A/N: Sorry for the long delay but this chapter gave me fits. I hope it was worth the wait.

The Underground

"Jareth."

The Goblin King turned to face the voice, bowing his head in acknowledgement of the Queen of the Fae. "Mother. What an…unexpected pleasure. To what do I owe the honor of your presence in my realm?"

Myria, Queen of the Fae, Ruler of the Hundred Magical Realms, raised one elegantly pointed golden-hued eyebrow before allowing her gaze to drift to the small bundle her son held cradled in his arms. "I come to greet my grandson, of course. Have you chosen a name for him?"

"Liam," he said, unable to contain the pride he felt for his son. He'd only had him for an hour, had only known about his existence for a week, and yet already the tiny form was the most precious thing to him. Even more precious than the child's mother, to whom he had offered everything…and who had thrown it all away. Just as she'd intended to throw their son away, to give him over to strangers who would do nothing to nurture his Fae gifts…

He ignored the small, mocking voice in the back of his head that reminded him that Sarah had changed her mind, or at least claimed to. That it was his own fault she'd spurned everything he'd tried to offer her…that he'd taken the wrong tactic with her the first time and hadn't learned from his mistakes this time.

No. He unconsciously held his son closer. He hadn't erred; she simply hadn't understood what it meant when one of the High Fae offered his heart, shared his body and willingly sacrificed his kingdom (yes, he'd been able to rebuild it, brick by brick, but it had taken months after her rejection of him had destroyed it), all in the name of love.

A love she'd thrown in his face.

A love he was trying very, very hard to convince himself had turned to hatred.

A love his mother had no trouble recognizing, judging by the expression of stern sympathy on her ageless face as she reached up and touched him carefully on the cheek. "My son, tell me about the mortal who owns your heart. Why did you tear her son from her arms? Why did you not bring her to join us, to become one of us, if you love her enough to get a child on her?"

He bowed his head. There it was, the shame he couldn't overcome. He'd fallen in love with a mortal, the only way one of his kind could procreate with non-Fae. And then, damaged both physically and emotionally by her rejection of him, he'd deliberately ignored her, refused to seek her out even in her dreams, where he'd first discovered her passionate, tender heart. And refused to allow the friends she'd made in his realm to seek her out as well.

Instead, he'd foolishly isolated her from him, walling up his heart in a desperate attempt to save himself – and in doing so, forced her into making choices the two of them should have made together.

"I've…made a mistake, Mother," he said softly, his eyes filled with the vision of the girl he'd wronged even as they lingered on the sleeping child they'd made together. He raised his head and allowed his mother to see the guilt and anguish in his face. "I banished myself from her after I took our son," he whispered. "She is locked away from me; I've forbidden myself access to her and must abide by the spell I cast."

"For how long?" was his mother's patient question, her fingertips still cool against the heated, humiliated flush on his cheeks.

He sighed before answering, shoulders slumping in unaccustomed sorrow as he responded. "Two mortal years. I altered time and the memories of those around her, and banished myself from her side for two mortal years."

His mother's fingers dipped down, to stroke his son's plump, rosy cheek. Already the boy looked more peaceful, healthier than when he'd first been born, after only a few hours in the Underground. He'd been such a fool; Sarah had no way of knowing that their child would eventually sicken and possibly even die if left alone in the care of mere humans.

Then he remembered how cruelly she'd rejected him, how easy it had seemed for her to give their son away, and his anger returned.

Sensing the return of her son's anger – and not liking it one bit – his mother spoke again. "Jareth, my son, when that time of self-imposed exile ends, you must allow this girl to join us here. Even if she is only a mortal, she is still your child's mother."

Jareth cradled Liam in his arms protectively, refusing to acknowledge the twinge of guilt he felt at her words to show. "No. She gave him up, Mother. Tried to send him away to live with others who would be ill-equipped at best to understand or properly care for him – and you know how their world affects us when we spend long periods of time there," he reminded her with a pointed look at his son. Jareth lifted his chin stubbornly. "She deserves to be punished for that decision."

"A decision her own parents no doubt drove her to, am I right?" Queen Myria raised one eyebrow, her son's answering silence and glower speaking volumes to her keen eyes and mother's heart. "And now your decision to take your child and leave the mother behind has had consequences you did not foresee, has it not?"

The stab of guilt grew to an ache in his gut, and he dropped soft kiss to his son's downy blonde head in an attempt to assuage it. "It is not my fault Sarah was unable to cope with the loss of something she'd already given up," he mumbled, knowing full well how his mother would take his words.

As predicted, she gave a very unladylike snort and shook her head. "No, Jareth, but it is your fault she is in this predicament in the first place." Her voice dropped to a sympathetic murmur as she went on. "You have magically bound yourself away from her for two years, but you can at the very least use your control over time in your realm to compress that time here to but a few seconds, can you not?"

With a very pointed look at the newborn cradled in Jareth's arms, she waited for him to respond to her attempt at persuasion.

After a long moment, Jareth finally bowed his head. "It will be as you ask, Mother. I will give Sarah the chance to redeem her foolish decision as soon as she is able to contact her friends in my realm."

He would do as his mother asked, when the two years were up; he would offer Sarah the opportunity to join her son in the Underground but he would withhold the previous offer he'd made.

She would always be the mother of his son, but he would never take her as his queen.

Two Years Later

It was strange, being home. Being back in her room.

It was strange, it was unsettling.

It was wrong.

Her room looked the same; the bed freshly made, everything all dusted and clean, the floor swept, everything exactly where she'd left it.

Wrong. So wrong.

She peered into her closet and breathed a shaky sigh of relief; there, at last, evidence she hadn't just dreamed away the past two years, much as she'd like that to be true. All her old clothes were gone, outgrown and given away or thrown out, whatever. All she had now were the clothes she'd brought with her from Shadybrook and the promise of a ripping good shopping trip in New York City with her mother to buy new clothes. When she felt up to it.

What kind of clothes, Sarah wondered dully, were appropriate for a recently released mental patient to wear?

She glanced down at herself. Well, baggy sweats and a plain gray t-shirt were comfortable enough, but did she really want to spend the rest of her life in clothes like that? Clothes that made her invisible, that hid her away from the world even more efficiently than the brick walls of Shadybrook Sanitarium?

Was that what she really wanted, or was it just the last, lingering effects of the medication in her system? She was supposed to stay on the lithium and other "mood stabilizers" for an unspecified amount of time, while she remained under Dr. Surdam's care on an outpatient basis, but she hated the way they made her feel. She wasn't crazy, had never been crazy, but had been forced to pretend that yes, she'd had a mental breakdown after her "car accident" and "coma" and just imagined everything that had happened to her in the Underground and the nine months that followed.

That she hadn't ever had a baby.

It had been a struggle to reach that point. She'd fought against it, insisting over and over again to a series of politely disbelieving doctors and nurses that she hadn't had a breakdown, that she really had given birth to a son who'd been stolen away by his father.

The Goblin King.

How, she wondered cynically, could they possibly have doubted her?

Why had it taken her so long to finally give in and agree that yes, she'd lost touch with reality? Why hadn't she realized that it was all they wanted to hear? If she'd gone along with the lie, she would have been released that much sooner.

Or perhaps not; Dr. Surdam had taken a great deal of convincing once she decided to stop fighting and just go along with the lies. "You believed this so deeply, Sarah, that you understand why I can't just accept you at your word when you tell me that you realize you never had a baby, never visited this 'Underground' world you so vividly described to me many times over our sessions."

God, she hated that man. But eventually even he had been forced to agree that she was no longer living in a fantasy world, that she'd actually been "cured" of what he termed her delusions and could once again tell reality from fantasy.

Finally, she'd been allowed to return home. A home that meant very little to her now except as the place where she'd once given up her baby brother to the same evil bastard who'd had custody of her son for the past two years.

She wondered what he looked like, if he remembered her in even the tiniest way, knowing how impossible that was as she did so. He'd barely been minutes old when Jareth snatched him out of her arms and stole him away. She wondered, with a feeling of dread, if even now Jareth was whispering poison into her son's ears, telling him how his mother hadn't wanted him, had wished him away, how she'd never loved him…

Sarah stifled her cry of grief by stuffing her fist into her mouth; no sense giving her over-anxious father and step-mother an excuse to look in on her, to follow her around with worried eyes as they studied her for signs of continued instability.

She wanted to hate them for sending her to that place, for leaving her there, but she couldn't. Not fully. Not knowing that it was her own fault, that she really had gone a little crazy once she realized that Jareth wasn't going to give her back her son.

She sat on the edge of her bed and studied her hands, turning them this way and that as she raised them in front of her face. There were numerous tiny scars on her fingers and palms from the mirror she'd smashed in her desperation to make Jareth hear her, and the mirrors she'd smashed afterwards before they'd been utterly removed from her life. She'd wanted to make him change his mind and give her back her son…or at least allow her to join them in the Underground. He could have done that much for her, given her the choice of leaving her son or leaving her life Aboveground behind. And she wouldn't have hesitated, would have agreed to anything to be with him and their son.

She shook her head and gave a disbelieving laugh. How could she possibly still harbor feelings for that bastard after what he'd put her through? It was his fault she'd spent two years in a mental facility while everyone around her tried to convince her that the truth was a lie. His fault for stealing her baby from her…

She sighed and dropped her head into her hands. No. One thing she'd come to realize over the past two years, whenever the medication allowed her to think clearly, was that this was as much her own fault as Jareth's. She'd willingly given her son up, even if she'd changed her mind the second she saw him.

She'd never given him a name, she realized with a start as she felt the tears leaking from her eyes, dripping through the cage of her fingers. She'd never even allowed herself to think of a single name, because doing so would make the baby real. And wasn't it ironic, she thought bitterly, that she'd spent so much of her pregnancy in denial of the reality she was facing.

Mirrors. Her bedroom mirror was still intact; she'd been allowed access to mirrors only six months ago, when she'd finally started to cave in and pretend that there had never been a baby. She'd resisted the urge to call out to Jareth, to Hoggle, to anyone who might be watching from the other side, knowing that she was being watched very carefully for any such signs of her 'delusions' returning. But now that she was home, in her own bedroom, no longer under 24-hour surveillance…

No. She wouldn't do it, wouldn't try to contact anyone. Jareth was the Goblin King, ruler of the Goblin Realm; if he'd meant to take pity on her and allow her friends to contact her, he'd have done so by now. She knew time passed differently in the Underground, that for them it had been much longer than two years, and her stomach clenched in renewed sorrow as she wondered once again how old her son would be now. Or if she'd recognize him, if his hair was still blond or had darkened to brown, what color his eyes had settled on…

"Sarah?"

She gasped and whirled at the sound of that voice from behind her, eyes wide with wonder and disbelief as she saw Hoggle standing in front of her dressing table, looking oddly tentative. "You all right, Sarah? Where ya been, we been lookin' for ya everywhere!"

Then she flew off the bed and held him to her in a tight hug as she sobbed out her relief in a babble of words that soon devolved into hiccups and gasps for breath. Hoggle held her throughout the storm, for once not seeming at all embarrassed by her show of emotion – or by his own. Because he wasn't just holding her, he was rubbing her back in soothing circles and whispering nonsense in her ear, just like a parent comforting a small child, and she wondered how he'd learned that skill.

That, in fact, was the first question she blurted out once she had control of herself again. He seated himself next to her on the floor, one arm stretched around her shoulder while she held tightly to his free hand. "Got married a while back," was his laconic reply. "Got two kiddies o' me own now." He sounded proud, and well he should; Sarah was happy for him, but something of her continued sorrow must have sounded in her voice or shown on her face, because Hoggle's proud grin vanished as he squeezed her hand. "I know what happened to ya, Sarah. I know ya had a baby; Didymus saw ya in the mirror when ya was still bulgin' out." He looked around the room expectantly. "So where's the little 'un now?"

Sarah stared at him. "You mean you…you don't know? Hasn't Jareth shown him off yet?" she asked bitterly.

"No one's seen hide nor hair o' the Goblin King for nigh on four years now," Hoggle replied. "Banned us all from usin' the mirrors, too," he added with a scowl. "Wouldn't let us do nothin' but watch you for a bit, and then even that was taken away from us."

"But now you can come through again," Sarah said eagerly, wiping her nose and eyes and rising up on her knees. "You can take me through, right?"

"So's ya can get yer babe back from the King? Of course I can!" Hoggle exclaimed, jumping up to his feet and tugging on her hand. "Whenever yer ready."

"Now, I'm ready now," Sarah replied. Hoggle took both her hands in his, clenched his eyes shut, and willed them both back to the Underground.

When he opened his eyes, however, he found himself in the Goblin King's gardens, alone.

"She comes when I bring her, Hogmush, not a second sooner," came Jareth's disembodied voice, echoing eerily through the cool night air.

Hoggle muttered, "It's Hoggle, an' ya know it!" under his breath, but made no other protest. He could circumvent the King's will in many ways, but not when it came to transporting others in or out of his realm; that was the solely his purview. If he allowed it, then others could manage, but if he forbade it…well, then, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Still, the King's words gave him a certain amount of hope; he hadn't said 'she's never coming through', he'd said 'when I bring her'.

Keeping that in mind, Hoggle trudged off to where he knew the others would be waiting for him, including his darling Hasty and their two boys, Hamish and Hrothgar. He only hoped Sarah would forgive him for his apparent abandonment of her.