The government.

The United States Freaking Government.

Impact was not a happy camper. She was an official citizen who obeyed (most) laws and begrudgingly paid taxes so her tax dollars could, in turn, be used to finance the bullet that hit her and the adapted who shot it.

The intelligence they gathered from the mission only gave them so much, but they finally had a name for the mysterious threat they were dealing with. SUPER. Strategic Unit for Preternatural Experimentation and Research. Department of mutant kidnap, experimentation and exploitation. The shady lab operation they infiltrated was a government-sanctioned task force.

They had escaped with some of the test subjects and placed them in spare rooms in the base. For the moment, there was nowhere else to send them. She wondered if that would add “theft of government property” to her list of charges alongside “vigilantism” and “trespassing in a government building.”

Rebecca was rubbing her upper-left arm because that was where the lucky shot from the Adapted landed. Her uniform held up, but “bulletproof” did not mean “negating all impact.” Now in a tank top, the dark bruising could clearly be seen on her skin. It was, by the flimsiest definitions, a successful mission, but it was not a clean one. The alarm sounded and killed the stealth aspect of the mission, and Rebecca was sure, looking back, they did some killing along the way.

Shivs—Cait, now that the mission was over—was going to have to deal with the weight of her actions on her conscience. She was a good person, but she did what had to be done. Realistically, there was no way every person she came across was going to make a recovery. When the shock of her mutation growth passed, Astrid would also have to deal with the realization that her crystal form killed a man. Rebecca would be there for her, but she would put no additional guilt on the women. They did what they had to do, and Rebecca would help them live with that.

She was going to have to debrief the whole team soon enough, but she needed a moment to get to the headspace where that was possible. She was too angry, and that was not her best look as a leader. She was locked in her office, pacing in front of a full-length mirror where her spouse resided.

”It’s the government, Jesse. The government took mutants and ****ed with their heads and their genetics.” Her face was read, with her freckles vanishing amidst the presence of angry blood. ”****! How do I tell the team that the whole damn country is basically our enemy now?”

The mission had been a partial success, and a whole-scale clusterf***. They all got away, eventually, but not without assorted personal traumas and additional guilt. For Jesse, it was mostly about not being able to help her teammates with anything else but intel, and having to leave the desperate shapeshifter kid behind in his cell. Once upon a time, Mirage would have been able to pull Delta Seven out of the prison through the mirror in a heartbeat. But not anymore.

Becca was, obviously, blaming herself for everything. She paced, trying to process all that they had learned, while Jesse, still wearing the same face she had during the mission, leaned against the mirror from the inside, feeling more tired mentally than she had been for a long time, watching her wife work herself into a rage.

>>”It’s the government, Jesse. The government took mutants and ****ed with their heads and their genetics. ****! How do I tell the team that the whole damn country is basically our enemy now?”

"I'd be lying if I said I can't believe it." Jesse said with a bitter frown "But at least we know more now than we knew yesterday?"

It was not much of a silver lining, but short of hugging her wife, Jesse was really at a loss of what to do.

Rebecca would not be so manic in front of anyone else, but she was always her truest self with Jesse. From their first meetings, the shapeshifter saw through her and understood her more than anyone else. To the world, she was steady and tempered like steel, but Jesse had seen the height of her highs and the depths of her lows.

She was feeling low after the mission. A smoldering, spiteful low. The X-Men had a looming threat she had no clue how to handle, because she was naïve enough to think the government would never sink lower than a registration act. What did she do next? Approach the office of her local representative and voice a complaint for the Nazi-esque mutant experiments being sanctioned a few miles outside the Bronx?

”We know just what we knew yesterday. We’re second-class citizens and politicians are garbage. We just never knew how far both those things went.” Rebecca paced to her desk to glance at some of the printed recovered files, but she could only look at them for a few seconds. Everything was still too fresh.

She slammed her fist against the wooden surface. ”Dammit!” She muttered quietly, more to herself than anything, ”If Arclight was here, she’d know what to do.” The loss of her old team meant Rebecca never got to finish learning from the matriarch that brought her onto the team. If she had ever retired, Rebecca was likely not the first pick to step up and fill her shoes. Trina was a real leader, and Rebecca was what was left.

Turning her focus back to the mirror and Jesse, she tried to focus on the small victories of their mission. ”No, I guess you’re right. We know more than yesterday. And Blue Team succeeded. We got the mutants out. That’s something…” It should have been a greater victory, but it felt hollow when she was certain there were other facilities with mutants just as desperate to be rescued.

>>”We know just what we knew yesterday. We’re second-class citizens and politicians are garbage. We just never knew how far both those things went.”

Becca kept pacing, and Jesse moved along, slipping from one mirror int he office to the next, to keep up with her wife. She did not feel the same nervous energy as Becca did, but she was upset in another way, and the fact that they could not connect made her more frustrated as well.
Becca was right, too. Politicians were garbage, and whatever someone could imagine they did in the shadows, they were probably doing much, much worse.

>>”Dammit! If Arclight was here, she’d know what to do.”

"Becca..." Jesse sighed. That was the point where her wife was too hard on herself. She was a good leader, great even, and she managed to pull off a mission - two missions - that easily could have ended in catastrophe. Sure, it was not a complete success, but she was putting too much blame on herself as she processed all that had happened.

>>”No, I guess you’re right. We know more than yesterday. And Blue Team succeeded. We got the mutants out. That’s something…”

"Not all of them." it was Jesse's turn to frown bitterly, as she thought of Delta Seven. He was just a kid... a kid with powers like hers, captured and used by the government to find other mutants. "Becca, we will need to go back. But this time we'll know better."

Rebecca heard Jesse offer a weak protest as she berated herself for not being the kind of leader the team needed, but she disregarded the sentiment. At a later date, she might logically remind herself that she was doing the best she could as the captain of an old ship and a skeleton crew. With the way her last mission went down, she needed time to be hard on herself so she could push herself to work harder and do what needed to be done.

The rescued mutants were a silver lining, but even that came with caveats of failure. As Jesse reminded her, not every captured mutant was set free amidst their mission. Blue team escaped with the mutants in the lab, but not every captive was held in the lab. ”Right,” she groaned. ”Dammit, right. The shapeshifter. The kid.” A child. They failed to rescue a child, reportedly no older than a pre-teen, under the control of a mutant-manipulating government organization.

Dystopian novels would not do it justice.

”We can’t go back, Jesse.” She was not happy admitting it, but she had to be a realist. ”SUPER proved one thing, and it’s that they aren’t stupid. The base was compromised. Everything that’s worth a damn won’t be staying there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just demo the whole facility.” It was a small victory in the grand scheme of things.

Rebecca did not mean to dismiss Jesse’s idea, but she realized that was what she did in her frustration. It was not right to take her stress out on the one person who was willing to be there at her worst. ”We will go and get Delta Seven out. We just… need to figure out how and where. I’m probably going to spend the night pouring over the files we recovered to see if I can get some leads.” She was not feeling the call to sleep any time soon anyway.

The whole situation had her shaking her head. ”We should have torched more than a records room,” she grumbled. The only reason she did not tear walls and ceilings apart on her way out was out of concern for the unconscious men left in hallways who would not be able to escape. Looking back, the reason hardly seemed worth it. ”Now Cait and Astrid are going to lose sleep they don’t deserve to lose. Over those people. Not even people,” she corrected, staring off into the distance. ”Monsters.” Try as she might, Rebecca could not find sympathy for the casualties they inflicted to make it out as a team.

>>”Right. Dammit, right. The shapeshifter. The kid. We can’t go back, Jesse. SUPER proved one thing, and it’s that they aren’t stupid. The base was compromised. Everything that’s worth a damn won’t be staying there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just demo the whole facility.”

Jesse sighed. Becca was right. They could not go back, because there would be nothing to go back to, and until they located another facility, or Delta Seven himself, they had no chance of finishing what they started - or for her to keep the promise she had made to the kid. And she intended to keep it. One thing Jesse knew about her wife was that Becca could be trusted to see things through, one way or another.

>>”We will go and get Delta Seven out. We just… need to figure out how and where. I’m probably going to spend the night pouring over the files we recovered to see if I can get some leads.”

"No you won't. You need sleep." Jesse said, leaning her shoulder against the glass. She knew Becca was not paying attention to her concern right now, but she was barely awake on her feet.

>>”We should have torched more than a records room. Now Cait and Astrid are going to lose sleep they don’t deserve to lose. Over those people. Not even people. Monsters.”

"Becca. Don't go there." Jesse said quietly. Monster was a word too easily thrown around; it was usually used against mutants, but if they started applying it to any enemy, things were going to get exponentially worse. "We did our best. You, me, the team." Jesse's best was frustratingly little, but this was not the time for her to process that "We can't all process this at once. You need to take a breath."

Jesse was trying to be the responsible, calming influence she knew her wife needed when frustration was getting to her. It was noble and often effective, but she was working against a pile of problems weighing on Rebecca. They had a foe with near limitless resources, meanwhile the team was operating on a shoestring budget. SUPER was willing to shoot to kill, or worse, capture, meanwhile they were toeing the line of the ethical high ground, tying hands behind their back before charging in. She had a daughter who was terrified of her powers for the first time possibly in her life. Sleep could have sounded good, but it would mean returning home to a bed she could not share with the person she loved. With everything else weighing on her… that might just be too much to bear for the night.

Rebecca looked down at her feet, because she worried Jesse would see in her eyes how close she was to breaking down. She had important things to stress about, and she did not have a moment to spare crying that Jesse could not offer so much as a reassuring hand on the shoulder. ”Do we even know if the kid gets to sleep? No, we don’t, and we won’t until I start looking through those damn files.” The tail end of her comment was sharper than she meant. Jesse did not deserve to be the target of her frustration, but Rebecca was not clear-headed enough to remind herself of that.

The word monster must have caught Jesse’s attention, because she quickly reminded Rebecca of the slippery slope she was approaching. Even in her days as a criminal, Jesse was not a killer. If she was, it never came up in Rebecca’s research. As her wife and team leader started considering compromises, Jesse had to be the voice of reason.

Unfortunately, it was hard to hear the voice of reason when it was advocating the same path that put their backs against the wall. ”Don’t go there like they haven’t gone there? They’re making mutants—our people—into lab rats, Jesse. What if our best isn’t good enough for this?”

She was still looking away, but it was now out of the fear she might lose control of her powers and shatter Jesse’s mirror. It had not happened since she was a child, but she was not feeling at her most stable. ”What if our best isn’t good enough and they get their hands on Astrid? What then? Will you be here to pat me on the back and remind me we were the ‘better men?’” It was unexpectedly harsh, but with the resources the government could back SUPER with, it was a legitimate fear for the X-Team Leader, and if one thing could get her emotional, it was the idea of losing her daughter.

>> ”Do we even know if the kid gets to sleep? No, we don’t, and we won’t until I start looking through those damn files.”

"Becca. I don't sleep." Jesse said calmly, hoping to bring her wife up from the spiral she was working herself into. She really did not sleep, or rather, did not need sleep in the mirrorworld; she did it out of habit, and to pass the time at night. But if someone was going to stay up after the mission they had just pulled, there was no argument that it had to be Jesse. Becca could lay out files, or set the computer to automatic pages, but Jesse was not going to let her pull an all-nighter. Not again.

She had hoped her comment about monsters would pull Becca back, but instead she got even more upset.

>>”Don’t go there like they haven’t gone there? They’re making mutants—our people—into lab rats, Jesse. What if our best isn’t good enough for this?... What if our best isn’t good enough and they get their hands on Astrid? What then? Will you be here to pat me on the back and remind me we were the ‘better men?’”

"Our best might not be much, but our worst will definitely not be enough to end this." Jesse frowned, shaking her head. She knew that mutants held potential to do great distruction and damage; if Becca went that route, many of them would join up, just to kill, pillage, and take revenge for very real pain in the past. But that was not going to solve anything, and Becca knew it too. "Astrid is fine, Becca, you taught her well. And if anyone comes for her, we'll be ready. But we have to manage our resources. And you are one of them." Jesse forced her own voice to stay steady. If they really came for Astrid, there was nothing she could do. The only way she could help was to keep Becca from falling apart - that was the only mission left. "You are the most important one, actually." she added, more softly.

Jesse did not need sleep, that much was true. She could not interact with the world around her, but there were ways around that problem and Rebecca knew that. She was fighting so hard to look over the documents because she felt like the one who should be responsible for the problems they had lined up ahead of them. Sleep was necessary, but she worried about the nightmares it might dredge up.

She had to give Jesse points for persistence. She was doing all she could to be Rebecca’s conscience and save her soul. As angry as she was, Jesse was doing a great job reminding her that she still had someone to support her. Her spouse was trying to comfort her, reassuring her they would find a way to survive without sinking to the level of their opponents. She was still wary; Astrid learned well, but so did her old team. It only took one well-placed explosion to finish them, after all.

As much as she worried Jesse’s view was naïve, she also held her tongue. She was lashing out at the woman she loved because she was trying to keep Rebecca from making a decision she could not come back from. She always valued Jesse’s opinions, even when they did not agree with her. It was her frustration and worry that were making her cagey.

Rebecca’s head hung low as she walked to the mirror, placing a palm on the cool surface. ”I’m still not sure if it’ll be enough. I still want our team to be in the best position to keep themselves safe. But… I won’t do anything hasty or reckless. We’re the good guys, after all,” she added with an attempt at a smile.

The fight slowly ebbed out of Becca, and Jesse let out a sigh. None of the issues were resolved, and none of the questions answered - but that would not change tonight, and they both needed different kinds of rest. There was nothing else to do, and Becca knew it; Jesse knew her wife enough to see when she decided to keep her words for another time. Becca never gave up. She just took breaks, and she usually had to be forced (or lured) into taking them.

>>”I’m still not sure if it’ll be enough. I still want our team to be in the best position to keep themselves safe. But… I won’t do anything hasty or reckless. We’re the good guys, after all,”

"We are." Jesse agreed with a small smile, resting her forehead on the other side of the glass. Forehead to forehead, palm to palm, they were as close as they could get. "We lived to fight another day today. Just for tonight, that is good enough."

Jesse was a great spouse. She knew when Rebecca was feeling weak, and she knew when to give the fiery Brit her time to work through things. There were still doubts in her mind regarding the right direction for the team, but Jesse had successfully deescalated a woman who was preparing to cut a warpath through SUPER’s employment records. It was a mighty feat for someone who was on the other side of a screen.

Rebecca pressed her hand and forehead to the glass, trying to envision the sensation of Jesse’s touch. She was just too drained to feel anything but the cold, uncaring surface of the mirror, but she forced her smile anyway. Jesse did everything she could; it was not her fault when that came up short. It was the mirror’s fault.

”Good enough,” she repeated. Maybe Jesse had a point; she was of little use to anyone in her current state. ”I think you’re right, darling. Maybe some sleep would be good for me…”

Pulling away from the mirror, Rebecca’s fingers took the longest to leave the surface, as if they were trying to keep her tethered to one of the two best things in her life. ”I can set the files out to make it easier for you to look them over.” She sounded distracted, like half her mind was occupied somewhere else. ”Then I… I think I could use a walk home. Clear my head.” She thought about how Agnes would “clear her head,” and wondered if beating up some passing thug might ease the storm clouds obscuring her logical thoughts.

>>”I think you’re right, darling. Maybe some sleep would be good for me…”

Jesse knew she was right. She also knew that Becca did not mean it. It was neither of their fault, but what Jesse could do to help was limited, and cut off by a plate of glass from any form of real contact. On evenings like this, she might as well have been a million miles away. They were both too tired to argue, so they silently agreed to disagree.

>>”I can set the files out to make it easier for you to look them over. Then I… I think I could use a walk home. Clear my head.”

"Sure thing." Jesse nodded. There were enough reflecting surfaces around so that she could spend the entire night looking at laid out pages if she needed to. That was something she could do to help. It was work. And she was going to do it as long as she needed to, to contribute to whatever happened next.

She also knew Becca was probably not going to take a quiet walk home either.

"Be safe, love. See you at home."