Author Note: One thing that piqued my interest in the movie was Alan's comment about the velociraptors' communication and social skills. This fic attempts to explore that a little further than the movie did.
This is very much A/U, as I've changed the end of the movie a tad. Billy still has his encounter with the pteranodons, but he comes away with much lesser injuries. The tete-a-tete with the raptors and the eggs goes a little differently as well.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. Please do not use any of these original characters without the author's express permission.
"I've always felt the bones talked to me as I pulled them out of the ground. The trick, of course, is learning to decipher their language."
Dr. Alan Grant
Ancient Bones, Ancient Tales
Dr. Alan Grant's right hand curled into a fist as his abused nervous system struggled to recover. With his ears ringing and his head pounding, it wasn't surprising that the sense of smell was the first to return upon regaining consciousness. He breathed in shallowly, hoping it would give him a clue as to where the hell he was -- given the fact that the rest of his body seemed to be temporarily on strike.
Dampness, decay, the pungent biological overload of too many living organisms in too small an area. This meant something, something important, but it was so damned difficult to think when his whole body felt like it had been run over by a freight train.
He inhaled again. Definitely soil, but why the hell was he lying face-first on the ground? He thought he'd given up the drunken binges while he was still a grad student, oh, what felt like eons ago. Before getting his doctorate.
Long before Billy.
He smiled lopsidedly against the ground. Everything lately seemed to come down to either Before Billy or After Billy. Before something else, too, if he could just remember what the hell that was.
As more of his senses grudgingly revived, his fingers also began to register their surroundings. Soil, yes. Damp soil, definitely -- the deep down saturation of a soil that never dries out. He shifted his upper torso slightly and grimaced as his shirt stuck to his body in the presence of an all-pervading humidity.
He froze as everything clicked. Forest. Humidity. Rainforest.
He knew somehow that this was a bad thing. And that lying on the ground in a rainforest was a very bad idea. . . .
Damn! Memory flooding back with a vengeance, he attempted to lever his body up from the ground, but for some reason, his left arm refused to hold him up. Falling back to rest on his stomach, he slowly opened his eyes. His first thought was that Billy was going to be furious when he saw the blood stains on the shirt he'd just given him for his birthday.
His next thought was how absolutely malevolent the upraised sickle claw of a velociraptor looked while still attached to its owner . . . up close and personal.
"BILLY!"
Billy Brennan winced at Mrs. Kirby's booming shout. The sound reverberated down the narrow valley in diminishing echoes like the fading peals of a church bell.
Dinner bell, more likely. Some people never learn. However, Billy smiled with relief when he saw the figures running toward him. Actually, it was more like heard them approaching, as they were forced to cut back and forth amidst the lavish flora to reach him. With the obscuring vegetation and pervasive mist, it was difficult to count the actual number of people approaching, but Billy tried anyway with equal parts hope and desperation.
He was getting tired of breathlessly waiting to identify running figures to see if one of them might be the missing Alan. It had become a habit on this blasted island, and he didn't like it, not one bit.
One, two, three . . . dear God. . . .
Billy could only stand and stare as the Kirby family surrounded him, all three of them talking at once in their relief at locating one of their 'guides.' In a state of mute shock, Billy didn't register their words, their hands in his, or even the pain from his cuts and scrapes aggravated by overly enthusiastic hugs.
The Kirbys eventually pulled back at Billy's silence, their babble dying down to confused glances as Billy sank heavily to the ground.
"Billy, are you all right?" Amanda Kirby crouched down to his level, looking Billy over for injuries, wincing at the blood stains that dappled his tattered, water-logged shirt. "How badly did those pterano-things hurt you?"
Billy merely stared off into the forest, hands clutching his knees, heartbroken.
Eric tugged on his mother's sleeve. He had evidently made the connection first, probably because he'd watched his future stepfather killed right before his eyes, not all that long ago. "Dr. Grant," he said. "He thinks Dr. Grant. . . ." Eric stopped when Billy's gaze settled on him.
Shifting his attention to Mr. and Mrs. Kirby, Billy asked with his eyes what he couldn't seem to manage with words.
Paul and Amanda Kirby exchanged anguished glances, and Billy dropped his head between his knees.
Oh, God. Alan.
Alan Grant froze. It wasn't like he could do much of anything else at the moment, but as his scattered wits coalesced, he realized he spent half his time on these God-forsaken islands desperately running . . . and the other half desperately frozen in place. He was too old for the pell-mell running, and he had a feeling the 'freeze and blend into your surroundings' trick only worked for baby bunnies.
The six-inch claw filling his vision slowly receded as its owner stepped back a couple of paces. It was replaced with the tapered snout and serrated teeth of a very large adult Velociraptor mongoliensis.
Funny how the mind fell back into familiar patterns in times of stress. Once a paleontologist, always a paleontologist. In this state of quiet hysteria, he actually thought it a shame you couldn't tell the age of the beast from the wear on its teeth like you could with a horse . . . as if it mattered how many sets of the ever-replacing teeth the raptor had gone through before it ate him. No, he knew it didn't make any sense, but he was absolutely certain he'd used up his share of luck on this trip.
And he was just plain scared.
Very, very scared.
The raptor's nose came closer and sniffed, much like a dog would, moving its large head over Alan's face and injured left arm. The thin, pink membranes in its nostrils quivered at the scent of blood that still extruded from the bite marks in his upper forearm.
Not that it mattered all that much, but Alan recognized this particular raptor -- the distinctive size and coloration of the big male made it easy to recognize the pack's leader.
Alan closed his eyes again, having absolutely no desire to watch the raptor tear his arm off at the shoulder. Even on those rare occasions when he was merely having his blood drawn, Alan had always averted his eyes -- he was quite the baby that way. Bad enough having to feel the pain, he simply wasn't up to watching all the gruesome details.
As he waited behind the feeble safety of his tightly sealed lids, he reflected that once again Billy had been right. He'd always chided Alan on the way he let events run away with him, doing or speaking without thinking it through first. Billy had affectionately called it "Alanation" -- wherein Alan did something brash and impetuous, which seemed to be a perfectly good idea to him at the time, only to find that he'd thoroughly pissed off somebody important in the process.
Doing this to college deans and grant committees had cost Alan the occasional reprimand or research grant -- doing it to an entire pack of velociraptors was turning out to be a completely different ball of wax.
Well, he'd certainly thought that blowing into the resonating chamber was a good idea at the time. It had seemed to forestall the velociraptor pack from doing something messily permanent to him and the Kirbys. But when he had mimicked the call for help, he hadn't realized he would pique the curiosity of a passing allosaurus as to why the tasty, possibly injured velociraptor needed help in the first place.
He grimaced. Oh yes, he remembered everything now. . . .
Alan was staring apprehensively into the female raptor's eyes from a distance of inches when the 25-foot-long allosaurus careened into the small clearing where he and the Kirbys knelt, breaking the tableau as the giant carnivore bellowed in delight at the feast laid out before it.
A big male raptor, who had merely been watching their confrontation with the female raptor until then, immediately sprang into motion. He was obviously the pack's leader, as he galvanized the other raptors into action against the allosaurus, snarling orders and seeming to be everywhere at once. He sent some of the pack scattering while the others leapt with an almost choreographed array of feints and mock charges against the much larger carnivore.
The Kirbys, having finally learned to handle themselves in a predator/prey environment, prudently fled in different directions into the forest.
For some undoubtedly irrational reason, Alan didn't follow them. He retreated to the edge of the clearing but went no further. Alan watched, fascinated, as the alpha male raptor confidently called out orders to the members of his hunting pack, directing the attack on the miniature tyrannosaur.
Oh, Alan realized he was just as much prey to the allosaurus as any of the velociraptors, and for that matter, he was still prey to the velociraptors themselves, but for some reason this confrontation intrigued him enough to override his usually strong sense of self-preservation. His theories on velociraptor intelligence had led him to surmise they had advanced pack-hunting techniques, and it was gratifying indeed to see that, once again, he was correct . . . and his conservative colleagues were dead wrong.
Of course, being 'dead wrong' in this environment had potentially deadly consequences.
On the island of Isla Nublar so many years ago, Alan had briefly observed the confrontation between tyrannosaur and raptors, but the mismatched one-on-one fight that had saved their lives back then was nothing compared to the timing and coordination of these Isla Sorna raptors.
Here, the raptors seemed to be the dominant presence, using their intelligence and social skills for a distinct advantage over the random violence of the less intelligent predators.
As if in demonstration of Alan's thoughts, the alpha male raptor glanced at the ground, pivoted on one hind leg and called out another sequence of orders. Almost as one, the pack of raptors retreated slightly, moved around the flanks of the allosaurus and forward -- and Alan realized with utter astonishment that the raptors were actually herding the big predator away from the center of the clearing . . . and the vulnerable eggs.
Poised, confident and extraordinarily fast, the raptor leader seemed to enjoy the challenge presented by the dangerous allosaurus. Maybe it was simply Alan's lifelong infatuation with ancient history, but the big male's actions reminded him somehow of a Greek or Roman general, directing the battle while still actively participating in the fighting . . . and making it look planned to the last minute detail.
Under the cover of the pack's diversion, a large female carried away one of the eggs still lying forlornly in the middle of the clearing. Catching the motion of the fleeing female, the allosaurus roared its displeasure and plowed through the pack of flanking raptors back toward the center of the clearing . . . and the one remaining egg.
As the knot of fighting dinosaurs came dangerously close to the egg, Alan's vision narrowed even further, his eyes drawn to its desperate plight. He watched the egg as it vibrated, bounced and rolled with the force of pounding claws and leaping raptors. He watched as time and time again it narrowly escaped being crushed by the struggle being fought literally on top of it.
The female raptor who had confronted them earlier tried repeatedly to retrieve the egg, but she was hindered by the battle around her and was unable to get close enough to grab it. She grew increasingly frantic and made one final plunge for the egg . . . but didn't make it. The enraged, harried allosaurus finally zeroed in on a target, and very little could survive the focused attention of two tons of determined dinosaur. With the strength borne from its thickly muscled thighs, the allosaurus leapt and sent the female raptor flying with a belly-opening gash from a toe claw. She landed with a sickening thud directly in front of where Alan lay hidden in the undergrowth.
The alpha male raptor screamed in fury and redoubled his efforts against the allosaurus.
The female raptor struggled to rise -- instinct and possibly something else forcing another attempt to save what had to be her own offspring. Still, it was a hopeless endeavor, as her life blood and innards poured out from the tremendous gash in her abdomen. The female raptor fell to the ground and then, amazingly, started to drag herself toward the egg.
As she strained to pull herself along with her inadequate forelimbs, she keened softly, a sound so resonant with grief and despair that Alan decided he never wanted to hear any creature make that sound again.
The female collapsed and died still yards from reaching her goal.
To his own dying day, which was beginning to look very much like today, Alan decided he would never know the reason for what he did next. Maybe it was his ingrained training as a paleontologist to preserve precious dinosaur specimens. Maybe it was the exaggerated care he had been taking to insure nothing happened to the eggs he was carrying in Billy's knapsack. Maybe it was simply watching the dying struggle of the raptor mother.
It was more likely another case of 'Alanation,' where sheer cussedness overpowered common sense.
But Alan finally ran. . . .
Toward the egg.
Ducking the lashing tail of the allosaurus, he dodged around two velociraptors as he dove for the egg. He was knocked off his feet by an oncoming raptor, who simply didn't see him as much of an obstacle, and then literally crawled the remaining three feet to the egg. He grabbed the egg and rolled frantically, just missing being flattened by one of the allosaurus' hindfeet as it impacted directly where the egg had lain. Scrambling madly, Alan barely avoided being squashed again as the allosaurus fell heavily to the ground under a coordinated attack by the encircling raptors.
The big dinosaur's frustrated roar rattled the fronds of the nearby palms as it struggled to rise.
Not pausing to catch his breath or gauge his direction, Alan ran. His last clear thought was that he and Billy were now even -- the young man was going to kill him when he found out what he'd done.