Jareth eventually pulled back from the hug, and seemed intent on going for a kiss, when Sarah put a hand up to stop him. She ended up getting Goblin King lips and a bit of tongue on her palms, and found she had a very disappointed magical being on her hands. He was positively pouting. He had, for all the timey-wimey agelessness about him, the look of a spoiled child denied a chocolate.

"Wait just a minute," she cut in before a muffled question could escape him "I've just explained my feelings for you. Now you explain your feelings for me."

"I'm trying to but you just stopped me," he replied, still pouting, before making another attempt to go in for a kiss, which Sarah skilfully avoided, having had years of practice dodging unwanted kisses.

"In words," she insisted firmly.

This seemed to confuse him. "I… I would be your slave," he said finally, with an air of bewilderment.

Sarah was beginning to feel like a school teacher dealing with a particularly thick student. "No, Jareth, that is what you would do for me. What I am asking you is what you feel for me."

Jareth considered this. He deduced, quite cleverly in his opinion, that 'arousal' was not the answer Sarah was looking for. He strongly suspected she wanted to know about emotions, which was something that he as a Sidhe did not have. He decided to tell her this, because she was human and therefore inherently ignorant. "I would be your slave. We of the Leanan Sidhe do not have the weaker emotions you humans often fall prey to, such as love. I would share my power with you and make you my Queen."

Sarah was dubious of this. Here sat a man who had been obsessed with her for ten years, according to reports from her friends in the Underground,who had informed her of his decade-long bender in rather irritated terms. Here sat a magical being of immense power, on her couch, eating pizza and seemingly on the verge of tears in fear of yet another rejection by her. She didn't know exactly what love was, but in her opinion, clearly Jareth didn't either. "Right," she stated, reaching yet again for her own magic box of tricks. "Let me get this straight. Give me a moment." In quick order (Jareth was impressed by her dexterity) another spliff was rolled, and as she exhaled the first puff of smoke, she began to speak again.

"So, the Leanan Sidhe, of which you are one, do not experience the emotion of love. Is that correct?" He nodded in the affirmative, looking more and more concerned with the direction of the conversation by the second. "So, why have you been spying on me for ten years? Why are you offering to make me your Queen? Surely you could find a more suitable match among your own people? Someone more fitting of your station?"

He coughed and cleared his throat, the second-hand smoke bothering him more than he cared to admit. "Because… you are beautiful. You say things that intrigue me, even when they are foolishly human. I am constantly beset by thoughts of you, and a desire to bring you happiness hounds my every waking moment. You haunt my every dream, torture me even in my sleep with your absence. I look at you and my chest feels tight, as though you have bewitched me, and yet you have no magic of your own. Yet your very existence is just that, magic. You hold some strange power over me, despite being human. You positively confound me. I want to kiss you, to hold you, to listen to you, to tie you up and spank you." Sarah's eyebrows went up at the last bit. "Sensually," he clarified.

Sarah decided another toke was in order after the last statement, and assessed this new information. The words he seemed to use the most were 'power', 'slave', and now this mention of spanking—which he seemed to feel the need to clarify was sexual. Plus, he was aristocracy. She thought she had the full picture of it now. "So, essentially," she began finally, "what you're telling me is that the Leanan Sidhe are so obsessed with power and repressed that they can only understand their emotions through the context of an S&M relationship?"

Jareth looked affronted. Jareth was affronted. This was why the Leanan Sidhe had cut off contact with humans, this was why they had never gotten along well in the first place. Despite being completely mundane in every way, humans had the horrible knack of looking at very serious and important sidhe business and immediately reducing it down to their own level of mundanity. The worst part was that they tended to be right, as Sarah currently was. "I… yes?" He was unsure if this was the correct answer.

She laughed at him, and he seemed to be ready to get up and leave, only that horrible plant he smoked had affixed him firmly to her couch.

Seeing that she had offended him, she decided to take pity on him and explain a few things. "Okay, Jareth, that tight feeling in your chest, that's probably love. You probably love me. Now, we can work with that, but you're going to have to stop pretending your emotions don't exist, because I don't want a slave, I want an equal. Except maybe in the bedroom. But that whole S&M dynamic stays in the bedroom. It's unhealthy to live your whole life that way. I think…" she paused "… I think we should date for a while. Try to get to know each other. What do you think?"

Jareth felt that he had been involved with war treaties that were less tense than this. So, she didn't want a slave, she wanted him to… talk about his feelings? Date? Was she trying to domesticate him? And yet… as her slave, if these were her demands, they must be met. "Very well, then. I maybe love you, only something more important than that. Because I am the Goblin King… and I would be delighted to court you."

—-

Two updates in one day! Admittedly, these could very well be one chapter, but I wasn't sure if I was going to continue with this anytime soon when I wrote the first bit, so I just sent it off into the wild to look after its self. But then I felt like writing this next bit, so I did. Yes, I know that it says in the film that 'the Goblin King had fallen in love with the girl, and given her certain powers,' but who says he wrote that? I really know nothing about the sidhe either, I'm just copping them because I wanna poke fun at Jareth's inability to sanely woo a human. I could research them but, uh, I'm just doing this for laughs.