Chapter Nine
Silas Hoggleston was not a Boston native, as he often told people; he was old, but by no means a man. The portly gent who appeared to be in the full bloom of his twilight years was just the mask that everyone saw; under the skin he was really a dwarf, a child of nature who was only putting up with humanity because he had a mission to complete.
The Boston Gardens were beautiful this time of year, the trees painted in wonderfully vibrant red and yellow foliage, with just a hint of snow in the air. It was the sort of weather that Hoggleston enjoyed immensely despite the fact that, as a gardener, spring was his working season. With a heavy woolen coat and a tired limping gait, Silas quietly made his way through the park, watching the families and young lovers pass him by. He wanted so badly to enjoy this peaceful moment, but it was useless.
Things were going wrong. This was the first bit of trouble that they'd had in ten years, but it threatened everything they had worked for. He didn't blame the girl; lord knew, this time it really wasn't her fault, but she was jeopardizing the entire plan.
The fact of the matter was that he needed help. The plan had been his, but he hadn't been able to do it on his own; he had enlisted the help of others, and for quite a while it had gone splendidly. But they had hit a sudden rough patch, like driving over black ice at midnight, totally unexpected. He needed more help, and so it was with no small amount of trepidation that he made his way further into the gardens, every step taking him away from people and closer to the Wise Man.
Sarah tossed and turned under the heavy sheets, burning and freezing, trying to find a position that eased the weight on her chest or the ache in her head. She wasn't quite sure how high her fever had gotten, but she was feeling uninhibited enough to guess that she had reached the edges of delirium, at the very least.
Jareth, who had hovered for much longer than Sarah was strictly comfortable with, was now sitting at his desk, the rhythmic clicking of his typing fingers both irritating and soothing. He wouldn't believe her, she lamented while trying to suppress a cough. She hadn't reached an official decision yet, but at this point she was pretty certain that he wasn't pretending; for some reason, he just didn't remember. And now, thanks to the advent of Didymus, she was no longer willing to even entertain the possibility that he was not the Goblin King; there were just too many coincidences, too many similarities for her to believe it was even an option anymore.
Which meant she had to make him remember.
They had shared something strange and profound, something that hadn't been meant to be forgotten, but he had. Sarah wanted to know why. What had he done after she'd won, or what had been done to him? The earliest Jareth Corbett novel that she knew about had been published eight years ago, so he had been living with the bizarre amnesia for at least that long. Strange how the Goblin King had done little but torment her and yet she was determined to be the one who helped him to become what he had once been.
But he hadn't been willing to listen to her when she'd tried to tell him about Didymus and Ludo, so how was she supposed to make him hear her out? Perhaps, if she told it like a story, the writer in him would be unable to ignore it and, hopefully, neither would whatever was left of the Goblin King.
To most people the hotel room would look rather average at first glance. Upon closer inspection however, the tiny and troubling details came out. A lance was propped in the far corner, the shaggy sheepdog that was sleeping by the window was wearing a miniature saddle blanket, there were strange jewels and crystals placed on nearly every flat surface, and the occupant of the room as talking to a mirror, to a reflection that was not his own.
"I don't like it," Didymus grumped. "It was one thing to lie to the boy, but to Lady Sarah? 'Tis most ungentlemanly. She is stuck in the middle of this terrible debacle and doesn't even know what is going on."
Within the mirror the stout figure of Hoggle shook his head. "Just try to keep her off the scent."
"Jareth Corbett, Ciren Didymus, Silas Hoggleston, and Ludo the cat; to anyone else these names would mean very little, but our Sarah is a smart woman, my brother. She knows. Mayhap not the details nor the whys of any of it, but she sees through the ruse," Didymus sighed wearily. Barely even a week out of Boston, and Hoggle's watchful eyes, and he had found her. Just as he had promised before… Well, before.
It was as though they were destined to be, a fact Didymus would find endlessly romantic if the situation were different.
Hoggle rubbed his temples, the gesture a telling sign, more than the bags under his eyes, that he hadn't slept very much in the past few days. But then, none of them had, not since the boy had left for Maine. "Then keep them apart," he finally growled out.
Didymus jerked back, surprised that his friend would ask such a thing of him. "I took an oath to help you with Jareth, and so I shall, but I refuse to start meddling in Lady Sarah's life as well! She's already feeling hurt enough as it is, and I am loathe to see the sweet maiden distressed; I will not add to that."
Hoggle didn't seem particularly surprised by his answer, only a slight deepening of his frown betraying his dashed hopes. "Does that hotel of yours have any vacancies?"
Didymus didn't like where this was going, but still replied, "Indeed, it does."
"Then don't worry about it. If you aren't up to keeping the two of them separate, I will."
Jareth stared at his computer screen blankly. It wasn't necessarily that he didn't have any ideas, he had plenty, he just couldn't seem to write them. Add to that irritation the fact that he had eaten very little over the past few hours, probably had more caffeine than blood flowing through his veins at the moment, was starting to develop a habit out of darting looks over his shoulder to make sure Sarah was still alive, and it all made for a very tense man.
She had started getting violent coughing fits somewhere during the afternoon, and Jareth would have been lying if he said it didn't scare the hell out of him. Didymus had told him Sarah wasn't in any serious condition, but then Didymus hadn't heard her body's valiant efforts at expelling one of her lungs. It put him in mind of tuberculosis, as irrational as that was, and so he kept turning around to search her lips for even the tiniest hint of ruby blood. Then there were the shivers that she had been getting intermittently since the late morning; at times they were so bad that he was convinced she was having some sort of a fit. He had wanted to give her more blankets, as many as he had in the house if that's what it took, but he didn't want to overheat her and had never really understood how blankets helped a fever anyway, since the problem was the body temperature being too high.
Jareth was a brilliant author, but a rather lousy excuse for a human being in his own opinion. If he had been nervous after the first few hours Didymus had left, it was child's play compared to how he felt now. He knew nothing about taking care of other people! Most of his efforts had been met with no results or just plain resistance from Sarah. After a while he'd been forced to relax a little, give her some space to rest, but that didn't stop him from flinching and checking on her every time he heard that horrible, wheezing cough rip itself from her throat.
"Once upon a time," Sarah suddenly whispered, her voice raspy and slow, "there was a young girl who felt as though all the trouble of the world had been placed upon her shoulders."
Jareth stood and went to her side, one pale hand caressing her cheek, checking for fever. "You're burning up," he said with no small amount of concern. Gently he tried to push her back down, but she remained resolute in her semi-sitting position. "You ought to rest."
She looked at him with wild eyes, green orbs that all but screamed she wasn't seeing the world for what it was. But just beyond that, tucked quietly behind the delirious haze was a glimmer of the woman he had been starting to come to know; more specifically, what he saw was stubbornness. Whatever it was that she wanted to say, whatever strange dream she was wandering through, was going to be shared.
Sarah seemed to relax when he pulled his chair over to the bedside and waited for her to continue. A few heavy breaths rattled through her congested chest as she tried to make herself comfortable for the telling of her story. "Her mother, through some strange twist of fate, fell in love with a man who was not her husband…"
And so, over the next hour, Jareth learned about the young girl, a lonely child who had felt forgotten when her father remarried; a girl who had turned to angry outbursts because even anger seemed a better treat than neglect. She was a child who had been at odds with everyone around her, who had craved affection but had never quite been able to achieve it. He learned about someone who had stumbled and staggered through one too many wrong turns while trying to grow up, someone that his jaded heart wanted to reach out to, to protect.
Suddenly Sarah changed, seemed to fall deeper inside herself, trance-like and yet somehow strong. "But what no one knew was that the King of the Goblins had fallen in love with the girl…"
And just like that, the story changed; became something more, beautiful and graceful and familiar. This wasn't the leather-bound play he had once known; it was too rich, too alive to be anything but Sarah's. Her characters fell in and out of the story with the ease of dancers, bringing every new scene to life. The tale wove around him, haunting and enchanting, making him crave… something.
Something… just at the edge of memory… something important, addictive… something that was his. More, so much more… not a writer… not a writer, anymore.
Sarah watched Jareth carefully. She knew that, on some level, he understood she wasn't just telling him a story, that she was trying to tell him what had once happened. He had loved the recounting, but hadn't seemed particularly interested in taking her word for fact. Lover of fantasy though he may have been, a part of him was just wholly unwilling to take something so monumental on faith alone. She had almost given up hope, but…
But at the end of the story, something had flickered through him, not visibly but she had sensed it in the same way a small animal knew when a predator was around. For the briefest of moments the eyes that had looked at her had been both bitter and affectionate, ageless and playful, the eyes of the Goblin King. They were back to the smoldering depths and mocking civility of Jareth Corbett, but that tiny moment gave her hope. Buried in there somewhere was the ethereal creature of ten years ago; someone that she had come to fear and adore. She'd find a way to bring him back, no matter what.
For the first time that day, Sarah was almost glad that she had gotten sick.
"Why now?" Hoggleston grumbled to himself. Though generally irritable by nature, traveling made him even more so. And traveling by train, crammed in with who knew how many mortals while trying to conceal the fact that he was not human? He felt like a bomb that was ready to go off. "We were so close!"
A/N: Sorry that this chapter's a bit late, I was traveling most of the week (it feels like I visited with my ENTIRE family in the course of four days). I'm actually in the car as I type this (cruising through the farmland of Iowa, which is sort of why I'm writing), 3 hours in to an 8 hour drive; I've never written in a car before, so I apologize if anything seems strange about this chapter.
Thanks for all the reviews everybody; I really appreciate it!
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Disclaimer: I do not own anything recognizable as having come from the movie Labyrinth.
