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Chapter 12

Jareth watched Sarah, her image and those of her two friends captured within a crystal ball. It really did boggle his mind. How could a girl who could avoid all of Jareth's attempts to prevent her success, navigate a near-impossible Labyrinth and finish said labyrinth in less than thirteen hours get lost trying to find a room that was only a few hallways away? And she really was lost – almost eight halls and three floors away from anything that remotely connected to Toby…

She knew she was on the same floor of the Castle as Toby, so why did Sarah bother going up not one but three flights of stairs? The castle changed on occasion, sprouted new corridors and rooms, switched rooms around and dissolved staircases, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the things the Labyrinth was capable of…

"Perhaps she'd just gotten lucky in the Labyrinth," Jareth muttered to himself.

He sat alone in the Tower Room, his elbow resting on the arm of his dark throne and his chin resting on his palm while he held the crystal in the other hand. He was all the image of bored amusement as he watched Sarah take wrong turn after wrong turn, but in truth he was bubbling with a mixture of dread and excitement.

If Sarah didn't make it to Toby, he had nothing to worry about as far as his heir's escape went. If Sarah didn't succeed tonight she wouldn't get another chance to try – Jareth would send her home, and though Toby would cry and scream for a while Jareth was sure he'd get over it eventually. A few new toys, maybe a new set of clothes like those dreadful ones he arrived in, and Prince Toby would be just fine again…

But, deep down, Jareth knew he didn't want to send Sarah away. He had the belief that it was her destiny to be his queen, and his destiny to have her. He knew she felt the same if she'd just look into herself, but as Jareth couldn't even bring himself to admit his own feelings out loud, it was unfair for him to expect Sarah to be able to.

No, he'd just have to let things play out. What's to happen will happen, and if he didn't interfere, if he just pretended he didn't know and left Sarah to her wanderings he couldn't say later that he made the wrong choice. He'd watch her, of course, but he wouldn't stop her.

Jareth rotated the crystal balanced on his fingertips and the polished, iridescent surface glinted in the bright lavender-tinted moonlight. He was an observer, a spectator, and he wouldn't interfere with… destiny.

For now.

Sarah turned down another hallway and still, she couldn't find the little golden bell. It was something she remembered from Toby's corridor – on the wall opposite his door was a little golden bell that he used to ring the servant when he wanted something, and Sarah was trying to use the knowledge as a marker for Toby's room. The only problem with that, however, was that Sarah didn't have a marker to lead to her marker and therefore she couldn't find a thing.

"Uh… Sarah, as much as I like your little journeys, I… don't think this one's goin' too well," Hoggle whispered gruffly as Sarah stopped in front of a large wooden door.

But Sarah wasn't paying attention to her friend just then. There was something about the door that seemed familiar, like she'd seen it before, and anything familiar could possibly be a way to Toby. She reached for the handle, not expecting it to open but just out of curiosity, and tugged. To her surprise, the door opened slowly with a low, ancient-sounding creak.

Before she stepped into the room, she remembered Hoggle had said something and answered with a vague, half-hearted, "What? I'm sorry, Hoggle, did you say anything?"

Hoggle sighed and didn't respond, also curious as to what was behind the door. Sarah squinted into the darkness but couldn't see anything, so she adjusted her stance and tried to focus. Just as she was about to shrug and close the door, however, several wall sconces whooshed alive with yellow flames and illuminated a room that Sarah could never forget.

A hundred stone staircases that went every which way. Up, down, sideways, left, right, and no where at all. It was the last room in her journey to find Toby and the last room in which she'd seen Jareth five years ago. It was also the room where she'd rejected him, and she remembered quite clearly the sensation of it falling apart around her… So how was it here now? Nothing in the castle was familiar to her, nothing was like it'd been five years ago, so why was this room different? Or rather, why was it the same?

"Why did he rebuild it?" Sarah whispered. Hoggle and Thilly had followed her into the room and they stood staring at the haphazard walkways with just as much awe as Sarah did, but as neither of them had seen the mystifying room before, she expected that their thoughts were much different from hers.

Though Sarah was unnerved by the sight of the Staircase Room, she knew that it shouldn't be such a big deal. She'd seen the Labyrinth, she'd seen Hoggle, she'd even seen Jareth, but there was something about seeing this room that made her travels five years ago so… real.

In truth, wasn't the staircases that uneased her, though just looking at them made her feel sick and dizzy, but it was what was just beyond those staircases - a separate hallway, with an arch and a window. Sarah could just see it, just beyond all the stone steps, even in the flickering light of the wall sconces. That room - if it could be called a room, for it was little more than a platform, really - was the place where she could've been given her dreams, she could've given in to her dreams. She could've stayed with Toby and her friends, she could've married Jareth and lived in a world of magic and make believe, her own little fairytale. She could have escaped that life she'd thought was so terrible, that horrible thing she'd labeled as reality...

But she didn't choose that. She chose her brother, chose to return to her previous life, no matter how much she'd said she'd hated it. She'd chosen to grow up, she'd discarded her dreams and her childhood flights of fancy and the last thing she'd seen in the Underground was Jareth's disappointed face as her fairytale world came crashing down around her.

"Sarah, I'm not so sure about this," Thilly whimpered, pulling Sarah away from her thoughts. She motioned for Hoggle and Thilly to leave and hastily shut the door behind her, locking away the unsettling sight behind the large wooden door.

Hoggle rolled his eyes, thoroughly annoyed with Thilly's meekness, and Sarah had an excuse to not think about the Staircase Room or the room just beyond it as she returned to navigating the halls.

"You're not sure about anythin'," Hoggle said sourly to Thilly.

Sarah looked out of one of the small, arched windows that dotted the outer corridors of the castle. She remembered Toby's room didn't face the Goblin City, and that the view was pretty unique when compared to any other she'd seen. The view from this window was similar to the one from Toby's.

"Right… So, we'll just go down… two floors? Three? Yes, three floors, and we should be…" Sarah was muttering to herself.

Both Thilly and Hoggle let out a tired groan, and Sarah looked at them consciously for the first time in about an hour, trying to seem self-assured and apparently failing.

"No, no guys – two… er… three floors, and we should be there. Just as long as we remember to turn… right-"

"-left, Sarah."

"Left. Right, thanks Hoggle. As long as we remember to turn left, we'll be there in no time, and then we'll use my escape plan and we'll be out of this dreadful castle faster than you can say 'Oh, well what a nice sky!'"

"I doubt it."

"Quiet, Hoggle. You're being bad for morale."

Hoggle snorted derisively, "Oh, I'm bad for morale and Sunshine here's the one snifflin' an' sobbin' every ten steps."

Thilly stopped mid-stride and stamped her foot, glaring hurtfully at Hoggle. "Oh, really! I've been perfectly nice to you, I offered you tea when you knocked on my door, I welcomed you into my home, and this is how you treat me!?"

"Well, I never wanted no tea an' it's no big deal to be welcomed by a Changeling. You lot live off a' bein' nice an' all that. If you'd've been rude I expect you'd've burst inta' flames or somethin'."

Sarah whistled sharply, cutting off Thilly's reply, and looked at them both with a pointed expression. When they both looked sheepishly to the floor, Sarah smiled pleasantly and turned back around. She motioned for them to follow her and they walked steadily and quietly towards the stairs, with neither Sarah muttering about directions nor Thilly and Hoggle bickering loudly at each other.

She could still hear them both bickering quietly behind her though, their voices low, urgent hisses punctuated by flabbergasted gasps of disbelief from one about something the other had said. Sarah still tried her best to recount the directions to Toby's room, confused as to how she'd gotten herself lost in the first place… Really, she'd defeated the Labyrinth for goodness sakes! She should've been able to find a bedroom.

As they started down the first staircase Sarah caught a glimpse of the moon outside one of the small arched windows. The moon was just out of range, not quite high enough to show that it was midnight but still frightfully high. She had about an hour to get to Toby before her window of opportunity was slammed shut forever, and the feeling of being on a time limit to save her brother brought back unpleasant memories that were only heightened by the re-visit to the Staircase Room.

The strange difference this time, however, was that Jareth wasn't the one who had set the time limit. Sarah was.

Roughly four hours later, Jareth was awakened in his chair by a loud, booming sound of alarm. He could hear footsteps outside the door and was surprised into complete wakefulness as a Changeling rushed into the room without bothering to knock. Due to the initial urgency of the situation, Jareth ignored this uncharacteristic behavior and listened to what the Changeling had to say.

"Sorry, Your Majesty, sir, but… But the Prince, he's missing!" and before Jareth could say anything in reaction, the servant rushed out of the room once again.

It appeared that Sarah, for the second time, had defeated the odds and succeeded in rescuing Toby. Jareth picked up the crystal that still rested in his grasp and watched as it focused lazily onto Sarah's worried face. It panned out just a little and Jareth could see, rested against her shoulder, the sleeping form of Toby, wrapped in a thick goose-down blanket.

The image began to falter and Jareth knew that he shouldn't have spent so much energy on watching Sarah try to find Toby's room, or on his little trick lighting the candles in the Staircase Room. Now that dawn was approaching, his leftover power wouldn't be nearly enough to watch Sarah as closely as he wanted to.

He'd just have to find her again once he'd rested a bit more. It would be a challenge if he didn't have an idea of where she was in the first place, of course, but it would be a worthwhile one as long as the eventual outcome was to his favor… And he would make sure of that. He was the Goblin King, after all, and he had an entire world at his command – one little girl couldn't be that much trouble.