September 16th, 1893 — St. Mungo's
Reuben Crouch

It had taken the rescuers nearly sixty hours to find Melody and Nora trapped beneath the rubble. Her cries for help had gone unanswered for days, her bangs and screams either ignored or unheard for just as long. The building above them had been too unstable to remove from below, as her single attempt to do just that had proven. Eleanora's terrified screams as the building shifted was enough to stop Melody from attempting again. Injuries and burns could be dealt with, there was no coming back from death.

Or, at least, that was what Melody had believed for the first forty-eight hours of being trapped.

And then Nora had fallen into such a deep sleep that Melody hadn't been able to rouse her.

She had, of course, examined Nora when they were first trapped. One minute, they were walking along the river before having to meet with Ben, and the next Melody had sheltered Nora with her body as the building besides them was blasted by an attack of sorts. It had all happened so fast that Melody had required hours to puzzle enough pieces together to understand there was some sort of creature attack happening on London. Something evil and vicious had attacked the city her husband now called home.

The city that her daughter might now die in.

The healers explained that Nora had suffered a head injury in her fall. That the stone beneath their feet had proven to be equally as dangerous as the collapsing building Melody had sheltered Nora against. Sure, Nora hadn't suffered the broken bones Melody had, but her wound was worse. It was silently lethal.

Melody was hysterical when they finally arrived at the hospital. Healers flocked to their side, anxious to treat both Nora's injury and Melody's still bleeding wounds, but to be treated meant leaving Nora alone. To be looked over meant laying in a bed somewhere her daughter was not, and Melody would sooner have stabbed a healer in the chest for attempting to part them than go willingly.

Ben's arrival was met with just as much anxiety and stress as their own at the hospital. He was, mercifully, unscathed, but Melody could see how terrified he was for Nora. It was only when he was glued to her side that Melody finally consented to treatment. It was only then that she collapsed from the unending combination of pain, exhaustion and trauma.

When she awoke, her leg was fully mended, her various cuts and bruises healed, and all that was left were the bandages wrapped securely around her chest where her ribs had shattered and a piece of one had gone through her skin. The bones, while easily healed, took time to settle back in place fully. Truthfully, Melody had ceased paying attention as soon as they'd said she was able to move and had immediately took off in search of Nora once more.

"How is she?" Melody cautiously asked upon finding them both. "Has she woken up yet? How long was I gone for?"

---

Ben could count the hours he'd slept since the dragon attack on his fingers. He'd been waiting for Melody to arrive with Nora when he'd first heard that anything was amiss. Once he'd heard the news he'd gone out to look for them, but his townhome was outside of the barrier and he hadn't be able to get in. He'd gone back home, hoping that the pair of them had also been on this side of the barrier before it had gone up, then when he could no longer reasonably cling to hope that they were safe he'd gone to St. Mungo's to see whether they'd been admitted there. He'd only left when the overworked welcome witch had more or less forced him out of the waiting room, promising to owl if they were brought in. To her credit, she'd kept good on her promise — and as soon as he'd gotten the owl, Ben had given up fitfully trying to sleep for sitting red-rimmed by Nora's bedside.

Healers kept drifting through to talk to him. They asked questions that he either didn't know the answer to or which were abundantly obvious. They gave long-winded descriptions of what might or might not happen that mostly sounded like unintelligible jargon to him. He tried his best to follow along because he wanted to understand, but everything they said was couched in so many maybes that it was impossible to parse anything.

Then Melody was back — Ben hadn't seen her since he'd first arrived at the hospital, what felt like a lifetime ago but had only really been six hours. "Mel," he said, voice hoarse. He didn't bother getting up from the chair by Nora's bed. "She, uh. No. She hasn't woken up yet. But the, uh. She's breathing normally and the healers said that's good. So. It's — she could be sleeping, they said," he said. They'd also said that she could be comatose, but that didn't feel like the best thing to lead with when Melody had just been through hell. "There's — they loop through every hour at least, so you'll be able to talk to a healer about it soon. You'll probably follow it all better than I can," he admitted helplessly.

---

Melody knew better than to believe the reasoning that she could be sleeping. Nora had been unconscious for an unfathomable length of time now, if it was a simple sleep she would have woken up hours ago. The healers were likely trying to offer Ben a best case scenario option to cling to in such a heartbreaking time.

Melody also knew better than to crush his hope with such harsh realities. Especially when she would have preferred to cling to the hope herself.

She sat in the empty chair besides Ben, her ribs aching from moving too quickly too soon. "Good. That's uh - that'll be good to talk to them." She didn't think she'd understand more than him, but it would be good for them both to understand what exactly was being done to help their daughter.

---

"Yeah," Ben said lamely. He had nothing else of value to contribute, so it seemed the only thing to do now was to go back to the waiting game: sit by Nora's bed and watch her little chest rise and fall and wait for one of the healers to come in and tell them what the next step was. The healers had vaguely mentioned treatment options, but not as anything concrete they'd like to try yet — the unspoken consensus seemed to be that they were waiting to see if it was worth their time to try anything at all. There were a lot of people in this hospital, after all, and some of them with much more pressing, gruesome injuries than Nora.

"This bed makes her look so small," he said helplessly.

---

She nodded. Their daughter — their bright and lively daughter — was dwarfed by the crisp white linens and blankets. Her little body barely covered even a quarter of the bed, so unlike her small cot at home. This bed was meant for elderly or gruesomely injured adults, not children. Never children.

"I tried to keep her safe, Ben. I tried, I'm so sorry I couldn't. The wall - I didn't see it collapsing until it was already falling." Melody tried to explain, her voice breaking as did. "I couldn't get us out either, when I tried to the rubble all shifted more. I couldn't - I'm so sorry."

---

Ben looked over at Melody as though he were seeing her for the first time since she'd entered the room. This entire saga had started for him when he'd arrived at the hospital. He didn't think he'd ever considered the sequence of events that had lead the pair of them up to this moment.

"I know," he heard himself saying, and it was true — even if he had not consciously thought about anything that had happened to Melody or Nora he could not imagine any version of events where Melody didn't do anything she could to keep their daughter safe. The pair of them may have been misaligned on every other point imaginable, but when it came to Nora it was no secret that they both would have tried to do the impossible for her sake.

"There's — people are dead, Mel," he said softly. "Lots of people. And she's not. You — did good." He had to leave off there; his mouth was too dry to continue speaking.

---

Rationally, Melody knew people had perished in the attack. Dragons weren't native to London, buildings didn't just collapse out of nowhere. Obviously, there were countless individuals who wouldn't be returning home again. However, Melody hadn't considered anything beyond keeping Nora alive through it. She hadn't thought about the attack or the dragons or any of it beyond how it pertained to the building balanced precariously above them. And now that she had ...

Nora could easily become one of those same victims. Head injuries were funny, fickle things, where even if Nora survived she might not be herself anymore. And then what would happen to her? How different would she be?

She sat forward in her chair, a sharp pained inhale escaping her as she did, to grip Nora's hand. "Thank you," she replied quietly, her voice thick with tears. (Later, when she had time to process all that had happened, Melody would realize it was the first kind thing Ben had said about her in months.)

---

Ben could feel the emotion in her voice when she replied, even if it was only two words. It caught in his chest — not that he hadn't already been feeling all of it, but he'd been alone in this room with his thoughts and feelings for too long and hearing those sentiments echoed from someone else brought everything to the surface. He hurt — not physically, but so viscerally that he might as well have. With a somewhat jerky motion, Ben surged forward and put his hand over the top of hers, holding on to both Melody and their daughter.

---

Melody didn't know how long they remained sitting like that, for each minute that ticked by without noticeable changes felt like an eternity. Her tears slowed at some point, her hiccuping breaths easing into more regulated breathing, and still Nora didn't move. She looked more like an angel than a living child — a baby - Nora wasn't old enough to be a child yet.

At some point, Melody reached out to him with her free hand. "She's going to be okay." She stated firmly despite her every thought otherwise. "The healers will help her and she's going to be okay."

---

Obviously Melody didn't know that, but Ben wanted to hear it, so he pretended she had some reason for saying it with as much certainty as she had. "Yeah," he agreed, and squeezed her hand. He didn't know when he'd taken it, because she had shifted since he'd put his hand on hers initially. He was a bit surprised by it, but didn't make any move to pull back. Being in contact with someone else felt right, at the moment — he needed something to ground him to reality, and her pain did that. He could feel it in how clammy her skin was.

"Yeah, she'll be alright," he said, with a sharp inhale. He hadn't cried, but probably only because he kept sniffing hard to hold it back. "She's safe now."

---

It was the lie they needed to propel themselves through the dark tunnel they were now trapped within. Nora would be alright. Not because the healers had said as much or because the young girl had given any indication of waking, but because any other reality was simply unimaginable. Nora would be alright because the alternatives were too horrific to consider. Melody forced down the bile that rose in her throat. Nora would be alright, she had to be.

"Before she ... before she fell asleep, she was babbling a bit. I think she was talking about the zoo...did you bring her there recently? I don't know where else she would have heard about nifflers." Melody needed something to focus on aside from the scene they were currently in.

---

Ben had lapsed back into staring at his daughter and waiting for something to happen, so it took a second for him to register her question. It was disorienting to be talking about something so mundane when their whole lives seemed to hang on the balance of the next few hours, but he supposed it was a necessary distraction.

"Oh. Uhm. Yeah. In August," he explained. "They had a new one just born, a niffler, so we went to see it. But I don't think the baby one was that interesting to her, honestly," he continued with a slightly chagrined expression. "She liked them better with hair. And, you know, walking around and stuff."

---

Of course Nora wouldn't have been drawn to the tiny lump that the baby niffler would've been. She was always wanting to explore and being rambunctious (a trait of her father's if Melody had ever saw one) so a tiny baby wouldn't have appealed much to her. Still, it was an experience that Melody hadn't known about. Something they ought to have done together had their family not broken apart.

Melody had to close her eyes against that particular wave of grief. After all, Nora never would have been in London had New Year's not happened.

"Maybe we can take her in a few months to visit again." Melody replied quietly. There was no excitement or hope in her tone, but rather a hint of desperation that they might be able to take Nora anywhere after this.

---

Ben nodded slowly; he understood what she was trying to do and appreciated the distraction, but actually wringing a smile out of his face was a laborious process. It was like trying to get moving on a cold morning, where the chill had seeped into one's bones and the muscles were sluggish to respond. "Yeah. In a few months the little one will be up and running around," he agreed. By that point Nora would be enchanted with it, he was sure — if she was... in a state to be enjoying anything, by then. The healers had been maddeningly unspecific about her prospects, because at this point it was just impossible to say how she would come out of it. In his mind Ben had simplified it down to two options, and then eliminated the one he wasn't willing to think about: she would be perfectly fine, or she would never wake up, and she was going to wake up so that meant she would be perfectly fine. But somewhere deep down he knew it was more complicated than that. She could wake up but not be able to walk normally; she could wake up but stop speaking; she could wake up and not remember anything. Melody had experienced memory problems before as the result of a head injury. It was far from impossible.

Ben might have already had his last real moments with his daughter, without knowing their significance. He couldn't even remember, right now, what the last thing he'd said to her had been.

"I wish I hadn't left," he said suddenly.

---

Had Melody not been contemplating the same thought only seconds prior, she would've been stunned by Ben's admission. This wouldn't have happened if they hadn't had a reason to be in London. This wouldn't have happened if Melody hadn't been drugged and made the second worst mistake of her life. They wouldn't be here with their daughter clinging to life by a thin miracle if Ben had only listened to her for more than thirty seconds. There were so many mistakes, so many opportunities for them to have arrived anywhere but here.

And yet, here they stood.

And, as always it seemed, Nora was the victim of their choices.

Melody shook her head, her body tense as she shut her eyes against his admission. "No, Ben." He had to leave to allow them to heal, and even in his leaving he had done all he could to keep Melody and Nora in comfort. If Ben had had even an inkling that they might arrive here he never would have left at all. He would have continued to suffer miserably in that house alongside them until their relationship deteriorated to the point of destruction. Melody understood that more now than she did when he first informed her of his decision to leave, because she, too, had begun to heal with space between them. Even if it hurt, even if she longed to be held by him at least once more, even if she would have chosen to suffer if it meant still being near him, she understood why he had had to go.

And, if she was being honest with herself, she felt grateful to him for it.

Melody reluctantly released Nora's hand to turn and face Ben fully, her ribs screaming in agony at the motion. She then reached for his other hand and looked him squarely in the eyes, her gaze focused despite the pain and grief she currently felt. "This isn't on you anymore than its on me. You would've been in London today either way with the debate and having to support Aldous. We might've made a trip out of it. Your leaving has nothing to do with this."

---

Ben shook his head. "No, that's not what I mean," he said, though it took a moment before he was able to find the words for what he was trying to say. He wasn't blaming himself for what had happened to Nora. There wasn't any point in trying to pin the blame on someone or something when things like this happened. That was a lesson he'd learned when his perfectly healthy parents had both died suddenly in a building collapse, or when the house fire had nearly taken his sister's life and left his older brother splinched. Sometimes bad things just happened, like lightning striking. It wasn't Melody's fault that Nora had been injured, and it wasn't Ben's fault that they had been in London that day, and it wasn't either of their fault that dragons had gotten loose in London. But that didn't address the deep-seated regret he held.

"It's — the time," he explained, and his voice broke. "I lost so much time with her."

---