Spirited Away: The Wait [ORIGINAL]

Let It Go

The Wait: Let It Go

“I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true.” 

-A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

    The next morning, Chihiro woke up to the sound of loud knocking. She stirred, mumbling incoherently in her sleep for her mother to let her sleep in just a little while more. The woman tried hiding under her blanket and covering her ears with her fluffy pillow, but the knocking was still too loud for her to go back to sleep.

     Tossing and turning restlessly, she poked her index fingers into her ears to mute the noise.

     It helped by one decibel.

     Groaning, she scratched her head. What was with that impossibly loud noise?

     After one minute of louder knocking, she decided she had had enough, and grumpily got up. She was about to make her way to the door to punch the slime out of that person who was refusing to let her rest, when suddenly Shou’s face appeared out of nowhere. “Wakey wakey!”

     Chihiro screamed in fright, as expected by the man.

     But what he did not expect was a hard slap to the face.

     “Oww!” he complained, his hand flying to his now red cheek. “What did you do that for?”

     Chihiro glared at the culprit. “You should have known better than to scare the lights out of someone early in the morning!”

     “You wouldn’t wake up when I came to wake you two hours ago! It’s nearly afternoon, sleepyhead.”

     “Still… Wait… if you came here to wake me up earlier, then why were you still knocking on the door? Shouldn’t it be unlocked?”

     He smirked. “Silly, silly, who said anything about knocking on the door? I was knocking on this,” he gestured to the little table by her bed.

     No wonder the volume of the knocking never seemed to go down! Chihiro thought she could pull all his hair out for all the pranks he played on her. She really needed to get back at him for once.

     “Anyway, are you okay? I know what Haku said yesterday was really horrible…”

     She waved him off. “I’m not particularly affected by it.”

     He lit up. “Then, you forgive him?”

     “No.”

     “But—”

     “He’s not the same Haku I met 10 years ago. This Haku is just… a steel-hearted person. I don’t know him anymore.”

     “But he doesn’t know about your condition and you know how he is right now… he’s…”

     “But Shou, the thing is, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about what Haku’s going through. I really doubt there’s anything that can convince me to think of him as something other than a jerk.”

     The blonde kept quiet for a while, trying to think of something to say to convince her otherwise. While Chihiro quietly observed him, the pent up frustration from yesterday began building up all over again.

     Haku was being irrational and a pain in the neck to put up with. It seemed that he was purposefully picking on her though; no one else seemed to be complaining about Haku, especially not the kids. Why was he doing that to her, of all people? If anything, they should have been closest—or at least, decently close. After everything they had been through, it was hard to believe that his attitude change towards her would be so drastic.