Author's Note: The characters of Jareth, Sarah, Toby, Hoggle, Ludo, Didymus, etc. belong to the wonderful Jim Henson company, and I claim no rights to them. The goblins are another story, but any resemblance to any real goblins, living or (while improbable) dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional... except for Shove, because he wouldn't leave me alone until I put him in the story.
He was furious, she could see that much. There was a slight pinch to his nose, a tautness around his winged eyebrows, a
slightly deeper etching of the lines around his mouth. He had gone very, very still; even his hair and clothing was still. She felt she could have walked up to him and pushed against him and found him no more yielding than a statue.

There was something else, though, something about him that she hadn't noticed before and had no name for now. He seemed more there than anything else in the room. More real, somehow, as though the sofa and the faded carpet, the window blinds and the wilting fern on the shelf behind him were not quite as substantial as he was. It was as if he'd been burned into the fabric of reality, and he shone brighter, more solid, crisper, than everything else. She glanced away from him, disconcerted by this feeling that her reality might not be able to cope with his, and noticed from the corner of her eye, something else that burned the way he did.

It was a book, wedged among many others on her overflowing bookshelves. She'd picked it up a few times, always meaning to read it, but never quite getting around to it. Now the edges of it seemed harder and crisper than those books around it. The color of it was more vibrant, as if someone had turned up the saturation on just that particular book out of many, or maybe washed out the rest of them with a tinge of gray. It almost glittered, the way he did, she realized, and her eyes were drawn back to him once again.

She didn't know if he was aware of what Shove had shown her, she rather suspected that he didn't, because beneath the anger was suspicion and a certain wariness she'd never noticed in him before. He looked like a man who was facing a gun, but was unsure if it was loaded. Somehow, she hated seeing him look at her like that, as if she were capable of hurting him.

He was bigger than she, stronger than her by far, more powerful, a King, and a Lord in his own right. He commanded legions of goblins and other fae creatures, and the vastness of the Labyrinth. He was more than mortal, more than human, more than just a man, and yet... yet he stared at her as if she were the sharpest of swords, the deadliest of poisons. She hated it.

"I never meant to hurt you," she said, because she didn't know what else to say, and anything, anything had to be better than seeing him stare at her like that. His mismatched eyes narrowed slightly, almost imperceptibly, but she noticed. Somehow, she was better able to read him now, since Shove had opened her eyes. She did not know what gift he'd given her exactly, but right now it was making it easier to follow the Goblin King's mercurial facial expressions, and for that she was grateful.

"Oh, you didn't?" he said, lightly, but she heard the slight sarcasm behind the words, the same words he had spoken nearly ten years before when she'd denied another intent. But she was older now, a little wiser, perhaps, and she knew him better, she thought.

"I didn't," she said, "but I had to have my brother back."

"You were only worried about your own precious skin," he said, his voice flat and harsh. "Worried about what would happen when your father and Karen came home."

"Is that what you think?" she said, tilting her head to study him better. "I'd read the book. I knew that if you took him, and I did nothing, we'd just forget about him. It would have been as if he'd never existed. By the time my parents got home, they wouldn't have remembered him, and I'd have never gotten in trouble. Why would I be worried about it, if I knew that's how it would end?"

"You wanted to be the heroine in your own adventure. You wanted to cower before me. You wanted to defeat me, and leave my world in ruins."

"Well, except for the last bit, maybe," she admitted. "A little. But I also wanted my brother back. I didn't know it then, but I loved him."

"Better late than never, I suppose," he drawled, but she read the line of pain behind his words.

"Yes," she said. He wanted to ask her what Shove had shown her. She could see it in the way he held his head stiffly, the way his gloved hands clenched, as if to hold himself in check. But she could also see that he wouldn't. He was too proud to ask her. Too afraid?

She shook her head, unwilling to believe what her eyes were telling her. Should she tell him the truth? Tell him what she'd seen? Or should she give him the chance to tell her his past himself? Torn, she turned away and went to the bookshelf, drawn towards the book like a moth to a flame. She ran a finger over the binding, and felt the cold cool leather of the spine. She pulled it out and it fell open to a page with a full color illustration of the fae court, so similar to the one she'd just seen in her minds eye that she gave a little gasp. Standing before the court, their backs to the artist, were a tall man and woman, one light, one dark, with a young man between them, his hair blonde and wild. The words on the opposite page were written in a strange, spidery hand, and not printed at all.

"Your family," she murmured, not realizing she'd spoken aloud. The book was suddenly snatched from her hands, and she looked up to find him glaring at it as if it were a venomous snake. The cover, she realized now, was plain with gold lettering: A Brief Hiftory of the Labyrinthe and the Goblinf: bye Mogg, Goblin Librarian. She'd never seen it's like before, and had never really noticed the title when she'd picked it up previously. What was going on?

"How do you know this?" he said, thrusting the book at her, his eyes flashing angrily. "How did this come to be here?"

"I—I don't know..." she said, honestly. "I saw them, in my dream, I didn't..."

"Of course you didn't," he mocked. "You never do." He stepped toward her until she was pressed between the bookshelves and his chest. He was furious. She could feel the anger radiating off of him, filling the room, putting out the light until all she could see was the glimmer of his eyes and the faintest halo of his hair. She had a sudden memory, of goblins screaming, and someone scurrying across the floor, and her head ached all of a sudden, she tasted wine on her tongue.

"What did he show you?" he growled, his hands were planted on either side of her, and she felt trapped, but not scared. Somehow she knew he would not physically harm her. Everything was dancing around in her mind though, the odd memory, the things she had seen, the way he seemed more real to her than the sharp edges of the shelf pressing into her shoulder blades—she was confused, disoriented, and the scent of him was setting her hormones off again.

She shook her head, to clear it, "I... I don't know..."

"Sarah, I command you to tell me," he said, and the sound of her name broke through the confusion.

"You can't command me," she said, her own anger flaring. "I'm not yours to command."

He flinched back, his eyes wary. "What did he show you?" he said again, and not knowing what else to say, and not wanting to lie, she told him the truth.

"He showed me the past! Your past!"

The Goblin King's eyes tightened, and he went very still. When he spoke it was a bare whisper, hissed harshly between his teeth: "That... was none... of your... concern..."

And then he simply wasn't there anymore. The room felt bereft, as though its soul had been torn from it, and she fell to her knees, not knowing until she put her hand over her mouth, and it came away wet, that she was crying.

The nights that passed after that were dreamless, and the days were gray and bland. The goblins seemed subdued, and they gathered around her, taking pains not to make too much noise, or to cause any mischief. Shove came creeping back the next day, looking sad, but pleased with himself, and he slept curled up on her pillow, holding a lock of her hair, as if afraid she might be lonely.

She wasn't, she kept telling herself. Why should she be? He hated her, he always had, the chemistry between them was nothing more than a game, or a result of the tension between them.

But she knew it was a lie. She couldn't even lie to herself anymore, not with Shove's gift.

He had given her the ability to see the truth.

It made conversations with others awkward sometimes, because she always knew when they were lying. They dimmed a bit, every time they lied. Like a string of Christmas lights, fading out only to come back and burn as brightly as before.

The thing was, she discovered, humans lied all the time. They lied to each other. They lied to themselves. They lied about big things and little things, important and unimportant. It was if they were lying just to stay in practice. Or like it was as instinctual as breathing.

If someone told her to "have a nice day" they dimmed a bit, if they didn't mean it. When the teacher who she shared a lunch table with told her that her husband was going out of town for the weekend, Sarah saw the lie written in every line of her face, in the way she held her head, in the way she pressed a little too hard with her pencil, as she filled in the crossword puzzle, and it came to her that the husband had run off with his secretary like an old cliché. When one of her students told her that he was always late to class because the other teacher didn't release them on time, he dimmed, and she suddenly knew that he was late because he was smoking in the boys' room during passing periods.

It got to the place where she avoided peoples' eyes and their words equally, because you can lie with your face only, schooling it into a mask that smiles when it wants to frown, and frowns when it wants to smile.

The only creatures she found that did not lie to her were small children, sometimes, and goblins. Goblins were amazingly honest. They would tell you when they had done something wrong, or would say what was on their minds without wondering how it would affect you. And they were more real seeming than the rest of the world, brighter, as if the human world were all a lie, and the only truth it in it was the goblins that only she and Toby could see.

So she knew, when she told herself that it didn't matter, that it did. When she thought that she wasn't lonely, she was. When she said she didn't care if she ever saw him again, her heart broke a little more each time, because she knew it was a lie, and that if she never saw him again, her life would be dull and gray and empty, and it would stretch on like the Endless Corridor, with no way to escape.

AN: Sorry, this is short. But there's more coming, I swear. This was a hard chapter to write, after coming back. It was in such an awkward place and yet two very big things had to occur before anything else could. I'd originally planned for this story to only have 13 chapters (seemed fitting), but I'm not sure that it ends where I thought it ended before. So you may be getting more. Or not. We'll see. Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed so far. You all are far too kind to my writing abilities.

(I've brought you a gift, something from a friend of mine: deviate 26886821 mercuralis)

Enjoy, my little goblins :)