Disclaimer
I don't own Jurassic Park in any way, shape or form. I don't expect any recognition, fame, nor monetary gains for writing this fanmade story. 'Cuz that's all it is; a fanmade story. XD Enjoy, nonetheless!
Chapter 13
Thornara leers unpleasantly as Rose and the others look around to see her and Victor standing at the edge of the clearing. They were both holding up a weapon, Victor his rifle and Thorn a handgun. The velociraptors hisses and made to advance on the two intruders, but a ringing shot made them retreat in confusion. "My, and here I thought you'd be hanging with creatures more like yourself, such as the brachiosaurus." She steps forward without worrying about the creatures, Victor protecting her back by staying where he stood. "This is better than I thought!"
Rosalia moves to stand in front of the pack and her friends, her arms outstretched to either side of her. "You're not hunting anything today, Thorn." She watches as Thornara's smirk disappear at the name Rose used. "This is my pack!"
Cooly regarding her cousin, Thornara slowly examines her like she's sizing her up. She slowly smirks again as she tilts her head up. "You've evolved, cuz. Maybe you'll be my first fight in a long time."
"Not if I can help it!" someone yells in the background, and Thornara had to dodge a thrown rock to avoid getting hit in the head. Scowling, she whips her head around to look for the source just as another rock came from the sidelines. Jiraz has abandoned the rocks in favor of the handgun he had packed into his bag, aimed at Thornara and safety off. He was the only one that had remained when the rest of Thornara's group ran off in favor of surviving the raptors. "You ain't killing another of my friends!"
"Mike?" Thornara said in surprise, her eyes widen slightly. She didn't expect Jiraz, of all people, to turn on her. Though she probably wouldn't have thought any of her 'servants' to turn on her, expecting the fear of her to keep them in line.
"And stop calling me that, dammit, it's Jiraz," he growls out, his eyes narrowed. Fury is clearly in his eyes and on his face.
"You tell 'em," Zain said as he smirks slightly; he believed that the tides had turned on Thornara and her boyfriend.
"Ah... you believe that you're in charge?" Thornara said slowly, the surprise gone and replaced with confidence that had Jiraz feel a little hesitant. "I was a fool to believe that you wouldn't turn on me, especially when it was your treacherous friend that had to be taken care of." She laughs as Jiraz's hand with the gun shake slightly. "But again, I thought your guilt would be what holds you back."
Mily realizes for what Thornara is attempting, and she turns to Jiraz. "Don't listen to a word of that bitch!" Jiraz had started to lower the gun when Mily yelled to him, making him halt the unconscious action.
"Don't listen to what? The truth?" Thorn smirks, her eyes on Jiraz. He had to bring his other hand up to steady the gun. "You practically gave me his name, whether you know it or not. His death is your fault. Edward's dead because of you!" Seeing that Jiraz had froze entirely from the impact of her words, she used the opportunity to turn the gun on him and fire a round at his chest. If it hasn't been out of reaction, the bullet would have slammed into his vulnerable heart instead of his right shoulder. Firing into a knee next, she watches him fall to the ground, howling in anguish, and she laughed in an enjoyably way.
"Jiraz!"Abandoning the protective circle of the raptors, Mily rushes to him. Thorn almost turned her gun on the girl next, but Rose attempts to tackle her down. Whipping around in time to meet the attack, Thorn brought the butt-end of the gun down on Rose's face. It may have broke open the skin on her cheek and had it gushing blood lightly, but Rose has grown more immune to pain in her few months, and simply reacted; she grabbed a hold of Thorn's arm and spins as hard as she could, bringing her right off her feet and send her a few feet away.
Barely landing on her feet, Thornara realizes that her gun had flew out of her hand in her flight and landed somewhere near Victor. Instead of worrying about it, she started laughing. Rose had crouched and was ready for another attack when her cousin started to laugh. She felt confused, but she didn't lower her guard one bit; a habit she picked up from her raptor family.
"Finally, a challenge!" Thorn slips out two blades, one that Rose recognizes as her own. Smirking, Thornara throws that blade at Rose's feet, then dashes forward with her own blade ready. Rose dodge rolls to both avoid Thorn's attack and to grab her blade. As soon as she got to her feet, she raises the blade to counter and block the oncoming slash.
All the velociraptors trills and trumpets, encouraging their human pack member as they spread into a half-circle, leaving space for the fight. It was an issued challenge when Rose had attacked Thorn. Okaa growls lowly as she paces the length of the raptor chain and back; she obviously recognizes the scent on the necklace to the human fighting her own human. And it made the raptor nervous.
Thorn backs off when Rose made to swipe at her, leaving a space of seven feet between them. Rose returns to her feet, obviously at ease with her stance and ready to react. She gained her own element of how to fight, something she wouldn't have gained had she never crashed on this island and had been among civilization instead. "I'm now impressed," Thornara said, making Rose narrow her eyes. "Not only can you live with the quarry, you also know how to fight like one! I like that." Taking the hesitation as her advantage, Thornara closes the distance and thrusts her blade forward, catching her cousin in the ribs just as she twirled away.
With a hiss, Rose clutches to her side and could feel the blood running down from the slash. It wasn't deep, but it will certainly leave a large scar. She heard Okaa hiss, as well as a gasp from someone, but she didn't allow that or the wound stop her. Letting out a laugh, she jumps and slashes down on Thorn like a raptor striking down their prey, getting her shoulder and arm. Then she dances away when Thorn tried to retaliate, getting in a few hits here and there. The fight is quickly making both of them forget thought and simply act.
After the fifth nick of blade, Thorn turns the tide by ducking the next swipe and grabbing a hold of Rose's leg. Lost of balance, all Rose can do was tuck and absorb the impact after Thorn threw her toward the river. The large rock she usually warmed herself on was what broke her fall, though somehow, she managed to slip off into the waters instead of back on the ground. Frowning, Thorn charges forward and into the water after her.
"Come out, come out..." Spotting Rose as she breaks the surface, Thorn smirks and aims a kick. Rose dodges and disappears into deeper water. Unfamiliar with the river's surface, Thorn quickly follows suit when she stepped into a large hole by accident. Rose had swam through a connection of the holes and found her cousin attempting to look around for her underwater. She lands a slash on Thorn's leg before the woman realized that Rose was close-by. Grabbing Rose's floating hair, Thorn then rams her knee into the other's stomach before twisting around to ram her cousin's head into the wall. Lost of air, but not yet in panic mode, Rose braces her arms out in time to catch the wall, then push away and had Thorn loose her grip as she was shoved into something sharp. Rose breaks for the surface and manages to get a few gulps of air before she was suddenly yanked back below the water.
Thorn keeps Rose underwater as she got to the surface, gasping for air but grinning manically. She feels her cousin flinging her arms around as she tries to fight for the surface of the river. "I'm not letting you back up, bitch!" What she doesn't realize that Rose was grabbing for something else.
Knowing that fighting for the surface this way was entirely useless, Rose makes to grab at the rocky wall. As soon as a hand grazes along a ledge, she grabbed hold and yanked herself down further. Her shoulders were cut from the sharp rocks as she pushes into another connecting tunnel, being that it was a tight squeeze, but she'd rather have that than drown. So before Thorn knew it, Rose had broke surface elsewhere and had pulled herself out onto shallower grounds.
"Well, may I get rammed by a triceratops," Thorn said in a slow manner, having had pulled herself out of the river and looking at Rose, blade in hand and ready for another round. "You're more difficult than I anticipated. Bravo, Rosalia darling, you'll be the first person to take longer than ten minutes to kill."
"Oh shut up!" Rose finally gets to the bank of the river, ten feet away this time. Unfortunately, Thorn was fresh for fighting, while Rose was still feeling the aches of her hunt with the pack. So when she finally got out of the water, she was panting and resisting the urge to wince as both sides of her ribs protest in pain. "Take your sadistic ego and your loser of a boyfriend off this island! I will kill you before you can harm the pack. I won't let you!"
"Kill me? Your own flesh and blood?" That slow smirk appears on her face again, her black hair swept back by a hand. "Have you really grown into such a cold-blooded killer? Don't you know how different it is to kill a human than it is to kill an animal?"
"The world can stand to loose a few people like yourself." But worry flickers across Rose's face. Can she really kill a human, even though that person is trying to do the same to her? Something deep inside her said no. "But I don't have to if you just leave my home."
"Then I suppose that I'll have to give you motivation, won't I?" The smirk turns into an insane grin before she throws her blade with military-precision at Rose's leg. It sinks into her thigh, and Rose yells out as Thorn laughs and runs off back toward the clearing. Heaving her chest in the attempt to keep herself from yelling, she yanks the blade out of her leg then hobbles after Thorn despite the want to lay on the ground and scream into the leaves.
"Now I don't suppose that you'll want to be put out of your misery?" she heard Thorn say just as she enters the nesting ground. Thorn has her rifle aimed at Rose as Victor stands nearby with his own at ease. Victor was simply enjoying the show. The rifle lifts to level at Rose's head. "Good-night cuz." Making to dive away, Rose was caught in the shoulder instead, and the blinding pain it came with had her on the ground with a yell.
A shrilling scream ruptures from a charging raptor, Okaa rushing to save her human. With quick reflex, Thorn twists her gun to fire the next shot into the velociraptor, stopping it in mid-attack in the chest. "Damn, these creatures are quick to attack," Thorn said as she reloads the gun quickly and aimed again at the raptor; Okaa refused to stay down. "This one is going on my mantle." And just like that, she pumped the rounds into Okaa's torso, and the raptor went down with a weak cry.
Rose jerks her head up at the cry and stares at Okaa's still figure. The raptor pack had shrieked and retreated away to a long distance, some hissing and snarling at Thorn, the others staring in the same fashion as Rose. Thorn couldn't know the rage quickly building inside Rose and in the raptors, even when the rage between the two species were entirely different from the other.
"Oh fuck," is Zain's only response as he and the others just realized what Thorn had done; the equivalent time it all happened in was really only a few seconds, and impossible to follow by human standards.
Thorn glances at the raptors, knowing that they usually attack when one of their own were harmed or killed. One of them certainly did just that; she just wasn't a velociraptor.
"I'LL KILL YOU!!!" Rose screams as she comes full-force from behind Thorn, taking her and Victor entirely by surprise. Thorn's rifle and Rose's blade flies out of reach, but fists came in handy as Rose attempts to beat the living hell out of her cousin. They both roll around on the ground, Thorn trying to avoid in her temporary stupor. Rose claws and punches no matter where she ends up, whether on her back or on top of Thorn.
"Enough!!" Thorn bunches her legs beneath Rose's stomach and sends her back and away from herself. Getting to her feet, she kicks Rose's hands out from beneath her as she got to her knees, then got her in the ribs.
"Rose!" Zain calls, but Victor had his wits about him again and slams his rifle into Zain's shoulder. He backs away before any human or creature to make a move to disarm him, his rifle trained on them from the distance.
"It's Thorn's kill, don't get in the way," he said with a grin.
'Dammit!' Zain thought, trying to think of a way around Victor without being shot dead. But he couldn't do anything, no option that could have him protecting Rose from Thorn's vicious kicks without Victor interfering. For each kick, he felt them like he was receiving them instead; something that doesn't ever happen for him. Though somehow, an idea came to him...
"Hmph." Thorn delivers a final kick that has Rose roll hard into a large tree, laying there in painful exhaustion. "Futile and weak of you to attack in pure rage. But I suppose that it's all part of the fun." She looks to the raptor she shot. "With the pack leader dead and next in line about to be killed, I'd say that the pack will be in a daze." Thorn laughs as she looks back at Rose, who was trying to get to an upright position. She couldn't seem to figure where her hands should be, nor if she was laying face-down or on her back. "It should be easy to pick them all off, even though it isn't as much fun."
She started laughing, smirking to herself in that gloat she usually had for every win. Though she sobered when Rose herself starts to laugh; hacking and still delirious in her pain, but laughing in amusement. Thorn narrows her eyes as she tries to figure what should be so amusing to her cousin.
"Boy, and I thought I was naive," Rose said when Thorn was just about to conclude that she was laughing in pain-induced insanity. "Ack... You did such a number on me..." She somehow found herself sitting up.
"What did you mean by what you said?" Thorn said, a sort of command driven by confusion for those rare times. How can she be naive, when she had won this fight? "I'm about to kill you, and you call me naive. Just how bad did you get your brain knocked around in our little play-fight?" She growls when Rose laughs low again, making her kick the girl in retaliation. Rose gave a cry that didn't even sound human, more like a weak imitation of a dolphin. "You have nothing to laugh about."
"I d-do." Rose's eyes waters from the kick, but she somehow kept a smirk. "Now, I w-will give you credit... You did shoot down the leader." She grabs onto a root and drags a foot underneath her, though she couldn't get herself standing up yet. "But what the hell gave you the impression that a human was going to lead a velociraptor pack?"
"...What?" For once, her conclusion of how things went were somehow mislaid by the evidence. Rose finally stands on her two feet, able to meet Thorn's gaze.
"I was never to be some leader. Had you expected me to be the next Tarzan? No human will ever become the leader of any raptor pack - I'm lucky to be alive at all." She smiles, showing the amusement and perhaps a little pity as though she knew what was to come next. "I am only a member of a pack. My pack."
In her confusion, Thorn never saw the movement coming in from behind her, of the new leader coming in to protect his family. She only heard the movement of crunching leaves and turns in time to greet the attack face-to-face. She never got the chance to scream.
Zain and Lizzy rushes in by the time Sirius had backed away from his kill, trumpeting out the triumph as the leader that rushed to the aid of a fellow raptor. Weary of the raptor but more worried about Rose, they edge along the clearing and reach the girl as she slowly slides back down to the ground. She isn't losing her conscious, but she certainly couldn't make much movement after all the beating she took for the day.
"...Is.. Okaa..?" she said when Lizzy attempts to pull her sister away from the tree, surprising her friends.
"...She's still alive, but I think that a round got her heart," Zain said; he has no regret for the beast dying, seeing as a raptor had killed Roger, and quite a good number of humans had been killed and eaten when they were created. Though it did hurt him a little to tell Rose of the dying of the raptor, for she is as close to it as a human can get with a creature.
"I need to see her." Determination crosses her face, and Zain could see that there'd be nothing to stop her short of knocking her out. Lizzy makes to object; she knew her sister inside and out in their younger years, and the original Rose couldn't even stay with a dying cat, too emotional to do so.
"We'll get you there." Zain shrugs at Lizzy when looks at him in surprise. "I don't think a t-rex can stop her, Liz, so let's just get her there to be with the creature that saved her in the beginning." Lizzy can only nod slowly.
"What happened to Victor..?" Rose asks as Zain and Lizzy walks her along with her arms around their shoulders.
"Oh, a little cunning from me, a few rounds from Mily," Zain said in mock modesty. "I made a break for the clearing you were in, and as he tried to fire at me, Mily did her little impersonation of Jesse James with her guns. Got his wrists real bad, so we didn't have to worry about him holding his rifle any longer. Though as soon as that raptor left the group to the rescue, the rest of them flocked onto Victor." For once, Zain only gave the quick and clean version in his own way.
"Then I am not joining in on their feeding. I am not a cannibal yet." Somehow, that made the three of them laugh weakly. It was just as unlikely for Rose to go cannibal as for the moon to be made of cheese.
The laugh dies instantly when they got to the raptor nest. Mily looks up from her work on Jiraz, and Kyle is oddly crouching next to the raptor, though it isn't so strange for Billy to do the same. Rose stumbles away from her supports and kneels in front of Okaa.
"Oh Okaa..." Rose gently rubs the raptor's eye ridges, hoping that the raptor isn't dead. Somehow, Okaa opens an eye to look at the human, the eye already clouding. Feeling useless, all Rose could do was rub the raptor's ridges and give her weak version of a raptor croon, trying to imprint on the raptor that she's hurting and sorry, but happy that, despite landing on the island of hell, she knew of the velociraptor's potential to go beyond just hunting and killing for survival. That they accepted a human as one of their own. Rose bent forward, ignoring the screaming pain from her ribs to touch her forehead to the raptor's. "I love you..."
With a soft sigh, the raptor closes her eye for the final time and gives a soft croon that fades in her last breath.
Feeling a breath along her neck, Rose turns enough to see Sirius had joined her in Okaa's passing, in his own way. He nuzzles into her hair, though Rose makes no attempt to give any indication of it other than reach over for a brief rub on his own eye ridge. He moves off after a satisfied snort to search for what may remain of the kill. Velociraptors are indeed intelligent creatures, but they haven't the humans' concept of regret, loss and pain of the death of a loved one.
As she gets pulled away from the raptor, she reaches around and grabs a hold of Zain's shirt. That surprises him, but he merely helps her back onto her feet. "I think I'm ready to go back to the human world..."
Lizzy smiles lightly at the news, though it might have been better if it was on Rose's own terms. Mily grins and looks at Jiraz, who blinks at the sudden joy expressed by both of them.
"Gee, I dun know," Zain said in a light tone, looking over at the raptors that are, after all the excitement was over and done with, going on about their business. "Coming back to the civilized world means a coverage on your life here on the island... Possibly psychologists attempting to crawl into your head, not to mention that people will try to force you into counseling. And the reporters!"
"They'll be chasing you from one block to another," Jiraz manages to say with a small laugh.
"I think I can deal with that. After all, I am the Raptor Girl..." She laughs, but it stops as she found that it hurts more than she anticipated. "But I might be able to tolerate a doctor for awhile..."
"Good to hear. 'Cause you need one," Zain said, still with that light tone. But he hasn't let go of her since he helped her to her feet, though he can later say that she was having to hang onto something or else fall to the ground.
"What's going to happen with Thornara's little enterprise?" Billy said, glancing in the direction where he knew where Thorn lays somewhere.
"That's something to figure out when we get back," Zain answers for both Lizzy and Rose. "But for now, let's concentrate on getting back to that so-called civilized world of ours. Details later."
Rose closes her eyes for a minute, and a rush of wind flutters her drying hair as Levine lands on her shoulder. The dimorphadon has already claimed the human as its feeder and mother. She gives a very slight smile as she nods. "Yeah, we'll deal with the rest of stuff later..."
Wow, I feel sad as I realize just how close I am to closing this story. o.o I'm saddened by the passing of Okaa, even though she's only a fictional character. I am sorry for the long wait on this chapter. There's a sob story, but you know something? I'm pretty sure none of you care as long as I'm still alive and writing. Lol. Anywho, stay tuned for the possible final chapter of this story, or possible further development of it. Which ever comes first. XD Comment and send those reviews!!