The Philosophy of Mercy

[credit_not_blame]

The worst thing about trying to be a person who lives life deliberately is that sometimes you make a choice you don't understand.

Well, at least that's the worst thing that Stacia is dealing with at the moment. There's probably other worse things she'll discover as she continues to move through life as a deliberate person. Life is full of 'worsts' (and 'bests', she's clinging to the 'bests' with every scrap of strength she has because otherwise there's no point to anything at all, and that way lies Harano and the Wyrm).

Magic bullshit happens, and sometimes it's the kind of magic bullshit that forces you look at something you'd put aside because you had other, more urgent things to deal with. Which is what happened to Stacia, and because she doesn't currently have another urgent distraction, it's gnawing on the back of her brain and driving her crazy. Obviously she can't go back and undo the decision, but she wants -- needs -- to understand why she'd done what she'd done so that she's more informed in the future.

What is the difference between showing mercy to an enemy verses leaving them alive to stab you again later?

Fortunately, between other magic bullshit, Stacia's own friendliness and charm, and a certain someone's absolute refusal to hold a grudge even when he really should, Stacia has someone who can probably help her break down that question and come up with a satisfactory answer.

She goes looking for Dan.

Comments

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan makes an effort to go find Stacia every other month or so, which he never tells her is at Bunny's behest. It's not that he doesn't want to see Stacia; it's that Dan's spent almost none of his life with any reason to stretch the social muscle of keeping in touch, and as such, unless he's being outright prodded into maintaining his friendships, he tends to forget how long has lapsed between seeing people. When he was a child, he lived in a bunker; when he was a young adult, he had no longterm relationships to hold onto; on the Rig and in the Wilderlands, his relationships were managed for him, and he couldn't let them slide unattended to even if he wanted to.

So to ensure that he continued to spend time with Stacia (and Elle, Ace, and the others), he's put Stacia's world in his "circuit", the worlds he skips to and from with the Guardians' magic powering his travels, working on the grimmer, more small-scale sorts of mysteries and tragedies than Bunny and his comrades have time for. Stacia's doomed world offers up a lot of opportunities to de-escalate conflicts between monsters, and Dan's becoming increasingly fluent in the complex politics therein. Every time he gets involved in solving a mystery here, he gives Stacia a call, and greets her with a hug and her favorite order of coffee.

"Howdy, stranger."

He looks better than she's ever seen him, alight with having work to do and ways to keep his mind occupied but no longer having to get by on malnutrition, gas station vodka and a prayer between cases. His hands are so minimally chewed that there's currently no broken skin, and he's gained a few pounds, although somewhere between now and the last time Stacia saw him he lost a tooth way in the back of his smile. It's not hard to guess how, as he starts their walk through the woods and takes a sip of a cotton candy-flavored frappuccino.

"Just got back from a kidnapping in Vancouver. Turns out it was just your average humans having a custody battle. Ugly, not supernatural." He shrugs, then pauses, noting an unspoken question in her bearing. His expression gets concerned. "What's on your mind?"

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"Long time no see."

Stacia returns the hug with enthusiasm and accepts the coffee, which is warm and glorious with the promise of caffeine.

"Problems that aren't supernatural?" she asks, an expression of exaggerated shock falling over her face. "Will the wonders never cease?"

She takes a sip of coffee so that she can consider her wording, then decides she's over-thinking it. "I've been chewing on a philosophical problem, and I'm not getting anywhere on my own. Fortunately, you're the person I know who's best suited to helping me work it out, because I know you've thought about it."

She flashes him a quick grin, then sobers to pose the question: "How do I know whether I'm showing mercy or whether I just don't want to do what truly needs to be done?"

[hallelujahjunction]

"Ain't never will. The world is full of wonders." He steers them towards a lovely scenic route along a ridge of cliffs - daunting for people who don't know the wilderness well, but Dan lacks any sort of fear about either of them falling, no matter how much he instinctively wants to fuss over Stacia. It's a beautiful afternoon, good for philosophical questions. "Alright. I do get a lot of thinking done while driving around the country. Shoot."

He drinks his frappe while she asks, and he thinks back on what he knows about Stacia's background, what she's been through, the stakes in preventing it from happening to anyone again, the way she interacts with her Rage, the type of person she is.

"Why is it that it's always murder that we think of as 'what truly needs to be done'?" He peels at a sticker on his coffee cup as they walk. "Ain't no one ever asks it in reverse. Ain't no one ever asks, 'how do I know if I'm needlessly taking a life or whether I just don't want to do the hard work of showing mercy?'"

He isn't criticizing. He's trying to emphasize that it's a whole shift in perspective.

"You know I've taken plenty of lives in my time. I'm up to a hundred and sixty-one, which ain't a boast whatsoever." Dan remembers each one of them, his little tally sheet in his head that he revisits over and over to ask himself if he made the right call. "I've always based my decision on immediate harm. Am I the last link in the chain before this person hurts someone else? Or are there other opportunities for them to choose different or be incapacitated, and how do I push them towards that?"

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia swallows some coffee to wash down a reflexive "you don't know I was talking about murder", because he does and she was. Besides, she also knows that Dan's not judging her. It's stupid to be defensive about it when she asked the question because she wants the answer, not to hear herself talk.

"I mean, I'd like to think that people euphemistically refer to murder as 'what needs to be done' because in general people are reluctant to do murder," she says. "It's psychologically damaging. But I also know that it's possible to build up a callus, as part of the damage." Because she's seen it happen. Because she's experienced it herself, sadly. Oh, that girl she'd been; she misses her and she hopes she always does. "But you're right. Mercy is hard work, and it's also invisible from the outside, which makes it harder."

Their walk has a gorgeous view, and everything smells amazing (even aside from the coffee). Maybe having discussions inside a boring classroom with boring blank walls is a mistake of the educational system. Something something, everything is interconnected, something something. It's not the topic at hand right now.

"One could argue that everyone always has the opportunity to choose to be different than they are," she says. "Though I suppose if someone did, I'd laugh in their face and be sarcastic about it for at least an hour." She huffs a laugh, more breath than noise. "That shit's hard at the best of times, and we're not talking about people in their best times. But I agree that those are good questions to ask before committing acts of violence that can't be taken back." Which is all of them, technically.

"So, you -- the general 'you', not you, Dan, or me, Stacia, specifically -- have the opportunity to remove someone from a situation where they're doing harm and give them the opportunity to do better. But they have to recognize what that opportunity is, don't they? Being yanked out of a familiar situation and dumped in a new one is pretty traumatic. They might just double-down on the harm-doing."

It's a weak-ass argument. But it's where her head's at right now, so she's going to leave it for Dan to do instead.

[hallelujahjunction]

The few times Dan's had to go to a traditional school - going undercover as a janitor, clearing cheshires out of vents and locker rooms, talking down rowdy monsters looking at drunk prom kids as targets - he's always marveled at how claustrophobic and awful it is. Beige-painted walls, orderly rows of desks, posters all over the walls of materials he can't read and doesn't feel like he's missing anything by being unable to, smudgy chalkboards. Stifling. Awful.

Dan's always known, true as gravity, that fresh air is important to thinking things through. That's why people talk about airing out grievances. Venting their spleens.

"That's a risk you run, yeah. So then the question turns into whether you're so certain that they'll double down that you would might be willing to take that opportunity to change away from them. Is that a decision you're situated to make? A lot of..."

Not evil. That's not the word he's looking for.

"A lot of tragedy gets did because folks think they know what's in someone's heart and mind and don't want to listen to anything that might could disprove it. I know ain't all these decisions made with the luxury of time to think it over. But when the situation comes up and there is time to think it over - do you actually know for sure that they ain't going to change? I always try and consider what information I'm basing it on when I make those decisions, and my gut instinct to stay my hand is information too."

He knows she hates the smell, so when they hit a scenic vista he moves downwind from her before he lights up a cigarette. "I don't always get it right. I done let some monsters and some folks go and then had to come back and try again when they didn't change their ways, and that has a price. I just keep hoping it's a lesser price than killing folks who would have gone on to change. I think....I think people got a right to be a better version of themselves tomorrow than they are today. And if you want to deprive someone their rights, you err on the side of avoiding that as much as you can."

Maybe that's the libertarian in him.

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia turns her mind's eye toward the reason she'd asked this question: the pack that had killed Lilly and Bares-His-Fangs and her choices in how she'd dealt with them. As a result of their history and her choices, four of them had killed each other in a violent Frenzy, the leader of the pack executed for various crimes, and the lone survivor stripped of her rank and ordered to undergo deprogramming of what she'd been taught by the pack.

The survivor had been the youngest and the lowest-ranked, and only survived the Frenzy because she'd fled rather than fighting. And Stacia had decided not to pursue her, not to hunt her down and make sure she died as well. It was possible that she'd figure out that Stacia was responsible for the deaths of her packmates; the information wasn't unavailable. Maybe one day she'd come for Stacia, or make problems for her because of it. Or, maybe as Dan hoped, she'd turn herself around and realize that killing other Garou for the supposed crime of "being too uppity" and "not knowing their place" was stupid.

Maybe some of the others could have too, if Stacia had left it to King Albrecht and the courts of the Silver Fangs. But she hadn't, and she didn't feel bad about it. They'd made their choice to go along with the murders, and one of them had carved the word "trash" onto Lilly's corpse. Maybe she would have pursued if it 0had been one of them who fled, instead of the one person she'd known hadn't been responsible because she'd been needed at Stacia's assault to keep her from bleeding out.

"That's a good point about gut instinct also being information," she says. "Chasing myself up my own ass isn't helpful." She leans against a tree, giving Dan a nod as he moves downwind. "I also think you're right about tragedy happening when someone decides on something and doesn't want to hear anything to contradict it."

Sums up a whole lot of Garou tragedy for sure.

"It's exhausting," she says. "No wonder people build up calluses. And I'm not even working at the level you are."

[hallelujahjunction]

He shrugs back. "I ain't working at any particular level. We're both dealing with life and death. I just make it a point to seek it out, because some part of me thinks I know best."

Dan isn't being self-deprecating; one doesn't go into a career thrusting themselves into dangerous situations if they don't believe, on some level, that they'll be better at it than the person next to them. Dan knows he's good at his work, and he believes his point-of-view would be sorely lacking in his field without him.

"It's hard work not to build up a callus. That's why I reckon mercy ain't usually an act of cowardice. It takes so much work to stay gentle." Not even just against internal forces; there's a lot of pressure from peers to lean into ruthlessness as well. Violence ratchets upwards. People who commit violent acts yearn for those around them to behave violently as well, as if there's absolution in numbers. I'm not that bad, look at the guy next to me, look at this mob I surround myself with. "People are more afeared of hard work than they are anything else."

He smirks and blows a smoke circle into the air, then shoots another through it, twirling his cigarette between his fingers like a tiny baton even as it leaves ash on his knuckles.

[credit_not_blame]

He may not be being self-depreciating, but Stacia sticks her tongue out at him anyway.

"You've been choosing mercy for longer than I've been alive, even in situations where I wouldn't," she says. "That's not nothing. That's a stronger conviction than most people can manage in our position; so just accept my admission of admiration."

She swallows a giggle, but a smile breaks out over her face regardless.

"I mean, in their defense, hard work is exhausting," she says. "And people really only have so much decision juice in a day, it's easy to let other people make decisions for you if you don't have the conviction to back it up."

[hallelujahjunction]

"Conviction don't mean I'm right. Conviction just means I think I'm right," he says, grinning before he takes another drag. But the he settles into that somber tone again.

"I'm an extremist. I know that about myself, and I wish I weren't, but ain't many people going to knuckle down as hard as I do about these things and that's-"

It's not fine. But it's normal.

"-to be expected. Like you said, most people ain't got much juice left for decisions."

He exhales his last drag and smears out the ember of his cigarette butt between his palms, shielded by the fingerless gloves he wears. He tucks it into his jeans pocket, not wanting to litter.

"That's one of the ways that makes choosing mercy a bit easier, though. Remembering that don't no one ever got enough resources or juice to make all the choices they want to make all the time, and that they might could not even realize how misguided they are when they act in a way you want to retaliate against. Anger - anger's defensive. It locks us into just thinking about ourselves and our needs and what we want, instead of seeing what's happening from a different perspective. It's like...it's an inflammatory response. Like swelling in the body. That's how I see it."