Chapter 1: iCan't Stop Looking

Disclaimer: don't own the iCarlies

A/N: This fic is a first for twowritehands in that it is completely closed on one character. It was a challenge but tons of fun at the same time. Tell us what you think in a review! Also, the storyline disregards iParty With Victorious and the previews for the upcoming episodes following iOMG :)

Freddie sat crisscross applesauce in the middle of the iCarly studio, attempting a magic trick—or what would amount to one. On the floor in front of him was a cardboard box. With a glue gun, he meticulously dotted the back of tiny cutout branches and leaves and stuck them to a cardboard tree trunk, his genealogy project. While other students would just have a poster board with a boring family tree traced on, Freddie would have a three-dimensional model tree. But not just any 3-D tree; an optical illusion. Using math he was going to make a bunch of perfectly matched lines look like they didn't add up. In doing so he hoped to impress his teacher with smoke and mirrors, thus turning C+ work into B+ material. Ta-da!

It was probably going to be a lot of work for nothing, but it was worth a try. Going above and beyond was too much of a habit to not try, but of all the assignments in his career as a model student, this was the first time Freddie felt like he probably wouldn't get a perfect grade.

And it was the first time ever that he didn't really care.

The assignment was to trace his family back as far as possible on both sides and he'd probably only make a B on it, but that would be okay, because he wouldn't be the only person in the class with only half a tree and a blank spot where his father should be.

He thought of Sam and her mother, and the fact that he'd never even heard the words "my dad" from Sam's lips.

Hmm. Sam's lips.

He didn't realize he was smiling as he pressed little four pronged leaves to the cardboard. (His family tree was a maple. Carly had told him that he had to pick a specific species, because it was detail like that that was the difference between winners and losers. Hers was an Oak.)

Nearby, Carly was laying flat on her back in the floor, reading print outs she got from that family ancestry website, Where'd'ya Come From Dot Com. She had her ankles crossed and shook her foot in time to the music of Cuddle Fish, which blasted loudly from the stereo.

Gibby was in the audience seats built to look like a car. He was reclined with his legs up over the dashboard. He was eating pudding, his project abandoned on a nearby card table. He sang along with the lyrics, always taking the back-up bass when he could, which in this song meant a lot of deep throated bellowing with his head back.

Freddie didn't hear the door open or slam, or even notice Sam until her army-green converse, which were mostly swallowed in the ratty ends of her too-long jeans, walked across his work area. He yelled at her, but she didn't hear. She turned down the music and swirled around to look at her friends. She held two plastic Mall-Mart bags filled with DVD boxes.

"What're those?" Carly asked, rolling onto her stomach. Gibby swept his finger around the inside of his pudding cup to get the last bits of pudding and then threw the cup into the trashcan; it went in nothing but bag.

Sam's blue eyes were alight and her smile was genuine with no sarcasm or loathing, showing off her pearly whites. She pulled one of the DVDs out and held it up. "It's every episode of Cult Busters ever made!" she said.

Gibby's large and lanky frame sprang up clumsily, "No way!"

"Yes way!" she laughed. Freddie and Carly frowned at each other. They'd never heard of this show. Sam and Gibby were singing the theme song, if it could be called a theme song. It was more like a string of notes played as the title rolled.

"Badada Badada BOWM. Cult. Busterrrrrrrs!"

Freddie pushed himself to his feet and left his glue stick oozing on the floor. "Cult Busters," he repeated, "What's that?"

Sam rocked onto her heels and rolled up onto her toes, "It's mah dad's show."

That took a second.

"What?" Carly asked, pushing herself into a sitting position on the hardwood floor. Her confused smile was on and shiny from her lip-gloss. Sam was already putting the DVD in as Gibby scoffed, "Sambrose Melancholy's you dad?"

"Yup," Sam answered. Gibby shrugged, "Cool!"

"Sambrose Melancholy?" Carly repeated.

"Yeah," Sam said, "Mom named me and Mel after him."

Just then, the DVD menu began and it showed a man made extremely large by muscle holding a small child's shoulder in one hand, and a gun in the other as they walked away from what looked like suburbia. He wore a three-piece suit tousled by a fight and the kid wore some kind of toga.

"That's your dad?" Carly asked getting to her feet. Her tone echoed Freddie's thoughts. Sam…you have a dad?

"She's got his eyes," Gibby said, "I always thought so—never occurred to me that they might actually be his eyes." He laughed. "Hey so is he in the movie coming out next week?"

Sam wrinkled her nose. "Neh, they wanna do it on location and he wasn't up for it."

Freddie and Carly traded lost looks. Freddie turned to the TV. The DVD menu changed to another shot, a close up of this Sambrose Melancholy—that could not be his real name, Freddie thought—and he saw that Gibby was right, the guy did have Sam's big round blues, the same thick eyelashes, too.

Sam hit play, flopped into a beanbag. Gibby did the same and she took a pudding cup that he offered out of his twelve pack.

"Sam!" Carly shrilled, stepping in front of the screen. Freddie stepped into the space beside her, crossed his arms.

"What?" she asked up at them.

Carly was so flabbergasted by their slacker friend that she looked at Freddie for help. He threw his arms up, "We're your friends! Why didn't you tell us when you found out who your dad was?"

She smirked, "I didn't find out. I've always known."

This took a second, too. In it, an electric guitar screamed Badada Badada BOWM and a chorus of people murmured "Cult. Busterrrrrrrs," then a voiceover began about the tragedies of brainwashed cults…

Gibby looked up at his two friends, from Freddie's low eyebrows and dropped jaw to Carly's bland, polite expression of disbelief where she was blinking her eyes slowly. Then he looked over at Sam, "Think you'd better explain that one, Sam."

She sighed, rolled her eyes and hit the pause button. "Why're you all so surprised?"

Freddie shrugged and Carly mirrored him, though they knew exactly why. Sam's mom was the kind of woman that didn't exactly promise that she kept up with that kind of thing. Gibby said it outright, "We always assumed your mother didn't know his name because she's, uh, you know, Fancy."

"Fancy?" Sam echoed with a smirk.

"A stranger waiting on the boulevard," Gibby tried again. She raised her eyebrows.

"A pretty woman," he offered. Sam shrugged, not satisfied with that definition, though everyone knew that she knew what his was saying.

"A hooker!" Carly screeched. "You're mom's a hooker, Sam, everybody knows it!"

If Sam was hurt by this, she didn't show it. She sighed and laid back into the beanbag, stretching out flat as she ripped the top off her pudding cup. Her shirt came up enough to show the peachy flesh of her lower stomach and a thin line of dark pink elastic under her jeans. Freddie noticed despite the gravity of the situation and looked away, swallowing.

Carly, calmed by embarrassment from her loss of temper, pushed her hair behind her ear, crossed her arms, and said in a much kinder voice, "You never talked about your dad before so we always just thought… Well, that she hadn't kept track or something…."

Sam waved a hand, bored, "Nah. She always knew it was Sammy. He sends us child support and mom sends him our school pictures."

"He knows about you?" Gibby asked.

Sam nodded.

Freddie exploded, "So why haven't you ever told us that you're dad was—"He threw his arms at the screen. "Famous!"

"First of all," Sam said, becoming a little defensive from Freddie's volume and tone. She stood, poked him hard in the chest. "It's nobody's business. Second of all, I would have told you guys if you'd have asked about him, but you never did, and third of all," She shrugged, dropping the defensive attitude. "I'm not supposed to spread it around."

"Why not?" Gibby asked.

She waved a hand, "Mom's blackmailing five other guys into paying child support."

"WHAT?" Carly and Freddie cried. Sam shrugged, "Hey, they're rich enough to afford it, ashamed enough to pay it. Bills gotta be paid somehow."

This was the first time in seven years that they were talking about Pam Puckett's career choices. Carly, Freddie, and Gibby had found out years ago on accident (a long story) and Sam knew they knew. It was never spoken of and it felt weird to be talking about it now, like some pact was being broken.

"So why tell us now?" Freddie suddenly demanded with venom, which made Carly and Gibby double-look him. "We didn't ask."

Now Sam was really pissed off. She advanced on him and he retreated a few steps. "What's it to you, Benson?" she asked. "I just thought you'd get around to asking eventually because of this dumb project."

"I can't believe you'd keep something like this from us," Carly said. Sam scoffed, "Don't go all soft. It's no big deal."

"I told you about when my mom left!" Carly cried and her voice broke a little as she said it.

Sam's expression softened. "I know," she said. Gibby looked lost, he was still too new to the group to have gotten the story on that. Freddie turned to glower at the hero on the screen with Sam's eyes as Sam hugged Carly.

"Let's just do these stupid projects," Sam groaned, changing the subject. "I need to get a good grade if I wanna graduate." It was senior year, and Sam was surprising her friends by actually caring about her diploma. She was now half-assing her work as opposed to ignoring it completely.

Gibby exclaimed loudly in agreement, hit play, and returned to his card table. Carly picked up her print outs, Sam went to Freddie's laptop to log into Where'd'ya Come From Dot Com for the first time since getting the assignment three days ago, and Freddie snatched up his glue gun and sank back to the floor.

He could feel himself sulking as he went back to work. He knew it was stupid—but he felt betrayed, perhaps more so than Carly.

Sam wasn't supposed to know anything about her dad, like him. He never realized how much that meant to him, to have a friend to share that with, being clueless about dads. And, now, apparently, she'd had a clue all along. Sam had a dad. Sam knew her dad. Sam's dad knew her.

He worked in silence, gluing leaves and names to his mother's side of the tree while his father's side stayed blank. If he stuck the leaves in place more violently than usual, they didn't complain.

Now, instead of the dance tunes of Cuddle Fish to buoy their spirits while they worked, they watched a DVD marathon of Cult Busters. Frankly, Freddie wasn't up for it, but he couldn't complain without explaining his disinterest, which he was barely willing to do even to himself, let alone out loud.

These first episodes were old—shot, like, twenty ago, so old they had to be re-digitized to be put on DVD. Freddie was surprised when he glanced up and saw in the opening credits that the same people produced this that did Celebrities Underwater. Wow, talk about a broad range of interests, the two shows were nothing alike.

While Celebs was basically a game show that provided opportunities for him to see Selma Hayeck in a bikini underwater, the show that Sam's father starred in was dramatic—and viewer discretion advised. Within five minutes, Freddie understood how he'd never heard of this show. It was the kind of thing that was on late at night (after his bedtime) and on the channels that his mother blocked.

Basically, it was a reality show. Sam's father was a hero described as a True Free Thinker. He infiltrated cults, de-brainwashed as many people as he could, and then got them out safely. It was dangerous work, as most people in a cult would gladly kill if their leader demanded it. The leader always demanded it and Sambrose Melancholy always survived and never lost a man. It was also scripted, but after the first four straight hours of it, that became less obvious.

They swore as they talked about what they called The Situation. (These DVDs were uncensored so there were no tasteful bleeps over the words that made Carly wince) and when they interviewed people they'd rescued from a cult, the victims told horrifying stories filled with sickening details about the brutal violence and abuse of all kinds that they'd suffered.

Carly frequently forgot her work and stared in horror at the screen as the victims told their stories. Freddie heard, too, of course and it made his stomach roll, but he tried to pretend like it wasn't freaking him out, tried to be more like Gibby who watched it all with the casualness of a teen watching Celebrities Underwater.

Sam had seen every episode at least once so it did not distract her as much as it did the others. Carly kept getting pulled into The Situation on the screen, fascinated despite her terror, and Gibby, though he'd also seen them before, was happy to see them again. Seriously, he seemed unmoved by most of it. It made Freddie wonder if he even understood most of what he was hearing or if he was just that tough-skinned.

Freddie ended up paying less attention to his maple tree or to the TV and more attention to Sam as she worked. She stood at his laptop with one leg bent, the heel of that foot on top of her other foot. Her jeans were tight, and he liked the shapes her legs made. She bit her lip in concentration, too, her finger flicking around the track pad as she searched for her family's lineage. She printed things off and was actually highlighting lines— Sam was doing her homework.

A distracting enough sight in all of its strangeness, never mind how attractive it was.

Freddie shot a glance her way often because he felt like he was looking at a thing that logically had to happen regularly enough but that was rarely, if ever, seen—like something the discovery channel would kill to get footage of. He didn't want to miss it.

Since he was looking at her so much, he noticed every time she realized that a favorite part of an episode was coming up, how she stopped, put her full attention on the screen, often making a comment about how cool it was, or how she would have handled it if she was there. Gibby had a constant refrain of, "It's so cool he's your dad, Sam," which usually came after every verbal or physical bitch slap delivered on the screen. Those were her favorite parts. Every time.

Freddie was taking his time getting his brain around it all. She'd been watching this show for as long as Freddie'd been her friend, and all the while, she'd known it was her father. She knew her father. His name. His face. His job. In Freddie's head, just like that, she went from being the tough girl who didn't need a dad, to the girl who eagerly soaked up every bit of the man that she could get.

Freddie paid enough attention to the screen to realize where Sam got her tough side. The last fifteen minutes of an episode always had a fight with a gun, a knife or iron knuckles versus anyone going to stand in Melancholy's way as he tried to get the children out. He wondered if it was sharing DNA with this guy that made her so violent, or if it was just a natural side effect from watching him with awe in every episode.

Because she did watch him with awe, and Freddie couldn't look away from her as she did.

…

Seddie on the way so hold onto your pants… 'cos Freddie doesn't. ;-)