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Chapter Text

“No seriously,” Eggsy said as he wiped the tears from his eyes. “Seriously, Merlin – how did you get the information?” They’d been halfway under the table for two hours now, drinking and laughing and crying. Reminiscing about lost friends and lost colleagues, lives gone and lives going on despite the odds. It was a celebration as much as a wake, and Eggsy was relishing the stories he got to hear.

He hadn’t met Roxy’s sister, or the men and women Merlin and Harry were mourning and he was lucky enough that he’d only lost his dog and one of his mates.

Lucky. Right.

He quickly took another drink, well aware that either Roxy or Harry would pick up on his changed mood in seconds if he lingered on the thoughts of Brendon.

“The Art of Interrogation. But I didn’t,” Merlin chuckled. “Galahad did.”

Now, Eggsy was intrigued. “Is that so?” He looked at Harry, seemingly sober but probably slightly buzzed – or completely shit-faced but hiding it too well for Eggsy to see. “You’re also an expert introgator?” He might be a bit buzzed himself. “Interrerogator. Dammit.” Or possibly shit-faced. “You know. Asking questions.”

Roxy giggled against his shoulder. “What do you do?” she asked Harry, “Seduce them with your impreccable shuits and dreamy bedroom-eyes?”

Harry raised his glass and toasted towards her. He looked a little pleased, a little uncomfortable and also a little astonished and quite a lot smug. She’d be flushing bright red if she were sober, Eggsy knew, but everything was mellow and quiet and everyone felt free and easy.

Well. Maybe not Harry, but it was hard to tell. He took a sip from the whiskey – Irish Malt – and smiled. “I just ask them questions,” he said, smiling. “If they don’t want to answer them, I ask different ones. So far, my seduction-skills have not been tested in that particular area.” He gave a shit-eating grin and smirked at her, then put the glass down. “So Eggsy, why didn’t you bring your fiancé?”

“She had some function or other, couldn’t skip. She’d have liked to come, though.”

“Too bad. Are her parents with her?”

“No. She can usually take those things alone. I … I didn’t want to not come here,” he admitted, trying to see the bottom of his glass. “So, I let her go alone. She said she understands.”

Which was probably the worst part.

“And who’s watching Jibbit?”

“Staff. He’s also capable of being alone for a few hours. Not like your little mutt,” he teased, nodding towards the sleeping ball of terrier on the bench next to Harry, cushioned on nothing less than Harry’s thousand-pound suit-jacket. “He’s really grown a lot. How old is he now?”

Harry glanced down and something softened in him that rarely did in pure human company. “Nearly a year. And he can stay alone.” There was an emptiness after he said it that somehow filled itself. But I don’t want to be.

It made Eggsy think of JB and how his decision to leave him in London when he went to Sweden led to both him and Brandon being blown up. He swallowed hard and waved the waitress to get another pint.

“I’ve always wondered why you chose a pug,” Harry mused and Roxy giggled into Eggsy’s shoulder so hard she left a wet spot.

“Tell him! Or better, lemme tell him!”

“You’re sloshed, Rox,” he snickered back and she nodded earnestly, staring up at him with eyes blown wide by the darkness and the alcohol.

“Sho shlossed. Shloshed. S l o s ht.” Her composure fell apart again as she giggled once more. “Totally shit-fashed.”

“I think we better get you something to eat, Ms Morton,” Merlin said, most sober of all of them, and called the waitress for a plate of chips. His blood was probably 100% whiskey anyway, Eggsy thought. Not even Tilde could drink him under the table.

He wished she were here. The two of them hadn’t had a night like this in forever, just friends giggling and drinking and having fun. Not since… since that night. Eggsy took another long swallow from his glass.

“I wonder,” Harry said absently, “if we shouldn’t have also invited Jamal and Liam. I didn’t think of it, though. An oversight – do you think they would come if we ask?”

Eggsy snapped back into the presence and took in the room they were in. It was a dark corner in a small pub, mostly underground with bad lighting and old wooden barrels as a substitute for tables, benches and candles and a lot of students and general university-folk. Roxy’s choice, and not even Harry had complained or hinted disapproval. They were in an alcove in the back, easily defensible position with a good access to the backdoor – Merlin’s decision, Eggsy recalled. For perfect privacy, they’d set up the little Silent Bubble that ensured no listener would be able to understand them if they weren’t within its one-and-a-half-meter radius. Roxy was wearing jeans and a sweater, Merlin his plaid blazer over a slightly opened shirt and Eggsy himself wore his track-trousers and a jeans jacket. Of course, Harry was the most dressed-up but even he looked relaxed in his white shirt and blue trousers. He didn’t wear a tie and looked almost casual and if you took all of them together, they would probably appear to be a study-group or maybe a casual faculty-meeting.

Liam and Jamal would look and feel like the only ones who didn’t get the memo about the costume-party being cancelled, coming to work in clown-makeup and huge, lumpy shoes.

“They’d feel so wrong among us,” Eggsy dismissed. “And we also wouldn’t really be able to talk, could we?”

“We could make adjustments,” Harry suggested and Eggsy felt warm from the offer. Still…

“Well, honestly… I might have a bit of a pro’lem with that. S’… ‘s not that I don’t like being with them, you know? But it’s… it’s hard, not … not telling them the whole truth.” It was hard enough lying to them on an ordinary day, when it was just ‘I can’t believe your house blew up, mate!’. But having to lie to them while quietly toasting to lost friends… While being responsible for Brandon’s death… “And it’s like… it’s like… lying is being not a good mate, y’know? Being a shitty friend, when I’m…” He choked and tried to hide it behind the pint.

There was a small change in the muscles on Harry’s mouth, something that made him suddenly look so much sadder and sympathetic. “When you’re the reason one of them is dead?”

This time, there was no hiding it, as his eyes suddenly welled up and his throat tightened close to suffocation. Eggsy wanted to speak but all he could do was nod.

“Tell me about him,” was all Harry said and with a little whimper, Eggsy told him all. How he grew up with Brandon practically living in his house. How they lived next to each other ever since his Dad had died and how many times he’d gotten Eggsy out of a bind. And how many binds Eggsy’d been in because of him in the first place. The time they broke their arms together because they’d seen a buddy-movie and had been convinced being tied together would make them even better friends until Brandon had stumbled over a small barrier and taken Eggsy down with him.

How they’d been thick as thieves until Eggsy had gone to the military and how easy it had been to pick up their friendship when he’d come back. He talked about the gifts Brandon always brought home to Eggsy’s Mum and Daisy and he talked and he talked until his voice was hoarse and his eyes burned from having spilled all their liquid.

Eggsy felt like an open wound when they left the bar and called a cab and he didn’t even put up any opposition when Harry said he’d take him home with him to sleep on the couch. “You won’t be happy when you wake up,” he said as he carefully manoeuvred Eggsy into the back of the cab and slid in next to him.

He didn’t hear him tell the cabby the address and he must have passed out because next he knew, he was being dumped onto the bed in Harry’s bedroom.

“Not the couch,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling while he felt Harry undo his laces and pull off his shoes. “How’d ya get me in here?” He sniggered as the innuendo hit him and let Harry pull off the socks before he somehow got it together enough to get his shirt undone and off his shoulders himself.

“Fireman’s carry,” Harry said and went into the bathroom to bring him a tall glass of water. He held it out to him and stared him down disapprovingly until Eggsy had emptied it. “If you throw up in my bed, you’ll buy me a new mattress. The bathroom is right there” he pointed, which duh – Eggsy knew where Harry’s bathroom was! “and there’s a bucket right here.” He kicked something and it made bucket-noises so Eggsy grunted. Nodding didn’t seem like a good idea. “Right.” Harry filled up the glass again and put it on the nightstand, then turned and left but stopped at the door. “Whatever state you wake up in tomorrow – don’t sneak up on me.”

With that he left and it wasn’t long until Eggsy slipped into blissful oblivion.

Chapter Text

The next morning came bright and sunny. Even with the blinds down, Eggsy could feel the sun tickle his face and he wished he could stay in bed all day. He felt tired and warm and comfortable, a slight headache making itself noticed as he turned his head to see if Tilde was awake as well.

No Tilde.

Not his bed.

“Shit,” he muttered and tried to sort the images he was seeing into something familiar. It didn’t take long to get it, since the huge painted butterfly on the wall opposite the bed was a pretty solid clue. It was one of those migrating ones, with the orange wings and the black parts. Monarch.

He giggled. Of course, Harry would have a King’s butterfly on his bedroom-wall.

Carefully, Eggsy turned his head and spotted the water on the bedside-table, next to a pack of aspirin. He swallowed one and drunk the water, grateful for the thoughtfulness, then sunk back into the cushions.

How the hell had he come to end up in Harry’s bed? He obviously had slept in it alone, so Harry was probably on his couch. That was … pretty nice. Nicer than Eggsy would think was appropriate, since it would have been fine if Eggsy had ended up on the couch.

Had something happened? Carefully, he moved all his limbs. Nope – all in good shape. No injuries whatsoever. So why was he in the bed?

Carefully, he went over the events of the night. The laughter, the jokes. The beer. And the whiskey-competition. And the beer. Shit, Roxy had flirted with Harry – she’d be mortified when she woke up!

Eggsy rubbed his eyes. They felt gritty and rough, as if he’d been crying. Had he been crying? Something…

He suddenly recalled the feel of the table under his hands and how it had smelled when he’d buried his head on his forearms. How he’d gotten pulled in by Roxy as she shushed him and how she had been too unsteady herself to hold his sobbing body and handed him over to Harry.

He remembered crying into Harry’s shoulder in bitter, bitter tears – harder than he could remember crying before. All the pain and misery. He remembered talking about Brandon.

He remembered telling all of them about Brandon.

’You won’t be happy when you wake up.’

“You arsehole!”

Eggsy snapped up from the bed and stumbled over his shoes, which were neatly placed beside the bed. He didn’t bother putting them on, too upset about the sneakiness that had been done to him. Barefoot, he stomped to the door and down the hallway, down the stairs towards the living-room, fuming.

“Harry! You little shit, how dare-“ he stopped when he rounded a corner and stared straight into the barrel of a gun, behind which he saw a bedraggled, bed-headed Harry clad in an undershirt and pyjama-bottoms. Some other slice of memory resurfaced from the night before. “I didn’t sneak up on you, did I?”

Blinking, Harry put the gun down. He looked a little crumpled, as if someone had forgotten to iron him out after the washing, and if it weren’t for the speed with which the gun was put in safety and away and the honestly pretty nasty-looking scar where one eye used to be, Harry would have looked like someone’s Dad after a Christmas-party.

“Sorry,” he muttered and turned away to walk back into the room, his bare feet hardly making any sound. Eggsy followed, still a bit rattled from his awakening, the hangover and the sudden adrenaline-rush of coming face-to-face with Death.

Harry had put his eye-patch on when Eggsy entered the living-room and he wondered if maybe stoic Harry Hart was possibly a little self-conscious about the scar.

He also wondered how it would have turned out if he had sneaked up on a sleeping Harry. He didn’t dare think about it too long. There was a little whistle, followed by some scratching, and Mr Bingley scrambled out from under the couch. He wagged his little tail and obviously wanted to be praised for being a Good Boy, which Harry obediently did. “Such a clever dog,” he murmured, smiling while he scratched Bingley’s chin. “Cleverest dog in the world.”

“Did you teach him to hide on command?” Originally, Eggsy had wanted to say something completely different. Something along the lines of You utter wanker! I can’t believe you did that!, but this took precedence. “That’s a great idea! Maybe I could teach Jibbit, too – he’s not much use as a guard-dog anyway.”

Eggsy loved his dog but facts were facts. He was a Pug and not a Doberman.

“I’m sure you can. It’s not hard. I fear, though, that this guy here would simply ignore the command if he thought there was a real danger. Terrier, through and through.” Harry sat down on the couch and leaned back looking up at Eggsy. Barefoot, in his pj-bottoms – were those reindeer- on the fabric? – and bare arms, sleep-tousled and without his classes, he looked vulnerable and harmless, like a teacher maybe.

He was a spy, though, so Eggsy knew that a) he was neither and b) had chosen to look like this deliberately. And possibly c) that he was prepared to take whatever Eggsy was going to dish out with his guard down.

That made his anger rise up again, although it wasn’t as bright and hot as it had been minutes ago. Harry had let him sleep in his bed, after all, and had taken really good care of him. It still was like some kind of betrayal, though, and Eggsy felt tears sting behind his eyes again even though there shouldn’t be many left after last night.

He sat down on one of the chairs. “Did you do that on purpose, yesterday? Make me cry?”

“Yes.” Harry’s eye didn’t waver. It felt like an admission of guilt, like an apology and like a promise that he’d do it again if he thought he should.

“That’s what Merlin meant, right? About being an interrogator?”

“Yes.”

“So it wasn’t about torturing?”

Harry’s eyebrows shot up, clearly honestly surprised. “It’s never about torturing. We don’t torture. I don’t torture.”

“Right. That’s not good manners, of course.”

“That’s part of it. But mostly because it doesn’t work. Inflicting pain is not a good incentive for telling the truth.”

Eggsy wanted to ask but it was a distraction to what he needed to know first. Depending on what kind of answer he would be getting now, he might ask later. Carefully, he went through the possible wordings to get what he wanted. Harry sat patiently and calmly on the couch and waited.

That in itself told quite a lot.

Harry had placed himself in a lower position deliberately. He could have remained standing. He could have sat at the table. He could roam the room and walk, or stand in the kitchen with his back to Eggsy or with his back to a wall. He’d done nothing of that sort, though.

The couch was one of those comfortable ones when you didn’t want to sit straight. Terrible though if you did want to sit straight or look dignified. The seat slightly lowered more towards the back than the front, with sagging cushions to make it even more of a hazzle to get up from it quickly. It was very obviously not the couch Harry had slept on, as it was only a two-seater and wouldn’t be able to accommodate the full length of him. It might be the dog’s couch, Eggsy realized and felt a smile threaten to break free.

Obviously, Mr Bingley would have his own couch.

The way Harry had set this scene up played a big role in how Eggsy wanted to ask his next question. Because apparently Harry knew it wasn’t quite alright to use one’s spy-skills to make a friend break down and cry, Eggsy felt less inclined to believe any malice behind it. And even though it was done deliberately, it was probably not just to show off.

So… “Why? We were all pretty tanked last night, so I know it wasn’t to prove some point. So why?”

Harry took a long, deep breath and then let it out slowly. “You haven’t talked about him. Not once.” He stopped, as if that were explanation enough.

“That’s no reason. Go on.”

“We all have our regrets, Eggsy. Some of us more than others. We lose people, lost so many, and none of us is fine. Not with the loss and also not with the feeling of responsibility.”

Eggsy crossed his arms in front of his chest, trying to keep some body-heat inside. Would it hurt Harry to heat his house a little bit? “Right. And you’re going to tell me that it’s not my fault now, correct?”

“No, of course not. You’re not a child, Eggsy. You know full well where your own accountabilities lie -“ he stopped momentarily to look straight at Eggsy “and where not. But what I mean is that your friend is just as much a casualty of our job as all the agents we lost. Just because he didn’t actively choose it, or knew about it, doesn’t mean his death is any less important. He was your friend – it sounded like your best friend, even. He died because he was doing you a favour and you have never talked about it since. You listen to me and Merlin reminisce about our friends and colleagues and you listen to Roxy talk about her sister. You smile and you laugh and you listen, but you never talk.”

Harry sat forward, elbows on his knees. “You are a part of us, Eggsy. Your friends, your family – they are a part of you. You don’t have to talk about any of it if you don’t want to, of course, but do not think that they don’t belong. That their deaths are somehow less important and your loss doesn’t have a place in our midst. I have not known him personally, and from what I hear, that is a pity. I’m sure I would have liked him. On a personal level, I want to know as much as I can about him but more importantly, I want you to be able to mourn him wherever and whenever you need to. If from now on, that will remain in private – fine. It doesn’t need to stay there, though.”

Now Eggsy leaned forward and Harry, maybe on instinct or maybe because it was just uncomfortable the way he sat – leaned backwards again. Carefully, looking down at his fingers intertwining with each other as if they had a life of their own, Eggsy thought about what Harry had said. “You could have just asked, couldn’t you?” But he grimaced. “No, yeah… you did.” He had asked, over and over. ’Are you alright, Eggsy?’ ‘Do you need to talk?’ ‘You can talk to me if you want, you know that, right?’ And Eggsy had always answered with ’No, I’m fine. Thanks, and yes, I know’

And maybe he had even believed it himself. Had believed that he was fine and that it was enough to be able to mourn Brandon when he was with Liam and Jamal and Tilde. And maybe he had thought that Brandon’s death didn’t belong in the room when he was together with the Kingsman’s Knights, that they somehow wouldn’t want to know about him.

What had Merlin said after the parachute-test? ”You need to get that chip off of your shoulder”.

Apparently, it was still there.

Eggsy sniffed. “He was on the verge of finding out about my job,” he said and chuckled at the memory. “There I was, talking with the King and Queen of Sweden, and suddenly he had those glasses on and I was seeing him fiddling with the grenade-lighter. Yelled at him to drop it.” Harry didn’t seem to move but there was a little smile in the corner of his eye now. “The King nearly chucked his spoon.” Now Eggsy smiled for real but it fell and he swallowed hard. “He still had the glasses on when the rocket struck.” There must be something in the room, he thought as he wiped at his eyes. Something he was allergic to. That, or he really needed to cry a lot more often to get rid of all that moisture in his head.

Distantly, he felt a hand on his, felt himself tugged forward and onto the couch, definitely noticed how he sagged into the cushions and how he was pulled against a warm, strong shoulder. Maybe he would feel embarrassed later about this moment but right now, it just felt good to be held while his body tried to shake itself apart. He clung to Harry and dug his fingers into the fabric of his undershirt, needing to feel him alive. “You wore the glasses in Kentucky,” he muttered over and over again. “Just like in Kentucky.”

“Shh, shh. It’s okay,” Harry whispered into his hair. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t. But it was nice that someone would lie to him like that.

Chapter Text

Through the kitchen-window, Eggsy watched the leaves on the cherry-tree outside Harry’s house. They had turned yellow-orange-red now and shone against the clear blue sky. If all one would look at was this, London seemed like a heavenly place.

“All right, tell me.” Eggsy buttered his toast.

Harry, sipping from his cup of tea and obviously watching something outside as well, looked up. “Hm?”

“How do you do this, then? Is it some special skill? Would I have learned that stuff, too?” They’d showered and dressed and Eggsy had talked to Tilde on the phone while Harry had taken Bingley out for a walk, bringing back toast and even croissants for breakfast. It was really nice, even though he would have liked some greasy bacon for the meal. ’You really don’t,’ Harry had warned and so it was Continental Breakfast for both of them this morning.

“It’s really nothing more than asking questions, Eggsy. The trick is knowing how to ask the right ones at the right time, and when to back off. It’s … like a dance. You give a little, take a little. It’s not really that hard. If you’re interested, there should be footage somewhere from many occasions. I can ask Merlin if you want.”

Eggsy nodded. “That would be great, yeah. It’s… really impressive.”

Harry chuckled slightly. “It wasn’t, really. You were quite easy.”

“Oi!”

“That’s not… You wanted to talk. And also, you were comfortable, slightly inebriated and in an emotionally unstable state. That’s the perfect set-up for getting information and the fact that you were among friends helped immensely. If on a professional setting you can create such an environment for the target, your work nearly does itself. If they trust you, it’s easier than taking candy from a child.”

That was a sobering thought. But of course, they were spies. It was their job to make people trust them, underestimate you and ultimately, trick them. So far, all Eggsy had done in his short time as a Kingsman had been hands-on fighting and shooting and saving the world. Not bad, all things considered, but clandestine had not really been on his plate. The few times it had, things had not worked out so well.

“That’s quite a lot of work, though,” he mused while he bit into the croissant. It was not as good as the ones in France but quite alright. “To set up a situation like that for complete strangers.”

“There’s short-cuts, of course. Some of the agents thought it quite crude, though, and preferred the long game. James – the Lancelot before Roxy – was particularly invested in setting things up right. He didn’t like the hands-on approach, thought it not befitting a gentleman.” He mused into his teacup for a moment. “A marvellous trickster. Pity he was such a prick.”

Eggsy nearly choked on a croissant-flake at that. He’d never heard Harry say anything negative about any of his colleagues, and certainly nothing as … blunt. “Really? How?”

Harry smiled distantly. “He liked the mind-games a little too much if you ask me. He was a great agent and a good man to have at your back, but privately, he played the same games as he did in the field. With us. I don’t mind sharing my life with people who ask – if I like them. But in his presence, it felt like being constantly under the microscope, watched and judged for everything I did and said. Not very relaxing.” He bit into his toast and scrunched his nose when he realized it had gone cold. Swiftly, the bread ended up in Mr Bingley’s snout and Harry started to toast a new slice. “An hour in his presence, even in casual settings, was enough to make me paranoid.” He gave a quick grin. “More than usual.”

For a bit, Eggsy chewed not only on the pastry but also on what he’d heard. Would it be the same now with Harry? Now that he knew how Harry could operate and sneakily get information about Eggsy’s inner thoughts and feelings, would he feel like a specimen?

No, he decided when the toast popped back up. No, Harry wasn’t like that. Eggsy had plenty of private thoughts and feelings and until last night, Harry had never pried or asked or tried to wriggle something out of him that he didn’t want to share. Usually, whenever he didn’t want to talk about something, Harry would back off. It said something about his own state of mind that last night had urged his friend to dig and despite the indignity of crying snot and tears all over their little party and even today into Harry’s sleep-shirt, Eggsy had to admit that he felt better now.

It wasn’t a mind-game with Harry. It was genuine worry and affection. He didn’t have a problem with being cracked open a little for those kinds of reasons.

“And what do you do if there’s a hurry? If you don’t like inflicting pain to get information, how else do you do it under pressure?”

Harry set down his cup and bit into the now-buttered toast. He left Eggsy waiting until he’d finished chewing – of course he did – and then started to spread some marmalade on the rest of the slice. “There’s a lot of interesting drugs that help make the person more … pliable. That’s usually enough for most people. If you’d have to get information from someone trained in interrogation-techniques, the long game would have to be the way to go anyway. Anything quick is bound to be a failure. And if you don’t have time for the long game, it’s better to side-step them and choose another target and eliminate the professional straight away before they get in your way. A quick information-grab from them will only be a waste of time and a danger to the mission.”

“Eliminate? Kill them, you mean?” Execute them, Eggsy thought. He flashed back to the moment in the hut in Colorado. The casualness with which Harry had executed Whiskey had shocked him, and maybe if they’d had a conversation like this, it wouldn’t have. Then again, Harry had only just retained his memories. No matter what talk the two would have had, Eggsy would still have suspected that Harry had simply snapped under pressure. “That’s what you meant, right?”

“Usually.” It was really bizarre to talk about executions over breakfast and Eggsy had to stop the sudden urge to giggle. His life was so weird. “But if at all possible, other means of getting them out of the way are preferable.”

“Like what?”

“Like burning their cover.” Harry answered with no hesitation. “Plastering their faces all over the internet. Making it impossible for them to hide. If that’s not an option, though, a shot in the head is a good way to eliminate them as a threat.” He gave a little smile, a hint of gentleness to prepare Eggsy for his next words. “It’s clean, quick and painless. If done right, of course.” Then he continued on with his breakfast and didn’t react at all when Eggsy swallowed hard as suddenly his own toast turned into ash and the honey on it into sticky molasses.

He hated when Harry talked about his … well, his death as casually as that. Eggsy still woke up at night with the image of the bullet coming right at him, the dream slowing it down so much that he could see it entering the lens and cracking the screen and then red and then nothing until there was just blue sky overhead and it still made him sick upon waking, made him scramble to the bathroom to throw up. He loathed that someone could be so callous about something that impacted him this much, even though Harry was admittedly the only one who was entitled to.

Harry cleared his throat but kept looking into his cup. “I don’t like inflicting unnecessary pain.”

It could have been a simple statement. Or a hidden apology. Eggsy poured himself some more tea and let the autumn-sun play across the silverware, deciding to take it as the second. “What about threats, then?”, he finally asked. “’cause Agent Tequila threatened to burn our nether regions when we first went to their compound. It was quite believable.” It hadn’t worked very well, but the threat to Harry had made them spill everything. Eggsy didn’t think Harry knew about that episode, though.

Harry waggled his head slightly. “It depends. It can help, yes, but it depends on the target. You also have to be careful with choosing the threat. If you are forced to go through with it and can’t, you lose all your credibility. And if you do go through with it… well, depending on the threat, you lose all leverage.”

Eggsy frowned. “How so?”

“Imagine someone threatened to shoot you. Once he does – you’re dead. If he doesn’t, he’s not believable anymore.”

“He could threaten to only shoot a part of me. Or cut off a finger or something.” Or threaten to shoot someone else…

“Sure. But once he does, the finger is gone. That leverage is lost and he’d have to find another one. Another finger – for a piano-player, that might be a severe threat. For a spy – maybe not so much.”

Eggsy could think of quite a few reasons to talk. Then again, would he and Merlin have talked as quickly if they hadn’t already suspected the Statesman-organization to be in their own corner? Maybe not. “It really depends on the secret one wants to keep, I guess.”

Harry nodded approvingly. “Absolutely. The name of your parents might not be enough of a secret to lose a limb over. The location of your friends and associates and the repercussions if you talk, might just be.”

Is Kingsman worth dying for? Eggsy remembered that test. The terror of the oncoming train, the helplessness and the sheer stubbornness that let him shout out his defiance. Would he have said the same if they’d threatened his Mum? Or Daisy?

“The trick is,” Harry said, as if he had been able to see right into his head, “to know what you can afford to lose beforehand. And I mean before you accept a mission. It’s not just choosing the fun-assignments. You need to know yourself and your weaknesses, know what can go wrong and what the worst-case scenario is. Believe me – dying is not the worst case.”

“Yeah,” Eggsy muttered. “I’m starting to see that.”

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.

Chapter Text

“One reason,” Harry said unexpectedly, “is probably that people are impatient.” It took a bit for Eggsy to find the thread again and where Harry was picking it back up. “It seems like a fast way to get what you want to know. Punch someone a few times until it hurts and then shake them and ask. It’s not even unlikely that they’ll give you the right answer if they’re just random people. It is, in some ways, like using drugs. You shake them out of their composure and in their confusion, their guards are lowered and they’re more likely to comply. The problems that arise come when it’s not just about minor details but complex questions. Also, the more involved and professional your counterpart is, the less likely is it that a few hard blows will give you anything. It’s always a tightrope you walk when it comes to violence.” He frowned towards his feet. “You also have to take yourself into consideration.”

“How so?”

There was a slightly pained grimace before Harry answered. “The more you use it, the easier it gets. You have to learn to de-humanize your adversaries or you go insane. But if you do it too much, you de-humanize yourself and lose your self.” He smiled, but it was slightly bitter. “It helps to have been on both sides of the equation. It keeps things in perspective.”

“Both sides?” Eggsy asked. “During training?”

Slightly startled, Harry looked up and then frowned. “Well.” He cocked his head to the right. “In some ways, yes.” He smiled. “Being around Lancelot for prolonged exposure certainly keeps you on your toes. Paranoia is a common enough trait for a spy.” He gave a quick grin. “Healthy, too.”

Eggsy had, of course, known that it wasn’t polite conversations around an interrogation room that Harry was talking about. He just couldn’t stomach the thought of the other kind of questioning when it concerned Harry – or anyone else he cared about, for that matter. The idea of someone hurting his friends… He swallowed hard to suppress a shudder.

“That right there,” Harry said quietly and waited until Eggsy met his gaze across the room before he continued, “that exact reaction is what you need to keep in mind. More than personal discomfort-“ what a polite way to say ‘being tortured’, Eggsy thought bitterly, “the thought of someone else being in pain instead of you will keep your head straight. If you ever get into a situation where torture seems to be the easiest solution, remember this feeling. Most people you come across have friends and family who care deeply for them. No matter what it is they do or have done, someone somewhere loves them as much as you love your mother and your fiancé and your friends. Imagine them having to witness what you are about to do to their loved one and then ask yourself if that is really the type of person you want to be. And it doesn’t matter if they are that type of person if roles were reversed! In that room, it’s not about who they are. It’s all and always about who you are, Eggsy.” He smiled tiredly. “In our line of work, it is essential to know yourself. Especially when you’re pretending to be someone else.”

Something heavy settled on the air in the room, weighing it down. Eggsy couldn’t have named it even with a gun to his head and he started to fiddle with the newspaper by his side to distract himself.

Had he ever known himself? Did Eggsy Unwin know who he was? Harry seemed to think he knew him and he seemed to approve, which was a big comfort. But what about himself?

A noise pulled him out of his thoughts and he looked up to watch Harry yawn and carefully dislodge himself from the sleeping, slightly snoring dog and walk into the kitchen where he could hear him rummage around and put on the kettle. “It’s not something you can learn from a book,” he said when he came back and offered Eggsy a mug of tea, exactly as he liked it. Both mugs were decorated with various butterflies. Of course. “Every day you breathe is one more day for you to get to know yourself. I find it helpful to stop and take stock now and then about what has accumulated. Like an inventory of your own character. And it helps when you have to put yourself together again after something or someone unmade you.”

The casual way he said ‘unmade’ sent shivers up and down Eggsy’s spine and he grasped the mug to let the heat burn into his fingertips and remind him of where they were. “Like … like when we made you come back in Kentucky?” Was that really his voice? It sounded small and too high-pitched to be his. He glanced up and found Harry absently studying his mug, turning it this way and to look at the butterflies. “Did we make a mistake? Should we have let you stay there to keep chasing insects?” He didn’t want to hear the answer. But he needed to know. “I… I’ve never asked.”

Without looking up from the mug, Harry smiled tiredly. “I wish I could give you an answer to that. I don’t know. I can’t say I was … truly happy with getting myself back. I wasn’t unhappy. But since I don’t know what would have happened if some of memory found its way to the surface, I can’t say for certain if I would have been safe to be let outside. And honestly – I don’t think I’d have been content staying inside for much longer.” He grimaced. “It was getting quite dull.” Eggsy felt his world crack a little bit. The idea that he and Merlin had simply been selfish, that by forcing Harry Hart back into the Butterfly Guy they’d made their friend unhappy pained him. He felt small and ugly but when he looked up, there was only kindness from Harry’s smile. “What’s done is done anyway, and I don’t regret coming back here despite all that happened.” He gave Eggsy a pointed look. “I won’t ever regret being able to see you happily married and get the chance to maybe forge a few more friendships as long as I still can.” Harry winked. “But yes, to answer the other question. Knowing what traits of myself I have in stock did help with finding myself again after” he tapped his head at the side where the bullet had entered. He didn’t say anything further and instead reached for the crossword-page of the paper in that awkward, lanky way one did when one was trying not to wake a sleeping dog.

The silence in the room was growing, creating a pressure on Eggsy that he couldn’t shake off. It was suffocating, and he didn’t know if he should move, leave, stay… There was a question that was digging its way out of him, onto the tip of his tongue and behind his palate and stuck behind his teeth so he had to clench them hard to not just burst out with it. Luckily, it didn’t take long until Harry broke with a sigh. “Just ask, lad. I’m old enough to tell you if you overstepped.”

“Right, of course.” Still, Eggsy hesitated until with deliberate casualness, Harry put the paper away and raised his eyebrows in expectant invitation. “What’s it like? Being … not yourself?”

“Oof.” Harry let his head drop into his hand, scratching his hairline. “It wasn’t bad. Felt alright. A bit like a holiday, I suppose. In hindsight, not unlike putting on a different persona for a mission, except without the benefit of knowing it was all a ploy. Now for your real question-“ his smile was friendly but distant, shut down. “about what it’s like to be unmade… Let’s just not, alright?”

Swallowing, Eggsy nodded. He couldn’t very well demand an answer to that, could he? It was very personal and especially when Harry had been so forthcoming with everything else, it was not fair to ask for more than he was willing to give.

There was just one thing that was nigging at him, but it would have to wait. Maybe another time.

“Oh for God’s sake – what is it?” Eggsy twitched when Harry practically threw his pen down onto the side-table and noisily folded the crossword.

“What? I didn’t say anything, did I?” He hadn’t, had he? Eggsy had sat on the couch and watched his toes and thought about … well, thought about The Thing and tried to come to a conclusion himself. He’d not been successful so far, but he hadn’t done anything, certainly not said anything!

“No, but your sighs and moping are very hard to ignore.” Harry softened a little when he looked at Eggsy closer. “Out with it, lad. Let’s hear it before it eats you alive.”

Now that he was allowed, Eggsy found his brain unable to word it properly. He tried to loosen his tongue with some liquid, but the tea had gone bitter and only made it worse. He grimaced and just went for it. “Can… can you teach me? I mean, can you teach me how not to answer questions? I…” He didn’t dare look up. “I mean, I’ll be having some secrets in my future that I don’t want to get out, with me being Tilde’s husband. On top of the ones I already have. If it’s so easy to make me spill the beans… can you teach me how to not?” He bit his lip to stop the question to go further, to hold that last bit in which he feared would be answered with a very straight ‘no’ and possibly a kick out the door.

Carefully, he peeked at Harry from underneath his eyelids, trying to observe without being obvious about it. It probably wasn’t working, or Harry just couldn’t stop staring at him for other reasons. With a long exhale through his nose, Harry moved to get the dog off his chair. Bingley yawned, scratched himself and then went over to his couch, jumped up, circled there and lay down in the middle with a slightly annoyed but overall content huff. Harry, on the other hand, leaned forward.

“What is this about? The truth, Gary.”

Eggsy shifted. Harry never called him Gary. “I … When I… When I started the Program, I felt weird, right? Like I didn’t belong. But the more we went at things, the more I started to like it and love it. I wanted to be an agent! Just because of that stupid dog-test…” he stopped, re-assessed, started again. “Anyway. I wanted that. And then … everything happened and you died and I saved the world and met Tilde and everything was amazing … until, you know.”

“You came back down and crashed?”

“Yeah. That. And then the next thing happened and you’re not dead and Brandon is and Tilde nearly died and we,” he swallowed hard, “we put Agent Whiskey through a meat-grinder,” another swallow, because that sight was only barely tolerable with a significant amount of adrenalin in the system, “and… I feel…”

He felt his eyes burn and swiped at them with the back of his hand. It only made things worse and Eggsy sniffed, then looked up as he felt a weight settle on the couch by his side. Without looking at him, Harry leaned against the backrest, not quite offering contact but opening up the possibility. His body-heat mingled with Eggsy’s own and even though it was just that, it made him feel … warm inside. Less alone. “Not safe anymore?”, Harry asked while taking the newspaper Eggsy had discarded. That paper was getting a lot of wear and tear, between the two of them. “Unsure of yourself?” Eggsy nodded. “Hypervigilant, trying to keep everyone in sight?” One more nod. “I know this won’t help at all, but that’s fairly normal.” Eggsy shot him a glance. Harry was still pretend-reading about fishing rights in the English Channel. “I would suggest you find someone on a professional level to talk to.”

Oh. “Of course,” he whispered, feeling stupid. This was obviously none of Harry’s business and he shouldn’t have hoped for more than a friendly word and breakfast. He shouldn’t have even been hoping for that much, truly, especially since he very well knew that Harry, despite looking like the coolest, toughest person in the world, was just as human as he was and was probably dealing with his own issues and – he startled terribly when there was suddenly pressure against his arm.

“Eggsy, look at me.” He did. Technically, at least: his eyes were in the general direction of Harry’s face. “Look at me.” This time, Eggsy complied. “If you want, I’ll talk to Merlin to see if he can dig up some training-system for TQE – Tactical Question Evasions. He’s bound to have miles of footage from Lancelot alone, and to be quite blunt – it’s easier to learn from watching first and trying to find your own path through a tricky conversation than throwing you into it unprepared. You might not think so now, but you are quite good at this already.” Harry smiled and twitched his head slightly to the side. “When you’re not drunk off your arse in a pub with friends.” Eggsy chuckled ruefully, but it made him feel a tiny bit lighter. “Once you feel like you’re getting the hang of it, we can do some mental sparring, if you still have the urge. The current Agent Lancelot is invited as well,” Harry added with a wink. “As for what you are very carefully not saying.” The voice changed tone, went from slightly joking to more serious and it made Eggsy sit up straight. Harry’s eye took him in, head to toe, slightly like he’d done at their first meeting but with less judgement and more … worry? “I know you are smart enough to understand that you are very dear to me. Yes?” Eggsy nodded. “And that I would go to great lengths to make certain you’re fine.”

More nodding. Eggsy hadn’t really known-known but suspected that the feelings of protectiveness ran both ways in their relationship. “Yes. And I –“ But Harry raised his right index-finger to stop him from voicing his gratefulness and Eggsy shut up at once.

“Then please don’t misunderstand me in this when I say that I will not be teaching you anything else on that subject-matter. It is not something to be mucked around with and play-pretend. For one thing, it would be pretending and can therefor never be effective because you know it won’t be real. But more importantly, as I said before: It is about who I am. And I am not willing to become someone who would willingly hurt you, or threaten your loved ones.” Harry swallowed hard and Eggsy, now that he was paying attention, could see that he was putting him through a lot more emotional turmoil than he’d realized. A whole lot more than he would have wanted. “Not even when it’s not real. In fact, I’ll do whatever it takes to prevent you ending up in such a situation and anything – everything – to get you out if that fails, but the other thing you’re asking me - I can’t be that person. Never. Is that understood?”

Hardly daring to breathe, Eggsy nodded stiffly. “Understood.” He bit his lip and blinked, only then noticing that his tears had started falling. Again. “I’m sorry,”

Harry sagged and nearly melted into the couch while he tried to suppress another yawn. “Me, too.”

“I… I shouldn’t… I’m really sorry. I’m just all over the place. One minute I’m happy, next – utterly miserable.”

“I wasn’t joking when I suggested professional help, you know. I’m sure the future Queen of Sweden would be able to name a few potential therapists? I wish I could offer you ours, but it looks like a lot of them are dead and the rest scattered, dealing with personal things right now.”

Wait – what? “For real? There were actually therapists working for Kingsman?”

“Of course.” Harry stared at him as if he couldn’t believe Eggsy wouldn’t know. “How do you think we’ve managed to do our jobs? Or did you think I’m this well-adjusted from sheer bloody-mindedness?” There was definite self-mockery in his voice now and Eggsy was grateful for the chance to get back into their usual bantering.

He snorted. “Well adjusted my arse. You might do well when adjusting your suits, that’s about it.”

Harry smirked and yawned, then leaned over and let himself drop against Eggsy’s shoulder as if that was something he had a habit of doing. Like with a feral kitten one fears of chasing away through sudden motion, Eggsy sat stock-still and pretended everything was normal. “One day,” Harry said quietly while his eyes closed and he went even heavier against him, “maybe one day I’ll introduce you to Guinevere. She’d be thrilled to get to know you.”

Before Eggsy could ask who the hell Guinevere was, Harry had fallen asleep.

“Looks like I won’t be getting home for lunch then,” Eggsy muttered towards the doggy-couch. “You wouldn’t be able to go get my phone from the kitchen, would you?”

Mr Bingley snored into his tail.

“Guess not.”

Oh, well.