He, too, wore fancy dress, but did not blend in with the throng. His costume alone glowed an iridescent pearl white and silver in the sea of colors. He wandered among the revelers, still intently searching the room for something he could not remember. As he ducked under a low-hanging chandelier draped in shining beads and candle wax he did not notice a dark-haired woman dressed in dark blue watching him from across the room.
She watched him from behind a horned mask for a time, then as the dancers moved between them to obscure her line of sight, she slipped away to another part of the ballroom. She discarded the mask and stood between two plainly dressed women flanking her, presenting her with small hand-held mirrors to admire herself in. She remained there preening until the man caught sight of her and began to work his way across the ballroom toward her. She let him approach until the crowd delayed him halfway across the room and then as dancers moved between them again she said, "We'll see who is chasing who this time. This time it will be done my way," and vanished into the crowd.
After she vanished, one of the two attendants stood a moment with a puzzled frown on her face, while the other wandered off aimlessly. The puzzled woman looked around her, trying to understand something. She caught sight of the woman in blue advancing on the tall man in white and inviting him to dance. As he accepted, realization spread over her face and she entered the throng of dancers purposefully.
"Aren't I the most beautiful woman here?" Caereh asked her partner, trying to evoke a response from him. Jareth had accepted her invitation to dance, moving with an innate grace and following where she led, but doing little more. He nodded absently at her question.
Alia searched through the throng of people, ignoring the dancers as she navigated their ebb and flow. She had eyes only for the furnishings of the ballroom.
"Not a single chair," she thought as she stood on the raised dais at one end of the hall after making a circuit of the entire room. "Not a chair, or a table, or even so much as a candlestick. Nothing but these cushions –" She kicked one down the stairs under the feet of the dancers. "– and a couple of huge tables that Schwarzenegger himself couldn't move. Caereh made certain we wouldn't be able to break out of here this time."
She stood there a while, trying to figure out what to do next, gazing at the dancers as they whirled without really seeing them. A flaw in the pattern of the dance caught her attention finally. A drab, putty-colored figure was making its way against the flow of the dancers toward the other end of the ballroom. She thought it looked like Cara, but couldn't be sure at this distance. She glanced around the room, spotted Jareth and Caereh still dancing, but did not see anyone else that looked like Cara.
"Better go get her. At least it's some place to start," Alia said and headed across the room.
As Alia slowly made her way across the room, a man in a mask, dressed in scarlet, bowed in front of Cara and silently petitioned her to dance. She stood a moment, dismayed and unsure. The gentleman took that as acceptance and reached for her with a gloved hand. He took the mirror that she still carried and showed her her reflection with a kind smile. The drab dress had turned a brilliant red-orange. She glanced down at herself and when she looked up again the mirror had disappeared and he swept her into the dance.
As they danced, Cara began to relax, enjoying herself, not caring that she did not know who he was, who she was, or why she was here. Only the dance mattered and as long as it lasted she was happy, certain that even if she could remember, she had never been happier.
An eddy in the flow of the dancers washed them into an out of the way corner, where they paused. He watched her closely, smiling. She smiled back uncertainly, unable to see his eyes behind the mask and get an idea of his thoughts.
Then slowly, so slowly that even in her half-witted state she knew what he intended to do, he leaned forward to kiss her. And she decided to let him.
It lacked something she had expected, but it was still a wonderful kiss and she found herself responding to it and kissing him back. When he pulled back and stepped away from her, she wished he would do it again and moved to follow him. He caught her and held her back with a small laugh. She stepped back and he let her go.
"If he's not going to let me kiss him again," she thought, "the least he can do is show me his face." She reached up for his mask.
He stopped her again, but this time she insisted. He finally relented and untied the ribbons holding it on.
As the mask fell away, she first noticed the set of slashes on his cheek. They glowed and glittered with a light of their own and, without thinking, she reached up to touch them.
He caught her wrist in a hard grip before she could and she looked up into his eyes, startled at his violent reaction. The light glittering in one of his green eyes gave him a lopsided look and made his eyes unreadable. She backed away from him in horror as her memory came flooding back. He released her wrist and let her go, retreating from her as well.
He backed toward one of the many mirrors decorating the walls of the ballroom and stepped through it. Cara ran to the mirror and watched, just able to keep sight of his brilliant red costume as he melted into the mirror crowd.
"There you are. I've been looking all over for you. Come on we have to find Jareth and figure a way out of this place fast. We're running out of time."
"But –" Cara protested and gestured at the mirror as Alia pulled her away. She looked at it over her shoulder, but the scarlet had disappeared. Hadrian had vanished from the mirror.
"Have you seen him?"
"Jareth? No, I haven't. I –"
"Well, help me look. He's wearing white, kind of like Sarah in the movie. Caereh was with him the last time I saw him. Is that them over there?"
Caereh was less than pleased with the way things were going with Jareth. He only did what she told him to do. "He might as well be one of the computer programs," she thought. "It doesn't matter. As soon as this is over we'll be able to fine tune what he remembers and what he doesn't."
"Excuse me. We have to quit meeting this way," Alia said as she pulled Jareth away from Caereh.
"I can't believe you just did that!" Cara hissed as they lost themselves in the crowd.
"Yeah, well, me neither, but did you have any better ideas?"
"No. Now that we have Jareth what do we do?"
"We have to figure a way out of here."
"Why not break out like in the movie?"
"Have you seen any chairs anywhere? Caereh's made sure there's no furniture to break the bubble with. That must be why she's not following us. She knows we can't get out of here."
"What are we going to do about Jareth? He just stands there. Not that it's not nice to have him not talk back for a change, but it's going to get old directing him to do everything."
"Maybe he'll be back to himself once we get out of here. But how are we going to do that? Come on, think! It's after midnight already. Or noon. Twelve o'clock, whatever time that is." Alia experimented with beating on the bubble walls with her fists. The wall rippled, but did not break as her fists bounced off.
Cara stared absently at her reflection in a nearby mirror, trying to think of something, but her mind kept returning to Hadrian's behavior. That made twice now in the last few hours that she had been kissed, more than in the last year. Hadrian's kiss had been nice, no sparks like the one with Jareth, but very nice. If it had been anyone else she would have wanted more. Why had Hadrian kissed her, she wondered as she reached out to her reflection and touched the mirror's surface lightly.
Hadrian had walked into one of the mirrors. Could they do that? It seemed solid though, cold and hard, and showed no signs of being anything other than a normal mirror. And where would it get them if they did? They would just be stuck in a mirrored version of the ballroom with no chairs there either. She shook her head. No, that would not help.
Then she realized someone stood behind her in the mirror. She could not believe she had let Hadrian sneak up on her like that and turned around. No one stood or danced anywhere near her. She turned back to the mirror and he waited there, in his mask and costume.
He bowed to her ironically and pointed to a clock whose hands began to spin clockwise slowly. She opened her mouth to protest, then realized that the clock was not moving forward. They were not losing time, but gaining it. She looked back at Hadrian with a question on her face. Before she could articulate it coherently, he bowed to her again, pulled a small mirror from a pocket under the red cloak he wore, and threw it across the mirror ballroom, discus fashion.
It sailed above the heads of the dancers, growing instead of dwindling as it moved away. It smashed high into the far wall of the ballroom, shattering it. A moment later she heard a crash and screaming from behind her. She whirled around to see the ballroom collapsing around her. She looked back at the mirror, but it had turned dark, empty, and she started to fall.