Chapter Text
(“We can’t. It isn’t safe anymore.”)
(-KM-)
“This is not a conversation I want to be having with you, Galahad.”
He was standing before one of the tall windows of the austere, almost Edwardian office he had inherited. His hands were clasped firmly behind his back, and his grave eyes were scanning the emerald sea that was the lawn of Kingsman headquarters. He enjoyed this view, found it tranquilizing; he often found himself looking out this window when presented with a particularly troubling problem.
Such as the one sitting in the chair across from his broad desk.
“Well, tha’ makes two’v us, then.”
He let his eyes flutter closed briefly. His nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply through his nose, taking in the various faint scents of the room: cold tea from the cup and saucer upon his desk; the aroma of the desk’s dark polish, piney and acrid from the binding of the polyeruthane with the wood; his own cologne, the same one he’s worn for nearly a decade because someone once told him it suited him, and he had thence never put much consideration into deviating; and, arching over everything, the almost tangy odor of gunpowder, barely masking the scent of a small but fresh wound.
He released his breath, the air curling out of his nostrils in a slow, controlled stream. His eyes opened and he looked once more up at the window, gaze fixating on the white Kingsman insignia in the middle of the green.
“I want you to speak to a counsellor.”
There was a snort from behind him. “Like fuck.”
At the candidly delivered expletive, the man previously known only as Merlin did then turn around, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. He surveyed the young man sitting across from him, face almost entirely devoid of expression. It was this same eerie stoicism that he used when conducting meetings as Arthur, when assessing threats and making the difficult executive decisions that his new position required of him: it was a mien comprised only of logic, so cold and unblinking it was nearly inhuman.
He had been told that it made people uncomfortable.
But the young agent slumped over in the stiff-backed leather chair on the other side of his wide desk betrayed no uneasiness. He simply stared back at his superior petulantly, defiantly, green eyes glittering behind smudged glasses and an errant strand of hair that was falling over his face. There was a powder-burn on his left cheek and a cut that went through his right eyebrow, taped up but still oozing.
Arthur—Eoghan— stared for a moment at the wound; his expression all but retained its eerie neutrality save for a single muscle at the corner of his severe mouth, which twitched.
“You forget yourself, Galahad.”
Eggsy narrowed his eyes, a small, mean smirk playing at the corner of his bruised mouth. “Is tha’ what you fink, eh?”
Carefully, Eoghan unfastened his hands from behind him in order to tap his desk with the tip of one long finger. “I do.”
“Well, pardon me, Arthur,” came the reply, irreverential emphasis placed upon his title. “Or do you prefer ‘Your Majesty’?”
Eoghan saw the bait, dangling bawdily in front of his face. He just barely refrained from raising an eyebrow. Really.
“Stop it.”
Eggsy’s unkind smirk made another scanty appearance at the corner of his mouth. He reached up with one blood-speckled hand and pulled at the Windsor knot on his tie, loosening it from around his neck. As he did so, Eoghan could see the beginnings of a set of bruises, small and intimate like fingertips. “Stop what?” Eggsy asked, none too innocently.
Eoghan shifted his gaze away from Eggsy, back to the hand he had placed upon his desk. He chose not to answer, and instead slid himself carefully into his desk chair, letting go of an almost-weary exhalation. He ran a hand down the front of his suit, smoothing out imaginary creases and thinking of the soft, simple cardigans he wore in his previous position. The role of Arthur required him to be always formal, always in costume; the viciously tailored suits made him look more dangerous, shark-like, accentuating the sharp edges that his sweaters used to hide. He was slowly becoming attenuated with letting his serrated teeth show.
And people treated him differently. A man in an unassuming cardigan was useful, but a man in a bespoke suit was powerful, to be obeyed. He now garnered respect from all corners of Kingsman.
(Well. Almost all.)
Picking up a memo from the left corner of his desk and scanning it disinterestedly, Eoghan spoke deliberately, carefully. “You will be glad to know that Lancelot is in stable condition. I’ve spoken to her doctors. They tell me she will make a full recovery.”
Eggsy said nothing. Eoghan slid his glance over the top of the memorandum; he was privately, perversely pleased with the expression on the young man’s face. He looked as though he had been freshly slapped.
“It isn’t the first time an agent has put a fellow Kingsman in hospital,” Eoghan continued slowly, watching the subtle contortions of Eggsy’s expression. “However, it is unfortunate that Roxy’s injuries are resultant of your ineptitude.”
The last word slid out slow and poisonous, and its effect on the young agent was visible in the vein that jumped in his neck and the way his eyes widened with both incredulity and anger.
“Excuse me?”
Eoghan replied in a tone that was much too mild a match for the growing animus in Eggsy’s voice. “No, I shan’t. You have been sloppy, Galahad. When the agency agreed to let you fill—” (he paused, and it was only for a second, for a breath that could mean nothing or anything) “—Harry’s shoes, I saw no reason to object. You had proven yourself, your capability and loyalty. I thought you would make a good agent. Evidently, I was wrong.”
Eggsy shifted and righted himself in the chair, glowering at Eoghan with an expression that was just this side of murderous. When he spoke, his voice was shaking with rage. “So you want me ta see a fucking shrink ‘cause you ‘fink I’m a lousy Kingsman, tha’ it?”
In that moment, when the energy of the room was inciting him to raise his voice, to retaliate to Eggsy’s language with choice words of his own—in that moment, Eoghan let everything within and around him go completely still. The silence that filled the room was his, and the entirety of its weight was concentrated in the shiny black pupils of his dark, unnerving eyes.
He blinked once. Slowly.
“I want you to do it," he said quietly, "because it has been three months, Eggsy.” He swallowed, striving to keep his intonations low, almost soothing. “We . . . burned him. He is not coming back.”
It was Eggsy’s turn to hold the silence now; but he couldn’t. It slipped from his hands and fell like a cross to the floor.
“Fuck you.”
And that was not meant to sound broken, surely, not half so broken as it did. Eggsy’s voice just barely escaped cracking, and the furious energy he had been radiating a moment before dwindled into something sluggish and black.
Eoghan took another practiced breath, slowly in and out, lingering in this personal, subliminal sigh. Picking up his tablet from where it lay on his desk, he diverted his gaze from Eggsy and onto the blue-lit screen. “Let’s not, shall we?” he said smoothly as he tapped the screen, selecting a contact and beginning to compose a memo. Without looking up, he continued in a stronger voice: “I’m making an appointment with you for our on-base psychologist, Dr. Hedonshire. You will go. Or you will be suspended.”
In his periphery, Eoghan saw the sudden movement that was Eggsy rising abruptly from his chair, and heard the accompanying screech of the chair legs across his office floor. He did not look up as Eggsy gave him one last glare and turned heel, marching angrily towards the office door; he did, however, call after him, voice as mild as summer rain.
“Oh, and Eggsy.”
The young man halted just as he had wrenched open the door. Though he stopped he kept his stiff back to Eoghan, refusing to look at him or speak.
Eoghan thought carefully about his next line of email, and then continued in the same mellow tone: “I know that you have been making a habit of late, but I must instruct you not to go back to the flat.”
(Though he had been the one to speak them, something uncomfortable settled in his gut at those words. The flat. His flat. The empty flat. The flat that had gone undisturbed for two months before Kingsman had removed all personal items, locked them up in storage unit in some godforsaken corner of England. The flat that, despite its emptiness, Eggsy kept haunting like an especially well-tailored ghost.)
“Why?”
Eoghan did look up then, and even from where he was sitting, he could see that Eggsy’s knuckles on the door handle were bone-white.
“It is being repurposed.”
The sound of the door slamming behind him was deafening, and seemed to echo throughout the office for the rest of the afternoon.
(-KM-)
(“It was never safe for us.”)