disclaimer.
All belongs to Michael Critchon.
additional notes.
Takes place after the first book and ignores the movies. Rated T on a basis of caution.
warnings.
PTSD, some suicidal thoughts, anxiety attacks, nightmares, trauma.
Alan
What use is a palaeontologist when dinosaurs can be grown in a test tube? Alan has never been particularly in touch with technology, preferring his dusty old bones to his grainy computer screens, and now, with knowledge of supercomputers racing through genetic code and of dinosaurs that no one else will ever have and that he can't share because there is no way to back it up without the living specimens of Jurassic Park as proof, and he doesn't know what comes next. So Alan does what anyone would in his position- he writes; he writes a story ("Not a story," he amends to Ellie over a pint down the local as they share a small, rueful smile and laugh as they have never done before, sides aching and tears streaming down their faces) about a palaeontologist and a botanist and a mathematician and a lawyer, about a little boy obsessed with dinosaurs and a little girl with a baseball always clutched in her hand, and about dinosaurs, that is less about the science and adventure and more about life and death and power no one should wield- a warning, he calls it, and hopes that it is heeded.
Ellie
In the aftermath of Jurassic Park, Ellie had been so sure it would be Alan who would help her through everything- her best friend, her maybe-once-something-more, the man who knew her like the back of his hand. Ian Malcolm is an unforeseen comfort; hurtling from sleep, still seeing the mangled corpse of John Arnold reaching out for her with bloated fingers and still hearing the clack-clack-clack of wicked talons against metal, unable to breath and sobbing hysterically as she slams a shaking thumb down on the phone number she had been so sure was Alan's. When Ian's sleepy voice answers instead, Ellie feels like the whole world caves down around her in a cacophony of fear and embarrassment- he doesn't ask questions when he hears her whispering her apologies through fountains of tears though, but begins to explain in painstaking detail the chaos theory he spent his life working on and after that, Ellie calls him each and every time the nightmares come back and encourages him to do the same.
Ian
When he wakes in the sterile hospital room, they tell him he died- his leg infected from dirt and whatever else was on the tyrannosaurus rex's teeth slowly his pulse and heart to an almost undetectable to crawl- and leave him wondering whether he still is and everything is some twisted nightmare (or whether it would be better that way). So many people come by to talk to him- those who wish to hush up what happened on that island, those who wish to discover it and those left reeling from everything- but it is Sarah Harding who pulls him out of his bitterness and his self-hatred. At first it's her infectious excitement when she talks about her hyenas, the way she waves her hands as she speaks, and then it the way she laughs, snorting in hysterics and flushing in her embarrassment, and after that it is the feeling of her head on his shoulder and her lips moving against his; she moves back to Africa eventually- she would never been content anywhere else- but Ian wakes up on a morning and doesn't wish that he had died and stayed dead anymore.
Lex
It takes Lex years before she can wear her baseball glove again- the cracked leather, the unyielding stiffness, the frayed stitching, all as familiar as the back of her hand ruined by the memory of standing amongst towering emerald tree and waiting for that moment when luck gave out and the monsters that stalked them came finally for their blood. Tim, it seems, dives back amongst his book with the ease he had always done so- Lex looks at her glove and tries not to cry, feeling her breathing hitch and her heart race a mile a minute and her mind spiral backwards to the overwhelming mantra of run run run run run, Lex, run run run. But as her daughter- same messy blonde hair, same mischievous blue eyes, but with her father's nose- hefts the wooden bat up to her shoulder with ready ease, Lex slides her glove on and feels like she's coming home.
Tim
Despite what his little sister may think, Tim doesn't read his books the same way as he had before. Reading one of Dr Grant's first publications, his favourite of the palaeontologist's books, he tears out the pages on raptors with one swift, brutal yank; the noise of the paper ripping is jagged and sharp, discordant in the quiet oasis of his bedroom, but he feels exponentially better when the chapter is screwed up into a tiny paper ball and lying in the little bin in the corner of his room. Instead he pursues herbivores with renewed interest- the Brachiosaurus with their swaying necks so high above the tree canopy, the Triceratops with their crowned heads- and he thinks that it is all worth it when he leads his first dig unearthing an almost complete Triceratops' skeleton with the memory of standing in a loose semicircle with his sister and with his friends around a piece of history discarded in time.
finis.