"Well, I think we can get that tube out in the next couple hours, once the attending has a chance to examine you? He might want to do an ultrasound, uh, take some pictures of your heart first - you were having a lot of trouble this morning and it was probably just the hypothermia but we want to rule out that it's something worse -" 

She stops. He's watching her with intense, terrified eyes, and doesn't yet look especially reassured. 

"...Okay. Wait. Taking a step back. What, uh, what do you think's been happening since last night when I, um, found you on the park bench - do you remember that?" 

She doesn't know. 

She has no idea, and she's only just starting to notice, now, that there's something there at all for her to not-know -

He doesn't have the slightest idea how to explain how he got from Predain to here. Wherever 'here' is.

He can start by figuring out what she knows, if anything - and a surge of unnamed emotion reminds him how desperately he wants to know. 

:The war. Did you hear news of it?: 

Marian blinks at him. "I'm...not sure which war you mean?" It's embarrassing to admit how little she manages to follow the news, these days. "Afghanistan?" 

The place-name, and the brush of associations in her mind, aren't familiar to Ma'ar at all. This place must be very far away.

He's also familiar with the kind of Healer who doesn't much track the world around them unless it's Healing-related. 

:Urtho's Tower: he prompts. :In Tantara. The mage who made gryphons: Urtho's Tower has stood for half a century. A clever, curious Healer, like Marian obviously is, might well have read about it at some point in her training; species creation is a discipline that involves extensive Healing components, after all, and Urtho's gryphons were groundbreaking.

(A surging ache in his chest. He didn't want any of it to happen. Not like this.) 

:There was - a war...: Ma'ar knows this isn't very informative but it's all he can manage without weeping. 

Wait. What. What. WHAT. 

Marian's brain is skidding in circles. Is this guy sane? Even a little bit? 'Mages don't exist and neither do gryphons' is unhelpful and rude.

But he did do something to Dr Beckett. And he's talking in her head. And...there was whatever happened on the riverbank, she thought she was hallucinating or drunk but she KNOWS she was practically sober by then and she's never hallucinated before and, and - 

Maybe he's just really good at hypnosis? Marian's mind is flailing for an explanation that doesn't completely break all her expectations of how reality works. It's just that someone being so good at hypnosis that they can do it non-consensually to a doctor, and also to her when floundering in an icy river, doesn't...actually...sound any LESS fictional than gryphons. 

"I...haven't heard of those things," she says as diplomatically as she can manage, while she tries to think of literally anything else she could say. 

She hasn't even heard of mage-gift? Apparently not. ...Does this kingdom or country or whatever it is just ban all Gifts and keep their existence a secret? 

:Maybe the information is classified by your government? The city guard who stopped us knew me. ...I thought: 

Oh. God. Marian feels a sudden surge of sympathy, and reaches to squeeze his hand between both of hers. 

"Did you - shit, did you think you were being arrested? Because of - things you did in this war?" 

This question is very obvious so Ma'ar just nods, saving his Mindspeech. 

"Oh shit. I'm sorry - I would've said something... That guy didn't have a clue who you were and he wasn't even police, he was some sketchy private security person. I think he thought you were, uh, molesting me, and he was bored and got a kick out of being an asshole to you. I'm so sorry that happened. I was incredibly pissed at him and he wasn't LISTENING to me." 

...Whatever else might be true, Marian's thoughts are incredibly sincere. Ma'ar's eyes are smarting again. 

Marian looks into his face. She's still reeling, almost dizzy with it. It's...too much, too surreal and impossible. 'My patient is somehow from a fantasy universe' just doesn't make sense. She has no script or protocol or relevant knowledge to apply to it. 

...But 'my patient is upset and scared' is something she knows. 'My patient fought in a war and has PTSD about it' as well, and also 'my patient was confused and didn't know he was in a hospital.' It's an awful tragic scenario but it's one that any good ICU nurse should be able to handle calmly and with grace. 

She looks into his eyes. "Hey. Ma'ar. Look at me? You're not a prisoner. All right? This is a hospital. We treat sick people. None of us knew anything about this war and even if we had it wouldn't matter, all right? We take care of people when they need it, no matter who they are or what they've done."

(She can't help thinking of that patient she had once who was supposedly a serial killer, though she's still confused how someone could do any serial killing while on as much cocaine as that dude. He was creepy as fuck. ...Ma'ar isn't, though, and also he's probably reading her mind and she should stop thinking about serial killers already.) 

She takes another deep breath. "It makes sense that you were scared, though, if you - I guess if you're not from here you probably don't know what a hospital looks like. I can't imagine how scared you must've been. I'm so sorry. But it's okay. We're not going to hurt you. I promise." 

Tears are filling his eyes again, blurring Marian's face. 

:Why did they hurt me before: 

"In the ER, you mean? ...Uh, the other room you were in before you were in this room?" 

(He nods.) 

"Shit. I'm really sorry. They - I don't know what medicine is like where you're from," now is SO NOT the time to ask him a thousand questions about Fantasy World Medicine, "but here, magic - isn't a thing - and the way we keep really sick people alive and help them get better involves, uh. Kind of a lot of tubes. And needles."

She tries to remember what she skimmed in his chart. "I think they gave you an intramuscular injection of sedative, because you were agitated and they needed you to hold still to put in an IV. An IV is...a sort of tube that goes right into your blood? So we could give you fluid and drugs when you were too sick to swallow. And in order to see what was going on we had to take blood out, too, with a needle, and send that to be, uh, studied. Then you were really unstable, your heart wasn't working great and you weren't breathing well, so we brought you to this room and we put in the line here in your wrist, to measure the blood pressure in your artery, and the central line in your neck, that's really just a big IV." 

He blinks at her. 

Oh. Oops. "Sorry, I went too fast, didn't I? The important part is, uh, that everything we've done - even when it hurt - it was just trying to keep you alive. ...Except the Haldol, I don't think they should've done that, but at that point everyone was kind of assuming you were a homeless person who'd gotten too drunk and that's why you were confused and fighting them. They see a lot of that." 

Ma'ar is still having trouble following the content of what Marian is saying. Her surface thoughts are scattered, constantly darting off toward her own confusion and curiosity - which makes sense, and he respects her more for it, but it makes it really hard to get the meaning of her words, when his head is still gluey. 

...He's not in Velgarth anymore. Marian is pretty sure of that; Ma'ar should check her reasoning for himself once he's capable of it, but he isn't right now, he can't find the right questions to ask or tests to run, and Marian is smart and almost certainly right. 

He feels himself breathing in short spurts, fighting the ventilator, which wants to push more air into his lungs than his drum-tight chest can hold. Tears are trailing down his cheeks again, hot and sticky. The lump of grief in his throat is even more painful when it's spasming around the stupid tube. 

Marian falls silent. Ma'ar looks really upset, and she's been a nurse long enough to know when she's talking too much and it's not helping. She sits with him in silence for a while, waiting to see if he's going to calm himself down. 

...He's not doing that. 

"Ma'ar? I - what's wrong? Are you still scared?" 

No. ...Well, yes, he's terrified of the looming unknown ahead of him. But that's not why everything hurts. 

Even Mindspeaking is hard. :...My country. Maybe my - entire world. I think - it must - have been destroyed: A shuddering breath. :In the war. That I started: Because whether or not his troops were first to move, it was his actions that led to the inevitable. 

It's the obvious inference. The immortality spell should have returned him to Predain. But he didn't anticipate a scenario where there wasn't a Predain, or anywhere else, left for him to wake up in. 

Predain is gone and maybe all of Velgarth is gone and it's his fault. His fault. He didn't mean for it to end like that, but intentions don't count for anything, here. 

Oh. Fuck. 

"...I'm so sorry," Marian says, knowing full well how pointless and empty the words are. "I - think we should talk about why you believe that later, okay? You're not thinking clearly right now. But it– I understand why that feels awful. It's okay to be upset about it." 

She can't possibly understand. She's a Healer. A nice, compassionate young Healer. She's probably never even killed anyone, let alone murdered an entire world. 

Marian sits quietly and holds her patient's hand and tries to figure out what to do. 

The ventilator is loudly upset again; he's breathing at almost forty a minute, his chest clenching with each exhalation as he fights the machine. The heart monitor, which has been quietly dinging for a while about his heart rate, is now pealing in earnest; his pulse is up at 153 and he's throwing a lot of ventricular beats again. His blood pressure is through the roof. She doesn't even know his sats because he seems to have lost his probe again. 

She said it was okay to be upset but it seems not totally okay for him to be this upset. 

"Ma'ar?" 

Ma'ar is way too upset right now to be Thoughtsensing her. He barely notices her voice. 

Okay. Think. What is she supposed to DO. She could...start the propofol again? (The pump is plaintively reminding her of its existence, after being paused and then ignored past the two-minute alarm interval.) But he might feel seriously betrayed by that. 

She takes a deep breath, and stretches her arm to its full limit to hit the call bell button, and then, carefully moving the tubes aside, she slides her head behind Ma'ar's shoulders - god, he's hot and sticky - and holds him. It's not exactly professional behaviour, but he's so alone and scared and upset and OH SHIT she'd been thinking he was a soldier, maybe a commander, she hadn't realized he had...been in charge of everything...and believes that what happened was his fault... 

Anne-Marie is the one who answers the call bell, a minute or so later. 

"Marian? What's goi– shit! What happened? Should I get the crash cart?" 

"I think he's just having a panic attack. He - realized something upsetting." 

Ma'ar's heart rate is up to 170, though. Whatever the cause, this isn't something his body is in any shape to handle. 

"...Yeah, maybe do that. Uh, and can you get Dr Prissan here ASAP?"