A/N: Stupid plot bunnies... I'm sorry people, I started two new short stories (one fluffy and one creepy). Don't know if they're going anywhere yet. But they take time out of this one.

LOST

Chapter 4: Coming home

They took me to the hospital and had me examined by a truckload of doctors and psychiatrists. I protested at first, telling them I wasn't who they thought I was, until detective Raskin silenced me by saying he'd be happy to lock me away again and ask the judge to place me where I was now anyway. So I went with them, the huge man in the orange hazmat suit, Jack Fenton, claiming to be my father and the woman, Maddie Fenton, equally clad in blue, claiming to be my mother.

After that first introduction I had refused to let them near me, afraid they would start hugging me again. My ribs hurt from the blow John gave me the night before. They looked hurt and lost and I felt sorry for them, but I still stayed away from them, crept out by their gushing over me.

In three days time they did an MRI of my head, and several tests which I couldn't quite determine what they were for, and they made me take off my shirt. I heard Mrs Fenton gasp at the sight of my scarred torso. Mr Fenton had gone home, at the insistence of his wife, saying it would be easier on me if only she remained. I agreed, because that meant half the problem was gone.

"Oh, Danny, what happened to you?" she whispered.

"Damned if I know," I thought, but I refused to acknowledge her. My name was Alan. I liked that name. Frank gave it to me. I smiled a little. Frank was nothing, a bouncer at a club, a bodybuilder who used steroids to make himself bigger. He was also one of the first two people I ever met. I did not want to let go of what little I knew of myself.

I got in a serious argument with the doctors and Mrs Fenton because they wanted to get a blood sample, which I wouldn't give. For some reason, the idea of them sticking a needle in me terrified me, and I refused to let them near me. In the end, they gave in, since I obviously wasn't sick. Just hung over.

On the second day a girl with long red hair visited me. I was sitting on my bed in the private room I had, courtesy of somebody called Vlad Masters, bored out of my mind. Mrs Fenton had brought me some clothes, a white t-shirt with a red oval on it and jeans. They had thrown away my shoes since they were old and worn and had holes in them. I had slippers on my feet.

She entered the room and closed it behind her.

"Don't you know how to knock?" I asked.

She remained silent, studying me while standing at the door.

"I'm Jazz," she said finally, like it was supposed to mean something to me.

I looked at her blankly.

"I'm your sister."

Ah. Hence the entering without knocking. She approached me, grabbed one of the chairs that were standing near the wall and sat down on it. I watched her, glad for the distraction.

"You don't remember me."

She was stating a fact, not asking a question, but I shook my head anyway. She blinked a couple of times, as if trying to hold back tears, and then, to my surprise, extended her hand.

"Jazz Fenton," she said, "Pleased to meet you."

"Alan," I said, shaking her hand.

She was the first one that actually made sense. Mr and Mrs Fenton both acted like I should know them, but I didn't. I didn't know anybody, and it made me very apprehensive about meeting new people, since I didn't know if I should know them or not. I only knew Terry and Frank and Grace, and John, George and Julio. And Aiden. But he was dead.

Jazz frowned at my answer.

"I heard you don't want to be called Danny," she said hesitantly.

I figured it must be hard on her, but I refused to be somebody I was not. I shook my head.

"I'm Alan," I said, "I've always been Alan. Well, except for the brief period when I was John, but they already had a John, so they named me Alan. I like that name. It's me."

"Who are 'they'... Alan?" Jazz asked.

I closed my mouth with a click and refused to say anything more. I wasn't going to rat them out. I had caused enough damage already. After a while of fruitlessly trying to make conversation, she left.

Detective Raskin came to talk to me a couple of times, questioning me about Samantha and Tucker, but I couldn't help him. I just kept telling him I didn't know them, hadn't seen them and certainly didn't know where they were. I did tell him about the cabin I found myself in, and how to find it, and they did, eventually. It neither confirmed nor denied my story, although they did find the broken chair with my blood on it. There were strange scorch marks on the walls, which made Mr and Mrs Fenton curious. They went over there to look at it, but if they found something, they didn't tell me.

I tried asking Raskin about it when he came by again, but he evaded my questions, instead asking where I'd been in the past three weeks. I didn't want to tell him about Terry and Grace, so I just shut up and let him talk. He threatened me a couple of times over the break in of the shop, telling me he'd try and put me away for a long time, but I knew it wasn't up to him to do that. I had heard that Masters guy had contracted a whole army of expensive lawyers on my behalf, and they were restricting his access to me. He left each time having gotten none the wiser.

Silence was my best defense. On the third day, a psychiatrist by the name of Mrs Crown came to talk to me, and whenever she asked a question I didn't know the answer to, I kept quiet. We, or rather, she, talked for about an hour, and then she let in Mrs Fenton, who had been waiting outside.

"I can't of course give you a diagnosis straight away," she said to my mother, ignoring me as if I wasn't in the room. Well, I hadn't given her much of an idea that I was there.

"But it seems to me this is a clear case of traumatic retrograde amnesia. The MRI, I am told, shows damage in his brain, more specifically, the hippocampus, suggesting a head trauma. But I suspect, because of his physical shape and the fact that there is no outward sign of a head injury, it has also something to do with the things your son went through before the brain damage, causing him to suppress his experiences. That would mean dissociative amnesia. I'm not sure which is the dominant one here."

I had brain damage. Great. Probably explained why I had trouble thinking. I was a retard. I scowled at her.

"What does that mean?" Mrs Fenton asked, glancing at me.

"It means he can remember nothing from before the head trauma. We'll have to see about how much of his memory we can retrieve. The best thing to do is taking him home, to a familiar environment. It may jog his memory."

Mrs Fenton shook her head.

"I still don't understand. This is temporary, isn't it? He will get it all back, right?"

Mrs Crown hesitated for a moment.

"Normally, I'd say yes, very likely. But this has been going on for weeks now. He should have started to remember things by now. He should have known you straight away, you're his mother. If he doesn't even recognize you..."

She turned to me.

"Danny," she said.

I looked away.

"Alan?"

Slowly, I turned my head and looked at her.

"Could you tell your mother what was the first thing you remember?"

"Pain," I said.

"And?"

"And nothing. I woke up, my head hurt, I didn't know where I was and I got angry, but that didn't help much so I left."

"When was this?"

"Three weeks ago."

Mrs Fenton gasped. "But you've been missing for three months," she said.

I shrugged. I didn't remember. And at this point, I didn't want to remember. I didn't really believe I was this Daniel Fenton guy. I was sure I'd recognize my own mother if I saw her. I wasn't going to attach myself to this woman, however nice she might seem.

"We'll have to perform more tests," Mrs Crown was saying, "Determine the extent of his brain damage and how it may affect his functioning. But it seems to me most of his intellectual capabilities are intact, although he'd probably need some testing from the school to determine if that's true. But I must warn you..." She glanced at me. "His ability to predict the future may be affected."

Joy.

She continued. "We can predict what will happen by taking into account what happened before in our past. We use our experience. He doesn't have that."

Mrs Fenton actually looked relieved at that. I wondered why, until I figured she saw a way out of the vandalism charge against me. I wasn't responsible for my actions because I had brain damage. Great excuse. George would really be helped by it. I had heard that he was doing better. It seemed they had hit him in the shoulder when he was running away. He had been holding a stick and they somehow had thought it was a gun, so they'd shot him.

The woman who thought she was my mother sighed.

"What we really want to know," she said, "If he'll be able to remember what happened to his friends."

Mrs Crown shook her head.

"There is no way of telling," she said, "We'll have to wait and see."

After that last consult, Mrs Fenton took me... home, I guess. My jaw dropped when I saw the strange house with the spaceship like contraption on top and the huge neon sign reading 'Fenton Works'. This was where they lived? She seemed totally unperturbed by her strange house or my reaction to it though, so I followed her inside.

We entered a living room with the obligatory couch and TV. So far, so good. But right there and then all normalcy ended. The kitchen was full of... things. Beside a toaster, there were a great many strange objects with dials and knobs and protruding antennae, some taken apart, with tools laying next to cutlery and plates. The oven was glowing green. It made my skin crawl.

There was something else in the house too. I could feel it. Something coming from below, tugging at me, trying to lure me towards it. I feared it immediately.

"What's down there?" I asked, pointing at an opening with stairs leading down.

"The lab, dear," Mrs Fenton said, "We have a ghost portal there. It would be best if you didn't wander in there by yourself until I explain the safety procedures to you... again."

She suddenly sounded defeated. I stood in the kitchen, looking around aimlessly. Mrs Fenton grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the living room.

"Jack!" she shouted.

Somebody answered from below and moments later the man in the orange hazmat suit came up the stairs and entered the living room. I sat on the couch, and they sat next to me. Jazz came down the stairs from above and took a seat in the chair opposing the couch. Mrs Fenton cleared her throat.

"Danny... Alan. I know this all is strange to you, but I want to stress to you that no matter what happens, or how you may feel towards us, we love you, and we're very glad that you're back, even though..."

She swallowed.

"Even though you don't remember us. You belong here, with us, and I promise we'll be patient. You... you don't want to call me mother, or mom, but I can't have you call me Mrs Fenton all the time... so would you settle for Maddie?"

She and her husband looked at me hopefully, and my resolve faltered.

"Alright," I said, "Maddie."

Mr Fenton extended his hand and I shook it.

"Jack," he said.

"Alan," I said pointedly.

They looked hurt, but nodded. After that, Jazz took me upstairs and showed me my room. It was clean and dusted, the bed was made and the desk was empty. There were a great number of NASA posters on the blue walls. I looked at them, trying to feel something. But the only thing I felt was the slight tugging of the ghost portal in the basement.

I walked around the room, letting my fingers slide on the desk and the computer, looked out of the window to look at the street below, and finally sat down on the bed. Jazz had been watching me from the door, but now she entered and closed it behind her. I looked at her in surprise.

"Alan," she said, "How... have you noticed... I don't know how to ask this... have you noticed something... strange about yourself?"

"How do you mean?"

I hadn't a clue of what she was talking about. She seemed nervous.

"Before you disappeared... you had powers. Ghost powers."

She stopped and looked at me. I stared at her.

"What kind of powers?" I asked, thinking she was crazy. People didn't have powers, and certainly not ghost powers.

"You could go invisible, intangible, shoot ghost rays... lots of things. Have you... noticed anything of this, maybe you drop stuff a lot because your hands go intangible or something..."

I started laughing.

"You're crazy," I said, "Nobody has powers. I certainly don't. The only thing that is freaky about me is that I don't know who the hell I am."

She got angry. "You're Danny Fenton."

"No I'm not. You only want me to be."

Tears brimmed in her eyes and I felt bad for her.

"Why?" she asked, "Why won't you believe us?"

I looked away. How could I explain this to her, my total conviction that whoever these people were, they weren't my parents or my sister.

"I'd feel something," I said finally, "If Maddie was my mother, I'd know. I feel like... I feel like my real mother is still out there somewhere, and I need to find her..."

Jazz was silent. She sat down on the bed next to me and stared at a poster of the space shuttle attached to the ISS. I reached past her and picked up the picture beside my bed. Three people were in it, laughing, wrapping their arms around each other. Samantha in the middle, Tucker on the right and Danny on the left.

"They are your friends, D...Alan. We should try to find them."

My friends were in jail. They weren't lucky enough to have a billionaire family friend who could buy a whole law firm if he wanted to. I had asked Jack and Maddie if he would consider helping them too, but it seemed he had refused. I disliked him without having ever met him.

"What happened?" I asked.

Of course Tucker and Samantha should be found. I just didn't see how I could do anything about it. They were Danny's friends. I kicked off my shoes and pulled my feet up. Jazz let herself fall backwards and stared at the ceiling.

"I'm not sure," she said, "We all thought the three of you went to lake Eerie on a short camping trip for the weekend. You were supposed to return on Monday, but you never did. The police looked everywhere, but there was no evidence that you even got to lake Eerie in the first place. Nobody had seen you there and Sam's car was nowhere to be found either."

"We went camping?" I asked.

We. I was referring to them as we. My mind was trying to shift gear as I was trying to process what just happened. I couldn't see myself being with them. I couldn't see myself being with anyone. Whenever I tried to picture something from my past, everything went dark, so I tried to avoid that. But I had said 'we'.

Jazz laughed a little. "It's a Sam thing. She loves camping, and you do everything she says. Tucker just follows along because he doesn't want to be left out and he's your friend. Camping is definitely not his thing."

"Is she... Danny's girlfriend?"

She frowned at my using third person on Danny, but shook her head.

"No. You both claim you're not lovebirds." She raised her hands and used her fingers to quote the word 'lovebirds'. "It's just a matter of time though, I think, before you two will get together."

If they were ever found. I looked at the picture again and felt a sudden pang of jealousy at Danny Fenton. He was the lucky one. I reached out and put the picture in it's place. Jazz got up.

"Do you like your room?" she asked.

I shrugged. I knew she wanted me to say it looked familiar.

"It's OK, I guess," I said. I nodded at the posters. "Into space exploration, is he?"

"You want to be an astronaut."

I snorted. "Yeah, right, that'll be obtainable."

"You can always dream," she said and left the room.

I laid down on my bed and stared at the blue ceiling for a while. Now that she was gone, I felt the strange pulling from below again, somehow trying to pull me through the floor. It was creepy. I didn't know if I could stay in a house that sent shivers up my spine half the time.

Trying to distract myself, I got up and sat down at the desk. I felt like an intruder. Nothing looked familiar. The drawers contained the usual things, pens, pencils, rulers, elastic bands, that kind of stuff. I pressed the button on the computer and it whirred to life, taking it's time to start up. When finally the login screen appeared, I couldn't get in because I didn't know the password. I turned it off again.

Looking around the room, I caught sight of something that was under the bed. Dropping on my knees and then flat on my stomach, I crawled under it and grabbed hold of the box that was standing there. Then I wiggled backwards, bumping my head a few times, pulling the box with me awkwardly. For some reason, being under that bed sent shivers up my spine. I didn't like the sensation of hardly being able to move.

The box contained pictures. Some were old, Danny in kindergarten, Danny, Sam and Tucker at a barbecue, Danny and Jazz dressed up for Halloween. Family pictures, vacations, fishing at some lake, formal school pictures. And lots and lots of pictures of Sam. I picked one that seemed recent and stared at her. Then I closed my eyes and tried to picture her. I had no trouble doing that, like I had trouble picturing other people in my mind.

Loud voices coming from downstairs shook my out of my contemplation, and I quickly put the pictures back into the box, closed the lid and shoved it back under the bed, but not so far that I couldn't easily reach for it if I wanted to. The picture of Sam I kept, and I carefully placed it on the desk before walking to the door and carefully looking out.

"Where is he?" I heard a woman's voice ask, no, scream.

She sounded slightly hysterical. I tiptoed to the stairs and looked down into the living room. Two people I didn't know were standing there, as were Jack and Maddie. The woman had red hair, carefully styled, and looked like she never did anything that might upset that hair. The man was blond, slightly taller than the woman, but not nearly as tall as Jack, who was towering over him. Beside me, Jazz appeared and grabbed my arm.

"Where is that... boy! What did he do to my daughter! Why isn't he arrested!"

The woman was still screaming, standing right in front of Maddie. I took it that she meant me, so I shook off Jazz's arm and walked down the stairs. She caught sight of me almost immediately and rushed passed a suddenly alarmed Maddie. When I reached the bottom step, she grabbed my shirt and pulled me close, but if she thought she was more intimidating than Terry, she was wrong.

"Where. Is. Samantha!" she said.

Maddie stepped in and placed her hand on the woman's arm.

"He doesn't know," she said softly, "Believe me, if he knew he would have told us."

The face of the woman, whom I gathered was Mrs Manson, twisted in anger and sadness. I felt sorry for her. They must have thought that if they found Danny they'd find Sam too. Instead, they got me. Useless.

"I'm sorry," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"You wicked boy," Mrs Manson said, letting go of me.

I was grateful for that and stepped back a little.

"You dragged her away on that camping trip! If it wasn't for you, she would still be with us!"

"It was her idea," I said.

They all stared at me, and I realized I had made it sound like I knew what had happened.

"I mean, Jazz told me it was her idea," I said lamely.

"You always had a bad influence on her," Mrs Manson hissed.

I remained silent, because for all I knew it, she could be right. I wasn't exactly a model citizen. But Maddie disagreed.

"My son has never done anything untoward," she said angrily, "They are friends, that's all. And she is like a daughter to me too. I want her back as much as you do."

"What about you?" Mrs Manson turned to me, a scornful expression on her face. "Do you want her back also? Or did you get into a fight, have you killed her and hidden her body!"

I paled. "No," I said.

I was sure I wouldn't do such a thing. Then I remembered how easily I had defeated John and Julio in that police cell. Those had been reflexes, so deeply ingrained in me that I didn't even know they were there. My body had reacted before my brain had registered what was going on. If I'd hit them a bit harder, I might have killed them. The violence I was capable of frightened me. Maddie stepped in.

"Of course he didn't. He would never do that, and you know it. Besides, Tucker was there too. You think he killed both his friends?"

Mrs Manson seemed to deflate, and suddenly all anger was swept of her face, leaving a very sad woman with dark circles under her eyes. Her husband had been standing next to Jack, quietly watching his wife. He was probably used to her.

"It's not fair," she said in a broken voice, "You've got your son back, but my Samantha is still missing..."

Suddenly, I felt anger rise in me, a boiling rage coming from deep inside of me, white hot, hardly controllable, taking over all common sense. It was anger at the situation, the unfairness of it all, the hurt and unhappiness of the people in the room. I took two steps and stood in front of her.

"But they didn't, did they," I snarled, "They haven't got their son back, they've got me."

I pulled my shirt over my head to give them a good view of the numerous scars, the new, pink ones and the older white ones, testimonies of pain and suffering, of somebody lashing into me, hurting me for the sole purpose of breaking me. I knew it had been deliberate. I just knew. And that knowledge almost drove me crazy.

"Me!" I screamed, "And I don't know who or what the hell I am! And you know what? I don't wanna know! I don't wanna know who gave me these!"

A stunned silence fell over the room as I stood there, panting, trying to control my rage. And then a slick voice came from the front door.

"Well, isn't this a nice reunion."