Chapter Twelve: Reunion.
As the phone rang for the third time, Karen experienced a moment of dread. Upon hearing the voice that greeted her from the other end, she decided that she should have followed her instincts and let the machine get it.
"Karen, darling! How are you? It's Linda!" As if she wouldn't recognize the overly chipper sound of Miss Linda Williams.
It wasn't that Karen resented Robert's first wife and her continued influence over their family, it was just that dealing with Linda was trying. For the longest time Karen hadn't understood why Sarah had been so difficult and intensely emotional during her teenage years; one meeting with her mother had cleared all that up. At 45 years of age, Linda was self-centered and oblivious to the world around her, sometimes even childishly cruel if it helped her get what she wanted. Add in the fact that the woman had an innate tendency to over dramatize everything, and it really all left Karen, an emotionally reserved sort of woman under normal circumstances, very uncomfortable.
Karen took a fortifying breath. "I'm fine, Linda. How are you?"
She ignored the question completely, instead replying, "I was wondering if you could give me the number of Sarah's boyfriend."
"Excuse me?" Karen stumbled for a moment, dread once again lacing her.
Linda hummed in exasperation. "I'm in town, you see, and I wanted to get together with my little lamb. I went to her library but she'd already gone, and when I tried calling her, the silly phone just rang right off the hook. So I was wondering if you might have the number for her boyfriend."
"Who's to say she has a boyfriend?" she asked stiffly.
"Well simply everyone at the library is buzzing about it! Tall, blond, and charming they said, completely enamored with my girl," the other woman laughed joyously.
Karen squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Tall, blond, and charming? One man came to mind in an instant and, while it was entire possible that she was jumping to conclusions, something in her felt that history was starting to repeat itself. Oh yes, Sarah's boyfriend was definitely charming, but only when he chose to be. "They're abroad," she said quietly. "I doubt you could reach them."
Her heart felt sick. When Leshia had appeared in her home and talked of fixing things, it had given her hope, but she had foolishly assumed that Sarah wouldn't have to leave them for a while; now she knew, deep in her bones, that her step-daughter was in that strange other-world again.
"Well that's horribly inconsiderate of them," Linda sounded shocked, "it's not often I come to visit."
"Perhaps you should have called in advance, then," Karen murmured before quietly hanging up, her mind elsewhere. She was willing to accept that all of their lives were about to get complicated again, but one thing was bothering her.
If Jareth was "insensible", as Leshia had said, then how had he managed come into contact with Sarah at all?
A strange feeling stole over Leshia as she entered Jareth's room. Nothing was out of place, though. The Twins were sitting in a corner, playing a card game that she was fairly certain they were making up as they went along, and Jareth lay unmoving upon his bed. Something was different, though, she just couldn't place her finger on it.
Her eyes narrowed on Jareth.
Oran regarded her curiously, and Sarah could feel her face turning red. What were you supposed to say to a man who had showed you every possible kindness, right before you went and drove his eldest son insane? Living with Karen and being subjected to the occasional visit from her own mother had taught Sarah how to handle social stresses with relative ease; they had never covered anything like this, though.
Was Oran angry with her? Should she apologize? And what exactly would she apologize for? At least half of this mess was Jareth's fault.
"Are you all right, my dear?" Oran finally asked, breaking the silence.
The abrupt question startled her into an inarticulate, "Huh?"
He stood from his chair to come a bit closer, settling at the edge of her bed. "You haven't spoken or even moved since you first woke up; I assume you're either very stunned, very confused, very hurt, or all three. So I shall ask again: are you all right, Sarah?"
She raised herself into a sitting position, moving slowly in order to give herself time to think. "I'll admit to shocked and confused," she finally answered. "As for hurt, not yet, no."
He was quiet for a moment. "I see," Oran murmured with a sad shake of his head, "not that I blame you for it; were I in your position I'd be quite terrified of how I'd be treated. Know this, dear girl: you have nothing to fear from us."
"With all due respect, sir," she replied, "I fear your son more than I fear you."
"That's not an unwise decision," he nodded. "Jareth is powerful and unpredictable, he's fiercely loyal but has a tendency to react to any sort of danger with brutal exaction. That makes him dangerous, more so than any of our kind; fearing him is quite natural, I daresay he's even come to expect it."
"That's awfully sad," she said lowly, more to herself than Oran.
He nodded again. "I won't make you face him, Sarah. That decision is yours, and yours alone. If you find yourself too shaken to see him, you don't have to."
Sarah was both touched by his offer and insulted by the fact that he had even made it. "He's horrifying at times, you know; he respects the personal boundaries of others only when it's convenient for him, and he doesn't care about morality when it comes to his powers. More than that, though, he's an overbearing egotist who can't stand it when things don't go his way; he's funny and unruly and utterly frustrating." She shrugged. "But that's what makes him Jareth, and I'd prefer to have all of him, scary parts and all, than not to have any of him."
Oran smiled. "I insulted you just now, didn't I?"
She shyly returned his smile. "Just a bit."
"Well, I'm glad to hear that you've decided to take the bad with the good because, heaven knows, there's an awful lot of darkness in that boy. Would you like to see him now?" He stood, offering his hand out to her.
"Yes," she replied instantly, "but first I have a question. How did I get here?"
Karen's hand shook as she careful placed her coffee cup back on the table. Normally, frustration merely made her a bit snappish and sharp-tongued, but today she wouldn't allow herself to show it.
She had never minded when Linda came to visit Sarah—after all, a girl did have a right to see her mother—but having Miss Williams in Karen's parlour was pushing the limits of her civil behavior. It was one thing to know that the woman was seeing her child, it was quite another to have to deal with the woman herself. She watched as Linda flirted with her ex-husband, batting her eyelashes and giggling girlishly, and Karen knew if she allowed herself to speak she would only end up saying something rude. The only thing that was really stopping her was the fact that Robert looked distinctly uncomfortable by the attention and at having his wife and ex-wife in the same room.
"Oh, darling," Linda cooed, breaking Karen out of her thoughts, "come in! Let us get a good look at you."
Toby was frozen in the doorway, his blue eyes focused on Linda, assessing, judging. He had met Miss Williams a few times before, but never when Sarah hadn't been around to influence his opinion. He moved into the room slowly, his gaze briefly flashing over the entire room before settling back on the woman before him.
Linda held out her hands for him. "You'll be a strapping man, indeed. You're getting so big!"
Toby stared at her hands for a moment before taking them into his own, but he held them as though studying something suspicious rather than clasping hands with an obnoxiously affectionate woman. "So have you," he replied with a child's brutal honesty. "Have you been gaining weight?"
"Toby!" Karen burst in shock and guilt. Shock because Toby had never before been so obviously rude to a guest—albeit an uninvited one—and guilty because she was holding in a laugh at Linda's obvious embarrassment.
"What?" he asked confusedly, though she could see the glint in his eyes. In less than a minute, Toby had successfully countered Linda's cruel game with a cruel game of his own.
"Oh, dear, that's all right," Linda fluttered, pasting a smile on her face, "children see things differently from the rest of us."
"That's very true," Toby said readily, cutting Karen off before she could reply. "I'm sure what I see as you flirting with a married man is really only you being friendly. It's so easy for children to get these things wrong," he chirped brightly.
Linda's cheeks heated and, for the first time in Karen's confused relationship with Robert's ex-wife, she could see the woman finally understand that she had met an opposing force who was not likely to ignore her strange and spoiled behavior. Anger burned in her eyes for a moment at the fact that her first worthy opponent in many years was a ten-year-old boy.
What she didn't realize, what no one had been willing or able to tell her, was that that young boy had the ability to channel an ethereal king. It wasn't just a ten-year-old she was trying to out-class, it was a ten-year-old with a grudge and an alter-ego that had who knew how many years of court life behind him.
"Ah," Oran replied with a grimace, "I was afraid you'd ask that."
Sarah arched a brow, an action that was so very like his son that it briefly made him pause. He had known her for five years, but in all that time he had only really spent one day in the girl's company, not even a full day at that, and it suddenly struck him that he didn't know her as well as he wanted to assume. Oran knew humans, as a rule, since he had lived alongside them for many years, but he didn't know this girl specifically; this girl who had caught his son's heart, obsessed the boy's mind, was an enigma to him. He had offered her an escape that she refused to use, and now she was waiting for an answer that they both knew she wasn't going to like.
Who was this woman that had punched her way into their lives, and what was it that made her different from other humans?
Oran gently lifted her sleeve until he revealed the tattoo on her arm: a braided circlet of silver, green, and gold woven across her bicep, the colors all coming to rest at an intricate blue J. "What did Jareth tell you of this?"
"He didn't, really," Sarah shrugged, "he just said it was a little bit of insurance on his part, to make sure that I repaid my thirteen hours."
"You'll have to help him work on his communication skills," he said with a roll of his eyes. "What Jareth meant was that this tattoo was meant to keep you from evading the consequences of a possible breach in contract."
"What do you mean?" she asked, furrowing her brows.
"The contract could have been voided by breaking the hourglass," Oran replied, "that's where all the binding magic was, the very symbol of your agreement. So to prevent you from doing that he added in the tattoo, which was set to bring you straight Underground if that ever happened."
Sarah frowned a little harder. "But I wasn't the one who broke it, he was!"
Oran shrugged. "The whole sequence of events hinged on the simple act of breaking that hourglass; apparently it doesn't matter who broke it, so long as it was broken."
She seemed to struggle for a moment, then let out an explosive sigh. "I'll get angry about this later—like when he's actually capable of listening to me yell at him—right now I guess it would just be better to see how he's doing." She finally accepted his still outstretched hand.
He helped her off the bed, then tucked her arm into his own. "Are you ready for this?" he asked before leading them out of the room.
"Probably not," she admitted, "but, when it comes to Jareth, I never am."
Oran smiled. "I daresay he thinks the same about you."
Sarah tried desperately to stifle her nerves. She knew the Twins weren't angry at her, and neither was Oran, so it seemed a bit unlikely that Leshia would be mad, but then it wasn't the family that she was worried about. For five years she had known what was happening to Jareth, had felt it through that strange connection they shared, but she wasn't sure if she was ready to see the reality of his condition.
Oran stood next to her, silent and patient as he watched her stare at the door that led into Jareth's room. They had been there for a couple of minutes now, and each second sent her anxiety higher. 'You've faced Jareth down under some pretty bad circumstances already, Sarah,' she rallied against herself, 'this is just another one of things you have to get through. Being a coward and glaring at the door isn't going to change that.' Abruptly, she was angry with herself; she was being a coward and that was unacceptable. Finally resolved, she jerked the door open and stepped inside.
Imm, Laim, and Leshia all looked up from their card game in the corner of the room; the Twins smiled and offered her a pair of sheepish smiles while Leshia's crystal blue eyes widened in surprise. Sarah hardly noticed them, though; the room had grabbed her attention. Thick curtains were pulled over two massive windows, blocking all light from entering. The sitting room part of the suite was large and tastefully decorated in dark wood furniture. A blazing fireplace stood to her left, directly behind a desk. In the center of the room there were several chairs and a few love-seats scattered about, all surrounded by a combination of cabinets and end tables. To her right was an open archway that led to the bedroom proper. She had been in this bedroom once before, she realized with a jolt, but it had been dark then. Her slowly awakening powers had responded to the desires of the Goblin King, and somehow transported her to this very room while he'd been sleeping. It had been then, when she really thought about it, that their relationship had started to change, had become a little less like a competition and a little more like two people trying to figure out how to relate to each other.
And now she was back. What new changes were in store for her this time?
Sarah began to move cautiously toward the bed, dreading what she was about to see but knowing that she didn't have much of a choice if she wanted things to start heading in a positive direction. The sight that greeted her made her gasp.
Jareth certainly looked ill—paler than usual, a little wasted, and certainly not as though he were going to be moving anytime soon—but, she narrowed her eyes, he didn't look like he was dying. For five years she had held a picture of him in her mind, the wreck that she knew he had become, and while he definitely didn't look in top form right now, he didn't look anywhere near as bad as she had somehow known he would be. Sarah sat next to the bed and frowned as she watched the strong rise and fall of his chest; had she over dramatized things again?
Suddenly, she felt a strange shifting on his end of their empathic connection; she couldn't quite tell what it was, only that it was different from the increasingly chaotic tangle that his thoughts had been becoming. She reached out to smooth his hair away from his eyes, her heart a little confused at being back with him after so many long years. "It's an awful mess we made, isn't it?" she whispered, ignoring the quiet murmur of his family in the sitting room.
"I'm willing help clean it up if you are," Jareth murmured. Her throat tightened when he smiled, finally opening his icy blue eyes to look at her. "Hello, Sarah."
She smiled for a moment, then punched him in the shoulder and loudly warned, "Don't ever do that again!"
A/N: Sorry to end it there, folks, but I've got studying to do.
It's the busy time of year now, with finals right around the corner and the holidays ready to pounce; I'm sorry for not replying to people's reviews like I normally do, but I've been pressed for time lately. That being said, I really just wanted to say Thank You to every one who asked how I am after almost getting run over by a truck. Your comments were all very kind and supportive. I'm fine, no injuries to speak of, though I was a little shaken up and plenty mad at first. Also, I just wanted to say sorry for not updating in a while. This story is very important to me, but this semester's been kind of crazy.
Please Review!
Disclaimer: I do not own anything that actually came from Labyrinth. The side characters are mine, though.