Chapter Text
“Can you please state your name for the camera?”
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“Sammy Gutierrez,” she said, smiling into the lens and trying to hide her fluttering heartbeat.
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“Ben Pincus.” Did people really like sitting on these plush sofas? It was impossible to get any stability.
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“Yasmina Fadoula.” They had to record this for what reason? At least let her talk to someone she might know a little bit.
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“Kenji Kon.” He had this in the bag. Be interviewed and save his friends from a bunch of weirdos that might not be arrested otherwise. Walk in the park.
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“Darius Bowman.” Everyone was waiting outside for him. There was no reason to worry about them and they were all perfectly capable. Just take a breath.
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“Brooklynn Creighton.” It was hard not to check the door was unlocked and, somehow, even harder to pretend she didn’t notice the interviewer's eyes wandering inevitably to her many stitched-up injuries. She really didn’t need the pity.
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“Thank you for agreeing to give this statement.”
They weren’t given the biggest choice but okay.
“Uh, yeah, no problem,” Sammy said, fiddling with her hands. She sat down on the sofa and gave the police officer in front of her a tepid smile. Offering to go first might not have been her smartest move and she had to remind herself that everyone was okay and safe right outside the door. As long as this got the bad guys arrested she would deal with it.
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“So you were stranded on Isla Nublar after the Jurassic World incident,” the officer stated, looking Ben up and down in perplexed shock. Ben resisted rolling his eyes - yeah, he was a little scrawny but that didn’t mean he was useless.
“Six months. We missed the ferry and no one bothered to come back for us.” Ben sat back and crossed his arms. He would never get sick of rubbing it in, never. Maybe people would start taking him seriously instead of treating him like he was incompetent just because his voice hadn't broken yet and he didn't have defined muscles.
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“How did you come in contact with Mr. Eli Mills and Doctor Henry Wu?”
Yaz hated hearing those names any more than she had to. Lawyers, and parents, and now the police, all seemed obsessed with these people. What more was there to know beyond they were terrible people? If they looked up they would see some people who needed their attention a lot more.
Yaz sighed internally.
“They came to the island to do who knows what and we got caught up in the middle of it,” she said truthfully. They were just about to leave, just about to get away from the island that had been causing them so much torment for so long, and then those choppers flew over their heads and sent them crashing into even more of a mess than they were in the first place.
Classic.
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“I understand they then took one of your friends as a hostage,” the annoying guy said. He had a clipboard, sheet of paper, and cheap pen that made the worst noise when he tapped it. Kenji liked to say he was good under pressure. How true that was? Well, he wanted to snap a neck with every tap, tap, tap and he... wouldn’t be the judge of his own greatness this time.
“Yeah,” Kenji said. That moment when Darius and Yaz came back and he thought the worst. That was one of the worst moments of his life. That was— that was, the day they took Brooklynn. Aka the second time his heart had shattered into a million small pieces and he was still trying to pick up the pieces without letting anyone know.
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“Do you have any idea why they did this? A motive?” He seemed really stumped and Darius couldn’t really blame him. He must see a lot of things in his line of work but a mercenary and a doctor kidnapping a thirteen year old girl randomly must have been unusual. Unhelpfully, Darius didn’t think the actual story would give too much clarification.
Also, wow did Darius hate reliving that day. Sometimes, he could still see Brooklynn falling right into the clutches of the enemy when he closed his eyes.
“Doctor Wu wanted his laptop back to make more dinosaurs and we had it,” Darius revealed. They couldn’t just leave everyone they loved and more at the mercy of whatever monster Mills and Wu decided to come up with, they just couldn’t. “They took Brooklynn to make a trade.”
And that didn’t work out too well for them did it.
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“After they took you off the island what happened next?”
It was hard to get the vibe of this police officer. On the one hand, Brooklynn knew they were supposed to be at least a little compassionate or they would never get kids like her to say a word. On the other, she really didn’t want to be spilling secrets of the most traumatic moments of her life to some stranger she barely knew.
It was hard enough finding the words to think about it all.
“I think they took me to see Mills, Eli Mills,” she said, cringing when she had to say his name. “He’s the guy who ran the whole operation, everyone was under him. He was mad that Wu and the mercenaries hadn’t got a hold of the laptop and he threatened to kill me.” It was easier when she just said the words as fast as she could. Just don’t give the memories a chance to take hold. “After that was when I was taken to Lockwood Manor.” She paused, her eyes flickering to the blinking camera. “ I don’t feel comfortable talking about what happened next.”
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“One of the things that confuses me,” he said, folding his hands in his lap as if he was trying to be conversational. “Is that in order to save your friend you willingly went with the people who had been threatening your family?”
Sammy winced.
She couldn’t believe she had done it either but Brooklynn and her friends needed her. After the Jurassic World incident, her parents had been paid off a lot of money by the Masrani corporation - they were fine and far away from Mantah Corp. It didn’t make it hurt any less, even now.
“I wouldn’t say teamed up,” Sammy said. They had been shot at by them and that didn’t exactly scream partners in crime to her. “But at the time it was the only thing we could think to do. They were the only people who we had contact with who might have had any idea where they took Brooklynn. I really didn’t want to do it but it might have been the only option we had.”
What happened with Mantah Corp went by no means well but Sammy would hate to imagine the alternative where they did nothing and let such bad things just happen.
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“Is this confrontation when you reportedly got shot at?”
Way to be blunt.
Yes, it was when they got shot at and it was when he got part of his arm ripped off. Ben didn’t mind this for himself, he could handle a little bit of verbal roughhousing, but he knew his friends were a bit more sensitive. He better be more careful when talking to them.
“We were practically just minding our own business but the Mantah Corp guy didn’t like us very much or something and started shooting,” Ben said. That wasn’t exactly how it happened but his indulgence would be excused. Besides, it made Mantah Corp look worse and that was what they were here to do wasn’t it? “I got grazed but everyone else got out relatively unscathed outside of the stress being shot at can cause.”
He shrugged, looking as nonchalant as possible. “But then again we’re used to that aren’t we,” he added. And no, he wasn’t playing the sympathy card, he hated that card, he was playing the tug on the heartstrings a little bit card. Human beings are a lot more susceptible than they want to believe.
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“And then you made it to the mansion,” he stated. “What happened next?”
“Lockwood’s caretaker Iris invited us in,” Yaz said truthfully. Ironically, it was one of the most out there parts of what had happened. They just knocked and a kind older lady let them in. An adult that actually seemed to care even a little bit for the wellbeing of someone other than herself. Unfortunately, it felt impossible.
As for what happened next. Well, she couldn’t exactly say she had the clearest memories of everything. It was mostly a blur of panic and self loathing.
“We were trying to find the basement when Mills showed up. He had been out on some business trip or something.” She hadn’t been paying attention to the specifics of whatever evil deed he was off committing next. “ Ben and Darius were the only ones who managed to get away.”
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“That bruise looks like it was inflicted by someone.” Kenji nearly snorted - how could he tell? Kenji really hadn’t been expecting it to come up. It had been enough time that it only hurt if he pushed it and the obvious handprint shape was starting to fade. “Did one of Mr. Mills’s men do that to you?”
Nah, Mills was clearly not that afraid of getting his hands too dirty. A teenager said something a little too true? Well that was not going to end well for them. Kenji was glad he was the one who was hit instead of Yaz who had really not been in a good place at the time.
“Nope that was up to the big man himself,” Kenji said flippantly. “I think I was annoying him or something but he thwacked me right in the face.” It wasn’t that important that he had punched him first. Kenji wasn’t exactly lying. Besides, he would have done it again in a heartbeat - no one hurts his friends and gets away with it.
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“So the situation was dire, half of your friends taken by Mr. Mills and the other half facing odds of astounding heights. How did you get out of that situation?”
It wasn’t a video game - Darius mentally rolled his eyes. Six kids trapped on an island and then facing impossible odds to save one of their own sounded like a cool premise for sure. He just couldn’t get on board when it was his own life.
The moment wasn’t his best one either. Everyone was a mess and he was barely thinking straight when Brooklynn had wandered back into their life and clearly it could have gone better. He cringed just thinking about it.
“We had to sneak through the lab and rescue everyone that way. I didn’t want to harm anyone else even if they were the people who had hurt Brooklynn and were planning to do terrible things,” Darius said.
Mills and Wu had done a lot of bad things and he would be over the moon if they lived in jail for the rest of their miserable lives. He just wasn’t a fan of ending lives too early even if they were the worst people he knew and he wouldn’t cross that line unless he absolutely had to.
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“This isn’t really an official question,” the officer said, turning the camera off and putting his notes down in his lap. “But, where do you plan to go from here?”
Brooklynn opened her mouth but nothing came out and anything she could say rang hollow. She could say do YouTube again, become an influencer, unbox the world, and put everything behind her. Ask her two weeks ago and that’s what she would have said.
Now, she was so focused on getting better and enjoying the time she had missed out on with her friends that doing anything else had never occurred to her. It couldn’t be that hard, the idiots of the world were behind bars or long gone and the island was behind her. It was all over and she could do whatever she wanted.
“I—” She paused. “I don’t know.”