Summary: As an apology from the Dingo Channel, the iCarly gang has been given a free trip to Chuck Dingo World—the Most Magical Place on Earth. What could happen to them there—romance, adventure, hilarity? The answer is all of the above. SEDDIE.

Disclaimer: I don't own iCarly—that's Dan Schneider's turf. I don't own Charles Dingo—that's also Dan Schneider's turf. And I also don't own Gibby (even though he doesn't appear in this chapter, waaah~!) But then again, no one really owns Gibby. …Except for Dan Schneider. You get the picture.

iGo to Dingo World: Epilogue

"That is some crazy vacation," Wendy laughed from the middle of the Shay's living room. Instead of sitting, everyone was oddly standing around the chairs and couches.

Wendy hadn't visited the group for just any old reason. Once they had landed in Seattle and after all the proper governmental procedures were taken for the trio-plus-Spencer to be released, Carly had called the copper-haired girl to let her know that they were back, alive and well, and to thank her for the warning about Mrs. Benson that they'd received on their third day in Dingo World. Wendy took this time to spend an hour talking to Carly about the things she had missed while on vacation. Apparently, Griffin had acquired a little crush on the aforementioned redhead and was flirting with her constantly. This made Carly smile. Just because the brunette was rather unenthused about Griffin's "Pee Wee Baby" obsession didn't mean that no one else was allowed to think otherwise. If Wendy was fine with the "bad boy's" odd fixation, then why shouldn't they be together?

But upon Carly's sentiment of, "That's wonderful, Wendy!" Wendy informed her that she was not interested in Griffin romantically. Carly wondered why this was. If she had been accepting of the boy's "Pee Wee Baby" obsession, she knew that she would've been perfectly happy with him. So why wasn't Wendy? And so, she rambled thus.

Wendy had revealed that for some time, she'd had been having feelings for a certain someone, and during Carly and the gang's time away, she finally had a date with that certain someone—that certain Gibby.

The brunette, in shock, immediately invited the redhead over so they could discuss just "how this could've happened," as Carly put it. It wasn't that she was appalled by the idea of Gibby and Wendy, just surprised. And the web show host could never control how her words sounded when she was overwhelmed.

And that's why Wendy had ventured to Bushwell Plaza. She hadn't received a chance to tell her story yet, though, for as soon as she entered the apartment, both Carly and Sam had ushered the girl to stand in the spot she currently claimed in the middle of the room, and took to standing around her as they rapidly spoke about their vacation. Spencer and Freddie, too, joined the room and conversation, Freddie arriving through the front door looking as if he were on an agenda to speak about something else, but immediately jumping into the story narration as soon as he heard Sam spouting details different from the way they actually happened. Spencer emerged from the hallway that led to his room, a rubber ducky in his hand that he squeezed with too much force every time he ended an often disjointed, but telling, sentence about their trip.

Yes, the vacation had been a crazy one. And the flight home from Dingo World was no exception from said insanity.

As soon as the military helicopter took off into the sky, an officer entered the large cabin the group was being housed in. He was overweight and balding, and after smoothing down whatever hair he had, he readjusted his belt and pants. After mentioning that his name was Officer Bennett, he licked his lips and prepared for the apparent long conversation that was about to take place. The next few minutes were spent by the officer explaining what had just happened, going over what was going to occur from that point on, and Sam complaining about her unfinished Fat Cake cake and her red sports car that she had "better get back in one piece, or someone's gonna get steak-smacked."

An embarrassed Officer Bennett said that Marissa Benson had sounded slightly manic when she'd phoned their agency—and everyone on the helicopter knew that he was just being polite with that understatement—but they had to follow orders according to protocol. They were told that as soon as they landed in Seattle and met with Mrs. Benson, they'd all be free to go.

The armored and pudgy officer was met with some groans (from Sam, Carly, and Freddie) and one relieved and blissful sigh from the eldest member of the group. But the sharp whizzing sound and clanging of metal on the floor that came next caused Spencer's peaceful eyes to snap open. From this, he got a perfect view of Officer Bennett's pants-less form.

The official glared down at his slacks that pooled around his ankles. "Stupid government pants," he grumbled. And scowling all the way, he stomped back to the cockpit, pants still at his feet.

It was after this, when everything had calmed down, and an awkward silence flitted across the room that Carly apologized for snapping at Freddie earlier. But he waved it off, never really having minded. Sam had proceeded to kick the side of the helicopter in frustration as they awaited their arrival in Seattle.

After the group was done telling the tale of their adventure, Wendy was only left with a few seconds to take everything in before the alarm on Spencer's cell phone rang. "Whoa!" the eldest Shay shouted, leaping into the air. "I gotta go," he said after silencing the whistling alarm. "I have to go buy—" He paused, his eyes dancing to the ceiling and lips pouting as if deep in thought. "—Cabbages."

Carly shook her head in confusion. "Why do you need to buy cabbages?"

"For a new recipe?" Spencer beamed hopefully, praying to be believed.

The brunette's eyes squinted in suspicion as Sam's tongue popped out of her mouth as if she were about to vomit from disgust. "Blech. Remind me not to try whatever it is you're making, then. The smell of cabbages makes me sick," she said, nearly spitting with her enthusiasm. "It reminds me of Ms. Briggs."

Freddie's eyes lowered in confusion. "Why does the smell of cabbages remind you of Ms. Briggs?" he questioned, awaiting whatever odd and irrational response Sam had waiting for him.

"Because, remember that one day it was like, a million degrees outside and she obviously didn't put on deodorant?"

His lips scrunched together in revulsion as he held up his palm. "Okay," he said, stopping Sam's explanation. That was all that need be said. Wendy mirrored Freddie's look and mouthed, "Gross."

Looking around awkwardly for a moment, Spencer shouted, "Kay, well, bye!" And he began taking off towards the door.

"Wait!" Carly called. Spencer stopped at the sound of her voice and turned back to her, an almost desperate look on his face. "I wanna go shopping for cabbages with you."

"No you don't!" he shouted at an unnecessary volume. "They're smelly and you don't like smelly things, bye!" The door slammed shut behind him.

Freddie questioningly looked to Sam who shrugged her shoulders in response. Wendy cast Carly a curious glance. But the brunette's suspicious glare was currently locked on the door.

The artist's eyes jumped around nervously as he approached the apartment door just across the hall from his own. Preparing to gently rap his fist against the door, he was surprised and nearly let out a shriek as it opened before he had even had the chance. A hand clamped down on Spencer's mouth. "Quiet!" Mrs. Benson commanded silently, subtly pulling Spencer inside and closing the door. "You're late!" she shouted. "I didn't think you were going to make it!"

The elder Shay sibling looked at his watch in confusion. "What's the problem? Our meetings start at three o'clock."

Grabbing the watch from him, she displayed it and tapped its face pointedly. "It's three-o'-one," Marissa stressed.

"I was just a minute late!" said Spencer in defense. He didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

"The last time you were "just a minute late," you disappeared for almost two weeks!" the neurotic woman shrieked.

Oh, so that's what this was all about, thought Spencer. "We were just on vacation!"

"You kidnapped my son!"

"No I didn't!" he yelled. "We were over this! He came willingly. He marched his little legs—" He over exaggerated the motion. "—And came with us!"

"Freddie's legs aren't little!" Marissa's eyes were wide and frightening.

"OhyouknowwhatImean!" shouted Spencer, rapidly. Frowning, he said, "Hey, I thought we agreed we wouldn't talk about this stuff. Aren't we supposed to be doing something?"

Mrs. Benson frowned, too, her breath slowing. "Oh that's right," she answered solemnly. "I'm sorry, Spencer. I just get so riled when my baby is involved." She exemplified this, shaking her hands wildly as she spoke. "Come along." Motioning for Spencer to follow her, she led the way to the kitchen table. "I hope the tea's not too cold. It was done by two-fifty-seven, but I wanted it to cool a little so it didn't burn your tongue."

Spencer chuckled as he sat and Marissa gracefully tipped the teapot over his cup. "Mrs. B, you didn't have to—"

She looked to him sternly. "If your tongue gets too hot, it could fall off."

The older Shay sibling's face went blank and his tone turned timid. "Oh my gosh, thank you."

Mrs. Benson nodded. The smile returning to her face, she gently placed the teapot down at the center of the tray that rested on the table and took her seat across from Spencer. But before she could take a sip, she yelled, "Wait!" nearly causing Spencer to send his tea flying.

"What?" he squawked, frightened.

"Pick it up by the handle so you don't scald your fingers." At this, the elder Shay took to staring at the woman incredulously. But she was clearly serious. "Spencer," she said, strictly. "If you don't drink your tea properly, then you won't get any of the sugar-free cookies I bought."

He gave a disgusted look. "But sugar-free cookies are nasty and—"

"They're cinnamon and chocolate flavored."

"Ooh, chocomon!" Spencer then hurriedly drank his tea properly, all the way down to keeping his pinky out while he sipped.

Mrs. Benson kept her mothering face about her as she took a sip of her own tea. "Now then," she began as she placed her teacup down on the tiny dish in front of her. "Why don't you tell me all about your highly dangerous little trip?"

The artist found nothing intimidating with the way the woman spoke. And so, he went on, describing his "vacation"—if one could call it that—as if he hadn't even heard the tone. He only paused when Freddie's mother turned on the television next to them, which suddenly displayed video feed of the Shay's foyer. "You…" he trailed off awkwardly. "Have a camera positioned in our living room?"

"Hmm?" Mrs. Benson questioned as if she were daydreaming. "Oh. Oh, yes. So I can make sure my Fredward is safe, you know."

Spencer stared at the woman across from him with alarmed eyes. "That's not creepy," he exclaimed in false cheer as he heaved out a wheezy, nervous laugh.

"Spencer," Marissa chided. "That's not very polite. I may have to hold back those cookies from you after all. What did you call them again—chocomons?"

"I mean it's totally cool that you have a stalker cam hidden somewhere in my living room!"

--

"What was that all about?" asked Sam curiously, an eyebrow cocked as she stared towards the door.

"I don't know," hummed Carly, eyebrows still tight in wariness. "But I have a pretty good feeling that he's not actually out getting cabbages." The seriousness of the situation quickly melted away, though, as Carly turned to Wendy. And as if in that turn, she became another person, she giddily chanted, "Okay, you've got to tell me how all that Griffin and Gibby drama went down."

"Well, I've liked Gibby for a while—you know that," Wendy sang, grinning from ear-to-ear. "But the whole Griffin thing started when he walked into the toy store-slash-pet store that I work at. From then, he was just trying to pick me up like it was nobody's bid-niz! Now, there's no doubting that Griffin is sweet, and—" She sighed dreamily. "—Unbelievably cute." The brunette giggled incredibly loud. "But Gibby just—"

"Whoa, wait!" called Sam walking towards Wendy. "You and Gibson?"

"Yep!" the redhead said joyfully, nodding. "And I got a date with—"

"Oh wait, I don't actually care." It wasn't that the blonde was trying to be rude—she was just honest. And she didn't see anything offensive with her word choice or tone. Sam went back to her original position, which was next to Freddie, whose presence Carly only now seemed to notice.

"Come on," the younger Shay sibling laughed. "Let's go upstairs to talk. I'm sure Sam's not the only one who doesn't want to hear our girl talk."

"No!" Freddie scoffed, shaking his head. "Of course I don't mind—yeah, I can't lie, thank you."

"Oh, Benson," sighed Wendy, waggling her head in mock disappointment. "I guess you can only be sweet 95% of the time, huh?"

"Yeah," murmured Sam. "The other 5% of the time he's just a dork that can't seem to speak English." Freddie glared at the web comedian. Some things just didn't change, and it seemed the sidekicks' treatment for one another was one of those things. "What?" Sam asked, shocked at the glare. "It's true! You speak Spanish like crazy now!" Then she paused, her eyes lowering in annoyance. "I bet you don't even notice when you do it."

"Falso," he grumbled.

Sam held out her palms, at the same time pointing to Freddie with the index finger of her right hand. "See?" The tech producer groaned in aggravation.

Wendy gave a chuckle, lowering her eyebrows but smiling all the while. "You two," she said, motioning from Sam to Freddie with her left hand, "are too cute." To this, both boy and girl rolled their eyes, staring back lamely.

"Come on, Wen," laughed Carly, tugging on the arm of Wendy's sweater as she took off up the stairs, stopping at the first landing to wait for her friend. "Before one of us gets a fork in our leg."

Giving a smirk as her last look to the two remaining members of the iCarly team, Wendy turned and skipped up the stairs after Carly. Once in the studio, the copper-haired girl started right in on her story as the brunette tinkered with Freddie's laptop. "Okay, so this is how Gibby asked me out. He walks into "Paws and Pull-Strings"—you know, the store I work at—and he says that he's looking for a hamster. So I say, "Okay, what kind of hamster?" He says, "Teddy bear." I look in the hamster section, and I'm like, "We don't have any teddy bears."" Wendy pauses to take a breath, beaming. "That's when I notice that he's in a bear suit. And I'm like, "Gibby, your mom lets you walk around in a bear suit?" And he goes, "Pull my string." And he's got this string sticking out of the back of the bear suit. So I pull it, expecting some joke about flatulence or something, but all of a sudden, the bear suit says—that's right, it talks—in Gibby's voice, "Wendy would you go out with me?" The redhead squealed. "Isn't that just adorable? I couldn't say no to that."

"It is," Carly said, smiling as she looked up from the keys. "I'm happy for you and Gibby, Wendy. You're gonna be great together." The brunette returned her eyes to the keyboard, typing carefully with only her two index fingers.

Wendy leaned on the tech cart, her elbow supporting her chin. "What about you, huh?" she asked. "I have a feeling Griffin was only hitting on me so that he could get over you. But I think he still likes you. So you gonna put aside your dislike over his "Pee Wee Baby" obsession and snag that boy again? He's a hot hunk of clean laundry, I'm telling you, Carly."

Carly looked up, cheery again. "All signs point to no, for now, Wendy." The brunette shrugged, turning her gaze back to the keyboard as she typed a bit more, a contraption buzzing to life somewhere around the room. "But hey, who knows what the future holds, right?"

The redhead looked around the room in question of what machine had just been activated. "Right," she called back, nodding. "So what are you working on over there?"

The web show host grinned mischievously. "This," she said as pressed a final key. Suddenly, the studio's TV screen that hung on the wall swung out to face the girls and displayed an image of the Shay's living room.

Wendy's mouth hung open. "You're spying on them?" she asked incredulously. Laughing, she tacked on, "You're such a creeper!"

"Hey, Sam did it first!" Carly shrieked in defense of herself. But then, she smiled sweetly at the memory, her tone going soft again. "When Freddie was dating that horrible girl, Valerie."

It took a moment for Wendy to answer, but that silence that lingered was meaningful as Carly traced back to that time that now seemed so far off for her and her friends, and as Wendy visualized what that scene must've been like, having not have known Carly or her circle of friends at that point. "Even then, huh?" she finally asked.

The teenaged Shay cast a reminiscent smile. "Even then."

--

Sam watched Carly and Wendy race upstairs, suddenly desperately wishing that at least Carly had stayed behind. At the moment, the blonde felt uneasy. The events and revelations that took place in Dingo World all held with them a dream-like quality. What if that was all they were—happy, in-a-perfect-world scenarios? What if Freddie wanted to forget all about what had happened?

"So," he called, breaking through the noisy barrier of her thoughts. "Are we gonna talk about what happened?"

Sam was at a momentary loss for words as she was pulled from her ponderings. Her expression blank, and eyes barely noticeably wide, she questioned, "Huh?"

"You know," murmured Freddie, face shifting to the right of the room and then down to the floor coyly as he began to list off the possible items of discussion. "The near-kiss, the dancing, the me-making–you-crazy, the me admitting I feel the same way about—"

He was suddenly cut off. Sam shook her head as she interjected, "Yeah, that's not really something we should be talking about around other people."

The younger resident of 8-D cocked a curious brow at the web comedian. "Sam," he said, calling her attention.

"What?" Her attention had already been on him.

"There's nobody else here."

She paused as if contemplating his words but didn't actually look around to see them true for herself. A slight stretched silence lingered before she finally said, "That's right, isn't it?"

"Yeah." He nodded.

"Huh."

Once again the room was quiet—so quiet that the only thing heard was the ticking of the Shay's new cat clock that sang, "I can has cheezburger?" every hour. It continued idly—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock—until, "…So?" he questioned, stepping closer to Sam. This stuff was rather important. If there was something that need be said, it should be said.

"What?" Sam asked again, sounding slightly louder and more impatient than before.

"Aren't we gonna talk?" Freddie spoke slowly, emphasizing each word and trying to convey the message's true importance.

Sam averted her gaze. "I—" She paused, shrugging, thumbs in the pockets of her Bermuda shorts. "—Don't really think there's anything to talk about." Shifting her stance so that she was now looking up at Freddie, unintentionally shyly through her eyelashes, she proposed, "Do you?"

Eyes sliding to the floor and lips pouted, he thought for only a second before shaking his head and answering, "Not a thing." Knowing that neither of them seemed to have any qualms about how things turned out in Dingo World was a big relief to both Sam and Freddie, so it was at this moment that they truly took in their proximity, and the fact that they were alone—the fact that they both wanted the same thing and that they were in a rare moment of perfect and content harmony, instead of the usual perfect and content disorder.

That's when they both found the way to explain what they felt for each other—the way to explain why it was that they both enjoyed fighting with each other, the way to explain why Freddie made Sam feel emotions she'd never felt before, and the way to explain why it was that solitarily Sam, as if apart from the world, had such an impact on the way Freddie lived his life. Their lips locked as they embraced in the act that had opened their eyes to their feelings for the first time in their friendship so many nights ago on that urban fire escape. That beam of clear light was refracted through yet another prism, and once again, the beautiful yet mysterious and strange rainbow of their emotions was revealed.

Odd noises were heard from across the hall and from the upper levels of the loft. From above came cheering and joyful laughter, from across the hall was an odd mesh of happy crowing and shocked shouting.

"Who do you think saw?" asked Sam quietly in her normal deep, dull voice.

Freddie kept his hands gently placed on Sam's cheeks, his pinkies and ring fingers resting just below her chin. Bouncing his head from side to side, his eyes soared heavenward as he pouted his lip, as if in deep thought, trying to come up with some sort of educated estimate. "Pretty much everyone."

Sam's gaze landed on a distant spot in the room as she huffed out through her nose, tickling Freddie's chin with the air she'd exhaled and causing a crooked smile to rise to his lips. "You think they're happy?"

Again, he pursed his lips. "More or less. Why?" he questioned with a shrug, causing her hands to bounce with his shoulders. "Do you suddenly care?"

Pausing, her eyes returned to his, and she pouted as she shook her head. "Not really," she answered, her voice nearly melodic with its blitheness.

Smiling crookedly once more, he dipped his head in for another kiss. And Sam closed her eyes as she reciprocated, their whole unexpected journey flashing behind her lids. Finally, things were right.

And so, the princess and the servant boy lived…more or less happily ever after. And for once, neither of the Shays stole the last word.

--

AN: That's it, everyone! Oh, I'm sad now that it's over. I had a ball writing this—I really did. I also hope that everyone enjoyed reading this tale as much as I did writing it. Thank you all so very much for taking the time to read, review, and favorite this. It means the world to me. I've got a few possible multi-chapter stories that I will choose from to work on next (when I have the time—I'm incredibly busy lately. My apologies.) But the first thing that you'll probably see from me is a one-shot that I'm planning called, "iDream in Wishes." Special thanks go to Panda Hallows, luna moody, somerdaye, and pinkjelly. But, again, thank you ALL so much. I really couldn't have done it without you.

Oh! And P.S. The nickname that Sam gives Freddie at the beginning of Chapter 9, "Bensonmum," is actually from an old AWESOME film that you should all totally see. It's called, "Murder By Death," and it's a murder mystery comedy! Totally awesome and hilarious =3

-Fictions