, then, that he wasn't dead after all.

He was lying on a low cot, his hands tied together in front of him with thick twine. He wasn't touching the stone of the Labyrinth, so he wasn't currently getting any information from it. As troubling as the pain in his chest was, he was troubled by this lack of contact more. He needed to know what Sarah was doing. He needed to help the kingdom help her.

It was appalling how quickly he'd gone from thinking of her in an adversarial light to thinking of her as a co-conspirator.

The shaking that had awoken him continued for a good three or four minutes, during which time, it was all he could do to hang on to the cot. When it finally stopped, he carefully rolled himself off of the edge and onto the floor. He then had to spend several minutes catching his breath and shutting down the gibbering pain centers in his brain.

Once more in control of his mental faculties, he pressed the sides of his hands to the stone ground. When he realized when it had done, what she had done… what they had done together….

He laughed. And that started a whole new coughing fit and reopened the rent in his lung, bringing up more blood. But he couldn't help it. He laughed. Was no one a match for Sarah?

A/N – I'm going to be adding chapters to Comfort Me with Apples as well as to In the Dark, so updates will go back and forth depending on which story is poking me harder. And although I originally wrote Elfstruck as a one shot…. I almost… almost… maybe… hmmmm.