Author's Note: Okay. So. This is the final chapter, and that may have kind of blindsided you if you've been following along, because I can't list how many chapters are planned for the work here on ffn. I had a lot to say about this and the process in general over on AO3; head over there if you want to see really ramble-y author's notes that may or may not actually add anything to the experience (username is still Exulansist) - and as an additional bonus, you can comment there if you're looking for some answers because it is easy for me to reply, or you can PM here if you have an account. I'm here for you. I have a lot of feelings and I'm happy to talk about them, and I am also happy to talk about yours. With no further ado...

Impossible, they keep saying, impossible.

It makes me want to scream.

A little harem of nurses, all gathered 'round my bedside, staring dispassionately at me where I cry and sweat and writhe, rubbing my skin off even against the padding on the inside of the ties of the restraints that hold me here. When I have to use the bathroom, they unclip me slowly, send me with an escort with a too-tight hand on my arm, the indignity charring my insides. When I ask for food or drink, they nod, patronize me, spoon-feed me tasteless green jello or tapioca pudding, hold a plastic cup of stale-tasting water to my parched lips.

The first nurse to come to my aid was followed by several more, flitting in and out of the room, distressed. Clucking like hens, I think unkindly. I know they are just following orders.

We are all of us just following orders.

The room, once burnished in amber, brightened and whitened until it reached right back around to clinical sterility. My neck itched, but I could not reach to scratch it. And still, impossible.

Drawn together, they stared at the bedside tray. I was exhausted by the slackness of their faces, the empty wrinkling of their brows. The nurse who I thought of as mine, the one who trickled liquid sleep into my veins, held something up to the light. It reflected a flash of sunlight into my eyes, blinding me.

"But how could she possibly have-?"

It was a scalpel, razor-thin, razor-sharp, and its wicked edge was coated in blood.

"She was under," protested my nurse, "I put her under deep sedation. This clearly brought her out of it. She couldn't have brought herself out of it. It just doesn't make any sense."

They murmur amongst themselves. I wonder if the scalpel was lying in a pool of blood. I think of the touch of his lips, lie still, try to appear uninterested.

"There just isn't any way she could have done this to herself!" she said, her voice rising above the fray.

"Who was on duty last night?"

Another devolution into hushed whispers. I frowned. I wanted them all to go away. The flowers in the vase stooped slightly under their own weight.

The nurse set the scalpel down, carefully. "She was immobilized. She's still immobilized."

I glared at her. "Just because you think I'm crazy does not mean it doesn't make me angry when you talk about me like I'm not in the room."

Her face softened, just a little bit, as the half-halo of personnel behind her went quiet. "You didn't do this to yourself, did you?"

"Of course not," I sighed, and moved my arms to the full extent of their motion. The straps went taut. "I can't even scratch where my neck itches. Do you really think that I let myself out, went to carve a slice in my leg, somehow tied myself back in and then called you? Why would I do that?"

I hoped that I sounded lucid, rational, because I couldn't quite think clearly.

"Did you see who did it to you?" she asked.

"No. When I woke up, I was bleeding, so I called you. No one was in the room."

"We don't keep surgical tools in these rooms, anyway," she murmurs to her audience of peers. "I just don't understand how it happened."

Impossible.

By the time my mind snapped, she had injected the sedative before I realized that the hoarse screaming was my own.

I open my eyes to find my hand in his. He has peeled off the glove to examine my finger. The prick of the thorn has diminished. His tongue darts out to taste the crimson smear on his lips.

"Your kind have a story," he says, utterly without preamble. "A princess succumbs to a forever-sleep at the prick of a spindle, only to be revived by true love's kiss. A bit cloying."

I blink sleep from my eyes. I am lying, prone, across a bed. He sits at the edge, one long leg folded neatly beneath him. The sky looms large above me, and in it, millions of stars surround the full, round moon. The moon is unsettling, enormous; it gives me vertigo, makes the room - earth? - spin, kickstarts my adrenaline. The sky is falling.

The warmth of the gift-dream is gone.

"I suppose that makes you both the villain and the prince," I say. "Doesn't speak very highly of my discretion in choosing a lover, does it?"

"Oh, Sarah," he says, his answering grin wild and wicked. "No one would accuse you of having been wise in your selection. Courageous, perhaps, but never wise."

He has removed my shoes. I bury my toes in the gathers of the coverlet.

"I'm not sure I chose you," I counter.

He has shed his formal coat. The ruffled shirt hangs open at his breast. Moonlight gleams whitely off of his skin.

"We aren't lovers yet," he says in return, and his eyes burn fiercely.

"I'm not even convinced that you woke me," I say.

"I kissed away blood drawn by the thorn of my rose, and you came back to me."

"Coincidence. They put me to sleep on the other side. They think I'm crazy."

"Your tenuous grasp on sanity is slipping," he says. He takes my other hand, lifts it from where it sprawls across the red sheets. His fingers pinch at the tip of the glove, just where my index finger ends, and he gives it one tug. It slides fluidly from my arm, baring my skin.

My arm is unmarked, flawless.

"Why erase my scars now?" I ask him. "Can't you stand seeing what you've done to me?"

"You say that as if you're blameless. You are the chief architect of many of the places we've visited." He strokes down the length of my arm, soothing my shivering. "You've grown wild and dangerous, and the labyrinth has simply responded accordingly."

Everywhere he touches, he leaves livid shadow marks on my skin. Inside, I ignite. A clenching in my core.

"Do you want me to touch you, Sarah?"

I know that the answer should be - has to be - no, but his lips brush mine, dragging the yes from them as surely as if he had reached inside of my body and manipulated it himself. A different flavor of manipulation.

I reach for him as he kisses down the column of my throat, itching to bury my fingers in his hair, hold him there where I need him. A yearning to put my bare hands against his skin builds in me until I am sure I must explode, but his hands, still encased in ever-present leather gloves, close around my wrists.

I yelp; the skin there is still thin and tender even if it is not purple anymore, and then shadows ring them, dark shackles, not quite bruises.

"I did not ask if you wanted to touch me."

His voice is low and dangerous as he raises his head. My heart thumps, once, heavily. He reaches behind me to a pair of silver scarves, one at each bedpost, that he knots around my wrists, just so, spreading my arms wide like wings.

"I will need both of my hands this time," he says. I burn.

One at a time, he removes his own gloves. The process is shockingly intimate, steeped strangely in eroticism. His eyes do not leave mine as I see his hands for the first time, slender and white and unmarred, long and somehow brimming with terrible strength, as if hands could evoke such a thing as strength merely by existing. He stretches, then flexes them, compressing one and then the other into a quick fist, a smirk curling around the edges of his cruel mouth.

My arousal spirals to undiscovered heights.

A fingertip brushes along my ankle. His other hand pushes the skirt of the backless black dress still higher, so that it bunches above my knees. The feel of his skin against mine is flame and ice and electricity, trailing upward, the brush of a butterfly wing or a feather or a wisp of a cloud.

His eyes are cast downward, his lashes thick inkstrokes against the white of his face. His fingers brush the incision, just so, and I hiss in pain, hot and cold and electrified.

He smiles.

His head bends, his mouth warm and wet, his tongue lapping gently along the cut. "Do you know," he breathes against my skin, "I can taste your desire in the dream-wound." My toes curl in the blankets. "It is intoxicating."

The syllables of intoxicating roll from his tongue like nothing I've ever heard. My chest heaves. All I can see is the tuft of his hair from where he bends to me, ministering to me with lips and tongue.

The fire blazing inside me is coiled up so tightly that I am beginning to be afraid, or I would be afraid if I could feel anything but him, his lips, his fingers in lazy circles on my skin.

"Do you choose me, Sarah?" he asks, laughter rippling through the question, because he knows what my answer is, what my answer has to be. I curl my hands into fists around the scarves holding me here.

"I want to touch you," I say, because it is true, because on the other side I am already tied to a bed, because I can't stand being teased. Because I refuse to give him the satisfaction of answering his question.

"Wicked thing," he breathes, scrape of teeth above my knee, the skirt bunched obscenely high on my hips. I look away from him, look up into the sky, see a shadow beginning to bite into the moon. It leadens my veins, fills them with dread.

He looks up from me, follows my frightened gaze into the sky. His smile widens. "Isn't it lovely that we should be so celebrated by the celestial bodies?"

I watch the galaxies swirl across the sky. He the umbra, I the penumbra. The moon glowing silver-blue, slowly yielding to shadow.

"Did you plan this? An eclipse?" I ask, and I am oddly short of breath, and his hands are pressing the rich fabric of my skirt still higher and his eyes are black as the night sky and blue as the morning sky and his face is still full of an untamed smile.

"I considered arrangements," he says, "I'm delighted by the symbolism of it all, heavy-handed as it may be; how fortunate for us that night skies like these are where dreams are woven." He nudges his wrist against me through the fabric, just so, watches the involuntary thrash of my hips.

"Jareth." A breathy intonation. I watch his eyes flick up to my face, the immediate tension in his body, the stilling of his hands against my skin. He moves upward, over the bed, over me. I remember the press of his hips on mine, but he holds himself above, apart.

Fingers circle my arm, run along the ticklish stretch of the inside of my upper arm. My skin prickles at his touch.

"I did leave two," he says. He is talking about the remaining scars, the two most recent. His lips close over my pricked finger.

"You - you told me not to leave any of myself here," I gasp. I can barely see him if I crane my neck, his hand over the knot of the scarf on my wrist. His mouth is velvet-soft. The rose's single perforation fills with ice. The sensation slowly fades as he moves back to kneel beside me.

"I told you that if you left too much of yourself behind in the labyrinth, you would find yourself lost," he says, "But Sarah, being lost in the labyrinth is one thing. I want you to lose yourself to me."

His fingers tangle in the curls of my hair, and he bends again to kiss at my pulse points, tongue fluttering against them until the waves of pleasure rising within me start to make my arms tremble where they reach for him, struggling.

It is too much, and it is not enough.

His teeth close on the outer whorl of my earlobe and his lips curl at the gasp of a scream from my throat. He cups his hand over my breast, through the dress, his thumb sweeps over the bud and I am half-sobbing already, soaking wet and overwhelmed with need.

"Do you choose me, Sarah?" he breathes in my ear, and arousal rises in my chest so powerfully that I am almost nauseous with it.

But my lips are shut; I bite them there, jaw trembling, refuse to give him what he wants because he will not give me what I want, though I know that this battle is already won and I know that I am not the victor. He tugs at my hair, slides his other hand slowly along my chest, down my stomach to my abdomen. He cups his hand where the heat licks away at me, slow burn building to roaring blaze.

"Have you chosen?" he growls, and my skin blisters where his breath scorches along my skin.

In a fit of pique, craving written starkly across his face, he seizes the dress where it has gathered at my hips, yanks it roughly over my head where it remains, wrapped tightly around my arms. I am exposed, the slickness between my thighs cold where the night air caresses it. I bring my legs together, but he wedges them apart, kneels between them.

One quarter of the moon is bathed in shadow, the dark smile encroaching.

He kisses the tip of my breast, then his tongue dips into my navel, teeth nipping at my skin as he inches lower. "Choose me, Sarah," he insists.

I feel his breath on me, and I know that I have lost.

"Yes," I groan, the sibilance drawn out as his mouth descends on me, just there, there where the ache is anchored, there where my whole self shrinks to nothing. I rage at the scarves binding my arms, thrashing and struggling, and he laughs against my skin before I begin to writhe, shifting against his lips and tongue, ravenous and half-crazed, coiling more and more tightly.

His mouth is wildfire against me. His hands are on my hips, improbably strong, holding me steady and still and far from the friction I so desperately crave. "Jareth," I whimper, my throat raw. He laughs again, laps at me, relishes the dance of my body in response. I am moments from the edge, from cresting and falling in ecstasy-

He stops and I scream in despair, in frustration and anger. He laughs, low and throaty and sadistic, rocks back on his heels, watches the twitch of my restless hips as I recede from the peak I have been reaching for.

Above us, the moon has gone half-dark, the umbral curve turning light to shadow. I imagine existing on its surface, imagine running from the impending darkness, watching it gain on my heels, playful but inevitable. I think of fog, and of shadow, and of the winking out of stars in the sky.

His hand, warm and weighty at my neck. He lifts my head gently, kisses me deeply. I respond in kind, opening my mouth, opening my body to him, but with my arms restrained there is only so much contact that I am able to initiate. There, the hard length of him against me, pressed against my hip. Here, the building blaze, the slick heat.

"Please," I beg against his lips.

He reaches down between us, and I feel his hand tremble slightly as he adjusts, positioning himself.

Then, the silky slide of him against me, into me, fullness and tightness, and a ragged little intake of breath from him makes it my turn to smile even though I am moaning, long and low. His teeth worry at the skin at my neck, he draws my legs up behind him, sinks deeper. I roll my hips, angling up to meet him, and he gasps again.

My eyes cast skyward to the rapidly darkening moon, fighting its losing battle. The shadow slips further; there is only a scythe of light left curling around its edge, soon to be extinguished.

His breath comes in pants against my skin, and I relish the hint at his loss of control, the first time I have witnessed him overcome with anything (but for the moment when he pulled my body from the water), the first time I have felt any kind of share in his power. He moves slowly, deliberately, waiting for me to protest. I twist my hips against him, feel his body shudder.

He moves his hands to mine. I tighten around him as he interlocks our fingers, skin on skin, pinning my hands more firmly to the mattress. His lips pull at mine; I give what I have left to give. I fight as hard as I can against my restraints because I want to force him to speed his tempo, want to rake my fingernails down his back, but the scarves are unyielding, if soft.

"Jareth," I sob, panting, "Please, f-faster!" I am beyond shame, beyond anything but the need to enter the free fall that follows this ascension.

He rocks against me and I am nearer and nearer to paradise, the wildness within me expanding and uncurling, stretching into my furthest corners, preparing for the rush, the eruption, the surrender.

The last silver-blue crescent disappears from the moon, light is devoured by shadow, and it finally succumbs to its name and its fate, blood-red glow spreading across its face. The stars, impossibly bright.

"Come," he commands, his voice like thunder, his hand moving between us to stroke a single fingertip over my clit.

I look into his face, twisted with insatiable desire.

A drawing in: of breath, of spirit, of body, higher and higher, tighter and tighter-

I come.

Here I am, my face livid with blood, my body spasming against the restraints, my lungs thrusting air through my vocal cords in a primal scream (his name) as I ride through my climax, cold and empty and alone, sparks dancing behind my eyelids. Here I am, screaming until my lungs are empty and pushing up against my throat with nothing else to give, the sharp sound dying in a grating rasp, my head thrashing against the pillow.

The nurse sprints in, sees my dark face, my sweat-soaked body, my writhing limbs; her hands shake as she fills a syringe, trying not to look at my convulsions. She thinks that I am misbehaving, or seizing, or possibly dying, but I know that she could never possibly guess the truth of what is happening to me. As the sedative flows anew through my veins, I feel the blood drain from my face, feel my head drop back to the pillow as my the tight muscles in my neck continue to scream out, my core pulsing and pulsing as I drop back to return to the darkness, return to him.

The oversaturated, galaxy-strewn sky fills my vision again, the red moon cloaked in shadow and dangerously near. My insides are still clenching, rhythmically.

"You sent me back," I gasp. I am covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He reclines beside me, his fingers drawing lazy patterns across my ribcage. He brushes against the underside of my breast, and the flame that I'd thought extinguished leaps anew within me.

"I did." He chuckles, amused. "It was not my intention, but here you are again." He undoes the scarves at my wrists (they fall away), and I bring my arms down around my body as my overextended shoulders twinge, shedding the rest of the black dress. I see that he has redone his pants, and flush when he catches me looking.

He hands me the edge of the red silk sheet, eyes sweeping across me one last time before I pull it up, wrap it around myself. It billows, settles gently around me in hills and valleys. I reach to him, and he finally allows me to stroke my bare fingers across his cheekbones, the curve of his lips over sharp teeth, the side of his face. I brush hair away from his face, wondering at my audacity to touch a god. For he is, isn't he?

And who am I, that I should be here in his presence, shielding my nakedness with the sheet we have just defiled?

"I want to show you something," he says. "We can wait until your legs work again." A small smile.

I want to nestle into him, feel his arms around me, but instead manage a sitting position, cinching the sheet around myself. I look around. "Does this place belong to you?"

"All places belong to me."

I wonder if he is teasing, but his face is serious.

"Where are we?"

"Nowhere in particular. One of the labyrinth's many offerings to its creator."

I cannot tell where we are, only that the ground beneath the bed is smooth and slate-tiled and stretches out quite a ways. "Did you bring me here on purpose?"

"Yes and no," he says. "The labyrinth has some mind of its own. I was distracted at our instant of departure."

I remember his arms around me, his back to the crystal shards that had rained down on us.

"Why did the bubble burst?" I ask.

"It was an oversight on my part, to allow you to shed your blood within the dream. It didn't appreciate the sacrifice," he says, and his unearthly grin shows all of his teeth. "I should have known better than to let you hold a thorned rose."

"What happened to it? The rose, I mean."

"It dissipated into the mists of time, I expect," he says, grandly. The way he says it reminds me a little bit of Jen. "It doesn't matter. More will grow in time."

Standing, he offers me his hand. I am astonished that he has not replaced his gloves, but I switch the hand that holds the sheet around me so that I can take it. Our touch is not electric, but his hand is cool and dry where it encloses mine. With his help, I slip down off of the bed (with shaking legs) and he steadies me, leads me for what feels like forever to a staircase uncurling against a cliffside, cold and grey, reaching up to the heavens.

"Where are we going?" I ask. My legs are weak and the steep ascent is daunting.

"Up," he says simply. We climb forever, the lactic acid burning in my tired muscles so starkly different from the languorous heat that enveloped me before. Stairs and stairs and stairs (up and up and up), and then a little stone door in the side of a stone wall.

He pushes it open with his palm, and it glides inward, frictionless and silent until it scrapes to a halt. My chest heaves, and then slowly, intentionally, I breathe deeply. Wind sweeps through the door, whistling constant and low, tugging playfully at the sheet I gather around myself.

"Through," he says now, and his hand falls to the small of my back, guides me (through the door).

He follows me through; we are standing on a stone plateau that stretches on and on. It might be the shorn-off summit of a former mountain - it might simply be some topographical anomaly generated by the labyrinth itself. We stand, hand in hand, high above each peak and ancient tree here, looking out over our creation. I am reminded of the beginning of my adventure, ten years ago, when he took me to the window and showed me his Underground. The maze twists away before me, forever and ever, each turn familiar, seen in a dream.

My labyrinth.

In my experience, it's usually German that has the words that we lack in our English vocabulary, great unwieldy words that speak volumes more than the space they already occupy. But, if we're fair, every language has words for things that go unspoken in others.

Take French, for example. L'appel du vide. Literally "the appeal of the vacuum," but more commonly translated as "the call of the void." The morbid curiosity of what-if.

The moment you spend wondering what it would be like to just end it in any manner, whether fantastical or mundane. You'd never do it - but you think about it, what it would feel like to do it, knowing you could. What those last moments would look like.

My mistake was failing to understand the nature of the void. It doesn't have to be the quick yank of the steering wheel to send yourself plummeting off the cliff.

Sometimes the void is within.

I am weightless, my stomach soaring, free from the inexorable pull of gravity. He takes my hand, looks down at my face, his expression oddly soft.

It's incongruent with everything I understand to be true about him, and though I could be wrong, I don't believe that I am. And that this thought doesn't bring me back to earth gives me pause. I go on feeling weightless, bobbing at the end of a string that he has tethered to himself, and look at my hand in his.

His hand is bare, the skin cool and dry and comforting. His eyes glint.

A wave of nausea crashes over me. My feet can't hold me down to the ground. His arm slips around my waist, urges me on.

"Jareth?" I ask. My voice is small.

He quirks an eyebrow at me.

"Jareth, is something wrong?"

He looks to me very much as if he is the cat that ate the bird.

I am the mouse.

He looks as if he is the cat who ate the bird (mouse) and found that the bird (mouse) wasn't exactly what he thought it would be. In fact, I'm certain that it's disappointment drawing down the corners of his lips.

"Jareth," I urge, my hand still enclosed in his. He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue.

"I explained it to you ten years ago," he sighs, as if impatient with me.

My heart flutters inside me like a caged animal.

Voices, tense and shrill, panicked.

"How did she get up here?!"

"I don't know! I don't know! The door is always locked, she was heavily sedated, she was restrained! I don't know how she could have-"

"Sarah! Sarah, come down from there! Sarah, come here, the doctors will help you, Sarah, please!" Karen's voice, thick with panic.

"Sarah, you don't have to go just because he tells you to." Toby is bawling, tears streaming down his face. "Don't do it, Sarah, don't let him win. It's not your fault! I'm sorry I was mean to you!"

They've all burst through the little door that opens up from the stairwell onto the roof, they are all standing there, an orderly, a nurse, a doctor with a clipboard, Karen and Toby, and they are all wide-eyed, standing back, arms extending toward me, pleading.

Why are they pleading?

My mouth is so dry that speaking is a burden. "What's happening to me?"

"Sarah," he says gently, and reaches over to smooth my hair away from my face. "We are on the verge of escape. Don't be afraid."

I recoil from his touch. "Afraid of what? What are you escaping from?"

A wave of vertigo - he keeps me from collapsing with the strong arm around my waist.

I teeter on the edge of the building. A quick glance down at my feet: my toes are pointing off the edge of the roof, my body swaying. The breeze feels so much stronger up here.

The thing is, I could just jump.

I wouldn't.

But I could.

Nothing would ever hurt again.

"Let go, Sarah," he says.

"I - you know that I can't!" My motor functions are sluggish. He holds me against himself, nips at my neck with icy lips. "Why are you doing this to me?" My tears freeze on my face. He looks outward, into the sky.

"Look," he says, "I have moved the stars for you."

I turn my face to the sky, to the moon hanging heavy and full and dark and red, and I see a rift in the sky where there is no light. I never knew darkness could be so absolute. A wordless, primitive terror mounts within me, threatening to strip me of my fragile grasp on my own mind. "Why?" I ask.

"You know why."

"What?" I cry, eyes brimming. "Jareth- no!" His name is a supplication falling from my lips, and I repeat it over and over, hoping that it will soothe him, will move him to extend mercy.

"I'm coming," I scream, turning toward the small group of people watching me, my family waiting on the roof with outstretched arms. "I love you! I'm coming!"

"Sarah," he chides gently. He gathers me in a bridal carry, supporting beneath my back and my knees, and I cannot get away, utterly lack the energy to struggle. I am a feather in his arms. The scarlet silk streams off behind us, pinned to my body by his arms. "You must let them go. Stay with me."

I begin to respond when I feel an awful lurch in my stomach, a sudden prickling in my limbs, and I know that it is done.

"No!" I scream, sobbing, hitting him wherever I can reach. "No, Jareth, no! What have you done?"

Screams echo in my ears.

I am swan-diving off the precipice, hospital gown loose and fluttering around my body like wings. I am a dove with a broken wing, plummeting to earth to the fanfare of my own name, wailed over and over.

"What have you done?" I scream again and again. "What have you done to me? What have you done?"

"Precious thing," he murmurs in my ear, the sickness in my stomach something I have never known before. He ignores the pathetic assault of my fists. My ears are filled with a strange rushing. "My avenging angel. You aren't the first to fall to earth."

I can't breathe, can't see, can only hear his voice, can only feel him against me, supporting my weirdly weightless body, carrying me on. "Why?" I ask, and my voice is thick with tears.

"I want to tell you a story," he says, still moving forward, one foot in front of the next. I can hear the heels of his boots on the ground because there is nothing else to be heard. The sky is the only thing in my vision, the enormity of it, swirling galaxies and blood-red shadow-moon, the terrible rift inching ever closer. It should be impossible, that we should be approaching the rift in the sky, but I see it with my own eyes, incontrovertible albeit tear-blurred.

The ground grows ever closer; my arms, outstretched but insufficient to catch at the air. The wind whistles in my ears but I hear nothing but my own heartbeat, relentlessly keeping time through my breakneck descent.

"Stay with me, Sarah," he says firmly when I look up into his eyes. "If you don't stay with me, I won't be able to finish the story. You wouldn't want it to go untold."

Concrete pavers, snapping gown-

He shakes me roughly. "Stay here, Sarah. Nothing remains for you there." The sky overhead fills me with fatigue, exhaustion settling into my bones.

"Once," he says, his voice low and musical - how did I never notice the melody of his voice before? - "there was a little girl. The little girl was very brave, but she was also very stupid, and bravery and stupidity are often a deadly pair.

"She was dissatisfied with her lot in life, and there is a danger in dissatisfaction that she could not understand, for she was still very young. She made a wish, and with her wish, she unknowingly interrupted the natural order of things, attracting the attention of a very powerful king.

"Wishes are slippery, shrewd things, and the little girl soon found that the granting of her wish did not bring her the happiness she sought. Unfortunately, as is the way of things, wishes cannot simply be undone, so she put aside her fear and challenged the king, and he gave her an impossible task. If she could solve his labyrinth within thirteen hours, he would allow her to revoke her wish.

"The little girl was surprisingly resilient: she danced with the king and completed the task in the allotted time, and at the crucial moment, the king revealed to her that he was impressed with her tenacity and intrigued with her cleverness. He offered an alternate prize, the value of which was beyond estimation: she should stay with him and be his queen, for he had fallen in love with the girl.

"But she spurned his gift, choosing instead to return to her unremarkable life with a newfound ability to find satisfaction even in the worst situations, but there is also a danger in complacency for which she still lacked understanding. However, in the instant that the little girl refused the king's offer, she severed the last strands that held his kingdom anchored in space and time, and as his castle succumbed to the pull of the elements, her victory would have been complete if not for one single mistake."

I am cold all over, but silent, eyes closed, my cheek against a bare swath of skin on his chest. His voice is so very beautiful that I dare not interrupt. But he seems to be waiting for me to ask the question, so I run my dry tongue over my chapped lips and manage to whisper it up to him.

"What was her mistake?"

"She reached out for the bauble that the king tossed into the air at the moment of his defeat, because, after all, she was only a very little girl, and little girls have a particular susceptibility to their fantasies. The crystal fell to her fingers, but disintegrated as soon as it had brushed the first one, and then she was whisked away to her old life and thought no more about what the touch of the bauble might have meant.

"As most little girls do, she grew up into a young woman, but unlike most little girls, she had allowed a king to slip into her dreams from his own ruined world, to build himself a new castle in and through her subconscious, biding his time. He stole her away during her waking hours and during her sleeping hours, enlisting her help in rebuilding his kingdom. But because the king was living within her rather than ruling alongside her, he grew wild and ruthless, dissatisfied and vengeful, and planted those seeds in her as well, carving out a portion of her innermost being in order to make room there for himself.

"When the young woman finally discovered the king within her, he knew the time of his escape was nigh. As she had come of age, he wooed her and courted her until she had given herself over to him entirely. Finally, on the occasion of their thirteenth meeting, the king was to be freed with her and of her, come what may. At any price."

My tears pool against his skin.

"Do you understand, Sarah?"

I don't understand. I don't understand anything.

My mirror-twin, eyes turning to his in the mirror. The low wailing behind impenetrable walls. His face behind mine in the photograph, wicked smile stealing onto my lips. He, with me and in me, ten long years of waiting borne out in cruel and unthinkable tragedy. It is impossible, and yet I am falling.

It is so very cold.

"I am, as ever, your slave," he whispers in my ear. There is no answering heat from my body, no rash of goosebumps, no elevated heartbeat.

I feel nothing.

"Jareth? What will happen to us?" I ask him. I can hear his heartbeat. It has never occurred to me that he should have a heartbeat. My hair sweeps across his arm, rippling gently in the wind.

The rift is very near. I could nearly reach out and touch its edges, feel where it parts company with the sky.

"You will become the very prettiest star," he says simply, eyes sparkling like sapphires, and takes one last step: he, the void within me, bearing me into the void without-

The ground looms near; I close- (in on my shadow) -my eyes, tuck my head to my breast-

I feel my body cave in on itself, and I cease to exist even as he draws me nearer still and places a kiss on my forehead, sending frost across my skin as shadows pull at us, dissolving us into the aether-

-starstuff-

-nothing.