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.

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