Word Count: 3,681
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with 911, Fox, or anything else related to that particular universe.

He stared at the door like it might bite him.

Maybe it would.

Who was he to know?

"This is ridiculous," he muttered, feeling completely irrational when he thought about the fact that he was talking to himself. If anyone walked by, they'd probably wonder if he was psychotic. Cart him away and place him on a psych hold. That was the last thing he needed. Among many things, if he were honest.

With a deep sigh, he pushed open the door and followed the series of arrows to the room number that had been printed on the email confirmation. The room wasn't particularly large but there were an array of tables in a semi-circle, facing a central podium with a stool. There were a few people already there – an older, curly-haired brunette woman wearing a light-blue shirt; a younger blonde girl that was probably in her early twenties; an Asian woman with lime green streaks in her hair wearing a purple sweater; a male whose red hair was peppered with grey still in a shirt with a tie. Each was sitting at a table, a sketchbook and pencil in front of them. The blonde girl and man were both fiddling on their phones; the brunette woman was doodling in the back of the sketchbook.

He tried not to feel too intimidated as he shuffled into the room and sat at the nearest table, keeping his eyes averted in case anyone was looking at him and fixed his gaze on the sketchbook. He felt idiotic, completely out of place, an absolute lunatic. He could accept Athena wasn't satisfied with his work performance lately – he knew he hadn't been as focused the last six months as she would have liked, and he knew he worked tough cases with serious consequences to him or the team if he screwed up – but being here felt stupid. He'd done the mandated therapy hours she'd demanded after Shannon died, he'd even gone to a few more just to tick the boxes and get back to work, but this was…

He sighed again, twisting the pencil between his fingers while his foot tapped against the ground. Seconds ticked into minutes, and a younger guy entered and sat across the room while an elderly woman hobbled inside with a walking stick. The podium remained empty and every minute that waned, Eddie wondered if he shouldn't just walk out and leave and find something else that Carla could suggest. Maybe dance classes. Or yoga. Or knitting.

A middle-aged woman in a yellow-spotted dress entered, arm looped through the elbow of a man who was definitely at least Eddie's height, if not taller. Where she was dark and short and looked around at the rag-tag group assembled in the room, his skin was fair, his hair somewhere between blond and brown, and his blue eyes swept over the room without really focusing on anyone in particular.

"Hi everyone," the woman said. Her quiet voice broke the lull everyone had fallen into while waiting. "Welcome. We're going to start very simple today and then gradually work our way up. This will work better if you take your sketchbooks home and continue to practise what we do here between classes?"

A couple of heads nodded but Eddie couldn't imagine drawing at home. If he wasn't exhausted by the time he got Chris into bed, then he'd much rather prefer to put up his feet and watch an episode of some nonsense on the TV to try to shut out the noise of the day before he dragged himself to bed and slept for a handful of hours. Having the sketchbook at home was likely to just encourage Chris to snoop, and he doubted he wanted his kid looking through his-

The man sat on the stool and the woman's fingers brushed against his broad shoulders, which drew Eddie's attention to the long-sleeved black shirt he was wearing. He hadn't been paying as much attention before but now he could see the swell of biceps beneath the fabric, the way it stretched taut across his shoulders and the way it accentuated the narrowing of his waist to be tucked into dark-wash jeans.

Eddie swallowed and returned his focus to the woman.

"Drawing is all about shapes," she began, looking at each of them. "I'm not going to insult your intelligence by revisiting childhood picture books and pointing out circles and triangles, beyond reminding you that there are many shapes involved in the construction of a person. If we're sketching, we should start with light pencil marks that outline the general shape. Then we can return to it and fill in more details."

She turned to the piece of A3 paper taped behind her, plucked a pencil from her pocket, and made some rough but clear markings on the paper.

"The basic shape of a face is going to vary from person to person. Some are more elongated ovals, others have wider jaws to look faintly triangular, others are square and blocky." As she talked, she sketched the basic shapes that she was talking about. "If you divide a face into thirds horizontally and in half vertically, then you can start to add in other shapes. Ovals for eyes, triangles for noses, stretched hearts for mouths."

She continued drawing and Eddie started to understand the point she was making, which he supposed was the reason behind the explanation and the accompanying illustration. It was clear she knew what she was doing and while Eddie knew, and appreciated, that there was a model for a reference in front of them, she evidently didn't need to glance at the man sitting on the stool who continued to look impassively at the back wall. His gaze was distant, like he wasn't really paying attention to the fact he was even there.

"When you understand that the human body is based on shapes, then you can really draw anything at all," she concluded, with a brief flurry against the page.

Her speech was probably not even five minutes in length but she had still managed a basic outline that strongly resembled the man in front of her. Eddie figured it would take him at least ten years to get even a fraction of the shapes she had produced, and he thought it might take another ten for those shapes to actually look like someone sitting in front of him.

"If we take into account that the face is about shapes, then I want you to spend five minutes looking at this face in front of you. What are the shapes you can see? Each of you will have a slightly different perspective based on where you are located in the room. Some will see our model's jaw differently, or his eyes, or his nose." Her index finger skated around those locations. The man didn't so much as twitch. Eddie wasn't sure if he was meditating or just that capable of zoning out. "Wherever you are, identify those shapes before you start drawing. Divide your page into thirds horizontally and in half vertically so that you can accurately locate where those shapes are on the page. Questions?"

Eddie hadn't expected to be set the task of drawing quite so quickly except he wasn't sure what he had expected either. She was correct that everyone in the room ought to know what shapes were. He didn't need extensive theory, although he certainly appreciated her quick tips to break down the complicated process of trying to draw something realistically.

It felt even stranger to stare at a man for almost five minutes, to really catalogue the features of his face in an analytical way rather than the way Eddie looked at suspects for twitches of guilty lips or flickers of uncertain eyes. The man's expression never changed, his gaze never wandered, and for a while Eddie thought he may have been a wax figure or a mannikin except for the steady blink and rise and fall of his chest.

After the allotted 'stare' time, Eddie then stared at his page and tried to visualise what it was that he wanted. He had the shapes but he lacked any sort of confidence in committing them to paper. He started with a small sketch, barely bigger than the palm of his hand. The proportions were wrong and the locations of features were off and he scribbled it out with such ferocity that the point of the pencil snapped.

The woman wandered over to him, holding out a sharpener and watching him with a gentle smile. "The harder you think about it, the unhappier you're going to be with your results."

He took the sharpener, managed an uncomfortable smile, and flicked his gaze between the sketchbook and the man he was meant to be sketching. "If it looks like something Picasso did, we can call it a win, right?"

She laughed and it helped relax his shoulders, just a little. "We're aiming for realism at the moment but maybe later in the course, we'll add Cubism just for you." She winked, took the sharpener back when his pencil had a sharp point to it again, and wandered away to talk to others in the room.

He never found it easy to stop thinking – he supposed that was the whole point of coming, wasn't it? – but he did his best to focus on the tricks of dividing the face and then lightly outlining shapes for features. Maybe his second attempt was a little less juvenile, a fraction better than something Chris would produce with his crayons and markers.

By the time the class finished, he understood why she'd suggested they practise between sessions. He wasn't going to manage anything resembling a human being in his entire life if he expected a 90-minute class once a week to magically solve his art woes.

He returned to the sketchbook a couple of times during the week, when he wasn't absolutely wiped out from negotiations or plans or calls. He made doodles, mostly. A more intensive focus on the shape of an eye, or a nose. He used photos of Chris or Shannon as a guide, trying to identify the shapes as he held his phone near his sketchbook to compare what he'd done to what he attempted to capture.

It was far from perfect, it still looked childish, but he was practising. It held his attention a little better than whatever might've been on the television and by the time he crawled into bed each night, there was a little less tension in his shoulders.

A month passed and they still hadn't graduated beyond the guy's face, although Eddie could see why the woman lingered on it. When he sat at different seats, caught different angles, he started to notice the bump in his upper nose or the line of his jaw or the swell of his lower lip. He hadn't even realised there was a mark around the guy's left eye until last week because he'd always been somewhere on the right side of the room, but he quickly became obsessed with trying to capture the shape and shading of the blot of colour above his eye and eyebrow that contrasted with the pale skin.

So they'd spent time looking at the shape of eyes, using the model and then looking at someone beside them. Eddie was confident staring suspects into submission but examining someone so closely had made him more uncomfortable than he'd expected. They'd also examined noses from the front and profiles, and they'd studied the shape of different mouths. Eddie hadn't realised there was so much variety in a human face but he now had a deeper appreciation for the work the sketch artists did when attempting to interpret vague vic descriptions of a suspect. Thin lips and thick lips required different degrees of shading, while upper lips could have a bow and lower lips could droop towards a chin.

And chins… The variety of shapes a chin could have?!

He wasn't convinced there was much growth in his skills, even though he thought his understanding of using basic shapes to create an outline of what he wanted was improving. Perhaps his work looked slightly less like Picasso had vomited pencil facial features all over a piece of paper, but only just.

He glanced between his sketch and the man's face again, gaze narrowing as he did another sweep over the features of the model on the podium. His job forced him to pay close attention to people, to scrutinise and assess and gauge.

He flicked back a few pages, to the week they'd focused on eyes. His drawings might have been rudimentary, at best, but he still thought there was something different about the man's eyes this week. For all the impassive staring he usually did, Eddie was sure there was a difference in the sparkle.

Two weeks later, the focus shifted to hands and Eddie had spent ten minutes staring at his pathetic attempts and wondered if it wasn't too late to request they stick with faces.

Every time he attempted to draw a hand, it looked like an odd-shaped square with five sausages protruding from it. Even when he spent the week between classes looking at his own hand, he still couldn't get the lines of knuckles right, or the shading of callouses and pores, or capture the rough lines of his bitten nails.

He got so distracted staring at his hand in the truck on the way back from a call, trying to identify the shapes he was missing from his drawings, that Walker had bumped his shoulder to snap him out of it.

"You're staring at your hand like you're high, man," Walker said, grinning at him. "You're not high, are you?"

"I will drop your ass off the edge of the building next time," he retorted, folding his hand back to his lap and flicking eyes over the rest of his team. Except when he did that now, all he started doing was identifying shapes. It was almost enough to make him groan and bury his head in his hands.

"I'll remember that next time you call for back-up, Sarge," Walker said with a wink and Eddie shook his head and focused on a spot above Tandy's shoulder.

"Don't make me write you up for insubordination or ignoring a commanding officer's order," he grumbled.

Walker, Tandy and Nicholls all laughed.

"It's not enough to just consider the hand in isolation," Natalie explained, holding her hand in front of her. "The hand is, obviously, connected to the wrist, then the length of the forearm to the elbow, and then up to the shoulder. Each of these areas have distinct shapes, and again they are specific to each person. My biceps are nothing like these," she said as she gestured towards the man with a small laugh. Her words almost, almost, seemed to make the model's lips twitch.

It seemed strange to Eddie that it had been almost two months and he still hadn't seen the man smile, or laugh. He hadn't heard the man speak. He didn't even know the guy's name. In some ways, he supposed, it became easier to break his features into shapes when he wasn't personalised but by the same token it felt dehumanising to simply use him for a bunch of shapes. As someone who pored over the minutiae of details every shift, Eddie wished he had a name, or perhaps the timbre of his voice, or maybe what he looked like when he smiled and it reached his eyes.

Maybe it'd help his sketches. Maybe it'd make the man seem like a person rather than a bunch of interconnected blobs.

"Today we're going to be continuing our exploration of hands but also looking at the arm as a whole. We need to remember that nothing in the body can be drawn in complete isolation. If I open and close my hands, different muscles move and become apparent beneath the skin. You need to be mindful of that when considering the shading of your shapes."

She tapped the model's shoulders and he rolled his eyes, shrugging off the hoodie he'd worn to class that evening and laying the fabric across his lap.

Eddie froze, eyes widening. He was certain he wasn't the only one who was staring. He was fairly certain that Jane, the curly-haired brunette, was the one who'd made some sort of noise but he wasn't sure if she was reacting to the same thing.

Eddie saw muscles every day. If you wanted to remain in SWAT, then you had to stay in shape. If the team weren't on a call, they were hitting the weights or the bag or the treadmill to stay fit, and strong, and prepared. He could appreciate the curve of the man's arms in the same abstract way that he noted those of the guys around him, or the way he checked himself in the mirror to make sure he was still at peak fitness. Someone who clearly worked out, who took care of himself and ensured he looked good, wasn't new to Eddie.

No, what was new to Eddie were the series of pale pink Marks that littered his arms from wrist to shoulder. There were tattoos as well – dark rings that braceleted his right forearm, the hint of swirly words that Eddie couldn't read on the outside of his left – but it was the array of small Marks that really drew Eddie's attention. He'd never seen someone with so many before.

"If we return to looking at the shapes, then you can see how outlining the forearm to resemble an oblong is probably your best bet. The upper arm, however, clearly needs a rounder circle at the top with a smaller oval for the lower arm to connect with the elbow," Natalie said with quick gestures of her pencil across the paper behind her.

Eddie heard Natalie's words but it was like listening through a pane of glass. They weren't really sinking in because he wasn't really interested in the shapes. He kept getting distracted tracing his eyes over the Marks, thinking about how each small pink stripe had a story. Nestled high near the man's shoulder, Eddie could see a half-red, half-black Mark. The smear was too obvious, contrasted too much with his pale skin, and Eddie's eyes drifted between the model and Natalie. He wasn't sure how they knew each other – nothing personal had ever been mentioned about the two of them, which was sometimes infuriating – but perhaps they were together. Perhaps she had a matching stripe on her back or leg.

His musings about Marks meant he didn't start drawing for quite some time. He didn't even realise he'd zoned out so thoroughly that he was rubbing at the inside of his left wrist until Natalie stopped in front of him and tapped her fingers against his blank page.

"Are you stuck?"

He blinked at her, right hand falling away from his wrist, cheeks feeling warm, as he looked at his empty page in embarrassment. "No. Just- Just distracted today."

She nodded, flashing him a warm and encouraging smile which he'd seen her give to everyone at least once most evenings. "Take your time and draw what you feel comfortable with, okay?"

He nodded even though he knew it couldn't be that simple.

Natalie was pushing them to look at the connection between the arm and the shoulder, the fluid sweep of her pencil across the page betraying the difficulty Eddie was having in capturing any sort of shape to the man's shoulders. He kept getting distracted by the breadth of his upper torso, the obvious strength in his arms, the daubs of pale pink stripes that spread up his arm and across his shoulders too. The half-half Mark was clearer when he lowered his shirt and cinched it under his armpit, exposing the thin curl of a tattoo above it and the lines of another tattoo peeking from his right pec.

Eddie found himself doodling the tattoos more than the shape of the shoulders, shading Marks around them. It was still drawing, even if it wasn't exactly the target of the lesson. He was still using the model for inspiration.

And if he kept looking back at the sketches later, refining the rough shapes of the tattoos into something that seemed closer and closer to what he saw in front of him… It was still looking at shapes, right?

Another couple of weeks passed and Eddie had the joy, or the privilege, or the delight, of being able to appreciate the model without a shirt. The pale pink Marks spread across each collarbone and halfway down his pecs, a constant and glimmering distraction. When he turned, there was a scattering of them across his shoulders too.

Eddie was no longer sure how many of the others were paying attention to the lessons and how many were simply ogling the man and pretending to put pencil to paper, but Eddie suspected most of the women had gotten distracted. Including the older woman with the walking stick, Geraldine. Last week she'd made a comment about missing her youth, when her husband's skin didn't sag everywhere and she wished he'd keep his clothes on because he no longer looked as attractive as the young man in front of her. The ensuing laughter had kept intermittently breaking out for the rest of their lesson. Even the model had turned sparkling eyes of amusement towards her for a brief glance.

Eddie could hardly blame them for their distraction though. He knew he was no better.

The increased frequency of sketching outside of class, the proliferation of doodled shapes in the spaces around his other drawings, indicated as much. All his attempts at taking reference glimpses for shapes was rapidly turning into storing mental images that kept him awake at night and uncomfortably hard in the morning.

~TBC~