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Chapter Text

“Open up!” Koichi had woken back in his room after what seemed like an extended fever dream involving Mars, a tall bronze-skinned man with purple hair screaming about killing Josuke’s father, and frogs that let mortal men blow up entire mountains. At least he thought it was a dream, until he found himself covered in red dust, and the words “I will fly back home through the interdimensional portal” written on his forearm. Then he had marched himself down to a certain manga artist’s recently renovated house and knocked down the door using Echoes Act 1.

“Yes, yes, what is it? I’m a very busy man, you know.” The door opened, and Rohan posed artfully against the doorframe. It probably wasn’t on purpose; his natural stance simply had the aura of a pose to it. As always, his perfectly coiffed hair resembled an immaculate swirl of Colgate toothpaste nestled in those green things that came with sides of sushi. He wore an outfit that looked simultaneously casual and like it would appear three months later in a fashion magazine when he already considered it outré. Outré of fashion, that is.

“I’m going to get you for what you did!” Koichi hollered at Rohan, who looked down at him, completely unconcerned. Due to the stresses he had been forced to endure in his short, yet eventful life, Koichi had the grey hair of an eighty-year-old-man. 

“You’re welcome for your safe return home,” Rohan said, aggravatingly calm, examining Koichi’s red face and dusty clothes with a critical eye. “Hm…red isn’t a bad colour scheme for you. I may have to make some adjustments to that sketch…”

“I won’t take this anymore! I’m not your muse!”

“Oh, but you are, but you are,” Rohan said, an air of breezy, arrogant nonchalance about him as usual. “I will have to deduct that tea-towel from your wages, by the way. I can’t believe you lost it. I thought you were more reliable than that.”

“You don’t pay me any wages!”

“Oh? That makes things so much simpler.”

“How did you even get me on Mars?”

Rohan held his forehead in despair. “For the last time, art knows not the bounds of mere space and time, Koichi! If you weren’t my muse, I don’t know what I would do with you…”

Koichi took a deep breath, inhaling for a solid five seconds. Then, he bellowed, at the top of his admittedly diminutive lungs, “I…am…not…your…muse!”    

“Very nice. Now run along home. It’s almost 7 am, and I’ve got a lot of drawing ahead of me…”

“You can’t order me around anymore! I-” he glanced down at his watch, and his hands flew to his face. “Oh s-h-i-t, I’m gonna be late for class! You-”

“Well, well, I suppose we better run off now, don’t we?” Rohan smirked and made a shooing gesture. “Goodbyeee Koichi. Parting is such sweet sorrow.” He closed the door in Koichi’s face before the latter could react. 

Context: The Day Before

37 Kars on 1980s Mars – the most gorgeous canvas Rohan Kishibe had seen in what must have been 1600 seconds (that was the last time he read Koichi’s face).

“Koichi,” Rohan said Rohanly, fervently sketching the landscape without even bothering to look at it, dotting it with splendidly rendered Karsopods with shocks of violet hair like spring crocuses at evenly spaced intervals, “fetch me my tea-towel. I need to see exactly what a tea-towel covered in Mars dust looks like.”

“Awww...” Koichi was watching Jonathan demonstrate his Amphibian Overdrive to an incredulous seven-year-old Joseph. “Why do I have to do it? Why can’t you get Josuke to do it?”

“That’s simple,” Rohan said. “I hate that house-burning son of a bitch and his existence in general and you are my muse and inspiration. Now be a dear and fetch that towel.”

“Can I do it later? You could just read my memories of the towel after I see it,” Koichi said, a hopeful note in his voice. Another impossible dust storm rose as Jonathan collapsed another mountain, causing the small Joseph to cheer and jump up and down in delight.

“Oh, I wish, I wish. I plan to lick the dust. Can I lick your memories, Koichi? Is that something you’d let me do?”

“Um...” Koichi looked at the dust avalanche coming their way. “Rohan...do you see that?”

Rohan glanced up, gasped, and said, “That’s...that’s...”

“We should probably get out of here,” Koichi said nervously.

“That’s the perfect reference for the aerodynamics of a cloudlike formation in the Martian atmosphere!” Rohan sketched even more furiously, his entire body trembling with the joy of creation.

“Why the heck am I even stuck with you?”

Rohan pointed with one end of the pen to a line on Koichi’s face reading “I do not yet canonically have enough backbone to deny other people’s ridiculous requests.” “That one wasn’t me, by the way. That’s allll you.”

“Wait. How could you have done 8 chapters of this already?” Koichi yelled before the dust storm flowed over him, counting the stack of volumes piled next to the frankly inhuman mangaka. “Aren’t we in a time loop?”

Though he was being buried to the neck in red dust, Rohan kept drawing. “Art is timeless and knows no boundaries, Koichi, we’ve been over this! Now where’s my tea tfwl...?”

Back in Morioh-cho

“I’m not a muse,” Koichi muttered, glowering with all his might as he kicked a rock down the road on the way home from school. It tumbled to a stop in front of Josuke and Okuyasu.

“Hey, little man!” Okuyasu waved him over. His hair looked fairly normal, all things considered, excepting of course the little grey Pikachu tail in the back. “Why the face?” He said this in English, for the purposes of joke-telling.

“Don’t you mean ‘why the long face’?” Josuke cut in. He had hair like a well-done steak glued to the sole of a pair of Crocs and oh no he is coming after me help

“Don’t be silly, Josuke! His face is short, like him! I’m talking about that look of disappointment and dejection!”

“That’s what ‘long face’ means,” Josuke said.

Okuyasu frowned, tapping his friend on the head with his fist. “Oi, Josuke, just because your dad’s British-American doesn’t mean your English is better than mine!” 

“Whatever.” Koichi sighed deeply. “First, I get transported to some horrible hellscape born of Rohan’s sick imagination and he threatens to lick my memories. Then am late to class and disappoint my teacher. Then I spill soy sauce on my spare uniform, and my usual uniform is still covered in Mars dust!” 

“What was that about the soy sauce?” Okuyasu asked, always one to pay attention to food-related business. 

“I have to find some way to get back at Rohan!” Koichi screamed, raising his fists in the air, trembling with purpose. “Josuke, Okuyasu, can I trust you to lend me your aid in this time of need?”

“Oh yeah!” Okuyasu and Josuke both cheered. 

“What are we gonna do? Punch him in his good-for-nothing face?” Josuke asked, uncharacteristic eagerness written all over his expression. “I mean, I’m not one to pick a fight, of course, but if anyone harmed one of my friends…”

“No,” Koichi growled. “No, that is far too lenient.”

“I’m going to punch him anyway,” Okuyasu decided. 

Koichi waved an imperious hand. “Your loyalty pleases me. But that’s all crap. I have much better ideas than that.”

“Well, out with it then! I wanna know how we’re gonna put that bastard in his place!” 

“Patience, my friends, and hear my words.”

“We’re hearing them!” they both chimed in. “C’mon, we can’t take this suspense!”

“Let’s give him…” Koichi paused for effect, making his friends lean in to hear the answer, both quivering with anticipation, fists raised to their chins. “…fake manga material.”

The excitement on the two delinquents’ faces drained away, leaving two blank stares. 

“Fake manga material,” Koichi repeated, in case the brilliance of the idea had been so blinding and boggled their minds so much that they couldn’t process it the first time.

Josuke and Okuyasu exchanged looks of pure confusion. “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’? I mean, let’s make up some memories and give it to him. Just compose a wild story, put it in our brains, layer it underneath so much obfuscation that he can’t tell it’s real. Or,” Koichi hastened to say, “or, better yet, try to create a story that’s sort of real and then change some of the details. If it comes from me, he won’t look too closely – until it’s too late.” 

“How is that even a…”

“And then,” Koichi said, the depravity of his own soul dawning on him and twisting his face into a caricature of horror and glee intermixed – horror at his unbridled iniquity, glee at his unfettered genius – “and then, when he’s gotten his precious new idea all drawn and coloured, we tell him it’s all fake. All of it. None of it has that genuine flavour he wants. He’d be a fraud! A hack! A– a piss artist! It’ll destroy him.”

Josuke and Okuyasu exchanged another look. “‘Piss artist’?” mouthed Okuyasu, seemingly dumbfounded by Koichi’s lexicon.

“Well?” Koichi trembled with purpose, features still contorted into a terrifying jack-o-lantern grin. “What do you all say we go fake some memories and give him what for?”

Josuke drew himself up to his full height. “But I refuse.”

“What?!” Koichi screeched, face falling and returning to normal. 

“Sorry, bro, that just doesn’t sound like something a cool person would do,” Josuke said.

“Are you saying I’m not cool?”

Josuke looked sheepish. When no one was threatening his hair, there was as much fight in him as there was self-restraint in Rohan.

Koichi raised his hand, and in an icy tone, said, “Echoes, Act 1. Write the chords to the chorus of “Whatcha Say” on me, so whenever I pass them, they will know the pain of the betrayal they have inflicted on me, their dearest friend–”

“Okay, okay, we’ll do it! We’ll help you!” Josuke yelled in a panic. “Sheesh. You’ve gotten scary, Koichi…” 

Chapter Text

The next day, Koichi dragged his hapless friends over to Rohan’s house by the ears. 

“Remember what we practiced,” he hissed as he rang the doorbell. Okuyasu began to ask, “What is it that we practiced?” but was shushed by Josuke.

The door opened in seconds. In honeyed tones, Rohan exclaimed, “Koichi, what a pleas- Oh, it’s you.”

Smiling frantically, Koichi kicked Josuke in the leg. “This was all taken from my dad’s childhood memories,” Josuke said reluctantly. “He was seven at the time.”

Rohan snatched the page out of Josuke’s hands.  My Grandmother has told me the most Coolest story. Here it is. Once upon a time there was a boy named Jonathan Joestar and he was thirteen years old. He was twenty meters tall-

“That can’t be right. He was born in 1920 and lived in England until 1938, yes? That means he must have turned seven while still in British territory sometime in 1927. And you’re telling me he started using the metric system before Great Britain adopted it in 1965?”

“Yeah, that’s the squeaky wheel that needed fixing in this scenario,” Josuke muttered.

“Just keep reading it,” Koichi said, his grin threatening to crack. 

“And this set is from Mr. Kujo from when he and Josuke’s father went on that trip to Egypt!”
“Dr.,” Josuke reminded. “My ... nephew’s ... oh crap, that’s right, Dr. Kujo is my nephew...” 

As Josuke had his weekly existential crisis over his family line, Rohan perused “Jotaro’s” memories.

Good grief, this all sucks. I hate this sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere…

Rohan frowned down at the paper, and Josuke cringed. Of course he would see through it. They weren’t professional identity thieves, they couldn’t just imitate Dr. Kujo and get away with—

“That is exactly what he sounds like!” Rohan exclaimed, producing a notebook out of thin air and scribbling furiously inside it. “What a fascinating story. I could probably make a weekly serialized manga out of this…”

“Yeah, sure,” Okuyasu said. He was not well-read when it came to the publishing industry or reading. 

“I will certainly write Koichi into this story as well. All your memories have given me fruitful material.”

Speaking of fruitful material, another Josuke had wandered into the wrong Morioh. A young buck-toothed sailor wandered up Rohan's street, tears welling in eyes that belonged to two different halves of two different people. 

“Who am I?” he wailed repeatedly. “Who am I?”

Rohan paused in his writing to drown over at the sailor, who they all collectively decided to name Gappy. “Who are you?”

“That’s what I want to know!” he burst into frustrated tears. Josuke patted him awkwardly on the back and Okuyasu stared at his head, trying to figure out what kind of hat he was wearing. 

Rohan cleared his throat loudly, and when he was ignored, cleared his throat a few more times. And then he said, “Strange fellow who is crying over his forgotten identity!”

“Who, me?” Gappy said. 

“Yes, excuse me, hello, could you please have an existential crisis elsewhere? We’re in the middle of something.”

“I’m sorry,” Gappy wailed. “I just wanted to know who I am. I want to be a whole person. You know, like Hirose Yasuho, my bestest friend in the entire—”

“Hold on, did you say you’re friends with a Hirose?” Rohan cut in, smiling like a cat who had just caught a canary. “I like the cut of your jib. You and I are not so different. If you want to know who you are, I can check for you.”

“Really?” Gappy’s eyes filled with wonder. 

“Wait! That wouldn’t be interesting from a narrative standpoint,” Koichi yelled in desperation. His plan was going to shambles! If Rohan lost interest in the false Joseph and Jotaro memories, his efforts would all be in vain.

“Nonsense, Koichi, the amnesic sailor angle is overdone. I will not be using this as manga material. Therefore, there should be no problem with me going ahead and reading his memories.”

Gappy beamed as Rohan pulled out Heaven’s Door like a rabbit out of his notebook, and peered into his memories. “Oh...oh my. To shreds, you say? And— my goodness, is this true?”

“Do you know who I am?” Gappy said anxiously.

“Yes,” Rohan said happily, whisking him inside his house. “My new muse.”

“Oh, curses!” Koichi muttered. “My plan was foiled!”

“What plan?” Rohan asked, raising one eyebrow.

“No plan!” Josuke squeaked in fear, pushing Okuyasu, who had not caught onto what the problem was, away from Rohan.

“I was going to feed you false manga material so you would be forever burdened with the shame of creating unrealistic art! There, I said it!” Koichi hollered. “I’m not proud of myself. I know it’s wrong to destroy your art for petty revenge. But I hate being used, and you won’t listen to reason.”

Rohan gazed down at him for one long, terrible moment, and smiled.

Josuke gulped, picked Okuyasu up bodily using his stand, and hightailed it out of there.

“Why are we running?” Okuyasu yelled once Josuke set him down.

“To save our lives!” Josuke screamed.

“Really? How?” Okuyasu sounded concerned. Then it dawned on him. “Oh, right, aerobic exercise is crucial to reducing the risk of heart failure!”

“No, Okuyasu, you fool,” Josuke sobbed. “You are my fool, but you’re— wait, it actually doesn’t matter if you know why we’re running.” 

Koichi would be fine, they knew, since Rohan had already squeezed all the manga material he could out of him, and he actually liked Koichi, as opposed to them. They kept going until they reached the edge of the town.

Back at the Rohan house, Koichi stood his ground, chin lifted and arms crossed. He was going to stand up for himself and own up to his mistakes. Involving Okuyasu and Josuke had been the wrong move. He should have simply owned it for himself.

“Is that all?” Rohan said, looking oddly calm. “If you don’t like being used, I suppose there’s no helping it. As expected, you’re a spirited and resourceful young man.”

Koichi relaxed, expression clouding over with confusion. “You’re...not angry?"

Rohan examined his nails. “A fool could see through that Josuke’s lies. I knew about your little plan all along. I just humoured you because that would make for an interesting anecdote to tell. That set of fake memories you gave me are a fairly good representation of reality, if my previous conversations with Mr. Joestar and Dr. Kujo are any indication. You have a creative mind, I will give you that.”

“You... already talked to them?” Koichi said numbly.

“But of course," Rohan replied airily, hands on his hips. “I have a frankly overpowered stand, I am willing to buy mountains if they inconvenience me, and I cannot be trusted farther than I can be thrown, so they wanted to keep tabs on me.” He patted Koichi on the head. “Even when you’re trying to bring me down, you only bring me more fortune. I appreciate you, Koichi. While I do have a new source of inspiration now, I have you to thank for teaching me how to treat them with the dignity they deserve, and I’m sure we will get along swimmingly. I will always fondly remember your part as my first and most reliable muse.”

Koichi hung his head in defeat. But then, he realized that Rohan had acquired a new test subject in the form of Gappy, and his disappointment turned to pure joy. “Oh, thank you!” he cried, to Rohan’s utter confusion. “Yes, my god, thank you!”

“Well, I’m glad you’re happy,” he said. “Now, I do have work to do—”

Koichi had already skipped all the way home.

(Koichi then wrote some apology notes to Josuke and Okuyasu for roping them into such a harebrained scheme. After bearing the story secondhand and reading the excerpt of his own “memories,” Jotaro briefly suspected Koichi of reading his diary, which caused him to send Koichi to Italy to get menaced by a half-vampiric thief, but otherwise, Koichi lived the rest of his life in relative peace, the rest of his memories remaining entirely his own property, and never teleported to Mars even once after that.)