One-Shot
Eiji Nizuma wasn't like the other kids and he knew it.
While they liked to pass their time by exploring the countryside, catching beetles and playing tag (Zoom!), Eiji preferred to stay indoors (Shh!).
The Aomori Prefecture was very quiet most of the time. You could see the stars out at night (Kira-kira!) and hear the buzz of the cicadas as they came alive (Chirrrp!)
He didn't enjoy the silence. A contradiction, it would seem to some. It was just that running around wasn't exciting enough. It was too plain, too ordinary. What he wanted was a real adventure (Wham!).
Adventures like in the ones he read in his shonen manga.
Was there anything there could be better than being a hero? Take Naruto for example, he was always up to something exciting (Kage bunshin no Jutsu!). Take One Piece – exploring the seven seas appealed to him way more than the sea of trees that hid nothing more than unassuming insects (Gomu gomu no punch!). Take Bleach, especially. Eiji could always pretend that there were indeed spirits and hollows to fight. He just didn't have the power to fight them (Bankai!).
Eiji wasn't a stupid kid (Baka!) and he knew that everything he read was a story. So, he settled for the stories, reading them day in and day out. He read manga when he woke up, after school and even during dinner (Itadekimasu!).
Then one day, he thought that he would try drawing. He wanted to draw the characters from the manga he drunk in so much.
Once he started, he never stopped.
Sheet after sheet, notebook after notebook. He filled in every page with manga characters, each with a story that he kept up in his head.
And drawing in notebooks at home wasn't enough, not when drawing became like breathing.
He started drawing in class, covering his schoolwork with inked characters that screamed from within the paper pages (Kaboom!).
One day he and his parents were called into school (Ding, dong, ding, dong!). The teachers wanted to talk to them, to get them to convince him to stop. His studies had not been terrible before, but after he found the joys of drawing they certainly took a dive. He didn't think it mattered that much. He was only in elementary school.
He didn't speak during the conversation, only nodding when asked if he understood. He disliked the teacher, he wasn't friendly at all and reminded Eiji of the villains he would see in manga.
When he got home he rushed up to his room. He gathered all the notebooks in his arms, all the ones that were scattered all over the place and hid them under his bed. He wouldn't let his parents take them away. They were his creations. His own heroes.
His parents understood, miraculously. They sat him down, saying that they wouldn't stop him from drawing, as long as he didn't do it during class.
For their sake, he didn't draw during class, but during lunch breaks drawings would explode from his fingertips, making their way to a notebook he had bought specially to use for school.
When he went onto middle school, he didn't have many friends. There were only a few who could stomach his odd obsession with manga – the rest of them were scared away.
The friends he did have, he cherished (Nakama!). He was grateful for their company, and would talk to them about manga and about what he liked or disliked about them.
He started drawing them, thinking of them as the protagonists of his stories. With that, his stories expanded. They went on and on, until he had notebooks that were long enough to be an actual volume of manga (Tankobon!).
At some point, his friends visited and were shocked (Gasp!) at the state of his room. He wouldn't let just anyone touch his notebooks, but his friends were special, so he let them read them.
Something strange happened, then.
They asked him if he was going to be a manga artist.
He had never thought about it. All he wanted was to draw, draw, draw.
But he could do it.
He had never once asked for anyone's opinion about his works. He had never intended to really show everyone the manga that he had produced in the first place. He knew, though, in the depths of his soul (Tamashi!) that he would be able to do it.
Suddenly, he found himself with a burning motivation (Atsu!).
His eyes gazed over the manga magazines he had (Jump!) and he grinned.
When he looked back at that moment (Flashback!), Eiji could say that it was the turning point that would map out the rest of his future. He would have been satisfied just drawing for himself, in all honesty. However he would not have known manga as he did now, and he would never have met Muto Ashirogi (Rivals!).
The then naive Eiji held up his one-shot, Large Bander (Debut!), unaware of the title that it would bring him in the future.
Eiji wasn't like the other kids and soon the whole manga world would know it.
A/N: Tadaa! This is my first entry for 'Twelve Shots of Summer' challenge. The prompt was 'Secret Genius' and when I thought 'genius' I immediately thought of Eiji. For some reason I think he'd be the type to just go along not realising he was a genius until his work was actually out there. Though I do think he thought he was a good artist to some extent~ I hope I didn't deviate from the prompt too much here. Anyway, this was my first time writing for Bakuman, and I had a lot of fun with it! Please check out the other entries for this challenge! (Just search up the forum, and you'll see them there!)
Thanks for reading!
- Dina (7/6/2014)