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Part Thirty-two

    "You okay?" Leo asked down to Sam, who only shrugged as a response. It didn't seem to fit the agonizing anxiety he should've felt at the moment, and so Leo pestered on. "Why don't I believe you?"

    When, again, Leo didn't receive a worded answer, he figured questions were not the way to go. While he had no say in what Sam should've been feeling, he also couldn't stand by and let his best friend remain cold in the face of something that had the power to heat him up.

    "Sam," Leo began, taking a deep breath as he stopped walking right before the living room. He brushed a finger against the little one's tail and winced when it didn't react, stiffer than he had ever seen it before. "You look so numb."

    "Jamie is inside the living room, sitting on the couch and waiting to talk to you right now. He was crying when we mentioned you were real. It's not my place, but I know he's feeling really guilty right now-"

    "How would you know?" Sam interrupted, his voice monotone as ever. "How could you possibly know what he's thinking right now?"

    "There was a point in my life, not too long ago, when I felt the exact same," Leo explained, not at all phased from being cut off. "You think I never felt awful when I first met you? You were this tiny, screaming mess in my hands and you thought I might kill you, and so yes, Sam, I do know how he feels. That's not the problem. The problem is that I don't know how you feel, and it seems like you don't either."

    "So what?"

    "So I don't want you wasting an opportunity to get rid of all the built up fear and anger you have for one, single person. Jamie wants to talk to you, probably so he can forgive himself for everything, but there's a chance for you to forgive him, too."

    "Just take me to see him..." Sam sighed, fed up with Leo's little monologue about how he should feel and what he should do. It wasn't his trauma, and he had no right slithering his giant human nose into Sam's business.

    Leo gave up, and pressed Sam against his chest for a quick moment.

    "I love you, Sam," Leo said, and then entered the living room.

    "Shit."

    Jamie took one look at the miniature person, and then he burst into tears.

    With Sam placed on the coffee table in front of the couch, and Leo gone from the room to meet back up with everyone else, Jamie and the borrower were alone. In the same room, together, yet neither could quite talk as expected with the way Jamie was crying.

    He thought he might be in awe at the tiny person. A new discovery was something the scientist in Jamie fell for the moment he heard about it, and the chance to meet up with one in person nearly forced the air right out of his lungs. He presumed that he felt the same as an eleven year old, and that was what led to the tragedy that brought him to his old home in the first place.

    What he did not expect, was the overwhelming guilt that flooded into his chest the moment he saw that Sam was real.

    If there was a tiny kid in front of him, then that proved it. Everything the burglar told him was true, and Jamie was the villain in a story he didn't even remember. If there was a tiny kid in front of him, that meant Jamie kidnapped Sam's parents, kept them apart for four entire years, and never once apologized for his actions.

    He hardly deserved the right to apologize in the first place. So, with the remorse of a criminal, Jamie buried his head into his hands and fell victim to an ocean of tears that wouldn't stop pouring.