Summary:
(The whispering voice we never want to forget, in each passing memory
Always there to guide you
When a mirror has been broken, shattered pieces scattered on the ground
Glimpses of new life, reflected all around)
Haku finds his way to a new life after Chihiro's return to the human world.
Notes:
The two lines at the top are from the US release's English subtitles. The lines in parenthesis in the summary are from the same version's translation of 'itsumo nando demo'/"Always With Me." Written for Yuletide 2009; originally posted on (and formatted more nicely on) AO3. Happy Yuletide, Topaz_Eyes!
Chihiro kept calling my name in the darkness
I followed her voice and woke up lying here
When the thin boy with dark green hair showed up at Kamaji's door, there were no signs to warn Yubaba of the disasters that would result from accepting him as an apprentice. The bathhouse didn't shake on its foundations; none of the frog girls got chills when he passed by. He made a little ripple in the gossip, then it was as though he slotted himself into a role that had been waiting for him, and they forgot it had ever been otherwise.
He told Kamaji that he had come to learn magic. Dragons had water and a little wind magic by nature, but hadn't traditionally bothered with refining either, or learning those odd spells that only lesser beings than river gods might use. Traditionally, however, their rivers didn't up and get destroyed on them.
What does a river god without a physical river anymore do? He learns another trade.
After the little incident with Sen and her No-Face, which resulted in half the bathhouse being closed for restoration and half the staff needing therapy, Yubaba sent Haku a message just as he was preparing to go meet with her: "You're released from the contract. Get the hell out of my bathhouse before you draw her back."
What does an apprentice mage without a master do?
"You'll have to do something about the hair." Lin stepped back and looked at him in the mirror critically. "I've seen pictures. The only people with hair colors like that, you wouldn't be able to pretend you were one of 'em."
Haku grimaced a little. Remembering to never use magic would make passing among humans difficult enough, without his appearance broadcasting his otherness. "Can I change it?"
"I don't know." Lin reached out and flicked the back of his head. "Can you?"
He tried for hours. He tried just thinking it another color, spelling it to be another color as best he could imagine how, taking the color from the stones and the trees and telling his hair through his magic, you want to look like this now, and then later, please? He deconstructed every step of his change from human to dragon and back, and how the shades of his scales and skin altered to meet each other, and tried to discover how they might be persuaded to change. He failed.
If only Yubaba had been a sorceress instead of a witch, she might have been the type to color her hair. Instead, she had to be the type to transform into a giant bird. He would never have thought of this as a disadvantage before.
Finally, he admitted he was out of ideas and out of time, and went to Zeniba.
"So, the dragon wants to play at being human, does he?" Zeniba's smile was almost as toothy as his own. No-Face had looked up from the spinning wheel when he came in, but just as quickly looked back down, obviously doing his best to stay as far out of the conversation as possible while still in the same room. Haku felt sorry for him, for about two seconds. Then he remembered the half-digested muck sprayed all over the bathhouse that he'd had to help clean up after Chihiro left.
"Just tell me what I need to know," Haku said, fixing Zeniba with his best stern, narrow-eyed 'obey me, I'm a god!' look.
"Certainly. Will that be cash or credit?" Zeniba's laugh was almost as unnerving as the 'right, one of eight million' look she returned.
He managed not to blink while his mind raced, but as one eyebrow ratcheted up and up over her smirk, at last he gave in and said: "Huh?"
Although he had spent a very long time, by human reckoning, with people doing business beside and above and even while standing in his river, it had not been very long at all that they had been using paper and coins for most transactions, and much less time before his river was taken from him that they had been using plastic cards.
"Didn't you end up with any of these tossed into you?" Zeniba asked over her shoulder, rummaging through a drawer. "I know you had to get plenty of yen in there over the years. What happened to it all?"
Honestly, he couldn't remember much of that time beyond the bare fact of his river's change from being to not-being. His mind shied away from it and the warning ache was still too sharp to contemplate pushing. "It went to the destroyers."
"That's a shame." She held something up in her hands, leaning back and assessing it. "This will do for you, then. Here."
A shimmering piece of plastic landed in his hand. He brought it up and squinted to read it. HAYAMI KOHAKU. "What?!"
"Simple," she said smugly, "a spell to change the letters and another to make the humans believe you're—"
"No!" he almost shouted, still-very-green hair rising as from an invisible wind. "My name!"
"Oh, that old thing," she flipped a hand, turning around and bustling away, "you didn't intend on keeping that all to yourself, now did you?"
The human world had changed so much in these few years since his river died. The newly dubbed Mr. Hayami wandered down a row of department stores in Ginza, looking like he was window shopping, while in truth he was trying to decide what on earth to do.
His plan, on being given notice to vacate Yubaba's corner of the spirit world, had been twofold: 1. Go to human world. 2. Find Chihiro. Number one was expanded after consultation to include, "Fit in, at least superficially." Now that he had achieved number one, with odd clothes in what Lin had sworn was "stylish" disarray and hair in L'Oreal #40, he honestly had not a clue on how best to go forward.
(Every time this next step crossed his mind, he heard — Can we meet again? and his own foolish voice saying, I'm sure, and, Promise. It wasn't so much that he regretted the vow as that he regretted its timing, because circumstances would drive him to fulfill it much sooner than either of them had likely expected.)
He looked up to the blue, blue sky and thought, Surely the humans won't notice one tiny spell. Just in case, he hid behind a large bush.
Chihiro stared out the window of her room, watching a pair of sparrows fight over the best spot on her mother's bird feeder instead of reviewing her homework.
Gradually the odd itchy feeling in her spine that had led her to stare out the window moved up, and became stronger, and out of nowhere she said, "Haku?"
Keep calling, Chihiro—