Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Labyrinth world.

Everything I've Done

Prologue

Anyone who believed that it was all over with the taking of Toby home that night, knows very little of the obsessive temperament of immortal creatures. Having no concept of time they are willing to wait as long as need be. After all water could wear on a stone.

It wasn't that Jareth was a patient man. No indeed no one had ever accused Jareth of being patient at all, it was merely that he had all the time in the world, to get what he wanted. What he wanted, was of course Sarah. What she wanted? Well, that wasn't so very important.

Saying that everything he had done, he had done for her, might have been a slightly faulty premise on which to run. Perhaps it was his royal upbringing that made him a selfish being. Or perhaps it was simply his nature. But in his delusional thinking, the fact that he had turned his attention to her, should have been enough. If only Sarah weren't so very ungrateful for what he offered her. The chance to love and fear him. He hadn't offered that in millennia. And he had thrown it at this girl with no thought of his own comfort.

He had reordered time and space for her, he had frightened her, wooed her. And still she had the audacity to turn from him. Her betrayal would obviously not go unpunished.

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It had been years, and Sarah might have believed it all to be a dream. A terrible, wonderful dream. It had been so long ago. Thinking in a logical way, it was not possible that it had ever happened.

Sarah knew it hadn't been a dream, but she wished it had. That one night, thirteen hours had colored every moment of her life after. There wasn't a day that went by that she didn't think of him. As she had grown she compared every man to him and found them all lacking in some fundamental way.

She had learned early on that is was better she not share her memories with anyone else. No one believed her. Toby had been too young then to verify her story, and since he had been sleeping safely in his crib when her father and stepmother came home, they thought she had been making it up as well. She didn't blame them.

She didn't blame any of them for not believing her, but since the experience had been so fundamental in her life she found herself retreating inward more and more. The friends she had had before the experience couldn't understand her pushing them away, and when enough time had passed by they had finally faded completely.

It wasn't that she was lonely as much as sad at the necessity, of keeping people at arms length.

She didn't even trust herself to call on the friends she had made in the Labyrinth. She knew Ludo, Hoggle, and Sir Diddymous would have been only too pleased to come to her, but she didn't dare trespass upon their good natures. She didn't dare get them into further trouble with 'Him.'

It had all seemed so simple the night she returned, she would call them when she needed them. Keeping her childish dreams alive by their presence in her life.

Then she had woken the following morning to find that around her wrist there was a bracelet. A bracelet that no amount of pushing, pulling, soaping, hammering, iron cutters employed upon it, would remove from her arm. A bracelet obviously designed for her alone. A bracelet that branded her as His. She wouldn't even think his name, for fear that the familiarity of it would call his attention to her. If that attention had ever wandered in the first place.

She had spent enough time examining that "brand" over the years, and had learned it more intimately than her own self. The twined threads of silver winding in imitation of the Labyrinth, the garish goblin faces with their ruby eyes staring back at her. It was designed in a way that even with its grotesque subjects it still appeared to be delicate, even lovely. But the bracelet instilled no admiring glances from Sarah. The bracelet was the reminder to her of what she had become. A Slave.

And so it was that Sarah lived alone in a two bedroom apartment, on the twelfth floor of a high rise building. And every night she double checked the sealed windows carefully. Every night she kept a small light lit in the room, and a flashlight in the nightstand by her bed. He would not catch her unaware in the darkness ever again.

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Jareth sat in his throne room and laughed at the precautions that His Sarah took. He however knew that eventually fate would conspire against her and he would once again have the chance to "Offer" to her all that he was. Fate was a fickle mistress and he knew that she would soon tire of thwarting him and turn on Sarah. He just had to bide his time.

He had never lost interest in Sarah, nor would he. The lines that some called the ravages of time, that etched themselves on Sarah's face meant very little to him. He cared not that she had aged, something for all his power he was incapable of doing. No he cared little that there were threads of silver in her once dark hair, nor that she wore small reading glasses perched on her nose when she worked. When she came to him again, and became his in truth something as trivial as age wouldn't be a consideration at all.

A smile lit his features and he leaned back and imagined just how things would be when he could again rule and fear her.

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TBC