DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS.

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Sarah lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. It was long into the night, almost morning, actually. She felt numb. She wasn't sure that she could feel anything anymore. From sadness to rage, to depression to fury--she had been over all of them.

Ever since she had returned from the Labyrinth, there had been a cycle--a forgetting normality, an obsession bordering on madness, then a knowing satisfaction that turned into normality once again. She had just been given all the answers she could ever ask for. So now it was time to forget it all until confronted with it again.

But she couldn't simply put it to the side this time. She couldn't even stop thinking about it. So Sarah just stopped thinking completely. For two days, she took sleeping pills and refused to get out of bed at all. Nice a vacation as that was from the real world and the fantasy world, Sarah realized that it couldn't last forever.

So she got up, she went to school. She presented nothing different when around others. But in her mind, the thoughts continued to spin.

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Everything that had been done had been done for her. And as wonderful as that sounded on the surface, there was something horribly disturbing lying just beneath it. He had deliberately set out to bewitch her away from everything she had known. From the very beginning, from before she even knew he existed, he had planned to lure her away from this world.

And it had worked.

There was very little true joy that Sarah could find in this world. Especially since she knew for certain that there was more. Though the books and the tales had long ago had her. Of course, she might have grown out of it someday. But then he had arrived, and shown her that every bit of it could be real, if she would only say yes. Eventually, how could she not?

But he had never given her a chance to find happiness here. Apparently, ever since the day Jareth had laid eyes on her, he had decided that she would be it. While there was something incredibly flattering in the fact that she had somehow attracted this...this being (Sarah abruptly realized that she didn't know what Jareth even was, but she decided that that was a problem for a different day), there was something slightly unsettling on having him so fixated on her.

He had specifically done everything he could to make her want what he could give her. He had done it all to make her never forget it, make her long for return more than anything else. Manipulation. Sarah wanted to hate him for it.

The problem was, she was fairly certain that she was in love with him--fairly certain, because she had never been in love before.

But he had captivated her in a terrifying way every time that she had seen him in the Labyrinth. After that, she had never forgotten him. Later, when she realized the words that he had said, she became obsessed with finding him again. Then she had accepted his offer of her dreams, a part of her mind knowing full well that that entailed accepting him as well. She hardly knew him, but at the same time it felt as if she had already spent forever with him. And even though she wasn't completely sure of the finer points of what she had accepted, Sarah knew that she would rather spend the rest of her life with him than without him. Besides, a little voice inside her head said, how can you not feel something for someone who's willing to give you anything, everything?

But could she live the rest of her life with him now, knowing what he had done? She might have been perfectly happy with a normal life, but he had never given her the chance to live it without interference.

What if she had never met him? What would have happened to her if he hadn't set out to enchant her away? But there were no answers to the 'what ifs.'

She might have been normal, being ignorantly happy in her safe, static little world.

Or, she might have been just as miserable at this point in her life, except with no way out.

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Sarah's life wasn't exactly miserable; it just wasn't wonderful. She had graduated from college with a degree in literature. While she enjoyed being in plays, she soon found out that she didn't have what it took to be a real actress. Though it didn't bother Sarah as much as she thought that it would. She ended up working in a library, which wasn't a bad job in and of itself, it just wasn't very exciting. She still lived in the same small apartment.

Sarah didn't have many friends. To put it more precisely, she had no friends, only acquaintances from classes or work that she saw around town. Not that everyone knew that she didn't have friends, everyone she knew just assumed that she had other friends. Sarah wasn't sure how it had really happened, it just seemed that she had little in common with the people that she met. But then, she felt that no one could really know the real her, for in doing so they would have to believe the unbelievable.

She still had her family, of course, but Toby was her only bright spot. Her stepmother was her stepmother, a woman that would never be close to her, let alone understand her. Her father was becoming more distant and ever more involved in his work, and he rarely had time for anything but the barest small talk. Sarah also privately suspected that they were having marital difficulties.

There wasn't anyone that she could relate to, really talk to.

It wasn't really how she pictured her life at this point. She was out of school, working, on her own--it was supposed to be fun and glamorous, or something by now, wasn't it? What annoyed Sarah the most was that everyone around her seemed to think that this was It. This was all there was to life. While somewhat true, no one else seemed to have any dreams beyond going on vacation next month, not even any dreams about marrying a millionaire and living in some upscale penthouse with a butler, cook, and four maids.

So it was a complete and utter impossibility that any of them would understand or entertain her fantastical dreams. No one here could ever understand her.

The only person in the world who understood her wasn't even of this world.