Running for Home - 52. February 4, 2022

February 4 2022

I’m starting to get a bit stir-crazy. I’ve been awake since the 21st of January and on leave from work the whole time. It’s been helpful, I guess, but I need to be doing something other than trying to write something worthwhile both book-wise and here in this journal, and watching shit daytime TV. I’ve read all the books Xi’an gave me for Christmas and then some others she’s brought me from her personal library too, though I might have to go back through some of them sometime in the future because my concentration hasn’t been the best.

Bobby and I are getting more settled together. I wouldn’t say we’re domestic - nothing like that - but there’s this level of comfort I feel in his presence that I haven’t felt in a long time. Not since before I realized I was in love with him as a teenager, and what it meant. I am not sure what to make of how he’s feeling. I know he loves me, I do… I just feel like he’s not sure how to behave. Like, I’m not Marie or Opal or any of his other miscellaneous ex-girlfriends from the time before Jean-Paul triggered the end of his denial. It’s like he’s trapped walking some wire between treating me like a princess and just treating me like some bro he hangs out with. To be honest, what I’d prefer is more the latter than the former but in quiet moments, alone, being spoiled a little is okay. Just not constantly, or in stupid ways. Just gestures of intimacy, not gallantry or acting like a slave to my desires.

I guess the one thing his public behaviour is doing is help keep things quiet. He was already acting this way with me pretty much all of December so when people have seen us about over the last few days it hasn’t raised any eyebrows. We are flying under the radar of public knowledge, but our closest friends know. I mean, Bobby’s not using his room in the live-in faculty dormitory wing hardly at all other than to store clothing and his computer, we are together all the time, and Jubilee said Xi’an, Dani and Rachel had already figured out I had feelings for Bobby before Christmas anyway, so… I don’t know. I couldn’t care less who knows and who doesn’t. Best of all, Bobby doesn’t seem to care either. That was a problem I was worried I’d have to endure, but I think he feels safe enough here at the School around friends to just relax and let it be what it is.

One thing we still haven’t talked about is what Bobby did do between running away from Jean-Paul and his return here. Did he date anyone? Did he have have sex with another guy, even one-night stands or blow-jobs in the dark back room at a club? Hell, has he even been to a gay bar? These aren’t things that are immediately important to me, but I do want to know what his experiences are. It has some bearing on the way I approach some things in our relationship.

Jean-Paul took the news pretty hard. I don’t blame him. If what I’ve learned from other people is even half-true, he had it for Bobby really bad back then. Piotr told me yesterday that it’s caused some tension in their relationship right now, but Piotr doesn’t blame Bobby in any way. It’s just something he and JP have to work through on their own. Considering that Piotr didn’t start exploring his bi side until he was in his 30s and only came out rather recently he was very understanding of Bobby’s dilemma. It is a different situation with Piotr, though, since he’s legitimately attracted to women as well. He is definitely better off with Jean-Paul than with Kitty, though. Damn that girl fucked up letting Pete go.

Jean-Paul has been to see me thrice since my return, but the first time was before he and Piotr found out. The second time was… Well, it wasn’t so much that we told them we were together as them walking in on the two of us asleep in the medlab. Bobby had been sitting in the chair next to the bed, leaning over onto it and we were holding hands. I was turned on my side practically clinging to him. It doesn’t take an idiot to figure it out what was going on. It was a completely awkward moment, and ended with both of them leaving rather quickly to get out of that space and process. He came back to visit me again today, and I don’t know what to think right now. It was pretty forced. I know it was his choice to be there, though. Nothing Piotr or anyone could have said would make Jean-Paul come to see me if he didn’t want to.

I don’t think either of us really knew what to say. Jean-Paul asked me a few questions about how I was doing, and then there was a big long pause. He told me not to worry about him, about jealousy. What he was feeling wasn’t that so much as a new kind of grief and frustration. It hit him a lot harder than he expected, and he wasn’t dealing with it very well. I told him that I wanted to have a long conversation with him when he was ready about Bobby and the shit he’s put both of us through, about his role in the anger and depression that stoked the wildfire that drove me to join the Brotherhood. Jean-Paul looked a bit stunned by that, but it’s not surprising. Jean-Paul is the first person that I’ve ever even mentioned my high school crush and how pathetically love-sick I was, about how it never really left me no matter how hard I tried to stamp it out. I’m too proud to have done that, admitted it. Dom apparently figured it out, but I never told anyone else. Well, except for Bobby but that situation is a bit different. Jean-Paul nodded and then gave me a small, bittersweet smile that spoke volumes more than anything either of us had said up until that point. And then he asked me to be forgiving if it took him awhile to come around to the new reality because I am his best friend here and I’d better not goddamn forget that.

That was another reality-bomb. Before I could say anything he sped out of there. I mean, I knew we were good friends, but… well, maybe this is another case of the significant other drowning out the friend-level situation. Piotr’s presence looms so large (in a good way!) that it’s difficult to know exactly where you stand with Jean-Paul. There is this quiet strength to their relationship, this solidity and comfort that I can only hope Bobby and I can achieve. I guess it feels hard to penetrate. I know where I stand with Piotr - it’s felt the same as in high school, closer even - but Jean-Paul has been a puzzle for me. Maybe it’s because in a lot of ways Jean-Paul can be a man of extremes. He’s very prickly at times, but at the same time you know when you have his confidence. The two of us can bicker if we are both in a bad mood, but at the same time I think we both enjoy having a bitch-fest about our students or just whatever over a bottle of wine (or three).

I guess I may be just a little uncomfortable because I suddenly feel like our relationship might be a tad asymmetrical. There’s this part of me that feels closer to Jubilee, but maybe that’s because I’ve known her since I was twelve and we found out we were both orphaned only-childs. Well, virtually orphaned for my part. I guess our relationship maybe feels more like siblings than friends at times - she’s my annoying twin sister or something like that. Fuck, Jean-Paul would know a thing or two about that, too, wouldn’t he? It mustn’t be easy for him, living so far from his twin sister. At the same time, it probably takes him a grand total of five minutes to fly up and hang out with her in Ottawa so it’s easy for them to have sibling time…

Okay, as heart-warming as all this crap might be, I need to stop avoiding what I really need to talk about now. It’s just… it’s hard. It’s not that talking about the dynamics of my friendships is unworthy, it’s just that I have something more pressing that needs attention and thought.

Emma came to me yesterday and told me that she found something very troubling while she was doing some telepathic work on Dominik. His brain is fucked up. She says he has a telepathic virus - something I didn’t even know existed. Apparently they are very slow-acting but eventually affect virtually every portion of the brain. Since there is no physical viral particle they are virtually incurable via modern medicine. Doctors just see them as the expression of some sort of neurological degeneracy disorder with physiological roots. It generally leads to years of misdiagnosis, mistreatment with all kinds of drugs and even surgeries until total hospitalization is required followed soon by death.

Emma told me that depending on what kind of infection was implanted, the symptoms can vary in terms of initial presentation and progression. They also tend to reach a tipping point where the effects start to cascade out of control. Dominik is reaching that point. In his case, the brain areas most affected are the centres related to risk-reward decisions, impulse control, aggression, and certain aspects of personality.

I shuddered. Visibly, violently shuddered.

Emma said that she didn’t like dropping a bomb on me like this, but that she thought I deserved to know the truth. She also needed someone to act as a proxy for medical decisions on his behalf because he was now in a place where he would be considered mentally incapable of making them for himself. According to her I was technically as close to next-of-kin as he had, since his daughter was not of legal age to make these sorts of decisions and his daughter’s mother never had any legal standing with him regardless. There was no one else. I asked her why she couldn’t just do it herself. I asked her why she thought I would be the right one for the job when I’m prejudiced as hell? She just gave me a look, one that said she knew that I knew the answer to that question, even if I didn’t like it.

Emma and Cecilia are working on repairing whatever damage they can, and Emma says she has already made significant headway in eradicating the virus from his psyche. She has no idea who the source of the infection would have been, but it would have occurred years ago. The timeframe she proposed made it likely to have happened while we were still in Freedom Force. There were a number of times we squared off against telepaths, so it’s entirely possible that one of them managed to do this.

I don’t know what to do with this information. I really don’t. How much of the issues we had stemmed from this disease? How much of the changes in Dom that I saw, especially after he returned from jail, how much of the was from this? From this, rather than from the years of untreated psychological traumas from the Brotherhood and Freedom Force? How much of what happened can I actually blame on him?

Fuck.

I just don’t know. I don’t fucking know. This hurts, it hurts so bad and I don’t know what to do about it. I loved him. I loved him so much, and it never felt like it was enough but now it turns out that maybe it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t his fault either? That it was some goddamn sneaky bitch of a telepath!? I… I want to find them. Find them and burn them. Burn them so bad, burn them to ash. They robbed me, robbed me of years of happiness that I could have had, that we could have had! I don’t know. I don’t know. I just can’t stop thinking… Fuck, they might already be dead. It could have been one last act of vengeance as their heart stopped, as they breathed their last - insert some device of torture, slowly screwing itself into Dom’s brain for years until he cracked. And he did crack, and cracked me right along with him. Almost ruined my fucking life!

I’m trying not to cry right now. Bobby’s going to come and find me in tears and try to comfort me, thinking this is about my captivity again but it’s not. It’s not, and this may be even worse than anything that happened to me in that secret dungeon.

What does this mean?

What does this fucking mean?