It has been way too long since I wrote fanfiction....and definitely too long since I wrote a Discworld fic...Sorry!
Disclaimer: Okay...This is posted on fan The fan is an important word in that sentence.
Sir Reynold cleared his throat nervously in an attempt to break the silence. Usually he didn't mind silence in the gallery-it showed that people were appreciating the restored Rascal as it was supposed to be seen. But this was different. The visitor had been standing still, staring at one small part of the painting for most of the day.
"You, ah, wouldn't know it had been damaged, ah, if nobody told hyou." The head turned to look at him.
Why not? I can see where you have had to stick it back together again. Death turned back to the painting. How did he do it? It's just pigment on canvas, but-
Sir Reynold jumped at the opportunity.
"Hwell, Rascal hwas a very talented painter. But, if hyou would, ah, leave? The gallery closed an hour ago."
Closed? Ah, yes. You make everyone leave for the night, for absolutely no obvious purpose. Perhaps you are worried that the paintings will be worn out. Goodbye.
It was very strange, but Sir Reynold couldn't quite remember what the man had looked like after he'd gone.
Death looked out over the valley. Dwarves and trolls had fought here for generations, although that had now stopped, thanks to one Sam Vimes, a man who was, against all expectations (including Death's own, which were rarely wrong) still alive. Poetry had been written about it, stories were told, and a painter had made it his life's work to paint one bit of it. The words 'majestic', 'dramatic', occasionally even 'beautiful' were used to describe Koom Valley. People said it looked like the gods had gouged out lumps of rock in anger and sent a river flowing along it.
To Death it looked like the results of centuries of horizontal erosion from a river with a fast stream and very rapid surface run off, prone to floods, with a large drainage basin*.
But even though he couldn't understand why humans were unable to see a natural process taking place without giving it a story, it did give them such freedom. The creativity of it all. He'd never got the hang of that, either. The music even he could tell was going wrong. He'd tried writing, briefly, but it just didn't make sense. He couldn't see the point. So, in the time honoured method of sentient beings universally^, he'd given up.
Then Hogswatch had come. Or, more specifically, the Hogswatch present had come. From Susan, who had spent a very awkward day with him. But she'd said it was a day for family, and it had to be done~. He'd unwrapped the bright red paper to reveal a set of paints and a pad of painting paper+.
He'd never tried painting before. It was harder than it looked, and it had almost immediately seemed like a failure. But, when he'd finished his first piece of paper and put it on the wall, he'd…liked it. It didn't look like the corn field, it looked like a lot of pigment on paper, but…there was something there. Something that hadn't been there with music, or words, but was in the paints.
Squeak. The Death of Rats handed him a paintbrush from where he was sitting on top of the easel.
Death grinned, and began to try to capture an entire geographical feature that had been created by the movements of water on a small piece of white paper. It was a human idea. Stupid, impossible, and incredibly, incredibly fun.
He liked painting.
*He'd never been very good at writing tourist guides.
^Up to and including the lumps of slime on the planet Tiujala, who have no arms or legs and whose entire language consists of the word 'gloop'.
~He didn't know why it had to be done, but she had her school teacher voice when she said it, and even Death didn't like arguing with teachers.
+Bound in black, of course. This was a present for Death, after all.