Life Found A Way

Back out where people were dying, an early morning mist hung over the jungle, which would ordinarily awaken those sleeping in the great outdoors. Perhaps the snapping of twigs, followed rustling of branches would have, as it was quite loud atop of the only tree that had been climbed.

In the branches, Harry Potter and Dr. Grant's backs were leaned against the tree, but their heads were dipping, as they too had fallen asleep.

Tim was curled up under Dr. Grant's right arm, while Harry's head was turned opposite his, as Lex had spooned over him during the night.

As one typically alert during unusual happenstances, Harry awoke to the sound of the rustling, glaring once he found the source;

A brachiosaurus had come to the tree, drawing an impressive string of leaves into its mouth.

"Bloody Merlin!" he whispered.

Harry maintained his focus on the brachiosaur until he was felt a tug at the arm, followed by a familiarly girlish scream pouring into his ear.

"Go away!" Lex cried.

She climbed to a slightly higher branch offset from where they sat, pulling Harry along. He stretched his arm out protectively as he noticed the brachiosaur coming back for more.

Harry squeezed in his abdomen, but finally let his arm down when he realized the brachiosaur nostrils hadn't even come an inch beyond their feet.

"It just missed us," He replied. "I don't think we're what it wants."

"It's okay, it's okay," interrupted a gentler adult voice. "It's a brachiosaur."

Looking to his left, Harry realized Dr. Grant and Tim had awoken and were inching as close as possible to the brachiosaur.

"It's a veggie-saurus, Lex!" Tim exclaimed. "Veggie-saurus!"

"Veggie..." Lex panted.

"Herbivores... of course!" Harry exhaled. "Remember what they told us last night?"

They watched Dr. Grant grab a handful of thin branches, stretching it out offeringly to the brachiosaur.

"Here," Grant instructed. "Here, baby."

By now, Harry's nerves must have been lost as he tore down a higher set of branches and stretched them as fas as his limbs would allow. But Grant must have sensed adolescent fancy in the air as Harry gave a quick double take to Lex before doing so.

It must have worked since Lex was smiling at the three of them, each stroking a hand across the brachiosaur's muzzle. She may have forgotten about the previous day's encounter with the triceratops, but still Harry took her by the hand and pulled her down from where she sat.

"Come on," Harry encouraged. "Aren't you going to touch it?"

"Can I?" Lex asked.

"Sure," Grant replied. "Just think of it as... kind of a big cow."

"I like cows," Lex resolved.

Harry raised an eyebrow, either at the way Lex said she liked cows or the sight of two holes spewing a strange goo, poking out from a bump atop the brachiosaur's head, which Tim just barely drew his hand out of.

"It looks like it has a cold," Tim noted.

But Harry didn't hear this part, as he'd already lured the brachiosaur back to him with some more branches. He stroked the lower part of its nuzzle, but noticed Lex was reaching her hands uncomfortably close to the tip of its nose.

"Come on girl, up here..." she pleaded

They were close enough to see its nostrils vibrate, as the brachiosaurus promptly shot out an explosion of mucus. Harry's arms were ready for shielding, but hanging above his head, he noticed a large fern which he quickly plucked off to cover his and Lex's faces.

Even so, a fern can't stop brachiosaurus mucus from flying into people's hair and dripping down the forehead. Harry and Lex were feeling lucky anyway, since they tore the fern apart to wipe up the mess they'd both accumulated.

"God bless you!" Tim shouted.

The brachiosaur continued eating, more specifically the fern it blew its nose upon, a sight which had Dr. Grant laughing.

"I've heard of leaf towels, but snot rags?" he chuckled.

As Harry felt the jerk from his arms, he nearly fell off the branch to get a view of the brachiosaur's entire neck. After a sneeze like that, he was thankful he hadn't spotted any bumps going downward, otherwise his thoughts would have been turned to a Norwegian Ridgeback.

Harry wincingly scraped the snot from his mop before turning his head down as he felt a trickle of curiosity pour from his head down through his spine;

The sight of a long, thin neck would have made him recall a humiliating experience with a long, thin reptilian creature in a zoo. A neck on a more massive scale, especially one with a large bump on its head, would have brought an encounter far worse out of Harry's more recent memory.

As the brachiosaur let out a gentle moan, Harry's head turned back up to its nasal chamber, which he noticed was vibrating again.

But as its head drew closer, Harry noticed the brachiosaur's eyes were fully directed at him. This drew nothing short of breath out of him once his eye contact was broken by the only adult in the group.

"Still drawing admirers, eh Harry?" Grant teased.

Harry, of course, blushed again, especially at Tim's giggling, though he didn't notice Lex's pink face looking a tad more furrowed.

"I was just thinking..." he exhaled.

"About..." Grant mused.

He paused, as he couldn't think of a worthy means of explaining his thoughts to a Muggle scientist. Still, his pause was perhaps just a little too brief.

"Kind of a... gift I have..." Harry continued, a little too quickly. "I can talk to snakes."

He paused again, at which point all he could hear was brachiosaur breath drowning out jungle ambience and a tiny gasp behind him. Tim leaned in closer, but Grant held him back as he inched closer to Harry.

"And how do you figure talking to snakes?" Grant requested.

Harry paused again, albeit rapidly, as he recalled there were people on the streets of London who called themselves "snake charmers" by profession.

"I don't know," he shrugged "I just... copy whatever hisses they make, they all come slithering my way. Nothing to it."

Harry felt a slight squeeze of his left arm, which made him notice Lex again, looking a tad closer to the way she did when they awoke.

"I've seen snakes on TV nab rats in their sleep!" she gasped. "You can thank blanket head over there!"

"Hey!" Tim cried.

"She won't!" Harry insisted, gesturing to the brachiosaur. "Not if I have anything to say about it…"

Harry stood up, perhaps a little too quickly, as he felt his right foot slip ever so slightly. Only a seeker's reflexes would have helped him spot himself with his right hand before climbing up to the next branch to get closer to the brachiosaur.

"Hello there," he called.

Harry stretched out his hands out again, able to reach the top of the snout this time, though thankfully not the still-dipping nostrils. This elicited another gentle moan from the brachiosaur, as if Harry were some sort of tick bird coming to roost upon a rhinoceros's head.

"You like that, do you?" He chuckled, still stroking its scales. "Bet that'll clear up your sinuses, won't it?"

The brachiosaur moaned with the same sensual pleasure, which Harry smiled at. He seemed to take as a reply, although he failed to notice three heads of confusion behind them.

"Don't you think you ought to use a little more tongue there, Harry?" Grant chuckled.

"What do you mean?" Harry puzzled.

"Well, you can't hiss without a tongue, can you?" Tim slowly replied.

"You heard me!" Harry insisted.

"Yeah, we heard you… Lex clarified. "In plain English."

Harry froze and, after another beat, lowered his arms, though his expression was more of an indicator of confusion. If he were in the position of his friends who possessed red hair and freckles, one would easily notice his ears turning as red as his hair.

"Whatever kind of hiss patterns you use, they don't seem to be working, do they? Grant added.

"I don't get it!" Harry cried, sliding back down the branch. "If it works on snakes, it's got to work on other reptiles, right?!"

"Well perhaps you should consider this," Grant suggested. "It's come to my attention that if dinosaurs were any more reptilian, they'd more likely walk with their bellies to the ground. You follow me on that?"

"Yeah," Harry sighed after another beat.

Running through Harry's mind at this point could have easily been his encounter with the basilisk or the Norwegian Ridgeback. Still, he must have recalled those times with Dumbledore where he felt there was no use in arguing;

After all, he'd covered up his ways of speaking parseltongue as best he could.

"Good," Grant exhaled. "Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I think I'd like to get down from here and see if we can get back to where we came from."/

"I'm game," Harry agreed. "This is the last tree I'll ever climb in my life."

"Right behind you," Lex quickly replied.

Harry swung himself to the branch below the knot they slept in. Lex cupped her hand over his, but swinging down, Harry noticed she still had a small amount of brachiosaur snot dripping down her arm.

As they reached the base of the tree, they leaned against it, waiting for Dr. Grant to join them, but Harry still wiped his hand on the moss.

"And when we get back, do you suppose we'll even get a proper shower?" He questioned.

"Yuck!" Lex grimaced.

"You're lucky you don't share a house with her, Harry," Tim assured him, wrinkling his nose. "One disaster and she'll never try anything new again!"

"I'm right behind you, you know…" Lex reminded him.

"Maybe now," Tim countered. "But when we get home, you'll just go back to sitting in your room and you'll never come out, and play on your com-pu-ter!"

"I'm a hacker!" Lex insisted.

"That's what I said," Tim retorted. "You're a nerd."

"I am not a computer nerd," Lex reiterated. "I prefer to be called a hacker!"

"Funny, you don't seem to dress like one," Harry interjected.

"The Murphy children froze, Lex pressing her boots hard into the ground, but Tim still leaned against the tree with his arms crossed and a smug expression on his face.

"And by the way, that friend of mine you saw earlier in this trip has been known to argue worse than you two," Harry added

"How do you figure that?" Lex questioned./

"I try not to mimic anybody," Harry apologized. "But you should have heard her in some of our classes two years ago…"

He cleared his throat and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, as he found that was the way he was able to create a shrill-sounding voice.

"Now, if you two don't mind, I'm going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed, or worse expelled!" Harry squeaked.

"Stop! Stop! You're going to take someone's eye out!" he continued, placing emphasis on the same words he remembered Hermione had.

Tim bounced off the tree and started giggling, but Lex's feet remained planted firmly as her face dropped even more than before.

"So yeah, don't get like that," Harry concluded. "I get enough of that already."

Harry stretched his leg forward to start his way back, as he quickly realized primordial trees would have massive roots to step over. Placing his foot down, he was interrupted by the sound of something snapping. It may very well have been a twig, but on the second step, it sounded more like a crack.

Looking down, Harry realized his no-longer fresh, new trainers had stepped on something purely white. Dr. Grant must have reached the bottom in all the argument, as he was already sitting inside a knot of roots, where a whole pile of these white talismans rested at his crossed legs.

"Oh God!" he gasped.

He picked one up, revealing something that looked not unlike the eggs at the Visitor's center, albeit fresher.

Lex and Tim must have heard the muted commotion, as they gathered in the knot behind one Grant and Harry.

"You know what this is?" Grant whispered. "It's a dinosaur egg! The dinosaurs are breeding!"

Harry noticed a pair of wide eyes and a triumphant smile across Grant's face, which certainly seemed to detract from the raptor discovery the day before.

"But Grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls," Tim interjected.

A wash of grief spread over Harry's face as he began to recall this from the Visitor's Center, but also the fact that he wasn't known to remember everything. He also noticed Dr. Grant's expression changing to furrowed eyebrows, as if to hypothesize or deduce something.

"Amphibian DNA," Grant exhaled.

"What's that?" Lex queried.

"Well," Grant begun. "On the tour, the film said they used frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps… they… mutated the dinosaurs' genetic code and blended it with that of frogs."

As Grant explained it all, Harry's legs felt the need to drop, as the wash suddenly became a tidal wave, landing him in the knot on his bottom, where he noticed Grant's look of triumph returning.

"Now…" Grant continued. "Some West African frogs have been known to, spontaneously change sex, from male to female, in a single sex environment… Malcolm was right! Look!"

He gestured to the dirt ahead of his feet, where the children noticed some tiny, repeating prints in the sand, some of which had only two or three toes.

"Life found a way!" Grant concluded. "Wait till your Grandpa hears about this!"

Harry had shrunk back into where he sat, but was quick to notice Grant standing up, so he took an extra step ahead;

Harry climbed out of the knot and started out of the roots, silently huffing, though not quiet enough to turn the others' heads.

He ignored the patter behind him, simply because he had no other choice;

Harry tripped over the largest root he'd come across, which was ironic that he never noticed. But he'd heard more footsteps approaching, harder than his own since they were being made by a pair of heeled boots.

Before his left hand could hit the ground, he felt his right hand being grabbed. He found himself blushing when he saw who it was pulling him back up.

"You okay?" Lex asked him.

"I'm fine," Harry exhaled.

He tried pulling his hand away, but Lex clutched it tightly as she pulled him back in the direction of Dr. Grant, who started forward again, fumbling over his park map.

"Come on," Grant commanded, "There should be a clearing over this way, hopefully even a view of the electric fence."

He gestured to some more trees up ahead, from which more light was emanating than in the area behind them.

Grant guided the children towards the light, moving them far away enough from the tree they slept in. In fact, far away enough to not realize that they weren't the only ones about to be awoken by rustling.

Back in the treetops, actually one tree behind the brachiosaur encounter, some rustling was heard pouring to the ground. The three people that made the rustling should have known to keep quiet, especially after that whole episode with the Tyrannosaur.

Hagrid had been sleeping soundly in a higher, more supportive knot than in the last tree he landed on. By now, he'd rolled out of the knot, onto a lower branch, turning the rustling into a loud snap as he started hanging over the edge.

Arabella Figg had been sleeping beside him and was now stretching herself awake. Unfortunately, advanced age can lead to physical accidents, thus she didn't notice herself leaning out of the knot, falling and landing square in Hagrid's chest.

Thankfully with his physique, Hagrid wasn't woken up, but that wouldn't last long as an equally heavy sleeper was about to drop in;

Sirius Black had been sleeping on his stomach the whole night, in a branch much higher up than where the others were in. But a much younger man can easily be awoken by sunlight as he rolled off the branch, landing his stomach flat upon Hagrid's.

There was definitely enough impact from the fall to pull Hagrid's head and eyes up like window shades.

"Sir'us Black!" Hagrid mumbled, still half asleep. "Whu'r' ye doin' ther?"

But Hagrid was about to get jerked fully awake before he could even finish his sentence;

In no time flat, Sirius's landing caused the branch to completely break off the tree. As the three wizards fell several stories to the ground, more branches were taken down with it than the last tree, along with more leaves.

With a larger bed of leaves on the ground, this certainly wasn't an issue for Hagrid, but the other two weren't so lucky. One by one, Sirius and Miss Figg had landed on Hagrid's front, in opposite positions to the last landing.

"To answer your question Hagrid," Sirius replied. "I'm wishing I'd landed in something soft."

"Speak for yourself, Black," Miss Figg muttered.

She gently slid off Hagrid's bulk as to not upset her elderly ankles once they hit the ground. Her feet may have been crunching about in leaves from the tree, but Sirius was rolling in them as he'd already done off Hagrid's stomach.

"Not much talking there, eh Figgy?" he chuckled.

"Indeed not," Figg sighed.

She extended her hand, but a man with Sirius Black's youthfulness would be light on his feet, as he sprung to them. This was not in the least because Sirius was too embarrassed to be carried by Miss Figg. On the contrary, he was trying to prevent himself from inhaling the scent of mothballs that could only be picked up by a batty old woman.

Sirius's jump perfectly contrasted with Hagrid's saurian rise, though his feet weren't required to snap the fallen branches further.

"The last time you slept in one of them, Hagrid?" Sirius snickered.

"No idea yeh'v got, Sirius," he bellowed.

"Indeed not…" Sirius shrugged.

He leaned down into Miss Figg's ear, gesturing as Hagrid brushed the twigs and leaves from his coat, albeit much more thoroughly on the inside.

"Especially with what he worries could fall out of those pockets…"

Their nitpicking was interrupted when Sirius cocked his head back as the barely audible sound of light chatter blew into his ear from several yards away.

"Look, over there!" He called out.

Up ahead, some silhouettes were just about to pass through the foliage, into dawn's early light. He felt himself nearly yanked to the ground as something heavy shook his shoulder. Over the other one, he noticed Hagrid's dustbin lid paw offering him a set of gold-rimmed binoculars, too large for his hands, wrapped in brown leather.

With the size of the lenses, Sirius found himself peeping through the left one to get a better view. Now, he could see the sunlight uncloaking four human figures, three of which were smaller than the fourth, two of were more pubescent, with one being unhealthily thin.

Once upon an observation of the last figure's head, Sirius's eyes grew when they picked up on a tangled mess of jet black hair.

"Harry!" he gasped.

"What?" Hagrid queried.

"I reckon that's Harry up there!" Sirius almost cried.

He strained as he passed the binoculars back to Hagrid, who grabbed them much more swiftly. But once Hagrid spotted the direction in which Sirius was looking, there wasn't a trace of any body to be seen.

"If that's the way he's gone, then it's the way I'm going to get my godson back!" Sirius insisted.

He placed another foot forward, but he was dragged backwards again, both by the shoulder and arm as he noticed Miss Figg was also pulling him.

"Wha' in Merlin do yeh think yer doin', Black?" Hagrid growled. "Both I an' Albus Dumbledore operate un'er a serious code o' operations, wher' both o' us keep top secrets. And need I remind yeh the Ministry o' Magic runs on tha' exac' same code!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sirius demanded.

"When I firs' met Harry, there wer' things I'd bin forgettin' he didn' know about!" Hagrid explained. "'F tha's it, then I reckon he don' r'member th' name Sirius Black, then don' he?"

As Sirius's face fell, Miss Figg realized hadn't spoken in awhile, but she failed to notice Sirius's shoulders drop.

"What he means is," she began slowly "That this all may come as a complete surprise to…"

"I know what he meant!" Sirius roared. "Honestly by now, I wish I could say I had something in dungarees, and maybe something… like a flying motorcycle, perhaps to aid the search. Cotton breeze out in the wilderness, you know."

He glanced up at Hagrid expectantly, as he recalled where Miss Figg's standing was, but Hagrid was shaking his head in the manner of a billy goat.

"Yeh know I'm not suppose 'o do magic, Sirius!" Hagrid reminded him. "Two yers ago, I got in'o enuff trouble with Harry's relatives, turnin' ther' son in'o a right bigg'r pig than 'e already was!"

"Then tell me," Sirius requested. "Do you have any better ideas?!"

"I do," Hagrid confirmed.

He sucked in as much gut as his stomach would allow and bent over, sifting through the fallen branches. He reemerged, releasing all he held in after pulling out the same broomstick they'd flown to the island on.

"Look ther', on the edge…" Hagrid begun.

He gestured to the farthest tree towards the entrance to the clearing before placing his binoculars back into his coat. He then pulled out another set, more specifically one made of brass, whose rims were covered with flimsy-looking knobs and dials.

"We'll fly on up, get a dragon's eye view o' the scen'ry, maybe?" Hagrid suggested.

"That reminds me, Hagrid," Miss Figg interjected. "Earlier today, Minerva brought up something about…"

"Blimey, will yeh look a' that?!" Hagrid exclaimed, his forehead slightly damp. "The day's no longer breakin'! Harry ought 'o be halfway out o' these woods by now! Git on with ourselves, why don' we?"

He mounted the broomstick, briskly dusting off the seats in front for Sirius and Miss Figg.

"A relief to know I'm not the only one in a rush this morning," Sirius whispered.

"Come on, then!" Hagrid boomed.

Sirius held out his arm for Miss Figg to embark, but her feet remained where they stood.

"You first," He insisted.

"Why not you?" Figg pondered.

"A man like myself must have the best view when searching for his godson, shouldn't he?" Sirius replied. "But don't worry, Hagrid and I'll keep you safe. After all, Bonesy and I squished together to do it, didn't we?"

"I've never know you to be so… reassuring, Sirius," Figg muttered.

She climbed in front of Hagrid, who dropped the brass binoculars in Sirius's grip, but made the mistake of looking away from him to lean into Miss Figg's ear.

"Always give 'em the omnioculars 'o keep 'em busy…" he whispered.

But his last word turned into a yelp as Sirius kicked off the ground and flew towards the limb of the furthest tree, as one event was about to lead into another…