Chapter Text
They sat together in companionable quiet for a few moments. The sun played with the spoon in Eggsy’s cup and he tilted it back and forth to create a little rainbow against the wall. It made him smile.
Harry leaned back in his chair, arms crossed lightly in front of his chest. He looked Eggsy over quietly, assessing him. Maybe debating internally if he should go on further. “Once you’ve got your training complete, are fit and agile and got a few successful missions under your belt, that’s the most dangerous time for an agent. You get cocky, and the younger you are, the easier it is to mistake yourself to be infallible,” he finally said. “When you’re young, you believe yourself invincible and indestructible. Like nothing can touch you. The moment you have to come face to face with reality, realize that you can be pulled apart, is the hardest fall you will take in your life. Once you survive that, things get … well.” Harry cocked his head to the left, thinking. “Not easier, that would be a lie. More like… Less excruciating, maybe.” He gave a lightning-quick smile. “Still painful, but not quite as intolerable. After that, you learn to look at assignments differently. The right way. And you learn to say ‘no’ to a mission when you realize that your stakes are too high in the game you’ll be playing.”
That surprised Eggsy. “You can… well, you were able to actually deny a mission? Just because you didn’t like it?”
“Of course. It would do no-one any good if you fail and things turn arse over teakettle. Better be up-front about your misgivings and walk out as long as you can. And don’t get me wrong – I’m talking from a position of over thirty years under my belt, lad. These words of wisdom didn’t come to me in my sleep, or someone told me and I’m merely repeating. I know what I’m talking about and I also know that, had you not decided to become a queen’s man,” he winked and Eggsy blushed, because goddammit, he would be a prince in the near future! “and instead stayed on as Gawain, you would have had to learn all of this for yourself. Because no matter what I’m telling you and no matter how much you might believe me – or not – there is absolutely nothing that will prepare you for the moment your world rips apart.”
Eggsy snorted softly. He was quite sure that he had a pretty good grasp on how that felt now, after seeing Harry be shot in the head, his best mate blown up, his dog killed and his Tilde nearly dying from some stupid virus in some stupid drugs. When he looked up to say as much, he saw Harry nodding at him and there was a chill moment when Eggsy realized that these thoughts were exactly what Harry had been talking about. That even with all his experiences, he still didn’t know shit.
He swallowed hard. “Maybe it’s not so bad that I’m quitting active duty, then,” he muttered.
“No.” Harry nodded kindly. “I think not. I still believe you would have been one of the best, but your stakes are too high as they are right now.”
Too much to lose, Eggsy realized. I’ve got too much to lose.
An unexpected thought crossed his mind. “What … what about Dad, then?” He’d had a family, after all. A son, a wife. A life outside of Kingsman. “Wouldn’t his stakes have been quite high, too?”
“Ah.” Harry moved his plate slightly forward to the middle of the table. “I can’t speak to his reasons for taking that … that last assignment. We were not that close that I knew what made him say yes when asked, I’m sorry to say. I know he usually chose his assignments abroad, away from London and his family, because it made it harder for anyone to draw a connection. He was always careful. And he was brilliant as back-up in anything that needed physical interaction.” His smile was small and secret, like he remembered something about Eggsy’s father that was amusing. Eggsy ached to have known his Dad better and he hung on every syllable. “I … I made a mistake. I had overlooked – I didn’t pay enough attention when we got our man. Lee did. He spotted the detonator and he died to protect the others. Me. Everyone in the room.” He swallowed hard. “A moment of inattention from my side, a lapse of judgement. A fucking stupid mistake!” His hand hit the table, not even that hard, but Eggsy jumped and Bingley, who had been dozing on his little kitchen-cushion, jumped up to bark at the invisible threat.
Hearing Harry curse was always a shocking experience. It was a bit like meeting your school-teacher in the sauna, or seeing them in a swinger-club – yes, that had happened. No, don’t ask – and for a moment, Eggsy didn’t know where to look until he felt that Harry had pulled himself back together. It had been a strange learning-experience that the cool, polite, polished, posh English Gentleman that Harry seemed to be was mostly veneer and that underneath was a person with just as many issues as one would expect in his line of work.
It was a damn fine veneer, though, so every moment Eggsy was reminded that it was just window-dressing came as a surprise.
“Sorry, Bingley.” Harry had picked up the dog and was scratching his fur, which caused the terrier to wriggle and squirm and make happy noises.
“Oi, why don’t I get scratches, eh? Nearly wet my pants here, too.” It was just a joke but before Eggsy had finished the sentence, Harry had shot forward and scruffled his hair. Eggsy tried to retaliate but however much domestic-Harry might look like a Dad, he moved fast.
After some immature giggling – Eggsy – and amused, smug chuckles – Harry – they cleared the table and put the plates in the dishwasher, ‘accidentally’ dropped some scrabs that the dog just accidentally found and guzzled up. With food and tea in his belly and no sign of a hangover threatening, it was the perfect time to go back home now to Tilde and have a nice, relaxed day together.
Except Eggsy realized that he didn’t want to.
Since he’d moved out of this house, his temporary home after his own had been destroyed, Eggsy hadn’t had much alone-time with his friend and he realized that he missed it. Back then, he’d been tense and worried – about Harry, about Tilde, about Roxy – and trying hard to come to grips with the death of Brandon and the loss of JB and the general terror of … well, everything, basically. Harry had been… well, pretty out of it on many occasions and had started painting the walls with butterflies, which had Eggsy even more worried. So, their time in the house together had felt more like being roommates in a mental institution and not at all like this. Today was too good an opportunity to pass up, so he dropped onto the couch – the good one, which had been Harry’s quarter for the night but of course there was no sign of it – and put his bare feet on the table just to smirk at Harry and wriggled his toes when he frowned disapprovingly.
“What about Tilde? Isn’t she going to be worried?”
“Naw. I told her I’ll be home late today anyway. She’s okay with it.” Probably not as such, but had hinted that he might not be home too soon and she said she’s happy that he’s having some – what did she call it? ‘Harry and son bonding-time’. She’d understand. Eggsy picked up the newspaper and began leafing through it to give his hands something to do. “I’m not mad about Dad, by the way.”, he said while carefully not looking at Harry. “I mean, of course as a kid I used to always think how unfair it is that he’s gone but … he wasn’t part of my life for a long time. And even if it was in some way your mistake that caused his death, it was his decision to get in the way. Nobody forced him to do it. He decided it was worth it, and … I can’t be mad about it at you for that.” He only looked up when he heard the sounds of Harry slumping into his own comfortable armchair and the yip and shuffle when Bingley took his rightful place next to him between arm-rest and Harry’s legs.
“Sometimes, your maturity astounds me,” Harry said when their eyes met. There was so much in the way he said it and the way he looked at him that it made Eggsy uncomfortable and he shifted slightly, trying to make light of it to not have it be so overwhelming.
“Wow, you really think I’m mature?”
Harry went with it. “I didn’t say that. I mentioned that sometimes, you show surprising amounts of maturity, which no-one who knows you would expect,” he shot back, quick and sharp enough to sting if it were meant to be a true barb.
Eggsy knew it wasn’t.
“So,” he said after a while of watching Harry smile softly at his dog. “High stakes. If Kingsman hadn’t been destroyed as it had been, would … would there have been a course or something to learn how to get information? Or would we just have been thrown into the cold water, so to speak?”
Without looking up, Harry answered, no hesitation. “Used to be the cold water. Ever since Merlin took over training-regimen, some form of preparation had been in place, though, so you would have benefitted quite a lot from that. Before, mostly before my time, there had been a few instances where agents got a bit too happy with the use of a knife.” He frowned as he thought back. “Apart from the ethical dilemma, it created quite a few problems and a change in policy was necessary. It had never been encouraged, but people had turned a blind eye. That stopped.”
Eggsy had peaked up, quite interested in this part of history for the Kingsman agency. He wondered who the knife-happy agents had been, who had brought forth the policy-change and was just about to ask when Harry continued. “Even without the problems it created for our agency, causing pain is just not a useful tool to extract information. There are quite a few scientific papers about the subject, and they all say that torture. Doesn’t. Work.”
Maybe it was Hollywood’s fault, but Eggsy didn’t think it was that definitive. “Like… ever? Because I’m pretty sure that with the right kind of pain we would definitely tell the truth.”
“Do you believe in magic?”
What? Eggsy blinked, trying to keep up with that segue way. “Huh?”
“Magic. Not in magic tricks with mirrors and smoke, but real magic. Do you believe that someone can wave a wand and turn you into a frog? That kind of magic.”
“Uh… No?” Eggsy thought some more. “No, definitely not. I like the idea of it but I don’t think it’s real. What’s that - ”
“What about the Devil. Not evil – of course that exists. In all of us. But I mean the figure, person if you will, of the Devil. With horns and a tail and all that. Do you think it exists?”
Eggsy shook his head.
“And yet, there’s hundreds of history documents about confessions from witches and sorcerers who claim they cast spells and procreated with the Devil and rode broomsticks at night. If magic isn’t real, they lied in their confessions. If torture would get you the truth, there would have been no witches executed and killed.”
“Huh.” That was actually a very good point. “But the Inquisition probably didn’t believe them when they denied doing magic.”
“Exactly! So why cause someone considerable pain when you are not going to believe what they’re saying anyway? Just spare the pain and execute them. You were going to do it anyway, so the only reason to cause pain was to cause pain.”
“Alright.” Eggsy nodded. “Yeah, I see your point. Let me play Devil’s Advocate here and say that the Inquisition wasn’t really in it for information. They already knew what outcome they wanted and just ensured that they got it. If you … I don’t know, had to find a bomb that’s going to blow up in ten hours, you don’t have any preconceived notions of where it is. So that’s not the same. In that case, wouldn’t causing pain work to get the location of the bomb faster than just talking?”
Harry shook his head. “Let’s run your scenario. You got the person who knows where the bomb is. They’re not saying where. So you beat him up a little bit until he is hurting so much that he tells you a place. You run out and check. What if he lied?”
“… Well, you’d need to make sure he can’t lie.”
“How?”
It felt a little bit like school, when they had played ‘debate’-teams for their Politics-class. “Well, maybe not beat up but… Pull out the fingernails.” That sounded nasty. Eggsy noticed that he’d curled up his hand and purposefully straightened it out again. “Or… threaten their family?”
Harry’s eyebrows shot upwards. “Alright, let’s go there. Substitutional Torture. Nasty concept. But again – what if he lies?”
“He can’t!”
“Yes, he can. That’s the thing you need to understand, Eggsy – Lying is always an option! You’re assuming the person you want information from will automatically tell you the truth under pressure. But that is not guaranteed. For one, they’d have to believe you will actually harm them. Or that we’d harm someone innocent, which is pretty hard to believe if we’re the supposed ‘good guys’. If you won’t do it, you have absolutely no leverage.”
Even though Eggsy had been the one to bring that up, he was now feeling slightly sick at the pictures he was creating in his head. If someone had him and Tilde and were threatening to harm her… “That’s a high risk to take, though, when there’s someone you love at stake,” he argued. “You’d have to be a very callous person to lie in that situation.”
Shifting, Harry put his elbow on the arm-rest and scratched his chin, not leaving Eggsy out of his sight. “Well, if we’re still talking about our hypothetical bomber, what guarantee do we have that he’s not? And even if isn’t and cares deeply, it’s still not a certainty he’ll tell the truth. Because if we kill the person, we destroyed our leverage and any theoretical goodwill you had left. There’s nothing keeping him now from trying to escape and kill you. It’s the same situation you would have been in if you only had him in your grasp.”
“Maybe not kill the other person, then? Just… hurt them?”
“Sure.” Harry leaned back but his gaze remained fixed. It was slightly eery. “It is very effective if your aim is causing your target pain without disabling them physically, I’ll give you that. Depending on the bonds they have, I’d say it works a lot better even than doing it to the target. But let’s put it into our scenario. Let’s take some ruthless government agency that is willing to torture innocent bystanders to get the hypothetical bomber to give up.”
Eggsy nodded. It might feel slightly uncomfortable to talk about torturing people like this but it was captivating. It gave him an interesting, somehow unexpected view of Harry Hart’s mind and he was thrilled to learn more.
“You’re forgetting that there’s a time-issue,” Harry said. “You only have limited time to find the bomb, or it will blow up. The bomber only has to hold until it does. Now let’s assume they hurt his wife. He might just say the first reasonable-sounding location that comes to his mind to make you stop. You run out and look for the bomb – it’s not there. You wasted a lot of time with this. You have also wasted time by hurting him or the wife.” There was a grim smile on his face which made Harry look slightly like a crocodile. “Now you have even less time to prevent the explosion. Let’s say you wasted five of the original ten hours. What now?” He raised his eyebrows in expectation, and Eggsy thought about it.
They’d have to go back to the person and … “Do it again?”
“Another round of torture? And what will give you the guarantee that it’ll be the truth this time? Depending on the person in front of you, it’s almost certain that it will be a lie. So now you’ve already given up your position. Now he is the one in power because he knows how far you’ll go and how desperate you are. He holds all the strings. He only needs to hold on for the next five hours and it will end for them – one way or the other. It won’t matter what pain you cause in the meantime, since your objective is to find the bomb and you won’t if they lie over and over and over. You also won’t if you kill them. And you’ll have to check every time, run after every lie. Waste time and resources. You’ve lost the game and if you try a different tactic now, your credibility is zero. Why would he believe that you’ll not be hurting them even further? He has no reason to do so, and you’re not closer to finding that bomb than you were in the beginning.”
Eggsy thought about the scenario. Harry had a point, he had to admit, but still… “So what would be your suggestion? Asking them politely?”
“Why not? It’s like a hostage-negotiation. The bomb is the hostage and you need to get it alive. You wouldn’t go in and threaten the hostage-taker with violence, would you?”
Another excellent point. “So you’d try to get them to just give up?”
“Oh, no. Well – that would of course be the ideal solution, but it isn’t the goal to reach in this scenario. You don’t need their willing surrender – you just need the location of the bomb. A really good interrogator knows how to work the target and there is a team behind them who research everything the target says. It appears as if they’re just making polite conversation, or maybe even just talking to themselves. But every tick of the eye, every twitch of the mouth or nervous glance can be a hint. It’s a puzzle which sets itself together during the interrogation. It’s … a little like trying to find an exit of a pitch-black room, starting from the exact middle. You stumble around blindly until you find a wall and then let it guide you along to find the door. Same thing applies here, only verbally. You can be polite, drink tea. Not even break a sweat. And you’re not wasting valuable time in which the target can’t talk because he’s screaming too much to make any sense.”
There was a darkness in his tone that suggested to Eggsy that Harry wasn’t talking purely academical here. For a split-second, he contemplated asking but thought better of it. It didn’t feel like an invitation to pry. On top of that, maybe Eggsy also didn’t want to know too much. Something else caught his attention and he frowned, remembering snippets of questions from the night before. “You did that yesterday right?”
Harry nodded, rubbing his shoulders and neck as if he wanted to loosen the muscles. “On a minor scale, yes. I’m by no means an expert in this area. I’m good, yes, but not an expert. The ones who are, they are … like magicians. Not Hogwarts-wizards, but the ones who pretend to read your mind when in reality, they just cold-read your reactions to anything they say. If you have someone like that in the room with your potential bomber, you get information much quicker and a lot more reliable than you would if you pulled out the thumbscrews.”
“Hm.” Eggsy thought about that and tried to fit it into what he had believed before. Admittedly, his ‘knowledge’ was mostly from the telly and so it wasn’t such a wide leap to understand that they might not be telling the truth. “Then why do they always show the hammer-fisted investigators on screen?”
Sniffing, Harry shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it makes for better television? Or maybe because they cater to a US market, and the majority over there believes it to work?” He shook his head again. “Truly, I don’t know.”
Eggsy turned away to watch his toes wriggle, still perched on the coffee-table. He wondered how someone would be trained in such ways. How Merlin and his team had set up lessons for that. Would it have been like role-play? One of them the ‘target’ and one the ‘interrogator’? That… sounded almost like fun, and he smiled it the thought of sitting in a room with Roxy, playing verbal high-stakes chess.