Lost fic: Photos Never Taken [Jack]
Disclaimer: Lost belongs to ABC, etc., not to me. No infringement intended.
Summary: Jack longs for things he can never have. General spoilers for the entire first season.
Archive: Please ask first.
Photos Never Taken
by eponine119
May 28, 2005
There must have been a dozen cameras on the island, but it never occurred to him until much later.
Everyone takes a camera when they travel, don't they? Maybe one of those cardboard things you buy when you forgot yours, or some kind of a cheap digital. It doesn't have to be a 35 millimeter SLR.
In all the things they salvaged, he never saw one. Not a single one. Maybe they ignored them, too focused on survival items, or maybe the island craphound hid them away like he did everything else that was personal but not terribly useful. There should have been some, though. It's been bothering him ever since he thought of it.
Everyone has a hobby. Photography was Jack's. He's not sure why. It just was. His dad got him a camera one year as a birthday present. A big, expensive unwieldy one. Not anything he'd asked for or ever wanted, and kind of a stupid present for a kid. It gathered dust for a year, until one day he was bored enough to take it out of the box and see what it could do.
He still has that camera. It's kind of banged up and the strap is worn and stained, but he loves it. He got a digital camera a couple of years ago, another present ("more convenient," his dad said) but somehow it wasn't the same at all.
That was Jack: traditional, and prone to becoming attached to things for no good reason.
He didn't bring the camera to Australia. Hadn't even thought about it. His mother said he was going, and a couple of hours later he was on the plane, worried about his dad and hating him all at the same time. He spent the whole flight staring out the window at the ocean, trying to figure out what he was going to say when he finally had to face him. Never came up with anything. Didn't matter anyway.
Jack's not sure what he would have taken pictures of if he'd had a camera on the island. He would have had his choice of subjects, paradise and horror and everything in between.
They're starting to fade now, the images he has in his head of his time there. The things he wishes he could picture surprise him sometimes. The firelight as it played against faces; the way features changed by flashlight or sunlight or rain. The key to photography is light, so he'd been told more than once. He used to believe it, but now he thinks photography is the key to memory. He would have shot the fuselage before it was swept out to sea. People he felt close to. Sweeping jungle landscapes. The colors on the island had been so intense, so saturated.
In the early days of photography, the death photo was common. There are entire archives of eerie photos of not-quite-sleeping babies and blank-eyed grandfathers and soldiers and young girls. Jack had never understood it, but now in some quiet way he does. He would have photographed his failures. They were more numerous than his successes. They always had been.
He doesn't know what he'd do with the pictures if he had them. They might be arranged carefully into albums which he couldn't bring himself to open, like the ones from his childhood and other times he thought he should always remember. They might be shoved into boxes in the back of his closet, with negatives and blurred shots and other things he wanted to forget but couldn't bear to part with. Maybe they would have been published or eulogized or given away.
Jack hasn't used his camera since he got back. A couple of times he's tossed it into a bag or the car, thinking he would. Once he even raised it to his eye, feeling its familiar weight in his hands, but he lowered it before he pressed the button that would forever freeze the moment in silver and emulsion. What he saw through the lens couldn't compare to what he'd seen before.
It was like his life, which he couldn't quite get started again. It didn't measure up. Civilization was a hell of a low, coming off the high of daily life and death. Or maybe it was the other way around and he hadn't realized it yet.
Sometimes he wonders instead about the photos that had already been taken. Smiles and sighs and sobs, all lost in the crash. Images that would never be developed or printed or seen by anyone, resting like secrets in colored capsules at the bottom of the sea or the soft dirt floor of the jungle. He thinks about the moments those people would have cherished if they'd been the ones to survive. Pictures they would have taken, weddings and birthdays and parties and graduations they never lived to see.
Jack knows he should appreciate everything he has. But he still keeps thinking of those pictures he didn't take on the island, and the longing for them overwhelms him. He doesn't know what he's going to do.
End.