Chapter Text
You worked on autopilot. Opened the apartment door, bent to pet the cat twisting between your legs. You placed your bag on your spot at the table, congratulated your brother on his most recent drawing. Waved hello to Jareth from across the kitchenette, and asked him how his day was. You might have listened to his answer, but you didn’t remember it past a few seconds after he had addressed you. Rain pounded on the windows, dark open sky weeping on everything it could touch. You were smiling wide, too wide. Jareth could only watch you from across the room, waiting for the ball to drop. With no outward indication of what had happened, he decided to leave you alone until your brother was in bed, at the very least. He knew you likely would not want to involve him in whatever was going on, and Jareth couldn’t gauge how bad it really was. Something had upset you, that was obvious. Whether it required violence from him, he wasn’t certain, but he knew he was willing to commit it on your behalf. No one, he decided, was allowed to put that look on your face if he could have a say in it.
The evening passed, you made dinner and then cleaned it up, halfheartedly listening to your brother’s chatter. Jareth let you go through the motions; at least cleaning dishes was a routine, safe thing for you to engage in.
“Mhm,” you would say. “That’s a very nice drawing.” he’s going to hate you and it’s all because you couldn’t get your shit together before dragging him back into it.
“Sorry, what was that? I didn’t hear you.” Pay some fucking attention, you’re acting weird and you made everyone worry about you like the attention whore you really are.
“We can go to the library again, sure. Maybe to the park as well. That would be very cool. Cooool.” You drew out the word, half muttered to yourself, unsure of what exactly you were trying to communicate. This is why you’re alone, you can’t keep this shit from just leaking out of you. You contaminate everything you touch.
Your head screamed at you in the voice of your mother, and it took everything in you to keep her voice from crawling its way up your throat to cut those around you. Your body was in the room, but the rest of you might as well have been in space. You knew your brother could tell something was wrong by the slight droop of his shoulders and the gradual softening of his voice until he no longer spoke, but silently retreated to the bedroom. You were hurting people around you, just as you believed you had always done. You felt awful; you felt like you were going to implode. Between silence and screaming, you hoped you had chosen the right one, the kinder option. You could explain silence, make up a story to fill in the gaps. You couldn’t take back words once you had yelled them loud enough to scar. You didn’t mean to punish anyone with your silence, though you could guess that it looked like it from the outside. You carried vivid memories of silences, interspersed with slamming doors and a tension so thick all you could do was pray for the inevitable explosion. Silence meant something bad was coming, and there was nothing you or your brother could do to stop it. You were inflicting that same silence on him now; there wasn’t any other way you knew to handle emotions.
A plate, slippery with soap and water, fell from your too-tight grip and shattered upon the tile at your feet. The explosion.
“ FUCK ,” you screamed.
It took approximately ten steps for Jareth to descend upon you, lifting you safely above the broken ceramic, cradling your body against his own and depositing you, shaking, upon the couch. He knelt in front of you, bringing your hands into his own in your lap, looking up into your face.
“You’re going to tell me what has been going on,” he stated plainly. “I know you do not mean it, but I’m certain you are scaring your brother, and myself as well.” You shook almost convulsively, tears streaming down your face from tight eyes.
Worried was a complete understatement. Jareth didn’t know how to help if you wouldn’t let him in, and he wasn’t sure he would understand how to help even if you did tell him the problem. Something burned in him seeing you like this, but in equal measure he was afraid of you pulling away if he got too close. He watched your heaving shoulders, heard your short, gasping breaths. He was certain something awful had happened to you.
“Y/n, please I need you to breathe for me, alright? That’s it, darling. Like that.” Darling? “y/n, did someone do something to you? I’m not angry with you, but I would like to know.” He grit his teeth. All the shows of affection only seemed to make you cry harder. Cursing his lack of social etiquette, he continued to hold your hands while he waited for you to say something. His knees ground painfully into the hard floor, but for your smile he would have knelt for an eternity.
“I, just, and I don’t know what's going to happen next, and I can’t keep doing,” you waved your arms in front of you, pulling them from Jareth’s grasp. “ This , because eventually someone is going to find out,” You sniffed, took a shuddering, heaving breath. “And I don’t really care what happens to me, but I brought him into all of this and now I’m probably scaring the shit out of him by breaking things and screaming because I’m no better than what I was raised to be,” you were sobbing now. “ I’m not a mother, I don’t know how to do this but I’m so afraid of what’s out there, he’s just so small yet and,” You went quiet. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Your miserable, red eyes found Jareth’s looking up into them and you shrugged hopelessly, covering your face with your hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s hurting him. And you. And I think I hate myself for it.” The pain in your chest felt like it was breaking you in half. This is all your fault.
Jareth stood before you, and turned to sit on the edge of the couch beside you, turning you slightly so that he could keep your hands in his grasp. You were ashamed to look him in the eyes again in such a state, but had you looked, you would have seen not contempt, but concern, and something else as well.
“No one here hates you, y/n. And I’m certain if you have a rational explanation with your brother, he will understand, too.” Jareth looked up at the face peering at you two from the doorway of your bedroom, largely obscured by the shadow of the door. Your brother silently shut the door, and Jareth made a mental note to check in with him once the crisis was over. It was quite likely that none of this was your brother's fault, and yet he would find a way to blame himself much as you were doing now. Jareth didn't want to label his involvement in this as 'damage control', but he also didn't see anything better to call it. He would make sure you were okay, and then convince both of you that neither was at fault. Hopefully somewhere in that plan, he might also be told what was going on.
"How about we start from the beginning. What started everything?" Jareth rubbed soothing circles on the backs of your hands with his thumbs. The motion grounded you, gave you something else to focus on other than the immense effort it was taking to breathe like a normal person.
" I was just stocking shelves with a coworker and they were asking about like, you and what we planned to do when he was old enough for school, and," you hiccupped, voice pitching up. "I realized I don't have anything for him, no birth certificate, or, or," you were crying in full force again. "He can't do anything without being legally alive and I can't give that to him without losing him too. He'll have to go through the foster system and I don't know anything about it other than what our parents used to tell us and what if they were right? He won't survive it on his own." Jareth could barely understand you through your hyperventilating and the constant pitching of your voice. "And I love him, and you and what we have but that's selfish and maybe I should let it all go but I don't want to." Shame colored your face as you admitted what you considered the most egregious thing about you; that you foolishly wanted something you couldn't have, and that you continued selfishly to want it above doing what you knew to be right for those around you.
You didn't realize what you had admitted, but Jareth certainly did. You loved him. His heart thrilled to hear those words from you, if only they could have been said under better circumstances. He vowed that he would discuss it with you on another day, opting to bury his feelings and the joy those words brought him underneath his growing concern for you.