A/N: This chapter is thanks to a request from Shiary. I know I said I would finish the Milverton story arc, but while fellow fanlings in the US are still watching the series it seems sensible to write unconnected chapters until the series is finished across the pond. If you notice any new similarities between my Mary and the one in the series, it's because Amanda Abbington is wonderful. Also, the word 'wonk' (it's an 'o', I promise) is a slightly disparaging word for someone who's been fast-tracked into policy work, usually based in London. Many work for political parties, and others for government departments in Whitehall or elsewhere in the city.

The room around him spun, the muted greys and taupes swirling together into a neutral blur. As his knees gave way, he put all his remaining power behind his arms, scrabbling to hold on to the edge of his desk, his hands flopping uselessly in front of him. He toppled over onto his right side, thankful for the thick carpeting under his head as he landed unceremoniously with his legs bent, slightly awkwardly, at the knees. The evening coolness made him shiver, wishing he could curl in upon himself a touch. The tremors in his feet started first, slowly moving up his limbs until he could have sworn that even his neck was trembling, and his eyelids started to flicker shut as exhaustion overtook him. He blinked hard, trying again to muster the energy to move his legs, his hands, his lips, anything, dropping back to the carpet wearily. He caught a glimpse of his watch, noting with mild surprise that he had only been this way for twenty minutes. His thoughts were frustratingly jumbled, scrambled into a most unbecoming mess, but he surmised that the reason for his predicament lay in the brandy secreted in his false desk drawer. As pedestrian as it was, he found that a little snifter helped the occasional 'all-nighter' pass a little more warmly, but it seemed that one of his staff had somehow found that a useful medium through which to drug him with a sedative.

Half an hour, now.

He heard footsteps approaching, far too languorous to be those of his ever-dutiful PA and far too fast to be those of the nightwatchman. As the door slid noiselessly open, he looked up into the face of the person who had done this to him. Hester smiled almost gently as she produced a loaded hypodermic from her inside pocket, leaning down to jab it into the top of his bicep, tendrils of grey hair curling down the side of her kindly face as her saddened eyes glanced over his vulnerable form.

What did you give me? What are you giving me now? he thought.

Evidently this one was some sort of paralytic, so that he would be fully conscious but unable to move a muscle to let anyone know he was here. The day before had been the beginning of the summer recess in parliament, and all of the policy wonks had taken it upon themselves to rush off that Saturday morning to their first real bit of downtime (oh, how he hated that word) with cheap holidays in peripheral European cities and surfing in windblown Cornwall. Many of the others, including Alice, would not be back until Tuesday or Wednesday, given the Bank Holiday...how tragic. He would undoubtedly be dying from dehydration or heatstroke in the searing July heat by then, and...was that his breathing slowing? Ah...then it must be-

"Curare, of course. Not the most pleasant of ways to go, stuck here all by yourself where nobody can see you. But then, you've perpetrated worse, haven't you? My brother died in a Caracas prison of malaria while you were waiting to see what the CIA would give you in return for his documents. You could have brought him home before then, of course, but you never were one for the human touch. I think it's only fair that you experience the same lonely sort of death that Colin did. Part of me hopes that someone finds you before the dehydration and diaphragm weakness get too much...but only part of me.

Sleep well."

That had been a full sunset ago, he thought blearily. He had long ago resigned himself to the distasteful manner of his going, and allowed himself a small, sad internal smile at the thought of his parents, off picking lavender and taking terrible photographs with hashtags for something called Instagram while drinking far too much excellent Beaujolais in Provence. He could almost feel the sun on his face as he closed his eyes. Everything was slowing down. Not long now. As he drifted aimlessly, he heard footsteps dimly in the corner of his mind. It sounded like running, but on the thick carpet around him it sounded like paws. He thought he smiled (he couldn't be sure) as everything grew pleasantly fuzzy and a splash of red moved in his mind's eye.

Redbeard.

He smiled at the sentiment. No point in closing oneself off now.

As his eyes crashed closed, a cool draft swept across his face and the footsteps became real. Firm hands shook his shoulders, strong fingers digging in almost hard enough to bruise.

"Mycroft? Mycroft, can you hear me? Open your eyes for me."

He forced one eye open a crack, and found the calm but grim face of John Watson looking down at him. John motioned behind his left shoulder, and Mary stepped around to kneel at his left side (or, more accurately, at his back). As a unit, they swiftly rolled him onto his back, John gently tipping his head back to open his airway. Mary checked his pulse with two fingers at his wrist, still searching his face for signs of pain as John, who was gently palpating his ribs having already surveyed his head for injuries, glanced up.

"Severely bradycardic. His pulse is 70 and his BP's only 80 over 40. His resps are almost down to nothing."

"Dehydration, possible shock, paralysis causing respiratory distress."

"What are you thinking? Paralytic?"

"Yep. If it were a brainstem injury or a stroke-"

"We'd see signs of trauma or weakness as well as paralysis."

"Exactly. So it's a paralytic plus either a sedative or a neurotoxin... You've been conscious the whole time. Anaesthesia's out because your breathing's compromised, but not so badly that it would be immediately fatal without a ventilator. It's a neurotoxin, then, but one that's been chosen carefully so it only has a slow effect on the muscles and a creeping effect on the nerves, prolonging the deterioration. Process of elimination leads me to think it's curare."

Mary nodded, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder while keeping a surreptitious eye on his breathing. The paramedics stepped through the door, and the little team worked quickly, efficiently slipping a drip into the back of his right hand with saline and, he presumed, glucose. The intervention left him a little more alert as an oxygen mask was gently placed over his mouth and nose, John sliding the fabric shears through his shirt and helping the older paramedic to attach the heart monitor. Mary slipped out of the room. He could guess where to, and found he was right as Sherlock strode in, dropping to a crouch at his head. As they gently hoisted him up onto the trolley, Sherlock turned to Mary, face shrouded.

"How did you know he was in danger?" How did I not know he was in danger?

"I didn't know he was in danger. This one," (she indicated John), "mentioned that your brother hadn't come round to gloat at you getting punched by that woman in the Stanhope Strangler case, and that's really unusual. You never miss a chance to score points off one another. We thought maybe he'd ended up marooned in the office, so we came to check. We'd already gone to the Diogenes, and they hadn't seen him since Friday night, so when we got to reception and the security staff hadn't seen him leave, we looked at the security tapes. He went in, then a woman went in, and she came out but he didn't, and Rambo was off."

"Who was it?"

Still too tired to speak, Mycroft nodded to the set of papers on his desk-the application from Hester Frear to take a secondment to his department, signed off by the head of the JIC. Sherlock's lips met in a thin line, and he whipped out his phone, punching in a number. It was a measure of his concern that he bothered to call at all, barking at Lestrade to arrest the woman, then cutting off with a strange choking noise as Greg's slightly smug voice carried down the line. He hit the end call button irritably, rounding on Mary as she tried unsuccessfully to hide her smile, all of them now heading down the corridor towards the lift.

"He's already arrested her. Why has he already arrested her?"

"Well, obviously because I clocked the file and made a quick phonecall on my way down to collect you. It's not just you who can speed-read, you know, Mr. Swirly-Coat."

John coughed to hide a giggle as Mycroft, buoyed by the prospect of a warm, comfortable bed and made slightly woozy by the swaying movement of the trolley, relaxed. Mary smiled, sphinx-like, as one of the paramedics injected something into his IV port, and he wrinkled his nose as he realised they had sedated him. John's voice carried over his head as the rasp of a plastic tube being removed from its packaging mingled with the sirens, and his last thought before the pleasant, temporary darkness took him was that Doctor Watson's instincts had certainly saved his life.

A/N II: Curare is an umbrella term for a group of poisons derived from rainforest trees, most famously used in poison darts by some indigenous peoples in the Amazon in hunting. (That practice also appears in the myth that they were used against people by 'head-hunting' tribes, one of many wildly inaccurate examples of 'native savagery' in an era where a lot of assumptions about non-European ethnic groups were being used to justify problematic policies like colonisation.) The starting point for a lot of modern anaesthetics, these drugs function as muscle relaxants, but not as sedatives, so Mycroft would indeed have been conscious throughout.

Edit: Spot the Anthea! And spot the Mystrade reference...I don't tend to ship, but they are quite cute.