A/N: Yo, once again, thanks a bunch to everyone who has reviewed this ^__^ This chapter goes along with the song "My Last Breath." (My Last Breath, the Evanescence song, not "One Last Breath" by Creed ^^;) Enjoy :P I may have gotten a bit carried away with commas, but hey, it still works, right? ^^; Though I'd like to apologize beforehand for this chapter not being the best of my abilities ^^; I promise the next and last chapter will be well worth the suffering through this one :P

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Caitie! Caitie! Had to find Caitie! Needed to hurry, hurry before it was too late...! Random words of urgency zipped through Jamie's mind as he searched all over her first floor for her. There was something about the way she had said good-bye before, along with their previous talk of suicide, that left him with the most uncomfortable feeling of uneasiness and dread...He had told himself she was smarter than that, she wouldn't kill herself, and had tried calling her, to hear her voice, to calm his nerves...but when she hadn't picked up, that had only made his anxiety worse. So he drove to her house. He just had to see her, had to make sure she was Ok...But she wasn't responding to his yells, and she wasn't anywhere downstairs...

Upstairs.

He raced to the staircase and nearly flew up it, his long strides taking them two at a time. He ran down the hall, checking every room he passed for any sign of his girlfriend. The office? No. The bathroom? No. Her dad's room? No, of course not. Only one room left at the end of the hall. Her's.

He hurriedly flung open the door and nearly gagged at the sight that met him.

There was Caitie. Lying on the floor. A spreading pool of blood soaking the beige berber carpet underneath her.

"C-C-Caitie!" He stammered, a rock hard lump forming in his throat. He stood there, frozen with shock for a moment, then ran to her side.

*

"Hold on to me, Love

You know I can't stay long

All I wanted to say was I love you and I'm not afraid"

*

"Caitie! Wake up! Please, wake up!" he sobbed, his voice hoarse, as he stroked her forehead, lovingly.

She caughed a little and moaned, moving slightly.

Jamie's heartbeat quickened with hope. "Caitie!"

"Jamie..." She spoke, weakly.

"Caitie! What happened? What happened?!" He cried wildly, even though it was quite obvious. "Oh, Caitie! It was your dad, right? Your dad did this to you, didn't he? We can have him arrested! Please, tell me it was him! Please!" He didn't want to believe that his girlfriend wanted to leave him, wanted to leave everything...

A feeble smile twisted the corners of her mouth up. "You know it wasn't him..."

"Then why? Why?! Why?!" He kept repeating.

But all she said was, "I love you."

"If you love me then why are you leaving me?! Please, please, don't leave...!"

"Come on, Jamie," Caitie croaked, exasperatedly, for an instant nearly sounding like her old self again. "You know I'm going to a much better place. You should be happy for me."

"No, Caitie, you don't have to kill yourself! It's not worth it! I...the blood...we have to stop the bloodflow...you can still survive-"

"No," she interrupted. "It's too late..."

*

"Can you hear me?

Can you feel me in your arms?"

*

"No, no, Caitie! It's not too late! We...we can still save you..."

"Jamie..." Her faint smile grew into a slightly larger, rueful one. He just didn't want to let go...She couldn't move any other part of her body, indeed she could feel nothing below her neck, save for a dull, throbbing pain in her arms, so she couldn't pull Jamie closer to her as she so badly wanted. But he seemed to be on the same wavelength as her and bent his head down to meet her's, kissing her deeply on her waiting, pink lips, sweet with the flavoured lipgloss she used, for what he desparately hoped wouldn't be the last time...

*

"Holding my last breath

Safe inside myself

Are all my thoughts of you

Sweet raptured light

It ends here tonight"

*

He quickly broke the kiss, gazed down at her for a second, then yanked the old, faded lavender blanket off her bed and began wrapping it tightly around her lacerated arms, trying to dam the bleeding.

Caitie sighed to herself. She knew it was no use. The carpet and the clothes she was wearing were literally soaked with her burgandy blood, and her injuries were so deep, nearly too the bone...

She watched Jamie through rapidly fogging eyes. She would miss him, that much was true...but she needed this like a malnourished dog needed food...She loved him to pieces, she really really did, but he was always going on about how he just wanted her to be happy, and this was the only way she could be just that...

Happy.

*

"I'll miss the winter

A world of fragile things

Look for me in the white forest

Hiding in a hollow tree

(Come find me)"

*

"You're going to be Ok, Caitie, you're gonna be ok," he kept muttering to himself as he pulled the homemade tourniquet constrictingly around her arms and fished his cell phone out of his pocket. "I'm going to call the squad now," he said, more for his benifit than her's. "They'll come...they'll fix it. They'll fix everything..." He sounded like a scared child not wanting to believe his favourite toy was broken as his thumb clumsilly dialed the emergency number. "Come on, pick up!"

"Hello?" Caitie could faintly make out Val's voice on the other end.

"Val?"

"Jamie?"

"Val! Val! Oh God!" He didn't know where to start.

"Jamie, calm down and tell me what's wrong." She sounded her usual preppy, happy-go-lucky self. Of course. Why shouldn't she? She didn't know.

"Val...Val...get over here, get everyone over here, right now, hurry, please!"

"Jamie," she laughed ignorantly at his panic. "First tell me where 'here' is."

"Caitie's house."

There was a pause from Val's line. "What happened?" She no longer sounded cheerful.

"Just get over here." His voice was wavering dangerously. "Please, hurry!" A sob choked his throat, and, unable to talk anymore, he snapped his cell phone shut and threw it down almost angrilly, covering his eyes with his hands, his shoulders shaking violently.

"Jamie..." Caitie didn't want her last memories of him to be consumed by sorrow and regret, but as soon as she spoke, he only started crying harder, and burried his face in her pale neck.

"Please, don't die!" he wimpered, covering her hand with his and grasping it firmly. She wanted more than anything to squeeze his hand back, but all she could manage was a pitifully small twitch, his salty tears tickling her slightly as they rolled down her blood-flecked skin.

*

"I know you hear me

I can taste it in your tears"

*

"Jamie, stop," she begged. Her vision was clouding up, like there was a fire and she was looking into a smoke-filled room.

It wouldn't be long now...

*

"Holding my last breath

Safe inside myself

Are all my thoughts of you

Sweet raptured light

It ends here tonight"

*

The wail of sirens announced the arrival of the Kingsport Volunteer EMT squad.

"I'll be right back," Jamie nodded as he lept to his feet and raced downstairs to let them in and alert them to Caitie's precarious position.

Meanwhile, Caitie closed her eyes for the last time...

"Upstairs, her room, hurry," Jamie motioned, carrying the difibrilator case as he briskly led the way.

"Ok, Jamie, details," Val demanded. "How is Caitie bleeding to death?"

"Suicide," was all he said as they entered her room.

Val's hand immediately went to her mouth; fingers splayed out, unsure what to to. A shocked little gasp escaped her as she froze in the doorway, unable to tear her eyes away from the still form of her best friend's body.

"Come on, Val," Tyler gently urged as he and Hank pushed past her, carrying the stretcher between them.

"She's lost a lot of blood," Hank said doubtfully as he took the heartrate monitor from the still mortified Val and began rapidly hooking it up.

"It'll be a miricle if she makes it out of this alive," Tyler spoke softly as the tiny box in Hank's hand began to beep out the heartbeats.

Caitie wasn't dead yet, no. She was quite close, too weak to open her eyes anymore, and was losing conciousness fast, but all hope wasn't lost, not yet...

Beep. A long pause. Beep. Another long pause.

"Too slow," Hank shook his head. "Her heartbeat's too slow..."

"Oh, God..." Val muttered whistfully, sinking to her knees. "Why...suicide...?"

"It'll be Ok," Tyler tried to be optimistic. "All we have to do is hurry up and get her to the hospital, she'll be Ok." He untied the now sticky blood-drenched blanket from her still bleeding arms and redressed them with the more steril gause and other supplies from the first aid kit.

"The heart rate's slowing down," Hank announced, alarmed. "Not enough blood to keep it beating..."

"The stretcher, help me get her on the stretcher! Hurry up, we gotta get her out of here!" The two boys worked quickly to carefully lift her up and onto the orange board, but they weren't quick enough.

"It...it stopped," Hank stammered in disbelief. "Her heartbeat stopped."

"No pulse either," Tyler reported, two fingers resting on the curve of her neck.

"No! Tyler, hook up the difibrilator!"

Meanwhile, Val was sitting down in the corner, leaning against the wall and hugging her knees to her chest as she cried to herself. As for Jamie, he was nearly going insane. Since he wasn't on duty, he could do nothing more than stay out of the way and watch from the sidelines as his two friends did their best to save his girlfriend, no matter how much his body kept yelling at him to DO SOMETHING!

"Clear!" Tyler shouted for the third time as Caitie's limp body jumped again with the shock of electricity. He checked her pulse again. "Still nothing. It's not working..."

"...She's gone," Hank finished.

A wailing cry escaped Val's throat as she bawled uncontrolably, but Jamie immediately jumped to his feet. "No! No! She can't be dead!"

*

"Closing your eyes to disappear

You pray your dreams will leave you here

But still you wake and know the truth

No one's there"

*

"No! We can still save her! Her heart just stopped, this happens all the time, zap her again or something!"

"Jamie...there's nothing more we can do..." Tyler said numbly as he slowly stood an dbacked up, putting a consoling arm around the histerical Val.

"There's plenty we can do!" he objected. "C'mon, we gotta get her to the hospital-"

"Jamie!" Hank pleaded for him to understand. "A hospital isn't going to do any more good than we already tried. She's dead, man. Look at all this blood. She lost too much. Even if we hooked her up to a blood IV in the ambulence, it wouldn't be enough. Dude...don't make this any harder than it already is..."

"Oh, I get it," he snorted angrilly. "You just don't care, do you?! It's no skin off your back if she kills herself, right? So you're just going to take the easy way out and give up!" He stopped his grevious ranting when he felt Val's light touch on his shoulder.

"You know that's not true. We all cared about Caitie. She was our friend, and we're all going to miss her." Her red, puffy eyes sparkled with tears of sincerity. "I realize this has to be an increadably difficult time for you...I mean, I know how much you loved her-"

"No, you don't," he snapped, bitterly.

Val shrugged tolerantly. "Ok, maybe I don't. But I imagine it was a lot. Still is. And I'm sorry, but..." Her voice cracked as she tried to stifle a sob. "But...she obviously didn't enjoy life here...felt she'd be better off like this..." She brushed away a tear that ambled lazilly down her rosy cheek. "And even though...even though we'll all miss her so much..." Sniffle. "Think about Caitie...This is what she wanted...At least she's finally...happy."

Happy.

That word burned a painful hole in the core of his heart. Oh, the irony that Caitie had gone through such lengths to reach eternal bliss, and in doing so had caused him so much anguish that he doubted he would ever be able to utter the word again.

Everything was messed up.

Caitie was dead.

It was so hard to actually comprehend that she was gone. She was actually gone. For good. She was never coming back.

"Please...let her go," Hank whispered. But Jamie wasn't so sure that was so easy.

How could life ever be the same again?

*

"Say goodnight

Don't be afraid

Calling me, calling me as you fade to black"