*OLD* Love Like You (Rohan Kishibe and Daughter Reader)

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 3)

WARNING: Cursed image that I drew after staying up all night to play Katamari Damacy and LSD: Dream Emulator lies ahead in these pages...(or basically, I was in a really goofy mood writing one of the scenes!)

(Y/n)'s frightened reaction to the surgery was expected, yet it didn't fail to break the adults' hearts. The first thing she did when Tomoko told her the news was burrow her face into Josuke's chest for security, although she knew that she couldn't evade the inevitable by hiding in plain sight.

"I don't want to go into surgery!" She cried out, frightened. "I don't want them to take my eye away! Please Dr. Higashikata, please Josuke, please Rohan-Sensei, please don't let me go!"

Her petrified pleas slithered into the depths of Rohan's mind and retrieved a memory that had been buried for countless years. But rather than dwelling on said memory in a negative light, the mangaka used it to make his daughter feel less alone in this situation.

"You know (Y/n), when I was young, I also had to get surgery."

Tomoko, Josuke, and (Y/n) tilted their heads to a curious angle, and the latter asked, "You did? What happened to you, Rohan-Sensei?"

He sat on the doctor's bed, took (Y/n) from Josuke's arms, placed her on his lap, then began to tell the story.

"It's funny, I was actually your age when it happened. One weekend, my family and I decided to go to the beach as a little getaway from the stresses of life..."

"A shadow blacker than a starless night...a shriek that haunts frightening nightmares..a body enveloped by a ribbon entwined from the sun's golden flames...and jaws that shatter the most vigorous dreams...but does a beast like that really live here on this beach?"

The residents of Morioh have always questioned the credibility of the tales told by the lighthouse keeper. While some of the stories seemed plausible enough to be in the realm of reality, such as the story of the dolphin who clotheslined a champion surfer into retirement, others were much too bizarre to be real, such as the story of the shape-shifting man from outer space who turned himself into the legendary Kraken to save a cargo ship carrying ice cream from sinking. But to little Rohan, every story was as real as he was, for stories are derived from the roots of reality, holding even the tiniest sliver of truth.

And it was Rohan's job as an aspiring mangaka to unweave the truths woven into these tales. If there truly was a beast that lurked on the beach of Morioh, then Rohan was going to capture it in a net of ink and imprison it in a cage made of gampi paper!

Rohan crawled into the watery crevices of a boulder and interrupted a pea crab's family dinner (and quite rudely too: he put one of the crabs in his mouth for a taste, but spat it out when it pinched his tongue), spent his last yen coin on a pair of tourist binoculars to scout the sky and found an advertisement for Lucky Land written in skywriting, and he even braved the chilling waters and found a submerged coffin speckled with barnacles.

But there was no beast to be found.

As the minutes bled into hours and the sun battered on his weary body, Rohan's belief of the beast's existence trickled away like raindrops in soil.

"It's already 2 o'clock," He said, using the sun's position to tell the time, "and I've spent 4 hours searching every inch of the beach! Where could that beast be hiding!?"

As Rohan made his way across a chain of seaweed-coated rocks, minding the slippery surfaces that threatened his safety, he considered the possibility that the lighthouse keeper's words held an entirely different meaning. Perchance the beast wasn't a literal creature, but rather an unseeable force that snakes its way into the purest of hearts and rots them from the inside out with a touch sewn by scorn and deception?