A/N Finally over the writer's block! This was written for the lj community groovysmoothie and its fic prompt challenge of Snow. Writing in past tense is hard now! This is pre-ship Seddie. If you like you can put it in cannon with Point&Click, about a year earlier, but it's a stand-alone one-shot. Please comment if you have anything to say, and thanks so much for your readership!
It doesn't snow very much in Seattle. Up in the mountains you'd get drifts of the stuff, wafting around the trees and crisping them up with white flocking, but in the city, by the ocean, you'd get maybe one or two days of snow a year. When the snow fell and it actually stuck to the roads, nobody would quite know what to do with themselves. Schools had the tendency to close early or open late, mothers would have an overwhelming urge to stock up on toilet paper and orange juice, and generally the city would shift and slide from normalcy a little bit more than usual.
So it was, when the forecast warned of a storm blowing in from the cold north overnight, that Sam Puckett found herself praying for the first time she could ever remember.
"Dear God or Jesus or Buddha or Spider King or whatever you are," her thoughts started out as she pressed her hands together behind the shelter of her locker door, "please make sure that the snow sticks, and we get a snow day, actually while I'm at it could we get two, so I could maybe have time to finish my paper and not have to repeat eighth grade? Amen and thanks and also keep it real." Her lips moved quietly as she squeezed her eyes shut.
Sam perceived a thump on the locker next to her. Praying finished, she packed her bags for the afternoon and shut her door. "Hey dork, what's going on?" She lifted her bag to her shoulder and started pulling on her fingerless gloves.
Freddie relaxed next to her. His hands were in his pockets and he arched his back over his backpack, head knocking lightly on the locker behind him. "Nothing much, beast. Did you hear about the snow? I think it might actually stick tonight."
Pet names exchanged, bags packed and winter coats buttoned, Sam and Freddie headed over to Carly's locker, and onward to Carly's apartment. It only took about five minutes for Sam to start pacing nervously between refrigerator and couch. On about the fifth circuit, Carly intercepted her.
"Okay, spill it. What are you worrying about?" Carly demanded, plucking a recently acquired string cheese out of Sam's hands.
"The snow! It's got to be a big storm tonight. A really big one." Sam headed back to the fridge, this time emerging with a bunch of green grapes.
"It'll happen or it won't. Why are you concerned?" Freddie's very reasonable statement came from the living room rug.
"Because, if I don't get a snow day, I'll flunk English and get held back a year, and then I'll be That Girl who is too old for forever!" Sam took the grapes in a red bowl to Freddie on the floor, joining him among the piles of white paper. She picked up her pair of scissors and started cutting into a folded piece; snowflakes of the giant paper variety littered the outer edges of their circle.
Freddie nodded, unsurprised at the prospect of Sam flunking out only halfway into the year, but Carly didn't let it go so easily. "You haven't written the paper yet? Sam, it's due tomorrow. I've had it written for like a week." Sam shrugged, seemingly engrossed in her snowflake. Carly continued, "How much English homework have you actually done? Have you done any of it?"
Once it was revealed that Sam had in fact, only done the first day of English homework, (the classic and timeless one hundred words on what I did during summer vacation,) and no more than that, Carly whipped Freddie and Sam into action. "I am not going to let my best friend fall back just because she's an idiot!" she had said, prodding Sam over to the kitchen table.
The rest of the evening was shot to hell, as far as Sam was concerned. Freddie wasn't so happy, either. Spencer emerged from his bedroom wearing goggles, a turban, and a fake mustache, but was immediately shushed and pushed back from whence he came in case he distracted Sam. Pizza was ordered and consumed in a manner most unpleasant: perfunctorily and purely with the purpose of nourishment. Freddie was set to work writing up facsimiles of old notebook entries, the busywork assigned for each week, and he would stare morosely out the windows. The Seattle skyline winked in the cooling dusk, the slight yellow tinge a ominous sign of the snow to come.
"Why can't we just let Sam do it herself?" Freddie demanded, after Carly insisted he find his thesaurus for a word in Sam's paper (that Carly was mostly dictating).
"Yeah, come on Carls, this is jank, I can just do it tomorrow on the snow day." Sam chimed in, glad to know that Freddie supported her emancipation.
"How do you know they'll shut down school? Maybe it won't stick in our part of town. Maybe it'll melt before dawn. We haven't had a snow day in years!" Carly's frantic voice scared Spencer back into his room, a bright splash of feathered turban whipping around the door frame.
They slogged onwards. Nine o'clock, and finally, it was complete. Half of a year's makeup notebook entries, an eight page paper on literary structure, and downloaded Cliff's notes on at least three books later, Sam had in front of her the key to not repeating eighth grade. Sam had her head slumped against her arm on the table, a dead expression in her eyes. Carly was very proud of herself. Freddie felt used, and said as much.
"Sam, you owe me so big! I had to figure out how to not plagiarize myself." He stood beside her, fingering the remains of the pizza.
"Carly's fault" was all Sam said in response. She would have much preferred to just hope for snow.
"You guys! It's started!" Carly was by the windows, her face pressed against the glass. When she pulled away, there was a cool red mark on her cheek. Behind her, flakes could be seen floating gently down in the pools of streetlamp light.
"Auugh, my brain is too tired for me to care, Carly!" moaned Sam from the kitchen. Freddie had joined her in a prostrate slump on the table. Elbows bumped congenially, their owners too braindead to care about propriety.
"Yeah, Carly, once I've had a nice little nap on the table here, I'm going home." Freddie's muffled voice came from beneath his arm, a strand of wayward blonde hair tickling his nose.
"You won't be so annoyed with me when I see you at school tomorrow" defended Carly.
There was the usual routine of waving good night to Freddie, pajamas and teeth brushing, slumping around on the couch watching things that were meant for an older audience, and eventual sleep. Slowly, Seattle fell hushed and crisp.
Early morning. Really early morning. The dawnlight shivered through the windows, reflected from myriad directions and multiplied enough to push the normally grey gloaming into the realm of bright at far too early an hour. Sam Puckett rolled over, squinting and demanding to know the time. Two full hours before school starts! Sam was mad, mad at the light, mad at Carly for wasting her entire day yesterday, mad at herself for being mad at Carly, mad at waking up on a day she could so obviously sleep in for.
Utilizing her anger for evil, Sam got up and rustled around in the iCarly studio closet until she found what she was looking for. Sneaking back downstairs as quietly as possible, she creaked open the door to Carly's bedroom. Carly mumbled in the darkened shadows of her bed; unlike the living room, she had curtains. Sam grinned, cheekily, and held up the air horn to Carly's face.
"SNOW DAY!" screamed Sam in time with the piercing sound of the air horn at point blank range. Carly screamed, Sam screamed back at her, there was a lot of screaming is what I'm getting at. Spencer ran in from the stairway, screaming too.
"What! What is wrong! Is there a fire? Did I hear the alarm!?" Spencer was braced against the door frame, conflating fire alarm procedure with earthquake safety.
After a good ten seconds of screaming all around, Carly reached up, and deftly, with one hand, pushed Sam flat onto her back on the carpeted floor.
"Oof" is the noise Sam made.
"Why did you DO that?" demanded Carly, smoothing her sheets calmly out in front of herself.
Her anger deflated, Sam didn't really know. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, she told Carly, and also was there any bacon?
Freddie would still be asleep, Sam knew. But she wanted to go get him, she wanted to play with him in the snow. It was not an urge she would normally admit to, but the idea was enchanting, and as she chewed slowly on her last slice of bacon, she formed a plan. "I'm going outside" she called to Carly, "to see what type of snow it is."
Sam must have looked a sight, she knew, knocking on Freddie's bedroom window like that. Her fingerless gloves were crusted with ice from climbing up the three flights of fire escape, her hair was hastily bundled beneath a ridiculous blue hat, and her face was covered with a pair of enormous sunglasses. Freddie was asleep, burritoed up in his blankets, facing away from her and the window. She knocked harder. When that didn't work, she put her hands in an O around her mouth, pressed up against the glass, and shouted "Let me in, dorkwad!"
Freddie sat up with a start, snorting loudly. His normally quaffed hair was a mess, his pajama shirt buttoned wrong. As he leaned over to look at his alarm clock, Sam knocked again on the window. Freddie's head whipped around, his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. Sam waved, and grinned in a way that she hoped was endearing.
"Snow day" explained Sam as Freddie dubiously let her into his bedroom. He quickly closed the window after her, the cold wind wafting in and making him shiver along with Sam, who was stamping snow off of her boots and onto his bedroom floor. His bare feet padded along straight into a puddle, and he made a whining, groaning, complaining type of noise while he smacked around his unbrushed mouth with his tongue. "Get changed! It's the perfect type of snow for building things." Sam rushed around Freddie's room as he stood there in his shorts, looking at her search for his snow things.
"Why... why did you come in through my window at five thirty in the morning?!" He finally managed to get out, once the sleep was properly tamped down.
Sam turned around from her search, one strangely knitted mitten in one hand and a green boot in the other. "I owe you. You wrote all those notebook things for me and I don't even have to turn them in until tomorrow."
"Yeah, but Carly was the one that made me do them. I didn't do them for you," retorted Freddie, demanding compensation in the form of an argument for the intrusion of his personal space.
They argued, then, about how Freddie did a nice thing for Sam, no, for Carly, no, for Sam for Carly. It was a good time all around for nearly five minutes, and by the end of it Freddie was kitted out in proper snow gear. His mom wasn't awake yet, so he left a note on his door. "Out with Sam in snow, yes I'm wearing two pairs of socks, will be back before noon. Love Freddie" Sam laughed at his loopy, almost girlish handwriting.
The small park next to Bushwell Plaza was quiet and crusted over with the heavy, crunching snow. One of the small trees had bent in half overnight, its young and flexible structure keeping it intact. Sam flomped over to its bent boughs and shook off the piles of snow caught in the branches, and it sprung back up just fine.
The rumble of snow plows occasionally crested over from the horizon, and every once in a while a new kid would rush outside, bundled up and leaping into the snow. Otherwise there was only the strange, shifted noises of footsteps in snow as Sam and Freddie worked in tandem on building a giant snow monster.
Freddie was carefully carving out the monster's tail when he felt a wet, cold thwap on his back. Sam squeaked a bit and dived to hide behind the uselessly tiny tree.
"I will get you, Puckett!" he screamed in what Sam would call his man-voice, even though his voice had cracked, and then it was on. Utilizing the half-built monster for shelter, Sam and Freddie pelted each other with hastily made snowballs, running back and forth, shouting threats.
"Once I destroy you, I will drink wine from your skull!" was a particularly chilling one from Sam. She had been reading too many things about vikings, lately. She leapt out from a snow bank and chucked three snowballs in a row at Freddie, who dodged them with the practiced air of one used to avoiding attacks from one Sam Puckett.
"Victory is mine!" Freddie shouted from behind her, and suddenly he was dumping handfuls of snow down Sam's jacket. Screaming happened again, as Sam pushed Freddie straight into the powdery mass of the snow monster, filling his boots with snow. And then after screaming they laughed, breathing hard and growing tired as their soaked clothes dripped in the morning sunlight.
They made snow angels next to each other, lying on the ground and flapping their limbs around. Sam's already flushed cheeks reddened more as she realized it was Carly's fault that she had the whole day to play in the snow. Then Freddie's hand was in her face.
"Come on, let's get inside and dry off." Freddie said, waggling his fingers through his chunky knitted mitten. Sam felt frozen to the ground, not just because of the actual freezing going on below her back. Eventually, she took his hand, and with an unbecoming grunt she managed to stand up.
"Wait, just a minute" Sam stopped behind Freddie in front of the doors to the building. She ran back, and with some scuffling, made a carefully rounded snowball. "I want to freeze it. Maybe it'll be good luck." She smiled at Freddie and he lilted his mouth to the side, the snow reflected in his eyes.
It doesn't snow very much in Seattle. When it does, everything shifts and slides a little bit farther away from normalcy, sometimes towards something a little better.