- c h a p t e r   t w e n t y   e i g h t -

Emma wasn't in quite the mood to drag herself to the door and find out whoever it was knocking there. Something within her chest told her that she wouldn't be happy if she did such a thing, and therefore she ended up sighing and wishing that she didn't have to ever get up.

She was all too aware that she couldn't spend the rest of her life curled up within her seat, occassionally seeing her cat step by, but at least for the moment she would much rather stay there as if she were stuck there. She almost felt as if she was stuck there, and it wasn't such a horrible thing at the end of it all.

Emma considered simply yelling towards the door, hoping that her barking manner would end up scaring whoever this visitor was away, but she instead sighed to herself and started shifting around. She didn't have much of a choice - she had to get up and figure out what was happening.

Giving another enormous sigh, she managed to drag herself across the floor and make it to the door. Once again, she started considering other options about what she could possibly do instead of speak to whoever was waiting out there, but she stopped herself before it could overcome her.

Simply put, she didn't want to do anything. She didn't want to start interacting with someone else. She didn't want to have to worry about conversing with another human, pretending that she didn't feel empty as hell.

Still, she opened the door.

She didn't know exactly what she'd expected, but Emma found her mouth hanging open when she opened the door. John stood there, looking as disgruntled as he always did whenever something was terribly wrong. Things seemed to be terribly wrong more often than anyone at Baker Street would admit, after all.

Her massive reaction to who was standing at the door proved to be rather alarming to John himself. He hadn't expected anything particularly warm from his former downstairs neighbor (and ex-girlfriend, for that matter) but at he thought she might at least have something vaguely positive to say.

"Er, hello. Sorry if I disturbed you."

"Oh, God, John," Emma exclaimed, heaving out a grand sigh. "What are you doing here right now? You look like someone just ran over your cat or something!"

"I didn't realise that coming here to talk to you would be an issue," John said, blinking several times. "I mean, I do have something important to say, but if it's a bad time."

Emma pasued a moment, thinking through the situation and what she wished to do. She could easily turn him away at this point in time - he was more or less freely offering to let her do such a thing. It seemed like a rather good idea now that it was presented to her, but her curiosity was pulsing within her veins.

"No, I want to know what's happening."

"I know I've become the bearer of bad news every time something happens around here, but...I don't think you'll find out what is happening until it's already happened."

"John, what are you talking about?" Emma said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She made sure to stand in the small crack she'd opened in the door, simply blocking the way into her flat. She'd never wanted someone to walk in and see whatever was lying across the floor even though she had craved someone to talk to.

"I don't know how to say this, God," John said, echoing words that Emma recognised from another point in time.

"Is Sherlock dead again?" Emma asked, her voice a hushed tone. She personally didn't know whether she was trying to make a joke out of the situation or not, which made the situation all too awkward. If it wasn't bad enough that she'd started gawking when she'd spotted John at the door, now it was only getting worse.

"No, he's not dead again," John said, starting to look down at his hands. "I suppose that would be more expected with his history, but...no. I'm not sure this is much better, but..."

"Something isn't much better than him dying? Good God," Emma exclaimed. "You make it sound like...well, I don't know what you make it sound like, actually. John, what are you talking about right now?"

"Sherlock is going to be deported. He's committed a crime, and they're sending him off for...a while. I supposed he wasn't going to tell you - he's rather busy preparing for it all."

"Committed a crime?" Emma asked. "You mean to tell me that the consulting detective known for solving just about every crime known to mankind committed one himself?"

"Well, it's not quite as simple as that - but yes, he killed someone himself, someone who was important to the government in a...complicated manner."

"Huh," Emma said, knowing that prying further into this matter would only manage to get her into quite a dilemma. If Sherlock wouldn't tell her anything, then there was no saying that John wouldn't be the same way.

"That's all I have to say," John said. "I guess I'll be heading out now."

"Okay," Emma replied. Without bothering to say goodbye, she gently closed the door right on John's face. She had matters of her own to take care of now, matters which had begun churning in her mind as soon as she'd found out that Sherlock was to be deported.

Emma began pulling her hair back into a ponytail of sorts, experiencing a fleeting moment of panic as she realised she didn't have anything to tie it back with. After glancing towards her former art project with its many pegs and tied ribbons, she ended up letting a sigh. It would just have to be a ribbon, wouldn't it?

She plucked her deep blue ribbon off from the project, using one hand to keep her hair up in the ponytail and the other to undo the bow she'd tied around the peg. She then continued to tie her hair up into a messy ponytail, barely enough to keep everything together. For once, she didn't give a single thought to how she looked - she just wanted it out of the way.

She took a moment to run through precisely what she wished to do and everything she needed in order to get what everything done. She had quite a lot of things rushing within her mind, enough to easily overwhelm her...but then she looked down at Florenz and let everything come into focus.

"A painting and a song. Quite an undertaking, I think," Emma said, purring down towards Florenz. "But it's all going to be worth it in the end when I come up with something magnificent for everything which is happening right?"

Florenz didn't seem to notice Emma's words and therefore didn't care, but Emma simply shrugged it off. Her cat's opinion of her endeavors was useless. He was a cat, after all. She didn't need his opinion to do anything.

No, she had made her decision as what she was planning to do as soon as she knew that Sherlock would disappear from 221B completely in just a matter of days. If she didn't start working on her masterpieces immediately, then she wouldn't manage to get it finished before he left.

Perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing. She didn't necessarily want to speak to Sherlock and give him art in his honour. He'd insulted her time after time again, and yet here she was, deciding to make such a wonderful display for him before he left Baker Street behind.

As Emma began gathering her supplies, a hesitation crept into her heart. Why should she be devoting so much of her time and exercising so much effort for a result which wasn't even necessary? She didn'tneed to come up with some way to say goodbye to Sherlock. She didn't owe him anything - that much was certain. He'd said those very words to her, after all.

Despite this, she bit her lip and forced herself to move onwards. She didn't gain anything from her hesitation, only wasted time and ended up more confused later on within the day. If she could push that confusion away from herself for just hours more, she would allow herself to be more successful. It would inevitably catch back up to her once again, but at least she escape it for a while longer.

Did Sherlock deserve it? Emma didn't care enough to work out the answer the particular question. She'd have to wonder if Sherlock deserved to be deported in the first place on top of everything else, and she'd rather not do such a thing. It wasn't her place to figure out any of the answers. Questions and answers belonged to another world.

All that mattered was her decision. This was as much about doing something for herself as it was doing something for him, and that was how she chose to rationalise it. She needed to get her thoughtssomehow, and she didn't know any better way than to make a painting and a song.

It was a true shame that her therapist never realised how much this worked for her above just about all other methods, and it had never come into Emma's mind until this point. It seemed so simple, so obvious...and yet this was the first time she'd ever done such a thing.

"I've made a masterpiece before," Emma muttered to herself. "Who is going to tell me that I can't do it again? No one talks to me anyways, so this can only go up."

With this particular thought in her mind she leaned forwards and prepared to begin her next masterpiece. Just because each artist was only was supposed to have one masterpiece in the duration of their career didn't mean it applied to Emma. After all, she didn't actually have a career to begin with.

Emma knew, in the back of her head, she was bound to be forgotten. She was bound to end up being less than most, only a name which few ever cared about.

Nevertheless, she didn't mind it all too much...all she could think about was how she wanted to be remembered in someone's mind. If Sherlock would remember her longer because of her song and her painting, then Emma would be pleased. She wasn't asking for much. She just didn't want to fade entirely into obscurity, into a place where no one could ever seek her out.

She would compose a song for Sherlock, as well as make him a painting. She'd painted him before, and she could most certainly do it again. At least for the moment, it didn't matter that he'd ever caused her such copious amounts of hell. At least for the moment, she could let it go for the sake of creating art. For the sake of saying goodbye when the words would mean nothing coming from her lips.

She'd said so much meaningless fluff to Sherlock and to many others. What Emma truly needed to do was find something which meant more, and she thoroughly believed that she could find this through art. Her art meant more to her than almost anything else she could manage to do, or at least that was how it appeared to her for the moment.

Would Sherlock love what she did? Almost certainly not. He would always find a flaw, always find a reason to put her down...but that was beside the point. She wasn't looking for his approval, she was looking for his remembrance.

Emma took a moment to close her eyes and think through the situation she was putting herself through. Perhaps things were not working out quite the way she had been planning, but if one thing was clear it was that things never turned out the way anyone planned in life. Plans were next to useless in this world, at least in Emma's opinion.

Sherlock might not get to see or hear anything she created, unfortunately. He would most likely end up shipped off to some foreign land by the time she'd even managed to create a rough draft of anything. Somehow, however, she didn't mind it too much. This was what "it's the thought that counts" meant, she believed.

After all, only a very small percentage of the people she'd tied ribbons for would ever see the ribbon display she'd created. As far as she could tell, the only one who'd seen and comprehended what it meant was Sherlock himself. It truly was the thought that she put it into it which actually meant something.

And yet now those ribbons were irrelevant to Sherlock - she was certain of that much at least. He wouldn't care about them at all, just as he eventually wouldn't care that she'd put so much work into creating masterpieces in his honor before he ended up leaving it all behind.

Nevertheless, Emma knew that she wasn't making a name for herself in Sherlock's mind. She reminded herself that she wanted to be a memory for longer than she would've been originally, and that was what was truly important. If her memory would end up fading away, then she might as well make it a vivid one to begin with.

She would miss Sherlock. All the time she'd spent with Sherlock missing from her life brought her to that very conclusion. At the end of it all, she would miss that foresaken man. He kept getting ripped from her life whenever she last expected it, entirely out of the blue. The shock never quite settled in, and before she knew it he would be gone again. It was like he was dead for the third time.

At least he would be alive somewhere. Emma didn't have the foggiest where he was being sent off to, as it was information she didn't have any need to know. It hadn't the slightest thing to do with whatever she needed to do, and therefore it wouldn't be told to her.

She was incredibly curious about where he was heading off to, but it wasn't as if he would end up following Sherlock across the world. It was the simple state of not knowing which sparked her desire to know. It was entirely useless to her at the end of the day, but what did it matter?

No, she had to focus. She was trying to make two masterpieces appear simultaneously with a cramped time limit. It would be possible, she knew, but possibility was beside the point. She had to get it done, whether she was capable of doing such a thing or not.

She refused to be forgotten. Emma would not disappear from Sherlock's mind so easily. She refused to let such a thing occur. In her opinion, it simply wasn't fair...but nothing in her life was fair.

That was precisely why she needed to change the world around herself to get what she wanted.