Forsake the Rest

She stands by the window, and watches the rain pour. She wants to recite, but it’s times like this when she would much rather write her own things than to recite someone else’s.

It’s times like this that she wishes her muse would come to her.

She doesn’t wish out loud, however – she will never do that again. Because her muse taught her valuable lessons – the most important of which, is that she should always be careful what she wishes for.

If it’s in his power, he will grant it.

He comes to her window, but only after her lights are dimmed. She is asleep, lithe form clad in silken pajamas, panda slippers at the foot of her bed, and a King kneeling before her. His muse, he smiles, and wishes away her clothes, so that she is clad only in the light of the moon.

She shivers, once, twice, and he slips himself under the sheets with her, and presses her naked body to his own. She sighs in her sleep, and presses back, and, leaning in to place his chin on the curve of her neck, he allows himself to smile.

He puts one of his hands to his mouth, and then the other, and tortures himself with the slow process of removing the leather gloves. Displacing them in space, he tempts himself with touches of her – the swell of her breasts, the dip of her belly, the vee of her legs. He doesn’t know he’s not supposed to touch. After all, he is King.

And she will be his eventually anyway.

Sarah wakes up cold and naked and shivering with fear, because she knows that the Goblin King was there again. Her lack of clothes are the obvious clue, but there are slighter ones too. His scent lingers on the pillow next to hers, and when she brushes her dark hair, a blonde strand is pulled out.

She cleans her room so thoroughly, there is no sign that it has ever been lived in. So thoroughly that there are no more lingering traces of him to be found.

As she cleans, she cries. She cries because he violates her in everyway possible. She cries because he never stays. She cries because there is nothing she can do about it.

Well, there is something she can do about it.

“Jareth.” She whispers, and feels the air around her displace. She strains her ear, and she hears his sharp intake of breath from right behind her.

He watches her, standing quiet and still, and he knows that she is listening to him. Listening to him breathing, listening to him being.

“You test me again, Sarah.” He says, and sweeps his arm high, and pulls her back against him. His hand on her throat, his fingers playing with her pulse, he kisses her ear lightly. “What will you give me for your dreams?”

Sarah tilts her head to the side in silent offering, and he accepts, kissing and licking and tasting and tempting where he may. But no more words are spoken.

They fall lightly back against the bed, and soft sighs and harsh breathing is all the communication they use.

This is their heaven.

This is their hell.

When they are both thoroughly exhausted, Sarah twists her hand in Jareth’s larger one, and wonders why he always wears gloves.

“It’s for protection.” Jareth speaks, breaking their silence. “I am a member of the high race of Tuatha de Dannan, and if we touch iron with our bare flesh, we will die.”

Sarah blinks, concerned. “But, there must be some way to –“

Jareth almost physically recoils, and practically hisses at her. “There. Is. No. Way.” He insists.

She frowns, and thinks of all the fairytales she has every heard, and thinks that maybe there is always a way.

“No way, Sarah.” He repeats himself, and he is so loathe to do so.

“Are you reading my mind now, Goblin King?” Sarah asks playfully.

Jareth smiles. “Why read your mind, when I can read your face?”

And then he leans in and steals a kiss, which he much prefers to stealing babies. And then their tongues meet.

And then there are no more words.

When she wakes up, he is already gone.

But she smiles, and waits for night to come. Because with the night, on owl’s wings, her King, her muse, will return to her, and they will indulge in forbidden pleasures that neither would ever admit to.

When she calls him this time, he looks weary.

“Jareth?” She asks, escorting him by the shoulder to her bed. “What is it?”

He doesn’t speak. Because if he does, he is afraid that he will tell her that there is trouble in the courts. He is afraid he will admit what he has given up just to be with her this evening.

He is afraid to look her in the eye, because he can feel the veil of death crouching in on her. And he cannot stop touching her, because he knows soon that she will die.

When they are spent, and while she sleeps, he sits awake, with eyes wide open, clinging desperately to her frail human form. He cannot afford to sleep, because he can practically hear her cells dying. He can smell the stench of death, and he knows that she hasn’t much time. A few days? A few weeks? A few months? A few years? Nothing in comparison to how long he will have to live with out her when she’s gone.

The thought of her death leaves an uncomfortable ache in his chest that feels surprisingly black, and he resists the urge to raise his hand to comfort it. He needs her, more than he needs his precious fae communion, and he made sure to tell them that earlier that evening. He wishes he could tell her what he gives up for her. He wishes he could tell her he loves her. But he wont do either of those, because he knows that every time she were to repeat the sentiment, he would see images of mortals long past who had perished in his Labyrinth, but he would see her head falling limp, and it would be her body that flinched the moment before death overtook her.

But mostly he wont tell her because she will not be with him long enough to full comprehend what exactly his love entails.

Which is why more than anything, he wishes he wouldn’t have to see her die.

He voices his wishes, foolishly, because he knows better than anyone else that you should be careful what you wish for.

He learned his lesson when he wished for her.

“Mmm. . . Jareth?” Sarah whispers in the night, turning her head back to him. “Are you okay?” she asks, because she can feel his agony.

He smiles in the dark, but the effort is lost on her, because he forgets that her frail, human eyes cannot see as well in the dark as his own. “Fine.” He says.

She cuddles back against him, and wishes he would say he loves her.

But more than that, she wishes she could say it.

The pattern repeats. He leaves, she cleans, she calls.

He tempts, she teases, they linger.

But then he doesn’t come.

“Jareth?” Sarah cries out in the dark of the night. “Jareth Jareth Jareth Jareth JARETH!” His name has become a mantra on her lips, a spell to summon the King.

But he does not come.

For three nights, she repeats the action, calling and chanting and praying, before finally she realizes there is only one thing she can do.

“I wish the Goblins would come and take me away, right now!”

The Goblins come slowly, because they are required by magic to come when she says the ‘right words,’ with out the quick giggles and laughs that she remembers. They stare at her for a moment in confusion, and then one of the more clever ones seems to understand.

“You the one who keeps calling the King?” he asks.

Sarah kneels down, because the Goblin barely reaches her mid shin. “Why has he not come?”

The Goblin looks away for a moment, and frowns. “There was an accident. . .”

“Take me to him.”

The next time she sees him, he is in a casket.

Lit brightly in the light of the moon, her King, her muse, lies still as death and pale as the moon that illuminates him. The Goblins are crying around her, but she hears none of it.

“A human challenger who lost to the Labyrinth came back.” A Goblin said, balancing high on the balls of his feet to try to get Sarah’s attention. “He brought a cold iron horseshoe with him, and when his Majesty told him that there was no way to undo what had been done, the challenger touched his Majesty with it.”

Sarah understands, barely, and remembers his gloves. She looks down at his hands, and sees that they are still there.

“Didn’t touch his hands with them.” The goblin explained further at Sarah’s questioning gaze. “Got him on the throat, where there is the least likely chance of survival.”

Sarah blinks at this. “Chance?”

The Goblin nods. “True loves kiss will bring him back to life.”

Sarah smiles at this. “Just like the fairytale?”

“No.” The Goblin says sadly. “Because when the person who loves him truly kisses him, they will forfeit their life to him.”

Sarah doesn’t understand, and it must show on her face, because the Goblin elaborates.

“His true love will give their soul to him, and then, his true love will die.”

The Goblins leave Sarah with the King, and she crawls in to the casket, where she lays by his side until morning.

She has studies the room carefully since they left her, and with it’s tall arching windows and it’s vaulted ceiling, she knows instinctually that it is a tomb.

She hates this room, because there is no one else left that she can hate.

“This is the last time I will ever see you again then, isn't it?” Sarah asks him, tears painfully pricking at her eyes.

She knows she can’t leave him. She knows that she could never forget. She would always hold an ache deep inside of her.

She knew that he saw her as a foolish child, who had foolishly wished away her baby brother.

It was the truth. But it was also a lie.

Because she knows he was always expecting her to take – and that was because she did. She took her dreams, to be with him, she took back the child that he had stolen from her, and she took his heart with no pretty promises.

“You always knew how much I’d take.” Sarah whispers to him as the sun begins to reach the windows, and casts the dreary night off of them. She knows this is the time to do it, because night is where she lived. “You never knew how much I’d give.”

She makes a wish on whatever deities may be listening.

And then she kisses him.

And by the time he wakes up, she already gone.

His sobs sound hollowly in the early morning light, and he clings to her frail, human form for the last time.

From over a great distance, his Fae communions hear his cries, and sing out in agony for their King. He may have forsaken them for her, but they would share his sorrow if they could.

Which is why, when the King finally leaves her body, which is cold and stiff and still, they hide it deep in an oubliette. It is also why they sing the song of forever, to ease him in to a blissful state of sleep for a hundred or more years.

Because when he wakes up, it wont hurt so bad.

Because when he wakes up, he may not even remember Sarah Williams.

Because they were the ones who heard her final wish.

Her wish was not that he would know that she loved him, because her regeneration of him proved it beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Her final wish was that the Goblin King would forget about her.

Princess-

I will see you in Venice.