InsaneJournal

It was probably fair to say that Falke hadn't really thought this through. Okoye had said they were traveling by plane, and yeah, he'd thought about it enough to venture an alternative that wouldn't involve being in a plane, but when she'd shut it down he'd just marked the matter as settled and put it away. In retrospect that might have been a mistake. Security was intense, if not in the actual effectiveness than in the sheer focus brought to the task by the guards. In Tumbleweed people usually at least pretended like they weren't paying attention to him, most of the time. He wasn't used to so much scrutiny. It made him pull in on himself, clinging to his cabin bag until Okoye had to take it from him herself to put through the X-ray machine. He let her, even though the loss of it left him feeling vulnerable and bereft and weirdly laid bare. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar feeling. The big open spaces, the noise, the bustle, the guards who acted as though they knew they were in charge and didn't much care about how anyone felt about it... it wasn't a place where he was needed to make decisions. As long as just enough of his mind was left to do exactly what he was told the rest of him could sink away, make sure he didn't react wrong, try to fight, to defend a self that wasn't really his to begin with.

That small part of his mind tracked their progress for him, directing his body to fall in with the others when they moved, sitting quietly when nothing was needed from him. He had spent days like this before, tamely submitting to his handlers until finally hitting a situation where more autonomy was required or demanded or, more rarely, when it was simply deemed to no longer be an impediment. That was what happened now, though, allowing him to come out of it slowly, to assess his surroundings before alerting anybody to his changing status and gauge what course of action might be appropriate.

They had made it onto the plane and through take off, though how long they'd been in the air he couldn't have guessed - just that it was much closer to two hours than twenty, probably. He had his bag back, too, sitting on the floor by his feet, but he didn't reach for it. Everything still felt weird, like he was behind a pane of glass separating him from what was going on in the rest of the plane. Here, he was partly blocked off from all of that anyway, sitting rigidly upright in a window seat where seat backs and the others protected him from proximity to strangers.

It helped, but not completely. As he settled back into the spaces of his body situational awareness awakened too, reminding him that this was an enclosed space, that the windows were tiny with thick, almost unbreakable glass, that even if he could get to a door opening it would be a terrible idea, that he didn't know how high up they were and whether he could even breathe outside at this altitude.

His skin itched. He needed to move but there was nowhere to go, not even back down into that sunken place - he didn't know how to call upon it, it just came and went according to some mystery metric that he didn't understand the maths for.

There was a magazine in a pocket on the back of the chair in front of him and when he finally made a move it was to reach forward to grab it, swiftly as though someone might stop him if he took too long about it. It might have been strange, but he immediately felt a little better having something in his hands. Especially something he could destroy. The first strip he tore off the edge of the cover page was an even half inch in width, maybe slightly wider at the bottom, but that wasn't a real problem. The whole thing looked about eight inches wide; he'd probably get about fifteen strips off each page, he decided as he pulled off the second. Even if it was only thirty pages, it was something to focus on for a while.