Chapter Text
15. Epilogue
Soundtrack for Chapter 15:
The Pogues: "Fairytale of New York"
Snow White: "I'm Wishing/One Song"
It took a long while for Sarah to remember to feel the cold. She thought of her mother's comfort and cushioned her sleeping head on her knees and a fold of her dress, but for herself, there was only a cold and a sense of loneliness that became more and more unendurable.
"So," Jareth's voice echoed in the bare room, one instant before she would have called out for him. She could see his reflection dimly in the chrome of the stalls and the tile of the walls, just a shadow of color. "It is done?"
"I told you to wait," Sarah murmured. Against her knee, her mother stirred.
"She's alive?" he asked indignantly.
"You," Linda croaked. She came suddenly upright, using Sarah's body as a ladder, and leaned hard on her shoulder with bony terrible claws. "This is your doing! Loathsome slave. Look what you've done to me!"
"You are rather an object of pity, woman," Jareth's voice replied. "And it gives me pleasure to see you so ruined, so I will look. Don't take this for my obedience. Something's rather wrong with your voice. I believe your power has gone."
"For now," Linda rasped.
"For now," Jareth's voice agreed. "Sarah, why isn't she dead? Do you need me to finish up for you? I will, and I won't even ask a price. She'll find some way to regain what she's lost, and then I'm sure we'll both wish you'd let me end her when we had the chance."
"You're not going to touch her!" Sarah shouted at him.
"I have a bargain for you, Chyaret, if you'll take it," Linda cackled. Her dress hung loose against her shrunken bosom, and her long yellow teeth gnashed together. "Have my daughter. Use her as you will. Use her, drain her, bleed her magic back into me, and I will reward you with a son."
"Your offer is tempting," Jareth considered, and Sarah could feel his hesitation in the pulses of warmth that filled Linda's vicinity, and then retreated. "But she is a woman made, and a witch. She isn't yours to give. No, woman. I'll do nothing for you."
"It's because he sees your power," Linda said, looking down at her daughter and clutching her shoulder so hard Sarah was afraid her mother's fingertips would meet around her clavicle and rip it out. Linda's rheumy eyes were leaking enraged tears. "You have everything and I have nothing. But he will use you and use you up. You still can't control him. But if you give me back a little of the magic you've stolen from me, I will teach you what I know. I will teach you what he taught me. How to cultivate the seed of men into a daughter's body, so that you can make and remake yourself and live forever. And I'll take no revenge. I vow it by my womb's blood."
"Jesus, Mom," Sarah said weakly. She stood up under Linda's terrible weight, her hand pressing her down and making the rising difficult. Then they balanced, and in the next moment, her mother held herself up against Sarah, leaning on her as child might. Her eyes closed, and then opened, and Sarah could see the girl she had once been, saw all her youth and her prime only lacquered over by the old age she had accumulated but never worn.
Sarah saw her own future there.
"No," she said.
Linda let Sarah go. "So. You've chosen each other over me. May it be bitter for you. A year and a day and a week, poison be love when you speak." Her curse seemed to boom in the echoing chamber, icy malficia swirling with it. Sarah shuddered as Linda walked away from her, slow but certain in the power of her curse.
I wish you were dead, Sarah almost said out loud to her. But Jareth was there, and Jareth was listening, and he would jump at the chance to grant her wishes., so she kept her mouth shut. The shadowy reflection of him coalesced into a core of bright and fiery solidity, and caught her before she fell down from sheer outrage.
"I told you," he said. He shook his head and bit his lip, but his arms around her were warm, and so was he.
"Do you need to talk about her?" Sarah asked him.
"No," he said, and his human face wore a look of human fatigue. "Not now. Perhaps not ever. I'd rather let it go." Leaning on him, or perhaps both of them supporting each other, they went out into the world.
"It's almost dawn," he mentioned, as they joined the general queue for medical attention. Sarah looked at the windows, where the black of night and the yellow of sodium lights was tinted just the faintest blue of approaching sunrise.
"Take me outside," Sarah asked. "I want to see it."
"It's cold and your coat is nowhere to be found," he warned her.
"I don't care," she said. "You're warm enough for both of us. Keep me warm, Jareth. Keep me warm, and I'll keep you fed. Is it a bargain?"
"Yes," he said. He scooped her into his arms and carried her like a bride into the threshold of the world, where the sun was rising, and the light was pouring down the white and icy streets, a sunrise in all the colors of fire yawning down the avenue. Solstice-day. The dawn had come. The long night was over.
Of course, Sarah thought later, it would have been very convenient if the story had simply ended there, with all prisoners freed and the living rejoicing to see another day, and the hag of night in the form of her mother banished to a suitable oubliette. The problem was, real life never quite worked so neatly.
The paramedics in their red jackets had pounced upon Sarah as she stood in the cold, diagnosing her with shock, mild hypothermia, some second-degree burns, a zygomatic fracture, a radial sprain, and several other complicated medical terms that passed her by. Jareth, they had ignored, either seeming to assume he had a right to be there, or just not seeing him. It had made Sarah laugh a bit under her breath. After bundling her into an ambulance with several other singed-looking individuals with various degrees of not-life-threatening injury, she was dropped off at a local hospital where, weary and unable to lie, she gave them her father's number. Several hours of poking, prodding, injections and bandaging later, she was left in a room off the ER floor with her injured wrist strapped to her chest and a strange hardened gum molded over her broken tooth until a competent dentist could look at it. And she had been warm, blessedly warm, and Jareth, in the unobtrusive form of an owl, had nestled in the curve of her hip under the blankets, safe and sound and sleeping. It felt better than five thousand orgasms, because she was achingly tired, and could rest.
She had dozed like that for a while, waking with a sudden start when she felt eyes on her. A man stood silhouetted in darkness against the window's daylight.
"Hello, ugly," he said.
The man's voice was slightly muffled from the bandages that covered half of his face. He had a nose-splint on, and these combined dressings made him look somewhat like a low-rent version of the Phantom of the Opera.
She jerked upright, hindered slightly by the soft braces around her knees. Against her, she felt Jareth startle, but she put her hand against him under the bedclothes, warning him to quiet. The other beds remained still, their sleepers occupied with dreams that perhaps were not quite natural.
"Hello, Polly," Sarah said warily. "Are you here to hurt me?"
"No," he said. "I came to talk." He approached and handed her the bed's remote. As he did so, something soft brushed her. It was a thick lock of long ash-blond hair clenched in his fist. She made a noise of inquiry as the bed came up gracefully against her spine.
"They had to cut it off," he explained, waving at the back of his close-shaved head. He sat beside her and ran his fingers over and over his severed ponytail, like it was in pain and needed his comfort.
"It'll grow back," Sarah said soothingly. And then in that same tone, "Why aren't you going to go for revenge? You're in better shape than me. Don't you want it? You probably won't get another chance, you know." Under the blankets, the owl's body tensed against her, ready to fly with fury and power, but she cupped his head in her palm.
Polly looked away again, out at the day-bright window. "No. I made you a vow. Anyway, even if I wanted to, what's the point? My parents are dead, and there's nothing that can fix that." He wound his hair over and over his knuckles and squeezed.
"But maybe you saved a life tonight," Sarah said gently, after long seconds had passed in his anguished silence. "Maybe lots of lives. That's a good thing, Apollonaire." Her voice stuttered over his name, but she wanted to give it to him.
He only laughed, harshly. "If you're appealing to my conscience, you can save it. If Mother and Father taught me anything, it's that the only thing that matters is power and powerlessness. Winning and losing. I lost tonight. You won." Slowly, painfully, he had gotten down on his knees.
"What are you doing?" she had asked. Apollonaire on his knees was dreadful and unpropitious.
"Pledging myself to you. You're Queen of our coven now."
"I don't want it!" Sarah protested incredulously. "Get up!" she commanded, but he fought her power, and stayed in place, though the muscles of his thighs jumped and quivered.
"My will's as strong as yours, Sarah Williams," he panted. The lost lonely skein of his hair slipped down to the floor, but he kept his eyes on her, defiant in submission.
"Why does it have to be me?" she had said. "You're a better witch than I am. I can't even command you. You do it, Polly!"
"You think I don't want it?" he had hissed. "You think I haven't dreamed of restoring the glory of the Vaan Knecht name, and proving that we're more than just a peculiarity, more than wrong-sexed freaks? It's right in my grasp but I can't have it!"
"Why not? What's stopping you?"
"Bootis," he replied. "My father's demon. Mine now, I suppose. I'm not sure what you were doing up on that dais with… yours, but I was trying to save my own skin. All of the rest of us made bargains and contracts with our family servants, and we had no leverage. I don't want to think of the mischief that will happen if I become King of the Coven with Bootis pulling my strings.
"My familiar spirit is as strong as yours, and his ambition is as great. The other witches left are in a similar fix. Only you, with yours—it's the most powerful demon any coven has ever associated with. And you made it submit to you." Apollonaire shook his head. "All of us need you to lead us. You're the only one who can keep the balance. You're the only one with any power that matters anymore. The rest of the spirits will obey it, and it obeys you. You're free."
"Fine," she said, trying to find the right words for the sense of the moment, and wishing she weren't laid up to deliver them. "Shit. Yes. Get up. I don't like you and I don't trust you, but yes, I'll do it. I'll lead. But I'm going to need your help."
"Naturally," he said, standing, the skein of hair back in his hand. "I'm going to stay near you, so you can borrow my power when you want it. And when things are a bit more settled, we'll reconvene the survivors, and re-establish the coven. We have enemies outside and inside, and we'll all be stronger together."
"Where's Nan? Is she..." Sarah had asked, though a bit belatedly, considering everything.
"Not a scratch," said Polly. "The lures I set on you backfired, didn't they? She might not forgive me for that, but she will if you tell her to."
"Polly," she asked, as he turned to go. "If you had known about the Elf and the Goblin King and everything else before tonight, would you still have done the things you did? Would you still have set the lures?"
"I would have set more," he said, the bandaging on his face pulling his grin lopsided. "Or I would have killed you in that vestibule before you had a chance to know your own strength. But that's not how it went. One more thing, Sarah."
He paused and put the long lock of ash-blond hair in her hand. "That's the token of my submission. You could do me wondrous harm with that. Don't let the Goblin King have it. And don't let him have you. Not until you know what you could be without him. He may not control you now, but if you let him stay as close to you as he's been all night, he'll control you just as surely. You're not your mother. Don't make your mother's mistakes."
"He's here now," Sarah said, exasperated. "He's been listening to every word you say."
"As if I didn't know that," he said flippantly. "Remember, if you need me, call. Or tug my hair. Just as good." And then he had gone, and she hadn't spoken another word to Jareth, and she had slept and slept for hours with Polly's hair clasped in her fist, until her father came, Toby riding his hip, to collect her and take her home.
"I'm looking forward to riding in the car," Jareth said, surveying her with untoward interest as she struggled to pull on the t-shirt and sweatpants her father had brought for her to wear. She was the last one of the patients in this bed-lined room to be discharged, because it had taken Robert so long to come for her. "Shall I be an owl, or perhaps a little coal, warm as bathwater, snuggled into your navel?" He had helped her gently, gently, to work her t-shirt over her head and injured arm, and managed not to stare too much at her naked breasts in the process. As he re-fastened her sling over shirt and sweater, Sarah was silent. She was thinking. She didn't want to share her thoughts, but she had to. The car ride home with her father was going to be fraught with questions that Sarah had no idea how to answer, unless it was with lies. She didn't want to lie to her father. She didn't want to explain Jareth to her father. In any event, in the form of ember or owl or man or pillar of fire and darkness, Jareth was not going to be there with her in that car with the only two people in the whole world who could be used to hurt her.
"You don't need to worry about the car ride, because you're not going. Stop, let me do that myself," she said irritably, as he put on her socks for her and slid her extra pair of boots—or rather, the second mismatched pair she'd created by leaving the proper mates behind at home—on her feet.
"Please," he said, on his knees at her feet, and resting his hands on her soles, and she realized he knew what she'd decided.
He was quiet a long time, head bent. "Sarah, please don't abandon me." He looked up at her through his stormy nimbus of hair, chin quivering. "Not again. Not after everything I've done for you. Please. Don't throw me away." He bent further forward and pressed two kisses to the very bottoms of her feet, devout, aching, fearful.
"Don't be so dramatic," Sarah said in exasperation. "I'm not abandoning you. I intend to keep our bargain. You're my demon, and I'm your witch. Nothing's changing that. But Polly was right. I'm still too inexperienced to handle you. I need time."
"How much time?"
"Three years, maybe four."
Jareth stood and whirled away with an angry toss of his head, refusing to look at her. "Or never. What's going to happen to me? You promised to feed me. Am I to starve while you're away?"
"I gave you more than enough blood to last a decade when I kissed you last night. Or did you use it all up making wicked magic to entrap me? But if that's not enough, here." She went to the narrow alcove where the blood-soaked rags of her white dress had been more or less made to drape over a wire hanger, and threw it at his feet. "That's for you."
"It's not enough," he said sullenly.
"Make it enough!" Sarah shouted at him, and then gentled her voice. "And when it's gone, come see me, and I'll give you what you need. Don't you understand? It's not just that you're bad for me. I'm bad for you. I'm selfish and childish and I care more about winning than I do about being good. Polly was right. Hell, my mother was right. I can't be trusted with you. I'm afraid I'll hurt people. I'm afraid I'll hurt you. And… I'm afraid you'll help me do it, too."
Jareth had gathered the folds of splotched tulle into his arms and he lay his cheek against them. "If I agree to this, what will you give me?"
Sarah thought. "Hope," she said. "I'll never love any man the way I love you. Not ever. You're my own. You're mine. What's that saying pagans have? Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again?"
"Hippy treacle," he said, "But I catch your gist. Do you promise not to abandon me? Promise? You won't forget me? You won't put me in a drawer and lock me away like so much junk? Please, I need to know. I will literally die without you. Unless I take another witch as my mistress, and that would hurt me… almost as much."
She embraced him, sorely tempted to take it all back, all her refusal, all her resistance, all her fears—but he'd taught her first, what was said was said.
"Never," she said. "Now kiss me, if it please you. Make me regret this."
He cupped her face between his hands, thumb running lightly over the agonizing pain in her cheekbone, and kissed her and kissed her as if he'd never get enough. He was fire for her, and she drowned in his fire, felt the strength of him move into the very roots of every hair on her skin, pricking at every nerve-ending, and soothing his singe with molten waves of gold.
And as quickly as it began, it was over, and he disappeared in a flash of feathers and flames.
"Nuts," Sarah said suddenly in the second hour of the interminable car ride home.
"What?" Robert Williams pounced on the first scrap of conversation his unusually-silent daughter had offered. "What is it, sweetheart?"
"Nothing." She sighed. She'd left Aunt Bub's book behind in New York. "I wish I hadn't," she muttered to herself. She looked out the window at the snow-covered landscape, at flashing yellow emergency-markers, at the trees and the grass buried in ice. Toby babbled happily from the backseat, wanting to be included in the conversation.
Plucking at a loose thread in her sling, her fingers found something flexible and oblong tucked between her arm and her chest. It was The Bloody Chamber. In it, bookmarked to "The Erl-King"—a story which in years later would always send Sarah into inappropriate paroxysms of laughter at the fairy king's comeuppance,—was her chiffon hair-ribbon.
"What's that?" Robert said with patient good cheer, as she unfolded the book and looked at the unusual bookmark. There were words burnt into it near the hem, infinitesimal, precise, smelling of spice.
BELOVED. WE PLAY OUR GAME A THIRD TIME. EXPECT ME THE WINNER. EXPECT ME. J.
Sarah swore under her breath. The Goblin King had found a loophole in their bargain. He hadn't promised not to grant any of her wishes. And if she called him to task for it, her respite from him would be at an end. She tried not to think about the weary future and watching every word she said. She had hoped for three years' grace—three years to grow older and wiser, three years to grow more powerful… and three years to prepare herself to lose to Jareth. It was not an encouraging thought.
"Dad," she said quietly, rubbing the ribbon between her finger and thumb. "I want to tell you about what happened last night. I want to tell you everything. It's weird and horrible and wonderful, and I want to tell you, but I'm afraid of what you'll think."
"Don't be afraid," her father said kindly.
"But what if you don't love me as much anymore?"
"Sarah," her father said, and the car skidded slightly as he took his eyes off the road momentarily to give her a serious look. "There's nothing you could ever say or do that would make me stop loving you. Don't you know, princess, my heart belongs to you? Always. Tell me what you want to, or don't. I'll still love you."
Comforted, Sarah clapped the book shut and slid it back beneath her sling.
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl whose stepmother always made her stay at home with the baby," Sarah began.
The Fairest One of All:A Yuletide Retelling of Snow White
December 5, 2015 - October 17, 2016