FEVER

So maybe she was crazy, but was that really important? Chihiro had a great job, a beautiful home, affectionate cats and tons of attentive friends…most of whom could be currently found tanning and sipping colorful, alcoholic drinks on a beach in Okinawa. Urgh.

Ignoring that last bit, Chihiro was in an out-shine-the-sun kind of sunny mood. Today was the day of her final visit to Dr. Marayuki. Who…just happened to be her therapist.

She now barely remembered the stories she'd raved that had scared her parents so. Witches, rats, radish men? Shape-shifting dragons, curses and spells? Babies as big as basketball players? Seemed to her, as a girl she'd possessed an imagination to rival that of Fuyumi Ono.

Regardless, Marayuki had insisted that she have a few more sessions after…after that dream. Over vision and hallucination, Chihiro preferred the term dream. It sounded nicer to her- sane people had dreams.

In it she was walking. Down a street she didn't recognize, in one of the city's many business districts, passing suits and skyscrapers and posh little spoiled trees in their medians. The day was clear, in the vision, and Amaterasu, despite the soaring structures, cast pure sunlight over everything. Her dreamself was mildly stunned at the absence of pollution, but still walked.

Walked, walked, walked. Mechanically placing one foot in front of the other, no thought, no destination, no awareness of any kind. The scenery remained the same throughout the jaunt until an old woman wearing a large, flamboyant feather hat tore past her, chasing after a speck of a dog dragging a six foot leash.

And the world crashed. Chihiro came to her senses as brutally has if she'd been splashed with ice water and spun around in a panic. And she'd caught site of her reflection in the glassy side of a skyscraper. She clawed at her eyes, cheeks, lips and chin, petted the ends of her brown hair and curled her fingers into her palms. Movement caught her eye.

A man's reflection stood beside hers, though she was alone except for the black suited men and women passing her by. He wore traditional garb, and smiled. That smile shocked Chihiro more than anything. It haunted her. It became a ghost that assaulted her mind, demanding to be remembered. A demand she couldn't seem to meet. The reflection placed a hand on her shoulder.

She felt the warmth and weight of it on her skin.

She screamed and pinched her eyes shut. When she opened them again her own reflection was gone and replaced by the man's.

"I cannot keep my promise if you deny me." He said softly, watching at her with such fondness she trembled.

- - -

"And that's what happened." Chihiro finished. Her voice shook. She swept a strand of hair that stuck to her lips aside and saw, with alarm, that her hands shook as well.

Marayuki, a medium sized woman with black hair shot through with gray, nodded and smiled tenderly. Chihiro had been a client for nearly six years- though it sounded more extreme than it was.

"Maybe," She began, twirling a pen in her hands. "It's an embodiment of your yearning for romance. Have you had a lover recently?"

Chihiro shook her head humbly. "Not since…maybe three months ago?"

"Did you, as a child, dream of romance in your future?"

"What child doesn't?" She grinned.

Marayuki laughed merrily. "True, true. But, did you?"

"…yes. I suppose so. Though I've never really thought about it."

"Most people don't." The therapist leaned forward in her seat. "What I'm perplexed about is that you do not know the young man from your dream. It is almost typical for lonely woman to have romantic dreams. Men too even!"

Chihiro snickered.

"But commonly, the imagined lover is…someone known to the dreamer."

"I feel like…I should know him. I feel…disgusted that I don't. Like I'm some kind of…horrible person who has… who's betrayed him." Chihiro looked up from her annoying wobbly hands. "Is that normal?"

"Dreams push a lot of emotions on us, and not all of it is necessarily rational. No need to worry."

- - -

Chihiro walked- sat- on eggshells though the session. She was doing her best to leave anything that might cause Marayuki to advice more time together unsaid. She was also caught, but the woman understood and scowled her teasingly. The session ended without conflict, and Chihiro was released from therapy with Marayuki's blessing.

As she bounded from the mahogany doors, Marayuki called out. "Chihiro!"

She stopped and looked over her shoulder. "Yes?"

The therapist smiled. "Call me if you ever feel the need to talk."

"Do I have to pay for it?" She gave a fox-faced grin.

"What do you think?"

Chihiro was still giggling as she made her way to the ground floor and onto the sidewalk. She breathed in the smells of the city and grinned at nothing in particular. She hailed a cab and gave him her address.

The drive lasted maybe twenty minutes. She paid the driver and stepped through her gate. Probably one Chihiro's favorite things was her little house. It was tucked inside a rare cluster of trees in a more rustic part of the city. She had lost the grass under layers of flowering plants and ferns and shells, rocks and yardsy clutter. The inside greatly resembled the outside. Flowers from the yard colored the house as brightly as any painter's brush. Great bunches of them were thrown into anything that could retain water. Bowls, cups, vases and fishbowls and- believe it or not- soda cans. Chihiro's curtains were light netting and more often than not her windows were wide open. The floor was cheap wood, and covered with a big, soft shaggy rug. She kept three cats: Mab, a white with a brown saddle and two black socks, Kuu, a completely black cat, and Yuma, an orange cat.

As soon as she closed the doorway, all of three of them were on her, yowling for food and attention and everything else. She laughed out loud and stumbled around the mini-mob circling her ankles. "Guys! Guys! Let me get in the house!"

She filled three mismatched bowls with kitty-chow and put them on the floor, tip-toeing around the gang and into the conjoined dining room.

There was no table- a large easel sat at an angle in the center, and canvases, new and used, where stacked against every wall. Four windows in three walls poured in sunlight like a flood. Half a dozen noisy wind chimes hung from the rafters outside in a chaotic arrangement. Two of the chimes were made of bits of strung metal, and all the rest random pieces of shell, wood and glass. Cups and wine glasses full of brushes sat on the window sills, and tubes and bottles of paint were lined up neatly according to color on a ledge- perhaps the only items in the house in any kind of order. Chihiro plucked a few of the tubes from the shelf and a hand full of brushes, dragged a stool up to the easel, turned the blank canvas on it horizontal and called up a picture in her mind.

She called up a grassy hill, rolling, steep and uneven. A string of round stones like a creek bed, a path that was little more than a long grassless patch, and a low pebbly wall. The hill sat below a cloudless sky blue as a baby's eyes.

Chihiro lost herself in her task, and it wasn't until she sat back to study the completed work that she saw the tiny figure of a boy in old clothing sitting on the line of the horizon, turned towards the anonymous side of the hill, but looking up at the sky. Chihiro gasped and barely caught herself before smearing the paint of the little body with her fingers. "What…"

She'd named the painting while in her trance as well.

Don't Deny Me.

- - -

Bonded to the little figure in ways she couldn't explain, Chihiro hung the painting off a protruding nail above the tiny two person table in her kitchen.

It didn't stop at that though. She had more visions, all of them ending with the strange man, pleading with her in some form or another to accept him, or remember him. She tried- she honestly did, but she never could.

Chihiro painted him. The man and the boy, who she now recognized to be the same person. She doodled him on her shifts at the coffee house, and more and more she felt like she was drawing a flip book of his breaking heart. Every drawing, the man looked more beaten and defeated, desperate.

For a while she considered calling Dr. Marayuki. But as the days crawled on, and the visions and the feeling of anxiety grew in her chest, Chihiro came to the conclusion that she had forgotten a part of her life that she shouldn't have. Being an artist, she had an open mind to the supernatural.

And she couldn't bring herself to even attempt to banish the man. She…came to care for him. Became so accustomed to his continuous presence she startled when he wasn't there. She spent more time painting than ever, and spent a fortune in paints as her fixation developed until she knew.

She only had to remember. To remember, and be able to tell herself the nameless man existed with enough confidence, to be able to tell herself enough times so she could build him before her. Birth him, and then work to mend the cracks she had made in him.

- - -

And she did so easily. Chihiro slept, and dreamt.

But it wasn't much of a dream- more like a review. She watched a movie from her own eyes, piece by piece until she had seen it all.

It almost worked, except she forgot the dreams sooner than she could preserve them. They were like wisps of smoke- but smoke could be captured. And she was determined.

- - -

"Alright guys. Mab, Yuma, Kuu. We're gonna do this today." Chihiro cracked all of her fingers at once and picked up a brush.

She was on her knees in the dining room, sitting on an eight foot length of linen stapled to the floor. It was just a theory, but something told her it was a theory that was going to work.

She had blown three weeks' paychecks on paint, her entire collection lined up within reach on the floor. A boot full of freshly cleaned brushes, and a low, wide mouthed bowl of water sat on her opposite side. Two pitchers of water and an empty, four gallon paint bucket were against the far wall. She'd hefted the old, heavy radio out of her bedroom and plugged it up in the corner with a CD of nature sounds set on repeat. She'd even stapled a net over the bottom half of the doorway into the room to keep the cats out.

Chihiro closed her eyes, breathed deep, and gathered the sounds around her- the chimes outside, the rain from the radio, the soft lap of Kuu's tongue behind Yuma's ear, and her own heartbeat- and filled herself with them.

And she started painting.

She started at eight in the morning, and painted the rest of the day. It was like sleepwalking- the trance refused to let her go, and she refused to wake from it anyway. She stopped a few times, drinking deeply from a water bottle she was forced to refill twice and taking antagonizing bathroom trips. The trance didn't leave during these occurrences. She had to rip herself from her work, and it took such an effort that it was nearly a physical pain.

The cats yowled at her when dinnertime came around and she didn't pause to feed them, but they sensed quickly that she couldn't be interrupted. They stretched out behind the net and slept, or watched her through narrow, lazy eyes.

She painted skies, hills, rocks and rivers and trees and flowers. She painted dawn, noon, and dusk. And then she painted buildings, structures of early architecture and brilliant colors. And she painted lights, and boats. And then she painted people.

And then she painted emotions.

Fear, despair, relief, gratitude, disappointment, love, happiness…

She pulled her brush back from the linen at 12:36 AM. Chihiro whipped moisture from her forehead and sighed. The CD was playing a track imitating the sound of the wind ruffling long grasses, but the gentle, but steady patter of rain from her open windows drowned it out. She looked out the windows and then turned to her cats. Yuma and Kuu lay sleeping, curled around each other. Mab yawned, whiskers turning up, and sneezed. Chihiro smiled, and finally looked at the painting.

And it was all there. Her adventure in the bathhouse, laid out on the cloth. The memories flooded her so she was warm. She felt like a piece of herself had been returned, so big that she hadn't noticed its absence.

Chihiro listed the names of the people in her mind and spoke them, to taste them and give them life, a new life in her new life. Yubaba, Lin, Granny, Yu-bird, Boh, No Face, Kamajii, The River Spirit…

…and most importantly, Haku.

"I remember you now." She whispered, staring at the painted face. "I remember you now. You can come out. You can keep your promise."

She stared at the length of cloth, but nothing happened.

"You can keep your promise! You can keep it! Keep it!" Her voice rose steadily in volume. She had finally remembered him- she was ready to save him. She wanted him back.

"Haku!"

The rain faltered. Lightning stuck. Thunder threatened to split the sky. Mab fell asleep. The power blinked out. The radio stopped. Chihiro cried.

The cloth glowed. Blinding, flashing, white. She could see it through her hands. It passed through her skin and outlined her bones.

- - -

Optional Ending

The fever had passed. Chihiro had almost fainted for forgetting to breathe when the coiled form of the river dragon had appeared on the painted linen. She had thrown herself onto the soft, warm and vibrating mass of scales.

Haku had been asleep, but he'd woken up on hearing her voice. He'd recognized it, despite the fact that it had been years since he'd heard it, despite the fact that it was barely audible against the rage of the storm, despite that fact that it wasn't the voice of a girl…

…But of a woman.

He'd changed, and seized her so fiercely she squeaked. And she'd cried into his shoulder, and he'd cried too, into her hair, and her cats and woken and watched them. And they'd finally gotten over the shock, and she'd explained everything. Why she'd forgotten, why she'd remembered, why she'd cared…

And he stayed. And for lack of a better ending, they'd lived.

I've done an especially teeeeeny bit of editing in a few places, and the ending was in the Word doc, I just decided to leave it there :)

For the record: first published on 6-4-07, this messge added on 7-6-09 :) Maybe I'll really tear it apart someday. It could be fun~!

-Oceans