Disclaimer: I do not own or stake any claim to the Labyrinth or any of its characters, nope not one bit of it. They belong to the Henson Company.

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It'll show you your dreams

Sarah was now two years into her pursuit of common, dreamless reason. She never welcomed the summer, immersion in her studies was her respite, but summer came nonetheless. These were times she might have otherwise used to get a jump on the coming school year, the odd girl she was. However, this summer she would spend in her former town in her former room, flanked at all sides by the memories she waged the constant battle against these years to escape.

Initially, she managed to avoid the room by any means possible. She even gave it a silly name, the Room of Doom, she labeled it facetiously, as if to ease her heavy conscience. If only she could grasp the absurdity of the matter. It was as ridiculous as if to say 'my puppy made me eat my homework'. A puppy would do no such thing, nor could it. And that's completely beside the second point, what on earth would possess you to eat your homework? Are you blind or obtuse? Jareth never made her do anything, never forced her to say anything. When you get down to it, what on earth possessed her to ask such a thing when she obviously was aware of the poor king's circumstances and special gift to her! It would be entirely laughable if it weren't so completely tragic.

Avoiding the room was just another part of her game. She would run every errand imaginable, even conveniently 'forgetting' something so she would have to run out again, just to kill more time. There was never a shortage of housework to be done before her arrival either, and now everything was clean, folded, dusted, disinfected, and in its place. If there was nothing else to be done, she would make sure to fall asleep on the couch, always immersed in something, be it a book or a movie. And then one day she just couldn't escape it any longer.

Her parents figured to turn her room into a guest room, and this especially made sense when she spent so very little of her time in there. Actually, now that they thought of it, did she even go in it at all anymore? Returning from one of the myriad errands one day, she was surprised to find her parents rummaging through her old belongings, cleaning, sorting, and boxing. Essentially demoting what was once her very livelihood down to junk and common clutter. The very thought of this stole her breath. She stammered out a few words of apology for neglecting to do this herself and absolved them of this chore. Honestly she was looking forward to this, but she never let on.

# # #

With each item she recaptured a piece of herself. Everything in this room held for her its own distinct memory. Here, amongst the clutter of dreams cast aside, for anyone to see her heart lay bare, and with each memory she reclaimed that heart softened a touch. She had located a certain book first, and laid it carefully aside for last. Her intent was to avoid this one as long as possible. To this there was a reason. In the reality of things and how hearts work, she would have been too indifferent to it if she'd dealt with this one first, additionally she needed all the time she could afford to it. The hours went by as she carefully and respectfully sorted through each of her childhood treasures and now the time had come.

Sarah stood up and mindlessly brushed off her thighs, as if an invisible layer of dust had collected on them. There might have been if dreams collected dust. Her bed had remained pushed up against the wall, under the window, and there was the book, on a table that been had moved by the door when she'd rearranged her furniture years ago. She sat on her bed, now late into the evening and looked out the window, in her memory seeing the bird who would be king who no longer graced the branches with his presence. With a sigh, she took another look around her silly, childish room, the very corners of her lips curving upward in an ever-so-slight grin. It was small, but it was genuine, and it was most certainly a start. She would sleep here tonight and deal with that book in the morning.

# # #

The sense of urgency and incompletion left her unable to sleep and gave her an early start to the morning, just as the dawn graced her window with the faintest hint of the golden sunlight to soon to follow. If she had turned her eyes a moment sooner she might have caught a sudden movement out the window as she stirred, but she hadn't and she didn't. It was for the best, for both of them.

Dreams sometimes tell us things we might otherwise refuse to acknowledge, they command our attention and we have no choice or say in the matter, but to observe. The events of the previous night laid the groundwork for that night's dreams, though she dreamt not of the stuff she did sort through, but of the one thing she hadn't, the one that broke her heart.

A jumble of memories, sensations, sounds, and feelings, that night she relived her most forsaken dream. In her chosen memory of it things happened differently. She had willed herself to forget key events, things which might make it more difficult to cast off that dream. He sang to her from her memory that night and he held her in his arms, a quite long forgotten event. In his eyes, there too, his heart laid bare, plain as day. It's a pity she ever awoke. She missed being the dreamer!

However, she was also still the thinker. Being a (quite grown-up) dreamer didn't mean casting off reason entirely, and the thinker in her couldn't deny the truth of what transpired between them. It simply wasn't sensible to.

Eight years had been enough.