Chapter Text
Harry owes Perceival a debt of gratitude.
He'd been at a loss trying to find a way to steal a few minutes with Eggsy that wouldn't risk interruption from other agents or be too obvious or overly familiar until Perceival had mentioned something Lancelot said in one of their weekly mentorship chats, and Harry had seized on the idea with relief. He'd made room on his calendar as soon as he returned to his office and made a note for Eggsy to meet him there the next morning so he could inform him. He congratulates himself on this brilliant move with a nip of Merlin's secret office whisky and spends the rest of his day in high spirits.
If the next morning he chooses his suit with a little extra care and takes an extra few minutes on his toilette? Well, that's his business. He spends his first hour in the Manor working his way through the frankly astonishing amount of paperwork their operations generate, and only looks up when his alarm chimes, informing him Eggsy should be arriving in a few minutes. He puts away anything Eggsy doesn't have clearance to see and attempts to tidy his desk a bit.
At precisely 9:15 a sharp knock sounds on his door.
"Enter!" he calls out, and Eggsy does. Harry smiles a little at the care he takes not to let the heavy wooden door slam behind him, and stands to greet him.
"Eggsy, thank you. I know you've been very busy these past few weeks but I wanted an opportunity to speak to you personally - catch up, if you will," Harry says. Eggsy hesitates before responding.
"Yes, of course. May I?" he asks, gesturing to one of the chairs in front of the desk. This level of formality from Eggsy still feels foreign - honestly, he wouldn’t have minded if Eggsy had eschewed his manners for once and thrown himself into a chair - but he simply nods. Hopefully these chats will allow him to reestablish their previous familiarity.
Silence reigns after Eggsy is seated, and it pains Harry to think of how stilted things have become between them. He thinks longingly of their easy few hours in his house before the dog test, but Eggsy pulls him from his thoughts before he can turn maudlin.
"Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about?" he asks.
"Yes, I -" want to ask you if anything is wrong, want to take you to dinner, want to ask if you're even happy to see me alive "- I wanted to commend you on your excellent work closing up the Valentine case. You showed exemplary teamwork with Lancelot and exceptional judgment throughout," Harry says, instead of what he's truly thinking.
"Thank you, sir," Eggsy replies. Harry winces at the "sir" and the distance implied - but the title at least he can remedy.
"You don't have to be quite so formal," he says. "In ordinary circumstances the Knight who proposed the successful candidate would continue to act in a mentoring capacity for the first few months of the new Knight's career. I regret that I wasn't able to do that for you, though you seem to have acquitted yourself remarkably well - I'm glad we were able to keep both you and Ms. Morton."
Harry had hoped for more of a reaction than a small nod, but he'll take it.
"Thank you, sir - Harry," Eggsy says, and Harry doesn't bother to hide his smile at hearing his name in Eggsy's voice again. If this new version Eggsy is committed to his professionalism, Harry will simply have to take that as his starting point.
"I know Percival and the other agents have done a wonderful job stepping in where I...couldn't, these past few months," he says after a moment, "but I'd like to be able to pick up where they've left off. If you're amenable I'd like to have you stop by for tea, around once a week should suffice. It'll give us a chance to chat. We can discuss anything you have questions about or ways of handling some of the trickier situations you run into on missions. If you like I can also give you a bit more of a...bird's eye view, if you will, of the other moving parts of our organization."
"Yes, that sounds lovely," Eggsy replies with a smile. It's not quite the cheeky grin Harry spent so long missing, but he can't help but beam back anyway. They chat lightly for a few more minutes before Harry dismisses Eggsy to his meeting with Tech, and his good mood lasts him well into the rest of the week. Finally, he's getting somewhere.
The next few weeks are an exercise in patience. Eggsy has dropped some of the formality he'd clung to since Harry's return, and he's been more willing to stop and chat if they happen to run into each other around the Manor.
He's learned that Eggsy is surprisingly bashful when Harry praises him for his actions on missions, and it becomes a priority for Harry to find something new to compliment him on every week. It's the barest hint of the praise he wants to heap on Eggsy, but he's learned to his consternation that anything non-work related makes Eggsy retreat into his formality and manners. Part of him is convinced that he should back off, accept that Eggsy won't ever be interested in him as more than a mentor, but when he voices those thoughts to Merlin he's surprised to find his friend disagreeing with him.
"Eggsy...he's been a true asset since the Valentine clusterfuck," Merlin says carefully. "He spent months helping us get the world back on its feet, barely took a day off for the weeks he was on assignment, and he's still adjusting to a more normal balance. I think he's still getting his feet under him."
"And by all accounts he did marvelously - what does that have to do with anything?"
"He's getting used to someone actually being Arthur - and that someone being you. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd wager he's worried about how to balance you being Arthur with you being his mentor. The lad might be worried about crossing lines."
Harry manages not to groan aloud, but it's a close thing. This was exactly what he'd been trying to avoid by waiting until Eggsy was an agent to say anything: if he were still a regular Knight, this wouldn't be an issue - or at least, not the same way.
At least he knows what the problem is now, and can start finding a way to reassure Eggsy that, Chester aside, their hierarchy has always been somewhat loose around interpersonal relationships, simply given the nature of their work.
Eggsy is slowly losing his mind. He's spent the past few weeks in forced proximity to Harry for an hour at a time, and he thinks the stress might actually kill him. When Harry had first proposed weekly teas Eggsy had feared Harry picking apart all of his missions and finding fault but the reality is somehow worse: Harry spends the whole time praising him. It's all he can do not to blush down to his toes, and it's done absolutely nothing to curb the stupid fucking crush he's been trying to stifle with renewed vigor since Harry came back.
Now he has to sit there and listen to Harry call him all sorts of lovely things, things no one had ever praised him on before like his instincts and his judgment calls and his decisions, and all in that voice - it's. Well. It's not a kind of torture that training had prepared him for, although Eggsy supposes his poker face has never been better.
Roxy and Tilde think it's hilarious. He'd gone to Roxy to complain after the first week and found her on a call with Tilde, so the two had listened to his woes and about died laughing at his misfortune.
"Oh, poor Galahad, his crush is complimenting him, how awful!" Roxy had teased.
Eggsy had groaned and collapsed on her couch, one arm covering his face.
"Your problems are so strange," Tilde had added.
"I hate you both," Eggsy had muttered.
"No you don't!" they'd chorused, and Eggsy had nicked one of Roxy's throw pillows to groan into as they continued to make fun of him.
The next week it had happened again, and at this point he had resigned himself to their endless teasing over his fully justified misery.
He can't even escape Harry around the Manor anymore either. Now that they're talking regularly he'd felt like a right coward avoiding him around HQ, so now he has to make small talk with him whenever they happen to cross paths, which happens surprisingly often given how busy Harry must be running the whole agency. If Eggsy were more suspicious of his coworkers he'd almost suspect Merlin of engineering the "chance" meetings - the man must have cameras everywhere.
But while Eggsy still hasn't fully forgiven Merlin for his secrecy around Harry's survival, he can't imagine what he'd gain out of forcing Eggsy into small talk with Arthur. When he makes the mistake of telling Roxy, she laughs for a solid minute before suggesting that maybe Merlin is trying to set them up. Eggsy rolls his eyes, privately reassured that his feelings for Harry have remained a secret. There's no way Merlin would ever encourage a relationship between a green Knight and Arthur, even if he were pulling strings around HQ for some reason.
When he's not ruminating on suspicious coincidences though, he's worrying about Tilde. The past few times they've spoken she's sounded stressed but refused to tell him why. He's taken to haunting the Intel department and poring over Swedish newspapers trying to figure out what could be bothering her. He hasn't gotten very far, and he's definitely pissed off the Head of Intel (Nimue is terrifying, he has learned) but beyond significant improvement in his Swedish he's had no luck.
He's at least managed to make Tilde laugh with his poor pronunciation - reading newspapers is all well and good for vocabulary, but apparently he's still mangling his vowels.
He doesn't realize he's been spending quite so much time in Intel until Harry mentions it a few weeks later.
He's so startled he fumbles his teacup and just barely manages to set it down with a clatter that makes him wince. Harry raises an eyebrow at the sound but otherwise doesn't comment, and Eggsy curses in his head.
The old Eggsy would make some bratty quip about how he spends his time isn't any of Harry's business. Agent Galahad knows better, but is also realizing for the first time that what he's doing could theoretically be construed as using Kingsman resources for personal reasons, nevermind that Tilde is an international head of state. He searches desperately for an answer that might be acceptable, and finding none figures he can maybe spin the truth in his favor.
"I'm concerned about Princess Tilde," he says. Harry's too good a spy to betray his surprise in obvious ways, but Eggy's been studying him attentively for weeks now and he can tell he's taken aback.
"And what has led you to that concern?" he asks. "Is there something we should be aware of? Do you think she might have knowledge about Valentine's contingencies?"
Oh, fuck. It occurs to Eggsy for the first time that he has no idea how Merlin justified his glasses turning off in the aftermath of Valentine's death in any of the official reports. At the time he'd been too busy falling apart in Tilde's arms to be anything but grateful, and then he'd been too busy on missions to wonder. Now he realizes there's no way Merlin didn't write up a full mission report, and the likelihood of him excluding that particular tidbit is low. He decides to play it as safe as he can.
"No, I trust that she's communicated everything she could about Valentine's plans and operations. My concern is for her safety. The past few times we've spoken she's seemed stressed, and she's avoided leaving the country for several months now where she used to travel frequently."
Unfortunately, his version of "safe" seems to have had the opposite effect - Harry looks somehow even more surprised, not less.
"I wasn't aware you and Her Highness were in communication," he says stiffly.
Shite. Is this some kind of protocol breach? Is he going to have to stop talking with Tilde?
"Yes, we became acquainted when I let her out of her cell in Valentine's bunker, and we kept in touch," Eggsy says slowly, hoping that's vague enough that it won't cause problems. A flash of emotion crosses Harry's face, gone between one blink and the next.
"Ah, I see," he says.
"It's not a problem is it? Merlin knows that we met and spent some time together, I assume he knows we're in contact. If I was mistaken, if it's a problem - "
"No!” Harry says, uncharacteristically sharp. “No, it's alright. As long as we can avoid any potential...conflicts of interest, your…personal relationships should be beyond our purview."
Eggsy sighs, relieved, and slumps back in his chair for a moment before catching himself. Harry's watching him with an inscrutable look.
"Forgive me, Eggsy, but I'm afraid I have to cut our time short today," he says. Eggsy startles, but stands and re-buttons his jacket.
"Of course, Harry - I'll see you next week, yes?"
"Yes, of course. I'll see you next week, Eggsy."
Eggsy beats a hasty retreat, only allowing himself to relax when he's safely hidden in the little alcove on the third floor that he'd discovered is a camera blindspot.
What the bleeding hell was that ?