Chapter Text
“I don’t like this, Lupin,” Jigen gripes.
“Come on, it isn’t so bad!” Lupin sings in a cheery whisper, ducking through a closely-knit patch of trees and narrowly avoiding a protruding root. “It’s just a couple of old bones. A couple of old bones never hurt anybody.”
“That’s exactly what somebody about to be hurt by a couple of old bones would say,” Jigen shoots back, cracking his knuckles to make a point. Lupin squeaks and hops over a log to get away, although it’s just for show. They both know Jigen doesn’t have any reason to tackle him in the middle of a job.
Speaking of jobs, the two of them are currently trekking through the grand old forests of Bumf—k Nowhere, British Columbia, in search of an ancient graveyard full of buried riches. As is usual, their only evidence of its existence is a couple local rumours and a journal entry from 1884, and as is usual, Fujiko is busy seducing the mayor the next town over so she can be ready to swoop in at the last second and steal all their hard-earned treasures for herself. Goemon is meditating back at the hideout. They all feel kind of bad bothering him, so he gets to sit out on this one.
Lucky bastard, Jigen thinks.
The reason Jigen’s so jumpy is because the journal entry mentions ghosts and unquiet spirits a total of eleven and a half times, and Jigen isn’t superstitious, but noticing how the final mention trails off halfway through and the pencil jags off the edge of the page as though the author had gotten dragged away before finishing the word doesn’t exactly tend to comfort the reader. Nor does the fact that Lupin’s swapped out his usual Walther for a big shovel and a couple of salt shakers. Nor does the fact that their usual backup man is off meditating and not standing back-to-back to him with blade at the ready, and even if he had been, ghosts are not a thing you can cut, worthless objects or not.
“What bothers you so much about ghosts anyway?” Lupin asks absently, pausing at the foot of a particularly old tree at the edge of a small clearing and giving its trunk a few knocks. “They’re not real, and even if they were, they couldn’t hurt you.”
“They just creep me out, man, all right?” Jigen nudges the brim of his hat up a little with the barrel of his Magnum for better visibility, which he next to never does. He doesn’t need better visibility to shoot well, unless something’s really getting to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Lupin’s head turn a fraction of an inch in his direction, and Jigen knows he knows. “Can’t shoot a ghost. Can’t run away from a ghost. If it kills you or gets you killed, you’re stuck forever with a ghost. That kind of stuff.”
“Aw, Jigen, you’re gonna bum me out here.” Lupin puts on an exaggerated pout and climbs past the old tree, apparently satisfied it isn’t some kind of secret trapdoor. “We’ll just grab the loot and run, all right? We’ll be out and gone before any kind of ghost will even have the time to blink at us.”
“Are you trying to argue ghosts are real or not?”
“Yep,” Lupin says cryptically and unreasonably cheerfully, and pulls a lever he’s uncovered on the forest floor.
As a panel of ground in the center of the clearing slides aside and a century-old crypt door grinds open, a cold rush of mist curls out towards them, and it’s not a ghost, but Jigen hates it anyway. He wouldn’t lie about this ghost business, about admitting to being afraid of something. He likes to appear unflappable, invulnerable, like nothing in the world has ever scared him before, but he can afford to be honest with Lupin even when the latter teases him for it. Ghosts, though… something about them gets to him, and it’s not just how he can’t shoot them. Maybe it’s the perpetual balance between life and death, where they’re no longer living but too restless to move on to the next thing. Maybe it’s how they’re only hollow echoes of their living selves, so similar yet so devoid of what gave them weight. Maybe it’s just the thought of leaving business unfinished. Jigen hates leaving business unfinished. He’d never admit it, but if he ever died with business left unfinished, he wouldn’t fault himself for coming back either. It doesn’t make him feel any better.
Anyway, they make his skin crawl, and he quietly vows that when he dies, he’s going to die with every single one of his loose ends tied up.
They begin to descend, and Jigen holds tighter to his gun and hopes, hopes.
Jigen Daisuke opens his eyes with the distinct and uncomfortable certainty that he has left the oven on.
The longer he lies there (on… a table, it feels like; the bastards didn’t even let him sleep on the sofa), the more certain he is that something is missing. He feels lighter, somehow, as though the air is resisting his passage through it less than it’s supposed to. His limbs respond faster to the little commands he’s firing at it—blink. Breathe. Twitch his trigger finger. It’s uncanny, and he doesn’t like it. If there’s not the right amount of weight in his movements, he’s bound to hit himself in the face with something at some point.
He rolls himself onto his side with a groan. It doesn’t hurt, but the groan is habitual, born from years of joint pain every time he tries doing something more complicated than aiming a gun. Lupin really must have paid out the ass for whatever chiropractor fixed him up this time. Well, either that or blackmailed them good. He’d have to go thank him later.
Speaking of Lupin, he isn’t anywhere in sight, but Goemon is. Goemon’s sitting on the sofa with legs folded as is usual, but he’s not meditating. In fact, he looks… bad. Paler than usual, with reddened eyes, as though he’d been crying, but that’s ridiculous. Goemon doesn’t cry. Well, he does, but rarely, and only when things have built up to a point at which he can’t take it anymore and he buries his face in Jigen’s wiry shoulder and shakes silently until the shadow passes.
“Shoulda woken me up, Goemon,” Jigen manages, voice hoarse, but with a trace of amusement. He may not be hurting, but by God, talking takes effort for some reason, like he’s forgotten how to do it. “D’something happen?”
No response. Jigen doesn’t think too much of it. Goemon isn’t talkative at the best of times, and usually after a good cry nobody feels much like chatting it up. He sits up, making the silent promise never to fall asleep around Lupin again if it means he’s getting put on the table, and goes to find the thief in question.
Luckily he isn’t very hard to find. There’s a balcony overlooking the little backyard and he’s left the door open, and there’s a nice chill breeze pushing the curtains around. Lupin himself is leaning on the railing, cigarette in one hand, hunched over something he’s clutching to his chest with the other. Jigen catches a whiff of the smoke scent, and holy hell, he thinks Lupin might be having a Marlboro. There may be hope for him still.
As he gets closer, though, he gets a better look at Lupin’s face. He looks just as bad, if not worse, than Goemon. His face is twisted into a bitter, damp-eyed mask devoid of his usual goofy grin—he’s good at tricking his enemies into believing the grin is all he’s capable of, and sometimes he ends up being good at tricking his friends, too. It’s easy to forget just how simple it is to fall into being hollow with a life like his.
He’s also holding Jigen’s hat.
“What the hell, man,” says Jigen.
Lupin's head snaps up. He looks around blindly, wildly, as though he’d been caught unawares while he’d been sure he was alone; it’s kind of openly vulnerable of him in a way Jigen’s never seen before, probably because he’s never been able to sneak up on him. He looks worse than Jigen initially thought—sallow, with deeply weary eyes that honestly look more like they should belong to Jigen himself than to the world’s best thief.
Said thief stares blankly straight through where Jigen’s standing before letting out a defeated sigh and bringing the cigarette to his lips once more.
He’s drunk or high out of his mind, is all. Jigen gives one of his habitual disdainful ‘keh!’s and is about ready to give up and go back inside when he hears the sound of felt crumpling, and he turns back to see his hat on the balcony floor.
Jigen’s eyes go from the hat to Lupin’s shoes to Lupin’s pants to Lupin’s obnoxiously bright jacket to Lupin’s face, which has gone from pale to ashen.
“Jigen?” he whispers. There's a brokenness that Jigen's never heard before, and he doesn't want to admit it, but in a way it scares him.
“I’m right here, you bastard,” Jigen tells him bluntly, but there’s an edge of bewilderment to his voice. “What is it?”
This time, Lupin’s locked eyes with him. His left hand is still halfway to his chest, although his fingers have started to twitch, and Jigen gets the feeling that the only reason he hasn’t dropped his cigarette yet is out of pure luck. Lupin takes an unsteady step in his direction, and Jigen, baffled, takes a step forward to catch him.
Lupin isn’t approaching him, though. He trips to the side and staggers straight to the balcony door and looks in, eyes still wide as they can go. He stares at something inside the living room for a few tense heartbeats before turning back to Jigen.
“I’m,” he says, eloquently. “You’re. But.”
“What,” Jigen replies flatly, nonplussed, and turns to look into the apartment himself.
For a second, his eyes don’t register what he sees. The living room is laid out just as it was when he’d left it, with Goemon still motionless on the sofa, Zantetsuken by his side. The only thing that seems even remotely out of the ordinary is the fact that, lying on the carefully cleared coffee table, is his own quiet, bloodstained body.
Jigen stops in his tracks. This doesn’t. This isn’t. This makes no sense. He looks down at his outstretched hands, calloused and scarred and overwhelmingly present and certainly not laid out peacefully on the coffee table in the center of the living room. It’s wrong, though, because he can see his own messy beard and long nose poking up from a face that has never looked so peaceful in his life. He leans away, back out onto the balcony, and meets Lupin’s eyes.
“What’s happening,” he asks, although really it’s not a question.
“Jigen,” Lupin says shakily in response, “are you dead?”
Jigen’s chest seizes, but it’s stupid, because Lupin is being stupid, because he’s not dead. He’s alive, he’s standing right here and he feels better than he’s ever felt, and he can see Lupin and Lupin can see him, so he’s not God damn dead. But the memory that has been pulling so faintly at the edge of his mind like a distant wave finally breaks upon the shore, and Jigen’s dead.
He’s dead.
As he stares down at his dress shirt, a jagged tear appears in the fabric, the flesh below it peeling open like a blooming flower, blood beginning to stream down his gut. His mouth opens, but instead of words his tongue turns to fluid and pours out and trickles into his beard and stains his face red. Around the wound, the flesh necropsies and spreads, sending cracked black veins spiraling out across his torso and withering his fingertips to hangnails. He crumples to his knees and curls over, pressing his hands hopelessly to his abdomen, and feels himself becoming long , uncontained, seeping out from his own limits like a pot boiling over. He hears Lupin shout his name.
And although he can’t feel, he faintly registers Lupin, the eternally present Lupin, through the blur of all-encompassing sound. He's repeating his name over and over, his voice a familiar anchor. It's not enough to make him remember, but enough to make him want to.
He becomes aware, rather suddenly, that there’s a weird surreal cold numbness in one of his shoulders for a moment before it fades again. Jigen forces an eye open for long enough to see Lupin’s hand, shaking, hovering just above it.
He’d tried to touch him. Of course, he’d tried to touch him. Lupin was the only man brave or stupid enough to try and touch something that isn’t there, just because it looked for a moment like a friend.
The thought is achingly familiar, though, and as Lupin offers encouragements that are as panicked in tone as Jigen feels, the shock slowly begins to subside. The distortions in his shape are gone as though they had never been there, his shirt is unmarred but for the small bloody mark where the knife went in, and his hat—he can see his hat lying where it had fallen on the deck, but at the same time his hat is comfortably on his head at the exact same angle it fits best, although he knows that if Lupin were to try and touch it it would slip through his fingers as easily as his shoulder did half a moment ago.
But he’s here. He’s here. That’s what matters right now.
“Jigen,” Lupin is repeating like a soothing mantra, although whether it’s to soothe Jigen or himself is anyone’s guess. “Hey, Jigen, it’s, it’s…”
He just doesn’t know where to go from there. He can't say it's going to be okay, because Jigen isn’t going to be okay. He can't say it's fine, because it isn’t fine, because Jigen is still dead and Lupin’s only just barely clinging to the faintest glimmer of hope that this is actually somehow him. But he has to try.
“Jigen,” Lupin says again, hoping it’ll mean something new this time.
In front of him, eternally just out of arms’ reach, Jigen’s panicked breathing is quieting down again, and he just looks like a scared human being. He looks like, if Lupin were to stretch out his hand again, he could rest it on his arm or shoulder or the brim of his hat, feel the warmth of his skin through his clothes. He’s just too scared to risk it again.
There’s a faint shff of fabric and Goemon’s there, having appeared as silently as always. He looks with some bemused concern at Lupin where he’s kneeling on the balcony floor, cigarette abandoned. He doesn’t say anything, and it’s probably for the best—he just watches Lupin, a question in his gaze.
And he doesn’t acknowledge Jigen, who has leapt to his feet.
As much as he likes to pretend otherwise, Lupin is quick to notice the slightest of things, and he knows perfectly well this isn’t quite how Goemon would react. Two and two crash into one another with the practiced adaptable ease of a thief who has had to think quickly on his feet for most of his career, and in about five seconds he comes up with four hypotheses:
- Goemon is, for some reason, completely ignoring Jigen, possibly out of anger at the fact he’s been duped into believing he was dead.
- Goemon is so grief-stricken he is physically unable to acknowledge Jigen.
- Goemon is incredibly sleep-deprived, which would not be a surprise, knowing Goemon’s personal habits.
And the last one of all, but certainly the most alarming, goes without saying.
“Oh hey, Goemon,” Lupin says, schooling his expression back into a cheesy grin and clambering up to stand as well. “How you feeling? It’s almost one PM, we gonna make lunch or grab takeout? We still have leftover noodles.”
Jigen looks at Lupin with a distinct air of bafflement. Goemon, however, doesn’t respond to the obvious change of subject, crossing the balcony and picking up Jigen’s hat—the physical one, not the one Jigen instinctually reaches up to touch the brim of. He can touch it and feel it just fine, the worn felt in just the right position under his fingertips, but it’s weird to think it isn’t his hat, technically. He’s not his himself, though, either, which is… weirder. Moving on.
“You should take better care of this,” Goemon says, oddly subdued, and flips it over in his palms to fix the crumpled brim. Goemon isn’t the loudest guy at the best of times, but he sounds… detached, cold, as though he’s resorted to autopilot. Even so, his voice catches a few times on his next sentence. “He w… he would like it better that way. He wouldn’t suffer such abuse to it in, in, in life, he shouldn’t suffer it in. In. The next world.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Lupin gives an apologetic shrug and shoots the briefest of glances at Jigen from the corner of his eye, no doubt trying to convey his realization, but Jigen’s already on it.
While the two of them talk further, Jigen swallows. He’s been around Lupin long enough to have picked up some of his thinking style, and it isn’t looking like he’ll enjoy the answer. Tentatively, he reaches for Goemon’s shoulder, and tries to touch it.
Nothing. His fingertips vanish into the samurai’s shoulder. They suddenly feel frigid like he’s dipped them in cold water, and he withdraws them quickly as Goemon looks momentarily uneasy, but otherwise, still nothing.
“Goemon?” Jigen says quietly, just in case it was a fluke, but still. Lupin looks at him again, this time with a slightly different look in his eyes, and he knows, and he knows he knows. Jigen swears under his breath.
Lupin is right.
Jigen’s his own damn personal demon.
“Eh, Goemon.” Lupin changes the topic on a dime. “Actually, let’s go into the living room for a minute. I have a question I should ask you.”
“…What is it?”