Impulse & Recoil
Disclamer: I don't own icarly and I never will.
A/N: So this is just a look into Freddie's mind after last nights episode, I hope you guys like it.
Words.
They can get you in and out of trouble, savior and destroyer.
Then sometimes they just fuck things up so completely that there are no words left to explain, but it's not the words, its not the fault of something ultimately intangible. The power is in those who wield the words. The words come out of you. They don't choose themselves, they don't pick and choose what tone you will say this in or how you'll enunciate that.
It's not their fault.
It's yours.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
My name is Fredward Benson and I'm a jerk. A Fredjerk, Jerkward, a veritable jackass. I'm not proud of myself. This isn't who my mother raised me to be and it certainly isn't what having two female best friends has taught me to be, I'm supposed to be one of the good ones but I guess even the good ones have their moments and I don't feel so good right now.
I don't know when my life shifted from comedy of errors to teen drama.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
Then again maybe I do know.
It started like a fairy tale just like the ones my mom used to read me from the pink book of fairy tales my aunt gave her when they still thought I was going to be a girl. It sits on my dresser next to the jewelry box my mom refuses to keep in her room " ..but its yours Fredward!" and stays pink and uncovered because "...your aunt put thought into that gift Freddie and if its covered she wont know you still have it.." But I'm getting off track, oh right fairy tales. You see...
Once upon a time Freddie Benson was in love with a girl and once upon time and time again that girl said no to his every advance, and once upon a time he never gave up, at least not until he did. It was hard because you don't give up on the perfect girl, you try and try and hope upon hope to wear her down to make her see that you could be, maybe, the guy for her.
This Freddie Benson, he saw the long brown hair and the big brown eyes and the smile and the sweet demeanor, how she just cares so much about everyone. He saw the first girl to speak two words to him, to be nice to him, to be his friend.
The feeling grew because it must be love it had to be, because she's perfect.
There's a flaw there, a big one, unseen during a crush no matter your age.
You never think the perfect girl may not be perfect for you. Or that maybe shes not that perfect.
It was an obsession a puppy love, an infatuation. Do you know what love is at ten or twelve or even thirty? I thought I knew what love was when I was ten, when I met Carly Shay and my one-sided love story began. To me love was caring and being nice, and Carly was those things to me, then again so is my mom...
I'm an nerd, and a geek. This isn't news, just the truth. I was those things before I ever set foot into Bushwell Plaza seven years ago and I'm confident that will be the case my whole life. School is easy everything else is hard, people they're difficult and although I've come a long way in seven years I've never been great with people especially girls, I'm awkward around them and find it difficult to come off sounding like I'm not an idiot. You would think I'd be better at it with two female best friends but it doesn't work that way, my spaz attacks and too close to being stalker-like comments and tendencies towards Carly are an assessment to that.
She was always there though, she took a chance on someone who by schoolyard standards should spend his free time alone or with other geeks and well, losers. The Freddie Benson's , Germy's – ahem Jeremy's- , and assorted av club nerds of the world don't become close to the pretty and popular brunette who lets face it was far beyond my league at ten...and twelve and thirteen and so on, but I digress.
She was an unexpected friend, my first real one, and she stuck around and I never understood why. Of course that was until I found out that I wasn't the only person Carly Shay was probably not supposed to be friends with.
Samantha Puckett. Sam, the demon, the bringer of distress, the bully...Princess Puckett.
Even at ten Sam was the epitome of 'kids you don't want near your kid's'. She was rude and misbehaved, she had detention weekly and was usually disrespectful to her elders, with few exceptions.
Then on top of that sparkling personality, she was a bully.
This girl who prior I had only seen at school but never directly interacted with, because frankly I knew better, she was my dream girls best friend? She gave wedgies, took lunches and took pleasure in embarrassing teachers, so why would Carly be her best friend? This confusion only drove my Carly love full throttle because Sam Puckett was someone that Carly saw something special in, and Carly was more amazing in my eyes for being friends with someone who otherwise might well be a loner because while fear may keep people around it doesn't make you any friends.
As such being friends with the perfect girl, the girl of my dreams, whether I liked it or not came hand in hand with being around the girl who creeps into nightmares. All this made worse by the fact that the day I met Sam, and knew her as more than a schoolyard boogeyman myth, was the day I became her favorite and sometimes only target and she always knows how to hit where it hurts.
"Carly will never love you."
Having someone pull you off that dream cloud and pressing you with not a possibility but an inevitability, a fact, a truth something they believe without a shadow of a doubt. It turns you stomach, takes your breath, and at the risk of losing any "man points"( I can already imagine Sam cocking an eyebrow " Since when are you a man?") it makes you cry, but not in front of her never in front of her; and it hurts, it hurts every damn time.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
Yeah, that probably hurts too.
I never got off that cloud not quite, no matter how often I was brought down. I wavered but never stopped, and no matter what "I love Carly!" was in the forefront of my mind, at least until it shifted to the background and then it was gone.
The thing is years pass and people change. I changed or maybe I just came out of my shell, I don't know the answer.
I'm not the same boy I was when this all started, I'm more confident, more outspoken, more aggressive, and more mischievous. Beyond just that, up until twenty-four hours ago I hadn't professed my "love" ( in one way or another) to Carly in such a long time that one would think that I was over her.
I think I'm over her.
Up until twenty-four hours ago I was the boy that could ask his friend Carly to dance, I was the boy who could hug her without having it last an uncomfortably long time, I was the boy who supported her dating whoever she was crushing on any given week. I wasn't the boy who made a pass on my recent ex-girlfriends best friend right in front of her.
This is where it gets far messier than its been.
We know things about each other that no one else will ever know, we keep each others secrets, we talk when were upset but when it comes down to it all three of us have a serious gap in function, if something is too weird, or serious, or dynamic changing we never mention it again.
So if me and Sam kiss we don't talk about it for a year, and only when Carly finds out, but then it's dropped. If I kissed Sam's twin sister, no one bats an eye. If I finally date my dream girl and we break up after two days we both simply bounce back.
If I date my supposed archenemy, my tormentor, my best friend; for months longer then I dated my perfect dream girl, and we break up...we just act like it never happened.
The problem with that is that reverting to old habits doesn't erase the past and its so painfully easy to do.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
See, just like that it's so easy but now I can't forget.
If my dream of Carly was a fairy tale, my reality with Sam was a fractured fairy tale all its own. Like little red riding hood, but time changes so much I'm never sure who's who, the only thing I'm sure of is that today, I'm the bad guy.
I was Red, naïve, happy go lucky and off to find happiness or you know grandmas house. In the first draft of this tale Sam would manage to trick me and she "the wolf" would win running me out of the woods or devouring me whole. As time wore on though I as Red would begin to torment this wolf as much as she's tormented me, and then maybe we would laugh about it later while declining some of grandmas special tea she never understood how we could fight so much .
She never understood it was a game and honestly I don't think we fully got that either.
Because I've never read a version of the story that ended with the wolf kissing Red suddenly, after years of trying to make her (well his) life difficult.
At the end of the day Sam isn't who she was before, not to me. After starting iCarly she became a frenemy at thirteen, a friend at fourteen after our first kiss, and after everything we went through together as a group as 'iCarlies' and as ourselves, by sixteen Carly Shay was not my only best friend.
The series of events was never clear to me and the lines are always blurred, enemy, frenemy, friend,best friend, boyfriend, ex-boyfriend. Sure we go back to being friends and never talk about it again right?
"I love you."
"I love you too."
Easier said than done right?
Except it is easy, deceptively so, because like I said old habits die hard and it's so easy for me to say these things.
"...Carly cares about me."
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
Of course it's just as easy for her to act like she doesn't care.
So if she doesn't care neither do I, if she can take some boy band loser into the elevator and do god knows what with him, then I don't care. I don't care that we broke up there and I certainly don't care that we told each other we loved each other there. Just like I don't care about anything that happened in that hour and a half before midnight. I don't care.
Intense.
That's what I said in the elevator and it was true. Our relationship was a whirlwind that went so hard in so many directions that we couldn't tell which way was up and we were just trying to keep our heads up while being pulled every which way. We never had the chance to figure out which way we wanted to go, it was decided for us.
Intense.
Kissing me at the lock-in, intense. Mental institution, intense over reaction. Dating, intensely careful and intensely volatile, allowing Carly to have any say in any part of our relationship, intense mistake. I could go on.
Our relationship wasn't perfect and when I think about it, even though I try to forget, the best parts were the beginning and the end. Sam made a move she blind sided me, but then Sam is never one to do what is expected of her and it was honest and raw and terrifying and us. We're full of oxymoron's and juxtapositions so it's only natural that she hates me but she also doesn't, no matter how jarring it was at the time.
The end was the only other time it felt like me and her. The only time it felt like it was me and Sam in this relationship. We weren't the perfect relationship pod people we were trying so hard to be and we weren't being overly mushy with each other because where did that come from anyway?
We talked most frankly, and most seriously to each other in that elevator while breaking up then we had the whole time we were together. Who knows what would have happened if we had a similarly serious talk when we began our ill-fated relationship (because sometimes I still can't believe I actually dated Sam Puckett) perhaps it wouldn't have been quite so ill-fated. Maybe instead of acting like bizzaro Sam and Freddie we would have been regular Sam and Freddie but with kissing and dates and being alone sometimes.
Or maybe we sabotaged it because we weren't ready. I've been paying for Sams' food so long it's an instinct so why did I care? Why did the ham in jail frustrate her so much when not so long ago it would have been a classic tale of Freddie woe to tell to strangers at parties? Maybe because it started intense and ended intense and who wants things to be that intense at seventeen?
"I love you"
After saying the phrase so freely for so long, nothing prepared me for the words that came out of my mouth, because saying I love you to Carly everyday was nothing like saying I love you to Sam that one time with her it was an impulse. But Sam...I didn't say it everyday to convince her, I didn't keep saying it to convince myself, I just said it because I meant it.
"I love you too."
And that's the best feeling in the world. Followed by the worst because in less then two hours I was no longer going to be able to call the first girl I really said I love you to my girlfriend, because saying I love you doesn't change anything else.
So now I'm here.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
I know that she heard me.
" So you have a new Carly crush?"
She still acts like she doesn't care. This time though, I know that she cares. I didn't drag a girl from a band into an elevator, I didn't flirt with a stranger. I did however bring back up something we never talked about. I did open something that we all thought closed so long ago. I did.
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
I've seen guys mess with them, both of them. They've been cheated on and lied to and I've seen what happens to girls after that happens. Most guys just walk away, but I'm their best friend, and I have to go get the ice cream and the movies and I always see the hurt, even on Sam who acts like nothing hurts her. That's why I never thought I'd be the bad guy, because even if Carly ignores it I see it, because Sam's boyfriends don't just cheat they try to cheat with Carly, because that guy is flirting with Sam but wait he just saw Carly, because the first guy she loved is the same guy she remembers saying he loved Carly , and because soon after he said he loved her...
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
…he said that.
They say the people that know you the best can hurt you the worst, and well, we've always been good at hurting each other.
"Carly will never love you."
"I love you"
"I love you too"
"Is it too late for you to love me?"
On some level, I knew it would hurt and I don't quite know if I can fix it.
A/N:
Well this is the longest thing I've every written that wasn't a research paper, I hope you all enjoyed it or didn't , can't please everyone but I hope you'll tell me what you like or didn't like.
I left it open ended because this is either going to be good or bad for all their relationships to a degree and who know where it really going at this point. I just hope whatever happens next is handled well.
My opinion ( if any of you are looking for opinions on the episode)
So this iOAR thing is out there I didn't know about it till today and honesty it shocked me quite a bit. That line, the one uttered so often in this fic being the reason for the outcry.
Although I do see creddie as strictly a friendship, brother sister type thing an do prefer seddie, it doesn't really matter to me who ends up with who or if no one ends up together. Mainly because this show is a lighthearted 30 min comedy not an hour long drama. The serious moments on the show last a minute and are usually forgotten by the next episode.
However when you implant an arc for a specific set of characters giving them a history they never had before it changes things. It does not mean that the past relationship needs to be taken into account every time something new happens but it does mean that maybe the guy that is best friends with two girls and has probably been privy to girl talk that likes of which most boys never experience, well you would think he would know that you don't say something like that to a girls best friend after you broke up not to long ago much less withing hearing and seeing distance( I say not to long because although the episodes were last year there have only been 4 or 5 episode in between).
Having it happen at all was blatant ship teasing which really all shows do, but having it happen in front of Sam puts this show into teen drama territory but of course the show ends before we see any real aftermath, and that's okay because that isn't what the shows about but it certainly gives us a lot to write about.
I could say more about the arc and whats going on now but I feel that would be a very long authors note and it's already long.
So later.