Work Text:
Mind On Fire (That Is Why I Burn You)
His name was Kishibe Rohan. ‘Rohan’ was not a typical Japanese name. He’d been named after the pen name of the Meiji-period author Kōda Shigeyuki. In Japanese it was spelled with the characters for ‘tears’ and ‘companion.’ Rohan himself preferred the Sanskrit meaning for the name: ‘to ascend; ascending.’
That meaning had been part of the reason for his Stand’s name Heaven’s Door. He was ascending to Heaven’s door: forever ascending in his endless endeavor to surpass himself.
The other reason for his Stand’s name was that it was everything he had ever wanted: a door to people’s minds. A door that let him feel and experience other people’s lives just as they’d felt and experienced them.
The best art was created from reality. In order to write his stories and characters, Rohan needed to experience it all for himself. To understand how characters would act realistically in any given situation, he had to feel in himself everything that they felt. He had to know their pasts, understand how it had affected them, how it had made them the people that they were. He had to feel all of that as if it were his own.
When he did, it was like his mind on was on fire. He felt feverish, wholly consumed with the need to get it out. To get it out of his head and into the world through his art. To light everyone else’s minds on fire with it, too.
He didn’t give a damn about the money or the fame. He wrote his stories for the sole reason of lighting his reader’s minds on fire.
In order to do that he needed reality, because only what was real had the power to touch people, be felt and leave a mark. That’s why his manga Pink Dark Boy was considered ‘suspense-horror,’ ‘creepy,’ ‘psychological,’ ‘thrilling’: reality was disturbing. It disturbed you; it unsettled you; it rearranged you.
Reality was someone grabbing a spider off your shoulder that you hadn’t even seen was there, pinching it securely between their fingers, stabbing an exacto knife into its abdomen to watch it die and then licking it in front of you: reality stayed with you. It was something you felt and would not soon be forgetting.
To capture such scenes for his readers, he needed to feel what it was like to kill that spider. He needed to know how it spasmed as it died and how it felt like to watch it. He needed to know how it felt to lick it and what it tasted like.
Without knowing that, he wouldn’t be able to draw it real enough. Without knowing that, he wouldn’t be able to use his art skills to draw the scenes in a way that would evoke those feelings in his readers.
He needed to feel and experience everything for himself so that he could make his readers feel and experience it, too.
He felt like his mind was on fire. It hurt, because reality hurt. It consumed him. He was burning alive.
When he was drawing, he did not feel like himself. He was not aware of himself. He was nothing but a conduit for the feelings and experiences he was making manifest in the world through his art. He was the Possessed, the Exorcisor, the Exorcism and the Demon. He was everything; he was nothing.
Whenever he wasn’t drawing, he was hungry. Hungry for new realities that would set his mind aflame. The hunger ate him alive.
It was why his personality was so abrasive, callous, antagonistic: he was bored. When he wasn’t drawing, when he wasn’t aflame, he was constantly, insatiably, overwhelmingly bored. By everyone and everything.
Most of life was not actually reality. Humans were fundamentally incapable of handling reality, because reality burned. So people covered it up with lies and illusions: fictions like society, morals, ideals, social scripts. Most people lived dull, conventional fictions. Because it protected them from the burning, and they felt satisfied and content.
Rohan was never satisfied. He was never content. He was hungry, and he was always craving more—he was always looking for more. Nothing would ever be enough. He had to keep surpassing himself, had to keep ascending.
It was why he was so impatient, why he was so rude, why he purposefully antagonized people: he was so cloyed of their boring, hackneyed fictions, and he wasn’t going to play along; he wanted reality. He wanted to see who people were beneath their society-polished facades.
He wasn’t going to play along with their rose-tinted fantasies, and he wanted their dark, their gritty, their sharp-edged truths. He wanted reality so that he could create art that would disturb people; art that would touch people.
True art was that which was able to break through all those delusional blockades and hit the parts of people that they hid away because those parts of themselves disturbed them.
It was why Heaven’s Door was so heavenly: it allowed Rohan to bypass those blockades and find those dark, those gritty, those sharp-edged truths. It allowed him to feel and to understand, as if he’d experienced it all himself. It allowed him to experience all those disturbing things that people hid away because they couldn’t handle the burning, and it allowed him to burn with it, in a way that those people themselves couldn’t handle.
Most people locked their flames away in rooms without oxygen, but Rohan burned.
He knew why he could burn, while other people couldn’t. It was because he had his art: all those flames that were burning him he used, turning all that pain into creation. It was why he was able to draw his manga all by himself and so quickly. He burned alive but then exorcised those flames from his mind, using that agonizing heat to create art like a generator used burning to heat water to turn turbines that produced electrical energy that powered lights and machines that created things.
In Rohan, because of his art, all that burning had somewhere to go.
In Rohan, because of his art, without that burning he was nothing.
He didn’t care about money, he didn’t care about fame, he didn’t care happiness. He lived to create his manga; it was the entire meaning and purpose of his existence.
When Kishibe Rohan was 16, he’d fallen into a soul-deep depression.
It wasn’t anything that had happened. It was just that he’d grown old enough to start thinking about the future and what he wanted to do with his life, and he’d realized that life and existence was utterly, completely pointless. Humans lived, and then they died. No matter what they did in their lives, they died, and none of it would ever meaning anything. He didn’t care about anything, because none of it meant anything. All of it just pointless fictions that people entertained for the sake of physical and emotional pleasures.
There was no meaning to any of it; none of it was real; none of it would last.
In school, Rohan had always been good at everything, but had never cared about anything. He’d never liked anything. He’d never liked anyone. He’d never had any friends. He’d never wanted any. People were boring and did nothing but annoy him. Everything was boring and did nothing but annoy him.
There was no meaning to any of it. None of it felt real.
He’d lost all motivation to do anything. There was no reason to go to school, no reason to do his homework, no reason to eat, no reason to get up out of bed, no reason to care.
He’d considered the idea of suicide, but it had been just that: a consideration of an idea. He didn’t even care enough to go to all the effort that would’ve been necessary to kill himself.
He’d hid his depressed state as well as he could for a while, simply because he didn’t want to deal with people butting in with their meaningless morals and concern. Eventually, though, he couldn’t even muster up the care to hide it, and people started to notice.
His homeroom teacher sent him home early, one day, because he seemed so out of it and sick. He’d realized that there was no longer any way he could hide the fact that he didn’t care about anything.
He’d drawn his first manga, that day.
He’d always been good at art, like he’d always been good at everything. He’d often spent his classes and recesses doodling because he’d been so bored out of his mind. He’d always enjoyed reading manga, to an extent, in that it made time pass quicker and sometimes it made him feel something. That had always been appreciated.
The manga that he drew that day was the first actual manga he’d drawn, though. He’d drawn it because he was trying to figure out what was wrong with him. The only reason he’d done so was because he’d realized he couldn’t hide his depression any longer, and people would be butting in with their meaningless morals and concerns, and that would have been annoying and he didn’t want to deal with it. So he’d thought that if people were going to try to annoyingly and uselessly help him resolve the issue, then he’d rather just do it himself.
So he’d drawn a manga, in which the protagonist was depressed and trying to decide on the meaning of of his existence when there wasn’t any meaning in anything. At the end of the manga, the protagonist made the decision that life was exactly as real as he made it, and that if he wanted life to have meaning then he himself had to create that meaning.
And so Rohan created the meaning for his own existence: that of drawing manga. Creating art that would touch people, so that his life would have meaning. His life would have meaning because he’d affected people. His life would have meaning because even after his death, his manga would last, and would continue affecting people, even after his death.
Rohan didn’t want to be alive. Life was meaningless, because it ended.
What Rohan wanted was to live forever: he wanted to have meaning.
Humans created meaning through stories. Life itself had no purpose: no plot, no moral, no structure, no order, no point. But humans, by turning their lives into stories, created meaning. They created plot, moral, structure, purpose.
If Rohan’s existence in the world had no purpose aside from that which he chose, then he would choose it.
So he did.
By the time he’d finished his first manga, his depression was gone. Instead of that gray, foggy emptiness that had been all that there was inside him, he found himself consumed by bright, burning fire: the desire to create, and to make other people burn as he did. He wanted to set their meaningless lives aflame. He wanted to create stories that would be fire-starters.
That, and that alone, was the one and only meaning of his entire existence.
Age 20 and four years into his mangaka career, Rohan had moved away from Tokyo because the city was loud and there were people everywhere, which made it hard for him to retreat enough into his mind to feel the things that he needed to in order to create his manga.
He’d moved to Morioh because the town was quiet, and because he’d lived there until he was four and didn’t remember any of it. He hadn’t had his Stand Heaven’s Door at the time, so at that point he hadn’t been able to draw inspiration and experiences from other people’s minds and had had to rely entirely on himself, which meant that he was eager to remember as much of his life as possible so that he’d have more material to draw on. He’d thought that living in Morioh might drag up some forgotten memories of his young childhood.
Then he’d been stabbed with the Stand arrow and received his Heaven’s Door, and his entire world had opened up.
There was now so much more material for him to draw on—so much more real material—and he was on fire.
If other people ended up getting burned by him, he didn’t care; he would immortalize their ashes in his work, and their lives would have so much more meaning than they would have ever had otherwise. They should all be grateful to him. What would their lives be without him? Nothing but meaningless, innocuous, vapid fiction.
Hirose Koichi’s memories had been the most incredible find of Rohan’s life: oh, the way it had made him burn. He hadn’t even been himself, for he’d been nothing but flames, nothing but the sensation of burning, nothing but the searing desire to unleash those flames on the entire world, nothing but ravenous hunger for more.
Rohan loved Koichi because the boy made him burn, and he was sure that all his readers would burn alive with him, too—and in the ruins of that inferno there’d be meaning that would last, because unlike humans stories never died.
Rohan’s bookshelf was full of books. Probably the half of which he hadn’t even read.
It was simply collected reference material, in case it would be useful for a story one day.
If something was directly applicable to the manga story he was working on, Rohan would go to any length to research something, and he would research that thing with absolute thoroughness.
If something had nothing to do with the story he was writing at the time then he didn’t have any interest in it at all. He picked up and dropped interests along with his manga chapters and one-shots, which he produced quickly. And so he quickly changed interests.
As soon as he finished a project he was already off to search for something new for the next one. Until he managed to find that something, he was bored, restless and agitated.
Once he found something that set his mind aflame, though, he latched onto it like a disk abalone. Nothing would have been able to pry him off. The rest of the world was irrelevant, and could have burned up like his house for all that he cared.
When he was working on a project he was so utterly focused on it that he was dismissive of everything and everyone else, and people tended to find him callous; when he was in between projects he was so utterly bored and irritable that he became pugnacious, and people tended to find him antagonistic.
At times like that, when he was searching for a new story, he tended to go people-watching. He’d often sit at the outside table of a restaurant or cafe with a glass of coffee or wine.
If it was wine, it was always Pinot Grigio, at such times. If there was a wine for feelings of sadism and schadenfreude, it was Pinot Grigio. Sometimes actively nursing those feelings was the only thing that allowed him to tolerate the company of others. People annoyed him to no end unless he was able to think of them as potential writing material.
It had been at such a time when he was in between projects that Josuke had knocked on his door wanting to play cee-lo. Rohan hadn’t had anything else to do and he’d been bored and irritated. He would’ve loved to see Josuke’s expression when he lost all his spending money to him. What was the expression of someone who had come so hopefully and smugly to gain and then had lost everything? Rohan would’ve loved to draw it.
Only, then Josuke had made a fool of him. It was not acceptable for Rohan to have been unable to figure out how Josuke had cheated. It was not acceptable for him not to know something; he needed to know everything. So that he could use it as material for his manga.
That was the only thing he ever cared about.
And damn it, but that one thing? He cared about it.
It burned, it burned it burned it burned it burned it burned—
Everything that he wanted to make manifest in the world; how much he wanted those stories to make his readers burn; how much he feared that the manga he wrote wouldn’t be able to set his readers aflame and they’d stop reading because it would be boring, would be fake, would be fictional just like all the rest of the world.
If people didn’t read his manga, didn’t burn from his manga, then there was no point; no point at all to his existence.
He didn’t even like people, didn’t even care for them, but he needed them—he needed them to read his manga. Because without readers he was nothing.
So he forever needed more. He was never satisfied, never content, always needed to be ascending, always needed to be surpassing himself, creating manga that was real.
The problem with reality was that humans were incredibly adept at getting used to things; once something became common, it became normal, and once it became normal it became a pattern, and once it became a pattern it became fake. Reality had to always, always be disturbing—and so reality had to always, always be new, always had to be something that hadn’t been experienced before, because only the unfamiliar was disturbing.
When Rohan finished a chapter of his manga, it was the greatest feeling in the world—for all of 0.2345 seconds. Then the depression crashed down on him, because he needed more. He needed more, and there was always the soul-crushing doubt in him that he would ever find any, because the world was so damn fictional.
He needed reality and he was so damn hungry, all the time.
And that starving desperation? It: Never. Went. Away.
Rohan would take anything—anything that burned.
Getting beaten up by Higashikata Josuke, for instance: it had burned him, and he had loved it because he could use it. It was inspiration that he could use; it was reality. And he knew exactly what it felt like, which meant that he could draw it and he could make his readers feel it, too.
It had been absolutely hilarious to see Josuke again after he’d been released from the hospital, because Josuke had looked at him like he thought Rohan would be scared of him, but Rohan wasn’t, Rohan was delighted, and it threw Josuke off completely.
Rohan wasn’t bothered by pain; pain was reality that he could use. And so upon seeing Josuke again, he’d just smiled: I dare you to do that again.
Josuke had looked away, clearly ashamed of himself.
Aside from taking revenge against people who insulted or damaged things he cared about, Josuke was a pacifist who didn’t believe in strife. It was one of the things about Josuke that made Rohan sick; Rohan went out looking for conflict, looking to cause pain, but Josuke was always trying to assuage those things. Always trying to avoid conflicts and heal injuries: always trying to turn reality back into rose-tinted fiction, and Rohan hated it.
Josuke was a liar, too, and Rohan hated that as well: that Josuke was always covering up the hard-edged truth with his society-polished lies. And then he’d go back on the the things he said, and it drove Rohan mad, because Rohan wanted to know everything that was inside everybody’s head. But with Josuke he couldn’t and he hated it.
Josuke was nothing but fiction.
It hadn’t been because Rohan cared for Josuke that he’d saved him from Highway Go Go. He didn’t care for Josuke at all. What he cared about was himself, and life lived due to sacrificing Josuke would not have been one worth living.
It had been hilarious, actually, that Highway Go Go had thought Rohan would care enough about his life to sacrifice someone else’s to keep on living. Rohan didn’t care about his life at all; his life was meaningless.
All he cared about was producing art. Producing art that people would read. If he’d sacrificed Josuke’s life for the sake of his own, the shameful weakness of that would have bothered him so much that he would never have been able to create true art ever again. Such a life would not have been worth living; Rohan would much rather have died. He’d never live a life that he had to be ashamed of; life was pointless and not worth that.
He would rather have died than have been saved by Josuke, too. Josuke hadn’t given him a choice. Rohan wasn’t thankful; the only reason he could live with it was because he hadn’t asked. He would never have been able to live with having asked Josuke to save him.
In the end, it had been completely outside of his control, like most of life was. So Rohan kept on living, unbothered by it. He still hated Josuke, though.
There was a reason that he so delighted in Koichi: Koichi was honest to a fault, managed to push through fears that burned him to be brave, and he was nice even to people that he didn’t like—but unlike most people whose niceness to those they didn’t like would have been fake, his was genuine. He didn’t pretend to care about people; he truly cared for them, even when he didn’t particularly actually like them.
Rohan, who didn’t care for anybody and also believed in being completely genuine, found that truly commendable.
Rohan was rude and callous because that was how he truly felt; Koichi was caring and considerate not because of any fictional ideals like the liar and actor Josuke, but because that was how he truly felt.
Rohan knew that Koichi didn’t even like him. It wasn’t that hard to tell: Koichi, like Josuke, hadn’t believed what Rohan had tried to tell him and had thought he was messing with him.
That kind of thing had always driven Rohan mad: the fact that people didn’t believe what he said simply because he didn’t like him. “You’re just messing with me,” they’d say, or “You’re always messing with me,” and yes, did mess with people, but the way he messed with people was different.
He was abrasive and he was antagonistic—he pushed people’s buttons, and he acted without any care whatsoever for people’s feelings—but he wasn’t a liar. He didn’t pull tricks. It drove him nuts that people thought he would lie to them, and it was actually hilarious, because he was far, far more honest than they were. If anything could be said about Rohan’s abrasive personality, it was that he was too honest.
Most people lied for the sake of societal fictions; they lied to make things soft, rose-tinted and easy. They lied to appease others.
Rohan refused to lie, and it was because he refused to lie that people found him abrasive. He said what he truly felt.
And yet people always though that he was lying, simply because they didn’t like him, because he didn’t care what other people thought.
It drove him mad; they were all such fucking hypocrites, all such liars caught up in their fictions and they didn’t even realize it.
Still, what he liked about Koichi was that Koichi cared about him even despite not liking him. In all honesty, Rohan didn’t even care about Koichi that much, but he admired his virtues and called him a friend because he knew that it would make Koichi feel obliged to help him out.
Even if he’d believed that Rohan was messing with him in regards to the Stand that was possessing Rohan’s back, simply because he didn’t like Rohan, he’d still been genuinely concerned enough to return, and he’d ended up saving Rohan.
Rohan had known that it would be worth sacrificing his pride to ask Koichi for help.
(“Carry me on your back,” Cheap Trick had said to him, and it had been hilarious because there was so much that Rohan quite willingly carried on his back, so many voices in his head that told him his manga would never be read. The whisperings Rohan could have handled; in all honesty, it hadn’t been Cheap Trick’s whispering that had been the insufferable part about him, but the absolute inconvenience of being unable to let anyone see his back; that, and that part alone, was what truly would have made living with Cheap Trick absolutely insufferable.)
Rohan knew that Koichi didn’t actually like him, but he didn’t actually care; he didn’t actually care about having friends, and he still liked Koichi anyway, because Koichi was genuine—and because Koichi, like him, was constantly striving to surpass himself.
There was obviously a reason, after all, that Koichi’s Stand Reverb kept developing and improving, while most people’s Stands remained static; Koichi, like Rohan, had in him a sense of hunger. And Rohan had known that, even if Koichi had to help him, Koichi would never mock him or look down on him for it, the way others would.
If there was anyone else that Rohan respected aside from Koichi, it would be Joseph Joestar and Kujo Jotaro.
Joestar was a liar and an actor, but unlike Josuke he was a clever liar, an clever actor; he knew exactly what he was doing. He played the fool like Rohan drew manga—it was an art form—and Rohan respected him for it.
Kujo had the straightest face likely known to mankind, but he was admirably straightforward and incredibly knowledgeable. He did exactly what he said he would, no holds barred. Rohan respected him for it.
Another thing he respected them for was the fact that they weren’t affected by his abrasiveness.
Rohan was abrasive because he didn’t have any inclination to be gentle, and he liked inciting real reactions in people; when Rohan was abrasive, Joestar played along easily, unbothered, and Kujo didn’t give a fuck and wasn’t affected in the least. Those were their genuine reactions.
Rohan enjoyed making people angry, it was true—because those were their real reactions—but he always resented people for being unable to handle him. When people genuinely could, he respected them. Such people were less annoying than most to deal with.
He respected Joestar and Kujo. His respect for them was the reason he actually even attempted to get along with Josuke.
He tried, okay? And that was far more than could be said about his interactions with most people.
There was a reason that he cycled through editors quickly; none of them could ever handle him. It was no doubt only due to how well his manga sold that Shuueisha hadn’t cut him off by that point, with how much difficulty he caused their editorial department.
It wasn’t Rohan’s fault if people couldn’t handle his personality.
He was burning alive—that was what made him such an successful mangaka. If people were burned by him, that was their own faults, not his. He didn’t care if people liked him or didn’t.
He only cared about people insofar as that they read his manga and were burned by it.
Kishibe Rohan’s mind was on fire, and the only reason he lived was for those flames to leave marks that would outlast him, because stories—stories that were real—were, in the end, the only things that had any meaning at all.
Rohan didn’t care about his life.
He just wanted the impact of his life on the world to last forever.