Disclaimer: I do not own Jurassic Park or its characters. If I did, they would have gone with Spielberg's original idea for the third movie.
Written for the JP3 community on Livejournal but too late for the smallfandomfest. There were images included in this, but obviously they can't come through.
Broken up into segments because I realised what a giant monster of a story it was if posted as a whole. This story has been updated from its old archived state with the newest copy from my LiveJournal.
Inspiration from "These Foolish Things" by Billie Holiday and the gorgeous "The Badlands Aren't So Bad" fan art, posted in the same LJ community.
Sources used in research: Big thank you to Park Pedia, Google Maps, and IMDB's Jurassic Park i-III online scripts for getting the facts straight.
Notes:
References and quotes drawn mainly from Jurassic Park I and Jurassic Park III.
AU: Sometimes the smallest changes have the biggest consequences
The Italics command sometimes malfunctions. Let me know if you spot any wrongly formatted test. Italics are utilized only for flashbacks.
On camera, he looked smaller, more withdrawn, introspective. The cameraman zoomed up a little closer on his face, and he ducked away his eyes. The cameraman grinned and tracked him anyway. The guy didn't like interviews that much, it seemed. But even the freshest undergrads on the dig could have said that- when they heard he was being lined up for the hadrosaurid cover story, they'd laughed. But everyone wanted him nowadays, the head of the University of Montana's paleontology digs, the associate professor all the students talked about. If the news networks had known he was such a neurotic old maid, maybe they would have called Dr. Cummings or De Silva. They should have interviewed his dig assistant.
Skov was right there with her pressed suit and freshly applied lipstick, shoving her microphone into his face. The boom guy tried to get as close as he could without getting into the shot. Skov had wanted to film in the main tent, and it was noisy as hell.
"So, Dr. Brennan. We've all heard the news about your find up here at Fort Peck. Are you excited?"
Dr. Brennan made some sort of vague noncommittal noise and shrugged.
The cameraman bit the inside of his cheek, tried not to laugh, kept the camera steady. This guy was great. Janet had her work cut out for her.
To her credit, she kept going undeterred. "Would you mind telling us a little about the fossils you identified?"
Dr. Brennan looked a little reluctant. "Ms. Skov-"
"-Janet," she chastised, smiling affectionately at the camera.
"Janet, then. Um, the excavation took some time, but we finally ID'd the bones we found as Anatotitan copei. Well preserved." His voice was so soft. Damn, they should have miked him, even if it meant stealing from Powell's crew.
"Well, most of us wouldn't have the first clue what that is." She laughed.
Dr. Brennan offered her a tired smile. He played professor enough during term. "Anatotitan copei is from the hadrosaurid…" he tried again as he saw her face blank. "It's a duck-billed kind of dinosaur. Really distinctive," -He gestured sharply- "Duck-billed snout, characteristic of a lot of hadrosaurs. Lived, um, at the end of the Cretaceous era. That's the era of the K-T mass extinction."
He had lost her. "Interesting. How about telling us the story of how you found it?"
He shrugged and retracted a little into his plaid shirt. "Miss Wallace could actually tell you more about it. She's the one that found it. Miss Wallace." He waved one of the graduate students over from the workbenches.
She looked too young, too washed out and nervous for all that she was dark from working under the Montana sun. Her eyes were huge. "Found them about hundred feet back that way behind the main site," she said, pointing. "We just got lucky, I guess. We'd been gridding that area, and I just happened to find a piece of vertebrae in the C-2 cell."
"Were you excited?" Janet asked.
Wallace shrugged. "It was a small piece of fossil- could have been anything. When we started uncovering more of the skeleton- yeah, it was exciting. And finding out the bones were 'saurid was unbelievable. All we usually get around here is raptors."
"The department must be thrilled to have a find like this turn up at your dig."
Zooming imperceptibly back to Dr. Brennan. The camera picked up the small line between his eyes.
"It's not my dig," he said darkly. "I just make sure everything runs."
"But with your outstanding record with the department, I'm sure the rumors about having you officially directing the summer digs are true-"
"-They are. I didn't take them up. I don't take over other people's projects." A vague humorless smile. "It's not polite."
It was the longest thing he'd said about himself in the interview, and she flashed him a smile, trying to share his joke. "Other people's projects?" she said. Then, "Oh, I see. But surely he-"
"-Thank you, Ms. Skov." His handshake was a little too firm. "It's been…great talking with you."
Didn't miss a beat. Maybe she just wanted to get the hell out of there. "You too, Dr. Brennan. It's been an honor. This has been Janet Skov at the Fort Peck dig site for News 13."
It was a nice final shot of the three of them. "That's a wrap."
"Thank you, Miss Wallace." Janet nodded to the graduate student. "And thank you for your time, Dr. Brennan." Now that the camera was down, Janet finally allowed herself to look flustered.
He shook her hand automatically. "Sure." He pulled away quickly. "My dig assistant Cheryl will show you out. Hey, Cheryl."
"I've got them, Dr. Brennan," Wallace said.
"Thanks, Miss Wallace. If you would excuse me." And he was gone, retreating to the back benches.
The cameraman smiled to himself again. They'd met a lot of weird dudes while covering stories, but this guy was in a league of his own.
Maria Wallace was used to the song and dance by now. Start with 'Sorry about that' and put something pacifying in the middle, and people were pretty good about it. Professors had the luxury of being eccentric and awkward without anyone calling them out. Even with his track record, Dr. Brennan had really crashed and burned on this one. He had almost topped that grad student Jimar "Mute" Henry, who was tall and dark and good at looming silently in his awful glaring Hawaiian shirts, but turned red and monosyllabic in front of cameras.
She had been at the dig for her last years of undergrad and still going now at grad school, so she was pretty used to him. Of course, back then he hadn't been Dr. Brennan yet- still working on his doctorate. God, she didn't know whether she could have gone in for the long haul- seven more years of school? Yeah right.
But even when not-quite-Dr. Brennan had been busy with his research and exams, he'd still haunted the dig during the summers, working slightly insubordinately under another professor the department had sent over. Word was that Dr. Brennan had always been quite the stock figure at the dig, even in his graduate days. She hadn't been too surprised a couple of semesters ago when he'd turned up as an associate professor to teach one of her classes. He pretty much lived in the paleontology department. She remembered her first impression of him as a young kind of sad guy. His eyes always looked vaguely shell shocked.
Dr. Brennan eyed the students at the workbenches as he walked past. They were doing a decent job for being-
"-Hey hey." He stopped one of the newbies that was brushing the hell out of a piece of bone. "Gently, okay? This isn't like doing the dishes. Here." He picked up a brush. "Like this."
He left the guy trying to mimic his sweeping careful movements and scanned over the other workbenches a little more critically than maybe he should have. Now he understood why Alan always grumbled so much about overenthusiastic volunteers and fresh faced undergraduates who didn't know one end of a chisel from another.
Wallace, though. Bless that girl. He really hadn't wanted to talk to that Janet woman, who would have just squeezed him for more information, given the chance. He felt she was a little disappointed. Guess she had thought he was one of the young ones- he would be more new, more…vibrant. Right. The students his first year teaching at U Montana had thought the same thing.
He was a young professor, and word was that he had been into rock climbing and hangliding before going for his doctorate, so people had showed up in his lecture hall supposing he was one of the 'cool' associate professors on campus, but he had laid those assumptions to rest on the first day. He had walked in looking distracted and tired and old.
But despite their initial doubts, his first class had admitted that he knew his stuff and had a talent for translating it from foreign paleo-speak into something they could actually understand. He passed out his trademark weak smiles once in a while, but there was a fierce quiet enthusiasm to the way he taught. It was magnetic.
The number of students sticking with their paleontology majors increased substantially after that first year. A lot of finger pointing was done at Dr. Brennan, who was the first to deny it, but enrollment in Geology 312: Dinosaur Paleontology still doubled. He tried to put off the students, but his students wouldn't be put off and clamored for his class every semester, much to his resignation.
He would never figure out how exactly the department talked him into heading the Fort Peck digs. God knows that only got him thinking about old ghosts more than he ever wanted, but for some reason he had said yes. Worst damn decision of his life, and he'd been volunteering for it for the past three years. He never let them list him as the head of the dig; he was just filling in temporarily, he said. He'd said the same about the 312 class and look where that had got him.
His worst fears had been confirmed the day the signup sheet for the first dig went up in front of his office as half his 312 students (and paleontology majors from any other year that were able to squeeze their names in) had filled up the sheet by the end of the week. Of course, most of them had probably heard this was Dr. Grant's dig and signed up. (Everyone in the paleontology world had a slight crush on Alan Grant.) But they kept coming back for Dr. Brennan. So he found himself getting into Alan's iconic rickety truck and driving those five and a half hours every summer.
----
He liked it like this, just Alan and him rattling through the long stretches of flat Montana highway with the windows rolled down, rushing into that dry summer heat. He made sure he always had something ridiculous blasting through the radio just to make Alan grumble.
"Alan." Billy turned down Super Sounds of the Seventies. "It was a left back there."
"I don't think so."
"Alan, pretty sure it was a left."
"We keep going straight, go right after three exits."
"No, you're thinking of-" he snapped his fingers. "You're thinking of the dig last summer at Snakewater. It was straight through the junction after the exit, right? That went into Choteau. You're thinking of last summer."
"I think I know where I'm going, Billy."
"No. Hey, look, give me that map in the door, will you?" The map almost encompassed the cabin, hiding the old receipts and empty cans of soda lingering on the dashboard.
"Can't see the road," Alan protested.
"What's to see? It's just straight all the way down. Look, we want to go into Jordan here, right? We have to take 94 down to Miles City and then take a left all the way to Jordan. You're taking us into Terry."
"It's a shortcut."
"It is not a shortcut. Turn us around."
"I know where I'm going."
"Al-an…"
At Billy's continuing insistence, they finally stopped at the post office in Glendive for directions.
"Where are you going?" the guy at the desk demanded. "You already passed Jordan, mister. You should have taken a left down by Miles City. Any further and you'd have been in North Dakota. You got a map?"
"Um, yeah." He was grateful Billy had poked his head out the passenger seat window at the last minute, shouted at him to come back, and pressed the old beaten up map into his hands.
"Right." The clerk got a highlighter out. Alan tried not to grab it out of his hand. He hated when people drew on his maps. "You have to take 200 up to Circle city here, and then keep going into Jordan."
Just two neat highlighted lines. They'd been driving for hours all for two straight lines.
"Thanks. Now uh, how long to Fort Peck?"
"Fort Peck? Hey, that's completely different. If you want Fort Peck, you've got to stop here." A small circle. An arrow. "And take 24 all the way up and then turn here. That's uh…North Big Horn Street."
"Alright. Thanks again."
"Sure."
The passenger seat was empty when he got back. Damn, they didn't have time for this.
"Hey, Alan."
He turned around. "Billy, damn it, I told you to stay in the truck. Last thing we need is to get towed."
"I was right there." He had the grace to sound affronted and gestured with an elbow. "There's a milkshake place next to the post office." He offered Alan one of the tall Styrofoam cups. "You like strawberry banana, right?" He grinned. "So where are we going?"
Billy was never one for 'I told you so's.'