c h a s i n g - p a r k e d - c a r s
.
Please note: This piece should not be overanalyzed while reading. Do all of your analyzing afterwords, otherwise you might drive yourself insane and not enjoy this story at all. I wrote this on a sensitive topic and want you to experience the rawness while reading, so please, feel free to lose yourselves in my words.
.
I wanted to fly,
like Superman does,
and feel tremendous;
.
It goes like: lips bruising, legs tangling, fingernails digging into the bare skin of his hips.
(but most of all -)
She breathes into the side of his neck, breathing out the letters to a prayer he will never understand, and then slides away from him. Space floats between them and he wonders why he didn't see it before, because they'll never change.
"Leaving?" he wonders quietly.
"Call me when you get your priorities straight." A ruffle of her blonde hair - her fingers, because she won't let him touch her now - and she's gone like a shadow he can never seem to catch.
(-smashing, breaking with words soft like velvet.)
His fingers dig into the mattress -
.
"How can you be so cruel," he asks, fingers sliding along her skin, gripping her wrist and trying to tug her towards him.
Her lips press against cell bars, those blue eyes haunted, glowing.
"Try remembering when I wasn't." Then she's sliding into the darkest corner where he can't see her, where he has to leave because he just can't take knowing -
.
- that their fingers fit together so perfectly.
"You know the only reason I'm allowing this is because you're paying for my ice cream, right?" she asks him with that smirk of hers that makes him grit his teeth.
He smiles back at her and their knees brush under the table, releasing a whole new flood of questions; this is something they don't discuss, just do, because that's the kind of person Sam is. She's been trying to convince him to lighten up and act out a little for months, but he refutes her claims with various theorems that have her mocking him all over again.
"Why do you have that look on your face?" She takes an exceptionally loud slurp of her rainbow ice cream - at least it's not Dippin' Dots; he'd be scrubbing stains out of his clothes for hours - and he realizes yet again how one-of-a-kind she is.
"What look?" He arches an eyebrow, confused.
"The one that says you're thinking about something extremely nubbish," Sam says. "Or sex - one of the two."
He turns an interesting shade of red and tries to ignore her amused snorts of laughter. "I don't - I'm not -"
"Deny it all you want," she says lightly. "Who is she? Megan Fox? Miley Cyrus?"
"Miley Cyrus is under the apparent delusion that the world's economic crisis can be solved by partying," he says sharply.
Sam pauses, looks at him with those blue eyes until he's squirming uncomfortably. Unlike most girls, he can never quite read Sam's eyes; they're always hidden behind a thin layer of sardonic carelessness, enough so that he wonders if she particularly enjoys his company or is just humoring him.
"Alright then," Sam mumbles finally, "if you're going to be such a nub about it -"
"If you're going to insult me," Freddie shoots right back, already irritated with the blonde, "you could at least go with something sophisticated like punctilious."
"What the hell does -" Sam begins.
"Punctilious is another word to describe -"
"Hasn't Crazy ever taught you anything about respecting your elders?" She's glaring at him now as though they're in elementary school again and he's covered in cooties.
He considers fighting about her crude nickname for his mother but decides it's not worth his time.
"I'm older than you, Puckett," he points out.
She bites her tongue right in the middle of a sentence and just stares at him, something in her eyes he can't place. It's not even anger so much as seriousness, and that fact alone nearly unseats him. It shouldn't - after all, Sam Puckett has as much a right as anyone else to be serious about something, but it just doesn't feel right. There are her eyes staring at him like the sapphires they are, staring at him like she's about to dissect him or something.
"Is it Carly?" she asks quietly.
(it's always: pain, pushing, pulling, tightening in his throat until he can't breathe -)
Her thumb strokes his lightly and, absentmindedly, he tightens his fingers around hers.
(-because her fingernails are digging into his skin and the droplets of blood slipping down his hand are quite mesmerizing.)
"I'm not letting go," he answers, and he can't tell her why because he remembers when blue eyes used to be less guarded, remembers how this all started, because -
.
"He's not going to let you go again." Carly links fingers with her best friend and they just sit in silence.
Sometimes it's easier to just sit and say nothing rather than remember.
Sam holds up bandaged hands and smiles in a way that can't be expressed. There's really nothing to the smile - that's what makes it so different. She put nothing into it because she gave everything to him; everything, when she should have been keeping it all for herself, because that's what she's good at.
Because if she keeps running then she won't keep imagining falling and clutching and screaming with city lights twinkling far below, won't remember -
.
"Damn it," she screams, "let go!"
Her hands dig into the side of the wall and leave deep groves in her skin, leave trails of skin and blood trailing against the parapet; she's falling within herself, eyes wheeling and connecting with the flashing lights and speeding cars far below.
"I can't," he yells right back, clutching onto her wrists far too tightly, bruising pale skin. "You can't do this - Sam, you can't just end it like this!"
She's squirming, her hands are sliding, he can't hold on, and -
.
"This is crazy," he says, his voice shaking a little (not from fear, though; no way.)
Sam hooks a leg over the fence marked No Trespassing and winces a little as one leg of her jean shorts catches on the sharp tips of the fence. Then, with a small smirk that means she doesn't care about the consequences (she does, actually) she thrusts her leg up and her jeans tear with an audible rrriiippp.
"Is it?" She's smirking again because she knows he hates it.
His face is slowly purpling with anger and he's breathing unsteadily, "Yes, it is! My bedtime was at eight o' five, and now it's nine sixteen! Do you have any idea what this will do to my hypothalamus?"
She's snickering by this point, "Are you serious?"
"I - well, you see -" he stutters, watching her hands dig into the top of the fence and pierce her tender flesh. "Your hands are going to get infected."
She slides down onto the other side of the field and presses her hands against the fence so he can see the blood dripping, staining the chain links. It's just like how Sam is, poisoning everyone around her with venemous words and fingers like claws. She's just like a demon with those eyes that make you melt and that laugh of hers and...
"Dweeb." She's looking at him strangely. "Are you coming are not?"
He pauses, looks at her, and sighs as his gaze holds the cuts, "Just let me pull out my portable first aid kit."
She laughs mockingly, but it almost sounds beautiful to him right now, because -
.
She's merciless, ferocious, the perfect hunter.
"Sam!" He's screaming as he tries to tug her away. She digs her hands into the cold flesh of the bruised, bloodied body beneath her and just laughs, her eyes rolling in their sockets. He sees those nails - her nails - covered in sticky, crimson blood that's not her own and realizes yet again just what she's become.
"Sam, stop it!" She ignores him, raising a hand a slamming a fist into the corpse's face. He can't even tell the sex of the victim anymore; all he can see is blood, blood, and more blood and the scent of it is nauseating him. "Sam, stop!"
"No!" She throws him off and stands there, chest heaving, in front of him. Tears roll down her cheeks and clumps of black are smudged around her hollow blue eyes; she's never looked so haunted. "I can't, Freddie. You don't know what he - what he did to my mom! He has to be punished! I have to punish him!"
He looks up then down - his vision is spinning, world slipping, cracking at his feet. "Sam, he's already dead. He's already dead!"
His scream echoes around them, and Sam stiffens. He falls to his knees by the corpse and dips his hands in the fresh blood, feeling nauseated; he already feels sick at the thought of one drop of his own blood, let alone liters of someone else's. His head begins to spin and the urge to vomit becomes predominant in his mind.
"Why did you do this?" His voice sounds quiet, lost.
Sam wraps tight arms around herself and hunches over as though she might suddenly drift away in the breeze, as though the seams in her skin are slowly retracting and she's falling apart.
"He beat her up, Freddie." She never sounds lost, not even now, and sometimes he hates it. "I couldn't just sit there and watch him hurt my own mom, so I - I -"
He's too lost in his own thoughts to pay attention to her. His - something, because she never liked titles - killed someone.
She murdered someone, and he didn't stop her.
Sunken brown eyes look down -
.
- and he muses over the scars lining his hands. They're healing from months past, yet jagged pink lines still remain etched onto his skin.
They'll never go away. He knows; he's tried scrubbing them away in the shower, lathering them with soap over and over and running the water until his skin is red with heat and he's rubbed away a layer of skin, but the scars are still there.
"Freddie."
He looks up, smiles a smile that's not really there as Carly kneels beside him. Her arms wrap hesitantly around his shoulders and she sighs into his chest as they sit in silence.
"They never go away," he whispers, tracing the edge of one of the scars.
Carly's hand closes over his. "They're - I mean -" She can't say it, because there's nothing to say. "Let's go, Freddie."
"To visit Sam?"
Carly cringes at his hopeful tone but hauls him up anyways, "Yeah, she's waiting for you."
He smiles something this time and remembers her blonde hair as it whips in the breeze and the sound of her -
.
Screams, echoing across the balcony as she struggles not to fall.
"Help me." He hears those voices every time he closes his eyes. "Freddie, help me, damn it!"
He can see the blood leaking down her hands and his own fingers close around her wrists. Her weight is substantial but nothing he can't handle, something so fragile now that he thinks about it. Skin that can bruise like a ripe fruit, eyes that can droop like fading flower petals.
He reaches down and -
.
It's so ridiculously simply sometimes.
Simple to figure out why he's here staring at Sam and Carly with wide brown eyes and waiting for them to speak because he doesn't know if he can.
"Let me see your hands." It's Carly's voice again, and he goes to respond when he realizes that she's waiting for Sam.
Sam's hollow laugh rings out as she runs a finger over the bars of the cell in front of her. "I'm not doing anything, if that's what you think." She turns to look at Freddie with something in her eyes he can't make out. All he can do is lace his fingers through hers and notice how grimy his palms have become, coated with filthy grey-green mildew. It's disgusting, considering how he normal keeps his apperance impeccable.
And when he kisses her he remembers dark corridors and sprinting through a dying meadow with -
.
-fluids leaking down his body because she doused him with green glop she hid in the back of her truck.
"When I catch up to you," he growls up at her. She's running, free and vibrant, across the meadow, the soles of her feet slapping against green-brown grass and smushing once bright flowers. Then again, she is Sam Puckett, so he's not really surprised she's killing flowers. It...fits her.
"Aka, never," she calls back with a laugh. Seconds later he lunges and she shrieks, hitting him on the head as they tumble down in a heap.
"Ow," he whines (and it's so masculine,) "you bruised my sternum."
Her lips silence him and if they weren't kissing she'd probably be calling him a nub right about now, but -
.
It's okay. It's got to be okay, because the sight of her lying on the ground surrounded by a crimson halo cannot possibly be real.
"Sam," he breathes, and he's crying because she was just up there on the fire escape looking out over the city and he could have saved her. He creeps closer, tracing her glassy eyes with his own and wishing that he could simply pinch her and wait for her to punch him upside the head because that's normalcy and she can't be gone.
Doesn't anyone hear him?
She. Can't. Be. Gone.
He could have held on tighter as she hung over the edge, barely clinging to life; he could have, he should have, he -
.
- shouldn't have opened the door, because she's lying on the Shay's couch with a bucket of popcorn in one hand and a Ben and Jerry's in the other, her eyes following the flickering colors of the TV.
"Sam?" he calls out cautiously.
She looks at him and he notices that for once she doesn't look as if she's going to strangle the life out of someone. She simply looks pensive, and now she's looking at him with those eyes of hers and he can barely keep from sprinting over to her.
"Why do you have to be so addictive?" he asks in what he hopes in a sexy tone, because he's really not good at this sort of thing.
If she were Carly she would have patted the cushion next to her, snuggled with him while they watched some romantic comedy, and offered to share her popcorn. But because she's Sam she does none of those things, just looking at him like he's some sort of particularly gross insect she'd like to squash or something.
"You've been so busy lately," she begins conversationally, "so I thought I'd just treat myself to a night out. But I - I couldn't do it." She takes a bite of mint chocolate chip ice cream and he realizes just now why's she's carrying ice cream instead of ham.
She doesn't say 'your turn,' or 'go on,' but he knows she wants him to say something. She's practically begging him in the set of her jaw and the way her finger plays with a strand of her hair.
"I guess I've just been busy with college stuff," he mumbles, seating himself next to her. She doesn't pull away, but doesn't lean into him either.
"I miss," she says, "not being able to use my punching bag."
And with that he smiles, kissing her on the forehead because he knows she hates that.
"And I miss your torments," he says quietly, turning to watch the blur of characters from Girly Cow on the screen. "We haven't watched this in years. Why now?"
Sam shrugs, "I have...every night since the first iCarly." She quirks her lips as if to say 'no big deal' but he knows it is.
He turns to look at her and it's one of those moments where he needs to act like a nub and snuggle.
"Can we-" he begins.
She's already groaning. "You're such a nub," Sam announces, but snuggles into his chest anyways, shoving a handful of popcorn in her mouth as she does so.
And he grins into her blonde hair, because he realizes that he just might -
.
- lose her when she sits in the chair, spinning herself in circles and refusing to look at him.
"The chair cannot possibly be that fascinating," he snaps as she turns another circle.
She looks up at him and he wishes she would smile because there's something so lifeless about her eyes now - something cold and hunting and calculating and primal - that makes him shiver whenever he stares too long. It's almost the same feeling he gets whenever after standing in the sun a gust of wind comes to tickle his skin.
"I'm not crazy," she says simply, and it's all she's been saying since officers dragged her here several days ago. She won't talk, so they shoved him in here and told him to give it a shot.
"Sam." He blinks back the fog in his eyes, breaking through the mist that covers him like a shroud. "Sam, you murdered an innocent person."
She blinks. The small hand on his wrist watch ticks - and it's so slow he thinks he might go mad.
"Are you sure about that, Fredalupe?" God, how he's missed her little nicknames, and the way she's chortling at him now as if he's the one who should be transported to a mental institution. He tried explaining to her that there was something off about her: in the way she raked her fingernails together while pretending to study, in the way she could stare right through someone.
He blinks, because just being in her presence is making him forget himself. He wonders how long she's been mad; he wonders if it was his fault, if he -
.
- could have phrased it any more stupidly, because she's looking down at him and laughing in that way of hers that annoys him more than makes him feel lightheaded.
"That's the best you can do?" she snorts. "God, I thought someone like you would have spent days organizing just the right way to ask me out."
He decides not to tell her that he did, in fact, spend days writing out all the possible routes, all the paths, all the scenarios just so he wouldn't mess this up. Because maybe if he planned it down to the exact degree then he could break the mystery that was Sam. Looking at it now, all he feels is stupid.
"Are you just going to sit there all day or -" Sam starts in on him.
"Well," he says softly, trying a new angle out, "I was going to ask you out for juicy beef tacos with those steaming hot chili cheese fries, but I suppose you'd rather -"
"Don't expect me to be ready on time," she growls so quietly he barely hears it. "And you're paying."
All he can do is smile radiantly, "Is that a yes?"
"It's whatever you want it to be," she answers with the crossing of her arms and one of those vicious glares but he's floating in the clouds right now -
.
- and he doesn't ever want to come down because she's falling, falling through the skies like an angel with her flaming blonde hair and those eyes. God, she's looking at him with those eyes and she may as well be stabbing him.
Why didn't you save me? Those eyes are saying.
"You never wanted to be saved," he whispers, his fingers gripping the edge of the brick wall too tightly, tightly enough that it leaves cuts lacing across his skin.
She's falling, and in one moment she'll hit the ground and it's so beautiful it hurts him. His grip tightens and he can't see a thing but it's okay because he can feel it and -
.
"How are you doing today?" she asks him.
They're sitting on two plain, plain chairs, both so plain compared to the scars both teens cover.
"I should be asking you that," he says, leaning forward so that he can look at her better. She's still haunted, dark bags crossing under her eyes like snakes, and he wonders if she'll snap.
One shake of her head. Two.
"I know you," is all she says before grabbing his wrist and god her fingers are covered in blood and she knows.
He doesn't know how, but she knows that he's been slicing and cutting.
(it's the only way; can't breathe, too tight -)
"I wish I could say the same thing," he answers, and they both remember falling angels and her screams.
(- and she's the surface, she's the air that enters his lungs. He thinks he is too, for her, but no, not really. She can breathe on her own.)
Her lower lip trembles and then steadies, because she's strong, has to be. "You let go," she says as if it's the most natural thing in the world -
.
- to be them.
(they both know they're nothing natural, nothing -)
.
- because when it comes down to it, the whole world is against them.
Those are her words, taken straight from her mouth, and sometimes, as they're lying out under the stars eating ribs and purposely not cuddling, he believes the same thing.
"You have sauce," he says, pointing towards the corner of her lips, "right there."
She smirks, "Well, why don't you -"
He's already sputtering and pretending not to think about what she's suggesting, because he's a good boy. But then her lips are on his and it goes like: lips bruising, legs tangling, fingernails digging into the bare skin of his hips.
"Did you get it," she whispers into the bare skin of his chest when they're done. "The barbaque sauce, I mean."
He chuckles into her hair, "Your mind goes to the darkest places, Puckett."
"And that's why you just might keep me for awhile," she finishes for him, kissing the side of his throat before snatching another rib from the picnic basket she prepared.
He just might, he thinks with a weary sigh, because -
.
She's never going to be normal, not with the way she's staring through the bars at him like that. It looks like she's poised to kill, and that's a look he's seen far too often.
"If you'd just let me fall then none of this would have happened," she hisses as soon as he sits down. The glass dividing them hurts; he wants to reach out and touch her and yet he's glad for the barrier's existence, because Sam just might strike him now. You never know with her.
There's something wrong about her statement, but everything's wrong about Sam now, from the red slashes decorating her skin to the way her lips mumble things left best unsaid in black alleys, in the darkest of nights.
"You didn't fall," he says, and his world is dissolving under his feet because there's something a little too true about his statement.
Sam drags a blade over the skin of her neck - and he really shouldn't be surprised she got ahold of a weapon - and he's reminded again just how fragile the body is.
Just how fragile -
.
- the swing under his behind feels. Sam is pumping her legs as she strains to get higher, of course, because that's just her.
"Stop being such a baby," Sam snaps.
He rolls his eyes, "Stop listening to Taio Cruz." The famous singer is Sam's new obsession, one thing she'll actually admit, and with the way she looks ready to launch out of her swing and fly far away from him.
"Never." There's no compromise in her tone, but there never has been. "Take a chance for once, Benson. God, you're such a pansy."
"Am not," he snipes back, pumping a bit higher in his swing. "Do you even know how many germs there are on these swings? Well, do you?"
"Don't know, don't care," comes her response. She suddenly lets go of the swing and launches far into the air and she looks kind of like a dove, he thinks; no, more like an irritated owl. After all, she manages to keep a layer of antagonism about her every time they sneak out like this and he wonders what's beneath the surface of that cold front.
Maybe he should ask Carly.
"Stop thinking about Carly," Sam orders as she lands on the grass with a thump. "She'll never love you."
"How do you know I was thinking about her?" Freddie squeaks indignantly. "Maybe I was thinking about - I dunno - Penelope from recess."
"Penelope thinks you're a dweeb." Sam smirks at him but he thinks he spots a hint of sympathy for him in the lift of her mouth. "Now jump before your mom sees your missing and calls the FBI again. I'm not getting any younger!"
"That was only one time," he whines as the swing propells forward.
And then he's floating in mid-air and if this is what true freedom feels like he -
.
- doesn't know what to do with her when he sees her lying on the side of the road covered in blood that isn't her own.
"Sam, what -" he cuts off as he sees the body lying in a pool of blood in the outskirts the grass leading out into undisturbed hills. The scene is something out of a horror film, he thinks, if he ever happens to actually watch a horror film.
But he's pretty sure no horror film can compare to what he's actually seeing with his own two eyes. Nothing can compare to this reality.
"What are you doing?" he asks her, and all is hushed.
She's crooning over the body and swaying from side to side as she hums. "Writing my suicide letter," she answers at last, waving a blood soaked knife in the air.
He falls to his knees in the middle of the road, his eyes locked -
.
- on the way she brushes her hair out of her eyes as she works on decorating Carly's birthday cake.
"Can I see?" he asks, resting his head on her shoulder. She tries to throw him off but he only ignores the gesture, smiling at her.
Blue eyes look at him thoughtfully. "If you want," Sam grumbles at last. She dips her finger in the cake and presses the same finger against his nose. She then licks the icing off, laughing as he gasps for lack of words.
When the ability to speak returns, all he can say is, "You misspelled Carly's name."
She slaps his cheek lightly as a rebuke but the effort is so half-hearted he wonders if he's bothered her with his observation.
"It's the thought that counts," Sam mumbles.
She's right, and the moment she says the words the light hits her face in such a way it makes -
.
- his blood boil. They're flailing in a tangle of limbs and he shoves Sam back as he fights to break the two girls apart.
"What the he - what are you doing?" he roars, looking back and forth beneath them. Red marks, blackened cheeks, pouring tears: they're all present on Carly's face, but on Sam's face he sees nothing but closure.
"What needed to be done," Sam says bluntly, and although he doesn't know what she's talking about he feels himself explode.
(he's tearing, punching, grasping desperately for reality -)
He pretends he can't hear Carly's pleads for him to stop, her screams as she tries to pull him away.
(-and the only one who can ground him is drooping to the ground covered in her own blood, blood now covering his shuddering fingertips.)
He's a monster, and he can't bring himself to care, because -
.
- in the end they're all monsters.
"We came to visit." Carly's voice floats towards him, lovely as ever. She's covered her face in so many layers of make-up he can barely see the raw pain still etched permanently into her brown eyes.
"She made me," says Sam, but he knows she's lying the moment the words leave her mouth. She's not wearing any makeup - just the way he likes her, just her with no layers in between - and his eyes flick over the bruises covering her face, over the scars covering her skin, marring once perfection.
"Who did this to you?" He's gripping the bars so tightly he thinks it should hurt but it doesn't. Nothing can hurt when you don't feel, he presumes.
Carly offers a sad smile and walks away and they're alone and it's all coming back and he closes his eyes to block it all.
"You did," Sam breathes into the silence, and their fingers link through the bars. "How can you be so cruel, Freddie?"
They're playing a game with their words, with the silence of the abyss in their eyes, and he tries to remember when he was free to experience happiness, when he didn't have to envision it. He tries to remember when he didn't pretend like Sam was the insane one just so he could be free.
Eyes close and then open. Hearts race.
"Try remembering when I wasn't."
The tears boil in her eyes but she won't let them fall.
"Okay," she whispers, because she can't say anything that will change what this has became. She can't change the day she lost him, the day he thrust her off the fire escape and watched her plummet, watched her blood spill out, watched her nearly die.
Her thumb strokes his and she says, "Remember the night we flew on the swings?"
He nods, the movement barely there.
"Do you remember -"
.
"Freddie, what are you doing?" She's pressed back against the edge of the fire escape and there's a fire in his eyes she's never seen before.
Shoving, gasping, pleading, and she's dangling in the air, held only by her bleeding hands and his fingertips around her wrists.
"Please don't let me go," Sam whispers up at him, and it's the weakest she's ever sounded.
"I love you, Sam."
He lets go.
.
Cause what goes up must come down,
and what's coming down is coming down fast,
I think it fell on my heart;
.
.fin.