Crestfallen {Samandriel/OC}

Chapter 1

Alfie's father had taken him here many times when he was a child, and though his father didn't approve of his current job at the café, and didn't approve of nearly anything the boy did or had done during his relatively short lifetime, he knew that his father still thought of the old memories when he drove past this spot every day to go to work, donned in his uptight businessman suit. Perhaps being in the car alone was the only time his father would allow himself to let down the stern expression that resided on his face all the time. Perhaps being the operative word.

Alfie sat on the swing, pushing back and forward lightly, feeling some of his disappointment fly through the air around him, surrounding him almost like a bubble as the wind ruffled his hair.

Again, he thought. I did it again.

He stopped swinging and planted his feet firmly on the ground. "If I can't break routine with her," He began, "Then I can break it with you." He looked up towards the sky as he spoke, as if addressing the grey clouds that were slowly drifting along, the sun no longer visible behind them. Funny, he mused, how the sun always seems to disappear randomly throughout the days. Turn your back for a second and it's gone, take a moment to wonder when it left, and suddenly it's back again. The pattern of the sun. The sun's routine. Everything has a routine. Even the swing. Back and forward, back and forward. Even the swing breaks routine better than I do, Alfie sighed. It can go from side to side.

"I know you're listening." He called. "You're always listening." He muttered the last part under his breath, though the ever-nearby Samandriel heard every word.

"I have to listen." His voice rang throughout the park; though obviously not his true voice, for Alfie would be long deaf. "I have to... Understand." The angel thought carefully about every word that he spoke.

Alfie, his mood already sour, only became more irked by this response. "Stop speaking in another language." He said. "You know that I can't get heads or tails from what you say."

Samandriel shot out his response shortly after Alfie's annoyed reply, trying his best to allow the human boy to comprehend him. "I have to listen in order to understand your kind. Humans are so vastly different from my kind." The angel's voice almost radiated the tone of wonder that coloured his words.

The boy began slowly rocking back and forward again on the swing, the air that ran around him calming him down by miles, yet still not enough. "What is there to figure out? We humans are filled with hatred for one another. We forget about arrangements we make, break the hearts of others and are, ultimately, the cruellest species on the planet." Alfie didn't often speak bitterly towards Samandriel, but it wasn't a new thing to the angel, as it had happened before.

He had to disagree. "Yet there is so much more! Your kind feels so much. Love, loss, pain, happiness, sorrow... We angels... We don't feel in the way that you do. We don't become attached, and we don't learn from pain, because we don't feel that kind of pain. Because of that..." There was a pause. "Some of us even wish to be human."

Alfie only noticed it slightly, but the last part seemed to strike a chord inside of Samandriel. Alfie was better off not knowing what the angel was referring to as he thought of all his brothers and sisters falling around him, ripping out their grace. He had watched hundreds of angels die around him as they fell over the years. Samandriel had seen too much darkness around the angels to agree with all that Alfie was saying.

"Samandriel..." Alfie seemed to almost say something, but it appeared that the boy stopped himself short before continuing with something entirely different. Samandriel did not even try to figure out his friend. He wouldn't have a chance. With his little knowledge of how the human mind worked, he probably wouldn't get anywhere.