A/N: Another short chapter, but the story is almost finished. It was never meant to be very long, and this looked like a good suspenseful place to leave off for now. I hope you are all enjoying this story. I wanted to write something original, I always try to find an angle no one else has used, though there are so many stories out there I guess it's impossible to know that. Anyway, only one more chapter after this I think, and then back to GSTK. Please read and review, it makes my day.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Labyrinth.
"Do you believe in destiny, Rose?" It was a sincere question, though Rose found it laughable. If there was such a thing as destiny, it was a cold bastard that took away the things she loved. It had damned her baby brother to a brief life in a plastic box, and her mother to an early grave. If destiny existed, it didn't deserve her belief.
"No." She answered, not as confidently as she had hoped. "No, I don't believe in anything."
Sarah turned to regard her niece, and amused expression coloring her pale face. "You don't, huh?" She asked, an indulgent smile touching her lips. "I bet you believe in ghosts."
Rose crossed her arms over her chest. "I wouldn't have before today." She answered.
"And what other beliefs have you lost that could so easily be remembered if the proof were suddenly standing in front of you?" Rose didn't answer, but Sarah hadn't expected her to. "It's no matter. Destiny exists whether you believe in it or not. It is a part of all our lives. It was destiny that brought you here."
Rose had picked up the statuette that her father had tossed onto the bed. Without knowing why she carefully inspected it for any damage that may have been caused by his abuse. She continued to study the figure, turning it over in her hands as she spoke. "So this was you destiny, then? To die so young and be stuck in this house for decades, just to have a conversation with your teenage niece?"
Sarah shook her head. "No, Rose. This wasn't my destiny. This was my choice. I chose to take my own life, and all the choices that led up to that moment were mine too. I made the wrong decisions, Rose, and I'm paying for all of them now."
"Then what is the point of destiny at all?" Rose asked, laying the statue aside and meeting Sarah's ghostly gaze. "If it was all your decision, what does destiny have to do with any of it?
"Because free will trumps destiny, Rose." Sarah answered, gliding closer to the bed, her iridescent fingertips brushed the discarded idol lovingly. "Destiny will guide us in the right direction, point us down the path we're meant to travel. But if we don't listen, if we allow stubbornness and selfishness to cloud our judgments, we make the wrong decisions, and we end up somewhere we were never meant to go. I chose poorly, and I threw away my destiny."
Sarah's gaze grew far away, and the sadness there brought tears to Rose's eyes. She wiped at them with trembling fingers, refusing to be drawn in, as her thoughts once again drifted to her mother. Had it been her mother's destiny to cross the path of a drunk driver, or was that the other driver's destiny? Or were they the same? Or had the driver of the other car altered his own destiny by choosing to drive under the influence, thus altering her mother's as well?
The speculation was maddening. She had spent countless hours since the accident going over every scenario in her mind, trying to find the one place where something she had done differently might have saved her mother that day. She knew her father had done the same. This new information, the juxtaposition of destiny and choice, was just a new variable in an already endless equation, and Rose found herself clenching her eyes shut to block it all out.
"Jareth." It was Sarah's haunting voice that brought her back to the present, and she opened her eyes to find the statuette floating in the air between them, spinning slowly. Sarah's eyes were closed and a faint and faraway smile graced her lips. Her hand was raised in an odd gesture, no doubt maintaining the figure's levitation. "He was my destiny." She said softly.
Rose lifted her eyebrow, intrigued by these words. Her father had told her bedtime stories of Jareth and his Labyrinth, and she knew that this is who the statuette was meant to represent. The stories Toby told were fantastical and entertaining, and Rose had always thought that they seemed personal, as if her father had first hand knowledge, but she had always chalked it up to his imagination. He was a writer, after all. But was Sarah trying to say the man really existed? "The Goblin King?" she asked finally.
Sarah seemed not to have heard the question, or the thinly veiled incredulity in it. "He found me first." She breathed, and seemed to be talking more to herself than her captive audience. "I didn't know it until later. There was an owl at the park every day that summer. He found me first, and he was waiting. Afterwards, I never saw the owl again."
Rose regarded her aunt strangely. Sarah's voice had taken on a faraway whisper, emphasizing the fact that she was not truly real, not in the same way that Rose was anyway. Rose reached out to stop the spinning figure that still hovered before her. Its eyes were facing her, seemed almost to meet her gaze, and a strange feeling of sadness crept over her. She looked back at Sarah, no longer worrying for her sanity. Suddenly she not only understood her pain, but shared it.
"Tell me." She said simply.
Sarah opened her eyes, and for a long moment she watched Rose carefully. "I can't tell you." She said finally, placing a ghostly hand on the girl's face. "But I can show you."
Rose winced instinctively, expecting the icy touch of dead fingers on her skin. Instead, she was filled with warmth, and a kind of light that seemed to originate from somewhere inside her. Images flashed before her eyes, memories that were not her own. She saw it all as Sarah had seen it, felt what she had felt. The anger, the frustration of a young girl who felt abandoned and misunderstood, the irrational resentment against the child that would grow to be Rose's father. She felt it all culminate into a single moment, a single choice.
And then she saw him. Beautiful and terrifying, a mythical creature made flesh and blood and standing before her. Her heart stood still and beat wildly at the same time, and somewhere she was aware that she was feeling her own reaction and Sarah's as well. He was magnificent and she wanted to run to him, and away from him, but the feet that weren't her own refused to move. Inexplicably she found herself standing up to him, and at the same time longing to touch him. His name washed over her like a warm breeze. "Jareth."
The rest of the story filled her mind, the images marching past relentlessly. She lived the events in her mind as though she had been there herself, and with each new problem felt both her own reaction to it and Sarah's as well. She also began to feel the duality that Sarah had, the driving need to pursue the story to the end, to be the heroine, to save Toby, and the nagging sensation that it was somehow all wrong. Rose grew more an more anxious to know the outcome, but the images stopped abruptly just as she had found herself once more staring through Sarah's eyes into those of the Goblin King. The foreign memories faded from her vision and she was once again in the empty bedroom with only her late aunt for company. "What happened?" she demanded. "How did it end?"
"You know how it ended." Sarah answered sadly. She held up her arms as deep red gashes appeared in the pale skin.
Rose shook her head, no longer sure if the anxious sadness she felt belonged to herself or Sarah. "But how?" she said. "I don't understand."
Sarah sat beside her, the phantom gashes slowly fading. "He was my destiny." She repeated. "I knew it the moment I saw him. It was like finding your way back home after being lost for years, or hearing a song that had been haunting you and you can't remember the name. But I had changed the timeline; I changed our destiny. We weren't meant to find each other that night, while I was still too young to understand what I was feeling. He tried to warn me, and even destiny tried to stop me. I kept forgetting the words, you see. It was the words that ruined everything."
"What words?" Rose asked, frustrated tears streaming down her face as she struggled to understand. She was dimly aware that her emotions were out of control, channeling both Sarah's sadness and her own reaction to it. Sarah's smile was heartbreaking, and she brushed the tears from Rose's cheeks. As she did so, the images resumed.
He stood before her once more, his face a study of pain and sadness. He offered her everything, but the price was too high. It wasn't enough just to deny him, she was the heroine. Everything had to be just so. She fumbled for the words, but they eluded her time and again. She almost didn't say them. She almost stood her ground, insisted that she had won and leave it at that. It would have worked, deep inside she knew it would have, but she was stubborn. She struggled one more time to remember the words and finally they flashed into her mind. She spoke them triumphantly, not realizing until much later when it was far too late the damage she had done. "You have no power over me."
The words echoed around her, weaving themselves into the fabric of reality. The look on his face was proof that he understood what she did not. She had not just defeated him, she had banished him. He could never come to her now as he was meant to, nor she to him. With that one small phrase she had severed the tie that destiny had bound them with, damning them both in the process.
Rose opened her eyes, gasping for breath. Her heart was filled with a terrible emptiness. "You shouldn't have said the words." The words were hollow, sounding too much like and accusation, though she hadn't meant it that way.
"No, I shouldn't." Sarah said simply. If she had taken offence to the implications of the statement, she didn't show it. "All of the mistakes I made that night could have been repaired if I had just been content to win, if I could have left well enough alone. I tried for years afterward to call him, but nothing I did made any difference. I had lost him forever.
Rose wiped stubbornly at her cheeks. "No wonder you were so sad." She said. "I guess when you've thrown away your chance and true love, there's not much left to look forward to."
Sarah had been staring at the ceiling, but with those words her eyes returned to Rose. She hadn't mentioned love; the word had never come up. "I'm glad you understand." She said. "Even if nothing else comes of this, maybe you'll learn from my mistakes."
There was a new feeling beginning to blossom in Rose's heart, one she had been without for so long, for a moment she couldn't put a name to it. The irrational emptiness was quickly and quietly being replaced by and irrational hope. She glanced at Sarah. "What else could come of this, Aunt Sarah? You said before that you needed me. You said it was destiny that brought me here. You drew me to this room. What were you hoping for?"
"Hopeā¦"Sarah sighed. "I don't dare to hope that I could ever make anything right. But if you would be willing to help me, I might at least be able to find some peace."
"I'll do whatever I can." Rose said, an image of herself sprinkling the room with incense and holy water flashing in her mind. "But I'm not a priest or a witch or anything like that."
Sarah laughed. "No, but for what we'll be doing you have exactly what we do need. You're young enough to believe, old enough to understand the belief, and you have enough of your dreams left to power those beliefs. Everything you need to summon the Goblin King."
