Scrimshaw

Most people give first of things; some time, a cup of coffee, a shiny stone.  Perhaps along the way, they begin to give themselves. All Jareth has is his kingdom.  It is not his to give, but he its.  For Sarah, though, it will give him himself - and so, worthless as he is on his own, it is himself he gives her.

He gives her all of him. Never has he been one to offer with measure or with reservation.  He gives himself not in hope of any return, but because she is Sarah, and he is Jareth, and that is what he does.

And when there is no more to give, still he gives her what is left.  She finds him at the last, curled at the side of a dusty road with the dessicated lacework of last year's hydrangeas bowing over him.  She finds him where he has lain since the spiders swelled with autumn, colours sun-leached.  The wind has worn him down to his fine bird-bones with her name writ upon them like scrimshaw, Sarah, Sarah, Say-rah, turning the words in his mouth like river-rocks and honey.

She strokes his tangled pale hair and scoops the bundle of bird-bones into her arms.  Then she carries him home on sturdy bare feet.  It is cool in her house, save in the dusty sunbeams; he moves for the first time, hiding his face in the sage-green linen of her dress.  He shivers as she turns to descend a flight of stairs and shushes him, gently, nuzzling into his hair and plants a kiss upon his temple, and with a click she closes the iron cuffs around his spun glass wrists and leaves him there, in the dark, in the damp, in the dust.

The last gift the Goblin King offers his beloved is the peace of solitude, to tend to her own needs.

Crocuses

Death's doorstep bloomed white with crocuses. He had expected to die, of course. It is not man's lot to live forever. Neither did it surprise him to die in failure. In forty years (no, forty-one, somewhere in the violent dark of Moria) he'd paid little thought to himself, but at least now he knew his mettle – tarnished, base and brittle.

But he had not expected crocuses.