Author's note: Technically, it's almost 2017 in Oz already so I'll just leave this here, okay?
It was a mistake.
They shouldn't have come here.
Claire knew it the moment they left the quiet comfort of a side street and stepped onto the promenade that ran along the bay, pulled instantly into a crowd so thick and loud it looked like the 4th of July parade, not New Year's Eve.
She swallowed uneasily, her eyes darting around in alarm. Too many colours, too many voices blending into a cacophony that her mind refused to process. Her fingers curled into tight fists until Claire could feel her nails dig into the soft flesh of her palms, and it was the only thing that stopped her from turning around and bolting where they came from so she could catch her breath and put an end to the sensory assault that felt so overwhelming she wanted to curl in on herself and disappear.
Even now, a year after the incident on Isla Nublar, she was not doing well with large congregations of people, her body going into a full combat mode and her senses growing so sharp it almost hurt. Too much of everything all at once, and she couldn't help but look for a safe exit. Supermarkets were bad enough – she would start with a cursory check and move through the aisles in a strategical order, aware of how insane it was, but unable to control it. This? This was a nightmare. Last week, she'd spent an hour in the parking lot outside Whole Foods when someone's car backfired and her body forgot how to breathe. What was she going to do it someone set off a firecracker here? Stop, drop and roll?
"Aunt Claire, look! There!" Gray was tugging at her hand, pulling her out of her personal hell that her brain had turned into after the island, his voice breaking the ice that rendered her paralyzed for a few moments.
Claire followed his gaze, finally noticing what caught his attention.
One of the hotels was doing a full-blown New Year's Eve fair or something of that sort, complete with the champagne fountain and an honest-to-god Ferris Wheel and a few other rides. Even from their spot a good three hundred feet away from it, she could hear the music and smell cotton candy, her stomach churning uncomfortably. Yet, she followed the boy obediently, knowing that any resistance was futile.
Of course, they would want to come watch the fireworks. She should have known that from the start.
"You okay?" Karen asked quietly, making Claire wonder just how shaken she looked, thrown smack into the middle of her worst nightmare.
She nodded automatically, offered her sister a crooked smile and didn't say a word for fear of starting to scream. Had it been Claire's choice, she'd be saying goodbye to this year curled up on her couch with a glass of wine, trying to block out the explosions in the sky outside her window. But when Karen invited herself and the boys over to California for the holidays, this plan went out the window. She had enough sense to at least try to pretend it was for their sake and not because Claire went off the grid again, and she was getting worried.
Naturally, keeping the kids locked up in the house for nearly two weeks was not an option. They did the parks, and the beach, and the malls, and so much more, until Claire learned not to see the unasked questions in her sister's eyes like they were not there at all. They kept doing that dance when they both pretended that everything was fine and peachy, and frankly, Claire didn't want to have it any other way. She had nothing to tell them, nothing that would make them feel better, at least. She was coping as best she could, end of story. Yes, her life was a mess, but she had a job, and as far as social norms were concerned, she was doing great. Everything else… well, she hoped it would get better eventually. One day, she might wake up and feel whole again.
Zach and Gray were trudging ahead of them, easily maneuvering their way through a mass of people, leaving her and Karen behind.
"Wait for us at the gate!" Karen called after them, her voice muffled by a few thousand others around them. Still, Zach gave her a wave of acknowledgement, and she breathed a sigh of relief, both she and Claire slowing down. Claire bit her lip and tucked her hands into the pockets of her light jacket, expecting yet another Maybe you should see someone speech. As in, therapy. As if, You're a lost cause. Instead, her sister asked, "Is it always this warm in December?"
Claire blinked, surprised by the question.
It wasn't warm, not by Californian standards, and the breeze coming from the ocean made her shiver. But, of course, compared to Wisconsin, it probably felt like tropical climate to them. Hell, the boys didn't even need jackets, both of them perfectly comfortable in their hoodies. It had been so long since she had to deal with the real winter, Claire almost forgot what it was like.
"Normally, yes," she responded, keeping her eyes straight ahead.
She really did appreciate having Karen around, even just for a while; having the voices of Zach and Gray fill the rooms and bounce off the walls and make her house feel alive. They'd grown so much in the months since she last saw them, Zach towering over her and Karen, and Gray almost as tall as them as well. She just wished they'd stop tiptoeing around her like she was going to break and fall apart if they so much as sneezed. At times, it felt like she had to tote not only her own issues around, but the weight of their worries as well, and that was the one thing she didn't think she was strong enough for, all the stiches keeping her together barely holding on.
Closer to the main source of entertainment, the sidewalks were even more packed, the voices louder, the laughter more excited. Claire's senses tunneled as she tried to push the word 'danger' out of her mind.
The boys were waiting for them near the gate, as instructed. And with them was—
Claire's heart stopped.
The last time she saw Owen Grady was eight months ago and the things between them ended—well, they ended. And on a rather ugly note, too.
After the incident, they stayed together for a while, holding on to one another to save whatever shreds of sanity they had left. The investigation and the trial were brutal, the press was going after them like a pack of rabid dogs, and in the midst of it all were tears and sleepless nights, the nightmares that threatened to suck them into the void and never let them go, and the need not to be alone. Sometimes, she couldn't help but feel like the aftermath of the tragedy ripped her into pieces so small she would never be able to put them back together, and even if she did, they would never fit right.
And when it got better, when the fog started to lift and the hellhounds backed off, looking for a new victim to sink their bloodied teeth into, Claire did what she knew how to do best. She put her armour back on and pushed him away, scared of getting too attached and not trusting herself to be objective as far as Owen Grady was concerned. And after a while, Owen got tired of banging on that door and trying to break through to her. He called her selfish, she called him heartless; he told her she couldn't run away from herself, she told him to get out.
He did.
He stayed with InGen for a while, and even went back to the island for the post-incident clean-up to make sure his raptor was safe; returned briefly to the NAVY afterwards, then quit and came back to California because his lease still wasn't over.
Claire knew all this from the snippets of information her nephews shared in passing. She was never brave enough to ask anything directly. Not that she had any right to, either. She'd spent the first few months after their breakup feeling catatonic and listening to the small voice in her head telling her that she knew he was going to leave anyway, unable to shut it down. Your fault, your fault, your fault… And then she started over.
All things considered, she did not expect to see him tonight.
"Owen!" Karen's fake-cheerful voice broke through the haze in her head, uncharacteristically loud and startling, and then the rest of the world burst right back in as well. The music, the laughter, the revving of an engine somewhere in the alley, muffed announcements in the speakerphones hanging from the trees.
For a moment there, a black hole inside Claire that he'd left behind opened up again, and she was scared it would turn her inside out, leaving her unable to claw her way out of it again.
"What a… nice surprise!" Karen added when no one else said anything for a few seconds, and the desire to fill the pause grew unbearable.
"Yeah, well…." He ran his hand over his hair, glanced at the boys beaming next to him, cleared his throat, then offered Karen a small smile that looked somewhat tight at the edges. "This is where the fun is." His gaze shifted. "Claire."
The sound of her name coming from his mouth knocked her world right off its axis.
"Can we go in now?" Gray cut in, bouncing on the balls of his feet with anticipation.
Karen's eyes darted toward Claire, and she nodded, and the next thing they knew, Zach and Gray dragged Owen away until the three of them disappeared from the view.
Claire sucked in a sharp breath when her lungs started to burn, her ears still ringing with the sound of his voice and her skin prickling like she was shocked by an exposed wire. In her chest, her heart continued to fold in on itself, and she wondered how long it would take for it to disappear altogether.
"Claire?"
She turned slowly to find an ocean of worry in her sister's eyes, its waves raging and trying to drag Claire all the way down to the bottom.
"A little heads-up would've been nice," she muttered in a strained voice.
"I didn't know, I swear," Karen said quickly, fiddling nervously with her necklace. "I would never… Look, I don't know what happened between you-"
"Nothing happened," Claire cut her off.
"—but it was probably Gray who invited him to come along."
"I didn't know they were still in touch."
Karen shrugged, relaxing a bit now that it started to look like the storm had passed and her sister was not going to turn into a puddle of goo. "He told them they could call anytime if they needed anything." A pause. "It's not like I can do much about it."
"You're their mother," Claire breathed out not without accusation.
"It's not what I meant." She sighed. "He's helping them."
"That's what the therapy is for." It was a mean and petty thing to say, and the words left a foul aftertaste in her mouth, but Claire was so damn tired of being a collateral damage in someone else's lives.
They started slowly toward the rides and a row of booths lining the sidewalk. "The therapy wasn't working. I can drag them into the room, but I can't make them talk. And they actually talk to Owen. Zach's grades improved, Gray started to sleep better. You know how bad it was in the beginning."
She did. The nightmares, the memories fueled by the reports on the news showing the footage none of them had seen before – it took a toll on her as well. What it did to two traumatized kids, she couldn't even begin to imagine, and what kind of a monster she was not to want what was best for them?
Claire pursed her lips together, trying to stay focused on not losing it.
"Why didn't you tell me?" She asked after a few minutes, her eyes snatching Owen's tall frame from the crowd. He was paying for three packets of cotton candy and funny New Year's glasses, Gray smiling from ear to ear and Zach smirking at whatever Owen was saying, both of them enthralled by the prospect of having him there.
He didn't change much, she noted absently. Lost some weight maybe, but bulked up a bit in the shoulders. His hair needed a cut, curling at the ends near his neck, and a five o'clock scruff was spilling down his cheeks – she still remember the feel of it against her palms, and some other parts of her body, both scratchy and soft at once. The memory made her cheeks grow hot, but Claire hoped she could chalk it off to the wind if needed be.
She used to hope he'd come back. And then she used to hope she'd run into him somewhere on the street. And then the night would come, tearing down the veil of pretenses, and she would wish she'd never met him at all.
"Because it has nothing to do with you, Claire. If he wasn't here tonight – and again, I didn't know he would be – what difference would it make?"
All the difference in the world, Claire thought. Because despite their breakup and the words they tossed at one another, all the hurtful feelings that were left piled up between them, he still cared. And that was something she didn't know how to live with.
xoox
The evening stretched before them, the lights getting brighter, the laughter louder, the people around them turning into smudges of every colour in existence. Claire's senses sharpened, as they tended to do in the dark, and she couldn't help but look over her shoulder now and then, half-expecting to see a set of teeth aiming for her.
"You don't have to do it," Karen told Owen the next time the merry trio reappeared before them, loaded with hot dogs and fries, referring to the fact that he was basically babysitting her offspring.
"I know, but we're having fun," Owen promised her, ruffling Gray's hair and pointedly pretending that Claire wasn't even there while she also tried to ignore him, scared of what she'd see in his eyes if she looked too closely. Maybe the same fear and longing and confusion that seemed to be fueling her own existence.
She was getting good at that, at recognizing the equally damaged. Except her own broken pieces she could handle. Owen's? She wasn't so sure.
How they ended up in line for the Ferris Wheel, she had no idea. One moment they were seemingly just standing around, and Gray was slurping his coke, and Zach was doing that thing when he would casually push his hair back from his forehead if a cute girl was around, while Karen was trying to fill in the pauses before all five of them were crushed by the space between the words that loomed around them, and then suddenly there was a break in the crowd and a bored-looking ride attendant was ushering them in twos toward the slowly moving Ferris Wheel, nearly as tall as those that they had at Disneyland.
Zach pushed past his brother and sprinted ahead, and after a short hesitation, Gray yipped and followed him, his sandy hair tousled by the breeze.
Claire tried to step aside, but the crowd carried her forward, a sea of people propelling her straight ahead, and then she was sitting on a hard plastic bench a row behind her nephews, making big eyes at Karen who managed to safely stay on the other side of the fence.
"Oh no, I'm sitting this one out," Karen called out, raising her hands and shaking her head.
"Sir?" The ride attendant turned to Owen, disinterested but determined to follow the safety protocol. "In or out."
"Owen, come on!" Gray called and both boys waved at him to hurry up.
Claire thought he would bolt. If she were him, she'd probably make a beeline for the bay and leap into the water. There was a flicker pf panic on his face, or maybe Claire simply wanted to see it, and the Ferris Wheel was moving ever so slowly, lifting the weight off her chest with every second – soon, it would be too late for him to join in and he would have to wait for the next round.
She let out a breath of relief-
And then the bench beneath her shuddered when Owen plopped down next to her, his closeness effectively knocking all wind out of her body, and it was too late. The safety bar snapped shut, trapping them in this place, in the moment.
She was going to kill Karen for allowing this to happen.
The crowd below them started to grow smaller with every passing moment, and the wind, unobstructed by the structures and people began to get stronger, tasting of salt and ferociously throwing Claire's hair in her eyes. She shivered and sank deeper into the bench, taking note of the muffled sound of the music she could hardly hear anymore. For a moment, the distance between her and the rest of the world felt almost liberating, and the darkens felt safe for once. And if she tried hard enough, she could almost imagine that she couldn't feel the warmth of Owen's body next to her, couldn't smell his aftershave – the very same scent that stayed on her pillowcases for months after he had left, couldn't see him glance at her out of the corner of his eye at the exact same moments she happened to glance at him.
They stayed silent, and she chose to focus on her nephews in the seat in from on them – their heads turning left and right, fingers pointing at something or another in the distance. From this far up, they could see the whole city gleaming and flickering below them like a sea of fairy light. Their presence felt comforting, their excitement reassuring, and she had to admit that the view was damn nice from up here. It had been a while since she felt that the world was lying at her feet.
And then the Ferris Wheel creaked and stopped moving with an abrupt jerk. Someone gasped, someone else yelped, a child started to cry.
"Aunt Claire?" Gray was looking over his shoulder at her, his eyes wide with panic.
"What happened?" Zach echoed, frowning.
"It's alright," she said quickly and looked down at the control booth where the ride attendant was glancing up now and then while saying something into his headpiece, his face puckered with confusion. "Everything is fine. It's just a minor glitch, we'll be moving again soon."
"It's okay, guys. Stay put," Owen added, and she scowled inwardly at how much calmer and not as pathetically fake he sounded. Almost relaxed.
He was good like that. Very good, in fact. He managed to chase the demons haunting her dreams away with a soothing touch of his hands and a whisper that would cloud her mind and keep it hidden from the monsters. Claire hadn't slept for a month after their breakup, torn apart by the hell that her mind had turned into.
No wonder it worked this time, too. Both boys turned away and slunk in their seat, their sneaker-clad feet dangling almost lazily as they continued to talk quietly.
"Relax, Claire. I'm not here to invade your personal space," Owen scoffed when she shifted, moving an inch or two further away from him. "They asked me to come, is all."
"I didn't say you were," she retorted icily, her hopes for not having to exchange another word with him getting washed down the drain.
He offered her a grimace of a cynical smile. "It's what you're thinking. Always have been."
Claire turned away and stared at the vast black canvas of the ocean below them. "How would you know? You left."
"Because you told me to."
"You needed an excuse, I gave you one. I don't see what you're complaining about now."
"I didn't need an excuse for anything," he muttered, shaking his head and looking straight ahead. "I loved you and you told me to get lost. You chose to lock yourself in a glass coffin and watch the life go by. How's it working out for you, by the way?"
She inhaled sharply, feeling his words land on her like blows, leaving her heart bruised and bleeding.
"You have no right to judge my life, Owen!"
He snapped his head around, his gaze hard and unapologetic, and Claire was grateful for the darkness, for the dim lights that saved her from the worst of it. "What you have is not a life! It's hiding behind those castle walls that you've built because you're scared of feeling anything."
"This is not the right time," she said stiffly.
"It's never the right time. It's never the right place, either. It's never the right anything, Claire. Never was and never will be because you can't compartmentalize people and relationships. You can't put labels on them and shove them into perfectly shaped boxes and store them away. Life is messy, and sometimes things happen. You deal with them and move on. You don't bury yourself in your house because you're too scared of being alive. That's what only cowards do."
He might have as well slapped her.
"You want to talk about being a coward?" She hissed. "Fine! How about your obsession with the goddamn island? If I never was able to move on, then neither were you."
Owen's jaw clenched. "That's not the same thing. I have not pushed everyone who cared about me away just because dealing with them was inconvenient."
Her hand clutched the metal bar in front of her so tight her knuckles turned white. "I did no such thing. You walked away because you wanted to. Don't you dare put it on me."
"I walked away because I couldn't fight your battles for you. You didn't want me there. You wanted to be right in your assumption that everyone leaves. Happy now?"
"You're no better than me, and you know it."
"At least I'm trying."
Her eyes narrowed and she snickered. "Is that what you're doing? Is that why you're still here and not across the world somewhere, saving another dinosaur?"
"I am still here because I only ever felt sane when I was with you."
And there it was, the last nail in her coffin.
Claire's blood rushed out of her head and into her fingertips, making them tingle like someone suddenly punctured them with a million tiny needles, her skin hot and her breath nowhere to be found.
He was not wrong, not at all. If saving her from the madness of the world was what Owen did best, then running away from actually living her life was Claire's forte. She shut herself off on the island for as long as she could, and when that stopping being an option, she chose to pretend that she didn't need anyone. Because she was Claire Dearing. Because she didn't know how to need people.
Needing people was messy. Needing people was terrifying. Needing people was throwing herself into the abyss and trusting them to catch her. No safety nets, no control, just the magic of free falling.
"Claire?" Owen's voice broke through to her across the fog.
She blinked.
His face was right in front of hers, his hands on her cheeks, and his eyes so pained his gaze was slicing into her like a knife. How long had she been out? Not long. They were still stuck on the top of the Ferris Wheel, with the world hovering far below. His expression softened when she managed to focus on him and take in a shaky breath.
"Good girl," he murmured. "Breathe, okay?"
"I missed you," she mouthed soundlessly when his thumb ran over her cheek because there was nothing else left to say.
Owen's relieved smile slipped and floated away, and his fingers twitched slightly on her face. She counted to three in her mind. Then to five. Then to ten.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth.
His lips crashed against hers when clock struck midnight and the sky around them exploded.
xoox
The pounding on the door awoke Owen at 5 in the morning. Loud and demanding, it snatched him out of his restless slumber that kept him teetering on the verge between sleep and wakefulness and dragged him into the hall where he expected to see the world ending, no less.
He checked the time and grimaced, ran his hand through his hair while stifling a yawn and finally pulled the door open.
"You can't do that, Owen." The words tumbled out of Claire's mouth and scattered around his hallway, resonating against the walls and every fiber of his body. "You can't tell me that you loved me and then walk away like nothing happened."
It took them 15 minutes to fix whenever was wrong with the Ferris Wheel and get everyone back down. The fireworks were still lighting up the sky in red and green and blue and every colour in-between when the boys and then Claire and Owen finally stepped on the solid ground again. And before Claire knew it, he was mumbling some lame excuses and making a hasty escape, her lips still burning and her mind reeling, crowded with the question she didn't know how to ask.
And she needed to know.
Hence coaxing Owen's address out of Gray and driving here at the crack of dawn because if she didn't, she would go crazy, her body humming with enough adrenaline to send her all the way to the moon.
"Love," he corrected her.
She blinked. "What?"
"Present tense. Still do." For a long moment, they simply looked at one another. "What do you want, Claire?"
"I don't know how to do it," she whispered, her voice cracking and breaking.
"Do what?"
"Not be afraid."
She looked small and lost and fragile, and a jolt of protectiveness flared up inside Owen, all the way from the heart to the tips of his toes. He swallowed, his head spinning.
"Claire…"
"Why didn't you tell me sooner? That you loved me?"
He shuffled from foot to foot and shrugged sheepishly, very aware of his old shirt and stretched sweatpants, and the bedhead that didn't go well with this moment. "I thought you knew."
She let out a shaky laugh. "You're the one who can read minds, not me." Owen moved aside and opened the door wider to allow her to step in. "I'm not good at this, Owen. At everything you want me to be." Her gaze skittered around the semi-dark apartment, and for a moment, he thought she was going to sprint away.
"I don't want you to be anything." He closed the door, an odd kind of calmness settling over him. "I want you to be you, and I want you to know that it's enough."
Claire tilted her head to her shoulder, studying him closely. "What if doesn't work again?"
"Then we'll keep trying until it does," he said simply.
She crossed the distance between them and pressed her mouth to his, her palm on his jaw. He could still smell the ocean on her skin, her clothes, her hair. They stumbled into the hallway, tripping over the shoes strewn over the floor and nearly falling. Owen steadied them with one hand on the small of her back and another one on the wall as Claire clutched his shirt, bunching it in her fingers.
"Sorry," Owen muttered against her lips, kicking his boots out of the way.
"Don't stop," she murmured between the kisses. "Please don't stop…"
xoox
"So, are you going to tell me what happened last night?" Karen asked, wrapping her jacket tighter around her body to shield it from the wind coming from the surf, her eyes narrowed slightly against the sun and the wisps of hair that escaped her ponytail fluttering against her cheeks.
"No," Claire smiled without looking at her sister.
This had been going on for hours now, ever since she showed up at home at 11 in the morning just as her family was finishing their breakfast and started artfully dodging their questions and avoiding the looks they were giving her and the hushed whispers behind her back. The smile gave her away, Claire figured that much. They didn't need to know the rest. Not yet.
Their eyes grew even wider, crowded with a myriad of questions, when Owen showed up at her place an hour later to take them all to the beach, beaming so bright it almost hurt to look directly at him.
"Is that a hickey?" Karen asked, making sure her sons were out of the earshot, an eyebrow arched curiously as she eyed a mark on Owen's neck.
He grinned and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looking at Claire like she was the center of his entire universe.
And now he was flying kites with the boys on the empty stretch of sand, their shouts swallowed by the thunderous crashing of the waves against the beach and hungry cries of seagulls circling over the water. The wind was tugging at the ropes, trying to snatch them out of their hands, their unzipped hoodies flapping around like wings, and their faces scrunched with a happy concentration.
"That's just mean," Karen sighed, shaking her head. "He's good for you," she added after a few moments when Claire didn't respond.
"He is," Claire agreed softly, and then turned to her sister. "I have a feeling it will be a good year. For all of us."
Happy New Year, guys! Thanks for the fun ride and I'll see ya on the flip side!