Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Mark is a lot uncertain and a little uncomfortable - and the strangest thing is that he thinks he likes it. He had not at first. It had been unsettling at best and downright disturbing at worst. He had been on edge enough from the enforced medical resting status and the thoughts spinning around his head had only made the inaction under which he was suffering worse. He has reconciled himself to the fact that these feelings aren't just going to dissipate with a return to his normal activities. He has also reconciled himself to the fact that he is glad that they aren't going to do that.
Letting go of the denial has eased some of the pressure, but he still has absolutely no idea what he is doing (and for someone that thrives on structure that is nothing short of terrifying). He has watched his buddies get "caught up" and snickered at them behind their backs even while he has been happy for them, but he has never been bitten by the bug himself - not until now. Now, he feels less as if he has been bitten and more as if he has been plowed over by one of the jeeps - that then shifted into reverse and came back for a second hit.
He has been keeping his mouth shut on the subject when he chats with the friends that come by to check on him because it is all new and precious somehow in part and also because he knows what he will sound like if he lets the words start slipping out of him. He would feel like an idiot gushing over a woman whose time in the colony is still best measured in days because it will sound like he is being overdramatic over noticing someone's pretty face (not that Maddy isn't pretty, Maddy is so, so pretty). He does not believe all those fluff stories about just knowing the first time that you see somebody (although, in truth, his first sight of Maddy is pretty muddled and confused in his head because blood loss and a concussion will do that to you). The way he feels about Maddy may have happened quickly, but it happened because of so much more than the fact that her eyes are the most amazing thing he has ever seen.
He had been grateful (and he thought she was pretty because of course he thought that she was pretty - he was concussed not blind), and he had wanted to find some way to say thank you for saving his life. He felt like you should say thank you when someone saved your life. (The fact that she had been in the right place at the right time with the right sort of knowledge to do that still kind of boggles his mind. He has always liked numbers, but he does not even know where you would start to try to figure out what the odds were for that particular set of circumstances.) He had also thought that some of that restless, unsettled thing that he had going on might be because he was feeling guilty that he had not given her a more proper acknowledgment of what she had done for him.
So, he had tried to pick Zoe's brain for an appropriate gift only to be laughed at . . . laughed at . . . and told that if he was really that grateful then he would pay enough attention to figure out an appropriate gift himself. So, he paid attention. He paid attention to her because he was trying to find a better way to say thank you. He kept paying attention because he was intrigued. Then, he tried not to pay attention because he felt like he was being creepy. Then, he let himself pay attention because he could not seem to stop.
Everything she does is beautiful. He thinks there was a song that he heard back when he was first learning guitar that had lyrics like that. It is true when it comes to Maddy. She is enthralled with everything that she sees, and he finds himself smiling just seeing the way that she looks at everything as if she cannot see and take in enough of it.
Her in this place makes him feel like everything is new and wonderful, and he does not want that to stop.
Being in this place makes her feel like everything is new and wonderful, and she does not want that to stop.
She is enthralled with everything that she sees, and she finds herself smiling just taking it all in and she cannot take in enough of it.
Everything is beautiful - even the things that are not actually physically beautiful.
She just wants to stand in the open spaces and spin and spin and spin with her arms thrown out to her sides, but she remembers that she is a grown woman - one who is trying to convince the leader of this settlement that she is useful. She needs him to see her as someone who belongs in his asset column and should not be reported to his superiors (although even she is not sure how much good that could do because they cannot send her back to where they came from so what would they even do about her). She feels like she needs to be careful to put her most put together appearance forward while everyone gets their footing, so she takes glances around to make sure that no one is within a line of sight before she basks in the privilege of being able to do something that requires her to be outside in the sunlight with no filter between her and the air that she is breathing.
It is so much better than she even dreamed that it would be.
She was enamored with this place long before her family coming was even a possibility, and she has found nothing to destroy what she has built up in her head over the years. She isn't naive - she knows that nothing is perfect, but being here with her family where she can hug them and speak to them (and nudge them in getting over their issues while she tries to hold Zoe back from bulldozing through them) is about as close to perfect as she can imagine.
Then, there is Reynolds . . . Mark.
That is so not a part of Maddy's wheelhouse. Maybe it could have been in a different world where things had happened differently or in a different older (where she had been a different sort of teenager and young adult) in a world where she had not been juggling multiple academic pursuits simultaneously - where she had not been so focused on what needed to happen next and next and next.
There might have been guys who shared her interests or found her interesting enough to interest themselves in her interests or something like that, but that had not been her world. If someone had ever done this whatever this is before, then she had not noticed. She finds it impossible to not notice now.
Mark is this sort of quietly focused presence that is just there. She can't not notice, but she has no idea what it is that she is supposed to do about it. She doesn't feel like she has anyone she can ask about what she is supposed to do. This feels like something that she should run by Kara for perspective, but she is in a completely different world than Kara - discussions about boys . . . men . . . aren't really possible. Everything in her screams that (adult or not) mentioning any of this to Jim Shannon would be a bad idea of epic proportions. There is a distance between her and her mother (not that she wants there to be) that they have not yet managed to bridge and she does not want to offer Mark up on the sacrificial altar of repairing their relationship.
So, she doesn't talk about it. She just rambles (in a why is my mouth still moving why will it not stop when I want it to sort of a way). He keeps coming back in spite of that - she is not certain what it is that makes him, but she kind of wants to find out. There is so much to be intrigued by in this place, and she is finding that the young soldier with the speaking eyes is becoming increasingly one of those things.
Did she really just write the phrase "speaking eyes' is her journal? She did. Forget posterity. Sometimes, she thinks she needs to request the destruction of her journals upon her death. Having someone read some the things she has written in her less than scientific moods is an indignity that she does not want to suffer - already deceased or no. Mark is nice to her (and not in the cloying way she sometimes experienced back in her early adolescent school years that she refuses to grant the dignity of being placed in the same experiential universe as Mark). She likes that. She find herself hoping that he will appear more often (which seems unreasonable because she is working and he is working and when is all of this extra time supposed to appear). She still finds herself hoping despite the impracticalities.
Because her heart has started stuttering when she looks up and sees him standing with his eyes on her somewhere on the outer edges of what she is doing, and she finds that she likes that feeling.