It's All Been Done Chapter 1: The way forward, a labyrinth fanfic

It is I, Jjah-Jjah! And I know, I know. I'm not supposed to be working on crap other than what I've already started. But I actually wrote this a long while ago, so ha! No actual working being done. Truth is, I've been feeling rather depressed lately and being as posting things and getting reviews always makes me happy, I thought I'd go ahead and post this to make myself feel better. It should inspire me to write too, being as the whole being sad and whatnot all the time is cutting down on creativity.

I've never posted anything in this category before… Behold me, Labyrinth people! I am Jjah-Jjah! Yo… In any case, I've written other Labyrinth fiction before, and I have to say this is my worst… It's just kind of stereotypical, but luckily I'm aware of it. Hence the title, after all. Anyway. Review and make me feel better.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Labyrinth. Can you believe it? I know it's a shocker…

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It's All Been Done

Chapter One: The way forward…

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"You remind me of the babe…"

"What babe?"

"The babe with the power!"

"What power?"

"The power of voodoo!"

"Who do?"

"You do."

"Do what?"

"Remind me of the babe!"

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Sarah jerked out of sleep so quickly that for a moment she forgot to breathe.

She shook her head and smiled weakly. Always, always, when she slept she heard them singing. The Labyrinth was singing to her. He was singing to her. She never dreamed of the events that happened, or the people she met, her friends, her enemies, or the dangers she faced… No. The only thing that followed her was imageless song.

Perhaps that was all for the better. During her time in the Underground she had never really noticed the music, much less how beautiful it was. More than anything it was this that kept the memory of the Labyrinth from fading from her mind. Always, whatever she did, the songs were stuck in her head. She even hummed them in the shower…

She yawned. She wasn't tired enough to go back to sleep. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was only an hour before when she was going to have to get up anyway. Might as well get up and putter around. She wearily dragged herself out of bed and headed for the kitchen.

The nineteen year old punched the coffee maker into submission and then pulled her body up to sit on the cold countertop, listening as the familiar rhythmic clicking filled the air.

It had been years since she had challenged the Labyrinth. She liked to think that she was at the very least older, if not a bit wiser. Over the dullness laced years she had slowly been forced to change. Some of it was for the best. She no longer saw the world in the featureless extremes of black and white. Now she saw the stark reality of the gray and she wished that seeing gray had been a talent she was born with. It was such a pity that it was something that had to be learned. Really. Now if she had been able to see gray in the Labyrinth then who knows what could have happened?

But then again, would she have even gotten to see the Labyrinth? If she had been able to see the world as something other than good and bad, virtue and evil, would she have lumped Toby into the role of wicked step-sibling and wished him away in the first place?

It made her brain itch. "Killer, you don't think you could climb into my skull and scratch my brain for me, could you?" Killer twitched his little feelers at her and made no other reply.

Killer was Sarah's only companion in a sea of animosity. He was a hermit crab whom she had won in a card game from one of the girls on her hall when she'd still lived in the dorms. Lucky for him, considering that the drunken twit was talking about flushing the poor little dude down the toilet because she didn't want him. Hell, what was the point of getting a pet if you didn't want it? When Sarah had gotten him, he had been horribly timid because of being dropped so much, with no water, moldy sand, and he had been named after an offensive body part.

She had renamed him Killer, because he had scared the holy crap out of all the other girly-girls at the card game. Who knew that hermit crabs were so fear inspiring? She sure as hell hadn't, but then again running the Labyrinth tended to do that to people. Sarah sighed and patted the side of his cage where it sat at the end of the counter. She certainly preferred living alone with him to the dorm, a.k.a screaming meemie central, or at home with her darling stepmother hovering in the distance like the bubonic plague.

She had been going to the local university for roughly about a year now. She was majoring in drama, and minoring in music, inspired by the soundtrack that played through her head nightly. It hadn't taken a whole lot for her to decide that dorm life was not to be in her repertoire. Between hermit crab abuse, screaming drunken Tri-Delts banging on her door at four in the morning, the mildew smell coming from the air conditioner, the larvae invasion, and the cafeteria food, she had come close to total mental breakdown. When the mold entrenched between the bathroom tiles began to resemble that algae with the little eyeballs that had been on the walls of the Labyrinth, she packed up her things and left.

Her stepmother had thrown a hissy fit, going into a big spiel about how if she didn't stay in the dorm while she went to college she'd be ruined for life or some such nonsense. Hell, it wasn't as if she were quitting school! She had realized the woman's ire when she found out that her room was under renovation to house an indoor hot tub. Sheesh… The least the witch could have done was be honest… Things probably would have gone downhill for good, if fickle fate hadn't waltzed into the room in the form of a letter from her estranged starlet mother.

The famous Broadway star had twittered on for several pages before stating that she had just remembered that she had forgotten to acknowledge her only daughter's high school graduation, and being as Sarah's birthday was also coming up, she had sent along a gift. That gift had been a gold-embossed check for a tidy sum.

So tidy, in fact, that she had been able to pay off all her college loans, her tuition for the next few years, (Though admittedly the tuition was not that much; it was a crummy school.), and buy a little house out in country, close enough to get to school on time, and far enough away enough to keep her parents from "dropping by" to use her as a free babysitter.

She knew she loved her mother for a reason.

She had a little bit left over as well, enough to keep the bills paid, and the refrigerator filled while she bolstered her bank account with money she got being a promotional telemarketer for school. 'Yes, we have several restaurants within walking distance, and the neighborhood has a very low crime rate! And the cafeteria food is swell!' Yup. It swelled alright, like road kill on the highway in the summer…

And it was thus that she came to be financially independent, and all was well with world.

Sort of.

The college years were stereotypically supposed to be the best years of her life. But something…was missing… Not quite right… She wasn't quite sure just how to explain it. She should have been happy, at the very least content, but she just wasn't. She felt kind of hollow. There was always a kind of sick feeling in her throat, a rock rolling around in the pit of her stomach. She just felt so melancholy, bored, kind of sad, listless… Generally like crap, though there was nothing physically wrong with her. (A doctor's appointment had confirmed that.) The only time she wasn't unhappy was when she was sleeping. She always looked forward to her song-drenched dreams. They were a bit disturbing, yes, but she tried not to think about it. One shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, after all.

The coffee maker clicked to a halt, and Sarah plopped off the counter, where she proceeded to pour herself a cup of the highly toxic brew, and systematically corrupt it by lacing it with enough milk and sugar to make it extremely syrupy. She downed it in two gulps and made herself another. The coffee smell was delicious as it permeated the kitchen. It was as if it was meant to be savored like a draught. Killer crawled underneath his piece of driftwood and disappeared, signaling the end of his nocturnal rule of the house. Back in the bedroom, the alarm clock sounded off like clarions of the approaching apocalypse.

Time to seize the day…

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"Seize the day, my ass…" Sarah mumbled, banging her head against her car's steering wheel. It had just been one of those days where you would rather shave your head and get ripped in half by a tiger shark with antisocial personality disorder than keep on truckin'. It was such an experience when the people you were paid to call in a happy and chipper voice kept on making guesses about your cup size. She would kill them all with chopsticks… Indeed she would. No one would be safe.

At least class hadn't been so bad, considering. The professors had pretty much given up on all hope of getting anybody to learn, because it was Friday. More importantly, it was the Friday before the first day of spring break.

The entire campus was a mass of whooping, tire-screeching idiots off to Cancun for a week of booze, beaches, roofies, and general stupidity. Maybe the tiger shark would eat them… Nah. If that happened then there would be spaces open for even more nutty weirdoes. Besides, they might make the shark sick. The important thing was that Sarah had one glorious week ahead of her free of flack. She was looking forward to sleeping profusely and generally being a lazy ass.

Yet there was one more duty to perform. The dreaded obligatory parental visit… Being as she, the dullard known as Sarah Williams, was not going anywhere for spring break she had no excuse not to go visit her parents. Yipee.

And so it was thus that she found herself in the driveway of her former household, peering at the door and wondering if she could get away with saying that she had been there, thought that no one was home, and left. All hopes of this kind were shattered when the front door opened and a precocious, gap-toothed bundle of five year old spilled out and began running towards her.

"Sarah's here, Sarah's here!" Toby yelled, in his little angelic voice. Sarah braced herself, plastered on the obligatory smile, and got out of the car.

"Hey, munchkin. What's up?"

She hugged her little brother, and listened attentively to his account of his day at school. She was utterly amazed that the boy lived with the parents he did and was somehow still so cute and sweet. You would think that with Karen as a mother his delicate little psyche would wither and die under the oppression. Maybe he was untouched by his mother's overwhelming aura of popular normalcy because they didn't spend a whole lot of time together. Karen and their father still went out every single weekend. It seemed at times that their time spent on Toby was only secondary to the time they spent doing things for themselves. Sarah often wondered how long it would take for Toby to realize this… Perhaps one day, when they were older, they would be able to band together for strength. Two kindred souls who knew what it meant to be second-best, but not now… Now were Toby's innocent years and she would not see his perceptions of the world shattered just yet.

She half listened to her little brother informing her about the new kite he'd gotten, as she braced herself for what was to come. She picked Toby up, balanced him on her hip, and started towards the still open door of the house. Very soon she would be subjected to a menagerie of tortures including the 'how-are-your-grades' torture, the 'what-the-heck-are-you-wearing' torture, and the most dreaded of all, the 'do-you-have-a-boyfriend-yet' torture. She shivered violently in anticipation. If all went well, she would get to play with Toby for the entire visit. Since Karen was a Nazi and dear old dad was the type to roll over and let his wife scratch his belly, Toby was the only one she could stand.

"Watch me fly my kite?" Toby murmured shyly.

"Hmm? Sure, kiddo. I'd love to."

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Those damn squirrels were at it again.

There was probably nothing in the world more annoying than their constant shrill chattering. She wished for nothing more than a scattergun at that particular moment. Unfortunately her dear stepmother disapproved of firearms; no doubt because of some innate survival instinct that warned her away from keeping weapons near the people whom she showered her charms upon regularly. Sarah stared up at the daunting task set before her with badly masked frustration. Though she had previously persevered through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, she highly doubted that she was qualified to be retrieving lost kites from the top branches of an extremely tall tree which happened to be infested with rabid horny squirrels.

Yup… She had watched Toby fly his kite, (He hadn't wanted any help.) and she had watched it lodge itself in the topmost branches of a tree next to the house. The poor thing had blinked up at his prized possession and burst into inconsolable tears.

This, of course, had resulted in him being herded inside by Karen, and the task of retrieving the kite had fallen to Sarah, who apparently should have used her psychic powers to deflect the kite from the tree because she was the supervising adult.

How the heck was she supposed to climb that! A trip to the garage in search of a ladder was in order…

Once she found a ladder, she hauled it over to the tree, and leaned it against it. It landed against the bark with a clunk, and she shook it a bit to see if it was well grounded. Murmuring a silent prayer to the anti-squirrel gods, she started onwards and upwards.

A few screeching of curses and shaking of branches managed to send the evil rodents into hiding. God, the things she did to insure social tranquility. She ascended the tree slowly and carefully. She sure as heck wasn't going to have a broken neck for spring break. Inch by inch, she came closer to the branch, till finally, she grabbed onto it with shaking hands and pulled herself up. There was the dreaded kite.

It was more towards the end of the branch, hooked on a snag. Gingerly, she reached one arm out and began working it loose. It took quite a while, and a bucketful of patience. Her arms trembled from over exertion and the knowledge of just how high up she was. She let out a sigh of relief as the kite suddenly came free. She picked it up and tossed out of the tree, watching as it fluttered to the ground like and exhausted butterfly. She sat there for a few moments, bolstering her courage to get down, and looked around. Interesting. The window that the branch overlooked used to be the window to her room. There was a pretty good view too. If anyone had been daft enough to climb the tree they could have spied on her pretty well... She shrugged and started down. At least until she shifted her hand and felt something cool.

She looked, and froze. She couldn't believe what it was she was touching. She picked it up from where it had been wedged between the branch and the tree trunk and stared in disbelief. It couldn't be.

"It's a crystal… Nothing more…"

She dropped it and watched it fall to earth.

And she climbed down the tree faster than she had ever climbed down anything in her life. She actually jumped down the last few steps of the ladder, and then ran over to where the crystal had fallen. It was still there. She picked it up once again, clenching it so hard that her knuckles turned white. It was real.

She grabbed the kite in her other hand, ran to the front door, opened it and tossed the thing inside. Without putting away the ladder or saying goodbye to anyone, she rushed to her car and was out the driveway and down the road towards her house in record time.

One of the Goblin King's crystals had been just sitting on the branch overlooking her room.

What in the hell did it mean?

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So yes. Make my day. Read and review, and I'll post the next chapter that has Jareth therein. Although in a slightly feathery state of being…

Tata, JJ