Title: Into the Rose Garden
Fandom: Labyrinth
Pairing: Sarah Williams/Jareth, Sarah Williams/Original Male Character
Categories/Genres: Post-Canon, Romance, Drama
Length: Super Epic (109232 words)
Warnings: N/A

Author on LJ: N/A
Author Website: Dryad13

Summary:

Sarah has good grades, a circle of friends, and a cute boyfriend. Life's great...right? So why does she have the strange feeling that something's missing? Fairy tales show that magic will make you or break you. Which category does she belong in?

Review:

Ah, Labyrinth, my faithful old friend, the fandom that has always been there for me with unexpected treats when I am laid low by a hiatus. *coldly eyes the Person of Interest season finale* Somehow, no matter how many times I dip into this fandom, I always discover something new and delightful to distract me from my woes. This time, it's Dryad13's Into the Rose Garden.

To be honest, I almost didn't choose this particular story to rec. I had another Labyrinth fic in mind, which in hindsight I recognize to be an equally well written but still somehow lacking choice. What really made up my mind was the Sarah's stellar characterization.

In Into the Rose Garden, Sarah begins in that odd, undefined place between the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. She is, in Brittney Spears' immortal words, “not a girl, not yet a woman.” There remain in her some lingering traces of girlhood, not yet shaken off after her initial encounter with the Labyrinth and the Goblin King, but through the story she slowly sheds those old habits and beliefs, growing into a far more adult type of maturity and self-possession. Rather than wasting words on pointless tantrums, she comes to wield them as weapons, ones she most often turns on Jareth, to varying effect. Yet at the same time, she learns to lay down those weapons and forgive where before she would blindly lay blame on whoever she felt deserved it.

By the end of the story, Sarah has grown to the point where she can rescue herself from situations not of her own making, is able to coax compromise from the Goblin King himself and gracefully accept his terms in turn. She can let her mother's abandonment go and even scolds her father and mother after a very public spat. Sarah begins Into the Rose Garden as a young woman, and by the end of her second trip to the Labyrinth, has begun to emerge into a more fully realized, adult version of herself.

Into the Rose Garden