Chapter Text
It felt like lightning had shot through his whole body. Josuke couldn't quite recall what happened, he and Rohan were reluctantly teaming up to defeat an enemy stand user. Rohan yelled at him, Josuke had yelled right back, taking his eyes off their enemy for just a second and then… he had been hit.
Everything went black and he could feel his body hit the pavement below him.
Once he came back to, Josuke shot to his feet. It couldn't have been any longer than ten seconds, but the enemy had somehow managed to disappear, almost like he had vanished into thin air. Josuke groaned, bringing a frustrated hand to his face.
Of course the enemy would get away, it was all Rohan's fault for interfering. Where the hell was that asshole anyway? Josuke tried glancing around him, but everything looked… blurry.
More than that, though, something felt… off about him, He couldn't exactly pinpoint what it was, but he felt wrong. Josuke carefully sat back down on the floor.
Could he have gotten a concussion from falling down earlier? He closed his eyes, trying to assess what he was feeling. There was pain all over from falling on the ground, but… he wasn’t nauseous, his ears weren’t ringing. That didn’t fully eliminate the possibility of a concussion, but it made it much less likely.
"Oi, Rohan. Where the hell are you?" Josuke called out, and his voice… his voice sounded different to his own ears. That was odd. He was sure his voice was deeper than this. There was an odd pain pulsating in his right arm, his back ached and his eyes and shoulders both felt ridiculously heavy. He was exhausted. God, maybe that guy had hit him harder than he thought.
A groan came from somewhere a few steps away, and Josuke turned to find… himself? His vision was still blurry, but there was no mistaking his overly-customized uniform and his pompadour. It was like staring into a mirror, just like it had been when he'd fought Hazamada a few months back. Josuke frowned, watching as his fake self slowly sat back up.
Fake Josuke glanced all around them with a guarded, frustrated expression that Josuke would have recognized on anyone. No… that couldn’t be. Could it? Why the hell would Rohan look like that?
"Where did the enemy go, Higashikata?" Yup, he was officially going insane because fake him was acting and speaking exactly like Rohan would.
Josuke glanced down at his hands and he felt his heart speed up. These… these weren't his hands. They were prettier, smaller, with longer, elegant fingers and green nailpolish. He moved them around experimentally, resisting the urge to gasp as he grabbed at his now flat chest and even smaller waist. This was the mangaka’s body. Had they… switched? How?
"R-Rohan…? Ah… Why do you… why do you look like me?" Josuke asked, afraid of knowing the answer. They hadn’t known much about the guy’s stand before fighting him, they only knew it was very dangerous. Josuke had to be dreaming, surely he would wake up from this hellish nightmare any second now, probably to Rohan slapping him hard across the face.
"What the hell are you talking ab-" Fake Josuke, no, Rohan froze mid sentence, staring straight at Josuke with a horrified expression on his face. "You… what the hell did you do?"
"What do you mean what did I do?! How on earth could I do something like this?" Josuke let his gaze trail over his own figure as best as he could with his blurry vision. God, his chest and ass both looked huge in that uniform, why hadn't anyone ever told him that before? It was too much, gaudy even, but that wasn’t the issue at hand right now.
Rohan shook his head, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose, the other resting on his hip. It looked like he was trying to process this whole situation, trying to make sense of what was going on. "Did you get hit by that weird force field too?"
Ah, yes. That was what had happened. It hadn't been lightning, it was that weird energy thing that shot out of their enemy's body. Josuke nodded, squinting his eyes in order to try to get a better look at his surroundings.
Aside from them both, everything else seemed to be in order. Nothing seemed amiss. "I did, yeah. Because you yelled at me and distracted me."
Rohan's lips curled down and he rose to his feet with ease. "Don't try to blame this on me, you impudent brat. You're the one who charged at the enemy without knowing anything about their ability! I tried telling you to wait, but did you listen?" Rohan huffed, dusting himself off with a disgusted expression on his face. "In any case, ease up on the hairspray next time. The smell is unbearable up close. I don’t know how you’re able to breathe like this."
Josuke raised an eyebrow before frowning up at Rohan. "Oh yeah? You wanna talk 'bout that? How about you wear some damn glasses, then? I can't see shit!" He struggled to get up with the pain shooting through his right wrist. Josuke frowned down at it, glancing over at Rohan before straightening himself up. Why the hell did Rohan's hand hurt so much? This was the hand that he used for drawing, right? Could it be he'd landed on it funny? Rohan would kill him if that were the case, but Josuke could just sneakily fix it with Crazy Diamond whenever things went back to normal.
"I…" Rohan looked at Josuke, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning away from him, his cheeks tinted pink in anger. The expression looked weird on his own body, for some reason. It made Josuke feel flustered too. "That's none of your business, Higashikata."
The height he had over Rohan was much more noticeable from the mangaka's body. Next to his body like this, he felt… small. It wasn't something Josuke was used to feeling. Save for Jotaro, everyone he had ever met had been smaller than him… But the difference in body types and size was glaringly obvious from Rohan's perspective. Could that be part of why Rohan was always angry at him? Did Josuke’s size frustrate him? Because Josuke felt pretty annoyed at how big Rohan -or, well, Rohan in Josuke’s own body- seemed to be.
"How do we fix this?" Josuke asked, changing the subject so that they were on the right track. They couldn’t be arguing now. They needed to find a solution to this issue as quickly as possible. He crossed his arms defensively, taking a step away from Rohan. "No offense to you, but your body fucking sucks, Rohan."
Rohan tapped at his chin and hummed, pulling a pen out of his pocket before summoning his stand. Heaven's Door shimmered into existence next to him. “You say that as if yours was any better,” he muttered out, unsurprisingly unable to keep himself from responding to Josuke’s earlier comment.
"Oh no, I'm not letting you use that on me." Josuke took another step back, not sure how he felt about the fact that Heaven's Door had materialized from his body instead of Crazy Diamond. It looked weird.
The other man rolled his eyes. "Pipe down, idiot. I'm not using it on you." Josuke watched as his arm fluttered open like a book. Rohan reached over and quickly read through the pages there, frowning at whatever it was he was finding.
Josuke leaned closer, trying to get a peek, but the glare that Rohan sent him was enough to keep him from trying again. He rolled his eyes instead, watching the mangaka for a few seconds before becoming impatient again. "What?"
"Nothing. There's nothing useful here." Rohan sighed, looking back at Josuke with an odd expression on his face. Josuke frowned at that, but he chose not to say anything about it. "We need to go find the stand user and force him to change us back."
That much had been obvious, but how the hell were they supposed to find the guy now? It wasn't like either of them had any special tracking abilities, and any additional advantages they might have had were null due to the fact they were in different bodies.
He hummed, looking up at Rohan only to find the mangaka cupping at his chest with both of his hands. Josuke let out a small, strangled noise at that, and he stepped forward to slap Rohan's hands away. "What the hell are you doing, pervert? I can still kick your ass even if I’m in this body, y'know?"
Rohan raised an eyebrow, his lips quirking up to a smirk. "What? You touched my chest.” He shrugged, glancing down and moving a hand straight towards the waistband of Josuke’s pants. “It's not like I'm grabbing your-"
"Rohan," Josuke interrupted with a frown.
The mangaka rolled his eyes, glancing around them right after. "Either way, I don't think we're going to find the stand user anytime soon. He had been in hiding for years, so odds are that he knows his way around town better than we do." He brought a hand up to his chin, humming softly. “We’re going to need some backup.”
Josuke's eyes widened at that and he shook his head quickly. "Oh fuck." Rohan raised an eyebrow at his sudden outburst, and Josuke brought his hand to his face. "My mom can't find out about this, Rohan. She doesn't know about stand business. We need to fix this today. Like. Now."
"So?" He asked, crossing his arms over his chest and cocking his hip a bit to the side. "Just tell her you're staying over at a friend's house for a while. Since you have my body, and only because of that, I can allow you to take one of my guest rooms for as long as it takes to get this issue sorted."
"That's not how it works, Rohan!" Josuke said, feeling panic start to bubble up in his chest. "My mom's not the type to easily go along with those things. I always have to beg to stay over for a bit, imagine if I randomly told her I'm leaving for an undefined time. She would kill me."
Rohan frowned, staring at Josuke as if he were the most annoying person on the planet. It looked so much more condescending from his body. Josuke wanted to punch his own face. "What are you suggesting, then?"
Resisting the urge to cringe, Josuke spoke up again. "As much as I hate the idea…" Rohan's eyes widened in realization even before he finished speaking. "You're going to have to pose as me."
It took a few seconds for his words to register in Rohan’s mind, and once they did, the mangaka scowled. “Absolutely not.”
“We have no other choice, Rohan! I don’t like this either. Not one bit,” Josuke said through gritted teeth, trying to calm himself down before continuing. “But, we gotta do it.”
Rohan looked up, as if praying to some unseen force for a few seconds before looking back at Josuke. “We need to set some ground rules. You are not about to fuck up my professional life.”
Josuke scoffed, bursting out into laughter. “It’s hilarious how you think that I’m the most likely to fuck something up, Kishibe.”
“What are you talking about?” Rohan asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
He raised an eyebrow, surprised at the fact that Rohan didn’t know why his part would be much harder than Josuke’s. “Rohan… you live by yourself. You have no social contact with anyone,” he paused, watching as Rohan’s face shifted into grim realization. “I live with my mother, and I go to school every day, interacting with dozens of people every single day. Not to mention you’ll have to style my hair.”
“Oh, fuck.”