Sarah huffed and hung up her own phone a little too aggressively to be strictly within the confines of Karen's noise limitation. She was sure that Belinda had somehow been helpful, but she didn't know how just yet. At any rate, she still wasn't sure how she was supposed to get back to Jareth and somehow stop the nothingness.

I have to get back to him and defeat the nothingness, Sarah thought. The absurdity of her own thought struck her suddenly; how could nothingness be defeated? But the other gods had been certain that's what it was. Jareth had been certain, but…

Jareth is not infallible, Sarah realized. And I bet that those other gods aren't either. They could all have been wrong, at least a little bit. It was at least a possibility, even if she wasn't necessarily confident in it.

Ever since her run in with the door guards in the labyrinth, Sarah found that she quite liked logic puzzles. She was certain that she had picked correctly with the door puzzle; they did say certain death after all, which Sarah tended to believe would have been instant evisceration. Since she had simply fallen into the clutches of the Helping Hands, and they had offered her a choice in directions, that was by no means certain doom. The silliness in the choice had been hers alone. What was more was that Hoggle came to find her. It made sense, in the same way that lots of things in Jareth's world made sense.

This nothingness did not make sense. It had been bothering her ever since Jareth introduced the idea, but she had been willing to believe in how adamant he was in his belief in it. Sarah saw where that got him.

"Okay, Sarah," she whispered in the dim light of the kitchen. "Think through this. It's just another puzzle. The nothingness was trapped behind the Disk." That felt true; the area behind the Disk had been empty, and the Disk itself had been cracked in half as if something had torn through it. But…

"For something to tear through it," Sarah said, testing the words as she said them, "it can't have been nothing. The thing behind the Disk had to have been something."

It was the only thing that made sense, really, even taking into account all of the magic that could have messed with what she knew of the laws of nature. Who was it that said nature abhors a vacuum? Sarah wondered, but then shook her head. It doesn't matter. Nothing, by nature, cannot exist because if it existed then it would be something. And if it's something, then it can be dealt with.

The logic made sense to her in the same way that all magical things made sense. Sarah smiled, the ghost of a plan taking shape in her mind. She had learned through her own magic and observation while in the labyrinth that things almost always tended to be exactly what a person expected them to be. It was how she got her magic to work most of the time, and after all, hadn't Jareth pretty much operated on that principle? She had expected him to be scary, and he had delivered on that, at least.

I was frightening…

He believed it, too.

Sarah's smile grew wider.

"Jareth, you fool," she murmured, looking at the wrist that had previously been encircled by her end of the red thread. "I told you I'd find a way around it. Didn't I tell you that my will is as strong as yours? I'm coming back for you," she said softly, kissing the fleshy underside of her wrist. The faintest sensation brushed against her lips; it was not her skin. Sarah closed her eyes and raised her left hand, touching the thin thread with her index finger.

"Found you," Sarah said without opening her eyes. She took hold of the thread and gave it a sharp tug. Somewhere down the line there was resistance, but she couldn't tell if it was because of Jareth or the walls he had thrown up to keep her out.

She ran her hand down the thread, and when she could reach no further, she took a step. If she had been thinking about it—if she had been expecting it—she should have hit the kitchen wall, the one where the phone and corkboard hung, the one where they hung Toby's childhood masterpieces. But she wasn't expecting to slap her forehead against a stick-figure portrait of his family, Sarah included, so she did not. It was both that simple and that complicated.

Sarah stepped not into a void, but into suffocating darkness. If there had been anything to hear, she could not have. Now that she thought she had it all figured out, she could see how everybody had mistaken it for a void, mistaken it for nothingness for so long. It was easy to do.

But it was incorrect, for the most part. After all, Sarah was in it and she still existed. Her tether still existed. Somewhere in the middle of it, Jareth and all of the goblins existed, too. She was sure of it, and that was all that she needed.

Here we go, feet, she thought, putting one in front of the other until she was certain that she was moving. She kept her hand on the thread, tight enough to keep it from slipping between her fingers, but loose enough that it could move with her. It was straight, and unbowed, meaning that there was no slack between them. If Sarah had thought it sentient, she might have thought that it was as eager for her to get back to her Goblin King as she was. But she didn't think that, so the thread was just a thread, even if it was magical.

She followed it for what felt like days, not bothering to open her eyes because even when she did, there was no difference. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, and the only thing to feel were the clothes against her skin and the thread in her hand. Jareth was at the end of it. That knowledge kept her going.

The curious thing about being consumed by the void, Jareth decided, was that he didn't feel like he was losing himself. Sure, all of his senses were cut off, but he could still think. He still felt like himself, but the edges of where he ended and where the void began were slightly blurred. He dismayed to realize that the longer he sat in the darkness, the more they seemed to blue.

This was the fate that his kindred had left him to. This was a fate that he had refused Sarah. Knowing the second made it easier for him to come to terms with the first. Had he been a more forgiving creature, he might have even been able to find some sort of peace. Instead, Jareth could only hope that if or when he was reborn, it would be in a position to extract vengeance from those who had wronged him. And Sarah, too, he supposed.

He was so distracted in his plans for wrathful comeuppance that he failed to notice the faint tugging at his wrist coming from the thread that Sarah had tied. When even those thoughts grew stale and tired, he allowed his mind to go blank. Sleep, or as close as he could get to it, would be a welcome sort of oblivion.

Sarah almost stumbled over Jareth, who seemed to be in something of a catatonic state. Her foot actually did collide with what felt like his shin, but for a multitude of reasons she was unwilling to go groping about in the dark.

"Hey," she said, nudging him. He didn't reply, or at least not that she could sense. It was possible that even if he was awake, he couldn't feel or hear her at all. Seeing was out of the question for her, and he had been in the darkness much longer. Sarah followed the thread from her wrist to his, and tried to take his pulse; she knew intimately that he had one, but she didn't know what rate it should be going at. Red Cross first aid training only covered so much, and the care of godlike mythical beings wasn't on the syllabus.

"Just as well you're sleeping. It lets me get away with all of the dashing heroics," she said, wondering if she should have saved that line to say to him when he was more conscious. It would have been delicious to hold over his head.

Sarah stood and faced what she hoped was the middle. The castle should have been around here somewhere, under normal circumstances. Though Sarah doubted it was as dire as Jareth thought it was, she knew well enough that these were not normal circumstances.

"Listen up," she projected into the darkness, almost shouting so that she could properly hear herself. The darkness seemed to listen; she wondered if this was the first time anybody had ever thought to address it. That would go a long way it making it believe that it was nothing, she thought, and almost came close to feeling pity for it. "Just because this bonehead here was so willing to sacrifice all of himself doesn't mean that I am. But I am the scion of Berwyn, as the world has recently made me aware, and I understand that it comes with certain... responsibilities. I'm here to make good on them."

Sarah dropped the thread in her hand and stood to her full height. Because her hands were shaking, she placed them on her chest and imagined what her sacrifice would look like. Glowing, sparling, maybe—Sarah had always had a weakness for soft, glittering things—and warm, probably. Yes, thought Sarah. That will do nicely.

As her hands pulled away from her chest, something came with it. It was small and in the shape of an orb, and generally exactly as Sarah had imagined it. It cut through even the darkness that had swallowed both her and Jareth. She looked down to see that he wasn't quite asleep; his eyes were cracked and he looked like he was watching her, though he didn't seem to be aware of it.

I wonder if he heard me call him a bonehead? Sarah smiled to herself as she imagined his indignation.

"So here it is," she said, cupping the light in her hands. "My sacrifice to you."

Sarah removed her hands, and it hung in the air before her. The darkness probed at the light; shadowy little tendrils snaked out to caress it before more and more wrapped around it once they found that it did not seem to be a threat. The darkness—Sarah refused to ever again call it nothingness—swallowed even that light whole, too.

"My mortality," whispered Sarah, and this time her voice echoed all around them.

A/N

Horror vacui