Chapter Twenty

Byron shut the door to Sarah's room as quietly as he could.

She was a strong woman, he knew; hell, she had beaten the Labyrinth! A girl who could do that wasn't someone to look down on, but at the moment she was shell-shocked. The same Sarah who had charged through the Underground like an angry lioness had just stood in the doorway of the empty cabin, eyes going distant as her gaze absently swept corners where furniture had stood only hours ago. She hadn't said anything, hadn't moved, just stood on that threshold, clutching Ludo, dripping wet and blank. Worried more over Sarah's reaction than the actual situation, Byron had gently coaxed her away. With a guiding arm around her shoulders, he'd slowly led them to her home, but he had known from the mechanical way she moved that her thoughts had turned inward, gone deep, and didn't look likely to surface anytime soon.

Getting them into her small home had been easy, warming up and drying off a woman who was inclined to act like a doll was not. He had done the best he could but, in the end, he'd had to concede that the most he could do without her cooperation was wrap her in some towels and let her ride out the worst of her shock in the familiar territory of her bed. Ludo had refused to leave Sarah's side, but Byron knew it was a small comfort when she'd rather be in the arms of her lover.

He meandered into the kitchen, checking once again on the soup he was heating. Byron had never been a good cook, had never even really been allowed in kitchens when he was human, and had merely scavenged for food as a goblin; he had only the vaguest idea of how to use a stove and little working knowledge of how to prepare a meal. If Sarah didn't come to her senses before they ate, Byron had no doubt that his soup would have enough of a bite to it to jolt her back into awareness. Or just make her ill. He'd take either really, he wasn't picky.

It had been a hard afternoon, he reflected as he stirred the acrid smelling liquid boiling on the stove. After he had gotten Sarah settled into her room, Byron had struck out on his own for a few hours. He hadn't felt comfortable leaving her alone with only a cat for company, especially when she was so out of sorts, but there were questions he wanted answers to before he tried to gage the situation. With a heavy heart and a silent promise to return, he had left the house in search of a few pieces to the puzzle.

His first order of business had been to retrace his steps back to the hotel Hoggle and Didymus were staying at. As expected, they were no longer there but… It was strange, he thought, that the hotel had no information of anyone named Silas Hoggleston having ever stayed there, but they did have record of Dr. Ciren Didymus having checked out that very day.

Why one but not the other? The thought had plagued Byron as he made his way to the scene of the crime.

Jareth's cabin had still been empty, devoid of anything to suggest that a man had been living there for the past few days. It was like walking through a ghost town, knowing that it had been a vibrant place only hours ago, but was now nothing more than gloom and dust. There had been no sign of Jareth at all but Byron could tell a struggle had taken place. The air was filled with the bitter tang of rage and the hair at the back of his neck stood on end, electrified by the dying afterglow of extensive magic.

His final stop had been Sarah's store, where he'd merely closed things tight before returning to the woman herself.

Byron stirred the soup more vigorously, hoping to diffuse the smell a little.

"I have no idea what that is you're making, but I could smell it from all the way upstairs!" Sarah poked her head through the kitchen door, her nose wrinkled and a frown on her lips.

He tried not to sigh in relief at the sight of her. The woman was wearing a fresh change of clothes, looked dry and warm and not at all depressed. He frowned as her words slowly penetrated. "It's soup," Byron said plainly, ignoring the fact that it smelled awful even to his goblin-recovering senses.

"What'd you do, find a dead skunk and throw it into some Bog water?" She ventured further into the kitchen, but kept her head back as though trying to afford maximum distance from the pot while still being close enough to get a look at it.

He bristled defensively. "I'm sure it tastes better than it smells."

"Are you going to taste it?" Sarah asked. "Because even I'm not that brave. I'm going to order take-out; do you like chicken?"

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Byron waved the spoon at his feared concoction. He wasn't going to lie—he wasn't brave enough to try it either—but it seemed his long forgotten pride was rearing its head at her insult.

"Bury it and pray no one ever finds out," came the succinct answer.

Jareth separated his laundry, the mundane activity oddly comforting to the stress brought on by his creative slump. He'd tried writing for hours but nothing had come out and he'd finally given up in a fit of temper, deciding to do laundry instead.

His thoughts wandered as his hands went through the motions. Why was it that he was having so much trouble? What was missing that would make his work easier? Why did everything suddenly just feel wrong? All afternoon he had found himself turning down the wrong corridors to get to a room, had wanted to walk around furniture that wasn't there—that had never been there. It was frustrating and bewildering. Perhaps he was simply losing his mind, he thought.

Jareth's hands froze on a pair of jeans. They were a faded blue, worn at the seams and the knees, and had what looked like long-dried yellow paint splattered across the hem of one leg; the style was boot-cut, a slight flare at the hips and legs. Womanly. They weren't his jeans.

He plunged both hands into the unsorted pile of dirty clothes, searching to see if there was anything else that was unaccounted for. Two fingers caught the strap of something that definitely was not his and lifted it up for inspection.

It was a silky bra with black lace edging.

Jareth's eyes flared at the sight of it and something at the back of his memory tried to stir.

Sarah luxuriated in the warmth of the Chinese food she had ordered; Byron was acting a bit wary, but she wasn't sure if that was because he was still feeling a little insulted or if it was because he'd never had Chinese before.

"So," he began after a little while, "no tears?"

She looked at him confusedly. "No, should there be?"

"It is in my experience that women tend to get weepy in these sort of situations." He shifted uncomfortably and shot her a suspicious look. "Why aren't you? Weepy, that is."

Sarah shrugged, pushing her food around into little designs. "I thought about it pretty hard—"

Byron snorted.

"—and I remembered what you said about magic. It doesn't change what's really there, right? In that case, no matter what they've done to Jareth, we stand a fighting chance of getting him back. All we have to do is find out where he is." She looked uncomfortable for a moment, then admitted, "I wanted to cry, very badly at first, but what good would it do me? Jareth and I have a history of bad meetings and partings; tears aren't going to change that. If the Labyrinth taught me one thing it's that I'm a fighter; so, I'll fight."

Byron shook his head. "No wonder he lost to you," he said in amazement. "No one could win against that sort of blind determination."

She smiled and turned back to her meal "So do we have any idea what's going on?" she asked while arranging spears of broccoli into a little forest of felled trees.

He watched her for a moment, as though he couldn't quite believe that he was seeing a grown woman play with her food, then shook his blond head. "Jareth's place is still empty and there is absolutely no clue as where he might have been taken. I went to the hotel Hoggle and Didymus were staying at, but they had already gone."

Sarah regarded him for a moment. Had he hesitated before telling her about the hotel? She frowned, "Something's bothering you."

"A lot of things are bothering me," he laughed, "namely the fact that the two of us have been shanghaied. It's just," he paused, a frown furrowing his elegant brow and clouding his hazel eyes. "I found something out at the hotel that's been bothering me more than anything else. They only had record of Didymus staying there, and I keep thinking, 'Why one and not the other?' It doesn't make any sense!"

"Unless they parted company," she suggested with a shrug.

Byron stared at her, his meal completely forgotten. "What do you mean?"

She looked up from her geometric arrangement of carrot slices. "Well it happens all the time, doesn't it? Two conspirators are knee-deep in a plot when second thoughts begin to surface; one of them goes on to carry out the plan while the other one goes off to find his own way of setting things right."

"How do you know these things?" he asked in amazement.

Sarah shrugged again. "Old spy movies. You have yet to discover the joy of late-night television."

"So you think Hoggle went on to get the Wise Man to do… whatever it is he did, and Didymus decided to help us instead?"

"Do you see Didymus here?" she questioned, waving a rice-covered spoon to the room at large.

Byron's spirits sank a little. "No."

"Then he hasn't decided to help us," Sarah argued. "Not yet anyway, if ever. I'm only suggesting that there's a new player in this whole mess… or rather, an old player with a new angle." She let out a sigh. "I love that canny old fox, but we don't know what Didymus is doing or what he hopes to achieve any more than we know what Hoggle's doing. It would be nice if our dear knight joined us but, for the time being, I think we'd better get used to the idea of it just being the two of us fighting this war."

Jareth wandered down the busy sidewalks of autumn-packed Boston, no destination in mind and a terrible unrest welling within him. Fall was giving its last dying breath, the sunny chill finally succumbing to a deeper cold, and he could practically smell the snow that would soon pepper the air.

He had always felt a strong connection with nature, but in this case tried not to think about how unnatural that particular ability was.

The past month had been hell and he wasn't even sure why. His bewildering actions had only increased, dominated by that growing sense of wrongness, and he had found a few more items in his possession that he couldn't explain—like a black turtleneck sweater and a pair of underwear, both of which were obviously designed for a woman and both carrying a scent that was familiar, elusive, and downright haunting. It was a scent that brought him to painful awareness, made him viciously hungry for the woman who carried it but, of course, that was the problem. He didn't know whose scent it was, couldn't match up the clothes to any woman he had recently seen or even begin to imagine how they had gotten into his apartment.

On the nights when his inner turmoil reached nearly painful levels he would breathe in that sweet trace of gardenia and lush woman, and if he opened his mind he could almost picture the flash of challenging green eyes.

Then there had been the key, he thought with a shake of his head. It was a simple brass number that he had found shoved into the back of his desk drawer; it looked like someone's house key. He hadn't had the slightest clue as to what it opened or where it had come from, but he'd taken to carrying it around in one of his pockets. The brass had a reassuring weight to it and he periodically found his hand plunging into the depths of his pocket for the simple pleasure of closing around the tiny object.

Jareth pushed his way through the throng of sightseers and began to circle back to his apartment. He'd recently gotten into an argument with his neighbor, Hoggleston, about the benefits of a change of scenery; the older man had vehemently argued that the problem lay in what he was writing rather than where he was writing, and he'd had to concede that it was a rather sound point. Still, he couldn't help but feel that Boston was no longer where he was supposed to be.

"What is it we're doing, again?" Byron asked as he peered over Sarah's shoulder. A month had past with no sign of any Underground activity around them and they'd eventually come to the conclusion that it was time they started making some moves of their own.

It hadn't been an easy month on either of them. With no place else to go, Sarah had taken Byron in like the stray he begrudgingly admitted he was, and, when she wasn't at work doing everything in her power to boost the sale of her little glass treasures, was slowly helping him adapt to human life in the twentieth century. Most things were incomprehensible to him on the best of days, and he had taken a special dislike to anything involving the kitchen, but they had made enough progress that she was able to leave him alone in her home while she went off to work.

Today was one of the rare occasions that they had ventured out into the town together. Both of them were ducked behind the narrow computer station of the public library, staring at the brilliant screen of the newly implemented electronic-catalogue system.

"It just doesn't seem logical that Hoggle would work so hard to get Jareth settled into a mortal life and then yank him out of it," Sarah explained, patiently waiting for the computer to finish its search. "You can't make such a popular author just disappear like that; there would be too many questions. It seems more likely that Hoggle would just try to get him back to wherever he was before he came here, back to whatever life he had already established. That's my guess, anyway, and I'm hoping that one of Jareth's books will have a little biographic blurb in the back so that we can find out where that life might be." She quickly jotted down the call numbers that came up then dragged Byron off to the stacks.

Half an hour later she had found three completely different answers. The first one had come from his debut novel, published eight years ago, saying that he lived in New York, while the second one had come from a more recent novel and proclaimed him to a Boston resident; the conflicting information was easy enough to explain by him having moved some time in the interim. It was the third one, however, that bewildered her; that novel had been a republishing of a much older volume and had declared that J Corbett was an English-born gentleman who had disappeared three hundred years ago.

Byron turned the book over in his hands, a faint smile playing around his lips. "I haven't seen this thing in ages!"

"You knew?" Sarah asked in astonishment.

He gave a sheepish shrug. "Haven't you ever wondered why he writes for a genre that is considered consummately feminine? It's because Jareth used to be a writer back when men where the only ones who could get something published. He's always written romance, said it was very Shakespearian of him, that a love story written by a rake could make a woman forgive his past transgressions enough to enjoy his dubious attentions."

"God, he was always a flirt, wasn't he?" she huffed in exasperation.

Jareth tore his mouth from the woman in front of him, distaste curling his lips as he stormed out of the bar. He didn't care that he was being rude; he had a sexual itch that desperately needed scratching, but it seemed like every damn woman in all of Boston only turned him cold.

A snarl built up in him as he began making his way back to the one place he had no desire to go: home. Absently, one of his hands dove into a pocket of his jeans and he clutched the brass key that suddenly felt unnaturally heavy.

Byron held back Sarah's hair, rubbing gentle circles over her back as she was forcibly ill, and tried not to let his innate unease at the situation show.

A second month had passed them by, a solid four weeks since their journey to the library. They had spent that time between coming up with theories about 'The Hoggle Conspiracy', as Sarah had taken to calling it, and trying to find a way of figuring out where in Boston Jareth might be. So far they hadn't had much luck, but both were determined not to let their lack of progress flag their spirits. He had no idea how she was still hanging on because, deep down, he knew that he was still holding on to the hope that Didymus would show up to save them.

"This is the third time this week, Sarah, and I'm not even going to count how many times you were sick last week. I think it's time to take stock of the situation, darling," Byron said softly. "You either have the most persistent stomach flu known to man or you're pregnant."

"Oh god, not like this," Sarah moaned to herself, "not when I don't know where the father is!"

He sighed in sympathy, "But you have to concede that it's a very real possibility, no matter how brief your intimate relations with Jareth were."

"I know that," she whispered, leaning back from the porcelain bowl and running a shaky hand over a concerned and circling Ludo; her face was sickly pale, 'green around the gills' as his long departed mother would have said. "We never used any sort of protection and I've had my suspicions for a couple of weeks now. I just wanted to find him before I really looked into the possibility."

"I'm going to get Didymus," Byron said after a moment.

She looked at him, confusion furrowing her brow. "How?" she asked. "Why?"

"I have enough paltry magic left in me to get the old fox's attention," he explained. His voice dropped then, became heated and assertive "If he really has defected from Hoggle then he's our best bet for help, especially since he seemed increasingly sympathetic as our time together wore on; I didn't want to force his hand in any way, but the situation has changed. I will not have my nephew or niece born without their father."

A/N: New chapter, different cliffhanger. I apologize if this chapter seems a bit disjointed in time (my stories generally take place over a very short period, usually a week or less) but it was necessary.

So here's the deal everybody: I'm going to do my very best to get the next chapter out as soon as possible (or on time, at the very least), but I only have a week and a half before the semester is over. So I hope that this chapter will tide you over in the event that I get caught up in finals.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: Anything recognizable as having come from the movie Labyrinth is not mine.