Recent Entries

When You Bury the Past, Bury it Deep

Neither Albert nor Lupin want to admit how much they're enjoying this. Matching wits with someone at your level, hiding your vulnerabilities while showing off all the places you've improved, trying to figure out where the other still has weaknesses or has adapted to them over the years. It's a thrill, and a very distracting one.

Which is why Lupin fucks up the timing, and in the middle of Albert pretending he doesn't know the 'Tickey' is Lupin and Lupin pretending he doesn't know Albert knows, the actual Tickey shows up.

"Uh."

He stands in the doorway, staring at the perfect copy of himself lounging against the couch. Albert fumbles, wide-eyed, while Lupin just gives his double a flirty wink and sashays out the door. Albert's left to make weak excuses about covert operations tech experimentation, and someone in his department being a joker, and he's not entirely sure Tickey buys it. Still, Tickey shrugs and fetches the wallet he'd forgotten in Albert's bedroom.

"So like that Lupin guy, yeah?"

"Yeah....like him."

There are things Albert keeps from Tickey, and Tickey knows and respects it. Lying is different - lying means keeping track of all the lies you'd told before, and the more you lie the easier it is to sleep up, and directly lying to him would be harder for Tickey to forgive. Lupin has, in one simple accident, made Albert more vulnerable and that lights a cold anger in him that hadn't been there before.

He scraps his original plan, and instead escalates to a point he never thought he'd get to. Fuck that hairy little scarecrow, trying to be the gum in his gears, a pesky fly annoying a giant to death. France has no need of such pests.

The next step is conducted completely off the grid, no chance of messages being diverted or erased by Lupin's pet hacker. Zenigata receives an message by courier mail sending him out to a town in rural France. Once he's there, anonymous notes left in his room and a package sent to his hotel by mail will guide him to a smaller town, and then a graveyard with a specific hill that overlooks the valley and is lit beautifully when the sun begins to set. It's old and the stones are all worn down with centuries of rain and wind, save for the grave on the hill. When asked, the old gravetender will say he he has no idea who's buried in that grave, but he will have some intel on the strange man who comes to visit it every couple of years and lays lupines at its base, then pays in cash to make sure it's maintained.

If Zenigata couldn't put it together himself, a few more items he finds in his room upon his return will clarify the matter - one or two photos, some signed notes, a newspaper clipping about a routine juvenile arrest.

When Lupin killed and buried his old self, he didn't know the term for the identity you left behind would one day be known as a 'deadname'.

But he put up a headstone for her anyway. She'd gotten him this far, after all. It was the least he could do.

(no subject)

The worst heists, in Lupin’s opinion, were the ones nobody knew about. Delicately, in the background of Zenigata healing from his wounds and Lupin gently romancing him into staying in bed, a war played out across France - an informant leaked here, a safe house exposed there, all so delicate and subtle that the media barely noticed it. Pawns were moving but neither man had worked up the aggression to shift their more powerful pieces as they tested each others limits. The key was using just enough power that Albert knew he meant business...and knowing that he’d take losses in the meantime.

Fine. Albert knew better than to try it all at once, anyway, with what Lupin held on him. The stress of it was frustrating, even so, and distracted him from planning anything more fun for his new situation with Zenigata...until things escalated to him planting suspicious data in the office of one of Albert’s underlings, and with an Interpol social event happening right down the hall Lupin decided to multitask.

(no subject)

It was Lupin's third theft in as many weeks. After his conversation with Sunshine he'd gone off and gotten himself properly drunk, just to get a third perspective on the matter, and then struck out twice with two increasingly annoyed women and gone home alone.

The question was never 'is Zenigata worth it'. Obviously, Zenigata was great, but Zenigata was not the treasure he was trying to hunt down here. The question was 'is trying to get a relationship with Zenigata that's more than occasional drinking buddies and sworn rivals worth it'. Was it worth it to disrupt the status quo, and would the treasure he got by disrupting it be worth the loss?

Klaus had, unfortunately, been incredibly unforthcoming about whether the sex was any good and Sunshine hadn't had as much perspective on romancing him as he'd hoped. (Boy, he'd read that one totally wrong.) He'd poked Fujiko about it a little but she'd assumed he was jealous and played up Zenigata's prowess and romantic charms just to needle him, only to find him storming out on her.

The next week, a diamond quietly went missing in Sweden. After that, a gold-plated vintage car in Australia vanished from a mob boss's personal collection. It wasn't quite the same without Pops but it also wasn't boring...losing Pops as a rival wouldn't shatter what made theft worth it. He'd had to convince himself of that before he could escalate to the next step.

(Of course he hadn't bugged the apartment. That would just be rude. But he had hidden a camera next to the door, just so he could see when Pops started residing in it again.)

(no subject)

Arsene Lupin III is the self-proclaimed grandson of the famed French gentleman thief Arsene Lupin. That's about the only solid thing he'll admit about his background, and even this might not be the literal truth. Lupin's been operating since at least the late 1960s, upgrading his theft strategy through the decades, though he doesn't seem to have personally aged much since 1970. (Theories about this include that he's immortal due to eating mermaid flesh, that he's only claiming to be Lupin's grandson, and that each Lupin III is routinely replaced by another person who transforms into the new Lupin incarnation after fighting a ritual duel with their predecessor. Lupin canon is very weird and runs on negative continuity.)

Lupin's targets are usually outlandish, difficult, or seemingly impossible, and he often sends a calling card ahead just to make the situation more spicy. He's also a master of disguise, able to seamlessly impersonate people of any gender or age. He's often accompanied by his two best friends Daisuke Jigen (a gunman) and Goemon Ishikawa XIII (a modern day samurai), as well as his love interest/friend with benefits/inevitable betrayer Fujiko Mine, and is constantly chased by Inspector Zenigata Koichi of ICPO.

Aside from his ambition and fondness for drama, Lupin's biggest weakness is his libido. He's consistently horny on main (a trait I'll tone down in playing him here, obviously), something which Fujiko often uses against him, though his actual success rate with women is limited. Despite being greedy and lecherous, Lupin's also something of a rogue with a heart of gold. He has a personal fondness for rescuing princesses and taking down corrupt governments and businessmen, and will often forfeit his prize in order to perform an act of heroism. He also feels some measure of competition with his alleged grandfather, and nothing drives him to steal something like knowing that Lupin I had failed where he might succeed. He's a chatty, sociable guy who's used to rolling with some deeply weird circumstances, and occasionally is the deeply weird circumstances.