AN: Just as a disclaimer, I've never actually been inside a British hospital, only an American one, so if there are any little devilish details that I skewed, feel free to point them out to me and I'll fix them.

And now, my Christmas gift to you all: the resolution of my dreadful cliffhanger. Enjoy.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

He heard sirens, he was cold, he couldn't see. These were the most critical things, the things he realised immediately, but he didn't understand why. He struggled to cling to the sound, but within seconds he blacked out again.

His hand flexed and he felt something pliant. Cloth. Wool? The side of his face was warm.

John?

He fumbled blindly to try and determine what he was touching, what he was lying on, if that something was alive, but his hands were so numb, cold, and his mind was so...empty. Something bumped him, sending pain shooting up his ribs, and then someone was touching his back, his head.

He lost wide, empty fragments of time and movement, having no notion of where he was, what was happening, how much time had passed, even which way was up, finding that lucidity broke upon him in flashes of pain and panic, punctuated by the relief of absolute blackness.

He gasped. The light above him was blinding, surging in torrents through his crystalline eyes to white out his brain. Sounds, movement, urgent voices shouting. Someone was touching him, frantically, pawing at the buttons of his shirt. Latex gloves. They pulled unpleasantly at his skin. Something beeped repeatedly, his head spun, he felt nauseous.

He heard the click of his belt buckle.

Air rushed into his lungs and in spite of a crippling surge of pain he snapped bolt upright, his hand darting out to catch the thin wrist that had strayed beneath his navel. He would never have guessed that he had such a rush of strength left, but he didn't relinquish his grip.

"Sherlock, let go. Let go, it's alright!"

He didn't, wouldn't. But that voice was familiar.

"You're hurting her, Sherlock, stop!"

A cool, firm hand closed over his own and forcibly pried his fingers from the poor orderly's wrist. Someone pressed him back down onto his back.

"Can you hear me?" There was a needle's prick in the crook of his arm, then another, then a third, now yet another at the back of his hand. "Sherlock?"

He didn't fight to stay conscious when the darkness crept back through him; he surrendered, let everything melt away.

When he finally came to again, it was gently this time, slowly. Everything was quiet, just a hum and some distant blips. There was an oxygen mask pressed uncomfortably to his nose and mouth and he dragged his hand up lethargically to explore it with his slightly numb fingers. They'd given him morphine, he identified the sensation immediately. Though, admittedly, it was with good reason this time. His mouth had never been so dry in his life.

He felt the IV in his hand as the needle shifted beneath his skin, the persistent ache in his midsection, the thin cotton sheets.

He was alive, then. Good show. Someone must have acted quickly. More quickly than he would have expected.

His eyes drifted open slowly.

Ugh, light blue. How predictable.

It was more or less the only thing he could see. His vision was shit, recovering, but slowly. Brain hadn't quite switched back on yet.

The sudden rustling near his head seemed so deafening by comparison that he blinked rapidly in surprise.

"Christ, you awake already? They told me it'd be a while."

Lestrade. It was Lestrade's voice. The same voice from before.

He pressed harder at the bottom of the clear plastic-and-rubber mask until he succeeded in prying it off his mouth and over the top of his head. He gulped in good old-fashioned nitrogen/oxygen/argon/carbon dioxide. Pure oxygen wasn't the sort of high he needed right now.

"Now don't - " too late. Lestrade sighed in defeat and leaned back in his chair. "I could've just called you a nurse..."

"Where's John?" He could now see well enough to know that he and Lestrade were the only ones in this room. This was unacceptable.

"He's alive, he'll be fine."

Sherlock's heart could have stopped in that instant and he would hardly have noticed for the wellspring of relief that poured into his chest.

"Where?" Sherlock repeated, hissing through his teeth.

"Calm down, he's the next floor up. There was something different about his processing, just a technicality."

"Get me my phone," he ordered, holding out his trembling hand as though he expected it to materialize.

"It's in evidence. You can't call him anyway; he was till unconscious, last I heard. Trust me when I tell you, he's alright, he's in good hands."

Sherlock managed a hollow snort.

"Oh, stop it." Lestrade fidgeted a bit, producing a pad and pen. "They told me not to get you worked up, they just let you out of exploratory surgery and you've had three pints of blood transfused, but since you're feeling so...animated, would you mind giving me a preliminary statement? I'm going to have a hell of a time keeping you out of jail, considering you broke into a home carrying an illegal firearm and shot an eleven-year-old. I need as much of the story as I can get so that I can spin it in the most...creatively legal way possible."

Sherlock's eyes fell closed as he sighed. He had shot the boy. The boy and not John. "Is he dead?"

"No, thank god, you clipped the side of his head, shredded his ear, and he fainted. If you'd killed him we'd have had another matter on our hands entirely."

He was silent as he inhaled slowly. "Mariana Van Orden killed those girls, at the behest and with the help of her son, Adrienne. The mother will tell you that they were competition for a music grant, she's wrong. Speak with the boy, he knows, though he may not tell you outright."

Lestrade stopped writing and looked up. "We know a bit about that. The mother had a sort of breakdown when she returned home to find three bodies on her kitchen floor, one of which was her son. We're working a confession out of her. And she did say that, something about a music school in Switzerland. That's what you yourself were on about the day before yesterday, isn't it? But you're saying there was something else now?

Sherlock groaned softly. Now that he was fully awake the pain in his side was spiking, and Lestrade was hardly helping matters. He needed another shot of...something. "It was another blind. Ingenious. The boy knows, knows something at least," he countered, taking a breath to elaborate, but he winced as a stabbing twinge set off little stars in his eyes. "The mother was a tool, she doesn't fully understand, but Adrienne..." he continued, but his chest felt suddenly crushed by paralysis. He gave a strangled cough and Lestrade sprang to his feet and rushed from the room.

Sherlock found himself prickly and irritable as the nurse – nice though she was – adjusted his dosages. Rather than admitting that he was just a bit jaded to the morphine, he instead opted to slightly exaggerate his pain scale to get a functional amount. Just as she was leaving she smiled – she really was a terribly sweet girl – and touched the back of his hand gently. Sherlock reflexively withdrew his arm and glared at her.

"Excuse him, he's sort of an arse. He can't help it." Lestrade said, rather lamely. He turned back to Sherlock, tucking his pen back into his pocket. "We'll do this when you're a bit more capable, yeah?"

Sherlock just worked his jaw. He wasn't used to being incapacitated, and twice in less than a week was just short of sacrilege. He moved his head in a way that Lestrade chose to interpret as a nod and as he stood to leave he offered a hesitant but genuine "Get yourself fixed up, Sherlock. We may need you yet."

Sherlock was not interested in "getting fixed up." He was interested in being fixed now, and he was interested in thundering up a certain flight of non-slip stairs. Likewise, he was interested in bursting into the room of one John Watson, just for the sake of seeing his chest rise and fall, just a few times, just because he himself had never quite learned to trust. He'd never had reason to.

He took a deep breath, one that smelled of plastic and disinfectant and other, stranger, more unsettling hospital things. He wanted to be back in his own bed, back in 221B where it smelled like books and wool and home.

That extra morphine (plenty of extra) was kicking in, and god, he was tired. Drifting again, in spite of the frustration and the pique, he was, really, profoundly fucking exhausted...

Click.

Fuck.

Clatter.

Fuck

How could they possibly expect him to rest with all this "checking in" they kept doing? He would snap awake at anything; footsteps, the click of a button, even an overzealous gust of air as someone hurried past. It had happened three times now, a different nurse each time, but all saying more or less the same thing: "Just checking in," "checking in on you, love."

Well, it's two a.m., so stop it. Piss off. I don't know you, I don't want you here; I don't even need you for anything, so go away and let me sulk in peace. And I am not your "love."

He picked anxiously at the clear square of tape that kept the IV lead stuck firmly under his skin. It itched. No-one had checked in for over an hour, but still he was not falling sleep. With an involuntary, antsy flinch he ripped the corner of the skin tape painfully from the back of his hand. God, that smarts. In spite of the red, angry swelling of his stripped skin he had to fight to resist the urge to peel the tape the rest of the way off. Grudgingly, he pressed it back down, now white with his skin cells and sticking only feebly.

He had never wanted to roll onto his side so badly in his life, and he knew that it was only because he couldn't that he felt such an interminable urge. His back was stiff and he and tried everything he could without twisting too abruptly, but it didn't help.

Finally, after a great deal of twitching and toe-wiggling and snarling quietly to himself in discomfort and frustration, he gingerly pushed himself into a sitting position and flexed out his shoulders. Maybe it was the medication, but he was in a very minimal amount of pain, more like a bad cramp in his side than a stab wound. He twisted a bit more, sighing quietly to himself.

From sitting up to standing wasn't such a monumental leap, now was it? He tapped his fingers on the bed frame. Carefully, oh-so-very carefully, he set his teeth on edge in concentration and turned, kicking off the stiff, unwelcoming sheets and letting his bare feet edge off the mattress until he was properly sitting up.

It wasn't so bad. Not really. His posture wasn't perfect, but he'd just been stabbed a few hours before, what do you expect? Encouraged, he clamped his hands determinedly on the edge of the bed – ignoring the sting of the IV as his tendons pulled tight – and slid slowly to his feet.

A grunt of pain and repressed queasiness escaped his clenched teeth, but he kept his feet without too much difficulty. Thankfully someone had found it wise not to try and separate him from his underwear, in spite of the slightly scratchy patch of dried blood that soaked most of the right front side. The incident with the orderly and the urgency of his condition must have put the staff off the mission of undressing him fully, or...perhaps he had put up an entirely separate fight about the shorts. His memory of the last few hours was far from complete, but regardless, he was grateful to be more or less decent. He had no qualms with being naked, generally speaking, but if he was going to be naked, he was going to do it deliberately, tenaciously and on his own terms.

He took a few deep breaths. It wasn't so bad. A bit of gentle stretching, a bit of leaning on the hospital-standard bed frame and he had managed a few measured steps forward then, just to make sure he could, backward. As was his inclination, he tested, experimented, checked how far he could bend left or right at the waist before he felt a sharp twinge. He wiggled his toes, stood on one foot, then the other and eventually decided that, while he wouldn't be doing any running or jumping or climbing of fire escapes anytime soon, all things considered, he was in tolerably good shape.

Good enough to traipse around a hospital in the middle of the night? Good enough to handle a flight of stairs and a hallway or two? Maybe.