Hearing Mari call him<span style="font-style: italic">‘darling’</span>hurt worse than any physical pain.  She wouldn’t use that term of endearment after she learned that he was the one who’d hit her -- the one who’d fucked her while she slept.  Like a beached fish, Dumas moved his lips without managing to produce the smallest sound.  There weren’t enough words in any language to say what he needed to say.<br/><br/>After the explosion that shredded his back, Dumas had been kept heavily sedated for several days.  The medication was intended to mask his pain.  However, unbeknownst to his doctors, it had also saved his sanity.  In that slow and stupefied state, he’d had a chance to accept the death of his lover without it tearing him apart.  Later, when the drugs finally wore off, the grief had slammed into him like a speeding truck.  But by then, he’d been ready for it.  It had only left him crippled, instead of utterly destroyed.<br/><br/>Now, facing another crisis, Dumas’s brain attempted to attain a similar state without the aid of narcotics.  It dragged him relentlessly inward, far away from the storm of raging emotions.  He stopped trembling.  And his face relaxed into an expression of eerie calm, framing eyes that had turned glassy and dull.<br/><br/>“It’s okay” Dumas assured Chester.  The words didn’t falter, but there was still something odd about them, as if they were hollow inside.  “I’m alright now.”<br/><br/>However, despite that claim, Dumas still obeyed Chester’s commands.  Why shouldn’t he?  Everything felt so distant, like a landscape shrouded in thick fog.  The only thing that stirred any reaction in him was when Chester draped his jacket over Mari.  That was good.  Chester would take care of Mari.  Someone needed to, and it could no longer be him.<br/><br/>Under normal circumstances, Dumas would have rather chewed off his own leg than let White see him in an emotionally wounded state.  But when the dj joined them, he was greeted with nothing more hostile than a bob of Dumas’s head.  As they walked back toward the club, Dumas even hummed snippets of the music White had played on the night that his father visited the club.  Although he’d never admitted it to White, he often watched the recording DEE had made of that performance.