Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-04-27 03:13 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-04-27 03:13 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: The Toll (Lost)
I've been writing Lost fanfiction with a sort of feverish intensity. I haven't been able to focus on any other work of fiction since finishing the show, so I'm just desperately trying to create more Lost somehow. I'm an eternal fandom butterfly, so I doubt this state will last long, but for now this is all I can do.
By 'this', I mean 'writing an incredibly ill-advised Danganronpa-inspired AU'.
You don't need to know Danganronpa at all in order to read this! I just borrowed the basic concept, because I love the way it creates a breeding ground for paranoia.
Title: The Toll
Fandom: Lost
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,500
Summary: The survivors of Flight 815 struggle with the paranoia of being told they have to kill each other.
“Jack,” Sayid says, drawing him aside on the beach. “There is something I think you should see.”
Sayid’s proved himself to be reliable so far, so Jack follows him into the jungle. Sayid leads him to what looks a lot like an ordinary tree.
“You see it?” Sayid asks.
“Uh, I’m not much of a botanist,” Jack says. “Is it... medically useful?”
“Look closer,” Sayid says.
Jack looks closer. Sayid taps the trunk, directing his attention to...
“What is that?” Jack asks. There’s something small embedded in the trunk, something like a circle of dark glass, something like... “Is that a camera?”
“I fear so,” Sayid says. He holds up a small black device. “I excavated a similar spy camera from another tree.”
“This isn’t the only one?” Jack asks. “Someone’s watching us? Who the hell—”
What does this mean? What the hell does this mean?
This is an uninhabited island, right? Their plane crashed here; people are dead. They burned the bodies. That couldn’t have been staged.
“Is this a TV show?” Jack demands.
“I know as much as you do,” Sayid says.
“Okay.” Jack massages his temples. “Okay. We can dig out the ones we can find, see if we can get any useful parts out of them. Let’s, uh, let’s keep this quiet for now; we don’t want to freak everyone out.” He stoops a little, to look directly into the lens embedded in the tree. “If anyone’s watching this, get us the fuck out of here.”
-
There are more cameras. There are a lot more cameras. Once Jack is looking for them, it starts to feel like they’re everywhere: in trees, in rocks. Attached to plane parts they’ve used to build shelter, painted to look like they belong there, and that’s what freaks him out the most, because it means at least some of them have been put here since the crash.
What the fuck is going on?
He takes them down whenever he finds them, but it’s becoming very clear that he’ll never find them all. Whatever he does, someone is going to be watching.
Who? Why?
-
Jack’s talking to Sayid about the cameras they’ve found, in hushed conversation on the beach, when he sees something that cuts off his voice like a blow to the throat. A stranger is coming out of the jungle.
Jack sprints across the sand, grabs him by the shoulders. “Who the hell are you?”
The man is about half a foot shorter than Jack, maybe a decade older. He’s wearing a buttoned shirt and no shoes. His eyes are his most striking feature, blue and strangely protuberant.
He wasn’t on the plane. Jack knows, somehow, looking at him, that he’s been here much longer than any of them.
“Easy,” the man says. “I’m just here to talk.”
Jack raises his eyebrows. “That works for me. Start talking.”
“I’d appreciate it if you let go of me.”
“Are you responsible for the cameras?”
“I’d be happy to answer your questions,” the man says, “but I’ll need you to let go and gather your people first.”
“No.” Jack shakes his head. “No. You don’t get to make requests, you don’t get to make demands. You’re just gonna tell me what you’re doing here and why you’re watching us.”
But the others are already gathering; they’ve noticed there’s conflict, they’ve noticed there’s a stranger.
The man raises his chin. “I’d really advise you to let go.”
“I don’t care,” Jack says.
The man whistles; there’s a loud report from somewhere in the jungle. Jack jerks back, startled, as something slams into the sand by his foot. The stranger wrenches himself out of Jack’s grip and takes a few quick steps back, straightening his collar.
“Are you shooting at us?” Jack demands.
“We’re shooting near you,” the man says. “If we all behave ourselves, I’m sure we can have a pleasant conversation.”
Jack stands there for a moment, breathing hard, thinking hard. The others have scattered outwards a little from the shot, but they’re still close, still trying to work out what’s going on. If he goes for the stranger again and more shots get fired, they could be in danger.
“What do you want?” he asks.
The man gives a small, satisfied nod. “I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that rescue isn’t coming.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to know that there’s only one way off this island,” the man says. “If you kill one of your fellow survivors, we will graciously grant you passage back to civilisation.”
What the fuck?
“You’ll need to do it without being caught, of course,” the man says. As if this is something with established rules, somehow; as if what he’s saying isn’t completely fucking ridiculous. “Twenty-four hours after each murder, we’ll take a vote on who you think is the culprit.” He casts his eyes briefly across the group. “As there are rather a lot of you, we’ll allow abstentions for anyone who feels uninformed. If you correctly identify the murderer, they’ll be executed. If you answer incorrectly, the killer will be escorted safely home, and the rest of you will be executed instead.”
“You think you can just force us to kill each other?” Kate demands. “Why would you even want that?”
The man fixes her with those strange wide eyes of his. “We’re not forcing you to do anything, Ms Austen. You could always just live out your lives on this island. We’re simply presenting you with an option, because... well, because the island is known to demand the occasional sacrifice, and this is a reliable method of sating it.”
“This is insane,” Michael says. “Even if one of us did kill someone, you wouldn’t know who did it. There’s no way you could know if we had the right answer.”
“Oh, that’s all taken care of,” the man says. “Rest assured, wherever you are on the island, we will be able to see you. You won’t need to worry about anyone else taking credit for your kill.”
Jack clenches his jaw, thinking of the hidden lenses he’s been uncovering, too many to get rid of them all.
“On the subject, we’ve noticed some destruction of our cameras going on,” the man says. “I’m afraid we can’t have that. From now on, any camera damage will be punished by death.”
There are some cameras, in the trees fringing the beach, that they haven’t gotten rid of yet. If Jack or Sayid had started excavating them, the others would have noticed, they’d have had questions. One of them is in a tree just a little beyond the stranger.
Jack heads for the tree. Grabs a steel bar on the way from the nearest shelter, salvaged from the wreck.
He slams the bar as hard as he can into the embedded lens. It leaves a small but satisfying crack.
He turns around to look at the man.
“Kill me,” he says.
The man, very calmly, pulls a pistol out of his belt and shoots.
Everything is kind of a blur after that. A lot of screaming, a lot of running. Kate at Jack’s side, trying to help him up. The man saying, If you survive, consider that a warning, and disappearing into the jungle. Hurley and Charlie bringing clothes at a run to serve as bandages; Jack trying to stem the flow of his own blood through a blaze of pain.
For a moment, he’s not sure how it’s going to go, if he’s actually going to die as a fucking example to keep the others in line, and he’s never been so pissed off in his life.
But he’s going to pull through, he realises when his mind starts to clear a little. It hurts like hell, and it’s going to ache for a while; his left arm probably isn’t going to be at its best. But he’ll live.
Live to see however this absolute bullshit plays out, he guesses.
-
“Hey,” Kate says. She was crouching over Jack when he opened his eyes, in their makeshift infirmary; she shifts back as he sits up. “How are you feeling?”
Not great. His shoulder is screaming at him with every motion; his mind’s a whirlwind. But better for having slept, he guesses.
“I’m still alive,” Jack says, managing to sound calmer than he feels. “Guess it was a bluff.”
“He shot you, Jack. It wasn’t a bluff,” Kate says. “Don’t do that again.”
Which makes him want to go straight out and destroy another camera, of course, but he guesses it wouldn’t be a good idea.
“How did you know about that camera?” Kate asks.
Jack glances at Sayid, who’s standing in the entrance to the infirmary. “Uh, Sayid and I found some of them around the place. We didn’t want to mention them until we’d figured out what was going on.”
“I see,” Kate says. She doesn’t sound impressed. “I guess we know what’s going on now.”
Jack’s still looking at Sayid. Now that he’s thinking back through the confused blur of treatment, he has a feeling Sayid’s been hanging around nearby pretty much the entire time. “Was there something you needed, Sayid?”
“You’re injured,” Sayid says. “I thought it best to ensure nobody could take advantage of your vulnerability.”
It’s a strange, jarring reminder of the situation. That they don’t just have to worry about that guy and whatever allies he might have; that they might have to guard against each other now.
Jack doesn’t like it. But it’s not a possibility that’s easy to dismiss entirely.
“These people haven’t given us any proof that they can get us off the island,” he says. But he’s thinking of the cameras; those couldn’t have been manufactured here, right? “Nobody’s insane enough to kill someone for that.”
Kate and Sayid exchange a glance.
“He brought newspapers,” Kate says.
“What?” Jack asks.
“You were still kind of out of it,” Kate says. “But he came back with newspapers from after—”
Jack’s already pushing past Sayid, looking around the beach. Spots a newspaper in Claire’s hands, sprints for her. It’s a bad idea, scorches pain down his arm. He doesn’t care.
“Hey,” he says, breathless. “Can I—”
But Claire’s jerked away from him, her eyes wide and alarmed. Another stark, painful reminder that they can’t trust each other any more.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I take a look at that?”
Claire hands him the newspaper, warily. Taps her own breastbone to indicate the place where Jack was shot. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” He scans the front page, the date, the headline: FULL PASSENGER LIST FROM MISSING PLANE RELEASED. There’s a photograph of Hurley, with the caption Lottery winner Hugo Reyes was among the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815.
He looks up at Claire. “Lottery winner?”
“Uh, yeah, apparently,” Claire says. “I get the feeling he doesn’t really like to talk about it.”
There are the cameras; they’ve been spying. They could have gathered information, they could have fabricated this. But could they have fabricated it without leaving the island?
Whatever line of logic he tries to follow, it leads him to the same conclusion: these people have a way off the island. There’s a way out of here.
But only if they kill someone, apparently.
He flicks through the newspaper, his eyes catching on headlines, hungry for anything about the outside world. Looks at Claire again. “Uh, I haven’t really been taking much in for a little while. Have there been any, uh, fights?”
Claire raises her eyebrows. “Murder attempts, you mean?”
He guesses there’s no point in trying to edge around the topic. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt anyone,” Claire says. “We’ve been living together, we’ve been making friends here. You can’t just kill someone you know that easily.”
They’re nice words, but there’s no way to know if she believes them. It definitely seems like she’s tenser around Jack than she was before. She could be trying to deflect suspicion, trying to make sure nobody looks at her when the first body turns up.
Jack hates that that’s his first thought. But Claire’s pregnant; if she leaves, the baby leaves too. If the stranger’s offer really is the only way off the island, she’s the only one who stands a chance of getting out of here with someone she cares about.
And there are over forty of them here. They’ve been getting to know each other, yeah, but they’ve been getting to know each other in smaller groups. They haven’t been here that long; there’s no way they could all get acquainted on a personal level. Everyone’s going to have people they know less well.
People they might feel more able to kill.
And, yeah, there’s the ‘everyone else gets executed if you get away with it’ clause. If you have friends on this island, you’re risking their lives no matter who you murder. But, in the moment, when you’re killing someone with your own hands, it’s probably easier to target a stranger, and they all have people who are pretty much strangers to them.
“That’s good.” He looks back at the newspaper, this tangible sign of an outside world they’ve been told they have to murder their way back to. “Thanks.”
-
“How’ve you been sleeping?”
Jack looks up from the ocean, squinting against the morning sunlight. Kate. “Is it that obvious?”
Kate laughs a little. “You do look kind of terrible.” She sits next to him on the sand. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think anyone’s sleeping great, and most of us don’t have a bullet wound to worry about.”
Jack’s hand instinctively goes to his makeshift bandage, a torn strip of T-shirt. It’s not hurting so aggressively by now, at least. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Kate tilts her head. “What, you think someone’s going to kill you in your sleep?”
It’s more that someone might kill anyone, really. Whenever he notices someone missing from the group, he’s on edge, watching for them until they emerge from the jungle or the ocean. He can’t supervise everyone whenever they go to the toilet or in search of food, but, God, there’s a part of him that wants to.
He keeps it to himself.
“Nobody’s going to kill you, Jack,” Kate says. “You’re the doctor. Everyone’s relying on you to patch them up if they get targeted.”
Jack shrugs. “If they kill me and get off the island, they don’t need to worry about that any more.”
“Yeah, but what if they put you out of commission and don’t manage to kill you? They’d be stuck here with no doctor. It’s not worth the risk.”
“So they’re not going to try to kill me unless they’re sure they can manage it,” Jack says. “I guess that’s some kind of reassurance. They’d have to get close.” He pauses. “You could do it.”
He looks at Kate. Kate looks at him.
“You’re asking me to kill you?” she asks.
Hearing it put into words hits him hard. What the hell is he saying? “It’s not a request. It was just a thought.”
Kate raises her eyebrows. “Well, it was a bad one.”
-
Jack’s never been great at getting to sleep, and, yeah, being trapped on this island hasn’t exactly made it any easier. He lies awake, his eyes closed, thinking.
Maybe Kate’s right; maybe there’s some kind of safety in being the island’s doctor. There’s always the chance that being allowed to leave the island is a lie, so people won’t want to do anything that makes it substantially harder to live here.
There are other people who are essential to their survival; does that mean he doesn’t have to worry too much about their safety either? Locke can hunt; Jin can fish; Sun’s expertise with plants is useful. Sayid knows electronics; he’s their best hope of being rescued, of escaping this stupid game together. If Jack killed someone, it—
His eyes fly open. No. He can’t – he refuses to think like that. No.
If anyone killed someone, it would make sense to target someone the group could manage without.
-
Jack hesitates when Sawyer volunteers to head out with him on a water run. It’s not like Sawyer, and being in pairs could be dangerous. He considers insisting on a third person.
Instead, he mentions to a few people he trusts that they’re heading out together. Hurley, Kate, Sayid. Making sure Sawyer can hear it, so he knows he’s the one who’ll be suspected if Jack turns up dead.
“Jesus, I’m not gonna kill you,” Sawyer says. “You don’t have to tell the whole goddamn camp.”
“Good to know,” Jack says. “If it helps, it means it’d be a bad idea for me to kill you as well.”
They head out into the jungle together. Jack’s got a feeling Sawyer offered to come along because he had something to say, so it’s no surprise when Sawyer speaks up, but the words aren’t what Jack was expecting.
“If Michael dies, Walt’s the killer,” Sawyer says.
Jack stops walking, looks at him for a moment. “What?”
Sawyer shrugs. “Walt’s his kid. They can’t both get out of here. Michael tells Walt to kill him, at least his son can get out alive.”
Jack tries not to think of half-extending a similar invitation to Kate. “Sounds like something you might say if you wanted to get away with killing Michael.”
“Fine,” Sawyer says. “You don’t want me to help, I won’t help.”
“Just seems strange to start making accusations when nobody’s even died yet.”
Sawyer scuffs his shoe across the earth. “I ain’t gonna kill Mike. There’s only one person I’m planning to kill.”
That’s not what Jack was expecting to hear. “Who are you planning to kill?”
“Seems to me that ain’t none of your business.”
“We’re trapped on an island together and you’ve just told me you’re plotting to murder someone,” Jack says. “I think it’s my business.”
Sawyer rolls his eyes; it’s a move that feels calculated to piss Jack off. “You can relax, Doc, it ain’t anyone here.”
Somehow, being stuck in this place with an aspiring murderer still doesn’t feel that reassuring. Should he mention this to people, put them on guard around Sawyer? Or will that just make Sawyer a target?
He probably doesn’t need to spread it around. It’s not like Sawyer’s someone people tend to let their guards down around. Maybe he’ll just tell Kate.
-
They’ve been exploring the island in small groups, trying to find where the stranger and his people live. Trying to establish their way off the island and secure it for themselves.
If it’s a ship, they could probably sail it. They don’t have anyone who could fly a plane, but if these people do, if they could abduct or threaten the pilot – or bribe them, apparently Hurley won the lottery—
They might have found the right place at last. There are a series of tall pillars here, definitely manmade.
“Stop.” Sayid throws his arm out in front of Kate; Jack draws to a halt as well, seeing what he must have seen. The ground around the pillars is scattered with dead birds.
Shit.
“You know what this is?” Jack asks.
“Dangerous, evidently,” Sayid says. “I don’t know the specifics.”
“Think we can find a way around?” Kate asks.
There’d be no reason to just build a few pillars; it’s probably a full fence, and Jack can see from Kate and Sayid’s expressions that they’re thinking it too. But they end up following the line of the pillars anyway.
It’s a fence, and a big one. It ends at sheer cliff on both sides. Might theoretically be possible to swim past it, but there’s no clear way down to or up from the water anywhere near it, so they don’t know how long they’d be swimming, and the currents are vicious around here; they could end up drowning in the attempt. They don’t know what it’s protecting, but they know they’d be taking a very big, very stupid risk to walk through it.
So much for tracking these people down.
Jack closes his eyes for a moment, clasps his hands behind his neck. If they can’t secure the strangers’ route off the island, what are the ways this could play out? They live here together, or they find another way to escape together. Or people start dying.
He won’t let that happen.
-
They tell the other survivors about the fence. Jack doesn’t like it, wanted to keep it to themselves; if they tell the others their search for the strangers hit a dead end, some of them might get desperate, might start thinking about other ways out of here. But, as Kate has pointed out, it could end badly if someone else comes across the pillars and doesn’t notice the signs of danger.
People are quiet after they make the announcement, subdued. It feels like they’ve made a mistake.
Jack catches Locke’s eye as he makes his way back to his shelter. Locke’s just watching him; he’s not smiling, exactly, but his expression feels like it’s somewhere on the verge of a smile. Jack always finds him hard to read, and it kind of pisses him off.
“What?” Jack asks.
“Nothing,” Locke says. “You seemed tense.”
“Yeah, imagine that.”
Locke shrugs. “Maybe this is all happening for a reason.”
“The reason,” Jack says, “is that some sick assholes thought it would be funny.”
-
“Oh, my God, Shannon, what—”
Kate’s on her feet, she’s running across the sand, and it takes Jack a moment to make sense of what he’s seeing. It’s Shannon, she’s covered in blood, she’s—
He’s on his feet as well before he knows he’s moved. Shannon’s covered in blood, but he doesn’t think it’s hers; she’s supporting someone who’s clearly injured, struggling to walk. Boone.
Jack reaches them, and together he and Kate help to ease Boone down onto the sand. Boone’s pale, he’s bleeding badly from what looks like a knife wound in his side. Did someone—?
“What happened to him?” Jack asks, urgently checking him over.
“I tried to kill him,” Shannon says, wavering.
Jack looks up at her. “What?”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.” Her voice seems distant, somehow; she’s staring straight ahead, staring at nothing. “I knew he’d be easiest. He’d let me get close. But I couldn’t do it.”
“He’s your – he’s your brother, why would—”
“We can’t both get out of this alive!” Shannon snaps, and then she bursts into tears.
“Oh, my God,” Kate says again.
For a moment, Jack can’t move or think; there’s too much to process. There’s been an attempt on someone’s life, which suddenly makes the prospect of an actual murder feel much more real. Shannon was willing to kill to get out of here; he’s going to have to decide whether she’s still a danger, how to protect people from her without putting her at risk herself. Boone is bleeding and shaking under his hands.
He counts to five.
“Okay,” he says. “Kate, help me get him to the infirmary, and then you can look after Shannon.”
Shannon wouldn’t try to kill someone else straight away, right? She’s obviously badly shaken by what she did, and she’d know Jack and Boone would be able to identify the killer. Besides, Kate can look after herself.
-
Jack’s tension starts to ease a little once he gets a good look at Boone. The wound looks painful, but it’s mostly superficial, hasn’t hit anything he can’t live without. They still have to deal with the fact that this happened in the first place, but right now Jack just needs to patch him up.
Boone’s not going to die. Not unless—
Jack goes still.
If he killed Boone, here, now, Shannon would take the blame for it. She stabbed him; she knows that, Jack knows that, Kate knows that. Shannon would think she’s the one responsible, wouldn’t be able to deny it.
He would get away with it. He would get off this island.
Boone is here and helpless, his life in Jack’s hands, and Jack is going to throw up if he thinks about this any longer. He closes his eyes, trying to calm himself down. He can feel his own heart beating like it’s trapped and trying to shake itself free.
You can’t just kill someone you know that easily, Claire said. He’d like to believe it. But Shannon targeted her own brother.
Someone’s going to be killed before long, and, if they can’t work out who did it, they’ll all be executed. If Jack could get out first—
Boone makes a small noise of pain, and it rips through Jack like a bullet.
He can’t. He can’t do this, he can’t think about this. He’s spent his whole life trying to save people; does he think he can kill forty people, people he knows, people he likes, and just step back into that life like nothing happened?
He grabs the medical kit.
-
It’s Rose’s idea to have everyone gather together for meals, get to know each other better, rather than just grazing throughout the day. Charlie strums his guitar and sings while they all pass shares of roasted boar and coconut around the signal fire.
Boone taps Jack on the shoulder, thanks him for saving his life. Jack swallows down all the words in his throat and forces himself to smile. They’ve reached a mutual agreement not to mention Shannon’s involvement to the broader group, in case it makes her a target – the story is that Boone slipped and gashed himself on a rock – but Boone and Kate are keeping a close eye on her.
Jack catches Shannon’s eye across the fire, unintentionally. She quickly looks away.
Honestly, he’s just glad that she was the first to break eye contact. When he looks at her or Boone, it’s hard to escape the feeling that they can somehow hear his thoughts.
How many cameras are on them right now? How many people watching, waiting for them to start killing each other? Did they see Jack hesitate over Boone before treating him; did they know what it meant?
They’ll just have to show those assholes that they don’t break that easily.
Jin and Sun come by to share some sea urchin, and Jack takes it with thanks, barely thinking of poison. Vincent noses hopefully around everyone in the group; Jack ruffles his fur when he gets close. The stars are bright, they have food and water, and everyone is here, which means that, for now, everyone is alive.
He doesn’t know how long this peace will last. They’ve already had one murder attempt, and he’s had to fight off dark thoughts more than once himself; he doubts he’s the only one. It’s probably only a matter of time until they have an actual body on their hands.
But right now—
Right now, it’s okay. Maybe there’s no other way off the island; maybe the only alternative is just living here together. If it’ll piss off the shadowy figures behind the cameras, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
By 'this', I mean 'writing an incredibly ill-advised Danganronpa-inspired AU'.
You don't need to know Danganronpa at all in order to read this! I just borrowed the basic concept, because I love the way it creates a breeding ground for paranoia.
Title: The Toll
Fandom: Lost
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,500
Summary: The survivors of Flight 815 struggle with the paranoia of being told they have to kill each other.
“Jack,” Sayid says, drawing him aside on the beach. “There is something I think you should see.”
Sayid’s proved himself to be reliable so far, so Jack follows him into the jungle. Sayid leads him to what looks a lot like an ordinary tree.
“You see it?” Sayid asks.
“Uh, I’m not much of a botanist,” Jack says. “Is it... medically useful?”
“Look closer,” Sayid says.
Jack looks closer. Sayid taps the trunk, directing his attention to...
“What is that?” Jack asks. There’s something small embedded in the trunk, something like a circle of dark glass, something like... “Is that a camera?”
“I fear so,” Sayid says. He holds up a small black device. “I excavated a similar spy camera from another tree.”
“This isn’t the only one?” Jack asks. “Someone’s watching us? Who the hell—”
What does this mean? What the hell does this mean?
This is an uninhabited island, right? Their plane crashed here; people are dead. They burned the bodies. That couldn’t have been staged.
“Is this a TV show?” Jack demands.
“I know as much as you do,” Sayid says.
“Okay.” Jack massages his temples. “Okay. We can dig out the ones we can find, see if we can get any useful parts out of them. Let’s, uh, let’s keep this quiet for now; we don’t want to freak everyone out.” He stoops a little, to look directly into the lens embedded in the tree. “If anyone’s watching this, get us the fuck out of here.”
There are more cameras. There are a lot more cameras. Once Jack is looking for them, it starts to feel like they’re everywhere: in trees, in rocks. Attached to plane parts they’ve used to build shelter, painted to look like they belong there, and that’s what freaks him out the most, because it means at least some of them have been put here since the crash.
What the fuck is going on?
He takes them down whenever he finds them, but it’s becoming very clear that he’ll never find them all. Whatever he does, someone is going to be watching.
Who? Why?
Jack’s talking to Sayid about the cameras they’ve found, in hushed conversation on the beach, when he sees something that cuts off his voice like a blow to the throat. A stranger is coming out of the jungle.
Jack sprints across the sand, grabs him by the shoulders. “Who the hell are you?”
The man is about half a foot shorter than Jack, maybe a decade older. He’s wearing a buttoned shirt and no shoes. His eyes are his most striking feature, blue and strangely protuberant.
He wasn’t on the plane. Jack knows, somehow, looking at him, that he’s been here much longer than any of them.
“Easy,” the man says. “I’m just here to talk.”
Jack raises his eyebrows. “That works for me. Start talking.”
“I’d appreciate it if you let go of me.”
“Are you responsible for the cameras?”
“I’d be happy to answer your questions,” the man says, “but I’ll need you to let go and gather your people first.”
“No.” Jack shakes his head. “No. You don’t get to make requests, you don’t get to make demands. You’re just gonna tell me what you’re doing here and why you’re watching us.”
But the others are already gathering; they’ve noticed there’s conflict, they’ve noticed there’s a stranger.
The man raises his chin. “I’d really advise you to let go.”
“I don’t care,” Jack says.
The man whistles; there’s a loud report from somewhere in the jungle. Jack jerks back, startled, as something slams into the sand by his foot. The stranger wrenches himself out of Jack’s grip and takes a few quick steps back, straightening his collar.
“Are you shooting at us?” Jack demands.
“We’re shooting near you,” the man says. “If we all behave ourselves, I’m sure we can have a pleasant conversation.”
Jack stands there for a moment, breathing hard, thinking hard. The others have scattered outwards a little from the shot, but they’re still close, still trying to work out what’s going on. If he goes for the stranger again and more shots get fired, they could be in danger.
“What do you want?” he asks.
The man gives a small, satisfied nod. “I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that rescue isn’t coming.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to know that there’s only one way off this island,” the man says. “If you kill one of your fellow survivors, we will graciously grant you passage back to civilisation.”
What the fuck?
“You’ll need to do it without being caught, of course,” the man says. As if this is something with established rules, somehow; as if what he’s saying isn’t completely fucking ridiculous. “Twenty-four hours after each murder, we’ll take a vote on who you think is the culprit.” He casts his eyes briefly across the group. “As there are rather a lot of you, we’ll allow abstentions for anyone who feels uninformed. If you correctly identify the murderer, they’ll be executed. If you answer incorrectly, the killer will be escorted safely home, and the rest of you will be executed instead.”
“You think you can just force us to kill each other?” Kate demands. “Why would you even want that?”
The man fixes her with those strange wide eyes of his. “We’re not forcing you to do anything, Ms Austen. You could always just live out your lives on this island. We’re simply presenting you with an option, because... well, because the island is known to demand the occasional sacrifice, and this is a reliable method of sating it.”
“This is insane,” Michael says. “Even if one of us did kill someone, you wouldn’t know who did it. There’s no way you could know if we had the right answer.”
“Oh, that’s all taken care of,” the man says. “Rest assured, wherever you are on the island, we will be able to see you. You won’t need to worry about anyone else taking credit for your kill.”
Jack clenches his jaw, thinking of the hidden lenses he’s been uncovering, too many to get rid of them all.
“On the subject, we’ve noticed some destruction of our cameras going on,” the man says. “I’m afraid we can’t have that. From now on, any camera damage will be punished by death.”
There are some cameras, in the trees fringing the beach, that they haven’t gotten rid of yet. If Jack or Sayid had started excavating them, the others would have noticed, they’d have had questions. One of them is in a tree just a little beyond the stranger.
Jack heads for the tree. Grabs a steel bar on the way from the nearest shelter, salvaged from the wreck.
He slams the bar as hard as he can into the embedded lens. It leaves a small but satisfying crack.
He turns around to look at the man.
“Kill me,” he says.
The man, very calmly, pulls a pistol out of his belt and shoots.
Everything is kind of a blur after that. A lot of screaming, a lot of running. Kate at Jack’s side, trying to help him up. The man saying, If you survive, consider that a warning, and disappearing into the jungle. Hurley and Charlie bringing clothes at a run to serve as bandages; Jack trying to stem the flow of his own blood through a blaze of pain.
For a moment, he’s not sure how it’s going to go, if he’s actually going to die as a fucking example to keep the others in line, and he’s never been so pissed off in his life.
But he’s going to pull through, he realises when his mind starts to clear a little. It hurts like hell, and it’s going to ache for a while; his left arm probably isn’t going to be at its best. But he’ll live.
Live to see however this absolute bullshit plays out, he guesses.
“Hey,” Kate says. She was crouching over Jack when he opened his eyes, in their makeshift infirmary; she shifts back as he sits up. “How are you feeling?”
Not great. His shoulder is screaming at him with every motion; his mind’s a whirlwind. But better for having slept, he guesses.
“I’m still alive,” Jack says, managing to sound calmer than he feels. “Guess it was a bluff.”
“He shot you, Jack. It wasn’t a bluff,” Kate says. “Don’t do that again.”
Which makes him want to go straight out and destroy another camera, of course, but he guesses it wouldn’t be a good idea.
“How did you know about that camera?” Kate asks.
Jack glances at Sayid, who’s standing in the entrance to the infirmary. “Uh, Sayid and I found some of them around the place. We didn’t want to mention them until we’d figured out what was going on.”
“I see,” Kate says. She doesn’t sound impressed. “I guess we know what’s going on now.”
Jack’s still looking at Sayid. Now that he’s thinking back through the confused blur of treatment, he has a feeling Sayid’s been hanging around nearby pretty much the entire time. “Was there something you needed, Sayid?”
“You’re injured,” Sayid says. “I thought it best to ensure nobody could take advantage of your vulnerability.”
It’s a strange, jarring reminder of the situation. That they don’t just have to worry about that guy and whatever allies he might have; that they might have to guard against each other now.
Jack doesn’t like it. But it’s not a possibility that’s easy to dismiss entirely.
“These people haven’t given us any proof that they can get us off the island,” he says. But he’s thinking of the cameras; those couldn’t have been manufactured here, right? “Nobody’s insane enough to kill someone for that.”
Kate and Sayid exchange a glance.
“He brought newspapers,” Kate says.
“What?” Jack asks.
“You were still kind of out of it,” Kate says. “But he came back with newspapers from after—”
Jack’s already pushing past Sayid, looking around the beach. Spots a newspaper in Claire’s hands, sprints for her. It’s a bad idea, scorches pain down his arm. He doesn’t care.
“Hey,” he says, breathless. “Can I—”
But Claire’s jerked away from him, her eyes wide and alarmed. Another stark, painful reminder that they can’t trust each other any more.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I take a look at that?”
Claire hands him the newspaper, warily. Taps her own breastbone to indicate the place where Jack was shot. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” He scans the front page, the date, the headline: FULL PASSENGER LIST FROM MISSING PLANE RELEASED. There’s a photograph of Hurley, with the caption Lottery winner Hugo Reyes was among the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815.
He looks up at Claire. “Lottery winner?”
“Uh, yeah, apparently,” Claire says. “I get the feeling he doesn’t really like to talk about it.”
There are the cameras; they’ve been spying. They could have gathered information, they could have fabricated this. But could they have fabricated it without leaving the island?
Whatever line of logic he tries to follow, it leads him to the same conclusion: these people have a way off the island. There’s a way out of here.
But only if they kill someone, apparently.
He flicks through the newspaper, his eyes catching on headlines, hungry for anything about the outside world. Looks at Claire again. “Uh, I haven’t really been taking much in for a little while. Have there been any, uh, fights?”
Claire raises her eyebrows. “Murder attempts, you mean?”
He guesses there’s no point in trying to edge around the topic. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt anyone,” Claire says. “We’ve been living together, we’ve been making friends here. You can’t just kill someone you know that easily.”
They’re nice words, but there’s no way to know if she believes them. It definitely seems like she’s tenser around Jack than she was before. She could be trying to deflect suspicion, trying to make sure nobody looks at her when the first body turns up.
Jack hates that that’s his first thought. But Claire’s pregnant; if she leaves, the baby leaves too. If the stranger’s offer really is the only way off the island, she’s the only one who stands a chance of getting out of here with someone she cares about.
And there are over forty of them here. They’ve been getting to know each other, yeah, but they’ve been getting to know each other in smaller groups. They haven’t been here that long; there’s no way they could all get acquainted on a personal level. Everyone’s going to have people they know less well.
People they might feel more able to kill.
And, yeah, there’s the ‘everyone else gets executed if you get away with it’ clause. If you have friends on this island, you’re risking their lives no matter who you murder. But, in the moment, when you’re killing someone with your own hands, it’s probably easier to target a stranger, and they all have people who are pretty much strangers to them.
“That’s good.” He looks back at the newspaper, this tangible sign of an outside world they’ve been told they have to murder their way back to. “Thanks.”
“How’ve you been sleeping?”
Jack looks up from the ocean, squinting against the morning sunlight. Kate. “Is it that obvious?”
Kate laughs a little. “You do look kind of terrible.” She sits next to him on the sand. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think anyone’s sleeping great, and most of us don’t have a bullet wound to worry about.”
Jack’s hand instinctively goes to his makeshift bandage, a torn strip of T-shirt. It’s not hurting so aggressively by now, at least. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Kate tilts her head. “What, you think someone’s going to kill you in your sleep?”
It’s more that someone might kill anyone, really. Whenever he notices someone missing from the group, he’s on edge, watching for them until they emerge from the jungle or the ocean. He can’t supervise everyone whenever they go to the toilet or in search of food, but, God, there’s a part of him that wants to.
He keeps it to himself.
“Nobody’s going to kill you, Jack,” Kate says. “You’re the doctor. Everyone’s relying on you to patch them up if they get targeted.”
Jack shrugs. “If they kill me and get off the island, they don’t need to worry about that any more.”
“Yeah, but what if they put you out of commission and don’t manage to kill you? They’d be stuck here with no doctor. It’s not worth the risk.”
“So they’re not going to try to kill me unless they’re sure they can manage it,” Jack says. “I guess that’s some kind of reassurance. They’d have to get close.” He pauses. “You could do it.”
He looks at Kate. Kate looks at him.
“You’re asking me to kill you?” she asks.
Hearing it put into words hits him hard. What the hell is he saying? “It’s not a request. It was just a thought.”
Kate raises her eyebrows. “Well, it was a bad one.”
Jack’s never been great at getting to sleep, and, yeah, being trapped on this island hasn’t exactly made it any easier. He lies awake, his eyes closed, thinking.
Maybe Kate’s right; maybe there’s some kind of safety in being the island’s doctor. There’s always the chance that being allowed to leave the island is a lie, so people won’t want to do anything that makes it substantially harder to live here.
There are other people who are essential to their survival; does that mean he doesn’t have to worry too much about their safety either? Locke can hunt; Jin can fish; Sun’s expertise with plants is useful. Sayid knows electronics; he’s their best hope of being rescued, of escaping this stupid game together. If Jack killed someone, it—
His eyes fly open. No. He can’t – he refuses to think like that. No.
If anyone killed someone, it would make sense to target someone the group could manage without.
Jack hesitates when Sawyer volunteers to head out with him on a water run. It’s not like Sawyer, and being in pairs could be dangerous. He considers insisting on a third person.
Instead, he mentions to a few people he trusts that they’re heading out together. Hurley, Kate, Sayid. Making sure Sawyer can hear it, so he knows he’s the one who’ll be suspected if Jack turns up dead.
“Jesus, I’m not gonna kill you,” Sawyer says. “You don’t have to tell the whole goddamn camp.”
“Good to know,” Jack says. “If it helps, it means it’d be a bad idea for me to kill you as well.”
They head out into the jungle together. Jack’s got a feeling Sawyer offered to come along because he had something to say, so it’s no surprise when Sawyer speaks up, but the words aren’t what Jack was expecting.
“If Michael dies, Walt’s the killer,” Sawyer says.
Jack stops walking, looks at him for a moment. “What?”
Sawyer shrugs. “Walt’s his kid. They can’t both get out of here. Michael tells Walt to kill him, at least his son can get out alive.”
Jack tries not to think of half-extending a similar invitation to Kate. “Sounds like something you might say if you wanted to get away with killing Michael.”
“Fine,” Sawyer says. “You don’t want me to help, I won’t help.”
“Just seems strange to start making accusations when nobody’s even died yet.”
Sawyer scuffs his shoe across the earth. “I ain’t gonna kill Mike. There’s only one person I’m planning to kill.”
That’s not what Jack was expecting to hear. “Who are you planning to kill?”
“Seems to me that ain’t none of your business.”
“We’re trapped on an island together and you’ve just told me you’re plotting to murder someone,” Jack says. “I think it’s my business.”
Sawyer rolls his eyes; it’s a move that feels calculated to piss Jack off. “You can relax, Doc, it ain’t anyone here.”
Somehow, being stuck in this place with an aspiring murderer still doesn’t feel that reassuring. Should he mention this to people, put them on guard around Sawyer? Or will that just make Sawyer a target?
He probably doesn’t need to spread it around. It’s not like Sawyer’s someone people tend to let their guards down around. Maybe he’ll just tell Kate.
They’ve been exploring the island in small groups, trying to find where the stranger and his people live. Trying to establish their way off the island and secure it for themselves.
If it’s a ship, they could probably sail it. They don’t have anyone who could fly a plane, but if these people do, if they could abduct or threaten the pilot – or bribe them, apparently Hurley won the lottery—
They might have found the right place at last. There are a series of tall pillars here, definitely manmade.
“Stop.” Sayid throws his arm out in front of Kate; Jack draws to a halt as well, seeing what he must have seen. The ground around the pillars is scattered with dead birds.
Shit.
“You know what this is?” Jack asks.
“Dangerous, evidently,” Sayid says. “I don’t know the specifics.”
“Think we can find a way around?” Kate asks.
There’d be no reason to just build a few pillars; it’s probably a full fence, and Jack can see from Kate and Sayid’s expressions that they’re thinking it too. But they end up following the line of the pillars anyway.
It’s a fence, and a big one. It ends at sheer cliff on both sides. Might theoretically be possible to swim past it, but there’s no clear way down to or up from the water anywhere near it, so they don’t know how long they’d be swimming, and the currents are vicious around here; they could end up drowning in the attempt. They don’t know what it’s protecting, but they know they’d be taking a very big, very stupid risk to walk through it.
So much for tracking these people down.
Jack closes his eyes for a moment, clasps his hands behind his neck. If they can’t secure the strangers’ route off the island, what are the ways this could play out? They live here together, or they find another way to escape together. Or people start dying.
He won’t let that happen.
They tell the other survivors about the fence. Jack doesn’t like it, wanted to keep it to themselves; if they tell the others their search for the strangers hit a dead end, some of them might get desperate, might start thinking about other ways out of here. But, as Kate has pointed out, it could end badly if someone else comes across the pillars and doesn’t notice the signs of danger.
People are quiet after they make the announcement, subdued. It feels like they’ve made a mistake.
Jack catches Locke’s eye as he makes his way back to his shelter. Locke’s just watching him; he’s not smiling, exactly, but his expression feels like it’s somewhere on the verge of a smile. Jack always finds him hard to read, and it kind of pisses him off.
“What?” Jack asks.
“Nothing,” Locke says. “You seemed tense.”
“Yeah, imagine that.”
Locke shrugs. “Maybe this is all happening for a reason.”
“The reason,” Jack says, “is that some sick assholes thought it would be funny.”
“Oh, my God, Shannon, what—”
Kate’s on her feet, she’s running across the sand, and it takes Jack a moment to make sense of what he’s seeing. It’s Shannon, she’s covered in blood, she’s—
He’s on his feet as well before he knows he’s moved. Shannon’s covered in blood, but he doesn’t think it’s hers; she’s supporting someone who’s clearly injured, struggling to walk. Boone.
Jack reaches them, and together he and Kate help to ease Boone down onto the sand. Boone’s pale, he’s bleeding badly from what looks like a knife wound in his side. Did someone—?
“What happened to him?” Jack asks, urgently checking him over.
“I tried to kill him,” Shannon says, wavering.
Jack looks up at her. “What?”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.” Her voice seems distant, somehow; she’s staring straight ahead, staring at nothing. “I knew he’d be easiest. He’d let me get close. But I couldn’t do it.”
“He’s your – he’s your brother, why would—”
“We can’t both get out of this alive!” Shannon snaps, and then she bursts into tears.
“Oh, my God,” Kate says again.
For a moment, Jack can’t move or think; there’s too much to process. There’s been an attempt on someone’s life, which suddenly makes the prospect of an actual murder feel much more real. Shannon was willing to kill to get out of here; he’s going to have to decide whether she’s still a danger, how to protect people from her without putting her at risk herself. Boone is bleeding and shaking under his hands.
He counts to five.
“Okay,” he says. “Kate, help me get him to the infirmary, and then you can look after Shannon.”
Shannon wouldn’t try to kill someone else straight away, right? She’s obviously badly shaken by what she did, and she’d know Jack and Boone would be able to identify the killer. Besides, Kate can look after herself.
Jack’s tension starts to ease a little once he gets a good look at Boone. The wound looks painful, but it’s mostly superficial, hasn’t hit anything he can’t live without. They still have to deal with the fact that this happened in the first place, but right now Jack just needs to patch him up.
Boone’s not going to die. Not unless—
Jack goes still.
If he killed Boone, here, now, Shannon would take the blame for it. She stabbed him; she knows that, Jack knows that, Kate knows that. Shannon would think she’s the one responsible, wouldn’t be able to deny it.
He would get away with it. He would get off this island.
Boone is here and helpless, his life in Jack’s hands, and Jack is going to throw up if he thinks about this any longer. He closes his eyes, trying to calm himself down. He can feel his own heart beating like it’s trapped and trying to shake itself free.
You can’t just kill someone you know that easily, Claire said. He’d like to believe it. But Shannon targeted her own brother.
Someone’s going to be killed before long, and, if they can’t work out who did it, they’ll all be executed. If Jack could get out first—
Boone makes a small noise of pain, and it rips through Jack like a bullet.
He can’t. He can’t do this, he can’t think about this. He’s spent his whole life trying to save people; does he think he can kill forty people, people he knows, people he likes, and just step back into that life like nothing happened?
He grabs the medical kit.
It’s Rose’s idea to have everyone gather together for meals, get to know each other better, rather than just grazing throughout the day. Charlie strums his guitar and sings while they all pass shares of roasted boar and coconut around the signal fire.
Boone taps Jack on the shoulder, thanks him for saving his life. Jack swallows down all the words in his throat and forces himself to smile. They’ve reached a mutual agreement not to mention Shannon’s involvement to the broader group, in case it makes her a target – the story is that Boone slipped and gashed himself on a rock – but Boone and Kate are keeping a close eye on her.
Jack catches Shannon’s eye across the fire, unintentionally. She quickly looks away.
Honestly, he’s just glad that she was the first to break eye contact. When he looks at her or Boone, it’s hard to escape the feeling that they can somehow hear his thoughts.
How many cameras are on them right now? How many people watching, waiting for them to start killing each other? Did they see Jack hesitate over Boone before treating him; did they know what it meant?
They’ll just have to show those assholes that they don’t break that easily.
Jin and Sun come by to share some sea urchin, and Jack takes it with thanks, barely thinking of poison. Vincent noses hopefully around everyone in the group; Jack ruffles his fur when he gets close. The stars are bright, they have food and water, and everyone is here, which means that, for now, everyone is alive.
He doesn’t know how long this peace will last. They’ve already had one murder attempt, and he’s had to fight off dark thoughts more than once himself; he doubts he’s the only one. It’s probably only a matter of time until they have an actual body on their hands.
But right now—
Right now, it’s okay. Maybe there’s no other way off the island; maybe the only alternative is just living here together. If it’ll piss off the shadowy figures behind the cameras, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
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