Lost.

Kris knew about the Lost—he’d never met one, he’d only heard about them. Someone is his village back home had a relative who was Lost. There was no hope for them. They were like empty shells. Their brains were, essentially, gone.

Kris fell to the ground, shaking his head.

“That can’t be,” Tao cried, echoing the only thing Kris could think. “He can’t…no. Not Lu Han,” now he was pleading. “Not him. Kai, you take that back! You hear me?! Take it back!”

Tao was crying again. Kai pulled Kris to his feet and grabbed Tao’s arm. He started to pull them through the woods. They went a few hundred feet before they came to a small clearing which seemed to have been made by the battered pod in the middle of it. Kris recognized it as the one he and Tao had crashed in, and sitting near the entrance to the small pod was the youngest member of their group.

Sehun looked up when he heard them approach. Kris had a split second look at the utter depression on his face before shock overtook it, and then just as quickly a blissful smile replaced that.

“Tao! Kris! You’re alive!” He yelled, running over and enveloping both of them in a bone-crushing hug. They only had a brief moment of happy reunion before Kai asked where Lu Han was. Immediately Sehun became sad again, and he gestured inside the pod. Kai went in and a few seconds later he emerged, tugging Lu Han along by the wrist.

When Kris knew Lu Han, he had been the kind of person who could melt the heart of the meanest person. He was pure-hearted, and he saw the good in everything. He was sunshine incarnate.

The man in front of him was Lost. His face was completely devoid of emotion, of any feeling at all. He moved limply. The second Kai let go of his wrist he sat on the ground, drew up his legs and stared straight forward. He didn’t look at anyone, he didn’t even seem to know that he was in the company of four other people, all of whom had their eyes on him.

Tao knelt down in front of him and grabbed his shoulders. “Lu Han, it’s me! It’s Tao! You remember me right?” Lu Han stared ahead with blank eyes.

“Tao…” Kris whispered. “He can’t hear you.”

Tao shook Lu Han. “Say something! I know you’re there! I know you can hear me!” He was on the verge of hysteria. Lu Han had always loved Tao, he wouldn’t have made him suffer like this if he could help it.

Sehun grabbed Tao and pulled him back. “We’ve tried everything we could,” he told them. “He’s gone.”

“How?” Tao screamed. “He was fine! What happened?”

Kris was aware that he should have been doing something leader-ish, like making Lu Han snap out of it or telling Tao to stop screaming because who knew what was in this forest, but he was too busy thinking about the last moments on their ship. Asteroids had been flying all over the place, they were getting battered on all sides. If they didn’t move, they’d be dead.

Or, if the asteroids didn’t move.

“Oh, no,” he breathed, staring at his brother. “No, Lu Han, you didn’t…”

Kai seemed to know where Kris was. “We think he did.”

Tao stomped his foot. “Did what?” he demanded. Sehun laid a hand on his arm.

“He tried to force the asteroids away from our ship with his mind,” he explained. “He knew the ship hadn’t been built to weave through them, nor to stand up to them. He saved us all,” Sehun was trying to be gentle, but there was no easy way to say what had happened. To move something like an asteroid, by himself, would have taken a great toll on Lu Han’s brain. Kris didn’t know if any of the psychokinetic Guardians could have managed the feat and come away from it with their brains intact.

“He did this for us, then?” Tao asked, his voice cracking. Sehun nodded. Tao fell to his knees in tears. For once, Kris could not think of a way to comfort him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kris made Kai and Sehun tell him exactly what had happened, starting with their ejection from the ship. According to them, they hadn’t noticed anything wrong with Lu Han until after their pod had landed. They’d passed out, and when they’d woken up they’d realized that something wasn’t right. At first they’d thought it was a concussion and Lu Han would heal from it, but eventually it became clear that it was not an injury he could heal from. They’d left their pod and started walking, taking turns carrying Lu Han on their backs—he could walk, he just didn’t go where he was told. It had taken them two weeks to get to Kris and Tao’s pod, and they’d only covered about 10 miles. They’d agreed that they couldn’t go on, not with Lu Han in the shape that he was. They didn’t know what this planet held and they couldn’t protect him and themselves at the same time.

According to Kai, the sun had set 3,079 times since he and Sehun had woken up. Kris did the math. The years on this planet consisted of 365 days. They’d been here for over 8 years.

“What happened to the citizens of the planet?” Kris asked, remembering that Kai had alluded to them being gone.

Kai shrugged. “Who knows. One day we woke up and there were huge ships flying over our heads. It took almost 8 days for all of them to disappear. We hid in the pod until they were gone, and when we came out we just knew that we were alone.”

Had Kris been standing his legs would have collapsed under him. “Alone? Totally? They’re all gone?”

Sehun nodded. “There’s nobody left on this planet but us.”

The silence stretched on as Tao and Kris struggled to absorb that information. “Then…the planet was evacuated?” Tao finally asked.

An alarm, screeching down the halls, sending the coats into a flurry.

“Abandon the project, save yourselves!”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“They’d either evacuated or died,” Kai said bluntly. “I assume a lot of them were already dead by the time the ships started leaving. There were billions and billions of people on this world, even if a thousand ships had left, they weren’t big enough to support the entire population.”

“The doctors knew,” Kris muttered. “That one—the lady who liked me—she was supposed to kill us. But she didn’t, she knocked us out and left us alive. They must have been among the last to evacuate.”

Kris tried to think of what could force an entire population to abandon its planet. Famine, incurable disease, climate change, natural disasters, a combination of all of those things…even then, an empty world was unimaginable to him.

“Oh,” Sehun cried, making them jump. “We almost forgot!” He ran into the pod, when he came out he was holding a very familiar chest.

‘If it’s split in two, it will be harder to corrupt.’

“The Heart!” Kris and Tao gasped at the same time.

Sehun nodded. “We found it when we got here. I guess those doctors didn’t think it was worth taking with them. We kept it safe.”

Kris took the chest from Sehun and held it to his chest. He felt the warmth of the heart through the thick wood. It was alive.

“It survived,” he sighed happily. “It made it!”

This was the best news of all. This had been their mission, to hide the heart where it could never be corrupted. They hadn’t failed yet, all they needed was the second half and the rest of the Guardians.

“Well, now that we have the heart and there’s four of us around to help Lu Han, we should try to track down everyone else,” Tao announced, getting to his feet.

Kai scowled. “Let them stay wherever they are,” he muttered scathingly.

Kris set the chest down and put his hand on Kai’s shoulder. “I know you feel like you were abandoned,” he said slowly. “But we don’t know what condition everyone else is in. They might be hurt or trapped like we were, we have to find them.”

He looked to Sehun for backup, but the youngest also seemed reluctant. “This planet is huge,” he said. “How can we possibly hope to find all of them? If they haven’t already found us, then they’re probably not anywhere nearby. How far are we willing to go to track them down?”

Kris pulled the pair of them to their feet. “We’ll be around for a very long time,” he reminded them. ‘I think we can spare the effort. At any rate we can’t possibly live in this forest for the rest of our lives.”

That last part at least seemed to get to them. Kris dug some clothes from his bag and handed them over to Kai and Sehun. Once they were changed the four of them managed to redress Lu Han. Tao offered to carry Lu Han on his back first, Kai took the heart and Kris kept the bag. Sehun walked behind Tao, making sure Lu Han didn’t fall. They set off in the opposite direction from the laboratory, since they hadn’t seen anything in that direction.

They broke out of the woods at noon and found themselves at the edge of what had once been a small town. The place was eerily silent, and though they were alone they stuck close to each other. About midway through the town they came upon what had once been a shop, though now the forest had all but claimed it back. The door hung off its hinges and the windows were smashed with tree limbs growing out of them, but Kris could see bags of food inside.

“Let’s go find out if there’s anything worth eating in there,” he suggested.

They found water and bags of thin, crispy foods. The package said they were called “Chips.”

“This place is weird,” Sehun muttered even as he grabbed another packet. When they left the shop again, Kai pointed up the path.

“What is that?” He asked. Kris squinted in the direction he was pointing.

“I think it’s called a car,” he said. “It’s like a carriage, but it moves without horses.”

“How the heck does it do that?” Sehun wondered.

“It’s got to do with motors and gasoline,” Kris said vaguely. He’d read extensively about the technology of this world but he really didn’t feel like explaining it right now, especially since (and now he was getting hopeful) there was a chance that rather than talk about it, he could make it work again.

Kris ran over to the thing and peered into the window. The keys were still inside. He looked into the back and it appeared to be empty.

“If only we had a Technopath in our midst,” Kris sighed before he pulled a zipper off his bag and bent the metal into a workable shape so he could pick the lock.

It took very little effort for him to open the door, but it took a lot of effort to coax the car into working. He had to fiddle around with the engine for a while, but when it finally he deemed it well worth the effort.

“Is it safe?” Tao asked, eying the thing with suspicion. Kris nodded.

“Perfectly, and it’s better than walking.”

Well, there was no arguing that point.

Kris was the driver since he knew the most about the car. Tao sat in the front with the heart and Kai and Sehun rode in the back with Lu Han. Initially they had to hold him up, since Kris had a habit of applying too much pressure to the break and gas. Eventually he got it though, and they made their way out of the town and down the mountain that they’d apparently been on. Once they got to the bottom the road flattened out across a plain of what appeared to be dessert. Kris saw another store up along the road and stopped the car.

“We should get some more supplies,” he said. “Who knows how long we’ll be traveling for.”

This was a much larger establishment and had more than just food; they found clothes, appliances and even some toys. They grabbed some more clothes and checked out the drinks along the walls (Tao took a liking to one brand called Cola) and at some point they realized they’d lost Lu Han. There was an initial panic before he wandered over by himself, clutching a toy in his hands.

“What has he got?” Kai asked, hands over his heart. He seemed to need something to focus on besides how much he wanted to kill his older brother for scaring him half to death.

Kris eyed the package. “It’s a Rubik’s Cube. It’s like a puzzle.”

Lu Han held it out. Sehun grabbed it and tore the packaging off before handing it back.

“Does he do this often?” Tao wondered.

“What, wander off?” Kai asked. Tao shook his head.

“No, take an interest in things around him…strange things that most people wouldn’t notice.”

Kai waved his hands. “He picks things up off the ground and tosses them up in the air.”

Kris’ heart lurched. He’d done that with Tao when they were children.

“Sometimes he’ll bring acorns over and stare at us until we take the heads off,” Sehun threw in.

Lu Han was twisting the thing in his hands, staring at it intently. They watched him for a few moments before Kai went back to grabbing food.

“Well as long as he’s happy and doesn’t wander off again, I’m happy too.”

By the time they exited the store the sun was going down, and Kris decided that it was probably best if they waited until daylight to drive to the looming city. There was no use exploring foreign territory in the dark, after all.

They slept in the car that night—Kris and Tao in the two front seats and the other three stretched out in the back. It was cramped and uncomfortable, but it was better than sleeping outside or even in the store. When Kris woke up at dawn the next morning, he saw in the mirror over the window that Lu Han was already awake and playing with his Rubik’s cube. Their eyes met over the toy and for a brief second Kris thought he saw a flash of recognition cross Lu Han’s face, but he blinked and it was gone.

Kris woke up the other three, and the whole time Lu Han didn’t look away from him. As Kris was preparing to pass around the food they’d collected, he saw Lu Han lean forward from the corner of his eye.

“Hello, Tao.”

In that moment it went so silent that Kris swore he heard every one of their hearts beating. He slowly turned his head to face Tao and Lu Han. Now he realized that Lu Han hadn’t been staring at him, but at Tao. He had his hand on Tao’s shoulder and was smiling brightly, exactly the way Kris remembered him. Tao’s mouth was open in shock, but his hand was resting on top of Lu Han’s.

“Hello, yourself,” Tao managed.

Lu Han smiled wider and leaned back in his seat, resuming his twisting of the cube.

For a long time they all stared at Lu Han. Kris didn’t know if they were waiting for him to speak again or if they were just stunned, but finally Sehun broke the permeating silence.

“What just happened?”

Kai took a deep breath. “Alright now, don’t get your hopes up,” he said softly, “But we may have been wrong about him being Lost.”

Kris shut his eyes and forced himself to remain calm. If that was true, it would be beyond miraculous. But that was a very big if.

“Can you elaborate on that?” Tao asked.

Kai ran his fingers through his hair, an action he’d always done when he was thinking very hard. “The Lost do not speak,” he said firmly. “They cannot do it. That part of their brain is gone. But since he did speak, that means that that part of his brain is still intact…”

“But we’ve tried to make him talk for years,” Sehun protested. “Why only now?”

Kai leaned forward with his face in his hands. “I wonder,” he muttered, “If it’s because Kris and Tao are here.”

Kris mind sprinted along to where Kai was.

“We’re always stronger as a group,” he remembered. “Everything from our powers…”

“To our healing abilities,” Kai finished. “So maybe this was an injury that could be at least partially healed but he wasn’t strong enough to do it—it’s actually quite possible that the only reason he could move as much as he could was because Sehun and I were always with him.”

“So do you think that once we get everyone back together, his brain will heal itself?” Sehun asked, and everyone could see that his hopes were way, way up.

“Now hold on,” Kai warned, “What Lu Han did with the asteroids was monumental and dangerous. There’s no way he can come away from that unscathed.”

“So, what does that mean?” Tao demanded. “Parts of his brain might still be damaged?”

“Exactly,” Kai said. “He might recover a few things, but I don’t think he’ll ever be 100% better.”

There was more silence as each of them tried to absorb that statement.

“Can you guess a percent?” Sehun whispered. “Or…can you guess if one day he’ll…” he trailed off and bit his lips shut against sobs.

Kris twisted his head a little farther to get a good look at his youngest brother, who was hunched over with his head down to hide his tears. Lu Han and Sehun had been in love for years, they’d practically been married by the Tree of Life itself. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the hell Sehun must have been stuck in all these years. Losing the one you loved was horrible, but how must it have felt to see your beloved every day and know that they didn’t recognize you? And now to hear that Lu Han might get better, but he might still not remember that the two of them had been in love…it was heartbreaking for Kris to think about, what must Sehun be feeling?

Kai reached around Lu Han and patted his friends arm. “Lu Han has always loved you,” he reminded Sehun. “Even if he can’t say it, I know he remembers who you are.”

“He might be regaining his memories in order,” Tao cut in. “When he came to the Southern Sanctuary I was the first person who greeted him—that’s probably why he reached out to me just now.”

Kai nodded enthusiastically. “It’s a good sign,” he said. “If Lu Han can remember Tao he’ll definitely remember you.”

Sehun wiped his face off on his sleeve and looked up at Kris. “What do you think?”

Kris knew that Sehun didn’t like it when people lied to him to make him feel better, so Kris wasn’t going to give him false hope now.

“I don’t know what to think,” he admitted. “Kai’s the one who studied medicine, so I think he knows a lot more than I do. I do think that right now the best thing to do would be to track down everyone else so we can see if this theory works.”

Sehun nodded solemnly and Kris took that as his cue to start driving.

It took them less than an hour to get to the city, though Kris probably drove a little faster than he should have. From far away it had looked very similar to the cities back on their planet, even if it was a lot bigger—both in how much territory it took up and in the sheer size of the buildings. As they entered the city though, Kris thought that it couldn’t have been a more unfamiliar and eerie place.

“It’s so bizarre,” Kai murmured. “It’s so huge and yet so empty…it’s a very lonely feeling.”

Kris figured that was a good way to put it, though he would have added that it felt like death.

At that thought Kris shuddered and abruptly stopped the car.

“This is creepy,” he blurted. “This is creepy on so many levels…part of me thinks we should get out and walk but the other part…”

“I know what you mean,” Tao said. “I don’t want to have to be here any longer than we need to be.”

They all sat in the car for a few minutes.

“Okay,” Kai finally cried, startling all of them. “This is silly. We’re Guardians of the Tree of Life. We are fighters, we have power. And we’re scared of what?”

“Emptiness,” Sehun whispered.

Kai hesitated for a half second. “Well we need to get used to it. This whole planet is empty and we can’t be afraid of it. Now on the count of three we all get out of this car at the same time. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Kris said, gripping the handle of the door.

“One,” Kai counted.

“Two.” They unlatched the doors.

“Three.”

They flung their doors open and stepped out. As soon as their feet hit the ground, Kris could tell they all felt the same thing. Sehun was the one who said it.

“Someone is here.”

(being "Lost" is akin to being in a "Permanent Vegetative State". For more info, click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_vegetative_state )

(seriously guise? how do I have 24 subscribers and 6 reviews, half of them from my wife? Can you at least say "I like it?" It might motivate me to update faster)