This is the result of spending two weeks on top of a hill in the raging wind, sitting in the attic on my laptop and listening to lots of David Bowie. Enter at your own risk.

Prologue

He had lost her again.

After all the centuries he had spent, waiting endlessly for her return, agonising year after agonising year, she was gone. Just like that, he had lost her again.

For the first time in almost a millennia, Jareth had felt hope. When he had stood before her that night, his heart had been beating so fast he could barely maintain his arrogant facade. It had been almost impossible to hold the crystal straight as he offered it to her, so very difficult to give her her instructions without collapsing at her feet.

He had tried so hard to make her remember, to place her in situations that would bring back all that they had once shared. The hedge-maze, shaped like the one they had once run through together. The ballroom and the masquerade, the dress she had worn when she'd first broken his heart. He had remodelled the Goblin Kingdom until it was full of her, waiting with bated breath for her return. He had ruled over the Underground for so long, only because he knew she would one day return.

She had returned, but she had not remembered. She was the same as he remembered, as beautiful now as she had been all those centuries ago, but she did not remember him. Nothing he did could make her recall the time they had spent together, lifetimes away now. She had lost the memories, and she was lost to him.

Centuries of work, of waiting, of surviving on the tiniest fraction of hope, all for nought. He was cursed, never allowed happiness. He could wait until the stars fell from the sky, and she would not be his. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, they had fought to be together, and were ripped so brutally apart. He had lived only for her return, and now she was gone.

Jareth yelled, one long, animalistic cry of bitter, anguished pain. He sent blasts of crackling power at the walls of the oubliette he had come to to hide, chunks of rock exploding around him. Then he sunk to his knees, dry sobs wracking his frame. The facade he had held onto for so long shattered, the emotions he kept hidden pouring forth. The oubliette rung with the sounds of his anguish. What had he done wrong? Why hadn't she remembered? What had he missed?

Jareth straightened, drawing a few ragged breaths. He conjured a crystal, watching as its contents flickered and swirled impossibly fast, until he found himself near the very beginning of his own history, comparatively young. This was the time when it had all begun, when his world had begun to change. When Sarah had first come into his life.

Sitting himself up against a wall, Jareth watched as, inside the crystal, their painful history came to life.