hey fellas, i'm back you know the drill. I need a nap. eventually i'll just start writing shorter chapters to update sooner lol

The carnivore observation decks were not an enviable task to maintain. Built on Isla Sorna before they had even begun to work on the creation of the dinosaurs themselves, they were great, hollow, metal tubes, meant to be disguised as trees, and though there were many efforts to restore them once InGen and Masrani came together in the collaboration of using Nublar as a park and Sorna solely for the purpose of observation, there is still a feeling of vulnerability when inside them. They were built well, considering they had still been mostly functional in the first wave of repairs, and they needed minimal maintenance as getting crews to fix them was always quite the affair, but Owen can feel the tension around the other scientists as if it were a choking miasma. The elevator to the top is a smooth and quiet ride, and Owen knows that there is nothing nearby yet, and even if there was, the entire team is armed to the teeth with enough tranqs to put down two elephants in one dart, but the others being on edge puts him on edge, and it takes a concerted effort to not feel like a caged animal.

At the top, the elevator does not ding , but a light above the doors flashes once before they open, and the team spills out into a large room. At first glance, it appears as though the entire circular wall is a window, but Owen knows better. It's all massive screens put together and emitting a soft glow, cameras outside tracking if there were any animals nearby. Those cameras could also be accessed by their own equipment, and they had used them to take the safest path to the observation deck.

Well, the other scientists had used them while Owen had carefully cast out his Awareness.

Beneath the layer of camouflage paint on his face, his skin itches, and his nose twitches at the awful smell of the team, necessary though these precautions are to hide their scent. At least the big carnivores that passed through this section of jungle for the nearby watering hole rarely gave the deck a second look- the deck in the raptor territory had gone through trial after trial from the very suspicious pack, though it had originally been built to observe triceratops before the raptors moved into that territory, and it could handle a wealth of damage.

"Anything heading towards us?" Barry asks him softly, bumping shoulders as he folds his notes to fan his sweaty face. Owen shrugs.

"Nothing yet. And I'd rather not pull something here, it'd have a stronger chance of sensing us in here, unlike the Brachies from a few days ago." Predators' minds were always so much sharper than Owen liked to touch. Inside the bond, his pack chitters nervously, aggravated by the distance between them and their Alpha and their inability to protect him.

"That's for the best then. A damn shame they couldn't get air conditioning in here during the renovations", Barry grunts, wiping at his eyes, his uniform, like everyone else's, stained. " How are you holding up ?" he adds in French.

"Fine, the girls are keeping everything outta my head. God, why the fuck did I agree to this again?"

"Because you are an idiot who can't keep a very important secret to himself."

"Ah, right."

They lapse back into silence, more so because of the glares sent their way by the team of scientists, though Owen knows that they couldn't possibly be heard through the layers of steel that made up the observation deck. He casts out a little further, finds the Spinosaurus wading through the river and skirts around it, wondering how the hell Ian Malcolm managed to avoid the thing and how Alan Grant managed to survive his encounters with it. By scientific standards, it's more of a monster than a true Spinosaurus, but it had been decently accurate to the information they'd had of it at the time, and Owen had always thought it was cool when he learned of it as a child. He still can't help the spark of awe that he feels as he dodges around its mind, though Blue has to disagree with him, thinking it a rather dull-minded creature to so easily lose to two humans (then feels further vindicated when Owen informs her just how many humans it had missed). The carnotaur is sleeping by the bank of the river, hide warmed by the glaring sun, and it's gathered a collection of colorful birds on its back, perching on what seems to them a great, red, sleeping hill. He's tempted to look farther, even with his pack berating him to bring himself back , but he pauses, something tingling at the closer section of his net of Awareness.

Owen concentrates himself there and finds a young family of rexes, a bonded pair and two young, both female. He's a little astonished that they're so close, and for a moment he glances at the screens, only to be disappointed that they're not close enough to see.

"Owen?" Barry murmurs under his breath.

"Family of rexes headed our way", Owen breathes back, eyes on the screen, mind extended just beyond the tall trees.

"How much fur-" Barry starts, but words freeze in his mouth as the jungle begins to shudder.

The entire deck falls into a hush, all eyes craned toward the screens, watching the trees tremble, the reverberation of several massive steps making the deck itself shiver as the family of rexes finally come into view, both of the adults too huge to be real, their leathery snouts bloody from a recent kill, large teeth glinting dully in the little sunlight that drifts through the canopy. The young are already slightly larger than raptors, and Owen can almost think them cute, the way all small baby animals are cute. Small being a relative term.

"One of the little ones has feathers", murmurs one of researchers, and a quick look proves that sure enough, the older of the two has a scattering of creamy feathers, much lighter than her brown and deep red hide, while the younger is entirely bald with a hide closer to a dark, murky gray. Despite the mostly unregulated climate of Isla Sorna, the rex family only has little scars, the biggest one a pale white line that runs across the mothers snout down to her throat, though whatever battle it came from had proved to not be her last.

"They're certainly something", Barry says with undisguised awe. Owen can't help but agree.

…

"God, I can't wait for this whole thing to be over with", Owen grumbles, scribbling down the last of his field notes into a paragraph that doesn't look like an illegible chicken scratch and sounds properly scientific. He swipes sweat from his face with an already damp rag, brow furrowing as he takes a sip from his almost empty bottle of water.

"We'll be exchanging one humid, dinosaur-filled island for another, what difference does it make?" Barry points out, swatting at the swarm of flies gathering around the camp.

"Fences and air conditioning", says Owen immediately. That, and he desperately wants to be with his pack, an itch under his skin that goes beyond not being able to take a bath, that prickles sharply the longer he's away, unable to feel the warm protection of their circle. The bond feels strong as ever, feels stronger even, with the distance, but it almost makes his head ache, as if there were a chain attached to his throat, pulling and pulling until breathing becomes near impossible.

Barry hums.

"What I wouldn't do to be in the breakroom right now", he grunts. What he wouldn't give to be with his pack, and his pack seems to bristle with agreement, becoming more agitated as the days go by that their Alpha is gone.

It had been tolerable at first, this distance, and the pack had all regarded it with wary bemusement, even as their bond had stayed solid over the growing distance. But it grates upon his mind now, a sensation of wrongness that he can't shake off despite his best efforts.

Not much left to do , he reminds himself, his breath shuddering through his lungs. If Barry notices his shaken demeanor, he doesn't comment on it, pulling out his notebook to look over what he's written down. Owen does the same, but he suspects much like Barry, he doesn't really do any reading, his thoughts too distracted to really pay attention to any of his own sloppy handwriting.

…

There's a prickling unease as they ease their way into the raptor observatory. The entrance starts a distance away and once more they're slathered with the stink of rot (not the scent of another predator, sure that that would cause more of a territorial spat, which is exactly the opposite of what they want. Owen's nose twitches, feeling strangely more sensitive, but this is it, this is the last thing they have to do for the next few days and then they can go home . He can return to his girls.

He's careful about where he spreads his awareness, wary of the raptors being able to feel him in the same way he can feel them because the only reason they had left him alone the last time was how fractured the island had made him feel. Now with the strength of his pack, he's a proper pack leader and he doesn't want to be Seen as any sort of threat that will bring the island pack's attention to them. He doesn't feel the need to cast out too far beyond the tunnels of the observatory anyways, though he's tempted to, put on edge by the tense atmosphere of the group.

The reputation of the raptors has settled itself as blood in soil, from the very first accident at the park and Owen has always had a deep respect for them. There is no other animal like the one created by Ingen, and though they're not quite so accurate to current knowledge of dinosaurs, they had been more or less accurate for what they knew at the time, vicious and terrifying in a way that only nature could create.

Stupid. Incredibly stupid. Unbelievably stupid, Blue snaps in his head, and the rest of the pack echo it.

They've been unsettled all day (and in return had left the replacement handlers too unnerved to run he usual drills), snapping and barking at each other in fear and anger at the thought of their Alpha in another pack's territory without any of them to back him physically, because for all the protection that their mental bond affords them, there is little they'd be able to do if Owen were in genuine danger.

Owen assures them that the observatory is safe (even as his own skin prickles with anticipation, waiting and alert for something that he desperately doesn't want to happen), that they'll be in and out in no time and that they'll be home before they know it (and he'll be able to see Venezia and Roma moved into their new paddock, which would be soon whether he made it back or not because they're growing rapidly and it would not be long before they outgrew the raptor paddock.)

"This place is eerie as hell", Barry murmurs quietly, walking just a step behind him and clutching at his gun, using the pad of his finger to tap a quiet rhythm against the side. Owen nods in agreement.

"Feels like I'm in a horror movie. Wish we had a bit more than flashlights in here", Owen says, uneasy.

Maintenance wasn't easy to do on an island where wild, dangerous animals roamed free, and no one had expected for the raptors to appear in this territory when it had first been built, so lightbulbs aren't exactly a priority here, not in comparison to the actual observation technology, but still. The glow of their headlights is bright, but it doesn't bleed into every corner, leaving little nooks of darkness that, though not big enough to actually hide anything, still leave Owen unnerved, permeated by the feeling of being trapped in a metal coffin that hadn't affected him quite as much in the other observatory. His Awareness gently probes ahead of him, only cognizant of the humans around him in the faintest of ways and catching glimpses of mice scuttling along and not much else, which is about what he expects. It isn't like the observatory can maintain much life when it's built the way it is, and as they get nearer to the raptor territory, Owen imagines that only a particularly brave or stupid animal would dare to wander this close.

He stretches his mind out a little farther, cautious, and snags on the birds that are moderately safer than most other animals as they fly from branch to branch (though knowing how high raptors can jump, Owen wonders if they are truly that safe. Considering that he's seen his girls snap birds into their jaws from midair, he doubts it).

"Okay", Owen says, pulling out his keycard once they arrive at the door to the main control room. "Let's get this done."

congratulations if ur still reading this. Ily very much, especially if you've left comments 3 I don't always have the energy to respond to every one of them, but I read them all and they're all an excellent little boost

chapter title from Shots by Imagine Dragons

btw yall got music recs? I've been listening to the same five bands for like ten years lmao