- c h a p t e r   t w e n t y   t w o -

If Emma thought she'd been ill when she'd first admitted to her crimes to Molly, she didn't know what to think of what she was currently going through. If she were forced to choose a word (something she'd rather not think too hard on, due to the fact her head felt as if it might explode at any given moment), she would say she was dying.

Yes, she'd felt somewhat sick for about a week at this point in time - but now it had worsened significantly, and she couldn't see any particular reason why she felt so dreadful to begin with. She had never felt quite so limp and useless, and it terrified her. Her body was rebelling against her, and for no reason she could see.

She could hurl just out of the way her heart was palpitating and her vision was blurring. She didn't have the faintest idea what was oing on, and that couldn't help her in any way. Emma tried to calm herself down, but when there was so little reasoning for whatever was happening to her that she couldn't help but continue to panic.

There was no viable reason for her to be sick - or at least, she couldn't spot one. She spent so much of her time couped up within her own flat, and it wasn't as if she'd been passing her cello around. It just didn't make the slightest amount of sense to her, but she wasn't going to think through it. She felt far too dreadful to do such a thing as think through it.

Staying alone in her flat wouldn't help - as far as she knew, Florenz didn't know anything about human illness. If she stayed in this way, then she knew nothing could improve. Emma had to get herself to someone to help her. She needed help, even though she didn't want to reach out to anyone else.

She needed to get upstairs, as long as John was up there. He was a doctor. He could help her. If she texted or called, he would most likely ignore her...but he couldn't very well ignore a sick woman in the flesh, could he? He wouldn't be so cruel to do such a thing, even if Sherlock was right beside him the entire time.

Deciding this was her best shot at not passing out with no one to find her, she mde sure to suck in a deep breath and start pulling herself towards the door. Emma stayed on her feet the entire time, but it didn't take her long to start feeling herself falling over because her knees were too weak to keep her upright.

"What the hell is going on?" she squeaked to herself, as if the words spoken from her own lips to herself could end up being as comforting as someone else's effort. "What is happening to me?"

For a few moments, she remained on the ground on all fours, staring at the ground as if it could give her some sort of answer. She was right in front of the door, and she needed to get out. But could she manage to open the door and then go through from there? Emma felt as if she would sooner end up collapsing.

If she collapsed, no one would find her. She wouldn't get better.

She had to get out of her flat.

With this new motivation, she yanked the doorknob down and crawled out of her flat, not bothering to close the door behind her. She sat down at the foot of the stairs, cursing her decision to buy a flat on the basement level.

Emma began to reconsider her decision to start making a hike up the stairs to get to John. Even though he was most likely the only person who could diagnose her and also aid her at the moment, she wasn't sure she had the strength to climb up the stairs. She had a feeling she'd end up vomiting all over the stairs before she managed to scale them.

But she couldn't stay sitting on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, praying that John Watson would end up coming out of the door and spot her. She just needed to get up the stairs, and then she could be better. She had to convince herself of that much for certain.

And so Emma managed to pull herself up the stairs, step by brutal step.

"Please help me," she said when John appeared at the door, using every last trace of energy she had left to speak. "I don't know what's happening to me. I don't know what's happening."

Even though Emma didn't like being looked down at, she couldn't help but feel that Sherlock and John looked almost like angels to her at this moment. She wasn't alone, and perhaps she could manage to live past this sickness. The two had to help her to her feet, but she managed to make it into the flat nevertheless.

"Have you eaten or drank anything unusual recently?" John asked, once she'd gotten settled on a chair.

"No, I haven't," she groaned. "I haven't...I haven't done anything..."

"Well, uou must have done something, or otherwise you wouldn't be quite so sick," John said, doing his best to ignore how difficult she was being. She was only causing more harm to herself by claiming she hadn't done anything wrong, leading herself in the wrong direction. Without her help, he couldn't diagnose this well.

"You must have changed something recently, made an addition to your daily life, or..."

"I didn't add anything to my life," she replied. "The only thing I did was take alcohol away."

John closed his eyes, the realisation of what was occurring finally washing over him. Of course Emma would've done such a thing - it seemed only too obvious now that it was happening. But it didn't make it any less dangerous, that much was certain in his mind.

"You're going through alcohol withdrawal," John said. "You quit completely, and your body couldn't tolerate it."

"You're kidding," Emma said, although she allowed her face to contort in a way which betrayed her inner thoughts - of course he wasn't kidding about this. He didn't have any reason to lie to her about such a thing. "You must be..."

"I wouldn't kid about such a thing, Emma."

"But...but...I quit because I thought it would help me and everyone around me," Emma gasped out. "It was all for good."

"You quit and it could end up killing you, Emma," John said. "The ambulence will be here, and the paramedics will be able to help you."

"I'm going back to the hopsital?" she whimpered. She should've seen this coming from further away, of course. "I can't be going back there, not again."

"Stop complaining," Sherlock snapped. "You could very well be dying, and they'll be able to prevent such a thing from happening. Your life is not something to complain over when it's being saved."

Emma wanted to be sick out of spite - but she also had a suspicion this wouldn't do a thing to make her feel better. Seeing further evidence of how much she'd managed to mess up her life certainly couldn't be a pleasing sensation. So, of course, she didn't have the faintest idea of what to do.

"If you don't go to the hospital, you're not going to get any better," John warned. "And if you don't get better, than you'll just end up getting worse."

"And if I get any worse, I'll die," Emma said, mostly kidding. She just wanted to distract herself from the way the room seemed to be spinning around her, the way she felt as if she might end up panicking and losing control at any moment. In that moment, her thoughts made it seem as if death might not be so much of a bad thing.

"It's a possibility," John said, gravely serious. "I hate to be macabre, but it's true. You could die."

"I spend my whole life just about to die, then," Emma said.

The next thing she knew, she was being carted into an ambulence and being sent off to a hospital. She arrived, a panic surrounding her and threatening to seep into every pore in her body.

She didn't want to acknowledge the fact that there was white so brightly cleaned it burned her eyes. She refused to let herself process the smell of utter sanitation necessary for a medical setting. There was a frenzy around her, threatening to overcome her and make her lose control. She couldn't let it get to her, not while she was so sick.

The people here at the hospital were going to help her - she needed to keep reminding herself of that fact. She needed to keep remembering the way they wanted to keep her alive and well. Not a soul wanted to see her die. No one liked seeing her in pain, she had to remember that.

The rest of the day turned into an incredible blur - Emma didn't want to pay attention to how ill she felt, how panicked she was in the face of death once again, or how she was pried apart. But she couldn't leave once they were done. She'd gone through an alcohol withdrawal, of course.

As much as Emma hated going to sleep in a hospital, she disliked waking up in one even more. At least in sleep she could delve into a world of dreams where she didn't have to worry about all the pains of real life. She wouldn't even have to believe that she was in the middle of a hospital, hooked up to multiple machines just to be nursed back to health bit by bit.

The sun didn't seem to care on this day - it shone, yes, but the light was weak and barely came through the windows as if it couldn't care to stretch out its sunbeams quite that far. Despite how pitiful this was, Emma could relate. She certainly didn't feel anywhere near as sick as she'd been the previous day, but she wasn't up to her normal health. (Although, it wasn't as if her normal health was all too special.)

She'd gotten a large amount of chastising for all she'd done in the past few weeks, as she'd ended up nearly signing her own death warrant. This was the second time she'd managed to escape a close scrape to death. It was terrifying to think she'd been through this experience twice.

At least in the latter experience Emma had been attempting to do some good for the world. She'd failed miserably in doing such, but at least she had managed to accomplish several weeks without her whisky. She would try to get off of her addiction whenever they released her from the hospital, but it would be a far lengthier and tedious process. It almost wasn't worth it, not after she'd nearly died in the process to begin with.

Why had she done it? To help. And then she'd almost died. Of course.

John had told her that she could've died because of what she'd done. She'd been drinking for far too much of her life, and now she was paying a price for letting it go. Maybe she would've been better off just solving all her problems with swigs of whisky, even though every person she'd ever spoken to tried to get her out of such a situation.

But she had to do it. She hadn't seen any other choice to get her through all of her problems. She'd caused all sorts of problems, all because of the drink. She'd hurt herself and so many others through the alcohol. Now, even though she was attempting to distance herself from it, she felt worse than ever. What a terrible mistake she'd made. What terrible mistakes she'd always made.

What was she supposed to do? She always ended up in the same horrible places over and over again, and it seemed to be a vicious cycle. Emma might never escape it, not at this rate. There was nothing more to say on the matter, in her mind. She could only just hope over everything.

Emma never wanted to lay in a hospital bed again, not after all she'd been through. She'd hoped to escape the psych ward and the building that ecompassed it forever. Simply, Emma assumed it would be far easier for her to succeed if only she could manage not to get hurt. Of course, she didn't understand what getting truly meant. How foolish she was being.

How foolish she always was - every decision she'd made was quite foolish, bringing her to a place where she couldn't properly escape. She only wanted to feel better, but just because her body was healed didn't mean the rest of the world around her would be solved as well.

What would Dr. Thompson think of her? Of course, she wasn't just physically sick through her withdrawal - she was mentally sick, as sick as could be. She'd caused so much destruction to herself in her attempts to build things up. No proper person with a well mind would end up doing such a thing.

Or perhaps Emma was just clumsy in everything she did, not smart enough to put any of her plans through to success. It wouldn't surprise her. She had only scraped through school by taking answers from other people's papers and an extraordinary amount of luck. It was a surprise she'd managed to survive this long with how horrible she was at being a good human.

All of her mistakes accumulated and forced her into illness and near death experiences. Then, of course, she ended up in a hospital bed with only her thoughts to keep her company. No cats or cellos could help her here.

Maybe all she could do at this point in time was cry. She felt as if she hadn't had a proper cry in ages, and it could do her a good favour. Something had to pry out the feelings she'd built up inside of herself throughout the weeks. Maybe if she let her emotions out in the form of crystalline tears then things could be better.

But if there was one thing Emma had learned from this experience thus far, it was that everything she thought could make things better often ended up making it worse. Chances were that she would end up finding herself sobbing without end. Everyone in the hospital would be worried about her and more than likely send her off to the psych ward.

Emma needed to sleep. Unless the world had turned around completely, certainly that couldn't hurt her. She'd been through enough to allow herself a few moments to simply breathe out and go to sleep without a problem. It shouldn't cause any issues. All she'd be doing is letting her body rest after having a bloody alcohol withdrawal.

She deserved that, at least.