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They’re back from a cleanup assignment in Reykjavik when the notification comes in over the feed on their glasses: a mission alert, priority level alpha, report to headquarters to be briefed straightaway. With that grade of urgency, neither of them even finish returning their weapons to the armoury, leaving them on the counter half-checked and taking the monorail back to the shop, from where Merlin has sent out the summons.
“Level alpha,” Eggsy says in the elevator ride back up to the meeting room. He puts his hands in his pockets and whistles. “Don’t think we’ve ever had one of those before.”
Beside him, Roxy nods. “It’s not something that’s used willy-nilly,” she replies, looking concerned. “Whatever it is, it’s got to be pretty serious, don’t you think?”
Eggsy shrugs tiredly. He’s already been up a day and a half and the three-hour plane ride back to London hasn’t helped much with recharging his sleep-deprived brain. “Kinda hope Merlin’s just taking the piss, to be honest,” he says, thinking of his bed back at home and groaning internally. As with everything when it comes to the mission controller, the chances of that are nearly zero, but still. It’s nice to dream.
Merlin is waiting for them at the head of the table with a pair of thick manila folders when they enter the room. He has his hands clasped in front of him and his mouth resting on his knuckles, eyebrows furrowed in the middle of his forehead.
“Merlin,” Eggsy greets with Roxy.
Merlin doesn’t look up as he replies, “Galahad. Lancelot. Please take your seats.”
“Any chance we could get this over and done with quickly?” Eggsy groans, sliding into his chair as Roxy sits across from him and rests her hands on the table. “I’m fucking beat, and I need, like, a million hours of sleep. You know what, right after this, I’m going on vacation, fuck knows I need one right —”
“Galahad,” Merlin says, and indicates for them to take the folders. He still hasn’t looked up from the spot on the table he’s been staring at, close to the crystal brandy decanter, since they returned. “These just came in from Washington. Glasses off, if you would.”
Eggsy exchanges a look with Roxy before they comply. “It’s not the Morgana Chapter again, is it?” he sighs as it occurs to him, picking up the folder and breaking the plastic seal on it. “Thought you said Reykjavik was the last we’d have to see of them. I mean, that’s why we’ve been freezing our arses off for the last two weeks…”
“It wasn’t that cold,” Roxy says. “You’re just a knob-end who forgot to bring enough thermal wear, that’s all.”
“I’m the knob-end? You forgot to bring the tear gas,” Eggsy counters. “Which I nearly got shat on for, thanks for that.”
“I told you, I didn’t forget it, I was ambushed on the way to the rendezvous point and it got lost somewhere!”
“How do you even lose a tear gas canister?” Eggsy asks incredulously, grinning as Roxy rolls her eyes at him. “Seriously, explain it to me again. I want to see if Merlin’s going to call bullshit as well —”
He stops talking when he flips the folder open and a ghost glares up at him from the grainy photograph paper-clipped to the corner, eyes cold in blurry greyscale.
Almost immediately, Eggsy feels the smile slide away from his face.
***
TOP SECRET
Kingsman Primer #625A5R
Subject: Triskelion International
Compiler(s): Caradoc, Bors, Lancelot
Read and approved by: Merlin, Arthur
Date compiled: 17.05.15
Last review: 05.02.20
Next review: 05.04.20
Summary
Triskelion International (c.n. the Morgana Chapter) is a privately held company established in 1980 following the resolution of the Cold War. While its main headquarters are based in Gothenburg (dismantled as of 19.05.19), Triskelion International has been known to operate across several transcontinental branches. As a front, the company focuses on the manufacture of military, special forces, commercial, and medical services, but investigations by Kingsman in 2007 have revealed a deeply rooted history of black ops and false flag operations associated with Triskelion, including the Kinshasa bombings in May 1994 and the Prague metro mustard gas attacks of 2003. On a smaller scale, Triskelion routinely contracts out personnel for mercenary work, the scope of which ranges from petty harassment to assassination. Though unconfirmed, it is also believed that Triskelion has played a significant role in the continuous destabilisation of the Middle East by funding and equipping renegades, and actively sabotaging the objectives of peacekeeping missions in the region. For the sake of this primer, these covert activities and the operatives involved are what are used collectively when Triskelion is referred to as the Morgana Chapter.
The exact command structure of the Morgana Chapter remains unclear, but evidence suggests that the organisation is extensively decentralised and heavily devolved powers are granted to its different factions. A communications network allows for some degree of coordination, but regional bases remain primarily autonomous and carry out their operations independent of each other. The complexity of each operation varies across factions, increasing along with base size and available personnel. Singular highly skilled operatives known as ‘assets’ typically lead or occupy a key position within each faction — past efforts to recover and detain assets for reasons of intelligence have failed thus far (see also, Coroner’s report #V09892: Perseus Vasilakis, c.n. Agravain; and Coroner’s report #G3642F: Gan Zhi Yong, c.n. Maleagant).
Encouragingly, efforts to stem the activity of the Morgana Chapter have shown promising results. In the past two years, the number of bases worldwide has fallen from 19 in 2018 to 4 in 2020 following an intense strike campaign organised and executed by global branches of Kingsman. Teardown of the Swedish core in 2019 has greatly accelerated base disassembly, with smaller-scale operations becoming more staple among surviving personnel. It should be noted that all assets have been identified and neutralised in every previous strike with the exception of the Indiana base (dismantled as of 29.12.19), in which asset activity was not observably present among enemy hostiles during the course of the strike (see also, Kingsman Primer #P5264D: John Doe, c.n. Mordred). Information on the Colombo, Reykjavik and Indiana assets remains limited at the time of compilation of this primer, though it is becoming evident from further intelligence that these individuals are significantly more elusive and dangerous than most other operatives under the Morgana Chapter, and should be treated on encounter with the intent of full neutralisation rather than apprehension.
***
Roxy doesn’t say anything to Eggsy on the way to the mansion, but he can feel her eyes on him throughout. He doesn’t look back at her. The engine of the monorail thrums quietly under his feet. Seated next to him, Merlin has one of the folders and is looking through its contents. Out of the corner of his eye, Eggsy thinks he sees Merlin’s hands shake between sheaves of paper, just for a second, before they are stable again.
“This isn’t possible,” Eggsy whispers, and in the same breath doesn’t believe the words he’s just said. “How,” he tries again, but the rest of it is too heavy and his throat closes up against the weight of what he cannot begin to grasp.
“We never found him,” Merlin says, like he’d been expecting this all along. He closes the folder and lets it rest in his lap and folds his arms, sinking back into his seat. “There was always the possibility that he survived.”
Eggsy knows that. He’s always known. Hoped with everything he had, even, at times when the grief became nigh unbearable and it was all he could do to clench his jaw and soldier on, chin held high. But he’d never once imagined it to be anything like this.
“Gunshot wounds to the head have a ten percent survival rate, on average,” Roxy supplies, the same thing she’d said to him five years ago. The intention this time, however, is different. When Eggsy finally meets her eyes, the sad look he gets in return makes his stomach churn.
“Eggsy,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
Lowering his gaze to the carpet, Eggsy doesn’t reply. The monorail will take about half an hour to get to the mansion, a decent amount of time for a power nap, but when Eggsy closes his eyes and leans his head back, he can almost hear church bells ringing.
***
Eggsy remembers — just barely — being seven years old and his mum telling him that his dad wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas. She’d been crying before that, which was how Eggsy knew something terrible had happened but couldn’t place exactly what, aside from the fact that it all started from the moment that man had come into their house and sat down with his mum and said some things to her that made her very upset. He’d decided then that he didn’t like that man at all, because he wasn’t anything at all like Dad, who only ever made Mum smile with gifts and silly faces that, more often than not, had Eggsy laughing along with her. That man needed to go, only Eggsy didn’t know how to make him, so he sat where he was and shook Dad’s snowglobe and thought about having the man trapped inside, where he wouldn’t be able to escape or make Mum cry ever again.
The man had come over to him a short while later. Eggsy had thought about hitting him, because that always made the bullies at school go away, but none of them were as big or strong as the man, who now had the snowglobe and was playing with it and smiling at Eggsy like how Dad would to get him to sleep at night. “Hello, Eggsy,” he’d said, and he didn’t sound like a bad man, not really. He even had a present for Eggsy, a… thing, of sorts, something that his mum would never once touch herself but insisted Eggsy kept with him at all times, and every night she always, always made him say the words — Oxfords, not brogues — even though Eggsy didn’t know what they meant.
He thought about that man an awful lot, growing up, and even when Eggsy was older. Who he was, where he’d come from, what it was he’d done that kept on taking Dad away from them for periods of time that stretched longer and longer until he never came back at all. Eggsy wondered what good it would even do if he found out, because beyond the trifling aim of satisfying his own curiosity, knowledge like that couldn’t possibly have any impact on the fact of Dean fouling up his whole family, or Mum’s phone calls pleading for him to come home from basic training, or having to look in the mirror every day with the knowledge that there would never be any way to truly make something of the person staring glumly back at him.
But then they had met each other again, and Eggsy learnt that as wrong as he’d been at seven about Harry Hart being a bad man, he was just as wrong about everything else.
***
The rooms for Kingsmen are located one floor above from the recruits’ bunk, with fitted beds and actual en-suite bathrooms and zero risk of flooding inadvertently in the dead of night. As far as Eggsy’s aware, anyway. It wouldn’t be the first sick joke sprung on him all day.
“We leave tomorrow at oh-six hundred hours,” Merlin tells them outside their respective quarters. “I want everyone ready by half five and not a minute later. And by ready, I do mean the full monty. Bring whatever you think might be useful, and then bring everything else you can carry.”
“Yes, Merlin,” Roxy says.
“Got that, Galahad?”
Eggsy blinks. It’s been years since being called that has burned something deep down with enough intensity to paralyse. He swallows and nods, pressing his thumb to the biometric lock on the door to his room. When it clicks open, he inhales and forces out, “Yeah. Okay.”
There’s a pause in which it feels like either Merlin or Roxy are going to say something else to him, but then it passes and they’ve disappeared into their own rooms, leaving Eggsy alone in the hallway with his thumb against the beeping scanner, eyes fixed on the name etched in gold on his front door.
***
Three hours later, Eggsy still can’t sleep.
The clock on his bedside table ticks to two a.m and he stares at it until the numbers go foggy. He closes his eyes and breathes into the darkness. The room feels too large and too quiet, for how much smaller it is than his actual one back home. Outside the window, there are city lights limning the distant horizon and the grey shadow of the moon in the cloudy sky.
Eggsy pushes the covers back and sits up, scrubbing at his face with both hands. He doesn’t get out of bed, just remains where he is as he looks around the room. He has thought about it a dozen times over, before and after missions that have required him to stay at the mansion overnight — that this used to be Harry’s room, that all of this belonged to him at some point, that he slept in this very bed. The first time Eggsy had come in he’d run his fingers over the bedspread and tried to imagine Harry tucked in with his head on the pillow, breathing steady and features soft with sleep.
He used to blame sleepless nights on the mattress, back in the day. Eggsy had lied and said it was too soft for his liking, even after they’d put in a new one.
***
“You look terrible,” Roxy remarks in the morning.
“Thanks,” Eggsy mutters. He shuffles over to the mess table, where there’s toast and ham slices waiting, and flops down into the chair opposite Roxy.
“Coffee?”
Yawning widely, Eggsy shakes his head.
Roxy pours him half a mug anyway, pushing it across the table. “You’ll thank me later,” she says as she puts the jug back down.
Eggsy eyes the dark liquid in front of him, then the toast, and realises that maybe coming to breakfast wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Listen, Eggsy,” Roxy says. She looks at him and gnaws her lip, dark circles under her eyes matching his. “If you want to talk about it,” she says slowly.
Eggsy stares back for a moment, then picks up the mug and drains the coffee in two gulps, scalding a good part of his tongue in the process.
***
It wasn’t like they didn’t try their hardest to locate the body in the aftermath of V-day. The church had been the first place they looked, and then hundreds of mortuary registers when that turned up nothing, but Kentucky was a big place. Locating one corpse out of a sea of the dead proved harder than anyone expected, and after six months Kingsman just didn’t have the resources nor manpower to keep up the search for someone they weren’t even sure was dead or alive.
Eggsy had voted in the negative for the KIA ballot held a month after recovery efforts were called off. He’d seen it before, after all, he’d watched the movies. Gentleman super-spy fakes his death and goes into hiding, working from the shadows and navigating the underbelly of cabalistic intelligence. Or perhaps, even, a discreet retirement to somewhere in the Bahamas, living out the rest of life with Bond girls and a seaside view, sipping coconut cocktails and watching the sunset for the hundredth time, not a care in the world. Either option seemed just as likely as Harry is dead, especially without a body, and Eggsy did what he thought was fair at the time.
The motion passed ten to two, in the end. Roxy had smiled sympathetically at him afterwards, something that Eggsy was grateful for. It was nice to know that he wasn’t standing alone on this, even if he truly was the only one who believed in it, who hadn’t given up on Harry, the same way Harry never gave up on him even up till Kentucky, Valentine, and that god damned courtyard.
***
They load up on the plane to Baltimore and fly out at five minutes to six. Merlin inputs the coordinates into the autopilot and gets to briefing them on the mission in the passenger cabin.
“Got these for you two,” he says, handing out a pair of folders. “Best if you refresh yourselves on what to expect once we’re there.”
“Do we have an objective?” Roxy asks.
Merlin’s lips go dangerously thin. “Capture, if at all possible,” he says, and nothing more than that.
Eggsy boggles up at him. “If at all possible?” he repeats. “What the fuck are you trying to say, Merlin?”
To his credit, Merlin has the decency to look frazzled for a second before he clears his throat and answers, “I’m saying that as far as we’ve seen, it’s been difficult to bring any asset in alive. There’s a reason why the directive advises against the use of nonlethal force.”
Asset, Eggsy thinks, and all he can think of is the thin-faced man in Reykjavik who fought with a quiver and longbow, raining arrows down on him with an accuracy deadlier than any marksman Eggsy had ever gotten into a shootout with. It had felt so good, getting a bullet between his eyes. Now, all remembering that does is make Eggsy feel queasy.
“But it’s Harry,” Eggsy pleads.
“You think I don’t know that?” Merlin says hotly. “It’s not like this is any easier for me.”
“If we just found him and got into contact, if we spoke with him, then maybe —”
“It’s been five years,” Roxy says, opening her folder. “Galahad, I hate to say it, I really do, but he might not be the person we knew anymore.”
“He wasn’t your mentor, you never knew him,” Eggsy says. It’s a fucking weak retort and he knows it, but Roxy falls silent and turns a page over in the folder she’s trying too hard to pretend she’s reading.
“I knew Harry for seventeen years, Eggsy,” Merlin says stonily. “The man I knew would have rather died than have anything to do with something like the Morgana Chapter.”
He’s clearly, painfully out of his depth on this one, but even so Eggsy looks Merlin in the eye and says, keeping his voice perfectly level, “You didn’t know him like I did.”
***
TOP SECRET
Kingsman Primer #P5264D
Subject: John Doe, c.n. Mordred
Compiler(s): Caradoc, Merlin
Read and approved by: Arthur
Date compiled: 31.12.19
Last review: 20.03.20
Next review: 20.05.20
Summary
An endeavour to track down American factions of the Morgana Chapter (see also, Kingsman Primer #625A5R) uncovered a base of operations in Indiana (dismantled as of 29.12.19) in July 2018. As per protocol, efforts were made to acquire intelligence on the asset assigned to the base (John Doe as of date of last review, c.n. Mordred), to which extremely limited success was achieved. Preliminary investigations in August of the same year aimed at establishing any activity linked to Mordred, past and present, were inconclusive in their findings. However, it is strongly suspected that the home invasion and murder of the Chilton family in Fort Wayne in March 2016 and the shooting of Joanna and Katharine Ward in December of the same year were contracts executed by the Morgana Chapter, both in which possible markers of asset-level proficiency were noted, though not with full certainty.
Very little continues to be known about Mordred. As of the current date of review, it has never been definitively confirmed that an asset existed within the Indiana base, with evidence being more empirical than physical, and scant besides. Following the dismantlement of the base in December 2019, a motion to locate and terminate the Indiana asset was put forth for ballot in February 2020, but was defeated by a vote margin of 7 to 5. All files regarding Mordred were submitted for final vetting and approval on 01.03.20, and officially archived on 05.03.20.
***
There’s a jeep waiting at the airport when the plane lands. Merlin drives them into the city, where they check into a Holiday Inn and start to unpack the equipment they’ve brought with them. Roxy attempts to tap the motel CCTVs for surveillance while Merlin draws up a list of locations to be scouted out over the week.
“Looks like we’ll be starting with Remington,” Merlin says, nodding at the map he has on the coffee table. Coloured pins stick out from it, numbering about two dozen in total.
“Are these the places he’s been seen?” Eggsy asks.
“Allegedly,” Merlin replies. He pokes a red pin into a section of the map that already has four others nearby. “Some of the intel we have is pretty out of date — I wouldn’t count too much on it all being trustworthy.”
“Done,” Roxy says, swivelling her laptop around to show off what she’s done — a 4x4 grid of live video feeds from around the motel, covering the entrances, car park, and the roads outside. “Now if anything dodgy happens around here, I’ll be the first to know.”
“Good work, Lancelot,” Merlin says.
Eggsy stares at the monitor, a nagging feeling at the back of his brain. “I don’t get it,” he says. “What’s up with that? It’s not like he’s going to come after us.”
Merlin gives him a look. “Think about it, Galahad,” he says. “You’re an asset whose headquarters just got destroyed, and suddenly you’re two states away and haven’t been sighted anywhere else in the last four months. Why Baltimore? Why now?”
Eggsy turns away and crosses his arms. It’s obvious what Merlin’s getting at, really — that there’s a base somewhere in the vicinity that they aren’t aware of, that the Morgana Chapter isn’t over, that Harry’s still with them for reasons Eggsy is afraid of never being able to understand. He doesn’t want to believe it, but there’s little else he can think of that makes any sense of the situation.
“Stop calling him that,” Eggsy grumbles, and Merlin sighs.
***
They find nothing for the next three days.
Canvassing Remington, Barclay, and Washington Hill draws blank after blank after blank. They’re mostly residential neighbourhoods, all of them prime areas to hide a base. Merlin scans for known signal frequencies used by the Morgana Chapter to transmit messages and can’t find anything either. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that whatever base Harry’s holed up with is in a state of radio silence following the fall of Reykjavik, but at this point, Eggsy will take anything he can get.
In addition to the motel CCTVs, Roxy gets their intercom plugged into the city’s police grid as well, just in case any suspicious activity crops up over the radar. That too doesn’t get them very much anywhere — there’s little of particular note other than a couple instances of shoplifting, burglary, and drunken assault in the streets. Nothing overly sinister or out of the ordinary that would qualify as a lead to follow.
They keep looking.
***
On day six, Eggsy asks the question that nobody else will, because someone has to and it may as well be him.
“How do we even know he’s still in Baltimore?”
Poring over the map, Merlin fiddles with a pin and manages to prick his finger by accident as he fastens it to the neighbourhood of Upton. He wipes a drop of blood off the coffee table with his handkerchief and sticks his finger in his mouth, making a vague noise around it.
“We don’t,” Merlin says, and gingerly picks up another pin.
Eggsy doesn’t really know what else he was expecting to hear.
***
Five years on, Eggsy still can’t help but wonder constantly about how things would be right now if he had followed Harry to Kentucky that day. Whether or not it would have made a difference if he had been there to watch Harry’s back, if there was a way that Eggsy could have saved him. He used to shrug off the belief that he couldn’t have done anything for Harry, because even though Eggsy wasn’t one at the time he did almost become a Kingsman, and with the two of them working together, well. They could probably take on just about anything in the whole wide world.
Maybe if Eggsy were there, he would have picked up on what Harry missed. Seems unlikely, but still. Maybe he could have kept watch outside, realised that serious shit was going down and radioed in for backup earlier. Maybe there was a back door somewhere, maybe he could have helped Harry escape, or maybe, just maybe —
Maybe, more likely, Valentine would have shot them both and left them for dead, assuming that they didn’t end up killing each other. It’s not an outcome Eggsy likes to think about, but he’s always been a realist, if nothing else.
***
Week two of staking out Baltimore rolls around and they’ve narrowed the search down to just a few more neighbourhoods within a five kilometre radius. Merlin thinks that the base might be a suburban one located further north, approaching city limits, and Eggsy convinces him to remain in the city after even Downtown, their best bet by a mile, turns up empty. It’s a pretty big area to clear within twenty-four hours even with three Kingsmen working the field and people are constantly coming and going, Eggsy argues, and Roxy agrees with him, which is sufficient leverage for Merlin to fold and give it one more day.
They’re dropped off at the Baltimore Basilica, right in the heart of the city. Swapping over from the previous day, Eggsy takes the southern half of Downtown and Roxy takes the north while Merlin prowls the roads in the jeep. Eggsy pulls up a map on his glasses to check where he’s going before returning Roxy’s good luck over the intercom and setting off.
It’s mostly tall buildings and office complexes that stretch southward from the basilica to the harbour, and Eggsy looks up at the windows as he walks down the boulevard. Harry could be in any one of them and he wouldn’t even know it. He tries to remember how large bases usually were from the primer on the Morgana Chapter he’d read — the one in Reykjavik had been out in the country and was absolutely massive, almost the size of a missile silo. A city base shouldn’t be anywhere as prominent, would it? Makes sense to him, but he could very well be wrong about that.
About an hour later, he comes to a halt at a traffic junction and waits for the green man along with the small crowd that has gathered there. They’re mostly office workers on lunch break, some of them carrying briefcases, and others plastic bags filled with sandwiches and subs. Eggsy’s busy plotting out a route that will take him in a loop to the far end of Downtown and back to the basilica such that he misses the switching of the traffic lights, and startles to someone pushing at him roughly from behind.
“Sorry,” Eggsy blurts instinctively, and he hears the person growl, “Move it,” as he turns his head to apologise again.
He stops dead.
Harry glares at Eggsy, sidesteps around him and continues on down the pedestrian crossing with the rest of the crowd. Without thinking, his body seeming to move on its own accord, Eggsy follows.
“Harry,” he whispers, and then, reopening his comms channel, “I found him.”
“Don’t do anything,” Merlin says immediately. “I have a fix on your location, I’ll be there shortly. Lancelot, do you read?”
“Roger that,” Roxy says. “I’m on my way, too.”
“Merlin,” Eggsy says. He keeps his eyes on the back of Harry’s head, an easier task now that the crowd is steadily thinning out. “Merlin, he’s right there —”
“Galahad, listen to me very carefully. You are not to engage him. Stay close, but I repeat, do not engage him. Do I make myself clear?”
Harry rounds a corner and Eggsy quickens his pace to regain sight of him, just in time to see Harry enter an apartment block and close the front door. Eggsy surveys the exterior of the building quickly, looking for a way in. There’s a drainpipe crawling along the side of the apartment, and Eggsy climbs it until he can haul himself up onto a fire escape, from which he accesses the first open window he finds and slides inside.
He lands in a stairwell and flattens himself against the wall, listening out for the footsteps he heard outside the window. They’re coming from upstairs, the click-clack of formal shoes against concrete steps. Eggsy looks over the railing and up, zooms with his glasses and catches shadows of movement about four floors above him.
“Is that him?” Merlin asks sharply. “Galahad, do you copy?”
Climbing up three steps at a time, Eggsy checks every other second to make sure he hasn’t lost Harry yet. Merlin becomes increasingly more irate with each attempt to get Eggsy to respond, but Eggsy ignores him. Here in the stairwell, even the smallest of sounds becomes resonant, and it’s difficult enough to stay silent as he ascends quickly, keeping his footfalls on the toes of his Oxfords to stop the heels from making any noise.
He’s very near the end of the stairwell when he hears the roof access open and close. Harry’s noticed, then. So much for the quiet approach. Eggsy sprints the rest of the way, throws his weight against the door at the top and bursts out blinking into the harsh light of the afternoon sun.
Everything is a blur for the next thirty seconds or so — out of nowhere, a foot ploughs into Eggsy’s side, knocking him to the floor, and Eggsy rolls backwards to his feet before he’s kicked again. The impact pushes him back a few metres, but this time he stands his ground and can stave off the punch flung at his cheek, the kick curving up to his lower ribs, a liver shot, another kick that would’ve knocked him out if it connected with his skull. Fists raised, Harry keeps aiming high with his kicks, his soles whipping through the air mere centimetres from Eggsy’s face. Eggsy bobs and weaves under his blows, benumbed with the sudden spike of adrenaline in his system, and lashes out before he can think about what he’s doing. Harry intercepts the punch, steps forward and socks Eggsy brutally in the cheek, but Eggsy grits his teeth through the pain as he traps Harry’s arm in an elbow lock, wraps his own around Harry’s torso and slams him against the floor with a twisting hip throw.
Harry is up again before Eggsy can catch his breath, and he catches Eggsy by the wrist just as Eggsy grabs his, the mirrored motion hauling them both close enough to look each other in the face. There’s a second in this shared proximity where Harry stares daggers at him and Eggsy goggles back, and then Harry smashes Eggsy’s own hand into his face and knees him in the gut, no space or time at all for Eggsy to think about blocking or dodging, let alone act on either. He stumbles back, unable to even cry out in pain, and then Harry hits him in the thigh, the hip, and across the face with a spinning kick, flooring him for good.
Ears ringing, blood in his mouth, Eggsy blinks and blinks against the fuzzy afterimage of so much light dancing across his field of vision, and then he’s turned onto his back by a hand that closes onto his throat, squeezing as the shape of a fist hovers above him.
Harry, Eggsy tries to gasp, but the fingers at his windpipe aren’t allowing him the air for words, noises, anything at all. Harry, please…
Brown eyes meet his, and something in Harry’s furious expression falters, if just for a moment. He stops tightening his grip on Eggsy’s throat, relaxes it minutely, but he doesn’t get off Eggsy either.
The roof access slams open again, then Roxy’s voice, “Galahad!” before a silenced shot rings out and the weight pinning Eggsy is gone entirely. Eggsy sucks a breath in, massaging his throat and sitting up to Harry darting away from him and towards Roxy, shirking around two more shots that strike the parapet on both sides of Eggsy.
“Lancelot, don’t hurt him!” Eggsy yells the best he can with his voice shredded raw, and Roxy doesn’t have the chance to reply because Harry slides on the seat of his pants to close the distance and pistons his foot up from a low angle to kick the gun out of Roxy’s hands. Roxy jumps to avoid the ankle sweep that follows, landing a step back and adopting an offensive stance. Harry punches without reservation, kicks hard enough to hear, and while Roxy’s the nimblest fighter Eggsy knows, Harry drives her back with sheer brute force even as she scores a roundhouse kick, an elbow to his torso that should stagger but doesn’t. The melee lasts for several more seconds with Harry kicking lower and lower and Roxy trying to swerve into a more advantageous position to counter his attacks, but Harry corners her with a flurry of hooks, forcing Roxy to the edge of the roof, where he delivers an unbalancing shove and sends her toppling over the parapet with a heel kick to the chest.
“Rox!”
Standing up, Harry turns around and looks at Eggsy. His face is hard, eyes harder. Eggsy gets to his feet as well, raising his hands in front of him in what should come across as surrender. He watches the space behind Harry, where he’d kicked Roxy off the roof. Jesus god. They’re about ten floors up, and Roxy might have gotten better with heights over the years but from this high up, an uncushioned fall from here would almost definitely be fatal.
“Harry, please,” Eggsy says, lifting his hands higher, as though this will prove his sincerity. “Harry, it’s me, Eggsy. Please, it’s me —”
Harry just observes him, not saying anything as he drifts towards Eggsy, picking up Roxy’s dropped gun on the way. Then he levels it at Eggsy, finger curling around the trigger.
“Harry,” Eggsy begs again. “Please don’t do this.”
No response, not even a blink. This close to him, Eggsy can now see what he missed on first glance and in the scuffle — a smudge of pearly-white skin at the corner of Harry’s right eye, the scar stretched into the unmistakable outline of an entry wound.
“Harry —”
Harry shudders and lets out a startled grunt, reaching up with his free hand to grope clumsily behind him, fingers scrabbling at the back of his neck. He sways, teeters, then drops the gun and to his knees, crumpling to the floor. Right behind him, Roxy is leveraging herself up onto the parapet, her watch held up to a firing position and the slender cord of a grappling hook trailing from the dial on its side.
Eggsy can only gawp stupidly as Roxy flips gracefully back to her feet and disengages the line from her watch. Then, she moves over to examine Harry’s motionless body, pats him down for weapons and retrieves her gun.
“Don’t hurt him?” she snaps, checking the rounds left in the clip and holstering it. She pushes a lock of hair out of her face and shakes her head at Eggsy. “Real rich, Galahad. Fucking hell.”
***
They dismantle their base at the motel within the hour and are on the plane back to London by the next.
In the cabin, Eggsy sits across from Harry, watching him sleep. Heavy steel cuffs bind Harry’s wrists and ankles, linked together at his waist by a chain secured to the base of the seat he’s in. That on its own makes Eggsy angry enough to want to get up and break something, but he doesn’t dare move, as if he’s afraid of rousing Harry, even though whatever Merlin dosed him up with before they left the motel means that he’ll be out cold for the remainder of the flight.
“You should get some rest,” Roxy says from the set of seats adjacent to them. She tosses a flight blanket over to Eggsy, still in its packaging, and opens another one for herself. “Might as well — we’ve seven hours till arrival.”
It’s remarkable, Eggsy thinks. Even without the glasses, Harry looks exactly the same, apart from the scar and slightly more silver in his hair. Eggsy’s heart pounds and he wants to look away from Harry’s face, his scraped knuckles, but can’t. His body hurts all over from where Harry’s strikes landed — the bruises have formed by now, he’s sure. It doesn’t matter, not with Harry unconscious and slack, but alive, in front of him. This is actually happening. He still looks the same.
“I don’t believe it,” Eggsy says. Even now he has to voice it, if just to feel how real it is. “It’s him, Rox.”
Roxy makes a noise of assent. “Yeah. I wasn’t sure about it either, but.” She sighs.
Eggsy grips the armrests with his already-sore hands until it hurts, and keeps holding on. “He didn’t know me,” he says, and even for having known this from the moment Harry first looked at him, the words leave him hollow and aching all the same.
“It’s been a long while since Kentucky,” Roxy says.
“But why? Why didn’t he know me?”
“Maybe he doesn’t recognise you.”
“Do you think they did something to him?” Eggsy asks. “The Morgana Chapter?”
“Eggsy,” Roxy says, “There’s no use fretting about it now. Get some sleep, and we’ll figure all of this out when we’re back, yeah?”
Eggsy gulps. Harry’s head lolls gently with the turbulence of the plane, chains clinking as his hands slip along his lap. Carefully, Eggsy unpacks the blanket Roxy gave him and drapes it over Harry, tucking the corners in around him and sitting back down. Like this, he can almost pretend that Harry isn’t shackled here against his will, that he’s not drugged to the eyeballs with a cocktail of tranquilisers, that he’s just napping and they’re going home together and everything is going to be okay from here on out. Almost.
He watches, and waits.
***
Things didn’t start out that way, back then. Eggsy was far from a bawdy chav thirsting for the care of an older man, and Harry wasn’t the haughty aristocrat with a perverse taste for guttersnipes who just so happened to cross his path. Harry gave him a new lease of life and Eggsy was ingratiated to him for that, nothing more, nothing less. But then Harry had nearly died that one time and whatever feelings Eggsy had regarding him were suddenly more than they ever were, from how his heart seized in his throat at the sight of Harry still and ashen, and the soul-lurching rush of relief that had overcome him when Harry was well again.
People noticed, of course — not being able to hide things for very long came with working among spies — but it only ever cropped up the once during selection. It was just him and Roxy and Charlie left at the time, cleaning their boots in the bunk, and Eggsy had jibed on Charlie’s lack of knowledge with respect to the origin of grilled chicken breasts, enough so that Charlie was sufficiently annoyed to snipe back with the intention of leaving a mark.
“At least I don’t want to fuck Arthur,” Charlie said, smirking as he scrubbed at his boot with a wire brush.
Eggsy frowned. “I don’t want to fuck Arthur either, so that’s pretty moot.”
“Sure, but you’d like to fuck Galahad, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Eggsy retorted emphatically, a bit too quick on the uptake.
“Come off it, Eggsy, mate,” Roxy laughed. “It’s not like we all haven’t seen the way you look at him.”
“Textbook,” Charlie snorted. “It’s a disgrace, really. Bet you’d let him take you up the arse like a little nancy.”
“Charlie, shut up, we’re all just having some fun, you don’t have to be a prick. Eggsy, don’t worry about it. Besides, I’m willing to bet Galahad knows by now as well.”
“There’s nothing to know, Rox,” Eggsy growled, scouring the heel of his boot harder than strictly necessary to get the caked mud off it. “He’s my mentor, it’s not like that.”
Roxy had just smiled knowingly. “Sure, Eggsy. Whatever you say.”
***
It’s just about midnight when the plane touches down at the mansion. A team of medical staff is already present in the hangar and whisk Harry away on a gurney as soon as the airstairs come down. When Eggsy tries to follow them, he’s stopped by Merlin’s prohibitory hand on his shoulder.
“Where are they taking him?” Eggsy asks.
“Infirmary,” Merlin answers simply, looking at their retreating forms too. “Just to check him over, make sure that he’s fine. You should probably get yourself looked at, too.”
Eggsy shakes his head. “I’m good.”
“Hm. Course you are.”
“He’s going to be alright, isn’t he?”
Patting Eggsy’s shoulder, Merlin smiles sadly and doesn’t nod. His expression holds everything that Eggsy fears but cannot put into words.
“Let’s hope so,” Merlin says.
***
The entire floor containing the infirmary and the ones above and below are all put on complete lockdown. Armed riflemen guard every other set of doors and Eggsy has to have his authorisation checked and cleared no less than twenty times before he finally reaches Harry’s ward. Even so, they don’t allow Eggsy in, only permitting him to stand outside and watch through the glass as half a dozen different people in scrubs mill around the unconscious man strapped to the bed in the centre of the room.
“There you are,” he hears Roxy say from behind him, and when Eggsy doesn’t reply, she groans and continues, “You didn’t sleep on the plane, did you?”
“Couldn’t,” Eggsy mumbles. His eyes are heavy with fatigue, but he keeps them on Harry, who is still showing no sign of waking up. He wants to be here when that happens, even though he has no idea what he’s going to say to Harry then.
“I don’t know how you’re not completely knackered by now, honestly,” Roxy says, walking forward to stand next to him.
When he sees a nurse sink a syringe into Harry’s arm, Eggsy flinches. He holds his own elbow and steps closer to the glass until his breath is misting it up. “What if he doesn’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
Kingsman. Who he is. Me.
“Anything,” Eggsy says instead, choosing the safest option out of all else that presents. If he tries for anything else it will end in the memory of Harry looking at him like how he did on that rooftop in Baltimore, his expression blank and empty of all recognition.
Roxy touches his arm. “We’ll know tomorrow,” she tells him. “We should go, now.”
Another nurse draws the curtains around the bed, shielding Harry from view. “Tomorrow,” Eggsy repeats, like a promise, but he doesn’t know to whom.
***
Harry’s moved from the infirmary to the detention level in the night, which Eggsy only finds out about when he tries to visit him first thing in the morning and is met with an empty ward and a very apologetic nurse. He’s one fraying nerve short of going on a rampage when he storms into internment command, where Merlin is engaged in discussion with Caradoc.
“What the fuck,” Eggsy growls.
Merlin stops talking to Caradoc and looks at Eggsy. “Guess we’re not all having a very good morning,” he says.
“Detention, Merlin? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I’m not taking any chances,” Merlin replies, his tone steely. “He nearly killed two Kingsmen singlehandedly and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him the opportunity to try again.”
“He needs our help,” Eggsy insists. “Sticking him in a cell is the exact opposite of helping.”
“We have to ascertain if he poses a threat,” Merlin explains. “Until we know what we’re dealing with, it’s better that we ensure he can’t hurt anyone.”
Eggsy remains resolute. “Let me see him.”
“No.”
“Fuck you, Merlin.”
“Be as uncouth as you like. He’s staying where he is.”
Eggsy opens his mouth to tell Merlin to go fuck himself, but he sees it then, on a few of the many large screens in front of Merlin and Caradoc — different angles of the inside of a holding cell, where Harry’s sitting on a bench against the wall with his legs and arms crossed. He’s staring at the wall opposite, bobbing his foot absently next to the leg he has planted on the floor.
“I want to talk to him,” Eggsy says.
“No. Caradoc hasn’t even gone in yet.”
“I don’t give a fuck.”
“Ouch,” Caradoc says wryly. “There’s my feelings hurt.”
“Fuck off, Caradoc.”
“Galahad, if you’re going to be an unruly dickhead, kindly go do it somewhere else,” Merlin sighs, turning back to Caradoc. “We’ve actually got work to get done here.”
On the computer screens, Harry turns his head, eyes ticking up to one of the cameras observing him, and Eggsy feels his anger drain out of him. It’s swiftly replaced with misery, borne of grief for the man he loved, still loves, who Eggsy wants to help but doesn’t know how.
Still, he has to try.
Eggsy breathes in to calm himself and loosens the fists he didn’t know he’d formed. “When can I talk to him?”
Merlin weighs Eggsy with a long sideways gaze.
“Please,” Eggsy adds.
Merlin types something into the keyboard connected to the array of screens and doesn’t look back at Eggsy as he says, “I’ll let you know.”
***
Eggsy texts his mum to tell her that he won’t be home for the next few days, to which he gets a long, rambling message on how increasingly worried she’s become about these sporadic business trips of his, that even Daisy’s been asking after him, that this can’t keep going on without some changes to how Eggsy goes about managing his work-life ethic. It’s like with the Marines all over again, a fight that Eggsy’s long gotten tired of and hasn’t the mental fortitude to sustain, so he makes up a story about having to outfit a member of the Saudi royal family and pockets his phone, ignoring the reply that buzzes back a minute later.
He goes down to the firing range and finds someone already there. Roxy has a pair of Sigs and is blasting apart a moving target with kill shots to the head and chest. Eggsy watches from the entrance and goes up to her when she stops firing and releases the empty clips from both guns, her weapon scores coming up on the screen above their heads.
“Hey,” Eggsy says.
“Hey.” Roxy pushes her ear defenders down around her neck with the butt of a Sig and starts performing safety checks. “Thought you’d be with him now.”
“Merlin won’t let me see him,” Eggsy mutters, picking up Roxy’s other gun and clearing that himself. “He wants Caradoc to talk to Harry first.”
She nods. “Makes sense. The Morgana Chapter’s practically his life’s work, it’s only fair that he gets to finish it.” At Eggsy’s dark look, Roxy rolls her eyes. “I don’t mean it like that, Eggsy. Of course I think you should get to see Harry, too.”
Finding no live rounds in the chamber, Eggsy lets the slide snap back into place. “He didn’t hurt you too badly, did he?”
Roxy grimaces. “I’ll live,” she says. “Got some bruises to show for it, but nothing lasting. It’s just lucky that I’m, well. Me.”
Eggsy looks up at the flashing numbers, all of them telling him the same thing that Roxy is aware of as well.
“You could have killed him,” he says in a monotone.
The Sig Roxy’s finished checking clatters on the counter, next to a box filled with spent casings. “I could have,” she answers plainly, no question about it, just a simple, cold fact in the world. The target at the other end of the range is further than Harry had been from her on the roof, the factor of human reflexes adjusted for by its smaller size. Only shreds of it hang off the metal shaft it was once attached to.
“But you didn’t,” Eggsy continues, and he doesn’t know why it sounds like an accusation.
Roxy lets her hair out of the ponytail she’s bound it into and lets the elastic band slide around her wrist before resting her hand on the counter. “Look, Eggsy, I’ll be frank with you — I’m not sure if that was the right call to make. I mean, afterwards. The way he fought, like. You know.”
Eggsy hates that he does. Nonetheless, he nods, forcing himself to think of the seconds with fingers stilled at his throat, of those spent staring down the barrel of an unfired gun, rather than flying fists and the angry bruises that now mottle his ribs.
“I’m sorry, Eggsy,” Roxy says. “I know what he meant to you.”
There’s no point in playing dumb — Roxy would see right through him — so Eggsy doesn’t try. He puts down the Sig he’s holding and shoves his hands deep in his pockets.
“I’m glad you’re alright, Rox,” he mumbles, and Roxy gives him a small smile.
“Thanks. And I’m glad you’re,” she hesitates, appearing to reconsider what she has to say next. After a while, she shakes her head and punches him playfully in the arm. “I hope they let you see him soon.”
Eggsy smiles back. “Thanks, Rox,” he says. “Me too.”
***
The truth is, it probably wouldn’t have worked out between them anyway, all things considered. It didn’t matter that Eggsy would have been perfectly alright with Harry almost being twice his age — he could see how a dynamic like that might make Harry uncomfortable, proper gent as he was. Eggsy didn’t care about what the world would think of them but he couldn’t say the same for Harry, wouldn’t want to have to put him on the spot unnecessarily and compromise the working relationship that Eggsy himself valued over everything else. For the best, really, and he used to comfort himself with that whenever the want welled up and he had to stamp down on it.
Now, he’s thirty and Harry’s still older, but so is Eggsy and this means that things are different for reasons he won’t stop to think too much about. Now, Harry is not dead and there’s some small part of Eggsy that can’t help but see this as his second chance, and every second that he’s not spending with Harry feels like having him slip further away like sand through his fingers. It’s selfish and loathsome and wrong to think that, Eggsy knows, when Harry needs so much more than a serving of erstwhile longing right now, but as much as he tries he can’t disavow himself of that notion entirely. He wishes he were a better person than that, but he’s not.
***
Two days pass before he gets called down to internment command again. It’s just Merlin waiting for him when Eggsy arrives, a thick stack of folders cluttering up his workspace. The live feed is still running on the computer screens, but Harry’s no longer in the cell that the majority are monitoring. Instead, he’s in a screen to the far left, which displays some other room that brings back Eggsy’s old memories of police station visits and the smell of stale coffee that he’d come to associate with them.
“Now?” Eggsy asks the moment he enters.
Merlin pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “If you can get anything out of him, you’re a more skilled interrogator than I,” he says.
Eggsy's chest swells. “Where is he?”
“Right next door. Use your access code to get in.”
There’s a guard with an assault rifle outside who stands down when Eggsy tells him to. Eggsy types his access code into the number pad and waits for it to process and buzz open, then takes a deep breath before pushing the door open and going inside.
Harry’s seated at a table, his wrists cuffed and chained to a thick metal peg embedded in the tabletop. His suit has been swapped out for a cotton shirt and trousers that look appallingly threadbare on him. He doesn’t look at Eggsy as he comes in, just stares disinterestedly at the peg with his hands clasped together, thumbs twiddling up until Eggsy sits down in front of him.
“Harry,” Eggsy says, unsure of what to expect.
He tenses palpably. Silence, then Harry unclasps his hands and lays them flat on the table to drum out an idle beat with his index fingers.
“Harry,” Eggsy tries again.
He does get a look at this, fixed and assessing. Harry sniffs, and says, “That’s my name.” A crash of dizzy relief surges through Eggsy, but then Harry adds, “As you people insist.”
Disappointment burns like bile at the back of Eggsy’s throat, and he forces a swallow to try and get rid of it. “What would you like me to call you, then?” he asks, switching tactics.
Tap, tap, clink, clink. “Harry will be acceptable.”
“Right. Good.” His heart sinking lower, Eggsy keeps going. “Do you remember who I am?”
Harry says nothing for a long while, then, “You were tailing me in Baltimore. We fought, and I lost.”
“No, I mean. Before,” Eggsy says, keeping his growing desperation out of his voice. “You knew who I was, didn’t you — s’why you ran, and. The roof…”
Nothing, save the tapping Harry’s making with his fingers. He keeps staring at Eggsy, an indiscernible look in his eyes. Eggsy bites the inside of his cheek and thinks about the hundred different things he wanted to say, but finds in this crucial moment that all it crumbles and none of it will come through.
“You haven’t killed me yet,” Harry says suddenly, and Eggsy’s chest goes tight with how he says it. It’s not flat, or scared — just observational, and he sounds fascinated more than anything, the most emotion Eggsy’s seen out of him. “Why?”
“Wha — nobody is going to kill you, Harry.”
Harry raises an eyebrow. “Whatever it is that you want from me, I don’t have it, nor do I know where it is.”
“We don’t want anything from you,” Eggsy says, almost a plea, ironic in that Harry’s supposed to be the one fettered and under interrogation here.
“There’s always something,” Harry replies. He tugs lightly at his bonds, as if to prove his point.
This isn’t going the way it was supposed to. Eggsy had been banking on the hope that Harry would remember something — anything at all to work with — perhaps too much so. He wasn’t prepared to be met with little more than a blank slate, and the lack of preparation for having nothing to latch onto has Eggsy thwarted, like he’s been cast out to sea without knowing how to swim and is now struggling to stay afloat. Feels just about right — he could drown in the way Harry regards him without an ounce of trust whatsoever.
“We just want to help you, Harry,” he says, for an utter want of anything better, or more honest.
Harry says nothing, but he doesn’t have to for Eggsy to know that he doesn’t believe it.
***
“These are from medical,” Merlin tells them as he pulls up three diagrams on the briefing screen.
The lines and shapes and shadows are all meaningless to Eggsy besides the fact that it’s obviously Harry’s brain, but he looks at them and wills himself to understand the information they contain. “What are we looking at?” he asks.
“I see,” Caradoc muses beside him. “That explains rather a lot.”
“Explains what? Merlin, what does he mean by that?”
“I’d like to know as well,” Roxy says.
“I was getting to that,” Merlin says testily. He presses a button on his clipboard to select one of the images, zooming in to a grey section with a faintly brighter streak running through it. “They took a few head and neck scans while he was in there — it’s not part of standard screening, but we thought it would be pertinent considering what we last saw of him.”
Eggsy nods, his throat closing up. Nightmares of a single gunshot and a body falling in a church courtyard have returned in recent days, on top of a new one — the rooftop again, Harry holding the gun to Eggsy’s forehead and pulling the trigger without hesitation.
“This is scar tissue,” Merlin says, pointing out the streak. “It’s likely that when he was shot, the bullet passed through his brain in a fairly straight line, but the angle’s not very typical — the gun must have been shaking, or something happened to destabilise it. Now here, this whole section is white matter, and this area’s where the perirhinal cortex of the hippocampus is, right next to the rhinal sulcus. As you can see, a small bit of both has been clipped by the path of the bullet as well.”
“He shouldn’t be alive,” Caradoc says. “The elevated intracranial pressure from the haematoma alone would have been more than enough to kill him.”
“We found an exit scar along the border of the parietal and occipital bones,” Merlin says, accessing another image that shows the back of Harry’s head, hair pushed aside by someone’s gloved hand to reveal the translucent, milky-white patch beneath it. “Would have been pretty big at the time he sustained the injury. Assuming he fell on his back, any blood and CSF would have drained through it until there was time to stabilise him haemodynamically.”
“Merlin, speak fucking English,” Eggsy growls.
“You watch your language,” Merlin warns, but swipes back to the initial picture. “As I said before, there’s been some damage to the deeper tissues that’s already healed, but I would be very surprised if there aren’t any lasting effects. At any rate, with this kind of traumatic brain injury, for anyone to walk away with nothing more than significant memory loss is the equivalent of winning the lottery.”
“Can you reverse it?”
Merlin closes the image and flicks the screen off. “Arthur’s conferencing with a team from Stockholm as we speak,” he tells Eggsy. “Experts, the whole lot. If anyone can answer that, it’ll be them.”
“So what do we do now?”
“What we can.” Merlin nods at Caradoc. “If you find out anything new, Arthur wants to be the first to know.”
“Hold on, you’re not letting him have another go, are you?” Eggsy says, jabbing a thumb at Caradoc. “Merlin, Harry already thinks we’ve all got it in for him. How is putting him through the grind again helping with anything, exactly?”
Merlin looks down at his clipboard, where he has some digital documents displayed holographically. “We still know nothing about what’s happened since Kentucky,” he says. “Where he’s been, how he ended up with the Morgana Chapter. Like I said, I want to help him as much as you do, Galahad, but I’d also like to know that nobody’s going to die trying.”
“He needs to know that we’re not going to hurt him,” Eggsy argues. “He won’t start trusting any of us if we keep him locked up.”
“Maybe a softer approach would be more efficacious,” Roxy agrees, and Eggsy looks at her in surprise. “Prisoners tend to respond to acts of perceived kindness more positively than they do under duress, after all.”
“He’s not your run-of-the-mill terrorist, Lancelot,” Caradoc interjects, the fucker. “Assets generally aren’t, for the greater part of what we know of them. I can lend you some of my memos to read, if you like.”
Roxy shakes her head. “That won’t be necessary.”
His last and only pillar of support gone, Eggsy can see that Merlin will not be swayed, but he tries anyway. “Just let him go,” he urges. “I’ll look after him, I promise. If anything happens, I’ll take full responsibility.”
There isn’t even the smallest instance which Eggsy can delude himself that it almost works. Merlin removes his glasses and slides them onto the front of his jumper, which has always been how he indicates that a conversation is over.
“I’m sorry, Galahad,” he says.
***
“They can’t do this to him.”
Roxy tears open a sachet of sugar and dumps the contents into her coffee. “And yet,” she says slowly, topping it off with an excess of creamer.
“I can’t believe you’re joking about this, Rox,” Eggsy snaps and throws his hands in the air. “This — this isn’t right. It’s wrong. It’s fucked up.”
“Hm, I don’t know about that,” Roxy says as she blows on her coffee and takes a sip. “I think Merlin’s just gunning for the best outcome possible. I’d probably be doing the same thing if I were in his position.”
Eggsy gawks at her. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
She shrugs, a quick lift of her shoulders.
“Then what was up with all that back there?” Eggsy snarls. “I thought you had my back.”
Roxy puts down her mug. “All I’m saying is that I’d rather we be cautious about this, that’s all.”
“You agree with them, then?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“It sure fucking sounds like you are,” Eggsy says bitterly, and turns away from her. “You don’t understand. It’s — Harry’s not. He’s alone, and probably confused right now, and… and scared. He just needs someone to talk to, Rox.”
“Eggsy.” Roxy’s voice is firm. “Look me in the face and tell me that you truly think that.”
Eggsy looks at her. He has it ready to be said. But then he remembers the half hour he spent with the stranger in the interrogation room with Harry’s face and voice, who answered every attempt to get him to open up with blank looks and impassive, laconic replies, and the words congeal like dried blood in Eggsy’s mouth, sticking to his gums.
“This isn’t the way,” he insists. That, he can actually believe.
***
That night, Eggsy wakes with his hands full of bedsheets and cooling sweat on his forehead, a half-formed shout slinking back into his lungs. He turns his head to look at the clock instinctively: roughly a quarter past three in the morning. He lies in bed until the half hour mark before he tosses the blankets off and washes his face in the sink, gets dressed. Then he leaves for the detention level.
The cell block is located in the vast subterranean facility beneath the mansion, a floor down from the armoury and across from the hangar. Eggsy takes the elevator, thinking about how he’s going to convince the night guard to arrange a meeting with Harry. He doesn’t have the required security clearance to ask to see detainees — only Merlin and Arthur are authorised to do so — but he figures he’ll work something out.
He passes the first level of checks without any difficulty. Further in, more than his access code is needed — palm and finger prints, a retinal scan, voice confirmation. Eggsy doesn’t really pay much mind to the lack of guards until he’s almost reached the cells, at which point he slowly comes to the awareness that he hasn’t seen anyone around since getting off at the detention level. It’s strange, and makes him feel uneasy, but at the same time he can’t help but revel in getting this far without being hassled about where he’s going so late at night and why.
The keypad at the entrance to the cell block accepts his access code and three layers of biometrics with a beep, hissing open the last set of reinforced double doors, and Eggsy walks in. The corridor is warm and brightly-lit, flanked by doors to the individual holding cells, of which there are six. He’s not sure which one Harry’s in, can’t actually remember ever being told, and decides to buzz up the warden on duty, but realises that he’s forgotten to wear his glasses. That’s fine — he just has six to check through, it’s not the most tedious thing in the world.
“Harry?” Eggsy calls at the first and second, knocking on the doors as well. He brings up the video feed on the touch screens outside each one, looking inside the cells and finding them empty. Repeating this for the next three cells has the same result, leaving just one more at the far end of the corridor.
“Harry?” Eggsy says again, and knocks. No response; he’s probably sleeping. Eggsy pokes at the screen, which flickers to life, and —
It’s empty, too.
He frowns. Have they moved Harry again? Probably not; Eggsy can’t imagine anywhere else in the mansion that Merlin would keep him. Maybe they’ve brought him up for another round of interrogation, stress techniques and all. That seems much more likely. He thinks about how unearthly late it is and feels a flare of anger; clearly, he needs to have a talk with both Merlin and Caradoc about the humane treatment of prisoners.
No, not prisoner. Harry.
He exits the cell block and heads for the elevator. As Eggsy passes a corridor, he sees one of the guards patrolling through it and calls out to him, “Hey, erm. Sorry, but could I check something with you?”
The guard stops walking but doesn’t turn around.
“The, uh, person they were keeping in the cell block,” Eggsy says, moving closer to him. “D’you know where he is now? I couldn’t find him in there.”
Still no response, and all of Eggsy’s experiences with watching action movies and serials comes rushing back to him in the second that the guard does turn around, everything leading up to a single thought in his mind, fuck.
“Please don’t run,” Harry says tiredly, pointing the pistol at Eggsy’s face.
Eggsy swallows dry, whispers, “Harry.” No glasses, no suit, no umbrella — there’s literally nothing he can do.
“Raise your hands and turn around, please.” Eggsy obeys, and then he feels the silencer of the gun brush the nape of his neck. “If you would be so kind, I’d like to know the safest and fastest way out of here.”
Eggsy’s pulse pounds in his ears. Trying to grapple with Harry for the gun is too risky; at this distance, he’d be shot at once. “How did you get out?”
“The way out, now.”
“Where did you get that uniform? Did you kill someone?”
“Lead me, or I will shoot you.”
Softly spoken, the realness of the threat finds its way beneath Eggsy’s skin, creeps along his bones and chills him to the marrow. Merlin was right all along, and Eggsy wants to laugh. Heart over head, he thinks, not that it would have mattered which one he trusted over the other where both were telling him the exact same thing.
“Go ahead, then,” he says, all strength for hoping lost. “Shoot me.”
The gun digs in, the rim of the barrel kissing skin. Eggsy squeezes his eyes shut and bites his tongue until he thinks he can taste blood, hanging on to his breathing until a heavy weight slugs him in the back of his head and he loses all conscious choice in the matter.
***
When he wakes again, it’s to a sharp antiseptic smell and the whitewashed ceiling of the infirmary above him. The lights have all been switched off and he’s alone, just the whirring sounds of machines keeping him company.
He fumbles for the call bell and holds it down with his thumb until he hears footsteps outside the door.
***
“He got out of the mansion through the garage,” Roxy says, playing the footage from their security cameras next to a map of the surrounding counties. “Took one of the motorcycles and got on the A1 headed north. He must have found out there was a tracker in the user interface — it stopped transmitting around Welwyn.”
“Did he take anything with him?” virtual-Arthur asks.
“We have a confirmed fatality on the detention level,” Merlin says. “One of the guards; broken neck, no defensive wounds. Probably didn’t even see it coming. He had the standard issue of equipment with him, but everything else in the armoury is accounted for.”
“Right. I want all highway cameras on the A1 to feed back into the surveillance grid,” Arthur says, addressing everyone in the emergency briefing room, holographic or otherwise. “Put whatever moves on that highway through the system. If anything comes across as even the littlest bit fishy, tag it. If a frog gets run over, I want to know about it. Caradoc, where is the nearest base of the Morgana Chapter?”
“Where it was, you mean,” Caradoc amends, and clears his throat as Arthur’ expression turns icy. “Norwich, I believe. It does fit with his direction of travel.”
“Percival, Kay, Lancelot,” Arthur says swiftly, the inherent order clear. Each of them nod in turn. “Merlin, you’re mission control.”
Merlin nods. “Yes, Arthur.”
“I want to go,” Eggsy says.
Arthur looks at him. “You’re too invested, Galahad. I don’t want to have to make this any more personal than it is.”
“Personal? They knew Harry, too!” Eggsy says, gesturing with a broad sweep of his hand.
“As I said, it’s already personal,” Arthur answers. “Any more and we’ll risk compromising the mission.”
A nauseous feeling comes over Eggsy’s stomach. “What’s the mission?” he demands.
Arthur inclines his head and clasps his hands in front of him. “Mordred will be dealt with in an appropriate fashion as and how the circumstances allow.”
Dealt with. Appropriate fashion. Mordred. Eggsy is going to be sick. “What do you mean by that?”
“This mission shall not concern those who have not been assigned to it,” Arthur declares, speaking to everyone again. “You have your orders. Dismissed.”
“You can’t —”
“Galahad.” Arthur’s voice is cold fire. “I’m putting you on probation.”
***
As they’re filing out of the room, Eggsy catches Roxy by the arm.
“Rox,” he says, and doesn’t even care that he’s begging, “Roxy, please.”
She promises him nothing, but she squeezes his hand back and Eggsy knows that barring everything else, solely for his sake, she’s at least going to try.
***
Eggsy’s bullied down to the monorail by the guards Arthur has directed to escort him from the mansion. They don’t even let him return to his room to pick up the clothes he brought — some casual wear and one of his suits, items he could probably do without but tries to retrieve anyway if just to get to talk to Merlin, or Kay; he can only pray that Roxy will try and bring her own mentor around. He still has his glasses, but the comms channels linking him with the other agents have been stonewalled except for the one opened to Arthur, the most lost of causes out of his potential allies.
Back in London, he’s bundled into a night cab and driven home. The second the car stops at his house, Eggsy goes in and thunders up the stairs, J.B at his heels, to his room, where he grabs his laptop and switches it on and looks on the National Rail site for train tickets to Norwich out of King’s Cross. He’s halfway through the booking process when he realises that he doesn’t even know where in Norwich he’s going, if the base was in the city itself or the surrounding country, and curses himself for not having read the primer on dismantlement mission at the time it was available to him.
Norwich open on Google Maps in front of him, J.B snoozing in his lap, he nods off trying to come up with a better plan.
***
It’s another day and night before the embargo on his comms link is lifted. On the morning he stops getting static buzzing in, Eggsy contacts Roxy first, and gets told by her exhausted voice in his ear that no, there’s been no sign of Harry at the deserted compound, although Arthur thinks that he might turn up if they lie in wait long enough and is sending Caradoc back to Baltimore.
When the initial relief has passed, Eggsy contemplates travelling there himself for the second time, but decides against it. There’s no guarantee that Harry will turn up there, and even if he does there’s little Eggsy can do if Percival and Kay both decide to blackball him — it’s a fazing thought, but he wouldn’t count on Merlin taking his side either.
There was a base in Stuttgart, Eggsy thinks he overheard once. It’s the next closest thing, further than Norwich but still travellable at eight hundred kilometres. He tries to work out how far someone could get on a motorcycle and shakes the idea off. The German Kingsman division is in Frankfurt; Arthur would be all over his arse in a matter of minutes if he tried.
***
“Still nothing?”
“Still nothing, Eggsy.”
“…”
“Mate, it’s four in the morning.”
“Yeah.”
“Go to sleep. If we find him, I’ll let you know before Arthur.”
“…you’d better.”
“Goodnight, Eggsy.”
“Night, Rox.”
***
A week after Harry escapes, Eggsy goes to his old house. There’s no real reason for the visit — his mum gets three tickets to see Derren Brown at the Royal Albert Hall, twenty minutes by foot from where Harry used to live. After the show, he tells his mum that he has to go back to the shop for a bit, which he can sense displeases her a trifle but Daisy has school the next day, putting her in less of a position to argue.
South Kensington is a neighbourhood too familiar for Eggsy not having set foot in it for so long. He recognises the turns from the time Harry had remotely driven him back from the Black Prince, the terrace houses and expensive cars parked out on the streets. He walks and walks, not thinking about anything in particular until he’s staring down the lane leading to Harry’s house. He stands and looks at it for a while, contemplating if it would be worth the heartache before he gives in to temptation.
The front door is locked, so Eggsy deploys the detachable snap gun from his watch to open it and slip in. He turns on the lights in the foyer and wipes his shoes on the mat, looking around. There’s a fine layer of dust over everything and the floorboard creak under his feet as he makes his way to the living room.
Nothing much has changed since the last time he’d been here, before V-day — he hasn’t been back subsequently. Given the neighbourhood and postcode, Eggsy’s astounded that nobody else has bought up the place to live in yet. Held by Kingsman, probably. He knows all about the different safe houses they have scattered around the globe. There’s nothing that points to anyone having come in here for a long time, though. Eggsy rubs a line in the dusty mirror over the fireplace and wonders if he should get someone to clean up the place, just in case.
The kitchen is just down the hallway, past the ground floor bathroom and the stairs leading to the basement. Eggsy flicks the lights on and walks inside, inspecting the place aimlessly until his eyes move the plate on the kitchen island, and the piece of toast on it.
There’s a bite missing. Next to it is an open tub of margarine, the impression of a butter knife swiped across the top, but there are no utensils in sight.
The lights flick off. Someone grabs Eggsy from behind and before he knows what’s happening, he’s whirled against the wall, pinned with a forearm, and sharp, slippery metal is pressing against his jugular with just about enough force to indent but avoid breaking the skin.
Harry looks at him, eyes unreadable in the darkness, and Eggsy looks back, his head hot, mouth half-open. Whole body gone numb with shock, Eggsy doesn’t even consider struggling or fighting back, not that it would do him any good.
“How did you find me?” Harry asks, his tone unnervingly casual.
A number of different replies leap into Eggsy’s mind — I wasn’t, I was just, I didn’t mean to, and, oh my god, Harry — but his voice fails him and he’s reduced to gaping at Harry like a fish.
“Are you following me?”
Eggsy closes his mouth and shakes his head.
“Is there anyone with you?”
“N — no,” Eggsy gasps, finally: a word, a spoken syllable.
The butter knife at his throat presses the barest of micrometres closer. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not, Harry, I swear, I’m not —”
Harry’s eyes search his as if to ferret out falsehoods. His vision acclimatising, Eggsy blinks Harry’s face into view to make out the squareness of his jaw, his furrowed eyebrows, the scar at the corner of his eye. Harry pulls back slightly, but he doesn’t take his gaze off of Eggsy’s face, and neither does he relax with the knife.
“Harry,” Eggsy says. “Harry, please. I just want to help.”
Eyes narrowed, Harry doesn’t budge. Eggsy can feel the tension in the muscles of his forearm, coiling like a spring ready to snap or release at any given moment, like he’s going to put Eggsy through the wall.
“You’re alone?” Harry asks, and Eggsy nods vigorously.
“Harry… Harry, please —”
There’s nothing at first, then Harry lets go of him and steps back. Eggsy slumps against the wall, plaster flaking under his nails and fingertips. He stands only when his knees stop shaking and he’s sure he’s not going to fall over again. Harry continues watching him stoically, his hand still curled tight around the handle of the butter knife. An empty minute stretches out between them as Eggsy tries to think of the right thing to say or do with Harry warily standing by. Then, Harry turns and drifts back to the kitchen island, where he picks up the slice of toast and takes another bite out of it, chewing without looking over at Eggsy.
***
He thinks of all the things Harry taught him in the months after they had met. Their first lesson, even before Kingsman: not to judge a book by its cover, that more often than not first impressions are wrong, that you don’t really know a person up until you do. In subsequent ones: everything Eggsy hated about the idea of no honour among thieves, how to channel all of his yearning to strike out against the world into protecting the vulnerable and the defenseless, and Eggsy understanding for the first time in twenty-four years why he could never consciously harm any animal.
There are other things as well. Donning a suit like the armour it has become, dinner room etiquette, the difference between single malt and single grain whiskeys, saying please and thank you as if the phrases were programmed into basic human nature. And then, in moments that Eggsy never wants to forget — Harry rapping his knuckles with a spoon when Eggsy reached for the sugar instead of asking for it, Harry tutting at Eggsy’s fumbled shirt cuffs and fixing them himself, Harry’s hands at his hip and shoulder whilst teaching Eggsy to waltz — what it is to love another person so much that every fibre of your being hurts with the ache of not being theirs.
He thinks of all this, and his mind is made up. He will use everything that he has learnt, everything in his power to help. Eggsy will do whatever it takes, no matter what, even if it destroys him.
***
After he’s checked that his comms feed isn’t transmitting, hasn’t been since the Royal Albert Hall, Eggsy puts the kettle on because this is something he can do. While he waits for the water to boil, he leans against the counter with his arms folded and watches the kitchen island, where Harry sits eating his toast. He’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts and his hair is messy, like he’s just woken up and hasn’t combed it yet. He still doesn’t look at Eggsy, remaining where he is and chewing sedately with his eyes stuck on the tub of margarine.
He’s here, Eggsy thinks, a sudden swell of hope rising within him. He remembers what Merlin said, only he also can’t help but think that this has to mean something. Harry might not remember everything but the fact that he’s here grips the stupid, naive bit of Eggsy’s brain and refuses to let go, telling it that against all odds, in some form or another, enough of Harry’s memory is intact to have brought him back to where he once used to live.
The electric kettle shuts off with a click, and Eggsy looks in the cupboards — they’re all adequately stocked with the usual safe house commodities — pulling out a box of teabags and fixing two cups of tea. He brings them over to the kitchen island and sets one in front of Harry, claiming the other for himself and the seat next to him.
“Two sugars, no milk,” Eggsy says. “Just how you like it.”
Harry stops chewing, swallows visibly. He eyes the cup leerily and doesn’t take it.
“I haven’t done anything to it,” Eggsy tells him.
Harry doesn’t move. His hand twitches towards the knife in the margarine and Eggsy wonders if Harry’s going to stab him in the neck and make a run for it.
When that doesn’t happen, Eggsy reaches to touch Harry’s arm and stops mid-way when he gets a forbidding look. He withdraws his hand and curls it around his own cup, wishing that Harry would say something in response. “You don’t have to drink it, if you don’t want to.”
Seconds pass, then Harry resumes finishing what’s left of the toast.
“Do you know where you are?” Eggsy asks.
Brushing crumbs from his mouth, Harry replaces the lid on the margarine and clatters the knife in his plate. “South Kensington, London,” he replies, matter-of-factly. “England, Great Britain.”
Eggsy bites his lip and breathes in. "I mean this place. This house.”
A look round the kitchen, then Harry returns to staring at the tabletop. “I don’t believe so,” he says.
If anything, Eggsy’s getting used to casting blindly about and getting nothing in return. He grips his cup tighter, the heat of it starting to burn his palm. “This is where you used to live, Harry,” he says quietly.
Harry doesn’t respond, physically or verbally. His gaze is fixed on the marble of the table like he’s trying to bore a hole in it.
“Do you remember living here?” Eggsy asks, thinking, please. Just this once, let this still be there.
Silence. It’s as if Eggsy hadn’t spoken at all. Harry gets up and takes his plate and goes over to put it in the sink. Eggsy hears him work the tap and an annoyed tch as the water flows out at full blast, spraying up from the sink and dousing everything close by.
“I’ll take care of that,” Eggsy says, hurriedly moving to turn the tap off. Harry moves back from the sink with a scowl, forearms dripping and a large sodden patch on his shirt, the exact same thing that had happened to Eggsy the first time he tried to wash something in Harry’s kitchen. He stands aside to let Eggsy scrub the plate and knife clean, looking on throughout, and Eggsy tries not to drop what he’s holding with Harry’s arresting attention on him.
There are no cloths or kitchen towels to dry them or the counter with, so Eggsy goes to the bathroom to grab a handful of tissues. When he returns to the kitchen, Harry’s gone but on the kitchen island, the cup next to Eggsy’s is empty.
***
He finds Harry in the bedroom upstairs. Eggsy gathers up his wet shirt and shorts from where he’s shed them on the stairs, folding them over his arm as he walks up. He knocks on the open door and holds off for ten seconds, entering when he doesn’t hear the come in he’s waiting for.
Harry’s sitting on the edge of his bed in a night robe, holding on to a framed picture with one hand. He has the other resting on the bedspread, beside the pistol that Eggsy recognises as the one he’d been held up with. The silencer is still screwed on to the barrel. Eggsy averts his gaze from it before he can start to feel ill.
As Eggsy approaches the bed, Harry says without looking up from the picture, “Thank you. For the tea, I should say. It was delicious.”
Eggsy blinks, lets himself be taken aback by the unexpected nicety. “Yeah? Um. You’re welcome,” he says. “No problem.”
Harry doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at the picture. Eggsy moves closer to take a better look, and yes, it’s what he thinks it is — a smiling Harry with glasses on, ten, maybe twenty years younger, sitting in a chair with a terrier cradled in his arms.
“That’s me,” Harry murmurs, and Eggsy’s heart expands rapidly in his chest.
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, it is. It’s you.”
“I had a dog?”
“Mr. Pickles,” Eggsy says quickly. “From your Kingsman training. They asked you to, and you — you got to take him home, afterwards. You had him for eleven years before he died of —”
“Pancreatitis.” Harry says it exactly when Eggsy does.
His heart on overload, Eggsy dares himself to believe it. “That’s right. You remember, then?” he asks.
Harry shifts on the bed, uncertain expression twisting to a frown. He puts the picture in his lap and looks up to meet Eggsy’s eyes.
“Eggsy,” he says, like he’s answering a question he isn’t very confident of.
Oh my god, Eggsy thinks. Oh my god. “Yeah,” he half-says, half-chokes, and can feel the tears forming. “Yeah, that’s me. You know my name?”
Harry tilts his head. “Yes. You told me on the roof.”
All of Eggsy’s relief turns to cold ash in an instant. By some miracle of effort, he barely keeps himself standing. “Oh,” he says, his voice small. “Oh. I — I see.”
If Harry senses his disappointment, he makes no indication of it. “You mentioned Kingsman,” he says. “Is it true?”
Eggsy’s not sure what he means by this. “Is what true?”
“Everything they said. About me being one. Working for them.”
Eggsy nods mutely. He doesn’t know what Caradoc or Merlin have told him but neither is he looking to complicate matters of what Harry thinks and believes any further.
“You work for them too, don’t you?”
Eggsy hesitates, then nods again.
Harry’s expression hardens and he presses his palm into the bed. The gun slips along the comforter, sliding marginally closer to his hand.
“Harry, I don’t want to fight you,” Eggsy says quietly.
“You’re not going to call them?”
“No.” He’d already decided from the start that it’s the last thing he’s going to do.
Harry’s mouth turns, but he stops surreptitiously going for the gun. Instead, he looks back at the picture in his lap and runs a thumb along the frame. “Will you make me some more tea?” he asks. When he looks up at Eggsy, his eyes are still dark, but they are also the softest they’ve been since Baltimore. “Please?”
Eggsy smiles, his chest loosening just a little. “Of course,” he says.
***
Twenty minutes later there is a half-finished cup of English Breakfast cooling on the bedside table and they are lying in bed together, on top of the duvet, facing each other but not touching. Keeping still and willing his breathing silent, Eggsy looks at Harry’s closed eyes and wonders if he’s fallen asleep before they are open again and Harry is watching him back through dark, hooded lids.
“You’re not sleeping,” Harry says, tone soft but every bit as razor-edged as it was before.
Eggsy tries not to let himself be too affected by how much that sounds like an accusation. “I’m not going to hurt you, Harry.”
There’s a dangerous glint in his eye, the one with the scar. “But I could hurt you.”
Eggsy shakes his head on the pillow, hair rustling against the case. “You’re not going to hurt me either.”
“I could.”
“But you won’t.”
Beat. “You don’t know that.”
“If you wanted to, you already would have,” Eggsy points out.
Harry doesn’t seem to have anything to say to this. His glare melts away to a brooding look and he presses his lips together, curling his fingers into the duvet.
Outside, the siren of an ambulance wails past in the distance.
“Have you been here long?” Eggsy asks.
Harry breathes, then answers, “No.”
“How long?”
“Just a day.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Elsewheres.”
“Right. Okay.” Eggsy decides not to force the issue — he has a feeling he probably doesn’t want to know anyway. “What made you come here?”
The questioning look from when Harry was studying the picture is back. “I don’t know,” he admits, after a while.
“How did you know to come here?” Eggsy asks. “You could have gone anywhere. Why here?”
He can see the silent struggle on Harry’s face as he tries to reach an understanding himself. “I don’t know,” he repeats, softer this time. “I was riding, and I saw — I think I saw, and it felt. I felt that I would be safe here.”
It’s something. It’s all Eggsy could ask for. “You lived here,” he tells Harry again. “This is your house. It was for a long time.”
Harry’s jaw works, the smallest muscles jumping. “What happened?” he asks.
Long as he’d known that it would come up eventually, Eggsy’s insides still tighten up with the memory he keeps only because he has to. “Do you remember Kentucky?” he asks. “The church?”
Harry closes his eyes slowly. “I remember,” he says, pausing to breathe in. His eyes are far away when he opens them, misted over with sleeplessness and slivered memory. “Killing. I’m angry, so very angry, and I don’t know why. There’s a lot of blood, and. A man. Outside.”
“Valentine,” Eggsy supplies, breathless with how far they’ve gotten in the past minute. “He shot you. Anything before that?”
Harry’s eyelids droop and he actually looks apologetic. “I’m not sure,” he murmurs.
“Anything at all,” Eggsy presses. Just a little bit more, and it feels like Harry will remember everything else.
He’s not expecting it when Harry reaches up and touches the underside of his jaw. Harry leaves his hand there, the pads of his fingers smooth on Eggsy’s unshaved skin.
“I know you,” he says, low and quizzical about it. “Why do I know you?”
Eggsy licks dry lips and moves his own hand to Harry’s. He doesn’t hold it, just lets his fingers brush against the inside of Harry’s wrist. “You were my mentor,” he tells him. “You taught me everything I know.” Hyperbole, but whatever helps, helps.
“I taught you.” He doesn’t sound like he fully buys it, but neither does he sound like he thinks Eggsy is bullshitting.
“Yes.”
“When I was a Kingsman?”
“You’re the reason I joined,” Eggsy says. “You proposed me when they needed someone new.”
Harry’s expression remains bereft of recollection. He removes his hand from Eggsy’s face and as soon as he does, Eggsy stops touching him as well. Harry turns onto his back so that he’s lying flat and facing the ceiling and rests his hands on his stomach. A pang of defeat clenches around Eggsy’s heart at the prospect of being pushed away like this. Not when he was so close, close enough to call it progress.
“Do you remember when we first met?” he asks.
He listens to Harry’s deep breathing for long, wordless seconds, and Eggsy’s debating dropping the question against asking a second time when he hears Harry speak again.
“Tell me,” Harry says.
***
There are two separate stories to tell, of course, but Eggsy goes with the option he can recount in better detail and thinks Harry will have a better chance of remembering. Eggsy starts from square one, ground zero at the Black Prince, and takes Harry through the stolen car, Holborn Police Station, the medal he still keeps in his sock drawer because he can’t bring himself to look at it or throw it away. The Black Prince again, then the tailor’s shop, the dressing room. He tells Harry that he’s watched Pretty Woman since and gets a small, fleeting grin out of him. It’s probably the most nonthreatening he’s looked in days.
Eggsy doesn’t stop there. He moves on to selection, the months he spent in basic training digging trenches in the cold and jumping out of planes. He skims over the inbetween where Harry got injured because Eggsy’s unsure of the finer points, and it’s just as well — Harry doesn’t seem too interested in listening to that, besides. He doesn’t interrupt or ask questions while Eggsy’s talking, only listens and responds with the tiniest changes of his expression at points where Eggsy hopes are familiar to him. When they come to the night on the train tracks, Harry turns his head to look at Eggsy.
“I think I remember some of that,” he says, not without misgiving.
“That was when Charlie got the boot,” Eggsy says. “He sold out Arthur — Chester, I mean. We got to watch together.”
Harry smiles at him. It’s tiny and not all there, but a smile nonetheless. “And you didn’t betray me then,” he says.
Eggsy chuckles. “Me? I’m no snitch. But you knew that already,” he says. “I think it’s one of the reasons you chose me.”
“I did,” Harry murmurs, and from the deadpan way he says it Eggsy can’t tell if it’s a statement or a question.
“Also I said you had a silver spoon up your arse,” Eggsy says, miming with his hand. “That might have had something to do with it.”
Harry is quiet at this. “I don’t remember that,” he says, sounding… sad. Does that mean he wants to remember? It feels like a stupid question and the answer should be obvious, but while Eggsy doesn’t want to assume anything, neither does he want to ask and risk the answer that isn’t as obvious to him.
Instead, he puts his hand on Harry’s hip and Harry lets him keep it there, an unexpected offering, a small wonder in its own right. “That’s okay,” Eggsy says, and by god, he means it. For now, it feels like they have all the time in the world, and they’ll figure this out sooner or later. Eggsy still has it in him to believe that.
***
He remembers the twenty-four hours he spent practically living with Harry the most out of their time together. Candidates didn’t get to see their mentors a whole lot during training — Merlin rarely permitted it, and even then it was five, ten minutes over the comms link in the recruits’ bunk, just to check that things were progressing well and they were one step closer to becoming the new Lancelot. It was a luxury, finally being able to ask Harry the things about him that Eggsy had accumulated over the course of selection. The only thing they weren’t permitted to ask about was the final test, which Eggsy felt confident about acing — no offence to Roxy — and left ample room for other, more important questions, like when Harry’s birthday was, what kinds of music he listened to, and who he thought would win in a straight fight, Jason Bourne or Jack Bauer, and yes, only one can win, you’re not allowed to call it a draw.
Eggsy was nothing but questions into the night and the following morning, and Harry had answered each one fully and patiently, reprimanding Eggsy whenever he tried to get a word in edgewise over the rattling of the cocktail shaker, the half-set breakfast table. As they were going over salad and starter forks and the correct way to use a pepper grinder, Eggsy finally asked what he’d been building momentum for since coming back to the understanding that the only ring Harry wore was the signet on his right hand.
Harry hummed and grated more pepper into his eggs. “I suppose I just never met the right person, that’s all,” he said.
“Weak, Harry,” Eggsy groaned, drizzling more honey over a stack of pancakes. “You sound like a forty-year-old cat lady.”
“Comes with the job, I’m afraid.”
“Are you saying you got a cat, too? Man, that’s not fair. J.B could use a pal.”
“Eat your breakfast,” Harry chided, but smiled as well.
“My dad had my mum, though.” Eggsy cut his pancakes into half, then quarters, which is a thing gentleman do instead of inhaling whole slices, apparently. “You never had anyone?”
“Your parents met a long time before Merlin recruited your father,” Harry explained, and speared a chunk of peppery eggs onto his fork. “Things get… complicated. After one joins Kingsman.”
“So nothing before?”
“Just a fling here and there. Nothing serious.”
Eggsy grinned as he made eighths of his pancakes. The thought of Harry getting it on with someone was an interesting mental exercise. What would his type be — the perfectly nice girl from down the lane, probably, with whom Harry could have had a family, a house, children. He’d have been an excellent father, without a doubt. Gentlemanly and modest, with kind hands and strong shoulders with which to give piggyback rides. Eggsy didn't quite know what to do with that realisation; he started shovelling food into his mouth and tried not to look at Harry’s hands too much.
“You’ll understand when you’re a Kingsman,” Harry told him.
Eggsy swallowed gooey-sweet pancakes and looked up. “You think I’m going to make it?” he asked.
“I have the utmost confidence,” Harry answered, smiling the way Eggsy always imagined a father would with his son — like they could never do any wrong, brilliant like the sun coming up.
“Thanks, Harry,” Eggsy mumbled, and thought, when I’m a Kingsman. That’s when I’ll tell him.
The next day, back at the mansion, Arthur asked to see him in the library. Bring J.B along.
***
Harry sleeps. Eggsy doesn’t. He stares at the ceiling and listens to the ticking of the clock on the wall. The only light in the room comes from the street lamps outside, filtering in through the curtains. Eggsy turns and looks at Harry. He sleeps on his side, face half-buried in the pillow and his hand resting at the corner of it. Even in the dark Eggsy thinks he can see the scar glow, a luminescent streak ending at the greying hair of Harry’s temple.
He’s touching it before he can help himself, the barest brush of his index finger, and Harry doesn’t wake up and try to strangle him to death, so Eggsy figures he’s good. The scar is fibrous and rough under his fingertip, but part of Harry now, and it still makes him the most beautiful person Eggsy has ever known.
Come back, he thinks. Come back to me.
***
In the morning Harry makes them baked beans on toast and lets Eggsy meddle out the tea and they have breakfast together at the kitchen island. Eggsy greets him good morning and Harry says it back and they don’t say anything more to each other as they eat.
***
There are enough supplies at the safe house — Harry’s house — to last a week, maybe two if they’re frugal. Eggsy can’t think of a way to bring more food in without rousing suspicion and having Harry leave to get some himself is out of the question. He can’t say with absolute certainty that the house isn’t already under surveillance, even though safe houses are generally forgotten by Kingsman until they become relevant to any agents who need a place to lie low for a while. A preliminary sweep finds no bugs in the walls or tracking devices under the sofa cushions, but Eggsy wouldn’t put it past the Kingsman tech team to screw him over from the other end after five years of faulty gear and gadgets that don’t do what they’re supposed to.
Keeping Harry safe and well-stocked isn’t the only major pickle on Eggsy’s plate. Beyond that, there’s convincing Kingsman command that Harry isn’t dangerous, which Eggsy doesn’t know how to go about easing into without having a strike team swoop down on the house and barge in guns blazing. Reason isn’t going to work on Arthur. Roxy’s their best bet but even so her word will only count for so much. What Eggsy needs to do is win Merlin over, and Caradoc if he’s lucky, and then maybe he can get somewhere with lifting the manhunt for Harry and focusing all their resources on helping him remember.
Saving the world was so much easier than this, honestly.
***
Eggsy doesn’t go to the safe house every day but Harry is always there when he does. Not that he has anywhere else to go, Eggsy supposes. Sometimes he’s watching telly or listening to the radio or reading a book, and other times Eggsy catches him in the study, staring at the newspaper clippings that haven’t been taken down yet and frowning before looking away. He talks most days and asks more questions, many of which Eggsy can’t address for not knowing everything there was to know about Harry, but he does his best. At any rate, Harry’s response — or rather lack of one — is the same whether he gets an answer or not. He remains distant and insular, and doesn’t look at Eggsy very much even as Eggsy tries to reach out to him.
The gun is kept in the bedside drawer. Eggsy thinks he sees the outline of a hand grenade under the towels across from the toilet. Electroshock pellets fall out with the cereal one morning when he tries to assemble breakfast from their gradually diminishing supplies. That Harry has had no choice but to turn his own home into a war zone for a battle that’s yet to happen makes Eggsy feel angry before he feels sick, but at least he’s here. For now. Eggsy still fears that one of these days he’s going to return to an empty house with nothing more than dust in the larders, exactly how it’s stood for years waiting for its master to come home.
***
Staying over with Harry is a temptation that Eggsy is careful not to fall for. It’s already precarious enough that he has to disable the transmission apparatus in his glasses whenever he visits; Merlin might be busy with mission control, but he’s meticulous when it comes to these things, and it’s only a matter of time before he catches on. But a night comes along where Harry asks him to stay and have dinner, a very, very bad idea considering the state of their pantry — Eggsy ends up smuggling in chicken saag and rogan josh from the Sainsbury’s Local a couple blocks away, and also manages a small plastic bag of frozen meals, just so Harry won’t have to cook for the next few days.
As he picks his way through bits of curried meat, Eggsy hears Harry say, “You’ve never asked me once for intelligence. Why?”
Eggsy looks up. “Huh?”
“About Triskelion,” Harry clarifies. He stirs his plastic fork in his food, which he’s barely eaten any of. “Your superiors asked a lot of things. You haven’t. Why is that?”
“Er.” Eggsy considers his own food, appetite gone. “I dunno. Never occurred to me, I guess.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
Eggsy looks at Harry. As per normal, Harry’s expression gives nothing away.
“You don’t have to,” Eggsy reassures him. “I don’t mind.”
“But do you want me to?”
Eggsy scoops gravy over his rice. Some of it slops down the side of the plastic container. “I think it would help me understand what happened,” he says, after pondering it through.
“They saved my life,” Harry says immediately. “I remember — waking. And then: pain. So much pain. I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know what was happening. They said they could make the pain go away, and I… I just wanted it to stop.”
Eggsy forgets about his dinner completely. “Was this after the church?” he asks.
Harry nods. “I think so. I’m not sure.”
“Do you remember what they did?”
The corner of Harry’s mouth twitches. “No. I don’t. I think there was — I could see a light, and a loud sound, then. Nothing.”
Eggsy swallows thickly. “Nothing? What do you mean?”
Harry puts his fork down and fists his hands on the dining table. “I don’t know who I am,” he says mechanically. “I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing — I’m told to, and I have to. I must. There will be consequences if I don’t. Terrible, terrible consequences. They gave me headaches, it was like my head was being torn in two. I didn’t want that, it hurt. It hurt so badly.”
Eggsy doesn’t even realise that Harry’s hand is shaking until he’s covered it with his own. “You don’t have to,” he repeats, and his own voice breaks. “You don’t — not for me.”
Harry looks at him and his eyes are suspiciously shiny. He turns his hand over to lace his fingers through Eggsy’s. “I knew someone,” he says in a low hush. “I’d forgotten — they made me say that I had forgotten. But I knew him, he meant so much to me. I think it was because — I don’t understand why. A boy, and. He’s saying a name.”
“Harry,” Eggsy breathes, and Harry’s face crumples.
They’re nearer than they were a second ago. Harry brings up his other hand from the table to hold Eggsy’s face. His thumb strokes gently over Eggsy’s cheek. “You?” he whispers wonderingly.
Eggsy doesn’t move. Couldn’t if he tried, or wanted to, and he only feels his eyes flutter shut as Harry kisses him. Slowly, gently, he kisses back, leaning forward into it until Harry’s damp breath fades from his lips and Harry is drawing back with a curious expression coming over his face, like he’s trying to understand Eggsy’s deal or what has just happened.
“You,” he says again, softer but also infinitely surer.
“I don’t,” Eggsy begins, but Harry kisses him again, much firmer and lasting longer than the previous one, and this time Eggsy holds Harry’s shoulder and feels his lips part, the tip of Harry’s tongue sifting in, just a sliver. He tastes of Indian spices and spit, and Eggsy thinks of all the times he dreamed this and how none of it could compare to Harry alive and here, close by and wanting him. The hand at his face pulls him closer, and the guiding pressure of Harry’s mouth on his is too good to be true.
He waits to wake up. Any moment now it’ll be over and Eggsy will jerk into reality and lie back in bed feeling vile and hollow and wrung out. But Harry breathes with him, says, “Eggsy,” like he remembers him again, and Eggsy can’t keep the sobs back any longer. They permeate the shared space between them, curbed to a mournful, low-pitched whining that Harry seems to take no note of. He tugs Eggsy against himself and kisses him, deep. Then he curls his hand around the back of Eggsy’s neck and touches their foreheads together with a sigh.
“I’m sorry,” Eggsy gasps, and it’s all beginning to surge through like water from a breaking dam — spoken apologies and the regret of five years where he thought Harry gone, his grief for the life that Harry deserved to continue living out and the days gone by that they now cannot have. He feels it in his shaking hands and the tear streaks under his eyes and in his chest like smoke he hasn’t been able to cough out for years. “I’m sorry, I should’ve… it wasn’t supposed to. I shouldn’t have let you go alone, you shouldn’t have been alone, I should’ve —”
Another kiss quietens him, threatening to shatter him completely. As if auguring that, Harry gathers Eggsy into his arms and holds him tight, and the physical force of his embrace is the only thing that keeps Eggsy together. He is warm, so warm, warmer than Eggsy could have possibly imagined. Eggsy kisses him and dares to want, longs hard enough to hurt with it. This is the man who saved him, who he could not save in return, who Eggsy loves with all his heart and it’s killing him, how even then he still could never love Harry anywhere near what feels fair or enough.
“Come with me,” Harry murmurs, and heaven help him, Eggsy does.
***
They’re fully undressed by the time they get to Harry’s bedroom, bodies jostling together as they kiss their way down the hall and up the stairs. Bits of clothing trail behind them — Eggsy’s suit jacket and tie draped over the railing, Harry’s boxer shorts on the carpet. In the doorway, Eggsy rubs his palm over Harry’s cock and kisses the base of his throat, inhaling the scent of his skin. Harry pets his hair and holds Eggsy by the armpit to thumb carefully at a nipple.
“Harry,” Eggsy whispers, cheek against his shoulder. He kisses Harry on the collarbone, fisting his hand around Harry’s cock and stroking upwards. Harry grunts and leads him to the bed, where he tips Eggsy’s chin up with two fingers and kisses him down, down, down.
“The first time I saw you, I thought,” Harry says, his fingers trailing over Eggsy’s stomach. He climbs over Eggsy and kisses him again, his cock slicking precome against Eggsy’s thigh. “I’d seen you before, but I didn’t know where. I wanted not to know you. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
Whimpering under him, Eggsy bucks his hips up against Harry’s groin. He lets Harry lick into his mouth and pushes his head back into the bed, nestling his hands in Harry’s hair. Harry noses at his neck and kisses Eggsy there as well, moving up until he reaches the junction of ear and jaw. There, he murmurs, “I thought I could forget you, like I forgot everything else. But then you came. I didn’t know what to do.”
“You ran,” Eggsy says, remembering. His pulse races, and he gasps when Harry’s cock presses to his, a hard, heavy weight against its length. Harry reaches down to fondle them both and brush Eggsy’s balls with his fingers, curling up to meet soft skin.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Harry mumbles, sounding like himself again, and Eggsy kisses him, has to for fear of what else might be said.
“Never,” Eggsy answers.
Harry smiles, silent and wistful. He shifts his body to lie next to Eggsy on the bed, and doesn’t resist as Eggsy turns him on his back and clambers on top of him. Eggsy kisses his mouth and jaw, sucks a mark over the pulse point in Harry’s neck to taste his heartbeat on his tongue. And then also: Harry’s sternum, his left nipple, the thick muscle of his abdomen as Eggsy kisses, licks lower. He rings Harry’s cock with his fingers and puts his mouth on it, and not a moment later there are hands frisking through his hair, nails scratching soothingly at his scalp.
He tries to go slowly, he really does, sucking Harry and tonguing his slit until Harry’s groaning the broken syllables of Eggsy’s name. But it takes barely more than a minute before Eggsy starts to taste the salty tang of release, and he readies himself, holding his breath from the moment Harry spills out hot and sticky into the back of his throat. He gathers it all with his tongue and swallows quickly, lapping at Harry throughout to draw out his pleasure. Inside his mouth, Harry’s cock twitches to softness and Eggsy rests his chin against Harry’s thigh, sighing around him and simultaneously smoothing the pad of his thumb over the base.
Harry tugs at him, gentle. “Up,” he says. “Come on, up. Your turn.”
Eggsy crawls up Harry’s body, retracing the path he took with his lips, and Harry twists them both onto their sides so he can shuffle down and take Eggsy into his mouth. He runs his tongue over Eggsy’s cock and slides it under the foreskin, making Eggsy pant from the pleasure collecting rapidly in his thighs and groin. The edge of climax verges closer with a series of licks, a satisfied moan, Harry massaging his balls with the heel of his hand. Without warning, he’s swallowed whole and he loses his breath, wrangled up in the wet heat of Harry’s mouth and kiss-swollen lips scraping him from root to tip, and he arches his back with a sound he never knew he could make with his voice.
He cries out Harry’s name as he comes, like a confession.
***
Deep in the night Harry holds on to him and Eggsy lies breathing against his bare chest, their legs tangled together under the sheets. Harry puts his head down on Eggsy’s and tightens his arms around him, and Eggsy falls asleep praying for them to remain like this, forever.
***
There’s sunlight outside the window when Eggsy wakes with Harry’s arm strewn across his chest. He blinks in adjustment, then at Harry, who doesn’t stir when Eggsy eases away and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He sits there and scrubs at his face, then turns his head to look back. Harry’s profile is mesmerising when he sleeps, lying with his mouth soft and lashes downcast, and Eggsy decides to watch him a while longer, which is why he takes a minute more to realise that on the bedside table, his glasses are flashing a contact notification.
“Hello?” Eggsy says, when he’s gone out into the hallway where he won’t disturb Harry.
“Eggsy.” It’s Roxy. There’s something lurking behind the way she says his name. “Where are you now?”
“Er.” Eggsy glances back into the bedroom to check that Harry’s still sleeping. “Home.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, Rox.”
There’s a long pause on the other end of the call. “Then why is your location disabled?”
Fuck.
“Uh,” Eggsy says instead.
“You’re with him, aren’t you?”
Eggsy’s tongue is suddenly too thick for his mouth. “With who?”
If anyone could make a pause angry, Roxy does a bang-up job of it. “Where are you?”
“I told you, I’m home,” Eggsy lies again.
“Eggsy, something’s happened.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Caradoc’s dead,” Roxy says.
A chill rides down Eggsy’s spine. His mouth prickles from the memory of dry brandy. “What? What happened?”
“We don’t know. Something went wrong in Baltimore — we think the Morgana Chapter might have been involved. He only managed to get two words back to us: Mordred, compromised.”
Eggsy squeezes his eyes shut. He knows precisely where this is going from the steel to Roxy’s voice. “Look, Roxy —”
“Where are you?”
“Rox, he couldn’t have,” Eggsy says desperately. “I’ve been with him for days, if he leaked anything, I would have known. There’s no way —”
“Merlin, you listening to this?”
“I am, Lancelot,” Merlin replies severely over the intercom, and Eggsy’s heart freezes. He hadn’t checked it was a secure line, or if anyone else was listening in. “Galahad, Lancelot has asked you three times. Are you waiting for me to ask you myself?”
Eggsy pushes down on a rising mixture of panic and despair. This can’t be happening. Not now. “Merlin, you have to believe me. Please. Harry’s not — he wouldn’t.”
“He’s already killed someone, Galahad,” Merlin says. “In case you’ve forgotten. And now may as well have done in an agent, too. I know what I believe right now. Do you?”
It feels as though the solid earth sways beneath Eggsy’s feet and he’s sinking, like he’s stepped into quicksand and there’s cold mud pressing in around him, broken glass in his mouth. The muscles of his throat work frantically and he chews over the words to make sure he’d be willing to live and die by them before saying, “You’re wrong. I won’t let you take him. If you come anywhere near him… you’ll have to go through me, first.”
The tension wound in the silence that follows could stop a bullet. Eggsy doesn’t breathe, and it sounds the same for everyone involved, up until someone finally speaks again: it’s Merlin.
“So be it,” he says softly, and Eggsy disconnects the call.
***
When Eggsy returns to Harry, he is sitting up and rubbing his eye with his wrist, the hem of the covers slipping down his chest. His sleepy smile lapses into a confused expression when he sees Eggsy’s face, then concern as his eyes demist and they can look at each other clearly.
“We have to run,” Eggsy says to him and realises, as he’s met with the ice of the stranger he’d met in Baltimore, that his life as a Kingsman is officially over as well.
***
While Harry collects the piecemeal armoury he’s stashed around the house, Eggsy runs out to the Sainsbury’s Local to pull money from the ATM there. He takes five thousand pounds first, the maximum for any one withdrawal, and then five hundred more in smaller bills so that they don’t run into problems getting change for minor purchases. It also means that they have ten minutes at most to leave before Eggsy’s debit card activity gets followed up on, but Harry has everything packed and ready to go when Eggsy gets back, and within two they are in the back seat of a cab headed for King’s Cross.
“We’ll need disguises,” Harry says. He tosses over a pair of sunglasses and frowns at Eggsy’s suit. “You could’ve chosen something less conspicuous than that.”
He has a point. Eggsy had worn it out of habit, and he can’t wear a cap to conceal his face like Harry’s doing — it would look too stupid on him, drawing attention. “I’ll make do,” he replies, popping on the shades and checking to see if they’re being followed.
Harry unzips the duffel bag he’s brought with him. “I’ve an idea,” he says, pulling out a parka with a thick fur collar and handing it to Eggsy. “Put this on. No, keep that,” he adds when Eggsy starts to shrug off his suit jacket.
“Harry, I’m going to fucking roast,” Eggsy protests, but defers to a raised eyebrow that brooks no argument. The parka is thick and heavily insulated, and Eggsy’s body feels bulky with so many layers of clothing on.
“Keep the hood down, but put this on at the station,” Harry instructs, and dangles a face mask in front of Eggsy, the sort they give out at GP surgeries.
“Oh.” Eggsy sees.
“Ill people bundle up a lot more,” Harry explains. “Having the hood down suggests a lack of dubious intent. The mask works better for the purpose of concealment. In addition, seen from a distance, it also deters people from getting too close.”
Okay, so he didn’t see all of it, but close enough. “That… that’s pretty brilliant, Harry.”
Harry smiles. “Just a few tricks I’ve picked up. It wasn’t dumb luck that kept Triskelion off my tail for two years, I’ll have you know.”
Eggsy stops stuffing the mask into his pocket. “Wait, what?”
“They’ll be expecting you to purchase the tickets; it’d be safer if I —”
“What do you mean, the Morg — Triskelion was on your tail?” Eggsy asks, correcting himself mid-sentence. The first time he’d mentioned the Morgana Chapter, Harry hadn’t a clue what Eggsy was talking about. “I thought you were — that they had you.”
Harry’s smile fades. His demeanour is cold. “They haven’t had me in a long while, Eggsy. Did you not think I would’ve tried to escape whenever I had the chance?”
“But you’re saying,” Eggsy splutters, because now, now he knows for sure, “You weren’t… in Baltimore. There’s no base there, is there?”
Harry shakes his head. Something else occurs to Eggsy.
“Harry,” he says, “How did you get out at the mansion?”
***
“Rox, listen,” Eggsy hisses urgently into the pay phone; Harry’s gone to get them tickets, and while he has Eggsy’s number, both of them know better than to use it unless absolutely necessary. “I don’t know when you’re going to hear this, but when you do, you need to stop whatever’s going on — I think there might be a mole, Harry didn’t escape, someone let him out that night. He didn’t kill anyone, he found the guy dead already, and. Look, you have to trust me on this. I can bring Harry in but I have to know that everyone’s going to give him a fair listen and until then, I. Anyway, I’ll call you back soon. And I’m sorry.”
He hangs up the receiver and pushes the booth door open. There’s a bodily thud, someone grunting outside, and a number of folders fall to the pavement at Eggsy’s feet. He doesn’t hesitate or look at who he’s hit; Eggsy moves by instinct, stooping down to gather up the dropped folders and saying, “Sorry, didn’t see you there, mate —”
He’s just barely formed the first consonant of mate when he feels a smarting pain at the side of his neck and a cold liquid beginning to seep in, tingling the skin there. He reacts immediately, fisting a hand and swinging up with it, but whoever’s stuck the needle in his neck blocks the punch and backhands Eggsy viciously across the face. Eggsy breaks his fall on the pavement with both hands and tries to retaliate with a reverse kick, but a wave of grogginess staggers him, and before he can try to shake it off he’s bashed to the ground again with a clenched fist.
The last thing Eggsy remembers is a figure standing over him and crouching down to inject him with the rest of what remains in the syringe, and then everything goes dark.
***
A harsh white light shines through Eggsy’s closed lids. As he comes to, a pounding ache in his head makes its obnoxious presence known. Eggsy groans and turns his head, trying to shy away from the light. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, not when they’re already watering from how fucking bright it is.
“You’re awake,” a familiar voice says.
“Ugh,” Eggsy grumbles, scrunching up his face and twisting it into the pillow.
“Oh, apologies.” The light is turned down, enough so that Eggsy is willing to risk a squint. “Is that better?”
“Thanks,” Eggsy mumbles. It’s still pretty bright, but the light in his face isn’t glaring anymore, allowing him to make out the person leaning with his arms on the railing of the bed Eggsy is in. “Ca — Caradoc?”
Caradoc smiles kindly. “Hello, Galahad. Was beginning to think you weren’t ever going to wake.”
Eggsy moves to get up, but… can’t. He looks down and finds that his wrists and ankles have been buckled in place, and there are two thick leather straps running across his chest and knees, keeping him bound to the bed. “The fuck?” He pulls at his restraints, but there’s absolutely no give. “What the fuck?”
“Nice touch, that,” Caradoc says, and nods at the parka Harry gave Eggsy, folded up neatly at the foot of the bed. “Actually almost missed you. Mordred’s idea, I take it? Speaking of which, you wouldn’t happen to know where he is, would you?”
Eggsy glares at Caradoc. “Tell Arthur he can go fuck himself.”
The kind smile grows softer still. “I would very much like to, but I’m afraid that’s no longer an option, anymore.”
The buckle at Eggsy’s left wrist holds him firm. The locking mechanism looks easy enough to operate, but is impossible to reach with his fingers. “Lancelot told me you were dead.”
“Ah, yes. That. Tricky piece of tech, the bioscanner in these things.” Caradoc taps at his glasses as he speaks. “But a piece of cake to manipulate once you know how they work.”
“You faked it? Why?”
“Let’s just say I needed to disappear,” Caradoc tells him, then grimaces. “Actually, that’s not really true — I probably could have hung around a little longer, but there wouldn’t have been any point. You understand, yes?”
“Uh. No.”
“Hm. Pity,” Caradoc says, scratching his chin. He waves his hand dismissively. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Where’s Mordred, Galahad?”
Eggsy remembers then: King's Cross, Harry getting them tickets, the phone booth, and then —
“It was you,” he realises.
“Me,” Caradoc agrees.
“Why did you —”
“Where are you hiding him?”
“Fuck off,” Eggsy snarls, and tries to struggle free again.
“I need him,” Caradoc insists reasonably, resting his hand on Eggsy’s thigh. “And you must know that things will get very unpleasant for you very quickly if you don’t start talking.”
“I don’t know where he is.” Eggsy wishes he were lying, but there you go. “What do you want with him?”
“There’s something I would like to try out, and I need his cooperation. Nothing too complicated, just a little experiment. That’s all.”
Eggsy stops struggling. “What experiment?” he asks, because he might as well gather whatever intel he can.
Caradoc’s smiling again, sickly-sweet and gloating. “Would you like to know?”
Eggsy rolls his eyes. “You’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”
“Do you know why assets have always been exceptional?” Caradoc rests his elbow on the bed railing, then his cheek on his knuckles. “Tough buggers to face in combat, assets. They’re highly skilled to begin with, of course, but psychopathy, on the other hand — now that, you can’t condition as easily. The Morgana Chapter’s dossed around for years trying to find a workaround, and what do you know, our dear friend Valentine gave it to them.”
“The sim cards,” Eggsy recalls.
“Not exactly. Valentine’s neurosuggestive waves worked on aggression centres in the brain, but indiscriminate killing isn’t what you want when you’re trying to organise, say, an assassination. No, what you want in an asset is focus, and discipline, and economy of action. Can’t get any of that out of a raging homicidal maniac.”
His watch has been taken from him — wouldn’t matter if Eggsy still had it, he supposes, seeing that it requires two hands to activate the laser cutter built into the frame. “So?” he asks, stalling for more time to think of a way to free himself.
“The Morgana Chapter secured and refined the existing technology,” Caradoc continues. “They made it so that a single person could be targeted, and then influenced to carry out orders by suggestion. Kill this person. Bomb that bridge. Those sorts of things.”
“You worked for them?”
“God, no.” Caradoc looks disgusted at the insinuation. “I found out about what they were doing, and I was… interested, let’s call it. See, that’s as far they got — little, simple instructions, because any more than that and assets would become disoriented. The technology at the time was too primitive to completely subjugate conscious thought. And then I thought, look, what if you took it a step further? What if, by some feat of engineering, you wouldn’t have to settle for mere suggestion? What if you could refocus a subject, have them operate at their full physical and mental capacity and leave them with a facsimile of their autonomy, so their decisions and their follow-throughs — but all at your whim?”
Eggsy looks at him. “You mean mind control,” he translates.
Caradoc grins. “If you like. It’s not as simple as that, but I’m not looking to quibble.”
“No, you’re looking for Harry. Why?”
“Mordred was exposed to early prototypes of this technology,” Caradoc explains. “They may have even experimented extensively with him, even. At any rate, my research indicates that his nervous system might be attuned to the wave frequencies already — as a test subject, it’s likely he would elicit a more favourable response. But it has been quite the challenge to acquire him, I must say.”
The last piece of the puzzle clicks in Eggsy’s brain. “You let him out at the mansion.”
“Yes. I did.”
“And the guard —”
“Was in my way,” Caradoc says silkily. “As you were. Count yourself lucky that Mordred got to you first. Now, let’s try this again: where is he?”
Eggsy stares him straight in the eye, would spit if he had a chance in hell at landing it. “Kiss my arse.”
Caradoc sighs, then smiles in a way that isn’t smiling at all and makes Eggsy fist his hands. “That’s fine,” he says, clapping Eggsy’s shoulder. “There always was going to be a beta test today, Mordred or no.”
***
There’s a sinister-looking machine on a metal trolley that’s wheeled over to Eggsy’s bedside as he wriggles and wriggles to no avail. Caradoc plasters his forehead with electrodes connected into the machine via wires and gives him an injection that burns Eggsy’s neck, then flicks a few switches and Eggsy screams.
And screams.
***
He doesn’t know when he stops screaming but he can’t hear the sounds coming out of his mouth at some point and that feels like a safe bet to go with.
***
Lying down, limbs restrained. No need to struggle. No orders given yet. Eyes open, look and see, the ceiling above, blink.
No orders yet. Awaiting further orders.
Handler’s hands at his wrists and ankles, undoing restraints, can move again, don’t. Not yet. Told to get up; get up. What has worked? Uncertain, not crucial to understand. What’s crucial is —
Get off the bed. Stand up. Sit down again. Take off jacket, put on parka, where did it come from? Questions are unimportant, orders are; discard at once, obey.
Wear jacket again, stand up, dislocate right thumb. Pain — purely physical, distracting but not disabling. Orders are orders. Even so, check: enough strength to still move.
Good. Mobility is paramount, consider number of exits; just two.
Current location unclear. Storage facility, sun through the windows, a smell of the sea. Docks, East London. Possibly.
More data is needed. Should check outside. Will do so if ordered.
Reset thumb. Check if strength of dominant grip affected: mildly. Swap over to left hand when throttling, or handling firearm. Pain. It hurts. Ignore.
Pain is immaterial.
Activity for past few days questioned. Answer to relevant detail.
What do Kingsman know of handler’s movements? Nothing.
Am asked as to the location of Mordred. Query ambiguous — seek clarification, wait for response.
Location of Mordred. Now. Unknown, repeat answer.
Cheek stinging, face turned to the side; a slap. No orders to return blow, look back at handler. Galahad, he says.
Who is Galahad?
***
Galahad is —
No one.
***
Footsteps outside, shutter doors opening, image of a man. Facial features too far to discern, he enters, a word spoken.
Eggsy, he says.
Is it a name? Unimportant, disregard immediately.
Is he the enemy? Important, but unable to establish given current information.
Enquire.
Await answer from handler.
He is the enemy.
Order to terminate, received.
Execute.
***
Scar at right eye, possible vision defect, first point of attack. Left cross, monitor time taken and efficacy of response.
Blocked. Vision impairment unlikely. Intercept incoming punch, respond with body blow. Identify weak spots.
Blocked. Continue assault. Throw straight chop, target throat; knee jab to floating rib.
Blocked, and blocked again.
Reassess enemy skill at close combat: high.
Adjust strategy.
Low kick to patella, use enemy’s larger weight to advantage. Force defence to lower extremities, then kick high. Knockout shots. Increase speed and power.
Pain in left cheek, contact from enemy’s fist. Retaliate with shovel hook, objective: rupture spleen.
Elbow block encountered: objective failed.
Eggsy, he says. Why does he keep saying that?
Meaning: unclear.
Disregard.
New objective: destabilise, then neutralise.
Palm thrusts to chest, create distance for axe kick. Follow with roundhouse; stomach level, a direct hit, then sweep ankles, miss. Use momentum to dodge under counter-kick. Rise, and attack.
Avoid right hook, fire chamber punch, advance on enemy, return right hook, follow into haymaker. Clash — capture enemy’s wrist, leverage weight; shoulder throw, not impossible, but untenable. Break away and adopt defence; unsuccessful, pulled back into grappling zone, enemy’s hand on wrist. Enemy’s face, close — clear distress, reluctant to counterattack.
Exploit.
Headbutt enemy. Opening created, adequate. Straight kick to solar plexus and crack collarbone with overhand. Deliver uppercut. Enemy down.
Employ heel drop, objective: fracture spine.
Pain in ankle — trapped with enemy’s feet, shifting higher, locking scissor kick, takedown unavoidable, break fall with shoulder. Miscalculation. Blood streaming from nose — kicked in the face, torn septum likely, dazed, pain. Enemy rising, unable to subdue. Incoming hammer fist, unable to parry.
Unconsciousness: imminent.
Termination of enemy: failed.
***
A long while later —
Strong arms are carrying him and he can feel the wind ruffling his hair. He smells smoke and saltwater and there’s a crackling sound in the air like something big is on fire.
“Eggsy,” someone says.
Harry, he thinks, before darkness washes over him again.
***
Eggsy wakes in a familiar room. There’s a conversation taking place nearby over the beeping sounds coming from behind him.
“…make any sense, Merlin. If he’d done this, why would he bring him back to us?”
Roxy.
“Maybe he means to send a message,” Merlin replies.
“Why just injured, then? Why not a body?” Roxy asks.
“He could mean to slow us down. It’s emotional warfare.”
“I guess, but —”
“Unnh,” Eggsy groans, and they stop speaking.
“Galahad,” Merlin says, looking down at him and trying to peer into his eyes. “Eggsy. Eggsy, are you alright?”
His head hurts and it feels like he’s been beaten up six ways from Sunday. It’s not a question he’s in the mood to be having, frankly. “Fuck you,” he growls, and winces when his nose throbs painfully.
“That’s him right there,” Merlin laughs.
Eggsy blinks at the ceiling, then looks over at the two of them. “What happened to me?”
“Dagonet buzzed us,” Roxy tells him. “Said you’d been brought to the shop half-beaten to death.”
He hesitates to ask, but forces himself to. “Where’s Harry?”
Merlin and Roxy trade looks. “We don’t know,” Merlin says. “He escaped before we got there.”
“He told Dagonet to keep you safe,” Roxy says softly.
Lowering his gaze, Eggsy grips his blanket with bruised hands to stop them from shaking.
“Eggsy,” Roxy says, “Tell us the truth. Did he do this to you?”
Eggsy closes his eyes, then opens them again. “There’s something you two should know,” he murmurs.
***
Wonders never ceasing, Arthur actually believes him. Eggsy is reinstated to the Kingsman roster with immediate effect, but all his access codes have been wiped from the system, leaving him tailing after Roxy for the next couple days before his authorisation is restored, so he doesn’t get stuck behind access points whenever he has to move about the mansion.
They find the self storage facility where Eggsy had been abducted to on the Wapping docks. The building is nothing more than a burnt-out shell when they arrive, still smoking with hot embers in the foundations. There’s a charred corpse under all the rubble, matching the dental records of Nicholas Holcomb, codename Caradoc. It’s badly burned, but not sufficiently to camouflage the sheer amount of broken bones in the body that was once a person, or the gunshot wounds to the chest and head, of which the coroner numbers no less than twenty-three and eleven respectively.
There is no drinking to the memory of the late Caradoc. Arthur reminds them all that candidates for his replacement are due in three days.
Respectfully, Eggsy abstains.
***
By the end of the week, the last of the files concerning the Morgana Chapter are closed and archived. Another day, and the ongoing manhunt for Mordred is officially decommissioned, turning into a search and retrieval for one Elyan the White.
“There aren’t that many places to look,” Roxy reassures Eggsy. “We’ll find him eventually.”
Eggsy can think of five reasons to disagree, each of them a year long, but he nods anyway. “I just hope he’s alright,” he says.
“Don’t worry about it too much,” Roxy says with a smile. “You should know what Kingsmen are capable of.”
Eggsy smiles back. “Harry’s not a Kingsman anymore.”
“Isn’t he? Sure he is,” Roxy laughs. “Elyan, remember? That’s what we’re calling him now.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what Arthur was thinking when he thought of that,” Eggsy says.
Roxy laughs. “Since when have you gave a rat’s arse about what Arthur thinks?” Before Eggsy can reply, she takes his arm. “Come on, Merlin’s about to drown the new recruits, and he said we could watch.”
“You’re fucking evil, Rox,” Eggsy groans, but lets himself be dragged along.
***
All Kingsmen run their apparel through the same dry cleaners’, a little establishment just off of Savile Row with staff that don’t ask too many questions about blood stains or gunshot residue for the amount of money they’ve been privately chartered with. When Eggsy goes to pick up his suit on a Tuesday evening, the man at the cashier hands him a train ticket before Eggsy can pull out his wallet to display his identification.
“Found this in the jacket,” he says. “You must have left it in there when you dropped it off.”
Eggsy frowns and accepts it, opening his mouth with a refutation ready, but then he reads the details printed on the ticket.
King’s Cross, platform eleven, one-way to Paris. The time and date —
Eggsy looks at his watch.
A minute later, he flags down a taxi outside the shop.
***
The train station is packed with people. Eggsy pushes his way through, says excuse me to anyone he inadvertently shoves aside, and makes it to platform eleven barely a minute before the train is due to depart. He looks up and down the platform, scanning the crowd until the train whistle sounds and he has no choice but to get on, flashing his ticket at the conductor as he wends around him.
He goes through the different carriages, checking each row of seats quickly and moving on to the next. The train is far from full — some rows are empty and others have the odd passenger, with groups of travellers scattered between them. A noisy family of four, a couple conversing rapidly in French. There aren’t any faces or people Eggsy knows, and by the time he gets to the last carriage the train has already long pulled out of the station.
Eggsy sighs, standing in the empty passageway. Well, it was worth a shot. He should probably book a return ticket to pick up at once when he arrives in Paris.
His phone rings. He checks it and finds that the number is unfamiliar, beginning with a London area code.
“Hello?” Eggsy answers.
“Eggsy.”
His heart leaps at the sound of his own name. Eggsy presses the phone closer to his ear. “Harry,” he croaks, throat dry all of a sudden. “Harry, is that you?”
“Yes, Eggsy. It’s me.”
“Harry, where are you?”
Harry doesn’t reply at first, then asks, “Are you feeling better?”
Eggsy nods even though Harry can’t see him and tries his best not to stutter in his haste to respond. “Yeah. Yeah, loads. Thanks to you.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Harry says.
“What about you? Are you okay?” Eggsy asks.
“I’m fine. Just fine, Eggsy.”
Lights pass by in the windows of the carriage Eggsy’s in, tracks rattling under the wheels. He tries to think of something to say, the right thing, because Harry’s on the other end and there must be some combination of words that will get him to come back, or express even the smallest fraction of the love that Eggsy feels for him.
“I went back to your place,” Eggsy says. “You weren’t there, but I thought you’d be.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve had to take some time away to sort out a few things.”
“What things?”
Harry sighs. “Remembering,” he says. “I’ve been trying, goodness knows I have. Some of it has been easy, but for others — I still can’t. Not all of it.”
Eggsy grips his phone tighter. “What do you remember?”
A pause, then Harry recites, “Oxfords, not brogues — words to live by.”
“That’s it,” Eggsy encourages. “Harry, I didn’t tell you that, did I?”
“No, I told you. I remember that now.”
“And then the German aristocrat bit afterwards —”
“Bordering on antisemitism, Eggsy. Watch yourself.”
Eggsy laughs and presses a hand to his mouth, tears starting in his eyes. He wipes them on his shirt cuffs and clears his throat to compose himself again. “You got all that by yourself,” he says, “Let me help you with the rest. We can do it together. What do you say, Harry?”
Another pause. There's some background noise filtering through: a snatch of inaudible chatter interspersed with what sounds like the distant rumbling of traffic, and Harry's own quiet breathing.
“I think I would like that,” Harry says softly. “I would like that very much indeed.”
A warm feeling soaring in his veins, Eggsy smiles. “I’ll come find you when I’m back.”
“Where are you now?”
“Train to Paris,” Eggsy says, looking out the window at the buildings and highways that the train trundles past. “Wasn’t even supposed to be on it, but I can’t get off now.”
"Oh, dear."
"Yeah, I know," Eggsy says, pulling a face. "It's bollocks."
“I hope you speak French.”
“Nope. Not a word.”
“I could try to teach you,” Harry says. “Would you like to learn a little?”
“Sure, Harry.” Eggsy can’t stop smiling. “Hit me with your best shot.”
“Je t’aime,” Harry says, his voice coming over the phone at the same time that Eggsy hears the carriage door behind him open.
He turns around.
The smile Harry gives him is like a benediction, and Eggsy drops his phone to run into his waiting arms.