Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The Shift.
Alan Grant was, for the first time in his life, feeling utterly lost.
The silence in the university office was a brittle, heavy thing. He felt tired, that deep aching fatigue that penetrates to the bone. As if he hadn't slept in days. As if he had just run a marathon. It made everything feel tender and over stimulated.
It had been six months since Isla Sorna, since the Kirbys, since John Hammond's horrific creations had (for the second time) completely derailed his life. And the easy camaraderie that once existed between Dr. Alan Grant and Billy Brennan had fossilized into something fragile and dangerously sharp. The space between them, once filled with shared discovery, dry wit, easy professional warmth and mutual respect, was now just flat, cold and impersonal.
Alan sat behind his desk, an old, worn but well loved and sturdy piece of furniture. A fortress of scattered papers, maps, pencils, the occasional miscellaneous fossil and heavy, leather-bound books. His focus was laser sharp and absolute, on a topographical map of the Hell Creek Formation. He was tracing the square grid of their last dig with a blunt pencil. His posture was rigid, muscles coiled and jaw clenched. A man raging a silent battle against an internal enemy, against the simmering, white hot anger burning in his core.
An anger that felt devastating, burning at all times like the hot coals of a banked fire. And directed with painful single-mindedness at the man who was (who used to be) his closest friend after Ellie.
He could feel Billy’s presence across the room like a phantom limb. What had once been a comfort, a surce of quiet, solid support, was now a constant, pulsing ache.
Billy was cataloging a new shipment of bone fragments, a fastidious and meticulous process he excelled at and which Alan was more than happy to delegate. His movements were precise and quiet, contained, controlled, almost unnaturally so. As if he was trying to make himself invisible, inobtrusive. He’d tried, in the first few weeks back from the hospital, to bridge the chasm between them. He'd been still weak then, pale and slender, having lost his tan, some muscle and some weight during his convalescence in hospital. At first he'd had to use crutches, his torso bandaged and arm in a sling, the damage from the Pteranodons deep and extensive. He had made a painful and pathetic sight. He’d offered explanations, apologies, desperate attempts to explain and justify the youthful, ignorant idealism that had led him to steal those raptor eggs. But Alan’s anger, cold and heavy (born of a deep and hurtful betrayal), had built an impenetrable wall between them.
The betrayal, the risk to their lives, the danger he'd put them all in, the injury to his own misplaced trust in Billy, was a wound that refused to heal.
Now, Billy just worked, his once proud, broad shoulders perpetually hunched, as if expecting a blow or a dismissal, harsh words like the ones Alan spoke to him when he found out about the eggs.
He was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Alan to get rid of him. And honestly, Alan wasn’t sure why he hadn’t done it yet.
“The department head wants a preliminary report on the new dig site by Friday,” Alan said, his voice a low gravelly rumble that felt too deep for the small, cramped room. It was the first thing he’d said to Billy in two days that wasn’t a curt, dry greeting or an instruction about a specimen or his field notes.
Billy didn’t look up from the microscope he was looking through. “I’ll have the sediment analysis cross-referenced and the preliminary stratigraphy done by tomorrow afternoon. It’ll be ready.” His tone was guarded, soft, professional, distant, a carefully constructed barrier. A far cry from the tone he'd have used before.
Another silence fell, heavier this time. Alan’s hands, resting on his desk, twitched. He suddenly found himself flexing his fingers, his hands feeling oddly thick, the joints tender and swollen. A strange, statick, a buzz, like a beehive, had been humming under his skin all morning. An all consuming restlessness that felt deeper than fatigue. He felt… crowded. The familiar office, which wasn't big but had always been comfortably cluttered, now felt oppressively small. The ceiling seemed lower, the doorframes narrower. He’d ignored it, attributing it to lingering stress or perhaps a deep-seated fear, a ghost from the island and the trauma.
“Did you feel that?” Billy asked suddenly, his voice quiet, drawing Alan from his thoughts. He looked up, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion.
Alan frowned. “Feel what?”
Billy, finally, for the first time in days, looked at him, his dark green eyes wide. He placed a hand flat on the table. “I don’t know. A vibration. It was weird. It wasn't tectonic," he shrugged, looking troubled. "It was almost as if it was a feeling. Something psychological. A feeling but… deeper. A fundamental shudder. Like a big truck passing, but it felt like it came from the air itself, not the ground.”
Alan hadn’t felt anything. But as he watched Billy, he noticed something else, something strange. The orange, late afternoon sun streaming through the window seemed to catch Billy differently. It highlighted the delicate curve of his jaw, the surprising slenderness of his wrist as he adjusted the lens of the microscope. Billy, with the usual confidence of a lean and athletic young man who knows he's attractive, had always used all his clothes slightly tight. But now, impossibly, his usual flannel shirt and practical t-shirt looked suddenly too big on him.
For a fleeting, disconcerting second, Billy looked almost fragile. It was a ridiculous thought. Billy was, as he always had been even after the hospital, a sturdy, athletic young man, able to keep pace with him in the desert heat of the badlands for hours.
The thought was interrupted by a wave of dizziness so sudden, disorienting and profound that Alan had to grip the edge of his desk. He felt nauseous. The world didn’t spin, it lurched, a single, nauseating jolt that had no physical cause, no sound, no easy explanation. A scent, rich and metallic, like ozone after a lightning strike, flooded his nose, so potent it was almost as if he was tasting it. It made the air feel thick and dense, heavy with charged energy.
Across the room, Billy gasped softly, a small, breathless sound. He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, as if warding off a headache. “Alan? My head… it’s ringing, like a high-pitched whine that won’t stop. And the light…” He squinted, screwing his eyes shut, as if the weak afternoon sun had suddenly become blinding.
Alan stood up, the movement jerky and unnaturally forceful. His chair screeched back against the polished floor, and he felt a strange, new awareness of his own body. His shirt felt tight across his back and shoulders, the denim fabric pulling taut in a way it never had before. He was a tall and broad man, always had been, but for a dizzying moment, he felt massively taller. Larger. As if he had physically grown in the time of a single breath, occupying far more room than he had a minute ago. His hands, resting on the desk before him, looked broader, the knuckles thicker and ridged with a sudden, new strenght.
He took a step towards Billy, the squeak of his worn work boots on the floor sounding louder, heavier. His own concern momentarily overwhelmed the low burn of his constant anger towards the man. “Billy, get up. Let’s get you some air.”
Billy looked up, his face catching the afternoon light, and Alan stopped dead, suddenly breathless. His mind screaming, overwhelmed.
It was Billy’s face, but the proportions were… different, shifting. His eyes, a striking, vivid dark green, seemed suddenly larger, bigger, in a face that appeared finer, the jawline less pronounced, softer. He looked impossibly younger than his actual age, more delicate and vulnerable, his confusion painted in softer, clearer strokes.
“What is happening?” Billy whispered, his voice sounding thinner, higher, almost feminine. He tried to rise, too fast, too quick, and instead had to lean his weight onto the desk, his body seeming to sway. He was shorter. He was definitely, impossibly, shorter.
Alan didn't have an answer. The static under his skin, the insistent beehive, was now a low, possessive thrum that settled deep in his chest. The intellectual part of his brain screamed 'Impossible,' but a deeper, more primal part roared 'Mine.' The instinct to step forward, to place his now (impossible, it couldn't be real) broader frame between Billy and the door, between Billy and the big, confusing world, was so visceral it left him breathless.
It scared him.
The scent, that unexplainable, impossible scent of ozone was fading, replaced by something else, something warm and faint, intoxicatingly sweet that seemed to be coming from Billy. It was not possible. Alan's mind, the racional scientist that was never turned off, was screaming in denial. He couldn't possibly be smelling Billy, not at this distance and not as something that smelled like wild flowers and honey cakes.
But he was, he was smelling him.
It was a scent that latched into something primal, deep in Alan’s gut, a new, unsettling current of hunger and protectiveness. He had to clench his fists to stop himself from physically reaching out.
He took another step, his movements feeling heavier, clumsy, his bulk seeming to absorb the light coming from the window. He looked down at Billy, who was still seated, his arms wrapped around his midriff as if warding off a chill, and the difference in their height seemed suddenly, uncomprehendingly more pronounced. Billy, who was just a few inches shorter than Alan, had to tilt his head back further to meet his eyes, and the action exposed the slender, pale column of his neck.
The world had changed, it had shifted. Not with an explosion, but with a silent, fundamental tremor. The cracks were there, spiderwebbing through. Reality seemed to warp, to change. And as Alan stared into Billy’s wide, bewildered green eyes, feeling the sudden, strange strain of his shirt across his chest, he knew, with a certainty that was as terrifying as it was deep, that nothing would ever be the same again.
The world was changing, and they were changing along with it.