"You guys should set up a rotation. Like nurses. Can't be healthy to be on call 24/7."

You're telling me...

Cafas, mid-mouthful at the termination of Noel's senntence, had a good moment to think about his response to that one. A nice change to his usual strategy of just saying exactly what he was thinking. He swallowed his food and his urge to go on a rant about how injustice and persecution don't sleep. "The amount of mental breakdowns I've had and witnessed speak to how right you are, and the deputisation only made it that much worse."

Noel's reminder was well timed. A shower would give him some thinking time. "Yeah I will go take that shower. If you need a drink or something, you know where the kitchen and bar are. Mi casa es su casa." He grabbed a towel and change of clothes on his way to the bathroom. Locked the door to avoid embarassing moments, stripped off and hopped int the shower. Steam rapidly built up around him as he lost himself in thought.

To Cafas it seemed all they ever did was police work. The riots, investigating M, all of it just seemed to be turning them increasingly into a branch of the police. A poorly regulated branch, but a branch none the less. How long had it been since the X-men had done anything... X-meny. Clay creature in the park? The Europe crisis? The riots had come close but they seemed forgotten now. Maybe it was just time for the X-men to be folded in to MRC. It seemed the world had calmed down to a point where they were no longer necessary.

Would you join MRC?... Me? No. No I'd quit. I joined the X-men to help mutant kind, not do police work... Today's events seem to disagree... I'm just a product of the shift in the role of the X-men. Trained to respond to the sirens... You keep people safe, MRC would pay you for it... Due process and I aren't on the best of terms... Fair point. What if this is the calm before the storm though? We disband and then we're needed?... We're no use in this state anyway, we need to not constantly be tired and injured from police duty. We need the annonimity back. The masks back on. We need to be the X-men again.

He had no idea how long he had taken by the time his train of thought pulled into the final stop. What soapy bubbles still clung to his body and hair were rinsed away and taps turned off in a post deep-thought daze. He toweled himself dry, threw on his clean clothes and unlocked the door. Dirty clothes and towel were thrown in the laundry before he went back to the patio.

"Have you ever considered joining the X-men? I mean, did you ever think about it, that you can remember? If so, can you remember why?" He largely asked as a launching point into a monologue he could feel coming on. He was genuinelly interested though. He waited for a reply.

"I remember why I joined..." a sadness tinged his voice, a veteran speaking of the ideals he thought he'd be fighting for, "I was angry at the hatred and fear of mutants, the measures being taken by those in power against us. The registration, the concentration camps, lynch mobs killing mutants in the streets." His experience with the last was all too personal.

And I saw the X-men fighting those measures, trying to talk reason into those who would have us rounded up and killed. I saw them fighting to stop the other side too, those mutants who would subjugate or destroy non-mutants, as bad as the humans, if not worse. They used violence only when necessary, tried to use reason and understanding as their weapons in the battle for peace, where others would use fear and violence."

"To me the X-men stood as a shining symbol for equality, peace, understanding and reason, heroes who sought no renown, no glory, only safety and peace for all... They used to be that too, for a time. Now though. What are we now. A militarised branch of the police force. A relic from a war already won, its purpose corrupted, now just a omnipresent threat to the mutants of New York. Get out of line, and we'll send the X-men after you. Some fucking heroes we are..." He trailed off, a scowl colouring his face, eyes having changed from deep brown to a violent purple as he spoke.

It might have been more dramatic if he wasn't just standing on his patio. The scene needed him sitting behind a big wooden desk, staring, unseeing, into the distance, out a window overlooking a vista.

"X's have mental breakdowns?" She snorted and it kinda sounded like a 'huh.' "It's just not the mental picture I have of you guys. Guess you got better PR than that." The grown ups always looked half asshat, half hero on TV. The kids always looked like little brainwashed philanthropists. Hell, the Mansion even a Christmas special battle royale every couple years according to the internet. Noel'd seen a TouYube compilation set to music sorta like how fans made tributes to their favorite anime.

Apparently he had enough to chew on, so Cafas took the out Noel gave him and took his leave for that shower. He gave Noel free reign in his home which was... weirdly trusting. She'd planned on staying on the patio and picking the debris from her hair, but the opportunity to snoop was overwhelming.

Of course, she tried to touch as little as possible. She was only curious about how typical X-people lived. Famous, rich, X-people who were only gay for one guy. Yes. That would be her first mission. Find the boyfriend and judge him as any straight friend of a straight man trapped in a flamboyantly pink-haired body would.

Noel found a picture of Cafas and another man... well, almost-man. He had cat ears. Had to be him. He looked young and surprisingly normal despite the furry bits. Hm. There wasn't anything immediately that she could dislike about Cafas' honeybun. At least not just by looking. He wasn't twirling a mustache and he didn't have an evil gay glint to his eye. He just looked... happy. As normal as a pinky and a cat-boy could look.

The brunette put the photo down and continued her casual snoop until she heard the shower water turn off. Then she busied herself with trying not to feel guilty and backing out to the patio to pour herself the last glass of Diet Coke from her two liter.

>"Have you ever considered joining the X-men? I mean, did you ever think about it, that you can remember? If so, can you remember why?"

She just about spit her soda out. It was so far off what she was expecting. Noel coughed and sputtered, but Cafas seemed content to wait for an answer. "Uh. Gee. It's not like I'm not flattered, but you're pretty much the first X-man who's stopped and given me the time of day. I've met some kids from the Mansion, but..." Noel shrugged. That wasn't an answer, but she was having trouble scraping one together in her head. Probably a result of that continual throbbing ache.

"I dunno. I guess it's just not for me. I have a job already that protects people and/or property. I try to do what good I can when possible through that. I don't need some big... production. You know? I don't want to be on the news or fill out any more paperwork than I already have to." Though the idea of having a group of people looking out for her, that was appealing.

That was probably how people who were in gangs felt.

Noel leaned back against the railing that separated the sky from the patio as Cafas verbally worked through his thoughts. The X-men, it seemed, had roots that were even more idyllic than their current ones. Idyllic and less regulated.

"So you want to go back to the vigilante days? Before they sold spiral-bound notebooks with your faces on them?" She was just trying to get a bead on where he was going with this. "I mean, if you have good people. People that are really and truly good down to their core then that might work. Put the masks back on. Disappear into the shadows. Leave the bad guys tied up with a note." She shrugged. "I'm not sure I'd even trust me with that, though." Wasn't the regulation a good thing? The complete waste of time they'd just sat through was a pain, sure, but they had official reasons to do so. Didn't they?

Cafas shook his head and began pacing. Vigilantism was a thankless and unforgiving job, and largely seemed unnecessary. “No. The vigilante work was only ever secondary. I think it’s part of what ended up pulling us the direction we went. The vigilante stuff became more and more frequent, until finally we ended up doing so much of it that the deputation actually seemed like a natural next step.” His strides lengthened, as much as they really could in the space available.

Don't all corruptions of purpose? You change so slowly over time that in the end you're working for those who were once your enemies, and it all seems perfectly natural.

”No Noel, I think we need to go back to doing what we’re meant for. We need to go back to fighting threats to humanity, threats to mutants... Conceited and stupid as this might sound, threats to the world. Not the petty threats we deal with now. Hell, there are police for a reason right?” He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was likely a conversation there was no going back from. He hadn’t confronted these grievances quite so directly before, nor seriously considered a solution.

I don't control the X-men though. I'm not even a team leader. Tricity and Sam run the show, and I don't think they'll go for the idea.

”That may mean the masks go back on, the shadows are drawn back around us, and I hope beyond hope it means that the X-men are an organisation spoken of in the past tense. I hope to never again see a threat so large that we have to put on the uniforms and load up the jet.” Cafas paused midstride to shudder at the thought of what would draw the X-men out again under his leadership. Cthulhu in the park was a one team job. Registration, Europe, those were missions for the whole of the X-men.

Missions we'd be luck to never see the like of again.

“ But those threats are why we can’t afford this regulation, this deputation. We need to be able to operate swiftly, effectively and without jurisdiction. The minute we attached ourselves to the police we gave that up. Imagine if any militarised government group, from Navy Seals to SWAT, were found operating on foreign soil? Well, the X-men are a government group now, for all intents and purposes.” X-men operating in other countries? Especially against the government like (not to lean to heavily on a single example but) Europe? That’s all too likely to lead to a war. That was not something Cafas would allow the X-men to have against their name.

Though you took a fair bit of that risk with The Ranger... But that was just me, and I could always claim to have gone rogue.

His thoughts were starting to break apart in his head. He’d travelled too far down the rabbit hole and lost his ability to think clearly about it. He looked to Noel for suggestion or guidance, perhaps to help him re-align his brain into a more usable state. ” What do you think? I could seriously use an outside opinion on the matter.”

> "We need to go back to fighting threats to humanity, threats to mutants..."

"I think that's above my paygrade." She was joking... kind of. It sounded like a whole other level of justice intervention. "Beyond what I get on the news, I don't have access to that kind of information. I mean, does anybody except Interpol or the NSA?" Or, well, probably any part of the secret shadowy government people. Maybe those guys in foil hats?

> ”That may mean the masks go back on, the shadows are drawn back around us"

"Don't you think it's a tad late for you guys? People know all your X powers. I mean, it's on the internet. Anonymity's kinda bunk. You're practically all registered with the state... Ohmigod, are you guys registered with the state? Like weapons for the police arsenal?" Made sense if they were, but dang. Wasn't that one of the things pinky was talking about fighting against?

> "Well, the X-men are a government group now, for all intents and purposes."

"All of this sounds like the best reason not to join a team at all." Noel shrugged. There was some allure to having teammates. Heck. She'd finally caved and gotten a roommate for some of those same reasons. Joining a team just seemed... more permanent?

Noel sighed. Her opinion felt less than helpful. "I think you've got a chip on your shoulder and I'm not sure if it's with your team specifically or the ideal set they left behind in favor of legitimacy, but it's got you all tied up. Up here." Noel tapped her temple. "You're heart's telling you that you could do so much more. You're having like... a mid-mutant crisis. Your current attachments are chaffing." So the real question was, were they chaffing because his organization had lost its purpose or because it was stale and had lost its scope?

"How legitimate a claim that you can save the world is, well, I don't know." Did the world even want to be saved? "Don't get me wrong, you're handy to have around and all, but the politics are going to happen whether they're attached to your group or whatever. People will read into your actions or try to assume your agenda. Or, even better, pin your actions on whoever they want to rob politically. Governments will condone or condemn you based on self interest.

You're a man who sees a problem and you're going to try to fix it. It's just not that straight forward. The world's full of twisty-turny jacknuggets." She put her hands on her head. Ugh. Her headache didn't like this discussion much.

"I think that's above my paygrade. Beyond what I get on the news, I don't have access to that kind of information. I mean, does anybody except Interpol or the NSA?"

"The X-men have a few tricks up their sleeves, but we don't have that access either. Sadly we are a reactionary group, not a pre-emptive group." It normally took something starting for them to stop it. Could they pre-empt this sort of thing? Maybe Slate, almost certainly Kealey. Her relationship with Shin may be an issue if they went underground again. Cafas didn't really know where Shin's allegiances lay. Was he more cop or X-man?

I'd rather not test that.

"Don't you think it's a tad late for you guys? People know all your X powers. I mean, it's on the internet. Anonymity's kinda bunk. You're practically all registered with the state... Ohmigod, are you guys registered with the state? Like weapons for the police arsenal?"

Cafas just nodded. The knowledge of that chaffed something awful. He continued to nod as Noel spun more truths. Why was the world not straight foward? Why couldn't it just be some two dimensional comic book world where good people fought bad people and it was all nice and simple.

"Ideally there would be no actions for them to politicise. Let the police deal with the crime, the way it's meant to be. The X-men aren't meant to be some vigilante group going around beating up bank-robbers and drug dealers. Sure we help, intervene when we see there's a need, but when we're already there, not called halfway across the city because we're mutants and we're expendable. But what we're meant for is fighting the big stuff, whether it's rampaging robots and elder gods, or the injustices mutants still face daily."

Cafas sighed the sigh of a man who knows his cause is lost but can't stop fighting. "I'm getting no-where with this am I? I'll drive myself crazy worrying about what the right thing to do is and get nowhere. Maybe I just need to go off and do things for myself. Maybe get together my own little group. I can't be the only one who feels this way can I?"