Work Text:
“Father says they are nothing but fairytales.”
“Is that what my son says?” scoffed the old woman.
Harry nodded.
His grandmother continued to knit by the open window. “My son is a nitwit. Do not make the same mistake, Harry. They exist. Mermaids are real.”
Harry fisted his hands. He wanted to believe her.
The knitting needles stopped. When she spoke next, the murmur of tides rolled in her voice. “Above all, remember this: a mermaid’s love is as fierce and endless as the sea itself. It does not change. It does not forgive. It cannot, or it ceases to be. Do you understand?”
At Eton, it was easy for Harry to keep his secrets. Through the years he kept his head low and held his oddities close to his breast. He studied, he fenced, he boxed; he learned how to argue and debate like a philosopher, how to tell good port from swill, and most importantly he learned that while an eccentricity or two could be forgiven, one did not speak of mermaids.
When schooling was finished with, a gentleman of Harry's standing was expected to either travel the world or settle in London to fritter away their days until duty summoned them to the marriage alter. With those two options in front of him, Harry chose to travel, and he enjoyed the experience a great deal, but inevitably, all roads led back to London, and less than two years later he was at the foot of the great city herself, poised to be embraced into her bosom.
Which posed a problem for Lord Harry Hart, future Earl. For him, London a gilded cage filled with temptations that could lure a man of his particular inclinations to his ruin.
What he needed, Harry concluded, was a valet he could trust, for one did not keep secrets from their valet. Anyone who believed themselves successful in that endeavor was a fool. And so he set about making discreet inquiries, seeking a man who could keep his mouth shut, even if only by weight of coin.
The usual channels by which one acquired a valet were useless to him. Too often that lot traded households and secrets like currency. Stymied, Harry persevered in the way that young men of his station did, which was by drowning his frustrations in a touch overmuch of drink to chase away the creeping doubt that he could ever find some peace to indulge in his preferences.
But then he found the man for the job.
Or, more precisely, the hoodlums found Harry when he left his favorite gambling hell, and then Lee Unwin found them.
The strange thing was, Harry wasn’t even inebriated that night; his mind was sober and keen as the blade of a knife, all his wits about him. The aid of a young dockhand refusing to tolerate the injustice of three versus one was mostly unnecessary but appreciated. Harry repaid him by offering for a round of drinks and a meal. Lee accepted.
By the end of the night, Harry knew his fruitless search was over.
So he offered Lee the job, blunt about his predicament. It was a calculated risk. But his instincts were right on the money. Lee only asked a few questions, establishing that Harry wanted only Lee’s cooperation and discretion, and accepted.
A valet who was willing to cover for him, vouch for his whereabouts if pressed, was worth his weight in gold. That Lee would also come to grin over the years, lazy and friendly, and gently rib him about his conquests, was absolutely invaluable. Such loyalty could only be earned, and Harry breathed easier for having an ally. A friend. Lee's accent was rough, his education spotty, but he could tie a Windsor knot one-handed, could tame Harry's unruly hair to perfection, and best of all, believed in their friendship enough to reveal his own secret when the time came.
“She's one o’ ‘em," Lee shared with a reverential hush.
So she was. Harry swallowed a powerful rush of emotions as he watched, and was in turn watched by, a sleek head of blonde hair bobbing in the waves. Every so often a tail slapped through the surface.
"How?" How had Lee, who had never stepped foot outside of London, who couldn't even swim, managed to meet Harry's childhood fantasy practically at the foot of the Hart family ancestral home? They’d barely spent a month at Fieldstone.
"She sang. I answered."
Harry raised an eyebrow. "Is it that simple? Have I been deaf all along?"
Lee pondered over his words. The wind batted at them, howling through the stone arches that ringed the cove, far out of sight from the house that sat atop the cliff. “I suppose not everyone can hear them.”
That stung, but Harry did his best to not be disappointed. The mermaid was lovely, even if he could feel disapproval emanating off of her, though he had to admit, as the shocked excitement ebbed, that something was… lacking.
Maybe he had never been meant to hear a mermaid’s call.
They wintered there while Harry oversaw renovations to the estate. Whilst he’d been away, his grandmother had passed, and the house had been allowed to fall into disrepair. His father hhad little love in his heart for their home, deeming it provincial. He had built himself a new manor elsewhere.
There was even, Harry had been informed, more progeny on the way with his new bride.
Good. He hoped it was a spare heir. He didn’t much care to be an earl, already suffocating under the weight of eyes and honeyed offers from those waiting for the title to pass onto him.
Lee left and returned at unpredictable hours. Since Harry rarely left his office, it all worked out for the best. Harry reduced the staff, pensioned off the rest, and wondered what this would all lead to.
He also asked questions.
“They don’t talk like we do,” Lee answered over a late-night dinner of cold cuts by candlelight. “They have to learn it from us.”
“They don’t speak to one another?”
Lee toyed with a pale blue conch shell. He was forever returning with a new shell from the cove, specimens that couldn’t possibly be native to the area. “They sing.”
“Ah.”
Another time: “I had to name her,” Lee said. The poor man wrung his hands, mortified at the confession.
Harry, in the middle of writing to his solicitors, looked at him from across the study.
“They don’t use names. I couldn’t… I couldn’t just—” Lee turned to the window. Rain beaded on the glass panes. Winter was ending, wet spring invading. “I named her Michelle.”
Harry almost said congratulations, but that seemed inappropriate. “It’s a good name.”
They didn’t speak about their imminent departure.
They still left.
The next year Harry arranged for them to return to Fieldstone again to spend the winter, for which Lee was grateful—far more so than the gesture deserved. Lee safeguarded him. Lee stood as a beacon in the otherwise shallow, monotonous existence Harry entombed himself in. It was the least Harry could do.
Besides, Fieldstone was his home in a manner that his fashionable flat in Mayfair could not be, imbued with a coziness that even the best clubs could not provide. He felt at ease there.
Additionally, it allowed him to avoid his father, the matchmakers, and the gossip mongers. If he spent most of his days as a specter in a empty house with the steady roar of the sea in the background, then that was preferable to being alone while crushed by humanity.
There was no masquerade to maintain in Fieldstone. No one there to lie to.
Lee returned one night, jittery. His hands shook as he accepted the glass of port that Harry immediately served, sensing that something momentous was afoot, a flash flood of biblical proportions.
It still swept him under when it hit.
“She’s carrying ?” Harry forewent the glasses. He drank straight out of the bottle. “Pardon my rudeness, but how the devil?”
Lee smiled wryly. “Y’know, I kept waiting for you to ask that. The technicalities.”
“I am a gentleman,” Harry protested over the burn of the port, blinking away tears. A mite strong to chug, he concluded too late.
Lee kindly did not point out that he had seen Harry at his worst, debauched and in the grips of terrible melancholic spells. “They can—they can change. Shift their shape to match ours. Apparently it was quite common in the past. Before we all decided they didn’t exist.”
Interesting. Harry tucked that revelation away for later. He clasped Lee's shoulder. “Congratulations, old boy. I haven’t the faintest notion what you’ve gotten yourself into, but I cannot deny that I am filled with envy.”
There was no jealousy in his tone. He didn’t desire the mermaid and they both knew it. His longing stemmed from a deeper, sadder want. Of things that he could not have.
Harry cleared his throat. “However, this does pose some difficulties, does it not?”
The port disappeared in a hard swallow and then Lee swiped the decanter, taking another swing. “I must resign.”
“Nonsense.”
“Harry, I can’t be your valet if I can’t leave and I’m not going to. She needs me.”
“Is the child not—?”
“‘M not certain? Michelle lacks the words to explain it. But if ’m not mistaken, they could be born—like us—or be one o' her kind. We cannot know until some years pass. Nor can Michelle shift back. She’s trapped.” Despondency bled from Lee’s slumped shoulders. “I had to leave her at the cove.”
Harry smacked him upside the head. It was a reflexive reaction, like that of an older brother exasperated with a younger sibling. “God’s teeth! You abandoned your expecting wife outside?”
“Y-you’d let her come here?” Lee gaped at him. “ Did you just say ‘wife’?”
“That’s what she is, is she not?” Spare him from unassuming, kind-hearted men. “Now be a good chap and go fetch her.”
There was an unused groundskeeper’s cottage. A month before Michelle was due, it was ready to be moved into. Harry officially deeded it to his valet, and then came the catastrophic realization that neither a midwife nor doctor could be allowed at the birth. Not if there were good odds that the baby would be born with a tail.
Michelle laughed at them dismissively with her strange, braying giggles when they approached her. She declared that she did not need helping hands, all she needed was to have the tub filled with seawater, and nature would take its course.
The men took her at her world, utterly mystified by the process. In early September of 1912, Michelle gave birth, and as she’d stated, she did not need their help; Harry took her tranquility as a hint to stay out of the way, preserving her modesty, even if Michelle herself was indifferent about it.
When Lee called him back in, hours later, and handed Harry the newborn, Harry was astonished by the slightest weights in his arms, by how he was such a slip of a thing that Harry could fully cradle him in the hook of an elbow.
Michelle watched him, unblinking.
“What will you name him?” Harry murmured, afraid to speak too loudly, to do anything that might disturb. This was not in his wheelhouse. He hadn’t even held his own new half-sister yet and she was well into her toddler phase.
“Gary.” Michelle checked on Lee as if to make sure that she’d pronounced it correctly. It must be very strange to her, this custom, this needing of names, Harry thought, and gave her a grateful nod. “Thank you.”
He meant that in every way.
Lee had a family, while Harry had businesses to oversee. Interests to protect. Politics—as disdainful as he found them—to engage in. Europe was not stable.
They parted ways. Not bitterly, not blithely, but with a companionable understanding that Harry would return and that he was welcome.
Gary became Eggsy (“I swear, he has a sixth sense for when the hens are laying—” Lee muttered darkly) and Harry became his godfather.
“Because o’ course you are,” Lee dismissed.
Harry hugged Eggsy and kept a stiff upper lip. “Of course I am,” he agreed coolly, and Eggsy gurgled into his cravat.
Two years later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.
Harry went to war.
Over the next three years, letters from Fieldstone grounded his sanity in the reality that existed outside of the ugly vagaries of war.
The letters traveled with him across muddy fields drenched in blood. They accompanied him through grueling battles, through the blasts and the fires, the screams and the deathly silences.
He met Hamish, codenamed Merlin.
He became Galahad.
And somewhere in the fiery hell of war, Kingsman was forged.
Eggsy went into the water last night, penned Lee in his last letter before Harry crossed the border into Germany.
Eggsy had taken after his mother, then. The news barely registered. Harry skimmed over the lines, thoughts turned towards the assassination he’d have to pull off while deep in enemy territory. Eggsy was a mermaid.
He didn’t spare a moment to consider that thought any further—neither in the context of Eggsy, nor in the broader categorical notion that mermaids were not all female. How could he, when a literal bomb hit his camp barely ten minutes later?
"Do you trust this man?"
"With my life. With yours, too, for that matter."
Merlin moved his bishop. Harry countered. They both shivered as a gust struck the side of their tent. The stove fire could only do so much to dull the biting edge of the Siberian cold.
"Your lover?"
Harry raised his gaze from the board. "Bad form, Hamish," he rebuked mildly. Hiding secrets from one’s brotherhood of spies was as absurd as hiding secrets from one’s valet. It simply was not feasible. More to the point, no one much cared that Harry preferred men. Not when the world was tearing itself apart around them. Therefore, Harry didn’t take it as Merlin being intentionally malicious.
He still didn’t appreciate it. “He’s an honorable man, and he’ll make an excellent operative.”
“Your Lancelot.”
“You will take yourself to task for this when you discover what a swell chap he is,” Harry warned.
Three moves later, he’d won the game.
Will you join us ? Harry had written. The Great War was taking its toll.
Despite having a wife and a toddler, Lee had written only yes.
In the end it was the bombs, again.
Minefields.
Minefields and a mistake on Harry’s part.
Harry returned to Fieldstone in the autumn of 1916, short of the first snowfall that snapped at his heels as if rushing him forward, denying him the coward’s escape. The War was not over, nor was his work. The world continued to spin and the pettiness of man would go on, regardless that Lee was no longer there.
Harry bypassed the grand house and drode down the road to the Unwin cottage to knock on the door. As steady as he appeared, feet solidly planted on the ground, on the inside he was a lurching, turbulent sea, nothing but froth and deep, salty tears.
Michelle screamed when he told her about Lee’s death.
Screamed loud and clear and endless. Mirrors and plates exploded. Harry dropped to his knees as the windows shattered outwards. It was a banshee’s wail of fury and rejection. He shut his eyes against it not because he rejected her pain, but because of how much he understood the denial that the universe had done this. That Harry had done this.
A hand grazed his wrist while Harry curled on the floor, gasping with lungs that wouldn’t work.
Harry turned his head and met scared green eyes.
Eggsy.
He’d grown.
“Michelle!” he shouted, pressing both his hands to Eggsy’s ears, shielding him from the storm. “ You are hurting Eggsy!”
The shrieking stopped.
Harry couldn’t tell, at first. It rang in his ears in a constant echo, piercing into his skull, ringing in his teeth. Then he realized he could hear his pulse, wildly arrhythmic. Then the whimpering.
“Eggsy.” He gentled his grip on Lee’s son, checking him for injuries. When Harry was reassured that Eggsy was unharmed, he glanced up.
The front door hung wide open. Beyond, a heavy mist rolled in from the ocean, turning the landscape a desolate, empty gray.
Eggsy recognized him. If Harry had been in a clearer state of mind, he would have remembered the photographs, all those frozen memories, living symbols of his past with Lee, that the boy had grown up seeing hanging from the walls. As it was, he could barely string more than two thoughts together before they dissolved like froth on sand.
“Eggsy, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, lad.” Harry’s apologies were endless, his nose pressed into the boy’s crown of feather-tufted hair. He could breathe again and all of it was salt-tinged. “Sorry, I’m so sorry.”
A trove of meanings all in one pathetic murmur. He felt a horrible, sinking wrench in his gut, a ship’s hull cracking as it hit the ocean floor. It was hardly gentlemanly to clutch at the child of the friend you just murdered, but Harry couldn’t let go. Instinct had kicked in, a fluttery, horrible outpouring of paranoia, too much violence crammed into a sliver of time, too many people buried, bodies torn to shreds. If he let go of Eggsy right then, his anchor, his hard-worn bulwark would come crumbling down, faults exposed.
Eggsy didn’t complain. Perhaps he needed reassurance nearly as much as Harry did. He couldn’t understand death yet, failed to comprehend the enormity of Lee being gone—but his mother’s upset was enough.
The final “sorry” was mouthed in exhaustion. Harry didn’t have the faintest notion of what came afterward. He had hoped to speak with Michelle, offer her options, but she’d fled and he could not blame her. He had taken her husband away and all he brought back was…
The medal. Lee’s honorary Kingsman medal.
He took it out of the silk bag in his pocket, releasing Eggsy as he did so, although the boy remained slumped against him.
Harry had to cough to clear his throat. “This was your father’s. It’s important. If you find yourself in difficulty—” Not that he intended to leave it at that, no, he owed Lee, he owed Michelle and he owed Eggsy, and while money couldn’t bring Lee back, it could do other things. “I shall be there. Always.” For as long as he lived.
Eggsy took the medal.
He was still holding it when Harry placed him on the bed, drawing the covers around him. The cold had seeped into the house through the now broken windows, but Harry kindled and fed the flames in the hearth, methodically making plans. If Michelle didn’t come back was his primary worry. What was she truly like, on the inside? How did her mind work? She had tolerated Harry’s presence, but never really engaged with him. Lee had been her entire focus, and occasionally the unkind thought had crossed Harry’s mind that Eggsy had more value to her as an extension of Lee than as her own flesh and blood.
But he could be wrong. He should be wrong. His absences had been long and varied from the start. The dynamics could be quite different from what he suspected. Or they might not be. Preparing for either outcome was key.
He rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll be back shortly. Please do not walk on the floor.” Shattered glass crunched underfoot. ”Fret not, dear boy, I’ll take care of you.”
When he returned less than an hour later, Eggsy was nowhere to be found, and the trail of a woman’s bloody footprints disappeared into the sand.
Harry waited. He sat with his elbows on his knees, back to the Unwin cottage, which had gained that particular emptiness of an abandoned home. He kept vigil over the surf rolling onto the sand. The water was dark.
Lee was dead. Michelle and Eggsy were gone.
Harry made a sound in his throat that he had never made before. It was heavy and dragged across his teeth like a vibration, a curse. Lee was dead, and Harry couldn’t even keep his family safe.
On the dawn of the third day, Harry forced himself to be Galahad.
Memories and days twisted and coiled like smoke. Harry could not rightfully claim that the end of the war brought any relief, not when so much of the world was recessed with moldering rot. Kingsman expanded rapidly in an attempt to forestall what they all believed was a segue into an even bigger, bloodier war.
The stage was set. All it would take was a spark for Act II.
A man called James Spenser assumed the role of Lancelot. Irrationally, Harry resented him for it, nursing the rancor like a sliver of driftwood pinched beneath the skin, but then he caught the undercurrents, how Percival’s body language shifted when James occupied the room, the gazes that lingered.
The bitterness eased. Lee was dead. James was not. He was a capable Kingsman agent, and he made Percival—Alastair—happy. That equation didn’t allow for Harry to continue feeding his ill humors. There were plenty of other sources for that.
Lord Jonathan Francis Hart died at the age of 68.
Harry had been dreading the inevitable for so long that when the news reached him in a coffee shop in Vienna, he found that he could not care. It simply wasn’t all that terrible. His tolerance for horror had been blown wide open, and this was but a drop in an ocean.
He performed his mourning duty with the same exacting focus that he brought to the role of Galahad. He visited his father’s grieving widow—a woman younger than Harry—and made the arrangements for the funeral and the handling of the estate, assuring her discreetly that he had no interest in tossing her on the streets as so many the aristocracy were wont to do.
His half-sister was a treasure, all rainbows and sunshine. They could not be siblings of a more different temperament, and he speculated at the circumstances that allowed such happiness to blossom even under his father’s stoic intensity. The mother made all the difference, it seemed. Pity that his own had died so young.
He parted ways with the dowager on a blunt note, advising that she should remarry once the requisite mourning period was over if she wished to. Harry doubted the young woman had held much love for her now-deceased husband.
She nodded at him, determined. Her life would go on. Perhaps even start.
Harry felt unimaginably old.
Then there was Fieldstone.
“I’m sorry to inform that bloated ego of yours that this place isn’t going to fall apart without you here.” Merlin gestured at the walls of the club, hidden from the sight of the public that believed it to be nothing but a particularly exclusive gentleman’s establishment.
Harry sipped his whiskey. Tristan—the new one, not the original—owned a distillery in Ireland, and he’d earned himself a steady customer in Harry. “Are you? Sorry, that is. That didn’t sound convincing.”
“Sod off,” Merlin sighed, dropping into the chair opposite from his, a plush wing chair that barely sagged under the Scotsman’s weight. “No, in all seriousness. Deal with whatever has you in such a poor mood. You’re poison for morale.”
It was a sign of true friendship that Harry only continued nursing his drink, letting the alcohol lap ineffectively at the knot of ice that had become his center. The silence stretched, broken by the crackle of the logs. “I don’t want to go back.”
A confession. One he should have swallowed down.
“Fine, then. Sell it off.”
“No.” It came out like the crack of a whip. Sell Fieldstone? He’d rather shoot himself.
“Whyever not?” Merlin asked. “You don’t want to go back. You want nothing to do with the place. It’s a yoke around your neck. Let it go.”
He should. Intellectually that was the right course of action to take. Too many memories seeped into the bones of the house, ghosts in the high beams and shuttered windows. The embodiment of his childhood, of his dreams fed and shaped by his grandmother’s stories, of the ocean that had tugged at him despite Harry’s awkwardness in the water, of his utter lack of interest in any activities normally associated with it. He hadn’t wanted to swim, or fish, or sail.
He’d stood at the shore and craved something indefinitely cosmic. His mermaid. His eighth wonder.
In defeat, Harry tipped his head back against the chair. “I cannot.”
That truth was torn out of him with a hook. He could fight it like a fish struggling for survival, rip himself in half, and the truth would be the same. He could not sell Fieldstone.
Neither could he abandon it.
“Well, then.” Merlin removed his glasses, polishing them. “I suppose you’ll be gone for a while.”
“Expect my return by October.”
He could say goodbye by summer’s end, couldn’t he?
The steward’s reports had not been coy regarding the state of Fieldstone. While by no means an ancient fortress, it was not a young building, either. Constant exposure to the wind and salt aged it, making short work of new coats of paint and weathering the wood and steel. Only stone held a chance against the erosion, responsible for the house’s signature somber, bleak appearance.
Which was fine. Harry felt rather bleak himself, looking upon it after—how long had it been? Nine years? He made a note to cut down the staff even further, perhaps even create a seasonal rotation. Fieldstone demanded upkeep to survive. It did not require love.
Harry listened as his steward reviewed the key repairs that had to be done while the weather was mild. Then he had a hearty dinner, provided by the cook with doughy hands and the strength of four men. He was half-tempted to inquire if she had ever considered going into espionage, possibly as muscle.
It was… pleasant.
Really, that’s what struck him as bizarre. As long as he refrained from staring out at the swell of the ocean, denied how the salt settled into his lungs, and turned a deaf ear to the steady roar, he was fine. It was pleasant enough. Fieldstone lacked the luxuries that he had grown accustomed to in cosmopolitan London—no telephones, no wires to carry electricity, no lightbulbs, a fairly rudimentary plumbing system—yet he didn’t mind that much.
It wasn’t as if he was unused to going without. Sometimes the places he visited were little more than jungles.
It was fine. He wasn’t knocked to his knees by grief or regrets. He wasn’t haunted by the specter of Lee in the study. He did not step into the library and immediately balk at a rush of nostalgia for his grandmother’s powdered hands and floral scent.
Truly, it was borderline anticlimactic.
Five days into assessing the state of Fieldstone, Harry rose from behind the broad length of his desk and opened the window curtains. They were thick, black, and he had not touched them since closing them on that first day.
Now that he did, his gaze inevitably fell on the Unwin cottage.
On his orders it had been maintained along. He had not provided a reason as to where the Unwins had gone but when one was as rich as Croesus and had a title that stretched back centuries, few people bothered asking questions.
Harry went downstairs, crossed the foyer, walked up the stone path that separated the two buildings, coming to a halt at the cottage door.
In his mind, Michelle’s scream was a dull, recurring note. It had grated at his nerves for so long that he could no longer feel the phantom pain. Time didn’t heal wounds so much as covered them in thin layers of sand, grain by grain until the hurt hid below.
Harry seized the door handle, then he tore his hand away as if burnt.
He could not bring himself to go in.
I cannot be this weak, he thought, wearily.
He didn’t sleep that night.
Harry didn’t sleep the night after that.
He didn’t sleep at all that week.
It was a desperation that lured him outside, barefoot, exhaustion dragging against every bone and muscle. He longed for sleep, the emptiness of it, a cessation from the constant crowding in his head. Harry understood perfectly well that what he was doing was dangerous, but the full moon lit his way to the cove that he hadn’t visited since it had become Lee’s rendezvous spot with his lover.
Beauty came in many forms. While it could be dreamy and romantic, it could also cut deep, and that was exactly the kind of beauty the cove possessed. It was no idyllic spot. It was raw juts of stone and untrammeled savagery stabbing into the sea, the swells narrowing at the entrance and coming in gentle in some areas but crashing violently against reefs in others. At high tide, the water rose enough that only a thin strip of outcropping was traversable, and even that was notoriously treacherous.
As a child, Harry wasn’t allowed in the cove. It was the kind of place where boys drowned, where monsters lurked. Even his grandmother forbade him from going.
But he did. It was inevitable.
Twenty years later, it had changed. The essence was eternal, but the layout was different enough that Harry’s instincts pierced through the fatigue. He was on his guard as he walked, the spray of the ocean on his lips, cool and beckoning.
Then he reached the spot that as a young man was his, where he had sat and waited and let the stars burn in the sky for his mermaid.
Older now, body tempered by violence, made rigid by scars, Harry gingerly settled on the edge. His feet sank into the ripples. Even during the height of summer, the ocean there wasn’t the sunny thing it could be elsewhere. It was always cold. The only difference was whether it was merely cold or cold enough to stop your heart.
“I’m here,” he announced to no one, shoulders slumping against the stone wall at his back. Spume eddied around his ankles and sank into his blood. I’m here again, alone.
There were no stars on the horizon.
Somehow that was appropriate.
Ill-advisedly, he fell asleep. It wasn’t a conscious decision.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a decision that his body made for him, either.
It came from without rather than within. Harry didn’t recognize it, didn’t question the pressure on his eyelids, the unspooling of all of his knots until his chest rose and dipped steadily, dead to the world as Endymion beneath the tree.
He did not stir when his feet were eased out of the water, and only sighed when fingertips brushed over his lower lip and traveled to the creases of his mouth, to the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes, winding outwards like the warp of a fisherman’s net.
When the cry of gulls awakened him, Harry felt marvelous in spite of the crick in his back. He climbed to his feet, failing to notice the gleaming abalone shell placed at his side.
He left without looking down.
The good night’s rest prompted Harry to prod along the process of setting the house up. It was the library on the agenda next; his grandmother had been an avid collector of books. Rare or common, old or new, first edition or last edition, she hoarded all of them.
These books had been his playmates growing up, tutors that illuminated subjects that even his grandmother couldn’t. Books that had comforted him on some days and books that on other days had triggered his sexual awakening.
He spent the day amongst old friends, then crept into bed near dawn and slept well.
Two days after that, he rose from his bed, donned his clothes, and went down to the cove in search of elusive rest. Illogical as it was, he slept better while wet and cold instead of warm and comfortable.
In the morning, another gift had been left, beside his thigh this time. It was small, less garish than the abalone shell, but the shape of it was sinuous and unusual, like the sweep of a fin.
Harry again overlooked it.
It became a pattern. One Harry was not oblivious to. What was it about the cove that, against all common sense, was so soothing? Some sort of aggressive regression to his younger self, perhaps? He had suffered spells of insomnia during his career, yes, and the nightmares—the nightmares were even worse—but this was a bit too predictable to be normal.
On the first night that the insomnia rolled back in, Harry properly dressed and took a torch with him. The waning moon lent little aid, but Harry was in no hurry, sweeping the light back and forth across the sand, stray bits of quartz and other elements reflecting flecks of color back at him. He was several hours “early,” as it were, although he wasn’t sure what the goal for the experiment was.
After so many years as a spy, Harry had developed a keen perception of when something was in the air, invisible, ephemeral, trembling like the beat of a butterfly’s wing. He could not vocalize exactly what he expected to happen, only that by the end of the night, something would come to a head.
He sat. He waited.
Sleep came.
Harry awoke to someone next to him, and instinct took over. He struck blindly and got lucky, identifying the swell under his palm as a throat. The rest was pure muscle memory.
He flipped the body (something hit him along the outside of his thigh that shouldn’t have, and for a split second his mind reeled at the implication), pinning the stranger down, forearm at their throat, promising worse if they moved.
Six seconds passed from Harry waking up to Harry dragging in enough air to speak; “Eggsy?”
How many youths with Lee’s nose and Michelle’s mouth could there be in Fieldstone?
In the darkness, Eggsy’s eyes narrowed accusingly. Something heavy hit Harry again, this time on the low of his back. Harry’s thought process stuttered, and he looked further down.
Fishtail. Eggsy possessed a fishtail. Long and absinthe-green, feminine in a way, tapering past the liminal slice of flesh that was skin and scales where the bellybutton should have been, growing increasingly slender until the end flared out in gossamer fins that were stronger than they appeared, since that was what Eggsy was using to swat him with.
Not violently, more in the manner of an annoyed flick a cat’s tail would make, which somehow was the strangest thing of all.
Harry opened his mouth and spilled the first thing that came to mind: “Are you quite done yet?”
The smacks eased off. Eggsy tilted his head. Did the boy even speak English?
Agents who were incapable of analyzing a situation and taking action based on that rarely lived long. This, however, strained even Kingsman shrewdness. Harry had to process a great deal of many things at once. Such as Eggsy being alive. In Fieldstone.
Eggsy was wearing the medal.
Eggsy was beautiful.
That last one. That was the bit of reef that Harry’s mind continually struck and sank on. The bit that was the absolute ruin of him.
Michelle hadn’t allowed Harry to properly see her, and he hadn’t pressed. She was lovely, and she’d made his heart beat faster for those first few minutes, but that had been it. She had been pretty, but he’d expected to be struck dumb, for the unsteady sway that filled his heart to settle.
Since it didn’t happen, he dismissed his suppositions as adolescent melodrama, the equivalent of still believing in love at first sight, waiting for the jab of Cupid’s bow. Claptrap, the lot of it.
He had apparently been premature in making that call.
Eggsy scalded him with a glare. “I knew ya knew m’name!”
Well. That was English of a sort.
“Why would I not—”
“—I remembered ya,” Eggsy cut him off, both verbally and physically, palm over Harry’s mouth. His hand was chilly, smoother than it should have been, and Harry would have gotten distracted by the sensory overload except Eggsy was talking, and the accusatory gleam was still there. “I don’t know y’name and she won’t tell me, and ye’r never there.”
Harry had to turn his head to speak. His lips still brushed against Eggsy’s fingertips. “I am never where, exactly?” It struck him as the least dangerous route to take.
Eggsy smacked him again. “Here! There! Ye’r-never-there! Y’promised.”
His speech came out overly emphasized, singsongy almost, and Michelle had spoken somewhat like that, as if the inherent connection between sound and meaning was flawed. But Eggsy spoke faster, clipped the consonants, and he emoted until the words exploded like fireworks, and most of it was a frustrated spray of reds and oranges.
“I promised?” Harry asked.
Eggsy gripped the medal. It hung from a crude chain of sorts, rusty, not something anyone should have been wearing around their necks.
“I see,” Harry said at length. And he did, to a degree. “Will you stop hitting me, please?”
“No,” Eggsy retorted, and the next blow was to the back of a knee, forcing Harry to readjust to avoid crushing Eggsy’s trachea. His palm came down beside Eggsy’s head instead.
Harry changed tactics. “What will get you to stop that?”
That earned him a ceasefire. Eggsy studied him. Harry took the opportunity to return the favor. There were many differences from the boy Harry had known to the young man he’d become. He was inarguably alien. Eggsy’s teeth were sharper than they should have been. Pink gills in his neck flexed when he breathed. Spiral patterns on his skin glittered, as if luminescent scales lay underneath. His hair was a messy tangle, too long and dark with water.
“Name.” Eggsy clutched the medal between his fingers, and Harry finally recognized the uncertainty at the edges like the farthest ring of a ripple, threatening to slide back into surface tension.
He should have been afraid. Harry had practically assaulted him. But he wasn’t scared, just… wary. Like Harry could hurt him in ways that went beyond the physical.
“Harry.” The civilized act of introductions was a ringing reminder how inappropriate this was. Harry sank back on his knees, not getting up just yet. That would have placed him in a more vulnerable position and he wasn’t sure that Eggsy wouldn’t topple him straight into the drink if provoked. “Harry Hart.”
Eggsy sat up, tail curling, far more flexible than he thought it would be. He flashed a grin that was so like Lee that it rocked Harry decades into the past, then brought him back just as violently because it wasn’t the same: Eggsy grinned with a fierceness that Lee hadn’t possessed, with a pink full lower lip displayed, levity writ large in the curve of his cheek.
He beamed “Harry,” like a triumph, and then it was—
Staring. Harry had enough self-awareness to call it what it was. The night had taken on a surreal twist, as if anything could happen, and Harry would be the ridiculous one to deny it. “Eggsy,” he started, at a loss. “Why are you here?”
“I live here.”
“No, you do not. The cottage has been empty for years.”
Eggsy rolled his eyes. “Here,” and the emphasis implied you daft man.
In case there was even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding, Eggsy twitched his tail and allowed it to slip into the water gently rocking up to where they sat.
“You live in my cove?”
“S’good spot. S’quiet.” Eggsy shrugged, and Harry put aside curiosity as to where he’d learned that gesture because living in the cove wasn’t good, it was miserable. Brutal. Nothing thrived here. He knew that best.
“Where is your mother?”
Something akin to anger flashed in Eggsy’s face, mouth awry. “She swims away. Bad place this, she tells.”
“But you don’t believe that?” he ventured, unsure of why Eggsy wouldn’t be in full agreement with his mother. What could there possibly be in Fieldstone that could overcome the distaste for the place?
“S’good here.” Eggsy shrugged again, a one-shoulder version, and the tick at his jaw drew the subject closed.
Harry asked other questions.
Eggsy was fifteen and already alone. At Harry’s indignation he simply stretched out on the ground, showing off lean muscles and the power behind them. “M’strong,” he bragged, even though he wasn’t yet full grown, and Harry needed to remind himself that Eggsy might have been half-human but he was also half other, and he couldn’t quite hold either him or Michelle accountable to the yardstick of human morals.
Eggsy had been living at the cove for the last two years. His memories of his life on land were spotty, but he remembered that last day in the cottage—the screaming. Remembered that the medal was important. Remembered everything but who Harry was.
Communication was made difficult by Eggsy lacking the vocabulary to express himself, but Harry watched the emotions and the hand gestures, and filled in the gaps.
When dawn broke over the horizon, Harry wasn’t startled. His internal clock was excellent. “You should go.”
“Why?” Eggsy watched Harry. “No one comes. No one is here. S’safe.”
“No one?” In theory, that was the way it should be, it being private property, but Harry hadn’t survived this long without taking precautions.
Eggsy huffed a laugh at him. “S’you. Only you. No one hear, no one see.”
Harry had to trust him on that.
The importance of settling the house peeled away like dead, itchy skin. Harry gave his orders to the staff, dealt with his correspondence, and then he went down to the cove where he spent most of his days. He brought with him things—replacement chains for Eggsy to use instead of the rusty mess around his throat. Scissors to snip away at the tangled knots in his hair, which Eggsy fussed but sat for, and then looked pleased when he could run his fingers through his own hair.
“Won’t get stuck !” he cheered, causing Harry to smile. Eggsy’s joy was infectious. He left the scissors behind on the cove in a waterproof box along with the spare chains.
Harry taught Eggsy to read. He assumed it would take a few weeks, if not months, but Eggsy proved brilliant. The more they conversed, the easier speech came to him. Though he still had atrocious syntax.
When Harry brought it up, Eggsy was moody. “S’how I learned,” he defended, but Lee hadn’t spoken like that.
“Not them. Men.”
“I don’t understand?” An ominous lurch in his stomach marked that for the lie that it was. Eggsy neither confirmed nor denied it, instead tugging on Harry’s sleeve and pointing at the page.
“Read,” he instructed, imperiousness alleviated by the adoration he had for the books that meant so much to Harry. “Please.”
Who could deny him?
“Do you want anything special?” Harry asked him one day. It was a carefully phrased question, open-ended.
Eggsy rolled on his back and blinked up at him. He paid no attention to the debris scraping against his skin. “Want?”
Harry set aside the book that he’d been reading from. “Food, for example.”
“I eat.”
“I’m aware that you do.” Those carnivore teeth weren’t for show. “But there are certain things that you cannot get yourself. Such as cake?” He tapped the cover of the book, as he’d had to explain to Eggsy what a cake was when asked what the narrator was enjoying so thoroughly.
“Cake?” Eggsy tried out the foreign word on his tongue, and Harry wanted to pick him up and bring him back to the house. Feed him well so that his bones weren’t flush to the skin. Pamper him.
Wanted to, but wouldn’t. Eggsy was borderline feral and would not thank him for it.
“Yes,” Harry said. “Yes, exactly. Would you like to try it?”
The next day Eggsy beamed at him over a mouthful of cake, hands and lips hopelessly smeared with cream.
Loving Eggsy was as natural as anything else in Harry’s life. It didn’t come as a startling revelation. It simply was. Eggsy was Lee’s legacy, proof that the man who had been Harry’s first real friend had existed. It was a given that the affection would come—the gratitude that, against all odds, Eggsy was hale and hearty, and didn’t despise him.
No, the real difficulty in caring about Eggsy was that Harry was a proper English gentleman. He had been drilled in manners and expectations since he could walk, pinned under the weight of responsibility and duty. When he thought about Eggsy’s future, he could not grasp what it was that he should envision. What should he try to help Eggsy achieve? Eggsy didn’t want for anything other than company and Harry, who knew what loneliness was, could not deny him that.
Except that he couldn’t stay at Fieldstone forever.
“I have to leave.”
Eggsy opened his mouth and closed it with a snap. The weather was turning, summer vanishing. His fingers tangled in the new chain around his throat. “Why?”
The withdrawn tone was a little surprising.
“I have duties to attend to. I promised I’d return to them.” Harry sidestepped the subject of Kingsman. That would require too much information, too many salient points to cover, and Eggsy wouldn’t be well-served by knowing any of it. He stood on both feet, not taking a seat. It was craven of him to wait until the last day to tell Eggsy, but the topic had been… difficult to broach. The timing had forever been off.
“Ya promised.” The chain twisted tight. The barb dug under Harry’s skin. He winced. Promises were a bit of a sore spot between them. No child liked being lied to, and Eggsy still resented how long it had taken for Harry to return. In his view it didn’t matter that Harry had no way of knowing Eggsy was waiting.
Harry patient rebutted, “I did, and I do my utmost to keep my word. Which is why I promise that I will come back when I’m able to. Of course, should you no longer wish to stay here—”
Eggsy slipped into the water. It was a fast movement, barely leaving a ripple in his wake.
Anger pricked the back of Harry's neck. He scanned the surface for a flash of Eggsy’s telltale colors. "Don't be obstinate. This is no way to behave.”
Worry overcame the anger when seconds mounted. Was their friendship this finite? He warred with himself. Eggsy was immature—of course he was temperamental—but going where Harry couldn’t hope to follow? That was poor form.
Something skittered and hit the side of his Wellington boot. Harry took a step back and then picked the item up, turning it over. It was a conch with a ridged pattern resembling an angel's wing. He ran a thumb over the ridges and when he lifted his gaze, Eggsy treaded the waves from a wide enough distance that Harry had no hope of reaching him.
He doubted that was by accident.
Instead of cutting the boy down, Harry raised the conch. “Is this for me?”
“Ya have to come back.”
Harry was tight-lipped for a long moment. It was strange to be… for someone to want him back. His colleagues were fine men, but to them he was merely Galahad, and they had use for him. Eggsy didn’t want anything but his presence.
He palmed the conch, slipping it into a pocket. “Naturally. This is my home.”
Eggsy’s quiet look of determination eased into something vulnerable, transient. Then he vanished into the murky depths and Harry knew that he was gone.
At the tail end of October, Merlin invited him for a tête-à-tête. “Your mood is much improved. Everything settled satisfactorily?”
“More or less.”
Merlin tossed him a case of cigars and got out some of Tristan’s whiskey. “Not selling, I assume.”
“No.” The match blazed to life, and Harry took a long drag, tasting herbs and something vaguely sweet under the tobacco. “No, as a matter of fact, I intend to return soon. Peace and solitude agreed with me.”
Merlin passed the bottle. “To satisfactory outcomes, then. May we all be so fortunate.”
1927
Harry did return, months later. He walked down to the cove and waited.
And waited.
“Ya took too long,” came a whisper in the darkness, between the ebb of white-tipped ripples, and Harry could not for the life of him deny the exquisite relief that welled behind his breastbone.
Eggsy was older and leaner, and the peculiar swirls that Harry had taken note of had grown. They were patterns as intricate as constellations, rough patches that shone at night as if starlight were trapped in his skin. An astrologer’s chart of secrets. They wound around Eggsy’s waist, the small of his back, between his shoulder blades. Even on his jaw, behind his ear. Michelle hadn’t had them. Was it a type of sexual dimorphism?
Harry asked, but Eggsy shrugged, and Harry did not press the issue. There was much more to catch up on. Books to read. Manners to be taught.
All of that in a very short amount of time. Harry meant to make the most of it.
Harry left at the end of two weeks. When he reached his Mayfair flat and undressed, he found another shell in his trouser pocket. Pink and round, polished like a gem.
He set it beside the angel’s wing on his nightstand.
He left, but he always returned.
One subject that Harry had decreed was taboo was to ask about Eggsy’s mother. The anger that rose in him when it came to Michelle was a bit too much like an exposed nerve.
But Eggsy had no such considerations, and when Harry inadvertently broached the subject of sex—he really should have vetted the novel but he hadn’t, and so there they were with the sun warm on their shoulders and the steady lap of the sea—Eggsy sat up with a pleased, “Oh!”
“Oh?”
“S’that’s what it’s called? Sex?” Eggsy sprawled in the shallows, his upper body resting on stone, chin on his arms. He constantly interrupted to ask questions, and Harry nurtured his curiosity regardless of the subject. That it had taken that long for sex to come up was something of a purposeful avoidance.
“Well, there are other terms for it, certainly, and in polite company one wouldn’t address it so boldly—” Harry paused. “Eggsy, how do you know what sex is?”
“She likes the gifts.”
“Pardon?”
Eggsy yawned at him, relaxed. Whenever he said “she,” it meant Michelle. Harry had taught him about mothers and the words that came with that, but Eggsy didn’t find it important. “The gifts. The sailors give gifts when she lets them touch between her legs.” He pulled himself up a little higher, piqued no doubt by Harry’s sudden blankness. “S’sex, yeah? Touching. Smells of ocean. Grunting. Messy?” he wrinkled his nose.
Harry set the book on his lap and ran both hands through his hair, exhaling a ragged breath that had gone stale in his throat. He had not come prepared for this revelation. “It can be messy, yes. I am sorry you had to witness that. You’re far too young.”
And there was the petulant twist of a pink mouth. Eggsy loathed it when Harry brought up his age in conjunction with young. As far as Eggsy was concerned, he’d been an adult for years, but Harry still viewed him as a boy on the cusp, not over it.
Of course, some deviants preferred—
“Eggsy.” The way Harry uttered his name stilled whatever tart reply Eggsy had been formulating. “Did these sailors ask to touch you? Between your… your legs?” He knew that Eggsy could change shape but chose not to. But what if he did have a reason? As ill-advised as this line of topic was, now the idea had taken root, and it bloomed with awful implications.
Eggsy shrugged. “I didn’t like their hands.”
Harry scrubbed his face. Thank you, God. He could live with many things—with absolute horrors—but he could not live with the knowledge that men had abused this sweet, perfect lad.
He didn’t notice how Eggsy watched him; wistful, exasperated.
The treasures Harry brought Eggsy grew; the waterproof box became two, then three. Paper didn’t last long, but it was worth constantly replacing the books so that Eggsy could read on his own, practice his writing. Same with the chains. Odd how the medal itself was resistant to rust, but there were so many strangely marvelous things about Eggsy’s existence that it didn’t bear much dwelling on.
Such as the fact that, while at Fieldstone, Harry was spared from the night terrors that followed him elsewhere. Only when Eggsy was nearby were the nightmares held at bay, mercifully granting him a dreamless, uninterrupted reprieve.
He did not mention this to Eggsy. Did not ask how he was doing it. Only loved him all the more for it until the emotion swelled over the dam walls surrounding his heart, so gladdened and thankful for the miracle that was their friendship.
1929
“Do you want to see?” Eggsy asked one day, when Harry returned from an unusually long trip to Greece.
“See what?”
They sat with Harry’s back to hard stone, as comfortable as that could be, Eggsy stretched out beside him; he could have placed his chin on Harry’s knee, though he hadn’t. If he had, it would have dawned on Harry that there should have been more space between them. Distance. But he’d relaxed his vigilance and stopped giving it any thought.
“My legs.”
“... Do you wish to show me?” Harry cautiously asked, thrilled despite himself.
The sunlight played over the strange constellations on Eggsy’s shoulders. His hair had dried out in feathery tufts, rough with salt, and his lips formed a shy smile that was nevertheless gilded with mischief. “That’s not what I asked, ‘Arry,” he teased, tail flicking droplets of seawater in Harry’s direction. Damned good aim, really. “S’not gentlemanly to answer a question with a question, yeah?”
Impudent little beast. Harry wiped his cheek. The water thankfully hadn’t gotten on the book in his lap. Eggsy loved books too much to harm them. “I would only like to see them if it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to you. I admit to being… curious,” he paused, mulling over it. “The biological process—the expenditure of energy—surely it’s a considerable effort?”
“Mmn. S’tiring.” Eggsy stretched out next to him, sunning himself on the rock. “S’not pretty. Hurts.”
“Does it? I would rather you not cause yourself discomfort on my behalf.”
“Everythin’ hurts, ‘Arry.” The smile that played around Eggsy’s mouth was elusive, as mysterious as the hidden world he lived in when Harry wasn’t around. It spoke of enigmas, and it was strange, because Eggsy was the most honest, sincere person he had the pleasure—and occasional distress—to know.
“I do not want you to suffer, dear boy,” Harry said, because that statement troubled him; it rang too true to the things he did in the name of peace for Kingsman, of lives ended so that the future wouldn’t bleed bleak. He absently skimmed his palm between the jut of Eggsy’s shoulder blades. His skin was smooth, sun-kissed gold, yet cool. The constellations were a different texture, fibrous, and he could blindly map them out with his fingertips. Would Eggsy have them in his human form? Or would they fade away, invisible waypoints that only a lover's mouth would unearth? “You’ll do no such thing on my account.”
Eggsy cocked his head and stared at Harry with his eyebrows drawn together, mouth slightly parted around a protest before it closed, settling for a nonchalant hum that made the hair on Harry’s nape stir.
They were too close.
The thought lingered at the edges of Harry’s consciousness. His friendship with Eggsy was impeding rational thought when, truly, he did not have the luxury of lazy days. Galahad was needed in the field, not languishing in the countryside, as Merlin bluntly phrased it. While he had yet to turn down a single assignment, that couldn’t particularly be commended when he should be in town, readily available at a moment’s notice, abreast of all news and developments.
It was his own reflection as he shaved that at last drove this home. He dragged both hands through his hair, fingers combing through the wayward curls, dismayed by how the smattering of gray at his temples had expanded. He wasn’t getting any younger. Another half decade, a decade at most, was what he had left in him. Mirrors could not lie. Age was catching up to him. He could either be a man of action or he could while away the last of his active years playing nursemaid to Lee’s son.
He didn’t allow himself to think that it was a gross oversimplification of what Eggsy was. Of what Eggsy meant. He just preferred to couch it in those terms, to draw a safe line around Eggsy, because it was easier to accept that he cared for the boy in a familial way. Not in any other manner.
That Eggsy didn’t need him, however? That was entirely true.
“I have to leave and I won’t be back for some time.”
Eggsy looked up at him from the shells he’d gathered. Sometimes he gave Harry one to add to his growing pile, which Harry always accepted, charmed, though he wondered why Eggsy fixated on finding the right sort of specimen, whatever that meant.
“Yes?” Sensing this was out of the norm, but not yet alarmed, the curve of Eggsy’s smile were like question marks. “Months?”
“No, Eggsy—I mean for years.” Harry twisted the Kingsman signet he'd slipped on that morning. Eggsy followed the gesture, frowning at the unfamiliar piece of jewelry. “I may not return for a decade or more.” If at all.
For a long minute, the waves rolling in were the only sound other than the thudding of his heart against his ribs.
“Oh.” Eggsy toyed with a conch. “How many years is a decade?”
“Ten.”
That got Eggsy’s attention. He bit his lip, shredding it open. Blood streamed down his chin.
Harry swore and knelt, scattering the seashells. “Eggsy!” The chastisement was a cry echoing off the rocks, his pulse racing at the sight of blood. Red, all too human. “Daft boy, what are you doing?” He gripped Eggsy’s chin and hissed, unhappy. Eggsy had sliced clean through his bottom lip.
Which perhaps should have alarmed Harry for a different reason, proof that Eggsy was an apex predator, that his thumb was near razor-sharp teeth. But Eggsy just looked stunned and lost and, more aggravatingly, uncaring of the harm he’d done to himself.
“Bloody hell, you need stitches—if not a surgeon—” Harry examined the damage, trying to stem the flow with a handkerchief. He dabbed at the blood, and though he knew this wasn’t a mortal wound by any means, he wanted to shake Eggsy.
Cool fingers wrapped around his wrist. Startled, it was Harry’s turn to blink and meet Eggsy’s eyes, trapped by the unreadable emotion in their depths.
“You have to come back.” It was neither a question nor a command. It was a plea. There was something that Eggsy was trying to tell him without words, and Harry, for all his worldly experience, could not bear to listen.
Breaking eye contact, he cleared his throat. “I cannot promise that. So I’d like you to—to leave. This place is unsuitable for you.” So dismal and bereft of life. There were thousands of beaches, beautiful places, where Eggsy could thrive. “I owe so much to your father, all that I have done has been to repay him, but I cannot think of anything else to give you that you would actually want. That would make any of this worth it. So leave. Please.”
The fingers around his wrist tightened. Stubbornly. Then they slackened, and suddenly Harry was holding onto nothing but a stained handkerchief.
“For him?” Eggsy had moved out of reach, sinking into the bobbing waves until only his eyes were visible, and Harry refused to meet them.
“For your father, yes. Lee was…” His friend. His brother. The first person to accept him as he was, who extended a hand when Harry sunk into pits of melancholia. The man who made Harry’s dream come true, who said yes to a question that Harry should not have asked.
The man responsible for Eggsy’s existence.
“I owe him everything.”
There was no reply. Harry counted to ten, pinching the bridge of his nose, mindful that he was dealing with a boy. If he had to explain it a greater length so that Eggsy understood why this was in his best interests then he would do so with forbearance worthy of his role as Eggsy's godfather.
“You see, I…” The words drifted and then dissolved, unheard. Whitecaps lapped at his bent knee, the sea reclaiming what belonged to her, Eggsy’s seashells disappearing one by one. He searched the mouth of the cove and the horizon that lay beyond it in vain.
This had gone so dreadfully wrong.
A goodbye could not, by the very essence of itself, be a joyous occasion, and yet he had hoped—misguidedly, as it turned out—that it would allow them closure.
He rose to his feet, trousers soaked, and pocketed the handkerchief.
Only later did it dawn on Harry how his words might have come across, and by then, he wasn’t on British soil and it was too late to take any of them back.
It was for the best, he decided, and it was an easy thing to believe.
He had, after all, not seen the light flicker and fade in Eggsy’s face.
Percival and Lancelot were concerned. They expressed it in minute ways that Harry could not help but notice, but could not summon the energy to deal with.
After several days, it was Percival who approached him. Percival, who was gentle and mild-mannered, and would make a brilliant Arthur one day. “May I have a word?”
They were in a cottage in France by then, in a town so impoverished that it no longer had a name, biding their time. An unknown weapons factory was suspected to have opened in the hills nearby; it was in Kingsman’s best interest to discover if that was true, and if so, to bring back prototypes to determine if “discipline” was required. That numerous locals had gone missing was a secondary concern, but they were to keep an eye out for that as well.
In the weeks since bidding goodbye to Fieldstone, Harry’s mood had noticeably plunged towards black. He blamed it on the nightmares and on himself for having grown used to being free of them. A weakness on his part. He had maintained his professionalism, he was not a brat throwing a tantrum, and yet there stood Percival, not a hair out of place, unwanted kindness in his gaze.
“Pray forgive—” Harry began, relying on standard politeness to get through this damned unpleasantry, but Percival’s head shake halted him.
“We hear you at night, Galahad. You pace incessantly. You are not getting enough rest.”
“I can assure you that it won’t compromise the operation.” Somewhere from the other room Harry heard Lancelot snort without bothering to disguise it as a cough.
“This isn’t about the mission,” Percival hastened to clarify.
Harry lifted an eyebrow as if to inquire what, then?
Lancelot’s head appeared at the doorway. “We’re worried about you, you sod. Merlin claimed you’ve been doing better the last few years, but here you are, acting like a proper martyr, dying night by night.”
“James.”
“No, darling, he’ll play around your little hints and walk off without so much as by your leave before you can suggest it.” Lancelot waved the glass of port in his hand to make his point. A drop sloshed over the rim and landed on his wrist. Lancelot carelessly licked it off and then smiled at Harry with characteristic insouciance. “You appreciate the frankness, don’t you?”
“I would appreciate clarity of what exactly this is meant to be, yes.”
“Good.” Lancelot drained the glass. “Come share our bed.”
“Pardon?”
“Christ.”
Harry’s paleness conveyed his shock. Percival threw a glower over his shoulder. “I thought we settled that I’d handle this.”
Lancelot shrugged. And for a moment, Harry’s air was gone, assaulted by déjà vu of Eggsy’s habit of the same.
“Yes, well,” Percival was saying when Harry snapped out of it. Mortification had painted itself high along the lines of his cheekbones. “You’re aware of the nature of our relationship, we take no great pains to hide it. If you are amenable to it, for the foreseeable duration of our stay…?”
“You’ll have to forgive me, but why?”
It was Lancelot who answered. “We all have our share of bad dreams, old sport. To be behind the eight ball in our profession is to be expected. A little company to keep the terrors away does wonders.”
“I see,” said Harry flatly.
Percival winced and floundered. “Yes, well… yes.”
“Thank you,” Harry asserted. “But I must decline.”
“You must have a sweetheart tucked away in that grand house of yours,” nodded Lancelot. “I had a feeling. That’s a man with a heartbreak problem, I said, but does anyone listen to me?” Lancelot totted off, likely to get another serving of port for himself, abandoning a flustered Percival.
“I don’t,” Harry denied, voice tight.
Percival dipped his head in apology and retreated into the other room. The cottage was not large; Harry’s arm was through a sleeve when the hushed argument reached his ears. Harry wasted no time exiting to the back garden, refusing to tolerate a lover’s spat, regardless of how beneficent their intentions had been.
They could not be trusted to understand. While Harry would die for these men, for their cause, that was where he drew the line. Lee had been the exception, not the rule, when drink and rapport had loosened Harry’s tongue enough for him to share the legends passed down the Hart family. Back then it had been embarrassing due to a young man’s pride, of yearnings that should have been discarded along with toys and scraped knees.
Things had changed.
The yearning hadn’t.
Harry jerked awake in time to snap his teeth shut against the scream in his throat.
The ceiling came into focus slowly, sweat matting down his hair, nerves like water beads jumping on a hot stove, the jaws of fight-or-flee clamped tight on his neck. He could still taste the scream struggling to escape and mutinously kept his lips flat as if sewn together. It would pass. The panic, the shuddering pulse in his ears and temples—it wasn’t real.
It had been real. It had been four years of sodden mud and artillery blasts. Of minefields. He dragged the back of a hand over his wet cheeks, unable to tell if what he wiped away were tears or sweat. He shuddered. The nightmares served as a reminder that no man who fought a war won it—they only survived it.
Fuck.
His hands shook as they rolled a fag, match threatening to go out until he steadied himself. Across the narrow room he could see his reflection in the dresser mirror: his face was a pale, gaunt mask, the lit tip of the fag an ember in the dark. He inhaled and then held the smoke, letting it burn in his lungs, and then opened his mouth, a fulsome dragon’s breath.
He sat up and deliberately emptied his mind, repressing the carnage of broken bodies, ignoring the throb of old scars. But it wasn't working. Not that night. The images wouldn’t be chased off. Flashes of pain and terror, of shockwaves, of healthy men standing an arm’s length away disintegrating into bloody chunks.
Of Germany and the bomb that had nearly killed him. Of the mortars and tanks. Of shrapnel and what it did to flesh. Of the sharp ting of teeth glancing metal. Of the miserable chorus of the dying.
Harry threw the covers off. He was shaky on his feet but not in purpose, although he didn’t intuit what his goal was until he’d dug through the contents of his single suitcase to clutch at something that was both soft and stiff.
The fag he extinguished against the oak planks of the floor. As if still ensnared in the nightmare, Harry buried his face into the handkerchief.
In his mind’s eye he looked through to a sky choked with black smoke. But then the scent of the sea overtook him, and he swallowed it down, and in his lungs was the dark depths of the ocean, the roar of the tides—soothing yet terrifying.
His lips parted, not on the aborted scream but on a name. Slowly, he came back to his senses.
The unmistakable salt-rich smell of the sea stayed. Despite being weeks old, Eggsy’s blood was as potent then as it had been from the first—as if the pith of him was primordial, as if even this small part of him could not be diluted. Harry’s fingers folded into one another in a travesty of a prayer, the cotton merged into the clasp of his fingers,
God, Harry was tired. He ached. He wanted. He missed.
All the more proof that he’d been right to make Eggsy leave. To not cheapen or dirty what was between them, to not add insult to injury to Lee’s memory. What a despicable creature he was to have come to rely so heavily on a tender lad half his age.
Indulging in one last sin, Harry kissed the blood-soaked handkerchief, as sacred to him as an altar cloth to a priest.
They found the factory.
They found the tanks of mustard gas and the corpses of the missing villagers.
Arthur’s instructions were clear: raze it to the ground.
Harry returned to his flat in Mayfair with a heavier conscience than he’d left it. Discovering correspondence from Fieldstone was the final straw, and so he entrusted all caretaking needs to Merlin’s firm. If he did not hear of, or about Fieldstone, for the rest of his life, he might die a happy man. Or at least, a less miserable one.
On a night where half a bottle of Tristan’s finest aged whiskey burned in his belly, Harry fed the handkerchief to the fireplace. By then the seashells were long gone, tossed into the Iroise Sea.
As he’d done while young, Harry drank a lot more and thought less of what the sea had reclaimed.
1931
“Miserable weather,” Merlin commented. He lifted the black umbrella higher as the city bustled around them, uncaring of the storm. They stood in front of Kingsman Tailors, their newest front after it had become increasingly difficult to maintain the club façade with as many new members as they had gained.
And lost, Harry thought distractedly, reading the headline of his newspaper, unmindful that it was getting wet while Merlin unlocked the front door of the shop. La Matanza in El Salvador had claimed Tristan when it had swept him under its mob violence, and Bors fell in the line of duty while raiding one of Hitler’s Nazi centers.
There had also been the loss of Gareth, Pelleas, and Caradoc that they had yet to recover from. The trio had disappeared into the Amazon, and although the world had known them as Percy Fawcett, his son Jack, and his friend Raleigh, their absence was still keenly felt at the Table. The lack of bodies had left their fates up in the air for years, but by then there was little chance that the trio would saunter out of the Amazon right as—he glanced up at the tumultuous clouds, mouth twisting sardonically—right as rain.
“Yes, rather. Don’t suppose it would be London otherwise.”
Merlin’s snorted laugh was segued by the crack of a sniper rifle and then the white burst of pain as Harry went down.
“—Cognitive impairment, acute memory loss with sporadic spontaneous recovery—”
“Complete removal of left eye due to corneal destruction and vitreous collapse. Partial reconstruction of the temporal plate was successful…”
“Outcome uncertain. Patient demonstrates difficulty in continuous retention—”
“…Recommendation is…”
Hamish—he had introduced himself as Hamish, and Harry believed that to be… mostly right—was quite possibly the only reason Harry wasn’t dead. Or fully gone mad.
“Not very attractive, is it?” he asked, grimacing at the handheld mirror. Half his head was swaddled in bandages, but he could feel where bone didn’t meet bone as it was meant to, nerves deadened but not dead. He’d been told that he’d been out for a spell. Specifically, a full month.
Harry remembered none of it.
In fact, Harry remembered almost nothing but fragments, faded images, inexplicable flashes of insight. A limbo of sorts. If he strained for his actual memories, they proved elusive, slippery, skittering out of his reach. Yet he was… improving, was one way to put it. Since waking up a few days back, he’d regained the introspection to conclude that his current state was not only inadequate but a liability. A spy playing without a full deck—who knew what secrets could rattle loose in his head?
“Your abundance of vanity hasn’t changed, I can tell you that much,” the other man observed from his seat beside the hospital bed. “Put that away, for Pete’s sake. Be glad that piss-poor sniper chose the absolute worst day for an assassination.”
“Attempted. Attempted assassination.” Another thing about himself, Harry noted, was that he could be quite tetchy regarding semantics.
Or perhaps he was prickly because he had lost a sodding eye.
He set the mirror aside. Feeble, long in the tooth, and deformed. Fantastic. Even the low morning light filtering in through the curtains couldn’t paint him as anything but a wreck.
“What now?” He dropped his head back onto the pillow. “The information I possess is too sensitive. I could easily be tricked into divulging it to the wrong person.”
Hamish didn’t equivocate. “Unfortunately. But there’s actually a perfect solution: Fieldstone. You have never been happier than at that tomb of stone—don’t ask me why or how, you’ve never been inclined to share—and the surgeons believe that familiarity will help trigger a more… precise memory recollection, rather than the scattershot mess afflicting you now.”
Fieldstone. Harry blinked at the ceiling. Fieldstone. No recognition. He massaged his right temple, avoiding pulling the muscles on the injured side of his face. Fieldstone.
For a moment his chest tightened. Out of the interminable gray rose a wisp of remembrance. With unspeakable gentility Harry coaxed it forward until it interlinked with conscious thought, reifying into a jolting realization.
Someone was waiting for him at Fieldstone. Someone important to him. Someone so important that he had not revealed their existence to Hamish.
Harry said, “By all means, then.”
The journey to Fieldstone was slow and arduous, as to not jolt Harry unnecessarily, but he still had to request through tight lips for the vehicle to stop so that he could get off and void his stomach of contents. He did this multiple times until there was nothing left to retch up, even if the nausea insisted that there was.
He was in poor condition for the trip, but there were moments of lucidity where boredom won out. “Tell me about my staff,” he demanded, during one of those lulls.
Hamish pulled out a discreet black diary. “Not including the two nurses and doctor traveling with us, you have a cook, a repairman, a housekeeper, and a steward. All but the housekeeper are relatively new, as you’ve been slowly cutting staff for a while, but you’re thorough about vetting your people. They may not know of your work as Kingsman, but they’re clean. Any of that ring a bell?”
It did not. Harry sighed.
The infernal journey did eventually concluded as they reached their destination. Harry stirred out of the nap he’d been taking, his eyes heavy with the desire to slip back into that welcoming darkness, in order to watch as the so-called Fieldstone came into view.
There was no pang of recognition, but he did feel… comforted by the sight. As if a candle had been lit in his chest. It was not a friendly-looking structure, poised on a cliff, stone-faced and still, but he thought that maybe he could finally get rest here, the kind of rest that had eluded him in London.
With the car being as noisy as it was, the skeleton house staff had plenty of warning that they were arriving, and were already lined up by the driveway when the driver pulled in and cut the engine.
The second car that had been traveling with them rumbled up and stopped as well. Harry hated to be so helpless, but he stayed put inside the car, allowing the doctor and the nurse to come over and check on him and then help him out after ensuring that he had the strength and the balance to do so.
But he was not a small man, and his knees split like water at the knees as soon as he stood up. In quick succession his pulse fired up as he started pitching to the ground, the nurse and doctor gasping and clutching at him hard enough to bruise to at least mitigate his fall, but Harry didn’t actually fall.
He was caught.
The scent of the sea flooded his lungs, more so than the actual dark sea they were surrounded by.
“I’ve got you,” murmured a pleasantly deep, melodic voice.
Harry jerked his head up, ignoring that starburst of pain that caused behind the eye that no longer existed. “You,” he whispered, and it was by the grace of god that not all reason deserted him, because Harry’s overriding impulse at being faced with the most beautiful man he’d ever seen was to pull him in like a sailor clutching at floating debris after a wreckage and kiss his mouth until it bloomed red.
“Hello, Harry,” whispered the man, wearing an affectionate little smile as he stepped back, allowing the doctor and the nurse and hold him up long enough for Hamish and the other nurse to get the wheelchair in place. It was ridiculous, unless they planned to hoist him up the steps, but Harry’s entire focus was still on the man—the young man, not a wrinkle to be seen—standing almost indolently, watching him.
Someone waited for him at Fieldstone. Harry’s broken brain couldn’t put a name to the face, but his body, his heart, all ached for this person standing only feet away from him. Even if his mind couldn’t remember, the rest of him did.
Hamish adjusted his coat, concern in the furrow of his brows, and gestured over the young man. “This is Mr. Gary Christian.”
Gary Christian?
Harry cocked his head, baffled. That wasn’t right. But Hamish seemed to believe that it was, and “Gary” didn’t correct him.
“It’s good t’see you again, my lord,” “Gary” said easily, without any of the hidden horror or dread that people looked at him with, a wretch in bandages. He bowed. “I hope you recover soon.”
“Yes,” Harry said, watching him carefully, feeling like he’d never actually woken up from that coma until now. “As do I.”