That sounds hard Kalorm reminds himself that 'resting' is the thing he's supposed to be doing right now. Surely being tired is actually helpful for that. He nods. 

And Merrin leaves. 

....She almost immediately feels an itchy restlessness and an urge to run back in and make sure Kalorm is still okay. 

Dear Merrin's brain: this is stupid. Kerrin is a way better medtech than her. She didn't even have any specific idea of what was wrong or what to do about it, and also it can't be that horribly wrong, they did the obvious diagnostic tests and the results weren't disastrous. Also she is very fatigue-impaired and even stupider than usual right now. And Nerdel is nice and less scary than the rest of that family but still, like, kind of scary. 

Once she's back at her temporary hospital suite, though, she sends a message to Personnel asking them to call her, not just send her a message, if Kalorm's condition deteriorates. She doesn't care if she's asleep at the time. She just wants to know. 

Nerdel has found a damp cloth she can use to pat her son's forehead and neck; he's sweaty for some reason, and it does a better job of substituting for stroking the hair that he doesn't have. 

"Are you annoyed with Merrin about something?" she asks him. 

What??????? 

Kalorm shakes his head emphatically, and then regrets it because now he's dizzy again. 

...Nerdel half-laughs under her breath. "I guess not! Sorry, I just - wasn't sure how to read the expression you made a couple of minutes ago? And I didn't want to ask out loud when she was right here." 

Kalorm is making such a face! 

...He should also say words. Probably. It sounds hard, but things being hard hasn't stopped him BEFORE. 

"...Tired," he manages. "Khemeth. Mad." 

Nerdel has no idea what he means????????? 

Communicating is still unreasonably hard and somehow Kalorm is even more annoyed about this because it doesn't really seem to be any specific person's fault. 

He takes a few breaths, marshaling his strength. 

"Khemeth. Made Merrin. Come in. Day off. Not. Fair." 

....Nerdel is not going to start laughing. That will NOT help at ALL. It takes some effort to avoid, though. 

"- Kalorm, listen - uh, I mean, I'm sure Khemeth was involved in the decision to ask Merrin if she wanted to come be around, because you know her and I think Khemeth hoped that would make things easier. But, trust me, she did not need to be forced to do it. She - it's a known fact about her that she gets very emotionally invested in her patients. She wants you to be okay, and she definitely wanted to be there personally to see you come off the ventilator, because – I mean, that's a win for her, right? That was what she was working toward, here." 

.....It is completely unfair and unreasonable that for some reason Kalorm is now apparently almost sort of crying??? He thinks it's at least not externally obvious, but it's making it inconveniently hard to breathe enough, and apparently his body notices and starts yelling at him really quickly if he's not breathing enough. 

....Nerdel squeezes his arm again. 

"- Hey, it's okay. I just– it's fine, now I know you're not mad at Merrin, anything else we can talk about later once you're feeling stronger. Okay?" 

Kalorm is not at all sure that it's okay, actually! It feels like maybe there's something actually important that no one else is talking about normally? About Merrin. Something about Merrin, and how other people talk to her, is really weird and wrongbad. 

- But he doesn't actually know what, and also he's so tired. So maybe he'll just...not actually nod in agreement, that would be going too far, but shrug and then close his eyes. 

In a different part of the hospital: 

Khemeth is cuddling his boyfriend! This is a significant improvement on the previous situation, which did NOT include cuddling his boyfriend!

...This does not actually mean that he's particularly more functional. 

Dekan is here to cuddle and make listening noises and perhaps occasionally interject useful-but-not-cognitively-challenging-to-answer* clarifying questions.

He's not going to attempt to take a more active role, right now, because he doesn't actually know what his boyfriend needs, given how they weren't able to spend most of the last two days in very close contact – and in normal circumstances Khemeth will generally at least keep him up to date by text, and they know each other well enough that this is usually enough. 

(He understands why. He's not angry about it. Being angry wouldn't help. At this point he's entirely used to the fact that Khemeth's side of the family contains people who are not at all reasonable or sane about him and his father, specifically, and he can hope that someday this will change, if he wants, but he's also aware that personally trying to affect the situation is predictably not going to improve matters.) 

...Dekan perhaps does, in fact, have some emotions about this. But now is among the worst possible times to make those his boyfriend's problem, so he won't. 

*this is a three-syllable word in Baseline.

"Missed you so much," is the first actual sentence that Khemeth manages. 

"...Yeah. I know. But I'm here now, and - I love you, and I'm not going to leave." 

(Dekan cannot honestly say that he missed Khemeth as much as Khemeth missed him, because he didn't. He's doing fine. He's used to random long silences from his boyfriend, and it's okay - genuinely okay - with him.)

"...I think I'm worried about Merrin," he manages eventually. 

Snuggle. Listening noise. 

"I don't know what it is. I - just keep feeling like we're missing something that she needs? I don't know why I can't figure it out– I mean, I don't think she knows either? So that makes it harder. But I should be able to see it." 

Hug. "And so you're feeling stupid. Khemeth, I love you and I think you're very good at what you do, but have you considered that right now you need to get some sleep? Unless something is going to explode before tomorrow morning because Merrin has a critical unmet emotional need that literally everyone including the staff of Exception Handling have managed to miss for the last two years. Is something going to explode before tomorrow morning?" 

"...No, I don't think anything will explode. Just. This is a very stressful situation for her, right, and it's - different from the usual kind of stress she deals with so well, it's not time-limited, and it's not - so when something is an emergency, she stops overthinking every single social situation so much, because there's no time for that? And this is a lot of waiting, a lot of time to think, and it's, I think it's hard on her, and I wish– ...I don't even know if it's that. I, just, there's something she wants and I don't know what and it's bothering me! I don't like not being able to figure out people things! I'm supposed to be good at this!" 

Dekan sighs. 

"Khemeth, you are sounding barely coherent right now. I am happy to help you figure this out. If you think it's important then you're probably right. But for now, the next step toward figuring out the fascinating puzzle of Merrin is to get some rest." 

The night stretches on. 

For all his exhaustion, Kalorm is finding it hard to sleep. Kerrin dimmed the lights for him, but it's still not dark; she apparently has to be in the room and within arms' reach of him at all times, and also has to have her LCD screens up, and she wants it to be light enough to actually see him. (She offered Kalorm a sleep mask, but he hates sleep masks, they feel like lying to his body about whether it's dark out.)

He's more comfortable without the breathing tube, but figuring out how to swallow his saliva is still taking kind of a lot of concentration. Sometimes, especially if he's half-asleep, he manages to do it wrong and ends up coughing, which is an excellent way to end up SUDDENLY WIDE AWAKE and MISERABLE; it subjectively feels like this is happening every five minutes. (It's not, actually; he's mostly getting blocks of 20 or 30 minutes of sleep at a time). His lungs are still producing stupid quantities of gunk, and it's exhausting to try to cough it up all the way; he's actually slightly starting to miss the lung-suction thing, at least it meant he didn't have to do all the work. Kerrin gave him control of the mouth suction thingy again, but Kalorm is apparently not actually strong or coordinated enough to get it to his mouth on his own, which is humiliating and awful.

He doesn't exactly have a headache, but his head feels stuffy, and he's still getting hit by random interludes of dizziness and vertigo if he moves his head the wrong way. His feet feel weird and bad - not exactly numb, not exactly pins-and-needles-y, but something vaguely in that corner. His chest is actually hurting less, but if anything that leaves him more aware of all the random aches and pains everywhere else. He's not really nauseated as long as he holds still, but it keeps feeling like he has to burp and can't figure out how. When he complains about this to Kerrin, she checks the weird tube that goes in his nose apparently to his stomach, and flushes it with a tiny bit of water to make sure it's not blocked and then puts it on more powerful suction for a couple of minutes, but this doesn't really help. He's just pervasively uncomfortable, which is, fine, maybe partly because he's lying on the floor, and at this point the relatively bonier parts of his body are starting to feel sort of bruised. 

He keeps having really weird unpleasant dreams. 

At some point he gets hiccups. This is incredibly horrible! He can't do any of the things that normally help with hiccups! Kerrin gives him a drug for it, but it still takes, like, an entire five minutes before it stops.

On the bright side: breathing-wise, Kalorm is doing great. By midnight, an hour after Merrin's departure, Kerrin is able to ease him down to 30% oxygen at rest, and he's maintaining an O2 saturation consistently above 95%. She boosts it to 50% when he's coughing, but he probably doesn't even need that; his oxygenation actually goes up. He may be clearly annoyed about it, but he's doing an excellent job of clearing his secretions without any nagging from her. They're making good progress on weaning down his continuous painkillers; he's now on half the dose he was at the point when they took out the breathing tube, and she's offering him a bonus short-acting-painkillers dose when it looks like he's gearing up for a coughing session, but half the time he actually declines. 

And communication is so much easier. He still can't speak above a whisper, and it's clearly tiring for him - he rarely manages more than a word or two at a time - but it's vastly simpler to figure out what he needs or what's bothering him. 

A lot of things are bothering him! He seems so miserable! She knows the light isn't helping - if she dimmed the lights and screens all the way, and ducked out to monitor him from the room over, he might actually be able to get some uninterrupted sleep.

She doesn't feel incredibly comfortable at the prospect. Merrin was worried. His vital signs are fine, but his condition is still very fragile, and watching numbers on a screen won't fully replace what she's tracking by keeping her eyes on him directly. He's also at very high risk of aspirating if he vomits, and she would really rather be able to get to him in a second or two.