Alice knew that she was dying.

The thinning of her usually thick, brown hair now turning thin, bristling at the ends; this, along with her brittle nails and pallid skin told her all she needed to know. Holding onto a beautiful, silver-framed hand mirror her great-grandmother had left her as an heirloom in her last will and testament, Alice noticed the way her normally full lips had grown not only thinner, but chafed-looking as well. Her blue eyes were glossed over, and it took a lot of inner strength to even keep her eyelids open. The medications were taking their toll on her fragile and weak body – this much she knew, and yet, what other course was there to take?

I either die slowly without the medication, or die anyway with the medication, only in a quicker fashion.

It was quite often that Alice had these thoughts. She'd been sent back to the institution by her father's sister (who had, after a month's dealing with her niece) found that she simply could not put up with Alice's antics and mental or emotional ailments, whatever they may be, any longer. Indeed, Aunt Melescent had agreed to foot the bill, no matter how lengthy or costly it may be, so long as young Alice was kept far away and in the institution, where they would put up with her instead. Of course, the sickness that Alice had developed whilst staying with Aunt Melescent in the first place was just the icing on the cake of her inner misery.

Well, sick and insane or not, put up with her the people of the institution did. They medicated Alice to the point of no return. Whatever sense she'd had left in her was far gone by now, just after the turn of her nineteenth birthday. All she had left were the faintest of all faint dreams – and of these dreams, not an ounce of logic was to be found within them. For instance, one recurring dream had her falling down an endless tunnel of darkness while sitting on a peculiar rocking chair all the while, a lullaby playing in her head. Another dream had her speaking to a cat of many colors – indeed, it changed colors at will! And, oh, the frighteningly large grin it sported . . . Sometimes, in the worst of the night, she'd even dream her own head was on the guillotine chopping block, facing upward and watching as the blade fell straight down; the target: her throat.

If ever Alice spoke of these dreams to the people there, the nurses murmured amongst themselves. Sometimes Alice caught fractions of the conversations they were having. Most often she heard the words milligrams, delusions or chemist. The last time she had felt truly aware of herself and coherent enough to carry on what the nurses considered being a "normal" conversation, it had been with a man doctor whom Alice had simply referred to as "Dr. Jones".

"It's not merely an ailment of your mind that's causing your troubles, Miss Alice," he'd said to her, before biting down on the lower right corner of his lip as he narrowed his eyes and glanced down at some papers on a clipboard in his right hand, seemingly re-checking over what he'd just read to himself not a moment beforehand.

"What is it then, sir?" Alice had asked, while she sat up in bed, brushing her still-rather lengthy brown hair.

"Well . . . we were able to do a few tests regarding your bloodwork, you see, Miss Alice," the doctor began to say, before looking up from his clipboard and staring at the bed-ridden girl in surprise as she herself froze in place; slowly lowering her wooden brush from her hair, it was then that she realized that she'd pulled a significant amount of thin-looking hair completely away from her head along with it.

Feeling panicked, Alice had thrown the brush across the room and scrambled from her bed, making a run for the door. "You're making me sicker!" she screamed as she ran, though the nurses soon entered the room and caught hold of her, one holding onto each of her arms. "You're giving me elixirs and pills that are making me worse!"

The last thing Alice could remember from that day was the feeling of a sharp prick to her forearm. They'd sedated her and put her back to bed, and she'd been given a needle full of God knows what - once a day - ever since. Of course, the injection was not the only so-called treatment she received. There were the little cups of pills from the chemist, as well, though by the time she received those she was so out of it from the injection that she scarcely objected to take them. If she did dare to object, she was lucky enough to receive a second injection, one that would knock her out cold for the night.

As the days went on, Alice – though never actually addressed personally anymore – eventually came to find, bit by bit, what exactly was wrong with her, and just why it was that she was dying. There was something wrong with her blood. There was something inside her blood, attacking her own immune system – which was what she had heard from a doctor speaking to a nurse; she'd also heard the nurse ask of a cure, and the answer given unto this nurse from the doctor was a clear no.

And so Alice knew this much, and nothing more, but it all added up either way the same: she was surely dying. Though her first instinct was to fight back, to try and live on, the longer and longer the chemist mixed pills for her to take, and the longer and more frequently she received her daily injections, the less inclined to fight she became. Indeed, returning to her earlier thought on the matter, her choice - after many months of long, slow, needless suffering - was decided within her mind.

Might I die slowly without the medication, or might I take matters into my own hands?

"Well it should have been quite obvious all along, shouldn't it have?" she mused aloud, before slipping quietly from her bed one evening and tiptoeing over to the locked medicine cabinet in the hall just outside her room.

She was a sly one, that Alice, and so she took a bobby pin from what was left of her hair and she used it to pick the medicine cabinet lock with much ease. Soon enough, the chemist-sent bottle of medication was in her hand, and as she closed the door, she smiled, knowing precisely what to do with it.

Slipping the medicine bottle into the pocket of her frock, she slipped back into her room and then called aloud, "Oh nurse, might I go to the restroom?"

"Certainly, Miss Alice," a rather portly nurse with a bun hairdo replied, before motioning Alice over to the community girl's powder room and producing a key from her pocket, before unlocking the door to grant her patient access to the toiletries.

"Thank you," Alice said as she stepped on inside; closing the door behind herself quietly, she moved over to the sink, where a porcelain tumbler that was used to wash ones' mouth out with was located.

Filling the tumbler to almost the brim with water, she placed it to the side of the sink and then opened up the stolen bottle of pills. How many were there, she couldn't be positive, but if she'd had to bet an amount of money on how many, she'd have guessed at least sixty or so. Regardless of how many, she emptied them into her mouth, small amounts at a time, before chasing them down with the water from the tumbler, and then filling it with water again and repeating the process.

Once both the tumbler and the pill bottle were empty, Alice simply replaced the tumbler to its usual spot on the side of the sink and slid the vacant bottle back into her frock pocket and left the powder room. Exchanging a few words with the portly nurse – mostly just chit-chat as to know how one another was doing – Alice returned to her bed and she lay down upon it quite like she often had done so for the past however many months.

The sole difference this time was that once she slipped into another of her dreams, it was quite more vivid than usual. To start with, Alice found that her hair had fully grown back in, and verily reached her waist as she rode a rather large leaf down a gently moving stream of rainbow-colored water. As it reached its inevitable waterfall, a low-hanging tree branch seemed to appear out of nowhere, and she grabbed onto it and pulled herself up to sit amongst the treetops, where a familiar-looking caterpillar sat also, with a rather placid expression on his face as he smoked something stout from a pipe.

"I do so love it when I come here for visits, Mr. Caterpillar . . ." Alice said to him, speaking as she brought her legs together to sit crisscross at the ankles. "I wish I never ever had to leave from here and return to that old asylum ever again."

"My child . . ." said the Caterpillar in return, pausing to take a long draw from his pipe and then exhaling just as slowly before continuing onward, "I should think, if my thinking is quite in the right mind of thought, that this time you shall get your wish."

"Do you mean to say then, Mr. Caterpillar, that - that I mightn't have to go back to the asylum?"

"Do tell me this, child," he then said to her, placing his pipe aside. "Place your two left forefingers against the underside of your right wrist."

Doing as instructed, Alice then said, "Mr. Caterpillar, for what reason am I doing this for—"

"Quiet!" he said to her, in quite a stern way, before dropping his voice to that a whisper; in this whispering voice, he spoke again, "Tell me, do you feel any heart beating on your wrist?"

When Alice shook her head no, he asked again in a whisper, "Do you hear a sound of a beating heart coming from yourself anywhere at all?"

"Why . . . no, no I don't, Mr. Caterpillar," was Alice's response.

Picking his pipe up once more, the Caterpillar took a draw from it, before blowing out a smoke ring and then saying in a quite knowing sort of voice, "Then, child, I should say that in my most honest opinion that you will certainly never be leaving this place ever again."

"Never again?" Alice asked, her eyes widening. "Never will I have to lie in the asylum, suffering with the other children – being experimented on, being called mad, taking medicines and injections and fighting off the demons in my nightmares? That will never happen again?"

"Indeed," the Caterpillar replied simply, with a curt nod of his head. "Never."

In the asylum's bedroom that was allotted to the name of Alice Liddell, the portly nurse stood at the bed's side, a pale shade on her face as the doctor with the surname of Jones held onto the thin, limp wrist of the girl who'd just left the powder room twenty minutes beforehand.

"We've lost her at last," the doctor said simply.

At the very moment he spoke these words, Alice herself was smiling and looking all around herself from where she sat atop the high tree branch. "At last," she said aloud to herself. "I've found Wonderland."