Tag for Episode 4.18, This One Time at Space Camp

The 'silent treatment' sucks monkey balls.

Just so you know.

That's what I've been getting from Zane for the last two weeks.

It would be bad enough if he'd just stay away from me.

I'd be able to miss him then. Maybe work up some regrets.

But he wants me to know he's not talking to me. So he pops up frigging everywhere, mostly to give me the stink eye. Glower at me. And then let some truly obnoxious comment fly right on the edge of my hearing, with just enough plausible deniability that calling him out would only make a big – a bigger – public scene. Which he appears to be jonesing for. Big time.

I am not.

Our personal drama is already quite public enough, thanks.

(If this is a taste of what he had going on with my enforcer-self? No wonder the files are full of what a gigantic pain-in-the-ass he was.)

All of this to let me know he's still mad.

Which, Christ on a cracker, I ALREADY KNEW.

And the crazy thing?

He's right to be mad. I should have talked with him first. Let him know I was planning on withdrawing. Gotten his – not approval, he never would have approved – but his acknowledgment of what I was going to do ahead of time.

I knew how much he wanted us to do this together. Win our berths on the Astreaus as a team.

I let him down. I screwed up.

Big time.

But him devolving into this…this caricature of wounded male ego makes it impossible to do anything to even address the issue, much less resolve it.

Because I'm not sorry I withdrew. I have no regrets on that front at all.

Even less now that he's being such an ass. The very idea of being stuck on a small ship on a distant moon with him, knowing this would be how he would handle it if and when we really disagreed about something important, turns my blood to ice. Me, and, I'm sure, everyone else on the crew.

I am truly sorry I hurt him by letting the news come as a surprise. That I didn't make enough of an effort to make sure he heard it privately, from me, first.

That was stupid and cowardly on my part. No to mention, quite rude. And he didn't deserve any of that.

But any apology I offered right now would be rejected. Because he's in no state to hear anything I would say. He's still mad about what I did. Not about the timing of his learning of it.

Makes me wish he were a yeller. That he'd track me down and shout at me for a while. Then I could yell back and we could get all the amped-up shit out long enough to talk. I'd have at least a chance to get through to him about why I did what I did. And we'd probably fuck in there somewhere too.

Or, at least, that's how things went down in the Lupo household. Not among the kids, obviously, but that's definitely how my parents rolled. Before my mom got too sick.

We kids threw punches instead. And yes, if you're curious, I did totally take advantage of being the youngest and a girl with an old-fashioned dad and no mom. I did punch first. As hard as I could. I was only going to get one or two hits in, so I made them count.

No yelling and no punches in Donovan-land. That's an icy place of brooding, caustic sulks, livened up with the odd scrap of bitter commentary. I remember it well, it turns out. Wish I didn't.

I suppose I should be grateful that he isn't seeking any sort of payback with the kinds of stupid, juvenile shit he used to pull around here.

He won his pardon fair and square. After everything he went through in prison and then his first unhappy years in Eureka, he's clearly got no plans to jeopardize his newfound position of respect and responsibility. At least, not directly. Not like that.

And I do wonder. If I'd been more…, I don't know. Giddy. Giggly. Girly. Clapped my hands. Jumped up and down. Shrieked a little with excitement for him when he told me he was in. Would that have helped soften the news of my defection?

I didn't do that. It never occurred to me.

I never doubted he'd make the crew. As soon as his pardon went through, everyone else was left competing for nineteen spaces. Even Fargo and Holly. One already had Zane's name on it.

First, he had his research proposal – which was all about taking advantage of the Titan location to pursue his actual heart's work as an astrophysicist studying the origins of stars. Then add the fact that he had repaired/rebuilt the first FTL drive, on the fly, in space(!), without ever having seen it before or even worked directly with the bridge device (not that anyone but our limited few knew that part). Finally, working alongside Fargo and Henry, he designed and supervised the building and installation of the bigger engines that power the Astreaus FTL drives themselves. Which he also helped to design and build.

His spot on the crew was a foregone conclusion.

I understood why he couldn't allow himself to think like that. Why he didn't let himself think like that. It's all too new, and he's already lost everything once. Including his doctorate. Yanked by UCLA on the grounds that his cyber crimes began on their campus, using their equipment, in clear violation of their policies.* That had reduced him to a mere 'Mr.' in a land where title and pedigree were everything.

And there are definitely people – Isaac Parrish and Larry Haberman I'm thinking of you – who take every opportunity to rub his nose in it. People who are all "Mister Donovan this, Mister Donovan that," when they don't normally use titles with anyone else except under the most formal of circumstances.

I am really and truly proud of him. My heart swells so much, sometimes, watching him direct his teams around the Astreaus, it actually hurts in my chest.

I'm proud of him for finding a way to be at peace with all the 'Mistering' that goes on.

I'm proud of him being the guy who is grateful for praise and rewards rather than taking them for granted.

For being able and willing to buckle down and do the scut work in IT, including helping frantic research techs find USB ports and gently talking befuddled ecologists nearing retirement through systems upgrades.

For earning respect and winning friends by actually doing something for others – even boring, unimportant things – because it was his job.

Things he couldn't, or wouldn't, or plain just didn't have to do before.

As much as I loved that guy, and I did love him – so, so much – I knew as well or better than anyone what an arrogant dickhead he was capable of being.

Which is all stuff I should have told him, long before now.

When he was still listening to me.

I should have told him that, in so many ways, he is a much better man than the one I used to know.

That I admire him in ways I didn't before.

That now I'm glad he's brilliant, instead of being afraid of it.

So maybe that's what makes it so incredibly frustrating that one of the things that hasn't changed one fucking iota is how he sulks.

The 'silent treatment' sucks. Hard.

Author's note: Still working my way through S4/5 via tags/missing scenes. A late, and personal project devoted to making up my own head canon that makes dramatic sense with - and of - what we saw on screen. And give me an opportunity to play around with different writing techniques. So, more first person POV here.

*more of my personal head canon! He clearly had at least one PhD in Eureka pre time shift, and if you stick to what Henry said - that the changes are all located *in* Eureka, there's no reason to think he hadn't earned the same degree in the world of the second time shift... except he clearly doesn't have the title anymore. So - awarded, but yanked for his felonies is a solution that at least...works.