This chapter covers chapter 25 of Invincible

"Another recording?"

Sam's voice echoed around the cell and I almost groaned. My head hurt. I was tired. Usually, it was so silent. What the fuck was she talking about? Why would I give a shit about a –

"Hm, not quite."

Elliot. I struggled to be alert but there was just such a fog in my head.

"Approach the bars."

Shit. If she was going to be close to him, I should get my eyes open. I should get it together. I couldn't. I just couldn't. Even as Sam spoke again and tottered over to the bars.

"We would like imprints of your hands," Elliot informed her. "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."

"Don't you need Fenton's fingerprints too?" Sam asked, and I held my breath. How smart, exactly, was Vlad?

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

I couldn't even be upset that Vlad called me unnecessary. Vlad had tipped his hand. A satisfied smirk spread over my face. For the first time in what felt like ages, there was a point for Danny. A point for Sam. Something that would help my parents.

"Pictures as promised. "Goodbye, Sam."

"Thank you."

I heard his footsteps and I finally managed to get my arms underneath of me and sit up, just as Sam sat on the end of the mattress and wrapped her arms around herself.

"Sam? Are you okay? Did he hurt you?" Did he get her before I became conscious?

"No. I just forget I hurt sometimes."

I went to say something, ask how bad and if she should get painkillers, but Sam just pulled her legs up under her and laid down against the pillows. Close to me. Incredibly close to me. She had a stack of papers in her hands and I recognized the photo paper that Vlad had used for mine. She fingered the papers but I needed her to listen to me before she fell into her memories.

"So, did I hear him right? Are they planting our fingerprints?" Maybe I was hallucinating.

"Yeah," she whispered back at me. I nearly laughed but all I could do was just lay there and grin. Points for Danny. I couldn't wait until they tried. Mom would lose her fucking mind. "What?"

"I don't fucking have fingerprints!"

"Wait, what?" Sam's eyebrows knit together as she tried to figure out what exactly I was saying.

I nodded like a dumb bobble-head. "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." Sam looked like she was going to collapse. "You aren't kidding?"

How the fuck could I kid about that? I should my hands at her and Sam nearly went cross-eyed staring down at my fingerprints. I watched Sam's expression change and a smile started to bloom across her face and then, somehow, God, she was in my arms. She was hugging me tightly, shaking and happy. Hopefully so happy. I hugged her back for all it was worth, knowing that it probably wouldn't ever happen again. Last hug. Last arms around her soft waist, her freshly washed hair rubbing underneath my nose. I held on for just a moment and then she pushed me away. I let go immediately, even as she mumbled that she was sorry.

"I got carried away."

"It's all right." I felt sad, looking at how awkward she felt. I needed to fix it. "Why don't you show me your photos?"

Would she even want to? Were they too personal? But she had seen mine. Sam just nodded, bending her knees and putting the photos up against her legs. I slid a little closer to her, waiting for her to tell me to move away. She didn't, and so I just settled into the mattress, my head lifted up on one of the pillows. Sam turned over the first photo and I had to laugh. Her parents, her perfect, prissy parents, in the 80s. It was kind of great.

"Dang!" Did I just sang dang? Thanks, Mom. "Your father has some hair on him.

Sam laughed. "Yeah, it's something else.

I just loved her laugh.

Sam moved slowly through the photos and I tried to glean what I could about her life, even from things like her parents wedding day and her mother's pregnancy. There was finally a photo of her, just as a newborn in her mother's arms. I squinted down at the picture, but aside from the thick black hair and chubby cheeks, there was nothing notable.

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

I wondered if kids were put in a line up if parents would be able to pick out their own.

"Are you calling me generic?" Offended, maybe, but playfully. I didn't think she was going to strangle me with my own chain.

I looked up at her, deciding to play it a little safe. "You don't want to hear me call you anything else."

"Ah, that's true."

No flirting, then. All right. I put my head back down against the pillow and Sam moved onto the next photo. I barely glanced at it: an old woman, a baby. It didn't take a genius to put the pictures together. I remembered Sam telling me about her grandmother and so when I looked up at her again, I wasn't surprised to see tears rolling down her cheeks. I just hated to see her so sad.

"You okay?" Dumb question but what else could I say.

"Yeah, why?"

"You're crying."

As if she really didn't know, Sam touched her own skin, looking down at her wet fingers.

"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." More like her grandmother than either of her parents, anyway.

"Thanks."' It seemed to cheer her slightly.

Grandma again, and again, reading to her and baking her cakes. Sam just kept crying and I just kept feeling inadequate about what to do about it. More Grandma, more sad Sam. I wondered if I should hold her hand. I kept my hands to myself. Grandma in the hospital and Sam audibly whimpered and then, Grandma was gone and her mother was back. I recognized Sam's house in Amity, but it was devoid of the furniture and artwork that I associated with it – the few times I had seen the foyer of the house, anyway. That photo brought the smallest of smiles to Sam's face and I wanted to hold onto that. In the next photo, Sam looked absolutely stunning. It had to be recent. She looked about the same as she had before the imprisonment, in a cute dress that looked so Sam. She looked healthy. Not frail, not hungry, not tired. Healthy. Happy. Whole, standing between her two parents in a place that had to be her home in New Orleans.

"You always look beautiful, all dressed up," I said, wondering if she would take the compliment. She did. She was so beautiful, though, all the time."

Sam jumped. "Oh. Thank you."

"Sorry if I scared you."

Sam blushed and it was the brightest thing in the cell. "No, I'm all right."

Sam turned the photo to distract us but the time of good things was over. I knew that it wouldn't last. Vlad liked to hurt us. We were little more than toys to him. I couldn't look at Sam's mom, crying on her bed, because all I could do was think about my own mother, missing me and Jazz, doing the exact same thing. Sam quickly flipped the photo and I glanced over, hoping that it wouldn't get worse. I recognized the two. The brother and sister Sam had briefly been friends with. To my surprise, Sam hid the brother's face away.

"Wait. 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."

Sam sighed. "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? That doesn't sound like you. What happened?" Sam wasn't petty or selfish. It was hard to imagine that.

"Nothing important. Please, drop it."

"I –" I almost pushed but her pretty, purple eyes were so sad looking that I was putty in her hands. "Okay, Sam."

She seemed satisfied and then she looked back at the photo. "You," she said.

I thought I misheard her. "Excuse me?"

She refused to look at me. "I don't know if you remember this 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 clamped my jaw shut and went back to watching her face as she looked through the photos. She looked as if she had bitten into a lemon when the next photo was of Jackson and Tara too. She seemed happier when Jackson was missing from the next photo, and the next, even though Tara was in both. Then, there was a girl that I didn't think I knew. A blonde, pregnant, and then pictures of Sam with the baby, and then the girl with the baby. Sam wasn't explaining anything and I was desperately trying to keep interested in the girl whose life I didn't know. Then, Sam's face twisted, in some sort of agonized expression.

"What's that face for?" I asked. Was I even allowed to talk or was she trying to shut me out? I didn't know. I had absolutely no fucking way to know.

"This has to be a recent picture," Sam said breathlessly. "It's snowing in Amity."

Snowing in Amity? I took stock of the photo again, looking beyond the two people that I didn't know. I was able to recognize the street, the shops that she was in front of. It was the town that I grew up in and that I knew by the back of my hand. She was in Amity Park, all right, and I had no reason to disbelieve Sam. It was snowing in Amity Park, which meant that the weeks really had turned into a shit ton of months and that our imprisonment was never going to fucking end.

"Holy shit," I managed, because what else was I supposed to say?

Snowing in Amity. I wondered if it would be Christmas soon. I wondered what my mom and dad would do at Christmas. I wondered if Vlad would even tell us that it was happening. I didn't think that he would. I couldn't imagine why he would but I still wanted to know. Christmas seemed like a milestone. We should know about Christmas.

Of course, we were going to get nothing.

So, on tumblr I'm: we are all of legend now (with dashes between every word). If you want to find my replies to anon reviews, add backslash tagged backslash anon dash replies. If you want to see anything I post about Superman or the Reflections Universe, go to my tumblr URL and add backslash tagged backslash reflections dash universe. Punctuation is spelled out due to Fanfiction's restrictions. If you're having any trouble accessing the tumblr content please send me a pm and I can format it for you in a different way.

~TLL~