Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Saint didn't think in absolutes, just now or prior. He lacked ambition and he lacked the black and white of the film he liked so much and it was a failing as much as it was a whole part of who he was, he knew. He saw the pallets of white, and he knew the pathway they'd taken here, but he thought distantly of the families these men might have, the different turns in the roads that could have brought them all here. He didn't see what was pretty and good, but he saw possibility, and there was possibility for both the ugly and the good - neither ruled over everything.
If the little boy had edged away instead of curling dirty brown fingers into Saint's palm, it would have been a different set of calculations, memory supplying the name of the friendly man on the front desk of the shelter, six blocks over, the name and hours worked by the woman at the soup-kitchen which was twelve blocks away. But he didn't, and Saint straightened, pushing weight over one knee and then the next.
And he looked at Luke, with clear, tired brown eyes that wore the havoc beneath them in bruised-blue, and shook his head. He didn't need the threat that was present in the way Luke implied without saying very much at all. He didn't need threats, but he was troubled and he wore this as obviously as he wore the shock. He looked at Wren silently, and the threadlet of her threat, the guileless way she made it, was added to the whole until it made a new picture.
"Who would I tell?" Saint looked at Luke now. "The police?" He shook his head, and it felt like being at a roadside, where the earth was tumultuous with the bones of the dead, passing over American green to get past another pointless checkpoint.
"I'm not going to tell anyone." And he began to shepherd the little boy out of the door, out of the white dust and the horror.