Title: Caught in the Web
Rating: PG-13 (crude talk, but entirely talk)
Summary: A lack of knowledge about Aboveground culture lands Jareth in uncomfortable situation…
Disclaimer: None of it's mine. Everything from the Labyrinth belongs to… I'm not entirely sure who precisely, but not me. Nothing from Greek mythology belongs to me either, though I think all of that's considered public domain and thus I can use it to my heart's content… muahahaha…
A/N: This was written for the Talk is Cheap challenge on the livejournal group labyfic. Humor isn't my usual genre, but when I read the prompt this came to mind and it couldn't be anything but a comedy. And, yeah, I messed with the timeline and had the Labyrinth take place probably in the mid to late nineties instead of the eighties. Oh well. And, uh, no offense meant to Wiccans, and certainly not to Buffy watchers…
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"I wish the goblins would come and take you away, right now."
The sentence sounded in Jareth's head, as it always did when somebody Aboveground made the silly wish.
The words felt strange this time. They were oddly discarnate, as though the sound of the girl's voice simply did not exist (he also had the strange fleeting impression that it was lacking capitalization and punctuation); but it was a summons to the goblins, and thus to the Goblin King, and Jareth could not refuse. Nor did he want to.
So it was without any trepidation and only a smidge of curiosity that he sprang up from his throne, changed his outfit to a menacing dark cloak with a wave of his hand, and practiced a quick wickedly gorgeous smirk in the mirror. Satisfied that he looked sufficiently impressive, he disappeared from his throne room in the Underground.
And reappeared… somewhere very, very odd.
He looked around wildly, never having seen a place such as this before. He was fairly certain that it was not the Aboveground, though the wish had definitely come from the mortal realm.
There were words flying past him in all directions, and images, and what looked to Jareth like random numbers and letters and symbols pushed together. All of the random information was in very straight strands, but they were locked in all different directions. There were several strings of 0's and 1's flying by in several straight lines, and he heard a bunch of brief snippets of sounds go by him, seemingly traveling along the same fibers as the letters and numbers.
"You've got mail!" A disembodied voice, deep and over-enunciated, flew by him.
"Ding-a-ling!"
Then, very disconcertingly, the sound of his own voice, saying, "Give me the child."
"What the blazes is going on here!" Jareth bellowed in anger, wondering where he was and why his own voice was speaking at him. He could not believe that he was lost. He was the King of the Labyrinth! He could not be lost!
Yet it seemed he was. He growled in frustration and conjured up a crystal just to throw it. Unfortunately, it simply floated away and did not smash into anything.
Suddenly, another person came sliding along one of the strands. Objectively, it was a bizarre sort of man, with a human chest and head, except for the two horns protruding from his head. His waist and bottom, however, seemed to be that of a goat.
Jareth however, having plenty of experience with satyrs, did not find his appearance at all unusual, except that satyrs did not live Aboveground. They did not even visit, nowadays, not for several thousand years if Jareth recalled his history correctly.
And they had never wished away children.
The satyr jumped cleanly from the strand he had been riding and regarded Jareth with happy surprise.
"Ho there!" he exclaimed. "Who are you?"
"I am Jareth, King of the Goblins," the so-named Jareth, King of the Goblins intoned dramatically, assuming his majestic pose.
"Huh. Never heard of you," the satyr told him with a shrug.
Jareth was quite put out at this, and folded his arms a bit petulantly. "Well, who are you, then?"
"My name is Pan," said Pan.
Jareth cocked his head to the side, considering. "The Greek god?" he inquired, glad that he was at least somewhat on familiar territory.
"Yes."
Unfortunately, the entrance of a Greek god did not explain much to the Goblin King.
"…Did you wish away a child?" he asked finally.
"No, I didn't," Pan replied. "Why do you ask?"
"I'm here because somebody wished away a child," Jareth told him. "Humans, usually girls, wish away their children, and I come to take them away and turn them into goblins."
"Sounds like horrid business," Pan frowned. "Why ever do you do that?"
King Jareth paused and frowned a moment, never actually having considered it. "To increase the number of my subjects, I suppose," he answered finally.
"What do you do with the girls?"
"I offer them their dreams in exchange for the children. If they refuse, they get to run my Labyrinth to try to get the child back."
"Do you chase them down and trap them in a dead end and ravish them?" Pan asked, a bit too eagerly.
"Er, no," Jareth responded.
"Why ever not?"
"Well, most of the girls are rather young," he answered, feeling a bit disturbed truth to tell.
"You don't even deflower the older ones?" Pan was incredulous.
"It's against the rules for me to do anything to them unless they specifically wish it," Jareth offered, suddenly thinking of one girl who he had been resolutely putting out of his mind.
"And you couldn't turn on the charm, seduce them until they were begging for you?" demanded the Greek god. "For a handsome man like you, it should be easy!"
Jareth was rather glad that he was wearing a cloak to hide his body's reaction as he imagined one very specific girl begging for him to take her. "I tried once," he admitted, "but she was too focused on saving her baby brother."
Pan sighed in deep disgust.
"If you didn't wish away a child, why am I here, anyway?" Jareth decided to change the subject to the more pressing matter. The snippets of sound were becoming quite irritating. "Where is here, for that matter?"
"My bet is, that girl wished somebody away over an IM," Pan said peevishly.
Jareth blinked uncomprehendingly. "Come again?"
"Instant message," Pan elaborated. "When two Abovegrounders speak to each other through something called the internet, which is a connection of many computers."
None of this made any sense to Jareth, who scowled and struck another intimidating pose to cover up his discomfiture.
"So where are we?" he asked.
"The internet. Or, more specifically, the girl's connection to the internet, along with the connection with whoever she was IMing." Seeing the utter lack of understanding on Jareth's face, Pan sighed and said in disbelief, "The internet? The world wide web? How can you have had connection with the mortal world any time in the past ten years and not know of the internet?"
Jareth shrugged. "I don't generally pay much attention to humans except for winning their children from them," he said carelessly.
"Not even to seduce them," Pan recalled from before, shaking his head and muttering in disbelief. "My, you must have a boring life."
This, Jareth supposed, was true.
"So how did you get here?" he asked finally.
Pan wrinkled his nose in displeasure. "I was invoked, and when I went to attend the ritual, suddenly I was trapped here. Damned little flakes, Wiccans they call themselves, or 'technopagans' if they happen to have watched too much Buffy. They seem to think that I'm the incarnation of their God. All the others they invoked got out of it, Athena and Cerridwen and Shakti, Freya, Krishna, Hathor, Chang O, Rhiannon, Isis, Kali, Aphrodite—anybody the little twits could think of, really. It would have been nice to be stuck here with Aphrodite, at least," Pan lamented with a sigh. "Anyway, they invoked them all at once, thinking they were all the same, so all the goddesses could just laugh and ignore the little buggers. But or some reason they only called me as their God, and so here I am."
"Oh." Jareth could not think of more to say than this, but he made sure to say it very, very regally.
"It was fun at first," Pan recounted. "After almost two millennium without being called, I begin getting called and prayed to all the time! They also seemed to like to have me possess men while they had sex with women, thinking it made it holy. Sometimes they even called on me to represent the spirit of the man between two women engaging in some very pleasing activities—I quite enjoyed that."
Pan was naked and the results of his imaginings were quite clear, so Jareth coughed discretely to try to turn the god to other topics.
Pan did so, with some unhappiness. "Then they called me here and I've been stuck, ever since."
"For how long?" Jareth demanded.
"Almost a year, now."
"There's no way out?" the Goblin King exclaimed in alarm.
Pan shrugged. "None I've found so far. I've been making my way between the computers, trying to find something, but no luck. I've tried talking to them, of course, but they can't seem to hear me."
Then, the Greek god cocked his head to the side, narrowing his eyes as he watched one line of text intently. "The girl's saying something interesting, though."
"Well? What is it?" Jareth asked irritably, still quite stuck on the 'no way out' part and too overwhelmed by the swiftly moving letters to manage to read them for himself.
"Something about how the girl she'd been talking to on the IM was frightened by rustling noises around her room, and has stopped responding."
Jareth's eyes widened in delight. "My goblins must have taken her without me!" Then he deflated. "What good can it do if I can't talk to her, though?"
"Might as well try," Pan suggested. "They didn't call me to do anything, after all, just to be there. Maybe since your stealing-babies gig involves offering the dreams and whatnot, it will work for you."
"Your friend is gone. My goblins have taken her," Jareth declared in a deep resounding voice, and waited for a moment.
Pan glanced at the IM. "Nothing," he said, "but try walking over here, and standing with your mouth right by the strand."
Feeling quite foolish, the Goblin King walked over and put his mouth right in the way of the letters. They were incorporeal, though he felt a slight flow of electricity running through them.
"Your friend is gone. My goblins have taken her," he repeated darkly, and to his surprise (and relief) he heard—or rather, it was something like hearing but not quite hearing itself—a girl squeal in response.
"what? who are you? are you the goblin king?"
"Yes," he proclaimed regally.
"She probably can't actually hear you, but just see words on a screen," Pan told him, but Jareth shrugged.
"i didn't mean it, i'm sorry, i want jenni back please."
"What's said is said," he always stuck closely to his usual dialogue, feeling that he really had his intonation and mannerisms quite perfected, though in this case it didn't matter. In fact, he reflected, this time it was actually incorrect, as she had not said but instead had typed her wish, but he decided that a revision to his words would diminish the effect.
"where are you? why are you in my computer, instead of here, in my room?"
Jareth looked to Pan desperately as he tried to think of an answer, but the Horned God just shrugged.
"omg, did my wish bring you into my computer, instead of to my room?"
The chit was more intelligent than she'd first appeared, it seemed. Or perhaps was just a lucky guesser.
Frantically putting together a plan, Jareth eventually replied, "Yes, it did. But your friend is still in my castle, and after thirteen hours have passed, she will be turned into a goblin. So, I will make you a deal."
"omg! NO! poor jenni! what kind of deal?"
"You will wish me out of the computer, into your room," he said, "and I will return your friend to you, unharmed."
"Hey, what about me?" Pan exclaimed sharply. "Get me out of here, too!"
With a sigh, Jareth added, "Also wish Pan out of the computer, if you please."
"pan? the horned god? he's stuck in my computer too? omg, i'm so sorry!"
"Do we have a deal?" Jareth asked impatiently.
"yea, yea, of course! one sec!"
And, gloriously, a moment later, they were both standing in a small Aboveground room with an excited looking girl in her early teens.
"Wow! The Goblin King! I've always wanted to meet you! And Pan! How did you end up in my computer?"
The god grumbled irritably about inane little girls trapping him and forgetting all about it, but the girl was too excited and awed by Jareth to pay much attention.
Jareth, once again striking his much-practiced intimidating pose, summoned a crystal out of thin air.
"Ooh, are those my dreams?" she asked eagerly, gazing at the crystal.
Jareth nodded slowly, significantly, quirking his eyebrow. "Would you like it?" he held it out to her.
"For free? Thanks!" she reached out and grabbed it, turning it to the side and gazing dreamily into its contents.
"Very well, it is done," he said, waving his hand to punctuate his words. "Jenni has been turned into a goblin."
The girl looked up from the crystal in confused anger. "You told me that she would be returned unharmed!" she cried out.
Jareth shrugged elegantly. (He loved that he could shrug elegantly.) "I lied," he said.
The girl began to cry and scream hysterically, and Jareth rolled his eyes and produced a crystal. He threw it at her and she abruptly collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
"Hmm," Jareth said after a moment. "That's strange."
"What?" Pan asked, finally emerging out of his brooding over having been forgotten. He looked down at the unconscious girl on the floor with mild surprise, but simply shrugged.
"Usually I'm immediately returned to the Labyrinth, once my business here is concluded. But I find I'm able to remain until I wish to return, this time," Jareth mused. "I suppose that her wish to bring me to this world lasts beyond the wish to take away her friend."
"Come to think of it, I can't usually exist corporally in this world, either. This could be fun," Pan said with a widening grin, quite clearly thinking of all of the human women he could ravish. "This will really make up for having been trapped in there for so long. Thank you, my friend. I owe you a favor."
Jareth began to assume his own, quite predatory grin as he began to consider the possibilities of running amuck in the mortal world. Sarah, he thought, must be about in her early twenties just now.
"Refresh my memory, Pan," Jareth said as he recalled the mortal girl with the long brown hair and pouting lips that had been the only one to beat his Labyrinth. "If I remember my history, you have pipes that, when you play them, can arouse inspiration, fear of loneliness, and… sexuality… do you not?"
"That I do," Pan agreed, pulling the pipes from—actually it was hard to tell where he pulled them from, as he did not seem to be wearing clothes—and brandishing them.
The Goblin King's grin grew truly wicked as he regarded the pipes. "Pan," he said, clearly relishing the words, "I believe I know exactly how I want you to repay that favor."