A/N: Thank you so much to everyone reading. This was posted a few hours ago, was taken down due to site issues, tweaked slightly and is being put back up. Feedback revered. x

John hurried over to the kitchenette in Greg and Melissa's room and filled a glass of water while Sherlock settled Molly on the bed, or tried to. When he came back to the bed with it, she was trying to sit up.

"No… I'm all right, I'm fine, I just need a minute…"

"You're not fine, Molly, you've got food poisoning." John did a quick calculation in his head. Salmonella took at least eight hours to kick in. Dinner had been at seven o'clock, or nine hours before. "There was something wrong with the chicken at dinner," he admitted, sitting down on the mattress beside her and, not knowing what else to do, awkwardly rubbing between the shoulder blades. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat.

"Why didn't you warn me?" she asked in a little voice.

"I didn't want everyone paranoid that they were about to get sick if they weren't…" John paused as Molly vomited again, or tried to, in the little plastic wastepaper tub he'd brought from the other room, not otherwise knowing what to do with it.

"John, will you please listen to me? There was nothing wrong with that chicken," Sherlock protested, by now back on his feet and pacing around, thinking at supersonic speed. "I'm extremely sensitive to taste and fussy about what I eat. I would never eat something that had been contaminated, and even if I did, there's no chance I'd have done so and not be ill as a result. Bacteria, I'm sorry to say, works the same way on my body as it does on anyone else's. I also met Elizabeth Hayden, and she was a highly-strung, unpleasant woman who clearly loved to make vexatious complaints about things and was probably experiencing an extreme amount of buyer's remorse after spending far more money than anyone in their right mind would spend on a wedding reception. In addition, let's look at the facts: Salmonella Enterocolitis is uncommon during winter and generally takes at least twelve hours to take effect on a healthy adult, and it certainly doesn't bloody discriminate between people the way you're claiming it does. The chicken wasn't responsible, because this isn't salmonella."

"It has to be, Sherlock. You just don't get food poisoning from, I don't know…"

"You're persisting in the assumption that this is food poisoning. Please, I realise this is difficult for you, but consider other angles to this."

"Oh, what, so you're saying this is poison poisoning…?"

Molly heaved into the tub again, but by this stage there was very little left to come up. John handed her the glass of water and urged her to sip at it, ignoring Sherlock for half a minute while he did. Finally, he took the glass back to the sink to refill it.

"The best thing you can do right now, Sherlock, is please solve the murder as quickly as possible," he said. "So at least I don't have to worry about my wife and children being locked in with a demented killer as well…"

"John," Molly gasped out, trying to sit up again.

"No, no…" he said, rushing back over to her and trying to ease her down again. "Stay down, Lolly. It's fine. You're fine…" Looking back at Sherlock, he saw that he was now, apparently, absorbed in the contents of his phone. And he didn't appear to be texting for help, either.

"You're not seriously Googling salmonella, are you?" John demanded, snatching the phone straight out of his hands and looking at the screen. "Sherlock, why the hell do you always have to be right all the-"

He stopped, still staring at the screen, and let out a breath. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.

"Lolly," John said distractedly over one shoulder. "We're just going outside for two minutes, is that okay? Two minutes. Just lie still, try to relax, and have some more water…" He went back to the bed, gave her a rather absent kiss on the forehead, and led Sherlock out to the corridor, shutting the door behind them.

"You don't have to sneak around researching things, Sherlock," he said immediately, in a voice barely above a whisper. "And I'm not an idiot, obviously it's going to have occurred to me, too. She's thirty-two weeks. As far as we know, the twins are just under five pounds each. If they're born today, they'll more than likely need oxygen at birth, will probably have jaundice, maybe have wet lung or transient tachypnoea, and may not be able to latch or swallow properly. None of these things are life-threatening… if they're born in a hospital with access to a neonatal intensive care unit."

Sherlock stared at him.

"So…" John rested his palm against the wall, as if it was holding him up, and swallowed. "So salmonella holds a really high risk of triggering premature labour. And that's why I need this to be salmonella, Sherlock. I need to get my head around it. Be prepared for…"

He trailed off, and Sherlock waited for it: prepared for the worst.

"Prepared for whatever might happen," John said instead. "I need to get things in my head… get them happening there, in case they really happen…"

"I know," Sherlock said. Then, after a long silence, "What can I do to help?"

A million options were already going through his head. The primary one involved helicopters and flamethrowers forging a path through the winter storm outside to convey Molly—and Mel, for that matter—to the nearest hospital. Twenty minutes by helicopter flight. Dead easy. It was a wonder nobody else had thought this up before now…

"Solve the case, Sherlock," John said. "As quickly as you can. Because… you remember what I asked you to do when Molly had the twins? Even if it's today, I still want you to do it."

"Are you sure? Hayley's—"

"I know. But…" John broke off with a wince and coughed hard into his hand. "Sherlock, if something happens… I want to know that Charlie was safe with you when it happened."

"If this means you're pregnant, Mel, you've got a hell of a lot of explaining to do," Lestrade said cheerfully, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. He had no idea whether a constant string of jokes was helping Mel, but if they were hurting her, she'd definitely let him know.

"I'll be too busy screaming to explain anything," she said, in between heaves. She'd been kneeling at first, but had rocked back into a sitting position to take the pressure off the tiles off her knees. "And then we'll get straight onto suing your urologist."

"Oh, let's do that anyway," he said. "Just to pay him back for causing me the worst pain I've ever been through. I'd sooner lose a limb than go through all that again." He thought, but did not say, that Julie's insistence on his having a vasectomy after Matthew's birth—a premature, emergency caesarean that had made her terrified of further pregnancies—had probably been the first step in the disintegration of their marriage. They'd both caused each other physical pain, in their own way, over their children.

Melissa suddenly looked alarmed. "Greg," she said, "I've never told you this, because I didn't think it mattered, but you know the older method of vasectomy can heal itself without you realising it, right?"

"Oh, stop winding me up."

"… Said the father of a woman I work with. Google it if you don't believe me, darling." She paused to heave again. "Luckily," she said as soon as she was able, "this is definitely food poisoning."

"Luckily for who?" he teased.

"For me," she retorted. "But on the ridiculously remote chance that I'm also harbouring a foetus who managed to get around your vasectomy and my religious observation of the Pill, we're calling him Houdini and alerting the Vatican."

He laughed, then decided, at the last second, that now was really not the time for a conversation on what exactly would happen if Little Houdini did manage to come through after all. No, it wasn't likely. But accidents happened. "Looks like Molly got the jump on you and stole our bed," he said instead.

"Fine," Melissa muttered. "She can have it. I'll be making sweet, sweet love to this toilet bowl for a while..." She looked up at him through red-rimmed eyes; then, abruptly, she failed to aim, and he failed to move.

"Jesus," he said. "And I'm in bare feet, too..."

"I'm so sorry," she gasped, and she sounded it. "That's easily the most unsexy thing I've ever done..."

"Yeah, you owe me a new pair of feet, you've ruined these ones," he said, wiping the ones God had given him with a wad of toilet paper and throwing it into the toilet bowl. "Would you be jealous if I told you that you aren't even the first woman who's thrown up on me?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm just furious. I'm making plans as we speak to file for divorce." She smiled weakly, breaking off into a grimace and vomiting into the toilet bowl again, making it this time. "This," she said when she was able, "is horrible. It's godawful. It's the food poisoning from hell…"

"Yeah," he muttered, swiping at his forehead. He hated to admit it, but a wave of nausea and a cold sweat had just started to encroach on his role as caretaker. "I'm starting to see what you mean now…"

"What, you want some of this sweet porcelain real estate, my love?"

He didn't answer. Instead, for the first, last, and only time in his life, he physically pushed her aside in a hostile takeover of said porcelain real estate.

"Oh, look, maybe you're pregnant," she said, though she was running the ball of her hand over his shoulder with a lot more tenderness than she often used with him.

"Shut your face," he muttered mildly.

"I'd love to shut my face for the time being," she replied. "At least, I'm kind of sick of vomit coming out of it..."

He didn't reply in words, but his agreement was obvious, all the same.

"Do you know," she went on, "I think we've seriously hit rock bottom in the gross stakes, and less than a day after we signed papers, too."

"Don't say that," he said. "You know what generally happens after the vomiting, right?"

"No bloody way," she said. "Go get your own bathroom for that, it's not a tandem event." Then, after a pause, "Greg, how the hell do we both have food poisoning if we didn't even eat the same thing at dinner?"

He was just pondering this one too when there was a businesslike rap on the bathroom door, and they both heard Donovan's voice from behind it. "Hey, can I open the door?"

"Why in God's name would anyone want to?" was the rhetorical response from Greg, but she was already fumbling with the door handle. Abruptly, she sprang back, apparently as the smell hit her in the face.

"Jesus," she said.

"Told you." Lestrade swallowed heavily in spite of himself, leaning over a little to run the bath tap and splash cold water on his face. "I'd stand well back if I were you, or you'll take a direct hit. Get any important information from our friends downstairs?"

Sally's eyebrows shot up, as if she was surprised he was still interested in the case. "Alibis all over the place," she said. "But every guest's alibi is that they were with at least one other guest at the time the murder happened, and there's not a lot that staff can verify. I guess that's to be expected, past three in the morning. Maureen and her husband were in bed on the second floor. Stewart and Alec Hayden were in a private room off the bar, playing poker with Ishani Parikh from two thirty until the alarm was raised."

"Who raised it, anyway?"

"Allison Marr. She heard a commotion behind the door as she was passing along the corridor with towels. She knocked, no answer; tried the door, no answer. But whatever she heard behind it scared the shit out of her, so she ran downstairs for the keys to the door and raised hell."

"Would it be possible," Melissa said wearily, "for you two to have this conversation somewhere else but in here?"

"No." Greg swallowed again. "Sorry. They'll never get the vomit off the carpet." He took a deep breath. Donovan had just given him unexpected good news. He had no idea how Sherlock was at card games, except that he'd once nearly got the shite beaten out of the pair of them for exposing how Three Card Monte worked in front of a charlatan in a pub one night six years ago. But it was a well-known fact among people who knew him that Greg Lestrade was a more than competent Texas Hold 'Em player. He'd competed in tournaments for cash and won more than once. "Right, Donovan, take notes," he said. "You can play poker with two or three, but it's not a great game and if that's what they were really doing, they should remember a lot of this, okay? Separate them and don't give them a chance to confer with each other or send signals about what you're asking. I want details of the game. Where each of them were sitting. What hands they played. Ask them if they were playing the ace high or low, which cards were wild, what everyone anted when the cards were dealt, how the game went, who won, how much. Details. As many details as possible."

"Okay." Donovan hesitated. "But why?" she asked. "We know none of them were in the room when Elizabeth was killed. You saw them all go in, right?"

Lestrade wasn't coherent enough just then to identify what was troubling him about the scenario when the room had been broken into. It was true he'd definitely seen all three of them, and none of them had been in the room before the door had been broken open. But there was something else… and he needed to concentrate on throwing up just then, and not throwing up on Melissa, if he could help it.

"Yeah," he mumbled finally. "I'll figure that out later. Just go ask, okay?"

After gingerly inspecting the disordered bedclothes on the bed John and Molly had just vacated, Hayley drew the covers over and curled up, pulling one of the pillows under her head. In the cradle nearby, Charlie was still asleep, so heavily that she'd been genuinely alarmed and debated trying to wake her up, just in case there was something wrong. Having nothing to do but listen to Charlie's breathing and the muffled sounds of the Hall's guests in the rooms around her, she was about to drop off to sleep when there was a gentle knock on the door. She got up and went to answer it, expecting either her father or John and genuinely surprised to see Jacob Dyer.

"Hey," she said in a soft voice. She threw her arms around his neck to give him a squeeze, then looked around the corridor to see if they were being watched, more out of habit than necessity. Neither of them had quite managed to shake off the habit of sneaking around when they were each other, like a pair of mutual thieves, even though there was now nobody to hide the relationship from. Even Jake's mother had stopped scowling at Hayley every time the two came into contact with one another.

"How are you?" he asked a little anxiously, hands on her shoulders. "You're feeling all right…?"

"Yes," she said, frowning. "Why wouldn't I be…?"

"Everyone's come down with food poisoning… okay, well, not everyone. I'm all right. But your dad and Mel are pretty sick, and so's Molly."

"Christ," she said, in the open-faced way she'd inherited from her father, but hadn't realised yet. "When you say 'pretty sick'..."

"Not a lot you can do except hold the fort here, I think," he said. "I wouldn't think anyone's in any real trouble, but they're not having a good time, put it that way. I came to see if you were okay, if you wanted a hand with…" He waved a hand at the cradle, clearly drawing a blank on Tiny Watson's name.

"Charlie," Hayley supplied. Jake, who loved small children even when they were being difficult, and who rarely had the opportunity to interact with Charlie, tiptoed over to the cradle and peeped over the bars.

He smiled. "She's cute," he said.

"She is, a bit," Hayley had to admit. "When she's asleep. Speaking of… it's still dark. Aren't you tired?"

"Buggered."

"I wasn't asking about your private hobbies, Jake…"

He chuckled, a little slap-happy for lack of sleep, and she slipped her hands under his arms, as if he was Charlie's age and she was trying to pick him up. He folded back onto the bed, where they curled up, legs intertwined; searching, listening.

"Listen," Jake finally murmured. "I have to go. Donovan will be looking for me. I assume she's in charge while your dad's under the weather."

She brushed his hair off his forehead and kissed his nose. "Okay."

"Call me if you start to feel sick, or if you need help with Charlie, okay?"

"Yep."

But Jake burrowed his face into her shoulder and kissed it, reluctant to leave. "Hayley," he said, voice muffled by her hair. "Once this is all over, we really need to tell your dad."