"I hate cases like this," the doctor sighed, stitching up the still teenager's arms. "These teen suicides. You just can't get used to them."

The nurse nodded and scanned the ticking tape on the heart monitor. "He's stable now, isn't he?"

"Barely. But still, there's all the emotional and psychological impacts." He sighed and tied off the final set of stitches. Almost three hundred. The cuts weren't straight. "I see more and more of these kids who can't care about anything but themselves because they're so trapped in their own pain."

The nurse surveyed and boy's left arm as she began to wrap it with gauze. The stitches showed with horrific dark violence the exact shape of the cuts. "What's this? A name?"

The doctor nodded. "His father told me his brother was stabbed to death two months ago. He was with him when it happened."

The nurse suddenly felt nauseous, which she rarely did. "He.carved his brother's name in his arm?"

The doctor just nodded and wrapped the small, straight cut on the boy's right wrist. "Finish up here. I'll go let the family know he's all right." He stole a final glance at the teen's still, young face and sighed. He never could understand despair.

He washed his hands outside the E.R., threw out his gloves and the bloodied smock, slid into his whit coat and stepped into the waiting room.

"Mr. and Mrs. Hardy?"

The two approached him, their eyes red, their walk slow, the pain of one child gone and the other trying to follow had taken its toll; they moved as one person, floating and almost lethargic, weak from grief.

Suicide takes everyone down with it. A never-ending vortex black hole of agony, pain so deep it sucks the soul away from the sufferer and pulls the hearts of those who love that tormented soul along with it.

"Your son will live," the doctor murmured, happy to at least offer that comfort to these poor people. But by the looks on their faces he knew they knew what he did; suicide was not a physical battle. It was a long, long way back.

One person could save this boy. And he watched silently invisible from a corner, knowing with a grim determination just what he had to do.