Disclaimer: Sarah, Jareth, the Labyrinth, and its other characters are owned by the Jim Henson Company.

Talespinner

Chapter 14: Don't Tell Me Truth Hurts

"…so being the demure and unopinionated person I am – " Sarah snorted and shook her head, but waited for Laurel to continue – "I of course let her know exactly what I thought about the process, which wasn't very complimentary because whoever came up with it must've had their heads up their collective asses at the time – seriously, it's that bad – anyway, I find out later she's the head of research and development."

Sarah took a fast swallow of water to get her mouthful of food down so she could laugh without choking. "That sounds awkward."

Laurel grinned and shoved sand-colored hair out of her eyes. "You'd think, wouldn't you? I'll admit I started to be mortified, especially when she emailed me and asked for a meeting."

"Oh dear."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking, only not half that politely. But she greeted me with a big smile when I came in and pretty much out of the blue offered me a transfer to R&D. Said I was wasted as a quality control chemist, which, if I do say so myself, I am."

Modest as ever, Sarah thought with an amused smile.

Laurel's grin grew another size. "So I start working for her next week, and can stop being bored out of my skull and sniffing for a new position," she finished triumphantly.

"That's fantastic! Sounds like being a loudmouth worked out for you," Sarah teased.

"Damn right it did. The job I'm leaving… it paid the bills and sure, I had time for theater, but it wasn't enough, you know? I didn't spend four years in college to go do the equivalent of my sophomore organic chem lab course for the rest of my life."

"Sure, that makes sense. I'm really happy for you."

Laurel settled back into her chair and seemed to finally remember her own dinner. "So what about you?" she asked around a fry. "You were too excited yesterday to do much more than squeak when you called to tell me about the publishing deal. I need details!"

It was Sarah's turn to grin. "Well, the advance on the book isn't huge, but that's to be expected since it's my first, and my job at the magazine makes it just a nice bonus. They've already commissioned a cover artist, and it should hit stores in about eight months."

"That's pretty fast, isn't it?" Laurel asked.

"Yeah, actually. I got lucky on the timing. Now I've just got to figure out what the heck to do with my short stories."

"The publisher doesn't want those, too?"

"Well, they might. And they're talking about taking one for an anthology, which should generate some publicity for the novel, but there's not much point in putting out a whole volume of my short stuff until after the novel's out. No one's going to buy a short story compendium from an author they've never heard of." Sarah made a face. "So there's that possibility, and I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I'm going to be cleaning them up, rewriting some of the old ones, and finishing some more new ones."

"Fair enough." Laurel nodded. "Now." She arched an eyebrow at Sarah. "I'm sure you're deliriously happy about getting the publishing process going, but what's been up with the last few weeks, anyway?"

The checks came then, which provided Sarah a welcome opportunity to avoid the question for a few minutes, but when they had paid, Laurel fixed her with her best you're-not-getting-away-from-this look and made no move to rise. Sarah sighed.

"Come on, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. You've been a cranky recluse all of a sudden, pretty much until you nailed this book deal. Work treating you okay?"

"I… yeah, work's been fine. Have I really been that bad?" She hadn't been acting that differently, surely…

"Sarah, you've been channeling an angst-ridden preteen whose boyfriend called her fat or something for nearly a month."

Sarah winced.

"…. Wait a second. Is there a guy?"

Ahh, hell. Jareth gave her headaches trying to explain to herself, much less anyone else. Unfortunately, she had just squirmed a bit too much under inquiry to get away with flat-out denial, now.

"Um. Kind of. I mean, there was, I guess, just not for very long."

"And you didn't tell me?"

"Well, the… date… was kind of an impromptu thing. And I thought he was pretty awesome at the time, but he walked out" (or what passed for walking, I guess, Sarah thought wryly) "and I haven't seen or heard from him since. I was… cranky, as you put it, and embarrassed."

"So you hooked up, and he apparently wasn't interested in more and didn't have the courtesy to make that clear," Laurel summed up, looking faintly amused at Sarah's halting explanation. "You don't have to be embarrassed about some guy being an ass to you. It happens. I'd bet you anything it wasn't your fault." She gave Sarah a shrewd glance. "Pissed off about it for weeks, though? He must have been one hell of a lay."

Sarah coughed into her water and sought a reasonable explanation. The one she settled on was surprisingly accurate in its ambiguity. "It wasn't like that. He was… someone I knew from high school. An old crush. So I got my hopes up more than I should have, I guess."

This seemed to satisfy Laurel. "Huh. I love your stories, Sarah, but they're turning you into a hopeless romantic."

"What do you mean, 'turning me into'?" Sarah joked.

"Point. At any rate, I'm sorry to hear it. What was he like, anyway? Another arrogant blonde like David?"

That drew a laugh from Sarah. "The original arrogant blonde, you might say."

Laurel snorted. "Figures. I knew you had a type. Does he dress up like a faerie, too?"

It was only by a supreme act of willpower that Sarah kept her reaction limited to sticking her tongue out at her best friend.

Later that night, Sarah was sprawled in her favorite chair, absently picking at the fringe on a cushion as she considered the conversation at dinner.

While she was somewhat chagrined that her moodiness was dramatic enough for Laurel to notice it, she was annoyed at Jareth. She had been dissatisfied with his sudden departure the last time she'd seen him, certainly, but had initially assumed there would be ample opportunity to get back at him for it in the near future. As the days had stretched into a week, then two, then three with no sign of him, however, her tight-strung anticipation soured into irritation.

She didn't like being toyed with.

…Okay, that's not entirely true. But I went out on a limb for him this time, and he… he knew it, but he just seemed happy about the power it gave him there, at the end.

Was he actually being unavoidably delayed from seeing her, now, or was he staying away on purpose? Or worse, simply didn't care?

It didn't help that she'd spent no small amount of time telling herself she was a fool for even giving him enough of an emotional handhold to make her feel this way. Had anyone else done this to her, she would have written him off in short order. While she was, as Laurel had accused, a romantic, she prided herself on some degree of practicality, at least.

But that was just it, wasn't it?

Jareth defied practicality. He had swept into her life once, then twice, and turned everything on its head each time.

'I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you.'

Sarah's lips twisted bitterly as she remembered those long-ago words. In some corner of her mind, she had always wanted to believe that his little speech at the end of the Labyrinth really meant that she was somehow important to him. It was far, far more likely that he had merely been rallying to a last-ditch effort not to lose.

And yet, he had given ground recently. Sometimes. He had shown her things few humans could ever hope to see, much less understand. He had styled her a player in his grand game of courtly intrigue, and brought her to his private tower for no apparent purpose but to let her enjoy the view.

Why, then?

Sarah shook her head and punched the innocent cushion, more frustrated than ever. Jareth made no sense in the context of normal interaction… made no sense in any context but his own, and sometimes scarcely that.

White light flashed, rendering walls and furniture and windows in stark lines before subsiding to leave Sarah blinking in the dark. Thunder was a near-constant rumble in the distance, a snoring giant rather than an angry one. Despite its distance, the low reverberations rattled the panes and sent unsettling tremors through the floor and Sarah's bare feet.

The strange house creaked and groaned like a ship amid strong tides, the high, hollow ceilings catching the sound and magnifying it until it rattled in tortured fragments through the empty halls. Wandering along the threadbare carpet and dusty hardwood floors, Sarah at first thought herself in a mansion, so grand was the scale. Gradually, though, she realized that this was some distorted parody of a family home - the shabby walls leaned at strange angles and stretched altogether too high, and the pictures hung upon them were stretched to strange proportions.

The eyes in every picture were enormous, and seem to follow Sarah with disapproving glares as she wandered the halls.

A doll lying neglected on the floor caught Sarah's attention, for the fact that it was normal-sized as much as for any other reason. Its golden, spiral curls had been lovingly maintained, though they were scattered in disarray around the painted plastic face, which was missing both eyes.

Strange that these would be gone when the ones on the pictures are so prominent.

Gingerly, Sarah reached down to pick the doll up for a closer look. Its head lolled back as she lifted it, then fell away and rolled across the floor like a dropped apple, coming to a rest with its blank eye sockets glaring at her in reproach. She gulped and dropped the headless body back onto the floor.

Light, tightly-spaced footsteps pattered above her head, and she jumped as she heard a muffled sob. Finding a dusty staircase around a corner, she decided to follow the sounds for lack of a better idea of what was going on.

The stairs were so high and steep and slick with dust that Sarah had to resort to climbing them on all fours as she had as an impatient toddler.

Or as Toby had done on the Escher room stairs, so many years past.

The hallway at the top of the staircase was impossibly long, and curved slightly away and upward into the distance. There were no doors in its walls. Breaking into a jog, Sarah followed the direction the footsteps had taken, her own feet slapping noisily against the cold wood planks.

She almost missed the one low door as she began to climb the sloping curve; it was the same dull, flat grey as the walls and perhaps only three feet high, which was strange to Sarah in this oversized house. It creaked open onto more stairs, this time leading down.

"…Daddy?" A child's wavering treble echoed up from the passageway, and Sarah darted through the doorway to follow it.

The stairs were mere light and air underneath her, and her heart jumped into her throat as she fell through them.

She barely had time to let out a choked scream, however, before she landed almost gently on a plush rug that expelled a puff of thick dust into the stale air and made her cough. She was in what might have been a memory of a living room, with a ratty leather couch the size of an elephant looming before a blank grey screen. A louder peal of thunder shook the house, and a burst of static exploded on the television and was gone just as suddenly.

Ohhhh no. That's one horror movie trope I don't want anything to do with,Sarah thought as she scrambled to her feet and went through the nearest door. She could not be out of the living room quickly enough.

"Daddy, where are you?" The sound was clear, but farther away, and Sarah was now in a hallway that was nothing but doors. It figured.

Movement dragged her eyes to the left, just in time to see a short, dark shape slipping across a side passage. Sarah shuddered – that was not the child. She went the other direction as chittering laughter echoed from where the shape had disappeared.

Two doors later, a conspicuous lump under a rug was flowing – or running – along it, and Sarah quickly changed direction again, biting her tongue to keep from crying out and attracting its attention.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, though, she knew it wasn't looking for her. The tenor of this nightmare was uncannily familiar, even though the house was not.

A high-pitched, fearful squeak sounded nearby – she was getting closer… and so were the creatures. Sarah broke into a run.

How does the kid move so bloody fast?

"Daaaaaadddy?"

This time the call was farther away. Sarah cursed under her breath, and more loudly a moment later when the door she had just tried opened onto yet another oversized staircase.

Wary from her previous fall, she stepped onto the bottom stair carefully, but this one did not seem to feel like dropping her, and she grimly began the climb.

"Daddy, Mommy never sprays for monsters at night… why won't you come ba – " The voice cut off with a shriek and a staccato patter of running footsteps. More scratchy laughter came, this time from every angle, as if the creatures were running in the walls.

Sarah was gasping for air by the time she reached the landing, but she did not stop to rest. She had to find the child.

A positively huge door near the landing led to a bedroom fit for the sleeping giant that Sarah had imagined to be causing the thunder. The bed alone would barely have fit into Sarah's own living room, and the drawers of the nightstand were each at least as tall as Sarah herself. Against the far wall, a broken mirror stretched so high it disappeared in the murky dark overhead, with no ceiling in sight. Sarah's wan reflection stared back at her in distorted shards.

"Hey, are you here, little one?" she tried calling, tentatively.

No answer.

"It's alright, I want to help you."

Muffled crying from the direction she'd come confirmed that the child was not in the room, and Sarah backed out of the freakish bedroom into the hallway before closing the door. Some errantly irrational fear made her completely averse to turning her back on that broken mirror.

The crying continued, apparently coming from a smaller door at the end of the long hall.

Sarah considered calling out again, but bit her lip and moved on quietly, instead. The last thing she wanted to do was make the kid keep running.

The faded blue paint on the door flaked away under her hands as she pushed, and the sobbing grew louder. A low, child-sized bed was tucked into the far corner of the room, and the sounds issued from the shivering pile of blankets on top of it.

Stepping closer, Sarah could see an unruly mop of dark hair and one red-rimmed eye watching her fearfully.

"You're not Mommy," the little girl whispered.

Sarah crouched next to her to try not to look so tall. "I know, sweetheart, but I'm here to help, if I can. Where are your mommy and daddy?"

The girl pulled the blankets down a few inches, revealing a tear-streaked face. "Mommy got mad and yelled. And she said Daddy's gone, but I want to find him." She let out a quiet hiccup. "And I was looking, but Mommy said I'd been bad, and that she wished the goblins would come and get me. And there were these noises…" Sarah winced. "Was I bad? I don't want to be bad, I just wanted to find Daddy."

Sarah tried to reassure her, hoping she was succeeding in sounding confident and adult-ish, though her hands had begun to shake. "No, you weren't bad – you just got lost. It's alright now."

The little girl squirmed. "It's so dark and scary, and there were m-monsters chasing me…"

Sarah rose to her feet. "Well, let's see if we can do something about that."

"Don't go!" the girl exclaimed, alarmed to see Sarah turning for the door.

"I'm not going anywhere, I promise… I'm just going to – "

The chittering laughter was back, coming from just down the hall this time. The girl squeaked and dived back under her blanket.

" – find the light switch," Sarah finished, more calmly than she felt. She flicked the switch…

…and nothing happened. A surge of déjà vu swept through her, dragging panic in its wake. The lights hadn't worked the night Toby was taken.

Sarah's mind worked frantically, casting about for some way to prevent the inevitable. This is a dream, but… but whenever I could recognize that I was in a nightmare, I could change it... and the girl is too scared to realize.

Maybe… Feeling almost giddily foolish, Sarah raised her hands. When she was younger, she had always clapped to make things happen in her rare lucid dreams. When I clap my hands, the sun will come up. When I clap my hands, the sun will come up. When I clap my hands – Sarah clapped.

The sun came up.

Warm light flooded the room in a rush, and she could have sworn it drove out the chill and clamminess in the air all at once. The gnarled goblin that had been scampering down the hallway screeched and covered its eyes. "You will not come in here!" Sarah shouted. "Out! Shoo!"

'Shoo?' Nice magic words you've got there, Sarah…

But the goblin turned around and fled back to the shadows. Sarah slammed the door shut and turned back to face the bed, suddenly disoriented. It took her a moment to realize what had changed, but when she did… the room had shrunk. Forbidding angles had straightened, dimensions shortened. She was no longer standing in a distorted nightmare of a house – it was only a cheerily-lit child's bedroom.

Somehow, she was standing in the center of the floor, even though she hadn't moved after closing the door. The room had shifted to center upon her…

…the girl was sitting up in her bed, looking at Sarah with awe…

…and in two very different bedrooms, a little girl and a young woman sat bolt upright and awake at the exact same moment.

How the hell did I do that?

Jareth was not going to be pleased.

A/N: Laurel sat down on my desk and refused to move until I promised to give her air time this chapter. She's very insistent like that.

The extended chapter notes on the forum are growing - once again, I'd like to invite you all to check those out and make use of the boards for discussion if you're so inclined!

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