Chapter Text
As the surface gets farther and farther away, the light of the ship fading from sight, the music from the party already smothered under the crashing waves, and his struggles to survive steadily growing weaker with his last gasp of oxygen burning away, Mashita can't help feeling a kind of resigned self-recrimination as he sinks. He should have known better than to trust that no one would try to pull something in the midst of the revelry. He knows how unpopular he is for asking questions of the wrong sort of people, those being the sort of people who had enough money to bribe the police into looking away from their misdeeds. His coworkers had surely been among those whose palms had been greased, with their not-so-subtle actions like shoulder checking him in passing, gossiping about him within his earshot and saying he's taking things out of context when confronted, or fobbing off the obviously difficult (or dangerous) cases to him to deal with alone. And yet, despite all that, he'd still gotten on the ship with the rest of the guests invited to the semi-annual banquet the city held to honor its civil servants.
Maybe it had been foolish of him to expect better of the people trying to harass him out of the police station. Really, though, who would expect to be deliberately thrown overboard while on a mid-size vessel crowded with people? His fellow officers shouldn’t have been so eager to commit manslaughter against one of their own, but it’s not like he has allies in the workplace anymore. Maybe that’s what had goaded them into this point, knowing that there wouldn’t be anyone around to question his disappearance. It’s not like their intent matters right now; he's going to die out here all the same. All of that hard work and dedication he’d put into the station, and his reward is being left to drown by his own colleagues. What a way to go, huh?
The urge to breathe in is nearly impossible to ignore, his lungs burning with the need for fresh air. But, he knows that giving in to that need will only hasten his seemingly inescapable fate. He doesn't have the energy left to fight his way back to the surface, the waves having drained that from him as they'd crashed onto his head and forced him under the water. In the end, the worst part of all of this is that no one will miss him after the sea swallows him. Everyone who would have is long dead. They'd be so disappointed in him, and he wouldn't blame them for it.
No longer able to resist his body’s demand for air, he gasps, stale air leaving him in a rush of bubbles. A split second later, he inhales seawater and truly begins drowning, the water burning as it fills his lungs. His consciousness warps from the ordeal, the world around him smearing into strange shapes, which is the only reason he can think of to explain the utterly bizarre thing he sees as he starts to black out. He could have sworn he saw a person diving for him, one with a fish's tail. The hallucination's webbed hands outstretched towards him and bright eyes shining with an expression of amazement are the last things he sees before everything…goes…dark…