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They left a phone number.
Ian doesn’t really know what to do with that. Well, he knows what to do with the phone number, theoretically, only needs to bring himself to be able to, but emotionally. Emotionally, he doesn’t know anything anymore.
He used to have his life in order, and he knows it wasn’t healthy, he’d have to be stupid not to know his life wasn’t healthy before, and he thinks it’s fair to say he’s about as far from stupid as it gets. But there’s knowing a thing and there’s actually working on your issues, and he’s spent his entire adult life trying to leave his issues blithely unacknowledged.
And that was before the T-Rex.
Now, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s not that he wasn’t always anxious, all the time-- he was. He constructed a whole persona to distract from it, acted too cool for school, flirted socially as much as in earnest, projected everything he could to throw people off of the fact that Ian Malcolm is perhaps the most anxious man he knows. So anxious that he devoted his life to studying the many ways the world could kill him, the probability of it all and the ways the universe had of throwing probability out the window. He mentally ran calculations on the likeliest disasters, and usually on the unlikeliest as well, in his head, all the time. He was never not thinking about how things could go wrong, but if he could make it math, he could live with it. He could accept anything if he could make it fit the pattern, there was comfort in a pattern.
The T-Rex didn’t fit into any patterns he’d given himself, before Isla Nublar.
He doesn’t know how to live with this. He will, because the alternative is unthinkable, when he thought he was going to die-- first, that he would be killed outright, that it would be worth it if Alan could save the kids, but that he would be killed outright. Second, that the sepsis would take him, there in the bunker, that the last thing he’d see or hear would be John Hammond, which he’d considered a worse fate than he deserved, all things considered. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t have answers, and he doesn’t like living without answers, or at the very least a good working hypothesis.
He’s used to being on the move, not just mentally but physically. He’s used to pacing his office, or the front of a lecture hall, used to being active, and-- and yes, so he was a workaholic, so the lack of balance in his life contributed to destroying a couple of marriages, so he was always traveling and working and focusing on untangling the universe, but now… now he can’t even walk more than a few steps at a time on crutches, can barely move at all when he gets out of his PT, and the painkillers and fatigue have destroyed his concentration, taken away the mental world he might have retreated to, his safety in numbers.
So to speak.
If he hadn’t spectacularly bombed at those prior relationships, maybe he could have called one of his exes, but… even his most amicable ex wife, he could never ask her to take care of him like this, not after all he knows he’s already done, the broken trusts and the strained affections. He wants nothing more, in the state he’s in now, than to crawl home to somebody. To be able to hold his children in his arms, when he wakes up screaming from nightmares where it’s them in the jeep, dreams where he doesn’t act, where he’s frozen, where he takes too long calculating, where he has to see…
He’d love to hold any of them, to feel them vital and alive and full of energy and bury his nose in their hair the way he did when they were tiny little things, and he can’t. First, because none of his ex wives would agree to take him in the way he is now. Second, most importantly, because they shouldn’t have to see him like this. Not the leg-- it’s hard, but it’s life, it’s his new life-- but the screaming and the crying in the middle of the night and the way he can’t hold himself together, the panic attacks, the way he’s still learning what will set him off and send him back there. Times he freezes stock still and stares off into the distance at another world, and it could be long minutes of silent panic before he recovers himself, before he can be a father again, and you can’t freeze up and exist in another world when you’re watching kids, you can’t.
It’s too much. He doesn’t want them to see him like this.
Besides, he can’t explain, they can’t understand, what he went through… Hammond’s covering it all up, he starts talking about dinosaurs and they think he’s lost his mind completely. He doesn’t need to run the calculations on the probability for that-- the most amicable ex wife in the world would be slamming some severe restrictions on his time with his kids, if he started spouting off about dinosaurs. The doctors who fixed him up don’t even know what they were fixing, anything he’s said while in and out of sedation and on heavy painkillers, they haven’t really given weight to.
Alan and Ellie, though, they left him a phone number.
Alan and Ellie, they know. They know.
Alan and Ellie, it’s impossible to believe he’d known them so briefly. He feels so much when he thinks about them. It’s not just that they survived together, a thing so few people have seen, have lived through, it’s not just the adrenaline and the fear and the relief. It’s…
The thing is, Ian’s always had a thing for brains.
It doesn’t hurt that they’re both very attractive, and he would have flirted with both of them regardless, because that’s part of who he tries to be to people, he tries to be charming and social that way, it just might not have meant something if they hadn’t been who they are.
He likes anyone who’s smarter than he is-- or, barring that, as ‘smarter’ is hard to find, he likes anyone who can do something he can’t do, who knows something he doesn’t know. Smart in a different direction, skilled in new arenas. And he likes to be able to play the expert in turn, sure he does. There’s no better seduction technique than to lean in close to someone and teach them something they didn’t know before, because there’s no more attractive quality in a person than a mind open to learning, eager for information, hungry to expand and grow and discover. Ian? He’s insatiable. He likes his partners to be the same.
It was enough to get his interest going, that the two of them should be the top of their field, both on their individual merits and as a team. To see them problem-solving, taking risks, working with the living, breathing reality of what had always been more mental exercise, no longer simply studying the long-dead… to see them outside the usual comfort zone he might have imagined went with their work, beating the odds-- he knew, intimately, the length of his odds, their odds…
He wants to call. He’s not sure what gives him the right, but he wants to call.
He lived through it too. Maybe that’s all it takes, maybe that’s all they all need. They have each other, true. They have each other, and Hammond has his grandkids, and they have each other-- how irresponsible, to bring them! But he has them and they understand and they know , the way Alan and Ellie have been able to go home and to know . Ian desperately needs to talk to someone who will know.
He calls.
---/-/---
Travel is even more excruciating than he’d anticipated, which just goes to show after everything, Ian Malcolm is still capable of optimism. At least, as much as he ever was. Maybe that’s not saying much.
Still, it’s worth it, to come home to a place where he isn’t alone. To have been invited, invited eagerly, even. Alan and Ellie meet him at the airport, find him struggling with the cane he’s new to-- preferable to crutches, but he doesn’t exactly feel cool, doesn’t feel attractive, doesn’t feel himself. He’d managed his rolling suitcase alone, before, as well as his carry on bag, but he’d assumed he would be able to do the same getting off the plane, and he’s barely keeping himself upright with his big soft-sided briefcase… He might not feel cool, but he’s not too proud to let Alan take it, to let Ellie take the suitcase.
She leans up to kiss his cheek. He finds himself glancing over to Alan when she does, a series of half-connected memories tugging at him. There’s something he can’t read, in the way Alan looks at him, and yet he thinks he knows what it means. Not because he’s ever seen a look like it, but because he thinks it’s a shadow of what he feels. Alan and Ellie may have each other, but still… to only be able to talk to each other… They might not need him as keenly as he thinks he needs them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to talk to him. There’s something that connects them.
“Ian, it’s so good to see you.” Ellie squeezes his arm.
“Hey.” Alan’s voice is soft. His hand wraps around the back of Ian’s neck, firm but gentle, just a moment.
“Well aren’t you both a sight for sore eyes.” Ian smiles, looking between them.
“Well.” Alan smiles back. “We try.”
Does he remember, the first few things they said to each other, the way his voice had barely risen above a whisper when he’d said those same words on the helicopter? Ian remembers it all too well, not only those moments of danger and blinding pain and imminent death, but the way it had been before then. The way he had flirted, and the way they had responded-- Ellie, charmed but taken. Alan, cautious, but… but something.
Alan walks at his bad side, close, something defensive in his posture. Ellie walks a little further away, he has to use his cane on the good side, counter-intuitive as it had seemed at first, the right distance to keep from knocking into it, and also to keep anyone else from doing so. They take up a lot of space walking three abreast, but he feels safer than he’s felt in a long time, and he doesn’t have to worry about strangers knocking him off his feet.
They insist on putting him in the front seat, for the leg room, not that it’s much leg room, tall as he is and fussy as his leg’s become. Still, he pushes the seat all the way back to get as much of it as he can, leans it back so that he can converse as easily with the back as with the front. Ellie leans over to stroke the hair back from his forehead when he does-- again, Ian glances to Alan, sees no indication that this might be a problem.
They catch up a little in the car, but it’s superficial. The real stuff they save. At the house, they get him installed on the sofa, and Ian looks around and wonders how many dinosaur things they must have put away. He wonders how many they’d left out before they’d asked him to come and stay. There’s a fossilized shell on the wall, mounted in a shadow box, about as unterrifying as a fossil can get, and a couple of imprints of leaves in a stone on a shelf, but there’s nothing with teeth.
“Do you drink white wine or red wine with pizza?” Ellie asks, phone in one hand and menu in the other.
“I’d better not.” Ian shakes his head, muscle at his jaw tightening. “The, uh… the meds for my, yeah.”
And the fact that it’s attractive, the idea of crawling into a bottle and not crawling out, the idea that it would stop all these thoughts. He doesn’t know if it’s true, but it feels true, in the stupid part of his brain that’s just so tired of dealing with the trauma and the pain and the constant, constant thinking.
“Root beer?” Alan says, and Ellie nods.
“Any preference on toppings?”
“No meat. Anything else is fine.”
She orders a half-veggie, half-cheese pizza and a two-liter of root beer, and joins them on the couch to wait, to hold off on unpacking the big stuff until they won’t be interrupted, but…
To wait, together. Alan sitting at his bad side, Ellie sitting on his good side. A pillow on the coffee table, to rest his leg up on.
Ellie still gets out the wine glasses, for the root beer. They eat in front of Jeopardy! and shout out questions to the answers, and it’s comfortable. He’s not sure what to do with how comfortable it is-- enough that his appetite is more than he thought it would be, more than it has been since. Alan and Ellie don’t keep track of their Jeopardy! scores, but Ian does. It’s about a dead heat between the three of them. He doesn’t think he can begin to tell them both how sexy that is.
“So how have you been?” Ellie asks at last, with dinner cleared away and the television off.
“Well… I can walk with a cane now, mostly.” He shrugs. “I’m alive, which is… good. But life is… different. It’s-- You know.”
“You’re still there sometimes.” Alan nods.
“Never know when it’s going to happen. I, uh… I don’t do well when it rains. And I’m contemplating becoming a vegetarian.”
“Someone put a hand on my shoulder from behind, the last time we were out at the site, and…” Ellie shudders.
“I’m still unearthing a full skeleton. I’ve seen how she moves, and… there’s no getting away from it.” Alan adds, and at some point, the three of them had all huddled closer, down in the middle of the couch, the two of them pressed in tight to Ian’s shoulders.
“I don’t know how you can do it.”
“Has to get done.”
“Does it?”
“There’s nothing else I can do. And anyway… it isn’t just Ellie and me. A lot of jobs ride on us. The dig can’t fold now. Besides… as long as Hammond isn’t going ahead with this… crazy thing, we’ve still got a place in the world with what we do.”
“The genie’s out of the bottle. If Hammond doesn’t, someone else will.” Ian says. Haven’t they all been thinking it?
“After everything that happened…”
“After everything that happened, someone else will. If we don’t stop them. Kick up enough fuss, the fact there’s no way kids don’t die if someone goes forward with this, get, uh, get someone in power to-- legislate this kind of thing…”
“Ian… we can’t possibly do that.” Ellie says slowly.
“We all signed NDAs.”
“I almost died. I’m still one of the lucky ones. Hammond’s grandkids were there, he, he can’t--”
“But someone else will.”
Ian sighs, head tipping back to hit the back of the couch. Two hands steal into his, one small and slender, one big and square, but both with the same calluses. He squeezes, and doesn’t think about what it means.
“Okay. Let, you know, let ‘em. Let ‘em. We can’t let this happen to the-- to the world. I mean… we can’t.”
“Ian… the lawyers will come after you.”
“What can they take from me? My reputation, my career? My career’s at a standstill, I get maybe an hour’s focus out of the day that’s good enough to write with. I can’t travel to lecture. I can’t talk to my exes or my family if I can’t talk about what happened to me on that island. No one knows what happened to me, the doctors who put me back together couldn’t decide what they believed happened to me… I can’t live like this, and I can’t live knowing someone out there is trying to start it all up again and I’m sitting-- you know? I’m sitting here, doing, uh, doing nothing? I can’t. I can’t let this happen to other people. Families with kids. I can’t-- I can’t do nothing, when I could do something, for this.”
“Ian... Hammond funds our dig.”
He sighs. Ellie squeezes his hand, he squeezes both of them again, Alan squeezes back. Hammond funds the dig, which affects not only their own livelihoods and reputations, but everyone on their team. People with student loans, families and kids, mortgages, aging parents, all the things that people have that they need to pay for. It’s a web of people to be responsible for, and if Hammond shut down the gig and destroyed their professional reputations, everyone on the team suffers, and so too their families.
“I understand.” He nods. “Yeah. Yeah. I understand.”
“Do what you have to do.” Alan squeezes his hand even more firmly, between both his own this time. “Stay here with us. Whatever happens…”
“There are things we can’t do, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be behind you.” Ellie’s head drops down to his shoulder.
“You’ve got your people to look out for.”
“Yeah. But we’ve got you to look out for, too.” She says.
“You don’t have to look after me.”
“Ian.” Alan’s voice is barely more than a whisper, Ian has to turn towards him. His hand is still being held. “You saved me and the kids. You’re the reason we even had a chance to get to safety. And the entire time we were out there I was sure you died doing it.”
“Yeah, well, there were a few times I wasn’t so sure myself.”
“What I’m saying is, yes, we do. I do. You could have stayed in the jeep--”
“I really couldn’t have.”
“See?” And there’s something in his smile Ian can’t yet read, soft and sad and strange, as he looks past Ian’s shoulder to Ellie, and they communicate something silent between themselves.
“Oh, I know.” She says, and the hand not holding his reaches up to pat his chest. “He’s a real keeper.”
Ian’s eyebrows slide up a quarter inch. “Oh, uh, am I? A keeper?”
“If we can keep you.” Alan says.
“I’ll think about it.” He smiles.
There’s something hanging in the room over them, a half-spoken promise. Whatever it is, for his first night in Montana, it’s enough.
They put him to bed in the guest room, and it’s nice. It’s too quiet, but the mattress is firm beneath a pillowtop, and there’s a big extra pillow to prop his leg up with, depending on what position he finds himself shifting into. No reminders of not-so-dead monsters up on the walls, no too-lush plants that remind him of the jungle, only blue walls, black and white photography prints, soft sheets…
He still wakes up screaming, of course, clutching at his thigh when it flares up in pain that lances through muscle and goes straight to the bone, but it’s not the pain, it’s the slow-to-fade images. It’s seeing that thing take Alan anyway, and the kids. It’s seeing it come for him and being unable to run because somehow in the dream his leg is already ruined before it reaches him. Feeling the tear of skin and muscle but not being thrown, not being released, being…
Whatever happens in dreams, he wakes up before it finishes happening, clammy with sweat and heart pounding, struggling for breath, his own cries echoing in his ears. But this time, there’s a knock on his door only moments after.
“Ian?” Alan’s voice, urgent but gentle through the door.
“You can come in.” He manages. It would be good to see him, to banish the picture in his mind’s eye.
Alan doesn’t turn on the light, just lets the light from the hall offer enough illumination. Enough to see him by, though, flannel pajama pants and a faded tee shirt, some university logo on it. Ian’s sitting up, he doesn’t remember sitting up but he is sitting up. He feels like he might fall at any moment, shaky and weak as he is. His heart is still hammering, his chest aching. His arms braced against the mattress and trembling with the task of keeping him upright, until Alan is sitting next to him with an arm around his back, pulling him into a hug. No judgment and no questions-- he knows the answers. Or close enough.
“Sorry, uh, sorry, I just…”
“Yeah. You don’t have to be sorry. We’ve both… we both have.”
“We’ve got room for one more.” Ellie says from the doorway. Ian glances over, and isn’t sure if he should be looking. Then again, she invited him to sleep in their bed, maybe it’s not too much, to look at her silhouette in her oversized sleep shirt, the shape of her long legs, her messy hair.
“Makes it easier.” Alan nods. “Come on.”
“Well… couldn’t hurt to try.” Ian nods as well, a little slow, a little hesitant. He doesn’t particularly want to go back to sleep, wants nothing more than to not sleep. He’s still on meds, enough that he can’t help but sleep at night but not enough to dull the nightmares. At first they’d just knock him out, now… now there’s no avoiding it. But easier… well, they both seem okay. Not perfect, but okay. Suppose he just says yes to them, suppose he learns how to be okay?
Alan helps him to his feet, walks with him the way he had when they’d left the island, though this time Ian can take more of his weight than he had on that trip to the helicopter, and getting into bed is a lot easier. He’s not sure where they mean to put him, but Ellie has grabbed his pillows, and she settles them dead center.
It feels good, settling in with one pillow under his head and one under his knee, to feel the two of them settle in close by. Alan on his bad side, and Ellie on his good side, same as at the airport. Both of them radiating warmth, a sense of safety.
In the morning, he’s the last to wake-- only does wake to the smell of coffee, and the question of whether he likes his leftover pizza hot or cold. Alan and Ellie are both showered and dressed.
“Cold.” He blinks, fumbling for his glasses first to one side and then to the other, before realizing they’re in the other room. “Didn’t realize there was a… ‘nother way to eat pizza for breakfast.”
“Good choice.” Ellie nods. “I should warn you, this house’s idea of a hot breakfast is usually those little microwave oatmeal packets…”
“Or toast.” Alan defends. It’s not much of a defense, Ian doesn’t think.
“Ah-huh, and who normally cooks?”
“Well… neither of us.” She shrugs. “We don’t have much of a kitchen at the dig site-- at any dig site. We’re not here that often, we’re either traveling to dig or we’re traveling to conferences or we’re traveling a lecture circuit…”
“Okay, so, me. I cook.” Ian says.
“You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning, for breakfast.”
“Oh, I see, ah, I see what I’ve gotten myself involved in. Would you like me to teach you my secret for the, um, now this is going to be the most perfect omelette, that you’ve ever had. For future reference. I can teach you sometime for dinner and you’ll be ready for any breakfast.”
The two of them exchange a look, moving to the bed. Ellie piles their pillows up behind Ian, and Alan hands over the cup of coffee he’d been carrying, the aroma of which Ian had woken to.
“We’ll buy eggs.” Ellie promises, and kisses his cheek.
For a moment, Ian thinks Alan is about to do the same. The moment passes, but the thought remains.
He doesn’t move back into the guest room.
He does teach them his secret to a perfect omelette.
He sleeps better, between them, than he ever expected. The nightmares come, but it’s easier. And it’s not as often.
When he does next wake up in the middle of the night, it’s his leg, not any dream he can remember. Alan’s hands gently move his own out of the way, before digging in, a careful massage, like the ones he used to get after physical therapy sessions. Ellie kneels up at the head of the bed, dabs at his forehead with a corner of her nightshirt.
“Oh, honey, no, I’ll… I’ll get you sweaty.” He protests weakly. He’s not sure when he started calling them ‘honey’, but it feels natural enough that he’s sure he already has been doing.
“I get sweaty all the time.” She smiles. “Sometimes it’s fun.”
“Mm, not a lot of opportunity for, ah, aha, fun sweaty with me here, maybe I should apologize for that.”
The two of them exchange another one of those glances over him.
“That depends…” Alan says.
“Depends?”
“On whether you feel up to taking both of us.”
For a moment, he really doesn’t know how to respond. He can’t quite say he’s surprised-- in the time he’s been staying with them, they’ve been heading this way, haven’t they? Standing a little too close, smiling so warmly, touches traded, little things done for each other, the way it’s felt to be a part of it all, a part of the rhythms of life in their house. And yet somehow he hadn’t expected this, this moment. Hadn’t thought Alan would be the one to voice it, and not quite so cheekily, but here they are.
“C’mere.” Ian says. Beckons him in. Alan lies back down, though one hand lingers on his thigh, leans in close so that Ian can kiss him.
It’s a first kiss, the kind Ian thinks a first kiss should be. Soft. Inviting. There’s no pressure in it, only at long last the sense that they’re both stepping into something. Something he wonders if they haven’t both thought about since the helicopter in to the island. Haven’t all three thought about. Behind him, Ellie settles back down as well, so that it’s easy to turn, to find her lips with his at last as well. To feel the softness of them, the welcoming warmth of her.
“What do you think about tomorrow, for taking both of you?” He asks, settling back down with one hand to reach for each of them, to cup one cheek on each side. “I don’t think I could manage just this minute.”
“Take your time, we’re not going anywhere.”
“Well. Next week we’ve got to go back to the dig site… but we’ll be back.”
They each snuggle in against a shoulder. Alan’s hand stays wrapped around his thigh, the warmth of his touch soothing the ache in the muscle. Ellie’s comes to rest over his chest, reassuring. Safety in numbers.
By the time they do go back, he’ll know his way around the house well enough to be fine without them. Steady enough on his cane he could get out of the house and get around, do grocery shopping. Get chores done. Hold down the fort during their long hours on the dig.
House-husband-- well, house-boyfriend. It’s the kind of thing he thinks would have driven his old self nuts with boredom. His workaholic self. After all the time he’d spent unable to do anything, though, this is nice. Just to move around and do things again, to have an hour a day, in bits and pieces, to write. To plan his next moves, to dust and do laundry and work around his cane, cook meals… he likes the idea of that. To prep meals they can take out with them to the site, before they go. To make things nice for when they get back… Until he’s ready to get back to work, the kind of work he’s used to, the kind he’s been missing, the kind he thinks the world needs him to do, it’s not so bad to be able to at least do things. To feel like maybe, somehow, he makes their home a little more complete and a little more happy.