Flight School: Predator

Knowing without Understanding

A/N: This is a relatively short chapter I managed despite the strange occurrences of college life as a freshman (HATE) and I'm pretty upset that I haven't had time to myself lately but here it is! Some more Io and Luka (and I can finally develop more on them LOL)!

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"I can't leave you," Luka repeated simply, as though it was the weather that they were talking about.

Io looked up to see that the eagle had fixed his gaze on him as well. The moment was fleeting and eternal all at once; the force of an emotion so large and unknown that swept the pair off their feet and allowed the respective creatures in their cages to grow.

"I thought you were going to say that I was..." his blurred vision, despite the gradual emergence of a light, made it hard to decipher the emotion in Luka's eyes—reduced his voice to an inaudible whisper that he was certain could not be heard over the breathing of the night. "That we could never..."

He paused to wipe his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, listening to every second of the eagle's silence.

"You know," the smaller frame sniffed once, loud enough to cause a fair shrug in his shoulders. "I think about it very often."

"How, if something silly like soulmates were to exist, they would break it to me that I was different," a quiet laugh escaped his lips and he looked up to see that his companion hadn't bothered to take his gaze off him. "Because it's sort of obvious that I am, see. You know it too."

Luka nodded vaguely; not because he didn't completely agree with what Io was saying, but because he was far too absorbed by his being to fully grasp where they were—what they were doing, saying, thinking.

"I know it's bad for me to expect things." Because truth to be told, expectations were more often than so the bane of many existences and it was clear to Io, who'd experienced the shortcomings of both himself and his external world. "So I try not to think about how I want to be treated by the people important to me. The people I care for."

"Which...includes you," he was going off on a tangent here, and he knew perfectly well that he was but it was Luka listening to him, so.

It was okay. "Of course it does, right?"

"Right," said the latter as he broke into a smile—one so rare, it warmed the very tips of Io's fingers without a single touch.

"So did I..." he went on with concern burning slow in his eyes, "treat you correctly?"

Io was mildly startled by the question. "Well I don't quite know because I never arrived at an answer, you see. I mean, about how I would like to be...understood. By other people."

To his surprise, the eagle nodded. "Because you will never be?"

It wasn't as though they had been moving in the first place but Io felt as though they'd halted in their tracks all of a sudden and somewhere within, a point of no return had surfaced with a shout. He noticed the intensity of his companion's gaze as they lowered to meet his and found it strange that he'd never quite noticed until now.

"Um," he paused as soon as he tried to begin. "I—I know that I give the impression of being...well, being different and I might have said something along those lines somewhere at some particular time that sort of, you know, led you to that same conclusion of not being able to understand me as well, but."