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Call this a position I never thought I’d be in, Sarah chuckled to herself.

She sat (lounged, really, his posture was definitely wearing off on her) in the large leather chair in the corner of Jareth’s bedroom, a stack of thick parchment paper covered in elegant, looping script clutched in her hands. She kept her eyes focused on the pages, which wasn’t easy when their author was alternately juggling crystals, pacing the room, and sighing dramatically.

She smirked but didn’t look up. “I’m almost done. Stop acting like a goddamn toddler.”

She could picture his innocent expression perfectly. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I did the same thing the first time I asked you to read something I wrote. It’s unnerving, I know.”

He sniffed. “Nothing unnerves me, Sarah. I only wish to have my papers back so that I might continue writing.”

“You’re the one who asked me to read them.”

“I had not considered how long it would take.”

“You’re immortal, for heaven’s sake. You can handle it. And I’d be done a lot faster if you’d just be quiet.”

Amazingly, Jareth was silent, though the air practically hummed with his impatience. She laid each page on his desk as she finished it, noting new titles among the pile of old and new books stacked there: The Riverside Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Castle of Otranto. Some came from the castle library (probably plundered centuries ago, he admitted), and some she’d brought him from her own collection. He’d become particularly fond of Gothic romance, and after he’d torn through Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole she’d brought him some twentieth-century equivalents. Rebecca was a recent favorite.

Maybe not so surprising, given that he’s a mysterious man who lives in an isolated castle.

She smirked as she laid another page on the desk. Glad he doesn’t expect me to play the terrified virgin.

She finished the last page and then waited a few seconds, just for effect, before setting the papers aside and looking at Jareth with a carefully neutral expression.

His eyes were piercing, and she felt the corners of her mouth twitching at the sheer force of will it must be taking for him not to demand that she speak.

Finally, she let him win.

You’re doing that far too often these days.

“It’s really good,” she finally said.

His face remained impassive, but she caught a glimmer of light in his eyes and the tiniest flexing of his left hand, which might as well have been a chorus of cheers and a victory dance. It was gone quickly, of course, and he cleared his throat.

“Of course it’s really good,” he said. “I was simply curious how a mortal mind might respond to it.”

“Well, it needs some polishing—“

“Polishing?” He looked horrified. “Why would anything I produce need polishing?”

“Calm down, Jareth, every script goes through plenty of revisions—“

“Every mortal script.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “This may have been penned by an immortal, but if it’s going to be performed in the mortal world and appreciated by mortal minds, then yes, it’ll need some more work.” She smiled at his indignant expression and crossed the short distance from the chair to the large, four-poster bed where he sat, enjoying a rare moment of looking down on him. She ran a hand through his hair, and his expression softened slightly. “Besides, you want it to be the absolute best that it can be, don’t you?”

He pulled her down onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. “I think it’s quite good already.”

She laughed. “Gods, grant me the confidence of an immortal man who’s just written a first draft.”

It was good, she realized, though of course she was biased. She’d worried that it wouldn’t be, and that she’d either have to be brutally honest and break his heart or come up with some sort of mealy-mouthed praise to keep his ego from being deflated. Neither approach had really worked for her in the past when she’d dated artists.

She remembered seeing him that first time in the mirror two months before, not long after he’d come to see her play, hunched over a desk and furiously writing with a quill, a kind of focus and determination in his eyes that she’d never seen in him before, but one that she’d immediately recognized, because she imagined it was the same look she had when she was immersed in a new piece of writing. He’d been shy at first and downplayed what he was doing, simply saying that seeing her play had reminded him of the endless volumes of goblin-written stories collecting dust in the castle library, and he had wondered what they might sound like in English. Gently, she’d shown him samples of theatrical scripts, and the translation had evolved into something more, and…

And just like that, we were…collaborating.

Not that she’d ever used that word in front of him.

She nuzzled his neck. “Hang on to that confidence, you’ll need it during Lori’s first critique.”

He pulled away. “Lori? You intend to show this to Lori?”

“Of course. I show her everything I write, and I’ve been telling her that you were working on something sort of Moon Gems-esque, and she really wanted to see it—“

He tried to snatch the pages out of her hands, and she held them just out of reach. “I wanted you to read this. I never said anything about anyone else reading it.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow, her pulse quickening slightly. “Afraid, are you?”

His eyes narrowed. He reached again for the pages and she put them behind her back and backed up against the wall, her eyes never leaving his.

“Give those back,” he said, his voice deathly quiet.

Her heart was racing now. “Make me.”

He gave a short laugh and made to turn away, as though he were bored by it all…

…and then his hand shot out and closed around her neck, and she felt a genuine bolt of fear that quickly turned into a mix of adrenaline and lust.

His smile was cold. She could feel the pressure of his hand, squeezing just enough to leave a mark.

He could crush you. The voice in her head was husky. You know he could.

He pinned her to the wall with his upper body and pressed his cheek against hers. “You know I can always just take what I want,” he whispered.

She licked his ear and felt him shudder. “Why don’t you, then?”

He pinned both of her arms above her head with his other hand—fuck, he was strong—and pushed his leg between hers. “Because I love it when you give in,” he purred. “And believe me…” he squeezed her wrists just enough to make her wince, “…you will.”

She was panting for breath now, her eyes locked with his, wondering, as usual, which one of them would back down first…

…and then his eyes were suddenly distant, his body going still. Sarah sighed against him, knowing what that meant.

He backed away from the wall and adjusted his clothing, the spell broken. She pulled the papers from behind her back and smoothed them.

“What is it this time? A parakeet?”

He didn’t answer, and when she reached out to touch his shoulder his body curled slightly inward. She heard him whisper something in Goblin that roughly translated to “this fucking place.”

Wishes were rarer now than they’d been when she was a teenager, but they still happened. He joked that they were mostly inconsequential, but there were times when they made him quiet and taciturn. She’d never pressed much about those.

The brief conversations they’d had on the subject had taught her that he was bound to this place—and to the duty of dealing with wished-away things—in a primal way. When she’d gently suggested that maybe he could just ignore the wishes, or give the wishers back whatever they’d wished away, he’d laughed bitterly.

She’d begun to realize that she hadn’t really seen a lot of it as real, even though Toby’s disappearance had certainly been terrifying at the time. But now, even though she shied away from a lot of the details, she knew that it was real enough for him. And the wishers.

Sarah held the script pages in her hands, glancing over the unusually elegant writing, long, curving lines with only the occasional drip of stray ink. She tried to keep her voice cheerful without sounding fake.

“I could keep you company while they—“

“No.”

She blinked at the harshness of his tone, catching a shadow across his face before it was quickly replaced by a faint smile. “I have no wish to keep you from what I’m sure are more amusing Aboveground pursuits.”

She smiled back, the dark moment forgotten, as it usually was. “Your company’s never dull.”

His smile was more genuine at that, the mocking laced with real warmth. “Indeed.”

Sarah went to put the sheaf of papers in her bag and then paused. “So…can I show this to Lori, then?”

Jareth grimaced. “If the path to a wider audience for my work must lead me through her, then so be it.” He cleared his throat and drew himself up to a decidedly haughtier posture. “Not that I have anything to worry about.”

She smiled. “Of course not.” She slipped the papers into her bag and glanced at the clock on the wall, the hands of which had begun to spin. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and they won’t have any interest in running the labyrinth to get it back. Whatever it is.”

“Maybe.” His body began to shimmer. “You’ll find your way home?”

“I always do.”

He blew her a kiss. “Till we meet again.”

She watched him vanish, leaving a heavy silence in the room broken only by the faint sound of goblins several rooms away. Her hand drifted to her neck, which felt tender when she pressed down.

You’re playing with fire here, and you know it.

“I started it. I can put a stop to it whenever I want.”

Yeah, not so sure about that anymore.

He’d been shocked the first time she’d goaded him in that way, really goaded him. And to his credit, he’d asked first—quietly, carefully—if she wanted what he thought she wanted. She’d said yes.

It had happened several times since then, a mix of teasing and threats and restraint. Some of it was a performance, she knew—she was no stranger to acting—but plenty of it felt real, or at least blurred the lines.

What made her flush with heat was how much he seemed to enjoy it.

Maybe he just enjoyed giving her what she wanted, she’d thought in the beginning. But maybe he enjoyed feeling powerful in the same way that she enjoyed giving up control.

There were rules, and they followed them. He’d never crossed a line, as far as she was concerned. But it didn’t change the fact that he was, and always would be, far more powerful than her.

She shook her head. He’ll always stop. He’ll always stop when you tell him to.

She felt a sudden chill. “Will he, though?” she whispered. “Will he really?”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Worth at least ten thousand.” “Nope, it’s junk.” “Bet?” “Sure, loser does the dishes, like always. You do love getting your hands soapy.” Miguel chuckled and took another sip of wine. In the soft, carefully chosen lighting of his well-decorated condo she could see faint spots of grey in his dark buzzcut. He’d had them since they were in college—“My father was 90% grey by 25”— but there were more of them now. She finished her own glass of wine as the garish-looking cuckoo clock on the TV screen was revealed, indeed, to be worth next to nothing. “Foiled again,” he muttered. “Seriously, have we ever caught an episode where something was revealed to be worth money? I’m not even sure those exist.” “They do.” He started to pour her more wine, but she waved him off. “I’ve seen them on YouTube.” “Yeah, well, I hope we never catch one. Somehow I think it’ll ruin the magic for me.” “Speaking of magic…” Sarah rolled her eyes, knowing what was coming. “Hey look, this next one’s a watch!” “Come on. It’s been like two months—mostly my fault, I know, been kinda busy—but you promised me a dish and an update.” Sarah was about to come up with more excuses not to talk about the things that she and Jareth certainly hadn’t talked about —things Miguel would get out of her eventually, with enough wine, which might explain why she wasn’t drinking as much—when they both heard a faint moan from the bedroom. Miguel’s expression tensed momentarily, but a smile quickly covered the moment. “Hold that thought,” he said. “You’re not off the hook here.” She watched him go into the bedroom and shut the door behind him, heard the sound of his usual, gently soothing voiced mixed with Nick’s whispery rasp. Feeling like she was eavesdropping, she got up and began rinsing off plates and silverware in a kitchen that still smelled pleasantly of garlic and fresh herbs. She did it as quietly as possible, though experience told her that very little could wake Sammy and Mari once they’d gone to bed. When Miguel emerged from the bedroom he looked tired. Sarah glanced around the kitchen at various jars of tea and a basket of fresh fruit. “Does he need anything?” “Nah.” Miguel’s smile was more forced than usual. “The meds don’t always work. Sometimes he wakes up in pain. I give him a little more, I know I’m not supposed to, but I just can’t watch him suffer.” Miguel’s voice seemed to crack a little at those last words, and Sarah reached out and hugged him fiercely. He hugged her back, then groaned and pushed her away. “Fuck, will you please tell me the gory details of your actual date?” She smiled. “Glad to be of service. Though there’s not much to dish about.” She helped him put spice jars away in cabinets. “I invited him to the play, he came through the mirror, we came back to my place—“ “Your place?!!” Miguel lowered his voice, glancing toward the room where the kids were sleeping. “You went to your place? You’ve definitely never done that before.” Sarah blushed, remembering quite specifically the things they’d done that night that they hadn’t done before. “No, we hadn’t. Now we’ve done it a few times.” He smirked. “I thought I noticed a few hickeys on your neck, you might want to—“ Sarah looked up from the dish she was drying to see that Miguel was staring at her neck. He moved closer to her, and her hands instinctively covered her throat. “Sarah, what the fuck?” “It’s not what it looks like—“ “Did he do that to you?” “Yes, but—“ “Sarah, what in the—“ “I asked him to.” Miguel’s mouth fell open, closed, and then he emitted a series of nervous laughs. “Well. Shit. Color me—did not think you would go for—“ “Why not?” She was surprised at the defensiveness in her own voice. Miguel smiled. “Not saying I thought you were a square, sweetie—okay, maybe a little bit of a square—“ Sarah swatted at him with a dish towel and he dodged, “but hey, if that’s your thing, go for it. Hell, I’ve been there, it was hot, not really Nick’s thing but he indulged me occasionally…anyway, didn’t mean to sound so shocked, just…be careful, okay? There’s a bit of a real-life power imbalance here.” She sighed. “Tell me about it.” “Anyway, back to the dish—did he make breakfast? Like, magic rainbow waffles with enchanted syrup?” “No, he was gone in the morning when I woke up.” She frowned. “He can’t always be here, there’s…stuff he has to do over there.” “Right. Drain the moat, keep the gnomes in line.” “Goblins, actually.” “Goblins. My bad.” Miguel shook his head as he continued to dry pots and dishes. “I would really, really love to see that place someday. I’m sure Mari and Sammy would too, maybe if I just casually wished them—“ “NO!” Miguel dropped the fork he’d been scrubbing and stared at Sarah, alarmed. She imagined that the expression on her face must have been shocking. She reached out and gripped his arm, a bit tighter than she’d intended. “Miguel, promise me that you will never, ever say those words, even as a joke. Ever.” He stared at her, glancing down at her hand gripping his arm, and she saw a strange look come into his eyes. “I promise,” he said finally. She let go of him, letting out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, and went back to organizing small things in the kitchen that didn’t really need organizing. Silence stretched between them. When Miguel broke the silence his voice was quiet. “Sarah…do you trust him?” She flinched. “Trust him how?” “You know what I mean.” She shrugged, not meeting his eyes. “Do I trust him not to kill me or people I care about? Sure. Do I trust him not to follow through on careless wishes and steal small children?” She shook her head. “Not really, no.” “Does he still do that?” “These days I think it’s mostly pets and inanimate objects. I kind of haven’t asked about the details, though.” “Why not?” She sighed. “Because we’ve never had those kinds of conversations. Until recently we argued and we fucked and we cuddled afterwards and we didn’t stay long enough in each other’s worlds for things to get messy, and that’s been great, let me tell you, but now I’ve gone and mucked the whole thing up by wanting more, and now we’re collaborating on a goddamn script and saying nice things to each other on the regular, and I find myself thinking about breakfasts and futures and I am so, so stupid.” She punctuated her last words by tossing a fork into a bowl full of soapy water, which splashed her in the face. Her heart was racing, and she wasn’t sure if she felt like laughing or crying. Sarah buried her face in her hands. “I am really, really good at fucking up a great situation.” “How so?” “You said it yourself a long time ago—dream men are perfect. No consequences, no commitments, no sheets to wash. That’s what it’s been like the last few years, and it’s been perfect.” Miguel regarded her skeptically. “If it were perfect I don’t think you’d have asked him to come to the play.” Sarah groaned. “Maybe. Where does that leave us? He is not relationship material.” “Why not?” “Why not?” She threw up her hands. “Jesus, Miguel, do you want the long list or the short? Besides being arrogant as anything, he can’t live in this world permanently, and I don’t want to live in his, not all the time. He is also a literal boogeyman, which is hot in bed but would make for some very difficult conversations if we ever decided to be serious.” She swallowed hard. “My God, he could steal Marisol and Samuel away if he wanted to, just to get back at me if he ever got pissed off at me for some reason, which happens a lot, I shouldn’t even be near them!” She realized that she was pacing back and forth. Miguel reached out a hand. “Sweetie, sit down.” “Thanks, I’ll keep standing and pacing, it helps me think.” Miguel sighed. “All right, here’s a question. Is it just HIM you don’t want to get serious with, or are you averse to seriousness in general?” Sarah stopped for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe both?” “Because, like, I get it if you’re not the settling-down type. It’s not for everyone. Hell, I thought it wasn’t for me for a long time, remember?” She laughed, thankful for the momentary distraction that vivid memories of Miguel’s boyfriend-a-week college years gave her. “Yeah. At first I was convinced Nick must be some kind of cult leader, the change that came over you.” He shrugged. “It happens.” His eyes wandered over to where Mari and Sammy’s drawings hung on the refrigerator, colorful figures of people and animals with large heads and tiny bodies. “I guess all I’m saying is…if you’re resisting this because you’re not up for marriage and babies, or even exclusivity, fine. That’s a totally acceptable position. But if you’re resisting it just because it’s him, well…” “That’s also a totally acceptable position,” Sarah interjected. “Again, very long list of reasons why that would be a bad idea, starting with steals children as a job.” Miguel shrugged again. “Only when people ask that they be taken.” Sarah’s mouth fell open. “Dear God, Miguel, when did you become Jareth’s lawyer?” “When I saw that he made you happy. And I saw that a long time ago, way before I knew he existed. I’d been really worried about you before then.” Sarah frowned. “I would have gotten out of that funk eventually.” “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m glad you did, though, and I’m grateful to him for helping.” She groaned. “Please never say that to him, he doesn’t need more of an ego boost.” Miguel wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “You’re adorable when you’re in love, you know.” Sarah cringed. “I am not in love.” “Whatever. Your hair’s longer than it’s been in years.” That caught her up short for a second. “What?” Miguel smirked. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Anyway, just don’t rule anything out, okay? Nick and I never would have worked on paper.” “Nick isn’t an immortal with potentially dangerous powers and a very flimsy moral compass.” “No. But he does own more than one Christmas sweater.” Miguel was still talking, but Sarah only half-heard him as her hand drifted to her hair, currently knotted and wrapped messily in a couple of rubber bands. Sure, she hadn’t cut it in a few months, but that wasn’t because… “…games we should play at Lori’s baby shower.” Sarah blinked. “Sorry?” “I was saying that you need to help me figure out what kinds of games we should play at Lori’s baby shower. Normally I’d go for full humiliation, but she’s kind of, you know, a god, so I’m a little wary of pissing her off, especially if I ever want her to cast me in something.” “Christ, when did everyone around me start having babies?” “Join the club, share the misery.” “No thanks, happy to be a cool aunt. I’m teaching a workshop on Thursday morning, maybe we can do coffee and discuss embarrassing games after that?” “Sure, I don’t need to pick up the kids till three.” Sarah smiled and glanced around at the mostly-clean kitchen, searching for more menial tasks to do but coming up short. Miguel smiled awkwardly. “It’s late, you should—“ “I can stay a while more—“ “No, no, I’m okay, really.” She reached out and squeezed his hand. “You know you don’t have to pretend to be okay with me.” He winced. “Yeah, but I do for Mari and Sammy.” Sarah hugged him tightly and slipped a couple of folded bills into his hand. “Take them to Coney Island when the respite care guy comes next week.” Miguel frowned as he looked at the money. “Sarah, I told you I don’t want—“ “Miguel, how much did you and Nick spend on me when I was broke and just out of college?” Miguel’s expression was halfway between a wince and a smile. “You did have an appetite for expensive food back then.” “Exactly. And odds are I’ll be broke again someday and you’ll need to prop me up.” He sighed and put the money in his pocket. “Right. Hurry up with that, though, I’m not used to being the freeloader.” She kissed his cheek and picked up her bag. As she opened the door he squeezed her arm. “Not trying to be your dad, Sarah, but…tell him to stay away from your neck, okay? That’s, like, varsity-level shit.” He cleared his throat. “More like 100% no-no shit, for most people.” Sarah nodded. “Yeah. Thank you.” It was close to midnight by the time Sarah got back to her own apartment, where a new sofa was the only indication that the last several months had been decent ones, financially speaking. She tossed her bag onto the small table by the door, noticing the thick pages of Jareth’s script sticking out of it. She ran her fingers over the edges and made a mental note to set up a meeting with Lori. As she stripped out of her clothes she caught a glimpse of another bruise on her back that she hadn’t noticed before. She glanced at the bruises on her neck, which looked a bit more dramatic than what had caused them. You should wear a scarf. Otherwise people will get the wrong idea. And what would the RIGHT idea be, exactly? She sighed and undid the rubber bands holding her hair up. It was long. She told herself it was because she’d been too busy to cut it. She rolled her eyes, jumped into bed, and pulled the sheet over her head. I. Am. Not. In. Love. As if in response, the crystal ball that she kept under her pillow seemed to hum slightly. Like she often did, she reached underneath and gripped it until she fell asleep.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The northbound A train was packed. Sarah’s body was squeezed between a woman carrying a very nervous-looking dog in a dog-sized clown costume and an older man with piercings that went from his nose across his face to his ear.Sometimes New York really does rival the Underground for colorful characters.A journey to meet up with Lori that should have taken ten minutes had already taken forty, with the train traveling at a snail’s pace and then stopping for long periods between stations. Sarah was somewhere between expecting these kinds of delays and feeling a deep sense of betrayal every time they happened.Today, given the crush of bodies around her and the fact that many of them smelled unwashed, she was leaning toward the latter.She tried to distract herself with thoughts of Jareth’s script. It was a bit of a disjointed mess, if she admitted it to herself, but the translated words had a lyrical quality that was kind of mesmerizing. There was no hint of irony or winking—it was completely sincere, something that she’d also gone for with Moon Gems. Which meant that on the stage it might come across as pompous and bombastic, but maybe not, with Lori’s guidance.It helped that in reading the script she imagined the words being spoken in his voice. She sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, unable to move more than a centimeter. The train stopped and lingered longer than it should have at 155th Street station.What would it mean, Sarah wondered, if Lori liked it? If she wanted to direct it, or if she wanted Sarah to direct it? Was Jareth actually capable of collaborating? Really collaborating? Would he even be able to spend that much time away from his side of the mirror? Had she just thrown a grenade into the center of their relationship? And had she done it on purpose?The train finally dragged itself out of 155th Street, only to stop on the tracks less than a minute later. The lights flickered and then went out completely.There was a collective groan. “Are you kidding me, motherfuckers?” someone shouted. “Are you kidding me?”Sarah closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The dog in the woman’s arms gave a pitiful whimper. When the air conditioning stopped running and the temperature quickly began to rise Sarah felt her heart rate increase. There were murmurs, and someone pounded on the windows.“Open the doors!”Sarah stood on her tiptoes and could faintly make out movement up ahead. As more murmurs passed through the crowd she figured it out—there was only one exit, at the end of the train, and they’d all have to file out.She gritted her teeth. Third. Goddamn. Time. In a month. The mass of people in front of her didn’t seem to be moving at all, and she felt a trickle of sweat pooling down her back. The air felt thick. She tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t.“We’re gonna die in here, we’re gonna die in here…”“Shut up.”“Don’t tell me to shut up, don’t nobody tell me to shut up—“The mass of bodies jolted suddenly, and several people gasped. Sarah had an image of a stampede, of things going completely to hell before she had a chance to move.“I wish—“She gasped. The people she was pressed up against ignored her, probably thinking that she was panicking along with the rest of them.What the hell is wrong with you?Sarah closed her eyes and took deep breaths in and out. Miraculously, the crowd seemed to have calmed down, the surge of potential panic replaced by muttering and resigned sighs.Wishes always have consequences, you know that.Of course she knew that. But sometimes she sensed it would be so easy…so easy to just say yes to whatever Jareth offered her, her uptight sense of “cheating” be damned…She eventually made it off the train and up the stairs into a light drizzle, resolving to take a cab next time, a promise she’d made before and never kept, because the subway was like a jerk boyfriend—gifted with endless second chances.Think of all the things you could have, if you only wished for them. What's the worst that could happen?She pushed away those thoughts as she opened her umbrella and began the long walk to the cafe, scanning the road for a vacant taxi light that she knew she probably wouldn’t find. You can at least trust him enough to not take advantage of one careless wish. Can’t you? The fact that she couldn’t answer that question probably should have worried her more. Lori was understanding about the train delay (everyone was these days, Sarah reflected, because they were becoming harder and harder to avoid). She had already ordered a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of mint tea and was glancing over the copied pages of Jareth’s script that Sarah had sent her. Sarah ordered a spinach and egg white omelet and forced herself to eat at least a portion of it, even though feedback sessions with Lori always made her lose her appetite. And this time it’s not even MY work that’s about to get eviscerated. It shocked her to realize that she was just as, if not more nervous to see Lori’s reaction to something Jareth had written. It felt like a referendum—on his abilities, maybe even her basic sense of judgment.She also couldn’t help picturing the look on Jareth’s face if Lori hated his play, the way she knew he’d shrug and act like her opinion was beneath him. She hated the idea of having to mince words and let him down easy.For her part, Lori was contentedly wolfing down her bowl of oatmeal and fruit, occasionally gazing out the window as she sipped her tea (the limited conversation they’d had up to now had included a frustrated comment about not being able to drink coffee). Her dreadlocked hair was cut to just above her shoulders, and she wore a simple T-shirt stretched over her very large stomach and a pair of black jeans, her ankle-length leather coat lightly spattered with rain and resting on the booth next to her. Years after they’d first collaborated Sarah considered Lori something between a friend and a mentor, even though the other woman was only a few years older. They spent time together outside of work, but Lori rarely talked about her personal life, and she’d never told Sarah about a boyfriend or a husband, only admitting that she was pregnant when it became impossible to hide. After that Sarah had managed to glean a few very minor details about Lori’s partner—Tal, younger, not a theater person, from France. She wondered if she’d ever know more than that.She’d learned to wait for Lori to start talking on days like this. Lori hated small talk, and after a brief greeting and ordering their food her friend was always happy to sit in silence for fifteen or twenty minutes before they started talking shop. It had taken Sarah a while to get used to, given the fact that she was usually surrounded by people who couldn’t stop talking. It’s nice that Jareth knows when to talk and when to be quiet.She shook her head. Focus. The waitress cleared the dishes away and Lori put her elbows up on the table, resting her chin in her hands. “So,” she finally said.Sarah swallowed. “So?”Lori ran her fingers over the copies of Jareth’s script pages, the flowing, ink-spattered lines contrasting sharply with the dull color of the printer paper. “I take it this guy doesn’t have a computer?”Sarah cleared her throat. “It was broken.”Lori shrugged. “Fine, was just hoping that he wasn’t some hipster sitting in the park with a quill and ink.” Lori regarded Sarah curiously. “You agree with me that this script is kind of nuts, right?”Sarah gave a high-pitched laugh. “Nuts?”“Yeah. Like, it reads like someone from another planet wrote it, someone who had a basic idea of what a script should LOOK like, but then they infused it with their own nutso sensibilities. Is he a drug addict?”“No.” Lori raised an eyebrow. “Huh.”Sarah smiled awkwardly and smoothed some nonexistent wrinkles in her shirt. “It was really kind of you to read it. I’m sorry if it was a waste of time, I just thought—““Hang on, what makes you think I didn’t like it?”Sarah blinked. “Uh…you said it was—““Nuts, yeah. Nuts can be good.”“It can?”Lori burst out laughing and reached for Sarah’s hand. “Sarah, how long have we known each other?”Sarah thought quickly. “Seven years?”“And are you telling me that in that time you haven’t seen me produce or write or direct anything that was more than a little nutty?”Sarah felt herself beginning to relax. “Well, Tacos mon Amour wasn’t exactly mainstream—““And I had my actors dress up as fucking sheep for King Lear.” She tapped the script in front of her. “Seriously, I’m offended that you’d think I was above something like this.”“I didn’t—“ Sarah laughed. “Look, I guess I just worried I was biased, given that I’m, uh, sort of close with the author.”“Yeah, well, that can certainly cloud your judgment.” She glanced over the pages. “I’m not saying this thing doesn’t need work. It needs a lot of work—some of the magic stuff has got to go, for one thing, because the scenarios described in here are going to call for Cursed Child-level visual effects, and we will not have a Cursed Child-level budget…”Sarah listened as Lori went through the script and a new version of it gradually took shape in front of them. In the back of her mind, though, she was already picturing Jareth’s reaction. Would he resist any changes? Would he just be happy that his work was going to be seen, even if he did everything he could to hide it? An hour and more cups of tea (combined with more good-natured complaining about caffeine avoidance) later, Sarah had detailed notes in hand and an idea of how to present them to Jareth. She was just about to gather her things to leave when Lori spoke up.“So have you and Miguel figured out how to humiliate me in front of friends & colleagues yet?”Sarah smiled. “Not yet. He’s still pretty intimidated by you, though, so I wouldn’t worry too much.”“Good.” She glanced down at her stomach. “Jesus, you wanna talk nuts…”Sarah set her bag down and waited. Eventually Lori spoke again.“We didn’t plan it, you know. It would have made sense not to keep it.”Sarah nodded, afraid that Lori would stop talking if she spoke.Lori shrugged. She seemed to be talking more to herself than Sarah. “He was supposed to be a fling, but he kind of grew on me.”“Yeah, uh…” Sarah blushed. “I kinda know what that’s like.” Lori looked up as if just now remembering that Sarah was there. Her smile was full of genuine warmth. “Well, tell your particular grew-on-me that he’s written something rather interesting, and I’d like to see what the revised version looks like, if he’s up for it.” She gathered her things and Sarah helped her get up from the booth, which took a bit more effort than usual. “At some point we’ll have to meet in person, though.”“Yeah.” Sarah smiled, her heart pounding with a mixture of glee and dread. “We’ll figure it out.”

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We’ll figure it out might have been overly optimistic, she realized a few hours later.“Why in the world can’t you and I simply produce the play as it is? Why the need for outside intervention?”Sarah rolled her eyes and flopped back on Jareth’s bed, resisting the urge to bury her face in an oversized pillow. “Because outside intervention is a good thing. Good plays don’t happen in a vacuum.”Jareth stood up from where he’d been hunched over the writing desk, the original script and Lori’s notes scattered across it. He paced slowly between the desk and the window. “But she wants to remove things that are important to me. Things that I worked hard on.”“Murder your darlings.”“I beg your pardon?”Sarah stood and went to the window, looking out over a dream-like expanse of maze and castle battlements—and, she noticed as always, chickens. They really were everywhere.“Murder your darlings,” she said again. “It means that you have to destroy things, even things you love, in order to make something great.”He stared out the window, his gaze focused on something beyond the maze that she couldn’t see. “This sounds like yet another mortal sensibility that is beyond my scope of comprehension. Not that I’m not familiar with destroying things, I’ve just mostly done it for amusement.”Sarah tentatively reached out and took his hand. “Do you remember…what I was like, when you came back to me?”His gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, though she felt him squeeze her hand. “You were full of rage,” he said quietly. “At your mother, surely, but also at yourself.”“And do you remember how I got better?”He smirked. “I’d like to think that very good sex was a part of it.”“Sure, asshole.” She gave him a not-so-gentle shove. “That was a part of it. But I also had to destroy some things. Illusions. Grudges. And then I sort of…built something new on top of the wreckage.”He smiled at her, a kinder sort of smile. “Mortals do love their metaphors.”“Yeah, maybe I do more than most.” She took both his hands and stared up at his mismatched eyes until she earned an all-too-rare blush. “Would you trust me?” she asked him in Goblin.He cocked his head at her. “Trust you? In what way?”“We can start with trusting that I know a little more about this whole playwriting thing than you do. Also trusting that Lori and I will help you make something good.”He reached out to touch her cheek. “I believe I can trust that much, yes.” She smiled. “Good. Then I need you to ask the goblins to bring up a cask of wine from the cellars.”Jareth blinked. “Wine? Why?”“Because the first thing that any sane person does after a mostly-positive response from Lori is get messily, joyfully drunk.”She’d definitely forgotten how potent Underground wine could be.That, at least, was the excuse echoing in a distant part of her brain as she found herself draped in a variety of scarves and jackets pulled from Jareth’s closet, forcing him to perform scenes from the play with her.“And my…” She squinted, his delicate handwriting as usual proving somewhat difficult to read. “my legions of incest will rain down upon your family until you are reduced to dust…”Jareth guffawed, clearly feeling the effects of the wine himself, though as usual not as strongly as Sarah did. “Insects, precious. Not incest. That would be a very different sort of play.”She laughed harder. “My legions of incest…legions…of…incest…”She sank to the floor next to his bed, her chest hurting from laughing so hard. He sat down next to her and started to pour more wine, but she waved him away.“Please. I’d like to remember some of this evening.”He smiled and produced a crystal, in which she could faintly see images of herself. “Indeed. I really should preserve your performance for posterity.”She reached for the crystal and he held it away from her. “That would be a horrific betrayal of trust.”He eyed her quizzically. “Would it, now?”She smiled, feeling that familiar drunk sensation of watching herself from afar, mildly shocked by what she was saying and doing but helpless to stop it. “Yeah, it would. The only other person who’s ever seen me like this is Miguel.”He seemed genuinely surprised, though he hid it quickly. “Well, as you’ve made clear, we’ll need trust in spades if you’re going to convince Lori that my play doesn’t need any revisions.”Sarah groaned and started removing the costume pieces she’d draped over herself. “For the last time, every play goes through revisions, and you will be fucking lucky to have Lori revising yours. And if you challenge her and make me look bad I will throw you in the fucking bog myself.”Jareth shook his head. “You are truly a marvelous thing to behold when you’re intoxicated.”“Just wait till you see me during tech week.”He continued to stare at her. She smiled at him, and then something in his gaze made her blush and look down. “What the hell are you looking at?”He looked away and was silent for a long time. “Why do you write, Sarah?” he finally said.She shrugged, her own voice sounding slightly off through the buzz of the alcohol. “Because I suck at everything else?”“You know that’s not true.” She sighed and leaned against his shoulder. “Yeah, maybe not. I guess the same reason a lot of people make art…to leave something of myself behind after I’m dead.”“Is this why people make art? Because they fear death?”Sarah massaged her temples, trying to coax her less-than-willing brain into a higher level of thought. “Not FEAR death, per se, but…yeah, it’s connected to mortality, I guess. If we knew we were never going to die there’d be no urgency, and I’m guessing we wouldn’t make much art, if any.” She paused, feeling a shadow settle over her mind. “Nick’s been writing a lot of poetry.”“Nick?”“Miguel’s husband. He’s been sick, and…they think he’ll get better, but he might not, and he’s never had a creative bone in his body, but suddenly he just can’t stop writing poetry, like really bad poetry, I’m sorry to be harsh but it’s true, but Miguel saves every single one and thanks him for them and keeps them in a little notebook.” Her voice was cracking, and she shook her head vigorously, trying to physically shake off the emotions. “Anyway, yeah, maybe the fear of death and leaving nothing behind is a bit stronger for someone like him.”Sarah suddenly turned to Jareth, shocked that she hadn’t asked him before. “Could you…is there anything that—““No.”In the back of her mind she realized she’d known what the answer would be, but it still crushed her. “You’re sure?”“I deal in dreams and memories, and occasionally the manipulation of time, precious. But I cannot stop death or heal the sick.”Sarah sighed. “Well, it was worth a try.”They were both quiet for a while. Eventually Jareth leaned forward, his face deeply contemplative. “You say mortals make art to leave something behind after they die. Why would I feel compelled to make art, then, if I’ll never die?” She regarded him, as usual fascinated by the places that his mind occasionally went. “I don’t know. Why do you think?”He stood up on (slightly) unsteady legs and went to stand by the window, gazing out at a sky now filled with stars. “I told you long ago that I wanted a glorious ending,” he said, so quietly that she could barely hear him. “Or at least a poetic one. You gave me one, in your play. Though I’ll repeat that I wish I could have died slaying a dragon.”Sarah was about to give her usual retort about budgets and egos, but something in Jareth’s demeanor kept her silent. When he turned and looked at her his eyes were piercing.“I wanted my existence to mean something, something beyond goblin mischief and tormenting careless wishers. And perhaps if I create things…things that move mortal hearts…then maybe it will mean something.” He turned away from her. “Maybe making art will turn me into something extraordinary, the way your work has made you extraordinary.”Sarah stared at him, her mind whirling with emotions undoubtedly made more intense by the goblin wine.He was staring out the window again, and she stood up on (much more) unsteady legs and joined him, wrapping an arm around his waist and standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.“Just to confirm, you’re saying that I’m better at something than you are, right?”The corners of his mouth twitched and he gave her a playful shove. “I will deny ever having said such a thing in a mortal or goblin court of law.”She shoved him back. “You’re a goddamn monster, you know that?”He caught her hands and pulled her against him, easily overpowering her less-than-genuine struggles. “Of course I am. And you love it.”She stuck her tongue out at him. “Yeah, I do love you.” She felt his whole body go rigid. Through the very powerful haze of the wine she could hear a voice screaming in the back of her head.IT. I love IT, I didn’t mean to say…or did I…He pulled back and stared at her, and she suddenly had a horrible sensation of vertigo—he’s going to think that he should say it too, even if he doesn’t feel it, or he’s just going to be blunt and tell me that he doesn’t feel that way, and either way it’s going to be horrible, fuuuuuck, I should NOT have had so much goblin wine…But maybe luck was with her, because after looking at her for a moment and maybe sensing her terror (or maybe not), he just lifted her effortlessly off her feet and kissed her.She kissed him back just as hard, as if she could erase that moment by force, wrapping her legs around his waist. He moved slightly and she felt herself pressed up against the wall, his body pushing between her legs as he whispered into her ear.“Taunt all you want, precious. We both know you’re no match for me in certain areas.”She snickered, feeling the fear and the tension melt away under the intensity of the kisses he was spreading down her neck. “You’re certainly good at talking about how skilled you are.”He laughed against her neck, one gloved hand reaching under her shirt. “I never make claims I can’t defend, you know that.”She shivered under his hands, one of which had slipped under her bra, the other reaching down to pull her leg up around his waist. She could feel heat and tingling even through his gloves. “I think I’ve learned enough about what you like,” she whispered, her teeth grazing his neck as she rubbed her body slowly against his, eliciting a slight moan, “to put us on an equal playing field.”He laughed and claimed her mouth again, his tongue making slow, languid circles with hers in a way that he knew made her melt. She gasped when he pulled back. “Do tell,” he said.“Mm hmm.” The wine and the intensely pleasurable sensations were making her bold, she realized. “Maybe I’m even better than you by now now.” He regarded her for a moment and smiled, a smile that anyone else would have taken for adoration…but she could see a glimmer of something dangerous behind his eyes, and a split second later he’d grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked down hard.“Better?” he said sweetly.He moved so quickly that she felt certain he must have re-ordered time, and suddenly he was straddling her on the bed, his hands pressing her wrists into the mattress. She squirmed underneath him, but his strength was effortless, his eyes gleaming slightly in a way that made him look almost feral.“Sounds like someone needs to be reminded of their place,” he growled, pulling her shirt up and off of her body.She flipped over onto her stomach and grabbed one of the bedposts, but he easily wrenched her hand free of it and flipped her onto her back again, pinning her with his body as he pulled off his own shirt.“Where’re you running to, precious?” he said, his voice still a mix of sweetness and danger. He quickly tied his shirt around her wrists, pinning them above her head. “You know there’s nowhere for you to go unless I will it. Not,” he tugged her bra aside and grazed her nipple with his teeth, “that you really have any desire to leave.” He pulled off his gloves and ran his hands over her breasts and stomach, slipping one hand into her jeans before quickly unbuttoning them. The sensation of his hands combined with the effects of the wine made her feel weightless with pleasure.  “I think it’s time,” he said, pushing himself between her legs, “for you to beg me.”She turned her face away when he leaned down to kiss her, and instead he bit her shoulder, a little harder than usual. She gasped.“Beg for what, exactly?” she whispered.She heard the sound of his pants being unfastened. “Mercy, to start with.” He leaned down to lick her nipple slowly, and she arched her back into him, pushing herself into his mouth, and he pulled back, not giving her what she wanted. “Maybe your very life. Or maybe just what we both know you want from me.”He yanked her jeans off completely and ran a feather-light finger over her cotton underwear. She moaned and quickly stifled it by biting her lip.“I don’t need…anything…”He slipped a finger beneath the edge of her underwear, pushing gently against the heat that he found there, and she moaned again. He smirked at her and withdrew his finger, then slowly, deliberately licked it.“That tastes like a lie, precious.”He pressed himself between her legs again, and she felt the hard length of him pushing against her, so close…He licked her ear. “Beg.” Her breath was a hiss. Her whole body ached with need, and she could feel how it was affecting him, his own breath quickening against her. She always drew this moment out for as long as she could, but lately it was getting longer, he was getting more insistent, and she always wondered how far she could push him.Dancing near this sort of edge set every part of her on fire.She turned her face away and he gripped her jaw, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Don’t you dare look away from me.”Jareth reached up and squeezed one of her wrists just enough to make her wince. “I could end you in an instant,” he whispered, twisting her wrist again for emphasis. “You know that, don’t you?”Sarah squirmed under the iron grip of his hands. “Yeah.”“Then give me what I want, precious,” he murmured, pushing her legs wider apart. “Now.”She felt dizzy, like she always did in this moment, but she still managed to speak. “Please,” she whispered.She heard a tearing sound as her underwear came off. “Please what?”She struggled against the fabric holding her wrists in place, and his hand moved up to tighten it. “Please what, Sarah?”She moaned and felt her last reserves of resistance give way, wrapping her legs tightly around him and pulling him against her. “Please use me.” He pulled back slightly, so agonizingly close to being inside her. “Again.”“Please use me.”“Again. And tell me how.”“Please fuck me hard, fuck me until I’m raw—“And then he was inside her hard and fast, and it was painful but also delicious. She gripped his shoulders with fingernails that she knew would leave marks, and then he flipped her over on her stomach, and then onto her side, until finally she was standing pressed into one of the posters at the corner of the bed, his fingers moving expertly between her legs as he thrust in and out of her, her body riding a seemingly endless wave of pleasure……and then he stopped, smirking through his gasps, and the ache was so deep that she thought she might collapse. She tried to pull him deeper inside her but he pressed his forearm against her chest.“Tell me you belong to me,” he whispered.She nodded, knowing that in this moment she would do anything he said. “I belong to you.” He pushed himself inside her slowly. She cried out.“Do you want to come, Sarah?”She moaned. “Yesssss.”He smiled. Dear God, she loved that look of utter glee that came over him in these moments. “Then ask me nicely.”“Please…”“What?”“Please let me come.”His slid in and out of her again, a bit faster, his hand reaching down to touch her in just the right place. “Again.”“Please let me—“The wave crested as her body seemed to fully merge with his, and she cried out, every part of her shaking with wonderful spasms of pleasure. He drank in the sight of it, his eyes locked with hers, and then he winced and shouted her name and pulled her sweat-soaked body against him as he followed her a moment later. They both fell into a tangled mess of sheets and pillows, gasping.She lay there for a long time, delightfully dazed, savoring the ache between her legs and the faint, bruising echo of her tied hands and other places that might have been squeezed or grabbed just a little too tightly. This, she realized, was what she really loved, almost more than what came before—this momentary feeling of floating above and distant from everything, free of all thought and memory, her body so thoroughly spent that her mind seemed momentarily separate from it.As she slowly drifted back into herself she wondered absently if he would say something about what she’d said earlier—some snide comment, or worse, some awkward apology that he didn’t feel the same way. But he was silent next to her as they both drifted toward sleep. At some point, surprising herself, she reached for his arm and pulled it over her body, nestling herself into the crook of his chest. Half-asleep, he pulled her tightly against him, his grip firm, but nothing like it had been before.His breath tickled her neck occasionally, his chest moving in slow rhythm with hers. As she drifted off to sleep she thought he might have murmured something in Goblin that she didn’t quite understand, or it might have been a dream.

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Karen moved in and out of the frame of the small window on Sarah’s computer, as usual having positioned her phone so that Sarah could only see her waist and occasional glimpses of her hands. She could at least hear her stepmother’s voice, though.“…their anniversary and everything, I know they’d really appreciate it, is the twenty-seventh okay?”“Sure.” Sarah randomly browsed social media mentions of Moon Gems while she talked to her stepmother, a bad habit that she hadn’t been able to break. “Two tickets?”“Yes, that’d be lovely, I really think they’d enjoy the show. The Fall might’ve been a bit too grim for them—““Moon Gems isn’t exactly cheerful—““—no, but it’s colorful and it’s got magic and lovely costumes, I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.” The image on the screen jolted suddenly as Karen picked up her phone. “Hang on a second, I’ll see if your brother’s available.”Sarah watched the image in her computer screen bounce up and down for a bit before it revealed the sight of the back of Toby’s head. Her brother was where he usually was these days—on the couch, staring intently at a TV screen, video game controller in his hand.“Say hi to your sister, Toby.”Toby lifted a hand in a brief wave, his curly blond head not bothering to turn around. “Hey.”“Hey Tobes. I’ll beat you at that thing next time I see you.”Toby snorted. “Sure.”The screen image bounced again and Sarah was back in the kitchen, where she could hear the sound of something sizzling. “Sorry, it’s like he’s losing vocabulary every week.”“Eh, he’s a teenage boy. It’s normal.” Karen sighed. “I just hope he grows out of it eventually.”“I think most of them do. You know, around thirty.”Karen chuckled. Sarah heard pots and pans moving and then her stepmother sat down at the kitchen, managing to adjust the phone so that her face was finally visible. “How’s the new script going, by the way?”“All right, I suppose. My collaborator doesn’t exactly make things easy, but I think he’s getting used to the idea that scripts go through revisions.”Karen laughed just a little too heartily and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. Sarah frowned. “What’s so funny?”Karen’s face was a mask of careful neutrality. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me your ‘collaborator’s’ name, Sarah?”Sarah blinked. “I, uh, haven’t mentioned it?”“No, you haven’t. Though I’m aware that it’s a he and said HE has come up quite frequently in our conversations in the last few weeks, which leads me to think that this nameless fellow isn’t just a script collaborator.”Sarah groaned inwardly. Damn you, Karen.  And of course she’d never mentioned his name, Sarah realized, because it would be quite hard to explain why the person she was collaborating with on multiple levels had the same name as the main character in her play, which Karen and her father had seen, multiple times…Karen had her chin in her hands, looking remarkably pleased with herself. “So? Do I get to know his name?”“James,” Sarah blurted. “James.” Karen smiled. “Lovely. Any chance of us meeting him?”Sarah felt her stomach drop. “Meeting him?”“Yes, Sarah. Not to be old-fashioned, but that is still a thing that happens, isn’t it?”Sarah’s mind raced to figure out how she had landed herself in exactly the sort of situation she’d told Miguel that she wanted to avoid. “Yeah, it’s, uh, a thing, just…we’re not…it’s a little…”“All right, all right, dear, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.” Sarah could see the corners of her stepmother’s mouth twitching. “All in good time.”“Yeah.” Sarah swallowed. “Sure. I’ll, uh, keep you posted.”“You do that.” The sound of food sizzling in the background grew louder. “I’d better deal with this. Your father says hello, he’s working late again, we’ll see you for lunch next Sunday?” “Absolutely.”“Right. Love to Miguel and Nick, and tell James we’re looking forward to meeting him.”Sarah forced herself to smile. “Will do.”The call ended and Sarah closed her laptop screen and let her head fall on top of it, visions of the world’s most awkward family dinner swimming in front of her eyes. I could tell them he died, right? Or moved to Iceland? Very suddenly? That’s a thing that people do in these situations, right? Or I could just stop seeing him.She sighed and fingered a fading bruise on her wrist, the feel of Jareth’s sleeping body pressed into hers still vivid in her mind, the faint echo of his breath on her neck. Yeah. Not likely. Hoggle always scoffed when Sarah called the winged creatures in the garden fairies, even though he’d called them that on the day they first met. Technically, he said, they were stej-vrash, which translated to something like “worm-wings.”She could remember a time not so long ago when she’d thought fairies were beautiful. Or at least cute. She remembered filling up the pages of childhood notebooks with pictures of them, begging for a pair of “real wings” for her birthday, devouring any fairy-themed TV show or book she could find.Now she wanted them all dead. To be fair, the fairy population had gotten quite out of control in the sprawling garden outside of Hoggle’s small but well-kept house near the edge of the Firey forest. Hoggle said it had something to do with a batch of squash he’d planted the year before, which, much to everyone’s surprise, seemed to have driven the fairies who’d eaten it into a breeding frenzy.Sarah cursed as yet another one of them escaped the spray coming from the metal tube in her thick-gloved hands. “I swear they’re getting smarter.” Hoggle grunted and easily downed a fairy from five feet away, kicking it casually into a basket of twisted limbs and wings. Sarah didn’t like to think about what would happen to the fairies afterward—they were pests, but they still looked vaguely human.“Ye gotta move silently,” he said, his small body crouching even lower to the ground. “Take smaller steps. And breathe less.”“Breathe less? Are you serious?”Hoggle rolled his eyes. “Nobody asked you to come here, missy. Why doncha go back to makin’ mushy-mushy with His Royal Highness?”“Can’t do that.” Sarah planted her feet and took careful aim. “I’ve been banished for being a distraction. Apparently Jareth needs complete solitude to awaken the literary genius within.”“A lack of sarcasm is also helpful.”Sarah jumped and Hoggle let out a tiny squeal as he dropped his spray-gun. Sarah put her hands on her hips.“No eavesdropping on conversations through magic, Jareth, we’ve been over this.”The disembodied voice seemed to rumble along the ground. “You said my name. I’m hardly at fault.” “Fine, fine. Get back to work.”“I was working, until I was interrupted.”Sarah opened her mouth to retort again and then thought better of it, knowing from experience that this sort of argument could go on for quite a while. Instead, she picked up Hoggle’s fallen spray-gun and handed it to him, just as Jareth’s voice rumbled across the ground again.“Hoggle.”Hoggle dropped the spray-gun on the ground again and croaked, “Yes?”“Public disdain for your monarch is a boggable offense, I’m sure you know.”Hoggle sighed. “Yes.”Sarah watched as Hoggle went back to spraying fairies, not looking very perturbed by Jareth’s threat. “He’s never actually tossed you in the bog, has he?”Hoggle downed two fairies at once and tossed them in the basket. “Nah.” “Has he ever bogged anyone?”Hoggle paused for a moment. “Come t’ think of it…not for a while, no.”“So why does everyone freak out when he mentions it?”Hoggle raised an eyebrow at her. “You ain’t stupid, Sarah. I’m guessin’ you know that he likes to remind everyone who’s in charge.” Sarah blinked. The fairies, emboldened by the lack of spraying, buzzed around her. “So you mostly…pretend to be scared? To make him feel better?”Hoggle shrugged. “Whatever works.” Sarah leaned against the open doorway of Hoggle’s house. The faint smell of drying herbs drifted out. “That’s really kind of you.”Hoggle didn’t have to turn around for Sarah to know he was blushing. “You live in this world long enough, you learn how to keep the peace.” Sarah glanced up at the castle that loomed over everything, imagining that she could see Jareth in the window. Is that why there are certain questions I don’t ask him? she wondered. To keep the peace? She pushed the thought from her mind and returned to spraying fairies, downing two with a single shot before she felt a strange vibration under her feet. At first she thought she was imagining it, but then she glanced at Hoggle’s home and saw that the window curtains were shaking slightly.“Uh, Hoggle?”“Mmm?”“Why is the ground moving?”Hoggle paused and followed her gaze to his curtains. “Oh. Yeah, that’s been happenin’ lately.” The ground continued to shake, not enough to make movement difficult but just enough to be noticeable. Having never experienced an actual earthquake, Sarah was unnerved. “Has this place always been prone to, er, earth-shaking?”Hoggle took Sarah’s spray-gun and tossed it along with his inside a small wooden box under his window. “Nah, more of a recent thing. Maybe cos the labyrinth and His Highness are testy at each other.” “Testy? What do you—““Well met, fair comrades, well met!”Sarah turned to see Didymus emerging from the firey forest astride Ambrosius, a bundle of firewood attached to the back of his steed’s saddle. Ludo lumbered silently next to him, carrying a load of firewood twice as large in his arms. He gave a small wave when he saw Sarah.Didymus hopped nimbly to the ground, seemingly oblivious to the ground shaking, and tied Ambrosius to a fencepost. “Verily, the fireys did as always attempt to distract me with their wildness, but they were no match for me and my brother.”Sarah gaped. “Are you two seriously telling me that you don’t notice the ground shaking right now?”Didymus cocked his head and sniffed the air. “Ah yes, the battle of wills continues…”Ludo suddenly tilted his head back and gave a low howl that gradually increased in volume. Amazingly, the shaking slowly subsided.Sarah shook her head. “All right, earthquakes, the king and the labyrinth fighting each other, and Ludo can stop it all with his voice—why hasn’t anyone told me about this?”Hoggle shrugged. “You didn’t ask.” Sarah followed him into the cottage, leaving Ludo and Didymus outside to sort firewood. He automatically handed her a primitive-looking peeler and a knife and pulled a bunch of root vegetables from a basket. “So the labyrinth, like…has a mind? A will of its own?”Hoggle shrugged. “Sorta. Ain’t like I can have a conversation with it, but I can sense when it’s grumpy. We all can, anything what lives here.”Sarah set about peeling a large carrot. “Have things always been tense between it and…him?”“They got their ups and downs. Sometimes he don’t like following orders, you must’ve noticed that.”She thought of the dark look on Jareth’s face the night that she’d first read his play, the way he’d cursed at having to deal with another wisher. “Yeah, I guess.” “Anyways, it don’t ever get too out of hand. Little shakin’ every now and then, sometimes he disappears for a while, sometimes the hedge walls turn into stone walls. We’re used to it.” Sarah chopped the carrot into small pieces. Like clockwork, Hoggle carried them over and dumped them into a copper pot that was hovering over the fireplace. “I guess I just always thought he was, you know, all-powerful here.”Hoggle looked at her, surprised. “He is powerful.” He continued to stare at her, his expression serious, until Sarah felt slightly unnerved. “Don’t you go forgettin’ that. Just cause the labyinth likes to put him in his place occasionally don’t mean he couldn’t turn me into a pig if he felt like it.”Sarah crossed her arms. “But you don’t think he would.”Hoggle shrugged. “Depends on my mood. And his.” Didymus brought the firewood inside and immediately began telling a story of fighting wild boars in a distant kingdom. After the soup was finished cooking they pulled the small table outside (since Ludo wasn’t able to fit through the door) and loaded it with cheese, bread, the soup, and mugs of fresh juice and mild mead, all thoughts of earthquakes forgotten, though Sarah jumped slightly every time the table rattled under the weight of pots and dishes. She couldn’t sleep that night, and she was fairly sure it had little to do with the extra helpings of vegetable soup and barley bread that she’d eaten.She lay in Jareth’s large bed, as usual enjoying the slightly unearthly sensations of incredibly soft linens and pillows around her, a softness that no earthbound bed had ever been able to imitate. The oversized shirt she was sleeping in—one of his, she still hadn’t gotten into the habit of packing an “overnight bag,” given that night and day didn’t really exist here in the same way—was equally soft. Hoggle says he’s powerful. But how powerful can he really be when he’s basically a prisoner in this place? She glanced over at Jareth’s peacefully sleeping form, his bare chest rising and falling slowly, hair spread out across his pillow. She still wasn’t sure if he actually slept in the way that mortals did, but if he didn’t he seemed adept at mimicking mortal sleep patterns.She rose quietly and went to sit at his desk. His play revisions, still not quite finished, were in one corner of the desk, under an inkwell, and she’d promised not to look at them yet. She glanced at the piles of books and papers scattered over the rest of the desk, noting absently that The Riverside Shakespeare was open to Act 3 of Richard II.…for within the hollow crownThat rounds the mortal temples of a kingKeeps Death his court and there the antic sits,Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp…Sarah sighed. It might be a coincidence. Or it might be that his wish for an ending was never far from his mind.She took a blank piece of parchment and a pen and started writing (she’d left ballpoint pens lying around his desk, but he still insisted on using a quill and ink). She had no idea what she was going to write, but within a few minutes she had several pages that began as prose and gradually morphed into dialogue and stage directions, as her writing usually did. She heard the bed creak slightly and jumped, turning her head to see Jareth leaning against a bedpost, wearing a pair of loose-fitting trousers. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” she said.His eyes traveled over her and lingered on the hand that clutched the pen. “I enjoy watching you write,” he said.She smiled and put the pen down. “I suppose that’s not as creepy as watching me sleep.”“I do that occasionally as well.”“Yeah, well, so do I, so I guess we’re both slightly creepy.”He glanced at the pages on the desk and she quickly turned them over. “No peeking till this thing’s been through lots of revisions.”“What’s it about?”She smiled. It was only in the past year or so that he’d begun to show a genuine interest in her writing, or other aspects of her Aboveground life. Which might explain why she was a half-inch closer to things like a family dinner, insane as it still sounded in her head.And why you blurted out “I love you” like a damned idiot, but let’s not think about that right now. She ran her fingers over the parchment. “At the moment it’s about power and what it does to different people who have it and don’t have it, something that’s been on my mind a bit lately.” She regarded him carefully, wondering how much he’d be willing to reveal. “That was quite an earthquake this afternoon.”His expression darkened. “Yes.” She stood, pulling his oversized shirt around herself. “Hoggle says you and the labyrinth are a bit testy at each other.”He seemed about to speak but then didn’t, instead turning back toward the bed. She followed him, sitting on the edge.“Do you, like…have conversations with it?”He shook his head. “It has…invited me into its inner realm a few times, always in different forms. Sometimes a lake of fire, sometimes a room full of knives. It seems to take forms that it thinks I will find intimidating. Perhaps not so different from the forms I take when I encounter wishers for the first time.” “Why does it do that?”He laughed mirthlessly. “To remind me of my place.”She reached out to touch his hand. “Are you…afraid of it?”He flinched. She thought he would pull his hand away, but eventually he squeezed hers, gently.“Might we speak of something else, Sarah?”She had a sudden vision of sitting with him in a strangely reconstructed version of her childhood bedroom, recalling the time when she'd been cruel to Hoggle, Didymus and Ludo in an attempt to be “grown up.” It must have felt good, for a moment, he’d said. To feel powerful. She stood up and moved in front of him. He cocked his head at her, confused.“Tell me what to do,” she said.When he still looked confused she unlaced the front of her shirt slowly. Understanding, he smiled. “Take off that shirt,” he said, his voice betraying none of the uneasiness from before.She quickly pulled off the shirt and let it drop to the floor, standing naked in front of him. His smile widened, and he stood up.“Kneel.” She did, grateful when he grabbed a pillow from the bed and placed it under her knees. She could feel heat pooling in the lower half of her body, the familiar giddiness that came from giving herself over to a role that she almost never played in her Aboveground life. He swiftly undid the drawstring of his trousers.“Open your mouth.” She obeyed.Later, lying in bed contented and with the taste of him still lingering on her tongue, she realized that they hadn’t tried this version of things before—it had always begun with threats, or demands, or the faintest hint of impending violence. This had simply been…surrender. She’d liked it. She could tell that he had, too. Drifting off to sleep, she felt his arm close around her waist and pull her against him. “Thank you,” he whispered. She threaded her fingers through his, conscious enough to realize that in a single night he’d asked about something she was writing and thanked her, two things he definitely hadn’t been in the habit of doing not so long ago.She sighed. Girl. You are in so, so far over your head.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Dammit, Sarah, I can feel your eyes on me.” Sarah jumped, almost dropping the dish and towel that she held. When she finished drying it she placed it carefully in an upper cabinet, as always aware of the fact that Mari and Sammy were sleeping nearby. “Sorry. I’ll, uh, go check on the kids.” Lori didn’t look up from her position on the couch, pages of Jareth’s revised script resting on her lap, her expression as usual unreadable. “Just go hang out in Nick’s office, the kids are fine.” Sarah set a dish quietly in the drying rack and glanced at the clock—almost ten pm. Miguel had said he’d be rehearsing until nine, but things sometimes ran late. She headed down the hallway to Nick’s small office (which these days was doubling as a storage space for all sorts of medical equipment), but she paused when she noticed that the door to the children’s bedroom slightly ajar. She opened it very gently… …to see Sammy sleeping peacefully next to an empty twin bed. Sarah stifled a scream, doing a quick search around the room to determine that no, Marisol wasn’t under the bed or balled up under the covers. She gently pulled the door closed. “It’s fine. It’s fine. You’ve been here all evening, there’s nowhere she could have—“ You know exactly where she could have gone. “No, no, no,” Sarah whispered to herself as she moved quickly toward the master bedroom, “nobody’s wished for anything around here, Miguel knows better, he would never—“ She opened the master bedroom door quietly to see Nick propped up in his rented hospital bed, reading a book by faint lamplight. Marisol was curled up asleep next to him. “Sarah?” Nick’s drawn face looked worried. “Is everything okay?” Sarah forced herself to smile. “Yeah. Sorry, I—I went into their bedroom and Mari wasn’t there, and I freaked out for a second.” Nick smiled. “They do know how to give people panic attacks, these two.” Sarah glanced between Nick and Marisol. “Is she—okay there? Should I take her back to her room?” “No, she…” Sarah could tell he was trying to make light of something that wasn’t light at all. “People say they’re both too young to understand most of it, but I think Mari understands more. Sometimes she wakes up afraid because she thinks I’m gone, and she won’t go back to sleep unless she’s with me.” When Sarah didn’t speak, Nick glanced back at his book. “Sorry, I know the grim talk is a little weird, it’s sort of an everyday thing around here.” “No, it’s not weird, it’s…all right, it’s weird, but Miguel and I work in theater, we’re used to weird.” Nick chuckled. When Sarah turned to leave, he made an awkward gesture with his hand. “Just…stay a little?” She looked at him quizzically. “Uh…sure.” He kept his voice low to avoid waking Mari, though there didn’t seem to be any danger of that. “I’ve barely left this apartment in ages, and when visitors come they tend to look at me with very concerned eyes.” He grimaced. “Just…talk to me for five minutes about something that isn’t my fucking condition.” Sarah gasped. “That…that is the first time I’ve heard you swear.” Nick smiled. “I’m full of surprises these days.” Sarah sat in the chair next to the bed. She realized, not for the first time, that she’d never had a conversation with Nick that lasted more than five minutes. She’d never even been alone with him. Looking at him now, it wasn’t just that his physical self was different. The old Nick had been reserved, careful, cautious where Miguel just said whatever came into his mind. New Nick seemed to mince words less. She suddenly felt bad that she’d insulted his poetry in front of Jareth, even if she’d been drunk. She smiled. “Wanna hear about my screwed up love life?” “Dear God yes.” She took a deep breath. “How much has Miguel told you about Jareth?” Nick idly stroked Mari’s hair. “Enough to know that I shouldn’t go casually wishing my children away when I’m feeling frustrated. Also that you’ve been sleeping with him off and on for a few years.” Sarah stifled a laugh. “Yeah, well…I sort of told him I loved him a few nights ago.” Nick’s eyes widened. “Really?” “Yeah, but it was an accident—I was a little drunk, okay, a lot drunk, and I meant to say I love it, like, this thing that he does, but then I said I love you instead, and he sort of looked horrified, or he might have been overjoyed, I couldn’t tell, but then I didn’t know if I should take it back, so we just didn’t talk about it, but now I’m worried that I’ve broken some sort of unwritten rule, and I don’t know what to—“ “Do you love him?” Nick’s voice snapped Sarah out of her reverie. “What?” “Do you love him, yes or no?” Sarah thought of all the equivocating she’d done over the past few years, the long list of reasons that she’d given to herself and to Miguel for why she shouldn't love Jareth. She thought of moments when his eyes had looked less than human. She thought of the nagging questions about certain wished-away children she didn’t want to ask. She thought of the new, very possible horror of having to introduce him to her parents. And then she remembered running across rocky landscapes with him as some sort of monstrous creation from her mind pursued them, both of them cursing and out of breath but laughing at the same time. The way he’d looked at her with so much hunger the first time they’d had sex, and the way that hunger hadn’t really abated. His hand squeezing hers on the way to the theater to see her play. And the way he’d looked at her afterward, and then again on that more recent night, and what he’d said about how her writing had made her extraordinary. And she realized, of course, that should would never matter. “Yeah.” Her voice didn’t falter. “I do.”   Nick smiled and patted her hand. “Then for God’s sake tell him that. Right now. Because he could get eaten by a dragon tomorrow, you never know.” Sarah felt a strange sense of clarity that had been lacking for the last several months. “That simple, huh?” “Of course not. Nothing’s ever that simple. But it’s a good first step.” His eyelids fluttered. “And now I’m kicking you out, because my sick self needs twice as much sleep as a normal human.” Sarah leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “We should do this again.” “Only if you sneak me some booze.” Back in the living room, Miguel had come home and was sitting on the couch with Lori, the script positioned between them. Miguel looked at her with concern. “Everything okay?” “Yeah, Mari’s sleeping in the bedroom. He said she does that sometimes.” Miguel relaxed. “Yeah.” “Nick also asked me to sneak him some booze.” Miguel raised an eyebrow. “Nick doesn’t have to deal with stern talking-to’s from doctors and respite caregivers when they think I’m not taking care of him properly.” Sarah smiled and glanced between the two of them. “So…uh…” “It’s good,” Lori said without preamble. “I want to direct it, if you don’t have someone else in mind.” Sarah felt her heart lurch with a mixture of fear and joy. “Seriously?” “You’re shocked that I think it’s good? Or that I want to direct it?” “Both, honestly.” Lori laughed. “You shouldn’t direct it, and you know why. I like it—it’s weird, but it’ll be something different for me. Flex the muscles a little. I’m guessing we’ll need to wait a few months since I’m about to be very busy,” she tapped her stomach, “but I can’t see myself being out of commission for too long.” Sarah nodded. “I’ll give you as much free babysitting as you need.” Miguel snorted. “Word’s getting around, Sarah, you should probably stop making offers like that.” She smiled at him. “You wanna audition?” “Of course I do.” He glanced at Lori. “If, well…” Lori rolled her eyes. “Anyone can audition, just don’t think you’ll be getting special treatment if you get cast.” “None at all.” Miguel looked genuinely happier than Sarah had seen him look in a long time. “I’ll expect to be abused regularly.” Sarah reached out to hug Miguel and was about to do the same with Lori before remembering that Lori was most definitely not a hugger, so she settled for a handshake. “Thank you,” she said. “This is gonna be…kind of amazing.” Back home, she paced back and forth in her living room. Visions of the play and the long process between now and opening night danced in her head. Some of them—Miguel maybe playing a lead role, Jareth being able to see something he’d made be appreciated by thousands of people—made her giddy. Some of them—Jareth having to collaborate with Lori, the logistics of managing his time in this world—made her wince. And Nick’s words kept echoing in her mind. Nick would know a thing or two about not putting things off, she thought. Sarah groaned. “What the hell do I say to him, though?” How about just keeping it simple? “I said I loved you. I meant it?” Sarah continued to pace. “Nothing is that simple.” No, it’s not. But it’s a start, just like Nick said. And I’d do it quickly if I were you, because you know you’re going to lose your nerve. Sarah blinked. “So…like, now? In the middle of the night?” Night and day don’t really exist in a normal way over there, you know. “True.” She felt her heart begin to pound and had the sensation of being on a roller coasting falling endlessly downward. Before she could argue a way out of it, she went into her bedroom and touched the mirror. “Jareth?” The mirror’s surface flickered to life almost immediately, and she saw him standing in his bedroom, looking surprised. And, she would remember later, uneasy. “Sar—“ Her name was halfway out of his mouth before he flickered and vanished, leaving his bedroom empty. “Jareth?” Probably got summoned by someone wishing away their parakeet again. Best to leave this until— “No.” The vehemence in her own voice surprised her. “No, we’re doing this now.” She leaped through the mirror. Mirror lag had been getting shorter and shorter, she noticed, though it still took at least a minute for her to be able to move her limbs again. She glanced around the bedroom and noted that Jareth’s copy of The Riverside Shakespeare was open to Othello and that there were more papers covered in delicate, looping script covering his desk—was he already starting on a new play? She sat on the edge of the bed. The goblins, she noticed, seemed to be livelier than usual a few doors down. A few minutes later Jareth flickered back into the bedroom, flashing her his usual rakish smile. “Hello, precious,” he said, kissing her. “Couldn’t bear to be without me?” She laughed, though she could still feel her heart pounding in her ears. “I…had some good news, actually. Couldn’t wait to share.” He crossed his arms. “What sort of news?” “Yeah, Lori, uh, wants to direct your play. She really likes it.” Jareth’s face cycled through several emotions at once, eventually settling on a pure, open look of joy that melted Sarah’s heart. “She likes it?” “Yeah. Don’t look so shocked, it’s good.” “I’m not shocked. More…pleasantly surprised.” “Yeah, well, it’s a long road between now and opening night, but—“ He reached out and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms tightly around her and pressing her face into his chest. Caught off guard, she hugged him back. Now or never. She pulled back slightly and took a deep breath. “There was, uh, something else I needed to tell you. Something about the other night.” His expression was unreadable, which made her heart pound faster. “Oh?” “Yeah, I…” Speak, girl, speak. “I said something, and I wanted you to know that—“ Sarah froze. Somewhere in the cacophony of noise echoing from the throne room, she’d heard a sound that didn’t fit. She glanced toward the doorway and then back at Jareth. The look on his face told her he’d heard it, too. She cocked her head at him. “What was that?” He shrugged, but she could see the tension in the set of his jaw. “Goblins being goblins.” Sarah shook her head. “No, it was—“ She stared at him, remembering his expression when she’d first seen him through the mirror. “Where were you just now?” He cleared his throat. “Summoned away briefly, thankfully no runner on this occasion, just—“ The sound came again. There was no mistaking it this time. She stared at him for a long time and wondered later if she had been wanting to savor that moment, that feeling of looking at him in a certain way and feeling certain feelings she might never feel again. She would remember the look on his face. He seemed to be pleading with her. She turned and ran out of the bedroom and toward the throne room. He was right behind her. “Sarah—“ She ignored him and threw open the massive doors to the throne room, where the goblins were playing their usual senseless games, eating less-than-fresh food, and occasionally breaking into song. In the middle of the throne room a baby was crying. He looked so much like Toby, Sarah remembered later. Barely able to stand up. Thin wisps of yellow hair. Dressed in a somewhat ragged blue onesie. Crying in a way that seemed to indicate tiredness or frustration rather than genuine terror. Instinctively, Sarah ran to the baby and picked him up. The child gripped the front of her shirt as she jogged him and smoothed his hair. “Shhh, angel, it’s okay, it’s okay…” She realized that the throne room had gone quiet. The goblins were all staring at her or at Jareth, or looking back and forth between the two of them.  Jareth, for his part, was leaning against the entrance to the throne room, his gaze fixed on her. Still carrying the baby, she quickly crossed the throne room toward him. “What’s going on?” she said quietly. He sighed. “You know what’s going on, Sarah.” Sarah felt cold. “But who…when…” “A girl wished him away. It’s her son.” Sarah felt sick. “Her son? She wished—so she has thirteen hours, like I did?” Jareth looked genuinely sad, though she couldn’t be sure why. “No.” “No?” She felt suddenly indignant. “Why not, did the rules change?” “No.” She realized that she knew what he was going to say, and part of her wanted to stop him from saying it. His eyes never left hers. “She didn’t want him, Sarah. I gave her the chance to get him back, and she didn’t take it.” “Didn’t—“ Sarah felt unsteady on her feet. “But why would she—“ “She looked very young. Maybe younger than you were, when we first met.” Sarah realized she was breathing faster and faster. “If she was that young…she couldn’t know, she couldn’t understand…” Her feet moved faster than her mind could keep up, rushing past Jareth into the hallway and carrying the baby with her. “Sarah!” She reached the bedroom and looked at her reflection in the large mirror. This can be fixed. Whatever wrong might have been done, it’s not too late to make it right. She put one foot through the mirror. “Sarah.” Jareth stood in the doorway, his face pale. He didn’t move any closer to her, though. She felt tears welling in her eyes and angrily shook them away. “Jareth, she couldn’t have known, please…” There was genuine pain on his face. Sarah gritted her teeth and stepped further through the mirror… …only she couldn’t. Or rather, she could, but the baby made contact with the mirror as if it were solid glass. She stared at Jareth in horror. He folded his arms. To his credit, she would remember later, there was no malice in his voice when he spoke. “What’s said is said.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Sarah stepped back into the bedroom and stared at Jareth. The baby, for his part, seemed too mesmerized by his surroundings to make a fuss. “You can fix this. You have to. There has to be a way.”She saw a flicker of something that looked like indignation pass across his face. “Sarah…don’t you think I would, if I could?”“I don’t know.” She could feel an unfamiliar rage building inside her. “Maybe you still like to feel powerful occasionally.”His eyes narrowed. He cleared his throat and moved toward her, and she instinctively stepped back.“I was wrong,” he said. His voice had an oddly hollow ring to it, as if he were reciting words that someone else had written. “I care not for the ancient laws of this place and the responsibilities that bind me to it.” Sarah felt the floor begin to vibrate beneath her feet. Jareth moved to take the baby from her, and the vibration intensified to the point where she had to lean against the wall to keep from falling. Jareth kept his eyes locked on hers as he took the baby, who was now clearly showing signs of distress. “I will take this child and return him to—“The child screamed as the shaking became unbearably strong. Sarah began to genuinely fear that the castle might fall down around them.And then Jareth suddenly doubled over in pain, and his body seemed to shimmer and twist in a horrible, strange way that bore some resemblance to the way that he would vanish when he moved between worlds, but different, more…tangible. His flesh rippled and shifted. He clutched his throat and seemed to be gasping for air. Horrified, she saw splotches of red blooming on his arms and chest. “Stop!” Sarah didn’t know who she was shouting at. The child in her arms gave a full-throated scream. “He didn’t mean it! STOP!” Jareth continued to gasp. In desperation, Sarah held up the baby like an offering. “Goddammit, the baby is still here! He didn’t do anything! The baby’s not going anywhere!”The shaking gradually subsided. Jareth’s body slowly regained its shape, and his breathing returned to normal, though the red stains on his shirt were still quite visible. His eyes looked wild and feral. He sat down on the edge of the bed, gripping the blankets and closing his eyes.Sarah felt a tug at the bottom of her shirt and looked down to see a lightly-armored goblin looking up at her. It didn’t speak. It just held out its arms for the baby. A few other goblins stood in the open doorway, intently watching the proceedings.“Give them the baby, Sarah.” Jareth’s voice was hoarse. “You know they won’t hurt it. They may be stupid, but they never did any harm to Toby.” The child was still crying. Sarah took a moment to calm him down, jogging him gently against her, and then, fighting every urge that told her not to, she very gently handed him to the goblin.“I’ll come check on you in a bit,” she whispered, kissing the child’s forehead. “Be good.”The goblin took the baby in surprisingly confident arms. Sarah thought the other goblins looked relieved as they shuffled back toward the throne room.Sarah stared after them. “Will he…be turned into a goblin?”Jareth’s gasping breaths gradually slowed behind her. “In thirteen hours, yes.” “I could run the labyrinth in her place—““No. She refused. If she’d expressed a desire to get the child back, someone else could run the labyrinth for her. But she didn’t want to get him back.” When Sarah was silent for a long time, Jareth continued. “Sarah, would you rather she had abandoned him? Neglected him? Your world is full of such children.”Sarah clenched her fists. “She is a child. She said some random words and had no idea what they meant, and now she has to deal with the consequences for the rest of her life.”“She won’t remember.”Sarah turned to look at him. “What?”“She won’t remember him. No one will. It will be as if he were never born. It would have been the same with Toby, if you’d failed to retrieve him, or if you hadn’t wanted to run the labyrinth to get him back.”Sarah’s mouth fell open. “Are you seriously arguing that that makes it okay?”“No.” He sighed, and she wondered if he’d had this conversation before, with himself or with someone else. “But can you seriously argue that this isn’t the outcome she wanted?”Sarah felt a litany of abuse pooling in her mind, ready to be unleashed…but she said nothing.Because, though she hated to admit it, he was partly right.What teenage girl with a baby she’d likely never wanted wouldn’t love an outcome like this—not only to be free of the baby, but to have no memory of it?But…“But it’s different.” Sarah’s voice grew steadily louder as she spoke. “Because this baby is going to be turned into a goblin. And this girl…and other girls…didn’t make a conscious choice to give their babies up. They just said some words that they didn’t mean.”“The labyrinth doesn’t care whether you mean the words,” Jareth said.She folded her arms. “But you understand the difference. Don’t you?”“I have come to see that mortals do not always mean what they say, yes. Not that how I see things matters.”She was unnerved by the hollow quality in his voice, thinking either that she’d never heard it before or that he’d kept it well hidden. “It matters to me.”He smiled sadly. “I’ll be sure to let the labyrinth know that the next time it decides to discipline me.”Sarah’s mind was racing, but one thought stood out among all the others, one question that she’d always known she should ask but hadn’t, because some part of her had known the answer.She clenched her fists. So be it. “How many?” she finally asked.He looked up at her from where he sat on the bed, his eyes wide. “What?”“How many have there been, since I ran the labyrinth?”Jareth winced. “Sarah, there’s no point in—““There is absolutely a fucking point.” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “You can’t hide this from me anymore.” He snarled and stood up, his face inches from hers. “I hid nothing, Sarah. It was you who didn’t want to know.”He’s got you there. She gritted her teeth. “I thought it was mostly animals and inanimate objects,” she muttered.“It has been, comparatively speaking. I knew the details would be unpleasant for you, so I never spoke of them.”“I want the details now.” She took a deep breath. “How many?”Jareth sighed and went to stand by the window. She thought he might just refuse to answer, but then he spoke.“Twenty-three.” The number hit her like a slap. She wasn’t sure if she had expected a smaller one or a larger one. Now that there WAS one, though, an actual number…“Did any of them get the children back?”He flinched. “No. Seven chose to run the labyrinth. None of them succeeded.”“Were they…” She cleared her throat, forcing her voice to be firm. “Were they all sons or daughters? Were any of them brothers, cousins, the neighbor’s kid?”His voice had grown quieter. “Four sons. Seven daughters. Six brothers, three sisters, three…no relation.” Sarah felt ill. Her body alternated between an urge to vomit, cry, and throw something at Jareth. Unable to decide between those options, she simply leaned against one of the posters of the bed, hyper-aware of the sound of her own breathing and the faint noise of the goblins down the hall.You knew. In the back of your mind, you knew. You just didn’t want to think about it. Yeah, well, now you know a lot more and you’ve got a lot more to think about. Eventually Jareth turned and looked at her, and the sneering expression on his face was both alien and familiar. She hadn’t seen it for years, since he’d first come back into her life.“If you’re quite finished with this interrogation, Sarah, would you be so kind as to venture back to your Aboveground world, where your mortal sensibilities are much less likely to be offended by my existence?”She stared at him. “I just…why didn’t you do anything to stop it? How could you…how could you let it go on, all these years?”He threw up his hands. “I’m sorry, do you need another physical demonstration?”“There has to be a way…you’re magic, there has to be something…”“Yes, of course.” The sneer was back. “How silly of me, only spending the first several hundred years of my existence in this role that I did not choose trying to figure out some way out of my ridiculous obligations, which resulted in quite a few creative bodily and spiritual mutilations, I assure you, when I could have simply listened to the indignant voice of a mortal girl who’s not yet seen a hundred summers. A voice that told me to just do something.”His words dripped venom, and for a moment he seemed to relish the shock on Sarah’s face. He gave a somewhat theatrical bow. “Please, wise one. Please tell me your plan for defying the forces that have made it quite clear that there is no defying them.” She looked down. “I don’t know how to—““Oh, you don’t?” His voice was mocking, and it hurt more than she wanted to admit. “Forgive me, this is an aspect of mortality that I haven’t quite grasped yet, this condemnation and judgment of others’ actions when you don’t have the first hint of a better fucking idea.”  Sarah moved in front of him. “I said I don’t know what to do now. Now doesn’t mean never. There has to be something, some way to change it…”Jareth sighed wearily. “Toward what end, Sarah? Why waste so much of your mortal energy on a task that will likely prove fruitless?”Her jaw dropped. “Because this is wrong!” She felt tears welling in her eyes again as she reached out a hand to touch his hair. “Because you’re not cruel, not like that, not…you were, but you’ve changed.” She stared at him and felt the strangeness of her own words. “At least I thought you had.”He winced at that. “Some things are harder to change, Sarah. This is what I was made for. It’s who I am.”“But you’re more than that. I know you don’t want to just…”Her voice trailed off as she suddenly flashed to memories of being pressed up against a wall, his hand around her throat, or kneeling in front of him, the picture of obedience, and the look of contentment on his face…She felt cold. “You still like it, don’t you? Being the monster. Being the one who manipulates all the pieces on the game board while a pitiful little mortal tries to beat the odds and get to the center.”He said nothing.She shook her head. “Jesus, everything we did…I’ve probably been making you want that feeling of power more.” “I’ve always wanted it, Sarah, with or without you. Just like I feed off of mortal need. The latter never seemed to bother you. Do you really care so much whether I enjoy what I do? Would you be more forgiving if it made me miserable?”“It’s not—“ She threw her hands up in the air and paced the room. “It does matter how you feel about it. I don’t want you to be miserable, but if you enjoy tormenting random mortals it makes you cruel, and I know you’re not cruel, or I thought you weren’t, I thought you’d become better—“He raised an eyebrow. “Better?” His gaze was piercing. “Better like who, Sarah? You?”She stopped pacing. “That’s not what I meant, I’m not—““Oh, but I do think we’ve just come to the crux of it, precious.” The way he said the last word made her skin crawl. “In your mind you’re better than me, regardless of the fact that you’ve never been tied down by the chains that bind me, and you have no way of knowing what you’d do in my position.”Sarah glared at him. “I would do something.”His laugh was bitter. “That’s a lovely pedestal you’ve built for yourself. A shame it isn’t so high, though. Why don’t we talk about what really makes you sick about all of this, Sarah? The real reason you’ve never wanted to know what still happens on this side of the mirror?”The chill she’d felt seemed to spread. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”He moved quickly, backing her against the frame of the open window. “You think you’ve been coming back to me all these years because of my conversational skills? Or even the way my hands can do amazing things to your sensitive parts?”He ran a finger down the front of her throat and she smacked him away. Undaunted, he did it again.“No, you keep coming back because you like fucking the villain. You like knowing that you’re good and I’m not, and as long as you keep enough distance between us you tell yourself that you’re not complicit in what I do.”His hand paused around her throat. He smiled, and it was unnerving. “It still makes you tingle, doesn’t it? The thought…the possibility…that you’re gambling with your own life every time you pass through the mirror. Or maybe…” his hand squeezed slightly “…that I’m gambling with someone else’s life.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “Just because I like to play power games when we fuck does not mean that I condone everything you’ve been doing.” “Oh, but I think it does, rather. Because clearly you’ve known this day was coming—the day when you’d know the whole truth, and you’d have to make a clean break. You just needed to…” he pushed her hand between his legs “…milk me for everything I was worth until then.”She pulled her hand away. “And I suppose you got nothing out of that arrangement, selfless fucking saint that you are,” she growled. “Poor Jareth, gifted with a need-fountain that never runs dry. Don’t you talk to me about milking.”He laughed. “Very well. We both gained something from this arrangement. But you let things get out of hand, didn’t you?” His expression was a mix of pity and fondness, and it enraged her. “You could forgive yourself if it was just fun and fucking, but…it wasn’t a slip of the tongue that night, was it? Silly girl, you went and fell in l—“She slapped him, and he slapped her back, hard. Something wild and uncontrollable stirred in her.“I was drunk,” she said. The coldness in her own voice shocked her. “Do you know how many people I’ve said ‘I love you’ to when I was drunk? Shit, I might’ve said it to a random guy who catcalled me on the way home from a bar once.” She smiled, that wild feeling making her slightly dizzy. “Sorry if you thought you were special.” She saw the change in his face, in his whole body, the way his bravado seemed to drop away. And then the wild feeling was gone, replaced with the sickening knowledge that she had hurt him, really hurt him, and she had done it for her own pleasure.Jareth saw the realization hit her, and the bravado was back. He shook his head and made a tsk-ing sound. “Really, Sarah. Don’t play the cruelty game if you don’t have the stomach for it.” His hand shot out and gripped her throat, and she flashed back to Miguel telling her that that was definitely not okay, and then his hand squeezed and she felt genuinely frightened.“Besides,” he leaned close to whisper in her ear, “I’ve had a lot more practice.” He let go and she gasped, and then he thrust his tongue between her lips before she’d caught her breath. She pushed against him with little effect, realizing too late that whatever they’d done in the past, he’d never truly let himself overpower her. He pulled back and easily caught her wrists in his hands. “Yes, Sarah. You know that everything we’ve done has been remarkably…safe, up until this moment. Don’t you wonder what it would be like now, knowing the whole truth?” He pushed one hand down the front of her jeans. “Knowing what I really am?” His fingers moved between her legs and he kissed her throat roughly. “Fuck you,” she rasped.He laughed and licked her neck, his teeth and tongue moving over all the exposed skin he could reach. “In due time, precious.” His other hand went under her shirt. “Gods, I can smell how much you want this,” he growled at her, burying his face in her hair. “How much you need this, need to be fucked to within an inch of your life by something dark…”He ripped at her shirt and clawed at her jeans as he wrestled her back to the bed. She writhed under him, her nails scratching at his chest.But she never said no.He smirked at the look on her face, which she knew must have been a mix of horror and desire. He ran a hand over her cheeks. “Look at that rage, precious. I could drink you, it’s almost better than your need…”He kissed her hard. She slapped him again and he pulled back and snarled, a faint red gleam in his eyes.“You’re not even angry at me,” he whispered. His face twisted into a sneer. “You’re angry at yourself because you still want me, even knowing the things you wish you didn’t know.” He pulled her jeans off and quickly removed his own pants and shirt, slipping a finger inside her.He laughed again, a horrible, hollow sound without any warmth. “You’re still wet for me, you, the good one, the decent one.” He pushed his fingers in deeper and she cried out. “That’s right, precious, you love this, I think you love it even more n—“She kissed him hard and bit his lip, tasting blood in her mouth. He pinned her wrists against the bed with both hands, his body hovering over hers, and the she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him inside her, so hard and fast that she cried out in pain, but then she did it again, letting the pain consume her, gritting her teeth and and moaning at the inevitable pleasure that it also brought.  It was a blur after that, a mess of hands and teeth and pain and ecstasy mixed with revulsion that left her feeling drunk and disconnected from the world.Tell him no, her addled mind begged at some point as he took her from behind, one hand around her neck and the other gripping her hair. Tell him no and he’ll stop, you know he will. There are some lines even he won’t cross.But she didn’t, and she never knew for certain if it was because she didn’t want him to stop, or because she was afraid that he wouldn’t.They were on the bed, then on the floor, and then he slammed her up against one of the bedposts and thrust viciously inside her while she cried out, tears streaming down her face, and there was a moment when his mask dropped completely and she saw a look of utter horror in his eyes at what he was doing to her. She wondered if he was about to caress her, comfort her, do something that he would have done before everything changed……so she kissed him and bit his lip again, yanking his hair, and he growled and kept thrusting into her until he came. Afterward she lay curled in a ball, aching but numb, and he lay beside her, silent except for the sound of his breath. At some point she felt him start to move toward her, maybe to wrap himself around her like he had before, but he didn’t.Sometime later she stood up and wrapped herself in the tattered remains of her clothes and stepped through the mirror without looking back.He didn’t try to stop her.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Sure you don't want a ballpoint pen?” Jareth didn’t look up from his seat in front of her vanity mirror, his pen alternating quickly between rapid scratches over the parchment and quick dips into an inkwell. “I suppose I’m a trifle old-fashioned.” Sarah’s hands hovered over the keyboard of her laptop. She was writing propped up in bed, as she often did, though many of the “good habits of great writers” books she’d read advised against it. “Just thought it would be more efficient,” she said. “Sex would also be more efficient without foreplay.” She laughed. “Fair point.” They both wrote in silence for a few minutes. At some point he sighed and laid the quill down on top of the parchment, massaging his forehead with his hands. She smiled at the familiarity of the gesture. “Problems?” He nodded. “It…doesn’t fit together. The pieces are there, but they feel like…like individual lines to different songs, instead of a continuous melody.” He groaned. “Gods, you’r rubbing off on me, I’m speaking in metaphors.” She blushed. Was she really rubbing off on him? She’d worried about how he might be rubbing off on her—not necessarily in a good way—but she hadn’t really considered the other side of things. She went to stand over his shoulder, looking at the scattered pieces of parchment, each one a translated version of a folk tale that he’d found in the castle library. Automatically, she picked them up and began arranging them on the floor. He stood up and watched her. “What are you doing?” She moved a couple of the pages around until they formed a grid. Ignoring his gasps of shock, she even cut a few of them in half with a pair of scissors she pulled from the desk. “Sometimes this helps you see things clearer,” she said. She pointed to the page in the upper right corner of the grid. “That’s your beginning—it sets up the world, introduces some characters who come back again.” She pointed at three pages in the middle of the grid. “Those are probably your middle, they’ve got the most conflict.” She pointed at the bottom right corner. “That one’s probably your ending, it’s the saddest. Or, if you want a lighter feel, go with the one in the left corner.” Jareth stared at the floor, and she watched the comprehension dawn on his face. He stared at her. “How did you do that?” She shrugged. “I do that with almost everything I write.” He folded his arms. “I assumed that at this stage your work just emerged fully-formed on the page.” “Are you kidding? I don’t think that was even true for Shakespeare. Almost every piece of writing begins as a mess.” “So it’s not that I’m not a brilliant writer,” he said without any trace of sarcasm. “It’s only that my brilliance isn’t visible yet.” She rolled her eyes and stepped deftly over the papers to return to her bed. “If you’d like to see it that way.” He grabbed her hand before she got to the bed and pulled her toward him for a kiss. “I would.” He deepened the kiss and she gave him a gentle shove. “Back to work.” “Fine, fine.” He kissed her one more time. “You taste even better on this side of the mirror.” She shivered in spite of herself and gave him a hungry look. “Get that thing arranged to your liking and maybe I’ll give you another taste later.” He watched her settle herself on her bed and then finally knelt down over the papers, still mesmerized. She chuckled to herself as he gently moved one piece of paper, then moved it back, and then slowly but surely began rearranging all the papers into something new. “Saaaaraaaah…” Miguel’s voice snapped her out of her reverie. “Sorry, did you say something?” “No, but Jaye’s about to make a break for it.” Sarah looked down at the baby sitting on her lap. As usual, Jaye was in constant motion, his face occasionally tilting up at hers to smile brilliantly and laugh. “Sorry, kiddo. Auntie Sarah was brooding again.” She gripped him under his arms and lifted him up above her head, then pulled him down again, then up. “You’re flying! It’s amazing, I know, you’re ACTUALLY FLYING!!! Defying the laws of physics and everything!” Jaye giggled wildly, his small arms and legs wriggling above Sarah’s face. He’d been ridiculously tiny when he was born, so much so that Sarah had refused to hold him for several weeks, terrified that she’d break him. At three months, though, he was the picture of good health, his cheeks chubby, his legs showing little rolls of baby fat sticking out of the bright red onesie that Sarah had given Lori at her baby shower. Next to her on the park bench, Miguel laughed at her as Sami and Mari played nearby. “You never get tired of that, do you?” Sarah shrugged and brought Jaye down to her chest, where he continued to squirm and laugh. “He just looks so damn happy every time I do it.” Miguel reached over and tickled Jaye’s curly hair. “You’re good with kids. You’re the only babysitter that Mari and Sami haven’t managed to scare away.” “Game recognize game.” She cradled Jaye against her chest and he pushed himself backward, clearly angling for more flying. “Just don’t go telling me I should have any.” “Are you kidding? Me & Lori would be stupid to do that, what with all the free babysitting you give us. Not that I wouldn’t have loved to see what kind of kids you and J—” He stopped himself when he saw Sarah flinch slightly, though she told herself that her reaction was much more subdued than it would have been a few weeks ago. He frowned. “I’m sorry,” “Nah, don’t worry. I mean, it’s not like I never wondered.” Miguel glanced over at the twins, who had moved from the swingset to the monkey bars. “Any word?” “From him? No. I’ve chatted with Hoggle and Didymus a few times, through the mirror.” “What did they say?” She shrugged. “Not much, really. Well, Hoggle basically said that I was mad at a snakeroot plant for being a snakeroot plant, which was kind of true, though I told him it was more that I was mad at myself for liking a snakeroot plant.” She laughed as Jaye’s swinging fist caught her nose. “I think Lori’s pissed that his play’s been put on indefinite hiatus.” “Not too pissed, given that she’s already working on something else.” Sarah laughed. Leave it to Lori to become even more productive than usual right after she had a baby. She claimed inspiration had struck right after Jaye was born and had furiously drafted a new play about obsessive motherhood, which was now being workshopped on the other side of town. Which was how Sarah and Miguel now found themselves more and more frequently in the park, or at Miguel’s condo, taking care of Jaye while Lori’s partner Tal worked and Lori worked on her new play. Marisol jumped down from the monkey bars and ran purposefully toward them, her dark hair blowing around her flushed cheeks. “Daddy check,” she said, sounding for all the world like a parent addressing a child. Miguel pulled her onto his lap. “Right, mija, you push the button.” He pulled out his phone and Marisol touched an entry in the phonebook that came up as Respite Care as the phone rang. A pale, middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense face appeared on the screen. “Hey Rita,” Miguel said. “Mari’s just checking in.” “Hey Mari.” The woman waved at her and Marisol waved back. “Got something to show you.” The image on the camera shifted as she turned it, revealing Nick standing up in the kitchen and stirring something on the stove. He waved. “Hey.” Sarah’s mouth fell open. It had been months since she’d seen Nick on his feet for more than a few minutes, much less cooking. He was wearing a sweater and a pair of jeans that looked far too loose on him, and his face was still marked by dark circles, but he looked much better than he had the last time she’d seen him. Marisol grabbed the phone from Miguel. “Daddy, you’re not supposed to be in the kitchen!” Nick laughed. “It’s okay, Mari. Rita says it’s okay, and she’s the boss of me right now, right?” He shifted the camera to Rita, who shrugged. “His blood pressure and his breathing are fine. I’ll make him get off his feet soon, but I figured a bit of movement couldn’t hurt.” “But what are you cooking?” “Vegetable soup, sweetie, you can have some when you get home.” He waved somewhat awkwardly to Miguel. “Hey Mi.” Miguel waved back very slowly. “Hey. You, uh, look good.” Nick laughed. “I can still rock a sweater.” After they hung up Miguel gestured to the monkey bars. “Five more minutes, then we’ll go home.” Mari ran back to where her brother was still playing. Sarah stood up and jogged Jaye, who was getting somewhat restless. “I can stay here a bit longer with Jaye if you wanna take the kids—“ She was interrupted by an unfamiliar sound. When she turned around she saw that Miguel had buried his head in his hands and was crying, his whole body shaking with sobs. She rushed to sit next to him, balancing Jaye on one knee while she wrapped her other arm around his shoulder. She glanced toward the monkey bars, relieved that the kids seemed completely oblivious. Eventually he wiped his face and took a deep breath. “I don’t think I realized till a minute ago that I was seriously wondering if I’d ever see him cook again.” Sarah smiled. "Guessing you never thought he’d write poetry, either.” Miguel laughed and pinched the baby’s nose. Jaye giggled and reached for his finger. “Yeah. Never say never.” Jaye was fast asleep by the time Sarah knocked on Lori’s door. There was no response at first, which wasn’t unusual—Sarah knew Lori sometimes worked with headphones on, or just got so absorbed in writing that she didn’t hear anything else around her. While she waited, Sarah absently ran a hand over Jaye’s head, taking comfort in the tiny, rhythmic breathing of his body. It was in moments like this—when she held at least one baby who was safe, who she knew was loved—that the fears that woke her up in the middle of the night felt far away. Lori eventually answered the door, looking slightly harried but happy. “Hey, sleeping beauty.” She took the baby and cradled him against her chest, rubbing her nose against his forehead. “You know how much I miss you when you’re gone, right?” Sarah smiled. “How’s the writing going?” Lori shrugged. “Way slower than I’d like. They warned me about the tiredness and the hormones but they didn’t tell me that crazy levels of LOVE would be so distracting.” She closed her eyes and let her head nod gently over Jaye’s. “Sorry, I’ll shut up, I can already hear myself becoming the kind of mom I hate.” “Not at all. Good to know you’re, you know, human.” Lori looked up and regarded Sarah with a critical eye. “You look slightly less like hell than the last time I saw you.” “Yeah, well…” She put her hands in her pockets and took them out again. “The usual remedies. Vodka. Ice cream. Texting Miguel in the middle of the night.” “Don’t suppose there’s any chance I’ll still get to direct that play?” Sarah sighed. “It’s complicated.” Boy is it ever. “But maybe one day it won’t be. Eventually.” “Dudes. They fuck everything up.” She kissed Jaye’s forehead. “Present company accepted. Are you good to take him for two hours on Thursday?” “Sure, it’s a date—“ “I can pay you—“ “Nah, it’s…this might sound weird, but it’s kind of therapeutic.” Lori smiled. “Not to brag, but he IS an absolute angel, except when he’s not.” She stepped back inside the apartment. “See you Thursday.” “Ahhh, gods, the neighbors are going to hear me.” Jareth looked up from between her legs and smiled. “I’ll take that as an indication that I should continue.” Sarah gripped the headboard and arched her back. “If you stop now I might kill you.” “I’ll say it again,” he said, giving her a slow, careful lick that made her cry out even louder, “you really do taste even better on this side of the mirror.” She fisted her hands in his hair. “As long as you keep doing that I don’t care what side of the mirror we’re on.” She lay back and lost herself in sensations for a moment, feeling the pleasure build. And then she heard the sound of a baby crying. Sarah opened her eyes and stared beyond Jareth at the doorway of her bedroom, knowing what she’d see but not wanting to see it. A faint, small shape on the floor, blond hair, crawling toward the bed, crying… She screamed and sat upright in bed. As usual the mix of feelings made her want to wretch—her body was hot, she felt damp between her legs, but her heart was also pounding with a feeling of abject terror, and an oily layer of guilt covered everything… The clock on her bedside showed that it was just past 3 am. She reached under her pillow for the crystal that was no longer there, but that she couldn’t bear to destroy, and had thus placed it in a box under her bed. Sometimes she’d take it out and put it under her pillow again, but she always put it back in the box before she went to sleep. Wiping her face with the bedsheet, she picked up her phone and texted Miguel, knowing that he was often awake at odd hours and turned off his phone when he was asleep. Dreamt about the baby again. To her relief, his response was immediate. It’ll stop eventually. U dont know that. No I dont but thats what Im supposed to say. Why dont u write anothr letter? Yeah, I will. Give Nick a kiss for me, tell him Ill bring him some booze tmrw. U will not. Unless I can have some 2. She smiled, the sharpness of the emotions fading slightly. As she’d done every night for weeks now, she sat down at her desk and began a letter. You were never just a villain to me. I’m sorry I made you feel like one. Other versions of the letter were scattered across her desk, most of them with just a few lines, some scratched out. I meant it when I said I loved you, but I don’t know what I feel anymore, because I don’t think I ever really knew you— I can’t ask you to die but I also can’t ignore the fact that people don’t deserve to have their children taken away just because of some careless words— I miss you. I don’t care what you are, I just want you back— She pushed the letters aside, the image of the nameless baby still fresh in her mind, and did something else she’d done repeatedly over the past several weeks: posted messages on various social media platforms about not casually wishing kids away, no matter how frustrating they became. More than a few people had quietly unfriended or unfollowed her after she’d done that for the third or fourth time. Sighing, she looked at her most recent letter, took a deep breath, and wrote. I need to not think about you for a while. It doesn’t mean—I don’t know what it means, I just know that if I keep letting you take up this much space in my head I’m going to go mad. She folded up all the letters and put them in her drawer. She picked up a half-full inkwell he’d left behind and went to pour the ink down the bathroom sink drain, then put the inkwell and its accompanying quill in another drawer. A copy of his script was on the floor—she gathered the pages neatly and put them in a box under her bed. Her hand brushed the other, smaller box. Taking a deep breath, she opened it and pulled out the crystal with its familiar memory-images dancing inside. She ran her fingers over it slowly, as if she could reach inside and touch them. It doesn’t mean we can never make more, she told herself. Closing her eyes, she slammed the crystal against the wall, somehow knowing that the material wouldn’t cut her. It shattered into a fine mist and made a slight hissing sound. When she turned back to look at it, the images seemed to hover in the air for a moment before vanishing completely. It was then, months after everything had changed, that she finally cried.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

A few days later, Sarah started writing again. She pulled out the pages she’d begun on the other side of the mirror some time before, trying to ignore the rush of feelings that the smell and feel of them inspired. She typed them into her computer and kept going, eventually hitting a stride that had her writing well into the early hours of the morning, leaving her desk only when her stomach’s protests grew too loud to ignore. What she wrote bore no resemblance to Moon Gems and had no elements of magic or the labyrinth in it, but as she wrote she could see that it was indeed about power and things unsaid and hidden, and it developed into a quiet family drama that took place entirely over the course of a single dinner at home (something that appealed to Lori, given that it meant the budget would be reasonable). Lori, meanwhile, had finished her own play, which had turned out to be more of a “choreopoem” in the style of Ntozake Shange, and when the casting process was finished Miguel had a part. It was a week before Lori’s opening weekend when Sarah found herself in a particularly Jareth- preoccupied mood—much as she’d tried to push him to the side of her mind, writing the play had brought back a lot of memories. She texted multiple people asking if they wanted to join her at the bar around the corner for a drink, and when no one was available she went on her own anyway. It is not fair that Im this drunk but still thinkin about him, she texted Miguel. U ordered Long Islands, right? Yes and they usually work, maybe tolerance is building up, I shd have a 3rd. Sweetie just b careful, don’t like it when u get shitfaced without me. “Goddammit, Miguel, I need you to encourage my bad behavior right now, not rein it in,” she shouted, realizing halfway through her sentence that she was speaking out loud instead of texting. Luckily the bar was mostly empty, and the couple at a nearby table and the guy seated a few stools over looked up for a second and then looked away. She shook her ice cube-filled glass at the bartender. “Rudy, is there anything behind that counter that will wipe my memory clean for at least a few hours?” Rudy smiled and took her glass with an arm covered in an intricate latticework of tattoos. That plus the spiky hair and the pierced nose were at odds with the gentle, shy-sounding voice that emerged. “If I had something like that, I’d be selling it for a hundred dollars a glass.” “Rough breakup?” Sarah glanced down the bar, prepared to give the silent treatment (or the “Rudy, tell this guy to go away” treatment) to a middle-aged lech. She was surprised, then, to see that the voice belonged to a set of very attractive biceps in a bright blue collared shirt, face partially hidden but with a full head of black hair and light-brown skin. The two Long Island iced teas kept her eyes on him for a few seconds longer than normal. “Breakup implies there was something to break,” she muttered. He looked up and smiled. “Sorry to hear that.” It was a very, very nice smile. And then he went back to staring at his drink. Oh, gonna make me do the work, eh? “You drinking to celebrate or drown your sorrows?” she asked, resting an arm on the bar and her chin in her hand. He laughed. “Maybe a little of both.” He gestured at the empty bar stool next to her. “Okay if I sit there?” She shrugged but kept her eyes on him and smiled. “It’s a free bar.” He moved closer and she could see that he was on the younger side, maybe late twenties, with a broad nose and a square jaw. “So what’s the celebratory part?” she asked. “Just got a new job.” “Awesome!” She started to clink her glass with his and realized she no longer had one. “Imagine there’s a glass in my hand,” she laughed, pantomiming the gesture. “You want another one?” She laughed at the way he seemed to say that in a rush, as if he were mildly terrified of her response. “Yes, please. Club soda.” Damn Miguel, keeping me cautious. “Unless you want me to lose all powers of speech.” “Nah, one-sided conversation’s no fun,” he said, sounding slightly more at ease. Rudy poured the club soda and set it on the bar, then politely moved down to the other end to busy himself drying glasses near the sink. “Cheers.” She clinked her glass with his—he was drinking Guinness, she noticed. “Sorry, forgot to ask, what’s the drown-your-sorrows reason for your drink?” He shrugged. “Same as the celebratory reason. Got a new job.” He took another sip of beer and wiped the foam from his lips. “Which means I can stop sleeping on my friend’s couch and eating instant ramen for dinner, but it also means I have to, you know, work.” She sighed. “Lemme guess. Finance?” “Nope.” “I.T.?” “Yeah. How’d you guess?” She smiled and had to stop herself from touching the very, very attractive curves of his arm. “Maybe because it seems like you haven’t chatted up many girls in bars before.” He blushed. “Great, computer geek stereotype.” “No, no, just a “maybe hangs out with mostly guys” stereotype.” She twirled a strand of hair around her finger. “You’re doing a good job of it, by the way.” “Of what?” She smiled, enjoying a feeling of being in charge that she’d rarely experienced with Jareth. “Of chatting me up.” His name was Vinh (like gin and tonic, with a v, he said, in a manner that told her people had been mispronouncing his name for a long time). He’d moved to New York a month before from Hawaii, and they filled a good chunk of time comparing the two places—Sarah had been once, many years before, with her mother and father. Vinh hated the cold weather in New York, and Sarah teased him that it was only autumn, it was about to get a lot colder. He was twenty-nine, just a few years younger than her, and he called the I.T. job his first “grown up” job. Eventually she let him order her another Long Island iced tea. “Growing up is definitely overrated,” she said, noticing that her voice was slightly louder than before. “You should do what I do—write & direct plays. You’ll go back and forth between abject poverty and relative comfort, but at least you don’t have to work in an office. And you keep really irregular hours.” He leaned forward slightly. “You write plays?” “Yeah.” She mirrored his movements and leaned in as well. “I’ve got one on Broadway right now.” “Seriously? Are you, like, famous?” “No. Well, I was in a magazine once, but it’s a magazine that only theater people read.” She took another swig of her cocktail and could feel warmth creeping into her extremities, as well as that familiar feeling of knowing that she wasn’t quite herself, but being powerless to stop the change. “I used to act, actually,” she said. “Anything I might have seen?” “Well, if you watch any of the crime shows you might have seen me as a corpse.” He laughed. “I bet you were a pretty corpse.” The color drained from his face and he coughed. “Shit, I am SO sorry, that sounded totally creepy, I just meant—“ “Yeah, I know what you meant, it’s okay.” She gave him a playful shove. “What’s your play about?” he asked, still sounding a little nervous. It was endearing, even more so when seen through a third cocktail. Such nice arms. And lips. “It’s sort of…fantasy, but with a twist.” She ran a hand through her hair and watched his eyes follow the movement. She leaned forward slightly. “It’s about a king, and a maze, and…you know, I really don’t want to talk about my play.” She was leaning in so close that she could feel his quickening breath on her cheek. His eyes widened, but he didn’t back away. “You don’t?” he said. She shook her head, and her hair brushed against him. “No,” she whispered. A voice in the back of her head was berating her, but it was very faint. He’s so lovely, and he’s gentle, so different from— She kissed him, and at first he seemed frozen, but then his hand reached up to cup her cheek, and he kissed back. It had been a while since she’d kissed anyone other than Jareth, she realized. She’d been prepared for the fact that the kiss wouldn’t be earth-shatteringly good, and that it wouldn’t be accompanied by that intoxicating feeling of need. But still. There was need here on both sides, if of a different sort, and he smelled of a nice combination of aftershave and soap, and the words “I’m just around the corner” were millimeters from her lips… But before she could speak there was a deafening crash, and they both jumped backward. Sarah turned around to see that an entire shelf of glasses had fallen to the ground. Rudy was holding up his hands in shock. “I swear I didn’t touch anything,” he said, looking a bit pale. “It was like…I swear they jumped or something…” He grabbed a broom and dustpan. “Carry on, carry on, I got this.” Sarah laughed and turned back to Vinh, though a small voice in the back of her mind whispered that this was NOT a coincidence. “Thanks,” she said to Vinh, blushing. “That was nice.” His face was also slightly flushed. “You, uh, wanna go somewhere else?” “Nope. But thanks for asking.” She gave him an awkward smile and reached out to shake his hand. He took it and smiled back, his face betraying only the slightest flicker of disappointment. “Can I text you or something?” She hesitated and then felt ridiculous for hesitating. You’ll kiss a total stranger in a bar but won’t give him your number? “Look me up,” she finally said. “Sarah Williams. My play’s called Moon Gems, at the John Golden.” She resisted the urge to kiss him again. “See ya.” He drained his glass of Guiness. “I hope so.” She waved good-bye to Rudy, who gave her a wink. When she opened the heavy door to the staircase leading up to the street she couldn’t help glancing behind her to see that yes, Vinh was watching her go. By the time Sarah opened the door to her apartment she was feeling a level of rage that was only somewhat due to her less-than-sober state. She fumbled with her keys, threw her jacket on the sofa, and stormed into her bedroom to point a shaking finger at the mirror. “Was that you, Jareth?” she shouted. “Brings back memories of all the shit you pulled with Chris, you petty, childish…” She shook her head and took a deep breath, for some reason determined to be as clear as possible. “I know we didn’t technically break up but we weren’t ever technically dating, either, and we never said we were exclusive, so I am allowed to do whatever I want on this side of the mirror, goddammit. You’re probably having orgies with selkies and nymphs over there, so how dare you try to muck up a single kiss…” She could feel her heart pounding against her chest. The mirror was unresponsive, though given that she’d said his name, she could imagine Jareth simply sitting and listening to her. “Seriously. Is this some sort of ‘If I can’t have you no one will’ macho bullshit? Because that went out of style like a hundred years ago. And it’s not like we’re spending time apart over something small, like the usual mortal arguments about money and not spending enough time together and you just want me for sex (which I know was never exactly a problem for us but I’m free-forming here), this was about you stealing children from people who didn’t know that they were really wishing them away.” “And don’t—“ she wagged a finger at the mirror as if Jareth were actually standing in front of her “—argue semantics with me, I know you didn’t technically steal them, but you’re still taking them from people who in some cases want them back, even though it’s not like you have any choice in the matter, unless, you know, ceasing to exist is a choice…” Sarah sighed. This version of reading Jareth the riot act was not going as planned. She fell sideways onto her bed, the room spinning slightly as she pulled her knees into her chest. Instinctively she reached under her pillow, but the crystal, of course, wasn’t there. “Dammit, I was trying to not think about you for half a minute,” she sighed. She kept her hand under the pillow as though the crystal might materialize if she waited long enough. “I finished another play,” she said quietly. “I wanted to show it to you. I almost said your name to the mirror out of habit. I wanted you to read it. But it’s not about you, so maybe you’d hate it. Then again, it kind of is about you. About us.” She sat up and pulled off her jeans, top, and bra, grabbing an oversized T-shirt from her dresser drawer and crawling under her duvet. “Lori still wants to direct your play. I kind of want to see it. Maybe we can work something out, eventually.” Her eyelids felt heavy. She reached out a hand to the side of the bed where he’d often slept. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I roll over and think your body will be there, and then it isn’t, and it makes me so goddamn sad.” As she drifted off to sleep she realized that she was waiting to hear the sound of his voice from the mirror, or at least some sound or breeze in the room that would indicate that he was listening. No sound ever came. “Takes forever t’ cut all o’ these vegetables on my own, ye know,” Hoggle grumbled from within his kitchen, a pile of root vegetables visible within the frame of Sarah’s vanity mirror. “I know. Didymus could help out, though. Or the goblins.” Hoggle snorted. “Didymus has t’ turn everythin’ into a duel or a quest—can’t just cut up the vegetables, he has t’ stab ‘em. And goblins?” He shuddered and carried a cup of water over to the pot bubbling on the fire. “Never lettin’ ‘em in my house again, lemme tell ye. They finished all my best cheese in minutes.” Sarah smiled. “Any, uh, earthquakes recently?” Hoggle thought for a moment. “Nah, been quiet. Maybe cause there ain’t been no runners. Then again I don’t always notice the shakin’ when it happens.” Sarah was relieved to hear that no children had been wished away since she’d last been on the other side of the mirror. At the same time, her heart hurt to think of how Jareth must be wasting away without anything from the outside world to need him. Maybe if I just— No. Absolutely not. You go down that road and there’s nothing but trouble at the end. She sighed. “How is he?” Hoggle became very interested in chopping vegetables. “Ye could ask ‘im yourself, ye know.” “Yeah, that’s maybe not such a good idea right now. Just…more checking in on you guys.  Wondering if he was, you know, more prone to bogging threats than usual, tossing more chickens out the castle windows, that sort of thing.” Hoggle shrugged. “Not that I noticed. He’s just sorta…vanished. Like, he’s here—we can feel it when he’s really gone, the whole place can—but nowadays he’s just in his room a lot. Doesn’t come out and doesn’t talk much.” Sarah felt strangely relieved to hear that Jareth wasn’t well (and then embarrassed that she felt relieved). A part of her had wondered if all his changes had been an illusion, if he felt no pain or remorse after everything they’d said and done to each other. And perhaps he didn’t—but the fact that he wasn’t strutting around the castle barking orders to everyone was…something. She heard a clattering sound as Didymus entered the frame of the mirror, dropping a large pile of wood on the floor. “Ah, my lady! Well met. Thou wilt forgive my presumption,” he reached inside his  frock coat, “but I have taken it upon myself to compose poetry that you and the king might recite to one another, as a means toward mending your rift.” Hoggle gave an eye roll large enough to be seen from space. Sarah smiled. “That’s very kind of you, Didymus. Have you, er, shared any of these with His Majesty?” Didymus cleared his throat. “I have made an effort, fair maiden, and thou knowst I would do anything on thy behalf, but…the King is not exactly…receptive to my plan.” Sarah reached out a hand. “Give him time. I’ll be happy to take a look at them.” The mirror shimmered as Didymus passed a neatly folded stack of small papers through its surface. “Fear not, my lady. There is yet no rough course of true love that didst not run smooth again through the power of poetry.” Hoggle shook his head as Didymus headed outside to feed Ambrosius. “Ye keep coddlin’ him like that ye’ll never hear the end of it.” “It’s sweet of him.” Sarah glanced down at the papers, which, not surprisingly, contained many allusions to flowers and summer days. “It’d be nice if things were that simple.” “Yeah, and it’d be nice if cheese grew on trees,” Hoggle grumbled. Later, she tucked the poems into her desk drawer along with her unfinished letters. No point wishing for things to be simple when they never will be. Yeah. She pulled a well-worn romance novel off of her bookshelf and went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. Won’t stop me, though.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The day before Lori’s play opened, Sarah, Nick, and Miguel managed to find seats on an early afternoon F-train headed in the direction of her apartment. It was Nick’s first time on a subway in months, and they’d mapped out the route carefully to ensure access to elevators and minimal walking time. Miguel actually looked much more nervous than Nick did and kept asking if he needed anything, which made Nick roll his eyes at Sarah repeatedly, which Sarah smiled at, not for the first time surprised that they were now at a place where Nick could comfortably roll his eyes at her. “You’re sure she’s okay with curry?” Miguel asked, glancing down at the plastic containers in the bag at his feet. Sarah nodded, her hands resting on another large bag of freshly-made naan and plastic containers of rice. “She always wants curry before an opening weekend, it’s like a superstition, helps calm her nerves.” “Think I’ll stick to the rice, my stomach’s already in knots without spicy food.” Sarah looked at him, genuinely surprised. “You never get nervous before opening nights.” “Yeah, but this is my first one with her.” Sarah laughed. “I forget that you still think of Lori as a god.” “So do you, a little.” “Yeah, okay, but her kid’s puked on me a few times now. It kind of diminishes the aura.” Miguel leaned back in his seat as the train rattled into Columbus Circle. “You think she’s okay?” Sarah shrugged. “She always gets a little crazy before opening weekend.” “Yeah, but this is the first time she’s had an opening weekend with a baby.” “She’ll be fine.” Nick shifted slightly in his seat, and Sarah noted how Miguel’s eyes watched carefully to see if he was in pain. “We didn’t sleep much for the first year of Mari and Sammy’s lives, but we managed to not kill them. Or each other.” “Barely.” Miguel grinned. “Speaking of killer, someone’s back to attention-getting hair,” Miguel said, grinning at Sarah. “Which I wholeheartedly approve of.” Sarah ran her hand through her much shorter, somewhat spiky, blue-streaked hair. It was a cliche, she knew, but cutting it all off and asking for even brighter streaks of blue had felt good. It had also made her remember all the times Jareth had absently tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, or run his fingers through her hair. She sighed. Nothing was ever simple. She was about to ask what Miguel might think of a half-shaved hairdo, but at that moment the subway car juddered to a halt. Miguel instinctively reached out to grab Nick’s shoulder, and Sarah’s bag fell onto the train car floor. The lights flickered. Miguel closed his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s nowhere near rush hour, this isn’t supposed to happen.” Nick squeezed his hand. “It’s okay. She’ll forgive us if we’re late.” The train sat unmoving for five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Grumbles were heard up and down the car. The air grew stuffy, and Nick started to sweat. Miguel immediately pulled out a handkerchief and started to wipe Nick’s brow. Nick gently pushed his hand away. “I’m okay, it’s not—“ “You’re not supposed to overheat, you know—“ “I’m not a fucking child.” Sarah’s eyes widened. Half the train car turned in their direction and then quickly turned away again. Miguel looked pained, his hand still holding the handkerchief awkwardly near Nick’s forehead. Nick looked down. “I’m sorry, Mi, I just…you’re good at it, and you’ve been more than anyone could have hoped for, but I am so fucking sick of being cared for.” He took a deep breath. “So sick of it.” Miguel carefully folded the handkerchief and put it back in his bag. “Yeah, well…I’m kind of sick of being a caregiver, honestly. Not that I won’t keep doing it as long as I need to.” Nick reached for Miguel’s bag, pulled out the handkerchief, and wiped his own forehead. “There,” he said. “That’s a start.” Miguel smiled and then abruptly started to cry. Nick hugged him, and in their muffled exchange Sarah could make out a mixture of anger and relief, of being in a strange place and not really knowing how to move forward, but knowing that they would. She sat awkwardly next to them until Miguel pulled her into the hug. “We owe you, you know,” Miguel said. Sarah laughed. “Me? What did I do?” “Well, a lot of babysitting, for one. And your bizarre love life made for an interesting distraction.” She rolled her eyes. “Happy to have been of service.” They sat in silence for another few minutes. The train still didn’t move. Another passenger got up and pulled down one of the windows, examining the opening. To Sarah’s horror, he started to climb out. “What the…” One of the other passengers got up. “Hey, man, you don’t wanna do that,” he called out. The other man ignored him, wiggling his body through the narrow window space and out of the train. “Fuck this. I’m not sitting here until they fix this shit.” “Dude, you could get electrocuted! Or hit by another train!” someone else shouted. The passenger ignored them. Sarah could hear his footsteps walking along the track. A few other passengers glanced at the window, but no one tried to climb out. Miguel glanced at his watch. “Okay, we’re officially super late, but just to confirm, nobody’s climbing out a goddamn window, right?” Nick and Sarah nodded. “Right.” The train grew hotter. Nick began to sweat in earnest. Miguel took out a thermos of cold water, took a swig, and casually offered it to Nick, who drank eagerly. Sarah closed her eyes. “I, uh…” She cleared her throat. “I might be able to get us out of this.” Two heads swiveled to stare at her. “What?” Miguel asked. “Yeah, like…you have MTA connections?” Nick added. “No, just…I could wish us out of here.” Nick looked puzzled. “I thought you and Jareth weren’t exactly friendly at the moment.” “We’re not. But, you know, desperate times—“ There was a sudden lurch as the train came back to life and began moving sluggishly down the tracks. A few people applauded, and Sarah breathed a sigh of relief. Miguel squeezed her hand. “Based on what you’ve told me, Sarah, it’s not a good idea to mess around with wishes. Seems like they always have consequences.” “Yeah.” She shivered—she’d been remarkably close to doing it. “Yeah, they do.” Lori didn’t answer the bell when they arrived. They waited outside for a moment until Miguel remembered that he had a spare key, so they let themselves in the front door and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. The apartment door was also locked. “Maybe she’s taking a particularly long shower. Or she stepped out for a minute.” Sarah was puzzled. “She would’ve texted us.” They let themselves into the apartment, quietly calling out Lori’s name in case Jaye was napping. The living room was messy—laundry was piled in one corner, food containers in the kitchen, baby-related accessories all over the floor and sofa. Sarah absently started putting food containers in a garbage bag. Nick sat down to rest on the sofa. Miguel returned from a quick investigation of the bedroom and bathroom. “No one here. Maybe her phone was dead, I’m guessing she’ll be back soon.” Sarah glanced over at the pile of laundry. “I think I saw a wash-and-fold downstairs at the corner, could you—“ Her phone buzzed, and she immediately felt relieved. “That must be her now.” The image on her screen, though, showed an unfamiliar number. “Hello?” “Hi.” The voice didn’t immediately ring any bells. “It’s Vinh.” Sarah blinked, experiencing that all-too-familiar sensation of realizing that this person knew her and she didn’t know them, or at least didn’t remember where she’d met them. Vinh…Vinh… And then it came back to her in a rush. “Vinh! Wow, uh…sorry, I guess I didn’t expect you to call.” “Yeah, I, uh, did a little sleuthing to find your number. If that’s creepy I’ll hang up right now and you’ll never hear from me again.” “No!” She felt herself blushing and realized that both Nick and Miguel were now looking at her with a great deal of interest. “No, not creepy at all, I’m, uh…glad you called. Kind of in the middle of something right now, though, so can I call you back?” “Sure. You’ve got my number now.” “Yeah. Promise I won’t ghost, just gotta deal with some stuff.” “Cool. I’ll, uh, be waiting.” She hung up and tried to return her attention to the garbage and the laundry. “Like I was saying, I think there’s a wash-and-fold—“ “Who was that?” Miguel asked, a familiar smirk on his face. Sarah felt the blush intensifying. “A guy.” “Yeah, a guy named Vinh, I got that much. What’s the context?” She threw more food containers in the trash bag. “I may have kissed him in a bar that night when I was drunk-texting you.” Nick’s mouth fell open. “You kissed a guy in a bar?” “Yeah, and?” Miguel rolled his eyes. “And details! Given that it’s been, like, ages since I heard you talk about kissing anyone other than you-know-who…” “Yeah, well, not much to report, it was just—“ Nick joined in. “Is he cute? Young? Old? Artist? Wall Street type?” “Wall Street type?!” She stared at him in mock horror. “What the hell do you take me for?” Nick raised an eyebrow. “Someone whose last boyfriend was an immortal baby stealer?” Sarah raised an eyebrow back at him. “You did not just go there.” Nick threw up his hands. “Fine, fine, just tell us more about him.” Sarah tied up the garbage bag and set it on the floor in the kitchen. “Well, he’s an I.T. guy, just moved here from Hawaii, very nice arms, very…” Sarah’s eyes had suddenly fallen on a pile of books and toys on Lori’s dining table, some of which she recognized from the baby shower several months before. The bright colors of a particular book cover stood out. She slowly pulled the book out from beneath a stuffed duck toy and some kind of soft-felt baby mobile that Lori apparently hadn’t gotten around to hanging. It was a copy of Outside Over There, almost identical to the one she’d owned years before, though of course less faded. “Sarah?” Miguel’s voice sounded far away. “You okay?” “Yeah, I…” She opened the book, flipping pages to reveal the familiar drawings. “I had a copy of this when I was a kid.” A feeling of dread began to pool in Sarah’s stomach. Slowly, trance-like, she walked into the bedroom. “Sarah? Sarah, what’s going on?” She stared at Jaye’s crib and then closed her eyes, hoping that she’d imagined it, but when she opened them it was impossible not to notice. The edges of the crib were covered with a faint sheen of glitter. Her heart began to pound. She looked down into the empty crib and saw something that Miguel must have missed—a small piece of paper resting next to Jaye’s pillow. With shaking hands, she picked it up. The looping script was familiar. I had no choice.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Sarah felt as though the ground beneath her feet had vanished. She leaned back against the crib, if only to have something to anchor her against the feeling that she might fall through the earth or float away at any second. Under the layers of shock that reverberated through her body, though, she could picture it. Picture the offhand way that it might have happened, with Jaye screaming louder than usual, Lori trying simultaneously to get the house in order and get Jaye to calm down. Maybe Lori had remembered snippets of Moon Gems. Maybe she’d been reading to Jaye from Outside Over There. Maybe she’d rolled her eyes or thrown up her hands just before she said it, knowing that Jaye was too small to comprehend the words. Maybe she’d even laughed as she was saying it. And then he would have really been gone, and Sarah felt sick knowing almost EXACTLY how Lori would have felt, that sense of creeping dread, and of course the defensiveness that she didn’t mean it, no one ever means things like that… And then Jareth would have appeared out of thin air, and it was hard to guess who would have been more shocked to see the other. Maybe Lori had mistaken him for the actor who played Jareth in Moon Gems, at first. Maybe she’d thought it was a joke in very poor taste. She wondered how much Jareth had told Lori, how much Lori would hate her now for keeping this particular secret… You selfish fuck, this is NOT about you. Except that it is about you. At least about the fact that you never got around to telling her something really, really important. She gradually became aware that Nick and Miguel were standing in the doorway staring at her. Miguel took the note from her hands and his mouth fell open. “Sarah, is this from…” Sarah started speaking very fast, realizing that she was desperately trying to fill the silence and the thoughts that rushed into it. “I was going to tell her…I was going to tell her everything, once they started working together, but then everything happened and I didn’t know how to tell her, or I just forgot to because I was living in my own goddamn head for months…why didn’t I tell her, why the fuck didn’t I tell her—“ Miguel gripped her shoulders. “Sarah, take a breath—“  “I told everyone not to, even though it sounded crazy, you saw it, I posted it like multiple times on multiple social media platforms, “Don’t wish your goddamn kids away, even as a joke,” there’s no way she couldn’t have—“ “Lori doesn’t use social media,” Miguel said. Sarah flinched. “What?” Miguel looked inside the crib again as if to confirm that Jaye really wasn’t there. “It’s like a thing with her, remember? Always has been, her agent hates it, wishes she would set up accounts to promote her plays…” Nick glanced between the two of them. “Can someone explain to me what’s going on?” Sarah’s mind was racing. “Lori wished Jaye away,” she said. “What the—she would never do that, she loves Jaye, she’s not—“ “She wouldn’t have meant it,” Sarah snapped. “Not that it matters. All that matters are the words.” Nick stared at her. “That’s insane.” “Yeah, no one ever said quasi-imaginary worlds were logical,” she said. “Why didn’t I tell her, why didn’t I tell her…” She barely heard Miguel’s vague words of reassurance as she pulled out her phone to look at the time and check for the last text she’d received from Lori. Three hours ago. Ten hours left, give or take… She ran back to the living room to where a full-length mirror hung in the entryway, only slightly wider than a human body. She pressed her hand against it. “Hoggle? Hoggle, are you there?” The mirror rippled. She heard Nick gasp. “Jesus Christ—“ An image of Hoggle standing in his kitchen gradually came into focus. She could see a fire burning in the hearth behind him and a pot of something bubbling over it. Hoggle wiped his hands on a ragged-looking towel. “ ‘lo, Sarah. He said you might be comin’ through soon.” Sarah turned to Miguel, who looked terrified as she hugged him tightly. “I’m going to fix this,” she said. “One way or another. I promise.” “Sarah, maybe we should—“ She shook her head as she hugged a very confused-looking Nick. “No time. Just trust me on this one.” She forced herself to smile. “I love you both. Tell the kids I love them too.” And before she could lose her nerve, she dove through the mirror. “Ye coulda warned me, Sarah, fer the love of Goblindom…” Sarah winced at the pain in her backside as her stiff limbs slowly came back to life. Her momentum appeared to have knocked a few vegetables and a wooden bowl of flour onto the floor, which Hoggle was now irritably picking up. “Sorry,” she croaked, brushing flour off of her jeans and helping him tidy as she stood up on wobbly legs. “Has she—have you seen her? My friend?” Hoggle sighed. “Yeah, eh, about that…he tried t’ send me after her. Y’ know, like he did with you.” Sarah frowned. “He—you mean he told you to take her back to the beginning?” “No—well, yes, but…” Hoggle took a deep breath and looked around as though someone might be listening in. “That’s what he SAID. But he also mentioned that the lady was yer FRIEND. Like, gave me a really long stare when he said it.” Sarah felt relief rush through her. He’s cheating. Or he’s trying to cheat without cheating. “So did you help her, then?” “I tried, but…it were the strangest thing. I know the damn labyrinth like my own garden, know where everyone usually ends up, but no matter where I went, I couldn’ find her. And when it seemed like I was gettin’ close t’ her I swear the damn hedges or stones would move.” Sarah’s heart sank. “It’s onto him,” she whispered. Hoggle nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” “Well, we’ll have to figure something else out, then. What’s the quickest route to the castle from here? Is there, like, a magic door?” Hoggle went to the storeroom door in the corner of his cottage. “‘Course there is.” He unscrewed the strange-looking handle on the door and popped it into a socket on the other side. When he opened it, Sarah saw a dimly lit tunnel. She knelt down and hugged him. “Thank you. For everything.” He made a dismissive sound and then tensed slightly when she didn’t end the hug. “Sarah? Ye all right?” She nodded, forcing herself to let go. “Yeah. Just…trying to remember how to be brave.” Hoggle rolled his eyes. “Don’ think ye ever forgot that.” His expression grew serious. “You…you ain’t plannin t’ kill him, are you?” Sarah’s mouth fell open. “No, I—is that even possible?” “Dunno. No one’s ever tried.” “Well, no, I definitely don’t want to—I just want to make sure Lori gets her baby back.” Hoggle nodded. “Well, ‘should ye need us’ and all that, even if the labyrinth ain’t makin’ it easy to help folk right now…” She hugged him again before stepping through the doorway. “I’ll call.” It didn’t take long for the tunnel to become a recognizable corridor of the castle. Sarah had learned its basic twists and turns some time ago, though as befitting a castle in a sort of world-between-worlds there were certain hallways and rooms that only seemed to appear at certain times. Things got noisier as she neared the throne room. When she opened the door the goblins were rolling a large, half-empty barrel of something that could have been ale around in a circle, with one goblin unsuccessfully attempting to balance on it as it rolled. Jaye was nowhere in sight. Maybe she made it to the center. Maybe she already got him out. One of the goblins noticed her and waved. “Blue lady! Blue lady got more blue!” It pointed to her hair. Sarah waved. “Hey. You guys, uh, haven’t seen a baby here recently, have you?” Another goblin slumped its shoulders. “King took baby away,” it pouted. Sarah blinked. “Took it away? Where?” The goblin shrugged and then looked up at Sarah eagerly. “Blue lady bring baby back? Play?” Sarah nodded. “Right…lemme find the baby first, okay?” Several goblins clapped their hands and then resumed rolling the ale-barrel. “Okay!” The door to Jareth’s bedroom was slightly ajar. When she opened it she saw that the lighting was dimmer than usual—some of the candles in the wall sconces had gone out, and the ones that were usually lit in the window or on the desk weren’t burning. His desk, she noticed, was a mess of books, parchment, and quills, with torn or crumpled pieces of paper scattered on the floor. He was seated in the large chair next to the bed, wearing a version of his usual loose-fitting shirt, tight trousers, and billowing cape. He looked up when she came in, though the lack of surprise on his face told her that he must have sensed her presence a long time ago. His face didn’t look especially gaunt—maybe because Lori’s wish had replenished him, she realized—but his eyes looked haunted. Her stomach gave a lurch at the sight of him. She’d often imagined what it would be like to see him again, what she’d say, what he’d say, but she hadn’t counted on the feeling of utter powerlessness that it would inspire. Jaye was asleep on his chest. Jareth held him gently in one arm, the other idly stroking his dark, curly hair. Minus the elaborate hairstyle and theatrical clothing, Sarah realized, it could have been a simple image of a father and his child. When he spoke she felt the pain in his voice as if it were her own. “Hello, Sarah.” She winced at the sound of her own name. “Hey.” He glanced down at the baby. “I’m rather good at getting them to go to sleep, actually. Though I suppose having a bit too much fun with the goblins would tire anyone out.” Sarah resisted the urge to grab Jaye, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to take him back through a mirror with her. “Where’s Lori?” she asked. His eyes still focused on Jaye, Jareth produced a crystal that floated toward her, images dancing inside it. Her heart sank. Jareth stood up and laid Jaye down in the center of his very large bed, placing oversized pillows around him like walls. “She made it rather far, actually, before she ended up in the oubliette,” he said, returning to his chair. He chuckled, and there was no warmth in it. “Wasn’t exactly elated to see me. I greatly doubt she’ll want to direct my play now.” The crystal vanished, along with an image of Lori frantically searching for a way out of the dimly-lit pit. Sarah took a deep breath. “Hoggle said you sent him to…lead her back to the beginning,” she said, glancing around the room in the same way that Hoggle had. “Yes. You could say that the labyrinth and I have been arguing a bit of late. It might have gotten…fed up with my defiance.” Sarah clenched her fists and took another deep breath. “I want to take Jaye’s place,” she said. Jareth folded his hands over one knee. “Yes, I imagined you’d say something like that.” “Well…can I, then? Take his place and you’ll send him back with Lori?” He stared at her, his eyes filled with a kind of fascination that she’d seen only a few times, but that had been enough to melt her heart toward him. “You would do this? Though you bear no responsibility for what happened?” She looked down. “I never stopped you,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want to know about it. You were right. And I never got around to telling Lori about you, which was just stupid, and now she’s paying the price for it.” “That may be true, but you didn’t give Lori a copy of a certain children’s book as a gift. You didn’t make her very momentarily weary and overwhelmed. You didn’t put the words into her mouth.” “And no, you can’t take the child’s place. This particular sort of magic only deals in children, and while I’ve never been certain of the exact moment when a human leaves childhood behind, I would say that you’re well past it.” Sarah closed her eyes. In the back of her mind she’d known that it was a long shot. And, she guiltily admitted, a part of her had hoped it wouldn’t work. “Right, then I’m going to go out there and find her and help her,” she said, striding toward the bedroom door with more confidence than she actually felt. “I see. And how, I wonder, will you find the oubliette that she’s trapped in?” Sarah paused. “I remember where it was. I’ll just search for the door guards.” Jareth sighed behind her. “Sarah, during any given run there are more than a hundred oubliettes in the labyrinth.” She turned around. He was smiling slightly, but it wasn’t mocking. “A hundred?” “Yes, depending on the labyrinth’s mood. It changes with the runner, or with…other things. I’ve never really been quite sure what makes the labyrinth do what it does, actually, and it hasn’t exactly been forthcoming.” “Well, I’m going after her anyway, because—“ “You don’t need to. She’s going to get the child back.” Sarah blinked. She studied Jareth for signs that this was some sort of game, but his face seemed sincere. “She…she is? How?” He stood up and reached a hand out to soothe Jaye, who was tossing and turning slightly in his sleep. “Suffice it to say that I’ve done some…studying since you last saw me.” He glanced over at his desk, which was indeed piled high with a host of new books. “It will take a bit of effort on my part, but I believe I can get Lori to the castle without incurring the labyrinth’s wrath.” He produced another crystal and let it hover in the air. Sarah saw Lori in the oubliette again, and as she watched a door opened and flooded the small room with light. Sarah felt relief wash over her. “Well. That’s wonderful to hear.” He nodded. She noticed that his hand was gripping the arm of the chair tightly. He didn’t have the gaunt look that she’d seen when he’d been need- and wish-malnourished in the past, but he seemed to have aged, if only slightly. She put her hands in her pockets and took them out again. “So.” He uncrossed and crossed his legs. “So.” She watched as Lori made her way through a hedged section of maze. “How long does she have?” Jareth made an image of a clock appear in thin air. The hands pointed to eight. “Five hours. More than enough time.” “Good.” There was a long silence. Sarah could hear the faint sound of goblin revelry down the hall. Jareth cleared his throat. “She and the child will appear back in their own home after she reclaims him, you’re welcome to simply wait for her there, through the mirror in Hoggle’s home,” he said, rather quickly. She sat down on the edge of the bed, keeping one eye on Jaye’s sleeping form. “I’ll, uh, just wait here for her. If you don’t mind,” she added quickly. “Not at all.” She felt him watching her as she glanced again at the books on the desk, noticing several ancient-looking tomes with Goblin titles but also works of philosophy and poetry—Kant, Ovid, Aristotle. “Interesting study materials.” He shrugged. “I had a great deal of free time suddenly. I thought I should put it to good use.” Another silence. “You’ve cut your hair,” he said. “Yeah.” He seemed to be waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, he said, “I preferred it long.” “I know you did. That’s why I cut it all off.” His expression was pained, but one side of his mouth curled slightly. “Do you really take such pleasure in spiting me, even now?” Sarah shrugged, hoisting herself up onto the bed and pulling her legs up against her chest. “It’s a mortal thing. Cutting your hair when you want to…move on.” He flinched. “And did you want to? Move on?” She sighed. “Not really, no. Just kind of felt like I had to.” She suddenly remembered the incident from a few days before and glared at him. “Oh, and speaking of moving on, I’d hoped you’d stopped pulling stunts like the one in the bar. Or are you going to tell me that a whole shelf of glasses just magically crashed to the floor?” He folded his arms. “I was jealous.” “No shit.” His face betrayed the faintest hint of a smirk. “I was gratified to hear, though, that you were occasionally sad when you woke up without me in your bed.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “How many times have I told you not to eavesdrop—“ “Sarah, you said my name and touched a mirror. You knew that I would hear whatever you had to say, regardless of how inebriated you might have been.” “You could have plugged your ears.” “You caught me in a rather vulnerable state, I couldn’t help listening.” Sarah stared at him. “Did you just use the word vulnerable to refer to yourself?” He ignored the question and stood, pacing aimlessly from one area of the room to the other. Within the crystal, Sarah could see that Lori was nearing the outer gates of the Goblin City. Silence stretched between them again. “I said some horrible things to you,” she said quietly. He didn’t turn around. “Not all of them were untrue,” he said. “I also said some terrible things to you.” “Yeah, you weren’t all wrong, either.” She pulled her knees tighter against her chest. “I didn’t—look, I’m not saying it wasn’t hot, you being bad, but it wasn’t—that was never the only thing I saw in you, okay? You were funny. You were a good writer. You saw things in ways that I never saw them.” “And I put you in an impossible position. ‘Keep taking the babies and I’ll hate you, or stop taking the babies and twist yourself out of existence.’ Not really fair of me.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.” Jareth leaned against his desk. She noticed yet again that he seemed to be gripping it tightly. “Did you really not mean what you said? The night that you brought me Lori’s revisions for my play?” Sarah froze. “Which part?” she asked, knowing exactly which part. “You said that you loved me. Was it really a slip of the tongue?” Sarah let her chin fall forward onto her knees. In the crystal, Lori was halfway between the gates and the castle.  “It wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” she mumbled. “What?” She stood up and crossed the short distance to him. “I said it wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I meant it, but then I was terrified because I know it came out of nowhere, and I was scared that you didn’t feel the same way at all and that maybe you’d say it back just to make me feel better, so I figured it was better to just never mention it and forget it ever happened, and then everything went to hell anyway and God knows you probably hate me now, so—“ “I’ve loved you since the day you offered to write me an ending.” Sarah’s mouth froze in mid-sentence. “You what?” He reached out to touch her cheek. “I didn’t know what it was at first, that feeling. I didn’t think I was capable of it. I’ve felt desire, of course, covetousness, even affection. But not…that.” “And you’re right, I don’t know that I could have said it back to you then, because I was terrified.” “Of what?” He stared at her, seemingly shocked that she didn’t know the answer. “Of your mortality.” “My…oh.” The knowledge hit her like a heavy weight. It wasn’t that he’d felt nothing. He just didn’t want to watch me die. “I read and wrote a lot, while you were gone,” he said, gesturing toward the scattered papers and books on the desk. “Mortal philosophy. Literature. I tried to understand the feeling, in the hope that I could find a way to defeat it.” His laugh was hollow. “It didn’t work, of course.” “In a way I was relieved that you were disgusted with me. It meant that the future was less frightening. I read that the pain passes, in time.” Sarah swallowed hard. “And did it?” He cupped her face in both his hands and let his forehead rest against hers. She could feel his breath on her cheeks. “No,” he whispered. “And thank the fucking gods for that.” He kissed her, and the need that flowed out of her was a torrent that she felt coursing through her veins and skin, and he drank her in hungrily as she threw herself against him with a cry of anguish that was part pleasure and part hurt, because she had missed him, missed him so terribly, and if this was a very bad idea she really didn’t care… She gasped when he pulled away, one finger stroking the angles of her face as if to memorize its contours. “Thank you,” he whispered, kissing her one more time, “for meaning it.” Sarah suddenly noticed that the noise down the hall had gone quiet. She looked at the crystal—Lori was in the castle. “How are you going to—what did you find out about how to—“ Jareth lifted the sleeping baby and cradled him comfortably in his arms. Sarah could hear footsteps in the hallway. “You’re brilliant, precious,” he said, his voice sounding strangely hoarse, “but you have always had a talent for seeing what you wanted to see.” He looked up at her, and something in his eyes made her feel cold. “Hearing what you wanted to hear.” Sarah stared at him, at the small sheen of sweat that had broken out on his brow, at the sudden shallowness of his breath… Out of the corner of her eye she noticed pieces of parchment on his desk with words written in frantic-looking script, some lines crossed out. Send the dwarf— Labyrinth too strong— Bargain with— And then one line, clearer than all the others. You know you can’t live with it. She felt dizzy. Behind her, Lori’s footsteps grew closer. “There has to be another way,” she said, feeling her heart pounding in her chest. “There must be another way, she’s got plenty of time, you could send her back into the maze, she’ll figure it out—“ He smiled. “Perhaps she would.” He brushed Jaye’s nose with a finger. “I wasn’t willing to risk that, though.” “Look, if you’re trying to make an impression, well done, this is a ridiculously unselfish act, but—“ “Unselfish?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Intriguing. Though I suppose, from your perspective…” He shook his head. “No. Believe me, Sarah, this is a selfish choice. I’m choosing to avoid an endless lifetime of knowing you could never forgive me.” He kissed her forehead, and she could feel his whole body shaking with effort. “Still, think of me as unselfish, if it pleases you.” Sarah gripped his shoulders. “Jareth, please don’t do this, I know you wanted a goddamn dramatic ending, but I’m begging you—“ “Not the ending I would have chosen, definitely.” His smile was forced. “I’d like to have seen my play, for one.” The door to Jareth’s bedroom opened. Lori stood there, gasping for breath, her hair and clothes disheveled. She stared between the two of them. “Sarah?” Sarah’s eyes were fixed on Jareth. “Please, there’s time, we can—“ “Sarah, I didn’t mean it, you know I would never mean it, it was so stupid—“ “Let’s think, together, I’m sure there’s something—“ Jareth moved slowly toward the doorway. Sarah noted that every one of his steps seemed to grow heavier, as though chains were binding him to the earth. His body shimmered slightly, and Sarah felt the ground begin to rumble. She stepped in front of him, still pleading with her eyes. He gently pushed her aside and held Jaye out to Lori, who took him. “I return your child to you, my lady,” he said, choking on the words. The rumbling intensified. “We have no need of him here.” Sarah felt her world grind to a halt as he turned to look at her, smiling through what must have been unimaginable pain. He reached out to touch her face with a hand that seemed to be shifting in unnatural ways, blood pooling on his fingertips. “I wish I could have seen everything else you’re going to create.” And then he vanished.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“That was definitely a K.”

“Afraid not, precious, but close, alphabetically speaking.”

“L?”

“Excellent.”

Sarah closed her eyes and concentrated on the feel of Jareth’s finger on her bare back. “I?” she said.

“Your skills are unparalleled.”

“C?”

“Very good.”

She turned her head to look at him. “Are you writing LICK ME on my back?”

He shrugged and lay down next to her on the pile of cushions and blankets that had somehow made their way from the bed to the floor. “You couldn’t recognize my more complicated word choices, so I felt it best to keep things simple.”

She rolled her eyes and then licked his nose. “Happy now?”

He smiled and bounced a cushion off of her forehead. “Very.”

She reached across the floor for her shirt and trousers. “I really should have included more of your juvenile sense of humor in the play,” she said, pulling the shirt over her head.

He grabbed the shirt and pulled it back up over her head. “What’s your hurry?”

“No hurry, I’m just a bit chilly.”

He tossed the shirt aside and pulled her back down into the blankets and cushions. “Then let me warm you.”

Sarah laughed. “Not that I don’t enjoy your insatiability, but I’m not sure how much I have left in—“

“I wasn’t suggesting that.” He lay back and stretched one arm across the floor. “Just lie with me.”

She felt of prickle of something unfamiliar—a mix of butterflies, and competing impulses to do what he asked and find an excuse not to.

Look, it’s not like he’s asking you to marry him.

She smiled awkwardly and lay down, resting her head on his chest. She felt his arm wrap around her waist and pull her closer. Warmth seemed to radiate from his body to hers.

“Your heartbeat is crazy,” she said.

“How so?”

“It’s like, fast and then slow. Irregular.”

“I’m hardly regular.”

She laughed and pressed herself tighter against him, enjoying the sensation of his skin on hers. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

They lay in silence for a moment. She grew warmer and gradually suspected that he was magicking her warm, which she certainly didn’t mind.

“Make me a crystal, would you?” she asked him after a few minutes.

“Whatever for?”

“You know what for.”

He sighed and produced a glass sphere, letting it hover in the air for a moment before it deposited itself into her open palm. “Your hyper-competitive side would be charming if I didn’t feel so humiliated.”

Sarah moved the crystal expertly between her hands. “Yeah, like I could ever make a dent in your self-confidence.”

“Much as I’m loathe to admit it, certain dents come rather easily, given that you have actually accomplished things beyond the manipulation of crystal balls.”

Sarah laughed. “And you haven’t?”

When he was silent she stopped moving the crystal between her hands and propped herself up on one elbow to look at him. “Wait a minute, are you serious? You actually don’t think you’ve accomplished anything?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I hardly think presiding over a kingdom of magical lowlifes and tormenting wishers count as accomplishments.”

She twirled a strand of his hair around one finger. “So…why don’t you do something?”

He seemed genuinely surprised. “Like what?”

“Like…anything. You’ve got a lot of fascinating thoughts. You could write them down.”

“And who would deign to read them?”

She shrugged. “I would.”

“Would you, now?”

She lay back down in the crook of his arm. “I’m not saying I’d LIKE what you wrote, just like I was never sure that you’d like what I wrote. But I’d at least read it.” She went back to moving the crystal back and forth between her hands. “Not that the judgment of a mere mortal would matter to you anyway.”

He took the crystal and levitated it just beyond her reach, laughing when she tried to grab it. “Not in the slightest.”

She continued to reach and he continued to pull the crystal further away until finally it vanished with a pop, and she playfully swatted his hand. “Now who’s humiliating who, you monster?”

He kissed her suddenly, his lips traveling up her cheek to her ear, and she forgot her feigned outrage. “Would you really read something that I wrote, Sarah?”

She cupped his chin, smiling at him without any hint of sarcasm. “Of course I would. I like the way things arrange themselves in your head.”

He blinked. “I do not believe anyone has ever said this to me.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “We’re full of surprises, mortals.”

He smiled down at her with that look of wonder that always made her feel slightly giddy. “Indeed you are.”

As the ground ceased its shaking, a horrible, alien keening sound echoed off the walls of Jareth’s bedroom and grew louder and louder with each passing second.

Sarah realized it was her.

Her whole body heaved with painful, wracking sobs. At some point she realized she was screaming obscenities at whatever forces had taken him away, colorful and nonsensical threats that poured out of her uncontrollably, though she wasn’t sure that anyone could hear them.

Eventually she stopped crying and forced herself to breathe deeply. Gone. He’s…gone.

Lori and Jaye were also gone—safely back in Lori’s apartment, she imagined. She stood up on unsteady legs and stared at the room around her as if to confirm that it was still intact—the bed, the pillows, the desk. She ran to the window and confirmed that the castle and the labyrinth, at least, were still here. Not that another round of furious shaking couldn’t decimate the whole place at any time.

She realized that her feet were taking her down the hallway to the throne room, where the goblins were all sitting motionless, their complete silence much more frightening than any moments of out-of-control mayhem had ever been.

She had no idea what to say to them.

She heard more footsteps and saw Hoggle, Didymus, and Ludo entering the throne room from the opposite side. They looked as shocked as the goblins.

“My lady,” Didymus said quietly, stepping down off of Ambrosius. “Didst thou…I regret that I must say the words, but…didst thou commit an act of murder?”

“No!” Sarah stared at all of them, the way their eyes seemed to accuse her. “No, I didn’t—I would never—I didn’t know he was going to do this! I swear, I never thought—I would have stopped him—“

Would you have, though? If it was between him and Jaye?

You might have. But then you would have hated him AND hated yourself. And he couldn’t have that.

The extent to which Jareth had read her correctly was unnerving.

Sarah wrung her hands, wishing that someone would yell at her, condemn her, do anything but fix her with that blank-eyed stare. “What…what happens now? To this place, to all of you?”

Hoggle shrugged. “Dunno. He’s the only king we ever had. Maybe they’ll send us a new one.”
He grimaced slightly. “Or maybe they’ll just turn this place into a tree and make us all birds, ye can never tell w’ them.”

As if in response, the castle began to shake again. Sarah gripped the edge of the throne. She’d always known that injuries sustained on this side of the mirror remained on the other side, but…could she die here?

The shaking gradually subsided, but the relief that Sarah felt was replaced by a shriek of surprise when she happened to glance at a particular section of the throne room wall.

Where words were slowly appearing.

It was as if an invisible hand held an invisible paintbrush dipped in bright black paint, which splattered letters on the stone wall. The letters looked vaguely similar to Goblin, but she couldn’t read them.

She glanced at Hoggle, Didymus, and Ludo. “Anyone know what that means?”

Hoggle's voice was uneasy. “Up the stairs,” he said. “One only.”

Sarah glanced at the spiral staircase in one corner of the room that had, at one time, led her to the massive chamber of logic-defying staircases. “I guess the labyrinth…wants to talk,” she said quietly.

Hoggle snorted. “They weren’t never much for talking before.”

Sarah’s eyes were locked on the staircase. “Well, I have to try.” She took a step forward.

She heard Hoggle clear his throat behind her. “Sarah…I know you ain’t little anymore, but this…this is a bad idea.”

Didymus looked grave. “I fear I must agree with my brother, fair maiden. It should be one of us who faces them. Our deaths would be of less consequence.”

Hoggle glared at him. “Speak for yourself.”

Sarah tried to tamp down the fear that was rapidly spreading through her whole body. “You really think they’d…kill me?”

Hoggle threw up his hands. “That’s just it, there’s no telling. The things what run the Labyrinth, they…ain’t kind. They ain’t mean, either. They just sorta are.”

Sarah swallowed hard. “Uh huh.”

“Which means, like, you bein’ mortal and way beneath them, they might just kill ye. Or turn ye into a mouse, if it amused ‘em.”

The pounding of her own heart in Sarah’s ears became deafening. She remembered the fear in Jareth’s voice when he’d talked about dealing with the powers behind the labyrinth. She tried to remember that she’d faced truly terrifying things in her own run through the labyrinth, and she had succeeded.

That all seemed like a very long time ago, though.

She rolled up her sleeves with a confidence she definitely didn’t feel. “Still going.”

Hoggle’s mouth fell open, but Didymus placed a hand on his chest and bowed his head slightly. “My lady, I thank thee for showing me, once in my brief life, an expression of true love.”

Sarah laughed, though she knew that she had to move quickly before panic rooted her feet to the floor. “I’d say it’s closer to madness than love, noble sir, but maybe they’re not so different.”

She turned back toward the staircase and jumped when a hand closed firmly around her arm. She heard Didymus gasp as she turned around.

Hoggle gripping her arm and staring at her with a fierce expression she’d never seen before.

“Dammit, Sarah.” The words sounded strangled. “He ain’t worth dyin’ for.”

She gently removed his hand and knelt down until they were at eye level. She could see tears pooling in his eyes.

“I don’t intend to die,” she said.

“Nobody ever intends t’ die! But you do, all the time, you Aboveground things, ye break like old firewood…”

Sarah pulled Hoggle tightly against her and he struggled for only a moment. Eventually he groaned in resignation.

“Ye couldn’t take a leaf outta my book, just once? Play the coward instead of the hero?”

She pulled back and kissed his forehead. “You know you’re not as much of a coward as you claim to be. And I…I did this. I’m the reason he’s gone, I’m the reason this whole place might be gone soon, so if there’s consequence-facing to be done, well…”

Hoggle sighed. “Just…be a little humble, all right? Might save yer life.”

She smiled, though she could feel the fear seeping back into her bones. “I’ll try.”

She turned and started up the staircase at a run before she could stop herself.

Instead of the open archway that had once led to the staircase room, at the top of this staircase Sarah was met by a door.

Under normal circumstances that wouldn’t have been a surprise—the labyrinth and its castle were full of doors and gates. But this door was, to put it mildly, wildly out of place in the castle.

It was made of metal, with a greenish coat of paint that seemed to be peeling slightly. There was a small, rectangular opening in the middle that might have been a mail slot. The doorknob was silver.

Sarah recalled what Jareth had told her about how the powers behind the labyrinth often presented themselves—to him they’d been a lake of fire and a roomful of knives. Was that sort of thing what waited for her behind this door?

Probably best not to think about it for too long.

She gripped the doorknob and opened the door…

…to reveal the offices of Sayles and Cullingford.

Or if not the exact offices, an eerily accurate replica.

There were the eternally dusty Venetian blinds, the cheap-looking desks piled high with file folders, the faint smell of tobacco (technically no one was supposed to smoke, but it was obvious that people did after hours), the sound of phones ringing. The place where she’d spent the most miserable six months of her post-university life.

The internship had been a favor from her father when she was having trouble getting a foot in the door anywhere, even though she’d never wanted to be a lawyer. Just try it for a bit, he’d said. You’re a performer, law can be a way to channel that. Law school might work for you.

She was grateful to Sayles and Cullingford for one thing, at least—filling her with so much existential dread that she’d sworn she’d never work in a place like that again, and had thrown herself wholeheartedly back into theater and waitressing to support herself, financial instability be damned.

Part of her wanted to laugh. The labyrinth could have chosen so many appearances as a way to frighten her, could have dredged up any number of childhood memories…but no, this was what it had chosen.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized this was really the ideal choice. She’d only been in the room a few seconds and she already felt mildly ill.

People—at least they looked like people—were scattered throughout the room seated at various desks, typing on computers and talking into phones. Their movements had an oddly dance-like quality, as if they were all performing a choreographed routine.

A woman with her hair in a tight bun who bore a striking resemblance to Genevieve, Sarah’s old boss, sat at the desk closest to the door. She looked up when Sarah cleared her throat.

“You’re an Abovegrounder,” she said. Her voice sounded human, but strangely flat, like computer-generated voice technology.

“Yes.” Sarah’s voice was a squeak, and she cleared her throat again. “I, uh, move between the two worlds, though.”

Not-Genevieve cocked her head and stood up. As she moved closer it took all of Sarah’s willpower not to shriek.

She’d initially taken the thing in front of her to be a human woman, one who bore a specific resemblance to someone she once knew. Up close, though, she could see that whatever this thing was, it was…not human. Its face was vaguely egg-shaped and the color of faded white wallpaper, with two sunken pools of blackness where eyes should have been. It had no nose. Its mouth, similarly, was a circle of blackness with no teeth or lips. Set against that uncanny template, its very realistic-looking hair and clothing were all the stranger.

Not-Genevieve reached out to touch Sarah’s forehead with a long, too-smooth finger, and Sarah did her best not to recoil. “Hmmm,” she said. “An in-betweener. We don’t see many of you anymore.” She gestured for Sarah to sit in a chair that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. “You’ll do, I suppose.”

Still trying to process everything that she was seeing and hearing (but grateful that, for the moment at least, the powers behind the labyrinth had decided not to dismember her), Sarah sat down. On the desk in front of her were two large sheets of parchment covered in writing that she couldn’t decipher.

The woman-thing was rifling through a desk drawer. “I’ll just need a few signatures,” she said, as though this were an everyday occurrence.

Sarah’s eyes darted back and forth between not-Genevieve and the papers. “What…what are these? What am I signing?”

The woman-thing located an oversized ballpoint pen and set it on the desk. “The first one’s a notice of decommissioning.” At Sarah’s blank stare, she continued. “The labyrinth will no longer be a repository for wished-away children. We’re…closing up shop, as you might say.”

“Closing…just like that? Is the place just, like, going to vanish into thin air?”

Not-Genevieve made a very awkward sound that might have been laughter. “No, of course not. It’s a perfectly decent magical space full of beings that are invested in its presence. And it might be useful again one day.” She looked momentarily thoughtful, though it was hard to tell given the lack of movement in her eye-holes. “If not wished-away children, maybe it’ll be a place for socks.”

“Socks?”

“Yes.” Her tone indicated that this was the most natural thing in the world. “Mortals are always losing one sock. They come up with all sorts of excuses for why it happens, when actually it’s magical beings stealing them and taking them to the alternate-universe sock repository. It’s getting overcrowded, though. The labyrinth could be useful in that way.” Not-Genevieve leaned in slightly, and Sarah again fought the urge to recoil. “We understand it’s pure torture for you, not being able to find that other sock.”

Sarah nodded slowly, realizing that this being’s equation of lost socks with ACTUAL pain and torture could certainly work in her favor. “Yeah. It’s, uh, the absolute worst.”

Sarah glanced down at the paper nearest to her. “So…when I sign this I’m just acknowledging that wished-away children won’t go to the labyrinth anymore, right? I’m not agreeing to the place being demolished or vanished or any of its current inhabitants being eliminated?”

“Yes, yes,” not-Genevieve said, sounding slightly impatient.

“What about those…earthquakes?”

“That was your king’s doing—tampering with the order of things in a magical realm is never a wise choice. Now that he’s gone there may be aftershocks for a time, but they’ll cease eventually.”

Sarah picked up the pen. He never lied to me. Who knows if this thing can lie…not like I can do much of anything but trust it.

She cleared her throat. “It’s not like I really have a choice, right?”

The woman folded her arms. “My experience with humankind tells me you’ll respond better if I let you believe that you do.”

Sarah swallowed. Pick your battles.

She signed her name in ink that looked suspiciously like blood. As soon as she finished, the piece of paper floated slightly off of the desk, rolled itself up, and vanished with a small shower of glitter.

“Right, now this one,” not-Genevieve said, tapping her finger against the other sheet of paper.

“What does it say?”

The woman cocked her head at Sarah. “Does it really matter?”

“Uh…” Sarah remembered what Hoggle had said about being humble. “I’d just like to know what I’m signing before I sign it, that’s all.”

Not-Genevieve sighed. “Suffice it to say that it concerns the former Goblin King’s torture and exile.”

Sarah gasped before she could stop herself. “Torture and exile? But why—“

She paused as the meaning of the woman’s last word sunk in. Her heart gave a leap. “Wait…so he’s not dead?”

“Death is a very mortal concept.” If the woman-thing had had a nose, Sarah was fairly sure it would have been turned up. “What happened to the Goblin King is likely beyond your mortal mind’s ability to comprehend, though I might explain his current situation as…tumbling about in the ether.” She glanced down at the paper and ran her fingers over it. “Or floating, depending on the nature of the wind.” She tapped the paper more insistently. “If you could just sign—“

“It was my fault, why he did what he did,” she blurted. “He shouldn’t be tortured and exiled for it.”

Not-Genevieve moved her body in a way that resembled a shrug. “The reason is irrelevant. There were rules and he defied them too many times. What’s said is said.”

Sarah gritted her teeth. At least she was learning where Jareth had gotten his phrasing.

Keep her talking. “Wh-Where is he being exiled to?”

“We’re still working that out, honestly, along with the nature of the torture. A life as long as the Goblin King’s, there are quite a few ideal situations and locations to choose from.” The lipless mouth turned up in a strange approximation of a smile. “We like to get things just right.”

Sarah took a deep breath. “Please,” she said. “I know you’re not…probably not in the habit of being compassionate, but seriously, if you’d just let him go, I’d do anything—“

She gave a tiny shriek when the woman-thing suddenly leaned forward and affixed her mouth-hole to Sarah’s forehead. She felt an intense pulling sensation, as if the skin of her brow were being sucked very hard, and a cascade of images from the past several years suddenly overwhelmed her field of vision, all of them blurring into one another—

And then the woman pulled back with an uncomfortably organic popping sound and it was over as quickly as it started. Sarah became aware of the odd noise of phones and typing again.

The woman leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Intriguing,” she said. “You may have just solved our conundrum.”

The writing on the other sheet of paper began to move, symbols swirling around each other like water until they stilled again. Sarah blinked, trying to clear her head.

“Solved your…so you’re not going to torture and exile him?”

“Oh no, that’s definitely still happening.” The woman’s voice was horrifyingly chipper. “The exact nature of it just became much clearer to us, though.” She positioned Sarah’s hand over the paper. “If you’d just sign.”

Sarah gripped the pen. “I can’t…you seriously expect me to be the one who sends Jareth off to be tortured?”

“Actions have consequences. Surely you learned this on your own journey through the labyrinth.”

“Yes, but—“

“You’re really, really beginning to try my patience, in-betweener.” The woman sounded bored. “I need a signature or we need blood, and I'm really not particular.”

Sarah gripped the pen. “No. I can’t be the one to—“

With shocking speed the woman grabbed Sarah’s left hand and yanked it toward the black hole of her mouth. The hole closed, and Sarah heard a sickening noise that was unfamiliar and yet immediately recognizable in the same moment that she felt a sharp stab of pain.

She screamed and pulled her hand back. Her two middle fingers had been reduced to stumps, and blood was pouring out onto the paper on the desk.

Like the one before it, the scroll rolled itself up and vanished in a puff of glitter. The woman-thing showed no emotion, though obviously it was difficult to tell. “It’s funny how mortals always say you’ll do anything,” she said drily. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t last beyond a few more fingers, though.”

Sarah clutched her hand, the pain blinding her to the point that she couldn’t think clearly. “Please,” she gasped, “please don’t…”

The woman gave Sarah a perfunctory pat on the head. “You have nothing to bargain with, even if you WOULD give up more of your limbs. Your friend Higgle was right. The Goblin King isn’t worth dying for.” She sighed. “No one is, really.”

“Hoggle,” Sarah gasped.

The woman chuckled. “Good-bye, in-betweener. I doubt we’ve seen the last of you.” She folded her arms. “Or your wayward king.”

A roaring sound like a tidal wave and a tornado combined filled the strange space surrounding them, and desks and human-like bodies swirled madly, blurring into each other. Sarah felt the ground beneath her feet give way, felt herself falling endlessly, and her last thought before the world went black was that if this was what “tumbling in the ether” was like, she prayed that Jareth wouldn’t have to experience it for much longer.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Sometimes the pain woke her up, and sometimes it was the nightmares. It didn’t help that she was sleeping in her childhood bedroom, which had long since been turned into a guest room, but still contained that very small bed and the built-in shelves where Lancelot and other stuffed animals had once watched over her. It meant that she was even more disoriented than usual when she woke up, thinking for a brief moment that she was in some sort of labyrinth-inspired recreation of her childhood memories. Which would likely never happen again, she always remembered. At the hospital she’d immediately contacted Hoggle through the bathroom mirror and had been shocked to discover that, while she could still see him, her hand met only a hard surface when she tried to push through the glass. She’d tried again repeatedly over the past few days, with the same results. “Just get yerself well, and then we’ll figure things out,” Hoggle had told her. “But they’re hurting him…we have to…” “He’s older than you know, Sarah, and this ain’t the first time they’ve shown him who’s boss. If he really is still alive, he’ll be all right.” Moaning softly under her duvet, she glanced at the clock on her bedside table, which showed that it was just before five in the morning. She reached for the orange pill bottle and the glass of water on her bedside table, remembered that she wasn’t supposed to take the painkillers on an empty stomach, and grudgingly got up in search of food, tucking the pill bottle into her pajama pants pocket. She tiptoed down the stairs and saw that a light was on in the kitchen. She found Karen seated at the kitchen table reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. “Morning,” Sarah said, rubbing her eyes. Karen jumped. “Ah, Sarah, are you all right? Do you want some coffee?” “No, just need to get some food to take my pills with—are you always up this early?” Karen folded the paper and smoothed her hair, which looked carefully coiffed even at five in the morning. “I like a bit of quiet before your father and Toby wake up,” she said. “You’ll also find as you get older that sleeping through the night isn’t always guaranteed.” “Great.” Sarah rummaged in a cabinet and pulled out a box of crackers. “More things to look forward to.” When she struggled to open the package Karen took it from her and opened it herself, glancing at the splint on Sarah’s left hand. “How’re you feeling?” She shrugged, sitting down to eat her crackers. “Hurts like hell.” “Like I said, it’s an open-and-shut case, the theater should compensate you,” she said. “Your father would know the details. Crazy to let someone use a power saw without proper training.” “Yeah, Miguel’s on it,” Sarah lied, having trouble remembering the exact details of the story Miguel and Lori had concocted to explain her missing fingers. “Right now I’m just in pain and frustrated.” “So it would seem.” Karen folded her arms over her soft pink bathrobe and regarded her stepdaughter with an appraising eye that Sarah knew all too well. “You’ve been crying in your sleep. Last night it was apparently so bad that Toby asked about me about it, and that child barely speaks to us these days.” Sarah grimaced. “I’m sorry.” “That wasn’t what I meant.” She reached out and squeezed Sarah’s good hand. “Did something else happen, maybe? With James?” “James?” “Yes, James. Your writing partner who was obviously more than a writing partner.” Sarah blushed, remembering how not so long ago one of her greatest fears had been the thought of a dinner with Jareth and her family. “No,” she said. “I mean…James is…James might be in trouble, and I don’t know how to help him. And it’s kind of my fault.” Karen took a sip of coffee. “I doubt that.” Sarah shook her head. “Did you ever…” She cleared her throat. “Did you ever try really, really hard to do the right thing, and it just ended up making everything worse?” “Many times,” Karen answered quickly. “Especially when it came to you and your brother.” “So why even bother?” she said. “Doing the right thing, I mean.” Karen smiled. “Because doing the right thing isn’t supposed to be easy. Or rewarding. At least not all the time.” She squeezed Sarah’s hand again. “And you never know, sometimes there are good consequences, they just don’t show up for a while.” Sarah laughed and pulled the pill bottle out of her pocket. “Very deep.” Karen opened the bottle and poured Sarah a glass of water. “You’re not the only deep thinker in the family.” We got a glowing review in Backstage!  Miguel texted her later. Congrats! Not that Im surprised, u know. Course not. Missed you. Think u can come next week? Hope so. Follow up appt tomorrow. Hurts a lot but its getting better. Any word from the other side? Sarah sighed. Nothing new. Still cant get through the mirror, Hoggle’s still annoyed that the goblins have decided he’s the new king and are making him wear a crown. Oh, and painkillers r amazing, really gonna miss them. We love you. Lori sends a virtual hug, aka the only kind u can get from her. Did u tell her Im sorry again. Not just about Jaye, about the bloodstains on her carpet. Yeah, and she says shut the fuck up already, u lost fingers & Jareth basically offed himself to get her kid back, so yr kinda even. Fine, fine. Still gonna keep apologizing. And I imagine Jareth will too, when I find him. There was a pause long enough that Sarah was about to put her phone away, but then another text appeared. U know I really hope you find him again, but u realize u might not, right? Her hand seemed to twinge in empathy with the other sort of pain she was feeling. Yeah. She forced herself to smile. Still u never know. He could just poof into the living room at any moment. True. Anythings possible. At the hospital the next day the doctor confirmed that everything was healing normally, told her to keep her hand clean and dry, and to come back again the following week. “Can I, uh, look into getting new fingers at some point? Like a prosthesis?” “Of course,” the doctor said absently, typing notes quickly into her computer. “You’ve got a lot more options these days—gloves, realistic-looking fingers. I hear they can even 3D print some glittery prostheses, you know, for kids.” Sarah chuckled. Glittery. He’d love that. That night she dreamt that she was falling endlessly, tossed around in an eternal void as she imagined Jareth must have been, and when she finally came back to her own body she could feel that she was in a cold sweat, her heart pounding. She curled in on herself, her terror raw and fresh… …and then she felt warm arms wrapping around her, strong and certain, and a hand stroking her hair. A voice shushed her gently, and she could feel warm breath on her neck… And then she woke up for real, and of course there was no one else there. “Cruel,” she muttered, wrapping her arms around herself again. “Too cruel.” The next morning she told Karen and her father that she was going home, despite Karen’s protests. “You’re still on painkillers, you need help opening jars, I’m terrified to think of you alone in that place…” Which is why I will never, EVER tell you how I really lost my fingers, Sarah thought. “I’ll call you every day with an update,” she said. “And Miguel or Lori will come by to check on me. I just need to be at home, start getting back to normal.” Karen relented eventually, sending her home with plastic containers full of food, which Sarah was grateful for. Her apartment felt different, though she imagined that the entire world felt different after everything she’d been through. She heated up some of the food Karen had sent home with her, winced when she noticed that she only had two painkillers left, and texted Miguel and Lori to wish them good show. She took one of the pills and crawled into bed early. When an unusual noise echoed through her living room a few minutes later and the entire apartment seemed to rattle slightly, she was too deeply asleep to notice. The nightmare she had that night was the worst one so far. The labyrinth-woman’s mouth grew larger and larger until it threatened to swallow her whole body, not just her hand. She felt that piercing pain again and again. And then she was surrounded by things with sharp teeth, or knives for teeth, and she could hear them snapping at her, trying to take more fingers and limbs. She woke up screaming, or thought she woke up, but yet again she must have still been in the dream, because warm arms wrapped around her and hushed her, and she remembered that time long ago when she’d imagined and dreamed terrifying things and had awakened wrapped in the warmth of Jareth’s cloak, and how even then she’d known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she never wanted to be far away from him. In the dream she gripped the arms that encircled her waist, settling her body into the crook of the body behind her that was so familiar, and she prayed that she wouldn’t wake anytime soon, because her real world was a mess at the moment and this dream was all she wanted. Just a little longer. Please. She turned over in the darkness and pulled him closer to her, her right hand reveling in the smooth, firm feel of his skin, the pulse of his heartbeat against her palm, the softness of his hair. She kissed him, gently at first and then hungrily, and he seemed to freeze against her for a moment but then responded in kind, pressing his body into hers. Dream-Jareth appeared to be wearing a T-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting trousers. She chuckled. Dream-brain, you do weird things sometimes. She buried her face in his hair and was about to start kissing him again when she heard his voice. “In the interest of abiding by the moral codes that mean so much to you, precious, I don’t think we should be doing this while you seem to be...not quite yourself.” She pulled back and turned on the bedside table lamp. Jareth was lying in her bed, very un-dreamlike, wearing one of her old t-shirts and a pair of her trousers. I’m warm and I don’t hurt…the painkillers haven’t worn off…am I hallucinating? Still dreaming? She jumped out of the bed and backed away, wondering if this was some cruel trick on the part of the labyrinth, to send her a golem that looked like him but most definitely wasn’t him. His eyes took her in and then widened. “Gods, Sarah, what happened to your hand?” She pointed at him with her good hand. “What the hell are you?” He swung his legs off the bed and stood up. She backed further away. “I’m the former Goblin King,” he said. “How the hell do I know that?” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Tell me something only he would know, about me. About us.” “Sarah, my mind isn’t exactly—“ “Something. Anything. Please, I just need to know that you’re you.” He threw up his hands. “You once screamed ‘You’re a god’ repeatedly when you climaxed and then denied later that you’d ever said such a thing, even though we both knew that you had.” Her mouth fell open. When she didn’t speak for a long time he looked defensive. “It was the first thing that came to mind.” At that point she started shouting. “Sarah, you’re going to hurt yourself—“ “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.” She threw another pillow at him, and he easily dodged it. “If I weren’t high as a fucking albatross right now, I swear—“ “Sarah, listen—“ “No, you listen, your royal asshat-ness.” She pointed an unsteady finger at him. “I watched you effectively off yourself. And we could have discussed it, we could have been a team, but no, you had to go into king mode and make that decision entirely on your own—“ “You know that options and time were limited.” “That is not the point.” Her head spinning slightly, Sarah sat down in the chair in front of her vanity mirror. “You don’t make decisions like that alone, all right? If you care about someone you consult. You work together.” She stared at him, still trying to process the fact that he was in her bedroom. She shook her head. “Do you know what that was like? Watching you die?” He looked down. “No. But I can imagine.” “Good.” She took a deep breath. “And then you show up here because, I don’t know, the labyrinth just loves to fuck with my head—“ “I can explain that, actually—“ “—and you just, what, change into my clothes and climb into bed with me like everything’s—” She noticed a strangely familiar smell and moved closer to him, grabbing a handful of his hair. “And did you take a fucking shower first?” He cleared his throat. “I’d been tumbling in the ether for quite a while. I did not care for you to see me at my worst.” “It’s one thing to not want me to see you at your worst. It’s another to take the time to blow dry.” “If you’d seen what I looked like when I was unceremoniously deposited on your living room floor you might understand.” “On my…they literally dumped you on the floor?” His expression showed that he’d rather not be reminded of the fact. “A final assault on what remains of my dignity, perhaps.” They sat in silence for a moment. “What happened to your hand?” he eventually asked again. Sarah snorted. “What do you think happened?” Jareth sighed, his head falling into his hands. “I’m sorry.” “Yeah, well, I guess it could have been worse. Anyway, we’re getting away from the main topic here, which is how…why…this is your place of exile? New York?” Jareth walked around to the other side of the bed and reached underneath it to produce a scroll that Sarah immediately recognized. “I imagine they didn’t let you read this before you signed it,” he said. Sarah sighed. “I couldn’t read it, it’s in…some language that isn’t Goblin. And I didn’t exactly sign it so much as bleed all over it.” She folded her arms. “Care to enlighten me?” He cleared his throat and opened the scroll. Sarah noted absently that the painkillers were starting to wear off, or maybe the shock of Jareth being in her apartment had weakened their potency. Her left hand throbbed with a steadiness that gradually grew more intense. Jareth began to read. “For repeated defiance and dereliction of duty, you, Jareth the Goblin King, are hereby rendered mortal—“ Sarah leaped up from her chair and immediately regretted it, sitting down when dizziness overtook her. “Mortal?” She shook her head. “You’re, they—they made you mortal?” Jareth raised an eyebrow very slowly at her. “Might I continue, please?” She rolled her eyes. “Fine. That seemed kind of important.” “…hereby rendered mortal and exiled for the duration of your mortal existence to the realm which, after careful consideration, we believe will inspire the most terror and result in the most torturous existence, this being the Aboveground realm, and more specifically an Aboveground existence that places you in close proximity to a particular mortal, one Sarah Williams, former labyrinth champion, former in-betweener (Sarah winced at that part, she feared it hadn’t just been a fluke), and one who we believe has the potential to cause you more pain and suffering than we could ever manage, simply by virtue of being a mortal that you love.” Jareth glanced up at her and read one more line. “Enjoy your torment.” Sarah’s head was swimming. She massaged her temples, letting Jareth’s words sink in. “Me?” she finally said. “The person who has the most potential to cause you pain and suffering is me?” Jareth shrugged. “According to ancient and not entirely sound labyrinth logic, at least.” She shook her head. “So the labyrinth could have sent  you to, I don’t know, anywhere—the bottom of the bog, the realm of acid-spitting leeches— Jareth rolled his eyes. “You could try not to give them new ideas, Sarah.” “Sorry.” She took the scroll from him, though the words were every bit as indecipherable as they’d been before. “But they could have sent you anywhere, and they decided that the worst place they could send you was…to me?” Jareth smirked. “You could say that the labyrinth has a very limited understanding of nuance.” “Yeah, I’m beginning to understand that.” She wrapped her arms around herself. The pain in her hand was becoming harder to ignore. “Still, bit of a low blow, the idea that I’m the person most fit to torture you. Like, I believe we’ve established that I’m not a saint, but I’m not a sadist.” He raised an eyebrow. “Only when you insist on flaunting your crystal ball manipulation abilities at me,” he said. She glared at him and pointed at her left hand. “Probably not gonna be an issue anymore.” He sighed. “Of course you’re not a sadist, Sarah.” He moved to the edge of the bed, closer to her. “But surely you can imagine how…to an outside observer of mortal customs…pair bonding beyond the function of procreation must seem like a uniquely cruel practice.” She sighed. “Well, I was never much of a romantic, but I never saw relationships as torture. Unless you count one of my college boyfriends.” “Your philosophers and poets seem to think there’s pain aplenty. But the pain…makes the bliss stronger, perhaps?” He chuckled. “Luckily for us the labyrinth doesn’t seem to grasp that.” Sarah laughed. “Or maybe it’s smarter than both of us.” “I prefer to take the optimistic view that I’ve been very, very lucky.” “Well, you’re gonna have to give me some pointers on the torture thing, unless we’re starting from the premise that relationships are always torture, which, yeah, kinda not on board with that.” “I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it,” he said drily. His voice shifted slightly. “You’ll eventually die, for one thing. That will be painful.” She looked at him. “So will you.” He considered this. “True. I suppose that changes things.” His eyes drifted. “Perhaps I can finally make that dramatic exit I’ve always wanted to make.” Sarah slumped in her chair. “This is…a lot.” “As ever the queen of understatement.” She noticed for the first time that there were bruises and scrapes on his arms. Slowly, she stood up and went to sit beside him on the bed. She touched one of his bruises, and he flinched. “Did they hurt you?” she said He placed his hand over hers and pressed it harder against his arm. “I believe there were other things floating around in the ether with me. Some of them might have been sharp.” Without thinking, she leaned down and kissed the discolored markings on his arms. She felt no heat, none of her former desire to peel his clothes off and taste every part of him, only the instinct to somehow confirm that he was here, real, and whole. Perhaps feeling the same urge, he gingerly lifted her left hand to his mouth and kissed her bandaged wrist. “Much as I am loathe to admit it, I believe I find myself in your debt,” he said. She laughed. “You owe me? For what? Practically destroying your life?” “You risked your own life to save mine,” he said. “They could have sent me anywhere, done anything to me, but because of you I’m here.” He smiled. “You wrote me an ending. Again.” She smiled back, weakly. “Huh. I did, didn’t I.” He smirked. “Don’t let it go to your head.” “Oh, I most definitely will let it go to my head.” She shook her maimed hand in front of his face, wincing as she did so. “Because yeah, you owe me.” He laughed and removed one of his gloves to touch her hand—then, perhaps remembering that those abilities were lost to him, he glanced at the pill bottle on the bedside table. “You’re in pain again—you should take some more of those…potion-capsules.” “Yeah, in a bit. I kinda wanna be sober for this next part.” He cocked his head at her. “What part is that?” She studied her knees, and then the vanity mirror, and then finally forced herself to look into his mismatched eyes, her heart pounding a deafening rhythm in her ears. “The part where I tell you that I love you, and it’s not an accident or a mistake or something I can blame on wine or potion-capsules.” Those eyes widened, and his mouth opened slightly. He shouldn’t be shocked, she told herself, we went over this, but still… She reached across him for the pill bottle. “And now, yes, I’d really like some—“ He touched a finger to her lips, and his piercing gaze made her face flush. When she stared at the floor he cupped her chin in his hands and tilted it upward. “I love you too, you impossible, baffling creature,” he whispered. He kissed her then, and it was almost enough to make her forget about the pain. “So, like, never? That’s it?” Sarah tried to keep her face solemn, which was difficult when Hoggle was still wearing the makeshift crown that the goblins had forced onto his head (which appeared to be made from discarded vegetable parts). Apparently they went silent and staring when he took it off and tried to claim that he wasn’t king, which Hoggle said he found much more annoying than their usual antics. “Never is a long time,” she said gently to the image in her vanity mirror, “but I suppose it makes sense. The labyrinth’s version of torture and exile wouldn’t be very effective if either of us could just  jump back into the Underground.” She sighed. The fact that she couldn’t go back to the other side of the mirror anymore hadn’t really sunk in yet. “At least we can still talk.” Hoggle grunted. “And what does His Highness say about all this? Where is he, anyway, finding a bog to throw people in Aboveground?” “He’s, er…” The words caught in her throat because she knew they sounded ridiculous. “He’s making me toast.” Hoggle’s mouth fell open. “He…what?” His eyes suddenly lit up. “Is that part o’ the torture? He’s gotta be yer servant or somethin’?” “No, I just have to take this medicine with food, and he—“ At that moment Jareth came into the bedroom bearing a small plate of only slightly-singed toast covered in what looked like a mix of butter and jam. She’d wanted to make her own food, or at least show him how to use a toaster, but he’d insisted on doing it himself, muttering something about not wanting to be dependent on her for mundane activities. He set the toast on her vanity table as casually as possible. “I wasn’t certain of your condiment preference, though I seem to recall that you enjoy jam,” he said, glancing toward the mirror. “Hello, Hoggle.” Hoggle’s mouth dropped open even further. “What’d you just call me?” Jareth shrugged. “Your name?” Hoggle backed away from the mirror, shaking his head. “This ain’t right. None of it.” Sarah chuckled. “Anyway, he’s alive, we’re alive. I’ll check in again soon.” Hoggle rolled his eyes. “Oh, that’s good of ye. Maybe ye could tell these goblins that I ain’t their damn king.” “I’m not sure.” She could feel Jareth smirking behind her. “The crown looks rather fetching.” Hoggle threw up his hands and walked away as the mirror faded back to its usual reflective surface. Sarah quickly devoured her toast. “They never made YOU wear a crown,” she said. “Not surprising. My kingliness was always evident.” Sarah wiped crumbs off her mouth and downed her very last pill. “I suppose the goblins will be all right as long as they’ve got someone to worship. Or, you know, cower in front of. Though I’m sure they’ll miss you,” she added quickly, taking his silence for sadness. “Their memories are quite short. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d completely forgotten about me in another week.” She sat next to him on the edge of her bed. “Are you missing it yet?” “Missing what?” “The world that you can’t go back to. Immortality. All those magical powers.” He lay back on the bed and she followed suit, stretching her hands up above her head. “It’s difficult to miss a place that you were tethered to,” he said. “Though it occasionally had its charms. As for my newly acquired mortality…that will obviously require adjustment, but you’ve known for a long time that I had no desire to live forever.” He raised one hand upward and linked his fingers with hers. “Not having magic is a nuisance, of course. I could have made toast much more easily.” Sarah smiled. “Your non-magical toast was fine.” His fingers idly stroked her wrist. “I can tell you one aspect of my old life that I don’t miss.” “What?” His fingers stroked further down her arm. “The hunger for human need. It was like a drum in my head, every moment, every day. Insatiable. And now it’s simply…gone.” Intrigued, she turned on her side. “I need you to kiss me,” she said. He obeyed, planting a rather chaste kiss on her cheek. She searched for that feeling that she had sometimes felt emanating from him in those moments, when he seemed to be feeding off of her needs. There was nothing. He smiled at the conflicting emotions on her face. “Still quite pleasurable to hear, I assure you, just perhaps not in the same way. I suppose you could say that I want now more than I need.” Sarah smiled. “That’s…good, I suppose?” He laughed and snaked an arm around her waist. “Are you so disappointed that I won’t wither away without you needing me, precious?” She pushed against him playfully. “Of course not. Just, you know, feeling out the new shape of things.” He smirked and let one hand slide up over her chest toward her neck. The painkiller was kicking in, and the pleasant warmth that surrounded her body mixed nicely with the different sort of warmth that his touches were inspiring… …and then he winced and pulled his hand away from her neck. She blinked. “What’s wrong?” He shook his head. “I…the last time we…” Memories washed over her suddenly, along with that familiar, confusing mix of shame and arousal. She ran her fingers over her neck, where not long ago he’d left bruises. She reached up to touch his cheek. “There’s a lot that’s different. We don’t have to do this now.” “I’d like to, only…” He looked away. “I don’t know what I am yet, which pieces of my original self will remain and fit together to make something new. I only know that I don’t wish to…overpower you right now, though I know this is something we both enjoyed.” Sarah stroked his cheek. “Yeah, I think I’ve had enough of feeling powerless for the time being. Though I might want to feel that way again someday, with you. When you’re up for it.” He nodded. “This is odd for me, but…” He cleared his throat, the words obviously not coming naturally. “May I take your clothes off?” She smiled and waved her left hand at him. “Yeah, I could use some help with that, actually.” He slowly pulled her loose-fitting shirt over her head, being careful of her hand, and then slid her trousers down around her ankles and off. It was, she realized, the first time this sort of activity hadn’t happened in something akin to a frenzy of desire, which in a strange way made it all the more intimate. “Can I take your clothes off?” she asked. He nodded. “You might have noticed that I, er, got a bit banged up on my way here.” She laughed and gestured to her hand again. “Think I’ve got you beat on that one, but yeah, point taken.” She slowly pulled the T-shirt over his head, revealing more fresh-looking bruises and mostly-healed scratches. When she removed his trousers she saw more, and the sight of him so battered made her ache. He grimaced. “These will heal eventually, correct?” She ran a hand very gently over some of the bruises on his chest. “Yeah. And hey, if some of them don’t, scars make a person more interesting.” Jareth laughed. “An easy thing to say for someone who has none.” Sarah rolled her eyes and held up her left hand. “Again, I’ve got you beat." She groaned. “I am really, really bummed that I won’t be able to one-up you at crystal contact juggling again. Like, that’s more annoying that not being able to type fast.” “ ‘One-up’ is a very strong phrase.” “Nope, just an accurate one.” He smiled. Mixed in with all the shocks, uncertainties, and newness of the past week, she could feel that familiar electricity returning. She let her gaze travel over his body and then reached out to trace certain details with her fingers—the slightly protruding angles of his collarbone, the lean muscles of his arms. His eyes followed her hand. “Do I feel different?” he asked. “No.” She moved closer and ran a hand through his hair. “I saw you vanish. I think I just need to make sure that you’re really here.” He wrapped his legs around her and pulled her close, and she sighed contentedly at the feeling of small gaps and spaces in their bodies filling and fitting perfectly together. “I’d love to prove that I’m all here,” he whispered, reaching across her to turn off the light. Their touches were slow and careful, as though they feared the other might break, but gradually they relaxed. He traced every contour of her body with his mouth and hands, his tongue softly flickering over her neck and her breasts until she was feverish with need. When he moved her arms above her head and pinned her to the bed, careful not to hurt her left hand, she enjoyed the weight of him above her, and when he slipped his fingers between her legs she gasped at how good it felt. His eyes stayed locked on hers. “Tell me things that you like, precious,” he whispered. “What?” she gasped. “Tell me things that you like. That I do to you, that please you.” She smiled, the pleasant warmth of the painkillers and the enjoyable sensations below her waist making the words come a bit more awkwardly than usual. “I like the feel of you inside me,” she said, and felt his grip on her right wrist tighten. “I like to listen to your breath get faster when you’re about to climax.” She ran a finger over his lips. “I like to taste myself on your mouth after you’ve very generously licked me.” He moaned and pulled one of her legs around his waist. “I like the way that you bite my shoulders,” he whispered. “I like to…to feel powerful, with you under me, begging.” He kissed her roughly. “But only because I know it gives you pleasure.” She kissed him back, letting her lips and teeth scrape along his neck. “Please,” she whispered. He gripped a handful of her hair. “Please what?” She looked into his eyes and was surprised to see a hint of tears mixed in with his heavy-lidded look of raw desire. “Please fill me up,” she whispered, her throat catching. “Fill me up and don’t ever vanish again.” He pushed himself inside her with agonizing slowness, and she cried out, pulling him in deeper, and then he moved steadily faster, and when her release came he followed soon after and fell panting on top of her, his hair splayed across her face. His laughter tickled her chest. “That was…rather quicker than I would have liked.” Sarah laughed. “More lessons in mortality.” “I’ll have to imagine scantily dressed goblins to give myself more staying power.” “Dear God please no, anything but that.” She ran her good hand through his hair as she felt his heartbeat—more regular now—thrumming against her chest. “So,” she whispered, “how’m I doing at this torture thing?” He chuckled and kissed her neck. “Happy to report that you’re dreadful at it.” She could see his eyes twinkling in the darkness, open adoration on his face, that look that had always made her giddy and also frightened her with its intensity. And for the first time, she realized, she didn’t want to look away.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Are ye gonna take these, or am I gonna hafta send some goblins through the mirror again?” Sarah’s eyes widened. “Fine, fine, I’ll take them, just—“ Hoggle pushed a massive armful of zucchini through the mirror, where they fell unceremoniously onto Sarah’s desk, several vegetables falling to the floor, before she could finish her sentence. She sighed, knowing that her limited repertoire of zucchini recipes had long since been exhausted, and that Miguel and Lori also probably wouldn’t take any more of them off her hands. Maybe I should start a co-op, she thought. I could just tell everyone the vegetables come from upstate. Not, you know, from another dimension. She cleared away some of the zucchini from her desk so that she could see Hoggle’s face. “Maybe encourage the goblins to take up a different hobby for a while? Like, I dunno, egg farming? You’ve got plenty of chickens.” Hoggle shook his head, the latest version of his vegetable crown (which now had more permanent bits of leather woven in) wobbling slightly. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ to upset this peace. Gardenin’ keeps the goblins calmer than anything else I’ve tried. Sometimes they even leave me alone long enough to let me sneak back to my own house instead o’ makin’ me stay in that damn bedroom.” He shuddered. “That place ain’t mine, never will be.” Sarah forced her face to remain neutral, remembering more than a few things that had gone on in Jareth’s bedroom that Hoggle was definitely better off not knowing about. “How go things in the rest of the kingdom, your Highness?” Hoggle rolled his eyes. “Told ye not t’ call me that. Mostly the usual, ‘cept for these.” He held up two oblong-shaped black objects that Sarah didn’t recognize. “They been poppin’ up in the Firey Forest, one after the other.” Sarah squinted and realized that Hoggle was holding… “Remote controls? Television remote controls?” “Some Aboveground magic, huh? Well, I guess this is where they all end up now. They’re quieter’n babies, at least.” They must have decided against individual socks, Sarah realized. “Funny. Our remote’s been missing for a while now.” Hoggle put his hands on his hips. “What, ye want me t’ go traipsin’ around the forest and look for it? Like I don’t have enough other royal stuff t’ do?” “No, no, we’ll be fine. Jareth says television is infantile, he’ll be happy if we’re watching it less.” A goblin rushed into the mirror frame, its body half covered in soil. “Fairies!” it shouted, sounding genuinely panicked. “Fairies in the turnip patch!” Hoggle groaned. “Not like I haven’t taught ‘em a million times how t’ spray the fairies…” Sarah started gathering the zucchini in her arms. “I’ll let you get back to work.” Hoggle grunted. “Enjoy your zucchini, there’ll be more next week.” Sarah sighed, awkwardly carrying the stack of vegetables into the living room, where a large bowl on her kitchen window countertop was already overflowing with turnips, radishes, and sweet potatoes. She glanced around for more storage space and noticed, yet again, that her Tony award for directing was back in the center of the bookshelf, even though she knew she’d moved it into the closet the day before. As she set the vegetables down on the coffee table, she also realized that she could still hear the sound of the hairdryer. She shook her head, glancing at the clock as she opened the bathroom door. Jareth ignored her, his eyes fixated on the mirror, one hand holding a comb and the other the hairdryer. His movements and his gaze had the intensity of someone performing microsurgery. “It’s never gonna look the same,” she shouted over the din. “I beg to differ,” he shouted back. He turned off the hairdryer and grabbed one of a half-dozen bottles of creams and gels from the overcrowded sink. “Mortal medicine may be barbaric, but mortal hair science is quite remarkable.” He brushed, sprayed, slicked, and combed his now slightly-shorter hair with practiced efficiency, glancing at himself in the mirror from several angles and finally sighing. “But yes, it will never look quite the same as it did on the other side of the mirror,” he said. “Because it’s not magic anymore, as I’ve said practically every day for the last nine months, you prima donna,” she teased, kissing his cheek and being very careful not to touch his hair. Glancing at her reflection in the mirror, she noted that her own hair was past her shoulders again, which she told herself was just a matter of laziness about going to the salon and not connected to the fact that he preferred it that way. She hadn’t changed clothes yet—she was wearing a black camisole and a pair of jeans, though given Jareth’s tendency to never dress down, she had a feeling she’d be rooting through her closet for something sparkly in a moment. Her prosthesis made a faint whirring sound as she ran her left hand through her hair. Jareth wore perfectly tailored suit trousers and a crisp white shirt with a few buttons undone. His jacket hung neatly on the towel rack behind them. She knew that the suit was secondhand—she’d helped him find it—but everything he wore somehow managed to look expensive. “Speaking of magic,” she said, placing her right hand on her hip, “I don’t suppose it was rogue goblins who moved my Tony award from the closet back into the living room for, like, the fifth time?” Jareth buttoned and then unbuttoned his shirt, turning back and forth and examining his reflection in the mirror. “They are devious little wretches,” he said absently. She sighed. “Can you please just let me be embarrassed and awkward about my successes?” He turned and took her left hand in his, running his fingers over both her flesh-and-blood fingers and the metal ones that she’d been using to type. “You’ve often said that I could do with a bit more humility,” he said drily, kissing her hand. “Perhaps you could do with a bit more arrogance.” Sarah groaned and gave him a not-so-gentle poke in the cheek with a metal finger. “Careful. I could go Terminator on you with this thing.” “I have no idea what that means,” he said huskily, gripping a handful of her hair, “but I must say I like the sound of it.” She felt warmth spread through her body and kissed him quickly to break the spell. “Later. It’s already seven a.m., and I need to change.” Jareth groaned and grabbed his jacket from the towel rack. “Why your theatrical community insists on announcing its award nominations at such an ungodly hour is beyond me.” His voice followed her as she shimmied out of her jeans and searched through her closet for something colorful. “And why, pray tell, is there a mountain of zucchini on the table?” Sarah quickly slipped into a bright blue dress that fell just above her knees. “You know why.” “Do I need to send more remote threats of bogging?” She slipped past him and back into the bathroom, where she ran a brush through her hair and applied a small amount of lipstick. “Happy goblins are less destructive goblins, as far as I’m concerned,” she said, removing her metal-and-leather prosthesis and opening the bathroom drawer where she stored a more cosmetic one. “I’ll take piles of zucchini over anarchy any day.” When she opened the drawer she saw that her cosmetic hand wasn’t in its usual place—instead, there was a rectangular box, wrapped with a red ribbon. Jareth glanced over her shoulder. “I’d meant this to be a birthday present, but the work took longer than planned,” he said. She looked quizzically at the box. “I told you not to get me anything.“ “I’m still working on obedience, precious, you know it’s not in my nature,” he smirked. She undid the ribbon and opened the box, expecting to see jewelry or perhaps something lacy. Instead, the open box revealed her usual cosmetic prosthesis, but the fingers had been delicately painted with… “Glitter,” she whispered, holding the box up to the light. “It’s glittery.” “Temporary,” he said, “but I thought it appropriate for festive occasions.” She fastened it onto her left hand, waving her fingers around in the air, smiling at the starry effect. He cleared his throat. “I hope to one day be able to shower you with jewels and gold, but for now…” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her lips lingering on his. “Fuck jewels and gold,” she whispered, just as the front door buzzer rang. “This is much better.” She felt his body relax against hers and kissed him for just a second more before rushing into the living room to buzz in her guests. Lori came through the door first, Jaye cradled in one arm and a sheaf of papers clutched in the other. “You,” she said, her eyes laser-focused on Jareth. His eyes widened slightly, and as usual Sarah tried not to laugh. “Yes?” he said, his voice decidedly less confident than usual. She shook the papers at him. “You wanna explain to me why you put the exploding cauldron back in act two scene four?” Jaye reached automatically for Jareth, and Lori handed him over. Jareth absently stroked Jaye’s head as the child gripped his shirt. “It seemed to me…that is, upon further reflection—“ “Workshopping a play has a purpose. When you go back and rewrite things you negate all of that.” Miguel and Nick came through the door with Sammy and Mari in tow. “Morning to you too, Lori, can we save the script arguments for after the nominations?” Lori’s smile was dangerously sweet. “No argument here,” she said, putting the papers in her bag. “Right?” Jareth’s smile was forced. “None at all.” Sammy and Mari ran to him and grabbed his knees. “Stories!!!” they begged. “Stories, pleeeease.” Jareth glanced at Miguel and Nick. “Have you done no injury to your parents in the past week?” Nick shrugged. “No more than the usual hijinks, they can have a story.” Jareth sat on the sofa and the two children sat on either side of him. He spoke in a voice so quiet that only the children could hear him clearly, though Sarah caught a few details about goblin mischief and changeling children. Miguel looked slightly haggard. “Have you got your computer hooked up to the feed? I brought mine just in case, you never know—“ “All ready to go,” she said, exchanging a smile with Nick as she hugged Miguel and kissed him on the cheek. “Just remember, nom or no nom, you’re still brilliant and we all still love you.” “Easy for you to say, you and Lori are old hat at this,” he said, glancing toward her prominently displayed Tony award. Sarah blushed. “One award hardly equals old hat.” “And I’ve only gotten Obies,” Lori said, squeezing Miguel’s shoulder, “so we’re in the same boat.” She glanced at Jareth and the children on the sofa. “It’s eerie how good he is at that.” Sarah chuckled. “You could say he’s had a lot of practice.” “Got another potential client for him, by the way.” Miguel handed her a fancy-looking business card. “Word’s getting around, apparently.”   Sarah laughed. “I always imagined that on this side of the mirror he’d be a model, or a rockstar, or maybe an actor,” she said. “Definitely didn’t consider nanny.” “I’m fine with nannying paying the bills,” Lori interjected. “So long as we get his damn play to opening night without me killing him first.” Sarah laughed. “You’ll have to give me some pointers on humbling him,” she muttered. Lori raised an eyebrow. “In case you haven’t noticed, he lives in the palm of your hand,” she said. “Not that he’d ever admit it.”   “Two minutes! Two minutes!” Nick was shouting, putting drinks and snacks on the coffee table as everyone positioned themselves around the computer. Sarah’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket to see Karen’s name. “Hi, listen, the nominations are about to start, I’ll call you—“ “I know, dear, please tell Miguel and Lori good luck, Robert and I really enjoyed Gods and Mothers, but I actually wanted to talk to Jareth.” Sarah stifled a laugh and shared a knowing glance with Miguel as she passed the phone to Jareth. “It’s for you.” Miguel snickered. “I think she likes him more than she likes you,” he whispered. Sarah rolled her eyes. “Or she has a crush on him, like every other woman he comes into contact with.” “Ahem.” Lori’s eyebrows were decidedly elevated. “Most definitely not my type. Which is a good thing. Makes it a lot easier to eviscerate his work.” “One minute!” “…Sunday would be lovely, Karen, I’ll discuss it with Sarah, I know it’s been a while. Please do tell young Toby that I look forward to besting him at one of his electronic games. Until then.” He passed the phone back to Sarah. “We’re having dinner with your family on Sunday.” She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you told Karen you were going to discuss it with me.” Jareth shrugged, not really bothering to feign innocence. “Aren’t we doing that now?” “It’s starting!” Mari and Sammy had begun to pout at having their story interrupted. “But we want to know how it ends!” Mari groaned. “Don’t we all, child.” Jareth smiled slowly at Sarah, and, unable to help herself, she smiled back, her slightly sparkly left hand running through her hair. “Don’t we all.” Jareth often dreams of falling. It is not the same as the falling that occurred between his immortal life and his mortal one, when pain and uncertainty seemed to stretch on forever. This is a sensation that is both exhilarating and terrifying, switching so quickly from one to the other that he can never be sure how he truly feels. Sarah might tell him that sometimes there is no separating emotions. He has lifetimes of experiences that she cannot comprehend, and it is still not in his nature to admit that, in some areas, at least, she might be more knowledgeable than him. But when it comes to mortal emotions, he will cede authority, if grudgingly. On this night the vividness of the dream awakens him and he carefully slips out of bed, ghost-like, to avoid disturbing Sarah. It is one of a small number of vaguely inhuman skills that he still seems to possess. He sleeps through the night now, mostly, though some traces of his old life linger in his body, among them a limited need for sleep. And a mind that flits from idea to idea, making the little sleep that he does require sometimes elusive. Writing has helped with that. Before the ideas simply buzzed endlessly, like fairies in his brain. Now, finally, they have a permanent resting place, and perhaps even one day a means of being absorbed into other minds. It is taking longer than he thought it might, but he enjoys the sense of urgency that mortality brings. Before, he might simply never have felt the impetus to create anything, because time stretched out in front of him like an endless road. But now there is an end, and that changes everything, as he once told Sarah. He wanders into the washroom and looks at his face in the mirror, as usual relieved that it appears much the same as it always has, not significantly older or more care-worn. He still enjoys the sight of himself in mirrors, though making himself beautiful is no longer as effortless as it once was. Women on this side of the mirror (and more than a few men) notice him, and he enjoys being noticed. Without magic, he takes pleasure in the power that comes from holding their eyes a bit longer than normal, raising a hand to his mouth for a kiss when he meets someone at a party that Sarah takes him to. She rolls her eyes at what she calls his “twenty-four hour seduction face,” but he has never taken any flirtation far enough to warrant genuine jealousy from her. This change, too, is odd. He comes from a world where exclusive pair-bonding is looked at askance. It is not that he feels no desire or interest—some of the beings he encounters here are pleasing enough—only that she pulls at him like a magnet and they do not. She would laugh at him if she knew how much he dreads the impending arrival of his first grey hairs, or the lines that will surely sharpen around his mouth and the corners of his eyes. He knows that he has always been beautiful, but it was never something that required work. Luckily the mortal world is eternally obsessed with maintaining an aesthetically pleasing physique, and thus the basics of that work have not been difficult for him to learn. He wonders if Sarah has noticed that she isn’t aging the same way that her friends are. She is not immortal—much time spent in the Underground would not grant her that—but it has changed her, in ways that she perhaps doesn’t fully understand yet. He stares out the small bathroom window at the strange geometric shapes that pass for towers and turrets in this world, the endless artificial light, the faint sounds from the streets below that never completely fade. He tells Sarah that there is nothing that he misses about the Underground, but in truth he misses silence, at least sometimes. He wanders into the living room, where she has thankfully not removed her award. He remembers the sight of her embracing Miguel earlier in the day, both of them crying when he’d received his nomination, and then later clasping hands with Lori, who’d of course tried not to show any emotion but had clearly been moved at her own recognition. They’d all hugged him as well, so overcome were they, and he’d let them, though that sort of emotional touch from adults was still alien to him, and not always wanted. Children were easier—they had always clung to him, it was familiar. This, perhaps, is the greatest change, though it began long before his mortal life—the idea of love without a desire for possession or control. He does not fully understand the love that Sarah feels for her friends, or they for her, but he is beginning to. He does not, could not love them in the same way, but it is a strange comfort in knowing that they love something that he also loves, and that loves him back. And though Sarah is forever linked with the word mine in his mind, he begins to see how she belongs to others, and to herself. He imagines her death often. He can’t help himself. He hopes that his comes first, but then he imagines her pain, and he hopes that hers comes first. And then remembers that in many ways she is stronger than him, and knows that she would survive. This feeling, he realizes, this is also falling endlessly, with no knowledge of what lies below, certain only in the fact that at some point, something will break the fall. It terrifies him, but of course it also excites him. He wonders how she would have moved on if the forces behind the labyrinth had exiled him somewhere far beyond her reach. A part of him knows that she would have moved on, in time. A part of him hopes that she wouldn’t have. He wanders back into the bedroom and lets his eyes linger on her sleeping form, her body curled inward, sheets crumpled around her, one bare leg visible, hand splayed across the bed, her hair falling across her face. His eyes trace every piece of visible flesh, recalling vividly the taste, smell, and feel of it. She’s begun playing at being powerless for him again recently, though it’s a fraught game for both of them, because they both know he no longer has the kind of power he once had. He takes comfort in the fact that being a “child whisperer,” as they call him, is a role for which mortals will offer compensation, and that this compensation allows him to purchase things for her, in the way that he might have done magic for her in the past. He sits on the edge of the bed and traces the curve of her leg under the bedsheet, letting his hand rest on her stomach, watching her body rise and fall with the rhythm of her breathing. Remembering the look of wide-eyed wonder she sometimes gives him, on her knees, that makes his own knees go weak. The sounds she makes when he pleasures her, not so different from all the women, mortal and non, that he’d pleasured in the past, but entirely different, of course, because the experience is wrapped up in these still-not-entirely-comprehensible feelings of unselfish love. Her eyelids flutter and she smiles sleepily. “Watching me sleep. Not creepy at all.” He traces a finger over her hair and down her arm. “I could wait a few hours and watch you write, if you prefer.” “Still creepy, just a different sort,” she says, pulling him into bed with her and wrapping her arm around his chest. He can feel the odd contours of her left hand with its missing fingers, a sensation that always makes him flinch with both pain and relief, because she could have lost a great deal more. “I just realized something,” she says. “Yes?” She idly strokes his chest. “We don’t know when your birthday is.” He chuckles at the fact that so often he still has no idea what she is going to say. “I don’t believe I have one, given that I was not, as your renowned playwright has said, ‘of woman born.’” “We should choose one for you,” she says, as though this is the most natural thing in the world. “I was under the impression that name-days were bestowed, not chosen. Do they not lose meaning otherwise?” He feels her shrug behind him. “Special circumstances, special rules. Plus, don’t you want presents?” He recalls his admittedly limited encounters with mortal birthdays—sweet desserts, song, the simultaneous sentiment of surviving another year and also marking the bittersweet fact that one is a year closer to death. He grimaces at the thought of himself in a party hat. “I am not partial to being serenaded in public,” he says, turning over to look at her, “but I suppose receiving gifts would not be unpleasant.” She smiles at him in a way that still makes him ricochet between emotions—an intense desire to pull her closer and ravish her, a warm feeling of protectiveness, and an ache at the sense that what they have, like all things mortal, is fleeting. “How about the day you arrived back here?” she says. “I know you weren’t born then, but, you know, it was kind of the beginning of your mortal existence.” He laughs. “You’ll write me an ending and a beginning, will you?” She raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re the one who told me I could do with a bit more arrogance.” He kisses her, loving the way that words dance back and forth between them in moments like this. “I have no doubt you’re up to the task,” he whispers. She kisses him back. He feels that sensation of falling again and surrenders himself to it, endlessly and willingly, and if one day pain will surely accompany that level of surrender, he realizes that he doesn’t care. There is her, and there is the small world that they have both made, and it is enough.