What You Wish For

He should have looked human, she thought. He should have looked like just an ordinary man with pale hair, in expensive clothing. She frowned. He didn’t. Her question was easy.

“What are you, exactly?”

“Would you rather I showed you, or told you?” he asked.

“Why not show and tell,” she countered. He smirked.

“Very well, then. If you insist.” For one heartbeat, nothing changed, and then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, one breath and the next, one nearly imperceptible blink of an eye, he changed.

Gone were the human clothes, the human hair cut. Nor was he as she remembered him, though. His boots were quite obviously goblin made, for she’d never seen leather quite like that in her world before. His black breeches were some softer leather that molded to his thighs, but wasn’t quite as tight or revealing as what he’d worn during her time in the Labyrinth. The white shirt was simpler, without frills, and unlaced, leaving a long thin vee of marble skin exposed from the pale column of his throat, down his sternum, where his familiar crescent shaped pendant lay, with a glimpse of a tightly muscled abdomen before the shirt met at a point just beneath his belt. There was a grinning goblin face with ruby eyes there, almost taunting her to look below. He wore a dark red leather jacket that reminded her of the one she’d seen him in before, with a wide standing collar, and long tails, and wide cuffs that fell over his black gloved hands. His face was without makeup, or glitter, but his eyes had taken on more of a slant, like a cat; and his eyebrows flared high, like an owls wings. His hair was mostly short, but wild, as it had been before, spiking up at odd angles, with two longer locks of hair that fell over his ears and down against his jacket. His ears, she noticed, were the tiniest bit pointed, and he wore a black metal ring through one of them.

He was the old Jareth, and the new Jareth. He was regal, and dangerous looking, and when he moved toward her, he had the grace of a large cat stalking its prey. She shivered.

“Do I frighten you?” he asked curiously, head tilted, eyes narrowed. Sarah licked her suddenly dry lips.

--from "What You Wish For" by KnifeEdge
______________________
So... I didn't really care for the last version of Jareth I painted, and the one I started last night looked like ass... This, this is much better.

That hair, however, continues to defy all natural laws...