He can see him, this man.
He's small, short, but definition raises lines of muscle across his biceps, and his eyes - blue, like ice, and the flame of a bunsen burner, and the sky that watches between the tips of trees in the forest - are warm and warning. Pieces of him have emerged over the years, different stages of life, snapshots that don't quite fit together.
The fingers take shape the most often, coming to life with slow arches of Sherlock's wrist and quick flicks of the pencil, round and sturdy, sure, with short nails. They're practical fingers, and when he blinks, on occasion, color reveals itself and soft shades pull the lines to life, sometimes stemming into round knuckles and other times callused palms. There are the hands of a child, small and wide and soft with the fullness of a life and they grip things like a woman's painted nail or the sheen of a plastic cup. There are the hands of an adult, strong and sturdy and these appear in loose curls of sleep or tangled in long ginger hair or clenched tight around the biting strength of a gun and then once or twice, Sherlock has watched as he has streaked those hands with blood from the bristles of his smooth brush.
The brightness behind his eyes, the forms and the etchings that reveal themselves, whisper at the insides of his mind until he picks up a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush, or sinks his hands into the slick drag of clay. The call to be created. Voiced, shown.
Sherlock translates everything word for word, every curve of the pencil is the trace of its original.
Once, after watching his flesh part for the press of a needle, after blinking at nothing and just barely managing to wipe the slide of drool from the corner of his mouth, he added his own needle to the grasp of this man's hand. It was crude and drooping and the solid needle collided with the sloppy feathered lines of its echo and paper skidded apart as Sherlock's knuckles went white with strain and the point of the needle made a sawdust scar in the dark surface of the table.
Later, he burnt it and the paint made the flame blue like the sea over tanned feet and green like swimming pools in the summer months against the shock of bright armbands supporting chubby arms.
There is no correlation between Sherlock's moods and what he draws. Thundering tantrums can be shed by the bright curve of lips, a smile rolling at the corners. Drifting content is marred by the handprint of a slap against a peachfuzz cheek, or a gun pressed against skin that could part and flesh that could rip.
It breaks him sometimes.
And sometimes it folds itself into the cavity of his chest and gives him air to breathe, keeps his eyes open and his hands steady. Keeps his mind from fraying too much at its edges.
But it can't do that for too long.
Sometimes he aches and doesn't cry. Doesn't cry.
Instead he closes his eyes and nothing comes.