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—KENSINGTON, SOUTH LONDON—
—JUNE 2017—
He sees pieces of things. They intertwine in spots of light before his eyes, overlapping, like photographs in a collage. Their colors are richer than he thought he remembered. Blues. Oranges. Some of them, he isn’t sure have names.
The thing he sees now is a whitewashed cross upon a chapel spire. It stands what seems to be a mile into a yellow evening sky. Wisps of dark golden cloud part to the left and right, and in the sky where they had been floats the muzzle of a weapon. It chugs, firing; in a flashbang from its eye, a dozen multicolored butterflies come fluttering toward him. One of them poises to land delicately on his outstretched finger, crooked into a perch. The beat of its wings slows just enough that he can make out the most brilliant of patterns in the lulling moment before—
The most abrasive pounding. Over and over. And a doorbell. Followed by barking.
The patterned wings and yellow sky fall away. Blackness replaces them. It’s a quick transition. Sighing deeply, Harry pulls the silk sleep mask from his eyes, and without opening them, deposits it on his nightstand. His hand finds the arm of his glasses. They’re in place on the bridge of his nose before he’s remotely in the mood to look through them, but his eyelids part anyway. “Front door,” he says with impatience.
Grainy for an instant, then crystal-clear, the black-and-white feed of his front steps materializes. With Eggsy on them. Wearing trainers and a hoodie over his nightclothes, jabbing the doorbell again with one hand, rapping on the frame with the other. A look of fear on his face.
It’s not a matter of danger. If it had been, Harry knows he would have been contacted already, via his glasses, laptop, phone, or one of four other secret means of communication hidden around his home. The new tailor shop features double the security measures of the former one. The training compound is not yet fully rebuilt. None of his alarms have sounded. There is no impending need to save the world, and he would not be unjustified in going back to sleep.
Harry is already standing anyway. He ties his robe around his collared silk pyjamas, puts his feet into slippers, and emerges from his bedroom.
“It’s all right,” he tells the very vocal puppy turning circles at his ankles. “Go lie down. Go on now. Back to bed.” Like his predecessor, Mr. Bojangles listens well; Harry is freed to descend his staircase without the fear of small paws underfoot. He flicks on the entryway light as he passes the switch.
“Harry!” he hears, muffled through the door. More banging. “It’s me! Harry, it’s Eggsy! C’mon, open up!”
He undoes the bolt and pulls back on the heavy handle. Eggsy stops mid-knock, looking startled, hand frozen in midair.
“If I hadn’t known it was you, I wouldn’t have come downstairs in the first place. I’m not in the habit of receiving solicitors at half past three in the morning.”
“Right. Right, fuck, I’m sorry…” Eggsy pushes a hand through his hair. The somewhat crazed look has not yet left his eyes, not even when he crushes them shut. “I know, I…I know, I know this is the absolute least appropriate thing, you don’t just show up at someone’s flat this fucking late; you were tryin’ to sleep, I know, I’m sorry, I swear I won’t do this again, I…I just…I…”
He stops, very clearly trying to force himself to calm down. It very clearly isn’t working.
“Come in, Eggsy,” Harry says, feeling a pull of empathy replace his last shred of complaint. He steps aside. “Have a seat.”
“If… Are you sure? You don’t ’ave to, I…I know it’s late…”
“Come inside.”
Eggsy nods as he shuffles through the door, his head swung downward. It’s more than obvious he’s hiding tears. Within moments, he stops bothering. Harry no sooner shuts the door than he’s clobbered into a tightly-locked embrace, noting the ragged escape of a sob over his shoulder. He’s quick to close his arms around Eggsy’s back, far quicker than he’d have done once upon a time.
“Fuck’s sake, Harry…” There’s a break in his voice.
“It’s all right.”
With a loud sniff, Eggsy lurches backward, and Harry is back at arm’s length. The younger man shoves a sleeve across the tear tracks on his face. It’s pointless, of course; they’re replaced immediately. “Yeah, so that’s good, I think; s’all I needed, thanks for that…”
Harry knows that Eggsy is a world-class liar. Precisely why his terrible ones stand out like a heap of horseshit in the middle of the dinner table.
“Is it?”
“Fuck no, the fuck it isn’t.” And he launches in again.
Harry intercepts, feels hands clawing his back the way a frightened child might cling for dear life to a parent’s leg, and at once, he knows what happened. What specific sort of event might have reignited this. The knowledge brings something to his throat that he knows has never been there before. He can’t recall a name for it. Only that it signifies being needed, and that it amazes him.
In fact, all at once he’s quite positive there could be nothing more worthwhile in the world.
For a clandestine moment, it hampers his function, and then, like all else, he works around it. He goes gently, waiting several moments to speak. Then he asks what he already knows is true, and he doesn’t phrase it as a question.
“You had a bad dream.”
This time, Eggsy removes himself with less urgency. He’s no longer trying to force himself faster through the stages. His nod comes next, and it’s followed by a restless semicircle’s walk around the foyer, hands across his face and through his hair again.
“Ugh, it sounds so fuckin’ stupid, sayin’ it out loud like that, like I’m some fuckin’ infant, like I dunno from one minute to the next what the fuck anything is.” He’s facing Harry again. His hands drop. “It’s just that… You…”
It’s impossible to miss that his eyes have welled again.
“You’d been dead for real all this time. I woke up… In the dream, I woke up, and that was real life. Fuck-all of any of this. You was just dead, that’s all there was to it, and I thought you was alive again, just like this, ’til I woke up in the dream, and then I ’ad to remember. And… And then when I… When I really woke up, I didn’t know…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, not that he needs to. His tears are frustrating him again. He streaks them to oblivion. “Fuck, it’s so fucking stupid, like I’m a child for fuck’s sake…”
It’s not only after hours, but long overdue for most of this; Harry refuses to count profanities, despite a gut feeling that they may achieve a new record. Instead, he rests a hand on Eggsy’s shoulder, leading him away from his spiral, toward the den. “Come on,” he instructs.
“For what?”
“To have a seat,” Harry repeats. “Followed by a drink.”
To Eggsy’s credit, even amid what’s clearly become a crisis, he at least attempts decorum one last time, however halfheartedly, before abandoning it entirely. He’s learnt his lessons well. “You really don’t ’ave to, I can just go…”
“I will not send you home in the same state you arrived. I have slept before; I guarantee I’ll do plenty more in the future.”
This, finally, is enough to do the trick. Eggsy slumps like a ragdoll into one of Harry’s houndstooth-print armchairs. Harry passes him with a reassuring clamp of his shoulder, steering his slippers to the drink cart beside the divan.
There is a moment where nothing is said. With a deft twist, the stopper is removed from a heavy glass decanter, and into a rock glass, Harry pours Eggsy two fingers of London Dry gin. Then he makes it three.
Eggsy’s postured like The Thinker when he returns. He lowers the glass into the distracted man’s field of vision. “Drink this,” he advises.
It’s accepted with a gratefully quick hand. “You read my mind.”
Harry returns to his drinkware to prepare a matching dose. He counts just enough beats of silence to allow time for a generous first sip. Then, closing off the decanter, he ventures ahead.
“Might I ask something?”
“’Course, anything.”
“On the occasions you had nightmares as a child, in what way did you reconcile them?” Glass in hand, he returns to the sitting area, though he doesn’t yet sit.
Eggsy lightly swirls his ice. The way he stares into it calls to Harry’s mind the image of a snowglobe. Butterflies fringe his peripheral; the tiniest ones in carnation and gold, piloting in circles. He blinks them away again.
“You mean did I run for my mum?” Eggsy tilts a perspicacious glance up at him. An index finger goes up with it. “Give you one guess why that didn’t ’appen.”
It’s what he assumed. Still, he clarifies. “Never once, in all your life?”
“I so much as cracked the door of my mum and Dean’s room, I’d ’ave been knackered straight away. I’d ’ave got the buckle for that. That’s my head through the fuckin’ wall, mate, that’s it for me. Done before I start.” Harry lowers himself onto the adjacent seat to an increasingly conversant look from his younger friend. “…So you’re saying this is ’cause of more repressed childhood shit. It’s perfectly alright I show up at your house in the middle of the night ’cause I never got no comfort from no one as a kid. You’re sayin’ I was overdue, essentially.”
A demi-smile betrays Harry as he rests his glass on a coaster.
“Am I close?” His tone’s eager to be.
“One day before long, you’ll reach the point where you don’t even need me to participate in these conversations anymore. You’ll have sorted the whole thing start to finish on the walk over.”
“Fat chance of that. I’d ’ave to buy my own booze.” At least the boy’s grinning now. Harry pleasantly recognizes a feeling of relief. As a sidebar, he tips Harry his glass. “This is sick, by the way. You’ve gotta stop lettin’ me drink all your good shit.”
“This sort of thing is precisely the purpose of the ‘good shit,’ as it were.”
“Yeah, well. Guess we’ve established it’s way too late for tea and biscuits to do the trick anymore.”
It’s altogether impractical for Harry to wish it wasn’t, but he does. It’s not only impractical, it’s a waste of time, even going unexpressed as it does in the confines of his own mind. And yet it exists. That naïve wish. The vain desire for Eggsy’s demons to disappear so much more easily, more completely, than they ever really will in the practical world. Than they ever could.
It’s why he forgoes his sleep. Why he opens doors at half-past three in the morning. Truthfully, it’s why he’s never going to stop, either. The idea is to protect the boy from far more than bullets and blows. He isn’t just overdue for sanctuary, but peace, too.
Eggsy mulls a swallow of his gin. “I get to ask you one now?”
Harry’s brow perks as he leans forward, taking up his glass again. “I suppose it’s only fair.”
He taps his temple, indicating where his glasses should be. No doubt he bolted too quickly from the house to have remembered them. Then he points to Harry’s. “How come you didn’t ask me why I didn’t just patch in?”
Answering doesn’t require much thought. He considers the color of his liquor instead. “When did that occur to you?”
“While you was gettin’ the drinks. You’d ’ad every right to turn me right back around at the door, tell me to think like a Kingsman, not like a child, remember my training and all… I should’ve done. I could’ve checked you were alright without leavin’ in the middle of the night like a lunatic. S’the kind of thing I should’ve thought of. That’s like mucking up the basics. I deserved to get it for that.”
“Perhaps you did,” Harry allows, along with a shade of upward quirk in the corner of his mouth. It’s mischief; he’s relishing his chances to use it.
“So why didn’t you?”
Eggsy’s trained attentively on him. He’s after honesty. He deserves it. So he gets it.
Harry swallows his erstwhile sip, and his glass levels, as does his gaze. “You wouldn’t have been satisfied,” he summarizes. “Your own perception was precisely the thing you doubted your ability to trust. Had you tapped into my glasses, you’d have seen nothing; they were facing away from me on the nightstand. Had you tapped my security feed, and I appeared immobile, your mind would’ve come up with reasons why. Had you seen any image at all, still, you’d have doubted its legitimacy; whether it was outdated, whether you were imagining things… Trauma often demands the tactile. You and I know that far too well.”
Guns and puppies flash in Eggsy’s eyes. “Yeah, you’re tellin’ me.”
“It would have done no good to encourage you to deny it. Basic training is intended to apply to fieldwork and surveillance, not to serve as a substitute for attending your mental health. No one would ask that of you, least of all me.”
He’s watching Eggsy’s face, and what’s been there is receding into a rakish grin, broadening by the moment.
“So…you knew I needed a hug.”
It’s difficult to avoid following suit, especially when one is not trying.
“More or less.”
“My fuckin’ days, Harry.”
Slouching back deep into his chair, Eggsy abandons the remainder of his vigilance, his smile warm and lazy now, glass lolling in his hand. That’s the last of it. At this point, his trepidations are well dissolved, and he’s remembered in full that he is among family here.
Never has the loss of an hour’s sleep been more gratifying.
“D’you know when I first knew you was gonna be good at this?”
This time, there is no lead-in. It sounds like a question whose answer has been revelatory somehow. There seems to be something about it in Eggsy’s squint, but for some reason—maybe the hour—he cannot ascertain precisely what.
“Good at what?”
“This whole Obi-Wan thing.”
Harry raises a bemused brow, resuming the sip he’d paused. “Well, hopefully it’s going better than that.”
“I’m serious. D’you know when I knew?”
It feels like the type of moment’s coming that he’ll want to set his drink down for. Erring with instinct, he does, weaving his hands across his knee. He’ll give Eggsy this game. “No. I don’t know when you knew.”
Eggsy points at him to punctuate what’s coming. And what he says is: “You ain’t never called me Gary.”
For something so glaringly, almost ridiculously obvious, it also dawns on Harry that he’s never considered that before. Of all the things to carry any lasting impact.
“Day we met. You already know I exist, so you know what my given name is, but you choose to take the word of a five-year-old instead. And then when we met again, you ’ad my full name, my walking papers from the Marines, all that shit on file, every word of it. You probably ’ad all that way before then, even. And there you are, just absolutely walloping me with that loaded speech of yours, even, all ‘tough love’—”
“Oh, figured that out, did you?”
“—goin’ on about my dad, and me wasting my potential, lightin’ straight into me. And obviously you know damn well I’m looking at you and thinking you’re some posh, uppity prick for judgin’ me. And I’m thinkin’ I’m in for the full handle any moment now. Any second, it’s coming… But then it doesn’t, though. You ’ad every reason to do it, and you didn’t.”
He folds his hands to mirror Harry’s. Some cousin of triumph masks him now, and it seems completely unattributable to the alcohol.
“You called me Eggsy. You have not once, ever, not one time, called me by my proper name.”
Without thought, Harry supplies, “Well no, of course not.”
“Y’see? That’s what’s different about you, Harry. You only call me what I told you I was called, whether you know better or not. And you wouldn’t even think of anything else. Don’t you get what an anomaly that is? Proper as you are—and fuckin’ ridiculous as you probably thought it sounded, for that matter—nah, you didn’t go by the proper bit on paper… You actually listened to me. You showed me respect in a big way that I didn’t peg you to do. That’s somethin’ a lot of people haven’t done.”
Harry can guess those types of people. The ones who undervalued him. Dean, as well as those pitiful minions. It’s particularly satisfying, with this context, to remember having beaten them free of their teeth.
“And you’re like that with everyone, really. You never call Roxy Roxanne. You sure as fuck never call Merlin by his real name.”
“No, I do not, mainly in the interest of continuing to remain alive.”
“But you get what I mean, though. You take people as they are. That’s what you did with me.” Eggsy’s focus on him is well loaded. “That meant a lot, y’know? More than you think. And I knew right from then… I knew you’d be somebody worth listenin’ to. Worth wanting to be like. I knew you’d already got me better than anybody else.”
At this, for once, Harry finds himself with nothing on hand to say.
These aren’t new sentiments. Not in the general sense. There’ve been plenty of them in the preceding days. He’s been made overwhelmingly aware that he is Eggsy’s unequivocal hero, against all odds established by everything that brought them here in the first place. There have been embraces, tears, emotions that one might never associate with a spy capable of cold, impersonal havoc, and he hopes he’s made his own immeasurable fondness more than clear. Recent weeks have been a complete period of healing in all directions. Frankly, if things keep up, he wouldn’t be shocked to find parting hugs written into Kingsman’s bylaws. Nor would he necessarily object, for that matter. After the loss, the chaos, it’s as it should be.
But this. It’s such a small thing. The sole claim a young Eggsy had dared to stake on his own life. How desperately he must have wanted unquestioned validation, in order for it to mean so much from a stranger… Such a small thing, still resonating after all else.
To learn that his impact began before he truly first attempted to make it.
That is very much something. Eggsy was right: he really hadn’t known at all.
And Eggsy knows it, too, of course. He’s mugging even still, waiting for Harry to say something. On the tail of the slightest clear of his throat, Harry readies himself to willfully oblige. He selects his words thoughtfully; excess credit feels undue, no matter the arguments.
“One’s identity is one’s own business. It was your decision. Overruling you is no one’s place.”
Then his own smile reappears, expanding to the force that’s backbuilt through every word of Eggsy’s unanticipated praise.
“However, on the other hand. I can say I’m certainly relieved to hear it wasn’t my display of violence in the pub that drew you in.”
“Oh, you kiddin’? That was just, like, half of it. I really needed to learn that bit with the electric zip tie, that was bloody mad.”
Harry laughs in a way he’d nearly forgotten how. A final drink drains his glass to the bottom, cubes clinking as he lowers it. “You’ll be much harder to impress now.”
“I reckon you’ll figure it out, I’m not worried.”
“Thank you for your confidence.”
Ice clatters as Eggsy tosses back the dregs of his gin, and Harry stands, offering his hand for the empty. Eggsy gives it, but he rises along with him anyway, nodding that he’ll follow. It’s only paces to the kitchen. “I really should get out of your hair. Late as shit now. Or early.”
He opens the dishwasher that’s really a dishwasher, not the dishwasher that’s secretly a hatch to a chute down the basement. “Where are you coming from? The palace?” He remembers the couple’s hassle of consolidating lives; their acquisition of a new a place in London. The glasses go on prongs to the far left.
“Nah, Tilde’s off doing something-or-other with the Peace Corps,” Eggsy says, scratching his chin. Even his voice betrays the yawn he’s fighting. “I’m at the house every night this week.”
Regardless, it’s rather heartbreakingly amusing to picture him having run here in the dark all the way from Sweden. Harry shuts the appliance and leads the way back into the den. “You can stay the night here, if you’d rather not walk at this hour. Again, that is.”
“You sure it’s all right?”
“Of course I’m sure. There’s a hideaway bed in the sofa.”
“Shut up.” Eyes wide, face frozen in mock-gasp, Eggsy goes to the accused furnishing and feels around behind the cushions until he’s got the handle; rearing his arm, in a wide backward step, he hauls loose the accordion of compressed mattress and metal. He points at it. “Oh, that is the fuckin’ bollocks. Now that’s thinking. Really, classic spy. Did our techs fix you up with this?”
It’s from Wayfair. Harry hates himself for grinning, really. Then again, it’s not the worst thing to endorse. “Respectfully, you’re a twat.”
“Respectfully thanks very much.” A twist on the undercarriage locks the frame into position, and Eggsy flops onto the foldaway mattress, toeing off his trainers. He shrugs out of the hoodie that served as his topcoat, rolling it into a ball and stuffing it behind his head. “Oh yeah, this works very nicely.”
“Please. Like hell it does.” There’s a closet near the entryway. Harry goes there next, opening the door to pin a goose down pillow under his arm and retrieve a quilt his mum once made for him during a terrible bout of the Spanish flu. Crossing back to the foldout, he shakes out the heavy quilt as high as his arms will raise, letting the colors umbrella—and if he more or less chucked the pillow at Eggsy’s face first, well, he’s only human.
Eggsy’s verging on another laugh. “You gonna tuck me in, too?”
Harry’s already halfway up the stairs by the time the quilt settles, outlining Eggsy like a rag doll, making him thrash his way to an edge. He’s pleased to have guessed right; it’s far more entertaining this way. “Tuck yourself in.”
“Gah! The fuck is the exit!?”
“Goodnight, Eggsy.”
The laughter, kicking, and wild batting subside by the time Harry reaches the top of the landing. A glance down shows Eggsy head and shoulders above his covers, angling his neck to look up backwards at the place he now stands, grin unmoved. “Hey, Harry?”
This strikes him as the feeling one must experience when the bad dreams have been banished from the ones they care for most. He gets the appeal now.
“If you’re going to say ‘thank you,’ you can save your breath,” he wards off kindly. “It’s what I’m here for.”
“No, it ain’t that. I mean, yeah, always, but I was just gonna say… Better dreams for you too, yeah? And no more butterflies. For tonight at least.”
And no more butterflies.
I knew you’d already got me better than anybody else.
Harry beams. It’s the only recourse left.
“No more butterflies.” A single nod acknowledges and seals his promise. There won’t be any trouble keeping it. For tonight, at least. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
A yawn comes from below, filled with tensile words. “See you in the morning, Harry.”
He looks on as Eggsy burrows himself into the sofa, curled to one side, a fistful of quilt beneath his chin. The foldout’s last creak of protest gives way to silence in the den. The light is still on; remotely, two blinks aimed at the switch turn it off.
It’s a scene he can barely make out in the dark, and yet it’s already a favorite memory. He makes a note to put on breakfast in the morning. Something his mothers made, perhaps.
Harry turns and makes his path back through the bedroom door, closing it softly after. His robe, he unties, returning it back to its peg. His slippers park again at the foot of the bed. Sitting, he checks through his glasses that all locks are secure, all alarms and cameras in working order. Then he unhooks them from his ears, depositing them once again on the nightstand. He swings his feet up, tucking them underneath his blanket. One hand retrieves his sleep mask, and he slips it cool and lulling over his eyes.
Breaths come slower. Limbs relax.
He sees pieces of things. They intertwine in spots of light before his eyes, overlapping, like photographs in a collage. Their colors are richer than he thought he remembered. Pinks. Yellows. Some of them, he isn’t sure have names.
The thing he sees now is a bright, white room, full of markings. All vivid. It doesn’t matter what they are, because they etch and leap their way off the walls, one by one, tangling together.
They take the form of a young man smiling.