Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Elisabeth likes these people. She likes laughing with Deena as she watches stitches from the hand carved needles slowly become recognizable shapes. She likes chatting with the nurses in the clinic about what was available in the market at any given time. She likes small talk with people as she passes them on her way from place to place (she doesn't think that she has ever engaged in small talk before outside of an awkward first date setting).
There is something about this place that builds a sense of camaraderie among the people that dwell within the walls. They aren't just inhabiting the same space. They aren't just nameless faces covered in plastic making their way down a too crowded sidewalk in a hurry to get to wherever they are going (or, at least, to make their way back inside). Every person in the community is an individual (and is recognized as such). In the world from which she came, people are more likely to be considered numbers or statistics than individuals (such recognition was reserved for family and the closest of friends). She isn't certain whether it is because there are so few of them or because of the rather cut off nature of their existence. She doesn't know whether it is something else entirely that she has not yet identified. She just knows that it is.
People know her here - not just her name or her occupation. They remember the names of her children. They commiserate over missed spouses. She would have considered the interest with suspicion before. It would have felt odd for people unconnected to her to know things about her and her family. She would have wondered why and been concerned at the scrutiny. In this place, it just feels like fellow waiters counting the days until they get to be reunited with the people that they love.
Elisabeth likes it here. She is surprised by that -pleasantly so. This place had been a means to an end; it had never figured into her thoughts (or her desperation) that she would legitimately enjoy it. That had been irrelevant.
Now, she can honestly say that she is happy that her family will be living here (for more reasons than their immediate or long term safety).
She clucks her tongue over Taylor when someone (usually his second in command) forces him to come into the clinic in order to get something checked. She smiles at Tate when he comes in for another in a string of treatment sessions of different things that they try to combat his allergies as he talks about his not so little any more girl (she believes around Josh's age) and how he hopes she doesn't want any window boxes of flowers when she gets here. She raises her eyebrows at Deena behind Reynolds' back when the man wanders by to bring her housemate a sample of a plant that he just happened to notice out on one of his patrols that he thought she might find interesting. She holds back the tears (knowing that they make the man uncomfortable) until Casey has left after delivering her baby's newly made crib.
The list goes on and on, and she wants her family to know these people. She wants them to be a part of this place.
The time seems to go quickly and slowly all at the same time. On some days, she feels like she cannot even see the end. On other days, she feels like her life is so full of tasks that she loses weeks when she blinks. She cries the night after the Fourth arrives feeling like it will be forever until they are all together again. She goes into a hormonal circle that has her convinced that they are going to be trapped on the other side and every gesture of kindness made in her direction leaves her sobbing because they are not with her to see it. (It's Tate, actually, that talks her around in the midst of that one with some casual comments that let her know that she isn't alone in getting discouraged every time an open portal isn't the one that is going to spill out her family.)
She loses all track of the days during the time she is desperately researching some treatment for the fever that periodically plagues the colony (that has cycled back into an on cycle around the time that she gets beyond her mild depression). She has worked with the samples that they had in storage off and on since her arrival, but the upswing in infections has her focused (and confined to the lab rather than the clinic proper per orders from Taylor). The challenge and feeling of time being in direct opposition to her leaves her little room for thinking of anything else. The day that Reynolds wakes up and squeezes Deena's hand after she finally finds something that stops the progression is the day she stops to take a breath and realizes that she is actually six days beyond her due date.
She goes into labor 32 hours later.
Zoe Dee Shannon makes her appearance a scant three hours after that (once she decided that it was time to come, she decided to come in a hurry).
The room is buried in plant life that her brain wanted to call exotic (but is really just normal for their new world) two hours after that.
"People used to send flowers when people were in the hospital," Deena informs her as she makes her way around the various pots to get a closer look at the little girl wrapped in a handmade blanket and clasped against her mother's chest.
"I've heard that," Elisabeth told her letting her head sink a little further back against the pillow behind her.
"I thought it might be a fun custom to revisit," the other woman told her looking around with a slightly wrinkled forehead. "I didn't realize that it would catch on quite so quickly."
Elisabeth just smiled and offered her daughter over for her best friend to hold. She was missing Jim something awful, but if they had to be apart when this happened, then she was in the best possible place that she could be.
There was a part of her that resented every first of Zoe's that her father and siblings missed, but there was another part of her that could manage nothing but gratitude that those moments were happening out in the open where she could talk about them and be proud without having to hide it and her. It wasn't that the days went by more quickly after her daughter arrived; it was that her days got that much busier. She had more with which to fill them. There was her regular work, Zoe to take care of, videos to make so that Jim and Josh and Maddy wouldn't feel like they had completely missed out on everything.
There was Tate to exchange little nods of the head and the reminder of the tally of the number of weeks left with when he stopped by the clinic. There was the slightly awkward (but so cute and sweet) courting attempts from Reynolds that stepped up after his illness to gently tease Deena over as well. He was deeply nervous about the arrival of the Fifth. Career military with a wife that had abandoned them early on, his boy had lived with his grandparents since he was a toddler. He lamented to Elisabeth that he didn't really know what he was doing. Elisabeth had countered with the fact that she had been doing this in house as it were for years and still wasn't sure that she knew what she was doing.
The weeks continued to count down, and she was assigned medic duties for the arrival of the Fifth. Tate and Reynolds had both been assigned escort. Taylor wasn't exactly subtle about how he chose his assignments. Deena had agreed to look after Zoe while she went, and the countdown turned from weeks to days to hours to minutes.
Then, almost as if it had snuck up on her there at the end, they were there.
It was as if she could not get herself close enough to them. Josh was tolerating her hugging even though she could hear the slight huffing noise that he was making against her shoulder as he did so (he was being such a teenager, and she gave up her attempt at fighting back tears when the thought came - her son was a full blown teenager); Maddy was clinging to her just as tightly. Her two older children were back in her arms, and she wanted nothing more than to stay in the moment and never let go of them. All the nights that she had cradled Zoe in her arms while wishing that it could be all three of them were flooding over her in a rush of memory and need to make sure that this was not a dream. They were really here. She really had them back. Then, Jim was cupping the back of her head in a gesture that was so familiar and so wanted and so very much missed that she could not help but accept that it was all real. She finally had her whole family. They were in the same place, the same time, and the same world.
She just had to introduce the two parts of it to each other.
She caught Tate's eye over the shoulders of the wife and daughter he had wrapped up in his arms and exchanged a knowing smile. She gave a reassuring look in the direction of Reynolds as he awkwardly patted his son on the back looking unsure and gave an approving nod when he finally pulled the boy in for an embrace that his son appeared to whole heartedly return.
She just had to introduce the entirety of the two parts of her family to each other.
The others, however, could wait. Today would be all about Zoe.
She got called away from her reunion to help render aid to someone who had passed out from the shock of the oxygen rich environment and was surprised to discover that she recognized the man who was passed out cold. It was, she felt herself giggling in her head (she was that giddy), a small world after all. She could catch up with Malcolm later.
Much later - she told herself as they made their way through the trees back toward Terra Nova with Jim's arm around her and Maddy tucked into her side while she made them all walk in an awkward formation so that she could keep hold of an only slightly protesting Josh's hand. She was going to be very, very busy for a while.