The Never Series

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

Never Sit On A Werewolf

Part Four

"How bad could it be?" Sarah asked quietly, her head still resting against his chest. Perhaps it was cowardice that made her avoid his eyes in that moment, but she suspected it was the fact that she could tell Jareth was ashamed of whatever story he was about to tell that kept her from confronting him face to face.

"Bad," he answered on a heavy sigh, moving one arm so that he could delve his fingers into the hair at the back of her neck. "Most fertility gods are women," he finally began, his fingers now massaging her scalp, "which makes a great deal of sense. Who better to pray to for a child than someone who is a mother herself? For eons, all that is fertile about this world—birthing, harvesting, the very act of creation, itself—was tied to a certain sense of femininity."

"Are you about to tell me that you're really a woman?" Sarah snorted disbelievingly. Setting down her glass on a nearby table, she hooked her fingers into the fabric of his shirt; the muscles that rippled underneath were undeniably male.

"No," he replied, a smile in his voice before he sobered. "I'm saying it might have been better if it had stayed that way. A woman's world should have been left to women but, inevitably, men found a way to superimpose their own desires upon the natural order of things. Ideas of virility began to creep into the religion." Jareth shrugged, his hand running through her hair again. "It wasn't entirely unfounded. There was a certain yin and yang about it: the fertile meeting the virile. After all, it wasn't enough to simply have rich soil, you had to have healthy seeds too, if you wanted anything to grow."

"So the field opened up to men," she supplied, thinking how odd it was to be talking about godhood like it was a job market.

He nodded. "In essence, though there were never as many male fertility gods as the female ones. You see, male fertility gods had one outstanding drawback."

Sarah's fingers began to trace little patterns into his shirt. "They thought with the lesser of their two heads?" she guessed, thinking how true it was of mortal men, anyway.

Jareth laughed, a deep and surprised sound that shook Sarah to her toes. "Crude," he chuckled, "but true. The problem with virility is that it's really an entity unto itself, with very little having to do with procreation at all. After a while, what men were praying for wasn't so much being able to create healthy babies as being strong, outstanding from other men, and impressive between the sheets."

"I'm guessing these desires were mirrored badly in their gods," she murmured, lifting her head.

"And so our story starts," he replied, cuddling her closer, if that were possible, and effectively stopping her from meeting his eyes.

Sarah stared at his throat, at the strong muscles that ran from his shoulders and chest up to his neck, and silently waited for him to begin. She didn't have to wait long.

"I was full of myself, if you hadn't already guessed," his arm around her waist tightened as he pulled both of them to the sofa. In a quick move he had arranged himself so that he was lying across all three cushions, Sarah draped atop him like a cat, her head nestled under his chin so that she still couldn't look him in the face. "I matched ever Don Juan, every Lothario on this planet, and left their women wanting more."

"You stole their conquests?" she asked hesitantly.

"It was a thrill," Jareth replied, a note of self-disgust in his voice, "to know that I could provide those women with something that no one else could ever give them, that I would always be the best." He began running his hands up and down her back, as though the motion was more soothing to him than it was to her. "Caerlik warned me not to meddle in affairs of the heart, and I told him that the heart was the farthest thing from my concern; I was only meddling in affairs, period. I couldn't see, then, that not only were my actions self-destructive to the point of stupidity, but they were also harming the very people I had been sworn to watch over."

Sarah reached up and buried her hands in his hair, twining the silky strands in her fingers. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a woman then came along and you fell in love with her."

"Yes," he murmured, his hands moving lower, dangerously close to her rear end, "but it wasn't me who loved her, it was Caerlik." His fingers started to trace the waistband of her pants. "I always thought love was just something the gods created in order to trick humans into staying with each other long enough to have children."

"If you dare cop a feel while in the middle of telling me how copping feels got you into so much trouble in the first place, I'm going to have to hit you," she warned him, but didn't move her hands from his hair to stop his curious fingers. "So?" she encouraged after a moment. "What happened with this woman?"

"Caerlik was my mentor, not really a friend—I don't think I ever really had any of those—we were more competitors than anything else. He would show me a skill, and I would endeavor to do it better than him." He shrugged, one arm finally settling across her waist.

"I don't like where this is headed," Sarah murmured into his chest.

Jareth gave a dry, humorless laugh, "Very few would. Love was beyond my experience, beyond my understanding, because I didn't believe it truly existed. All I saw was a pretty woman on Caerlik's arm, and I wanted nothing more than to take her away from him."

Sarah shuddered. "What was she like?" she asked, wondering was sort of jewel that woman must have been to turn the head of not one god, but two.

"I don't even remember her name, Sarah," he replied sadly. "She meant so very little at the time. Just another game to play against Caerlik."

She shuddered again, only drawing mild comfort from his soothing motions.

"I seduced her, used all my powers and every trick I knew to get her away from Caerlik's side." Jareth laughed his hollow laugh once more. "He caught us together and said if I was going to rut like an animal, I might as well be an animal."

She didn't want to say anything that would hurt him, but having been on the receiving end of a man's lust without any benefit of his love, she knew she wouldn't be able to completely temper her response. "Yeah well, maybe you should have kept your pants on."

"I'm a fertility god," he almost sounded indignant, but his voice was still tinged with that empty sadness.

She snorted, trying to lighten the heavy mood, "That doesn't mean you have to personally ensure every woman's pregnancy."

"Funny, Caerlik said the same thing," the smile in his tone was plain, as though he sensed her need to step back from the situation for just a moment.

"Are you starting to notice a pattern yet?" she joked, then squealed when he turned slightly, so that she was pressed between him and the back of the sofa. Molded to him from thigh to chest, she finally looked into his eyes. His blue depths were quiet, but not still; there was pain there, an acknowledgement of his mistakes and a soul deep resignation at not being able to change them.

"He loved her," Jareth murmured after a moment, "really, truly loved her. But she never loved him again; she couldn't, she was simply incapable of it. She died a bitter old woman. And she wasn't the only one; there were dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of women who never loved again, whose daughters were born incapable of finding love, until there was this vast clan of women who I had literally and figuratively screwed over."

"I don't understand," Sarah shook her head, "I mean, Caerlik's woman I get, but the other women and their daughters… why couldn't they love?"

"There's something about the affections of a god that imprints itself into the receiver, until it becomes so much a part of them that they are able to pass it on to their children." His hand stroked over her cheek. "If I had gone to those women out of love, or any sort of caring at all beyond the interest of conquest, they would have led blest lives. But I graced their beds out of greed, I took from their bodies until there was nothing left to give."

Her fingers went back to clutching at his shirt. "You cursed them with your indifference?"

His hand flitted down her neck. "Yes," he whispered.

Sarah shivered at his touch, reveling in the simple sensation of being held so gently, being touched so reverently. If this was how he had treated all those other women, then she certainly couldn't blame them for having fallen prey to him. It was an unintentionally sobering thought—was she falling too? Would he take her and then cast her aside, as he had so many others, to live out the remainder of her life in a barren, loveless haze?

But wasn't she already? Hadn't Isaac done to her what Jareth had effectively done to all his conquests? Sure, his story had a supernatural tilt to it, whereas Isaac had merely played with her emotions, but the end result was still the same. If she was doomed to live without love forever, would it be so wrong to partake in the comfort that came from Jareth's embrace?

"What happened between you and Caerlik?" she said suddenly, trying to steer her thoughts away from the dangerous territory it had taken a trek into.

His eyes darkened from the color of the sea to a midnight abyss at the mention of the other god—or, at least, she assumed he was a god, Jareth hadn't really said either way. "True to form," he growled lowly, a sound that rumbled through both their chests, "Caerlik turned me into an animal, doomed to live in fur until the moon rises. You see, the moon doesn't just influence the tides, it influences a woman's passion as well; the problem is that the higher the moon gets, the more surreal the encounter becomes. I could still be with women, once I had taken on my proper form, but they would never remember me, never respond in quite the same way as if they knew they weren't dreaming."

"It bothered you?" she questioned, trying to ignore the way his solid thigh pressed between her own.

"It was just a blow to my ego at first, nothing more. But Caerlik knew me better than I knew myself," he leaned down, resting his forehead against hers so that they were facing each other without really having to see one another. "It drove me insane, after a while. The sex was fulfilling on a physical level, but I needed that emotional connectedness, no matter how temporary, to ground myself. A dream might pleasure you beyond imagination, but you'll feel no need to hold on to it because it is, after all, just a dream. Caerlik robbed me of something I needed, and without it I simply drifted."

"So you killed him?" Sarah asked, remembering the bloody rip across the other man's chest.

"Wouldn't you have?" Jareth countered.

She shook her head, which turned into a nuzzling motion since their foreheads were pressed together. "No, but I'm not an angry god, so it's probably not a fair judgment."

"So what did you do with your life after your… falling out with Caerlik?" Sarah asked, several hours later as she laid in bed, a book forgotten at her side. The night had passed by in a blur, most of it spent cuddled into her houseguest as they both simply rested on the couch. A large part of her had thrilled at the contact, at the basic, instinctual kinship that had sparked from the gentle touches, despite the serious and sobering nature of the story he had told her.

Jareth—who had, oddly, been giving her a little bit of privacy—came in from the other room where he had been doing who-knows-what. "I continued on as I had, for a while," he replied, looking thoughtful, "drifting from place to place, woman to woman."

"Old habits die hard, I guess," she murmured cynically, fingertips playing with the edges of her book.

He hummed noncommittally. "I wasn't thinking about all the years ahead of me, or how much worse the bed-hopping was going to begin grating on my nerves. Soon, something that had once been a joy and a way of life was all but intolerable."

"So what did you do?" she repeated, watching him settle at the foot of her bed and cross his ankles, looking just the way he had when she's first laid eyes on him.

He shrugged elegantly, a self-depreciating smile tugging at the corner of his lips, "I was torn. I couldn't use any of my powers unless I was in human form and, after making a career out of whoring, I wasn't really sure what to do anymore when the sex lost its appeal. My life as a god had, essentially, dead-ended. The only natural conclusion seemed to be that I had to find a way to undo whatever curse Caerlik had placed on me."

Sarah sat up a little from her slouch against the pillows. "I sense a 'but' coming on."

"But," Jareth crooned, truly smiling now, "there was a part of me that didn't so much mind having to spend half my time as a wolf." He leaned further back into the footboard, stretching his legs out. "There was a simple beauty to being an animal. No one was going to take care of me, to make sure I was being looked after, so I had to provide for myself. Eat, sleep, protect, defend: being a wolf was about nothing more than survival. Sometimes that was easy, sometimes it was hard, but my life finally had a purpose."

"But?" she prompted when he paused overlong.

He shrugged. "No matter how much time I spend as a wolf, I don't forget who I am, what I've done, or where I've been. When I change into an animal, the instinct takes over but what makes me who I am—the thoughts and feelings—never goes away."

She wondered what it would be like to struggle between two worlds, one fire and the other ice, to find comfort but not be able to fully let go of a previous passion. What was it like to find a simple and rewarding life to live, but to still lust after the life that had come with so many complications and disasters? She could only imagine what actions he regretted, what horrors he hadn't told her about, and yet he still chased after that decadent godhood. In her opinion, though she hadn't known him long, she thought that the wolf side balanced him out—after all, continued survival came with a certain amount of forced responsibility that he'd never had to bear before—and without it he would simply be doomed to make the same mistakes all over again.

"I became obsessed with finding a away to unravel the curse," Jareth interrupted her thoughts.

Sarah frowned. "Why couldn't you just undo it yourself when you weren't the wolf?"

He shook his head. "I never knew what Caerlik did in the first place so I couldn't do it myself, and since he was dead it wasn't as though I could simply ask him."

"But you can talk to him now," she said slowly. "It's unconventional but, dead or not, we both know you can talk to him."

He shut his eyes for a moment and ran a hand through his hair. "Do you really think he's going to tell the man who murdered him and stole his love how to do anything?"

"Well, no," she replied, thinking practically, "but it never hurts to try, does it? Besides, if that doesn't work, we can always ask Meg if there's anything she might be able to do."

"You have a remarkable talent for ignoring the fact that I killed one and insulted the other," he said, giving her a funny look.

"I know," she murmured glumly. "I'm great at being oblivious."

In one swift move, Jareth had uncrossed his ankles and sprung forward so that he was resting expertly on his toes, body crouched like a hunting animal, mere inches from her. "What happened?" he whispered, a strange light in his blue eyes.

Sarah backed up reflexively, but found that she was already pressed against the head of the bed. "Nothing," she denied.

"Oh, no," he chastised. "I shared my story, and now I'm sick unto death of talking about myself. I want to hear about you."

"There's nothing to tell," she persisted, flinching when one of his hands reached out to cup her cheek. She didn't like talking about herself, about the stupid mistakes that she had made and how they were still affecting her life. A small voice in her said she was being unfair, that he had bared himself to her scrutiny, so it was only right that she did the same, but logic didn't heal a wounded heart.

"You just sprang into existence?" he teased, fingers smoothing over her cheek. "What makes you tick, Sarah Williams? I want to know." His fingers trailed lower, until they were cupping her jaw. "I'll take whatever you give but, above all, I'm curious about the fool who was at your door earlier today, and how you came to live in this place."

"Don't make fun of my home," she snapped. So her old Victorian was a little… odd, but it was still home and she loved it, quirks and all.

"I'm not," he crooned soothingly, his fingers drifting toward her chin.

Sarah closed her eyes for a few minutes, gathering what strength she could. She could feel Jareth waiting, could feel his penetrating gaze focused on her. The mark of the deadliest hunter, she thought idly, was his unwavering patience; he knew that his prey would come to him, that he could outwait anything until his opponent was reckless enough to throw their lot in with the wolves.

She shivered, opening her eyes. "Growing up, my family life was nothing to speak of. Not bad or good, just average. I got decent grades in school, I did fairly well in college; I just plodded along like a content little lamb until I met Isaac. Everything changed with him." She shivered again, although she wasn't quite sure if it was out of revulsion from Isaac, or from Jareth's fingers stroking over her throat. "Average little Sarah got to feel like someone special for once," she snorted in self-disgust. "All my life I was just the girl next door, a great friend but not particularly interesting enough to go out with. I thought that maybe Isaac saw something that no one else had, that he saw something worthwhile in me."

Jareth's hand moved to the back of her neck, where he began playing with her hair. "What happened?" he urged quietly, a somber look on his face.

"God, I feel like such a fool," she moaned. "He swept me up in whirlwind: dinner at nice restaurants, dancing on the beach at night, quiet little picnics out in the woods. I fell hard and fast. He treated me like no one else ever had, like I was precious to him, worth loving above all other women on earth. But it all started to fall apart after we got married."

A strange light had entered Jareth's eyes, intense and… angry?

Sarah looked away, breaking eye contact, feeling overwhelmed by her old shame. "He started to become indifferent," she whispered, "he didn't seem to care what I did with my time or if we even saw each other over the course of a day; sometimes he wouldn't even sleep in the same bed with me." Her heart felt sick at the words, but there was something cathartic about being able to share her pain with someone else. "Then he started disappearing for days at a time, gone for all those long hours with absolutely no consideration to me other than a brief call on the phone to let me know he was alive, but never telling me where he was or who he was with."

"You tolerated it?" Jareth asked in a neutral tone.

"I didn't know what else to do." She shrugged, "You remember the romance long after it's gone. I thought, in the classic fashion of foolish women everywhere, that maybe I was doing something wrong, that it was my fault he was being driven away. But you can only be oblivious for so long before you have to wake up and face reality." She paused, unconsciously leaning back into the hand behind her neck. Jareth's presence was solid and comforting, something to hold onto, to draw her away from the past. "Isaac's behavior had changed right after the wedding. Whatever he was after, he obviously thought he'd gotten it then and didn't have to keep pretending to be in love with me for it."

"What did he want?" he asked quietly, still carefully neutral.

"Money," she whispered, focusing on Jareth's throat. "He didn't want to have to work his way through life like everybody else. A good interior designer makes a decent living, and he knew my business was starting to get successful." She sighed heavily. "It wasn't hard to put two and two together, but he was the first man to really show me the kind of attention I had always wanted; it was hard not to cling to the fantasy, even after it had died." Her eyes felt suddenly tight, tears just waiting to fall. "You know what the really stupid thing is? I still—"

Jareth's lips crashed against her own, cutting her weepy declaration off. The hand at the back of her neck cupped the base of her skull, tilting her head slightly to the side and making sure that she wouldn't pull out of the kiss too soon. Not that she wanted to. They had been flirting the line between companionable and intimate all day, talking to each other like friends but touching each other like shy lovers. There was something more to the kiss though, something more than the simple culmination of too much teasing: there was a passion she couldn't explain. Nothing about the situation seemed completely sane; she had learned that he was a murderer with the morals of an alley cat, and she had just poured out the sordid tale of her ex-husband and yet, somehow, she was still lip-locked with this man that she barely knew. And it felt right.

Fire lanced through Sarah's blood, and she keened softly in the back of her throat. Jareth made a sound of pure male satisfaction in response, his tongue sweeping through her mouth, staking claim. Seconds passed into minutes, one kiss blurred into two and then three, until their mouths were making love in a way that no other act could match. When they finally broke apart, it was only far enough to breath, their lips still faintly touching.

"You don't still love him," Jareth snarled, the sound rolling through her from the way his lips continued to brush against her own. "You resent him, hate what he did to you. The only thing you're still in love with is feeling like you're the center of someone's universe." He took a calming breath, but a very lupine growl still rumbled low in his chest. "And why not? You should want to feel special, but not for an arrogant prick like him."

"For an arrogant prick like you, instead?" she teased, trying to lighten the serious mood. She didn't want to think about their problems, didn't want to look into her reasons for being attracted to him, or how giving in to that attraction might affect the future. Maybe this was just another bad decision that she was going to regret later, but for the time being she just wanted to feel. She missed the slide of a man's body against her own, the thrill of molding her soft female curves against hard male plains.

"Exactly right," he whispered, rubbing noses with her. "Exactly right," he repeated, descending to her lips once more.

A/N: Only one or two more parts left, I think. This part was very conversation heavy… I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or not.

As I said earlier, a lot of this story revolves around things that are not easy to find information on. Earlier I was apologizing about Greencraft. Now I'm going to apologize about mythology. Just about every culture has their own ideas about fertility gods, so there was really too much to assimilate into the story. Also, I was really hoping to model Jareth's story after something that actually happened in mythology, but the closest was Fenrir, a Norse god, and that story was dissimilar enough that I cut out all references. So, once again, I did the research, but in the end I made all the facts up myself.

Once again, thank you to everyone who extended their condolences. It's been a rough couple of months, but things might be pulling together, at last. Also, sorry that I haven't responded to reviews like usual; it's been pretty busy at this end.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Jareth or Sarah.