keep you like an oath

by kirkaut

Eggsy wakes. And wakes, and wakes, and wakes. (May nothing but Death do us part.)

WARNING: very disorienting story telling and a (mostly) unreliable narrator. based on the Futurama episode, "Sting."

---

The thing about gunshots is that they aren't particularly quiet.

It seems silly to mention it, but Eggsy's seen too many films that don't totally grasp the concept of what, exactly, a suppressor does for a pistol. It bothers him, honest, the near silent little 'thwip' that finds its way into most action movies.

It's not that they don't drastically cut down on the noise or anything, but it's still an echoing crack, if not heartily muffled.

Without a suppressor, though, a gunshot is nearly deafening.

A gunshot in a fairly enclosed space, even more so.

Eggsy's aware of the brutal concussive sound, of the shrill ringing in his ears as the noise booms violently around him in the alleyway.

The world goes spectacularly white, brilliant and blinding.

When it happens, it happens much in the same fashion as most things in Eggsy's life: during an argument, and with a sense of crushing disappointment being directed his way thanks to whomever it is he's fighting.

When it happens, Harry is staring at him with a look of abject fury, mouth slanted hard into a frown, eyes narrowed into judgemental slits. Shoulders hunched and leaning in towards Eggsy with aggression, coming closer, as if the proximity will help drive his harsh words even further into Eggsy's head and make them stick. His aim is off, though, because instead of piercing through Eggsy's admittedly thick skull, they cut deep and precise into the delicate chambers of his heart.

"You arrogant child!" cuts through the atriums. "Do you ever stop to think about the possible consequences of your actions?" slices through the ventricles. "Or are you so arrogant that you can't even consider that you may be endangering the lives of your fellow agents?" shreds through the superior vena cava. "I have half a mind to take you out of the field," dices through the aorta, and "perhaps put you on surveillance with Merlin so that you can see how a proper Kingsman agent operates while on a mission," punches through his chest like a knife-edged hand, pulling the crumpled and blackened mess of his heart out with it. His sternum is split open, gaping on the pavement, but Harry takes no notice.

When it happens, Eggsy is too wounded, too cut down by Harry's vicious, spitting words, to be cognizant of his surroundings.

When it happens, it's all his fault.

Before, though—that part's just as important.

Because before Harry scours him with acidic words, before Eggsy's internal organs have been crushed flat by shame, there is a mission.

There is a mission, and it isn't one that favours a lone agent. A haggard, too-thin boy no older than seventeen is being cared for in one of Kingsman's numerous safe houses, having made a daring escape to the crowded streets of the outside world, evading his captors and running, running, running, until his feet were torn and bloodied and he'd happened to collapse on the pavement in front of Percival's home.

When comes to, he's cognizant enough (and more than a bit shaken and starved) to relay all the information he could. Clutched deep within London's underbelly, there circulates a human trafficking and prostitution ring. The intel he provides them says that somewhere between fifteen and twenty offenders keep armed guard over their fifty-odd prisoners. He isn't even sure they know that he's gone—likely not, he explains, as they barely checked in on their "stock" more than what was required to make sure everyone was still alive.

"You have to help them," he pleads, bony hands quivering and clutched at a steaming cup of tea. "I promised, I promised, I said I'd get help, I told them—please, you have to, there are kids there, like proper kiddies, there was a girl who couldn't have been more than five, please—"

"Hush," Harry chides, not unkindly, and sets a plate of chocolate digestives down in front of the shaky teenager. He reaches for one, wary still, but devours it quickly once it's in his grasp. "Of course we'll help you. Now." He sits at the table, hands twined together over his crossed legs, looking prim and lethal. "Tell us everything you know."

Eggsy—who's only there, he knows, because he and Harry had been out for lunch when Percival had called Harry's mobile, sounding bewildered but urgent—can't find it within himself to chime in or ask questions. Nausea rolls deep and tidal in his belly while his imagination runs wild, thinking of the atrocities being committed to all those innocent people. Those innocent children. Christ, he doesn't know what he'd do if Daisy—

His hands clench suddenly on the table, raking his nails across the wood. Harry spares him a brief glance, eyebrow twitching minutely, and Eggsy forces himself to calm down lest he fly off the handle and storm out the door. There's no part of his body that isn't aching to use the information the poor boy in front of them has given, and track down the fucking scum that have made humans their trade.

On the cab ride back to the shop, Harry reaches over and touches two fingers to the back of Eggsy's hand, still balled up tight. "Are you alright?" he murmurs, eyes narrowed ever so slightly with concern. "I know how missions of this nature can be...sensitive, for you."

No lie, for all that Eggsy had been pissed (seriously, seriously frothing at Harry for a good few months when the man had turned up at HQ, completely alive and un-fucking-harmed), the one good thing that had come out of him and Harry having to reconstruct their friendship entirely from scratch was that Eggsy had been able to confide in him his darkest secrets. Not the least of which was that Dean, the wonderful example of humanity that he is, had occasionally forced Eggsy to act as a rent-boy, up until the very moment Harry Hart swept in and stole him away.

It had been a bit of work, convincing Harry not to go out and put a bullet in the space between Dean's eyes, but it'd been worth it for the way Harry had kept close for days after.

"I'm fine," Eggsy affirms with an exasperated grin. "Seriously, bruv, no worries, yeah? You, me, Gawain—I seen the scores, we's the best stealth combat agents in house right now. We got this, man. I can focus, yeah, put all that shit behind me."

Famous last words, in retrospect.

Because Eggsy isn't prepared for the level of filth that permeates every nook and cranny of the underground compound, isn't prepared for the pungent stench of human waste and the city's sewers, the way that every surface is covered in a film of grime that's so putrid he can almost taste it. It's foul, is what it is, and there are a few times where he catches a retch creeping up his throat.

Between the three of them and their arsenal of weapons, it only takes them ten minutes to bring down their sixteen targets. They operate together like brutal cogs in a machine, complementing each other's fighting style and effortlessly flowing into the spaces left open and vulnerable, and protect one another with violent and bloody resolve.

If Eggsy throws his punches a little harder than he needs to, thinking of the poor souls that have been trapped in this fucking travesty of a prison, that's his own business. As it were, Gawain and Harry look none too pleased with their current surroundings; Gawain is outright scowling and furious, and Harry's mouth is tight and pulled down in a manner that Eggsy knows means he's experiencing a hefty amount of disgust and disappointment with the human race.

They split up before the dust has even settled, leaving a room full of blood spatter and broken bodies behind them. Eggsy darts left, Harry goes straight, and Gawain veers off around to the right.

Eggsy isn't prepared to be the one between the three of them to stumble across the room that holds around forty, scraggly looking kids.

And they are kids, even if some of them only seem about five years younger than Eggsy himself. They all look hunted and skeletal, and he can see who's been here longest just by the sheer amount of dirt smudged deep into their skin, shocked eyes bright in the dark of it.

By some serendipitous meandering of fate, Eggsy knows that the path he's just taken is clear of any sort of hostile force, so he quickly tucks his gun away and raises his hands complacently. "I'm not here to hurt you," he tells them, making himself as low to the ground as possible, getting down onto their level. "I'm here to get you out, yeah? Me and my friends, we're here to make sure you're safe. Get you home, tucked into your beds, alright?" He beckons them forward, leading the tentative hostages back to the door. The coast is still blessedly clear when he peeks out into the hallway, so he turns around and gestures for the oldest looking two to step forward. "When you get to the end of the hall, make a left, and then the second door on the right. Take that to the very end. There'll be three doors, and you want the one on the left, okay? It'll take you up some stairs, and you just keep climbing til you see sunlight."

They nod their heads fervently, their frail bodies trembling all over, and Eggsy steps aside.

The lot of them goes sprinting down the hall, save for two girls, tucked into the corner. One of them can't be older than eleven, and the tiny child tucked into her arms must be no older than five or six. He feels sick from the wave of red hot anger that crashes into him, making him wish he could go back to where they'd left the guards, and put a bullet in each and every one of their skulls.

Eggsy crosses to them quickly and crouches down, peering into their frightened faces. He schools his own into something warm and reassuring, opens up his expression and his stance so that there's nothing to fear from him. "Come on, loves, it's time to go. I promise you'll be fine."

The older girl shudders suddenly and clutches the child even more tightly to her. "They have guns," she whispers, her voice weak and scratched, and he doesn't miss the way that her eyes keep darting frantically between Eggsy and the open door.

He barely even thinks about it; how perhaps unbuttoning his jacket—his only protection against opposing fire that he has—and draping it around her shoulders may not be the best idea. His bulletproof waistcoat follows, and he tucks it carefully around the too-small and skeletal frame of the youngest one. "There you are," he soothes, pulling the garments tightly around their shoulders. "I'm going to let you in on a secret, okay?" They nod, wary. "These are very special clothes that I've got on. They can stop knives, and all kinds of bad things, but they are especially good at stoppin' bullets."

He tugs on the lapel of his jacket, smooths a hand over the shoulder and down, then reaches up to swipe a thumb against a tear that's escaped the older girl's eye. It smudges at the dirt, leaving a fingerprint brushstroke on her cheek. "They'll keep you safe, I swear it. And when you get home, there's a number in the back," he reaches around and taps at the spot in question, "like a tag, yeah? You call that number once you've found your way back home, and you tell them, 'All the King's horses.' Got that?"

They nod, and the little one turns to stare at him with large, baleful eyes. "Like Humpty Dumpty," she whispers, curling a fist into the waistcoat and pulling it more firmly around herself. Her grip leaves dark stains on the fabric, tiny oval smears like fingerprints.

He beams at her, proud and relieved, and tucks a greasy strand of hair behind her ear. "You're a smart one, aren't you? Yeah, like Humpty Dumpty." He presses a finger to the frame of his glasses. "Arthur, Gawain, this is Galahad. I found the hostages and they're all on their way out of the compound—I'll be on my way soon, just got two little stragglers to take care of." He sends a wink their way, and the littlest girl ducks her face away with shyness. Eggsy aches, reminded all the more of his own little sister, tucked safely in her bed.

He stands, slowly, so as not to startle them, and extends a hand down to the older girl. She reaches for him, wary and with trepidation, but a small hand slips against his palm and clings. He pulls her to her feet and keeps her close to his side, and moves quickly to the doorway, gun drawn.

The hallway is beautifully clear.

He pulls his new-found companions along behind him, careful to keep his body in front of theirs should anyone attack from the front. His jacket and waistcoat are still swallowing them whole, and the moderate amount of protection that they offer helps to put his mind at ease.

They're nearly to the exit when footsteps sound behind them. Eggsy freezes for only a split second, and then pulls the girls ahead of him. "Quickly!" he hisses, opening the door for them. "Come on, up you get! Climb the stairs and don't stop til you see sunlight, yeah?" They give him twin nods, eyes wide and staring past him into the dank stairwell. "Go!" he reminds them with a bark, voice harsher than he wants it to be, but time is of the essence and he'll be fucking damned if he's the reason any of these kids don't make it out alive.

With one last fretful glance at him, the eldest girl takes off, the younger child jostling and bouncing in her arms, peering over a bony shoulder at Eggsy. Her palm opens and closes in a small wave, and Eggsy's heart crumples.

They disappear from view completely when one dirty foot twists round the top step, the patter of their footfalls echoing and fading away.

He thumbs at the safety switch on the side of his gun, praying that there isn't more than just the one person he can hear making their way quickly towards him. He's only got a single bullet left, and the odds aren't exactly in his favour without his jacket or his waistcoat. The dress shirt is good for single hits, but as soon as the thin, lightweight kevlar's been compromised—well. There's a bullet compacted in the space between his necktie and his collar. That's him fucked.

He keeps low to the ground and grapevines down the corridor, tucked as close to one muck covered wall as he can get without actually being forced to touch it. He takes corner cover and squares his shoulders, listening to the approaching footsteps.

There's a faint click over the comms just as whomever is coming closer stops walking. "Galahad," comes Gawain's voice, two-fold: once over the glasses and again from about two metres to Eggsy's right, around the corner. He breathes a sigh of relief and drops his position, flicking the safety back on.

"I'm here," he calls out in response, not bothering to leave his spot at the corner.

Gawain shuffles forward slowly, carefully, and comes around the edge, gun first. He drops it the minute he sees Eggsy alone, and his brows furrow over his light green eyes when he sees his state of undress. "Arthur isn't going to like this," he advises, waving at Eggsy's unprotected torso with his now-prone firearm.

"What am I not going to like?" comes Harry's voice, distant and filtered through the tunnelled hall. He fairly floats toward them, keeping his footsteps so light that they can barely hear the sound of contact between his heels and the ground, even in the acoustics of the hall. He looks only slightly winded, but otherwise unruffled, save for the errant curl that escapes his coif to snake over Harry's forehead and flirt with his eyebrows. Eggsy loves that curl a disproportionate amount, and his entire body yearns to step forward and push it back into place, only to watch it slip forward yet again. He does his best to make his feet heavy, though, to keep himself in check.

He sees it the instant that Harry registers Eggsy's without his suit jacket and waistcoat. His mouth thins instantly and he inhales sharply through his nose, the air whistling back out in a slow push out of his nostrils. In his hands are the broken halves of a Rainmaker, done in during their fight with the guards, and his fingers curl around them so tightly that his knuckles are stark beneath his skin.

"Galahad," he says, pitched low and dangerous. He takes two long strides forward until he's standing less than a foot away from Eggsy, looking imposing and ever so much taller than his 1.89 metres. "Where is your armour?"

Eggsy lifts his chin and meets Harry's glare dead on, no matter how his pulse thrums with nerves at the weight of that serious gaze. "I gave 'em to two of the kids. Made them feel safe, y'know? They didn't want to leave otherwise."

"Christ," Gawain mutters, then goes silent again when Harry thrusts the two pieces of the Rainmaker in his direction. He takes them slowly, carefully, like Harry's a wild animal.

With his hands now free, Harry reaches forward and winds a tight grip around Eggsy's bicep and hauls him forward, dragging him along beside him as they make their way into the stairwell.

"Oi!" Eggsy hisses. He tries to wrench himself out of Harry's grasp but the man is too damned strong. "What the fuck? Let go of me!"

"Be quiet," Harry advises, still speaking in that tone that promises Eggsy a verbal lashing. "You insolent fool, be quiet, damn you." He gives a harsh tug, and Eggsy stumbles. His feet catch and trip on the stairs, but the constant drag of his body behind Harry doesn't allow him to fall.

Gawain trails along a few stairs back, his silence pointed and unsettling. All three of them know that the tension that began mounting in the hall only grows and multiplies with every ascending step they take, and will spill over and flood the street the moment they find daylight.

They are not disappointed.

Harry damn near throws Eggsy ahead of him the minute their lungs are able to detect fresh air. He skids along the alleyway in his Oxfords, and when he finds his footing, he spins on his heel and levels a dirty stare in Harry's direction. "What the fuck're you on about?" he demands, and refuses to move. Let Harry come to him, if he's going to throw a fit. "This because I gave those girls me jacket and all? Jesus, Harry, I'm fucking fine, aren't I? Ain't nothin' happened to me, bruv. I can handle meself."

Clearly, this is the wrong thing to say, because the next thing that Harry does is to take long, loping steps forward, circling around Eggsy and making him spin on his heel to keep Harry in his line of sight. He comes close yet again, and abruptly smacks Eggsy across the cheek with the back of his hand. His glasses are knocked askew, his head jarred sharply to the right, and there's a bloom of warm pain that spreads across his cheek. None of it compares to the bitter sinking of his gut, emptying him out to make way for the wrought iron of shame that sears into his entire being. He lifts a hand to his freshly struck cheek, and is ashamed to see the way his fingers tremble.

He keeps his head averted to the side, unwilling to meet Harry's fury or Gawain's shocked silent gape.

"You arrogant child!" Harry seethes, leaning into Eggsy's peripheral space. "Do you ever stop to think about the possible consequences of your actions? Or are you so arrogant that you can't even consider that you may be endangering the lives of your fellow agents?"

Eggsy says nothing.

This only seems to infuriate Harry further, because he spits: "I have half a mind to take you out of the field; perhaps put you on surveillance with Merlin, so that you can see how a proper Kingsman agent operates while on a mission."

The breath in his lungs leaves him in a single gust of despair and hurt. He allows his eyes to flicker shut for a brief second, before his forces them open and up, lands his gaze somewhere between the thin bow of Harry's upper lip and the rounded tip of his nose. "Arthur," he whispers, feeling anger and hurt and shame wisp out of him with the word. Harry's eyes lose a bit of their vicious squint and gentle into something more—Eggsy can't put a name to it, can barely even think straight for all that his thoughts have been scooped out and replaced by the clanging, shrill echo of Harry's insults. "Harry, I'm sorry, but they were scared, they wouldn't fuckin' leave! I'm sorry, Harry, I—"

The sentence goes unfinished, because the door behind them, the same door they've just exited through moments before, is thrown open.

All three of them turn at once to face the limping, bloodied figure that's made its presence known. Eggsy recognizes him instantly as one of the men he'd taken down during their fight, a man he'd left bleeding on the dirty floor with three broken fingers, a shoulder out of socket, minus a few teeth but plus a broken nose and two black eyes. He makes a wretched silhouette in the doorway, decrepit and macabre, and none of them notice the minuscule firearm clutched in his large, meaty hand until it's too late.

In an instant, his hand rises. In an instant, a trigger is pulled.

In that same instant, Eggsy staggers back.

The world around him edges out and disappears into darkness. There's a strangled shout that he can't make out—maybe his name? Maybe it's nothing at all, maybe there are no words to be found in the guttural cry. Either way, it's the last thing he hears.

And then...

Nothing.

ooo

Eggsy's eyes are open.

He has no memory of lifting the lids, of going from nothing to something, but he must have—he must have, because his eyes are open and the world is bright around him, if not a bit muffled and blurred.

His eyes are open, but he's having a difficult time focusing. It's as if his vision has tunnelled, leaving the details in his peripheral smudged and inconclusive. He remembers falling, vaguely, of folding his body to the ground as someone cried out after him. He wonders if he hit his head on the pavement, if he maybe has a concussion, leaving his vision impaired.

His breathing is shallow, almost unnoticeable, but he doesn't want for air.

It's strange. All of it, honest, just. Weird.

Turning his head feels like an insurmountable task, and when his neck finishes twisting to the side, he wishes that it hadn't.

Harry's on the ground beside him, facing him, staring into him. His eyes are open, but they're sightless. There's no spark of life to be found in the beautiful brown of them, no vibrancy in them at all.

There is, however, a bullet hole in his forehead. Blood leaks from it in a steady, dripping trickle that winds into the hairs of Harry's eyebrow, over the frames of his glasses and into his hairline. It meanders along the scar at his temple, smudging bright red over old wounds.

Eggsy sees Harry, lying still and dead on the gritty ground, and screams.

He's screaming when he raises himself onto shaking arms and drags his body the scant few inches between them, crying himself hoarse with pleas of Harry's name, dripping tears and grief induced spittle into the beautiful grey-streaked curls of his hair, nosing at the bloodstained temple, and begging to a God he don't believe in to please, please, Harry, wake up, come on, you wanker, just get up—

Harry doesn't move. Doesn't breathe, doesn't blink.

And Eggsy keeps on screaming.

The world stays blurred.

Suddenly, there's a weight in his hand, hot and strange, and when he looks away from Harry long enough to glance at the curl of his palm, he finds a gun. A gun, not his gun, his gun is...well, he doesn't know where. Maybe he dropped it or summat, but it doesn't matter, because the weapon in his hands has a full clip. The safety's off.

Anger and despair lurch inside him, driving him to his knees, to his feet, and turns him around. Harry's killer stands in the doorway, illuminated in the street light like a caricature. Eggsy can't remember the sun going down, could have sworn it had been up moments before, but he dwells on it for no time at all. All he can see is the silent, unmoving girth of the man who's shot Harry between the fucking eyes, and rage floods every vein in his body.

He lifts the gun and aims it at the man's head. Tears fill his eyes and he blinks them away, lets them drip down his face and leave tracks through the smear of Harry's blood that's crusting on his cheeks. His vision clears, and the world goes strange, because when he looks at the man in the doorway—

Eggsy would recognize that stupid fucking ballcap anywhere. Sees his own reflection in the lenses of this stupid V-Glass specs, watches the beguiling smile pull at Richmond Valentine's mouth as he meets Eggsy's wrath with charm and cheer.

His arm wavers and drops a fraction of an inch at the sight of him.

You stupid motherfucker, he hears, but Valentine's lips don't move from their frozen grin. This is the second time I've killed him. Can't you ever get it right?

Eggsy's arm steadies, and he fires.

His eyes squint to nearly shut at the sound the gun makes, popping loudly in his ears. He forces them open and refocuses, but Valentine's gone. The rotund, broken man in the doorway clutches at his shoulder, bleeding and critically wounded, but says nothing. He doesn't react to the multiple injuries he'd already sustained, nor to the newest one that Eggsy's left buried in his shoulder. He stares forward, through Eggsy, and doesn't say a thing.

Eggsy pulls the trigger, again and again and again, until the gun clicks empty and blood spatter paints the wall.

There's barely a head to be left on the son of a bitch that's ruined the one good thing in Eggsy's life, but the lips remain.

Still twisted into a horrid smile.

Eggsy's shaking fingers loosen on the useless gun, and the metal cracks against the concrete. He turns on his heel, slowly, hoping that when he completes the rotation, Harry will be up and about and wiping at the blood on his face with a handkerchief.

No such luck.

Harry's eyes are still blank and wide, still flicked open and empty and accusing. They stare through Eggsy like he's nothing. Eggsy feels like nothing; no bones, no flesh, no blood and guts to sustain the listless gathering of limbs that he's become, so he tucks his body down, down, against the ground, hands curled into fists by his shoulders. He lies down next to Harry's corpse until their faces are aligned.

"No," he moans into a sob, fingers clawing into pavement, tearing at the nails. Small bits of gravel and dirt wedge into the spaces between nail and finger, sticking uncomfortably and cutting into flesh. "Harry, no, no, please."

There's no response that Harry can give him, save for the gentle weeping of blood from the hole in between his brows.

ooo

The day of the funeral dawns like a cosmic joke, all bright sun and warm winds. Harry's name is printed in the paper, black and stark as sin, and every bit of Eggsy's punctured heart curdles with regret that it isn't a different sort of announcement that brings Harry to the ink of a printing press. An announcement of a happier sort, one that maybe would have involved Eggsy's name as well—his given name, obviously—but there isn't time for such delusions.

Not anymore.

There are empty chairs all around him. Empty chairs, an empty pit in the earth, an empty Eggsy, and a coffin full of Harry Hart. A crowd stands around him, fluctuating and pulsing in numbers. Well-wishers and mourners alike ebbing about like the tide, and Roxy is the only constant, listing into his side and gripping at his arm with her well-manicured fingers. Eggsy sags into her as the ceremony progresses, shoulders hunching and spine bending until he's as curled into himself as he can be without laying his body down in the coffin beside Harry. He thinks about it: contemplates taking those few steps forward as the coffin is lowered, hopping into the ditch and plastering himself against the heavy wood and steel; letting dirt rain down on him until there's nothing but darkness and soil and no world left except for the one where he's with Harry still.

"It's my fault," he whispers, watching the grave fill up. He tightens his grip on the rose in his hand, and the thorns slice into the cushion of his palm. Blood smears between the creases, between his fingers, staining the stem and leaves. "It's all my fucking fault."

Roxy squeezes her hands tightly around his arm. When she speaks, her voice is off, somehow. Muffled, like she's talking through glass or from a distance. "Just give him time," she soothes, and reaches up to brush hair back off of Eggsy's forehead. She's like static, voice crackling and wet with the sound of tears gathering in her throat. "You know how stubborn he is. He'll pull through, he always does."

Eggsy feels his face contract into an expression of confusion. Roxy isn't making any sense, from her words to the muted tone she uses to the way her presence flickers in and out of focus in the corner of his eye. There's the susurrus of soil, raining into the coffin lid, covering the Union Jack that's draped atop the wood. The wafting scent of funeral bouquets—lilies, roses, daisies, all fragrant and fresh and despairingly bright against the grim backdrop of a cemetery. They're constant, endless things, but Roxy is a flickering shadow at his shoulder.

Her grip on him loosens and slips away, and when he turns around after her, she's already gone far—almost impossibly far, for such a short amount of time—leaving Eggsy surrounded by nothing but his own misery.

He edges forward to the pit in the ground where Harry's coffin has been lowered, and he bends, scooping a bit of dirt into the cup of his palm. Some it sifts through the cracks of his fingers, falling in wet, dark clumps to the blades of grass by his feet. He reaches forward, over the grave, and releases the rest of it. He imagines he can hear the nearly soundless patter as it collides with the substantial mounds of soil already heaped atop the coffin. His other hand extends forward and unfurls, dropping the bloodstained flower. The air stings the small, thorn-inflicted wounds in his hand, and he shuts his eyes against the gentle burn.

His hands fall to his side, listless and empty save for the filth of dirt and blood smeared between the deep lines of his palms, and he sways gently with the breeze. Behind his eyelids, the sunlight dims away, taking with it the subtle yellow illumination of the thin skin.

It doesn't feel as if he stands there for hours, immobile and undisturbed in his vigil over Harry's grave, but it must be; by the time he opens his eyes again, the world is black as pitch around him. The moon hangs, heavy and full and almost comically large (he's never seen the moon so big), in the middle of a starless sky. The air around him is still, without the whisper of the wind he feels or the constant murmur of London's vibrancy. There's no gentle chirp of nocturnal insects, no distant harrumph of a barking dog. Not even the sound of tires scraping over asphalt.

He's utterly alone, in every way imaginable. So why is it that he can't shake the unnerving sensation of eyes, boring into the back of his head?

He turns in fractional rotations, scanning his surroundings. Nothing and no one is there, save for the car in which he'd driven. Eggsy pulls the lapels of his overcoat more closely around him, collar turning up, and with a final, wary glance behind him to Harry's headstone, he takes his leave.

The drive home is a blur, an automatic twist of the steering wheel and press of the clutch. He shifts gears without thinking, and the roads are sparsely trafficked. The mews are quiet when he pulls up, and there isn't even the buzz of electricity from the street lamps. His own home is sturdy, silent, and dark, so he enters as carefully and as quietly as he can manage in order to keep from disturbing his mum and sister.

He grabs a bottle of scotch from the liquor cabinet in the kitchen—the expensive one that Roxy bought him when he was declared the new Galahad—and a glass, and slowly shuffles up the stairs and into his bedroom. Exhaustion makes toeing off his Oxfords difficult, makes shrugging off his overcoat and suit jacket a trouble. He pours himself a good few fingers worth of drink as his other hand loosens the knot of his tie, and when he reclines on his bed, he stares up at the ceiling and drinks it all down.

The liquor burns, scorching and bitter as it slips down his throat to settle hotly in his stomach, and it's the first real thing he's felt since Harry died.

So he pours another glass full, then throws it back.

Another, but this one disappears slowly, nursing at the amber liquid.

And a fourth that he manages to sip twice before the dizziness of a hasty imbibing settles in, and he's forced to shove the tumbler onto his nightstand. Some of the liquid sloshes out and beads together in miniature puddles, staining the wood. He stares at them, bleary eyed and drunk, and turns his cheek away.

He stares out his window for a moment or two, then lurches up into a sitting position, arms braced on either side of his legs, fingers clutched into his duvet. It takes some concentration to keep the world from spinning too quickly as he lowers himself down to the floor and fumbles beneath the frame of his bed.

His hand connects with the solid, straight edged corner of a box, so he hooks his fingers around it and pulls.

It's just an old Adidas box, still glossy and sharp looking, but when he pries off the lid, there are no trainers to be found inside.

There's a frayed bit of rope, stained dark with old blood in some spots, from the very first mission where Eggsy had been tied up and managed to escape his bonds before incapacitating his captors with what Merlin had marked down in the mission report as, "unnecessary but efficient brutality." He may or may not have filched the report one night when he was hanging about in Harry's office and photocopied the page listing his assailants' injuries. Harry then may or may not have found his copy and scribbled 'bloody well done' onto the bottom of the page. He runs his finger along the creased edge of the paper, can see the imprint Harry's pen left behind when he left his little message. It pushes out and up like a strange, backwards braille, and Eggsy brushes over it.

There's a crinkled piece of thin, plastic-like paper in one corner that he knows is a receipt from a German hostel he'd stayed in with Gawain. They'd been on a mission that turned out to be total horseshit, a failure from the start because of false intel, but once Merlin had relayed the message they'd just said 'fuck it' and stayed for a week anyway, because Eggsy had never seen Muenster and Gawain adored it.

They'd gotten so drunk one night that they'd nearly been arrested, careening through cobblestone streets on bikes and hollering Christmas carols at the top of their lungs, despite it being the middle of March. The consequent hangover had been punishment enough, so Harry had spared them a stern lecture on constant vigilance and had just levelled them both with a single, withered look the next time that they were in HQ.

There's the broken shaft of an arrow from the time that Eggsy got shot in the arm with a fucking arrow. He doesn't like to think about it too hard, since it'd hurt like a bitch, but it was too cool not to keep, honest. Roxy had looked at him like he was fucking mental when he'd grabbed her and asked her to make sure the med staff didn't toss it in the rubbish.

Speaking of which, there's a handful of photographs of him and Roxy shoved in here, as well. Blurry, pixelated things, taken in the dark and dimly lit recess of a club, bass thumping around them and alcohol pumping through their bodies. All of the pictures have varying degrees of clarity and varying degrees of intoxication, but Eggsy's favourite has to be the one where their cheeks are mashed together so tightly that their eyes are scrunched shut from the force, both of their mouths pursed into an exaggerated pout. They're both sweaty and dishevelled, rat-arsed drunk, and Eggsy has no recollection of even taking the bloody picture, but he'd nearly pissed himself laughing the morning after when he'd found it on his phone.

There's also a small collection of pictures he's taken of Merlin, glaring at him with differing levels of unimpressed irritation. He and Rox have had a bit of a snapchat war going on about it, seeing who can make Merlin the angriest and snap a pic before he throws their phone across the room. Eggsy counts it as a sign of a approval that he hasn't poisoned either of their morning tea, yet.

The shoebox is a tiny treasure box of sentimental knick knacks, a disjointed trove of keepsakes from his time at Kingsman. Reminders of the dangers he's faced and survived, of the friends he's made. Of the man he's become. Strange, seemingly inconsequential little things that mean the world to him.

There's one object in the box, however, that means more to him than the rest. His fingers tremble when he lifts it out, and the photo paper warbles quietly in the silence of his bedroom.

A picture of himself and Harry, taken with a high definition camera that they used for surveillance purposes. Roxy had been mucking about with one, skulking through the manor's grounds and testing her abilities with the thing, when she'd snapped the photo in question. Eggsy runs the tips of his fingers over Harry's face. Swallows hard around the lump climbing in his throat.

In the picture, they're seated together at one of the tables scattered around the manor's courtyard, mission files splayed open and forgotten around them. Eggsy's leaning in towards Harry, chin perched on his fist and lips split into a wide-mouthed grin that's so joyful that it borders on looking painful. There's no mistaking the adoration in his eyes as he gazes at Harry, every single bit of his body leaning in and drifting closer, caught in his orbit. And then there's Harry, whose suit jacket is draped over the back of the chair, whose shirtsleeves are rolled halfway up his forearms, and who's tilting his shoulders in towards Eggsy. His legs are crossed at the knee, fingers knotted together against his thigh, but his torso is unmistakably leaning to its left, bringing their bodies closer. Eggsy doesn't remember being that close to Harry—he's fairly certain that if he'd realized it at the time, he would have blown a load or summat—but their faces can't be more than six or seven inches apart.

The two of them, caught in the warm glow of a summer sun, swaying into one another like their bodies were made to do so.

Tears bite at his eyelids. He lifts the photograph to his mouth, presses a dry and trembling kiss to Harry's profile.

The picture is placed gently on his nightstand, leaning up against his lamp. His fingers slip on the glass of his tumbler of scotch and downs what's left. He pours himself more and more and more, until the world spins so heavily that it's all he can do to get himself laying down before his eyes slip shut in an attempt to recover his equilibrium.

His eyes open. Harry's grave looms before him. The dirt—which had been freshly packed down and six feet worth of freshly sifted soil—is overgrown with neatly trimmed grass. The sky is dusky blue, casting the world into a melancholy shade, leaving everything around him tinged an evening's shade of cyan. The headstone is the only exception, still a gleaming marble beacon in the destitute backdrop of the cemetery.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference is that the coffin sits atop the undisturbed earth, instead of buried deep. The lid is hinged open.

Eggsy approaches it slowly, warily; he's dead certain that he's dreaming, but can't trust his own subconscious enough to think there isn't a chance he's going to peer down into Harry's decaying face.

He holds his breath and leans over.

A relief—it's empty.

A strange tension leaves his shoulders. He's not sure why he feels disappointed, exactly, other than it would have been a chance to see Harry's face again, even rotted and miserable.

"Snap out of it, man," he mutters to himself, turning on his heel and leaning against the heavy casket. He scrubs a hand over his face, thumb and index finger pinching at his eyes and his nose. "Ain't nothin' but a dream."

"Oh," comes a voice, dear and achingly familiar. Eggsy straightens immediately, head swivelling towards the source. "I wouldn't be too certain of that."

Harry steps into a stray moonbeam, hands tucked into his pockets and a wry smile on his face. There's no bullet hole marring his forehead, only the usual lovely wrinkles, and his brows are drawn together with a fondness that Eggsy's missed desperately.

"Harry," he chokes, and stumbles forward, tripping over his own feet. Harry catches him at the elbows and draws him near, steadies him, and doesn't stop smiling. His fingers are ten points of pressure at the bend of his arm, sending tendrils of warm crawling up to his shoulders and down to the tips of his fingers. "Fucking hell, Harry, I thought you was dead!"

The smile takes an odd twist, sadness curling up the corners. Harry's eyes grow hooded, something strange shadowing the skin beneath them, and he whispers, "Not quite, my dear," with regret laced heavily in his voice.

Eggsy's hope is snuffed out quickly. "Oh," he chokes, then swallows against the dry lump in his throat. "So. I am dreamin', then."

The world goes a bit dim around them. Harry's face becomes harder to see, but Eggsy can still feel his hands wrapped tightly around his sleeve.

"Of course not," Harry demurs unconvincingly. Eggsy flinches away, casts his eyes down towards his feet, but one of Harry's fingers curls beneath his chin and tips his head up. His gaze is forced up, and he can't stop the startled blinks that twitch violently at his eyelids when he catches sight of the freshly leaking bullet wound in Harry's forehead, blood forking a path down his nose and through one eyebrow, trickling down behind the right lens of his glasses.

The longer Eggsy looks, the more gaunt Harry becomes. Ashen, grey, and dead. His stomach lurches and he reaches up, thumbs digging into the steadily sinking hollows of Harry's cheeks. His warm brown eyes are filming over even as Eggsy stares desperately into them, willing him not to rot away in his hands.

"Of course not," Harry repeats, and draws closer, ghoulish and unearthly as a spectre. "I'll even prove it to you." His hand, skeletal and withered away, tucks itself into his suit jacket, and from the inside pocket he pulls out a sheathed dagger. He presents it towards Eggsy, balanced on the flat of his palms, and his face is a macabre portrait of satisfaction when Eggsy gapes down at it. "There," Harry murmurs through the ruin of his lips, all teeth. "You see? I remember you eyeing this dagger in the window of that antique shop in Cologne. I never told you that I went back and purchased it the next day while you were resting. I'd planned on giving it to you for your birthday next month. It's hidden, along with an envelope with your name on it, tucked away in the safe behind the George Stubbs painting in my office. You'll find the passkey on the back of your father's medal of valour." A sickening imitation of a grin precedes his next statement. "I'm rather sentimental when it comes to you, it seems."

Eggsy remembers the knife well. Recognizes it easily. Can recall with perfect clarity the sound of his and Harry's Oxfords scuffing on the pavement, their shoulders brushing together every now and then. Casual conversation passed between them but their eyes fixed, attentive, on the mark that strode fifteen paces ahead of them. They'd come to a zebra crossing, waiting for the traffic to finish crawling by, and Eggsy had happened to glance to his right, peering thoughtlessly into the large display in front of an antique shop.

The dagger had caught his attention immediately, unsheathed and wickedly sharp and dangerously curved, glinting in the hazy German daylight. He'd drifted closer, looking more intently at the miniature portraits, the Arabic writing just where the hilt met blade.

"Find it," Harry urges, "And you'll know that I'm alive."

Eggsy's fingers brush over the ornate carving of the ivory handle, but Harry pulls it away before his touch can linger.

"If you want it," Harry murmurs, an entreaty, "you have to promise me you'll do something."

"Of course," Eggsy acquiesces, breathless. He would promise any version of Harry anything he wanted, even the most rotted and disgusting version that's wasting away in front of him now. "What is it?"

Harry leans forward, and for all that he's gone corpse-like, he still smells spicy and sweet, like the bottle of aftershave Eggsy stole from his dresser. His paper-thin, mottled skin is soft where it brushes against Eggsy's cheek.

"Wake up."

Eggsy's face squints up in confusion. "Wake up?" he echoes. "But...you said this ain't—"

A sudden, deafening screech interrupts him. He flinches, and -

Eggsy wakes.

The wail of sirens tapers off into the distance, still shrill and ringing in his ears, lights flickering against the walls of his bedroom. Eggsy rolls onto his side and gasps into his pillow, flattens his hands against his stomach in an attempt to still the churning of his insides. He shivers violently once, twice, and burrows closer to his mattress.

When he closes his eyes, he can still see the haunting visage of Harry's corpse in front of him. It splits and doubles, varying in colour as his brain attempts to sort the terrifying image accordingly.

He forces his eyes open with a snap and a sharp inhale through his nose, levels his focus on the glow of his bedside clock. Eleven minutes past three in the morning, he notes with despair. The nightmare—and it was a fucking nightmare, to see Harry so grotesque and molten grey—is a yawning, sickly memory that leaves his stomach perforated and his heart aching.

He scratches his fingers over the sparse, coarse hairs on his abdomen, and thinks of carved ivory.

ooo

Merlin goggles at him like he's lost his mind when Eggsy bursts into his office the next morning, wild eyed and dishevelled with exhaustion, and demands to be allowed into Harry's—Arthur's—office. The room's been locked since they lost their king, closed to the knights and the magicians alike, and its doors are opened for no one.

Merlin holds the only key, and Eggsy needs him to turn the lock. Needs to pry open that safe and feel ivory and deadly steel beneath his fingers.

The Scotsman pulls his glasses off with one hand and directs two heavy blinks Eggsy's way. "Have you lost your damn mind?" he demands, standing up from behind his desk. His dark brows furrow together, looking more condemning than usual without the thick frames of his glasses to hide behind. "You know well enough that I'm not going to just...let you into the throne room. I know you miss Harry, lad, but some things I cannae do just because you had a dream."

The noise that tears out of Eggsy's throat is half frustration, half despair, and all growl. "You have to!" he insists, darting forward and twisting his hands into Merlin's jumperr. It's a testament to how much this startles the older man that he doesn't immediately throw Eggsy halfway across the room. His upper lip furls towards his nose with bewilderment, revealing the slight overlap of his two front-most teeth.

Eggsy feels his eyes go glossy, wet and pleading. "Just the once," he promises, curling his fists tighter. He feels sorry for a moment about what he's doing to the expensive cashmere stretching and pulling under his grip. He's seen the expense reports, he knows how costly it is to seamlessly weave kevlar into cashmere, but he doesn't let go.

He can't let go.

Not when there's so much at stake. Not with the promise of Harry's proof of life, so close and so nearly tenable.

"Just the once," he implores again, breath coming fast and ragged. "An' I'll never ask again, Merlin. Swear down."

The silence pulls tightly between them for a minute, then two, then three.

Merlin considers him from beneath that dark brow, pulling air in and out through his nose. Eggsy must make some kind of pitiful picture, though, because when he sighs and his shoulders loosen, it reeks of acquiescence.

"Just the once," he agrees, sounding disappointed in himself. Eggsy looses a hard exhale and unclenches his fingers. The fabric holds residual puckers and creases where his hands had been. Merlin shoves his glasses back onto his face and turns back to his desk, fumbling with a drawer.

There's the brief jangle of a ring of keys being shoved into Merlin's pocket, and then he's striding briskly past, through the door and into the hall. Eggsy follows close behind as they lope through the halls, striding a few scant inches to the rear of Merlin, and hovers close behind Merlin's shoulder when they finally arrive at the shut set of heavy, wooden French doors.

The brass key slides into place after only a moment of hesitation on Merlin's part, and the twist of it in the lock sounds strangely like defeat. The doors push open and Eggsy bursts into motion, shouldering his way into the empty office with only a muttered apology back to the doorway. He makes a beeline for the Stubbs, a mundane scene of a horse and dog standing snout to snout and staring at one another in front of a wooded landscape, and his fingernails find the edges. He digs his fingers beneath the frame and pulls.

A gentle click sounds against his ear and the painting hinges open.

The safe sits in the wall, as promised, and the keypad illuminates itself in their presence.

"How did you know this was here?" Merlin asks, sounding strangled. Eggsy doesn't turn to face him, frames his hands around the keys.

"Harry told me," he tosses out, absent-minded.

"Even if that were true," Merlin says, sounding odd and distant. "He would never have told a soul his passkey. The man kept his own secrets locked up tighter than the bloody country's. You can't possibly know—"

"How do you think I got into his feeds?" Eggsy asks, gaze still caught by the glowing numbers. "Harry told me, didn't he? Trusted me well enough." Eggsy's thumb punches the digits in, the keys stiff and creaking beneath. "Twelve," he mutters under his breath, hitting the one and two. "Nineteen. Ninety-seven."

A hydraulic hiss, a weighty series of clicks as the multitude of locks shiver out of place, and the safe pops open. Merlin makes a strangled noise, deep in the back of his throat. Eggsy trembles, head to toe, and forces the gap open further.

There's a bottle of Scotch inside—a Glenfiddich single malt that set Eggsy back two grand, purchased in honour of Harry's ascension to the role of Arthur—along with the shattered, broken frames of the glasses Harry had been wearing when he took a bullet to the head in Kentucky.

'Why do you have these?' Eggsy had asked him, once. Harry had twisted the broken plastic between his fingers, watching the uneven rotation.

'To remember what I almost lost,' he'd murmured, and then set them aside.

Eggsy lightly touches the spider-splintered glass before reaching deeper into the vault. He curls his fingers over the dagger's handle, holding on so tight his skin fills all the negative spaces, and his palms are sure to hold an imprint. He closes his eyes and smiles, tremulous. "It's here," he breathes, and pulls the dagger out. He brandishes it in front of Merlin's face, manic in his relief. "It's fucking here, just like Harry said!" He shoves it gracelessly into Merlin's chest, leaving him to fumble for a hold on it. Eggsy spins back to the safe and scrabbles his fingers against the bottom, into the corners, until the feels a hard card stock and the pointed crease of an envelope.

He slides that out, too.

His name is on the front, etched in black in Harry's spindly, scratchy writing. He forces a thumb into the flap, breaking the wax seal, and tears it open. The paper is textured and thick, sturdy between his index and middle finger.

Congratulations , it reads in that terrible penmanship, messy and dear. Eggsy says them aloud as his eyes track over the page. I knew you could do it, my dear boy. Come and find me, alive.

Come back to me.

Eggsy nearly crows with victory. "Look!" he cries out, and shoves the message under Merlin's nose. "I told you, I fuckin' told you, and here's the proof, yeah? Harry's alive, Merlin, we need to go and find him, we need to—" He cuts himself off when the look on Merlin's face melts from startled to something dark and frightened. He's staring at the paper like it's done him wrong, and when he lifts his face to meet Eggsy's gaze, he looks wary and dreadfully concerned.

"Eggsy," he intones slowly, tone careful and words drawn out. "This isn't funny."

"The fuck do you mean?" Eggsy thrusts the paper at Merlin again. "It's right fuckin' there, Merlin! Read it!"

Silence gapes between them.

"I'm going to recommend that you see a psychiatrist," Merlin tells him, gentling his voice. "I think...you may need something to help you sleep, if you're so deprived you've begun imagining things."

He plucks the note out of Eggsy's hand and turns it around.

WAKE UP it blares in large, bold letters. Eggsy snatches it back and stares. Flips it over to the other side, but it's perfectly blank. He turns it over once more, hoping beyond reason that the original message will reappear.

WAKE UP, EGGSY it screams. He drops it, fingers burning, and it flutters to the ground and turns to flame and smoke when a stray beam of sunlight catches it in its ray.

"Okay," Eggsy agrees, dull and listless. The fight, the hope, the excitement, all drain out of him as he watches the particles of ash swirl along the floor. "I'll. I'll go see someone, Merlin. Promise."

The ash scatters, disappearing into the carpet.

ooo

That night, Eggsy shakes out a pill into his palm. He rolls it around, prodding at it with one finger before sighing and tossing it into his mouth, swallowing a gulp of water quickly after.

It isn't long before his head grows heavy, eyes drooping shut, and he drifts into an uneasy slumber.

Come back to me, Harry's voice comes, trailing after him into oblivion. Come and find me, Eggsy.

Please.

---

Eggsy's never liked taking pills.

When he was a boy, his mum had given him some paracetamol to help with the ache of muscles that came with a gymnastic move he'd thrown too hard, and he'd tossed it in his mouth without a thought. The coating on the medicine had been bitter and horrible, and even though he'd quickly washed down the painkillers with a healthy swig of water, the taste had lingered, sour and unrelenting, on the back of his tongue.

For the longest time his mum had been forced to crush up pills and slip them into yoghurt, into ice cream, into little bowls of custard, just to get him to ingest them.

Eventually, he'd learned to take a gulp of water, hold it in his mouth, and then toss the pills back, but the distrust and wariness of that awful, rotten taste still lingers well into his twenties.

Sleeping pills are another beast entirely.

Back when the events of V-Day were still a fresh wound, and Eggsy was convinced he'd watched his mentor—the love of his fucking life—die before his very eyes in a brutal execution, the adrenaline and high had faded quickly into night terrors that left him shaking and sweating awake every night.

He'd refused to see a psychiatrist back then, despite his mum's and Roxy's nudges in that direction, and after weeks and weeks of painful, sleepless nights, Roxy had shoved a small bottle into his hands.

"Melatonin," she'd bit out, forcefully curling his hands around the bottle. "It's not as extreme as sleeping pills, but it will help you sleep. Please, Eggsy. Just take them."

He had, with an insincere smile and a murmur of thanks, and the bottle had only seen a few pills disappear before he tucked it away, never to be used again.

He hadn't like it; the heavy, foggy feeling, the way he never truly woke up but instead drifted out of sleep with an irritating slowness. How he'd felt drowsy and off the rest of the day.

He'd swallowed down enough to get himself back on track, onto a semi-regular sleep schedule, and then never touched any kind of sleep aid since.

Until now.

His head lolls heavy on the pillow, neck like rubber, like a noodle, unable to support the weight of his skull and his drowsy, murky brain. His ceiling fan twists slowly above him, barely creating breeze enough for him to feel it on his face, much less have the desired effect of cooling him down.

He feels warm. So warm, despite the gooseflesh raising the white-blond hair on his arms. Warm, and so, so tired.

He lists his head to the left and struggles to focus on the bottle of sleeping pills the doctor prescribed to him. They're packing a fucking punch, these pills, because Eggsy can barely remember going to the pharmacy to pick them up. Really doesn't remember going to see the doc in the first place, honestly, just the jangle of pills against plastic and the bitter tang of them on the back of his tongue.

His head aches sharply when he tries to think about it, tries too hard to recall the details of his day, so he lets them slip through the weak grasp of his memory and instead, concentrates on the whirr and waft of the fan.

Come back to me, Harry's voice beckons, and draws him deep. Come and find me, Eggsy. Please.

"Anything," he whispers. "Yeah, anything, Harry."

Eggsy lets Harry's quiet entreaty chase him into darkness.

There's another sound that comes underneath of his voice, quiet but distinctive: the sound of a heavy wooden door, pushing over a throw rug as it opens, and the gentle rush of it surrendering to gravity and slotting back into place. Footsteps on hardwood floor, one sharper than the other because the sole of the shoe has been hollowed out to make way for a dagger.

Eggsy opens his eyes.

He's in the shop on Savile Row, orange-lit and warm, the way it was on the first night he met Harry. Quiet, still, with the heavy soundproofing provided by bulletproof glass and the careful insulation in the walls. He's utterly alone. Leodegrance is nowhere to be found behind the service bench. Nor, Eggsy discovers when he peeks his head around each doorway, is he sequestered away in any of the fitting rooms.

All except for fitting room one, the door to which is sealed tightly shut.

"Good evening, Eggsy," whispers a voice in the dimly lit recesses of the shop, too indistinct and thin for him to identify. "I don't know if you can hear me."

"Yeah, I hear you," Eggsy says, turning on his heel. He finds his eyes drawn to the corners of the room, tracing up the sharp edges to the ceiling. Something doesn't feel right, like the atmosphere's gone out of alignment, the spidery feeling of unease like there's a hand reaching for him that he just can't see. His own anxiety permeates the walls, oozing through the cracks and slipping its way all around him, over him, into him."Where are you, bruv? Whosit I'm talkin' to?"

"You've been asleep for quite some time," the whisper tells him, rasping and cracked like wind through dried leaves. A tired, entreating sibilation that sticks in Eggsy's ears, gumming them up and leaving a whining sort of pressure against his eardrums. He rubs his thumbs on the wedge of cartilage just below his temples, trying to soothe the strange, pulling ache.

"Harry?" he—wagers, hopes, dares, dreams— and takes a step further into the shop, disturbing the small particles of dust that glimmer in the fading sunlight that filters through the large front window.

They seem to sidle away neatly, carving a path for him to follow.

"Merlin says I'm just imagining things," is Eggsy's attempt at casual conversation. He takes careful steps toward the closed door of fitting room one. "He thinks I'm losing me mind." Eggsy reaches out and presses a hand to the smooth grain of the door, fingers drifting down to curl around the doorknob. "Says you ain't real."

The door opens beneath his hand, cold and round metal slipping from between his fingers with the inward swing. The gentle creak of hinges nudges through the muggy, cloudy feeling in his ears, and he drags his eyes up, up, up.

Harry stands before him, whole and hale, and smiles placidly. His skin is blessedly blood-warm and tanned, no trace of a bullet wound anywhere on his person. He looks tired, though, eyes bruised and the lines by his mouth are deeply set like he's spent a lot of time recently very unhappy. "Don't be ridiculous," Harry says, reaching forward to grasp Eggsy's outstretched palm between both of his own. They dwarf Eggsy's hand so completely that his fingers have room to curl loosely back around his own palms. The skin of them is dry and hot, but Eggsy's fingers seem to sap the warmth from them. He flexes the hand still hanging by his hip, finds it cold and suffering from poor circulation, as if he's been still for far too long.

He rubs his hand along his joggers and pushes it into his pocket, hoping the fleece lining will keep him warm. He drifts closer to the calming heat of Harry's close proximity, drifting further into fitting room one until he's crossed over the threshold. Harry tugs him closer, until the fabric of Eggsy's tee and the loose cotton of his sweats create quiet rasps of friction against the expensive material of Harry's suit.

Eggsy steals warmth from Harry, greedy for it. Steals the heat from his body and drinks in the tenderness pouring from those gorgeous brown eyes.

The door shuts with a muted click behind Eggsy and the ground shudders into motion not too soon after, dropping them down into the rough brick elevator shaft. The mirrors and walls of the dressing room give way to the shadows as they go down, down.

Their bodies stay pressed together, Eggsy caught in Harry's orbit and unable—unwilling—to extract himself. Harry's thumb sweeps across the knuckles on Eggsy's hand, running over old scars and pushing whorls into the odd coolness of his extremities.

Eggsy breathes in through his nose, slow and deep, and smells the spice of Harry's cologne as well as something bitter, almost antiseptic. "I am dreamin'," he says, somewhere into the hollow of Harry's throat. "Aren't I?" He runs the sharp tip of his nose up the line of Harry's neck, just off centre, and he can feel the bobbing of his cartilage when he swallows.

"If you were dreaming," Harry says, and presses his right hand to the place on his torso where his heart thrums, creating a spot of heat that curls over his shoulders, then burgeons and slips over every vertebrae. The lift shudders to a halt, and Eggsy's heart thuds beneath Harry's palm. "Would I be able to take you to the Colosseum? I know how you've always wished to see Rome."

Eggsy draws away, puzzled. "The fuck're you on about?" he asks. Harry lifts his chin in a slight nod and smiles, indicating that Eggsy should turn back and face the lift exit. He does so, if a bit warily, and his jaw drops at the sight laid before him.

The Colosseum, as promised, sprawls around him in its crumbling glory. The sun blazes around them, filtering through the arches and windows, casting otherworldly shadows on the ancient rock. He steps forward and the short layer of grass crunches beneath his feet, bright green and well manicured and he can smell the crisp scent of freshly mown grass, so it must be real, right? He presses a hand to the cool, moss-covered slab of stone nearest him. It's rough and scratching beneath his fingertips, and he uses its sturdy nature to steady himself as he cranes his neck around do take in the view.

They're in the bloody Colosseum, over a thousand eight hundred kilometres from the shop in London, but the earth smells so rich and musty around him, and the rock feels so cool and sharp beneath his hand, and reality takes a moment to knock itself out of alignment and Eggsy's knees give way. His head gets dizzy with confusion.

It makes no sense. No fucking sense at all, that the lift would go from the shop to Rome, but everything seems so real. Only the vague fuzziness of the world that's followed him since Harry died—again—but not the surreal haze that follows him in slumber. That world, the world of absolute dreaming, is full of intangible oddities and nonsense that seems reasonable. This...whatever, wherever he is, feels vibrant and beckoning, drawing him in and welcoming him into its heady embrace.

Not reality, no, but not quite the other, either.

Harry crouches down in the grass beside him, hands hanging over his knees. He gazes at Eggsy with those considering eyes and flattens his lips into something contemplative. "Perhaps not Rome," he muses, and curls an arm around Eggsy's shoulders. "Venice, maybe?"

There's a dip, a drop, a thudding pressure to the world around him, and suddenly the grass gives way to a solid presence beneath his bum, the gentle sway of a boat on water. They're in a fucking gondola, he realizes when he glances around wildly at the Venetian buildings that surround him. A bridge tucks them under its shadow, and Eggsy can feel the change in temperature, can hear the muffled sounds of street life grow dimmer. When he dips his hand over the side of the boat, the water laps between his knuckles and his wrist, and he can feel it clinging to the fine hairs on the back of his hand.

Harry tightens the arm that's still around Eggsy's shoulders and nudges his forehead into his temple.

"It seems real," Eggsy admits, pulling his hand out and watching the water bead and trace its way down his wrist to his elbow. It tickles, cold and wet. "A bit romantic, bruv." He winks. "But how'd we get here so fast, man?"

His head begins to ache, white hot and sharp, like all his synapses are firing but unable to connect, sparking endlessly until his brain is in danger of immolation. He covers his eyes, presses his thumb and middle finger into the divots beside his brows. A piercing tone reverberates suddenly in his ears and he draws away from Harry so that he can lean forward and press his face into his hands. He takes slow, deep breaths in the space between his knees, wincing harder with every passing second that the shrieking continues. "Do you hear that?"

But Harry ignores him; he pats him on the back in an absend-minded consolation, and then suggests, with all the air of someone contemplating what to have for tea, "Perhaps the island of Zavodovski? As I remember, you hold a strange fondness for penguins."

The sky flares brightly again and the gondola fades peculiarly from existence even as Eggsy's arse touches it. When Eggsy dares to lift his head, the postcard scenery of Venice and the textbook beauty of the Colosseum pale in comparison to the joyous rookery of penguins that waddle and chirp and utterly consume the island around them.

There have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of birds perched on ice and rock and slipping in and out of the shallow breaking waves. Penguins that preen and primp their feathers, combing oil through their plumage. Penguins that huddle together against the wind—wind that Eggsy can hear and see, but doesn't feel. There's the tremble of the earth beneath him, a dangerous rumble because he knows this island is essentially an active volcano that hasn't seen human life in—possibly ever.

He thinks of the dirty, well loved plush penguin that his father had bought him at the Edinburgh zoo, back when he was too small a babe to recall the trip itself. He barely even remembers sharing this information with Harry, but he must have done so during one of their achingly long talks following Harry's turn as Lazarus rising from the dead.

Just one of those strange tidbits of information that they'd exchanged while relearning one another; things like how Eggsy actually adores classic cinema, and how Harry actually likes Depeche Mode for some fucking reason that's beyond Eggsy completely.

Penguins, Harry has remembered Eggsy nattering on about with a nostalgic lilt to his voice, and penguins Harry has given him.

"Jesus," he breathes, and drops into a crouch. A penguin shuffles past and cocks its head at him before moving along. Another one toddles along in its wake and Eggsy can't resist the inane urge to extend a hand, fingers dangling loosely, like he's offering it out to a dog to sniff. The penguin gives a hoot, a mad little laughing thing, and ducks below his hand. It nuzzles in, almost purring, and Eggsy's fingers slip over the fine feathers that adorn its head.

Oil slick and unbelievably soft, he wonders. The penguin nips him gently when his hand stalls its grooming passes and he grins, enthusing, "This is fucking amazing!" The wind picks up, ruffling at his hair and sending strands across his forehead, into his eyes. He pushes them back with the hand not being monopolized by a penguin, still petting at it absent-mindedly, and glances around at their surroundings.

Volcanic rock looms and jags every which way, sloping steeply upwards to the volcano's peak. Thick sheets of ice and snow coat every inch of rock that isn't too warm, and if Eggsy's remembering correctly, the island itself is just north of Antarctica, meaning—

"Why ain't I cold?" he muses, brushing his hands against his joggers and standing. He wanders over to a jutting slab of ice and presses his hands to it. He feels the slick and stick of it against his palms, skin dragging and stinging only a little, but nowhere near freezing enough. He's only in a tee for fuck's sake, there's no way he wouldn't have frozen half to death by now if any of this were real. "Why ain't I cold?" he asks again, but it's flat because he already knows the answer.

He isn't cold because he isn't here. Not really. No humans can be on Zavodovski, because the climate is too extreme, too volatile, too completely covered by fucking hordes of penguins.

Harry unbuttons the front of his jacket with quick, nimble movements, and shrugs the heavy fabric off. He drapes it over Eggsy's shoulders, tucking his fingers beneath the lapels and pulling them tightly together so that Eggsy is cocooned and warm. Harry tugs him closer, knocks their foreheads together.

Eggsy can't feel the frigid South Pole air, but he can feel the gentle puffs of warm breath that leave through the thin gap of Harry's mouth.

"I want," he starts, but chokes on it. He clears his throat. Tries again. "I want to believe that you're alive."

It only comes out slightly broken, and all raw.

"You must trust me." Harry's long, gorgeous fingers curl more tightly into the material of his own suit jacket. "Trust me, and believe that I'm right here. All you need to do is wake up, Eggsy, and I'll be right here."

He flinches back. "Wake up?" he repeats desperately, and fists his hands into the fabric of Harry's dress shirt. "No, don't—don't fuckin' say that, Harry! This is real, yeah? Has to be! It has to be real, it's got—"

His eyes snap open.

His bedroom is dark and nearly unfamiliar, a study in shadows and indistinct shapes.

There's not a penguin to be found in sight, save for the faded plush of one that sits on his bookshelf. No Venetian canals, no historic crumbling wonder of Rome to be found here in the townhome that he shares with his mum and Daisy.

He turns his face into his pillow and lets loose a scream, and when all the air has left him, he throws it across the room. It hits the door and then the floor with soft, muted thumps, and it isn't satisfying at all. Breathing heavily, he plants his hands flat against the mattress and shoves up, but something weighs him down, tangles him up by his shoulders and arms, and he wrenches off the offending thing and holds it up.

The fabric is weighty, a familiar blend of kevlar and silk. Eggsy fumbles for the lamp next to his bed, fingers trembling, and flicks it on.

The pinstripes of Harry's suit warp and bend when the tears fill his eyes. He spreads his palms across the expanse of it, smoothing wrinkles down and arranging the jacket to drape over his knees. A touch of frost clings to the edges of the lapels, and when he draws it close he can smell the remnants of a dream—the musky hint of Colosseum, the fishy smell of water lapping underneath a canal, the putrid stench of sulphur and penguin shite.

A hysterical giggle bubbles its way out of his throat and he buries it into the shoulder of the jacket, lets the fabric absorb the fat, hot tears that roll down his face and trail beside his nose, over his lips.

"It was real," he whispers, feeling giddy and light. He tucks his face more firmly into the jacket, loving the scratch of fibres against his cheeks. The smells begin to fade and he chases after them, clenches the suit to his chest when he falls back against the mattress. His body curls around it, unwilling to let go lest it disappear into the ether, and grins.

He'll show Merlin tomorrow. It's proof, it's got to be proof.

Harry is alive .

ooo

"Harry isn't alive."

Merlin says the words slowly, gentle as he can manage, but Eggsy hears the bite of agony beneath them, that harsh thread of damnation that tells Eggsy to stop playing these games. But Eggsy has no games to play, no lies to tell, only a jacket that still has traces of Harry's cologne sunk into the weave. He shakes the garment bag at Merlin. "I have proof," he insists, and fumbles with the zip.

The sigh that staggers out of Merlin's nose is long-suffering, but he merely crosses his arms over his chest and continues staring Eggsy down with that grim countenance.

"I was so sure I were dreamin', yeah? 'Cos there were penguins and we was in Rome, and—" Merlin's expression is twisted, unimpressed and showing hints of devastation, so Eggsy shuts up quickly. He sounds mental, him, off his bloody rocker when he tries to explain it, but it's real . Harry's alive, and he knows it. "Anyway, that ain't important. Harry gave me his favourite suit jacket, Merlin, and when I woke up," the zip goes down, metal springing apart with a quick whir. Eggsy pulls the bag off and displays the suit coat proudly, beaming at Merlin over the pinstripes. "This was around my shoulders."

Merlin's eyes flick to the coat only briefly before something in them shutters closed. His jaw works and clenches, but he stares Eggsy down and doesn't say a word.

"It's Harry's," Eggsy points out, almost needlessly. Surely Merlin would recognize it, after all those years by Harry's side. Would know the signs of a Kingsman suit with his eyes shut and hands tied behind his back, for all that he was vital in the implementation of its bulletproof properties.

Merlin snatches the hanger out of his hand with a frustrated growl. "This," he hisses, and shakes it in front of Eggsy's face, "is not Harry's suit."

And—it isn't.

It isn't Harry's jacket.

Eggsy's world bottoms out, dark and vignetting at the edges, because even though what he had slipped into the protective garment bag that morning had absolutely been Harry's suit jacket, what Merlin clenches angrily in both hands is nothing more than a ratty, faded Adidas hoodie.

Eggsy reaches out and fingers the fraying sleeves, slips his hand over the cotton, and panics. "No," he denies, and tugs the jumper back out of Merlin's hands. "No, no, no no no. This ain't fuckingpossible." He draws it to his face and inhales sharply through his nose, chasing the traces of Harry, of Rome, of Venice, of fucking Zavodovski, and finds none. There's only the minute smell of laundry soap and the cedar chest of drawers where he folds his clothing away. "I swear," he croaks upwards to Merlin. "I fucking swear, Merlin, this...this wasn't...I—"

He was wrong.

It wasn't real.

His knees give way.

Merlin catches him, clipboard edging painfully into one of Eggsy's shoulderblades, but he just buries his face somewhere between the worn cotton hoodie and the luxurious cashmere of Merlin's jumper. "I'm sorry," he manages after a few moments of gasping breathes and dizzying denial. "I guess. I guess I haven't been sleepin' as well as I thought."

There's a nudge at the crown of his head, like Merlin's resting his chin there. "It's alright, lad," he rumbles, and Eggsy feels it in his chest. "You'll pull through this with the same shit-stubborn attitude that you do damn near everything else. You'll wake up soon, I know it."

Eggsy freezes in the other man's embrace. "What'd you say?"

They split apart. Merlin's eyes track over the grey of Eggsy's face, his panicked pallor, and his own expression grows heavier and aged with his concern. "I said," slowly, a careful reiteration, "that you'll be alright, soon."

Eggsy's throat works soundlessly, save for the sticky click of his dry tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Right," he says, and steps further out of Merlin's grasp. He presses the heel of the hand not clutching his hoodie to the centre of his forehead. "Right. I'll just take two of them pills I got, instead of just the one tonight."

He makes to turn away, but Merlin catches him quickly, fingers digging into his shoulder and stopping his rotation. "Be careful," he warns, ominous and otherworldly. Something about him is hazy, distorted, and Eggsy blinks. He must be more tired than he thought, if his vision is starting to be so affected. "Those pills, Eggsy. One will relax your mind, calm you down. Two will put you right to sleep. But three. Don't ever take three, Eggsy. Promise me."

Curiosity lends itself to him easily. Eggsy's never been the type to take a warning at face value, more the type to hear 'the stove is hot' and then slap a hand on the stove just to make sure. It's a bit of a self destructive streak in him, the knowledge that he's going to get burned but reaches out anyway.

"What happens if I take three?"

"Promise me that you won't ."

He'll make no such promises until he has his answer. Merlin's apparent refusal to answer only strengthens his resolve. He pushes his misery to the back burner, pours all of his limited energy into a stubborn, stern expression.

"What happens," he demands, no longer a question.

Merlin's face is flat when he says, "Take three, and you'll find you cannae wake up. Not ever."

Eggsy's arms fall limply to his sides. "The fuck?" he breathes, and can't help but take a step, then two, away from Merlin. "Who the fuck is makin' sleeping pills that put you into a fucking coma? An' with no warning on the label, neither! What kind of fucking idea is that, bruv? You trying to get rid o' me or summat?" It's a weak attempt at levity, but when Merlin stays stoic, silent, a terrible thought occurs to Eggsy.

The hoodie drops to the ground, nearly silent, and completely ignored.

"You're trying to get rid of me," he says, voice dull and dead and at war with the horror of realization creeping into his mind. The thought's there, now, sinking its claws into the edges of his brain, sinking black tendrils into every nook and cranny. Merlin's face doesn't so much as tic. "You...blame me, don't you? For what happened to Harry? You think it's my fault."

"It's not healthy for you to stay here," Merlin says, but his mouth doesn't move. His mouth doesn't move, and he's got that same disturbingly static look in his eyes. No part of him is twitching, or hitching with breath, and it seems as if he hasn't blinked in ages. Eggsy's headache returns with a ferocity. "Go home, take a damn shower. Get some bloody rest. He's not going anywhere."

"He's not going anywhere," Eggsy repeats, and thinks of a freshly dug grave. Thinks of heavy grey marble, shining and new, and the rotten pallor of the Harry who'd stood before him and slipped a dagger into his hands. "Right."

He turns on his heel and exists Merlin's office, leaving the Adidas hoodie crumpled on the carpet.

The pills rattle in his pocket. He doesn't recall bringing them with him, but he must have, if they're there.

His feet are dragging, heavy things that scrape across hardwood flooring, trip him over expensive rugs, and take him to Harry's office door.

The Throne Room, he thinks dazedly, twisting at the knob. It's loose beneath his fingers, and the door opens easily. Merlin must have forgotten to lock it up the day before, which isn't like him, but Eggsy isn't complaining.

The Throne Room, he thinks once more, taking in Harry's empty desk. Never to see its rightful King again.

He sidles further into the office and shuts the door behind him.

There are traces of Harry everywhere in this room, despite its traditional trappings, despite the sour memory of Chester King that lingers, hung up on the walls with stern faces of Kingsman agents past.

Harry's influence is a visible thing.

The books on Ornithology stacked in front of the fireplace. The various framed photographs of classic Bentleys and Aston Martins and Bugattis, none of them models from a date past 1960. His weird bug collection, of butterflies and moths framed and pinned and labelled with Harry's awful chicken scratch writing. There's even a fucking stuffed badger on the mantle above the fireplace, and Eggsy could understand the symbolism behind Mr. Pickle but he's not sure he's ever wanted to know the story behind the goddamn badger .

Not until now, anyway. Not until it was too late, and he realizes with a pang that now he'll never know the story of why Harry had taken one look at the snarling, ugly thing, with its lopsided eyes, and thought it would make for a nice bit of décor.

He lets his body slump into one of the plush chairs in front of the fireplace and nudges at the books with the toe of his trainer. In the back of his mind, he can still see the wet shine of JB's eyes, the nervous little grunts and whines. Chester's expectant glare is still a hot discomfort, despite all the months that have passed since Eggsy poisoned him.

The bottle of pills bulge starkly in his pocket and he stares at the lump, considering.

They rattle around when he pulls them out and twists off the cap.

He's never liked taking pills, but he shakes one out and swallows it dry.

"One to calm down," he reminds himself, and lets another white pill tumble out. He rolls it around in his palm until the coating starts to melt and stick, leaving residue behind, and then he throws it back, too. "Two to put you right to sleep," he says, and swallows against the hard, bitter mass jammed in his throat.

Drowsiness is immediately, sending his neck snapping back when his muscles suddenly fail him. His eyes flutter shut and he takes deep, soothing breaths. In through his nose, out through his mouth.

In through his nose, out through his mouth.

In, out.

In.

Out.

He wrenches his eyes open with an exasperated growl, and sits there, staring angrily at that stupid fucking badger, and wonders why he hasn't fallen asleep.

Eggsy's fingers twitch against the pill bottle of their own accord. A third dose settles in the cup of his palm, tantalizing.

"Three," he warns himself, and pinches it between his thumb and forefinger so that he can hold it in front of his face. "And you'll never wake up."

His hand drifts towards his mouth, and the pill presses into the divot of his bottom lip, against the cut of his front teeth.

A grip, firm and calloused and familiar, wrenches his hand away. The pill goes scattering to the ground, harmless, and gets lost beneath the furniture. Eggsy looks up, startled, and the air punches out of him.

"You mustn't," Harry scolds, and drops to his knees before Eggsy in supplication. His hand is a gentle, caressing presence now that the threat of that third pill has been eradicated. "You know that you mustn't, Eggsy, come now. What were you thinking?"

Eggsy stares, heart hammering, and fumbles to grasp Harry's hand within his own. His fingers nudge up, hard, against the spot in his wrist just an inch below where his thumb hinges into his palm. Harry's pulse thrums, steady and sure, beneath his touch. He's warm to the touch, nothing clammy or cold or dead and wrong about him. Eggsy releases his wrist in favour of cupping both hands around Harry's face, smoothing them down his jaw. There's the shadow and prickle of a beard, like Harry hasn't found time in the past day or so to shave.

He prods carefully at the space between Harry's eyebrows, delighting in his disgruntled sigh, and smooths his thumb over the hairs of one arch, following it into the sunburst webbing of the scar leftover from Valentine's shoddy aim.

"You're here?" He manages to crackle out the plea, despite the air that seems to catch in his throat. He draws Harry's face closer for inspection, only to have the older man tilt his chin upward and press his lips to Eggsy's forehead in a lingering kiss.

"I'm here," he affirms, and presses another kiss against his cool skin. One large hand drifts up to cradle the back of Eggsy's head, a thumb pressing into the spot where his jaw and ear connect. Eggsy shivers. "I've been here all along. I'll not leave your side, my darling."

Utterly helpless to keep himself from doing so, Eggsy winds one arm around Harry's neck, the other beneath his right arm and clasps his hands together at the nape of Harry's neck. His fingers sink into the silky lush of Harry's hair. He buries his face into Harry's collar, mouth skimming against the fabric and soft skin, and he gasps in relief.

"It's you," he shudders, "It's really, you're really— fuck. "

"I miss you," Harry says into the bristly cut of Eggsy's hair, somewhere just above his ear. He feels the reverberations of it against his cheek. "Eggsy, I—"

Whatever he's about to say is cut off by the creak of the office door opening. Eggsy clings more tightly to Harry and buries his face even deeper, until the scratch of silk beneath his cheek is very nearly uncomfortable. There's the brief sound of shoes tapping against the wooden floor before they stutter to a stop. A distant clatter, wood falling onto wood from a great height, almost like the sound of—

" Harry?"

—Merlin dropping his clipboard to the ground.

They separate from their embrace only far enough that they both can peer around to where Merlin loiters in the doorway, flushed and incredulous.

"Harry?" Merlin asks once more, and then, bizarrely, "You're still here, then?"

Confusion addles Eggsy's mind briefly, until realization sends his spine snapping into a straight line. He doesn't let go of Harry when he demands, "You can see 'im?"

Merlin nods once, and stoops to pick up his discarded clipboard. "I see you," he tells Harry. He doesn't look at Eggsy once. "The way you look at him. I see you clear as the fucking day, Harry."

A sharp ringing tone begins to build in Eggsy's head, echoing around and making his temples throb. He ignores it, disregards it completely in favour of Merlin's fixed gaze and the heat of Harry's body, the hair that still sifts through the cracks of Eggsy's fingers, the smell of spice and sandalwood he's come to associate with Harry. He tugs their heads together once again, knocking brows with more force than necessary. It doesn't help his growing headache, but he pushes in more tightly, as if he can meld himself into Harry and nothing in the world will be able to keep them apart again.

"Fuck," he lets loose a sob. "Fuck, Harry, I'm so fuckin' glad I didn't kill you. I've felt so awful, so fuckin' gutted, bruv, but. You're here. You're here , Merlin can see you, I can...I can feel you." He pushes his manic grin into the side of Harry's nose in a sloppy kiss. "Everything's gonna be alright."

Both of Harry's hands smooth down the back of Eggsy's head. This close, Eggsy feels more than sees the small smile that lilts at his mouth, but there's a sadness to it that he can somehow sense.

His head throbs harder, and the ringing grows louder. Eggsy winces and hides himself further into Harry.

"Almost," Harry whispers into the corner of Eggsy's mouth. "You have to wake up, Eggsy."

Despair and pain rocket through him all at once, slamming around his head like an angry bull. His skull feels like it's cracking from the inside out, like all his bones are brittle and splitting. He screams.

He screams, and screams, and screams himself awake.

He tumbles from the armchair, knees and palms connecting harshly with the ground. He casts an anguished glance across from him, but Harry isn't there.

The office door is still shut, Merlin nowhere to be found.

The painful ringing doesn't leave him, but the aroma of Harry's cologne does. It dissipates, disperses, somewhere out of reach like the vestiges of a dream.

Eggsy crumbles into the expensive carpet and ruins it when he drags his nails across the fibres.

ooo

Realistically, with all the medication and stress he's body's been under, a pint is the last kind of indulgence to which Eggsy should succumb. He really doesn't need the fuzzy, addled haze of alcohol on top of the mind numbing melancholy he already feels. He really shouldn't mix beer with his sleeping pills, the effects of which are still causing him to reel. Leaving HQ had been a struggle in its own right, and navigating the London streets had been a blur of stumbling footsteps and wrong turns.

"You doin' alright, cuz?" Jamal asks, knocking his half-empty pint glass into Eggsy's. A bit of lager spills over and sloshes across Eggsy's fingers, splatters over the already sticky table. Eggsy stares, and doesn't do more than flex his hand around his glass.

"Yeah," he intones, dull. His headache is a persistent fuck, clamouring for all of his attention and all of his head space. Ryan and Jamal share a significant look over their drinks and Eggsy groans, scrubbing at his face with the hand that isn't sticky from drink. "Yeah, no," he admits, and it's bitten out painfully. "No, I'm not fuckin' alright, hmm? Jesus, I can't fuckin' sleep, I'm seeing ghosts everywhere I go, and this," he jabs two fingers into his temple, massaging roughly at the skin and hair., "fucking headache is doing me in, bruv, I swear." He throws back a healthy swig of lager, feels it bubble and bitter on his tongue.

Ryan shifts in his seat and Jamal looks fixedly down at his hands, both of them blatantly uncomfortable. The three of them remain in an uneasy silence, accentuated by the contrast of the busy rumble of pub-goers engaged in conversation. Eventually, Ryan licks his lips and gives a weak attempt at a smile, crooked teeth bared.

"It's not all bad, though, yeah?" he tries, bumping his foot against Eggsy's underneath the table. "You got Roxy and Merlin lookin' out for you, not to mention the two best bruvs you could ask for." He and Jamal knock their fists together and share a brief grin.

"Yeah, cuz," Jamal adds, leaning forward. "Plus, mate, there's no way you coulda known that bloke was gonna rock up with a fuckin' pistol. You thought you was doin' the right thing, giving those kids protection. How was you to know it'd all go tits up?"

Eggsy hums, considering, still staring miserably into the amber liquid of his drink.

"It ain't like Harry meant it," Ryan says next, sounding earnest. "All them things 'e said, bruv, he were only scared, yeah? Plus, I bet he feels like a right git, hittin' you like that."

The two of them continue the reassuring chatter, trading points and doing their best to soothe Eggsy's jangled nerves.

He freezes once their words register, and then his body jolts with realization.

The glass in his hand tips and clatters, spilling beer everywhere. Ryan and Jamal don't so much as flinch, despite their jeans getting soaked through. They just keep looking at Eggsy with those expectant, wary smiles.

"How'd you know any of that?" Eggsy asks, slow and as steady as he can manage. "I ain't...I ain't told you none of that. I never told you 'bout being an agent, so how—" Pain splices his brain in half and he moans, eyes squeezing tightly shut. The fucking ringing he's been hearing all day trills on, growing louder and louder with every passing second. "What the fuck is goin' on?" he rasps, clutching at his scalp. "What the fuck—"

He looks up, eyes half shut.

Ryan and Jamal are gone.

Gazelle regards him cooly, her expression made all the more dour by the sickening spread of green through the veins that spider up her neck and cross her jaw. Her lips are pursed together with judgement, and she flicks her eyes up and down Eggsy's slumped, astonished form with barely concealed disdain. "What do you think?" she asks, leaning to her right.

Richmond Valentine grins at him over Ryan's ale, wide and gap-toothed. "I don't know, Gazzy," he muses, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. A glance at his chest reveals the sharp, glistening spike of Gazelle's prosthetic blade, smeared in blood and protruding from his sternum. The wound around it is an gaping, sucking, ugly thing that draws Eggsy's eye and reminds him that he's the one to have put it there. "I'm not sure he's ready." He lifts his chin in a nod that's directed towards Eggsy's left. "What d'you think, man?"

Eggsy turns slowly, dreading whomever is seated beside him.

Chester King glowers, leaning closely into Eggsy's space. His face is sickly grey where it isn't flushed and sweaty, and there's an open sliver of a wound in his neck where Eggsy had stabbed him with the pen and removed his implant. It's bleeding sluggishly. "I don't care what the little prick does," he sneers, blood dripping into his collar. It blooms, soaked into the fibres, spreading vibrant crimson like a flower unfurling.

Valentine rolls his eyes and sits forward as best he can, threading his fingers together on the beer-wet table. He sucks a 'tch' noise from between his teeth, exasperated. "Well, goddamn it, Big C, that ain't what I was asking. I don't give if a fuck if you give a fuck what happens to the kid. What I'm asking you is, do you think he's gonna join us?"

"I'm telling you," Gazelle says, interrupting the exchange. She looks bored, examining her nails, and just barely deigns to glance at Eggsy once more. "He isn't ready. There's too much anchoring him to the other side." She raises one impeccably shaped eyebrow, gives a mocking pout. "How sweet. Somebody loves him."

Valentine looks genuinely delighted by this, for some fucking reason. "Aww, really?" he coos, beaming over at Eggsy. It makes for a disturbing image, his chest speared through and blood staining the teeth he bares in that charismatic grin. "That's beautiful, man! Love is, like, one of the greatest things on this planet. Congrats! Who's the lucky girl?" Eggsy stares at him, horrified and more than a little confused. The ringing in his ears grows louder, more shrill. Valentine's hands go up in complacency. "Or guy, I don't judge."

Chester's face distorts even further in disgust. "I knew it," he hisses, suddenly withdrawing from Eggsy's immediate proximity, curling in on himself with a distinct sense of revulsion. He wags an accusing, age-crooked finger in Eggsy's direction. "I knew there was a reason he was so insistent on my approval of you. And under my roof!"

Valentine slumps in his seat and throws a hand out towards the older man, palm up. "Why you gotta be like that, huh, Chezzy?" he demands, then points at Eggsy with two blood-coated fingers on his other hand. "It's the twenty-first century, man, who cares if two dudes or two ladies or two whoevers fall in love! Hell, I have seen some messed up shit on this goddamn planet, and if anyone can fall into something as beautiful and pure as that in the middle of this fucked up, crazy world, who gives a fuck if they've got the same stuff going on downstairs?"

"It isn't right ," Chester fumes, sitting rigidly at the edge of his seat, as far away from Eggsy as he can get. "And don't call me Chezzy."

"Sorry," Eggsy chokes at last, feeling faint. All three heads swivel towards him, their faces showing with varying levels of interest. "But what the fuck is going on 'ere?"

Valentine's mouth opens yet again, arms lifting so that he can use his hands during whatever ranting explanation he's no doubt about to launch into, but Gazelle gets there before him. "You're In Between," she snaps, and Valentine deflates. There's a rare moment of softness that comes over her expression, making her eyes less sharp and her mouth less severe, and she reaches out to touch her fingers to the back of his wrist. Valentine covers her hand with his own with a smile that's close-lipped, but no less genuine. Eggsy shudders.

"In Between?" he parrots. "What does that mean?"

"Oh, for God's sake," Chester mutters, snide and sneering and under his breath. "It means you're bloody d—"

"Don't!" Valentine shrieks, letting go of Gazelle to flap his hand at Chester. "The fuck? You know we can't say nothing! God damn." He turns back to Gazelle, whining, "Why does it always happen that I have to do everything myself?"

She taps her fingers against his hand. "You do say if you want it done right..."

His shoulders rise and fall with the force of his sigh. "Yeah, I know. Listen, kid." He's addressing Eggsy now, face slack with seriousness. "You gotta make a choice. You can't just wait around here, dicking around forever. So, you either wake up—"

The three of them stand at once, chairs scraping on the ground. Gazelle leans heavily into Valentine, off balance without her prosthetic. From where they tower above Eggsy, the shadows of the shitty pub lighting cast their faces into something dark and terrifying and nearly skeletal.

"Or," Valentine finishes, and reaches out for Eggsy. His grin has lost all of its charm in favour of something vicious, dangerous. "You come with us."

Eggsy's chair overturns from the force with which he throws his body from it, stumbling over his own feet in his haste to get to the exit. He throws the door open, looking over his shoulder at where the three of them are walking towards him. "Fuck you!" he shouts, and tumbles into the street, taking long strides out onto the pavement.

Only, once he's found his footing and turned around, he's not in the street at all.

He's still in the Prince. No asphalt or concrete beneath his feet, but instead that ugly carpeting, stained with spilled drinks and spilled blood and probably some piss as well. He wrenches his gaze away from the ground and up, only to find himself nose to nose with Valentine, with Chester and Gazelle bearing in closely from either side of him.

He spins around, but the door is gone. There's only brick. He pivots back around slowly, heart hammering in his chest. Painful. Erratic. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk.

"You know," Gazelle murmurs, and it's seductive, drawing Eggsy closer so he can hear the faint whisper of words. Her lips brush against his ear. "It's all your fault. You killed Harry."

Eggsy recoils and backs into the wall. Valentine steps forward and Eggsy has to twist his chest quickly to the side to avoid the spear of Gazelle's prosthetic. He shrugs and pulls up one side of his mouth, sympathetic. "She's right," he admits, and his head shakes a little bit from side to side. "It is pretty much your fault."

"Shut up," Eggsy grits out. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

"How can you live with yourself?" snarls Chester King, looking wizened and gnarled and hateful. "My best agent, and you ruined him!"

"Shut it, you fucking geezer," Eggsy seethes, leaning up into the old man's face. "I'm not afraid of you. Any of you," he adds, looking briefly towards Valentine and Gazelle. "Because you're not real." He reaches out to shove a finger into Chester's sternum, and is very nearly giddy when his hand passes right through. "None of this is real!"

"Well," Gazelle says archly. "Then you'll just have to wake up."

She reaches out and shoves Eggsy, hard, back into the wall.

He falls through the brick and down, hurtling off the edge of the Earth and into darkness. The sharp chime that's been following him around grows deafening, all consuming. Eggsy squeezes his eyes tightly shut until colours flare into the blackness.

He falls into something soft, and his eyes fly open in surprise.

The angry honey-badger on the fireplace mantle in Harry's office stares back.

The other armchair is vacant. There isn't so much as an indent in the cushion to imply anyone has been there at all.

"What's happening to me?!" he shouts into the empty room.

No one answers.

The ringing sound trills quietly beneath the rasp of his heavy breathing, and he fists his hands into his hair and screams into his knees.

ooo

He finds himself at Harry's grave, a bouquet of flowers clutched in his hand.

The stems are crushing, splitting apart beneath the strength of his grip.

It's just...he needs to see it. Something in him is called to it, for all that it's a reminder that Harry's buried six feet under, dead and gone.

Perhaps that's why he needs to see it; to remind himself that—no matter what mess is going on inside his head, no matter how hard his own body and brain seem to be fighting against him—Harry isn't coming back.

Not this time.

There's only so many times one man can come back from the dead, Eggsy reasons to himself, eyes skimming over the headstone's epitaph.

My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure.

Harry A. Hart
1965-2015

"Always gonna be Galahad, ain't you?" he mutters, kneeling down and skimming his fingers across the first line of the poem. He brings his fingers to his lips and kisses the tips of them, then pushes it against Harry's name.

He sighs and drops his gaze down to the increasingly sad-looking bundle of white orchids and sweetheart roses, and lays it down at the base of the stone. "I'll never stop hoping," he admits to himself, to the dirt, to the marble. "Never gonna stop waking up in the morning and thinkin' you'll be at the shop. Never gonna stop missing you." He runs his hand along his brow, covering his eyes as he fights back the hot sting of tears. "Fuck, I miss you." He looks up at the stone. "I miss you so—"

He chokes and falls back onto his arse, scrabbling for purchase in the dirt.

The epitaph has changed. The headstone screams. The grave accuses.

HERE LIES HARRY HART
HE WAS KILLED BY EGGSY UNWIN

"I didn't kill him!" Eggsy roars, and lunges for the stone. His flowers are ruined when he digs his finger into grass, into dirt, and pulls them out in messy clumps. He flings handfuls of soil over his shoulder, shoves it to the side. He digs and digs and digs, trying to reach the very base of the headstone so he can rip the fucking thing out of the ground and throw it into the Thames.

He digs, but the dirt won't move. He digs until his fingernails are torn, until the wind is a living, howling beast around him, and until the world has gone so dark he can no longer see the ground beneath him.

The headstone shines, a sole beacon of light in the pitch black.

Eggsy curls his messy fingers over his knees and trembles. He forces his eyes back to the marble and sobs.

It urges:

WAKE UP.

He wakes.

The walls of his bedroom tighten in and suffocate him. Shadows loom and climb against them, trailing into the corners and the edges of the ceiling. Slowly, they gain form, and six bodies crowd around him in his bed.

Roxy, her gun trained on him and her expression blank. Valentine, still dripping blood and still impaled. Merlin, holding an AK-47 and in a pilot's uniform, frowning down at Eggsy like he's the source of all the world's disappointment. Gazelle, spidery-green and sour and frothing at the lips. Chester, bitter and angry and sliced open at the neck. Charlie, too, half his head missing in a grotesque crater of broken skull and exposed brain.

When they speak, it's in terrifying unison.

"You killed him," they chorus, leaning in and caging him against the mattress. "It's all your fault. You killed Harry Hart."

"Fuck off!" Eggsy hollers, thrashing in the sheets. He lurches to the side and fumbles for the drawer of his bedside table, smearing blood and dirt and bits of grass everywhere he touches. His fingers close around the gun he keeps there, and flicks the safety off before he's even drawn it fully from its hiding spot. He sits up straight and aims. "Shut the fuck up!"

He fires at them, one by one, and they each dissipate like smoke. Eventually, he runs out of bullets. He throws the empty gun across the room and swings his legs over the edge of his bed.

Breathing hard, he glances to the bottle of pills, still perched neatly on the table.

Two shake out quickly into his palm, and after only a split second of hesitation, there's a third. He swallows two in one go, no water to wash them down, and presses the third to his quivering lips. The medicine touches his tongue, bitter and awful as the coating comes off with his saliva. He pulls the pill away, gagging.

"Eggsy!" comes a far-away voice. Eggsy squeezes his eyes shut, unwilling to give in to the hallucination. The voice comes again, louder, more insistent. "Eggsy!"

"Harry?" he wheezes. He opens his eyes and darts them around the room. "Harry, where are you?"

There's a clatter from the bedside table, the sound of glass against metal. Eggsy zeroes his gaze in on the photo of him and Harry that he'd framed and kept close by, determined not to forget the sight of Harry's smile.

But Harry isn't smiling. Harry isn't even sitting at the bloody table in the photograph, not anymore. He's pressed up against the glass from the other side, hands and face nearly taking up the space completely. He bangs a fist against the barrier between them, and the sound of rattling glass comes again.

The pill falls out of Eggsy's fingers when he grabs for the picture frame and holds it up, thumbs pushing into the glass like he'll be able to touch Harry if he presses hard enough.

"You can't sleep forever," Harry tells him, sounding desperate. "You need to wake up, Eggsy, you need to open your eyes so I can tell you...so I can tell you just how very sorry I am for all those things I said, and how I didn't mean them. Not a word." His palms press flat against the glass, reaching back to Eggsy. His eyes are bright and pleading. "And how fucking awful I feel about hitting you. Christ, that's the worst bit, isn't it? That I ever laid a hand against you. It's killing me, Eggsy, knowing that's your last memory of me, that it could be the last thing I ever did to you."

"It's alright," reassures Eggsy, managing a smile through his tears. "I forgive you, Harry, honest. You was scared, bruv, and I was a fucking moron."

"You must wake up," Harry persists, forehead nudging into the glass. His eyes close. "You must , so that I can apologize. So that I can tell you that I...that I love. I love you."

Eggsy stops breathing. Harry's eyes open and fix on him, fierce and determined. "What do I do?" he croaks, and brings the picture right up to his face.

"You have to fight," is Harry's urging, sibilant and sharp. "You need to fight, Eggsy, fight!"

"I want to," Eggsy moans. "Shit, I want to, I'm just...I'm fucking scared . And I'm so tired, Harry." And he is tired, despite all the sleeping and dreaming he's been doing, he's suddenly exhausted, body-heavy and aching all over.

"I don't care!"is cried out from the frame, tinny and beseeching. "You've been sleeping long enough, and I love you, you petulant little berk. So wake up, Eggsy, just wake up. Wake up, wake up, WAKE—!"

There's an explosion of sound as the persistent ringing reaches a crescendo. The world goes black and silent all at once, before there's a rush of light and wind that knocks him back. He hears the sound of glass shattering when he loses his grasp on the picture.

And then—

nothing.

ooo

Eggsy wakes.

The world returns slowly, in gentle lights and quiet beeps and the murmur of a voice pitched low; the words indistinguishable but their speaker familiar, the rumble of them dear. His eyelids feel gritty and weighed down, and it's not half a struggle to try and eke them open.

Before he can manage to do so, a pressure against his hand registers. It's warm, enveloping, and growing more firm with every passing second. As awareness filters slowly back to him, it becomes more apparent that a similar sort of pressure—not as squeezing, more like something that's against— is present along the length of his arm, up to his shoulder. There's a brush of it at the crook of his neck, too.

Eggsy takes a bracing breath though his nose and forces his eyes open.

They clench shut again almost immediately, the brightness above him nearly blinding. The headache splits his skull a second later, reverberating through his temples, down his neck, and into a screaming agony in his left shoulder.

"What the fuck?" he grumbles. Or tries to, anyway. It comes out more as, "Werrrrfk?" when it climbs its way out of his dry, scratchy throat.

Oh, God, his mouth tastes awful.

The nice, warm thing that's been pressing up against him goes stiff, and then bursts into motion. It shifts, a bit going from his hand up towards his face, and its touch soothes a bit of the sharp pain away. Eggsy manages a squeaky little moan and pushes his face further into that calming touch, chasing it.

"Eggsy," says the voice, only it's a bit off; thick and wet, like it's getting caught on something. Something...sad. Tears. "Eggsy, can you hear me?"

He wheezes and ducks his head back against the nice touch.

It trembles against his cheekbone. Fingers, he realizes, when different points of contact register. They're fingers, massaging at his throbbing temple. The ache abates and his eyes adjust, just enough that it doesn't hurt quite so badly when his eyelids slowly lift.

A worried face blurs up above his own. Directly above his own. He goes a bit cross-eyed.

"Jesus, Harry," he slurs, and he sounds unintelligible even to his own stuffed-up ears. "A bit close, aren't ya?"

And then...something beautiful happens.

Harry's face breaks into the single happiest, most relieved smile Eggsy's ever seen on another person's face. It stretches so wide and so suddenly that it seems in danger of cracking off his face completely. It's absolutely amazing the way it transforms him, clearing up the haggard lines and bruising shadows beneath his eyes.

"You're alive," he realizes, and tries to shove himself up, tries to get even closer. His shoulder screams in white-hot agony, and he collapses back against the bed, gasping. "Harry, you're alive!"

"Of course I'm alive," Harry mutters, smoothing a hand over Eggsy's head, down his cheek. A thumb passes over the cut of his jaw. "What's important is that you're awake, Eggsy, thank fucking Christ that you're awake."

"'Course I'm awake," Eggsy grits out around the dizzying pain. He forces his eyes to stay open, desperate to keep Harry in his sights. "You wouldn't stop waking me." He watches as Harry reaches off to the side and depresses a button connected to an IV drip. He looks thin and shaky, and it's the most casual Eggsy's ever seen him dressed in a nice jumper (cashmere, undoubtedly) and a pair oftailored blue jeans. Of course Harry's fucking jeans are tailored.

He makes himself focus. "Where am I?"

"In HQ's medical ward," Harry tells him as he examines Eggsy's vitals. "A private hospital. You were brought here after you were shot."

Eggsy blinks. "I wasn't shot," he insists, though he knows the slowly ebbing stab in shoulder says otherwise. "He got you instead, didn't he? Right between..." He can't help the way his eyes dart up, making sure to account for the spot in the middle of Harry's forehead. It's unblemished, save for a line or two. "Between the eyes," he finishes, but it trails off into a whisper.

His right hand, no longer wrapped up in Harry's own, trembles slowly upwards, reaching for Harry's face with a caution that seems wholly unwarranted, but utterly unavoidable. Harry, ever observant, sees him reaching out of the corner of his eye, and ducks his head down so that Eggsy can prod at his forehead. "Fortunately, that wasn't the case," he assures Eggsy drily, but his eyes are still wet with relief. When Eggsy's satisfied with the unwounded expanse of Harry's head, he starts to withdraw his hand. Harry catches it once more, smoothing warmth into the dry skin, and after a moment of hesitation, presses Eggsy's fingers to his lips.

"Unfortunately," he says, pitched low. "I wasn't able to pull you out of the line in fire in time. He did manage to give you a rather nasty gunshot wound to the chest." He pulls Eggsy's hand down and presses it into his own torso, at a spot a scant few inches beneath his collarbone.

That's where the bullet hit him, Eggsy realizes. An inch or two down, and his lung would have been pierced. A few inches to the right, and his heart would have been ruptured.

"You were very lucky," Harry informs him, and his voice is tight. Strained. Distant, like he's reliving the moment that Eggsy collapsed in the alleyway. "Although, you did try to go into cardiac arrest three days ago. I'm a bit cross about it, so forgive me if I seem...unsettled."

Cardiac arrest ? Eggsy's mind goes blank. Three days?! "How long have I been..." He fumbles for the word. "Sleeping?"

Harry tucks his hand even closer to his chest and drags his fingers over Eggsy's knuckles, and doesn't even seem to notice that he's doing it. "A touch over two weeks."

Eggsy lets out a string of harshly exhaled invectives. Harry chuckles, still gazing down with that fond and exhausted shade in his eyes. The smile that's been curving up his mouth dims in favour of a more serious expression.

"The doctors said there was a great chance you wouldn't wake up," he tells Eggsy, starting to withdraw. Eggsy clings to him with the meagre amount of strength he possesses, and when he tugs Harry forward, he comes to a perch on the edge of the hospital bed. "I'm afraid I let their pessimism get the best of me, at times. But Roxy took care to remind me on numerous occasions just how very bull-headed you are."

" Just give him time," she soothes, and reaches up to brush hair back off of Eggsy's forehead. She's like static, voice crackling and wet with the sound of tears gathering in her throat. "You know how stubborn he is. He'll pull through, he always does."

"I think I heard that," Eggsy says upwards, face scrunching together. "I think I heard...a lot of things, actually. Was you talkin' to me?"

Harry sets his jaw and looks away, squinting towards the window. The tips of his ears are blooming crimson. "The doctors," he says, like the words are being pulled out of him, "seemed to think that you would be able to hear me. Thought that a...a friendly voice might be enough to pull you back from wherever it was that you had gone inside your head."

"It worked, dinnit? Eggsy nudges at him, prodding into his chest. The morphine is beginning to kick in, leaving him drowsy. "You brought me back."

Harry turns his chin over his shoulder and looks down at Eggsy, who grins at him dopily from his hospital bed. He hums in agreement, says nothing.

"You love me," Eggsy accuses smugly. "I heard it, bruv, and no take-backs allowed. There ain't no 'Get Out of Coma Free' card here." He yawns, jaw cracking, and curls his fingers into the fabric of Harry's jumper, tugging him further down. Harry doesn't seem to want to acquiesce, at first, but then he sighs and tilts down until their foreheads nudge together. The lines of their noses brush. "I love you," he murmurs, and his eyes can't stay open any longer. "Stay?"

Harry's lips skim across the apple of his cheek. "There's nowhere I would rather be." A kiss, featherlight and brief. "Get some rest, Eggsy. It's alright, now. Sleep."

Eggsy gives one final noise of agreement before the pull of the morphine drags him under.

He falls asleep, fingers still caught in cashmere.

epilogue.

Harry wakes.

A sharp inhale, a bleary glance around at his surroundings, fingers nudging at his eyelids to clear his vision.

It isn't hard to pinpoint the source of his slumber's disturbance, once he casts a hand out to his right and finds the other side of the bed warm but empty.

Eggsy's missing.

He sits up, sharp and sudden, and his fingers scrabble for his glasses. It's been months since the horrible time of Eggsy's stint in a coma, the bullet wound healed and his physio well underway. He's doing brilliantly, focused and determined without overextending himself, and isn't afraid to nudge his shoulder up against Harry when the stiffness gets to be too much and he's in dire need of a massage. He's gained back the weight he'd lost, and then some, adding a pleasing touch of roundness to his cheeks and lower belly that Harry finds horribly sweet and can't quite seem to stop skimming kisses against when he gets the chance.

The days are easy, when the sun is up and Harry's easily accessible to Eggsy's small, reassuring touches. When the world is bright (or rather, grey—it is London, after all) and in sharp focus, Eggsy breathes easily.

The nights are a different story.

The first few weeks after being released from hospital had been the worst of it, when Eggsy had been completely unwilling to let Harry out of his sight. Initially, he'd attempted to recuperate in the familiarity of his own home, but after a week of Eggsy looking hunted and as if he were wasting away on the spot, Harry had offered him the guest room in his house. He was just as interested in keeping Eggsy close by, following those two godforsaken weeks where he'd done nothing but slip away. Where all Harry had was the steady beep of heart rate monitors and the terrible knowledge that the last thing Eggsy knew before being shot was the furious spit of Harry's words, wrought in fear, and the way he'd raised a hand to him.

(Eggsy had brushed aside each and every 'I'm sorry,' with the insistence that he knows Harry didn't mean it, any of it. But some days the echo of the words, of the sharp crack of his hand against Eggsy's cheek, gnaws in his gut like acid. The guilt will stay with him, he knows, for a very long time.)

The guest room arrangement hadn't even lasted a whole night before Eggsy was carefully inserting himself into Harry's bed, watching him the whole night through with panic in his eyes. Having Harry's weight, his presence, the steady sound of his breathing nearby had a calming effect on Eggsy the way that nothing else had. He seemed wary of all medicine and downright refused to take any sleeping pills, despite the doctor's gentle insistence that a good night's rest would do him good.

He rested just fine, thanks, Eggsy had snapped, angrily tossing the pills into the rubbish.

And he did, for the most part, so long as Harry was curved towards him and always within touching distance the moment that the sun went down and the world began to darken.

There were terrifying evenings at the beginning when Eggsy would wander out of bed and into the streets of London, wearing nothing but his pyjamas and a dazed look. Times when Harry would have to scan CCTV footage just to catch a glimpse of where he may have gone, when he would learn to install a subtle alert system linked to his phone that would tell him if Eggsy had gone to stand in the middle of the street again, staring up at the row of homes where they lived.

"Shit," Harry swears, heart thudding at the memory, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed to start pulling on the slippers he's taken to keeping beneath his bedside table. He's got one on and is in the middle of tugging the left shoe onto his foot when there's an amused huff of air behind him.

"I'm right here, Harry," Eggsy says, voice full of exasperated affection.

Harry lets relief deflate him just a touch before he turns in the direction of Eggsy's voice and finds him standing in the French style balcony doors, both of them open, curtains drifting in the summer breeze. The street lights illuminate him and turn the fringes of his hair into a golden halo. He grins crookedly at Harry and shakes his head before returning his attention out onto the streets and up.

Harry stands from the bed and toes off his half-worn slippers, then pads over to where Eggsy's standing. He's in his briefs and the pyjama top that matches the bottoms Harry's wearing currently, though a good portion of the buttons are undone, leaving a large and gaping V that exposes a decent amount of his chest and a bit of his stomach. Harry presses his nose into Eggsy's temple and breathes in deep before settling his chin against his shoulder. Eggsy's eyebrows flick up as his mouth curves, amused.

"There weren't no stars there," Eggsy informs him, breaking the silence. A siren wails in the distance. He says it like a secret, because for all that his world was turned completely inside out by the events of his coma, he rarely talks about what he'd seen when he was under. Lord knows Harry's tried to prise it out of him, and he's gotten more information than most, but whatever happened in his mind touched Eggsy in a way that left scars. Ugly ones, at that.

"Didn't seem right," Eggsy continues, peering intently at the dim sparkle of the few sparse stars they can see through the city's light pollution. "Not that I noticed at the time, really, but. Y'know. There should be stars, yeah?"

Harry buries a kiss into the fabric of his own shirt, warmed by Eggsy's skin. "I'll take you to my family's estate in Hampshire," he promises, and slips a hand into the opening of the top. The smattering of chest hair Eggsy has tickles against his palm as he drags his hand across his collarbone. "On a clear night, the view is really quite remarkable."

His fingers drift over the circular scar the bullet left in the front of Eggsy's chest. The exit wound's presence is nothing more than an sunburst of tissue that spindles across the freckle-marked expanse of Eggsy's shoulder blade. Two more areas Harry finds himself unable to stop from skimming over with kisses.

He leaves the scar and settles instead for splaying his palm over the space in Eggsy's sternum where he can best feel the thump of his heart.

"That sounds nice," Eggsy muses, leaning back into Harry. "A proper vacation, jus' you an' me an' the stars."

JB, who's been snoring gently at the foot of their bed up until this point, lets out a snarling little howl in his sleep. Eggsy's shoulders shudder against Harry's chest when he laughs. "JB, too. Obviously."

"Obviously," Harry agrees, curling his other hand over the jut of Eggsy's hip. The little beast was about as keen to let Eggsy out of his sight these days as Harry was; that is, to say, not at all.

Eggsy stifles a yawn against the back of his hand, and Harry takes that as his cue to shut the windows and coerce him back into the soft cocoon of their bedcovers. He comes easily when Harry pulls back, fingers dragging over skin, beckoning him to follow. They arrange themselves together, Eggsy's nose pressed into Harry's bare chest and Harry's arm curled across his shoulders, and pull the quilts and jersey cotton up to their middles.

Eggsy tilts his face up for a kiss, and Harry meets him halfway for it.

"Sleep," he urges into the bow of Eggsy's lips. "I'll be here in the morning when you wake, and every morning after that."

"Promise?" Eggsy mumbles, raising his eyebrows though his eyes have already drifted shut.

Harry spares a brief moment to think about the platinum band he keeps in his sock drawer, shut away inside a velvet lined box. His lips twitch into a smile.

"For the rest of my days."

the end.