"Do you like the new clothes?"

"Go away, Elliot."

He smirked, leaning against the stone wall behind him. I glared at him through the cell bars. In an effort to look both hostile and disinterested, I crossed my arms and leaned against the stone toilet stall.

"Smile, Sam," Elliot ordered, "I have pictures for you."

"I … pictures?" I breathed, thinking of my long ago request.

"Yes, I talked to Vlad about it. We agree there's no harm in giving them to you." His smirk stretched into a leering grin. "But they don't come free."

No, of course they wouldn't. Everything that went on in this cell had a price. Even the shower, mattress, and everything else recently given to us had a price. I wasn't sure what that price was yet, but I was sure we were dearly paying for it.

"Another recording?" I guessed.

"Hm, not quite." Elliot opened the black satchel that he had swung across his body. He pulled out a thick sheet of metal, cut into a rectangle. "Approach the bars."

I tottered forward a step and then I hesitated. "What's it for?" I asked, afraid he was going to hit me with it.

"We would like imprints of your hands. All you need to do is press your hands into the metal and you can have the pictures."

"Why do you want my hands?"

"We will be transferring your fingerprints to a hotel room in Canada, along with Danny's prints. It will be more proof that the two of you are together and far from Amity."

Hope surged within me. This meant the police were still looking and were looking close to home.

"Don't you need Fenton's fingerprints too?" I questioned as I walked forward. Thoughts were whizzing through my head. If I did this, I would be helping Vlad. If I didn't, I would never see the pictures and something terrible was sure to happen due to my defiance.

"When I was being created," Elliot explained, "Vlad figured out how to give me his fingerprints. Danny, at this point, is nearly unnecessary."

Nearly. My heart caught on the word and then tripped over it. I was only here because he was here; I knew that. What happened to him, to us, when he became completely unnecessary? I felt sick, because I knew the answer. I just couldn't bring myself to think it.

With caution, I reached my hands outside the bars. I spread my fingers against the cold metal. I pushed down as hard as I could, which wasn't much, admittedly. Yet, when Elliot studied the prints I had left behind, he seemed satisfied.

"Pictures as promised," he announced, finally. He returned the metal slab to his bag and instead pulled out a pile of pictures. He slid them between the bars and I eagerly grabbed them.

"Goodbye, Sam," he bid me.

"Thank you," I said, because it did seem like the right thing to say.

He left and I scurried over to the mattress to delve into the images. I was so excited to see what they would bring me, although I hope they didn't present me with anything like Danny's horrible pictures showed him. I dropped heavily onto the mattress and my side screamed in response. I released the pictures and clutched at my side, as though that could make it better.

"Sam?" Danny asked. I hadn't even known he was awake. "Are you okay? Did he hurt you?"

"No." I drew in a deep breath to stabilize myself. "I just forget I'm hurt sometimes."

My side continued to throb, but I made a conscious decision to ignore it. I drew my legs up onto the bed, so that I was leaning against the pillows. Fenton was lying closer to the middle than I would have preferred, but I wasn't really paying him any mind – the second I flipped over these pictures, I would see my mother.

"So, did I hear him right?" Fenton began in a low whisper, interrupting my delicious, dramatic moment of flipping over the first image. "Are they planting our fingerprints?"

"Yeah," I confirmed, mimicking his quiet tone. He immediately broke out into a wide grin. Suspicious, I asked, "what?"

"I don't fucking have fingerprints!"

"Wait, what?"

Danny nodded. "When I was sixteen, I had an ecto-gun blow up in my hands. It was an unstable prototype. It completely took my fingerprints off. The awesome fucking part? It was when I was Fenton so my parents know about it. If they plant my fingerprints, they're fucking themselves over."

"Oh my God," I breathed, hardly able to believe what I was hearing. "You aren't kidding?"

Fenton thrust his hand under my nose. It all looked like clear skin to me. Vlad had just made a fatal miscalculation. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't freaking believe it! Excitement rolled through me in waves and I began to tremble as a scene fashioned itself in my mind; a scene where we were rescued, safe. Unable to contain myself, I flew forward, wrapping my arms around him in a hug.

His cold arms twisted around me, squeezing me once. I shuddered with the familiarity of the feeling. The unyielding feel of his collarbone beneath my nose; the place his arms came to rest on my hips; the way he squeezed me and then buried his face into the crook of my neck … It all took me too far back. I pushed away from him, sitting back up.

"Sorry," I mumbled. "I got carried away."

"It's all right," he returned, just as awkward. "Why don't you show me your photos?"

I nodded in agreement. I drew my knees up to my chest and propped the photos up against my thighs. Fenton moved closer to me, half propped up on his pillow, half lying down. I took a moment to calm myself down; to prepare myself for seeing my family again, and then I turned over the first picture. My parents beamed up at me, but they didn't look like the parents that I knew. They were decades younger, decked out in the tacky styles that were popular when they were in their twenties, when they first started dating.

"Dang," Fenton exclaimed. "Your father has some hair on him."

I had to giggle. "Yeah … it's something else."

I turned to the next picture. My parents again, also young, but this time it was on their wedding day. My mother was wearing the most obnoxious cupcake dress that I had ever seen a woman dressed in. My father, standing at her side, was nearly lost in the gigantic white folds that enveloped her. Even so, he was gazing at my mother like she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. It wasn't a look that I had seen him give when I was growing up.

Then, my mother was standing by herself, feet wide apart, hands on her hips, her stomach swelled with pregnancy. She had managed to squeeze her bulging stomach into a skirt suit, and she was still wearing her trademark make-up. In fact, even in the first date photo she had been wearing that exact shade of red; she must have fallen in love with it long before I ever realized. I found my eyes drawn to her baby-bump, unable to comprehend that it was me inside of there. I wondered what she had done when she was pregnant. Had she held her hands to her stomach? Had she talked to me? What dreams did she have for the life inside of her; who did she think I would become?

I didn't think anyone expected us to end up here.

With a sigh, I flipped to the next scene. It was a hospital scene, but not in the negative sense. My father was leaning against the hospital bed, his arm around my mother's shoulders. Mother wasn't looking at him, or at the camera, but down at her arms where she was holding me. I could make out my ruddy, baby face and the patch of thick black hair on the top of my head; the hair that my mother would later spend years raking her fingers through and complaining about.

Fenton leaned closer to the photograph.

"People always say babies are so cute," he commented. "I think they all just look like generic babies."

"Are you calling me generic?" I squealed, unsure of how offended I should feel.

Danny glanced up at me, a cheeky look on his face. "You don't want to hear me call you anything else."

"Ah," I mumbled, before admitting, "Yeah, that's true."

"What's next?" Danny asked, reaching over and turning to the next picture for me.

I wasn't prepared. I was in no way, shape, or form prepared to see my Grandma Manson's face staring up at me. She looked almost the same as she did when I last saw her. Perhaps a few wrinkles had been added to her powdered cheeks over the years, but she was still so recognizably my Grandma Manson. Her bright eyes glittered with mirth whilst one finger was lodged inside one of my fists. I was still just a baby, but I could already see my resemblance to her.

"You okay?" Danny asked me.

"Yeah, why?" I responded.

"You're crying."

Shocked, I reached up to touch my cheek. My fingers were covered in tears. I hadn't even realized that I was doing so.

"Sorry, it's just … That's my Grandma Manson. She was the first person to love me. My parents always travelled a lot, even when I was a little kid. It was always just me and Grandma Manson at home. She knew everything about me, including how bad it was at school; my parents never really cared about that stuff. She would always be there for me. She was my friend when no one else wanted to be. I loved her so much."

"You kind of look like her," he commented.

"Thanks," I replied, and flipped to the next picture.

There was Grandma Manson again. I was also in her lap, although this time I was a little older, maybe five or six. I had a large book spread open on my lap, with Grandma around my shoulders to point at a word. I remembered a lot of nights like this. It was Grandma Manson who taught me how to read in the first place. She taught me most of what I knew, education wise. It was my mother who taught me about make-up and balls gowns, the things that took precedence in her life. I loved my mother, but she was a little shallow at times.

The next picture was me, again, this time I was clearly ten years old – it said so on the birthday cake in front of me. I remembered sitting at the island in the kitchen, watching my grandmother make the cake. My parents were missing my actual birthday that year; they would come home two days later and take me out to a fancy dinner. That year, Grandma Manson made me the largest marble cake first thing in the morning, and all we ate that day was cake with milkshakes to drink. When she was decorating the cake in front of me, she took an extreme amount of care in making sure that each row she placed on it was the right shade of purple – some shades to match my eyes, other shades to match my favourite shade of purple. She had drawn stems onto the cake and tiny little thorns. She had decorated ivy onto the sides of the cake, before writing 'HAPPY 10TH BIRTHDAY SAM!' onto the cake in large, loopy letters and sticking candles in and around the words. The cake was big enough to feed a dozen people, but the two of us ate it all ourselves. She knew that there was no one who wanted to spend my birthday with me but her, and never commented on it.

I felt tears prick at my eyes as I remembered the long, aching nights in which I realized over and over again that there was only one person in the world who cared about me. No one my own age wanted anything to do with me; as hard as I tried, I was the weird kid and kids didn't want to chance contamination.

I turned to the next picture, hoping to distract myself. Instead, I was taken right back to middle school. Or rather, the end of it. I had just turned fourteen. It was my last year of middle school and we had done a closing ceremony for the 'graduating' class. Excluding the caps and gowns, we had gone through the same kind of routine that typical high school graduations did. The whole class sat in alphabetical order, waited for our name to be called, and then we went and collected our report card from the principal who was standing at the front of the gym. This picture was taken afterward though. I was holding my report card, standing next to Grandma Manson, who had gotten dressed up in what she called her 'Sunday best', even though she never went to church.

I moved on to the next one and my heart caught in my throat. This picture was taken in a hospital, just a few days before my grandmother died there. In the photo, she looked fine, nearly healthy, although that wasn't the case. I was sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, wearing the purple lipstick that was becoming my trademark as much as my mother's red lipstick was hers. I had picked up flower crowns, purple as always, and we were both wearing them low on our brows. Grandma Manson's were sagging down over her eyebrows, nearly obscuring her eyes. Looking at her wrinkled smile, I could nearly feel her arms around me. I tried to remember what it was like to feel her hug; I tried to remember her scent, but it was all escaping me.

I moved to the next picture, knowing that it wouldn't be my Grandma Manson. I'd had a long time to grieve for her, but I didn't know if I would ever come to terms with her death. She was my whole world when she was alive and losing her was a wound that would never heal.

The next photo was my mother, standing in the foyer of the house in Amity. I had taken this photo, the day we had moved in. It wasn't to document the occasion of moving (I couldn't have cared less). I had taken the picture to document the fact that my mother did, in fact, have lips when she wasn't wearing lipstick. That day, I had caught my mother out of her make-up and suit skirt with heels for the first time in living memory. She'd had on old mom jeans, one of my father's t-shirts, with her hair tied up in a messy bun on her head. She was standing, barefoot, surveying the emptiness of the new house. I'd taken the picture with my cellphone before she noticed I was doing such a thing and freaked out over being caught on camera looking like she was.

I smiled, and then moved on. I was almost halfway through the pictures, and I never wanted them to end. I flipped to the next one, and it was my entire family together. My parents had come to New Orleans briefly around the time of my 'graduation', although there wasn't a ceremony as I finished high school online. Still, they had come. Mother had immediately launched back into the New Orleans social scene, never having lost contact with her friends there. Since I was friends with some of their daughters now, attitudes toward me having changed with Leslie's, Mother had found us a party to go to. I had put on my new dress (a graduation gift from Mother). It was pink, although it was so pale that I had put up no fight about wearing the colour. The dress was a 20s style dress, falling just to above my knees. There was a satin sash and bow around my waist, with little, sparkly, embellishments on both of my short sleeves; coming from where the sash started up toward my breasts; and coming from the bottom of my skirt up toward the bow. Mother had purchased a new dress for herself, as well. It was a dark blue, coming to her knees, with short little sleeves. There was a jewelled embellishment on her left hip. Father was sweating in a tuxedo. In the photo, I was standing between the two of them, resembling neither of them, but happier to be there than I ever thought there would be.

"You always look beautiful, all dressed up," Danny commented.

I started. I had been so lost in the swell of memories that I had forgotten his presence.

"Oh. Thank you."

"Sorry if I scared you."

I flushed, embarrassed that he had noticed. "No, I'm all right."

I turned to the next picture and my heart shattered. This hurt far more than the pictures of Grandma Manson; hurt more than my stab wound. This picture had only my mother in it. She was sitting on my bed in Amity, my comforter rumpled as I left it all those months ago. Her cheeks were red and puffy; her eyes were bloodshot. I could see tears glistening on her cheeks as she cried. I had no idea how Elliot had gotten in his hands on this picture; how he had managed to catch my mother looking so vulnerable, but I hated him for it.

I felt my own tears wet my cheeks. My mother; my poor mother. My ache for her increased to the extreme. When I was younger, just over a year ago, really, I couldn't have imagined thinking that I loved my mother; I couldn't have imagined my mother loving me. I had hated her with a half-deserved passion, thinking that she never cared about me and that she had never wanted me. I had counted down the days until I would be eighteen and able to start my own life, separate from her. I had thought that once I turned eighteen, I would leave and never see her again. Now, I was eighteen. Now, I would give anything to see my mother.

I turned to the next photo, searching for a happier picture of my mother. Instead, I was confronted with Tara and Jackson, probably thirteen or fourteen years old. Tara, I was happy to see. Jackson, well, I promptly bent the picture to hide him. I had no use for him in my life.

"Wait," Fenton interrupted me. "Weren't you friends with both of them? I mean, I didn't hear about them a lot – I can't even remember their names - but you really liked her, right? And I thought you liked him too."

"Tara is still one of my closest friends. Jackson … I mean, I thought he was okay at the beginning. And then I cut him out of my life for petty, selfish reasons, but now I'm glad I did. He got into a lot of hard drugs and turned into a sour person."

"Petty, selfish reasons?" Fenton repeated. "That doesn't sound like you. What happened?"

I swallowed. I didn't want to talk about this. I should have just said that Jackson became a drug addict and left it at that. I shouldn't have brought up any other details.

"Nothing important," I said. "Please, drop it."

"I-" I glanced at him, and his blue eyes seemed to soften. He nodded. "Okay, Sam."

I looked back at Tara, all braces and large eyes. I thought of Jackson, as I first met him, blue hair and all. And I muttered, "You."

"Excuse me?"

"I don't know if you remember this," I continued, staring at the picture and not glancing at Fenton at all, "but Jackson thought that he was in love with Phantom. And, after what happened, after you told me the truth, I just couldn't listen to Jackson anymore. I thought I'd punch him every time he said your name, and even though I'm a lot weaker than him, I was determined to do it. So, I just cut him out of my life. I couldn't handle it."

"S-"

"No," I told him firmly, and to Fenton's credit, he didn't say anything.

I moved beyond the folded picture, hoping that there were no more of the twins. Unfortunately, my wish did not come true. The next picture was of Jackson and Tara at Tara's high school graduation (as Jackson didn't pass enough of his classes). I folded that picture in half as well and moved on. The next one was of Tara and I, still at her graduation. She was clutching her diploma so tightly that it was starting to wrinkle around her hand.

(-.-)

"How's it feel to be a graduate?" I asked Tara as she bounced off the stage.

"Fuckin' fantastic!" She screeched, hitting me with her diploma.

"Be careful," I laughed. "That thing is important."

At the same time her mother said, "Language, young lady."

"She thinks young ladies can't say 'fuck'," Tara informed me in a whisper, although I had already realized this. "I say she's really fucking wrong."

"Sam, Tara," her father called. "Let's get a photo of the two of you!"

And so, Tara and I wrapped our arms around each other's waists and grinned for the camera.

(-.-)

I moved to the next photo; Tara and I again. This time it was a badly taken selfie; both of us attempting the infamous duck face, although both of us agreed that it looked really dumb on the two of us. Us again at the beginning of July, laying out by my pool, the photo taken by Leslie. Then, Tara alone. She was standing in Amity, which I thought was strange, because the photo was clearly taken late this year – she had her eyebrow ring in, which she didn't get until New Orleans. It hit me, then, that Tara had gone to Amity because of me; because I was missing.

I was so thankful to have friends like her in my life.

Speaking of good friends, the next set of photos were brimming with photos of Leslie. There she was, looking like she did when I first began to know her as a friend, rather than a bully. She was heavily pregnant, her hair cut short. Then we moved up a few months. Leslie had just given birth to Gavin and I had gone to see her. She had promptly deposited him in my arms, exclaiming, "Feel how heavy he is! I can't believe I carried him around for so long!" She had been right; Gavin had come out almost thirteen pounds. I had loved that little boy since, though. The next picture was him and I, me feeding him a bottle (Leslie telling me that she wasn't letting him near her boobs, no matter what her mother said about breast feeding) while Leslie was stretched out on the couch next to us. The next picture was taken the same day as the feeding, Anne (Leslie's mother) taking a picture of the two of us sitting on the couch together. The next photo was of Leslie and Gavin together, asleep in an overstuffed armchair. I took a minute to appreciate their peaceful faces and how alike they looked. I had always appreciated the fact that Gavin looked like Leslie and her family, instead of his absent father.

The final photo was of Leslie and Gavin. They were bundled up in heavy winter clothes, stepping out of a store onto a snowy street. I smirked, thinking of how cute Gavin looked in little snowsuits. He had been born early in the year, and was always decked out in brightly patterned suits; my favourite had aliens with Santa hats on it. But, as I looked at the picture, I realized that there were several things wrong with it. Gavin was far too big to be a newborn and the shop that Leslie was leaving was in Amity. Like Tara, she must have come when she heard about me. But the fact that she was there during the snow frightened me. It meant that we had been imprisoned far longer than I would have assumed; it was late enough in the year to be snowing.

"What's that face for?" Fenton whispered, likely afraid I would snap at him again.

"This has to be a recent picture," I replied, feeling faint as I said it. "It's snowing in Amity."

"Holy shit," Danny breathed.

I couldn't have said it better myself: holy shit.

I don't anything recognizable. Thanks to my betas: Forever Sky.

~TLL~