Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

__________________________

Luka Sullivan did not start off tall and intimidating.

"This one's going to have all them friends." He'd listened to the officer's laugh, then. Oblivious to what he was getting himself into but not really getting himself into, just letting himself get into or...being forced into whatever it was he was letting himself get into.

The Juvenile Residential Facility was a bunch of dull buildings cordoned off by towering gates topped with barbed wires and a view that was really just trees and nothing else. He could not quite remember how he got to the facility in the first place; if there was a road or a path leading towards it; if there was a road or path at all in a place so forgotten and hidden from the rest of the world. Should the path be present, however, would he find it in himself to follow it back home?

"And what are you here for?"

The boy beside him was covered in tattoos and stitches from his wrist all the way up his forearm. Luka did not want to know how that had happened.

"I don't know," he had answered, quite honestly for there was nothing else to say. Not even lies filled a cage so empty. Not even flies.

"That's some bullshit," he'd laughed, and the others around them snickered as well, kicking him under the table after sizing him up. "You're fucking puny. Can't see you doing anything 'ther than baking some. What'd you smoke to get here?"

The boy was scrawny but the boy was ten. There was nothing unusual about being scrawny at ten, or at least that was what Luka had tried to tell himself until he began to realize that it did not matter very much to him. Nothing appeared to matter very much anymore.

There was nothing left to care about.

Not the dirty work that they'd left him to do; not the toilet he was forced to clean; the pleasant way others would get his attention—grabbing his hair and jerking backwards, and certainly not how he appeared in the eyes of others. Luka would fall, then. Like he had that one time.

That one, great fall.

*

"You're still here?" A man whose face he'd forgotten was speaking to him in a strange manner. As though Luka was a puppy that had turned into a dog against all odds and had not yet been beaten into oblivion. "Thought they'd put you up elsewhere by now."

The boy did not understand what he meant by the words 'by now', nor was he aware that he'd completed his sentence of two years at the facility and was now creeping into his third, extending every second within dull, grey walls with rust and algae lining the edges of the floor and window panes—sealed from the outside.

The truth was never laid bare before his eyes; not that it mattered to the boy in any way since he would, ultimately, leave it behind and forget that which fell between the gap, the abyss, in his memory. The then and the now.

He had not intended for the crevice in his mind, hindering remembrance of the past—pleasant or not. All Luka could see as he stood on the edge of the abyss was a speck in the far distance where the other side of the gap had started, up till the very cubic meter underneath his feet. The speck was nothing to him, as every field of vision was and had its limits. No human eye was made to comprehend something so far apart from itself and Luka was no different.

A single glance over his shoulder was not enough to remember what was behind and going forward, all he could hear was the occasional, joyous laughter that was strangely familiar; nursery rhymes in a voice that sounded unlike himself, and someone reading a book aloud. He had long forgotten what the name of the book was and what he was doing, reading that book. Why he was reading it and how something like that would matter to a boy four years of age.

Luka Sullivan's retreat into himself was a slow and gradual process that had begun with the most ill-fitting silence for a boy who'd loved to laugh and share his ideas. The scrawny boy who'd return to his paper-thin covers and hard-backed mattress with a fresh new scar or wound had grown into something that resembled a tall young man, lean from the lack of nutrition.

"They couldn't find you a family?" Said the man who spoke to him as though he was a dog with a broken leg. "Figured. You're under mental issues, aren't you?"

Luka stared, and after a good pause returned to scrubbing the floors. Had the man been looking for a conversation or to invoke some form of emotional response from the boy whose memory was an abyss, he would have to look for it elsewhere.

Back then, when he was no longer the skinny, underweight fledgling that provoked every sadistic nature that sought delight in the suffering of others, they'd gradually left him alone. His silence, they found particularly frustrating since it yielded no form of gratification at the lack of reaction from every bit of pain and suffering.

Luka had become so apt and so befitting at leaving things behind that it would take him less than a second to feel nothing—nothing at all from being on the receiving end of pain and worse, feeling nothing from being on the receiving end of pain somehow translated into the absence of guilt when he was the very source of pain.

He'd once witnessed an officer mistake his cellmate for him running outside at night by accident, to which the former had ordered the latter to serve his punishment in the form of additional cleaning duties. Back then, Luka had found himself with the thoughts of a demon coiling around the bars of his cage; the thoughts of: it happened by itself, he had nothing to do with it. He was not the one who caused his pain. The officer was to blame. There was nothing he did that was wrong.

With time, Luka's mind no longer worked on what could have been done. It was unlike the new-born creature of his to think of that which he could have done to prevent the misfortune of someone else, or that which he did not do. All his narrowed vision could see was the distinction between the paths of others and his own—completely separate and irrelevant, insignificant and unrelated—that he had nothing to do with the lives of others and others, him.

"Kids like you are nothing but trouble for the government, your family of...shifters and shit," it was a social worker who'd said this to him with the straightest face, and Luka who had returned the words with a gaze equally indifferent. "I can't help you if you're going to be like this. People don't want to adopt kids who don't fucking smile, y'know."

They would never. Of course they wouldn't; after all, why would they? Why would anyone choose grief and sorrow over joy and happiness? Luka knew that the former two were part of that which human beings liked to leave behind, let go or avoid altogether.

Luka Sullivan was not wanted in a world obsessed with happiness.

"And you've got that group of people after you. Hunters, or something. I can't help you with that since the government's...nevermind," the social worker had sighed, a long, helpless breath escaping his lips. "It's choosing between changing for the better—meaning you get a grip and stop with that attitude—and staying here for the rest of your life, kid."

Luka had not bothered to give the man a response. Where the currents of the river would take him, he would go. Nothing he did was to change the course of his fate or where he would flow for there was no meaning in any act against the power of the world that existed independent of his mind and so he did not attempt to change that which was written in ink.

He would, however, on occasion, look outside the window that was the size of his palms put together. He would stare up, angle his head slightly to see the moon that rose above dark canopies in the heart of the night. He would stare at the moon.

It seemed to remind him of something. Something that he had to do and something he had to be doing; something he had been searching for but long forgotten what it was.

____________________

It was a windy Wednesday afternoon when Luka Sullivan met his unexpected visitor in the most unexpected of places and at the most unsuspecting time of the day. After all, it wasn't every day that he had the officers calling him into the visiting cell for his weekly dose of human interaction, consisting mainly of further investigations and questioning.

For the past four dull and disappointing years he'd spent within dull and disappointing walls, that was all the social interaction—if considered social, at all—that Luka had the honour of exchanging. Having seen the people around regard him for less than human, he, too, had come to think the same.

The prospect of having a visitor long discarded from his cage, Luka had only room for his creature of silence and nothing more.

The boy was reading under the shade of the only tree in the facility, like he would be on weekday afternoons before returning inside for that one class he had to attend when it happened. The sound of summer and its heat scorched his bare feet that narrowly made the shade of the canopy above. They used to be able to fit well under the shade.

He turned the page.

Can't believe this is the only tree inside when you've got an entire forest out there.

Luka had heard a voice he'd hear every now and then, on rare occasions where they let him see the sun and feel its wrath. Other occasions were on his own accord, sneaking past the guards and out from the back door of his building to read under the tree. However good he was at being quiet as a shadow, nothing, however, could get him past those towering walls and barbed wires.

He could climb and sit on it. But then he would fall.

I know you can hear me now. No use trying to ignore my voice, said the voice. The voice was calm and quipped, slightly amusing to any other creature within but because Luka had lost whatever that was inside, he did not seem to react to its humorous nature. He looked up from his favourite page of the book and saw something move at the corner of his eye. Something in the trees.

Hi there. I'm Mary Poppins, said, he supposed, the thing in the trees, and I've come to fly you out of here.

Only then did Luka raise his gaze to see an eagle perched on the lowest branch of the tree, staring at him with eyes he'd never before seen. He looked elsewhere. There was no one else around. Slowly, he turned back.

"You're a talking bird," he observed after a good moment.

Oh I assure you, I am. A genius one at that, quipped the eagle, close enough that he could identify a hint of laughter in her eyes. They should be coming for you soon. The letter arrived just this morning, so.

She waited for him to move. He didn't. He was waiting for her to move.

What are you waiting for? She lifted a foot—adorned with talons that Luka observed at once—and swept it back and forth. Shoo. Go pack your bags.

"I don't have any bags."

Goodness! That was a figurative statement. Figurative. Do you even know what that means? Skies, save me from this boy.

Luka stared. "What do you want me to do?"

Return to your room and await the letter, the bird explained with utmost patience (or so she credited herself with). With it comes a flight ticket. A ticket to the island. You've seen it before, haven't you?

He had. Between the earth and the sky, a place up high. Luka hadn't thought it part of the external world he existed in, having assumed it a figment of his distorted memory and imagination. A broken mind could not possibly perceive the world independent of his mind in a way that resembled others.

He turned to the eagle. "What's your name again?"

Mary Poppins, said the eagle with a fold of her wings. She waited, in thorough anticipation for him to repeat after her.

"Your name is very long," was all that he managed to comment, tone and facial features void of discontent despite the remark.

His Avian could no longer contain the burst of absurd laughter she never thought she had within. It sounded loud and raucous in Luka's otherwise quiet mind, filling it with a sound that had become increasingly foreign to the boy at fourteen.

Skies, I've always known you were a strange one but to think you were this strange! Animals never really piqued the boy's interest, not until they seemed to possess the qualities of a human mind. Were you always like that?

Luka stared at the eagle, thinking.

"I can't remember."

Fine with me, the eagle peered into his eyes that were dark and hard to see beyond.

Well, for starters, you'll be glad to know that I am, in fact, not Mary Poppins, her eyes turned the shade of amusement, should it have one. I'm Victoria. And you can count on me to fly you anywhere, Luka.

______________________

The moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it?

_______________________

He woke to the sound of the night, the warmth of a human being an arm's length away and the rise and fall of his chest slow, patient. Io was fast asleep; his hair the shade of moonlight soft against the spare pillow that he would pretend was not specially put out just so that his friend would feel further invited to stay the night.

The eagle sat up, breathing heavily from the remains of the nightmare that he had not a concrete memory of. Every strand of remembrance slipped between his fingers within seconds of his waking, leaving the dust of it all scattered across his cage, easily swept up and away.

Beside him, the moon phoenix stirred. Luka had not meant to wake his friend (who was both diurnal and nocturnal, which left the golden eagle generally confused most of the time), and quickly put more covers over the tiny frame in hopes that he would quickly return to the arms of sleep. He didn't.

"Luka...? What's wrong?"

Io was rubbing his eye with one hand and supporting himself with another, attempting to sit up. The eagle held the other by his shoulders and gently placed him back under the covers.

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

"Nothing's...not, nothing," mumbled Iolani Tori, half-asleep but in the mood for arguments, clinging onto Luka's arm so that he couldn't be forced to retreat underneath the covers again. "Was it a...nightmare? Or maybe it's not. Like, a dream. A dream about sad things—but not a nightmare. Just sad things. It's not bad things. Just sad things."

Luka laughed quietly, breathless at the dream that he seemed to be in, right now. At present.

Luka Sullivan hadn't always been accustomed to letting go. He had grown accustomed to keeping things in a box and the box safe, high up in a place between the earth and the clouds and apart from the ground.

Yet, he wasn't always so apt at keeping things locked away or leaving things behind as soon as he'd picked them up. There was a reason for his silence; his apparent indifference and seeming inability to possess human qualities. Underneath it all, he'd flown the skies in search for something that he'd been looking for his entire life.

And at present, he'd done it.

He found someone that would not 'pack light'; someone who kept his box safe, high between the earth and the clouds; someone who wasn't part of the world obsessed with happiness; someone who would always, always be there in the sky and would never leave him behind.

He found the moon that he had always been looking for.

____________________________________

A/N: It is easy to tell that Luka and Io were designed to be very different in certain aspects other than their appearance.

While Io has always been carrying everything on his back, remembering every painful memory, tiny details, however insignificant, every moment of the world being human, Luka has been desperately trying to forget it all—or rather, letting everything slip away.

If Io carries the world on his back, Luka carries, quite literally, nothing. The general human being would, at the very least, have happy or pleasant memories they are fond of on their backs. Things that they would like to carry with them for the rest of their life to remember 'the good times' because no one wants to remember the bad. For Luka, there is no good or bad memories. He has nothing to remember and therefore, is quite literally the opposite of Io.

While Io hangs on to everything, Luka has been living his life not feeling the need to hang on to anything at all.

But that was before he met Io. For all intents and purposes, Io IS QUITE LITERALLY that which he has been searching for all his life—the moon. And figuratively, Io is also the one person in the world who showed him that it was okay not to 'pack light'. That it was alright to be broken and that there was no need to always be in one's tip-top condition to compete with the rest of the world.

There is no competition when it comes to the creatures in our cages, and Io is the one who demonstrates this to Luka very clearly. While everyone around him continues to exhibit traits of 'packing light', Io is the only one who does the opposite and in a way begins to restore Luka's faith in humanity and in himself.

This is why I cannot afford to make Io and Luka lovers or give them the open romantic relationship that many readers have been asking for. What they have is something that is beyond human understanding and cannot be described by the mere word 'lovers'. Even for lovers, the feeling develops only at a certain time in the life of a human being and under certain conditions. But Luka's love for Io is that of 'that which he has been searching for all his life'.

Imagine: finally discovering that which you have hoped to find ever since you were a very young child. Io is not just the moon to the astronaut that Luka wanted to be; Io is the person that Luka has been waiting for all his life to show him that it was okay not to pack light.

I was close to using 'worship' to describe Luka's feelings towards Io but at the same time, that would mean that Luka would not be standing beside Io but rather in a place where he could see him and look up towards him; which then again brings me back to why I always emphasize that Io is ultimately alone. It is true that Luka does not exactly seem to be standing beside Io but somewhere behind, watching his back and doing his best to protect him.

Io has come to realize that he, too cannot expect Luka to stand beside him because no one really can. Luka is, however, very important to Io and this was demonstrated in the previous book where Io throws aside a bunch of his values and chooses to save Luka, destroying himself as he did so.

I don't think I can ever write openly romantic or at least nuances of lovers when it comes to the eagle and the sparrow. It is belittling their relationship and reducing it to something within human comprehension. They are, as of now, my most complex, frightening and incomprehensible relationship. Writing over this would be a difficult task for me. I'm not sure if I can do any better than Luka and Io.

-Cuppie.

Thank you for reading