House was obsessing. He knew he was obsessing – it's what he does. Any puzzle can be solved if he gives it enough time, so that is exactly what he did. He spent the weekend obsessing over every little detail of Cameron's visit, trying to figure out where they had gone so wrong. How had it ended that way?

But House didn't stop there. He started to pick apart every time he'd seen her since he realised this new boyfriend was on the scene. What had he missed? Was she acting hurt? Was she showing any signs of being the broken woman he had helped on Friday night? He remembered a time when Chase had knocked his mug off the table and she had jumped out of her skin at the sound of it crashing to the floor. His mind went to how she was starting to look more tired in recent weeks. Or was she? Were these pieces to his puzzle or a desperate attempt to find meaning? House realised he couldn't be sure this wasn't all his imagination. He needed to talk to someone. He wanted to talk to Wilson, but there was a niggling feeling inside that told him that was the wrong move. Where had that feeling been the other night? Not for the first time, he cursed at himself for how insensitive he had been.

He knew what he needed. He needed to talk to Cameron.

House planned to get to work early on Monday morning and catch her before his other fellows came in. Cameron was always early – it was one of the things he found most annoying about her. She persisted in this despite the fact that he rarely arrived before ten. By 8:30 at the latest every working day for the last three years his unfailingly reliable employee would be in the office sipping coffee and catching up on his paperwork.

Every morning, except apparently this one.

Where was she?

House had arrived at quarter to nine and there was no sign of Cameron.

He sighed and sat down at his desk, his mind already working to come up with a convincing lie to tell Chase and Foreman when they saw him at work so early. Almost simultaneously, he was conjuring up another lie to explain Cameron's absence. They would both have known that Cameron was due back from her week off today and he felt it his duty to maintain her privacy. For a brief moment House wondered why he was bothering with this detail. It crossed his mind for a second that he probably pitied the young doctor, although he got the feeling this wasn't the whole story. Still, he'd have time to obsess over that later, once he had sent Chase and Foreman off to test their patient for whatever remotely feasible diagnosis they came up with first. His mind was too busy focusing on his latest puzzle to worry about the old news that was his deaf-blind patient with liver failure. He had taken the case thinking that it would be more interesting than having a patient who could communicate normally with him, although he was finding it frustrating that he couldn't even get a lie out of the man to berate him or question his life choices. Cameron would have been all over the case, he thought. Someone who she could try and fix, to care for and to make life better for.

Foreman arrived a little after nine, and Chase followed not long behind. They prepared their coffees and sat down to review the file, not having noticed House in the adjacent room. Why would they? They had no reason to look over there as House wouldn't ever be on time, let alone early.

House knew that this was the perfect opportunity to screw with them. He spent a few minutes trying to think up the perfect prank; after all he had many up his sleeves, but kept coming up short of ideas. His mind, as it had been all weekend, kept going back to Cameron. Why couldn't he let this go? Frustrated, he gave up and stormed in to the outer office; in a way that both of his fellows knew left no room for questions.

It was past ten by the time his fellows left the room. House had been going out of his mind with worry that Cameron had still not shown up for work. Even when she had been sick she would make sure that he got a message that she'd be away. House realised then that there were very few possibilities as to why she wasn't here, and none of them were good. Either she was still mad at him, which he felt was probably completely justified but skiving off from work was a very un-Cameron-like response to the situation; or her boyfriend had done something much worse to her.

House knew it was probably the latter and he couldn't wait another second to find out for certain. He limped to his bike, as fast as his useless leg would allow, and sped past all the idiot drivers between the hospital and Cameron's apartment that clearly had nothing better to do with their day than waste it driving at a leisurely pace through the town's streets.

He reached her apartment in record time and started to bang on the door loudly with his cane. The desperation in his actions could be seen and understood easily by most. Unfortunately, the hurt woman on the other side of the door was not one of them.

Cameron, who had been trying for the past hour to will her aching body to move, had just about felt ready to make the painful trip to the bathroom to clean herself up when she had heard an angry banging at her front door. He mind instantly went to Chris, her boyfriend who was notorious for forgetting his key, or else took some pleasure in having her let him into her apartment herself. She couldn't be sure which was true, nor did she really care right now. All she cared about was getting cleaned up and finding whatever pain medication she had to dull the torture her body was going through. This had been her mind's sole focus, and even then was at times too much to handle. To have to deal with Chris again, or perhaps worse a concerned neighbour, who was not expecting to see her in this state, was more than she could bear to think about. So instead she chose not to. Cameron curled her body up smaller and tighter than she already had, squeezing her eyes shut as if to block out the world.

A few feet away, House was becoming more impatient. He had seen her car outside; she had to be home. Why wasn't she coming to the door? His mind jumped to the worst possible scenario as his hand was already fishing though his pocket for the spare key he had made when she first started working for him.

The key turned in the lock and House opened the door, breathing a sigh of relief that the living room looked normal.

"Cameron!" He called out. There was no response. "Cameron!" He tried again.

House made his way to what he assumed was the bedroom and pushed the door open. His heart sank at the sight of the mess that lay before him. Bed sheets were thrown on the floor, the lampshade was hanging at an almost impossible angle, something, he guessed a mug, had been smashed and there was a powerful smell of coffee hanging in the air. House saw photo frames shattered all over the floor, depicting images of happier times in the young woman's life. How he wished life were still like that for her.

While it was obvious something had happened here, there was still no sign of Cameron. He was about to leave to check the other rooms when he saw something in the corner of his eye.

Cameron was crouched down, her back to the bed, in the furthest possible hiding space from the door.

"Cameron?" He asked again, this time more gently. "Alison?" He still couldn't get a response. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, hoping to get some rise out of her. Her breath was steady, it was as if she had no idea he was there, as if her mind had completely shut her body down.

The fear that had momentarily subsided in House upon finding her alive quickly returned. He could tell that whatever was happening either psychological, following the trauma, or neurological, likely as a result of a damaging blow to the head. He knew that a psychological response would be easier to diagnose. If this was the case, Cameron was likely to be experiencing some form of dissociation as a protective mechanism for her mind following the assault. He pushed himself off from the floor next to her, his leg beginning to throb from the extra strain he had been putting on it, and made his way to the kitchen. He was looking for something to cause an intense physical sensation to bring her out of the dissociative state. Making his way to the freezer, he grabbed a bag of ice and walked back to the bedroom.

"I'm sorry." House said, as he took the bag and placed it on Cameron's exposed arm. "Alison?" He asked again.

He could hear her breathing start to speed up, almost as if the fear was returning to her mind once again.

"Leave me alone." She whimpered.

"Alison!" House repeated, this time raising his voice a little more.

"Leave me alone!" This time she shouted. Her breathing was getting faster and faster, she was beginning to hyperventilate.

"Come on, Cameron, snap out of it." House said, the volume of his voice almost matching hers.

House could tell her was getting nowhere by shouting. She was reaching the point of having a panic attack and he knew he needed to bring her breathing back down to normal as quickly as possible.

"Ok, Cameron I need you to listen to me." He said, loudly enough for her to hear and very firmly, as if leaving her no room to argue. He prompted her a few more times to be sure that he had her attention. "I need you to take some slow breaths for me now, ok? I want you to breathe in through your nose and blow the air out through your mouth for as long as you can until I say stop." Cameron nodded. "Ok breathe in." She took a breath. "And out… and stop. Breathe in again."

House continued this routine, coaching the scared woman in front of him until her breathing had returned to normal.

They sat in silence for a while; Cameron trying to find herself back in the present moment and House waiting anxiously until he felt enough time had passed for him to request to look at her injuries. Although he knew he shouldn't be the first to break the silence, after a few more minutes House wondered if Cameron would ever speak up. He needed to take matters into his own hands.

"I need to see what he did to you." He said evenly, as if there was no emotion behind the loaded request.

"I can deal with this on my own, House." Cameron retorted.

"Clearly you can't." He replied.

"I would have been fine if you hadn't come banging on the door."

"I didn't do this to you, your ass of a boyfriend did."

"Get out!" She snapped. House didn't move. "Get out of my place and leave me alone. This is all your fault!"

House saw red.

"You're the one that went back to him. You kept turning up at my door, expecting me to fix everything when you're doing nothing to help yourself!"

This was not what Cameron had been expecting from him. She knew he could be a jerk, he could be unfair, but she had never thought of his as cruel. She could feel her blood boiling and clenched her fists, as if preparing herself to fight.

"You don't know anything about it, do you?"

"So explain this to me then, because I'm really struggling to understand how you could be that self destructive that you keep putting yourself in a position that you know will only end in pain."

"I can't…" Cameron started, her eyes filling with tears and her heart filling with rage. "I can't leave him."

"Yes you can."

"Are you saying I wanted this to happen?" She questioned, uncurling her body slightly in a primal attempt to make herself look bigger and more threatening. It had the opposite effect, in House's eyes, as he had never seen her looking smaller and more vulnerable than she did in this moment.

"I'm saying you need to fix people. Even abusive people. Why else would you go back to him after everything he's done to you?"

Cameron was stunned into silence. Her rational mind knew that House was wrong, but she was starting to question why she stayed with Chris. There was no logical reason, not any more. He swore he'd change the first few times, but lately he wasn't even doing that. Why was the idea of leaving him still so painful?

"I need to get myself cleaned up." She decided.

"Avoidance is a great strategy." House commented sarcastically.

"Coming from the man who avoids feeling anything by spending every waking moment high as a kite."

Leaning forward, using the floor as support, Cameron attempted to push herself up from behind the bed but the weight of her body was too much for her injured arms to take.

"Let me help." House said.

Cameron tried a couple more times to get up without success. He body had become stiff from holding it in one position for so long, which was only exacerbating the pain that she was in. She resigned herself to the fact that right now she did need House's help.

"Where's your first aid kit?" He asked.

"Kitchen cupboard above the oven." Cameron grunted through the pain.

House went to fetch it and spent the next hour helping Cameron to wash and dress her various wounds. It was definitely worse than it had been when she came to his house. He knew she had to be in a lot of pain.

Reaching into his pocket, House pulled out a familiar orange bottle of pills. He poured three out into his hand, taking two for himself and offering her the third. Cameron considered his offer for a moment, before taking the Vicodin.

"You're not coming in to work today." House told her.

Cameron could only nod. She felt shame as she watched him patch her broken body back together and couldn't imagine having to face her colleagues looking and feeling like she did.

"Take a few days off, I expect you back at work by the end of the week."

Again, she nodded. There were no words that could be said to make either of them feel better in this moment.

Once House had finished, all he wanted to do was leave without saying another word. He was feeling a storm of emotions and knew he'd say something he regretted if he allowed himself to open his mouth.

He approached the door and was about to leave when he heard Cameron call out to him.

"Don't tell anyone, please."

There was a desperation in her voice unlike anything he'd heard before.

"Fine."

He shut the door to her apartment and once again Cameron was left alone.