Swallow isn't always an annoyance.

Right now, she's a student. She has math homework, and bio, and she's hoping to take calculus next year.

She's also sitting on an absurdly large boulder, wrapped in a blanket. Big, warm fluffy blanket. She isn't wearing a coat. Her blanket works nicely.

The blanket is green. Everything she owns is green, really.

Not everything everything. Just most everything.

The blanket disguises her wings to the casual observer.

The less casual observer will note that the tips poke out the bottom and that she's been molting.

Today her hair is french braided. She seldom has the same hairstyle from one day to the next, and yet always she maintains that sweet innocence, that blissfully selfish childishness.

She'll never grow up, if she has anything to do with it.

Granted, the park isn't the most fabulous place for the corruption of mankind (unless tripping passing joggers is your idea of twisted fun). But mankind doesn't need corruption, anyway, since it's doing a fairly good job of it on its own, and Devin's the sort of character that would lean back and watch the man-made apocalypse swing about. Which, in case you're wondering, will happen in exactly two years, twenty-one days, and a minute after happy hour. But that's Devin's secret.

He's dressed in an ensemble that's pleasant to the eyes: brown blazer over a white tee, faded blue jeans and a green-patterned hankerchief tied around the waist. His hair's bound back into its usual tail with a handful of stray bangs curling into his long face. Well-worn flip-flops scruff the dirt path as he shuffles his way towards the angel, hands in his pockets and back in his usual slouch.

He sends a perfectly humane smile to the angel as he pulls out his hand to give her an all-fingers, waggling wave.

"Hiya," he says. "It's a nice day for perching, hm?"

She turns, looking him over with appraising and bored expression.

"It is." Haughty? Perhaps a touch.

But there's no reason to lie about it.

She doesn't lie often.

He's interrupting her study time. Bad demon.

He cocks an eyebrow slightly and a corner of his lips mirrors the move. He's amused by her and the image of a fledgling chick she represents.

Slipping one hand into the inside of his blazer, he pulls out a crinkled, half-full bag of gummi bears and fishes for a red one, absently.

"Pride's a sin, int it?" he half-states, half-asks, popping an orange one in his mouth and chewing as he muses.

"I'm not that kind of angel."

As far as she can tell, that kind of angel doesn't exist. She isn't sure what does, but hey.

She's just a kid with wings.

Pretty wings.

"And I am so not proud." Humble, right.

Lying's a sin too.

He peers at her as he chews on a grape.

We won't bother with the laws of physics on this one.

"So what kind of angel are you?" He asks, thoughtful.

She shrugs expressively, using a flip of the wings for added emphasis, up up uuuuuuuup and out, stretching brown-black to both sides, long as her arms, and then folding back neatly to be gracefully recovered by her blanket.

"The kind with wings."

She's a girl with wings. That's really all there is to it.

"Why? I've never met any other kind."

He arches an eyebrow at her, dark and slender, defined in lazy smugness. Without permission and with lukewarm forwardness, Devin step closer to lean against the boulder and next to the boulder-perching angel. He doesn't mind proximity; he wonders if Swallow will, though. Not that he'd move, anyway.

"So if I had wings, I'd be an angel, too?" The thought amuses him, and his blue eyes crinkle at the corners.

He fishes for a green gummi and flicks it upward to catch it in his mouth.

Devin's a little bored.

"That or a bat."

She thinks about this.

"Or maybe a hanglider or airplane pilot."

She grins.

"Can I have one of those?"

"So would a bat be an angel?" Devin asks. "Or just girls with wings?"

Devin glances down at his plastic bag and calculates. There's not much left, and his face falls with a wistful sort of woe. He offers the sweets, anyway, deciding that one small sacrifice for company isn't so bad.

"What're you working on?" He says, gray-blue eyes more blue than gray, today, and currently trying to make out what else is hidden beneath the blanket.