Title: It's Only Forever
Prompt by: keenquing
Rating: PG/K+
Originally posted: 3rd April 2019
Notes: for Wayback Exchange 2019 at Dreamwidth and AO3.

"I wish... I wish..." he intones, hunched over the drafting desk, fingers tracing his own pencil marks and carefully inked lines.

The little creatures on the page cannot hear him, but the real goblins can. He can almost hear their gasps of surprise, their mindless chatter, their collective breath of anticipation. 'What does the boy wish?' Surely, they already know. Eyes closed, he sees them all so clearly in his mind. The circular room, the hordes of strange creatures, and in the centre, a king like no other.

"I wish..." he says once more, a smile playing at his lips, no more words escape, and yet they are there in his mind, as clear and plain as if they were spoken, and so, they are heard.

"You should know better, my fine fellow."

The voice startles him enough to open his eyes but that is all. When he rises from his chair to turn towards the mirror, he is smiling again because he already knows what he will see, who waits for him beyond the glass.

"Hello, Jareth."

"Hello, Toby."

They stand what seems to be a few feet apart, but magic splits the worlds in which they live, as well as bringing them together. Toby walked the lines between those words once, or rather crawled it. He ought not to recall it, young as he was then, but he can. More nights than few he has seen it all, over and over, clearer perhaps now than it had even been then.

"Look at you now. What a fine prince you would've made," said Jareth, looking him over.

"Look at you," Toby counters, unflinching under the gaze of the Goblin King. "It's like you never age at all."

Jareth smirks but says nothing to confirm or deny.

"It seems to me that you have been so careful in your life, Toby. For twenty years, the words 'I wish' have never once passed your lips. You learnt well from your sister's mistakes."

"Maybe." He nods his agreement. "She did too, obviously. I'm just not so sure she learnt all the right things."

He struggles now that they are face to face. There is nothing intimidating about Jareth, not to the young man who, as a boy, had been chosen as heir to the throne. Besides, what he has to say makes little or no sense, like everything else connected to that place - the labyrinth, the castle, the goblin city. The ridiculous is normal there, the outlandish terribly dull, and yet.

"She made her peace with what life was supposed to be," he says at last, knowing he does not have to speak her name, thinking maybe Jareth would prefer that he didn't somehow. "You had to give her a choice, and she had to make the decision that she did, for me and for herself," he explained, "but things are different now. Things can't ever be like they might've been."

"Such riddles would live well here," Jareth tells him, smiling as he comes closer. "I still say I chose well."

"It wasn't me you chose, Jareth." Toby shakes his head, eyes fixed on the King's own, gaze never wavering. "Come on, we both know I was a pawn."

"You were... a means to an end of a kind," he admitted, smile faltering only slightly. "But there was something in those eyes that was so like mine..." he said, seeing it still now as he had then, it seemed. "Had I a son, he would own those eyes."

Toby glances away, shakes off the strange moment, then presses forward.

"Will you help her?" he asks, knowing it's the only question that matters, that even Jareth with all his tricks won't shy away from answering straight, not now.

"I lived to be all she wished for. I bent the world to be as only she hoped. Still, she denied me."

"She wasn't ready then," Toby tells him what he must already now, deep down. "She wasn't, but she is now. She talks to me about it. I don't even think she knows she's doing it, but she does. Twenty years, and every conversation about guys, about life, about growing up, everything, it always comes back around to you. The labyrinth, the goblins, what might've been. Come on, you have to know this. Don't tell me you haven't been keeping tabs?" he says, one eyebrow raised, a challenge.

Jareth turns his back, begins to walk away, but stops before he is gone too far.

"If she wishes it, then I can deny her nothing," he says, turning back at the last word, "but she has to wish it. You know the rules."

The blinding light forces Toby to close his eyes tight against the glare, and when he opens them again, the mirror shows nothing more than the usual reflection of his untidy room, but that doesn't mean that's all there is.

"Toby, that was... He was a fantasy."

They have to have this conversation, but he wasn't fool enough to think that Sarah would make it easy. She has lived her life the best way she knew how, and it hasn't been all bad, but the future is yet to be decided and she ought to listen to Toby's advice, after giving him so much herself over the years.

"Sure, he was a fantasy," he agrees of Jareth, "but that doesn't mean he wasn't real, that he's not still waiting on you. Sarah, you're not happy. I don't think you've been happy for a long time, and I think I know why. You weren't meant for this world, sis. You were meant for something better, something more."

She smiles sadly, her hand breifly at his cheek. "Sometimes I think he chose you well. There are times when you sound like him, just a little."

"So do you," he counters without pause. "You have that same power in you, the right to rule. I was almost a prince once, but Sarah, you were born to be a queen."

"Toby..." She shakes her head, glances away a moment, but makes no further argument - they both know she doesn't really have any that he will believe anyway.

"What do you have to stay here for?" he asks, watching her expression and smiling at what he sees cross her face. "Besides me."

There is no answer to that. She loves her father well enough, she learnt to make her peace with Karen and accepted her as the mother-substitute she tried so hard to be, but Sarah's life has always been her own. A strength lies within her, proven by the labyrinth's trials so many years before. She can be whatever she wants to be, whoever she wishes. Toby was right, sometimes she does still wish, and wish, and wish...

"Even if I asked-"

"If you wished, you know he'd come for you," Toby cuts in, his hand on her arm, turning her back around. "You know," he tells her one more time, watching tears fill her eyes even as a smile curves her lips.

"Maybe that's why I never say it," she admits, swallowing hard. "I know I don't have much to miss anymore, but like you said, there's still you. You're my brother, Toby, you... you mean so much to me."

"You don't think I know that?" he says, eyes wide. "The things you've done for me, and I don't just mean the labyrinth."

His words are true and undeniable. Sarah has been everything he ever could hope for in a sister, a guide, a helping hand in times of trouble. She has never wavered, never been anything but constant and reliable. It has taken until now perhaps for them both to realise just how much she has given up for him. Now her time has come to shine.

"It's your turn, Sarah," he tells her easily. "I want this for you. I want everything for you that you want for yourself. Everything he wants to give to you."

His eyes move past her to the mirror and she turns to follow his gaze. There is nothing there, not yet, but there could be. She glances back at her brother, then down at his hand grasping her arm yet. If he lets go, if she lets go, there's no going back.

"Use your words," he says, smiling as mischievously as any goblin ever has when she looks up.

A burst of girlish laughter escapes a throat twenty years too old to own it, and yet.

"I love you, Toby," she tells him, pulling him into a hug he might usually protest but won't today.

"I love you too, sis. Always," he promises, squeezing her tight.

A moment later, she is turning away, facing the glass, staring past the image that it shows to something far deeper, far more real than this reality has ever been to her.

"I wish..." she begins, eyes falling shut, heart beating faster, magic stirring in her soul. "I wish to be where I have always belonged."

And all at once it is light and dark, cold and hot, fast and slow. The world is not the world anymore, and then...

"Hello, Sarah."

Her eyes open at the sound of his voice, her mouth smiles as she sees him again, at last.

"Hello, Jareth."

Toby watches from beyond the glass as they embrace and then he turns away, a single tear falling which he quickly wipes away. Taking in a breath, he exhales slowly, promising himself it was all for the best.