25 Decisions

As she walked through the door her feet were guided down the corridor, taking unfamiliar turns, but always she knew she was going in the right direction, whether through forgotten memories or Jareth's help she didn't know. It didn't matter, within seconds she stood before a large archway, she knew that all she had to do was step through it and turn to the left and she'd see him sitting on the throne, a throne she'd only ever seen empty before. But this time it wouldn't be empty, this time there would be no Escher room, no chase to save Toby, Toby was fine, it was her who needed saving. Would Jareth be the one to save her? She was about to find out. Taking a deep breath she walked into the throne room, and once again, after all these years, she was face to face with the Goblin King.

At first his appearance shocked her, the outfit he wore was similar to that he had worn in her previous visit, grey trousers, shirt, but the trousers were no longer skin tight, the shirt no longer covered in frills. His whole outfit had been toned down, less flamboyant, less pretentious. The hair had changed too, no longer did it tower above his head before flowing down his back like feathers. Instead it was sleek, straight, held back in a simple ponytail, showing off the sharp angles of his face. The eye make-up had been reduced to a single dark line, accentuating his unique eyes. The effect was devastating, at once all the love, all the longing, everything Sarah had tried to repress for the past five years came to the fore, the power of her emotions was almost overwhelming and she stumbled with the force of it, only to gain her ground a second later, standing tall. She would not let him do this to her. Whatever his reason for bringing her here, she would not cower before him, she would not appear weak. Her will was as strong as his and it was time to prove it. So once more she stepped forward, towards the throne.

"Hello Sarah."

"Jareth…" Sarah whispered. Despite her earlier resolve, she was rendered almost speechless by the sound of his voice, by finally being face to face with the man who had haunted her dreams for years.

"Jareth? You've gotten bold in your years. What happened to the quaking little girl who never spoke my name for fear of what it may invoke?"

"She grew up."

"Yes she did." He said, standing up and slowly circling her, taking in her new bold, mature form. For the first time he noticed just how much Sarah had grown up in the few years since he'd last seen her face to face. The girl he'd known back then, had challenged and tormented, was gone, and in her place was a fully-grown woman. A woman full of pain and suffering, cowering from a world destined to destroy her, a woman almost crushed by the cruelty she'd experienced, but a woman nonetheless.

"Yet regardless of that growth, you stand here before me once again, unsure and afraid. You may have grown up, but that little girl resides in you still."

"Whether that is true or not is not for me to say. As for my presence here, I am not the one responsible for that, and I would appreciate an explanation."

"You are right on one thing, it was me who brought you here, but I am not responsible for it. I had no other choice."

"No other choice? I don't understand."

"Which part was unclear?" He replied, a mocking smile on his face.

"I don't understand any of it!" She shouted, finally exasperated and no longer trying to engage in civil conversation. She knew he'd only lead her round in circles, never giving any answers, only tormenting her with hints and vague comments. She needed to know what was going on.

"I don't understand why I'm here, how I'm here. I don't understand what happened after I was… after I was attacked." As much as the pain was numbed, she couldn't force herself to say it, not yet. "I saw the hospital, I saw Toby, but how is that possible if I'm here?"

"You're not here, only your soul. Right now you're body's lying in a hospital bed, and yes, Toby is watching over you. He even saw your eyes open, the doctors put it down to a nervous twitch, but he'll never stop believing it was you. That for a second you came back."

"Came back? But how did I go back, how is my soul here, why is my body in hospital?"

"Think Sarah, you know what those men did to you. They beat you, they raped you, do you honestly think you could survive that?" Jareth's voice was beginning to rise now, not through anger, but through emotion. As she watched him speak she could see the tears begin to form behind his eyes, see him blink them away before speaking again. This time more softly. "If I had left you there, you would have died, by the time someone found you, you were already in a coma, a few more minutes and you wouldn't have survived. I couldn't leave you to die, so I brought your soul here, to give your body the time it needed to recover. After what you had been through, you didn't want to live, unconsciously you gave up, you willed your body to stop fighting, but without your soul, your body could endure the attack. You survived long enough to get to hospital, to be put on life support and even that almost wasn't enough. The weak spells you've been having, that was your body dying. Every time your heart stopped, your soul was almost wrenched out of here, but the doctors managed to bring you back. From what the doctors have said, your body's in a coma, and you've got an extremely slim chance of ever waking up."

As he finished speaking he looked into her eyes, she could see the passion behind his, see how much he longed for her, how much he cared. But the shock she felt overpowered any feelings she had towards him. So it was all true. She had been attacked, she was in hospital, her body at least. Yet her soul was here. For a while it was too much to get her head around, she couldn't comprehend the fact her body and soul were separate.

Almost as though he had read her mind Jareth began to speak. "Your body cannot live without your soul much longer. Eventually the link between the two will be broken, and you will die. I am sorry, but there is not much time, you have to make your decision now."

"My decision?" After all she had heard, all she had been through, her brain was having trouble keeping up.

"Yes, whether you want to stay here or return Aboveground."

"I don't understand, why do I have to make the decision now? Can't I just stay here for a while, let my body recover a bit more?"

"I'm afraid not. To remove your soul from your body goes against all the laws of nature, they cannot exist for long separated. On your last visit you were here 13 hours, this time has been much longer. The link grows weaker, soon it will snap and you will die."

Sarah tried to comprehend what he had just said, it had been important but she'd missed it. What was it?

"But then why do I have to make a decision, if I can't stay here what decision is there to make?" She looked into his eyes, and she saw the truth. "I have to die. To stay here I have to die."

"Yes."

"But even if I go back, I might not live."

"If your body can't repair itself… you can't come back. Your soul will move on, and you'll be lost forever."

The shock was finally too much for Sarah, her legs gave out and she sank to her knees as the tears began to well in her eyes. "Even if I do survive, the pain won't go away, you've held it back, numbed it, but it's there. I'll have to live with what they did, how can I do that, how can I live through that?" She felt his hand on her shoulder, but couldn't look up at him.

"Then stay…"

"How can I stay here, how can I just give up and die?" She was getting angry again, angry at the predicament he'd put her in, angry that he was making her choose between him and her family.

From the way she was sat she couldn't see the sadness in his eyes as he gazed at her, but she heard it in his voice as he replied.

"You're dead and you don't even know it yet. You think you live because you breathe and your heart beats, but there's nothing left. Your soul is dead, you're a shell, a shell that you numb because the only thing left inside is hate and despair. You live your life alone because to reveal your feelings is to bring this pain on another, pain that you would not wish on anyone, not even on the one that placed that pain in your own heart. You hide away from the world because the world does not understand you, nor you it. You mime your way through life, envying the normality that surrounds you, knowing you will never again achieve that sense of belonging. Yet after a time, you crave it no longer. For your heart forgets quicker than your mind, and soon all you're left with is memories of another life, as you sit alone, flicking through the photo album in your mind, trying to recall the feelings you see on your own face, slipping day by day into a world of your own making, a world created through despair, a world devoid of life, as you realise you died that night, and ever since then you've been living a lie. Is that the future you want?"

"Jareth, please don't…" Her voice was quiet, self-pitying, but he wouldn't stop, he had to make her see.

"I see the flame of your passion, unquenched by the torrents of pain that are drowning your soul. You feel yourself trapped, but your strength shines through brighter than the flame of your heartache. You fear your pain, because you see it as a weakness, but you do not realise the strength it has given you. You have survived the torment of a family ripped to pieces, whilst still being the sister Toby needed you to be. The only mistake you made was to forget about yourself, you treasured that pain, and in the end found comfort in it. You plastered a smile on your face to put peace in Toby's heart, but your own heart was not reached by his smiles. You feel love, but no joy, and it's slowly killing you"

"Stop it, just stop it! You think you know me? You've read my poetry, and I can't believe you did that, those words were my deepest feelings, they expressed my pain as best as I could, but that's not me. They're a reflection of me, a reflection of my pain, but that's not me, that's not all I am, and I didn't even realise that until now. Because there's a part of me that's still alive, a part of me that still feels, still loves, and now I'm torn. Because I love two people, in two worlds, and those worlds can never mesh. I look at you now, standing before me, a dream I've had a thousand times now made real, but I can't have it, I can't have you. Because in that other world, in the world I live in, the world I belong in, the world my body's in attached to so many machines keeping me alive right now, in that world sits my brother, watching over my body praying for me to return." Her voice faltered as she thought of Toby, but she forced herself to continue.

"Now you're asking me to make a choice, between you and my brother, being staying and going. If I stay I've got you, I become a queen and live in a castle in a world I've thought about every day since I was fifteen, but I'll have to live in a world without Toby, without my father. And if I go? I get them back, and maybe, just maybe, I'll get my father back to the way he was, I saw that, I saw him, in the future, happy, sober so maybe if I go back that'll come true, maybe not. Even if it does, I'll still have to live with what happened to me, I got a taste of that pain when I was asleep being carried by the Mysteriques, and I'm not sure I can stand it again, not forever, because that's how long the pain will last, and on top of that I lose you."

Sarah hesitated before continuing, but she knew it had to be said.

"I've loved you ever since the day you gave my brother back, I'm not stupid, I knew even back then that you were simply playing the game, obeying the rules, but you made those rules and you can break them. You didn't have to give Toby back, but you did, even though it meant you'd never see me again, you still gave him back. I realised then that I loved you and I've wished for this moment every day since then, prayed that one day you'd come back, that I'd get the chance to be with you. And now it's finally happened and I don't know what to do, what am I supposed to do? You're making me choose between my family and you, how can you do this? How can you ask me to stay, to give up Toby and dad? Why did you bring me here knowing you were going to do this, to give me everything I have dreamed about for the past five years, and then tell me that to have it I have to give up the two most important people in my life???"

"This is not how I intended our reunion to be, but the circumstances called for me to bring you here. I am not forcing you to choose between anything, your decision is your own. All I will say is this, the visions you saw on the bridge, of you father and your brother, they are the two possibilities for the future depending on what decision you make. One will happen if you stay, one if you go back."

"But which is which? How do I know what to choose?"

"You know the answer to that." Once again his voice was soft, his eyes full of pain. "You saw the visions, you were only in one of them. That is the future if you go back."

For a while Sarah couldn't remember the visions, couldn't remember being in either, then suddenly it came to her, with a clarity that caught her heart and ripped it apart. The hand she had seen clutching Toby at her father's funeral had been her own. If she went back, her father would die. His life would not change, he would have his daughter back, he would slowly drink himself to death. Yet if she stayed, if he lost his daughter, if his son needed him once again, he would turn himself around. Once again the vision of her father and Toby laughing together swam in front of her eyes, and she knew what she had to do.

She slowly turned to look up into Jareth's face, and for a few seconds was silent before she finally spoke.

"Send me back…"