Hi everyone! I didn't have enough characters in the summary to say this, but this is the story of Claire and Owen's first day back on Isla Nublar and at Jurassic World.

This is technically the sequel to my other two Jurassic World stories (third to "The First 48" and "Until Everything is Normal") though I don't think you'd necessarily have to read those two to get this one. This one's going to be five chapters, and as always, nothing's mine, and I hope you guys enjoy the story!

Seventeen days.

That's how long it takes before Masrani Global decides to send people back to Isla Nublar. Just seventeen goddamn days.

Claire gets invited back into the need-to-know, hush-hush, big girl meetings as soon as the investigation against her clears, and she soon learns two things she wishes she could change but knows she has no control over.

First, Lowery has not been as lucky as she has. Throughout the company, it's widely speculated and across-the-board accepted but not actually confirmed that he has been behind the leaks to the media. Claire thinks so, too, at least as far as all the security footage is concerned – he was the only one from my team still there, she thinks – and probably the classified Indominus memos and information, too – that first park was legit, he'd said; they just needed dinosaurs, he'd said, and goodness knows he boasts the tech skills needed for hacking InGen – but nobody had bothered to speak to her during his investigation, so she thinks the company probably didn't really give him the relatively fair fight, the second chance, they gave her, and that saddens her.

She gave him a hard time that day; she gave him a hard time always, but if he hadn't been willing to sic the T-Rex on her (a button she knows couldn't have been easy to press, no matter what his true feelings towards her might have been), she wouldn't look like the hero in this whole mess, and Masrani wouldn't have had a reason to give her that second chance, and she'd probably be out of a job, too. If Lowery hadn't been willing to sic the T-Rex on her, she thinks, with a much more honest perspective, she and the three guys she cares about more than anyone else in the world would probably have never stepped foot off that island. She needs people with their attitude towards the dinosaurs – be honest, Claire, she thinks; Lowery's attitude, Owen's attitude; it's only recently become yours, too – on her team, so she wishes there was something she could do.

The second horrible thing she learns is that while they were looking into her decisions and keeping her in the dark about their present ones, they were readying a team of humans to return to the island. By the time she finds out, it's less than twenty-four hours before that return mission is to begin, and there's nothing she can do. She knows it has to happen; going back is an inevitability, but they are just reaching a point where they're not headline news every night, and it just seems so soon, too soon.

To her surprise and secret delight, she's not on the list of the people returning (not the first one anyway; she's sure she'll be on the second.) The first mission is volunteer-only, and they somehow miraculously got volunteers, mostly surviving members of the ACU, and when she hears their assigned tasks, she silently thanks the universe that Owen both hasn't been apprised of this happening and hasn't been asked to join because she knows he would've signed his name to the mission in a heartbeat.

The brave souls willing to board the first ferry back are to return to Nublar and attempt to re-contain Blue and the T-Rex, the only two predators not in their proper areas by the end of the incident, at least as far as they can tell from the security cameras that are still up and running. The paddocks remained undisturbed throughout all the chaos. The herbivores in the valleys and the jungles were never as contained as the carnivores, and they've mostly stuck to their normal areas on the island, their homes for the last decade, so as far as the assets (she cringes whenever she hears that term now) are concerned, they only have two very large problems.

Capturing one, semi-trained velociraptor seems a lot easier than capturing a T-Rex, and the businessmen and women glower at Claire whenever they discuss the Tyrannosaurus in the board meetings. She thinks they're waiting for her to apologize for ordering the opening of Paddock Nine because, for all intents and purposes, had she not done that, the T-Rex would've stayed nicely in her home like the other carnivores, none the wiser to what was going on elsewhere on the island. Claire has no more intention of ever apologizing for that decision than she does for the one that had her abandoning her post and running off into the jungle to find her nephews, so she ignores the accusatory stares.

Once the dinosaurs are contained and that task is done – if that task gets done, she grimly, morbidly, realistically thinks – the next order of business is a temporary repair to the shattered wall of the aviary, even though almost all of its inhabitants were shot down and eradicated before the final showdown on Main Street. They also plan to quick repair the various fences the Indominus broke; the sides of the mosasaurus enclosure gates need fixing, too, and they want to push the walkway back several feet because holy shit, if that thing could jump like that to get to the Indominus, it could've jumped out and gotten guests, too, and then they're laughing – actually fucking laughing – about how lucky they are that such a thing never actually happened in a decade of the park being open, and Claire's not sure if she wants to cry, quit, strangle them, or all of the above.

She walks in on the morning of the eighteenth day, the first day actually on island grounds, to a board room filled with smart boards. A few of them display several video feeds of both cameras on the island and cameras on their men and women in Costa Rica. Another features a virtual wall of heart monitors, and suddenly, upon seeing that one, she's back in the Control Room, realizing that damn it, Owen Grady is right and oh my god, what have we done as her best and brightest ACU members rapidly lose to the Indominus Rex, and she needs to sit down. She's barely breathing as the ferry docks on the island and soles of boots touch the ground. She hears Owen's voice in her head. Those men are going to die.

She almost shouldn't have worried, as capturing her T-Rex friend ends up being almost stupidly easy. Finding her takes a little while, despite the still-active tracker embedded in her skin, but once they do, they all watch from the San Diego conference room as the ACU team takes a page out of Claire's desperate, stupid, last-ditch effort playbook and lures the aging, hungry beast back to Paddock Nine with a series of food and snacks and far-flung flares. She never sees a human, just the beacon that means her next meal, and if Claire weren't so goddamn nervous, she'd be smugly grinning at everyone who gave her shit for luring the T-Rex to the fight with a flare as the paddock doors slide shut, and the dinosaur devours a goat inside. The mosasaurus is weakened, too, from two and a half weeks in her enclosure without human care and regular frozen sharks, and applying the temporary fixes to the enclosures, there, at the aviary, and around the island, takes a few days but goes off without a hitch. Moving the walkways and applying permanent fixes, they decide, will require larger teams and construction equipment and can wait for later, so they establish temporary barriers around the streets nearest the mosasaurus, reminders to steer clear of the area.

The stateside team around her celebrates with each small victory, but Claire still feels like she can't really breathe. No one has specifically told her yet, but she knows what all of this means – re-capturing the dinosaurs, fixing the damaged enclosures, moving the walkways – but while her head is screaming no, her heart is sighing yes, and she's not used to her head and her heart being such contentious enemies, so she tries not to think about it.

As the first week back on Isla Nublar draws to a close, there is no sign of Blue. No one has spotted her on the ground; they can't find her on any of the cameras, and, as she was never a part of the park, she doesn't have a tracking implant. The popular theory in the boardroom is that she has not survived the nearly month on her own, out of captivity, without her pack and without her Alpha. Claire doesn't have the heart to tell Owen.

"Did you find her?" he asks hopefully every night as she returns to their shared hotel suite. Masrani never bothered to make them move out of the suite they once shared with Claire's family, so it's almost become like their own little apartment.

"Not yet, babe," she sighs as she lays herself on top of his sprawled body on the couch.

He's turned into something of a couch potato since being released from his InGen contract, filling his days with video games and keeping up on the news reports so he can tell her what the media's saying and she doesn't have to watch. She would find his idleness irritating, except she knows he's still grieving, and she knows job hunting could lead to him re-locating, a possibility she doesn't even want to consider, and exhaustion has almost always overtaken her by the time she returns in the evenings, so she's grown quite accustomed to burying herself in his warm neck and soft t-shirts until the dinners he makes for her are ready.

"You will," he always says confidently, kissing the forehead tucked under his chin and wrapping her up in an embrace. "I know you will."

Apparently Masrani thinks Owen will because on the twenty-ninth day since the incident, her bosses call early and ask Mr. Grady to accompany her to the office. He grabs her hand under the conference room table as they hand him an itinerary, and she's not surprised when they hand her a copy, too.

The plane for Costa Rica leaves in six hours.

They're going back.

She drags him down to the storage closet on the first floor, the one she'd cried into his shoulder in after her post-disaster-but-almost-as-disastrous first press conference. She flicks on the dim light, and he pulls the door shut behind them and leans in for a kiss. She leans back away from him and asks what the hell he's doing.

"Is that not what we're doing?" he asks, confused and a bit disappointed.

"No! I need to talk to you. Somewhere where no one will hear us," she says.

"Okay," he says, slightly concerned.

She lowers herself onto a box with a sigh, and he waits patiently, knowing she'll talk when she's ready. She almost can't bring herself to say the words, but she finally looks up at him and says, "They're moving towards re-opening the park."

His face is hard but unreadable, and she wishes she could tell what he was thinking. "They told you that?" he asks. She shakes her head no. It's not official, but…

"They don't have to," she says.

Silence hangs in the air for a moment as Owen's hands come to rest on either side of his waist, and he paces a bit, processing the information. Claire can't take the silence and says they shouldn't be surprised. The public has never been more interested in them. A new attraction always brought the eyes of the world, but the attention generated from this is something else entirely, and it's somehow, miraculously, magically not all negative. Their online store is still up and running since their warehouse is located stateside, and sales are absolutely through the roof. She's never seen off-site merchandise numbers so high.

She continues by saying that at twenty-two thousand guests per day, that puts them on par with Universal Orlando and some of the smaller Disney parks, the 13th most visited theme park in the world, according to the previous year's statistics. If a lion got out at Disney's Animal Kingdom, Disney wouldn't shut down the entire park forever. They'd build a better enclosure, put up construction walls around the damage, get rid of the lion, but eventually, probably quicker than with Jurassic World, the show would go on.

"And our 26 million dollar lion is dead," Claire finally finishes.

"But it wasn't a lion; it was a fucking dinosaur, Claire," Owen argues. "She ate people."

"And Jurassic World is one of the largest sources of revenue for all of Masrani Global," Claire says. "Simon believed a breach in one of the enclosures was an eventuality waiting to happen. I doubt he quite envisioned that when he put the emergency protocols into place, but it's the flagship of the company. They're not just going to write it off and let it go."

Their eyes lock, the battle to persuade him of her opinion having turned silent, but while she thinks he needs convincing to accept what she knows deep in her soul to be true, he doesn't. We'd never re-open, she'd sighed, and he thinks now that was probably more for dramatics, more to get him to stop fighting her, god damn it, stop undermining her authority and let her do her job than a truth she actually believed. Though he likes to think his influence had something to do with her eventual decision to close the attractions, her and Simon Masrani's instincts had been to make decisions about the Indominus catastrophe for the benefit of the business so if she says Masrani Global isn't done with Jurassic World, then she would know.

"Shit," Owen says. "How long have you known?"

"Since they sent people back to the island," she admits. "It was obvious once I saw what the team currently there was sent there to do."

"What do you want to do?" he asks.

"I don't know," she admits.

He pulls the itinerary (that he's already balled up and vowed to ignore once he gets to the island) out of his back pocket and says, "We can forget this. We can tell them no. We can go anywhere."

"Is that what you want?" she asks.

He shakes his head and tells her this is her job, her decision. She counters by saying if they're really in this, if they're sticking together, it's their decision. Silence blankets the small storage closet again. They both want to give in, to go back, maybe not forever, but for today,but neither wants to be the first to admit it.

"I'd like to try to find Blue," he finally relents. "I know her better than they do."

"I have to see this through the clean-up," she agrees. She goes on to say that they did a lot of things wrong, and she can't bail before those wrongs are righted in whatever way they can right the things that happened that day. Owen tells her, again, like a broken record, that it wasn't her fault. She nods. "But I made mistakes, too."

"And after everything with the Indominus is handled?" he asks. "When it stops being about that special brand of hell and starts being about getting things back to normal…what do you want to do then?"

Her lip quivers, and he's afraid he's said the wrong thing. She says, again, that she doesn't know. She doesn't know what she wants to do; for the first time in her life, she doesn't have a five-year plan anymore; she's not even sure what her next five weeks look like (except she knows, without a doubt, that she wants him there next to her, wherever she may go, though she doesn't say that out loud) because who would have ever thought five weeks ago, they'd be here, and that scares the hell out of her, but for now…for now…

"We're going back," Owen finishes when she can't.

She nods and repeats, "We're going back."

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