Her powers were gone. The thought repeated over and over in her head, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake it. It was like a mantra, echoing itself with each iteration. Gone, gone, gone.
Once upon a time, she might have been happy for it. When her powers first manifested and she realized what she was, when her foster parents threw her out into the streets for the crime of being a mutant, Lorna would have given anything to be rid of her powers. Even her hair had faded from green to brown without them, which would’ve been Heaven even before the abilities made themselves known. But now? Lorna had just started to feel at home, had just begun to feel as though she belonged somewhere, and now it was gone. It felt like her chest had been hollowed out, the absence of her powers more intense than the presence of them.
So caught up in her own thoughts, Lorna didn’t realize she was approaching someone until she plowed into them. Taking a step back to steady herself -- something that, as it turned out, was tougher when she couldn’t rely on her powers -- she glanced up to apologize. Seeing who she’d run into, Lorna faltered. “Magneto,” she said, blinking up at him. After their last encounter, she wasn’t sure how to feel about him. The X-Men tended to fall on the ‘he’s bad’ train, but part of Lorna desperately wanted to believe there was more to him than that. After all, if Magneto was all bad, what did it say for her? Their powers were the same, after all. And there was the nagging insistence in the back of her head, the thought that people were capable of change. Who’s to say he wasn’t, too? “Were you...?” She trailed off, shifting her weight and gesturing vaguely to Time’s Square behind her. For the most part, the crowd had dispersed, but a few people still lingered, staring up at the sky as if willing the ship to come back and undo what had been done. That seemed like a pretty bullshit plan to Lorna, but she wasn’t about to go tell all of them that.
