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It’s fitting that Harry is here to attend his own funeral.
It’s several hours past the ceremony and Merlin and Roxy leave Eggsy in silence to say his last words at the gravestone. The sky splashes with deep violets and vermillion as it mingles with a brewing warm gray, with thunder rumbling lowly in the distance. Eggsy has his gadget umbrella tucked nicely in the crook of his arm with Galahad’s Kingman medal knotted at the handle.
Harry stands only at the corner of his right eye, as if taunting to leave as soon as Eggsy blinks his reddened eyes and wipes away the tears.
“There’s nothing to see here, Eggsy.”
Eggsy doesn’t respond, and leaves the bunches of ivory orchids and chrysanthemums at his grave when he feels the first trickle of rain.
It’s a bittersweet, melancholic situation: he know’s he’s dead but it doesn’t feel that way, as Harry sweetly brushes his oily locks in between his shaky, bony fingers as Eggsy lies awake in the crack of dawn in Harry’s master bedroom.
The bedsheets still smell like him; lavender and gunpowder with a musky after-scent. It makes Eggsy happily vomit.
Eggsy doesn’t sleep well for several weeks, and the insomnia is painted over his face and posture and shows when he bites three or four avoidable bullets in the past few assignments. Merlin gives him these drugs—these sleeping pills, that would knock him out within minutes.
He doesn’t take them, because his Harry scolds him when he does and threatens to leave.
“I’m proud of you, Eggsy.”
Harry starts imprinting himself in the wrong, selfish parts of his brain.
Eggsy slightly turns down the volts in his ring and brushes his palms against the gold plating whenever Harry leans over for a kiss, and through the sharp, blazing pricks in his nerves, it numbs the feeling when his Harry locks lips with his.
It’s enough to enjoy the memory without the guilt.
He doesn’t answer Roxy’s insistent wailing as she twists his wrist to look at his thirty-or-so burn marks all over his arm.
Merlin is shouting something important about the assignment over the intercom, but the mingling reverberations of the gunfire and his rising pulse gradually drowns out his barking.
Eggsy’s bruised and broken body slumps lifelessly against a slab of concrete, garments all in shreds and the lens of his glasses cracked, creating a kaleidoscope of crimson and gray.
Harry is delicately dabbing the blood off of his lips with a satin handkerchief as he cradles Eggsy’s head.
“You can’t die here, Eggsy,” he says softly.
Eggsy is sobbing now into Harry’s chest, and doesn’t realize the gaping hole in his stomach and the pools of blood decorating his pin-striped suit.
It takes him three weeks to get up on his feet again.
He’s diagnosed with some sort of schizophrenia, and they give him more medications to take—one for the sleeping, one for the pain, and one for Harry.
Eggsy watches with glassy eyes as Harry’s fingers interlace with his, as they dump each of the contents of the bottles down the toilet together.
“I love you, Eggsy,” Harry whispers into the shell of his ear, and Eggsy ignores how hollow and warped it sounds, because his conscious doesn’t know how Harry would say those words.
Harry’s rubbing his back as Eggsy curls up in the cold shower—and feels himself drowning, drowning, drowning in everything until he falls asleep on Harry’s lap.
“I’ll always be here for you, Eggsy.”
He’s dead. He’s not here.
He’s not here—and he knows this; he knows this from the beginning, but it feels too good and too real and misses him too much.
Eggsy dreams of Harry at the police station.
That Harry is beautiful, confident and silent, back straight, suave in his walking and sharp in his talking. He remembers the glass crashing against that man’s skull, remembers the fluid movements of his fighting, remembers his mahogany eyes that shine as bright as the Kingsman’s gadgets that dress the walls.
“Harry would be proud of you,” Merlin says.
Eggsy jolts awake in a shivering mess, and for the first time in months, Harry is not at his side.
He tries to ignore Harry now, with all of his tentative touches and whispers of affection.
Eyes forward as he walks, breaths in, breaths out—
“I’ll always be here for you, Eggsy.”
He’s still in the reflection of his bathroom mirror, but Eggsy makes sure to close his eyes and cover his ears.
Merlin eventually stops yelling at him for not taking the drugs when he finally hears Eggsy chuckle and joke over the intercom in what seems like a thousand years.
It’s music to Eggsy’s colleagues’ ears, and Roxy tries to hide her tears when Eggsy mocks her for them.
“Harry’s dead.”
He’s able to say this to him when Harry’s tucking him in at his bedside, and Harry stays silent and kisses him on the forehead.
“I’m always here for you, Eggsy.”
“You’re not Harry,” Eggsy grunts as he pushes Harry away and turns to lie at his side, and ignores the expression of hurt in those awful hazel eyes.
Eggsy keeps the Kingsman medal in memory of his father in his pocket at all times, and makes sure to squeeze it between his knuckles—because the real Harry loved his father, saved Eggsy’s life, and died before his own eyes.
The real Harry would be disappointed to see him like this.
The medal's a fitting anchor, and he notices Harry follows distantly and doesn’t say that he loves him anymore.
He’s back at Harry’s grave again early in the morning, cradling the same plume of white, sympathetic flowers.
Eggsy gives a sad smile as he kneels down to his mentor’s grave, pushing away the wilted bouquet he left before. The air feels different, crisp and clear; he's able to breathe in now, and the tears that creep at his eyelids aren't full of bitter regret.
“I miss you, Harry.”
He’s dead.
He’s not here.
He’s not here, but that’s alright.
Harry doesn’t come back again, and Eggsy sleeps soundly alone that night.