Rites of Passage by Betty Bokor
Jareth/Sarah. When Sarah is called to save the King, her life takes a whole new course, again.
Spoilers: The movie, the book, and some of the Return series.
Disclaimer: The Labyrinth original characters belong to The Jim Henson Company and Lucasfilms Ltd. This was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt at copyright infringement has been made.

Rites of Passage

Chapter 3

He made a grand entrance as the white owl and achieved his first goal; Sarah seemed terrified, covering her head with both arms. Then, he appeared before her dressed in his most imposing dark armor and cloak, amidst roaring thunder, blinding lightning, and a strong breeze that kept his hair and his cape swirling in the open balcony doors, framed by the fluttering curtains. Added a good dose of glitter, evocative of his magical nature, and he was done. First impression and all.

It took her a few seconds to recognize him from the description in the book and a few more to reconcile in her mind reality and this man being in it. He was more handsome than she had expected; in fact, she had not expected him to be handsome at all. And he was a man –or looked like one– and not a goblin. His eyes were hypnotic and his voice, calm and masculine, was bewitching. When he admitted being the King of the Goblins, she felt she could pass out right then and there. But one idea, one insistent idea and its consequences kept pounding in her head… Where's Toby? What happened to him? What's dad going to say? What am I going to tell him about him? Karen is going to kill me…

No matter how tempting the King's offer was, she could not ever face her father or her stepmother again without the baby; her priority had to be to recover Toby. So, pushing down her own desires and accepting the fate she herself had brought about, she agreed to go in search of him.

A few minutes later, she was standing in front of a gigantic labyrinth, ready to face the challenge.

The King was pleased with his first impression of Sarah, at least the first impression not from afar. She was strong willed, determined, and courageous, good attributes for someone destined to someday be his wife. If only she had not wished Toby away…

He felt between a rock and a hard place or between the sword and the wall, according to what language he chose for his thoughts. The rules he had set himself for his Labyrinth were clear. If a child was in danger, malnourished, or abused in any other way, he or she would have to stay; the runner could not be allowed to reach the center of the Labyrinth and the child would not be returned. The King would appear to the wisher in his most frightening manifestation and he would ensure that the obstacles on the way were insurmountable. It usually did not take much effort. Anyone who could abuse a child, often did not want the nuisance back in his/her life. Many did not even try; many more abandoned before reaching half way. Then, the King was able to choose a suitable family from the Underground to adopt the child.

That was what he had made his mission in life. When very, very young, the King had been a selfish, spoiled adolescent, but he had had time to learn… And many reasons to mature faster than he should have.

At any rate, now, what mattered was that Toby was not in any danger. There was no way to know why Sarah had wished him away, but it obviously was not because his family did not love him. Perhaps she was a selfish spoiled teenager as he had once been, but that would have to be figured out later. Now, the King had to deal with her in his Labyrinth. And, according to those same rules he had set, there was no need to keep Toby there. Sarah should be discreetly helped so that she could reach the castle –not solve the Labyrinth, just reach the castle– and the child would be returned. None of the runners had ever solved the Labyrinth and the King was content with that. It gave him an opening for going back on his word and retrieving the child if he detected abuse after sending him back. It had happened very few times, but it had. In any other case, the recollection of the whole episode was erased from both the runner and the child's memories and it all was well again. It always happened that way.

The problem was that he did not want Sarah to forget him and his world. If she lost, she would be returned to her world without Toby and without memories of him and if, later on, he tried to bring her back, the fact that she had not even reached the castle would be held against her by the other fae. They would already object to him wanting to make a human his queen.

On the other hand, if Sarah won Toby back, she would not have such a handicap, but she would be gone anyway. Unless he offered her…

No. She was not ready. She would not understand the meaning of such a proposal and all the consequences that it entailed to accept it.

He had to find a way to send Toby back while keeping her. There was a chance that she would feel drawn to his magical world and its inhabitants and would accept to become one of them, a guest, at least until she was mature enough to be his bride. His world seemed to be more agreeable to her nature than the real world.

However, ten hours later, all was said and done, and he had lost. Lost in so many ways he could not even begin to fathom. And it was all mostly his fault. He had not counted on Sarah making friends among the residents of the Labyrinth; he had not imagined some of them would even defy him for her; and, above all, he had not appreciated in what a predicament he had put Sarah. She was not capable of facing her family without the child. She had said it…

"I can't. Don't you understand that I can't? I need my brother back."

How could he have missed that? As soon as he had gone back to his castle, after leaving her standing on the hilltop, he had given careful consideration to the matter. He had finally decided to treat her as a normal runner, to let some creatures help her and others hinder her advances. He expected her to become frustrated –as most wishers did– and end up admitting that she would not get to the castle on time and, facing the possibility of losing her brother, he hoped she would try to negotiate with him for Toby's release. At that point, he was going to offer the return of the child in exchange for her staying behind.

But her new friends had helped her in unexpected ways and she had maintained a confident attitude –arrogant seemed a more accurate description– through the whole run. Their personal encounters had not gone in any way as he had thought they would and her final refusal had been the most devastating outcome possible for the whole episode.

And then, she was gone.

The first week after Sarah's departure, the King seemed furious. He walked around the castle kicking goblins and sending whoever dared to annoy him straight to the Bog of Eternal Stench. Mostly everybody avoided him because everything seemed to be cause for annoyance. What nobody knew was that he was primarily mad at himself. He blamed himself for his actions, his words, and even his attitude towards Sarah.

For a moment, while sharing her peach-induced dream, especially during their dance, he had become certain that she could feel the connection that he knew existed between them. That had encouraged him to make the final offer that Sarah had rejected so nonchalantly. That had been his biggest mistake. Too late had he realized that she had only had one goal in mind the whole time: to rescue her brother. He had also forgotten that she was only fifteen years old. In many other cultures, or even in her own culture a mere two centuries ago, she would have already been on her way to becoming a wife and a mother, but, these days, that was not the case. Sarah still played with dolls and she was definitely not ready for marriage. She had not understood that by the time he offered himself to her, Toby was already safe at home. She had not even understood that he was offering himself and his kingdom to her.

There was no way then that he could go back and try to entice her to come back. She was lost to him forever and that seemed much longer than he had ever thought. And, though her final words to him had been a mere repetition of the words from the red book he had given her and had no binding power over him, they did have a special meaning to her. She believed them to be the reason why she had been returned aboveground with her brother and the way she had finally defeated the King.

She was now beyond his reach.

For a few more days, as he calmed down, he regularly tried to check on her, visiting the park close to her house or sitting on a branch in front of her window, but she did not come back to the park and her curtains remained closed. He did not want to use his crystals to see her –it felt like an intrusion in her life– and he had increasing trouble dealing with the pain the failed incursions provoked. Slowly, he forced himself to forget the idea of having his soul mate with him for the rest of his life and he started looking for distractions and reasons to forget Sarah herself.

For her part, Sarah was deeply affected by her experience in the Labyrinth. The first night, after Hoggle and all her new friends left, she spent hours trying to deal with the magnitude of what had happened that day. For days afterwards, she worked hard to reconcile her daily reality with what she now knew existed somewhere… else. She finally arrived to the conclusion that the whole experience had been a rite of passage. Definitely a rite of passage. Not exactly a ceremony or a ritual, but- Maybe, yes, a ritual. After all, what she had been forced to endure in order to save Toby had been a somewhat established procedure for anyone trying to recover a child who had been wished away… And it had modified her status in life. After her return, she had left the brat behind and she had become the young woman she had believed herself to be for a long time.

What most astonished her was the difference between how she had seen herself before the incident and what she could see after it. She re-evaluated every relationship in her life. For starters, she realized that, since her mother had left, she had been completely indifferent to her father's feelings about the matter. She had unconsciously blamed him for her mother's abandonment and she had added more faults to his character when he had tried to rebuild his life –their lives– by marrying again. Now, suddenly, she could imagine how painful it had to have been for him to see her mother merrily leaving him for another man. He had the right to try and be happy with someone else himself and that was what he had been trying to do for the last few years. Meanwhile, he had kept on taking care of her as always and he had been extremely patient with her selfish behavior.

Karen was not that bad either. It was not like they would suddenly become best friends, but Sarah had to recognize that she was there to help her or give her some –unasked – advice more often than her own mother. And now she could also see that Karen had gone from being a carefree single woman to being the mother of a baby and a teenager who did not like her or want her in her life. She had not given Karen any chance to build some kind of relationship between them.

Then, there was Toby. She still saw him as a spoiled whiny brat, but now she knew how hard it would be to lose him. The idea had scared her to death, more than the King of the Goblins himself… And that was a lot to say.

Finally, there was her mother. Slowly after that first night, Sarah started seeing things that had been imperceptible for her before. What she suspected, though she really never dared ask her mother, was that she knew the King. She had to have met him. There was no other explanation for the fact that all the toys she had left in the attic resembled in one way or another elements from the Labyrinth. Even the poster with the cleaners had acquired a different meaning now.

Once, after Sarah casually brought up the toys in a conversation, her mother told her that while in college she had joined an art class with her friend Elisa and that all the toys in that box had been the result of their class projects. But they had both created figures that Sarah had seen in the Labyrinth and that were only vaguely described in the book. Their level of detail implied first hand knowledge.

Then, there was the fact that Linda had abandoned husband and daughter to follow the steps of an actor who had been known to have many affairs with different women and who had not ever asked her to marry him… but who had a suspiciously marked resemblance to the King. No mismatched eyes, darker –and shorter– hair, a very different voice, but something in him evoked the image of the King in Sarah and she could not avoid thinking that that was the only reason her mother wanted him.

Whatever the case may be, all this introspection and new awareness of those who surrounded her had been one of the reasons why Sarah had changed the course of her life. The other had been what happened to Toby. Before Sarah started her junior year of high school, Toby suffered a strong adverse reaction to a medicine and almost died. Sarah felt completely helpless and decided that she wanted to be prepared to help people who went through situations like that one. All her dreams of being an actress and becoming rich and famous to spite her stepmother had vanished by then. She did not want to be anything like her mother.

During her senior high school year, she was accepted in a program that linked three years of accelerated studies for an undergraduate degree with four years of medical school in what was called a seven-year program. She excelled at it and, after receiving her graduate degree, she started her residency with the aim to achieve her specialization in medical toxicology.

Ten years after her Labyrinth experience, she had a steady job –with terrible hours–, a small apartment in the city, and no personal life. She had only seen one way to achieve her goals and that was completely dedicating herself to her chosen undertaking. She had put aside almost anything that could become a distraction and had persevered until reaching every objective in her plan. But she had forgotten how to enjoy herself.

She did not have many friends either. These days there were only the three neighbors she had in the same floor of her apartment and, of course, her friends from the Underground. Her neighbors were two young men and a girl. Peter and Mike were actors and Laura was a chef's apprentice at a local restaurant. The boys had finally landed a stable job in a musical downtown and now and then Sarah spared one evening to go out with them on their night off. She had gotten acquainted with most of the cast of the play and she had landed a suitor among them. She was not terribly interested in Terry, the lead singer of the cast, but she felt flattered by his attentions. For many years she had relegated dating to a last place in her priorities, but now that she was where she wanted to be, the idea tempted her.

Her friends from the Underground were another matter altogether. She had never been able to leave them behind. In her most desperate hours, she had always found solace in their presence. Even if their time together sometimes could not be more than a couple of rounds of scrabble, it was enough to renew her energy and give her hope that everything would turn out okay. The only one she had never seen again had been the King. She had asked about him; at first, casually, and then, openly. Her friends had not given her much detail. Their answers had gone mostly from "He's fine" to "He's mad as hell", with not much variance in the middle. In a few occasions they had mentioned that there was another lady living in the castle, but, those times, she had been the one who had not wanted any more information.

She could not explain why, but the idea of women living with him made her insanely jealous. She obsessed about it for weeks and it took her much self-discipline to let the matter finally go. Sooner or later, it seemed that all the ladies moved out.

Today, Sarah had been cleaning her apartment while watching TV –Friday night and nothing else to do– when the program she was watching ended and a documentary about birds of prey started. One word about owls and she was thinking about him

Sarah sighed. She was thinking about him again. After ten years, her thoughts still went back to him at the slightest provocation. She was not sure her recollection of him was accurate anymore, but that did not stop her from imagining how he would look or what he would say if she ever saw him again.

She was startled out of her thoughts by a noise by her dresser.

"Who's there?" she asked worried.

"Sarah? We need you," she heard Hoggle say softly.

She walked to the dresser and looked in the mirror. She was surprised to see the dwarf on the other side. She had not called him… "Hoggle?"

"You said once that if we needed you… for anything…"

"Yes, of course," she answered while she nodded emphatically. "How can I help you?"

"You said you cure people who gets poisoned and things like that…"

"Yes, that's right. That's one of the things I do. What happened? Is Sir Didymus hurt? Ludo?" she asked anxiously.

Hoggle looked down. "No… It's that rat-"

"The King? What happened to him?" she asked more alarmed.

"He's dying."

A. N.: If you would like to see the pictures that accompany this story, though they are not all up yet, you can find them at BettyBokor at Deviantart. The right link is on my profile.