A/N Hi all! This will be a 2 chapter story. It was inspired by the nick extra scoop "Locker Tours!" and deals with events leading up to, and after, the episode iKiss. Don't worry, it's a pretty different perspective on the whole thing, I hope. Please leave me a review if you enjoy! (Or if you don't!)
Locker 96 is small and near to the ground. Freddie fills it with textbooks and notes, and the occasional piece of technological equipment that he doesn't value very much. There's the usual school ephemera - broken #2 pencils, gym clothes that don't quite fit anymore, a tightly shut umbrella with one spoke broken, five emergency bucks hidden inside a college text about molecular theory. On the inside of the locker door are carefully cutout pictures of cars and road signs. Freddie has dreams, sometimes, about driving down Route 66 as far as it goes, all by himself. He knows, of course, that it will likely never happen. A driver's license is two years off, and he should start begging his mother for a learner's permit now to get one by next year. Not to mention that whole not having a car thing. He'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Locker 96 is fairly clean, and the lock works a treat, but there's a distinct problem with the security. Sam knows the combination. When she made Freddie switch lockers with her last year, it was pretty early in September, and Freddie had let the combination to his old locker fly out of his mind in the wake of eighth grade algebra. Sam, though, must secretly have a head for data, because she still remembers hers. Freddie has asked to get the combination changed, but the only way to replace the lock is if it breaks, and he's not about to deface school property.
Almost in retaliation of this refusal to break things, Sam seemed to have taken it upon herself to make Freddie's interactions with his locker as miserable as possible. Since the locker switch, Freddie has opened his locker door to find all manner of perplexing, disgusting things waiting for him.
It didn't start out so bad. Sometimes, Freddie would find Sam's second lunch stowed in his locker, kept there so she wouldn't be tempted to eat it between classes like she often does with her first lunch. There was the time he found an actual notebook, with notes on history in Sam's broad, badly capitalized handwriting. When Sam would get ideas for making iCarly better, she would slip notes into Freddie's locker with her thoughts scrawled on them, unsigned, as though she was embarrassed for having had them. Once, after Shannon started slipping love notes through the grill of his locker, Freddie found a few of them defaced with Sam's surprisingly accurate doodles. There was one of Shannon with her head chopped off with an axe, blood spurting in red sharpie pen all down the curly, loopy text of her letter. Freddie had kept that one, tucked next to his emergency cash, and would glance at it if he needed a chuckle.
But sometime between eighth grade and now, Sam had ramped up her invasion of Freddie's privacy. The doodles among his math homework that Sam "borrowed" to copy gave way to the homework just never coming back. She kept her smelly gym clothes in his locker. When he'd confronted her about that, she'd simply looked at him and replied, "Well, you don't expect me to let them stink up my locker, do you?" and crossed her arms, as though this was perfectly reasonable.
*
About two weeks after the last gym clothes incident, Freddie opened his locker to find a package of Lofat Fat Cakes placed smack dab on the center of his science notebook. He cocked a suspicious eyebrow; what had Sam done to his locker now? He flipped through all his books, looking for errant smelly socks. He double checked that the hinges weren't sawn through. There were no suspiciously absent notebooks, nor were there any additional ones. He reached over and grabbed a Fat Cake. He hadn't exactly developed a taste for them, so much as gotten used to eating them now and again. Sam was in his locker so much, she'd taken to keeping snacks there. It basically worked like an early warning system. Freddie chewed contentedly, wiped his mouth clean of pink sugar dust, and pulled out his wallet to check if he had money for lunch.
Damn, he hadn't packed a lunch last night, and in his hurry to get out the door before his mom tried to make him change his outfit, he'd forgotten to get lunch money. He wiped his sugary hands off on his brand new shirt. He was proud of it; it actually fit him, unlike half of his too-small wardrobe, and he'd bought it himself, without his mother's supervision. She didn't like it one bit. Freddie rummaged around in his locker until he found the old textbook he kept his emergency lunch money in.
He figured, Sam would never crack open a book about molecular theory, nor would she bother to wonder why he had it. To her, a dork was a dork, and whatever dorks were into was definitely worth ignoring. Except, of course, that she was quite proficient with all the tech equipment Freddie used for iCarly. He'd started to suspect she knew more than she was letting on when he caught her uploading new audience applause sound files to her "noise box". When he'd taught her how to use Camera A in case he needed to be on screen and use both hands, he'd only had to explain things once. Carly had required a diagram. It was a little uncanny, but maybe Sam just thought it was useful, instead of dorky. Sub-atomic particles were nowhere near sound boards on the nerd scale.
So when he opened up his book safe to find the carefully carved hollow empty of his five dollars, Freddie groaned and thumped his head against the locker door. That would be why Sam had left her calling card. She just stole his emergency funds! And now, he had no way to get lunch. Freddie shot Sam glares that would give a normal man a heart attack in the cafeteria, but he still went hungry. He reached over to eat some of Sam's fries and received a stern slap on the wrist. "Don't come between momma and her pommes frites." Sam had French class right before lunch.
*
Now locker 96 is a time bomb. On Friday afternoon Sam had visited, to first retrieve her Fat Cakes and second, to leave Freddie a gift. She unwrapped her present and carefully taped it to the ceiling of his locker with three lengths of clear packing tape. When Freddie came by to get his books for the weekend, he noticed that the Fat Cakes were gone, but not what they had been replaced with.
By this Monday afternoon, after an AV Club meeting, Freddie's backpack has been stuffed inside locker 96 for the whole day. A rank smell greets him when he kneels down in the quiet hallway to retrieve his bag. Thinking it must be residue from his locker neighbors having just been there after wrestling practice, he doesn't do much but wrinkle his nose, until he touches his backpack and feels a greasy, oily slick down the front.
"Oh, god!" Freddie flicks his hand to remove some of the goo, but then something soft, slimy, and slightly warm flops down from the top of his locker and rolls out, onto his bent knees. "Aaack!" he screams, a bit too high pitched for decorum, and leaps away. On the floor by his feet is a rotting trout, with a few pieces of greasy tape still attached. Its glassy eye stares up at him, unblinking, and the stench is, if anything, intensified. "SAM!" Freddie is livid.
Carly is home, likely contentedly eating cookies and laughing. Sam is in detention, likely arranging betting pools for how long a new substitute is going to last. The fish is still lying dead, marooned on the hallway floor in a pile of its own ichor. Freddie is stalking angrily over to Sam's locker, and when he gets there he fishes, pun intended, in his pocket to retrieve the multitool he'd just stowed after AV.
Freddie is no idiot. He understands the simple mechanism of the school's locks, and makes short work of the one on locker 52 with a little leverage, a little fiddling with a thin screwdriver, and a little punching his fist into the seam of the door. Sam's locker yawns open before him, and Freddie casts his eyes over his options. Bolt cutter? No, too violent. Setting fire to homework? As if Sam kept homework in her locker. Taping a fish to the ceiling of her locker? Where the hell did Sam get her hands on a trout, anyway? No, he needs something fast, something annoying, and something feasible.
"Hola, Freddie, que pasa?" Gibby is walking down the hall in his slightly loping way, obviously fresh out of Spanish club. He adjusts the sombrero on his head. "Dude, do you have any idea where that smell is coming from?"
"Yes, Gibby. I do." Freddie sees the glint of the handcuffs and is struck with inspiration. "Come on, I need you to lend me a hand." He grabs the handcuffs Sam had stolen from that cop in Japan, pockets the key, and pushes Gibby with a kind hand on the shoulder all the way to Sam's detention.
"Oh, is it for iCarly? Cuz my mom said to tell you that I can't have any more ham thrown at me. It's too high-sodium or something." Gibby's voice trails away as they walk down the hall.
What happens next is that in about five minutes, Freddie comes dashing down the hall. He grabs his backpack that was lying in front of locker 96 in mid-run, and sprints to his bike as quickly as possible. One minute after that, Sam is blazing past, half dragging, half carrying a stupefied Gibby after her. She is so oblivious to her surroundings that she doesn't notice the oozing trout on the floor. Her foot comes straight down on it, and flies out from beneath her. Sam and Gibby end up in a groaning heap, flecked with fish juices.
Sam's growl is so loud that it disrupts choir practice down the hall. With a heave, she grabs the open edge of Freddie's locker door and lugs herself to a standing position; Gibby follows, pulled harshly by the wrist. Sam looks at the crushed, putrefied fish, and slams locker 96's door shut with a resounding clang. Resuming the chase, she nearly wrenches Gibby's arm out of his socket.
*
For the week after this, Sam doesn't visit Freddie's locker. He spends it deodorizing and worrying, having borrowed some powerful substance from his mother's closet full of chemical cleaning agents. And then, for the week following that, nobody visits Freddie's locker. That's due to Freddie not being in school, embarrassed beyond measure and moping alternately in his room and on the balcony out in the hallway of Bushwell Plaza.
When Freddie finally comes back to school, not much has changed. His locker still smells fresh as a chemically recreated daisy, and Sam hasn't been using it as secondary storage.
In fact, Sam stops breaking into locker 96 entirely. She stops keeping another lunch in it. She stops irretrievably borrowing homework. She stops leaving Freddie notes for iCarly improvement. There aren't even any humorous doodles of Freddie as a soulless robot on his history notes.
Freddie has a pretty good idea why she's staying away. When he walks over to talk to Sam and Carly, Sam will suddenly have her head deep in her locker, rummaging for some non-existent binder. At lunch, Sam refuses to look him in the eye, even when he's sitting directly across from her. The pranks have stopped, but the insults haven't, and she always makes stubbornly sure that Freddie leaves whatever room they're both in first, to show that she doesn't mind his dweebish presence and that everything is totally back to normal.
Normality is subjective. One day, Freddie removes all his meticulously taped car pictures from the inside of his locker door and places them in a folder. Then, he lines the door with tantalizing packages of beef jerky. He makes sure that one pouch is slightly open, the smoky aroma forming a pleasantly meaty cloud of scent coming from the grille on the locker face.