She sat on the edge of the cliff, her arms draped softly around her right knee as her left foot dangled above the abyss.
Her brows furrowed as her head leaned forward. Right there, in front of her, cradled between sharp mountains and steep valleys, her last target laid in silence, wasted and littered with corpses.
'It's okay,' she told herself. 'They were bad people,' she kept on lying to her weeping conscience.
She took her right hand towards her earpiece, shaky fingers threading through messy hair as they tried to find a very familiar button. She pressed it, and the small piece of tech came to life in an explosion of static. A few seconds later, it died down. She swallowed the last bits of bitter bile left behind by the massacre, before talking to her teammates.
"Everyone okay?" A few 'affirmatives' followed shortly, and she counted them in her usual routine. No skipped heartbeats today. No one to mourn.
"Great."
Another successful mission. Another suicide plan pulled off. Still, she was sure the nightmares would continue, fueled now by new faces she'd have to see every time she'd sleep. Faces of bad people, she kept on reminding herself. Tormented and crying out in pain as she took their lives nonetheless. Good or bad, it wouldn't justify her actions. It never did.
She clutched her knee tighter. Pushed her head between her crossed arms. Hot tears welled up behind her eyes, until she could no longer contain them. So they started to flow. On and on they kept coming, as the now familiar lines started playing in her head once again.
There's no living with a killing. There's no going back from it. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand that sticks.
"Why are we doing this?" Rebecca had once asked her.
"Because of the poison they put in food and water," she'd answered. "Because they hunt us relentlessly wherever we go," she'd followed. "Because we're NOT God's mistakes," she'd cried out between broken sobs.
"Because we're not…" she tried telling herself once again.
The words her father left her with didn't help much either.
"Don't be what they made you to be," he told her with his dying breath.
'Don't be what? A killer? A mutant? Alive?' She knew the meaning of those words very well, but she could never bring herself to live by them.
'Don't be like you were?' Since they started thwarting Alkali's plans, new mutants started being born. Protectors or villains, it didn't matter to her. They were mutants nonetheless, and with each and every one of them, their kind was clawing their way out of extinction's grasp.
It still didn't justify her actions though. Never would, never will. And that was something she was still trying to learn how to live with.
A/N: Okay, I know I'm late to the party, but I've just seen Logan and man. It was a very good movie. It was the best X-Men movie by far. So I've decided to write a very short drabble about it, 'cause why not. Thank you for reading it.