A/N: Finally! An appearance from Jareth!
The moonlight through my bedroom window illuminated the princess music box on my nightstand. Voluminous tresses, a glittering ball gown with enormous sleeves, and dark fiber lashes that had to have been attached with a crafter's tweezer to fit the small, painted face. Like the ubiquitous glamour photos, backstage mementos, and playbill articles taped up to my vanity, the music box princess served as another reminder that Linda Williams had been the idol of my adolescence. As tempting as it was to dust myself off of it like I had the collection of fairy tale books and toys of the past, I couldn't stick my nose up at the naive adulation. Sheathing the room with Mom's photogenic smile, the clippings of her comings and goings on Broadway, and the juicy tabloid-esque tid bits on who she was seen wining and dining with uptown was how I had taken control. If I could wear her preferred fire and ice lipstick and White Shoulders perfume with as much grace. If I could read through adaptations of her latest script in the park with a similar thundering tempo. If I could outline her every move in New York or Hollywood, then maybe, just maybe, I'd thought, I could fill the hole inside she left by becoming her equal.
She had been too beautiful, too talented, too wild and, most of all, too much of a visionary to shackle herself as a suburban wife and mother. I had convinced myself that it was up to me to conjure the radiance and magic that she couldn't share anymore.
So much for magic. I reached over on my side and turned the music box so that it faced away from me and folded over the patchwork comforter to cool off my legs. So much of my youth had been spent play-acting a ghost. Then Irene and Toby had come along with their own needs and that backlash had thrust me into a motivation mitigating cage. One where textbook rationality and submission to authority were the only kind of identity traits rewarded. And that leaves... what? What kind of person am I now?
The only answer that met my searching thoughts was silence. It was the first night in a long time that I didn't have the white noise of my institute dorm neighbor talking herself down from a panic attack or the flip-flop of the evening orderly's crocs as they passed the hall. I wasn't so sure I liked idle void as the background to my last call soul searching. It made me feel my own unique energy that I brought to the room and my mind wandered to uncomfortable places. It was too easy to recall the storm of voices that bounded through paper thin walls. The fundamental conversation that incited the close of my late childhood.
"You're really going to sit there and tell me this behavior is normal for a girl her age? She's FIFTEEN and still holding onto imaginary friends!"
"It's a coping phase. When my parents divorced at ten, I would sneak stray animals home and binge on pudding pops. You have to remember that it's only been two years since Linda left. She'll figure things out. We just need to give her time."
"Only a good therapist could 'figure things out' for that girl. I overhear her carrying on whole conversations with herself in her room and she still howls like a baby when she doesn't get her way. You've spoiled her."
"Well, what do you want me to do? You're the one who could step in as a mother figure. She doesn't listen to me anymore."
"She doesn't listen to anyone! That's her problem! She's content to live in her little fantasy world and avoid responsibility. If we let her carry on like this she'll be developmentally infirm before she graduates and then you'll have a kidult parasite sucking this household dry. I think we should set her up with a shrink that can show her some tough love. My friend, Kathleen, knows a good one at the Amherst Institute."
"But the institute's the kind of place where you send someone away long term. Sarah's not sick. She's just a misguided child. Can't we check the yellow pages for a local children's therapist or something?"
"I'm only suggesting we set her up for a consultation there. If they don't feel like she's a case they should take on, we can look up something softer. There's no cost for checking."
"I suppose…"
It only took one manipulative conversation to set off the next ten years of my life locked away and now it only took a big check and a sign off to decide the newest chapter back home. It was clear my getting to leave the low lit halls and hospital gowns behind hinged on this "job skills" prospect being followed through to the end. I pictured my first day with the obscure Jary King with the removed disinterest that one plans their next meal. It would suck or it wouldn't. It would be easy or it would be a pain in the neck. My manager might be a slave driver or he might be laid back and understanding. The details wouldn't change the contract I was locked into so it wasn't worth mulling too much over. It hadn't even occurred to me to drill Dr. Myers on just what kind of industry I would be playing a part to, what I would be doing, what "job skills" I would be learning, what kind of wage I would be getting (not likely anything above minimum), or how long this would have to go on before I was in the clear to decide my next move. The hard truth was there weren't enough job skills in the world to make up for an employment gap of ten years and a history at a glorified asylum. No matter what stars and checkpoints got marked, I would be lucky to get a gig greeting customers at the Piggly Wiggly or greasing the stoves for the line cooks at the Fast Burger.
A soft snicker interrupted my train of thought.
I sat up, looking out for reassuring shapes and identifiable shadows that would set my pointless anxiety at rest and reassert the limited size of my bedroom. Nothing immediate came into view, but something didn't sit right.
To the upper right I could make out the wall of plush cubbies, with each one spouting out fuzzy limbs and tails in various shades of grey. In the center, my shelf of aged out board games and playset toys, including Sweet Shop, which Robert bought to teach me the "value of currency". It was topped off with the horned and hunched Ludo doll grandma gave me. To the direct right, in front of my cushioned window seat was the small, skirted chair and in that chair wa-
A sudden feeling of cold expanded from my core and up my limbs. I refused to believe what dark figure imposed its presence in that chair. Even in the comparative lightness of the street lamps through the window, the figure stayed shadowed, but the cut and width of its shoulders, the rash, heavy breathing suggested a man.
An urge to scream or question froze like the rest of my body. This wasn't a break in. This was now-you-see-it-now-you-don't theatrics. Something defying physics and my own senses.
"Should you hold your senses so accountable? You did just get out of the loon retreat," the figure said with a subdued laugh.
The way the intruder seemed to answer my frantic train of thought threw uncomfortable tingles up the back of my neck.
"Did you misplace your ability to speak along with your memories?"
I leaned forward onto my arms to staunch the dizzy sway that I could feel coming. Toby and Robert knew that kind of personal information but they didn't have that build or the capacity and motive to play such a mean-spirited mind game. I couldn't place the british accent or sharp articulation with anyone from the institute, yet I knew it.
I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them. The shadowy figure remained, his chair still facing the opposite side of the room. I took note even in my paralysis of the stretched out and crossed over position of his legs. In the back of my mind, the primitive part of me that wanted any reassurance that I would live, his distanced and relaxed stance said that it was unlikely this intruder was here to immediately harm or harass me.
"Who are you?" I couldn't keep my voice from shaking. Every cell in my body told me to scream my head off and bring Robert or Toby running, but if I did, there was too much of a risk that the man in the shadows would cross the room before their arrival did any good. I had to keep him talking until I could find another solution.
"I'm whatever you like. Your best friend, your lover, your enemy, or I can be a little bit of everything in between. It wouldn't be the first time, and you always did have mercurial whims for me to keep up with."
The only thing that response cleared up was whether this man was crazy. I had read about things like this happening. Girls getting their dorms or bedrooms broken into by men that saw every girl as the ex that broke his heart and deserving of violent vengeance or rape. Horror stories that I skimmed over and thought could never happen to me. Not to the girl wha up for being "crazy" herself.
The figure's laugh was a sneering one. "I'm not going to bite your head off, love. No harm will come to you. Also, "crazy" is your world's term for those that have senses evolved beyond conventional understanding."
My limbs felt weaker than weak. Transparent and boneless. "You read minds," I observed in a whisper.
"Only yours," The figure rose and appeared at my side, quicker than a blink, quicker than movement itself. It was that defiant teleportation, or possibly the majesty of his tall, dark frame that made the dark edges of my room begin to close in on my sight and my heart slow. "Your every naval gazing thought and nostalgic dream is a king's feast." His voice was in my ear then and the undefined outline of a head was above my own. "I hate to invade you like this, Sarah, but I've become downright emaciated. A man needs to eat if he's going to have the energy to carry out his job and you do expect so much of me."
Soft, warm lips touched down on my own and I had no chance to think of restraint. Their descent was faster than a thought and their gentle contact seemed to take the air from my lungs, the blood from my veins. Before I knew it, the dark frame surrounding my vision had crawled its way to a total eclipse and I fell into the darkness without fear or pain.