Disclaimer: I don't own nothing…
A/N: Finally, some real Jareth and Sarah interaction. Hope you like!
Sarah closed the door to her bedroom with a grateful sigh. Violet was still puttering around the little kitchen, which gave her a few moments alone. As much as she loved her roommate, she could take only so much solicitous hovering.
"Ah," she groaned, clapping a hand to her wounded shoulder as she moved. The blessedly large pills the doctor prescribed helped to dull both the pain and her annoyance with Violet and her family. Still, sudden movements caused sharp stabs of discomfort up and down her arm.
Holding the limb as still as possible, Sarah walked slowly across her room, and sank down onto the edge of her bed. The canopy bed of her childhood remained where it always stood, in her bedroom at her father's house. This was nothing more than a twin daybed with soft blue sheets, and several articles of clothing still littering the comforter from last night. She smiled weakly to herself as she looked at the white metal frame, and remembered Violet's comments as they, together, lugged it up the stairs of the apartment building.
"Your first grownup bed, and it looks like it should belong to a seven-year-old girl who wears a shirt proclaiming herself a princess. Good pick, Sarah."
"Shut up, Vi. It was cheap."
After several weeks of sleeping on the floor on a mattress, Violet had swallowed her pride and bought a bed no larger, and no more elegant, lacking both a head and footboard.
Sarah pulled her eyes and mind away from the bed, and looked across the room, into the mirror. For a moment she wondered who she should call out for. Hoggle again? Ludo was too big, and too hard to hide when Violet, as she surely would, came to check on her. Didymus was small, but hard to silence.
She opened her mouth to call the dwarf. Her eyes focused suddenly on her reflection, and she paused. Her lips closed and her eyebrows rose.
She looked deathly pale, her dark hair tumbling completely uncontrolled around her face and shoulders. The purple smudges under her eyes looked like bruises. Tiny reddish-brown specks of blood had managed to soak through the medical gauze to stain her shirt around her shoulder.
"I look like death warmed over. Or maybe not even warmed."
"Oh, hardly."
Sarah's head whipped around to the darkest corner of her room, which contained her small writing desk. There, lounging in the small, turquoise swivel chair as though it were a stone throne, sat the Goblin King himself, in all his wild haired glory. He rested his elbows on either arm, put his fingertips together, and regarded her over tops with a sly smile.
"Really, Death is rather a grotesque person. It isn't his fault, it's just part and parcel with the whole job, but I don't see any oozing wounds or bare bone about you."
Sarah blinked twice.
Jareth remained sitting in her chair, smiling to bare his sharp, predatory teeth.
She groaned, and shook her head.
"Unbelievable. Of all the ways to finish off this day…Un-freaking-believable." She then offered him a sharp glare from the corner of her eye. "As for oozing wounds and bare bone, if you examine this shoulder a little closer, you'll find some of both."
He spread his hands in a gesture of great affability as his smile grew. "Of course, Sarah. I will examine anything on your body that you wish me to examine as closely as you like. I am, as you know, at your command."
"Get out."
The smile fell into a mocking frown. "That isn't very friendly."
"So much for my commands," Sarah said through her teeth.
"I find it hard to believe you meant that seriously," Jareth murmured.
"Well, why don't you bend your immortal, and therefore one would assume somewhat experienced, mind to the possibility that after the most wretched day of my life, the last thing I want in my bedroom is a riddle talking King of the Goblins? Then take your tight pants and get out!"
"You take exception to my pants?"
"You aren't leaving, are you?" Sarah guessed with a defeated sigh.
Jareth grinned again. "Now, really, Sarah," he rolled the name around his mouth for a moment, as though tasting every letter, "I came all this way, with every intention of forgetting the unfortunate way our last meeting ended—"
"You mean the part where I kicked your ageless ass?"
"—just to see if you are feeling better. And no, my dear, our last meeting did not end in my defeat. It ended with me stopping a rather large wolf from devouring your pretty face."
"Actually, it seemed more interested in ripping off my shoulder."
"Or else we can count our last encounter," he continued smoothly, "as the moment I kept your father from spilling out a window to his death."
Sarah frowned moodily. "You aren't here to see if I'm feeling better. What do you want? And what were you doing in that dance club last night?"
"Last night, as you may recall, I was dancing."
"Why there, where I go to dance?" she demanded.
"Don't flatter yourself, Sarah," Jareth said softly. "What makes you think you are ever any factor in what I choose to do?"
"Don't kid yourself, Jareth," she shot back. "I'm not stupid, and I'm not fifteen. As you can apparently conjure up a ball in the wink of an eye, you don't need to come to a mortal dance club for entertainment. Now I'll ask again, what do you want?"
His lips thinned slightly in displeasure, and she knew she had thrown him off. He had come in one of his more splendid regalia's, all black silk with swirling designs of black beadwork along his shirt, open halfway to his navel, a long dark coat thrown over top, and those scandalously tight pants. His blonde hair was even wilder than she remembered, but artistic around his pale, proud face.
Everything about him had been planned to remind her of that wild race through the Labyrinth, where nothing was what it seemed, and nothing made sense, especially when she looked up into those ancient mismatched eyes.
But that was years ago…things have changed…
"You are rather ungrateful, you know," Jareth told her as he rose swiftly. His jacket fluttered behind him as he began to pace in front of her, his limbs moving with barely suppressed power. "First I dance with you when I would dance with no other woman, and do not try to tell me you did not enjoy it."
Sarah gave a one-shouldered, slightly defiant shrug. "I thought you were someone else."
His face darkened dangerously, and she nearly laughed at the ease with which she could rile him. "Then I pull a dangerous animal off you before it can kill you. Then I save your father's life. Now I come here to see if you are any better, if there is anything I can do to help your suffering, and this is how you repay me, with insults and accusations? You have no thoughts for what you owe me, Sarah."
"Alright, to begin with, if you decide at any point in this rant that what I owe you is my little brother, you can just lose that notion right the hell now," she warned him.
Jareth paused in his pacing to offer her an icy glare. "I do not want your brother. By the time they are this age, they are much harder to convert to goblin ways, and tend to whine quite a lot. You may keep him."
"Oh, thank you very much, Your Highness." Sarah rolled her eyes and chose to ignore the childishness of her own voice. "Then let's examine these deeds you have performed, hm? First, the dance. You instigated that, and while I will admit that you are still a very fine dancer, you also have to admit that you enjoyed that dance as much, if not more, than me, because you knew who you were dancing with. So that one is out."
He continued to walk up and down the small length of her room, his mouth tightening with annoyance.
"Then there is the wolf. I have never seen, nor heard of, a wolf that big, which is also white with red markings on its ears and feet. But I'm willing to bet you have."
He merely turned and walked another length a little faster.
"Silence is taken as assenting. So this is a wolf that, like you, had no business being in my world, let alone my dance club."
"I did not realize the club belonged to you," he snarled as he moved past for the umpteenth time.
"Don't interrupt. I will then jump to the conclusion that its presence and yours might be related."
"That is quite a leap, Sarah."
"Am I wrong?"
He spun away on his heel.
"Okay, then. So as it is at the very least your fault he was in the club, then that makes it your fault I got attacked. You put me in the danger you saved me from. The two cancel each other out."
"Oh, do they?"
"As for saving my father…" Sarah paused, then sighed. "Yes, you annoyed me, and yes, you creeped him out to the point where he tried really hard to get rid of you, but he leaned out of his own accord. I guess that means that I owe you for that one."
Jareth came to a stop, and gave her a strange frown.
"That is the one thing you will admit I have done for you?"
"Yes. Don't rub it in."
Both those strange eyes fixed on her face, as though he were weighing something. Then he moved closer, until he stood directly over her. She had to crane her head back to meet his ancient, predatory eyes.
"You owe me for the life of your father," he murmured, raising one eyebrow slightly. "That is a very great debt. How, dear Sarah, do you intend to repay it?"
As he spoke, he slid one hand under her chin, stroking her jaw ever so slowly with his thumb.
Sarah stared up into his face…such a handsome face, and so much of his strong, powerful body so close to hers…his other eyebrow rose to join the first, and he smiled.
"You've got to be kidding me."
His face fell into a truly puzzled frown at her words, and his hand stilled.
"What?"
"Jareth," Sarah hissed, heat entering her words, "I am missing a rather impressive chunk of my shoulder. Every time I move, I feel like someone is trying to rip it off again. I look like crap, I am exhausted, I was almost eaten by a wolf, and I am high on some really fun pills. What the hell makes you think this is a good time to attempt a seduction, you jackass?!?"
He snatched back his hand as though her words burned. His eyes blazed with anger and, possibly, chagrin. His jaw clenched, and he backed away from her.
"You refuse to pay your debt, then, Sarah?"
"At this particular moment, I refuse to do anything that doesn't involve this bed." She quickly rethought those words, and raised her uninjured arm to point a warning finger. "That doesn't involve sleep. Immediately."
"Ever ungrateful girl."
"Sore, tired, and really uninterested girl," she shot back. "However, when you're ready to discuss this wolf of yours, you're welcome to come back, and you can try your luck again. I wouldn't get my hopes up, though. I'll repay my debt in my own way."
"And what makes you think that I will agree to this scheme?" he whispered dangerously.
"Lack of choices." Sarah rose to face him, and managed to conceal her discomfort very creditably. "We're in my world now, Your Highness, and by God, we're going to play by my rules."
They stood dangerously close to one another, green eyes on mismatched, both fighting silently for control. Then he broke the stalemate with the most charming smile Sarah had ever seen him give. For a moment she was nearly staggered.
"Playing by your rules, are we?" Jareth said as he made his way towards the darkened corner again. He turned to face her as he began to fade into the shadows. "How absolutely…enticing."
Sarah gasped in rage as he disappeared. "Don't you just disappear in the middle of an argument!" she shouted, completely unconcerned that she had been ordering him out from the beginning. "I was supposed to get the last word, you bastard!"
Behind her, the door opened. She turned to see Violet's head appear around the edge, a look of deep concern on her face.
"Sarah? Who are you yelling at?"
"I…uh…there was a spider."
Violet blinked. "A what?"
"A spider. On my wall. I was going to kill it, but it got away. Because I'm wounded."
Those soft blue eyes regarded her for a long, curious second. Then her roommate shook her head.
"Get some sleep, hon."
