Sarah opened and closed her mouth several times, hoping that she would think of something to say... or that Jareth would disappear in a poof of smoke.  Sadly, neither of those events occurred.  Her mind remained a complete and utter blank, and Jareth still stood there, staring down at her with a perfect blend of arrogance and disdain.

She had a feeling that she might very well have remained there for all eternity had he not apparently decided to take pity on her and speak again.

"My kingdom does not accept repeat offenders, much less people like you.  So what are you doing here?" He cocked an insolent eyebrow and tapped his foot.

Absurdly, Sarah smirked, though the corner of her mouth trembled slightly.  "You realize that the only way you could look more like my first grade teacher is if you put on a dowdy dress, right?"

He merely blinked.  "Answer the question."

"A pair of heavy-duty stockings and some ugly lipstick would help too."

"You are much less amusing than you used to be."

"Ouch.  Really.  Because, of course, I base my self-image on what you think of me, Jareth, despite the fact that I haven't seen you in twelve years."  She glared at him.  "So if you're going to tell me that I'm less amusing than I used to be, I could very well tell you that the stick up your ass is much larger than it used to be."

He chuckled, though the sound carried very little humor in it.  "Heaven protect me from embittered spinsters who seem to think that I owe them something."

"You don't owe me a thing," Sarah replied heatedly.  Setting her chin stubbornly, she stumbled to her feet and looked him squarely in the eye.  I'm as tall as he is, she thought inanely.  He seemed to notice it too, because he cast a disdainful glance at their feet.  "Not a thing," she repeated, trying to keep her voice from cracking, "so whatever you're going to do to me, you might as well get it over with, and it'd be nice if you could do that without calling me an embittered spinster!"

"Do to you?" Jareth asked, a note of amazement in his voice.  He threw his head back and laughed, a deep, rich, sonorous sound.  "My dear young lady," he continued, every word dripping with sarcasm, "I would like nothing better than to pack you off back to where you came from and let your brother finish his quest uninterrupted."

Despite Sarah's bold words, his barbed words were starting to sting.  "Then why don't you?" she exclaimed.  "As fun as it must be to stand here and insult me, I'm sure you have much more valuable things to do with your time, Your Highness."  She sketched a mocking bow and was satisfied to see his lips purse.

"Because I can't," he bit off.  "Once someone is drawn to the Labyrinth, they cannot leave until the quest is completed."

"So I'm stuck sitting here until Toby rescues Anna?"

"Is that the young lady's name?" he asked indifferently.

"You bastard," she whispered.  "You enjoy this, don't you?"

"Beg pardon?"

"You steal people and you enjoy it!" She sighed in irritation.  "At least when you stole Toby, he was young enough that he didn't know what was going on."  For the most part, she mentally amended. 

"Indeed," Jareth said calmly.  "In fact, I got the impression that the little tyke was quite enjoying himself."

"What about Anna? Is she enjoying herself?"

"Is that really my problem?"

"Of course it is," she hissed.  "You're the one behind this whole mess.  You always are."

For the first time, she heard what might have been a tone of frustration in his voice.  "Me, me, me.  You always think it's all me, don't you?"

"Isn't it?"

"Did I make the wish, Sarah? Did I wish that the young lady was in some sort of trouble? For that matter, did I wish that you didn't have to deal with your brat of a baby brother anymore?" He snorted.  "At least your wish was specific.  'Some sort of trouble'? Your brother should consider himself lucky that I chose to interpret that in a fairly harmless way."

"You chose.  You."

"But he wished it."

"Listen, I don't know what exactly you are, you pompous, overbearing..." She took a deep breath.  "...but I do know humans.  We don't make wishes like that...not true, honest wishes.  We say things that we don't mean.  Do you think that I really wanted my baby brother to disappear? I was immature and I just wanted to not have to take care of him.  But had I even the slightest thought that it might actually happen—"

"You would still have made the exact same wish," he interrupted smoothly.

"You're ridiculous."

"Am I? You may not have wanted to get rid of your brother, but you definitely wanted a bit of adventure, and I gave you that, didn't I?"

He was close to striking a nerve, but she wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of admitting it.  After a moment's hesitation, she said, "All that aside, we seem to be standing here arguing like children.  Could we possibly engage in something more productive?"

"Productive?" Jareth shaped the word with his mouth as though it were an utterly foreign term to him.  "Now, where would the fun in that be, hmmmm?"

"Productivity isn't supposed to be fun."  She tucked hair back into her braid and fixed him with a stern stare.  "If it were fun, it wouldn't be productive.  Now the way I see it, we have three options." She held up a slender hand and held up her fingers one at a time.  "You can deliver me to my brother and let me help him.  You can take me home.  You can release Anna, take the three of us back to our world, and end this farce."

"I don't like any of those options," he sniffed haughtily.

"Weren't you the one who told me that life isn't fair?"

"I believe I was merely sick of listening to you whine and moan about how 'it's not fair'.  I pointed out – quite succinctly, if I do say so myself – that there really is no basis for comparison."

"The point is that those are your options."

"I choose none of them."

She inhaled through her nose.  "Tell me, Jareth, is your petulance and childishness a result of any sort of latent sense of inadequacy? Were you, perhaps, not breast-fed?"

Jareth let out an utterly irritated sigh.  "This is why I hate you people.  Always analyzing, always probing, never content to just be."

"'Us people'?"

"Adults," he snapped.  "Normal, well-adjusted, mature, grown-up."

Sarah laughed in amazement.  "I'm twenty-six years old, Jareth.  I couldn't very well stay a child forever.  The years do tend to keep moving along, whether we want them to or not."

"That wasn't what I meant, and you know it quite well."  He put his hands on the wall on either side of her head and leaned in close to her.  Though she was determined to keep up her façade, his piercing green eye seemed to stare directly through her.  "And how long did you resist, Sarah? How long before you threw away your stuffed animals and your dreams?" His voice lowered till it was almost a whisper.  "How long was it before you were letting some oily-faced, muscle-and-hormone-bound teenage boy paw at you in his parents' basement?"

She drew in a shocked breath.  How could he have known?  When her voice finally emerged, it was little more than a hiss.  "You were watching."

A sardonic grin split his face.  "You think I offer every girl in the Labyrinth a chance to be my queen? I was really quite taken with your naiveté, and yes, I kept an eye on you for a while afterwards.  At least, until I was far too disgusted to watch any longer."

Sarah closed her eyes.  Damn me, but you are quite the magnificent bastard, aren't you? Her heart was beginning to feel as though it would beat right through her ribcage.  The effect Jareth had had on her as a girl had been considerable, especially considering that she, in her innocence, hadn't really had a clue what he was offering to her.  And now... Now she was no longer a child.  Nor was she immune to the elegant man only inches in front of her, despite the fact that she did not like him one bit. 

Whenever she had thought of him during the last twelve years, she had always told herself that he had not been serious, that his offer of his heart had simply been the last of the tests she had to face to rescue Toby.  And now, to have him admit that he had truly been prepared to be hers, had she wanted to be his – and not just that, but that he had watched her afterwards... An image flashed in her mind of a white owl sitting outside her window as she slept, unmoving, unchanging.

She swallowed hard.  There was only one way to respond to his admission.  Sarah cleared her throat and asked in her pleasantest voice, "Tell me, Jareth, are you often attracted to girls who are really far too young for you? Now, where I come from, we call that the Lolita Complex.  You shouldn't be ashamed to admit it – a surprising number of men suffer from it.  Seeing as how you reside in a land filled with hideous goblins and you can only see real women from outside their windows, I suppose it's not much of a surprise that you would develop in a...shall we say, wayward fashion—"

Her voice was abruptly cut of by Jareth's shout of frustration. "Talk, talk, talk, that's all you ever do, isn't it? Good god, I can't even describe how grateful I am that you didn't choose to stay here.  I would have long since been driven insane."

"Pompous ass," she muttered.

"It had nothing to do with your age," he said flatly.  "You believed in a way that few believed.  Your body—while very nice, of course—was a bit too underdeveloped to truly tempt me."  Jareth held up a gloved hand to forestall her enraged sputtering.  "What I liked was up here."  He touched her forehead with a single finger.  "I also liked what was here," he indicated her heart, "but were I to point to your chest, you seem to be the high-strung type who would object."  A smug grin lit his face.  "Now, inasmuch as I can't just leave you here to rot—"

"I wouldn't rot in twenty-four hours."

"—Assuming that your brother succeeds, that is.  I can't just leave you here, even though your bleached skeleton would be quite an elegant addition to the landscape, don't you think? No?" She glared impotently.  "I'm afraid that I'll have to take you to my castle."

A bark of laughter escaped her.  "You could have said that to me twelve years ago and saved us both a lot of bother."

"I'll have to lock you into a single part of my castle," he mused.  "Can't have you escaping, can i?"

"Escaping?" she asked sarcastically.  "And where would I go?"

"To help your brother, of course."  He snorted.  "However, it's not even where you go that is the problem.  It is the havoc you could cause that troubles me."

"I...don't understand."

"Let me spell it out in the simplest possible terms, then," he said dryly.  "My realm is a place of unlimited possibilities.  You are so well-ordered and practical that having you run freely wherever you wish could cause..." He rubbed his forehead as though imagining the consequences.  "Catastrophe.  You caused enough damage the last time you were here; unless you feel some sort of sadistic need to destroy more, you will do as I say for once."

"I'm not a sadist."

"Well then."  He grimaced.  "I dislike the whole idea, frankly, but I don't see another way to get around it.  You'll have a nice room or two to...organize, I suppose, while I sort out this whole mess you've managed to make."

"Oh, thank you so much.  Don't do me any favors."

"Promise that you won't get any stupid ideas about leaving those rooms."

"No."  Hell with that.  I don't care about your realm; if it'll help my little brother, I'll do whatever it takes.

"You're quite the annoyance." Jareth cleared his throat, while Sarah decided that she didn't much care for the smirk on his face.  He held up his hand, and counted off on his fingers.  "Here are your options.  Come back to my castle with the binding vow that you will not attempt to escape.  Or stay here, in which case I will forget about you the instant I leave here, and should your brother fail, that would be quite unfortunate for you, wouldn't it?"

"You're lying," she whispered.  "You wouldn't do that.  You watched me after I went home; you wouldn't just let me die."

"I wouldn't have let you die then.  Now, you're an adult and nothing more than a danger.  It is out of respect for the girl you were that I make even this offer.  Take it or leave it."

Sarah swallowed nervously.  Though she didn't want to believe his words, his face was deadly serious.  "Well," she replied hesitantly, her voice hoarse to her ears, "if you put it that way, I suppose that I haven't really much of a choice."

"Then promise that you won't attempt to escape, and we'll be on our way."

She pursed her lips, but finally sighed and said, "Fine.  I promise that I won't attempt to escape.  Happy now?"

"No.  But it'll have to do.  Come on, let's go."

With an elegant flourish, he offered her his arm.  She felt utterly foolish, but after a moment's pause, she slipped her arm through his.  Disliking the intimacy of the gesture, she said roughly, "So are we walking the whole way to your castle, Jareth? Seems ridiculously inefficient, even for you."

He shook his head and muttered, "Inefficient.  Petulance.  Inadequacy.  Bloody grown-up words."

In the next instant, the word faded to white around her.  She could neither see nor hear anything.  All that was real, the only thing she knew for sure, was the comforting feel of someone else's arm wound through hers.  Not knowing which way was up or down, she clung to that single certainty gratefully. 

It was perhaps only a few seconds later that her senses began to return.  She blinked, the sudden sunlight piercing her eyes, and drew in a deep breath that was the sweetest breath she'd ever tasted.

A discreet cough sounded from her right side.  She glanced over, relishing the feel of the strands of hair brushing against her cheeks.  Jareth was standing there, an amused look on his face as he looked down at his arm.

His arm...to which both of her hands were desperately clinging.

Unaccountably ashamed of herself, Sarah immediately let go of him and stumbled several feet away.

"I do believe you left marks on my arm," Jareth remarked casually, brushing a crease from his immaculate sleeve.  "I hope they're not permanent."

"I was just surprised," Sarah muttered. 

He merely kept smirking. 

Determined to ignore him, she glanced around for the first time.  They were in a verdant garden.  Flowers grew everywhere and climbed up the marble walls visible in the distance.  Several feet away, a large round fountain with a statue of a mermaid bubbling water touched her with a light misty spray.

"Where are we?" she breathed.

"In my castle, of course."

Sarah laughed disbelievingly.  "Your castle? Look, I've been in your castle.  I've been all over your entire kingdom and back, and I didn't see any place like this."

"Do you remember what I said about unlimited possibilities?"

"Yes...?"

He shook his head.  "Am I supposed to spell everything out for you? Use your imagination.  You used to have one."

"I'll have you know I—" she began indignantly, but he cut her off with a careless wave of his arm.

"Your rooms are through there.  I have business to attend to.  I'll check back on you in a while.  And don't..." He sighed, as though it were already a lost cause.  "...Please don't do anything stupid."

Before she could begin to fashion a retort, he was gone.

Sarah looked around, only now beginning to really comprehend that this wasn't some longing dream or feverish imagining.  This was real.  She was back in the Labyrinth.

"Where are you, Hoggle? Didymus?" She smiled sadly.  "Didn't you all say 'should you need us'? Well, I need you.  I need all of you..."

She waited, holding her breath, hoping against hope that she would hear Hoggle's gravelly voice saying, "Why didn't you say so?"

Birds sang in the distance and a bee—or at least she hoped it was a bee—buzzed somewhere nearby, but no matter how long she waited, there was no sound, and she had to accept that she really was truly and completely alone in this strange room, in this strange land where she no longer belonged.

"Toby?" she whispered.  "Toby, please hurry..."