• Sam •

The light that shone around me was a lemony yellow, dying and fading to something so lost to the world that I wouldn't have noticed its presence had I not been staring up at it. But I was, my face bathed in the strange, disconcerting throb of the limelight. I swallowed the knot in my throat and tried stringing together lyrics, words that flowed beautifully and made sense but nothing would surface. I hadn't been so nervous, so absolutely terrified before, I was almost certain. Losing Grace had been drawing close to the lead, and yet it wasn't pulling ahead in the moment because this was so now and was blurring together all of my memories in my permanently-human mind.

My fingers were drumming along the table in anticipation—I really needed to calm down—and I could feel cold, bored eyes bearing down on the nape of my neck. I could almost feel Grace's fingers brushing along the ends of my hair, teasingly. I spared a look at the cop, his face wrinkled and old, holding his hands together in front of him in a too casual manner for the situation and I envied his relaxed demeanor. His eyes flitted down at me before he continued his staring at the wall as he had been attempting to do as to not appear rude.

We were in a room about twenty by twenty square feet with a table smacked in the center and drilled to the ground with rusty bolts. Two chairs, one that I occupied and the other on the opposing side of the table. My mind was whirring and my mouth tasted like copper as the doorknob was jiggled. The policeman cast a quick glance and returned to his wall-watching ways that Grace would have found out-and-out hilarious. Oh, God, kill me now.

When my eyes focused despite my brain's protesting, a women I didn't recognize was placed before me. Her cliché orange jumper was the brightest thing in the room aside from her perfect eyes that were glossy with crystal tears, one already collected on her chin. Her hair was in a tight ponytail and smoothed so perfectly that it was hard to believe she had been in jail for so long.

"Mom," I managed and I hated how uneven my voice was. My wrists were suddenly stinging. Why had I come here?

Her gaze stayed impassive, like she had no idea who I was or why I had the nerve to address her by the title. My stomach was turning with something that felt like a herd of disturbed buffalo gone rouge.

"Mom," I tried; my mind was attempting to distinguish the emotion in her eyes and they were empty, empty like Cole's and empty like Victor's the day Tom Culpeper delivered him to Beck's house. I drifted to the day I set him loose after his rapid-change pain-free display of ability, proving that Cole wasn't a good friend, then later displaying that he was perfectly capable of feeling something deeper than drugs. I wanted my mom to make that sudden turn-around and smile at me and wish me a happy birthday like she used to. The way her eyes used to shine and she would ice a soft, beautiful cupcake with a quick smudge of vanilla and a bright candle on top. "Mom, it's me. It's Sam."

She turned her face away and seemed to have a mutual understanding with the guard that something was interesting on the far wall, something I couldn't see.

"Mom," I could tell that my voice was betraying me and that I needed to just get out what I wanted to say. "I met this girl." I hesitated as she crossed her arms across her breasts, so unlike her gentle features and personality, and her face went rigid. "Her name's Grace, Mom. Grace Brisbane."

"Really," her voice was distant and worn and I was completely lost on the fact that she had actually spoke to me for the first time since she'd been arrested for attempted murder on her only son.

"Yeah," I confirmed, watching her warily. I was acutely aware of the guard now interested in everything word leaving my mouth and could tell that his eyes were gleaming perversely. This was the man that was supposed to protect me while he was drawn to mention of a younger person of the female variety. I tried to hide any show of surprise from my mom as I talked to her. "She found the cure, Mom," I told her, quieter than before, leaning towards her in hopes of the cop not hearing me.

Her head turned sharply to me, her eyes wide and bright and so excited that I couldn't help myself but to think of Grace nodding anxiously, like this was the most exciting and adrenaline-filled news she had heard in over ten years. "What?"

"I'm cured, Mom," I couldn't stop calling her the name that was so alien on my lips. "Full-time Sam." I couldn't bring myself to mention the tiny blip of only having fifteen or so years left, either.

"My Sam?" Her eyes were so far from this room and I couldn't tell if she was thinking about her pulling a razor across the Devil child she was convinced that I had become, but that was where my mind was. The look of release and forgetting in her eyes, the panic swelling in my chest, trying so hard to just get away because my mother had never looked at me like that and I had never wanted to see that again. The uneven skin on my wrists, pale and pink, was throbbing with the fast beats of my heart as she contemplated something about me.

"Grace cured me. I'm me," I said. This whole scene reminded me of meeting Grace after what should've been my final shift, my last year as Samuel Roth, trying to keep her convinced that I wasn't imagined or thought up in false hope but that I was real and that she could hold me and my body wouldn't just disappear. I was me more than I had ever been.

She blinked. There was a hesitation as she looked about to say something. "Sam, I…" she was staring at her hands now like she didn't recognize them as her own or she just didn't want to. "I'm so sorry. You were just… so different and possessed."

I swallowed hard. "I know, Mom. I know, but I'm fine now. I'm just Sam."

Her face suddenly light up like what I had been saying was just registering and it was the only important thing she could have been told. "Oh, wait until your father hears. He'll be so—"

I cut her off unthinkingly. "Don't tell him."

She glanced at me. "…What?"

"Please," I tried. I knew that my Dad would be… pleased to know that his son had returned and was no longer demon-possessed, but for some reason I didn't want him to know. Maybe it was sick satisfaction that I could sway my Mom to my side without his say-so; I had never had a problem with my Dad knowing until now and it felt like such a… Grace thing to do. But I thought of Beck, taking me in and raising me properly and trying to keep me in line. He was keeping me as human as possible, and now that he was gone I couldn't bring myself to replacing him as I had replaced my biological father. "I don't want him to know."

"But Sam."

"Mom, please. Don't."

She shook her head and pressed her fingers to her lips like she was still trying to figure me out, because I apparently wasn't all there in my head. "Samuel, I just don't understand you sometimes."

Try thirteen years, Mom.

We fell silent. Several lingering moments of nothing but her studying my face and trying to figure me out. I knew she was dissecting me and looking on me as a puzzle she had to solve, because she could never just leave those kinds of things alone.

"Those eyes, Sam. I just don't know where…" she turned her eyes down to the table and cleared her throat, sitting up straight in her seat. "Tell me about Grace."

And there it was. Instant, deathly calm normality, too casual for us to be the ones immersed in the conversation, yet we were and nothing felt wrong about it. Everything seemed perfect and the pieces were clicking and I knew that this would just blow Grace's mind because every thought of my mother that she had was hate hate hate and murderer, evil, vile murderer. But she had never known my mother, never met her or knew how good she was to me before I was shifted. She never knew like I wish she had, so maybe she would understand that it blew my mind but it was impossible to not forgive their rash in fear.

"She's nothing like me."

"Opposites attract."

"I met her when I wasn't Sam." No pleasantries to mask her disgust. "The ones like me were attacking her and I… I stopped it and having to save her made me Sam."

"I like her already." She nodded with some approval that I knew didn't really belong to her but I appreciated anyway. There was something different about how my mom acted that I couldn't put my finger on. She just felt like a different person, not so quiet or loving, but hard and sarcastic and I couldn't help myself but to think of Beck and Cole and Isabel all ridding themselves of pleasantries. "Is she pretty?"

"Very."

Pause.

"Oh my God," she breathed and leaned forward on her elbows, studying my eyes again like they were something she had never seen before. She repeated herself, more breathy and ill at ease. "Oh my good God."

"…What?"

"You two… you're not…"

"We're not what, Mom?"

She murmured something unintelligible and then raised her voice faintly, and odd gleam in her eyes. "…out of marriage."

Maybe my face was betraying me because she had a knowing look on her face and I still wasn't too sure if we were talking about the same thing anymore. "Wha—"

Oh. My cheeks must have reddened because they were hot and my breathing was catching in my throat and I suddenly wasn't thinking straight anymore through my embarrassment. Had anyone else made the implication I might have been fine. But this was my mother looking at me like I'd just slapped her in the face and spat at her and did so many horrible things.

And then, as a guard came in and called 'time's up', she burst out laughing. I knew that was the funniest news she had heard while in prison and it just left me sitting at that table, staring at my hands awkwardly, because I couldn't remember for the life of me what we had been talking about beforehand.

A/N: Ahah, my first Shiver fic, and sorry if the ending annoyed but I'm not the one for straight seriousness, especially when I can awkward-ify a situation.

Just something that was on my mind as I read about Sam missing his mom and how his parents are serving life sentences.

I know I pulled a cliché prison-meet scene, but it's not as if I had them speaking through those phone booths. Sheesh.

July 11, Babes. Mark it in your calendars.