Sleeping Sickness. Out of the Labyrinth. Lost.

Sarah had learned, or more accurately remembered, that when things began to seem too easy- they generally were. The trip towards where she heard the howl of the Goblin King had been uneventful and almost pleasant. Zazzle entertained her by transformed into various Labyrinthine inhabitants, one after another, and broke only to exchange surprisingly intelligent conversation. Their route held memories of challenges and sidetracks. They stepped over bits of burned hedge where goblin guards' spears laid in a heap. The two passed limp vines that draped like curtains through their path and Zazzle explained how they once snared wanton travelers in quick traps. Sarah only hesitated a moment as a fly, with a scent of fetid bog in its wake, drifted past her shoulder.

Despite these old reminders, and the incident with the Spikers, the Labyrinth was quiet, calm and sadly falling apart. "Have most of your friends and family left?" Sarah asked Zazzle, as she ducked beneath another loop of orange vine. She was cautious not to touch it, despite Zazzle's assurance that they were long dead.

"Where elsssse would we go?" Zazzle asked, flicking her green-gold eyes towards Sarah. The woman thought she noted a trace of sadness and loss behind those feral cat eyes. Just as quickly it was gone and Zazzle had become a lumbering mix of something that looked like a hippopotamus and a turtle. "Bessssidessss, they aren't many of ussss left. Mossst of my friendssss are dead."

She spoke the words nonchalantly, but this time Sarah easily saw how Zazzle's eyes became too glittery and veiled with tears. Sarah laid a hand on her friend's back as Zazzle returned to her native shape. Sarah focused on changing the conversation. "Have you ever been to the castle, met the Goblin King?" A low growl followed Sarah's question.

"Yesssss, once, when I wasss just a cub," Zazzle's response was still low and throaty, like a threat. Sarah sat up against a severed tree stump and sighed deeply. Her leg was sticky with blood and fighting through the pain had become unmanageable- she needed a rest. Zazzle turned back around, "Did I offend you?"

"Oh no, " Sarah waved off the comment with a brisk shake of her head. She stretched her leg out, wincing once at the pain and then lowered her head down between her legs. "I'd probably growl too, talking about the last time I met Jareth." There was a sort of electrical hum in the air around them, like a light bulb beginning to dim and eventually die. Sarah lifted her face to the sky, a brilliant blue in the late afternoon, but saw no electrical source above them.

Zazzle was preening her springy fur with a tiny and perfect pink tongue. She acknowledged the woman carefully, pausing in mid-groom. "Why did you leave, Sssarah? Why did you defeat him, only to leave ussss still under hisss rule?"

Sarah had just pinpointed the source of the humming when the question struck her. A laugh escaped her before she could manage to stifle it back down. The question was preposterous. Of course she had left. What was there for her in the Underground? A flash of Jareth's face consumed her mind for scarcely a second, long enough that she couldn't deny it had been there. Short enough that she could excuse it for a side-effect of pain and exhaustion. However, unease had since blanketed her and she shook her head to force herself back to the present. "I couldn't stay here! And be his slave? How could you ask that?" The anger in her voice glowed brilliantly, just like the blush that had crept across her face.

Zazzle now lowered her face. "No, no, no!" She jumped atop Sarah's lap, butting the top of her head against Sarah's chest like a housecat. "You misssunderstand! Of courssse not ssslave…. Queen."

"What?"

The humming was becoming louder. Like living in some kind of electricity plant or standing beside a live wire. In fact, this whole trip made her think a false step would lead Sarah into unbridled and free electricity. Her heart thrummed hard against her chest. Had Zazzle just really said Queen? It was hard to concentrate with the unnerving, grating, grinding sizzle of current in the air.

"Don't you know? Didn't they tell you anything?" Zazzle's hair bristled on end and she briefly looked twice her size.

Sarah scarcely heard. "What is that sound?"

Zazzle circled on Sarah's lap, a glimpse of her fine-pointed teeth showing as she hissed. Sarah looked down again, briefly regaining concentration from the noise. "You jussst left without learning? How could you not feel it every day, everywhere? Sssurely you felt sssomething?" Zazzle punctuated her questions with pinpricks of her needling claws.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Zazzle. I needed to get out of here so I could grow up. SO I could make something of myself. So that I could manage to live a life outside of fantasy and make-believe," Sarah shrugged her shoulders in callous acceptance. "Look at where it got me though? All those years of convincing that you and him and this whole place," she stabbed her hand into the air and swung around in a half arc, "…Wasn't real….. Now I'm back.

Sarah stood suddenly, unseating the cattish creature from her lap. Zazzle landed with ease, fervently licked the middle of her back and fixed Sarah with the most human of eyes she had yet seen. "Of courssse you're back child! The Underground never let you go. It'ssss sad. You worked sssso hard to forget that you missssed it all."

Zazzle began walking again on all fours. Her little nub of a tail swayed from one side to the other and her head sunk below her shoulder blades. Sarah watched, wishing she could take something back. The truth was the truth, though. She couldn't save everyone, couldn't be the heroine the time in the Labyrinth somehow made her be. For better or worse, her life of normalcy had been snatched away. She was left with this place. What was left in the world she had called home?

"I'm sorry," Sarah said at last, walking after her new little friend. "Zazzle, listen, I'm sorry. I just," another sigh punctuated her words, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Zazzle glanced over her shoulder. They had walked free from the vines and trees and were again in the turns and twists of the mostly brick maze. Up ahead the humming sounds became unnerving. It came from all around them. The little huntress fixed her narrowed eyes on a blooming yellow rose snaking up ivy along the walls, ahead a sea of those yellow flowers swayed ever so gently from side to side. The little cat hissed and backed against Sarah's legs. "Back up Sarah," she commanded.

"But what?" Sarah's mind swam in yellow and electrical currents.

"GO! NOW!" Zazzle darted between Sarah's legs, leaping in a sprint of escape. Sarah, surprised and feeling somewhat drugged, went to turn. In her movement a wave of vertigo slammed the side of her head and she reached out blindly to steady herself. Her hand met the cool, soft petals of the nearest rose.

"So…. Sleepy," she whispered, her eyes first drooping, giving way to exhaustion, and then closing. She slipped languidly to the ground, laying her head against the nearest wall as she succumbed to an inebriating slumber.

The men had been traversing the Labyrinth again for nearly an hour, or so it appeared by passage of the sun, when a flash of bright fur crossed their path. They had travelled in silence, since the collapse into the oubliette and subsequent upheaval of emotion. Now, however, Jareth called out in a low stentorian voice as he held Gideon back with an upheld arm. "Who are you!"

The creature slid to a stop. She fixed the two men in her sight and then blinked abruptly in response to Jareth. In one fluid movement it had arched its back, lifted the stubbed tail, pointed its ears and lifted its lips to show rows of tiny sharp teeth. A hiss filled the space between them. "Jareth….." the name was a growl.

The king scoffed. "Huntress, I'd thought you all dead."

"Nearly, no thanksssss to our king," She twitched the nub and bared her teeth again. "Unfortunately, I came in sssearch for you. We share a mutual friend who issss in danger."

"Sarah?" Her name spilled out of his mouth before he could think about possible consequences of showing his weakness so soon. The little cat eyed the king, twitching her long whiskers as her eyes narrowed again. This time, though, confusion poured over her, like water drenching a flame of rage. The king waited. Gideon watched, a bystander in the confrontation.

Zazzle sat, still occasionally flicking the bit of tail on the ground. She considered this man before her. The dictator of her home, who had been made into a horrorshow tyrant by her parents. His actions, especially those as of late, did nothing to diminish the infamous reputation that preceded him. She accepted his heavy hand in ruling their lands, his brash sentences of punishment and the disgusting slant of his career: stealing babies. What she did not understand was the naked fear that slipped out of his mouth with the girl's name or the gentleness that moved to the corners of his eyes and the way his hands grasped each other as he waited, anxious.

She waited a moment longer, weighing her decision carefully. "I will bring you to her, but first a question." She took several purposeful steps towards Jareth, hating him more and more with each step. Wondering again and again what it was about the girl that made him, this monster, something else. "Why haven't you told her?"

Gideon's interest was piqued. "Yes, Jareth. Even those left in the Labyrinth ask the same question."

Jareth tightened his hands into fists, digging half moons of his fingernails into the flesh of his palm. He shook, trying in vain to stow the anger that bubbled beneath his skin. "It is my decision to make."

"No! No! It is oursssss! She issss our only hope!" Zazzle hissed the words as she leapt to the feet of the king. Her eyes flashed and she was suddenly ten times her size. The voice that came out was a roar and Gideon took a step back.

"Illusions," Jareth chided, passing a hand across Zazzle's hair, ignoring the ferocious fangs that bore in response. In that moment Jareth turned away from them both, laid a hand upon his maze and then pressed his forehead against the brick and stone. A tumultuous shudder coursed through the ground in harmony with Jareth's rattling sigh.

"And I know. She does not deserve this. If I tell Sarah the truth, " Jareth sucked in air, tasting waste and dismay in the world around him. "If I tell her, she will feel compelled to stay here, curse herself, damn herself. Someone such as she does not belong here. If I could, in a moment, I would send her back to her world and her life, if she could be happy."

The clear longing, the tainted love, the hopeless loss in the Goblin King's words were too naked and heartfelt to be chalked up to more trickery on his behalf. Both Zazzle and Gideon swallowed down their contempt for the man beside them as startling realization stole through them both. They did not betray the clarity of the moment with more harsh and accusatory words. Instead, lowering her voice and sinking back into herself, Zazzle turned in the direction where she had left Sarah. "Come."

They covered the ground in half the time anticipated, given the urgency at their heels to find the girl who had been left alone to the wiles of the Labyrinth. However, the magic of that place was so near the end, that they met no resistance and Zazzle found Sarah where she had been left: Asleep near a bed of roses, peace on her pretty face.

Jareth strode forward first. He did not see the other two steps away, just past a corner. Somewhere a deep wonder had calmed their mutual dislike of the man who now bowed before a sleeping girl. They granted him respect in a land that would not have otherwise known the word. Jareth kneeled beside Sarah, noting the still pink of her cheek and rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. She was alive, and relief stole through him as his muscles trembled once.

"Sarah," he whispered, and gently looped a finger beneath a stray strand of chestnut hair and draped it behind her ear. She did not stir, did not move, even her breath remained the same. Jareth glanced up at the flowers, still vibrating, still humming, but so faint now that he nearly missed them when he had, instead, been so consumed by the sight of this woman. "Sarah," he said her name again, enjoying a rare moment when his defenses were down and no one could see.

His hand, damp with anticipation, stroked her cheek. Again she did not respond. "Zazzle," the king called out and the huntress appeared.

"Can you carry her? To the end of the Labyrinth. Perhaps out of this place the spell will be broken."

Zazzle nodded gravely, a trace of dislike still tainting her response. But first she whispered: "It won't, you know. Leaving this place will not wake her. You know as well as I that the sleeping sickness is broken only by…. A kiss, Goblin King."

Jareth tightened his jaw. "We will take her out of this place. You can at least do us that courtesy." The king then rose and walked several lengths from Zazzle, assessing the length of the passage and the yellow flowers. He then turned and, grimacing, bellowed again an unspeakable curse.

"Jareth!" Gideon spat out, silencing the man who raged beside him. "Do you wish to call Damien to our exact location? Perhaps he won't enter the Labyrinth again but out there is fair game!" Jareth, visibly shaken by the loss of control, strode to Sarah and easily lifted her into his arms. Zazzle had already shifted into the lion-cat being capable of bearing the weight of a human woman. Jareth draped the girl carefully atop his subject and then, a single goal in mind, sent them all on their way.

It was not yet dusk when they found the edge of the labyrinth and walked into open grasslands. Their horses were grazing, calm and content, as damselflies spun overhead. Jareth, hesitating a moment just at the edge of the border of the Labyrinth, let his eyes follow the hovel of the dump and then peaks of the roofs in the Goblin city, and at last the great castle itself. It stood ominous and foreboding, like the final warning to his opponents in the Underground. The sheer power made him shudder. The memory of his fall was sharp, like acid in his mouth. The old injuries sent phantom pains that made him move again.

Gideon had already gathered the horses and was helping to unburden Zazzle. He had rested Sarah in a thatch of clover. A surge of jealousy interrupted Jareth's reveries and he came upon the small group in a sour mood. "Leave us." His eyes locked on Zazzle, who bristled beneath his disdain.

"Or rather, we thank you! We are in your debt, kind friend," Gideon interjected, his purple eyes hopeful that Zazzle would accept his heartfelt sentiment and ignore Jareth's unyielding disregard for goodwill. Zazzle nodded graciously toward Gideon, but did not leave. She tarried beside Sarah, rubbing against the girl's arm and bidding her a silent farewell.

"You lossst the magic long ago, Jareth. Sssuch was your father'sssss cursssse. We are not idiots, not like your Goblinssss," Zazzle's expression shifted, something like sympathy and also disgust. "The crystal bought you time. Ssssshe was chosssen…. When you lossst. You know, I know, he knowsss," she gestured towards Gideon.

Gideon shook his head. "Come, Jareth, let's find camp."

Zazzle remained, judging the Goblin King's reaction. For a long while they stood, stalemated beneath the waning sun. At length Zazzle conceded and circled back in her tracks. Her tiny form disappeared into lengthening shadows that consumed the once great and terrible maze as the sun set.

"It did not work," Jareth said at last, once Zazzle had gone and the three were alone. He looked at Sarah out of instinct, and still she slept without motion or response. "I cannot do it."

Gideon, exhausted after the unnerving trip through the Labyrinth, had no more encouragement to give. His words lay frozen, and so he clucked to the horses and led them toward a copse of trees just ahead, for shelter. Jareth was left, with his thoughts and Sarah.

I'll lay my love between the stars.

As the pain sweeps through makes no sense for you….

A dream. The words making themselves whole in his silvery and seductive voice before he knows what he's saying. A girl. A girl in make-believe dressed up in clothes that make her look like princess. A ballroom. A place transcending time and reality all lit up with a hundred candles and floating bubbles that break like dreams.

But I'll be there for you, as the world falls down.

Falling…falling… falling in love.

A touch. His hand meets her slim waist and he imagines the silk of her ball gown would be warmed by her skin, if he could touch it without his gloves. A look. Their eyes meet when his mask has been lowered and he feels more naked to her than he ever has before. A promise. He cannot speak these things to her in any other place. He cannot make the words so true and honest as they are then in that ballroom, in a drugged dance with other dark dancers at the ball.

It's gone. Falling… falling….

Jareth was startled awake and he realized that he had been dreaming. The fire that Gideon had made before returning to Jareth and Sarah and helping move the woman to the camp, had died away. It was a bed of embers and ash, a faint orange glow reminiscent of flame. He didn't know how long he had slept, but it was full night and the sky a deep black as the moon had fallen past the horizon. Or perhaps there had been no moon. "I'll lay my love between the stars," he whispered as he looked at the heavens and replayed the words from the Huntress and Gideon both. It was a bitter truth.

Sarah was sleeping still. He reached out and touched her and for one heartbreaking moment he thought she stirred. But her eyes remained closed and her face motionless in the night.

He rolled on his side and stared at her. The night hid his many years and even more mistakes. The dark hid the gazes and glares of his companions. The night washed clean so many little lies and grievous sins that made up his life. The stars were mute above and they did not whisper accusations and look at him as though he had killed and bloodied child after child after child. They knew, as he does, that he was a prisoner. Albeit a prisoner of his own making.

He came closer to Sarah, smelling something sweet in her hair. His hand swept across her cheek, toucing her arm again and then, as he held his breath, his fingers twined together with hers. Zazzle's words returned in time with the thrumming of his heart. Jareth, more than anyone, knew the secret behind the rose garden. Beautiful and deadly, they kept his contenders away from the other exits in the Labyrinth. Should they pass through, despite the warning, there they lie for all time.

He also knew, looking upon the pale loveliness of Sarah asleep, that there was only one thing to wake her. That, while this most certainly was not a Sleeping Beauty fairytale, there was something of truth in those stories. Cold fear filled him deep inside at the thought. A kiss, a true love kiss. If he knew, if he truly knew that there was love between them how could he then send Sarah home? Or if he should fail and she slept on despite his lips upon hers, he would know an ultimate loss from which there would be no escape.

"Sarah," he whispered, his hand now on her forehead, which was cool and dry. His face hovered over hers and he could almost taste her breath.

Only the moonless night was witness as the king pressed his lips to the soft fullness of the girl's mouth. The sky above in its dark oblivion kept another secret as Jareth slipped back from her, visibly shaken. A handful of moments passed, like petals off a daisy, as Jareth laid in wait.

And only the Underground's deepest night heard the sharp intake of breath as Sarah's eyes opened to look around, she sat upright and stared wonderingly at a sleeping Goblin King.