Matt

I shouldn't have cared what Miranda thought. Real critics evaluated the execution of a piece, not the subject. Miranda could no more criticize me for rendering Claire as a passive sufferer than she could me painting daisies instead of petunias. It was a perfectly valid artistic choice. Had I conveyed what I set out to convey? Miranda couldn't answer that. She didn't have the tools, so she criticized what I had drawn instead.

And yet, her words would not leave me. Imagine someone with every physical and intellectual gift Eldfell and Arcian could bestow. Now, add being the daughter of the wealthiest man in the galaxy and all the doors that would open for her. I'd never been around people with money before Miranda showed up, unless you counted Gwen, who didn't exactly flaunt it. But Claire Eldfell had had money. She'd never have to make do with pencils that came in tins the size of lunchboxes, five credits for the lot, whose colors were too harsh for what she wanted. She'd never have to hope and pray she was good enough for a scholarship. Her family was the sort that hobnobbed with ambassadors and kings.

That was only the beginning of her privilege. Having every physical and intellectual gift was an exaggeration—no one was that perfect—but it was an exaggeration I could run with. She would be beautiful, but how? Not in the sweet, angelic way designed to arouse only pity that I had first chosen. Claire had been a crippled, suffering princess, but still a princess: the long hoped for heiress to an empire. Her beauty would have been calculated to command, something to bend men and women alike to her will. Eldfell's dark hair and cold eyes put into a woman's body and made beautiful. She would be strong, tough enough to survive a procedure meant for krogan.

There would be an intellect too, keen and fiercely honed. Lastly, imagine having all that and knowing you could still be locked away if one man decided you weren't making the best possible use of it. Claire would have been cunning. She would have had no other choice. If she didn't learn her father's moods and what did and didn't please him, she would be thrown into a nursing home. And she knew it. My modern princess, locked away in her tower. It would have made her old before her time, suspicious and haunted. All that privilege hanging by a gossamer thread. She would have learned to manipulate the way other children learned their ABCs, because that was what would maintain her comfort for another day.

Arrogance and terror would be her twin companions. The suffering would still be there, but it would be there as it was for Miranda, part of the whole. That would be a challenge to render, far more than the golden-haired martyr I had first conjured. That Claire had been pathetic. This new Claire would be tragic: the best of humanity slowly succumbing to one man's arrogance and her own determination to escape the fate he planned for her. This Claire would have literally worked herself to death trying to meet her father's expectations. And she would have been proud and alone to the end, afraid to confide in anyone in case her father smelled weakness.

Perhaps that would please Miranda more. There were bits of her in Claire now, but then they had the pain and the money in common, didn't they?

The image came to me as suddenly as lightning and as sharp as a photograph. Claire Eldfell, in fencer's gear, mask off. Her shoulders drooped with exhaustion, but her jaw was set with fierce determination. She would get through this lesson even if it killed her. A fencing master stood opposite her, expression unreadable behind his mask. His sword lay on a nearby bench, one hand extended toward the girl, but his head turned toward the third figure in the room. His loyalties were divided between his student and the man paying his fee. He knew he should stop, but he dared not. Robert Eldfell stood between and a little behind them, coldly and impassively assessing his daughter's performance. A study in stubbornness, weakness, and malice.

This was no sketch. Such detail could only be properly shown on canvas. I'd need time and space I didn't have at present. But I'd have it soon, thanks to Miranda. Professor Montague would have studio space in her house. If I were a really good boy, she might even let me use some of her supplies. Professional grade paint to go with the professional grade pencils Miranda and her foundation had given me. And there would be research to do. I'd seen fencing once or twice in vids, the hobby of bored aristocrats with names like Smythe-Wessen and von Richten. It would be easy to base the painting on nothing more than those vids. Claire, though, deserved accuracy, as she deserved every ounce of skill and effort I possessed.

Miranda knocked and entered. "I forgot to tell you that dinner's in an hour. You can order up some room service if you don't feel like dealing with the crowd."

I waved her away. No I didn't feel like being with a bunch of people. There was a painting to plan. They would only disrupt my concentration. Actually… I looked at Miranda. She was the sort of person who would hang around with people who fenced. Maybe she even fenced herself. I might be able to get a bit of information from her or at least the concession that it was a good idea for a painting. "Maybe you could join me for dinner?"

Miranda stiffened. Not like she had before, with anger and irritation transforming her into cold marble. This was more like what happened when the rabbits we kept on Mindoir caught sight of the local predators. They went very still and hoped they would go away. Subtle patches of color appeared on her cheeks. "I don't think that would be appropriate."

"Appropriate?" What could be inappropriate about—oh. Oh. I felt my own cheeks grow hot. It'd been so long since I felt like asking a girl out that way that the idea hadn't even crossed my mind. "I didn't mean it like that. I just have something I want to talk over with you." I closed my eyes. I wish I had meant it like that. A normal guy would have. Miranda had been unsettling at first, but I had seen her in the throes of enthusiasm. She was beautiful. I should have been dying to tear her clothes off instead of feeling vague, muted attraction and being grateful that I felt that much.

I forced a smile. "Your honor is entirely safe with me, milady."

A shadow passed over her face for no reason I could think of, but she smiled in return all the same. "I'll see you in an hour then."

Miranda

I wish I had meant it like that. Shepard's voice had been barely above a whisper. He probably hadn't even realized he'd spoken aloud. But I'd heard him. Worse, I understood him. His dossier spoke of posttraumatic stress disorder or depression. Decreased sexual appetite would not be uncommon. I knew what that was like. I wasn't celibate—one of the first things I'd done after joining Cerberus was rid myself of my unwanted virginity—but the pain was a complication. At its worst, it robbed me of desire altogether, and Andrex could smother it with a cloud of opiates. And there were the long chats about expectations, what I could and couldn't do, and various other things that could suck the passion right out of an encounter unless I chose my partner carefully. I knew what it was to lust after someone, but I also knew what it was to want to lust after them and be physically unable to do so. Strange to have that in common with a teenage boy.

The pain was no more than a mild burn that day, so I spent most of the hour writing a report for our Teltin Institute. I'd meant what I'd told Shepard. The L3 implant and his subsequent training would help far more people than just me. BAaT had had limited success in creating powerful, useful biotics, but we were still nowhere near the asari, or even the salarians. Teltin was our chance to remedy that. Many children had been cast out by their families after manifesting biotic ability. We took them in, and provided cutting-edge training that would make them useful to humanity. Shepard could be the breakthrough we had been looking for.

Shepard arrived exactly one hour later, sketchbook under one arm. He looked… different. I don't mean a cliché sudden attractiveness. Misery had swirled around him since the day we met, but he seemed to have sloughed some of it off. He moved more briskly and his smile was nervous instead of infused with false charm. Even the nervousness was different. There was no terror in his eyes, as there had been when I mentioned biotics, just the ordinary sort of anxiety mixed with a subdued excitement. It must've been caused by whatever he wanted to discuss with me.

"Have a seat." I tossed him a datapad containing a menu.

The color left his face. "Fifty credits for smoked salmon?"

"Expense account," I reminded him. "You can have whatever you like." He'd see me weak far sooner than I would have liked, so the luxury had been my backup plan. Niket had been overawed by the slightest bauble that my father had deigned to give me. Shepard hid it a little better, but he didn't know what to make of all this luxury I took for granted. That and his curious fascination with me were the only tools I had now that I could no longer terrify him into compliance. Fortunately, he was proving far more susceptible to bribery than he ever had terror. "Now, what was it you wanted to discuss?"

He put the menu down. "I, er, got to thinking about what you said about me turning Claire Eldfell into a victim."

Good. Let him think. I wasn't some pathetic cripple, fit only to be pitied for what I couldn't do. I'd survived. Soon, I would do better than survive. And, even at my worst I'd had Niket and Nielsen. I hadn't simply gazed pitifully out a window as life passed me by.

"You had no right to criticize how I chose to represent her, but you gave me an idea. You wanted Claire active?" He picked up his sketchbook. "Well, how's this?"

He flipped through the pages furiously until he came to a sketch in colored pencil. It lacked the polished quality of the one I'd seen earlier, and the pencil strokes seemed frantic, as if they'd been done in a great hurry. A female fencer stood in what was clearly supposed to be the en garde position, her foil sticking outward. Her foot positioning was all wrong, and both hands were gauntleted instead of just the sword hand.

And yet, it was me that I saw in that scribbling. Oh, the girl's features were different, much softer than mine. I preferred the quicker, more realistic feel of the épée to the more mannered foil. This girl was as much an invention as the blonde saint that had so infuriated me. But I recognized her in the hunch of her shoulders and the set of her jaw. Not me, but me as I might have been. "Better," I managed.

His eyes shone with satisfaction. "Good. Because this is just the proof-of-concept." His face lit up as he spun me a tale of an exhausted girl fatally determined to succeed, the fencing master too weak to help her and the forbidding father who controlled them both. How her skin would be as pale as a nineteenth-century consumptive, beautiful but clearly unhealthy. How the father would appear impassive on first viewing, but gradually revealed a subtle cruelty as he looked for any excuse to shut his daughter away forever. Maybe the fencing master loved her—he hadn't decided yet.

Gregory had been happily married and not that close to me in any case, but that almost seemed beside the point as Shepard's words tumbled out like a waterfall. I could see hints of what he must've been before Mindoir, this boy who used colors and lines to tell stories the way other people used words. Reserved by nature, perhaps, and twisted into something else by circumstance, but passionate about what he loved. If the real me could ever command even a fraction of the passion he showered on his paints and the construct he had created, then…

"I was hoping you knew someone who fenced." He put his hand over mine, as if I were a girlfriend he was hoping to convince to run away with him. I looked down at them. His fingers were a study in contrasts, long and tapering and perfect for holding pencils or paintbrushes, but calloused from years of helping out on the family homestead. The artist and the farmboy all wrapped up in a neat little package.

"I don't even know what I don't know," he continued, "and I thought maybe you could help me out." He squeezed my fingers. "Please?"

That desperate, pleading intensity intrigued me. More than intrigued me. He had said he wanted to capture me the way he was painting his spectre of Claire Eldfell. What would it be like to be the object of that intense scrutiny? Terrifying as he peeled me back layer by layer, or exhilarating as he found something that my father couldn't claim credit for? And perhaps the intensity could be expanded to other things. His biotics. That would be helpful. Or some girl he loved. If he were older or less traumatized, he would've been exactly the sort of man I would have seduced for my own sake. See what I could make of his attention to detail. He wasn't even bad looking, with his auburn hair and ice blue eyes. Perhaps all he needed to turn back into himself was a little encouragement. I could provide that. I'd been designed to provide it.

No, wait. Best to stop that particular train of thought right now. He was a traumatized sixteen-year-old boy, like it or not. I'd do everything in my power to turn him into a good biotic. I'd manipulate him in every way possible for the benefit of humanity. But not for something as selfish as taking him to my bed. I'd be taking advantage of him, and even my father hadn't sunk quite that low.

The idea was locked away like an inconvenient surge of biotic power. I wouldn't think about it again. If I found myself needing relief that badly, well there were people who knew my needs and would expect very little in return.

"So, what do you say?"

I ought to have said no, spared myself even the temptation of seeing him like this again. His art should have been nothing more than something I could use to manipulate him into becoming what I needed. And yet…this was what he'd been meant for, just as I was meant to help advance humanity. Seducing him was a dangerous, damaging fool's game, but I could help him in other ways and see a little of the person he had been and might yet be again. And bask a little in that passion he showered on me and his idea of the girl I had been.

"Mr. Shepard, I'd be delighted to help you."