Second and last instalment. (Slightly) less medi-babble, more character focus. Hesam gets some of the best lines. I love this guy. Can we please make him a regular?

And: Emma!

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"Our luck had to run out at some point," Hesam told Peter later, reasonably, as he wrote up the run report in the EMT room while Peter went through the equipment replacement sheet. Ginny had gone back to the crash site with another ambulance. "We saved four people today. Our record has to be the best in this whole damn city." He looked Peter over. "You feeling better?"

"Yeah." Physically speaking, it wasn't even a lie. Peter felt that there was nothing left in him to drain out, which did have its positive sides.

Hesam gave a chuckle. "You know, the last time you nearly worked yourself to death for weeks in a row, at least you didn't black out."

"Miss those days?" Tiredly, Peter pushed a strand of sweaty hair out of his eyes.

"Not particularly." Hesam finished his report, and gave Peter a scrutinizing look. "What made you stop that, by the way? All that running off on your own, I mean. The impending lawsuit, or me telling you I wasn't your chauffeur?"

They had never talked about that particular incident, and Peter had secretly hoped they never would. He didn't feel up to the discussion right now, so he just shrugged. "A little bit of both."

Hesam got to his feet with a bitter laugh. "Strange that we seem to do better saving people while I am your chauffeur." He went to the table with the spare run forms, and put a small stack of them into his bag. "I'm nearly out of those. – Get over to the supply closet and restock, OK? I'll clean the rig. And maybe you can get us a sandwich or something from the cafeteria."

Peter nodded, and was relieved to find that his field of vision stayed clear as he got to his feet. He cast a look at Hesam's run form to see whether he'd missed anything. "Three epi, two atropine, bag valve mask – no, wait, that wasn't ours…" He skimmed his list again. "Anything I forgot?"

Hesam thought for a moment. "Get a spare roll of tape. We've used up most of ours."

Peter snatched the list and headed for the door. "Right. I'll be back in a minute. Two if the cafeteria is full."

"Pull rank," Hesam told him. "Tell them people are gonna die unless you get those sandwiches now."

"Will do."

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Peter wasn't back after a minute.

When Hesam appeared in the supply room a good five minutes later, it was with an air of worry mixed with exasperation, clearly suspecting that Peter had somehow managed to drop unconscious while resupplying. He quickly found that he hadn't been that far off the mark – except that it hadn't been Peter who had dropped unconscious.

Peter glanced up quickly from taking care of the little girl in pink, now smiling and talking, when only a minute before she had been on the floor, not breathing. Emma was kneeling next to him, now following his glance to the door, where Hesam stood, trying to take it all in.

"Get someone in here with a gurney, OK?" Peter told Hesam as he took the little girl's pulse. "She's got a haemothorax. Emma's drained it, but she needs a surgeon." Hesam didn't move at once, and Peter realised how weird this scene must look to him. "Hurry!" he added, but his tone was almost apologetic.

Hesam shook himself, and turned on the spot to get someone to help transport the girl.

Peter put the ends of his stethoscope into his ears to listen to the girl's lungs. "What's your name, sweetheart?" he asked.

"Megan." She made a face. "It hurts," she added quietly.

Emma, who was keeping a 4x4 dressing pressed on the puncture, stroked the girl's hair. "I know," she said. "It'll be okay. We usually don't do this on the floor. And without anything against the pain. You've been very brave, Megan."

"And very lucky," Peter added, looking at Emma, not the girl, so that she could see his face. "Lucky that Emma found you." He was beaming at her. He knew what it felt like to save a life, had been saving lives almost maniacally for months – but in this instant, he felt happier for Emma than he ever had for himself.

Come to think of it, he couldn't remember ever feeling this happy for himself.

Which was another thing he'd have to think about.

In that instant, a nurse came into the room wheeling a gurney, followed by Hesam and a doctor. Peter mentally commended his partner for being able to find one in today's mayhem, and get her here.

"What happened here?" the doctor asked as she entered, looking from Peter to Emma to the girl.

Peter saw Emma getting up to explain, and carefully picked up Megan to lay her on the gurney. "It'll be OK," he told her again. The nurse shook her head as she reached for the girl's tiara, which was askew on her forehead. Megan held on to it, but the nurse gently tried to prise it from her. "You can't have it now," she told the girl. "But we'll keep it so you can have it back, all right?"

Megan thought about this, but then she held it out to Peter. "Can you give this to Emma?" she whispered confidentially. "It's for special people only."

Peter smiled at her as he took it, looking back around for Emma, but she and the doctor had retreated to the corridor, conversing in low tones. Hesam was waiting by the door.

"I'll give it to her later," he told Megan. "I promise."

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"Let me get this straight," Hesam said when they were heading back to the ambulance bay with their resupplies. "You went to the storage closet for our supplies, found an apnoeic girl in a pink tutu and a plastic tiara, and with the help of a file clerk, performed a thoracostomy? Can't you even go to the bathroom without saving somebody's life?"

Briefly, Peter was torn between anger and amusement, but then he had to laugh. Hesam's words did make the entire situation sound rather absurd, which, upon reflection, he guessed it had been.

"I didn't do anything," he said. "It was all Emma." He still derived a deep satisfaction from the thought.

Hesam threw him a sceptical look. "How'd she know how to do that?" he asked.

"She went to medical school." Peter decided not to mention to Hesam what Emma had told him about dropping out.

"Everyone in this place is full of surprises," Hesam murmured, shaking his head. "And I bet she's got a secret identity as a prize boxer." Peter followed his glance and saw that Nurse Hammer was passing by an intersection ahead of them, forcefully making way. He noted Hesam had kept his voice down.

"Yeah, but that was something we knew all along, didn't we?" Peter said with a grin.

"Watch it. I bet she could throw you across a room."

Peter contemplated this. "She probably could."

They arrived at the truck, Peter making sure their equipment was in order, then climbing into the front seat as Hesam radioed dispatch, to clear the hospital and confirm that they were going back to the crash site again.

"If you could have any special ability," Peter said with a sidelong glance at Hesam as they drove, lights and sirens. "Like a super power. What would it be?"

"Super power?" Hesam asked. "Like in a comic book?"

"Yeah, something like that."

Hesam thought for a moment, then he laughed. "I'd like to read minds. Just to figure out what goes on in yours."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, I think so. It would be cool to be able to do that, wouldn't it?"

"I guess," Peter said vaguely. "You wouldn't want… a healing ability or something?"

"No. I've already got one, of sorts. And a paramedic with a real healing power? Never going to work. Can you imagine what sort of pressure that would put on you? I just wouldn't know when to stop."

Yet again, since they had started working together, Hesam displayed an astuteness that he wasn't even aware of.

As Peter pondered Hesam's words – and really everything that had passed that day – Hesam looked at him, eyebrows raised. "You didn't, by any chance, think of getting us sandwiches?"

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They were back at the train wreck ten minutes later, and a fire-fighter showed them through.

"We estimate that we've retrieved some one-hundred and fifty people from the wreck alive now," he told them as they walked, Peter carrying the backboard, Hesam the blue bag and monitor. "There are a dozen or so critical cases; the others are being treated on scene. Over here." He motioned to a young woman lying on the ground, who was being treated by another team of two FDNY EMTs, who were bagging her with the ambu-bag. Peter saw that, similarly to the boy they had failed to save on their last run, it wasn't much good. The woman's chest was barely moving. She seemed to have been crushed against something hard; one arm looked broken, and there was blood everywhere on her blouse.

"She's unresponsive," one of the EMTs told them. "We're thinking several fractures, could be spinal injuries. She can't breathe."

"What'ya need?" Peter asked Hesam, grabbing the airway kit.

"Number three blade. Size seven tube." Hesam sat at the woman's head, while Peter unzipped the airway kit and attached the Miller blade to the laryngoscope, handing it to Hesam. The Iranian inserted it into the woman's mouth, looking for the vocal cords. Peter laid his hands on her throat, ostensibly to feel if the tube went down correctly, but as he did so, he closed his eyes and concentrated, picturing her ribs healing, her lung –

"Dammit," Hesam murmured. "Can't see a thing. There's blood everywhere."

Peter reeled back. He knew he had accomplished something, although he couldn't say if it had been enough. The woman's heart rate improved, but only slightly as her airway remained obstructed; her eyelids fluttered as she came to, gagging. Hesam withdrew the laryngoscope.

"Let's put her on the board," he said, and got to his feet. One of the EMTs was already attaching the bag valve mask to the patient's face again, in the hope of getting some oxygen into her that way. The other EMT and Hesam rolled the woman on her side, Peter slid the board under her, and secured her in place. He decided against trying to heal her again. The risk that it didn't work was too high, and he supposed she stood a better chance if they got her to the ambulance at once, suctioned her airway clear, and got her intubated.

She lost consciousness again as they carried her, Peter fighting back the fatigue that threatened to overwhelm him once more. They wheeled her into the rig and secured the board on the stretcher. Peter immediately went for the suction unit, before Hesam could tell him to. His partner nodded approvingly, ready with the laryngoscope at the seat near the patient's head, while Peter cleared the woman's airway of blood and mucus. The woman's cardiac sounds were failing.

"Go for it," Peter nodded at Hesam, laying his hands on her throat again. He closed his eyes, pictured her lungs healing, willing for it to happen.

He wanted to shout in frustration when the ability failed him again, leaving him shaky and exhausted, when he heard Hesam say, "I'm in."

Peter pulled himself together, got his stethoscope, and verified that the woman's lung sounds were right as Hesam pulled out the laryngoscope and stylet, and connected the tube to the oxygen supply. The patient's colour improved almost immediately as highly concentrated oxygen finally filled her lungs.

"Get in front!" Hesam told Peter, who nodded, jumped out and slammed the back door shut. Their patient would pull through, he knew it. And he didn't care how much of it has been his doing, and how much Hesam's.

Peter was still feeling light-headed as he got into the driver's seat, but found he managed to stay focused. He hit the lights and sirens, and pulled out to the hospital. He kept glancing back, but what he could see of Hesam in the rear view mirror, splinting the patient's left arm, looked calm and unexcited, perfectly in control.

When Peter parked the ambulance and got out to help wheel their patient in, Hesam had two IV lines running, the patient's clothes removed and covered with a blanket. The triage nurse acknowledged their work appreciatively as they gave their report. It was, Peter had to admit, a perfect call. A perfect save.

Hesam went to restock – "If somebody drops unconscious in the supply closet this time, I'll be there to revive him, and what'ya wanna bet it's a big, fat, ugly guy? In a pink tutu?" – while Peter wrote up the run form. Back at the ambulance bay, they met Karen O'Neil, another paramedic at Mercy Heights, cleaning out the back of 062 with her partner. She looked exhausted; there were spatters of blood on her uniform.

"Good to run into you," she said. "Jackson just told me there's a CISD meeting scheduled later tonight. If you wanna go."

Hesam and Peter exchanged a glance. "Thanks for letting us know," Peter said. They got back into 059 and cleared.

"You gonna go?" Peter asked.

Critical Incident Stress Debriefings were often set up after particularly traumatic accidents like today, with psychologically trained personnel, to help the rescue workers reflect on the day's events, and share the load with others.

"No," Hesam replied after a moment's reflection. "You know, I feel cynical for saying this, but… we did pretty well today."

"Yeah," Peter agreed. "We did."

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It was dark when he got home; he and Hesam had worked nearly three hours overtime until all the work was done. He had a lot of things on his mind. No, he didn't need a CISD meeting. He'd hardly ever felt less in need of one. The day had been… therapeutical.

He thought back to the last half hour, just a very small moment in today's work, to sitting once again at the piano in the rec room with Emma. "You saved me," she'd told him. For a long time, he hadn't wanted any thanks at all, from any of the people he'd saved, because he didn't want to think about whether or not he deserved their gratitude. For the first time since he'd taken up his job as a paramedic again last August, even though he couldn't remember ever feeling this physically exhausted, he felt rested, at peace with the world.

In his almost empty apartment, all those newspaper cuttings on the wall suddenly looked hollow, pretentious.

Slowly, one by one, he took them off. He lingered for a while on his first, aware that there might be new paper cuttings in the morning, but he didn't care. There would be hundreds of EMTs and paramedics in the city who would search the papers for inch-tall representations of themselves in the photos of the wreckage. A hundred and fifty lives saved. A hundred more lost.

He threw the cutting on a chair as someone knocked on his door.