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This was the part where she was supposed to be relieved.
They’d all flown back to the States from the Dolomite Mountains as a group and dispersed once they’d landed in the nation’s capital; from there, another private plane had been arranged to get Owen, Claire, and Maisie back to their home on the other side of the country. They were about an hour into that flight, and Claire knew that she was supposed to be relieved. Maisie was back in their company, everyone was sore but (relatively) unscathed, and they’d be sleeping in their own beds later that night. Her heart rate was supposed to be returning to normal. The adrenaline was supposed to be waning. Her body wasn’t supposed to still be on high alert. But among all the chaos, Claire had forgotten that they weren’t the only ones who needed a ride back to the West Coast until they were loading the fourth passenger into the main cabin.
The cage containing the young velociraptor Maisie had affectionately named Beta was sitting on the end of one of the couches on the plane. She was tranquilized but not fully sedated – Xanax for dinosaurs, Owen had called it as he’d watched a paleo-veterinarian administer the drug just before boarding the second flight. There were so many people on the flight home from Europe that Beta had been sedated and placed in the cargo area of that plane. Claire would have preferred that location for the second flight, too.
Instead, Beta’s eerie, lizard-like eye traveled across the plane as she lay on the bottom of her cage, taking in her strange surroundings in her semi-conscious state, and Claire felt a wave of trepidation sweep across her stomach every time the raptor’s eye swept across her body. To make matters worse, Maisie sat on the couch right next to Beta’s cage, looking in at the dinosaur as if she were waiting for it to wake up and play with her like a puppy.
“Hey,” Owen said as he made his way down the aisle of the plane.
He’d been leaning against a counter across from the couch, supervising Maisie and Beta, but decided to come check in with Claire when he glanced back and saw her nervous eyes fixated on their daughter and the dinosaur. Claire was sitting straight up in one of a cluster of four seats, her hands clutching the armrests on either side. She’d claimed the one facing front and closest to the aisle, watching from afar. Owen took the one facing her, grabbing the armrests before he slowly lowered himself to the seat, and Claire knew from the way he moved that he was beginning to feel the consequences of their action-packed trip.
“You okay back here?” he asked. He didn’t really need to ask; he knew how she was feeling about their travel companion without her having to say a word.
“I just somehow didn’t realize getting her back would mean traveling with her…like this,” Claire explained, her hand pointing towards the cage to punctuate her final words.
“You were just on a helicopter with her literally strapped to my back!” Owen reminded her.
“We were trying to escape an atrium filled with three gigantic dinosaurs! There was too much going on to think about that then!” Claire argued back. “Plus she was a little more…restrained…on your back.” She quickly threw her arm out, pointer finger outstretched towards Maisie and yelled, “Don’t!”
Owen turned around to see what was happening and found Maisie with her hand halfway to Beta’s cage, as if she were going to try to reach in and pet her. She froze and looked back at them with a startled expression on her face as Claire yelled.
“She’s tranq’d,” Maisie reminded them.
“I don’t care; she’s still a dinosaur, so just…keep all appendages outside of the cage, please. Thank you,” Claire said quickly.
Maisie, still frozen in place, glanced at Owen with just a small movement of her eyes. She understood what Claire was saying and why she was saying it, but Owen was the animal expert on the plane. Claire noticed her eyes shifting over to Owen and sighed in frustration over Maisie seeking out a second opinion instead of simply listening to her.
Owen glanced back at Claire, knowing damn well that she would've caught that nearly imperceptible shift in Maisie's gaze. Sure enough, he discovered Claire looking at him, too. She raised her eyebrows at him, silently daring him to tell Maisie it was okay, and he, not for the first time, found himself caught between the two women in his life. Luckily for him, this one had an easy solution.
“Not a great idea, kiddo,” Owen said to Maisie with a small shake of his head.
Maisie dropped her hand back into her lap and peered back into the cage. “She looks scared,” she said.
“I’m sure she is, but she’ll be alright,” Owen insisted. “Never put your hands in a carnivore’s cage.”
“Sorry,” Maisie muttered. She put her elbow on her knee and rested her head in her palm, staring in at the dinosaur she felt a sort of kinship with. They were the same: Beta, born just from Blue, and she, born just from Charlotte. She wasn’t scared anymore, so the fact that Beta still was, the fact that Beta couldn’t understand they were safe now, and they were taking her back to her mother, tugged at the girl’s heart. “We’re gonna get you home,” she said softly.
“Thank you,” Claire whispered to Owen back in the seats.
“You weren’t wrong,” Owen said with a shrug.
“Well, this is boring,” Maisie declared a few minutes later, heading down the aisle towards Claire and Owen. She gestured to the empty seat by the window next to Claire and said, “I’m gonna take a nap.”
Despite what they’d just been through, nobody had seemed to sleep too well on the plane back from Italy. Claire clasped Maisie’s hand and said, “Why don’t you take the bedroom in the back of the plane? You’ll be more comfortable in there.”
“You sure you’re not just trying to get me away from the dinosaur?” Maisie asked with a laugh.
“Yes, though that is an added benefit to the bedroom,” Claire admitted with an innocent smile. “Go.” Her face sobered as she said, “Unless you feel like you need to stay with us.”
“I guess a bed does sound more comfortable than that chair,” Maisie agreed. “Okay.”
As Maisie headed towards the bedroom, Claire turned back to Owen and said, “I think this experience is going to give her unrealistic ideas about air travel.”
“It’s a hell of a first plane trip,” Owen agreed.
With a small groan, he moved from the seat across from Claire to the one next to her, pulling her attention away from Beta’s couch and towards him and the side of the plane. He held out his hand, and Claire accepted the invitation, entwining hers with his as she gingerly leaned back into her seat, her own body growing sore from recent events. They looked at each other for a while, not needing words but also not quite knowing what to say.
They'd thought about this, talked about this, countless times across the past four years before it finally happened - hushed, practical conversations by the fire after Maisie had gone inside for the night; fearful words whispered to one another in the dead of night when the near-permanent pits in their stomachs were keeping them awake. Despite Owen's belief that if someone ever found her, they'd never see her again, they'd always agreed they wouldn't let that happen without a fight. They'd hoped it was a fight that would never come, and the reality of that fight ended up being far greater than they'd ever imagined, but now that it'd come, and now that they'd won, their weary eyes swelled with emotion as they gazed at the only other person in the world who understood.
“We got her back,” Owen finally said.
Claire’s face melted as she softly repeated, “We got her back.”
Owen chuckled and amended his statement with, “Or Grant and Sattler did.”
“We owe them everything,” Claire said with a sigh.
“Well, maybe we’ll pay them back during the next dinosaur apocalypse,” Owen said. He reached for the water he’d left in the cupholder earlier and took a drink. “Since this is becoming a regular thing with us.”
“I’d say I hope it never happens again, but that’s what I said all the other times…” Claire started.
“All the other times…” Owen muttered in disbelief, repeating her words.
“So I probably shouldn’t jinx it by saying it again,” Claire reasoned.
“How does this keep happening?” Owen wondered aloud.
“We kind of walked into it this time,” Claire said.
Though really, she thought, if she were to be radically honest with herself, she kind of ran head-first into it every time. She just had a tendency to drag Owen along with her.
“We should probably quit doing that, then,” Owen said simply. Claire laughed, not in a way that conveyed amusement, but in a way that told him she thought that response was absurd. “What?” he asked, eyeing her from the side.
“We both work with them,” Claire reminded him. “You’re not going to stop working with the dinosaurs, right? And I’m not going to stop trying to help them, either, because…” Her voice grew small then, vulnerable. “Because I can’t, so…”
Owen cut in as she trailed off and said, “Yeah, can we talk about you being a subject of interest at the CIA?” That tidbit of information from Franklin had been news to him.
It apparently wasn’t news to Claire, however, as she immediately said, “It’s nothing,” as if it were a reflex. With a lowered volume, she added, “Probably.”
“Claire…” Owen warned.
“You know what, let’s not talk about this on a government plane, okay?” she said.
“Be careful,” he said.
He’d meant for the words to come out sternly; instead, they came out in a tone that was almost pleading. Claire turning into a kind of vigilante on behalf of the dinosaurs had not been on his list of things to expect after the creatures were set free into the world, and while it wasn’t exactly unattractive in his eyes, it frequently neared the top of his list of things to worry about.
“I promise I’m reconsidering some of my methods, but that’s the best I can do,” she replied.
“Yup,” Owen groaned, his head falling back against his chair. He dragged his hands over his face, his eyes closed, and said to the ceiling, “This is gonna happen again.”
Claire sighed quietly. They’d been down the well-worn road that was that particular subject before, and her instinct hadn’t changed. She wanted to yell, to argue, to passionately insist that it was what she had to do to be able to live with herself after everything that happened, after everything she thought she’d done to the dinosaurs and to the world, but she didn’t really want to fight with him. Not then. Not when they’d just gotten their daughter back, not when the day should be full of celebration and love.
She touched his arm, drawing his attention back towards her, and whispered, “Come here.”
Her hand curled around his arm for leverage, and Claire pulled herself towards him. She cupped her other hand around his cheek as their lips met in a soft kiss, the stubble on his face scratchy against her skin. Owen grabbed the hand that held his face, caressing her wrist as he returned her affection, and when their kiss came to an end, she lingered, pulling his forehead against her own to keep them close. Owen followed her lead, holding the back of her head.
“You okay?” he finally whispered, caressing her hair. It wasn’t often that they went from the beginnings of a potential argument to kissing that quickly.
Claire nodded. “There were a lot of close calls this time,” she whispered back. Owen nodded, too, agreeing, too many. “And too much of us on our own,” she said, pulling back to look at him. “I like it better when we stick together.”
Owen grinned and asked, “For survival?” with a wink, recalling his words to her from so many years ago.
Claire let out a small, genuine laugh this time, and said, “Yeah, for survival." She kissed him again, and just like that, the squabble that had threatened to overtake them was forgotten. She moved back to her chair, twisting her body so she was facing him and asked, “Can I say something without judgement?”
“That depends on what you’re about to say,” Owen said with a laugh.
“This is going to sound weird, but does it kind of feel like this is the week we really became parents?” Claire said. “I mean, I’ve thought of her as my daughter for years now, but…”
But she felt like more of a mom than she did a few days ago, she thought. She’d felt no hesitation at all towards saying yes when Kayla asked if the girl in the photo Claire had held in her hands was her daughter, but now she’d seen just how far she’d go to save this girl, how far she’d go to bring her back home with them. There was a fierceness within her that she hadn’t known was there. It shouldn’t have surprised her, she knew – she had been all-in on saving her nephews, too, as soon as she knew they were in danger; they’d both made it their mission to protect Maisie as soon as they found her in Lockwood Manor – but something felt different there.
Owen nodded as she tried to figure out how to finish her thought and said, “I know what you mean. I feel it, too.”
“That probably sounds terrible after four years,” Claire realized.
Owen shrugged. “It’s been a weird four years,” he said. “We didn’t get to just be parents, you know. We had to make all our decisions around this, protect her from this.”
“Clearly all for nothing in the end…” Claire said sadly.
“I don’t know about that,” Owen said. He paused for a moment and asked, “No judgement, right?”
“I promise,” Claire replied.
“Part of me’s glad everything we decided for her ended up being justified,” he said. “We weren’t just paranoid. I know I was firm with her about going into town, but she’s had me wondering lately if we were doing the right thing.”
“Were we?” Claire asked.
“We held this off for a long time,” Owen argued.
“You think it was inevitable?”
“Maybe,” Owen reasoned. “Like you said, we weren’t going to be able to keep her there forever. Something tells me four more years wouldn’t have killed their interest.”
“Do you think Maisie feels like something’s different now, too?” Claire asked. “With us, I mean.”
“I kind of hope so,” Owen said. “She seemed genuinely surprised we were there.”
“Yeah, that kind of broke my heart a little,” Claire admitted. “Does she really not know we love her?”
“She knows,” Owen told her with confidence. “She convinced herself otherwise, but she knows.”
“I hope so,” Claire said.
A chittering noise from up the aisle of the plane pulled Claire’s attention back to the cage she’d almost managed to forget about. Beta was looking straight at her, her claw curled around the metal bars on the front of her cage. Claire instinctively eyed the exits, as if she weren’t thousands of feet in the air, as if there were anywhere she could actually go if something went wrong.
“Owen, she’s staring at me,” Claire said.
Owen chuckled to himself, and pushed himself out of his chair, stepping over Claire’s legs to reach the aisle. She watched as he wandered back down to the cage, nearly blocking her view of the dinosaur.
“Hey, girl, how you doing?” Owen said kindly. Her claws tapped in succession against the metal bar and her tail thumped against the back of the cage even as her eyes opened and closed slowly. Owen knew she wasn’t fully back, and wouldn’t be for a little while yet, but the tranquilizer effects were beginning to wear off.
“Owen?” Claire asked.
“She’s alright,” Owen said. He grabbed a blanket from the cabinet near the couch and tossed it over Beta’s cage, blocking out most of the harsh lights but not covering it completely. “There,” he said. “Maybe that’ll help her go to sleep.”
Claire and Owen eventually fell asleep, too, side-by-side in the chairs between Beta and the room Maisie resided in. Owen’s feet rested in the chair across from him, while Claire was curled up into hers. Just as Owen predicted however, the tranquilizer’s power over Beta had faded, and when the dinosaur woke up in a strange, dark place, she let out a shriek that jolted all three of the plane’s human passengers awake. Claire awoke with a gasp. Owen came to just as the plane rocked slightly, and he knew Beta had even managed to scare the pilot.
He stood up and saw the scared flight attendant standing at the front of the plane, her eyes fearfully watching the blanket-covered cage as it rattled. “I got it,” he assured her, and she nodded, lingering in the entry way to watch what happened next as Owen climbed over Claire to reach the aisle of the plane again.
“Oh my god, I’m on a plane with a velociraptor,” Claire moaned as if she’d managed to convince herself she’d only dreamed it before.
“Says the woman who runs off in the middle of the night to rescue dinosaurs,” Owen laughed, pulling the cover off of Beta’s cage. The young raptor got one look at Owen and shrieked again.
He wasn’t sure whether Claire chose to ignore him or simply didn’t hear him as she leaned forward, her fingers massaging her temple, and said, “I’m trapped on a plane with a velociraptor.”
Maisie came running into the middle of the plane from the bedroom. She surveyed the scene with Beta rattling her cage, Owen standing by, and Claire hunched over in distress and said, “Can I try?”
Owen nodded, so she dropped to her knees and started rifling through the baskets of snacks on the table near the couch. Owen grabbed her shoulder and firmly said, “Be careful,” before making his way back to Claire. The word trapped had changed the way he was looking at Claire’s aversion to the situation, and he slowly sat back down across from her, placing a hand on either side of her knees.
“You feel trapped?” he asked delicately.
“There’s nowhere to run if she breaks out,” Claire replied with fear in her voice.
“She’s secure. And there are more tranqs right over there if we can’t calm her down,” he said, motioning to the tranquilizer gun sitting on the counter across from the couch. “I’d bring you the gun because I know you’re a good shot, but I don’t want you getting all trigger happy,” he teased.
“On you or the dinosaur?” she joked.
Owen chuckled, gently rubbed her legs, and said, “Claire, I promise, I would not have let her on this plane with us if I thought it would turn into a situation we couldn’t control.”
“I know, but…” Claire breathed. Beta continued to rattle her cage in the background, claws clanging against the metal bars. She trusted Owen, she really did, but she sighed and asked, “Why does it always have to be raptors?”
The beginnings of a grin teased the edges of Owen’s lips, but before he could attempt to answer that one, Claire’s eyes shot over to Maisie to see what she was doing with their prehistoric travel companion. Owen turned around, too.
“I mean, raptor cages…raptors chasing the truck…raptors on Main Street…genetically-modified raptor claws in my leg..." Claire mindlessly rattled off as Owen stood from his seat.
He wasn't sure whether Claire was talking to him or just talking to herself, but he didn’t go far, stopping just behind the seat he’d just been sitting in, near enough to both Claire and Maisie to satisfy him. He trusted Maisie with the young raptor, but he still felt better – and he knew Claire would, too – if he kept an eye on them.
When he quickly glanced back at Claire, she caught his eye and added, “Weaponized raptors chasing us through Malta! Now raptors on planes.”
Owen contemplated what she’d just said and said, “Yeah, you don’t have the best track record with them.”
“Not exactly,” Claire replied.
She followed him up and climbed into the seat that Owen had just been sitting in. She stood tall on her knees, leaving her just behind Owen and tall enough to have a clear view of Maisie and Beta. If she couldn’t control the situation, she at least needed to see what was going on.
It hit her, then, exactly where they were taking the young dinosaur, and she muttered, with dismay, “And now there’s going to be a raptor family in my backyard.”
Owen snickered at that, knowing there’d likely been a raptor family in her backyard for quite some time now, and glanced over his shoulder at her. “They come with me. Blue and I are a packaged deal.”
Claire, not finding that so charming, groaned at the bad joke (that wasn’t entirely a joke, she thought) and sunk to her knees in the chair. Owen chuckled quietly to himself. He didn’t want to be taking amusement in her obvious agony – he hadn’t needed to hear the list to know where her fear came from, he knew that fear was surely compounded with their kid involved, and he would never intentionally make fun of any of that – but at certain moments, he couldn’t help himself.
Maisie sat down on the couch next to the cage and sweetly said, “Hey, Beta, you hungry?” Beta curled her claws around the metal bars of her cage and screamed a third time. Owen stood up a little bit straighter, but Maisie wasn’t rattled. “Hey!” she said, holding up her hand. She slowly moved it towards herself, and the raptor followed her hand to her face. “Eyes on me, Beta.”
Beta chittered and calmed down a bit, sniffing around the edges of her cage. Claire looked up at Owen.
“Are you training her?” Claire asked.
“She’s picked up a few things,” Owen said proudly.
Maisie tried again with Beta and said, “You hungry?”
Claire gasped as Maisie stretched her arm out towards the cage, but Owen nodded, reassuring her that Maisie had this. Maisie started feeding Beta long pieces of beef jerky she got from the snack baskets, and Beta happily took them out of her hand, pulling the strips into the cage with her teeth before chomping them down.
“See?” Maisie said. “She’s okay.”
“Why don’t you ask Owen how he got that wound on his hand before you decide she’s your best friend?” Claire suggested.
Maisie looked at the hand that had been wrapped in cloth but was now wrapped in an actual bandage and glanced up at Owen, a hint of worry in her eyes. Owen shrugged and reluctantly admitted the source of his injury had been Blue.
“Blue did that?” Maisie asked with surprise. She knew Owen had said Blue would hurt them, but everything she had personally seen of Owen’s former project - the old videos, even her experience with Blue in person - had always led her to believe otherwise.
“Yeah, she did, so be careful, alright?” Owen said. “I know it can seem like she’s your friend, but she’ll still hurt you if she feels threatened.”
Maisie nodded in understanding. Beta, unhappy with the interruption of her lunch, rattled the cage again, trying to reach the food in Maisie’s hands.
“You said that lock is secure, right?” Claire asked.
“She’s not going anywhere,” Owen promised.
“Wait, what…what happened in Malta?” Maisie asked, thinking about Claire’s list.
Owen and Claire shared a look at that seemingly innocuous question. She had seen him racing through the streets on the bike long before the narrow miss with the plane, but she didn't think he knew what had happened to her. They hadn't exchanged battle stories amongst themselves, an unspoken agreement that maybe they didn’t need to know what the other had faced alone. Claire didn’t want Maisie to feel as if they were keeping secrets, though, and through the look they shared, she knew Owen agreed, so she nodded slightly.
“Do you really want to know?” Owen asked her, giving her an out.
“We’ll tell you, but we don’t want to scare you,” Claire added.
Maisie thought about it for a moment and asked, “If I say no, does that mean I don’t have to tell you what happened before we all found each other?”
Owen and Claire looked at each other again. They both wanted to know exactly how she ended up upside down in a vehicle with the survivors of the original Jurassic Park, but they both knew if they didn’t tell, they couldn’t make her tell, either.
“Not if you don’t want to,” Claire decided.
“I don’t want to scare you, either,” Maisie said.
She said it casually, feeding Beta another stick of jerky as she spoke, and Claire decided that was all she needed to know.
“At least it’s all over now,” Owen said, trying to remove the look of concern from his face.
“Oh no, it’s not over until we’re all home safely,” Claire corrected. She nodded towards the cage and said, “Including her.”
A few hours later, the plane began descending into the same small airport in California that Claire and Owen had taken off from just a few days before. They sat side-by-side in the seats again, with Maisie across from Claire for the descent. Owen pulled the car keys out and handed them to Claire.
“You and Maisie go get the car when we land,” Owen said. “I’m gonna stay here with Beta until you pull it around. We can load her in the back.”
Claire nodded. Maisie peered over at the cage and asked, “How will we know where to release her?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Owen said. “We’ll find Blue.”
“Or she’ll find us,” Claire said.
Maisie turned around and looked at the cage. “Just a little bit longer, Beta,” she promised.
The plane’s wheels touched down on the runway, and Claire let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Maybe now she’d finally start to feel some of that elusive relief flood her veins.
“Alright, girls,” Owen said to the rest of the plane’s occupants as the plane came to a stop. “Let’s get you home.”