The sharp pencil starts with the basic form, sketching out the shape: broad shoulders, well-muscled torso, sturdy hips and strong legs half-hidden by blankets, before sweeping back up along the curvature of the back with its nearly delicate shoulder-blades. The shape of the head is next, details left for later, and then one arm half-bent so that it holds the corner of the pillowcase, the other hidden. There is the hand, large but always careful in its motions, nails short and a little ragged (he still bites them sometimes, a nervous habit is hard to break).

Feliciano starts in on the shading next, leaving the details for last, the contours of the stripy blanket as it drapes over Ludwig's lower half, and thank God he doesn't move much in his sleep, or it'd be near impossible to really get the way the half-light through the curtains softens the sharp lines on Ludwig.

Face next, so Feliciano scoots his chair in as quietly as he can. There's something almost boyish in Ludwig's face when he's asleep, some softness that is missing when he's in public and has to yell at people, and Feliciano knows he's one of the few people to ever get to see the way Ludwig's face relaxes and his thin lips part slightly and the tension in his jaw fades. His eyelashes, too, are longer than Feliciano would've thought, although nearly invisible, and they twitch against his pale cheek.

The pencil delineates a high cheekbone, a strong jawline, disheveled fair hair, faintly arched eyebrows. Feliciano smiles to himself as he shades Ludwig's cheek, adding the faintest of marks just where Ludwig would get a small dimple if Feliciano could make him laugh hard enough.

He sharpens the pencil before moving to Ludwig's back, drawing in the faint freckles across the top of it and the should-be-fainter scars all across, the dips on either side of his spine right before the blanket.

Returning again to the shading, Feliciano softens lines and softens them again until the little sketch looks like what he sees the rare times he wakes up first, soft and half-lit and warm, calm and unguarded.

Perhaps later, he will paint this in watercolors or oils, or ink it in until it is muted with early morning, but for now it is a pencil-paper sketch that he will fold and fold again, carry in his wallet until it creases and foxes at the corners, a soft-lined reminder to take out when he is far from Berlin and Ludwig and look at to see this sleeping young man with his strong frame and sweet face and guarded heart that fits Feliciano so well it is as if he were drawn into it in graphite.