A/N: MASSPIRG, not that it's super important, is a real thing—it stands for Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, and it's a non-profit based on college campuses advocating for things college students care about, like environmental reform, gay rights, etc. I'm quite happy inventing complex cosmologies for imaginary kingdoms and horrifying traditions of arcane sacrifice for ya'll, but I draw the line at making up inoffensively virtuous student organizations for Sarah to join in her desperate search for post-Jareth meaning.

TW [see profile for key]: (d), implied (i), (l), (q), (s), (v), (x), (y), referenced (ag), (am), , (aw), referenced (ay)

(Please note that I've changed the way I do trigger warnings. I'm trying to cast as wide a net here as possible, so if you think you might be at risk of being triggered, I recommend going to my profile first and taking note of the codes of possible triggers, which will not change, rather than looking up the codes for each individual chapters, which not only could contain spoilers but also include things like swearing and smoking which many people don't find upsetting)

Betaed by the glorious syntheticaesthetic (find her work linked in my favorite authors).

Chapter 5

All Right, Easy

I'm saving up all of my strength
for when I finally fail
at keeping you safe.

When my last friend should leave me,
it's all right, easy.

"Two Small Deaths," Wye Oak.

The rest of the summer isn't hell, exactly. Not to anyone with a basis for comparison.

Hell, in Sarah's admittedly limited experience, is seeing a dream come to life and steal away your baby brother and all your preconceptions in one go, and then, after you've risked life and limb to undo the harm you'd done with your cruelty and ignorance, being dumped back into your mundane world, not sure what really happened, not sure whether you're even sane, with your only firm touchstone for reality being the memory of the stupid, selfish impulse by which you'd betrayed your brother in the first place. Hell is trying to move through a world that suddenly seems to have only two dimensions and not knowing if any alternative exists outside your own mind. Hell is the sneaking suspicion that one does and that it could re-emerge and take you at any moment, but you'll never know when or even if it'll happen, and that if it does then everything you've done up until that point—your entire goddamn life—will just have been killing time. And if it doesn't… then your life-altering experience was a fluke and you're just an ordinary shmuck with a life slightly more empty than every other shmuck around you.

Hell is not, she tells herself, lying on the bed with her body curled around itself like a question, having the magic return and discovering that you have power and agency. It isn't rising to the occasion and acting in good faith and doing everything you could reasonably be expected to do to save the life of someone who was frankly a bit of a creep, and that was before he turned out to be packing a Ziploc baggie full of rohypnol.

So whatever this is, it can't be hell. Even if that person died because you lied to your friends about a police raid and accidentally left him behind. Even if the police never raided the party, exposing you as a liar to all your friends. Even if the subsequent investigation into that person's death reveals that you and your friends were with him just before his murder, and now your parents and all your friends' parents know where you'd been that Friday and it wasn't at a sleepover at Andre's. Even if you're grounded for the rest of the summer. Even if it doesn't matter, because your friends are all either grounded themselves, or not speaking to you, or, in most cases, both. Even if, the day after the police call her in, your best friend turns up at your house with a toothbrush, a backpack full of clothes, and a frangible lie of a smile. Even if your best friend is still a minor, so when her tight-lipped mother shows up three days later to escort her home, you watch that smile shatter and do nothing, because there's nothing for you to do except make things worse.

Even if, once she's gone, there's nothing left to distract you from the fact that, creep or not, someone is dead—

"Blunt force trauma," the detective had said. "Lacerations to the face, hands, and throat. Puncture wounds in the scalp and eyes," and he'd slid a photo across the table to her and oh god the image of that familiar face, the skin grey and taut and waxy and patterned with puckered gashes, hair caked with blood, one eye closed, the other a pulpy mass…

—dead because of you, because of choices you made, and everyone who blames you is right three times over, even if they don't know it, and you can never, ever tell them why.

Even if you still aren't sure whether what happened was an ending or a beginning.

The rest of the summer isn't hell, but it's close enough for government work.

But she grits her teeth, and takes the guilt and the confusion and the fear and the failure and the anger and the magic and locks them back in their (slightly battered) cage and gets on with things.

She manages to worm her way back into Irene's good graces with an unprecedented enthusiasm for babysitting. The first few times she volunteers, Irene gives her the raised-eyebrows "you're not fooling anybody, young lady" treatment. But she doesn't say no, and can be heard just a week later (by anyone with an ear pressed to the door of the master bedroom, anyway) arguing leniency on Sarah's behalf.

"She's a teenager. She's bound to make stupid mistakes. Anyway, she's about to start college—isn't it better she make those mistakes now, when she still has us nearby to look after her?"

Robert Williams' muttered response is inaudible through the door, but Irene laughs and says, "She's a smart kid, Robbie. And anything that gets her out of the house can't be all bad, can it?"

While there's no immediate effect in her father's behavior towards her, it's almost certainly down to Irene's influence that Sarah is allowed out of the house at all that summer.

"I've just been feeling so shi—bad about this whole thing," Sarah says, carefully. "With Kyle. I thought I could maybe do some volunteer work, like, at the hospital or something. Help people. Maybe it'd make things a little less shi—bad. You know? Do you think Dad would let me?"

Irene purses her lips. "The trick to dealing with Robert—" She stops, as if unsure whether this is really appropriate information to share with her step daughter.

Sarah gives her what, with luck, is a winning and reassuring smile, and winks.

Irene laughs, glances around surreptitiously, and leans forward, having plainly decided that there's no better method of step-mother/step-daughter bonding than lessons in manipulation.

"The trick to dealing with Robert," she confides, "is to ask him for things he really wants to give you. Right now he wants to be mad at you a lot more than he wants you to change bedpans for a bunch of strangers. But," she holds up a finger, "if you can figure out something he wants to let you out of the house for, then you'd just have to wait a week or two before bringing up the volunteering."

After a little scheming, they hit on the idea of self-defense lessons.

"I just haven't felt safe," Sarah says, trying not to feel too dirty by saying it. "Since what happened to Kyle, I mean."

It isn't a lie, exactly. If the police have found any leads regarding Kyle's death, they haven't shared it with anyone, although the word about town is that the killing was gang-related. Even now, stir-crazy as she is, the thought of walking abroad at nighttime alone, listening for footsteps, tensed for a blow…

The first blow, the detective said, had come from behind.

It's true that she doesn't feel safe.

It's just not honest.

"I think it's a sensible idea," Irene chimes in. "Very mature." From over Robert's shoulder, she winks at her step-daughter.

The plan works like a dream. After two weeks of self-defense classes, Sarah is given leave to spend three days a week volunteering at the hospital, and by August has even gotten permission for supervised visitations with Alisse, although Alisse's mother proves a more steadfast opposition.

But between classes, volunteering, babysitting, a newfound understanding with her step-mother and surreptitious late-night phone calls with Alisse, Sarah makes it through the summer without a major recurrence of the Great Existential Crisis of 1986.

With September comes college and a fresh start, a nine hours' drive along I-190E away from everyone she's ever known.

It's both better and worse, being in a new place, a normal place, untouched by any of her mistakes or her tragedies or her secrets—untouched by him. Home is filled with reminders of her encounters with the hidden world, but it's also a refuge from them, providing all the comforts of familiarity. This campus, this new city, is a blank, yet to be imprinted with meaning or association, and in that absence, Sarah finds her mind drawn constantly to the Goblin King.

The best remedy, she discovers, is overstimulation. Keep her brain so busy and her body so exhausted she has neither the time nor the energyto fixate on the past. At the Freshmen Activity Fair she signs up for no fewer than fifteen different clubs, organizations, and societies (though she drops everything but club field hockey, Model UN, Film Society, Amnesty International and MASSPIRG within the first month) and develops a devotion to her academics that would have astonished most of her high school teachers.

And it's a goddamn revelation, that she can transform her anxiety into productivity, her self-doubt into self-improvement—that her demons can be a source of energy, rather than added inertia. Maybe it's for this reason that it's so much harder, this time, to forget them.

Friendships come too, but slower and harder than before. She knows, when she thinks about it, that it's her fault for not putting in the time or the effort, not making herself approachable. Too intense. Too driven. Too damn busy. Yet she can't, when she realizes it, quite figure out how to fix it. She's not entirely sure she wants to. It doesn't help that she's developed something of an aversion to large parties. Eventually she finds herself adopted by a group of senior MASSPIRG members. "The Crusader," they call her, and "mini Joan of Arc," ruffling her hair and laughing at her irritation. She learns to appreciate microbrews and tries not to miss her high school friends too badly.

She spends Christmas and New Year's at her Nana's in Chicago with her father, Irene, and Toby, and the rest of her winter break with her mother and Jeremy in their elegant (though not particularly guest- or college-age-daughter-friendly) New York townhouse. Linda is effusively pleased to see her but somewhat at a loss when it comes to sustained interaction, vacillating between treating her like a precocious child and a confidante of long-standing. It seems only occasionally to occur to her that Sarah might be less than utterly delighted with her whirligig life of performances, premieres, and parties, and when it does, the concern in her face is so clearly mixed with bemusement that Sarah finds herself smothering her resentment and assuring her mother that yes, she's having a splendid time. Either she's a better actress than she thought, or Linda has been on stage so long that she has a hard time separating genuine from fake, because the reassurances work every time.

Jeremy—charming, handsome, sharp-eyed Jeremy—is less easily hoodwinked, and keeps dropping hints that Sarah could, if she wanted to, confide in him. But the awkwardness which has lingered between them since her parents' divorce is not helped by the fact that Jeremy bears a slight resemblance to someone from Sarah's past whom she would very much like to forget, and she quickly becomes adept at dodging his attempts to bond.

It's around this time, during the endless, interstitial month before the beginning of Spring Term, that the dreams start.

When she returns to school, things feel… off. She's as busy as ever, but rather than distracting or satisfying her, her commitments make her feel itchy. Spread thin. Everything is at once too much and too little. There's a longing inside her, only half understood, for something big, something to pour herself into, something not merely to do but to be.

But she doesn't know how, much less what. So instead she's irritable and distracted. She finds herself jumping at shadows and snapping at her friends.

Then, of course, there are the dreams.

Not every night—not even most nights, but at least once a week. Sometimes, during particularly bad weeks, the dreams come three or four nights in a row.

The beginnings vary. She'll be taking an exam for a class she's never attended, or struggling to steer her beaten up station wagon down the Mass Turnpike, or preparing for a date with Denzel Washington, an undertaking complicated by the fact that Denzel can't decide whether or not she's famous enough to date, and keeps calling to cancel. But at some point in every one of these dreams, she hears her name from somewhere behind her, and, turning, finds herself in a dark and glittering space packed with brightly dressed dancers, some with human faces and others wearing elaborate, bejeweled animal masks. The air is sliced with whirling blades of light and the music growls low and insistent.

She looks down at herself and sees beyond the swell of her breasts great waterfalls of glimmering organza. When she hears her name spoken again and looks up into the eyes of the Goblin King, she is not surprised.

Now they're waltzing, twirling elegantly across the floor, the crowd forming a circle around them, silent, watching. Some part of her mind whispers that this is not normal rave behavior, but the larger part of her is lost in the drugging heat of him, in the lilting whirl of the dance. His body is like a furnace—how can anything living be that hot?—and she shivers, pressing herself closer. His laugh is a low rumble against her chest and he tightens his grip on her waist. He raises their clasped hands, brushes the hair back from her neck, and leans forward, his burning lips ghosting up along her jawline to her ear.

"It's time," he murmurs.

He steps back and suddenly, over his shoulder, through a gap in the crowd Sarah spies a familiar figure. The girl is dressed, like Sarah, in a voluminous white ball gown, but the stick-figure angle of her elbows and the mass of light brown curls identify her, even before Sarah sees her face—Alisse.

She breaks from the Goblin King's arms.

"It's time," Jareth repeats angrily from behind her.

"Time," the watchers echo, as Sarah shoves her way through the crowd. "Time," through a hundred frozen, porcelain mouths—for she sees now that every face, human or animal, is a mask.

Alisse stands at the foot of a narrow stone staircase which thrusts up and forward into empty space. She falls to her hands and knees and begins to crawl upwards. Sarah is half the room away.

Still the crowd barks, whistles, mutters: "Time, time." The word is sometimes clear, sometimes distorted through strange clicks and slurps and hisses, as though the speakers are unaccustomed to human speech. She catches glimpses of strange, uncanny faces beneath the masks, of fur and scales, of yellow eyes and jagged teeth.

Alisse is more than halfway up the staircase now, except it's not Alisse anymore. It's Toby, as he was five years ago, small and plump and vulnerable, and dressed in a red and white onesie. Sarah gives an inarticulate cry and pushes harder, but the crowd is beginning to close ranks now.

"Time," burbles the crowd, only it's not "time" they're saying any more. The word that's coming back to her, garbled by a thousand grotesque and misshapen mouths, is "tithe."

Suddenly, Jareth is before her, face stern. "Tithe," he tells her. Behind him, silver flashes at the top of the staircase and Toby disappears.

And now his arms are around her and he's hustling her towards the staircase as the crowd parts before him. She writhes and flails in his grasp, desperate for freedom. One arm manages to work itself loose and she reaches up and tears and tears and his mask falls away—

Kyle's dead, grey face stares back at her. It blinks its ruined eyes, shakes its blood-matted curls and smiles, redly.

"Tithe," it says, as it drags her inexorably onwards, up the stairs, far from the watching crowds below. "Tithe," through a mouth broken and bloody, the word plopping soft and mushy from a dead man's swollen tongue.

A woman stands at the top of the stairs, wearing a gown like the night sky strewn with stars and holding a gleaming silver sickle. Her mask is a cat's, and from behind it blink a cat's green eyes. Sarah reaches up to pull the mask from her face. It peels away like dead skin. The face underneath is Alisse's. Sarah reaches up again and again, and now the woman wears her mother's face, now Irene's, now her own. Before she has a chance to remove this last, cruelest of masks, there's a sudden pressure from behind and she's forced to her knees. Twisting around, she sees not Kyle, but the glamour the Goblin King had worn when she first encountered him at the rave—round, dark glasses and blood-bright hair.

"Dance with me?" he asks, and forces her further down, so her head is hanging off the ledge of the staircase.

The woman wearing Sarah's face speaks, her voice as cool and deep and alien as the ocean.

"The hero's sacrifice," she says, and out of the corner of her eye Sarah sees the silver flash of the sickle and then she's falling upwards through space…

"Jesus," says Chloe van Zandt. "You're a wreck. What've you been up to?" She adopts a stern expression and wags a finger in Sarah's face. "Crack kills, you know."

They've all gone for dinner in one of the dining halls after the MASSPIRG meeting. Sarah is picking at her food, apparently looking as run down as she feels.

She's too fucking tired to joke.

"I've been having trouble sleeping," she mutters.

Alonzo Bruno puts up his eyebrows. "Hey Mac, you hear that? Sarah's been having trouble sleeping."

Mac blinks. "Trouble sleeping, eh? Tough break."

Alonzo elbows him in the side.

"What?" he asks, aggrieved.

Alonzo jerks his head towards Sarah, and Mac colors faintly.

"Oh, right. Hey, if you want something to help with that, you could maybe stop by my place tonight around ten."

Chloe purses her lips. "Stop corrupting the frosh."

"It's not corrupting!" Alonzo protests. "I'm betting she's not as straight as she looks." He grins at Sarah. "Isn't that right?"

"She sure as hell couldn't be straighter," Mac says with a teasing smile.

"They're not corrupting me," Sarah tells Chloe, smiling at Mac in return.

Chloe throws up her hands.

Arriving at Mac's apartment quarter after ten, Sarah is not in the least surprised to find him, Alonzo, and a few other seniors she hasn't met before passing around a joint.

Sarah settles down to join them, and after a few rounds, is feeling relaxed enough to show off a little. Taking a hit, she purses her lips and blows the smoke out around the tip of her tongue, forming a wobbly but distinct ring.

Alonzo raises his eyebrows. "Not a novice then?"

Sarah shrugs. "It's just a party trick."

"Cool trick, though." Alonzo's mouth curves in a wicked smile. "Kinda sexy, too. Good breath control, excellent tongue action. Your dream girl, eh, Mac?"

Mac flushes and whacks Alonzo. "Don't be an asshole." He turns to Sarah, ducking his head so his face is half hidden underneath his curls. "Sorry about him."

Sarah smiles, feeling pleasantly floaty and buzzed and at ease with the world. "No need. If I'd known that's what you looked for in a girl, I would've let you smoke me out sooner."

Mac jerks his head up to stare at her. Then, a slow grin spreads across his face.

Just as advertised, the weed helps her sleep, and if she dreams that night, she doesn't remember it.

A week later, she's over at Mac's once more. Alonzo and the rest of the crew are nowhere around.

"I thought," Mac says, with a touch of diffidence, "maybe we could hang out, just the two of us."

Sarah finds she isn't at all averse to this suggestion, and when Mac reaches across her to fiddle with the music, she finds it perfectly natural to lean forward and kiss him.

And oh but this is nice, this is pleasant, his large hands gliding roughly up her stomach, sliding under her bra—

"I want," she pants into his mouth as she leans into his touch, fingers scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt. "I want."

"What do you want?" he asks her, voice tender and amused, pressing kisses along the column of her throat.

She shakes her head, not knowing how to say it any truer than that, than the mere fact of desire—surely that should be enough—so she answers with a whimper and a thrust of her hips.

The part of her that's watching from the sidelines observes that he's actually quite good at this. Certainly more talented than either of her previous partners, and if her own hands know better exactly where and how to touch her, he has plenty of advantages of his own when it comes to reach, and position, and tongue…

Yet the more they continue, the more maddening nice and pleasant become. There's a frustration roiling in her gut, growing with every skimming caress, every gentle brush of his lips. The swirl of his tongue across her navel sends butterflies flittering through her stomach.

She doesn't want butterflies.

She knots her fingers in his hair and pulls his head up, mashing her mouth against his. Their teeth click together unpleasantly and he draws back.

"Mac," she whines, fingers digging into his biceps, "I need more." There's a possibility lurking on the edge of her awareness, somewhere on the other side of flesh, something sharp and transcendent and awful and unseen, and if she can just push hard enough—

He gives her a sidelong grin, then nips her on the nose and goes to fish out a condom.

Then, finally, he's inside her. She clings to him, bucking upward to meet his thrusts.

"Harder," she urges, scraping her teeth along the meat of his shoulder, "faster."

He obeys, the motion of their bodies driving her back until her head collides with the headboard and she sees stars.

"Don't stop," she says, almost angrily, as he makes to withdraw.

"You're wild," he says, shaking his head as he tugs her further down the bed, half awed and half reproachful.

But at least he's moving again.

"Is this it?" Mac pants over the smack of their bodies. "Is this what you want? Is it?"

No! howls the wildness inside of her, greedy and tragic and fierce.

Close enough, the rest of her thinks.

"Yes," she tells him—tells herself, willing down the wildness, the fierce, unstable longing."Oh, yes."

Perhaps all the exertion means that she processes the THC faster than usual or something, because that night, curled in Mac's arms, their skin sticky with cooling sweat, she does dream.

"It's time," says Jareth in her ear, only tonight when she reaches up to pull off his mask it's not Kyle's but Mac's face that is revealed, and Mac opens his mouth and screams—

Sarah awakes with a start. Mac is sitting up in bed, twisted away from her, still cursing.

"Jesus," he says, fumbling for the light. "Jesus. What the fuck was that?"

She squints through sleep-bleared eyes.

"What—"

As he turns towards her, she catches sight of four long scratches on his cheek.

"Oh no. I didn't— Oh god, Mac, I'm so sorry."

"What the fuck?"

"I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to, I was dreaming—" Her throat is seizing. There's an ominous prickling at the back of her eyes.

"You were dreaming? What are you, Freddie Krueger? You almost clawed my fucking face off!"

"I'm really sorry, Mac. I didn't mean to. I don't know what to say." She presses a hand to her mouth, hiding the sudden trembling of her lips.

He looks at her, face twisting in concern and anger and fear and indecision. "Shit. Don't cry. I mean, it's—" He breaks off, clearly unable or unwilling to say that it's "all right" when the evidence to the contrary is still gouged into his face and probably in need of some Bactine.

Sarah ducks her head, letting the fall of dark hair hide her face. "I think I'd better go."

He opens his mouth as if to argue, then shuts it. She's already half off the bed, sheets shoved aside, one arm crossed over her bare chest, the other groping on the floor for her underwear.

"Yeah," he mumbles. "Maybe that would be a good idea."

The next few weeks are spent hiding in the library, going to meals at irregular hours, and generally doing everything she can to avoid Mac and his friends. She schedules a session with one of the school counsellors, who tells her she's spreading herself too thin and suggests regular therapy sessions, which strikes Sarah as an excellent way to get herself a one-way ticket to the funny farm.

Finally, Chloe van Zandt runs her to ground in her dorm room. Sarah's roommate looks from Chloe to Sarah and back again, then flees, muttering something about a forgotten assignment, an act of treachery that leaves Sarah plotting dire vengeance.

Chloe speaks first.

"Sorry, what?" asks Sarah, who is still glaring after the unfortunate Marjan.

"I said," Chloe repeats, "Where've you been? I've never known you to miss a meeting before, and you just missed three in a row. What's up?"

"Yeah, sorry about that. I've been busy."

"Did something happen with you and Mac?" Chloe demands.

Sarah stiffens. "No. Of course not. Why would you think that?"

Chloe rolls her eyes. "Oh, I don't know, maybe because he's been drooling over for months now, and then Alonzo lured you into his little stoner circle and spent a week crowing about how he's the world's best wingman, and now Mac's walking around with bandages on his cheek looking like someone's hit him in the balls with a frying pan and you're skipping meetings, holed up in your dorm room. It's not like it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that something went down between the two of you. Come on, spill."

"There's nothing to spill."

"Sarah, I'm on your side."

"What side is that?"

Chloe makes an exasperated noise. "I don't know, you tell me!"

For a brief moment, Sarah does consider telling her—how she and Mac had finally hooked up, and it had all... 'gone south' doesn't even begin to describe it. But then she would have to explain the dreams, which means she'd have to explain about what happened last summer, which means—

She clenches her jaw.

"Nothing happened," she says. "I've just been really busy. Sorry if I worried you, or whatever."

Chloe stares at her for a moment, then slaps a piece of paper down on Sarah's desk.

"My chief at Emergency Services told me I should look for recruits for next year, since a bunch of us are graduating. We don't take freshmen, so it can be hard to find new people. It takes some training, but you can do it easy over the summer, and the department will subsidize the cost. I thought you might be interested, since you've got that world-saving fetish."

"Yeah," Sarah says. "Sure. Maybe."

Chloe snorts and turns to go. In the doorway she pauses.

"You know you can talk to me, right? About anything?"

"Yeah," says Sarah, not looking at her. "Thanks, Clo. Really."

She picks up the paper in front of her. Be a hero in YOUR community, it reads. Save lives and volunteer as an EMT with Amherst EMS.

"Well," says Chloe, finally. "Just let me know, okay?"

After a beat or two, Sarah hears the door close. She's still staring down at the flier. Save lives and volunteer…

It takes her three days to swallow her pride and go track down Chloe and admit that, yes, something had happened between her and Mac, and, no, it wasn't Mac's fault and she really didn't want to talk about it and could Chloe please tell her a bit more about this whole EMT business?

Chloe, while being perfectly gracious and helpful and forgiving, has a little too much of the air of "I told you so" about her for Sarah's taste.

But Sarah forgives her for that. Because she has a goal now, even if it's a short term goal, and that, more than anything else, is what gets her through the rest of the year.

A/N: Another chapter that had to be split. Character development, blargh, I know. Just one more chapter for Sarah to grow up in/for scenes to be set in, and then we return to our Regularly Scheduled Programming of existential threats and devilishly compelling antagonists for Chapter 7 ("Somebody Moves"). Chapters 5 and 6 have been a beast to write (honestly this chapter can still use work but it's time for it to get OFF MY COMPUTER so we can all move on), so thanks for sticking with me! In case it's not clear by this point, this is going to be a fairly lengthy story: my ridiculously detailed outline projects 33 chapters, but given how often I've had to split chapters so far, it could be as many as 40. To those of you who have expressed a desire for smut, it is coming (oh it IS coming, and please do not take this chapter as a predictor of its sexiness levels—that was deliberately-unsatisfying backstory/character-development sex, not smexy OTP foe-yay sex) but it'll take us a little while to get there.

Hope all the OCs aren't too grating—the focus of this story will still overwhelmingly be on Sarah and Jareth, but there are literally three humans in Labyrinth besides Sarah, and they're all related to her, and I'm not good enough to build an interesting world with only two complex characters (who live on different plains of reality and are enemies at that). If it helps, none of her college friends will play a role in our later story. Feel free to forget them.

Soundtrack:

"Two Small Deaths," by Wye Oak.

"Tell Me a Story," by Iggy Pop.

"Wild Creatures," by Neko Case.

"Civilian," by Wye Oak. (If you prefer to emphasize the comic "bad sex" aspects rather than the "unfulfilled desire" aspects: "Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang. Bet you forgot that one existed, didn't you. Well, you're welcome/I'm so, so sorry)

"This Year," by The Mountain Goats.

Thanks so much to kellyn1604, Sazzle76, Max, Nanenna, Honoria Granger, xoBrandyxo123, SarahlouiseDodge, FelineGrace, Shelby, Ebony-Dove, quaintlullabies, etcetera nine, KBates, kittyspike08536, Avenging Neko, HarleyChevalier, and guests for reviewing, you lovely, lovely humans! (And guests, glad you've been enjoying the music :D)

Obviously I live and die for your feedback, but I admit to some slight trepidation on this occasion. More Jareth soon, but for the meantime, be gentle, I prithee!