ᴇɢᴏɴ ꜱᴘᴇɴɢʟᴇʀ, ᴘʜᴅ (spengs) wrote in wtnvgame, @ 2020-12-29 23:44:00 |
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On a purely logical level, he could understand. Pete was in a new relationship. With someone new. Someone he hadn't known for years. It made sense for him to want to figure things out before telling people. It didn't matter that Egon had told him about him and Janine before there even was a him and Janine. It wasn't the same situation. The factors were different. He couldn't expect Pete to behave the same way when the variables of the situation weren't the same. Any good scientists knew that changing the variables meant changing the end result. It was simple. Logical. Everything that appealed to Egon as a scientist.
But Egon didn't feel much like a scientist. At least not about this. He didn't engage with his own emotions often, finding them messy and complicated. He preferred to set them aside for the most part and focus on his work. On science. And logic and reason and scientific discovery. In short, he often bottled things up. Which worked fine for him. Right up until something happened that forced his emotions to the forefront. That never ended well.
Egon knew, logically speaking, that his childhood hadn't been standard. Or particularly ideal. It was, perhaps, generous to say that he'd had a childhood at all. He'd been self-sufficient out of necessity. An adult in a child's body because the adults in his life hadn't shown much interest in him or his needs. That wasn't normal or good or healthy, but it was the life he'd lived and it was a life that had shaped him into someone who tried not to need much.
Except that he needed Pete.
Pete was his best friend. Pete had been, for a not inconsiderable amount of time, his only friend. And he'd come to rely on Pete's presence in his life. Pete balanced him and made sure he had emotional support when he needed it. Made sure he took care of himself in so much as he could. Made sure he didn't lose himself in the science. Pete was important to him. And the addition of Ray and Winston and Janine to their lives hadn't changed that. It was why he told Pete everything. Why he made sure, even when he had a hard time with emotions and people and so much outside of his work, that Pete knew he was important to him.
And Pete had gone and got a girlfriend and hadn't told him. He'd kept that from him. He'd left him out of it. And Egon couldn't help but feel hurt and small and vulnerable. Couldn't help but feel the way he had for so much of his childhood. Because as much as logic was telling him this was fine, that it wasn't intentional and that it didn't mean anything, his feelings were telling him that Pete didn't need him any more. That Pete was moving on with his life and leaving him behind and that he was going to lose his best friend.
He wasn't jealous. It wasn't that. He'd considered, briefly, that he might be jealous. That the emotion at the root of this was fundamentally a selfish one. Yes, he and Pete had been a thing once, and an undercurrent of that ran through their friendship and always would. But he was genuinely happy with Janine. He cared about her. He would even go so far as to say he might love her, or at the very least, had the capacity to eventually. He wouldn't have begun a relationship with her if he didn't want to be with her. And he was reasonably certain she wouldn't be amenable to a relationship without exclusivity. So while he did care about Pete, he didn't have romantic inclinations where he was concerned.
No, he just felt hurt. Abandoned. And that was harder to deal with. Because jealousy was arguably a less complicated emotion. If he was just jealous, he could fight that with logic. That he wanted Peter to be happy and that Katie seemed like a very nice girl, and that he had Janine so it was all fine. Hurt and abandonment were harder to reason away and excise. Because those were emotions rooted deep in the damage his childhood had left and that made them infinitely more complicated.
So he did his best to shut them down. Tried to lock down his emotions and focus on logic. Science. He had projects to do. He needed to get a containment unit and an endoscopic camera, and probably some safety equipment. Maybe some defensive measure in case throat spiders were especially violent. He had work and work was logical and rational and not messy. Or at least not messy in a feelings way. He just needed to focus on work until he managed to shut down these feelings and move on.
Even if moving on meant letting go of Pete and all that entailed.