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He had chosen them when he was three. They were the only toys he wanted and he huffed in typical normal three year old fashion until his mother bought them for him. Every playtime from that day, little Alan Grant would take himself on adventures with his dinosaurs, imagining jungles and deserts and mountains and volcanos and T-Rexes and Brachis, and Trikes. Trikes were his favourites.
When he was six, his mother bought him a little picture book called My First Dinosaur Book. Inside was a cartoon of people digging in the ground, finding bones and fossils, his precious dinosaurs waiting to be found. He decided there and then he was going to do that one day. One day, he would dig up dinosaurs too.
Those toys went with him wherever he went. He took them to university as a student. On digs, he would have them in his tent. As a professor, he kept them in his office. And even as head of his own dig sites, he would still take them, and keep them in his trailer. He never hid them from anyone, and he didn’t care if anyone scoffed. Ellie never scoffed. She found it endearing.
He had never planned on having kids. He didn’t like kids. He didn’t want any. But he knew if the day ever came where he changed his mind or, god forbid, and accident were to occur, that kid would get those dinosaurs. He would pass them down because why not?
But he never had kids. The only woman he could possibly imagine having children with was Ellie. But after Isla Nublar that had fallen apart. The kicker was that he had finally come around to the idea. But the trauma of what happened pushed them further apart rather than pull them closer together.
Now she was married to someone else. Now she was pregnant. He picked up the brachiosaurus toy he’d had for 40 years and turned it over in his hands. He made his mind up. He was never going to have children now. But Ellie was. They weren’t his but if he’d had any, they would have been hers. So let hers have them. He packed them all up and said goodbye to his Brachi, his T-Rex, his Stego, his beloved Trike. Let them belong to her child, the child he wished was his.
He gave them to Charlie when he was three, the same age he had been when he’d seen them in the toy shop decades ago. He watched him play with them, making herbivores attack each other. He smiled as he played with the boy the way his parents had played with him. He wanted this life now. But only with Ellie. And it wasn’t his to have.
But he left a part of himself with her children in one way at least; he’d passed down his dinosaurs, his only heirlooms.