InsaneJournal

Cassidy needed to stop being cooped up and looked after by well-meaning family. Too little, too late, he thought as he put the earbuds into his ears and pressed play on his iPod. He spent the past six months being the family scapegoat. He spent the last month spiraling out into deeper and deeper depression. He'd barely eaten anything, he'd reverted back to his incredibly exacting methods of straightening and tidying. He was even wearing his gloves to bed again, something he hadn't been doing for nearly a year.

He tightened the laces on his boots and proceeded to walk in a general Thames-ish direction. From there, he headed up to the Tower of London. It was one of those places he always managed to get himself off a destructive track because the staggering size, immensity and history of the place reminded him that he was so very, very small in this world, and there was a lot more for him to do before he could be remembered in history like the noble souls that died on the Tower Green. That, and it was just far enough away from home where it could be marked as a nice half-way point, and the church next door always had its doors open, so people could rest and look for some sort of solace in God's temple.

He wasn't there a half an hour later. The roads were in poor condition for driving, and the walkways were covered in half-frozen, slick and awful ice. The sounds of his music were just the right decibel to drown out the sound of tires on cobblestone and pavement, and engines rumbling and idling at street lights. So he wasn't particularly paying attention to them, just his beeline path to the Tower, and his music.

Of course, anyone knows that that's a stupid idea.

He was hit by a car approximately three quarters of the way to the Tower of London from his home and was knocked unconscious immediately upon making contact with the ground. He flew forward from the car about three feet, and, lucky for him, he didn't have to immediately recognize the feeling of a severely sprained lower back and a broken hip, dislocated and cracked femur, and a pretty good case of road rash on the side of his face.

A witness to the accident rushed to his aid, and searched his pockets, pulling out his phone, immediately calling the numbers in his ICE list, while another called the emergency line. Cassidy, of course, was out cold.