I re-watched Spirited Away a while back and lamented that there were very few good one-shots to tie it all up. Recently, I dusted this off and fixed it up. Hopefully, it's not too bad.
And No More Dreams
By Rurouni Star
At age twenty-one, the world was no longer magical.
It hadn't been an immediate discovery; there were many events and aspects in her life that had led to it. But for all of that, she could still remember the day it had all come together for her, when it all began to make such perfect sense.
At the time… she had put it off for nigh on four years. Dreaming of things that might have been real, if she had let them. Things that might have been truth or fiction or just a daydream from the aspirin she'd had to take in the car. She'd put it off to make it last longer – a memory of being loved and cherished by so many different people. Feeling special.
But then… as she discovered later, people tended to imagine things that made up for their lacks in life.
Ogino Chihiro could still remember what it was like to be desperate, fourteen, and utterly alone.
It was being dirty, tear-streaked, and huddled in the shadow of a bridge in the middle of the night. Believing in something that never was because it was all she had left to do.
"Haku?" she asked the wind in a trembling whisper. "Haku, I'm tired of being strong. I want you to help me again. Please."
No lights appeared in the bathhouse; no footsteps thudded lightly on the bridge above her. No kind-faced boys came to dry her tears.
She decided, shivering in the dark, cold night, that the world must have lied to her. Because there were no spirits, benevolent or otherwise, in this place. Merely empty space that stretched about her into eternity – and her, alone, at the center of it all. The expansive ocean, and the path she'd walked between a sky and a reflection had merely been dreams.
And Haku?
Haku…
"Please, Haku. Please come for me, just this time…"
Haku had never existed.
Because if he had… he would have found her, and taken her away again. He would have put his hand on her back and told her how amazing and how brave she was, and they would have flown away together to a station called Swamp Bottom.
Such dreams had been her sustenance for four years; sometimes, she thought they were as many as the stars in the sky. And just as cold and distant.
As it was, the only thing that dawn had found was her tiny figure - a girl with too-skinny legs and damp clothes – alone in the middle of an abandoned field of stones.
When she walked back to her house with a bruise on her knee and an aching hole in her heart, her parents hadn't even noticed she'd been gone. But as her mother walked out with a single shrieked profanity and a bag over her shoulder, she took Chihiro with her.
At some point that day, she discovered that dreams were just the self-betrayal of a child. And she decided to grow up.
So at the age of twenty-one, with no more illusions left in her to break, she was sitting on a cold stone bridge in the fire of a setting sun, dangling her legs over the edge and staring at the water that had never been an ocean.
For all that the world was unmagical, she reflected tiredly, it was still so achingly beautiful at times that she wanted to believe again.
"I wish I could stop," she said into the wind. "Forever and ever."
She couldn't, though, and it was proof enough that she was crying once more, on the rail of an old bridge.
"You want to stop what?" asked a gentle voice from behind her. She stiffened and tried to spin about, with one hand on her face to hide the tears.
A stranger stood behind her – a man about her own age, she thought, in blue and white. His eyes struck her instantly. They were vividly blue and perfectly clear – and she found herself involuntarily thinking of a sea that stretched on into eternity, all the way to the end of the world.
His hand reached forward, and his fingers brushed away the tears she'd tried to hide. She felt immediately the recognition of someone dreaming a dream all over again.
She was frozen in place for a moment, as his warm fingers traced her face; the edge of her eyes to the slope of her cheek, where she felt the awful urge to lean into his touch. As though it was the missing piece from her whole broken life.
It passed, so quickly.
"I don't know you," she said in a hoarse voice. And then: "I don't remember. I don't."
He smiled, but it held such sorrow in it that it really wasn't anything close to such an expression. "Nothing is ever truly forgotten," he said sadly. He paused and his hand brushed to the edge of her jawbone, to cup her face. He leaned to press his forehead to hers, and she saw an ocean in his eyes.
"I hurt you very badly, didn't I?" he asked quietly.
Chihiro trembled. "I don't know you," she repeated, but it was barely more than a whisper.
"It would stand to reason," he told her, "because you don't know yourself anymore either."
"I can't sit here dreaming forever," she said in a choked voice. "I can't live through this again. Please, don't make me."
His hand was on her back, now, and she seemed to remember it being there before; many, many times, and many years ago.
"When you don't really believe, it's hard to find any magic ever again," he said. "I tried so hard to find you… and you were right where I thought you'd never return."
"You're not real," she whimpered, and she felt the situation fully return as she let out a choked little hiccup.
His hand in her hair, now, and she could feel his breath brushing softly across her face.
"Then it won't hurt to say my name," he said. "But you won't."
She felt her body begin to collapse in on itself, and onto him. She felt him, so real and warm and comforting that even as a dream, she wanted to love him. And… she gave in.
"Kohaku," she said softly, sobbing into his chest. "It's Kohaku."
"And Chihiro," he said with a sad smile, smoothing back her hair. "I never forgot. Not for a moment."
She'd always wondered what might have happened if she had looked back. Had sometimes regretted not just staying with him and forgetting her parents and her reality. And sometimes, she had wondered why she'd never stopped to hug him tightly to her, one last time. Later, she had wondered if his lips would be as real as hers, even if he were nothing at all.
Eleven years and a million shattered, pieced together dreams later, she knew.
He tasted like an ocean.