Review please. And thank you EVERYONE for reviewing so kindly thus far. Keep it up! I love it...yes I'm an egomaniac...forgive me. ~_~ Chapter Five, Woohoo! Hope you like.
Ordinary World: Chapter Five: Awakening
Chihiro opened her eyes gradually, as though she were fighting some kind of heaviness that wasn't all related to her normally languid state of being. Raising her right hand to her eyes, she rubbed some sleep from them, blinking as she took in surroundings that were very...familiar.
Lush green grass, brighter than any back home, a tall red building on the near horizon, sunlight on rocks that would be under water in the night...
"So you do remember it," a voice remarked thoughtfully and Chihiro only kept from jumping by gripping the grass beneath her in fistfuls. Suddenly she remembered what happened...she remembered who she was with...and she remembered who she would prefer to be with.
"Of course I remember," her indignant reply was terse and frowned upon the air even as she spoke.
"Well you never know, spells like that can affect any part of your brain Pretty and I figured I might have knocked a few memories loose, but oh well. Can't win 'em all I guess," Kesuke shrugged, reclining on his heels as he stared at her in thought.
"What?" Chihiro was more than a little agitated with someone she would refer to as her abductor when soft-pedaling it and something else less polite if she were in a rage. As it was she was feeling somewhere in between the two.
"Your little dragon boy is taking his time in getting here. I wonder if he ran into any of Master's lackeys...hm, no matter. He'll get here, battered or not," and Kesuke shut his eyes and plopped down on the ground in an all out sprawl. Chihiro slammed her jaw shut even as she began to gape.
"Battered? They're hurting him? What are you talking about? Stupid, open your eyes and talk to me!" Chihiro talked in a blur, frantic at the thought of any harm coming to the boy she loved in more ways than numbers could account for.
"Whoa, slow down Pretty. He's probably fine, too strong for any of master's so-called lackeys. They're probably eating vortex fragmentations or if they let him get this far, dirt. Don't look at me like that," he added the last part with a mock-plead.
"Why not? You're nothing but trouble!" Chihiro glowered.
"I'm hurt Pretty. I didn't really mean for that to pain you as much as it did either," Kesuke replied cannily but no less sincerely.
"It's not just that, you come in on my life, no, our life, and readily mess things up, just when I think they're about to open up for me again," Chihiro's words died softly as the truth of her own words hit her.
She had lived a rather dull life, waiting all that time for Haku, just waiting for something else to happen, something else to begin. She had few or no friends, no one she could confide in and just when it seemed one might be there for her, Haku namely, after all that time...it ate away at her subconsciously just to think about it.
"Pretty," Kesuke for the first time felt kind of uncomfortable, as though for once he had no rejoinder or witty comeback. And he really didn't. He really didn't. Her eyes snapped to meet his, still glaring, but it was a sad, kind of disheartened glare of something stolen, something broken and something contemptuously impaired.
"Don't call me that! My name is Chihiro. Chi-hi-ro! Get it?" she corrected in a biting tone that she hadn't known she possessed.
"Sorry," he mumbled. Chihiro's glare rattled itself to a look of vague consternation and then confusion.
"What? Speak louder," she all but ordered, being the captive of course.
"I said, sorry," he enunciated better and Chihiro could tell he wasn't used to having to admit when he was wrong or step down and go as far as to apologize. She felt a twinge less animosity for him, an inch more compassion, the kind she had for most people in reality.
She didn't exactly like her position or the circumstances he had placed her in, but she couldn't let him go on looking like he did, like a moping stray animal. Apparently he wasn't as tough as he thought.
"Apology accepted," she responded, and even tried a tentative smile with this strange boy from another world.
"Thanks," he said.
"So why am I here?" she wasted no time and Kesuke moaned and turned away.
"Can't tell you," he muttered and she cocked her head to one side.
"Why not?" the childish implication of the never-ending game of 'why, because I said so' hung in the balance of the space between his answer and the silence.
"It's not what she ordered me to do."
She?
"She who?" Chihiro asked, curious and more curious by the second.
"Master," he answered evasively and that was all they had time for.
THUD!
"Oof, get offa me!" Kesuke's voice was muffled coming from underneath the pile of cloth and body that had so conveniently heaped itself onto him.
"Gladly," came a cool and assured voice and Kesuke did a double take.
"So you made it..." he thought aloud, impressed obviously.
"Chihiro are you okay? I'm sorry I got here so late...the portal that dropped me on Mr. Happy over there was kind of bugged," the cool voice explained sheepishly and Chihiro was bewildered in the most joyous way to find that that voice belonged to none other than Lin.
"Lin!" Chihiro wanted to smack the watery drops forming in her eyes away, feeling foolish for showing them but ignored them instead and embraced the older woman in a fierce hug. She was so excited; she didn't even notice Lin's use of the word portal as her transportation, which under any other circumstances might have miffed her just a tad.
"Chihiro," Lin smiled down at the girl who was still shorter than her, but not by quite as much anymore of course.
"I can't believe you found me," Chihiro commented and added, "How?"
"A white dragon told me," Lin smirked in a decidedly suggestive manner that Chihiro chose to ignore; she knew Lin would be teasing her mercilessly later anyway. Why start now? And besides, there was the small matter of...
"Who are you by the way?" Lin turned to face Kesuke who still wore a starkly bemused expression on his face.
"A messenger boy," he replied cheekily and grasped Chihiro's arm, pulling her away from Lin forcefully. "And she's my package, so I'm afraid you can't have her."
Lin eyed him in a dangerous fashion any of the bath workers would have known was one to steer clear of...steer maybe in a five hundred yard radius clear of to be precise.
"What kind of delivery boy are you? Slave dealer?" Lin hazarded a guess and Kesuke shook with mirth.
"Goodness no, I'd never deal with the likes of them. But brave of you to guess," Kesuke allowed.
"Then an apprentice?" Lin ventured again.
"A sort I suppose," Kesuke pondered and shook his head slowly afterward, "but not exactly. I have no contract you see."
Lin's eyes widened.
"Presumably not Yubaba then?" Lin stated but it came out as a question, a question Kesuke affirmed.
"Let go of me," Chihiro whispered to Kesuke, not certain why she was whispering. The only other person there was Lin...well, Lin wasn't precisely a person but anyway...
"But I can't Chihiro," he replied with a solemnity that Chihiro was surprised enough to see in him that she stopped struggling.
"You can't?" she repeated unbelieving.
"I can't," he nodded.
"And why not?" Lin challenged, her eyes belying only part of the nervousness that resided within her. Who this man was, not letting go of Chihiro---or Sen as she was used to calling her---and what his purposes were befuddled the older woman.
"It's a deal I'm under," Kesuke evaded the true answer discreetly.
"Lin," Chihiro's voice brought the two out of their rather heated and terse conversation.
"What Sen...I mean Chihiro?" Lin corrected herself.
"Where's Haku?" Chihiro had been wondering why he hadn't come for her and begun to worry; her worries were semi-confirmed when she noted the cloudy look Lin's normally clairvoyant eyes got.
"He's recuperating," Lin said and dropped it there.
"From what?"
"The travel back. It was pretty nasty apparently, for him anyway," Lin was the one being evasive now and Chihiro felt for all the world that she was the only one asking questions and the only one not getting any real answers.
"Let me go," she reiterated to Kesuke.
"I told you, I can't," he sighed.
"Figure it out. I need to see Haku," Chihiro checked her temper, even as it began to creep up on her.
"You can't. You have to come with me," Kesuke insisted and Lin snorted.
"Who says?" Lin confronted him and advanced towards him, Chihiro only now noticing her attire. It was not the bathhouse uniform; it was like...like hakama, she decided as she noted the pleated white pants and green haori. But before Lin could reach the two inseparable people, there was an unnatural gust of black wind that seemed to roll in with the also unnaturally purplish clouds now coming above.
"I say so," a deep, sinister and female voice icily replied. It looked like a woman but it couldn't have been. No, it looked more like one of the dark elves in myths Chihiro read as a child, lithe body, structurally well defined features and long pointed ears. Long black hair swirled in the same threatening manner the woman spoke to them, purple eyes flashing like the lightning Chihiro felt suddenly certain she could call up.
"Nori," Kesuke registered the newcomer's name shortly.
"Nice to see you too Kesuke," the she-demon replied in the same cold manner, a twinge of a smile painting itself over her blood-red lips. Chihiro felt like she was in the presence of the epitome of the cliché "beautiful danger."
"Go, take her. I'll handle the witch," Nori little more than commanded him and he nodded, however reluctantly as Chihiro was fast to note. Wait a minute...witch? Chihiro looked to Lin, shocked to see a strange and yet familiar aura forming itself around her friend. She could swear it had a tinge of green a different shade than her haori and that...was that energy crackling between Lin's long tapered fingers?
"Witch?" Chihiro all but croaked and Lin smiled ruefully
She yelled in typical Lin-fashion, even as Chihiro was being taken away into yet another portal of sorts, hand grasped firmly by Kesuke: "You've missed a lot! Don't worry Sen...I mean, Chihiro! We're going to get you back. Kesuke, if that girl comes back with as much as a scratch, you're in big trouble mister!" And Chihiro felt a twisted need to smile dryly. That was what she had said to No-face on her first visit...it seems Lin used those words on purpose, to make her less nervous. It helped.
"Thank you Lin," she smiled faintly as she was pulled nearly all the way into the portal and glimpsed Lin dodging that vile elf/she-demon's blasts of what could only be called lightning...and throwing her own magic right back at her. It was a crackling kind of energy that seemed to glow with a luminous shadowing of different shades of green.
And Chihiro only thought as she lost sight of them completely, once more being taken in through and to a place she wasn't sure where of: I didn't know Lin could do magic.
Kesuke noted the bemused and startled expression that Chihiro wore and shook his head, not for the first and not for the last time. This girl had apparently missed a lot in six years.
She probably didn't even know about the Queen.
Oh well, she'd know soon enough; he gripped her wrist tighter; it had been the truth. He couldn't let her go. He'd cast a spell to make them inseparable, just so he wouldn't lose her. He found himself thinking if the dragon-boy had any sense, he'd have beaten him to it. Shoving thoughts like that out of his mind though, Kesuke silences his thinking and listened to the easy whir of the traveling portals as he and Chihiro waited for the right one to open and take them...well, wherever it was they were going.
Chihiro for her part didn't have a clue and was getting pretty sick of it, but held her tongue.
Kesuke knew most of it, since he was the one orchestrating most of this...task. But even to him some things were up in the air still.
Rather far away, Haku moaned. The river god and spirit rolled over, ignoring the rather sharp pain in his temples. He'd gotten back in time to tell Lin before passing out. Lucky he could count on her now. Sighing, he stood and stretched, feeling ten years older than he really was. Chihiro would either be safe with Lin or...still with that other being that Haku could not repress his slight revulsion for. Kesuke. That was him. What could he want with Chihiro though? That was what plagued Haku all through his sleep, making his recuperation longer than he expected, restless as he was.
Chihiro.
Sen.
Love.
And she'd slipped through his fingers like water once again, this time not of her own volition though and he would cheerfully kill himself if he ever let it happen again.
It won't happen again, he assured himself as he exited his room and strode purposefully down the echoing corridors. This was not the bathhouse. No, this was the underground operation headquarters of the impending mission he had been given leave of just to be with Chihiro. Instead of avoiding it, living the life he dreamed of for years with her, he ended up somehow dragging her back into it with him and he cursed himself for it. How? He muttered something not altogether polite about fate and bad timing and continued to walk through the corridors. He needed to get Chihiro back if she wasn't there already and something told him she wasn't.
When he turned into a wing of the main meeting room, greeted by the sight of a rather dirty and weather-beaten looking Lin, who nevertheless managed a weak smile at him, he had his answer and turned away rapidly.
She wasn't there. Something had happened.
Again, an annoying voice chimed in inside his head and he told it to shut up and following that, realized that he must be going mad if he was arguing with himself mentally.
Mentally.
Yeah that seemed to sum it up.
Tearing down another wing and another set of corridors, he came to a room full of full-length mirrors, all with different gilding and framing. He stepped close to a particularly ornate golden one and touched its placid surface.
"Dissolve," he spoke firmly yet softly and the mirror's reflective face became watery, a murky kind of blue. Plastering a rather forced smile on his face, Haku took a breath and stepped into the mirror.
Seconds later the face of the mirror was flat and utterly mirror-like, giving no indication if its true use and power.
I'm coming Chihiro, he promised fervently and Haku's thoughts were rather one-track after that, all of the girl who lost her show in his river all those years, the girl who overrode the obstacles in a strange world only six years ago, and the girl who had come back into his life just recently only to be taken away again, caught in the middle of something he had no doubt, she understood very little or nothing of.
Chihiro...Sen...Best friend in many ways, and pillar of strength she didn't know she was.
Haku ran his fingers impatiently through his hair absently as he waited for the river of magic to carry him to his destination:
The Palace Merquise.
Undoubtedly where she was being held.
Not for long though, he added and resigned himself to the wait that seemed like forever and was in reality, a mere patch of minutes on time's great patchwork quilt.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Review please, you know the drill. ^_~ I know, more Haku and Chihiro togetherness is desired but bear with me. They will be together...just bear with the plot [which I hope isn't abysmal...]
Erm, what I mean is, I hope you like the story okay. ~_~
Again, thanks to all people who are reviewing, I REALLY appreciate it. ^_^_^^_^_^^_^ See how much I'm smiling?
-Kaji