title: and nothing was left for you and me
pairing: sam/freddie
pov: past-tense third, freddie-centric
rating: t (there's cursing and like... death, so i mean)
*note: there's mentions of sam in the sam & cat realm in here, so i guess i feel it's kinda important to make it clear that the killer tuna jump never happened.
i didn't proofread very well (as always) because it's 6:29 am and i finally was able to finish this and i just want it to be finally done and out there before i decide to alter it again so i just, yeah. sorry for any mistakes.
a/n: wow i don't know how i actually finished this, for two reasons: one, seeing as i really loathe writing in past-tense (as you've all probably noticed from my other stories where i just kinda skip around between past/present (oops? and i probably did it in here too unintentionally but i also don't actually even care) or i've written in second pov, which is actually, strangely, my absolute favorite thing to write in. and two, i haven't written seddie in... holy smokes, i don't even know, two and a half, maybe three years? honestly, they probably seem out of character in some parts because i kinda forgot how to write them right, but jeez, i don't even care. and maybe considering that i started it probably two months ago with the intention of finishing it within a week and well, um, here we are now. i don't even know what this turned into, it wasn't meant to end the way it does. i promise that i tried really, really hard to make it a happy ending, i really did! i didn't want to write another angst story, because that's all i seem to write nowadays. but. you know me, so, um... i'm really sorry wow.
oh and um, i like run-on sentences and breaks and parenthesis (sue me, i can't help it). also i am so sorry if i bore you with my creepy extensive knowledge about stars, and let it be noted that i don't think i actually know that much about love so don't hold me accountable to my comparisons of stars and love okay (you'll understand when you read it, just. i felt like i was writing for a science textbook or something dear god but i love stars and shit so). i don't know why this a/n is so long either ew sorry, half of you probably didn't even read all this. ah, well.
"You know that place between sleep and awake; that place where you still remember dreaming? That is where I will always love you. That is where I will always be waiting."
The thing is, Freddie loved Sam. (Jesus Christ, he loved her.) My oh my, he did, he did, he did.
Everyone knew; everyone had always known. They could all see it, even from far away.
He found her so very utterly intoxicating.
To him, she was ice cold lemonade and breezy days on the hammock and jumping off of a rope into the cerulean shaded lake in the summertime.
She was eating warm, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies with a glass of milk at your grandmother's kitchen table when your feet didn't even touch the floor, laughing big and wide about carefree nothings.
She was long drives to nowhere in the pitch black, empty night, the car's headlights only illuminating no more than five feet of road in front of it.
She was spending your day in a used bookstore, flipping open dusty, old novels with cracked spines, and getting yourself lost in the lives and adventures of fictional people you'd never have the pleasure or misfortune of meeting.
There are some people you can just love and love and love, and she was one of them.
She was his epitome of lovely.
/
Sam, she had never been normal, like the other girls.
She was abrasive and mean and violent, taking her anger or annoyance out in the only way she knew how: on the people around her.
She was always hungry, her stomach a black hole.
She thought school was stupid and that the only thing they taught you in that hellhole was how to conform to be just another faceless member of society, doing your rightful part and duties.
She hated when roads were bumpy, her favorite smell was (surprisingly, not ham) but pumpkins and cinnamon infused into one, and she had a secret, suppressed desire for reading.
She hated poetry - downright loathed it, groaning at the mere mention of it - but yet adored just one poem. It was a short little one by e.e. cummings: maggie and milly and molly and may. She'd had it memorized since she was six and could recite it to you in a heartbeat.
She liked mix CDs and colorful Christmas lights and dreamcatchers and mismatching socks.
She held her breath past graveyards and through tunnels, and sat on top of the car, laughing and yelling, with her legs dangling through the sunroof and her arms outstretched above her on brightly lit bridges at night.
Her favorite flowers were baby's breath and she hated the notion of 11:11 and shooting stars.
She was always live for the right now and do what you want and fuck the rest.
Nobody told Sam Puckett what to do.
/
She wasn't around anymore, no.
Freddie didn't know where she was in particular, he just knew that she was gone. (Everyone was.)
He was the only one left in Seattle. Well, except for his mother.
Carly had gone to Italy and it became clear that she didn't have intentions of returning for a (long, long) time, Spencer couldn't take her not being there and had left his apartment and life on a whim and took off to Canada with Socko, Gibby went to New York City for college, and T-Bo's sister got really sick and so he left to go take care of her, selling The Groovy Smoothie in the process to some stupid, awful corporation that wholly ruined it.
And Sam had taken off on her motorcycle, and never looked back.
She wanted to get lost in a new life in some other place, and it was clear she had no intentions of being found.
Bits and pieces of the last time he'd seen her always floated into his stream of consciousness. They plagued his mind all the fucking time.
/
He remembered her tear-stricken face appearing when she came back up the elevator - after Carly had walked out of Bushwell Plaza for what would be the last time for several years, and Gibby had left to go get a smoothie and cry into it, and Spencer had retreated to Carly's room where Freddie was pretty sure he had just sobbed into her fluffy purple pillows for hours.
He remembered their matching watery eyes meeting in a flash, azure locking with chestnut.
He remembered the smell that was Sam wafting into his senses when she walked over without hesitation and wrapped her arms around him tight, tight, tight, as if he were her anchor, keeping her from getting swept into the current and drifting out to sea.
He remembered her pressing feverish kisses into his already scorching neck, salty and wet with the sorrow dripping out of her orbs.
He remembered her whispering, "I'm leaving too."
/
At the time, he'd pulled back quickly and stared at her with wide, wide eyes, keeping a tight grip on her arms.
First it was, "What?"
Then, "What do you mean you're leaving?"
And, "Why, what, where are you going? You can't leave, Sam, you can't!"
And she'd just stared back at him with cloudy and apologetically sad, sad eyes.
Freddie could count on one hand the number of times he'd ever seen Sam Puckett look sorry.
/
"I don't know. Nowhere, everywhere."
"You'll be alright, Freddork. You don't need me."
"It's not for forever, okay?"
A small smirk and downcast eyes. "Hate you."
/
His heart ached when those two words left her mouth and made his mind flash back to that serene night on the fire escape, the words of AM floating through the air.
His throat closed up though and he couldn't bring himself to retort back to her then, "Hate you too."
But she already knew.
/
A nervous, soft kiss and then she was gone.
/
Three years had passed and all he'd gotten from her were a few texts, and once, a short phone call that consisted of her harassing him to trace the IP addresses of mean reviews for some babysitting service she seemed to have started with some girl named Cat.
He could've called her or texted her or messaged her, sure, but he knew it wouldn't do any good. She wouldn't have told him where she was, because she didn't want him to know - didn't want anyone to know, really. She didn't want anything from her past barging in and reminding her of her old secrets and memories in a place where she had no expectations to live up to.
He was essentially positive that she wasn't coming back. (Or maybe just not soon enough.)
And Freddie, he was still in Seattle, in college, just going through the basic motions of his life.
He got up, went to class, did his homework and studied to get good grades like he always had, and went to bed. (And then the cycle repeated.)
It was the same thing, every day, and he never felt anything real except for (love, love, love for Sam).
His tired, bloodshot eyes with the bags that fell under them, and his phone with barely any messages filling it, and his scratchy, forgotten voice always reminded him that he was (alone, alone, alone).
/
She was the sun and he was the moon and they were never meant to collide, because doing so would result in total catastrophe.
When Sam checked herself into that loony bin after she'd kissed him, she didn't do it because she thought she was crazy, not really.
She did it to protect him.
She knew and he knew that she was a whirlwind, beyond anyone's control, helplessly destroying everything she touched.
But (he'd adored her) and he'd wanted to believe that it would be okay, the two of them together, and he'd made her raise her white flag of surrender and collapse into him.
He clung desperately to the insubstantial hope that they would be fine. That he would be fine.
But how sad it was to commit himself to such a fading, destructive delusion.
Because Sam Puckett ruined Freddie Benson.
/
He was so, so tired of thinking of her. God, he'd wished he could just stop.
But she was always, always there.
Thoughts of blonde curls and sharp blue eyes and vicious words and long ebony eyelashes and pale, pale skin ate away at his sanity at every moment, haunting him in sleep and consciousness alike.
Sometimes he'd hear her - her laughter, her sarcasm, her taunting and teasing. Her voice was so loud in his head and he couldn't get it out.
He would sit in his room, back against the bed with his knees pulled up against his chest and his head in his hands, and yank at his coffee-colored hair in attempt to silence her. His once immaculately styled fringe became permanently unruly and pathetic.
Sometimes he'd yell at her, wail at her to just leave him alone.
He didn't want to want her anymore. He didn't want to love her.
But he did.
(He always did.)
/
He wasn't mad at her, not really. He wanted to be.
He wanted to scream at her resplendent and magnificent countenance until his cheeks and forehead went purple and his lungs gave out, he wanted to grab her chin and make her look into his eyes and let her see how much she had really hurt him, he wanted to hit her in her pretty little face.
(But not really.)
/
There was a good deal of people - plenty, in fact - that noticed that something wasn't right with Freddie.
Students at his college, professors in some of his smaller classes, complete strangers when he went to a public place.
(Did he really look that bad?) He often wondered.
He found though, that none of them actually wanted to know. None of them really cared.
They just felt it was their obligation to ask. That that was what any semi-normal human being would do. That's what society had ingrained into their brains.
Everyone always acted so sympathetic, so concerned.
But at the end of the day, everyone was a bastard that went home and turned on the television and allowed themselves to be sucked into the electric, brainwashing heart of the media.
Their compassion and their pity and their condolences hovered in the still air in front of the flickering blue screen, the light casting eerie, dancing shadows on the person's tired face in the dark, dark room. It was all so close that it would be so easy to just graze it with a swipe of fingertips and grab it back, but no one ever did. It ended up soaring up into the heavy charcoal sky for miles and miles, free and forgotten, and then it so easily deflated and sunk right back into the person's skull when the black turned golden and the night met the day.
/
Freddie thought that love was a lot like stars - (the radical changes that the affection underwent bore a scary resemblance to that of the stellar evolution of the burning plasma spheres).
(the protostar) It started out small - blustering, fragmented sentences and flustered faces, averted eyes and secret smiles. It either blossomed - much like a large, golden sunflower in the springtime, or no moves were made and it dwarfed, slowly fading away and dying out.
(main-sequence) It was what we saw exhibited when we laid on the grass in the inky darkness with our lover, pointing out constellations and naming the stars that seemed to twinkle brighter than all the others. It was that phase where you still felt that excitement when your fingers were tangled with another's, even if your hands were hot and sweaty and sticking together, and butterflies still tickled from your stomach all the way down to your toes when they kissed you, and you kind of just wanted to be around them all the time and wrap your arms around them and soak their scent into your nose. (It was here where infatuation radiated into that deep and tender adoration - that next stage - or swirled downward into an unfortunate death.)
(red supergiant) It could be said that this was perhaps the most domestic phase, and that not much happened during it. It was perpetually the calm before the epic storm. The relationship was growing and expanding in every single different dimension of time. But right before the big blowout, right when it had swelled to its greatest size, people realized that hey, love was actually really fucking hard.
(supernova) It was the magnificent eruption of passion, and if you blinked at the wrong second, you'd miss it, because that was how long it lasted. There were metaphorical explosions in the sky, whether it be from intimacy and idolization of each other, or screaming at each other so loud you felt that your lungs might give out while your heart beat furiously, or physical violence that was resorted to in the form of bruises and contusions that laced your body and crimson blood that dripped from their nose, or desperately clinging to the idea of each other when you both knew that the paper was shot to pieces and that it was useless. No matter what the circumstance, you both held each other tight at the end of the day, because you knew you were going down and that you were slow dancing in a room engulfed in blazing orange flames.
(neutron) Some fell here, into neutral territory. It was perpetually nothingness, and most came out of it unscathed by the fire and dusted off the stray ashes before moving on.
(black hole) The most terrifying notion of all: succumbing after the combustion and then collapsing into the unknown void. Love in this sense could be compared as the complete downfall and decomposition of a person, because that was what it it did. It contracted you down into an obscure dimension of yourself - one where no salvaging light could be shined upon you. You were in the darkness and that was precisely what you became.
Freddie wrote all of this in a paper once for his Astrology class where the assignment was to "Explain the life-spans (birth, life, and death included) of stars", and he got the paper back on a Wednesday with an F- on it and the comment "This is not an English class, nor a Philosophy one, Mr. Benson - I expected more from you. Come see me." written and circled in red at the top.
He never went to go see her. Instead, he started sitting at the back of the lecture hall so that he could slip in at the last second and bustle out first. That way there wasn't a margin of time for his professor to find him and force him to stay and talk to her.
He didn't need a nosy professor prodding deep inside of him with concerned eyes, trying to make him spill his guts about his strange behavior. He really didn't.
The Wednesday after that, he realized that he fit his description of a black hole to a T.
/
The days and weeks and months passed by in blurs, like moths fluttering about and swarming to a warm light in the darkness.
Freddie felt like he was on one of those rides at a carnival, where you spun and spun and spun, only held up by a centrifugal force of inertia. The kind where if you glanced up, the sky looked like someone had taken a paintbrush and swirled it around and around, obscuring the lines separating the ceruleans from the indigos and the cobalts and the ultramarines. The kind that nastily tricked your mind into thinking that you were flying and that nothing could touch you and that you were infinite.
He tried to make time go faster so that he didn't have to deal with the exquisite pain of longing for someone so unattainable that was lodged in his chest by injecting or snorting or smoking any type of drug he could get his hands on, or downing bottles of shitty alcohol. (It never worked. Even when he was in that stoned or coked up or doped haze or that intoxicated, wasted high, Sam still swam through his thoughts, getting stuck in them like they were made of molasses.)
It was tragic, really, how a mind of such fantastic intelligence became taken over with haunting shadows and ruinous madness.
His nightmares no longer waited for sleep.
Sometimes, as he had laid on his bed suffocating into his pillows, a buzzing nausea taking over his veins, he had himself fully convinced that Sam had been leaning over him, yelling at him to, "Shut up, get up, move on!" But she never was and he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't.
Freddie thought there was no way he wouldn't miss her forever.
/
He remembered swaying slowly to the soft music emanating from his iHome with her on the fire escape dangling over the nightlife of Seattle at 1 AM.
He remembered being wrapped up in each other by the fire on a camping trip, her soft humming faintly reaching his ears and the warm blaze illuminating her face in a glow that made her look much softer than she really was.
He remembered sticking daisies in her curls while she glared and hit him, acting like she was angry while her eyes showed that she was anything but.
He remembered her showing up at his door one afternoon, saying, "We're going on a road trip, nub. Let's go." And he remembered driving in no general direction while she played with the radio until she gazed out the window and told him, "Take me to the sea."
But just as he had switched off the music when it got too late, and the flames had went out while the smoke disappeared into the crisp autumn air, and the petals fell, like he for her, and the gas in the fuel tank had ran out, and an accumulating storm had forced them away from the raging waves of the ocean, the turbulent, ever changing tide within Sam had distanced him from her.
/
Freddie had detached himself from everything.
He was translucent, vacant, invisible, absent.
He no longer existed.
He had lost track of the days and the time - Mondays bled into Saturdays, and the only reason he'd known it was morning was because he saw the sun filtering through the dark, always closed curtains in his room.
Freddie didn't know if he could have even been counted as a person. He hadn't felt like one.
He'd thought that he should've gone outside in the sun that would surely have hurt his eyes and his once tanned but turned pale, pale skin to check if he still had a shadow.
/
It all came back in flashes, Freddie thought, when you were finally leaving the perplex entrapment that was existence.
/
"Remember that time you dared me to lick the swing set?"
"No. I said, 'Sam, don't lick the swing set'. And then you said, 'Don't tell me what to do Benson'. And then you licked the swing set!"
He'd always heard people say that time heals.
But there wasn't enough of it to mend the vast, gaping wounds that had taken over his entire being.
It was said that it took ten times as long to put yourself back together than to it took to fall apart. But the truth was, people were like paper - where if you tore a piece and tried to repair it, evidence of the rip would always stick out and be terribly noticeable. You could never truly fix what was once broken.
"Well you hate me!"
"I never said I hate you."
"Yeah you have! Like, nine hundred times! I still have the birthday card you gave me that says 'Happy Birthday, I hate you. Hate, Sam'!"
The room was too dark; Freddie was sure it had to be some ungodly hour of the morning - one, two, three? He didn't know.
His phone felt heavy in his hands as he typed out three words and hit send with his eyes squeezed shut tight, tight, tight.
And then he sent one more.
"I would never date Sam Puckett. And she'd never date me."
'I love you.'
'Bye.'
"Give me one reason I should believe you."
"Because I came here. Have I ever come to you for help before? For anything?"
It had crossed his mind to call his mom, or Carly, or Spencer, but no, he couldn't do that.
He couldn't listen to their pleading and their grief and their guilt.
They wouldn't understand, they wouldn't forgive him. (Neither would she.)
"Aw, Sam, if you're in love with me, just say so!"
"Nyeah!"
"Nyeah!"
His fingers shook as he opened the cap and shook what was left in the Vicodin container onto the bathroom counter.
As he placed all eleven of them in a neat little row, he sang under his breath, "Did I tell you I knew your name, but it seems that I've lost it."
He grabbed the half-full bottle of Vodka from under the sink and swished it around, watching the clear liquid splash against the thick glass.
He imagined that there were boats sailing around in there, and that he had just made them all crash and splinter into thousands of pieces.
It reminded him of his heart, of his mind, of his entire being. He swore that there were cracks consuming his body and that pieces of him were chipping off and floating away.
"He's still in love with me, it's kind of sad."
He picked up the pills one by one and stuck them in his mouth. He just kept them there, on his tongue, as he grabbed the Vodka and made his way out to the fire escape.
He sat down almost on the edge of the cold metal, his legs dangling stories above the rushing cars and bright, blurry lights.
Then he brought the bottle to his lips and downed the remaining liquid in it, ignoring the bitter sting of it and washing down the tiny white little capsules in the process.
"I love you."
"I love you too."
Freddie thought he was eerily calm for someone who was about to die at any given time.
He thought about nonexistence. He thought about Hamlet's contemplation of suicide ("To be, or not to be, that is the question."), about Kurt Cobain and his tranquility with the unknown ("Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I've got."), about William McKinley's last words after he had been shot ("We are all going, we are all going, we are all going. Oh, dear.")
And he thought about Sam as he looked out over the city and tried to remember every little thing about her, but his vision was getting fuzzy and it obscured the lines of her body, making everything melt together.
We are all going, we are all going, we are all going. Oh, dear.
Everything was hazy and he couldn't see straight. His breathing was shallow and he couldn't suck in enough air anymore to take a deep breath and he was just so tired.
He felt like he did when he was sleepy - everything was soft and nothing made sense but everything made sense too.
He knew that it was coming, that he was going to be gone.
And then it hit him that he was fucking terrified and that he didn't want to go yet, he wasn't ready to.
But his limbs felt like they were detached from his body (they were so heavy) and he couldn't get up and he couldn't even lift his arm so that he could stick his finger down his throat and make himself throw up what was killing him or so that he could grab his phone beside him and call for someone to please, please save him.
We are all going, we are all going, we are all going. Oh, dear.
He slumped down and rested his head against the smooth, cool railing in front of him as his breaths grew shorter and shorter.
His phone buzzed beside him and it was her ringtone and he couldn't answer it, he couldn't hear her voice like he so badly wanted to, and then he was crying and the only thing that ran through his mind was (I love her, I love her, I love her, she's gone, she's gone, she's gone).
He should've tried harder, he should've went after her, he should've tried to find her.
There were so many what-if's and should-have's and could-have's that tortured his mind.
But it was too late. He was fading, drowning, floating away.
He thought, Every living creature dies alone.
We are all going, we are all going, we are all going. Oh, dear.
And then he was gone too.