"Ease off if he starts to respond. It wouldn't do to have him start seizing if he's not able to compensate immediately."

Alistair nodded, though Eggsy figured he must have already thought about that in extreme detail. Merlin's words were meant to ground more than inform. Alistair stood at attention beside the bed, ready and waiting for Daisy's attempt at reviving James. Roxy hovered nearby, her expression hopeful where Alistair was a mask of paper-thin blankness over trembling anxiety.

Harry's hand rested on Eggsy's shoulder, watching, and Daisy sat at Eggsy's side waiting for them to give her leave to work. Merlin, at length, looked away from Alistair's rigid form and nodded to Eggsy.

"Alright love, give it a go," he smiled at Daisy, who raised her hands and set about using her powers so quickly he had to assume she'd been bored with them all.

From the outside, Daisy's healing was uneventful to the point of being dull. There was no peaceful green glow or ray of holy light, no one levitated, and in fact once she'd whispered to him that she only even held her hands over the target because it made everyone watching feel better. This time was no different, her tiny face scrunched with focus as she went to work, the monitors steady and unchanged so none but she and Alistair would know if James' heart was beating under his own power or theirs.

"All done," Daisy announced, sitting back and swinging her legs with an air only a satisfied six-year-old could affect.

Harry squeezed Eggsy's shoulder, his eyes on James.

"Alistair?" Merlin hedged.

Alistair didn't respond. If Eggsy had to guess he was barely even breathing as he waited. All of them were stuck with the uncomfortable knowledge that failure was just as possible as success, and here lay the critical moment. Daisy could heal the worst of wounds, but James wasn't wounded. James was kept alive by sheer stubbornness and machinery, had lived off untried and untested electrical impulses for five years. James was a very special case.

Alistair wasn't the only one holding his breath when James' eyes cracked open, unfocused and slow.

"Dad?" Roxy asked softly.

James blinked, dragged his gaze around the room until it landed on Alistair.

"James."

James smiled lightly and a little self-deprecatingly, a smile Eggsy knew well from every time any member of the force woke up in the hospital.

Looks like I lived.

Roxy's shining eyes overflowed, Harry blew out a long breath, and Eggsy saw Merlin swiping beneath his glasses out of the corner of his eye. This was all in the split second before Alistair toppled like a Jenga tower.

Roxy caught him on the way down, both of them sagging to the bed under his unconscious weight while the heart monitor ratcheted up to a frantic beat. James struggled to push himself up but blanched when movement turned out to be wildly unpleasant. Harry darted forward, wonder overruled, and pushed him back down.

"James, James he's alright," he spoke soothingly, and carried on speaking to calm him down.

"Should I fix him too?" Daisy asked, leaning toward Alistair.

"No love, he's just tired."

The energetic swoops of James' monitor were calming and Merlin's drive to action already had a nurse rolling in a second bed, which left Eggsy with not much to do. He watched Harry, softly undone in his off-duty clothes and with a startling lack of hair gel, watched James slowly rise to awareness, then tugged Daisy into a hug.

"You did so great, Dais."

Daisy wriggled in his arms as she watched the scene with him. "He wasn't sick though. He was stopped and I had to tell him to start again."

"James' power," Merlin supplied, watching like the omniscient spy he was as Roxy and the nurses set Alistair up on the cot.

"Good they had a bed so close by."

Merlin's lofty air seemed to increase. "It's a hospital."

Eggsy made a face that told him exactly how much that wasn't an answer and turned back to Harry and James.

"Harry," James tried, winced, and pointed clumsily at his own temples with a little smirk, mouthing: 'You're going gray.'

"Is that the first thing you can think to say?!" Harry burst out.

James grinned wide and bright at him. Harry righted himself with an indignant huff. "Well, it was delightful talking to you but I'm afraid it's time for you to go back into a coma."

Still ginning, James' eyes landed on Eggsy, a keen interest sparking in his gaze for the only unknown face in the room.

"Ah, 'm Eggsy, and this is Daisy - say hi Dais," Daisy waved brightly at him. "She woke you up."

James' smile flickered. He looked between Merlin and Harry, calculation hidden behind his disarmingly unworried expression.

'How long?'

"That's not important," Harry replied quickly.

James made a face at him. Roxy turned to them, wiping her cheeks as she did. "He's alright, isn't he?"

Eggsy nodded. "Yeah, Daisy's real thorough. Shouldn't even need much physio."

Roxy smiled at Daisy for a moment, then took James' hand. "It's been five years dad." She said softly. "We'll get you something to drink and try to explain."

"I have something to say too!" Daisy chimed.

Alistair's eyes flickered open, his even breathing catching as his waking mind struggled to pick up its lost threads. The setting sun painted the hospital walls a burning orange, the same color catching Alistair's black hair in ways James had been memorizing while his tea brewed.

Bleary and unfocused eyes dropped to James' bed, then blew wide on finding it empty.

Maybe James was blending in with the silent monitoring equipment, maybe Alistair's vision had gotten worse in the intervening years, or maybe he was almost as tired and disoriented as James felt. Whatever the reason, Alistair sprang up before he realized he wasn't alone in the room, his perfect hair mussed and stuck up at odd angles, and the purples and yellows and pinks of the Sailor Moon pajamas James had insisted on made dark by the dusk.

Alistair flung himself out of bed, then stopped short to stare down at himself, and James thought that was as good a moment as any to speak.

"They let me change your clothes. It seemed like you'd be asleep for a while and we couldn't have you creasing that fine suit." James tried to sound suggestive, but disuse forced an unattractive crack in his voice.

Alistair's gaze snapped up, the evening light making his eyes nearly glow his mysterious mixture of brown and green.

"James?"

James took a calming sip of his tea and tried speaking again. "Good morning, my dear."

And then...nothing. Time stood still in the air between them while half a decade spanned the distance all the same. James felt it like a physical presence, an invisible wall he wasn't sure how to cross. As was his habit during grave moments, he grinned and started talking.

"Everyone's gone, though I suspect most of them will be back early tomorrow. They want me to rest. I'd like to see them try to rest when they've just found out the gays can marry, there's a virtual reality Pokémon app, and Disney's released three new Star Wars films. I hope you waited to watch them."

Alistair remained frozen while James set aside his tea, watching. The tension ratcheted up with each passing second, reaching into James' chest and squeezing his heart.

"Speaking of everyone, I can't believe you let our daughter debut with a nerdy name like Tri-Point. Now I'm positive that our Arthurian knights theme was a conspiracy to keep me from calling myself The Grimch."

A soft sound fell from Alistair's lips as the stillness shattered at last. He crossed the distance between them, his bare feet slapping against cold tile until he stood close enough to taste. He stopped short, as an old, learned hesitation, caution in place of everyone else's well-founded fear, stayed his hand, the air disturbed by his movement ruffling James' clothes. But death was no longer a risk of handling James Spencer, and James doubted there would ever come a time when he would miss it.

Alistair's hands were thinner where they hovered between them, more dexterous for the replacement of his bow with a pen, and a little more aged than in James' memory of his five-years-ago yesterday. He took one, drawing it to his cheek to feel the sleep-warmth of Alistair's skin.

"The little flower says I'm a perfectly normal human. No powers to speak of." The smile he flashed felt too small and too real for joking, but he tried anyway. "Best news I've heard in years."

A blink later Alistair had collapsed into his chest, arms twining around his neck and dragging him down into an eager kiss. James' arms banded around him, holding him close as he swayed back into the wall for support. Alistair clutched at his shaggy hair and surged up into the kiss, making it bruising and sharp as his trembling fingers dug just shy of painful into James' scalp and shoulder. James barely felt the sting, clinging back just as hard. From the moment he woke his arms had never felt more empty, and now they'd never felt more full.

The sun's rays were weak when they at last drew apart. Alistair didn't go far, setting their foreheads together so they still breathed the same air. His eyelashes were damp but his flushed cheeks were dry.

James searched for something to say to his intent gaze, even opened his mouth to clear the way, but words failed him. Alistair shook his head, pressing even closer and closing his eyes.

"I did."

"What?"

"Wait."