When Spencer came back to the apartment after dropping Carly off at the University of Washington, he stayed awake for forty-eight straight hours watching home videos and pouring over every last photo album and watching every single iCarly episode online.
Somewhere in the twelfth hour (or was it the fifteenth?), Mrs. Benson knocked on his door, holding an empty measuring cup for pretense. She got as far as "Do you have a c-c-c-cup" before breaking down completely, Spencer holding her awkwardly and knowing, for once, exactly how she felt.
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Somewhere around the sixteenth hour Spencer was awake, Mrs. Benson calmed down enough to start talking coherently.
"I'm so sorry about all this, Spencer," she said, wiping her nose with one of the five Kleenex boxes-worth of tissues that surrounded them both. "Just, little Fredward was so precious as a baby- he was perfect.."
Spencer kept his arm around her as she told all she remembered about her son.
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They paused the nostalgia-fest to get some food after Spencer had been awake for twenty-five hours. Mrs. Benson started to go to her apartment to get some sort of prepared tofu dish, but shrugged in defeat when Spencer handed her a bucket of vanilla ice cream and a spoon. Spencer himself was settled on the sofa with a tub of Rainbow Sherbert.
"She was only eleven when she came to live with me," Spencer said, staring straight ahead, and Mrs. Benson listened as he told all he could remember about Carly.
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Spencer was forced to take Mrs. Benson's phone away from her around hour thirty-two, so determined was she to break the "Don't Call Me until Three Days Later" contract Freddie had made her sign. As he locked her phone in a cabinet in his room, Spencer paused before throwing his own phone inside it.
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They reached the end of iCarly at the beginning of hour forty.
Spencer and Mrs. Benson stopped crying completely at the end of hour forty-two.
Once they had gone through the tenth box of tissues, they started talking again.
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They went downstairs for smoothies at the end of hour forty-five; Spencer had a ring of sherbert around his mouth and tissues stuck to his most comfy PJ pants, and Mrs. Benson looked remarkably like someone who had been struck by lightning. They ignored the stares of the other patrons and ordered six smoothies to go.
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The two of them, emotionally and physically exhausted, fell asleep on each other's shoulders on the couch watching a tape of graduation at hour forty-eight.
Neither of them heard their phones ringing in Spencer's room fifty hours after Spencer had dropped Carly off.
A/N: ehhhh, I'm not sure I like this one that much... I may take it off in a couple days, depending on how I feel.
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