Fallen For

By LiteraryLitany

Chapter 1: A King's Ransom

Pain swirled in confusing patterns of reds and browns and grays, blurring her vision until she didn't think there was anything there but the lapping waves of agony that her body kept throwing at her. Her head felt empty and bruised, her face and shoulder burned as if they were on fire, and her legs…

They'd been pulsing before, with an icy fire, but that was gone now, along with any other sensations from the lower half of her body.

There was a strangled gurgling sound, too loud to be coming from the forest around her. It took her a long minute to realize she was trying to scream, but just kept breathing in blood instead.

What had her mother said? Go in kicking and screaming, go out the same way. Well, she couldn't kick and she couldn't scream. She'd have to settle for quietly choking on her own blood.

There was a low growl near her ear that sent sparks along her nerves, even those in her legs. "No you don't. I have waited too long. You are going live, you hear me?"

The voice was harsh with anger and fear, but somehow was still smooth and musical. She liked that voice. If she could pick any voice to die listening to, it'd be this one.

"Sit up, Sarah." She didn't like that idea. Moving would hurt. Choking wasn't so bad really. The pain would go away, and…

"Damn you girl, move!" Despite herself she was afraid of the desperation in the beautiful voice. She'd disappointed everyone in her life, her parents, her teachers, her brother. She didn't want to disappoint this beautiful voice. Not when she was about to die.

So she moved. Shifted her weight to the shoulder that wasn't burning and eased onto her side.

Her vision swam and for a moment her blinking eyes cleared enough to see the stones she'd fallen on, soaked in her blood, and her legs spread out between them. The shape was wrong though.

Cold whispered down her spine, the first bit of panic she'd felt since she'd hit the ground. Coughing up the blood she felt a desperate surge of fear that somehow propelled her to sit up. She screamed, a proper scream this time, as she felt her legs and the agony burned white-hot through her brain.

"Sarah…" The voice had lost most of its anger now, leaving only fear and something desperate and beautiful that she wished there was a word for. "Sarah, you have to listen to me. I'm going to tell you to say something, and you have to say it. Word for word. Don't argue now. Please, for pity's sake, don't argue. Just do it."

She whimpered, pain and wrongness in her neck making that task sound more daunting still as her legs faded back into numbness. Her foggy mind was trying to tell her something about the voice. Something important. But the empty feeling in her skull kept whatever it was from making sense.

"Repeat after me." The voice said gently, apparently in control of his fear now. She liked the gentleness. It felt like the words were a caress. The only kind of touch that wouldn't cause her more pain. "I wish…"

She coughed and something made a noise in her neck that sounded very ominous. "I wish…" She croaked, the words garbled and rough, too stark a contrast to the beautiful voice.

"Good." He sounded relieved, and the softness of the encouragement caressed her deeper. "Now say 'That the Goblin King'."

"That the Goblin…" Her head was moving without her thinking about it. Muscles in her throat twitched but she fought through it. "K-King…"

Her mind was getting louder. Screaming at her. But she couldn't understand what it was saying…

"Would come and claim this body…" The voice was almost a whisper now.

"Would come…" She whimpered, her head falling back with a crack. Her head was bright with new pain and new numbness, but it was suddenly clear. "Claim this body right now…" It was nothing more than a garbled cry, and she fell back, expecting the sting of the rocks but instead felt the softness of an arm, and lips on hers, drinking in her blood still pooling from her bitten tongue, and the pain was running away…

When Sarah Williams awoke, her first thought was of how wonderful she felt. Her body was limp, and weak, but it sang.

Which, when some foggy memories filtered back to her, made no sense. A fall… The pain! And then, she'd been so delirious, she'd heard a voice…

Her eyes flitted across the bed she lay in. It was a big bed, bigger than a king sized, and round, the pale silver of the silken sheets making it look a moon, lit by only a faint flicker of firelight slipping through the drapery around its circumference. She shifted, blushing at how nice the silk felt against her soft, bare skin.

Bare skin?

She sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest, and glancing about wildly, trying to make sense of the situation, but all she could see was the bed and fabric. She tried her other senses, diving to bury her nose in the pillows. A faint whiff of her sweat, but barely there. Mostly it smelled of the lingering scent of a man, somewhere between leather and feathers, but it wasn't a fresh smell. There was dust on the carvings in the posts.

She heard a door open rather forcefully and stilled in fear. Two sets of footsteps, one angry and one light followed the sound and came to a halt not far away.

"Sire, it took weeks to clean up after her the last time." This voice was reasonable if exasperated, so she assigned it to the lighter foot-falls.

"She will not be permitted to wander so freely this time." The voice was chilly and anxious, and with a shock of absolute horror, Sarah recognized it. The beautiful voice that spoke to her at the bottom of the cliff. The voice that called to her from her childhood.

The Goblin King.

She muffled the gasp that nearly caught her breath and hurried to straighten herself out in the bed to pretend sleep so she could listen better.

"You seemed confident she was containable last time as well, sire." The voice was perfectly respectful, but Sarah thought she caught a teasing amusement in it. She wondered who dared to taunt Jareth like that. Her concern as to the state of his Court hadn't been high on her priority list last visit. Did he even have one?

Jareth sounded grumpy, and despite all the fear and uncertainty, that was sparked her amusement. "I am not going to underestimate her this time. And I like to think we've both learned a few things." Had she? Her time leading up to the fall was blurry at best. The last clear memory she had was taking off for college…

Her father and step-mother had been thrilled to get her out of the house now that Toby didn't need a babysitter anymore. He was the only one in that house she had missed. Him and the friends in her bedroom mirror, that had slowly ceased their visits as she grew older and more focused on her impending future out in the cold, cruel world. Fantasy didn't let her escape from the pressure, the stress, the worry that she'd curse herself to obscurity.

So her only option had been to salvage as much scholarship money as she could from her glowing high school director's recommendation and save up the rest herself. Her father would have nothing to do with her dreams of theater school, after all. That was up to her.

Had she achieved that? There were flashes, of theatre classes and plays… something that might have been a student film… But it was all jumbled. Incomprehensible. Like seeing flashes of a movie in another language but you know it's not in the right order.

What was in the right language though, was Jareth dismissing whoever it was he'd been talking to. She hurried to close her eyes and even out her breathing, in time with his soft footfalls approaching the bed. She'd had some substantial practice at faking sleep for some reason. It was easier than it should have been. Jareth drew the curtain aside, and it was pure torture not to open her eyes. To see what he looked like. If he was how she remembered in the same way his voice was. 80s glitter and all.

His fingers, still gloved, she could feel that at least, ran over her bare shoulder and down her arm, sending shivers through her. Odd shivers. Unreasonably pleasant. "You may open your eyes, precious. I know you're awake." That all too familiar smirk dripped from his voice.

She did, curiosity overcoming her chagrin at his amusement, and turned to him, clutching the sheet close to preserve whatever modesty she had left. That thought sent another shiver of worry through her but she resolved to worry about that when she was finished staring at the Goblin King before her. It wasn't like last time she'd seen him. Something had changed. A veil had been pulled aside. There was no more cute and glitter, no more eye-shadow and show-offy leggings. Last time she'd seen him it'd been seduction with a laugh, danger with a wink. Now she was looking at a King of the Night in his unaltered glory.

Author's Note: And that's chapter one! It's been sitting on my shelf for forever because I couldn't make some decisions about the later plot, and I've discovered if I don't clear those up at the beginning, nothing gets done. *coughARegularRomeocough* So, I actually know where this is going. All of where it's going. And no, things are not quite as they seems. And yes, you aren't supposed to know how Sarah fell in the first scene. Not yet, anyway. That said, I am taking suggestions for subplots from readers. If there's a character from Labyrinth or Folkore you'd like to see pop up, or if you think there's some trouble for Sarah or Jareth to get to alone, lemme know what you'd like to see, and if it can fit in I'll make an effort to include it. Thank you so much for reading! And writers run on reviews. It's our version of biodiesel, greatly preferable to the sugar and caffeine that will drive us to an early grave.