Anderson and Donovan were clicking through images on a laptop, pointing and discussing things in low voices when Greg and John and reached the interview room. They looked up as they walked in, and John was gratified to see the concern in their faces.

'Is he - okay?' Anderson asked.

'He's still alive,' John said. 'That's the best we can hope for, for now.'

'Lets concentrate on finding the bastard who did this,' Greg said. 'Any updates?'

'Dimmock has gone across to the medical centre to try to get some more information out of Magnussen,' Sally Donovan said. 'Tyler is working the crime scene with the forensics team - trying to get some DNA from the shooter if we can. Which reminds me, John - we need a DNA sample from you as well, so we can rule your DNA out.'

'Fine,' John said numbly, opening his mouth as Andersen approached him with a swab.

'Right,' Greg said. 'Now that's done, John we need you to have look at these photos we've had sent across and tell us where exactly Sherlock was in the room when you found him, so we know where to concentrate the search.'

The lights were bright in the interview room, and John felt oddly light-headed and disconnected. He ought to phone Mary, to tell her what had happened. He ought to phone Mycroft - shouldn't he? Sherlocks parents even. Christ, he didn't even have their phone number. How would they react? Would they think this was just another magic trick?

'John!' came Greg's voice, making him start.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I was just thinking -'

'John this is important,' Greg said urgently. 'We need to find the shooter before they come back for a second crack.'

'What - you think it was planned?' John said incredulously. 'You can't be serious. Nobody knew that we were going to Magnussen's office. You can't think this was a hit on Sherlock.'

'We're not ruling anything else at this point in time,' Greg said. 'I'm having armed officers placed on the doors to the operating theatre. It might not be chance, John. People don't generally get shot just by surprising intruders. Whoever beat you to Magnussen's office, it was a professional job. They hacked the security system to get in from the helipad doors. That security system was virtually impenetrable. Whoever beat you there, knew what they were doing. They weren't there by chance, and shooting Sherlock could have been a calculated move.'

John pulled out one of the chairs placed round the table and slumped down into it; his legs no longer feeling up to the effort of standing.

'Now, can you show us where Sherlock was when you found him?' Greg was asking

'Here - in front of the mirror,' John said, indicating with his finger on the laptop screen. Anderson used the mouse to click on the position that he indicated. At the touch of a button, the outline of a man appeared, centred on the cross. John took a deep breath. It made it look a little too much like a murder scene for his liking.

'Like this?' he asked.

'Other way round,' John said, 'and further from the door.'

Anderson made some more adjustments, until the outline was in the position that John remembered Sherlock lying.

'And Magnussen? Where was he?' Greg asked.

'Over there,' John said, indicating. Another click and another outline appeared.

'So the shooter must have been between them, yes?'

'No idea,' John said, rubbing the back of the neck, wondering why it had to be so bloody hot in there. 'Sherlock heard something from upstairs. 'A chair scraping perhaps, to let him know that Magnussen was upstairs. He must have disturbed the intruder.'

'Did he know there was someone else there?'

'Of course. We'd found Janine and the security guard out cold.'

'Did Sherlock have any idea who the intruder could be?'

John opened his mouth to explains about the perfume trail, but something stopped him, it was ridiculous, of course it was ridiculous, so instead he shook his head. 'Not really, he said,' unsure why he was so unwilling to give this piece of information away.

Greg nodded. 'So how about you take us back to the beginning John. And tell us everything. No holding back. We can always - sanitise the report a little later to keep his nibs out of trouble.'

And so John recounted the events of the evening. Meeting Sherlock on the ground floor of CM News at 7.30, as instructed. Sherlock taking them through the security barriers and up to the third floor canteen, where they had got coffee, and waited for twenty minutes or so for the building to start emptying. He tried to gloss over how they had got into Magnussen's office, but Greg wasn't having any of it.

'There are layers and layers of security preventing anyone from getting into that office, he said. 'And what, Magnussen's PA just let him in?'

'He knows her,' John said succinctly.

Greg was clicking through images on his laptop as he talked, bringing up a picture of Janine's security pass. 'How did he-,' he started, then, 'Hang on. Wasn't she Mary's bridesmaid at the wedding? Irish girl? Pretty but mildly terrifying? But why would he let her into Magnussen's office?'

'Um...' John hesitated..

'John...' Greg said with a warning edge to his voice.

'Sherlock and Janine have sort of been - seeing each other,' John said.

Donovan choked on a mouthful of coffee, spitting it across the papers on the table. 'Seeing each other, as in...'

'My reaction exactly,' John said.

'Sherlock has got a girlfriend,' Sally repeated in disbelief.

'So what, her boyfriend - and that's definitely something I'll have to process later, by the way - her boyfriend pitches up to see her at work and she just lets him into one of the most secure offices in London? How long have they been seeing each other anyway?'

'A month,' John said with a wince.

'So how did Sherlock know that she'd let him in?'

'He - um - sort of proposed, ' John said, waiting for the explosion.

But there wasn't one. There was just a stunned silence.

'Right,' Greg said, slowly. 'So he meets Magnussen's PA at a wedding in a fortunate twist of fate, presumably wines and dines her to get her to go out with him, and then gets engaged to the girl all in order to get into his office? And was that all it was, do we think? I mean they weren't really...'

'Why are you asking me?' John said. 'All I know is that she was coming out of Sherlock's bedroom this morning - where incidentally Sherlock hadn't been all night, I found him - never mind. But she's moved the coffee in his flat and they were sharing bathroom time this morning, so draw your own conclusions from that.'

'Crikey,' Andersen said, sounding shell-shocked. 'So maybe him and Molly...'

'No!' three voices exploded at once.

'Can we leave your crack-pot theories about his leap of death just for once and focus on the case in hand?' Greg said with a sigh.

'Fine by me,' John said wearily. Christ he was tired. His day had started all to quickly with his decision to be a good Samaritan and rescue Issac. And since then he'd what - discovered his best friend was a junkie, or at least doing a very good imitation of one, that he had a girlfriend, had an audience with arguably the most dangerous man in the Western world, listened to the same man piss into the 221b fireplace, broken into an office with fourteen layers of security, watched Sherlock get engaged and then less than ten minutes later found him bleeding and nearly dying on Magnussen's office floor. It had been an extremely long day, and his bed seemed a very appealing place right now.

'So,' Greg was saying, 'Janine let you into the lift, you went up into the office, and then...'

'She wasn't waiting at the top as we expected,' John said. We went into the office and found her out cold on the floor, she'd been hit across the back of the head by the look of it, the security guard was in a similar state in the room next door,' John said. 'I checked that they were both breathing. Sherlock realised that someone else had beaten us to it. Then he heard a noise from upstairs and went to investigate. He told me to stay with Janine. I stupidly complied.'

'If you hadn't, you might both had been shot,' Greg said reasonably.

'Possibly.'

'And then?'

'Um - then Janine woke up, closely followed by the security guard. The security guard pulled his panic alarm, but I got Janine to turn it off before it could scare off the intruder. Once I knew she was okay, I went to find Sherlock.

'And you found him lying on the floor in Magnussen's office, as you've described'

'Yes.'

'Any sign of anyone else?'

'I don't know,' John said, shaking his head, and taking off his coat, pulling open the neck of his shirt. 'I don't think so.' The room suddenly seemed hotter than ever, the walls closer. He felt trapped, and a little nauseated. 'I need some air,' he said abruptly, turning and walking out of the interview room, through the Emergency Department, aiming for the ambulance entrance, knowing that was always the quickest way out, ignoring the curious glances of the crews waiting to offload as he hit the button on the wall by the doors to get out.

Cool air hit his face and he started to feel better almost immediately. Another panic attack. The second one in less than an hour. He needed to get a handle on this. He needed - Mary, he needed Mary. He sunk down on a bench a little way from the Emergency Department and turned his phone over in his hands, debating calling her, asking her to come here to be with him, but he couldn't bear the thought of having to explain it all again, not even to her. He checked the time on his phone. A quarter past nine.. How could it possibly be so early? A little over two hours since he had wandered out of the tube and walked to meet Sherlock at what he knew now to be the building that housed Magnussen's office. He had been whistling a little as he went, fired up by the challenge of a case after the weeks of boredom. If he had refused to go, would Sherlock still have gone alone? If he had stayed at home with Mary then would events have turned out differently? Would Sherlock have been more cautious or less so? Would he still have been shot? Would he have been found? What if - what if. No point in wondering that now.

All that mattered was that Sherlock was lying on the operating table upstairs, fighting for his life, and he needed to go back into that room and help Lestrade and his team work out who had shot Sherlock and why. And he couldn't do it. Not alone. Sherlock was the one who solved crimes, not him. Alone he was - useless, and lost, and he had absolutely no idea how to do this.

'Brought you this,' said a gruff voice next to him, and a can of Coke was pushed into his hand, as Greg Lestrade came and sat next to him.

'Thanks,' John said, resting the cold can against his forehead for a moment, hoping it would help to focus him.

'I would have brought you coffee, but the machine's out of order. Bloody vandals,' Greg said.

'No, this is good, This is better,' John said, opening the can with a hiss and taking a swig. Cold, sweet. It helped.

'Look John, I know this is - well this is shit, isn't it?' Greg said. 'Here am I trying to get a statement out of you and-'

'You're just trying to do your job, Greg,' John cut in. 'I know that. I'm just - I'm not handling it very well.'

'Can't have been easy. Finding him like that.'

'No,'

'But you got him here alive, John. You did good.'

John shook his head slightly. 'I did very little in the end. There was very little that I could do. And you know the worse thing? I thought that I was going to have to crack his chest in the ambulance, and I didn't know if I could do it.'

'If you had to, then you would have.'

'Would I? I'm not so sure.' John held out his hands. They were shaking.

'Fuck. Look what the bastard has done to me.'

'Done to all of us, John. Again. If he pulls through this then we can toss a coin over who gets to punch him first.'

They sat there in companiable silence for a while. Then John took another swig of his Coke, and said, 'I don't know why he's let this case do this to him, Greg. I don't know why he's gone to the extents that he has to try to get to Magnussen.'

'Is that what this is all about?'

John nodded. 'I think so.'

'And did he really get engaged?'

'Only for about two minutes, but - oh fuck, who's going to tell Janine?'

'Sally's going to interview her in a minute,' Greg said. 'I suspect she might slip it into the conversation.'

John groaned. 'Tell her not to. I'll do it.'

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

'Have you told Mary yet?'

'No- I. I'd rather not tell her until we know - which way its going to go. She'd only worry, and I want to spare her that if I can. She's fond of Sherlock, you know? She likes him, she thinks of him as a friend - a good friend. She'll be devastated. I'd rather be able to tell her that he's going to be okay.'

'And Mycroft?'

John looked at Greg in surprise. 'You mean you haven't told him?'

'Give me a chance, John. We only got the shout just over an hour ago. In that time, I've deployed a scenes of crime team, sealed off the area, and carried out preliminary interviews with the two main witnesses. I think that's pretty bloody fast work. Besides, I assumed that you would have told him.'

'Not yet.'

'You want me to send an officer round?'

'No - I'll, I'll do it. I'll phone him. Sherlock's parents will need to be told too, won't they?'

'His parents?'

'Yeah. I met them not long after his return from the dead. I didn't even know that they existed, did you?'

'No - I always assumed that he and Mycroft were manufactured in a laboratory somewhere, or something. I can't imagine them all sitting round eating Sunday lunch, somehow. They're always so - other, so removed. What are they like, his parents I mean?'

'Normal,' John murmured. 'Very, very normal. Well, no time like the present, I suppose.' He flicked through his contacts until he found Mycroft Holmes' number, then pressed the button to dial, but instead of Mycroft's voice, he got Anthea's.

'Anthea, it's John Watson. Is Mycroft there?'

'No, he's in a meeting. Can I take a message?'

'No, I need to talk to him. It's urgent.'

'He can't be disturbed at the moment, John. Can I get him to call you when he's free?'

'Is he likely to be long?'

'Difficult to say. Several hours I would say. Possibly all night.'

'Can you get a message to him?'

'It's not that kind of meeting, John.'

'Anthea, Sherlock's been shot,' John said, horrified to realise that his voice was cracking. 'Mycroft needs to know.'

'How bad?' Anthea's clipped tones demanded.

'Well he's still alive,' John said. 'But it's touch and go. He's in surgery at the Royal London. Just - tell Mycroft that will you? When you can. Tell him that unless he's preventing World War III, he needs to come and be with his brother; because it might well be his last chance.'

Huge thanks to Sevenpercent and ThessalyMc for the critique and suggestions. And thank you to all the lovely people who've left reviews. They're the fuel that keeps me writing!