From the moment she'd stepped off the plane memories had flooded back to her, nostalgia and such overwhelming her a bit. At the very least it was cooler than New York had been. Her apartment really needed better ventilation, maybe she should look at getting some AC installed, or at the very least get a ceiling fan or something. She found she wasn't too bothered here in England though, it was a comfortable temperature.

She'd heard that in the cemetery of her home town there was a pair of graves that had been commissioned and completed, but not by her, for her dearly departed brother and father. She didn't know how to feel about this. Serena hadn't actually been home for a couple of years, but she was just a kid when she left. Now she was responsible for herself and relatively successful all things considered.

As the bus from Heathrow trudged along the motorway to the town near her old home she sighed. There was an odd mixture of the place giving her nostalgia and a feeling of alienation. It wasn't as if anybody in particular made her uncomfortable being here. It was more like she'd been a completely different person when she lived here. The world had felt different.

She dosed off a little everything fading into black as she fell into a dream in her seat, dreaming of being a child again in her cramped little terraced house with her older brother and dad.

The blonde was jarred awake by the stopping of the bus, her headphones falling out of her ears. She yawned and stretched out, moving around her head. Stiff neck from sleeping on the coach. She scolded herself for having fallen asleep, it would have been so easy to have missed the right stop. Thankfully it seemed like it was just one stop over so she hadn't messed things up.

Serena fished her phone out of her bag and stopped the music, flicking over to messages and seeing that she didn't have anything. She updated her various social media with what was going on, took a picture of the countryside as they moved into the town she grew up in and then typed out a rapid message to James, with a selfie of course, and generally just checked up on him, she hadn't done that in a while.

The driver announced over intercom that they were about to arrive at the next stop. Only Serena and one other began to gather their things. She was a little nervous all things considered, when you came back to a place after so long away it felt so surreal. She'd almost forgotten this place existed, she wondered how much it had changed since she'd last seen it. Pulling the backpack strap over her back she stood and left as the coach stopped.

After grabbing her suitcase she set off from the station, walking in the direction of her hotel first. She glanced around with eyes full of wonder at the city borough, headphones gently contributing to the scene with some pop punk music.

She finally arrived at the check in area of the travel inn she was staying at. She was greeted by a wide smile from a large brunette woman. The blonde pulled her headphones gently from her ears and greeted her with a nervous smile as she walked up to the desk.

"Hi hun, are you a tourist here?" She asked as Serena approached the desk.

Serena was well aware of some of the xenophobia in the UK as of late, she wondered if the woman at the desk was a person with such views. "No no, I was born around here, I've come back to visit some relatives up in the cemetery." The woman smiled synthetically.

Serena handed over ID and the receipt for the room she booked online. She received the key and thanked the woman, moving to the elevator to go and drop the stuff off in her room. She thought it might be a good idea to take a little rest as she dropped her stuff off but after just a few minutes in her room she began to feel restless, she looked her room's window and saw the slowly setting sun.

It was all of maybe 15 minutes before Serena got fully fed up with it and pulled a jumper out of her bag, leaving it unzipped over her chest and splashed a little water on her face before heading out. She quietly slid down the stairs and smiled at one or two other people that happened to be staying at the bed and breakfast, politely moving aside for them before they insisted that she went first. Something odd about the UK, she had learned was that every body was almost polite to paranoid level.

This fact amused her quite a lot, the way that people reacted to one another. It was even more evident if it was someone of a different racial descent. It was a little sad, but it was life. She herself was kind of blind to prejudice on the whole, she just didn't care at this point. She dealt with enough mutants and anti-mutant stuff on a daily basis that race and other things didn't bother her anymore. They hadn't a huge amount before she had become a mutant, in fairness.

She trudged along through the quiet streets that were just turning on their lamps, there was still some fading light in the sky, but soon enough the moon would be out and everything would be highlighted in a gently silvery glow. Her headphones played more gentle, relaxed music now. She wasn't all that worried about walking alone through the streets anymore either. The town was fairly quiet, but even if it wasn't after living on her own in new york city, she was fairly sure she could handle almost anybody.

She wasn't sure where she was going in particular, she was just going. She paused before some kind of a memorial, it seemed to be dedicated to world war one soldiers, and it was a lovely well maintained one. She smiled gently and picked a flower nearby to lay on it. So much death had happened in the world, at least a common trait of people was that they tended to respect the fallen.

She glanced up at the buildings that were around her. Some of them were very old, Victorian. Other's were much newer, more compact housing. It seemed like all of the cities and towns near the London area had a tendency of this. It was were most of the jobs tended to be in England, so she could understand why. It wasn't like she didn't understand either, she lived on the 7th floor of a large apartment building with a doorman, so this was even more quaint by NY standards.

She noted how well trimmed a lot of the grass was, there were still some corner shops and restaurants open. But she found herself oddly not very hungry. She didn't even crave anything like tea or coffee, something felt vaguely off. She couldn't quite place her finger on what it was, but she didn't want to eat or drink anything in particular, she didn't want to sit still in a room.

She needed to be out here, breathing the fresh air and moving. Keeping up with the movement. She was no longer in denial, she had some issues where it came to her family, and she'd come back the UK to see if she could get some closure on some of that. But she didn't really know where to begin for tonight.

The blonde wandered around for what felt like hours. It was around 2 in the morning. She blinked as she realised she'd walked all the way to the cemetery. Serena blinked slowly, breathing rapidly as she looked at the place, her chest feeling hot. Her breathing was off, everything felt twisted.

The longer that Serena stared at the gate, the more everything seemed to distort. Her head felt hot, and she was beginning to feel shaky. She took a few slow steps inside, thinking that if she confronted whatever it was making her feel this way it might make her feel better. She dug her nails into the sides of her jeans, if she had her bare legs out it would have been enough pressure to draw blood.

She tried something that she'd read about while researching a paper for school, something about distancing yourself from a situation and logically calmly, looking at facts helping to calm you down. She began to do so and quickly put the things together. She gently sat down on the grass. Taking slow, labored breaths and making an effort of will to control the rhythm of her breathing.

She suppressed the urge to throw up and softly leaned forwards, pulling her knees up to where she was sitting. She planted her face in her knees and closed her eyes, letting the world fade to black.

After a couple of minutes the shaking slowed until it was gone, and her breathing was back to normal. She remained like that for a while, just sitting there, relieved that she no longer was having what she'd worked out was likely a panic attack. Serena was level headed and strong willed, she reasoned that this did not mean that she was immune to very human feelings of anxiety.

Her eyes fluttered open to the silver moonlight gently illuminating the graves around her. It was truly a beautiful place, there were flowers all over the place, gently resting on the stone that was a homage to the dead and the fallen. She took in a slow deep breath of the slightly crisper evening air and slowly glanced around the head stones, taking in the names and dates, focusing on something rather than her own feelings.

She didn't see anybody else here, she supposed that it was the kind of hour that most people were getting into bed for work the following morning, and the stereotype of kids that hung around in grave yards would have to be explored some other day, because there wasn't one in sight. There were a few simple oak trees planted at various positions around the cemetery, she had to admit as the wind gently filtered between the branches, swaying the leaves that this was indeed a beautiful place to come to rest.

She twirled a finger through her hair for a bit, feeling oddly vulnerable for a minute or two. Not in any kind of a physical way, but she hadn't opened herself up to things from her past for a long time, and even then it had been in a controlled environment of a therapists office.

It was a little overwhelming... as previously noted. But it was also somewhat thrilling to her. She giggled to nobody in particular at the weirdness of the situation and then slowly, and carefully stood up from her position on the bench. Her legs felt a little numb, she must have been sat there in that position for longer than she realised.