Characters: Haku, Chihiro
Summary: All is cold until he meets her.
Pairings: Chihiro x Haku
Author's Note: I tend to focus on Lin in this category, but I suppose I had to do a Chihiro x Haku eventually. This probably won't be a regular thing.
Disclaimer: I don't own Spirited Away.

The life Haku has led in the bathhouse has been cold. That there is no memory of what his name and life were before coming to Yubaba's stronghold makes him a single swimmer cast from a burning ship into a storm-tossed sea. Without his memories, Haku is a ship without an anchor, a shriveled leaf in the wind.

Yubaba took more than Haku's true name. Haku feels as though he has never seen the sun, never felt its light on him, since the day he stared into her huge, glassy, owlish eyes and she took his name into herself.

In the most literal sense of the word, Haku has rarely seen sunlight. Yubaba's bathhouse is most active at night, and that is when Yubaba has Haku do her business for her. When the sun is out, Haku is most likely to be asleep in his small room (unlike the others he does, at least, rate a room to himself, even if it is tiny), worn and exhausted. His childlike body belies the adult state of his mind, but he still tires easily.

And Haku feels as though he's been stumbling blindly through darkness since he laid eyes on Yubaba's luxurious apartments.

But then suddenly there is a moment in time when Haku starts to feel just a little warm again, feels as though there's sunlight pouring through him and melting the ice that has made his fingers so stiff and brittle.

There's a little girl standing on the bridge, perching on one of the railings, in fact.

A human girl.

The first thing hitting Haku's mind is fear.

What if Yubaba finds her? What will she do with her? Haku doesn't want to think about that; he has no desire to see anyone turn out like him.

So he pushes her away, literally, with cold eyes and forceful hands and that urgency in his voice that no one has ever been able to deny. He tells her to turn and flee as fast as she can for her world, before the sun should fall completely and he's trapped.

Forget your parents. Just run.

But when he's had time to think, Haku thinks that it can't be a coincidence that the moment he saw her, he as warm again for the first time in what felt like an eternity.