It was obviously a dream, but Neela did not care. She stood in the middle of the Broadway in Southall, by the old flower market, enjoying the sun shining from a cloudless sky. A festival was in progress; all around her Neela could see faces familiar to her enjoying themselves, eating food and listening to music. Some of them Neela thought she'd forgotten, faces of people she hadn't seen in ages, yet some belonged to more recent friends, ones she wouldn't normally have associated with London.

Then the sounds of the street party were interrupted by another familiar, yet altogether more unpleasant noise. The scene began to vanish, even though Neela tried desperately to hold onto it, to stay even one minute longer in its comfort. Even when she was already mentally awake, she chose to lie down with her eyes closed, savoring the memory of the dream, trying to ignore her cell phone.

Finally, she reached out with her hand and picked up the phone to see who it was. The caller id only indicated it was coming through the County switchboard. For a short moment Neela considered not answering, but her conscientious nature quickly took over.

"Hello?" she said groggily, trying to inject a bit of anger into her voice.

"Neela, thank God I reached you," a clearly distressed voice said. "It's Morris."

"Archie? What is it?" She'd taken a quick glance at the clock on her DVD player. It was almost two in the morning.

"Please, don't hang up," Morris said. "There's been a gas explosion at a late night food court downtown."

Neela groaned, already sitting up on the sofa. Then, a thought occurred to her: she shouldn't have been receiving this call from Morris, but from the surgical attending on duty.

"Do they need me upstairs? Has Crenshaw…" Neela began.

"No, this isn't for surgery. I need you down here in the ER!"

"Archie, you can't just…"

"Neela, we're down to me and Gates over here, with two fresh interns who can barely do sutures. We've got nobody on-call. Most of the critical cases are being diverted to Mercy and Northwestern, but there's gonna be plenty of spillover for us."

"Have you checked with everybody else?"

"Wexler's still on her diving trip, and Abby's injured. Brenner says he's been out drinking, so I can't let him near patients."

"Morris, I'll…"

"Neela, please," Morris interrupted her. "We are way beyond the end of the rope here. I wouldn't be asking you if we weren't."

Sighing, Neela bit her lip and tried to come up with an excuse for not going, even though she knew she couldn't refuse. It wasn't in her character to turn down a request like this simply because it was inconvenient. There were people in need of her skills out there, and she had to do what she could for them.

"Archie, listen. I'll be there as soon as I can," Neela said. "I don't know how fast I can get a taxi at this hour…"

"Don't worry about that," Morris said. "I've got Frank on the other phone talking to an old buddy in the PD. There will be a patrol car to pick you up outside your house in a few minutes."

"That's good," Neela said wearily. "Look, I have to go get ready, see you in a bit, okay?"

"Okay… and… thanks," Morris said before hanging up.

Standing up and stretching her muscles, Neela turned off the TV and went to the bathroom. There wasn't time to shower, so she simply threw a handful of water over her face. Then she made her way to the wardrobe cabinet and changed into the first set of clean clothes she could find. She was almost finished dressing when she heard an emergency siren cycle once down on the street below.

Walking to the apartment door, she glimpsed the syringe and vial on the living room coffee table, still unused. Neela quickly snatched them up and shoved them into a nearby dresser drawer. It was unlikely that anyone would pop in during her absence, but she still felt uncomfortable leaving the items in plain sight. She suddenly found herself unsettled by having the barbiturate in her apartment in the first place.

Outside, the cop car produced another impatient wail. Neela quickly threw on her overcoat, exited her apartment and raced down the stairs.

-

What Morris had called 'spillover' earlier in the night turned out to be a flood. In the first hour after Neela's arrival, County had received eight patients between the three available doctors. Everyone had some degree of burns or lacerations from flying glass, and four had severe penetrating trauma. For the first two hours, they were forced to focus only on the worst cases, having to ignore anyone who was even borderline stable.

For several hours, the ER ran like a gory production line. As soon as one patient had been stabilised, another one was rolled into the trauma room, with just enough time in between to change into new gloves and sterile coats. Sam was mostly in charge of triage, only disturbing the doctors for advice when absolutely necessary.

As all crises, this one too eventually came to an end. After four a'clock, the ambulances stopped coming, and most of the people still to be treated only had superficial wounds. At half past six, the ICU signed off on Neela's last critically injured patient, a middle-aged woman who'd arrived to the ER with a two-foot section of windowpane through her thigh.

She was finishing up with her charting when she saw Morris walk up to her. The man seemed just as exhausted as she was, throwing her a tired smile as he stood to lean against the opposite side of the admit desk.

"Thanks," Morris said. "Without you here, I don't know what we'd have done."

"Don't mention it," Neela said. "It actually felt pretty good to work in green scrubs for a change."

"Still, I put you in a spot. I owe you a big one."

"You could consider it a repaid debt," Neela said, eliciting a surprised look from Morris.

"What debt?"

"From when we were held hostage in trauma two by that gunman."

Morris raised his eyebrows, looking puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I remember how you talked that man down," Neela said. "If you hadn't kept your nerve, the situation could have ended much worse than it did. I never thanked you for that."

Morris looked away and humbly waved his hand in front of him. Neela expected him to fall back on his usual shtick, to throw a feeble joke or shrug off her gratitude with a sarcastic comeback, but instead a pained look crossed his face, and he said: "I can't really say I feel what I did was anything heroic."

"Don't sell yourself short, Archie. At one point I held little hope of either of us getting out of that room alive," Neela said, placing her hand on his.

"You know, I thought you were one of the people who thought of me as a complete jackass," Morris said.

"Not so long ago, you were a complete jackass," Neela said with an impish smile. "But not anymore. Not complete, at least."

They shared a weary laugh. Neela was putting away the final completed chart when a strange notion occurred to her. Now that Pratt was gone, Morris was the person in the hospital she'd known the longest, apart from Abby. There's a scary thought, she mused in her head.

"That means a lot," Morris said, again lapsing to sincerity. "You know, we both lost a friend yesterday."

Neela nodded, replying in a barely audible whisper: "Yeah."

"It seems we're both running short of them around here. So what I'm saying is, if you ever want to get together, just to talk or whatever…"

"I'd like that."

Neela walked around the desk and was heading towards the doctor's lounge when Morris called after her again.

"Hey, Neela?" he said. "You still interested in hockey?"

"That ortho-surgical match probably turned me off from the idea of playing it for good."

"There's a pre-season match at the United Center on the twenty-third," Morris said. "The 'Hawks and the Blues. Greg and me were supposed to go together, but…"

Neela's smile crumbled. She hadn't really considered that Morris, as a fellow ER attending, had in some ways been closer to Pratt than she ever had. The loss would leave a bigger gap in his life than in hers.

"I'll have to check my schedule. I'll let you know," she said.

"Great," Morris replied.

"You know, screw my schedule," Neela said, suddenly turning back to Morris. "I can get it cleared, Crenshaw owes me."

"Okay, then. It's a date," Morris said, a wide smile suddenly on his face. "You know, as friends," he seemed to feel necessary to add.