Mercedes is sinking like a stone at the (reservoir) wrote in repose,
Re: Sunday Service: Mercy/Shiloh
Mercy didn’t do bonding. In a pack, everybody knew everybody’s shit as fast as it happened, which could be as infuriating as it was efficient and no-nonsense. Of course, there was still plenty of time for nonsense as Mercy had found out early and repeatedly -- with less time spent gossiping, there was plenty left over for plotting. Politics. Yawn. Mercy hadn’t given a shit about the hierarchy because he was at the bottom even if he played into their bullshit games. Connections, alliances were made between wolves over shared ambition, love, the desire to find a mate (which he’d learned early were not always one and the same). Not sob stories. And with no way in to all of that, Mercy had grown accustomed to doing his own thing with everyone else on his own personal periphery. Inconsequential.
Except for Sam, who might have been the closest thing to a bond that Mercy had ever felt. And because of that connection, he’d been run out of the only home he’d ever known. So, yeah, you could call him jaded without falling off the mark.
Mercy’s grin was sharp around the edges, and matched with a glint in his eyes. “I could do that,” he offered with a questioning raise of his eyebrows, pointing the same way the pastor had gestured and taking a half-step like he was ready to go. He reached to his collar and plucked at the pendant. “I know my saints. My mom wasn’t real big on little details like denominations, or anything,” he explained, something like a smirk unspooling under the surface of the conspiratorial aside of his tone.
He snickered when the good Father brought up capitalism to the brown kid. “You can call it reparations, if that makes you more comfortable. The White Guilt tax, maybe? It’s not like I’m showing them a dirty air filter that I pulled out of a scrapyard. That would make me a crook.”
The funniest part, to Mercy, was that he hadn’t ever actually been a nickel and diming kinda guy. Bad for business. Word of mouth was the bread and butter of a small town, and Mercy had eaten enough ramen in college.
“A VW, huh? Maybe you should head across the street,” he said, mirroring the guy’s earlier motion to the Catholic church across the way. “That Vatican money could probably bump you up to a Porsche, at least. And then you can bring it to my garage for our man-of-the-cloth discount.”