A/N: Major thanks to Lili and Gothic Rogue for looking this over. Please don't tell me that I use my spell checker well. I actually am capable of spelling on my own.

This was originally a one shot. Then it hit 20 pages and I still wasn't done, so I broke it up into a short series.

Disclaimer: I don't own it; I just play with it.

The fist came at her face seemingly out of nowhere. She had left long before he had come home; he suspected that she had been with another man. The fact that she and her two closest friends, Tessa and Katelin, came up to her apartment together did not rid him of his paranoia. Nor did the bags of groceries in her hands. Nothing could once he had the idea in his head.

Tonight she hadn't thought that it would be a problem. Damien was supposed to attend a dinner with some of the clients in his advertising firm. Apparently it had been cancelled. When she got home, he was on the couch in a pair of sweatpants. She knew all too well that he was waiting for an explanation for both her absence and the lack of dinner on the table. Tessa and Katelin had exchanged a concerned look when they saw him sitting there. All three knew what he was capable of and had seen the repercussions of angering him.

When he started beating Sarah, the other two women tried to pull Damien away from her. He just threw them aside as though the weight of the two combined was less than that of a feather. Damien's rage was temporarily turned on to Katelin and Tessa as he screamed at them to leave. Their presence compromised his control over his girlfriend. When they weakly protested again, Damien held them each up against the wall, one woman behind each arm. They were shaking in fear. The man glared at them, which terrified the two women to the bone.

"Get the fuck out of my house!" he growled. He then grabbed each woman by the hair and dragged the two out the front door. Both were tossed to the ground not far from the stairs. Before they could stand, Damien had shut and locked the door on them.

They wanted to call the police, but the cops wouldn't do anything. The last five or six times Damien had beaten Sarah was evidence enough of that. Tessa had called on Katelin's cell phone, as she had been calmer, and the cops never showed up. The girls even tried pounding on Damien's door and yelling to the neighbors, but they had grown used to his abusing Sarah. If they heard, they certainly wouldn't react. There was nothing they could do to help, no matter how hard they tried.

So, hit after hit, blow after blow, Sarah took her "punishment." In his eyes, it served her right for disobeying him. He fancied himself a god. His word was law; he was both judge and jury. And Sarah, ever the faithful nun, took it in silent misery. She was even starting to believe that she was inherently bad and that she deserved every hit that she took. He was all she had; without him, she was nothing. Or so he made her believe. Tessa and Katelin had tried to convince her to leave him, but they just didn't understand how much she needed him.

When he had found her, Sarah was still the fanciful girl that had bested Jareth's Labyrinth. Though the experience taught her a good deal about familial bonds and growing up, she was incapable of letting go of her fantasies no matter how childish they had been. Deep down, they were so much a part of her that she feared if she lost them, she would also lose herself. If nothing else, the experience in the Underground strengthened her belief in the mystical.

That was until he came along. Damien changed all that. While, at first, he was the perfect Prince Charming, Sarah soon discovered that he was a good deal closer to the character of the evil stepmother. He put on a happy face for the rest of the world but, when they were alone, it was an entirely different story. She was his and would do what he said; there were no two ways about it.

Sarah had tried to leave him. Once, she had moved in with Karen, her father and Toby, but Damien found her. He beat her savagely that night and then brought her breakfast in bed and a bouquet of yellow roses the next morning. At first, all of his beating had been followed by extravagant gifts and gestures. The second time, she was not so lucky.

Tessa and Katelin had convinced her to leave again. She moved into their apartment and slept on the couch. Damien had come for her less than a week later, this time with promises that he would seek help and things would be better. The three women had their doubts, but in the end, Sarah went with him. That night, he beat her within inches of her life. When the police met him at the hospital, he fed them some story about her falling down the stairs. As there were no other witnesses and Sarah did not discredit him when she awoke, they had no choice but to believe him.

All of this ran through Sarah's head while he repeatedly pounded on her with his fists. She began to wonder what could happen in someone's life to make them this cruel. Her knees gave out and she dropped. He took this opportunity to kick her hard in the stomach. Coughing, bleeding, she fell onto her side. Everything on her body hurt. I deserve this, she thought, I should've been here to make him dinner. I should've at least told him where I was going, so he wouldn't worry. This is all my fault.

After a pause, a voice long thought dead surfaced in her head. No, Sarah, you don't deserve this. You've never done anything so bad to deserve this pain. And the young woman realized the voice was right, but there was nothing she could do about it. If she ran, he'd only find her again. Maybe this time he would even kill her. No, if she left, she would have to go somewhere so far away that he'd never be able to find her. Or she'd have to find someone stronger than he to protect her.

That will never happen, she thought bitterly as she drew herself up to her hands and knees and began the slow crawl to the bathroom. After he had kicked her in the stomach, Damien had gone into the kitchen for a glass of water. He must feel that she'd been punished enough for something she didn't even do. What Sarah could never understand was how he could be so calm about his cruelty. He claimed to love her; he claimed that she was his world; he claimed that he couldn't live with out her. Yet, despite all of his claims, he was cruel to her, so much crueler than she had once thought Jareth to be.

How wrong she had been. Though Jareth hadn't treated her well, his malice had been nothing compared to Damien. At least Sarah had done something to deserve his anger. Who could blame him for treating her poorly, though? She certainly couldn't. It was only all these years later, after being subjected to Damien's "punishments" for a time that she realized that Jareth had made her an offer that she had been too young to understand. "Fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave," he had said in the depths of his castle all those years ago. She truly hadn't understood at that time, but eventually the realization dawned on her. He had offered her his heart and she had turned away from it as though it was nothing. She was so focused on saving Toby that she might have destroyed Jareth.

No, she thought with a sad smile, he wouldn't have let a silly girl like me do that to him. The somewhat smiling face in the mirror looked as though it had come straight from a horror movie. The cuts oozed blood. The bruises were even beginning to show on her cheeks and nose. Gingerly, she had begun to dab the cuts on her face with a damp washcloth. With a pain in the region of her heart, she realized she had bought these washcloths because of their dark green color. It allowed her to keep them, as the bloodstains couldn't show through on the dark material.

Saline tears began to roll down her cheeks as she cried silently. The water droplets rolled down over her cuts, mingling with the blood in them and causing a painful sting. She didn't react. Thanks to Damien, she was now quite capable of keeping herself from reacting to pain. Crying and pleading only made him hit harder.

Just then, she couldn't hold it back any longer. She locked the bathroom door shut and fell to her knees beside the bathtub and sobbed as quietly as possible. She did not want to provoke another attack from Damien.

Suddenly, though she hadn't thought this much about Jareth in years, she desperately wished he would somehow find her and take her away. If he did, she could be with a man that would treat her as she deserved to be treated simply because he loved her enough not to let her get hurt, let alone attack her himself. But these were just the silly dreams of a child trapped within this battered body. It would never happen, she knew. That thought created a new sadness in her, one that rivaled the pain Damien had inflicted a mere few moments ago.

Jareth paced the Escher Room. It had been so long since he'd been there; he avoided it purposely. Being there reminded him too much of Sarah and what he could never have with her. After the night of their shared dream, his visits to this part of the castle had dwindled to nothing. Despite this, he hadn't ordered the room opened to the Goblins or removed. It had once meant so much to him that he couldn't just say good-bye to it. Now, though, he felt inexplicably drawn to it.

The wild-haired man stood in the middle of the room. Actually, he stood on the stair that seemed to be closest to the middle without actually floating away from solid ground. For a long while, he thought of all the pain that loving that girl had caused. The Goblin Kingdom had fallen into a state of disarray, as its king was too busy with his own thoughts and obsessions to govern it properly.

No, he thought with a degree of bitterness, she didn't ask that I love her. She didn't ask for anything that I did for her, except take the boy, and I did it anyway. She didn't even accept that which I offered her, the gift of my heart beyond all of the hoops I jumped through to be her perfect villain. Perhaps I was so convincing a villain that she couldn't see me as anything more.

Jareth shook his head angrily. Thoughts like these would bring him back to where he had been before his sister, Lily, had come to break him from his reverie. She saw what his obsession with the girl had done to his subjects and took it upon herself to bring him back.

Lily had hoped it would be little more than a slap across the face and a short lecture about how irresponsible he was being over a mortal girl. Unfortunately, it had taken quite a bit of weaning to get him to this point. She had pulled him from the low point in his life and he was about to let himself return. He couldn't do that to Lily, not after all she had done for him.

"One look," he promised himself, "one look, and nothing more."

With a flick of his wrist, Jareth balanced a shining orb about the size of a baseball on the tips of his fingers. He gazed into it intently and willed that it show him the woman that he loved, despite all of his desperate attempts to change that.

After a moment's concentration, a picture came into view. It was not the happy Sarah that he had expected to see. In fact, he had hoped to see her happily married with a baby so that he may fully get over the emotion he felt for her. Sadly, what he saw was the exact opposite of what he had wanted. True, Sarah did lie beside a sleeping form, but there was no happiness.

Jareth became incensed, as the image in the crystal grew larger and larger. No, there was certainly no happiness on her face. In fact, she was sobbing violently. Her trembling was so great that Jareth was surprised the man beside her didn't wake because of it. It was then that he realized what had caused her to sob so much. All over her face and what he could see of her body, which was plenty thanks to the spaghetti strap nightgown she wore, was covered in cuts and bruises.

Jareth's mind was racing. There was only one reason why the man beside Sarah was not awake, comforting her. He must have been the one to cause her this damage. Jareth's rage grew. "He will pay," the blond man growled. He had never seen Sarah in such a state of despair. Whether she felt for him or not, the Goblin King had no choice but to give up his place a villain to Sarah's heroin and save her.

Thunder exploded so loudly that Sarah jumped. She hadn't expected a storm; the weatherman hadn't said anything about storms tonight. Tears still spilled down her cheeks. As he couldn't see her face, Damien must've thought she was shaking out of fear because he placed a supposedly comforting hand on her arm. She had to resist an urge to jerk her arm away, as he had placed his hand directly on one of the bruises he had inflicted just a half an hour earlier.

When a flash of lightning broke through the darkness, Sarah clutched her comforter closer to her body. Thunderstorms had never really sat well with her and she couldn't quite figure out why. And, as though she weren't already frightened of enough, the French doors that lead to the balcony of Damien and Sarah's apartment were blown open by the fierce winds of the storm.

The man in bed beside her got up to shut the doors. He started mumbling something about the building manager, spending all of his hard earned money on this dump and how everything broke constantly. With the cool air blowing in through the doors as an excuse, Sarah covered her face with the comforter. It would do her no good to let Damien see how much he affected her.

"What the fuck are you doing on my balcony?" she heard Damien's indignant yell merely seconds later. It was followed by a laugh, a very cruel and strangely familiar laugh.

Instantly, Sarah knew exactly who was outside that window. It was no wonder the sudden storm and the way the door flew open felt like déjà vu. To be positive, and to prove she wasn't dreaming, Sarah pulled the covers away from her face. The sight caused her to push herself into the seated position; the Goblin King stood towering over Damien in the window with an enraged expression on his face. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was looking rather put out and angry that some strange man dressed in styles that seemed a combination of spandex and what the leading men of romance novels wore was interrupting his sleep.

Jareth's gaze drifted her way for a brief moment. "Are you alright, Sarah?" he inquired. His features softened considerably as he posed the question.

"Why wouldn't she be?" Damien replied, as his anger began to rise dramatically. He openly glared at the figure before him and his face slowly began to turn red.

Jareth turned back to him, a completely calm expression on his face. His eyes, on the other hand, were full of cold hatred. "I don't recall posing that question to you. You would do well to have some respect around your betters," he responded, seething.

"I'm alright, Jareth," Sarah said quickly in an attempt to calm the two feuding egos in front of her.

Damien turned and glared at her, but before he had a chance to say a word, Jareth replied calmly with, "You're lying."

"Betters?" Damien scoffed as he finally just pushed his way into the conversation. "And how the fuck do you two know each other? This is the bastard that you've been cheating on me with, isn't it? You little whore!" His glare mirrored the accusation in his voice. With three quick strides, Damien stood in front of her. Before she had the chance to move, his club of a hand hit her hard on the cheek. Jareth had all the proof that he needed that Damien had been the one to harm Sarah so.

Sarah cried out. For once, the force of his attack wasn't so strong that it threw her back on the bed. Perhaps because, for once, a challenging figure stood before him. Jareth looked positively irate. It was an expression Sarah wasn't expecting to see, not in the slightest.

"Touch her again and there will be hell to pay, boy," Jareth said, menacingly. The way Jareth spoke to him only angered Damien more. He did not like to be talked down to.

With a loud crack, Damien hit Sarah so fiercely that she tumbled off of the bed and landed hard on the ground. She couldn't help but cry out in pain. From her place on the floor, she watched the two men. Her hands clutched the cheek that Damien had struck mere moments before. He had hit her so hard that it broke the skin and blood began to trickle down her cheek.

In a daze, Sarah watched as Jareth grabbed Damien by the shirt and pushed him back until he was pressed against the wall. The shock on the mortal man's face was evident. Through the tears that spilled down her face, Sarah smiled just a touch. There was such a feeling of safety deep in her core that she hadn't felt for a very long time. She knew that she should be afraid for Damien, but somehow she wasn't at all.

"Now what did I tell you?" Jareth growled. "I expressly forbid you from touching her and you did it anyway. For this and other wrongs, you deserve a punishment of the most severe variety. But the greatest of your wicked deeds was done to Sarah, so I shall leave the punishment up to her. But know that if it were up to me, you would die in the most horrible fashion I or any of my advisors could devise." He looked to Sarah. "What shall we do with him?"

"I…Jareth, I don't know," she said nervously.

The Goblin King turned to face the young woman and his expression once again softened. "Then I will give you time to decide," he said quietly. A crystal materialized in his hand and he pressed it against Damien's chest until the man had disappeared into it.

"What did you do with him?" Sarah asked tonelessly.

"I put him in an oubliette," Jareth said coldly. "And there he'll stay until you've made a decision." He offered her his hand and she hesitantly took it. When she was on her feet, she found that she felt very dizzy. If it hadn't been for the Goblin King's arms around her, Sarah would've collapsed back onto the bed.

"Come with me," he said, his voice filled with many emotions that Sarah could not decipher. "Stay with me in the Underground until you can decide what should be done with him."

Sarah just nodded. She was in such a daze over the events of the last fifteen minutes that it didn't even come to mind to question why Jareth had come to her aid like that, why he had been so angry with Damien. All she could do at the moment was look at him and offer a soft, "thank you," as he lead her to the window and back into the Labyrinth for the first time since she had defeated it long ago. The sight of the castle beyond the Goblin City was the last she saw before the darkness of sleep pulled her into its depths.