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The cameras flashing are bad. The police sirens, and the “You have the right to remain silent” speech are worse. All the dams breaking, and finally snapping, letting it all explode out of him, is plain horrible.
But the worst part, by far the worst, is when the police handcuff the four of them, and tear their little camp fam apart.
In a heartbeat, they’re screaming— kicking— flailing— yelling. There’s hands, too many hands, on his body, and he fights and wriggles just to get them off. He only wants five people to touch him right now, and three of them are being crammed into faceless cars in front of his eyes.
Someone faintly mentions something about a medical examination that Darius barely hears over the roaring of his heart. This is all too sudden, and he needs a moment for his brain to catch up, breathe, process all... this. This is two weeks shoved crudely into twenty four hours. He needs it to stop. He needs the camp fam, and he needs this to stop.
People are barking instructions at him he just doesn’t have the brain space to follow. Stay there, hold still, let me check your wounds — it means nothing. He just wants quiet, and dinosaurs, and the camp fam.
A voice penetrates through the web, pleading in tone. “Just lie still please, Darius.”
But he can’t! Not until he knows his camp fam are safe. And he hates how people know his name without him telling them. He wishes he and the others weren’t being watched with eight billion pairs of eyes. He only wants to hear his name called from five mouths who say it with love and a smile on their lips. They’re the only faces he wants to look at him right now.
But he’s losing the fight. More and more hands close on him, pinning him down, and his face is squished against the dirt, where he can see a few specks of mud right in front of his face. Winded, and confused, and utterly drained from the ugly, flaming mess of— everything! — all he can look at are those specks of mud, pushed apart by the thudding of shoes around him, and he is suddenly, violently homesick for his home, his safety net, his family, his camp fam.
Please come back.
Then, he’s stabbed with a needle and everyth i n g g o e s d a r k.
He wakes up in a cage. Cell 1026, the sign on the wall reads — what a joke. He doesn’t even have room to stretch out his legs, he’s seen dinosaurs held captive, time and time again... This is definitely a cage. He wonders for a second what they plan on doing with him, then remembers he is — in the eyes of the law — a criminal. He’ll probably be held here, in this cold, cramped, lonely cage, until he’s put on trial. Like a criminal.
I was only trying to help. He doesn’t realise he’s spoken until his words come out in a puff of white breath that fills the air around him. It’s freezing in here, and his clothes are still soaked from the rain. He’ll catch a cold in no time. If he hasn’t already caught one from being in the chill Biosyn valley all night with barely enough to keep him warm. Oh, he would give anything for the warmth of his home — his real home, before he pissed off to the middle of nowhere and shut himself off. That was the worst decision of his life. He wishes more than anything his instinct wasn’t towards isolation; it rots him from the inside and makes him plain miserable. If he could take it all back, and do something differently, he would’ve been with the camp fam more before the world had the chance to push them apart.
He shifts around, stretching out as much as he can, and curls his arms around himself, imagining it’s the arms of Kenji, Brooklynn, Yaz, Sammy, Ben... any of them would do. Just someone. With him. Please.
Some time later, someone comes to poke and prod at his body, examining him for any injuries, and his are only minor. Bruises, twists, cracked ribs... barely worth handing him two tylenols, but he takes them anyway. Maybe they’ll numb the heartache reverberating at the walls of his chest. His body still throbs with the weight of Ben collapsing against it. His fingertips still feel Ben’s cold, slippery skin (or that might be the hypothermia he’s probably getting). His fingers are still terrified to search for a heartbeat that might not be there.
They move him to a slightly larger cell, one with a bed. He lies down on it, tenderly cradling his ribs, and wonders how the others are doing. Yaz and Sammy were out in the same chilling cold as him, kneeling by Ben’s side for hours. They were all tossed and battered around in that goddamned facility, rushing, falling, breathing in enough smoke from the fire to give Darius — and probably the others — a hacking cough. Not to mention all the things from the past... God, month? that just hasn’t caught up to them yet.
It all comes crashing down. All of it. The pain, the heartache, the anger — but terror is by far the strongest feeling. Like a fresh, fragile scar, the stitches still tender to touch. He can’t shake the feeling he isn’t out of danger. He’s still about to die at any second. He’s about to die and God, he needs the camp fam.
And all of it just seems to short-circuit his brain. He can’t think, can’t process, can’t even formulate words. His body is broken and so is his mind.
So when footsteps approach him and settle outside his cell, it takes him a full ten seconds to notice.
He looks up to see two men in uniform — cops — their faces nondescript, and Darius instantly gets a bad feeling about them.
“Darius Bowman,” the cop announces. Darius stares hard at their boots: scuffed, the leather faded slightly. He wonders if those boots have been used to kick criminals into submission.
The cop doesn’t announce their names; another red flag. Darius was raised never to trust cops (respect them, yes, but never trust them) especially not the ones who don’t tell you their names. That makes him think they have something to hide; something they don’t want going on record.
“We’re here to help you.”
Darius lets his eyes flicker up to them. He doesn’t want to come across aggressive — that’s a sure-fire way to get thrown into jail, or worse — but he can’t stand to look at them. Not when they aren’t five warm smiles gazing down at him. Not when they aren’t pulling him off the ground straight into one of those group hugs that never seem to last long enough.
Three words slip, unbidden and desperate, from his tongue. “Where are they?”
“Who?”
You know who, Darius thinks, a lick of anger curling in his belly, but he restrains his tongue. “The other three. My—” family best friends people I can’t live without “—Are they okay?”
“That’s classified.”
An overwhelming combination of rage and primal need and exhaustion spike through Darius’s heart, and before he can stop himself, he shouts, “Where are they?”
The cop’s hand closes around something black and shiny on his belt — Darius doesn’t need to know what it is, but his instincts act before he can, and he’s bent into that weirdly specific defensive position the camp fam all know, wrought into their muscle memory. His hands are raised in surrender, and his knees are slightly bent, like a loaded spring ready to sprint far away from here.
Just do what they tell you, his father’s voice says calmly, don’t talk back — and shame spikes through Darius’s heart. He knows better than this, dammit! His father didn’t raise him to retaliate and yell.
(But, Darius thinks, if his father could see him now, he’d cry.)
Darius slowly lets his hands drop to his sides. He’s — literally — backed into a wall. There’s nowhere for him to go, no other way around but through a man who is here to do goodness knows what to him.
“We’re here to ask you some questions,” the cop says. “They’ll help us get to the bottom of everything that’s happened.”
Ah. This is not ideal — and Darius almost laughs at the thought, because everything is so fucking far from ideal right now! But if he’s being questioned, he needs to reconvene with the camp fam to get their story straight. Why were they in Biosyn, why were they flying from Malta, what on Earth happened, where are the other two — the Nublar Six is the Nublar Six after all — and he can’t justify why there’s only four of them without a firestorm of rumours spreading.
He could, of course, tell the truth. But he can think of a million reasons why that’s a one way ticket for the camp fam to wind up in jail for the rest of their lives.
An idea strikes him. “I’ll answer your questions, if you can show me proof that all of my friends are safe.”
The cop’s lip curls, but he falls silent for a moment. Darius’s heart leaps into his throat, rattling at the walls incessantly. Finally, he says, “Very well. But you answer my questions first.”
Darius is as vague as he can be, playing into the deranged traumatized mind-shaken narrative as much as he can, letting himself shake and stutter over his words when recounting the worst parts. He hopes with all his heart that they’ll take it easy on him: that they’ll see a frightened nineteen year old who’s been through horrible ordeals, who, alongside his friends, almost lost their lives countless times.
Because, stripped to his core, that’s what he is. That’s what he’s been since stepping foot on Nublar, and he wonders, for a heartbeat, if he’ll ever be anything else.
Satisfied, the cop leaves, locking the door after him, and Darius waits, with his heart in his mouth, until he returns with a tablet screen.
He thrusts the tablet through the bars (like Darius is an actual animal) and says, “Here.”
Darius looks at the screen, almost trembling with relief. His camp fam. Brooklynn, Yaz and Sammy are safe. All in cells just like his. It’s live footage, the timestamp blinking in the top right corner, so he knows— he knows they’re okay.
Looking up, he notices a bruise on the cop’s face, and the question “What happened to your jaw?” slips out.
His lip curls. “Your blue haired friend. She didn’t go down without a fight. Neither did the other two. One swore at me and Blue Hair bit me on the neck.” He points to a nasty-looking bite, and Darius bites back a laugh. That’s Brooklynn, alright.
“Listen. You can’t just get off easily from this,” the other cop begins to say.
You think? Darius almost laughs at the absurdity of it, and the thought occurs to him that it might be an insanity laugh. As if any of this could actually be funny.
“You and your... friends are gonna go through the court system like any other person. You won’t get special treatment just because you’re Nublar Six.”
Darius does laugh at that — because, truly, everything that’s happened to them has been the fucking opposite of special. Was it special to be abandoned on an island crawling with dinosaurs? Was it special to have to survive there for months? Was it special to see his friends’ blood splattered across concrete in a dark red sheen? Was it special to genuinely believe three of his friends were dead at various points? What kind of a person says that?
And he finds, as he’s laughing, he can’t stop. His shoulders are shaking, his eyes are scrunched, and the weirdest, most deranged sounds he’s ever made lurch from his throat.
“We’ll... leave you to it,” one of the cops says — or maybe he didn’t. Maybe Darius is imagining it. Maybe this is all a dream (oh, he wished) and he’ll wake up twelve years old again and crawl to his desk and turn on his video game.
He’s alone again, and the laughter turns to tearless sobbing. His whole body trembles, until he loses the energy to keep moving, and he curls up on his bed once more, curling his arms around his battered, broken ribcage and imagines his arms are the camp fam holding him close.