Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the plot. Everything else belongs to their respective creators, owners and producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

Summary: She is not supposed to be there when the egg hatches. But she is the first thing it sees when the shell breaks. She never wanted to be a mother. Suddenly, she is.

A/N: Hey guys, I managed another chapter so here it is. Thanks to everyone for the reviews and love; they helped push this chapter into being and I hope this makes you guys happy. There's a lot more Owen here, plus some Sarah. Some quick references to the Avengers and Jurassic World movies as well, and another one to "Roverandom", an adorable tale by Tolkien. I trust most of you would get there the last quarter of the story is coming from but just in case there's confusion, this is what is responsible for it. At the start of the movie, Claire's in the lift and she says "Erica Brand deserves better". That made me sit up and I was like "Oh. She's not exactly what she appears to be." I thought it was bloody fantastic actually. Plus, she never once screamed or yelled or threatened Zara after the latter lost her nephews. So there, there's the basis for what I've done.

A quick note on reviews: Someone mentioned moving against InGen. At the moment, I believe I've made it clear why it's not possible. For better or worse, there's a deadlock. However, I believe some of you picked up on Simon Masrani's woes as an indicator of where this is going. That rocks my socks off. :)

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XIII.

There was no need to make changes to the raptor paddock so that Sarah would have a safe way in and out. "She can use the interaction stalls. They have doors to let the raptors out into the open, although we've never had to use them." Owen was comfortably sprawled out on the sofa, much to the annoyance of Sarah who had planted herself firmly between them right in the middle. When he had offered her a hand to sniff, she had done so with all the hauteur of a queen before proceeding to show him her back and rump. "So you can put her in through there and when we need her to come out, she goes in, the secondary doors close and you can open a stall door to retrieve her. So it's all good, and there's no additional cost involved."

Her little Indominus chaperone was getting sleepy though. Owen had arrived in the evening right after dinner; Alex had been around to discuss how they could manage InGen's request that the hybrid be allowed to mix with the raptors. Sarah had just gobbled more than twice her body weight in food and as was now the pattern with every meal, she was seized with the desire to sleep. If not for Owen, she would have been the one sprawled out on the sofa, usually with her tail hanging off it while Claire used those moments of quiet to get some work done or just read because Sarah treated any book in her hands as yet another toy. She had torn up "The Mists of Avalon" before Claire could even get ten pages into it. Claire could hardly say that she had been overcome with grief; fantasy was definitely not her genre. But it had been a nice gesture on Zara's part to alleviate her boredom and it had been a personal copy which Claire promptly replaced with a quick order to Amazon for the latest, glossiest edition.

"Claire?" He had caught her drifting, thinking of more pleasant things than the highly unpleasant moment that she had been dreading ever since her cold had died a total and complete death and her sinuses cleared. The moment that happened, Owen had told her to expect him over and he was as good as his word, showing up the very next day. Apparently, she hadn't been the only one to do any missing. Or so she hoped, Claire cautioned herself. Still, she was pretty sure...

"She's falling asleep." She nodded at Sarah who was fighting to keep her eyes open. The third membrane flicked back and forth over her eyes each time she opened and closed those bright orbs. "If you get up from the sofa, she'll be convinced I'm safe from your evil clutches and stop fighting it."

"I'll show you evil clutches, Dearing," Owen muttered without any bite.

"All in good time, Mr Grady," she countered, making a poor show of trying not to smile as Owen dragged himself up. He'd had a long day; the raptors had been missing Sarah and were more antsy than usual each time they realised she wasn't with Owen. Blue had misbehaved a couple of times and Owen had had to file three reports, one to Vic Hoskins who apparently wasn't on the island and two for the board to review. "Now make yourself scarce."

He scowled and went to the kitchen, where he proceeded to help himself to the organic grapes she had ordered in a bid to squash her cold. Gently, Claire stretched out her hand and scratched Sarah under her chin, just at the tip. It was magic; the Indominus was fast asleep in under two minutes, breathing deeply and Claire could swear she could hear very faint tiny snores coming from Sarah as the breath whistled in and out from between her teeth.

What followed next was a well-practiced manoeuvre she had mastered after several weeks of trying. Very, very stealthily, Claire inched herself towards the edge of the sofa, her eyes fastened on the dinosaur. Every time Sarah moved, Claire stopped and then started once she had stilled again. When she was an inch from landing up on the floor, she braced her feet firmly on the ground and in one smooth motion, pulled herself up and away from the seat. Sarah remained sleeping and Claire did a mini fist pump as she tiptoed away before remembering that Owen was there. His soft chuckle made her blush. "You wouldn't understand unless your raptors clung to you when they were little," she whispered to him as they retreated to her room. Owen closed the door behind her.

"Well, they did, at least when I tried to get out of the paddock. I used to have scratches on my hands from prying them off. Barry and I would toss food and I would make a run for the gate. The bars still had that wire mesh across them to stop the girls from getting out. But not Blue, she never fell for it."

"She wanted affection more than food."

Wistfulness glanced over Owen's face. "I'm not so sure about now. Sarah's coming to four months and she still wants a ton of physical affection from you. My girls were starting to grow out of it around this time actually."

That was the opening she needed. Taking a deep breath, Claire sat on her bed and patted the space beside her, running her hand over the embroidered silk coverlet. "I have something I need to tell you." She winced; it reminded her of a clichéd scene from one of those movies which was so bad it was actually good. Karen made her watch those whenever she visited, before the work got too much. For a while, Claire wasn't sure if she had been in love or hate with Jason Statham.

Owen frowned faintly but he took a seat next to her. Then his beautiful eyes widened in shock. "Oh no, you're pregnant."

"Owen!"

"I'm sorry babe, I should have warned you. Looking at me like you want to eat me up could have that effect on your ovaries and boom." He spread out his fingers, mimicking the spread of fireworks as they exploded and Claire glared down her nose at him.

"Excuse me—"

"You kind of look like Sarah when you do that."

"But you were the one looking at me like I was dinner."

"So the feeling's mutual," he grinned shamelessly at her before his gaze dropped away to the huge bed with its cream and aquamarine sheets and duvet. "I remember promising to show you my evil clutches. The setting looks about right for that..."

There were important things, earth-shatteringly important things, things of universal import—okay, maybe that was stretching it but Claire clung to whatever she could to remind herself not to fall for Owen's smoke on whiskey voice that he was pouring on like rich dark honey fresh from the honeycomb. She was sitting down and getting weak in her bloody knees. Anymore and her ovaries really might go up in flames and did Owen have to lean in so close and still smell so good after a day at work—

"Monkeys," Claire blurted out. Hindsight might inform her that she could have gasped or even wheezed the word out but that was for another time in the future to feel embarrassed about. Regardless, it worked. Owen's mouth stopped an inch from hers.

"I could have sworn I heard you say 'monkeys'."

Claire placed a hand on his chest to ease him away. God that felt good. Hot flesh and hard muscle with the rhythmic beating of his heart that sheared right through his shirt to brand her palm. Tactical error, she told herself as she squirmed away, one that she would have to remember not to make again. "I did say 'monkeys'."

"Is that your safe word or something?"

He actually looked intrigued, even though his mind was clearly in the gutter, where hers promptly joined his. "No," she protested so loudly that for a moment, she feared she would wake Sarah. Folding her arms over her chest so that she wouldn't press her hands to her burning face, Claire took a deep breath that did a lousy job of calming her madly racing pulse. "You said Sarah likes a great deal of physical affection. We have cuddle times, like fixed sessions where I have to pet her and she really likes bath time as well. Not so much the water but when I use a cloth or a sponge."

"And this has to do with monkeys because...?"

"Don't monkeys build social bonds through grooming and touching? It's pretty prevalent in most primate species, isn't it? And Sarah...well...she doesn't behave entirely like a dinosaur because," Claire paused, bit her lip and forced out the rest, "because she's not."

The shock followed by horror and then anger that Owen was visibly experiencing was definitely real this time. "InGen filled the gap in the genomes with monkey genes?"

"And then some."

"How do you know this?" Owen demanded.

She couldn't tell him. She couldn't tell him at that moment that she couldn't tell him. "That can wait, please. I'm more concerned about Sarah."

She spoke softly, aware that she didn't need to add to the volatile mix of emotions she could feel radiating from him. For a moment she had half-expected Owen to storm off, either to the lab to demand answers or just away from her but she should have known better. He had more control than that.

He took a sharp breath; the line of his jaw reminded her of granite. She could tell when he reined in his temper, because some of that hardness disappeared. "Alright Claire. Go on."

"Apart from the T-Rex and Velociraptor genomes, Sarah has..." She quickly rattled off the list of dinosaurs that Jarvis had supplied her with. "Tree frog and cuttlefish, along with snake DNA."

He looked at her for a long moment before turning towards the door, as though he could see Sarah through it.

"What? What is it?" She knew he had hit on something. She could feel it.

"I get why they've thrown some of the deadliest carnivores into the mix to make a new attraction. But there's really no need for the rest. My girls have different strands of iguana and even avian DNA but not all of these in one animal."

Claire caught herself picking at silvery flower stitched onto the coverlet and put her hand in her lap instead. "I've been doing some reading up. I have no idea what the tree frog and snake DNA is meant to do but cuttlefish do experience incredible growth because their lifespans are so short. I presume Henry has worked whatever magic he knows to eliminate that while keeping the accelerated growth part. That's why we've estimated that we can show her in about two years to the public."

"Nice work, Sherlock."

She gave him a look and shrugged. "Elementary, Watson."

They didn't laugh but the lightness of the moment took more edge off the tension. "Are you going to tell me what you're thinking about?" she prompted.

He cracked his knuckles and cleared his throat. "All those different dinosaur genes make Sarah a perfect killing machine. I don't know what Henry Wu wants with the other animal DNA but monkeys—"

"Capuchin and chimpanzee, to be precise."

"Monkeys and apes are highly social creatures. You add that to the Velociraptor's pack instincts and you have an animal with an enhanced desire for structure in a group and a powerful need to bond with another. Capuchins are considered the most intelligent of the New World primates; they use them in labs all the time. Chimpanzees are widely regarded as the cleverest of all primates. They improvise, they problem solve, and they pick up social traits from the people they interact with or those that are taught to them in experiments. They can take orders from people."

Claire stared at him, her gut starting to churn. "You're thinking...they've made Sarah into some kind of...weapon?" Her knuckles were starting to hurt because she was pressing down on them so hard.

"It certainly looks that way. The capuchin and chimpanzee DNA is completely unnecessary. They're not filling in gaps in the genome; they're augmenting and a hybrid is a perfect front for covering whatever it is they wanted to do with her. The research with the raptors showed that pack animals can take orders, but the human has to be the alpha. Even then, I can't get into the cage with them, not anymore and that's a problem, according to Hoskins and his grand plans to use dinosaurs as soldiers." Owen got up and paced the room restlessly before sitting back down. "Monkeys and apes are wild animals but they can be domesticated, sometimes to a great extent. More than a raptor, that's for sure."

When he put it that way, it sounded almost plausible. Hoskins wanted something vicious and unstoppable in the field and with her mix of DNA drawn from some of the most famous theropods to walk the earth, Sarah would fit right into that slot. Presumably Henry was hoping that the primate DNA would offset enough of the dinosaur DNA to enable someone to control her, to give orders. It was all probability and hypothesis that they were waiting for facts and reality to confirm. It was madness.

"Henry did mention wanting to put Sarah through a series of tests to see how intelligent she is and what she's really capable of. I shut him down."

"He'll try again," Owen said grimly. "He'll want to know what exactly his latest creation is capable of."

They both sat in silence, as though winded from the conversation. But there was more and they knew it.

"So are you going to tell me how you found out about Sarah?"

It was crunch time. "No. That conversation is never going to happen." That way, if the truth ever came out, at least Owen could genuinely plead ignorance although she wasn't sure how much that would help him.

"Are you trying to protect me, Claire Dearing?"

"Someone has to, Mr Grady" she quipped and her smile almost reached her eyes. There was no easy way to say this. "Finding out about Sarah really was the result of another discovery. Henry said something, I got suspicious and ...found a way to confirm whether my suspicions were true. And they were. Henry and Hoskins had my apartment under surveillance. There were cameras in here and they bugged my handphone too. That's not the case now—"

"Son of a bitch!" Owen exploded as he shot to his feet. Claire didn't think; she just threw herself at him and latched onto his arms. "Let me go!"

"No!" She resisted as he tried to pry her off without hurting her. She could feel the strength in his hands. Claire wasn't a petite girl by any shot but Owen dwarfed her and made her feel small. If he wanted to, he could have sent her flying across the room. "Owen, we need a plan."

"I have a plan!"

"Attack is not a plan!" She planted her feet on the ground and pushed him as hard as she could away from the door. "You probably could break Henry's neck before security personnel get to you but I need you and jail is not the best place from which to help me." Not to mention that she wouldn't be able to help him either and that would just kill her.

Owen was breathing hard, his eyes bright and livid like a swirling storm laced with lightning. He was a storm and she was holding onto him only because he was letting her. He moved and she clung harder to him, digging her fingers into his biceps. "Okay, Claire. Okay. I won't do anything stupid. I just...give me a minute."

Immediately she stepped back, stepped out of his space and he spun around, one hand on his hip, the other clenching and unclenching. The sound of his fist crashing into the wall made her jump and from beyond the door, she heard a sharp bark. Sarah was awake. On the way out, Owen punched the wall again and she knew he was imagining that it was Henry's face, maybe Hoskins' as well.

The Indominus Rex had already hopped down from the sofa and was racing to her. She knelt to pick Sarah up but the dinosaur brushed her attempts aside with a snout that was industriously sniffing at Claire's legs and arms before inspecting her shoulders and face. She was checking her for injuries, Claire realised. "I'm okay, I'm okay," she murmured as Sarah warbled in her ear before scooting off to the bedroom to see what Owen was doing. Apparently whatever she saw satisfied her because she came back and let Claire pick her up and take her back to the sofa.

It took the better part of an hour and classical music to put Sarah back to sleep. Carefully, Claire removed herself from the sofa and went to the kitchen where she filled a small cloth with ice and tied up the loose ends. When she got to the room, Owen looked up and she was relieved to see that at least he didn't look enraged now. That had been pretty frightening. Wordlessly, she took his hand. The knuckles were swollen and his skin was scraped. She pressed her homemade ice pack gently to it and for some reason, she recalled a similar moment years ago when Zach had been five and she had been playing with him outside when he had fallen and scraped his knees. She had sat him on the kitchen table while she held the ice to his knee and told him a story about a little dog whom a mean wizard had turned into a toy and who had to find a way to become a real dog again. He'd stopped crying at the end of it and bravely let her put antiseptic on his wounds once the swell had gone down.

"I got blood on your wallpaper," he muttered. "Sorry about that."

"It's nothing." She waved it away, concentrating on moving the ice evenly over his bruised flesh.

"So did you mean it?"

She looked up inquiringly.

"When you said you needed me."

It was the tiniest lilt in the way he sounded, the slight crinkle of laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, the warmth of a smile that she could see he was holding back. All of it made her heart beat faster. Curling the fingers of her other hand around his, Claire held his gaze. "Yes. I need you." Not just for fighting the monsters that were men driven mad by their own brilliance and ambition, not just for navigating the world of dinosaurs and their behaviours. There was a lump in her throat that those words couldn't get past even though she swallowed hard but Owen seemed to understand, seemed to hear them anyway because he slipped his fingers into the gaps between hers. It felt closer than a kiss somehow and she knew he felt it too.

"Okay. So what's the plan then?"

"We'll need to come up with one together." And to do that, they would need to assemble all their facts. "My apartment was under watch from the moment I got Sarah. All those tests in the lab were meant to monitor Sarah's health but it's clear that Hoskins and Henry have been waiting for something and whatever it is that they're waiting for, it's not happened. Hence, Henry's suggestion to run those intelligence tests on her."

"Which then makes the notion of them weaponising the Indominus more plausible."

"Exactly." Claire nodded.

"You're sure this place is entirely clean right?"

"Positive. And your place is secure too, along with your computer and your phone."

"Claire Dearing, you are protecting me."

"Call it a bad habit."

"No way. A man could get used to a beautiful woman whose got his back covered."

Heat touched her cheeks. "You were asking about this place being free from InGen eyes and ears because?"

"Because now when I think about it, the reason why Hoskins might be so keen to have Sarah in with the raptors probably is because that's the only way he and Wu can watch her now."

"Along with any walks we take at night in the Innovation Centre."

They both had the same thought. "If anything's going to happen, it will probably be in the raptor paddock," Owen said.

"There's nothing I can do about that. It's standard practice for all paddocks to be extensively monitored and if I had blocked that feed—"

"I'm not questioning your decision, Claire. And the last thing I would want is for you and your mysterious source to get in trouble with Simon Masrani. The raptors seem to have a propensity for keeping Sarah hidden in the trees and grass; on Isla Sornar as well the survivors reported that there wasn't a single juvenile raptor spotted. Maybe that might help, or delay whatever it is Hoskins and Wu want to see."

That was a thought worth keeping amidst a sea of troubling ones. "They'll know something's up though. But like me, they can't say a word to Mr Masrani." A frustrated sigh escaped her. "I've been thinking about how I could tell him but my hands are tied. Everything I know about Sarah has only got to do with the Park side of matters, like the paddock construction, how much to feed her, what to feed her, publicity, sponsorship. I don't know how much freedom Mr Masrani gave Henry although I'm pretty damned sure he wouldn't have signed off on making dinosaurs into weapons. Even if I managed to, by some miracle, get a DNA sample off the island and send it for testing to show him what kind of strange cocktail of genes Henry has come up with, it might not work and I'll be dead under the weight of the massive lawsuit which would result."

Owen took the ice pack from her and set it on the bed. That she didn't mind that it was probably going to result in a huge wet spot was testament to just how worried she was. "Hey, hey. We'll figure out a way to tell him. We just have to wait for the right moment."

"When will be the right moment?"

"I don't know," he confessed. "Maybe if Sarah does whatever it is Hoskins and Wu have been waiting for. We could report any anomalies that aren't dinosaur attributes to Mr Masrani. That way, you're in the clear because you're doing the job he gave you and if it turns out that he doesn't mind having a dinosaur that InGen could use as a living weapon—"

"I'll quit," she blurted out, shocking both of them.

"You would?"

She would, actually. "It's wrong, taking dinosaurs, taking animals and modifying them into war machines. The world's a different place now, what with the invasion of New York and gods and aliens and super soldiers but..." She looked down, a frown pinching her brows together. "Some things just shouldn't be done and some lines can't be crossed. I might not be able to stop it but I can't be a part of that."

"That makes two of us."

Now it was his turn to shock her. "You'd leave the raptors?"

Owen looked down at their joined hands. "I don't want to. But I'm guessing the discovery that the raptors can take orders probably prompted Hoskins into working with Wu on creating a dinosaur they felt might be more manageable than the girls."

She tugged her hand free and touched his cheek, making him look at her. "Oh Owen, this isn't your fault. Even Mr Masrani thinks the programme is just for presentations at conferences and for contributing to the body of research."

"I knew the endgame, Claire. I should have guessed—"

She took his chin firmly in hand. "Owen Grady, you listen to me. You had no idea how far Hoskins was going to go, you couldn't be expected to know and you aren't responsible for what he has done. You've been trying to tell him no from the start, for God's sake. This is not your fault," she insisted fiercely.

He took her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm that she felt with every inch of her skin. "Thanks, Claire."

"It's always my pleasure, Mr Grady."

It wasn't the best plan in the world, but it would have to do for now. They would wait for Hoskins' and Henry's next move, fend them off when it happened and in the meantime, watch Sarah as she grew. For a moment, Claire considered the possibility that whatever abilities Henry thought Sarah had might not actually come to pass. She was an experiment; experiments failed all the time. She might be able to live her life peacefully in her paddock. Then, she tucked away that naïve hope because no more time could be given to such things.

And also because Owen was tracing the lines on her palm with a delicacy she wouldn't have expected from him. She'd always been curious about something and now was probably as good a time as any to ask. "Why me, Owen?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not one for water-cooler conversations but Zara is and you do hear things every now and then, at least about other people... You could have gone out with almost anyone else on the island. So why me?"

"You mean why you when at first glance we seem so different?"

She nodded.

"I could ask you the same thing but I'll answer your question. I saw you around, sometimes at the lab and sometimes at the paddock, or the Centre. You're a good-looking woman but that's not the real reason, just so you know. People I know talked about you and that's what got me interested in you in the first place."

She knew people talked about her. She just chose not to find out what they said.

"What got my attention was that the women liked you. Zara would talk about how you'd let her sit in on business deals and presentations so that she'd get some experience and that you actually cared about her opinion. You gave Vivian time off with pay when she had to go back to San Diego to look after her sick father and you made sure she kept her job even after six months of leave. I know you found out somehow about Julie and Chris being harassed by Sandford and his pals, and that you had something to do with those assholes getting caught and fired."

"I was just doing my job."

"Yeah, you were. And you looked out for other women while being fair to everyone else behind that armour of professionalism you work in. That's what I really liked."

She was used to being valued for securing a deal, or for giving a flawless presentation that no one could criticise because she would cover all her bases and then some. She wasn't used to compliments like this. "Well, the working world can be a tough place for a woman and it helps if we...you know...stick together. For survival, I guess," she muttered. "I mean, so much of our culture tells us that girls and other women are the enemy but I'm not going to buy into that narrative—" She stopped abruptly and flushed. "Oh God, I'm using my mother's lines now."

"She must have been one hell of a woman."

Her mother and the memory of her were Claire's rock and soft spot. To her alarm, her vision started to mist over and she blinked hard, looking away quickly. "Yeah, she was." She tried to smile and it came out bittersweet.

She had never spoken to Owen about her mother until today. It had always been about Karen and Zach and Gray, sometimes high school experiences, what it was like being the youngest in a classroom full of the best and the brightest. The absence of her mother and father was something he had never pressed her about although he must have noticed it.

"You think you're cold." Owen's words caught her the way water caught light. "But you're not. You've got more than fire, Claire Dearing. And I see you."

There was a world in that moment, fathomless and deep. "And you're here to storm my walls, is that it?"

He laughed. "You're not a fortress to be conquered, nor a princess in need of rescuing either." He shifted them closer and she let him move her, let his hand at the base of her spine guide her against him. "I'm here and when you want to, and if I don't screw up, you'll climb down and let me in."

He was right. So she kissed him.