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Harry faces a house. It has been waiting for him, rebuilt for him, and now he cannot hide his ungrateful unwillingness to step inside of it.
Red brick without patina under a grey and heavy sky.
"Let's look at it, then," Harry sighs.
“It’s still so good to have you back," Eggsy says, following right behind him in a bright yellow jacket that seems to be all the colour there is in the whole neighbourhood.
Harry doesn’t have the heart to tell him how strange it is that there’s not much to come back to.
Of course most of the agency’s properties have been rebuilt by Statesman. Harry can’t figure out if he’s glad he wasn’t around when they were destroyed or if he would have liked to have the memory. As it is now, he knows what happened, but can’t picture it in his head. There one day, gone the next - so much changed in his absence, from the store to this house that he supposes is Eggsy’s too, in some way, having heard about how it was put to use after his death
Inside, the air smells too fresh, the built-up scent of years of rosewater, cologne and whiskey wiped away. The house could still become a Kingsman safehouse or a storage place.
Lost in the hallway, Harry keeps his face expressionless - though maybe he’s gotten worse at keeping a façade up, having fallen out of training, because Eggsy seems like he can tell something isn’t right. The floorboards creak and settle beneath his feet.
Harry can almost believe it is a ghost accompanying him instead of a mere man.
”So…” Eggsy says. “Think you can live here again?”
Harry does not reply. As they wander into the kitchen, everything too bright and full of blind spots, he grows less and less inclined to say that he can. There are no butterflies on the walls. Not even faded squares to show where they have been before. A reminder that they were destroyed, not removed, and won’t be found again.
Harry still sees butterflies in stressful moments, and he turns from a window in a possible bedroom and sees Eggsy with two or three swarming around his head.
They are gone when Harry goes back outside.
“If I could make a request,” he begins, “and you have the time, I would like to see whether a particular café still exists.”
“’Round the corner?” Eggsy asks.
“Have you been there?”
A shrug. “I’ve walked by. It’s still there far as I know.”
They regard the sky together on the front steps, Eggsy shuddering a little, hands in his pockets.
“It’s gonna rain,” he says.
“That’s just fine,” Harry replies, having brought an umbrella, having missed the English rain. “It’s London.”
Familiar display windows appear behind smog and traffic. Harry exhales at the sight of the café. That place, at least, has not changed. He is sure that even the fresh croissants will taste exactly the same – and oh, he’s still craving loose-leaf tea, not the cheap sawdust they gave him at Statesman. He wants to sit down with Eggsy just to sit and talk, but Eggsy seizes his arm just before they’re about to cross the road.
“I just remembered something,” he exclaims.
Harry looks at him. At the spark in his eyes.
Eggsy’s grip on Harry’s arm loosens, but his smile grows wide. “My mum’s old flat,” he continues, and he gestures in its general direction with a nod of his head. “You’re gonna like this.”
Harry would like coffee in a familiar place, but accepts that his plan will have to wait. The old flat is only within walking distance if you are fast and determined, so there is little time to waste and all of Eggsy’s knowledge of shortcuts is put to good use. All the while, Harry barely notices the backstreets, thinking of a different route he took back when he was looking for a Kingsman candidate. A larvae, in Eggsy’s own words.
Eggsy’s back is straighter now, his smile widening as they approach the concrete eye-sore of a building. In the stairwell, Harry expects them to head upwards, but instead Eggsy takes him down.
“Three landings,” he says, eyeing Harry almost suspiciously. All that Harry’s hiding is that stairs are difficult without depth perception, but he refuses to lose his dignity and takes it slow, one step at a time, back straight without holding onto the railing.
Eggsy grows impatient, already on the first landing. Then, three steps in one stride, he comes back up to Harry’s side. Again, he grabs Harry’s arm, leading him.
“Please,” Harry says, making it clear that he can do this fine by himself, thank-you-very-much – but Eggsy can’t wait, and it is faster like this. The cold stairwell is warmer like this, when they touch, even though both of them are wearing jackets that trap body heat and it isn’t the first time they’ve had to lean on each other.
Maybe it is just an excuse to touch, Harry thinks. To feel that they are both still here, alive in a musty basement.
When Eggsy lets go, he heads for a stack of carboard boxes: One of them is not as mouldy as the others.
”It’s not all of it that’s gone,” he says. ”I kept more than just Mr. Pickles.”
“But he’s gone now, isn’t he?” Harry leans against the wall, then grimaces – now he’s probably got some kind of mildew in his suit.
Eggsy’s fingers hover over the gaffer tape seal on the box. “Explosion got him, the shelf he sat on and the wall, too.”
Funny that, Harry thinks, now he knows exactly what that dog went through, staring up into the barrel of a gun. Hearing it fire. A flash of light - yellow sweeps across the basement floor and Eggsy's curved back all from a single light bulb swinging back and forth, Harry having leaned against the switch on accident.
”When you died…” Eggsy begins, eyes fixed on the cardboard. “When we thought you were dead, I mean, Merlin told me Kingsman would be dealing with the aftermath and all. I don’t think he was s’posed to, but he said I could go take a memento if I wanted.”
Harry can imagine Eggsy in the hall of his house, probably feeling like a thief trespassing in a dead man’s home. Looking up at pictures and down at rows of black-polished shoes wondering what would remind him the most of his mentor. Or standing in the study, pressing a button to reveal all the weapons and gadgets with stories behind them that he’d never get to hear. Harry does not want to imagine the expression on Eggsy’s face. He does not want to imagine much of anything that happened while he was dead, all the mourning – or perhaps the lack of same; that might as well have been the case.
The world goes on and someone needs to save it. No room for emotion.
But he has to imagine.
He has to imagine it in order to understand why Eggsy’s hug felt the way it did back in that cell in Kentucky. Why even now, Eggsy sneaks glances at Harry, as if afraid he’ll disappear. Eggsy tries to exploit the blind angle offered by Harry’s wounded eye, but it doesn’t work; the boy is ever obvious.
Eggsy tears at the gaffer tape on the box, then looks back over his shoulder – “Don’t we have some cool gadget that can cut this?”
“I do have a pocket knife,” Harry replies, searching his inner pocket.
“Just a regular knife?”
“…It is disguised as a pen.”
“That’s more like it.”
Harry places the pen-slash-cutting-tool in Eggsy’s waiting, outstretched hand. With that, the box soon comes apart like a ruined cocoon. Harry expects the memento to be something small: A token like a ring or a pin in Eggsy’s open palm. Maybe something with a cruel joke to it. Inside is a stack of Eggsy’s mother’s old shirts mixed with books and school supplies, but Eggsy finds the wooden frame in the mess. The glass needs to be cleaned, the frame is dusty, but six butterflies survive on pins and needles.
”I saved this,” Eggsy says. “…But I don’t know shit about butterflies. I hope they’re not worthless.”
Harry kneels beside him, taking the frame into his own hands. These are garden-variety English species, pretty, though also pretty common. It does not matter. There are other butterflies in the air around the two of them, filling the dark of the basement with bright specks of light. Harry’s heart is beating fast in time with their wingbeats.
“None of them are worthless,” he answers.
Eggsy leans in closer. “What’s your deal with them?”
Harry watches the hallucinatory butterflies fade without words to answer the question.
How can he explain the feeling of lying in the grass in a park, not yet Eggsy’s age, seeing them flutter above him while the other boys were running laps and shouting, bare legs occasionally intruding on his field of view? Then, later, the joy of something simple and controlled, stuck on a pin, easy to categorize, easy to keep while the world turned to chaos around him more often that not. These insects are pieces of Brittsh gardens, countryside messengers, something to protect.
“I’ve always loved them,” Harry says. A jolt runs through his body when Eggsy meets his eyes, and he remembers Eggsy calling himself a butterfly - though maybe he didn’t really forget it in the first place.
There are a lot of unsaid things inside these boxes, Harry wagers. A childhood’s worth. More than that. The room feels like it grows smaller around them, and darker, the butterflies in the frame trembling a little whenever they’re just in the corner of Harry’s good eye. Eggsy reaches out and runs his thumb across Harry’s face, under his glasses, coming to rest at that black battle-wound, a light caress with a heap of implications.
It’s another way to say it’s good to have you back. And a lot of other things.
Harry lets him touch, if that’s what he needs.
It’s what Harry needs, too.
“Thank you for keeping these,” he says.
“Ah, it’s - it’s nothing. Just stuffed them down ‘ere.”
“I’m going to hang them above the fireplace,” Harry continues. “It’ll be a start.”
“Might look a little lonely with just six.”
“I might not need more. I’ve seen plenty of butterflies in that cell in America.”
“I guess so.” Eggsy pulls back and pushes the box back into the shadows. “…Do you want to get out?”
Harry stands in response, holding out a hand for Eggsy to take. It is no easier to deal with the stairs going up, but this time there is no rush. Slow and steady gets them back outside, London having fallen victim to rain in the meantime.
Without hestitation, they share Harry’s umbrella.
In the end they never get to that café. Instead Harry buys a tea kettle – which is the only right way to start moving into a house – a packet of good tea and a bottle of scotch while Eggsy brings two mugs from his mum’s cupboards. In the kitchen the scent of Earl Grey fights off the lingering scent of paint, and Eggsy sits on the counter smiling even though all Harry is doing is making a cup of tea.
Harry thanks his Kingsman training for teaching him how to keep his emotions down. He does not speak of how much he’d like to kiss Eggsy when the first sun after the rain falls on his face. How he has imagined, long ago, being in his old kitchen making them both scones with homemade apricot jam, walking Eggsy home afterwards, maybe on a cool day like this. Nor does he mention the fact that even without any memories back in Kentucky, he would sometimes dream of faces, and Eggsy’s was among them, flashing just after his father’s but so much more vividly.
Instead of saying it out loud, he puts the emotion into every little movement he makes, lets it shine through in the way he, too, is smiling, so that the whole air of the house becomes infused with this love that Eggsy might sense.
They catch up at the kitchen table. Talk about the time that passed, the time that’ll come sweeping over them like a new season before they know it. The past and their plans - and then suddenly nothing at all.
The butterflies hang above the fireplace.
Eggsy leaves his jacket slung over the back of a chair. It keeps glowing yellow all day long, not out of place at all.
Just waiting for him to come back. And Harry knows, looking at it, that this makes the house more of a home than any butterfly on pins ever could.