Disclaimer: I don't own ER. You can thank Shadowdiva (Ash) for this chapter; she convinced me it was necessary. I'm not altogether happy with it, it just lacks something, I like Ray's part, but I'm less keen on the conversation, I'm having issues with them sounding too British! Thanks again for all the reviews, the next part is written so the more reviews the quicker you'll get it!

He'd never intended to have a go at Ray, something inside him had just snapped. He'd never imagined that this would be so hard; he'd even found himself questioning whether he'd done the right thing saying he'd look after her. Was he that poor a friend that he couldn't even look after those he cared about? He'd never thought that that was the case, but now, he wasn't so sure. He wanted to help her; he really did, but was this really the right way?

He wandered out of his room and leant against the doorframe watching her asleep on the couch. She looked so peaceful and he had to admit that it was a blessing not to have to look at her haunted eyes. Was it wrong for him to think like that? He hated what she was going through, he couldn't understand how it had come to this, how she'd let it get this bad? Surely she'd seen the signs, he sighed, but then he hadn't seen them, too caught up in his own life, his own guilt, to see hers.

He hated seeing her like this, but he hated the invasion of his own life as well. He wasn't used to having someone depend on him so much for the simplest things. It had been bad enough when Chaz stayed with him, but they'd been like ships in the night, they'd shared a door, a kitchen, a bathroom, that was all, there was none of this dependency that there was with Neela. Take today for example, he'd slept in after lying awake half the night listening to her cry, the El had broken down, Moretti had been on his case all day about various issues to do with the new interns, and when he'd come home all he'd wanted was to crash on the couch with a beer and relax. But no, he couldn't do that because he'd had to give Neela her meds, had to try and persuade her to eat a few mouthfuls of the pasta he'd cooked, and had to meet those haunted eyes with his own. It was no wonder he'd snapped at Ray.

He left her there sleeping, pulling his mind away from the cold beer that he couldn't have, that there wasn't any of anyway, and retraced his steps back to his room. If she was asleep perhaps he could catch up on some shuteye as well. Like a fool, he'd never realised that looking after her would affect his sleep, but it did, in fact it was probably the biggest intrusion of all, more invasive than having someone staying in his spare room, more disruptive that revolving his life around someone else. Because in the dark, when he should have been sleeping, he could hear her cry, distraught tears of anguish, and as much as he tried, he couldn't ease her pain. And the occasional nights when that didn't happen, when she was quiet, he worried that she'd done something, found a way to hurt herself, and then he'd find himself in the kitchen counting the knifes, or in the bathroom locking the painkillers away.

He closed his eyes, but the thoughts kept coming, and now there was a new one, his anger towards Ray. He'd never meant to say what he did, but the day, the weeks, had caught up with him and he'd just felt so angry at the world. It was no excuse, he knew that, but it was the truth. The guy had been through so much, it was understandable that he would harbour anger towards her, he couldn't condone it, but he understood and he shouldn't have reacted the way he had. They'd never discussed her on his visits, Ray never asked and he'd never volunteered any information, there had been too many other issues to address. Ray's confidence, his self-belief, his body image, and his own guilt over Ray's accident. It had always amazed him that Ray didn't blame him for it, especially now when it was so apparent that he did blame Neela. Would that change now that he'd said what he'd said? Would it make him reconsider? He'd been the last person to see Ray, he was the one who could have put him in a cab and sent him home, no one else, him, instead he'd just let him wander off and he felt the responsibility of that every day. He was lucky that Ray didn't blame him, but that didn't stop him blaming himself. And now he had more to blame himself for, he'd promised Ray that he wouldn't tell anyone about his accident, but he'd told Abby, and he'd told Gates, and Sam and Morris. They needed to know for Neela's sake but he knew that he'd broken that promise.

He'd tried to talk to Ray about it on his first visit, but he'd been in no state to discuss it, he still hadn't accepted what had happened, and he was swinging from grief and depression to not acknowledging that anything had changed. It had been his second visit when they'd sat down and really discussed things, but from what little Neela had said over the last few weeks it was clear that they'd barely touched on the surface of what had happened that night and in the weeks leading up to it.

He heard movement through the wall and heard the bathroom door open and close and the lock slide across. He felt himself tense, it was second nature these days, he was constantly alert watching for any sign that she was about to topple over the edge again. If he was completely honest at times he wished that they'd ignored Dubenko's concerns, surely the grief wouldn't have been as hard to live with as this guilt, but he'd still have felt guilty, guilty about missing the signs altogether, of letting her go through it all on her own, and guilty over Ray. There was no escaping the guilt. He could see how easy it would be to allow it to spiral out of control.

He gave a wry laugh, guilt was a cruel bed mate, it kept him awake until the early hours, it forced him to admit thoughts that he shouldn't be having, and it made him offer to do things that he wasn't really capable of. How had guilt become such a close friend of his?

They'd gone to a bar nearby, a bar like Ike's, unpretentious, a place to get a drink, nothing else. It was the first time he'd seen Ray using his prosthetics and he was impressed at how far he'd come, but, as he watched him walk to the bar and back, there was a look of concentration there, a need to be constantly vigilant, which had never been there before and he knew that was down to him, because he hadn't got him a cab that night. A shadow crossed his face as the waves of guilt crashed over him.

'How the hell can you spend time with me? You should hate me. This is my fault'

Ray looked at him with incomprehension 'what are you talking about? What's your fault?'

The torrent of words and thoughts continued to pour out of Greg 'this, your accident. If I hadn't let you wander off, if I'd got you a cab, it wouldn't have happened…'

'Wait a minute, it wasn't your fault…' Ray interrupted.

''I was the last person that saw you I could see what a mess you were in'

'There was nothing you could have done. Could you have stopped me? I doubt it, I didn't want to go home. If you'd put me in a cab, I still wouldn't have gone home'

'If I hadn't kept ordering you drinks…'

'I would have ordered them myself. You weren't pouring the drink down my throat, were you? You didn't make me go to another bar. You didn't…'

'But…'

'For Christ's sake Greg, don't you get it? You couldn't have prevented this. You're not to blame, I'm an adult, I'm responsible for my own actions. I should have got a cab and gone home, I know that, I'll always regret that I didn't, but I don't blame you'

'How can you be so…?'

'Don't get me wrong, I did blame you, I blamed everyone, but I can see now that that was wrong, it wasn't going to get me anywhere. I need your support to get through this, not your guilt'

'You've got it man, you know that, anything you need…'

'That's good to hear, I need your advice, I want to go back to County, not yet, eventually, but I don't know how it would work, if it could work'

'I could speak to Moretti, see what he suggests, I think he'd be pretty keen to have you back'

'Moretti? The new ER Chief, right?'

'Not so new, he's been there five months or so'

'Can you speak to him, I don't want anyone else to know, I need to know if its possible first, but speak to him, see what he says'

He remembered back to that conversation, he still believed it, Greg wasn't to blame, but that didn't mean that no one was. She was. He knew deep inside him that it was wrong to blame her, but he still did. It didn't surprise him that Greg had hung up on him, in another time he would have done the same if someone had said those things about her to him, but it was different now.

Her. Neela. It was the first time in six months that he'd allowed himself to think her name, let alone think about her. She, and it was always she or her, never Neela, was the person to focus the blame on. But she or her was different to Neela. Neela conjured up images and memories, thoughts and desires; she was faceless, somewhere to focus his pain, his anger, the person he screamed at. Two parts of the same reality. The woman he loved; the person he blamed. The person he'd do anything to protect; the name he never wanted to hear again. Twisted thoughts. But that was how his mind worked these days. He'd covered all the stages of loss, pretty comprehensively he thought, but blame was where he still struggled, he'd stopped blaming a lot of people: Abby and Luka, Greg, Hope, even Gates (he still didn't like the guy though). He knew it wasn't their fault but he couldn't accept that it wasn't hers. Would he ever be able to? He wanted to go back to County, but would he be able to if she was still there? Could he work with her again?

And then the enormity of Greg's words hit him 'almost killed' and he felt the breath being torn from his body. 'Almost killed'. A world without Neela. How many times in the last six months had he wished that she didn't exist, that she would just disappear, was this his punishment for those thoughts? And how would he have felt if he'd picked up the phone to be told she was dead? That was a whole new area of fear and pain and grief, one that he had to quickly close the door on before it screwed with what remained of his sanity. Why hadn't he asked Greg what had happened, if she was okay? But he knew why, when it came to Neela his feelings were all over the place and if he admitted that he was concerned about her, that he didn't want her to have been hurt, would he still be able to hold onto the small amount of control he had over them? He doubted it. So, it was safer not to ask, but he wished that he could.

He allowed his mind to drift back to a similar yet less complicated situation. The night of the plane crash, the night when he'd berated Greg for not looking after her, for not keeping her safe. He'd felt so angry that night, angry that he couldn't protect her, that no one had protected her, and then when he saw her, he'd felt the relief enveloping him tight, because all that mattered was that she was okay, it didn't matter who'd done, or not done, what, she was okay.

That was the night Michael came home, and she'd married him, and what was so simple became less so. It had still been simpler, she was his roommate, he was allowed to be worried about her, now, now she was the woman he blamed for losing his legs, and he shouldn't be worrying about her, but however much he told himself that, he was. And because he hadn't asked all sorts of scenarios were playing in his head, Greg had said trampled, so it could have been a head injury, internal injuries, spleen, lungs, scarring… For the first time since he left Chicago, he let himself picture her in his mind, dressed as he'd last seen her in blue scrubs and a red hooded top, and he tried to imagine what damage she'd suffered. But it wasn't enough, he wanted to see her. And again, for the first time since he'd been in Baton Rouge, he walked over to his closet and pulled out the box marked Chicago. The stuff that his mom had thought would be too painful for him to look at, and there it was at the top, the photograph from the fridge, of Neela and him. Again a simpler time. Would life ever be that simple again?

As much as he wanted it to be, he knew he'd never be the person in that photograph again, too much had happened. And as much as he tried to convince himself that he should, he wasn't ready to forgive her. At no point, as he lay there, staring at the photograph, did he acknowledge what Greg had said about her being depressed, his heart wouldn't even allow him to consider what that meant. If he didn't acknowledge it, the questions couldn't haunt him.