Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters, situations, ideas, etc., of Labyrinth, and I am making no financial gain off this fic.
Notes: This piece is written for the 30 Kisses challenge at livejournal and is in response to theme #19: red.
fever
Red is the color of roses and the taste of wine, like illness hot beneath the skin, burning in the blood. When she is sticky with fever she imagines her walls painted a red so deep as to be a creature of its own accord and only after does her (step)mother tell her how she sang in a high light voice like a flute or a child to the walls: Hello / How are you / I am dying / How are you?
Perhaps it is the fever bleeding through her skin that brings him to her side when she is mouthing hoarsely in the night for water; perhaps it is the fever driving her brain into manic dream images firing one after the other in a quick succession of terror fear hope love need hate red. Regardless he steps from the red of her walls.
"Sarah. How unwell you look."
Hello, she says, How are you. My throat hurts. The walls are red. My throat hurts.
"I imagine it does." (He turns a crystal around his fingers, winking and bright in the moonlight.) "I wonder what I should do - turn the other cheek, walk the other way. Save my fight for another day. Would you like me to help?"
You aren't real.
"I never was."
Her eyes close and she breathes, tired and heavy with sweat and fever. What do you want?
"Many things," he says, and leaning over her he rubs his thumb down her throat and pops the crystal into her mouth where it shatters and slides like wine into her heart.
She wakes to sunlight spilling across white walls patterned with roses: redpinkyellowdusk and long graceful green stems painted into the white. Sarah rolls her tongue in her mouth at the remembered texture of glass and thinks with slow-moving clarity: I am not dead.
