Summary: Sara didn't accept Jareth's bargain, but she didn't leave the Labyrinth unmarked. A story of consequences, and two lonely, stubborn people learning to live with each other.

Disclaimer: I do not own Labyrinth; the premise and characters belong to Jim Henson's estate and some movie studio/s. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Author's Note: This story was inspired by words #50, #65, and #66 on the 15minuteficlets livejournal community. You may notice a style change between the first two chapters and the final three -- that's because the last three were a single story that I split up in order to keep the word counts and pacing more even.

Any canon goofs, grammar mistakes, continuity errors, implausible characterizations, bad dialogue, and boring passages are entirely my fault.

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Abeyance
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"My kingdom is great; you have no power over me," she had said. And so he did not.

Jareth was, after all, bound by rules, as were all living beings. His were simply different from most others. He had power to cross the boundaries of worlds, power to enter and shape dreams, power to fashion his own realm to his whim -- but he could only touch what he was invited to touch, his games and goals were shaped by those who played against him, and he had to come when he was called. That was his penance.

Sara invited him to touch her, to reshape her world -- but only thus far and no father. For her the Labyrinth was a compendium of childhood wonders, petty nightmares, goodhearted friends, and bumbling enemies who were easily thwarted. Only he retained his true form. Only he had power to stand in the way of her self-imposed quest.

And then even he had no more power to move her. She rejected him, and with that rejection she cast off the touch of magic and retreated into her safe, ordinary world. Until that point, she had followed the pattern laid down by the first child who, dissatisfied with her life, had called on magic for selfish whims and thus summoned Jareth to test her. That one had not been prepared to pay the price, and her successors had likewise been defeated by the Labyrinth or tempted into disaster by his bargains. They had lost their magic. Sara won the game -- the first to win in centuries -- but she turned away and he thought at first that she had renounced her magic despite her victory.

His hope lay in the impression that maybe she hadn't understood the purpose of her test. She had imagined their game to be a struggle over her brother's fate, when in fact it was a struggle over the shape of her soul. She had left something in the Labyrinth -- he could feel it, trapped in a crystal spell -- but maybe it hadn't been her magic.

Impression turned to conviction when he saw that Sara retained small ties to his realm and used them to call her new friends into her formerly prosaic home. She was unaware that she drew on her own power to move them across the worlds, that her power brushed against his with each summons... and that her friends completed their journeys only on his sufferance.

So Jareth watched, and as Sara tried awkwardly to fit into her old world after knowing the touch of magic, his hope grew, for although she'd rejected him, she didn't turn to another. Somehow she was still the innocent girl with wounded eyes who had first caught his attention, only now the light of magic shone within her, casting a subtle allure over her words and gestures. She captivated him anew each day, and her dreams, filled with her longing for him and his world, tested his resolve not to interfere with her choice, whatever its terms had been.

When she finally called him again, the icy touch of his joy lingered over the Labyrinth as a white owl flew between the worlds.

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AN: I have nothing against the common interpretation of Jareth as one of the Fair Folk and the Labyrinth as part of the Otherworld, or fairyland. There are a lot of amazing stories written using that assumption. I just think that there's no more evidence for that in canon than there is for almost any other theory. "Balance" is, among other things, an attempt to work out another explanation for Jareth and his kingdom.