On the floor, the Hoggle sat, looking at her with his brown eyes set deep in his dried-apple face. She was not at all surprised to find him there, looking not uncomfortable, but sad, which on him looked like annoyance. He lifted her from the bed by his shoulder and helped her into her own room. She moved slowly, fully articulated joints creaking like a Gi-joe that's been left in the sandbox. The comparason pounded in her head oddly as she entered her room, which took a breath of relief as it accepted her.
Hello said her ancient friends, the dreams that she had dreamed in this room, her pillow still filled with the dust of her old dreams, We've missed you everso.
She sat on the bed and said nothing, and the Hoggle sat beside her. The room accepted her silence in the same way that a cat accepts it when his mistress wants to pay more attention to the keyboard than Himself. It mewed and pured and pushed at her hand and her mind with its memories, stroking the fur of them about her skin. She appreciated this, but it didn't ultimately help, stroking on the surface of a skin-drum does not fill it. She felt old. She felt robbed.
She felt keenly that whatever this was, it was not her story anymore, though it was true that it had been once. The tale had been wrenched from her, goblin baby made of paper and inspired daydream, born of her brain and now hacking away at it's own umbilical cord with the blade of-- her brother. Go on, take everything. She hadn't thought it in years, after years of being open enough in her heart to love him too, but now it had all turned its back on her, and there was nothing left. He had taken it all again (it weaseled through her brain, through her). She felt this, in spite of the earth-eyes of Hoggle looking at her.
"Don't be stupid, missy," he said to her, "and sit around feeling sorry for yourself." He frowned and looked at his feet, swinging above the floor. He looked different sometimes now, after all this time, and had been known by many other names, but he was one of the ones that stayed with her, and was always with her, her constant companion and friend of her thoughts. This is why he hesitated a moment before he said, "Did you honestly think that when you turned your back from it, the world of the Labyrinth disappeared too?"
Sort-of. He knew the answer as well as she did. It lived in memory for her, and that was all. Hoggle and Didimus and Ludo had said often enough that they were greatful to her for rescuing them from it, or rather, for taking them into the Other Worlds, the ones she confined to page after page and walked through in her perfect and terrible dreams. Oh they had changed, they all had, all of them. Didimus now looked more like a man of a fox-ish nature, had grown amusingly bishounen, and rode a large white wolf instead of a shaggy dog. Ludo had not changed terribly much, but he had the least opportunity, content to lie in the warm tunnels of her psyche and keep her warm and safe feeling. She thought of him now, and it made her feel a bit better, a bit more full. But still.
Hoggle sighed at her. "You're better off. I can't speak for that ungrateful, stupid brother of yours, but it's his choice, after all."
"Yes," she said out loud, "but it's my world. I made it... up." Sort of. She had taken it out of another book and lived in it so hard it had become... something. It was not exactly hers, not the clay of it, but she had taken that clay and shaped into vitality. She'd learned this, eventually. And her friends' gratitude was that when the whole of it had become too real and had tried to shape her back the way she had shaped it to begin with, she had not left them behind too to be forgotten; memories pretty-trinket junk-heap. Ah, she knew, she knew, she knew all of this, but she had not thought on it in some time. She had kept the Worlds (for the most part) to safe places, pen and screen, page and ink. She read things and slept on them, and did not let them seduce her the way she once had. She was in control of her creations. She thought. She assumed. She believed. "What do you... what should I do, Hoggle?" She asked, very near to tears.
"How should I know?" He asked, but hugged her anyway. He was gruff about it but not unkind, "I suppose you have a choice. You could involve yourself again and take it back, or you could... forget about it, I suppose. He's not a baby anymore."
"But I can't," she said, "don't you see that I..." She stopped, her face stricken like with a rod of black iron, and she put her face in her hands, "Oh Hoggle!"
"There there Sarah," he said, "it's all right. Don't cry..."
And the room and all in it mewed too, whimpering and her heart cried, 'junk, junk, junk,' and wondered what really matterd now, again. The question could never stop being asked, and never entirely got a satisfactory answer.