The plate clatters as it strikes the kitchen floor. A freshly prepared meal gone to waste.
"Sarah!" her stepmother's voice blasts out across the room, "What happened?"

She stands watching the Universe revolving, feeling the movement of the Earth beneath her feet, lost in a capsule of Time and transported backwards on the back of its tides.

I am tired of living up to your expectations of me. Isn't that generous?
I am tired of living up to your expectations.
Your expectations.

The slight twitch of his features that always stuck in her mind as somewhat wrong, something out of place. The strange vibrant undertone of his words that she had presumed was frustration, desire to overpower. There was meaning in those words. There was a secret in those pauses between breaths.

But – she had won. She had defeated him. Because he was evil.
He was evil and he had taken Toby.

You asked that the child be taken, I took him.

The raw, almost agonised honesty that had lurked beneath a suave persona. A character of cunning.
A character.

She moves without seeing, without knowing, on the tremulous instinct that brought her to this realisation in the first place. It presses and pushes her towards her bedroom. The bedroom she'd inhabited when she set out on that journey. It's only been a few years. Sometimes she still feels like asking the goblins to take her brother back; if anything he has become more annoying. But she thinks it fondly, without real intent, and never aloud. She made that mistake once and she knows the price.

Except – she can't help feeling that there was never really any danger. She was meant to rescue Toby. She was meant to overcome dangers. She was meant to become a better person.

A set up.
A character.
Her expectations.

"Hoggle." Her voice hollows out the room like a rotting trunk. She feels empty, adrift in Space.
He doesn't appear immediately. She fights back a scream. Grabs Lancelot from the shelf. Bites into his ear.
"Hoggle!"

"Sarah?" The short stumpy figure emerges from behind her bed at last.
He looks afraid.
He looks confused.

She rounds on him with a fury of fire in her eyes, a terror that catches, bordering on hysteria. The natural reaction of a human whose life has begun to collapse quite suddenly about their ears.

Isn't that generous?

The most generous being in the Universe. The most devoted liar in history.
Her guardian, her protector, her enemy-friend.
The love she has never stopped dreaming of.

"Hoggle. We need to talk about Jareth."