Daisuke sighs and lays the brush aside, looking mournfully at the painted sunset before him. The light and shadows in it lie rather oddly, Dark thinks, Daisuke's skill outmanouvered by the moving sun.
'It's no good,' Daisuke says.
'Are you going to scrap it?' Dark asks sleepily.
Daisuke shakes his head. 'It's not good enough to show anyone, but…it was a beautiful sunset and I put a lot of work into the painting. So I still like it.'
Dark remembers screams and the sound of breaking, Hikari discarding another imperfect work. Sometimes he's glad to be with the Niwas.
X
Art exists to be admired. To draw attention, to please the eye. To steal hearts away and bring the mind back to it again and again in memory. Its purpose is always to be seen.
'DAAARK,' Daisuke wails from the back of his mind as Dark only just avoids a pitfall in a corridor too narrow for wings. 'We could have left by the roof! Why do you always have to show off like this?'
Dark laughs soundlessly, he can hear police officers behind him and he just knows some are waiting ahead. 'I guess it's just in my nature.'
X
Dark doesn't always get on well with other artworks but he's rather fond of Towa. She's a kid, barely old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution. Whichever Hikari created her didn't give her the dangerous edge or the arrogance many of their artworks have, she's touchingly grateful to the Niwas and uncomplicatedly flattered by any attention from Dark.
Towa calls him Dark too, not Kokuyoku. She's not stupid, she has to be aware of what his real role in things has always been, but she treats him like some kind of rockstar. As if his celebrity was really so simple.
X
'He's a thing and I'm going to break him.'
He's a hypocrite, isn't he? Clinging so hard to the human body he inhabits, the human mind he shares, while he ignores the tears in Argentine's eyes. Daisuke just pleads with him to stop, doesn't bring up the story Hiwatari told him.
'I am you.' How often has Dark said that to Daisuke? To each of his hosts in turn? Insisting that he's not an artwork, monster, parasite, curse. Not something they should exorcise or seal or push away. Maybe it's true. Maybe he's just lying so hard he's convinced himself.
X
The mermaid emerging on the canvas reminds Dark a little of Menou, wide wistful eyes and tumbling locks. Daisuke's been working on her for weeks, mind humming with quiet joy at getting something on the canvas that resembles the image in his head.
Hikari had treated Kokuyoku as if it was the last piece of art in the world, but his violent obsession had been nothing like the steady love Daisuke feels for his pieces.
'Dark? What's wrong?'
I'm jealous of an amateur artwork that isn't even alive.
It's a good thing Dark can screen his thoughts from his host.
X
'What are you looking at?' Dark asks, peering through Daisuke's eyes at the book he's holding. The black and white picture shows a building with three staircases forming a triangle in which dimensions are twisted bizarrely. The people there walk as if gravity is different for each of them.
'It's pictures by Escher,' says Daisuke. 'A Dutch artist.'
'Too bad he wasn't a Hikari, that world looks interesting to navigate,' says Dark.
Daisuke sighs and turns the page, showing a circle filled with tessellated black and white angels fitting the gaps between each other perfectly as they fade to infinity.
X
Dark tries to be asleep on those occasions when Daisuke is sent down to the basement and tries to hide this timing from his host as well. It's creepy, all the sealed artworks lined up along the walls. A place that should be full of talk and movement instead deadly silent even to his senses. It reminds him of Sleeping Beauty, all the servants, lords and ladies lying asleep where they fell in a place cut off from the world by briars. But Dark is not the prince in this fairytale. He's the one that sent them all to sleep.
X
Dark doesn't get Daisuke's enjoyment during the trip to the art gallery. He has a house full of pieces rarer and more interesting than this.
'But don't you think it's beautiful, Dark?' asks Daisuke mentally, admiring a delicate ink painting.
'Nope, just boring. Art galleries are only interesting when there's something in them worth stealing.'
Daisuke sighs and runs a hand through his hair, spikes springing back up in its wake. A few people nearby look at him, wondering what it is he's finding frustrating. 'Don't you ever think about anything but stealing?' he asks. 'Do you even like art?'
X
'Don't you hate humans?' Krad had asked. And maybe Dark should but he doesn't.
Humans dragged him into this world, created him and then broke him before he even existed. But they're interesting. They change and grow. Care about things with a passion that's hard to understand even as his host's emotions tug him into caring as well.
They love as if they exist to love, as artwork exists to be loved. They can give as easily as they take, create as easily as they destroy. Dark doesn't hate humans no matter how much he should. Sometimes he hates art.
X
Daisuke will probably never grasp the irony of his birthday present to Dark. Of course, he didn't know what Dark was at the time he drew it and it's not as if Dark's about to point it out. But a picture of a living picture as a present for that picture is pretty strange however you look at it. Perhaps even more so when you think about what it means that Daisuke thought Dark envying his presents mattered enough to try and make up for it. Even though Daisuke knows Dark isn't human, he still thinks of him as real.