Hey all! I think this'll be my last update on . I'll continue posting on AO3, but as I'm not getting much engagement here, I think it's best to keep to one platform.

If you have been favouriting, following, etc over here, please know I really appreciate you and I would love it if you continued to support me on AO3 :) Same author name, same fic title!

If anyone had asked Owen what he expected to see on the other side of that damned door, a little girl would have been his absolute last guess after fancy French restaurant and Narnia. But there she was. Just a little girl with dark brown hair and eyes, and a puzzled expression. The room vaguely resembled a very sparsely decorated kids room - desk with a laptop, climbing holds along one wall, kids clothes visible in a plastic wardrobe, books. But no toys, no stuffed animals, nothing.

"You're not one of them," she eventually muttered, startling him out of his shock.

"No." The kid looked terrified. Not that he blamed her. A weird grown-ass man she had never seen had just broken into her room. "My name's Owen," he said.

The kid blinked at him, then took a couple of steps forward slowly. "I know you," she said. "I've seen you…videos of you…with…with Blue."

"Oh yeah?" Where the hell did the kid get videos of him and Blue? "Have you seen Blue?"

The kid shook her head. "I heard them say she's here when we saw the other ones. They wanna study her, like they study me. None of the other ones survived."

For a minute he thought she meant the raptors, but then it clicked. The embryos, the weird labels. Mills was cloning humans and this kid was the only viable one. "Shit," he muttered. "Uh, don't repeat that. Sorry."

The kid stared at him. How the hell was he supposed to handle this? A fucking kid was not part of any damned plan he might have had. Did he take her with him? Hell, he already knew he was not about to leave the poor kid. "Son of a…," he muttered. Looking back to the girl, he sighed. "What's your name, kid?"

She shook her head, "I don't have one."

"Everyone has a name," he said. "What do they call you?"

Again she shook her head. "They don't really talk to me much."

Owen sighed, then he remembered the sign on the door. "What if I call you 'Catie'?"

"Catie?" she asked.

"Yeah, like the sign on your door," he said, smiling at her.

After a minute, she nodded and took another tentative step forward. "Okay."

He bent down and put his hand out toward the kid. "Do you want to come with me, Catie?"

The girl looked at his hand, then up at him, then back to his hand. "O…okay…." Her little hand reached out and took his slowly.

Owen stayed crouched down and smiled at her, trying not to spook her. "How old are you?"

"Nine."

"Nine?" he gasped. "You're almost an adult!"

Her nervous smile relaxed a little. "No I'm not."

"Maybe not quite," he agreed, grinning. "I need to find my friends, but after that why don't we see if we can find a way out?"

Catie stepped the rest of the distance toward him and nodded. "Okay."

"So," he said, turning around and walking back into the lab. "You saw videos of me and Blue? You like dinosaurs?"

"Yeah."

"What's your favourite?" he asked as they crossed to the door.

"I like velociraptors and Blue seems cool, but my favourite are microraptors," she said quietly. "Their feathers are pretty."

Owen grinned. "My girlfriend loves them too. I'm sure she'll tell you anything you wanna know about 'em when we find her." God, he hoped she was okay. That was the next thing - find Len and Barry, find Blue, save Blue, get the fuck out. He put an ear up against the door. No sounds in the hallway. Glancing up and down the hall, he found it empty and slowly opened the door fully, pulling the kid with him.

It felt like they had barely left the damned lab when he heard someone catching up to them and ducked again into the nearest room. This time the room contained velociraptors. Not embryos. Fully grown raptors. Ones that looked suspiciously like Blue. How the hell long had they had her? The raptors hissed and growled and rattled their cages at the newcomers.

"Someone's gonna hear that," Catie whispered.

"I'll keep you safe," he said, smiling down at her. When she scooted closer to him, wrapping her hand around his arm, his smile grew and he crouched down to look her in the eyes. "We'll be alright. I'm gonna help you."

She nodded and looked over at the raptors. "These are the ones they made, but one's missing. The scary one."

Owen narrowed his eyes at the raptors, chewing on his bottom lip. The Indoraptor. Probably their pack leader. Why would they separate her from the pack? Pulling out his phone, he snapped a few more pictures and hit send.

Then the lock on the door beeped and it started to open.

Owen grabbed Catie and pulled her behind one of the shelves, away from the raptors. Not that he thought the raptors would forget they were there, but hopefully they could sneak around whoever it was and get out. The kid clung tightly to him while they hid.

A pair of guards entered the room, babbling about how something must have spooked the raptors to have them go off the way they did. Pulling Catie close, he whispered, "We're gonna make a run for it when they get closer to the raptors."

Catie nodded and he manoeuvred them closer to the door one step at a time as the guards neared the raptors and inspected the room. When they were close, he grabbed a nearby beaker and tossed it, hissing at Catie, "The door, run!"

He heard Catie run and turned just in time to see another guard at the door grab her. "How did you get out, kid?"

Catie screamed. "Let me go!"

Owen looked around for something to distract them so he could get her and run. There were not many options, so he opted for the shelf itself and heaved the thing as hard as he could. When he started toward Catie, one of the guards fired on him, forcing him back behind a wall. He could hear the kid screaming for him as they took her down the hall.

And he was pinned down, with the remaining guards closing in on him.

A quick glance around and he noticed a reflective surface where he could see the guards approaching cautiously. On the ground next to him was a small cage, so he waited until they were close, then grabbed the cage and swung it as hard as he could. One guard fell into the other and they went down like dominos. Owen sprinted past to the door and looked both ways to try and figure out where they had taken Catie.

No sign of her or the other guards who had taken her, he could not hear her screaming for him anymore. He bit out a curse - he had promised her he would keep her safe and now she was who-knew-where with who-knew-what happening to her.

A bullet ricocheted off the wall next to his head.

No time. He picked a direction and bolted. Behind him he heard one of the guards calling for someone named Wheatley to release the raptors.

"Son of a…."

Mills was nowhere to be found in the direction Barry had seen him go. Either that or they were lost. Given that the underground levels were damned near a maze, Lennie would not be surprised. She carefully rounded a corner into a large open room. Only this time instead of live dinosaurs, it looked like a museum. Fully assembled specimens of every sort were displayed around the room. One in particular caught her eye and she crossed the room to inspect it, ignoring Barry's protests behind her. It was a museum, not a shooting gallery. She was pretty sure she would be fine.

"What are you doing?" he hissed.

Lennie muttered, "Relax. They're looking for intruders, not fine upstanding employees like us." As she approached the fossil, she slowed to a stop and looked up at it. The Berlin specimen. "This is supposed to be in the Natural History Museum in Berlin."

"Maybe it's a replica?"

Shaking her head, she mumbled, "Dunno about that. A couple of years back there was a rumour the museum had been broken into, but nothing was stolen. Wonder if they just replaced what they stole with really good fakes." She eyed the specimen, but did not reach out to touch it as it could be alarmed like in a regular museum. "Either that or these are the fakes being sold to rich idiots for a tidy profit, I suppose."

Turning back to the room, she noticed a few other famous fossils - Sue, Dippy, Bruce…. This had to be for rich idiots, no way in hell were they all real. Turning back to the Berlin specimen, she pursed her lips and examined it. It looked real enough. Maybe a diamond amongst the bullshit?

Before she even realized what was going on, she felt herself being pulled by the waist down behind the base of one of the fully articulated skeletons, settling between a pair of legs as a hand clamped down around her mouth. The first thing she noticed was the person holding her smelled like Owen. Then she turned her head and saw it was in fact Owen, looking anxiously back toward the door he had just sprinted in from. Lennie felt her eyes go wide and start to water. Was she hallucinating?

A group of guards entered the room and began searching. As the guards moved, Owen released her mouth and guided her around the specimens to avoid them. After a few minutes the guards left and she finally got a second to process whatever the hell was happening.

Owen stood a few steps ahead of her, holding onto her hand and watching her. "Owen?" she whispered, approaching him slowly. When he tried to speak she waved him off, instead reaching for the zipper on his jumpsuit. Ignoring the hole she saw over his chest, she pulled the zipper down and pushed the vest and shirt under the jumpsuit aside to reveal an ugly square-shaped bruise where the hole was. In the back of her mind she noted the bruise must have been from the box he kept the ring in. She reached out to gently run her fingers over it, wincing when he let out a hiss of pain. "Owen?" she whispered again, finally looking up at him. "You're okay?"

"I'm fine, baby," he muttered, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

Pushing out the breath she had not realized she had been holding, she jumped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. "I thought you were…." Even with him here in her arms, she could not bring herself to say it.

She felt him shaking his head as his arms slipped around her waist to rub up and down her back. "No," he murmured. "I'm okay. I'm here."

Lennie pulled back a little to look up at him and run her fingers through his beard, before kissing him softly. When she felt his fingers reach up to wipe away the tears that had fallen, she smiled. He really was here, he was alive. "I love you," she muttered as she pulled back just far enough to look into his eyes. She had to bite her lower lip to keep the grin from splitting her face in two.

"Love you too," he said, giving her a quick kiss before straightening his back to nod at Barry.

Where the hell Barry had hidden and how he knew to hide was a mystery to her. Probably the shock of seeing Owen again short circuiting her brain. If it meant he was okay, though, she was fine with it.

"You're not gonna believe what I found," Owen said as Lennie slipped an arm around his waist, leaning her head on his shoulder.

Lennie snorted a laugh. "Get in line." Pulling back a little to look up at him, she and Barry told him about the weird conversations they had overheard and the room with the dinosaurs, ending with the caged microraptors and archaeopteryxes.

Owen took that as his cue to fill them in on the little girl and the velociraptors. "Told her you'd tell her all about microraptors," he said, smiling down at her.

"I'll talk her ear off when we're safe," Lennie agreed, holding tightly onto Owen's hand; she was pretty damned sure she was never letting go again. "So where the hell do we start?"