Lost and Found (Spirited Away fanfic)

The human and the dragon

Authors note:
Hello! I am taking the time to rewrite a fanfiction I wrote when I was 16 that you can find through the fanfiction.net account, significantthirdwheel. My updates will be sporadic but frequent. This story will follow similar themes that my first story had, but I decided to go in an entirely different direction due to my dissatisfaction with the original. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and feel free to share any positive or negative feedback you have! I am always looking to improve.

Thank you!

Fiona

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Akio Ogino, 1959-2009

Beloved husband and father

Chihiro looked down at the picture of her father in front of her. It was a photo of him taken at her parents' wedding, two years before she was born. He was large, boisterous, and happy; which was how she was sure he would've liked to have been remembered- rather than the half sentient skeleton of a man he was when he'd passed. The cancer made him so frail, so vulnerable. Chihiro never thought she'd see him like this in her life. At least, not when she was only 18. He was supposed to be there for her graduating college, to eventually see her get married and start a family. He had been gone for two weeks, and she arrived from his funeral to her small Tokyo apartment exactly 10 minutes ago. The drive there and back was long and exhausting, and although she was happy to see her mother again after being far from home since starting college, she's never seen her in a worse state. Still, she was the strongest person Chihiro knew. In fact, the first time Chihiro saw her mother cry in her 18 years of living was while they were lowering her father's casket into the ground.

Chihiro didn't feel a strong connection to either of her parents. She never did. After they moved across Japan when she was 10 years old, she felt not only less connected to her mother and father, but to the world as a whole. Although Chihiro spent her teenage years suffering from this sudden detachment, her parents saw a positive adjustment in her while this was happening, in both her work ethic and attitude. At the age of 17, she had graduated as valedictorian of her class. The snarky demeanor she held as a child melted away, and she became almost overly polite and respectful. Due to this, most of her issues socializing, making friends or finding a partner, and listening actively when spoken to were overlooked by her parents. So long as their daughter was succeeding in life, there was no harm in her being a bit strange.

However, Chihiro wasn't happy. She didn't understand what she had at one point in her life, and she didn't remember having it, but she knew it was hers at some point. Maybe it was just a sense of normalcy, but it felt much deeper than that. Sometimes she thought back to the move her family made eight years ago. Upon arriving at their new house, her family had discovered that a new family had already moved in. They were late in claiming the house, almost a whole two weeks late, in fact. This didn't make any sense, as they thought they had arrived on the right date, but sure enough, it was 13 days later. Chihiro's parents, trying to avoid as much speculation as possible as to what happened, chalked it up to a misunderstanding. They must've just misread the date. Luckly, their realtor referred them to a house closeby for a similar price that they were eventually able to purchase after a week of staying in a nearby hotel.

Her parents remembered what happened in that mysterious abandoned theme park they found before moving in. They found a fair with food out in the open, ate a delicious dinner, and left their money on the counter when they were finished. They were so distracted by how delicious the food was that they hadn't noticed Chihiro had run away. After a short search, they found her at the field near the tunnel they came in through, and they went home after clearing off the debris that some teenagers probably threw on their car. Chihiro never told her parents, but she remembered none of this. She remembers entering the tunnel, and then exiting with her parents. This had always baffled her, kept her up at night even. She had read somewhere that intense trauma can cause blackouts in memory. This is what she assumed may have happened, maybe someone had taken advantage of her while she was missing from her parents sight. Maybe she blocked whatever happened out of her mind intentionally, to protect herself from whatever she had experienced. But the feelings she had towards that tunnel didn't coincide with trauma.