A/N: Thanks again to my reviewers - hopefully I will be able to keep the story mysterious and interesting!

Chapter 10: Jareth

Jareth flung himself into an armchair and rested his feet on the side of the bed, exhausted. His whole body felt stiff and his bones ached, as if he had spent the day running a marathon. Sinking deeper into the chair, he closed his eyes and sipped at a tumbler of brandy, Taking in the pleasant burning sensation that coursed through his body and relaxed his muscles. The real source of his ache and exhaustion lay in the bed next to the chair, breathing deep and steady as if she were asleep. For three long hours he had worked on the disruption in Tabitha's heart, attempting to break the icy blackness that had a grip on her flesh, only to find that the curse was all but impenetrable.

He might have been able to break it if he gathered all of his strength and blasted it away, but such an action would have annihilated Tabitha along with the curse, and that seemed like overkill. Instead he was forced to approach the situation with the delicacy of a surgeon, poking and prying gently at the curse in hopes of finding a weak spot to chip away at. But each time he poked at the darkness he was rewarded with a surge of sizzling pain that shot through his entire body, leaving him incapacitated for increasingly longer periods of time. Refusing to be defeated, he kept working at it. It was only when he wound up on the floor, wracked in spasms of pain for several minutes, that he thought perhaps he should take a break.

He leaned forward in his chair and studied her face, as white and smooth as marble in the twilight. Only her lips held any color, and they were a violent shade of red, as if she were suffering from a fever. Her face was framed with dark blonde hair that lay tangled on the pillow, damp from sweat. This was the first time Jareth had gotten a close look at her since her first visit to the labyrinth, and he couldn't help but compare the two versions of her in his mind's eyes.

Her features were a little strong for a woman, her forehead was a high and a bit broad, her nose was very straight, and her mouth was slightly too wide, but all of these things seemed to work together well enough. At the very least, they suited Tabitha. As a child she had seemed disproportionate to him, but apparently she had grown into her face. She was no great beauty, but there was something pleasing about her looks now, something earthy and subtle that he admitted was attractive.

With a sigh, he sat back in his chair and drained the rest of the brandy in the tumbler. What had happened to him? In the months since Sarah's rejection he had become unrecognizable to himself; a wild thing with bitter anger bubbling just below the surface like a volcano ready to erupt. How had he gotten this way?

It had been bad in the beginning. Jareth had closed himself away from the world for weeks, avoiding even the sight of the labyrinth, burying himself in sleep and darkness. He felt like he had been swallowed by the emptiness he had been left with, and didn't know how to get out.

But that state could not last forever, and eventually he began to wake up to a growing dissatisfaction and bitterness that made him edgy and restless. He couldn't stay locked away, but the outside world seemed hard, cold, and cruel to him, like a master who enjoyed kicking his dog. He hated it, rebelled against it, and sank even deeper into the dark, unhappy mire inside of his head.

His temper became so rough and mean that his own subjects stayed as far away from him as possible. Despite emerging from his rooms he often found himself completely alone, and even when he wasn't he was plagued by cowering subjects who didn't have it in them to fight back. His temper grew more fierce, like a hurricane with nothing to break against. Occasionally he would pause, overwhelmed by depression and loneliness, only to swallow it with anger again and move on. It was easier to burn with anger. When he was angry he didn't have to face the pain.

All the same he became tired of being alone. In a stroke of brilliance he decided to kill two birds with one stone - he would summon Tabitha. Tabitha would not only be company, she was also not likely to cower before him like his goblin subjects. Yes, he had thought, she was far too stubborn to know her place. She had been gone so long she had probably forgotten about her debt to him, and hadn't even done the work she was ordered to do. It was time she was reminded of where she belonged.

Looking back on it now, he couldn't deny that he had been looking for someone to take out his pent-up rage on. He told himself that she was disrespecting him, turning her back on him, and that was why he needed to deal with her, when in reality she had nothing to do with it. And when she didn't respond to the summons, it became the perfect excuse to blow his top about everything.

Tabitha had been lucky that she arrived when the worst was over, or things might have gone considerably worse for her. Jareth thought about that with an uncomfortable stir of guilt in the pit of his stomach. With a heart condition like that, he might have -. No he wasn't going to think about that. There was no point in combing over what might have been. Tabitha was sick, but she should be fine for awhile. The curse didn't appear to be actively killing her, it was more of a handicap than anything else. She wasn't in danger of death.

Jareth closed his eyes and felt a pleasant weariness creep over him. It had been a long time since he had worked so hard at something, and it felt nice to be tired for a good reason. Despite the dark flutter of fear in his gut over Tabitha's health, he was glad he had something to distract him from his problems for awhile. He was tired of demanding something from life that it simply would not give, and he found that he welcomed a change of pace. With a sigh, he relaxed into the soft cushions of the armchair and drifted into sleep.