Disclaimer: I don't own iCarly, nor do I own the characters. I do own liquid soap, though.

Freddie Benson hummed to himself pleasantly as he opened the laptop on his iCarly studio tech cart and pulled an install DVD from a paper sleeve. It was Saturday morning, and Carly and Spencer were out seeing the new "Prisms of Liquid Soap: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Technology and Hygiene" exhibit at the Seattle Museum of American History. Maybe they took their hand soap a little too seriously, he wondered.

The fact they were gone didn't matter to Freddie; he had a key to the Shays' apartment anyway, and if anything, the lack of anyone else's presence would make upgrading his system to the newest iteration of PearOS Derf, "Feral Tomcat," go much more smoothly. He was anxious to put the new operating system through its paces, especially since it was heralded as a major upgrade that included such vital new features as a faster average boot time of 0.2 seconds, the default relocation of icons from one side of the desktop to the other, and a revamped email client that now offered the option of sending messages with pictures of flowers in the background.

As Freddie placed the install disc into the slot-loading optical drive with a growing sense of giddy expectation, he heard the doorknob to the third-floor studio jiggle. A click quickly followed, and the door swung open to reveal a deteriorated sleep shirt and flannel pants-clad Sam Puckett, who stomped rapidly across the room in his direction.

In no time, she'd grabbed hold of his wrist and pulled him back toward the entrance. "Come on, Fredward, you've got a long day of hard work ahead of you," she growled. Something smelled funny, he noticed.

Finally working his arm free of her iron grip in the doorway, Freddie shouted, "I'm in the middle of something important, Sam!"

"Yeah, like getting two tenths of a second of your life back whenever you start your computer from now on is worth the 45 minutes of it you'll lose by upgrading it," Sam shot back. "You can play with your little Feral Tomcat later; what we've gotta do is more important, mostly 'cause it involves me."

"How'd you know about the tech specs of the new PearOS?" Freddie asked.

Sam fixed him with a blank stare and one raised eyebrow. "Anyway," she continued, ducking the question, "we've got a shower to rebuild."

"What?"

Sam sighed curtly. "My mom's out of town right now, got an appointment with her plastic surgeon in L.A. I think. Before she left to go last night, she somehow broke the plumbing for the shower." Studying the confused look on Freddie's face, she continued, "I thought it best to not ask how."

"Probably a good idea," Freddie answered.

"Darn right . . . So, anyway, this thing needs to be fixed pronto, 'cause I'm starting to smell pretty much – not good," she said, jamming her armpit and the yellowing portion of shirt covering it into his nose and swinging her greasy hair over his head in one swift motion.

"DUDE! That's horrible!" Freddie shouted in disgust as he struggled to break free. "Get off me, man!"

"Now you understand the gravity of the situation," Sam deadpanned.

"Yeah, but, why don't you just get a shower here? And why drag me into this?" Freddie wondered.

"One," Sam replied, "fixing this is probably gonna be a really messy, dirty, sweaty thing to do. Ever see a clean plumber who smells great on the job?"

Freddie admitted she was probably right on that point.

"So what's the point in getting cleaned up first?" she asked rhetorically. "Two," she continued, abruptly sticking her face within an inch of Freddie's nose, "I . . . LOOOOOVE . . . Dragging you into stuff like this. It's probably gonna have to be a two-person job, anyway, and ya see anybody else around here?"

Freddie glanced around the room in the faint hope someone would somehow materialize from thin air. "Besides," Sam continued, "as much as I hate to admit it, you're pretty good at figuring out how to put stuff together, so I could really, MAYBE, uh, use your help." He looked back at Sam, who stared up at his face with an expression that made a complete mockery of wide-eyed innocence. "Come with me?" Sam cranked her demented Hummel figurine vibe up to eleven as she began batting her eyelids. "Pweese, Fweddie?"

It took several seconds before Freddie could extricate himself from the strange sway Sam's twisted angel-on-a-speed-bender appearance held over him. "Oh, alright," Freddie at last grumbled dejectedly. "Where do we have to go?"

Sam made a mental note: Holy chiz, that crap actually works, as she replied, "First, hardware store."

They tramped down the stairs together. "You know, I have a life of my own and stuff to do, too," Freddie complained.

"Yeah, right!" Sam snorted. "Face it, Fredifer," she grinned wickedly as they continued down the stairs. "Your butt belongs to Momma, and you know it. Keep movin', grease monkey."

Why do I let myself get suckered into stuff like this? Freddie wondered to himself.

Once at the hardware store, Sam and Freddie were confronted with a dizzying array of pipe parts and shower and tub fixtures hanging from and propped against a long aisle of metal shelving and particle board. "I have no idea what we're gonna need here," Freddie muttered.

"Don't worry 'bout that," Sam answered while grabbing some lengths of pipe and accessories from the aisle, "I have a pretty good idea of what pipes and rings and stuff need replacing, and . . ." She pulled an 8-1/2"x14" piece of legal paper from her pants that was covered both front and back in free-flowing handwriting. ". . . my mom left very detailed instructions for exactly the kind of showerhead we'll need."

"What makes the showerhead so important?" Freddie wondered while surveying the surprising variety available. "Just get the simplest one there is, like you're doing with the flange, pipes, solder, and o-rings."

Sam looked at Freddie as though he'd just parachuted in from Mars before shaking her head. "Dude, your innocence scares me sometimes."

She went back to examining the available merchandise. "Let's see," she muttered to herself while glancing from the paper to the aisle and back, "Of course it can't just be wall-mounted – gotta be hand-held, too, so that rules out all these . . . Has to have a massage mode, but with multiple pulse rate settings, different flow rates, different flow patterns, so that just leaves these, and . . ."

The look of comprehension dawning on Freddie's face quickly shifted to one of horror once he fully comprehended what Sam's mom, and apparently Sam as well, had in mind.

Sam reached triumphantly for the last in stock of a particular variety of showerhead. "Oh, yes," she said in a voice Freddie thought sounded strangely similar to Spencer's whenever he watches The Boat Network, "This. Is. PERFECT. I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy," Sam cooed as she clutched it reverently.

Upon noticing that Freddie's face had gone ashen, Sam added, "Oh, did I tell you we'll need to hit the drugstore to pick up some tampons, too?"

Freddie's face turned even whiter.

"I'm kidding! Jeez, ya squeamish little boy . . . Come on," she continued while grabbing him by the arm, "I think we'll need a tub of grout and some caulk to be on the safe side. Let's finish up here, head home, and get crackin'."

Author's Note: This story's set early in the fourth season, probably in the ballpark of iGet Pranky, so Sam and Freddie clearly aren't dating yet in this thing. They are, however, definitely headed in that direction, even if neither of them know it yet or would ever admit it at this point. It's an interesting dynamic to try to portray.

This is also a bit of an experiment – rather than having a fully formed story, I had just two ideas in mind when starting this thing: the title, and the notion of building a story around something totally boring and mundane, and trying to make it funny and engrossing.

And that's why you've somehow found yourself reading the beginning of a multi-chapter story about fixing a shower, of all things. This story will continue with further updates in the future; my only goal is to not bore anybody to death in the process with adventurous tales of caulking.