Leareth is very confused about why any of this is happening but he does vaguely remember counting before, for some reason, which makes the new prompt easier to process. 

Again, he can answer it almost immediately, once he's made sense of the question, but...the making-sense-of is hard. And he...thinks...it shouldn't be...? He's very tired and gluey but it feels like something is even more wrong than that, something is wrongwrongwrong and he can't even remember what except that it feels like he's dying - 

:Leareth, you're not dying.: Well, not imminently in the next hour, at least. And not at all if Shavri - and Samora, and Marian, and the doctors, and everyone else here - have anything to do with it, but still, kind of misleading to say it categorically. Shavri doesn't correct herself, though, it's more nuance than he can deal with right now. :You're with Healers. The artifice is helping you breathe. Don't fight it.: 

She's been including everyone nearby when addressing Leareth, and she cuts Leareth out of the link before going on to just the staff. :He's really having a lot of trouble with panic spirals. I don't know if it's all the impairment, he did also have a terrifying near-death experience.: 

Nod. "But it can't possibly be helping. Let's try the headband on him?" 

Marian translates this to Samora. "- Just to check, it won't be a problem for you to take it off and on and off again in rapid succession like that?" 

"Nah, it's fine." If she'd been in the middle of reasoning through something complicated it would disrupt her chain of thought pretty badly, but she knew this was going to happen and didn't start reasoning through anything complicated in the last two minutes. She flips the headband off again and stands next to Leareth and if nobody looks like they object she puts it on him.

Marian doesn’t object, just helps her lift Leareth’s head while navigating tubes in the way. 

....That's. Different. 

Leareth does not exactly feel any less exhausted or bleary, but there's more...him...to feel it? There's a locus to his thoughts, now, a sense of actually being a person - of being Leareth specifically - with continuity over time. 

It's alarming to realize that until a few seconds ago he didn't have that??? 

- panicking won't help. Leareth is mostly just noticing that as a concept, right now, more than - being able to lean on it to actually stop panicking - but the thought is there, and he can hang onto it. 

He's...not dying? Leareth's memories are very much in fragments right now, and physically he feels awful, but - some time has passed, he thinks? And he doesn't feel worse. And he has a very hazy memory of maybe being informed that he was not dying.