"I can't believe you're really leaving us," Karen sniffed. She pulled a dainty handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped the corners of her eyes.

"I'm not leaving the country," Sarah replied, laying a comforting hand on her stepmother's shoulder. "It's just in the city."

"Yes, but it's the city," argued Karen. "New York City! How will you manage there on your own?"

Sarah laughed as she dropped another load of books into the shipping crate. "I'll manage," she said. "And if I need you for anything I'll call."

That seemed to satisfy her stepmother who went back to rummaging through the piles of clothes pulled from the bottom of Sarah's closet. Karen had been fine with the idea of Sarah transferring to NYU until she'd actually begun the process of moving her things out. The sight of Sarah books and belongings being packed away in crates and loaded into the family van had seemed to shock her into the reality of what was happening. Sarah was leaving and most likely would not return home to live.

Sarah sighed at the thought. It was about time. She had held off leaving for as long as she could. Instead of going away to college right after high school she'd hung around town, working at a local restaurant and attending classes at the small college nearby. At twenty years old, she knew it was time to finally leave the nest.

"Just what exactly prompted you to transfer to NYU now?" asked Sarah's father as he taped up another book-stuffed box. "You could have finished up at Brierley."

Sarah picked up a worn stuffed animal from the floor and brushed its matted fur, trying to think of a suitable answer. She knew why she had stayed behind in her small hometown and why she had chosen this time to leave, but it was hardly the kind of thing she could tell her parents.

Because it's obvious he isn't coming back.

The thought rose unbidden from her heart and she choked it back down before answering.

"I just need a change. I need to spread my wings," she lied.

Robert Williams smiled at his daughter. "Well, I'm proud of you," he told her. "Just promise you won't forget us when you're rich and famous."

Sarah shook her head and laughed before jumping up and giving her dad a kiss on the cheek.

"Promise, dad," she said.

There was a quiet moment between the three of them before Robert cleared his throat and picked up a box.

"I guess I'd better get this down to the van," he said, a bit too cheerfully.

"I'll come with you," Karen hastily added. She hurried off after her husband, but Sarah didn't miss the reappearance of the hankie and the sniffing that accompanied it. She chuckled a bit to herself. She and her stepmother had not had the best of beginnings, but once Sarah had given the woman a chance, she'd discovered her to be a caring and loving person. She would miss Karen's sometimes intrusive mothering.

Sarah turned her attention back to the job at hand.

"I guess I should finish the closet," she told herself. She got down on her knees and began hauling clothes and boxes and papers from the back of the closet, pushing them into a pile behind her. Moving further into the closet, Sarah reached back into its depths and pulled out a heavy wooden box. She dragged the box out into the light of her bedroom and stared at it warily. Karen had given her the box for her seventeenth birthday.

"It's a hope chest," she'd told her. "You collect all the things you'll need when you get married and put them in the chest."

"Um, thanks," Sarah had answered. She certainly had not been making plans to get married, so the whole thing seemed a bit ridiculous to her at the time. Still, she knew Karen meant well.

Now the box sat in the mess of Sarah's room, a painful reminder of the real reason she had remained at home for so long.

After studying the wooden chest for several minutes, Sarah scooted closer to it and laid a hand on its lid. Slowly, she opened the lid and then sat back, not quite ready to look inside. Finally, after a lengthy inner dialogue, Sarah looked over the rim of the box and smiled wistfully. There were so many lovely things inside, so many cherished belongings... She'd forgotten.

Reaching inside, Sarah pulled out a small music box with a dancer in a puffy white dress on top of it. She wound the key and the music box played a haunting melody she remembered from a dream. Sarah set the music box aside, but it continued to play as she pulled more items from the chest: a plastic princess crown, a frightening statuette of a wizard king, and a red bound book with gold lettering. Sarah clutched the book to her chest, caressing its cover, worn with much use.

Through dangers untold... the words echoed in her mind. Sarah closed her eyes and remembered:

Dwarves and fairies and even stranger creatures. Talking blue worms and beasts who could call rocks and knights who rode sheepdogs and goblins and...

Sarah cut off the thought at the edge of the Goblin City. She wasn't going to let her mind wander there. That was why the chest was in the back of the closet to begin with. To keep her from remembering all of it, the Labyrinth, her friends, the goblins, him.

Damn it.

She picked up the music box and other items, tossed them back into the chest and was closing the lid when another box in the corner of the chest caught her eye: a small birch box with a carved owl on the lid. Sarah gingerly lifted the box from the chest and placed in on her lap. She flipped open the hinged lid and took out the crinkled wrapping of purple tissue paper. A jeweled brooch, as shining and bright as the day it was new, fell from the paper and into her hand.

"It's a gift... I gave you this on your sixteenth birthday."

Sarah turned her face away from the sparkling piece of jewelry, remembering that final night. She had been so angry. Why had she been so angry? Oh yes. She remembered. Chase Lewis had asked her to go steady and then the blasted Goblin King had shown up and made things difficult. Why did he have to do that? Why couldn't he just have been her friend? Why couldn't he just have been...

Ordinary

The word popped in Sarah's brain like a crystal bubble and she laughed out loud. She had told him she wanted to be normal, to have an ordinary life. What had followed was anything but.

She had broken up with Chase the following day. He was handsome and athletic, but insufferably dull. Karen had nearly had a stroke when she found out, but it hadn't made one bit of difference to Sarah. She tried for weeks to call to anyone in the Underground who would hear her, but no one answered. After a month, she had given up. She was sure the bloody king of the goblins was keeping them all from answering her and she'd decided to show him a thing or two. Gathering up anything that had anything to do with the Labyrinth, the Underground, the goblins or their ruler, Sarah had tossed them into the big cedar chest and shoved it into the back of her closet. It had sat there undisturbed for two years.

"I should have put it in the attic," Sarah told herself. "Or the charity box."

She looked down again at the jeweled brooch, tears beginning to sting the corners of her eyes. She would not cry. She would not-

But what no one knew...

The tears came in a torrent, hot against her cheeks. She needed them. She needed him, exasperating as he was. She needed her life to be weird and messy and full of magic. She needed to find fuzzy little worms on her pillow and goblins in her underwear drawer. Ordinary was overrated and she was dying for a taste of the Underground.

And it wasn't the magic she missed. She missed him. The Goblin King. Her friend.

They had had such nice conversations and enjoyable moments together. She didn't have to pretend to be more than she was when she was with him. He knew she was stubborn and willful and that she could be selfish and immature, yet he kept coming back. Perhaps it was because he was also stubborn and willful and selfish and even immature at times, but it didn't matter. They had been friends. And she had cared for him.

"Yeah, that's why you chucked a lamp at him and told him to never come back," she told herself between sobs.

She ran a finger over one of the brooch's creamy pearls. "I wish- " she began hesitantly. "I wish I could just see you, if only once... Jareth."

"Tch," clucked a voice from the window behind her, "I wish you wouldn't cry all over that. It's a family heirloom."


A/N: Are you all thoroughly soaked through from my sop-fest? You really should have brought an umbrella, dears. Give me some love in the form of comments and I will ferry us out of this bog.

Mwah!

Fanny