“So where would he go?” Mary says into the phone. She’s come home to try to work out where Sherlock has gone before John does. She’s only managed a half hour lead on John, though, who’s just called to inform her of his disappearance.

“Oh, Christ knows,” John answers. “Try finding Sherlock in London.”

“Have you checked Baker Street yet?”

“No -- not yet.”

“Maybe he just wanted to go home,” she says, fairly certain it’s the last thing Sherlock would do.

“Maybe,” he says doubtfully.

“Why don’t you go talk to Mrs. Hudson? See if he’s been there.”

“Yeah, all right. I’ll start there. Greg’s going to talk to Mycroft. I’ll update you later. Bye.”

Mary already texted Mycroft, immediately after leaving Sherlock’s empty hospital room.

He’s gone. Do you know where?

As soon as she sends it, she felt a twinge of guilt; she was supposed to look after him. She’s failed yet again. But all Mycroft says in response is, No. He knows I know his traditional bolt holes. He’s unlikely to use them.

Sherlock has never confided in Mycroft, but there is someone else he has trusted in the past. After hanging up with John, she makes a phone call. Molly doesn’t answer, so Mary goes to find her in person. She’s sitting in the canteen at Bart’s when Mary locates her, and her eyes widen.

“Oh, hi -- you’re here -- why are you -- did you try to call me?” Molly stutters. “Sorry, sorry. I’m always leaving my phone places. I left it at home today, and -- “

“Has he been here?” Mary interrupts.

“Who? Sorry?” Molly’s being truthful; if she were covering for Sherlock, she would have known who Mary meant, would have at least hesitated.

“Sherlock. He’s gone.”

“From the hospital?” Molly goes pale. “But -- oh no! He really shouldn’t be up yet.”

“I know, that’s why I’m looking. Do you know anywhere he might have gone?”

“No, not really. I’ve never known any of his hideouts. Just the spare bedroom,” Molly mumbles, fiddling with her drink. “Well... my bedroom. We agreed he needs the space.” She gives an embarrassed smile.

“Is he still coming ‘round your place, then?” Mary asks.

Molly shakes her head. “No. Not since -- not for years. No. Sorry, that wasn’t helpful.”

Mary says. “It’s fine. If he comes by here, call me, would you?” She leaves her number with Molly, who promises to call -- “from a landline, of course, since I don’t have my phone, so of course it would have to be” -- if Sherlock shows up.

He won’t, though. She’s fairly certain he’s three steps ahead of her, at least. She hopes he’s at least four ahead of everyone else. She intends to close the gap.

* * *

She texts John. Any luck?

Not yet. Talking to Mrs. Hudson. No real leads yet. Greg should be here soon.

All right. I’ll stay put at home in case he shows up here, or anyone calls.

Good idea.

She makes a brief stop at the drug den where they found Sherlock and Isaac, hoping to find Bill Wiggins. She has a hunch Sherlock might have talked to him -- especially since he’s going to run out of hospital painkillers soon. When she fails to turn anything up there, her next stop is an address she looked up while at home: the residence of Philip Anderson.

Anderson opens the door but leaves the chain on, peering through the gap. He holds a finger to his lips. “It’s not safe,” he hisses at her.

“I just --” she starts, but he shuts the door again.

She knocks again, twice, before a piece of paper slides under the door. She picks it up and finds four numbers on it. She stares at it a long moment, then sighs and walks away.

* * * 

At the appointed time, geo coordinates, and elevation (half an hour later, in the lowest floor of an underground parking garage), she finds herself once again talking to Anderson. He’s accompanied by a woman whom he doesn’t bother to introduce.

“Do you --” she begins, but Anderson cuts her off.

“It wasn’t safe, you see. There’s been a bit of a schism, in our movement, recently. And there are some theories about you that --” he pauses, eyeing her consideringly. “Well, different group members have different loyalties, suffice it to say. But it could have been very dangerous for me to be seen with you. You understand.”

“Yeah,” the woman affirms. “Nothing personal. We’re on your side.”

Mary doesn’t really understand. But she also doesn’t care just now. “Do you know where Sherlock might be? He’s disappeared.”

Anderson hesitates for a long moment, then looks down and starts to shake his head. She arbitrarily selects a landmark and adds, “John is sure his hiding spot is near the Tower of London, but --”

It works -- Anderson snorts and looks up. “Preposterous.” Then, “Leinster Gardens. That’s his number one bolt hole. It’s top-top secret.”

His companion adds, “He only knows about it ’cause he stalked him one night.”

“Followed!” Anderson corrects her indignantly.

“Followed, yeah.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Great, thanks.” Mary turns to go, but Anderson scurries to catch up with her. The woman hangs back uncertainly.

“He’s on a case, isn’t he? Do you think he needs any help? We’re available, if he needs anything.”

“I’ll tell him,” she lies.

She reaches the exit stairs. Anderson stops. “You understand,” he says regretfully, watching her leave. “I just can’t be seen with you.”

* * *

She’s turning the corner onto the street when a homeless man asks her for change. She says no and continues past.

“Oh, come on, love. Don’t be like all the rest,” the panhandler entreats.

It occurs to her that she might want a pair of eyes -- he could help her keep a lookout a distinctive-looking tall man with curly hair, alone on the otherwise empty streets. She turns back to drop some coins in his tub, in case she needs him later. But before she can move on, he grabs her wrist.

His hood falls back, and she realizes it’s Bill Wiggins. She only just stops herself from smiling triumphantly. She’s close.

“Rule One of looking for Sherlock Holmes,” Wiggins says, putting a phone and a headset into her hand, “he finds you.”

I was doing all right by myself, actually, she thinks. “You’re working for Sherlock now.”

“Keeps me off the streets, doesn’t it?”

Mary nearly laughs at the absurdity of it. “Well ...no.”

The phone starts to ring, and she puts the headset in her ear. She continues on her original path as she answers. “Where are you?” she says.

“Can’t you see me?” Sherlock asks. His voice sounds clear, steadier than it has since before she shot him. A brief surge of joy and relief floods through her, crowding her wariness.

“Well, what am I looking for?” She glances around, but she doesn’t expect him to literally be visible. He likes playing games too much. Still, she suspects he can see her. That makes his voice in her ear somehow far more intimate than a normal phone conversation.

“The lie -- the lie of Leinster Gardens,” he answers, “hidden in plain sight.” She steps back a bit to get a better look at the tall houses that line the street, but she doesn’t see anything yet. She keeps walking. “Hardly anyone notices,” Sherlock continues. “People live here for years and never see it -- but if you are what I think you are, it’ll take you less than a minute.”

She walks on, looking for anything out of place. “The houses, Mary. Look at the houses.” He doesn’t sound angry with her. That’s a good sign.

“How did you know I’d come here?”

“I knew you’d talk to the people no-one else would bother with,” he says.

She laughs a little. “I thought I was being clever.”

“You’re always clever, Mary,” he tells her. “I was relying on that. I planted the information for you to find.”

Why? She wonders. He could have just asked her to meet him, and she would have. He must know that. Is this a test, then? A test to confirm what he’s already guessed about her? To confirm her cleverness?

It’s good that he thinks she’s clever. He’s always liked clever people. She remembers John’s descriptions of his admiration for Irene, and how he showed off for her. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here.

“Ohh,” she says, spotting something out of place. She stares at the pair of houses without any lights.

“Thirty seconds,” Sherlock says.

“What am I looking at?” She knows how much he likes to explain things.

He explains the empty houses to her, their details and their history. He’s still showing off, and she nearly smiles, listening to him.

“Only the very front section of the house remains. It’s just a facade.” He breaths in, right next to her ear. “Remind you of anyone, Mary? A facade.” With that, a giant image of her face appears across that of the empty houses.

She jumps, looking around, seeing nothing.

“Sorry, I never could resist a touch of drama,” he admits, sounding self-satisfied. She shivers. She remembers, suddenly, someone else Sherlock enjoyed showing off for. Moriarty. Things did not end well for Moriarty -- or for Irene. Sherlock is in love with cleverness, but mostly his own.

“Do come in,” Sherlock continues. As she does so, he tells her a ridiculous (but possibly not untrue) tale of gambling with a cannibal to gain this property. She only half listens as she warily enters the building, checking for potential dangers.

She finds herself in a long, narrow passage, unfinished, dim, stark. Sherlock is still taking maximal opportunity for drama. He sits at the far end of the corridor, the interrogator; a bright light shines over his shoulder, directly into her eyes. The metaphor is only slightly marred by the presence of his IV drip.

She doesn’t think appealing to his sense of mercy is likely to work. To stay safe, her best bet is to draw out the mystery, to tease him with some answers but not provide others. “What do you want, Sherlock?”

She half expects him to stand up and take center stage, but he continues to talk softly into her ear. (She remembers what John told her about the night at the pool, Moriarty’s voice guiding him via a headset, and she suppresses another shudder.) “Mary Morstan was stillborn in October 1972. Her gravestone is in Chiswick Cemetery where -- five years ago -- you acquired her name and date of birth, and thereafter her identity.” She doesn’t respond, but slowly approaches him. She needs to see his face, to be able to read him.

“That’s why you don’t have friends from before that date,” he says. She tries not to grimace wryly. She hardly has any friends from after that date, either -- and the number is decreasing all the time, as she injures and alienates the few she does have.

“It’s an old enough technique,” he continues as she walks, “known to the kinds of people who can recognize a skip-code on sight, have extraordinarily retentive memories.” She nods slightly. He is also describing himself, and his brother. She knows that being that kind of person is not enough to damn her in his eyes.

Come on, Sherlock -- keep going. See through that facade, as well. Mycroft can’t blame her if Sherlock figures out the truth on his own. He doesn’t continue, though, and she sighs softly.

She deliberately doesn’t confirm or deny any of the specifics. “You were very slow,” she says, simply, coming to a halt well out of arm’s reach.

“How good a shot are you?”

There’s no point pretending she doesn’t have her gun. She pulls it out and cocks it -- Sherlock does so appreciate dramatic flair, after all -- but doesn’t point it at him. “How badly do you want to find out?”

“If I die here, my body will be found in a building with your face projected on the front of it. Even Scotland Yard could get somewhere with that.” She nods. There’s no way she’s shooting him again, anyway -- but she knows she has yet to persuade him of that fact.

“I want to know how good you are,” he says. “Go on. Show me! The doctor’s wife must be a little bit bored by now.”

Of course, she feels no nausea right now, and she hasn’t just climbed over thirty stories. It will hardly be a fair comparison to the night she shot him. Still, what would be the point in lying? If she makes him think she’s a worse shot than she truly is, he might think she was trying to kill him but missed. (The fact that she did miss, but while trying not to kill him, is too complex a story to try to convey just now.)

She doesn’t want to point a gun anywhere near him -- and she suspects that whether she does so is part of the test. She thinks for a moment, then reaches into her bag for a coin. She flips it into the air and shoots it, casually, precisely.

She stares at the figure at the end of the hall, but she hears the footsteps behind her, and then the voice. “May I see?” Sherlock asks, not through the earpiece this time.

She cocks her head at the unmoving figure at the end of the hall. “It’s a dummy,” she realizes, turning toward the real Sherlock. That’s the safe thing for him to have done, if he really didn’t trust her not to shoot him again. She feels a flicker of surprise that he chose that path.

“I suppose it was a fairly obvious trick.” Not obvious for him, though -- since when has Sherlock done the safe thing? She walks forward and kicks the coin toward him.

He bends down and picks it up, examines it. “And yet,” he says, the pain of bending over with a chest wound thick in his voice, “over a distance of six feet, you failed to make a kill shot.” He looks like he’s about to collapse, and she wants to grab him, to haul him over to the chair at the end of the corridor, to sit him down and examine his wound. But she doesn’t think he’d allow her to, and she forces herself to remain still.

“Enough to hospitalize me,” Sherlock continues. “Not enough to kill me. That wasn’t a miss.” His lip curls, just a little. “That was surgery.”

She looks away. It was sloppy surgery; shoddy work. But he’s not wrong about his basic premise.

“I’ll take the case.”

She’s caught off guard. “What case?”

“Yours,” he says. She’s a bit surprised -- Magnussen isn’t the kind of problem Sherlock is wont to solve. There’s no puzzle behind his slime and transparent power grabs. (None that she expects Sherlock to know about, anyway; she only knows that Magnussen has secrets because she’s been tracking him for years.) But then, he took Lady Smallwood’s case, despite the lack of mystery.

“Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?” Sherlock asks. He sounds angry, maybe a little hurt.

Because your brother didn’t want you involved isn’t on the table, unfortunately. Instead, she looks him in the eye and appeals to the one motivation she’s dead certain he shares: John. “Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever -- and, Sherlock, I will never let that happen.”

She stares at him, willing him to remember the fears he faced when he came back and John rejected him. When he wanted John’s forgiveness so much that he threatened him with imminent death to gain it. They’ve both done foolish things for John Watson’s love.

Sherlock turns and starts to walk away. “Please --” she says, starting to follow. Please don’t leave me. Please give me time to find a better way to explain. He looks back at her. “-- understand. There is nothing in this world I would not do to stop that happening.”

He turns away again. “Sorry.” He walks to the fuse box. “Not that obvious a trick.” He flips a switch, and the corridor lights up.

In that moment, she knows. She knows the trick. She knows Sherlock never does the safe thing -- and neither does John. She knows everything is lost.

She looks down the corridor at John. He’s doing his best Sherlock impression -- which isn’t very good, now that there’s light on his face as well as at his back -- and he looks angrier than she’s ever seen. Which is saying something, considering she was there for Sherlock’s return.

“Now talk and sort it out.” Sherlock orders. “Do it quickly.”

Oh, Sherlock. If you knew anything about communication, you’d know it doesn’t work like that.

John walks toward her, but stops with a large gap separating them. They stare at each other for a moment, and she can’t think of a thing to fill the silence that hangs between them. Finally, Sherlock sighs, “Baker Street. Now.” John looks at her like she’s a cockroach on a birthday cake as he walks after Sherlock, and she trails behind, feeling empty and lost.

Sherlock stumbles on the way out, and when they find a cab, and Mary tries to direct it to the hospital. Sherlock overrules her, and that’s the last any of them speak or look at one another on the longest cab ride of her life.

* * *

John is thoughtless.

Wrapped up in his own emotions, he can’t see anyone else. She wants to yell at him for not helping Sherlock up the stairs to 221B. But she's lost that right -- and the right to help Sherlock herself. So she stays silent as they approach the flat.

Mrs. Hudson is waiting when they arrive. Mary gives her a small smile as she greets them, but wishes she weren’t there. This will be difficult enough without an audience.

She walks to the fireplace, surreptitiously glancing around. Mycroft will have cameras here. He almost certainly installed some when Sherlock was taking heroin, even if they weren’t here before. She’ll need to keep in mind her unseen watcher.

Mrs. Hudson makes a very obvious observation about Sherlock looking terrible, and he tries to send her away, ostensibly to fetch him morphine, then snaps at her rudely when she protests that she hasn’t any. She stays in spite of the abuse, and she asks, “What is going on?”

“Bloody good question,” John responds, his gaze still murderous.

“The Watsons are about to have a domestic,” Sherlock says from the doorway. “And fairly quickly, I hope, because we’ve got work to do.”

In spite of everything, somehow Sherlock is on her side still. On the side of the Watsons, of them patching things up. On the side of them all having work to do, together.

John, though.

She shot one of the two people John loves most in the world (the one person, now, she presumes). There is nothing she can say to help. Nothing that’s not forbidden by Mycroft.

“Oh, I have a better question.” John walks toward Mary. He stops a few paces away, staring straight at her, but more through her. “Is everyone I’ve ever met a psychopath?”

It’s not a good question. Sherlock isn’t a psychopath or a sociopath, no matter how much he likes to claim the term when convenient. Moriarty would have had no leverage over a psychopath. John is a medical professional; he knows this as well as she does. What, then, is he really asking? Is he asking whether she’s as much like a psychopath as Sherlock is?

Sherlock answers. “Yes.” All right, then. “Good that we’ve settled that. Anyway, we --”

“Shut up!” John’s shout as he rounds on Sherlock makes Mrs. Hudson jump and clutch at herself. John, blind to everyone else in his rage, doesn’t notice. “And stay shut up. Because this is not funny. Not this time.”

“I didn’t say it was funny,” Sherlock says. But he stills.

John turns back to her, flings angry words in her direction again. He’s not having a conversation with her. She’s not even sure he wants answers. He wants the universe to know he’s angry. “What have I ever done, hmm? My whole life, to deserve you?”

“Everything,” answers Sherlock. They’re both talking about her, not to her. They will sort out her fate without her involvement. She should speak for herself, but she’s all out of words, numb, awaiting the end.

“Sherlock,” John says, “I’ve told you -- shut up.” He turns and faces Sherlock, walks closer.

“Oh, I mean it, seriously,” Sherlock says obstinately. “Everything -- everything you’ve ever done is what you did.”

John gets ominously quiet. “Sherlock, one more word and you will not need morphine.”

Sherlock answers equally softly, eyes locked with John’s. “You were a doctor who went to war. You’re a man who couldn’t stay in the suburbs for more than a month without storming a crack den and beating up a junkie. Your best friend is a sociopath who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. That’s me, by the way. Hello.” He gives a little wave.

Sherlock is walking a dangerous line here; he’s saying out loud the things that John never admits about himself. But with that last bit, he’s implicitly forgiving John by placing himself in the same camp. He’s also making it hard for John to reject these character traits in himself without also appearing to reject Sherlock. It’s a deft move, but she’s not sure if it will work. She stamps out the small flicker of hope she feels.

“Even the landlady used to run a drug cartel,” Sherlock continues.

Mrs. Hudson protests. “It was my husband’s cartel. I was just typing.”

“And exotic dancing,” Sherlock can’t resist adding, though it’s not particularly pertinent.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Mrs. Hudson says, frowning, “if you’ve been YouTubing…”

Sherlock interrupts. “John, you are addicted to a certain lifestyle. You’re abnormally attracted to dangerous situations and people. So is it truly such a surprise that the woman you’ve fallen in love with conforms to that pattern?”

John, nearly crying now, points to her, still looking at Sherlock. “But she wasn’t supposed to be like that,” he argues, begs, so softly she strains to hear. “Why is she like that?”

He directs it all -- the question, the pleading, the hurt -- toward Sherlock only. This is John and Sherlock, talking about her -- and about John -- and she’s just a bystander. An observer from outside the sphere of John’s trust. She feels numb, lost. She wants to leave, but she’s paralyzed, awaiting the official verdict.

Sherlock answers. “Because you chose her,” he says.

John turns away, sounding suddenly, dangerously normal. “Why is everything,” he asks calmly, walking toward her, “always my fault?” He punctuates his sudden shout with a furious kick to a dining room chair (Mrs. Hudson jumps, shouts, and dashes out, but Mary holds still). Apparently, violently angry, betrayed John Watson still won’t hit a woman. She hadn’t been sure -- isn’t sure of any man, any person, in such a moment -- had been braced for action in case of the worst.

John’s chest heaves. He stares at her with such loathing, she has to look away.

Sherlock says softly, “John, listen. Be calm and answer me. What is she?”

Mary isn’t sure what he means. John, either. “My lying wife?” He’s looking at her, but still speaking only to Sherlock.

“No. What is she?”

“And the woman who’s carrying my child who has lied to me since the day I met her?” She meets his gaze at that and bites back a half dozen retorts. His child? She’s doing all the bloody work, but she’s just the carrier. And she’s a liar? Sherlock has routinely lied to him, with and without his knowledge, since the beginning of their time together -- he’s admitted as much a number of times, including the wedding speech. But even as she thinks it all, another part of her thinks, He’s right even when he’s wrong. I’ve hurt him terribly -- both of them. This is all I deserve. She looks at him, dares him to get it over with, to send her away.

But: “No,” Sherlock says. “Not in this flat, not in this room. Right here, right now, what is she?”

She has no idea, but apparently John does. He and Sherlock speak in near-code sometimes, the habit of two people in a long relationship. She’s not familiar with their code, though she and John have their own. John finally inhales sharply and turns back and forth between her and Sherlock, answering, “Okay. Your way. Always your way.”

Clearing his throat, he picks up one of the much-abused dining room chairs and moves it over near the armchairs. He sniffs angrily again and stares at her. “Sit.”

“Why?” she asks cautiously.

John’s voice goes ragefully low once more. He points at the chair. “Because that’s where they sit. The people who come in here with their stories. The clients. That’s all you are now, Mary. You’re a client. This is where you sit and talk, and this --” he gestures toward the armchairs “-- is where we sit and listen. Then we decided if we want you or not.”

He sounds vindictive, possibly even vengeful about it. But it’s true -- they get to decide, he and Sherlock. Everyone in a relationship decides, over and over, when they have reached the breaking point.

John sits. Sherlock crosses and stares at her before sitting too. Mary pauses. She wonders if it might not be better if she decides for them all that this is too broken. If she turns and walks out.

She can’t, though. There’s still a tiny hope, and she can’t leave it. She sits, and she stares at the two men she had hoped to build a life with.

“So.” Sherlock says. “Tell us. From the beginning.”

Mary, very aware of Mycroft’s probable surveillance, swallows. “I can’t tell you --” John snorts, shakes his head. She’s about to lose her only chance. “I can’t tell you everything right now,” she amends, “because there’s so much. But I’ll try.” She bites her lip, stalling. She doesn’t want to watch John’s face as she tells him her ruthless assassin cover story.

Then she remembers -- she doesn’t have to. Mycroft has anticipated such an occasion. She reaches into her bag and pulls out the flash drive he gave her. She slides it across the side table, toward John.

“‘A.G.R.A,’” Sherlock reads. “What’s that?”

She looks at John, clearing her throat. “Er, my initials.” John looks pained, looks away. She keeps speaking to him. “Everything about who I was is on there.” Except it’s not, but she has no way to tell him that -- not with Mycroft listening. “If you love me, don’t read it in front of me.”

John asks, “Why?”

She wants to say, trust me, but that will never work again. “Because you won’t love me when you’ve finished,” she says, trying to swallow back sudden tears, “and I don’t want to see that happen.” She looks away.

John sighs, grabs the drive, and pockets it. She feels a deep relief that he didn’t run to a computer to look at it immediately, and that Sherlock didn’t pluck it from his hand and do it for him.

Christ, Sherlock looks terrible -- she wants to take him to the hospital, right now. Wants John to notice something outside his own pain and help her take Sherlock there. Instead, she asks Sherlock, “How much do you know already?”

Sherlock answers quietly, his normal quick deductions coming slower and more breathily. “By your skill set, you are – or were,” he corrects, raising his eyebrows, “an intelligence agent. Your accent is currently English but I suspect you are not.” She neither confirms nor denies, doesn’t ask whether he detects a hint of American or Slavic in her accent. She just listens. “You’re on the run from something; you’ve used your skills to disappear. Magnussen knows your secret, which is why you were going to kill him; and I assume you befriended Janine,” he pauses, looking intensely pained, “in order to get close to him.”

She wants to run to him, but she forces herself to remain seated. She pretends not to notice. “Oh, you can talk,” she says instead. Sherlock’s lip curls up, and he rumbles pained amusement.

John scowls. “Oh, look at you two,” he huffs. “You should have gotten married.”

Sherlock just looks at him, hollow and sad and raw. There’s too much pain in this room; it’s unbearable, and it’s getting them nowhere. “The stuff Magnussen has on me,” she says, “I would go to prison for the rest of my life.”

“So you were just going to kill him,” John says. And oh, he’s going to take the moral high ground over that? As if he hasn’t killed bad men before.

“People like Magnussen should be killed,” she says, struggling to remain calm. ”That’s why there are people like me.”

John punches the chair with his fist. “Perfect,” he says sarcastically. “So that’s what you were? An assassin?”

No, John -- someone who kills whomever the government orders them to. As soldiers do. She bites back the retort.

He glances at Sherlock. “How could I not see that?”

“You did see that,” she says. “And you married me.” She follows Sherlock’s line of argument from earlier, which she believes to be basically correct. John didn’t know what she was, but he knew she was exciting, that he didn’t get nearly as restless with her as with others. She was also kind, nurturing, thoughtful when he was grieving. But if not for her own appetite for adventure and her own unflinching sympathy for his violent past, that wouldn’t have been enough.

She tilts her head toward Sherlock, still watching John. “Because he’s right. It’s what you like.” John just stares back until she lowers her eyes.

“So, Mary,” Sherlock says, with a slight emphasis on her fake name, “Any documents that Magnussen has concerning yourself, you want,” he pauses, swallowing before continuing shakily, “extracted and returned.”

Of course, that’s the last thing she and Mycroft want. “Why would you help me?” she asks instead of answering.

“Because,” Sherlock says, “you saved my life.”

“Sor-sorry, what?” John asks, echoing her own thoughts.

Sherlock, through strained breaths, tries to explain his reasoning, She watches him, feeling John’s eyes burning into her as she does. “When I happened on you and Magnussen, you had a problem. More specifically, you had a witness. The solution, of course, was simple.” She tries not to laugh at that. “Kill us both and leave.”

“However, sentiment got the better of you,” he continues, and she watches him with fascination, awaiting his justification for her actions. “One precisely calculated shot to incapacitate me,” Sherlock explains, “in the hope that it would buy you more time to negotiate my silence.” She wishes it had been far more precise. “Of course, you couldn’t shoot Magnussen,” Sherlock says, looking at John. “On the night that both of us broke into the building, your own husband would become a suspect,” except that John’s gun and her gun have entirely different bullets, but she is hardly going to argue with him, “so --”

Sherlock’s every breath is labored -- each one audible, countable, no longer just a background bodily process. She watches him nervously. “You calculated --” breath “-- that Magnussen --” breath “-- would use the fact of your involvement rather than sharing the information with the police --” breath “-- as is his M.O.” Breath. “And then you left the way you came.” Thank God she didn’t actually have to make the climb back down.

Sherlock asks her, between breaths, “Have I missed anything?” Only the biggest thing of all. Only your brother. He looks satisfied, though; he’s not going to dig further. He thinks he understands her reasoning under pressure. He doesn’t, but he’s somehow still on her side. She marvels at him.

“How did she save your life?” John asks.

“She phoned the ambulance.”

“I phoned the ambulance,” John argues.

“She phoned first.” Well, she phoned Mycroft, but close enough. She’s wondering, eyeing Sherlock, if she shouldn’t be doing so again. “You didn’t find me for another five minutes,” Sherlock tells John. She grimaces at that; John was probably tending to Janine. “Left to you, I would have died. The average arrival time for a London ambulance is…” Sherlock raises his arm dramatically as footsteps sound on the stairs.

Paramedics rush in. “Did somebody call an ambulance?”

“--Eight minutes,” Sherlock finishes. John stands; she just stares at Sherlock admiringly -- how does he always pull off such theatrical flairs? -- and with a great deal of relief.

“Did you bring any morphine?” Sherlock asks. “I asked on the phone.”

“We were told there was a shooting,” the paramedic says uncertainly.

“There was, last week,” Sherlock explains. “But I believe I’m bleeding internally and my pulse is very erratic.” He holds up his wrist, where he’s taking his own pulse. He pushes himself up out of the chair -- oh, not a good idea, not now -- and gasps, “You may need to restart my heart.” the last syllable is a near-shout as his knees buckle under him. She and John both rush forward to catch him, and the EMTs follow.

“Come on Sherlock,” John repeats twice. He and the detective clutch each other as Mary reluctantly steps away and makes room for the paramedics.

“John?” Sherlock says.”John, Magnussen is all that matters now. You can trust Mary. She saved my life.”

“She shot you,” John says. They are all forcefully reminded of this fact as Sherlock collapses, admitting, “Mixed messages, I grant you,” before falling and groaning painfully. John follows him to the floor, repeating his name before finally releasing him to the paramedics. He straightens, and gives Mary one long glance that doesn’t look remotely convinced by Sherlock’s pronouncement. Then he follows the paramedics downstairs.

Mary accompanies them silently, trying to make eye contact with John, but he won’t look at her as he climbs into the ambulance. Mrs. Hudson trails behind them all, fussing and promising to meet them at the hospital soon. When the ambulance door closes, she heads back toward the flat. Mary numbly follows.

Mrs. Hudson turns in the doorway, blocking her path. “I don’t know what exactly is going on, but I think it would be best if you sort things out with the boys before you return here.” Her tone is pleasant but firm.

“Oh,” Mary says, startled. “I was just planning to gather a few things for Sherlock before going to hospital.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Mrs. Hudson says, not budging.

“Right. Okay,” Mary says. She turns and walks away from Baker Street.