AN: I offer my apologies - I can, apparently, not leave this particular AU alone.
Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Kara has always been a believer in hope as a necessity. Growing up in a world that almost seemed to revel in the dismal and the bleak, she has never understood why the list of problems always seems to be the end of the conversation. Why not go from the list of problems to a list of ways to make it better? Why not work toward solutions instead of standing around trying to talk as much misery into other people's lives as possible?
She has a tendency to soap box a bit about that but only with people that she is comfortable sharing that level of a picture into her personal thoughts with (people who, admittedly, are in short supply). She saves the rest of it for her songs where it can be hidden in plain sight in analogies and allusions (and passed off as stray fancies by those who do not want to have to think beyond the prepackaged talking points about the most bleak of options being the only ones that are acceptable to accept). She believes in doing better than that. If she were intending to shut down, then she would place herself on a corner somewhere and bleed her thoughts and disappointments out on her guitar until she suffocated on the combination of the poor air quality and the lack of hope. (She swears she is not really cynical. She is not.)
That is not how she chooses to spend her life. She likes to think that her way is better (her way does not force anyone to have to pick up the pieces and sit quietly through her funeral after all). She makes plans. She lives her life around the premise that she is going to have a future. She does not know any other way. She cannot see any other way; she does not want to see any other way. Seeing it any other way means that she will have given up, and she never wants to know what that is like.
She keeps music because music is as much a part of her as her eye color or her freckles or the way her thoughts tend toward the rejection of the status quo. It simply is, and it would make no sense for her to pretend that it was not. She added other learning to her repertoire because she is a doer who wants to be a fixer. She wants to finagle and figure and create things. She wants to solve problems or, at least, complete steps that other people can use to help them solve problems. She does not understand why more people do not feel that way. She does not understand why more people do not try.
Thus, she finds herself squirreled away in a dome working lengthy hours with more missteps than successes to her initial credit (which is fine because each and every misstep gets her that much closer to the next thing that will work the way she wants). The days sort of bleed together, but she likes it. She is doing something. She is doing a lot of somethings. It is what she thought she wanted (which conveniently turns out to be what she actually wanted). She is content. She is focused. Then, someone has to go and make waves.
There is a man a couple of years older than her in the agricultural corps of the dome that spent weeks dropping by her desk in the afternoons to check up on how her projects were going before she realized that he was flirting with her. She had made it clear at the time that she was not interested, and he had respected her wishes and backed away into a friendly capacity. He had also made it very clear that his original intentions have not changed. He is sort of always there in the background as if he is waiting for her to turn around one day and be on the same page that he is. She does not know what to do with that. He is nice. He is a hard worker. He is a fixer and a tryer and a solver of problems, and she likes him. He is easy to talk to on simple subjects and a good sounding board when something tricky needs a little outside perspective to help her work her way through it. She likes to hang out with him. She likes having someone she can talk to in person instead of via typed messages and distance. She cannot even say that he is wrong in his suppositions. They would be a good fit (if the both of them were willing to put in the effort). She still never says yes, and she is not entirely comfortable with her reasons why.
She fingers the cord around her neck and the guitar pick that rests in the hollow of her throat. She traces the edges that have gone smooth under years of assault by her fingers and wonders for the thousandth time what she is doing and if it is wrong of her to even passively not let go. When is she going to stop? She sighs and makes her fingers let go before dropping her hand back to her side. She does not take the necklace off - not on this day.
She is going to hold on to it today.
He is going to hold on to it tonight.
He shouldn't. He knows that he shouldn't. That does not stop him from running his fingers across the worn smooth edges and clutching the pick in a fist curled against his chest as he tries and fails to fall asleep. What is he doing? He thought he had already stopped this. He thought he was beyond needing the crutch the object represents. Still, he does not put the necklace back in its hiding place - not tonight.
It had been a rough day at the end of several rough (but wonderful all the same) days, and he had had all of the people in his life that he could take for the moment. He needed some space and some time, but what that was going to accomplish was beyond him at the moment.
At this point, he thinks he might be thrilled if someone would bother to let him in on whatever it is that he is supposed to be feeling because he has not got the faintest idea of what it should be. When it is Maddy that he is around, he is relieved and grateful and kind of shocked (and a little bit punched in the stomach by something that he does not want to name every time he realizes how much of a part Kara plays in her recitation of her story). He gets why he is confused about all of that - because he taught himself not to hope when it came to Maddy.
He taught himself that hoping was dangerous, but she is sitting right next to him. He can reach out and touch her if he wants to, and he does in the most obnoxious big brother ways that he can manage - like threatening to give her hugs when he is covered in gunk from a day with the ag corps. He comes up behind her and mucks up her hair when she is not paying attention (because they are not children any more, but that is where they left off and there has not been time for them to grow into some new, mature adult dynamic yet). He just needs an excuse that lets him reach out and touch her to reassure himself that she is real. He is not a little girl like Zoe who can just jump up and clamp onto her whenever she feels like it. He is a grown man, and he needs pretenses (even if those pretenses land him back in the category of teenage boy).
He retreats to his bedroom after the eighth conversation where Kara's name is oh so casually thrown around as if it is a matter of course that the girls that he had abandoned would band together to keep an eye on each other while he was out of reach. It is a lot to take in, and he needs some time to himself before he starts throwing around words he is not certain that he wants to say (or asks questions when he isn't certain that he wants the answers).
He knows why his feelings are all confused; he just does not know what he is supposed to do about it. Maddy was gone (or he was gone or however it is that this whole thing is supposed to work) and now she is not - when he did not allow himself to ever believe that she could be. Kara is gone but now she is front and center in daily conversation - how is he supposed to remember that he cannot afford to hope when Maddy is HERE?
It has been years. He has a life here. He wants with everything in him for her to have a life there. He does not want her to be on pause dreaming of the impossible any more than she had wanted that for him. He could not . . . should not let himself get dragged into the mire of what ifs - which is how he found himself shut up in his room with the ghosts of his past.
He had found what he wanted in the inside zipper pocket of the backpack that had come with him through the portal all those years ago. It was not that he had never emptied the bag of the contents - he had. He had even worn the item in question for a while - a very short while before he had convinced himself that he was being ridiculous and had tucked it away. It was kept out of sight but still within reach for the occasions that he broke down and pulled it out to run his fingers across the surface in a gesture that he remembered had been soothing once upon a time. It had quickly become just another way to get bogged down by everything that he had lost. It had stayed in the pocket of that bag undisturbed for quite some time. It is out now - and all of the turmoil of his emotions with it. The pick at the end of the cord slides between his fingers as he wonders what in the world he is doing (and how in the world he is supposed to figure out whether or not he should).