Jareth, King of the Goblins and ruler of the Underground, sat pensively in his throne staring into a crystal.  There was a plain wooden cradle on the floor at his feet, and in it lay the child he had so recently rescued. 

He sat the wrong way in the stone chair, turned sideways with one leg on the floor and the other thrown out over the armrest.  The crystal in his fingers shook slightly.   His face was disapproving, which wasn't unusual, but there was also a mask of pain there too, something so rarely seen on his kingly visage.  He looked dangerous, but also confused.  He stared deep into the depths of the perfect sphere, though nobody else could say what he was looking at. 

The room around him was cleaner than usual—possibly because there were no goblins rushing around.  He had banished them from the throne room the moment he strode in with the newborn infant in his arms.  Their carousing would disturb her, he was sure of it.  So the chickens were gone, the goblins were gone, and the place had magically cleaned itself with no more than a glance from the Goblin King.   It looked barren and gray, but Jareth wasn't paying attention and the infant slept soundly. 

"Sweet Sarah, what did you do?" he asked the crystal.  "Why?"  But the crystal did not answer, and the Goblin King sighed.  He stared into it for a little longer, but all he could see was her sleeping back with the silky waterfall of dark hair cascading down it.  

The infant mumbled in her sleep, then, and woke herself up with the noise.   She whimpered, and the sound seemed to draw Jareth up out of his stupor.  He shook his head, banished the crystal, and reached into the cradle to carefully pick up the child.

Her eyes were open now, and they were beautiful blue, framed by thick dark lashes that fanned to the side like any baby's eyelashes.   She was still terribly small, terribly fragile, and Jareth could hardly bear to hold her for fear he might hurt her.   But he couldn't seem to leave her in the cradle, couldn't put her down when every time she was left alone it seemed like another betrayal, another abandonment of her tiny form.  So the Goblin King who had held so many babies without a care and then turned them into little, ugly goblins, now cradled this human infant in his arms as if he might break her.  He settled her in the crook of his arm and with his other hand conjured a crystal.   Still too young to see clearly or truly control her movements, she ignored it.  Jareth spoke to her anyway as the picture again showed him Sarah sleeping on her cold sheets that would soon turn hot in the afternoon sunlight of southern California. 

"See?" he whispered to the tiny child, "That's your mother, unlikely as it seems."  His brow furrowed, and he absently kissed the silky hair on top of the child's head.   "I don't know what's happened, little one, but I'm going to sort it out.  I promise you that much."  He dissolved the crystal after another few seconds and turned his full attention to the newborn infant he held. 

"Did she really think you would be better off as a goblin?" he whispered, touching her fists, her tiny feet.  Her toes were perfectly curled, little miniatures of their adult form right down to the microscopic little nails.  "Did she think she could remove you from her life and just forget you?"    He shook his head and ran a finger down her tiny tummy.  "It's not that easy.   I am a man—an immortal one at that—and I know it is not that easy.  Childbirth is more than it seems."  He sighed, a gesture that took his whole body, and stared off into the distance for a long moment.  Sarah.  

"I'm going to have to pay an old friend of mine a visit," he said quietly, and smiled as the baby in his arms burbled.  "Would you like to come with me, eh?"

*****

Sarah was asleep, sleeping the deep slumber of someone exhausted to the core, when the Goblin King appeared in her bedroom.  He was not holding the infant. 

"Sarah," he whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed and bending over her.   She did not awaken, did not acknowledge his presence in the least.  Jareth smiled slightly, but it was a smile full of self-mockery.   "Foolish man," he mumbled as he left the room.  

For the next half hour Jareth prowled Sarah's home like a tiger, scowling at little clues he found.  None added up to the full story.  He had stopped watching her a year after she left his Labyrinth, when it was apparent to him that she was never going to call him again.  That was just after her sixteenth birthday, when she put away the games and banished the children's books to the little hidden shelf in her closet.   That was the year makeup became real for her, the year a boy had first sought her hand to hold, her mouth to kiss.   She had allowed it, and Jareth hadn't looked closely enough to see that she felt nothing from the touch.   He stopped watching her when it hurt too much to continue. 

Now, a year and a half later, she was living on a foreign coast among people of a foreign language and she had wished her newborn daughter away from her.   Jareth had almost every power imaginable, but he couldn't see into the past and her mind was too distorted by drugs for him to pick out the details that he wanted.  He stared at his finds: a pile of fast food receipts from every state between California and her old home, vitamin supplements for pregnant women, a California drivers' license showing a tired, sunburned Sarah that he barely recognized. 

"Little one, what happened?" he whispered to the photo.   "What changed, sweet Sarah?"  The child he remembered might have wished her half-brother away in a fit of frustrated jealousy, but she would never have done the same to a daughter, a child fresh from the womb.  He ran his gloved hands through his hair in frustration.  Why had he left her alone?  This world was going to kill her one way or another if she stayed in it; he'd known that.  He just always assumed that she'd call him before it happened, that she had enough self-preservation instinct to ask to be taken away before it could get her completely.  

"Baby," he said, a term of endearment for the sleeping girl-mother, for the child she had once been.  The child that was no more. 

He was sitting on the edge of her bed when she woke, her eyes hazy with both pain and sleep.  "You," she said, wincing as she turned over, one hand clasped to her abdomen.   She didn't sound surprised to see him.   Maybe she was expecting him to argue over taking the infant.   Maybe she just didn't have the will anymore to care.

"Me." Jareth reached out and tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear.   "Do you want to talk?"

"No." She looked up at him warily.  "What do you want?  Why are you here?"  

Jareth chuckled, the cold mask returning a little.  "Sarah, Sarah.  You know that I always pay a visit when I am given a child." 

Her eyes closed, and she shook her head imperceptibly.   "I can't deal with you right now, Goblin King," she said.   "Go away." 

"No."   Jareth said firmly.   "Sarah, you can't just wish away your own baby, barely out of the womb, and leave it at that.   The world doesn't work that way, even for you."  

The threatened tears, the ones always hovering in her throat, were inching closer to the surface.  Too much more and she'd break….

"I don't want to hear it." 

"I know you don't, but you have to for your own good and for the good of that mortal infant I have yet to turn into a goblin."   Jareth crossed his arms over his chest.   "Would you like to look at your baby, Sarah?   Have you seen your baby yet?   Do you even know if it's a boy or a girl?" 

His questions, accusing tone of voice, and cold eyes were too much.   Sarah buried her head back in the blanket and began to cry.  Pain pierced the Goblin King's heart because he knew he'd been the one to cause her suffering.  But he couldn't let it go; not just like that.  And where was the child's father, the other guilty party in this unfortunate circumstance?   Jareth wanted to rip his throat out, both for causing the pain he now saw in Sarah's eyes and for the fact that he, whoever he was, had coerced Sarah into giving into him when Jareth couldn't.  She was only a child, one part of Jareth's mind admonished.  She didn't know what it was you offered her.

She is still a child, Jareth argued back. 

"Sarah, beware," the Goblin King said, the icy indifference of his façade ignoring her tears.  "Everything I do concerning you is in your best interests.  I know you don't believe me, but it's true.  Fighting me hurts only you.  Can you not understand?"  Getting no response from the weeping girl, he decided to change tactics.   You cannot imagine the pain of knowing you sent your firstborn to me for eternity.  Sarah.  Such wounds never heal, child."

That got a response.  "I am not a child!" she shrieked, sitting up and baring her teeth furiously like a cornered animal.  "What do you know of pain, of betrayal, of abandonment?  Damn you to your own Underground, Jareth!"

It was the first time she had ever spoken his name, and the Goblin King started, his mismatched eyes staring into hers.  Then, in the space of an eyeblink, she was in his arms and he was smoothing her hair, touching her shoulders, rocking her back and forth like a scared toddler.  "Sarah, sweet Sarah, what happened?" he asked.  The shock of sudden contact, of the first touch of skin upon skin had thrown Sarah for a loop and she had not shrugged off his body yet.   "What kind of world is this where children are having children and don't dare even look upon them?" he demanded.

She pulled away from him, then, and scrambled back on the bed, holding her aching abdomen and just barely managing to keep the tears back.   She was not ready for this emotional onslaught.  Her body was not healed, her heart felt as if it never would be, and all she wanted was to fall asleep…sleep so long and so deep that she wouldn't wake until the pain had been driven away by Time.  His arms were a dangerous place to be…so strong…choking her, smothering her in the smell of man.   "Leave me alone!"   Her voice was weak, panic rising to a frantic pitch.

"I'm sorry, Sarah."  His control was back, with only tiny licks of soul-deep sorrow bleeding through the exterior.   She could have seen them were she coherent enough to see through the panic.  "I promised that this world would never hurt you.  I promised it wouldn't get you.  I wasn't watching, though, and you never called me."  

"I didn't want you!" Didn't want you to see me like this.   "For the last time, go away!"

"I can't do that, Sarah.  You called me by wishing away your baby and now I get to say my piece."

"No!" Sarah slapped her hands over her ears, but all that happened was Jareth's grip jerking her hands away and holding her wrists tightly as he bent down so she stared into his mismatched eyes.

"No, Sarah, no more hiding.  You have to hear this, for your child's sake if not for your own.   You are a mother.  You have a beautiful daughter, a little girl.  She has ten perfect fingers and ten perfect toes.   Her hair is dark silk, just like yours.   Her eyes are yours, too.   She looks just like you."   He had half-shouted the entire tirade, but now he quieted.  "Sarah.   Give it a month.   Come back to my castle, as my guest this time, and just relax while you heal.  Your daughter will be there." And so will I.  The final words were unspoken, but hung in the air nonetheless like tinsel Christmas ornaments, like the sound of a single crystal shattering on outstretched fingers.  No hands were outstretched to catch it.

Sarah shook her head, her tears dampening streaks down her cheeks.   "I can't!  If I see…her…I won't be able to wish her away a second time!"

"That's the point."  Jareth's tone was matter-of-fact, his mismatched eyes boring into her.   "Sarah, I have been generous up to this point."   He heard her mocking laugh and remembered his words as being redundant.  "I can just steal you away to my castle if need be.  I would prefer such measures not be necessary.   Come now.  Take my hand willingly and you get the deal—a month to heal.   Make me steal you away and you may never get the chance to return here."  His eyes disclosed the truth to his words by disclosing nothing.

Too exhausted to fight any more, Sarah reached out her trembling fingertips and brushed the outstretched hand of the Goblin King.   Her eyes did not meet his.  Her fingers fell away from his palm, but between one blink and the next Sarah found herself settled in a big four-poster bed in what she could only assume to be Jareth's castle.  The sheets were plain linen, nothing so exotic as silk or satin, but that set her more at ease than strange fabrics would have.

"Beautiful," she whispered as her head slowly turned to survey her surroundings.   The décor was done in warm peach and cream colors, saved from being over-feminine by the absence of lace or ruffle adornments.  And there, next to her arm, lay Lancelot the bear, her old friend from childhood.   At that point she didn't much care if the toy was a quality fake or if Jareth had stolen it from her sleeping toddler brother.   She hugged the little bear to her chest and sighed, breathing in his tattered smell.  Comforted, she closed her eyes.  The pain in her abdomen had ceased, but she didn't have time to wonder about that.  Within seconds she was asleep in the big bed.