Thanks to Sue Penkivech for beta reading- and for giving me the title. :)

Packing Up the Pieces
by Jen1703

Socks, bras, underwear.

Packing was always so tedious. It had never, ever been a fun task for Lorna Dane, even if she'd been packing for a dream vacation. And she was most definitely not packing for any kind of vacation, dream or otherwise.

More like a nightmare, actually. One from which she desperately wished she could wake.

She'd tried so hard to keep it a secret, and she felt her cheeks burning in embarrassment even now at the memory of everyone admitting they'd known all along. How humiliating. All she'd been trying to do was save face, to buy herself some time until her powers came back.

Because they would come back.

They had to come back. They were so much a part of who she was, so much a part of everything that was important in her life. To think they were gone forever… it was just inconceivable.

But until they did, Emma was right. Lorna didn't belong there anymore. She'd lost the part of herself that made her part of things.

Shoes, hair dryer, toiletries.

In retrospect, she knew she should have talked to someone, confided about her power loss. She'd endangered herself and the lives of her teammates by trying to keep it a secret.

No, former teammates, now.

Bobby… he would have understood. He'd been going through the same thing, and he'd seemed to be adjusting so well. Or, at least, he appeared to be handling it well. Sometimes it was difficult to tell what was the actual truth, and what was simply the truth Bobby wanted people to believe. So many people didn't bother looking beyond that almost always-present smile of his to see what lay beneath.

She'd looked. She knew. Not always, but she felt she had a better idea than many did.

Regardless, she should have talked to him. They could have mourned the loss of their powers together. It could have helped bring them even closer than they'd grown over the previous little while. But now…

Now he had other things to worry about. His powers had been restored, but… at what cost? Lorna shivered slightly, in spite of the warmth of the room, picturing Bobby, once again completely ice, with vicious, dagger-like spikes growing and disappearing and then re-growing, seemingly randomly, all over his body. Sure, he had his powers back, but what good were they without control? She ached to hug him, for both their sakes, but she couldn't. He would slice right through her without meaning to, and then he'd never be able to forgive himself.

She knew him too well, cared about him too much, to risk doing that to him.

Jeans, slacks, shorts, a handful of skirts that she hardly ever wore anymore.

There was no way she could have confided in Alex. She'd known damn well what he'd have said and done. She hadn't spent most of the last decade with him without learning how to anticipate his reactions. He would have looked at her exactly the way so many of the others had – full of sympathy, pity, disdain. He wouldn't have been able to understand. She wasn't sure he would have even tried.

But then again, he rarely seemed to understand her at all anymore. He hadn't for… well, for a very long time. Longer than she cared to admit, even to herself. Why she'd put up with it, she'd never really know. Lately, he hadn't even pretended. The whole wedding disaster had proven that beyond any shadow of a doubt.

She cringed, not really wanting to revisit that chapter in her life. Water under the bridge, and all that. She could do without remembering that she'd gone more than a little mad, that she'd tried to kill not only Annie, but the people who'd been her friends and family for years.

But she supposed being left at the altar could do that to a girl.

Right, enough about that. What was passed was the past, after all.

As she leaned over the small, black suitcase, packing up her life, Lorna tucked her hair behind her ears as it insisted on falling forward over her shoulders. It was still green, but only for the time being, she suspected. She was almost curious to see what color roots she'd develop – blond, brunette? Red, even? Maybe she'd resort to dyeing it green until her powers returned…

Dammit, she loved her hair. She knew it was terribly vain of her, but she loved her hair. For some women, hair was their crowning glory. For Lorna, it defined her. She'd never been Jean, the beautiful one, or Ororo, the Kenyan goddess. Not even Rogue, the pretty Southern belle. She'd been Polaris, the green-haired X-Man; Lorna, the girl with the pretty green hair. Surrounded by outstandingly beautiful women, her own beauty was only average. Her hair was what made her special, what made her stand out.

She needed her powers to return. For so many reasons.

She'd be back, she knew it. Whatever it was that she'd seen in space, she knew – somehow, absolutely undeniably knew – it held the answers. It made no logical sense, she knew that, too. But she was convinced once she found that… being, creature, alien, whatever it had been that had looked at her, everything would fall into place, and everything would go back to normal.

She'd be whole again.

Tops, carefully folded so as to not wrinkle.

The last thing Lorna placed in the suitcase, very carefully, was a picture frame. It was a group photo, a bunch of them posing outside at some casual gathering or another, not too long ago. She was standing next to Bobby, his icy arm slung casually over her shoulders. He must've said something funny just before the picture was snapped, because she was turned slightly towards him, laughing, eyes crinkled up, and he was grinning almost smugly. It wasn't the most flattering picture of her ever, but she loved it nonetheless. Loved it of her and Bobby (the fact that he'd been stuck in ice form at the time aside), loved it of her friends and family.

She'd been happy.

The X-Men were her family, and wherever they were was her home. It hurt her to leave it, but she had no choice.

She knew it would hurt Bobby, and that just about undid her. He'd see it not as her leaving, but as her leaving him. Again. But she was nothing if not stubborn, and she'd made up her mind about this.

Flipping the top flap of the suitcase closed, Lorna crossed the room to do a final check of her dresser drawers, reaching out with her powers to pull the zipper closed… and swallowed a hard, choking lump in her throat when she felt nothing. No tingle of her powers pulsing through her, no sense of the metal zipper, nothing.

Blinking back burning tears, Lorna stalked across the room and violently zipped the suitcase by hand. Jaw set, she lifted the case off the bed, extending the handle and positioning it behind herself. At the door, she cast a last, longing gaze back inside, but then forced herself to step over the threshold and into the hallway.

Closing the door behind herself, she made a silent promise – to her room, to herself, to Bobby.

I'll come back. And everything will be good again.

END