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The last UnSub he stopped in Texas had been mumbling something about mercy as he died: how God must have mercy on them and how they would be all saved. It was typical deep-South churchgoer rhetoric, Aaron thought. He also thought that if there was mercy to be found anywhere, it wouldn’t follow him. He’d gone straight home after that.
A half full bottle of iodine has earned a permanent spot on his bathroom sink lineup, next to the toothpaste and a bottle of hand soap he’d topped up with water last week. In the cupboard sits a larger supply of gauze and bandages than one man should ever need, and he learned long ago that dark coloured towels were easier to maintain than bleaching his own blood off the white ones Haley had bought when they married. One of the lights above the mirror is burned out, leaving a singular dim fluorescent glow to see by.
He says three Hail Marys unable to look himself in the eye. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. The words fall heavy from his mouth, and Aaron questions if he deserves these prayers at all.
It’s only when he peels off his jacket that he sees how far the red blooms on his blue-striped shirt, and he wonders if the stain will ever come out. He forgets about the unmendable tear where the UnSub’s knife had caught him in the fight, instead focussing on where the raw, red meat of his muscle glistens, cherry-red where pale skin should be. And God, have mercy, it hurts. He’s clammy and pale under the flickering cool light, and the acidic remnants of the day’s lunch turn uncomfortably in his stomach.
Taking his shirt off became a test of his mental endurance. Beneath nine neatly fastened buttons, nine clean, carefully placed scars are joined by the new wound. Nine, the number of the scales and the sword, of judgement and of finality. The ninth hour that gave way to Biblical stories of new beginnings and new men. Aaron remembers the litany of it: nine times he silently begged God to have mercy; nine prayers he’d offered up to take the place of Foyet’s blade; nine shames that followed when he realised he was still alive to remember the sound of his own trembling, pathetic surrender.
He turns away to undress with his back to the mirror, the way he has since he was a child, and ends up trying not to stare at the faint pink remnants of his own blood on the carpet instead. He makes a mental note to buy a rug for the spot before Jack next comes to spend the night, and focuses on the whirring of the extractor fan instead.
Practiced hands softly palpate the edges of the wound, and Aaron pulls himself together enough to take stock of the facts and make a plan. The incision is clean, and he has just enough iodine left to disinfect it relatively thoroughly. Four, maybe five inches wide, but not deep enough to warrant a trip to the ER when butterfly bandages would do the job. A graze on his left upper arm gets a cursory wipe down with wetted fingers, and it’s added to his mental evidence manifest.
Iodine’s sharp sting is welcomed, white knuckles gripping the edges of the basin when he pushes the weave of the gauze into the wound and bears down on the surrounding bruising. It’s a clinical ritual he has grown somewhat accustomed to, despite the testaments of his shame being swept away with the scratch of the cotton and a yellow stain scored by rattled breaths. He asks himself when he had become so much like his father, seeking out fights under the guise of ‘protection’, and of some ‘divine right’ to mete out ill-considered verdicts.
Some people grow up to become serial killers, and some people grow up to catch them, he’d told Vincent Perotta. He debates whether any definition of justice could be considered ‘holy’, and decides he doesn’t have an answer that doesn’t make him sick. He reaches for the worn box of bandages instead.
Mercy, he thinks, is unmarred skin and hands that don’t shake.
In moments like this Aaron recalls a different bathroom: larger and brighter, decorated with a collection of odd porcelain sheep and cloying floral soaps. The same faint pink stains adorn the small rug in front of the sink. He needed a step-stool to reach the faucet, and to reach the antiseptic on the shelf just above it. He remembers how that bathroom was where this ritual began at barely seven years old, where the smell of smoke and stale cedar cologne hung heavy in the air and where he suppressed ragged breaths so Sean didn’t hear him cry. Back then, his bandaged hands would tremble too, and Aaron would press them together weakly, his eyes fixed on the door, whispering a prayer that his younger brother wouldn’t have to feel this pain too.
At eight years old, his mother would begin storing the antiseptic in the cabinet under the sink instead.
Slowly, Aaron breathes in shaky measures until the pain lodges itself dully in the space between his lungs and his throat instead of his open torso. One, two, three, four, five stitches he smooths down, and he wonders when he’ll stop measuring his life in Pyrrhic victories. He thinks of the new rug, maybe blue, to match the couch, thick enough to swallow the evidence of his failures.
Mapping out the nine blushing scars and the tenth angry, red gash, he thinks of that little boy. Maybe this ‘mercy’ God was supposed to have was that of strength and of endurance. Maybe it is calloused hands that allow him to keep hold of the ones he loves, and maybe it is the stubbornness to walk headfirst into danger knowing it could save another.
A tenth scar breaks Foyet’s perfect constellation of nine, and for that he is grateful that his body is no longer a temple to a killer’s ideals, if not a monument to the times he had clawed at a salvation just out of reach. Even Foyet had brought him to the hospital that night, and it would take Aaron two months to realise that his mercy was not of being saved, but of God never allowing him to lay down his shield.
A white bandage covers the evidence, and he pulls on a clean cotton t-shirt. The old garment is used to wipe down the sink - it’s destined for the trash anyway - and he briefly laments the inconvenience of having to replace it. The now-empty iodine bottle goes into the trash too, and he adds ‘antiseptic’ to his mental shopping list, next to ‘rug’, ‘light bulb’ and ‘bread’. He’ll mend himself next time too, and maybe it’s mercy that he learned how. When he flicks the light off, leaving the bathroom in darkness save only for a soft glow from the kitchen outside, he decides this grace is enough.
He hopes that when Jack is old enough to ask him for the meaning of ‘mercy’, he’d have an answer to give.