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Title: The Magic of Siblings
Fandom: Labyrinth
Author: Apache Firecat
Characters: Sarah, Toby
Rating: PG/K+
Summary: Toby calls Sarah, when they're both older, with news.
Word Count: 2,612
Written For: Ficlet Zone 54: Reverse Fandom: Miami Vice: Brother's Keeper and 1 Million Words A to Z: H (Him)
Warnings: Future Fic, Also part of the author's Labyrinth 2 series
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
"You're not marrying her!" Sarah cried out in protest, fury coloring her face and tears filling her big, dark eyes. Not her! Anyone but her! She had scarcely been able to believe it when Toby had began dating that wretched woman the first time around, one of the very "doctors" who had tied her down into an electric chair when she had been younger, before she had been freed of the curse under which the Williams family had fallen in the wake of her true mother's abandonment of them, but this... marrying her?!
"Come on, Toby!" she pleaded, feeling as though the years were falling away, and she was young... Okay, young and scared again. The idea of those wretched doctors who had done everything they could to erase her memories of the only time since her mother's departure in which she had actually felt any kind of semblance of happiness did make her cringe. It did more than make her cringe. It made her... Sarah caught herself looking over her shoulder, gulped, and turned away from the shadows. The shadows held nothing for her, she reminded herself firmly, not friend or threat. The doctors could never touch her again -- she was a legal adult and had been for some years now --, and her friends...
Well, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they were not answering her no matter how loudly she pleaded for them to come or what kind of sacrifices she considered making. She had tried that, after all, the very first time she had been left alone with a babysitting charge. They weren't coming back to her, not easily. Her information was mounting, though, and one day she would be able to find her way back into the labyrinth. Realizing that Toby was talking, and likely had been the entire time her mind had been wandering, Sarah forcibly yanked her mind back to the present, the present conversation, the only being she had presently in her life who still seemed to care about her, and most importantly, the present dilemma. She could not be expected to come around that woman!
What she heard next, though, as she forced herself to again listen to her brother made her blood run cold. "Oh, come on, Sarah, you sound like Mom! You know for two women who can't stand each other, you two definitely agree on a lot, especially where I'm concerned!"
"That's because," Sarah muttered, tightly gripping the phone and forcing herself to refrain from slamming it down, "whereas we disagree on a lot of things, we do both love you!" That was the only thing she could hand to Irene. The woman had never loved Sarah's father, but she did love her children -- her actual children, of which Sarah had never been one. "She still wants to know what happened to the model!"
"Yes," Sarah blinked, "what did happen to the model?" She swiftly ran her mind over her brother's former girlfriends before hesitantly asking, "That's the one you just found -- what, a month ago? -- with her agent and photographer, right?"
"Three photographers, Sarah," grumbled Toby. "In our bed."
"That's why you're doing this, Toby," Sarah said bluntly. "You're not in love with that doctor. She's taking advantage of your broken heart."
"She wouldn't do that. She's a doctor of psychology -- "
"They are not good people, Toby! She is not -- "
"If you're going to insist on talking bad about my fiance, Sarah, I'm going to hang up the phone. Mom said you wouldn't understand."
"Like she does!"
"You two really should talk, you know. There's no telling what else you might agree now that you're both..." Sarah heard her brother pause and knew he was searching for the right words. "...older," he finished lamely.
"I have nothing in common with that woman other than you and the fact that she convinced my father to marry her! She may be older, Toby, but she's not lonely! You've seen those postcards she sends out at every holiday and for any other excuse she can think of! There's a different man every time, just like you and your -- "
"Careful there, sis," Toby warned.
Sarah sighed, making sure to make the expression loud and have it linger over their phones, over all the distance that separated them which clearly still was not enough. "Toby," she said, going back to the original issue, "you're marrying one of the people who strapped me down to an electric chair and -- "
"You were sick, Sarah." There was an audible pause again before he spoke in a gentler, quieter tone, "You still are. I worry about you, you know. I don't know what exactly did happen to make you believe all that crazy Goblin stuff, but -- "
"I'm not sick, Toby!"
"Then why have you never been able to find this supposed Goblin City again?" Sarah closed her eyes against the image of her brother using air quotes. "Why have I never seen this Goblin or this great Goblin King of yours?"
Sarah fell quiet, trying to collect her emotions. She truly did still want a relationship with her brother, and it had been over a year since their last actual conversation. The only reason why she'd even know about his breakup with the model was because it had been all over the London tabloids.
"Sarah," Toby asked in a much softer, heartfelt tone, "if I was kidnapped, why don't I remember?"
"Toby, you were a baby! It's nothing unusual for people to block terrible memories, especially when it's things that happen to them as children! We've been over this. Most children don't remember things that happened to them when they were younger than three and a half years old, and you weren't even that old!"
"It's also common," he replied, "to deflect memories and to create fictitious recollections of events that are better than those actually experienced. I'm sorry your life was so terrible that you felt the need to turn to imaginary Goblins for solace, but I didn't do that to you!" He sighed deeply. "I miss you, Sarah."
She heard the genuine sorrow and heartbreak in his last four words, and her anger drained. Toby couldn't help being an idiot. She'd made that same excuse for him so many times over their years, but it was true. He couldn't help that he'd only been a baby when Jareth had kidnapped him. He couldn't help that babies didn't remember things that happened to him. He couldn't help that he was an idiot, first a plaything for his mother and then, as they had both grown older, a plaything to be passed around by the pretty, sexy girls to whom she introduced him. He couldn't even help that he thought marrying Doctor Fawcett, a monster of a woman who had taken pleasure in her pain and was considerably older than both of them, was the answer to his current predicament, a way to love, a way to hurt Molly, and a way to remind his mother that he was supposedly in control of his own life. She scoffed aloud at that idea before she could restrain herself.
"What was that?"
"What was what?" she asked quickly, feigning innocnce.
"Did you just scoff at the idea that I'm marrying Pamela?"
"No, of course not! It was something on the telly -- "
"Yeah. Right. You don't even watch the telly unless it's news or documentaries."
"It was news -- "
"Uh huh. Look, Sarah, I love you, and I'm inviting you to our wedding. Pam has tried to apologize for her part in what was done to you, but they were trying to help you. Heck, Mother has tried to apologize -- "
"No, she hasn't!" Sarah cried, suddenly gripping her phone so hard that her knuckles turned white.
"She says she has."
"She's lying! Besides, Toby, have you ever thought about how it has to feel to me? I was sixteen and seventeen going through that mess, being chained down, being shocked because I spoke the truth, being -- "
"It wasn't the truth, Sarah. It still isn't. It never has been. It's the truth as you perceive it -- I understand that --, but it's not the truth. They were trying to help you."
"They were getting their jollies by hurting a kid! You know that stuff never stopped until I was able to gain my own independence!" And that, she remembered, had only been because of an old friend of her mother's, a David Jones, an old friend who had mysteriously disappeared immediately after she had been emancipated... That was another mystery into which Sarah was constantly digging, but she had never found the answers.
Her brother again sighed heavily into the phone. "Look, Sarah, I didn't call to fight with you -- "
"I know," she admitted. Suddenly feeling drained, she slumped back against the wall. For just a moment, she thought she heard whispered voices, but she knew it was only the wind outside her flat. "I'm -- " She paused. She didn't want to apologize. She shouldn't have to say she was sorry for defending herself, or for caring about her brother, for caring that he was being used -- But trying to stand up for his rights had never gone well. Indeed standing up to his mother over his right to choose with whom his friends and where he spent his nights had been the very thing that had finally driven her completely away from her family. She had not even been able to see her father for seven years before he died. She closed her eyes as her tears welled up even more sharply than before.
"I know," she said, simply, again instead of all the other things she wanted to yell at him. How could he be such a fool?! But Toby had never been one to think with his head.
"I ain't lost my head," she remembered the Dwarf saying, but Hoglet wasn't here. The Fieries and the Goblins weren't here. Ludo wasn't here nor was Sir Didymus. Jareth most especially wasn't here. There was only her brother, and he was so far away and getting further away with every passing year... "I'm -- " she tried again, but she couldn't say the words. She couldn't say what she didn't mean, not again, not ever again.
Her left hand curled, her fingernails pressing into her palm, as she remembered another time when she had had to say words she had not meant, words she never could have felt, when she had had to deny the feelings that were filling her in order to save him. Toby had never appreciated the sacrifices she had made for him, but how could he when he couldn't understand them, when he couldn't remember them? How could he when he thought that everything that had happened before was all only in her imagination?
"It's okay," he said gently, his deep voice cutting smoothly into her thoughts. "I love you anyway. Even if you are crazy."
She tensed, but she let him get away with the insult. He was the only man who could insult her any more, the only being who could still hurt her... Silently, her tears began to slip down her face.
"I love you, Sarah," he said.
"I love you too," she answered immediately, and thought of the cheesecake in the refrigerator. She'd dig into it tonight. She allowed herself that much for not allowing her voice to warble just now and betray her.
"I would like you at my wedding, but I understand if you can't come. Please RSVP. Pammy's kind of strict on those sorts of formalities."
She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to keep him on the phone longer, but fell silent as a loud Click echoed through the line. She leaned back against her wall and slowly let her phone drop. "It isn't fair," she whispered words she had not spoken in years. She had not used that expression in so very long, but it was truth: It really wasn't fair that, after everything she had given up for him, her brother still felt even more than a world away. It wasn't fair that they still didn't have the relationship she had tried to cultivate with him over their years, and now that he was marrying "Doctor" Pamela Fawcett, she would never have that kind of relationship, that kind of friendship, with her only brother ever again. It wasn't fair that she had given up her life for him before, and she didn't even have a relationship with him now to show for it. She had no relationships, no family who genuinely cared for her, no lovers, not even any friends...
Sarah slid to the floor of her flat as car headlights flashed outside. It wasn't fair that after all these years, she still couldn't find the answers. She still couldn't find a way to truly connect with her brother and could so seldom even get him away from his mother long enough to have a real conversation with him. It wasn't fair that they'd grown ever further apart instead of closer. It wasn't fair that she'd given up everything for her brother, even tried to be his keeper to protect him over the years, and now they barely spoke.
It wasn't fair that she had never been able to find out what had happened to David Jones, or even get a lead on exactly which plays he had been with with her mother. It wasn't fair that she'd never been able to find him again, or that he had not even been there after the final court proceedings to celebrate her emancipation with her. It wasn't fair that her father had fallen into that wretched woman's trap at all, or that her mother had abandoned them both when Sarah had still been so very young.
It wasn't fair that she'd had actual friends who had stood beside her despite unimaginable horrors, a place where she could have actually belonged -- ruled even --, a love unlike any she could find even in any fairy tales... and had to give it all up for this mundane world in which magic did not exist and even the magical bond between siblings was non-existent. It wasn't fair that she couldn't find her way back, no matter how hard she tried, and though she had read legends of the Goblin King and knew she was not the only one who had encountered him and believed in him, even been wooed by him, no one else believed her. It wasn't fair, Sarah decided, that she had never gone to speak to any of the others who had gone through the labyrinth.
Maybe it was time she did. Maybe it was past time. She had tracked down many who were no longer living back in the beginning of her research. She'd gone to visit a few of the survivors only to find they had moved with never any trace of to where they had gone. There were others she had located in asylums, as her stepmother had tried to do to her. She could start there, Sarah decided, first thing in the morning, but right now, as the rain began outside, she had cheesecake calling her name.
As she moved to her fridge, Sarah didn't see the image just on the other side of the window. She didn't hear the words murmured, only remembered them of the most gorgeous being she had ever seen taunting her, "You say that so often. I wonder what your basis of comparison is." She never saw the snowy white owl turn and wing his way from her flat.
The End
Fandom: Labyrinth
Author: Apache Firecat
Characters: Sarah, Toby
Rating: PG/K+
Summary: Toby calls Sarah, when they're both older, with news.
Word Count: 2,612
Written For: Ficlet Zone 54: Reverse Fandom: Miami Vice: Brother's Keeper and 1 Million Words A to Z: H (Him)
Warnings: Future Fic, Also part of the author's Labyrinth 2 series
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
"You're not marrying her!" Sarah cried out in protest, fury coloring her face and tears filling her big, dark eyes. Not her! Anyone but her! She had scarcely been able to believe it when Toby had began dating that wretched woman the first time around, one of the very "doctors" who had tied her down into an electric chair when she had been younger, before she had been freed of the curse under which the Williams family had fallen in the wake of her true mother's abandonment of them, but this... marrying her?!
"Come on, Toby!" she pleaded, feeling as though the years were falling away, and she was young... Okay, young and scared again. The idea of those wretched doctors who had done everything they could to erase her memories of the only time since her mother's departure in which she had actually felt any kind of semblance of happiness did make her cringe. It did more than make her cringe. It made her... Sarah caught herself looking over her shoulder, gulped, and turned away from the shadows. The shadows held nothing for her, she reminded herself firmly, not friend or threat. The doctors could never touch her again -- she was a legal adult and had been for some years now --, and her friends...
Well, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they were not answering her no matter how loudly she pleaded for them to come or what kind of sacrifices she considered making. She had tried that, after all, the very first time she had been left alone with a babysitting charge. They weren't coming back to her, not easily. Her information was mounting, though, and one day she would be able to find her way back into the labyrinth. Realizing that Toby was talking, and likely had been the entire time her mind had been wandering, Sarah forcibly yanked her mind back to the present, the present conversation, the only being she had presently in her life who still seemed to care about her, and most importantly, the present dilemma. She could not be expected to come around that woman!
What she heard next, though, as she forced herself to again listen to her brother made her blood run cold. "Oh, come on, Sarah, you sound like Mom! You know for two women who can't stand each other, you two definitely agree on a lot, especially where I'm concerned!"
"That's because," Sarah muttered, tightly gripping the phone and forcing herself to refrain from slamming it down, "whereas we disagree on a lot of things, we do both love you!" That was the only thing she could hand to Irene. The woman had never loved Sarah's father, but she did love her children -- her actual children, of which Sarah had never been one. "She still wants to know what happened to the model!"
"Yes," Sarah blinked, "what did happen to the model?" She swiftly ran her mind over her brother's former girlfriends before hesitantly asking, "That's the one you just found -- what, a month ago? -- with her agent and photographer, right?"
"Three photographers, Sarah," grumbled Toby. "In our bed."
"That's why you're doing this, Toby," Sarah said bluntly. "You're not in love with that doctor. She's taking advantage of your broken heart."
"She wouldn't do that. She's a doctor of psychology -- "
"They are not good people, Toby! She is not -- "
"If you're going to insist on talking bad about my fiance, Sarah, I'm going to hang up the phone. Mom said you wouldn't understand."
"Like she does!"
"You two really should talk, you know. There's no telling what else you might agree now that you're both..." Sarah heard her brother pause and knew he was searching for the right words. "...older," he finished lamely.
"I have nothing in common with that woman other than you and the fact that she convinced my father to marry her! She may be older, Toby, but she's not lonely! You've seen those postcards she sends out at every holiday and for any other excuse she can think of! There's a different man every time, just like you and your -- "
"Careful there, sis," Toby warned.
Sarah sighed, making sure to make the expression loud and have it linger over their phones, over all the distance that separated them which clearly still was not enough. "Toby," she said, going back to the original issue, "you're marrying one of the people who strapped me down to an electric chair and -- "
"You were sick, Sarah." There was an audible pause again before he spoke in a gentler, quieter tone, "You still are. I worry about you, you know. I don't know what exactly did happen to make you believe all that crazy Goblin stuff, but -- "
"I'm not sick, Toby!"
"Then why have you never been able to find this supposed Goblin City again?" Sarah closed her eyes against the image of her brother using air quotes. "Why have I never seen this Goblin or this great Goblin King of yours?"
Sarah fell quiet, trying to collect her emotions. She truly did still want a relationship with her brother, and it had been over a year since their last actual conversation. The only reason why she'd even know about his breakup with the model was because it had been all over the London tabloids.
"Sarah," Toby asked in a much softer, heartfelt tone, "if I was kidnapped, why don't I remember?"
"Toby, you were a baby! It's nothing unusual for people to block terrible memories, especially when it's things that happen to them as children! We've been over this. Most children don't remember things that happened to them when they were younger than three and a half years old, and you weren't even that old!"
"It's also common," he replied, "to deflect memories and to create fictitious recollections of events that are better than those actually experienced. I'm sorry your life was so terrible that you felt the need to turn to imaginary Goblins for solace, but I didn't do that to you!" He sighed deeply. "I miss you, Sarah."
She heard the genuine sorrow and heartbreak in his last four words, and her anger drained. Toby couldn't help being an idiot. She'd made that same excuse for him so many times over their years, but it was true. He couldn't help that he'd only been a baby when Jareth had kidnapped him. He couldn't help that babies didn't remember things that happened to him. He couldn't help that he was an idiot, first a plaything for his mother and then, as they had both grown older, a plaything to be passed around by the pretty, sexy girls to whom she introduced him. He couldn't even help that he thought marrying Doctor Fawcett, a monster of a woman who had taken pleasure in her pain and was considerably older than both of them, was the answer to his current predicament, a way to love, a way to hurt Molly, and a way to remind his mother that he was supposedly in control of his own life. She scoffed aloud at that idea before she could restrain herself.
"What was that?"
"What was what?" she asked quickly, feigning innocnce.
"Did you just scoff at the idea that I'm marrying Pamela?"
"No, of course not! It was something on the telly -- "
"Yeah. Right. You don't even watch the telly unless it's news or documentaries."
"It was news -- "
"Uh huh. Look, Sarah, I love you, and I'm inviting you to our wedding. Pam has tried to apologize for her part in what was done to you, but they were trying to help you. Heck, Mother has tried to apologize -- "
"No, she hasn't!" Sarah cried, suddenly gripping her phone so hard that her knuckles turned white.
"She says she has."
"She's lying! Besides, Toby, have you ever thought about how it has to feel to me? I was sixteen and seventeen going through that mess, being chained down, being shocked because I spoke the truth, being -- "
"It wasn't the truth, Sarah. It still isn't. It never has been. It's the truth as you perceive it -- I understand that --, but it's not the truth. They were trying to help you."
"They were getting their jollies by hurting a kid! You know that stuff never stopped until I was able to gain my own independence!" And that, she remembered, had only been because of an old friend of her mother's, a David Jones, an old friend who had mysteriously disappeared immediately after she had been emancipated... That was another mystery into which Sarah was constantly digging, but she had never found the answers.
Her brother again sighed heavily into the phone. "Look, Sarah, I didn't call to fight with you -- "
"I know," she admitted. Suddenly feeling drained, she slumped back against the wall. For just a moment, she thought she heard whispered voices, but she knew it was only the wind outside her flat. "I'm -- " She paused. She didn't want to apologize. She shouldn't have to say she was sorry for defending herself, or for caring about her brother, for caring that he was being used -- But trying to stand up for his rights had never gone well. Indeed standing up to his mother over his right to choose with whom his friends and where he spent his nights had been the very thing that had finally driven her completely away from her family. She had not even been able to see her father for seven years before he died. She closed her eyes as her tears welled up even more sharply than before.
"I know," she said, simply, again instead of all the other things she wanted to yell at him. How could he be such a fool?! But Toby had never been one to think with his head.
"I ain't lost my head," she remembered the Dwarf saying, but Hoglet wasn't here. The Fieries and the Goblins weren't here. Ludo wasn't here nor was Sir Didymus. Jareth most especially wasn't here. There was only her brother, and he was so far away and getting further away with every passing year... "I'm -- " she tried again, but she couldn't say the words. She couldn't say what she didn't mean, not again, not ever again.
Her left hand curled, her fingernails pressing into her palm, as she remembered another time when she had had to say words she had not meant, words she never could have felt, when she had had to deny the feelings that were filling her in order to save him. Toby had never appreciated the sacrifices she had made for him, but how could he when he couldn't understand them, when he couldn't remember them? How could he when he thought that everything that had happened before was all only in her imagination?
"It's okay," he said gently, his deep voice cutting smoothly into her thoughts. "I love you anyway. Even if you are crazy."
She tensed, but she let him get away with the insult. He was the only man who could insult her any more, the only being who could still hurt her... Silently, her tears began to slip down her face.
"I love you, Sarah," he said.
"I love you too," she answered immediately, and thought of the cheesecake in the refrigerator. She'd dig into it tonight. She allowed herself that much for not allowing her voice to warble just now and betray her.
"I would like you at my wedding, but I understand if you can't come. Please RSVP. Pammy's kind of strict on those sorts of formalities."
She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to keep him on the phone longer, but fell silent as a loud Click echoed through the line. She leaned back against her wall and slowly let her phone drop. "It isn't fair," she whispered words she had not spoken in years. She had not used that expression in so very long, but it was truth: It really wasn't fair that, after everything she had given up for him, her brother still felt even more than a world away. It wasn't fair that they still didn't have the relationship she had tried to cultivate with him over their years, and now that he was marrying "Doctor" Pamela Fawcett, she would never have that kind of relationship, that kind of friendship, with her only brother ever again. It wasn't fair that she had given up her life for him before, and she didn't even have a relationship with him now to show for it. She had no relationships, no family who genuinely cared for her, no lovers, not even any friends...
Sarah slid to the floor of her flat as car headlights flashed outside. It wasn't fair that after all these years, she still couldn't find the answers. She still couldn't find a way to truly connect with her brother and could so seldom even get him away from his mother long enough to have a real conversation with him. It wasn't fair that they'd grown ever further apart instead of closer. It wasn't fair that she'd given up everything for her brother, even tried to be his keeper to protect him over the years, and now they barely spoke.
It wasn't fair that she had never been able to find out what had happened to David Jones, or even get a lead on exactly which plays he had been with with her mother. It wasn't fair that she'd never been able to find him again, or that he had not even been there after the final court proceedings to celebrate her emancipation with her. It wasn't fair that her father had fallen into that wretched woman's trap at all, or that her mother had abandoned them both when Sarah had still been so very young.
It wasn't fair that she'd had actual friends who had stood beside her despite unimaginable horrors, a place where she could have actually belonged -- ruled even --, a love unlike any she could find even in any fairy tales... and had to give it all up for this mundane world in which magic did not exist and even the magical bond between siblings was non-existent. It wasn't fair that she couldn't find her way back, no matter how hard she tried, and though she had read legends of the Goblin King and knew she was not the only one who had encountered him and believed in him, even been wooed by him, no one else believed her. It wasn't fair, Sarah decided, that she had never gone to speak to any of the others who had gone through the labyrinth.
Maybe it was time she did. Maybe it was past time. She had tracked down many who were no longer living back in the beginning of her research. She'd gone to visit a few of the survivors only to find they had moved with never any trace of to where they had gone. There were others she had located in asylums, as her stepmother had tried to do to her. She could start there, Sarah decided, first thing in the morning, but right now, as the rain began outside, she had cheesecake calling her name.
As she moved to her fridge, Sarah didn't see the image just on the other side of the window. She didn't hear the words murmured, only remembered them of the most gorgeous being she had ever seen taunting her, "You say that so often. I wonder what your basis of comparison is." She never saw the snowy white owl turn and wing his way from her flat.
The End
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