Thy Bog Overfloweth
Chapter 2
The first day of the first week, Sarah brought Jareth with her to work. She'd explained her job at the bookstore- usually shelving books or working at the counter, but the employees had other odd jobs that they did sometimes, simply because they needed doing. It was a fairly small store, but Sarah liked working there- and she'd beaten it into the Goblin King's head that if anything he did get her fired, she'd be more than happy to try one of those recipes for wild fowl she'd found in one of Karen's cookbooks.
He'd paled slightly when she said that, but gave no other sign that this threat meant anything to him.
He also didn't promise anything, and Sarah was too busy getting ready to go to realize this.
Jareth, in the form of a snowy owl, watched silently from the passenger's seat in the car Sarah was borrowing from her cousin. She had forced him to put a seatbelt on (well, she'd forced him to hold still while she fastened the seatbelt for him) and he felt, for the first time in his owl shape, conspicuously inadequate. Though slightly larger than a normal owl, the seat belt buckle seemed to come up to where his stomach was, in this form. He felt short. Vertically challenged.
Quite little, really.
Clicking his beak in irritation, Jareth leaned more than a little when the car turned sharply, and before he could catch his balance again, the blasted thing turned the other direction, and had Sarah chosen to look over then, she'd have seen a scowling (hard to manage that with a beak and feathers, but manage he did) owl as it staggered to one side and then leaned almost completely over to compensate for the inertia of the car as it tried to right itself.
Had it been anyone other than himself, Jareth was sure he would have been amused, at the very least, by such a predicament. Unfortunately, he was... far too close to the situation to be anything other than annoyed. Then the damned vehicle had the nerve to slow to a stop, and despite the way Sarah decelerated for a good twenty five feet, the sudden jerk nearly choked him on the seatbelt. Jareth hissed, loudly, in displeasure.
It was going to be a long ride to Sarah's store every morning.
Sarah glanced over at Jareth when she heard him hiss, and frowned sympathetically.
Note to self- have Jareth ride in the car as a human... elf... Fae... Goblin ruler... until we reach our intended destination and then force him to turn owl...
"It's only another four minutes," she offered when he shot her a particularly nasty glare. When he didn't stop glaring, she winced slightly, knowing that even the short period of time left in the car would leave him irritable. For how long exactly, she didn't know, but irritated animals tended to bite, and an irritated Goblin King could do much worse.
Right, so give him a stack of comedy novels to keep him busy until lunch...
They'd discussed, briefly, what Jareth would do to pass the time while Sarah worked. There was a little break room above the shop where Jareth could stay, and she'd brought a stack of books for him to read. Sarah had told him that she'd visit him upstairs for lunch (bringing food for him, of course) and they'd eat together and she'd stay up there until her half-hour lunch break was over. From there, he'd only be up there for another two hours, and then her shift was finished.
It left him with way too much time alone to get in trouble, but Sarah didn't have much of a choice. Because he would be unsupervised for such a long time, she'd been sure to grab some books off her bookshelves that were not only highly amusing but surprisingly addictive. She hoped that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books would buy her a day or three- hell, if she was lucky, they'd last the week on that series alone.
She didn't think she'd be so lucky, but hey, she could hope, right?
Jareth was disgustingly relieved when Sarah parked the car.
Here am I, he grumbled mentally, The great Goblin King, son of the High King of the Unseelie Courts, and I find myself queasy from riding in a mortal vehicle. I won't stand for it! He decided. I can overcome any mortal technology!
The Goblin King watched Sarah undo her seatbelt and twist around in her seat to grab a pile of books. He shuffled impatiently as she fiddled with the buckle of his seatbelt, listened as she apologized when it got stuck, and snickered inwardly when she finally cursed and just wrestled him out of the straps without unbuckling the belt. He hooted softly when she absent-mindedly stroked the feathers between his eyes, and hid his disappointment when she stopped to open the back door to the shop. He didn't ask her to do it again for two reasons: 1) it would be embarrassing, and Kings, even Goblin Kings, had far too much pride to put themselves in an embarrassing situation and 2) if he alerted Sarah as to what she had been doing, he suspected she wouldn't repeat the action.
Jareth looked around the cozy little room, it had three worn armchairs and a small table. There was also a dusty window looking out over the employee parking and the roads beyond said parking lot. Despite being small and a bit cramped, the room seemed comfortable enough. Sarah put him down in one of the chairs, put the books on the table, and wiped a great deal of the dust off the window with the side of her hand.
"You may return to your..." Sarah paused, and Jareth wondered at this, what was she waiting for? "...humanoid form," she said decisively.
She doesn't realize what I am! The thought struck him upside the head in a similar fashion (and with similar force) as the calculus textbook she'd whacked him with earlier. Jareth allowed himself to smirk as an owl, but once he was back to his bipedal form, his face was expressionless. He realized with a tad of surprise that there was open curiosity in her gaze, and he raised an eyebrow.
"Are those the only two forms you can shift to?" Sarah asked. Jareth had to hide a grin.
"Curiosity killed the cat, Sarah," he mock-scolded.
Sarah snorted. "I am nowhere near graceful enough to be a cat. And anyway, the rest of the saying is 'satisfaction brought him back.'"
Jareth pretended to consider this for a moment. "I agree with the first statement, but not with the second. No cat in my realm ever revived after being curious about a Goblin's antics."
"I suspect the Goblins don't revive from their own antics," Sarah muttered. This time Jareth did grin.
"I'll show you my other forms later," he promised, "in a place where I won't get stuck between furniture."
Sarah had been working for about an hour when she heard a strange thumping noise upstairs. It was more than slightly muted, as if someone was trying to keep it quiet, and it wasn't bothering the costumers, so she just shrugged it off, making a mental note to ask Jareth about it later.
Jareth had sensed the arrival of the first Goblin and sighed. Much as he hated to admit it, the book the girl had picked out for him really was entertaining, to say the least. He'd just gotten to the part when the Vogons were destroying the Earth when Slidge popped in.
Jareth put the book down, careful to memorize the page number, and turned to the Goblin.
"Hello, Slidge," Jareth greeted.
"'Allo, King," Slidge replied.
"What brings you here?" The King asked. Slidge tilted his head, and the leathery skin on the fairly small Goblin's brow crinkled.
"Dunno," Slidge said at last. "Just am, I guess. Didja hear about the 'vations delay?"
"Yes, I did. Where are you staying, Slidge? Are you staying Above, or did you find shelter down in the Underground?"
"I'm stayin' with my ma's clan," Slidge said, nodding and whispering in a conspiring manner, "They don't snore as loud as my da's clan."
"I can see where that would be helpful," Jareth agreed. The Goblin's tail thumped against the chair it was sitting on, and Jareth winced. He cast a spell to muffle the noise, but he couldn't be sure how well it worked. The spell was put to the test when the Goblin's tail wagged harder as his two siblings popped in to chat with the King.
When Sarah juggled the food containers up the stairs to eat with Jareth, the door swung open just as she reached the landing, and she shot a grateful look at Jareth, who'd opened the door for her.
"I ordered Chinese a couple of minutes ago," Sarah explained. "And DJ is taking care of the shop right now. How far have you gotten in your book?"
"I'm right at the end, with the mice," Jareth said as he took a bag and started to rustle through it. He started to pull food out, puzzled over two sets of sticks, and accepted a Styrofoam plate. He piled random foods on his plate and glared at the two sticks again. Sarah noticed his confusion at the eating utensils and smirked.
"Those are chopsticks. Look, you break them apart and hold them like this..." Sarah demonstrated how to hold the chopsticks, and then how to use them to grab food. Jareth protested this second lesson because the food she'd grabbed was from his plate. Sarah just grinned at him and ate the stolen dumpling. Her grin widened throughout the meal as she watched Jareth struggle with the chopsticks and react to the various foodstuffs as he tasted it.
Mental note: order more rice next time, Sarah thought, watching the high-and-mighty Goblin King curse as he dropped more rice into his lap.
Unlike the ride to the store, Jareth was in his Fae form on the car ride back to the house. Sarah had stowed him in the front seat again, and she'd managed to finally undo the seatbelt. She then ordered him to "regain his bipedal persona; and fasten your seatbelt." He'd done the former gratefully, he argued the latter.
"It is undignified to wear such an infernal contraption," Jareth started, and Sarah effectively shut him up by saying,
"It's more dignified than watching your brains splatter across the road if we get in an accident and you go flying through the windshield because you wouldn't wear the damn seatbelt."
Unlike their luncheon together, the trip back was also laced with amusing dialogue.
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an extremely odd book. Highly amusing, and delightfully intricate, but undeniably odd."
"It's not odd," Sarah argued. "It is extraordinarily unique!"
"Which is another way of saying it's odd," Jareth replied. He hid a grin as Sarah sighed long-sufferingly.
"It's nowhere near as odd as a certain someone I could name," she muttered, and Jareth paused.
"Point taken," he agreed. "It's nowhere near as odd as you are."
Her response was to hit him upside the head.
How the hell does he manage it? Sarah wondered. He always knows the exact question to ask to make me the most embarrassed!
The second morning of the first week, Jareth had commandeered her bathroom to take a shower, and while looking for towels- one of which he dropped on the floor after towel-drying his hair- he'd found a box of tampons. He'd then proceeded to march into her room, where she was waiting to use the shower, dressed in only the towel he'd wrapped around his waist to ask her what "these weird things" were used for.
"Um... they, uh... Once a month...err... When women... gah! Ask something else!"
Later, Sarah had to bully Jareth into the car, and he'd spent the first ten minutes of the ride complaining about how violent she was.
"If you don't shut up," Sarah told him through gritted teeth, "You'll wish you'd stayed at your goddamn Castle of Stench!"
"Why, Sarah," he'd purred. "I'm hurt-"
"Not yet, you aren't!"
When Sarah brought the pizza upstairs, she found the Goblin King sitting amongst a horde of Goblins, apparently naming their kids.
She arrived it time to hear him name the last little Goblin boy- "And from now on, you will be known as 'Zaphod'"- and grinned.
"Tomorrow, you read 'A Nameless Witch'," Sarah informed him after the last of the Goblins popped out. "You need a break from the 'Hitchhikers' trilogy."
He'd looked up at her, saw her smirk, and stuck his tongue out at her. When she laughed at him for the childish gesture, he denied that he'd ever done it and called her delusional.
Jareth had come running when he'd heard her muffled shriek, and crashed through her bedroom door with mild panic written on his face. "Sarah! What's wrong?"
She looked shell-shocked, and he wondered at this, until he noticed her gaze was riveted to the calendar on one of her bookshelves. Two days from now, April fourth, was circled in green pen with a little smiley face on it.
"It's almost Toby's birthday! Aack! I haven't gotten him anything, and we don't have cake mix and stuff! Move your ass, Goblin King, we're off!"
The first place he'd followed the more than slightly hassled Sarah into was a video game store. Or at least, that's what the sign outside said. What that meant, Jareth hadn't the foggiest, but he was rather disappointed to find that they were just brightly colored boxes. Then he saw another box, with little people running around in it, seemingly controlled by the little girl, connected to the bigger box through a lump of plastic and buttons and wires.
Sarah ignored him until she'd purchased a box, a little one with a picture of a dragon and a knight side by side with a matching book. She'd snapped him out of his fascination with the big box by giving him a helpful shove towards the door, and then proceeded to a general store.
She purchased a box of eggs, milk, and vegetable oil, despite his exasperated protests that they already had those items at her house- he would know, he nearly turned the kitchen inside-out looking for food that morning. She then bought a box with a picture of a chocolate cake on it and several cans of stuff labeled 'frosting'. Then she herded him to the gift section and asked his advice on which wrapping paper to buy and Jareth was pleasantly surprised when she actually agreed on his choice- a clear, deep blue splashed liberally with gold and silver streaks.
He was perplexed by the cash register and the way the doors slid open whenever anyone stepped near them- he couldn't sense any magic in the items, but they moved as if magicked. Sarah promised to explain the best she could later, and when he asked if they were returning to the store tomorrow...
"Hell, no," Sarah said with a grin. "Tomorrow, we bake!" She then cackled, which gave Jareth the rather unpleasant sensation of ice water running down his back.
Oro: Well, this came out differently than this one planned.
Sarah: You mean you actually plan it?
Jareth: Out of curiosity, what are those things used for?
Oro and Sarah: Shut it.
Oro: This one does NOT own Labyrinth Jareth: Or its characters Sarah: Or the inaptly named 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' Trilogy. Or 'A Nameless Witch', though all books mentioned are excellent and this one encourages you to read them. Further bulletins as events warrant, review, and once again, this one is open to suggestions and criticism.