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Eggsy Unwin has a problem. Sure, he has a lot of things in life that are non-problems: Dean Baker is finally out of the picture, locked up on the consequences of his own actions, never to bother his family again. Eggsy has his mother, and his gorgeous little sister Daisy, and his best friend Roxy, and a slobbery, wrinkle-faced, wheezing little creature that runs at his feet and shits in his shoes and curls up at the foot of his bed at night, snoring like a long distance truck driver. He's got Merlin, who claims daily that Eggsy is the bane of his existence, whilst leaving packages of Hobnobs on Eggsy's desk every week, though he's never admitted that it's him doing it. Eggsy has a job he loves, that affords him travel and good food and, yes, a little gratuitous violence every now and then when he needs to let off steam. Surface level, Eggsy's life seems perfect. But. There's a problem.
That problem is 6’2”, perfectly coiffed hair, immaculate suits that accentuate legs that go on for days. That problem is Friday night dinners in a townhouse in the mews, freely flowing wine and exquisitely cooked dishes that Eggsy has never heard of. That problem is classic films watched from the comfort of a worn settee, hundred-year-old Scotch sipped from lead crystal glasses, smokey and earthy and always going straight to Eggsy's head no matter how hard he tries to stop it. The problem is that he's woken up, again, in Harry Hart's spare bed, knowing that in the loo down the hall is a spare fresh, fluffy towel, a spare toothbrush, a spare bottle of the ridiculously posh and expensive shower gel that Roxy had gifted him once and is his current addiction in luxury. Distantly he can hear Harry pottering in the kitchen downstairs, no doubt working on a full Saturday morning fry-up, all for Eggsy's benefit, because Eggsy knows that Harry is the kind of freak who eats half of a grapefruit for breakfast and calls it a healthy and energizing start to his day, the ponce. Eggsy doesn't need to look at the low bedside table to know what's waiting for him there: a glass of water and two paracetamol tablets, placed precisely where they have been every Saturday morning that he's woken up this way, tangled in the 800 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets that Harry will wash and replace this afternoon after Eggsy has left, fresh and ready for him to muss anew next Friday night when they do this all over again.
Eggsy is tired of it, really. Not the Friday night dinner and movie routine. He quite loves the Friday night dinner and movie routine, the gentle banter while they eat, the inevitable fight over the remote that will come after Eggsy has dried the dishes and stacked them neatly back in the cupboard, just so. It's frighteningly domestic, the ease that he and Harry have fallen into since he returned home from the hospital ward at HQ, a bright red starburst of scar tissue across his left temple the only physical reminder of a hot, sunbaked, horrifying day in Kentucky. Some days, it almost feels like the whole thing was a dream, a nightmare of Eggsy's own devising - the scared unconsciousness of a boy who cares too much.
Too much, apparently, because Eggsy has known since he stared down the business end of Valentine's pistol through the grain of Harry's feed that he was in love with him. There's a certain decisiveness that comes in the split second when you know you're about to lose something very dear to you, when you can see the train coming but cannot stop it, where you're forced to confront the nebulous feelings that have been swirling in the category of “later, when we have more time”. In the split second before Valentine pulled the trigger, it all became so suddenly clear and stupid all at once, the reasons that Eggsy had been trying to talk himself out of it. Their age difference, the fact that Harry had pulled him out of the gutter that was his life and given him everything. It all became small and insignificant compared to the idea of losing him, and Eggsy hadn't even had a chance to breathe before the crack of the gun had sounded, tinny through the speakers of Harry's Kingsman-issue laptop, and the feed had gone dark.
In an instant, none of it had mattered, and in an instant it would matter no more, because Harry was dead, and Eggsy had been left with a gaping hole in his chest, an ache that spurred him out of that god forsakenly ugly orange office and into the dining room to confront Arthur.
The rest of it was a blur, saving the world. In the grand scheme of things, Eggsy couldn't really remember any of it, had trusted his body to know the moves before his brain could think of them, and it wasn't until he was back on the plane, sitting opposite Roxy while Merlin fluttered around the cabin, barking orders at the other remaining agents, most of them scattered to the wind, that it hit him. Harry was dead, and Eggsy was alive, and nothing was going to change that. He'd lost his opportunity, and now he was expected to go on while his heart lay in tatters on an asphalt car park in the Kentucky heat. He didn't notice the fat, sticky tears making tracks down his cheeks until Roxy guided his head down between his knees with a small, cool hand pressed gently to the back of his neck, and by then they wouldn't stop, and he could hear these wet, horrible gasps making their way out of his throat and his heart felt like it was going to explode straight out of his chest, and Roxy just kept murmuring something, stroking at the short hair at the back of his neck while Merlin kept talking, rapid fire and low and-
“Right. We're going to Kentucky. Stubborn bastard isn't dead after all!” Merlin finally says brightly in their direction, and Eggsy hears another gasp wrench its way out of his throat.
“Merlin, if you're taking the fucking piss,” Eggsy growls from somewhere near his left kneecap, and Merlin clicks his tongue, scoffs at Eggsy's pain and Eggsy is going to shove a lighter down his throat, he is.
“Eggsy, it was only a head shot. Harry's survived worse, and that was just in fifth form. Wait until you meet his mother - you'll understand.”
So they go to Kentucky, and Eggsy doesn't realize he was holding his breath until they get to the hospital. It's utter chaos, doctors and nurses and techs running around, mothers wailing in the hallways, children sitting in chairs in the waiting rooms, transfixed on televisions alight with bright, colorful programming. And then - a room, stark white and quiet for all the screaming outside, and in it, Eggsy's heart, not dead and bleeding out on cracked pavement, but mostly whole, swathed in white bandages and giving Merlin the best side-eye that Eggsy has ever seen.
“Well, it took you quite long enough to get here, Hamish, don't you think?”
Eggsy exhales for the first time in 48 hours, and his lungs finally feel less like they're on fire.
Which is how, on a Saturday morning four months later, Eggsy rolls and stretches, kicks the buttery smooth sheets down to his feet, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and decides, just as suddenly as he had all those weeks ago in that office, that if he was going to go about his days loving Harry Hart, then Harry Hart was going to go about his days knowing that he was loved. It hadn't taken the cold barrel of a gun this time, for him to come to a conclusion. It had taken, instead, the quiet care of a glass of water and painkillers, of a toothbrush meticulously chosen for Eggsy and placed in the loo. Fresh sheets and baked chicken and Pretty Woman. It had dawned on Eggsy the night before, watching Vivian transform like a butterfly under Edward's care that this was stupid, this pining and not telling. One glance at Harry, besotted with what was unfolding on the screen before him, had told Eggsy everything he needed to make a decision - no more pussyfooting around it.
The water is cool, clearly having been placed in its spot recently, and Eggsy pops the tablets in his mouth, washes them down quickly. His shower goes much the same - quick, perfunctory. He scrubs the thin layer of sweat that worked up in the night off and down the drain, dries himself as quickly as possible, brushes his teeth with that damned spare toothbrush. Towel slung low across his hips, he nips back into the bedroom to dress: trackies that he knows Harry hates but won't dare comment on, ever the gentleman, and a threadbare white t-shirt that lives, perpetually, at Harry's house these days. He pads down the stairs, feet bare, and makes his way into the kitchen.
Eggsy stops in the doorway, leans on the jamb, crosses his arms and drinks in the sight before him. Harry looks just as loose and fresh as Eggsy feels, the handle of a pan in one hand, a spatula in the other as he pokes at sausages sizzling away on the hob. There's an ancient radio on the windowsill, soft music crackling through - classic rock, though if Harry tells the story later it'll no doubt be told that it was Tchaikovsky's 5th or something equally, infuriatingly posh. Right now, it's Styx filtering quietly through the grate while Harry bobs his head, hair left to its own devices, curling errantly behind his ears. He's got an apron slung over his dressing gown, humming absently to himself. Eggsy wants, so badly, to amble up to him, slip his arms around that lithe waist, nuzzle a kiss into the spot above the topmost knob of his spine, knowing full well that he'd have to go on tip-toe to reach it in any meaningful manner. Before Eggsy can even weigh whether such a gesture would be welcomed or met with an elbow to his solar plexus, Harry turns and smiles at him.
“Breakfast is just finished, if you'd like to set the table?”
Eggsy grunts in affirmation, and the moment is gone. He shuffles to the cupboard and starts pulling china and cutlery from drawers. He sets the table with all the care that Harry taught him all those months ago, in a 24-hour time period where everything was golden, suspended - the whole future laid out before him, and time enough to make decisions later. Except, now it's later, and Eggsy still feels stagnant, stuck in a rut of Friday nights and Saturday mornings, and he wants so vividly all of it. He doesn't want to wake up in this house on Saturday mornings, have breakfast and then split. He wants to wake up here every day, to come down and tease Harry endlessly over his grapefruit and his paper, adjust his tie for him with a peck on the cheek before they hop in their waiting cab and head to the office. Eggsy puts the last of the table setting down, tweaks the placement of a fork, smooths his hands down his thighs. He steels his shoulders and turns to Harry, still humming along to Journey or whatever is playing now, and clears his throat.
Harry doesn't turn to look at him, just gestures his spatula toward the counter top.
“There's coffee brewed, if you'd like some,” he says towards the sausages, and Eggsy sighs.
“I'm in love with you,” Eggsy replies, casually, as if he'd thanked him for the forethought of caffeine. He watches in stark horror as the easy line of Harry's body tenses very suddenly, knuckles white on the spatula as he pokes aggressively at the sausages. He still doesn't turn to look at Eggsy, and Eggsy can see the way the cords of muscle in his neck stand out, caught in fight or flight mode. Eggsy silently hopes there's a third, secret option, because he's not looking forward to either of those. The silence rolling off of Harry is deafening, cut only by the radio, softly weaving the notes of Queen through the air.
“Well. That's quite - that's quite enough of that,” Harry says, bewilderingly enough, and sets the spatula down on the rest to flick the hob off, before reaching up and doing the same to the radio. Now the silence roars, no longer cut by anything. Eggsy hears himself pull in a ragged breath, once, twice. Harry still won't look at him.
“I know what you're thinking. I'm too young, too naïve, too…it's not because of the job, Harry. It's not because of any of that. It's because you're- do you know you do this thing, when you're absorbed in your paperwork? You chew on the end of your pen, Haz. Like, proper gnaw on it. It doesn't even have to be your pen. I've got three of them on my desk with teeth marks in them.”
Eggsy is rambling now, trying to dig himself out of the hole he's found himself in, and Harry still hasn't looked at him, laser-focused as he is on the sausages that have finally stopped bubbling. His shoulders have relaxed minutely, no longer rounded up by his ears, and Eggsy can't stop now.
“It's not - it don't have to change anything, you know? We can just - we can just keep on an’ nothing has to change. I just thought - it's not every day that someone comes back from the dead and it made me realize and - it don't have to change nothing, I just couldn't keep on without you knowing, is all. You deserve to know that you got someone who cares about you comin’ home from fuckin’ wherever in one piece. I care, Haz.”
Eggsy stops, then, and shuts his mouth for once with a decisive click. Harry shifts, a little, one foot to the other, and Eggsy lets his breath whoosh out of him. He looks down at the table spread, sighs, and finally moves to the cupboard to gather mugs: the horrifying pink one that Daisy had gifted him on his birthday, depicting a pug with a unicorn horn of all things - “It's a pugicorn,” his mother had told him solemnly as Daisy giggled with glee at the look on her brother's face- and Harry's infinitely more demure plain black one. Eggsy has just set them down on the countertop, hand outstretched for the carafe when Harry finally moves, slowly, as though he's worried that he'll spook Eggsy.
“Eggsy, while I'm flattered-” Harry starts, and Eggsy huffs out a laugh. Fight it is. He flattens his hands on the countertop and hangs his head for a moment.
“Haz, save it. Really. Let's just - Let's just eat and forget it, yeah?”
Harry's face screws up at that, lips pursed like he just got done sucking on a lemon.
“Well, I don't think we need to forget it, but my dear boy-”
Eggsy doesn't let it get any further. He doesn't want to hear anything else. He knows what Harry's thinking - it's just misplaced hero worship, Harry is too old, Eggsy is too young, what they do is too dangerous. Eggsy doesn't need to hear it, because he's already speedrun all of it, in a dimly lit office with the low crackle of static whizzing through the speakers of a laptop. He's gone through all of it, and none of it mattered. They've been given a second chance at it, and Eggsy will be damned if he's going to let the little things get in the way of that. He stops Harry with a hand on his chest, firm and unquestionable. Eggsy is going to talk, and Harry is going to listen.
“It don't matter, you get me? None of it. It didn't matter when you was lying dead in that car park or when I was in that bunker. It didn't matter for 10 hours while we was on that plane to come get you. It hasn't mattered for the last twenty Saturdays that I've woken up here and had breakfast with you at that table. None of it matters, Harry. I love you, and not in the way that I love my mum or Daisy or Roxy or even Merlin. I love you in the way that I want to wake up with your ridiculous curly hair in my mouth every morning and ain't nothing you can say that's gonna change that. Okay? So if you don't- if you don't feel the same, that's fine. But if you do, then don't go thinkin’ that any of the rest of it matters, because it don't. It just - it don't.”
Harry doesn't have anything to say to that, it seems. Just stares at Eggsy while his heart thumps under Eggsy's hand, fast and wild, and Eggsy thinks that, surely, he's not reading that wrong, the rabbit-quick thudding under his fingertips that's just another reminder of what he almost lost but didn't, for whatever reason. Harry opens his mouth to speak, shuts it and furrows his brow.
“It don't matter, Haz,” Eggsy says, so quiet he almost can't hear it except for the way it rattles in his skull, shakes his bones just the same as that fateful day in the pub when Harry had laid waste to the troubles in front of them.
“Yes, well. Quite,” Harry finally murmurs, and Eggsy is left perplexed for a moment, because what does that even mean, until he's not confused at all, because one of Harry's impossibly large hands has found its way to Eggsy's hip, fingers toying at the elastic of his trackies, and the other has found its way to the side of Eggsy's neck, his thumb dipping into the hollow behind Eggsy's ear, and Eggsy shivers, full-bodied, as Harry rubs a gentle circle there. He feels adrift, tethered only to those two touches, his hand still planted square on Harry's chest, the thumping still as wild as it was, betraying the calm facade on Harry's face as he leans closer and closer and holy shit, Eggsy thinks, this is happening.
It's just a gentle press of lips, at first, soft and questioning - one last moment for Eggsy to summon his strength behind his hand and push Harry away, but why would he want to, when they slot together so perfectly this way, hips pressed to the counter next to them. Eggsy doesn't push Harry away, wouldn't dare to. Instead, he curls his fingers into the dressing gown, fist tight in the fabric, and reels Harry in closer, presses his mouth more insistently to Harry's, inhales softly through his nose and its coffee and breakfast and Harry that fills his senses. He feels dizzy with it, the slick slant of his mouth under Harry's, the routine of their Saturday morning broken by something new, something fantastic and unbelievable as Harry Hart kissing him in the kitchen, his hands on Eggsy tightening just so when Eggsy traces the edge of his bottom lip with his tongue. Harry's already had his tea - Eggsy can taste it on his tongue, bitter because Harry doesn't take sugar. It's intoxicating and radiant and Eggsy doesn't ever want it to stop, this moment they've carved out and stolen, warm and bright with the sunlight filtering through the window over the sink.
Eggsy is the one to break it, fist loosening in Harry's dressing gown and he falls back on his heels slowly, eyes fluttering open to gaze up at Harry, perfect Harry, who tips forward just slightly, like he wants to chase Eggsy back down. He could get used to this, he thinks, this simple morning snogging over the coffee.
“Darling,” Harry starts, stops, rubs another circle in the tender skin behind Eggsy's ear. Eggsy grins, easy and bright, because yes, Harry.
“Damn right,” he murmurs, turns out of Harry's grip towards the coffee and is successful in retrieving the carafe this time. He pours them liquid sustenance and doctors them the way he knows they both like. Harry is still for a beat, before moving back to the pan, grabbing the spatula and turning toward the table to start putting the food on plates. Eggsy glances over and sees that Harry is smiling to himself, teeth dazzlingly white and Eggsy knows that he's won, because Harry doesn't smile like that for just about anyone, save for Eggsy.
It's a Saturday morning, and Eggsy thinks, quite happily, that life might actually be perfect.