As Sarah gasped for air, she watched Jareth depart. He never looked back. Her gasps became distorted as she strained against her braces and casts, the Goblin King slipping from view, as if by magic, and she began to slip from consciousness.
Was it from too much oxygen to the brain or too much panic? She didn't know. As the blackness covered over her eyes, she felt nothing. In the dark, she was free. She seemed to spread herself out and swim through oblivion like she would a great ocean. Sarah was carefree. Did she ever really have any problems? Wasn't there only ever the blackness? The bliss was short-lived as Sarah felt an odd tug at her chest and suddenly her weight was returned to her.
She cracked an eye and was greeted to a face-full of bright lights and several faces overhead. She remembered this- like the night of the accident, wasn't it? Ah, but this was happening right now, she told herself. They wore masks and were speaking frantically to her, trying to get her to acknowledge them, but she couldn't hear them. She didn't really want to hear them. She wanted to go back to the dark where she could move around and think of nothing, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't seem to go back. One of the masked people hovering over her placed a contraption over her nose and mouth, and soon she was immersed in another kind of darkness.
Sarah dreamed. The darkness in front of her swirled and shifted, much different from before, and splashes of color sprang up here and there. Sarah felt herself reaching out to touch them, perhaps even to mould them into something whimsical and interesting, but she felt something fighting her, and soon the colors moved on their own to create a grassy courtyard on a high hill overlooking a packed and bustling city below. She turned and began to walk curiously to the edge of the field to better inspect the small houses far beneath her. The grass stopped at a neat cliff that dropped sharply down and was penned in by a twisted, wrought-iron fence that rose to just above Sarah's head into sharp spikes. Sarah gripped the bars of the fence and looked down below and spotted what appeared to be a town square, bustling with life, with small beings moving here and there as they ran errands and conducted business. Her eyes shifted to look upon their small houses that seemed to follow the theme of the fence she leaned against, their A-frame roofs topped with daunting spikes whilst the houses themselves seemed so unkempt and faded. She frowned, and, looking a bit farther, found her breath catch in her throat. A large and elaborate labyrinth enclosed the drab and dreary city and seemed to spread for miles. Sarah found herself unable to breathe. Her hands tightened around the bars of the fence, her knuckles showing white, as her body tensed and her mind raced. Eventually, she found she could no longer hold the breath and slumped her forehead against the bars, feeling as if they were imprisoning her with her memories of the place, of how she abandoned her brother and nearly killed both of them for her foolishness. Sarah slumped more and her hands grew slack, falling to her sides as she slowly turned around and saw him standing on the other side of the courtyard. She wasn't surprised- what was the Goblin City without its King? Unlike the all-consuming blackness before, she wished she could actually escape from this dream. She smirked slightly, wearily, and stood to her full height as she took a couple of slow steps towards him.
As she got closer, she could feel his eyes upon her and looked up. He was indeed staring, but staring coldly. His arms were crossed in front of him in a severe posture, his mouth firmly set. He was like a statue in his own garden- unmoving, stony in the otherwise lush environment. Sarah found it unsettling and dropped her eyes away from him and noticed rows of red roses lining the low wall that bordered the other half of the courtyard. She didn't know why, but she found the roses peculiar, and it wasn't just because their color was so incredibly intense and vivid, but as she got closer, she noticed their petals seemed to move. As she approached the Goblin King, it became clear- the roses were bleeding. Blood rolled off of the petals in heady drops and fell to the ground, instantly absorbed into the soil and undoubtedly into their roots. Were they carnivorous or cannibals? Sarah was fascinated and disturbed all at once before suddenly stopping herself before she walked straight into the thing she'd been walking towards to begin with. Sarah stood stock still and slowly raised her head. She found herself nose to nose with Jareth, the man who was the most extraordinary ornament in his own garden. For a brief moment, he seemed timeless.
His eyes narrowed as they met hers, and in response Sarah's eyes involuntarily widened. Silence pervaded the courtyard and a seemingly perfect breeze blew, sending a ripple through the grass and a gentle tousle through Sarah's dark hair. Sarah didn't look away. She kept reminding herself that this was her dream, after all. Even if she didn't cause this particular dream to happen, she was still in it, making it at least somewhat hers. Her eyes flickered back and forth between either one of his, reminding her of their discordiance. Sarah sighed and slightly pursed her lips.
"Well….aren't you going to say something?" She raised her eyebrows expectantly and waited, watching the Goblin King's face intently. His jaw seemed to clench for a moment, but still there was silence as he glared down at her. Sarah slowly dropped one of her brows to leave the other raised and took a step back.
"If you have nothing to say…I suppose I'll be on my way," she said. The bleeding roses behind Jareth continued to shed drops as Sarah scanned the courtyard for an exit and spotted a door ajar in the side of a spire that seemed to reach even above the high garden. She slowly turned towards the door and began to casually walk toward it. As her hand reached for the handle, it slammed shut with an unsettling bang. Sarah gasped in surprise and turned her head to shoot an angry look at the only person possibly responsible, only to find him five steps behind her, in the same pose as before. Sarah was beginning to lose her nerve. She had no memory of him ever remaining this silent for so long, or of looking so seriously as he did before her now, that she was unsure what to do with her only obvious avenue of escape cut off. Sarah backed against the door and tried pushing against it to no avail. It was solid, and she was feeling more and more like a cornered animal with no way out as she looked from side to side.
"The roses…" Jareth began.
Sarah's eyes seemed to audibly snap back in front of her when he spoke, the previous silence and events making her hang suddenly upon his every word.
"…do they fascinate you?" he finished, eyes still narrowed and intensely focused upon Sarah. Sarah frowned and relaxed almost imperceptibly.
"Only in as much as they bleed. I mean, they're bleeding flowers. When do you ever see something like that?" she rambled out all at once. Sarah thought she saw the corner of the King's mouth twitch up ever so slightly.
"Sarah…" he began, almost chidingly.
"Yes?" she responded quickly.
"You are running out of time," he said almost matter-of-factly, raising his head. His face relaxed some as a frown took over from his previous stony expression.
Sarah's eyes narrowed. "You said that last time. I don't understand what you mean. There's plenty of time. See?" she said, pointing up to the sun as it shone brightly overhead. Jareth shook his head and turned around easily, making his way to the rose bed. Sarah followed before she realized she was following- that was often the problem with dreams- and watched as Jareth knelt down to cup one of the roses in his hand. The blood continued to roll off the petals slowly and fell into his palm, before rolling and falling once more to the ground. Sarah found herself rather fixated upon the scene. She found it lovely and disturbing all at once.
"Do you know why these flowers seem to grow more beautiful every time you lay eyes upon them?" he said, interrupting her reverie.
"No," Sarah replied rather dumbly as she tried to pull her eyes away from the roses to look at Jareth.
"These roses are sewn with the blood of the plant that created their seeds. They will only grow and flourish in that selfsame blood that birthed them, and the story goes that with every passing moment, the mother plant's children cry tears of blood for its sacrifice to raise them up into the sun. The blood rolls down its petals, as you can see, and falls back down onto the earth to be absorbed back up through its roots, purified, and dispelled, all over again. With every purification of what it previously shed, the roses taken on a seemingly more magnificent sheen, its beauty always surpassing that which surpassed before."
Sarah's brows raised in a dazed surprise at the story as Jareth removed his hand from the rose. He continued to watch it seep and licked discretely at what remained on his hand.
"Wow," she said lamely, blinking a few times to try and come back to herself as she swore she saw the rose suddenly shimmer as it went through its changes.
"I'm not sure if 'wow' is the choicest of words, but it's suitable enough," he replied, and pulled a small knife from his jacket pocket. Sarah noticed the gleam of the metal long enough to rip her eyes away from the sight of the petals and look at Jareth who was slowly wiping the blade on his sleeve.
"There have been stories of men and women who have wasted away before one of these roses, abhorrent to miss a single moment of their perpetual transformation," he continued, and kneeled down upon the ground to lightly touch the one he had held before.
"They feel the rose to be some sort of eternal thing, yet mortal- lasting only so long as they look at it, but continuous since it would exist outside of their viewing. They develop an irrational attachment, as if the flower still living outside of their gaze, as it is meant to do, would make the plant something like a cheating lover to the people who would watch it. What they do not realize is…" Jareth paused, and pulled out the knife again. Taking it firmly in hand, he ripped down against the base of its stem in one quick jerking motion, severing it from the ground and its supply of blood. He stuck the knife into the ground just before the flower bed and rose to his feet, carrying the crimson flower, and turned to Sarah who stood open-mouthed in shock at the destruction of such an incredible plant.
"What they do not realize," Jareth began again, placing the rose gently into Sarah's two outstretched hands, "Is that continuously seeping and purifying over and over and over again isn't making the flower more beautiful…."
Suddenly the flower began to tremble in the palms of Sarah's hands, before inwardly imploding and liquifying all over her fingers. Sarah's natural reaction was to be thoroughly disgusted, and she was as she tried to get the gloopy flower guts to slide off of her hands and on to the ground without wiping them on herself.
"….The process is making them hollow. What one sees isn't the revelation of more and more beauty, but more and more into the rose itself- literally. When the roses are newly grown, they appear coarse and dull, like an ordinary rose, but it is then that they are their sturdiest. As they purify the blood that gives them such beauty, the trade-off is often their lives- they cannot survive even as a cutting after awhile. They are rooted. They cannot leave the bed without dying."
Jareth watched Sarah struggle with the remainder of the thick liquid on her hands and pulled a small handkerchief from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She took it gratefully and began to get the last of it off of her hands.
"There is an upside to this tale, however," he began. "The upside is that, if well planned, the severed flower can be used to nurture its offspring and begin a new lifecycle. Even so, these flowers are rare for two reasons- one, that no one can ever usually bear cutting, or witnessing the cutting, of these roses they've invested so much time into staring at, and two, because people are rarely good at timing the cuts so as to not waste the blood of the mother plant," he said with a sly smile.
"Why can't they cut the flowers to make more if it means that they'd even get one of their own to look at forever?" Sarah asked, folding the soiled handkerchief. Jareth took it from her gingerly and tossed it nonchalantly at the base of the flower bed.
"Well, why do you think? What do you think of the roses now, knowing what you know and seeing what you've seen?" he asked.
Sarah frowned and turned her eyes once more to the eerily shifting roses. As she watched them, for some reason she could no longer immerse herself in their cycle as she did before.
"I don't understand…" she said, looking up curiously at Jareth.
Jareth grinned at her and picked up his knife and the handkerchief, now both miraculously clean, from the rose bed and put them away into a pocket.
"Knowledge does strange things to alter one's perception. I believe the humans have a saying- 'Ignorance is bliss' or some rubbish? Anyway, there's some truth to that, although it's not always the case by any means."
He stepped away from the roses and began to walk towards Sarah who found it easy to look away from the flowers and back to Jareth. "So…what's the point of telling me the story and showing me all that then?"
Jareth raised his brows. "Reason? Does there have to be a reason to share something interesting?"
Sarah frowned. "No, I suppose not. But you're not the type of person to give something away for free."
"That is true," Jareth agreed, moving to stand in front of her. "It's because the roses, their lives, are a metaphor."
"A metaphor for what?" she asked, becoming oddly suspicious of the Goblin king once more.
"A metaphor for a girl who experienced despair, who turned that despair into art, who turned the art into a crime, who challenged the crime for a trip through my Labyrinth, and who used my Labyrinth to survive and live a normal life until an egregious accident just days before the 26th year of her life rendered her yet another situation to mold but this time with the most daunting choice yet," he said without missing a beat, his eyes slowly narrowing anew. Sarah stood in stock still silence as she looked up at him and listened, unsure of how she should be reacting to what he was suggesting.
"Are you saying….." she began, swallowing slowly. "Are you saying that just because the clocks here, the clocks on that day, had twenty-six hours that just because my birthday also happens to be my twenty-sixth that I'm going to die?" she finished with something of a squeak.
Jareth shook his head and took a step towards her. He raised his arms and put his hands on her shoulders. "No," he said. "I'm saying that because of this accident, you are destined to die, but that because it falls on this number, out of all the numbers in the universe, that you have a unique opportunity to challenge destiny, just as you have everything else, and survive in spite of it."
Sarah's eyes began to water with tears as she looked up at Jareth. "How? What would it take to do that?" she said, almost pleadingly.
Jareth paused and took a breath. He looked around himself for a moment before looking back at Sarah who was fighting to hold back a storm of emotion at what she had just discovered and witnessed in such a short span of time.
"Sarah…" he began. "If you want to survive, you must take back what you said to me the last time we met. That day when you stood in the ruins of my castle and declared yourself my equal, that I had no sway over you. You must rescind that declaration. Only then do you stand a chance to–"
Sarah's face suddenly changed to anger as she stepped out of Jareth's reach and backed away from him. "No," she interrupted. "No, I can't do that."
Jareth stood there, arms outstretched where they were, before dropping them back down to his sides again. His face took on the dark, icy sheen it had when she first arrived in the courtyard as he raised his eyes to look at her, except this time his gaze was met with one of Sarah's own.
"You would prefer to die then?" he said quietly, his question coming out as more of a statement than a question.
"I would prefer to live," she said firmly.
"And saving your life by taking back an ill-said statement isn't living?" he said coldly, his brow twitching slightly.
"I've seen your world…what it can and cannot be…and there is no living there," she replied bitterly.
Jareth laughed softly once, then laughed softly again, before throwing his head back and laughing in earnest. Sarah watched this display with morbid fascination. If she weren't already concerned with saving herself, she might've been frightened by the strange display, the sudden shifts in mood, but she couldn't be bothered with that. She needed to find a way out, and a way to speak to the doctors again. He was wrong. She wasn't dying. Sure, it felt like death in all those casts and braces, but they were only temporary. It couldn't possibly be killing her, right?
Jareth composed himself and stood there smiling lopsidedly at Sarah before evening out his expression to something more amicable.
"Sarah, what will you do if you go back and the doctors tell you exactly what I have? That you're dying, irreversibly, and that there's nothing they can do? Will you still avoid me then? Come, you're a smart enough girl, no, a grown woman now, to see the smarter choice when it's presented in front of you. Death, or life?"
He seemed to be cajoling her, prodding her with a doom that seemed not only impossible to her but even vaguely cliché. Was this the best he could come up with? Sarah grinned, and her sudden change in expression seemed to throw Jareth off for a moment.
"The thought of accepting your offer, of handing myself over in surrender for all those years ago, even if it means I might live…..it sickens me," she said with a vicious smirk. All expression dropped from Jareth's face, the color draining from it, when she realized that it wasn't just his face that was losing color, but the grass, the roses, and the sky and sun as well.
Jareth jolted forward. "No! NO! Not yet! I'm not finished speaking with her yet!" he cried as light flooded Sarah's face, and as she opened her eyes, she was greeted with the familiar sight of nurses in blue scrubs hovering around her as she awoke.
"Glad to have you back with us, Miss Williams!" one of them said. "We'll have you back to your room soon!"
Sarah smiled, or tried to smile, as she stared up at the ceiling and began counting the tiles, thinking of nothing but the numbers as she tried to clear her head.
〜≠〜
When she arrived back in her hospital room, she was greeted by not only her father and step-mother, but this time her little brother Toby as well. They fawned over her almost instantaneously and it brought tears to Sarah's eyes. Her family seemed a wreck, her father appeared to have been crying, and Karen had remnants of black left over on her cheeks that she hadn't managed to wipe away well enough. They held her hand, Toby told Sarah a short story about how his classes had been, and soon the doctor was in the room with them. Silence.
Everything seemed to fall into a blurry haze to Sarah. The doctor had said that she had lapsed into a sudden attack that morning, that even her heart had stopped for awhile, and that they had deemed it necessary to put her into immediate surgery. They had found hemorrhaging in her brain, a slow leaking of blood that had been caused by the accident and was too small for them to see upon their first examinations. The doctor explained how this sort of thing was terminal. It was affecting Sarah's faculties. She could not survive it for much longer and there was nothing they could do due to its location. Suddenly Sarah heard weeping. She could'nt tell where it was coming from, but none the less she tried to comfort them, saying not to cry, that it would be alright, but even after saying that, she couldn't think of why she was saying it.
The room around her was spinning. She saw the colors of the walls merging with the colors of the people standing around her, of the people who came in and out, of the chairs and table, and of the tall plant in the corner. They all became daubs of color in what was increasingly a kaleidoscope vision. She didn't know why she was seeing these things, but it seemed pleasant enough. Suddenly the colors began to fade to drab, and she could feel herself reaching out, grasping, trying to hold on to even the blur of it all, when in the middle of the room stood a man with light blond hair and mismatched eyes. She knew him, but she wasn't thinking like she should be.
"Will you still die here, in spite of me?" he said. Sarah tried to answer him, but couldn't.
"Sarah Williams," the man declared. He stood in the middle of the haze as it slowly but surely began to die down no matter how hard she tried to hang onto it.
"Sarah Williams!" he said again. "Do you want to live?"
Sarah paused. Live? What could living possibly have to do with anything? She could feel that old darkness from before pulling at her, the swimming oblivion, and she smiled slightly as she remembered the freedom of it.
"Do you want to live to see another day?" he said, more insistently.
Her eyes snapped back to the figure, his face now contorted in a desperation that might've matched her own moments ago. She looked to her side and could make out the vague figure of another man somewhere beside her. Her father, yes, and her younger brother, too, and a step mother.
"Yes, remember them, Sarah. Hold onto them."
Sarah closed her eyes, and as she did, a flood of memories, of childhood, adolescence, and her new adulthood flowed through her, and she felt a tear fall down against her temple.
"Do you want to live to see another day, Sarah Williams?"
Sarah could smell the wet morning dew on the grass, the fur of her old dog, her childhood home, her current home. She raised a hand to wipe away the tears from her face and sighed. "Yes," she said softly. As she looked down at her ephemeral hand, her fingers were soaked with her tears, but there was something strange about it. Her tears were red.
"So be it," the man said, and, as he bowed his head, she was gone.
So we're finally getting into the good stuff! Please forgive the late update- I've had to unexpectedly begin moving house so things have been a bit hectic for me in the past couple weeks. Things have somewhat calmed down again, though, so hopefully I can get back to regular weekly updates. If things come up, you can always check my profile page for goings on with updates or lack thereof.
Please leave a review and let me know what you thought of chapter three! Thanks again to my medical consultant Jinx1764! See everyone at chapter 4!
~KS