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Jigen walks away from him in the half light of the evening. He doesn’t look back. He walks with his hands in his pockets, and a puff of smoke climbs over his shoulder before he rounds the corner and disappears.
Lupin’s hands shake. They tremble like fragile leaves in the wind, threatening to fall and shatter. The same way his synapses fire, and fire, and fire, and fire, and his mind moves as fast as a hurricane with the same amount of debris left behind. Tonight the debris wears a suit and a borsalino, and it walks with a lopsided gait thanks to a shotgun shell to the knee that never quite healed right.
They’d argued.
He’d argued.
That unconscious part of him that rears its ugly head had surfaced in time to bite and snap until Jigen had thrown his hands in the air and walked out. The part that feasts on discordance, and revels at the chance to wind false dichotomies and half truth’s around its pointed tail. It’s easier when he’s angry. Easier to keep people at arms length so they can’t see him spiralling into the abyss.
It’s lonely though.
Lupin does his best work at night. No one looks at you too hard under the moonlight. No one notices if you have stubble, or if your jawline is a little too solid for the feminine features you’ve enhanced.
Lupin does though. He looks in the mirror. In a window as he walks past. In the still black of the lake in the library grounds. He looks and his reflection looks back and he hates it. He’s too large, too broad, too hairy; and at the same time he’s too small, too fragile, too soft. Discomfort sits underneath his skin and it itches. It stretches him in ways that are uncomfortable, he gets so close, but every time he tries to reach it the euphoria is just too far away.
He longs for the days where Lupin fit him like a glove. When he moved without pain. He longs for the days when he wore Marie not as a shield, but as something else. Something freeing. Ballgowns and lipstick hold no weight against the onslaught of his self-doubt. A mask can’t stay put forever. Latex slides, makeup runs, and there comes a point in every altercation where Lupin has to say ‘actually, just so you know’ and the very thought of it chokes him up. A painful lump in his throat, or is that just his adam’s apple? It’s hard to tell, it might be both.
He counts cracks in the ceiling and grits his teeth in the darkness because ‘you don’t make love like other men’ is a double edged compliment. He’s men, but he’s not other men. And sometimes he’s not men at all. Yet despite knowing this, despite knowing this for years - it never fails to pierce him in the softest part of his chest when it’s said aloud while his mind is racing, chasing a peace that seems unattainable.
He loses his way in the dark.
He pushes people away. Keeps them at arm's length. Fujiko is pushed away first, she’s the easiest to move along. Throw a diamond in another direction and she’s off chasing it. Goemon is next, with carefully considered words and excuses that he doesn’t believe, but he’s too polite to say otherwise. Jigen is last because he won’t go without a fight. Lupin has to pull out all stops to push him out the door. Insults are thrown with abandon, some of them even stick. No grievance is too old when it comes to this kind of self-preservation, and when the gunman turns his back and walks out the door Lupin sinks to his knees and cries.
He wants what Jigen has. He wants the quiet confidence. He wants to be self-assured in who he is, not stuck in this constant state of flux that never quite seems to find a home no matter how hard he tries to settle it. He’s known Jigen a long time. Long enough to appreciate testosterone and how it’s made his friend whole. Jigen is a man who is undeniably comfortable in his own skin, and times like now Lupin hates him for it.
He sits on the bed they sometimes share. It smells like Jigen’s cologne, like something woodsy mixed with tobacco and amber.
He doesn’t hear the door open when Jigen returns. He hears the footsteps, each one making his heart race faster, and faster, until it feels like it might breach the containment of his chest in an unholy explosion leaving nothing but a crater in its wake. He’d yelled. He’d argued. He’d pulled out every last insult in the book that he knew to ensure that he could continue to spiral alone. He just needs space to reach the bottom and he can rebuild himself from there. Block by block. A little bit of rouge there. The subtle scent of aftershave. Until he’s happy with himself again (for a while).
He didn’t realise he’d lost his way in the dark.
Jigen sits on the bed beside him without looking at him, unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He takes his hat off and places it beside him. He shrugs off his jacket and loosens his tie. His fingers don’t shake like Lupin’s are as he unbuttons his dress shirt, untucking it from his trousers with practice precision.
He lights his cigarette and leans back on his elbows. Lupin loves this man, he does, even when he pushes him away. More than ever when he pushes him away. Lupin does his best work in the dark, but Jigen is a sunrise, inevitable and consistent.
He tilts his head to the side and the angle highlights the beginnings of grey starting to thread through his beard. His shirt hangs loosely on his shoulders, a stark contrast to the compressing fabric he wears underneath it. It’s a reminder without words, and one that hurts more anything Lupin has put himself through over the last few days.
“Y’said I don’t understand what it's like, to not feel welcome in your own body.” He says, and Lupin wants to scrunch his eyes shut. “Y’know that I do.”
“Y’said that I couldn’t know how it feels, to want to pull the essence of me out of my veins and put it somewhere new.” He says,uncaring of the ash that falls onto the binder. “Y’know that I do.”
“Y’said that I don’t know what it feels like to be trapped somewhere I don’t belong.” He says, and with every breath Lupin watches his chest rise, and fall. Rise, and fall. “Y’know that I do.”
Rise, and fall.
“Y’know that I do, better than anyone.”
It chokes him up, or maybe it’s just his adam’s apple, it’s hard to tell. The gravelly tones pierce something in him, letting emotion flow forward where it hadn’t been. It rushes upwards, filling his chest, leaking down into his stomach and out from under his eyelids.
“Even now?” he feels stupid, asking, but he has to know. Is there an end? Is there an end to this feeling?
“Sometimes.”
Lupin wants to scream. He wants to yell and cry and scratch because if there’s no end in sight then he doesn’t want a part of any of it.
“I have you though. That helps, a lot.”
Jigen doesn’t look at him. His gunman doesn’t cry often, he’s not an emotional man - but there’s tear tracks running into his beard. They make him less self-conscious when he leans forward with his head in his hands and a sob. When he shakes out the last of the unconscious part of him that got him here in the first place. The part that sharpened his tongue to the point where Jigen felt he needed to remind him of where he’d come from. Where they’d come from.
Jigen’s chest rises and falls, and the cherry red end of his cigarette is like the light at the end of the tunnel.