Spirited Away Fanfiction: Chihiro is 20 and at university. Her brush with the Spirit World still influences her life today. She is trying hard to fit in with the "real world", but she is finding this difficult and the cracks are starting to show
Thi...
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Chihiro helped with the decorations. Rin was a hard woman to work for and she found herself snapping back at her sharp orders. However, her belligerence always seemed to raise a smile from the spirit woman. After an hour or so Rin stopped her.
"You're still recovering, don't push it."
"I'm fine," she said from the top of a ladder. She wanted to finish hanging the lights.
"Come down! Or I'll get Haku to bring you down and spank you!" Chihiro laughed.
"He'd have to catch me first!" But she did come down. "You never know I might like it!" She said in a mock sultry voice. Rin grinned.
"Now run along and play, I've got work to do."
"What am I supposed to do now?" Chihiro half whined.
"Have a look around. This place is huge; even I don't know it all." Chihiro sighed and walked away.
After a while, she became quite excited. She had the whole bathhouse to herself and all sorts of places to explore. She walked to the old disused upper west section, very few came here now. It appealed to her sense of adventure. In truth, most doors were locked or the rooms were empty. It was a little disappointing. She found a few old halls, the floors inches deep in dust. She also found lots of old musty chests, with rotten clothes or linen in them. After an hour of aimless wandering, she was bored and about to turn back. But she stopped to open a white bleached wood door she had missed on the way up another featureless corridor.
The room inside was white, bright white. Even the floorboards were painted white. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the only colour in the room. In the middle of the floor, lying across each other in an X were two black lacquered hair sticks. They had red roses painted on them, and a thin band of what looked like gold leaf about an inch from the thick end. She stepped in and gingerly bent down to pick them up. They were beautiful; the roses looked so lifelike she could almost smell them.
"No!" Squealed the voice in her head, "don't touch them, they are..." the voice was cut off, Chihiro frowned. She had always taken the voice to be part of her slightly unstable mind. Now she was beginning to suspect otherwise. It was something to ask Kamaji or Haku about.
This room was magic she knew that now, she could not see it but she could certainly feel it. It was cold and made her shiver; also there was a tang in the air, almost metallic. These hair sticks were magic too, they tingled in her fingers. They felt heavier than they should be. She looked more closely at them. There was an even crack across the gold band on both of them. She slipped one into her waistband and gripped both ends of the other one and pulled. A wicked needle-like blade came out of the lower half of the stick, the upper section served as the blades hilt.
"Thorns for a rose," said a deep, throaty female voice. Chihiro was almost afraid to turn around. Magic crackled in the air, wild and untamed, like static but worse. She did turn and saw nothing except white walls.
