A/N: Fear not, my companions. I made it out of the cabin experience alive. Although my family discovered intensely creepy things about the cabin, like demonic movies in my room, a creepy hidden crawlspace in our closet, stiff closet doors that opened over night, sounds of footsteps coming up the stairs and walking around the kitchen, items dropping, glimpses of limbs darting around corners...nonetheless, I am very glad to be home. And to have wifi.

Also, you guys post some of the most thoughtful and hilarious reviews ever. My thanks to those who passed word along to the government of my need for assistance. xD

It doesn't take long for Owen to realize how thankful he is that all the eggs didn't hatch unanimously–one baby raptor is more than enough.

After a short, ten-minute nap, the newly-christened Blue rouses herself fully, huge amber eyes flicking restlessly around her surroundings. Her newborn status is very apparent in her motions–her slit pupils take a bit to focus and sometimes her limbs twitch uncontrollably as though shooing off a fly. Owen briefly rubs the pad of his thumb down the tiny crests protecting her eye sockets. Like a human infant reacting to an offered finger, her claws immediately wrap and curl tightly around the digit, clutching it close to her body. That's when Owen makes an important discovery–the claws of a freshly-hatched Velociraptor may seem deceptively small and thin, but they're really just as sharp and wicked as needles. He feels pinpricks of pain as the razor-like tips begin to pierce his skin and his first instinct is to bat the source of the discomfort away, but Owen has never embodied anything except control. Instead, he keeps his breathing steady and carefully monitors his movements as he leans over to disentangle the onyx weapons from his hand.

Ten minutes old and she's already drawn blood. He's strangely entertained and relieved. Several times previous to Blue's hatching, he had wondered if the scientists had robbed, by way of their extensive fiddling, the incubating raptors of their wildness, their defiance. He doesn't want a tame lap dop. His soul stirs in discontent at the very thought, shuddering, keening for something more, for a chance to plunge recklessly and boldly into new territories.

Blue squeaks when he gently removes his hand from her grip and subtly shakes off several crimson droplets. Her vocal cords aren't even near mature yet, Owen knows, and so her range of vocalization is reduced to a litany of pips, clicks, and cheeps. Even so, the variety of expression is amazing–many animals learn their distinctive cries by observing their parents. For Blue to already possess a wide vocabulary means the prehistoric instinct has not been wiped out by the genetic tinkering.

"First lesson: no clawing Daddy," he admonishes softly, shaking his scratched finger at her in disapproval. He lowers his voice when he does, dropping it to a pitch where a rough, growly undertone harshens the words. Her triangular jaws part slightly, exhaling in a hiss, while her eyes lock onto his finger and struggle to follow the waving motions.

Owen boops her playfully on her blunt snout and she sways back, peeping in surprise. He shows her his finger again, ensuring that the little blood trails moving sluggishly over his skin are visible.

"No. Clawing. Daddy," he growls again. Connecting his drawn blood with his disapproval. He doesn't expect her to understand fully, not when she's less than an hour old. But foundations must be laid for a house to be built.

In truth, he's not mad at all. But animals invest their attention into body language, into tone and delivery rather than pretty, empty words. So he makes sure to bunch his shoulders together and flex the muscles in his upper body, hissing softly. Dominance. Control. He projects it like cold air flowing off ice.

Blue chatters, head tilting rapidly from side to side. Her body curls and she ducks her head, shying away from eye contact. Amusement ripples through him. She's behaving like a puppy caught doing something it shouldn't have, and she seems to believe that if she avoids direct eye confrontation then he really can't find fault with her.

Owen senses confusion and tiny flickers of vague, undirected fear–which makes perfect sense. She's young and the world and everything in it is frighteningly new to her. In comparison, she just seems… small to him. Tiny, and new, her life as vulnerable and delicate as a flickering, stubby flame on a fresh candle.

The delayed realization hits him like battering ram.

He...feels her. Like warmth from a fire, like a breeze tousling his hair.

Owen has always been blessed with a vivid imagination and extraordinarily developed observation skills–and thus he's always attributed his incredible talent with animals towards these intrinsic qualities. When he imagines what an animal is feeling…that's exactly what it is. Imagination. A hypothesis based on intense examinations of body language.

But this–this extends far beyond that. Beyond any animal he's ever worked with.

He sets her down in the empty nest and withdraws, curious and exhilarated. His heart beats in his throat like war drums.

Like a bolt of lightning striking a pole, a flashback of his experience on Isla Sorna seizes his mind with paralytic strength–he remembers seeing the raptors close-up, the way his mind fogged and smoothed out the background details like a thumb pressing irregularities out of clay. How he focused on them with such an intensity that he felt like he was walking amongst them, sitting behind their eyes. How he projected words to accompany their actions.

Blue flips herself over in the nest, squawking plaintively. Owen shakes off the disturbing and frankly ludicrous thoughts he's been entertaining in favor of watching the baby raptor take her first steps.

Her muscles tremble with effort, her toes splay as though expecting the earth to drop out from beneath her at any given point–but she walks. A scant hour old and she walks. Pride bubbles up in him. Her claws briefly get stuck in the packed twigs of the nest. She tears them loose with an annoyed snap of her jaws. Her first obstacle, climbing over the edge of the nest. For a few seconds, she stares at it fuzzily, head cocked in deliberation.

"When you look at them, you see the intelligence in their eyes–you can see them working things out." Words recovered from the journal of Robert Muldoon, deceased game warden of the first Jurassic Park. Killed by raptors.

He was right in what he said.

"Come on, girl," Owen coaxes, wondering if he's established a bond enough with the infant that his presence is enough to beckon her onward. She chirps alertly. Questioning. She's not tall enough to see over the nest–for all she knows, her world has been shrunk to that of the interior circumference of the nest.

"I'm over here, Blue. Come on," he keeps up a steady stream of words so that she can use them as a location check. She falls silent. Twigs crunch and snap as she digs her powerfully-clawed hindlegs into the nest's walls to gain footholds. Her smaller, though no less dexterous, forelimbs allow her to anchor herself to the curved surface. When her triangular head pops over the nest, Owen beams.

Good girl, he thinks proudly. What a clever girl.

Blue chirrups softly, twisting her slender neck to itch at a patch of her shoulder with her snout. To any untrained outsider's eye, she would appear to be only dealing with a sudden irritant in her skin, but Owen just...knows. Smugness drips from the actions–the lazy, relaxed tail, the loosely-dangling forelimbs, the idle grooming motions.

Did it I Blue did clever girl good girl. The random words float, unbidden, uncalled, to Owen's mind, startling him. He didn't think them. He knows because of the poor, clumsy grammar structure, the simple intent behind the unskilled message. It's as if someone just poured jumbled words and feelings into his head, like soup into a bowl. They're still in his mind-voice–it's not as if he heard a disembodied voice speaking as if in his ear–but something about them feels backwards, different. Oil sliding over water–together, but distinct.

After conquering a feat such as climbing out of the nest, stumbling across the floor to Owen is barely a hindrance at all. Blue clambers into his lap, hunger-cries already warbling softly from deep in her throat once again. Hatchlings need to eat often, especially so in their first few hours of life. She fastens her claws into his shirt to form a hold and performs a tiny hop. A narrow tongue flickers insistently over his cheek, near the corner of his mouth. Instinctual behavior; a hatchling seeking food from its provider.

Well, he can't exactly cough up globs of meat, so he draws the food bucket closer once again and begins another round of feeding.

When two days have passed, Owen finally admits his suspicions to himself. The other eggs have grown cold and sterile. The warm, milky-new presences he would imagine while running his hands over their leathery surfaces have extinguished, leaving behind gaping voids of nothingness. Blue, who in the span of two days has learned to ride on his shoulder, nuzzles their chill exteriors, puffs dismissively, and returns to gnawing fiercely on a lock of Owen's hair.

Owen sits down heavily, a stone in his stomach. Blue manages to clip off a few strands of his hair with her teeth and instantly begins sneezing. He puts her in his lap and strokes down her spine, just the way she sometimes permits him to, and activates the comm. link.

"Dr., I think the other embryos are dead," he says glumly. Actually, he's quite certain they are, but he's seen firsthand how sciencey-types react to someone with confidence butting into their fields. Might as well let them draw the same conclusions and pretend it was their observation in the first place.

A beat of radio silence, and then Dr. Wu's voice filters into his ear. "Really? What a shame, what a shame." He sounds disappointed, but from a clinical perspective. What a shame, Owen's mother once said when she dropped a carton of milk and it exploded across the floor. She sighed and then cleaned up the spill and that was the end of the matter. "Fortunately, we have a few other batches already in the process–all of them different DNA mixtures this time. We're hoping that offering a more varied field of experiments will yield clearer results." The musing tone suddenly brightens into excited curiosity. "But how about 001? How is she? I assume you've been taking detailed notes?"

For a long moment, Owen is stunned into silence by the abrupt switches in tone Dr. Wu exhibited throughout the conversation. The casual disregard for pointlessly lost life. The reference to Blue as nothing more than a number. The cold stone in his stomach expands, grating on him like sandpaper.

"Blue is fine," he sends back, sure to put emphasis on her name, "and yes, I've been taking good notes." Irritation washes over him as the condescension towards his experience and skill finally begins to take a toll–he doesn't have all those spiffy degrees in Behavioral Science for nothing, after all. Despite what he feels, however, none of it enters his calm voice, besides a steel-like thread of authority. "May I remind you, Dr. Wu, that I've done things like this before."

Okay, so maybe raising Velociraptors is different than looking after lion cubs, but that's besides the point.

"Of course, my apologies. A team will be sent in shortly to retrieve the failed eggs. Do you need us to bring in anything else?" Polite, superficially thoughtful. Owen can almost imagine the cordial smile on the other end of the line.

Beer, he thinks humorlessly, a tad wistful. And Netflix. "Unless your lab techies have cooked up baby Velociraptor colic soother, then no, I'm good."

Dr. Wu laughs. "I'll be sure to pass on the recommendation." The link goes silent and Owen knows the exchange is over.

For the duration of the conversation, Blue had been staring curiously at his blinking earpiece, listening to the tinny speaker in great confusion.

Her translucent eyelid licks thoughtfully slow over an amber iris. Owen watches the slit pupil dilate and constrict as she sorts out whether or not the technology wedged in his ear is a living thing or not. Lately, she's been learning several fundamental distinctions between things that are Living and things that are Not Living. Owen had watched in amazement as she would experimentally close her jaws around a blanket to see if she could gather any reaction or incite movement; sniff objects like the nest or the turf and then inhale Owen's scent, obviously sensing differences between the two.

Being privy to the unfolding development of a new creature is mind-boggling awesome. Even if he has to isolate himself in a faux-jungle habitat so that the infant dinosaur can imprint solely on him.

Oh well. He can always catch up on his Netflix at a later date.

Four days pass. Owen finds himself growing astonishingly used to the small perimeters of the Nursery and the bathroom alcove. To Blue, it must seem as though this room is the entire world, and after hours spent locked up in it, Owen's almost starting to believe it too.

As strange as the isolation from the rest of humankind is, it does wonders to strengthen the bond between man and raptor. It removes him from the clutter and chatter of daily human life, lets him clear his mind and reflect on potential training methods.

He had been counting on the introduction of the other baby Velociraptors to help Blue determine her sense of self; he certainly doesn't want to raise a Velociraptor that thinks she's a human. Owen's read too many articles explaining the negative side effects of such total imprintation. Now, after factoring in the sudden death of the rest of the clutch, and the additional two weeks that will be necessary before the newest batch of eggs is ready to be moved into the Nursery, he has his work cut out for him.

Some animal workers wear headpieces resembling the likeness of the adult animal when interacting with the infants, so that they learn to familiarize with others of their kind. He doesn't exactly have access to a Raptor head helmet, though.

In other animals, like puppies, imprinting is a process that can take place between eight weeks and four months of age–despite Hollywood's glamorous portrayal of it being some instant, unbreakable bond-forming experience. (Oh, how he hates Twilight.) However, Blue is vastly more intelligent than most other species–perhaps even more than orca whales or primates. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume the period to be shorter and closer to birth than average. In fact, Owen has already witnessed signs of it. She takes food from his hands trustingly and follows him around like a duckling. At night, though she appears to be more restless than during the day (perhaps due to origins as a nocturnal hunter?), she obligingly settles down to sleep in her nest, right next to Owen's cot.

Another day passes before an idea occurs to Owen. He presses the comm. link to open up a channel, grinning. "Dr. Wu? I'm gonna need a clicker."

A/N: Reviews ward off the cabin demon. :3 Have a lovely day!