“It’s medicine,” Merrin says, patiently and calmly and not sounding at all exasperated. “It’s mixed very precisely, if it’s too sweet then it’s actually harder for your body to absorb. How’s your stomach feeling, by the way - any nausea or cramps? …if you haven’t noticed try to take a minute and pay attention and tell me.”

"I'm FINE."

Merrin in no way whatsoever believes him! It, again, does not seem productive to start an argument about it.

She focuses for a while on coaxing him to drink more of the carefully prepared water. She's not sure to what extent this is an inherently deeply frustrating task versus Wei Wuxian being unusually frustrating. (She is not at all going to let any of her frustration show.) 

"I met Sect Leader Lan," she says after a couple of minutes, just to make conversation. "He's....very young. Oh, and I also met his brother, I think? Not sure I got his name. He looks pretty much exactly the same but was very intent on swordfighting some trees and didn't seem to want to talk to me. I wasn't sure if he doesn't like foreigners or if he just doesn't like being interrupted when he's swordfighting." 

"He doesn't like anyone in the whole world. He's the most stuck-up, smug, priggish asshole I've ever met."

Well, that's certainly a strong reaction. Merrin isn't sure how much to update off it, given how Wei Wuxian seems to have a habit of reacting strongly to quite a lot of things. (And he hasn't not been rude to her, personally, though she's trying not to hold the corpse attacks against him, it's not his fault that he wakes up disoriented when he's ill.)

"Huh. That's unfortunate. Is he rude to you too, then?" 

"He reported me to Lan Qiren when I was studying at the Cloud Recesses and snuck out late to buy alcohol. And he can't take a joke."

"Oh. Good to know, I'll make sure not to make any jokes to him." Which ought not to be hard if he won't talk to her.

Merrin frowns. "I, um - what happened to the Cloud Recesses? I'm still trying to - understand your world's recent history, and the sect leader said something about them burning..." 

"The Wen-dogs torched it and tried to kill all the Lan, even the little kids. Only a few of them survived."

(He is very very very angry. The corpses outside start to move.)

That is probably not great! He's kind of shaking; Merrin takes away the container of water before any unfortunate consequences happen to it. 

"I'm so sorry," she says. Very very calmly. "Let's talk about something else now." She should at some point LEARN to stop bringing up upsetting topics with him! 

He feels dizzy and his chest hurts and his vision keeps sort of blacking out.

"They killed my entire family and I am going to kill all of them."

That is NOT a change of topic and Merrin does not at all like how he looks. His eyes are glazed and not really focusing on her, he's breathing in rapid shallow spurts and definitely not getting enough air, and she can't see that well in the dimly-lit tent but she's pretty sure that most of the color has drained from his face. 

"That's understandable. It's an awful thing to happen. I'm so incredibly sorry." Though she's trying not to feel it, right now, because she's KIND OF BUSY and the last thing this situation needs is for her to also be sobbing uncontrollably.

"- Wei Wuxian. Look at me. I need you to take some deep breaths and try to calm down -" but she's not sure he's seeing or hearing her very clearly, right now, "- nevermind you need to be horizontal right now. I'm going to help you lie down. Just breathe." She gets him lying down in a less controlled manner than she might have hoped, she wasn't really sitting in the right position to catch him, but she at least manages to cushion his head, and then she reaches for his wrist to check his pulse. Which is unsurprisingly very fast and weak and not totally regular.

"...Please don't send a corpse after me. Wen Ning wake up please." 

"Yes, Mistress Dath, what is it"-- he sees Wei Wuxian-- "zhuren, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I need to not be in this bed. --She said she's sorry, like it matters that she's sorry, like--"

He is not going to take deep breaths and calm down.

Well if it's not helping then she's not going to keep saying it! Merrin would really prefer that he would listen to her on the calming down thing but at the very least he's flat on his back now and if he passes out he won't fall. 

"I - asked what happened to the Cloud Recesses," she tells Wen Ning quietly. "It seemed important to understand. But he's -" Probably she should not drop a bunch of medical jargon on his head. Merrin settles for gesturing vaguely at Wei Wuxian's current state, while keeping her other hand on his wrist where she can feel his pulse. "He's very upset. And he really needs his heart rate not to be this high right now."

She raises her voice again. "Wei Wuxian, is your chest hurting? Um, that's one of the questions where it's very important to tell doctors the true answer." 

"... ... ... yes."

Oh no you really shouldn't ask zhuren about bad things the Wen have done. 

Wen Ning attempts to convey this message telepathically.

Merrin is not telepathic but she is at all capable of interpreting facial expressions and also this conclusion is becoming KIND OF OBVIOUS. 

"It's because being angry raises your heart rate, but right now you have less blood volume, because you're still really dehydrated and you're probably anemic - not enough of the substance in your blood that carries oxygen - so when your heart is trying to beat this fast it's not having time to refill properly and is actually pumping less blood, thus dropping your blood pressure even lower, and your cells aren't getting enough oxygen, which is why you're dizzy and your chest hurts. If you lie still for a while and relax it should stop hurting." 

Merrin tries to say this very calmly and neutrally, like it's an interesting scientific fact that she herself has no particular feelings about but that Wei Wuxian might want to know. Sometimes that works well with stubborn people, if they feel like they can just assess her claims as logical arguments and decide whether or not she's making sense. ...Possibly it's a thing that works better for dath ilani teenagers, but she supposes she's about to find out. 

"...well give me more of the thing that carries oxygen then."

....Cute? Merrin considers this and decides that, yes, this is a very reasonable and also endearing response. If only it were that easy.

"I would really like to! Right now I am mostly focusing on getting you to have more water in your blood - and salt, salt is important too - because that's clearly also an issue and might be the bigger issue, and I don't have any of the supplies or setup I would need to give you a blood transfusion. Or any way of checking your blood type. So unless I can figure out something using your world's magic - which apparently I'm too old to personally learn - then I think I have to do that the slow way, by making sure you're eating lots of protein and iron so your body can make more red blood cells and hemoglobin." 

She is not going to get into the complication where she can't even run proper lab tests to diagnose exactly what his balance of problems is; she's forced to rely on correlated but lossy indicators like 'how pale he looks'. This is really frustrating! She's dealt with it before in training scenarios but none of those lasted days and also they generally weren't with real patients! It's...upsetting, to know that faster and safer and just better fixes for everything wrong with him exist, theoretically, and Merrin even has most of the background she would need to rebuild that infrastructure from scratch, but it doesn't matter, she can't do that in a day. And so this is what she has, and maybe it's enough or maybe it's not - and right now Merrin is not feeling very optimistic. Mostly on the front of assuming no other horrible emergencies will happen in the next week. This world seems to just have a very high baseline of horrible emergencies.

It's like the meanest training scenario she can imagine but all the time and...not a game, the stakes are real people and real lives and it probably shouldn't hurt as much as it does, that there were children who died when whatever-it-was happened and the Lan Cloud Recesses were destroyed - burned - (a mental image of children burning to death that Merrin tries to push aside) - and she wasn't there and couldn't do anything. There's no reasonable counterfactual scenario where she could have done something, and it's stupid to feel herself wishing that her plane could have crashed five years ago - five years ago she wouldn't have been ready - she's not ready now, she's not sure it's possible for anyone to be, but if it is then it would take a Keeper and she isn't one and could never have been one and, and, and– 

"You can learn demonic cultivation."

"Oh, yes," Wen Ning says enthusiastically. "Maybe zhuren could teach her."

- wow that was a very sideways jump from what was on Merrin's mind just then. 

"I - huh. Really? Is...that useful for medicine?" It does seem probably useful for not getting set on fire the next time a horrible emergency happens in her vicinity, which Merrin is finding herself pretty concerned with, right now. "Well, how hard is it to learn and what would that involve?" 

"Well, I don't know. I've never tried to teach it before." (He does seem more relaxed with this change of topic.) "I only invented it eight months ago and I spent three of those months on a mountain eating corpses."

He spent three months on a mountain doing what. Merrin has so many questions! 

....This is probably not something she should ask him about right this second when he is just barely starting to calm down. Actually her main update here should be that it's not worth risking conversation topics that are even slightly potentially fraught when he's still fragile enough for having strong emotions to make him medically unstable again. Also, she needs to avoid more potentially upsetting topics because if she starts crying then this is not going to help anyone here stay calm. 

"How did you end up inventing it?" she asks, instead. "Was it by accident, or did you have - some reason to think it was possible?" 

"Well, resentful energy is energy, right? It only makes sense that you can control resentful energy the same way you control qi. It's just that people never learned it because it's evil or whatever."