[ ππππΒ ] β sender and receiver lock eyes across the room
It's been about three months since Saturn's release and rescue from the hands of his kidnapper.
He returned functionally intact, as far as his body is concerned. The rest of him - in fact, everything that could be meaningfully thought of as 'him', as Saturn or Samuel Drakos - arrived broken, splintered, fractured and crushed.
The Saturn his peers, teachers and closest loved ones once knew no longer exists. In his place is this skittish, agitated, distrustful, bitter, broken husk. Someone who knows the kind of hatred that would allow them to throw their lives away for vengeance.
And it's beautiful, Hue thinks.
No, that isn't right. B thinks it's beautiful.
Hue thinks it's horrifying. Hue has been quietly plunged into flashbacks of the kind of life he used to live before he came here, before he became an artist.
Art, B thinks, is what Samuel Drakos is now. A sculpture that he shaped with his very own hands.
He's come so far from trying to beat an arm until it hemorrhaged! This time, he was able to reach inside of someone and twist them from the inside until they were unrecognizable. It was grueling, and it took much time, and Saturn had to work very hard and overcome so many obstacles, but they did it, and they did it together.
Now he's been reborn into his masterpiece.
The light of true inspiration, that spark that makes you believe that anything is possible, the touch of God on your crown, that is what B feels, watching Samuel dissociate in the middle of a busy hallway through the art room window.
Aww, he's thinking about me.
Those frayed nerves of his appeared to still work, at least. Slowly he raises his head and turns to meet his gaze.
Hue looks terribly worried.
He opens his classroom door and gestures for Saturn to come inside, but he doesn't respond.
'Alone.' Hue mouths. He kicked out the other students who liked to straggle in the art room some time ago. Just in case Saturn needed somewhere quiet to go.
To his surprise, Saturn approaches him.
Hue steps aside and allows Saturn to enter the room before closing it. Saturn silently slumps into the nearest desk, still saying nothing.
There's something so familiar about this. B is reminded of dosing him with scopolamine, the moment that started all of this. Samuel just followed him. There was no struggle whatsoever, which had confounded his little friends in particular when they struggled to decipher the clues B left for them.
All that fighting and clawing and scratching and Saturn finally escaped him, yet here he is again. He walked right back into his orbit willingly, blind as faith. And this time, all B had to do was wave.
Hue watches Samson for a second or two, brow knitted in a sense of deep frustration, helplessness and - interestingly enough, guilt.
It's just, how was it that he and the other adults here weren't able to a damn thing for the poor kid?
Eventually, he retires to his own desk. They simply sit together in silence. Hue has no idea for how long. B knows it has been precisely 78 minutes.
"...You don't have to say anything. I'm not good at this anyway. But you can come here whenever you want, and nobody will bother you."
"Okay," Saturn finally says, in a small, tired voice.
