Vanya is sitting on one of the ancient-looking infirmary cots, swinging his legs and staring into space. 

A girl in scrubs is sitting across from him. She looks up. "Oh, hey, you must be Marcy! I'm Marian, the, uh, new school nurse." For some reason an upperclassmen from the Shanghai enclave is standing across from her. "This is my apprentice, Wen Qing," she adds. "I think that covers everything, you guys can head out now." 

"There's a school nurse now? I thought they gave up on sending adults in here."

"There's apparently one exception to that and last year's nurse survived, like, an entire month." Marian says this with no particular intonation. "Anyway. Vanya, did you eat lunch? You are clearly really undernourished and that's not going to be helping with anything." 

"I don't like the food." 

Why is the school nurse a mundane instead of a wizard with a healing affinity and four enchanted weapons?!?? Also, Vanya, what the fuck. Does he not have the thing where being hungry makes you want food? Does having your life force drained make everything taste like it's rotten?

"Try reading a book while you eat so you don't have to think about the taste," she says, since it's at least better advice than "become a wizard combat medic".

"Is there any way of getting him, uh, food that tastes better and isn't hard to eat? ....In the hospital we'd give people who have trouble eating enough calories meal supplements to drink, like Ensure, but I don't have that here." 

Shrug. "Not that I know if. If you think it'd help, I suppose we could start pooling our vending machine tokens for him. Anyway I have to go, have a shop assignment to work on. Marcy, any questions?" 

"Yanli's affinity is the food, she has a seasoning that makes the food... it doesn't taste better but it's"-- she visibly gropes for a word-- "moreish? You can't really stop eating it."

"That," Larisa says, "would be amazing. I'll find her later. Marian, Wen Qing, thank you so much for your help - Marcy, someone'll be by at the end of work period to find you, are you going to the library -?" 

Shrug. "Library's fine." 

"Bye Larisa! Yeah, library's good. Do you have a space or should I see if ours is free?" It might be full of upperclassmen or Philadelphians.

"Yeahthat'sfine," Vanya said in a very quiet voice, hunching into himself. 

That was not actually an answer to her question but she can try the Boston/Philly room first. She moves to the door and says "Okay, follow me?" Marcy has never seen a horse girl movie, but if anyone else here has they will recognize her voice and body language as "horse girl tentatively trying to get a grumpy horse to be friends". 

Vanya does not notice her body language because he only looks at the floor, but he does follow her. 

Whatever works. She leads him up to the library, rapidly switching focus from Vanya to anywhere a mal might be hiding and back to Vanya, because it's pretty clear she has to be alert enough for them both.

They make it to the library without incident, though Vanya seems to find the walk tiring; he's dragging his feet a lot more by the end, and stumbles on the stairs. 

(He has, in fact, not eaten anything at all since dinner yesterday, and he may or may not have drunk any water, he can't remember.) 

The convenient think about walking lots while lightheaded and constantly wishing he were dead, is that it builds a lot of mana. 

Watching for mals won't help if he falls down the stairs. ". . . Do you need to lean on me." 

That would be so humiliating. 

"No," Vanya mutters. 

- and then stumbles, and ends up leaning on her anyway. 

He appears to have been mistaken. That's fine; she can look for mals while being leaned on. 

Vanya is trembling a bit by the time they reach the library. 

“I - I need - somewhere quiet,” he mumbles into Marcy’s shoulder.

The reading room is up on the mezzanine and she's not sure Vanya has another flight of stairs in him. She leads him to an armchair away from the main clusters, near an entrance to the stacks. "Is this okay or do you want to go upstairs and see if our reading room is open?"

"S'okay here."

Vanya collapses into the chair and curls up into a ball. The THING is happening again, where it feels like he can't breathe and everything is made out of DOOM and also he's tainted and damaged and he doesn't deserve to exist even if he wanted to exist which he doesn't. 

Marcy grabs another chair and drags it over to where she can face Vanya and see into the stacks, that being the direction from which danger is most likely to come, and makes a mental note to put it back at the end of work period. She has no idea about the Thing and wouldn't know what to do about it if she did. 

"Do you have your math homework? And your textbook?" she asks, because that's a known and well-defined task.

"...Yeah. Did some of it." Vanya starts halfheartedly digging around in his backpack, which he dropped on the floor.