A/N- Thanks are not nearly enough, but I offer them anyway. Jolie Black (Patience Personified), sevenpercent, ThessalyMc, and the anonymous medical beta, you are without equals. - GW

Battlefield medicine is a proving ground like no other. No matter how prepared you think you are, the reality dwarfs everything you've been told to expect, and anything you could have imagined. It isn't just the fact that you're working literally under fire, or that you could be killed or maimed, just like your patients, at any moment. It's more than the noise, and the screaming, and the devastation that explosives and bullets inflict on human flesh. It's the realization that no matter what you do, tomorrow will be a repeat of today. The futility is the greatest shock of all, and it can be paralyzing. John never let it dim his determination to save every life, no matter the odds. He quickly discovered that the more desperate the situation, the sharper his instincts became. His colleagues agreed. Even if it looked like your number was up, John Watson would change the game if anyone could.

They should see him now. Futility personified.

At every turn, he has been one beat too late. One step too slow. It's not that his fabled instincts failed him, or that he doubted what they were trying to tell him. He did something that would have gotten him killed on the battlefield, and could have the same result for Sherlock. He hesitated.

The irony isn't lost on him. He waited too long to act, and now waiting is all he can do.

Sherlock is breathing on his own, and in no immediate danger. The arrhythmia bears watching, but has shown no indication of worsening. When his lab results come back, they expect to find morphine and cocaine in addition to the succinylcholine. The combination would explain a lot of what they're seeing, but not all of it. This persistent unresponsiveness is not right. The succinylcholine has dissipated as evidenced by the fact that he's breathing again. Even a heavy dose of morphine shouldn't have him in this state. Cocaine would account for the arrhythmia, but it would also counteract the sedative effects.

But that assumes there was something more than succinylcholine in the injection. There is another explanation that no one but him seems ready to consider, and it's just as likely as the drugs combination. For all the times he's sagely advised others not to anticipate the worst, he can't seem to convince himself to do anything but. No matter how unlikely the worst case scenario might be, images of what life would be like for Sherlock with that incredible brain irretrievably ruined keep running though his mind in an endless loop.

He knows what Sherlock would say. It's a waste of energy and brain power to visualize a worst case scenario against which there is no recourse. The time to mitigate the damage has passed. Wallowing in guilt, real or imagined, is pointless and self-defeating.

All true. With much softer words, he's said the same thing himself to the terrified families of patients in his care, and saw the same doubt in their eyes. He had always thought he understood what they were feeling. But being told that all you can do is wait is torture, no matter how true and well-intentioned the words. He will never say them again.

A nurse has been in to check on Sherlock twice since the doctor let John come in to sit with him forty minutes ago. Both times were in response to the alarm that went off when his heart slipped into another bothersome spurt of arrhythmia. Both times, it settled down a few seconds after she came into the room. She's just come in for the third time. She watches the monitor for a moment, two fingers pressed to Sherlock's carotid. This time, she leans down to talk to him, too. "I think you're just doing this to get my attention. You'll get farther if you just open those pretty blue eyes and ask me for a date." She straightens up and winks at John, then leaves them to go on with whatever she was doing when Sherlock interrupted her.

He hears the door open behind him again a moment later and turns to look, thinking she's come back for something, but it's not her. "Greg. I didn't know you were still here."

The DI steps just far enough into the room to let the door close behind him. "I just got back, actually. When you came in here with the doctor, I went on to the crime scene. That's where I was headed earlier when they called to tell me you'd already left in the ambulance." He walks to the foot of the bed and watches Sherlock for a moment. "How is he?"

"Stubbornly resisting all attempts to wake him up."

Greg chuckles softly. "He's probably not unconscious at all. Just holed up in that Mind Palace of his until he comes up with a way to make this look like he wasn't wrong about Ellis."

"He wasn't wrong."

Greg turns to him with a frown. "Of course he was. What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that Ellis all but confessed when we talked to him this afternoon. It looks like Manning may have been working with him, but Ellis is the killer."

Greg looks down for a moment. "He's almost never wrong, John, but it does happen. And you have to admit that he's been all over the map on this from the start. Hell, he went back and forth a dozen times on whether there even was a case to investigate. First the drug was the key, and then it wasn't. The Internet was a link, and he discarded that. There was no suspect, and then ten minutes after you hear Ellis' name for the first time, he's suddenly the killer." He glances at Sherlock, and lowers his voice. "He hasn't been himself since he came back. This is the first case you two have worked in a long time. I can't be the only one who's noticed a difference."

"He hasn't changed, but everything he came back to has."

Greg meets his gaze and holds it. "The doctor said she thinks there could be morphine and cocaine in his system, too."

"He's not using drugs, Greg."

"I didn't say he was."

"You're as transparent as a pane of glass. And you're not the first person who's wondered about that tonight. Armstrong saw the needle tracks."

As if on cue, the doctor comes through the doors. "Dr. Watson, I've got the lab results."

John stands up as Dr. Armstrong crosses to the bed and leans down with a penlight to check Sherlock's eyes.

"The succinylcholine is confirmed, and the morphine." She lifts one eyelid and shines the light into it. "But it's the ke-"

Sherlock's eyes snap open, and he sucks in a huge breath. Armstrong pulls back in surprise, and John moves in immediately.

"Sherlock, it's John. Look at-"

His response is explosive. Sherlock is instantly in motion. Flailing and kicking, fists blindly striking out and connecting hard.

Greg moves in to grab Sherlock's shoulders, which puts his face squarely in the way of a blindly thrown punch that knocks him back a step. John ducks under the flying fists to hold Sherlock down, but it only seems to accelerate whatever is going on with him. He starts thrashing so violently that, for an instant, John thinks it might be a seizure, but the actions are too deliberate.

Armstrong presses the intercom and calls for assistance and a dose of haloperidol, then moves to the end of the bed to help. A moment later, two orderlies come through the doors, one of them the man who escorted John from this room earlier. John is still trying to talk to Sherlock, shouting his name, ordering him to stop. There is absolutely no response, and the struggle continues to escalate. Even with five people holding on to him, Sherlock is by no means under control.

A woman hurries into the room and hands the sedative to Armstrong who quickly injects it into the IV port.

Sherlock's struggles weaken at once, and his eyes glaze over. A few seconds later, he goes limp, and his eyes close.

The tableau holds for a few seconds more before everyone lets go, and the room takes a collective breath.

John wraps both hands around the railing and bows his head, stunned by what he just witnessed.

"What the hell just happened?" Greg is rubbing gingerly at the reddening spot where Sherlock's fist connected with his jaw.

"That was an unfortunate demonstration of what I was about to tell you," Armstrong says to John. "The third drug in the injection wasn't cocaine. It was ketamine. A significant amount of it."

John quickly runs the differential in his head. Ketamine psychosis from a high dosage compared to hypoxic brain injury. The symptoms would be similar, but the prognosis would be devastatingly different. Ketamine psychosis is temporary, but damage to his brain from oxygen deprivation-

Armstrong has returned to Sherlock's side to continue assessing his condition. "He's in no immediate danger. His pressure is higher than I'd like, and the arrhythmia is still present, but I expect both to resolve when he's worked the rest of the drugs out of his system. The haloperidol will be the last, I'm afraid. I really wish he hadn't made that necessary. It's going to require careful monitoring, and will delay his recovery by hours."

"How many hours?" John asks, trying to recall the statistics for himself and coming up blank.

"It's difficult to predict. We're dealing with a combination of factors."

Hypoxemia, for example, John's mind helpfully supplies. "An educated guess, then?"

She tilts her head, considering. "Ketamine is normally metabolized in an hour give or take. The sedation will increase that. Six?"

Greg finally finds his normal voice. "So, he's on a bad trip, and he just made you extend it."

"Essentially, yes." She turns to John and nods at his hands on the railing. "You should let me have someone take a look at that."

John looks down at his knuckles which are bleeding again. He lets go of the rail, and drops them to his sides.

"I'll send someone in with antiseptic to clean that up. After that, you may as well go home. There's nothing to do now but wait until he wakes up."

"I'll stay with him."

She looks as if she's about to object for a moment. "Very well. I'll start the paperwork to have him admitted."

Greg waits until she leaves. "Ketamine is nasty stuff, but it's not the worst thing Manning could have given him, I guess. At least we know he'll come out of it now."

"Ketamine could explain his condition, or it could be masking the real problem."

Greg tenses visibly. "What problem?"

"The combativeness and confusion could be from the ketamine, or they could be the result of brain injury. The symptoms are similar."

"Christ."

"It only takes four minutes without oxygen for the brain to start dying. Depending on how long he was down, he could come out of it with no damage at all, or he could have a whole array of issues. Varying degrees of memory loss. Personality changes. Cognitive impairment. We won't know if I found him in time until he actually wakes up." In the struggle to detach himself from who he's talking about, he forgets who he's talking to.

Greg was shocked before, but he looks gutted now. "Jesus," he whispers. "Jesus, John. No wonder you look like... "

"Sorry. I guess I could have said that better."

Greg accepts his apology with a tight nod. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"It may not be like that at all. I'm just being... Look, forget what I said. The doctor doesn't seem to think it's nearly as gloomy as I just made it sound." He takes a shaky breath. "I just can't stop thinking that if I'd gotten to him just a couple of minutes faster..." His gaze is fixed grimly on Sherlock's still face.

Greg goes to the other side of the bed and lays his hand on Sherlock's shoulder. When he looks across at John, his eyes narrow. "Don't do that. If this is anyone's fault, it's mine for not putting a tail on Sherlock as well as Ellis. We may have been looking at the wrong killer, but we sure as hell knew his target."

"There's plenty of blame to go around," John says quietly. He looks up. "Do you know where Ellis is now?"

"In his flat. My phone would be going off if he wasn't."

John almost smiles. "You said he isn't the killer, but you haven't pulled the surveillance."

"He's got me trained pretty well, hasn't he." His expression is unabashedly fond as he looks down at Sherlock for a long moment, then straightens up and squares his shoulders. "I can come back later tonight, but I have to get Manning processed, as soon as they finish patching him up."

It takes John a moment to put that together. "He's here?"

"Looks like you broke his jaw. And his nose. He's down the hall."

"I want to talk to him."

"Even if I believed that's all you want to do to him, you know I can't allow it. Hell, I can't even talk to him. He was cautioned when he was arrested, and he asked for a lawyer. Nobody can to talk to him."

"Nobody with the police can talk to him. I'm not with the police."

Greg is shaking his head. "Not a chance. You're a witness, for one thing. And his lawyer could argue that you work with the police, which you do. I'm not jeopardizing this case just to give you another crack at him. I need him in one piece for his arraignment." He nods at Sherlock. "And you have more important things to do."

The door opens and a young man in scrubs comes in carrying a metal tray covered with a white cloth. "Dr. Armstrong sent me to treat your hand."

Greg crosses his arms. "Let him bandage those knuckles before you think about using them again. I'll go remove temptation from your path." He turns to leave, then pauses at the door. "Call me if anything changes." He glances back at Sherlock, then nods to John and walks out of the room.

The nurse sets about tending to John's knuckles with gentle efficiency.

"Flex your fingers for me."

"Nothing's broken."

The nurse chuckles. "I wouldn't be so sure. I just came from treating your sparring partner. Now flex, please."

John complies. "Has he said anything about our... sparring match?" He asks it casually enough, but the nurse's glance up from his work is brief and dubious.

"Friend of yours?"

John's smile is tight. "Not exactly."

"Didn't think so." He wraps two knuckles with plasters and starts packing up his equipment. "Try to keep your hands dry. Change the dressing if it gets wet." He smiles. "You're a doctor. You know the drill." He gets up to leave, then pauses to glance at Sherlock. "He's your friend."

"Yes."

"I know it's hard, but you need to focus on a good outcome. He'll pick up on it, even out cold like he is." He turns to leave, and makes it almost to the door before John manages to thank him.

When they come to move Sherlock to his room, John steps outside to call Mary. And Mycroft. He had sent Mary a text an hour ago, but all he'd said was that he'd been delayed and would call her when he could. He was hoping to postpone his call to Mycroft until there was something definitive to tell him, but now it looks like it will be morning before that happens. The longer he waits, the harder it's going to be.

Mary is sleepy, and then instantly alert when he tells her where they are and what the delay was all about. She won't hear of him coming home, which he expected. And she's as worried about him as she is about Sherlock, which he didn't expect, but understands. She knows as well as he does what this could mean. For all of them.

Mycroft answers with his customary bland indifference. "Yes, John. What is Sherlock up to this time?"

He listens without interrupting until John reaches the end of his narrative of what happened in Regent's Park.

"What is the prognosis?"

"His doctor expects him to regain consciousness in a few hours. We will know more when he can talk to us."

"You said he is in no immediate danger."

"Yes."

Mycroft exhales in a huff. "Your professional detachment needs work, Dr. Watson. What are you not telling me?"

"I don't know how long he was without oxygen. There could be some level of impairment. We won't know until he wakes up."

"What kind of impairment?"

John knows better than to withhold or embellish the facts. He gives Mycroft the unbuffered truth. There is a long pause when he finishes.

"Very well. Call me the moment you know." Mycroft ends the call.

John blows out a long breath, turns off his phone, and goes back inside.

When he comes off the lift on Sherlock's floor, he sees the bustle of activity down the hall and his heart drops. Dr. Armstrong comes out of the room followed by two nurses as he breaks into a trot. She holds up a placating hand as he reaches her. "He's' fine. He was tachycardic for a few minutes, but it resolved on its own. It's not unexpected."

"The ketamine shouldn't still be doing this."

"It's a bit unusual, but as I said. Not entirely unexpected under the circumstances." She touches John's arm lightly. "I'll be here until seven a.m., and I expect him to be awake before I leave. You need to be positive."

"Thank you." He appreciates her kindness, but he's irritated in equal parts at being talked to like a civilian, and at seemingly being unable to avoid acting like one. He walks past her and pulls up a chair next to the bed, but he's not ready to sit quite yet.

Sherlock has a red mark where they've been pressing the orbital socket of his left eye, testing for pain response. John touches it gently, then rests his palm on his forehead. He feels warmer now, and the clamminess is gone.

"Greg thinks you're wrong about Ellis. I know you're right, but I can't prove it without you."

The number of things he can't do - doesn't want to do- without Sherlock is almost back to where it was two years ago. How Sherlock feels about having him around again, or about working together, or anything at all, remains as murky as ever. It's that uncertainty that made John hesitate tonight. Unsure how far to push. An outsider without the right to do anything but suggest. For Sherlock's sake, as well as his own, that has to change.

He adjusts the chair so he can hold Sherlock's hand, and settles back to wait.

The hallway wall is entirely glass, covered by a curtain that is pulled half closed. The door is shut, but the nurses' station is right outside, and it doesn't take long for the traffic back and forth to start wearing on John's nerves. He stews in silence for most of an hour before he gets up and pulls the curtain the rest of the way shut. It will block the view, if not the noise. When he returns to his seat and takes Sherlock's hand again, it moves ever so slightly, and John is instantly back on his feet, leaning in close.

"Sherlock, it's John. Open your eyes." He checks the monitor, but there's no change in heart rate or breathing. Reflex, then. He presses the same spot they've been using to test, then presses harder.

Sherlock turns his head just slightly, but it's the first real response they've gotten out of him. "Sherlock, look at me." A minute passes. Two. "I know you love to make an entrance, but you're really dragging this out. Any time you're ready, but soon would be nice." He watches for a moment, then sits down and tries to get comfortable. It's going to be a long night.

Over the next two hours, Sherlock's heart settles into a consistent rhythm, and his blood pressure returns to normal. As a result, the frequency of visits by the nursing staff drops to every thirty minutes, and John is surprised to find that he actually misses the interruptions. Long stretches of solitude give him too much time to think, so when the door opens behind him, he turns to welcome the few moments of distraction. But instead of Sherlock's nurse, he finds a rumpled Detective Inspector.

"Greg, you didn't have to come back." He's been sitting in the same position too long, and his back cracks audibly when he turns to look up.

"I told you I was going to." He hesitates. "I'm, uh, thinking it's time to bring Ellis in for a little chat."

"What changed?"

"Manning got chatty when we were booking him. His lawyer tried to shut him up, and Manning fired him on the spot. He's claiming he's our vigilante. All by himself."

"What?" It comes out a lot louder than he intended. He glances at Sherlock and lowers his voice. "He confessed to killing Hartman?"

"Yeah, and all the rest. He didn't give any names." Greg smiles. "He wants to talk to you and Sherlock. Nobody else."

John shakes his head. "That's not possible. He's what? Twenty-five? He would have been seventeen years old when-"

"I was right."

The familiar deep voice, blurred with sleep, triggers a flood of relief that makes John glad he's sitting down. Since his own voice seems temporarily absent, he settles for squeezing Sherlock's hand.

Greg seems to be holding his breath, the question clear in the way he's trying to catch John's eye.

Sherlock opens his eyes, and turns his head toward John. "It's not Manning..." He frowns as his voice fades out.

"I know. Welcome back." He meets Greg's worried gaze, and smiles.

Greg exhales, looks away for a beat. When he turns back to Sherlock, he's smiling. "You've got a long way to go before you sell me on that one, especially since you seem to be living proof to the contrary."

John watches Sherlock, waiting for the return fire Greg's comment will draw, but Sherlock seems to be lost in thought. "You're not gonna let him get away with that, are you?" Sherlock's eyes drift shut. John gives the long fingers another squeeze. "Hey, don't go back to sleep yet."

Greg's smile falters. "Is he okay?"

"He's fine. Sherlock? Come on. Tell Greg why it's not Manning."

When Sherlock opens his eyes this time, he looks slightly annoyed. It's a very familiar expression. "You know I hate repeating myself." The wearily imperious tone is there, but he can't quite manage the laser gaze that usually accompanies it.

John and Greg exchange a look that's both bemused and filled with relief. Greg crosses his arms and looks as stern as his smiling eyes allow. "When you're back on your feet, I expect an explanation for why you agreed to meet him in the park without backup."

"He's a witness, not a-"

Greg holds up a hand. "Not a suspect. Yeah, I know that's what you thought. But it didn't turn out that way."

Sherlock frowns, and closes his eyes. "He's not the killer." His voice is softer than it was a moment ago.

"You need to spend a few more hours sleeping this off before we can get back to it. Manning wants to talk to us."

Sherlock opens his eyes long enough to predict, "About Ellis." He settles back into the pillow, and the eyes drift shut again. A moment later, his breathing slows and deepens.

"He's asleep," John says softly. He looks up at Greg. "You should go get some sleep yourself. You look like hell."

Greg smiles. "Take a look in the mirror. It's been a rough night." He comes around to the opposite side of the bed and looks down at Sherlock for a long moment. "I'm really getting too old for this," he tells the sleeping man, then looks across at John. "He's okay now."

It's not a question, but John answers it anyway. "He's okay, Greg. Go home."

Greg nods and walks around the bed, heading for the door. He pauses to squeeze John's shoulder, and the gesture puts a lump in John's throat that takes a long time to fade.

End of Chapter 7