Of course he’ll stay.
Because she’s dreamed herself up a friend and friends stay.
Friends bring you the stars and help you count them when you’re too tired to do much else and the task of stitching yourself back together again feels insurmountable. 

And this dream boy, Orville, he lets her pawn a little of her weight off on him and the bleeding slows even as the heart beats hard and strong and pushes the blood through the wound. (She thinks of her father even still, how he had bled and bled and bled and had never died. Had he? He’s still alive, isn’t he? She has to believe that he is.)

He’d asked her not to be sorry, this dream boy, but she is. Because he had not asked to be dreamed into this. There are so many dreams more pleasant than this, but he smiles at her even if it’s just a little and this means the world to her. This one smile from her dream boy. Her Orville, who brought her the stars and all he asked from her in return was that she try. That she stay awake.

So when he leans his cheek against hers, when he gently turns her head, she looks to the stars and she helps him count them. “Three, four, five…” 

And the distraction helps. She does not think about her exhaustion or the bleeding or her own pulse. She thinks about the stars and her dream boy and her pulse slows and, with it, the bleeding. The skin stitches itself back together slowly, slowly, slowly. She draws in long, measured breaths as the magic works and her eyes grow heavy. It is not the bleeding that makes her tired now but the use of the magic to stop it, the healing that has stitched her chest closed. 

“How can I thank you, Orville?” she asks from someplace far away, her eyes falling heavy closed as sleep beckons even more greedily.