Afterimages
When pills and REM sleep don't exorcise Amber (he shouldn't be surprised; she always was a tenacious bitch and her image is no different) House is certain he's losing his mind.
He'd failed to diagnose his patient. Not because he hadn't found an answer in time, because he'd been unable to assemble the puzzle. The information had been there, but he'd been betrayed by his own intellect. Fed false clues by a malfunctioning brain.
He thinks of neon lights and loud music and slyly smiling mouths painted in lipstick red as strawberries, and Chase gasping for breath on the floor.
Had he tried to kill him?
No. No, he wouldn't do that…would he?
There were faster, surer ways to kill if that'd been what he'd intended, and he hadn't. He hadn't planned a single flying screw or glass shard of this train wreck.
Or is it a bus crash?
"What's the matter, House? Scared?" Amber in front of him, her voice inside his skull, perhaps lurking in the scars of injuries sustained trying to save her.
"Shut up!" he says, but knows he's speaking to an empty room.
Why is he seeing Amber? Why did his medical insight fail him? Why that weird impulse to make the kid hear? And why hurt Chase? He's already lost the most promising of his second batch of fellows; why risk the life of the brightest member of the first?
None of it makes sense.
"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," says Amber, almost singsong, "because I'm not myself, you see."
"Do I look like a hookah-smoking caterpillar?" he demands. "And your name wasn't Alice, last time I checked."
She doesn't say anything. Just smiles, smug and vaguely threatening.
No, she's not Alice, because he's the one falling headlong down the rabbit hole.
If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' he thinks to himself, smirking without humor as he pours a glass of scotch and raises it to Amber in mocking salute, it's almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
Literal toxins in the Vicodin and in the alcohol. Then the physical scars of various games of Russian roulette with his life and the metaphorical toxins of everything he's ever done to screw it up. If he's finally falling off the genius/insanity tightrope—
It's only a surprise it didn't happen years ago.
END.