Work Text:
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been faking me out
Can't make you happier now
Heat Waves - Glass Animals
He remembered how she loved the heat, she would stand outside their camper in direct sunlight, her eyes closed, face tilted upward. She would get so excited when the weather began to turn, soggy spring giving way to air so warm you could dry off post shower in a few minutes. Towel merely optional.
Alan actually didn’t care much for the heat, he found it suffocating. But you had to go where the dinosaurs dictated. Which is why he had spent the better part of the last 15 years in a desert in mid America.
It was the middle of June in Montana and summer had blown in with a screeching presence. Heat Index flying above 100 degrees Fahrenheit almost everyday. And it hadn’t rained in 9, the ground was parched, wildlife rarely visible choosing to only roam after dusk. Even the bugs had eased their buzzing round the heads of his team while they worked to extract the latest skeleton.
Ellie would’ve loved this weather, he thought to himself, swallowing hard. 27 days. Almost 650 hours since she stood in that very doorway and said tears streaming down her face, “I hate this.” Before she turned and took 38 steps to her truck and then drove out of the dig, out of his life. His heart tore from his chest and it went with her as she drove towards shimmering lies of water that stretched across the ground. And finally the shimmering consumed her and Alan could no longer see her.
He knew she meant she hated the situation, and not the dig, not Alan, but Alan had convinced himself that maybe he was just telling himself that to cope. Maybe she did hate him, he had abandoned her emotionally.
Somehow Alan has survived the past 27 days with what should be a fatal injury.
Alan hated so many things currently. He hated that he had counted her steps as she walked away, every stretch of her legs forward he had prayed that she’d turn around.
He hated John Hammond, the man who created monsters that never should’ve walked the earth again. No, they weren’t the monsters, they were animals simply surviving. Hammond was the monster. It was now just over a year since the incidents at Isla Nublar that wrecked Alan’s brain and then his entire life.
But what Alan hated the most was himself. That he didn’t feel in control. He hasn’t been the same since last June. So far removed from himself that he was positive the Alan he was actually died on that island. He was now cursed to be the bearer of this shell that looked like him, and sounded like him, but wasn’t even close.
He couldn’t articulate what he was feeling, if he let himself even begin to consider addressing the trauma he survived his entire system would override, shocked into stillness and silence. Mentally he built walls that would rival those that held the raptors. Behind those walls is where Alan stayed, both a cage and a comfort.
Nightmares stole his peace; he hadn’t slept fully, deeply since the night before they flew to the island. Days with Ellie that had once been filled with flirting and touches and constant banter became shadowed by vast empty canyons, only space and silence between them. Sex had felt less intimate and more like a drastic attempt for them both to focus on literally anything else but the war raging in their heads.
Alan had believed they were fighting the same war, but he was very wrong. They were stuck in their own personal battles, and they had different forms of combat they had to employ to make it out alive. He had always needed a routine, but after Nublar he needed a militant itinerary. His things didn’t have to be neat, but he had to know where to find them. He needed consistency with little to no wavering so he could manage to accomplish anything. Alan needed to be on autopilot as much as possible, he didn’t have the capacity to make hundreds of tiny decisions everyday. He could barely manage, What to eat? What to wear? When to stop working and go rest before he suffered dehydration.
Ellie had taken over instructing the grad students, making sure their curriculum was still being covered. Once the term ended though she had sat beside Alan at the tiny Formica table in their camper and said his name so gently and low he almost didn’t hear it.
“Alan I can’t do this here, I can’t survive being so close to raptor skulls, I hear their screams each night and I know you do too.” She clutched his forearm with both of her hands, “Alan, we should’ve taken more time off. We aren’t ok. Alan I need to break this cycle, I need something new, something not tainted. I want a house, with a yard, with grass,” she was trying to make it a joke. They had joked before that they should put down a slice of astroturf in front of the camper entrance so there was at least one green thing in 1,500 sq miles of red dirt.
She held her breath and Alan’s gaze and prayed so fucking hard he’d receive this next sentence the way she wanted him too. In the smallest voice Alan had ever heard her use she told him, eyes brimming with tears she was trying her damndest to keep from spilling. “Alan, I want to have kids, and I want them with you.”
A beat, two, three, Ellie watched a single tear slid down Alan’s cheek. He took both her hands in his own and kissed them several times in quick succession. She also started to cry, still balancing on hope and terror, she held space waiting for his reply.
Alan drew a ragged breath down to his lungs and released it, hands still wrapped tightly around Ellie’s he said, “Ellie I can’t. This is the best I can do right now, wake, dig, sleep. I’m, I’m not strong enough to handle change. Ellie, I don’t think I want children.”
He felt his words pierce and it harmed them both. A plunge for each word in that final sentence. His own heart screamed at him that he was killing them, their love falling to it’s knees then lurching forward, spread out face down as it bled out in the Montana clay.
But despite his heart shrieking in pain, his brain refused to move. To aid him, his brain froze him in place, he couldn’t say anything more. Couldn’t console her. Couldn’t take it back.
That night had been 29 days ago, and two days later she was gone. And Alan was still here, frozen. Broken and desperately in love with her, but alone. So very alone with nothing but heat waves and the ghost of their love to surround him.