Flight and tactile sensation

And then I was outside. Coat on, black sweater, hands in my pockets. It looked more like night than day, with the smoke heavy in the air, and the city keened. Wind shrieking along the devastated sections I had only seen on video so far.

When I flew out into this cold, now-broken world, I took to the air with a violence I hadn't been willing to use indoors, tearing through the sky in the same way a fighter might punch at a wall to vent his fears or sorrows. No slowing before turns, I just took the brunt of it against my side, and felt the cold and the wind punch through the softer outer layers I wore. No gentleness to the plunges or the skyward soars, no consideration for the g-forces. It was a strain and I needed that strain to leech certain feelings out of me before they overflowed and I said or did something regrettable.

But the air, in a way, fed those negative emotions by the same measures with which they absorbed them. Because as I rose higher to go over clusters of buildings it was too annoying to fly around or through, I could see the city, and I could see the damage. A gaping black yawning through the heart of the city, where it wasn't stretched thin along the coast in the direction of Boston, and where the buildings weren't all temporary, one story tall structures, sprawling out and waiting to be replaced when the resources were there. In the heart of the city, the buildings had been tall. Now there was a hole extending far deeper than the buildings had extended up.

No succor in pummeling the sky with my body, here. Not when it answered me with sights like these.

The forcefield protected me from the whipping cold. There was, at least, succor in its companionship.

Soon.

Soon we see what we can do together.

Dive hard. Extend my arms out, and experience the wind through those fingers, feel the air resistance… my actual hands still in my pockets. I folded them in close, hugging them in tight and close to my body, and felt the resistance decrease. An umbrella open in rushing wind versus one that was shut, spearing forward.

Fly harder, between buildings this time, because air flow tended to go over buildings, curling before continuing forward, and with the forcefield out I was vulnerable to the vagaries of wind, even with everything tucked in closer.

***

No violence to my flying now, except where I experimentally opened the mouths in my forcefield and felt the air rush in through the apertures, pulling at my hood.

- Radiation 18.1