Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ian wasn’t always the hero. He never was, and he never would be. Now more than ever, he had people who he cared about and who cared about him, and he supposed that made him act more heroic than usual. It was incredibly inconvenient, but he guessed he liked it. It was better than the alternative, anyway. And so really, that just made Ian Malcolm human.

A human who wasn’t used to exhibiting care, at that. Sometimes he screwed up. Sometimes he made the cowardly choice. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but it happened. In fact, he could classify now as one of those instances.

The telltale quakes were the first thing to alert him to the T-Rex’s presence. And then it was there, sticking its enormous, scaly snout in the tent where the only three people in his life who were worth a damn currently slept.

Everything froze. Ian wanted to say his mind told him to run over and help but his body made him freeze. Or maybe his body told him to run over and help but his mind made him freeze. Neither was true, though. Every single ounce of Ian’s being told him to freeze, because this wasn’t some bully he could go up to and punch in the jaw. This was an angry, prehistoric animal the size of a building that could kill him and everyone around him in an instant.

Ian’s mind instantly transported back to that day when he was nearly killed in an instant by the same kind of dinosaur. The terror coursing through his veins when he suddenly couldn’t feel his body, when he went completely airborne. The crash into the hut. The stabbing pain that shot up his leg and forced him to black out. The confusion of waking up in a dark, stormy world, not knowing if his best friend was dead or alive. Or if he would even survive.

Ian’s bum leg was a physical manifestation and constant reminder of the fear he felt that night. So it wasn’t any coincidence the pain flared up now, as he stared down a full Tyrannosaurus Rex looking to make a meal out of the three people he loved more than anything.

But these women were smart and capable. They’d know to hold still and they’d do everything right and they’d get themselves out because they were the smartest and most capable people he knew. Logically, there was nothing Ian could do to help them.

The terrified scream of an unknown man brought Ian back to his senses. After the initial scare subsided and the reality of the situation sunk in, he didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. But it was far too long. To his horror, nobody emerged from the tent yet, which meant he needed to get them out now. He chided himself for his hesitation as he ran in that direction, but another man distractedly plowed full force into him as he too tried to get away from the Rex, shoving Ian to the ground if it could buy him a spare few seconds.

Ian couldn’t get up. The running and shouting of dozens of men along with the raging storm disoriented him enough, but the T-Rex’s stomping and roaring sent him over the edge, his bearings completely lost. It was coming in his direction, so he took cover under a log and hoped for the best.

Time passed. Everything was a blur. The screaming subsided and the earthquakes disappeared. The world around him was completely devoid of human beings. He had to find them.

***

The world is an unpredictable, scary place. It's impossible to stay one step ahead of anything, and anyone who tried would be doing so in vain. Ian lived by those words, but he relentlessly turned that night over and over again in his mind. The clear image of Sarah, Adelaide, and Kelly all cornered in a fabric prison by such a monstrous creature, while exaggerated in his imagination, plagued him nonetheless.

Ian hated himself for his choices that day, subconscious or not. Everyone had trauma. He wasn’t special for his. He should have acted and he shouldn’t have justified himself through the competence of Sarah, Adelaide, and Kelly. Even if they did find their own way out in the end, just like he knew they would.

It was a miracle they all made it out relatively unscathed, and for that, Ian was incredibly grateful. But the dread that overcame him when the T-Rex found them and the panic that followed were feelings he’d never forget.

All of these self-loathing thoughts added up to an irritatingly unproductive mindset, so Ian did what he did best. He buried those thoughts deep in a vault in the back of his brain, locked them inside, and threw away the key.

It wasn’t hard to find them, really. Follow the roars, follow the screams. Follow the blood.

But the relief Ian felt when he found Sarah and Kelly (and he guessed Nick, too) behind that waterfall was palpable. There was only one person left who he couldn’t immediately make out on anyone’s shoulder or in anyone’s pocket.

“Where’s Adelaide?” he asked.

The guilty expression on everyone’s faces gave the answer away. Adelaide was not with them.

Sarah immediately launched into an explanation. Something about chaos and darkness, but Ian didn’t hear any of it. The ringing in his ears overpowered everything. He just expected Adelaide to be with them because why wouldn’t she be with them? But no, Adelaide was gone. They left her behind. Adelaide was gone.

Ian also didn’t hear himself as he laid into them. It was probably mean and it was probably hurtful. He didn’t care. Adelaide was gone.

“Yeah, well where were you?” Nick yelled over Ian’s shouting.

Ian froze. That shut him up.

He was the one who left Adelaide in the tent. He was the one who brought her to the island. When danger arose, he was nowhere to be found. This was his fault.

Seeing that they now had his attention, Sarah jumped in gently. “Burke said he saw Ludlow grab her. She’s alive. That’s as good a place to start as any.”

Peter Ludlow.

Blood rushed to Ian’s head as he felt the anger boil over again. He threw his fist into the cave wall, looking for something he could take the anger out on, since Ludlow’s face wasn’t readily available. The bones cracked and he cried out in pain.

Without another word, Ian stalked out of the cave. He was going to find Peter Ludlow. And he was going to kill him.

***

Chaos erupted when the T-Rex ripped the tent from its foundations. Screams echoed around the field and stomping feet rumbled the ground beneath her. Try as she might, Adelaide could not locate Sarah or Kelly anywhere. Panic only just started to take over when the world closed in around her.

These were not familiar hands. Adelaide couldn’t say she was very familiar with Sarah, Nick, or Kelly’s hands, but the unyielding grip (despite her struggles against it) was one indication.

Her theory proved correct when the world appeared to her again and she stared up at Peter Ludlow. Great.

This man didn’t scare her before, and he didn’t scare her now. If he wanted to hurt her or kill her, he would have done so already. And Ian would be back to find her shortly. It would all be okay.

“Oh Christ,” an exasperated voice said, and it wasn’t Ludlow’s. It was Roland Tembo’s. Adelaide tensed up. Now that was a person she was scared of.

Roland appeared in the picture and looked down at her disappointedly. “Why did you kidnap the tiny girl?” he asked Ludlow, not taking his eyes off her.

“I’m not tiny,” Adelaide mumbled. She couldn’t force her voice to go any louder if she tried.

“I believe she may be tied to an InGen project from years back,” Ludlow explained. “I’m afraid I can’t disclose much more, but I’m quite curious to see if I’m correct.” His gaze darted off to the left as he searched for something, and his eyes lit up when he found it. “Ah, there we are.”

Adelaide couldn’t see what he was looking for until it was too late. The hand quickly shoved her toward a series of metal bars, which she belatedly realized was a cage. She scrambled away in a random direction, refusing to let him trap her. Ludlow simply closed his hand around her though, squeezing all the air out of her lungs in an overdone attempt to keep her in one place. Then he let go.

Adelaide fell an inch and landed hard against the bars. Before she could even sit up, the cage door closed with a loud clang, the lock snapped into place, and she was set on a big rock at waist height for the humans.

“Watch her, please,” Ludlow said. He didn’t bother to wait for a response as he took off.

Nonononononononono, they can’t do this. They can’t do this to me.

Adelaide started to hyperventilate, but she couldn’t let herself fall apart in front of Roland. She already felt so weak around Beans. She felt even weaker around him. Weaker still if she were to break down. She couldn’t let him have that.

And so, Adelaide ran toward the door of the cage. The lock was way too complicated and large to manage on her own, which left her with one option. She slammed her body into the door, hoping to force it open.

But it didn’t budge. So she tried again. And again. And again. She should at least be able to make a dent, right? And this was a good distraction, because if she stopped to think about the hopelessness of the situation, she’d have a panic attack.

“Stop. You’ll just hurt yourself,” Roland said.

Adelaide flinched from the volume, but she didn’t slow down. “I don’t care,” she huffed.

“Clearly.”

After a couple more attempts, Adelaide had to pause. She wasn’t getting anywhere, and her shoulder protested.

Trying to ignore the looming form sitting on the rock next to her, she looked out into the world beyond. The men that remained carried the baby Rex from earlier over to a cage much thicker and stronger than her own. Adelaide’s heart sank. They succeeded. They were taking the dinosaur back to the mainland.

Was that what they had planned for her, too? Her cage was clearly meant to hold a small dinosaur, but given the options, it looked like they had to make due with the baby Rex.

“Is that what I am to you?” Adelaide wondered aloud, unable to take her eyes off the sleeping infant. “Some kind of animal?”

“What are you, then?” Roland asked, genuinely curious.

“A person.” She turned to look him in the eyes but faltered when they were higher than she originally thought. They stared down at her with an unmatched intensity, and she simply couldn’t hold eye contact. “Just because I’m small doesn’t mean you can-”

“It actually does mean I can,” he interrupted. “I can do whatever I want. So stop throwing yourself into those bars or I’ll stick you somewhere you won’t ever see the light of day again.”

Adelaide thought her heart stopped. It constricted in her chest, because that wasn’t an empty threat. That was a promise.

But she wasn’t a quitter, and she needed the last word. The last word was all she had, because she certainly wasn’t fighting her way out of this one. She threw her body into the cage door again.

In the blink of an eye, Roland snatched the cage up with both hands and held it up to his face. Adelaide tumbled backwards head over heels until her back slammed into the other end of the cage. Held at such a steep angle, she was forced to look directly up into his angry, fierce eyes.

Adelaide went completely silent. Her breathing became sporadic and her fingers coiled around the bars to keep her from shaking. He wanted her attention? He had it.

Roland’s eyes flickered back and forth. He looked like he was about to burst, but then he let out a deep sigh, his hot breath washing over Adelaide. He slammed the cage back down on the rock next to him.

The ground rattled and the momentum caused Adelaide to fall face first, landing in a heap. She had to peel herself off the ground. Despite the way her body still shook and despite the way her mind was still freaking out from the close call, she had to convey that she was unbothered by his antics. Maybe Ian was rubbing off on her more than she would have liked.

“Geez…who died?”

Roland paused in rubbing his face with his hands. “Ajay,” he answered simply.

“Oh, shit………Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Okay, I’m not sorry.” Adelaide was glad she had the opportunity to take that one back, because she wasn’t sure if she meant it. She knew for certain she shouldn’t be apologizing to her captor though.

“You fascinate me, miss Adelaide.”

“Great. Let me go.” Adelaide wasn’t here to play games or chit-chat.

Roland just chuckled to himself. It was the condescension of the laugh that made her angrily dig her nails into her palms.

Ludlow suddenly reentered the picture. He completely ignored Adelaide and spoke only to Roland. Something about a job offer. Adelaide didn’t hear, since she’d resumed trying to escape.

Only when Roland stood up did she pause, afraid she’d pissed him off again. But he just walked away. “Best of luck with the escape, miss Adelaide,” he said without turning around.

This infuriated Adelaide. Best of luck? If he wasn’t going to help her, then he could fuck right off with his best wishes.

One look at Ludlow showed that he was pissed, too. He snatched up the cage by its handle and took off.

The cage swung rapidly back and forth, forcing Adelaide to wrap her limbs around the bars in the corner again.

“Hey!” she shouted. Ludlow ignored her. “Hey, where are you taking me?” He ignored her. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

Adelaide shouted at him until she was hoarse, trying to pull any reaction from him. Insults, threats, even jokes. He would not acknowledge her. She screamed until she was loaded in with the other cargo, but then the door slammed shut and she was all alone. Her body deflated along with her hopes of escape.

***

As soon as the guard let Ian and Sarah through the harbor gates, Ian sprinted directly toward Peter Ludlow. Next thing he knew, his fist collided with the man’s nose. Then he was on top of him, and his fist collided with his nose several more times.

It took three security guards to pull Ian off Ludlow and restrain him.

“Where’s Adelaide?” Ian spat. 

“Safe and secure, I can assure you,” Ludlow said, getting to his feet and brushing himself off as if nothing happened. He used a tissue to wipe the blood from his nose and he readjusted his glasses.

“That’s not an answer.” Ian tried to yank free but was held fast. “Where is she?” His voice dripped with venom.

“Now, Malcolm. Come with me. I want to show you-”

Ian was no longer looking at Ludlow. He looked out beyond the man to see a large ship heading straight for the dock with no indication of slowing down. And then it crashed into the harbor, sending everyone sprawling.

***

The adult Rex was now loose in San Diego and Adelaide and the baby were still missing. It wasn’t a stretch to assume they were being held in the same place. Ian marched over to Ludlow and hoisted the man up by his collar. “Where are they?”

Thoroughly dejected from the T-Rex fiasco, Ludlow no longer seemed interested in secrets or plans. He apathetically recited the location and Ian let him drop to the ground.

As far as Ian was concerned, the speed limit was just a suggestion. Not that anyone would care with a giant dinosaur rampaging through the city. He was pushing 100mph by the time they arrived at the facility.

***

Adelaide paced back and forth. The men dumped her cage with the rest of the cargo in some random place, but she had a direct view of the baby T-Rex. It wailed desperately for its mother, which hurt both Adelaide’s heart and her ears. That was until someone tranquilized it again. So now she got to watch it sleep in its almost-definitely-too-small cage.

Adelaide was scared. She had no idea what Ludlow’s plans were. She had no idea what country she was even in. How was she related to some random InGen project? Was she supposed to be a part of the new park, too? An exhibit for people to point and gawk at?

The thought sent a shiver down her spine, but without anything to do, she couldn’t get rid of it. She had to find a way out of here. Repeatedly ramming into the cage door was not helpful, and her now-bruised shoulder probably couldn’t take much more. Studying the lock provided nothing. Adelaide was truly stuck.

The sound of an engine brought her to attention. She steeled herself. She’d make Ludlow listen to her one way or another. She would not go down without a fight.

But all the words Adelaide had prepared disappeared when she saw it wasn’t Ludlow. It was Ian and Sarah!

“Ian!!!” she yelled.

Over the sounds of the car and the generators and the general goings on of nature, neither Bean could hear her. They located the baby first, probably since it was so much bigger.

Adelaide wanted to call out again, but her voice got stuck in her throat. Watching them stomp around carelessly, watching them pry open the heavy door she couldn’t even begin to lift, listening to them shout at each other over the noise, all while they didn’t know she was there. All while she was stuck in a cage. It was humbling, to say the least.

All the fear stored in Adelaide’s body was released when Ian turned around and his eyes landed on her.

He rushed over and yanked the cage into the air, supporting it on both sides with his gigantic hands.

Adelaide fell to her butt from the abrupt movement. One moment, Ian was standing across the room. The next, his face was inches from her. She dizzily looked back and forth between his eyes, unable to pick one to focus on.

“What happened? Are you hurt?”

Disoriented, Adelaide couldn’t come up with an answer.

“What did he do to you?”

“M’fine,” Adelaide laughed. She tried to get to her feet, but the slight tremble in Ian’s hands was amplified at her size, violently shaking the cage and making her fall over again.

Satisfied (for now), Ian switched his gaze over to the lock.

“Ian, we gotta go!” Sarah called from somewhere behind him. She sounded out of breath. She was probably carrying the infant over to the car.

Unable to find an immediate solution to the lock, Ian decided to leave it for the time being. As long as he had Adelaide with him, they’d be okay. He would know she’s safe. He held the cage to his stomach for stability as he ran back to the car.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!” Adelaide yelled.

Exasperated and very short on time, Ian explained, “I uh, can’t figure out the lock right now. We’ve gotta - we’ve gotta get the baby to the ship, so, um-” He paused to open the car door and set her on the passenger seat. As a precaution, he bucked the seat belt around the cage to keep it in place. Things would probably get hairy. “-so we can lure the adult back into the cargo hold.”

“What?!” Adelaide shouted in confusion.

“The T-Rex is loose in the city. Gotta stop it.”

“No, no, get me out of here! I can’t…I can’t stay in here!...Ian!”

Ian was hardly listening, keeping his eyes on the road as he backed up and turned the car around to go find the Rex. “I promise you’re safe, Della. Just hold on.” His words sounded a little rehearsed and therefore not very reassuring, but all Adelaide could do was hold on, like he said.

The next series of events was a blur. She couldn’t see out - only up - and Ian rose way into the air next to her. He wouldn’t look at her. Adelaide knew it was because he had to focus on driving, but down on the seat with nowhere to go, she felt trapped now more than ever. And her only way out wouldn’t even listen to her. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for it to be over.

Her eyes flung open when they crashed through a building. Scattered debris flew everywhere, but once Ian was sure it didn’t hit Adelaide, he climbed out of the car and told her to stay put. As if she was going anywhere.

“Don’t leave me!” she called desperately, but he was already gone.

The silence that followed was deafening. Adelaide felt so alone. So helpless. Ian and Sarah raced off to do who knew what, leaving her here, still stuck in the stupid cage. If anyone were to come by, she’d be a goner. If they got themselves killed, she might never get out. All the energy from earlier, spurred on by her panic and fear, drained from her body. She sat in the corner, anxiously awaiting their return.

***

They did return, albeit sopping wet. Adelaide didn’t ask.

She currently found herself in Sarah’s apartment, sitting on a table, still in a cage. As soon as Kelly saw, she raced over. Ian ushered her out of the way, but that didn’t stop the girl from staring from a distance. Sarah watched, too.

Adelaide knew Ian was focused on picking the lock, but to see him frowning in her direction so intently in addition to the watchful gazes of Sarah and Kelly, was off putting. Especially from behind bars. She felt like a wild animal.

The sound of the lock popping was perhaps the sweetest sound Adelaide had ever heard. She sprinted toward the opening as Ian swung the door open, but her mad dash was cut short as he reached in and grabbed her.

He yanked her out much faster than normal and held her up to his eyes, scanning her for any kind of injury. He was also very pleased to have her back in his hands, protected from all harm that could ever possibly come their way.

“Put me down!” Adelaide cried, but she couldn’t help laughing. “I’m alright. They didn’t hurt me.” She batted at his probing fingers, wishing for solid ground.

Ian reluctantly obliged, but Adelaide could tell he was still anxious and even a bit angry. If Ian was able to get his hands on Ludlow, she could almost say she felt sorry for the man. Almost. Adelaide ignored Ian’s fidgeting and collapsed onto the table, feeling the wood texture on her skin. She was safe. For now.

It didn’t escape Adelaide’s notice that Ludlow, and maybe even the InGen company, had plans for her. She didn’t know what those plans were, but they couldn’t be anything good. They’d have to stay on guard and keep an eye out for anything suspicious, but those were worries that could be saved for the morning. For now, they could rest and celebrate the survival of their second dinosaur island of death.

Anonymous: Hear me out, in the tent scene what if Nick Van Owen found Adelaide in the Trex scene / waterfall scene (Sarah comforts Kelly). And he’s suddenly just over protective of her, holding her against his chest whispering “it’s ok, it’s ok”

NON-CANON

~

Nick’s muddy, gross hands opened up, but the air was still just as damp outside of his grasp as it had been on the inside. Specks of water from the roaring waterfall in front of them flicked at Adelaide.

She trembled as she took it all in. They were lost, cold, and scared. A man just walked into the jaws of a T-Rex and died. Ian was out there. And she didn’t know if he was coming back.

Nick looked down at his hands. He couldn’t believe he was holding a whole living person in them. In all his years of, well, life, he’d never seen anything like her. As far as he could tell, she was just like any other person, only infinitely smaller. And now she was his responsibility, he guessed. At least until Malcolm came back. If he came back.

“Where is he?” Adelaide whispered, her voice barely audible over the rushing water.

She was shaking like a leaf, but Nick didn’t know what to do. Should he…comfort her? She wasn’t a child. But also, she was scared. But also, they were all scared.

After a painfully awkward pause, Nick finally rested one of his thumbs on her shoulder, hoping it offered something in the general vicinity of comfort.

Adelaide’s shoulder buckled slightly under the pressure and she flinched away from the sudden contact. Nick was strong. She followed through with the motion and ducked away in shock.

He pulled his thumb away. She stared at it, looming above her head.

Oh. He was trying to comfort her.

“It’s okay,” he said placatingly. “It’s okay.”

“I know,” Adelaide snapped, then returned her attention to the waterfall. Watching. Waiting.

Nick sighed. The borrower was starting to turn blue from the cold, and she was shivering more than ever. She’d make herself sick if she worried any harder. So, he brought his hand to his chest and cupped the other one around her, holding her close.

Adelaide instantly wiggled around, trying to find a way out. She needed to be able to see out, she needed to see if Ian was coming, she needed to be able to defend herself. She banged on his chest, yelling at him to let her out, but he held fast.

As the seconds dragged on, her hope started to dwindle. Her best friend was gone. They never should have come to this crazy island and she never should have left his side. And now she was stuck in the hands of Nick Van Owen, maybe forever. Adelaide started to cry.

She felt Nick’s voice more than she heard it. It rumbled in his chest and into her own body as he repeated his words from earlier. “It’s okay, it’s okay,”

All the tension slowly drained out of Adelaide’s body and she let herself sink into the little divot between his palm and his chest. The heat that radiated off him was pleasant, maybe even a little calming. The repetitive phrase wormed its way into her head. It’s okay…

Adelaide could almost say she was asleep when Nick suddenly yelled, “It’s coming back!” She just about jumped out of her skin as the voice enveloped her, but with the way he reflexively held her even closer in his panic, she couldn’t budge. Not that she wanted to move, especially if the T-Rex was coming back. Adelaide was frozen.

But then nothing happened. And then Kelly shouted, “Dad!”

…Ian????

Adelaide resumed her struggles against Nick’s massive hand, pushing and scolding. “Hey!...Hey!!!” she called, and the hand finally pulled away.

A little dazed but overall fine, Adelaide turned to see Ian standing there. Wet, out of breath, and probably hurt, but definitely alive.

She nearly leapt out of Nick’s hand, but Ian’s was there first. He gathered her up and gave her a once over, and Adelaide absently registered Nick talking in the background. “Hey, I said it would be okay, didn’t I?” he said in that stupid, smug voice of his. She ignored him.

But he was right. Ian was here. They were all here. It was going to be okay.

The wails of the baby T-Rex really grated on Adelaide’s nerves. At first it hurt her ears, then her heart, and now her head. Not once did she get even remotely close to it, despite her curiosity. But it seemed harmless, considering the gash that ran along its leg. The wound was longer than she was tall. And it was chained to a post that was driven deep into the ground by a Bean. It wasn’t getting up any time soon.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t in danger, though. It was dark and humid after a short bout of rain, and creepy crawlies almost definitely stalked around every corner. Then there were the bigger animals, including the adult T-Rex that would want its baby back soon. And not a Bean to be found.

Adelaide set her sights on a small patch of grass that would hopefully help conceal her from some of those dangers. Trudging through the mud took a lot longer than she would’ve liked. The suction of the wet ground held her legs fast, and she strained every time she took a step, which was only exacerbated by the bruising and soreness from the whole ordeal that got her in this situation. She stopped short when she came upon a lake.

No, not a lake. A puddle. But it might as well have been a lake as far as she was concerned. It stretched out in both directions, so going around would take who knew how long, especially in the sticky mud, but the water was murky, preventing her from getting a good gauge on how deep it was or what lurked within it. Adelaide glanced back at the screaming infant, then slowly shuffled forward into the puddle.

Despite the heat of the air, the water was frigid. She huffed and puffed as she waded deeper, holding her bag up by her head to keep it dry. The waterline leveled out at her waist, and as she passed the halfway point, it quickly receded.

Adelaide thought about her life indoors, and how much of it was spent longing to see the outdoors. It wasn’t all it was chalked up to be, that was for sure.

She also thought about borrowers who supposedly lived their whole lives outside. She’d never run into any of them - there was never an opportunity for them to cross paths, and they were almost definitely elusive - but she certainly didn’t envy them. This sucked.

Adelaide made it to the other side without incident. Well, sort of. Her clothes and boots were probably destroyed for good, and she was soaked to the bone, but she was alive and no more injured than when she started. She had just made it to the thick bunch of grass when the world lit up in a brilliant orange flash of light. Then the soundwaves of the explosion reached her ears, so loud it knocked her off her feet, followed by faint screaming and shouting.

Adelaide thought Nick and Sarah were supposed to free the dinosaurs, not explode their camp!

But there was no time to register what just happened. She dove into the grass as the ground repeatedly quaked and she watched the disturbance of the water in the puddle with each tremor, hoping it wasn’t something that could eat her.

It actually was something that could eat her, though it probably wouldn’t. A tall man appeared out of nowhere, running toward the baby T-Rex. He stopped right next to Adelaide. He didn’t see her, but she didn’t know if she was relieved by that.

The man bent down to free the dinosaur, and Adelaide saw that it was Nick Van Owen. In a perfect world, she’d have nothing to do with Nick, but this was far from a perfect world. Maybe even the opposite.

Out of all the Beans that could happen upon her though, this was at least one of the better ones. It was now or never. She needed to get his attention or he’d be gone, and she’d be right back where she started, which is to say, in a lot of trouble.

Adelaide ignored every instinct in her body and ran as fast as she could into the open air. But after the first step, her foot stuck in the mud and the momentum made her fall forward. Growling in frustration, she pushed herself up and continued on, unsuccessfully wiping the mud out of her eyes. She yelped when she suddenly ran into something and stumbled backward. It was hard and slippery and very, very big. It was a shoe.

Adelaide tilted her head up and up and up to see Nick Van Owen staring down at her. She thought she might throw up.

The shock on Nick’s face suddenly morphed into a calm determination. “Adelaide?”

Adelaide nodded. There was no way he saw it from so high up, but she seemed to have misplaced her voice. Fallen over like this, just his shoe was taller than her.

“What other tiny people would be running around on this island?” Nick muttered in response to his own stupid question. Receiving no feedback from Adelaide (that he could see or hear), he pushed on. “Let’s get you out of here.”

In the blink of an eye, Nick crouched down and reached for her. Adelaide yelped.

“Woah, woah, you hurt?” Nick asked, hesitating with an outstretched hand. They were running out of time.

Adelaide’s heart pounded as she took in the sight of his hand. Each of the fingers was just as tall and just as wide as her. Each one individually held more power than she did in her whole body. It took a moment for her to register the question, but she shook her head no. At least, she wasn’t hurt in any life-threatening way.

Closer to her level, Nick saw the movement. “Alright, well, I just caused a lot of trouble back there, and I don’t want to stick around for the aftermath, so…” He reached for her again and this time, he ignored Adelaide’s cries. A scared borrower was much better than a dead borrower.

The fingers wrapped around her, seemingly in slow motion, and yet Adelaide couldn’t fight them off. The familiar movement of being yanked off the ground was made worse by the large, unfamiliar hand attached to the large, unfamiliar Bean.

Upon feeling the admittedly odd sensation of a struggling person in his hand, Nick opened it to look down at her. She immediately halted all movement, scared she would throw herself right off the high platform, but her fearful eyes stayed trained on Nick.

“Easy, easy, I’m saving you,” he said with only a ghost of a smile on his lips, but it disappeared when the problem became clear. He glanced between Adelaide and the T-Rex, trying to work out a way to get them both to safety.

Adelaide didn’t like the way Nick considered her. It felt like he was making decisions in his head about what to do with her without consulting her, and she was a little miffed. “What are you looking at?”

“What am I supposed to do with you?...You think you can balance on my shoulder?”

Adelaide floundered but ultimately nodded.

“Perfect,” Nick said. “Hold on.” Without warning, he deposited her on his left shoulder and drew his hand away, already set on the T-Rex.

Adelaide clung on for dear life as she moved from his hand to his shoulder and then fell when he bent down. Her knuckles turned white and she let out a small scream. She only just caught the way he ripped the stake out of the ground, his muscles flexing from the effort.

Before she knew it, Nick had the baby in his arms. She could feel the way his posture changed, straining under the weight of such a large animal. In comparison, she weighed nothing.

It was a silent trip back to wherever they were going, minus the piercing wails of the baby T-Rex, probably because Nick was focusing on the dinosaur and Adelaide didn’t want to talk to a Bean. She tensed when he waded through some deep water and tensed even more when she heard Sarah’s voice. No Ian.

“Oh my God, are you out of your mind!?” she shouted, eyeing the screaming infant. It was too dark and Adelaide was too small for Sarah to notice her.

“She’s got a broken leg. Let’s get in the car before they hear us,” Nick explained. He sat the dinosaur in the back of the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. In one quick motion, he rolled his shoulder forward and caught Adelaide in his palm. “You alright?”

Adelaide screamed as she fell and let out a quick exhale when she landed. She forced herself to sit up and look around at the dark interior of the car. Nick and Sarah were both staring. “Never better,” she said sarcastically.

If this were Ian, she’d flop back into his palm and rest her sore body, but this wasn’t Ian. This was Nick, who was virtually a stranger.

Nick picked up on the sarcasm but chose to ignore it. “You don’t look alright. Here.” He reached out with his middle finger toward Adelaide.

Adelaide scrambled back as far as she could go without falling off his hand, her heart pounding. But there was nowhere to go, and the finger just kept coming. And then it made contact with her face, the force of which pushed her away slightly. She sputtered but dug her hands into his palm to prevent from being knocked over as he essentially stroked her face over and over. She tried in vain to push the finger out of the way, but it was too strong.

“Cut that out,” Sarah said, watching in confusion. She was still caught off guard by the presence of the small woman.

Nick ignored her. He pulled away to examine his work, and he thought he did a halfway decent job clearing the mud away. He could at least see Adelaide’s face now, and it displayed a mix of shock, disgust, and anger.

“Don’t do that again,” Adelaide said.

Nick spoke as he placed her back on his shoulder so he could drive. “Relax, we’ll get you back to Malcolm in a minute. You’re safe now. It’s all good.”

“That’s not-” Adelaide cut herself off before she said something she’d regret. She didn’t want to piss Nick off when he literally held her life in his hands. She’d scold him later when she was safely back with Ian.

For now, all she could do was hang on, ignore the two unignorable Beans in the car, and listen to the ever-growing wails of the baby T-Rex. It was going to be a long ride.

Ian had been in and out of consciousness for an indeterminate amount of time now. ‘Awake’ and ‘asleep’ were becoming harder to differentiate, and he longed for his next shot of morphine. He could feel the steady pounding of blood in his leg.

Robert Muldoon spoke somewhere off in the distance, which was what pulled Ian out of a bout of deep sleep. The words were garbled and unclear.

A thought came to Ian, so before he either forgot or fell asleep again, he interrupted the man’s probably important conversation. Besides, each time Ian fell asleep, he feared he might not wake back up. This should keep him occupied for a moment. His head lifted a little.

“You called her a ‘tiny’. Why?” He exhaled a faint laugh at the ridiculousness of the name. Adelaide almost definitely hated it.

“What was that?” Muldoon asked, unsure if he heard Ian correctly. Ian’s voice was quiet and weak, and Muldoon had expressed his opinion that the man might not pull through without proper medical care. There were just too many bigger fish to fry presently.

“You’ve seen her before.” That wasn’t exactly what Ian meant, but the pain and the drugs seemed to prevent him from forming complex sentences. 

So, Muldoon did hear him correctly. He approached the spot where Malcolm laid on the floor and sat in a chair. “Yeah, I’ve seen her kind around.”

“Where?”

“Here and there. A bit of everywhere.”

Ian’s main concern was whether he needed to be worried. Past that, he was deeply curious about the existence of such small people across the world. Adelaide either didn’t know or didn’t want to share, and he respected that. But if someone else was willing to indulge him…

“Tell me,” Ian prompted.

Muldoon was also quite curious about borrowers. He knew enough - it was hard not to when he’d been all over the world - but he’d never seen one traveling with a regular person before. He’d never seen one trust a regular person before. At least, not to this extent.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Ian sighed and laid back down. “No.”

Muldoon chuckled. Malcolm seemed very protective of the girl, so he guessed he wouldn’t get much out of him. He supposed sharing his story wouldn’t hurt, though. Plus, it would distract him from the whole lot of nothing he could do right now.

***

Muldoon knew the area well. Growing up in a remote part of Kenya, these animals were just another part of his everyday life. This also meant he was very good at hunting. So good, in fact, that other hunters hired him to track the animals for them. It wasn’t his favorite thing to do, but it was a living.

The air sat at a pleasant 75 degrees, but he watched the sweat drip down the men’s backs as they hunted down a cape buffalo. For no particular reason, Muldoon found himself disinterested and detached today. Until he heard a scream.

He shot to attention. The noise was faint, but definitely there, and very human. It obviously wasn’t one of the men who accompanied him.

Turning in the direction he thought the sound came from, his eyes landed on some grass. Muldoon slowly stalked toward it, his senses zeroed in. He crouched down and gently pushed the tall grass out of the way. In a small clearing no bigger than his hand laid a dead shrew and a small person. A very small person.

It seemed to be a young male, and he was well under three inches tall. He was sprawled out, panting hard, eyes trained on the shrew…The boy had killed the shrew! His clothes were tattered and he looked to be bleeding.

“Bloody hell…” Muldoon muttered.

His voice drew the boy’s attention. With wide eyes, he shot to his feet and abandoned his kill, sprinting for cover.

Muldoon didn’t bother chasing after him, too stunned to even think about it. That creature was human, there was no doubt about that. The way it moved, the way it looked at him. He could see him thinking, analyzing.

A deep bellow that signified the death of a cape buffalo pulled him out of his thoughts. He took one last look at the clearing and the dead shrew, shook his head, then returned to his group.

***

“You call them tinies,” Ian said.

“Yes.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No.”

“Interesting.”

“They’re tiny.”

“Yes, I’m, uh...aware.”

There was a long silence.

“Not very creative though, is it?” Ian mused. “Not very scientific. Degrading...perhaps.”

“I’ll let someone know. Make sure to get them properly named.”

Ian exhaled a laugh.

***

The next day, Muldoon found himself back at the same clearing, this time alone and much more prepared. It was unlikely such a small person even left tracks in the dirt, but if he did, they were long gone by now. So, Muldoon started in the direction the boy went.

He spent the better part of the day walking in circles. He kept his eyes trained mostly on the ground but occasionally glanced up at the trees. There was no reason this creature couldn’t climb. Hell, if it survived out here, it could probably do a number of impressive things.

His steps were slow and light, but he imagined at that size, the boy would hear him coming a mile away. He also imagined that there were more of them, and they probably worked together to survive, especially if they were capable of critical thought.

Muldoon was deep in the middle of nowhere when he heard a voice, so quiet he could chalk it up to imagination, but he knew better. He crouched down, hiding in the grass, watching the plains before him.

After fifteen minutes of holding the uncomfortable position, Muldoon almost fell over when he saw a small person tentatively peek out of an ordinary snake hole in the ground. They looked around cautiously for predators, holding some kind of weapon high in their hand, then ushered a couple more people out of the hole.

Muldoon couldn’t believe his eyes. There must have been a whole colony of them underground. But there wasn’t much he could do. Any movement would likely scare them off. And so he watched.

In fact, he watched them take down a silvery mole-rat. The thing put up quite a fight, and its giant buck teeth looked intimidating next to the small people, but working together, it was a laughably easy kill from what he could tell. 

Fascinated, Muldoon rocked back on his heels. The crunch of the foliage underneath his feet echoed across the plain and the world went deadly silent.

As expected, all their little eyes shot up in his direction, locking onto his own eyes. (At least, he assumed they did. He could see their heads turn, but their actual eyes were too small and too far off.) And just like the day before, they abandoned their kill and made a break for the hole in the ground.

Muldoon cursed and stood up, stretching his sore limbs and walking over to where they disappeared, bypassing the mole-rat. There was no sense in being quiet now. They knew he was there.

Unable to keep his curiosity at bay, he laid himself flat on his stomach and peered into the hole. Immediately, a sharp pain radiated underneath his eye. He felt around and yanked out a small sliver of wood. It was a spear! A tiny, shoddy, makeshift spear, but a spear nonetheless. And if it hit any closer, it potentially could’ve ruined his left eye for good. Muldoon couldn’t help but laugh in amazement.

He set the spear on the ground close by and whipped out a small flashlight attached to his belt. He clicked it on, illuminating the narrow tunnel. Just at the edge of the light stood a whole group of people, varying in age but huddled around each other and each brandishing their own weapon. They flinched back from the bright light and shielded their eyes.

“Bloody hell…”

At the sound of his voice, another spear was sent flying his way and it stuck him in the hand. They did not want him here, that much was clear.

Muldoon took the hint. He distractedly removed the second spear and set it by the first, then got to his feet and dusted himself off.

The decaying silvery mole-rat sat there, already coated in flies. At the last second, he picked it up and placed it near the entrance, too. He suspected these tiny beings wouldn’t emerge from their home so soon after he left - it must have looked like he would use the mole-rat as bait and stick around to spy on them. But Muldoon didn’t do that. Instead, he left, lost in thought but still well-aware of his surroundings.

What was he to do with all this information?

Nothing, he decided. Absolutely nothing. Maybe he’d visit again someday. Or not.

***

Time passed, and Muldoon saw dozens of tinies over the years. From the plains to the city, indoors and outdoors, across countries, they seemed to be pretty much everywhere. Like roaches, almost. Except they took very little, left behind no waste, and took care of pests. You just had to know where to look and what to look for. Muldoon knew where to look and what to look for.

***

Ian listened as patiently as he could. He wasn’t sure he believed Muldoon, but there wasn’t any particular reason to doubt him outside his own cynicism.

The confirmation that borrowers existed across the world and that some even lived outside though - that was fascinating. He’d have to tell Adelaide when she came back. If she came back. Hm.

“My question is, how’d you get one of them to trust you?” Muldoon asked. When he received no reply, he glanced at Malcolm, who had long since passed out. His skin was sweaty and pale and he looked worse by the minute. If Muldoon believed in hope, he’d hope for the man to pull through. If not for himself, then at least for that poor girl.

And then maybe, just maybe he’d sit down and talk to her. Or not. He’d keep on living just the same.

“How old are you?” Ian asked.

“23,” Adelaide responded distractedly. She was focused on patching a hole in her pants.

“You - you keep track of that sort of thing?”

“If you didn’t think so, then why did you ask?”

“To see if you uh, keep track of that sort of thing. Are you mad?”

“What? No?”

Ian smirked to himself. Women always got offended by that question, and he never understood why. Sometimes it was nice to be able to talk to someone with no concept of societal norms or pressures.

“Well, wait, what day is it?” Adelaide asked.

“December 14th.”

“Oh, never mind. I’m 24.”

“When is your birthday?”

“December 14th.”

Ian blinked. “And you don’t celebrate?”

Adelaide didn’t look up from her pants. The thread was too short to complete a full, secure knot and she was growing frustrated trying to tie one. Every time it slipped out of her fingers, her mind slipped closer to madness. “I am celebrating.”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

Adelaide set the needle down on her leg. “The world is dangerous. I’m not always guaranteed another year. So I’m pretty excited to be here today, but I don’t know how I would even celebrate something like that externally. I can’t be loud. I don’t have friends. So…”

“I take offense to that.”

“You know what I mean,” Adelaide smiled.

“I don’t, actually.”

They held eye contact for a moment, waiting for the other to break first. Adelaide couldn’t tell if Ian was lying. He was. He had a good idea about what she meant but he always liked to hear her talk about it. Adelaide broke first, despite her natural hesitancy toward explaining her life in the walls.

“You know I don’t want Beans to know I exist, right?”

“Yes.”

“And celebrations are usually loud.”

“Yes.”

“And if we were loud, the Beans would hear us.”

“Understood.”

“I don’t know what else there is to explain.”

“No friends?”

“Yeah, I mean…” Adelaide hesitated. “There were other families spread around the motel. I talked to some people my age occasionally, but never enough to make friends.” She knew Ian long enough to know he wouldn’t use this information against her or others like her. In fact, he almost definitely already gathered that more borrowers lived in the motel probably. It just felt wrong to say out loud.

Ian either didn’t pick up on her hesitation or he ignored it. “Well, you have me, and uh, moreover, you have access to the - to the whole world through me. So what do you want to do?”

“I want to fix these stupid pants.”

“Right."

“What do you do for your birthday?”

Ian smirked. “I throw a…wild party.”

Whether that was the truth or not was anyone’s guess. “Oh, okay, me and all my friends will throw a wild party,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You asked!”

They sat in silence for a couple minutes while Adelaide continued to fiddle with the knot. Finally, she got it, hissing in triumph.

It was a very poor patch job. The hole would probably tear open again next week, but that was a problem for next week. Adelaide already knew her future self was going to hate her present self for this decision and she absolutely did not care. For now, it was fixed.

Ian knit his brows and couldn’t help but smile at her exclamation. Even he could tell the stitching wasn’t going to last, but her excitement was contagious. “Now what?”

Adelaide frowned. She wasn’t necessarily a planner, so she didn’t really think about what was next unless there was a need. And if there was a need, she’d borrow. But again, it felt wrong to announce to a Bean when she went borrowing. So, she shrugged.

“Do you need anything?” Ian asked.

“Yeah, I need more thread. This needle is also getting dull. And it would be excellent if I could find someone who was good at this,” she sighed.

“Hm.”

Ian shot to his feet and walked away. It took Adelaide a second to register it, then another second to realize what he was doing. By that point, it was already too late to stop him. He returned with a small needle and a whole spool of thread.

“I was going to get them myself,” Adelaide said flatly.

“I know.”

“I can do things on my own.”

“I know.” Ian bent down and set both items on the floor underneath the couch, right next to the entrance Adelaide used to get into the walls. Then she wouldn’t have to climb with them or knock them to the floor herself. He stood back up and held out his hand to her.

“What are you doing?”

“Give me your old needle. I’ll get rid of it.”

“I can do-”

“-do that yourself. Yes. I know. Can I do this for you, though? Because it’s your birthday?”

They entered another staring contest, and Adelaide broke first again. God, she was getting soft. She delicately set the needle in his hand, making sure not to poke him with it, no matter how much she was tempted to do so.

Ian disappeared again but shortly returned, this time with an apple. “I unfortunately do not know anyone who can uh, fix your pants. I offer you, instead, an apple.” He didn’t wait for a response as he shoved a slice into her hands.

Adelaide was forcibly pushed backwards from the impact. She managed to stay on her feet but had to recalibrate. “Why?” was all she could think to say.

“Uh, did we - did we not establish that it’s your birthday?”

“Yes, but-”

“Do you want to go to the park? The…non-Jurassic one?”

Adelaide had to restrain herself. She wanted to yell at him for ignoring her and interrupting her, but he was trying to be nice. He was doing a nice thing. Or, well, things.

And the park did sound nice. They’d been outside a couple times here and there but she hadn’t been back to the park since that first day. That was also the first time she sat on Ian’s shoulder and (regrettably) in his pocket. It was a hectic, scary experience, which is why she never thought about returning, but they’d been through a lot since then. The park sounded like a breath of fresh air.

“Sure.”

Ian held his hand out and Adelaide noticed the way he didn’t just scoop her up. Oh, so he was being nice nice. Maybe she should milk this birthday thing.

The park was relatively uneventful. They people-watched. Adelaide munched on her apple slice. At one point, a very large honey bee also found the apple to be quite intriguing. Adelaide whipped out her knife as soon as she heard the buzzing and held the slice behind her back. The stinger pumped menacingly as it floated around her. But Ian just gently shooed it away before she could stab it.

Adelaide pushed Ian’s hand out of her personal space. She refused to admit how nervous it made her to have Ian blindly wave his hand around when she was so high up. She refused to admit how nervous the bee made her. “It might come back. You should’ve let me kill it.”

“They’re good for the environment.”

“Hmph.” Adelaide worked just a little harder and a little faster to finish her apple in hopes that the bee, or any of its friends, would not return. As luck would have it, no more bugs interrupted their afternoon.

The setting sun was warm, the air was crisp, nature hummed, and time passed leisurely. Adelaide lived by extremes, oscillating from extreme adrenaline to extreme boredom. Though her time with Ian lessened those extremes, it was rare that Adelaide found herself in just a plain old pleasant situation, feeling plain old pleasant. It was nice. And she couldn’t imagine spending her birthday any other way.

“When is your birthday?” she asked.

Ian smirked. He didn’t expect anything for his birthday, but he was deeply curious to see what kind of plan Adelaide would conjure. “June 29th.”

“How old are you?”

“38.”

Adelaide’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s…awesome!”

Ian laughed. “You are quite - quite possibly the only person in the world who uh, thinks so.”

“Why?”

“Uh…people don’t like to age. Beauty fades. Puts us one year closer to death. I imagine it reminds us of all the um, the time we wasted, all the things we didn’t do and currently are not doing. Waste of time to even think about it, though. Trivial, if you - if you ask me.”

“I’d kill to die of old age.”

“You don’t think that will happen?”

“Unlikely. Didn’t even think I’d make it this far, to be honest. I’ll probably get taken out by a rodent or fall off something high, who knows.”

Adelaide didn’t seem very bothered by that fact. Ian frowned. The casual way in which she regarded death was morbid, but fascinating. But he didn’t know Adelaide to be emotional or philosophical. She was practical. She had to be. And he respected that.

“Hey, Ian? Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Adelaide leaned against Ian’s neck and yawned. She could feel his pulse beneath her and the cool breeze on her skin. And as the sun sank below the horizon, she saw it. For the first time in her life, she truly saw it. No clouds blocking the way, no windows to peek through, shining bright against the darkening sky. After twenty-four years, Adelaide saw the stars. And that was perhaps the best gift of them all.

Adelaide had six whole months to think of what she wanted to get Ian for his birthday. It was plenty of time, a piece of cake. It was too bad she waited until the last possible second to think about it.

Her reminder came when Ian offhandedly mentioned that the date was June 20th. Adelaide only kept a very general idea of time, picking up on dates when she could but not bothering to put much thought or effort into it. But this meant Ian’s birthday was nine days away.

Like he said a number of times (as if he wanted to rub it in or something), Ian had the whole world at his fingertips. He could get her anything she wanted, take her anywhere she wanted. What could she possibly get him when her only options came from his own house? She couldn’t just go out and get something.

Which meant Adelaide would have to make something instead. It was unfortunate that she wasn’t any good at making things. She could make a hook, a weapon, sometimes clothes. Ian hated fashion, and he probably had little use for a hook or weapon the size of his fingernail.

She could also rig Bean items into useful items, but nothing ever looked good. It was functional, it got the job done. So anything she made for Ian, he could buy a better one at the store. And she’d have to take something from him anyway just to make it worse and give it back. Hmph.

Adelaide had the privilege of being able to dedicate her whole brain to the task while she went about her day. Chores required little thinking. But the more she thought about it, the less her thoughts made sense, and it was driving her crazy.

The night of June 28th, Adelaide made a hard decision. She’d have to go with her last resort. It was something she thought about right away while brainstorming, but it was the last resort for a reason. She didn’t want to part with it and there was even a small chance it would make Ian mad, but she was out of time. 

Adelaide took one last look at her beloved strop and prepared to lug it out of the walls, or at least to the entrance so that she could surprise him with it in the morning. Hopefully it was a good surprise.

Even after she was done, she kept herself awake all night thinking about any other possibility, but still nothing came. Before she knew it, the sun rose, and she heard Ian up and about, probably making breakfast or reading the news.

Adelaide emerged on the kitchen counter. “Happy birthday,” she said tentatively.

Ian glanced up. “Thank you very much.” He returned his gaze to the paper.

Adelaide frowned at his lack of enthusiasm, but she honestly should’ve expected it. She pushed on anyway. “Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“I have a surprise.”

“Oh, boy,” Ian sighed, but he obliged.

Once she was sure Ian wasn’t going to peek, she retrieved the gift from just inside the walls. She pulled it close to the edge of the counter so he could see it clearly, then backed up a couple inches. She took a deep breath. There was no going back now. “Okay, open them.”

Adelaide watched Ian intently for his reaction, prepared for anger. It took half a second for his eyes to zero in on it. Confused, he stood up and snatched it off the counter.

A pang of jealousy filled Adelaide’s chest when she saw how simple it was for him to pick it up. She worked up a sweat just thinking about moving the damn thing. The feeling didn’t last long though, since she was infinitely more worried about what Ian was thinking.

“This is my watch,” he said, frowning slightly.

“Surprise!”

“I lost this thing years ago. Well, I…I guess I didn’t lose it…” Ian had forgotten about that watch, but knowing what he knew now, he could hardly say he lost it. It even seemed as though a certain borrower stole it from him. “Why did you take it?”

Adelaide winced. “It was when I first got here. I was feeling bold and angry and I-”

“You don’t tell time.”

“I used the leather. For my knife.” Adelaide had other means to keep her knife sharp, but her parents taught her that a knife needed to be more than just sharp. To hone a knife was to keep it in good shape, to make it last longer, and leather provided an excellent means to do so. After losing her parents, she couldn’t bear the thought of parting with the weapon, so she kept it as pristine as possible.

Adelaide remembered how angry she was when she first arrived at Ian’s house. Angry at the world and angry at Beans. Borrowers typically only took what was necessary to survive and they tried their best not to take anything a Bean would miss, but Adelaide simply did not care at the time. If the Bean missed his watch - good. He deserved it just for being a Bean.

When Adelaide and Ian finally became friends, she felt bad about the watch, but she was way too scared to return it. And then the longer it sat there, the harder it was to give it back and admit she took it.

“Yeah, I can certainly - certainly see that.” Ian examined the strap of the watch. Its surface was rough and patchy, obviously used as a strop. It wasn’t a pleasing sight, but he also didn't have a particular attachment to it and had long since given up on finding it. Actually, he preferred the one he had now. It suited him much better and was considerably higher quality.

Adelaide watched an array of emotions pass across Ian’s face, and she wished she could identify even one of them. To her shock, he placed it back on the counter with a loud clunk.

“Keep it,” Ian said.

“What? No, it’s your birthday gift.”

“You’re giving me back my own watch for my birthday?”

“...Yeah.”

Ian laughed. “You need it more than I do. I have other watches.”

Adelaide’s face fell. “Oh. Okay. I’ll just…” Her cheeks flushed, fully embarrassed by the whole situation. He wasn’t mad, or at least not anymore, but he didn’t need her gift. He had other, better ones. She awkwardly shuffled to start dragging the watch back to her home. She had such a difficult time parting with it, but now it felt wrong to take it back. She didn’t really want it anymore, despite its usefulness.

Ian watched as Adelaide pathetically yanked the watch away, straining from the effort. There was a slight chance he said the wrong thing. “Actually, on second thought,”

Adelaide jumped when Ian’s fingers fell from the sky, invaded her space, and yanked the watch into the air in a matter of seconds. She stumbled back, watching it soar way over her head.

“I think I like this one. It’s, um…it’s unique.”

Besides the brief scare that still had her heart pounding, Adelaide was thoroughly relieved. Part of her knew he was lying to make her happy, but she ignored it. He accepted her shitty gift, and that was all that mattered. She would do better next year, and this time, she had a whole year to prepare.

Anonymous: Alan Grant interacting with borrowers lives rent-free in my head, I loved his interactions with Adelaide in your previous story! Awkward though he is lol, he’s trying! I’d love to see if you had more ideas with Alan and Adelaide, or perhaps even another tiny! I can’t get enough of him 💕 Love your work, will definitely be back! 💞💞

CANON

~

Alan wiped the sweat from his brow, the dry Western heat getting to him, and it wasn’t even midday yet. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and no matter how much he loved being out in the field, it wasn’t exactly easy. Paleontology was a slow, hard business.

He delicately lifted a rock from its position on the ground and set it out of the way. He returned his gaze to the spot it had been and his jaw dropped.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he mumbled, looking around as if this was some kind of joke. In the divot left behind by the rock sat one of the smallest people he’d ever seen. It was a borrower. And they were terrified of him.

“Ellie!” he called, making the borrower flinch.

A pang echoed in his heart when he remembered Ellie wasn’t there. She gave up dinosaurs after their experience at Jurassic Park. He couldn’t blame her, but he sure did miss her. And he could really use her help right now. She was the only other person he knew who knew of the existence of tiny people, and he found that she was much better at talking to them than he was. At least, she was with Adelaide. Alan couldn’t say he met any more tiny people after her.

He stared intently at the poor, huddled creature, wracking his brain for what to do. Despite the heat, it shivered like it was wintertime, and it looked like it had been out here for awhile. His presence probably wasn’t helping, but he couldn’t just leave it now.

Alan recounted every interaction he ever had with Adelaide. Admittedly, there weren’t many, but he had to find some useful information in there somewhere.

***

Having a frantic, small being on his neck wasn’t what he imagined, not that he could say he imagined something like this often. It was honestly just itchy. Every shift, every breath, left behind a faint tingle. Eventually, Alan couldn’t take it anymore. He reached for the spot and scratched at it. His hand barely grazed the small body on his shoulder.

Adelaide yelped and, overcompensating for the expected knock backwards, tumbled forward to get away. She flailed clean off Alan’s shoulder, but was able to grab a hold of the fabric of his shirt before she hit the hard Earth below. She hung there, breathing heavily.

She couldn’t let go. If she let go, she’d die. She couldn’t stay there. If she stayed there, he’d grab her or she'd either lose strength and fall and die. She couldn’t climb back up. That’s where she just was, and he tried to grab her. Adelaide’s arms strained.

Alan thought he lost the ability to breathe. Ten minutes in and he nearly killed the girl. But it wasn’t necessarily his fault.

Seeing her hanging there, arms shaking from the stress, he reached in to pluck her off his shirt.

Adelaide couldn’t see the fingers, but she could feel their presence through the heat they gave off. They closed in, each one looking to wrap around her and pry her away. What she did to piss them off, she couldn’t say, but they approached at an impossible speed.

She used the last of her strength to pull herself up into a curled position, if only to prolong contact for at least a few seconds. A screechy sound resembling “No!” came out of her mouth.

Alan’s fingers coiled around her, securing her limbs in place. Adelaide could feel the blood pounding through them as they tightened around her. The texture of his rough skin grated on hers, and she wished desperately she could pull away.

But the fingers stopped. Alan registered her scream and paused, then slowly uncurled his fingers. “What did I do?”

The thunderous rumble of Alan’s voice startled Adelaide. It was so close and so enveloping, it knocked her right off his shirt.

Alan easily caught her in a cupped palm, but before he could even bring her in sight to figure out what the heck was going on, she panicked and jumped onto his shirt again, clinging for dear life and pulling her legs away from his hand.

Absolutely baffled, Alan didn’t know how to proceed. He did not sign up for this. Adelaide was a marvel, yes, and he wanted to know everything about her, but he was deeply unequipped to deal with such a frightened little…thing. This time, he kept his hand underneath her when he spoke, since it seemed to startle her right off his shirt last time. At the last second, he also thought to lower his volume.

“Are you…can I…can I…help you?”

“No,” Adelaide called, tightening her jaw.

“Okay. Are you going to climb back up?”

Adelaide didn’t respond, trying to calm herself down.

Alan didn’t know how long he could do this. And he thought normal people were confusing.

“Why did you do that?” Adelaide’s voice warbled.

“I’m not…Do what?”

“Try to grab me!”

“When?”

“Just now!” Adelaide didn’t know how much longer she could hang on.

“I didn’t try to…You mean when I scratched my neck?”

Without a reply, impatient, and a little fed up, Alan gathered her into his hand and, just as he expected, she instantly tried to get away. The feeling of tiny limbs pressing on his fingers tickled, at least when he felt them. He had a suspicion that most of her efforts were going unnoticed.

Before she could get herself killed, Alan bent down and placed her on a log. In an effort to put distance between herself and the giant, Adelaide nearly backed right off the log, but caught herself just in time. Her eyes darted around in search of clues to his intentions. Or an escape route.

“I don’t really carry tiny people around, so you’ll have to forgive my…inexperience.”

Adelaide crossed her arms. “I’m not tiny.”

Alan paused, then decided to ignore what she said. He wasn’t going to waste time arguing about that. “You were moving. It itched. I scratched at it. I wasn’t grabbing you.”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“That never happens with Malcolm?”

“No,” Adelaide lied. “It’s hard to think straight when a hand two times your size comes barrelling at you on the top of a mountain.”

“Look, ah, Adelaide. Neither of us asked for this. But to get back, I’m gonna need you to trust me. Unless you want to walk?” After a beat of silence where Adelaide just shifted uncomfortably, he continued. “Can I ask you to trust me?”

“Can I ask you to not grab me?” she shot back.

“Can I ask you to stop moving so much?”

“Well can I ask you…” Adelaide needed the last word, but realized too late she had run out of things to say. Alan’s piercing gaze stayed trained on her while he waited for an answer. She didn’t know this man. She didn’t know his intentions and she didn’t know if she could trust him and she didn’t know if she could keep her fidgeting to a minimum. But what other choice did she have? “Yes. Yeah, you can.”

Alan held his hand out, but she stepped in the opposite direction. He sighed. “I’m not going to grab you.”

Adelaide nodded, hyping herself up to climb back on.

“Come on, before a hungry compsognathus wanders in,” he chuckled. Adelaide’s eyes went wide and she glanced around as if the animals were already there and ready to strike. That probably wasn’t the best joke for the moment.

She still hesitated before she stepped on, but they were back on track in no time. Alan did notice her efforts as she tried to keep still, even if they had little effect. This time, he resisted the urge to scratch.

When Malcolm first pulled Adelaide out on the helicopter, Alan thought it had to be some kind of animal or doll, or he was hallucinating. But she was very, very real, and very much a person. And somehow, the mystery and surprise of the impossibly miniscule person with Ian Malcolm had nothing to do with the mysteries and surprises of Jurassic Park. A million questions ran through his head, none of which he felt comfortable voicing aloud at the time. That moment shifted his worldview permanently, and he wasn’t sure if it was for the better or for the worse just yet.

Alan understood Adelaide’s trepidation to some degree. It was clear she was terrified of him, and even more so the kids, despite her insistence on hiding it. She was stuck in a world far too big for her, far away from home, relying on virtual strangers to keep her alive. How that loud, arrogant Malcolm character won her over, he had no clue.

But she also had to understand that out of all the present dangers, he should be the least of her worries, right? Alan had no ill will toward her, and he planned to get her back to safety just as he did himself and the kids. She had to know that to some extent. The faster she came to realize that, the easier this would be. Probably.

Adelaide shifted and his neck twitched. It was going to be a long, long trek back.

***

Okay.

Don’t invade their space. Don’t call them tiny. Don’t grab. Don’t mention hungry animals.

None of that advice seemed to apply here.

“Ah...hello,” he said awkwardly. The being jumped, but he persisted. “I’m Alan. Believe it or not, I’ve met sma-…people like you before.”

The borrower started to crawl backwards.

“Can I help you get somewhere?”

Nothing.

“Should I…put the rock back?”

Nothing.

He probably shouldn’t put the rock back. To have a giant drop a boulder near you could not be comforting. Comforting…How could he be comforting?

“It’s alright,” he said in a tone that couldn’t be any less soothing if he tried. Great. Smooth.

He needed to get this person out of here because if he didn’t, somebody else on the team was bound to find them, and while the interaction would probably go infinitely more smoothly than the one he was having right now, there was a small chance it would be much, much worse, and he couldn’t take that chance.

“It’s alright,” he repeated, in a tone that was marginally more soothing.

The rule was to not grab. Adelaide hated when anyone grabbed her, including Ian. Personally, Alan wanted nothing to do with that man ever again, but he would kill for his phone number right now. And phone service. If only to ask him what to do, or even better, ask Adelaide what to do.

As the minutes passed though, Alan desperately wanted to disregard the no-grab rule. It would freak the borrower out, probably for life, but he could get this over with and be on his way. But then he wouldn’t know which way to go, because at that point, there was no world in which the borrower would talk to him. He wished he never picked up the damn rock.

And so, Alan just sat there, He settled down in the dirt and got in the most comfortable position he could, which was not very comfortable. He was deeply aware of the passing time and how much of it he was wasting, but he wouldn’t budge until this borrower talked to him, or at least made some kind of decision.

Sometimes he would look off into the distance, sometimes he would look back at his crew, sometimes he would glance at the borrower. Every time he did, they shied away.

Patience is a virtue, he repeated to himself. Patience is a virtue, one that he was well practiced in. His job was to dig up dinosaur bones. If he could sit under the blazing sun for hours on end, only to come up with a singular stegosaur vertebra, and call that a wildly successful day, then he could sit with this tiny person who needed his help. But as time dragged on, it was clear his patience didn’t extend far beyond paleontology.

“What do you want?”

The voice was so faint, he almost didn’t hear it. Alan looked down at them and, again, they flinched back. “I want to get back to my job.”

“O - Oh, I-” They started to back away more frantically

Alan rubbed his forehead in frustration. “No, I didn’t mean…We're digging up dinosaur bones. You are in our direct path, and I’m trying to get you out of here before anyone else finds you…I met one of your kind a while back, so I know you would rather be anywhere else, and I’d love it if we could both continue on with our day, alright?”

“O - Okay.”

“Now, will you let me help you?”

“Okay.”

“Great,” Alan said as he offered his hand. They moved even further back, then looked up at him, searching his eyes for any kind of deceit. It was remarkable how similar they behaved to Adelaide when they were frightened, as if it was an ingrained behavior for the species.

They then studied his hand as if it was a trap waiting to spring closed. After a careful minute of consideration, they stepped on.

Alan wasted no time getting to his feet. “Where to?”

When he didn’t get an answer, he looked down. The borrower pointed north. Good enough for now.

The whole time, he could feel them trembling in his hand. He spouted off comforting words - “It’s alright, it’s okay, you’re doing great” - but he couldn’t seem to muster even an ounce of emotionality, so he doubted his words had any effect.

“Okay,” they said again after some time.

“Is that all you can say?” Alan chuckled. The joke didn’t seem to land. “Is this it?”

He looked around. The area was a bit busier than the dig site - more rocks, more plants, hillier terrain. He didn’t see any sign of civilization, but then again he probably wasn’t supposed to. This only made him more curious, but he knew not to snoop, unless he wanted to freak the small people out beyond repair.

The borrower nodded in response to his question. Wasting no time, Alan set them down. Before his hand even touched the ground, they were off, sprinting toward a pile of rocks. Not once did they look back.

Alan stayed crouched as he watched them go, baffled by the interaction and by the last hour of his life. He watched until they disappeared, then stood up, brushed himself off, and unceremoniously headed back to camp.

What did he know? He knew that there were more borrowers than just Adelaide, and that they were apparently pretty widespread. He knew that some lived indoors while others lived outside. He knew they didn’t like humans, regardless of their experiences with them. He wondered if the little guy would tell their borrower family and friends about him. The image made him laugh.

It was a privilege to be able to witness life at a smaller scale, to witness something most people didn’t know existed or didn’t know was even possible. Alan would remain intrigued by them probably for the rest of his life, but personally, he’d be happy if he never had to have an interaction like that ever again. He should call Ellie.

Alan marched into the bunker with Ellie, intent on locating a gun or two to take these raptors out. And then they were out of here for good. It was a shame he also had some devastating news to deliver - news that might get him killed by something other than a dinosaur.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. They were in a large clearing, maybe a mile from the visitor’s center, when a herd of Gallimimus wheeled directly toward them. It was so fascinating, the way they flocked like birds. He honestly could have sat there all day.

But they were very large dinosaurs, and he was in charge of three exhausted, vulnerable people. Urged on by Adelaide, Lex, and Tim, Alan sprinted back the direction they came, each hand holding onto a child for dear life.

A big log rested on the grass ahead, and it offered as good of protection as any. Without slowing down, he and the kids leapt over the side then pressed their backs against it, waiting for the dinosaurs to pass. But as he did so, he felt the infinitesimal weight on his shoulders disappear and a faint scream filled the air.

When he realized what it was, it was too late. Alan’s head whipped around to locate Adelaide and catch her, but the moment his eyes landed on her was the moment of impact.

Before her body could tumble off the side of the log, Alan gathered her up and held her close to his chest so that they could wait out the herd. She wasn’t moving.

The dinosaurs disappeared, but Alan was too scared to pull Adelaide into the light. He sat there, blinking and breathing, nothing more.

“Dr. Grant?” Lex said, worried by the sudden shift in his demeanor.

That was all Alan needed to pull himself out of it. He slowly extricated his hand from his chest and laid his palm out flat.

Adelaide laid limply in his hand, her limbs bending every which way and her hair splayed out across his palm. Alan floated her around, trying to get a good angle to see if her chest still moved. When he couldn’t see anything, he held her up against his ear. He didn’t hear anything, either. He had no way to know if she was breathing.

“Is she okay?” Tim asked.

“I don’t know.”

***

Malcolm was going to kill him. There was no world in which Malcolm didn’t kill him. Alan couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it. It was now a matter of how to break it to the man.

The first thing Alan heard when he entered the bunker was, “Where are they? Where is she? Are they okay?”

The only sound that followed was the hum of the emergency lights.

There was no point delaying the inevitable. Ian, Ellie, and Hammond watched Alan intently as he reached into his chest pocket and pulled out an impossibly tiny person. Ellie already knew what was coming. She couldn’t bear to watch, yet somehow she couldn’t force herself to look away.

Alan held Adelaide out on his palm.

“What - what - what’s this?” Ian asked.

Alan closed his eyes. “Ian, you have to understand-”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you bring me - you bring me Adelaide right - right now.”

“Ian-”

Ian quickly snatched Adelaide from Alan’s hand and held her up to his own eyes. If her chest was moving, he sure couldn’t see it. In an effort to quell the sudden burst of anger and sadness and fear and guilt, his jaw tightened so hard he thought his teeth would shatter. He slowly raised his gaze up to Alan. “What happened?” he seethed.

“We were running and I jumped over a log. She fell from my shoulder and I couldn’t catch her in time. I’m sorry.”

Ian looked Adelaide up and down, his eyes flickering back and forth in disbelief. She was so small, even smaller when she wasn’t awake to try to make herself look bigger. Even collapsed and unconscious, putting no effort into holding herself up, she was still so light. He gently nudged each of her limbs into place so that she at least looked comfortable. They moved all too easily under his fingers. 

“Della,” he whispered. “Della, come on. We’re going to get out of here, Della. Adelaide, come on.”

“Ian-” Ellie interrupted, tears welling in her eyes.

Ian ignored her. He held Adelaide to his chest. Maybe his rapid heartbeat would wake her up. She complained that it did that sometimes when she slept in his pocket. He frantically pulled her away to check. Still asleep.

The sound of clanging metal caught his attention. Dr. Grant was in the middle of pulling a couple guns out of storage. He didn’t even look bothered by the circumstances. Ian’s face turned red as an unbridled rage bubbled up in his chest.

Without thinking much about it, he shoved Adelaide at John Hammond, who instinctively reached up to hold her. Ian would need both of his hands for this. He lunged from the table directly at Grant, relying solely on his one remaining good leg. He more so fell into Alan, but grabbed him by the shirt collar and pinned him against the wall with his body weight. The gun clattered to the ground. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Get off of me!”

“You killed her. You son of a bitch, you bastard, you killed her.”

Alan couldn’t procure a response in his struggle to get the tall, heavy man off of him. With the help of Ellie, he was finally able to push him away, back toward the table he came from. If it wasn’t for Malcolm’s wilting leg, Alan wasn’t so sure he would have won that fight.

His clothes rumpled and his patience growing thin, he regarded Malcolm as he leaned against the table, panting. He looked in bad shape.

“I am sorry, Ian, I really am. But those kids are out there and we have to go find them before something happens to them, too.”

Ian wasn’t listening. He shot up - Grant’s irritatingly calm voice was all that was needed to prompt a round two - but Ellie eased him away again. His leg screamed in pain. He slowly slid down the side of the table and slumped to the ground. His conversation with Hammond came rushing back.

“She’s three inches tall, John!”

“And who brought her here?”

Ian had been too eager, blinded by his pride. He wanted to be the one to show Adelaide the world. She told him she didn’t want to come here. She was scared to leave the house, to travel far away, to be around a bunch of unknown giants. She was so scared that a human would take her away. Ian laughed it off at the time, thinking she worried too much, and that if he showered her it wasn’t so bad, maybe she’d open up more. He thought he knew what was best for her. He should’ve listened.

From the beginning, it was painfully clear that it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. The park was doomed to fail, perhaps even catastrophically, and when dinosaurs were the main attraction…He just couldn’t imagine the ones to get hurt would be him or Adelaide. But the systems that fail don’t reward those who predicted their failure. Failed systems don’t discriminate. They take down everything in and around them.

“Give her here,” Ian muttered numbly. Hammond nodded, gently handing her over. Adelaide’s head lolled from side to side as he did so. She looked the same. Still unmoving. Still unconscious.

In the heat of the moment, Hammond was the closest and only option. If Ian was going to beat the hell out of Grant, he didn’t want Adelaide’s delicate body anywhere near the fray, so he pushed her into Hammond’s hands. Ian trusted Hammond, in most aspects, about as far as he could throw him, but he trusted he would keep the borrower away from harm for a few minutes. He trusted him with the task more than Grant, at least.

Ellie bent down to Ian’s level and rubbed his arm in reassurance. Then she was off with Alan to do something. Save the kids, maybe? Ian wasn’t paying attention.

His eyes bored into Adelaide for an eternity, searching for any sign of life. If he stared long enough, he was bound to catch a twitch of her hand or a flicker in her eyes. She was bound to wake up.

For once, Hammond didn’t say anything. He didn’t have any smart comments or consoling words, and for that, Ian was grateful. If Hammond opened his mouth, he was going to get hit.

A single tear leaked out of Ian’s eye and trickled down his cheek. And then another. And another. He wasn’t crying. He didn’t cry. His face didn’t contort and his breath stayed relaxed, but the tears built up too much and the dam broke.

One landed on Adelaide, drenching her face and shirt. Ian moved her out of the way.

It was his duty to protect her. She was always so confident and full of life, it was hard to imagine she wasn’t as durable as any other human. But she wasn’t. She was tiny and fragile. Ian forgot that, or maybe he ignored it. Either way, his blindness got her killed.

What was he supposed to do now? Take her back to Texas? And then what? Adelaide would be gone forever, with nobody to remember her except the few people who made it off this island.

“Why don’t we get you into the car?” Hammond suggested. Ian’s tear soaked face and dead eyes made Hammond falter for only a second before he continued. “They may need a pickup when they’re done.”

Ian didn’t want to move. But the world kept on moving whether he wanted it to or not and Adelaide deserved to go home. It was time to leave.

Hammond carefully helped Ian to his feet and supported him as they made their way to a Jeep. Not once did Ian look away from Adelaide. Not when they left the bunker, not when they left the building, not when Hammond situated his leg in the Jeep, not when they pulled up to the visitor’s center.

Not until he heard Dr. Grant’s voice. “Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration, I have decided not to endorse your park.”

Ian glared at him, and in their brief moment of eye contact, he saw the guilt plastered all over Grant’s face. He’d live with that guilt for the rest of his life. Good.

The presence of the people around him slowly came to his attention. Ellie and the kids stared at Adelaide.

They were worried. Maybe sad. He knew that. But the way they stared wasn’t like the way he stared. It was an invasive stare that would make Adelaide undoubtedly uncomfortable if she was awake. Instantly, Ian closed his hand around her and held her to his chest so that they couldn’t gawk anymore. They didn’t deserve to look at her anymore.

“Dr. Malcolm, is she-” One of the kids asked.

“Yeah, yeah, um…she’s…” He took a shaky breath.

“What are you going to do?”

“I uh, don’t know. What do you think I should do?” Ian asked. When he looked up, he saw it was the girl talking. Lex.

“Um…”

“No, really, cause I haven’t - I haven’t the foggiest idea.” The intensity built as he spoke. What kind of ridiculous question was that, anyway? What are you going to do? Kill John Hammond and Alan Grant and tear this whole island to the ground. That’s what he was going to do.

“Let’s leave them alone, okay?” Ellie suggested quietly.

Alan helped Ian into the helicopter when they arrived. He climbed in and pulled his hand away from his chest. Maybe this time…

But still she laid there, as dead to the world as before. Her face was slack, her body bruised and bloody. And there was nothing Ian could do to fix it. There was always something Ian could do to fix it. There was nothing Ian could do to fix it. 

Alan spoke. “Ian, believe me, I never-”

“Just - just don’t.”

“I did everything I could-”

“Hey, uh, I said DON’T.” Ian’s voice boomed throughout the interior of the helicopter. The space fell into an uncomfortable and agonizing silence. They lost so many people, but to have one of the dead trapped inside with them as a constant reminder…

Ian blinked away the oncoming tears as he slammed his head back against the headrest, studying the ceiling. He absently stroked Adelaide’s arm. He always liked to feel her in his hand, to know she was right there, safe with him. She was always safe in his hands. If only he had kept her with him when he lured the T-Rex away. But no, she just as easily could’ve gotten herself killed there as well.

Ian handed Adelaide off to Alan the previous night because he knew he would watch after her. Because Alan was a dinosaur expert and an all around smart, level-headed man. He would take better care of her than Ian could. Logically, the choice he made was sound. So why did just looking at Grant bring on such bitterness and hate? Why was he filled with so much regret? Why did it hurt so bad?

The world passed them by. Pelicans flew alongside the helicopter, uncaring and free. Hammond regarded the mosquito trapped in amber that sat atop his cane with detached interest. Alan and the kids fell asleep. Ellie watched them, wishing she could take a picture. Ian didn’t feel anything, save for the cold, lifeless weight in his palm.

A loud gasp for air accompanied by a large spasm in Ian’s hand drew everyone’s attention.

Adelaide was soaking wet and disoriented. Her back protested her startled jump into consciousness, a sharp pain radiating up her spine, through her neck, and into her head so that she could hardly move.

She tried to recall the previous events. There was a field. Dinosaurs. Running. She was thrown into the air and then…nothing.

She was in a hand. It was warm and spongy and she could feel the life pulse beneath her. Whatever they were doing and wherever they were now, Adelaide almost thought it was better she didn’t know. Almost.

Ian’s mouth fell open. If he couldn’t believe Adelaide was dead an hour ago, he sure as hell couldn’t believe she was alive now. But she was. She may have been extremely hurt, extremely scared, whatever, but she was alive, and the gaping hole in his chest left behind by her death flooded with relief so strong it was nearly tangible.

Ian regarded the borrower with the same intensity he did when he first snatched her out of Alan’s hands. His eyes jumped back and forth, searching not for a sign of life this time, but for a sign that she was hurt. His hand stayed motionless, frozen due in part to shock.

“Adelaide,” he breathed.

Adelaide blinked her crusted eyes open. Just lifting her arm to wipe the gunk away sent another flare up her back. She could have sworn that that was Ian’s voice. But she was probably dreaming again, and to get her hopes up would be to have her hopes dashed. Again.

“Ian?” she whispered tentatively, still unable to see through the haze.

Air came at her fast, and before she could brace herself, Adelaide was pressed into dark fabric, held tight by the hand. No matter what dinosaur they were running from, she did not want to be in this position. She thought Alan understood that.

Not only that, but it hurt. Whatever caused her to black out, it did a number on her body, and there was no way it could stand this pressure for much longer. She wiggled around as much as her poor body would allow, pushing and shoving along the way.

Adelaide thought she felt something along the lines of a laugh come from the Bean with the way the chest abruptly contracted and expanded and the way she could hear the expulsion of air through the giant lungs.

Why would he laugh? What was going on?

Gravity forced her into a prone position as the hand pulled her up into the air, and light emerged all around her.

They were not on the island. At least, they weren’t in nature. The world around her was metal. And the person holding her was not Alan. It was Ian. Ian was alive.

“Oh my god!” Adelaide cried.

“Oh my god yourself!” Ian said.

“Oh my god yourself! Ian!” She scrambled to an attempted stand but settled for a seat. She surveyed the palm around her, grabbing his thumb with both hands and pulling it close. She ran her hands along the skin. It was real. He was real.

The thumb suddenly sprouted a mind of its own and pushed inward, nudging Adelaide’s shoulder. She flinched but remained unbothered because it was Ian Malcolm, alive and in the flesh. A large drop of water splashed down next to her.

Adelaide just nearly dodged it, the quick movement hurting her back. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was the water itself. It was a tear... Ian was crying? Crying wasn’t something Adelaide thought he was even capable of. Something must’ve gone horribly wrong, but she couldn’t think of anything so bad that it would make him cry. Who died?

Instead of asking any helpful questions, the one that came out of Adelaide’s mouth was, “Is that why I’m wet?” It didn’t escape her notice that she was still soaked from the torso up. Not only did Ian Malcolm cry, but he cried on her. Gross.

“Della, we thought you were dead.”

“W-What?” Adelaide had blacked out a number of times in her life, most of them being around Beans. Something about the toll of living in a constant state of fear…Regardless, it wasn’t unheard of for her to go unconscious from time to time. Before she could ask why they thought this time was any different, Alan’s voice came from across the helicopter.

Right. There were other people here too.

“You fell when we were running from the Gallimimus,” he said, and for once it was the giant who had trouble maintaining eye contact. “I couldn’t catch you in time. I am so, so sorry.”

“No, you don’t - you don’t get to talk to her,” Ian said.

Adelaide jumped in. “Woah, calm down. I should’ve held on better. That’s my fault.” She shifted her focus. “Thank you, Alan, for watching over me.”

“Don’t thank him,” Ian scowled.

“I can thank him if I want to thank him!” Adelaide shouted, but doing so caused another flare in her back. Ian’s thumb returned, gently resting on her chest. The weight forced her to lie down, which she assumed was his intention. If she had the strength to fight it, she would have, but laying down did feel nice.

Alan watched the pained movements. “You hit the ground hard. I’d take it easy if I were-” His advice was cut short by a glare from Ian.

Adelaide rolled her eyes. “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re going home.” She slowly scooched over until she was resting up against his chest, relishing in the soft fabric of his shirt and the heat that human Beans seemed to have an endless supply of. “You know I’m never letting you out of my sight again?” It was only partially a joke.

Ian chuckled. “Oh, you think I’m going to let you out of my sight? Cute.”

Adelaide’s body vibrated in time with his voice. “I am not cute,” she insisted.

At the same time, she curled her body up even further against his chest, pulling her legs close and feeling the slight rise and fall as he breathed like the gentle rocking of a ship. As the minutes passed, she paid attention to his heart rate while it progressively slowed down. He really was worried about her.

Ian watched her settle in. Adelaide was correct - she wasn’t cute. She was absolutely adorable. And absolutely alive. And they were absolutely going home.

Anonymous: Slight Jurassic park 1 idea:  What if after Ian hands Adelaide off to Alan, during the T-rex attack, she escapes Alan’s grasp and runs through the rain and the mud to get to Ian? She’ll find him bleeding and incapacitated, and tries desperately to wake him, afraid he’s dead. 🥲🫠

NON-CANON

~

Alan had no idea what to do. He didn’t want to look after Adelaide and he didn’t want Ian to run off and get himself killed, no matter how much he disliked the man. Alan tried to give her back, holding her out awkwardly in-between cupped hands, but Ian was already too far gone. “Ian!” he called uselessly.  

Adelaide demanded that Ian come back, that Alan put her down and let her go to him. She didn’t care how illogical it was, or if anybody could actually hear her over the rain. It was unfair of Ian to make this call and take away her agency. She tried to claw her way out of Alan’s hands, using anything she could – her fingernails, her teeth, her knife.

The knife seemed to do the trick.

An instinctual flick of Alan’s hand in response to the tiny stabs sent Adelaide hurtling toward the ground. She aimed to land on her feet, but her left foot hit the ground first and her knees gave way. A crack so loud it could be heard over the storm and the yelling and the dinosaur emanated from that leg.

If not for the cushion of the mud, Adelaide was sure she would be dead. As it was, pulses of hot pain washed over the leg so that she could hardly stand on it. She took in the world around her.

The ground was a bad place to be on a normal day. It was worse now. The torrential downpour made visibility nearly zero and it made the ground impossible to walk on. Puddles of mud collected here and there and it was as if the Earth wanted to swallow her whole. There was a frightened giant stomping around somewhere. There was a hungry dinosaur stomping around somewhere, with much less awareness of her presence than the giant.

Adelaide ran in the direction she remembered Ian to be. She could feel Alan’s shoes shake the ground beneath her feet, but she’d lost sight of him. With any luck, he lost sight of her too. She couldn’t be taken away again.

Adelaide zeroed in on the path in front of her. That was the only way she’d make it where she needed to go. Everything else was a distraction. The mud held fast. She pushed on.

***

The storm subsided into a light drizzle, not that it felt much different to such a small person. Rain was rain, and she was knocked over by the drops all the same. All signs of the dinosaur disappeared. All signs of the Bean disappeared. It was Adelaide and the Earth.

A mountain of splintered wood rose up before her - the remnants of the shack they passed on their way in. A tall structure Adelaide could get lost in for hours, and the T-Rex knocked it down in a matter of seconds. She had to find a way to get around it.

Underneath the mountain, a dark mass laid motionless. Adelaide froze. For a frightening moment, she thought he might be dead. And then he let out a groan.

“Ian!”

Adelaide scrambled forward, tripping over her own feet a number of times. She came up along the right side of his body and, unable to see very much from down on the ground, climbed up it.  She wove her fingers into the fabric of his loose shirt to haul herself up, and when she came to a stop on his stomach, she surveyed the damage. Something was wrong with his leg. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving.

Adelaide ran toward his face. She stopped just before his chest curved down into his neck and called out to him again, cupping her hands around her mouth.

“Ian!”

Nothing.

“Ian, come on! Nonononono !”

He couldn’t be dead. There was no way he could be dead. Adelaide refused to let him be dead. She forced herself to sit still and in doing so, she was able to feel a very faint rise and fall underneath her. Just barely. Thank God.

Ian was still deeply unconscious, and shouting at him wasn’t working, so she picked the other direction. Watching her steps so as to not plummet off the side of him, she decided to take a look at his leg. A brief glance earlier told her it was in bad shape, so she couldn’t imagine what closer inspection would procure.

Adelaide stopped short when she saw the extent of the damage. Down by his knee, a deep gash larger than she was tall bled profusely. The darkness hid any other potential injuries on the rest of his leg as it stretched off into the night. For now, she would focus on this one.

It looked as though Ian halfheartedly tried to wrap his belt around his thigh in a makeshift tourniquet. The belt was pulled through the buckle, but he must have lost strength before he could tighten it. That was something Adelaide could fix.

She slid down his leg and landed on the ground with a soft cry. Wiping her hands on her pants, she took hold of the belt. While it was a manageable size, the thick, wet leather was hard to get a grip on, and her hands slipped off a number of times.

Every second she wasted was a second closer to Ian bleeding out completely. Adelaide grunted as she tugged with all her might, straining against the thick, protesting muscles of his leg. Just a little bit further and the metal clasp would catch the worn down hole. Just a little bit further.

The second Adelaide saw the prong go in, she released her hold and let herself fall to the ground. Ian’s body involuntarily let out a grunt from the pain. There was still no way it was as tight as it needed to be, but hopefully it would slow the bleeding a little.

She hauled herself back up onto his leg and set to picking the splinters out of the gash. There usually wasn’t much Adelaide could do to help out a Bean, so she was happy to do what she could. Even if it meant reaching into a wound larger than her, staining her arms up to her elbows in blood. She had to be careful. Not only did she not want to fall in, but doing so would, at the very least, irritate it. Worse, it could get infected.

Adelaide gagged, already noticing a rotting smell. That was almost definitely a sign of infection. She needed to get it covered.

But there was nothing nearby. Search as she may, Adelaide couldn’t find a scrap of accessible fabric anywhere. Her own clothes would barely cover anything, Ian’s clothes were inaccessible, and the wood would only make it worse.

Leaves! Leaves could work!

Adelaide moved to slide off his leg again, but a moan escaped Ian’s lips, and it sounded much more conscious than all the other weird little noises he made in his sleep. The relief was immediate.

“Ian!” Adelaide ran up toward his face again. Each breath was a lot stronger now, which was excellent news for Ian. Adelaide, however, couldn’t seem to find her footing on the ever-changing landscape that was his stomach. Despite the embarrassing amount of times she fell, she made it to his chest and kept going. She leapt onto his face, ready to see open, alert eyes. That was not what she saw.

His face was pale, sweaty, and dirty, blood trickled from somewhere, and his eyes were still closed.

She punched his nose. The skin twitched. She punched it again, harder.

“Della,” Ian whined.

Yes! Yes, he's okay!

“Why are you here?” he breathed, his eyes still closed.

“You can’t just hand me off like some - WOAH” Adelaide was cut short by a falling hand. Ian blindly reached in to grab her, but his hand was a lot heavier than he remembered. It moreso crash landed into Adelaide, knocking her down and pinning her to his face.

He loosely curled his fingers around the squirming form and plucked it into the air. Adelaide yelped, his grip simultaneously too loose and too tight. She was moved over to his chest, where the hand crashed down again, this time with her in it. The lifelessness in his hand should have made it easy for her to push it out of the way, but it was in fact much, much harder. The dead weight roughly trapped her against the slowly moving chest. She was stuck.

“Ian Malcolm, you let me out of here right now!” Adelaide banged on his chest with her fists and feet and tried everything in her power to roll over or find purchase or escape or anything . “Ian, I gotta cover your leg. You gotta let me cover-”

She stopped. There was no point. He was no longer conscious to hear her words.

Adelaide huffed. It was more than just annoying, it was dangerous. Ian could bleed out right then and there and she was trapped underneath his stupid, giant hand. If he didn’t wake up soon, he might not have the opportunity to wake up at all.

Adelaide grabbed a hold of the black fabric underneath her and pulled as hard as she could, but the fabric kept bunching and she wasn’t going anywhere. She couldn’t stop though, not until her arms gave out… or she heard the sound of an engine…

On instinct, Adelaide froze. It sounded like one of the Jeeps, which meant a Bean had to be operating it. The sound got closer and closer and then it passed them and then it stopped.

“Alan!”

“Dr. Grant!”

Those were two familiar voices. Ellie and that game warden. A rescue! If there was anyone here Adelaide could trust, it would be Ellie. So then why couldn’t she make herself call out to her? It was as if every time the giants yelled for Dr. Grant, they stole more and more of her own voice away. They were so loud, so fast. Adelaide couldn’t see them from underneath Ian’s hand, but she sure could hear them…and feel them.

There was only one right thing to do. If not for herself, then for Ian. Adelaide squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Ellie! Help!”

A pause. “Did you hear that?” Ellie asked.

Ian groaned, probably roused by all the commotion. That caught the Beans’ attention. Booming footsteps indicated that they were approaching, and Adelaide braced herself.

“He’s put a tourniquet on. Ian?” Ellie whispered, patting his face.

“Ellie!” Adelaide tried again.

“Adelaide? Are you alright?” she asked as she removed Ian’s hand from over top of the borrower. The ease with which she did so sent a pang of jealousy through Adelaide, but it all faded when she found herself staring up at two Beans.

“Remind me to thank John for a lovely weekend,” Ian muttered, breaking the tension. The voice reverberated in his chest and through Adelaide’s whole body. She jumped, startled by the sudden noise.

In the near distance, a much more frightening noise echoed across the jungle. A stark reminder that the dinosaur may have left, but that didn't mean it wouldn’t come back.

“His leg-” Adelaide started, ignoring the roar.

“I know, I see,” Ellie interrupted. “Can we chance moving him?”

Another roar.

Ian sat up. “Please, chance it.”

Adelaide was thrown off balance by the abrupt movement and tumbled down his chest. She landed in his palm. Ouch.

Ian regarded the small being in his hands. He had quite a few choice words for her, but they had to get out of there first. He held her up to Ellie.

“Wait, no, no, no, no.” Adelaide protested.

“It’ll only be a second. Dr. Sattler, here, please.”

Ellie looked mildly uncomfortable, like she understood the urgency of the situation but didn’t want to just snatch Adelaide away when she was so clearly opposed.

“No! Ian! What the hell?” Adelaide yelled. It was as if he was deaf.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Muldoon muttered, and he quickly snatched Adelaide from Ian’s waiting palm and deposited her into Ellie’s.

Adelaide had only just begun to bare her teeth when she fell into a hand. She opened her mouth to shout at Muldoon for grabbing her, but he already had Ian slung over his shoulder and was walking in the opposite direction. And so, she took a second to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” Ellie asked. Adelaide felt the wind rush past her as she was lifted into Ellie’s eyeline. Her bright blue eyes scanned the borrower for anything amiss.

“Yeah,” Adelaide mumbled.

“What happened?” As she spoke, Ellie wandered around, looking for other signs of Alan or the kids.

Adelaide tried to see around her, to track Ian’s progress, but the giant body blocked all of her view. Her thoughts were distracted, but she tried to describe the events as best she could. “Um, the…the big one. The T-Rex, I think? It escaped and attacked us. I missed most of it. I don’t know where they are. I’m sorry. Can you take me back…please?” 

Ellie wasn’t listening anymore. She peered over a ledge into the Rex enclosure to find a smashed tour vehicle at the root of a tree far below them. “The other car!” she announced. She sprinted back over to Ian and dumped Adelaide in his hands, then took off with Muldoon to inspect the car.

All of this was a blur of fingers and shadows for Adelaide. Motion sickness threatened to overcome her and her leg pounded from being knocked around.

Ian sat in the back of the Jeep, his leg outstretched to the best of its ability. He leaned his head against the headrest and kept his eyes closed while he talked, the words using up all of his limited energy. “See? It was only a mere - a mere moment.”

“Was it only supposed to be a ‘mere moment’ when you passed me off to Dr. Grant? What’s wrong with you?”

“How did you get back?”

“I jumped and ran.”

“Do you think, perhaps, you shouldn’t have-”

“Do you think, perhaps, you shouldn’t have thrown me away?”

Ian laughed at Adelaide’s strong choice of words. “It was to keep you safe. You know that.”

“So you could just run off and get yourself killed? And then what? What would I do then?”

“Uh, probably thrive.”

“Don’t do that again. I don’t care what happens. You dragged me here. If you go down, I’m going down with you.”

“Well, good news. Nobody’s going down, uh, starting now.”

Adelaide called his bluff. “You don’t believe that.”

“Ah, who’s to say?” Ian finally lifted his heavy head from the back of the seat and looked down at Adelaide. She looked annoyed and she was keeping her weight off of one leg, but otherwise she seemed alright. He let his head fall back again.

And then an impact tremor shook the ground. Ian held Adelaide closer to this chest. The Rex was back.

***

After a harrowing drive through the jungle full of screaming and roaring, the group made its way back to the control room relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for the Jeep.

Muldoon and Ellie helped Ian lay down with his leg propped in front of him, and Ellie gave him as high a dose of morphine as she could without killing him. It would ease the pain considerably, but she saw how bad it looked. If Ian didn’t get medical attention soon, he would die. At the very least, he would lose his leg.

Adelaide was overwhelmed by everything that happened around her. She stayed at the center of the storm, right on Ian’s chest. Ellie, Muldoon, Hammond, and some engineer named Ray Arnold raced around trying to fix machinery and tend to Ian and do a million other things Adelaide didn’t understand. They talked about some guy named ‘Nedry’ a lot. There was no sign of Alan or the kids.

Ian blinked in and out of consciousness a number of times, but Adelaide was reassured by Ellie that he was fine. The injection of morphine just made him tired.

Adelaide made sure to steer clear of Ian’s hands. She did not want to get trapped under either of them again, especially if he wasn’t awake. He had no control over his movements like that, and while she survived without incident last time, she couldn’t keep pushing her luck. And it was just uncomfortable. And embarrassing.

But when Ian mumbled her name and reached toward her, she couldn’t force herself away. He needed her by his side. The hand landed right next to her. “I’m right here,” she said, grabbing a hold of his pointer finger and holding it between both hands in an attempt to offer comfort. His leg still smelled, despite the way Ellie thoroughly cleaned it. She told Adelaide not to worry, but it was hard not to.

“Della, let me - let me see your hand.”

“What?”

Suddenly, Ian grabbed her in that same semi-conscious grip he did earlier and parked her right in front of his face. With the other hand, he held a finger underneath her palm so that her fingers splayed out across the tip of his. His eyes rapidly shifted in and out of focus as he regarded her minuscule fingers, then compared them to his own. He looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her.

“Fascinating,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Adelaide asked nervously. She didn’t like the careless attitude he emanated, especially when he held such a fragile limb. He’d been grabby lately, but not like this. It was as if he didn’t register her as a person, but rather something to study.

“You confound me every single day, Della.”

“Yeah, it’s a hobby of mine,” she responded distractedly. “Can you put me down?”

Ian narrowed his eyes and his hot breath washed over her. “How do you do it?”

“Uh, you just let go, I think.” This wasn’t Ian. Something was wrong.

“No,” he laughed. “How - how do you exist? I still haven’t…figured that one…out.”

Adelaide tugged her hand away, though it took three tries to actually dislodge it. The gaps between his fingers were just small enough to prevent her escape, but she was afraid if they opened any wider, he would drop her. “I don’t know, but you’re acting really weird, and I want you to put me down right now.” By the end of the sentence, her voice started to give away her nerves.

“ I’m weird?” He laughed again. “I think you need to take a long - long, hard look in the, um, mirror.” He looked from his finger to Adelaide and back again, noting that they were roughly the same size. She was so small. He had more strength in that finger than she did in her whole body, and yet she trusted him to hold her. Or, upon further observation, maybe not. She was wiggling around a lot.

With that, the fingers released Adelaide, belatedly giving in to her demand to be let go. She hit his chest hard, rolled off the side, and landed on the metal floor below.

Without wasting a breath, she pushed herself to her feet and backed up, right into another hand. She yelped as she was yanked away, far away from Ian, and deposited on some kind of desk. Scrap papers and pens and all sorts of Bean things surrounded her, creating a colorful, dangerous landscape. To her left, a clunky computer towered way overhead. To the right, a sheer cliff dropped off the edge of the desk. In front of her sat the game warden.

“Hey!” Ian shouted. “Give her back!”

“Quiet! You’ll be alright,” Muldoon said irritably.

Adelaide could hardly slow down her breathing enough to get her question out. “What - what’s wrong with him?” Her heart hammered in her chest so hard she thought it would explode.

“Morphine’ll do that,” Muldoon explained.

“You can’t just grab someone!”

Muldoon nodded, but a faint smile plagued his face. “Understood.”

“What in the hell?” came a new voice. Adelaide whipped around so fast she nearly fell over. Above her rose the engineer, Mr. Arnold. He had dark skin, big glasses, and was smoking a cigarette. He blew the smoke from the cigarette out and directly into Adelaide’s face.

The smell that filled the air made Adelaide cough and gag. She backed away from the oppressive cloud before remembering that Muldoon sat behind her. She was closed in by two Beans, one of which just grabbed her, the other just discovered her. And she couldn’t even go back to Ian, what with the way this ‘morphine’ stuff was making him act. Adelaide found herself in a truly unsafe situation, and her only sense of comfort was far, far gone.

But instead of any of the normal, expected Bean responses, Mr. Arnold said, “Shit, I can’t deal with this right now.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth, turned back toward his computer, and rested his elbow on the desk to block this little creature from his sight. It shook the surface of the desk in a way only Adelaide registered.

They sat in silence while Adelaide took it all in. Muldoon studied her with interest, and eventually, she caught on. She couldn’t shy away anymore. With Ian out of the picture, it was up to Adelaide to establish herself as one of them. One of the Beans. She tilted her head back, puffed out of her chest, and forced herself to hold eye contact. (At least in small bursts.)

“You called me tiny. Earlier today.”

“You are.”

“No, like a tiny. You said you know…” The word ‘borrowers’ was on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t feel comfortable disclosing that. The next descriptor that came to mind was ‘small’. That wouldn’t do, either, not in this situation. “You know people…like me. What do you do with them?”

“I don’t do anything.”

Adelaide scoffed. A Bean who knew about borrowers and didn’t do anything about it? Yeah, right. “I find that hard to believe.”

“And why’s that?”

“Nobody ever just lets us be. In the end, they always find a way to exploit their size, or - or their power.”

Muldoon shrugged. “Believe what you like.” Despite his nonchalant attitude, he was gleaning all kinds of information from the conversation. He was very interested in her, but he wasn’t going to go and scare her further by letting her onto it. “What I have a hard time believing is that someone like you willingly travels with someone like him.” He indicated Malcolm with a nod of his head.

Adelaide threw Muldoon’s own answer right back at him. “Believe what you like.”

He laughed lightly, wondering how such a small body could muster so much sass.

Ian stirred, catching their attention. Adelaide watched from afar as he methodically patted himself down, then the ground around him. He was looking for her. Before she could go to him though, she had to check to make sure it was safe.

“Is he…normal?” she asked, not taking her eyes off Ian.

“Can’t tell. Malcolm. She’s right here.”

Ian blinked, then zeroed in on Adelaide. “So I didn’t, uh, dream it.” He rubbed his eyes.

Adelaide went to reach for her hook in her bag, then remembered it was no longer with her. It was back in Ian’s jacket pocket, back in the car, back by the site of the T-Rex attack.

Muldoon noticed and offered a hand to her, but Adelaide paid it little mind. She wasn’t going to let this man carry her again. Not when he’d grabbed her twice now. She was on a very cluttered desk. She was a borrower. This was what she did best.

Trying (and failing) to ignore the two massive hands that jumped around as Mr. Arnold typed something on his computer, Adelaide explored the desk. There had to be something here.

The sturdy metal mesh of the cup that held all the pens and pencils looked promising. It would be child’s play to climb it, like the handholds were specifically made for her, so she hoisted herself up to peer over the edge. Sure enough, it held pencils, pens, and at the very bottom - a paperclip.

“What’s it doing in my pencils?” Mr. Arnold whined.

The voice startled Adelaide right over the edge. She toppled into the bottom of the cup, landing at an awkward angle with her limbs sticking every which way. Her head propped up against a sharpie. Her foot was caught in an eraser head. Great.

Refusing to dignify that with a response, (it seemed as though Muldoon wouldn’t either - good on him) she took a deep breath and pushed the eraser off her foot. She rolled over onto her hands and knees, stuck her arm through the paperclip and hoisted it onto her shoulder, then set to climbing back out.

Adelaide almost fell down again. When she looked up, Mr. Arnold hung over the opening, blocking out most of the light. His scrunched up face said she was a bug that he was too scared to squish. But as long as he didn’t overcome that fear…Adelaide pushed on.

As she landed back on solid ground with both feet underneath her, Mr. Arnold asked, “Can you please get it off my desk?”

Adelaide chose to answer before Muldoon did. He’s more scared of you than you are of him. At least, that’s what she kept telling herself. “I’m not an it. If you have any kind of string or thread that I can borrow, it would make this a whole lot faster.”

“Uh, yeah,” he blinked, pulling open a drawer hesitantly. Adelaide stumbled from the small earthquake but held her balance. She watched him yank open a few more drawers and produce some scrap piece of thread that had probably been sitting in the drawer since he started working here. But string was string. As long as it didn’t snap.

Mr. Arnold let it coil into a pile a couple inches in front of the small girl then returned to the impossible task of getting Jurassic Park back online. Adelaide smirked. She definitely didn’t have to worry about this guy. He didn’t want to be anywhere near her.

She could feel Muldoon’s sharp eyes on her, though, watching her every move as she quickly assembled a makeshift hook. She didn’t understand why Beans took such an interest in the small things like that. She was just assembling a hook. It wasn’t rocket science. They could probably make a much better one themselves, what with their endless supply of resources and superhuman strength. Whatever.

Not once did Adelaide look back at Muldoon or Mr. Arnold as she lodged the hook into the desk and swung herself over the edge. One long, controlled fall later, she was on the scratchy, carpeted floor. And across the vast expanse of a room was her goal.

Brown, clunky boots guarded her on the left, while nice, black dress shoes flanked her right. The type of shoe didn’t really matter, though. What mattered was that they were shoes, they were massive, and they could crush her in an instant without her ever seeing it coming.

To add to the list of problems, the desk, and therefore Adelaide, were nowhere near a wall. It would take a lifetime to get to one, which left only one choice: to cross the middle of the room. Out in the open.

She gulped. The wide expanse of monotonous gray carpet seemed to stretch on endlessly. There was no protection out there. Once she started, there was no turning back, no running away. That was it.

But the only three people in the room were seated and aware of her existence. If there was any time to go, it was now.

Adelaide anxiously wrapped the hook contraption around her hand and elbow, drawing out the process as she ventured out into the open. The repetitive motion grounded her and kept her focused on something that wasn’t giant, looming feet. When she ran out of thread, she considered uncoiling it just so she could coil it again.

Halfway through, her cautious steps became less cautious, picking up speed. Caution wasn’t necessary anymore when she was in the middle of the floor. Speed was now her ally.

It all happened so fast. It always happens so fast when a Bean is involved. Adelaide should have known better, but somehow, they always caught her by surprise.

The heavy metal door swung open, and booming footsteps crashed into the ground, headed right toward her. The brown boot rose a couple stories in the air, its shadow completely overtaking Adelaide, then came plummeting down toward the spot she was stuck to.

Move.

Move .

Adelaide screamed as she dove out of the way. Blood rushed in her ears, but she could have sworn she heard Ian shout at the person to ‘watch out’. It was a hopeless maneuver. Even a far leap for Adelaide wasn’t guaranteed to be big enough to clear the width of a shoe. But what else could she do?

The boot struck the ground like a meteor. Adelaide could see the treads meld into the carpet with all of the Bean's weight behind it. If she was a couple inches to the left, she would be no more than a stain.

“I saw you. Don’t worry,” Ellie said casually as she strolled past.

Adelaide glanced up at her but had to quickly look away, or she’d scare herself so bad she wouldn’t be able to keep going. She unsuccessfully attempted to rid the stress from her body by rubbing her face.

Ellie stopped at Mr. Arnold’s desk, then looked over her shoulder at the poor borrower. She should have stopped to check on Adelaide, but she couldn’t say there weren’t more important things on her mind. Adelaide looked shaken, but otherwise fine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you alright?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Adelaide squeaked, her voice an octave higher than usual. She had to keep moving, but her legs refused to cooperate.

One foot in front of the other. And if she kept putting one foot in front of the other, she’d get where she needed to go. That was how it typically worked. So why did it feel like every time she took a step, the distance doubled?

Adelaide focused on the massive litter around her. Discarded soda cans and stacks of paper. This place was a mess. She thought of the ways she could borrow in a place like this, and the image brought her comfort.

In no time, she was at the base of the ledge on which Ian sat. He lifted his head to greet her, but noticed she was just out of arm’s reach, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

“What are you doing? Come here,” Ian said.

Adelaide made it to her goal, to her friend, but couldn’t find it in herself to close the distance. She eyed his hands, the ones that held her captive a number of times tonight, and that was enough to hold her back.

Ian looked bad. His leg looked worse by the moment and his face showed that he was beyond exhausted. That was probably why he didn’t just grab her. In fact, if he was any better, he would have marched over to that desk and collected her himself ten minutes ago. As it was, he was stuck on the floor.

“Are you going to grab me again?” she asked quietly. He didn’t seem to be drugged like earlier. No matter what his answer was, she would believe it, but the question needed to be asked.

“No, of course not…Again?” There was genuine confusion on his face.

“You don’t remember?”

Ian shrugged. “Afraid not, Della. If I grabbed you, uh, I certainly didn’t mean it. Come here.” He could see the way she held herself back, as if she didn’t trust him. He couldn’t say he remembered much of the past few hours, but he couldn’t imagine just grabbing her. Whether he did it or not though, he wanted to keep her close, if only so that another person doesn’t go walking over her again. 

Ian didn’t even remember. He kept her trapped for so long, both intentionally and unintentionally, and he didn’t even remember. A terrifying couple of hours for Adelaide, and he didn’t even remember.

“Yeah, right,” she mumbled quietly, unwrapping her hook again. She threw it up over the ledge and tugged, securing it on the first try. The second she had a firm grip on the string, she suddenly became weightless.

Ian reached over and pinched the paperclip in between his thumb and finger. He plucked it and Adelaide into the air and set her gently on his chest before she could even register that she was dangling well over the floor.

Before she could scurry off, Ian rested his hand over her, not enough to truly trap her if she wanted to get away, but enough to get her to sit still for a second. She was jumpy and scattered, and despite having ample reason to feel that way, it wasn’t doing either of them any good.

Adelaide’s body instinctively wanted to fight back, to get out of the tight space. But the way he laid his hand over her - it was in a very conscious way. Very conscious, very awake, very careful. That’s how Adelaide knew he was back, at least for the time being.

“You’re alright, you’re alright,” Ian said in his best attempt of a soothing voice, trying to quell her shaking by running a finger down her arm.

Adelaide pushed the finger away. “Yeah, I know I’m alright. You, on the other hand, look terrible.”

“Me? Never. Though, I could use more morphine, um, any time now.” Ian emphasized the end of that sentence so Ellie would hear. She smiled at him but shook her head no. He figured, but it was worth a shot. His leg hurt so bad he’d almost rather amputate it.

“Oh, more?” Adelaide asked hesitantly. She couldn’t ask him not to take it - it was probably the only thing keeping him from passing out. One look at the fluids oozing out of the wound and soaking the bandage told her everything she needed to know. But God, she really didn’t want him to grab her again…

“That’s the dream.” Ian failed to pick up on her hesitation. Surprisingly, someone else did. Muldoon slowly ambled over to the two of them and sat a healthy distance from Ian. He gave Adelaide a knowing look. He would be there for her when Malcolm slipped again.

Adelaide wasn’t sure if she was scared or grateful, or a bit of both. The whole night had been a whirlwind of new, terrifying experiences, from rainstorms to dinosaurs to Beans, and the Adelaide of twelve hours ago wouldn’t have been able to even imagine their current predicament. She had one of those Beans by her side, another Bean for when the first Bean got out of hand, and an engineer working on getting the system up and running again. 

She and Ian were both hurt. Both their legs were messed up in some fashion or other, the whole of Jurassic Park was shut down, the future was bleak and uncertain, and everything was undeniably wrong. So even though Ian tried to get rid of her, Adelaide wasn’t going anywhere. When she said they were going down together, she meant it.

Adelaide repeatedly banged her head on the wall, willing the awful noise to go away. The loud siren woke her out of a deep, peaceful, perfect, much needed nap, and until it went away, there was little chance she would fall back asleep.

Every three or so minutes, relief came. The monotone, ear-piercing siren would cease, only to be restarted again 30 seconds later. Adelaide was no stranger to loud noise, and could typically sleep through anything, but this was just the right frequency to trigger some kind of sound-induced rage.

When she couldn’t take it anymore, she wandered out of the walls to take her frustration out on something else. Maybe she’d push some things off Ian’s shelves.

“What……what are you doing?”

“I’m sick of this noise,” Adelaide complained as she leaned all her weight against a plastic cup that sat out on the counter. It slowly but surely inched toward the edge.

“Okay…,” Ian ambled over. He plucked the empty cup into the air, and Adelaide tumbled backwards from the sudden lack of something behind her. She stared straight up at him as she laid on the counter. “And you’re taking it out on my, um, dishware?”

“Yeah.”

“Great.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a cup.”

Adelaide rolled her eyes. “The noise.”

“A tornado siren.”

“Oh…Well can you turn it off?”

Ian laughed. “No, no, I’m not in charge of it. It’ll stop when there isn't a tornado warning anymore.”

Adelaide sat up and turned around to face him. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard this noise. It happened every so often over the years, especially in the spring, but now she finally had a way to figure out what it was. And the answer was…underwhelming.

“Can I at least see it?” Adelaide asked. She knew that a tornado was a kind of storm, and now she wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Ian clicked his tongue. “Probably - probably not the best idea, I’m afraid.”

Hmph.

Adelaide located her target across the way. Silently, she marched over to the sink and pulled out her hook. Ian watched with interest as she climbed up onto the window sill. She continued toward his basil plant and pressed her back against it, straining to push it toward the ledge.

Ian frowned. Her progress was slow, but unlike the cup, the pot would shatter if it fell. “You’re acting like a cat.”

Once again, he removed the object Adelaide was trying to push. This time when she fell, she fell right off the edge of the window sill. Anticipating all of this, Ian caught her and set her back up on her own two feet. Before she could scold him, he pointed out the window. “See that wind? Bad idea.”

Adelaide regarded the storm brewing outside, then spun around. “I don’t know when you’ll get it through your thick head that I’m gonna find a way to do anything and everything. The only reason I ask is because I know I’ll be safer with you. And like…I enjoy your company…or whatever.” Deciding that was too much, she backtracked. “But whatever, suit yourself.”

In a slow, exaggerated manner, Adelaide strolled toward her hook still hanging from the ledge, waiting for him to change his mind.

Ian rolled his eyes, then scooped her up. “Come on.”

“Ian, I swear to-” Adelaide cut herself off. She couldn’t let the indignity of being scooped off her feet get in the way of her victory.

By the time she righted herself, they were outside. She wasn’t sure what she expected. Ths sky was a sickly shade of green. The air was thick and heavy, making each breath laborious. Rain relentlessly pelted the ground. She could see the force of the wind from outside, but it just didn’t prepare her for what it would actually feel like.

Ian set her on his shoulder and told her to hang on, which she did right away, white-knuckling the leather on his jacket.

Her hair whipped around, but even though it was secured by an elastic, the thin hairs at the front of her head immediately came loose. She could feel her body sway back and forth, and her eyes watered if she opened them beyond a squint.

Yet this was all…normal. Trees were forced to bend at odd angles to the point where Adelaide was sure they’d snap, and Ian sat calmly on the front step, watching as if he did so every day.

“Wow,” was all she could think to say.

“Pretty neat, huh? Certainly not as bad as it could be, that’s...that's for sure.”

“It gets worse?!”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen uh, trees uprooted, roofs torn off, downed - downed power lines start fires. Current trajectory suggests that won’t happen tonight…though, it could all change in the blink - in the blink of an eye. Who knows,” Ian mused. He didn’t think much of it beyond that. Weather was unpredictable. Such was life.

Adelaide didn’t love this nonchalant attitude toward a storm that could tear roofs off houses. In fact, she could even see other Beans off in the distance casually sitting on their porches as well, watching the storm with the same detached interest. Frustrated, she tried in vain to push the hair out of her face for what felt like the three hundredth time.

A particular strong gust of wind caught her in the brief second she let go of Ian’s jacket. It punched her in the stomach and sent her flying backward. Almost in slow motion, Adelaide felt the fall. She reached for the fabric, she reached for anything, but it was just out of her grasp.

Of course, Ian felt the small weight leave his shoulder the moment it happened. His hand shot out, plowed into her, and wrapped around her. He brought her into his eyeline. “Let’s - let’s go inside.”

Adelaide wanted to protest. She was fine. Just a little fall. Nothing to be worried about. But she was worried and she did want to go inside. So instead, she said nothing.

Relatively speaking, the storm was mild. Ian had yet to see a funnel or anything slightly resembling one, and already the wind seemed to be dying down. The occasional debris flew through the sky, though it was nowhere near them. Unfortunately, mild wind to him was strong wind to Adelaide. And he knew she wouldn’t admit to feeling unsafe.

Once they were inside, Adelaide couldn’t help but ask, “We’re safe in here, right?” The storm was cool, but the notion that there was a natural force so powerful that it could throw grown humans into the air would not leave her head.

“Without a doubt.”

“You said they can literally destroy homes.”

“Yeah,” he paused to think. “But not this one.”

“You’re just lying to make me feel better.”

“Maybe.”

Adelaide could still hear the wind whipping outside, its high-pitched scream tearing through the air. She could still hear scattered objects being thrown about.

She allowed herself one last question. “Why would the Earth destroy itself like this?” If a tornado annihilated anything in its path, why would nature produce one? If it killed plants and animals and people, what benefit did that serve?

Ian hummed. What an interesting way to look at it. He had to think about his answer. “I don’t think the Earth operates on the same - on the same scale of thought as, um, we do.” He explained how tornados worked - the warm air meeting the cold fronts, etc etc. He explained why Texas had them more than other areas. He explained the unpredictability of weather and how that was one of the fundamental tenets of Chaos Theory. Always with the Chaos Theory.

The academic, detached nature of his ramblings calmed Adelaide down. She supposed it was harder to be frightened of something when the reasoning was so obvious, so ordinary.

A loud slam against the house made both of them jump.

Ian laughed it off, but Adelaide picked at her fingernails. “Do you have anything else I can push off your counter?” In that moment, she elected to ride out the storm outside the walls. Not that anything bad would happen, but…just in case.

Ian wordlessly pulled the plastic cup back out and set it next to her. He knew what she was getting at. It was the same old song and dance. She was nervous and she didn’t want to admit it. She wanted to stay out here with him but she didn’t want to admit it.

Normally, he’d tease her about it. But for now, Ian was feeling generous. And maybe his ego enjoyed the implication that she trusted him to get her through a storm. That in any weather, Adelaide would choose him.

Anonymous: Short story idea… Adelaide needing to use the phone to call Ian at work for a sudden emergency: A pipe burst and the house flooding! 🌊 Would she have to swim to get to the table? It would probably only be a couple of inches of water, but enough to make Adelaide freak out. Adelaide:"In what circumstance do you think I'd have the chance to swim? I haven't found the lake in your walls yet." 👀👀Here’s your lake in the walls😈🏊‍♀️ Thank you 😊

CANON

 ~

Anonymous: Angsty idea 😈 (After the events of ch 17) Ian returns to his house in Texas, and decides to cut into the wall where Adelaide lived. (Out of morbid curiosity or a need to feel more connected to her. Idk). But he finds the picture they took on Halloween and other memoried of their time together. Trinkets she made for/from borrowing and the gifts he gave her. Her room, her nest and her drawings.🥲🫠

CANON

~

Without a real grasp on fine motor skills, the door slammed harder than intended. Whatever. Ian immediately found whatever drink was both closest and highest in alcohol content.

He and Sarah got into another fight. Again. It wasn't relationship-ending, but it was big enough for him to angrily storm out and drive the twenty hours to Austin. Already he couldn’t remember what the argument was about, even though it had only been about a day or so.

Regardless, they’d make up soon. They always did. For the time being, he was going to get wildly drunk.

***

The hole in the corner of the backsplash really wasn’t that large. Five inches maybe? But it may as well have taken up the whole wall for how much attention it drew. He couldn’t look away from it.

There was no point in covering it up. He knew it was there. There was no point in fixing it. Beforehand, somebody used it. Nowadays, he was hardly home. But when he was home…

How long had it been? A year? Two? Five? Did it matter? Whether it happened yesterday or a decade ago, Adelaide was gone, and she’d be gone every day thereafter. And it was his fault.

Something warm and wet tickled Ian's skin as it trickled lightly down his knuckle. Then the stinging, searing pain set in. It seemed as though he had punched a hole in the drywall. Hm.

Splintered pieces of wall fell away as he slowly withdrew his hand. Before he could turn away, a brief glimmer within the foundations caught his eye. Stupidly, he investigated.

The first thing that stuck out to him was an Altoid tin. It looked like fabric had been hastily pushed off of it and its lid sat ajar. A pencil ran the length of the room, at least from what he could tell, and various trinkets hung off of it - rubber bands, thread, safety pins, paper clips, even a screw. Most of what was inside was obscured by darkness, though.

Just as he suspected, Ian had accidentally found Adelaide’s house. Out of all the places he could have put a hole into his wall, it was here.

God, she would be so unbelievably pissed right now. If she were here. He could imagine the absolute thrashing he would receive for putting a hole through her entire house.

Then, to his horror, he realized: He put a hole through her entire house. He was strong enough to put a hole through her entire house. His hands were large enough to put a hole through her entire house. Ian regarded those hands as if they belonged to a monster.

Against his better judgement, he peered back in. He couldn’t see much and, since there was already a hole, there wasn’t any reason to not make it bigger. He took out a pocket knife and carved further.

With enough light filtering in, the home became much clearer. It was messy, cobwebs having nearly overrun the place, but despite the clutter, it was hauntingly empty. Someone had clearly lived here once. A long, long time ago.

A matchbox served as a table, and it was slightly open so that the matches were accessible. Other lighting sources made themselves present through birthday candles and Christmas tree light bulbs. Another table was crafted from a button and broken toothpick fragments, and for a chair, she used a cork for the seat and cardboard wrapped in fabric for the back. Her bed just looked to be a pile of fabric scraps.

There were plenty of things Ian recognized as his, such as an overturned shot glass and a stress ball he got from some conference somewhere. One thimble and three plastic medicine cups sat full of water, and he couldn’t help but laugh at the playing card that hung on the wall. Adelaide had drawn a mustache and glasses over the Queen.

Ian took his time shuffling through and studying each item. Adelaide was always so private for reasons opaque to him, and without her here, he indulged his urge to snoop. It wasn’t like she was using any of it anymore…

Some stuff had to be pulled out for him to see, and even then he couldn’t properly make out what half of it was, though if by some miracle he could, he still didn’t know what it was for. There were pieces of paper with miniscule images clearly drawn on them, but it was anyone’s guess what they depicted. Ian wouldn’t be able to see them if he tried, even with a magnifying glass, and the papers themselves were so tiny that they could easily be swept away with a gentle breath.

Everything in the house looked so lived in and purposeful. When removed from context, however, each piece just looked small and dinky in his grasp. A particular woven basket came apart completely in his large, clumsy fingers.

Not only would Adelaide be furious that he destroyed her house, she’d be even angrier when she learned he was going through her things, and angrier still when she learned that he broke some of them. He could almost hear her voice scolding him in his head.

Stop talking about her like she’s here .

His gaze landed on a large polaroid. Well, large compared to its surroundings. Ian instantly shut his eyes, wishing he had never carved into the walls in the first place. It was the picture of them from Halloween. He remembered her makeshift spider costume and his own costume that was so half-assed he couldn't even tell what it was. He remembered how freaked out she got when he pulled out the camera, and how he let her have the picture as consolation. He remembered how the flash went off before they were both ready, resulting in the horrible image resting against the wall in front of him.

Finally, Ian stepped back and saw the situation for what it was. A giant mess he’d have to patch up. Great. This brought an immediate headache, and what was it all for? To find closure, or something of the sort? That rarely worked, and it obviously wasn’t working here.

Closure…perhaps he should just get rid of it all. Keeping Adelaide’s belongings only fueled the delusion that she would return. If he trashed it, that was clear acceptance. Burn the old, make room for the new.

Did he want to accept it, though? He should accept it. But did he want to? He should.

The deliberation grew to be irritating. Mind made up, Ian stumbled his way over to find a metal bucket and, refusing to think about it too hard, grabbed fistfuls of Adelaide’s belongings. He could feel some of them snap under the pressure, and what didn’t break in his gigantic hands certainly didn’t withstand the fall into the bucket.

He lit one of her borrowed matches and dropped it in, watching the contents burn.

***

Not one to exaggerate, this was perhaps the headache to end all headaches.

Ian groggily sat up and rubbed his eyes. He felt his bare feet on the floor, felt the warm sun shining through the window. He drew the curtains closed.

Next thing he knew, he was trudging through the kitchen, and his eyes landed on the massive hole in the wall, as well as the debris that collected underneath it. He groaned.

Then, he noticed the metal can from the night before, but it was knocked over, its charred contents spilled out everywhere. Hm.

He couldn’t say if it was the right decision. He certainly couldn’t say if there was a right decision. It didn’t make him feel good, though. In fact, quite the opposite.  Everything Adelaide owned, all gone, and with it, Adelaide. There was no getting it back, just like there was no getting her back. Fitting, he supposed. In a logical sort of sense. Emotionally, however, devastating. Pretty emotionally devastating.

Nothing he couldn’t sweep up, though. Broom in hand, he shuffled all the dust back into the bucket. Most of it went back in, but the broom kept catching on something. He gave it a few more hearty tries, each time growing more and more irrationally frustrated. Just short of breaking the broom in half, Ian finally bent down to pick up whatever it was and slam it into the bucket.

Once his hands closed around it though, his heart sank, and the spot it once occupied filled with dread. One by one, each of his fingers curled slowly and securely around the item, his gaze fixed on a distant wall, expressionless beyond the tightness in his jaw.

He squeezed it, feeling the sharp edges of cracked glass, feeling the burnt leather crumble away. Ian didn’t even look at it, knowing it would break him. He remembered when that thing went missing. He remembered when Adelaide gave it back to him as a gift, as if it wasn’t already his to begin with.

So perhaps it was foolish, selfish even, that he marched to his room, opened a drawer, and shoved the ruined watch into the back corner. Ian never hoped for anything. Hope didn’t result in action. If Ian wanted something, he got it. So even though he refused to acknowledge it as such, his decision to keep the watch was a declaration of his belief in hope. Because he didn’t have anything else left. There wasn’t anything he could do about Adelaide. But maybe hope would prevail, in the end. What did he have to lose, anyway?

sedge-meadow: hello, it’s you know whooo! would love to read your take on AYLAM… (Adelaide You are a Literal Alien to Me). Halloween shenanigans? or something along the lines of morphine!Ian lolll?! an evil AU where Ian really is an ethically suspect scientist?! dealer’s choice ✨

CANON

~

The door slammed, and Adelaide took cover behind the basil plant on the windowsill. She knew without a doubt that it was Ian, but there was no guarantee he'd be without guest, and she wanted to maintain the habit anyway.

As usual, it was just Ian. At the same time she peeked out from behind the plant, Ian dropped his boots to the ground with a thud so heavy, Adelaide felt it from her high perch. They bounced a couple times before settling far apart and far away from where Ian usually left his shoes.

Adelaide watched him saunter in her general direction, nearly tripping over himself several times in the process and mumbling a string of curses. Each step was sudden and unpredictable, no rhythm to the movement, no destination in mind. It was like each foot wanted something different, and Ian didn’t even bother looking at them. If Adelaide didn’t know any better, she’d describe his overall attitude as careless.

As he got closer, his goal became clear. The fridge. Adelaide was more curious than anything, but her defenses went up almost immediately. This was not normal behavior, which meant it needed to be closely monitored.

Ian opened the fridge and pulled out a drink. While he was still a good distance away, and now that his hands were occupied, Adelaide felt safe to call attention to herself.

“Hey. How was work?”

Ian’s head whipped up as if the sound surprised him. As if she didn’t ask this question at least once a week. His eyes lit up when they spotted her. “Della!” he shouted, louder and much more enthused than normal. He cracked open the drink in his hands, and a loud hiss emanated from it. A little of the beverage bubbled up over the edge and spilled onto his fingers. He hardly noticed.

Ian rounded the table, clipping his hip on the corner along the way, but again he didn’t seem to notice. He approached at breakneck speeds and wasn't slowing down, so Adelaide backed up a couple steps.

“You’re excited,” she said, mostly to figure out why.

“Why shouldn’t I be, huh?” he said, a hint of sarcasm coloring his voice. His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Here. Come here.”

Ian didn’t wait for her to ‘come here’. He reached out, overestimating just how much speed and power he needed to grab Adelaide. His hand plowed into her and Adelaide was plunged into chaos. His palm slammed into her body, but before she could get knocked around, his fingers cushioned her on the other side. They pressed her into his palm, firmly securing her in place between them. The first thing she noticed beyond the forming headache was a sticky residue with a sickly smell so strong it made her eyes water.

Then she was whisked away to God knew where, the whole world a messy blur. The sticky substance threatened to keep her when Ian let go, but his skin peeled away from hers in a mildly painful and decidedly gross fashion. She fell onto his chest, out of breath.

Adelaide scrambled off of him as fast as she could, letting herself tumble to the couch below. When she made it to the far side (as far away as she could possibly be before the arm of the couch stopped her), she glanced nervously back at Ian, who was rubbing his face with his hands. His head lolled to the side and he eyed her.

“What gives?!” Adelaide said, letting her irritation take over, mostly to avoid engaging with her nerves.

“You don’t know…you don’t know how lucky you are, Della.”

“Not really feeling it right now.” She absently rubbed her arms, and she could still feel the leftover residue.

“You don’t have to - you don’t have to deal with…this. You live in the walls.”

Adelaide didn’t know what ‘this’ meant and, furthermore, she didn’t feel that warranted a response.

“Tell me about it.”

“What’s to tell?”

“Everything.” Without warning, Ian scooped her up again and dropped her on the table in front of him.

Adelaide fell into a pile, landing hard on her elbow. “Quit doing that!” It was worth griping about, even if she had no way to enforce it. The day she stopped griping would be the day she lost all control.

“Ah, please,” Ian mumbled in a tone that said she was clearly exaggerating the severity of his actions. As he spoke, he sank into a disinterested slouch.

That was it. Adelaide was out of here. She stomped off, reaching for her hook, steam coming out of her nose.

Mid-step, she was suddenly connected to a bungee cord. Her body snapped back, and she had trouble understanding what happened until she reached behind her to see what she possibly could have been caught on. Her small fingers met the unmistakable feeling of skin. There was absolutely no way…

The sheer audacity of Ian to pinch the back of her shirt and hold her back left her stunned. Adelaide always knew alcohol was bad news. It made Beans act weird and more recently, it made her act weird, and she wanted nothing to do with it. She knew Ian to drink here and there, but he never acted like this. It made him bolder and more condescending, and she really didn’t like it. He was bold and condescending enough as it was.

In vain, Adelaide tried to pull away, but he had her held fast. She grit her teeth. “Let. Go.”

Ian did as told, albeit reluctantly, and Adelaide fell flat on her face. She wasn’t sure if she could call this battle won, considering she was still on the table and not upright, but he did listen to her, and it did appear as though she would be able to make a getaway.

While she was still recovering, Adelaide was hoisted into the air by the back of her shirt as if attached to a crane. Apparently Ian wasn’t done.

Somewhere in the back of Ian’s mind, he knew what he was doing was, to some degree, wrong. Adelaide would probably be, to some degree, angry at him. But when he felt the soft fabric of her shirt between his fingers, he was immediately fascinated, and he wanted a second feel. It was probably so soft because it was so thin. And it was so thin, in fact, that he was surprised it supported her weight as she swung around. Though, Adelaide didn’t particularly weigh that much. The proof was pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Regardless, Ian needed a better look.

From afar, the shirt was a muddy but solid beige color. Upon closer inspection, it was composed of a hundred threads, mixed hues of browns, grays, and blacks, with faint hints of even more colors. He wondered how many of those threads came from his own belongings.

“Ian!” Adelaide choked out, now fully panicked. While Ian pondered the strength of her shirt, she fully expected it to tear. His other hand waiting far below provided little comfort and, even without looking, she could feel his watchful gaze. His breath smelled like a dying animal.

At her exclamation, Ian was pulled back to the present. “Ah, right,” he conceded, slowly setting her down. He lowered himself to the floor and let his arms rest on either side of her.

It was unclear to Adelaide if this blockade was intentional. It was always hard to tell if he even thought about those kinds of things. How his towering arms were more like walls than anything. How the simple act of resting them there was more like corralling her in, a signal that he wanted her to stay put, a demonstration that he could make her stay put.

“What is your deal?!” she shouted.

“M’sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Uh, yeah. Whatever.”

“Not ‘whatever!’”

“Tell me about the walls.”

“Ian Malcolm, we just went through perhaps the worst thing imaginable. We were hunted by literal dinosaurs, things that shouldn’t exist-”

“-You shouldn’t exist-”

“-and you want to know how I clear dust from the walls?!”

Ian’s head fell like it suddenly ran out of battery. When it came back up, a shadow had fallen over his face. It was clear he was deep in thought, but Adelaide had no idea what those thoughts were. In the end, he snatched up his beer, took a swig, and slammed it back down on the table. The impact bounced Adelaide into the air, hopefully hiding her jump. She tried her best to ignore how the glass bottle was nearly three times her size.

“Seriously, can’t you at least acknowledge what happened? Your leg is still-”

“Della-”

“And they don’t even believe you! That’s gotta-”

“Della. Stop,” Ian said forcefully.

Adelaide stopped. He was already in a poor state of mind. It was be suicidal to push him into an even worse mood.

“Why don’t you, uh…Why don’t you…” He made grabbing fingers at Adelaide. She winced, ready to either make a break for it or curl herself into a protective ball to shield her more vital organs.

When he didn’t get closer, she assumed he was asking for permission to hold her. “I don’t want you to touch me right now.”

“No.”

“Okay…?” She noticed his eyes were not quite aimed at her head. “My bag?”

“Yeah. Lemme - lemme see.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Her bag was fragile, the objects inside even more fragile. Sometimes they fell apart in her own hands, so she doubted they’d last long in his.

“Why?” he exhaled a laugh. “You don’t trust me?”

“No, I don’t trust that,” Adelaide explained, pointing at the evil drink.

Without missing a beat, Ian pulled the bottle off the table and set it next to him on the floor. “There. Gone."

"That’s not what I…,” Adelaide took a deep breath. “I’m leaving. Please don’t stop me.” She meandered in the opposite direction, taking her sweet time to see whether he would.

“Yeah, I, um, I would too, if - if I were you. For the best, I’d imagine.” Ian wouldn’t look at her, his eyes distant. He drummed his fingers absentmindedly against the table, causing vibrations Adelaide could feel.

Adelaide narrowed his eyes. He didn’t want to be alone. Neither did she, really, but it also wasn’t safe to be anywhere near him. She watched each finger repeatedly strike the surface of the table, already angry with herself for letting pity fuel her decision.

Pity for a giant. How kind of me.

Adelaide dug one of the least fragile and more replaceable things out of her bag. A severed pen cap. She walked up to his other hand and shoved her makeshift cup into it. The act of kindness was unexpected, so it tumbled out of his grasp. Upon noticing the faint tickle and locating its source, Ian delicately pinched the cap between two fingers. Just in doing so, it collapsed a little under the pressure, but the old plastic remained in tact.

“Do you use this for everything?” Ian asked.

“No.”

“Utensils?”

“Just my knife, pretty much.”

A new glimmer appeared in his eye, and he pushed the cup back into her hands. His expectant look told her he wanted to see more and, with the newfound knowledge that he could still be relatively gentle, she produced a piece of lead.

“What are you handing me?”

“Pencil. You know, for drawing.”

Ian squinted, leaning in very close, and Adelaide had to force herself to stay put. “I can hardly see it.”

“Right.” Adelaide hurriedly put it away, refusing to dwell on how that made her feel, and she pulled out item after item. She even let him hold her hook and her knife.

Each time Ian handed a belonging back to her, Adelaide stumbled backwards from the force, each time feeling like she was just punched in the stomach. Each time, Ian either didn’t notice or didn’t care. But so far, her belongings remained undamaged.

Ian asked question after question and Adelaide answered to the best of her ability. At one point, he got her to draw a map of the walls. She explained as she went, wondering how much of it he actually absorbed, and of that information, how much he actually understood.

Ian placed a hand on the paper, but just barely clipped Adelaide along the way, bulldozing right over her. He mumbled an apology and dragged the paper closer to get a better look.

Giants never knew the extent of their strength. They couldn’t comprehend how little effort it required on their part to move things around, most of the time unconsciously. Usually, Ian at least tried to understand, but any care to do so at the moment seemed to be obliterated by the alcohol.

He was clumsy and careless and Adelaide was trying her goddamn best to play nice. Since she now knew Ian wouldn’t tell anyone about her, his occasional curiosity was normally more endearing than anything. He currently wanted to know everything about her life, and while she was glad he was gripped by her every word, she thought talking about it was quite boring. Whatever kept his hands off, she supposed.

Though maybe Adelaide could take advantage of the circumstances and get him to talk about things he typically wouldn’t. She’d deal with the moral implications later. “Why don’t they believe you?” Adelaide asked, eyes trained on her crude map.

“Hey. I uh, I told you to stop.”

“You’ve been poking and prodding me all night. I’ve answered all your questions. You at least owe me this.”

Ian laughed. “Um, I don’t owe shit.” He casually waved her off then pushed himself to a stand. The benefits of being tall. Or rather, not small. He could simply remove himself from any and all unsavory conversations.

“You can’t walk away from me!” Adelaide called up to him, trying unsuccessfully to catch his eye and feeling another wave of helplessness crash over her.

“Just watch me.” Two paces later, Ian realized he was being unfair. Not that life was ever fair. It was quite apathetic, actually. He, unfortunately, was not. Resigned, he plopped back down on the couch. “No proof, Della.”

Adelaide was glad he decided to stay, but she knew she had little to do with it. “There’s plenty of proof, what do you mean?” After they came back from Jurassic Park, Ian almost immediately took their story to the public. By doing so, he lost his job and his reputation, and Adelaide simply couldn’t wrap her mind around how or why. The dinosaurs were right there.

“All covered up.” He looked her up and down, then chuckled wryly. “Should’ve, um, should’ve testified about tiny people. At least - at least there’s proof there.”

Adelaide’s heart dropped. Her breath was lost to the wind. “You didn’t-”

“No, I didn’t.”

This did not exactly bring relief. “You won’t-”

“No, I won’t,” Ian said, and his tone indicated that he was annoyed she would even ask. In all honesty though, in the late hours of the many sleepless nights, a fleeting thought would sometimes float across his mind. After losing everything, it wasn’t a hard conclusion to draw that revealing her to the world would almost certainly reestablish his credibility. But it was just a thought, one that would never sprout into an idea, one that he would never consider.

Ian regarded Adelaide pitifully, standing only three inches high on his coffee table. He saw the betrayal in her impossibly small eyes, and it decidedly pissed him off, because how dare she feel that way, but moreover, it pissed him off because she had every reason to feel that way. Not only was he unable to protect her at Jurassic Park, but he was the one that put them there. He was responsible for the trauma inflicted upon them both.

The pain in Ian’s leg flared up and he winced.

“Why would you even say something like that?” Adelaide asked. Even the implication that he could expose her to the world was bone-chilling. It wasn’t like she could stop him. She thought she knew Ian well enough, but she now realized she didn’t know him at all. Who was he when all the chips were down? Something like this, she guessed.

Ian reached out for her, his palm resting on the table with his fingers curled in a relaxed, natural way. Adelaide flinched, her face scrunched up with tension. “Stupid,” Ian answered. “Stupid. Just uh…being stupid. You know I would never.”

“Do I?”

Ian silently let his hand wait there. An invitation. To accept would have meant she trusted him. To decline…well, to decline would have meant the opposite.

Once again, Adelaide felt pity toward him. He was sad. She was small. It appeared as though there were two pitiful beings in the room that night.

Adelaide slowly and awkwardly leaned into his hand. It snapped shut.

“Nononono,” Adelaide cried as she was lifted into the air, filled with regret. Why did she trust him time and time again when, more often than not, it came back to bite her?

Once again, Ian dropped her on his chest. She rolled a bit on impact, though she didn’t get very far this time. He draped his hand over her to prevent her from either accidentally falling off or jumping on her own accord. Realistically, Adelaide could escape if needed, the gaps between his massive fingers barely large enough to squeeze through. And despite his thoughtless actions throughout the night thus far, she knew this decision was intentional.

That was why she trusted him time and time again, even when, more often than not, it came back to bite her. Because even when he exerted his Bean power, he always gave her a way to escape. Because even when he annoyed her, he still made sure she was safe. Because when she needed help, he was there. When he needed help…Adelaide should be there.

Even when it was super uncomfortable, as exemplified by her present predicament. Ian’s fingers did not stay put. They began to wander as if they had a mind of their own. They probably did, for all Adelaide could tell. Under her little cave, blind to the rest of the world,  it was hard to imagine the true scope of a Bean, hard to imagine that these invading fingers were attached to something much larger and much more powerful.

Ian felt the skin along Adelaide’s arm, felt the miniscule bones underneath, registering them only as a unit. Her arm was too small to feel the individual bones. He carefully lifted the arm up, then pinched it between his thumb and finger. No thicker than the wick of the candle burning nearby. Probably just as fragile too. He slid his grip down toward her fingers, which he could only just make out through his own thick skin. Her clothes were soft, her skin was soft, her hair was soft. All on account of how thin and how small everything was, no doubt. If they were on the same scale, he could only assume there would hardly be any differences between them.

Adelaide held her breath. She knew he was being as careful as his drunken mind could coordinate, but when his fingers moved, they tugged slightly on whatever body part they had grasped between them. The more she tensed, the worse the problem became. She had to relax.

“You are an alien to me, Della,” Ian mumbled. Adelaide felt his voice travel right through her, a sensation she could never get used to.

Everything that Ian could feel was the same - hair, skin, bones, presumably organs - all in complete miniature. It was the exact same, but so, so different. It resulted in a life that was so, so different.

“I’m not from outer space,” Adelaide said. She wasn’t even sure if she was joking, too focused on anticipating Ian’s next move.

“You might as well be,” he laughed.

“...Okay.”

Adelaide stayed with Ian until he fell asleep. As soon as she felt his breaths fall into that deep, rhythmic pattern, she wiggled out of the cave, and for the first time that night, she felt like she could breathe. But her work was far from over.

Adelaide stopped back home before she climbed up the mountain that was the kitchen counter, now equipped with a thimble. She tossed it in the kitchen sink, pushed the cold water handle on, and lowered herself slowly into the basin. It hardly took any time at all to fill the thimble. She shoved a piece of cork into the top to keep the water from spilling, strapped the whole thing to her back, and carefully climbed out.

Her next stop was the rarely traversed bathroom cabinet. Adelaide wiped the sweat from her brow but knew she couldn’t afford to take a break. Not if she wanted to be in bed before sunrise.

She located a sheet of plastic packaging and pushed one of the pills through the thin foil with only a bit of effort. It wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky, nearly the length of her calf. She hoisted it into her arms and set off, really starting to feel the added weight of the water on her back.

Upon reaching the coffee table, Adelaide groaned. She’d have to make two trips. Ian better appreciate her come morning. Or else…or else something.

She left the pill behind on the ground and used the first climb to transport the thimble. She left it by the paper, then went to retrieve the pill. Once the items were where they were supposed to be, Adelaide dug the lead back out from her bag and drew an arrow on her shitty map pointing to them. That way Ian would understand the intent. Probably. Hopefully. She couldn’t take pills, but she knew that some were supposed to help with headaches, and if there was one thing she remembered from when she got drunk, it was that the following morning presented the, without exaggeration, worst headache she ever felt in her life. Water was her closest ally during that time.

Adelaide fully intended to go back home after the whole ordeal. She longed for her own bed, she longed for the enclosed comfort of the walls, especially after the numerous close calls with a giant, drunken Bean. She loved Ian, but she really didn’t want anything to do with him at the moment.

But with the way her limbs shook and the way her eyes drooped, she figured a quick rest up on the table wouldn't hurt.

***

Unfortunately, Ian awoke on the couch, which was never a good sign for the day ahead. Or the night before. Each bone cracked in a mildly painful way as he sat up. Squinting in the sunlight, he made out a couple unusual items sitting on the table before him.

The first was a cup of water or, rather, a thimble of water. Next to it, a pill. From the look of it, he had to assume it was long expired over-the-counter allergy medication. And if, for some reason, he mistook who these things were for, there was an arrow conveniently drawn on a nearby piece of paper pointing to them.

Neither of these things were useful to him right now - not even a sip of water and a pill that was not meant to relieve headaches, but the sentiment came across loud and clear. His lips quirked up in a small smile.

Next to all of it was the culprit herself, curled up with her bag supporting her head. Ian remembered at least a few of the things he said and did the previous night, so he was surprised to see her out here this morning. She was so stubborn sometimes.

One of the things he recalled was a conversation regarding Adelaide’s preference for dark, enclosed spaces, like she was some kind of spider. It was fascinating to learn how open spaces made her feel exposed, how overhead lights felt more like spotlights to her. Spaces that most humans would call claustrophobic and scary, Adelaide called cozy.

And so, knowing full well that he was overstepping but not quite able to bring himself to care, (after all, he was already in for a day of apologies. What was one more added to the mix?) Ian scooped her up and brought her over to the wall. He placed a clean hankie on the ground, and while his hand was too big to fit through the opening, he was able to set her gently within the threshold. As he stood back up, he regarded her from so far above, noticing the way she nearly disappeared from this vantage point. What a fascinating little life she lived in a fascinating little world, all out of sight from human beings. Ian thought he should ask her more about it sometime under less…heightened circumstances. If she would let him. For now, he needed some ibuprofen or something.

Anonymous: If Adelaide suddenly became human sized, what would be the first thing she would do? Places and people to see? Foods to try? How would she or others react to her change Thanks!

NON-CANON

~

Adelaide’s stomach grumbled again, this time accompanied by an odd pain. It burned like she swallowed acid, though she couldn’t remember being poisoned recently.

She was seconds away from excusing herself when her vision whited out and her ears rang at such a piercing decibel that she could no longer hear Ian’s ramble about…whatever it was he was rambling about. She clutched her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut, nearly doubling over. And then all at once, it ceased.

Weird. If only that was the weirdest thing she was destined for that afternoon, but Adelaide was unknowingly in for a whole world of weird. She thought she could handle weird. She dealt with weird on a daily basis, most of which resulted from Human Bean shenanigans, but even this was out of her wheelhouse.

Adelaide opened her eyes to be met with pure, unadulterated shock. Ian’s jaw was practically on the floor as his eyes jumped around, taking in every inch of her. Or rather, every foot of her.

It was then that Adelaide realized she was not craning her neck to draw these conclusions. All it took to see Ian’s slack-jawed expression was a slight upward tilt of her head, barely even noticeable. Either she grew, or the whole world just shrank.

They stared at each other for so long it bordered on comical.

Finally, Ian pushed himself away from leaning on the counter and took a couple steps toward her. Adelaide lifted her legs up and scooched backwards, banging her head on the cupboard above and jumping when a series of metal objects clattered to the ground. She had knocked them over in her frantic attempt to keep the distance between herself and Ian. She had accidentally knocked over pots and pans. Massive, immovable pots and pans. She looked back at Ian with panicked eyes.

“Della?” he said cautiously.

“What happened?!”

“You’re…uh……big.”

“Why - how?”

“I…,” he shook his head and blew air from his cheeks. “I could not tell you.”

It was a lot to take in for Ian as well. There were things he came to accept he would never be able to learn about her just by nature of her size, unless of course Adelaide let him use a magnifying glass, but they both knew that would never happen.

Now, he could see every fine detail. He could see that her eyes were hazel. He could see that her well-worn clothes hung awkwardly on her body, the stitching bulky and crooked. He could see a slight splash of freckles across her cheeks and faint scar on her eyebrow and the permanent rashes on her elbows. It was all fascinating, but frankly it was all too much.

He imagined it was probably worse for her, so he offered her a hand to pull her off the counter. 

Once she was on her feet, Adelaide was suddenly overcome with nausea. She was way too high up. Ian tried to pull away, but her hand remained locked in his.

Adelaide marveled at the way their hands fit together. Hers was still smaller, but the notion that her fingers could wrap around the back of his hand and vice versa, all while their palms met in the middle, was unbelievable. The thin skin, the bones and muscles underneath - it was all so moveable.

Ian cleared his throat, breaking her out of her trance. Standing this close, she still had to look way up at him, her eyes only landed somewhere around his chest, but her feet were on the floor and her eyes were nearly at the height of his chest.

“Hm. Well. You’re still short,” he said.

Feeling the tension break, Adelaide laughed and playfully shoved his chest. “Whatever.”

Ian winced, rubbing the site of impact. “And strong.”

By then, Adelaide’s attention was already elsewhere. She bent down to pick up all the kitchenware she knocked over. She placed a hand on either side of a pot and lifted it with ease, watching intently. Not five minutes ago, that pot could have been a swimming pool for her. Now…

One by one, she placed each item back where it belonged with the same reverence as the last.

Ian frowned. There were a ton of interesting facets of human life, and so many of them just opened themselves to Adelaide. None of them involved picking things up off the floor. Still, he couldn’t help the amused grin that grew on his face because of course, out of all the remarkable wonders of the world, Adelaide would find that interesting.

Once everything was in place, Adelaide knew what she wanted to do next. She raced over to the end of the kitchen, paying Ian no mind, and flicked on the lightswitch with her pointer finger. The room skewed a bit warmer, having already been illuminated by the sun outside, but she stared at the overhead fixture nonetheless. It was aglow. She turned back to the lightswitch and flicked it off. She turned back to the light. It was off. The brightness of the room was under her control, making her feel immensely powerful. She did this a couple more times, until Ian grabbed her hand in his. “I think that’s enough with the - with the lights.”

Her eyes landed on the fridge next. An inaccessible oasis full of riches beyond even the strongest borrower’s dreams. Did she dare…? Adelaide slowly wrapped her hand around the sleek, white handle and gave it a sharp tug. It was heavier than she thought, the suction of the door holding strong, but it was no match for her own newfound strength. A blast of cold air hit her face and she smiled. All the food she could ever want was at her fingertips. Her eyes zeroed in on a bowl of grapes.

They were so tiny. She picked one off the bundle and rolled it between her fingers. It suddenly gave under the pressure, exploding in her hand and dripping juice onto the floor.

“Woah,” Adelaide muttered under her breath. She put it in her mouth and munched on it while she regarded the rest of the fridge’s contents, but her attention kept returning to the grapes. An uneasy feeling snuck up on her and landed in her chest. “I was stuck in there.”

“Pardon?” Ian came up behind her.

“I was stuck in there. Before. But it’s so…I was stuck in there?!”

Ian placed his hands on Adelaide’s shoulders and she jumped. “Yeah, and I saved you from there.”

Adelaide shut the refrigerator faster than anything she’d ever done in her whole life. She had just grown around five feet and somehow, she felt smaller than ever. The spaces in between those grapes were barely visible. She could reach a finger in there maybe. And her whole body was stuck in there.

“I want to open some doors,” she decided aloud, then took off to find one.

“You want to open…you want to open doors?” Ian repeated, making sure he heard that correctly. As he followed her, he was able to confirm so. Even before he sauntered into the room, he heard the rhythmic slam of a door closing over and over again.

“You may very well have limited, precious time at this, uh, stature, and this is how you - how you choose to spend it?”

“Shut up, you wouldn’t get it,” Adelaide said, unflinching in her pursuit to open and close every single door in the house.

“I suppose not.”

Without thinking much about it, she placed her hand on the knob of the front door. Just as she saw Ian do countless times, she twisted her wrist and pulled. The door opened. The breeze hit her face. And suddenly, Adelaide faced the outside world.

Her legs wouldn’t move. The terrifying realization that she now had the whole universe within her reach only resulted in paralysis. There were too many options and she simply couldn’t think of one.

“Would you like to go outside?” Ian asked.

“No. Yes……No. I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s close the door while we - while we think about it.”

Ian laid his hand on the door to push it closed, but Adelaide stopped him. “No, let me do it!”

Ian chuckled but let her do as she demanded. Before she could race off to find some other mundane thing to marvel at, he grabbed her face in his hands. “Hey. Hey. Are you…don’t you think we should, um, figure this…out?”

Adelaide pried his hands away. “What’s to figure out? Like you said, time is precious. I want to do as many Bean things as possible.”

“Right,” Ian sighed, and in that moment he resigned himself to trailing behind her for the rest of the day while she explored the house from her new perspective.

***

“I can’t sleep in the walls…”

“This is true.”

Those were the only words exchanged about it, but as always, Adelaide’s feelings on the matter ran deeper.

It wasn’t as though she was a stranger to sleeping in odd places. On more than one occasion she fell asleep in someone’s pocket. But to stare at the walls and know her home was so close yet so inaccessible was disheartening. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to fit more than a couple fingers in the entrance, and that thought alone kept her from trying. Not to mention, her bed would have just appeared as a couple fabric scraps in a dinky tin that could fit in the palm of her hand.

It was all so small now. Where she previously had vivid nightmares about having to dodge it, she could now use real silverware to eat food. She could prop up a book in her lap and turn the pages with ease. Every single thing that was once imposing and dangerous was now unimpressive. To know that she was downright terrified of some of those things - a jar, a boot, a pair of scissors - only served to make her feel extremely pathetic. That was how Ian saw the world every day. How could he not think of her as pathetic? She was pathetic.

This, combined with the inability to go home, upset Adelaide more than she would’ve liked, and those thoughts only raced harder as she tossed and turned on the couch. Even the couch felt weird, beyond its usual hard, uncomfortable nature. The fabric was too soft, the cushions gave too much under her weight.

Maybe TV would distract her from imagining her old self next to everything, sizing objects up to see how tall she would have been next to them and realizing just how tiny that actually was. But to change the channel would have required an immense amount of effort that she frankly didn’t have the energy to-

The remote was right there. She could just grab it. And press the buttons. All she had to do was extend her arm a little. Even as she did so, the action was confusing and foreign. She squinted from the sudden burst of light when the TV flicked on.

Some show she obviously didn’t recognize was on, and it immediately started to grate on her nerves. Some invisible audience kept laughing at bad jokes every ten seconds and each time it drove Adelaide closer and closer to snapping the remote. The anticipation of it made it even worse, too, knowing it was coming. Then she remembered she could change the channel.

Adelaide cycled through nonsensical TV program after nonsensical TV program. Sports, police, cowboys, more police, more shows with the invisible audience. She eventually settled on one about space with aliens and spaceships and such. It still didn’t hold her interest, but it didn’t irk her, and that was more than enough. If she was lucky, maybe it would even put her to sleep.

There was a sort of freedom that excited her though, about picking the channel. That was her TV show that she chose to watch all on her own, and that kind of privilege only came with the ability to operate the remote.

On all accounts, Adelaide considered herself her own person. She had her own thoughts and opinions and feelings and she was not afraid to voice them to Ian. But she couldn’t help wondering how many of her thoughts and opinions and feelings on certain matters were heavily influenced by him. The sheer amount of choices Adelaide made for herself today showed her just how many she regularly wasn’t making, and she didn’t even realize it.

Something as plain as picking what to watch - what other TV was out there that she didn’t know about because Ian simply didn’t feel it was good or even worthwhile? What food Adelaide ate, where she traveled, who she met…How much control did Ian have over her life and, more importantly, her perception of the world? It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him to make those choices, but the more she thought about it, the more her whole personhood threatened to crumble beneath her.

At that moment, Adelaide decided she wanted to go outside tomorrow. In the meantime, she was starving.

She pushed the blanket to the floor and wandered into the kitchen. She could reach everything.

Her go-to meal awaited her in the cupboard, and it was only when her hand closed around the package of crackers did she realize she could eat anything. Hell, she could make a whole meal.

And that’s how she found herself banging around pots and pans while she munched on an apple, searching for all the stuff she needed to make a meal. Adelaide absently thought about how she was never able to get her sensitive teeth through the thick skin of most fruit, always opting to carve into it with her knife instead. Though it still required a little effort, now her teeth easily sank into the apple, causing the sweet juice to dribble down her chin.

She wiped it away and focused on the task at hand. Adelaide didn't know how to make anything, but spaghetti seemed simple enough. The noodles had to be boiled, so she knew she needed a pot and hot water and the noodles themselves. And sauce. And she remembered liking cheese on it too.

Adelaide filled the pot with water and noodles and set it on the stove and stopped. Now what? She knew to turn one of the knobs, but which one, and how far? After testing a burner by feeling it warm up under her palms, she finally got the water to boil. Was she supposed to put the sauce in the water? Or wait until after? She was pretty sure she had to wait until after.

An indeterminate amount of time passed before Adelaide arbitrarily decided the noodles were done cooking. She dumped as much water as she could into the sink, watching a couple noodles go with it. She wasn’t sure how to help that.

They were then dumped onto a plate, the rest of the hot water spilling over the edges. Then sauce, then cheese. Adelaide smirked. She was pretty good at this.

***

Ian groggily wandered into the kitchen. As he rounded the corner, his eyes fell on the person running around and his heart stopped.

Oh, yeah. He forgot that Adelaide was a regular person now and In His House. Weird.

He opened his awareness to everything else. The smell of something burning. The scattered dishes everywhere, some dirty, some clean.

“I made breakfast,” Adelaide announced.

“No, no. You made a mess is - is what you made.”

Adelaide whipped around. Hurt flashed briefly across her face, then her eyes hardened and her body relaxed. “I’ll clean it up, don’t worry.” She began to scrape the charred remains of what looked like a couple eggs onto a plate. Most of it was hardened onto the pan. What did come off was brown and crusty, flakes spraying off in every direction.

Ian knew she would at least try to clean up after herself, but he had his reservations. It was unlikely she even knew how and, knowing Adelaide, there was a slim chance she would ask for help. Either way, he imagined he’d do most of the cleanup.

He watched her hold the fork like a spear and stab into the food. He watched her take a bite. “Is it any good?” he asked.

“Of course it is,” she said a little too quickly. Her face poorly masked her disgust. “It just needs…salt.”

Adelaide grabbed the salt shaker. In the brief second it sat upright in her grasp, she remembered that it was, or at least used to be, the exact same size as her. Was that how it felt to hold her? Was that how easy it was to move her around?

And then the second was over and she poured a mountain of salt on her something-that-resembled-eggs. She took another bite. “Mmmm,” she hummed in mock satisfaction.

Ian grabbed a fork and tried some. It was awful. “No, you’re right, it’s delicious,” he said, his level of sincerity debatable. Regardless, he threw the fork in the sink.

“I have to teach today,” he said.

“Can I come?” Adelaide felt that was the perfect opportunity to go outside. See the world. Maybe see real people. A way in, so to speak.

“I think that’s a, um, a horrible idea.” 

Ian was still deeply curious about why Adelaide suddenly grew and he was disturbed by her lack of care. He didn’t understand why she didn’t want to understand the why. The why was always important. It was also just odd to have someone in his home, especially someone with a sense of familiarity about the place. And in the back of his mind, the idea of how they’d move forward danced around. A lot of if’s. A lot of variables. A lot of questions.

If this was permanent, Adelaide would have to get used to the world. If there was a way to show it to her, this might have been it. She could sit in on classes, she wouldn’t have to talk much, and she’d get plenty of opportunities to just observe. And he’d be there the whole time in case something went wrong, which was likely. Despite it all, Ian was a bit excited to be given that responsibility.

It was hard to keep the smile off his face, and that was Adelaide’s in. She saw the cracks form before she even laid into her argument. That’s how she knew she had it in the bag.

***

Adelaide stood in the doorway, Ian a couple steps ahead of her, exasperated. “I’m going to be late. Come on. Unless…unless you want to, uh, stay?”

“No, I’m coming.” She almost floated forward, wiggling her toes in her boots. The ground beneath her feet was so smooth, so…walkable.

Ian pushed back past her to close the door. Adelaide didn’t even think to close it. When had she ever had the need to close a door? He marched back out and left Adelaide no choice but to follow. They climbed into the car, and Adelaide had to watch Ian intently as he buckled his seat belt. She repeated the motion and was proud to say that it was a success on the first try. This human stuff was easy.

***

This human stuff was not so easy.

They arrived on ‘campus’ and, for all she was worth, Adelaide could not take her eyes off the first person that walked by. Or the second. Or the third. She vaguely recalled something about staring and being rude, but it was amazing to see Bean after Bean stroll on by, all on her level, and it was even more amazing that they paid her no mind.

Only when someone caught her staring did she finally tear her eyes away. They gave her an odd look, to which she was a little embarrassed. She also couldn’t help the occasional twitch when someone passed too close, the odd flinch when someone’s eyes lingered too long.

“People are going to think - they’re gonna think I abuse you or something. Cut it out,” Ian said, and, when he studied her closer, “And uh, walk normal.”

“How do normal people walk?” Adelaide protested. Did Beans walk differently than borrowers? Why did Ian never point it out? Did he never notice because he couldn’t see her that well? How were Beans supposed to walk? She wasn't sure what she was doing wrong, though her limbs did feel awkward and heavy, and her body on the whole felt like it took up way too much space. The more she thought about it, the worse it became, until she seemed to have forgotten how to walk entirely.

Ian tried to hide his confused but amused smile. “Just like that.”

They arrived at…a building, and Adelaide raced ahead to open the door. When she smugly turned around, the person trailing behind her was not Ian. The woman walked through the door and mumbled a ‘thank you’.

Adelaide flinched when she spoke, then remembered a response was warranted. By the time she had that realization, the woman was halfway down the hallway, so Adelaide chased after her. She grabbed the woman’s shoulders and spun her around. “You’re welcome!”

Despite the self-congratulatory but genuine and friendly smile on Adelaide’s face, the woman regarded her with shock, confusion, and maybe a bit of fear. She rolled her shoulder to get Adelaide to let go then continued on her way, picking up the pace.

Ian slowly followed up, wincing. Adelaide was so awkward, it was almost unbearable. He still wasn’t sure if this was a sound idea, but that was what made it so thrilling.

***

Adelaide was instructed to sit in the back of each classroom and be quiet. This raised alarms in her head, so of course she fought Ian on it, because how dare he tell her to shut up and do nothing. But in all honesty, there was nothing to do or say.

After everything Adelaide had been through her whole life, math and chaos sounded like the least interesting things in the world. She was bored. Even the desk she sat at was infinitely more intriguing than Ian’s lecture, and so was everything else in the room that seemed to be catered exactly to her size.

Lectures and classes passed by in a haze, all blending into one another. Adelaide wasn’t sure how much time had passed before her stomach started to grumble. She realized she desperately wanted something to eat, but the bigger revelation was that she could go get something to eat, all by herself. Maybe she would try one of those vending machine things.

The grumbling got worse and worse until it was painful, until Adelaide recognized that it was not the normal pangs brought on by hunger. Those pangs were the exact same ones she felt the day before...

Adelaide abruptly stood up, her chair scraping against the tile floor and undoubtedly drawing everyone’s attention directly to her. She was too preoccupied with getting out of there to notice, and she scrambled out of the room as fast as she could. The door slammed behind her, but she was already sprinting down the hallway. She had to find somewhere safe. She had to get somewhere where she could-

A flash of white, and the world was different. It was normal.

Adelaide didn’t have time to process her feelings on the matter because she was in the middle of an expansive Bean hallway with absolutely no cover overhead. Even to get from one side to the other would have taken Adelaide a minute or two, where previously, she could’ve easily cleared it in a couple steps.

What was worse - she didn’t have her bag. It wasn’t on her person when she grew, so it remained its normal size. Finding it on the counter, so small and indistinguishable, and knowing that if she tried to retrieve the contents inside she’d break them, made her stomach churn. Adelaide gave it to Ian for safekeeping because she knew she would have either lost it or destroyed it. Ian had more experience being gentle than she did. But that meant she had absolutely no tools at her disposal. She had nothing to defend herself with. Adelaide had a sinking feeling, knowing that she was on her own.

The lights were suddenly a lot brighter, the sounds and smells around her amplified, most of which came from nearby Beans. The ground hummed with energy every time a massive foot struck the surface. Panic set in.

Adelaide's ears rang and her vision tunneled. She pumped her legs harder, looking for anything that could serve as a temporary hiding place. The world moved too fast for her to stop and analyze the pros and cons - if it looked concealed, it was good enough for her. But the hallway was endless.

The ever-present hum of the floor became more defined, turning into a faint rumble, which only grew less and less faint by the second. If Adelaide wasn’t mistaken, that indicated only one thing. A Bean was approaching. Without turning around, there was no way to tell whether it saw her and, furthermore, there was no way to tell whether it was friendly. Whatever the case, the threat of being stepped on, of being crushed into dust, remained the same. Still she pushed her legs harder.

The tiles rushed dizzyingly beneath her feet. They alternated in color - tan, brown, tan, brown - and she tried not to trip over the uneven grooves between them. Was that a piece of gum the size of her head? Gross. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford to get distracted.

A shoe collided with the floor directly behind her, as evidenced by the near-deafening sound and the way her whole body momentarily lost its sense of gravity. Though Adelaide was in the air for less than a second, it was enough to throw off her rhythm, so she stumbled as she came back down. That loss of speed was all it took. The next step that Bean took was headed directly for her, she was sure of it. She ran for all she was worth, and it made her sad to know it was all in vain.

Adelaide smashed into a wall that had not previously been there. Her face lit on fire from the impact, every part of it burning in pain. This had happened enough times for her to know that she ran directly into someone’s hand, and it wasn’t a reach to say she knew what would happen next.

Sure enough, Adelaide was instantly immobilized and her vision disappeared as the hand coiled around her and yanked her into the air. It was taking her somewhere, which meant she needed to get away. Now.

Adelaide kicked and screamed and kicked and screamed. She most likely wouldn’t have screamed if she was thinking straight, but her hope was that doing so would startle the Bean into dropping her or, maybe, it would alert a kinder Bean nearby that she was getting kidnapped. Though, she honestly didn’t know the extent to which the thick skin cushioning her on every side muffled her cries. Probably a lot.

If only she had stayed in the classroom. She would have been in the same predicament, but with a million more hiding places. Sure, someone may have seen her essentially disappear, but that meant Ian would have as well, and he would have known what that meant and he would have known what to do. Not that Adelaide needed him to protect her. She did kinda want him to, though.

The effort to escape only became harder with time. Whoever trapped her must have felt her wriggling around and squeezed just a little tighter to compensate. Not enough to crush her, but enough to tell her to sit still. The implication that they could go further hung in the air.

Additionally, Adelaide felt a tooth, or at least part of one, rattling around in her mouth, and with it came the taste of blood. It must have fallen out when she crashed into the hand. Her nose was also likely broken and her head spun endlessly.

A door slammed closed nearby, and Adelaide would have jumped if she had the room. There was no indication as to where she was. She couldn’t hear anything beyond the blood rushing in ears, couldn’t see anything. So far the Bean had said nothing. They suddenly unfurled their hand, and Adelaide spilled out into the center of the palm, sweaty and disoriented. Panting, she looked up to see who had her very life in their hands.

Jesus fucking Christ.

***

Ian debated following Adelaide out of the room, but if what he suspected was true, then she was going to get herself in more trouble than she could handle. He excused himself and chased after her.

His theory was practically confirmed when there was no sign of her in the long hallway. Ian let his eyes fall to the ground and, sure enough, a small speck was doing its best to make it to the other end. Adelaide was likely running as fast as she physically could, which made Ian feel a little remorseful as it took only a casual ten steps to catch up to her. He also knew that she had no idea who he was or what his intentions were, but he needed to get her out of there lest she draw anyone’s attention, so he skipped the formalities and wasted no time snatching her off the ground. He could feel her fight him and could even hear faint yelling, but he didn’t notice when his hand reflexively tightened to keep her in place.

It was irrelevant at the moment but still interesting to note that it had been exactly 24 hours since Adelaide grew. Hmm.

The nearest place Ian could find was the restroom. As soon as he was sure it was clear, he opened his hand and let her collapse into the divot at the center. The stress instantly evaporated when he saw she was fine, and even more so when she recognized it was him. She was going to give him a heart attack one of these days.

“What the hell!?” Adelaide shouted, panting in between each word. She punched the surface of his hand, even if it was a bit childish, but it was the only impactful way to show her frustration. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Are you okay?”

Adelaide spit out her tooth fragment and held it up to him. The context clues were enough for him to know what it was, but she wondered if he could actually see it. After a moment of silence, she added, “Also, I think my nose is broken.”

Adelaide glanced around. She really was small again. It physically felt good, it felt like she had returned to normalcy, but the timing was inconvenient and the environment around her was overwhelming. Mere minutes ago, she stood eye to eye with Beans. Now those eyes were the size of her head, and a pair of them held her under their watchful gaze. Now she sat comfortably (or uncomfortably) in the palm of one of those Beans. Before, the fixtures in the bathroom were usable as intended. Now they were scalable buildings. Now the door was immovable.

Ian’s lips flattened into a thin line. “Sorry.”

Adelaide hardly heard the apology. Just the sound of his voice brought her outrage right back to front and center again. “You know not to grab!”

“You wouldn’t stop running-!”

“Maybe if you said something-”

“There wasn't time-”

“And you didn’t have to squeeze so tight-”

“Right, and let you fall-”

“I wouldn’t fall-”

“You were panicked, of course you would have-”

“It felt like I ran into a brick wall-”

“I said I was sorry-”

“And that’s supposed to make it all better-”

Ian lightly placed his finger against Adelaide’s mouth, intending to get her to stop talking, but it really covered her whole face. They were talking over each other completely at that point, wasting their breath on an argument that could be had later.

Adelaide sputtered and tried to push away the intruding finger.

“I’m uh, I’m sorry for hurting you. I’m not sorry for getting you out of there. We’ll look at your nose - we’ll look at it - at it later. I have to get back.” Ian finally pulled his finger away.

“I can look at my own nose,” Adelaide muttered. Then, louder, “Can’t we just go home?” She had seemingly run out of all available energy for the rest of the day. Maybe the rest of the week. She was exhausted and in an immense amount of pain.

“Can’t, Della. Sorry.” With the knowledge that he hurt her and could easily hurt her again in mind, Ian placed Adelaide in his pocket as gently as he could.

Adelaide clenched her jaw to prevent another outburst, but this only made the pain in her face flare up. She went from an unstoppable force to being confined in a pocket, all in a matter of minutes. She flopped down and let out the most world-weary sigh, hoping for the day to pass by as quickly as possible.

It didn’t, of course. Adelaide only became more restless and antsy as time dragged on. Even with Ian’s voice enveloping her at a near deafening level, she couldn’t bring herself to listen to it. It was boring and she was mad at him. Every time she tried to make herself more comfortable, a slight push from outside told her to sit still.

In between endless classes and meetings, Adelaide had to say something. “I cannot take this much longer,” she moaned, dragging herself to the lip of the pocket.

Ian lightly tapped her head twice, ushering her back in. There were people everywhere. “That’s what you get, um, that’s what you get for wanting to tag along.”

Miffed, Adelaide pulled herself up again. She didn’t care if there were people around. It was her choice if she wanted to be seen, not his. “How was I supposed to know this would happen?”

Ian gave her a sad look. He understood, or at least thought he did. There was no way for either of them to predict this, and it was far more unfortunate for her than it was for him. He couldn’t imagine there was much to stimulate her mind in there. “It’ll be over lickety-split. No time - no time at all. Alright?” When she didn’t respond, he nudged her side. “Alright?” When she didn’t respond, he nudged her side again. “Alright?”

“Alright,” Adelaide conceded, batting his finger away but feeling herself smile a little. Despite her sour mood, she knew he was only looking out for her, and she didn’t know what she would have done if he didn’t show up. She just had to endure a little while longer.

***

Adelaide was grateful to be back where she belonged, on the counter, 3 inches tall.

Doing human things was exciting, and a small part of her had to admit she could get used to the luxuries of living life at that size. Everything came so easily. But what would she even do as a human? Get a job? Yeah, right.

Her hiding spaces as a human would be limited too. Adelaide didn’t love being away from home and she missed her belongings and she missed climbing and she missed the freedom to retreat from the world if she got overwhelmed.

And her body just felt so big and awkward and clumsy. Her limbs were too long, her spatial awareness was off, and it felt like she took up a disproportionate amount of space. It was as if none of her body parts wanted to cooperate with one another. Though running from Ian was terrifying, she did feel lighter on her feet, like she had complete control over her body again.

But now she studied the familiar household objects with a different lens. The TV remote, the salt shaker - she saw them how Beans saw them. They were small, and they were bigger than her.

Ian must have sensed something was wrong. “You look, uh…constipated.”

Adelaide couldn’t muster the energy to send a joke back, but she framed her next sentence as lightheartedly as possible. “I know how you see me now.” She wasn’t even sad about it, per se. If anything, she was dumbfounded, in disbelief that Ian would still value her opinions, call her a friend, when she was so insignificant.

Ian exhaled for an extended amount of time. “Apologies, you’re going to have to elaborate.”

“I’m so small. I’m like…nothing. I held that salt in my hand. I know how easy it is to lift me up and carry me around. I just don’t know how you can see me as anything other than…” A doll. A pest. A thorn in his side. Something he could toss aside. Certainly not a whole person.

“We’ve uh, talked about this. You may not be exactly human, but-”

“But I haven’t seen it from your perspective before.”

“This changes things?”

“I never realized how tiny I looked. And how expansive your world is. I’m so…insignificant compared to it all.”

“You’re saying all small things are, um, insignificant, then?” He waited for a response but didn’t get one. “Because that is just objectively false. Bees, parasites, uh, technology is getting smaller by the day, our very DNA isn’t even visible but is a necessity for life. Nothing is ever insignificant, Della. The smallest things often have - they often have the greatest impact. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you-”

“You get rain instead of sunshine. I know. Somehow your math theory doesn’t make me feel any better, though.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“That I’m right and you’ve always thought about me that way.”

Ian rested his hand on the counter. Adelaide was glad it gave her eyes something to focus on. She couldn’t hold Ian’s intense gaze for longer than a couple seconds, too nervous for his answer.

“You’re uh, you’re right. I have always thought about you that way.”

That caught Adelaide’s attention.

“That’s what you wanted,” Ian shrugged.

“I want you to be honest.”

“Well now we’re just going in circles.”

Adelaide was frustrated by Ian’s evasiveness and, for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what he thought of her assertion. Was he lying to protect her? If so, she didn’t want to be pitied. She could handle the truth as far as he was concerned. And if he was telling the truth, then he was an irritatingly better person than her.

“Thanks for seeing me as a person, I suppose,” Adelaide mumbled, nearly inaudible by the end of her sentence. She lazily kicked her shoe at the ground.

“What was that?” Ian leaned closer.

“I’d give you a hug, but I’m no longer big enough, so…” Adelaide was joking, but she felt a weird hitch in her heart. It wasn’t so much the hug itself, probably...maybe, but the missed opportunity. How many other things did she forget to do because of her distracting excitement over doors?

“Ohhh, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Ian drawled. He snatched Adelaide off the counter and held her to his chest. Never enough pressure to hurt her, but definitely enough to keep her in place. He laughed when he felt her squirm around, trying to get out of the makeshift hug.

Adelaide felt that laugh vibrate in her bones. She should’ve just kept her mouth shut. In some ways, that just proved her point. To him, she was just a doll that he could whisk away whenever he wanted. But underneath all the teasing was something more.

Being a giant showed Adelaide just how strong, loud, and fast Beans could be. She therefore understood even better how much Ian restrained himself on a daily basis, keeping his movements (relatively) slow, his grip (relatively) gentle, and his voice (relatively) quiet. He made adjustments for her that could only be interpreted as signs of care and respect.

So even though he crossed her boundaries from time to time, it wasn’t because he thought less of her. With that in mind, Adelaide forced herself to relax, feeling Ian’s heartbeat through the coarse fabric of his shirt and letting him take her wherever.

Despite the many benefits that came with being human, and despite the excitement for both of them that came from a shifted worldview, it was good to be back how they belonged. If given a second opportunity, Adelaide would absolutely utilize her time as a human more efficiently, but in all honesty, she would have been fine if that whole ordeal never happened again. She liked being small. There was nothing else to it.