Eggsy spent twelve more hours in medical studiously not telling anyone about Harry Hart, and after a few harsh words about not losing things or running away, was released to collapse onto his own couch to sleep.
He woke up to J.B. licking his fingers.
"What the fuck is going on," he asked the dog, his eyes still closed.
J.B. yipped helpfully.
He was wearing his glasses. If he somehow lost this pair too Merlin was going to skin him. He lay on the couch and tried to force the world to make sense by the power of thought alone for awhile, until the doorbell rudely interrupted this endeavor. His doorbell was a bit dated, so when whoever it was leaned on the thing it just kept buzzing and buzzing until he heaved himself up in irritation.
"Alright, alright," he grouched. He opened the door and got yet another brutal shock.
"Oh thank god you're back! Why wasn't you answering my calls?"
His mum was standing on the front step, a bookbag over her shoulder, with Daisy cradled fast asleep in her arms. Eggsy's peripheral vision collapsed into dizzying lights as he dented the door with his fingernails.
"Oi, did you just wake up? Eggsy, it's almost noon!"
Eggsy opened his mouth, but hadn't heard anything she'd said and wouldn't have had anything coherent to reply with even if he had.
"My phone...?" he tried, grasping.
"Lost it again, have you? And here I was starting to worry. Look, I hate to do this when you've just got home, but the babysitter's run out on me and I have class in ten minutes, so be a dear and watch Daisy today yeah?"
The girl in question, who Eggsy had yet to tear his eyes from anyway, was tucked into his arms with only moderate gentleness.
"Thanks a bunch love. She don't want to wake up from her nap, seems. I'll see you later." She pressed a kiss to his cheek and ran off down the lane.
Eggsy stood there a good while trying not to burst. Then he walked to the living room, footsteps softer even than the time he'd broken into the Louvre, sat on the couch, and tried not to let his trembling wake Daisy.
What cruel wonders this fantasy world held. It seemed every time he looked around another missing piece of his life slid back into place as if it had never left. A perfect, impossible world, seemingly tailored to him better than even his best suits. Daisy came around, stirring slowly enough to give Eggsy time to wipe his eyes and force his breathing under control. Eventually she yawned a cute little yawn and looked up at him, smiling like the sun.
"Eggsy!" she said happily.
Eggsy bit back a hurt sound and hugged her tight as his eyes burned again. His Daisy had never reached the age where she got his name right. The little girl in his arms looked ready to start kindergarten - maybe even first grade. Daisy took this in stride and hugged back, then wiggled around a bit with all the excess energy the extra sleep had given her. Eggsy laughed, not a little brokenly.
Real or imaginary, alive or dead, he could no sooner give up the chance at one more day with Daisy than he could keep it from destroying him.
"What do you wanna do today, Dais? You name it, anything you want."
Elsewhere, Harry strode through the halls of Kingsman like a hurricane. He'd laid awake for hours and hours and then suddenly woke up to find his bed empty save himself with no recollection of sleeping. He refused to believe the night had been a dream. There was no logic behind the decision, just denial buried under a grief so heavy he was somewhat surprised he was still breathing.
He'd searched the house - hell, he'd searched the block, but there had been no sign of Eggsy anywhere. So he'd gone to the next place Eggsy might fly to at odd hours of the morning - Kingsman headquarters. For a moment as he dressed the thought that it had been a very vivid hallucination had stolen unbidden into his mind.
But he'd left his glasses. Them, and the ruined suit that Harry half believed was so because Eggsy had crawled from his own grave and walked home in it.
Kingsman headquarters turned out not to be the best of destinations, both because Eggsy was nowhere to be found and because Merlin was usually everywhere within its walls.
"Harry?" Merlin greeted when Harry inevitably stumbled across him. His eyes were wide and concerned, though he looked the worse for wear himself "What are you doing here?"
While a lack of logic was prevalent in his mind, he was still spy enough to deduce one very apparent thing from the start of the conversation: Eggsy was neither in the mansion nor believed alive.
Which meant he was missing, run off to wherever men nearly two weeks dead go during the daylight hours.
"I need to work." Harry replied.
So Harry went to work. There was nothing else to do. After all, the entire plot of making pancakes at an inappropriate time to lure back the dead hinged on it being an inappropriate time.
Later Harry was blazing through the backup of dossiers on his desk when he received a text: 'Eggsy sez he's lost his fone. cn u tell him I'm running l8 2 pick up Dais?'
He shot up from his desk, almost knocking his chair over in his haste. Merlin looked at him sharply.
"I have to go." Harry said, already halfway out the door.
He'd seen Pet Cemetery. He'd let Eggsy ruin him if it came to that, but he'd never forgive himself if the boy did something to Daisy.
The sun had long set and if he had to hazard a guess, Daisy was up well beyond her bedtime, when Eggsy heard the front door open. Harry was in the living room a second later, strangely panicked as he looked between Eggsy and Daisy.
He took Eggsy's breath away. Somehow he'd forgotten the way he held himself with such an air of dignity, the way he looked so comfortable in his regal suits. Now that Eggsy was a fully minted Kingsman, he could see the danger he contained beneath his skin like it was just a layer of crystal glass, and it was wonderful.
"Harry!" Daisy cried excitedly, breaking Eggsy out of his trance by racing over to hug Harry's legs and grin.
Harry blinked out of his stupor then and swung her up into his arms. Eggsy fell just a little bit more in love with him at his easy camaraderie, by such deadliness being so gentle.
"Hello Princess," he greeted "shouldn't you be in bed?"
"Eggsy let me stay up to see you. We went to the zoo! And saw Wonder Woman! Did you know she's a god?!"
Harry laughed "I certainly didn't, but I do now."
He looked at Eggsy again at last, and Eggsy smiled. All the tension seemed to bleed out of him at once at that and he offered a tentative smile back.
"Well, I'm glad you two have had such a wonderful day," he addressed Daisy again "but I think your mother will be quite upset if she comes back to find you still awake."
Daisy pouted, but it broke on a yawn. "Only if you tell me a story," she bargained.
"Oh, of course. What kind of world would this be if little girls didn't get stories before bed?"
What kind of world indeed, Eggsy agreed.
Later, after he apologized to his mum sheepishly for maybe letting Daisy have more ice cream over the day than real food and thoroughly ruining her sleep schedule, and hugged her a little too long before she left, Harry came up behind him and drew him back against his chest, kissed up his neck, and turned his chin so he could devour Eggsy's lips. Eggsy let it hold him together.
He did try to talk to him once, but it went like this:
"Harry."
"Yes, my love?"
"...never mind."
He clung to awareness until four in the morning, when the world suddenly lurched and he passed out.
When he woke up in the empty version of his and Harry's house, he pulled out Daisy's favorite stuffed bear from the closet, its fur still permanently coarse on one side from being too close to the burning wreckage of the car, and he sobbed. They weren't pretty sobs, either, they were the kind that tore from his chest, the kind he hadn't cried since that hazy day in his memory when he was holding her hand in the fucking burn ward and the monitor went flat, half screams and half tears and all agony. If the neighbors heard him, he figured they were the spare set anyway.
He wanted to go back to sleep. He wondered if a coma would keep him there, in that perfect fantasy where Harry cooked him dinner and went to sleep beside him, and J.B. took heart medicine with his kibble, and his mum and little sister didn't burn to death in a car crash coming home from vacation.
After a while he realized he'd stopped. He was staring at the wall, somewhere in the ballpark of where his glasses were flashing on the nightstand. With strength he pulled from hours before, from sitting at home with Daisy and Harry and J.B., he stood. He cleaned up, got changed, and checked the glasses.
New mission in Iceland.
Eggsy half expected to wake up In Reykjavík with glasses that wouldn't function and have to slum it until he fell asleep. He half expected to wake up in Reykjavík with glasses that did function and snap.
He woke up in the morning alone on Harry's red sheets.
So, he thought, this was going to keep happening.
He'd lived so long with the hollows in his heart where his loved ones used to be that he'd hardly noticed when his heart shrank around them, or so it must have, since as he wandered around the house alone his chest felt tight from trying to fit them all back in.
He needed to talk to someone. Harry alive wasn't as easy to bare his heart to as Harry dead seemed to be, but before he thought much of it his feet had taken him to the graveyard again, twice in nearly as many days.
He wandered to the normal spot and let himself feel disoriented at the glorious sight of three missing headstones. He dared to dream that there was a fourth empty grave far off on other posh land, too.
There was one grave left that he could visit there, though, old and mossy as it was. Harry had made sure Lee was well taken care of, having him buried in such a nice place.
"Hey dad," he said, and settled down in the grass.
When he got the chance, Eggsy wondered how the hell it all worked. His Kingsman glasses had come with him the first time, and he'd had to get them replaced after he forgot them on the nightstand only to have them stay behind. He woke up in his normal world almost always exactly where he went to sleep, but in the other one, the better one, half the time he'd been thrown to the couch or woke up later than he had since secondary school or something of the sort. Sometime during the second week he connected that he always woke up alone, and the fact that he also went to sleep alone in his darker timeline might have had something to do with it.
Harry didn't seem to find anything strange about it. He always came home before the sun set, smiling at the sight of Eggsy re-appeared in his house as if it had always been their usual routine. If Eggsy thought he'd loved the man before, he'd been dead wrong. Or maybe he'd been right, but the fact that he'd been able to go on living after Harry died was proof enough that he loved Harry a great deal more now, because every second he spent on missions in his world, where he knew there was no Harry Hart, was agony, one he only got through at the thought of sleep, and of waking in some random place to wait for his return.
It struck him as strange, how Harry just accepted that he did practically nothing all day. It certainly encouraged his theory that the place was just some sort of dream land he'd created for himself. He should probably snoop, but a part of him was still too terrified that one little push would shatter the illusion to try.
So he did the sensible thing, which was milk the fuck out of the situation for as long as he possibly could. Harry invariably came home around five in the evening, which was also weird, what with him being a spy and all, and Eggsy fell so much harder so much faster than the first time he might have gotten some sort of heart whiplash from it. His mum had apparently gone back to nursing school, and as Eggsy was more than willing to help out she dropped Daisy off or came to dinner a few times a week. It was one of those times when Daisy had been left in his care that he accidentally stumbled over the case-breaking clue.
