A/N: Today's post brought to you early by…alcoholism! Hangover Saturday = productive writing Saturday. I've edited this down a lot, but it still may be a bit overwritten (sorry!). I haven't taken on a writing project like this in ages, so expect things to be a little shaky while I learn it all again. It also occurs to me that this is why betas are a thing? So I am working on acquiring a beta for the next chapter. In the meantime, any and all critiques are welcome so long as they are (a) constructive, and (b) specific.

If you wanted a more specific visual reference for Jareth's glamour in the previous chapter, think David Bowie as Halloween Jack except early 90s raver rather than mid 70s glam (and with eyebrows). And if you haven't memorised every look/persona ever assumed by David Bowie, go to google and type in "David Bowie Halloween Jack." You know, the one where he's flipping his hair, and his electric guitar (colour coordinated with both his hair and his trousers how does he do that?) is very deliberately positioned in just such a way as to perfectly frame his crotch? Yeah. You're welcome. Feel free to take a moment to let that image sink in before proceeding with this chapter.

EDIT (6/29/2016): Updated to incorporate suggestions from my lovely beta, syntheticaesthetic. Find her linked on my profile and in my favourite authors!

TW [see profile for key]: (p), (as), (aw)

Chapter 2

Well I'll Be Damned

Now, don't be fooled by fools who promise you
The world and all that glitters—more fool you.

"Prisoner of Love," Tin Machine.

Well I'll be damned:
Here comes your ghost again.

"Diamonds and Rust," Joan Baez.

A peculiar twist of his fingers, and the crystal in his hand is now a bright flame. He cups it tenderly in his palm, then tips it down his outstretched hand. It comes to rest balanced between the tips of his index and middle finger.

For a moment, Sarah gapes at it, dancing and flickering before her. She looks up. The Goblin King is watching her, his head tipped to one side—a curiously avian posture. She had once thought him almost human. She won't make that mistake again.

"You're kidding," she manages.

She's not actually sure whether she's speaking to him, or to some kind of slow-acting chemical that has spent the past hour patiently digging through her psyche in search of her deepest, most secret, most muddled and disturbing and ambiguous and bat-shit fucking insane memory and struck gold (and assuming she makes it through the night with her sanity intact she is going to kill Kyle DeLuca), or to the entire damn universe, because she's due to start college in less than a month and a half, because it's been four years of confusion and self-doubt and repression and reinvention—four damn years to fix everything he broke just by existing—and now he shows up out of the blue when she's underdressed and out of place and cut off from her friends by thick walls, three hundred yards of tightly-packed dancefloor, and a couple of potent doses of Special K.

Except… she can see the shadows cast by the flame on his outstretched finger, can hear the silk of his shirt rustling in the light breeze, so she can't be hallucinating. And even she were hallucinating, she's progressed to thinking in complex hypotheticals so it can't be the drugs (she's still going to kill Kyle DeLuca). And even if it were the drugs, even if he's just a waking dream, a memory, a ghost made flesh (and silk and leather and teeth), that doesn't mean he isn't real.

And she's always known, hasn't she, that it wasn't over. Even through the long, stifling nights staring out the window at a sky full of stars that no one could move. Even through the sullen, dragging days when she hated the magic and longed for it in equal measure. Even when she told herself it was all a dream. Even when she believed it. (And really, why not here? Of all the places in the world for their paths to cross, what could be more appropriate than somewhere where half the people are blissfully lost inside their own heads and the other half are blissfully lost inside their own bliss? This is just one roofied peach away from his kind of party.)

He watches her, hand outstretched. His index and middle finger still proffer the flame, but his ring and pinkie fingers have relaxed, curling back towards his palm, almost as if he's beckoning her. In one gesture, an offering and a summons. How like him. Apart from that, if he's moved at all, if he's so much as breathed, she can't tell. The stillness seems as natural to him as it would be unnatural in anyone—anything else.

So she looks right into his eyes and says it again, flatly, loading her tone with as much contempt and incredulity as bravado can muster: "You're kidding."

"The bargain is not to your liking?" There's nothing in his tone to indicate mockery, but a small smile is playing about the corners of his lips. Smug bastard.

Sarah lifts her chin. The Goblin King isn't the only one capable of posturing. Holding his gaze, she opens her hand and lets the cigarette fall. Then, almost daintily, she lifts her foot and grinds it into the concrete.

His eyes narrow ever so slightly, though the smile remains. "No matter," he says, and closes his hand with a snap, crushing the flame from existence.

She flinches, silently curses herself for it, and squares her shoulders. "What—" she begins, voice cracking. That bottle of water suddenly seems a long time ago—years ago, decades even. I'm not afraid. I'm just dehydrated. She clears her throat slightly and licks her lips. "What are you doing here?"

He unfastens his gaze from where it had suddenly fixed on her mouth. The eyes he raises to meet hers are amused, though seconds before they had been… something else. "I'm doing my job, Sarah."

She stumbles back a step. "You're here to steal someone away?"

He rolls his eyes. "Not steal. Despite your repeated and somewhat melodramatic claims to the contrary, I only take what is given to me. It is the custom of my kind."

Of all the people to talk of melodrama! Mr. 'Fear me, love me, do as I say—' And hang on, 'of his kind'? She opens her mouth to ask, then snaps it shut. No. Bad Sarah. She won't let him draw her in. "Then what are you doing here?"

"As I said, I'm do—"

She corrects herself, raising her voice to speak over him. "Why have you come here to do your job, whatever it is?"

His eyes narrow dangerously at the interruption. She resists the urge to retreat another step. She saw that look cross his face once before, in the Labyrinth. Right before he stole three of her hours and set the Cleaners on her.

But he simply says, almost pleasantly, "A question of rather more moment. What would you give me for the answer, I wonder?" He laughs at her scowl, and leans a shoulder against the alcove wall. "But I've always been generous where you are concerned, and it wouldn't do to break with tradition. I have come because one of these mortal revelers is to die tonight."

And now Sarah understands what people mean when they talk about blood running cold—this wash of chill horror that numbs and pains and freezes her where she stands. "Who?" she asks, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. Her voice sounds strangely muffled—distant—to her own ears. She says it again, louder. "Who?"

The Goblin King regards his gloved fingers and says nothing.

She stamps her foot. "And you're here to—what? Kill them?"

He flexes his fingers, furling and unfurling them, turning his palm this way and that, seemingly fascinated by his own capacity for movement.

"Save them?"

His hand begins a rhythmic, undulating sort of twist, as if he is rolling an invisible crystal. "In a sense," he says.

Sarah positively snarls in frustration. "Which is it? And what does that mean, 'in a sense'?" These last words are spoken in a mincing mockery of the Goblin King's rich tones.

His brows snap together and his hand tightens into a fist, but he says nothing.

"Answer me, dammit!"

She had not known he could move that fast—had scarcely known that anything could move that fast. She trips over her own feet in her haste to retreat and the back of her head collides painfully with hard, unyielding brick.

And here he is before her, so damn close she hardly dares breathe. She presses herself into the wall behind her. He has scarcely half a foot's advantage in height, but every inch of it is put to good use—at this distance, he positively looms.

"Have a care, Sarah," he murmurs. "Or have you forgotten to whom you speak?" The last words twist into a snarl.

She blinks, trying to clear the spots dancing before her eyes. His face is bare inches from her. The heat of his breath against her skin is like the midsummer sun. How hot must his internal temperature be for his breath to burn like that? Not human.

She shuts her eyes, and sees landscapes of (pain) swirling brown and white flashes of (pain) light. She swallows queasily. "I know exactly who I'm talking to, Goblin King," she says—tries to say—but her voice comes out blurred and mumbled even to her own ears. Wrong—her head is—her head—

Her stomach clambers up into her chest as the wall shifts suddenly behind her, scratching her arms and back with ragged fingernails and catching at her hair. She opens her eyes muzzily and finds her gaze level with the Goblin King's ribcage. Her knees tremble, lock, tremble again…

Above her, he makes some incomprehensible sound. Then, gloved hands slide under her arms, raising her, supporting her. One hand reaches around the back of her neck and cradles her bruised head, the other ghosting swiftly over the scrapes on her arms and back. Her face is almost against his chest and she feels something ever so gently brush the top of her head.

She jerks back, but he's already pulling away and she finds that she can stand unsupported, that her vision is clear and her head no longer hurts.

"You—" she says, and stops. "You healed me." Her voice catches and she shivers, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, trying to efface the tingling remnants of his touch.

He has turned away from her, passing a gloved hand across his face, and leant his head against the opposite wall. His shoulders are hunched. "I'm sorry," he says to the wall. "I forget, sometimes, how fragile you mortals are. My kind are more … resilient. Sarah—"

He turns to face her, mouth working as though he would say more but can think of nothing to say. She is taken aback by the anguish in his eyes.

"Yeah," she says, still struggling to process everything that's happening, everything that has happened. He's here. He hurt her. He healed her. He's…sorry? Slowly, her hands cease their motion and she lets them drop to her sides. Part of her is furious—how dare he look so broken when she was the one injured? But his posture is so slumped—so defeated—that she can't help but stand straighter in response. "No shit. Just… just don't fucking do it again. Ever."

"I swear it—"

"In fact," she continues, gaining steam—she'll give him fragile, "maybe instead of slamming people into walls because they happen to get a little impatient with you, you could use your damn words next time."

At the words "next time," his breath catches and he fixes her with a piercing look, but Sarah is frowning, still puzzling it all through. "You did that before. In the club. Touched my head and the pain went away and then when Alisse came—" Her eyes widen. "It was you! You sobered me up!"

The lingering tension in his face dissolves into a smirk.

"Come on, that shit was expensive!"

"I find," he says, airily, "somewhat to my surprise, that I prefer our games when you're fully cognizant of them."

"Fully… Christ, have you always talked like a—a Dickens novel? And hang on—I thought you had no power over me!"

"As you say."

"Then how did you…"

He is grinning fully now. "It's within the remit of the Goblin King to cheat from time to time. Or had you forgotten?"

"No," says Sarah wryly, a reluctant smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. "I really hadn't."

She stops for a moment, marveling at this strange moment of accord between them. If she had had any doubts that he was really there, this would have put an end to them—she could have dreamt up a dozen Goblin Kings, but it would never even have occurred to her to imagine one capable of self-referential humor. His mismatched eyes sparkle in the moonlight, and she finds herself remembering, quite against her will, that she hadn't always hated and feared him in the Labyrinth. There had been a moment, in a dream, when she had forgotten… When she had forgotten…

Oh no.

"Someone's going to die!" she exclaims, and the cold horror that sweeps through her once more at the recollection is swiftly followed by self-recrimination. How could she forget?

For the briefest of seconds, his shoulders slump, and then they refigure themselves into that posture of arrogant ease that so infuriates her.

"And you're here to—to save them? In a sense?"

"Correct," he drawls.

She makes a sound of frustration. "Are you here to make sure they don't die?"

"That is my intention."

"And that's different from saving them…how?"

He laughs shortly. "So many questions! But I find," he says tightly, "that my generosity has reached its limits. What's the expression you mortals use? Ah, yes: no more free rides."

Which means if she wants more information, she'll have to give him something in return.

"All right," she says, slowly, feeling a prickling of unease. I can't believe I'm about to say this. "Let's barter." She looks up into his shark-toothed smile and doesn't flinch. "You answer my questions and—what was it you asked for before? Well, I'm definitely not giving you any of my dreams. And I think you've taken enough of my hours already." She pauses. "A lock of hair? I could do that."

She's low-balling him, of course—if he wanted a lock of hair just to light her damn cigarette, he's almost certainly going to want more for answers to all her questions. So she's astonished when he says, in a suspiciously off-handed tone, "That would be an… acceptable price."

She narrows her eyes. "In return for you answering my questions now, I'll give you a lock of my hair, which I will choose and cut myself, but only if you swear you won't to use it to trap me or compel me or to use it against me in any way. And," she adds, as an afterthought, "that you're not asking for it because you intend for it be used to trap or compel me or used against me in any way."

"Precious, you wound me."

"I'll just bet," she mutters. "That's my offer, take it or leave it."

He taps his chin, as if thinking it over. She's nearly certain it's a pose. Surely this couldn't be what he's been after all along? "I will answer your questions now regarding my purpose here tonight so long as it does not interfere with the performance of my duties. In return, you will cut for me a lock of your hair of my choosing, which I swear I will not use to trap you or compel you or use against you in any way, nor do I intend for it to be thus used."

She narrows her eyes further. "You'll answer my questions truthfully."

"I don't tell lies," he says, drawing himself up haughtily.

"No, but you do cheat."

His mouth quirks. "Granted."

"Then how do I know that you won't cheat in keeping your oath?"

His lips thin. "I think you misunderstand the nature of oaths, Sarah."

"Maybe. I think you misunderstand just how little I intend to leave you any loopholes, Goblin King," retorts the daughter of Robert Williams, attorney at law.

He makes a gesture of impatience. "I haven't got all evening, Sarah. Time is short!"

She sets her jaw, stubborn.

They stare at one another for a long moment, and then he exhales in disgust, and drops to his knee before her. "I swear by blood and by starfire that I will use nothing you give as part of this bargain to trap or compel you or against you in any way, nor is it my intention or desire that it be so used. May the earth disclaim me, the wind unmake me, and the salt sea take me if I lie." He rises again. "Will that satisfy your thrice-damned impertinent mistrust?"

She nods, swallows, and clears her throat. She had felt the power in his words as he spoke, felt the echoes as they passed through her, reverberating through some great, alien expanse of space. "Yeah," she says, a bit hoarsely. "That'll do."

"Then say your right words and let us get on with things!"

Her right words? "I don't—"

"Of course not," he says to the night, as if her ignorance is a personal affront. And then, with almost insulting patience: "This isn't a wish, but a compact, Sarah. You need only speak the terms. I will pact them."

She takes a breath. "You'll answer my questions now about what you're doing here tonight, so long as it doesn't interfere with you doing your duties—answer my questions truthfully," she adds, ignoring his scowl, "and in return, you can choose a lock of my hair and I'll cut it and give it to you, as long as you keep to the terms of the oath you just made."

"So pacted," he says, instantly.

There's a deep rumble and the ground trembles ever so slightly, though that might have just been the sudden increase in bass from inside the warehouse. Sarah shivers. She can feel that rumble in her bones. The Goblin King raises his right hand and snaps his fingers. The rumble and the music stop abruptly.

Sarah gives a start. "What the hell did you just do?" she demands.

"I've stopped time."

Shit. Shit. "You have no power over me," she reminds him, the words tripping off her tongue in embarrassing haste.

"No power except what you give me," he corrects. "I believe our bargain was that I will answer your questions so long as it doesn't interfere with the performance of my duties. I don't have all night to satisfy your curiosity, Sarah. This way, we can converse at leisure. No, don't sulk," he chides, looking intolerably pleased with himself. "It was unbecoming enough in a girl—far more so in a grown woman."

Of all the—Sarah grits her teeth. She can't let him goad her—can't let him distract her. "Who here is going to die tonight?"

"No one, if I have my way."

She grinds her teeth further. "Whose life have you come here to save?"

"One of the revelers—ravers, I think you call them."

Okay, so either he's yanking her chain, or he doesn't like her current line of questioning. She presses on. "Which one, Jareth?"

His head snaps up. "Who gave you that name?" His voice is low, filled with a dangerous intensity.

Interesting. "Sorry, but my answers weren't part of the bargain. Now answer the question, Jareth." She says his name deliberately, goading him, but from the way his eyes flash, she realizes that she has somehow miscalculated. Either he's much, much angrier than she anticipated, or that isn't merely anger. They stare at one another for a long moment. Then:

"I don't know yet," he says sullenly, looking away.

"That's why you stopped time—that's why you said you don't have all night."

"Is that a question?"

"No. Do you know anything about this person that you haven't told me?"

"Yes."

He really wasn't going to make this easy, was he? "What is that information?"

He gives her a long, measured look, his eyes unreadable. "This person is connected to you in some way.

It's like a punch to the gut. She actually hunches over from the force of it, wrapping her arms around her ribcage. Her first thought is of Toby—that somehow she's managed to put him in danger again—but he's safe at home with her father and Irene. Her second thought is of Alisse. "Connected to me how?" she asks the ground, gripping herself even tighter.

"I don't know," he says, and then, seemingly taking pity on her, "It may not be a close connection. Just someone whose death will touch you in some way. You need not even have met them."

"But it could be," she presses, trying to banish the flickering reel of images before her mind's eye (pale brown hair darkened with blood, staring blue eyes, a skinny body lying twisted and broken on an empty dancefloor), "a—a 'close connection.'"

"It could."

She scrubs her forehead with the heels of her hands. "How do you even know about this?" she asks helplessly.

A pause. And then, reluctantly, "I have seen the mark of this death upon you."

She jerks her head up. "What? When?"

"In your time? No more than a week or so ago. In my time, three months."

"You've been spying on me? But you can't—"

"It isn't a power over you. It doesn't affect you in any way."

"It's affecting me now!" She shoots back. "And it'll affect me from now on! Jesus, how am I supposed to—to anything when I know you might be monitoring—Don't you ever do it again, I—I forbid it!"

His eyes flash. Then his lips tighten. "As you will."

She stares at him, filled with a horrible suspicion. "Which came first? You knowing about the death, or you seeing it on me?"

He doesn't answer.

"Dammit Jareth, we made a bargain! Which came first?"

"I saw the death upon you," he says, tightly. "That is how I knew."

She puts out a hand, reaching blindly towards the wall to steady herself. She shuts her eyes, and focuses on her breathing. "So—so you've been watching me. And—and you saw this death and you decided to come here tonight to—to stop it?"

He inclines his head.

"Why?"

"It will provide an advantage to me to do so."

"What advantage?"

"This death affords me…an opportunity."

"An opportunity?" she repeats, incredulous. "What kind of opportunity?"

"A valuable one."

She stamps her foot down, and then bites hard on her lip. She can't afford to lose her temper. She changes tacks. "Why is saving their life not the same as saving them?"

His lips thin. "The gift of life is not freely given. Some would argue that the price isn't worth the gift."

"And what is the price?"

He is silent, staring at her, a calculating gleam in his eyes.

"What is the price, Jareth?"

"It's an old bargain," he says at last. "I will preserve their life. In return for their soul."

A/N. Yeah, so I realise I just wrote a whole chapter in which nothing actually happens. Sozza. I promise, at least one thing happens in the next chapter. One thing minimum.

The phrase "so pacted" to seal a bargain I have stolen from either Jalen Strix's "Forget Me Not Into Oblivion" or Ellen Weaver's "The Fairest One of All." If you haven't read and loved and reviewed both of these stories (favourited on my profile for your convenience!), you are both bad and wrong and need to fix this immediately.

Songs:

"Nightclubbing," by Iggy Pop. (This song is the creeping feeling of unease when you're grabbing a fag outside a nightclub while being leisurely stalked by a sexy yet sinister stranger. Like actually tho. Go listen to it if you don't believe me.)

"Gimme Danger," by Iggy Pop and the Stooges. (After that stranger turns out to be the Goblin King, you're going to want a song that vocalizes the way the undercurrents of menace and erotic promise melt and mingle and intertwine until they are all but indistinguishable, if they ever were distinguishable in the first place. Let us take a moment together to love Iggy Pop.)

"Prisoner of Love," by Tin Machine. (More next chapter, really. That's not a spoiler though, keep your trousers on.)

"My Death," by Jacques Brel, as covered by David Bowie.

Thanks so much to the lovely Sazzle76, Jetredgirl, kittyspike08536, Honoria Granger, Ebony-Dove, CharlotteFox, and Nanenna for reviewing! Reviews fill me with happy and dancing and keep me writing. Like ackshully tho.

::hearts::

Silks