Disclaimer: I own nothing but the words, I guess.

--

Don't get fooled, don't get lied too.

Love was always cruel.

--

Sam's gone and Carly has yet to move, frozen in place like sculpture on the verge of crumpling into tiny dissolving pieces; the kind you can never put back together again.

She stands there taking in tiny non-existent breaths in a churning pace bordering on hyperventilating because Sam's taste is still clinging to her lips minutes after the fact and she feels like it'll stick around longer than that.

Maybe hours, or days, or just shy of forever.

Her best friend just kissed her; gave her the tongue and she doesn't know how to process anything anymore because it feels like she's been hit by a train. The impact sudden, and jarring, and total.

And maybe after hours, or days, or just shy of forever she decides she feels very conflicted.

Lucky for her though, repression soon comes calling.

--

She tastes like apples and something else.

There might have been a hint of strawberries, possibly, injected into her bloodstream from skin on skin contact during their kisses.

The brunette drops to her knees and falls back onto her heels, unable to get these images of them together out of her head and it's making her fucking itch so bad. On her forearms and thighs and the back of her neck.

She resists the urge to scratch though, afraid it will only spread if irritated.

This --liking girls or whatever-- it isn't permanent. It's a side effect of some greater infection.

(Sam)

It'll go away, she just needs to be alone for a while.

Self inflicted quarantine.

--

Freddie just left huffing and Sam is forcing her into the corner of the room; angry and seething-- tempting and nine kinds of sexy. The two of them had just traded blows and now the blonde was all riled up with no where to go.

The look a predator gives it's prey is universal and easily identified.

When a hand runs along her mid-drift, finger tips grazing and catching trails of fabric and skin, there was no helping the groan of pleasure bubbling in her throat, the one that crashed like waves into the barricade of her teeth before emitting out into the air, hot and heavy.

Sam's leg divides her own while she stands jammed up against the two intersecting walls, and her knee comes close too…

It was close and then it was almost and then it was there and then there were stars shooting across the room and behind her eyelids.

It's no longer a side effect at this point.

Patient A is completely overtaken by the disease.

--

She wants Sam to take her and remake her.

Wants her to enslave her body and charter it like a map so that the blonde would know every point and location, she'd know every look in her eye.

Especially the one filled with all the want and need.

They don't talk about what this is, don't give it a name. It just is and it should be enough because it's better for her if it stays in the shadows where nothing gets admitted or confessed. No big brothers or tech producers are shocked and possibly appalled. They aren't disappointed or heart broken.

Should be enough.

But oh God, she couldn't count the ways it isn't.

--

She's sitting in a diner, looking like a water color painting; all these bland colors bleeding through and together to express a splotchy scene of melancholy.

If she looks a bit empty it's because she is; has been since what she's labeled as her own personal judgment day happened ten minutes ago.

Her own little apocalypse.

She sits there, looking like a broken doll. She stares at, or maybe through the wall thinking about how everything was alright and then Sam walked in, sat down and bled out words in a monotone.

"We- uh this, it can't happen anymore."

Her lips were strained thin and she was looking everywhere else in the room.

"It just can't."

And then she stood up and walked out like she wasn't the one who fucking started all of this. Like it wasn't her plan along to make the brunette feel so alive at one point and now so dead.

--

She stares at her own reflection; picking out all the faults and flaws.

You return what is defective.

It's been a week and they haven't spoken a word to one and other. Freddie is so stressed out you would think it was his relationship with Shelby on the rocks. He keeps asking question after question until finally, she couldn't take it anymore and exploded at him, then kicked him out of her apartment.

It's not his fault, she knows that. She'll apologize.

And he'll forgive and forget.

She won't though-- in relation to Sam Puckett. She's being eaten away by the need to understand why she was cast aside and in the last twenty minutes or so, she's decided that this….

Whatever this is, or was.

Isn't how it ends.

She wants answers.

--

A/N: This started out as a really short drabble for champangescene but I read it over and decided that variety is the spice of life and when inspiration hits, you should run with it and I have a few ideas to toy around with this story. It's going to be a short one for sure, maybe two or three chapters but I hope you at least find it interesting.