videotape
lost. gen. 1,680 words. pg. au future/past
the oceanic six get a message from 1973.



note: this idea has been hovering around in my head since the finale. The premise was simple enough: Jack finds a tape message from Juliet. I wrote everything else around that and incorporated bits of what I've seen from the season five trailers. Mostly this was a result of listening to the song Videotape (by Radiohead) over and over, and my need for something about Lost.



Before it took the name Widmore, it was Hanso, and there were buildings, out-posts, everywhere. Ben tells him this after they get Hurley and Sayid, before they get Sun.

When the image on the screen is of Juliet, the video marked “REPO” in bold black letters, there’s a silence in the room and then Hurley saying, “Dude.”

The first thing she says, “Jin is alive.” On the video, it’s the first thing she says. The video, it’s over thirty years old.


-


To convince Sun they show her the videotape. The reaction isn’t what they expected. Jack stands behind Hurley, behind Sayid, behind Kate. Aaron is asleep on a hospital bed. Jack constantly makes sure the door is locked.

“What does Ben have to say about this?”

Sayid looks to Jack, deciding to answer for them. “He ran before we could get to him.”

At the sight of Sayid’s gun in his back pocket, Kate walks over to Aaron and caresses his back. The boy shuffles a little before stopping completely.

Jack checks his watch. “We have to go. The practice opens soon.”

The message on the television continues. The old age has corroded the tuning on the tape and it repeats the last few seconds. “Don’t bring him back.”


-


Juliet fiddles with the buttons until the red one blinks a few times until settling on. She sees a countdown on the small screen. “Is it working?” she asks Daniel.

Daniel is s till working behind servers, huge ones he isn’t entirely sure still works. “Yeah... yes. Yes, it’s working... I think. Wait.” He rearranges wires connected to the computer Juliet sits across from. “Now. Press it again. That red one. It should record.”

“Now?”

“Wait,” Daniel hears something not coming from inside the hatch. He stops breathing. “You’re gonna have to hurry, Juliet. Say only the important things. I think we might have been—“

Juliet interrupts him by pressing record. She starts, “Jin is alive.”


-


The stations were everywhere, the outposts. To find them was to go back to old records, archives long forgotten by the mass public but still protected.

The first one they found contained the notebooks from the Pearl station. Hurley opened one and began to read. “Subject A has begun to play an excessive amount of chess with himself. Irony of it all is I believe his reaction when he achieves check mate. It is as if the move was not anticipated and the game is true..” Hurley put it down and looked at Sayid. “So, we’re like supposed to go through all of these?”

Sayid reminded him. “Just look for something recognizable. Something someone might have left behind that could be from one of them.”

Hurley’s eyes wandered as Sayid continued to rummage through the mess of the notebooks. “Holy shit, dude.”

Sayid turned to him. “What is it?”

Hurley bends down to pick up a notebook. “Something recognizable, huh. Like this?”

Sayid took the notebook marked “815.”


-


Kate holds the tape out in front of her. She already knows the entire message, but she can’t quite wrap her mind around the title. “How did you know?”

Jack can see her on the reflection of the bathroom mirror. He has just finished shaving, passing a wash cloth over his face. “Know?”

“There must have been dozens of these. How did you know it was this one?”

He tells her the joke exchanged at the Hydra all those years ago on the island. The humor is lost to Kate as the memories return. “That’s very clever of her,” Kate says.

Jack comes out of the bathroom nodding. He takes a good look at Aaron on one of the beds, asleep. “Are you two okay here?”

Kate sighs. “I’m used to motels. He isn’t.”


-


Jack stepped on the tape. He could see the curve of the R beginning on the white label. Then the E, and when he removed his foot all together, the rest of the word.

Ben continued. “Luckily for us these outposts weren’t discontinued. Widmore has use for them. He doesn’t know exactly what for. Fortunately for us I do. Anything to discover what happened on the Island these three years will be helpful. I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into.”

Jack bent down and picked it up. Amidst the many tapes in the large room the size of a studio apartment, he couldn’t believe this was only a coincidence.

“Video reports weren’t common for the Dharma Initiative. Mostly it was to solidify some foundation of truth.” Ben moved one tape over the other, reading the titles. All of them numbered, none of them the ones he was searching for. “When you read something it doesn’t ring entirely true. As long as it’s written it can be fiction, ramblings.”

“People can’t lie and ramble on tape, Ben?” Jack asked when Ben turned to him.

Ben paused and smiled. “I suppose they can.” He walked over to Jack, eying the tape in his hands. “You found something?”

Jack could sense it in his gut. “I did.”

“Then let’s play it.”

The marking on the tape made Jack handle it carefully. “It’s from 1973.”

They walked to the end of the room where a lone television set sat on a table with the bottom of the legs on wheels. “Then we have a year to when return.”


-


Juliet spent the past three years trying not to say a word and here she was reducing all that had happened to a few minutes. “Jin is alive,” she says first, and without thinking goes on. “Daniel says the island moved, but not to another place. Locke changed everything. We fought but then we started getting sick. First Charlotte, then Rose, then Miles and now it’s only a matter of time before Daniel and me.... I don’t know who’s getting this, or if it’s even getting to where we want it to.” She stops for a few seconds. Behind her Daniel struggles, she can’t see him completely.

The red button begins to flash and Juliet bangs her palm against the player before it fades completely.

Juliet passes the same hand over her face, removing the tiredness. She gets up and realizes that there was nothing in the message that could help them.

“Juliet?”

She stops and moves back towards all the screens.

Locke emerges from the darkness, Daniel and Sawyer behind him.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Sawyer steps up from behind Locke, stops the old man from speaking. “You gotta hear him out.”

Daniel swallows and looks down, his gesture of agreement.

Juliet searches for her gun in her back pocket, finds it with some difficulty and points it at Locke.

“Your hands are shaking, Juliet,” Locke says in a soothing, paternal tone. “You’re next.”

Daniel goes around the hatch slowly, his hands up. “I need to check to see if we have enough power to record one last message.”

“It’s important, Juliet,” Locke says.

Juliet can’t understand the shaking of her hands, the blur of her vision, the dizziness. All the symptoms she witnessed, all of them manifesting suddenly.

Sawyer walks up right in front of her. “You ain’t right,” he says quietly. “You know that.” He brings his hands to her pistol. “If the old man can convince me, he better convince you.”

Juliet lets Sawyer take it, a wave of relief hitting all of them. Daniel proceeds to the screen, fixing the computer.

“Alright, alright,” Daniel bolts a few seconds later. “We have eight seconds.”

Sawyer helps Juliet to sit in front of the screen, the red button flashing.

“Tell them bug-eyed bastard can’t come back with them.”

“What?” She couldn’t feel the ends of her fingers.

“Ben can’t come back,” Locke says clearly.

Daniel is prepared, waiting. “Ready?”

Juliet nods. She shakes a bit to compose herself. “Go.” The red light blinks on. “Don’t bring Ben back. Don’t bring him back.”

An electrical circuit breaks and the whole hatch goes dark.

The four seconds gone.


-



Kate reads it over and over the same way Sun repeats it over and over.

Jin is alive.

Kate reads from the first page of the notebook Hurley found, “On September 22, 2004, Oceanic Airline Flight 815 will crash. Together a group of over 40 people will find themselves stranded on an island already inhabited. Home to polar bears and bat shit crazy former members of a group called Dharma Initiative and some others who we aren’t sure are yet. Bad things happened, many were killed. Some by hands and hearts, some by hovering black smoke, and some by sheer stupidity. I always wanted to write a book but was never one to talk too much about myself. It isn’t exactly a fairy tale, but if there is a lesson for all that happened I suppose it’s: these things happen. I don’t believe in fate or chance or none of that. I like to think I’m here because of me, my own damn fault. To say anything else is to deny everything I done, and what’s the point of that. Excuse the poor introduction. I ain’t never wrote this much since I was eight. The plane will crash because you’re reading this letter, and if you’re reading this letter, I’m signing it: goodbye, Mr. Sawyer.”


-


Jack notices her pupils are somewhat dilated when the tape skips to the final message. Don’t bring him back. Don’t bring him back. It could have been the color in the tape, but energy was lost and as he slowed the tape in a much more advanced player, he could tell more and more the last part was recorded later. He got passed the skip, only it was black the rest of the tape.

A few small noises here and there.... and then, barely audible, “It won’t be enough.”


-


“It won’t be enough,” Daniel says, trying to fix it, the red light flashing on and off fading more and more.

“It doesn't have to be,” Locke says. “I’m leaving the island.”





.end