Chapter Text
A Tuesday afternoon at a randomly-selected commercial business in a randomly-selected neighborhood. For once, it wasn’t a business where their tiny syndicate had goings-on with the people in the back. No, today, the dynamic duo of the Lupin Group was patronizing a legitimate business for a legitimate reason.
The fashionable little store was simple and clean, sunlight flooding in from the east-facing windows. A myriad of merchandise lined the walls, tucked into neat rows on shelves, with the occasional mirror hung up along the way. The floor was almost entirely open in the middle, minus a checkout desk at the back and a waiting chair or two. It was currently before lunch, so the place was deserted, too; even the streets on the palm-lined drive had quite a few parking spots left, and the beach beyond was enjoying its emptiness by presenting a sparkling view.
Because this neighborhood was upscale, for the people who worked there, two men in sharp suits walking in did not, at first, seem odd. But upon closer inspection, they probably noticed a strained tension between the two—not the least of which reason was because the one in black appeared to be marching the one in red forward by the nape of his neck.
“Do you accept walk-ins?” Jigen demanded once they’d made it close enough to the counter at the back that he didn’t have to shout. Lupin, against his hand, was constantly trying to get away, like some horse that didn’t want to be lead to the starting gate.
“Y-Yes…?” offered the middle-aged woman at the desk dubiously.
“Date on the Riviera my ass,” Lupin grumbled under his breath, trying to shrug his shoulder to break Jigen’s grip. He looked back at the curb balefully, where Fujiko had driven off with the convertible.
“Shoosh, darling.” It didn’t work, and Jigen merely tightened his hold. “You got an opening now?”
“…Maybe?” the woman replied, crow’s feet tightening. Her gaze flicked dubiously between the two of them, suddenly very aware that there was a bull in her china shop, which was made of glass from shelves to cases to wares.
Lupin clicked his tongue and pushed Jigen away by the ribcage, quickly whirling on his heel. “This really isn’t necess—”
“Good,” stated Jigen, cutting him off. He slung his entire arm around his boss’s neck, effectively corralling him back toward the desk.
“Dammit, Jigen—”
“Can I help you?” asked a second woman, a younger one, appearing out from the door by the desk before the two men could come to blows about it. She was petite and brown-haired, completely unassuming and lost in a lab coat, probably not much older than twenty.
As she arrived, the pair of customers were staring each other down from a foot away, like matching statues. And then, with matching growls, they suddenly looked down upon her.
Naturally, when faced down by two gangsters who were about to fight each other, a good response was to dodge behind something. The other was to go wide-eyed and stock still, until you could figure out which direction you needed to dodge.
The latter was what she did.
Noticing this, Lupin sighed through his nose and then sent his partner a dry glare so sharp that it could have cut the very glass around them.
Look what you made me do, it read.
Jigen staunchly ignored it, his silent and professionally pleasant smile clear as day:
‘S not my fault you’re a troublesome prick.
“C-C-Can I help…you…? Sirs?” squeaked the frightened ophthalmologist—showing a good deal of spirit, Jigen thought.
The hitman answered by looking away, and Lupin, apparently deciding his partner was no longer his prey for the time being, shoved his hands in his pockets. His sullen glare suddenly transformed into the friendliest of smiles and he leaned gratuitously into the woman’s personal space.
“I sure hope so,” Lupin chimed with a mocking leer. “Please tell this grim reaper of a man that I don’t need any help.”
As soon as the woman looked at Jigen, she was hit with his annoyed scowl (courtesy of his boss’s remark), visible to her from under the brim of his hat due to their height difference. She quickly turned back to Lupin for help, a nervous tick on her otherwise frozen smile.
Hyee?! her face read.
But the strange and dapper man in red just kept smiling back, not giving an inch—and perhaps, it could be said, stealing a few. It was a devious trick they’d perfected over the years to get people to trust him—even if Jigen had just performed the act accidentally.
Dammit, Jigen grumbled to himself. At this rate, he’d never get the job done; Lupin would weasel out of it for sure.
“A-a-and s-so wh-which one of you is the patient t-to-today…?” the young woman persisted at a tremble. Behind her, the older woman was watching them all closely, but hadn’t yet brought out the broom to sweep them out of the place, for which Jigen was grateful. Lupin had a knack for such things, when he wanted to.
“That would be him,” Jigen stated promptly, not about to be outmaneuvered—by Lupin or a broom.
“O-oh…” Something akin to relief came over the younger woman’s face as she turned back to Lupin—at which point she froze again, realizing instinctively that he was not exactly safe either. “And wh-what is the reason for your visit today, th-then, Mister…um…?”
After a long second of gazing into her eyes like he was going to enjoy sucking out her soul, Lupin’s smile suddenly fell, and an unimpressed gaze rolled over to Jigen. He never once moved his body.
“If I do this,” Lupin muttered lowly, “will you leave me alone about it?”
“Absolutely.” Jigen nodded once, folding his arms with a triumphant smile somewhere down in his gut. “But you gotta do it honestly. I’ll give Fujiko your bank account numbers if you don’t. The Swiss ones.”
“Fine,” Lupin all but growled, standing up straight—only to sit back on his hips with a grumbling slouch.
The young lamb before them had a habit of staring at Jigen’s scowl whenever Lupin’s eyes weren’t on her, which was a finely-honed preservation instinct he had to give her credit for. But as soon as Lupin turned back to her, her eyes darted back to him, and then stared, wide-eyed, waiting for the tiger’s lunge.
“Your…purpose…visit?” she squeaked.
Jigen suppressed a sigh. With what he’d had to do the last few weeks to strong-arm Lupin here, he’d nearly forgotten how delicate normal people could be.
As she stood there, more or less rooted to the floor, Lupin’s gaze softened a little, and he went from crime boss to regular man as he shook himself out and stood up straight and tall. He looked around the room and its cornucopia of well-lit items, hands still in his pockets and weight set on his back leg, until his gaze eventually returned.
Alongside the pity he gave her, a very human sense of defeat fell over the criminal mastermind’s frame.
“My dear, we’re here today because…”
He sighed, his gaze lingering on his reflection in a nearby mirror.
“…I think I need glasses.”
* * *
At first, Jigen had caught Lupin behaving strangely over the breakfast table.
Papers were strewn about, which was fairly normal for him, and a cup of hot tea sat nearby, his usual morning brew. What was strange about the setup was how Lupin was sitting—holding up a piece of paper at arm’s length and closing one eye, then the other, in sequence. Then, both open, he’d squint and move the printed sheet closer and farther.
“Been staring at the sun?” Jigen asked, yawning as he reached for his favorite coffee mug at this particular hideout. It had a savanna scene, cartoonish animals dancing around on it. Someone had even guerilla-glued googly eyes onto some of them. It was an atrocious design, with even more atrocious alterations, but the components fit his fingers just right, which was rare because of how handling a gun so often over the years had curved them.
“N-no…”
Lupin’s hesitation caused Jigen to pause, even as he was giving Herbert the Hippo, as he’d named him, his morning smile of greeting. Herbert, on the mug, had complementary rhine stones on his nose, thanks to one of Fujiko’s drunken crafting binges, and he couldn’t not smile at that. (Though seriously, why did they ever let that woman near a tube of glue?)
It wasn’t like she and Goemon hadn’t glued their fingers to each other’s fingers once. Lupin, who had been covered in fake blood at the time from testing a new recipe, had come out of the bathtub and stared at them like they were idiots, then proceeded to be useless because he was covered in wet chocolate-powder-based blood-syrup and couldn’t touch them, let alone the furniture. Luckily, Jigen had been able to fish out Fujiko’s nail polish remover from the bathroom, though the scene of the shower walls still gave him nightmares.
So, now, seeing Lupin with nothing more than a piece of paper and acting a bit strange, Jigen had expected an answer about a craft project due to some crazy scheme Lupin was working on, or perhaps a fun but worthless bit of scientific trivia he’d just read about, which were the only things his weird behaviors around the house ever turned out to be.
“Well, tell me if it’s a brain tumor, then.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Any time.”
Jigen had shrugged the whole thing off with his egregiously bedazzled mug at his lips. It was just one of those inexplicable things Lupin did—and frankly, it wasn’t Jigen’s place to ask questions when his boss was working.
And well, if it was a brain tumor, he was pretty sure he was in Lupin’s will somewhere, though he was also pretty sure Lupin was going to make him go through hell and highwater (and Fujiko) to get whatever was listed there.
But that wouldn’t be such a bad way to remember him, if Lupin going batty didn’t kill him first.
And speaking of getting him killed, the next thing Jigen noticed was that, as they drove around, Lupin’s response time to his navigational directions got longer—or shorter, as it sometimes was:
“Peach Tree Street.”
“Is this…?”
“No, this’s ‘Palm.’”
The creak of the seat belt. A grunt of vexation. A block or two later:
“Maybe this…?”
“No, that’s ‘Plum.’”
A hum. The creak of leather on the steering wheel as his knuckles tightened.
“What about this one?”
A pause, and then Jigen’s voice: “Pear.”
“What the fuck is wrong with this town?!”
“Got me.”
“Must like trees. And alliteration.”
“Maybe.”
The hum of the engine. The spin of the wheels. And then, just as they were nearly on top of it:
“Turn.”
“What?”
“Here. Right here!”
“What?!”
“This’s it—”
“Fuck!”
A yank of the wheel. A sharp swerve. More swearing from both of them and probably the person behind them, given the honking from the cars nearby.
When they finally got on the next street and no one was protesting their place within traffic, Jigen took a deep breath and glanced over at his boss.
Lupin was patently ignoring him, the proverbial bead of sweat going down his temple.
“…You drunk or something, Lu?”
The man glanced over at him tellingly, but quickly snorted, his dark eyes back on the road with a deep frown. “No…” He ran a hand over the back of his neck; sucked in a breath and swallowed hard. Resettled himself in the seat, grip tight on the wheel.
Jigen glanced down at the map in his own lap, his eyebrows raising. “All right, then.”
“It’s not that.”
“I believe you.”
A deep, annoyed breath from the other seat…and a notable deceleration of the speedometer.
“Next turn is two blocks from here. A left.”
Another deep breath, but this time, a sigh followed it.
“Two after this stop sign, I mean.”
“…Thank you, Jigen.”
It was grudging, but also relieved.
“Mm-hm.”
Jigen’s, meanwhile, was only forgiving.
Because a suspicion in the back of his mind was telling him something important, and this time, he had no reason to ignore it.
There was an incident at a restaurant, too, that Fujiko had told him about: A fancy one, in a far-flung city, one Lupin had had to call in a favor to even get a reservation. A specific date for the two of them, to reward the hard work they had accomplished on a recent series of jobs. It was one of those up-in-the-sky observation-deck sort of places, so dimly-lit it was basically the black-box theater version of a bistro.
And as Fujiko turned away from gazing out at the sparkling city lights below, she found her dinner partner, dressed up to the nines, frowning down at the menu like it had done him some great wrong.
But she hadn’t gotten far in life by asking uninformed questions. So she did what she always did: she observed.
The leather-bound menu was laid flat on the table before her dinner host. First the crime boss put his temple in his hand and squinted; then, changing it to a fist, he frowned more, mostly with his brow, leaning downward. Soon, he halved the distance between himself and the menu; rearranged his weight on his hand to do it. Then, he blinked hard, gave the paper a laser stare, and finally gave up with a huff, cupping his cheeks in both hands. He basically looked like a kid vexed by a multiple choice test.
But to her amazement, it didn’t end there. While Fujiko was looking around to see who had noticed the faux pas in manners, instead of doing the sensible thing and pulling the menu very close to his face, after that, Lupin’s mouth pulled into a scowl and he pressed at his eyes, deforming the lenses this way and that.
At that point, Fujiko had sighed inwardly and looked around the room at the people that mattered—at the waiters and other patrons nearby—and then made up her mind. With a sigh, she quietly stood up and moved her chair from the spot opposite her boss to the one beside him.
As Lupin looked up, startled, his date sat down, fancy dress and all, and pulled the table’s votive candles into a cluster. She situated it right next to Lupin’s menu and then whispered into his ear, “This better?”
Lupin eyed her, but soon squinted down at the paper, no longer pressing at his eyes, which were going a little bloodshot at the edges from being molested. After a moment of bending near the menu, he huffed through his nose and said, “A little bit.”
“Here,” she whispered, pushing her shoulder up against her paramore’s, “Don’t strain yourself. Let me read it for you…in that sexy voice you’ve always liked.”
Lupin gave her a baleful look, but in the end, he smiled a little melancholically when Fujiko gripped his hand under the table.
“Thanks babe,” he whispered, squeezing her hand back.
Fujiko gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and went to work.
After this tale, Fujiko and Jigen had put their heads together and compared notes. A certain suspicion was nigh on confirmed, but that didn’t mean they had a plan for dealing with it, just yet.
But still, they seemed to be managing.
They went on like that until about a month later, the night before a heist. That day, Fujiko came out of the shower to find Lupin lying on the safehouse couch, his head tilted back on the armrest and a cold compress over his eyes and forehead. Jigen was nearby cleaning his gun, but seemed to have stalled. As Fujiko’s slippered feet walked by, Lupin groaned in pain, like the sound of even her dainty footsteps was too much.
“Headache again?” she asked. A quick glance revealed a robotics project scattered about the coffee table, abandoned in mid screw-twist, apparently.
“Yean…” Lupin sighed, his voice exhausted and gravelly. “’Ve had this for four days now, it won’t go away...”
Fujiko sighed, sitting down next to him on the armrest and putting a hand on his hair as Jigen politely—but oh so silently—continued reading a book on the sectional across from them. “You sure you want to go for it tomorrow? Will you be ready?”
“Nothing a Tylenol and sleep won’t fix,” Lupin offered. His voice was light, but the slouch and sigh after was less than convincing. “Besides, I set the time, can’t stand up my date, can I?”
His date being the cops and the press and the eyes of the world. In Fujiko’s mind, punctuality was less important than the payoff, and in Jigen’s punctuality was far less important than doing the job right. They both knew it was important to Lupin’s sense of showmanship, but…
She bent down and, moving part of the wet cloth aside, set a worn palm on her lover’s forehead. “I’ll get you a new one, how’s that sound?”
With that, she pulled up the wash cloth.
“Thanks, Lovely…” Lupin sighed, reaching up a hand to touch her cheek.
But he missed. He hit Fujiko square in the cheek, nails and all. She snorted, jerking her head back, and Jigen looked over the top of his book a little higher.
“Oh, sorry,” Lupin muttered hazily. Once Fujiko’s face carefully returned, his fingers walked along her lips, until they found their target of her jaw, and curled around there.
“That must be one hell of a headache, if your depth perception’s that messed up.”
“Must be a migraine,” Lupin admitted, sounding miserable and exhausted.
When Lupin gazed up at her, his two observers couldn’t help but notice how unfocused and harsh his gaze seemed, eyes red and watery. It was nothing like the soft but playful light they should have had, that was so easy to get lost in as they focused on you and only you.
“I’ll be better tomorrow,” their leader said. “I promise.”
But he hadn’t been.
Just a few days ago, in another country not far from this one:
Lupin had been hanging from the ceiling of a bank vault, doing his ninja thing down through the lasers on nothing but a wire. Jigen had been watching him from the security control room, and Goemon had been up in the ceiling, running the cables from which Lupin hung.
They’d infiltrated the bank. Discovered the lasers and waited for the right pattern to show up. Synchronized their watches and lowered Lupin down, knowing they only had about five minutes to work.
And then, as he was hanging above the numbers on the safe deposit boxes, he’d suddenly stopped.
And stopped.
And waited some more.
And they only had so long before the laser pattern switched.
“What’s wrong?” Gomeon asked over the radio device each of them had on an ear.
When Lupin didn’t respond with anything other than a frustrated huff:
“Is there some layer of security we didn’t know about?” Jigen added over the radio, for which there was a receiver in Lupin’s ear. Jigen had disconnected the security cameras from their respective tape recorders, but he could still see the feeds coming in—and it didn’t look like there was anything vexing. Lupin was just hanging like a spider, staring into the wall of deposit boxes like they were playing chess for his firstborn child.
Jigen checked his watch. Two minutes.
And then, all of a sudden, Lupin said:
“I can’t read it.”
“What?” Jigen hissed through his comm. “What are you talking about?”
“The numbers…I can’t…”
There was a decidedly long pause. Jigen and Goemon exchanged a moment of confused silence over the airwaves.
“I need to get closer.”
“You can’t. The setup wasn’t made for that.”
And indeed, Lupin was hanging in such a way as to avoid touching anything, save for the box they needed. If he swung, his wire would hit the lasers. If he leaned in, his head or feet would.
“I know, but…”
It also wasn’t like Lupin to just not explain the problem at a moment like this. While he’d never been one to tell the entire truth about a heist’s payoff, their success depended on communication at times like these, and he most of all honored that—especially when he was suspended from the ceiling by one steel thread that someone else on the team controlled.
“Clock’s ticking, boss. A minute thirty.”
“Fuck it,” Lupin grumbled decisively. He quickly threaded his arms through the lasers and positioned his tools on a box, drilling in. Once the lock was broken, he pulled the box out slightly on its rollers—they needed to brace the wire before he yanked the whole thing, for which there was a signal—but then, he started drilling another box.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jigen asked into the radio. “You didn’t tell me we were hitting two.”
“I’m doing what I need to do, shut up. Goemon, be ready—I’ll need extra resistance from you so that I can grab both at once and my arms’re both gonna be immobilized for maneuvering. Get ready in ten.”
“Understood.”
What the hell is he doing, Jigen wondered, checking his watch.
“Forty seconds,” he muttered dubiously, watching his boss through the cameras.
“I’ll be done by then.”
“You sure?”
“Ready, Goemon?”
“Ready.”
The plan had called for one box, which Lupin would drop right in front of. Because they were long, they usually required two hands to pull out, and to get through the lasers, he needed to be near motionless when he did it, threading his hands around the beams from different angles as he drew the box back toward himself and into the safe zone directly around his body.
But this situation had two boxes, which were at disparate vertical levels and required an awkward reach. Jigen drew in a breath as Lupin grabbed the original target with his right hand then dropped his left arm through the red laser web, ready to run since the sirens were sure to go off. But Lupin had one more trick up his sleeve: he took both his legs and stuck his rubber-soled feet out against the wall of metal, underneath the red lines. (It was heat sensitive, not pressure sensitive, so rubber didn’t set it off.)
“You aren’t seriously going to… Ah!” Jigen whispered to himself as he watched it on the screen. But then, he remembered the ticking of his watch and hit the transmitter: “Fifteen seconds, get out of there or we’ll be running.”
Without a word, Lupin yanked both boxes out, all twelve or so inches of them. He used the momentum to pull them as straight as he could, let their bottom ends fall onto his toes, and then bounced them over the red gridlines into the safe zone his body occupied. There, he again caught them on his toes to support their back ends—and keep them from swinging into the lasers.
“Up,” he commanded, and Jigen simply had to watch as Goemon slapped the pulley and Lupin zipped up through the lasers—
Hitting the ceiling’s edge just in time for them to change their pattern. Lupin whipped his feet up at the last moment to do it, throwing the boxes into the ceiling—but he managed it. It had no doubt made a mighty noise though.
“What the hell was all that!” Jigen demanded, holding his chest as he slid down into his seat.
“I don’t want to hear it. Ready phase three.”
Lupin turned his transmitter off, but quietly, over the line, Jigen heard his voice through Goemon’s, along with the soft clinking of metal:
“Goemon. Please read these off for me.”
There was a pause, and then the samurai’s deep voice floated through the wifi: “55763 and 55788.”
“Good,” said Lupin after a long sigh. “We got the one we need, anyway.”
Goemon was silent, no doubt giving Lupin a long look that Lupin pretended not to notice.
“Jigen.” Lupin had turned his comm back on. Jigen couldn’t currently see his partners, since they were in a vent above the ceiling—a place the cameras didn’t reach. “See you in the morning?”
Jigen took a deep breath, arms folded and kicking back on the security desk console. He would be here till morning in his disguise as a substitute security guard, as per the plan, but that wasn’t what was causing him pause.
“Jigen…?” came Lupin’s voice again.
Yelling at him wasn’t going to change anything. He could lodge a professional complaint but if Lupin didn’t want to deal with it yet, he wouldn’t. Jigen could definitely force the issue that way, but that would leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. So, he had to do something else to resolve this.
“Everything okay over there, Unit One?”
There was a telling tinge of concern in Lupin’s voice, and Jigen relished it. Lupin deserved a moment of stress over him.
Taking an extra moment just to be a bastard about it, Jigen touched at his transmitter to turn it back on. “Everything’s fine. See you in the morning.”
Lupin sighed, sounding relieved. Somehow, even though he couldn’t see it, Jigen could feel the tension around him release somewhat too—probably something about Goemon’s breathing evening out on the other end of the line. “Roger that. Unit Two and Three out. May the god of thieves be with you.”
“Yeah yeah. You owe me one for that heart attack. Tell you what, with the winnings, I’ll take you out for a sunny day on the Riviera with Fujiko and the convertible, how’s that sound?”
“Delightful. Now, I’m gonna go Swiffer some vents with my mighty fine self. Over and Out.”
Jigen let the unit drop back down below his shirt. Letting out a long sigh, he leaned back in the office chair, his elbows up and hands threaded behind his head.
He knew exactly what he had to do. It just wouldn’t be pretty.
* * *
And that was how they’d ended up here—
“Close your left eye and tell me which line is clearer.”
—With his boss sitting eyes-first into some kind of spider-face-looking torture device that Jigen was pretty sure could kill him in six different ways, if someone had been out to get him and had modified it. And that wasn’t even mentioning what the doc could do, while Lupin sat with his chin immobilized and his eyes seeing nothing but little letter charts.
And it wasn’t like they lived a kind life. If someone took the opportunity and fully blinded his boss somehow, it wouldn’t be more than a week before Lupin would be begging somebody to kill him and Jigen just might do it out of sympathy—and Jigen wasn’t sure what he’d do to himself, for bringing Lupin into this situation in the first place, if that all happened.
Jigen sighed as he glanced around the room, rubbing the bridge of his nose. All that was far from likely, and he’d worked hard to make sure this place was as random (and therefore clean) as could be, but he could never be sure. And, of course, this may have been a windowless room—which was as much a blessing as a curse for his nerves—but there was always the door to watch, too, along with the woman.
So all that was to say, Lupin might have been frustrated and chomping at the bit to leave, but Jigen was just about ready to chew through a log from fretting.
So perhaps that was why Lupin was acting the way he was:
“You know what I’d like to be seeing with my left eye right about now?” he whispered playfully as he sat, his voice doing that deep-toned, chest-voice thing that melted most women into puddles as easily as his wandering, attentive fingers.
And it wasn’t just making his voice deep and gravelly; no, it was something much more dexterous than that—it was a whole ‘nother voice he could use, sharpened to perfection and pulled out at moments where he needed to dominate someone, get them under his power, one way or another.
“…What?” the young woman asked dubiously, a little shiver visibly going through her back as she straightened up.
That was the exact look Jigen was afraid of: the I’m offended but also kind of turned on and I don’t know why? look.
Because the “Don’t know why” part was exactly what gave Lupin an in:
“You.”
And she was the perfect target for it: fresh and pert and a hard-working twenty-two. Jigen pegged her for an intern, or new hire, to be honest, one who had no idea what fun was. And yet here they were in the dim lighting and a black back room, reminiscent of a VIP booth, just without the strippers and booze and suspicious sticky spots. There was even a little black leather sofa, which Jigen could have been sitting on if he weren’t worried that Lupin was going to flee (or die) on him.
In the meantime, the poor ophthalmologist pulled back from the device, sputtering. Upon what little of Lupin’s face Jigen could see, he saw a corner of the man’s mouth twitch up. But not to be accused of tact, Lupin’s fingers wiggled decidedly where he cupped them on the table, and then, even unable to see, he managed to reach out to her with a playful note and catch one of her hands.
“Sir, please,” she muttered, staring first at Lupin in a blushing fluster—and then checking back at Jigen.
Jigen was standing in her blind spot, arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe of the tiny exam room. In the shadows, as was his place. Watching over his boss, as was his duty. And…
The woman’s eyes went wide with silent terror at his scowl, and quickly turned back around.
…intimidating hapless civilians, as was his God-given talent.
Grumbling inwardly, Jigen took a deep—and very audible—breath of displeasure and went back to surveying the scene. “Boss, please.”
Boss. Jigen used it on Lupin the way parents used the full names of their children. Lupin pulled back just enough to give Jigen an extremely annoyed look, then rolled his eyes and set his chin back on the platform with a huff.
“We’re only here because you dragged me here, Bodyguard.”
So that was how they were going to play it. Jigen scoffed. “Yeah, cuz one of these days you’re gonna shoot me if you don’t get your damn eyes checked out.”
“Might shoot you anyway,” Lupin grumbled.
“What was that?” Jigen snapped back.
“Nothing, nothing,” Lupin hurried on, voice suddenly turning light and trilling. He popped up over the eye-checking machine and, putting his hands atop it and his chin on the backs of his fingers, gazed down at the poor young woman, now as turned on as she was afraid. “My dear, is he scaring you? I can ask the big brute to leave…”
Her eyes went wide, reflecting the diffuse yellow light shining through the lenses of the machine.
Jigen heaved a sigh. “Just get out of here without committing any felonies, okay?”
“A felony? On this poor beautiful soul? Why would I do that?” Lupin sent his victim a charming grin, white teeth sparkling as much as his eyes, and then set a well-timed wink upon her person.
And for her part, the young woman did not swoon; she did not melt. Nor did she run. She merely stared back at Lupin like the lion he was and cried,
“Who are you people?!”
“Nobody, if you know what’s good for you,” was Jigen’s answer. “Please get on with it—he’ll do this all day if you let him, and”—here he turned to Lupin—“You know you owe me extra every time I have to watch your back while you bang someone.”
“P-pardon…?” the young woman squeaked.
Meanwhile, Lupin sucked in a breath, squeezed his eyes shut—and then, apparently unable to hit the ball back against Jigen’s pitch, huffed, “Why must you insist on ruining my charm today?! Did someone die on you again or something?!”
Jigen’s teeth gritted reflexively. “No, but thanks for reminding me.”
Lupin’s lips pursed. He glared off at the wall, away from all of them, then eventually sunk back down into his seat with a growling sigh. He gave the woman an apologetic gaze momentarily, one that almost made it Jigen’s way. “…Sorry.”
Jigen sucked in a tight breath, unable to keep it down, and took a moment to run a hand over his face as he shook his head. But, when he finally let out the breath, it wasn’t as indignant as it’d been a moment earlier.
Finally, it seemed he’d cowed him into it. Now if only they could get an honest exam done, he had hope that everything would be fine…
“So by ‘clear,’ what do you mean, exactly?” Lupin muttered rather grudgingly. “Like, it’s bigger? Or thicker, or…? Cuz I can see them all down to the bottom, I just have to, you know, squint. But they’re all fuzzy, it’s just one is thicker lines than the other so I don’t really get what you’re asking me. The thicker one’s always gonna look better, right? Because it’s thicker.”
The woman paused, clearly wondering if he was making another joke at first, and weaseling out of things second, then said, “Not if you’re far-sighted. So, I guess…out of each pair, which one makes you squint less hard?”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
At that, she finally smiled, and the tension in Jigen’s gut eased a bit as Lupin finally, finally settled in for the rest of the test.
“Heh…that was a good one,” Lupin noted of himself.
“It was,” she replied gently, clicking another lens into place. “Still using only your left eye, tell me which one of these is clearer: this one”—click—“or this one?”
…Though Jigen was still mentally making bets with himself on whether or not Lupin would get her number by the end of all this.
Measuring Lupin’s eyes for the focal distance had gone over about as well as he’d expected (“Aw man, there’s more?”), but eventually, while Jigen read the newspaper in the public part of the store, Lupin had tried on a few pairs of glasses to placate him. On the third or fourth he’d gone very quiet, looking at them rather morosely in his hands, and then announced, “I’m headed out for a smoke. Be back in a sec.”
“Sure. I’m gonna hit the can.”
And it was as Jigen was returning to humanity that he bumped into the young ophthalmologist, a small, square paper in her hands.
“Well! It turns out that you’ve grown a bit near-sighted, with a slight astigmatism in one eye. But it’s just a bit. It’s a +.75 in one eye and—oh, where did your friend go?”
Jigen sat back down in one of the two leather waiting chairs, picking up a different section of the paper to read (with his still perfect eyes, thank you very much). “Taking a smoke,” he announced, nodding over his shoulder.
She peered toward the window, head bobbing this way and that like a small prey animal looking out of its nest, until her brow quirked down.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I—” Jigen almost got the entire sentence out before it hit him why she was asking.
He turned in the chair, newspaper falling off his lap.
“That idiot,” he hissed.
He didn’t.
But upon close inspection up and down the street, he had.
He left me!
Jigen looked at the woman, and a moment later, she looked back at him, trembling under his gaze.
…With the bill!
The stare Jigen leveled the poor little ophthalmologist with knocked about a year off her life, judging by how wide her eyes went.
Muttering obscenities in his head and planning exactly the amount of hell he was going to give Lupin when he caught up to him (and wondering how much he should try to see if he’d been kidnapped), Jigen gritted his teeth and held out his hand to the woman.
“I’ll pay the bill,” he stated, “with a tip for your troubles. Just give me that please, confidentiality laws be damned.”
The lady handed it to him without hesitation, though her arm was stiff as a board.
It just made Jigen stick another hundred in her hand in return. Which he was definitely, definitely going to invoice Lupin for.
I’ll get you for this, Jigen grumbled in his best Zenigata impression as he stepped out the door, Just as soon as I figure out where the hell Fujiko parked.