Work Text:
The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. – The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Adam looks out his bedroom window and sees Mercy Thompson come into view. She’s pushing an old car out from her pole barn, and Adam takes a moment to admire the woman’s form and strength, her independence. He raises an arm automatically in greeting, and the distant figure pauses her pushing and waves back with both arms. Christy is snapping at him, though, even angrier not to have his full attention, and he turns away from the window to answer his wife. When he looks again, dusk has fallen, and with a twist of irritation he sees that the car is positioned in the exact centre of his field of view.
As the days stretch into weeks, Adam watches the abandoned car with dwindling patience. It takes an embarrassingly long time before he realizes the car is actually a deliberate insult – and at the thought, there is an unexpected warmth in his chest, like a bruise is fading. He drives Christy to the airport for the last time, and his headlights pick up the Rabbit in the field when he turns into his driveway and walks back inside.
~ ~ ~
Adam looks out his bedroom window and sees Mercy Thompson march into view. A few days ago he left her cat sitting in a carrier on her front porch (“That cat should not be let outside; there are coyotes in this neighbourhood.”), and he knows this will be Mercy’s retaliation. He keeps an eye on her as Mercy does something unidentifiably mechanical for a few minutes, and then he hears a distant clang as the rear bumper of the Rabbit falls off. Mercy props the bumper against Adam’s fence, gives his house the finger, and stalks back out of frame. Behind the curtains, Adam smiles.
~ ~ ~
Adam knows a lot about damage. As a soldier, he first trained to think of hurts, great or minor, as progress towards destruction of the target. Each injury brings the body further from full capacity, towards the point (despair, incapacitation, death) where it ceases to fight. From what he’s gathered from Jesse, Adam imagines children growing up with video games think much like this – he wonders if young soldiers today conceive of health in Hit Points.
In his years in Vietnam, Adam learned to categorize a fantastic host of irritations, injuries, losses, deprivations, and depravities. He learned to map bruises, broken bones, blood loss, poison, fever, and fatigue (and 80 hours without sleep is an injury, he doesn’t care what the commander says). He became fluent in the signs of drug use, disillusionment, depression and trauma. He knew the difference between the damage that sends you back out on the offensive, and the damage that sends you home, or to the grave. He learned to recognize the wounds that fade, and the ones that linger. He sensed the makings of a spiderweb of scars, reaching deeper with each act of violence into all the peoples in this land.
From the moment Adam first learned of the existence of werewolves (four of his men dying in the space of seconds, and Christiansen clinging to him even as the creature ripped into his side) Adam knew that his laws of trauma would need to be rewritten. A werewolf could triumph over physical injury so totally that it would seem as if he had never been hurt at all.
The mind is the werewolf’s only true vulnerability, the only thing left that can warp or wither as the wolf keeps the body young. For the predator that survives – that wishes to survive –only so long as it controls its instincts, psychological fragility is more deadly than silver bullets. This is why the dominance system is so important, why weakness so provokes the wolf’s hatred and fear.
The night that Adam announces his divorce before the pack, he and his wolves fight three dominance contests in wolf form. The roars and violence last for hours – the stench of rage, blood, and weakness rather longer. Adam doesn’t even think about Mercy until, slumped in wolf form in his back yard, he hears her door open and sees her silhouette moving against the early morning sunrise. The woman hops the fence and comes to crouch at his ear.
“Are you hurt?”
Adam growls.
“Did you win?”
Adam huffs, and gives his tail a careful thump. Mercy gives him a quick pat (he snaps at her, but doesn’t mean it) and walks away to fill a pail with water from his hose. Soon he’s gulping water eagerly, head in the pail like a Labrador, and Mercy’s hopping the fence again, heading home. It’s only later that Adam realizes the oddness that after such a night, his wolf had had no problem turning his back to Mercy.
I trust her, he thinks. I trust her with my life.
Adam makes sure to drop by Mercy’s garage and chew her out for trusting him, in wolf form, not to kill her. When he gets home that night, the Rabbit is missing a door.
~ ~ ~
The Rabbit suffers a little more every month or so. One November, Adam stuffs Medea in a carrier again (“[…]IF I SEE IT AGAIN, I WILL EAT IT”), and wakes later to a distant smash as the rear windshield splinters. Soon afterwards, once the hideous Thanksgiving of Jesse’s kidnapping is over, the Rabbit loses three tires and gains a coat of spray paint. As the months pass, though, Adam notices an insulting new trend in the routine: Mercy starts employing assistants in her vandalism.
One evening Adam looks out and sees Mercy and Samuel going out to the Rabbit together. Another time it’s the vampire Stefan who seems to be helping Mercy’s “repairs.” Adam feels his hackles rising in jealousy when he looks at the car these days, but it’s not until the December afternoon Jesse stomps into the house smelling once again of Mercy, spray paint, and Christmas baking, that he finds out the reason for the quirk.
“It’s not like she can do it all herself,” Jesse argues. “Her arm’s still in a brace.”
That night it’s Adam turn to hop the fence. The night is bitterly cold, for the Tri-Cities – the temperature has dipped far below freezing and though there’s little snow, the hard earth is glittering, covered in a spiky frost. Adam’s nose is hurting from breathing the cold air, but he zips up his jacket, sits down in front of the Rabbit and looks, really looks at it, for the first time.
The car has come a long way since Mercy first wheeled it out to the field. Mercy has surgically dismantled it piece by piece. It’s been broken, beaten, painted, scratched, hacked and abused. It’s lost most of what made it more than a rusting metal frame. Adam feels sick, remembering how he had used to look forward to new damage to the car, how he’d taken it as a sign of Mercy’s insubordination, her flirtation. Oh God – she’d put the damn thing in his view this whole time, and he’d never seen it as a cry for help. Adam can’t get the smell of it out of his nose, and he’s coughing and coughing until there are tears streaming down his face.
A flimsy door opens and closes, and Mercy comes into view. She’s leaning on her walking stick as she walks, and her winter coat is bulging over where her arm is still in its sling, but she’s moving gamely enough. From his position on the ground she towers briefly like a giant, silhouetted against the night – then she steps near and settles down beside him, and he can only look at the Rabbit and pretend he’s not avoiding her gaze.
“I’m sorry about the car,” he ventures after a while. He can feel Mercy looking at him quizzically.
“Bran’s Porsche, when I was 16? I’m pretty sure I’m over it.”
“No, Mercy,” Adam says gently. “I’m sorry about this”– he waves at the wreck in front of them. “I’m sorry it – got hurt. I’m sorry you got hurt.” He turns to her now to follow the impact of his words, taking in the shadows under her eyes, the fragile stiffness in her frame – and then suddenly she’s laughing, her breath drifting in clouds about them.
“Adam, this might be the first time you’ve ever given me a serious apology in all the time I’ve known you. I’m sorry to waste it. But the Rabbit? That’s just something I mess up to piss you off. I thought you knew that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Adam feels a wave of relief, but he must be sure, he must be able to sniff out this weakness: “Mercy – haven’t you noticed, well, similarities between yourself and the Rabbit the past year? You’ve both taken quite a beating.”
“I’m not sure whether to be insulted. You’re saying, what, the car is my portrait? Some kind of painting? How can you look at that” – she jabs a finger at it – “and see me?”
“Mercy–” and then Adam remembers a line from an old novel, and says slowly: “‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist.’ Oscar Wilde–,” he adds.
“–Dorian Gray.” Mercy leans back, her good arm around her knees. “OK, you’ve got me thinking. You’re not quite right, but there is something more here.
“The Rabbit – messing it up is a tradition now. It’s an in-joke between you and me (or I thought it was). I like ticking you off and I get people to help me so I can do it more often. But it also means I’m still fighting you, fighting back when you get a little patronizing or manipulative. So it’s also a sign that things are OK. It means we’re still in each other’s lives. And if you and I are still bickering it also means I’m not doing too badly against the things that really want me dead.”
Adam considers. “In the book, Dorian Gray’s portrait took the damage so Dorian could stay young and strong.”
Mercy’s mouth twitches. “And become a depraved murderer. You’re 0-for-2 on flattering metaphors tonight, babe. But yes – it’s one of my ways of – let’s call it, keeping a healthy mindset over the long term.”
“Of enduring.” Adam smiles at her, his heart swelling with joy – and then they’re kissing under the starlight, their breath mingling together.
A few minutes later, Mercy starts shivering seriously, and they prepare to head back indoors.
They stand for a moment contemplating the Rabbit. Finally, Mercy says, “You know, I am a car mechanic, so hear ye my professional opinion. Nothing’s been done to this old girl yet that she couldn’t come back from.”