literature

The Other Half of Memory

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“Um, Mom?  Do you know where the box with my baby clothes and stuff I’ve outgrown ended up?”

“I just saw one of the movers with it…check the garage sweetie.”

Chihiro nodded, already running towards the garage. The movers had finished up and left about a quarter of an hour ago, and Chihiro couldn’t force herself to wait any longer.  She looked around, practically frantic, until she spotted it.  The box her mother had marked “Chihiro’s old clothes”.  She ripped off the packing tape and then slowly, reverently lifted the cardboard flaps.  There, poking out from beneath a neatly folded green sweater, was a flash of pink.  She slid her hand beneath the sweater and pulled out a tiny pink shoe.  She felt lightheaded, then realizing she had forgotten to breathe.  With a gasp of air to fill her aching lungs, she closed the box with her free hand and walked down the hall and up the stairs.  

“Chihiro, why did you need something out of – that shoe…wasn’t that from…”

She looked up at her mother with a strange smile and nodded, sidling past the woman and  stepping into one of the bedrooms.  When she heard her mother’s steps recede in the house, she hoisted herself out of the window and onto the roof.  Careful not to slip on the roof tiles, she lay back, looking at the shoe that, until a few hours ago, had had almost no meaning to her whatsoever.  

That day she had fallen into the river, Haku had saved her, but not the shoe that had fallen off her foot.  This one in her hand was the only one she still had.  She wondered if, in some way, the other might be with him… That wasn’t likely though.  Chihiro watched the sky for a while before she felt her eyes closing and falling asleep.  Just before her eyelids closed completely though, she could have sworn she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of white and aqua whipping through the sky…


“Chihiroooooooo, get up already!”  The brunette flopped out of bed at the sound of her friends’ voices.  She stumbled into her school uniform and – after taking her skirt back off and making sure she put it on right side out that time, threw her bag over her shoulder and ran out the door.

“Bye Mom, I’ll be home right after school!” she called over her shoulder as she slid into the backseat of her friend, Rin’s car.  

As Rin’s car rattled down the uneven pavement, Chihiro thought, not for the first time, how weird it was that the first friend she made in her new school had the same name as her only friend in the spirit world.  Well…not quite her only friend.  But in her head, that wasn’t the word she applied to Haku.  There were things she was careful not to think about.

“Chihiro, here,” Rin turned around in her seat with something in her outstretched hand.  Chihiro took it, unwrapping the paper napkin to reveal a still-warm dumpling, “I figured you’d still be asleep when I got to your house, so I swiped a dumpling for you.  Oop, green, here we go,” the light changed and the girl eased down on the pedal, the car rolling into the intersection and bouncing along towards school.  

Chihiro felt a small spot of cold hit her arm and looked up in confusion.  

“Oh,” from her seat by the window, she was the first to notice, “Mr. Sendo, may I close the window?  It’s raining…”

The teacher, a new addition to the faculty, with a kind smile and a vague disposition, looked up from grading papers, “Who – oh, Chihi – what was – ah, I see, rain.  Yes, of – the window – yes.”

The man is incapable of finishing a thought, Chihiro stood, the raindrops falling faster now.  She saw them smack against the window and cluster together, only to form little rivers and slip down and out of view.  

“Oh, ah – class?  I have an – erm – I’m sure some of you have – our town has been working, for the past few months, on bringing back some parts that have become run-down, and a friend of mine asked me if I thought you all would like to help.”

Every pair of eyes in the class focused on the teacher.  That was quite possibly the first complete sentence the man had ever been able to get out.  It was a momentous occasion.  

“You see, there’s only so much about ecology I can teach you with just an overhead, and sometimes you need to go out there and see the devastation, have a hand in the healing, and that is why your participation in this citywide effort will take the place of your final exam.”  Mr. Sendo looked slightly winded, but the vacancy was gone.  His face was flushed and his eyes bright, his normally fidgety hands calm and still on the edge of his desk.  The class was silent for a moment – two whole sentences in one day you know – but then burst into cheers at the fact that their final exam was going to be purely participation.  

“Mr. Sendo?” Rin’s hand shot up, “Which part of town will we be working on?”

He shuffled through a slim binder, stopping at a page near the middle, “There are several – ah, let’s see – this one isn’t really – here’s one!  They’ve already torn down – we’d be restoring the – does anyone remember the Kohaku River?”

Chihiro jumped visibly, the colour draining from her usually ruddy cheeks.  Rin shot her a concerned look.

“You ok?”

She couldn’t hear Chihiro’s reply, but saw her mouth the same name the girl sometimes mumbled when she fell asleep in class.  

“Haku…”

“Mr. Sendo, I think Chihiro needs to go to the nurse’s office, should I walk her down?”

“Hmm – Miss R- oh, of course,” he waved her towards the door and then turned back to the class to run through a few other places they could help restore.  Rin pulled Chihiro’s arm over her shoulders and helped her towards the nurse’s office.  

“Chihiro, what happened in there?” Rin asked as she set her friend down on one of the plastic-wrapped beds, “I wasn’t going to be nosy because I figured it was none of my business, but who’s Haku?”

The girl let out a squeak and her cheeks went pink.  

“Ooh, so he’s someone you liiiiiike…” she cocked her head to the side thoughtfully, “but what’s he got to do with the Kohaku River?”

“N-nothing…just that ‘Haku’ is sorta part of ‘Kohaku’, see?” Chihiro laughed to cover her pathetic story.  

“…That was the lamest lie I’ve ever heard,” the taller girl crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes, “You’re hiding something…well just tell me when you’re ready,” she looked at the clock on the wall, “We’d better go back or Mr. Sendo’ll start wondering what happened to us.”

As they slid open the classroom door, they saw students with their hands just going down and the teacher counting tally marks on the board.

“So it’s decided, we’ll work on restoring the Kohaku River.”

Chihiro hit the floor like a sack of bricks.  

“Ok everyone, we’ll be dividing into two groups today, those planting and those digging.  At first, everyone will be digging either the trench for the river or holes where the trees will go later.  The orange paint lines mark where you’ll be digging, and since I believe your teachers,” the woman looked askance at the adults standing off to the side, “have already told you which groups you’ll be in, you can all be on your way.”

Most of the students in Chihiro’s school were there, milling around with shovels.  The teachers, who had been on the sidelines while the woman in charge spoke, now stepped up to herd their students towards the orange markings.  

“Chihiro, over here!” Rin waved from the area marked as the future riverbed.  Chihiro looked up, confused.  She and Rin – along with the rest of their class – had been assigned to digging holes for, and then planting, trees.  

“Chiharu and a friend of hers wanted to switch assignments so they could work with their friends and Chiharu’s boyfriend…not really sure why though, I mean, she always beats him up for his crazy compulsive lying thing.  But anyway, your names are so similar that it was easy to alter the rosters,” Rin gave a grin.  She always struck Chihiro as the kind of friend who, when she knew you were having a hard time making ends meet, would offer to drive the getaway van.  Weird, but always there.  

Chihiro shook her head and walked over to join Rin.  She pulled her tie from her pocket and eased her hair back into a ponytail, thinking about the people who had made the tie just for her.  Maybe when the river was back she could – no, she told herself, don’t start thinking about that.  

She grabbed a shovel and started roughly stabbing the hard-packed soil with the end.

“Whoa girl, slow down.  The dirt never did anything to you,” Rin looked at her curiously, “About Ha-“

“Rin.”

“Come on, I was just-“

“Please don’t.”

Rin blinked at her friend’s voice, strained and abrupt.  It wasn’t usual Chihiro.  She decided the subject of this mysterious Haku and whatever connections he had to the Kohaku River were best left for another day.  She took a shovel for herself and started breaking up clumps of soil.  

By the end of the afternoon, Chihiro and Rin were exhausted, but they, along with about two hundred other students, had gotten a huge amount of the riverbed dug.  They would all start bright and early the next morning, joined by a hundred or so extra people volunteering, and with any luck, the digging would be done by the end of that day.  

“Mr. Sendo’s class, over here!  Mr. Sendo’s class!”  The students looked up to see Mr. Sendo waving them over.  His class grouped around him, waiting.  

“Since this is a – it’s taking the place of your fi – I sent permission slips to your – I got them all back, right?”

Most nodded, a few pulled theirs’ out of pockets and passed them up.  Since this project was a replacement for several science classes written and practical final exams, they were helping most of Friday, and all of Saturday and Sunday.  Instead of returning home and losing work time, they were to be staying in the small apartment building less than a five-minute walk from the worksite.  They had dropped off their bags with a teacher that morning, and those bags were now waiting for them in their rooms.  

“I’ve been authorize – see, we have two – would you all rather go out as a group for – or the apartments have kitchenettes.”

The class seemed split down the middle, so those who wanted to eat out as a group went with the teachers while those who wanted to, and were capable of making their own meals headed off on their own.  

Chihiro and Rin, along with Yuu and Miho, two other girls from their class, were sharing an apartment.  They had chosen to cook for themselves, and were now wandering through the grocery store, their cart weighted down, not with groceries so much as with Miho.  

“Miho, get out of the cart!”

“I will only after you push me down an aisle!” the girl twisted her face into a pout, then laughed.

Rin, the strongest of the four and therefore the one elected to push the cart, sighed in frustration.

“Fine, one aisle.  Then you get your butt out so we can buy some food and go home,” she found an empty aisle.  The freezer section, perfect.  That way, in the likely event that Miho got hurt, they would have ice.  


“Good morning sleepyheads”

Rin and Chihiro were already up and ready for the day, having woken up on time.  Well…Rin woke up on time.  When Chihiro didn’t, she had proceeded to sock her with a pillow.  Now that it was almost time to start work, Yuu and Miho – who had survived her freezer section ride intact -, still being asleep, looked as though they were about to suffer the safe wake-up call Chihiro had.

“OW!”

“Oh good, you’re up,” Rin smiled wickedly, letting the second pillow drop to the floor unused, “Well, not that that’s taken care of, see you two at the worksite.  Chihiro made breakfast and there’s some for you two left on the counter.”

“Rin!  I’ve leaving,” Chihiro’s voice called from the door, “Stop beating them up or we’ll be late!”

Once Rin and Chihiro had left, Yuu looked to Miho.  

“We’re not going to make it through this weekend alive, are we?”

Miho shook her head solemnly.  


About an hour before their workday would end, the group working on digging the riverbed had finished.  It had taken two whole days and nearly four hundred people, but they had finished.  The woman overseeing everything saw this and gave a shocked smile.

“Excellent work everyone!  Do you all have enough energy to start the next step tonight?  We still have another hour or so.”

They were all exhausted, but most of them were excited by the progress they had made and reluctant to call it quits there.  The woman then signaled a large dump truck.  The students and volunteers saw that it was filled with pebbles and smooth river rocks.  

“The next step is to cover the sides and bottom completely with these,” she started pulling bags off of the truck.  Several of the volunteers, getting the message, moved to help.  

Sunday morning rolled around, and with it, Chihiro’s turn to wake everyone up.  

“Rin!  Rin, get up.  Everyone’s tired, but you’re the only one still asleep!”

The taller girl did not take kindly to waking up when it was anyone’s idea but her own.  Without moving anything else, she held up three fingers.  

Two.

One.  

Chihiro left quickly with a, “See you in a bit,” over her shoulder.
By the time she got to the worksite, the others had already started up where they left off last night.  Already they had covered a fair chunk of the riverbed.

Running towards the covered section was a boy she recognized as Chiharu’s boyfriend.  He was laughing and brandishing a water bottle, which he proceeded to snap open and squeeze its contents into the trench.  He shouted, “I am the mighty Kohaku River!”
Chihiro gasped softly; for just a second, she was certain she’d seen a flash of slate grey eyes.  


Haku was hard at work looking over papers and tallying accounts.  Yubaba had released him from service years ago, but she’d recently fallen ill and asked him, as a favour, to watch over the bathhouse for just a few days.  

Just then she was checking in via the same paper figure method Zeneba had used on him so long ago.  He started running through the previous day’s report for her when he felt a tug on his arm.  He turned his head to see who had done it, but no one was there.  

“Haku?  What’s wrong?” Yubaba asked, vaguely annoyed that he had stopped in the middle of the report.  

“Nothing, I apol - whoa!” the tug came again, so strong this time that he fell out of the chair and into an awkward heap on the floor.  

“Yubaba, I’ll have to get back to you,” he shooed the paper shape away and the image of his former mistress faded

“What in the world is going on?” he asked himself.  The tugging sensation remained, but much fainter.  Haku pulled out a bowl made from a large, iridescent shell and filled it with water.  It was his scrying pool.  He asked it what the reason for the pull was, and as the shell’s bottom rippled out of sight, a new scene appeared.  ‘An almost familiar scene,’ Haku thought, ‘Why do I feel like I’ve been there before?’

It was an empty riverbed with small trees newly planted on each side.  There were people, mostly young, moving about.  Near the edge of the image, he caught a glimpse of a familiar brown head of hair.

“Show me that girl please,” he said, telling himself it couldn’t be her, what were the odds?  …it was.  

“Chihiro…”

“Haku, I brought you some – what’re you looking at?” a tall brunette walked in with a tray of food and tea.

“Rin, come look please.  Tell me who you think this is,” Haku said, his voice shaking almost imperceptibly.  

“All right, I’m coming. Ok, tell you who I – no.”

“Do you see her?”

“No, it can’t be.  Se – sorry, Chihiro?”

Haku let out a sigh, “So I’m not just imagining it.”

Rin peered closer, “What is everyone doing?  There’s a sign posted but I can’t make it out…” she squinted, “Kohaku…what’s it s-hey!”

Haku bumped her out of the way and focused the picture on that sign, its letters now as clear as day.

Kohaku River Restoration Project

The river spirit felt tears stinging his eyes, “She’s bringing me home…”


Chihiro stared out of the classroom window, watching the wind shake leaves loose from their branches.  Normally, she could care less about the trees, but she needed something to distract her from the ticking of the clock at the front of the classroom.  It wasn’t a very effective distraction however, as the rhythmic tick of the second hand beat a tattoo in her brain.  It had been nearly a week since her ecology class’ project, and work was predicted to have been finished sometime today.  That morning, it had taken all of her willpower – and her mother’s lack of naiveté – to keep her from skipping school today to be there the instant…the instant what?

The instant the rover started flowing again?

The instant there was a chance of seeing Haku?

Chihiro’s entire being was moving in time with the tick of the second hand as though it were the flick of a conductor’s baton.  Her pulse thundered with it, her fingers fidgeted with it, her foot tapped with it.  

She was jolted from her rhythm when the bell dismissing them rang.  

Lunch.  

A spark of an idea hit Chihiro, and before Rin could even gather up her books, the girl was down the hall and taking the stairs three at a time.  

<i?It’s ok, lots of students leave to go home for lunch, no one’ll think me leaving is suspicious</i>, she told herself.  Her stomach was a jumble of nervousness and excitement, Please let the river be done!  

When Chihiro reached her house, she eased the door open as quietly as possible, not remembering if her mother had said she would be coming home for lunch today or not.  

She breathed a sigh of relief as she reached the door to her room, no sign of her mother.  Chihiro hurried to the small box she kept under her bed.  Inside it were a few childish treasures, but underneath those, the shoe.

It was such a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing, but it was probably the reason her family was alive.  She took it out of the box and practically flew down the stairs and out of the house.  

She reached the river, panting heavily from having run such a long way.  Once she had caught her breath, Chihiro looked up at the scene around her.  It looked like all work had been finished earlier, and cleanup was just about done.

It’s probably not the best idea to call him with these people around…

So she sat against a tree to wait.


The last few days had been torment for Haku.  The scrying pool had been out full time, showing the river nonstop, but Chihiro hadn’t show up in it since she left Sunday afternoon.  Meanwhile, the pull of the river had grown stronger and stronger until it threatened to yank him out of the spirit world and back to the human world.  He couldn’t have that happen, not just yet, so he had set up magical wards.  As long as he remained in the bathhouse, the tug was only an unpleasant sensation, as opposed to an actual physical force.  

Don’t look in the pool ever five seconds you fool, Haku chided himself, She’ll still be in school, she won’t be the-

His thoughts cut off when his glance flicked to the pool anyway, and leaning against a tree, he saw just who he had wanted to.


Chihiro saw a few of her classmates driving along the street, hurrying to get back to the school before the lunch period ended.  She knew she ought to be running right now, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave.  With her school bag by her side, she was obviously a student and would probably be caught and punished, but the pull of the river wasn’t only affecting its former spirit.  

I wonder if he even knows the river is back…  She turned the shoe over in her hand, smiling faintly.  He does.  I know it.

Eventually, the workers finished cleaning up their materials and left, a few casting strange glances towards the student who had been sitting there all day.  Of course, by then she had fallen asleep and was oblivious.  One worker, a young man, walked over to her.  He placed a hand on her shoulder and shook gently.

“Hey kid,” he shook her again, “You should probably get home soon, the sun’ll go down in an hour or so…”

Chihiro blinked muzzily, looking at him, “I will.  I’m just waiting for someone.”

Her sure smile unnerved the worker, and he settled for a nod, walking away.  

She looked around, he had been the last worker left.  There was almost no one anywhere near the river.  Now was as good a time as any.  Chihiro stood up and walked over to the riverbed she had helped recreate just a week ago.  It was infinitely strange and familiar all at once, stirring up old memories and new fears.  What if he didn’t come?  What if this wasn’t the real Kohaku River anymore, and the day it had been filled in had ended its life for good?  She shook her head vehemently, she had to try.

Slowly she bent down, her hand slipping beneath the water.  She paused, unsure of what to do next.  Maybe just my hand isn’t enough… she thought, and sat down, quickly removing her socks and shoes to dangle her legs in the river.

“Haku, please come home…” she whispered, afraid that the river, instead of becoming a way to see Haku again, would end up a cruel reminder of what she left behind in saving her parents.  


“Haku, please come home…”

The spirit’s ears pricked, his head jerked up from what he had been doing.  He knew that voice.  He heard it every day in his head.  

“Haku?” Rin looked at him, confused, “What is it?”

“Did you hear that just now?”

“…hear what?”

Haku shook his head, “Never mind.”  He told himself he imagined it, his head bending down again to resume his work.  


“Dammit Haku!” Chihiro yelled, miserable and angry, “You were supposed to come back!”  She kicked the water, sending up an arc of shining droplets.  

“Why couldn’t you come back?” another droplet fell to the river, this one considerably saltier and sadder.


“Ahh!” Haku gave a sharp intake of breath, his hand flying to his side.  Pale fingers lifted his shirt enough to reveal the beginnings of a bruise just below his ribcage.  

“What in the…” his voice trailed off as a wave of sadness he knew wasn’t his own hit him almost as hard as Chihiro’s kick just moments ago.


“Never mind then, be that way,” she stood, brushing the dust from her clothes, stuffing her socks and the pink shoe into her school bag and slipping her feet into her shoes.  
Wiping away the trail left by the one tear, she set out to go back home, knowing her mother would want an excuse as to why she was so late, as well as spattered with water when it hadn’t rained.
A/N: The title of this fic is from the book Downsiders, which is an amazing book. And just in case it messes anyone up, yes, there are two Rins. The one everyone knows from the movie, and one in the human world who becomes Chihiro's friend.
And the two mentioned in the River Restoration chapters, Chiharu and her boyfriend are taken from CardCaptor Sakura. I love Chiharu and Yamazaki, they needed to pop up in one of my fics.
And this is a work in progress, I'll edit it once I've gotten more written.
And on Rin and Haku's names, I chose to use them instead of Lin and Kolaku because...I don't know why really. I just like Rin better than Lin. That probably stems from people who changed Riza's name to Liza in some english translations of FMA. It might be correct that way but I don't like it as much.
© 2007 - 2024 kateavalanche
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KazenoShun's avatar
Do you still have the story up on ffnet?