A/N I felt really, really dirty writing this chapter, it was weird considering that I read tortureporn pulp comic books for fun. And now, a word on reviews. I know sometimes it is hard to know what you should say in a review, but the thing that would be most helpful to me is if you could specify a particular bit that you like best, and why. Like, I know some of you do that already, and I want you to know that I'm extremely grateful. It helps me to know what I'm doing right, so I can keep doing that in the future. Also of course letting me know what isn't working is even *more* important, but if you aren't feeling critical that's fine. This is the penultimate chapter of Point&Click! Thank you for your continuing appreciation in whatever form it may come.

Disclaimer: iCarly is not mine, but I do like to throw hammers at teenage girls.


It's only two weeks before winter finals. Sam is looking forward to the break while Carly and I are busily studying together. I know Sam has to study some time, but she signs up for the easiest classes and is a lot smarter than she's given credit for. I'm briefly envious of her obvious plan of getting by with the smallest amount of work possible, but Carly brings my attention back to advanced biology. My head swims with classes and phylums as she quizzes me with index cards in her living room.

"Man, enough of this. I can't keep my biospheres straight." I collapse back onto the couch, and let my head hang off the edge so all the blood rushes to my brain.

"Thank cheese for that!" Sam's voice comes from behind me. Spencer is drawing the back of her head for practice, so she's perched on a stool near his art tables.

"I have to think of some way to do my last photography assignment other than the final." I announce to the apartment at large. Carly politely asks what it is, and I explain that I have to use some alternate light source, something that isn't sunlight or lightbulbs. Spencer suggests vats of bioluminescent jellyfish. Sam suggests attaching a lightning rod to my subject matter. Carly suggests candles. Candles it is.

"But what can I shoot in candlelight that isn't boring? I mean, a bowl of fruit is a bowl of fruit." I'm at a loss for ideas. It's been hard each week to come up with something new. I'm not used to taking art classes and it shows. Sam changes the subject to what we're having for dinner and the topic is all but forgotten.

Later in the evening, Sam is lying contentedly full of Indian curry on the couch downstairs while Carly and I are storing the boxes of candles we picked up on the way back from the take-out place. I drag out one of the Miscellaneous storage bins from the closet in the iCarly studio when Carly broaches the subject of my photography assignment.

"Um, Freddie, I don't know if you want to take more pictures of me, but, I was wondering, could I be the subject for your weird lighting project?" She's obviously nervous about her words having the wrong connotation. Candlelit photography of Carly? Sounds good to me. Maybe I'd be able to get enough good shots out of the session to finally get all nine images for the final, too. I think about the fact that I only have maybe three good shots of Carly so far, and shrug it off. Maybe if I look back at my negatives with a more discerning eye, I would find some to print that I hadn't noticed before. Carly is waiting nervously for my response.

"Sure, if you're volunteering, of course. What should you be doing in them though? Any ideas?" I try to smile disarmingly.

"Actually, yeah. Just a really nice Christmas portrait. I want to send it to my dad. He hasn't seen me in so long. I mean, he can get online once in a while, but there's something different about having an actual photo..." She trails off and I realize that she wasn't nervous about sounding like she's flirting with me; she's nervous because she almost never mentions the fact that she has a dad at all.

"That sounds great! Do you want to do it right now? If I worked on them right away we could totally mail it in time." Pushing the storage tub back in its place together, Carly and I get to work on placing candles around the studio. We pull down the greenscreen backdrop, which we've found makes a perfectly good neutral backdrop in black and white, and pull over some huge empty gift boxes with bows all over them. We had made those for the sticker graphics and they had become regular background props in the show.

I step out for a few minutes to visit my apartment and retrieve my camera. As I walk past Sam, she snores a little, so I poke her side, and she stretches and rolls over. Spencer is still drawing her, sheets of used newsprint littering the ground around him. When I come back from getting my camera and saying hello to Mom, who is happily bleaching our bathtub, I notice that the vast majority of Spencer's drawings are of fish, and sports cars, and fish driving sports cars.

When I step out of the elevator on the third floor I'm a bit taken aback. There's a warm luminescence that's refracting off of every available surface, and Carly is brushing her hair. She's changed into a simple blue dress and I pause for a moment, absorbing the situation. I would have given anything to be in this spot a few months ago, but for some reason right now I'm just glad to be helping Carly out with something so personal. Thoughts of cheesy lines involving the phrase "Freddie Techno Magic" most definitely do not fly through my head, not at all. Carly coughs a little uncomfortably and settles onto a chair draped with a fleece blanket, next to the giant gift boxes. I move around, trying to find some good angles, as she smiles fleetingly.

"Think about something that makes you happy," I instruct as I snap a few unsatisfactory frames.

Carly's brows draw together slightly as she sighs. "Any suggestions?"

"Well, your brother is downstairs, drawing Sam, who apparently looks a lot like a tuna driving a souped up Honda Civic when she's asleep." That works. She cracks a true smile, and I get my shot.

"Hey, maybe Spencer would want to send a picture to your dad too," I suggest carefully. Luckily, it seems to be a good idea to Carly, who gets up and shouts down for her brother to come upstairs. Meanwhile, I take some pictures of the iCarly studio props. They all look so different in the candlelight; the transformative power of the soft, flickering light is amazing. In candlelight, a bowl of fruit is not just a bowl of fruit.

The elevator dings and the door slides open to reveal Spencer and Sam, who is wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Carly waves him over, but the second he turns the corner and sees all the lit candles, he lets out a piercing shriek. "Fire! Fire! I can't be in here, I'll burn the whole place down!" He runs out the door and down the back stairs, arms flailing.

"Oh, Spencer, come back! It's safe! We have fire extinguishers... three of them!" Carly runs after her brother, down the stairs.

"So, having a little romantic interlude up here in the studio?" Sam swans through the candles, deftly avoiding their flames and somehow not catching her blanket on fire. She plops on the only available chair that doesn't have candles on it, the chair Carly was sitting in for the shoot.

So I explain, calmly, about Carly's present for her dad. Sam's eyebrows go up in understanding and she thoughtfully changes the subject. "Spencer's fear might be justified, you know." She pushes the giant presents to the side with her foot. "Weren't you there the day he caught on fire while taking a shower?"

We have a good laugh about Spencer's seemingly mutant fire powers, but I debate her point. "Nothing bad would have happened, though. If something is already on fire, he's totally safe." Sam laughs, and nods. She reaches over, licks her fingers, and puts a few candles out by pinching their wicks. She's silently daring me to do the same, so I do. It burns a bit, but I try very hard not to show it.

I hear a low chuckle and it's Sam laughing at my pain. There's a quiet pause that feels completely comfortable in the flickering soft light, and Sam's staring at me, her shoulders wrapped in blankets but her neck straight. I lift my camera slowly. She holds her gaze steady as I line up the shot and click the shutter button three times.


I'm in the darkroom the Tuesday before our final is due. I'm printing the negative of Sam I shot last week, taking my chances because Sam is working in the lab at the same time. I've decided that, since Sam knows specifically about me taking this shot, I'll give her a copy as a present. It's beautiful, there's a look on her face I can't quite pin down, and she should have it.

Sam has a lot of cleaning to do. The darkroom is pretty full even though it's after school, with kids working hard on their final projects. Most of them seem to have put it off until the last moment, and I'm still in denial about not having enough shots of Carly. There's messes everywhere, and Sam is still in detention, whether it normally feels like it or not. Mrs. Grey is extremely pleased to have a helper for finals. I expose Sam's candlelit headshot for fifty seconds at a very low intensity to make sure I get as much detail as possible, and walk out to develop it. I thought Sam was out in the lit part of the lab cleaning trays, but she's in the darkroom, sweeping the floor. She has a sizable pile of dust and I'm thankful that it's getting swept up and not all over my negatives. We nod to each other, and I know she sees her face on the print as I swish it around in the developer, but she doesn't say anything. I time the stop-bath with my watch, deposit it into the fixer with a confidence I did not possess in September, and struggle through the other, buzzing students back to my projector closet to choose another slide of Sam.

I turn on the projector, the thin light painting Sam's flipped face onto the paper frame while I squint at my sheet of negatives. There's three shots of her, and I can't decide which one is best. I'm about to pull the last five frames out of their protective sleeve when Sam breaks in and quickly closes the door behind her.

"They're all of me. I found them, in a folder in Grey's filing cabinet. Eight of them. They're all of me, and this is the ninth."

I'm caught. I panick, trapped between an idealized inverted image of Sam and the real, demanding one. My hands are shaking and the negative sleeve shivers in my left hand. I reach over with my right and turn off the projector light.

I close my eyes, hoping the pitch black will make Sam disappear, but I can hear sounds of her breathing the stale and chilly darkroom air. The warmth of her body is radiating onto mine. These closets are not built for two people. I can't move without touching her. The darkness brings minimal comfort; I manage to squeak out "They're just...how I see you. And I was making this one as a-mrph!"

She's grabbed in the pitch black and found my left wrist, pressed it back against the wall, and the negatives fall out as I open my hands in surprise, because at the same time I feel a warm rush and what must be her nose is brushing my cheek. Her nose finds mine and her feet fumble a bit due to our blindness and suddenly we shift and she's kissing me. It's hard and soft and her lips are kind of chapped and her hair is tickling my neck and I'm not sure either of us are breathing and after only a few seconds she withdraws.

I lick my lips after the fact.

She's still got her hand on my wrist and it's trembling. I reach over and extricate it, suddenly remembering my print. I push past her, into the relative light of the darkroom, and single-mindedly move my photo into the first wash.

I hurry back to my closet where Sam is hiding, looking out at me from the half closed door. I think, is it possible, that she looks scared. So I push her back with me into the tiny space, and close the door behind me.

"I really don't want to mess up the keystone to my final project. I've been... I've been working on it for four months." My mouth is inches away from her face, and I whisper this toward what must be her left ear. There's another pause; I'm clenching and unclenching my fists, unsure of what to do next, but I know I can't, for whatever reason, move to the side.

A sort of guttural sound emerges from Sam's throat, and we're kissing for the second time. She's got me pressed up against the door, one hand holding my shoulder and the other jammed uncomfortably between my arm and the wall. She's leaning toward me so I have to hunch a bit and bend my neck. I hope she can feel my smile on her lips, because I pull back momentarily. Only to catch her trapped hand with mine, though, and we're kissing again as I grasp her waist and push her back, toward the projector.

The second I push back, this sweet sigh comes out of what might be her nose, and she opens her mouth and licks my bottom lip and I'm so surprised and enjoying this so much that I push her back more, harder against the ledge that the projector stands on. Her hand trails up to my neck and I get this completely insane idea to bite her lower lip a little bit, and our feet shuffle as our weight shifts.

This is when I hear a loud, complicated crunching noise – my negatives being crushed and trod upon.

Immediately I unravel myself from Sam. A rush of developer-scented cold air wafts between us as I whine "Sam! You RUINED them!" and stoop down between her legs to find my film.

Wan red light wedges into the projector closet and I see the negatives by my hand. I grab their bent form and straighten up to the sound of Sam's footsteps running hard and fast away from me.