Chapter 7: Between the two of us, our memories vary
~*o0o*~
"Tell me a story," the Goblin King didn't ask so much as demand it; his disarming smile did little to soothe her ire.
"Why don't you tell me a story?" Sarah challenged, "I'm sure you know plenty, what with you being as ancient as you are."
"Another time," Jareth responded, something strangely soft about his countenance as he gazed at her from across his study's desk in the dim light of the early morning. "I would like you to tell a story about me."
"You," she scoffed in disbelief, "You are far more apt to weave a tale about yourself than I am. Does your arrogance know no bounds," the Champion teased, her barbs half-hearted.
"Nevertheless, I would very much like to hear what you tell the children under your care."
Sarah sighed in an overly exaggerated manner and leaned back in her seat, "Very well, if I must: once upon a time-"
"Oh dear," the Goblin King remarked.
"What?"
"Setting the rather cliché beginning aside," he drawled, "I hardly think myself bound to one particular time.
"Once upon a time," Sarah restated, with an edge of menace in her voice, the Goblin King merely rolled his eyes in a manner unbefitting for a King. "There was a tyrannical King that didn't know when to leave well enough alone. Until a dashing Champion appeared and defeated him quite courageously."
"Hmm, I rather thought this King fellow, seemed a decent character." Jareth interrupted, "How dreadful of this horrid Champion to slay this handsome, dazzling-"
"Tyrannical," she corrected
"Powerful-"
"And oh so modest King."
~*o0o*~
"If I wish it," Sarah responded flatly, wincing as the forbidden word left a tantalising tingle on her tongue.
How she had avoided that word, the word that had seized her like a meaty fist from her home and from a life of safe mundanity. Although the hand did not always drag, it often beckoned enticingly.
How many people carelessly spoke the words I wish with no thought to the consequences? They did not have a Goblin King, hanging on to their every word and capable of spinning them from straw into exquisite dreams...and realities.
What made a King so willing to abide by the desires of one selfish little girl?
He was alone. And you knew him. You saw him when all others had forgotten him.
Surely it had to be more than that. It wasn't for the first time that she considered it was unfair of her to ascribe such humanity to a creature such as him, the sinister guardian of a Kingdom that clamoured for death and the taste of sacrificial souls.
Did she want him to love her? Would that make it easier to digest these heinous acts of wanton cruelty and destruction if they were in her name?
She didn't like to think it was true.
"Yes," Jareth breathed, a hunger that matched his Labyrinth lurked within his mismatched eyes, he had never looked less human. "Let us end as we began."
It was difficult to suppress a shiver at his words; it truly would be an ending when he forcefully snapped shut the book containing the last chapter of her mortal life.
Perhaps he'd set it on fire too.
What was she?
No human looked as though they were half-inflicted with the curse of Midas's touch. But her King didn't make everything he touched golden; he turned it to crystalline ash and glitter.
"I wish you weren't my husband."
A flicker of irritation was swiftly cleared from his face, "There's really no need to be so unkind Sarah. I'm offering you a gift. If you throw it back in my face, perhaps I shall dispense with any pretence of...pleasantry."
He would too. She had no doubt about it, that he would be only too happy to revoke his offer of granting her the hours she had requested.
She couldn't run from him for thirteen hours. But any chance of escaping this fate was better than gracefully accepting defeat, accepting this murderer as her husband.
Murders you were a part of...
Sarah folded her arms across her chest, and then quickly unfolded them. She needed to be ready to flee at a moment's notice. Standing there and exchanging insults wouldn't help her if he leapt upon her the minute she made her request.
Except the problem was that he was no longer insulting her. He called her, love.
A word too weighty for her to pry apart his meaning.
A word she didn't want to pry apart, lest she risk losing too many pieces of herself in the process.
She shifted her weight, keeping one foot pointed at a right angle in preparation to run away from him. She despised the small smirk he let slip as his eyes drank in her alert state. "I wish that you would be so generous as to accept my claim to the Right of Rina, and grant me thirteen hours to win my freedom."
Jareth's wicked smile caused her to falter, teeth sharp enough to shatter bone flashed from beneath thin lips pulled into a facsimile of civility. A deep sense of dread settled upon her like the siege of rocks that once descended upon the Goblin City.
This is a being that has taken the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands without remorse...and you want to challenge him again? In his own territory no less. Her thoughts were half hysterical with disbelief.
Maybe he'll toss me in the Bog, like Nessa.
He wouldn't do that, part of her corrected, he wants to be able to touch you without need for a clothes-peg over his nose.
If only smelling bad would be enough to deter him.
'Marry Jareth or smell bad forever' wasn't the ultimatum he had given her, but nevertheless, she contemplated it. Somehow, it was beneath her pride to even attempt such a manoeuvre against him, which was ridiculous in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps you're not as opposed to being married to him as you think...
That had to be wrong. Looking at him filled her with revulsion and betrayal. The years of fragile trust built up between them had shattered into a million glittering pieces of fairy dust. Faerie ash.
"I shall be happy to," he responded with a musical lilt to his voice, "For I believe I will choose the game this time, my own dear one. And it shall be a chase unlike any other chase, for I am a generous husband," he mocked her; "You have thirteen hours in which to escape the Labyrinth and annul our marriage." He shook his head sadly at these words, as though he couldn't believe her audacity in wanting such a thing. "But if I catch you before then, you shall be my wife and my Queen, my most dearly treasured thing to cherish forever."
A flash of heat bloomed across her cheeks as she vehemently denied his words in her head.
Even if you get to the centre of the Labyrinth, you'll never get out again, Hoggle's warning criticised her.
"What do you know of cherishing another person?" Sarah sneered.
"What do you?" He responded silkily, "You have few lingering attachments to your former life, no one that loves you, nor that you have loved. Poor Sarah," Jareth crooned, taking half a step closer to her, boots squelching in the mood as he neared the shade of the bush in which she lingered before. "I shall have to warm your glacial heart."
The fire he had woven into her veins sang in response to his claim.
"I'm sure you cherished all of those challengers. You cherished them night and day," she spat back, a bitterness welling up inside of her that she thought had been cured by her sudden aversion to his despicable actions.
Unfortunately, her feelings were not quite on board with what her mind demanded she concern herself with.
Surprise passed over his face, as though he hadn't even contemplated this objection. "How was I to lure my prey without being alluring? I assure you that I cherished not one of them. But you knew that already." Even though it was still dark from her earlier outburst against the Labyrinth, she could see the moon gleam off of his onyx armour and silver hair, highlighting every sharp angle. "Does your resentment for them burn bright enough to quash your grief over their demises, I wonder."
"That's sick," Sarah refuted, "Of course I'm upset they're dead. The only person I resent is you. I thought that you were my friend."
He was supposed to be her friend, her trusted confidant, hers.
Deep down beneath the horror, there was a spark of disappointment and a longing for the ignorance she had once clutched to her like a blanket.
She bristled with offence as Jareth threw back his head and gave an unrestrained laugh, tinged with malice.
"Is friendship all you ever wanted from me?" Jareth questioned with a dubious raise of an eyebrow, still shaking slightly from mirth. "Worry not, you remain my only friend; what wonderful games we have played together and shall continue to play." He took another step closer and followed Sarah's movement as she darted behind the bush, but he kept his pace languid, not yet purposeful in his pursuit. "Better run along Sarah, before I catch you. I promise you that when I do, you'll never be able to flee me again. Nor will you want to."
~*o0o*~
Sarah had severely underestimated the Labyrinth.
She knew that it was sentient and ever-changing but she hadn't quite expected it to transform in such a manner.
What was once a sprawling behemoth of incalculable size had now become something akin to a towering fortress, reaching for the stars above, resolute and accusing.
Its roots had become unearthed, spiralling skywards and coalescing into a singular terrifying, jagged structure. Great walls rose up around Sarah as she retreated from the Goblin King, rising at his command just as they had done so to eject his last suitor.
Fragments of arches and bridges fractured and drifted around them lazily, and nonsensical stairs grew from the earth like misshapen trees in diametrically opposed gravitational orientations.
She could have accused him of reminiscing, of the insipid romanticism he claimed he was infected with but Sarah knew better.
The twisting, interlocking staircases of the lithograph that adorned the wall of her childhood bedroom were called to life once more. When Sarah looked at the platform across from her she had the heartbreaking sensation of time reordering, resetting as though Jareth believed he could erase the magnitude of his sins by recreating a time and a place before their little game, before her decision to reject his first offer.
Up and down, left and right; she had the pick of any direction.
Seeing the strangely serene midnight blue of the night sky above, she sought to follow through in one direction. But up wasn't necessarily out and she feared that she was only moving closer to the heart of the Labyrinth rather than away.
As her footsteps thundered upon crumbling stone she could see stars falling past her as though the heavens were weeping.
Sarah frantically tore at the door knocker in front of her, pounding it viciously against aged wood before it had time to protest her brutal treatment. With a wheeze of pain, the door swung open, but there were no walls, only a path between the descending stars and endless stairs.
A step too far in any direction and she would fall along with them.
The Goblin King was waiting, of course, mirroring her movements from the staircase opposite her, an enormous chasm sat between them, inky black and endless.
Gone was his mahogany cloak, in its place he donned the attire he had chosen for their very first meeting; the high collared cloak of sapphire and ebony with matching armour.
Perhaps he truly meant to fight her.
This was the garb of the Goblin King, not of Jareth; this was the figure that had snatched her brother from his crib and mocked her paralysing fear for his safety, not the friend that had defended her and had exchanged easy banter.
Worst of all, he was singing.
"Left alone my heart is stone, cleaved from between these very bones. Listen close, for I shall confess. It lies within you at your request." His beautiful and dreadful voice called out to her, just as he had done in a very similar time and place.
Her next step sent her flipping upside down, with a shriek she feared she'd lose her balance but her footing remained steady and Jareth merely matched her, switching his orientation.
"What no one knew was, I was sickened. By a fever that only quickened." Sarah wanted to snarl back at him that he was sick; he was an utterly depraved monster. "No one knew but you and I, my Kingdom and crown, at your feet they lie."
The stars were now rising up past her and she needed to delve further to be free.
She hoped.
Sarah couldn't help but laugh, a raw breathless sound of pain and hysteria. She was a fool to think she had ever understood one modicum of this Kingdom.
"One by one they fell to your games, now everyone shall speak of their Queen's name."
What kind of a Queen was she?
By the end, she hoped she'd be no kind at all.
She couldn't imagine much worse a fate than being tied to such a place, forever forced to feed it the lives of people she knew, that she'd spoken to.
Aislhara had a brother and sister.
Simeon had an ailing mother that relied on him.
Aline's father could never say goodbye to her.
It was her fault, all her fault.
Where were her friends, Hoggle, Ludo and Sir Didymus? Had they been swept up in this bizarre transformation? She couldn't help but ask herself this as a pair of trees and a hut floated past. Perhaps there were forests and lakes beneath her, or even above her in this architectural depravity.
He was watching her. He was always watching her.
He mimed leaning back against a door as though tired, although his chest did not heave for breath as her own did. Instead, he offered her a ravenous grin, more teeth than lips which were curling upwards, unnaturally wide. "Sarah, Sarah I can say it at last. The time for equivocation is in the past,"he rhapsodised adoringly, savouring the taste of her name.
"Shut the fuck up," Sarah bellowed back, using words that were decidedly not a rhyming couplet. She shook her head and pressed on, flipping her position again. She was surrounded by trees once more, an intricate tangle of limbs and foliage she had to pick through carefully.
The Goblin King was utterly insane.
Unluckily for her, her vehement protestations against his serenading were as much use as a bar of soap against Bog water.
"I can't live within you, it's true. And now I shall no longer live without you." As she ran for her life, for her freedom, Sarah contemplating yelling at him once more that Toby's edgy teen poetry to his girlfriend was more original than the drivel he was spouting. "A thousandfold, you've proven your worth, behold the new era we shall birth."
Finally clear of the greenery, Sarah teetered to a stop in front of a wall.
No, it wasn't a wall, it was a mirror.
She couldn't stifle the sound of shock she uttered in response to her appearance. It wasn't the ragged snagged hem of her skirt or the torn collar of her blouse that drew her attention, it was the lines of gold pulsing beneath her flesh that had spread to her face and spiralled along her temples.
She hadn't noticed it among the heat and the sweat she was exuding, but now she had become cognisant of it once more, it seemed impossible that she had ignored the irrevocable burn of magic inside of her; shattered souls and the taint of Jareth's touch.
Sarah gasped as she noticed that Jareth was on the underside of the platform she rested on; mere inches of concrete separated them as he matched her position irrespective of the logic of gravity
His voice floated up, clear as ever, "No one could blame you for walking away, but you returned to me, day after day." The emphasise he placed on his words filled her with outrage; he had no right to assume anything of her intentions.
She had to move. Now.
But there was no way forward, and the forestry behind her had dropped away into the gaping maw of the darkness below, no longer existing as soon as she turned her gaze from it like a solipsistic nightmare.
"Time after time you've run from me, this time I'll catch you, I'm sure you'll see. This is the way it was meant to be."
The only way was forward.
The glass was the slippery wet of tear-stained flesh, slick and salty the surface rippled and granted her passage.
But nothing had changed, she was still in the Labyrinth's tower, except the uneven surface she was stood upon was made of hands, reaching and grasping and yanking at her shoes.
Barefoot she stamped down hard upon wrinkled fingers and cracked nails.
The stones cut into her flesh but she didn't bleed. She wasn't sure if there was any room left for blood inside of her.
The Goblin King could still bleed.
Jareth was carelessly strolling along the path beneath her with a suspiciously unfair lack of obstacles before him.
Sarah didn't know if she was travelling higher or lower, direction had lost all meaning. She could only hope that persisting longer meant she was travelling further away.
She had no time to pause, to consider her choices as she leapt to the next platform, sucking in a sharp breath as it wobbled precariously under her weight.
He continued to sing mercilessly, each achingly melodic word pained her. "Life can be easy. I'll give you your fantasies."
"Liar!" Sarah hissed wretchedly at his mellifluous tone and saccharine falsities. She didn't know what direction she needed to face to address her complaint but the Goblin King's delighted chuckle assured her he was still in earshot.
She must have been in a new part of the Labyrinth now, for there were walls beside the paths to safeguard her from tumbling to her demise. Row after row of musty curtains hung limply; clinging to the fabric was an excellent way to maintain her footing as loose steps fell away, leaving chinks of shadow as a replacement.
"The dreamers all forget, but your destiny was set"
One misstep led to her yanking a pair of curtains off the rail, leaving a painting naked and exposed to her critical eyes that had no time to ponder upon the image.
Nevertheless, she did pause.
Silvery gilding, ribbons and lace. Set amongst iridescent shimmering streamers, two figures danced in each other's arms.
Sarah read the accompanying plaque before swiftly returning to her determined fleeing.
'What you are and what you aren't.'
A curious name, she couldn't consider, for fear of Jareth gaining on her.
Yet she wanted to look at them all, each tiny piece of history that was preserved in the Record Room.
Had the Labyrinthine tower swallowed the contents of its lands and the interior of its castle to give birth to this monstrosity that was impossible to navigate?
"It's in your very blood, Labyrinth stone, Labyrinth mud," Jareth taunted her, now above her on the same staircase. How often had she heard those words, over and over again?
Stone and mud; in her game and in his song. Echoing throughout time like a warning.
Spinning around she rapidly started to descend the staircase. She didn't know how he'd reached her platform but it made it agonisingly obvious that any attempt to follow through on a coherent plan was moot. She could do nothing more than run and hide.
That wasn't good enough. She had to do more than evade him, she needed to escape to fulfil the terms of the game he'd laid out.
"You dreamed of us, rejuvenated us from dust. I heard your call; it awoke me from my fall."
On the bright side, since the Labyrinth didn't make a lick of sense, it was feasible that the exit could be mere metres away from her at any time.
Oh, she had been a fool to retreat the way she had come.
The staircase came to an end, any other viable platform was too far away to reach and the Goblin King was coming.
"All of us you needed, how you begged and how you pleaded." He was close enough now that she could see his victorious smile once more.
Jareth didn't even give her the dignity of looking out of breath; his pace was easy and unhurried as he continued his path down the stairs. The heels of his boots let out a resounding click-clack against the stone; it might as well have been the gunfire of an execution squad. "I'll give you your dreams, unthread reality at the seams. Reorder all of time, to make you mine," Jareth promised her.
Threatened her.
She didn't know the limits of his abilities but was entirely unwilling to call his bluff.
"J-Jareth," Sarah started, edging as far back to the end of the staircase as she could. "We don't have to do this; you don't have to do this." He simply raised an eyebrow at her, incredulous that she was questioning his intentions.
"None of this makes any sense," she continued, heart pounding hard enough to combust and blood boiling feverishly. He was near enough now to reach out for her, his hands shockingly bare, the only difference in his appearance now to what it had been in the beginning. "Why did it have to be me?" she choked out. Out of the thousands that passed through, why did he have to become fixated with her? "What do you want from me?" the once Champion whispered, brokenly.
He was close, too close. He was going to take her and never let her go.
"Sarah, Sarah, my Champion, my Queen. By now you should know exactly what I mean," Jareth crooned, fake pity bleeding from his frigid eyes like icy rapids waiting to drown her.
And as the Goblin King reached out an ungloved hand to ensnare her, Sarah stepped backwards and fell.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling in-
~*o0o*~
Falling into a chasm of endless darkness-
-until it spat her back out-
~*o0o*~
The first thing that mattered, that absolutely mattered, was a pedestal.
A thin glass stand, woven into the shape of a tree stump upon which a lengthy piece of velvet, the colour of dried blood hung atop it. It was the sole decoration on a circular platform of unsteady stone that was crumbling away, one fleck of dust at a time.
It wasn't important that she had fallen kilometres, or that she had felt her bones snap upon impact and knit themselves back together in an instant, as though she were a cheap Lego set, a toy that could click back into place after being torn apart.
No, she was compelled to creep closer on painfully unblemished legs and memory wounded bone and stare at the cloth with extreme trepidation. Even without removing the material, she knew what was behind it.
It felt cliché to jump to such a conclusion, to assume she knew with infallible certainty what she was looking at. But between herself and Jareth there had always been a sense of inevitability; upon the other end of the chains that shackled them together was a leaden weight.
The Goblin King wasn't her anchor in the traditional sense, he took a more literal interpretation; he was the stones that lined her pockets, preventing her from breaching the surface of reality and floating away. He'd sooner see them drown together than have her leave again.
It was quite ungentlemanly of him to fail to provide a cushion of air to slow her descent this time, but she supposed that Jareth was through with living up to her expectations.
She had to see what was underneath, had to know what he had hidden from her in that hallway so long ago.
The cloth fell apart in her hands as she yanked it clean off.
Sarah screamed.
It was a horrible sound, forced from her lungs, her body jolting violently into shock upon looking at the innocuous canvas. She didn't know that she was capable of making such a sound, like the earth fracturing and bleeding beneath brutal force.
The ground beneath her grumbled in protest and teetered from its less than stable position in the cosmos that was his Kingdom.
'Birth,' was the name attached to the artwork upon an aged wooden plaque.
She was transfixed in horror; it took unfathomable effort to tear her eyes away at the first sound of footfall.
She wasn't screaming anymore, she had one hand fiercely clamped over her mouth as she looked upon the Goblin King. As she looked at it.
His approach was careful, keeping a wide berth between himself and the painting and he began to circle her slowly with a great degree of caution. Something akin to amazement flashed across his face as he noticed Sarah returning her attention to the canvas once more.
"How can you bear to look upon it again?" his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper, eyes beseechingly vulnerable.
But she wasn't looking at his face anymore.
What is wrong with it?
That was her first thought.
Wrong was the simplest word to sum up what she could see.
"What is it?" Sarah wasn't sure if she spoke or screamed again, there was an incalculable amount of shrieking, and howling inside her head.
"It is the birth of something awful," he explained it gently, so gently as though she were a helpless child clinging to her mother for comfort.
Upon the canvas, there was the likeness of a kneeling man, caked in filth and bound by twisted vines. Open wounds wept freely and mingled with the tears streaming down a face distorted in peril; she thought his eyes had been tightly shut in rejection, half-hidden by matted blonde hair, but she could now see they were both an empty mess of gore. There was blood encrusted under the man's fingernails too.
The torment of the man wasn't the thing that had made her scream.
It was the thing attached to his head.
Through the scarlet tide of his blood, dripping from the crown of his head, the wave of red blackened like an infection, twisting shadows and a mess of endless limbs sprung from the prone body of the bound man.
She had thought the replica of the Escher room impossible to make sense of, but it paled in comparison to the geometric intricacies, shapes that were senseless and governed by no laws were interlocked and weaving. It was eternal and it was more than she could ever understand.
She shouldn't be screaming, it was all shapes and matter, rendered obsolete in its imitation of paint and brush. How pathetic was it to be scared of a painting?
But it hurt to look at, it made her eyes burn and it made pain resonate through her head like a bell that had been struck, vibrations of agony jolted through her synapses. When she closed her eyes she could still see it, never-ending spirals that had no beginning and no end, born from the violent head wound of a shrieking man that had blinded himself with his own hands.
For all the clumsiness of its union with the man, it held a certain chilling elegance. Perfection. It was what it was always meant to be, every entwined part functioned as it should and despite the enormity of it, the entity existed as one.
The tendrils of darkness interlocked themselves around a golden silhouette to the far right; it was so small and seemingly insignificant in comparison to the incomprehensible size of the entity.
Sarah didn't know if the spirals were moving upon the canvas or if they were moving in her head, twisting through her blood and raging in her mind. As she tore her eyes away once more the room spun around her, warping and reshaping.
It wasn't real, none of it was real. Every appearance it deigned to take was a fabrication easily disposed of. But she was looking at it, so it chose to look back.
"That's you, you're in the painting," Sarah forced out, her voice scratchy and sore. How long had it taken to memorise every feature of Jareth's face? He was still recognisable distorted by agony as he was.
"Yes," he responded mildly, face impassive.
"What happened to you? Who did that?" she choked out, who had torn his head open and fed him the vile contaminating spirals that had taken over his mind?
A small frown furrowed his brow; tilting his head in a familiarly avian manner he considered her words carefully. "What happened to me?" he repeated, incredulously.
Whatever that thing was, she knew that Jareth needed to be free of it. People so casually banded the word 'evil' around but she had never seen anything that fit such an imprecise but all-encompassing expression before.
"I can help you," Sarah urged, voice high and wavering as she offered out her hand, a foolish gesture in light of their current circumstances. "Whatever that thing is I can help you fight it." She latched herself desperately onto a small spark of hope that flickered to life once more.
"Oh my darling, you misunderstand," his sneer was condescending as ever, but there was delight there too, filling his unnaturally cold eyes. "I may have taken the form of that miserable sack of flesh from which I was born but I shall not be mistaken for him. I am the only Jareth you have ever known."
"W-what do you mean?" Her hand recoiled as though burnt.
She already knew what he meant; it had been foolish of her to hope otherwise.
The Goblin King laughed softly, his own hand outstretched mockingly, inches away from hers. And she knew she was still supposed to be running, fleeing for her life or at least her liberty.
She was rooted to the spot.
"I am not the dreamer, I am the dream," Jareth crooned, "As you should well know my Sarah, you have always been my favourite dreamer. And I have always been your most beloved dream."
"You arrogant little-"
"It isn't arrogance, simply knowledge," he corrected, holding a finger to his lips in admonishment for her outburst. "I am the first nightmare. I am every nightmare. But for you, I am your dream, your deepest heartfelt desire." As he spoke the words he seemed almost stunned by the absurdity of them.
"So that thing..." she trailed off, mind skipping over his insistence that she in any way had desired to dream of him.
He grinning too widely with a flash of jagged teeth. "Wasn't it kind of me to take on a form that would like? Truly, my love, everything I have done is for you."
She had never despised how achingly beautiful he was more so than she did at this moment.
It was clear that she had never known Jareth, that there had been no Jareth to know. There was only a monster masquerading in a humanoid skin to please her.
The Goblin King gave a careless flick of his wrist, pulling a clock free of nothingness into existence once more, the pendulum swung back and forth exceedingly slowly, taunting her.
"Eleven hours, fourteen minutes and three seconds," he sang cheerfully, "You've plenty of time left Sarah, but unfortunately there is nowhere for you to go."
She hadn't even managed two hours and he was literal steps away from capturing her.
And the Goblin King looked at her as though he wanted to cleave open her head with his bare hands and sew each wrathful word of devotion between her thoughts like a spider weaving a web around its prey.
She was terrified that part of her wanted to let him do just that.
No. She wouldn't give up. She had come too far.
"But you were oh so clever weren't you, when you demanded the Right of Rina," Jareth's smile twisted into something distinctly unpleasant. "Already making demands in your Kingdom, of your Kingdom. I can be demanding as well," he warned. "And you did insult us."
Sarah had never heard a sound more rage-inducing than that of the clock hands, winding around and around as they devoured her hours, utterly famished.
"All of your hours are mine," Jareth crooned, "They have been for some time now."
Some people seethe silently, enraged; some regard others with icy disdain and cool calculation. It was the Goblin King's mistake to overlook the fact that Sarah fell into the prior category. As her fury mounted and her hands shook with poorly concealed vexation, the ichor burning in place of her tainted blood twisted.
And she knew what it was to be more than herself.
She was a living chronicle of triumphs and defeats and a pesky little obstacle like time wasn't going to stand in her way.
The soft ticking of the clock hands ceased, provoking a frown of confusion from the mocking Monarch.
The hands began to spin anti-clockwise.
It met resistance, friction. A terrible grating sound filled the air, a shrill screech that could shatter glass and fracture unyielding stone. The clock came to a deathly standstill and a final tick sounded like a faltering heartbeat, leaving uneasy silence in its wake.
"Sarah, what...what have you done?"
He'd asked her that before when she'd lightly suggested to the Goblins that one of the challengers might like a stroll through the Firey Forest after she'd caught them leaving Jareth's study in a slightly dishevelled fashion.
His voice had been full of both incredulity and respect.
Perhaps Sarah should have realised then that she was no longer full of good intentions. But rot is something that creeps slowly and gradually from within before painting itself luridly across flesh in golden blemishes.
Respect was distinctly lacking from the Goblin King's inquiry this time around.
And he was incandescent in his wrath.
What remained of the sky was a dying void, the stars it wept fell to the last remaining platform in the ever-changing Kingdom, they bejewelled the ground like dying embers frozen before the final moment when they could be allowed to fade from existence at last.
"You had thirteen hours to capture me," Sarah reminded him, it, whatever it deigned to be referred to as. "That's no longer the case."
"No!" Jareth bit our harshly, "the clock is still in its sixth hour, you will not squirm your way out of an agreement you instigated that easily." His face was a grave mask as he stalked forwards through those dimly shining lights.
"But you don't have thirteen hours anymore, you don't have any hours." Sarah rebutted softly, "Neither of us do."
No time left to capture or be captured.
His smile was a savage snarl, kept civil only by the placating gesture of his raised hands; the labyrinthine sigil still glowed hauntingly, enticingly.
"Stalemate my love, and here I thought you didn't like chess."
Where did they stand now? Schrödinger's marriage?
Queen or Not-Queen of a Kingdom that had been ground to a halt by the strength of two equal but opposing forces. She would always be his equal. And he would always oppose her it seemed.
"You do so love the exactness of words," she reminded him airily, heart pounding hard as she wondered whether she really could keep them suspended in this limbo.
He tilted his head consideringly, scrutinising her for a long moment; he was mere inches from touching her again. The memory of his caresses upon her skin prickled pleasantly and she didn't know if she was eagerly anticipating the next step forwards or dreading it.
With a slow smirk he appeared to evaporate before her eyes, a swirling cloud of shadows and malice stretched thinly through the gaping emptiness of the sky and sunk low beneath the lights studding the ground.
Sarah sucked in a deep breath, eyes frantically casting over her surroundings. She took a hesitant step towards the painting. Keeping her eyes averted from the monstrosities it laid bare on the canvas, she quickly wrapped it up with that aged cloth, almost falling apart in her hands again. She hurled the ugly thing to the ground and stomped on it hard.
Oscar Wilde, eat your heart out.
She let out an almost hysterical laugh as she felt the flimsy frame give. Part of her felt that she should look at it once more, for no other reason than to reassure herself that the horrors it contained were no longer rendered visible.
"Is that it?"
The Goblin King's scornful words reverberated through the lazily suspended pillars and staircases still spiralling beyond her platform, frozen in its entropic decline.
"Tremble in fear before the mighty painting-slayer."
His laughter was terrible, Sarah could feel it scuttling in her skull like thousands of insects hollowing out a place for themselves to reside as an awful unshakeable memory.
It didn't seem possible that a sneer could exist without a face. The Kingdom was quite capable of making its displeasure clear, the temperature dropped rapidly and there was a creeping sense of hostility in the looming shadows. Eyes without the messiness of nerves and viscera watched over her and a formless mouth continued to taunt her with jaws waiting to rip and tear.
It had been too much to hope that a painting could be anything more than a painting. Especially that painting with the interlocking, intertwined, endless, boundless, all-consuming—
Sarah abruptly tore herself away from spiralling thoughts. Gods, it was still in her head and crawling through her veins.
The ground let out a deafening crack, and thick thorny vines burst free they latched on to her like grotesque leeches with jagged protrusions, slicing through her threadbare shirt and dirt-smeared skirt.
For all of her newfound power, her body was still shockingly mortal. Breakable.
Sarah tried to stifle her scream, she'd already allowed Jareth to see far too much of her, to steal too much from her.
The Goblin Queen, all hail, her mind whispered sarcastically, lay prone amongst the fallen stars, entrapped between the unrelenting ink-black vines. Rose blossoms the same glacial shade of blue as Jareth's irises began to bloom adding a final insult to injury.
The term gift-wrapped sprung to mind.
He could tear her apart if he wanted to.
What did he want?
Her eyes fell to the stars, still clinging to the last vestiges of life.
The stars stared back without mercy.
"Just get it over with." Sarah snapped.
The vines squeezed tightly around her chest. It was all she could do to hold back the insistent nudge of time, demanding to be reordered. There wasn't strength left in her to fight against the very physical threat choking the breath from her lungs.
"Do you think I mean to kill you?"
His voice tore through her mind once more, ripping open a wound to match her battered and bruised body.
"I could, you know." A thousand overlapping voices became singular once more as Jareth materialised in his humanoid guise. Soft owl feather trailed behind him, drifting loose from his cloak, backlit by the fallen stars below.
His hands were glaringly bare. Kneeling beside her with a smile that looked almost kind he brushed a strand of hair from her blood-encrusted cheek, leaving a tantalising trail of fire behind.
"But you are a fascinating little thing," he whispered with hateful tenderness, his accusing stare only softened by the strange sentiment behind his words. The Goblin King shifted over her, straddling her helpless form. And yet the thorns of his own creation refused to push through the flimsy material of his billowing shirt, obsolete only to him they kept Sarah bound.
Sarah tried to wriggle free, bucking her hips and glaring futilely at her captor.
His grin was both fond and infuriatingly condescending as he hushed her.
"You've done me a great service sharing your stories," he continued, thoughtfully. "Belief is a powerful thing. I dare say we shan't be concerned with sustaining ourselves for a while." The Goblin King appeared unperturbed by her cursing and muted whimpers of pain. "And I won't be the only one remembered and feared this time," he added slyly.
If only her hands weren't bound she would have punched him in his unbearable smug face again.
"They know not to make wishes," Sarah rapidity defended. That was one thing she had made sure of when regaling the children at the library with tales of the Underground.
"Do you think they'll heed such a warning?" Jareth questioned, carefully tracing a finger across her lower lip, following the downturned corners of her grimace. "You didn't."
"I wish I'd never told anyone about you. I wish I'd never even met you!" Sarah spat.
"Careful." Jareth's hand gripped her jaw, there was a slight application of force but she knew he could shatter bones just as easily as breaking open a fortune cookie. "I might wish you'd forgotten your brother forever when you came here as a child. You wouldn't like that, would you?"
He released her swiftly, eagerly drinking in her spite and visceral loathing. "I don't see why you're so happy that I won your Kingdom over, Jareth." She wanted to take back his name as soon as she uttered it, watching the way his eyelids fluttered shut, basking in the sound of it was almost too much to handle. "You weren't exactly happy that it picked me as its Champion."
What began as mild exasperation escalating into something bitter and putrid, the scent of overwhelming sweetness and crisp snow showers flooded her senses as he bent his head low over her.
"Are you unfamiliar with the concept of misdirection? I am my Kingdom!" The Goblin King snarled, anything remotely human had faded away beneath the flash of ravenous teeth and eyes so cutting they stole away the parts of her that crumbled away at the edges, snatched up by eager, starving hands. "You bled upon me, marked my walls and ate greedily from my boughs. Many you have sacrificed to me and many more shall you sacrifice. I am your Kingdom as great, and I am your King."
Because that's what had been birthed into this world, something limitless and eternally vast. A labyrinthine nightmare sprung forth from a pitiful little man that knew not what he had dreamt of.
"That doesn't make any sense," Sarah hissed back, "The walls of the Labyrinth fell when I ran from the cleaners you set upon me. You were unhappy when it guided me to your Hall of Records. How is any of that by your will?"
"Are you aware of every individual hair upon your head?" The Goblin King answered disdainfully, hands clutching too tightly to her shoulders and shifting uncomfortably closer so that the soft brush of his feathered cloak stuck to her bleeding arms.
What did it mean to be a Kingdom masquerading as a person? Did it even matter what he was? She already knew what he wasn't.
"You don't understand yet, but you will," Jareth murmured quietly. He raised a hand over Sarah's chest, the vines contorted to make space, leaving a small circular patch for him to place his hand above her chest near partially exposed flesh beneath the tattered ribbons of her shirt. "May I share my Kingdom with you?" A flicker of rage passed over his previously impassive face as he took in the rapid shake of her head in rejection. "Ah well, I said I would ask, this time I shall simply give."
"Sto-"
Warmth-
Indescribable warmth flooded through her once more. How she hated revelling in the sensation of finally, finally, being sated-
Her eyes were shut tight but she could feel him grinning brightly as he pushed more and more of himself into her through the palm of his hand; more of the defeated lost and lonely souls her challenges had vanquished.
Sarah had never known true contentedness before this moment, to be oh so full with rapturous bliss. Flickers of images flashed through her mind momentarily dazzling before fading into nothingness, too quick to grasp on to anything coherent. But it was hers. All hers forever.
A thousand connections sprawled out towards her, wrapping around her more tightly than the vines that restrained her. Inside of her and outside of her. She could feel the pulse of the Labyrinth thrumming through her body.
Sarah was distantly aware of the sonorous chime of the Goblin King's voice as he sang to her again. Nonsensical words like the snatches of memory fragments woven together into seamless mosaic within her head.
"Do you not see that this is our victory, Champion, Wife...Sarah."
His voice didn't hurt anymore; Jareth's very presence saturated all of her senses as they bled together into something indiscernible.
When he finally removed his hand from her the vines wilted away and fell around them in an eerie halo of silver ash. Only the flowers remained. This was their wedding after all.
She had the insane impulse to spread her arms out and create snow angels amongst the glittering remains of her confinement.
And he was right-
She did understand.
She knew what it was to glut herself on the lives of others like a starving beast; to be hazily euphoric with the supernova of power burning in her chest and flooding through her veins. Nary an inch of her skin was untouched by looping swirls of sunlight living under her skin.
The adoration painted across Jareth's face caused the remains of his power to surge and sing back in harmony. All of her instincts cried out to her to reach forward and pull him back down, to be closer-closer-intertwined and inseparable and eternal-
Jareth allowed her to wind her hands into his hair and pull his face towards her. The gentle brush of his scalding lips was nothing compared to the bruising pressure of her own mouth as she demanded that he give her more. And with each caress and press of flesh upon flesh, he gave her more. Blinding sparks flashed behind her eyes and her skin was seared beneath each touch.
When she, at last, found the strength to tear herself away from his careful and questing advances, she almost smiled at the hesitant question in his eyes; the sheer brutal agony of the hope that lay there reminded her quite abruptly that they were not the same person. As interwoven as they had become, with a Kingdom and its secrets laid between them and within them, she was still Sarah.
He kneeled, hands cautiously tracing the twirling shapes down to the crook of her elbow. So soft with painful longing in his eyes the Goblin King let out a sigh. Keeping his movements careful and fleeting he rested a hand upon her torn shirt and the brief withdrawal of skin contact gave her a momentary respite to think.
And the more she focused on the parts that were separate from Jareth, the harder it became to remember which parts of her were solely Sarah.
There had been boundless silver sands that stretched as far as the eye could see. He'd played there with his cousins-
No, that wasn't right, Sarah didn't have any cousins. Her home was in the clouds and her father was waiting for her to come home, it had been so long, so terribly long and she was alone and suffocating and help-
That wasn't quite right either, she and her sister hailed from the water, not the sands or the skies. And their enemy feared them; he was so scared of what their river could do and undo-
Oh, this one was one of her memories.
An old story she'd read soon after her conquest of the Labyrinth, and she'd paid far too much attention to the peaches and the pomegranates meant to entrap and entice. Sarah had stared at the unbroken skin of a peach, innocently sat in a supermarket aisle and counted her lucky stars that she was not bound Underground in the same way Persephone had been. But even then, whilst Sarah hadn't been enslaved by marriage, her life was divided just the same between two realms.
Background details that had been entirely unimportant in her mythology books now sprung readily to mind
Underground. Underworld. Built upon five rivers.
Styx...Acheron...Cocytus...Phlegethon...Lethe-
Jareth only hated one river.
Nasty little River-Dwellers- that's what he'd called them.
Sarah had been courted by Nessa of Lethe.
How do you kill a Kingdom of dreams?
That's what he'd asked her.
She knew the answer then and she knew the answer now.
And Nessa, the Princess of the River of the Forgotten, had given her a parting gift; a gift that echoes of her memory living within her blood drew her unsteady hands towards.
"A toast to our marriage, Husband," Sarah spoke, half-solemn, half-derisive. Aeons of hatred and fear of their enemies resided within her, even if they were barred from an exodus they would have their retribution.
The Goblin King's eyes tried frantically to focus on the object around her neck, but for all his efforts in understanding, he made no attempt to stop her.
With one swift movement, she removed the cork from the tiny bottle and tipped the content of the opalescent liquid down her throat.
Jareth's hands snatched at the empty bottle, exquisite horror dawning upon his ashy pallid face.
But it was far too late.
"Oh, you precious, hateful thing." Jareth cursed; his eyes were starlight and agony, furiously clinging to her thorn caressed arms, slick with blood now as black as dreamless night under the empty sky. "How can you be stupid enough to-"
"I'm not stupid," Sarah replied quietly, her voice nowhere near as impassioned as the Kingdom she now stood against. A strange calm fell over her as her thoughts started to become cloudy with a wine-drunk fugue. "I am relieved that I can scrub clean the stain of your memory you've inked across my mind and my skin."
His hands closed around her wrists and the back of her head met the ground hard, the Goblin King's outline started to shimmer iridescent and immaterial. His onyx-mahogany-dove grey cloak flickered like an aged recording, and the contours of his face shifted before her eyes like clay in the hands of an indecisive potter. "You are the one that shall be forgotten, not I" the Goblin King growled lowly. He was unable to disguise the naked terror in his eyes, but only a fraction of that was for her.
"Yes," she agreed, her voice positively pleasant as she saw the stars littering the ground die out one by one. "But I am the one that remembered you, that read your story destined for the flames." The small leather-bound book remained suspended in her mind for a moment before she began to have difficulty recalling whether the title had been white or blue or some other colour. "It is my stories that the children Above remember and my victories that the denizens of the Underground fear. They only remember you because of me, Goblin King-Goblin King-" Sarah laughed brokenly, "If no one can remember me and my awful, villainous deeds, who will be left to remember you?"
It was so hard to think.
But she wasn't afraid as her memories melded together. She would be brave like Nessa, like Marietta, like Eileen? Alina? No, Aline.
Which of them had come first? The order shifted and changed in her head like sand. Sand in an hourglass. It was slowly trickling away.
Sarah had no words left to fight him. Her last weapon was memory and she was winning.
The visage that glowered and the hands that shook her violently seemed to drip like molten glass, light refracting so prettily amongst all his jagged crystalline shards
At least maybe they'd be safe now, those indistinct figures that part of her still knew she cherished. A sandy-haired boy and his parents, her parents?
"Sarah-Sarah-" the figure beseeched, "Look at me. Look at me!" It demanded. It was no longer humanoid, had it ever been? Immeasurable in size made of crystal and darkness, it tugged on her ruined flesh and urged her to respond. "You will remember me, tell me my name!"
With great effort her eyes refocused; a name swam to the forefront of the murky haze of her mind. Why was it asking her though? Did it not know its own name?
Her lips parted soundlessly as some hidden and crumbling part of her instinctively bit back on the response that the mammoth monstrosity of shards and shadows demanded.
"Sarah," it said again, "I can't, I need-"
It continued to mutter the same name over and over, the sound merged together into one long stream of incoherent babbling. It started to become distorted, syllables changing and a cadence that wasn't quite right. What remained of its face screwed up in despair and cracks spread across the surface as it valiant fought to dredge forth the word eluding it.
Before it stopped.
It was silent.
She didn't know how long it had been like that or even how long she had been here.
Its form shifted before her eyes into a naked man with eyes that failed to belie the iciness and sharp edges to the devouring darkness that had latched on to her with such distress. Aside from the danger lingering in his eyes, the most striking thing was how emaciated he appeared, his ribcage stuck out starkly along with his hollowed-out belly. He tilted his head and gazed upon her with an almost detached curiosity, eyes set in such a painfully narrow face lingering on the arctic blue petals strewn violently around her bleeding body.
Oh.
She was bleeding.
And her blood was as golden as sunrise arrival.
That seemed like it should have been a noteworthy observation earlier.
Although the twisting and writhing tendrils of darkness had receded into the shape of this person, her surroundings appeared no brighter. It was utterly dark save for the faint luminescent glow of the stranger's waxy skin.
There was an insistent ticking sound. Steady like a heartbeat-
"Who are you?" She asked, her throat felt as rough as sandpaper as she forced out her question. Had it been a long time since she had last spoken to anyone?
The man arched an oddly shaped eyebrow and considered her for a moment more, his expression completely alien and lacking in any warmth. "I believe I should like to ask the same of you." He approached her swiftly, uncaring of the shattered glass and shimmering ash beneath his bare feet.
The frenzied hunger in his cruel eyes sent a thrill of intense discomfort through her. He stalked forwards like a predator, utterly famished and waiting patiently, so patiently, to strike.
A hint of intrigue crossed his face as he scrutinised her, "But firstly, I should like to know, what exactly are you?"
~*o0o*~