Family Building

"Have you ever made a nest before?" It was a simple question but it rooted Sparrow's feet to the floor. His nests so far had been rudimentary living quarters, scraps of material to suit him and whoever was bunking with him at the time. His usual roommate had been his twin sister, and she was just as unfussy as he was. He didn't know where to begin with making a fully functional nest to incubate eggs and raise hatchlings in. He swallowed his pride and turned to Seffe, the blue raptor watching him curiously.

"I um. No I haven't," he admitted.

"Damn, that makes two of us," Seffe tutted. While the problem of neither of them knowing how to make a nest was obvious, Sparrow felt relief at knowing he wasn't the only one with no experience here.

"We could ask around? Maybe Swavelli would know?" Sparrow suggested but the other raptor's face scrunched at the suggestion.

"Ew, no. She'd make fun of me," he said bluntly. "We can just make a nest and put rocks in it to see if they fit. How many eggs do raptors have in a nest?" Sparrow thought for a moment, trying to recall his own hatching before his parents had left him and Piper in the Dead City's nursery-like woods. 

"I think there were three of us," he recalled. There had been a third egg in the nest that hadn't hatched before they left, their parents still had hope for it but the twins had never seen their third sibling. He shook the melancholy feeling that came with thinking about that egg. "How many eggs were in yours?" Seffe avoided eye contact, clearing his throat a little.

"I rolled out of my nest. Hatched on my own and found Swavelli soon after, I've got no idea how many other eggs there were," he admitted. Sparrow hummed, they were working with a sample size of one but three seemed as good a number to start with as any.

"We could do a nest for four, three like my nest and then space for an extra?" he suggested.

"What if we have more? Or less? Would they get cold if there's too much space in the nest?" Seffe asked nervously. Sparrow didn't know the answer to that either. He tried to wrack his brain for a solution but came up short, flopping onto the grass and staring up at the stars while he thought. Piper would know what to do, he thought, or Equinox. He hadn't seen the older raptor in a while but considering how old he was he probably knew a thing or two about building nests. He hadn't seen his parents since he was a hatchling either, and he longed to ask them their advice, clearly they knew what they were doing when at least two eggs of theirs had survived. He sighed and looked up at Seffe, who was now standing over him and watching him from an upside down angle. 

"We just have to try our best," he said definitively. This seemed to do little to assuage the blue raptor's nerves and he continued to hold his arms close in a nervous gesture. Sparrow took initiative, taking a leaf from Piper's book and just acting without thinking. He trotted off through the city, sticking his head into every building he could find and running a critical eye over the materials he found inside. He ran into a half-flooded glass front building and was immediately jumped by a pair of herons, two tall birds that came shrieking and pecking at the large raptor without fear. Sparrow hissed back at them but the two continued to harass him until he backed out of the open door. Once he was outside, the herons put their wings down and returned to the back of the building, one of them stooping down and taking a seat on something. Squinting through the door, Sparrow could just about see a bandle of twigs and reeds packed into a ball, a nest! It looked wet and smelly and his stomach turned at the thought of having to sit on a nest that smelled like that for however long it took to hatch the eggs.

"Maybe that nest is for water-based things, and ours won't have to be that... gross," a voice came from behind him and he resisted the urge to yelp. He turned calmly to face Seffe instead.

"You following me, bluebird?" he asked playfully.

"You can't get far without me," Seffe teased. "Let's keep looking together, two eyes are better than one." Sparrow didn't argue, he liked spending time with Seffe, he couldn't imagine himself raising a clutch with anyone other than him. His breezy, carefree nature was such a contrast to most people in his life, and his 'it is what it is' attitude had been a balm to Sparrow's more anxious tendencies. He knew he'd make a great father, which assuaged his worries about not being a great one himself. In fact, the only thing Seffe had ever seemed anxious about was raising these kids, but instead of making their nerves snowball into a bigger ball of anxiety, this only reassured Sparrow further, knowing how seriously his mate was taking this. The thought reinvigorated his motivation for nest making and he doubled his efforts in scouting locations for somewhere safe to put their eggs. 

Entering a more heavily overgrown area of the city, the ground grew soft under their claws and seemed that it would give way enough to dig a decent hole. Some dinosaurs definitely laid their eggs in burrows, he wondered if that was the case for Utahraptors too. Maybe if they started to dig some kind of natural instinct would take over and something would tell them they were doing the right thing. This area was far too open though, anything would be able to see a nest from here and it'd look like a free lunch. He thought of the heron parents and how they defended their nest, they had one entry point to defend and between the two of them they defended it well. If he and Seffe could find some kind of dead end to make a stand like those herons had they would be able to chase off most threats. To this end he ducked into a nearby alley, following the trail of soft, damp soil until he was surrounded on all sides by brick walls. The sky was still open above them, but barely visible through the fronds of palm trees growing high above the buildings. 

"This place looks good," he said to Seffe, who had joined him at the end of the alley.

"It's secure, no holes in the walls, I like it," the blue raptor agreed. "Do we try to dig?" Neither of them could think of anything better to do, so they began to scrape a hole in the ground, leaving the soil piled up around it in a circle like a small guarding wall for the pit in the middle. It was barely a foot deep, but from ground level the eggs wouldn't be visible. Whoever was looking for a free meal would see them first, and that would hopefully be enough to scare them off. Seffe plucked some soft feathers from his underside and laid them in the nest, a meagre bed for their children to be born in. Sparrow contributed some too, though they both agreed they would probably need something more to fill it out. Keeping the location searing into their minds, the two ventured back into the city for their next task.

"Okay, so now where do we get eggs?"