"Hey... Can you hear me? What's your name?"
Shaking the girl's shoulder gently, Cameron winces as she moves from her haunches onto her knees and slips her hands beneath the younger woman's cheap puffer jacket. The synthetic lining brushes against her knuckles - an odd sensation due to tingling numbness - but she does her best to feel for anything concerning as she traces the girl's spine. Satisfied only once she's checked her hips and her neck, the blonde grunts as she pulls the girl up into a seated position against the wall.
"Hey? Can you open your eyes for me?"
She tries again, tapping lightly at the girl's cheek with greater urgency as the latter's eyelashes flutter in a display of consciousness.
"That's good, come on, you have to open them for me."
The blonde insists, offering a smile that feels utterly bizarre on bloodied lips when the younger woman finally cracks open her eyes.
"What's your name? Can you hear me? ¿Cómo te llamas?"
"Co?"
"Tu nombre? Spanish?"
"Nie... Polskie. Polish."
Damn it... Of course you are...
"Can you understand me?"
Cameron asks, cringing a little as she feels hopelessly presumptive, but she knows she's just going to have to go with it, and that in the grand scheme of things, now is not the time to feel unreasonably guilty for not knowing every fucking language.
Save that for later. Add it to the guilt bank.
A small smirk at this, entirely at her own expense, before she tries again
"What's your name?"
"Lena... Where... Where we?"
"I don't know... Well, no, I do, but I don't know how you got here, and I don't know how we're going to get out..."
Cameron replies nervously, shivering, and the girl's frown could just be a result of her recent trip down the stairs, but the blonde supposes she might also be wondering just what in the hell her cell-mate (for want of a better word!) is going on about.
"Are you hurt, Lena?"
She tries to regain some sense of control, and when the girl repeats the word 'hurt' with an even deeper furrowing of her brow, Cameron wonders if she's unfamiliar with the term, before Lena extends trembling fingers and touches them to her lip.
"Ow..."
Cameron pulls back, before swiping at battered flesh experimentally and discovering blood.
"Hurt."
Lena repeats, and the blonde shrugs awkwardly and insists
"Not badly, it's okay. I'm okay. What about you? Did you hit your head? Does anything hurt?"
She motions to her head before gesturing to the younger woman's arms and legs to emphasize her point, and Lena touches a hand to her temple with a dramatic wince, presumably to help in their difficulty communicating.
"bół głowy... Head hurt."
"Yeah... I can imagine."
The blonde grimaces, and she wants to ask the girl what happened and how she ended up here, but her own head is pounding something rotten, and she's not sure how successful her questioning is apt to be. Instead, she moves so that she sits crossed-legged in front of the younger woman with her hands balled in her lap for warmth.
"It will be okay."
She offers lamely, and Lena nods obediently, sending her short, black bob bouncing; her hair a tangled mess suggesting she'd been treated with a rough hand before ending up in their shared prison.
"Your name?"
Lena asks, and the blonde chuckles croakily when the girl holds out bound, bitten-nailed hands in an obscurely out-of-place fashion.
"Cameron."
She replies automatically, vaguely acknowledging the curious fact that she has always gone by her last name without missing a beat while working for House.
Working for House... We're calling this work?! No, this has nothing to do with work, and everything to do with needing to prove something that it should never have felt necessary to prove. If I'd stuck around at the hospital waiting for someone to come and check out this shithole with me, it wouldn't have made me pathetic, it wouldn't have made me a princess, it would have made me sensible. Sane. It was never a problem with me, to begin with, it was with House; it was his issue that he felt compelled to pick and to tease. It was never my responsibility to govern the allowances of his habit...
"Things all seem a lot clearer when you're freezing your butt off wondering if it's going to be the air or the men upstairs that get you."
"Co? What?"
Lena asks, pulling her puffer in tight, and the blonde hazards a guess that she's not a day over seventeen.
"Never mind, I was just talking to myself... Loco."
"Zwariowany."
"Probably."
Cameron agrees with a tight smile, wondering if she should try her well-meaning lie of things all being fine again, but in the end, opting for silence.
Waking up from his uneasy dozing, House frowns as he takes in his surroundings. Open reference books, stone-cold coffee, and a completed crossword puzzle bearing an imposter's hand.
Chrysalis.
Rubbing at his scruff with a wince, he frowns when he notices an irritating flash coming from his phone on the desk in the DDX room. Considering climbing out of his chair to investigate, he settles on an altogether more favourable approach and calls out to Thirteen who sits bent over a book in the far corner.
"Hadley!"
He shouts, but the young doctor pays him no mind, and further scrutiny reveals that she has her earphones in as she pretends to read.
He is fairly sure of this latter presumption as she stares off into space.
"Thirteen, you-"
But he trails off in the middle of pushing himself out of his chair as the door to the DDX room is thrown open and Chase appears, looking flustered.
"-Ah! If it isn't Boy Wonder, appearing in my time of need! He has been summoned to fetch the All Mighty's-"
"House!"
Chase interrupts, spotting the greying doctor's phone and chucking it at him impatiently.
"He has developed the power to read minds! He is truly a gift. He is-"
"-Enough! We need to go."
"Why?"
"Check your phone."
"Give me a minute... And don't you start giving me orders, Robert, it's bad enough I have to pretend to listen to Foreman!"
House grumbles, pawing at his phone before stiffening with his jaw clenched when the screen lights up to alert him that he's received a message.
And who it's from.
"Cameron? She's okay?"
"Like I said... Read it, and then let's go."