Chapter Text
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how I got here.
The last thing I remember, I was on the other side of the ocean, and then on the other side of the continent. Yet here I am, walking through a neighborhood in Tokyo rather than Brooklyn. I really don’t remember anything. Well, I remember who I am (Arséne Lupin III, at your service), and what I had for breakfast (eggs and bacon), and that… there was an argument? I think? Just before I woke up on a street bench thousands of kilometers away from where I was supposed to be.
It’s late, probably after midnight, but with the time difference, it’s still daytime back in New York. I tried to get a hold of Jigen or Fujiko, but Fujiko doesn’t answer and the lady at the motel where we were staying at said there was no one staying in the motel under the name “Dan Jones”, a.k.a. Jigen’s fake ID. So with no word from my friends and no yen in my pockets, I’ve been wandering around wondering what to do. I don’t even have American dollars to try and exchange. In fact, I have nothing: no money, no gun, no cigarettes, no clue what the hell is going on.
At least it’s a nice night, but it is getting late. The shops I walk past have long since closed for the night, and houses are dark so their inhabitants can sleep. The city itself goes on, though. I yawn and weigh my options, none of which are appealing. I don’t like the idea of trying to find an alley somewhere, especially since I’m likely to get jumped in this area, but I like the idea of breaking into somewhere even less. I have a few safe houses in the city, but they’re all in distant neighborhoods and I don’t have the keys or the money to get a ride.
A sound of pent up frustration crawls its way out of me. I wish I could remember! Come on, Lupin, think! I try to coax just some small clue, a hint, from my brain to what might be happening to me, why I’m here and not where I was this morning. All I manage to do is bring on the beginning of a headache, and I close my eyes against the flash of light that comes across them.
Then, I hear it. Like an answer to my prayers. A very messed up answer:
Pops.
Out of instinct I dive for cover and watch as he rounds the corner. I quickly notice something is off. For one, he should also be in New York. But more importantly, he is singing loudly off-key, slurring his words and stumbling around. Some lights turn on in some of the buildings, and the silhouettes of the inhabitants look down on the drunken inspector.
Well, he might arrest me, but spending a night in jail sounds better than any other option. I stand up and wave. “Hey, Pops!”
Zenigata stops and nearly falls over as he turns to face me. “Wha’ you want?”
“Oh you know, just passing through,” I say. “Pops, are you okay?”
“Never *hic* better.”
Pops is not okay. He stinks of cheap alcohol, he probably slept in his suit last night and has already puked. He also hasn’t shaved in maybe a day or two. In other words, he’s not himself.
So… no jail for me tonight. I better get some kind of cosmic karma on this.
“You live around here Pops?” I ask.
Zenigata waves and points. “Over there.”
“Okay, let’s get you home.”
I place one of his arms over my shoulders, and we continue down the road. Pops can barely walk straight, which makes it hard for me to walk straight considering he has probably twenty-five kilos on me. On more than one occasion he accidentally slams me into a wall. Somehow, we make it to his apartment building without landing on our faces.
“Which one is yours?” I ask.
“401,” Pops slurs.
I sigh, of course he would be on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. Before we even get to the third step, an old man appears from one of the first-floor apartments. He looks boiling mad.
“Zenigata! There you are!” he shouts. “Do you have any idea how much trouble… what are you doing?”
“Taking this guy home,” I reply. Pops is by this point barely conscious, and if he passes out now there is no way I am getting him up four flights of stairs.
“Who are you?”
“Uh… his nephew?” Oh, smooth one Lupin.
“I didn’t know he had any extended family,” the old man mutters, and then adds, “Listen, young man, he needs to be out by the end of the week, or pay his rent! It’s two weeks overdue!”
“Overdue? That doesn’t sound like him,” I mumble.
“I wish I had never given him the apartment!” the old man continues, “I only did because he was on the police force with my son...”
“Hold up, was on the police force? As in past tense?”
“Ye-es.” The old man squints at me, suspicious as to why a nephew didn’t know his uncle was no longer a police officer.
“Sir, may we have this conversation in the morning?” I ask, trying to stop Pops from sliding down the stairs.
The old man waves his hand and turns to return to his own apartment. “Very well, but remember he owes rent!”
Thankfully I get Pops to the right floor, find his keys, and open the door before he passes out completely and/or we wake the entire building. It takes me a few seconds to process what I am seeing: if I thought Pops was a mess, his apartment is even worse. Old instant ramen containers and beer cans are everywhere. There is dust on most flat surfaces. Everything is a mess. The air smells like old cigarette ash, stale beer, old food, and dirty socks. Which would be understandable if Pops was, well, Pops: I rarely visit Japan these days, so he is never home. But apparently, along with me getting transported from one side of the globe to the other, Inspector Zenigata is no longer Inspector Zenigata.
“What the hell?” I whisper.
Taking a deep breath, I enter the apartment. Pops is barely supporting his own weight now, so I end up dragging him into the bedroom and manhandling him into the bed. I manage to wrestle him out of most of his clothes – pants, jacket, shirt, shoes – and leave him on his side to sleep it off. I don’t need him choking on his own sick, I need him to tell me what the hell is going on and why we are both in Japan when really we should be in New York.
With the Inspector taken care of, I focus on myself. I clear as much crap off of the couch as I can and flop down. It is not a comfortable couch to sit on, let alone sleep on, but at the moment I don’t have much of a choice. The floor is even less appealing. Apparently, I am more tired than I realize, because it feels like I close my eyes only to open them a few seconds later and find it is morning.
However, the crick in my neck tells me loudly about the several hours I spend lying on the beat-up couch of my rival.
The morning light reveals the extent of the mess that is Zenigata’s apartment. Stuff is everywhere. It looks like a bomb went off, or several bombs, and he never cleaned up afterward. The sight is shocking to see.
I notice off in the corner an interesting piece of destruction: the splintered and torn remains of a small family shrine. I know that Pops is proud of his ancestry: it’s part of the reason he became a police officer in the first place. So why would he destroy the shrine?
My investigation is interrupted by a knock on the apartment door. Peeking through the peephole, I see the old man from last night. I open it. “Good morning, sir.”
He tries to peer past me. “Is Zenigata in there?”
As if on cue, Pops lets out a snore that could rival a 747 taking off. “He’s still sleeping it off. Sorry for disturbing you last night when we came in.”
“Honestly, I’m glad he made it back,” the old man says. “You said you were his nephew?”
“Oh, uh, yeah!” I run my hand through my hair. “I’m, uh, Hikaru, his sister’s kid.”
And I’m the helmsman on the USS Enterprise. Wait, does Pops even have a sister?
The old man raises an eyebrow and lets my lie slide by. “I take it he doesn’t talk to his family much these days.”
“No, not really,” I say. I step out into the hallway and close the door. “What happened to him?”
The old man looks around, and once he is sure there are no other ears nearby, he says quietly, “From what I’ve heard, his wife left him and took their daughter with her.”
I had forgotten that Pops was married. He and his wife had separated just before he was assigned my case. They had a daughter: Toshiko. Sweet little girl with keen observation skills. She spotted me one day when I had passed by the park she was playing. I only intended to observe for a little while in a "not-stalker-okay-maybe-a-little-but-totally-not-creepy" way. Next thing I know, she is the astronaut princess of Mars and I’m her goofy alien sidekick. Won’t lie, it was a fun afternoon.
However, when her father found out, it was less fun. Zenigata descended upon us like a storm. Jigen, Goemon, and I had to split up for a while. Jigen ended up shaving his beard to get out of the country. Goemon just up and vanished like he usually did to the point where the police gave up looking for him. I was on the run for weeks, using every trick and skill in my arsenal just to stay half a step ahead of Pops and every single law enforcement officer in Japan. I ended up burning several safe houses in the process. Pops nearly caught me. No, he nearly killed me. Eventually, I decided to leave Japan and go globetrotting for a while. Figured it would be better for my freedom and health, and that it would be much more fun.
Before I left I wrote Pops a letter, formally apologizing for interacting with his daughter, swearing on the grave of my namesake grandfather that I didn’t do anything to her, and that I would never step foot near his family again.
Pops got himself assigned to Interpol and continued chasing me, the bastard.
“He threw himself into his work until it wasn’t enough and then he threw himself into the bottle.” The old man shrugged. “I guess he showed up drunk one time too many, and he was dismissed. I haven’t seen him sober in weeks.”
“He wasn’t assigned to the Lupin case?” I ask.
“The Lupin case?” the old man says. “As in Lupin the Third? No, thank God. That assignment is a death sentence. Though what he’s doing to himself now isn’t much better”
I frown. Death sentence?
“But I do need his rent by the end of the week,” the old man says. “He can’t stay here any longer without it.”
“I’ll get you the rent money,” I reply. “Don’t worry, it will be in your hands by the end of the day.”
I know that, under normal circumstances, Pops would never accept my money or charity. But these are hardly normal circumstances and I’d hate to see the guy out on the street. The old man thanks me for what I am doing, and I return to Pops’ apartment. I check in on Pops to make sure he is okay and then clean myself up before heading out.
A newspaper falls to the ground when I pick up my jacket, and I notice my name on the front page: Lupin the Third steals $50 million, seven dead.
Seven people…
Dead?!
I grab the newspaper and read the article. The paper is from two days ago, and the heist occurred at a bank I know I’ve never robbed. According to the paper, I went into the bank in broad daylight, held everyone hostage, cleared out the vault, and escaped. I killed two of the guards as I walked in, another one and a teller who tried to be heroes, two cops, and one of the hostages. Several other police officers and hostages were injured.
No. No, no, no, nononono… This isn’t happening. I feel like I’m having a bad dream. I pinch myself. It hurts.
I begin to dig through the other newspapers and find articles referring to other jobs I pulled. Some I remember doing, some I don’t. Almost all of them have a body count, and none of them make mention of Jigen, Goemon, or Fujiko. Just me, and often a crew of masked henchmen.
What the hell is going on here? Is this what the old man meant when he said being assigned to my case was a death sentence? The old man… did he recognize me? Several articles have accompanying pictures: sometimes a mug shot, other times security camera stills where I am the only one not wearing a mask. In a few of them, I’m smiling at the camera. If he did recognize me, then the cops are probably on their way, and I certainly can’t pay the man in cash for Pops’ rent.
I don’t have the time or my tools to create a proper disguise, so I have to improvise. I borrow a (relatively) clean coat and hat from Pops and adjust my height slightly. I can’t do much about my face, but if I can buy some cheap cosmetics I can fix that. I got Pops home and I’m about to pay his rent, I’m entitled to the yen in his pockets.
“An’ where th’ hell you think you goin’?”
I slowly turn around. Pops is standing in the doorway to the bedroom, barely half awake. His eyes are thin slits; he must have one hell of a hangover at the moment.
“Hey Pops, I didn’t hear you get up,” I say.
“Kinda hard to sleep through my landlord threatening to evict me,” he mumbles and staggers towards the bathroom. He pauses and asks, “Why’d you call me Pops?”
“Because I always call you that?” I answer.
“Except I don’t know you.”
“Y-you don’t?”
Panic is rising within me faster than I can compensate. First I show up in Tokyo with no memory, then rescue a drunk Zenigata from spending the night in the gutter, find out he’s about to be evicted and also isn’t a cop and not assigned to my case, and now he has no idea who I am.
What the fucking hell is happening?
“You okay kid?”
I feel like my head is spinning. “I, uh, I need some air.”
I yank the door open and stumble into the hallway, nearly crashing into one of Zenigata’s neighbors in the process. I can hear him calling after me, telling me to wait a second.
“...damn it, Lupin, don’t...”
A sound like screeching metal roars behind me. I am thrown forward, and a painful white light consumes me. I try to get up, to get out of the way, but I am pinned to the spot. Everything fades away until only the light and the pain remain.
And then I black out.