The kindness of the question and the disarming gentleness of it pushed those damnable tears out. She didn't want to cry. Shoving her free hand against her eyes - the other still clinging to his shoulder - she tried to still them. They would not be stilled.
"I don't know where I am," she confessed in a shuddering whisper. It wasn't what he asked. She knew it wasn't what he asked. Her ankle. She tried to focus on it, but the strangeness of this place was overwhelming. Where was she? Who was he? Why was she here? Where was home? She tried to stand again, and was moderately successful. But she couldn't unpry her fingers from his shoulder. "Are we in France?" she asked, but she knew the answer. Not with English around her. Not with the strange and brutal architecture of this building. Sterile, cold. She shivered from it.
At home, seventeen was far past the age of marriage. At home, women her age typically tended their children and their husbands and their homes. Maturity came quickly in her time, but here... Here, she was seventeen, confused, afraid, and too young by far. Out of her element. There was one solid thing in the world now and it was the shoulder of a strange man in strange garb. Terrifying.
"Who ar....where is thi..."
Too many unanswered questions, questions that she never should have had to have asked. She scrubbed at the wetness under her eyes. Crying. She was crying. She couldn't even... The failure of her will to control her own emotions was the final straw: she broke, and with the breaking went her resistance to what had happened to her, her caution, and her distrust.
"Help," she half-gasped, swallowing the word with the sob that tried to escape.