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Felicity buys him the camera.
She presents it to him on the one month anniversary of their departure from Starling – a big box wrapped in kids’ birthday paper, slid over the table of the café they’re having lunch in, her smile hopeful, expectant.
“I just thought you could use a hobby,” she shrugs, modestly, as he unwraps it, “you know, one that doesn’t involve you sticking people with pointy things.”
“Do people take pictures with cameras anymore?” Oliver examines the box, “I thought that was what phones were for.”
“You barely use your phone.”
That’s true.
He pulls it out of its packaging – a proper camera, high spec, a couple of lenses, a digital screen, a strap to hang round his neck. It feels real, substantial in his hands, if a little alien. He hasn’t owned a camera since… well since probably before phones were what people took pictures on.
“What do I take photographs of?”
“Whatever you like looking at, I guess.”
So his first picture is of her.
He spends a week dutifully experimenting, with lenses and focus, taking pictures of plants and hillsides and the car and occasionally the inside of the lens cap or of his own blurry fingers. He can’t say he’s finding it especially compelling, as hobbies go (his shoulders miss the weight of a quiver on his back, his fingers itch for the bow string; the camera is no real replacement), but Felicity seems so pleased every time she spots him using it that he keeps it up, for her. Maybe she’ll worry less if he tries for a while.
And he likes taking pictures of her. He’d take pictures of her all day if she’d let him – tousled and soft in the mornings, effervescent and sweet in the day, warm and vibrant at night, buying drinks for locals and fixing some kid’s Gamaeboy on the street, flipping her dress off over her head before she runs headlong into a lake in her underwear, because it’s hot and she can. He’d take pictures of all of that, although if he tries to take more than a couple a day she laughs and hides her face, or moves so all his shots are blurred, squirming away from him, calling him a sap. In that way, he mostly captures her in motion, and though she’s usually blurred he’d recognise her anywhere – in the familiar movement of her hands swinging up to her face or the twist of her body toward him, the jerk of her shoulders as she laughs with her head thrown back, her hair in her face.
(“I’m not that interesting!”
“You’re the most interesting person I know.”
“Take a picture of that tree instead.”
“I like you better than the tree.”
They compromise – he takes a picture of her hugging the tree.)
“You know you don’t have any photos of yourself,” Felicity points out, eventually.
“Isn’t that really what phones are for?”
“We’ve already discussed how you never use your phone.” She prods him in the arm, “I meant – more generally. I don’t think I’ve seen a single picture of you post-island that wasn’t press or, like, one of Thea’s selfies. You should have pictures of yourself. You know – to look at. Reflect. You’re having a period of self-examination.”
Oliver snorts. “Because things go so well when I’m navel-gazing.”
Also, he’s not fond of his own image, these days. There were no mirrors on Lian Yu and the first time he saw his own reflection in Hong Kong for a split second he hadn’t recognised it. Something about his own gaze is unsettling, to this day. So it’s easier not to look at all.
“You’re always taking pictures of me.”
“You’re much prettier than I am.”
“Fine, then we take one together,” she grabs the camera off him. “Sir – sir – could you help us – ”
And then she’s flagging down a stranger to hold the camera for them and she’s telling Oliver to smile – so he smiles, because she makes it easy.
He doesn’t even mind looking at the photo, after. It’s the first one that he’s seen of himself that he’s actually liked, in a long time.
At the next hiking trail they stop at, Oliver is the one who suggests they get a picture. Felicity throws one arm around him, the other out behind her, hanging off his shoulders so she can lean back and smile at the sunrise. Her weight feels better than the quiver on his back ever did.