The bus, oh, the bus. A simple drunken night had dissolved to reveal a mortifying accident. House, being already very drunk during the crash, now had his brain decorated with amnesia and a concussion. Though, even now, the pulsing pain in his leg still vexed him.

He had a fracture in his skull stretching from the top to his ear canal— hell, he’d bled out of his ear, had a seizure.. it was clear that his head was a little jangled up from that damn crash.

But he remembered one thing; someone on that bus— prior to the crash— had an illness. He could remember seeing a symptom of some kind, and he, being him, had a need to solve the case. He couldn’t just let up. He desperately needed to solve the echoes that flitted through his mind.

But through hallucination after hallucination, he found it hard to differentiate between memory and lie. So here, sitting on the empty, featureless bus— he folded his hands in his lap, trying to think.

This was a hallucination, it had to be. His leg didn’t hurt, here.. that meant it couldn’t be a memory, it was a figment. And so, when his eyes snapped up to meet another person across from him— that HADN’T been on the bus in his memories— he was shocked.