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maidenjediFANDOM: Jurassic Park (Movies)
RATING: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Owen Grady, Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, Simon Masrani
SUMMARY: Alan Grant sends a book to Owen Grady.
Written for
Notes: Title from the Robert Frost poem The Exposed Nest. Alan Grant takes a lot of cues from the Crichton novel here (which I re-read this summer for the first time in more than twenty years), but it is mostly background. This is very much movie-fic.
Also on AO3.
Alan Grant laid his hand on the book in front of him. It was the only copy he had, and it was a mock-up. In the end, he’d decided only to have it printed for coursework, and therefore no one read it, except the kids assigned it in Grant’s doctoral courses.
Velociraptors: A Study of Nature’s Most Violent Predator
The title was mundane and stopped far short of accurately describing what Alan had wanted to get across. But it was sufficient. Ellie had approved, anyway.
He’d written down everything he knew about velociraptors from before Isla Nublar, and then he’d gone through and made corrections based on what he learned there. He’d called Ellie several times, trying to get the details right; he even called Tim Murphy, to make sure there wasn’t anything he missed. It had been a long time; his nightmares had subsided, but his thirst to understand, to derive meaning from bones was still very much alive.
We had so much more than bones, though. For a little while.
It had to be enough.
It was enough. And the world was in agreement on this point, as far as Alan knew. Hammond had stopped the research, shut down that part of InGen. The company had never gone into the philanthropic trade the way Hammond’s granddaughter Lex had gone on a crusade for. Alan had little idea of what they did do, now, to be frank.
But he always had had blinders on, focused on the bones. He wrote his book, and then he went back and kept digging.
Not too long ago, he’d gotten a phone call, a voice from the past. Ian wanted to meet up, he had something he wanted to tell Alan.
They hadn’t been on a first-name basis, on the island. But some experiences change everything. Theirs, on Isla Nublar, certainly did.
“They’re bringing it back. All of it. They’re calling it Jurassic World."
Alan turned gray, and swallowed hard. “How? I mean…why would anyone…”
“The story, what happened, it never got out. Not really. They thought we were kooks, talking about tyrannosaurus rex and dilophosaurus without a trace of irony. And then InGen countered it in the press, and buried their involvement. No one really knows, Alan. Except us.”
Ian was going to scream to the heavens and see who listened. He had plans to go up to Washington, and he wanted Alan to go with him.
Alan decided on a different path. He tried Simon Masrani, and got a polite lunch out of the deal. Masrani went on and on about how different, how safe it would all be, how he would achieve the wonder that Hammond had always strived to see. He told Alan about InGen’s big hire, a wildlife expert who’d served in the war.
Others, then, had been in a war. Muldoon, maybe; he'd been a wildlife expert, too. Arnold, definitely.
Masrani was full of good cheer, and Alan tried to dampen it. Masrani countered every horror story, every fear.
"I am no fool, Dr. Grant. I will not make the same mistakes."
What Ian Malcolm would make of that bold claim, Alan knew all too well.
When Alan got home, he put the book in an envelope, with a note, and crossed his fingers that Owen Grady, whoever he was, was at least a man who would listen.
-
He cracked open a beer and sat down hard on the recliner, eyes glued to the television.
Behind the anchor desk, the screen showed an aerial photo of an island, pulled from a promotional package sent to news desks around the world. “Officials with Masrani Global say that the park is set to open on schedule,” say the brightly smiling news anchor. Her colleagues at the desk broke into excited chatter, side commentary meant to fill air time before the weather desk was ready to go.
The park.
He reached for the remote and shut it off. The weather was going to be hot and humid; it was summer in Georgia. Besides, he was leaving in the morning.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The image of the island on the news was burned on the backs of his eyelids. Isla Nublar. The park.
He reached for the beer he’d set down.
On the coffee table, on top of an assortment of papers and, probably, bills, lay two packages. One was slim, and he’d already opened it; contained within was the contract for his new job. He reached for it now, flipping through the pages.
International Genetic Technologies: Security Division.
Dear Mr. Grady….
He hadn’t heard of InGen, until he was approached by a headhunter after his discharge went through. Owen had been interested in private sector work with a zoo or a wildlife preserve of some kind; he’d studied animal biology and zoology in college and paid back his ROTC scholarship with the requisite stint in the Navy. He’d loved the Navy almost as much as he’d loved wildlife, when all was said and done, but it had been time to leave.
He’d done some searching, just basic curiosity, and found that InGen had been the company behind some of the most daring and interesting work with wildlife in the last half century. He was being brought on board to train animals set to be released in one of the world’s largest preserves; his experience, with both wildlife and the Navy, was “the perfect combination,” he was told.
It hit his ear funny, that phrase.
But he was headed for Costa Rica in the morning anyway. He was over twenty-one, single, free as a bird – and InGen had offered him a very attractive benefits package.
Owen put down the contract, and his hand hovered over the second package as he read the address label again.
Alan Grant, Ph.D., Department of Paleontology, University of Kansas
Owen had been obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid - what kid wasn’t? Alan Grant was well-known in his field; Owen had read everything he could his hands on about dinosaurs and he knew Alan Grant’s work pretty well, or had, in those halcyon days of good always wins and dinosaurs were extinct. Owen saw Grant’s name in connection with InGen in a few Google searches, but he hadn’t zeroed in on any of it, hadn’t wondered about it.
He finished his beer, and went to his computer. He typed in “Alan Grant, InGen” into the searchbar on Google.
After a while, Owen found some old articles, half of them in Spanish, about Isla Nublar, and a place called Jurassic Park.
Owen could talk his way through Mexico if he had to, but he never could read Spanish for shit. The translations he ran couldn’t be right. A child injured on a beach in a remote national park in Costa Rica. An outbreak of infant deaths in the villages not far from that beach. InGen hoarded amber, sponsored dino digs in northern climates.
Procompsonagthids. Dilophosaurs.
Velociraptors?
InGen hadn’t just been on the cutting edge with commonly known wildlife studies.
Owen breathed slowly, holding the package in his hands, trying to imagine what he’d been sent and why. Alan Grant had been among those consulting for InGen, but had cut all ties with the company in 1993. It seemed that after that time, Grant, already a preeminent figure in paleontology, gained special notoriety for his work describing the behavior patterns of various dinosaur species. Most of his colleagues appeared to appreciate his opinion. Some had written him off as a quack. One or two denounced him publicly as a fraud.
Owen rubbed his face with one hand. InGen had been in the news recently, after the death of John Hammond and Simon Masrani taking it over. Masrani was an eccentric, but a skilled and charismatic one, and from what Owen had read, he had been close to Hammond. Hammond, it was well-known, was a dreamer. Some of his dreams, he made come alive.
We want to bring you in because you have a specific skill set, Mr. Grady. You know more about predatory animals than most people with your background; your unique experiences with wildlife and in the Navy are exactly what we need for the park.
The park?
Why, yes. The preserve will be part of a massive, shall we say, amusement park.
They told him nothing else. We’ll show you, when you come to Costa Rica, they said.
His contract had arrived that morning, as he’d been told to expect, and right next to it on his beat-up doormat was this.
He opened the package.
-
They’re doing it again. Help them do it better.
Owen stayed up all night with the book. At some point, he put it down and went out to get a bottle of bourbon. He came back, and didn’t get up again until the InGen driver knocked on his door.
“Mr. Grady, it’s time to go.”
He nodded. He hadn’t showered. He should have been pretty drunk, but the book in his hand had sobered him considerably.
“Your bags, sir?”
He waved to them, and opened the book again. He followed the driver to the car.
He read the book on the flight. It was unlike him; he preferred to watch the ocean below, to see the world move past him. Owen liked to take it all in, and enjoy the journey, so he never took a book on a plane.
He couldn’t put this one down.
-
On the ground, Owen got out of the plane, and determined right away to ask.
Simon Masrani, in a dark grey suit, his shirt collar open, stuck out his hand. “Mr. Grady, it is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Dinosaurs,” said Owen. “Is that…?”
Masrani didn’t blink, and Owen’s was a hard, unflinching stare. “It is. And you’re going to help us, I understand.”
At that, Masrani swept his hand in a welcoming gesture, urging Owen to follow the guide. They climbed into a Jeep, and Masrani began telling Owen what had inspired him to follow John Hammond’s original, if flawed, dream.
“We’re going to go right where he went left. We’re going to ensure the safety of this place from day one, because we want to achieve Hammond’s vision – a place of wonder, where gasps of delight can be heard from every guest, at any time. And we’re going to improve on that, as he would have wanted. Oh, I have no illusions, Mr. Grady. People died here, and it was tragic. We want to honor their sacrifice, achieve bigger things. And I need you to help me do it.”
He continued chattering, and Owen listened with one ear, half his attention on their surroundings. Outside the noise of the Jeep’s engine, there was a world apart. It hummed and called; Owen could tell, at night, nature would serenade them with a cacophony.
Masrani caught him and laughed. “Oh, none of our animals are out in the preserve just yet. You won’t hear them at all.”
“I wasn’t listening for them,” said Owen.
“What, then?”
“The rest of it. The jungle, the island. You have animals and you want to introduce them to this environment. I’m going to have to understand where they’re going.”
Masrani grinned. “I knew you were the man for this job.”
They pulled on to an unfinished, paved road; here the jungle cleared out, and the interior buildings of Jurassic World came into focus.
Everything was new, the shine still evident. If there had been a Jurassic Park, twenty years ago, evidence had been swept away or buried.
Masrani led the way inside, and Owen, who had begun the day and the journey filled with more accusations than questions, took it all in, and tried to hold in his curiosity.
When they reached the nursery, he was a goner.
-
Not long after Blue and the others hatched, Owen began to wonder.
He watched them carefully, making notes about their behavior patterns, in particular their tendency to act as a group. Blue had emerged as the leader quite early, though she listened to him before making decisions.
For now.
They were getting bigger, and more sure of their place in the food chain. Owen would need help, sooner rather than later.
But first, he had to do some studying.
Owen took up his copy of Velociraptors: A Study of Nature’s Most Violent Predator and flipped to a dog-eared page. He’d highlighted a section here, had read it many times since the ride to Isla Nublar.
These animals, being the hereditary forefathers of our modern birds, passed on more than just skeletal similarities. Though for years our thinking has been shaped first by the assumption that they were reptilian, and later mammalian, we can confirm that in fact their behavior patterns were also bird-like. Migratory instinct was ingrained, natural. Their social behavior would have mirrored that of a flock of geese, for example. And, crucially, they would have a hierarchy, a code of behavior that would designate a leader of the group.
Another page described, in disturbing first-person narrative, the feeling of being hunted, of ambush.
Just that morning, Owen had seen that same instinct in play. He hadn't been the one hunted, but he'd seen the faces of the two eldest raptors. His time would come.
Masrani had hired a park director, and she was overseeing the hiring of control team staff, who would very soon arrive and begin hiring support staff. They had three dozen fully grown herbivores already in the preserve; construction was nearly complete on the hotel. The park would open, and eventually, Masrani and his people would want to introduce the raptors.
Pack hunters...for whom ambush is an instinct.
Whatever had happened on this island before – and those details were never unclassified - Owen would help them do it better. There was a great deal that hadn’t been clear the first time around.
Owen wrote a note and stuck it in an envelope addressed to Dr. Alan Grant at the University of Kansas.
“I will do whatever I can. Thank you for the book.”
-
