Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Jurassic Park and Jurassic World characters. I simply borrow them to have some fun.

Author's Note: More filling in the gaps between FK and Dominion. This scene came to me after I watched the extended version of Dominion. You may be able to guess where this is going, but for now, just enjoy the ride.

The Missing Chapters of Maisie, Owen, and Claire

"No ice rinks in Yosemite Valley"

.*.*.*.

"Country fried steak and eggs," Claire peaked her eyes over the top of her menu.

"Nope!" replied Maisie.

Claire arched an eyebrow with an affected smirk. "Moons Over My Hammy?"

Maisie always giggled at the ridiculous name. "Nope."

"Oh I've got it!" Claire declared with triumph. "Eggs benedict!" And Maisie's face twisted into the exact look of disgust she expected.

"Blech…never again," said Maisie. Iris always made her eggs benedict. It was the one American breakfast dish she claimed to be sophisticated and posh enough for a proper English girl. Maisie hated it – and Claire knew it.

"All right, I give up," she replied, laughing. "What are you having?"

Maisie shot her a pointed look and in her best 'well-duh' voice said, "The Grand Slam, of course!"

Claire nodded with a knowing grin. Owen had created an absolute monster fan of baseball…and of Denny's. It just never failed: whenever they went out on one of their supply trips, Claire always tried to make time to see an exhibit, visit a museum, or stop by some local landmark, and then go out for lunch afterwards. And despite being surrounded by a limitless selection of Californian restaurants and cuisines, Maisie always insisted they find a Denny's. Today was no different. They'd stopped at an antique mall in Merced on their way back from a Grocery Outlet in Atwater, and inevitably found a Denny's for lunch.

It was the middle of December and by now all of Owen's shipments for the day would have arrived, been signed for, and unloaded. By the time she and Maisie made it back to their build site, any trucking vendor involved in today's haul will have been long gone. Since ending their west-coast road trip just after Thanksgiving, Owen and Claire were careful to have Maisie away from the cabin site on days when deliveries were scheduled to arrive. As promised, they'd come clean to the girl about the real reason for their prolonged search for lumber, and then equally up front about this new safety measure — the fewer people who saw Maisie at what would be their permanent place of residence, the better. And this included even the most down-to-earth ranchers who lent their pickups to local trucking companies to haul a few pallets of lumber to Yosemite Valley.

To her credit, Maisie insisted that she understood the danger in people like Dr. Wu coming to look for her. She'd even figured out on her own–and Claire had openly confirmed–why they always drove at least a town or two away to restock on food and essentials: so they weren't a recognizable fixture in the neighboring village across the bridge from their build site. So off she went, somewhat reluctantly, on these trips that were mostly designed to get her away from the house, but she wasn't super salty about it. And Claire's little "educational stops" and willingness to indulge in Maisie's great love of cheap diner food made her feel a bit less like a freak.

"Grand Slam it is," Claire was saying as the waitress came over to take their orders and the menus disappeared. And then they sat in the sort of awkward silence that tends to result from having spent hours together on the road and exhausted all topics of conversation already…well, almost all. Maisie glanced down, nervously fidgeting with her fork, and Claire keyed in on the jitters instantly. "Hey," she said. "What's up, you ok?"

"Mmm-hmm!" she nodded a little too quickly.

Claire tilted her head, "You sure?"

Maisie's mouth curled into a half-frown as she bit her bottom lip. "Actually," she took a deep breath, "There's…something I…I should probably tell you."

In an instant a thousand possible scenarios flew into Claire's brain, each one a bit scarier (and more unrealistic) than the last. But she took a deep breath and pretended she was Owen. "Oh yeah?" she asked, trying hard to sound as nonchalant as possible. "What's that?"

Maisie seemed not to have noticed Claire's heightened anxiety as she was preoccupied with her own. She should have realized earlier than this. After all, there was a calendar in the camper. But she barely kept track of the days of the week anymore, nevermind…well, what she'd realized this morning. "Promise you won't be cross?"

This response didn't help Claire's nerves one bit. "Nnnno?" she responded. She couldn't promise that. "Why," she asked, "have you done something wrong?" The potential scenarios here were driving her a little batty. What had happened? Had Maisie seen someone she recognized? Did she have an allergy she'd never told them about? Had Iris somehow found them and been in touch with her old ward this entire time?

"I don't…think so?" Maisie responded with a mousy little squeak, and this time Claire shed the facade.

"Oh my gosh, Mais. What is it?"

A bit startled, Maisie shrank back in her booth, but realized she'd stalled long enough. "Well…" she started carefully. "The thing is…actually…today is…" she gulped and met Claire's worried gaze as she finally spit it out. "My birthday."

Claire's eyes went wide as saucers. "What?!"

"Don't-be-cross?" Maisie added quickly, leaning forward with her little hands folded tightly on the table top.

"Oh sweetheart," Claire reached forward and grabbed her hands in a tight squeeze. "Of course I'm not cross!" And this was only partly true, for she wasn't mad at Maisie. Just herself. Why hadn't they asked the girl months ago when her friggin' birthday was?! "Why didn't you tell us?"

Maisie had to shrug. "Honestly? I just sort of…lost track I guess. I mean all the days kind of…run together." Claire nodded. She could certainly relate. "I only realized when I saw the newspaper in the antique shop. The one the man was reading at the till?" She mimed the spread of the headline in the air with her hands, as if imagining the exact angle from which she'd spotted the date on the paper behind the cash register. "December 11th," she said. Then, in an embarrassed, sing-songy tone, "I'm eleven."

Claire slid out of the booth and moved to give her daughter a fierce hug from across the table. "Happy birthday, Maisie," she whispered, swallowing back the frog in her throat.

"Thanks," the girl whispered back, returning the hug.

Sitting back in her seat, Claire straightened up. "Can't wait to tell Owen," she said. "We are gonna celebrate!"

"Oh…n-no, that's all right," Maisie rushed to explain. And Claire gave her a strange look. "I don't need a—that is, I only just–"

"Maisie, it's your birthday," Claire insisted. "Of course we're gonna celebrate."

Maisie gave her a timid, uncertain shrug which Claire couldn't quite interpret.

"D'you have any ideas what you want? Maybe something you'd like to do?" she tried.

Maisie shrugged again, "Not really."

Claire frowned. "What about your grandfather? What did you guys do for your birthday?"

A far away look alighted in Maisie's eyes, but it wasn't exactly sad. More reflective. In truth, she had been thinking about what she wanted for her birthday–it just wasn't something she'd quite figured out how to say. "Well," she started slowly. "There was always a great big cake. And tons of food. It would take me and Iris a whole week to eat it all."

Claire chuckled. "I bet," she said as the waitress brought over their food. "What else?"

"Hmm," Maisie chewed her lip thoughtfully. "When I was eight, I got my pony," she said, cutting her fork into her grand slam, while Claire almost choked on her BLT.

"Your…your pony," she repeated slowly.

"Mmm-hmm," said Maisie with a mouthful of pancake and syrup. "I named her Cretasceous. She was a white welsh."

"Uh huh…" said Claire.

"And when I was nine, Grandfather put in our pool."

Claire's face flushed. "Your…pool! That's…wow–"

Maisie added hurriedly, "I didn't use it much. Though Iris did try to teach me water polo." She laughed at the memory of the older woman, dressed in her striped swim cap and full-body jumpsuit, trying to throw a buoyant soccer ball into a floating net.

"And…last year?" Claire was almost afraid to ask.

"Ice skating," said the girl.

"Oh!" Claire perked up. That was something they could do–

"In my backyard."

Her shoulders slumped again, but this time with amused resignation. "Right. I don't suppose there was a…pond or something that just…froze?"

Maisie gave an embarrassed chuckle, "He had a rink installed."

"Of course."

"Just a temporary one," she added, as if that made any difference. "It was only up till Christmas."

Claire sighed. What did she expect anyway? The Lockwood Manor might as well have been a satellite campus for Buckingham Palace. "Those sound like…amazing gifts, Mais," she said with a kind of defeated smile.

But Maisie shook her head. "Claire," she put down her fork and laid one hand atop the other. "I don't want an ice rink in Yosemite Valley," she explained with a bit of that uncanny maturity of hers that Claire had come to know well. "And honestly, the more I think about it…the more I think that was just Grandpa's way of trying to make me happy…while hiding me away."

Claire blinked back hot, stinging tears as she watched Maisie come to terms with more painful revelations about her past. She was right, of course. A pony? A pool? An ice rink? All good ways to make a little girl never want to leave a place. Such a smart kid, she thought, though in this case a bit too smart for her own good. "Well," Claire said at last. "Can you think of anything you always wanted to do? Something you couldn't do at the manor that we could do together?"

Maisie smiled at the kind offer which she–of course–had an answer for. Just not one she was ready to give. "Mmm…" she said slowly, "Well, I actually never…" – had a real birthday party! she desperately wanted to say. A real one with kids and ice cream, and cake, and pin-the-tail on the donkey, and hair braiding…and friends. But she knew it wasn't possible. First of all, she had no friends – only Owen and Claire. And if Maisie told them what she really wanted now, they would just feel guilty knowing they couldn't give it to her. So she thought quickly and came up with something less…complicated. "I never learned…" she started again and finally settled on, "how to ride a bike." Which was true.

Claire straightened up in her seat. "Oh! A bike?" She sounded relieved, and Maisie smiled. "Now that we can do," she gave the table a firm knock as if pounding a gavel with approval. "I'm sure Owen would love to teach you how to ride a bike."

Maisie hesitated. "Or…you could?" she asked hopefully.

And once more, Claire Dearing almost choked on a BLT, simultaneously shocked and quite moved by the girl's request. She'd wrestled enough already with the fact that Owen was clearly the "fun one" – what, with the baseball and the dino trivia and the 'Maisie grab me that jigsaw will ya?' kind of rapport they had – while she had remained the strict disciplinarian and educator. That Maisie wanted to do something like this with Claire just about made her whole year. "Or I could," she rasped, clearing her throat before she wept all over her lunch. "Ok. So we have a plan. We'll stop and get a cake on the way home – one that won't take us an entire week to eat –" Maisie chuckled. "We'll tell Owen it's your birthday, of course – he'sgonnabesoexcited – and then we'll go pick out a bike. The three of us. How's that sound?"

Maisie smiled before tucking into her pancakes once more. "Sounds perfect," she said softly, which again… was true.

.*.*.*.

Maisie had never actually picked out her own cake before. Her grandfather always had it designed and catered by some ritzy bakery that specialized in over-the-top wedding cakes and other such high-society fanfare. So when Claire stopped at a little bakery called Jantz and let her pick out a simple 6-inch round, iced with white buttercream and filled with chocolate pudding, she already knew it was gonna be the best birthday cake she'd ever tasted.

And it was for this reason that she now regretted her little lie back at Denny's. Maybe Claire would have felt bad knowing her real birthday wish, but she also would have understood. And she might've even talked to Owen and—no, Maisie chided herself for such 'fanciful thinking' (as Iris would have called it). The moment had passed, and Claire seemed so excited about teaching her to ride a bike, Maisie couldn't bring herself to come clean.

So on they drove in their station wagon, anxious to get back home with enough daylight left to have their little celebration. And as a consequence, Claire was driving so fast that when Maisie first saw a glimpse of the creature to their right, she half thought she'd imagined it. Staring out the window, transfixed by the woods and brambles speeding by, she peered more closely, seconds away from deciding–yes, she'd imagined it. And then she saw it again: a small, yellowish tail peeking out of the branches. "Claire!" she exclaimed so loudly, Claire actually yelped.

"What?! What?!" she cried, breaking by reflex and trying to maintain focus on the road while also glancing in the direction Maisie now pointed.

"Slow down, slow down!" pled the girl, holding in sight the now unmistakable animal that was jogging alongside them.

"Maisie, we're on the highway."

Maisie did a quick glance in both directions. "No one's passed in a while. Slow down!"

She did, reluctantly, and then she saw it too. "No," Claire whispered. "Oh, it can't be." But there was no mistaking it. Jogging beside them on two legs, zig zagging like prey being pursued by predator, was a young parasaurolophus.

Coming to a screeching halt, Claire slammed the breaks and pulled off on the shoulder. The squealing of the tires caused the animal to halt as well, and for a moment, the three of them just stared at each other: Maisie, Claire, and the parasaur jerking her head side-to-side like a bird trying to get a good look at their car.

"Whadyou mean?" asked Maisie, though she didn't take her eyes off the beautiful creature.

Claire shook her head and whispered quietly. "She's barely a hatchling." And her mind's eye flashed back on the last set of parasaurs that InGen's lab had transferred to her care, a few months before the end of Jurassic World's operation. As dinosaurs, even the juveniles were large, but with its stubby legs and cranial crest not yet formed, Claire could tell this parasaur couldn't be more than a few months out of her egg. And it had been nearly six months since all the original surviving species from the island had been set free. Slowly she turned her head toward Maisie who, this time, met her gaze. "This can't be one of the dinosaurs we set free," she rasped.

Maisie swallowed hard, dropping her own voice to match Claire's whisper. "What should we do?"

But the parasaur didn't give Claire time to answer, for she flicked her tail and jerked herself off in the direction they'd been heading, squawking again with that sick sea-lion bark she remembered from the island.

Maisie nearly leapt through the windshield. "Go! Go!"

"What?!"

"What're you waiting for?!"

"Maisie, we are not gonna follow it–"

"Of course we have to follow it!" she cried. "You said yourself, she's just a hatchling–"

"So?"

"SO, come on, Claire! Isn't this why you came to the manor in the first place? To protect the dinosaurs?"

"Maybe, but right now I'm more worried about protecting you."

Maisie closed her eyes with a frustrated growl. She was getting away. "Claire, please," she begged, knowing every second they stayed put gave them less of a chance of tracking the animal. "If we don't at least find out where she's going…what was the point of any of it?"

Claire's chest tightened as she beheld her daughter's watery gaze, knowing how much Maisie's heart would break if she didn't at least meet her halfway here. Knowing how much her heart would break too, if that happened. And then there was this matter of a parasaur hatchling this far south of Orick. Early reports in the initial months following the incident at Lockwood Manor had most of the herbivores being herded and contained near Big Rock National Park – nine hours from the Sierra Nevada build site Lowery had found for them. Was this the beginning? Massive exploitation of de-extinct animals? Illegal breeding operations? Was this parasaur hurt? Malnourished? Lost?

At last, in a wordless response, Claire slammed the station wagon into drive and sped in pursuit of the dinosaur, sure of only one thing: Owen was gonna kill her.