Dana stalked through the living room on the way to the kitchen to find Mike in his t-shirt and boxer shorts, folding up the blankets and pillows that had converted the Brodys' sofa into his bed for the night. It was just Mike's bad luck that he was the first person Dana had come across that morning and the one to bear her wrath.
"Oh please Mike, you slept on the sofa?", she whined.
"Good morning, Dana.", said Mike, ignoring her tone, not rising to the bait.
"I mean, why are you even fucking pretending? Everyone knows you've been screwing my mom for years.", she continued, getting more exercised.
"Dana.", sighed Mike.
"Dana!", echoed Jess only louder and angrier, racing into the center of the room and coming to an abrupt halt with one hand on her hip.
But Dana was in no mood to back down. "Aren't we a little bit beyond this? I mean, there really is no reason to hide it any more. There is something a little more important going on right now after all, in case you hadn't noticed. I know. Chris knows. Even Dad knew. Exactly whose feelings are you trying to spare? The only person who cared is gone. He's gone. Properly, this time. So, just give it the fuck up!".
Jess bit her lip and glared at her daughter. Dana, realizing how incoherent and ridiculous her outburst had been but still feeling better for having lashed out, stormed back to her room. Mike and Jess raised their eyebrows at each other, while Chris, who had ventured out of his bedroom in the middle of the yelling, ducked back inside quickly and pushed the door closed behind him.
"What the hell did you say to her?", Jess asked Mike.
"I said 'good morning'", he shrugged. Jess laughed plaintively, drawing him into a hug. Mike kissed her cheek.
"Did you sleep okay on there?", she gestured to the sofa.
"Sleeping probably isn't the best way to describe it. But I was fine. You look beat too. How are you doing?" Mike said, rubbing her arm.
"I honestly don't know how I am." said Jess, looking up at him, still feeling bewildered.
"Maybe you should go talk to Dana?", he suggested, "I'll see to Chris, get him to help me make breakfast.".
Dana sat on her bed texting Xander to come by and get her 'the fuck out of there', scraping her top lip with her bottom teeth to keep from crying again. Jess knocked, didn't wait for an answer, entered and sat on her bed.
"You can't just attack Mike like that.", stated Jess. "Mike has only ever done right by you and you know it.".
"Oh really?!, like the time he broke up my parents' marriage? Mike's been a great help, for sure!", Dana snapped sarcastically.
"Mike is not why we separated. That had more to do with the way your Dad has been since he came home. You will apologize to Mike.". Jess was calm and stern. She checked herself for not having spoken about Brody in the past tense.
"Mom. I am an adult. You don't get to tell me how to feel, what to say and who I should apologize to anymore. That's not how it works." Dana replied, aggressively.
"If you were an adult, you wouldn't feel the need to abuse Mike because you can't deal with everything that's happening right now. I'd expect it from Chris, because he is a child, but not from you. If you are angry with your father, go ahead and be angry with him. That's how it works. Don't confuse the issue here.". Jess was proud of herself, she wasn't getting emotional, she was in control.
"Maybe I'm not angry with him.", Dana growled. "Maybe I'm mad at you?" She tossed her phone down on the bed bedside her, building up steam. "Do you believe he has done what they say he's done? I haven't heard you question it once. Are you just going to take it? He is still your husband, even if you have clearly moved on. Mine and Chris' dad. You just sat there last night and let fucking Mulder and Scully tell me, tell Chris, that our father is a mass murdering terrorist. Why won't you fucking fight for him?!" Her voice cracked at the last and she broke down. Her tears fell once more but not like the previous night, this time they seemed to come out in chunks, like they were almost too big to express from her tear ducts, each wave accompanied by a huge sob that rocked her body.
Jess took hold of her daughter and rubbed her head while she cried. She couldn't remember the last time Dana had let her hold her like this. She was suddenly just the soft, limp, trembling girl in her arms, not a sharp, angular firework that fizzed every time Jess looked at her. "The video, Dana. He confessed. What defense is there? I know this hurts more than anything has ever hurt before. It's probably the worst thing you'll ever have to go through. I can't see how there could be much worse than this. I don't want to believe he did it...but he confessed...it just explains so much. Dana, I'm so sorry. That's why I didn't fight for him.". Jess blinked back her own tears. She added, quietly, "And if you're really asking me why I didn't fight for him when he said he wanted to leave home, it was because he didn't want me to.".
Dana looked up at her mother and wondered if, deep down, that had been what she really meant.
"But he was getting better, for Christ's sake. He was doing so much better!", Dana said angrily. Her words tumbled out, choking her as she gasped in air and spat out strands of her hair from her mouth. "He wasn't like before, the time when he just seemed...wrong. That time, I would have believed it. Like that CIA woman believed it. He told me we were right. That time he listened to me. I told him I needed him to come home and he did. This time he...he was different than before, he told me he knew he'd been screwed up before. Like he'd changed. This was right before Finn's dad's service. Right before. He couldn't have done it. He wouldn't just leave me like this.". She cried hard enough now that no sound came out, hiding her silent rictus howling against her mother's shoulder, covering her with tears that seemed thicker, stickier than normal. She wasn't sure if it was out of grief, or the sense of rejection by her father that Brody really having done this implied, or the indignation and sense of injustice caused by her conviction that he definitely had not. Either way, it fucking hurt and adult or not, it was far too much for her to bear.
Jess stayed with her, smoothing her hair and stroking her back long after Dana had stopped crying, almost grateful that she had fallen to pieces and hostilities had ceased long enough to allow Jess this direct contact with her baby. God knew, she needed it. Jess felt sure that Dana was just in denial. She would suggest that she told everything to the agents who were coming to pick them up later that day and hope that they would help her make sense of it. Jess just didn't have the answers. She had always handled the calls of "Where's my daddy?", and "Is he ever coming home?" that the kids launched at her on an almost daily basis while they were growing up by being positive and giving them hope. She would rather have been seen to have lied to Dana and Chris all that time now, she wished he had never come back. What had their prayers been worth? What assurances could she ever give them again, when nothing was certain even if they came true?