Every path they'd taken was a dead end or just a loop back to the start…Mulder couldn't find the opening for the chute that had deposited them here, and Scully couldn't find any kind of trail that didn't end right where all the others did – in the Bog of Eternal Stench. The minutes were ticking by into hours. She could feel the tension inside her stomach and refused to let it show.

Mulder was muttering to himself as they took a trail for the second, third, tenth time, dropping sunflower seeds from his pocket like they were Hansel and Gretel. "What's the rule about mazes? You always follow the wall…" Scully didn't like to interrupt him, so she instead carried the map, holding it open before her. How the greenery twisted and turned, the walls moving as if on bearings…Their brown, stinky hell, that could be clearly visualized on the map, but no amount of logic; no navigating by moss, by sun, by shadows; could connect them to any other portion of the Labyrinth.

She was still trying to make sense of it all when something on the paper caught her notice. A ribbon of the path straightening and stretching – and toward the Castle-! "Mulder-"

"Ha ha!" He sounded like he'd gone completely mad. Before Scully could say a word, he'd turned and caught her up in his arms, twirling her once and completely crushing the map between them before setting her on her feet again. "Look, Scully!"

The small agent's breath caught in her throat. "How-" A door! Never in all her days had Dana ever been so happy to see a door, nor would she ever be so overjoyed ever again.

Mulder couldn't contain his excitement, pulling the necktie off his nose and grabbing the handle. "You see, Scully? It's just like before, we're going to get that Goblin King son of a bi-"

He pulled on the door and Scully felt her stomach drop out. "Oh no, Mulder!" Her partner looked across the threshold and his face went white. It was the same stone corridor from the entrance, exactly where they started! The same massive doors, the same, glittering bricks. Even the eye fungus glared at Mulder, remembering his poking and prodding. She felt unconscionably like crying.

Mulder leaned against a wall, stupefied, as his partner stumbled forward. "But…but it can't be…"

Scully leaned her arm against one side of the wall and buried her round face in the crook of her elbow. "It's hopeless…we might as well go back to the Bog of Eternal Stench for all the progress we've made!"

"No!" Mulder was anxiously trying to rally her spirits, laying his broad hands on her shoulders and gently turning her around. "No, Scully, we can't give up! The Senator is counting on us – and Sarah, too!"

She sniffled and scrubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her borrowed shirt. "But there's only a few hours left! Even if we could get to where we were before, we'd never make it in time!"

"There's one thing we haven't tried yet." Mulder's eyes were grey and grim, his jaw squared.

Scully got a hold of herself and took a long drink of water from the bottle at her hip. "W-what's that?"

"We haven't tried going left yet."

She blinked at him, blue eyes widening slightly. "But Sarah said-"

"I know what Sarah said. But it's the one thing we haven't tried, and time is running out. If we don't try, what difference does it make? The Senator's stuck and we lose. But we have to try, Scully."

Dana covered Fox's hand on her shoulder with her own, feeling some of her mettle returning. She nodded. "Right. Let's go." Mulder turned the exact opposite direction Sarah had led them in when they first arrived all those torturous hours ago – and they took off at a run.

"I…can't…believe it…" Scully clutched the stitch in her side and leaned against her partner, her words coming between gasps for breath. "Straight…to the Castle!"

Mulder was grinning, mopping sweat from his red face. "The Labyrinth's best kept secret…" Against all sense and reason, the left-most path took them directly to their destination. A gate to what Scully could best guess was a stable directed them to a side entrance of the massive stone edifice. Everything we went through, all that we did, and it was so simple… "How much time is there left?"

Scully shook her wristwatch and frowned. "I'm not sure. Fifteen minutes, I think."

"Damn it." Mulder straightened his back and rolled his shoulders. "Alright, we'll cover more ground if we split up."

"Mulder, no!" She grabbed his arm at the elbow. "This is exactly what got us in trouble last time; remember the hotel? I'm not leaving you."

The tall agent's face was grim. "Someone's got to find Sarah, Scully. You heard what he said – she's the only one who can get the key for the Senator."

"And suppose one of us finds her and can't find the Senator – or each other?"

"Listen to me." He lay his palm against her red hair and Scully stilled. "No matter what happens, I will find you. No goblins in hell are going to stop me."

Dana sighed, her shoulders drooping. "Alright. But I'm going left." Fox smiled at her.

But how he hated it when his partner was right.

Mulder had barely wished Scully luck and set off before his own ran out. The first room he'd come to was some kind of goblin den – and they were much more horrible close-up and without the benefit of alley shadows. They were scaly, lumpy little devils; jagged teeth; drooling maws; horns and claws and cloven hooves. They chattered and howled and laughed in a way he could not identify, except to say it made the hairs on his arms stand straight. He reached for his firearm and was immediately overcome by a wave of the little beasts. They chewed on the back of his neck, or snuffled at him with the snouts of pigs. One had the chamber of his gun open and was eating the bullets.

Stuck as he was on his stomach, Mulder could only see the Goblin King's boots when he appeared before him. Of course he would. He'd never miss his chance to gloat. "Now, I thought there was an old mortal saying about a woman's intuition…?"

"Get them off me!" He could feel teeth in his shoulder – and not to take a bite, no, but to experiment on what he might taste like, his texture, or just his general makeup. Their little paws and hands reminded him of so many bugs crawling over his skin. Nails were tearing his shirt open, and he could feel blood beginning to drip down his arm. It was more maddening than the Bog, if that was even possible…

"Oh, very well…" The King gave a command in a language Mulder could not even begin to guess at; nor did he want to try, gasping for breath as the swarm pulled back. It didn't hurt, not yet. He was too stunned to move – or so he thought. The agent tried, and found himself stuck exactly as before. "I didn't say you could stand up."

"You slimy, cheating, son of a who-"

"Agent Mulder, your language!" The King seated himself at the ledge of the room's only window, dusty light illuminating his silvery hair. "Who knows where the ladies in the Castle might be."

The injunction had the opposite effect: Mulder felt his heart pounding with hope. "You don't have Sarah?"

The faery's mouth pursed. "No, not yet."

He could feel himself beginning to hyperventilate. Shock. Blood loss? Legs should be elevated, if I could just roll onto my side… "She doesn't love you, you know!" The difficult breathing was becoming a laugh, and Mulder felt dizzy.

But Jareth barely deigned to look in his direct. "Of course she loves me. She has always loved me. She just doesn't know it yet." Capricious, the Goblin King abandoned his perch, strolling over to his pinned prey. "You want to see the Senator, do you? That's what all this is about?" Jareth dusted his fingers against his sternum, and Mulder felt a little of the magic lifting. He could raise himself to his knees, but no higher. "Very well, Little Fox. I shall give you precisely what you want."

A crystal hit the floor next to Mulder's left hand and shattered. He flinched away but fell to the floor again – the room was spinning like a centrifuge, and in the middle stood the Goblin King, his sleeves and his hair billowing in the breeze of his own making. Gone were the goblins and all their yellow little eyes; gone was the picture window that looked out upon the Labyrinth. This was a chamber of a very different sort. The spinning had stopped, but Mulder's inner ear didn't seem to notice, and he was barely able to turn to keep from vomiting on himself.

"Behold!" Jareth had turned away from one toy to the other, opening his arms and indicating a gilded cage dangling from a bar on the wall. "The South's own favorite son! Daniel Jackson Beaumont."

Mulder gasped for breath, blinking blood, goblin saliva, and sweat from his eyes. "Senator…" The man was naked but for a ragged cloth around his loins. Goblins giggled with piercing shrieks of delight as they poked and prodded him with their long claws. He scrambled from one part of the cage to another to escape his torment, his pasty, flabby body covered with sores and weeping wounds. He swung like an animal from the bars and made sounds nearly as inhuman in their desperation. Mulder couldn't stand to watch. "What are you going to do with him."

"Whatever I feel like." It pleased the King to look upon his captive, and he turned with the same comfortable smile back to Agent Mulder. "Don't, for an instant, bother to pity him, old sport. The Senator played fair shrift with me. He wanted power, and I gave it to him. He never asked what I wanted in return."

"You're…disgusting…"

"Me?" He feigned hurt, his gloved fingers pointing to his chest. "Disgusting? What of the Senator's own deeds, how is it I am the only one who deserves your censure?" Clearing his throat, a scroll appeared before the faery, and he perused it lazily as it floated there before him. "A bill to provide for the welfare of the misfortunate – against. A program to feed children starving in your wretched cities – against. A chance to give medicine to those dying without it – oh no, not our Senator, not our lad." The paper disappeared and, lazily, he walked over and pushed the cage. The man dropped and the goblins could poke and claw at him as much as they liked. "Saving the tax payer's money for better things, Little Fox! War, pestilence, plague – war was his favorite, though. I'm not sure if Danny Boy here preferred those big rolling boxes of yours – what's the word, tanks? Something like that; or the planes that shoot missiles that blow up a shepherd's hut three boarders away with the man's wife and children still inside. Made him feel like a real man, that." The King's mouth was open in a contemptuous grin, and his teeth were horrible and sharp. "Don't mistake me, I don't give a tinker's damn how you mortals kill one another. Slaughter the whole lot for all that I care – bombs, bullets, bayonets, it's all the same. But don't ask me to feel sympathetic to the ones who give the order but haven't the courage-" he emphasized this word by shoving the cage again; the Senator went rolling. "-to take up the arms themselves."

He turned back to his other victim and smiled more conservatively, one hand tucked behind him at the small of his back. "What you ought to be asking is what am I going to do with you." The faery squatted at the knees, examining his prey. "You didn't make a bargain to enter the Labyrinth – and so I am under no obligation to send you back." Like a claw, his hand shot out and gripped Mulder by the chin, vice-like and bruising. "I think I'll make a valet out of you; goblins are so bad at household niceties, as you can imagine." The agent glared at him, and repeated a phrase about his mother that made the King cluck his tongue. "We will have to curb that uncooperative streak – and believe you me, we will." He released the man and rose to his full height again. "To dear Dana I will be more generous. I will put her to auction for the Kings of the Underground and select a suitable match for her. She will be honored to mother a royal line of your betters."

"I won't let you touch her." Fox spat a glob of blood from his mouth as he growled.

"Yes, yes," the King merely waved him off. "I'll live to regret this and I haven't seen the last of you, I know all the clichés. Where is our darling Dana, anyway? I should like to have her witness the minutes tick by; call me petty."

He clapped his hands together twice and Scully simply dropped next to Mulder, on her knees at his left, crying out in pain as she landed. "What in the- Mulder!" She helped him up onto his knees, quickly assessing his wounds and brushing his hair back with her hands. "What happened to you-"

"There will be time enough for that after my victory." Jareth stood apart from them, a raised portion at the end of the room. Mulder glared at him as Scully held him up; he might drop to the floor without her. The Goblin King was smiling. "I daresay I like this game even better than our last."

Mulder felt Scully's hands spasm against him. "You won't get away with this."

Jareth sighed, tilting his head to the side. "More clichés? I expected better from you, my pet. Now, we have just…" With a motion of his hands, a stately grandfather clock sprang from the floor and stretched toward the ceiling. How the pendulum swung back and forth in pitiless time. "Around about a minute left, I should say. It was a good try, I'll give you that. You made it here. That's more than most can say – more than Anwer got to, certainly." At the looks upon the agent's faces, he smiled. "You think I'd forgotten? Oh no, my memory is punishingly long. What is it the poet said?" Humming, he began, "Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind-"

There, and no further; the door (for there was a door now, suddenly, though Mulder never saw one before) swung open with a terrible bang – and it was Sarah at the threshold. "Jareth, stop it!"

The Goblin King stood frozen to the spot for a moment, a look of stupefaction on his face. "Sarah?" He shook himself free of her magicless spell, opening his arms wide. "How glad we are you decided to join us! The Senator is here, the one you've so yearned to find. Shall I introduce you?"

But all the while he spoke, the young woman tore down the room; her leg brushed Scully in her hurry, who watched, horrified without knowing why. The young woman's voice was choked, she almost looked like she would cry. "Stop, please stop; I'm begging you."

"Begging?" His growl was horrible. Scully's grip on her partner tightened once more. "Didn't I beg you? Ha! 'Please,' she says, brazen hussy. Do you think I am so easily move-"

He didn't finish. Sarah had flung her arms around the man and pressed her mouth to his. Without hesitation, Jareth's own arms wrapped around her, held her close against him and kissed the girl fit to die. Mulder's jaw dropped. The goblins stopped their torments of the Senator and retreated to a shadowy corner, for from the two something indefinable seemed to pulse.

There was, thought Scully, no visible reason why these two should fit in any way: he fair where she was dark; a king, an immortal being of magic, and just a girl. And yet how helplessly they were drawn to one another. How closely they fit, as if cast from the same mold. Propriety would make this moment a private one and yet she could not make herself look away.

And the clock had begun to toll.

In the same movement, Sarah's hand reached between their chests – fixed upon the key at the Goblin King's sternum, and yanked. He made a pained sound against her mouth. But Sarah had turned from the embrace and thrown the object for everything she was worth. "Dana!"

Scully scrambled to her feet, caught the key as it arched through the air. "I've got it!"

Jareth still had his arms around her stomach, and she made no effort to fight him. "You have to hurry-"

But Mulder had already pulled himself to his feet, using his partner's shoulder for support. He hobbled to the cage even as the clock continued to chime and the Castle shook around their feet. "Senator Beaumont – I'm Agent Fox Mulder, I'm with the FBI. It's alright, sir, we're here to help you-"

Scully turned, looking over her shoulder, to look for her, but Sarah was watching none of this. Her hands were on the Goblin King's chest and she was weeping as if she might break. "Jareth – I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Hush now." He stroked his hands down her cheeks stained with dirt and tears, and tilted her head up to him. "It's alright. No more tears: I will take care of you."

She jumped closer to him as a stone fell from the chamber ceiling. "I-is the Castle going to fall apart again?"

"A little. Not to worry, it can be set right."

"I never meant for any of this to happen!"

Still he held her, the high bone of his cheek pressed against her hair. "Some things cannot be helped."

Mulder touched Scully's shoulder and she jumped in spite of herself. "I have him. We need to get out of here."

Scully shook her head. "We can't go without Sarah." She turned to call to her, but the girl was glowing – incorporeal, in the Goblin King's arms and out. The agent opened her mouth and no sound came out, only more light. And still the Castle continued to fall, even the stones beneath her feet, and the world fell down, down, down, down…