Disclaimer: I do not own Spirited Away in any way, shape, or form. The characters and setting used all belong to Hayao Miyazaki.
Before the Train Leaves
by insert cliche
"You can use this."
As he holds his train tickets out to the human girl, Kamaji's voice is both excited and forlorn. His eyes are hidden behind his glasses, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he wishes there was another way to help. Sen decides not to comment on how the old man's hands are shaking, choosing instead to accept the folded stack of tickets without complaint and without fanfare. She thanks him for the tickets, and thanks him once again for helping Haku.
(The girl would do anything for the dragon boy, after all. Kamaji knows love when he sees it.)
She slides the small square door open and leaves in the next moment. Kamaji watches his last chance to freedom disappear with the girl, and reminices on all that he lost and everything that he will never have again. He used to have so much: a life outside the bathhouse, a wife and family, a human form.
Where is everything now?
Kamaji sees Sen walk away towards her own future, and turns away in pain. He doesn't know if he'll see her again. Whether or not she comes back, he will stay in the boiler room, kept company by his self-created soot sprites, and dream of a past left behind and a future gone away.
When he looks out of the window and sees the little girl board the old, red train, the old man sighs. (How old is he? Everything seems such a long, long, long time ago.)
He wishes losing the future didn't hurt so much.
Lin watches her assistant leave (with mouse, bird, and monster in tow), and knows that Sen will perform miracles. Maybe she'll make peace with Yubaba's frightful twin, or she'll lead No-Face to a place that's so nice that the copy-cat soul will never return. Maybe both. Maybe none.
The only thing Lin is completely sure about is that the girl will save Haku. (He's not the stupid, stuck up, arrogant-as-hell lizard boy anymore, because Sen cares too much about him, and Lin cares about Sen, and thus she cares for the boy by association. That girl is freaking contagious.)
Sen is going to save Haku, come back, free herself through another stroke of luck, and have a happily ever after. She's going to end up a literal fairytale princess (like the ones Lin used to hear about when she was a little girl, centuries upon centuries ago).
She'll be what Lin wanted to be, once upon a time.
But there are no happily-ever-afters for a bathhouse worker trapped through her own foolish mistakes. Lin (is that really her name?) is going to have to break herself free without help, just because she's unlucky and nobody would want to help her in the first place. She'll board the train and wander the never-ending land around her until she finds a purpose.
Lin doesn't know that souls fade away after boarding the train, turning darker and darker until they vanish into the night when they get off. She doesn't know that spirits can disappear.
Because the train is her freedom, and she'll do anything (anything) to get on.
Yubaba finishes yelling at all of her lazy, idiotic workers, sighs, and heads back to her chambers. It's surprisingly quiet now, with no monster (that wretched No-Face!) screaming and destroying her bathhouse for a stupid little girl. Even with the cleaning up going on below her, it's quieter than a normal bathhouse morning.
It feels peaceful, something that the centuries-old witch hasn't felt in a while.
She remembers a time when she used to be best friends with her twin sister, a time when she was loved by her parents and everybody around her. A time when she could dream, a place where she could cry...
...a past where she was happy.
She sees the human girl, Sen (because Yubaba still owns Chihiro), lead a considerably thinner No-Face out into the water, and watches as her worker follows the train track towards the platform. She knows that a high-status worker (most likely Kamaji, that sentimental old fool) gave Sen those tickets, and she knows what the girl is planning to do.
Sen is going to save Haku's life by returning the golden seal (Yubaba tried so hard to get that seal, so many times already), and befriend her kind sister in the process. She will make friends, even when traveling alone, and she will be happy. She will return happy, and she will get Yubaba to release her, and make her friends happy in the end. Who doesn't want to be happy?
Nobody. Everyone wants to be happy. (The only problem is that only the lucky ones get chances towards that happiness.)
Yubaba knows that she's going to have to free Sen (Chihiro, a voice whispers in her mind) when the human girl comes back, and starts planning ways to make it seem believable.
When Haku wakes up, two thoughts register in his mind. The first is that, for once in his (long, long) life, he is warm (not that cold, cold, cold darkness, the one that he doesn't even remember the beginning of. Nobody knows that Yubaba makes her slugs like this on purpose). The second is that Chihiro is not here.
But I heard her voice, he thinks. She was calling out to me.
He walks over to Kamaji and shakes the boiler-man.
"Kamaji. Wake up."
The old, wizened face peers up at him, and Haku can see his own reflection in the spider's black sunglasses.
"Ah, Haku. You're awake."
"I'm fine," Haku bites out. His own health is both unimportant and irrelevant right now. "Where is Sen?"
"She left to return the golden seal."
The dragon boy freezes, and then tries to think. Zeniba? Yubaba's sadistic twin sister? What if something happens to Chihiro? What if she's injured by the witch herself, or attacked by another spirit? What if she is killed?
Haku doesn't hear the rest of Kamaji's words. He gets up abruptly, and runs out of the boiler room.
"She did it to save you."
Everyone knows that she'll come back victorious, owning everything that they once dreamed of having. She will go (home to that dirty, smelly human world) as quickly as she came, and they don't know if she'll remember them at all.
All they know is that she has luck on her side.
They were never that lucky.
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