Lost & Found

"Too late, my time has come

Sends shivers down my spine

Body's aching all the time

Goodbye everybody, I've got to go

Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth

Mama, ooo-

I don't want to die

I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all…"

"Oh, Doctor Faust… why?"

Zappa walked slowly out of town, watching his shoes kick clouds of dust from the gravel road with his head hung low. He felt numb.

He'd placed all his hopes on the assumption that once he found the reclusive Faust, everything would be better again. Everything in his life would go back to normal. He'd finally be able to go home. But now he was just lost as he had been the day before.

The mental wear-and-tear he'd been going through recently was starting to show on the outside as well. His body-hugging top and baggy shorts were no longer their usual immaculate white; and his black socks and gloves showed spots of dust as well. The two canvas bags attached to his belt drooped sadly down to his knees. Gauze bandages wrapped themselves around parts of his legs, arms and chest, and a nasty-looking bruise swelled under one eye. The pink heart design on the front of his shirt now seemed much too cheerful for his sorry appearance.

Most of his face was still averted, buried in the thick collar of his shirt; but he raised his eyes for a look at the rows of houses around him. The street was strangely empty, though he thought he saw pairs of eyes peering out at him from behind closed doors and draped windows.

"How could they know… but they're hiding from me!" he wondered out loud.

As if in response to that depressing thought, one of his wounds suddenly burned white-hot with pain. Zappa grabbed it reflexively - a large sword gash in his side recently sewn shut by the doctor.

"Ah, ah, ah…" he winced, "Jeez! Is this ever gonna stop?"

He just wanted to lay down somewhere and rest, but Doctor Faust had warned him leave town as quickly as possible. He'd said that it was contact with other people that was triggering Zappa's mysterious fainting spells – and it made perfect sense in retrospect. As he looked back at his memories of the past few weeks, the only blanks appeared where he had fainted after meeting someone. Life would be much more difficult if he did as the doctor ordered, but on the other hand he didn't want the thing inside him to come out again…

"Oh, God…" he moaned to himself, momentarily sickened by just the thought of it. He really didn't want to think about that at the moment. "J-just keep walking…just keep walking…I'm going to do exactly w-what he said."

So the young man just kept walking, though his body shuddered with pain and fear, because it was the only course he knew he could take. He walked through abandoned streets, lights flickering on inside each home he passed as the evening darkness grew. Finally, the clusters of houses became more intermittent and eventually disappeared entirely. In their place sprouted tall oaks, growing increasingly dense as he walked away from town.

Zappa sighed in relief once the houses were behind him. He looked over one shoulder – the town was still in sight – he had to go still farther to the west, into that dark grove and setting sun. But the grim sentinels of trees loomed dark above him, and it was still getting darker.

He kept walking; the dust of the road replaced by the subtle, musty smell of leaves. The dappled shadows from the branches above began to twist into alien shapes around him as night deepened. Every once in a while his foot would snap a small twig, the sound making him start and whirl around looking for some wild animal. His eyesight was fading quickly though – if anything was really there he had no hope of seeing it. He knew it was finally time to stop for the day when he tripped over a huge fallen tree trunk he didn't even see coming, and landed sprawled and aching on the other side.

"Ow… ow… ow… not good," Zappa gritted through his teeth. This time it was his leg that was acting up. Sitting up in a pile of dry leaves; he stretched out the injured leg and tried massaging it. That didn't work. Exhausted and defeated, he let himself fall backwards onto the forest floor.

That's when he first noticed the crickets. It was now pitch-black in the forest, and the insects saw fit to begin their nightly song. The sound was both comforting and sad in a strange sort of way.

He felt around blindly until he found the fallen tree he'd stumbled over. After pulling himself towards it, he lay down curled-up with his back against the rough bark, feeling somehow smaller than usual. The crickets' soothing song relaxed him, and his eyes started to droop. He didn't even bother to try and find his diary as he usually did every night.

"I guess this isn't so bad," he said quietly, but tears were starting to well up in his eyes despite his self-reassurances.

Outside his bedroom, there were always crickets singing in the evening. They were reminding him of home, not enough to let him sink into memory but just enough for the pangs of homesickness to surface.

It was very dark.

And Zappa knew he was going to have to be alone for a very long time.

But somehow, he slept.


He awoke with a start, as he usually did; but for once, Zappa found himself in the same place he remembered falling asleep in. After making a quick scan of the forest clearing, he relaxed visibly, sinking into the cool grass beneath him. He was still here within the trees and still safe.

Sitting up, he stretched luxuriously, his muscles feeling much better than they had the day before. His joints were still felt out of whack though, and they would ache whenever he bent them too far or put weight on them.

"Wow, I feel great!" he exclaimed despite this fact. Maybe it was due more to the fact that it was a bright and beautiful morning than his actual health. Zappa's despair had evaporated under the warm rays of the sun. He simply sat peacefully for a moment before remembering something important.

"Oh no, my diary! I completely forgot about it."

He zipped open one of his huge canvas bags, fishing around inside for a moment before pulling out a small durable-looking brown book. He flipped slowly through the pages, slightly yellowed and packed to the brim with his own neat cursive handwriting.

"I should've done it yesterday, I've got too much to write about now…" he mumbled, finding his thin black pen and taking it deftly in hand. Forgoing any planning, the tip touched the parchment and started moving.

'Dear Mother,

I hope that you're still doing well. Yesterday I finally found Doctor Faust. He wore a paper bag on his head for some reason and must have been at least 10 feet tall! I didn't think at first that it could possibly be him. I've never seen any doctor that looked that weird before! But after I had another fainting spell, Doctor Faust told me that he knew what was wrong with me.'

Zappa had to pause for a moment. He took a deep, shuddering breath. He tried to rest his pen back on paper several times, but felt an uncharacteristic loss of words. It took a minute to work up the courage to give a voice to the issue he'd been avoiding for the past day. When he went back to writing, the words came out slower and looked scrawled into the page.

'He said that there is something living inside me that makes me do things while I'm unconscious. Sometimes it does terrible things. There is nothing a doctor can do about it now. He said that if I don't stay away from other people both myself and others will keep getting hurt.'

He couldn't look at the words he'd just written. Averting his eyes from them, he had to keep writing.

'I'm sorry I won't be able to come home for a while. I'm sorry that I won't be finding a wife either. Please understand, I don't want to hurt any one. Maybe Doctor Faust will find a cure for me soon, but I can't be sure. I think I will live here in the woods for a while. I'll come home as soon as I can to take care of you, Mother.'

Usually writing in his diary helped put his chaotic life back into perspective, but now he just felt miserable. Zappa silently closed the leather-bound book without proofreading it. It wasn't until he started placing his journal back into its spot in his bag that… he saw it.

There was a dark splotch, a stain on the white, skintight sleeve of his shirt. Zappa dropped the diary to get a better look at it.

The stain was dark red, and flaked as he touched it. It definitely wasn't there yesterday.

"Oh no…" he said, feeling lightheaded, "It's blood. It's b-blood…"

He checked his whole body over twice; there were no new cuts or gashes anywhere. The blood was not his. Suddenly, his whole mind was thrown into doubt.

"What happened this time… where could this have come from!" he cried, looking frantically around the clearing where he sat. No evidence presented itself, but there was also something else missing from the scene.

"Wait… wait, where is it! There was a tree trunk right here! I fell over it last night!"

Leaping to his feet, he ran circles around the perimeter of the trees, looking for anything remotely similar to the fallen tree. Nothing but straight, healthy oaks and tangled underbrush greeted him.

"No way… this is different? This really is a different place!" Zappa said, panic making his voice frenzied and high-pitched. His breath started rasping inside his chest. The warm morning sun and cool dewy grass suddenly didn't seem so inviting anymore. Grabbing his diary, now wet and cold from the grass it lay discarded in, he shoved it back into his bag and took off running as fast as he could into the trees.


The stain was not coming off. No matter how hard or vigorously he rubbed at it, or how much water from his canteen he dumped on it, he could not remove that red spot.

His eyes moist and red and throat choked up with guilt, Zappa had been plodding slowly along picking at the stain for a while now. After escaping from the clearing he woke up in, he tired himself out quickly and had to stop running.

"Come on, please… please, come out... argh, I can't take this any more!" he stopped walking for a second to throw the stick he'd been scrubbing with into a nearby bush in frustration. Though he'd succeeded in making the stain a little bit more brownish, it wasn't going away. Zappa stopped one tear from rolling down his cheek before he began walking again. He still couldn't stop looking at it, though. To him it was undeniable evidence of the unknown sin he'd committed.

The trees started blurring together into one indistinguishable green mass as he hiked. There was no way to mark which direction he'd come from, but he tried his best to stay on a westward path by keeping his back to the morning sun. Nothing seemed familiar yet at least, so with any luck he wasn't going in circles. The lingering lump of guilt in his chest kept him from feeling the slightest bit hungry, but he did manage to take a sip of water. As soon as he did, he was sorry. Shaking the canteen, he was disappointed by how little it sloshed inside.

"Great. I have no idea where to find water around here… I don't want to die of thirst out in this forest…" Zappa moaned in desperation. He'd wasted far too much trying to wash away the stain.

Almost as soon as he placed his water back into the pack, Zappa heard an eerie, high-pitched sound. It echoed strangely against the closely packed tree trunks. It took him a second to identify it, but once he did, it froze his blood – somewhere, a woman was screaming.

All color drained from his face. The scream stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

"W-w-where did that come from! Oh, great…" he stuttered. A few days ago he would have chivalrously tried to locate a woman in trouble, but now he was driven by completely different motives. The only thing he could do was try to keep himself away from her for both their sakes…

It took a little while longer for him to realize it, but he would fail at that as well.

In his westward path, he eventually stepped into another small grassy clearing hidden within the trees. As dappled light gave way to the dry open heat of the noontime sun, Zappa looked around under the open sky. He then saw the figure laid out prone on the other side of the grass.

Dread filling him, he started backing slowly out of the clearing. He almost made it out, too - but before he could he heard the figure let out a soft moan of pain. The sound pulled his heartstrings painfully taut.

"I can't just leave someone out here like that… I just can't." he whispered. He stood motionless in indecision for a moment longer before giving in. Against his better judgment, he stepped out into the center of the clearing, trying to get a better look at the injured person.

"It'll be ok," he tried to convince himself, "I'm not gonna faint. I'm not gonna faint…"

The figure was a woman, wearing a strange, partially revealing black-and-white blouse held together in the middle by straps. A pair of dark black leggings covered her legs, which ended in sturdy-looking boots. Her long, vividly blue hair was tied into loose pigtails with a pair of ribbons. She lay in the center of what looked like a crater in the dirt; the grass, leaves and undergrowth had been thrown back in a circle around her with great force.

"Oh, no… what could have happened…?" Zappa whispered, wide-eyed, before crying out as he jumped backwards in fright. The woman shifted suddenly, and he caught sight of two feathery wings, one black and the other white, growing out of her back.

"Gah! What the heck… is she an… angel?" he said, now bordering on hysteria. "Oh, God, if the angels are falling out of the sky, what hope is there for anyone… what hope for me!"

He stepped into the crater and touched one of the woman's arms gently. It felt real enough…

"Um… miss?" Zappa had no idea how he should address an angel, and that worried him for some reason. "Miss… a-are you alright? Miss…"

In response to his voice, the woman started moving again. He drew back abruptly as he watched her rise to her feet, though her eyes were still closed tight. He suddenly noticed that she had a thin black tail, which was now lashing angrily like a cat's. Her wings started unfurling, making her seem several times larger than she had been just a second ago.

"A-a-are you angry with me? I'm sorry, I'll g-get out of…" Zappa's frantic apology was cut short by fear as the black wing started changing, twisting into a frightful shape. A skull's face appeared out of the feathers, surrounded by a dark cowl. The feathers themselves hardened into black blades, and clawed hands started sprouting out from between them.

Necro was awake, and his bony jaws opened and howled an enraged, bloodthirsty cry.

"KYOOOOOOOHHHH…"

Whether Zappa fainted from sheer terror or from something more sinister, he would never find out.


-Author's Note-

Hello and thank you for reading chapter one of my fic! Sorry if it ended up too long… I decided to combine two small chapters, as you can probably tell from its name. Also, in case you haven't figured it out, this takes place directly after Zappa's story mode ending #1, but the story modes of all other characters are slightly offset in terms of their time frame. This allows the story to kind of weave through the events of GGX2 before it takes off on its own. Also, the quote at the beginning of the chapter is from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"- and if you didn't know that, then you need to go find one of their albums as soon as possible, because your life lacks all meaning without it. XD

Remember to leave a review, please… God knows I need it. T.T