They're shuffling the packed boxes from the penthouse out to the hallway when corporate finds her. Richard Wisner, COO of Masrani Global, has arranged for a live televised announcement, they tell her, and they need her to come prepare as she'll be the one on camera. It's to air just in time to make Jurassic World the headline news of the evening on the East Coast (great, because nearly two weeks of being headline news wasn't enough, she sarcastically thinks) and they've set up a small hair and makeup room in one of the vacant hotel rooms downstairs. She sighs, knowing she doesn't have much of a choice in the matter, and reaches for a box, saying she just needs to get something more professional to wear.

"Oh no," her colleague tells her. "Richard wants you to wear that."

"A tank top and hiking boots? On national television?" she asks, almost horrified, pursing her lips and closing her eyes to take a calming breath when Owen audibly snorts at the prospect.

Despite the casual wardrobe, two people are in the process of making her head "camera ready," curling her hair in an attempt to replicate the way it had looked in some of the leaked footage, when the colleague who had retrieved her from the penthouse hands her the speech Masrani wants her to make, the speech that confirms what she already knew, though that doesn't stop her stomach from leaping into her throat when she finally sees the words. She orders everyone out of the room, repeating the command in a firmer voice when no one moves to listen to her.

"Not you, Mr. Grady!" she calls as Owen starts shuffling out of the room with everyone else. He waits until everyone is gone and pushes the door shut behind them. Claire holds out the piece of paper. "And there it is," she says in a near whisper.

The rage that had become an almost permanent fixture within him in the days immediately following the incident returns at its utmost intensity when he reads the speech they've given her. At its core, it simply states that Jurassic World will live again, but the speech is full of cool, corporate lingo and indirect references to the catastrophe the woman they expect these words to flow out of lived through, and he can tell from the way it's written that they want her to gloss over everything that's happened, be detached and unruffled when it comes to speaking about the past, straightforward when it comes to announcing the re-containment of the assets, and enthusiastic when it comes to talking about the future.

Before he can tell her exactly what he thinks of this bullshit, she's opened her laptop and placed a Skype call to Richard back in San Diego. Claire had always gotten along well with Richard; he wasn't as warm and personable as Simon was, but he was candid, especially with the senior employees, and she appreciated that. That's why, when she asks him why she had not been involved with the decision to re-open Jurassic World, he says honestly, "We weren't sure how receptive you'd be to that plan."

She laughs in disbelief and simply asks why, and Richard knows she's shifted the topic of discussion to the decision in general. Money, he tells her. The beginnings of lawsuits are just beginning to roll in, but the litigation itself will take years. Insurance will cover some of the eventual, inevitable payouts, but that, too, resolving those claims, will take years, and it won't cover everything, if their legal and financial experts are correct. They have the money to spend on re-opening now, and the public is still interested now, and they need the revenue from the park to survive the fallout from the disaster. Guests with vacation packages scheduled between the incident and the re-opening can be given waivers, not refunds; employees can return to their jobs instead of being granted severances packages; the online store can stay up and running; the operating participants and advertising partners within the park can offset some of the costs, and it's now or never. Normal as it feels to be here, Claire still thinks she could probably live with never, but instead of vocalizing that thought, she simply asks why she has to be the one to make the announcement.

"The public trusts you, Claire," Richard tells her. "Hell, they love you. If they see you there, on the ground, working to re-build, they'll trust that it'll be okay to come back."

She tells him she intends to stay with Jurassic World through the aftermath and the cleanup, however long that might take, but after that…she understands that she's become the face of this entire park, but she's not sure if…well, is it really okay if she's the one to…

"What are you saying, Claire?" Richard asks, and she sighs. She hasn't been this nervous and inarticulate in a professional conversation since college.

"Do I need to resign before the focus here shifts to re-opening?" she asks bluntly.

He tells her he's sure no one could replace her as the park's manager (that means they looked, she thinks, and no one else wants the job) before reminding her that Jurassic World was not the shining cash cow of the corporation because of her poor leadership. "So resign if you want to," Richard says. "But only if you want to, and I, for one, hope you don't."

She doesn't, something she says with conviction, which surprises Owen, considering she shuts her laptop and picks up the speech again with slightly trembling fingers. They're going to have to talk about this later, but for now, the announcement time draws nearer and nearer, and she gets more and more visibly nervous as she scribbles mysterious notes onto the speech with a pen, and since she barely made it through the first few post-incident press conferences, Owen's not sure she can handle an announcement like this yet.

But then they're outside on a rubble-filled Main Street, and he's watching as Claire Dearing, punctilious stickler Claire Dearing, all but ignores the speech Masrani Global wrote for her.

She hits the important point – Jurassic World will live to see another day – but she replaces all instances of assets with animals and speaks of their care and livelihood with consideration and kindness, and she explicitly promises the genetic manipulation that led to the Indominus tragedy will not be a part of the park's future, nor will the victims of such tragedy ever be forgotten. The people behind the cameras don't know what to do. They know she's going off-script, but her speech is broadcasting live all over the world, and cutting the feed in the middle means admitting her declarations were not in their plans, so they almost have no choice but to let her continue.

Owen's not sure what to think as he watches her, a smirk on his face as the executives around him grow more and more uneasy with how this is going, though he finally understands just why she was so nervous before this thing started if this is what was coming out of her pen. He's trying his damndest not to just burst out laughing. He thinks she's probably saying what the public really needs to hear, what she needs to hear if she's going to consider being here, and he likes her apparent vision for the future of this establishment, and he knows she's going to be in so much trouble when the cameras stop rolling, but he's never been prouder of her.

He tells her as much when she walks over to him when the broadcast ends, touching his arm, wanting it around her, but not wanting to break her own self-imposed rules about public displays. He squeezes her in a hug, perfectly content with the idea of having the rule-breaking blamed on him, and he keeps his arms locked around her waist as he pulls back.

"You've got some balls, Dearing," he tells her with an impressed tone after expressing his enormous pride.

Her cheeks flush pink, almost embarrassed, and she chuckles, adrenaline coursing through her veins, and oh, she doesn't know what's come over her. She's assertive and particular, but she doesn't openly defy her bosses; she doesn't cause trouble at work with her superiors; she always says what they want her to say with a smile because she almost always agrees with what they want her to say, but there are a lot of things true about her now that weren't true just a few short weeks ago, and she doesn't for a second think to regret what she just did.

Until her phone rings.


It's not Richard on the other end of the call. She expected it to be Richard, ready to rip her a new one for single-handedly redefining the future of Jurassic World on international television, but it's not Richard. It's worse.

It's Karen.

Her sister and her nephews had arrived home just in time to see her announcement. "Aunt Claire's on TV," Gray had called from the living room. "She's on the island!" he had said, and Claire thinks she should've known that her sister's fingers would fly faster on a touch screen telephone than her boss's.

"How could you go back there and not tell me?" Karen shrieks, and even though Claire has the phone to her ear and not outstretched in front of her, Owen hears every word. "I mean, we all knew you would have to go back, and god, I don't know, maybe it's better I didn't know, but how could you not tell me, Claire?"

And that's all she gets out because then the call is usurped by two overly-excited boys with a rapid fire barrage of questions.

What's it like there?

Is Owen there, too?

Have you seen any dinosaurs yet?

How's Blue? Is she okay?

When's the park re-opening?

Are you staying? Is Owen staying?

Can we come back, too? When can we come visit?

Why did you go back to the island without us?

At that, Karen cuts back in with an, "Are you fucking kidding me?" directed to her sons.

"Mom!" Gray says in the background, shocked by the obscenity that escaped his mother's lips.

"Sometimes the situation calls for it, little man," Karen says.

Claire smiles slightly, ready to answer any of their questions, but then she hears cries of seriously and not fair and come back and she knows Karen has relocated to a more private location.

"You're staying, aren't you?" Karen asks softly.

"Oh, I don't…nothing's been decided yet, Karen," Claire promises.

"I saw you standing on that destroyed street, and I just…are you not just terrified to be there?" Karen asks, nearly crying again. "Gray still wakes up screaming about the Indominus almost every night. Zach's almost always awake in the middle of the night, too. How could you think about being there every day so soon?"

Claire sighs. She says it's not really like that for her. The entire day was horrifying, causing more fear than she ever thought one person could feel at any given time to go coursing through her system, and no, she hasn't seen a dinosaur yet, and she has no idea how she might feel when she does, but when, like her, you've read every first-hand account from the people who survived the original park, and when, like her, you've seen dinosaurs every day for seven years, and when, like her, you've been the one to oversee the building of the paddocks and order and monitor regular ACU practice drills just to make sure your team is the best it can be, you accept that something like that can happen. You don't expect it to, obviously, certainly not on that scale, and you try your hardest to make sure it doesn't, and even then, you don't really understand just what it will be like if it does, but somewhere, in the back of her mind, at some point, she had accepted that it could, so when it did, and when it happened to her, she did her job and stopped it; she survived.

"So you want to tempt fate and go for round two?" Karen asks. Claire sighs again. "Seriously, you really still want to be the manager of that park? After everything that happened…I know you're ambitious, but is that really what you want?"

"No…yes," Claire says. "Look, I don't know, but…"

"But you can't stand the thought of anyone else doing it," Karen finishes.

She says it as a statement, not a question, because it's not, and Claire almost grins. Karen's always known her a little too well, even when thousands of miles separate them. She mutters, "Something like that."


Her wide eyes find Owen when her phone rings again almost as soon as Karen hangs up. This time, it's the call she was expecting, and Owen knows she must be nervous, because hell, he's nervous for her, but she takes a breath, and, with a little nod of her head, presses the green button and answers with a firm hello.

"What the hell was that, Claire?" Richard yells, and again, even though the phone is to her ear, Owen hears every word.

Claire stands, cringing, as Richard yells at her, and Owen thinks she's handling it better than he expected she might, because unlike him, he imagines, Claire Dearing probably does not have a lot of practice getting scolded by her superiors. He picks up every few words as Claire listens and her boss speaks, and he's thinking about what corporate asshats they all are for getting angry with her for daring to talk about past, present, and future dinosaurs as if they're more than just dollars, more than just data on a spreadsheet, when her sharp, cool voice pulls him from the deep reverie of thoughts in his head.

"Things are going to be different if you re-open this park on my watch, Mr. Wisner," she confidently assures him.

If money is the sole motivator, she thinks, nothing about how this place is run will change, and when the hoopla from the re-opening dies down, they'll be right back to bigger, louder, scarier when the numbers slip, and she knows she can't let that happen, or else they'll be right back here, too, standing on a wrecked Main Street in a year, two tops, if they're lucky. Owen hears the reply loud and clear as Richard asks her what she believes gives her the authority to make those kinds of public declarations and promises without the executive board's approval.

"I am still the operations manager of this facility, and one quick call to any news outlet in the world could produce a reel of footage that I think would prove me to be uniquely qualified to make decisions about the assets and how they are managed," she says.

She sneers the word assets, and Owen watches in admiration as she goes on to say that they can either listen to what she has to say and include her in the decisions about the future of this establishment going forward, or they can fire her (a bold move, given how close she came to actually being dismissed from the corporation) and find a new face of Jurassic World because she is willing to play the role of their performing publicity monkey in the wake of everything's that happened, but she won't do it unless she's taken seriously in her actual job going forward, and then he gets what she figured out earlier that day, when she closed her laptop, rewrote the script and defined the future of the park all on her own.

Masrani Global needs Claire Dearing more than Claire Dearing needs Masrani Global right now. It's no longer an mutually beneficial relationship. She could go on to succeed elsewhere without them, but she's their face, their savior, the warrior woman who stopped the monster they created, the one who everyone will look to when deciding how to feel about the re-opening of the park and, as an extension, Masrani Global as a whole. If they see you there, they'll trust that it'll be okay to come back, Richard had said, and Owen grins. She's a pawn in their publicity game, but she's not going to be a passive one. It's in their best interest to keep her here, something both sides know full well to be true, and Richard might be Claire's boss, but Claire holds all the power.

He comes back to reality just in time to hear Claire vow that if they even think about ordering InGen to perform gene splicing to that extent again, so help her god, she will leave and do everything she can to have this place shut down faster than he can say Indominus Rex because, eventuality or no, something like that will not be happening again as long as she is in charge here. The pride swells within him again as he watches the same woman who, just a few short weeks ago, rather flippantly declared yeah, that's kind of what we do here, when he scolded her for going and making a new dinosaur proclaim that there will be no designer dinosaurs ordered as long as she has something to say about it, and maybe everyone on the board needs to take a step back and remember what John Hammond's, what Simon Masrani's, dream for this place actually was, and Owen recognizes that voice. That's her corporate bitch voice, her take no bullshit demeanor, and suddenly, the air around him feels just a little too hot.

Watching her assert her authority over anything and everything at Jurassic World has always been the quickest way to turn him on, unless that authority was directed against him and sometimes even when that authority was directed against him, depending on what she wanted, or if the annoyance he felt towards her managed to outweigh the attraction at any given moment. Watching her now, fighting for the dinosaurs, demanding to be taken seriously…well, Owen changes his mind about Claire in front of the T-Rex paddock being the hottest thing he's ever seen, and she's fully immersed herself into manager mode again, which can only mean one thing.

She's decided to do this. She might not have figured it out herself yet, but Owen knows she's decided to do this, and the atmosphere around him finally grows silent as she finishes her second impassioned, fearless speech of the hour.

"Is that all, Ms. Dearing?" he hears Richard firmly ask.

Claire sighs and decides to take one more chance. "No, actually, there's one more thing I want."


The wind whips the short red tendrils of hair out of her recently redone ponytail as the helicopter arrives on Isla Nublar. If declaring the end of Designer Dinosaurs is her first official act as the post-incident operations manager, then getting Lowery Cruthers back is her second. Turns out he'd been hanging out in his apartment in Costa Rica, unsure of where to go or what to do after being fired a few weeks back, and he'd been more than happy to drop everything when Claire called and offered to chopper him in.

He steps off the helicopter, engulfing her in a hug, and she awkwardly pats his shoulders.

"Oh, um…okay," she says, completely taken aback by the display of affection.

"I can't believe you made me do that to you; I never would've forgiven myself if you'd died," Lowery mutters, arms still around her.

"Well, I didn't," she says, wiggling herself free from his embrace. He pushes his glasses back onto his face and apologizes, putting his hands at his sides. "Would you like your job back?"

"They want…they want me to come back?" Lowery asks in disbelief.

"No," she says honestly. "I do." He kind of chuckles nervously upon hearing her response. "Is there a problem?"

"Well, it's just…I always thought you really only tolerated me, at best," he admits.

She narrows her eyes at him and says while she finds his taste…questionable (he's wearing a black t-shirt that features a nasty looking T-Rex coming at a redheaded woman with short hair, a purple tank top, and a flare, and good lord, she does not want to know where he got that and resists the urge to chastise him further about why he thought that would be an appropriate thing to wear back here and couldn't he have bothered to change his shirt first?), he was damn good at his job and passionate about the park and the dinosaurs, and that's what she needs if they're going to move this place forward.

"Plus, you had my back throughout the incident," she concludes. "So what do you think?"

"No more crazy hybrids?" he asks. "Just dinosaurs?"

"As long as I have anything to do with it," she promises. She knows the dinosaurs in the original park featured a degree of genetic manipulation as well, as do all of the species inhabiting the island upon which she's standing, and she's okay with that, but she thinks she might spend the rest of her life making sure no more Indominus Rexes come out of that lab, and the more people she has on her side, the better. She narrows her eyes at him again, suddenly remembering mutterings about a Pepsisaurus or something insane like that, and adds, "I'll still be acquiring corporate sponsors for our attractions, though."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Lowery nods. "I'm in. What do you need?"

They head away from the helicopter, back towards the Control Room, as she tells him she needs it up and running again, at its full capacity, before large quantities of workers and outside contractors arrive. They're still a ways away from that – she'll have to meet with partners and investors, determine who wants to re-open their establishments and continue their contracts (she's sure there's a catastrophe escape clause in their somewhere) and who might need a little more convincing. They have to design the new Main Street, see what else is damaged, establish a timeline, assess what truly needs to be done, but she'll feel safer being here now and in the days to come with all of the cameras and all of the implant tracking systems up and functional, as if twenty thousand people were walking through their gates tomorrow.

He nods, pressing the button on the elevator that will take him up to Control. "You got it, boss," he says. "I'll do my best."

"Thank you, Lowery," Claire says.

"Hey, Claire," he says as she turns to go her separate way. Her quizzical gaze fixes upon his face, and he says, "So you and the raptor guy, huh?"

She rolls her eyes and turns away, heading down the hallway, unable to fight the small smile that crosses her face.


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