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It doesn’t get better as they leave the island.
If anything, it gets worse. The pressure building like the herald of a storm front.
She leans against Alan the entire chopper ride back to Puerto Rico, letting the heat sink from him into her. He acts better than she does - lets Tim curl up with his head on Alan’s lap as he exchanges snarky comments with Ian. Only she can feel the tension in the arm he has around her back, his fingers knotted so tightly in her hair it's on the wrong side of painful.
She doesn't make him let go. She can't.
She presses her head against his shoulder, tries to will him to feel the bone and heartbeat and know they are alive and it is going to stay that way.
There’s a canyon between them. She needs to know what happened when she wasn’t there, but it’s not something that she wants to bring up in this space of fear and pain, Hammond’s stoic silence and Ian’s sardonic smile. She limped away from the last raptor attack, and the prickling discomfort in her ankle keeps her awake even as the children doze off, worn out and stretched thin.
When the miles of ocean under them turn into the friendly stretch of Puntarenas’ beach, she releases a breath she hadn’t felt herself holding. Knowing that there are other people, alive, unaware, it’s like waking up from a nightmare.
Everyone piles out of the helicopter, but Alan stays still, a hand still curled around the back of her neck.
‘Alan.’ She touches his face. ‘Alan, are you-’
‘Not yet, honey.’
And the gap between them in narrowing, so close she can see the canyon drop-off speeding towards them and the edge yawning open to meet her feet.
‘Come on.’ She tugs at his hand, dragging him back from the jungle into civilisation. She’s a fossil hunter. She never thought she’d be happy at the sight of so many people again, but there it is. Life.
They end up in the exact same hotel in Puntarenas they stayed in on the way to Isla Nublar. Same floor, even. It has identical bright, knotted rugs and the same fake wooden panelling and the same view of the serene Pacific. It’s almost like she dreamt the last couple of days.
Ellie pulls the shutters closed on the bright sunshine, locks the door, and then crawls into bed with Alan.
She thinks they deserve to sleep for at least a week, but Alan slides in and out of nightmares all night, waking her with him, and somewhere in the small hours he mumbles to her about what he’s dreaming about.
There’s teeth and claws and Tim and Lex who are too young to have ever seen anything like this. I think , Ellie murmurs, we’re about 65 million years too young to have seen anything like this . Which makes him laugh, at least.
The room is suffocating with the presence of dinosaurs, and when he next falls asleep she slips out of the room.
She’s thinking about getting some air, but when she passes by the bar she makes an abrupt detour.
It doesn’t surprise her that Ian’s in there. She is surprised that Hammond is sat next to him. Ian slides her a glass with a smirk, explaining that he and Hammond have been debating how you would get measurable evidence for the phrase tempting fate .
Hammond, as tired and genial as a man who owns an island and filled it with killing machines could be, just rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
‘I’m pretty sure that injured people shouldn’t be drinking, Ian.’ She should be frowning, but he’s a surprisingly difficult person to stay annoyed at.
‘Yeah, well.’ He taps his glass against hers. ‘I figure I deserve it.’
They fill the next half an hour with idle chatter punctuated with awkward silences, drinking their way steadily through the bar’s supply of imported whiskey. Ellie’s chewing at the edge of her glass and debating with her common sense on going back to bed when Hammond slides a tiny slip of paper in front of her.
It takes her a few seconds to realise it’s a check. She pulls her eyes away from the neat line of zeroes and stares blankly at Hammond.
‘What’s this for?’
‘I do believe I promised you funding for the next three years.’
‘I thought that was if we gave sign off on it? I won’t-’
‘My dear Doctor Sattler, my ideas may evidently not be up to much but my word is. You protected my grandchildren, everything I have would not nearly be payment enough. The funding is yours, as promised.’
She wants to scream. But she’s so tired. Tired of being angry, tired of being scared. And the words die in her mouth.
His ideas nearly got everyone killed. But a few days ago she laid her hands on ancient skin and horn and felt a heartbeat as old as time throb under her fingers and heard the rustle of primeval leaves overhead and nearly cried at how lovely and impossible it all was.
He had a dream, once. Didn't they all?
She takes the check silently, nods at Hammond, pats Ian on the shoulder and turns to leave.
There’s still one thing to be said, however.
‘Hammond?’ She smiles. ‘Thank you for the triceratops.’
He smiles back, fond, proud, sad. In his own way, she thinks, he loves the dinosaurs almost as much as the grandchildren now asleep in the room down the hall.
She sneaks back into bed, curling back into the fold of Alan’s arms and letting him run half-awake hands down her sides.
‘Alan?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Let’s go home.’
It turns out, if you want to avoid reporters, Montana is a good place to do it.
And it’s a good thing, really. She’s not sure they’d give the best of interviews, the state they’re in. It takes months for them to remember how to get back to normal. Jumping at loud noises. Flinching at rain. Spending storm-filled nights buried together under blankets, trying to forget what thunder meant that one time, Alan’s hands warm and steady on her skin even as he trembles next to her.
It’s easier in the daytime. Summer in Montana is warm and honest, and they spend time shifting sand together. Walking in the dust. They unearth ancient foliage together and she teases him for being such a wildlife biologist didn’t he know that botany was the real ruler of Earth?
‘I thought it was woman that inherits the Earth?’ He grins at her one day, gently lifting unearthed shards of rock into the sunlight to show her the beautiful, fragile fan of a ginkgoite leaf.
‘It is. Woman, and the ferns.’
‘Maybe we should name this one after you? Ginkgo sattleri, it’s got a nice ring to it.’
‘Maybe I should find something to name after you.’
‘I’ll take an ancient species of mighty oak, thanks.’
‘Nah, maybe some kind of grumpy, pervasive shrub. You know, the ones that grow back even if you set fire to them, and they have thorns and really annoying clinging seedpods.’
‘That hurts, El.’
‘Stop whining and start categorising. And that is clearly ginkgo adiantoides, you palaeozoologist heathen.’
He flicks sand at her. She throws a handful back and they end up rolling in the sand (a safe distance from the fossils) like two teenagers.
It’s like nothing has ever changed.
And Ellie? Ellie is fine. Honestly.
Her foot heals, the cuts and bruises they all collected after a night of running through jungle heal so finely that only Alan can find the original lines of them, tracing over her skin in the middle of the night.
She has the distinct impression that maybe she’s not coping as well as she should, maybe she should have joined Alan’s streak of nightmares in Puerto Rico and gotten it out of the way. But then, the entire world was burning down around her and she felt like at least one of them had to be present to extinguish the flames and sort through the ashes.
It finds her, sometimes. In the quiet moments, when she can just hear Alan’s breathing and feel his heartbeat and she can feel herself start to shake as the momentum of something she’s put off for months now starts to catch up.
Then Alan strokes her cheek, or touches her waist, or tucks some hair behind her ear, and she can breathe again.
‘El, are you okay?’
She breathes in. She’s bottled everything up for this long, right? What’s the harm, if she keeps it up.
‘Okay? I’m the Queen of Okay.’
They dig up plants and ferns and Ellie, quietly, feels grateful that the bones stay hidden.
Later in the year, the kids come to visit. She’s a little surprised their parents even let them out of sight, now, but she supposes a quiet dig in Montana isn’t as alarming as a tropical island.
They’ve grown up so much, shooting up like flowers. Alan takes Tim on a tour of the finds, proud as if he was introducing his kids to each other - young and alive human and long-buried fossil.
She shows Lex around the grounds, pointing out the multi-layered ground, the hidden lake beds, her and Alan’s ideas for what might be out there. She’s building up steam, she’s had a lot of time to talk about this with Alan, of course, when Lex interupts her.
‘How did you meet Alan, Ellie?’
She flushes automatically. It’s a stupid response. There’s nothing inappropriate about it.
Just newly-minted Doctor Ellie Sattler - who clawed her way through long nights, endless research proposals, denied requests and sneering professors with their own ideas about what lovely little blonde Miss Sattler should do - landing in the middle of a California conference with no patience and an axe to grind.
So the story of Ellie and Alan starts like most good romances. A blazing argument in the middle of the sun-drenched NAPC over the potential toxicity of the serenna genus and its species.
Alan is five minutes into a detailed argument related to serenna distribution and its potential effect on migration when she decides she hates him.
15 minutes and a switch to velociraptor prey animals and their diets, and she decides he’s not that bad.
30 minutes and a discussion about whether s. aegyptiacus would win in a fight against t. rex , and she realises that if she allows the argument to continue, she’s probably going to fall in love with him.
She lets it.
‘We debated at a conference,’ she tells Lex. ‘I joined his next expedition.’
Ellie-and-Alan didn’t happen until later. Shoulder-to-shoulder in a six-by-two foot trench, knees pressed together, letting the rain soak into their clothes, gently uncovering the first bone of the dig.
He had beamed at her, hair slicked down by a curtain of sleet, starting to shiver and as delighted as a little boy on Christmas day.
She kissed him for it. How could she not?
Lex frowns at her in confusion. Ellie just smiles.
They round the corner, and Alans grins at her over Tim’s head, currently bent over the plant samples they dug up a few days back. The sun's shining, Tim and Lex are happy and safe, Alan is Alan, And Ellie is content.
Of course, a couple of days into the kids’ visit, Ellie is digging the remains of a promising-looking ancient pond bed, showing Tim the ancient lines of mud, when she turns over a distinctive hooked claw.
It’s utahraptor , not velociraptor . But it’s all one family and one look and she will know that skeleton when she forgets everything else she’s ever learned about palaeontology. Screams in the night and oh god how had she managed to forget what they sounded like?
She feels the shriek clawing up from her stomach – a sound a velociraptor would be impressed with, if she let it out – and tries to swallow it back, clapping a hand over her mouth and biting down on her fingers as the pressure builds inside her throat. Don’t scream.
The thought throbs inside her brain like a headache.
Don’t scream don’t scream don’t scream
She’s scaring Tim, she knows that, but she the dam’s broken now, and she can’t force the flood back.
Someone’s tugging on her hand, and she blinks past the tears long enough to focus. Tim holds her chewed fingers and looks up at her with solemn eyes.
‘Ellie, do you want me to get Alan?’
She flinches.
He nods silently, stands and trundles back to the dig site.
Ellie sits, alone, in the dirt and dust of the past. Breathing and breathing and trying not to scream.
Everyone seemed to remember the tyrannosaurus. But for most of the time on the island they’d been stuck with the velociraptors and that’s what Ellie remembers. Claws and screams and the bright eyes that were too intelligent to be natural and her quiet acceptance around midnight that while she would try to get everyone off the island alive, she didn’t think they were going to. She was going to die without seeing Alan again.
All that time holding her edges together, and it’s once coincidental claw hidden in the earth that brings it all pulling apart at the seams.
The touch makes her start.
‘Easy. It’s just me.’
‘Just you.’ She manages to squeeze out.
Alan, crouching down in front of her, tired and rumpled but still smiling the way he did when they first met, a thousand miles and a handful of years ago.
Alan, curling his hands around hers, protecting her from herself.
Ellie’s a modern, grown-up girl with her own PhD, she should probably be embarrassed about being seen having a quiet breakdown in a dig trench. But it’s Alan. So instead she shakes and clings to him and sniffs back the tears.
Alan just rubs his thumbs over her hands and smiles. ‘Okay, honey?’
‘I told you,’ she chokes out. ‘The Queen of Okay.’
‘So you said.’ He tilts his head, regards her silently.
Ellie hiccups, breathes, looks up to meet Alan’s smile. ‘Hey, Alan?’
‘Hmm?’
‘I think I’m still scared of dinosaurs.’
‘Yeah, likewise.’ He smiles off into the distance, and she wonders if he’s remembering the shadows in the corridors and the sounds in the night too. ‘Think of it like exposure therapy, El. These ones aren’t going to go walking anywhere, any time soon.’
‘Right.’ She takes a breath. Then another. ‘Right.’
She stands, pulling Alan up with her, and hand-in-hand they turn back towards their van and the children, playing in the sunshine. Ellie lets the desert wind blow dust over the bones.
It’ll still be there, tomorrow.