It was all Sarah had to say to Jareth, who was looking at her like she'd sprouted a second head. Immediately he understood and remained silent while she apologized to the store manager for the broken mirror. Her deep blush and apologetic commentary lasted all the way through the checkout line. The babble not only sped up their transaction but it kept Sarah's fear of her newfound knowledge at bay. By the time they were done the Super Saver employees looked more annoyed with her nonstop stream of apologies than with the fact that she broke the mirror in the first place. She had no doubt they were glad to see her go.
Boggled down with garishly colored plastic shopping bags, the second they were free from the crowd loitering around the store exit, Jareth turned to her.
"You saw him, didn't you?" he asked quietly.
Sarah swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.
"What was he doing?"
She could only stare mutely at Jareth. Knowledge is power, and she finally understood the correlation between bliss and ignorance. Because right now she knew that on one side of the mirror was a dark Goblin King, and on the other was a nice, young, fresh-faced, slightly shabbily dressed Jareth.
One person. Two sides of the mirror. Sarah did not envy Alice or her looking glass.
"Sarah?"
She snapped back to reality. Jareth was standing inches away, peering at her in sincere concern. The look in his eyes took her breath away as another realization slammed home. If the man in black hated her guts, wanted to hurt her…how did Jareth feel? The opposite of light was dark; what was the opposite of hate?
"I'm fine," she heard herself answer woodenly. She dug into one of the bags he held and withdrew a newly purchased roll of duct tape. "We have to cover up every mirror in the car. It's not safe."
Either Jareth didn't notice that she tactfully avoided his question about what the dark king had been doing in the mirror, or else he chose to ignore it while they quickly slapped duct tape over the two side view mirrors and the rearview mirror.
"Driving home is going to be a bitch," she muttered as she got behind the wheel. "How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"A little lightheaded," Jareth admitted.
She glanced at the clock and to her surprise saw that it was two hours past her normal lunchtime. Somehow time had a habit of slipping away in those godforsaken stores.
"I'll make us some lunch as soon as we get home."
As if on cue her stomach growled in response to the prospect of food.
She wanted to talk to him about her theory of good versus evil. She wanted to talk to him about how on earth they were going to get him home. Instead, laden with garish plastic bags containing Jareth's new wardrobe, they made their way into the apartment. Directing him to go change, Sarah handed him the bags containing clothes and made a beeline for the fridge with the other bags, which was starting to look pathetically lacking. Well, thank god the Super Saver was a one stop capitalist trip for all her shopping needs; she started to unload the food purchases she had made. Within no time she had bread, lunch meats, and mass market-ly produced potato salad on the counter.
Sparing all courtesy, she started munching on her own sandwich before automatically starting to make Jareth his.
"How do I look?"
His voice from behind her caught her in mid swallow, and the rye bread and pastrami stayed half chewed in her mouth as she saw him in fitted street clothes for the first time in her life.
No one should look that good. Ever.
She was pretty dead on with sizes, if she had to say so. And she did. His dark jeans hugged his hips, and his button down shirt, though only buttoned with three flimsy standard white buttons and how else would Jareth button his shirt, really? was not too big, not too small, it was…just right.
She had a hard time swallowing.
"Appropriate," Sarah managed, before turning back to his sandwich. A layer of muenster cheese and a hefty dollop of stone ground mustard was added before she handed it to him.
He grinned. It was pretty devastating.
"Thanks."
She wanted to talk to him, needed to talk to him, and yet she only smiled and took a large bite of her sandwich. He did the same, and a silence feel between them that Sarah knew would be broken with serious chewing and eventually a serious discussion about what she had seen.
Until a knock sounded at her door.
Sarah and Jareth froze. The last visitor at her door had not been a pleasant experience.
"Hello?"
Kee's voice.
Sarah looked at him, and without a word, she asked what should she do. Just as wordlessly, he shrugged back.
"Sarah?"
Sarah knew her friend. Avoiding Kee was not an option. Unfortunately, when she opened the door, it was not Kee standing there, but Kee, Alec, and Christian.
Surprised stares were exchanged as the trio registered the non-invalid status of Jareth, perched on the stool and munching on homemade deli.
Oh fuck, Sarah thought.
"Hey man, how you feeling?" Christian asked Jareth, who turned to Sarah with his eyebrows upraised ever so slightly.
"Uh…Jareth, this is Christian, Alec, and Kee."
Hellos were exchanged.
"Christian found you after you fell out of the tree yesterday," Sarah said pointedly. Thank goodness Jareth still had enough visible bruises on his face to lend credibility to yesterday's events. She wouldn't think about how quickly they were fading.
"Oh yes. Thank you so much," Jareth said, addressing the younger male. "I would hate to think what could have happened if you had not helped."
"You scared the shit out of us, man," Alec grinned.
And then Christian uttered the worst possible sentence Sarah ever heard.
"Food! I'm starving. Sarah, do you mind? We just got back into town." Without further permission, he proceeded to pile deli meat on the bread she left out. It was only after he started to eat that he added "I mean, if you don't mind." Only it was kind of muffled as his mouth was stuffed, but Sarah got the gist.
Before Sarah could open her mouth, she heard the second worst sentence possible.
"You are not interrupting."
She threw a furious glance at Jareth, who had the grace to look away but enough diplomacy not to blush. Her appetite was disappearing rapidly.
Appetite? What appetite?
Kee and Alec had officially entered the loft. "Are you sure?" Kee asked.
"Of course," Jareth graciously offered. Sarah threw Kee a hopeless glance which was met with more brevity at the situation than she had hoped. Now that there were no severe injuries to worry about, Kee was getting a kick out of this. Great. Her best friend was a sadist.
The two science geeks started making their own sandwiches, and Christian made himself a second. Sarah used the prep work to pull Jareth out of ear shot.
"'Not interrupting?'! Are you insane?" she railed in a whisper. "Remember what I said, 'let me do the talking?'"
His pale green eyes seemed to blush turquoise. "I am sorry. They are your friends and are merely curious; there is nothing to worry about."
"Nothing? Nothing? Nothing, tra la la?" she bit out crossly, shocking them both into silence until Kee, Christian and Alec had finished loading their plates. They joined them at the kitchen table, and don't think Sarah didn't notice that Kee crowded the table just enough to force Sarah to sit uncomfortable close to Jareth. Uncomfortably close? Yeah right; her arm was brushing against his every time she breathed.
"So did you go to the hospital?" Christian asked Jareth, who had anticipated having to answer by taking a huge bite of his sandwich which forced Sarah to speak on his behalf.
"It wasn't as bad as it looked."
Three heads that obviously didn't buy it swiveled to face Jareth. He smiled with a mouthful of dripping mustard and nodded. He chewed, chewed, chewed, swallowed, and smiled again. "Scrapes and dirt mostly."
"Wow man. I thought you'd been like…mauled by a mountain lion or something."
"Or something," Sarah muttered.
Kee threw her a glance. "It's just incredibly lucky that we were so close. And that Sarah was there."
"Lucky," he agreed solemnly.
"When did you guys get back?" Sarah asked.
"Just now. All our stuff's still in the van outside."
"But we wanted to make sure you were okay before we unpacked and hit the showers," Alec added.
An awkward silence descended after that and Sarah wanted to groan. Because she could sense what was coming at her from around the corner and it was going to hit her like a train filled with dyna-
"So you guys…dated in high school?" Alec asked so casually it was in no way shape or form an innocent question.
-mite.
She and Jareth simultaneously found themselves thoroughly absorbed in chewing their sandwiches.
"Yes," Sarah eventually admitted, telling herself she was blushing only because of the lie, the lie, and nothing but the lie. "High school."
"Did you go to the same school?"
Sarah and Jareth exchanged glances. "No," she said, "he was at a…private school."
"Well it's nice to be able to be friends with your ex," Christian said casually, in such an easy way Sarah knew that, unlike Alec, his was an innocent comment.
Alec turned to Jareth. "Maybe you can fill in some blanks for us on dear Miss Williams. She never talks about the folly of her youth like the rest of us kids."
"Alec," she warned, and was met in response with a charming smile. Suddenly she knew what she had only suspected before: that quiet, intelligent and cute Alec was interested in her.
Great. First Robert and now Alec.
"What?" he teased. "Don't think no one is curious about you."
Perfect.
"Alec, maybe now isn't the time-" Kee tried to interject, but only half-heartedly. One glance at Kee's face told Sarah that the Asian girl was just as curious. It didn't bode well for the direction of the conversation, but in addition it set off disquiet in her mind. These people were her colleagues, they were the only community she'd been a part of for the last five years…and to hear they thought she was distant or that she held some things back made her uneasy.
No one likes to hear they're not who they think they are.
"So Jareth, what was Sarah like when she was a hormonal teenager?" Alec persisted.
She could only flick her eyes in his direction without drawing the inquisitive attention of the others. Her gaze merely skimmed the surface of his but it was enough for her to convey both her discomfort at being shoved into a proverbial corner as well as a wordless warning to keep it simple. If their silent communication had been any clearer it would be called telepathy.
"She was very stubborn," Jareth finally said.
"Well, nothing's changed there," Christian quipped, and Sarah forced herself to join in the light-hearted laughing.
"The TA for our last lab barely finished his thesis lecture before Sarah had whipped out three stat books that contradicted the poor guy," Alec said. "She's the queen of arguing."
"I bet the bio teachers at her high school were terrified of her." Christian meant it as a joke.
"No." The word dropped out of Jareth's mouth before he could stop it. "She wasn't in the science classes then." A simply white lie, a one-syllable 'yes' would have ended the conversation and saved him the trouble of maintaining the cover story that he was Sarah's ex-boyfriend. Yet...he couldn't lie. He was too busy picturing her as the girl she used to be. That girl's story deserved to be told without creative editing.
Sarah, on the other hand, was furious.
He continued anyway, unable to help himself. "She used her imagination in any way she could. Writing, drawing, dancing, acting...her talents were what separated her from the other girls."
"How did you guys meet?"
Jareth didn't let her answer. "It was in a park. I watched her perform a monologue in a white gown. She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen."
Sarah was between a rock and a hard place. Rock: being pinned by Jareth's stare during the truth hidden in their fabricated relationship. Hard place: feeling the full weight of her friends' curious glances at learning of this Sarah they'd never known before. She chose to focus on the latter. No, she hadn't been that girl in a long time. Stubborn still, yes. Convinced she was right, always...but now she had facts to back her up. Proof, cold hard evidence that she shot at people as if facts were bullets loaded into an "I'm right" air rifle. It made her incredibly INCREDIBLY uncomfortable not only to endure the curiosity of her friends but to remember the fifteen year old girl sitting in front of her mirror with a tinfoil crown and stars in her eyes.
With a silent and motionless start Sarah realized just how long it had been since she'd thought about that period in her life. All the excuses she made for why it was okay to be so angry and rude, the years she spent believing she was a victim when in reality she was just a spoiled brat…all of it was just embarrassing to scientist Sarah. How difficult and skewed things became when she'd allowed herself to be ruled by her emotions. The tiniest piece of small talk her father or Karen might tentatively offer as a cease fire was an excuse to throw a tantrum.
As vividly as if she'd watched it on a television, Sarah remembered a specific blow up between her and Karen. It was one night; THE night. The night she went into the Labyrinth. She'd returned from the park late and she was whining to Karen about being used as slave labor…and Karen, who'd been doing nothing more than trying to ease the tension and diffuse the fight, told Sarah she'd be okay if she went on a date.
"I'd like it if you had a date, you should have dates at your age."
What was meant as an assurance that yes, even stepmothers can be cool and wouldn't mind if their fifteen year old stepdaughters went on dates, Sarah took as an insult. And not just a little one. She'd been mortified and furious – it was an unintentional slap in the face; how could Karen know that boys thought she was weird and didn't look twice at her? That there was nothing on earth she could think of to talk to them about? But at fifteen she didn't have the vocabulary or humility to ask for help; she could do nothing but storm upstairs and retreat into her fantasy world.
Literally.
When she returned from the Labyrinth, her life was much clearer. She had chosen her family over her fantasies. For the first time in a long time she wasn't angry every second of the day. Sarah found that she liked that clarity; she liked not acting solely on emotion but allowing herself to analyze situations from every angle before making a decision based on facts. It was so much simpler, and she embraced the complete orderliness of science with a vengeance that bordered on obsession; blanketing herself in logic quelled any doubt she had about…
She looked sideways at Jareth. His food lay forgotten on his plate and he was looking straight at her.
God…remembering now…
…how bright the stars had seemed when she was fifteen and imagining that one day someone would move them for her.
Science didn't break your heart the way dreams of fairy tale kings did.
Just fear me love me do as I say and I will be your slave.
Jareth was still looking at her, as still as a statue. Good god, he looked like he heard every thought in her head. Her heart froze.
"So what happened?
"Huh?" she asked, tearing her gaze from the Goblin King at her left.
Alec looked slightly embarrassed at his prying question, but he asked it again anyway. "Sounds like a fairy tale. What went wrong?"
Jareth and Sarah opened their mouths simultaneously and their responses overlapped perfectly.
"He was too controlling."
"She had a lot of growing up to do."
They stared at each other, surprised, shame-faced, and more.
Kee sensed the awkwardness and changed the subject. "That's a total one-eighty from your studies now. When did you get into biology?"
Years of habit allowed Sarah to rein in the stampede of thoughts and emotions enough to focus on what was being asked of her. Sarah mock sighed and shrugged. "After I met him," she said, chucking her thumb casually at Jareth. "Plus a bit of the ol' growing up, not wanting to be a starving artist my whole life, you know."
It was hard not to elaborate but Sarah forced herself to be quiet. The less of the story they knew the less chance they'd trip over their lie.
Jareth, never ceasing to amaze her, seemed to know that her limit had been reached, and he effortlessly turned the conversation to focus on the three students; where they came from, their families, anything and everything that seemed totally trivial. It kept the chatter up until the food was gone and everyone was ready to depart.
"I'm still feeling a bit battered," Jareth said with a mock wince, rubbing his neck. "I think I might need to lie down for a bit."
And that was how Sarah found herself hugging Kee goodbye and closing the door behind her three friends.
Jareth was behind her.
"You handled that very well, if I may say so," he said quietly.
Still facing the door, she nodded slowly. "Yes, I think I did."
Then she pivoted on her right foot and slapped him in the face.