Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Saint stood. His knees did not protest, but the blood flooding his lower limbs tingled as the dust and the white powder (cocaine, very probably, his mind supplied the grainy newspaper imagery to capture it, without the camera to do it for him and easily cross-referenced to find a similar original) began to settle. Luke, because it was Luke: the absence of a uniform and the presence of the paint that obscured his face were both duly noted and quietly filed away beneath the white blanket of shock - caught himself up with Wren.
Saint watched dirty fingers slide over fine-boned face, as if Wren were a porcelain cup on the very brink of breaking and the possession and treasury of the cup were very precious things. It was a picture, and his mind had fogged like heat behind glass. All Saint could think of were the pictures. The men, twisted into portraiture at their feet, the musculature of repose obscene. He slid to knees once again (now they argued) and held two fingertips against the artery that ran up alongside the neck: pulse-beats, faint but unmistakeable butterflied against the pads of his fingers. No, not dead.
The reverie of Luke and the sunlit-Wren was all-encompassing. It neatly shuttered out the world in which the drugs settled like snow on concrete, in which the children were dusted with it, like a bomb had gone off and they raw, small, exposed and clearly terrified.
Saint liked children. He stepped carefully out of the direct sight-line of the destructive man who embraced his wife as if he'd known she had been here all along (Saint's mind processed with the black and white of portraiture in these, shocked minutes where he could hear his blood thrumming in his ears - the violence was shocking. It was destructive and beyond real contemplation) and he squatted in front of the bare-foot boy, and the others, and held out a hand.
"I'm Saint." His voice sounded raw in his throat, his tongue was thick. Fear had clotted his thinking, and now he felt rusty. Empty of much that was rational. "What are your names? Do you want to get out of here?"