A/N: Hello to everyone who clicked on this! So I was sitting on my couch last night, rewatching this movie for the five-hundredth time, when I thought to myself "Self! You should really, probably write a Spirited Away fanfic about what maybe kinda happens after the movie."
If you're reading this, you've probably wondered if Chihiro just goes back to the - Let's call it the Spirit World - the Spirit World after the end of the movie, more than once. I know I have, and the other major problem I have with this movie is WHAT KIND OF LOVE IS THIS I WISH THEY TOLD ME!
Like really! What kind of OUAT-type true love is this? Is it romantic? Platonic? Family-sibling-ish love? WHAT IS IT?!
This one-shot won't go into that, but please! Enjoy the story.
Disclaimer: I do not own Spirited Away or any of the characters within. That honor belongs to Hayao Miyazaki.
Chihiro sat in the window seat at the very top of her house, staring out of the glass at nothing in particular.
Well, there was something she was staring at. But it was too far away to reach. Some days she considered running all the way down the grassy slope in front of her house, toward the overgrown road that would take her to the so-called abandoned theme park.
That was where Haku waited.
Chihiro wasn't actually sure if he was waiting, but he had promised her they would meet again. And she hoped to all the spirits that remained in this world that they would.
She missed Yubaba's son, and the little crow that had ridden on her shoulder during their short stunts as tiny animals. She missed Granny and No-Face, Rin and the little speaking frog she'd never learned the name of.
All of her friends, the ones she'd left behind for the human world. Chihiro missed them all.
She wondered how Haku would react if she came running back through the run down train station and across the trickling creek filled with rocks that turned into an ocean at night. What would he say?
More than anything, Chihiro wished she was in the Spirit World now, maybe walking down the railroad tracks to Granny's, or just hanging around in the women's apartment space and talking with Rin and the other girls.
Even playing around with and feeding Skittles to the little soot workers Kamajjii the boiler man had animated to put the coal into the flames sounded fun right about now.
But Chihiro didn't get to have that life anymore. School was to start again in a few days, and she was feeling less and less excited by the moment.
When she'd first got back from the Spirit World two years ago, Chihiro and her parents had been surprised to discover they'd been declared missing after two days. Chihiro had, for the sake of her sanity's reputation, forgot to mention to her parents that technically, they'd been in the Spirit World for over a month.
But who was going to believe her? Tales of a bathhouse for the spirits ruled by a less than respectable witch wasn't exactly the stuff of a nonfiction account. Stories like that didn't get famous on the news for the explanation of a family that had disappeared off the face of the planet for an entire month.
Chihiro and her parents had been back in the real world for two years, and her parents had stopped questioning how the world thought they had been gone for a month, and yet they were only inside the theme park for half an hour. Chihiro had thought again and again about telling her parents what had really happened, but she'd known from the start that that was a bad idea. There no was telling what they might do. When she was younger, they might've thought she was just making up stories to have fun. But now she was twelve, and that kind of thing was no longer acceptable.
There wasn't much else to do but keep quiet about her experiences, and her memories of her parents as fat pigs in a barn sleeping off an overdose of the food of the Spirits.
"Chihiro!" Her mother called, startling the girl out of her thoughts. "Where are you? Are you hiding in the attic again?"
Chihiro took a deep breath and stood, stretching out cramped muscles. She ran to the door quickly when her mother called again. "I'm here, Mom!" She called down the narrow set of stairs.
"Do I really look that much like your mother, Chihiro?" A young voice asked jokingly. "Should I be concerned?"
Chihiro smiled when the form of her best friend appeared, running nimbly up the steps without making a sound. "You only look tiny bit like her, Ling, but I don't think you have to worry."
"Great!" Ling flopped down on the spare mattress Chihiro's family had brought from their old home. The old house had had four bedrooms, one for her, one for her parents, and two for guests. This new house had only three bedrooms, so the second spare mattress was stored in the attic, it's only users being Chihiro and occasionally, Ling.
"Your mom's pretty and all, but I quite like looking more like me than her."
Chihiro tilted her head, sitting down on the mattress beside him. "You realize that doesn't make any sense, right?"
Ling looked affronted. "Of course it does!" He sprang up again, and once more Chihiro found herself getting some serious whiplash. It always seemed like her best friend never stopped moving, never stopped running around. Over the past year and a half, she'd slowly been getting more and more used to it.
"It means I like looking like me, and not your mom!" Ling started jumping up and down on the bed, and Chihiro resisted the urge to knock his feet out from under him. She shook her head. "It still sounds like nonsense to me, Ling."
Ling stopped jumping, got down on his knees beside her and looked her in the eyes, right up in her personal space. It took all of Chihiro's nerve not to push him away. Ling stared at her, and simply said "You're not trying hard enough." He leaped away instantly.
Chihiro scrunched up her face, but decided to let it be. She changed the subject. "Where's Ran Fan? I thought she was coming too." Ran Fan was Ling's twin sister, and hung out with he and Chihiro more often than not.
"She got sick, so Fu made her stay home."
Chihiro made another face, something she'd found she quite liked doing. "Aw. And here I was hoping I would be able to finish my story." A few weeks ago, Chihiro had gotten fed up with not having anyone to talk to about her adventures and mishaps in the Spirit World. So she told Ling and Ran Fan about it, in the form of a story about another little ten year-old girl.
So far, Ling and Ran Fan had been impressed by her storytelling skills. Her imagination.
Chihiro wanted to tell them the truth so badly, but held back for fear of being mocked. Ling bounced back to a standstill in front of her, crossing his legs on the bed and giving her the I'm actually sitting still and paying attention to you, so you better make this good look. "I don't think Ran Fan will mind. I can just retell it to her later when I get home."
Chihiro hesitated. "Are you sure?"
Ling nodded, giving her an odd look.
Chihiro took a deep breath, then began the ending of her tale.
"'There must be some mistake', said San. 'None of these pigs are my mom or dad'. Yubaba's eyebrows went up in disbelief, unwilling to believe the girl had really seen past the spell. 'Really?' She asked. 'Is that your final answer?' San hesitated, then nodded." Chihiro took a deep breath, retelling her own story through the eyes of someone who had experienced everything. Ling watched her, listening, with eyes wide.
"'That's my final answer,' she said, and San's contract exploded into a poof of dust in Yubaba's hand. All of the people and creatures who worked for Yubaba and her bathhouse exploded into cheers and applause. Haku called out to San, and she ran across the bridge to take his hand, shouting and waving goodbyes' to all the friends she'd made in the Spirit World." Chihiro closed her eyes, reliving her last moments in the Spirit World with frightful clarity.
"Haku and Chihiro ran down the stairs through the center of the food places for the Spirits, and down toward where the huge river would run when the sun sank. 'Your parents are waiting for you near the entrance. They're wondering where you are,' Haku said, his eyes filled with happiness. 'You should go,' he urged. San held onto his hand for a moment. 'Will we ever meet again?' She asked, her eyes sad. Haku smiled comfortingly. 'I'm sure we will someday.' He paused. 'When you go through the tunnel, don't look back.'"
San nodded, than ran down the final set of stairs toward the expanse of grassland she hadn't seen in the month she'd been in this land. There. Her parents stood waiting for her, calling her name. San ran toward them, worried. But they were more worried than she was. They didn't have any memory of the past month. As Chi-I mean San, and her parents walked down the narrow all, San gripped her mother's arm tightly in the way she had when coming in. She stopped. She wanted to look backwards so badly, but somehow San knew that if she did that, she would never get home. And so she followed her parents out to where they'd left the car, and went to go live in their new house. The end."
Ling stared at her, as if waiting for something else. Then he flopped onto his back, still silent. Chihiro almost smiled. "You okay?" She asked.
"Oh, I'm fine. I'm completely alright. It's just that I didn't like the ending of that story."
Chihiro felt like she'd been smacked. "What do you mean you didn't like it?" Ling shrugged. "I didn't like the ending. I mean, did San go back to the Spirit World? Does she ever get to see Rin and Kamajjii and Haku again? What happened?"
Chihiro felt so sad, and she couldn't even tell him why. "I don't know," she said softly. Then she smiled at him. "If I ever find out, I'll tell you the rest of it."
A/N: I feel like I should mention that I didn't misspell "Sen". I had Chihiro change it. "San" is a reference to Princess Mononoke