Just a quick little one-shot. This is probably the last you'll see of me for a while, as I move house in two weeks and that means indefinite interwebz termination. Anyway, I can't remember where I got the idea for this, but I wrote it in maths. Very productive class, that. Oh, well. I spend biology drawing dinosaurs with monocles and top hats. And I do tend to pass. The world makes sense again... Anyway... I haven't read 'The Female Eunuch', nut I plan to. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a work by Germaine Greer, a radical feminist. She's great, I adore her, even though she is generally widely hated.

I have started the sequel to 'Sad Love', and it's fairly jolly to make up for all the angst. You'll get it when you get it, I'm afraid. Anyway, enjoy this little tidbit, and don't miss me too much! Actually, do. In the form of many, many reviews. Cherrio!

Disclaimer: I own nothing, as you well know by the lack of gold hotpants in Jareth's wardrobe.

At sixteen, Sarah dismissed her time in the Labyrinth as a child's fancy. Hoggle, Ludo and Sir Didymus stopped coming. She threw away her toys and stopped telling stories to Toby. She thought she knew about growing up.

When she was seventeen, Sarah began wearing black and began listening to strange, dark music. She painted her room a deep purple and insisted on using red candles as her only source of light. She thought of Jareth as she'd first seen him; dark and menacing, dressed in black, at her window in a storm. She wrote stories and poems about him in the candlelight, dark tales of terror and sin. She thought she knew about pain.

At eighteen, Sarah thought most of all about the ballroom. She remembered his silky voice, the way he held her, the way his pants clung to his thighs. She remembered his eyes, the way he looked at her. Sarah remembered the way she had felt, the way he'd made her feel. She thought she knew about love.

When she moved out of home and started university, Sarah thought about how big and how rich the Goblin Kingdom was. She thought about the grand majesty of the castle at the centre of the Goblin City, the rich fabric of Jareth's clothes, the decadent opulence of the ballroom. Sarah compared it to her meagre apartment, her bare cupboards and her dime-a-day job. She thought she knew about wealth.

After a year of university, Sarah started thinking about everything she had learnt in gender studies. She read The Female Eunuch and began to see Jareth as a pig. She shuddered when she thought of the way she had followed him, how he and his big male ego had tried to dominate her. Sarah became as independent as she possibly could as a uni student on a pitiful wage. She thought she knew about power.

Not long afterwards, Sarah began writing again. She found herself slipping over and over into a world of goblins and hedges, dark oubliettes and dashing kings. She ground her teeth and tore at her hair trying to escape her childhood. Sarah cursed the Goblin King for stealing her youth and her originality. She thought she knew about hatred.

A year after finishing university, Sarah published her first book, then another, and another. She gained enough profits to start her own small publishing company, helping other young writers to gain recognition. She lived in a penthouse apartment with a cat called Archie. Sarah took the train to work, reading drafts or making notes on the half-hour ride. She didn't have a boyfriend, rarely talked to her parents or brother, and only saw her friends between book launches and tours. She remembered wistfully her old friends from the Labyrinth, now immortalised in her own novels. She thought she knew what it meant to be alone.

When she was thirty, Sarah saw Jareth again. She wasn't sure why he appeared, she wasn't sure how. All she was sure about was that when she gazed into his eyes, she knew nothing.