A/N: It's time for some closure. I have to admit, I have some reservations about picking up right where I left off with this story. I wonder if my style will match up, if this new chapter will even come close to resembling the work of my past. But, really, this is the time for me to close out my first story here. I hope that by completing Carrot Flowers, I'll be able to move on to my own original works. I know it's been a while, but I hope those of you that have been hanging on will enjoy. This is the beginning of the end, but it won't be all at once.

That's enough prattling on. Please, enjoy!

What happened to me? I wasn't always like this, was I? Being so lonely is one thing, but...

I used to be happy, right? I was never really alone. I had my family, I had Gwen. I had Kevin.

My body floated in the endless black, the pervasive echoes of my thoughts damped under the thickness of silence. I didn't have to open my eyes to see; there wouldn't have been any point to it, anyway. I was a speck of nothing drifting endlessly to nowhere. Pain was just a memory in that place, a dull throbbing feeling ingrained within me like the very thrumming of blood crashing through my veins.

How did I get here? If I could just hang on to a thought long enough to connect them, to trace along the lines between my memories, I could get an answer. My eyes were already shut tight, squeezing together as if I could force myself to remember. What was the last thing I saw before this place, before nothing?

It was dark. Nighttime. The slicing, the pain.

No, that's not it, that's not important. It was him, wasn't it?

Cash. Cash was back. Had he ever really left? I remember his face. He looked so pale, his skin a sickening alabaster tone. His flesh looked like it was cold to the touch and feverish all at once, clammy and boiling. His eyes were...they were black. Endless. There wasn't pain in them, and there wasn't sanity in them, either. There was no emotion, only small bursts of anxiety and insanity amid the endless nothingness in his eyes.

Was it him? Everything that had happened in the past few months was because of him. I stood between Cash's knife and Kevin's chest, and I lost an entire month of my life for it. Was that Cash, though? Cash had always been a bully, but he'd never really seemed like a killer. A punch in the gut and a swirlie was more his style, not a knife to the chest. Why would he kill me, though? He talked about me like he owned me, that was definitely new. I kept thinking about Cash, if he was alright. I could probably guess that if I was focusing on whether Cash was alright or not, it meant that I wasn't alright.

He tried to kill me, after all. Or...

No, he didn't. He tried to stab Kevin, and I got in the way. What was it this time, though? I felt like my whole body was being sliced up. I saw darkness and shadows cutting into me. I felt the searing pain at each split of my skin, the heat of sticky blood oozing down my chest in contrast to the coolness of the blade, my final moments of Cash's face, those words.

'I knew you'd miss me.' That's what he said. His eyes were wild and his mannerisms barely human. He crouched over me like a predator about to sink its teeth into its kill. What had made him turn so feral, enough that he'd nearly kill me twice?

Or, had he succeeded? I opened my eyes to the darkness, eternal naught. Was I dead? I was almost afraid to speak out loud, like saying even one word could shatter the space around me, showering fragments of reality like shards of glass prefaced by an eternity spent falling.

"This is what you wanted." That voice rang so clearly in my head, a heaviness to every word, devoid of emotion, of any joy, or even of malice. It was purely factual, so convincing and tempered in a way that made it sound believable. Who are you? The words burned at my mind, but I couldn't speak, I couldn't break the silence of this prison.

"You begged for this. An end to your suffering. An end to the pain. The only place you can truly be alone." That isn't true. If this is death, it's not what I wanted. That voice was so familiar, a tricky voice that defied the specificity of age or gender. It was a thousand strands of silence braided into sound, a thousand lies woven into a single truth.

"You're alone, like always. You never had anyone, not really. You'll die alone, a solitary end for someone drowning in the pain of loneliness." If it weren't for the prickling of my skin, I wouldn't have known if I had any substance or not. I still felt. I was still real. I wasn't alone, not really. I had my friends, my family. Grandpa. Gwen. Julie. Kevin.

"They don't really care about you. If he cared about you at all, he'd be here, and he's not. It's just you, and you're going to die." Why was that voice so familiar? I'd heard it before, but pinpointing when was just giving me a headache. A chest-ache, too. The dull throb of blood pulsing through my body, pushing a hot ache deep into my bones, feelings of gushing blood over jagged rips of flesh, a thousand drops of cold dew soaking through to my back. I was feeling it all now. Every sensation flooded through my body, growing more intense, more substantial.

"Fade away, Benjy. Let go. You're not real, nothing about you is real." Memories of the past months flashed through my mind, like staring at my own reflection in murky water. Through the haze, the dusty film of sepia tones and burbles of disjointed words, I grasped at every moment I could clutch, desperate to recollect my own face.

Though it was definitely my face, my body, my voice, everything about it was so foreign to me. That Ben is a stranger. That Ben isn't real.

I'm real.

Floating in the endless black, I was coming to a realization, something just on the tip of my tongue that couldn't quite be shaken off into a sound. There's been something here this whole time, a shadow lurking in the corner of my mind, a voice that tells me I'll be alone forever, something that's been picking apart my insecurities and using them against me, manipulating me for no apparent reason. The odd feeling of weightlessness did little to counteract the heavy feeling of oppression that sank its hands onto my shoulders and pushed me down beneath the quietly licking waves.

I didn't notice it, not at first, but maybe that's because there was too much truth hidden in its voice. I didn't want to see the truth, that I was lonely, that I felt weak, that I wasn't a hero, just a kid with bad luck and a supportive family. I didn't want to hear the sultry tones of the shadow's logic, and so I flailed against it with all the strength I had. I mean, I found something great with Kevin, something that I wouldn't trade for anything else in the world. But, I'm actually pretty happy now, and the shadow's hoarse cracking words seem too urgent to take a hold of me, too desperate to fully take root in my heart or to sprout paranoia and chaos in my soul.

The sudden jolt of cold striking my body was paralyzing, and as my eyes darted open, the reason for my weightless feeling was apparent. I was in a lake, floating, flailing, probably too deep to make it to the surface before I would take in a deep gasp in hopes of finding air, only to find a painful, miserable death in drowning. I struggled to clutch at the water, my battered body ascending slightly with every moment, the stirring from a deep slumber having done wonders for my ability to panic. I clawed at the water, trying to pull myself up on an invisible ladder, the surface so inviting to strained lungs filled with stale air. My body was shaking, the cold soaking through to my bones. And still, I wondered where Kevin was, if he would be there on the other side of the surface, waiting there for me. Kevin, my Kevin, my light.

No. As the surface became ever clearer, as I begged my body to keep wrenching its way to the top, as I begged my lungs not to burst and my mouth not to open, I felt something reassuring, something that I thought had been lost. I was going to save myself this time. No Kevin, no Gwen, no Grandpa, no parents. No safety net, and my life on the line. I was consumed by my will to make it to the top before the sleep set in, and with barely a moment to spare, my head broke the surface of the lake and I sucked in air so greedily into my lungs, soothing their deficit as I tried to keep myself afloat. I was close enough to the shore that I could float on, and hopefully I would make it. For now, I was breathing, though battered. My clothes were drenched enough to keep me from being any bit effective at swimming, and so I lay on the surface of the water, my eyes turned to the stars overhead as I fought tears.

It wasn't sadness, but rather, a longing to take my life back, to become the Ben I was before all of this craziness got started. Despite the aching in my lungs as my chest still heaved in desperate searches for the chilly night air, despite the burning ache in my limbs that had rendered them useless, despite the fact that I was bleeding profusely into the water around me, I was captivated by the constellations overhead, the normally faint stars above barely cutting through the ambient light pollution that clouded the skies above Bellwood. Had I not been so anxious to make it to dry land, I could have slipped off into a dreamless sleep in waiting for the ripples to bring me to the shore, completely lost in my own stargazing.

As I looked up to the sky, I thought about Kevin, and how more than anything, I wanted to give myself to him, even if it's just so that somebody could have had all of me before my death at the hands of that psycho, Cash. No, not someone, not just anybody. Kevin. The guy I had...I can't believe I'm going to admit this even in my thoughts, but the guy that I had fallen in love with, and that I knew loved me back like I was his and only his.

Wait, where's the light pollution at? Looking to the sky, one of my previous thoughts had circled back in my brain and began riding out the process once of being considered, only this time, I was in a safe enough place to actually slow down and consider everything. And, now, I was wondering where I was exactly if I could see the stars for miles, because I certainly wasn't around any kind of brightly lit city. Or, any city at all. Where the hell was I?

No matter how long I spent thinking about it, the memories wouldn't return in full. From what I could recollect, Cash sliced me a few times, I passed out from blood loss, and he dumped by body in a lake. I winced with the realization that I was still bleeding from several deep cuts along my legs, chest, and sides, and even as I floated peacefully towards the shore, albeit slowly, I could feel the dizziness winding around my throbbing skull. Even as my eyes began to droop with heavy lids fluttering uncomfortably against the starlight, my mind was reeling with wild thoughts. Was Kevin alright? Had Cash gotten to him before he came for me, or would he be going to take his revenge on Kevin next? Just what was going on with him, anyway? Cash might have been an ass, but I had a hard time seeing him as a murderer. Well, attempted murderer.

The only thing I knew with certainty was that I needed to find Kevin, and I needed to either stay the hell away from Cash, or find a way to take him out for good.