Exchange Fic #11: Shakespeare
The actual identity of the writer will remain secret until all the submissions are in and posted.
****
Title: Shakespeare
Author: slobber_neck
Recipient: wizzcat01
Prompt: 1) Jareth's influence has never left Sarah's life, he's always been there in one form or another (physical or metaphorical), guiding her path, but is she ever going to acknowledge it?
2) A story in which it's Sarah surprising (or shocking) Jareth in some way. Be it her turning up unexpected in his world or maybe doing something completely out of character for her... the choice is yours!
3) Write a Jareth and Sarah story, but with very subtle undertones of 'Jargle', never mention it directly, or acknowledge it EVER as a truth, but during the course of the story slip in fleeting glances or ambiguous references, it still needs to read like a normal JxS story to those that never needed the brain bleach.
In a way, I tried to do all three…
Rating: E for Everyone.
Plot Summary/Author's Notes: Long before the Goblin King entered Sarah’s life, there was Shakespeare. A prequel of sorts.
In a thousand years, not one human had ever solved his labyrinth. Of course, he hadn’t made it easy for them either. He’d thwarted their every move; ruined all their chances. He’d done his utmost to prevent them from completing the labyrinth. It was his duty, after all. But like all great things, the calls of the desperate began to wane. The Goblin King was no longer called upon to take away the unwanted; he was forgotten. For a thousand more years, he reigned over his subjects, never-aging and wild, with absolute silence from the above world. And then there was her.
She had been a child when she’d first discovered the book; when she’d first said the words. He’d known she hadn’t meant them; she had nothing to give to him. Instead of presenting himself as protocol dictated, he watched her from afar. She’d thought it was a stage play, a silly story that she liked to embellish upon and act out to suit her whims. She didn’t think it was real. Jareth found it diverting at first - to think the Goblin King would ever fall in love with a mortal! The absurdity of the notion entertained him. And yet he found, for all her oddities, that he couldn’t look away from her. He’d become so entranced with the mortal child, this Sarah Williams, that he couldn’t leave her alone. He’d started to wonder if she hadn’t begun spinning a spell herself with her own words.
Then, as suddenly as her obsession with the labyrinth and its all important words had begun, it ended. Jareth, the Goblin King, felt the loss acutely, as though part of his very being had been torn asunder. He could scarce bare the separation and decided to break all protocol and seek her out. To seek out a mortal child! What madness it was. Yet he felt himself twist and change, humanoid limbs shrinking, the spines of feathers bursting through his skin. As an owl he would find her in her mortal world. As an owl he would watch.
And there she was, no older than twelve, a mere wisp of a girl with long, tangled black hair and sharp green eyes. Her eyes missed nothing when he fluttered to perch on the stone pillar by the lake - they narrowed at his approach. When she was satisfied that he was nothing more than an owl, she turned her sullen face toward the water. Broken. It was the first word that came to mind when he saw her there. Something was amiss. Something had changed in her life and she was not what she once was. There was a loneliness that hung about her aura, a sort of silent misery that he could all but taste. Jareth decided that seeing her alone by the lake was not giving him the full picture. He followed her, flight by flight, as she walked through the empty streets, passing closed storefronts as she went. He hovered as she entered a large white house, even as her sheepdog barked endlessly at him. He circled the house until he saw her again, and there he waited outside her bedroom window.
Jareth watched her for days and soon he learned the source of her melancholy. Her parents were fighting; an ugly, uneven war of emotion. Her mother sought fame in a far away city while her father sought the comforts of another woman. Sarah was being forced into a world of adult decisions without a fair understanding of the subject. She was being forced to grow up too soon and she was forced to do it alone. Jareth felt a kinship with the girl. His heart, so old and crusted over, ached for her. Her sadness consumed him as much as it did her. He remembered a time, so very long ago, when he was forced to put aside childish things in favour of a war he didn’t understand. He remembered when his father never returned from battle and his kingdom was lost due to his own childishness. He remembered the loneliness that he had made himself forget.
When he found her by the lake again, no tears adorned her face. Her strength was silent, locked inside her newfound independence. Almost involuntarily, Jareth felt himself reshape and stretch; his form molding into something new. He walked out of the wooded cove he’d been watching her from and approached her, his aged heart hammering in anticipation. Sarah heard his approach, the slight sinking of damp grass beneath his feet, and looked up, startled. She stared at him, wide-eyed; her features alight with fear and fascination. He knew what he must look like to her, a boy a little older than her with feathery-light golden hair tickling the edge of his soft jaw, his slanted blue eyes burning with an unnatural brightness. He lowered himself beside her, never taking his eyes from her face even as she looked away, an adolescent blush of embarrassment staining her cheeks. He wasn’t surprised that she found him attractive; she was only human, after all.
Jareth dangled his bare feet in the water of the lake and she turned to stare at him. They sat in silence until she could bear it no longer. Her chin jutted forward, a signature that he would understand in time to mean that she was forcing her courage from somewhere deep within, and turned her eyes upon him. They were a soft moss green ablaze with a curiosity that could not be contained. Jareth felt his soft, young face open with a smile, which seemed to unsettle Sarah, but nothing could abate her courage once mustered. Jareth mused internally that this was a trait he very much admired.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice as light as summer rain.
Jareth’s smile deepened and he stretched his face upward, toward the summer sky. “A friend,” he said simply.
She surprised him with a derisive snort. “I don’t have any friends.”
His eyes came down from the sky and fell heavily on her profile. All he found there was a tangible loneliness that he longed to wipe away. He thought of all his thousands of years, king of a kingdom of fools and castaways, and asked himself if he could count even a single one as a friend. He couldn’t, not really, not even the dwarf who merely suffered his companionship out of obligation. Not one of them would love him if it were not for their fealty. He too knew true loneliness. He too knew what it was to live without friendship.
“Then let us be friends, Sarah.”
Her head snapped around and her eyes narrowed suspiciously as they fell upon him.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know many things,” Jareth replied with the smallest of smiles.
“What do you want?”
Jareth could feel her fear mounting. Like a bird cornered by a predator, he could feel that she was about to take flight. He made no move to touch her lest he frighten her further.
“Only to help you,” he whispered.
Sarah seemed to consider his words, mulling over them and trying to decide how they tasted.
“What if you can’t?” she asked at length.
“I’m sure I can. Trust me.”
Sarah shook her head and pulled her feet from the lake, curling her body into a protective ball as though to steel herself against the very concept of trust.
“I don’t even know your name.”
Jareth studied her face, knowing that whatever he said next would either ensnare her or scare her away, yet he could not openly give her his name. It simply wasn’t done.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
The faintest of smiles tugged at the corners of her lips. “Shakespeare.”
“That can be my name, if you like,” Jareth said.
“But it’s not your name! You only quoted him!”
“Who’s to say I’m not the man himself?”
Sarah’s face lightened further. “He’s been dead for hundreds of years!”
“Has he indeed?”
Her smile was like the sun, so brilliant it hurt to look upon. Jareth tried with all the might of his mind to convince himself that she was a mortal, just a child no less, but to no avail. He had never seen anything quite so radiant and she would not always be a child.
“You’re so weird,” she declared.
Jareth smiled back at her and shrugged his shoulders. He fell back against the soft carpet of grass while Sarah and he talked more about Shakespeare, and acting, and dreams. Jareth watched her walk away, into the waning sunlight, and knew that this was the beginning of an impossible friendship.
He appeared when she most needed a friend, someone to confide in. He offered her gentle advice, but mostly he encouraged her to dream. He encouraged her to nurture that seed of imagination that was so vivid and alive. He wanted nothing but her happiness. But all friendships are tested at some point; this one was no different. Years passed and it was the day before her father’s wedding. Sarah was distraught; she came to the park and sat at the lake, only to stand up immediately and pace about. Jareth approached her, as he had so many times before. When her eyes met his, he knew immediately that she was upset.
“Sarah.”
It was all he had said, but the mere act of speaking had been enough to set her off.
“I don’t want him to marry her,” she said.
“Have you told him that?”
“No! How can I possibly tell him that? She’s pregnant.”
Sarah spat the last word with venom. Jareth studied her for a moment. Her green eyes were stormily staring into the lake as she tossed stones in violently. Jareth glanced up at the sky, which was threatening a storm as vicious as that in Sarah’s eyes. It was in his power to offer, he knew, but would she accept?
“There’s always a way, Sarah,” he said softly, still staring at the sky.
Her head whipped around to look at him. When Jareth lowered his own eyes to look upon her, he found that she was watching him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“You need only ask.”
“What?”
She was becoming both increasingly angrier and panicked at Jareth’s words, although he couldn’t be sure why.
“I can make all of your problems disappear, Sarah.”
Sarah drew in a shaky breath at this and began to back away from Jareth, her eyes never leaving his face. Jareth knew that this was a critical moment and that what he was offering her something he hadn’t ever before.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Jareth smiled, but it was thin and without warmth. “I am who I have always been, Sarah.”
“Shakespeare,” she breathed.
Jareth’s smile deepened as he approached her. “A child’s mistake, but you’re not a child anymore, Sarah. Open your eyes.”
“Stay away from me!”
It was now or never. Jareth decided to give her what she wanted most; she had only to accept.
“Look, Sarah,” Jareth said, a crystal coming to his fingertips. “Look what I’m offering you.”
Sarah stared at the crystal in his fingertips, her eyes following the girl with dark hair and a beautiful dress, dancing. A girl who had stepped out her very dreams. If Sarah looked hard enough, she could see that she knew the girl. The girl was her. She shook her head and raised her eyes to look at Jareth.
“I wish I’d never met you,” she whispered, the words barely realized on her breath.
There was a sharpness, a pain, in Jareth’s heart at her words. She had surprised him in her rejection, but more so in her denial of his very existence. The crystal burst in Jareth’s hand, shattering into fragments of Sarah’s dreams. She’d meant her words and there would be no denying it, no bending of the rules this time. Wishes are but dreams realized.
“As you wish,” he said softly, his pain bearing over his humiliation.
He began to fade from view, starting at his toes and slowly travelling up to his head. Sarah’s eyes widened and her face fell as he disappeared from view. She groped through the air where Jareth had been only moments ago. Perhaps she realized her mistake, Jareth mused.
“Wait! I didn’t mean it!”
He had no choice but to leave only the quietest of whispers behind: “What’s said is said.”
Sarah’s heart ached at the loss of her friend, her Shakespeare. She ran through the woods, calling the only name she knew for him. She cried to take back her words. She cried to accept his offer. But, cry as she might, her words went unanswered. Sarah’s tears soaked through her pillowcase that night, until sleep claimed her. And it was then, when sleep had claimed her that he came to her. It wasn’t breaking any rules, not really. She had forgotten about him by now, as she had wished. But he had not forgotten about her and Jareth was certain to ensure that he would not be so easily forgotten.
Sarah awoke to sunbeams dancing on her bed. Although she felt well-rested, she also felt as though she hadn’t slept well at all. There was this feeling niggling at the back of her mind, as though she had dreamed something wonderful but couldn’t quite place it. No, try as she might, the dream was gone. She rolled over in her bed, a feeling of dissatisfaction washing over her, and hit her elbow on something hard. Angrily, Sarah sat up and picked up the offending item, ready to hurl it across the room. Instead she turned it in her hands to discover that it was a small, red book that seemed vaguely familiar. She opened the pages, her eyes eagerly skimming over the story within, until she saw something that made her stop. It was a single line, hastily hand-written in a narrow, curving scrawl across the top of the page.
A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.
Sarah closed the book and held it against her chest, tears forming in her eyes unbidden. Confused, she wiped them away.
“Why am I crying?” she asked herself, “It’s only Shakespeare.”
****
Title: Shakespeare
Author: slobber_neck
Recipient: wizzcat01
Prompt: 1) Jareth's influence has never left Sarah's life, he's always been there in one form or another (physical or metaphorical), guiding her path, but is she ever going to acknowledge it?
2) A story in which it's Sarah surprising (or shocking) Jareth in some way. Be it her turning up unexpected in his world or maybe doing something completely out of character for her... the choice is yours!
3) Write a Jareth and Sarah story, but with very subtle undertones of 'Jargle', never mention it directly, or acknowledge it EVER as a truth, but during the course of the story slip in fleeting glances or ambiguous references, it still needs to read like a normal JxS story to those that never needed the brain bleach.
In a way, I tried to do all three…
Rating: E for Everyone.
Plot Summary/Author's Notes: Long before the Goblin King entered Sarah’s life, there was Shakespeare. A prequel of sorts.
In a thousand years, not one human had ever solved his labyrinth. Of course, he hadn’t made it easy for them either. He’d thwarted their every move; ruined all their chances. He’d done his utmost to prevent them from completing the labyrinth. It was his duty, after all. But like all great things, the calls of the desperate began to wane. The Goblin King was no longer called upon to take away the unwanted; he was forgotten. For a thousand more years, he reigned over his subjects, never-aging and wild, with absolute silence from the above world. And then there was her.
She had been a child when she’d first discovered the book; when she’d first said the words. He’d known she hadn’t meant them; she had nothing to give to him. Instead of presenting himself as protocol dictated, he watched her from afar. She’d thought it was a stage play, a silly story that she liked to embellish upon and act out to suit her whims. She didn’t think it was real. Jareth found it diverting at first - to think the Goblin King would ever fall in love with a mortal! The absurdity of the notion entertained him. And yet he found, for all her oddities, that he couldn’t look away from her. He’d become so entranced with the mortal child, this Sarah Williams, that he couldn’t leave her alone. He’d started to wonder if she hadn’t begun spinning a spell herself with her own words.
Then, as suddenly as her obsession with the labyrinth and its all important words had begun, it ended. Jareth, the Goblin King, felt the loss acutely, as though part of his very being had been torn asunder. He could scarce bare the separation and decided to break all protocol and seek her out. To seek out a mortal child! What madness it was. Yet he felt himself twist and change, humanoid limbs shrinking, the spines of feathers bursting through his skin. As an owl he would find her in her mortal world. As an owl he would watch.
And there she was, no older than twelve, a mere wisp of a girl with long, tangled black hair and sharp green eyes. Her eyes missed nothing when he fluttered to perch on the stone pillar by the lake - they narrowed at his approach. When she was satisfied that he was nothing more than an owl, she turned her sullen face toward the water. Broken. It was the first word that came to mind when he saw her there. Something was amiss. Something had changed in her life and she was not what she once was. There was a loneliness that hung about her aura, a sort of silent misery that he could all but taste. Jareth decided that seeing her alone by the lake was not giving him the full picture. He followed her, flight by flight, as she walked through the empty streets, passing closed storefronts as she went. He hovered as she entered a large white house, even as her sheepdog barked endlessly at him. He circled the house until he saw her again, and there he waited outside her bedroom window.
Jareth watched her for days and soon he learned the source of her melancholy. Her parents were fighting; an ugly, uneven war of emotion. Her mother sought fame in a far away city while her father sought the comforts of another woman. Sarah was being forced into a world of adult decisions without a fair understanding of the subject. She was being forced to grow up too soon and she was forced to do it alone. Jareth felt a kinship with the girl. His heart, so old and crusted over, ached for her. Her sadness consumed him as much as it did her. He remembered a time, so very long ago, when he was forced to put aside childish things in favour of a war he didn’t understand. He remembered when his father never returned from battle and his kingdom was lost due to his own childishness. He remembered the loneliness that he had made himself forget.
When he found her by the lake again, no tears adorned her face. Her strength was silent, locked inside her newfound independence. Almost involuntarily, Jareth felt himself reshape and stretch; his form molding into something new. He walked out of the wooded cove he’d been watching her from and approached her, his aged heart hammering in anticipation. Sarah heard his approach, the slight sinking of damp grass beneath his feet, and looked up, startled. She stared at him, wide-eyed; her features alight with fear and fascination. He knew what he must look like to her, a boy a little older than her with feathery-light golden hair tickling the edge of his soft jaw, his slanted blue eyes burning with an unnatural brightness. He lowered himself beside her, never taking his eyes from her face even as she looked away, an adolescent blush of embarrassment staining her cheeks. He wasn’t surprised that she found him attractive; she was only human, after all.
Jareth dangled his bare feet in the water of the lake and she turned to stare at him. They sat in silence until she could bear it no longer. Her chin jutted forward, a signature that he would understand in time to mean that she was forcing her courage from somewhere deep within, and turned her eyes upon him. They were a soft moss green ablaze with a curiosity that could not be contained. Jareth felt his soft, young face open with a smile, which seemed to unsettle Sarah, but nothing could abate her courage once mustered. Jareth mused internally that this was a trait he very much admired.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice as light as summer rain.
Jareth’s smile deepened and he stretched his face upward, toward the summer sky. “A friend,” he said simply.
She surprised him with a derisive snort. “I don’t have any friends.”
His eyes came down from the sky and fell heavily on her profile. All he found there was a tangible loneliness that he longed to wipe away. He thought of all his thousands of years, king of a kingdom of fools and castaways, and asked himself if he could count even a single one as a friend. He couldn’t, not really, not even the dwarf who merely suffered his companionship out of obligation. Not one of them would love him if it were not for their fealty. He too knew true loneliness. He too knew what it was to live without friendship.
“Then let us be friends, Sarah.”
Her head snapped around and her eyes narrowed suspiciously as they fell upon him.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know many things,” Jareth replied with the smallest of smiles.
“What do you want?”
Jareth could feel her fear mounting. Like a bird cornered by a predator, he could feel that she was about to take flight. He made no move to touch her lest he frighten her further.
“Only to help you,” he whispered.
Sarah seemed to consider his words, mulling over them and trying to decide how they tasted.
“What if you can’t?” she asked at length.
“I’m sure I can. Trust me.”
Sarah shook her head and pulled her feet from the lake, curling her body into a protective ball as though to steel herself against the very concept of trust.
“I don’t even know your name.”
Jareth studied her face, knowing that whatever he said next would either ensnare her or scare her away, yet he could not openly give her his name. It simply wasn’t done.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
The faintest of smiles tugged at the corners of her lips. “Shakespeare.”
“That can be my name, if you like,” Jareth said.
“But it’s not your name! You only quoted him!”
“Who’s to say I’m not the man himself?”
Sarah’s face lightened further. “He’s been dead for hundreds of years!”
“Has he indeed?”
Her smile was like the sun, so brilliant it hurt to look upon. Jareth tried with all the might of his mind to convince himself that she was a mortal, just a child no less, but to no avail. He had never seen anything quite so radiant and she would not always be a child.
“You’re so weird,” she declared.
Jareth smiled back at her and shrugged his shoulders. He fell back against the soft carpet of grass while Sarah and he talked more about Shakespeare, and acting, and dreams. Jareth watched her walk away, into the waning sunlight, and knew that this was the beginning of an impossible friendship.
He appeared when she most needed a friend, someone to confide in. He offered her gentle advice, but mostly he encouraged her to dream. He encouraged her to nurture that seed of imagination that was so vivid and alive. He wanted nothing but her happiness. But all friendships are tested at some point; this one was no different. Years passed and it was the day before her father’s wedding. Sarah was distraught; she came to the park and sat at the lake, only to stand up immediately and pace about. Jareth approached her, as he had so many times before. When her eyes met his, he knew immediately that she was upset.
“Sarah.”
It was all he had said, but the mere act of speaking had been enough to set her off.
“I don’t want him to marry her,” she said.
“Have you told him that?”
“No! How can I possibly tell him that? She’s pregnant.”
Sarah spat the last word with venom. Jareth studied her for a moment. Her green eyes were stormily staring into the lake as she tossed stones in violently. Jareth glanced up at the sky, which was threatening a storm as vicious as that in Sarah’s eyes. It was in his power to offer, he knew, but would she accept?
“There’s always a way, Sarah,” he said softly, still staring at the sky.
Her head whipped around to look at him. When Jareth lowered his own eyes to look upon her, he found that she was watching him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“You need only ask.”
“What?”
She was becoming both increasingly angrier and panicked at Jareth’s words, although he couldn’t be sure why.
“I can make all of your problems disappear, Sarah.”
Sarah drew in a shaky breath at this and began to back away from Jareth, her eyes never leaving his face. Jareth knew that this was a critical moment and that what he was offering her something he hadn’t ever before.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Jareth smiled, but it was thin and without warmth. “I am who I have always been, Sarah.”
“Shakespeare,” she breathed.
Jareth’s smile deepened as he approached her. “A child’s mistake, but you’re not a child anymore, Sarah. Open your eyes.”
“Stay away from me!”
It was now or never. Jareth decided to give her what she wanted most; she had only to accept.
“Look, Sarah,” Jareth said, a crystal coming to his fingertips. “Look what I’m offering you.”
Sarah stared at the crystal in his fingertips, her eyes following the girl with dark hair and a beautiful dress, dancing. A girl who had stepped out her very dreams. If Sarah looked hard enough, she could see that she knew the girl. The girl was her. She shook her head and raised her eyes to look at Jareth.
“I wish I’d never met you,” she whispered, the words barely realized on her breath.
There was a sharpness, a pain, in Jareth’s heart at her words. She had surprised him in her rejection, but more so in her denial of his very existence. The crystal burst in Jareth’s hand, shattering into fragments of Sarah’s dreams. She’d meant her words and there would be no denying it, no bending of the rules this time. Wishes are but dreams realized.
“As you wish,” he said softly, his pain bearing over his humiliation.
He began to fade from view, starting at his toes and slowly travelling up to his head. Sarah’s eyes widened and her face fell as he disappeared from view. She groped through the air where Jareth had been only moments ago. Perhaps she realized her mistake, Jareth mused.
“Wait! I didn’t mean it!”
He had no choice but to leave only the quietest of whispers behind: “What’s said is said.”
Sarah’s heart ached at the loss of her friend, her Shakespeare. She ran through the woods, calling the only name she knew for him. She cried to take back her words. She cried to accept his offer. But, cry as she might, her words went unanswered. Sarah’s tears soaked through her pillowcase that night, until sleep claimed her. And it was then, when sleep had claimed her that he came to her. It wasn’t breaking any rules, not really. She had forgotten about him by now, as she had wished. But he had not forgotten about her and Jareth was certain to ensure that he would not be so easily forgotten.
Sarah awoke to sunbeams dancing on her bed. Although she felt well-rested, she also felt as though she hadn’t slept well at all. There was this feeling niggling at the back of her mind, as though she had dreamed something wonderful but couldn’t quite place it. No, try as she might, the dream was gone. She rolled over in her bed, a feeling of dissatisfaction washing over her, and hit her elbow on something hard. Angrily, Sarah sat up and picked up the offending item, ready to hurl it across the room. Instead she turned it in her hands to discover that it was a small, red book that seemed vaguely familiar. She opened the pages, her eyes eagerly skimming over the story within, until she saw something that made her stop. It was a single line, hastily hand-written in a narrow, curving scrawl across the top of the page.
A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.
Sarah closed the book and held it against her chest, tears forming in her eyes unbidden. Confused, she wiped them away.
“Why am I crying?” she asked herself, “It’s only Shakespeare.”