In order to celebrate the year that I have been on Fanfiction, I decided to write a fanfiction in the fandom where I originally began. Spirited Away has been and will forever be one of the greatest movies of all time.
It was a dream, one that had plagued her throughout her childhood and well into adulthood. It was always set in the same place. A new town, an abandoned theme park, an adventure. She would never think of it as a nightmare, she couldn't. Even though parts of it kept her paralyzed on the bed in fear, those where the Dragon Haku was injured, the Witch Yubaba billowing smoke, the rest of the images in her head filled her with peace. It always started the same, through the forest in the car. Her father driving too fast, her mother shouting that he was going to kill them. A statue in the middle of the road, her father breaking hard. A plaster building, the wind picking up pulling them in. A theme park, food everywhere, her parents gorging themselves on food, the adults turning into pigs.
It was enough to terrify her, but it never did. It was as if she always knew, in the back of her mind, in her very core, that it would all be alright. Yes she relived those dreams almost every night, but in her dreams the fear and uncertainty caused her heart to race. More than once she found herself on the floor where she had fallen off the bed from tossing and turning. Every night her dream played out, and every night had a different outcome. Haku would return with her, she would stay with him, her enslavement, him finding her twenty years later.
But Chihiro only visited this place in her dreams, in her waking world she attended school, had friends, and attempted to have a social life. She never quite fit in, but she never stood out. She was just average. Her dreams were her escape from the mundane world that she was forced to live in. When she was a child she found Haku as a playmate, when she grew up, she fell in love with the dragon of her dreams.
Art was her favorite subject, Haku was her favorite thing to draw. Green was her favorite color, and her hair was always tied by a purple hairband. Her parents were always cautious, they were never greedy and always thought of others. She was always afraid of bathhouses and for some reason she lost her love of radishes. She believed that babies should be let outside to feel the sunrise, and birds were her favorite wild animals. She never swatted at flies and mice were her favorite pets. Spiders reminded her of grandfathers and although she had many friends, she was never particularly close to any of them.
She hated the thought of being separate from her parents for too long, and shadows were a mystery. She was an advocate against pollution and sent around a petition to stop construction on the apartments built on the Kohaku River. She would watch boats with a vivid curiosity. She loved eating berries and frogs kind of freaked her out. She would catch herself watching soot, to see if it would come alive, and sometimes she swore that she could see things that couldn't be seen.
For her eighteenth birthday, her friends took her to see a fortune teller. The woman told her that she had been touched by the spirit world. Chihiro recalled almost dying as a child, when she fell into a river. The fortune teller said she was touched another time, Chihiro's friends called her a fraud, but the memory jogged the girl's memory.
She always held her breath going over bridges, but never made it. Her friends called her odd, but they found her quirks adorable sometimes.
"Chihiro, what are the names of your characters again?" Linnette, a new friend asked.
"Haku the water dragon, Kamaji, the boiler man, Yubaba the bathhouse witch, Zeniba her sister. Rin, the girl who works at the bathhouse, Boh, the giant baby, No-Face, a spirit who every body thinks is a monster."
"Don't get her started Linnette, there are so many more she could go on for ages." Rina laughed.
Chihiro just smiled, "You know what's weird, I remember running down a long flight of stairs as a child and running into a wall."
"Did this happen before or after you crossed the bridge?"
"After." her brow furrowed and another headache settled in.
These always happened when she remembered something.