Disclaimer: Dan Schneider owns iCarly. That's a fact. Here's another, iCarly shot its final episode in June. Dan, thanks for letting so many of us play with your stuff. It's been great.

Speaking of great, hop over to Fictionpress and check out the narrative, "The Enemy Within" by Moviepal, it's powerful and has the added benefit of being true.

My thanks to Julefor for reading an earlier draft of this and giving me some feedback.

This story takes place in the future and is only concerned with Seddie. The other characters on the show are just filler to me. They always have been. That's not a shot at the creators, actors or fans involved with those characters. This is just the story I want to tell. I think this is real, more real than the show could offer considering its intentions. Like all the stories I've written in this fandom this is one I had to tell.

iConclude

Chapter I: After Happily Ever After

"How can I tell you about my loved one?"-Paul McCartney

"Sam?" Freddie said. His hand reached out to touch her soft cheek. The white hair on her forehead was perfectly groomed, silken. He noticed his hand had a tremor. There were dark spots on the waxy, vaguely brown flesh and wiry hairs curled up above the knuckles. The nail on his right thumb was damaged working on a circuit board years ago. His mother would have made him go to the hospital; possibly consult a specialist at the Mayo clinic. Sam had urged him to "wrap a towel on it" and get to the store, she wanted to barbecue. So, he wrapped on towel on it. It had never healed right. That was, how long ago was that?

"Sam?" he said again, "get up princess, we have to go," his hand trailed on her cool face. That beautiful face. Her eyes were closed but their luminous blue lived in him and he could see them anytime he closed his own.

"Dad?" said the voice behind him. "C'mon, let's sit down." Strong hands were on Freddie's shoulders gently pulling him away from the coffin.

Wayne, their oldest, looked exactly like her, blond hair, blue eyes, and he had her freakish physical strength along with the appetite of some fictional character that never stopped eating but never put on a pound.

"Wayne, this is not how it works," Freddie said, his tone suggesting that a column of numbers would not produce the correct sum, his hand continued to shake as he enumerated his points, "She is a married female whose natural mother lived a long time-and I never understood how when you consider the choices Pam made-statistically your mother should have out-lived me," and Freddie Benson shook his white head in disbelief. He heard his own mother in his voice.

"I know dad, sometimes it isn't about the facts." His son guided Freddie back to the chairs in front.

Sitting, Freddie looked around at the big room with its cream hues and understated yellows and blond woods. The lights were low and gave the space a dusky shade. Ahead was a sea of plants and flowers that enveloped the silver-grey casket. Sam really wasn't a flowers person. But surrounding the body in smoked meat was probably out of the question. He smiled at the thought of it. It was the first time he had smiled since she spoke to him at the hospice.

The hospice room was comfortable, decorated in soothing colors, the cold, plastic hospital tubes and hard machines cleverly, subtly designed into the space. It didn't have the hospital smell that he grew up with, the odor of cleaners and rubbing alcohol and antiseptic ointments. She was sitting up in the bed, "Sam, why don't you want to be home for this?" he asked her.

"Are you nuts? That's where you live. You really want my moldy ghost in the house with The Next Generation? You are such a nub, Benson," her voice was hoarse. She touched his face weakly. "You'll be here, right?" she asked. It was as close to saying she was afraid as she would ever get.

"Sam, I'll be here until…" the words would not come out of his mouth.

"Just checking, I know they're rereleasing _Galaxy Wars_ I'm sure you and Parker will be in line with New Sam and Evan."

"Well, we'll draw straws. Loser stays here," he said with his smirk and squeezed her newly frail hand, the large blue veins like worms.

"That's mean," she said. She was trying to smile but the medications she was on seemed to reduce her Sam-ness.

"Makes you proud, does it?" he said.

"Yep."

"I learned from the best," then, after a moment he added in a voice he rarely used, a timbre that took charge. "Sam, you are coming home, that's all there is to it."

"Okay," her surrender thrilled and horrified him. Sam was coming home. Sam had no fight in her. The memory made him wince as if stabbed with some sharp object.

"Grampa?" The hospice was gone, Evan, the oldest grandson, Evan who loved to dance and shake his butt when brushing his teeth, Evan who was already Freddie's height pressed into him. There was a tall gene somewhere in the Benson-Puckett biology. His mom, Pam Puckett, both were tall. Freddie coiled his arm around the waist of the teen and drew him in. Freddie felt the boy's tears on his own neck. Why couldn't Freddie cry? He loved Sam. Evan loved Sam.

Everyone loved Sam. Everyone here, anyway, the large room was crowded with people even though its walls had been retracted to allow maximum occupancy. The entire facility was dedicated to this funeral event. He saw lots of faces he did not know at all, a strange mix of ethnicities and incomes, it was eclectic, like one of those restaurants that had video screens hanging next to old Peppy cola signs from the '30s. When she was young, a tomboy thug, she never would have suspected this kind of turn out. Oh the changes time had wrought. But who thinks about being old when they are seventeen?

As she aged, she matured, like old wine. Sam Puckett was an embodiment of some life process. She filled out her time on Earth growing into new spaces that enriched her and that she improved with her presence. She had truly lived that cliché "the full life."

He was so proud of her. How he loved to see her succeed, how he enjoyed watching her pick herself up after a failure and grow taller and stronger for it. She was his hero in so many ways. He did not understand back then, but she inspired him, pushed him, made him grow. To him the greatest mystery was why she chose him. Did she choose him? He had not chosen her. He started out wanting Carly.

Carly was here today of course, the secret service agents stood silently, oddly invisible in the back corners of the room. Had anyone ever assassinated a vice-president let alone a former one? Carly approached him and he stood, the lifelong friends embraced. She was still thin as a delinquent's excuse, and her hair was unnaturally dark for her age. She had a powerful perfume on and her suit was perfectly, expensively fitted.

"Oh Freddie, why?" she sobbed and shuddered. The two gripped each other like life preservers.

"I guess it was time," Freddie said, but he didn't know why. It was just something to say when people die, where was his brain? Why was his thinking so jumbled? He was sure he had a plan but suddenly it had no shape. His brain was in the same place as his missing tears, "Bill with the girls?" Freddie asked. It was small talk, he didn't care, Bill was another in the long line of Carly's bad choices in men a habit she never got free of.

Carly whispered into his shoulder, "our girls or somebody's."

Freddie nodded and squeezed her tightly. He could not focus on Carly's latest domestic misadventure. When they were younger Freddie, Carly and Sam were the iCarly trio, the brain, the heart and the muscle. Although they had remained friends time had changed them as it did with everything. Time was a river, pushing everyone along. At one distant point Freddie thought he loved Carly Shay. It took a blonde demon and years of living with her, fighting with her, to show him what love really was. Freddie thanked God silently for all the times God told him "no" when he prayed for Carly's affection.

As he had aged, as Sam got sick, he thought much more about God than in his youth.

Carly separated from him and slipped into a row of chairs. The agents in the room adjusted ever so slightly to accommodate their mission. As he watched her sit, he realized time was more than a river, time was hard on people. It beat them up. The old people in the room, people like him, looked like they had been in a very rough fight. Time was an unbeatable opponent.

When they were young he and Sam were "frenemies" friends who behaved like enemies at times. She abused him mercilessly, tricking him, insulting him, hitting him. People who saw them together then understood they had a chemistry an explosive reaction that could consume them or propel them to the stars.

He started as a nerd, a "nub" in her words. He was smart, sheltered from crossing without the lights, in desperate need of someone to show him the other side of the street. She was a criminal, a shop lifter, a truant, a rebel, a risk taker, an agent of chaos. She needed someone who would accept her as she was. They appeared to be opposites, but that wasn't true. They needed each other. They became a team, a binary. Separate they were both capable. Together, they were a force that built the lives they had lived until this very moment, and the clear conclusion of that team was evident now in the front of the room. The image made him shudder. Would he have accomplished all he had without her egging him, insulting him, driving him? Would she have achieved everything had he not counseled her, calmed her, acted as a rudder in the wild currents of her life?

By the time she had gotten sick Sam was a very successful woman, owner of her own string of coffee-deli shops (Sam's) star of her own Internet cooking show (Samisfaction) and periodic star in the mini-fiction videos that became his passion. She was a celebrity yes, but the folks who were paying respects today weren't just fans. There were other, sometimes more famous people, past and present employees, competitors, customers, strangers Sam had helped, people whose lives she had touched.

That pleased him. Sam's effect on people was an unusual thing to watch evolve. She didn't do normal human interaction. She could be hard to get close to. She irritated and pushed people; she made trouble and stirred things up. His Sam had a very relaxed attitude about things that most people thought needed discipline. It was like the old iCarly show. She barely showed for rehearsals but at go-time creativity just boiled out of her. He thought of that face in his viewfinder and his chest surged with something sharp that made him blink.

He and Sam were good partners. She saw possibilities and he organized, refined, produced and directed them. "I'm the creative one," she would tell him. "You're just a brain, get me some ham." The remembered words, the almost audible sound of her voice made him both happy and profoundly sad all at once. They had grown old together. They had become the irritating old people she had always mocked in the iCarly days, when they first started their lifelong fighting.

One of their biggest battles occurred the night they got engaged. He had of course planned it like a military invasion and when he showed her the ring she had not picked out, in effect challenging her independence, the two went into a long conflagration. It ended with the ring going back and Sam picking out what she wanted. Another lesson learned. Yet even when he asked her with the ring she chose, her first response, "I guess," was sufficient to start another battle until he got the kind of yes he wanted to hear. Push and push back, striking a balance.

He looked around the crowded, broad mortuary. In addition to the sprawling floral arrangements that lined the halls and entryway of the funeral home there was a display set up of printed and digitized three dimensional photos that traced Sam's life. Her Splash Page timeline was in funeral mode on a big screen. The music was from her PearPod in shuffle play. Freddie wasn't surprised by the shredding guitars, but the soft violins of old pop music was unexpected. Some were tunes she might have heard growing up with her mom. Some music reminded him of long drives with her. She liked Lady Taco the singer. He did not. Sam would tease him, "I know you love Lady Taco, Fred-dick," and she would leer at him in her private way that was so dirty. He exhaled, Sam was improper even at her own funeral. And warmth spread up from his core.

He looked around at the mourners. A kind of family was present, some biological, some assigned by common interest. He was not used to death but he had dealt with it. His mother, Pam, T-Bo, Spencer, Fat Johnny, but this one was different. It should be deeper, harder, but so far his pain waited out of reach. Why wasn't he crying?

Melanie, Sam's identical twin sat in front with his boys their wives and some of the grandchildren. It was eerie to see her. He had to make himself not stare. He had never had to do that before. He missed Sam so much. He couldn't cry but the tears poured out of Mel, spilling down her face. She leaned into her daughter Andrea who rubbed her shoulder but did not weep. Sam and Andrea never got along. Freddie understood why, but that was ancient history. He rubbed the ham earring on his left lobe. Sam always trimmed his ears when they got too "shaggy," who would do that now? Why was he thinking of that?

Sam and Melanie got much closer over the years. Much like Sam and Freddie, the differences between the twins were overcome by the powerful similarities. He remembered Melanie's words on a long ago winter night where snow had paralyzed the city:

"Do you know how much Sam loves you?" Mel asked him.

He nodded there in the mortuary, the words still clear and strong. The numbness of his fingers that cold, lonely night suddenly real again.

Mel continued, "You guys broke up again but it won't last. I know her, I grew up with her, not like you did, I lived with her. Never doubt how much you mean to her. Whatever has happened, I can't believe it will ever be over between you two. You have an effect on her that no one else does."

He put the rest of that night out of his mind. Ancient history.

When he and Sam finally stopped breaking up (the picking at each other would never cease) and settled into the idea that they were supposed to be together they lived a life out of some fantasy romance, though probably not everyone's fantasy, that was for sure.

They continued to appear to battle, but even casual observers could not miss the charged connection between them. It was not unusual for the two of them to exchange loud words and then walk out hand-in-hand smiling and laughing, and woe to anyone who thought to join in the heated banter. Suggesting to either that the other was deficient caused the two to come together like Lego pieces in a construct of extraordinary strength. Belittle either to the other in any way and you had an enemy, and in Sam's case might produce an outright beating. Both were fiercely protective of the other.

Freddie sat down and watched a parade of people pass by the casket. He did not know a lot of them. Sam had so many people in her huge life. Freddie was just one routine in a very complicated program.

But maybe the most essential component in some way; sometimes he granted himself the luxury of thinking how important he was to her. He shook that off and refocused on the room around him.

The mourners were divided into specific, demographic clusters. There were professionals in suits, people from his Pear days and financiers of his films. Sam's current and former employees, fans of her work going back to the iCarly days. That simple show touched people and they continued to get letters, and texts, and followers on their accounts. How many thousands of followers did Sam have? Oddly the exact number eluded him. Numbers didn't usually do that.

Another was a group of people that might have been from Sam's old neighborhood. Men and women, girls and boys with weirdly colored streaks in their hair, older, heavy men and women with bad grooming and weak fashion choices that did not always cover tattooed flesh. Freddie examined the body art, counted stars, and shapes that might be dragons and even Bible verses. Not as much barbed wire as he would have thought, however.

And everybody was wearing computers. Some were cheap, disposable systems, others were expensive implants. It was a world he dreamt of as a boy, had helped build as a man. All around him the data streamed, invisible as the air. He saw many people reacting to the feeds from her Splash Page "Conclusion Entries" that were fashionable these days.

His own personal computers ("We've made computing personal" was the slogan wrapped around his most successful advances) were muted or the influx of texts, e-mails, and condolence messages would be numbing. Even from here he could see the Splash Page tickers enumerating incoming updates on her passing.

A thin, shaggy, grey man in cracked, creaking motorcycle leathers walked up to Freddie and extended his calloused hand.

"I'm Carl Guzman, Sam gave my kid Judy a break and helped her get out of juvie a while back," he looked over his shoulder back at the body. "She was all right."

Freddie stood and shook the strong, hand; Guzman smelled of gasoline and the road, "yes, she was one-of-kind. Thank you for coming," Freddie said.

"Hadda do it man," he said with a smoker's weathered voice then he walked on without a word. Freddie wasn't sure he would ever have met the Carl Guzmans of the world without Sam. Sam offered him the horizon and let him meet and like people outside his comfort zone.

Freddie didn't like everyone in the room, today, however. One distasteful figure was a writer that had been pursuing Sam and him for an interview. She was interested in doing a series of articles on early web personalities, a, what-impact-did-it-have piece. She had dug into Sam's past, some of the ugliness that lived under their worst split, the time of James Ryan. Freddie had done a lot of work to clean up that mess but things on the Internet lived deep, like earthworms and were impossible, like roaches, to eradicate. The woman stayed back, which was good. If she made a "can we talk sometime" overture it would be hard to contain Wayne. He had his mother's temper and far less of the lived experience that restrained hers.

The next person in the line of respect that had formed was a plain, heavy young woman with a red, swollen face. She wore new jeans and a clean white blouse, "Mrs. Benson, Sam, was…" she said and the tears fell out of her eyes in a way Freddie thought resembled rain on pavement. He should be crying like this stranger. He drew her in and held her as she shook. His Sam had become a magnificent woman, she grew into someone that found a place in the world and made a difference. He wondered who this woman was and how she knew Sam.

As if reading his mind she spoke, "My dad, he, he abandoned my mom and sisters, Sam, she, she brought us food, helped us pay the bills, got my mom some help…"

Freddie's eyes burned but no tears came, "Yeah, sounds like Sam," he said, sort of rocking with her. Sam did these things and never told him. He suddenly noticed the music that was whining from the wall speakers. He listened to the tune and the words were thoughtful. Sam was more about the rhythm than the meaning, more dance than contemplation, yet even now she surprised him, startled him with her choices. Why had this complex lady ever wanted to be with him?

"It hurts, Freddie," Sam said to him from the bed they had installed for her at the house.

"The nurse is coming with something," he told her. Her skin was dry and cold as he stroked it. How many times had his hands caressed her?

"If I go to sleep, will I wake back up?"

"I don't know," and his voice failed.

"Freddie?" she was fading. The pain seemed to be the only thing keeping her with him.

He had wanted to tell her to let go, that it was okay to leave, but he was selfish, he could not say those words.

"Fred?" What? the voice was wrong.

She was gone.

"Fred, that's not her, dude," Gibby said to him.

The death bed had vanished and Gibby was in front of him "Huh?" Freddie said.

Freddie was back in the warm, cramped mortuary. He looked into the face of his old friend. Despite the stoop to his shoulders Gibby was still far taller than Freddie and his once impish hair was long gone, replaced by a substantial spread of wrinkled, spotted scalp. What hair remained was short and grey. Gibby had never done the comb-over or used any of the baldness remedies on the market these days. Gibby said he didn't think baldness was something that needed to be cured. Like everyone, Gibby had been fighting time and losing. But in Gibby-style the outcome didn't seem to matter. Gibby defied convention.

"What'd you say, Gib?" Freddie said, squinting at him.

"That's not her, Sam I mean. She's not in the box. She's out here with all of us. With the people who knew her."

Freddie nodded. He heard the words but they didn't take root. He was numb, his sons were crying, his friends were crying, strangers were crying, but his tears weren't coming. His brain was thrashing like the platters on those old magnetic drives in his first computers. His mind was trying to organize and break down into component parts what was happening here.

His grief was just out of reach.

Sam was at the front of the room in a forest of plants and flowers, an assortment of visitors passing by.

Beautiful.

Still.

Gone.

And Freddie's brain could not quite grasp it.

A/N Chapter two is called Homecoming.

This story has been kind of a toothache, it needed to come out. But I'm working on it in a very odd manner. As such, I may rewrite and change chapters after they post as I did with iWTF, my first fan fic. I keep reading this and seeing areas I missed, things I could do better. So, with this mini arc I will be changing things up. That is something I've tried to do with my iCarly fan fiction, to write in ways that keep me moving, changing. So, we'll see.

This story takes place in my Knightroverse and some of the events referenced here are covered in more detail in the other stories I've written. Yeah, I'm beatin' up Freddie again.

I know that I have to finish "iLove You So Now What?" and I appreciate those of you who continue to read it, favorite it and recommend it to others. That means a lot, thank you.

Chapter two of iConclude is underway.