title: Recovery

description: the Missing Scene.

Author: Rodlox

Archive? Yes

Fandom: Invisible Man, Jurassic Park 3

Rating: "This film is not yet rated"

Spoilers: everything - from season one up 2 the ep with the mayo - of The Invisible Man, as well as Jurassic Park 1 and 3.

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters from The Invisible Man or Jurassic Park. I do not intend to infringe on any copyright laws with this story. It's for entertainment purposes only and I am not making any money on this story.

Summary: The I-Man must go to Isla Sorna.


RECOVERY
By Rodlox

"A piece of cake, a walk in the park," Darien muttered to himself as he pushed on through the wide-leaf bushes. The tropics weren't all that bad, considering that the only signs of civilization were his target and the helicopter that'd dropped him off.

Speaking of dropping off, he mused as he kept his eyes peeled for anything unusual, it was easy to keep leeches away - just quicksilver that patch of skin, and the vermin fell away for easier lunches.

Darien raised the redbox so he could read the screen. He hadn't been told the principles it operated on, or what powered it. He'd only been told that it would lead him to the other humans on the island.

Right now, it was telling him to go straight.

Pushing aside another thickly-grown branch, Darien Fawkes found himself in a clearing.

A clearing with a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Luckily for Darien, the dinosaur was not moving. It wasn't even breathing.

The neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. It was indeed most certainly dead. And it wasn't just certainly dead, it was really quite sincerely dead.

Darien didn't even have a quip to say, in part because he didn't know if whatever had taken out this T.rex was still in town.

A look around, then a quicksilvered peek about, and he saw nothing.

Fawkes decided to not walk through the center of the clearing, just in case. With another look at the redbox to make sure he was still going in the right direction, Darien hiked on.

~~

After hiking over the valley, which had just as many plants as the woods, Darien halted at the chirping sound that wasn't crickets.

Out of the lower underbrush came a rag-tag squad of some sort of tiny bipedal dinsaur.

The really-really-little guys hopped around, chasing insects. Darien crouched down; if they were anything like that dog his auntie Millie kept, he reasoned, they'd be less nervous if he hunkered low, rather than tower over them.

"Hey fella," he cooed, reaching out a hand. The yellowish tiny dino looked at Darien, then Darien's hand, chirped - and bit it!

"Damn!' Darien cursed loudly enough to scatter the other compys. Instinctively, his body poured out quicksilver on the bitten hand and the attacker.

Crying out in pain, the compy let go of him, and tried to run away, it's head still invisible. Crashing repeatedly into trees, and tripping over roots, it was soon attacked by the others of it's kind - natural scavengers for the most part.

As he walked well around the critters, Fawkes checked the bite, and saw that it wasn't very deep. In fact, they'd barely punctured the skin.

But a 'barely' was still enough to make Darien nervous - memories of the Quicksilver Disease still haunted a few of his nightmares.

Brushing aside the ferns before him, Darien saw an clearing - a fairly-well-mowed plain between him and a definately man-made building. Not too wide and barely two stories high, but it was more than enough right about now.

Going saran-wrap, Darien jogged across the clearing, hoping that the quicksilver would clean the tiny wound.

About to drop his invisibility when he arrived at the door, Fawkes found out that it was locked. "Damn," he swore.

With a thief's reasoning skills, Darien looked around for windows - and found none.

At last, to one side of the construct, he found a door in the fence.

"Doin' a favor fer a friend," Darien mocked the Official's words. "Yeah well, with friends like -" and stopped when a shrill "Haah haaah," filled the air.

Darien stopped dead in his tracks hearing that, looking all around him. And then, when the coast was still clear, he double-checked with quicksilver vision. "Take no chances," he whispered to himself.

Even then, there were no dinosaurs in sight; so Fawkes made a mad dash for the gate. Before opening it, though, he took one long look up at the half-circle-shaped cage.

According to the readout on the way in, Darien remembered, this was where the solitary human was. "And me," Darien ammended.

The air force, he'd overheard, was going after the cluster of humans nearing the coast.

The door opened easily enough, and Darien went indoors. It was 'indoors' in the sense of a contained space, yet it was outdoors and airy. Very very airy.

Another look, now that he was between gate doors, at the redbox. According to it, his goal was up these mountains - on a cliffface.

"Aw crap," Darien muttered quietly, not wanting any dinos to overhear him. "Well, sooner I get up there, the sooner I can get out of here."

Checking his tattoo, he saw he'd only just passed the third scale. "Wha?" he wondered. "C'mon, I used more than that . . . not that I'm complaining."

At least twenty meters of walking in the cage later, mostly along the clifftop, Darien could see something below - and a look at the redbox confirmed that this was the site of his target.

But, as he sat down to start climbing down, a flying reptile - a pterosaur - swooped down at Darien. Several more of the winged beasts were in the vaulted cage of a sky, watching this with - interest?

"Cyaa- cyaa-," the pterodons cried out. "Cyaa- sskaak, rrhea!"

Fawkes went see-through; but before he could hug the ground, the attacking pterosaur actually veered off, avoiding him.

"Well well well," Darien said, contemplating. "This gives me an idea." An idea which he used as he started to climb down the cliff, thankful that there were a bunch of natural handholds along the way.

With his back and butt quicksilvered, the pterodons kept away from him. Darien kept climbing down.

It took him awhile, but eventually he made it down. "Hopscotch at a hundred feet in the air," Darien muttered. Not only did he have to leap from one flat-topped outcropping to another, but a wrong step would let him move very very fast - straight down.

"One patata, two patata," he said to himself as he leaped once, twice, three times but no ladies in sight, "three patata, four." Hop, leap, jump.

By the twenty-sixth potato,' Fawkes was overlooking what was obviously the pterosaur nest: bones of humans, large fish, and more foreign-looking bones littered it, with at least a half-dozen chirping, waddling carticatures of the adults.

And in the center of it all -

The torso and part of this man's neck were torn and bloody, with hatchling pterosaurs *thwapp*ing it worse.

This was the legendary Dr Grant? "He looks different on tv and magazines," Darien quipped, also noting that a number of angry adult pterodons were dive-bombing towards him, their wings folded.

Between the bloodied man in the nest, the ravenous hatchlings, and the defensive adults, Darien didn't see much of a chance.

"What the hell," Darien muttered, and just jumped into the nest, arms and legs spread out.

Instants before he hit the hungry hatchlings, quicksilver coated his entire body, and reached out, an action normally to cushion his fall.

But in this case, it collided and coated the infant 'dactyls. Their fragile bodies unable to handle the thermal shift, shey perished instantly.

Pushing himself back up - and hearing at least one infant crackle and snap - Darien carefully, gently picked up the doc, and let his quicksilver coat him too.

Hopefully the quicksilver and the cold would keep this guy's injuries from getting worse, at least until they got the hell outta here.

Darien saw a way out.

~~

"I feel rediculous," Darien said, not for the first time. A fireman's carry, he'd realized right away, would put the torn and damaged organs of the doc right on Fawkes' shoulder. That left one way to carry somebody his size.

But now, now he was almost at the rondevous point. Just a little bit further.

Darien almost wondered where all the dinosaurs were. So far, he hadn't seen that many - and none of them were all much reason to come back.

Just ten more meters.

Thirty more feet, then he would have broken through the final underbrush between him and the helicopter.

But it was as twenty-two feet from the brush that Darien saw her.

He'd been looking to the sides for defense, to make sure nothing was sneaking up on him. But she was just standing there.

"Hey," Darien called over, making sure he wasn't seeing things.

"Hey," she answered, a tonal voice, rhymic and pleasing to the ear.

"You wanna come with me?" he asked. She just looked at him. "Trust me, this place ain't exactly paradise."

She tilted her head slightly and smiled at him. Though before she could say anything, out of the jungle, there came a mysterious and deep sound: "Hhhk! Haah hsk!"

The young lady turned around and, with only one parting look, ran into the jungle depths.

Darien just stood there for a moment, watching her go.

~~

As Fawkes walked up to the helicopter, Bobby Hobbs, standing at the door, could see Darien's eyes change color - to a vivid red.

"How was it out there, partner?" Hobbs asked when Fawkes was handing over the doc. He'd been sore that he hadn't been allowed to go on the field trip.

"Oh, the usual," Darien answered, bitten by wild animals, harrassed in a remake of 'The Birds,' went over an hour invisible. You?"

"Had to stay on the 'copter with Alex, a bunch of paper-pushers, and a few marines," Hobbs said as he pulled the right thing out of it's case.

"I don't know about you guys," red-eyed Darien said as Hobbs put the needle in him, "but I'm going to take a nap," and Darien collapsed on the helicopter floor.



~~~epilogue

back at the Agency, later...

"I know you guys told me there was only one person all by their lonesom," Fawkes said, "but I still say -"

"That you saw a woman in an InGen uniform, in the middle of a jungle filled with dinosaurs?" the Official asked.

"Exactly! I mean, I lasted in there - why couldn't she?"

"I suppose it's possible," the Keeper remarked, "that she might have some sort of a defensive mechanism . . . even so, that seems unlikely."

"Oh yeah? Why's that?"

"The InGen Corporation," Eberts answered, "was formed to focus on extinct forms of life, not to modify humans."

"And what did the redbox say?' Alex asked the sighter.

"It said that there wasn't anybody there," Darien admitted; but then countered with, "Look, I wasn't hallucinating, okay? I know what I saw!"

The phone on the Official's desk rang.



end.