This is a sequel to my first Claire/Owen story called "The First 48." I would recommend reading that one first, but you maybe wouldn't have to. This one's going to be a 3-parter. As always, nothing's mine, and I hope you enjoy!

There's a rhythmic scratching filling the room, one rapidly increasing in tempo. She absent-mindedly picks at the dinosaur on her shorts until breakfast arrives. It takes a little poking and prodding to get the glower off her face and her supposed diet out the window when the gluttonous French toast is unveiled (that's what she gets for leaving the ordering up to him, he argues,) but the fork eventually finds her fingers, and her hands stay busy as she eats.

She finishes her meal quickly, but he's still working on his and her hands become unoccupied again, an increasingly dangerous thing as her eyes focus with raptor-like intensity on the little blue screen print in the corner of her white shorts again.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

She needs to prepare herself. She'll probably be thrown in front of a press conference before the clock strikes noon tomorrow, so she has to find a balance, a balance between sympathetic manager and corporate bitch, as Owen would say. She has to figure out how to mentally distance herself from the park and the dinosaurs (have the attitude towards the assets that she had just a few short days ago; she can't imagine going back to that way of thinking) and every decision that led to every disaster if she wants to survive this publicly, personally, and professionally, and she can't determine how to walk back into work tomorrow, exuding confidence with her head held high, if she's covered in fucking dinosaurs today.

She was relatively alright until she had taken the call about returning to work the night before, and he knows that's her trigger. His eyes fill with worry as he looks at her, her brow furrowed, her finger running a race against her thigh. It's not the strangest manifestation of post-traumatic stress he's ever seen, but it's up there, and he knows she's not going to get very far. She's the one who decides which vendors to use for the merchandise, after all, and he knows she would've chosen the best her budget could buy, and with a business that was raking in the cash like Jurassic World was just a few days ago, and maybe still is, if the online sales reports in her email are any indication, that's a pretty big merchandising budget.

He sighs and gathers the empty plates and the used cutlery, reluctantly leaving their shared chair, ready to place it all just outside the door for someone to collect. He nearly drops everything right onto his bare feet when the irritating scratching is replaced with her pained cry.

She's sucked her finger into her mouth, and he knows she's lost her battle. When she slips the digit back out of her lips, her nail is at an angle he hopes he never sees again, and her front teeth are stained with the faintest hint of her crimson red blood. She's pressed too hard, fought too fast, and the blue dinosaur on her thigh has come up the victor, just as he knew it would. She heads for the bathroom, insisting she's fine. He knows she's not fine.

When she returns, the blood is gone, her finger is wrapped in a bandage, but her eyes are red, and he's sitting on the edge of the bed facing the bathroom, waiting for her. She walks up to him without a word, and he brings his hands to her waist in what he hopes is a comforting, steadying grip, the t-shirt that she so intensely hates soft under his fingertips.

"Sleep, Claire," he says. "I'll lay down with you; you have to sleep."

"I can't," she mutters. She's tired; she barely slept the night before, but the little red numbers on the digital clock beside the bed insist on continuing to silently, metaphorically tick the day away, and the clock inside her head noting the time left before she has to step onto Masrani Global's plane not-so-silently ticks right along with it, and as long as the clocks are ticking, her mind is reeling, and she can't – she can't.

"So you're gonna take it out on the little dinosaur?" he gently teases, thumbing the print.

She covers her face with her hands again and says she knows she should enjoy this. She's in her last few precious quiet hours before her life becomes nothing but press conferences and lawsuits and damage control and telling people who deserve compensation that the clauses they agreed to but almost certainly didn't read when purchasing tickets seriously limit Masrani Corp's liability and answering questions about a genetic hybrid she thought she knew about but had no fucking clue about, but…but…

The hands against her waist begin gentle, soothing movements against her body, and she knows she doesn't have to say anything further. They may not know each other all that well, but he knows her well enough to know her mental itinerary for the day is booked solid.

He has seven hours and forty-two minutes until they have to leave that hotel room, and if he can't get her to sleep, he'll have to employ an alternate tactic for keeping her mind off the impending tomorrow.

He moves her shirt with his hands as they travel up her sides, exposing her pale stomach. She's got a nasty sunburn mirroring the scoop neck of the purple tank top she wore on that day (it, along with all their other clothes, still lies in a dirty heap on the bathroom floor,) but her stomach is untouched by the harsh Central American sun, and he presses his lips to it in a kiss that almost makes her giggle. One hand holds the tee against her waist while the other slides down her ass, gripping the hem underneath the dinosaur print on her shorts. He pulls gently, slowly tugging the side of her shorts down, and he thanks god they defined their relationship as more than just for survival, or else he knows he'd never have the balls to do this. Even still, his name escapes her lips in an almost accusatory tone. He halts but claims, lips still pressed to her belly, that he knows her clothes are stressing her out.

"How can I forget about what I have to walk into tomorrow when I'm covered in it?" she asks.

"You can't," he agrees. "Guess the only thing to do is take them off." He finally meets her eyes, raising an eyebrow at her, and she tips her head to the side.

"It's the middle of the day," she says.

"Do you have something better to do?" he chuckles.

"No, but…" she starts. Yes, she thinks. There are a thousand things and a thousand problems she could be should be working on right now, but the idea of leaving all that for Future Claire to deal with is an enticing one.

"Come on, when's the last time the great Claire Dearing spent the day in bed?" he teases.

She laughs and looks away, trying to recall. "Not since…well, I don't think I've ever done that."

Without another word, he pulls her down into his lap, a leg on either side of his, the waistband of her shorts at a sharp angle against her hips, and meets her mouth in a searing, mind-erasing kiss.

Getting out of the hotel is hard. A car pulls up to the front double-doors – damn this hotel for not having a viable back exit – and a security guard helps Owen and Claire get outside. The reporters and photographers haven't gone away; if anyway, the crowd has grown larger, the two days of radio silence and hibernation from the world's new favorite heroes having done nothing but feed the frenzy.

The kids, of course, don't care about the cameras, and as soon as they're in sight of the car, the boys spill out the back before Karen can stop them. Gray barrels into Claire, not unlike he had done inside of the Innovation Center, and the cameras go crazy. Zach stands close to Owen, too proud to do to him what Gray had done to their aunt (he's sixteen; he has a reputation to uphold, and he's not about to blow the wonders this week has done for him over a hug, no matter how much he wants it) and Owen gets it, patting his shoulder a few times with a knowing grin.

Karen climbs out of the car as Claire manages to pry her nephew away from her, and the foursome in the middle of the entranceway make their way through the crowd. Gray gravitates towards his mother, and Claire instantly gravitates towards Owen. He voicelessly asks if she's alright, and she nods; she knows, in this moment, she's okay; the morning's stress hasn't found her again yet, but they're not on the plane yet. Zach takes one look at their relaxed, almost-too-happy glances at one another and laughs. Karen asks what's so funny.

"They look like sex," Zach laughs, and Claire hopes with everything she has in her that the scene outside the hotel isn't quiet enough for any of those cameras to pick up decent audio.

"And how would you know what that looks like, young man?" Karen asks. "Huh?"

"Don't worry, Mom," Gray pipes up. "He just looks at girls. He doesn't know how to actually talk to one."

Karen and Claire try not to laugh too hard at the boy's expense as Zach shoves his little brother, hard, muttering "Asshole," under his breath.

"Hey, in the car. Both of you," Karen says sternly, grabbing Zach's hood and pulling him away from Gray. Claire takes a calming breath; that was a wonderful thing for the cameras to see, but it's not going to bother her. It's not. It's not. When both boys are back in the car, Karen turns to her sister and puts on a false, blissful smile. "That was such a nice two whole days of kindness and no fighting."

It's then that Karen notices their clothes and the fact that they don't have any bags in their arms. Claire is decidedly nondescript. She found black yoga pants in the pile of gifted clothes; JURASSIC WORLD is stamped in hot, neon pink across the ass, something she found much more offensive than a small dinosaur print the day before, but she rolled down the waistband and grabbed a tank top long enough to cover the rest and flipped it inside out, anticipating cameras. She convinced Owen to do the same with his tee, but the orange and yellow board shorts slung low across his hips are covered in an island-themed dinosaur print she couldn't do anything about. Owen wears flip flops; Claire painfully pushed her feet back into her heels. Karen says they should've called her; she would've forced her way out of their room to buy them something; the reporters don't really want her anyway; it's the least she could do.

"Oh, that's okay," Owen says, playfully nudging Claire's side. He gestures to the shorts with his other hand and says, "She loves me in these, don't you, babe?"

Claire shoots him a look that would stop a velociraptor in its tracks, and Karen gasps. "Wait – wait," she says, looking at Claire and pointing towards Owen. She looks a little too gleeful, and Claire knows what's coming, and she knows Karen's thinking this is just a little too good to be true. "This is Board Shorts?" Karen asks.

Owen's face falls as Claire tries and miserably fails not to laugh as she nods with a look on her face that says she can't quite believe it herself. She keeps her eyes on her sister as Owen glares at her in disbelief. She can feel his thoughts without any words – You told your sister about that date? How could you tell your sister about that date? Now I'll always be Board Shorts and not the guy who helped save her kids from dinosaurs – so she puts an arm around him and pats his back, and his face melts into a grin as Karen continues to giggle across from them.

Claire suddenly gets swept away in a thought that without the cameras surrounding them, this – Owen and her family, Owen as her boyfriend with her family – would almost feel normal, but she's acutely aware of the cameras focused on her (oh god, she hopes they're not actually hearing any of this) and the dinosaur logo hidden between her breasts, and her stomach fills with anxiety as she remembers nothing about this is normal.

She sees Karen catch a glimpse of them out of the corner of her eye, and she sees Karen's face contort into a grimace as the older woman lowers her voice and disgustedly informs the sickening couple that they do, indeed, look like sex. Claire pulls herself back to the moment and does nothing but briefly tilt her head towards Owen, the good kind of guilt written all over her face, and she and Owen share a knowing smile. Karen rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, uh-huh, I've spent the past two days stuck in one room with a husband I can't stand and two traumatized children, and you've spent the past two days having sex," Karen sneers. Claire gently grabs Owen's wrist and checks his watch (hers has been a casualty of the incident) and informs her that it's really only been on and off for the past seven hours or so, not two whole days, and oh god, why are they still talking outside of the car? Karen nods and says, "Still. Life is super fair."

The boys think the private plane is awesome; Claire's torn between wanting the nearly six hour flight to San Diego to be over and hoping that it never ends.

She slips her heels off as soon as she gets settled in her seat. She's sitting next to Owen and across from Karen, the set of four seats facing each other, with the boys on a couch on the other side of the plane. The door to the plane is sealed shut, and Claire asks where Scott is.

"On the way home," Karen says, completely not caring that her children are present when she adds, "Bastard." Off her sister's look, she continues, "Apparently seeing on the news that genetically modified dinosaurs have run amuck on an island containing three family members and both children is not an acceptable reason to take off from work with no notice."

Owen notices Claire attempting to stretch her feet against the floor of the plane – anything, anything to make the pain still radiating in them go away – and he scoops them up, swiveling her in her seat and placing them in his lap.

"Let me take care of you," he mutters in a low, raspy voice as she tries to protest and pull her feet away. He says it exactly the same way he said it against her inner thigh, just before his tongue touched her for the first time, and damn it if that doesn't stop her in her tracks, a small, hopefully indiscernible moan escaping her lips.

He soothingly works his fingers against her feet, carefully avoiding the blisters that are still tender, and maybe it's leftover peace from the orgasms, or maybe it's the realization that everybody on the plane loves her (or at least likes her enough to want to survive with her), but she sinks down sideways into her seat, more of her long legs spilling into his lap. She can let herself be a little vulnerable, she thinks. It's a Masrani Global Corporation plane, and she's had business meetings on this very plane before, but she doesn't need to be Claire Dearing, Operations Manager, right now; she doesn't need to be on right now.

That thought inevitably trails her mind back to work, and she reaches for her phone. There are new messages, good lord, are there new messages; they have yet to really slow down since the incident, but none of them are the messages she was hoping for, so she rests her phone against her chest with a small, perturbed sigh.

"What's wrong?" Owen asks.

She shakes her head as if to say it's nothing. She's not going to do it. She can already feel the stress permeating her being again, and she's not going to do it. She's not going to think about work until she has to…but she continues.

"It's Zara. She hasn't answered any of my messages," Claire says, and across from them, the boys simultaneously let out a barely audible gasp, freezing when they realize they've caught Karen's attention. "It's on the Masrani website that she's my assistant, though, so she's probably getting bombarded, too. I thought she'd be on this plane. Maybe she's already back at headquarters."

"Um…" Zach says, discomfort burning off of every cell that makes up his being. "They didn't…they didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?" Claire asks normally, certainly not expecting the storm that's about to hit her.

"Aunt Claire," Zach says softly, desperately not wanting to be the person who has to tell her this. "Zara's…she's…"

Words fail him, so Gray steps in, muttering, with a soft voice, "She's dead."

Claire shoots up in her seat, tearing her feet from Owen's lap, her hands immediately traveling to her mouth as tears fill her eyes. "Oh god," she gasps. "No…no, she's getting married; she can't be…what happened?"

"We met up with her again on Main Street," Zach says slowly, looking anywhere but at his mother or Claire. "She got picked up by a pteranodon, and she was fighting, so I thought she might be okay…hurt but okay…but then it…well, then it dropped her in the mosasau…"

Nobody hears him finish, and nobody hears the curse that escapes Owen's stunned lips, because Claire lets out the worst noise of shock and terror he's ever heard someone make and buries her face all the way into her hands as she turns her body away from them and into the side of the plane. Owen flips the arm rest separating their seats up as soon as he sees her start to shake; she's breaking, quietly but utterly breaking against the wall of the plane.

She knows the Indominus is not her fault, despite the guilt she knows she'll probably always feel, but this, Zara, oh god, this is completely her fault, and explaining to Zara's nice fiancé that she died chasing after nephews that Claire couldn't be bothered to shuffle some meetings around for is suddenly at the top of her Things to Be Stressed About list.

That's all it takes for the impending internal interrogations and her active entry into the already hyper-active media circus to take up prominence in her brain again, and it's a fight she's still not ready for; the only thing she's ready for is going back to bed with Owen in Costa Rica, where nothing mattered except lips and skin and oh yes, right there as they made love in the afternoon sunlight (that's really the only thing you could call it the way they had done it: slow, tender, the-only-thing-I-want-to-discover-right-now-is-you lovemaking.)

That's why, when she feels his large hand on her trembling back, she turns and lets him gather her into his arms, climbing onto his lap so she's straddling him again. One of his arms comes around her body to rest low, probably too low with her family around, on her back, the other cradling the back of her head. Karen wordlessly gets up and puts herself between her sons.

"You guys saw that?" she asks quietly. "You watched the whole thing?"

Gray looks up at her with a tear-stained face, silently nodding. Zach tells her she's seen it, too. It was in one of the internet videos; it was shot from so far away, you couldn't tell who it was, but he knew…he knew. Even Zach's eyes are watery, so Karen wraps an arm around each boy.

Owen's trying, rocking Claire gently and quietly shushing her, even though she's hardly making any noise at all, whispering that she's okay; it's okay because he knows she's upset about more than just Zara. She shakes her head furiously against his shoulder and cries, "You can't tell me this one's not my fault, Owen. I made her go out there. She should've been safe in an office, but I made her…I made her…"

She surrenders, sobbing so painfully he's not even sure she's breathing, and he doesn't say anything because she's right. He can't tell her not to feel guilty this time.

The first time she wakes up screaming, it's all his fault.

There are jungle noises in her head, noises accompanied by stomping feet, shaking ground, ear-shattering roars, more teeth. Her eyes shoot open in the dark, and she realizes she's wrong. There aren't jungle noises in her head. There are jungle noises in her room.

Somewhere between the subconscious illusion of Isla Nublar and the reality of the cool San Diego hotel room, Owen's moved over to her and he's stroking her back, whispering soothing words, telling her she's okay as she sits on the mattress. She knows he thinks that she's having a panic attack about going back to work in – she checks a clock – oh, god, only five more hours, but it's not the impending conferences this time.

A boy screams from the suite's second bedroom, and her sister calls over, "Thanks a lot, Claire!"

She cringes, and she thinks she would feel culpable if she weren't about to be so mad at Owen. "What the hell is that?" she hisses, whipping around at the waist to glare at him. "Is that coming from the clock?"

He doesn't know what she's talking about. She demands to know why their room suddenly sounds like a Central American island. Guilt immediately colors his face.

He couldn't sleep. He thought she was out, so he'd turned on the ambient noise feature on the swanky hotel's provided clock. He'd set it to the rainforest setting: it sounded the most normal, the most like what he knew as home, where he could sometimes hear dinosaurs roar in the distance at all hours of the night.

He turns it off immediately, apologizing profusely, encouraging her to lie down again.

She thinks she should break up with him right then and there. Instead, she sinks in to his embrace, trying not to focus on the struggle they can still hear from the other room.