Slide To Open

Part One

Leo had a voice that smoothed Sam's inner workings to a velvet peace, a small ripple in his ears that spread into his body and caused too many slip-ups that had the potential to be seen. With Sam in the walls, or on the countertops of the household, it was easy to find Leo throughout the various rooms of his house, and Sam hated how tempting it was to get lost in Leo's voice. He always spoke of something calming, something exciting, and Sam always had time to listen as he hid away in the dark confines of his shelter.

In fact, Leo was the one to enforce communication with the rest of his group of friends in the first place. Not on purpose, seeing as Leo had no idea of Sam's existence to begin with, but unintentionally.

It was a Saturday night, Sam's favorite because Leo would be Home the next day for the entirety of the day, and the storm outside blew harder than usual. A distant vibration of wind chimes echoed through the walls, bouncing around Sam's ears and fading as he ventured deeper into the house. Storms had always scared him, but he found comfort in sticking close to his well known area of fortitude; a hollowed-out wall of Leo's bedroom. To be fair, Sam hadn't the slightest that the boy would move into that particular room, but he had an inkling that it had to be fate, because how else was he supposed to find the chipped electronic caught between the bed and the entrance of his home?

Sam spotted it the moment it fell, face down on the hardwood floor, and bounced for a moment while a gasp was heard from above on the looming bed frame.
The rain picked up outside the room, pounding into the window with a pulse that rivaled Sam's own, thrashing around with a velocity that he was glad to be rid of within his walls of comfort.

He blinked for a moment, mapping out the possibility of carrying the phone back to his place in the wall, 'borrowing' it from Leo without the fear of being seen from below. How was Sam supposed to know how expensive the electronic was, or how often the humans relied on its uses on the daily?

The answer to that was almost laughably simple; Sam didn't know. He was clueless as to what a phone was, or what it was used for, other than entertainment purposes. And when he saw entertainment face down on the hard floor, too far away for Leo to grab from his place on the bed, his only instinct was to take the phone and run.

So he ran.

The phone was far too heavy to carry more than a few steps without Sam collapsing on the spot, and he found himself praying to his parents up above that he managed to make as little noise as possible as he carried it back into his little hole in the wall. A hole that went unseen by a human, not because it was too small, but because the only difference between his entrance and the rest of said wall was a thin line running across in the shape of a door. The same door that closed shut as soon as the phone was safely deposited inside, and the click of the door was masked by a heavy sigh that came from high above.
Sam smiled, his white teeth a fair glint in the dark of his home inside the walls, and he ran a small hand over the button of the electronic laying before him. The light that came from a single touch lit up his home to such an extent, he was forced to cover his eyes with braced arms, as if the brightness would attack as it swallowed him whole. Instead, Sam lowered his posture and opened an eager eye to focus on the screen before him. It gleamed with such a white frequency, the walls around him were littered with shadows and highlights that he had never experienced before, and while it was strange to see his room more visible than it ever had been, there were more pressing matters at hand.

As his eyes adjusted, Sam took notice to instructions on the screen:

Slide to open

Thankful for his parent's guidance in teaching him how to read, Sam took several moments to figure out what exactly he should be sliding, eventually settling on the screen itself and sucking in a breath of air at the sight of the screen changing before his eyes. What seemed like dozens of boxes arranged in different colors and symbols floated towards Sam, each one calling out to him with a different respect than the other, all impatient and waiting to be explored under Sam's minuscule hands. He resorted to crawling on top of the cracked screen in order to reach up, first pressing his hands down on a box with a gray circle inside. What the circle represented, Sam was none the wiser, but he figured the boxes at the top had more importance than the rest.

Sam was right in so many ways. The one click had expanded the screen into fields of images, all colorful and holding countless mini-screens of pictures and words that filled Sam's vision like air. He took a breath, wary of his overexcitement, and pressed down on one image in particular.

It blew up into a screen of Leo and Leo only. His face, while still larger than Sam even within the electronic, was significantly smaller than his usual stature, and Sam was able to get a solid glimpse of the boy he had been living with for a short period of time. Whatever allowed the phone to generate such an image and keep it still for Sam to witness, he didn't care, because the sight that filled his eyes was the only thing on his mind for the next few minutes.

Dust brown bangs hung from a forehead of hair, falling in waves that ended with a hardly visible curl and followed the frame of Leo's face like a trail. His nose, long and almost as skinny as Sam was, was splattered in a mixture of moles and freckles that melted into his skin with no clear path or sign of stopping. He had a nice jaw, or so Sam thought on that night of rain and thunder. A nice jaw and kind, leaf-green eyes crinkling at the sides as he smiled up at Sam. Sam couldn't help but return the grin, focusing on every aspect of Leo's face he could find in close detail.

This machine was incredible.

It didn't take long, only a short few hours later, for Sam to discover something new in all his wonder; a communication box. One that was also filled to the brim with images and smaller boxes to click on and get somewhere new, somewhere that flashed against the grain of the pixelated faux bright smelting the room and giving Sam the slightest headache. He didn't mind one bit that night. Everything was too incredible to ignore for the time being.

Upon the discovery of the communication box, he found he could not only talk to other people through the device; he could look at them. Something he had never done in years, and even then it was only between two individuals that he no longer had access to. This box allowed him a space to speak to new, fresh faces he had never seen before.

So that's where he started.

It was as simple as changing the name on the screen with a title called "bio," and he made a new account with no pictures and no description to match. Nobody would find him, nobody would be able to know who and what he was, and most importantly, Sam would no longer be alone. He craved the sincerity of a talk with anyone, no matter what the conversation was, and no matter who it was with.

It didn't take long for him to find Leo's account, either.
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A/N: Hi there!
   I'm D, I love writing, and I've recently joined a whole bunch of sites to join and connect with authors and stories. It's always been a dream of mine to be able to have people read what I write and enjoy it, so i built up some courage and decided to post a short story I've been working on for a little while.
   This story is G/T, because I think the idea of borrowers is neat, though not all my future projects will be. Only time will tell, though!
   Regardless, I hope you all enjoy and continue to read on, and please feel free to let me know your opinions in the comments! Id love to hear them!
   Thank you for reading! :)