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For the longest time, Jigen had thought there were two Lupin the Thirds. A man and a woman.
Jigen met the woman first. He’d been paid to protect a painting she was after. She’d arrived at midnight, as she had promised in her calling card, wearing a flashy red suit jacket with a black shirt and a yellow tie. She had a slender build, her dark hair was cut short, and she had a cocky grin on her red lips. The air around her was filled with the confidence she had in her skills.
Like everyone else prior, Jigen had presumed Lupin was a man, so when he’d seen her , he had hesitated before pulling the trigger. It had given Lupin plenty of time to kick him in the shin and bolt off with the painting. It cost Jigen a well-paying job and his dignity.
He had met the man several weeks later during a similar job. Jigen had immediately recognized the flashy red jacket, the cocky grin, and the aura of confidence. However, that time, the thief had been more masculine in appearance, even sporting sideburns, which hadn’t been there previously.
I wonder if you can hit me now without the handicap, Lupin had teased at Jigen’s gunpoint. Jigen had been about to pull the trigger when every other guard in the building had rushed into the room to catch the thief. In the chaos, Lupin had stolen the treasure, but one of Jigen’s bullets had managed to graze his left arm as he’d escaped.
The next time, it was the woman again, and the next, the man.
Jigen had continued running into both of them in similar fashions for about a year, but it wasn’t until he’d started working under Lupin, instead of against him, that he’d realized there was only one. It was the bullet wound on the woman’s left arm that had tipped him off; Jigen had left that on the man.
Of course, he’d never said anything to Lupin about it, since it had probably been just a minor realization in the end, and Lupin would have mocked him for it.
They had fallen into a pattern fairly quickly after their partnership started. Lupin would appear and offer Jigen a job. Then, they’d do the job and have fun for a couple days before going separate ways with their money. Eventually, when they each started to grow bored of aimless traveling, Lupin would always know where to find Jigen. After that, the loop started again.
He couldn’t really help himself; the jobs Lupin came up with were more challenging than anything Jigen had ever done before, but they were the most fun he had ever had, too. If the alternative was to offer his services to someone with too much money, too big a reputation, and too many enemies thereby, he’d, without a doubt, rather work with Lupin.
Even if Lupin was…special in his own way, he was consistently inconsistent. Jigen could expect that if he’d seen male Lupin last, it’d probably be female Lupin who would greet him next. Both took risks the same, both treated him the same, both acted pretty much the same, apart from some habits. The man reaped all the benefits of people mistakenly thinking he was an idiot and the woman took the advantage of people treating her like one. Jigen had once chastised her for abusing her gender like that and she had just laughed in his face. Hey, it worked, right? It was one thing Jigen didn’t agree with, but he couldn’t deny it got them places.
More than once, Jigen had found himself wondering if Lupin was even real, some otherworldly being beyond his comprehension messing with mortals because it amused him. A creature coming and going like the wind, leaving only mayhem and broken hearts in its wake….
There were no obstacles for Lupin. No dire situation they couldn’t slip out off, no lock they couldn’t pick, no desperate heart they wouldn’t steal. Jigen was the closest person to Lupin, and if he was left with that impression, it was little wonder the public was going crazy whenever Lupin appeared. Everything about Lupin was a mystery. It was romantic and Lupin seemed to like it that way.
Normally he wouldn’t care about his boss’s business this much, but things were different with Lupin. He cared for the guy…and the girl too. Considered them as his friend, even. He enjoyed working with them both and he couldn’t tell when he had last had honest fun before Lupin. He would be lying if he said he didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy the shenanigans Lupin got the two of them into. Lupin faced all the challenges with a smile and Jigen could just admire that for miles, whilst wishing he could be the same.
It probably would have been easier to digest if Lupin had been an otherworldly being, but they were a human. Frightfully so. Jigen had seen him bleed; Jigen had seen her broken. When you peeled off all that charm, smooth-talk, and layers and layers of disguise, there was someone under there, someone who Jigen presumed was the true Lupin. He wanted know which--or who--that was.
So one day, when they had been holed in their hideout hiding from the police for several days, without much else to do than pester each other, Jigen decided to just go for it, because fuck it, right? Their relationship could handle it, at this point. At least, he assumed so.
“Humor me for a moment, Lupin,” Jigen called to his partner, who was getting himself a cold drink from the kitchen. At least Jigen presumed it was him, this time. She rarely went around in her underwear or with fuzzy sideburns.
“What is it?” Lupin asked, with a hint of irritation in his voice.
“You know, I’ve thinking, and--”
“Well there’s your problem, you know thinking doesn’t suit such a pretty--”
“Let me finish for once, you fucker?”
“Sorry, go on.”
I swear, sometimes… . Jigen took a deep breath and sank deeper into the sofa, shaking his head.
“I’ve been wondering what the deal is with you.”
Lupin closed the fridge door with a bottle in hand. “What do you mean?”
“This whole thing where you keep switching from man to woman. What’s the deal with that?”
The thief gave Jigen a long look and lifted one eyebrow almost to his hairline. Then he threw his head back, mouth open slightly--like he’d just figured something out.
“Oooooooohh, that’s what you’ve been thinking!” he beamed, all the tension melting out of him as he trained his gaze onto Jigen fully. His face cracked into an ominous grin. “But that’s not really the question you want the answer to, is it?” he purred.
Jigen lifted his brow under the brim of his hat and Lupin abandoned his drink to the kitchen counter. He closed the distance between them and jumped on the sofa’s armrest, to perch on it like an owl.
“I ‘switch’ because I want to,” Lupin said matter-of-factly, then rested his chin on his knees. “That’s the truth, but not what you wanted to hear, right?”
Jigen rose to sit against his own armrest, but didn’t get a word out of his mouth before Lupin slid down into the cushion across from him and interrupted him again.
“You’re easier to read than you think, Jigen. I know you’ve been trying to solve me like some puzzle, but I’m honestly surprised it took you five years to actually say something!” Lupin laughed brightly, sounding honestly amused. “So, what you really want to know is whether I’m a man or a woman, but you’re too bashful to ask if I have a dick?”
Jigen was struck silent by Lupin’s bluntness. He…couldn’t really refute that, since that was what it boiled down to. Under the disguises and the act, Jigen wanted to know if Lupin was…one or the other.
“...Well, do you?” he asked, since there was no use avoiding the issue now. Lupin wouldn’t let it slide at this point, so might as well just be blunt.
“I do, do you want to see it?” Lupin said, and promptly shoved his hand in his underwear from where he was sitting. When Jigen lifted his arms to cover his face for modesty’s sake, Lupin threw something small and floppy at him--and he almost fell off the sofa trying to avoid whatever it was. Lupin, naturally, instantly cackled at his partner’s panic.
But as he started to calm down, Jigen more closely inspected the thing that had landed on his chest.
It was a non-erect penis and a pair of balls, made out of silicon the same color as Lupin’s skin. It reminded Jigen of those realistic dildos, but, unlike those, no one could ever get any joy out of this sad little thing.
“...The fuck is that?” Jigen huffed and carefully poked it off of himself, onto the floor where it just flopped and landed on its side.
“It’s one of my prosthetics,” Lupin said, still way too amused. “The same kind as the pair of tits you’ve used in some of our jobs.”
“But why would you--” Jigen started, only to close his mouth when it dawned on him.
“You are a wo--”
Jigen didn’t make it to the end of his sentence when Lupin heeled him in the groin. He yelped in pain and curled into a ball.
“Not today, you idiot! Maybe tomorrow or next week, but not today,” he huffed, leaning over from his spot to pick up his penis off the floor. He swept the dust off of it and situated it back into his underwear.
It took Jigen a while to do the same, though he eventually unfurled from his crippled posture.
“What is that even supposed to mean ?” he spat as he came up, since his dick still felt like it had fallen off too. He might end up pissing blood, at this rate. The bastard.
“Psh, it’s not rocket science, now is it?” Lupin said and waved his hand. “You wake up in the morning and choose which tie you want to wear. I wake up, pick a tie, and then choose if I want to put on lipstick or sideburns.” Lupin thought for a moment. “Or both. Could actually go for both tomorrow.”
Jigen still looked awfully confused; he couldn’t quite wrap his head around what Lupin was trying to say. He imagined those flashy queens and kings they occasionally ran into (Lupin seemed to know many), but he had the brains to figure this was something different. Lupin occasionally crossdressed to perform, but the man and the woman Jigen dealt with on a daily basis were as casual as Lupin could get.
Jigen mulled over Lupin’s answer for a moment. He had always thought that the other one of the Lupins was the fake. An illusion Lupin had built to confuse others, especially police, but apparently that wasn’t the case? Jigen had kind of wanted to assume the male Lupin was the “real” one and the female Lupin--well, wasn’t. “She” was just someone whose clothes and persona Lupin put on when necessary. She hadn’t been real the same way he had been.
He was the default, while she was just an option. That’s what Jigen had expected.
But if the reality was that neither of them was a disguise….
Then Lupin... wanted both? Was both? Arg, this was hard.
“But if you choose which one to be in the morning, then…”
Two cushions down, Lupin’s eyes widened, and he unconsciously pulled his legs closer to his body.
“...Why don’t you choose to be one or the other all the time?”
Lupin’s eyes widened even further, this time looking as incredulous as they did betrayed.
“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” Jigen rushed, holding out his hands--not that it did much good, he realized after a moment, when Lupin’s hurt turned into silent suspicion. Sighing, he ran a hand through his hair.
How not to sound like a dick about this…?
“It just seems like...it’d be easier, you know?” he asked, putting all the caring and sincerity into his voice that he could. “I’m not saying that you need to, or that you should, I’m just wondering...I just want to understand why you would want to do that every day to yourself. It’s a hard world, for people like that.”
“‘People like that’….” Lupin’s face turned into a pained smile--even as he made a show of knocking his forehead into his knees several times, where it stayed thereafter.
“I don’t mean it like that…” Jigen muttered, miserably. He felt as defeated as Lupin looked.
“I know,” Lupin said, his voice muffled into his knees. “You’re so old-fashioned sometimes, Jigen-dear...”
Jigen chuckled a bit, nervously. “Sorry. I’m an old work horse, I guess.”
“Don’t make me send you to the glue factory….” Lupin mumbled.
“You wouldn’t!” Jigen mock scorned, though not doubting for a moment that Lupin would.
After a minute of Lupin sitting in a ball, and Jigen looking around the room trying to get images of horses out of his head, Jigen continued, “So…?”
Lupin’s eyes lifted from off his knees, though his gaze became fixed to the wall when he started speaking. His voice was solemn. “I lie a lot, Jigen. I lie to other people, because it’s part of my job and what I do, but I don’t like lying to myself. ”
Huh. Jigen mulled that over a moment. Even if it sounded simple...
“I don’t get it,” he said and shook his head. Lupin’s mouth twitched a little, the hurt in his eyes turning cold.
“Didn’t expect you to, but it doesn’t really matter. I don’t need you to understand that at all, in fact,” he shrugged. “What you do need to understand, though,” he continued, and suddenly his voice turned as cold and dangerous as his eyes, “is that I’ll not treat you kindly if you try to moralize me on this. People have tried to change me before...and in thanks, I made them disappear.”
A chill ran down Jigen’s spine. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Lupin wasn’t serious about his threat. Jigen was strong, but that would probably be a mild inconvenience if Lupin really set out on his way to destroying him.
And then, just like that, Lupin’s eyes warmed again--before they turned sad. He looked down at his hands, still wrapped around his knees, as he worried them. “I don’t want to make you disappear, though, Jigen,” he whispered. “You’re my best...employee.”
Jigen laughed at the simplicity of the statement.
“I’m your only employee.”
Lupin smiled, but it barely reached his eyes. “That you are.”
A silence fell between them. Lupin shuffled deeper into his corner, hugging his knees tightly and hiding the lower half of his face in the space between them. Jigen’s pain, however, had subsided enough so that he could finally sit straight again.
After a time, he glanced at Lupin. He appeared to have gotten lost in his thoughts, dark eyes staring into nothingness.
Jigen scratched his head and lit a cigarette. This might just be too complicated for Jigen. He was a simple man who knew how to shoot things. Figuring out and understanding what made people tick the way they did was beyond his league. Apparently he’d been right about Lupin hiding something, but he’d been wrong about what that something was.
He looked at his partner again, who hadn’t moved since he’d gone quiet. Male and female aspects littered Lupin’s form even from this distance...though he’d gotten very good, over the years, of minimizing the crossover. Still, Jigen’s gaze lingered here and there, trained to look for abnormalities that would indicate danger. A soft curve here, a hard one there--that often changed with the cut of his hair or coat. It was like putting one color next to another, and changing the appearance of the base color because of it.
It was all the same color on the canvas, it just...looked different, when put with a different tie .
Jigen narrowed his eyes at the crunched-up form in front of him, so clearly hiding from the future....
So clearly hiding, because of him . From his potential response .
Lupin had said he didn’t need Jigen to understand why he was the way he was.
People have tried to change me before.
I made them disappear.
Jigen sighed. It sounded like Lupin had a steaming pile of bad history and dead people prior to this, and Jigen certainly didn’t want to join those people. It also sounded like he just wanted Jigen to accept him as he came, without too many questions. That was certainly something he could understand.
And the truth was, he liked Lupin and liked working with him…and her. With them both. They were the best thing to ever happen to him, if he was completely honest with himself, and he wasn’t about to jeopardize it over a thing like this .
So, he tried to lay down all of his prejudices and presumptions and just…forget them. For Lupin.
“...Not gonna moralize you on anything,” he muttered, and Lupin curiously turned to look at him. “I think I had to give up my rights to judge people for their life choices a long time ago. You just do you and call me if you need someone shot, ok?”
Something in Lupin’s eyes lit the moment Jigen said that, and a smile slowly grew on his face as the tension bled from his body.
“Sorry for throwing my dick at your face,” Lupin said with a smile that didn’t feel sorry at all. Jigen just threw his head back and laughed.
“You might need to make a spare for me too, considering you just crushed mine.”
Now it was Lupin’s turn to laugh: “Yeah, sorry about that, too.” His pose relaxed; his arms unfolded from around his legs.
“It’s fine, I guess I deserved it,” Jigen replied, and Lupin hummed in agreement.
They sat in comfortable silence for while, until Lupin leaned over to his partner and plucked the cigarette from his lips. He took a long drag out of it as he relaxed into the sofa and put his feet on Jigen’s lap. Jigen just laid his own hands on top of them and sank deeper down into his corner.
They could afford to stay like this for a while.