Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Josh wasn't Maddy, but that was no reason to think that he was stupid. He had thought this out. He had a plan - or something that was sort of like a plan. Maybe it wasn't the world's best thought out plan. Maybe it didn't have lists and outlines and bullet points like something that his sister would have created, but he had a basic idea of what he was doing. He knew living on the streets wasn't a brilliant plan; he knew it wasn't even a reasonable one. He didn't intend to stay there forever - just long enough for his family to be unable to find him. That's all he wanted - for them to go without him.
He had put more thought into this than it probably looked like it did. He wasn't just some angsty run away looking to get even with his parents for never taking him on a dome vacation or something. He had reasons. He even had goals.
He was the oldest of his siblings. From a practical standpoint, he was the only one old enough to be considered an adult (and that should be reason enough even without considering any of the other issues). He got a pass just because he happened to still be in his last year of school? Zoe was going to be left to fend for herself just because she was the youngest? What kind of craziness was that?
That, of course, was a rhetorical question. He knew exactly what kind of craziness it was. It was the same kind of craziness that had yanked his baby sister out of her home and kept her away from them for weeks. It was the same kind of craziness that left the authorities not telling them anything about her for those weeks (not where she was or how she was). It was the same kind of craziness that had left them with no way of knowing how scared she was or who was comforting her.
He knew all about that kind of craziness. He wasn't going to live with it any longer. That was never going to happen to Zoe again - ever.
If he thought for one minute that him being there was going to make things better - what was going to keep Maddy from getting sick or Zoe being thrown to the wolves - then he would be right there with them. He didn't think that. In fact, he was very sure that it was the opposite. His presence would only make things less likely to work out for his sisters.
Things had to work out for his sisters. Things were going to work out for his sisters. They could be safe. Or, they could be as safe as you could reasonably expect to be in a world that had dinosaurs running around.
Zoe, however, loved dinosaurs, and Maddy loved everything having to do with learning about things that she didn't already know - which made the dinosaur thing not a drawback from their perspective. (He smiled to himself every time he thought about his sisters staring in awe at some giant plant eating animal meandering by them.) He would always have a picture of the two of them living happy lives in that world that was meant for them tucked away inside his hand. It was a good picture. It was a good place for them.
It wasn't for him. He didn't want to be there. He wasn't grateful for the chance. There was nothing about Terra Nova that meant anything to him other than the fact that his family was going to be there. He was okay with that. He had made his peace with it and moved on to what to do about it. His life wasn't going to be there.
His life was here, in Chicago, with Kara. He knew all the things that people would say about being too young to make those kinds of decisions. He called bull on that. He was precisely at the age where people were forever telling them that they should know exactly what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives when it came to work. What made work different than decisions in regards to his family? It wasn't different.
He had decided that most people were liars. They were always saying that things were going to be okay or that things were going to get better. There was nothing better about a system that did things the way it did. There was nothing better about getting Zoe at the expense of his dad. There was nothing better about nights spent wondering whether or not his father had done it on purpose - if he had made some last ditch desperate attempt at giving them the "family is four" excuse for allowing his little sister to stay with them. Sometimes, he understood his dad a whole lot better than he wished he did.
Sometimes, he wished he could shut off the part of his brain that made the things that Jim Shannon had chosen to do make sense. He didn't want them to make sense. He just wanted to be angry that his dad had left them. Josh knew with every fiber of his being that he had chosen to leave them on the off chance that it would somehow all work out in his absence.
His father should have stuck it out. He should have faced the process and paid the fines while playing their little game of feigning being sorry over the broken rules. He should have let them save face; he should have not provoked the altercation - the list of should haves went on and on and were pointless because the should haves weren't the actually dids.
He knew there were other cases involving third children. Maddy wasn't the only one who could look things up on her plex. He might not be as quick. He might not know the right places to start the way that she seemed to, but he could still find what he needed when he needed it. There were other people who had gone through the process of dealing with population control and child services and all the other organizations that thought that they had a right to be involved. In the end, most of those families were still together.
The Shannons weren't ever going to be together again. He knew that. He didn't think this plan was all that well thought out or even moderately so. His dad was going to break out of a maximum security facility only to break into another maximum security facility without anyone noticing? Seriously? Like they weren't going to know exactly where he was headed the instant that Jim Shannon's cell turned up empty?
He needed to stop thinking about that. It wasn't doing him any favors. It was just making him angrier, and he couldn't afford to be angry right now. He needed to be paying attention to his surroundings. It wasn't safe on this side of town. Granted, he had a fairly cynical view of what safe actually entailed. He believed safe wasn't something that it really was anywhere these days. He wasn't sure that it ever had been - despite other people's nostalgia for the good old days. Seedy sides of town, he thought, were pretty much a given throughout all of history.
It was just for a few days. It was not like he had completely cut off ties with the rest of the world. Kara would be mad at him at first for making a unilateral decision. She had wanted him to go. She had only been thinking about him and being safe and a future - as if he had one without her. He knew what that sounded like. He knew what kind of a desperate, obsessive tone that struck in his head (which is why he never said the words out loud). He didn't care if he was desperate and obsessive in his head; he had been desperate and obsessive about several things for a while.
He desperately loved his sisters. He had obsessively taken care of his sisters when their dad wasn't around to do it. In his opinion, he had kind of failed miserably at it. There had been Zoe with the threat of population control hanging over her head every day. There had been Maddy lying in that hospital bed while he sat unsure whether or not she was ever going to wake.
He knew what it was like to fail his sisters. He knew what it was like to watch his mom struggle and not be able to do anything to fix it for her. This he could fix. If or when their dad got caught in the course of this crazy plan (that made no sense but everyone seemed willing to go along with anyway simply because it might work) and this whole things blew up in all of their faces, there wouldn't be a third child around to get in the way. There would just be Maddy and Zoe - both beautifully underage and eligible.
They and his mom could start over - he could give them that. He could make that work out for them. He could even do it while being selfish and getting to keep what he wanted in the process. As far as he was concerned, there was no way in any shape, form, or universe that that wasn't a win all the way around. Besides, it was already handled. They couldn't stop him; it was already too late for that. Even if they tried, they would never find him in time.
As for the note he left his mom, well, Maddy wasn't the only one who knew how to work her parents when it needed doing. It was mean, and he would be the first person to admit that there was self-centeredness wrapped up in, around, and all through it. He had made his choices. He was an adult now - just weeks shy of his high school graduation.
It didn't even matter if he stopped going to classes. He wasn't Maddy, but his grades were plenty high enough to skate through what was left. It would take him a while, but he would find a steady job and a place. If that meant that he had to go pleading with Kara's parents for a spot in their garage for a while, then that was exactly what it was that he would do. If nothing else, Kara would insist just to have the chance of yelling at him some more for what he had done.
It was going to be okay, he kept telling himself. It was all going to be okay. He had made the best decision for all of them.