I blame the following jumble of words on my creative imagination, current squee-ing D.N.Angel obsession, and my Goo Goo Dolls 'Dizzy Up The Girl' CD. Specifically the track 'Iris'. It gave me a fic idea, but I too squee-ful a mood to write something that angsty, so I turned it into this!
Oh, and I blame my cold too. I don't know how it figures into that, but I'm accusing it anyways.
This is supposed to be a short take on what could possibly happen in the future. And I solemnly swear that this was written with absolutely no yaoi or shouen-ai intentions whatsoever. It just... really sounds... like it's implied... argh... So if you like yaoi, go ahead and have a field day; if you don't, please look beyond into the symbolic message I was trying to get across!
If the characters seem a littleoff, remember: this is six years later, people change. And if you'd like to see more of my work further desecrating the poor D.N.Angel section, tell me. I have quite a few fic ideas already...
Ah, crap, right, disclaimer: I do not own D.N.Angel or any of the characters mentioned. But fic is mine, steal and die.
Note: Line-break things really really hate me for reasons I do not know.
Tonight, at twelve-twenty pm., I will steal the 'Harp of Harmony' on display at the Waterside Musuem of Rare Antiques.
'Kaitou' Dark
"What! Again! The phantom thief stole the Lyre of Discord just last week! He's after its mate, the Harp of Harmony, already?"
A middle-aged man with more than his fair share of gray hairs for his age pounded his desk in aggravation. "He just doesn't give us a break, does he! And just what is he still doing around, anyway? The thefts of phantom thief Dark have never been reported to occur for more than five years in a row, and the night he stole the Lyre of Discord was on the six year anniversary of his first activity in forty years! It just doesn't make any sense..."
The members of the Anti-Dark police task force, by now all veteran policemen, looked to one another nervously as Captain Saehara continued to beat on his desk; their superior was well on his way to making another dent to match the other inumerable ones on the abused piece of furniture. Every single one of them couldn't help but share their captain's thoughts. Just why had Dark's burglaries not ceased? This situation didn't match any of their records...
Throughout the countless ages, for as long as man has been intelligent enough to philosophize, man has heatedly argued with one another about philosophy. There may or may not be some form of irony in this.
The favorite topic of eternal debate was the meaning of life, with one of the deriatives of this being what one needs to live. What one, most basic thing, a human requires to live as full a life as possible.
There was a long-tortured sigh, and a voice remarked, "Well, this is incredibly boring. Where's the challenge, the thrill of the steal?"
A second voice piped up in reply, "Everything doesn't have to be thrilling, you know. You're less likely to die of a heart attack that way."
The owner of the first voice clicked his tongue, "You just have no sense of fun. Days like this make me wish creepy boy hadn't quit. Or almost, at least."
"I'm happy for him! He finally found someone." There was then a moment's pause before the owner of the second voice added, "And it's Satoshi, not creepy boy. He's not even young enough to be called a boy anymore, anyway." Although it seemed to be more out of habit than an actual reprimand.
"Once a creepy boy, always a creepy boy." The first voice said sagely.
"You're impossible."
"It's a part of the charm." The second voice was about ready to tell the other what it thought of the first one's idea of 'charm', but the other voice snatched the opening first. "And none of that changes the fact that this is horribly boring."
"Well they are getting better, even you have to admit. Maybe someday they'll come up with an actual 'challenge' for you."
"Maybe, in fifty years kind of maybe. I mean, they'll being led by Saehara for the love of" The second voice interrupted the first indignantly.
"Saehara-san is a very good man!"
"As true as that might be, he's still not the sharpest tool in the shed by far."
"You're just too demanding of people."
"And you, not nearly enough."
This conversation appeared quite normal enough, unless one actually saw the person talking to themself.
It was generally all around agreed that love had something to do with it, not that anybody realized they were actually coinciding on anything.
A lot of people just out-rightly proclaimed all you needed was love. The specific form of love they were referring to was the love two people shared intimately. It was really just a fanciful ideal for fanciful, idealistic people.
Others declared all you needed was your own self. These were generally narcissistics, too in love with themselves to truthfully consider if there was anything else out there worth their time or attention.
Some staunchly defended that all you needed was money. A love of the materialistic things in life was still a love, if not a love born of greed.
The whole thing played out as it generally did, being that Dark nabbed the sought item and got away without a scratch on him. One peculiar event did occur though, as the guards actually managed to corner him for a brief moment, before the alluring harp of solid gold had even been stolen! Dark had been pleased with this unexpected turn of events. Yet this was Dark, so he cut the hapless goverment service workers no slack in the least.
They had attempted to rush him in a group, as usual, with the same amount of success as the other seventy-odd tries at this tactic. Dark, with a smug grin and an odd red tint to his hair, simply spun on his heel. His long black trench coat - black always being the color of choice for the phantom thief, with no real mystery as to why - billowed and wrapped around him, almost swallowing him in its leathery folds to the outside observer, then drifted delicately to the floor. No Dark in sight.
Once again the vigilant policemen had been foiled in the carrying out of justice to the thief, but they were so used to it there was hardly a groan among them. They simply truged home to see if there was any of the night left to get some decent rest, with some sparse conversing about the lastest sports' game.
New would be the day that it would dawn on any of them that what they thought was Dark might've been nothing more than an illusion, and that he was still there somewhere.
So it has been established that there are, in fact, quite a few ways to love and be loved in the world. The question that remained was, which love was the kind you needed?
A question to which there is no one answer. After all, everyone is different. Save a few strange exceptions who aren't really exceptions and yet are at the same time. There was no real explaining that either.
It was only after the guards had sulked off from the night's defeat that Dark had come out of his hiding spot. Nimbly plucking his coat off the marble floor(Emiko wouldn't hear of his coming back without it) and wrapping his newest prize in it, the mysterious, intriguing, infamous phantom thief set off for home.
A couple minutes later found the mysterious, intriguing, infamous phantom thief complaining loudly to himself.
The Harp of Harmony reached about his hips in height, and since apart from the strings it was made completely out of solid gold, the thing was ungodly heavy. There was no way Wiz's wings could carry such a load, which meant Dark was walking home this time. Dark, for all his boast about his 'manly strength' and the like, was having trouble hauling the bulky piece of artwork.
"Kyuuu."
While Dark was directing several unpolite statements to the golden source of his annoyment, something occured to Daisuke.
"Um...Dark?"
"Yeah?... Why the hell does this thing have to be so heavy? Wait, let me rephrase that, I don't mind it being gold - gold is good, very good - but why is it so large! The Lyre of Discord fit in my pocket!.."
"Yeah, about that..."
"What?"
"Kyu?"
"...Where are we gonna put this thing? The basement is getting kind of... full."
Dark paused struggling with the harp for a second to consider this. His conclusion was:
"...I think we're going to need a bigger basement."
Daisuke decided to look on the bright side of things, as was natural for him. "Well, at least there aren't many more of them. We're close to getting every last surviving Hikari artwork, aren't we?"
Dark stopped fighting with his appropiated luggage completely, letting it fall with a very heavy thud. "I never even thought of that. You're right, we are. What are we going to do after we've got them all?"
Silence reigned for a moment, and then:
"YOU MEAN YOU DON'T KNOW!"
"OW! Shit, Daisuke!" It was definitely a good thing the harp was already on the ground, or Dark probably would've dropped it on his foot. On their foot. Which would've been most unpleasent. As it were, he was rubbing his head from the volume of Daisuke's voice, which had come from his mouth. Their mouth.
"How could you not know!" Meanwhile, Daisuke was having a panic attack, the kind for which he was well reputated.
"Well excuse me if I never got this far before!"
"Kyu!"
It was right about then that some poor soul had the unfortunance to turn the corner and witness the ongoing spectacule. Although he had heard the two half a block away and was prepared to see a fight going on, he was shocked into stillness. He hadn't counted for one of them to be clad in all black with a suspicious black bundleprobably a dead body his numbed mind figuredby his feet. He also hadn't accounted for the bizarre hair, which at one moment was a deep violet color with ends dyed bright red, and at the next moment vice versa; it also appeared as if someone had been spiking it and gave up about half-way through it.
The eye color couldn't even begin to be explained without a very open mind to the unnatural, paranormal, and just plain freaky-looking. What he had expected least of all though, was that there was only one person arguing. The tall, male youth was rubbing his head with one hand and gesturing wildly with the other. And he was shouting, in two very distinct and differing pitches.
The sorry soul who regretfully saw this going on stared quietly for about a minute, then quietly turned around, and very quietly walked back the way he came.
There are always a few very strange situations one runs into in the course of their lives. Niwa Daisuke's very strange situation just happened to have a mindand witof its own. And live inside his body. Or their body, since they were technically supposed to be the same person. He still hadn't quite figure out how that was supposed to be, since they were very, very different personality-wise. Or were they? It was the kind of thing that gave him a serious migraine thinking about, so he gave up trying to puzzle it out years ago.
They just were. Both of them. That was that.
And how does Niwa Daisuke cope with having a split personality going by the moniker of 'Phantom Thief' Dark? Love, of course.
Daisuke finally took a mental breather, and Dark was able to try and think of how to pacify his nerve-racked other half, which had never really been his forte to begin with.
"Well... uh..." And still wasn't.
"Kyuuuu..."
"Then why have we been doing this for the past six years!" And Daisuke was back at it.
Dark finally lost patience, not that it had taken very long. "How should I know! I'm Kaitou Dark, it's what I do, okay!"
"But why?"
Dark was getting seriously frustuated, mostly because he didn't actually have a clue why. "... Look, if I had a reason for everything I did..."
"...You wouldn't be you," Daisuke finished, "Or me, whatever."
"Yeah, that."
Silence came back for an extended visit.
"...Dark, do you think anyone heard us?"
"Nah, who'd be out at this time of night besides us?"
"Good point. Let's get home before it gets any later, mom might be worried."
"Kyu kyu."
"I somehow doubt that, but alright." With a grunt of effort Dark managed to heft the harp back up and began walking down the street again.
Somewhere else, a man was reporting an incident to the insane asylum.
There are many ways and things to love, both Niwa Daisuke and Kaitou Dark, who were really one and the same - in some sense or another - had both learned to love the same thing.
"...Dark..."
Dark inwardly groaned, though careful no to let Daisuke hear it. He knew that tone of voice, and roughly what Daisuke was going to say next.
Dark was imbedded into Daisuke's DNA, he was a genetic sort of thing. After a male Niwa reached puberty, their fourteenth birthday to be exact, Dark would manifest himself whenever the boy was in love. It was an altogether complicated and embarassing matter. What made it even more confounded was that if the object of the boy's affections returned those feelings while aware of Dark's existence within him, the genetic reaction that caused Dark would go dormant and the phantom thief would disappear completely.
Dark could never return to a host afterwards, and had to wait until the next boy was born under the Niwa name. Generations upon generations of males in the Niwa clan had been the mysterious phantom thief, and every generation eventually gave up that title in exchange for the love of another.
Daisuke, however, was not like the generations upon generations that preceeded him. He was a kind, gentle person to his very core, and even though he had desperately wanted the affections of one girl, and almost received her undivided love in return, he gave it up.
The redhead had grown attatched to his other side, and when the time came, he found he couldn't abandon the thief as all before him had. He didn't want Dark to be alone. Daisuke simply couldn't let Dark go because he didn't want to.
"...You... you're not going to leave after all the Hikari pieces have been collected, are you?"
Dark didn't answer, but instead sighed. This frightened Daisuke.
"Dark! Promise me!"
You can't give up love completely, not every single form of it. And so, together, they found something to love.
Life.
"...I promise."
They loved life, and lived for it. Both as themselves, and as each other. For themselves, and for each other. They lived just for the sake of living.
Which might be the very best reason of all.