This is, I think, my favorite visitation. I've written several, but this one in particular stands out for me. It's sad and probably a little silly, but it was the way I felt at the time, and I don't ever take feelings back.
Faith
"Alexa! Alexa look at me!"
The girl with the brown hair kept typing away. A letter to an old
friend in
another part of the world, Jareth knew. He could read what she
wrote.
Perfectly, painfully boring. She did it almost dutifully, filling
her
friend in on her life. Graduation, new job, ordinary, dull
things. Jareth
narrowed his eyes.
"Alexa Marie Close...how dare you ignore me!" he
thundered.
She paused, and for an instant, he thought she would turn, but
she didn't.
She only looked slightly puzzled, as though she'd heard something
odd. She
dismissed it and kept typing, her fingers flying over the keys.
"You can hear me, can't you?" Jareth said, uncertainty
tinging his voice.
There was no answer, only the clack and click of the keyboard.
"Alexa, get back there and rewrite that chapter of Truly
Outrageous! What
in the Underground are you thinking?" He leaned over her
shoulder and
peered at the screen. "Your car needs cleaning? This is what
you're
writing about? You hate the uniforms at work? Oh, my heart bleeds
for you!
Get back to Aeris, you left her in a vampire's bedroom!"
The girl stopped, sighed, and put her chin in her hand, her elbow
propped on
her computer desk for a moment. Her green eyes fell on something,
and she
reached out. She picked up her blue pen, the irridescent
"fanfic" pen she'd
bought herself last April, when she'd started the first Herald
story.
"Ah, that's my girl," Jareth said approvingly.
She started to scratch a few numbers across a page of printer
paper...her
paycheck, figured in with a few other bills...
Jareth gasped. "Anything but this..."
Then the pen stopped writing. She shook it. Ran it over the
paper.
"Damn," she muttered, and threw it in the garbage
unceramoniously.
He glanced at it. "Well, I'd rather it end this way than to
let her use you
for that."
She went back to the keyboard. He leaned over her again, his
voice a
whisper in her ear.
"Alexa...what's wrong with you? I know it's been a rough
week. Go check
your mail, Tara added another chapter to her story. That will
cheer you
up..." He waited. "Well??"
She sent the letter, and closed her browser. Jareth slammed a
fist down on
the keyboard in anger.
Only, it didn't quite land. His hand went right through, catching
him off
balance. He tried to grab onto Alexa, and his other hand
missed...and he
wound up on the floor, looking at the inside of her computer
desk. His
shock evaporated quickly, and he managed to get to his feet
again. He
stared at her, his eyes hard. "You don't belong to me
anymore," he said, an
admonition, damning her. She was standing up, by the window,
straightening
the purple curtains. But her face was very still and dark, and
her hands
were merely fluttering uselessly over the curtain, the impression
of doing
something. She might not hear him, but she could feel him. And he
went on.
"You don't believe. You let them take your faith from you.
You are like
the others now."
His face softened a bit. "You hung on for so long...was your
suspension of
disbelief really that fragile? Oh, Alexa, I thought so much more
of you....
But perhaps there is a little left somewhere inside. What is it?
If you
have no more faith than a mustard seed..." But she only
stopped playing at
the curtain and laid down in her bed with a book. Music, the
Brain, and
Ecstacy...the how and why of music, the shredding of the mystery
of it.
"Not even that much," he whispered. "You don't
even have that much left."
She flipped a page.
"Such a pity," he said, and vanished.
A tear slipped down her cheek. "But leave a light on for
me," she
whispered. "Just in case....."