"Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate. Love sells the proud heart's citadel to fate--"

"I only asked you if you were going on a date this weekend," his mother said crossly. Her evening dress was perhaps a season out of fashion, but according to the magazines she read, her hair was the very essence of Friday night style.

The young man, interrupted in the rhythm of his quotation, let out his breath through his nose, scrubbed one hand through his dark hair. He might have expected that she wouldn't sit still for Rupert Brooke. She only tolerated Shakespeare so long as she was in a highly-noticeable seat in the theatre. "That would be a no, mother."

She sighed, and continued snippily, "That one girl in your math class does seem to like you quite a bit." To her credit, she ended her sentence on a questioning note, seeing her son's frown deepening, the tiniest scowl between his dark brows.

"It's still a no, mother," he said, though perhaps more gently this time. "Enjoy your evening."

"It would be nice, if you took a girl out, dear. If your father were--"

But he was up the stairs, taking them two at a time with his long legs, and gone with the definitive sound of a closing bedroom door behind him. Gone off to read his books again, no doubt, head in the clouds, with little heed for what his family hoped for from him.

His mother was left on the landing with her stylish pocketbook and her well-coiffed head full of questions. Where had she gone wrong?

Whoever would have imagined that Toby would have grown into such a wicked child?

"There's a young man in the labyrinth," said a goblin, into the silence.

The King of the Goblins, bored and angry on his throne, snapped his fingers. "A young man." He rolled his eyes. "You know what the penalty is for lying to your King, do you not?"

The goblin cowered. "But Jareth s-sir, see for yourself! It is only the truth that I speak."

Surely such insolence would not go unpunished, Jareth thought. Didn't the most brainless goblin know the price for fostering false hope? He conjured a crystal ball, bright and hollow in his skilled fingers. "Show me the intruder," he said.

And show the boy it did.

Sixteen, perhaps, dark hair and darker eyes, something wild and unsettling about him, something fey that slept uneasily beneath the everydayness of his jeans. What was most unsettling about him was his stride-- he was not questioning, not much, nor was he at all uncertain.

He entered the labyrinth without a backward glance, and walked through those first stone walls as though he were walking through the foyer of his own home.

"He knows the way in," said one phenomenally stupid goblin.

"Of course he doesn't." Jareth's voice was rough, and he flung the goblin against the wall for good measure. "No one knows the way in. Only I do."

Jareth looked more closely at the youth's face, as if trying to read some purpose in his mind through his inscrutable eyes. His eyes... One blue, one brown, like the ocean meeting the mountain with barely a bridge between, abrupt and disconcerting. Familiar eyes.

Jareth was unaccustomed to surprises. His hand fell away from the seeing-crystal, and it floated up like a soap-bubble, to shatter brilliantly against the high vaulted ceiling.

Following his sister's footsteps, the thought came unbidden to his mind, and once there, refused to be banished. Had it really been so many years? Jareth raised a hand to his aching temple. So long since that girl had come and gone, leaving his castle and his city in shambles? Since he had held the babe-- his heir-- in his arms until the thirteenth hour, only to lose him at the last?

One cannot lie thirteen hours in the castle of the Goblin King and come away unchanged.

For a brief moment Jareth thought of war.

This youngling striding with arrogance toward his castle, alarming in his swiftness, coming closer to claim his birthright and his own... What could this child bring to bear against him, after all? He was yet young, and Jareth had years of wicked magic to call upon.

But if he knew the path through the labyrinth, what else might he know? He shared her blood, she who had proved his undoing.

Then Jareth thought of flight. The aged owl, frail and bending, taking wing before the oncoming kestrel. He shook his head, and something happened behind his eyes. Though perhaps he knew it was not a fight that he could win, neither was it a confrontation he could avoid.

His Jarethkin was coming home.

In the heart of the labyrinth, Toby heard himself laughing though he wasn't sure why. His head told him he was lost, or dreaming; his eyes whispered differently, surprising him by recognizing a landmark, this pillar or that tree. His feet tread their winding path independently of his brain.

"Lord of the maze," he shouted, turning the honorific words into an invocation. He could not see the sky, sheltered as he was by the towering walls and overgrown bowers, but he could feel his voice reverberating, and he knew he was heard. He wondered at the heat that was spreading through his chest-- like terror, or exultation. "I am here!"

And, simple as breathing, he was not alone. What had one moment been a shadow, or an intricately carved rock-face, was suddenly the Goblin King, standing before him. Swift and owl-silent, tall and terrible. More beautiful than words. All the things his sister had never said, though perhaps she had dreamed them.

Everything that Toby had ever known, without knowing. His voice shook. "I know you," he said, and to Jareth he looked for a moment more like a boy than a threat.

"Of course you do." With an unpleasant smile, Jareth looked down at him, and Toby thought that all the distance in the world would not be sufficient to put between them. The Goblin King shook his head, advancing. "You were a fool to return, child."

In a rush like falling from a great height, Toby's voice returned, though perhaps he did not understand the words spilling from his lips. "Through hardships untold and dangers--"

Jareth laughed, a sound like the wind imprisoned in an endless cave. "You should know that spell has been broken, that word-bond severed." He sneered at the momentary uncertainty that flickered across Toby's face. "Here!" Jareth called, mocking, and lightly tossed him a seeing-crystal. He expected a catch, of course, crude and boyish and about as effective as a baseball glove to catch a peach unbruised.

But Toby caught the crystal on the very tips of his fingers, his mouth half-open-- in wonder, or in concentration. Opening his palm slowly, he set the crystal spinning in his hand. It seemed to sing, or to fly, weightless in those youthful fingers like a bubble.

Jareth, still and observing, did not breathe.

"Look," Toby murmured, blinking at the bright thing moving in his palm as though it were not his own will that maneuvered it. "It knows me."

"You may think so," Jareth said, and now there was something sharp in his voice, like fascination, or desire. "And why do you think that might be?"

Toby shrugged, eyes still on the mesmerizing crystal that danced on his palm. "Because you touched me," he said, simply, a childhood of aching coalescing behind his gaze. "I remember. When I was still young enough to become a goblin."

"My heir," Jareth scoffed. He would not allow himself to think about that young heartbeat, and the promises it spoke. "But you did not become a goblin--"

"Didn't I?" Suddenly Toby's eyes were on fire, reflecting the shining crystal that he no longer had to look at to manipulate, passing it from hand to hand without effort. "Am I not?"

"You are yet mortal." Jareth did not bother to scowl. "You do not know the price to be paid, for being the heir to the Goblin King."

"I have known it all my life. I have walked these labyrinthine paths in my dreams."

"So much you think you know, little one. Just like your sister, self-assured. What now will save you? There are no magic words, this time."

Toby, unbowed, watched the Goblin King's eyes. "You're wrong. Every word is magic."

With a grand sweep of his hand, Jareth gestured to the labyrinth, the Goblin City and the castle beyond. "Only when you are King," he intoned. "And then, every word is a burden. Every corner, every crevice of this maze is a link in the chain you wear around your neck. Not a goblin draws breath without your awareness, not a shadow seeps in the darkest oubliette without your knowledge. It is not so easy as choosing left or right at a fork in the road-- this path will consume the unworthy."

"You think the truth will make me run away." Toby's tone was cold, words resounding in the emptiness like a bell. His voice sounded like Jareth's. "This is what I am running toward. Am I not one of your own?"

Jareth had lived too long alone with the echo of his own laughter, and there was hardness in him that did not so easily abate. "You seek to usurp all that is mine. Who do you think you are, child?" he said, and if there was gentleness in his tone it was the gentleness of the earthquake, or the hurricane.

Toby did not flinch, the crystal rising across the bridge of his young fingers like a sun. "Your Jarethkin."

Jareth knew the day was won. And, as the ancient owl folding his tired wings, head heavy under the unlessened dawn, he found that he could not be ungrateful.