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. The lyrics included in this chapter are from the song "Within You" as written by David Bowie.
The following day, she shuffled through her classes, barely paying attention to what she was saying. Not that the students were listening anyway. She felt like a ghost, and it was only the giant mug of coffee she kept refilling that kept her from falling asleep at her desk.
Around noon she was called to the office, and shown in to see the principal. He was a big man, balding, with a pouting lower lip that the kids made fun of often, calling him "baby face." He sat with his hand steepled above her personal file.
"Sarah," he said, as she sat down, "is everything alright?"
She heard the faint hint of the lie behind his words, but chose to answer honestly anyway.
"Not, really," she said. "I'm not sleeping well."
"You should try some chamomile tea before bed, always knocks me right out." She tried not to laugh. "Anyway, I'm concerned about you, Sarah. Your students are out of control and you look like the walking dead. There's a rumor going around that you're sicker than you're letting on."
"No," she said, "I'm fine. I'm just tired, is all."
"Well, I'm going to make sure you get some rest. We can call in a substitute for a week or two. Take a vacation. See a doctor. Get some sleep. I can't have you scaring the students into thinking you're going to keel over at any moment. Understand?"
She nodded. She understood more than he knew. His concern was honest, although she felt a half-truth in all of it, too. He, like many others, didn't really care about her. She was expendable. She taught English, and there were always English teachers. If she'd taught math or science, or been a coach, he'd be at church praying for her but English teachers were a dime a dozen. He didn't care if she came back from her vacation or not, just so long as she didn't look like death when she did.
He handed her some paperwork to fill out, and told her to go ahead and leave directly after her last class. She didn't have the heart to argue.
The rest of the day Hoggle's words continued to twirl through her brain. She was descended from royalty? Somehow that didn't seem as momentous as learning that what she'd conquered, in the end, had not just been the Labyrinth, but the Goblin King's heart as well. Did he love her, she wondered.
Did she love him?
He was mercurial, and cold. He was often arrogant and manipulative. How much of that was an act, or a mask, to keep his true feelings hidden? She couldn't tell until she talked to him again. And since he was angry, and the dreams had stopped, that wasn't likely to be soon.
Dreams, he'd said, are more than true. Especially our dreams. Although I confess, our dreams have become so hopelessly entangled that I know longer know which of us is dreaming them.
She heard nothing but truth in the remembered words, and she thought: if that's true, then I'm sharing his dreams as much as he's sharing mine. She suspected that it had been going on for so long, the dreams, that they were hopelessly entwined. But he had shut her out, now, and it made her angry. In dreams she'd felt closer to him than ever. There had been no anger between them, no enmity. They'd been... friends.
It was unfair of him to be angry with her for something Shove had shown her. Besides, it wasn't as if he hadn't been watching her since she was a child. He probably knew more about her than anyone else. It wasn't fair.
But then, that's how it was.
The words swirled through her mind: You have no power over me.
There was a lie there, but it was complicated, and she couldn't unravel it. What she did get, however, was a small truth. He could not shut her out, not completely. They were bound together, by what happened, and he could no more shut her from his life than she could shut him from hers.
It was with this knowledge that she went to bed that night, and with more determination than she'd felt in years, that she went to sleep, and dreamed.
At first there was no light, and she groped around desperately, searching for the wall. It was closer than she thought, and she scraped her knuckles against the rough surface when her hand came in contact. She knew, by the smell of the air, that she was back in the oubliette. He was trying to forget her again, but she would not let him.
Wincing at the pain in her hand, she felt along the wall, shuffling her feet, looking for something but not knowing what it was until she found it. Her foot bumped against the wood first, and kneeling down, she felt the rough door shape lying on the floor. She picked it up and placed it against a niche in the wall, and then felt around for the latch, concentrating on him the whole time. She heard the lock turn, although she'd done nothing, and she swung the door open to find a stairwell going up with a dim light filtering down through the dust filled air. It was just enough to guide her, so she took a step, and then another.
The stairs seemed to go up forever, but she would not let them beat her. As she climbed she thought of everything he'd ever said to her. She thought of the owl perched in the tree the day her mother had been buried. She thought of the way he felt when he pressed her against the wall, and the way he tasted when he had claimed her mouth. She remembered Brad, and the night he'd tried to rape her, and the glimmer of Jareth's eyes in the darkness as he'd saved her. She thought of his hands, his slender but strong, gloved hands, and the way they felt in her hair, so gentle. She heard his frustration with her, and knew it for desire. She heard his anger, and knew it was directed at himself. In the near darkness, she opened her eyes and saw the truth, that he loved her, and that she, in spite of it all, loved him, and the truth gave her feet wings so that she nearly flew up the last few stairs and into the heart of the Labyrinth.
She looked down at her blue jeans, her white poets shirt and vest, her moccasins. She was fifteen again, and suddenly she couldn't remember why she was here, in this place with no up or down or sideways. All she knew was she had to find something, something important, someone important. Someone she loved was in this place and she had to find him.
She climbed. Up and down, vertigo disorienting her when she came to a place where the stairs came sideways out of the wall. She paused at the lip of a ledge, and looked over it at the depths of insane architecture. This was impossible!
And then he was there, on the other side of the floor she stood on, staring up at her. Her heart skipped a beat.
How you've turned my world you precious thing...
His world? There was something she needed to remember. But she could focus on nothing but him as he ran up an upside down staircase. She spun, searching, hearing his booted steps behind her.
You starve and near exhaust me...
Something to do with her dreams... what was it again? Her hormones were going haywire, and she could almost feel his lips on hers, like before... but wait, when had he ever kissed her before? She was fifteen. She'd never been kissed, unless you counted that one time, in second grade when Tommy Little had cornered her on the playground and kissed her and gave her his pet frog. But yet she could feel the echo of the Goblin King's lips on hers, feel the softness of his hair like a ghost on her fingertips.
Everything I've done I've done for you...
For her? But he'd only been cruel and horrible. He'd almost killed her with those cleaners! Not to mention the oubliette. The oubliette... a memory tried to get her attention but it slipped away as she ran up a flight of stairs, desperate to keep him in view. Then he was rounding a corner, and walking past her... no, through her. He turned, his face twisted with cruelty (no hurt, her brain said).
I move the stars for no one...
But he'd moved them for her, hadn't he? Why? What couldn't she remember? Her body felt strange to her, like it didn't quite fit. She was gawky and awkward. He disappeared again, stepping into space, defying gravity as he transferred from one up to another. He was comfortable here in a way she was not. It was his home... his heart...
It came trickling back. His heart...
You've run so long, you've run so far...
He came around again, stepping onto her side of the ledge, approaching her warily. He held up a crystal, juggling it smoothly for a moment, before suddenly hurling it into space. She followed its arc, heard the sound of it as it impossibly bounced up a flight of stairs, and was caught in the hand of a small baby boy wearing a red and white playsuit.
"Toby!" she cried, but in the instant she said his name, she heard the lie.
It wasn't Toby. It was a dream. Toby was safe, at home, ten years old now, with goblins for friends. The baby was an illusion, a distraction, a temptation.
But that wasn't why she was here. She turned back, looking for the Goblin King, only to find him gone. She searched around wildly, fighting vertigo as she looked at the walls and stairs that seemed to go on impossibly. She found him, above her, and standing sideways, and she immediately set off towards him, climbing up and down stairs, trying to find the one that would lead her to him.
He was only watching her now, not coming toward her, but vanishing every time she got too close and reappearing further away.
She had a stitch in her side, and her legs burned from all the climbing, but she would not give up now. She had to reach him, find him, tell him the truth.
She paused, reorienting herself, and found herself standing on a ledge. Below her, seated next to a window, was the illusion of her baby brother. He glanced up at her, and again she felt how easy it would be to jump, to take hold of the baby and go home, to her normal, dull, gray life. She backed away and looked up. He stood on the ledge above her, all she had to do was climb the stairs.
She went up. As she did, the stairs crumbled away behind her, falling into space, as did the rest of the room, until she stood on the only thing that was left in the world, a small crumbled ledge, floating in a hazy pink sky.
All around her, time stood still. And as he came out of the shadows, she saw that he was not wearing white, as she had expected. Instead he wore a black shirt, gaping open to his waist, beneath a tight black leather vest he'd left unfastened. His black breeches hugged his legs, and with the gloves and the boots he was everything predatory and dangerous. He came toward her, wary.
"Sarah," he said, but he did not seem to know what else to say. So she took a step forward, feeling her body behave as usual. She was not fifteen, she was twenty-five. She was a woman. She knew, finally, what she wanted.
"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered," she began, and his eyes hardened. "I have fought my way here, to the castle beyond the Goblin City." Slowly he backed away from her, though his eyes never left hers. They were locked together again, and he did not know how to play the game this way. "For my will is as strong as yours," she continued, " and my kingdom as great..."
"Stop," he said, holding out his hand, and in his eyes she saw all the pain and loneliness that he'd endured in his long, long life.
"I have come to give you the heart that you have stolen," she said, softly, taking the hand he'd held out, and pressing it to her breast.
And then she woke up, and it was daylight, and the phone was ringing by the bed, and her knuckles were bleeding.
AN: Well, would you look at that! Another chapter! I have another one edging around the corners of my brain... but this one has been in the works now from the beginning, so I'm glad you're finally able to see it. Shove says "Hi!" and "Please review!"