Natural Selection (Spirited Away, Haku/Chihiro, 2/8)
Title: Natural Selection
Authors: murinae and aishuu
Fandom: Spirited Away
Pairing: Haku/Chihiro
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,200
Posting Schedule: Sunday afternoons
Summary/Prompt: After marrying Chihiro, it's Haku's turn to explore a new world. Haku must navigate human life as he struggles to find his place as a god in a faithless, electronic age.
It was back to the information desk, but thankfully it was Nakajima who was working beside him instead of Kuwabara. She handled most of the work with the computers, although he was still forced to scan books and DVDs the library's patrons handed him.
After the fifth giggling teenage girl in a row made flirtatious comments to him about how motivating they found his presence, he was tired of the whole procedure and wished he could escape back to the bookshelves. Chihiro had never been so foolish growing up, and Haku had little patience for girls who didn't respect the wedding ring he wore openly on his left hand.
Thankfully, the work was fairly brainless, which allowed him to wallow in his own thoughts. The catlike spirit had accepted his tuna with little more than a flick of its whiskers, but the mystery it represented was still preying at him. Haku didn't like having any unanswered riddles around him.
An unanswered riddle itched like algae between his scales; it would grow and if left alone, make things slippery and slick.
But cats, or spirit creatures that were too catlike for their own good, thrived on mysteries. He'd see the one eye flicking at him, every now and then, almost like a wink. And he noticed, even as he struggled and fought with the tide of technology that pulled and pushed at him, that his time with the cranky machines was getting a little easier.
Something was definitely smoothing the way.
He couldn't complain when the computers would go haywire just so when certain (rather giggly) patrons would use them, requiring the much-less-desired Kuwabara to come to the girls' aid and letting Haku stride off to help someone else.
The piles of tuna cans in the trash, though, were definitely growing.
"Why?" he finally asked, as he left a whole side of fresh salmon. Salmon, of course, had been Chihiro's idea. "If it's not about gratitude or debt."
"Mrrrr, it may not be about your gratitude or debt. But ..." the salmon vanished, and the amber eye closed into a small slit. "Dragons aren't the only ones with pride and obligations. And you're not the only god I might want to please."
With that, Haku didn't see the creature for another whole week. By that time, he managed to bring the whole system down.
Thankfully, he'd done it in a fashion that meant the Dragon Lady hadn't been able to pin it on him, although he was sure she suspected he was the hapless culprit.
Without the spirit's interference, his own issues with the system had flared up. It started small, with all the wallpaper being swapped from its bureaucracy-created library logos to ones with classical Japanese themes. Kuwabara kept changing them back, but after two days he'd declared it a waste of effort. It was obvious some kind of virus had gotten into the system, and they needed to call the tech guys.
Thank goodness for viruses, Haku thought, since it gave him a convenient excuse when his own computer began to act wonky. Luckily there was no music this time, but it was spurting out some odd information on samurai movies and turning on and off by itself. Nakajima made a couple jokes about the library being haunted, but Haku knew things were only going to get worse.
By the fifth day, tech support had arrived in the form of a young girl who looked like one of the teenagers that liked to hang around Haku. She spent most of the afternoon running virus scans, only to be thwarted by pop-up ads for the latest Miyazaki movie.
"I don't know what is happening!" she declared, throwing her hands up in the air. "I've never seen a virus able to do all of this."
The terminal in front of her made a half-hearted th-weep noise, then started belch out code written in ancient Chinese. The tech support looked like she wanted to either cry or call for an exorcist. "It's not supposed to be in kanji!" she kept saying.
Haku wasn't about to tell her that the code was not kanji at all, nor was it even a code; it was just the original tales of Sun Wukong, as written by Wu Cheng'en.
It probably wouldn't have helped, anyway, especially when, with a final odd-sounding grunt, all the systems in the library shut down simultaneously. More puzzling, anything that even had an electrical wire or electronic component suddenly refused to work, from people's cell phones to the break room's coffeemaker.
The library sounded painfully silent without the background hum of technology. They'd maintained the lighting system, but that seemed to be the only thing that used electricity that was working. Haku blinked as he looked at a dumbfounded Kuwabara, and realized he'd have to make some effort to play innocent. His coworkers had already noted his technophobia, and there was no need to feed that gossip.
"Does this kind of thing happen often?" he asked.
Kuwabara shook his head, before wandering over to try to console the now-hysterical technician who'd devolved into a sobbing mess.
It was still two hours to closing, and the staff was forced to twiddle their thumbs as they explained to distraught and angry patrons that they couldn't sign out anything without the system. Haku tried not to feel guilty as a college student had a nervous breakdown on learning that he wouldn't be able to take the three books he needed to complete his term paper (which was due the next day).
It didn't help that the student's laptop was refusing to work as well, and - instead of his term paper - it was displaying a picture of a daisy.
The Dragon Lady had finally trooped outside to find a phone and call the central office about the situation. By the time she returned, most of the patrons had left or - in the case of the college student - been gently shuffled outside.
"They're working on it," she said, her lips in a tight line. "You all might as well go home. There's nothing to be done until tomorrow."
Kuwabara and Nakajima took their leave gratefully and hastily, but Haku took a moment to pause and really look at his boss. He had expected to see her with her fists clenched or her eyes snapping. She always appeared that way, at any rate, when addressing a delinquent employee. Now that the entire building had defied her, he expected an exploding blood vessel to be imminent.
Instead, there was only the slight downward slant to her mouth. She had wrapped both of her arms around her chest in a self-comforting gesture, and if Haku could trust his ability to read humans, there was something much like sadness in the way she surveyed the now silent building, and something much like a prayer in how her head was bowed.
Even Haku had to admit that somehow, with the computer system being down, it seemed like the very heartbeat of the place had slowed and nearly stopped. When had the computers become such a natural part of a place where the past, forever captured in text, should have held sway?
It was time, Haku decided, that he upgraded to personally catching some yellowfin.
Chihiro laughed that evening as he explained about his trials during the day. She had a very cute laugh, and the way her eyes sparkled with amusement somewhat mitigated the wound to his pride inflicted by her amusement.
But he still winced.
She understood his reaction, like she always did, and tried to explain what she found so funny. "It's interesting to see that gods suffer at the whims of other gods," she said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin before picking up her chopsticks again.
"We're all subject to each other, depending on whose domain we're in," he replied. "I am a visitor to the library, not its ruler." He frowned down at his own rice bowl, trying not to show how unhappy he was with the situation. Since he'd lost his river, he'd not had anything to rule except for Chihiro's heart.
And that, he reminded himself, was the greatest kingdom he could wish for. Still...
"So is the cat spirit the library's ruler, then?"
"Unlikely," he replied. "It doesn't feel that way, at least." He thought of the cat spirit, in how it swirled around the shelves, mistlike, like ink dropped in water. "It's not solid enough. Library spirits are older, and less interested in technology. They're more about the preservation of the past. It's likely the cat creature is a companion to the dominant spirit -- its realm must be compatible with the library, so it can coexist together in that domain. But it's not the library itself."
"So have you ever seen the actual library spirit?" Chihiro persisted as she snagged another piece of saury.
"No," Haku said. "I just know it's not the cat spirit The god of the library, however - it's not present in the same way I am, or you are, or even most spirits claim to be. But there is an echo of something, I think."
Chihiro gives him a long look, chopsticks cradled in her one soft hand, the other cradling the bowl. "An echo, you think? But you didn't try to find out for sure." It was a statement, not a question.
"No." Haku said, and perhaps it was testament to how well Chihiro knew him that she didn't ask why not? even though she knew, more than most, that dragons did not like unsolved mysteries.
Instead, she put the chopsticks aside, then her bowl down completely as she slid around the table to come closer to him. It still surprised him, every now and then, how gracefully she could move now, for he could still remember her ungainly steps as a child. Her fingers brushed his arms, whisper soft. For a long moment, she just rested them on his shoulders, warm and weighted, and said nothing.
It was enough.
"Sometimes, we become echoes when ... I think it might have been dying," he said.
Again, probably, he didn't have to even say that much, for Chihiro's fingers were already drifting up to the bend in his neck as she rested her chin on his head - just as she had when she was but a child and he was but a dragon in dragon form, flying through the night.
And it was enough.
Dragons hated pity (and Chihiro, of course, knew that much, after all the long years). Dragons couldn't abide sympathy. Dragons had no use for kindness born out of worry, or empty syllables meant to placate.
But sometimes, dragons needed to be reminded and just as there was power in the right words, sometimes gestures held weight as well. And as they left the dinner on the table, Haku was reminded, yet again, of the greatest kingdom that he did rule. He was reminded that he did have a body (as did she), and that he wasn't an echo (though her voice did seem to ring in him, when she called his name).
But afterward, in the quiet of the night, when the dishes were done and Chihiro slept (as all mortals had to do, and many gods liked to), he thought of the way the river grass used to sway. The smell of the first grass of spring. The sharp edges of ice in winter.
What if something of him been left behind in a river that was there no longer?
He couldn't tell if that thought was comforting... or otherwise.
He'd never wanted to examine what the death of his river meant - beyond the obvious, that is. Gods were always being pushed out of their habitats by the whims of mankind and having their territories overtaken by the push of human progress. New gods were continually taking their place, or when it was in an area that no god could exist, that area remained godless, barren, and without faith.
Haku still remembered the day when his river had been lost to him. He'd been aware of the encroachment of human settlements along his shorelines, but had foolishly thought the worst he would suffer would be pollution. Pollution was a horrible thing, since it could destroy life within a river and alter the river's nature. More than one god had been driven insane when their domain had become contaminated.
It had concerned him, and he'd been thinking of ways to fight back the day it had happened. It'd been a July day, hot and sticky the way Japanese summers were, when the workmen had arrived at the source of his river and started to build the dam.
He had been the god who ruled the river, but without a river, he could not be quite the god he was before. The humans' ingenuity struck at his weakest point. He'd been powerless and the water had been taken away from him. The pain it had caused as the currents ebbed into nothing had been unbearable, like having his body slowly hacked apart, inch by inch. Then they had come with concrete, completely destroying the place he'd once commanded.
How he could have still existed (when his river - the reason why he existed - was no more) was still a question he didn't quite have the answer to, even now. Gods disappeared all the time.
A part of him suspected that he'd been driven insane from the loss, for a sane dragon wouldn't have been foolish enough to seek out Yubaba. If he had not met Chihiro, he might have destroyed himself entirely.
To this day, he could still feel the shadow of the pain whenever he thought of his former glory. A river could be destroyed, but the memory lingered. If he ever returned to where his riverbanks had once lain, he didn't know what would happen to him. If there was a shadow there, like there was in the library, he might once again go mad.
But it was possible that the library spirit wasn't entirely dead. The cat spirit still existed there, and Haku was convinced it was the library spirit's companion, and it wouldn't have remained if there was nothing to remain for.
Although he would never admit it to anyone, he felt a bit embarrassed that he hadn't had the courage to seek out the library's spirit. It was highly discourteous, and he deserved the cat spirit's ire for his rudeness. But each god deserved to be honored according to its nature. Along with the yellowfin, Haku needed to take the time to look for where the library spirit was to figure out how to pay his respects.
What did one bring to pay respects to a dying or dead god?
Haku suspected that this was going to be a rather challenging question.
Gods didn't exactly give each other offerings in the same ways that humans made their offerings. Tangible offerings made by mortals carried the intangible burden of hope and all offerings nearly always carried the twin chains of prayers and faith. Haku had never prayed a single day (except one) and most of his faith he reserved for himself.
Therefore, it wasn't with anything like reverence when he plopped down the yellowfin tuna behind the periodicals. The fish was newly caught; just moments ago it had been struggling in its last death throes. Just looking at it made Haku's own mouth water; he wasn't surprised, then, when he heard a loud popping noise as soon as his fingers left the fish. When the smoke cleared, a single yellow eye blinked at him lazily. One clawed paw immediately swiped away the tuna.
"Mmm, very nice," the creature immediately rumbled. Immediately, the dormant computer island behind the cat spirit blinked into life, instantly booting into the library's login screen. As the cat spirit munched on the fish, the lights flickered on, one after the other, in a ring rippling outward.
Haku had arrived early in the morning, before even the Dragon Lady had made her rounds, so at least there wasn't any need to explain to any curious coworkers why the entire system was turning on and running smoothly again.
"I think the staff here will appreciate that," he said to the cat spirit, who was licking his whiskers with a rather self-satisfied grin. "Though I feel they would appreciate it even more if they did not have to experience same sort of outage again. After all, it was not their fault nor did they give you any insult or grievance."
"And as for you?" the cat spirit blinked languidly.
"If I have offended you - or your the host of this ground - I do offer my apologies," Haku said slowly. "I did not mean to trespass without giving formal greeting."
The creature tapped its claws. "Then what did you mean?"
"I..." Haku paused for a moment. It was one thing to stand before Chihiro and confess his thoughts about his own river or how reluctant he had been to face the dying god. "Again, I meant no offense."
"That isn't an explanation," the cat spirit pointed out. "Why didn't you seek out the rightful ruler of this territory? You don't seem to be a terribly rude soul, I'll give you that much. Better than that blasted inugami in the back."
There was something much like irony, Haku thought, in the fact that a river god's mouth could go dry. But his throat did feel rough and ever so thirsty when the thought of his own river and of going insane. Of being without a place and of being in pieces. Even before the dam had been built, even before his very life had been literally cut off, he had felt it coming, trickle by inexorable trickle.
He thought of what it might have been like for this unknown god.
Did the the slow creeping of electronic media amongst the shelves feel anything like the spread of oil in his tributaries? The new hum of the equipment had replaced the whisper of turning pages -- was it like how the roar of traffic had replaced the thrumming of the crickets and cicadas?
At least he had been a river; he flowed and moved since it was his nature. But for a god whose world was bound with leather bindings and pressed together with time, change would have been...
His mouth definitely felt dry as he gave the one yellow eye a long steady look. "It does not make a difference why I did not greet the ruler of this domain back then. I will make my greetings now. If..."
If it wasn't dead already. If it hadn't gone insane. If it was indeed more than just a shadow.
"Hmm, that's the thing with you dragons, isn't it? It's either everything or nothing with you, all at once," said the cat spirit. It's tail curved over its shoulder, twitching. "But then again, I'm hardly one to talk about being everything and nothing all at once. I think both ways, you know."
With that rather cryptic statement, it turned to walk back to the shelves. "You're nearly there, but only near enough to be far away, more's the pity. Perhaps you need a lead."
Haku had become familiar with the shelves quickly after taking the position, but he felt off-balance as the cat spirit wound its way back. It didn't take a direct route, occasionally circling back upon path, but that was true to its nature. Cats were not direct creatures, delighting in obfuscation, and while Haku was convinced it was not truly a cat, it wore the guise of one. Haku reminded himself that patience was a virtue for everyone, including gods.
The cat spirit didn't choose to speak as it paused by the mystery section to wash a paw quickly before continuing on its way back into nonfiction. Haku waited, knowing that if he appeared in a rush the trip would take even longer. This type of spirit delighted in making things difficult, and Haku couldn't claim any sense of urgency since he'd neglected meeting the library spirit for more than a month.
Haku refused to let his annoyance get the better of him as they took another turn - which was a good thing, since the cat spirit vanished a second later. It only took a heartbeat for Haku to understand why; the Dragon Lady was standing there, dressed in her usual immaculate blazer and skirt.
Apparently the cat spirit hadn't forgiven him for his rudeness yet, and had chosen to take a bit of revenge against him. They were at the 395s - Haku noted with irritation. Etiquette.
"What are you doing here, Ogino-san?" she asked, her voice deceptively mellow. "Isn't it a little early for your shift?"
"I wanted to have a chance to look around a bit," Haku replied, sticking to the truth. Dragons rarely lied, but they were masters of obfuscation. "I thought that if the library systems were down, I might need to help people using more old-fashioned methods."
"Luckily for us, the systems seem to have fixed themselves," she replied. "I trust that there will not be a repeat of this incident."
"You believe I had something to do with it?" he asked, hoping his voice sounded incredulous instead of guilty. It was true that his actions might have been a precipitating factor, but he hadn't knowingly done anything to sabotage the system.
"Computers seem to have an interesting relationship with you," she replied. Her face wore a blank expression and he couldn't tell what she was thinking, which was unusual in and of itself. He was able to read most humans very well; it was just his luck that his boss would be one of the few he wasn't able to decipher easily.
"I would never do something to harm this place," he said, his tone a bit harsher than it should have been. He didn't like being accused of treachery. The Dragon Lady had no clue how close she was to upsetting a real dragon.
"Not deliberately, perhaps," she agreed, before giving him a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Despite the unfortunate events of yesterday, I will still require you to fulfill your obligations at the desk. Since you've decided to grace these hallowed halls with your presence early, perhaps you can make good use of your time by working through some of the backlogged requests."
Haku had no choice but to acquiesce to her politely-worded order. He smiled and murmured an agreement, before turning to make his way back to his desk. He had to submerge his rising irritation, reminding himself that any task worth doing took time.
It took him over an hour to enter the hand-written item requests into the system. Before they'd shut down the previous day, many patrons had scrawled down their wants onto index cards. Deciphering their handwriting was a challenge, and Haku set aside three as being entirely illegible. Handwriting, too, was something that was falling by the wayside as people adopted texting and typing.
It was sad in a way; he had been friends with many brush gods. He remembered how they had delighted in their art, and how pleasing it had been when one or two had visited him. Some kanji were so sacred that just writing it was an invocation; now text had reduced down to something that was either hastily scrawled and or something so uniform that it was void of any personality.
Realization struck, even as he typed in yet request for the library add yet another set of Bakugan to its shelves.
Etiquette, eh?
Tuna was one of the best offerings, yes, when he wanted to woo a cat.
But... if he wanted to talk to the god part...
He thought about what his own reaction might have been, if he had been asked for a favor - as a river - and been offered clods of dirt. True, he could use it as a part of his riverbanks but in the end, it was better to be offered something of his own nature.
Haku did not think of himself as being dense, but he had to admit he had wanted to indulge - just once - in the human behavior of headdesking.
The nature of a companion to a library spirit, one whose domain could coexist with the reams of text ...
First, he would need an ink well. Next, he'd need a rounded ink stone. Finally, (and as always), he'd need the right word. Words had power. Words had meaning. A god could exist in a word.
And what could be a better companion to a library god, after all, than one whose existence flowed the kanji?
But of the thousands and thousands of words, which would be the right one?
Part Three
Authors: murinae and aishuu
Fandom: Spirited Away
Pairing: Haku/Chihiro
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,200
Posting Schedule: Sunday afternoons
Summary/Prompt: After marrying Chihiro, it's Haku's turn to explore a new world. Haku must navigate human life as he struggles to find his place as a god in a faithless, electronic age.
It was back to the information desk, but thankfully it was Nakajima who was working beside him instead of Kuwabara. She handled most of the work with the computers, although he was still forced to scan books and DVDs the library's patrons handed him.
After the fifth giggling teenage girl in a row made flirtatious comments to him about how motivating they found his presence, he was tired of the whole procedure and wished he could escape back to the bookshelves. Chihiro had never been so foolish growing up, and Haku had little patience for girls who didn't respect the wedding ring he wore openly on his left hand.
Thankfully, the work was fairly brainless, which allowed him to wallow in his own thoughts. The catlike spirit had accepted his tuna with little more than a flick of its whiskers, but the mystery it represented was still preying at him. Haku didn't like having any unanswered riddles around him.
An unanswered riddle itched like algae between his scales; it would grow and if left alone, make things slippery and slick.
But cats, or spirit creatures that were too catlike for their own good, thrived on mysteries. He'd see the one eye flicking at him, every now and then, almost like a wink. And he noticed, even as he struggled and fought with the tide of technology that pulled and pushed at him, that his time with the cranky machines was getting a little easier.
Something was definitely smoothing the way.
He couldn't complain when the computers would go haywire just so when certain (rather giggly) patrons would use them, requiring the much-less-desired Kuwabara to come to the girls' aid and letting Haku stride off to help someone else.
The piles of tuna cans in the trash, though, were definitely growing.
"Why?" he finally asked, as he left a whole side of fresh salmon. Salmon, of course, had been Chihiro's idea. "If it's not about gratitude or debt."
"Mrrrr, it may not be about your gratitude or debt. But ..." the salmon vanished, and the amber eye closed into a small slit. "Dragons aren't the only ones with pride and obligations. And you're not the only god I might want to please."
With that, Haku didn't see the creature for another whole week. By that time, he managed to bring the whole system down.
Thankfully, he'd done it in a fashion that meant the Dragon Lady hadn't been able to pin it on him, although he was sure she suspected he was the hapless culprit.
Without the spirit's interference, his own issues with the system had flared up. It started small, with all the wallpaper being swapped from its bureaucracy-created library logos to ones with classical Japanese themes. Kuwabara kept changing them back, but after two days he'd declared it a waste of effort. It was obvious some kind of virus had gotten into the system, and they needed to call the tech guys.
Thank goodness for viruses, Haku thought, since it gave him a convenient excuse when his own computer began to act wonky. Luckily there was no music this time, but it was spurting out some odd information on samurai movies and turning on and off by itself. Nakajima made a couple jokes about the library being haunted, but Haku knew things were only going to get worse.
By the fifth day, tech support had arrived in the form of a young girl who looked like one of the teenagers that liked to hang around Haku. She spent most of the afternoon running virus scans, only to be thwarted by pop-up ads for the latest Miyazaki movie.
"I don't know what is happening!" she declared, throwing her hands up in the air. "I've never seen a virus able to do all of this."
The terminal in front of her made a half-hearted th-weep noise, then started belch out code written in ancient Chinese. The tech support looked like she wanted to either cry or call for an exorcist. "It's not supposed to be in kanji!" she kept saying.
Haku wasn't about to tell her that the code was not kanji at all, nor was it even a code; it was just the original tales of Sun Wukong, as written by Wu Cheng'en.
It probably wouldn't have helped, anyway, especially when, with a final odd-sounding grunt, all the systems in the library shut down simultaneously. More puzzling, anything that even had an electrical wire or electronic component suddenly refused to work, from people's cell phones to the break room's coffeemaker.
The library sounded painfully silent without the background hum of technology. They'd maintained the lighting system, but that seemed to be the only thing that used electricity that was working. Haku blinked as he looked at a dumbfounded Kuwabara, and realized he'd have to make some effort to play innocent. His coworkers had already noted his technophobia, and there was no need to feed that gossip.
"Does this kind of thing happen often?" he asked.
Kuwabara shook his head, before wandering over to try to console the now-hysterical technician who'd devolved into a sobbing mess.
It was still two hours to closing, and the staff was forced to twiddle their thumbs as they explained to distraught and angry patrons that they couldn't sign out anything without the system. Haku tried not to feel guilty as a college student had a nervous breakdown on learning that he wouldn't be able to take the three books he needed to complete his term paper (which was due the next day).
It didn't help that the student's laptop was refusing to work as well, and - instead of his term paper - it was displaying a picture of a daisy.
The Dragon Lady had finally trooped outside to find a phone and call the central office about the situation. By the time she returned, most of the patrons had left or - in the case of the college student - been gently shuffled outside.
"They're working on it," she said, her lips in a tight line. "You all might as well go home. There's nothing to be done until tomorrow."
Kuwabara and Nakajima took their leave gratefully and hastily, but Haku took a moment to pause and really look at his boss. He had expected to see her with her fists clenched or her eyes snapping. She always appeared that way, at any rate, when addressing a delinquent employee. Now that the entire building had defied her, he expected an exploding blood vessel to be imminent.
Instead, there was only the slight downward slant to her mouth. She had wrapped both of her arms around her chest in a self-comforting gesture, and if Haku could trust his ability to read humans, there was something much like sadness in the way she surveyed the now silent building, and something much like a prayer in how her head was bowed.
Even Haku had to admit that somehow, with the computer system being down, it seemed like the very heartbeat of the place had slowed and nearly stopped. When had the computers become such a natural part of a place where the past, forever captured in text, should have held sway?
It was time, Haku decided, that he upgraded to personally catching some yellowfin.
Chihiro laughed that evening as he explained about his trials during the day. She had a very cute laugh, and the way her eyes sparkled with amusement somewhat mitigated the wound to his pride inflicted by her amusement.
But he still winced.
She understood his reaction, like she always did, and tried to explain what she found so funny. "It's interesting to see that gods suffer at the whims of other gods," she said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin before picking up her chopsticks again.
"We're all subject to each other, depending on whose domain we're in," he replied. "I am a visitor to the library, not its ruler." He frowned down at his own rice bowl, trying not to show how unhappy he was with the situation. Since he'd lost his river, he'd not had anything to rule except for Chihiro's heart.
And that, he reminded himself, was the greatest kingdom he could wish for. Still...
"So is the cat spirit the library's ruler, then?"
"Unlikely," he replied. "It doesn't feel that way, at least." He thought of the cat spirit, in how it swirled around the shelves, mistlike, like ink dropped in water. "It's not solid enough. Library spirits are older, and less interested in technology. They're more about the preservation of the past. It's likely the cat creature is a companion to the dominant spirit -- its realm must be compatible with the library, so it can coexist together in that domain. But it's not the library itself."
"So have you ever seen the actual library spirit?" Chihiro persisted as she snagged another piece of saury.
"No," Haku said. "I just know it's not the cat spirit The god of the library, however - it's not present in the same way I am, or you are, or even most spirits claim to be. But there is an echo of something, I think."
Chihiro gives him a long look, chopsticks cradled in her one soft hand, the other cradling the bowl. "An echo, you think? But you didn't try to find out for sure." It was a statement, not a question.
"No." Haku said, and perhaps it was testament to how well Chihiro knew him that she didn't ask why not? even though she knew, more than most, that dragons did not like unsolved mysteries.
Instead, she put the chopsticks aside, then her bowl down completely as she slid around the table to come closer to him. It still surprised him, every now and then, how gracefully she could move now, for he could still remember her ungainly steps as a child. Her fingers brushed his arms, whisper soft. For a long moment, she just rested them on his shoulders, warm and weighted, and said nothing.
It was enough.
"Sometimes, we become echoes when ... I think it might have been dying," he said.
Again, probably, he didn't have to even say that much, for Chihiro's fingers were already drifting up to the bend in his neck as she rested her chin on his head - just as she had when she was but a child and he was but a dragon in dragon form, flying through the night.
And it was enough.
Dragons hated pity (and Chihiro, of course, knew that much, after all the long years). Dragons couldn't abide sympathy. Dragons had no use for kindness born out of worry, or empty syllables meant to placate.
But sometimes, dragons needed to be reminded and just as there was power in the right words, sometimes gestures held weight as well. And as they left the dinner on the table, Haku was reminded, yet again, of the greatest kingdom that he did rule. He was reminded that he did have a body (as did she), and that he wasn't an echo (though her voice did seem to ring in him, when she called his name).
But afterward, in the quiet of the night, when the dishes were done and Chihiro slept (as all mortals had to do, and many gods liked to), he thought of the way the river grass used to sway. The smell of the first grass of spring. The sharp edges of ice in winter.
What if something of him been left behind in a river that was there no longer?
He couldn't tell if that thought was comforting... or otherwise.
He'd never wanted to examine what the death of his river meant - beyond the obvious, that is. Gods were always being pushed out of their habitats by the whims of mankind and having their territories overtaken by the push of human progress. New gods were continually taking their place, or when it was in an area that no god could exist, that area remained godless, barren, and without faith.
Haku still remembered the day when his river had been lost to him. He'd been aware of the encroachment of human settlements along his shorelines, but had foolishly thought the worst he would suffer would be pollution. Pollution was a horrible thing, since it could destroy life within a river and alter the river's nature. More than one god had been driven insane when their domain had become contaminated.
It had concerned him, and he'd been thinking of ways to fight back the day it had happened. It'd been a July day, hot and sticky the way Japanese summers were, when the workmen had arrived at the source of his river and started to build the dam.
He had been the god who ruled the river, but without a river, he could not be quite the god he was before. The humans' ingenuity struck at his weakest point. He'd been powerless and the water had been taken away from him. The pain it had caused as the currents ebbed into nothing had been unbearable, like having his body slowly hacked apart, inch by inch. Then they had come with concrete, completely destroying the place he'd once commanded.
How he could have still existed (when his river - the reason why he existed - was no more) was still a question he didn't quite have the answer to, even now. Gods disappeared all the time.
A part of him suspected that he'd been driven insane from the loss, for a sane dragon wouldn't have been foolish enough to seek out Yubaba. If he had not met Chihiro, he might have destroyed himself entirely.
To this day, he could still feel the shadow of the pain whenever he thought of his former glory. A river could be destroyed, but the memory lingered. If he ever returned to where his riverbanks had once lain, he didn't know what would happen to him. If there was a shadow there, like there was in the library, he might once again go mad.
But it was possible that the library spirit wasn't entirely dead. The cat spirit still existed there, and Haku was convinced it was the library spirit's companion, and it wouldn't have remained if there was nothing to remain for.
Although he would never admit it to anyone, he felt a bit embarrassed that he hadn't had the courage to seek out the library's spirit. It was highly discourteous, and he deserved the cat spirit's ire for his rudeness. But each god deserved to be honored according to its nature. Along with the yellowfin, Haku needed to take the time to look for where the library spirit was to figure out how to pay his respects.
What did one bring to pay respects to a dying or dead god?
Haku suspected that this was going to be a rather challenging question.
Gods didn't exactly give each other offerings in the same ways that humans made their offerings. Tangible offerings made by mortals carried the intangible burden of hope and all offerings nearly always carried the twin chains of prayers and faith. Haku had never prayed a single day (except one) and most of his faith he reserved for himself.
Therefore, it wasn't with anything like reverence when he plopped down the yellowfin tuna behind the periodicals. The fish was newly caught; just moments ago it had been struggling in its last death throes. Just looking at it made Haku's own mouth water; he wasn't surprised, then, when he heard a loud popping noise as soon as his fingers left the fish. When the smoke cleared, a single yellow eye blinked at him lazily. One clawed paw immediately swiped away the tuna.
"Mmm, very nice," the creature immediately rumbled. Immediately, the dormant computer island behind the cat spirit blinked into life, instantly booting into the library's login screen. As the cat spirit munched on the fish, the lights flickered on, one after the other, in a ring rippling outward.
Haku had arrived early in the morning, before even the Dragon Lady had made her rounds, so at least there wasn't any need to explain to any curious coworkers why the entire system was turning on and running smoothly again.
"I think the staff here will appreciate that," he said to the cat spirit, who was licking his whiskers with a rather self-satisfied grin. "Though I feel they would appreciate it even more if they did not have to experience same sort of outage again. After all, it was not their fault nor did they give you any insult or grievance."
"And as for you?" the cat spirit blinked languidly.
"If I have offended you - or your the host of this ground - I do offer my apologies," Haku said slowly. "I did not mean to trespass without giving formal greeting."
The creature tapped its claws. "Then what did you mean?"
"I..." Haku paused for a moment. It was one thing to stand before Chihiro and confess his thoughts about his own river or how reluctant he had been to face the dying god. "Again, I meant no offense."
"That isn't an explanation," the cat spirit pointed out. "Why didn't you seek out the rightful ruler of this territory? You don't seem to be a terribly rude soul, I'll give you that much. Better than that blasted inugami in the back."
There was something much like irony, Haku thought, in the fact that a river god's mouth could go dry. But his throat did feel rough and ever so thirsty when the thought of his own river and of going insane. Of being without a place and of being in pieces. Even before the dam had been built, even before his very life had been literally cut off, he had felt it coming, trickle by inexorable trickle.
He thought of what it might have been like for this unknown god.
Did the the slow creeping of electronic media amongst the shelves feel anything like the spread of oil in his tributaries? The new hum of the equipment had replaced the whisper of turning pages -- was it like how the roar of traffic had replaced the thrumming of the crickets and cicadas?
At least he had been a river; he flowed and moved since it was his nature. But for a god whose world was bound with leather bindings and pressed together with time, change would have been...
His mouth definitely felt dry as he gave the one yellow eye a long steady look. "It does not make a difference why I did not greet the ruler of this domain back then. I will make my greetings now. If..."
If it wasn't dead already. If it hadn't gone insane. If it was indeed more than just a shadow.
"Hmm, that's the thing with you dragons, isn't it? It's either everything or nothing with you, all at once," said the cat spirit. It's tail curved over its shoulder, twitching. "But then again, I'm hardly one to talk about being everything and nothing all at once. I think both ways, you know."
With that rather cryptic statement, it turned to walk back to the shelves. "You're nearly there, but only near enough to be far away, more's the pity. Perhaps you need a lead."
Haku had become familiar with the shelves quickly after taking the position, but he felt off-balance as the cat spirit wound its way back. It didn't take a direct route, occasionally circling back upon path, but that was true to its nature. Cats were not direct creatures, delighting in obfuscation, and while Haku was convinced it was not truly a cat, it wore the guise of one. Haku reminded himself that patience was a virtue for everyone, including gods.
The cat spirit didn't choose to speak as it paused by the mystery section to wash a paw quickly before continuing on its way back into nonfiction. Haku waited, knowing that if he appeared in a rush the trip would take even longer. This type of spirit delighted in making things difficult, and Haku couldn't claim any sense of urgency since he'd neglected meeting the library spirit for more than a month.
Haku refused to let his annoyance get the better of him as they took another turn - which was a good thing, since the cat spirit vanished a second later. It only took a heartbeat for Haku to understand why; the Dragon Lady was standing there, dressed in her usual immaculate blazer and skirt.
Apparently the cat spirit hadn't forgiven him for his rudeness yet, and had chosen to take a bit of revenge against him. They were at the 395s - Haku noted with irritation. Etiquette.
"What are you doing here, Ogino-san?" she asked, her voice deceptively mellow. "Isn't it a little early for your shift?"
"I wanted to have a chance to look around a bit," Haku replied, sticking to the truth. Dragons rarely lied, but they were masters of obfuscation. "I thought that if the library systems were down, I might need to help people using more old-fashioned methods."
"Luckily for us, the systems seem to have fixed themselves," she replied. "I trust that there will not be a repeat of this incident."
"You believe I had something to do with it?" he asked, hoping his voice sounded incredulous instead of guilty. It was true that his actions might have been a precipitating factor, but he hadn't knowingly done anything to sabotage the system.
"Computers seem to have an interesting relationship with you," she replied. Her face wore a blank expression and he couldn't tell what she was thinking, which was unusual in and of itself. He was able to read most humans very well; it was just his luck that his boss would be one of the few he wasn't able to decipher easily.
"I would never do something to harm this place," he said, his tone a bit harsher than it should have been. He didn't like being accused of treachery. The Dragon Lady had no clue how close she was to upsetting a real dragon.
"Not deliberately, perhaps," she agreed, before giving him a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Despite the unfortunate events of yesterday, I will still require you to fulfill your obligations at the desk. Since you've decided to grace these hallowed halls with your presence early, perhaps you can make good use of your time by working through some of the backlogged requests."
Haku had no choice but to acquiesce to her politely-worded order. He smiled and murmured an agreement, before turning to make his way back to his desk. He had to submerge his rising irritation, reminding himself that any task worth doing took time.
It took him over an hour to enter the hand-written item requests into the system. Before they'd shut down the previous day, many patrons had scrawled down their wants onto index cards. Deciphering their handwriting was a challenge, and Haku set aside three as being entirely illegible. Handwriting, too, was something that was falling by the wayside as people adopted texting and typing.
It was sad in a way; he had been friends with many brush gods. He remembered how they had delighted in their art, and how pleasing it had been when one or two had visited him. Some kanji were so sacred that just writing it was an invocation; now text had reduced down to something that was either hastily scrawled and or something so uniform that it was void of any personality.
Realization struck, even as he typed in yet request for the library add yet another set of Bakugan to its shelves.
Etiquette, eh?
Tuna was one of the best offerings, yes, when he wanted to woo a cat.
But... if he wanted to talk to the god part...
He thought about what his own reaction might have been, if he had been asked for a favor - as a river - and been offered clods of dirt. True, he could use it as a part of his riverbanks but in the end, it was better to be offered something of his own nature.
Haku did not think of himself as being dense, but he had to admit he had wanted to indulge - just once - in the human behavior of headdesking.
The nature of a companion to a library spirit, one whose domain could coexist with the reams of text ...
First, he would need an ink well. Next, he'd need a rounded ink stone. Finally, (and as always), he'd need the right word. Words had power. Words had meaning. A god could exist in a word.
And what could be a better companion to a library god, after all, than one whose existence flowed the kanji?
But of the thousands and thousands of words, which would be the right one?
Part Three