2

"Hey, Hesam! How's it going?"

Hesam Malek looked up from his clipboard, standing in the back of the ambulance and going through a list of things that had been restocked after the night shift. There was something guarded about his smile, Peter noted.

"Now look who's back." Hesam clicked his ballpoint pen shut and put it back into his sleeve pocket. "Looks like we're good to go. Seems Nicholas even managed to remember gassing up this time." He tucked the clipboard under his arm and jumped down, and he and Peter closed the door and went around to the driver compartment.

It was not lost on Peter that his partner seemed to carefully avoid any further mention of his long absence, which made for an uncomfortably long pause now as Hesam stored the clipboard in the glove compartment and started the engine. Normally, this would be the time to catch up on mindless chatter, but none of that would come to mind.

"Just saw that Jackson's already booked me down for a double shift today," Peter finally said, in an attempt to start a conversation.

If Hesam saw through it, he didn't let it on. "We've all been running doubles for weeks, loads of people sick," he replied. "And of course, with everyone working overtime, that's not helping things." He somehow managed to say this without sounding too accusing.

It was early morning, but the streets were already full of cars as they rolled out, though not nearly as bad as it would be once the rush hour hit. Peter liked early mornings in Manhattan. The majority of the north-south streets were still completely in shadow, but going east, the sun was so bright between the tall buildings that Peter pulled the sun visor down.

"What happened to you?" Hesam suddenly asked, taking Peter completely by surprise. He had just convinced himself that Hesam wasn't going to ask questions.

"What do you mean?" he replied, cautiously. He had a feeling the mononucleosis story wasn't going to work here.

"You were gone from that crash site without a word, you didn't show up for work the next morning. Jackson was having fits. We thought we'd seen the last of you, and then, a few days ago, Jackson suddenly was surprised that we didn't know you'd reported in sick, seemed pretty much calmed down, too. And what's happened to your face?"

"My face?" Peter repeated, and his hand went instinctively to the half-healed cuts on his cheek and forehead, reminders of the fight against Sylar. Dammit! He had remembered to hide them using the shape-shifting ability when he'd gone to talk to Jackson, but today, he had forgotten.

Hesam was looking at him across his shoulder while he drove, his expression more curious than suspicious.

Peter's mind raced as he went through similar explanation attempts as he had played through two days previously, but with Hesam, they rang even worse. Before he could answer, the Iranian gave a chuckle and turned again to the street ahead, where the traffic was backed up for several hundred metres. "If you don't want to talk about it… whatever works for Jackson is good enough for me."

"It's… complicated." Peter should have known Parkman hadn't pulled his trick on everyone at Mercy Heights. He would have done it with Jackson, who was the one who mattered, but the rest of the department would probably have been left a lot more bewildered, especially with Jackson's inexplicable change of heart. He didn't like lying to Hesam, and was glad that concealing the truth was the extent of what he'd have to resort to. He left it at that, and Hesam seemed content, at least for the time being.

In the following hours, they didn't have much more time to discuss Peter's absence in any greater detail. Peter was glad of the routine. It wasn't much less stressful or any more predictable than the last few weeks had been, but at least he knew what he had to do at any given time. And it left him no time at all to think about anything involving special abilities, the loss of them, or the Company, all of which was a welcome change.

.

He was reminded of all that again that night just past ten p.m., an hour before their end of shift, when he and Hesam were called to a house fire in uptown Manhattan. The location alone would have been enough to pull Peter out of the detached professionalism he'd been adhering to all day, as it was only a couple of blocks away from the house of his parents. The worst was that they arrived before the fire department did.

This happened on occasion, depending on which units were available and reached the scene first. Usually, this meant a few minutes of agonized wait during which little could be done. Tonight, there was something to be done, which didn't make things better.

A small crowd of people had formed on the lawn of the large house, a few of whom now started towards the two paramedics jumping from the ambulance. Flames were leaking from a window in the third floor.

"A woman's jumped from the window," a man told Peter, as Hesam proceeded to tell the people to get clear. "She's badly injured, said her husband was still in there."

Peter ran after Hesam, who was already on the ground next to an elderly woman. Apparently, some of the bystanders had already dragged her further away from the window. They'd meant to get her to safety, of course, but Peter could see that they'd probably made her injuries a lot worse. A younger, fitter person might have survived the jump down from the window into the thick, artfully clipped hedges below with lighter injuries, but the woman looked barely conscious, and Peter saw at a glance that both her legs were broken. A thin trail of blood ran from her mouth down onto her fluffy pink dressing-gown. She smelled of cigarettes.

"Her husband's in there," Peter told Hesam in a low voice as he crouched beside his partner to assist him in stabilising the injured woman.

Hesam looked up at the windows. From here, it didn't look as if the fire had spread any further than the window they had already noticed; all the others were completely dark.

"Try the door," Hesam told Peter. "I can take care of her here. And you come back at once if you smell any smoke in the hall. No heroics. You get me?"

Peter gave him a grim nod, noting that Hesam had him down pretty well, and went up to the door with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The neatly mowed lawn, the well-tended hedges, and especially the size of the house all said money. An open front door simply didn't go with that.

He tried the latch, but predictably, it was locked. He tried everything, but couldn't shoulder open the door, or break it open – which was only to be expected as well.

Cursing under his breath, he went back across the lawn to Hesam, staring up at the windows, listening for any cries for help, but there was nothing from the house at all except for the sound of the fire.

Hesam, who had got an IV in place, had followed Peter's glance, and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket.

"Tell me you're not thinking of climbing up there."

Of course he had. But even Peter had to concede that it would have been impossible. There was a trellis for roses under the windows, but it was made of thin wire, and there was no way it would support his weight. And even if it could have, there had to be a reason why the woman had chosen to jump down from there rather than trying any other escape route.

"Peter."

Peter tore his eyes from the burning house and looked back at Hesam.

"Peter… I know this is Manhattan, but you're not Spiderman." Hesam jerked his head towards the ambulance. "We'll intubate her, and then we'll get the board from the car and bring her in; we'll soon know if her husband will be needing us."

Peter handed him the airway kit and watched as Hesam readied the laryngoscope, while he placed his hands on the woman's throat to feel whether the tube went in the right place. He could have been a certified EMT-Paramedic by now but, thanks to Nathan, had had to break off his nurse to paramedic bridge program last June, and although he had intubated once or twice, under supervision, he was far less accomplished with it than Hesam was. Add the fact that someone with as little neck as their current patient was not a good studying object.

"I think you're in," he told Hesam as the Iranian slid the tube down.

"You think?"

"Yeah." Peter unrolled his stethoscope and listened to the woman's lungs, and to her stomach, as Hesam carefully gave the ambu-bag a squeeze. Peter could hear air passing on both sides of the lung, and none in her stomach, which was the way it was supposed to be. He gave Hesam an affirmative nod.

While they had been working, two more ambulances had arrived, which now pulled up in front of the house. Peter jumped up to get the long spine board in order to immobilize the injured woman, while Hesam remained with their patient. In the meantime, the firemen had secured the site, unrolled fire hoses and finally broke open the front door.

Two fire fighters vanished into the building, and stayed in there long enough for Peter to be sure it would have been possible to get up there five minutes before. For a second, he found himself contemplating all the abilities he had once had that would have been useful here, then he shook off those thoughts and came back to Hesam with the board.

Their patient was in a bad way. Peter wiped the man stuck in the burning house from his mind as he concentrated on the task at hand, helping Hesam to place the woman on the board, secure her head with a cervical collar, hooking her up to the monitor. She had lost consciousness, and her pulse was so feeble now that it was hard to discern. They put her in the back of the ambulance, and Peter checked the IV that his partner had administered earlier.

Hesam gave a silent curse.

"We're losing her," he told Peter, as he monitored the woman's cardiac rhythm. "We need to get her to hospital right now." He looked out of the open doors in the back towards the burning house, where firemen were milling around on the now trodden lawn. There was a lot of smoke now as the fire was being extinguished.

"There's gotta be another ambulance here soon," Peter said, squinting in order to discern anything that was going on. "They called a Priority One."

"You stay with her," Hesam decided. "I'm checking on the situation out there. Unless they're carrying her husband down this instant, we're rolling."

Peter nodded, watching the woman's weak cardiac pattern on the monitor and looking out over his shoulder once in a while. Even in here, the smoke stung in his eyes.

Then one of the firemen came briskly towards the ambulance, shaking his head and gesturing to Hesam to move out. At the same time, Peter saw the two firemen who had entered the house earlier emerge again, carrying a charred human form between them that could not possibly be alive. Peter's heart sank.

Hesam turned on the spot and ran back to the ambulance, and Peter saw him mouthing another curse as he slammed the door shut. Seconds later, he was in the driver's seat, and they were moving.

After just two minutes, their patient went flatline.

"Asystole," Peter shouted to Hesam.

"Fifteen minutes to the hospital, twelve if we're lucky," Hesam shouted back from the front. "Push a milligram of epi." His voice sounded strained as he radioed the hospital to announce that they were coming in with a working one-hundred.

Peter gave the patient an injection of epinephrine through the IV, started doing CPR, and then, two minutes later, gave her another injection of atropine. He was relieved when his efforts resulted in renewed heart activity.

"She's got a pulse back." For now, Peter added in his mind as he bent over their patient and watched her heart rhythm on the monitor. To his surprise, he saw that her eyes were open when he looked back at her face, and she was clutching his hand, her mouth working as she gagged feebly.

"It's all right," he soothed her, chafing her hand. Being conscious with a tube down your throat wasn't fun; he'd had some experience with that himself. The tube was breathing for her, but the sensation of a foreign object in the trachea was never comfortable.

After a while, she calmed, blinked a few times, and her hand tightened on his as she tried to speak again.

Peter leant closer, and saw her mouthing, "Hal…"

Peter bit his lower lip. He thought he knew exactly what she meant. It was the classic – going to bed, smoking a cigarette, and falling asleep. Her eyes were searching in desperation, roaming behind his face in order to see that of her husband somewhere near.

She went flatline again.

He wouldn't save her; he knew it with painful clarity. As little as he had been able to save her husband. But there remained something, one very small thing, that he could do for her.

He pushed another dose of epinephrine through the IV line, resumed CPR, and was rewarded by renewed heart activity a few seconds later. Her eyes were open a fraction. Peter didn't even know if she could see him, but he was determined to give this a try.

He looked up briefly to make sure Hesam couldn't see him in the rear-view mirror, and then looked back at the dying woman. There was a single hair on the shoulder of that ridiculously fluffy pink dressing-gown, much shorter and darker than her own hair, and Peter carefully placed his hand on her shoulder, closing his eyes as he willed himself to take the shape of a man he had never met, and never would.

"I'm here," he said quietly, his voice coming out deep and gravelly. "It's OK." His hand, someone else's, knotted with age, tightened slightly on her shoulder. There was recognition in her eyes as they closed for the last time.

.

They sat in the EMT room, Hesam on the couch, Peter on a chair, with paper cups of coffee, the only available beverage. The soda machine had already been out of order when Peter had last sat here, weeks ago, and it probably would be until just before Christmas. They'd wheeled the woman into the trauma room at 10.33 PM, where the surgeons had worked her for another twenty minutes before they had called it.

Their shift was long over, the paperwork was done, the car restocked, but none of them felt inclined to go home. They weren't talking. There was no need for it.

Peter leant forward on his chair and stared into his ink-black coffee. He wasn't going to sleep anytime soon, but the coffee took just a small part of the blame.

He'd become a paramedic in order to save lives instead of watching them pass, and today, he might just as well have been a hospice nurse for all the good he had been able to do. Of course he couldn't save every life. He knew that, he'd been told a couple of times now, and he wanted to accept it. It was just that this was so hard to accept if he took into account what he had once been able to do. What had he done with his powers back then? The only person he could ever claim to have saved was Claire, who definitely needed a lot less saving than most other people. Other than her, up until the point when he had lost all his abilities to his father, he hadn't really done a lot with them. It was only after he had been rendered powerless that he had actually, actively, tried to make a difference. And now that he had at least this very limited ability, all he could do with it was to ease an old lady's passing.

No, he wasn't Spiderman.

But he knew someone who could help out in that regard. Someone who, with some luck, was still in the city.

Peter straightened, downed his coffee, and got up with a slight groan.

"Hey," he said in that ostentatious tone that often served as an unofficial announcement that there had been enough grieving for the day. "Seeya tomorrow."

Hesam gave him a tired wave and watched him as he left the room.