Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Josh is more confused than anything else in those first days after his sister and father suddenly appear. He is thrilled beyond the ability to communicate it as anything other than older brother gruffness to be able to wrap his arms around Maddy (but even that does not dismantle the confusion in which he is enmeshed). None of this makes any sense, yet he seems to be the only one that ever questions portals and different dimensions and one way physical travel with two way sound transference.
He does not get it. He never even pretended to get it to begin with - but Maddy is here (having fallen through another portal that she located somewhere in the middle of the ocean that spat her out here in the same place where she had sent her family to have to get by without her years ago). He does not understand and supposes that he does not have to understand. He had really, truly been convinced that he was never going to see his brilliant, quirky, stubborn, demanding, high handed and giving little sister again. (He may have missed her desperately, but that does not mean that he put her up on some sort of a pedestal where he forgot all about all of the sibling idiosyncrasies that could grate on his nerves in only the way that someone with whom one shared a childhood could.)
She is here. He has her back. She is not a hallucination or a dream. She is not a bit of wishful thinking that he let creep up on him in an unguarded moment.
The adjustment is strange and awkward. For one thing, she never got older in his head. She was always still sixteen in his thoughts even though he knew better than that (he and Zoe had an unspoken agreement about the acknowledgment of Maddy's birthday that ensured that he never forgot that their sister was growing older the same as they were). It never translated to the way that he thought about her - forever sixteen and looking at him with pleading eyes while she begged him to make sure that it was never Zoe lying in a hospital bed while they kept a vigil.
He kind of wants to lock her up somewhere and make their mother run a whole battery of tests until he is reassured that everything really is as fine as it looks at first glance. He is too used to losing her to be ready to accept that things could be this easy. He wants reassurances. He wants to put to rest all of the fears and nightmares about her choking on blood somewhere out of his reach that he has lived with each and every day since they came here.
Zoe, in contrast, does not seem to find the adjustment awkward at all. It is a joy to watch her. She is buzzing with excitement as she flits around Maddy like one of those giant insects in the orchards that never seem to settle on a spot. Maddy does not appear to mind the fact that she is being nearly smothered in the little girl's attention. A Zoe that is overexcited is not an unheard of thing, but this is a completely new level on the Zoe intensity scale.
He takes just as much joy in the moments that he can watch his other sister. Her awestruck expressions hit him right in the heart (he had forgotten how much her eyes lit up when she encountered something new that she wanted to turn inside out and learn upside down and backwards). He finds himself looking around and knowing for certain that he never looked that intense while taking in his surroundings here. It was like he always said - this was always supposed to be Maddy's better maybe. She was intended to appreciate this for what it was in a way that was lost on the rest of them who only appreciated it for what it did.
Their mom had struggled to hold on to her professional persona when they first came in, and he had wondered why she was bothering. It was not as if Taylor would have held it against her if she took a moment to be a woman who just got part of her family back instead of the head of the clinic. It was not as if any of the nurses would have held it against her either - the colony is small and everyone has to treat someone close to them at one point or another. They all know what it is like; this was that on steroids.
Later, he will look back and be fairly certain that he understands exactly both what she was doing and why. He does not know what to say to the man that came back into their lives with Maddy either.
He is angry at his dad. He has been angry at his dad for a long time. He knows that much. He knows he has a world of resentment built up that he would love to allow to come spewing out of him (maybe it would finally do something to alleviate the weight that he has been carrying around in his chest since the day population control hauled his father out of their apartment in handcuffs). He hates that his dad had to make the grand gesture that they all knew was going to be futile. (He hates that he recognizes in himself the react first and deal with the consequences later penchant that got the older man removed from their lives.)
He hates so many things that can all be traced to that moment - all the events that he feels were failures on his part that might never have been if that one moment had not gone down in the manner that it had. He never got to have that out between the two of them. He never got to speak to him in the aftermath. He never got to fling teenage angst in the man's direction because he was always too busy being the replacement man in the house to take the time to try to work it all out. Now, his dad is here. He is present and available, and the part of him that wants to be happy to see the father he was certain was gone from his live forever is drowning under the years of resentment that never had anywhere to go.
He knows what the problem is. The problem is that he cannot deal with his dad. He loves him. He is happy to have him (under everything else), but he cannot deal with him in the midst of everything else that he is processing.
He knows what the problem is. The problem is that he cannot deal with his son. He loves him. He is happy to have him (under everything else), but he cannot deal with him in the midst of everything else that he is processing.
Jim is doing the best he can at the moment, but that does not mean that he is handling things particularly well. This is a little much for him to take in; he likes to think that it is not just him- that this would be a monumental adjustment for anyone to be making. He is twitchy, on edge, and constantly looking around for something to pop up and catch him off guard when he cannot afford to be.
It is a very unpleasant reminder of what it was like when he first got out of prison. The sense of being off balance and being detached from himself is nearly the same. Maddy was his touchstone at that time, so it really ought to be easier this time around - he has more than just Maddy to hold on to here. It is not working out that way. He remembers what it was like to adjust to a Maddy that was an adult. He remembers the difficulties he had in wrapping his head around the fact that she had an apartment and a career in the making (not even touching on the fact that she had been left behind or that she had been so sick that they could have lost her and he had never even known). He remembers the strangeness of a world that was so different from her issues with grade skipping and teacher conferences about concerns over the application or her potential and emotional maturity that had been facing them when he had been forcibly uprooted from her life.
That experience did not pave the way for him to be any more prepared for a Zoe who was not a toddler crying out in fear for her father to make it better. He feels like he does a double take every time that he sees her, and he cannot seem to make himself stop. He feels like he missed everything with his youngest. There is literally nothing that he can do about that. The time is gone; there will never be anything that changes the fact that he was not there. He is her dad, but he is not her Dad in the same way that he was for Maddy and Josh (which brings his thoughts back around to Josh).
Josh is something else altogether - something that is complicated and messy. He is something that is liable to get much worse before it ever dreams of getting better.
His boy is a boy no longer. That is a man with responsibilities that he grew into without Jim's help or guidance. He shouldered responsibilities that should not have been his, and Jim can see the resentment for that not hiding particularly well behind the look in his eyes. He wants to tell Josh that he is proud. He wants to tell him that he is impressed. He wants to clasp an arm around his son's shoulders and tell him that he has done this all so well.
But what follows that commendation?
Thanks, son - I've got it from here? That seems a glaringly wrong thing to say, so the first words remain unspoken out of a fear of not knowing where they will lead. That is cowardice, and he knows that. He wants to curse population control in his thoughts every time he is faced with an awkward moment with his eldest, but even he knows that that is not entirely fair.
It is not all on them. Pretending it is seems a denial of his own responsibility in the matter that he instinctively understands Josh will not accept. He feels as if he is in some sort of territory battle every time he does anything with Zoe. Josh is always in the background hovering as if he expects him to do something wrong. It is like the roles that should have been theirs originally have swapped - Josh is the dad and Jim is the only moderately reliable teenage brother that no one is sure should be allowed to babysit. Awkward does not even begin to describe it.
Elisabeth's father told him once that he found him to be chronically less mature than one should be able to expect from his age and position, and he has never felt as if he is more in line with the sentiments of that statement than he does now. He does not know how to bring this into the realm of something that he can fix. He does not even know how to bring it into the realm of something that he can say. Where does that leave them?