Chapter Text
Monday, 7:45, Hyde Park. Aerion Dayne cut around a cluster of joggers without slowing, coat billowing behind him, taking the long straight toward the Albert Memorial. A fat bulldog he’d barely managed to dodge was left barking behind him, his owner cursing his ancestors, as if Aerion didn’t do the same every chance he got. As he glided forward he let his eyes enjoy the view. Trees always looked their best in late September: the chestnuts gone amber, the limes pale yellow, the planes still mostly green but beginning to turn gold at the edges. Nothing had fallen yet, so there was no need yet to drive around the slick mulch of leaves and conkers that would carpet the paths by October, not that such obstacles would deter him, for he liked to ride his electric scooter as he would have ridden a warhorse or a dragon, the bell declaring his right of way, rather than warning. Most people moved out of his way, and the ones who didn't he navigated around. He had yet to hit anyone, though there had been moments of meaningful proximity and shouts aplenty.
He was, like usual, dressed to the nines. The coat was charcoal wool, midcalf-length, bespoke from a tailor in Mayfair who had required three fittings to get the hem and shoulders right because Aerion was not, as the tailor had tactfully put, a standard proportioned client. Therefore the coat had been cut narrower than usual at the waist and had some padding in the shoulders, but was left full everywhere else, so the wind could lift it and spread it at whim as he sussed in his scooter at full speed. Underneath: slim, high-waist black trousers, a fine wool-and-silk-blend turtleneck in a dark burgundy that most people would have called black until the light hit it, and very thin black leather gloves he felt justified to wear because the morning air was already cold enough and honestly they tied the fit together really well. His only visible jewellery were his piercings: several on both earlobes and conch, and a neat row on his left eyebrow, thin bars capped with sharp looking spikes on both ends. His boots were Louboutin Chelsea, black leather, the red of his soles flashing briefly when he had to step off the scooter at kerbs.
He came out of the park at Queen's Gate and turned south, speeding along the wide street of white-stucco terraced houses that had been built for one immense wealthy family in the nineteenth century but were now mostly embassies, consulates, offices, the odd cultural institute, and, yes, the occasional bafflingly expensive private residence, even if divided in several one or two-floor flats. His uncle's house was a few streets further west. Still a full house for one single family, the same one the family had occupied since the 1880s when they'd decided that Mayfair was becoming new-money pedestrian. Uncle Baelor had inherited it along with the oil portraits and the seat at the House of Lords, letting his younger brother Maekar, Aerion’s father, take the usufruct of Somerhall state. Aerion passed within half a mile of it every morning, but he had not been inside it in over a decade, ignoring the polite Christmas party invitations that never stopped arriving, with the precision of a clock, exactly ten days before Christmas eve, even if he never bothered to reply.
They had never got on well, his father and him, como a água e o azeite, as his mother used to say, but while she was still living she had done her best to keep the family together. She'd died of a brain tumour, diagnosed and gone in less than a year, the year he was taking his A-levels. He’d sat his exams anyway. Four A's. History, Further Maths, Chemistry and Biology. There had not been anything else to put his grief aside than his books.
He’d been glad to move on to university to read Palaeobiology, glad to leave the suffocating atmosphere of rural, conservative Somerset, and be himself, for the first time, ever. The haircut and the piercings and the eventual decision to take biweekly shots had helped, but Aerion had grown into himself fundamentally from getting to choose his own clothes and move through life without the constant weight of his family surveillance. The monthly allowance he’d inherited from his mother’s share of her family’s mining fortune had been generous enough to allow him to never have to ask his father for money again, which at first had been good for his pride, but after his father had started disparaging him about “how his life choices were very difficult to reconcile with the family's values”, had become more of a vital necessity. He’d changed his name at 21, and taken the chance to change his surname at the same time, to his mother’s maiden name, Dayne.
The museum was ahead of him now, its Romanesque arches and towers an imposing silhouette against the light grey skies of early autumn mornings in London. Instead of going around the building to the staff entrance in Exhibition Road, Aerion sped along the now-empty lanes before the main entrance where tourists would queue for hours once the museum opened, taking the tight corners the way a downhill skier took flags until he leaped off gracefully at the foot of the main steps. He never took chances leaving it outdoors, not after his first scooter had been stolen despite the extra security lock, so he just folded and hauled it with one hand, trying not to wince at its weight as he badged his way through the still closed entrance, nodding at the woman on security, whose name was Patricia and who had been at that desk for the early shift for as long as he'd worked there. She said good morning. He said the same back. This was the full extent of their relationship; he preferred it that way and he suspected she did too.
His Loboutin red soles rang out across the central hall as he made for the main staircase, the sound going up into the vaulting, designed to resemble a cathedral, with natural history standing in for God. He always preferred coming in early, before the crowds, the museum his alone to enjoy.
When Aerion had first visited at age five, Dippy still presided over the hall, not the blue whale suspended in a long diving arc above the entrance that had replaced it. Aerion still hadn't fully made his peace with the change, as in his opinion a still living creature could not outdo the sheer wonder contemplation of the extinct Diplodocus, one of the largest beings ever to walk the earth, evoked. The first time he saw it, he’d been so fascinated he’d just stared for twenty minutes until his father had physically lifted him and carried him to the cafe, Aerion twisting back over his shoulder the whole way to keep it in view.
There, over ham&cheese sandwiches and salt&vinegar chips, his elder brother Daeron and cousin Valarr had managed to convince him it was the remains of a British dragon, like the dragons on the family sigil, the one that went back to the crusades. Uncle Baelor had smiled and nodded when asked whether that was true. Aerion had been nine before anyone bothered correcting him about visiting the dragon museum. He had not entirely forgiven them, not that he needed another reason for barely interacting with them. Daeron was a self-proclaimed singer-song writer, which stood for good-for-nothing junkie who’d spent the last years in and out of rehab, and while Valarr liked to act as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, Aerion knew better than to trust any greedy City boy, least of all his cousin.
The curator offices occupied a corridor on the fourth floor, just off the mineralogy collection. His was smallest of the lot, with sloping ceilings that would have bothered a taller man than him, but he liked it, and the fact that if he opened the skylight and stood on his desk, he could haul himself up onto to the roof and sit there with the whole grey sprawl of London laid out around him. While acknowledging how outdated the scratched dark wood of every furniture piece was, he liked them too, particularly the lateral filing cabinets that predated his birth and that no one had bothered emptying or moving, though nothing in them had been touched in years, not since the museum's digitisation drive had made them obsolete. He liked browsing through them, setting small quests for himself to connect the dots between obscure references, deciphering the snaky handwriting.
As soon as he closed the door, he pulled off his gloves, hung his coat on the hook, parked his scooter underneath and opened his laptop before plopping down on his leather wheelie chair, another relic of a different era.
Forty-three new messages since he'd logged off last Friday. He deleted twenty-nine without reading past the subject lines, and took some time examining the rest. Three emails from the conservation department about the Iguanodon exhibition timeline. One from a journal requesting peer review on a paper he'd have to decline because he knew the author from their college days. One from a PhD student at Edinburgh asking about access to some nineteenth century sketches of dinosaur bones that fell under Aerion’s broad jurisdiction. He was composing a reply when the phone on his desk rang. Internal line. He considered not answering, but his seniors at NHM only called when there was some urgent business, and literally no one else called, ever, preferring to write to him even if the phone number was written along with his email on both the personnel webpage and his business card.
“Aerion, my office, please.”
“I'm in the middle of…”
“Soonish would be better than later.”
The line went dead.
Patricia's office was the largest in the floor, as was her right as Head curator, and every non-working surface was covered with plants, including a monstrous Monstera in the corner that sprawled larger than Aerion’s kitchenette in his one bedroom flat at Maida Vale. She sat behind her desk with her hands folded, her expression sterner than usual, and Aerion knew immediately he was about to be assigned some menial task he wouldn't enjoy.
“Raymun's out sick,” she said, straight to business as usual. “Stomach bug”.
Aerion tried to keep his expression neutral. Raymun was always out sick. Raymun had three children under six, which apparently meant he contracted every virus that passed through North London. He’d taken more sick leaves since he started working in January than Aerion had taken in the three years he’d worked at NHM, not that he’d bothered keeping track.
“He was scheduled to run a school group today from….” she glanced at her computer screen, “...Ashford Primary. They're scheduled at 10 AM.”
“I see.”
“You're going to cover it.”
"No, I'm not.”
Patricia's eyes narrowed fractionally. “Aerion.”
“I have a paper to revise and a lecture to prepare for the Oxford symposium in December. Not to mention my book. The one I've been working on for three years and it’s due for final submission before the end of the year.” He crossed his arms. “Also, I don't do school groups. That's not in my job description. I'm a researcher, not a children's entertainer.”
He had a PhD in Palaeobiology, not a MsC in Science Communication like Raymun, as Patricia certainly knew.
“Every member of staff is required to participate in public engagement activities. It's in everyone's job description, including yours.” Patricia picked up a pen, examined it as if it might tell her something useful. “You haven't done a single one this year.”
“I wrote three blog posts for the website.”
“Which maybe five people read, including me.” She set the pen down. “When did you send your postdoctoral contract renewal proposal?”
“July,” Aerion muttered, eyes fixed somewhere over Patricia’s shoulder. The Monstera was really a fascinating species. He wondered if he should buy one to make his flat look a little less like a hotel room. He would need to make the space as attractive as possible if his contract with NHM was not renewed.
“Still waiting to hear?”
He nodded, refusing to look at her.
“Aerion, I'm not threatening you. I'm reminding you that the committee looks at these things.”
His jaw tightened. He nodded again.
“Group arrives at ten.” Patricia repeated, her voice softened. “You talk about dinosaurs for forty-five minutes, show them some fossils, and answer their questions. Raymun already prepared materials. They're in his office, I'll have Joanna get them to you.”
Aerion pursed his lips, and nodded again. His neck was starting to develop a kink from all that tense nodding.
“Aerion, they are six-year-olds. They don’t bite.”
Aerion scoffed. “I'm aware children don’t bite, Patricia. Doesn’t mean I have to like them.”
“Good.” Patricia smiled, leaning backwards on her wheely chair. “These ones are very small ones besides, maybe about…” She held her hand hovering over her desk. “Waist-height. Well, it depends on whose waist. Shorter than you, certainly.”
Aerion nodded again and attempted a smile that came out as more of a grimace. “That's extraordinarily useful information, thank you.”
“Discovery Room, ten to eleven”.
“Yes.”
Joanna brought him the laminated notes, along with a folder full of dinosaur colouring prints and origami patterns and other games he was supposed to give away to the students. That was good, because it meant he would not be required to talk to the children for as long as he had feared. The notes he ignored, because they were titled “Dragon Hunters! (For Little Explorers!)”, and Aerion was not going to deliver a lecture called “Dragon Hunters! (For Little Explorers!)”. He spent forty minutes doing actual work, polishing his book draft, and then spent the remaining twenty minutes between nine-ten and nine-thirty staring at his laptop without reading anything, thinking about his contract’s renewal and what he would do if it didn’t go through, until he forced himself to get up and go to the bathroom to check that he looked presentable, because if he had to do this he was going to do it in his own terms, looking as sharp as possible.
He took the back stairs at nine forty five. The main staircase was faster but it required crossing through the central hall, and the central hall on a school visit day was full of children, which he was already going to get enough of today. He could already hear excited shrieks before he got to the bottom of the stairs. Turning right, he went through the corridor past the Darwin Centre and down and around to the Discovery Room, which was technically a space designed for interactive learning.
The group had already arrived, earlier than expected. He heard someone talking before he opened the door, using the bright and animated voice some people used when they thought children couldn't understand normal human speech. “...and so in the olden days, when people found bones in the ground, they thought, oh, this is a dragon! They were uneducated, you see, and so they had no way of knowing they were dinosaurs, not dragons!”
Aerion's right eye twitched, his longest spiky piercing gracing his eyelid.
He opened the door. Twenty-odd first graders sat in several rows forming a rough semicircle on the floor. They were various sizes and states of attentiveness, and in front of them stood a woman of approximately his own age, who was holding a Pterodactyl in one hand and gesturing with its wings in a way that was clearly meant to be illustrative of flying but seemed severely compromising the integrity of the model that was certainly not designed as a toy. She was tall, which Aerion noticed immediately because she must be taller than him by at least ten centimeters, possibly fifteen, mixed-race, with long dark hair in braids wound into a crown, and she was wearing a yellow cardigan with wonky-looking embroidered flowers that looked like something from a craft fair, or even worse, hand-made.
“Mz L, Mz L…. Pterodactyls are boring, tell us about the T-Rex!”
“The T-Rex was the biggest predator ever!” the woman claimed, grabbing a T-Rex model from the top shelf behind her, designed high enough so that little fingers couldn’t grab and muck them, and gestured with it, making roaring sounds before resuming speaking: “and it could run faster than a car! Imagine that, a dinosaur that is faster than the cars your parents drive! They would catch you and eat all of you in a single bite with their very big maw!”
She illustrated the point making the T-Rex model’s mouth crash against the neck of the Pterodactyl she’s still holding on her other hand.
Aerion cleared his throat.
The woman turned, and smiled widely at him, completely unphased by Aerion’s annoyed expression. She was undeniably beautiful, not that Aerion had any taste for women, even less one who looked like they exclusively wore vintage and/or handmade garments. “Oh! You must be the lecturer from the museum, wonderful, the children are so excited to hear more about dinosaurs.”
Aerion began talking as he crossed the room, his voice tight with disdain: “If you're going to teach children about paleontology, perhaps verify your facts first. Tyrannosaurus rex couldn't run. Recent biomechanical studies indicate its top speed was around eleven to fifteen kilometers per hour. Your average footballer runs faster.” He extracted both dinosaurs from her hands with more force than what was strictly required and placed them back on the shelves. “And these are not toys.”
Twenty-odd pairs of eyes tracked their interaction with vivid interest, sensing the tension.
The woman's expression had gone slightly awry. “Sorry, I just wanted to give the kids some answers, I am but a primary teacher”.
“Wikipedia?”.
The slight pause was enough.
"Indeed," he sneered, the single word containing all his disdain for the site.
The woman’s mouth curved into a polite smile. “My name is Tanselle Legrand. And you are?”
Aerion ignored the hand extended towards him. He didn’t like casual touch. “Dr. Dayne. I'll be conducting the educational portion of this visit.” He set his satchel on the table at the front of the room, extracted the folder of notes he hadn't asked for and wouldn't use, just to have something to hold in his hands. “Please, sit.”
Miss Legrand sat on the floor among the children, though her posture suggested she was ready to stand back up at any moment.
“Right.” He opened the folder, scanned Raymun's notes, cartoons, laminated pictures, the words 'FUN FACTS' in bubble letters. He closed the folder, put his hands in his pockets and looked at the children, who looked back at him with an expression so eager he couldn’t help but feeling some echoing trepidation in his stomach.
“The dragon thing isn't wrong,” he began saying, because that was an honest mistake, and it deserved some explanation. “But it's more interesting than that. The people who first found dinosaur bones in Britain, and England was first, specifically around here and further west… they didn't call them dinosaurs because that word didn’t exist yet. This was about two hundred years ago. So they looked at these massive bones coming out of the ground in places like Oxfordshire and Sussex, and they thought about the stories they already knew. Some of them were scientists. Some of them were country doctors and village priests and people who happened to be digging in the right field. And they all had to make sense of what they were seeing with the language they had.” He paused. A boy sitting in the first row, with a riot of black curls on his head had put up his hand, but Aerion ignored it for a moment. “Which is… what do you think they thought? Before anyone said dinosaur. What would you think, if you dug up a leg bone the size of that window frame?”
He pointed at the narrow strip of daylight at the top of the wall and felt a thrill when twenty-odd heads immediately turned to where he was pointed.
The boy that still had his hand up yelled excitedly. “Dragon!”
“Dragon. Yes. Or giant. Or…”
“Monster!” said a small girl with two plaits, with great solemnity.
"Monster, yes. Good. The word dinosaur was only invented in 1842. Before that there was a man called William Buckland who found bones in a quarry in Oxfordshire and he called the creature… does anyone want to guess what he called it?”
Silence. Not that Aerion was expecting anyone to actually know.
“Megalosaurus. Which is Greek for…”
“Big lizard!" said the black-haired boy in the front.
Aerion gaped at him. “You speak Greek?”
“My grandpa does,” answered the child, and Aerion would agree he had reason to smile as smugly as he did to the other kids looking at him with awe. “I just know a little.”
“Very good, Panagiotis” said Mz Tanselle, who leaned forward a bit to put a star sticker on the boy’s arm. “A star for you.”
“You’re correct, Pana… Panagiotis” said Aerion. “Megas means great or large, sauros means lizard. Although Buckland was a priest, and later a curator at the Ashmolean Museum, he was also one of the finest geologists of his generation, and he wrote the whole scientific description of Megalosaurus in 1824, and before that he had also eaten a piece of the heart of Louis XIV of France.” He stopped, lifting his eyebrows meaningfully at the children, who’d all gasped at his words. “That's true, by the way. He was also notable for attempting to eat every animal that existed. He said moles and flies tasted the worst.”
“Did he eat the dinosaur?” said the girl with the plaits.
“No. The dinosaur had been dead for about a hundred and sixty million years by the time Buckland found it, so there wasn't much left to eat, you see.”
The whole classroom laughed, and Aerion felt the corners of his lips twitch. He turned his back to them and opened one of the drawers under the shelves and extracted a few fossil samples, hiding them in his pockets before turning back.
“Could you eat a dinosaur bone?”
“You could attempt it. I'd recommend against it.” He turned back to them and crouched slightly so he wasn't quite so far above them, showing them a fossil and ignoring their grabby hands for it. “The bone would have become a fossil, like this, which means the actual organic material has been replaced by minerals from the rock around it. So you'd be eating rock, essentially. Your teeth would break before the bone did.”
“My front teeth already fell out,” volunteered a boy near the wall.
“Ehhh… that’s good to know,” Aerion said.
“Can my tooth become a fossil?”
“It could… if you buried it in the right conditions, wet, acidic soil, fairly deep, and left it for, let's say, several million years…”
“But I won’t to be alive in several million years to see!” the boy said, with an exasperated sigh.
“No. Neither will I. But the tooth might still exist. As a fossil. And then someone in several million years, if there are still people on Earth, which isn't guaranteed, would dig it up and look at it, and they'd have to figure out what kind of creature made it.”
There was a short silence in which this was absorbed.
“They'd think it was a monster!” whispered theatrically one of the girls sitting in the back.
Aerion squinted at the back row, trying to locate who had spoken. “Eh… Probably. Yes.”
He stood back up, registering a mild complaint about the crouching in his hamstrings. He'd been meaning to do something about that, possibly yoga, though every time he thought about yoga classes he thought about the social component of yoga classes and the idea turned lackluster. He was going to talk about Gideon Mantell next, about the dinosaur teeth, how his wife found them in a roadside pile of gravel, and the argument with Buckland about whether they belonged to a herbivore or a carnivore, when the door opened.
It opened inward and wrong, by which he meant whoever was opening it misjudged the arc of it and caught it on the edge of a display unit, which made a significant noise, and the children swiveled again, and Aerion looked up, and then kept looking up. The man in the door was, Aerion thought as he blinked rapidly, broader than the doorframe, and that didn’t seem plausible. He was holding the hand of a small boy, him so big or the boy so small he reached him way below waist-line. The boy appeared to have been crying, or sick, his round face reddened and blotched under a shock of red hair. On his other hand, the tall man held a big plastic bag from the museum shop, and he folded it awkwardly, one-handedly, towards his chest, as he tried to close the door behind him without making it rattle or bump against himself, the boy or any other piece of furniture, which given his size it required more navigational skills than Aerion would have expected.
He had shoulder-length dark blonde hair that was probably slightly ginger if the fluorescent lighting hadn't been washing everything out, and it was gathered at the back of his head in a half-done arrangement that had come partially loose, and he was wearing glasses, thick-framed, round lenses, that sat slightly askew on his nose. His facial expression was simultaneously gentle and stern, something to do with the slope of his forehead and nose and the curve of his lips and cheeks. He and the boy were wearing matching Ivysaur t-shirts that Aerion recognised from the NHM shop new merchandising collection, and upon registering that, Aerion instantly recalled how pissy he’d been someone with power at the museum decided it was advisable to sell Pokémon merchandise, as if mixing fiction with science would help anyone understand the complexities of palaeobiology. Probably due to the limited size availability, not that giants would often stop to buy their clothing at a museum shop, the t-shirt was very tight around his improbably wide shoulders and torso, leaving very little to the imagination, and Aerion’s imagination was running wild already.
He was, in short, the most attractive man he’d ever seen.
“Sorry, sorry,” the man said, his eyes scanning the room as if he was automatically counting the children. He nodded, seemingly satisfied by the number he found. “Sorry, Mz L. We were in the loo, but now we are all back together, aren’t we Robin?”
Robin didn’t seem keen on speaking, half-hidden behind the bulk of the man.
“Was it any good, Mr D?” asked a girl with short hair and an Elsa t-shirt, tugging at the leg of his jeans as he tried to move towards the front of the class, steering the boy forward.
“Ehhh”, said the tall man. “The loo? Yes, it was a great loo. Lots of mirrors.”
The boy sat next to the wall by the girl with the plaits, who examined him briefly and patted his knee.
“I want to go to the loo too,” whined someone.
“We’ll go to the loo afterwards, buddy, because now we have to hear about the dinosaurs, can you hold it?” He messed up the hair of the boy who’d asked to get to the loo as he continued navigating around the kids. With his half-hunched posture as he leaned forward here and there to exchange words with the kids, his too-small t-shirt frequently rode up, showing a half-inch of boxer shorts that featured what appeared to be dinosaur silhouettes in a repeating pattern. Not the realistic kind, more like something from a kiddie cartoon.
Aerion realised he was staring, but he couldn’t move his eyes elsewhere as if they were glued to the pink dinosaurs. Was that Barney?
“Did you see the big whale Mr D?” intervened another of the children, tugging at his hand to get his attention.
“Don’t think I have yet, have I. What’s it like Ahmed?”
“BIG!” said several of them simultaneously.
“Bigger than Mz L?”
“Yes!”
“Bigger than ME?"
“Yes!”
“Much bigger.” said the plait girl, rolling her eyes.
By then, the man had reached the front of the classroom and he was so much bigger from up-close, than Aerion felt himself leaning against the display shelves for purchase, or to camouflage, he wasn’t sure. The man hadn’t yet turned his eyes at him, too distracted with the kids that continued pelting questions at him.
“Yes, we had a minor vom accident, Timmy, but I don’t think it’s contagious, so no need to worry. Our poor t-shirts however, didn’t survive,” he let the museum plastic bag he was holding dangle significantly in front of them, his nose wrinkled in a fake disgust gesture. “But at least we got new tees out of it, didn’t we Robin?”
“Is that Ivysaur?” yelled one of the boys near the door.
“It is, Sam. Cool, right?”
“Charmander is way cooler!” replied Sam.
“No, Pikachu is the best!”
“Is Ivysaur a dinosaur, Mr Dinosaur man?” asked Sam.
Aerion was taken aback by the question suddenly directed at him.
“Mr Dayne”, whispered Mz L to the boy who had asked.
“He can’t be Mr D, we already have a Mr D!” protested the kid.
“He can be little Mr D. and our Mr D can be big Mr D!”
Aerion felt blush creeping up his neck, turning his pale face blotchy red. And that’s exactly when the tall man turned to look at him, noticing him for the first time, his already comically big eyes behind his glasses widening as they roved up and down and up again. “Oh… hiya. Are you… Raymund couldn't…?
“I'm covering,” Aerion explained curtly. He didn’t trust his dry mouth to say much more right now.
“That’s brill. I'm Mr D.” Aerion tried and failed not to think of what that D could stand for. It couldn’t certainly mean that. His eyes darted downwards anyway, just for a second. “Sorry. I mean, that’s what the kids call me, you see. And you are?”
“I’m doctor Dayne” replied Aerion, his hand extending forward on an instinctual gesture, despite his previous reticence about shaking Mz Legrand’s hand. When the other man's big paw closed around his, it sent a thrill down Aarion’s spine, who extracted his hand with what he hoped was clinical speed and resisted the urge to rub it against his burning cheeks.
”If you are a doctor why aren’t you working in a hospital like my mom, saving lives?” asked the girl with the Elsa tshirt.
”There are different kinds of doctors. Being a doctor means being the world’s utmost expert on something,” explained Mz L.
The whole class ooohhed and Aerion preened a little.
”So you’re a world most expert on what?” asked Panagiotis.
”English dinosaur discoveries in the early nineteenth century.”
“So is Ivysaur a dinosaur, Dr. Dayne?” repeated Sam. Aerion looked at the boy who'd asked and then for half a second at the Ivysaur on Mr D's very tight t-shirt, and then back to Sam and the rest of the children, fixing his attention on them as if his life depended on it. He was aware that Mr D settled himself down among the children, somewhere to his left and suddenly he felt a confidence boost: he was going to give the best lecture he had ever given to a group of first graders.
“No,” he began brightly. “Ivysaur is a Pokémon, which is a fictional creature. Means it doesn’t exist. However.” He held up a finger before the chorus of protest could form. “However! The reason Pokémon look the way they do is because the people who designed them were thinking about real animals, including real prehistoric animals. Bulbasaur, which Ivysaur evolves from, was based partly on a frog and partly on the neck frill of a ceratopsian which belongs to the same family as Triceratops.” He picked a plastic Triceratops up from the shelf and leaned forward to hold it next to the Ivysaur on Mr D's tshirt, which required him to hover his hand over Mr D’s chest close enough to feel its warmth, which he did for display purposes without any other second intention. Although Mr D. was sitting down, his head came up to Aerion’s midsection and his hair looked very soft, as did his pectorals, straining against the tight light blue tee. “You see it?”
Several children craned forward.
“Whooaaa,” said Sam. “They look a bit alike!”
“And Aerodactyl, I believe is the name, the flying fossil Pokémon” Aerion continued, forcing himself to move away from Mr D. “is clearly based on a Pterosaur, though it's not technically a dinosaur, but a flying reptile, a separate lineage. So whoever designed those games did their research. Unlike Barney.” He set the Triceratops back on the shelf.
“Who's Barney?” said the girl with the Elsa t-shirt.
“The purple dinosaur," Aerion said. “On the television. Maybe you are too young for it? He's supposed to be a Tyrannosaurus, and he's purple, which we have absolutely no evidence for, and he walks upright with his tail off the ground, which is correct, but he also runs around singing and hugging children, which…” He paused and lifted both eyebrows meaningfully. “We can say with reasonable confidence that this is not accurate behaviour for an apex predator.”
Several children giggled. Mr D produced a raspy laughter that made something warm lit inside Aerion’s chest.
“Now let’s go back to Buckland,” he said, positioning himself back before the desk at the front of the classroom. “Because I want to tell you about the next important person in British dinosaur history. Her name was Mary Anning.” He paused for effect. “She was twelve years old when she found her first complete skeleton.”
They all gasped.
“Twelve?” repeated someone in disbelief.
"Twelve. She lived in a town called Lyme Regis, in Dorset, on the coast, where the cliffs are full of fossils because the rock there is very old and very soft and the sea eats it away. Her family sold fossils to tourists, which is how she learned to look for them. And in 1811, she and her brother found a skull in the cliff face and spent months digging it out.” He spread his hands to show the length of it. “About this wide. Not a dinosaur either… a sea reptile called an Ichthyosaur. Big eyes, long snout. Looks a bit like a dolphin.”
“Like Lapras,” said Sam.
Aerion opened his mouth, frowning: “Ehh.. I don't know what that is.”
“It's a Pokémon that looks like the Loch Ness Monster."
“The Loch Ness Monster is a hoax,” Aerion scoffed. “However! The Plesiosaur it is supposedly based on is real. So I guess, yes?”
Sam sat back with a proud smile.
“Mary Anning sold fossils her whole life,” he continued. “To scientists, to museums. She corresponded with the best geologists in Europe. She taught herself French so she could read the scientific papers of her time. She did all she could to get herself into science in a period in which women had very limited access to education, so it’s good to remember her. Mary Anning.” He saw Mr Legrand, nodding furiously as she wrote in her notebook, and he felt proud of having impressed her. “However, she wasn't allowed to join the Geological Society because she was a woman. They used her research and cited her work and invited her to meetings as a guest and did not make her a member for fifteen years, and by then she was very ill and died not long after.”
“That's not fair!” said the girl with the Elsa t-shirt, and there were hums of agreement everywhere.
“No,” Aerion agreed softly. “It wasn't.”
As he spoke, he kept stealing glances towards Mr D, who had scooted towards one of the sides of the classroom to sit more comfortably against the wall, long legs folded up in front of him, a child on each side leaning against him, one of them the boy that was wearing a matching Ivysaur t-shirt. He looked so soft and so strong at the same time, like the perfect person to rest your head against, as the children were. Aerion was, he recognised distantly, in a significant amount of trouble.
“Did she have a dog?” said Robin suddenly, from behind Mr D's right arm, still half-hidden.
Aerion blinked. “Mary Anning? Yes, actually. A terrier called Tray. He helped her find fossils because dogs can smell organic material in rock. He died in a landslide while they were working.” He paused and grimaced. “She was very upset about it. She wrote about him in her diaries.”
“I have a dog," Robin said, and he looked as if he was about to cry again.
“Good for you” said Aerion, for lack of something better to say. How do you even stop a boy from crying. “Keep it away from cliffs.”
Mr D's mouth wobbled in what might have been a smile, and Aerion felt the corners of his own mouth lifting slightly.
“Right,” said Aerion, turning away and reaching back to the shelf. “Who wants to hold a fossil?”
The resulting noise was deafening. Aerion weathered it without flinching. The teachers stood up to help him. The small girl who'd been leaning against Mr D was now attempting to hang from his arm. He let her dangle for a moment, made a crane noise, set her down, and finally approached the desk where Aerion had set the samples, and was busy explaining to Mz L which ones were safe for the students to touch, which was the perfect excuse not to lift his eyes and ogle at the male teacher from up-close, as much as he wanted to.
When Aerion finished explaining, the three of them went around the semicircle distributing samples, a small ammonite, a piece of belemnite, two fragments of bone from the education collection, the kids often calling for Aerion to explain what each one was, where it had been found, how old, how the mineralization worked, what the creature might have looked like. The children held the samples with surprising care, turning them over and over. The boy called Panagiotis held the bone fragment up to the light and squinted through it.
“Is this from a T-Rex?”
“Hadrosaur, most likely. Duck-billed dinosaur.”
“Is that the one with the trumpet head?"
Aerion tilted his head. “Which one are you thinking of?”
“I saw it on a documentary. It made a sound like this”, he made a long resonant foghorn sound that made the other kids around them giggle.
“Maybe a parasaurolophus?” Aerion hummed. “Yes. Sounds like it. Its crest functioned like a resonating chamber. We think they used it to pass messages to each other. So they were quite social creatures.”
Panagiotis did the sound again, louder, and several other children immediately joined in.
“Okay, okay” Mr D said, waving his hands over the heads of the children in an attempt to distract them. “Parasaurolophus orchestra. Brilliant. But that’s enough for now. Let's maybe let Dr. Dayne…” His eyes caught Aerion's straight over the heads of the children, and for an instant, before Aerion forced himself to look away, it felt like they were the only two persons in the room. “...finish what he was saying. Yeah?”
“I was finished,” Aerion said, which wasn't quite true, as he moved on to explain a little about the Mantell teeth, and about the detail that the Iguanodon thumb-spike had originally been mounted on its nose, illustrating with a teeth fossil on his own nose, which children reliably found hilarious, and after some time speaking he became aware that he'd been talking for probably longer than the forty-five minutes Patricia had specified, and that several children had begun to show signs of boredom, and so he shut up and looked questioningly at the teachers, hands immediately going to his pockets to ground himself.
“Question time,” said Mz L, smiling at him much more warmly than she’d done an hour before. “Anyone got a question for Dr Dayne? Real questions, please, Timmy. About dinosaurs.”
“Why did they die?”
“Asteroid,” Aerion replied with complete confidence. “About sixty-six million years ago. It hit what's now the Gulf of Mexico and the impact threw enough debris into the atmosphere to block out the sun globally for, we think, somewhere between one and two years. Without sunlight the plants died, and the herbivores that ate the plants, and the carnivores after them. Species that could survive underground or underwater in the short term had a better chance. Birds made it.” He looked at the window, where a pigeon was sitting on the sill. “A pigeon is a dinosaur,” he pointed out. “Technically.”
All heads turned to look at the pigeon who seemed to look back, unimpressed.
“That's the most disappointing dinosaur.”
“Indeed,” Aerion deadpanned. He heard Mr D chuckling and tried not to smile.
The children asked twenty questions, of which he answered seventeen to completion and deflected three on grounds that the answers were too complex for a first session. The question time dissolved as the children began to argue with each other rather than talk to him, the room's noise level climbing while Aerion stood in the front of the class with the folder of activity materials Joanna had brought him that morning held in front of him like a shield. After a couple minutes of pure cacophony he decided to open it because he needed something to do with his hands and found the origami sheets inside. He took one to read the instructions, placing the folder behind him on the table.
The noise continued growing around him, and he tried to breathe through it, at the pace his therapist had prescribed for situations like this one, which he hadn't thought he'd need for a school group, but he had never spoken before so many children, before so much noise, and he could not let the situation overwhelm him. He folded one of the origami papers in half, corner to corner, pressed the crease flat with his thumbnail. Unfolded it. Folded it the other way. Pressed again. The paper held the crease exactly.
Suddenly, somewhere to his left, very close, two sharp claps and a shrill female voice startled him: “One, two, three—”
“Eyes on me!” chorused the children.
The room went quiet immediately, and the weight in Aerion’s temple and breast dissolved a little.
“Are you alright?”
Someone, a much deeper voice whispered, very close to Aerion. Mr D had appeared to his right without Aerion noticing the approach, which was either an impressive proof of how quietly a man that size could move or to how far inside his own head Aerion had just been. Up close, his eyes were very blue.
Aerion tried to smile. “Fine”, he explained. “The noise..”
He winced. He hadn't meant to say out loud the second part. Mr D nodded once, as if the noise were a complete explanation. “Is that for the children?” he asked.
Aerion nodded stupidly and held up the folder. “There are origami sheets, for the children,” he explained. “Dinosaurs.”
Mz D. grabbed the folder. “Alright, origami time”, he said, already moving and distributing sheets, waving off their requests. “Nope! Everyone gets one sheet, no swapping or bartering.”
“Which dinosaur is this?” asked Panagiotis, squinting at his paper.
Mr D folded himself awkwardly to look at the sheet in the kid’s hand, then stood up, shrugged and turned to Aerion: “Dr. Dayne, what dinosaur is this?”
Aerion looked at it from across the room, tilting his head. “Parasaurolophus,” he said. “Probably.”
The children descended on the paper with considerably more enthusiasm than skill, and all the while Aerion stood at the front, wondering when he was supposed to leave. Then a boy near his feet held up a badly crumpled square and looked at him pleadingly. Aerion crouched, took the paper, smoothed it flat against the floor with his palm, and handed it back.
“Start again” he instructed. “Crease it properly this time, fold it in half first, corner to corner, and press it flat before you move to the next step.”
The boy obeyed as Aerion watched. The fold was still crooked, so he sighed, took it back and showed him how to crease it properly. He was not entirely sure how, from there, he ended up sitting on the floor, trying to put together the badly creased papers the children kept handing him for help. He was used to that kind of precise work, it was a useful skill for someone whose job consisted of handling small fossils and fiddly archival materials.
“How are you doing that?” Aerion looked up.Mr D had approached him, crawling on his knees amidst the children, and was staring at Aerion's hands while on his own hand he was holding a disastrously-creased purple square. “Your fingers are very… “ He stopped, and Aerion noticed his cheeks were pinker than before, which only made his eyes bluer. “Nimble,” he finished awkwardly.
“Are they?”
“You must have had a lot of practice.”
“I haven’t done this before!” Aerion replied, which wasn’t exactly true, because he’d had an origami phase when he was ten, but that had been ages ago.
“Right,” Mr D said. He pushed his glasses up, and his index finger must least be twice the size of Aerion’s, and noticing that made Aerion’s hand sweat, and damp was not good for origami, so he put the finished dinosaur origami on the floor and stood back up, putting his hands in his pockets, letting his nails dig into his thighs, hidden from view.
“Mr D, look, mine has a beak," interrupted Panagiotis, materialising at Mr D's elbow with a slightly lopsided but recognisable orange dinosaur.
“Oh, that's brill, mate, look at that.” Mr D held it up for inspection, and then passed it over to Aerion who took it automatically, ignoring what the brief brush of fingers did to his heart rate.
“Is it the one that makes the funny sound?” Panagiotis asked Aerion.
Aerion looked at it with a thoughtful expression. “It is, he does it when calling to his other parasaurolophus friends.”
Panagiotis made the foghorn sound again, grabbing the green dinosaur Aerion had folded and pointing it to the orange dinosaur he had folded that was now in Aerion’s hands. For some reason, Aerion made a shorter, quieter version of the same sound, mimicking excited movement with the dinosaur origami. The children within earshot lost their minds entirely. Mr D exhaled sudden laughter through his nose and Aerion felt an echoing one bubbling its way up his throat.
“Dr. D," said one of the children suddenly, tugging at Aerion’s sleeve who tried not to wince watching the wool-and-silk material stretch. “What are these?” She was pointing at his face. More specifically, at the small titanium piercings along his left eyebrow, three flat-topped spikes, descending in size, the largest no bigger than a match head.
“Piercings,” Aerion said.
“Does it hurt?”
“It did when they were done. Not anymore.”
“Why do you have spikes?”
Aerion considered this question. “I like them.”
“It makes you look like a Stegosaurus,” the girl concluded.
Several children laughed, Aerion hadn't even noticed them crowding in around him.
“The Stegosarus didn’t really have spikes,” he explained, getting up and pointing to a poster on the closest wall. “The spiky things along his back are plates, they were flat and wide, osteoderms, they are called, probably used for temperature regulation or display.”
“So they weren’t prickly like porcupines?” asked the boy called Timmy.
“Not the plates on the back. They were likely covered in keratin, the same material as your fingernails, and had blood vessels running through them, which suggests they may have flushed with colour when the animal was threatened or trying to attract a mate.”
“So your spikes,” asked the girl, and Aerion didn’t like her knowing smile one bit, “are you using them to threaten or to attract a mate?”
A beat.
From Aerion's right, barely audible: “She's got you there.”
Aerion did not look back at Mr D.
“Neither”, he replied firmly, willing the heat rising up his neck not to reach his face.
“Can I touch them?”
Her hands were already reaching up, dangerously close, for she wasn't that much shorter than him.
“No!” Aerion stepped back on instinct, traipsed on his own feet and upon beginning to fall his back met something solid, Mr D's chest, whose right hand automatically grabbed onto Aerion’s waist to stabilize him.
“Clara” Mr D’s voice behind Aerion was gentle but firm. “We talked about this in class just last week. You cannot touch someone without asking them for permission.”
“You haven’t asked Dr. D and you’re touching him!”
The hand immediately disappeared. “It’s okay to touch someone if that prevents them from falling. But sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” muttered Aerion who was mourning the disappeared warmth. “And I wasn’t going to fall.”
“You really were.”
The look Aerion threw at him over his shoulder was deadly cold, but Mr D just smiled down at him, and their eyes locked again.
Clara, oblivious to the tension, asked: “Can I touch your eyebrow piercings then, Dr D?”
“No.”
“And the ones in your ears?”
“Nope.”
“I just think they're cool,” she insisted.
"Thank you, but no." said Aerion. Mr D exhaled behind him, warm on the back of his neck, but he didn’t turn again and kept his eyes on the children.
After some time, Mz L began to assemble the children into a line, but when Aerion turned to the desk where he’d left the samples, he saw Mr D was hoovering nearby, as if waiting to get a private word with him, which left Aerion no reasonable option but to approach.
“Yes?” Aerion asked, trying to sound polite and not like a fool.
“Your lecture was… super interesting. It made me curious about the first British dinosaur scientists. Is there a good book you can recommend?”
Aerion knew hundreds of books. He knew academic literature and popular science treatments and several novels that were worth the time despite their fictional approach. He opened his mouth and stopped himself before something like 'I could show you my private collection' made it out of his mouth. “Megalosaurus,” he said finally. “The first named dinosaur. That's the thread to follow. They probably have a copy at the museum shop”
Mr D nodded, pushing his glasses up. “Cheers.” He started to turn, and then didn't, turned back. “Hey, the kids are going to the main hall, yeah?”
Aerion hummed. “I believe so. Mz. Legrand has the schedule.”
“Right, she does. Yes.” He stared at Aerion, who looked back, blinking. “Are you… I mean. Do you have to go back to…?”
“I have work to do.” Aerion said.
“Yeah. No. Sure.” From this angle, standing as close as they were, looking upwards, Aerion couldn’t help noticing how unusually pointed Mr D’s canines were. “Just, it'd be good to have someone who actually knows stuff, when we're looking at the museum….” He gestured vaguely upward and to the left, in the direction of the main hall. “If you wanted. No pressure.”
Aerion looked at his watch. He looked at the door. He thought about his office, and the email from Edinburgh, and his book draft, and his contract renewal. “I could,” he said carefully, “perhaps explain a bit of the exhibit in the main hall. It’s on my way back to the office after all.”
“Brill,” Mr D replied, which was the same adjective he’d used with Aerion an hour ago, and his smile widened even further. His teeth were really wonky, not attractive at all. Aerion licked his lips, realised what he was doing, and closed his mouth and probed at his own slightly pointy canines, turning his gaze away from him before he could do anything stupid like bite him. Instead, he busied himself collecting the fossil samples from the desk and putting them back on the shelves with more swiftness than the task required, so that when he turned back in a couple minutes he the group leaving the room in an ordered line, and Mr. D standing by the open door was looking back at him expectantly.
So Aerion did what he had to. He led them to the main hall, stopping at every relevant exhibit, explaining every bit worth explaining, patiently answering their eager questions, waving his hands around, painfully aware of the warmth radiating off Mr D when he drifted close enough for Aerion could feel him, a solid, welcome presence by his side. And if he preened every time Mr D directed his wonky smile at him, well. He was, after all, a scientist. He knew exactly what display behaviour looked like.
