Dai-Dark- 45. You can only see color when you and your soulmate are touching.
Daisuke only saw color in his dreams. Well, that wasn't completely true. He saw color a small number of waking moments, there and gone so fast that he could only hope that he captured a hint of their essence when he tried to paint. Color was more of a concept than a fact. The sky was blue. Clouds were white. Grass was green and flowers came in yellow, red, orange, purples and pinks and blues in all shades and varieties. But colors were also just labels on crayons and paint tubes pastels and color-theory set aside for the much more obtainable goal of nuance in shading, pen and inks, and charcoal.
It was terribly hard to see color when your soulmate shared a body with you.
Daisuke would have thought that would mean he would always see color. Dark was in his head, so that should count as touching, right? Wrong. There were brief flashes of color when they changed, like their souls brushed together as they passed each other, but the world was stubbornly gray the rest of the time.
There had been the times they were separated, the moment of reunion where he took Dark's hand where the whole world had color. The shock of not knowing what he was looking at, not really. It was one thing to see labels lined up and descriptions in books, and another to actually experience it for more than a heartbeat. There was color in his painting's world too. Not much color since it was his snow painting, but he saw blue in the shadows for the first time, and the soft color of skin, pale peachy-brown he could remember trying to mix blind from a color chart. He couldn't tell if he'd gotten the color right, and at the moment he hadn't been able to think of the words to describe what color he saw. Freedert was bright, the Second Hand of Time was pale as ice, Dark was—something deep and just as dark as his name, but not the blacks and grays of charcoal; something subtler and a little warmer.
Daisuke could have stared at color forever in that moment.
It had been over all too quickly.
Again and again and again, glimpses of beauty and mysteries he'd never get to have. It was in those glimpses he could almost understand his ancestor; to experience that sort of beauty, wouldn't it be worth stealing it?
But he was Dark's tamer, and for all that they shared a body, they would never actually be able to touch in the sort of way that would let Daisuke have that.
So he tried to hold onto those memories, those impressions of bright, riotous color and life and emotion.
Maybe, just maybe, he'd be able to capture just a bit of them and satisfy that hungry part of his heart.