Detention

It was as though the magic broke, when she stopped pressing down on his hand and instead looked up at him. He lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement and hummed a short questioning ‘mh?’.  What had he said? Something odd again? The lights flickered in her chocolate eyes and as she started pressing down on his palm he felt as though he could get lost in them. Oh right. He had complimented her. Maybe he’d been overstepping? Her words made him knit his eyebrows tightly together in his forehead. “Mh. Yeah. In my defence you were, uh, mega scary,” he admitted a little hazily. “I’m not very good with magic.” He looked at her apologetically. Maybe that wasn’t exactly what a witch wanted to hear. “Don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s unpredictable and uh, dangerous and well, I-I like numbers more,” he mumbled, lowering his eyes back onto their hands.

Wayne looked back up in confusion. What? “My nature?” He asked, raising his eyebrow lightly, regarding her a little skeptically. What the hell did she mean by that? “But I am the best?” He replied slightly offended at the thought, his voice pitching a little at the end. “I mean; at what I do at least!”
He knew however, that she was probably right about wanting to fit in. He was slowly getting more comfortable with who he was, but he still wished he understood people. Or did he? Most of what other people conversed about was so bloody dull it could lull him to sleep, so maybe he didn’t really care after all. He just cared what his friends thought of him. And maybe Artemis, just a little.
Wayne stiffened.
Why are you even at Athena?
It only took at second for his body to relax, as she continued the pleasant little pressures on his hand, moving on to his wrist. He hadn't really understood the question. "What do you mean?" He whispered. Did he not fit in? Was that what she had meant?

Wayne furrowed his eyebrows.
We all have our defences to make sure we don’t get hurt. He could only agree. He knew he had about a million defence mechanisms that might not be the most healthy, but, he thought, at least he wasn't scary. He slowly took back his hand and reached for his glass of water to take a sip, hoping it would make his mouth less dry. The stange panic he felt around her seemed to have faded a little, and instead he felt curious. He wrinkled his nose lightly as she insisted that magic could be beautiful and shook his head a little. "Mh, how can it be beautiful if it doesn't make sense?" He asked meekly, genuinely interested in what she meant by beautiful. To him, beauty came in orderly things and numbers and mechanics and in how beautiful it could be when things came together in some bigger sense. Magic never could.
Wayne almost protested that he never would apologise for being good at anything at all really; what a ridiculous thought that was. Why would anyone do that, now? There surely wasn't anything to apologise for. She spoke before he had the chance, and he sucked his bottom lip in whilst listening to her. But it wasn’t what I meant. Yet another thing he never had understood. Why people always said stuff they didn't mean. He couldn't help the wave of confusion hitting him and once again opened his mouth to talk when Daniele waltzed back to their table with the food and the wine. He managed a sheepish smile to the Italian, that merely chuckled warmly at him before dashing away again, swiftly picking up a few empty glasses on the neighbouring table. The amazing smell had him close his eyes for a second. He was absolutely starving and the confusion seemed to disappear as quickly as it had come, when his hunger took over his mind.

And as quickly as it had come and gone it came back again. This time he actually looked her in the eyes - not a small feat for him, he usually didn't like it, but this time he had to do it, to understand what she was saying to him. Or try to. Why was he at Athena? He didn't like explaining or opening up to strangers and felt a tight knot in his chest at the prospect of having to do it. As if he owed her that in order for her to understand him better somehow. But he didn't want to talk about it. About his father and mother and how he had ended up there and how Umbrella had taken him in and expected him to know about the supernatural. A whole world he had not known about until a few years ago. He finally looked away from her, feeling the heat shoot up his cheeks.
"I, uh, it's complicated," he muttered. Why was a guy like him, a guy that already had just about 3 PhD's already, at an Academy. "I have a job in Oakheart and we work with different species. They insisted that I went and got educated in supernatural beings before they wanted to full-time hire me," he muttered, the words falling out of his mouth with about a hundred kilometers an hour. He sucked in a large portion of air. There it was. Now she knew that he hadn't grown up knowing about things like witches and bloody vampires. He bit his own cheek and raised a hand to scratch himself behind the ear. "If you just came to insult me you could have given me a bloody heads up," he grumbled, using his fork to push the food around his plate.