Work Text:
Kishibe Rohan does not remember; Kishibe Rohan can not forget.
It’s work, as it’s always been. Kira’s dead, so he can finally get back to work as usual. The entire thing was nothing but a nuisance, really- his publishing schedule had been erratic, and he’d had innumerable run-ins with that brat, Josuke, that left him in various states of physical injury and with significant amounts of property damage.
Now that it’s over, though, it’s clear the entire event was nothing but a blessing. Nothing lets you draw like experience does; maybe Rohan had never felt raw pain or suffocating fear before, not in a way that let him draw it like this has. When he sits down to work, his mind is a funnel: carefully filtering what he allows himself to think about. He’s disciplined, agonizingly focused- but sometimes, the untrained parts of his psyche begin to slip into an unproductive state.
Cracking his knuckles, he picks up his pen and begins to ink the latest page of Pink Dark Boy.
If there is one thing Rohan hates, it is interruptions, especially when they’re of such an inane, insufferable variety.
You are five years old. It is raining. You a—
It’s pushed away. The images flooding his mind aren’t ones of a helpful variety; they’re nonsense, nothing but meaningless intrusions.
He cannot remember. He will not forget.
You are five years old. It is raining. You are at your babysitter’s house; your parents had other business to attend to that was more important than you are. You—
“Stop,” he says aloud, shaking his head dismissively as he places his pen down. “I don’t have time for this.” There’s work to be done, damnit, and Rohan can already feel himself slipping into that profoundly wrong state of mind. Was it something that reminded him? Maybe the house he’s sketching is a little too close to how it was before; maybe that dog he drew is a little too familiar.
Maybe I should take a minute to collect myself.
No, he doesn’t need a break. He has never needed a break in all of his years as a mangaka. The needs for sleep, for food, and for comfort have never been something he’s concerned himself with. With enough willpower, you can brute force your way through anything, and flashbacks are no exception.
The next time he picks up the pen, his hands are shaking too hard for him to hold it for more than a few seconds. After it falls onto the table, he places his head in his hands and squeezes his eyes shut.
Five years old. Rain. It’s storming; you hate thunderstorms. You’re at Reimi’s house. Your parents aren’t here. Hers are. You couldn’t sleep; you were crying because of the storm. The power is out. The house is pitch black. Reimi brought you one of her stuffed animals; it’s a pink unicorn and it’s your reprieve from the storm. She’s gone to bed and you’re on the brink of sleep. It is pouring.
You hear the sound of a window being broken.
Panic. You feel like you’ve been electrocuted. Confusion. You hear a man screaming: Reimi’s father. It stops. You hear a woman screaming: Reimi’s mother. It stops. The house isn’t silent; you hear footsteps, but you don’t hear Reimi screaming. You can feel your heartbeat in your throat. Reimi is in front of you, now; she shuts the door behind her and she begs you to jump out the window, into the bushes. You hear a dog barking before it whimpers and then abruptly stops. She is crying; she runs a hand through your hair and tells you to be brave for her. You are crying. “Please, Rohan,” she whispers in a panicked voice. You are so, so scared. You don’t want to be alone outside in the dark. It is pouring and the rain is coming down impossibly hard. You have to jump. She turns around as someone storms up the stairs, and she tells you she loves you. You can barely talk through your tears but you tell her you love her, too, and she hugs you tight before pulling furniture up against the door.
You look back at her one final time before someone begins banging at the door. They’re trying to break down the door. Bang. Bang. Bang. Reimi urges you again to jump; she is begging you at this point. You open the window and the rain sprays your face. You beg Reimi to come with you. “Reimi, I’m scared, please come with me,” you plead, but she’s holding the door shut; the lock is broken.
You jump. You fall into the bushes, and scrape your knee, but you don’t break any bones. You hear sirens wailing in the distance; Reimi must have called the cops. You do the only thing you can manage. You run, as fast as you can, but you hear one last scream and your blood is on fire.
They find you curled up a few houses over, laying in a family’s garden. You aren’t a credible witness due to your age and the fact you don’t remember everything very well.
But you do remember. You do. You remember. You can’t stop remembering. You remember.
You remember
You remember
You remember
You remember
You remember
You remember
You remember
When Rohan manages to snap himself out of it, he’s barely breathing. His face is soaking wet; he’s hyperventilating and he has no idea how long he’s been like this. As he pours himself a glass of water, to try and calm down, he recalls an event from a few months ago.
He’s at a therapist’s office in a small town to the direct west of Morioh. It’s an ugly building, he thinks, with ivy creeping up the sides and a red-brick base. A few people in the waiting room recognize him when he walks in, which is mortifying, considering he’s specifically wearing maroon-tinted sunglasses and a white silk scarf to avoid being identified. They take him back, eventually, and he’s sitting across from an older man with black hair and glasses. Rohan doesn’t bother learning his name.
“So, what brings you here?”
“Thought it may be helpful for my artwork. No better way to portray suffering than to withstand it, right?” Pulling out a small tape recorder and a notebook, he notices a bleach stain on the floor and winces. “Wow, hopefully the services here are better than the cleaning regiment.”
The therapist sighs deeply.
“Mr. Kishibe, for liability reasons you are not allowed to document the session in that manner. I’m going to have to ask you to put the recorder away.”
Rohan scoffs and rolls his eyes.
“I’m the one paying here. I should be allowed to do whatever I please," he says, shaking his head at the sheer audacity of this man to tell him no. “How long is it going to take before I’m fixed of whatever issues you perceive I have, anyway? I’ve got a lot better things to do than wait around while someone does a piss-poor job at dissecting my mind.”
Of course, on some subconscious level, riddled with denial, Rohan knows there is something wrong with the way his mind functions. He is anxious often, restless to the point he works for hours on end without stopping, all to get out the painful amount of information flooding his mind. His art is not a choice, but rather a compulsion. There is an irrepressible need to transfer his cluttered, irrational thoughts onto paper, to make them real: something he can touch, something he can process.
Other times, though, he is depressed, intensely so. It’s a chore to drag himself out of bed, and not even art appeals to him. He ignores the doorbell, he won’t answer the phone. Not that he needs to hear anyone else, anyway. Rohan only needs himself.
“I don’t believe we can help you here, Mr. Kishibe. We can’t help you if you don’t want to be helped.”
Upon hearing that, he’d promptly walked out and returned to his home. It was their loss, not his. Most people would beg for just a short glimpse into the mind of an art prodigy like Kishibe Rohan. If his work required him to suffer, to reach euphoric highs and lows and grapple with intensely painful memories, so be it.
Now, sits down at the kitchen table, tentatively sipping his water to steady his shaky breath.
This isn’t trauma, he thinks to himself. No, trauma is something else. It’s something held by victims of child abuse, and survivors of natural disasters. Trauma is for people who are assaulted; people who witness the horrors of war. It’s also for people who spend their summers hunting down a serial killer, of course, but Rohan is different. None of it affects him in the way it affects Josuke, or Okuyasu, or Koichi, or anyone else here.
He has nightmares, sure, and he wakes up screaming, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. When he turns corners, he feels a rush of adrenaline when he wonders who may be just out of view. There’s memories that come screaming back and are so loud and disruptive that Rohan wishes he could shut his mind off just to avoid them.
He hasn’t been able to practice drawing hands for a while.
Kishibe Rohan does not suffer. He does not waver; he is not mentally ill. His experiences are necessary to maintain the creativity in his work. The pain he feels is a commodity for him, and he weaponises it, luxuriates in it, because it’s the only thing that inspires him.
Kishibe Rohan has to remember.
Kishibe Rohan begs to forget.