"What? No. You're thinking he's a diabetic?" 

"I don't know." It could be another explanation for an apparently-healthy man falling asleep on a public bench in the middle of winter, though. If she's right then she feels TERRIBLE about failing to think of it earlier. "Just check his blood sugar, please." 

Ma'ar drifts in the darkness behind his eyelids, intermittently close enough to the surface that he tracks the nearby minds with Thoughtsensing and glimpses fragments - baffling fragments - but mostly not. 

...He feels the stabbing pain in his finger, though. (Bill used the biggest needle for the lancet.)

He jerks away, trying to shout and making a wordless guttural noise instead. Opening his eyes fails to help much; everything is a too-bright blur. 

A hand falls over his. "Hey, it's okay, we're not going to hurt you. I promise. I'm really sorry about that other guy, he was a stupid bully." This is not the most professional speech Marian has ever given, but whatever, it's now past three am and she is out of fucks to give. 

The words don't parse, of course, but the tone reaches him, and her surface thoughts swim into brighter focus. 

She's trying to tell him that he's safe. Which doesn't mean he is safe, but...is more reassuring than it could be. He may be a prisoner, but they don't want to hurt him right now. 

...A flicker of memory, the bridge, the young woman screaming at the man grappling with Ma'ar and pinning him - 

- he's so confused, he doesn't understand any of what's happening, but the young woman was kind to him. And there's very little else he can hold onto, right now, so he might as well cling to that. 

He seems calmer, at least. That's something?

She wonders where he's from. The handful of times he tried to talk, it didn't sound like English, and he seems to understand some but not all of what she's saying. He doesn't quite look Inuit, but he could not-implausibly be Native American. It seemed like he didn't know anyone in the city... Poor guy. 

The glucose monitor beeps. 

"Huh." Bill makes a surprised sound. "Marian, you're a genius sometimes. Glucose is 51." 

The normal range in mg/dl would be 70 to 110. So, low, but not critically low, probably not enough by itself to explain his decreased level of consciousness? Marian can't remember off the top of her head how hypoglycemia interacts with hypothermia. 

"Can we treat it before we get there?" The ambulance appears to be stuck behind a truck, which is technically breaking the law by not getting out of the way. 

"If we get an IV. I figured best not to wait for that." 

"I can have a go." She addresses the patient again. "I'm sorry, I need to poke you again. ...Can you tell me if you're diabetic? You can just not or shake your head." 

     (No answer. His eyes are open and trying to track her but he seems not to understand the question.) 

"I just need to look at your arm..." 

He has decent veins, she thinks, or normally would - he looks fit, his forearm muscled - but right now he's cold and hypotensive and his veins are not popping up at all even when she finds the tourniquet. And also it's three am in a moving ambulance and she's mostly sobered up but the sleepiness is hitting now in waves. 

"...Ugh. Nevermind. Sorry, Bill, I shouldn't - but make sure the ER nurses get on it ASAP, please." 

The ambulance reaches the ambulance bay, sirens and lights switching off. Bill radios ahead, and by the time he has the back door open, a couple of annoyed-looking night shift ER nurses are reaching them. 

The conversation immediately lapses into the usual Montfort Hospital staff dialect, of Quebecois French full of English loanwords. Bill gives a terse, bored report covering the gist of what Marian told him. 

One of the nurses peers in. "Marian? Qu'est-ce que tu faites ici?" [What are you doing here]

"C'est compliqué. Pas important. J'était proche quand..." She gestures vaguely at the patient. "C'est pas mon shift maintenant, je veux simplement cacher et dormir, je travails le jour."

[It's complicated. Not important. I was close by when... It's not my shift now, I just want to hide and sleep, I work days.] 

Judging by the looks she gets, this is considered a little odd but not especially.

Marian says a few more reassuring platitudes to the poor patient, and then escapes before someone fails to notice her completely-non-scrubs attire and starts giving her work to do.

She's halfway to the ICU when she realizes she left her coat behind. Whatever. It'll probably end up in a bag with drunk bathrobe guy's other possessions, and she can retrieve it before she goes home. 

The ICU is dim-lit and peaceful and Chantal, at her desk, doesn't even blink at Marian coming in wearing damp jeans and the sequined bright purple sweater-top she wore to the party earlier. 

     "You're early," she says in French. 

"I'm not here yet. Want to hide and sleep." 

     "Eh. I'll ask you in the morning then." Chantal goes back to her charting.  

Lights. Movement, jarring him, pain jabbing his shoulder... Voices, strange syllables that slide past him without resolving into words. 

...where is he...? 

Staying conscious at all is a struggle; holding onto a thread of thought, impossibly hard. Ma'ar drifts in shadows, trying to sink away from all of it. He's cold, but in an abstract way. Distant. 

...Until something STABS him in the crook of his elbow, and the pain of that isn't distant at all. He struggles and finds that his wrists are pinned in place. Panic rises. He reaches for his Gifts but there's nothing there, no energy to be had, he's an empty cracked vessel... 

"Fuck!" the nurse attempting to place an IV snarls. "I almost had it and then he fucking had to move. Chelsea, hold him - hey, you," (to the resident, whose name she forgot), "can we sedate him, he's getting combative on us." 

     "Did you send the tox screen? I'd rather know what's already in his system before we starting piling on more." 

"I intend to do that as soon as I've got blood from him, which I don't know if you've noticed but we're having some trouble here!" 

    "All right. Hmm. Five of Haldol, that shouldn't hit his respiratory drive too much - do we have a sat reading yet...?" 

"He fucking took it off again. That's a big dose, can I start with two? And I want to give it IM and then get the stupid IV." 

None of the people present are talking to him, which makes it harder to focus on surface thoughts even when he can maintain enough concentration for passive Gifts, which is only in snippets. 

Frustration. Tired, busy, he's an inconvenience - they want to keep him immobilized - they think he's sick, no, they think he's...a drunkard? Or drugged? They have some way of checking but can't do it yet - maybe they don't have many Healers with true Sight, wherever this place is... 

...he remembers being under attack, running, trying to get away - a river - icy water - he doesn't remember anything after that, he doesn't know what happened, but the obvious sequence is that the attacker caught up with him. And now he's a prisoner. What happened before that is a blur as well, but - the war - death and destruction bearing down on him... 

Wherever his immortality spell brought him, however far it is from Predain, it wasn't far enough. Someone must have caught up to him. Recognized him. And now he's a prisoner. 

He just hopes the young woman is all right, the one who tried to help. It seems likely she had no context on who he is, so with luck she won't be implicated... 

Ma'ar is incredibly tired, but he gets his eyes open, at least for a few seconds, and manages to turn his head. There are metal bars inches from his face. A restraint firmly tied around his wrist. 

A lot of people, and he has to assume that they know who he is and what he's capable of. There will be precautions against his mage-gift. 

He's trapped. 

Oddly, the moment when that realization sinks in, he feels more relaxed than he has in weeks. Months. 

He's lost. The war is over and he lost it. He's been overpowered, he has none of his allies, he's too drained to fight with either fists or magic... 

For the first time since all of this began, there's no longer any reason to keep pushing forward. 

Urtho. 

Gone. 

What is this guy ON. Why is he suddenly sobbing uncontrollably. Did he just flip from being an angry fighty drunk to a morose drunk. Maybe he'll be less work this way, at least. Though he's managed to lose his sat probe again, damn it. 

At least she finally has the Haldol pulled up. And she's just remembered that if she's giving it IM instead of IV, due to the lack of an IV because her patient keeps fighting her, she probably can't - or shouldn't - keep the rest in the syringe and use it later. Whatever, she'll give him five, he clearly needs to chill out. 

Something is STABBING him again, this time in his upper arm. Ma'ar can't flail very far, with his wrists pinned, and he catches himself and tries forcibly to relax. He's a prisoner. Helpless. And he was injured during his capture, probably, judging by how awful he feels? 

He lets it happen, whatever 'it' is, and after a little while, a grey gluey blanket seems to settle itself over his thoughts, muffling everything. He still feels it, when they stab him again in the arm, but he doesn't bother to fight it. 

He drifts in grey fog, and cries. For Predain. For Tantara. For Urtho, who paid the highest price of all for his pupil's mistakes... 

Eventually even the grief is muted behind greyness. When the sticky fog swallows him entirely, it's almost a relief. 

Emily Beckett, third-year medical resident currently halfway through her critical care rotation, stands at the foot of the narrow gurney with her arms folded, frowning at the monitor. 

This patient should be a pretty simple case, well within her skills. Male, a John Doe, at a glance in his thirties or early forties but in good shape for it. She can't quite pin down his ethnicity, but - Hispanic, maybe, or he could be Native. Brought in after he was found intoxicated in public, sleeping on a park bench, and tried to run away from a security guard. The kind of story that's amusing to tell later at rounds, but not interesting. 

...So why is he giving her such an uneasy feeling? 

The patient lies with eyes closed and does not enlighten her. 

The monitor pings gently as his heart rate drops to 49, then back up above 50. The oxygen saturation probe is barely picking up a waveform, and there's a question mark by the number it's giving, but the number itself - 93% - is fine. Last BP 90/47, perfectly tolerable. 

Patricia, the nurse for Resus 1, is currently hanging more fluids for Resus 2, their elderly lady with urosepsis who's waiting on an ICU bed. 

Emmy crosses over to her. "Hey, Pat. Did we ever get a temp on your other guy? The paramedics couldn't get one, right?" And, right, the report mentioned he ended up in the river during his attempted flight. Not for long, and apparently he made it out on his own so it can't have been that deep, but - still. 

     Patricia looks up. "Hmm? Kelly tried but he wouldn't hold still for it. I'll give it another go when I'm done here, one sec." 

"Did you give the D50? He had a low sugar on the way in." 

     "...Crap. Sorry, I got the IV in and went to send off his tox screen and then her bag was empty." 

Sigh. Emmy hates it here. It's not like she can blame the nurses, when this place is chronically understaffed. 

And she's not too proud to push a med herself. "It's fine, I'll get it. And the temp. You focus on her, I know she's sicker."

Ma'ar doesn't even notice the syringe of 50%-dextrose solution in water going into his IV, or the saline flush following it. 

The thermometer under his tongue is unexpected enough to penetrate the fog, but it doesn't hurt, and he's very tired. He tries to turn his head away and then doesn't resist further.