Disclaimer: Terra Nova does not belong to me.
He may not have the best idea of how girls' minds work (and the fact that he is still thinking of her as a girl rather than a woman may be telling himself something that he does not particularly want to hear), but he does know that there will never be any sort of an apology that he can make that will ever be adequate to cover the injury that he has inflicted upon her.
He is sorry about that. He is not sorry that he had a job to do. He is not sorry that he has successfully completed his mission. (He is not some hired hand that got roped into this in exchange for favors the way that so many of the others are. He is an actual believer in the cause and signed up for this knowing full well that he was embarking on a path that would involve deception and intentional inflicting of hurt and betrayal on people that he was going out of his way to make like him – and that just maybe he might genuinely like in return.) This, however, is not the same as knowing that Washington is disappointed in him as a commanding officer that had taken an interest. That was something that he always knew was going to be an ultimate result. Maddy was not an always knew situation. Maddy was an unexpected turn of events.
He is sorry for the hurt that he knows that Maddy must be feeling. She is a bystander in this. She got brought along for this ride without ever having been given a choice in anything. It may very well be that she is a mature and intelligent sixteen year old who has carried a lot of adult responsibilities within her family for quite some time, but she is also still a kid who is figuring out life. She is young enough (inexperienced enough) to be susceptible to someone paying her attention the way that he had. He had known that going in – had always known that what he was doing would never be classified as anything other than using her. He had done it anyway. He is not sorry about that (because he had needed an in and she was there and the mission came first), but he is sorry that she has to hurt because of it.
Hurting her was a side effect – not a purpose. He had done his level best to mitigate what he always knew would eventually be coming. Reading people and reading between the lines of what they do and say is an occupational requirement for him, and the time that he has spent with Maddy is not some sort of an exception. He listened when she spoke – the holes that she leaves in the stories about the lives of her family from before make it very clear that she was someone who had had her trust battered in the past. The fact that she was still willing to try – to treat this new world and everyone in it as if it was all a clean slate worthy of being given a chance – just shows her resilience and her underlying good nature. He hopes more than he thinks he has hoped anything in his life (even that his mission would ultimately be successful) that he has not managed to be the final straw that managed to break that in her.
He had tried to make things happen more quietly than they ultimately did, but one does not always have control over things like that. If the opportunity for him to slip off quietly with his fellows after the situation had come to a head had been available to him, then he would have taken it (having her present to see as everything culminated had never been on his wish list). She had not cried, and he thinks that is what pinches at him the most. If she had been crying, then he thinks that he could convince himself that she was still enough of a child that she would let out her tears and bleed off what had happened and go back to still being Maddy. If she had been angry and yelled or called him names or managed to throw things at him or some such, then he could have talked himself into believing something similar. She had not done either of those things.
She had just looked at him, and that look was, quite frankly, nothing short of devastating. There had been something about her eyes that he could not even begin to put the name of an emotion to – as if something had clicked into place in her head and things finally made sense to her. She looked as if she was thinking that the way he had treated her had been an anomaly that had finally been reconciled with the known (and he hated more than anything how easily she had seemed to find it to accept that her being a pawn in a larger game made more sense than her having found someone outside of her family that genuinely enjoyed her company in a not professional capacity).
He had wanted to shake her in that moment. He had wanted to tell her a lot of things that he knew would not do any good because there was no reasonable reason for her to actually hear him when he said them. Those things would remain unsaid – things like how he had genuinely enjoyed her company or that those times with her had been the happiest that he had been for a long time. He had no way to let her know that she made him smile in a way that he had not since his father had died – that she (in some weird, incomprehensible way) made him more sure than ever that he was doing the right thing because there were people like her in the world that deserved the outcome for which he was striving. He could not tell her that he was sorry that he had kissed her – not because he had not wanted to (honestly, it was now a treasured memory that he would take to his grave) but because he had promised himself that no matter how much he had cultivated her time and attention there had been lines that he would not cross. She had deserved better than to have her first kiss stolen by someone that she was going to hate later.
The truth was that he had gotten caught up in the moment – had his breath stolen and his thoughts scrambled by the way his heart had been crushed by the mere suggestion that she might die on this adventure he had insisted upon taking her on as he realized that he was in far deeper than he should ever have allowed himself to be. He had been genuinely petrified when he had returned from patrol to discover that she had very nearly been murdered by someone on the science team. How was he supposed to say that if this had been another place and other circumstances, then he would have wanted nothing more than to spend his life with her in the middle of a moment that outed him as the liar that he was? Why should she believe that he had not been saying things to keep a charade going when he told her father that he wanted to marry her? How could he explain that that abrupt confession had been him letting all the things that he understood that he wanted and his grief over knowing that he was never going to get to have them come pouring out of him in that moment?
No, there was no I am so sorry in the world that would ever be adequate enough to cover what he had done to her (what he had done to both of them), so he would not say it at all. Maybe someday when everything was over things could be different. Maybe at some future point when there was distance and resolution the two of them would be able to talk and he could try to explain. But, for now, there was no point or purpose to pouring out words that would strike her as nothing more than meaningless strings of syllables. Besides, he would be so busy for the foreseeable future that there would really be no time to try to force the communication.
Maybe he would make a recording for his tags – for just in case. It might be the coward's way out to leave her with a message from him with no opportunity for her to take him to task or question or argue with him in turn, but it was better than no explanation at all, wasn't it? He did not know. He would do it anyway. It would be something – even if that something was only getting his own jumble of thoughts and emotions out of his head and into something slightly less tangled and daunting.