"Do my crying underwater,

I can't get down any farther.

All my drowning friends can see,

Now there is no running from it.

It's become the crux of me,

I wish that I could rise above it."

Demons - The National

He wakes in a sweat, as he does many nights. Most nights. Morning light creeps through the blinds, and Tokyo carries on with or without him. There's something wondrous, or something terrible, or perhaps both, something about that many people in that little space, something in that pavement so saturated with life.

He was dreaming of gold hair that melted in his fingers. These days, it's usually something to do with him; something that was his, or belonged to him. The other night he dreamt of bloodied cable knit jumpers, and the night before that he dreamt of a soft strong voice and the cold touch of fingers that all led to a stethoscope in place of a body, but he knew who it belonged to. There was only one answer to it, only ever one answer.

He wants to roll over, to dismiss the morning, and go back to sleep, back to a great and vast nothingness. He wants to forget, or at least not remember. He wants the mercy of not remembering, of a blank existence, void of memory, void of emotion, of sentiment.

Sherlock Holmes does not want to be here. Not in the slightest, not even a little bit. But life has tossed him a spade down here in the hole that circumstance and his own failings have dug him and told him to get himself out, or otherwise keep digging.

He rolls out of bed, chest covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat, and staggers to the window. He throws open the blinds and cards a hand through his hair, leaning against the sill as he digs in the pocket of his pyjamas for his lighter. Snatching the box of cigarettes from the dresser beside him, he shakes one out and lights it with trembling fingers.

He is saved by moments like this, where he can suck in all the tar he likes and pretend everything is alright. His blood will rush a little faster and he can close his eyes and tell himself he's in control; these moments where he takes out the string and darns himself back together again after his mind turns traitor and tears himself apart in the distorted void of sleep. Those moments where he does not see his trembling hands.

Smoke drifts from the lit end as he exhales, staring across the street at the restaurant with the basement that becomes a gambling parlour Tuesdays and a fighting ring every other night of the week, except Sunday. Everything's quiet there on Sunday. A small part of him, one of the raw reflexes from before his fall, wants to break in on Sundays and see what the hell happens there, since a place that's quietly, illegally busy every other day of the week won't bother to rest on the last; Tokyo is not a place that sleeps. Another part of him—a part that sounds suspiciously like John more and more every day—tells him that' a bit not good, and that he has other things he needs to worry about.

The yakuza will come for him in, oh…an hour and fifteen minutes. They will break the door down, flood his little one room apartment, shove a gun in his face and demand to know where all the money he found went to and where their leader's body is, and then he'll smile and joke, perhaps throw a tantrum barb someone's way, and before they know what's happened two will be on the ground, one may or may not be dead—their mobility, or lack therof, will not remain so unclear however—and the last will have his own gun pointing at his face, taken right out of his inept hands.

He smokes down to the filter. He does that a lot lately, and doesn't notice when he lights another, or the next one, or the fifth. The street moves beneath him and he stares down at the people below, a gargoyle playing at heroes. A child tugs at his mother's skirt, bleating for some reward or another; he will not get it, judging from the cardigan she's wearing. A man in an outdated suit crosses the road and yells at a speeding cab; he'll be fired today. This city may have a different face than Paris or London or Moscow, but their bones are all the same. These are the people he's written his life away for, the people he's traded tea and smoking bullet holes and dishwater hair for empty alleys and the life of a fleeing animal. And that's what he's become, see; an animal in the corner, running all over the world. A hare playing at the fox. Fine. If that's what was to be, he'd run, and he'd hide and he'd do anything and everything that he must to finish his. And he would win. He would. There was no other conceivable option than that he would triumph. He was the good one after all, wasn't he? He was on the side of the angels. But he hadn't believed that then, and it was harder to do so now.

An hour and ten minutes left. The yakuza, if anything, were at least adherent to structure; they would eliminate a power imbalance quickly, especially one that managed tripped them up from the inside. He had taken out the leader of the lower brothers; they'd be out for blood, not to mention the money he'd taken, but they wouldn't find either.

He glances back to the hiding place, to the spot he'd turn to in case of fire.

Aizukotetsu-kai may have had the bones of a yakuza, but the meat and muscle of the buraku—social discards and outcasts—to make it move.

Takaijihi. That was his name now. 'Tall Mercy'. Partly for his height, yes, but partly for the other meaning: a high price; expensive. Neither side pretended that the reason they had allowed him to attend their meetings wasn't because of the damage he'd done to the three cocksure foot members that tried to mug him.

After they'd sulked off tail-tucked and cried to her, their gang boss sent out some underlings to break in and found Sherlock licking his wounds—or stitching rather, as it'd been messier than he'd anticipated; he'd blurted 'Ninkyo' through a mouthful of blood, holding up his hands, before they laughed, stopped beating him, and taken him into the heart of Kyoto to face their boss. He'd been thrown to the floor, his head held high as he looked at her, absolutely certain that he was going to die, and he didn't see the beauty of Kita Seong-Eun before him, he saw his fingers running through short strands of golden hair inside his head, and he imagined what it would have felt like without feeling the pain of the knowledge that he could only guess. But instead of shooting him and leaving him to die, however, she smiled at him, and offered a hand to help him up; she knew, as he did, that it was better the tiger was kept in your cage, and not someone else's.

Kita Seong-Eun, the daughter of a Korean mother and Japanese father, was the second woman to beat him; she had the grace to call it a draw and spare his pride, what little he might still have. She was merely next in line to step up to where he knelt—because who can stand after a fall like that?—and neatly chipped a piece of him up, made him heavier, not lighter, forced him closer to the floor. She had loomed over him with The Woman's shadow. She had Sherlock Holmes at her mercy, and she had the power to afford to leave him alive.

But whereas The Woman had been all threats and secrets and one powerplay tripping after another, Seong-Eun openly acknowledged her position in life without denying what she had done to get there, nor all the benefits it allowed her now. She was dangerous because she had no secrets to be used against her, no one to be loved by her, and where The Woman had inspired no loyalty but her own, Kita Seong-Eun commanded the love of all of her underlings, and the respect of her elders.

Kita Seong-Eun may not have been the same kin as The Woman, yes, but he easily recognised they were of the same breed.

The night they met, she had him dumped into a chair across from a cheap shaky table and commanded his handcuffs be struck off before presenting him with a finger of clear liquid in a plastic cup. He sniffed it, and she'd laughed at him.

"You asked for ninkyo, did you not?" She said. He didn't trust her eyes. "No one will kill you while I am here, I promise this." She glances down at her cup, fingers idly stroking the sides. "Normally, we would have a traditional initiation ceremony, but you aren't quite normal, are you Mr Holmes?"

He said nothing, but raised his cheap little cup in a toast.

"To beginnings."

"No," She smiled, and he didn't trust that either, "To rheostat".

They both downed the sake and she drew a kit from her side, opening it to reveal bottles of ink and a pack of sterile needles, waving over a tattooed man from where he hovered in the corner.

Proceed with caution.

She had called on him a day later. Not in person, of course. They were not friends, not acquaintances, and barely allies. She had merely gotten to him first, and unleashed him on everyone else.

She had sent Ning Min Lee, known in inner circles simply as Ne, after the Japanese word which asks for confirmation, for an agreement—a man who paradoxically centred his whole identity on the phrase equivalent of 'am I right?'. He was tall and skinny, with a slicked back pompadour that looked as if he'd made it by greasing up a hairball from the drain and a prominent brow and high cheekbones made him look skeletal, and chronic ulcers gave him a sickly and menacing countenance, as if he were always annoyed. He had arrived with a cigarette in one hand, yellow juzu beads around the other—Sherlock had nearly smiled at the irony—and with his shirtsleeves rolled up, displaying his tattoos, as if they could strike fear into a man who'd seen them nearly every day in London, where they meant nothing.

You are a funny man, Mr Holmes. You will not try to run, ne?

He had given Sherlock an address, a name, and one sentence on what to do before softly adding that if he failed, he would let Sherlock see just how long his intestines could stretch.

Information he already knew, of course, but not careless enough to test himself (the average intestine, total, is twenty-odd feet long; his, perhaps longer, or shorter; he didn't want to approximate).

He did his job. That much could have been said of him. He'd done it. For who exactly, he couldn't say. He didn't know anymore, to be honest. For him, no, it hadn't been for him. He hadn't gained anything, except a few more secure days in Tokyo…a few days that meant nothing. He'd still have to run, in the end. He always ran, in the end. He didn't do it for Kita—why on earth would he do it for her?—and for John…everything was for John, everything was for them, for both of them, for who they'd been, and perhaps who they might be, but nothing was just for one cause. He was a prism, and the light shone through, flashing in all directions, refracting off of himself until he was in darkness. Is the prism aware that it exists for light, or does light exist for the prism? He isn't sure…he isn't sure he's ever been sure.

The club music pounds through the pavement, through the stilettos of the dressed up women, of the girls pretending to be the women they want to be, and through the shining shoes of the social climbers, and the tight dresses, tight trousers, tight ambitions, tight dreams of those standing in line.

He flashes the cross-and-brackets daimon inked onto his wrist, set amid the coils of a dragon slithering out of a skull—impermanent, but no one needs to know, so long as it looks convincing—and he understands that this life is degrading, as surely as the ink will fade from his skin. The shelf life of all the lives he's occupied is never long; he uses them until his purposes are met. Kita knows this, and so does he, which is why she will keep him on life support until she is done with him.

He can hear the music from outside; the manager must be in the red.

I shoot the lights out, hide til it's bright out—

He's let in to pass through the line, amid the shadowed nudges and hushed whispers of 'gaijin', and revels in the shallow sullied feeling of being more than these people, these ladder-climbers, and he crosses into this next world, into a bright, flashy falseness. How the lights of this existence must look when they're turned on.

Are you willing to sacrifice your life—

The song screams, echoing round the room. He skirts carefully around the girls hobbling on impossible shoes towards the dance floor, turning his eyes away from the writhing bodies. The floor is tacky beneath his feet. The air smells of sweat and perfume, dry ice and smoke.

Ahead, a shining flight of stairs, glowing green in the darkness. He climbs them, turning on the landing, and coming out onto the balcony club floor.

Lights glimmer on the go-go dancers who flock the stage like birds vying for bread, decked in false faces and colourful plumage, with long legs to wade through the mire. An upbeat, pop dance song is playing in time to the flashing lights. Some idiot DJ is pretending they won't die one day. Some clubgoers that crowd the floor are pretending they won't die one day.

A set of men are doing lines off a steel-shining table. He feels a pang, an echo of reverberation shoot through him. He remembers that feeling of weightless abandonment, of an invulnerability free of gravity, like you could never come down. That drug that injects you with white hot youth. He feels a pang, and he moves on.

As he waits for his drink, choosing to be blind to the winks of the bartender and her cleavage damn near in his face, he wonders how often criminals think of their mothers. It's a passing thought, and allows him to look lost in concentration. He never thinks of his mother. He thinks of John, and Mrs Hudson, and his home. He thinks of the life he's traded for this shiny false existence.

Ne eyes him across the bar, worrying at the yellow beads around his wrist. Sherlock raises his glass, eyebrow arched. Ne lights a cigarette, staring him down, the embers glowing in his eyes before the strobe lights drown them out, and then looks away.

A hand claps him on the shoulder and he starts, ready to toss his drink in their face and use the distraction to break their wrist in three separate ways before he notices the missing tip of an index finger.

"Sherlock, my friend! You are doing well?"

"Ishido." He nods in greeting, relaxing.

Ishido Shino, mole and next door neighbour, smiles. Yakuza members, after transgressions, are to give the tip of their little finger to their boss, as a sign of repentance and loyalty. Ishido, in his younger days, had overcompensated before his semi-retirement from the gang at the ripe old age of 29. Now, he was benched to the more promising realm of computer hacking and payroll, a business that went hand in hand. Sherlock had the fortune of discreetly persuading him towards his side before Kita Seung Eun had recruited him with that plastic cup of sake and the fake tattoo. A job promised in London through batting lashes was all it took.

Sherlock politely doesn't notice the delirium tremens as Ishido reaches for his drink, his standard fare of seltzer water and cherry flavouring for colour that he'd affectionately called The Hooker Spasm in a moment of self-deprecation.

"Is she here?" He calls over the din of the music, and Ishido nods, masking it from Ne's gaze—among others'—with a drink from his glass.

"Upstairs. Waiting, although I don't know for who."

"'Whom'." Sherlock corrects, eyeing the staircase set discretely in a darkened corridor near the back of the club. "And I do."

Ne is waiting at the foot of the stairs, wrapped in shadow as if it was part of him. Sherlock walks past him as if he's a stranger, although really, what's the difference?

He hides the slip of paper in his palm, and tugs his gloves on.

He always thinks he's seen the worst face humanity can show him, until it gets uglier than before.

In Moscow, he must watch a man he knows to be innocent garrotted in front of him. He knows he can do nothing, he knows that, ultimately, this man will die for a misunderstanding, that he will die for nothing. It's a feeling he can't name, watching the demise of someone who means nothing.

In Barcelona, he sits next to a man who will later kill a woman and maim her child driving drunk. Sherlock will be the only witness. Later, he will smother him with a pillow while he sleeps—too merciful an end, but too unforgiving to allow his existence any further—and be forced to run before he can get the information he wants. He thinks of the child often before he goes to sleep, but he can't remember their face, only their expression as they were crippled in the flash of headlights.

Wherever he goes, his demons follow him.

They are here, now, settling down in his chest in Tokyo.

Kita holds her head in her hands, looking quite bored with the shivering creature across the table.

"How much did she take?"

"Around 50,000 yen." Ne answers.

She raises an eyebrow. "50,000?" She repeats, and turns back to the girl.

Sherlock knows her. A girl who calls herself Lita. She lives above him in the tenement squalor. He met her in the stairwell, tights ripped, lips bloodied, tears spattering her shirt next to the dried semen. He'd cleaned her face, let her sleep on his couch, and they began a cycle of wash, rinse, repeat. She made him noodle soup, even cracking an egg into it—a luxury for her—and he didn't ask questions when she appeared at his door, bloodied and bruised and crying. A few times, she tried to pay him back the only way she knew how—he'd start awake when he felt a small hand slip into his pants, or lips at his neck, and he tried to explain to her as best he could in rudimentary Japanese that none of her favours were needed with him. He'd lead her back to the sofa and make her life down before throwing his coat over her like a blanket. He'd watched over her often, sitting at his table since there was no room for a bed, and wondered if he could get the name of the men that hurt her.

She was going to die here. And there was nothing he could do. He still had a man to find, and appeasing Kita Seung-Eun was his only way.

She was crying, and Kita barked her question again.

"Y-yes." Lita answered. "50,000."

Kita stares at her a moment, and he feels anger well up inside him. She looks like she doesn't even care. She's not even angry; what is 50,000 yen to her? But this girl has transgressed, and must be punished.

"What will you do?" He asks, not looking Lita's way.

"Eh," She shrugs. "Let the men have their fun, then maybe take a finger or two…but that'd hurt business, wouldn't it?" She laughs, ignoring Lita as she bursts into great, terrible sobs. Sherlock closes his eyes, and sees that child staring at him.

"Stop being such a baby." Kita mocks. "You want a reason to cry?"

"Jihi," She calls, turning to Sherlock and says, as easily as if she was ordering a meal, "Hold her hand down."

At night now, the child screams like Lita did.

He closes the door softly behind him. The lights in the large VIP suite glow off the walls as if the room was underwater. Everything is white; he nearly rolls his eyes at the thought of another interior designer thinking they were original, with the white marble floors and plush endless couches and high ceilings.

There is a light at the end of the hall, a beam from a lighthouse in the middle of a rocky ocean. Rooms exit off of the corridor like grottos, silent and still with sleeping sharks.

"Kita?"

He treads carefully on the shining floor, bleached like sand, as he glancing into the darkness of each anteroom as he passes, heading towards the light at the end of the hall.

"I told you to call me Seung."

He stops. Thinks for a moment, re-evaluates—then turns.

Kita stands at the other end of the hall behind him, leaning against one of the pillars, her body smooth in the light. She's naked, ink curling over nearly every inch of her skin. She smiles. The water snake coiled between her breasts does the same.

She steps forward. He stays where he is.

"My mother raised me better than that."

Kita laughs. The lilies on her thighs sway as she moves, bobbing in the soft current of movement. A koi pond swims around her navel, mosaic Siamese fighting fish circling her torso in a drain. At her throat, a bacculite curls over her collarbone. Between her legs, an anemone folds out like a sunflower. Pinnate colonies wind up her calves in impossible detail, taking over every pale space of skin like ink bleeding on paper. Red and white coral coats the curve of her shoulders in false armour; octopi hide in safety, squeezing themselves inside the bottle of her ribs, tentacles wrapped over bone, never to be separated.

He stares openly, as one does when awestruck by an rare work of art. And that's what she is, what this is. It transcends her, and this is not Kita Seung-Eun he's looking at, this is just a canvas and it is the ink that draws his attention, not her curves, not what she's offering him, and certainly not her.

She turns, obliging an unspoken request. A red tide washes over her shoulders, its glowing bioluminescence soft in the cool churning light—an ultraviolet tattoo. He almost wants to touch it, feel the flesh raise and prickle under his fingers. At her coccyx a bluefire jellyfish nestles, defenseless and unassuming, thin drifting tentacles curling up around the vertebrae of her spine. He wonders for a delirious moment if it would sting him if he grazed it—

Kita moves quickly, faster than he imagined she could—stupid—and he barely blocks her jab, forearm coming up to stop the blade an inch from his temple. He steps on her bare foot, heel digging into the thin skin, and uses his weight to his advantage, grabbing her other arm and pinning it behind her.

"Show me the note." She says quietly, as if he doesn't have the upper hand, as if she didn't just try to slit his throat.

He stares down at her. Wondering, for a moment, if he could play stupid, if it would give him the upper hand.

"And how," he begins, "might I do that, when you keeping trying to kill me?" He cocks his head. "Run my course, have I? It's barely been a month."

"I know who you are, Mr Holmes. I know who you work for."

"Oh? Enlighten me, please."

"Moran." She hisses. "The spider's web."

"Really?" He can't help but be a little offended. "You think I'm working for him? You think I'd waste my time so poorly?"

"You…but you didn't use an alias, you came just after he left. He must have sent you, he must have left you in charge—"

Sherlock can't quite conceal the anger that bubbles up inside him. His grip on her wrist tightens. His heel digs further into her foot.

"He's gone? Moran isn't here?"

Kita shakes her head. "He was in Bombay, last I heard. Heading for Bangalore. But you would know that, wouldn't you?"

"You've been misinformed, sadly." He bites out. "Our association is at an end as well. I wasted—" He stops. He is overcome with the urge to break something. He has spent a month here, a month, a captive, a gun for hire, and for what? Moran isn't here. Moran is not. Here. A month is gone, Moran is gone, he was never here in the first place, not when it was crucial, not when it mattered—he wants to break something—

In his blindness, overcome momentarily with disappointment, Kita sweeps her free foot, catching him in the knee and sending him down, but he takes her with him, his grip unwavering. She tries to free the knife but he holds onto it, feeling the blade bite into his palm. He tugs on her arm, feeling the pop of dislocation and she is too proud to scream, which is a pity, because then her soldiers would come to her aid. Her pride might be the death of her, and he wants to say we are the same but instead he tightens his hand around the knife, slippery with his blood, and grapples it from her hand. Kita stills as he holds it to her throat, the two of them struggling for breath. The sea life printed on her trembles with rough waves.

"Do you know why you will die tonight?" He asks her softly.

She doesn't answer, eyes staring unblinkingly up at him. He knows this feeling, he's had it before—the moments of realization that you will die with absolute certainty. That death has finally come for you and there's no getting away.

"You will die," he breathes, "for a girl whose fingers you made me cut off one by one, for a girl who didn't know any better than the life you cornered her into. You will die for the sake of a man you will never meet. A man with an unerring ability to haunt me, a man you never harmed, or heard of, or laid eyes on. And I want you to know that. You are dying for no other reason than the fact that a stranger's life means much more—means the most—to me, than yours does."

"The note." Kita says hoarsely. "Show me the note."

Sherlock grins bitterly. "You want to spend your last moments staring at a piece of paper…"

But he acquiesces, pulling the slip of paper out, showing her the scrawled name.

"'Ne'?" She reads, confusion bunching her face. "On whose orders?"

He frowns, then flips the paper, and watches as Kita reads.

"'Kita Seung-Eun.' Upstairs. Two guards. Quietly.'"

"Had it backwards." Sherlock murmurs. "Apologies."

Later, he thinks about how odd it was that her last words were her death warrant.

He finds Ne outside, ever present cigarette smoldering in his hand.

"It is done?"

He nods. There isn't even blood on his shirt.

"Your hand."

Sherlock looks down and curses. His gloves are ruined.

"Here," Ne pulls off a few notes from the wad Sherlock has handed him. "Get some new ones."

Sherlock represses the urge to laugh. He nods his head in thanks.

"What will you do now, Jihi?" Ne asks as sirens wail in the distance.

He shrugs. "Run, most likely."

Ne nods. "Smart."

"And you?"

"Well, they will come after you, even if I take her place. They all loved her, and had none to spare for me, or for you. We're outsiders, you know. They never knew what exactly to do with us. But perhaps I can do something for you. A plane ticket, perhaps."

Sherlock sits on his bed, thumbing through his phone, the one he kept from before for moments like this.

13:04

Why exactly are representatives from the London Aquarium looking for you?

13:07

Missed Call from: John Watson

YOU HAVE ONE VOICEMAIL

He presses play and holds the phone up to his ear, as though he hadn't memorised it long ago, as though he could pretend it just happened.

"Sherlock, why the bloody hell is there an octopus in the meat drawer, I—wait, what was that—SHERLOCK! YOU—OH MY GOD YOU ABSOLUTE WANKER YOU STOLE AN OCTOPUS FROM THE AQUARIUM, DIDN'T YOU? JESUS, what the fuck is wrong—OH MY GOD IT'S STILL FUCKING ALIVE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST—listen you two work at the aquarium right, you deal with…this—SHERLOCK, this is worse than the head cheese in the sink, honestly—do you hear me, this is WORSE , you absolute bastard—you've put me off coffee and now I can't eat sushi ever again, what's fucking next you posh—"

The message ends with a click.

Sherlock sighs, pocketing his phone in the inner pocket of his coat, near his heart. He shrugs his coat on and hears footsteps thunder down the hall. He rolls his neck, checking for the small bag tucked next to his phone.

He turns as the door bursts open.

Later, he will sit on a plane and think of a new name as he shrugs off his old one. He's already washed the blood away in the sink, and it's time for this one to go too.

Later, he will wake from where he sleeps on a dirty floor in another busy city, as the sun rises through the windows, and wonder in his exhaustion why it looks the same, no matter where he is.

Later, he will jimmy the lock on a door in London, and, after placing a box of takeaway sushi on the counter, he will settle into a familiar chair in an unfamiliar flat. And he will wait.

Later.

All of this will come later.

For now, the demons weighing on his chest drag him down into sleep. For now, he will keep downing this sour in the cup he's been dealt. Life will go on, with or without him. It will still end and begin whether he is there to see it, to cause it, or ignore it. For now, it will.

For now. For now. For now.

"Demons" - youtube watch?v=N527oBKIPMc

The club song (not sorry in any way, shape, or form): "Monster" - Kanye West (ft a shit ton of people): youtube watch?v=2kWuOUijAbc

Sorry for the weird linking system.