With a gasp, Sarah rushed over to the bed, but she stopped short of actually touching him, and resigned herself to hovering over him and listening quietly to make sure that he was still breathing. Though his breath was shallow, it was steady.
She bit her lip, deciding that waking him yet might not be a good idea. She needed time to think. Firstly...how on earth had she ever forgotten him? For the last two years, whenever she'd remembered her experience in the Labyrinth, he hadn't been part of it. What had she been thinking? Sarah screwed up her face; now that she remembered Jareth, it was hard to fathom how she could ever have imagined the Labyrinth without him. He'd been such an essential part of it: the reason she was there, the obstacle in her path, the destination at the end, the one lingering regret. She'd spent two years believing that the king of the goblins had been a small, shriveled, leather-colored, annoying, and frankly hideous goblin. His seduction within the bubble ballroom had been laughable and his lascivious, last-ditch efforts to defeat her had been nothing short of ludicrous. In her memories, the nameless Goblin King had been nothing more than annoyance.
And now, to be faced with this magnificent man and to suddenly remember the truth left her more than slightly overwhelmed.
Of course, there was also the issue that the Goblin King was currently unconscious on her bed to deal with. She needed to figure out why he was here and what on earth was wrong with him...and of course, how to get rid of him.
She stared down at him again. In her memory, he was intimidating, frightening, and infinitely powerful, a form of mystery. The man before her held little resemblance to that mighty figure. He looked drawn, tired, and all too small and human. Looking down at his pale features, she suddenly felt a twinge of sadness. Yes, he had been her adversary, and yes, she had rejoiced when he was defeated and had taken a special pleasure in speaking the words, "You have no power over me," but all the same, it didn't seem right for such a man to be reduced to this.
With that in mind, she was no longer scared. The man on the bed was not to be feared; he was just a drained, sick man who had needed a place to come in from the cold. Suddenly confident, Sarah reached out and touched his forehead confidently, feeling for a fever.
When she gasped, feeling the heat of his forehead against her fingers, it was easy to ignore the fact that she would have once given nearly anything to be near him. Despite the fact that he'd been out in the storm, he was burning up. She turned around, quickly walked the few steps to her door, and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.
Sarah made it safely to the bathroom, where she rooted in the cabinets under the sink until she found a washcloth, which she proceeded to drench in lukewarm water and folded neatly.
Unfortunately, on the way back to her room, she forgot to avoid the creaking floor, and winced as the resulting noise brought stirring noises from Toby's room, which, she was sure, would shortly develop into screaming.
"Karen," she called softly into the master bedroom, "Toby's awake."
"Can you handle him, dear?"
Sarah bit her lip, slightly exasperated. "At the moment, no... I'm working on a really important paper. It's worth fifty percent of my grade in English."
"What paper is this?"
"Um, the one I told you about yesterday."
"Yesterday? You didn't tell me about any—"
But by then, it was too late. Sarah had made it back to her room and was in the process of closing the door. She locked the door and thanked her lucky stars that her father and Karen had finally agreed to install a lock on her door; they hadn't wanted to, feeling as though no one in their house should lock out anyone else, but when Toby had refused to stop trying to rummage through her room in the middle of the night and had even toddled into her room while she was getting dressed, they had at last seen the necessity of Sarah having a little guaranteed privacy.
Blocking out the sound of Karen's insistent voice, Sarah turned her attention back to Jareth, who hadn't moved. Quickly returning to his side, she gently placed the washcloth on his forehead. She was no doctor and knew next to nothing about taking care of people, but she did know that if someone had a high fever, getting their body to cool down a bit couldn't possibly be a bad thing.
While he lay silently on the bed, the damp washcloth looking incongruous on his exotic face, she next turned her attention to his clothes. His blouse and tight pants didn't look like they would make him overheat much (and even if they would, she wasn't about to touch them), but she decided that she should take off his boots and his cape.
The boots were easy enough: she simply grabbed onto his feet and pulled. They didn't want to slip off at first, but once she stopped blushing and straddled his legs to give herself leverage, they came right off, and she jumped away from him as quickly as she possibly could.
Removing the cape, however, proved to be somewhat more difficult. The clasp was nearly invisible and quite small, so she needed to squint and bring her face quite close to his neck in order to see how it worked. Though she tried as hard as she could not to brush bare skin with her fingers or, indeed, to breathe, the slightest contact was impossible to avoid. She was close enough to smell him: the scent of pine trees on a cold autumn day rose to tickle her nose. His was a distinctive and heady scent, and breathing it in, she again wondered how she could ever have forgotten him. Finally, Sarah's suddenly clumsy fingers managed to undo the little silver clasp and the feathery cape slid down from his shoulders.
She frowned. She'd managed to get the cape unhooked, but it was still lying squarely under his body, and she wasn't quite sure how to deal with that. After an awkward moment, she decided that merely having it off his shoulders would have to be satisfactory. It had been hard enough to unclasp the thing, let alone managing to maneuver a very male and very heavy dead weight around to get it off the bed.
Then she looked again. She'd forgotten about the protruding bones at the top of the cape, but they seemed to be digging into his back, and if he'd been awake, she was sure that he'd be in a good deal of pain. So, really, she had no choice.
As gently as she could, and attempting to ignore the fact that she was essentially undressing a man, she slipped her arm under her shoulders and, with a bit of grumbling to herself, managed to raise his chest and shoulders high enough to slip the pointy part of the cape out from under him. With one final grunt, she took hold of the cape and pulled as hard as she could.
That action produced some definite results: Sarah, with the cape securely in hand, went flailing backwards and landed squarely on her rear end. Jareth, on the other hand, had not woken up, but the momentum of the cape sliding out from underneath him had flipped him over, and he was lying on his face, breathing down into the mattress.
"Oh, no," Sarah groaned. With only the slightest wince to acknowledge her aching posterior, she bounded to her feet and, arriving back at the side of the bed, slid her arms around him and pulled again.
Getting him onto his back again turned out to be no easier than removing the cape had been, and a good deal more embarrassing. By the time Sarah had him lying peacefully with the wet compress on his forehead again, she was red-faced and panting.
She sat down with her back against the bed frame, feeling utterly exhausted. Though she told herself that she was only closing her eyes for a moment, that she wasn't going to fall asleep, having her eyes felt closed felt so good that she decided to keep them closed for a minute longer. And a minute longer. And that it really couldn't hurt anything to just doze for ten minutes. Ten minutes. Really. Then she would open her eyes and check on Jareth again.
Sarah had never heard the proverb, "Time makes fools of us all," but if she had, at that moment, drifting off, she would have known exactly what the originator of it had been feeling.
When her eyes drifted open again, much later, she was so disoriented that she couldn't fathom why she'd fallen asleep on the floor. But then she looked at the window, where Jareth was now sitting, and it all came flooding back.
She didn't want him to know yet that she was awake, so she kept her mouth closed and didn't move. Instead, she just stared at him.
He was sitting on the sill with one leg pressed against the window frame, staring out the window with an expression that she couldn't name. The orange light from the streetlamp illuminated the stark relief of his face, exemplifying just how slender he had become. There was something so sad about his profile that she felt like weeping.
"I dislike charity," he said shortly.
Sarah flinched involuntarily. How had he known that she was awake? "I beg your pardon?" she asked.
"I would sooner be dead than to have a child feel pity for me." Though he didn't turn and meet her gaze, he was staring steadily at her through the reflection of the glass, which, she realized, he must have been doing all along.
She couldn't help but feel a little hurt. Here she'd done her best to help him, even though he'd done absolutely nothing to deserve it, and the best he could muster up was words of scorn. "Then I apologize for letting you inside in the first place," she replied in as curt a voice as she could manage. "Perhaps we should rectify that. Feel free to leave the same way you came in."
This time, he did turn his head and look at her. "I said that I want no pity. I did not say that I am not... grateful for your efforts."
"Well, are you?" Sarah was well aware that her question was nothing more than baiting, but she was still miffed.
"Answering that would seem slightly redundant."
"No, what you said was that you're not ungrateful, but you never said that you are grateful. So, are you?"
Jareth sighed in vague irritation, "Good god, girl, I didn't come here to argue semantics with you."
"Then why did you come?" she shot back. "To stare at me through the window? You know, people get arrested for less than that all of the time."
"And what an amusing phone call that would be. 'Hello, officer, there seems to be a bird staring at me. Would you mind terribly if I asked you to lock it up?'"
"Now you're mocking me," she snapped. "I don't see why I should have to put up with this in my own bedroom."
Seeming to sense that he was about to push her over the edge, and casting a nervous glance at the blizzard outside, he sighed and stood up. Sketching a deep bow, he said, with only the slightest hint of irony in his voice, "I do apologize if I've offended you. I promise that I shall behave quite perfectly from now on."
Sarah stretched and moved from sitting on the floor to sitting primly on her bed. "Wow, you must really want to avoid going outside if you're willing to offer a genuine apology. Well, genuine-sounding anyway."
Jareth's face darkened. "No one would want to be outside in this weather."
She stared at him, at his nearly-emaciated frame, now clearly visible as the light from the streetlamp silhouetted him and cast his shadow across the floor. "Especially you," she said flatly. "What happened to you?"
Following her gaze, he gazed down at himself almost ruefully. "You."
Sarah blinked, at first thinking that she must have heard him wrong. When she wasn't able to convince herself of that, she laughed disbelievingly. "Me? What could I have done to make you look like you just stepped off the model runway in hell?"
He just looked at her, his eyes dull and humorless. "You always did fancy yourself quite clever, Sarah. However, for me, this is no laughing matter." Jareth sat back down and stared out the window again.
A little bit of her anger melted. He really did look quite forlorn. "What happened, then?" she asked softly. "How is it my fault?"
"You defeated me. You looked me in the eye and said—" He couldn't hide a slight shudder. "—said what you did."
"You mean, 'you have no p—"
"Stop!" Jareth hissed. "Don't say that." He glared at her.
Ignoring his injured gaze, Sarah said, "So you expect me to believe that when the other people who mastered the Labyrinth defeated you, nothing happened, but as soon as I won, you lose thirty pounds?"
"There have been no others. No one else has ever mastered the Labyrinth. Only you."
"Just me?" she repeated in wonder.
"No one else ever made it half as far."
Feeling absurdly proud of herself, Sarah said, "Go on? After I said – what I did, what happened?"
"I lost everything," he said simply.
"What do you mean, 'everything'?"
"Everything. The Labyrinth, my throne, my power, even my human body. Everything."
"But why?" she cried. Despite herself, she was beginning to feel very guilty. Could this really have all been her fault? "Why would that happen? So you couldn't control me. Why should that have made any difference?"
"The Labyrinth's not made to be beaten, Sarah," he replied softly. "It's made to confound. If it makes enough sense to someone to let them through, it means that something is terribly wrong with it. When you defeated it – and me – it disappeared."
"What?" she breathed. "How could that happen?"
"Stop with your 'how's and 'why's," he replied irritably. "I thought that you had actually learned to stop questioning and just accept that sometimes things are what they are. All you need to know is that the Labyrinth and its denizens are no more. At least, not in any form that I can reach."
Her hand drifted up to cover her mouth. "But Hoggle...and Ludo...and—"
"Gone. All gone."
"Not possible. I saw them after you were defeated," Sarah said, slightly confused, but quite willing to believe that Jareth was lying through his pointy teeth. "More than once."
"You understand so little about the power of wishes and your own mind, Sarah. You wished to see them, yes? Each time, you wished it."
"So? They came, didn't they?"
"You wished to see them, so you saw them. That does not mean that they actually came. What you saw was just your imagination. In effect, you wished their images to yourself, not their real selves."
"That would mean that... that I haven't seen them since..."
"Since you left them at my castle, yes."
Sarah shook her head desperately. "No. I don't believe you. Why should I believe you?"
Jareth shrugged indifferently. "It is entirely immaterial whether or not you believe me. You wished to know what has happened, and I'm telling you. You just need to decide whether or not I would have a good reason to lie."
"You always have a reason to lie!" she exclaimed.
"As I said," he continued, a slight edge to his voice, "you are under no obligation to believe me. Neither am I under any obligation to speak to you, so if you're going to keep badgering me and questioning every single word I say, I believe I'll just stop talking and go back to sleep."
"I could throw you out of my room," she muttered. The words were under her breath, but Jareth must have had had extraordinarily sharp ears, for he caught every single word.
"Threatening the same thing twice is rather ineffective. I actually was not going to mention it, but you can't throw me out of your room." The smirk upon his lips was a pale imitation of its former glory, but it was there nonetheless. "What was it you said? Ah, yes. 'Unless you want to, you don't have to go outside again until the snow's stopped.' I believe that was it. And frankly, I don't want to."
"But I said that when I thought you were an innocent owl," Sarah replied stubbornly. "I don't see why I should be held to that."
"A promise is a promise, Sarah, dear."
She crossed her arms. "And a jackass is a jackass, no matter what clothes he puts on."
"A bit bitter, are we? Listen, do you want me to explain or not?"
"...Yes," Sarah said grudgingly. "Please go on."
"So the Labyrinth is inaccessible, if it even still exists. I've been forced to spend the last two years as an owl."
"Was that necessary?" Seeing his raised eyebrow, she hastily amended her words. "I mean, I know that you're a bit...unusual, and you wouldn't look very good in a suit, but surely getting a job and making some money in the human world is preferable to... um, eating mice to survive?"
"As much as I would enjoy toiling away like a dead-eyed drone in this pathetic excuse for a world," Jareth replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "that wasn't an option. I do not have control over my form, so when I say that I was forced to spend two years as an owl, I mean that I was not physically able to regain this form."
"You regained it easily enough tonight."
"Because you said the right words."
"Huh?"
"You made a wish to know why it seemed like the owl could understand you. For the last two years, I've waited around your window as much as I could in the hopes that you would see me and wish something of the sort so I could be myself again, but you never did. And then you just stopped seeing me at all," he said, every word as harsh as a bullet.
"What do you mean?" Sarah asked, confused and not a little upset. "I always saw the owl, until you stopped showing up, and then I didn't see you again till tonight."
"Stopped showing up, you say," Jareth replied in disgust. "I was always here. You lost your faith in the Labyrinth and in me, and you stopped even seeing that I was right there." He pointed to the branch, mere feet away from him.
"How could I have lost my faith in you when I didn't even remember you?" Sarah cried, an ache in her chest. "Until I saw you tonight, I wasn't even aware that you existed!"
"And whose fault is that?" he asked. His voice was quiet, but the tone was infinitely more terrible than it would have been had he been screaming and ranting.
"I don't know! Do you honestly think I would completely forget you all on my own?" She shook her head wildly. "You made too much of an impression for that."
"You protest and you protest, but the fact remains that you did forget me," he sneered. "And I can assure you that I certainly did not slip you any more peaches."
"Rot in hell!" she snapped. "I don't know what happened, and I certainly don't need to defend myself to you, you bastard! You're the one who stole my baby brother and tried to drop me in the Bog of Eternal Stench. I don't owe you anything."
"You owe me a warm room for the duration of the storm."
"Besides that." She clenched her fists.
"Sarah," he said, his voice quiet again, "do you remember what I told you about the power of your own mind and wishes?"
"I fail to see how that has any bearing here," she replied stiffly.
"It's the exact same thing. You wished your friends to you, and... you wished me away," he said slowly, almost as though the words pained him. "You didn't want to remember me, so you pushed me out of your mind and replaced me with something else."
"I..." she shook her head dazedly. "You really think that's what happened?"
"Eaten any magic fruit lately?"
"No."
"Then, yes. That's what happened."
Sarah stared at her feet. "So it's true. You really lost everything because of me."
"Damn straight I did. As if it weren't bad enough that you defeated me, you had to add insult to injury and forget about me."
Sarah started to cry. She didn't mean to, and she certainly didn't want to cry in front of him, but she was exhausted and there was only so much she could take. Assuming that everything he said was true, and despite her brave words, she believed him, she really had destroyed his life. She roughly wiped her flannel sleeve over her eyes, but the tears wouldn't stop coming.
When she looked up again, her eyelashes spiky and wet, he was gazing at her with an entirely new expression on his face. "Oh, dear," he said, in a voice that was more genuine than anything she would have believed could come from him. "I seem to have let my frustration get away with me."
"Yeah, you're good at that," she sniffled.
Jareth sighed. Slowly, he stood up and walked across the room, sitting down next to her on the bed. She stared straight ahead, still fighting to control her emotions.
"Sometimes," he said, also staring ahead, "I forget how young you are and that you're not as used to me as my goblins were. I could yell at them and throw them from the castle ramparts for the hell of it, and they would lap it up and come back for more."
"...Fine," she said shortly, her voice rough and unsteady. She didn't want to say anything at all, but he had clearly been waiting for a response.
"Nor am I used to women and their... emotions." He said the word as though it were an anathema. "The only females in the Labyrinth besides those pesky fairies are goblins like Agnes the Junk Heap. They don't... cry."
"Go to hell," Sarah muttered.
"Dammit, Sarah," he snapped, "I'm trying to apologize."
She let out another shuddery breath. "Well, you suck at it."
He sighed in exasperation, but when he spoke, his voice was surprisingly gentle. "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too," Sarah whispered. "I wanted my baby brother back, but I wasn't trying to destroy your life."
Jareth leaned back and gazed at the ceiling. "I know."
The two of them sat in silence for several minutes, side-by-side, and neither quite sure where to go from there.
