Author's Note: With Cori's permission, of course, I decided to take a swing at and continue her incredible one-shot, "Lost". It's #23 in her Nova Shots series.

I've already got a plot laid out and have already started on writing the next chapter. I know my writing will be nowhere near as good as hers, but I'll try to put as much effort into it as I can. This short story will be just that - a short story, no more than 5 or so chapters if everything works out alright. For now, this is just a duplicate of her original one-shot, and I'll pick up where it leaves off next time.

Disclaimer: "Lost" is Cori's idea. DP, obviously, is the property of B. Hartman.

Hopefully I can live up to her standards and try to make this work. :'D

-AnneriaWings

Lost

by: AnneriaWings

-Day One

I cradled my broken hand close to my chest and did my best not to glare at the two people in the world who were supposed to care about me. They were huddled around the small campfire they'd managed to start and were completely ignoring me, my broken hand, the blood that was steady dripping down my shirt, and the fact that my whole body was trembling from my cold, wet clothes. My fingers twitched and pain coursed through me. "Ow…" I muttered, biting my tongue to keep stronger words from leaking out of my mouth.

Here we were, probably hundreds of miles from anywhere, surrounded by who knows what in the woods, and I couldn't do a thing about it. Trapped as Phantom but as human and powerless as Fenton, I had no hope of getting my parents to listen to a word I said. Or, for that matter, get them to feel any sort of sympathy when Public Enemy #1 fell and broke his hand.

How did I get into this idiotic situation? To be completely honest, I still don't have a clue – a statement my parents refuse to believe, of course. I remember snaring my sister's breakfast on my way to school on Friday because I was running late, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in the forest with my parents glaring at me, surrounded by the wreckage of a crashed plane.

"This has got to be your fault," Mom accused sourly before I was even fully awake. My head felt like it was full of cotton, my body barely responding to my orders to sit upright. "Why did you crash our plane!?"

I blinked at her dazedly, trying desperately to figure out where I was. Scattered plane pieces equaled 'crash our plane' – check. Lots of dark and nasty-looking trees probably equaled 'middle of nowhere' – check. Now… why was I even on the plane? Why wasn't I in school? "Uh…" Pain suddenly throbbed through my head and I hissed, rubbing at my forehead. At least the world wasn't turning circles, I could count that as something positive.

Footsteps crunched through the wreckage and I twisted my head – slowly – and blearily stared up at my father. "The pilot's dead," he said, his voice softer than usual, "and I couldn't get a reading off the navigation."

Mom's eyes never left me, but she addressed Dad. "Communications?"

"Not working. I'm not sure how long it would take to fix, either." Dad knelt down beside Mom, dropped a bag onto the ground, and studied me carefully. "Why's Phantom here?"

"He must have crashed our plane," Mom muttered. "He probably hit it while he was flying – that was the jolt we felt just before everything went dead."

I let my hand drop away from my head, trying to ignore the piercing throb. Was this all my fault? Glancing from one to the other, I was pretty sure that they were waiting for me to confess and apologize. For a moment, I felt relieved that they weren't blasting first… but then I felt a welling of resentment that they were automatically assuming it this was my fault when it obviously wasn't.

Only… I tried to remember what had happened to get me anywhere near my parents' plane. I distantly remembered them telling Jazz and I about this ghost hunting expedition they'd planned – but they weren't leaving until Sunday. Wasn't it Friday? "What day is it?" I asked softly, wincing at the pain in my head speaking caused.

"Sunday," Dad replied instantly. "Why were you on the plane?"

"I don't know. Last thing I remember is Friday." My gaze dropped to my hands, noting the burns and cuts on my arms. The normal gloves were missing – didn't know where they were – and the fingers of my right hand looked scorched. I had a variety of small cuts and bruises on my skin that were starting to heal. Could be the result of slamming into a plane and sending it to a fiery doom…

But my 'professional' opinion was that I was recently in a ghost fight – one I couldn't remember.

Mom sighed darkly and picked up the bag Dad had dropped between them. "Is this all the emergency supplies?" she asked as she dug through it, wrinkling her nose at the things inside.

Dad nodded. "Small plane – small bag."

I ignored them as they dumped out the emergency bag and started to paw through the supplies. The situation wasn't too bad, I thought. We couldn't be too far from help; I could just fly out and get some help sent back. I could probably even be back in Amity Park before they got home, ready to greet my 'I thought you were dead' parents with fake tears in my eyes.

I floated into the air…

I floated…

My forehead creased as I realized that I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I concentrated – something I hadn't had to do in over a year – and still I went nowhere. Blinking, a little concerned, I held up one my hands and tried to turn it invisible. Then intangible. Then make it flare green with energy.

Nothing.

My heart suddenly skipped a beat and I licked my lips. I was still in ghost mode, that much was obvious based on my parents' disdain of my entire existence. But I didn't have access to any of my ghost powers. That did not bode well.

"Eight granola bars, a flare gun with no flares, and a baseball cap?" Mom said suddenly, jerking me out of my thoughts. "What kind of emergency pack is this? Where's the emergency transmitter?"

"What, still no cell phone?" I joked softly, snapping my mouth closed when Mom's hazel eyes burned into mine. I looked back down at my fingers, vowing to stay quiet from now on.

With no ghost powers, I was stuck in the rather horrible situation of being almost completely dependent on my parents – two people who wanted nothing in the world more than to tear me apart to see how I worked. I had few forest survival skills and I'd be mince-meat before too long if they decided to leave me alone. Until I got my ghost powers back, I'd have to play submissive captive ghost-boy. That meant no more smart-aleck remarks.

Maybe it was just the crash and the bash to my head that temporarily misplaced my ghost powers. Perhaps I'd get them back in just a few minutes or a few hours. Probably by sundown I'd be back to normal and be able to fly out of here and not have to deal with my 'let's tear the ghost apart' parents.

Dad grabbed the baseball cap and put it on his head before glancing back at the plane. "We could probably get the radio working again, depending on what kind of parts we could salvage and whether or not we could find a power source. From what I could tell, the main battery looks like swiss cheese."

I watched them hopefully as they chatted back and forth about how they could get the main radio system working again. Mom was better with chemistry but she was killer with a screwdriver when push came to shove, and Dad could fix – or, more usually, unfix – anything. And, while we waited for rescue, Mom was one of those outdoorsy-type people would could make a fire from anything. If I had to be in a devastating plane crash with two people, fate had definitely chosen two of the best.

That was when the plane caught fire. Mom and Dad jumped to their feet, but were forced to run for it when oily smoke started to balloon from the engine. I scrambled to my feet and barely managed to stagger dizzily to the safety of the trees before the plane exploded.

Well, so much for that plan.

"What now?" my mother asked, her arms crossed as she watched the plane burn. Her eyes cut to mine and I winced a little from my spot collapsed under a tree – she still thought this whole thing was my fault and, no doubt, blamed the explosion on me as well. Unfortunately, this was a thought that I wasn't sure was entirely incorrect. "Do we stay here and wait or do we try to hike out?"

"That's a big smoke signal," Dad said softly.

"And we have eight granola bars. Split between the two of us, that's four days if we eat a granola bar a day."

I opened my mouth to interject that there were, in fact, three of us – but then I remembered that 'ghosts' don't need to eat. I did, but then I'd have to explain why I had to eat, my parents would probably not believe me anyways, and I'd be nowhere but having wasted my breath. Silently closing my mouth, I rubbed at my aching head and decided it wasn't worth it. Not yet.

That was when I had a rather random thought: my ghost powers were absent. Could I turn back into my human form? I felt a dizzy wash of anxiety as I glanced at my hands. Normally, when I ran low on energy I transformed back to human and there was nothing I could do to stop it. If that happened here…

I looked up at my parents as they argued back and forth about staying and leaving, then back down at my hands. I narrowed my eyes slightly and focused, imagining all of the energy in my body tunneling inside of me and hiding, allowing my human form to appear. I waited for the aura to appear that signaled that it was working… but nothing was happening.

After a few moments I broke off, panting a little at the effort. Leaning back and allowing my head to connect with the tree – ouch – before I remembered how much my head hurt, I sighed. No ghost powers. No turning human. I was stuck.

"We were headed out into nowhere, Jack; no one's expecting to see us at all for another four days," Mom said. "They're not going to start looking until then. Thirty miles a day, four days… we could be over a hundred miles from here before they even realize we're missing."

"A hundred miles and lost," Dad muttered, but I could see that he wasn't really arguing anymore. I didn't blame him – it usually wasn't worth arguing with Mom once she got her mind wrapped around something. Besides, she was the outdoors expert. If she said we needed to try to walk out, neither of us could really argue against it.

Neither of them asked my opinion – not that I had one, but it still stung. When they finally decided that yes, they were going to walk away from the crash site, they simply climbed to their feet, Dad shouldered the emergency pack that he must have grabbed before the plane exploded, and started to walk away.

"Hey!" I got to my feet, a wash of dizziness making me stumble. "Wait for me!"

Mom never hesitated, but Dad turned around to watch me trip over my own feet and collapse to the ground. By the time I got my hands and feet underneath me, Dad was crouched beside me. "Wait until you can think straight and then fly home, Phantom." I stared at him – I couldn't fly! – but he continued before I had a chance to speak. "Tell Danny and Jazz what happened," his eyes narrowed, "but if I hear a single word about you doing anything to them, I will hunt you down and tear you apart."

"But…"

He got to his feet and turned his back on me, following my mom into the woods and leaving me alone.

My mouth dropped open in shock, my mind blank for a few precious moments. They just… left. Left me all alone in the woods… How could they do that? I was their son!

Eyes narrowing, I struggled to my feet and stumbled after them. They were not going to leave me all alone in the woods – especially since I had absolutely zero survival skills and I, truthfully, didn't know how long it would take for my ghost powers to recover. If I knew it would just be a few hours, I would have sat and waited. But, for all I knew, it could be weeks before I could fly again; I didn't have weeks.

I had to catch up to them. Without them, I wasn't too sure I'd survive this adventure.

Using the tree trunk to make sure I was still standing upright, I struggled to take a breath as I caught sight of my parents some distance ahead. I was barely staying in view of them, more bouncing from tree to tree than actually walking. My fingers dug into the tree for a moment, then I pushed off and started after them, determined to catch up with my parents despite the persistent ache in my body.

They knew I was back here, following. I'd seen both of them turn around to look at me a few times now and I was a little surprised that they were letting me follow. I was pretty sure that my mother could have gotten me lost in about five minutes if she wanted to. Chuckling a little to myself as I tried to keep my feet moving in a straight line, I tried to imagine what they were talking about up there. They were probably laughing about the pathetic ghost boy that can't even walk straight, maybe blaming me for the plane crash… maybe even coming up with plans to allow me to tail them back to Amity Park before they captured me.

My fingers brushed against a tree trunk as I caught another glimpse of my dad's bright orange jumpsuit through the trees. I tried to pick up the pace a little, my feet struggling to keep putting themselves in front of each other without tripping over things like roots and dead branches. The sun was starting to set – at the same time making it more difficult to see and raising my hopes that my parents would stop soon. After getting some sleep, my head would probably be feeling better and I'd stand a better chance of not being left behind.

My teeth ground together slightly as I thought about that. I really should tell them who I was; this wasn't a good situation to be in and be surrounded by a coat of lies. There was a real chance that some of us – maybe even all three of us – wouldn't survive. We needed to work together and I knew that my parents would never willingly work with a ghost.

Maybe, though, if they knew I wasn't really a ghost… The only problem was that I couldn't think of a single way to prove it. I couldn't turn human and there was no way they'd believe me without some sort of proof. Even with proof I wasn't sure they'd believe me.

I groaned softly and slipped under a low-hanging branch, squinting through the trees and not seeing anything. Having no choice but to trust to luck, I kept walking in the same general direction and kept an eye out for my parents. Less than a minute later I spotted them in a small clearing. They looked like they had stopped.

Hope welled up inside of me, my tired body unhappily stumbling towards them. Dad turned around, spotted me, and raised his arm with his fingers spread apart, a look of concern on his face. "Phan-"

I didn't hear anymore because my feet suddenly dropped out from under me, my body tumbling down an embankment towards a hidden creek I hadn't even begun to notice. I gave a strangled gasp of surprise, instinctively trying to fly even as my hands reached out to grab something to slow my fall. There was nothing to grab, no flight to come to my aide.

I slammed into the creek, the hand that was out to break my fall crashing into a rock just under the surface of the water. I heard the sickening crunch of breaking bone, a nauseating ache staring to well up in my hand, and struggled to sit up and get my head out of the water. Spitting out water, coughing helplessly, I knelt in the foot-deep, freezing water and stared around me. I cradled my hand close to my chest, noting the nice gash in my palm that was seeping red-green blood.

"Phantom?"

Looking up into my dad's eyes, I shook my head wordlessly, closed my eyes, and felt a stab of despair race through me. They wouldn't believe I was their son, they wouldn't slow down for me, and they wouldn't help me. I was just a stupid ghost – an idiotic one that had doggedly been chasing them all afternoon. And now my hand was broken.

"Come on," my dad's voice said and I opened my eyes, seeing him holding out his hand for me to grab.

I got to my feet, wincing at a pain in my leg, and held out my good hand, allowing him to almost drag me up the small ravine onto dry land. As soon as I was free I started to shiver from the cold water – something that I'd never done before in ghost mode; I usually didn't have any concept of temperature as a ghost. Holding my broken hand close to me, I started limping silently towards the clearing.

"Are you okay?" Dad asked softly, reaching out and grabbing my broken hand. I gasped in pain when he touched it and yanked it back. He stared down at his fingers, obviously studying the not-quite-ghost-like red-green blood. "Why didn't you fly?"

"I can't," I said, looking away.

"Oh." He watched me as I collapsed to the ground at the edge of the clearing and then went over to talk to Mom. Mom set about making a fire, Dad grabbing branches for firewood, and I just sat there, my broken hand held tightly against me, blood dripping down my shirt, trembling from the cold that was seeping into my bones, and having no idea what could possibly go wrong next.