Sarah went home alone that night. His dad was too messed up and when he checked on him next he was asleep. So he left Robert there and stuffed everything into a ratty old bag he kept for just such occasions. Karen would be home soon. Sarah always managed to steer clear of his stepmother and stepbrother when he was in male form. Even if he decided to dress as a woman, Karen knew him well enough to see through it and ask questions.
Awkward questions, too!
How was one supposed to explain to a clueless mortal what an iigon was? Or just a Peshawa. Or even the whole business that Sarah was Robert's daughter in every way that counted. Worse, how could Sarah explain it to Toby? Toby would either be traumatized for life, or he would think it was exciting and tell all his friends. And that would mean explaining things to the community at large. Which would create a headache too large for Sarah to handle.
Better to jog back to his apartment quietly before Karen and Toby came home than to let that happen.
So Sarah jogged, ratty canvas bag slung over his shoulders and a lighter feeling in his feet than before. Getting answers really did make all the difference, he mused, and it had been interesting to meet Jareth in a non-aggressive situation. The Goblin King was as arrogant, as annoying and as aloof as Sarah remembered thinking him to be, but he hadn't been a bad person. Just too used to getting things his own way. And perhaps a little bitter? Not that Sarah blamed him! Imagine everyone finding out that your iigawa was so unhappy he actually ran away, taking your daughter and heir with him!
Unlocking his door and sauntering into the slightly musty apartment, Sarah tossed the bag in a corner and went straight to the fridge. The cycles really were taxing on the weekly grocery bills.
All in all, Sarah was remarkably glad when she woke up one morning after three months, sweating and itching because the change had been affected again, and found she was back to herself.
"Alleluia," she huffed, "Finally!"
Peshawa had routines similar to everyone else. Especially those who chose to live as mortals. Sarah's routine hadn't changed much. She wrote for a newspaper so she could work from home with minimal trips to the office. She had a different store depending on which gender she was at the time. And she kept a distant, but fond contact with friends. Apart from that, she lived the same life. And she was glad of it!
Robert had, however, explained that Peshawa believed in a system of worship. There were clan Gods, apparently. He hadn't offered to teach her the rituals and she hadn't really wanted to ask, but the Peshawa were apparently horribly religious. The morning rites involved some of kind prayer service at sunrise.
The woman tugged on a skirt with a luxurious sigh and discarded the very idea of religion. Karen went to Church on the weekends, and Toby went for some kind of old-fashioned Sunday school, secure in the knowledge that telling a lie was a sin and that God could see every move he made. To her, it sounded a lot like a Big Brother complex. Man needed to feel that there was a purpose and that someone knew it, even if he didn't.
But according to Jareth, the Underground believed in fate. And Jareth was… well, whatever he was, he was powerful and clever and of very great importance even in other dimensions. Therefore, if Jareth believed in a kind of philosophical religion, could she take it for granted that fate existed? The 'Crossroads and Consequences' theory- it was very subtle and very practical. But Jareth had also said that there was a more complex level to it that needed concentration and study.
Sarah's spirits dropped as she remembered again that she was not going to be taken back to the Underground again. She'd liked it there. And there was so much more to see in the Underground.
"Sarah, honey, are you home?"
"In here, Dad."
Robert stuck his head into the kitchen and then followed. "Good morning. Was it a bad change?"
"I slept through it," Sarah shrugged, "I'm a bit sore, but it's getting easier. Does it hurt for you any more?"
"Not really. But then I haven't changed for a long time," Robert excused. He deposited a box on the table and waved a triumphant hand at it. "Karen sent you cake. She had a baking spree yesterday."
"Yum! What is it?"
"I think that one's orange-poppyseed," Robert guessed, "At any rate, it looks sort of like an orange kind of cake. Whatever it is, it should be okay."
Sarah nodded, mouth full as she cut slices. She offered the box up with reluctant politeness but grinned when her birthfather knowingly declined. "More for me," she laughed, taking just one more piece before shutting it up and putting it away. And then a sobering thought occurred to her- "Dad, Karen only bakes when she's upset."
"We had a small argument."
"Dad?"
"It was about Toby, honey. She wanted to send him for swimming lessons and I pointed out that he wasn't interested in swimming. We argued about what was good for him versus what he wanted to do. It finished relatively quickly but she went on to bake the tension away for a while."
"You agreed, didn't you?" Sarah sighed.
The man folded his arms. "No, I didn't. I said no. Which is why she is baking!"
"You said no?" Sarah pretended to faint in shock. "Dad, that's wonderful! How did she take it?"
"I told you, she baked the tension out of herself. There are four more cakes sitting at home and Toby might need to take swimming lessons anyway if only to burn off all the cake he's eating!"
"Dad?"
Robert caught his daughter's stern eye and wilted slightly. "Yes, it was a particularly hard thing to do. But I'm not incapable, you know."
"I know. I'm just glad you realize it."
"Are you done making fun of your father?" he asked, "After everything I've done for you- given you life and love, food and clothing, an education, a home…"
"The annoying habit of saying 'yes' when I want to say 'no'," Sarah put in dryly.
"Alright, I'll give you that."
"It doesn't matter though," she soothed, "I'll get used to it. Like you said, it's not that we're incapable. And we both stand up for ourselves, never mind that we're predisposed to obeying anyone we see as stronger than us."
Robert ruffled her hair and thanked his God for the fact that Sarah had the natural ability to adapt herself to whatever came. She would survive anything with that attitude.
"Think of it! We've both stood up to Jareth!"
And he fell back to earth from all those misty-eyed flights of fantasy.
"You ran away from him because you didn't want to be there, so you made the choice to leave. And I went through his blasted Labryinth to get Toby back and I won! How cool was that?"
"Very. No one else had for years. It's been so long I think even Jareth forgot that it was possible."
"Dad?"
"Hmmm?"
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure, honey. What is it?"
"Did you ever really like Jareth at all? I just wonder, you know. He didn't seem like such a terrible guy to me, but he must have made you really unhappy."
Robert swallowed thickly and tried to formulate some kind of satisfactory answer. There was no real answer to give. The Goblin King had been both worse and better than he had feared. Jareth had listened very patiently to his opinions, trying to draw him out of whatever mindset the iiga implanted in the minds of their young. But then he hadn't been left alone, either. Jareth had insisted on certain duties being performed and certain rituals being followed. Robert had been allowed an opinion on those, but he hadn't been allowed a say in the matter.
"He isn't a bad person," he said slowly, "But we didn't really get along. We were too different."
"And you got along with Mom?"
"With Linda?" It was funny how Sarah still called the woman 'mom'. "I loved her. She was a strong woman, with a great sense of adventure and fun. But she found someone who made her happier so she had to go."
"What about Karen?"
"I love Karen too, Sarah. I wouldn't have married her otherwise."
"See, what I don't understand is how you can marry someone else on earth when you're already married on another dimension?"
They were still in the kitchen, putting things away and talking about these things as if they were perfectly normal topics of conversations for a father to have with his daughter. It wasn't. Not for the majority of households across the world. Most other families didn't even think that other dimensions existed, let alone spoke of them as if they were a plane ride away.
"I suppose I can only say that marriage means different things on different dimensions," Robert began, "In my clan, it means a lifelong commitment to someone until they die or until they decide to throw you away. You walk two paces behind them in the street and you never speak in company unless they give you permission to speak. In the Underground, marriage is a lot less structured. Goblins get together if they feel like it. Or they don't. It's that simple. But once they make it clear that they live as a couple, anyone who tries to break them apart is in a lot of serious trouble. On earth, I suppose it's a bit of a contract, isn't it? We sign a legal document recognizing our marriage and then in theory we have all these privileges of spouses and lovers and whatever else."
"So you're saying that they're all different?"
"The marriage I have in my clan is not a marriage I can have here. This marriage would not be recognized by my clan and my marriage there wouldn't be recognized here either."
"So you just deflect the entire issue by saying marriage is all a question of which dimension you happen to be in. Because on earth, you're not married to anyone else but Karen at the moment. And the Peshawa only recognize your marriage to Jareth."
"No. I never mated with Jareth when he took me."
This was news. Sarah frowned as she tried to assimilate that fact. "What do you mean?" she questioned, "You are married to the guy, aren't you?"
Robert's smile was quite sheepish at this point and he looked as though he wasn't quite sure how to answer this. "Not according to my clan," he said simply, "Jareth took me away from them; I was given to him but we didn't have a mating ceremony or anything. In the Underground, however, once a couple is acknowledged publicly as a couple, they are said to be married. So I am married in the Underground."
Sarah sat down and rubbed at her temples. "I'm going to get a headache," she complained, "It's too complicated! Why couldn't everything be simple? So you're not married to Jareth in your own clan?"
"I'm not mated to him, no."
"So you could always go back if you wanted," Sarah reasoned.
"I could. But what would be the point? I ran away because I didn't like the hold Jareth had on me. And he tried to give me a little bit of freedom! I had no freedom at all in my clan. More so because I was the leader's son. Why would I go back to that?"
"They're family. Don't you want to know how your family is?"
And Robert did. At least, he wanted to know how one member of his family did. Nila was too young, and too compliant, and he could only imagine what Jareth must have done to her! Her third child, indeed! Didn't that monster have any self-restraint? Robert had only left twenty-four years ago. The Goblin King hadn't wasted any time starting a new family.
"Did you mean anyone else there?" he asked casually, "Another girl?"
"Just Vernon. And the usual people in the Goblin Kingdom."
Jareth could have told her to mask herself and her children as goblins for a time, just while Sarah was in the neighbourhood. He probably didn't want Nila infected by his former family's independent streak.
"I only wondered. Jareth mentioned an old friend of mine and he seemed to speak of her as if she lived quite near."
Quite near! In his lap, probably, the man thought darkly.
Sarah ran through the people she had met just to be sure and shook her head again. "No one but goblins. What was your friend's name?"
"Nila."
"No. No one by that name. Was she a goblin, though?"
"No. A peshawa."
"A peshawa? Definitely not. I didn't see any other peshawa around. Except Vernon and I don't think he qualifies."
"Vernon barely qualifies amongst his own people let alone anyone else's," Robert snorted, "The stupid man never could keep his hands to himself. Jareth almost assaulted him at a public function for it."
"He tried the same thing with you? All the compliments and the praise and the 'glories of nature' bit?"
"Oh, God, yes. I kept trying to get away from him and he kept popping up all over the place." Robert grinned and shrugged. "Ah well. The lot of a Peshawa, I suppose, is to be admired."
"I think Jareth might have hit him when I went up to my room," Sarah giggled, "Though I don't know if it was anything to do with me. He threatened to cut his hands off, though, if he didn't stop patting my shoulder."
"I would have bitten him," Robert agreed, "Nasty little devil."
"Oh, he wasn't so bad."
"Mellowed with age, has he?"
"No. I've just never met anyone like him," Sarah explained.
Robert gave her a very stern look that was part determination and part threat- "And you never will again," he promised grimly, "Or I'll have Jareth's head on a spike for it."
