A goodbye

A/N Only a few more chapters to go! But I'm sort of planning a sequel with the whole Loki/Clint/Avengers thingy and then a prequel so yeah :-) hope you like this chapter :-D

Lena opens her eyes. She's out of breath, surprised and shocked. She's alive, after everything, she's alive. Her mutation, her proper, original one, worked. It copied Aiysha's healing mutation, although not perfectly, so although Aiysha usually heals quickly, it took Lena a while to heal.

She sits up, and looks around her. Now she's awake, she can feel the cold of the table beneath her. Her hands shiver involuntarily.

Lena strains her eyes to see through the dark. Round her, she can see the rough outline of flowers, lots of them.

She jumps off, avoiding the blooms, then runs to the wall and turns on the light. The darkness scares her, although not as much as walls of pure white. The flowers are all different colours, pinks, yellows and reds. Attached to them are notes, from her friends.

She turns one over in her hand. Written in the neat handwriting of Aiysha is 'I'm sorry. Goodbye.'. The message from Alex is much the same. They all are. They are all sorry, all sad. And she's done this to them.

But then she smiles, up at the sky. The person who decided her fate was clever, very clever. She may have a nack of falling in love with the wrong person, but they always give her a way out. She escaped from Asgard. So she will escape from here.

Just in case, she goes invisible. She passes as silently as she can through the room, but her eyes are caught by a small pile of folded booklets on the wooden desk.

In memory of Eleanor Laufeyson

1992-2015

Service held on 27th June 2014

Lena's heart stops in her mouth. Her funeral is in two days time. And Laufeyson. She told Charles about her real surname, even though she has been using her maiden name most of the time. Only, he needed her passport for something, and even though her husband( or she likes to think of it as former, as she hasn't seen him for 2 years) is not of this world, that is official name now.

But her body will be missing if she leaves now. She can't lie there and pretend to be dead, somebody would catch her breathing, and there is no way she is letting them out her in a coffin. That would be scary.

She's just have to trick them, and in more ways than one. An image of a body, and she will have to find a coffin now, and put the image inside it( not even she can conjure an image that someone can touch), then trick someone into thinking they put her in the coffin.

Well, whoever said faking your own death was easy?

(27th June 2014)

Charles manoeuvres his wheelchair carefully around the room to the desk to collect the order of services. Moira said she could fetch them, but Charles decided he needed to.

He said it was for practice with this wheelchair, but he knows it is to show Lena, if she is watching, that life goes on. Not that he's coping well without her, but he would want her to think that. Even if he's mad at her for leaving him like this.

Especially when he knows she knew it was going to happen.

For this he is equally angry with himself. Did she not trust him enough? Was he too cold, or did he just seem uninterested? She was behaving differently, he noticed that, but he didn't do anything. Why. Did. He. Not?! If he had asked, maybe she might still be alive.

This guilt is the worst part.

He clenches his hands tightly, too tightly, on the arms of the chair. There are already lots of these marks and scratches on his chair. He feels hot tears prickling at his eyes, something he had never really experienced before but has become an expert on in the past week or so.

The worst was when he had to get all of her things. She had no official will, but they found some paper stating her wishes for everything to go to Clint Barton. So Charles packaged everything up, and sent it to the address he found in a book in her rucksack. He didn't invite Barton to the funeral, and just kept it a small thing.

He knew Lena cared about Barton, but just couldn't bring himself to invite him. He couldn't really explain this feeling. Nothing personal, he thinks.

A hand touches his shoulder. Moira.

"We need to go."

Charles doesn't protest at her words, doesn't mention that he could reschedule this whole thing, doesn't mention anything. Just follows her, quietly and with a trail of misery left behind him.

The service is painful, reminding him again and again of what he has lost. Funerals are meant to be for the living to remember the dead, but to Charles it feels like the dead are remembering the living. Lena was so alive, so happy, living and beautiful. Charles just feels dead inside, empty and hollow and cold.

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Lena sits on a chair, far out from the small huddle of people, still invisible.

It feels weird to cry at her own funeral, when she knows she isn't really dead, but she does it anyway. She feels likes she has lost something, and maybe she has. She'll never see Charles again, that much she knows. That's why she didn't pull out of the healing process up until it had healed the child. So she won't be alone.

The first time she disastrously fell in love, she hid herself away. This time, she'll be doing it again, only better. So she can't be found; although, who will be looking for her. Being dead means you can't just go anywhere you like.

But she will have to find Clint. She knows Charles hasn't actually informed him of her death, but Clint will have received all of her things that were in her room. He's an intelligent guy, he would have figured out that she had( supposedly) died.

Somehow Lena finds a line drawn between her new friends thinking she is dead, and Clint thinking she is dead. As much as she loves the first lot, she can bear leaving them to grieve, they don't know her like the latter does.

She walks away, towards the house for the last time. She gathers a rucksack she got from the supply room, which is full of enough food to get her to Clint's flat in Montana. It's very easy to ride buses for free when you can trick the driver into thinking you have a bus pass. She knows everything she is doing is evil and wrong, and usually she wouldn't, but she figures informing her best friend she isn't dead calls for these drastic measures. She would call him, but guesses he wouldn't believe it was her.

Ah well.

Time to go, she supposes.