Work Text:
I have very small arms, very small arms, what shall I do. Very small arms, I cannot hug you.
Mr Tyrannosaurus Rex was sad, and angry. More angry than sad, but being a predator, the king of predators, Angry! was sort of the default. You need to be at least a little angry in order to kill things. Most of the time you need to be a lot angry. Unfortunately, being angry cannot help you put on your hat when your arms are no longer than the longest caveman is tall. And Mr Tyrannosaurus possesses a very nice hat. A pristine fedora.
Putting this item of clothing on every morning is difficult, the most difficult part of his day after rousing himself from a lovely bit of dawn sunbathing. His teeth are so big and sharp that even picking it up and tossing it into the air damages it, and if he should miss catching it with his head, then he'll have to perform the trick all over again. Hats are not easy to come by in the Cretaceous Period, at least not quality hats. And for a killing machine, Mr Tyrannosaurus is quality.
In the end, he does what he usually does, which is wait for a breeze to blow his hat onto the spiky arms of a monkey puzzle tree, where he can knock it off onto his gargantuan cranium. And so the work day begins. It's a humid, sunny one, but it often is.
Work is killing, and killing is work, very enjoyable work. Dinopolition says you never work a day in your life if you enjoy what you do, and that definitely applies to Mr Tyrannosaurus. The labour is various, but always fun, and good exercise. Sometimes he charges across a wide plain at juicy herbivores, and sometimes he lurks in the bushes and leaps out at juicy herbivores. His tools of the trade are always with him - his enormous pair of jaws, and his enormous back legs. He's a bit like the big stone scissors cavemen use to harvest cycads and trim hedges, but a million times more deadly.
Today is a bush day. Today he is stalking a herd of triceratops. Not unusual, he enjoys both the challenge and the taste of triceratops. Pretty, lumbering creatures, triceratops. Pretty, because of the brightly coloured bone frills around their heads, and lumbering, because, you know, four legged. They're actually smaller than Mr Tyrannosaurus, and he's just as brightly coloured, being a variety of greens and browns and yellows painted on his scales in sharp stripes, so as to blend in with the undergrowth. Meanwhile, triceratops display scary reds and yellows and oranges, colours which frighten lesser predators than he.
All except one triceratops. There is one triceratops, an especially small and delicate female, who isn't red and orange and yellow, but pink and orange and yellow. She's also wearing a skirt, a pretty pink, modest skirt. And a bow, a pretty pink bow tied to her nose horn. It's intriguing, it's intriguing and unusual and interesting, and he always finds his eyes drawn to the little female while he's charging down some relative of hers. Being distracted is annoying, dangerous, and today it's going to change.
As he's psyching himself up, said pretty little female is revealed to his sight by the movement of the herd, chopping away at fronds of vegetation, just like the rest of the walking happy meals. He always tells himself that today will be the day. Today will be the day when he ceases to stare and takes a bite. She's not the fastest, doesn't have the longest horns or the most powerful defence, so there is really no reason why he hasn't removed that aberrant colouring from the gene pool. But when it comes down to it, there's always some convenient excuse. Oh, he stumbled. Oh, daddy or a brother got in the way. Oh, the sun was in his eyes. Always.
And today is absolutely no different. With a terrifying roar Mr Rex breaks from cover at the perfect moment, his six tonne stomps shaking the earth, throwing up dust, scattering the herd, forcing the weaker ones into sudden isolation. His jaws open wide, teeth like flint knives glinting wetly in the hot sun. They flash, but then they swerve, swerve away from the inviting neck of the pink triceratops, towards another female, a normally coloured one.
All throughout, his fedora remains in place.
🦕🦖
Defeated again by something incalculable, Mr T. Rex returns to his bower, a shady, sandy place under some trees where he rests after good meals. Rests for days, under his tummy growls again. He's a young male, that's probably the issue. He is still afflicted by stage fright sometimes. Unusually coloured prey sometimes indicates disease, or some other liability, like poison. He's noticed that any creatures the cavemen take for themselves eventually change colour in captivity, becoming paler, and much more stupid. It could be that the pink female is one of theirs, gotten loose. Best not touch anything of the cavemen’s, because they can be very mean if provoked, with their sharp sticks and pointy rocks.
And numbers. Mr T. Rex is not a social creature, not like them. Raising the next generation is about the only time his kind get together. Which is just as well, because they tend to be quite opinionated. Quite political.
So, he rests. And thinks. And promises himself that next time, next time for sure, there will be no weird hesitation.
And it's true, next time there is no hesitation. The herd moves on, and he follows, casually subsisting on iguanodon and hadrosaurs while he paces along behind the massive group of horned dinosaurs, studying them. For days the herd and their camp followers trek on through the lush heat of a young world.
But naturally, the presence of a tyrannosaurus makes the animals at the back nervous, and when Mr T steps just a bit too close, they hurry forward, through a vegetated rivulet, right into an ambush. Carnotaurus, those persistent harriers, launch themselves out of the brush, left and right. Possessing even shorter arms than he, and a stub nose, their proportions irritate Mr T as much as their presence alarms him. But why should they alarm him? They can do nothing to him. He'll stand here and watch, and win a free meal by chasing them off after they make a kill.
Except he doesn't just stand there and wait for someone to expend precious energy for him, of course not, no, Ms T. Horridus is in danger, and he, king of tyrant reptiles, only now realises, as he watches carnotaurus snap and leap and chase weaker animals down, that he doesn't like that idea.
His roar is spine chilling and his charge is monumentous, kicking up dust and debris. With one blow of his head, a carnotaurus goes flying, smashing into a comrade, knocking both through the underbrush and out of sight. A third falls to the crushing, piercing power of his jaws. A fourth knocks his hat off, his crown of superiority. The battle is not very long, but it is very dusty.
When it's over, his hat is gone and the herd has split, with the front section galloping away down the rivulet into the plains beyond, and the back section doing the same, returning the way they came. Eventually they will rejoin the main herd, so long as Mr Tyrannosaurus either moves away a bit, or goes to sit in a bush.
He doesn't do this though. There is something he needs to check.
🦕🦖
Down a tree lined gully, which terminates in a sort of cavern formed of greenery, the tyrannosaurus comes upon his prey. A group of three triceratops change from the cowering posture they had adopted when they heard the tell-tale twin stomps of a theropod, to a last show of bravery, tossing their heads, jerking their horns up and their frills down, rumbling and hooting in an attempt to scare him off. It's really quite marvelous to stand on two legs, he is so much more agile, faster, and more capable than them, despite his greater size.
One catches his attention. The smallest one, almost invisible behind a big female and an even bigger male. Ms Triceratops is wearing his hat. It has slipped over her eye rakishly. The sight is so adorable that Mr Rex’s jaw drops and he freezes in place. Deeply confused and alarmed, the big triceratops toot and stomp their feet, before charging through the brush in opposite directions, still hooting, abandoning the little female.
Snapping his mouth shut with the sound of many cavemen breaking all at once, Mr T. Rex approaches the small prey, who seems frozen by fear. Approaches only a couple feet. He’s seen others of his kind. He knows he’s scary. The scariest thing on earth, ever. After cavemen.
“That is my hat.”
Ms T. Horridus looks up, increasing her adorable rakishness.
“I'd like it back. Please.”
The tiny pink triceratops waddles forward, dips her head, and shakes off the hat. It slides down her face and lands on the earth between them with a soft plop.
The pair of giant reptiles stare at it.
After a few minutes of staring, Mr T steps forward, hoping he doesn’t fluff his next move. Flicking his scaly lips forward, he plucks the thing from the ground, to almost instantly toss it into the air. As it's doing a flip and falling, he dances back and forth, before catching it square on the crown of his noggin. Surprised when the move comes off so well, he stands there, looking up, eyes crossed. When he looks back down, the pink triceratops is wagging her tail, watching him with awe, her beak open.
Mr Tyrannosaurus feels that his next statement should be awesome, inviting, and involve a question mark.“...Want to go see what the cavemen are doing?”