Running for Home - 53. February 7, 2022

February 7 2022

I had another appointment with Dr. Sofen today, thank God. I really needed to decompress and let everything out. She was totally okay with making more recent events the priority, considering how much angst they are causing me. Of course, that also means that it was one of those appointments that you leave feeling both entirely drained and not totally sure it helped to relieve things at all. I know enough, now, that it gets better long term. Usually. You have to be patient with this shit. Sigh.

So Dominik’s brain has stabilized, whatever that means. Emma is certain she has eradicated the telepathic virus, so there is only physical healing left. Cecilia showed me a scan of his head a few days ago. I’m no doctor, but it was clear that his brain wasn’t filling up as much space in his skull as it should. Cecilia rattled off a few different things that were of most concern to her, but I was too stuck on the picture to really process what she was saying. It was real, whatever this was. A physical manifestation of a psychic problem. It just hit home for me even more how complex a dilemma I now faced.

I gave Cecilia and Hank the go-ahead for some sort of stem cell therapy that should help regenerate the damaged areas. It’s really promising, but at the same time there is only so much it can do, even if it works. It’s anyone’s guess at this point how much it will help him. It will take time, too. Donor cells have to be extracted from a tissue sample somewhere else on his body, coaxed into pluripotency, and converted into a nervous system lineage. Then the cells have to be introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid around Dom’s brain and hopefully they will penetrate its barriers and begin to replicate and reinforce what’s left of his grey matter. Since the brain is pretty plastic, they should be able to support and strengthen existing neuronal connections and then hopefully make room for more growth of new connections in the future. I don’t know if that means his brain volume will increase back to the amount it should, but one can hope that he will at least be functional when all is said and done. I guess I can have hope, considering that he was doing well enough to run a successful business up until he kidnapped me.

I’m still having trouble fathoming that part. How had he done this whole business thing? I feel like it came out of nowhere. Was he planning this for a long time? He’d talked about owning a bar here and there over the years but I never thought he was serious, especially not after he came back from jail. Maybe I fucked up. Maybe that was just another reason in the long list of them that lead to our break-up. But where had he got the money for all this? I know he got the property from Magneto, but what about the start-up costs? Cash to buy the initial volumes of alcohol, insurance, utilities, decorating the place, all of it… where did this come from? Did he steal it? Or did he find some sort of investor or benefactor?

Was he fucking someone else to get at their money? Was that what happened?

As if. It’s more likely that he somehow managed to steal it. I have trouble believing that one, though. He’s not exactly capable of white-collar crime, and if he was fucked up enough that he couldn’t even jack a car without being caught all those years ago I’m certain it didn’t come from him robbing a bank the old fashioned way. I would have figured it out if he was doing some serious criminal shit before we broke up. It’s so confusing. I’m certain that Emma has the answers to these questions, considering just how deep she’s gone into his head to stop the telepathic virus. I just don’t know whether or not I should ask. Whether or not I even want to know. Whether or not it even matters.

What will happen to his bar now? If his recovery timeline is long-term, are we going to just sell off the bar and give his kid the profits as a lump sum? I doubt that will work, but until I see any legal documents relating to what the mother wanted or is supposed to get, I have no idea. I don’t even know if it falls to me to make these decisions as well. I mean, sure I agreed to be his proxy for medical stuff for now but I haven’t said anything about dealing with his legal messes.

The other wrinkle in all of this is Bobby. I finally opened up to him about what’s going on with Dom. He started out looking sympathetic and concerned but as I kept talking he started to frown, and it got deeper and deeper. Suddenly Bobby and I are in a place neither of us bargained for. My ex-lover was doing crazy things because his brain was fucked up. And I have sympathy.

...More than just sympathy.

Bobby could tell. It freaks me out how well he reads me. It’s easy to read him because his emotions are as transparent as his ice. He wears his heart on his sleeve, so what you see is what you get. It’s probably part of why Jean-Paul got so attached to Bobby back in the day - the idiot was sending out signals of his mutual attraction and interest that JP was reading loud and clear even if Bobby didn’t mean to do it. He can’t help it. I love him for it, though. It’s a form of honesty that so many people see as a weakness. Fuck, it’s a weakness my father tried to smack out of me once he became a drunk. I used to think of it as a weakness, too. I try to be more honest with my emotions now. People always used to think I had exactly four moods: melancholic, surly, exuberant and enraged. That may have been true, to an extent, but it was never the whole story. Those were just outward expressions of what I was really feeling, put through a filter that added many layers of distortion. I knew what I was feeling, even if I didn’t show it.

So yeah, it’s amazing that Bobby has such a good handle on my emotions considering that we’ve only really had about a month of time together again as friends, let alone as something more. Like so many other aspects of our relationship, I’m trying not to overthink it or derive some sort of fundamental cosmic meaning from it. The reality is that we lived together, sharing the same space and living almost the exact same life for four years as teenagers. That’s fucking intense, and you can learn a lot about anyone in that sort of environment let alone someone with whom there is a powerful, shared connection. So Bobby knows that my feelings about Dom and what’s happened to him are not simple. How could they be? It would be wonderful if I could wave a magic wand and say that things are over with him and just close the book, but I can’t. I don’t know what to think about the thunderstorm raging in my mind, this vice clamped around my heart. Dom was my best friend for almost twenty years, and my lover for the last seven to nine of them, depending on where you define the ‘beginning’ of us as partners and not just friends.

I asked Dr. Sofen if she thinks I have Stockholm Syndrome. She shook her head and said that while there were some things that overlap, I had so much prior history with Dominik that of course things would get tangled up in this mess of a situation in the aftermath. And then she asked me if I’d ever stopped loving him.

And there’s the truth, right?

I haven’t.

Fuck me, I haven’t.