A/N: Warning peeps, it's about to get uglier. Brace yourselves, and tell me if you saw it coming.
Jareth had barely slept in over a week. Something tugged at the corner of his mind pounding out his waking hours. This at least, he could handle. It was only when he closed his eyes and started to drift off into the realm of the unconscious that nagging tug morphed into a gruesome force threatening to tear his sanity to bloody ribbons.
Something very dark lived inside of him these days. Festered by the hour. Even the goblins were on edge at this point. His usual scoffing had given way to unabashed fits of rage. And when the anger subsided from his exhausted form, it took all the strength he had not to simply curl into a quivering ball and hide his pained features beneath his gloves.
Somehow a part of him already knew it. Sarah was not coming back.
That same part of him also secretly knew why he couldn't sleep anymore. There was an image, a voice, a nightmare that returned to him at each and every opportunity. It was Sarah's form but not quite, undergone an unspeakable mutation. Sarah's voice, but faint and hoarse. The sound of it made him wake up screaming.
Of course no one asked him about the screams or the fits of rage or why his eyes betrayed a haggard decomposition. Yes, something was eating him from the inside. And no one dared breathe a word. Even his fae brethren and sisters in foreign kingdoms sensed the livid tension brewing in his castle and kept their distance.
He surmised his once iron will was all but spent. In fact, the thought that he might collapse at any instant did not faze him in the least. The inevitable rang loud and true now. But the melody still terrified beyond his capacity to hear its haunting requiem.
To all outside observation, the monster within his soul had at last gripped the corners of his lips, dulled his once ethereal locks, scattered wrinkles around his eyes and painted veins of red around his irises. The sight of him made even his subjects recoil in dumbfounded horror.
Jareth, enough. This is for you now. I am long past salvation. You know very well where I am.
The wrenching cramp in his gut made his heart pump near to bursting. At last he could deceive himself no longer.
Sarah…oh, no…no, Sarah…
Flicking a crystal down his wrist, blackness welled within him like bubbling bile. There was one place he hadn't checked yet, one place in the vast stretches of his sprawling labyrinth. Fear pounced upon every fiber of his being until he felt nothing, until there were no nerve endings left to stop him from doing what he knew he must. The most obvious of places, really…
Only the shifting light and a slight pulse marked the seamless transition from castle to musty shadows.
Mind soaring and dipping, giddy with unprocessed suffering, he clutched at the cold wall beside him.
As his boot met with mild resistance, he fought back the overwhelming urge to wretch. No light needed in this dank hideaway. He didn't want to see the remnants now sprawled in the darkness at his feet.
She had never left—no. That trick, that escape…well, that had never been a trick. She had escaped, though. Escaped the moment her spirit left its long neglected body, while a part of her continued to live on in the echo of his memory, a silhouette of the soul. Yet the sweetness of her had lingered, had needled the hem of his conscience for months. Yes, he knew full well the nightmare in his dreams was Sarah. A dead Sarah, a rotting Sarah, a corpse of the woman he once knew.
Sarah was dead. And with the finality of her departure confirmed, something inside him died too.
A/N: You see in a small moment of eureka I realized this was the most plausible explanation. And also the most compelling, though clearly tragic. Sorry, the happy end skipped this story. Better luck with the next one, eh?