Okay, sorry again. Have been busy with my internship reports 'n' buying stuff for x.mas and so on, it's really amazing how quick time goes by!! But I'm almost finished with the story, so here is your long expected chapter. I'm very happy that you liked the last one, now here is some relief to the tension, I hope. ;)

*********************

Jen Andrews was once again wondering why exactly she was doing this job. For the past hour she hadn't done anything apart from shutteling the victims of a major car pile up through a mercilessly short-staffed emergency room and somehow managed to keep a clear head. Now all she wanted to do, was drop dead instantly and never wake up again which was, after all the chaos she had had to handle perforcedly, maybe not the best, but a still understandable attitude.

So, when the young woman spotted the man she secretly blamed for the anything else but smoothly running ER, she decided to throw all her politeness over board and confronted him.

"Mr Dawn, I need to talk to you...urgently!", she approached him and took on a posture in front of him that made fleeing impossible.

The administrator pointed excusingly on his watch. "Dr Andrews...I'm sorry, I'm slightly short of time..."

"And I'm very short of temper!", she retorted bitter-sweetly.

Dawn frowned, the visible signs of his growing mispleasure evident on his wrinkled forehead. "May I ask what you are implying?"

"I mean that I spent the past hour, working myself through about twenty victims of a car pile up with less staff on hand than battle-field doctors normally have!"

"That's very unfortunate, of course, but as I see, you managed it brilliantly and now...", he started, nevertheless, not very successfully.

"I don't need to be buttered up by you, Mr Dawn, but this ER needs doctors and a head wouldn't be bad as well as I might add!", she scolded.

He ignored her last comment and tried to make a more or less comfortable peace with the young doctor. "I see your misery, Dr Andrews, but what am I supposed to do? Shall I cut the medics outta my bones?"

She shrugged. "Would be useful, indeed..."

Dawn sighed. He hated doctors. He hated them all for different reasons. But for their unfrequent relation to money he hated them all in the same way. "You have to get my point, I need to watch our resources..."

As he said that, Dr Andrews felt very much in the mood of strangeling him with her stethoscope. "You could have thought about your resources before you expelled Dr Travis..."

Her sentiment was followed by a second of out-raged silence, not only between the doctor and administrator, but also among the remaining staff in the ER that was neither in the busy ORs nor in the examination rooms.

Brandon Dawn's lips curled. "I also need to watch the reputation of our hospital...", he replied, his mouth as thin as a line.

The doors of the ER burst open again and two stretchers were rushed in. Turning around on her heel, Jen Andrews shot her vis a vis a very last sharp glare and hissed:"You'd better watch your butt that no one kicks it!"

A few nurses headed towards the first strechter which was pushed by a very young paramedic who was even whiter than the sheets that covered the motionless body on it. James Haver hadn't been an EMT for long, yet, the ride to the hospital had given him enough to make him age about ten years in thirty minutes.

The scenery he and his partner had entered, packed with their equipment and their usual expectations, had been different to what he had seen before, that at first he was paralysed by the sight of it. In the middle of the room there had stood an unshaven, tall man whose face was covered with water that streamed out of his eyes. His hands had been twisted on his back, held by a stronger and taller man who had panted heavily, while his body had been bending slightly as though he was surpressing a pain that came from the rough direction of his upper chest. Next to that an awkward couple had been standing another man, about James' age, holding a gun in his shivering hands, though he hadn't made the impression that he wanted to use it.

The obvious reason why James and his partner had been called in the first place, was hardly to be spotted since the man had almost seemed to be invisible in an older man's arms. The only thing alerting James' eyes from the very beginning, had been the pally face in front of the dark-blue shirt which dressed the chest the young man had sunk against.

"I don't have a pulse!", someone had suddenly shouted and two blue eyes belonging the older man met James', as much pleading as horrofiedly insisting.

What had started from then, had been a lesson to young James Haver, that thirty minutes could be an awfully long time when you were trying to get somebody to a hospital while you weren't even sure if he'd survive the next second.

As it had been announced to him when he had hurried in, the young man – Jesse Travis, a not very tall, yet obviously very energetic and healthy guy- had had no pulse and stopped breathing. Along with the older man –a doctor himself as James had found out- they had started CPR and finally got him back, after tiring minutes in which James hadn't been sure if he was really helping this man by pressing his trained hands down onto his patient's pain-tensed body.

Getting an IV into Jesse's arms had made James spit out a shocked gasp as he had wanted to aim the needle. Those arms looked inflamed and the skin had been covered by a thin slithery layer of blood, making it almost impossible to find the weakly visible veins.

The the ambulance the man had woken up shortly and muttered something incomprehensable under the mask that helped him breathing. However, James had had the feeling that even through the thickness of painkillers, which were suppose to burry the patient's consciousness, Jesse Travis had realized in his short moment of awakeness that he was in good hands.

Jen Andrews gaze had already wandered of the whole maltreated body, when she spotted the man on the second stretcher and gulped. Seeing the so well-known faces of Mark Sloan, Amanda Bentley, Tanis Archer and the very unhappily looking Steve Sloan who was fastened to his stretcher, she couted two and two together and again threw a look at the first patient who was wheeled through the ER. What had been nothing more to her but a battered victim of inhuman torture suddenly transformed back into her young colleague, even though the form which lay there had not much in common with Jesse Travis.

"Male, early thirties, several wounds on arms, wrists and face, cracked collarbone, broken ribs. Strong internal bleedings, has been coughing blood...", the pale EMT informed her.

She nodded. "Okay, trauma one. How much morphine did you give him?"

"0.6..."

"0.2 again, X-ray of chest and abdomen, keep 0 negative blood ready, three conserves...", she commanded, running next to the stretcher, passing a confused Brandon Dawn and leaving four human wrecks behind.

"I don't care if you paged one or not, I need an surgeon here, right now!", the young doctor felt like smashing the receiver against the wall of the trauma room. She'd known it. Even before she had started speaking to the nurse in the OR area over the phone, she'd known that this women would wreck her nerves. Murphy's law.

"They are all busy in the ORs!", the nurse on the other end of the line replied irritably, listening cooly to the noise that stroke her ear from the phone. Behind Jen Andrews it sounded as though the hell had broken loose in the ER of the Community General Hospital which was at least partly true. Chaos was ruling.

"But I need a second surgeon and I need an OR now!", Andrew shouted, drowning the faint beeps from the monitors in her back.

"I'm sorry, I can't hel...", the nurse wanted to say, but before she could finish her sentiment, the line was dead.

Alerted by a monotone flat beeping, Andrews had thrown the receiver carelessly onto the phone cradle and whirled around to face her desolated ER staff who were doing all their best to save their colleague's life. But in this moment all their efforts didn't seem to be enough. Jesse was coding.

"Defi!", Jen commanded, and seconds later had the paddles in her hands. "200! Clear!" Like a well-choreographed ballett the nurses jumped back simultanously from the table as two hundreds of voltage shot through Jesse's body, trying to regain his heart rythm. Nothing.

Andrews cursed under her breath.

"300! Clear!"

The limp form tensed under the energy that was sent through it, then violently slumped back down onto the sheets. To all their momentaneous reflief that enforced movement was joined by slightly hopping beeps, indicating that Jesse's heart was beating again.

'For now', as Dr Andrews thought, instinctively throwing a look through the shielding panes outside into the entrance area of the ER where Mark, Amanda and Tanis had sunk into some uncomfortable arm chairs while Steve had been taken away for examination. The young doctor sighed, her eyes pacing over Dr Sloans exhausted face. As much as her sensible mind told her that he was in no state to cut up anybody's chest, she knew it was the only choice that was left. A quick look at Jesse's gaunt expressions told her that she couldn't wait for another surgeon to come out of the OR.

The young man was just about stable enough to make it for a few more minutes without the pressure in his chest not being reduced. She had to take the risk. But she needed a second pair of professionate hands. Just when Jen Andrews had made her decision, Mark Sloan happened to meet her pleading gaze. The older doctor felt his heart missing a beat as he saw her, forming "Help me!" with her lips.

*********************

The trauma rooms in the ER never matched quite the atmosphere of the ORs during an operation. In the OR the doctors normally shared active conversations while they were going through a procedure they knew by heart, showing off routine in each of their relaxed movements. It didn't mean they weren't paying attention to their patient, but unless it was a very complicated operation the surgeons never awarded their work more affection than they knew was necessary.

Mark had often quietly admired Jesse and the rest of the ER staff for voluntarily swapping this chilly mooded place of work against the hectic and unresting trauma rooms, where you always operated under more difficult circumstances that enforced three times as quick and crucial decisions from the doctors in charge. Maintaining competence and overview here demanded courage.

A lack of exactly this courage was it, what Mark felt as he entered room and immediatly became part of the this whole efficient engine invented and kept alive by the firm will to rescue a patient's life. Here, no one exchanged hospital gossip with someone else. Each motion by anybody was influenced by the certainity that fatal consequences might follow it.

Wearing a yellow sterile operating coat over her scrubs –just of the same kind as the one that was handed to Mark now-, Jen Andrews stood in front of the X-rays, her eyes narrowed as she tried to figure out what was wrong on the pictures showing the interior of Jesse's chest.

Mark joined her, avoiding to scrutinize his friend who lay on the operating table while nurses were looking after his now rapidly aggravating condition.

"I can't see the lung's been punctured", Andrews announced far from being satisfied with what she saw. "Neither is the stomach. But the amount of blood he's loosing internally must come from somewhere." She shook her head and eyed Mark whose mind was already rattering, his eyes flickering behind his plastic OR glasses.

It was odd indeed. The X-rays of Jesse's chest and abdomen showed no sign of one of the organs being hurt, but his constantly falling blood pressure and blood spitting coughs didn't confirm this diagnosis.

The doctors' minds raced, trying to find out where it was useful to set the scalpell best, while they knew that time was working against them as much as they knew that it could be their friend's immidiate death when they made a mistake now.

All of sudden Mark's memory screamed at him, letting him realize that he had seen something like this before. Not very often, but on the battlefields of Korea some wounds had looked quite similar. "The arteries around the aorta...they must be damaged...", he said, instantly whirling around to the operating table.

Facing Jesse was like a blow into the belly to Mark, seeing his friend's apathical expressions almost not endurable. Yet, different to minutes before Mark felt motivated by the fact that was in the position to do something for his friend. His fear to make the wrong decision or that they were simply too late was huge, but his fear of what would happen if he didn't even try was bigger. Mark swallowed his angst of self-doubts and self-reproaches he might had to deal with later. Jesse would have done the same for him.

Jen Andrews stood at the table, fumbeling on her rubber gloves while shooting a look of alarmed questioning. "How do you know?", she asked.

Mark pulled the rubber gloves over his hands and both doctors longed for their instruments. "I saw something like this before...", Mark replied, bending over Jesse's shattered body while trying to ignore that it belonged to one of his closest friends. For the next few hours, for the sake of the procedure, Jesse wouldn't be more to him than a body which was hiding a problem that kept the system from functioning properly.

"When ribs break, the loose parts sometimes miss the organs and instead directly damage the arteries which branch off from the aorta. It rarely happens, but sometimes it does...", Mark explained, too concentrated to notice the awe in Andrews' face.

"That's why he can't breath...", she concluded. "The blood stream in his chest is keeping the lung from unfolding..."

Mark nodded weakly. Then he set the scalpell for his first cut.

******************

On his way from the ER to the lounge, Mark felt his legs shaking. He had pretended distance well to himself as much as to anybody else in the trauma room, but that faded as soon as he was released from his occupation.

Now that he was walking through the corridors of the CGH every so little detail rumored through his brain, keeping this traumatical experience vivid as though it was still bitter reality. Jesse's ashened face under the breathing mask, his lethargically closed eyes the most powerful evidence for the anguish he had been through and eventually thought of giving in to.

Stone-faced Mark passed the door of the restroom and closed it silently behind himself. Then he went over to the sink and started retching. Something he hadn't done in years of being a doctor and still like a relief to him.

After emptiing his stomach, the older doctor faced himself in the mirror over the sink. He saw his bloodshot eyes, the shadows in his face and once again the age in his expressions. He looked weary and tired. Old.

Mark turned on the water faucet and formed a bowl with his hands in which he let run the cold transparent liquid, squirted some of into his face and washed his fingers that were still holding the sharp smell of disinfectants.

Washing your hands in innocence? inquired his mirror image.

Mark tried to ignore it.

It's all your fault. You should have been there for him. He came to you for advice and you only neglected him. You gave him the feeling of being guilty of something he didn't do. You knew he relied on your trust. You let him down. You failed!

******************

"Mark? Mark, wake up!", Amanda gently ruttled the older man by the shoulder. He'd been sleeping on the couch in the lounge for several hours now and she'd let him, assuming that he needed the rest. But now she thought it might be good for him to wake up and talk to somebody.

Startled, Mark shoot into upright position and wondered where he was for a moment. He didn't know how he'd come from then restroom to the lounge, didn't know how he had just been able to fall asleep, didn't know how late it was and what had happened in the meantime. Amanda reassuringly squeezed his shoulder.

"Everything's okay, Mark...", she said gently, sitting across him by using the low couch table as a chair.

He ran one hand through his face and cleared his head, giving her a self-concious, sorrowful smile. "How are Steve and Jesse?"

She grinned her beautiful grin, free of doubts that everything would be okay soon. "Jesse's sleeping peacefully, his condition is progressing. As to Steve, it's nothing serious, just a contusion and some scratches. I managed to wrestle him down and give him some sedatives so that he should be sleeping now."

They shared an amused grin, both of them knowing how much Steve hated being at the hospital for reasons other than an autopsy report or lunch with his father. However, even the tall police lieutenant knew better than to mess with the young pathologist. When Amanda asked you to do something, you were better off doing what she wanted. It was her persistence and intelligence that enabled her to easily keep up with the male occupants of her job, and it was her charme and her female intuition that made her even better than those. Her affection for her job as much as for her social life had contributed a big deal to the respect she got from Mark, Steve and Jesse. In those three men Amanda knew she had found three of the straightest friends one could have, three people for whom qualification and character counted more than gender or skin color.

Even if people looked at those issues as something natural, Amanda knew from experience that this attitude was something one had to be thankful for. And she truly was and therefore was willing to lean their friends all of her support as soon as they needed it, just as they were always at her side when she'd ask them.

"I talked to Dr Andrews. She told me what happened in ER just now. She said she would never have thought of anything else but an organ being damaged."

He sighed. "I shouldn't have come that far!"

"That was not your fault. You probably rescued his life. You were there for him!", she insisted.

"I should have been there before!", he whispered, avoiding her eyes.

There had been something about Mark's and Jesse's acting in the past days that had occured strangely to her. Putting her finger on it, it had been from the day when Jimmy Harris had been admitted, but she hadn't paid any attention to it until now.

It was something in Mark's whole behaviour that ensured her that he was hiding something from her, the same she'd witnessed before when he had told Jesse about the investigations on Jimmy Harris' death and that she would ask Mark for advice. Something had been going on both hadn't wanted to tell her and both had seemed equally ashamed as perpetually burdened by it.

Earlier, when she hadn't been too certain, she hadn't known how to ask, but now it seemed all very clear to her and she wanted to persue her instincts. Amanda took a deep breath. "There is something about Jimmy Harris. Something you and Jesse didn't want to tell me."

This question was another proof of her smartness, thought Mark, he knew it wasn't making any sense to try to hide anything from her. Still, he had a tough time figuring out how to make her understand everything. "That's a long story...", he started carefully, trying to win time to find the right words. Explaining it to her would be about as hard as explaining it to Steve and Mark even had less idea of how she would react to it.

"I've got plenty of time...", she said friendly, giving him the subtle sign that there was no way out. He wanted to be honest and he had to be honest now.

Since he had no plan where to start actually, Mark simply started at the beginning. "A long time ago, when I was still an intern, there was patient in this hospital..."

As Mark had finished his story and linked it to the recent argument with Jesse, he looked up, frightened to meet Amanda's eyes which as he realized in astonishment were filled with tears. At first he thought she was crying over him because he wasn't the mentor she always believed she had. Secretly it matched the feeling he had towards himself, that he was not the mentor he had always believed he was.

"I still don't know how I could do that to him. How I could project my own mistakes so much on him that I wasn't seeing him anymore. I made an awful mistake... ", Mark said quietly.

Amanda's next deed surprised him as much as it moved him. Never evading his gaze, her fingers reached out for his. She took his hands into hers and closed them softly around his fingers as though she was holding a treasure, something of immense value. He felt her palms and her gentle grip, believing that this simple gesture of friendship was of restoring effect.

"You were always a good friend to him, Mark, he loves and looks up to you as though you were his father. And I know that you love him like your son and you know him better than you want to admitt. He is a lot like you, that's why I'm sure that he will forgive you. Just give yourself and him a chance..."

He looked at her for some seconds, her words sinking into his mind. Even if it was only to give him back his self-confidence, he was extraordinary grateful for her words. Their correctness was maybe still in the offing, but her words had been honest, spoken out of a deep love from the deepest ground of her soul. Mark was Amanda's best friend and the discovery of him being not perfect, not always unmistaken wouldn't keep their friendship from remaining what it had been before. That was what she thought and had wanted to show him.

He had understood. "Thanks, Amanda!", he answered hoarsely. "Thank you so much."