The Indoraptor fell. He twisted in the air, legs and tail flailing for balance. The other raptor ripped from his grip, clinging to a ceiling girder with her legs and watching him plummet. He flipped on his side and watched helplessly as death rose beneath him, a pair of titanic bone spears, waiting for gravity to gift them his flesh.
But he flipped again, and the spears did not find him. He slammed into the skull between them, skin flayed but not pierced by the tusks on either side; he bounced off and skidded across the cold marble floor.
Stunned, he lay there panting. The world rocked to and fro beneath him.
After a seeming eon, he lifted his head and peered about. The creatures were gone from the roof; he was alone. He staggered to all four feet and sniffed the air, sniffed his sliced sides. The ground swayed below, and he staggered. There was blood coming from his bashed head.
The Indoraptor heard faint noises, but could not guess their source, nor identify the faint bellowing separated by countless walls. He paced out of the wreckage from the broken skylight, balance returning with each loping step, and followed his nose until he found the outside.
He'd glimpsed it during his rooftop foray, but in the rain had mistaken the swaying treetops for the silhouettes of buildings. Now confronted with their height he hissed, crouched, threatened by their mobility in the whipping wind. Crashing within the depths drew him further among their red trunks. The alien dimensions of knotted bark and irregular patterning of the roots crisscrossing the forest floor displeased him; he longed for straight edges and walls, a roof above limiting surprises. The rain pouring from the heavens was a constant irritation; used to the dark and the damp was he, but a flood was new, and offended his overstimulated senses.
A beast came crashing through the underbrush, its beaked face suddenly illuminated by lightning beside him. Instinct compelled him to leap clear of the adversary, his body twisting away as his head lashed out at the end of his long neck. His jaws closed on its flabby throat and it keened, stomping forth, dragging him with it. He wrenched and twisted to kill it, blood flowing into his jaws, but the beast refused to slow, and its neck refused to break. He clung to its bulky side in frustration, and it, roaring in pain, galloped sidelong into a tree, crushing him painfully between its charge and the hard trunk.
The Indoraptor fell twisting from its side and sprang to his feet, bloodlust and rage carrying him after it, but the world spun again and the ground rose swiftly to meet him. He panted, slumped upon the muddy forest floor; his head had not stopped bleeding. He let the lumbering animal escape.
The earth began to rumble; the Indoraptor possessed no instinct to predict what it might mean, and so did not escape what the lone beast had foreshadowed. No sooner had he begun to puzzle and fear the change than did the source explode from the dark rain, a massive herd of screeching animals. The Indoraptor squalled in panic. They, many, horned, long-necked, trampled around and over him, stomping, most coughing in great heaves of their chests, and all smelled foul, all of sickness and death. The Indoraptor clung to the side of a tree and snapped and bit at any who grew near, but the herd in its panic ignored him, endured his bites to focus on fleeing the death-gas that had almost claimed them. A lone predator was, by comparison, a walk in the park.
Only after they had all gone did the Indoraptor finally let his snout fall into the mud, panting and aching. Their footprints had scored his sides with scrapes and bruises; the humans had never caused such bustling pain. His bloodlust cooled, the Indoraptor instead missed his cell. He missed the dim, freezing den at the end of the man-hallway. He missed straight lines and the total, oppressive silence in the nighttime when he was the only creature in the world. Claustrophobia was a comfort; this odd new world held too many variables, too much confusion for his sheltered mind.
The sky rumbled, and blue light danced between some dark clouds. Their textures looked difficult to grip, and the more the Indoraptor looked up at the zenith of the world, the less he could stand it. How many worlds were there? Could a creature somehow get to those heavens and race among those cloudy cliffs? He had only just discovered the world beyond the walls, and grasping its scope was too much to bear. Blue light flashed between the clouds once again, and the Indoraptor twitched, badly. His head began to twitch with rhythmic shrugs. He struggled to his feet and limped through the forest, tripping on fallen logs and ditches, whines sliding between his teeth with each stride.
Occasionally, the humans would crowd the bars with sticks that grasped dancing blue light at the end, and when they probed deep into the cell with these sticks, into the corners where the Indoraptor would tuck himself, and jabbed his hide with the ends, light and pain would explode through his body. They would do it until he thrashed and seized, foam flying from his mouth, limbs flailing and aching, his tail jackhammering against the floor. It felt like all his insides were then out. The Indoraptor was not going to wait until whatever humans up there came down to poke him with more electric sticks.
He found, eventually, the lights of the great human structure, and skulked about its shadow in uncertainty, struggling to gauge which entrance to take advantage of. Humans milled about, and though his bloodlust was aroused, he couldn't muster the energy to go after them. A scent beside the stairs gave him pause, and stinging memories of the other raptor came to mind, of her clinging to his back and escaping his teeth. He smiled reflexively, mouth aching from the unnatural movement.
Eventually he broke the glass of a disconnected shed window, and forced his way in with difficulty. He could hear human cries beyond the walls but paradoxically found comfort in them. Humans he could understand. They wanted to hurt. They made noise and stared and stung, and that he had survived, many times over. He crammed himself between the wall and some metal vehicle and slept almost immediately.
—
He woke when searing light shined directly into his eyes, and the vehicle beside him erupted into a rumble. He launched himself away from it, crashing out into the world with a scream. For the first time, the Indoraptor saw daylight. It was devastating; he could not comprehend it fully at first. The color and depth given to the world was too much to bear. He couldn't handle the amount of open space before him.
The humans surrounding the vehicle began to cry out; without much thought or effort, the Indoraptor snapped his jaws shut around the shoulder of the nearest one and flung it. By then the others had their stinging guns trained upon him, and he knew death would leap out at any moment. He turned and galloped for the closest shadow, the trees. The ground exploded beneath his feet; one shot whizzed by and sliced through the meat of his tail. The Indoraptor dove into the bushes and loped on, fleeing until the yelling had disappeared.
He collapsed on his side in the near-dark beneath a tilted tree and panted, croaking in pain from the previous day's aches and the hole in the base of his tail. He turned and licked it, probed it with his tongue, trying to convince the pain to dispel, but it refused. He peered out into the daylight. It chased him even here, peeking down upon him from the canopy. He hissed and growled at its offending rays, and stuck to slinking through the bushes.
For a while he wandered, struggling to make sense of every dip and hump in the land. He gnawed restlessly on bark, puzzled by its yielding softness; he sampled leaves, needles, mushrooms, and rocks he chanced upon. He stomped through a bubbling creek and bit at the bubbles accumulating between shards of shale. He attempted, many times, to clamber up the boughs of big trees, only to fall harshly back on his rump.
Only by accident did he discover the hunting he'd been denied. By following the creek upstream he came upon a wide lake, and atop it a rumbling waterfall. In the dancing waters above the waterfall he spotted a great black creature, squatting on powerful legs with its mouth open. It snapped as salmon flew flailing past, and swallowed down wriggling fish within its reach.
In great excitement, the Indoraptor rushed up the falls and leapt upon the bear, teeth and claws digging into its soft belly. It roared and responded in kind at its bizarre assailant, but gurgled and died as his hind legs disemboweled it with messy kicks. Its innards stained the water pink as he ate his fill, and for the first time he could without reproach. Hunger had been his constant companion all his short life, stunting and disfiguring his already unnatural form. He ate until chunks of flesh stayed lodged in his gullet, unable to go further down; his sides clenched and he vomited almost half of what he'd eaten, unknowing of his own limits. And still he ate more, vomited it again, and ate again.
He sprawled on a flat rock, scales still oozing blood from his new wounds, belly bulging, staring at the rushing water and the fish occasionally flying out of it. A memory he previously discarded came back to him, of the bear waiting for the prey to come flying within reach, and the Indoraptor briefly wondered if he could replicate the trick. He rolled onto his belly and stuck his neck out over the water, mouth open much wider than the bear's had been. For a while the fish avoided the shadow he cast over the water and leapt around the rock's other side, and he eventually gave up.
He didn't know it, but it was one of his swiftest forays into empathetic thinking. To replicate the behavior of an entirely different creature on the first encounter would set any animal behaviorist to great excitement. But it was all the Indoraptor knew. He had subsisted primarily on the faces of humans, on their probing eyes and hands, for lack of a better alternative. Social thinking was in his DNA, even more so than it was in his genetic mother, the Indominus Rex, who was mainly solitary predator with a side of pack animal. The Indoraptor was flipped, a group thinker with a sprinkling of lone wolf to make his head bulky and his mind curious and lonesome. But the circumstances of his birth and upbringing had choked off any potential for this to become second nature. He had been denied the company of his own kind. He was an in-between, a stepping stone, a ligament and not a major tissue. Prototypes did not deserve the luxury of a social life.
But his body and mind unconsciously cried out for it, though he had no way of knowing it. And so he had subsisted on mimicking humans, on flexing his arms when they flexed theirs, bowing and tilting his malformed head when they spoke and gestured to each other. Eye contact was the closest they ever came to his enclosure, and only once had someone ever made the mistake of getting closer. With a bash of his tail, the Indoraptor had burst the lightbulb keeping his cage illuminated, and feigned sedation when darted. The Indoraptor later used the maintenance worker's skull as a toy for many months.
His dislike of the brightness and heat finally roused the Indoraptor into hopping off the rock and seeking shade. Only by entering the trees again did he chance upon the scent of one that gave him pause; a growl issued from between his lopsided teeth. The scent was fresh, enough to make his memories bite. He followed where it was strongest, slinking through the shadows; the dappled sunlight played with the yellow and gray of his hide, camouflaging his approach.
He spotted the other raptor high up on a rocky ridge, her tail flicking through the air as she surveyed the horizon. He didn't know it, but her name was Blue. Instantly he rushed up with a hoarse screech, arms stretched forward and claws out. Blue leapt out of his reach with a snarl, landing a ways away with her body low to the ground, tense and ready to jump. They growled at each other, whines building in their throats; the Indoraptor knew then, with sudden resolution, that he wouldn't rest until she stopped struggling between his jaws. The wounds on his back from her sickle-shaped claws still stung.
The Indoraptor leapt for her and she dashed out of his reach again, into the underbrush. He galloped after her, bellowing his hate for the entire forest to hear. Still Blue sprinted always out of his reach, leading him in an exhausting chase up and down the mountainside. Her previous encounters with varied terrain gave her the agility to leap easily from rock to rock, while the Indoraptor slid and clambered clumsily across them on all fours, not yet confident enough to navigate them. But he persisted; the rush of bloodlust was upon him, the thrill of chasing another creature.
The Indoraptor lost Blue swiftly, but he pursued her scent anyway, drool dripping from between his lipless teeth, his sickle-shaped talons tapping the earth energetically with every step. When exhaustion slowed him, he plowed on in a trot, then a four-legged crawl. By the time the California heat wore him down and his endurance gave out, aided in no small part by the huge meal he had just devoured (he vomited twice on Blue's trail, and didn't stop moving throughout) he was in territory he recognized even less than previous, and perishingly overheated. He collapsed in shade, his black flanks rapidly rising and falling. His red eyes swept across unfamiliar plains dotted by copses of leafy trees. Mountains rose and fell like the curves of a massive live thing.
Swooning from exertion, the Indoraptor dozed for hours on end, mouth ajar and panting. Flies gathered on his bloody mouth as he slept. It was twilight when he woke, and the air not much cooler, but he forced himself to rise no matter how his muscles protested. Blue's trail was still present, and he plodded on all fours along it, his third eyelid nictitating across his slit pupils to clear out the dust rising from the grass. He pursued with the same singleminded obsession that had driven him across raining rooftops and into Maisie Williams' bedroom two nights previous; another had been sighted by him, sighted him in turn, and survived. He couldn't handle thinking of how their eyes had met and nothing else had happened. The overstimulation of it was unbearable. He couldn't stand the stares of humans beyond his cage's bars, and how he could never get to them to punish them, to culminate the connection that had been established by dismembering and devouring the offender. He had to finish what was started.
His chase was not that of predator and prey; in a way, the Indoraptor didn't know what the two forces were. There was Him, and all Else; the Raptor and all Others, who brought nothing but stings to his body and scratching noises to his mind. To be near the Indoraptor was to be silenced; he craved and reviled solitude, and had no idea how to live differently. The sheer presence of another overwhelmed him. He had to end it, to save himself. As long as Blue lived, he would feel threatened, unfulfilled.
Again he chanced upon Blue, who had thought she'd lost him long ago. She sprang away with little difficulty from the stream where she drank and he had burst in, and again loped off into the night. So began again the following of the trail.
The Indoraptor stopped only for want of food and rest, and all other times hunted down the path. He kept surprising Blue, only for her to turn tail and run. He had no instinct to conserve his energy and bail on a death struggle that would cost him too much to win, but Blue was older and wiser, and had battled many larger beasts. The Indoraptor's stalking didn't matter as long as she was faster and surer of footing, for her enclosure was now the entire neo-Jurassic world. She would merely avoid him until he lost interest or died.
But she underestimated the obsession of her stalker. The Indoraptor took to observing her instead of springing upon her without warning. He watched her explore from the depths of dark bushes, always downwind to avoid his scent blowing into her nostrils; he was forced to learn to take the wind into account when she kept sensing him and bolting. He watched across sunlit fields as she stalked bounding deer and brought them down, areas he refused to tread because it felt too open, and he resented the sunlight on his scales; he observed her grooming and picking at her pebbly skin, a feat that escaped him and his scraggly teeth; and he waited impatiently for her to make the mistake of dozing, and there he would burst upon her, barely missing her each time she roused and fled.
The Indoraptor hunted too on his own, harvesting the tactics he'd witnessed in Blue. He learned to overturn rocks until snakes and mice wriggled out, to wait until just the right moment for ungulates to come within reach of his deadly leap. He wasn't as successful as she was; he could not run as fast as her, and his overlarge feet and hands continued to trip him up during times he needed to be stealthy. But he sustained himself enough to continue the chase.
He hated it all the while. The forest was too big, too full of endless variables. Water ran through veins in the land, trees and rocks gouged the topography, and rain and thunder fell as often as clear sunshine did. Bugs buzzed in the evening, more replacing each nagging fly the Indoraptor happened to catch. He had to find his own food, and plenty of it. The constant chase brought his meager endurance to its limit. More and more he missed his cell and the silence it brought. When the hunt was over, he decided, he would go back.
Blue became an anxious thing, nervous at every snapping twig, expecting the black beast to come barreling out of the forest. At times she knew he was there; she would swivel her head around and pinpoint him lurking in the brush, from a distance too great for him to cross in just one leap. Then she would stare. Most often, this stare infuriated him, roused him and sent him chasing after her, only to lose her again. But sometimes he let the stare fester. Blue peered at him with one bright eye and he glared back, orange to red, and the Indoraptor felt his hate grow and grow until it filled him with no room for anything else.
A peculiar mood overtook Blue nearly every night, behavior the Indoraptor found odd and reasonless. Blue would climb to the highest point available, neck arched high up to the sky, and utter a raspy cough, over and over, letting the sound roll across the surrounding landscape. She paused after each round of coughing, head tilted and listening, before resuming the call again. She would persist for almost an hour, then reluctantly wander off, her efforts seemingly unsuccessful.
The Indoraptor didn't know what she searched for, nor did he really care. He had no way of knowing that Blue's solitary situation was a status forced upon her. Many times did she look beside her for her sisters when on runs, and each time disappointment and longing filled her up when she found nothing. The Indoraptor had little use for this knowledge.
But he did have use for that call.
On his own, he slunk away and practiced imitating it. He coughed gently, far away from Blue's ears, until he had perfected the short, husky bark. That very night, he deployed his trick. As Blue perched upon a rocky outcrop and began to call, the Indoraptor tucked himself into a secure hiding place and answered.
Blue fell deathly silent, head cocked. The Indoraptor barked again and she sprang to life, leaping from her vantage point and racing to the source of the noise, a reedy call bubbling in her throat.
He could barely wait until she was within reach to burst out of the bushes, jaws closing around her neck and hands gripping around her chest. She squalled, outraged at his trickery, and struggled desperately to escape. The Indoraptor bore down upon her, crushing her with his doubled size and ripping her apart with teeth and claws. Hot blood filled his mouth. Blue's talons kicked out and gouged great troughs of flesh from the Indoraptor's belly and legs, but he paid no attention to it, too hyped up in his bloodlust to care.
Eventually Blue fell limp, not from injury but from exhaustion from struggling. She dangled from his teeth and panted, eyes rolling, head at an ugly angle. The Indoraptor stilled too, now registering the pain from their exchange of blows. The blood and heat tasted good; he could feel her pulse against his tongue, not yet burst beyond repair. Yet he didn't dig for it. He wouldn't release her, but he injured her no further as he contemplated why he didn't feel justified in killing her yet.
He was tired of the forest and its change. Nothing ever stayed the same, and the Indoraptor felt insecure without walls or ceilings. He had been created and trained to infiltrate human settlements, not battle wild animals. This was not the prey he was built for. The more he stayed, the more he wanted to leave. That was it. He just wanted to leave.
Blue, taking advantage of his pause, lashed out with her hind leg. He slammed the meat of her foot into his stomach, forcing a cough out of him and dislodging his grip on her. She hit the ground hard, thrashing, tail flailing, before rolling onto her feet and staggering away. The Indoraptor sank his teeth once into her flank and made to chase her, but his heart wasn't into it, and she disappeared into the brush undeterred.
The Indoraptor sank onto all fours and sniffed at the blood trail she left. The urge to chase and finish her was strong, but his discomfort was stronger. He had to return to the things that he knew.
—
Housekeeping: It's never said in canon, but I just want to be clear in this fic, the Indoraptor and Blue are not genetically linked. I figure they were both made with black-throated monitor lizards, which accounts for their stripes and gives them more genetic similarity. But I want them to have babies, damn it. They're not related.
This is purely indulgent; I love dinosaurs, I love mentally unstable biological weapons, and I love socially awkward creatures learning how to creature. So this was born! I happened to be reading White Fang at the same time, so I tried to emulate the style. It's great for interpretations of animal behavior that aren't too anthropomorphized. Let me know what you think!