Discuss what part with Shepherd? The part about how she was superfluous and he just had not figured it out yet, or the dead babies part? Lying back on her space of concrete, Claire stared at the ceiling and felt like she was drowning in all the fucked up mess of things, the twisted histories, and the pathetic chain that was forged by a man with the emotional intelligence of an adolescent.

She would talk to him all right. She would make him look straight at what a hypocrite he was. She would show Shepherd what she’d discovered, the truth of what he was doing through her eyes… not his distorted vision. The Gods had even directed her to the signpost of what a sad joke everything seemed to be. That boy. That curled up child she had rested on, the corpse with no name and nothing in his pockets. He would be her mascot, and Shepherd would have to look at him and answer to her.

Claire mixed her paints and began to recreate that lonely moment in the alley. There were hours to spend on the work, hours wherein she detailed the brick, the cold, the withered child, and herself… fast asleep against the cadaver’s stiffness.

She had never painted herself before, used the memory of her black hair on her cheek to mask most of her face, but it was her. The same curled up slender form, the bone structure that screamed Omega, all in the clothes she’d stolen from Maryanne.

Mindless tears were falling on the painting as she worked, mixing the colors as her hand moved in a frenzy. Shepherd was sitting across from her, she blithely recognized the fact that he had arrived, but ignored him in her fervor to remember her boy perfectly—to not miss a detail of the grotesqueness of his withered face and milky, shriveled eyes. It was not until the hand holding the brush started to shake that he reached forward and stilled her. The brush was taken from her fingers, the painting turned so Shepherd could see. With his hand encasing hers, he viewed what had eaten up the hours of her day.

His rich voice stated fact. “This is you.”

Stuck in the artist’s haze, that blurry moment where one knows they are creating something monstrous but still mentally indistinct, she muttered, “I was tired and alone. I had been wandering Thólos for hours because I needed to see what had happened, what had been taken when you locked me in this room. I found this boy who’d died alone and sat at his side, feeling as dead as he was… I couldn’t go any further so I leaned against him and fell asleep.”

Shepherd tightened his grip on her hand, growling, “You could have frozen to death.”