Five Years

Sarah hummed a little tune as she picked up the party debris from the floor of her bedroom. She wasn't quite sure where she'd heard the song, but it was catchy.

"Something, something Underground..."

She moved a large pillow from the floor beside her bed, bracing herself for what might lie beneath it: a fuzzy blue worm, a pile of rocks, or one of the Fire Gang's appendages. There was only a crushed conical party hat beneath the pillow and she gently straightened it before placing it on the head of one of her stuffed animals. Throwing the large pillow back on her bed, she flopped down on top of it and stared up at the ceiling.

To say it had been an interesting day would be the understatement of the year, but at that moment Sarah was in no mood or shape to dig out her thesaurus for a more appropriate descriptive. She smiled to herself. She, Sarah Williams, had lived a fantasy! She'd accepted a challenge, faced insurmountable odds and had triumphed!

"Not bad for an ordinary girl," she thought to herself. The echoed words dampened her happy thoughts a bit. An ordinary girl. He had called her that. The thought of him made her feel uncomfortably squishy in her middle. She wondered what had happened to him. When all the creatures from her adventure had shown up for her bedroom celebration, she had expected him to come as well. After all, she had said she needed all of them.

Sarah sighed and looked over at the Escher print on her wall, remembering her final confrontation with the Goblin King in the impossible room. He was no doubt thoroughly angry at her for beating him. He had been so panicked at the end when she had started reciting the words.

"To think he started spouting all that "fear me, love me mumbo jumbo," she laughed. "He must have been really desperate."

The unanswered question of why he had been so desperate still hung tauntingly low over her head and she tried to swat it away as if it were a pesky fly.

"He just obviously wanted to keep my brother," she told herself, though she couldn't imagine what a magical king would want with a babbling human baby.

Sarah turned her attention back to her ceiling, chewing her bottom lip as she thought about his words to her and his reaction to her final declaration to him.

You have no power over me.

He had vanished like smoke, tossing the crystal high in the air before folding in on himself. The crystal had burst in her hand and she'd found herself at home with Toby snuggly asleep in his crib and no sign of the Goblin King.

A terrible thought occurred to Sarah that made her chest clench in dread. What if she had killed him? What if her words had been to the Goblin King what Dorothy's bucket of water had been to the Wicked Witch of the West?

She sat up straight in her bed. She had only meant to defeat him, not to destroy him! Why was the Universe suddenly taking her words so seriously?

"It's not fa-" she began, but quickly clamped her hands over her mouth. She was being melodramatic again and that had a way of getting her into trouble.

There was a very simple solution for finding out the truth and she was going to be mature and calm about it. Swinging her legs over the side of her bed, she walked to her vanity and sat down, staring hard into her mirror.

"Goblin King," she spoke to the mirror, trying very hard to keep her voice from shaking.

There was no reply. She turned to look behind her, hoping to see that he'd materialize the way Hoggle and the others had done, but her bedroom was empty.

"Goblin King," she called again with no answer. She tapped her fingers on the vanity trying to think. "Maybe I'm not calling him right." Straightening her back, Sarah sat upright in her chair and called out to the mirror. "I would like to speak to His Majesty the King of the Goblins."

Nothing.

"Maybe is he is dead," she thought sadly. "Or he could just be really pissed and he's screening his calls."

Sarah sat back and slumped down in her chair, her eye catching the gold leaf lettering glinting from the red book on the vanity. She wanted to know that she hadn't really hurt him, physically or otherwise. It had just been a game after all, hadn't it? There hadn't been any real danger, had there?

She let out a sigh and closed her eyes. "I just want to know you're okay and you're not mad," she whispered.

It was a childish thing, she knew, to wish that the Goblin King wasn't angry at her. After all, she'd been on the receiving end of most of the mischief that happened during her stay in the Underground. Still, after what had nearly happened to Toby, she didn't want her words to be responsible for hurting anyone else, even the smirking, devious, tight-panted king of the goblins.

Sarah got up from her seat at the vanity and returned to her bed. Plopping down listlessly, she grabbed a pillow and hugged it to her chest.

"Just tell me you're not dead," she spoke quietly to the ceiling. Hoggle had told her the Goblin King's name. What was it? She closed her eyes tight in thought and it came to her in a shimmer of glitter.

"Jareth," she said aloud.

"You think very highly of yourself if you think you can kill a Fae with your stolen words, little girl," a smooth voice purred from the foot of her bed.

Sarah cracked one eye open and glanced in the direction of the voice where the Goblin King stood, hair, glitter, tight pants and all, calmly smiling at her.

A/N:

Short answer: not dead. I, like the Goblin King, am very much alive, just incredibly busy. I've been lurking lately and have seen some real stellar stuff come through the FF archive (I'm looking at you, Ellen Weaver, TheRealEatsShootsAndLeaves, and ShadowLurker13!) I've been inspired to write more Labyfic 'cause it's like an addiction. I gotta fever, and the only prescription is more Labyfic! So, here ya go. This one is an exercise of sorts, so I'm not really sure how or where or how long it'll go. Give me love in the form of feedback so I don't get all twitchy please, will ya, Man?

Fanny