I love Mercy bc after ten thousand years she’s still extremely sensitive and emotionally vulnerable and wears her heart on her sleeve. And not in a constructive communicative way, or a bullshit “weaponsied feminity” way. She’s just incapable of not expressing what she’s feeling, and most of the time what she’s feeling is angry. She plows through life three rounds no filter. The most interesting Mercy moments for me are the ones where she’s relieved or sad or guilty because those are the moments that prove she isn’t putting up an angry front to hide behind, she just lives like this—as an exposed nerve. She can regulate her norepinephrine at will, but so help her she can’t regulate her emotions.
I’d like to know what she’d be like if she were happy
It’s such an interesting contrast to Augustine as well. Harrow describes him as
It was as though ten thousand years had built up a shell and left a space at the centre. Nothing seemed to touch Augustine. He was effervescent and charming in a way you found a little tedious and flip […] But there was never any real emotion, or reaction, or opinion—his mouth said one thing, and his face could contort itself into any number of silly expressions, but those eyes were devoid of substance.
Which is the exact opposite of Mercy, who has zero emotional filter and is therefore always tensed for a fight. She’s like a raw nerve, and he’s a dead nerve - they have basically polar opposite coping mechanisms for all the shit they’ve done/seen/experienced over the past ten thousand years! It’s no wonder they hate each other!
Augustine’s mask does break at a few key points (when he recognizes Gideon’s eyes, immediately after Mercy kills John, and when fighting John in the stoma), but wearing it is so reflexive that he falls back into it almost immediately. The best illustration is John’s death, because his immediate reaction is “There’s hours … if we drop through the River now -” (referring to trying to save the Nine Houses), but then in his VERY NEXT LINE flips to acting calm and saying there’s nothing they can do.
Their dysfunctional emotional reactions are what helps them hide their betrayal from John. Both of them have been operating with such a skewed emotional baseline for so long (Mercy feeling rage, Augustine feeling nothing) that John can no longer tell what motivates them. Surely there was a time, back when Mercy and Augustine would have genuinely considered all the Canaan House crew friends, that John would’ve been able to understand that. (After all, he understood it well enough for them to see the deaths of the people they loved the most and continue serving him). But now they feel the same emotions whether they’re killing insurgents or working with BOE.