They hadn't been sleeping long. Sarah could tell by the golden light of the just-falling sun and the exhaustion that still weighted her bones. Thilly's coughing had woken her as well as the rest of the group, however, and by the vicious sounds the Changeling girl's lungs were making they all knew no more sleep would be had that evening.
Sarah moved to kneel beside Thilly, whose eyelids were partially opened though her eyes rolled back into her skull. She placed her palm on the girl's forehead, unsure of what the base temperature for a Changeling was but knowing that the cold, clammy skin wasn't anything close to normal. Thilly's breathing between coughs was short and raspy and she mumbled nonsense words in a whispery, fevered voice.
"Is she okay?" Sarah jumped as Toby appeared beside her, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He managed to look annoyed (as a kid his age would be, of course) as well as worried (as a kid his nature would be) when he looked from Thilly to Sarah and back again.
The others of the group all moved to crowd around the sickly girl, staring silently as each one tried to figure out what to do next.
"We can't move her, milady," Didymus spoke up. "She is far too ill."
"We can't just leave her here, neither," Hoggle snapped.
"I am not saying we do such a thing! It is a simple matter of –"
Sarah held up a hand, "We stick to the plan. We get us all out of the Labyrinth—"
"—But!"
"No!" Sarah rubbed the palms of her hands on her jeans, a worried movement that also helped remove her of the memory of Thilly's cold, cold skin. "No one here will help her, don't you understand? Jareth will throw her in the dungeon, or kill her himself – kill all of you! We have to get her out of the Labyrinth. There has to be another city nearby. They'll have doctors there… or something like doctors. I'm sure of it."
Sarah swallowed, her mouth dry and her heart thudding in her chest. There was something in her that knew she needed to stay, and something else that knew it was the worst thing she could do. She was warring with her own emotions and thoughts in a way that she didn't know how to handle and wasn't even sure she could. Why couldn't she just make up her mind? Why were these decisions so difficult? She couldn't even blame it on the Labyrinth, or Jareth, or the Underground in general because the decisions she made the last time she was here were the easiest of her life. Her goals then were clear and simple, and she wished so very much that she could have that clarity now. More was on the line than her baby brother's fate as a goblin prince… This was a life, multiple lives, which she was responsible for.
Deciding that action was the best action, Sarah motioned at Thilly.
"Ludo, can you pick her up?"
The large beast growled and did a half-body nod. Sarah ran her tongue across her lips nervously, trying to think of what else needed to be done. She'd been a half-hearted girl scout a lifetime ago, but all the childish Wilderness Survival crap she'd learned as a kid didn't help much here. She didn't know any of the plants in this world, and even if she did she didn't know the biological makeup of Changelings and whether or not a plant that might help a human would work the same on Thilly.
Sarah, she ruefully realized, really didn't know a whole hell of a lot.
Still, she watched Ludo bend down to pick up the still-unconscious Thilly and started to pack up the makeshift camp they'd made. The faster they got away from the Goblin City and into a realm not ruled by Jareth, the better. She was sure there were other cities out there (And the "Sarah doesn't know much" epiphany should be stubbornly and specifically ignored here? A little voice in the back of Sarah's mind mocked. Sarah felt a little turn in her stomach when she realized that the voice was Jareth's) with doctors that could help Thilly, and inns to provide shelter for the rest of them until they could all get on their feet.
And get you home? The voice chimed in again.
Sarah grimaced, trying her best to ignore that irritating corner of her conscience. She stuffed Toby's blanket into his back a bit more violently than she should have, and her little brother looked at her with worried, sleepy eyes.
"Are you mad at something?" he asked. Sarah sighed.
"No, Toby. Just worried."
She swung his pack and her own onto her shoulder and took the young boy by the hand. Ludo carried Thilly more delicately than one would think capable of such a lumbering, monstrous creature, but Sarah was thoroughly unsurprised. Ludo was possibly the most gentle being Sarah had ever met, and seeing him suddenly shot a sensation of warmth and nostalgia through her that made her eyes tear up and a lump to form in her throat. One by one, each of the traveling party began to walk forward and one by one Sarah remembered what she loved about all of them.
Ludo, the gentle giant.
Hoggle, the gruffly endearing one.
Sir Didymus, the honorable knight.
Thilly, the delicate doe.
The sudden onset of good feelings, knotted up with worry and fear for the health of her newest friend, stopped Sarah in her tracks. Toby tugged on her hand and she started walking again, quickly wiping her face on her sleeve before he saw her.
Ludo informed them that he'd been listening to the rocks, and he thought he got a reasonable answer to where they should head next (though he told the group this in much fewer words). Sarah trusted him – she had little else choice in the matter – but they didn't get far before the tell-tale clink, clink, clink sound of crystal hitting solid objects met their ears. Sarah stopped and watched as a round, clear orb fell from one of the trees that they'd taken shelter under. It rolled until it was about a foot or two away from the group – who all stopped as well, everyone quite aware of what the crystals meant – and then stilled.
Ever the master of slight-of-hand and distractions, Jareth did not appear near the crystal itself, but under the tree from which it fell. Sarah gulped, her mouth gone dry. She wanted to say something to break the shocked silence that had overtaken the group of friends, but her mind had gone entirely blank.
Jareth, though, never missed an opportunity to pull focus as much as possible. He spoke to them without moving from his position leaning against the tree.
"I've warned you, Sarah," he said softly. "Multiple times. I've told you that moving forward would mean certain death for one of your friends."
Sarah, bristling with anger, took a step forward. She let go of Toby's hand, her own fist clenching at her side as if she was about to swing at the Goblin King himself.
"Then you did do this to Thilly? Just to get me to turn around?"
"I did no such thing," he snapped.
"You've practically admitted it!"
Jareth finally moved away from the tree, toward Sarah. Sarah felt a hand pulling at the clothes on her back and turned to see Hoggle there, brimming with anger but still trying to keep Sarah from acting one her own emotions.
"Once again, you're not listening to me," said Jareth, exasperated. "I give you a warning and you take it as a threat! It's no wonder we're always opposing one another. There's a severe lack of communication going on here, Sarah."
Rolling her eyes, Sarah huffed, "Oh, shut up."
"Your friend… Thilly, is it?" Jareth, much to Hoggles surprise, looked to him for confirmation. The dwarf nodded, confused. "Is a Changeling. She is a creature of the Goblin City, and of no other realm. Her life force is entwined with the city – it's been that way since the Changelings began. They're not meant to leave, Sarah."
Stunned, Sarah looked at the sleeping form of Thilly, still held gently across Ludo's arms. She had gotten much worse as they got further and further away from the city. And she did talk about the fact that Changelings never left… Perhaps the reason was that they legitimately couldn't leave, for risk of death if they did. Sarah chewed on her lip, wracked with a new piled of guilt for enticing Thilly away from the city…
"I can said her back," Jareth cut into Sarah's thoughts. His voice was calm and quiet, and she couldn't detect a hint of malice in his tone, but all of her instincts told her to fight against him…
She turned from Jareth, to Thilly, and back again. Sarah cast a glance at Hoggle, whose eyes betrayed that he was just as torn in the matter as she was, and who had probably already made the connection between Thilly's illness and their distance from the city as well.
Almost without conscious thought, Sarah found herself nodding to Jareth. The Goblin King tilted his head in acknowledgment and held out his hand. He gave a little twist, and a crystal appeared, floated away from his fingertips, and toward Thilly. When it touched the Changeling girl it started to expand.
"Ludo, let her go," Sarah said softly, knowing that the giant wouldn't do so without Sarah's permission. "Please."
Ludo stepped back and the crystal – now looking more like an iridescent bubble – wrapped entirely around Thilly's body, levitating her in mid air. It floated up, up, up and off to the castle, gentle as a soap bubble on a light spring day.
"She'll stay asleep until she's safely deposited in her quarters," Jareth said. Everyone turned back to him, their attentions having been on the floating form of Thilly. Jareth smirked, "Wouldn't want to surprise the girl, her waking up in the middle of the air."
Sarah shuffled her feet, at a loss for words. She knew she should thank Jareth, but the words stuck in her mind and refused to be spoken. Jareth's eyes were sharp on her, and he seemed to know what it was that was warring inside her.
"Why must you act this way, Sarah?" he asked.
Sarah snapped, going from gratitude to anger in a heartbeat. "You've given me no choice!"
"I've given you all the choices in the world! I wasn't lying when I told you during your last visit that I'd nearly broken myself into pieces trying to please you. Why do you think I was so angry when you threw it all away?"
"Because you're selfish and cruel and you were mad that I didn't fall for your little games." Sarah ignored the part of her that told her she sounded like a spoiled little brat with that last sentence. She also ignored the part of her that told her she was acting like a spoiled little brat, with her arms crossed stubbornly across her chest and her face contorted into a sneer.
Jareth snorted – it was very unbecoming of a king, but he didn't seem to care at the moment. "You would know that description fairly well, don't you think?"
Sarah let out a frustrated growl, her hands moving to pull at her hair. "I'm nothing like you!" she screamed. "Stop saying that I am! Stop tormenting me, stop tricking me, stop, stop, just stop! I just want to-"
Sarah cut herself short, but Jareth finished her sentence for her:
"Go home?"
She suddenly knew that, to speak those words, it wouldn't be the truth. She hated her home. She hated the fact that she had no real friends there. She hated how her father and stepmother ignored Toby, a cycle that was apparently endless from Sarah's experience. She hated the ugliness of her world, the lack of magic, the lack of exploration, the dull, dull grayness of it all. She hated it, hated it, hated it. Still…
"Yes," she lied.
Expression turning angry and disbelieving, Jareth stepped closer to Sarah. She felt more than saw her friends tense, ready to move to her rescue if Jareth attacked (though what they could do to a man who could re-order time was a question none of them really asked). He didn't raise a hand to her, though. He merely looked at her, imploring her to be truthful to the both of them.
"You are not the woman you intended to be when you left here, Sarah," he said, voice soft as his eyes softened as well. "You spurned me for dreams and desires you thought were more close to reality – a career as an actress, a friend, simply living a normal life like every other person in that sickly world of yours. But you failed, in every endeavor you set yourself upon. Nothing was good enough, nothing quite fit, nothing lived up to your surprisingly low expectations, and you were just as sick of it all as you were when you were fifteen years old. You just didn't have the courage to admit it.
Why can't you just admit it? Why can't you just admit that you were happier here, with me, with your friends? Why is it so difficult for you to concede that you never belonged in that world, that you truly belong here?"
"Because I know this place," she practically shouted. Her eyes shifted downward, on her feet. She couldn't meet Jareth's gaze. Sarah sniffled fiercely, tears of anger and desperation pouring down her face as if a dam had broken and freed them. "This is the place where nothing is what it seems, remember? You sang me a love song… You told me that, that you'd always be with me, you'd always love me, and that was a lie. A trap. It wasn't what it seemed, it couldn't be, because if it was it would defy everything this world was about."
Sarah spoke before comprehending the words she was saying, instinctively saying the things that she'd been feeling all this time but had been keeping hidden from herself with lies and… fear? Sarah nodded to herself, no doubt looking utterly mad to those around her but she didn't really care.
The truth choked her and it took her several aborted tries before she could speak the rest of her confession:
"I loved you," she said. Her voice broke on the last word, but she ignored it. "I loved this place. I loved all of it, all the miserable little goblins and the fear and the terrible Labyrinth and the danger. I loved trying to meet the challenges that you set for me… But I knew this place too well. I knew that whatever I was feeling about it, it wasn't real. It couldn't be."
She met Jareth's eyes for the first time since her cascade of a speech had begun and refused to acknowledge the tears that fell down her cheeks.
"It was too perfect for me," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I figured it out at the end. Nothing is what it seems. I finally understood what that really meant…"
Jareth looked at Sarah, his expression a mixture of confusion and sadness, and a lingering trace of bitterness for the woman he'd offered dreams and from whom he'd gotten rejection in return. The woman who had angered him, irritated him, challenged him to think faster, better, to use every trick up his sleeve and others he had to make up on the spot. He was a being of ultimate power in this world, the ability to shape reality as he wished, and he'd wished to do so. For her. He would have done anything for her, if she'd let him.
"You were wrong," he said. "I can't blame you for it. You were provided with false information."
Jareth moved to stand in front of Sarah, his hands gripping her shoulders lightly. She didn't flinch away from the touch, but her eyes directed toward the ground as she sniffed, streaks of tears still running down her face. She was angry at herself for losing it like this in front of her friends, in front of Toby.
"I was wrong as well," Jareth muttered. He still wasn't quite used to admitting fault. "I'd never met anyone like you, Sarah. I didn't know then, but I know now…" He leaned down in an attempt to catch her eyes, "I love you."
"I love you too," Sarah said. The present tense made all the difference.
Jareth cupped Sarah's cheek, her eyes closed at the touch and a final tear fell. He wiped it away with his thumb, and Sarah looked up at him.
"But what do we do now?" she whispered.
The End.
Okay, so the ending is a bit ambiguous. This was one of the faults I met when I decided to finish this story: I hadn't exactly put a lot of believable romance into it. By chapter 20, it was still obvious that Sarah and Jareth really disliked/were irritated by each other and Jareth had done some pretty awful things that would be hard to forget and Sarah spent the whole story acting like a complete twit to him and her feelings about him, with only a few tiny instances of a kiss or self-admittance of love. At the time I began the story up until the last chapter I wrote two years ago, I didn't know how to thread romance through the story that would make a big "They kiss and wedding bells chime" ending conceivable, so it had to be a sort of forced confession out of the both of them. If I ever get the time to re-write this story, that is definitely the number one thing I plan on fixing. Until then, it's really up to the reader to decide if Sarah and Jareth put aside their favorite hobbies of mentally torturing one another and sniping at each other and had a happy ending, or if Sarah took Toby back to their world and tried to forget about the Underground all over again.
Also, uh, I probably should do an epilogue about Thilly but: she gets better, Jareth wasn't tricking them and he actually saved her life and was telling the truth about the Changelings not being able to leave the Goblin City and she is either a) Sarah's maid of honor at the Jareth-Sarah wedding in six months, or b) waves good-bye to Sarah from her infirmary bed as Jareth regrettably sends Sarah and Toby back to "Aboveground" when Sarah decides to reject him a second time. Choose your own ending! Fun!
Once again, thank you everybody for reading. You have no idea what your comments/favorites/alert-adds mean to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.