Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Harry leaves a hole in the world when he dies.

At least, that’s how it feels to Eggsy. He barely has time to register the pain of it in the days immediately following Valentine’s attack; Kingsman are being worked too hard to brake for anything but the most pressing of injuries. The beauty of Valentine’s little SIM card trick is that it worked on so many levels – there’s nothing quite like trying to meet your neighbour’s eye in the street a few days after you’d tried to brain them with a biscuit tin at the local coffee morning, and blowing that up on a global scale makes for a mess the likes of which Kingsman hasn’t seen since the Cold War. Every country that can go on the offensive in a serious fuck-off kind of way immediately does, and those that can’t immediately start lobbying for protection from those that can. Merlin brushes the dust off about a dozen old alliances with other agencies, government-mandated or not, and sets them all to work, although it clearly doesn’t sit well with him. Shockingly, Kingsman and MI5 don’t exactly get along during peacetime.

‘Too many egos the size of small continents, by any chance?’ Roxy asks and when Merlin laughs, Eggsy makes an effort to smile. It’s the sixth day after V-Day. They’re sat in Merlin’s office making up a list of Kingsman staff killed in the line of duty; they need all the laughs they can get.

‘Still haven’t heard from Gawain,’ Merlin sighs, running a hand over his head. Eggsy makes eye contact with Roxy, who nods.

‘Might be time to put him on the list, then,’ she says gently.

‘Not until we know for sure,’ Merlin sighs. ‘And that’s not me being sentimental, it’s just – he’s a resourceful lad, if anyone might still turn up after weeks, it’ll be him.’

‘But if he hasn’t made contact by now, if he is still alive, Merlin – surely that indicates that he might have been one of Valentine’s men?’ Roxy says. God, Eggsy’s so grateful she’s here. He doesn’t think he’d have the stomach to raise that with Merlin today.

‘You’re right,’ Merlin says. ‘But there’s still the chance he’s lying unconscious in a ditch somewhere and he’s not a traitor, so,’ he trails off, staring blankly into his empty coffee cup.

‘So we’ll wait a bit longer,’ Eggsy fills in the blank, trying to look encouraging. Merlin nods, then gets an urgent call from the tech team in Brazil over his headset and turns away, already tapping on his laptop.

It’s like that all the time, days broken down into scheduled attempts at recovery. Eggsy flies to twelve different countries in three weeks on a string of black ops missions while Roxy plays the diplomat, hiding the strain behind pretty words and even prettier dresses. Eggsy waves him off when Merlin thanks them for going above and beyond. He assumes it’s different for Roxy but from where he’s standing, nothing feels like too much anymore; his baseline for horror got reset on bloody Kentucky tarmac, and he doesn’t have room for any more negotiation. Several vital parts of him seem to have shut up shop completely, with just enough still working to keep him breathing, talking, functioning like a passable replica of a real boy.

On the twelfth day Roxy catches him on a flying visit to the base before he sets off for Seoul and she leaves for Paris, and hugs him for a bit too long.

‘Hey, Rox,’ he murmurs, stroking the back of her head.

‘What,’ she sniffs into his chest.

‘D’you reckon Merlin used to have hair before he joined Kingsman? Or he was like born bald and he was like this weird bald kid in school? ‘Cause –’

‘I can hear you right now, you know,’ Merlin says loudly over Eggsy’s glasses. ‘If you’re going to joke about me, at least make it an actual joke.’

Roxy’s muffling her laughs into the material of Eggsy’s jacket, so he counts it as a win.

He powers through the missions put in front of him and helps Merlin out whenever he’s back at base, and sometimes when he has a few hours free he goes over to his mum’s and plays with Daisy, who’s just starting to talk in actual toddler sentences, although she still refers to him mostly as ‘Egg’. He hasn’t bothered looking for a place of his own, reasoning that he’s not been in the country enough to bother about it yet, and the only time it’s ever come up his mum looked so conflicted he started to worry about her blood pressure. That’s another inspired side effect of Valentine’s whole operation that none of them had seen coming; is it better or worse to have your loved ones close, knowing from first-hand experience what you’d be capable of doing to them if someone twisted your brain chemistry just right?

Eggsy pushes that particular mindfuck right out of his head and focuses on reeling from one day to the next without falling down. He feels like he’s made up of nothing but directionless momentum, winding himself tighter with every mission and terrified of running out of fuel. He doesn’t sleep for days at a time and when he does his dreams are all Harry, cruel and sweet and short like a handful of holiday snapshots thrown down on a kitchen table – Harry laughing at his bad manners, smiling at him over a whiskey glass, Harry’s hands moving as he fights, a perfect clockwork dance. Sometimes when Eggsy wakes up he lies to himself about Harry being on holiday or a long undercover mission and it’s easier, for the space of a breath, to bear his absence. He thinks about how Harry would be in the sun, sleeves rolled up, laughing, the tip of his nose peeling with sunburn.

‘How are you getting on, Eggsy?’ Merlin asks on the eighteenth day, and Eggsy hears the question underneath it. He’s asking about Harry in the way that he does about a hundred times a day, looking over to check on Eggsy, squeezing his shoulder in solidarity when Eggsy can’t dodge it anymore and finally buckles up to write the report on what happened with Arthur. He doesn’t really need to ask but he does anyway. Eggsy gets the feeling Merlin doesn’t have a lot of people left to lose.

‘Golden, Merlin,’ he smiles and it probably doesn’t even look fake. He’s always been a good liar when he puts his mind to it and he doesn’t want Merlin to worry, the poor bloke’s got enough on his plate as it is. What would he even say? He was in Pamplona this morning and now he’s in London, and soon he’ll be in Oslo or Amsterdam or Monaco, shooting bad guys, trying to stop civilisation collapsing, with a hole in his chest big enough to put a fist through. He could be anywhere in the world, and when he gets back Harry will still be gone.

---

It happens on a Thursday, three months and sixteen days after Valentine’s attack.

Eggsy comes into work with dark circles under his eyes. Daisy’s teething again and he’d volunteered to stay up soothing her while his mum finally got some bloody sleep, and got all of about two hours of it himself for his trouble. He buttoned his shirt up wrong three times this morning, his hair’s a fucking mess, and he hasn’t had any coffee yet. He is sleeping for at least six hours tonight if he has to kill a man to do it.

The moment he sees Merlin he can tell something’s gone on – for a spy, Merlin is genuinely crap at keeping his feelings off his face.

‘What,’ he says. His heart’s already pounding, always hovering on the knife-edge of panic these days. His mind darts to Roxy, supposed to get back from a surveillance operation in Slovakia this morning. ‘What’s wrong, what –’

‘Eggsy,’ Merlin starts and then looks like he doesn’t know what to say – Merlin, whose job it’s been to deliver bad news for months, so how fucking bad can this possibly be?

‘Merlin,’ he says urgently, ‘just fucking tell me what –’

‘Harry’s alive,’ Merlin says, and the bottom drops out of Eggsy’s stomach.

‘What,’ he says, then stops. ‘Harry – what.’ Merlin is suddenly a lot closer and trying to hand him a bottle of water. Eggsy’s fingers mechanically close around it. His voice cracks. ‘When did you –’

‘I found him in Cuba, in one of the safe houses,’ Merlin says. Eggsy looks down at the water bottle, then back up at Merlin.

‘What,’ he says again, and the corner of Merlin’s mouth twitches like he’s trying hard not to smile. Eggsy registers dimly that he looks brighter, more animated, almost close to mirth again after so long in the dark, because Harry’s – Harry’s alive.

Alive. The word reverberates in Eggsy’s head until it feels meaningless, incomprehensible.

‘The bastard survived the gunshot, Eggsy. He woke up in a hospital in Kentucky with little memory of what went on at the church, then managed to get himself out of the country and sequestered in the safe house. God only knows what kind of favours he had to call in. I wouldn’t even have known he was there if I hadn’t been running a routine equipment check on the CCTV and found out he’d disabled it months ago.’

‘But why didn’t he – did you know? Did you know he was alive, all this time?’ He blurts, heart hammering. It doesn’t make sense – Merlin looks as if he’s still ticking it over mentally himself, adjusting to this new world that still has Harry in it – but no one gets this far into Kingsman without being a bloody good actor, and back when they were organising Harry’s funeral it had been Merlin’s assumption that Valentine had taken care of Harry’s body that led to them burying an empty coffin. Eggsy still visits the grave sometimes. He was there last weekend, putting down a fresh bunch of lilies and scraping the first suggestions of moss from the headstone.

‘I found out about half an hour ago, but thanks for the vote of confidence,’ Merlin says, running a hand over his head. His eyes still have that faraway, wondering look. ‘As for him – well, he found out about the situation with Chester pretty fast when Gawain turned up and tried to kill him. Roxy was right, as it turns out,’ he shrugs wearily, rubbing his temples. ‘Gawain was playing both sides – he knew about Chester and Valentine but held off on getting the chip. He could be a bit funny about blood,’ Merlin says, and goes silent for a long moment, clearly swallowing something painful before he clears his throat and finishes, ‘And obviously once Harry realised there was corruption in the ranks, he decided to stay put until he could figure out who was still loyal.’

Eggsy’s stomach swoops. Harry thought Eggsy might not be loyal, he – he didn’t want Eggsy to know he was alive.

Harry’s alive.

‘So what, he’s,’ Eggsy says, words rasping out, ‘he’s on his way here? He’s coming here now?’

‘He’ll be here within the next few hours, yes,’ Merlin says, watching him. ‘Lad, do you need to sit down?’

‘I’m not a fucking invalid, Merlin,’ Eggsy snaps, then runs a hand over his face. ‘Sorry. Sorry. I can’t – I don’t understand why he wouldn’t have said, I don’t.’

‘Well,’ Merlin hesitates, still eyeing him, ‘I’ve got a fair few questions myself. I’m sure he can explain it to us in a bit more detail when he gets here.’

When Harry gets here. In a few hours. After having let Eggsy think he’s dead for months.

Eggsy swallows. The sick roiling feeling in his gut is shifting, morphing from shock into something infinitely more dangerous. He feels lighter than he has in months, almost dizzy with rage.

‘Come and get me when he gets here then,’ Eggsy says, avoiding Merlin’s eyes as he sets the water down gently on his desk. ‘I’ll be in the gym.’

---

He tries for hours to shift the tension bunched at the top of his spine, trying to make his shoulders drop, whaling away on the punching bag until he can barely see from the sweat dripping into his eyes.

Harry’s alive. Maybe Eggsy spent too long telling himself that when he knew it was a lie, but he can’t believe it now, can’t even look directly at the thought. He flicks frantically through the last few months instead with the benefit of this bright new lens, looking for any signs he might have overlooked of Harry trying to get in contact – missed calls or unrecognised numbers, a stray blank postcard, a fucking carrier pigeon – but there’s nothing. Harry didn’t call, didn’t write, didn’t try and get in contact. He had been real, alive, moving around in the world for every second of Eggsy’s grief. What was Harry doing when they were compiling Merlin’s list of the dead? Was he sleeping? Was he awake, thinking about the mess he’d left behind him? What was he doing when Eggsy was standing in front of his empty grave, numb? Did he have friends in Cuba, people he could trust? Did he treat it like a fucking holiday? Was he still hurt? Is he still hurt now? Did he – did he know what it must be doing to Eggsy, all this time, to think him dead?

He punches the bag so hard it splits and just stands there, shaking, while the sand spills out over the floor. He’d forgotten what it was like to be this angry at someone you loved.

He doesn’t notice Merlin until he’s stood basically close enough to count the sweat drops on Eggsy’s skin, and then he jumps a fucking mile.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he says, dropping his head into his hands for a moment.

‘Harry’s just arrived,’ Merlin says, holding his clipboard to his chest like a shield.

‘Yeah, I got that, thanks,’ Eggsy says, and starts unwrapping his hands as he takes a deep breath and heads towards the door.

‘Maybe you should take a moment before you –’

‘No,’ he says loudly, grabbing a vest from his bag and pulling it on as he heads out the door.

‘He’s in the sick bay getting checked over,’ Merlin calls after him, and Eggsy can’t help it, starts to run.

---

He bangs through the double doors to the sick bay. Harry’s sat there on the bed, blood pressure cuff around his arm, smiling at the nurse tending to him like he’s just told a joke, before he sees Eggsy and the expression on his face changes entirely.

Eggsy just stands there for a moment, eyes darting to catalogue physical changes, registering the new scar that decorates Harry’s left eyebrow with a dull thud of recognition. He’s lived inside the memory of that moment for so long it rushes back to him with no struggle at all – Valentine’s grin, plastic glasses frame cracking as the bullet hit, sharp static.

‘Eggsy,’ Harry says, the weighted way only Harry has ever said his name, and it knocks the words loose from Eggsy’s throat.

‘I cannot fucking believe you,’ he says. He sounds almost breathless. Everything feels blurry, like just seeing Harry is enough to throw every other sense off-kilter. The fluorescent lights are pressing down on him, distant beep of a heart monitor worming its way into his ear.

He steps closer until he’s close enough to reach out and touch. He vaguely registers the nurse stepping away at Harry’s raised hand and the distant closing of a door. She’s left the blood pressure cuff on Harry’s arm though, which means Eggsy can still use it to strangle him if he runs out of things to shout.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you? I cannot fucking believe you let us think you was dead for three fucking months, Harry, I, how did you – did you know we –’ he stops, a thousand endings to that sentence climbing up his throat. He can’t stop talking, he shouldn’t stop or he’ll give Harry an opening and Harry will run with it. He’ll make everything sound so simple and clear, and it’ll be the most beautifully done up lie Eggsy’s ever heard but that won’t make it any more true.

‘Christ, it’s good to see you,’ Harry says, bringing a hand up to Eggsy’s face, thumb on his jawline, fingers brushing along his pulse point, and Eggsy is shocked into letting him have it for a moment, pinned under Harry’s touch.

Then he wrenches himself away and runs a hand over his face, not surprised to feel it come away wet. He stares at the ground for a moment.

‘Eggsy –’

‘Oh no,’ he says, looking up, and his voice is hoarse but he doesn’t give a single shit. ‘No you fucking don’t, Harry. You’re not getting away with it that fucking easy, you got some explaining to do.’ He swallows hard. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell anyone you were still alive?’

Harry shifts in his seat and looks about a tenth as repentant as he should do. ‘As I’m sure Merlin’s already explained, I couldn’t be certain who within Kingsman might have defected to Valentine’s cause, and I was still very –’

‘You thought I might have gone over?’ Eggsy asks, hating the way his voice wavers, eyes catching on Harry’s scar so he doesn’t have to look him in the eye for the answer. ‘There wasn’t even any fucking time for that, Harry, I –’

‘Not you, Eggsy, but –’ Harry stands abruptly and starts unfastening the blood pressure cuff with fast, economical movements. ‘Look, I’m afraid I really don’t have time to discuss this at present, I’m due for a de-briefing –’

‘You can’t just leave, we’re –’

‘Eggsy,’ Harry interrupts heavily, ‘I am still rather weak, as you can see. I’d rather not have to undergo two interrogations in one day.’

‘Tough shit,’ Eggsy says, scowling. ‘I reckon they’d let you off on de-briefing if you asked nicely. You could get out of just about anything right now, you’re like the fucking prodigal son.’

Harry just watches him warily.

‘You’re just scarpering because you got no excuses left,’ Eggsy says. He waits for Harry to tell him he’s wrong, but he can already see by the way Harry’s jaw is tightening that he’s not going to. ‘You could have let me know, and you didn’t. You let me go through that, three months grieving for you, because what? Felt like testing my loyalty a bit further, yeah?’

Harry doesn’t say anything. He just stares at Eggsy, cuff hanging forgotten in his hand, something hard shifting behind his eyes.

‘Guess it worked,’ Eggsy smiles bitterly. ‘They got me to take Galahad, Harry, and you weren’t even fucking dead,’ he says, his voice finally breaking, and he has to bury his face in his hands for a moment and breathe in and out deeply, feeling suddenly, violently sick.

‘Eggsy,’ Harry says, softening, and Eggsy can’t fucking hack that voice, woven into the worst of his nightmares, the ones where he wakes up feeling safe and loved and then remembers all over again. He throws himself back and bolts for it, shoving through the doors. Harry doesn’t call after him.

---

Roxy finds him two hours later, five shots and three pints down in The Black Prince, doggedly knocking back the end of another just as she walks through the door, tight expression on her face. He frowns when he sees her. Honest to God, he can’t handle being in another fight today, and every time Rox makes an entrance like that, she’s usually gunning for one.

‘What,’ he says tonelessly when she sits down opposite him, critical stare running over the collection of empty glasses littering the table.

‘Oh, Eggsy,’ she says, and she sounds so fucking sorry that Eggsy has to swallow hard and look away.

‘Don’t, Rox, I’m fine, I just –’

‘Clearly,’ she says, eyeing him. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No,’ Eggsy mumbles, drawing a star in the condensation on his empty glass.

‘Thank God, I had no fucking clue what to say,’ she says. Eggsy tries to laugh, but it comes out a bit more like a sob and he can’t do that here, which is one of the reasons he came, so he scrubs a hand over his face and when he looks up again Roxy’s taken hold of his other hand across the table, her face uncertain.

‘What do you want to do then?’

‘I wanna get drunk,’ he says. ‘So drunk, Rox. Like, absolutely fucking plastered.’

‘We can do that,’ she nods, ‘we can definitely do that.’ She hesitates. Eggsy waves her on and she rolls her eyes but concedes. ‘Will it really make you feel better, though?’

‘I don’t think I can feel worse,’ he says, and he knows it comes out too honest from the way Roxy blinks a bit and squeezes his hand.

Without his permission Eggsy’s brain momentarily flashes back to that first jarring glimpse of Harry sitting still for the nurse. Harry was so good at looking calm, so composed you wouldn’t even recognise the banked threat until he swung for you. Eggsy had seen it for the first time outside the police station, Harry propping himself against the wall like he owned it, the glint in his eye at Eggsy’s rudeness. Eggsy could have told him for nothing how that only made him want to taunt Harry more, watch him get riled up with the challenge.

‘How was Slovakia,’ he blurts. Roxy’s watching him closely and he needs to make that stop. He feels edgy with drink, like if anyone is nice to him right now he might shatter into a million bits.

‘Full of twats,’ she says and leans back against the seat, a little tension flowing out of her. She lets go of his hand to rummage in her bag. ‘Look, can’t even keep hold of their wallets.’ She throws a couple onto the table, coins spilling out of one and circling, gleaming in the light. He spots a few pounds among the currency he doesn’t recognise.

‘Rox,’ he says, eyebrows raising, sitting up a little straighter in his seat. This is good, this is easy, he can do this – just be one of the lads again for a while. So long as she doesn’t ask him about Harry. ‘You been practising?’

‘Got a bit bored,’ she admits. ‘Plus this one tried to feel me up at the airport. Come on, I’ll get the next one on –’ she checks the ID of the closest wallet ‘– Lukas here, and then can we go somewhere that doesn’t smell like wet dog?’

‘You’re such a snob,’ Eggsy says, and laughs when she gives him a two-fingered salute.

---

‘What I still don’t get,’ Roxy ponders three hours later as they’re sat absolutely rat-arsed on the curb outside a club waiting for their taxi to arrive, Eggsy with his head jammed between his knees trying not to be sick, ‘is why he didn’t contact you.’

‘Yeah,’ Eggsy says, trying to take deep, even breaths. Roxy pats his knee. She gets this kind of dreamy-eyed look on when she’s drunk and it’s really sweet but he’s never wanted to shove a sock in anyone’s mouth more. He doesn’t feel angry anymore, just lost. He keeps thinking about Harry’s house. It’s been empty for months because no one could bear to discuss what they were going to do with it, so he’d go there sometimes just to sit, just to be around Harry’s things. Once when he’d got back from a mission gone spectacularly, wrenchingly wrong and he couldn’t make himself go home yet, he’d slept over. He hadn’t been able to go into the master bedroom so he’d slept in the same bed he’d stayed in before. When he woke in the morning he’d had a nightmarish Technicolor flashback to having breakfast with Harry, whose mask of decorum had broken into a wide grin when Eggsy had bolted his food in about five minutes and started asking questions about honeypot missions.

‘Because you were obviously, you know, special to each other,’ Roxy continues, jarring him out of the memory, and Eggsy groans in horror.

‘Rox, don’t, it’s not – wasn’t like that anyway –’

‘It was,’ she scoffs.

‘Alright then, not for him,’ Eggsy says.

Roxy starts to say something else but she must notice how the line of Eggsy’s shoulders has gone rigid and tense, because after a moment she closes her mouth and starts rubbing circles into his back instead, the warm pressure of her hand easing the chill of the wind.

The taxi doesn’t come for another twenty minutes and he falls asleep on Roxy’s shoulder, but when he wakes next morning there’s a box of paracetamol and a glass of water on his bedside table and a text on his phone that says don’t forget we’re training the new recruits in the morning :)))))

He rolls over and groans into his pillow.

---

He’s watching the new recruits taking their seventh lap of the jogging track a few hours later, clutching the travel mug full of coffee Merlin had wordlessly passed him on his way outside. If there was ever a day to call in sick it would have been this one, but one unfortunate side effect of Kingsman losing so many agents is that Merlin’s getting the newbies in on training supervision these days, which is only ever any fun when the whole sorry lot of them are about to get dumped in a river in the middle of Yorkshire without a map or a phone. Even Eggsy and Rox don’t get quite as much enjoyment out of this as Merlin though, who commentates gleefully on the recruits’ progress like he’s watching Wimbledon.

Eggsy’s too busy squinting to see if that blur in the distance is a fight breaking out to notice Harry appearing next to him without warning.

‘Jesus,’ he says, nearly spilling coffee all over his jacket.

‘I do apologise,’ Harry says, looking at him sideways. Eggsy thinks this is probably a lie, but then he doesn’t know what Harry sounds like when he’s actually sorry about something, so he could be wrong.

He takes a sip of his coffee and stares straight ahead. He’s been successfully distracting himself from this fucking nightmare situation all morning and he’s not ready to stop now.

‘What do you want?’ he says.

‘I was wondering if we could have a chat.’ Harry hesitates. ‘We didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation yesterday.’

‘And whose fault was that,’ Eggsy says, not really a question. He’s surprised when Harry laughs and he looks around on pure reflex, just like he had during training every time Harry stopped by, at the upturned corners of Harry’s mouth, barely a smile at all.

The absolutely stunning thing is, if Eggsy wasn’t so angry, if it hadn’t come about like this – if Harry hadn’t been lying to him, hiding from him for months – the thing is, even after all that, the chance to see Harry smile again is still a gift of an impossible calibre. Just for a moment, Eggsy marvels in it: he lets himself luxuriate in Harry standing next to him, the plain indomitable fact of him, hands stuck in his pockets and cheeks flushed with the cold wind, living proof that Eggsy can finally relinquish the cold stone of grief in his chest. 

‘I am sorry, you know. For the way I behaved yesterday,’ Harry says, and Eggsy realises they’re staring at each other. He would have given anything he could steal or borrow to see Harry looking at him like that a few months ago. ‘And for not getting in contact sooner. I – I never meant to cause you any pain.’

Eggsy is too incredulous to even laugh. It’s not really funny anyway.

‘We had a funeral,’ he says instead. ‘Loads of people came. It wasn’t just me you hurt.’

There’s a beat while Harry stares down at his shoes. Eggsy clenches a hand into a fist. He wonders how many times Harry’s actually had to hold himself accountable for ridiculous spy shit like this, but then Harry never married, never had any children. Maybe he’s never had to make reparations, which is why it’s so difficult for him now. Maybe even just coming here, seeking Eggsy out, is Harry’s way of trying to give him something in recompense for what he’s done.

That doesn’t mean Eggsy has to accept it.

‘I know that,’ Harry says after a moment. ‘I would never have kept it from any of you, Eggsy, if I thought – I didn’t think there was any other way.’ The line of his mouth is thin and sad. The pleading in his voice reaches Eggsy as if from very far away.

Eggsy stays silent for a long moment.

‘Merlin asked me to give a eulogy,’ he says eventually, and hears Harry’s harsh intake of breath. ‘And I spent so long trying to figure out what to say about you, writing it out and throwing it away. There was so much we hadn’t ever done or talked about, but I wanted to, Harry, I wanted –’

Harry raises a hand, as if to reach out to him, but then drops it, his face haggard. Eggsy watches him, jaw tight. He has no idea what he’d do if Harry put a hand on him now.

‘I kept thinking about how you’d said –’ he coughs out a hoarse laugh ‘– you’d said you’d be right back, basically, which everyone who’s ever watched a film knows is a fucking rookie mistake, Harry, and – then you weren’t right back at all, obviously, you were fucking dead, and I couldn’t, I had to back out, I –’

‘Eggsy, I had no idea, Merlin didn’t –’

‘No, you don’t have any idea, because you weren’t fucking here!’ he bursts out.‘And you don’t just get to swan in after three months of everything going to shit and fucking decide that I have to forgive you because I  don’t fucking owe you anything, Harry, not anymore.’

Harry stares at him and Eggsy has to swallow against the pang of guilt in his throat but he doesn’t take it back. He’s almost savagely glad to have had an effect; to finally see the great Harry Hart struck dumb.

‘I got work to do,’ he says, turning his eyes back to the recruits, numbly tracking their course. He doesn’t even flinch when Harry leaves without another word, doesn’t even blink.

---

Harry sends him a message nearly a week after he comes back, addressing him as Galahad, and asking him to meet Harry in the conference room as soon as he returns from his current mission.

‘Do I have to?’ he asks Roxy, because he’d already asked Merlin and the conversation didn’t go to his liking. ‘He’s not my boss yet, is he?’

‘Technically no, but everyone knows he’s going to be the next Arthur, so it might be wise not to fuck it up before Harry actually starts signing your payslips.’ She squints down the scope of her rifle and sighs in exasperation. ‘She’s moved again, can you try from your angle? I still think you’re wrong about Harry, anyway.’

‘Nah, there’s like five people in the way over this end. And I’m not wrong. And I don’t –’

‘– don’t want to talk about it, yes, I am aware, and yet! Look which one of us brought Harry up. Again.’

Eggsy shifts uncomfortably on his elbows and conspicuously doesn’t say anything. There’s a triumphant sound from Roxy’s end.

‘Got her! Right, last one back to the plane gets to tell Merlin we used up all the grenades.’ Eggsy rolls his eyes. ‘And all I’m saying is, alright, maybe he did fuck up really quite monumentally but also, he probably didn’t know his arse from his elbow for the first month of it. He had just been shot in the head.’

‘And the other two months?’ Eggsy says quietly, not moving from his spot just yet. The grass is soft here, the breeze cool on his heated skin. The constant burn of his fury doesn’t seem quite as urgent.

‘You’ll need to ask him about those,’ she says. ‘My armchair psychology only extends so far, you know.’

Eggsy smiles back unwillingly, even though she can’t see.

---

‘Arthur,’ he greets Harry coolly as soon as he gets through the door and sits down, back straight and hands clasped in his lap. Harry is sat at the head of the table and Eggsy sits on his right, in the chair where he killed Chester, hoping Harry knows all about that and it makes him bloody uncomfortable.

‘No need to stand on ceremony, Eggsy, I’ve not even been officially appointed yet,’ Harry says, and Eggsy isn’t looking at him but he knows Harry is smiling from the way it curves his words.

‘Might as well get used to it,’ Eggsy says briskly. ‘What did you want to discuss?’ His voice has gone hard and crystal like the posh tone he uses on missions, his body tightening up against Harry without his permission.

Harry shifts in his chair for a moment and doesn’t say anything. Eggsy still doesn’t look. He can play silent treatment all fucking day if Harry wants to.

Harry sighs. ‘I finally got round to reading your account of Chester’s demise.’

Eggsy stills, thrown a little off his guard. Well, he wanted Harry to know. He hopes he’s not about to be told what a good job he did though, it’s a bit late for a pat on the head. Nothing felt good that day anyway, every moment after seeing Harry get shot like a slow wade through tar, racing a realisation he couldn’t overtake.

‘I had no idea he was so far gone. Or that he would make an attempt on your life even after you were no longer a candidate.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Eggsy says, clenching his hands around his knees, wrinkling the fabric, trying not to give Harry anything. ‘Reverting to type just like me, I s’pose.’

Harry just fixes him with a level look and Eggsy stares back, unrepentant. Harry sighs.

‘Alright, well if you will be glib – I wanted to ask you about your statement. Every other line you’ve printed exactly as it happened, or so I assume. But when Chester asked you to join him, you haven’t specified your response, only that you refused. I wondered if you might enlighten me. I wouldn’t normally be so finicky, but this report has to go before a rather more, ah – difficult to please – board of directors than I, I’m afraid.’

Eggsy goes still. He didn’t write that part down, not exactly. He’d written the rest of it up in a sharp caffeinated binge, remembered every line of dialogue like it was a movie after all, but he couldn’t get that bit to stay on the page, kept deleting it every time, I’d rather be with Harry, thanks, God, they’d think he had a death wish. Better he kept that one locked up tight with the rest of the nightmares.

‘Why do you need to know?’ he hedges, trying to calm the manic beat of his pulse.

‘The passing of Arthur can’t go unacknowledged, nor uninvestigated, especially when it occurs at the hand of another agent. I’m sorry, Eggsy, but I must ask you to be candid with me.’

‘Is that why you asked to meet me here?’ Eggsy asks, heart twisting at the thought. ‘Trying to jog my memory?’

‘My office is being renovated before I take on the role of Arthur,’ Harry says. Eggsy can feel his eyes running over him cautiously. ‘And I thought it suitably private. We can remove to one of the other offices if you’d prefer.’

Eggsy stays silent.

‘I apologise if it’s making you uncomfortable, Eggsy. Are you quite –’

‘I said,’ Eggsy says slowly, ‘I’d rather be with Harry, thanks.’

There’s a pause.

‘What,’ Harry says in a blank voice.

‘That’s what I said, when he asked me to join him. Do you want me to write it down for you? Or we could re-enact it, we’re even sat in the right places.’

Harry doesn’t say anything. He looks like he’s about to be ill. They stare at each other, tension stretching out between them like unspooling piano wire.

‘Eggsy, I –’

‘I know, I know, I’ve heard it, remember? You’re sorry, I know you are.’ He slumps a little in his chair, hands balling into fists out of reflex. It’s not like trying to keep his dignity intact has worked particularly well so far. All he needs now is to be back in the fucking tartan onesie for this conversation.

‘Well, then thank you for telling me,’ Harry says, his voice raw. Eggsy waves a hand irritably. He doesn’t know what panel of judges Harry has to go before to sort this all out but they better appreciate what he’s fucking brought to the table. He feels like he’s been punched.

‘Even if you won’t take any more apologies, then you must let me say one thing,’ Harry says, and then he actually waits for Eggsy to nod before he continues, for fuck’s sake, ‘I want you to know I was remiss in what I said to you before I left for Kentucky, Eggsy. I should never have –’

This is one too many for Eggsy. He stands up fast, legs of the chair scraping along the floor.

‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Got it. Anything else you need?’

Harry shakes his head, mouth a thin pale line. Eggsy gets the fuck out of there like he’s fleeing the scene of a crime.

---

Harry’s due to be officially sworn in as Arthur his third Tuesday back in the land of the living, literally about ten minutes after he’s cleared by an agency mandated psychiatrist, which demonstrates the kind of breath-taking lack of basic caution that Eggsy should really expect from Kingsman by now.

‘He’s not fit for field duty anymore,’ Merlin says bluntly. ‘He’s the most experienced. Nobody else wants it. He can’t possibly do a worse job than the previous Arthur. How many reasons do you want?’

Eggsy doesn’t want any; he just doesn’t want to have to go to the ceremony. He hasn’t spoken to Harry since the disastrous meeting in the conference room. He was on his way to see Merlin the other day and caught Harry laughing at something Roxy said, his expression clear and unguarded, fluorescent light glinting off his perfectly combed hair, and had to duck into an alcove to calm himself down before he could walk past them without shoving Harry into a wall. If someone had told Eggsy three months ago that he’d spend the first fortnight of Harry Hart’s return avoiding him like the plague, Eggsy would have laughed. Well, he probably would have punched them first, then laughed, all while crying.

‘No can do, you have to be there to witness,’ Merlin says, not even trying to sound particularly sympathetic. ‘There isn’t a sick note in the world that could suffice, so don’t bother trying.’

Eggsy shifts on the balls of his feet for a moment, trying to shove the question into the box in his mind where all his thoughts of Harry go, but he can’t quite manage it. He knows this feeling, and knows it well, learned it from an early age: just because he’s still angry, can’t see Harry without his hands clenching into fists, doesn’t mean he doesn’t want Harry safe and whole and in the world for Eggsy to be mad at. It’d all be for nothing if Harry’s – if Harry isn’t alright now.

‘Spit it out,’ Merlin says, not looking away from the screen of his computer.

‘Why isn’t he fit for field duty anymore? What’s up with him?’ he asks, struggling not to add ‘don’t tell him I asked’ mostly on the basis that Merlin would probably do the exact opposite out of spite.

‘That’s confidential,’ Merlin says.

‘Who am I gonna tell?’

‘Roxy.’

‘Well yeah, but she don’t count, she’s like fuckin Fort Knox – and anyway, since when do you give a shit about rules, Mr ‘Did you see me steering that quad bike with my feet’?’

‘That was once, and I was just letting off steam,’ Merlin says, taking a sip of tea.

Eggsy fidgets some more, trying to make his voice sound tight and unhappy on the off chance Merlin’s feeling particularly maternal today. It doesn’t take much effort. ‘Shouldn’t someone else be taking Arthur though? Not very safe, is it, if Harry’s still sick? He looked alright when I saw him. Is it his eye or like –’

Merlin sighs and gives up the pretence of actually paying attention to anything on his screen, swinging round in his chair to look at Eggsy. He’s fiddling with a pen lid, presumably not from one of the poisonous ones.

‘For someone who professes daily not to care if Harry’s head gets blown off, you’re awfully curious about his health.’

Eggsy’s jaw tightens. He’s fallen into parade rest without realising it so he lets his arms hang loose, tucks his hands into his pockets, tries not to meet Merlin’s knowing gaze. ‘Not good for Kingsman if the head of the table’s off his rocker, is it?’

‘How conscientious of you to be so concerned for the agency’s welfare,’ Merlin says. ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to know Harry is just as sane as he’s ever been.’

‘And his eye and that?’ Eggsy asks, not missing the way Merlin dodged the question but willing to let it go. Nobody’s sane at Kingsman, not really; ‘lunacy’ falls just under ‘wilful lack of self-preservation’ in the job description.

‘He’s fine, Eggsy. Well, as fine as he could be, under the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances?’

‘The church, Eggsy?’ Merlin prompts with a glare. ‘Kentucky? Minor massacre? Ringing any bells at all?’

Eggsy swallows, remembering how Harry’s voice had sounded when he mentioned Kentucky. ‘But he knows that was Valentine and everything, doesn’t he?’

‘In theory.’ Merlin sighs. ‘Can’t say he’s not been told, but whether he’s internalised it is another matter.’

‘So he’s not fit for field duty because he feels guilty?’ He rolls the thought around in his mind, trying to fit it around the image he has of Harry from before he came back, blithely beating Dean’s goons to a pulp, fearless and assured and ruthlessly pragmatic.  

Merlin rubs his temples. ‘Ask him yourself, Eggsy. I’m sure he’d be willing to explain.’
Eggsy snorts.

‘God,’ Merlin says. ‘Alright. I don’t care, obviously, but you might want to rethink that oversized grudge you’re lugging around. Did it occur to you that Harry might not have wanted you to see him after he remembered what happened in the church?’

‘It don’t make no mind to me what he did, I –’

‘Well, obviously I know that, but just think about it from his perspective for a moment – it took him months to gain back the sight in his right eye, quite a painful process if truth be told, he was alone for every moment of it, he was forced to terminate a rogue agent shortly after arriving in Cuba, and the last thing he remembered doing was completely losing control over his own body and slaughtering dozens of people for no good reason.’

Merlin lets that sink in for a moment. Eggsy swallows and has to drop his gaze, and Merlin sounds much too satisfied when he speaks.

‘And my work here is done.’ He swivels back round to the screen. ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on your way out.’

---

Despite what Merlin might think, it’s not as simple as all that. Eggsy can’t just lurch back in time to how he felt when he first knew Harry, like he was pressing his whole heart into Harry’s hands every time they spoke. He needs something bigger than a simple apology to trust Harry again, and if Merlin is right and Harry couldn’t hack the idea of Eggsy rejecting him after what he did in Kentucky, then they got more work to do than even Eggsy knew. No way he’s letting Harry go around thinking he can make those decisions for the both of them; Eggsy has a lot of faults, but no one’s ever accused him of being a pushover.

He goes to Harry’s swearing in, wariness hanging around his eyes. He sits bolt upright the entire time with every intention of not meeting Harry’s gaze because he’s trying, at least, not to let this affect their work more than it has to. But this is the first time they’ve been in the same room together since Harry asked him about Chester and Eggsy’s still ticking over everything Merlin said and his gaze keeps drifting against his will, especially once he notices everyone else is staring at Harry too. It’s like being handed an agency-mandated excuse to do the same, one he can’t make himself ignore.

Eggsy lets himself look, registering Harry’s surprise before he wrenches his attention back to the contract in front of him. He finally lets himself study the way Harry looks now, sat up with his back unbowed under the weight of leadership, the scar tissue scattered across his brow, hair threaded with a little more silver. There are bags under his eyes but he’s still so beautiful it makes the nerves in Eggsy’s hands ache.

Eggsy doesn’t even notice the bulk of the ceremony passing until Bedivere stands on his foot under the table and pointedly shoves the contract into his hand when Eggsy glares at him. He skims the document but barely takes anything in; it’s all legal gibberish anyway, and it doesn’t seem half as urgent as an in-depth study of Harry’s broad shoulders.

Eggsy swallows and scrawls his signature numbly. He needs to get out of here; never mind not trusting Harry, he can’t trust himself.

Harry snags him just as everyone else is milling about and blocking the door, hand catching on the bend on his elbow. Harry just looks at him, opening his mouth like he’s about to say something before Eggsy can get any words out.

‘Not yet,’ Eggsy blurts, which isn’t really what he meant to say but at least the tone is one up on their last interaction. His stomach lurches at Harry’s proximity; he can feel Harry’s touch like a brand and it’s throwing him right back to Harry’s hand on his jaw in the hospital room, soft against the throb of his pulse. He used to dream about Harry’s hands on him all the time, woke up most mornings aching for the hot press of Harry against his back, used to get distracted and tetchy thinking about the wrap of Harry’s fingers around his wrist, holding him in place.

He tried to – not think about it. When Harry was dead.

‘Not yet?’ Harry repeats, brow furrowing. Eggsy looks around at the few stragglers eyeing them and scowls, trying to project fuck off vibes. Roxy, absolute gem that she is, clears her throat and starts basically shepherding people out, making loud comments about whose turn it is to inventory Fitting Room 3, which gets them all moving. Eggsy sends a grateful smile her way and turns back to Harry.

‘I need more time. I mean, I’m still fucking mad at you,’ he clarifies, trying not to let the words tumble out too fast. ‘But we could talk, yeah, just – not yet, I need –’

‘More time,’ Harry says, and Eggsy nods. Harry still hasn’t let go of his arm. ‘But you’re alright? You’re – you’re getting on with everything alright?

‘Yeah,’ he says. Harry’s eyes are running over his face over and over, like he’s trying to commit it to memory. ‘Look, I’ve gotta go, I promised I’d meet Jamal and Ryan for a drink and it’s already nearly seven.’

‘Of course,’ Harry says, and releases his arm immediately. Eggsy hovers for another moment, fighting the impulse to grab Harry back, needle him into getting into Eggsy’s space. His skin feels too tight; his hands are shaking.

He swallows it down and gives Harry one last look before he slips through the door, closing it with a quiet click.

Chapter Text

Eggsy gets more time away than he anticipates. He’s sent off on an urgent mission the next day and gone for nearly a month trying to stop the assassination of a Russian diplomat and thereby avert the beginning of World War 3.

It would have been fine with just the one assassin; Eggsy can deal with a few poison tipped darts with his hands tied behind his back. What he’s not prepared for is the entourage – the four other foreign agents on their tail just looking for the opportunity to stick the knife in, poison the room service, dart out from behind the fucking curtain and all the rest. It’s like being in a fucking Monty Python sketch, except none of the assassins ever jump up again shouting ‘Just a flesh wound!’ when he dismembers them. He’s never had to foil so many attempts at the same time and it really fucking messes with his plans to get Nikolai to the safe house when a Japanese agent blows up their snowmobiles and tries to set them on fire.

‘What the fuck did you do?’ he screams, hanging onto the edge of their hotel room balcony with shaking hands, trying to muscle the strength to swing himself back over. ‘And for fuck’s sake get under the fucking bed, I can’t save your arse if you’re busy waving it around for them to shoot at!’

It takes them nearly three weeks to get out of Moscow and Eggsy is on the phone to Merlin every fucking chance he gets, glasses long since trodden beneath the heel of a Ukrainian agent who probably could have crushed Eggsy between his thighs as part of his morning yoga.

‘Where the fuck are we going and what the fuck am I supposed to do when we get there?’ he basically shouts into the crappy Nokia brick and literally hears Merlin praying for patience before he responds. He’s not slept in about three days and they ran out of energy bars last night and he’s starting to see weird smoky fuzzy things at the edge of his vision and frankly he can’t even remember what Nikolai used to look like before he lost half that ear, so he’s gonna fucking shout at Merlin if he wants. He nearly chokes thinking about how much he wishes someone else were here and maybe Merlin can hear it because he moderates his voice a bit after that, and after he’s finished relaying the next set of instructions he tells Eggsy about how one of the new recruits fell asleep during training yesterday and the puppies swarmed her searching for treats.

He sounds genuinely apologetic when he says they can’t afford to send anyone else to help Eggsy out; everyone else is tied up on bodyguard duty at the latest summit all the first world countries have taken to holding after V-Day, and they just sent Roxy to New Zealand on the hunt for the last endangered batch of Valentine’s men. Eggsy tries to get his shit together and cracks a joke about sheep or something, whatever, can barely get the words out in the right order, but Merlin laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s heard all week.

He doesn’t mention Harry and Eggsy doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want to think about Harry here, everything burning too bright and sharp and urgent; he doesn’t know if he could keep the thought of him safe.

They’re hanging on by the skin of their teeth at the end of it, the safe house a bust, Eggsy nearly begging for evac as Nikolai clings to the back of his fleece jacket, ragged suit long since torn into tatters for tourniquets, pressed up against breezeblocks for cover. He’s praying for a miracle when he throws his last grenade, pushed up against the borderline again – every time he thinks this has to be the worst, it can’t get closer than this, and every time he’s wrong – and that’s part of the thrill, isn’t it? He still loves every second, he does, he does, adrenaline searing through his veins, but he just needs a second to breathe, let the claw marks heal over before he ends up more scar tissue than skin.

Merlin gets a chopper to them in time, though God only bloody knows how. Eggsy has a feeling the cost of it might be more than he can stand to hear. He can’t keep counting how many times he owes Merlin his life or their friendship’s going to collapse under the weight of it, so he decides to call it quits and tells him so, half-delirious with the sudden rush of long overdue painkillers. He listens to Merlin laughing at him and then giving him the latest over the comms, the familiar pinch of the glasses on his nose making his eyes smart for a moment, while he’s still being patched up, and tries blearily to ignore the awed look in Nikolai’s eye. He’s whisked off before he can say goodbye and doesn’t examine too closely why he’s so thankful for that, because it’s probably fucked up and he doesn’t have time to get fucked up now, not over this, not on top of everything else he already can’t help.

But uneasiness lingers with him while he heals, taking the mandatory week’s rest after a mission with the very definition of bad grace. Rox and Merlin visit him in the sick bay and he sort of floats through it in a haze, drifting off with Roxy’s cool fingers stroking over his brow.

He wakes up from sedated sleep asking for Harry more times than he can count because apparently his hindbrain is tired of fighting the desire for the steady reassurance of Harry’s voice and hands, until he eventually gives up embarrassment as a bad job. At some point Merlin’s far-off voice tells him Harry’s been away squaring things with the board of directors but he’ll be back soon. He’s been asking for updates on Eggsy’s status three times a day since he’s been gone, and gets bloody if Merlin doesn’t call at the appointed times.

This last detail feels too good to be true, and Eggsy thinks it might be part of a dream.

He sleeps, he wakes, he drifts. It’s like those car crash weeks on the run and Nikolai’s wide-eyed gratitude unlocked something nervy and animal inside him, flinching away from the kindness. It doesn’t feel right accepting thanks for something any decent human being would do. Maybe it never really did. He saved the world – him and Rox and Merlin, they saved it – but the cost of that is still being counted out every day in blood and war and nightmares, and he can’t help thinking they didn’t save it enough.

Eggsy replays it all over and over again, watching Harry lose it in Kentucky and killing Chester and Valentine’s bunker. He turns back earlier, kills Valentine with a dart before his hand could ever touch the button, sees himself switching brandy glasses back over and over, catches Harry’s arm before he leaves angry, a knot twisting in his stomach that follows him into sleep and makes him wake thrashing, the hot pulse of mania bleeding out of him, breathing heavily in the dark of his hospital room.

---

Eggsy’s in the firing range when Harry gets back.

Merlin hadn’t let Eggsy leave the confines of the sick bay the entire time he was recovering, citing previous instances of him sneaking off home on the bullet train before anything had actually healed, so the minute the mandatory rest period is up Eggsy legs it outside and thanks fucking God for English weather when it starts to rain as soon as he steps out the door. He stands out in it so long he’s practically hallucinating the nurses screaming for him to get inside before he catches cold, and he grins as the rain trickles over his face, closing his eyes, t-shirt sticking to his chest. He lets the water cover him, wet strands of hair falling into his eyes, shaking with cold and thankfulness.

He only goes to the firing range because he needs to do something to do with his hands, and he’s been told very sternly that he might wrench his shoulder if he works out too much in these next few weeks. And as much as he’s dying for a glimpse of his mum and Daisy, he just can’t go home yet; there’s something pulsing under his skin and he can’t keep still, the frustration of enforced bed rest catching up with him.

He’s not been there long when there’s a loud cough from behind him. He turns around frowning, pulling off the earmuffs, ready to blast off at Merlin for not leaving him alone for one fucking hour, but it’s not Merlin.

It’s Harry. He’s smiling a little bit, leaning against the door of the booth, propping up his umbrella.

‘Far be it from me to interrupt you when you have a gun in your hands,’ he says in that fond tone he hasn’t dared to use for weeks, ‘but I heard you were up and about and I wanted to see how you are.’ He says this last bit as if he’s expecting Eggsy to argue with him, but Eggsy doesn’t say anything. He can’t think, for a moment, of what he might say.

‘Merlin kept me updated on the Russian mission,’ Harry says, watching Eggsy carefully. ‘It sounded a little fraught.’

Eggsy laughs hoarsely, leaning back against the wall so he can prop his head and still see Harry. He puts the gun down, carefully pointing the barrel away from them both.

‘It was alright,’ he says, but it doesn’t even sound like he believes that himself.

Harry hums noncommittally. Eggsy examines him for a moment. His suit is wrinkled, his hair a little out of place.

‘Did you only just get back?’ he asks suspiciously.

‘Give or take ten minutes,’ Harry smiles.

‘Don’t you need to like, debrief.’

‘It can wait.’

Eggsy watches him for a moment silently, wondering if Harry is calculating enough to have chosen this moment when Eggsy is still vulnerable to come to him again, hoping he might be more pliable. It’s not beyond the range of possibility, and it’s also something Eggsy has done before himself so he can’t exactly throw any stones about it. Harry likes getting what he wants, and he’s usually fairly fucking incorrigible about everything until he gets it, but he doesn’t look impatient now, or insincere. He just looks solid, immovable, like he’s prepared to stay no matter what Eggsy throws at him next.

It’s unsettling. No one ever forgives no matter what, Eggsy knows; there’s always a line, one bruise too many, a hurt that can’t be healed. It just takes a lot to beat it out of some people, that’s all.

‘May I be permitted to tell you how sorry I am, again?’ Harry says finally. ‘I’ve not stopped meaning it, you see.’

And it’s not that Eggsy isn’t still angry – he is – but he waits for it to flood him like it has every time Harry’s tried this before, and the rush just doesn’t come. He thinks about waking up shouting, dreaming about necks snapping under his hands, screaming as he threw Gazelle’s prosthetic, the assassin he’d felt slip under the wheels of a train because it was his job to keep Nikolai safe. It was easy enough not to think about it all when you were in the middle of a firefight, but once you were lying safe in the dark it could rush up on you like the swallowing ripples of the tide.

Maybe he doesn’t have to forgive just yet, but he could stick a foot out on the bridge to it and see how far he gets.

‘Maybe,’ he says, his voice wavering. He frowns. ‘You can keep saying it.’

‘I am so sorry, my dear boy,’ Harry says. His eyes are steady. He sounds like he could say it a thousand times and still mean it. Eggsy imagines that; Harry meeting him off the bullet train every day saying sorry, holding doors open for him saying sorry, bidding him goodnight saying sorry. It’s almost comical, but for the first time Eggsy has no doubt that Harry would do it if Eggsy asked.

It’s not that Eggsy doesn’t want that; he could stand to hear it at least a few more times before it gets old. He just would also really like a hug all of a sudden, the need rising up like the warmth in Harry’s eyes has broken a dam inside him; he hasn’t touched anyone for weeks he wasn’t trying to kill. But he doesn’t know how to just ask for something like that. He learned early never to reach out to someone who hasn’t already given him express permission to touch.

He scratches the back of his head instead, hedging for a response. ‘I think. I dunno. Maybe I get it a bit more now, yeah,’ he says, scrubbing a hand over his face. ‘M’not saying I’m not still pissed at you, but I get why you stayed away.’

Harry just watches him and Eggsy has the heady feeling that he’s being memorised, like Harry is making preparations in case Eggsy changes his mind.

‘You should have told me,’ Eggsy says softly. ‘You should have got in contact – a phone call, a postcard, anything, Harry. Just so I knew you were alive.’

‘I know,’ Harry says, and then the words pour out of him like water, ‘I know I should have. There’s a million things I should have done instead, Eggsy, I – you don’t know how often I’ve been over it, wishing I’d let you know. But after what happened with Gawain I had rather a crisis and by the time I was – more myself again, you understand, all I could think of was what you all must think of me, and how I’d misused my skills as a Kingsman.’ He smiles bitterly. ‘Which my psychiatrist informs me is a perfectly normal response to such a trauma.’

Eggsy hesitates and then decides to leave huge chunks of that alone for the moment in favour of getting more information.

‘You’re still going to see her then,’ he says, eyes catching on Harry’s, who looks amused at the giveaway. Well, fair enough. Eggsy knows the gender of Harry’s psychiatrist. He also incidentally read every note ever made on her file, but there’s no way he’s letting that one slip. ‘Is it helping?’

‘I believe so,’ Harry sighs. ‘It’s not my first go round, obviously, after decades in the service, but Genevieve is rather more, ah, rigorous than my previous counsellors.’

Eggsy raises his eyebrows. Harry rolls his eyes.

‘In the sense that she didn’t simply sign me off after I asked her to. Rather dedicated to her profession, it turns out.’ He smiles tiredly.

‘It is stupid, you know,’ Eggsy says after a moment, crossing his arms over his chest. ‘Thinking any of us’d give a shit about what you did in the church, Harry. And to Gawain. We’ve all got blood on our hands.’

His voice goes a bit strange at the end. Harry looks up and takes a step closer to him. He waits to see if Eggsy is going to say something before he comes closer again, but Eggsy doesn’t, keeps quiet until Harry’s stood in front of him and he has to bend his neck to meet Harry’s eyes.

‘You don’t have to love it all the time, Eggsy,’ Harry says gently. This close, Eggsy can smell his cologne, track the trajectory of Valentine’s bullet. He wishes he could reach out and trace it with a fingertip. He would barely have to move at all. ‘Everyone hates their job sometimes. It doesn’t mean you didn’t make the right choice.’

‘You’re one to talk,’ Eggsy says and Harry laughs, conceding. Something lurches in Eggsy’s chest at the sight. He remembers Harry laughing at his sniping when they were stood outside watching the recruits together, Eggsy still tight with anger and disbelief. He lets his hands hang loose at his sides, now. ‘And anyway, when the fuck did you get so wise,’ he says. ‘You spent half my training in a coma because you’re an idiot, and then you died, and now you come up all full of advice.’

‘One would think dead men might give better advice than most, once they’ve returned from beyond the veil.’

Eggsy snorts.

‘They wouldn’t have died in the first place if they was so clever.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ Harry says lightly, ‘but I can promise you I am very much alive.’

His eyes flicker down briefly to Eggsy’s mouth.

Eggsy raises his eyebrows again; he can’t help it. That’s pretty fucking brazen even for Harry, who just arches an eyebrow in response. Eggsy rolls his eyes.

‘You know this don’t fix everything,’ he makes himself say, and it hurts but it’s the truth. He can’t have Harry thinking every time things get fucked up he can disappear for three months with no consequences. ‘This – us just being able to have a conversation – it don’t mean everything’s alright now.’

‘I know that,’ Harry says, nodding, serious again. ‘But you’ll let me try, won’t you?’

Eggsy nods. He’s sort of dizzily aware of how close together they’re standing. They aren’t touching at all, but it’s like he can feel to the millimetre how far he would have to move to touch Harry, or lean back against the wall and watch Harry curve into him, show Eggsy how penitent he really is.

He has to take a deep breath and firmly remind himself not to give Harry a mile before an inch when he says, ‘You should go. Merlin’ll be pissed you haven’t been to debrief yet.’

‘I’m sure he’ll live,’ Harry says, although he takes an obviously reluctant step back. Eggsy misses the heat of him viscerally as soon as he’s gone, wants him to press in further, harder, again. He stamps down on it. One step at a time.

‘I’ll see you around, yeah?’ he says, picking up his earmuffs again.

‘Indeed,’ Harry says, opening the door.

Eggsy’s trying not to smile when he starts firing again, and hits the bullseye every time.

---

It gets easier after that; Eggsy doesn’t turn the other way every time he sees Harry coming, or stew in angry silence if Harry tries to join a conversation. The others watch curiously the first time Eggsy addresses Harry in a briefing, Merlin actually studying them narrow-eyed like he’s watching a David Attenborough documentary until Roxy elbows him in the side and clears her throat over his swearing.

For the first time since they’ve known each other Harry appears to be cautious of pushing Eggsy too far too quickly, and doesn’t suddenly start appearing round every corner, although he does manage to find Eggsy for lunch most days and still makes a point to ask if his presence is desired rather than just assuming. He always sends Eggsy a courteous text enquiring after Eggsy’s day if they don’t manage to see each other, and always responds promptly and eloquently to whatever Eggsy answers, even if it’s harsh and short. He also keeps sneaking Eggsy’s favourite foods onto the menu in the cafeteria, which Eggsy doesn’t notice for a while until Roxy pointedly mentions how many times they’ve had arctic roll for pudding in the last two weeks, isn’t that your favourite, Eggsy?

He doesn’t hear the end of that one for months, but he minds significantly less than he lets on. This level of attention from anyone is new to him, let alone from someone he has actual feelings for – admittedly pretty complicated ones, but still. It’s like Harry’s laying it all out there for everyone to see: he might as well be skywriting ‘HARRY HART SENDS HIS SINCEREST APOLOGIES TO EGGSY UNWIN AND WISHES HIM A PLEASANT AFTERNOON’ every lunchtime and it would be about as subtle.

For his part, Eggsy’s trying not to swing too far the other way suddenly, aware that his anger is still prone to resurfacing at unexpected moments. But it’s more difficult than he’d anticipated to control himself now that he’s started to yield, after he spent weeks letting himself off easy by avoiding Harry. Getting used to the way Harry looks first thing in the morning, every detail perfectly in place and gleaming, or last thing in the evening, shaking off tiredness for one last greeting before he leaves, is a trial Eggsy feels he might not be equal to.

‘For pity’s sake, lad,’ Merlin mutters when Harry shows up late to a meeting with a gracious smile and some patently fabricated excuses and Eggsy accidentally knocks over his coffee mug trying to do some kind of inane wave. Harry’s been out on assignment for a week and has returned with a slight tan, which is making Eggsy feel sort of furious and light headed.

‘Oh my God,’ Eggsy hisses, inconspicuously edging the briefing folder over the spill, ‘Shut up. You don’t see me blabbing every time you run into that bird from engineering.’

Merlin turns faintly pink and Eggsy smirks, winking when Harry turns a questioning glance on them both.

---

He’s making his way home one day when he bumps into Harry standing outside a closed door, one hand held tightly to the right side of his head, eyes closed in pain.

‘Harry,’ he says, dropping his bag on the floor and moving closer instantly, ‘hey, Harry, what’s up?’ He tries to make his voice as quiet as possible, his mind racing. He’d wondered if Harry had headaches or migraines or something, it seemed impossible that he wouldn’t, but he’d never felt right asking about it. His eyes flash to the sign on the door: Dr. Genevieve Bradley.

‘Eggsy,’ Harry says, and grabs Eggsy’s arm with the hand not held to his face. Eggsy nearly flinches at how hurt Harry’s voice sounds.

‘I’m here, what do you need,’ he says quietly, then bites his lip. Don’t overwhelm him, don’t ask too many questions, just get him sat down somewhere. He doesn’t know what to do for this, really – he had to dole out first aid for his mum and himself dozens of times, but that was mostly in the form of cold compresses on black eyes. He’s never seen Harry like this before and he doesn’t want to get it wrong.

‘I’m quite alright,’ Harry says, although he tightens his grip on Eggsy’s arm and doesn’t move from the doorway. The way he’s standing sort of hides it but Eggsy can tell he’s not supporting his own weight, leaning everything on the door.

‘Well yeah, obviously,’ Eggsy scoffs and Harry tenses and for a minute Eggsy’s kicking himself, wrong thing to say, so stupid, don’t fucking antagonise someone going through a migraine or whatever the fuck this is, but then Harry laughs, albeit hoarsely, and the knot in Eggsy’s chest loosens. ‘Let’s get you sat down somewhere, yeah, or you’ll be giving the cleaners a fright.’

Harry makes a noise of assent and Eggsy covers Harry’s hand on his arm with his own for a moment, squeezing, before he detaches to grab his bag and then kind of hovers around Harry for a minute, trying to decide whether he needs Eggsy to help him get going. He doesn’t know how any of this migraine shit works but a few times Dean clouted him so hard he got a concussion and he couldn’t really make all his limbs move quite right for a few hours afterwards, like being in a dream but not being able to do anything. Maybe it’s like that with Harry now, and he needs Eggsy to steer him right. 

But Harry just says ‘Time to go home, I think,’ and finally removes the hand clasped to his temple so Eggsy can see the smile not quite reaching his eyes.

Eggsy thinks about arguing for the sick bay, but he has the feeling Harry will only get belligerent if he tries, and this doesn’t look like something a nurse can help, aside from doling out painkillers he’s sure Harry already has on prescription. So he just nods and takes Harry’s arm gently, not trying to take any weight, and looks up at him.

‘Not far to the platform,’ he says, ‘I was going that way anyway.’ Harry nods and pushes off the wall as if it’s no trouble at all, although Eggsy would bet his winged Adidas it cost a lot more effort than he’s letting on. But either he doesn’t need Eggsy’s support or he doesn’t ask for it anyway as they make their way through the mostly empty corridors of the training facility and onto the platform.

They’re quiet on the train, sat opposite each other like they did the first time Eggsy ever came here. Harry sits back with his eyes closed, his face utterly blank of expression. It’s beyond weird. Harry keeps his face kind of neutral and polite a lot of the time out of necessity, always ready to pin on another mask, but this is different. This is Harry’s face so blank with pain that he’s almost unrecognisable, the laughter lines and crows’ feet all smoothed out. Eggsy wants to lean forward and kiss his eyelids, lift some of the pain away.

After about an hour Harry opens his eyes and sees him staring. Eggsy doesn’t even try to hide it. Harry smiles but doesn’t lift his head, just letting Eggsy look. He looks a little less taut now, but there’s something dark under the surface in his eyes.

‘Is it always like that?’ Eggsy asks.

‘Not always. Some days are worse than others.’

Eggsy wants to ask about a million questions about this. There’s still so much he doesn’t know about Kentucky and Cuba and their lingering effects on Harry’s wellbeing, but even he knows this isn’t the right time to start digging that particular hole, so he restrains himself. ‘Is it like headaches or migraines or what? Have they got you on something for it?’

‘Migraines,’ Harry says peaceably, putting out a hand to rest on the seat beside him. ‘I used to get them occasionally anyway but they’re rather more troublesome than they used to be. I have painkillers. It’s a small price to pay.’

There’s a beat while Eggsy flashes back to the sound of the gunshot, Valentine’s voice shaking, his own hoarse shout. He can hear it so clearly. It must be even louder for Harry.

‘Are you always gonna get them?’ he asks, fiddling with the zipper on his jacket. He doesn’t want to ask ‘are you going to remember every time you get a bloody headache’because it’s a stupid question and the answer will probably be yes, yes, why wouldn’t he? Who could forget being shot in the head? But then again, they are spies; they have the technology and all that. Eggsy can’t actually remember Bond getting shot in the head but if he did, he’d probably be up and running and too busy banging blondes into next week to even dwell on it.

Harry isn’t Bond, though.

‘Perhaps,’ Harry says, jerking Eggsy back into the moment. ‘But if anyone can come up with a cure for migraines, it’s the Kingsman R&D division. Even Merlin doesn’t know exactly what goes on down there. They send up reports every now and then and he goes a bit pale, starts making a lot of frantic phone calls, it’s most entertaining.’

Eggsy snorts and they fill the rest of the trip with speculation so ridiculous it makes Harry’s shoulders shake with laughter while Eggsy watches, pleased.

There’s an awkward moment when they get out of the shop and go to turn their separate ways, the lingering distance between them making itself suddenly, sharply known. Eggsy shoves his hands in his pockets so he stops fiddling with the strap on his bag and waits for Harry to say goodnight. He can spot the pain Harry’s trying to hide in the way he’s hunching his shoulders ever so slightly, a small wince when they pass under a streetlamp, and he wants badly to offer to come home with him, just to make sure he’s alright. But there’s whatever they are to each other right now and then there’s whatever that would be, and he has to let Harry take this one; he can’t get so involved in Harry’s life without him asking first. He has the feeling that once he starts he won’t be able to stop.

‘Thank you, Eggsy,’ Harry says. It’s so heartfelt Eggsy struggles for a moment not to let something mean and snappy slip out on pure embarrassed reflex.

He just nods. ‘You’ll be alright from here, yeah?’ he says, and then before Harry can reply he blurts out, ‘Will you text me if you need anything? It don’t matter what time.’ He winces a bit at the cloying, clingy sound of that, but Harry just looks startled and pleased rather than put off.

‘I will, Eggsy, but I wouldn’t count on it. Straight to bed for me, I think.’

Eggsy nods approvingly. Harry smiles.

‘Goodnight, Eggsy.’

‘Night.’

Harry gives a half wave and starts walking. Eggsy turns in the opposite direction and only looks back once, twice, three times, but on the last he catches Harry turning back too, before he passes out of a pool of light from a streetlamp and back into the dark.

---

Two days later, the first present arrives.

It’s for JB, which Eggsy finds out when he goes downstairs in the morning and finds JB tearing into the packaging while his mum looks on, puzzled, holding the empty torn envelope.

‘It’s addressed to Jack Bauer Unwin,’ she says, raising her eyebrows.

Eggsy looks up from trying to wrest the package out of JB’s tiny snarling mouth.

‘What?’

He takes the envelope. JB finally barks with glee at having shredded the cardboard enough to get the toy out and starts happily chomping on the rubber bone inside.

‘Oh, what the fuck,’ Eggsy says when he flips the envelope over to find a return address. ‘JB, you put that down right now, you –’ He stops when JB whines and stares up at him pityingly, then bends down with a sigh to scratch behind his tiny ears.

‘Fine,’ he says, and stomps back upstairs to get changed for work.

He’s determined not to say anything about it at first; maybe it’s just another step in Harry’s twelve point plan to get him back onside, although it’s a bit oddly timed, considering Eggsy is actually talking to him again now and everything. But whatever, if Harry wants to send his dog something in the post randomly without asking Eggsy first, then it’s fine. It’s fucking weird, but on the scale of weirdo things Harry Hart has done that Eggsy knows about, it doesn’t even rate particularly high (see also: lying about being dead for three months, and having his dead dog stuffed and on prominent display in the downstairs loo). It’s not like it’s hurting anyone. Eggsy keeps the half-mangled envelope in his bedside drawer and stubbornly doesn’t think about why he hasn’t thrown it away.

Until the gift basket full of expensive toiletries and cologne arrives a few days later (they don’t even have fucking labels, they come in fancy glass bottles andthey have a handbook like you need instructions on how to use bubble bath). And then a few days after that, tickets to see that play he’d mentioned to Roxy that his mum wanted to see, slipped into a card that also contains five all-access passes to Alton Towers, date negotiable. Eggsy didn’t know they even did date negotiable.

And then the one that makes Eggsy’s heart clench; the presumably priceless first edition copy of My Fair Lady, in the same package as a DVD of Pretty Woman. And the ridiculously soft and decadent dressing gown which is suspiciously similar to Harry’s red one and alright, is actually super fucking comfortable and Eggsy would prefer if no one ever found out how much he wears it when he’s alone in the house. The whole thing makes him want to scream into a pillow.

After about three weeks of this, his mum calls him down for roast dinner on Sunday and nods to something on the sofa when he gets downstairs.

‘That came for you this morning,’ she says. She drops a kiss on the side of his head as she passes, depositing Daisy in her high chair with a murmured endearment.

Eggsy eyes the suit box wearily. He’s got more suits than he knows what to do with these days, and they’re fine for missions, obviously – they always fit perfectly and they make it a lot easier to slip into the kind of cut glass consonants people expect wherever he tends to wear them – but they’re a costume he slips on and off, not something he’d choose to wear outside work. He’s a bit surprised, to be honest; every one of Harry’s presents so far has been something Eggsy hasn’t had before, not a new version of something already owned.

But then he opens the box.

And oh, my God. It’s beautiful. Beauty doesn’t cover it, it’s – it’s exactly what he’s wanted for fucking ages, how the fuck did Harry know?

His hand actually comes up to cover his mouth as he stares, then he puts it down again.

His mum leans over his shoulder to look and says, ‘Isn’t that –’

‘The £800 white leather Adidas jacket Pharrell Williams designed that I’ve wanted for about a thousand years, yep,’ Eggsy says, distantly recognising that he sounds like he’s about to hyperventilate. He lowers his hand to pull the sleeve out of the box and it’s gorgeous and supple in his hands. He puts the sleeve down again, tucks it carefully back into the box, puts the lid back on and stands there for a minute just staring blankly.

‘Are you alright, love?’ his mum asks, sounding a bit nonplussed. ‘Who sent that, anyway? Was it that boss of yours again? I don’t get why he keeps sending you stuff, you’re already working for him –’

‘Oh, it was definitely Harry,’ Eggsy snorts, taking the lid off the box again and stripping off the jacket he’s wearing, letting it land on the floor, where it could catch fire for all he cares. He lifts the jacket out of the box and puts it on slowly, taking excessive care not to stretch or scratch it, and then turns to his mum.

‘How do I look?’

‘Lovely, babe,’ she says hesitantly, ‘but why –’

‘He’s just generous, mum, don’t worry about it,’ he says, worrying at his lip. This is ridiculous, this is insane, this is – he has to talk to Harry about this. Maybe he shouldn’t even keep it really, maybe his mum’s right and it’s weird and Harry could get in trouble. But get in trouble from who? He’s the fucking boss, so unless he wants to take himself out back of the potting shed to get caned they should be alright.

It’s just so much more, somehow, than everything else Harry’s given him so far.

He fights with himself for a moment, then pulls out his phone and texts Harry a string of incomprehensible emoji and a single smiley. And then another one saying WHAT THE FUCK.

Language, Harry texts back.

Then a minute later when Eggsy is running Daisy’s (recently cleaned) hand gently over the surface of the sleeve, laughing at her puzzled expression at the tiny perforations, Harry sends another.

Do you like it?

Eggsy stares down at the message until the screen goes dark, closes his hand over the phone in a fist.

---

He gets to Harry’s office early the next morning with his fight face on.

‘Harry,’ he says firmly, ‘you really don’t have to try and buy me back.’

‘I’m not,’ Harry says, blinking amiably. Eggsy opens his mouth and closes it again, thrown off by Harry just denying it outright.

‘What’s all this sending me stuff then?’ he demands, crossing his arms.

‘Just odds and ends I thought you might be in need of.’

‘You thought I might be in need of –’ he checks in the parcel that arrived a few mornings ago, which he’s brought in to prop up his righteous indignation because he didn’t want to risk bringing in the jacket and getting it scuffed ‘– truffles, caviar and French champagne?’

‘I thought you might never have tried them, and everyone should try truffles at least once, Eggsy.’

Eggsy opens his mouth and closes it, infuriated. He is infuriated, and that is why he can’t speak, and is blushing.

‘I apologise if I’ve made you uncomfortable,’ Harry says, sounding like he’s attempting to be genuinely concerned but is mostly failing.

Eggsy laughs disbelievingly, setting the parcel down on Harry’s desk and putting his hands over his face.

‘My mum thinks I’ve got a sugar daddy, Harry. Everyone at work thinks the same actually, except for Merlin and Roxy. I can’t even see Merlin in the corridor anymore without him whistling Big Spender. You know they’ve started calling me Guinevere?’

Harry’s mouth twitches. Eggsy sighs and runs his hand over his hair.

‘It’s lovely, Harry, all of it is lovely. The jacket – you know, it’s,’ he hesitates. ‘It’s perfect.’

Harry smiles, warm and soft.

‘But you don’t have to do it all, you know?’

‘I know that,’ Harry says. ‘I just want you to have all the things you haven't been able to have before.’

Eggsy stiffens, frowning. One step forward, two steps back. ‘My mum tried her best, yeah? It’s not like she had a lot of help from anyone around here.’

‘I wasn’t implying that, Eggsy, although I’m aware that we didn’t offer your mother enough support and I dearly wish I could rectify that in hindsight. But this isn’t about that.’

‘What is it about then?’ Eggsy says, heart speeding up a bit despite himself. It’s no good expecting Harry to admit anything now, not really, not when they’re still getting used to just being around each other again. There might not even be anything to admit but – but Harry’s gifts, even if some of them veer wildly off their mark, have obviously been chosen with considerable expenditure of time and effort, not to mention actual money. It’s a little bewildering, if it doesn’t mean what Eggsy thinks it means.

‘Seeing you happy,’ Harry grates out, and then looks immediately as if he wishes he either had a drink in his hand, or that he could teleport to another plane of existence.

Eggsy smiles, small. Close enough.

‘Alright then,’ he says. ‘But no more big stuff like the pool table, alright, you’ll freak my mum out.’

‘I promise,’ says Harry, a troubling glint in his eye. He shifts a little and puts on one of his more business-like expressions. ‘Now, we do actually need to have a chat about what Merlin has here termed –’ he reads off the file in front of him ‘– ‘a wanton disregard for firearm safety’, anything to say about that?’

---

They’re back in the firing range again a few weeks later when it happens.

Eggsy does not, repeat does not, need any more firearm training from anyone, ever, no matter what Merlin might shriek in the margins of his reports. But if he’s going to be strong-armed into a refresher course then he’d rather have it with Harry than with Merlin, who kind of hates touching people for extended periods of time and seems to break out in hives when Eggsy jokes about his stance needing correction.

Eggsy’s been going through the motions fairly monotonously up until this point, not even really showing off although he does do a little twirl with the handgun when Harry hands it off to him, flashes him a grin when Harry rolls his eyes.

It’s when he gets into position that Harry says, ‘Not like that, there’s the problem, you’re locking up,’ and steps up behind him to alter the set of his shoulders.

Eggsy freezes for a moment in case this is some kind of practical joke and he’s about to have a bucket of something dumped over his head. There definitely isn’t a problem with his stance, he knows that; this whole thing is just an exercise in lowering Merlin’s blood pressure. But no, no, Harry genuinely is correcting his stance, and Eggsy takes back every joke he ever made about this because it doesn’t seem like a fucking laughing matter now when Harry is pressed so close to his back that Eggsy can actually feel him exhale.

‘Like this,’ Harry says quietly, breath on Eggsy’s ear making him shiver, and lifts his arm, his hand tight around Eggsy’s wrist. The hair prickles all the way along Eggsy’s arm, his breathing kept rigidly, carefully slow.

‘Like that?’ he says low, squaring his shoulders a little more, eyes burning into the target. This is stupid. This is so, so stupid. He’s been carefully avoiding physical contact with Harry for weeks for precisely this reason: it’s a million times worse than the presents, or the texts, or the fucking cafeteria menu. Just the clean simple fact of Harry’s body so close to his and Eggsy’s heart is beating so hard he’d be amazed if Harry couldn’t hear it.

‘Exactly,’ Harry says, and Eggsy fires.

He empties the entire clip into the target and then yanks himself away from Harry so fast he nearly gives himself whiplash. Their eyes meet for a brief electric second before Eggsy looks away, feeling a tremor go through him, the punch of heat in his gut.

‘I’m just gonna,’ he says, abruptly making for the door and waving the gun around like an idiot before he remembers and sets it down hastily. ‘We can finish this later, yeah? Got some – stuff to do.’

‘Right,’ Harry says, still staring at him. He leans back against the plastic divider, crossing his arms over his stomach. ‘Well, this should be enough to appease Merlin for now. Don’t forget about our etiquette lesson tomorrow. I’ll not have you backing out on me now.’

Eggsy nods and bolts, and gets halfway to the end of the building before he remembers he can’t leave yet because it’s only the middle of the day. He curses and loops back round to the gym, and proceeds to spend the rest of the day running every errand and seizing on every distraction he can find in lieu of begging Merlin to send him to another continent, because the thing is.

The thing is, now that he isn’t restraining the urge to shoot something every time he sees Harry, he has enough time to think about what else he might want, no matter how much he keeps trying to ignore it. The presents provided a fairly compelling distraction for a while but Harry’s started calming down on that front and as Eggsy’s libido roaring back to life just now is reminding him, there really isn’t much left that can distract him from fantasising about Harry these days, especially not if Harry’s going to go barging into his personal space and touching him through three layers of clothing as if that makes it safe. It’s kind of the ultimate in dangerous mental paths for Eggsy to go down, because he’d actually had a handle on this before Harry died – he’d had it on fucking lock, he could tuck his dick into his waistband with the best of them and pretend the sight of Harry’s shoulder holsters didn’t have  any kind of dizzying effect on him, none whatsoever.

But there were all the other things too – like how he’d felt something inside him snap to attention the first time Harry laid a proprietary hand on his shoulder and called him my boy, or when he was tied to the train track and staring up into Harry’s glittering, contemplative eyes. He hadn’t ever wanted any of those things before but they set up shop in the pit of his stomach and throbbed whenever Harry touched him. He’d started up a pretty good line in imagining how in some universe where this wasn’t completely one-sided, Harry might be able to give them to him if Eggsy asked nicely, when Harry popped off the face of the earth and Eggsy was too busy trying not to have a breakdown to mourn the loss of the sexual fulfilment of his dreams.

And it’s different now anyway, he thinks to himself as he beats the ever-loving shit out of a punching bag, it’s – doesn’t that kind of thing, doesn’t it need trust? He’s never been tied up or held down or hurt, he thinks with a low down shiver, not done anything like that before, and wouldn’t he need to trust Harry more than anyone, to let him do something like that? And Eggsy is still working on that, poking and prodding at it in his mind, trying to fit all this new knowledge of Harry around the image Eggsy has of him; Harry, who could let Eggsy think he was dead for months, but who also led him away from Dean and everything he stood for with firm and gentle hands, and showed him where he could fit in the world, if he wanted to.

In the end it’s Harry who makes him see how it could work, and once he realises it, it’s the only thing he can see and he’s useless for days, even though he knows it’s going to be an exercise in delayed gratification. Harry is still Recovering From Trauma, as Merlin often reminds him in a stern voice, like Eggsy is constantly on the verge of whisking Harry off on an unsanctioned crash course in free running (not that he’s never been tempted).

They’re in the middle of the so-called etiquette lesson next day when Harry says it. Since they started talking again this is something Harry’s latched onto like a steel-jaw trap and will not fucking let go, because he says he wants to be able to send Eggsy on diplomatic missions without Eggsy setting fire to the tablecloth just to avoid figuring out which fork to use. Eggsy maintains that that only happened once, he doesn’t know why people keep bringing it up, and the mission was always bound to end in violence anyway because the host was such a twat. Harry doesn’t usually dignify this with a response.

Today he’s supposed to be teaching Eggsy about suitable small talk at formal dinners but it’s so insanely boring that Eggsy keeps being rude on purpose to make him laugh, so by this point Harry has mostly given up and they’re just sat outside having lunch and snickering at the recruits as they watch them go round the obstacle course.

They're talking about the dog test.

‘I still don’t get why you have to say here, we’re gonna give you this tiny puppy to bond with and train and look after for like eight fucking months and then at the end of it all ask you to shoot the bloody thing just to prove a point, like wow, look! Look what you’re willing to do for this fucking job! Congrats. Join our club of sociopaths who don’t know how to love.’

It’s possible Eggsy is still bitter about it.

‘It means different things to different people,’ says Harry with the serenity of the ages.

‘What does it mean to you then?’ Eggsy bites out. He’s still feeling vaguely agitated after yesterday and neither of them are really saying what they mean, which is edging this conversation uncomfortably close to one where Eggsy snaps at Harry and then walks away.

‘For me it’s about trust.’

Eggsy tenses and Harry – Harry probably notices, realistically, but he carries on anyway, stirring sugar into his tea with care.

‘The candidate trusts Kingsman at face value when they choose a puppy, and that trust is then tested to its natural limit at the very end of training. The candidate should trust that Kingsman would never ask them to kill an innocent without a good reason. You know yourself, no reason is given when you are handed the gun. Ergo, the candidate is placing themselves entirely in the hands of the agency, trusting Kingsman enough to follow an order for which they have no discernible motive, and which has the potential to cause considerable distress.’

‘Like in the Marines,’ Eggsy says, nodding, ‘following orders without questioning.’ He never was particularly good at that part. His mind whirs, skating over Harry’s words like ice he doesn’t want to break.

‘Hmm, not exactly. Remember, Kingsman agents have rather more individual autonomy than do soldiers. It’s about relinquishing that in the interests of the greater good.’

Eggsy rolls his eyes. Someday he is going to start a tally of how many times they can all try and justify bloody behaviour in the interests of ‘the greater good’. Again: sanity not exactly a prerequisite for getting the job.

‘You were a rather unique case, anyway, as you know,’ Harry says, voice going warm. ‘I should have known you would never go through with it.’

He takes a sip of tea, letting the pause draw out. ‘Much too decent to have been let in, really.’ 

Eggsy rolls his eyes but can’t help smiling a bit.

‘Like you didn’t spoil Mr Pickle rotten all his livelong days out of guilt. Me and JB just skipped that bit. And besides, I did sort of help out with killing Valentine and like, thousands of his crew by proxy, yeah?’

Harry laughs.

‘I suppose allowances have to be made for the prevention of an apocalypse.'

There’s a beat while Harry watches one of the recruits swearing colourfully at a twisted ankle, and Eggsy watches Harry.

‘And what about trust,’ he says, his gaze helplessly intent on the way Harry’s eyes glint turning back to him. 

‘Well, it does have to be earned, doesn’t it?’ Harry asks, not breaking eye contact. Eggsy swallows and sees Harry’s eyes dart down to follow the movement. Right. Not reading this wrong.

He starts thinking after that, about how Harry might like to earn back Eggsy's trust. About how Eggsy might let him.

Chapter Text

The trouble is, once he starts thinking about it, he can’t stop.

It’s like every dirty thought he’s ever had about Harry has been circling on some lower level of consciousness, and now they’ve all broken through to the surface at once. Every time he sees Harry he feels the charge of something ramping up in intensity between the two of them, can’t stop his smirk of anticipation when Harry’s eyes drop down to his lips and linger.

After the incident in the firing range Harry is frustratingly, devastatingly courteous and doesn’t try to touch him again, but it’s almost all the worse for that; it just makes Eggsy hyper aware of the space between them. He sees Harry gripping the back of a chair and imagines the tight band of his fingers around Eggsy’s neck, watches Harry doling out orders during a meeting as if it’s his own private show. It’s fucking unprofessional but it’s not as if Harry doesn’t know and try his best to make it worse, taking Eggsy aside for a private word at the end of briefings under the flimsiest of pretences and murmuring to him as if Eggsy can follow anything but the electric undercurrent of heat in his voice, like a car revving into a higher gear.

He wants Harry to touch him so much it feels unwieldy, too big for his body, but all Harry does is look. He watches Eggsy like there’s nothing else in the room worth looking at, and sometimes it’s almost embarrassing but more often it just makes Eggsy’s mouth run dry, throat clicking as he swallows, trying not to look too eager. With everyone he’s fancied before, he’s been able to put on a bit of an act, play it up, flirt and be cheeky and just sort of generally dance around it without having to give too much of himself away. He never even had the chance to do that with Harry, it had caught him too off-guard, and now it’s much too late to learn how to hide it. Harry doesn’t seem to mind, at least – it only makes him run hotter, if the way he covers every inch of Eggsy’s body with that laser-like focus is anything to go by.

Roxy confronts him about it one day, sidling up to him as he floats out of a meeting in which Harry had praised him at length for his recent mission taking out a diamond smuggling ring.

‘So,’ she says in a voice so faux-casual she’s basically wearing a sign, ‘how are things going between the two of you anyway?’

‘I haven’t wanked this much since I was in Year 10 and fancied my English teacher,’ he says, then squints at her. ‘You’re not asking for that pool Merlin’s got going on that he thinks we don’t know about?’

She snorts. ‘He wouldn’t let me join. Said I had too much insider influence.’

Eggsy can’t help laughing.

‘Have you two actually – you know – done anything yet, though?’

Eggsy raises an eyebrow, grinning.

‘If you can’t say the words you shouldn’t be doing it, Rox.’

She swipes at him and he dodges, yelping.

‘Can’t blame me for asking,’ she says after a minute. ‘You’re walking around looking like you just got fucked six ways to Sunday in the broom cupboard.’

‘Jesus,’ he hisses, looking around for wayward eavesdroppers, ‘keep your voice down, Harry’s still our boss and it’s not –’

‘Oh, come off it,’ she rolls her eyes, ‘because all of this,’ she gestures between Eggsy and the room down the corridor behind them which still presumably contains Harry, ‘doesn’t just scream unprofessional work environment to you?’

‘It’ll be hostile work environment in a minute if you don’t shush,’ he says, then pauses. She’s probably just concerned for his mental health, what with him having decided to play an incredibly prolonged and public game of chicken with such an obvious weirdo. ‘You don’t have to worry I’m being talked into it.’

‘Obviously not,’ she says scornfully. ‘You’re so flat on your back for him you might as well be a pancake.’

Eggsy would really, really love to deny that, but he’s too busy laughing. Also, it’s true.

‘I just meant,’ she hesitates for a minute, scanning his face. ‘He is your boss and – and twice your age, Eggsy. Do you really think this is a good idea?’

Eggsy looks away for a minute, trying to find a way of phrasing his answer that isn’t just ‘I don’t care.’ Because it is genuinely more complicated than that, more than he wants to go into with anyone that isn’t Harry, actually; the truth is that even if it should, it doesn’t matter, none of it – not that Harry is his boss, or older than him, or from a different walk of life entirely. Getting through all of that and still wanting him didn’t even feel like a struggle, which is probably, Eggsy realises, about the point when any normal sane person might start to think they were in trouble. Either way, whatever issues him and Harry are still working through, the age gap isn’t one of them.

‘It don’t bother me,’ he says finally. ‘Harry wouldn’t treat me any different in the field and I’d kick his arse if he did. Anyway we’ve not even done anything yet, so –’

‘Aha!’ Roxy crows while Eggsy rolls his eyes. ‘Knew it. What the bloody hell is taking you so long?’

And that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Eggsy can’t figure it out. He’s kind of realised by now that Harry massively goes in for teasing, that much is obvious, but surely there has to come a point where that’s as much torture for Harry as it is for him. Because Eggsy wasn’t joking about the masturbation thing – he’s starting to feel a bit alarmed over how easily he gets hard for Harry, when they haven’t even kissed or fucked or anything yet, and how often he has to duck into a nearby loo and rub one out before he embarrasses himself over Harry handing him a folder and smiling or something. What the fuck is he gonna do when they actually get down to it? He’d like to not go off so quickly that he has to join the French Foreign Legion in shame.

Harry has him as cornered as he can without actually putting his hands on Eggsy one afternoon, Eggsy’s back pressed against the wall as they talk, their eyes caught on each other like honey traps. They’re talking quietly about whether Eggsy might start taking lessons in the jet now things are finally starting to calm down, nearly half a year after V-Day. A strand of hair falls loose over his forehead and Harry’s reaches forward as if on reflex to smooth it back into place before he catches himself and pulls back again, looking badly caught off guard.

Eggsy stares at him and wonders blankly how many times Harry’s held himself back from doing something like that and Eggsy hasn’t even noticed. He’s been so busy wishing Harry would make a move that it hasn’t even occurred to him that Harry is waiting for him to move first. He’s still giving Eggsy time to say no, which puts Eggsy in mind of the kind of bullshit promise you make someone before a fight, winking at someone in the ring before you pull on the gloves, all bravado – like Harry’s telling Eggsy he can still back out now and Harry won’t think any the less of him, but he hopes Eggsy knows what he’s getting into if he stays.

The thought makes him smile almost uncontrollably and he has to look down for a second and clear his throat. When he looks up again Harry is watching him warily.

‘Are you quite alright?’ he asks, and it’s so very Harry that Eggsy smiles too wide again and thinks Jesus, alright, and grabs hold of Harry’s tie, reeling him in slowly, and kisses him.

It takes a long time for them to pull apart, that first time; the moment hanging perfect and still until Harry regains his bearings and pushes Eggsy slowly back into the wall with the kind of noise he might make if he was wounded, his hands coming up to settle around Eggsy’s waist. Eggsy keeps hold of Harry’s tie, winding it around his hand in case Harry gets any funny ideas about moving. Harry’s mouth is gorgeous, the slick pull of it opening Eggsy’s lips slowly, tongue running lightly along his own. Eggsy’s other hand finds Harry’s arm and grips hard enough to cut off circulation, if the way Harry bears down on him and opens his mouth wider is any indication.

Eggsy falls into it like he’s drowning, losing himself in the sensation of their tongues sliding together, the banked power of Harry’s body pressed hard against him. He can’t stop his hips from undulating, cock half-hard against his leg just from kissing, and he wishes wildly that Harry would do something with his hands other than rubbing his thumbs mindlessly over the clothed skin above Eggsy’s waistband, dipping in ever so slightly and sending a frisson of pleasure right down to Eggsy’s dick before he draws back again.

Eggsy can’t get enough air, trying to pull in oxygen around Harry’s tongue in his mouth, marvelling at the filthiness of it all as Harry flicks into his mouth with tiny thrusts. They’re out in the open here, anyone could walk past and see Harry taking him apart against the wall, Eggsy already halfway to wrecked without Harry even having to do much. He pivots his hips forward more urgently at the thought and gets the sudden pressure of Harry’s hands pinning them to the wall in response. He lets out a shocked noise into the confines of Harry’s mouth, which makes Harry smile against him and pull back slowly. Eggsy tries to follow, helpless, but Harry keeps himself out of reach with a sharp look.

‘Can you keep still for me, Eggsy?’ he says, his voice silky, mouth trailing so lightly down Eggsy’s neck it raises goose bumps. It’s like he can actually hear the revving of starting engines, Eggsy thinks giddily, swallowing. Harry’s mouth curves against his skin.

‘Yeah,’ he says, his voice rough.

‘Good. Now I hope you’ll agree with me that this isn’t the most optimum environment in which to have the kind of discussion I believe we ought to be having, especially considering we’re within range of four different CCTV cameras.’

Eggsy actually feels the rush of blood to his face and tries not to squirm in Harry’s grip, flexing the fingers still keeping a death grip on Harry’s arm. Harry presses a soft kiss under his ear.

‘No one can hear us, Eggsy,’ he says quietly. ‘This is just between you and me.’

‘Just for us,’ Eggsy confirms, and he wants to hate the way it comes out, needing something from Harry so much that makes him sound like that, fragile and young. But maybe Harry could use a reminder, in case he’d forgotten what he’s getting himself into here – that this isn’t just an easy lay between co-workers who’ve been dancing around each other for months. It’s not even about whether Eggsy trusts Harry not to hurt him or lie to him again, but something more complicated, Eggsy exposing the unfamiliar landscape of what he wants to the light and trusting that Harry won’t run away.

It makes meeting Harry’s eyes now feel like he should brace himself for something, but Harry must be more of an entitled bastard than even Eggsy thought because he doesn’t even flinch, just smiles and brushes a light kiss to his lips, the lightest stroke of his tongue against Eggsy’s mouth.

‘Of course,’ Harry says, pulling back to smile down at him, one of those beautiful, wide, genuine smiles he doesn’t give away often. ‘I’m not very good at sharing.’

Eggsy’s startled into laughing even around the ache of want low down in his stomach. Just the other day Harry sent him a box of delicate candied fruits attached to a note that said ‘don’t bring these into work, you won’t get them back.’ At least half of everything Harry does is attached to some unnecessary peacocking for attention, but not this, Eggsy thinks, caught on the way Harry’s eyes follow the curve of his smile. Not this.

‘Right then,’ he says, finally letting the grip of his fingers on Harry’s arm soften. ‘But it’ll have to be your place, because there’s no way I’m letting my mum walk in on this.’

---

He can’t believe, in hindsight, that he expected Harry to be joking about the whole conversation part.

‘We really should,’ Harry pants against his neck, the hand undoing the buttons on Eggsy’s shirt going wildly against everything he’s saying, ‘talk about this first.’

‘Mmph,’ Eggsy agrees, too busy riding Harry’s thigh to concentrate on his words, sharp bolts of pleasure jolting up his spine, heat pooling in his gut at the friction. They’re pressed up against the inside of Harry’s closed front door and everything in Eggsy is snarling, biting, his nails digging into the back of Harry’s neck. They can talk about it until the bloody cows come home after if Harry wants to, but right now Eggsy needs to get off or he thinks he might actually explode.

He’d white-knuckled it all the way home on the bullet train, Harry sat next to him and being an awful filthy tease, whispering in Eggsy’s ear could he please remain as still as possible for the duration and then placing his hand possessively on Eggsy’s thigh, just high enough to raise eyebrows if anyone else had been privy to it, but they were alone and frankly Eggsy was gagging for Harry to touch him so he wasn’t exactly about to say no.

Harry kept his hand there for the whole journey, just that one point of contact, thumb rubbing slow circles into Eggsy’s thigh until Eggsy was having to take careful deep breaths, trying not to spread his legs wider, Harry’s thumb occasionally brushing along the inside seam of his trousers. Harry kept up a steady stream of conversation the whole time as if he didn’t notice Eggsy’s erection a few inches away from his thumb. Eggsy had to clench his hands in the seat either side of him in order to obey Harry’s instruction and that just wound him up hotter, knowing he was doing exactly what Harry told him, spark lines of nerves on the back of his thighs lighting up. He’d felt almost nauseous with the desire for something to happen, which is why as soon as they’d got to Harry’s front door he’d been ready to lunge but Harry had surprised him, pinning him as soon as they got inside. Eggsy’s mouth was wide open on a shocked grin when Harry kissed him so hard he nearly banged his head against the door, until Harry’s hand came up to cover the back of it.

He can’t control the little hitching noises coming out of his mouth now and even if he could he wouldn’t because he can tell it’s getting to Harry, who’s sucking red marks into his neck with the kind of fervour Eggsy had prayed he might bring to the table. His mind is whirring with about a million different things he wants to do but they probably won’t get there tonight, not when even this fully clothed grinding bullshit is fucking incredible, too good to stop, Harry’s powerful body rocking into him, the hard press of his cock lining up with Eggsy’s suddenly and making them both gasp. Harry’s shoulders are fucking insane, Eggsy thinks as he clutches at them, meeting Harry’s eyes as their hips roll together, biting his lip on a groan.

‘Really, Eggsy,’ Harry says, then kisses him hard, like he wants to be fucking him already, tongue dipping deep, caressing the roof of his mouth.

‘No yeah, I know, I know,’ Eggsy says nonsensically when they pull apart, sounding breathless. ‘But it’s fine, yeah, I want it, I’m not – you’re not doing anything I don’t want, oh,’ he trails off into a hard sigh as Harry runs a hand up Eggsy’s chest and teases at a nipple in a way that makes Eggsy go flat and shivering against the door.

Harry’s eyes go narrow and dark, one hand travelling down to grip Eggsy’s thigh and bring them into closer alignment, the tips of his fingers brushing against the crease of his arse.

‘Can you come from this?’ he asks softly, his other hand still playing with Eggsy’s nipple, the hot sparks of pain mingled with pleasure coursing through Eggsy and making the rhythm of his hips stutter, abruptly close, leaking precome into his boxers. His trousers aren’t even undone but he knows he must look a fucked out mess, whereas Harry could run a hand through his hair and look good as new.

Eggsy lets out a choked laugh and lets his head fall back against the door with a quiet thunk, mind catching on the thought – how he must look right now, shirt half unbuttoned and mouth reddened, hair out of place, blushing stupidly under Harry’s attention. Harry’s staring like he can’t believe his luck, which is ridiculous because Eggsy has never seen anyone as gorgeous as Harry right now, the yearning for him filling up Eggsy’s eyes and his hands, skin humming with it until he almost can’t bear the tension and Harry takes mercy and bends his head to bite lightly at Eggsy’s neck, making him hiss.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’ he murmurs.

‘Oh my god, are you a fucking vampire or something?’ Eggsy half-laughs before his breath hitches, and then it’s like Harry takes it up a notch and gets proper serious about it, hitching Eggsy’s thigh up higher. The friction against his dick is so perfect Eggsy has to grip Harry’s shoulders and bite his lip so as not to come, immediately, embarrassingly quickly, in his pants like a teenager.

‘It would be just to take the edge off,’ Harry says, an encouraging note in his voice that every cell in Eggsy’s body rises up towards. ‘I’m sure you can come more than once for me tonight, can’t you?’ 

‘Oh, fuck,’ Eggsy says around the rushing of blood in his ears, the building crest of pleasure, and he tries not to moan it but it’s just as Harry starts sucking another bruise into his neck so he can’t help the thin, whining way it comes out.

‘Eggsy,’ Harry says seriously, looking at him, reaching down to fit his palm against the length of Eggsy’s cock and squeezing, ‘come for me.’

And Eggsy’s body spontaneously obeys, just like that, his forehead screwing up and his mouth opening in a moan as he comes hard and sudden, in powerful shaking pulses as he rides Harry’s thigh and Harry’s hand jerks him through it, fingers gripping Harry’s shoulders so tight the fabric of his jacket nearly rips.

‘Shit,’ he says after a minute, Harry laughing a little into his neck where he seems to have gone back to perch. He uncurls his fingers from Eggsy’s thigh and lets him down gently, still teasing at the softening length of Eggsy’s cock with soft petting motions as he mouths along the line of Eggsy’s jaw.

‘So good, Harry.’ It comes out kind of slurred but he can’t be fucked to care. He rests a hand on the back of Harry’s head as Harry amuses himself and runs his fingers lightly through his hair while his body resettles itself in the land of the living. His legs feel weak and trembling but there’s no chance of falling down with Harry sticking so close.

He might not have had this, he thinks abruptly, and it makes him flex his fingers slightly in Harry’s hair. He might have let this go past him, closing himself off, never getting any further than nodding at Harry in the corridor, and he’d never know what it was like to hold Harry like this, even when they’re both still fully clothed and his boxers are starting to get kind of uncomfortable, and his shirt is sticking to his skin with sweat. Harry’s mouth is so soft, sipping gently at the mess he’s made of Eggsy’s neck, his hands locked gently but firmly around Eggsy’s hips. 

Harry, who is actually still hard against his thigh, Eggsy realises after close endless minutes, then feels ridiculous for having gone so completely space cadet that he didn’t make any attempts at reciprocation when he’s been literally dreaming about getting his hands on Harry’s cock for nearly a year. He removes his hand from the waves of Harry’s hair and slides it down between them. 

‘Eggsy,’ Harry says warningly, and Eggsy’s hand slows but doesn’t stop.

‘I wouldn’t be comfortable going further when we haven’t discussed your limits,’ Harry says but still doesn’t stop him, although his voice goes a little rougher when Eggsy edges his hand over the bulge in his trousers and Jesus Christ, Eggsy’s eyes actually open a little wider. He’d kind of had the feeling Harry was hung but there’s imagining that, on occasion pretty much panting for it, and then there’s actually feeling the evidence in your hand.

‘God, Harry,’ he says blankly and then his mind whirs to life with limitless possibilities and he says ‘God,’ again, then ‘Oh, shut up,’ when Harry looks amused, because he’s clearly trying not to thrust into Eggsy’s hand. ‘Anyway, what limits, I’m all for it, let’s go –’

‘Not just yet, I don’t think,’ Harry says, taking a deep breath and kissing him lightly. He stays close after, letting their foreheads rest against each other. ‘I’d rather delay that particular gratification, if you wouldn’t be too upset.’

‘Delaying for how long,’ Eggsy asks suspiciously, squinting at him.

‘Only until after dinner,’ Harry says, smiling lopsidedly. ‘I am only human, after all.’

Eggsy smacks him on the arm and then wistfully abandons his attempts at groping to pull Harry in to kiss again, wrapping his arms around Harry’s neck. It’s like he’s already chemically addicted to the taste of Harry’s mouth. He could spend all day here, all pressing concerns like the uncomfortable panels in the door tossed aside.

They pull back eventually although Eggsy makes some kind of muttering noise about it.

‘I assume you’d prefer to shower before dinner,’ Harry says, and Eggsy wrinkles his nose, nodding. Harry just looks at him for a second, wearing that almost imperceptible smile.

‘What,’ Eggsy says uncertainly.

Harry opens his mouth and closes it, then opens it again. ‘Forgive me, I was just admiring,’ he says, brushing knuckles down Eggsy’s cheek. ‘It’s not often one gets to witness something so beautiful. I’ve spent quite some time considering how you might react to me, you understand – how you might look, and sound, and taste – but I have to say that my imaginings fell painfully short. You were perfect, Eggsy.’

Eggsy can feel himself turning slowly, vibrantly red. It’s not that he’s not had his fair share of compliments, obviously, he’s a good looking bloke, but this isn’t – it’s too much, really. Of course Harry would hand him something that painfully earnest without even hesitating, obviously, of course Harry Hart is exactly the kind of gent to basically write sonnets about someone’s O-face, is the thing. They haven’t even taken their fucking clothes off yet. He can’t imagine what Harry’s gonna say when Eggsy blows him.

‘You weren’t bad yourself,’ he says, trying to sound cheeky but it comes out a bit too sincere to really work. Harry just rolls his eyes and dips down to kiss him again. Eggsy doesn’t let him go for ages, tangling his fingers in Harry’s tie again to make him smile against his mouth.

---

Dinner isn’t awkward, exactly.

‘I didn’t know you were shit at cooking,’ Eggsy says, still towelling his hair dry, peering into the sink over Harry’s shoulder at the smoking saucepan. ‘What even is that?’

‘I am not shit at cooking,’ Harry says, sounding so petulant Eggsy feels a lurch of affection in his stomach, which is ridiculous. Whatever this turns out to be, he isn’t going to fucking stand for swooning like a sap every time Harry does something remotely charming, like being a really shit cook. It’s probably still just the afterglow, he tells himself ruthlessly.

Eggsy ends up making something instead. It’s nothing fancy, just a pasta dish he got used to making on his own when there was no one else in the flat to sort anything out for tea. Harry doesn’t seem to mind though, lingering at Eggsy’s shoulder as he makes the sauce, his hand firm on Eggsy’s hip like a placeholder. It all still feels a bit surreal, if Eggsy’s honest. Every so often he has a moment where it feels like he’s jolting back into his own body, like someone’s shaking him and saying yes, look, this is really happening – five months ago you thought Harry was dead, but now you’re standing in his kitchen in bare feet wearing his pyjama bottoms, arguing over whether or not putting oil in the pasta water will stop it boiling over.

‘Didn’t you learn any of this at some point during, like, decades of living alone?’ he teases, and Harry tsks but his reply comes out amused.

‘You’re assuming I’ve always lived alone.’

‘Oh? What’s that then, you been hiding someone away all this time?’

‘Only old Bertha in the attic,’ Harry says innocently. Eggsy pokes him with a wooden spoon. ‘Actually, Merlin lived here with me for a while in the nineties, but only out of necessity when his house was being refurbished after a fire. We agreed never to speak of it again after he moved back out,’ he says, sounding fond. ‘I wonder if he still knits.’

A pause.

‘You’re definitely not to tell him I told you about that.’

‘Yep,’ Eggsy says, carefully storing it away in the little blackmail folder in his brain. ‘No one else, though? Just you living here?’

‘No one else ever seemed worth the bother,’ Harry says, between the lines of which Eggsy can read like a neon flashing sign. He leans back into Harry’s chest, settling in when Harry’s arms wrap around him.

‘Sauce’s ready,’ he murmurs, dropping his head back on Harry’s shoulder.

Harry kisses his ear. ‘I’ll get the plates.’ He extracts himself from Eggsy’s body reluctantly, and Eggsy feels a brief, childish urge to cling, part of him still mistrustful that this is too good already; too extravagantly, overwhelmingly good to be real. But Harry only steps away to get plates and then Eggsy dishes up and they sit down at the table, close together so they can talk, and it all continues to be real and not a dream, as far as Eggsy can tell. It’s amazing how much of his adult life can be summed up in that one statement, like this is just the latest in a series of exercises pitched to find out exactly how mind-bendingly bizarre his life can get before he starts questioning reality.

Good as well as bizarre, obviously, he thinks as he watches Harry spill pasta sauce on the tablecloth. Who even uses fucking tablecloths these days?

‘I’ve never done anything like this before, you know,’ he says eventually, twirling his fork through his mostly demolished food. He can’t look at Harry for this bit. It took him a good five minutes to work up the balls to say it in the first place. ‘I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.’

‘And you assume I’m a seasoned connoisseur,’ Harry says, and Eggsy can tell by his voice that he’s smiling so he has to look up to check and alright, maybe this won’t be as bad as he thought.

‘I dunno,’ he says, grinning. ‘First you got a mad wife in the attic, then you can’t cook. I’m learning all kinds about you tonight, Harry.’

Harry rolls his eyes.

‘Rest assured that while I might have a little more experience than you, I’d hardly consider myself any better prepared.’ He leans forward with his hands clasped together, holding Eggsy’s eye. ‘I have no doubt anything we do together will far outstrip any of my previous encounters, simply by virtue of it being with you, Eggsy.’

‘Harry,’ Eggsy says seriously, ‘you need to stop talking like that or you’re gonna get your dick sucked under the table before we can have this conversation about limits or whatever it is you been flapping about.’

Harry’s eyes go a bit tight for a moment but then he sits back, watching Eggsy closely. He’s still wearing his suit trousers and shirt but he shed his jacket and tie while Eggsy was in the shower and he looks so good leaning back like that, his shoulders squared, a few buttons undone on his shirt, one hand wrapped around a wine glass. He looks like he’s been lifted out of a portrait; he’s the only person Eggsy’s ever met who could take a candid picture and make it look posed.

‘Then tell me what you’d like us to do,’ he says, the soft uncomplicated sound of the words rolling over Eggsy like cool water.

Eggsy hesitates, shifting in his chair. He’s never had to think it through before, not properly, never had to put it into words and then actually speak them to another person. It’s just been a low lingering flame at the back of his mind, something he thought he might need but couldn’t let himself ask for, in case he couldn’t stop asking once he’d had it.

‘I think I want you to hurt me,’ he says slowly, enunciating to compensate for the nerviness behind the words, aware that he’s flushing but barrelling on anyway, no point turning back now, ‘but only like, a bit? Or – how I want you to do it – like if we said what you’d do beforehand. And maybe you could hold me down and that?’ He scratches the back of his neck, swallowing hard. ‘And you might have noticed I like it when you tell me what to do.’

That last one’s still confusing, for as much as Eggsy’s been too busy wanting it to really wonder why. He’s got authority figure issues that are visible from space, but the thought of kneeling at Harry’s feet knocks him the fuck out. Maybe it’s just specific to Harry, a level of understanding and reverence he’s never found in anyone else, and Eggsy never wanted this before because his body was waiting, somehow, for the considering tilt of Harry’s head, the firm and fair clasp of his hand, like a match waiting to be lit.

Harry just nods, his eyes dark and intent. He takes a sip from his glass.

‘Anything else?’

Various scenarios drift across Eggsy’s mind but one in particular stands out.

‘I really want you to tie me up,’ he says firmly, sure at least of this. ‘None of them crappy Ann Summers handcuffs neither – proper rope and that. They’ve got tape for it too, haven’t they? Can you tie proper knots?’

‘Quite a number of them,’ Harry smiles, his eyes glinting. ‘I used to be a Cub Scout, you know.’

‘Using your powers for evil,’ Eggsy tuts, slumping in his seat a little, feeling like he can breathe again. It wasn’t so hard to say after all, not to Harry.

‘What kind of stuff do you want, though,’ it occurs to him to ask after a moment. ‘I mean, what do you get out of it?’

Harry just looks at him nonplussed for a moment.

‘What do I get out of it,’ he repeats disbelievingly. He actually raises a hand to his temple as if he needs extra strength or something, the drama queen. ‘Eggsy, are you quite aware of the effect you have on me?’

‘I did have an inkling yeah, considering the effect I was having on you all pressed up against my thigh earlier,’ Eggsy says, raising an eyebrow. He widens his legs a little bit even though Harry can’t see from the angle they’re sat at; the movement’s still obvious enough to make Harry’s grip tighten a little on his wine glass.

Harry drops his gaze for minute, running fingertips along the tablecloth. Eggsy watches like a man possessed. Harry’s hands never get any less hypnotising, no matter how long Eggsy’s exposed to them. They’re hotwired to his fantasies by now, capable of lighting him up without even actually touching him.

‘Well then, you must be aware that the temptation to see you tied up for me, entirely mine to direct as I wish, and trusting me to take care of you, is more than I could ever have hoped for, Eggsy.’ His eyes are like lasers now, his hand flat against the table. Eggsy swallows hard, squirming in his seat, every inch of his skin sparking with the heat of Harry’s eyes on him. ‘Of course, if you happen to think of anything else you’d like to try, I’d be most eager to hear it. I have a few ideas of my own.’

‘Yes, yeah,’ Eggsy breathes, trying to surreptitiously adjust his pyjamas – Harry’s pyjamas, Christ – so his erection won’t be so blindingly obvious when he stands up, although judging by the way Harry’s looking at him, he won’t have time to feel embarrassed about it. ‘Definitely. So do you think we could, um.’

‘Get upstairs,’ Harry says, low, and Eggsy says, ‘Yes.’

---

They make it up the stairs without touching but that’s only because Eggsy’s obeying Harry’s last words like they were an order, something he doesn’t even realise until they’re already there and Harry slams him up against the inside of his bedroom door this time, his hand sneaking hot and quick up the inside of Eggsy’s soft t shirt.

‘This a bit of a thing for you, is it?’ Eggsy asks, words muffled by Harry’s mouth, tongues sliding together. He’s breathing like he’s been running for miles. ‘Shoving me up against walls? Didn’t have you pegged as a brute, Harry –’

‘I did, fortunately, have you pegged as a talker,’ Harry murmurs, pulling back a little to make eye contact. Eggsy cocks an eyebrow and lets his hands roam over Harry’s back, pulling at his shirt, imagining digging his fingers in sharp while Harry fucks him. He shivers, the thought reverberating through him like a gunshot in an empty room.

He licks his lips and smirks a bit when Harry’s eyes follow the movement, tightening his grip. Harry’s halfway to hard but Eggsy’s pretty much already there, the fact that he’d come in his pants about an hour ago already a distant memory.

‘One thing we were in rather too much of a hurry to settle downstairs – would you like us to have a safeword?’ Harry asks, looking like he’s having to make himself pull back from the moment a bit to form the question properly. It helps to know Eggsy’s not the only one already half-lost.

Then he catches up to Harry’s question and his hands still on Harry’s back, brain stalling.

‘We don’t have to,’ Harry says, soothing a hand over Eggsy’s waist. ‘I’ll always ask before I do anything, and you’re free to say no, obviously. But it helps, just in case you change your mind at any point, you see.’

Eggsy nods, letting his hands settle on Harry’s shoulders in thought. A phrase flashes into his mind and he rolls his eyes at himself, because there’s cheesy and then there’s that, but then he can’t get it to go away so he just sighs and goes with it, meeting Harry’s curious look with a quirked eyebrow.

‘Manners maketh man?’ he says, half-laughing, and feels himself flushing when Harry laughs too, affectionately.

‘I’ll have you know I was under a lot of strain that day,’ he says and Eggsy just sticks his tongue out. ‘Oh good, yes, do feel free to remind me that I’m involved with someone young enough to still consider that suitable behaviour in the bedroom.’

‘Oh my God,’ Eggsy says, grinning, glee bubbling up in his chest. ‘Is this what you’re gonna be like all the time? All ooh Eggsy don’t stick your tongue out at me and ooh Eggsy I don’t think those boxers with the Avengers on are very appropriate –’

‘Anyway, the whole phrase is a bit long,’ Harry says loudly, reaching up to cup Eggsy’s cheek while Eggsy laughs. ‘Perhaps just ‘manners’?’

‘Fine with me,’ Eggsy says, which is when Harry sticks a hand up under his shirt, the brush of fingertips on his skin making the muscles in his stomach tremble. Harry’s watching him as he does it so Eggsy pretties it up a bit, looks up from under his eyelashes, lets his mouth fall open a little further, knowing how it must look; it’s always served him well before.

Harry’s mouth quirks, then in a flash he’s got both Eggsy’s wrists in an iron grip pinned over his head with one hand, the other coming up to clasp gently around Eggsy’s throat. His thumb rests gently against Eggsy’s rapidly beating pulse. ‘Pretty enough, Eggsy, but please don’t feel the need to flaunt yourself for me. I’d rather have you exactly as you are.’

Eggsy can’t help it, the way his breath catches, the way the calculation slides from his face in an instant. The small hurt of his wrists banging against the door got him all the way hard so fast he feels like all the blood in his body must have drained to his cock and the stretch of his upper body is being forced into is just the right side of uncomfortable. It’s overwhelming how quickly and how much he wants.

He stares at Harry, knowing he’ll be able to tell and completely unable to do anything about it.

‘There you are,’ Harry says, his eyes glittering. It reminds Eggsy of staring into the oncoming lights of a train about to run him over, closing his eyes before the crash.

He waits for it to feel too much – for his fledgling trust to falter, to feel angry at Harry for completely refusing to pull his punches – but it doesn’t come. He just wants more, endlessly, now.

‘Harry,’ he says hoarsely, just to have the weight of it in his mouth.

‘I want you to do something for me, if you can,’ Harry says, releasing the slight pressure on Eggsy’s throat to get back to feeling him up under his shirt. Eggsy lets out a hard breath, letting his head fall back against the door when Harry’s fingers go unerringly for his nipple and start playing, every twist and stroke sending a jolt of pleasure through him, pooling in his gut.

‘Can you refrain from coming until I tell you to do so?’

‘Yes,’ Eggsy says through gritted teeth, which is probably true, if he doesn’t think too hard about Harry telling him what to do, or Harry’s hands on him. Or Harry’s anything. This is setting out to be just like an extension of all those times Harry didn’t touch him and the space between them felt like one long stripped wire, hair raising on his arm with the tension of it. His dick is so hard it’s starting to ache a little, the awareness that he couldn’t touch himself even if he wanted to making him twist a little against Harry’s hands. Harry watches him calmly, his hand tight and immovable around Eggsy’s wrists, and Eggsy feels himself drip precome into Harry’s pyjama trousers.

‘Beautiful, Eggsy,’ Harry mutters, scraping his fingernails lightly down the trail of hair on Eggsy’s stomach. Eggsy can’t reply, too busy trying to jerk his hips forward and get some fucking friction. Harry tuts, keeping himself out of range, and presses his hand firmly against the skin just above Eggsy’s waistband, brushing that strip of nerves in the hollow of his hip and making Eggsy breathe in sharply like he’s been punched in the stomach. Harry watches him and Eggsy can see the fine tuning of plans going on behind his eyes, like he’s figuring out how far he’s allowed to push.

‘I’m going to let your wrists down now, and then I’m going to sit in that chair over there.’ He nods over his shoulder to a large armchair in the corner of the room. ‘I want you to strip, and then come over and sit with me.’

Eggsy raises his eyebrows a little.

‘Is that gonna fit both of us?’ he asks, eyeing the chair doubtfully.

‘I’m sure we’ll manage somehow,’ Harry says, squeezing his wrists a little tighter until Eggsy’s attention is jerked back to him with a helpless noise. His cock bobs in the pyjama trousers when Harry smiles a little savagely. He’s going to be fucking insufferable after this, Eggsy can already tell. ‘Does that sound amenable to you?’

Eggsy nods and Harry releases his hold, thumb rubbing consolingly over the jut of his wrist bone as he does so. Eggsy lowers his arms slowly, muscles flooding with sensation. He watches surreptitiously as Harry strolls over to the chair and situates himself, instantly assuming a position of gentlemanly relaxation as if the structure of it is wired into his fucking marrow. Eggsy will never, ever understand how it comes so easy for him to fold himself away so gracefully and look so good doing it, instead of awkward like Eggsy would be, but he does, and Eggsy can’t wait to see him with that polite exterior stripped away, the heart of him finally exposed to view.

He strips off the shirt in one smooth movement, letting it drop to the floor. Harry watches him with his legs spread, one hand raised to his mouth as his gaze flows, glittering, over Eggsy’s bared skin. He’s obviously hard but seems content just to stare for the moment, as usual. Eggsy slips his thumbs into the waistband of Harry’s pyjama trousers and slides them slowly down his hips, breathing harshly when his dick is finally freed to the air and bobs heavily against his stomach, trousers falling forgotten on the floor.

Harry doesn’t really do anything but his hand curls into a fist near his mouth and Eggsy can’t tease anymore, gets over there and affects as much nerve as he can muster as he stands in front of Harry naked, his cock rudely level with Harry’s eye line, while Harry sits composedly and still mostly dressed.

‘Sit down with your back to my chest,’ Harry says, his voice walking the razor edge between hoarse and fucking filthy, and it’s so good it makes Eggsy’s toes curl.

He turns around and smirks at Harry’s audible intake of breath before he lowers himself down until he’s sat in Harry’s lap, his legs splayed wide either side of Harry’s, hands clutching the arms of the chair. He feels bizarrely on display like this, flushed and naked to Harry’s clothed composure; he hadn’t dreamed of wanting that before either, but now the relief of Harry’s strong arms bracketing his body is immediate, running hot enough for Eggsy to feel even through the shirt, and the feel of fine fabric against his naked skin dirty enough to make him shiver despite the heat.

He shifts around a bit until he’s comfortable, maybe just a little out of nerves, and is viciously glad when Harry grabs his hips and yanks him back until he’s flush against Harry’s chest, setting his mouth against Eggsy’s ear. It’s like his body already knows it’s alright to do what Harry tells him, what Harry wants, and moulds against him like they were made for it. Harry’s cock feels like a fucking iron bar, perfect and hard and in almost exactly the right place, bumping up against the curve of his arse like he wants inside. Eggsy can’t help but grind down against it, and the way Harry’s cock twitches in response is worth the cost of Harry’s exasperated exhale against his ear.

‘Oh, sorry, was that a bit of a tease?’ he breathes, arching back against Harry’s chest, providing Harry with a perfect view of his chest and cock straining and wet at the tip. Yeah, he knows how it looks and Harry can go on all day that he doesn’t want Eggsy to preen for him but there’s nothing like knowing someone wants you to see them naked and spread out, ready to get fucked.

Harry bites his ear and Eggsy hisses, shocked.

‘That is not playing fair,’ he says, reaching around to grip Harry’s head in place. ‘Keep doing it, though.’

‘Who exactly is giving the orders here,’ Harry murmurs and it’s that voice again, the one that says he knows exactly what he’s doing and he’ll thank Eggsy to remember exactly how much he wants Harry to be giving the orders, ta very much.

Eggsy makes a grumbling noise but quiets when Harry runs a soft hand over his chest, sucking in a breath. Watching Harry’s hand spreading wide over his naked stomach is worse than pornographic, because Harry doesn’t actually wrap his fingers around Eggsy’s cock like Eggsy is dying for him to do, but just fits his hand snug to the inside of Eggsy’s thigh, trailing fingers on the soft, sensitive skin.

‘I want you to touch yourself for me,’ he says directly into Eggsy’s ear, ‘while we get acquainted with a few of the things I’ve wanted to do to you, seeing as you’re so sceptical about what I might be getting out of this.’

‘And you want me to not come until you say so,’ Eggsy says, trying not to squirm at the way Harry’s breath tickles his ear, ‘while you’re doing that.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ Harry says peaceably, letting his fingers trace maddening patterns over Eggsy’s thigh, pad of his thumb digging in when Eggsy’s cock jerks, ‘and I know how much you want to be good for me.’

Eggsy swallows and feels any last kneejerk protests slip away as he nods and turns his head quickly to kiss Harry on the cheek.

Harry’s mouth opens in surprise, hand stilling on Eggsy’s thigh for a moment before he turns his head and catches Eggsy’s mouth in a half-kiss, soft but with a lot of feeling, before Eggsy pulls back. He settles his head on Harry’s shoulder and lets his mind drift, closing his eyes as he runs a hand down his stomach to finally touch his cock.

He tries to start slow so he has any chance in hell of obeying Harry’s insane command – that and he hasn’t got any fucking lube, who’s the fucking Cub Scout now – but the first touch of his hand is blinding, so good on the hot sensitive skin of his cock that he can’t help but moan. He strokes himself leisurely a couple of times, all the way from root to tip, and lets out a dirty satisfied sound at the pleasure of it, then Harry’s thighs tighten underneath him and he realises with a slick tight feeling that Harry’s watching all this greedily, nonverbal despite all his plans, with a front row seat to Eggsy wanking off like he’s been saving himself for Jesus and it’s a kneejerk response to grind back as he fucks into the channel of his fist, all thoughts of going slow forgotten, smoothing the wetness around the tip with his thumb, getting his fingers slick with it.

Harry’s hand clenches in his thigh when he grinds his bare arse back, and Eggsy wonders whether Harry’s wet, whether Eggsy could goad him into opening his flies and fucking into him right now, short jerking thrusts while Eggsy strips his cock and he knows it’d hurt without any prep but he’s out of his fucking mind on it anyway, just wants Harry to get inside him. He moans again when Harry’s fingers dig in a little too hard, scraping against his skin, prickles of sensation spreading out to his dick.

‘Do you know,’ Harry says finally, sounding like he’s keeping his voice level with a fair amount of effort, ‘it’s technically against the rules for any Kingsman to have relations with a trainee? They had to ban it in ’45, I believe, after one trainee fucked his sponsor into revealing the dog test.’

Eggsy breathes out through gritted teeth, fucking into his fist slowly, trying to stop the shivering rhythm of his hips building.

‘Why am I wanking to a history lesson, Harry?’ he asks, pretty fucking proud to get the words out in one piece, and it’s like at least sixty percent just to see whether Harry’ll dig in his fingers again but he gets even better than that when Harry strokes the knuckles of his other hand down Eggsy’s neck then fits his hand under his jaw, squeezing once, gently, in question.

Eggsy nods vigorously and Harry bites his ear, a little too hard, and pinches his thigh. Eggsy jerks at the spark of pain and has to grab the base of his dick for a second and breathe out slowly.

‘As I was saying,’ Harry says smoothly, squeezing down a little harder on Eggsy’s throat and Eggsy lets out a whining breath, wondering dizzily whether Harry might leave bruises in the pattern of his fingertips, more precome slicking his hand at the thought, ‘regardless of the rules, I would have fucked you the moment I brought you to the mansion if I could have. I was watching you when the room flooded, you know. I couldn’t stop myself. You were so gorgeous, so powerful moving through the water, and so single-minded when you punched through the glass. It was quite a struggle not to drag you away from the other recruits and bend you over the first table I saw, but I didn’t think you’d appreciate being singled out like that. I had to save my fantasies for after your training, when I might have the chance to make them a reality.’

‘Fuck,’ Eggsy says thickly. He’s trying to alternate smooth long strokes with fast ones, working himself up rather than proper going for it, but as the pressure of Harry’s hand on his neck increases his breath starts coming struggled and harsh. It’s like he’s drifted into a fever dream, Harry’s hands on him taking over the controls so he can’t even stop the roll of his hips, mindless with need.

‘Is that too tight for you, darling?’

Eggsy shakes his head frantically, closing his eyes and gasping when Harry’s fingers twist against his skin at the movement.

‘Not yet, Eggsy,’ Harry says silkily, and it’s enough to make Eggsy’s hand slow on himself, hitching breath as his hand slides over his dick, holding back and biting his lip for a second, even though his hips jolt forward involuntarily. He holds his hips still until the danger passes, stunted pleasure ebbing away. If Harry says not to come yet he’s not fucking going to, even if his balls are drawn up so tight it hurts, feeling stunted and hungry.

‘Very good,’ he says, and Eggsy shivers hard at the approval in his voice.

‘Now do it slowly for me,’ Harry mouths against his neck, and he strokes himself again tentatively, goose bumps raising where Harry’s breath skims along his skin. It feels so petting and cossetting to be touched like this Eggsy marvels that he doesn’t feel the slightest urge to swat Harry away. ‘I can’t articulate how much time I spent imagining you in my office like this, spreading your legs so beautifully, perhaps still wearing that charming tracksuit you so love.’

Eggsy laughs out a gasp, settling back into a slow rhythm, arching his back.

‘Or perhaps kneeling under the desk for me, looking even more gorgeous with your lips stretched around my cock. I got very little work done, you understand, for all the months you spent at the mansion.’ His voice changes, a little thready with desire like he’s touching a nerve even for himself. ‘I imagined you happy to be tied for me, hands behind your back, legs braced against the chair as I fucked you. Your skin is so gorgeously pink when you blush, my darling. I thought you might let me tuck you back into your clothes and send you on your way still flushed, bruises around your wrists, a plug in your arse to keep you open and wet for me. Are you close, Eggsy?’

Eggsy just makes a kind of helpless noise, jerking himself faster now, hand slick on his cock, delicious building pleasure intensified by the lack of oxygen. Harry’s holding the pressure just steady enough to keep him in this glorious fucked out dream space, drawing out the pleasure in Eggsy’s body like an unravelling string.

‘I’ve thought about fucking you everywhere, if truth be told,’ Harry says, low, like he’s getting lost in his own fantasies now. ‘I’d like to take you somewhere hot at some point, preferably where we can lie in the sun without clothing like the most indulgent of sybarites and I can worship you as the sun does, and forbid you to touch yourself until I’ve tasted every part of you, until you’re spread out flat with pleasure against my tongue.’

Eggsy grinds back against Harry hard for that last one, because what the fuck is a sybarite when it’s at home, and Harry’s hand on his thigh finally jerks into action like Harry had been too distracted before, which is flattering until all other thoughts are blown right out of Eggsy’s mind like a fucking rocket when Harry runs his fingers through the precome Eggsy’s leaking like he’s a teenager all over again and down past his balls, stroking gently along his taint.

‘Perhaps a little faster now,’ Harry suggests like he’s not making it ten fucking times harder for Eggsy to control himself, but his voice is pure sex, kind of rough and velvet at once, throat clicking when he swallows, fingers teasing. It’s like there were about a million more nerves there than Eggsy’d thought he had and he can’t help but cat down into the touch, doing a kind of twist with his hips that makes Harry actually make a fucking noise, which would feel more like a victory if Eggsy wasn’t about to come like a fucking freight train just from Harry brushing a finger over his arsehole.

‘Harry,’ he breathes out, voice cracked and straining, thumb rubbing slick and wet over his slit and fucking whining endlessly with how close, God, ‘please, please, can I come, please –’ and he cuts himself off swallowing around the thick strong band of Harry’s fingers but he feels Harry’s hips thrusting up against him when he speaks and it’s too much, good feeling cresting inside him, and he whines like he’s fucking dying when Harry’s finger circles his rim, pushing into the pressure of Harry’s hand on his throat.

‘You can come, Eggsy,’ Harry says and Eggsy can barely hear him past the roaring in his ears but it doesn’t matter because his hand is a blur on his cock and he rocks down wildly against Harry’s finger gently probing at him and he comes so hard it nearly hurts, stars bursting behind his eyes, Harry’s hand squeezing down hard on his throat at the last moment and drawing sudden tears from his eyes as he cries out hoarsely, cock spurting a second time, shocked and jerking.

Harry’s making sweet little affectionate noises into the hollow of his collarbone when Eggsy comes back down to earth, hand on his throat lax now and petting him gently. He feels wordless and suspended, anchored by Harry’s hand. He turns his head toward Harry and just breathes in and out with his eyes closed, heart clenching painfully in his chest.

‘How do you feel?’ Harry asks quietly into the curve of his shoulder a few minutes later, lips brushing against his skin.

Eggsy just hums gently, nuzzling into Harry’s hair. He shifts around a little, brain coming back online enough to register the muscles in his legs growing stiff with discomfort. When he moves he feels Harry, miraculously, still stiff in his trousers.

‘You,’ he says and almost winces at how hoarse his voice is, and how much he likes it, ‘are a fucking madman.’

‘Why is that?’ Harry enquires, apparently deciding Eggsy’s awake enough to start being teased again and rubbing slowly at his hole, setting off sparks of pleasure that make Eggsy shudder in oversensitivity. He shifts against Harry, trying to get more of it and away from it at the same time, breathing hard when Harry dips the pad of his finger inside then withdraws.

He hisses when his cock twitches, clearly trying to get hard again. He glares down at it then directs his still-hazy attention at Harry instead, turning to press a wet kiss to his jawline.

‘I literally cannot believe you haven’t come yet,’ he says, and Harry laughs.

‘There’s something to be said for delayed gratification, I’ll have you know,’ he murmurs into Eggsy’s jawline. Eggsy shifts his hips a little and feels Harry still perfect and hard as fucking nails and still not inside Eggsy, and starts to get ideas about that, even though he feels kitten-weak and like he might need about another thousand years of Harry kissing his neck before he can move again.

‘Harry, can I,’ he starts then stops, hissing through his teeth when Harry’s finger dips further inside for the first time, tipping his head back at the spark of nerves along his spine. ‘It’s really hard to think when you’re doing that.’

‘And yet you’re still able to form full sentences, so evidently I need to up my game,’ Harry says, gently thrusting in to his knuckle and making Eggsy squirm, assaulted with the hot shock of it.

‘I want to ask if I can do something though,’ Eggsy gasps, and Harry pauses on an outstroke, fingertip still circling gently. ‘I can ask for things, can’t I?’

‘Ask for anything you want, my dear boy,’ Harry says, intrigued.

So Eggsy says, ‘can I suck you off, then?’ and Harry’s cock twitches against his arse, and because he’s secretly a little shit he just grinds back a little and says ‘please?’ in the raspy voice Harry’s left him with, like his throat’s already been fucked with long glorious strokes. Harry swallows hard enough that Eggsy’s feels his chest move before he speaks.

‘I have no doubt you’d be glorious, Eggsy,’ he says, his hand finally leaving Eggsy’s throat with a final squeeze, to which Eggsy’s dick tries to respond like it’s already a fucking reflex, which is embarrassing but also really, really hot, and running down his abs, digging in his fingernails. Eggsy shivers. ‘But you really don’t have to –’

‘I want to though, I really – you don’t even need to move,’ Eggsy interrupts, letting his head fall back against Harry’s shoulder. He bites his lip when Harry’s finger stops massaging his hole and slips inside again like Harry just can’t help himself, has to be inside that slick wet heat. ‘I want it, Harry, I want to,’ he says, too honest, words bursting out of him quickly, ‘I wanna get on my knees for you and you don’t – you don’t even need to get undressed, I’ll do you just like this, just take you out and swallow you down, Harry,’ almost babbling, his breath hitching and it’s not fake, he doesn’t want Harry to think he’s faking it, please let Harry know that, ‘Harry, please, I feel like I been waiting forever.’  

There’s a beat while Eggsy’s heart flutters in his chest wildly at asking for it, at wanting it so much his mouth is watering. Harry lifts his hand to cradle Eggsy’s jawline and breathes out, ‘Yes, Eggsy,’ directly into his ear, and lets go of him.

Eggsy swallows and slides down out of the seat, smooth fabric of Harry’s trousers slick against the hot skin of his shoulders. He winces as feeling rushes back into his legs and he’s at least still wobbly enough that he’s glad he doesn’t have to walk anywhere for this.

It’s a whole new experience, looking up at Harry from a kneeling position, one which his fantasies didn’t do justice to. Harry looks so fucking gorgeous Eggsy is suddenly kicking himself over not having demanded a position where he could see Harry getting slowly more and more turned on before, although that would have made it ten times harder not to come when Harry told him, if he could look Harry in the eye while he was telling Eggsy what to do; that demon silky voice in his ear was hard enough. His hair is all mussed from Eggsy’s hands, his shirt wrinkled, cheeks flushed with heat and mouth tightly closed. His eyes are sweeping over Eggsy, how his thighs are spread slightly, his belly still sticky with come, and Eggsy would blush but he’s too busy leaning forward to undo Harry’s trousers while Harry obligingly moves forward so Eggsy can reach.

He unzips Harry and takes him out and it’s probably good that he still feels a bit floaty and blissed out from earlier because feeling Harry’s cock in his hand is closer to a religious experience than anything he’s ever felt before. It’s long and thick and perfect, petal-soft and so hot Eggsy’s cock twitches in sympathy. He gives it one long loving stroke that makes Harry say his name more breathily than he’d probably like, hands clenching on the arms of the chair, and then Eggsy’s sealing his lips over the head and the thick weight of it in his mouth flicks a switch in him somewhere, hits a buzzer, and every thought of finesse or technique goes flying out the window. He sucks hard and gracelessly, trying to fit as much in his mouth as possible.

‘Fuck,’ Harry says succinctly, sounding punched out with the heat of it, which just makes Eggsy think about how many blowjobs he’s going to give Harry in payback for that little hushed reverence, like Eggsy on his knees is a sight to be treasured.

Eggsy fervently thanks any and all higher powers that he’s never had much of a gag reflex, sliding up and down until everything is slick and Harry’s breathing hard, weirdly measured like he’s trying hard not to lose control and just fuck into Eggsy’s mouth. He winds a hand into Eggsy’s hair and guides him slowly up and down and Eggsy’s mouth opens wider in a groan, letting the muscles in his throat go slack.

He closes his eyes at the bliss of it, his own arousal a buzz in the back of his head, dimly aware that his dick’s getting interested again. He doesn’t care, doesn’t even feel the need to do anything about it except pet himself lazily, skating the sharp edge of overstimulation. Everything feels soft and blurry and gorgeous, the heavy weight of Harry’s cock so filthy wonderful in his mouth. He just wants to stay here for as long as he can, savouring his position kneeling on the floor, knees getting numb and back aching at the stretch and lips sore and aching for more of it.

Harry groans hard when Eggsy bucks against his grip to slide his mouth up to the head again and flicks his tongue over the slit, searching out the salty taste of him, letting it spread across his tongue. Harry twists his hand in Eggsy’s hair and Eggsy moans around his dick, opening his mouth wider and running his tongue along the vein on the underside, suddenly desperate to feel Harry come in his mouth. His hips are making tiny little rocking motions, fucking up into his hand while the other comes up to jerk Harry into his mouth.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Harry says, ‘Eggsy,’ and moves Eggsy’s head up and down over him again but much, much faster and it’s so fucking hot Eggsy shudders, making a noise Harry must be able to feel because he does it again and again until Eggsy’s just letting Harry use his mouth, moaning continuously, tears welling up at the corner of his eyes again. Harry tries to jerk Eggsy’s head away urgently and Eggsy makes a kind of growling noise and refuses to be yanked off, gasping at the pain, his mouth quivering around Harry’s cock and then Harry comes with a groan, halfway inside Eggsy’s mouth, spilling hot and perfect over the dip in Eggsy’s lower lip. He licks up the taste, keeps sucking and swallowing until Harry makes a kind of disbelieving noise and he looks up to find Harry staring, totally fucked out, collapsed back in the chair.

‘Fucking gorgeous, Eggsy,’ he says, eyes worshipful, and Eggsy smiles, thumb running over his lower lip and dipping into his mouth. Harry groans and pulls him up into his lap again. Eggsy throws his arms around Harry and buries his face in his neck, breathing deeply. Harry’s arms come up around him at once, holding him tight, one hand coming up to clasp perfectly around the back of his neck.

‘Fuck,’ he says thickly, arching his spine and nursing the small leftover aches in his muscles. He closes his eyes until he feels the soft touch of Harry’s knuckles against his cheek and opens them to find Harry looking at him like he’s thinking thoughts full of four letter words. The nice ones, that is.

‘You did so well for me, darling,’ he says, eyes sweet. ‘You take to instruction so beautifully I shouldn’t be surprised, but as always you surpassed all expectations.’

Sleepy shivering pleasure goes through Eggsy at the praise, his eyes half closing. He feels so indolent and spoiled he knows he’ll be shocked by it when he gets all his brain cells back in working order again, but if someone tried to take him out of Harry’s arms now he’d claw them to death.

He’s still half hard when they eventually get cleaned up and into bed and Harry spends about a minute running his hand soothingly down Eggsy’s back, pretending he’s not going to pester him about it before he gives it up as a bad job and flips Eggsy onto his front, licking his way down Eggsy’s back to his arse. He proceeds to eat him out with one hand on his lower back pressing him firmly into the bed until Eggsy’s gasping into the pillow, dick sore and smearing wet into the sheet, coming with a shout with three of Harry’s fingers twisting inside him.

‘Fucking madman,’ he breathes into the pillow as Harry flops down next to him, and Harry twists over to bite his neck.

Chapter Text

It turns out that once Harry gets the go ahead he’s all in, whipping past the starting line faster than Eggsy can blow the whistle, leaving him gobsmacked in the dust. He wants to show Eggsy everything, he wants to try everything he hasn’t already tried, and he wants to do it now. Eggsy thinks fascinatedly that he might actually have a list.

Harry fucks him for the first time the morning after Eggsy sleeps over, strapping his ankles to the bedposts with thick leather belts and forcing his legs open wide, keeping him on the edge for hours until Eggsy is crying, wordless, stretched around Harry’s cock and two of his fingers, burying his face in the bed while Harry croons how beautiful he is and doesn’t let him touch himself at all until Eggsy comes untouched, and he’s so happy he cries a little more.

They fuck in Harry’s office six times in the first week and Eggsy wonders as he’s moaning around Harry’s fingers in his mouth, wrists tied behind his back with black silk rope – it pays to be prepared, Harry informs him primly when he pulls the ropes out of his bottom drawer, and after all, he wouldn’t want to mangle the fabric of his tie – as Harry fucks him hard over his desk, how it can possibly keep being this good every time, this overwhelming. He’s had good sex before, he’s been around, but this is bloody ridiculous. He feels on the edge for it all the time even when Harry isn’t actually fucking him, constantly aware of the bruises waxing and waning across his wrists and knowing when he drifts back into focus in a meeting and finds Harry watching him, eyes hot, that Harry’s thinking the same thing, just as desperate. Harry grabs Eggsy by the wrist as he’s about to leave, makes him gasp, matching his fingertips to the bruises he left, and lets the door fall shut with a click before he asks Eggsy nicely to get on his knees.

It’s like Harry knows what he needs even before Eggsy does, every time, and Harry handing him that knowledge means more than all the apologies and the presents in the world ever could. It makes him feel shameless and precious and dangerously greedy, like he can ask for whatever he wants and Harry will give it. Even when he’s sweating and messy and covered in come, blood still pumping itself to the site of bruises Harry made with his teeth and the pressure of his fingers, being with Harry never feels like anything less than a blessing, a series of instructional moments on how to be adored.

It’s also making him act like a fucking idiot at work, he knows that. It’s so good to finally get what he wants that Eggsy can’t really internalise it for ages and wanders around with a disgustingly stunned beatific expression that Roxy doesn’t hesitate for a moment to mock him for, although she does also squeeze his arm affectionately when she’s finished laughing. Merlin frowns and immediately starts threatening to do things like postpone Eggsy’s flying lessons if he doesn’t get his act together, and Eggsy nods contritely and starts making vitriolic plans to get Harry on the plane so they can join the mile high club.

One of the immensely comforting things about Harry’s all-inclusive attitude to their new sex life is that Eggsy gets to stop worrying, after about the fifth time he asks Harry to please tie the ropes tight enough to leave bruises, please fuck him hard enough to rattle the bedframe against the wall, that Harry is going to refuse him something, that Eggsy’s going to go too far somehow and Harry will get disappointed or change his mind. He gets fairly shirty with Harry at one point over some misplaced comment about Eggsy calling him sir and ends up spitting that if Harry thinks Eggsy’s doing this out of some kind of professional obligation he can take a fucking running jump, and the frustration in Harry’s expression clears so quickly it’s almost comical. He reassures Eggsy that he assumes nothing of the kind, and that he wouldn’t expect anything to change between them professionally, (apart from all the sex in his office, he adds with a quirk of his mouth). He doesn’t come near Eggsy until Eggsy says it’s alright, and when he does he just hugs him while Eggsy stands baffled and grateful, the knot in his stomach untying.

---

About a month after they sleep together for the first time, Eggsy comes back from ten days in Budapest, and he comes back angry.

He feels ill at ease the whole time he’s away, skin prickling with sensitivity, ready to jump at the slightest provocation. He hates the mission and his handler Daniel who makes him feel like a schoolboy playing cowboys and fucking aliens, and he hates the weather, and the rough cold empty house he has to stay in while he keeps the targets under surveillance. It takes him until the plane touches down on London soil and he feels a jolt of happiness at the thought of shoving his cold fingers under Harry’s pyjama shirt in bed tonight to realise that he’s been missing Harry. That’s when he gets angry.

It takes Harry all of about three seconds to realise something’s wrong after Eggsy arrives at his house and slingshots himself through the door and into Harry’s arms, lips landing on Harry’s with the kind of precision he’d be boasting about if he weren’t currently trying to shove his tongue down Harry’s throat. The scent of Harry’s cologne is so viscerally comforting that Eggsy feels it like a sucker punch, pausing for breath and shoving his face into Harry’s neck.

Harry’s gone just as animal, hands scrambling to get Eggsy’s shirt untucked at the back so he can get his hands on skin, his massive hand span covering nearly the entire breadth of Eggsy’s back. Eggsy finds his mouth again with a worried sound like it might not be where he left it, and the kiss is desperate and gorgeous and leaves him panting when they pull back, anger abruptly melting away at the look on Harry’s face.

‘You’re back,’ Harry says, and Eggsy grins like he always does when he’s managed to make Harry stupid enough with kissing that he doesn’t succeed in filtering everything before it gets to his mouth. ‘Or rather – did you skip debriefing again? Merlin’ll have your hide for that –’

‘On Monday, after my mandatory three days’ rest,’ Eggsy says, leaning forward and hovering near Harry’s lips as he speaks before kissing him again, opening up his mouth slow and deep. He’s getting much better at moderating himself around Harry when they’re alone, unlike the first week where it felt like every inch of Harry’s skin was suddenly magnetised and Eggsy was an iron filing. He can even successfully tease now. Sometimes. ‘I wanted to see you.’

‘How sweet of you to think of me,’ Harry murmurs, running one of his huge hands up the ridges of Eggsy’s spine. ‘Sweet and lovely and of the devil.’

‘Says you,’ Eggsy says indignantly. He sees Harry smiling, about to rejoinder, and abruptly shoves his face into the hollow of Harry’s neck again, hands fretting at the back of Harry’s jumper.

‘Eggsy?’ Harry says startled, settling his hand softly on the back of Eggsy’s neck. Eggsy closes his eyes. ‘Is everything alright?’

Eggsy makes a noise into his neck.

‘How was Budapest?’ Harry asks in tones of dawning understanding, fingernails scraping lightly down Eggsy’s back in a way that’s riling him up and winding him down at the same time. He feels antsy and weird, like he wants to burrow under Harry’s skin and sleep for a hundred years.

‘Shite,’ he mumbles, laying his head on Harry’s shoulder. ‘I didn’t see anyone except through binoculars the whole time I was there and Daniel was bitching in my ear all the way through and it was fucking freezing and,’ he stops because he’s getting to the end of the list and Harry might not like being tacked onto the end of it, even if it’s just the lack of him that Eggsy’s complaining about.

He pulls his arms back round to Harry’s chest and huddles against him, moody. He doesn’t know if it’s alright yet, to miss Harry again. He’d done enough of that to last a lifetime before Harry came back.

‘And the food was crap,’ he finishes lamely. Harry laughs a little and Eggsy knows exactly what his smile looks like right now without turning to look. 

‘I see,’ Harry says, and Eggsy thinks morosely that he probably does, the fucker.

His suspicions are confirmed when Harry leads him upstairs and runs him a bath full of those posh bath salts and things he sent Eggsy ages ago while they sit in the giant ridiculous wicker chair Harry keeps in his bathroom. Harry rubs his back and kisses him sweetly, taking dipping glances at his mouth and jawline and neck until Eggsy’s just hanging on, fingers gripping on tight to the back of Harry’s collar, mouth sore and red, rocking softly into Harry’s lap.

He sets Eggsy in the bath and leaves him to it with the strict instruction only to come out to bedroom when he’s relaxed and ready, which makes Eggsy shiver low in his stomach with anticipation. He lies back and lets the water flow over him, closing his eyes.

When he surfaces again the water’s gone lukewarm and he feels hazy, empty and full at once. He gets out of the bath on trembly legs, leaning against the side while he towels himself off and lets the water drain, wrinkling his nose at the weird bath crystal residue left behind and swishing the water about a bit to get rid of it. He doesn’t know why Harry bothers with that stuff half the time, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

He wraps himself in the giant fluffy towel and goes out to the bedroom, where Harry is lying on the bed still fully dressed apart from his shoes and jacket, reading something leather-bound with one hand resting behind his head. Eggsy would roll his eyes at the tableau of it but at this point he knows that Harry is a giant drama queen who loves to be praised and appreciated just as much as Eggsy does, if not more for his inability to acknowledge it, and anyway he does look fucking good, of course he does, so instead he just stands and admires Harry for a moment and then drops his towel unceremoniously to the floor when Harry finally looks up.

‘Think I’m about as relaxed as I’m gonna get,’ he says. Harry arches an eyebrow, letting his gaze run over Eggsy like a forest fire and making him flush under the attention. He feels kind of needy and exposed and he wants to go and sit near Harry or on him, preferably, missing the heat and hardness and comfort of him after ten days away, but Harry hasn’t told him he can do anything yet so he won’t. He stands and lets Harry drink in the sight of him, drops of water still running from his hair and pooling in his collarbone. He shivers, once, but he doesn’t look away from Harry.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Harry says mildly, getting up from the bed with delicate unfolding of his ridiculous gazelle legs. He puts his book down on the bedside table without even glancing away from Eggsy, which is one of those little things that doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of everything but makes Eggsy proud of whatever game he has that makes Harry forget to do normal human things like use a bookmark.

‘Sit on the bed for me, please,’ Harry says in that firm but fair tone, crossing to the dresser and fetching something from a top drawer, and Eggsy complies. He’s glad he’s sat down when Harry turns back around, because in one hand he’s holding a pair of leather gloves, and in the other a silk scarf.

Eggsy swallows and braces his hands on either side of him, leaning back a little further to admire the view as Harry stalks towards him, which triggers the muscle memory of watching Harry take Dean’s goons out in the pub. Eggsy’d had a massive erection then too, actually.

Harry lays the stuff down next to Eggsy and starts undoing his cufflinks with quick, economical movements.

‘I thought we’d try something a little different, seeing as you’re rather wound up tonight,’ he says, setting the cufflinks aside and neatly folding his cuffs up over his arm, revealing more muscled forearm with every inch until he’s bare to the elbow. He watches Eggsy the whole time, something glittering in his eyes. Yeah, he knows.

‘Yeah?’ Eggsy breathes after too long, Harry’s words a very distant memory. He’s going to die. Harry is going to kill him with sex, and then someone is going to have to explain to his mum why he died in his mentor’s bedroom with a giant hard-on and a red handprint on his backside.

‘Do you remember,’ Harry says, catching his chin with a gentle hand and tilting it so Eggsy is craning up to make eye contact with him, ‘when you said you wanted me to hurt you?’

A frisson of pure energy goes through Eggsy and he nods. They haven’t done anything like this yet, nothing outside of getting a bit rough – he has the feeling Harry’s been trying to ease him into it gently, which is a fucking laugh and a half when his entire body feels prickly and tense with wanting it, like he’s on the edge of something with a long drop and getting ready to jump.

Harry smiles and runs his thumb over in the inside of Eggsy’s lower lip where it’s slick and wet, until Eggsy has to let his mouth fall open under the pressure.

‘Do you still want that, Eggsy?’

‘Yes,’ Eggsy says lowly, mouth moving around Harry’s thumb. He keeps his eyes locked on Harry’s and doesn’t blink as he sucks it into his mouth, hollowing his cheeks with it. Harry breathes out slowly through his teeth.

‘How much do you want it, I wonder,’ he says, and Eggsy just gives him a look. Harry leans down and strokes Eggsy’s cock just once, his grip so sudden and hot on the sensitive skin that Eggsy gasps, jerking back on his hands again. Harry’s thumb traces a vein on the underside slowly. ‘Hold still, please.’

‘A lot,’ Eggsy grates out, trying to watch Harry’s hand teasing on his cock but jerked up by Harry’s hand on his chin, ‘I want it a lot, obviously, you’ve got your hand on how much I want it, Harry –’

‘It doesn’t hurt to make sure,’ Harry says, looking entirely too pleased with himself. Eggsy’s tensed with the effort not to thrust into Harry’s hand and he half-closes his eyes with pleasure when Harry’s thumb absentmindedly catches on his foreskin, which must really push some of Harry’s buttons because his hand starts moving, just an inch of friction and Eggsy lets out another noise before Harry stops again and he groans in frustration.

‘Not yet,’ Harry says, which Eggsy bitchily thinks of as one of his favourite phrases, solely designed to keep Eggsy hanging on the edge of if not yet, then when? ‘I’d thank you to keep your hands off yourself for the time being.’ His voice is Eggsy’s favourite variant of highbrow, at least when Harry uses it on him; not a command, not quite, but with an edge that promises all sorts if you happen to disobey.

He sits quiet and swallowing on the bed, hardly breathing, as Harry steps back and picks up the gloves. Harry straightens them out watching Eggsy all the while, then pulls on the right one with a twisting motion of his wrist until it’s sheathed, stopping just above his wrist. Eggsy knows the network of veins on his forearms so well he could reach out and trace them now, if Harry would let him. He can’t tear his eyes away. It’s ridiculous, he knows – it should feel ridiculous, something so performative, but instead it just makes the muscles in his thighs tremble. He swallows again just to try and get some oxygen inside him.

When the left glove is on all the way too Harry flexes his fingers and makes a satisfied sound at the way the leather stretches around the movement. It looks soft and supple, the kind that Eggsy imagines would feel expensive and decadent on skin.

Eggsy clenches his hands in the bedsheets. Harry’s never worn leather gloves in front of him before, he knows because he’d fucking remember. So maybe – maybe Harry went out and bought these, went to more than one shop and was fussy about the fit and the quality of the leather, looking carefully for exactly the right pair, thinking about how they’d feel and look when he touched Eggsy with them, how they’d heat up after the contact with Eggsy’s fevered skin. Maybe he wants Eggsy to think about Harry doing all that for him, about planning this just so to please him the most.

‘Have you ever experimented with sensory deprivation, Eggsy?’ Harry asks, the kind of question he likes to drop on Eggsy with absolutely no warning just to see his face change.

Eggsy shakes his head. If he tried to talk it’d come out all babble and vowels.

‘I want to try blindfolding you. It tends to heighten the other senses.’

‘But then I won’t be able to see you,’ Eggsy says mournfully before he can stop himself, and Harry smiles and steps forward, reaching out to him again and clasping his chin in one gloved hand.

‘That is rather the aim of the exercise,’ he says, running his thumb over Eggsy’s bottom lip. The slide of the leather makes Eggsy’s breath catch and he shifts in frustration, abruptly aware again of how hard he is even though Harry’s barely touched him. He feels pulled up toward Harry, who is blocking the light of the lamp by standing so close, his hand the only point of contact between them.

‘Are you so fond of the sight of me?’ Harry asks, thumb caressing Eggsy’s jaw.

‘Harry, don’t be dim,’ Eggsy says but it’s soft. He thinks about it for a moment, Harry’s gloved touch sweeping over him, everything loud and bright receding into the darkness, leaving him with only the cool glide of the leather and Harry’s low sleek voice.

‘Alright,’ he says, a little hoarsely. ‘But if I don’t like it you gotta take it off again, yeah.’

‘Of course,’ Harry says, watching him with patient eyes. ‘Tell me your safeword.’

‘Manners,’ Eggsy says promptly, like he does every time Harry asks him to reiterate it. He’s not sure which one of them it’s intended to reassure but either way it is comforting, the reminder of his power to halt the course of events with just one word – a word Merlin had actually said to him the other week when he was being grumpy during a meeting. Eggsy had choked on thin air while Harry looked calmly on and kicked Eggsy in the shin under the table, although not very hard.

‘Very good, Eggsy,’ Harry says warmly, and Eggsy fidgets, tries not to look too imploring. It’s awful, this hotline Harry’s praise has to Eggsy’s dick, it’s just the worst, he thinks as Harry carefully folds the silk scarf into a blindfold and kisses Eggsy lightly on the lips once, then ties it firmly at the back of Eggsy’s head.

The difference is quick and sure, a calm mantle settling over Eggsy’s shoulders. He lets out a long breath and shivers when Harry places a gloved hand flat on his chest and gently pushes him backwards until he’s flat on the bed. He shifts his hips a little, settling against the mattress, pulse starting to speed up. Harry likes to do this sometimes, go a little quiet while he thinks over exactly what he wants to do. Eggsy spreads his palms over the cool sheet on either side of him, waiting, settling into the scent and sound and feel of the bed around him, soft and welcoming, Harry’s palpable presence in front, like a silhouette cut out of the night sky. 

‘How does it feel?’ Harry murmurs, running his hand down Eggsy’s stomach, leather rasping soft against the sparse hair. Eggsy’s breath hitches.

‘Good,’ he says a little thickly. ‘I just want – I wanna know what we’re doing, what are you gonna do? How with it do I need to be, because this blindfold lark is really spacing me out, Harry.’

Harry laughs and it’s a rich, rounded sound, Eggsy notices without the distraction of seeing it. He smiles on reflex, eyelashes fluttering against the silk of the blindfold.

‘I had planned to spank you,’ Harry says carelessly, and Eggsy squirms against the bed, against Harry’s hand still pressing down on him, his dick jerking. Harry must love it, seeing Eggsy halfway getting off just on hearing him talk, and now Eggsy can’t even see him, fuck, just has the silken tell of his hands and voice to go on. He swallows.

‘But I confess myself reluctant to discipline you out of nowhere. Can you think of anything you’ve been bad for?’

Eggsy’s mouth stretches up in a grin he can’t control and he imagines Harry’s eyes following the movement, always fixed so close on him.

‘I dunno. I used up all your milk for cereal before I went to Budapest and I didn’t buy anymore.’

He actually hears Harry sigh and smiles again before his mind jerks back to the game they’re playing.

‘I thought about you a lot while I was away,’ he says and listens intently for Harry’s reaction, trying not to move at all, not the slightest sound against the sheets.

‘Did you indeed,’ Harry says, his voice still smooth but the promise of heat behind it. He slides his gloved hand down, thumb brushing against the nervy thread next to Eggsy’s hipbone, and coaxes him until he’s turned face down on the mattress, cock pressed snugly against the sheet. He shifts until he’s a little up on his elbows and knees just for comfort’s sake because if he’s getting fucked then he wants to be able to brace himself, and hears Harry taking that sharp intake of breath that means he’s having to try harder than usual to keep himself under control. Eggsy fucking lives for those sharp inhales, he does.

‘What kind of thoughts were these?’ Harry asks after a moment, running one gloved finger down over the curve of Eggsy’s arse cheek. Eggsy shivers at the shiny feel of the leather, skin coming out all over in goose bumps. It’s like not being able to see Harry is heightening every other sense until he can feel the exact trail of Harry’s finger like it’s superheated. ‘Am I to assume they were the chaste meditations of an Austen heroine separated from her beloved?’

‘You’ve got a problem about Austen, you do,’ Eggsy says, trying to sound casual although the effect is spoiled a bit by the way his hips rock forward into thin air when Harry runs his finger down the crease of his arse. God, the way that leather would feel wrapping around his cock, the softness of it against the sensitive skin. Not at all the sort of thing you should be doing with fine leather, probably. He wonders a bit deliriously whether Harry will be able to wear them again after tonight, whether they’ll be too ruined to pass in public. Whether everyone who saw them would be able to tell what Harry had looked like now – is he running his hand through his hair yet? Is he flushed to the edges of his cheekbones? – and what he’d done to Eggsy with them.

‘Is that a no?’ Harry says innocently, letting his thumb slip inside and brush teasingly against Eggsy’s hole. Eggsy jerks against the bed.

‘Fuck, Harry –’

‘No?’

‘No, I –’

‘Then what did you think of?’

‘You,’ Eggsy bursts out, too shaken to be anything but honest, ‘God, all the time, Harry, fuck –’

‘Did you think about what I’d be doing to you if I was there?’

Eggsy struggles for a moment. It’s not that he doesn’t want to say, but it’s difficult to organise the words into a sentence when he’s feeling this flushed and tight under the skin. He feels almost wounded by how much he wants Harry to touch him, to feel the smooth slide of the leather over every inch of him, delicate and petting.

‘Yeah,’ he says roughly, ‘Harry, you know I – I thought about you every night, I couldn’t –’

‘Couldn’t what?’

‘Couldn’t sleep, Harry,’ he swallows again, turning his face restlessly to the right, hips curving back into Harry’s teasing hand. ‘I kept thinking about when I was in Naples.’

Harry’s hand stills then returns, but he doesn’t speak. Eggsy soldiers on.

‘When I called you on the glasses and you said we shouldn’t because I was in the middle of a mission but I knew what you wanted really and,’ he stops, trying to spear his jumbled thoughts into a straight line, flashing back to that night when he’d felt heady and craving, staring at himself in the mirror of his hotel room wearing nothing but the glasses, Harry’s voice smooth as caramel in his ear telling him exactly what to do with his hands. ‘And it was so fucking hot, Harry, I knew you were watching and you couldn’t keep a hand off yourself but you stayed so fucking calm and you kept – kept telling me how good I was and I couldn’t, I, please –’

‘It’s alright,’ Harry says, not coddling but firm and it sets something right in Eggsy’s spine, something needful that makes the muscles in his shoulders square up ready for a challenge. Harry’s other hand settles firm in the curve of his hip and pulls him up so that his body forms a deeper angle, arse stuck out in the air.

‘This would be easier if you were bent over something, but I’ll trust you to keep yourself in position,’ Harry says, his fingertips running patterns over the insides of Eggsy’s thighs, body ghosting close to Eggsy’s back. Eggsy shivers. ‘I think ten strokes is sufficient for now, and if you want me to stop you know what to say.’

Eggsy breathes out an agreement. Ten strokes doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe Harry’s still trying to ease him into it. He marvels at the difference between Harry’s words and tone; to see the words on paper might look almost proper but it’s nothing like that to hear them spoken in Harry’s raw-edged tone, his fingers moving fretful across Eggsy’s skin. When Harry wants something, really wants something, he tends to slip back into the gentlemanly persona, his diction and bearing lapsing back into composed formality as if he can’t help trying to mask how much he needs. Eggsy can relate. He stretches out his back, wondering how it’s possible to feel so blissed out on the simple touch of Harry’s gloved hand on the small of his back.

‘Hold still, darling,’ Harry murmurs, gentle, and then strikes him.

The shock of it hits first, the slap of the leather so loud in the quiet, then the sting surges in like a narcotic rush, pushing his breath out in a shocked gasp. He folds forward a little, can’t help it, before pushing himself back toward Harry mindlessly, feeling the sting of it melting down into pleasure.

‘Fuck,’ he says, mouth open in a shocked o, and then Harry does it again a little further down, huge hand falling straight across his crack, and Eggsy lets out a moan and lets his head fall forward, shutting his eyes behind the blindfold at the intensity of the pain mingling with pleasure.

‘Three,’ he breaks out on the third stroke, he doesn’t know why, and Harry audibly takes a breath behind him and then says, ‘Very good, Eggsy,’ in that low admiring tone, and Eggsy squirms with it. He badly wants something inside him – Harry’s fingers, his cock, his tongue, anything, imagines the thrusting in time with the slaps and his arse clenches around nothing at the hot rush of lust.

He counts four, five, six, each number breaking out of him on a sharp gasp, then Harry’s hand catches on the exact same sore skin two strokes in a row and it sets Eggsy off, crying out, rearing back into it and away from it in the same motion, flattening his chest to the mattress, shoving his face into his folded arms, tears sparking at the corners of his eyes.

‘Christ, Eggsy,’ Harry says, voice roughened and low. ‘If you could see how you look – you’re taking it so well for me, darling. Do you like it? Do you want me to keep going?’ He runs his other, cooler hand over Eggsy’s sore skin and Eggsy pictures it, black leather skimming over red marks, and jolts back into it.

‘Yes,’ he says and he doesn’t even recognise his own voice, the hunger in it too sharp.

‘Gorgeous,’ Harry says fervently. He strikes again and again until Eggsy’s hip are shuddering into a rhythm, pushed and pulled at once, dick jolting forward with every strike, Harry’s breath coming harsh and quicker in the dark silence.

‘Ten,’ Harry says before Eggsy can bite it out, then yanks Eggsy back up against him with no warning, burying his face in Eggsy’s neck like he has to get skin on skin. Eggsy makes some kind of noise at being pulled up sharp against Harry’s still-clothed body, the press of Harry’s cock against his arse, his mind still a black hole of needing, and cranes his head around to mouth at the side of Harry’s face with absolutely no finesse, the impulse of all the blood in his body screaming for something, for Harry to make good on what he’s stirred up.

‘I know, I know,’ Harry says, soothingly but still frenetic, still rushed, hands fumbling around to Eggsy’s front and fucking finally grasping Eggsy’s dick, so slick with precome that the leather slides down easy and it’s so good Eggsy groans and rears back against Harry’s cock and hisses at the brush of fabric against his sore skin. Harry bites lightly into his neck saying, ‘So good for me, darling, you can, you can, Eggsy, yes,’ gloved hand still rubbing him, thumbing over his slit and that’s all it takes. He comes in a glorious full body rush, fucking into Harry’s hand over and over, riding the waves of pleasure.

‘Harry,’ he mumbles, and Harry says, ‘I’m here, it’s alright,’ all muttered endearments, and Eggsy feels overwhelmed with it suddenly and has to turn round in Harry’s arms even though it makes his knees twist awkwardly in the sheets and his everything feels weak, right down to the ligaments and tendons that hold his bones in place. Harry catches him at the elbows, leather leaving sticky fingertip indents, and he finds Harry’s lips with his fingertips, trembling, and kisses him hard, pulling him down onto the bed.

He falls flat against the mattress, breath hitching when his reddened skin hits the sheets. Harry goes down on top of him with an oof sound.

‘You could have just asked,’ he complains and Eggsy nuzzles into whatever part of Harry’s face is directly in front of him, which turns out to be his nose, and makes a sound of frustration. Harry laughs, chest shaking against Eggsy’s, and when he says ‘Close your eyes, sweetheart,’ and sets his hands against the cloth of the blindfold Eggsy does it, and can’t imagine any command Harry would give him that he wouldn’t at least try to obey.

He feels the cloth slipping over his forehead, lack of weighted darkness over his eyes like a sudden breath of fresh air.

‘Wait a moment or it’ll be too bright,’ Harry says, kissing his eyelids, and Eggsy flashes back to that time on the train where he’d wished he could lean forward and leech the pain right out of Harry just like this. He smiles and Harry kisses that too.

He opens his eyelids slowly, squirming a little where he lies at the first beams of light to break through. He feels the delicious weight of Harry’s cock against his hipbone and relishes the idea of doing something about that soon. The glimpse of Harry’s face that breaks through when he opens his eyes a little wider distracts him, though.

Harry is a vision, flushed and staring down at Eggsy with a combination of adoration and mild concern. His hair is mussed and falling in his eyes, bright spots of colour riding high over his cheekbones. Eggsy feels like he’s been hit in the face with something heavy he’s held often before but never fully appreciated the weight of.

‘I,’ he says, and then stops. He doesn’t want the first time he says it to be during sex because that’s such a copout and in his experience it usually turns out to be a load of heat-of-the-moment bollocks. Anyway, Harry already knows. Eggsy left Harry still sleeping in bed two Sunday mornings ago to get him the paper from the newsagents down the road, just so he could do the crossword with breakfast. Harry knows.

Harry’s waiting, eyebrows raised in question, although his eyes keep darting in a fairly gratifying way to Eggsy’s body spread out under him.

‘I want you to fuck me,’ Eggsy says firmly instead, which’ll do just as well. It’s not like it’s a lie, anyway, and if Harry’s taken the blindfold off then Eggsy reckons he can ask for other things now without needing to do it particularly nicely.

‘Ah, a romantic,’ Harry says, kissing his way down Eggsy’s neck, effortlessly pinning Eggsy’s wrists above his head with one hand. Eggsy shivers but won’t be distracted, and makes a rude noise.

‘You were just spanking me! You don’t get to say I’m not –’

Harry’s laughing helplessly, kissing his way down Eggsy’s chest, and Eggsy’s chest feels welling over but he carries on over the crest of it, his voice wobbling around his wide grin.

‘And anyway what was it you were going on last time I was under your desk, fucking filthy it was, my ears were going red – oh, fuck –’

‘I would have thought it would take a lot more than that to make you blush, darling,’ Harry says, smirking up at Eggsy from where he’s taking kitten licks at the come still covering Eggsy’s dick and belly.

‘Mmm,’ Eggsy says, staring down. Harry keeps his gaze fixed and licks a deliberate stripe from one end of his cock to another and Eggsy sucks in a breath, dimly unable to believe how fast he might be getting hard again, twitching with oversensitivity.

He rocks his hips from side to side and tries to project grabby hands until Harry relents and comes up over him again, hand squeezing Eggsy’s wrists together until his skin sings with the small hurt of it. This is fucking girly and a half, stopping Harry lapping at his dick just to get him up here to kiss, but he feels like he has to, like he might go flying apart without it. It’s hard sometimes after Harry’s done something they haven’t tried before; he clings, has to soak up Harry’s touch and comforting weight like sunshine, honey sweet.

Harry breaks away after a minute or so of soft sucking kisses, Eggsy mostly just letting his mouth fall open and making Harry do all the work. He lets Eggsy’s wrists go with a final squeeze and sits back on his heels, slight smile at Eggsy’s noises of complaint. He’s still really, noticeably hard – it always is noticeable with Harry – and Eggsy stares with the unabashedness of those long past shame at wanting that dick until Harry raises one hand to his mouth and slowly pulls off a glove with his teeth, mouth caught in a gorgeous snarl as he yanks it up over his hand, revealing his long pale fingers.

Eggsy’s mouth falls open a little.

‘Jesus, Harry,’ he breathes. Bizarrely, he remembers a moment a while back when Roxy’d let slip that she couldn’t imagine Harry being sexy because he was buttoned up too tight. Eggsy’d actually choked on his own laughter and she’d had to whack him on the back, annoyed. He sincerely wishes he’d thought to wear his glasses so he could have recorded this moment and played it back to Rox to demonstrate how wrong she was, how utterly fucking out of this world wrong.

Harry pulls off the other glove the same way, flash of white teeth on the gloves Eggsy came all over, and when his hands are free he clasps them around Eggsy’s thighs and manhandles him until their cocks are lined up with a sharp twist of his hips that makes Eggsy give a cut off noise and get his head back in the game. He props himself up and rummages under the pillow because Harry is usually horrifyingly well prepared and – yep, there it is.

He grabs the bottle of lube and sort of lobs it at Harry so it lands in his lap but like, gently. He just really can’t be bothered to lean down there and pass it to him. He smiles angelically when Harry glares at him, and winks.

He should know better really. Alright, he definitely does know better, but he secretly likes it when Harry forgoes a lot of prep and that moment right there of Harry’s long thick fingers slicking into him, two at once, makes him shallow breathe like he’s just been plunged into ice water. It’s gorgeous and exactly what he wants, and from then on it turns quick and bright again, him yanking Harry down to kiss when Harry circles at his hole then thrusts back inside hard.

‘You do like to make things hard on me, don’t you,’ Harry smirks into his neck, sucking a bruise that everyone and their mum is going to be laughing at Eggsy about on Monday, when it will still be there, because Harry will take every chance he can get to refresh it before then.

‘Oh come on,’ Eggsy says, voice going a bit high when Harry adds another finger, and lets his hips roll back down into it. He loves the sweet stretch of that almost more than Harry actually fucking him – the thickness of Harry’s fingers inside him, the burn in his lower back fading slowly into pleasure, need, more. He could lose hours like this. ‘You’re walking into that one.’

Harry makes a kind of agreeing noise into his neck, clearly too preoccupied to pull away and respond properly. He runs his other hand up under Eggsy’s leg and hitches it up for a better angle and Eggsy groans, the stretch even filthier, the sounds Harry’s fingers make driving into him louder. Harry makes a pleased sound, bites a little harder into his neck and thrusts his fingers in hard then pulls them out slowly, making Eggsy feel every inch, until he’s just teasing at the rim, nerves twitching and overexposed. Eggsy bites his lip, tilting his head so Harry can get to more of his neck, arching down hard into his hand. He clasps at the back of Harry’s collar and runs his hand down under his shirt, feels the muscles in Harry’s back move.

‘Maybe one day I’ll actually get you fucking naked, what do you reckon,’ he mumbles and throws his head back on a gasp when Harry skims across his prostate. About three times out of ten Eggsy can bother to cramp his hand up trying to locate it himself and Harry gets it every time on the first fucking try.

‘It’s entirely possible,’ Harry says, smiling, watching Eggsy’s face as he brushes lightly against that spot inside him again. ‘After all, I plan to have you every way I can, every day if we can manage it, for as long as you’ll let me. Inevitably at some point we’ll arrive at mutual nudity.’ His eyes are soft and uncomplicatedly sweet.

‘God, Harry,’ Eggsy says, his entire face flushing. Sometime Harry will do something like this, something that just bowls Eggsy over with the full force of his affection and it’s – it’s too much to look at directly, so he kisses him hard, hard enough that Harry gasps into his mouth. He reaches down and hauls Harry in by the belt and then unbuckles it with the efficiency of someone who really, really wants the cock being withheld by said belt.

‘Harry, please,’ he whispers against Harry’s mouth and Harry says, ‘Yes, yes,’ hurriedly and starts fiddling with the lube again and unbuttoning his trousers while Eggsy holds his breath, and everything’s a fine edged moment of anticipation until Harry’s finally, finally grasping Eggsy by the hips and pushing inside him slowly.

Eggsy rolls his hips into it, letting his head fall back and his legs tighten around Harry’s waist. He never gets used to it, how good it is every time, just saturated with a deep smug sense of getting exactly what he needs and pitying everyone else in the world who doesn’t get to have Harry’s cock inside them on a regular basis.

Harry waits, watching Eggsy’s face closely, about two seconds for Eggsy to adjust before he withdraws and thrusts back in again hard with a hitching breath, making Eggsy moan and yank at the shirt on Harry’s back like he doesn’t have control of his own hands, and then it’s on. Harry’s relentless and pounding, the way Eggsy likes it best, rattling the headboard against the wall with his thrusts until Eggsy can’t stop the little whining sounds he’s making with every plunge of Harry’s cock inside him, throwing one hand back to grab frantically at the headboard for leverage.

Harry grabs his hips and tilts them up slightly before he thrusts back in and Eggsy nearly shouts at the sudden pressure against his prostate, pleasure flaring hard and bright like a flame. Harry grins and lets go of his hip to reach down and jerk his cock hard and fast in time with his thrusts, which is not playing fucking fair but feels too good to complain about. His mouth is feral and adoring and Eggsy loves it helplessly, yanks him down to kiss and just ends up moaning against it, his cock so hard it nearly hurts.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he chants, ‘don’t stop, don’t you dare fucking stop, Harry.’ He’s panting and he closes his eyes and Harry twists his wrist just so, just a little too hard, and suddenly Eggsy’s coming with a gasp and roll of his hips, his arse clenching so tight around Harry’s cock that Harry groans and buries his face in Eggsy’s neck, his hips moving in frantic hard jerks.

‘Oh, fuck, Eggsy,’ Harry groans, planting a kiss at his hairline that Eggsy arches into, running his hand as far down the back of Harry’s shirt as he can get it. Harry’s slicked up with sweat from fucking him so hard, hips still moving until with a final thrust so hard Eggsy’s mouth opens soundlessly, he finally comes with a low moan, head hanging over Eggsy’s collarbone, bracing himself against the headboard.

Eggsy runs his hand up into Harry’s hair and pulls him down gently into a kiss which is more like just breathing into each other’s mouths, Eggsy’s lips skating haphazardly over Harry’s cheek, his jaw.

Harry sits up slowly, pulling Eggsy up with him as if he doesn’t care at all that Eggsy is covered in sweat and come and Harry is still fully dressed, and Eggsy buries his face in Harry’s shoulder, mind still hazy and soft, eyes just a little wet.

He slowly slides back into himself, led by the constant soothing stream of Harry’s voice, and sniffs loudly. Harry’s hand is stroking carefully over his back, holding him up. Eggsy feels a sense of bone deep satisfaction he didn’t realise it was possible to get from sex; it feels like he’s had every anxiety wrung out of him with loving hands, leaving nothing but calm still waters. He feels like he could take on the fucking world.

He pulls back and cups Harry’s face in his hands and kisses him slowly, trying to pour some of that peace back into him. Harry kisses him back tenderly and levers his hands under Eggsy’s thighs to lie him back down, pulling out of Eggsy carefully, until they’re tangled up together and trying to get Harry’s clothes off, finally, still kissing. Eggsy hiccups a laugh when Harry flails around trying to pull a sock off.

‘Shh, you,’ Harry murmurs and bears them both down to the bed where they lie in a heap. Eggsy absolutely does not have the energy to get up and turn off the light and if Harry tries to harass him into it he’s going to get clouted with a pillow.

‘Some of my best work, I think,’ Harry says indistinctly, face mashed somewhere in Eggsy’s stomach.

Eggsy snorts and with great expenditure of effort, wrestles around with the pillows and sheets until he can lie back and drag Harry all over his front with blatant disregard for Harry’s grumbling about the wet spot.

‘Your fault,’ he points out, kissing Harry’s cheek haphazardly with a loud smacking sound. Harry looks down at him clearly trying not to smile and failing, his eyes wide, a stray curl falling over his forehead. His eyelashes are so sweet and long Eggsy just has to kiss him loudly again, obnoxious, screwing his face up.

‘Whatever did I do to deserve you,’ Harry murmurs in a baleful tone of voice, but he’s smiling properly when he rolls off Eggsy onto his side, staying close. Harry is always, always the little spoon.

‘You’re not fooling anyone,’ Eggsy says, nuzzling into his back and running a hand possessively down Harry’s flank. Harry shivers abruptly, grabs Eggsy’s hand and shoves it in between his thighs where heat lives, a fingertip’s breadth from his dick. Eggsy chokes on a laugh.

‘Keep you still,’ Harry mutters into the pillow. Eggsy plant a sloppy kiss in the middle of his back, closing his eyes with a smile.

---

The next time Eggsy has to go overseas for longer than a day Harry accompanies him all the way to the stairs leading up to the plane. He takes Eggsy’s hand in both his own and kisses it gently, tingle of nerves spreading out from the place where his lips touch. Eggsy watches him pensively.

‘I’ll be thinking about you,’ Harry says with a glint in his eye, then walks off leaving Eggsy staring after him, the complete fucker.

He sort of nods to the thin air in front of him for a second, then realises he’s just gripping the safety rail gormlessly and hastens onto the plane.

Merlin doesn’t even try to conceal his grumbling over Eggsy’s earpiece.

‘God, this is awful. You might at least switch off the glasses feed for that kind of drivel. I think I actually preferred it when you were both carrying giant fuck-off torches for each other and tragically refusing to do anything about it.’

‘Oh shut up,’ Eggsy says, rolling his eyes and trying to stop himself colouring. ‘You’re just bitter because Roxy won the pool over you.’

‘I am not,’ Merlin says immediately. ‘She cheated anyway. And after she went on and on about how she didn’t know a bloody thing! I should never have let her in on it.’

‘She didn’t, though,’ Eggsy says smugly. ‘She didn’t know a thing about it before I snapchatted her a picture of Harry’s bedhead in the morning and then she screencapped it for like, future blackmail purposes.’

‘Well,’ Merlin says after a moment, ‘I suppose it’s good one of us has something on him.’

---

A month or so later Eggsy gets stuck outside Harry’s house in the rain because there’s some kind of security breach on the bullet train, which he nearly has a heart attack over until Harry calls him from an actual real-person train, not a weird spy one, sounding so distinctly pissed off that Eggsy relaxes. He wouldn’t be on the phone to Eggsy ranting about the rush hour if he was dead.

‘I’ll be home in about two hours, I should think.’

‘Right,’ Eggsy says, staring out at the driving rain from his perch on Harry’s front step. ‘I’m gonna have to head home then, can’t stay out here all night waiting for you.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Harry sighs. ‘It’s a shame, I’d – well, I’d been looking forward to it.’

Eggsy stares down at his shoes, smiling. They hadn’t even been going out anywhere, or had any particular plans.

‘Me too,’ he says wistfully. ‘But – tomorrow, yeah? We’ll have a redo.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Harry promises, and they hang up.

Harry gives him a key the next day. He just hands it over, no fanfare or fuss, catching Eggsy by the arm at the end of morning briefing.

‘I don’t mean for you to move out of your mother’s, of course. I’d only thought – well, that we might avoid another instance of you waiting on my doorstep like a lost puppy,’ he says, smiling. ‘Lord knows your mother’s already suspicious enough without you getting pneumonia on my behalf.’

Eggsy stares down at the key in his palm, shiny bright, silver and new. His brain is still trying to catch up to the impulse of his fingers, to close around the key and hide it away before Harry can change his mind. He’s having another one of those bizarre moments where he feels like he’s been bundled off in the middle of the night and dropped into someone else’s story; he would have robbed Harry’s house with no remorse eighteen months ago, and now Harry’s handing him a key to the front door like it’s nothing.

‘Harry,’ he starts, then stops, looking up to meet Harry’s eye. He’s watching Eggsy carefully.

They haven’t ever actually had a conversation about any of this, really – not counting Harry’s declaration that he’s going to fuck Eggsy into mutual nudity one day in the distant future. As far as Eggsy’s concerned, they don’t need to. It’s not like any of the rest of this has been by the book, and it’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to him by far, even though it began with one of the worst. He knows how Harry feels about him; he’s not fucking blind.

This, though. This is different to Harry clearing space in his ridiculously vast wardrobe so Eggsy doesn’t have to keep bringing extra clothes with him, or getting in Eggsy’s favourite brand of teabags, or being visibly nervous at the prospect of meeting Daisy. This is Harry getting that tetchy look in his eyes that says stay, please; that expression that always makes Eggsy want to bend as far as he possibly can, until he breaks, to satisfy Harry’s need.

He wishes there was some way of letting Harry know about the dangerous feeling swelling up in his chest – how he’s in Eggsy as deep as blood, as marrow, and that Eggsy will never let him out. It’s alright, he wants to say; you don’t even need to beg.

He swallows.

‘Thanks,’ he says, and closes his hand around the key.

Harry looks so relieved it’s almost comical when Eggsy pulls him down by the tie and kisses him. He makes it long, longer and deeper than it has any business being when they’ve both got work to be getting on with, but Harry clings too, his fingers digging in a little too hard on Eggsy’s shoulders, and Eggsy just grins and rolls back into it, sighing into Harry’s mouth. The Queen herself could come barrelling through the doors and he’d tell her to hold on a minute until they were done.

He catches himself smiling stupidly on and off for the rest of the day, and eventually gives up trying to stop it. He just can’t process it, that’s all; the miraculous gap between what he’d anticipated from Harry and what’s he been given. It dawns on him that this is probably what it’s like to get to know someone, really know someone, like including all the deep down parts everyone hides and pretends aren’t there. Being in Kingsman has shown Eggsy more than he cares to see of those parts, but with Harry it’s different. With Harry he wants to root inside deep and learn every nook and cranny, every square inch he can touch, and drag every part of himself Harry doesn’t love into the light, so Eggsy can love it for him.

---

With the key, Eggsy stays over more often; with staying over more often, Eggsy becomes much, much better acquainted with Harry’s nightmares.

It’s not that he didn’t know about them before. The second time he’d stayed over Harry had woken him up with tossing and turning and muttering, face a pained grimace, but once Eggsy had managed to wake him up while staying out of range of any wayward thrashing limbs, he’d come back to himself almost at once with an awful, resigned look coming over his face. He kept trying to apologise and Eggsy kissed his brow, his cheekbone, his mouth, until he stopped, and let Eggsy soothe him back to sleep.

He hadn’t realised how common they were, though. He has the feeling Harry was trying to hide it from him, with enough success that Eggsy feels both angry and guilty for having been duped. At least three nights out of seven Harry’ll wake from a nightmare kicking and shouting, and Eggsy will wake too, and try in his clumsy way to draw Harry back down into rest.

‘Perhaps I should sleep in the guest room,’ Harry mutters one bad night after the third time he wakes. They’re both exhausted, sheets too hot and in the way and Eggsy’s eyes itchy from having just returned from Paris at fuck o’clock this morning, but it still makes him prickle up with indignation.

‘Fuck that,’ he says fiercely, and kisses Harry hard, until he’s not thinking about anything but Eggsy anymore, throwing him back down into the sheets, kissing him so desperately that it makes Eggsy think of drowning.

Harry doesn’t suggest sleeping separately again.

Eggsy probably wouldn’t be as worried if it was just nightmares – everyone gets those, especially in their line of work – but it isn’t just that. There’s a certain amount of just not talking about Kentucky and Cuba which starts to make him uneasy after a while. He’s learned the rules of what not to mention, even if Harry notices him diverting the conversation to avoid it, and after a while Eggsy’s genuinely not sure which of them is trying to protect the other.

He knows, objectively, that there’s nothing to be gained from pretending it didn’t happen, because that shit will eat away at your insides until there’s nothing left unless you come to some kind of peace with it, but that knowledge is running up constantly against his base need not to see Harry hurting. He just can’t stand the way Harry gets still and hardened whenever Kentucky comes up at work even tangentially, and is guilty of intervening in conversations way above his paygrade with little or no finesse and rerouting them until the subject no longer threatens. He doesn’t know if Harry notices but he’d be a piss poor intelligence gatherer if he didn’t. He doesn’t mention it to Eggsy, which makes it all the easier to preserve the fiction that nothing is wrong.

He knows it’s bad; he knows that Harry has to hurt, in a way, to heal from it, but it’s one thing to know that and another to put it into practise.

It’s that thought that brings him to Merlin – the guilty hope that maybe someone else can take it out of his hands, someone a lot more fucking qualified to handle the psychological fallout. He can hold Harry when he wakes up from a nightmare, but he doesn’t know how to fix what’s broken rather than just the symptoms of it. He’s not exactly a bastion of mental health himself.

‘But is he actually talking to her about it?’ he persists when Merlin tries to wave him off with platitudes about Genevieve. ‘She can’t be that fucking good if all she does is sit in a chair and nod while he runs himself in circles about it without fucking getting anywhere.’

‘I know, I know,’ Merlin says, his pacifying expression collapsing in on itself. He takes off his glasses and rubs his temples wearily. He does this all the time in front of Eggsy, as if he thinks it’s going to put him off complaining. Lucky for him Eggsy got wise to it about two days into their acquaintance. ‘But their sessions are confidential, obviously, and if Harry isn’t talking to you about what goes on in there then he’s hardly likely to tell anyone else, is he?’

Eggsy doesn’t say anything, worrying his lip between his teeth and frowning.

Merlin sighs. ‘Lad, you saw what happened in that church. It’ll be a bloody long time before Harry stops thinking on it, but he will. I won’t say he’s been through worse but he’s been through a lot, and –’

There’s a cut-off noise from outside the door.

Eggsy and Merlin freeze and stare at each other for a moment.

‘Friend or foe?’ Merlin shouts out, then frowns when Eggsy pokes him, hissing at him to shush.

After a moment the door swings open from the outside to reveal Harry, one hand clenched into a fist at his side. He looks preoccupied in a way that gives Eggsy a very, very bad feeling.

‘What do you mean,’ Harry says quietly, ‘you saw?’

Eggsy stares at him, then at Merlin, then back at Harry again, not understanding.

‘You saw.’ Harry says, his voice wavering slightly. ‘You saw what happened in the church?’

‘Harry,’ Merlin starts carefully.

‘You watched,’ Harry says, as if Merlin isn’t there at all, and the tone of his voice is so awful that it makes Eggsy’s blood hammer through his veins in panic. ‘You saw it all. You saw –’

‘I thought you knew that, Harry,’ he hurries out desperately, taking a step towards Harry but stopping when Harry steps back. He swallows. ‘I – when we talked about why you didn’t come back you said, you said we’d think you’d misused your Kingsman training and I thought –’

‘I meant in killing Gawain,’ Harry snarls, ‘I meant in disabling the CCTV cameras. I knew you knew what I’d done but how – how could you possibly have seen –’

‘You left your laptop open,’ Eggsy says in a small voice. ‘You were in too much of a hurry to be off and you left it open in your study, and the glasses feed was already open, I –’

Harry stares at him, breathing hard. Eggsy registers dimly that Merlin has retreated further into the room, as if to give them what privacy he can for this complete clusterfuck of a conversation.

‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ Eggsy blurts, something brutal and sharp twisting in his stomach at the look on Harry’s face. The fault line running between the two of them is breaking open, cracking. ‘I’m so sorry, I –’

‘How can you possibly want me after you saw that,’ Harry breathes, hand reaching out to anchor himself against the wall. ‘How can you possibly let me touch you?’

‘What?’ Eggsy asks blankly.

‘How can you even come near me?’ Harry says, voice breaking, and something goes ding ding ding in the back of Eggsy’s brain. All those times they didn’t talk about it, all those times Harry looked at him like he was waiting for Eggsy to wise up, like he was too lucky for words, and Eggsy just thought Jesus, what a nutter, as if I’m the one who’s losing out.

‘Harry, it doesn’t matter to me,’ he says in a low voice, reaching out a hand stupidly like he can shove all Harry’s bad memories back in the box they came from. ‘It wasn’t your fault, you weren’t in control of yourself. It was Valentine’s signal, you know it was –’

But Harry doesn’t let him finish, cutting him off with a hoarse laugh before pushing himself away from the wall and gone, leaving Eggsy staring at the empty doorway.

He swears, hanging his head for a moment before he follows.

---

Harry doesn’t get far.

He doesn’t go home, or for one of the cars or even a jet like Eggsy was afraid he might, saving them both from death over the Atlantic after Eggsy would have inevitably tried to follow and crashed the plane he’s only half-trained to fly.

He blasts his way out the front doors of the mansion, that half-running gait that recalls Eggsy nauseously to the way the camera had jerked and swung as he walked out of the church and straight into Valentine’s bullet. He gets all the way to the treeline outside the mansion before he stops and Eggsy trails to a stop behind him, trying to make enough noise that Harry knows who’s followed him. Neither of them speak for a moment. Harry doesn’t turn around.

Eggsy stares at the hard, uncompromising line of his shoulders.

‘I’m not letting you run away from me, not now I know what this is about.’

Harry doesn’t say anything.

‘You came after me before, remember? How many times was it, even when I was still pissed at you? You think I’m gonna let you get away with running off on me now?’

Harry turns to him with his eyes glittering.

‘This has nothing to do with you, Eggsy.’

‘Bollocks,’ Eggsy says. ‘It’s got everything to do with me, if you’re tearing strips off yourself because you think you’re too – too damaged to touch me, or something fucking stupid like that. You wouldn’t let me take anything I’ve done for Kingsman out of my own hide, I can do the same for you.’

‘It’s not the same, Eggsy,’ Harry says, and his voice is so tired that Eggsy starts to feel real panic. All of this is spiralling out of his control at last, all these months of swallowing it down every time he thought about pointing out the open wound Harry so obviously wasn’t addressing. It feels dangerous, like he might accidentally goad Harry into finally getting tired of him, deciding he’s not worth the effort after all, going back to his old life where he never had to put up with a man half his age shouting at him about his emotional problems. It feels sickeningly familiar, like they’re right back in Harry’s downstairs loo arguing about Eggsy throwing away his last hail Mary.

But they’re not those men anymore, either of them.

‘So tell me,’ he says. ‘Tell me how it is.’

Harry just stares uncomprehendingly. Eggsy swallows and tries again.

‘You never actually told me any of it, you just said it was bad and I know it was – I know it still is, but – tell me all of it. If you want. I’ll still be here after.’

Harry keeps staring at him blankly for long enough that Eggsy starts to feel shifty but he stands his ground. He crosses his arms and stares back mulishly. If he’s made the wrong choice then – then maybe it’s better to know now, instead of later, what Harry can’t trust him with.

‘You can’t promise that,’ Harry says finally. ‘No one can.’

‘I just did though,’ Eggsy says. ‘I do.’

Maybe it’s the first time anyone’s ever done that for Harry, go out on a limb without any assurances they’re going to like what they hear. Eggsy doesn’t even feel the weight of the promise; it’s lighter than air, a truth slipping into place with a quiet click. But even if it isn’t, it seems to do the trick. Harry heaves a sigh and sits down right there on the ground, leaning against the trunk of an old oak.

Eggsy blinks at him for a moment and then sits down too, shuffling cautiously closer when Harry opens his mouth and starts to speak.

He talks himself hoarse for hours as they let the morning dew seep into the seats of their trousers. He tells Eggsy how he still remembers every moment, every spray of blood, every shattering bone under his hands, like it’s happening all over again every time. The whole massacre only took a few minutes but Harry recalls it like it was days of slaughter, like it was the kind of violence that changes the shape of someone forever. As if in his own mind he’s fixed inside it like a ruthless warrior in a mural, limned with gold and blood.

He talks about feeling Valentine’s bullet hit him, which is so surreal that even being a degree removed from the situation doesn’t help; Eggsy still feels nauseous hearing about it, and he impulsively puts a hand on Harry’s knee like he can somehow reach back in time and draw out some of that impossible pain. How many people can say they remember the agony of being shot in the head?

Harry doesn’t pause in his monologue but he puts his hand over the top of Eggsy’s and squeezes, once.

Then he starts talking about escaping, and Gawain, which is a part of the story Eggsy has only ever heard in bits and parts and sneaking glimpses at files he shouldn’t be looking at. Some of it he knows already – that the bullet only grazed him and he was down for the count for less than an hour before he woke up in a hospital full of chaos and got far enough away that he couldn’t still hear his own last words echoing in his ears – but he gets the feeling that some of the other stuff Harry tells him has never seen the light of day before.

‘I have no idea why I chose Cuba,’ Harry says, smiling suddenly at the absurdity. His eyes are fixed somewhere behind Eggsy. ‘I must have thought it closest, or maybe I remembered it best. I don’t recall much before arriving at the door. He was already there when I arrived, and the whole affair took less than thirty seconds from that moment. I knew he was supposed to be on assignment in Rio and he looked so caught out. He had luggage,’ Harry barks a laugh of disbelief which makes Eggsy wince. ‘He had suitcases, and I knew. I don’t know why, but I did, and I don’t think I’d do it again but I raised my gun and he told me Arthur would have wanted me to listen to him and then I shot him,’ he says, words muddling together, throat clicking as he swallows, twice. Eggsy just stares helplessly. He remembers what it was like to kill Chester, and knows it wouldn’t be a patch on looking a friend and colleague of decades in the eye and shooting them for – what was it, the greater good? Or was it just for survival?

‘I don’t know if I’d have been able to do it if I hadn’t been nearly out of my mind,’ Harry says after a long pause. ‘I could barely see straight, I have no idea how I got all the way there.’ He laughs again, brittle. Eggsy squeezes his knee. Harry looks at him suddenly and it’s that razor sharp focus that always makes Eggsy feel a bit tight in the chest, like his heart’s suddenly swelled two sizes. ‘And then after that was all over and I realised I couldn’t go back, that I was alone with no assurances of rescue, all I thought about was you.’

Eggsy swallows. Months spent falling asleep trying not to think about Harry, while Harry was doing the exact opposite.

‘I have no excuses for not contacting you, except for my own cowardice. But you must believe that I thought of you constantly, Eggsy. Of what you might say or do if you were with me. You were all I wanted.’

Eggsy nods, throat tight. He remembers shouting at Harry when he’d first got back, livid with grief, and wants to curl up in mortification. After those first few awful weeks had passed, it didn’t occur to him that Harry might still hate himself for something Eggsy never even considered hating him for; that he might have started weighing himself on scales thrown off balance by his own self-loathing.

Harry’s quiet for a few minutes and Eggsy’s starting to think he’s heard the last of it when his stomach rumbles loudly. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against his knee in shame, ready to apologise for such fucking ridiculous timing, when he hears Harry laughing.

He looks up. Harry’s face is creased up with amusement, his eyes watering from that or something else. It’s half-hysterical and too loud but it’s not brittle like before and it’s Harry, laughing. Eggsy will take it. 

He smiles. Harry squeezes his hand tight and looks at him tiredly, laughter ceding into hiccups.

‘You don’t hate me, then,’ he says, as if he can’t quite bear to make it a question.

‘I just sat on wet grass for you for like, three hours,’ Eggsy points out. ‘My arse is completely numb, I’m fucking starving and I think there’s like, bugs and shit in my hair.’

Harry rolls his eyes. Eggsy just raises his eyebrows and looks at him sternly. He’s not indulging that kind of bollocks, no matter what tortured corner of Harry’s psyche it’s coming from. Surely the best way to help Harry get out of this funk and back into the rhythm of himself is to be the most Eggsy he can possibly be, play his part in their act for two. And stop making it so much easier for Harry to hide from himself.

‘You know I forgave you months ago, right? For not coming back earlier?’

Harry blinks at him, which is a sure sign that Eggsy is to treat whatever comes out of his mouth with about a wheelbarrow full of salt.

‘Well, you might have mentioned it at some point,’ he says peevishly. ‘It’s kept me awake until the early hours many a night, don’t you know.’

‘It has not, you snore like the clappers,’ Eggsy says rudely, something welling up in his throat. He remembers Harry’s hand shaking, reaching for him in the night. He swallows hard. ‘Don’t think I’m gonna go round feeling bad and bringing you things, you knew it was all alright since the first time I let you feel me up, probably. And anyway the whole thing was just ‘cause you were too thick to pick up the bloody phone –’

Harry cuts him off with a kiss; a hard one, full of a lot of different feelings Eggsy can’t identify. He curls his spare hand in the collar of Harry’s shirt and lets the kiss go syrupy sweet, soft.

He pulls back, eyes Harry, and decides to push his luck one more inch. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Harry.’

‘Ah, well if you say so,’ Harry says quietly, then catches the stern look on Eggsy’s face and sighs. He leans his forehead against Eggsy’s. ‘Alright.’

Eggsy lets out the breath he feels like he’s been holding since he saw Harry standing outside the office door. He lets his eyes close, smiles when Harry’s thumbs brush over his lips.

‘Soppy sod,’ he mutters, and Harry says ‘Oh, shut up.’

---

There’s no such thing as an easy fix, Eggsy knows that. Harry whisking him off to Kingsman training looked like one from the outside, but it only took him about ten minutes to realise it wasn’t, and it probably says something about him that he wasn’t put off by the ‘most dangerous job interview of your life’ speech that Merlin loves and won’t let anyone else deliver. Even now it’s still not the easy choice, which sounds stupid when Eggsy thinks about the cars and the money and the weapons and that heady feeling of knowing you’re making some kind of difference, but it’s true. He might feel most days like he was born for it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt thinking about how one day his mum might get another visitor a lot like Harry, giving her the same set of bad news in different clothing. Being a Kingsman isn’t just a one-time decision, but one he has to keep making, over and over, with no guarantee it won’t be a thankless task.

Harry knows that better than anyone. Eggsy worries he might clam up again after he spills his guts on the mansion lawn, but he doesn’t, although it doesn’t make him any chattier about it either. For all his shellshock after he’d found out Eggsy saw the footage, he seems well aware of the dividing line between that and pain for pleasure’s sake; he still holds Eggsy down, still treats him as sweet and as sharp in bed as he always did. He lets Eggsy know, in little ways, that he remembers what Eggsy said on the lawn, and what it meant to have that conversation. He stops looking at Eggsy like he’s half-waiting for him to run away.

It’s a bit of a lottery what mood he’s gonna be in after his sessions with Genevieve; sometimes he can’t sleep at all after, doesn’t even try, and Eggsy bullheadedly drags a blanket down from the bedroom despite Harry’s protests and curls up on the sofa with his head in Harry’s lap, lets the soothing stroke of Harry’s fingers through his hair lull him to sleep.

The season is starting to turn inevitably to autumn when Harry gets back from a conference in Kiev at seven in the morning on a Sunday. Eggsy’s there waiting at the bottom of the airplane stairs, grinning too widely to hide it. He keeps his hands clasped firmly behind his back, heart fluttering with nerves.

Harry sees him and makes a bloody good attempt to hide his smile but he can’t do it, gives it up halfway down the stairs and draws up close to Eggsy when he reaches the ground.

‘To what do I owe this honour,’ he says, looking Eggsy up and down like he’d quite like to swallow him whole. Eggsy bites his lip, grinning. Harry’s been away for four days, which Eggsy’s discovered is the tipping point – any longer and he starts to get restless under the skin for Harry’s hands, and so noticeably that he’s been told by Roxy in no uncertain terms that he needs to get a fucking vibrator for when Harry’s out of town.

‘You know why,’ he says, and any doubts he might have had about Merlin winding him up dissipate when Harry sighs and raises a hand to his forehead like his life is just one endless fucking moment of losing work and then discovering AutoRecovery wasn’t switched on.

‘I’m going to kill him,’ Harry says calmly. ‘He knows I hate it when he tells people, he does this every bloody year.’

‘I know, I know –’

‘Do you want to know what his real name is?’ Harry says, eyes shining mercilessly. ‘Ambrose. His first name is Ambrose, which is of course why he makes everyone address him only by his code name. I invite you, my dear boy, to refer to him by it as much as possible, multiple times a day if you can manage it, and preferably in front of –’

‘Fiona from engineering, yep, got it –’

‘Every bloody year,’ Harry mutters.

‘Before you kill him though,’ Eggsy says brightly, ‘I thought we might go home and celebrate properly, if you know what I mean.’ He reaches forward and yanks on Harry’s tie until Harry’s mouth is only a breath away from his lips.

‘I think I’d have to be absurdly simple not to catch on to what you mean,’ Harry says quietly, effectively distracted, his hands coming up to rest on Eggsy’s hips and his eyes warm. ‘But is it possible to wait until after briefing? I’d thought I might go along, you see, being as I’m the head of the organisation.’

‘Nope,’ Eggsy says cheerfully, mentally counting back the hours since he left the house and hoping to God JB hasn’t gnawed through the kitchen door and savaged the poor little terrier pup waiting in the living room. He’d tried to get as close to Mr. Pickle as he could but it was less about the likeness than the thought of it, really, he supposed; he’d certainly never loved anyone enough to study the stuffed body of their dead dog for distinguishing features before.

Harry watches him, waiting for an explanation. Eggsy smiles. 

‘I’ve got you a present.’