FIC: who she is (Jurassic World, Claire Dearing/Owen Grady, PG-13) for perpetual
TITLE:who she is
RATING:PG-13
FANDOM: Jurassic World
PAIRING:Claire Dearing/Owen Grady
SUMMARY:Claire and Grady find that they haven’t gotten as far away from InGen as they had hoped.
AUTHOR’S NOTES:For perpetual, re: her prompt. The title is hers, too, because I suck at titles.
Grady had been a consultant for the Navy, not a squid. Still, he remembered hearing a SEAL say about the service, “Even when you’re out, you’re not out, right?”
He and Claire had been out eight months. They had spent some time with Claire’s family in Connecticut before finding a place of their own in Maine. They lived on the water; Grady trained horses and Claire took over a small nonprofit.
It was nice.
One morning Grady came into the kitchen to find Claire halving cherries. He paused in the doorway; the knife was so big, and the cutting board and Claire’s hands were stained dark red. There was a gut punch moment of fear before logic kicked in, and he lost his breath.
Claire looked over her shoulder at Grady’s pale face. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said, and came up behind her, sliding his hands around her waist. Claire set the knife on the cutting board and took half a cherry in her fingers, slipped the fruit into his mouth, the flesh of the cherry raw and supple. She turned in his grip and kissed him, tasting just as wild as the cherry, and she put her hands on him, staining his shirt blood red. He held her, lifted her against the counter, cherries tumbling to the floor.
Afterward, they sat on the tile floor, like a crime scene splattered and smeared red.
“You’re cleaning this up,” Claire said, popping a cherry into her mouth, and Grady laughed.
***
The television was on in the bedroom as they performed their nighttime rituals, the drone of the eleven o’clock news easy enough to ignore.
“Class action lawsuit announced against InGen regarding the company’s prenatal genetics initiative. The suit alleges that InGen knowingly used female personnel as test subjects in their trials to engineer genetically superior ‘designer babies’-”
Grady stopped brushing his teeth.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “Apparently, playing God was public policy at InGen.”
Claire didn’t say anything. He rinsed and spit, then went into the bedroom to find her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, eyes on the television, the TV’s blue light casting her oddly, making her look pale and alien.
“Did you hear me?” he asked. She turned to him, and his brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
***
Claire got out of the shower, wrapped herself in a towel. Grady paused in the doorway, looking at her.
“You’re not showing,” he said.
She wrung her hair around her fist, water falling to the tile. “You’re not still mad.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“When I was sure-you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Claire looked away, looked to the foggy reflection of them both in the bathroom mirror.
“When I was sure I wouldn’t lose it,” she said.
Grady’s shoulders slumped. He took her hands, pulled her toward him.
“Sometimes I don’t get girl stuff,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“What are we going to do about this? Do we-do we sue InGen? Do we-I mean, are you even sure that...that there’s something wrong?”
Claire rested her hand over her abdomen. She couldn’t feel any change there, and that was odd. She had changed in other ways.
“I don’t want to believe there’s anything wrong. I think I’d know if there was.”
Grady nodded. “Okay.”
He placed his hand over hers on her stomach.
“So,” he said, meeting her eyes, “boy or girl?”
***
They lay in bed, side by side. Claire put her hand on her belly. Five months, she was showing. Her body felt strange, but not alien; she could feel herself changing, and she felt less like a monster movie than a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
“Right here,” she said, pressing down gently with her fingers. “The baby’s kicking.”
Grady put his hand where she’d indicated. He could feel movement beneath his palm, and he smiled.
“We should really pick out a name so we can stop calling him, ‘the baby’.”
“Her,” Claire said. “I’m not ready. I don’t knowwho she is yet.”
Or what she is,she thought, like a reflex.
Grady moved over her, pressing his ear to her belly. Claire smiled, feathering her fingers through his hair. She could feel her daughter moving within her.
I’ll love you either way,Claire thought.