Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Viktor, for all his contempt of Kingsman’s aristocratic roots, respects the agency itself. It’s difficult not to when he’s grown familiar with the quiet that followed a mission, the peace that only comes when war is prevented before it ever makes the papers.

There is a grim sort of freedom in knowing that his bullet was the one that stopped someone else's. That somewhere, a child—just as young as he once was—gets to sleep through the night without hearing glass shatter or men scream. That they get to be happy in ways he never was. And while he wouldn’t say that he was sentimental in any way, it was satisfying to have his work, his life, matter even if the world never realized it. Recognition was never the point regardless. It’s enough to know that someone’s freedom, someone’s quiet summer day, came at the cost of his name never appearing in the headlines.

He was lucky—if one believed such a thing—that the late Galahad had seen an Oxford student on scholarship, a wiry young man with a limp rather than a family or title to lean on, and somehow saw something worth salvaging. It was even luckier, although it was more than just luck in this case, that he had passed the trials to be knighted as Lancelot. For a young man like Viktor, it meant, means everything to know that his life would be in service to something larger than himself, his purpose lives in silence, and that his death—whenever it comes—will be in service to the world. Ideally, it would come sixty years from now, long past the age most agents retire.

Although, if he's honest, that may have been best—death that is.

???, 20XX

Static gargles through the line of his glasses, swallowed up by a hiss that crackles and bites at his temples, sharp enough to feel like fangs.

The mission should have been simple. An informant handoff under the protection of the night where he could be in and out, no witnesses, no casualties. Instead, the sky fractures open. The first explosion turns the cobbled alleyways into a maze of rubble and smoke. Stone cracks and centuries-old walls crumble like sand. Viktor ducks on instinct—tactical cane clattering to the ground, abandoned, pistol drawn—pivoting hard through the chaos, careful not to back himself into a corner where his limp would betray him.

“Lancelot. Do not engage—trap—” The signal cuts to dead air. Before he even breathes, a second blast thunders through the street; its shockwave lifts him clean off the ground and slams him backwards, spine-first into solid stone. A raw, strangled sound claws out of his throat, unable to sustain itself, every volume of air throttled from his body before he can even think to scream. For the moments that follow, he doesn't even register the pain. Only the white-hot, electric heat tearing through muscle and sinew, burrowing deep into the hollow between his vertebrae like a blade wedged into bone.

His vision curls at the edges, burning and blistering like a photograph to a flame. There’s another one of his guns—fallen from his belt, no more than a meter away—he tries to crawl toward it, muscles jerking, twitching, but his useless limbs fail to obey, helplessly collapsing to the ground.

Fuck. Yes, it is an inappropriate and unprofessional word for a gentleman, but it’s the only thing fierce enough to hold the terror clawing at him, to anchor him for the half-second before the world begins to fold into the promise of unconsciousness.

A ringing clogs his ears—high, thin, a tinny thing that pings against the walls of his skull like a prayer said too late—only shattered by the stead sound of footsteps that slices through the noise. Every step pounds against the flesh of his brain, a new spike of agony.

The world spins wildly, a dreidel tilting on its axis, but through the blur, Viktor sees them: a pair of black Oxfords, polished to a mirror shine, untouched by dirt or even a single scuff. But no brogueing.

A voice cuts through the haze, amused, but the actual chords of their throat is lost to him, emerging distant and distorted to his pounding head, like it’s being fed through a broken speaker directly to the circuitry of head: “Pity that we had to meet this way, Lancelot.”

Somewhere high above, the bells of a ruined church tower clang a final, broken note into the burning night as Viktor’s cheek thuds to the ground with pure, hardened finality.

And then, like everything eventually does, the world slips into nothing.

UKHQ, 20XX

Golden eyes open slowly and the world shudders back into shape, peeling back pale, noise-dampened layers to reveal a ceiling too white to be kind. It’s not sterile exactly—this wasn’t a public hospital, and Kingsman never did anything as banal as fluorescent lighting and ruin the air with an antiseptic sting—but the colour is still clinical. Clean in a way that makes it feel like he’s mourning for himself.

His body is even slower to follow: one arm heavier than the other, legs weighted as if he’s been buried six feet under and was only halfway dug out again. Everything feels horribly disorienting, too groggy, too blurry, like a nightmare where the air thickens until it chokes you, and while his head throbs in retaliation to the movement, he manages to sit upright, leaning against the too-soft pillows supporting his neck and… his back.

Oh.

It’s then that he feels it. Something foreign caged around his spine, hidden under the brutish white hospital gown draped across his shoulders. Metal. A brace, hugging his spine in cruel mimicry of bone and sinew.

Suddenly, his mouth is dry. Although, it had already been dry, parched from however long he’s been out, but now it feels as if sand is funnelling through his lips, every grain scraping against his throat. It doesn’t take one of Kingsman’s elite medical professionals for him to tell him what he already knows.

At the foot of his bed, a crutch waits, gleaming black, the grip inlaid with brass. Likely sized perfectly for him. A parting gift from whoever decided to curse him with… his fingers reach backwards behind the  pale fabric of the gown, and touches the metal firmly laden to his back. The pads of his fingers trace how it sinks and dips and follows his movements exactly, then the divot inside a circle between the gap of his vertebrae. Screws. They’ve replaced him with screws.

Stomach plummeting, Viktor’s grip finds the blankets over his legs, twisting the fabric until it slips from the tight fitting of the comforter. Some part of him—the bitter, splintering part that can’t steady the tremble of his hands—doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. And so, in the cruel quiet, with the heartbeat monitor shrieking each second louder than the last, with the tangle of IV lines like chains around his arms, he does both. Strained and breathless chuckles with no humour in them at all break from him, his chest wrought tight as tears spill over his cheeks. Years of service, only to be rebuilt in screws and steel, degrading him to more metal than man.

Even without a mirror, he knows what he must look like: the fine lines around his mouth drawn deeper now, the dullness in his skin from too many months still and sedated, and his own once golden eyes a hollow bronze looking like a man halfway back from the grave.

Whether he likes it or not, time has passed. Too much time, yet not enough. If there were mercy in the world, decades would have passed, and he would have died in his sleep. The wet heat of his tears cools on his cheeks, leaving nothing but the merciless beep, beep, beep of his heart, ticking louder and faster with every breath. Eventually, somehow, someway, the sorrows ebbs. Disappointment cuts through him and the exterior of Lancelot returns, or, well…

Viktor glances down at his pallid hands, curling nails into his palm and pressing into skin that refuses even to blush pink under the pressure.

Whoever he is now.

Arthur—Mel Medarda, his most dear companion—comes to answer that question. She arrives without ceremony, the door to his medical suite hissing open and shutting quietly behind her; never one for dramatics, despite her title.

A pressed charcoal suit follows the curve of her spine and shoulders, tailored to fit in all the right places. A silver tie wraps around her collar, matching the pocket square tucked neatly at her breast. The heels are new—a shining pair of black stiletto heels, a change to the traditional Oxford footwear—but the expression is not. Brow furrowed, her lips stained in deep rouge are set into a hard line. The celadon of her eyes hold no glimmer tonight, or whatever time it is anymore.

“You’re awake,” she says softly, but not without gravity. Like the world's balance has shifted in his absence, and she hasn't yet decided if it's for better or worse.

Viktor stares as she makes her way to the foot of the bed, settling on the edge of the mattress. “Apparently.”

“Do you know where you are?” How redundant of a question, but standard protocol. Viktor recognizes the rhythm of the recovery manual when he hears it.

Still, he does not answer. The location is irrelevant. He knows these halls, knows the floor plan. Kingsman’s medical wing hasn’t changed once ever since he was twenty-three and bleeding out on the tile after his first solo mission.

Mel presses on however, running through the paces. “Do you know who I am?”

Viktor lifts a brow and Mel levels him with an equal stare; she never did appreciate sarcasm, but it’s the only tool left when everything else has been confiscated. Clenching his hand into a fist and unfurling it slowly, just to confirm he still can, he eventually replies: “Yes.”

“What do you recall last?”

The memory of it evades him, rotten, and sour, like a worm coiled inside the apple that he had just bitten. “I…” A frown settles on his face. So much of him is strongly structured and firmly intact. He’s confident as to who he is, what his age is, why he lives and breathes today, but for some reason this last puzzle piece to his mind refuses to fit—the why, the how, the moment it all fell apart. “I don’t recall.”

“That’s alright.” There’s a line in the manual about not forcing recall and while Viktor can't remember the wording, but he recognizes the practice. Mel merely nods, once. Efficient. There are no “welcome backs.” No “we missed you.” Just a manila folder placed neatly onto his lap, labelled with the signature classified stamp in red across the cover.

Flipping it open with one hand, he’s presented with a dossier. A photo of man stares up at him: sun-kissed skin, broad shoulders, too-white teeth with a fiddly gap in between the front incisors, and cutting, bright amber eyes that could belong on the runways.

Lancelot—Jayce Talis

Nationality: United States of America.

Age: 32.

Former engineer.

Evaluated highly on initiative, tech interfacing, and unarmed combat.

Candidate supporter: Arthur—Mel Medarda.

Behavioural notes: emotional, idealistic, volatile.

Viktor’s nose crinkles at the sight of it; the whole thing is so offensive, he doesn’t even know where to start. The fact that this new Lancelot wasn’t even a graduate from Oxford or Cambridge or even St. Andrews would would be easy to nitpick, but an American?

“Viktor,” Mel’s voice cuts through before he can speak, a soft and quiet tone, “you’ve been asleep for thirteen months.” There’s a hesitation in her voice she rarely allows, and she releases a sigh, permitting this one moment of weakness to escape her. “We didn’t know if you’d wake,” she continues. “And when we found you…” Her words come slow, careful, knowing that too much would have him scampering like a cat; she has known him for nearly a decade after all. “With your injuries, it was determined that you would never be able to return to the field. Kingsman couldn’t afford to leave Lancelot empty.”

Turning the file closed, he pinches the bridge of his nose in an effort to placate the shame that stirred just behind his eyes. He hopes that she mistakes it for anger; he hopes he can convince himself, too. “… So you gave away my name.” Viktor manages to not choke up around it.

“He earned it.”

It stings more than he lets show. Of course the man earned it. No one gets to be a Kingsman for free. They were privileged men who rose from old money and stood as the perfect sons and daughters of their high standing families. Viktor had been the outlier—born in Czechia, no family name to trade on, only his hunger and a scholarship to Oxford to wedge himself into a world that had never wanted him. But at least, he thinks bitterly, he had graduated from Oxford. Had earned his place by the same rules they played by.

This Jayce Talis didn’t even have those bare minimum qualities. “And the best candidate was a brash, reckless American?” It’s a poor jab, petty too, he knows guiltily that it’s unbecoming of someone like him, but he deserves a little cruelty right now.

“Columbian immigrant actually, dual citizenship with the US. And yes, it’s unorthodox,” At least she acknowledges it, placing a hand to Viktor’s knee, the bad one no doubt raw without his brace supporting it for months.

Pain flashes up his leg in an instant, a wince harsh between his teeth and Mel immediately recoils her hand, smoothing the gold clip in her hair instead.

“But he’s brilliant,” she adds. “Passed selection faster than anyone since you.”

A scoff nearly scrapes out through his throat, but he holds it back—that would be unbecoming even if it would feel justified. “A low bar, then.” That still scrapes harshly though as he turns his head away from her gaze; a reminder that some wounds were still bleeding. “… I suppose this is where you send me off. Swear me into secrecy and return me to civilian life.” This was always bound to happen one day when his body, his leg specifically, got the best of him. Still, he had hoped that it wouldn’t be so soon and not so crippling either. Maybe his degree could finally find some use; engineers in the United Kingdom were always needed even if he simmers this fact with disappointment.

“Not quite.” None of their former agents ever returned back to the field. Most were decommissioned entirely—as in, death. But some did manage to retire to the rolling hills of Scotland, or wherever those fields are. “We were considering to offer Merlin’s post,” she explains with a flick of her fingers. “For when—if—you woke. You have the right to refuse.”

Something inside him clenches its jaws tight around his heart. Bitterness tangled up in a knot too dense to separate. A convoluted conundrum as Viktor stares at the crutch leaning at the foot of his bed. “If you’re asking whether I still believe in the mission… I do.”

“Good,” Mel says, possibly relieved as a rare smile meets her lips. “We've been without a proper Quartermaster for months. And the former Merlin always did have a soft spot for you.”

He doesn’t bother asking what happened to him—he was a wiry old man in his late 70s with a completely sane mind, but a body that was deteriorating faster than his senses. It didn’t require a degree from Oxford to guess that something had cost the man his life during the most recent recruitment.

“I’ll leave you to the doctors for your recovery. I look forward to seeing your return, Merlin.” Rising from the mattress, Mel makes her way across the room, heels clicking against the tile, but just before she disappears through metal door, Viktor catches her with an itching question.

“Does he know?”

“That you were Lancelot?” Her heels halt and without looking over her shoulder, she replies, “No.”

“Then let’s keep it that way.” Best to not have his own feelings complicate the missions.

Mel inclines her head once—a small, silent promise—and then she is gone. The door clicks shut behind her. Viktor doesn’t move. Just lets the silence wrap around him like a well-cut suit. Cool. Functional. Custom-fitted to a man who’s not quite whole anymore.

He glances again at closed file. Jayce. Lancelot. His title. His name. His legacy—polished and reassigned.

The bed creaks when he leans forward, pulling the cane onto his bed. It feels too familiar. Like it’s always been there and while he had always used a cane, the last few years it had gadgets and a gun for the field. Now, it’s just a stick, a new one too, extended up so it fits under the pit of his arm, for him to rely on it too heavily. 

Outside, somewhere outside his room and in the hall, a voice echoes—loud, American, laughing too freely. He doesn’t need to see to know it belongs to the man wearing his codename.

Quartermaster’s Laboratory, Three Months Later

The first time Viktor sees him, Jayce doesn’t knock. The lab door hisses open with too much force like it’s reacting to a presence that refuses to be ever be subtle. Jayce steps inside already mid-sentence, either not realizing, or not caring, that Viktor has his back to him. “—I know I wasn’t authorized to take the the prototype taser cufflinks into the field, but in my defence, I didn't know that they weren't for public use yet.”

Ignoring the subtle pang at the forefront of his brain, gnawing at his annoyance, Viktor does not turn around. Instead, he keeps his hands attached to his keyboard, inputting range calibration data with one hand while adjusting the simulation parameters on his display with the other. While his crutch leans against the worktable, his patience leans on nothing. “Ah, so is that why they were thrown at your target like a cricket ball?”

Jayce halts in his step behind him. “… Okay, so I see you already read the report.”

What a harebrained comment. This is what they replaced him with?

Finally deigning to look up, Viktor turns—his eyes are shadowed from fatigue and the low light, chestnut hair tucked behind one ear in a way that seems unintentional but isn’t—and meets Jayce’s gaze for the first time.

And the man is infuriatingly good-looking.

His photographs while attractive portraits pale in comparison to the man in person. Lancelot is too golden. Too symmetrical. Tan in a way that could only be bronzed by the sun, every inch of his face chiselled by god’s hands. Eyes bright and sharp—intelligent, no doubt now that Viktor’s finally looking at them, despite the lack of an Oxbridge degree—but with the impulsive shine of a man who acts before he thinks. A bespoke navy pinstripe suit fits perfectly around Jayce’s shoulders and a pair of dark framed glasses sit perfectly against his nose-bridge. Dark hair gelled back, strands of it fall forwards, unable to be fully tamed.

Everything Viktor is not. Everything Lancelot should never be.

It’s for that reason of Jayce being too perfect, too ridiculously attractive, that Viktor, as unseemly as it may be, rolls his eyes. “Of course, I read it, Lancelot. I need to be familiar for all the misconduct you put my devices through.”

“Well if it helps your data collection, it definitely sparked a little. The guy went down, so... mostly a win.”

“Yes, let’s lower our standards to mostly. That’s exactly what Kingsman has been missing. I’ve tirelessly worked day and night for the organization so we may produce half-hearted results by agents who can’t respect my time.” It’s not meant to come out sounding so bitter, so angry, but for once in his life, considering that so much of it has gone rotten as of late, he deserves to be annoyed and that annoyance is so easy to direct it to Lancelot of all people.

“Wait. Are you Viktor?” Lancelot drops like it’s something surprising to behold, like the attitude is the thing that tips him off as he drops a small metal casing on the table between them. It clinks and rolls, stopping just short of Viktor’s hand draped in an interlock atop the wood.

“Merlin,” Viktor corrects, picking through the remains of the cufflink. “You can set the codenames down when you’re dying. In which case, don’t waste your breath.”

“Can’t blame me for asking, nobody’s seen you for months. Or, I haven’t at least. The other agents have been telling me I had to meet you, but somehow, I’m the only guy who hasn’t spoken to you.” Jayce leans forwards, his abdomen pressing into the edge of table as he offers out a hand. “Jayce Talis. Er—Lancelot. The new Lancelot.”

“Indeed.” Without looking up, Viktor clips Jayce’s hand between two pinched fingers and pushes it aside.

Awkwardly, Jayce chuckles, one hand reaching behind his neck, like one does in movies, because of course, they are products of some fiction show. “Are you always this charming in the mornings?”

“No.” The response is immediate as Viktor pries open the internals of the cufflink with the flat edge of a pair of tweezers. “You’re getting the polite version.”

“Remind me not to push my luck, then.” Humour. How… suitably charming.

Eyes on the cufflink, Viktor tries to pull out the small coil of wires, but with no luck. The links are unsalvageable; the circuitry is so melted that it would take more time to repair it than to build a new prototype and there were other higher priorities that Arthur was breathing down his neck for, or as much as she can, considering their friendship together. Dropping it in a bin marked User Error, Viktor laments over the loss of it only briefly. Realistically, it wouldn’t take too long to build a new pair. With it gone, Jayce should be leaving, but for some audacious reason, he lingers—bold, curious, and somehow not annoying enough for Viktor to order him out.

“Did you really built all of this, by the way?” Jayce asks, scanning the laboratory in long, sweeping motions catching how every wall is filled with covert weapons and devices of all kinds: umbrellas, briefcases, canes, even pairs of shoes and glasses perched nicely on the far table.

“Most prototypes, yes, and I didn’t build it to be misused.”

“Sorry about the links.” Jayce’s tone is gentle, earnest in a way that isn’t performative. And Viktor detests, truly does, that he notices the difference.

He also hates how Jayce makes his way around the table to peer at his display, how Jayce’s hands are good hands—strong, calloused, wide that they could encompass his wrist with just a thumb and pinky. Not the hands of a man who’s just playing dress-up with weapons. There's something behind the way he fiddles with the thumbs, running over the head of his nail and to a free hangnail. Like he’s itching to understand how everything in Viktor’s lab ticks.

“You know,” Jayce says after a moment, quieter now, “they said you were good with tech, even better than the last Merlin. They didn’t say you were…” He gestures vaguely at the space around them, reaching a little too close to the wall where a row of golden lighters were leaning. “This.”

It tightens something in his chest that Viktor doesn’t want to think about right now. The heart is an organ that has no use to him anymore; a Merlin even more than any other agents should not be getting attached to anything, especially their past. “You should go.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I don’t need your statements, Lancelot. I need you not to get yourself killed using tech you barely understand. Worry about understanding the shoes you’re wearing first.”

Jayce’s smile fades, just a fraction. “I’m trying to understand. That’s why I came down here.”

Something in Viktor goes very, very still. The lab hums softly around them. Lights flicker across glass and steel. Somewhere in the ceiling, coolant flows through the pipes with the quiet regularity of breath. And Viktor, because he’s a glutton for punishment, has to remind himself that it wasn’t that long ago when he was the one trying to understand what it meant to carry such a title like Lancelot, how he learned by bleeding, and feeling how heavy it was in his hands. Now Viktor’s left to play Merlin, explaining weaponry to a man who doesn’t know what it means to hold legacy in your palm.

But none of that is Jayce’s fault. That makes it worse.

Without a word, Viktor opens a drawer and pulls out a replacement—an older prototype, but at least not a faulty one, silver lions engraved on either side. They weren’t even cleared for use in the field by Arthur, but he drops the case into Jayce’s hands regardless. “Next time don’t touch anything unless you’re prepared to rebuild it from scratch.”

Instantly, Jayce straightens and his bottom lip catches between his teeth—an almost-smile as their eyes meet. It’s not a spark. Sparks are for children. This is a pulse. A shift. Gravity altering around a point of interest.

A proper grin blooming crookedly across his face, revealing the small toothy gap smile of his and Jayce doesn’t break eye contact. Doesn’t apologize for looking. It’s not disrespect. It’s like he’s peering straight through his soul and grabbing at it, only for it to pass through his fingers, because of course it does; Viktor’s soul was never quite whole anyway.

“You know,” Jayce says, leaning in a little too close for comfort, voice almost too soft for the room, “you’re not nearly as cold as you pretend to be.”

The lab door hisses open again. A junior tech steps in with a clipboard and a clearance badge that shines too brightly under the lights. Before they both know it, the spell breaks and Viktor clears his throat, turning back to typing notes on the screen in front of him like the last sixty seconds never happened.

“I’ll…” Running his fingers through his hair, Jayce’s grin slips into something sheepish and lopsided, far too honest for a good man of the state, “See you later?”

Viktor doesn’t move, brow furrowed as he clicks the keyboard, running across the surface dirtied by his prints. Only when Jayce is out of his periphery and the door shuts does he allow himself the smallest exhale, slow and quiet.

Tactical Surveillance, A Month and Two Weeks After 

Two rows of monitors sit before him, eight in total; four display live feeds from agents in the field: rooftops, alleyways, the opulent blur of ballroom interiors. Civility, or at least what it seems to be. Viktor’s finger’s drum against the console as he watches one of them: Caitlyn Kiramman, codename Galahad, drop a man with a single bullet between the eyes. Clean, efficient, he always liked that about her.

With a ping to the system, the top left monitor populates as Jayce’s glasses come online, tethered to the field relay. Identifier: LANCELOT, glowing a soft green in the corner of the screen.

His glasses must be angled down—the image shows only a slice of motion: the hem of a robe fluttering past, sunlight fractured across uneven cobblestone, flashes of bright fabric strung up along a marketplace. Somewhere in Marrakesh according to the UI. Street noise fuzzes the audio: the low drone of commerce, an old man’s laughter, a sharp-edged dialect Viktor remembers enough of to follow in snatches—Arabic.

“Target moving southwest,” Jayce says through comms, the breath between his words suggests that he’s winded from the chase. “Blue jacket, no tie, carrying the briefcase. Should be able to intercept at the next junction.”

“Copy,” comes the field handler’s reply. There were always operatives Viktor and the former Merlin had vetted themselves—men trained to relay information and assist the agents when Viktor was otherwise occupied, which he often was. And yet, lately, he finds himself here more often than not: staring at the monitors in the tactical surveillance suite adjacent to the lab, eyes glued to field feeds like they’ll offer him something with a silver spoon.

He tells himself it’s habit from when he was an agent, assisting the late Merlin with operations whenever he was at base. But it’s not. He knows what it is. As humiliating as it is indulgent, Viktor knows that he misses the field. Craves it in a way where a man with a crutch under his arm and metal links in his vertebrae should not. Wretched thing it is to want, and he leans further into his crutch, embraces the frustrated groan against his spine, because he enjoys being sharply reminded of what he cannot have.

Keeping his eyes on the feed, Viktor notes how Jayce moves like a bull atop eggshells, always keeping his weight too forwards. Even when he’s only off by a centimetre, the imbalance is obvious: the lean of his frame, the way the glasses angle too far down—something that’s definitely not due to slippage of the nose pads because Cutler and Gross would never have poor quality—showing too much ground and not nearly enough horizon. The slight difference alone leaves the man far too exposed to be comfortable for anyone watching.

“Cover your left,” Viktor mutters to the empty room, his hands far from the live microphone. “You’re going to swing wide and leave your side open.”

Jayce, predictably, does exactly that. The feed jostles violently—a flash of brick and cloth blur as Jayce lunges into cover with a grunt, his body meeting the ground. Scrambling for his gun, a clean bullet lodges right into the target’s spine and the briefcase skids across stone.

“Shit.” Jayce groans, clutching his arm. He rolls onto one hip and shifts the glasses just enough to show his hand streaked with red. “Bastard nicked me.”

It’s only then that Viktor actually activates his end of the microphone, although even he’s not completely sure of what spurs him to do so. “Language.”

A laugh rumbles through the communicator and it comes to Viktor then that Jayce has a rather good one. An earthy chuckle that captures the embodiment of the sun, the air, the dirt, the universe in its chords. Viktor hates it immediately.

“You watching me, V?”

The nickname lands casually, like they know each other better than they do. And maybe Jayce believes they do, or doesn’t care if they don’t. Either way, Viktor’s certain he knows far more about Jayce than the reverse: everything from his primary school transcripts to his grandmother’s maiden name.

“Unfortunately.” Biting his bottom lip, Viktor restrains the urge to sigh. Sighing is for disappointed professors who must once again stress the importance of the syllabus, and for college students who open up the fridge to find that their milk has gone sour. Not for quartermasters. Not for him. “And codenames on the line, only please.”

“Alright Merl,” Jayce says easily because apparently their newest Lancelot refuses to be serious.

“Merlin,” Viktor reiterates, curt.

Somehow he can physically feel the man grinning like a fool through the microphone, his smile too toothy, too perfect. On screen, Jayce wraps his bloodied hand with a handkerchief, careless with the knot, then lifts the briefcase in one hand. “Mission complete. Heading for drop-off. So Merlin…” Jayce starts, his tone slipping into that drawl men use when they’re about to say something ridiculous—the kind of voice that might just as easily attach darling to the end of a sentence. “I’ve got a reservation for the Ritz tonight and thought maybe we could—”

Without warning, the feed cuts to black.

Viktor blinks and waits for a second. Two, even. Nothing. Pulse ticking, he hears how his own voice rises at least five decibels, urgency leaking under his tongue like blood from a scab. “Lancelot?” God, for a moment, without rationality, he wishes he was a religious man so that there was a higher power he could plead to, but that’s—that’s idiotic.“Lancelot, do you read me? Confirm position.”

Silence.

Jayce is fine, he has to be. Fingers racing over the console, Viktor brings up diagnostics. Vitals: Normal.  Transmission status: Standby. Which means: “He folded the damn glasses.” His tone is even—perfectly modulated despite being forced through gritted teeth—but his heart isn’t.

He knows the specs: collapsible comm-glasses, frame-hinged with a sleep mode. Folded, they enter low-power mode—cut video, cut mic. Useful in enemy territory to avoid trace signals or unexpected pingbacks. Suicidal, in this context. Jayce has just killed contact, alone on an unsecured street, carrying a briefcase full of encrypted intelligence, and with a visible wound to his dominant arm.

Six minutes. That’s all would take for a body to disappear. For a Kingsman to be sliced in half, their body dragged away and never seen again.  For a briefcase of state secrets to go from asset to national crisis. While he has faith in the Kingsmen, the fourteenth Lancelot—the one that Viktor had notably replaced just about ten years ago years ago—had faith as well. His name and loss were written out as a reminder of how even the best can fail should their hubris get the best of them; his corpse paraded by their enemies before the rest of the Kingsmen had wiped the organization who committed such an atrocity out. 

Breath shallower than he’d like to admit, Viktor stares at the blank screen, jaw tight. Across the other feeds, agents continue moving in choreographed precision. Mission logs update in real time; Galahad radios in that she’ll be coming home to HQ in an hour, perfectly professional and while Viktor in any other situation would laugh at her comment of her still not beating Merlin’s old recon record, he can’t manage the effort to even smile at it. Because if he’s perfectly honest, he’s not quite sure if he hears it, if he’s even in the right mind.

Uselessly, like a dish rag after service, Viktor just sits there, facing the void where Jayce Talis should be, and doesn’t feel anything at all. Only the ache in his chest. Sharp. But unfamiliar. He’s suffered wounds before, but this sinking feeling is like old scar tissue pulling against something new.

“Unbelievable,” Viktor scoffs, pushing two fingers to his temple. “Absolute idiot.” He toggles the line. “Operative, standby. This is Merlin taking over.” Despite the stiffness of his words, the strain of his voice fraying begins to take shape. Viktor tries not to imagine the worst-case scenario—that’s poor use of a agency time and emotional indulgence, but they come through his mind anyway. Ambush, misfire, misstep. Dead signal. Dead agent. Dead weight in his sternum that refuses to cease.

Nausea pulls at his stomach more than once, but by some miracle, no, not a miracle, by discipline, Viktor remains in his seat. He does not pace. He does not fidget. He stays patient and waits for confirmation of anything.

For a full thirty-two minutes, Jayce’s feed remains dark. No visuals, no environmental scan. Just a name card hovering uselessly in the corner of Viktor’s monitor, like a gravestone waiting to be engraved. The vitals still read normal, but they would so long as someone with a steady pulse was holding the glasses. If they entered the wrong hands, no one would know the difference. He’ll have to look into biometric gating for sleep mode. If agents were going to insist on being walking hazards, the least they can do is be harder to impersonate.

He doesn’t even realize he’s dug his nails into his palm until the screen flashes: RECONNECTED. The breath he’s been holding escapes—jagged and loud through his teeth.

He wants to scream. He wants to stand, pace, throw something heavy. He wants to rip those damn glasses off Jayce Talis’s face, crush them under his heel, and strongly recommend Jayce Talis pursue a a less hazardous profession, like gardening, or librarianship, somewhere with a locked room. But before he can say anything, the voice crackles through the channel, smug with momentum:

“Did you catch that, Merlin?” The camera pans to two men sprawled across the stone, one with a bullet wound blooming bright at the neck. “Shot him right in the jugular. Pretty sure I finally outscored sharpshooter Galahad.”

Not even an ounce of awareness. Of course Jayce didn’t even realize his glasses had been off. Of course he didn’t know that Viktor spent thirty-two minutes staring at a black screen, spiralling through every possible outcome. It gnaws at something Viktor keeps buried, something brittle and not built to bend.

“You’ve been offline for the past half hour, Lancelot. Do you think this is a bloody game?” Viktor snaps before he can stop himself and the silence on the line goes taut. “You think this is a holiday in bulletproof tailoring? You do not take the glasses off. Ever. Your surveillance team needs eyes on you at all times.”

“V—”

“Merlin.”

That shuts him up for a moment and Jayce quibbles around the topic with his silence, before admitting: “I’m sorry.” It’s too little, but Viktor doesn’t know what would be enough. Doesn’t know why that apology lands like it misses the point entirely. “I forgot the hinge puts the glasses to sleep when they fold. Rookie mistake. I swear I won’t do it again. Wasn’t thinking.”

No, Viktor thinks. You weren’t. And that’s the problem. Gold eyes stares at the feed showing how Lancelot navigates the barren routes of Marrakesh like nothing’s wrong. It’s maddening. Both of them keep silent, cautious in breaking the peace.

Then, softer than either of them deserve, Jayce mumbles into the microphone as he slips through a crowd. “You could’ve just told me you were worried.”

Viktor grits his teeth until his molars throb. “I wasn’t,” the reply clips itself with a pair of scissors, snipping the concept of caring for his replacement in half. “It’s not my job to worry. It’s my job to keep you alive. Preferably by stopping you from treating cutting-edge surveillance tech like a pair of sunglasses from the airport gift shop.”

Jayce is quiet for a second, then sheepish, like a man of his stature and confidence could ever be that: “Is… the Ritz still out of the picture? I just thought you might like to go and we could, I don’t know, get to know each other a bit?”

The question is so audacious, Viktor wants to storm out of the room, perhaps even give the man the harshest scolding of his life, but the time for that has passed and the anger in him fizzled out the moment he heard Jayce expose his heart on his sleeve for any sniper to aim at. “… Get back to HQ, Lancelot,” Without another word, he mutes his mic and fixes the golden bridge of his glasses.

His attention is already sliding over to Agents Percival’s feed when Jayce’s voice comes through the speaker, hesitant, a fraction of its bright and full tone it once was. “… Copy that.”

Arthur breaks into the other line, a voice for his ears only of course. It’s soft, gentle, and he knows that she’s halfway across the country on the second floor of the Kingsman Tailors, but it’s as though she’s peering straight through his sternum, her hands trying to feel out exactly where his heart is. Because of course, she sees everything: the feed, his feelings. “Merlin. You do know that you are allowed to care somewhat, correct?”

Viktor clicks the microphone as he swaps to line four. “Yes, Arthur. I know.”

The fact of the matter is that Viktor does care. He cares about his teammates, the Kingsmen, his technicians and operators that helped manage the system. He cares especially—much more than he should—about his closest companions in the agency: Arthur and Galahad. And as ridiculous as it may sound, he cares a fair amount for his replacement, Jayce Talis, as well. But caring is obvious; it wouldn’t take a philosopher to determine that Viktor does in fact, very much care. But he shouldn’t. Not because he’s not human; he’s very much human, painfully so, made of flesh and bones and sinew just like any other. But because their line of work asks them to put their feelings away, lock them inside a nice box, and try, very, very hard, to forget where they hid the key.

Grief, when it comes, is expected to last only as long as it takes to swallow a mouthful of 1815 Napoleonic brandy at a once-in-a-lifetime toast.

There are some things that a Kingsman is never meant to want. Grieving longer than it takes to have the alcohol go down is one. Returning to active service after the body gives out is another. The third, really the most foolish of all, is wanting someone. Most agents never sought one out; mainly because a relationship built on lies isn’t a very good one in the first place. And Viktor knows better than to want what was never meant for him.

Except, Jayce—Lancelot, pardon, the lines are a difficult thing to distinguish sometimes—seems to insist that wanting is a very good thing. No more than four hours later, when the clock pushes past eleven and Viktor really should be going home, the door to his lab slides open. In comes Jayce, takeaway bag in hand, the faintest smear of blood still clinging to the corner of his suit cuff. “You’re working late.”

Viktor keeps his head down, trying to solder on this thin microchip—a bit too large for the glasses he wants to implement it for, but it’s what he has as a test subject for the time being. “I usually do.”

A brown paper bag props itself on his table, the scent of something savoury and bordering on spicy, filling the air. Thai, if Viktor had to guess. “Figured you hadn’t eaten, so I brought food.

Hissing as the soldering iron nearly slips, Viktor drops the damn chip and waves the hand to spare his fingers from the heat. “The Ritz wasn’t up to your liking?”

“Mm,” Jayce, like he deserves it, drags up a stool and sits on the other end of the work table. “I mostly just wanted to go with you. Thought it might be more your style, considering, you know... the posh accent and all.”

For some reason, Viktor doesn’t dismiss him. Just like before, he lets Jayce linger, lets him occupy this space of his as though he was always a part of it and Viktor, for an even more inexplicable reason, actually chuckles, softly, barely, but there nonetheless. Perhaps it’s because Jayce is so honest, so warm, that it’s hard to be upset at him for too long or perhaps it’s because Viktor feels the slightest pinch of guilt for how he lashed out. Maybe both. “You do realize I’m from Czechia, correct?”

Jayce nods, a lie so transparent that it’s almost endearing; in truth, they both know that Jayce, in fact, did not know this. Still, the man finds it in himself to smile, close-lipped and toothless this time, a pleasant one that crinkles the corner of his eyes. “Thought you didn’t sound properly British.”

“Quite.” Viktor pulls the magnifying lens forward, arcing its arm over the workspace. “I moved here for university. Attended Oxford and found my way to Kingsman shortly after.” He's not sure why he's giving his very brief life story away, but it comes out anyway. It's not as though he ever tried to hide it from the other agents, and Jayce wasn't an exception to this either. 

Jayce leans forward, propping an elbow on the table. “So you’ve been around for a while, huh? What were you doing before you took up the mantle as Merlin?”

Your job, actually. It’s what Viktor wants to say, to be bitter just a little bit, but he bites his tongue, fiddling with the microchip once again, looking at it under the glass. “Minor work, really. Nothing you should concern yourself with.”

It takes a few seconds for Jayce to think of a proper response and the empty space is just long enough that it almost feels uncomfortable, but the man eventually breathes out what he’s obviously been wanting to say, “I’m sorry about earlier today. I really am. I know you don’t really like me, but—”

Is that what he thinks? That Viktor dislikes him? Viktor only comes to realize how he must’ve sounded for the past few months then and his fingers stiffen in place. How much he’s told himself that he hates so many bits and pieces of Jayce Talis, but none of them were really anything he could validly hate—no, not even the fact that he didn’t graduate from Oxford, Cambridge, or St. Andrews. Or, that he has a ridiculously loud and endearing laugh that draws far too much attention to him than is appropriate. Or, that really, Jayce Talis, is just doing his job. Trying very hard to as well. 

With a sigh, Jayce rakes a hand through his dark locks, destroying the pomade’s structure with ease; although he does look rather nice with his hair being a little disheveled. “I don’t know.” One hand rubs at his face, like he’s trying to scrub the awkwardness off his skin. “I was hoping we could be friends. Mel said you and I... had similar backgrounds. Scrappy underdogs who didn’t come from aristocracy. I just thought, maybe.” A pause sits, uncomfortably so as he hesitates, the way boys do when they’re trying to confess something they don’t have words for.

“Sorry.” Again comes out the apology like it’s the one thing Jayce knows how to say, and maybe it is—maybe handsome men really only know how to sputter apologies because they’re unsure how to face the world otherwise. “I know I’m terrible at this.” Viktor’s not entirely sure if he means having conversations or something else, but Jayce continues to ramble anyway. “I’m not even sure why Arthur endorsed me in the first place. I only came to England for my uncle’s funeral and then, before I knew it, I was being swept up by Kingsman. I just… I just want to help people, y’know? Maybe I could’ve done something else if that was really it, but...” Jayce stares into his hands as if they are his foundation, as if the callouses over his tan skn hold the answers to this conversation, “I know it's stupid to say, but it just feels like this is what I’m supposed to do.”

And perhaps—Viktor realizes with his stomach tightening—he’s been letting his own resentment for himself get the better of him, had let it cloud his vision, had him finding ways to complicate his feelings for Jayce, the world, his purpose, because he couldn’t admit that he didn’t know how to handle losing the field, losing the thrill and the purpose that came with it. That despite what he’s told himself, for all his careful walls and for the sharp reminders of his own aches and pains, trying to cauterize the wanting out of him, he does in fact, want. He still does. He wants the field. Wants to believe that what he does still matters. Wants, more than anything, to believe he can still make the world a better place. To have things that he really shouldn’t have anymore.

Setting the chip down carefully, he puts the work away, just this once, and properly meets Jayce’s eyes. Gold and hazel, or perhaps an amber, something honey-like would be a good description. It’s easy to get lost in it, to find himself swimming, not drowning in the bright flecks of it.

“I think that’s a fine thing to want, Jayce.” Because it’s true and Jayce’s name doesn’t feel so difficult to hold on his tongue. “And you’re not…” What a struggle it is to find the right words, and Viktor feels it roll around across his tongue, but none of them feel quite correct, in the end, he settles with, “a bad person. I don’t dislike you by any means.”

Instantly, Jayce beams, his smile far reaching not just across his face, but in the space itself. It fills every nook and cranny as his head tilts, much like a dog’s would “So—” A rather diabolical way to start, surely he could have played the mastermind villain of the latest Bond film. “You like me.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Okay, but you don’t dislike me.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take it.” Leaning as far back out of his stool, Jayce chuckles, nearly slipping off the damn thing, before catching himself on the edge of the table, only to cover his incident up with another awkward laugh. “Er, Thai?” He offers, obviously hoping that the both of them could forget his little embarrassments as he pulls out three hot plastic to-go containers of food and a carton of rice.

Better than anything he’s done so far, Viktor makes a mock toast just through a nod alone as he pushes the magnifying lens’ arm back, folding it to the wall: to the start of something new. “Very well.”

Thai food, or at least the dishes that Jayce picked up, really isn’t the best to eat straight from plastic containers, but they make do by using the lids as plates even if they’re much too shallow to sustain rice in them without anything spilling out. It’s all so very pedestrian, and something that Viktor hasn’t done for a decade since he was in university, when lucky to use paper plates and plastic forks that he'd insanely wash to reuse them again. Proper men use proper silver cutlery, fine plates, and pressed linen, but they’ve already broken so many rules that define propriety. Another one hardly matters. 

“What about you?” Jayce says as he uses a plastic spoon to poorly ladle green curry—แกงเขียวหวาน or gaeng keow wan gai if one wanted to romanize it, because yes, Viktor has picked up scant sentences and phrases in several languages over the years—into Viktor’s takeout lid. “Do you ever let yourself want?”

“Occasionally.”

Jayce chuckles; he does that often, Viktor's noticed, finding excuses to laugh or smile even when the world doesn’t offer many. “Bit of a bad habit for a Merlin to do that, isn’t it?”

“We all have our bad habits.” It’s true, even if Viktor preferred to not admit it—like smoking cigarettes, even if he only touched them once in a while. “And what I want isn’t much different from you.” He mashes the curry and rice together on his plate, watching how they pool together as the honesty pools out from his gut, easier than he remembers it ever being. “I would like to matter. Have my short existence be important.”

A normal person would have paused, hesitated to consider their words and weigh the gravity of such an existential statement, but Jayce’s smile merely slides, partially lopsided and off-centre, but natural in ways it shouldn’t be, but is. “Well, if it helps, you’re probably my third friend on this continent. So you matter a lot to me.”

As guarded as Viktor is typically, he does not reject the statement this time. He does not wave it off with the fact that they were not friends considering they had only a handful of conversations together, and for the past several months, Jayce had assumed that Viktor had hated him. Rather, he perches an equally crooked smile across his lips. “Are you always this sentimental in the evening?” Reminiscent of their first conversation, and the fact that the banter comes so easily nearly has Viktor snorting at the thought. He shovels a spoonful of rice into his mouth to silence himself as a similarly sentimental man.

“No, not really.” Because it’s that easy for a man like Jayce to be entirely honest, wearing his heart on his sleeve, on his face, on his smile. “You’re just special.”

“You shouldn’t say that to men you barely know, Jayce.”

With a shrug, Jayce breaks into a full grin, toothy, charming; a smile that Viktor now notes that he doesn’t actually despise—never did. “We got time.” Perhaps they do. In their field of work, it's not someting they should have, but for now, maybe, they could have it and Viktor doesn't quite mind that fact even with the crutch underneath his arm. 

Chapter Text

Time becomes all that Viktor wants and while it may sound like a foolish thing to wish for, he finds that he doesn’t mind being a fool just this once. And well, if he’s being completely honest—a confession between him and nobody else, other than perhaps, his loyal Persian hound, Rio—dreamy hope is mostly due to Jayce.

Jayce, whose warmth makes the days stretch a little softer. Whose laughter leaves an echo in the corners of his lab long after he’s gone. Jayce, who comes through the doors of HQ every evening with a takeout bag dangling from his fingers, unprompted, even when he hadn’t been assigned a mission, even when he had no reason to be there.

When Viktor finally corners him about it, Jayce only shrugs, casually as if this were the simplest thing in the world. “No particular reason,” he says, flippant, offhanded, the words so lightly delivered they knock Viktor off balance for hours after. “I just like being with you.”

Frankly, it’s a little too audacious of a response.

But maybe they’re both too bold for their own good, because Viktor follows it up with: “You know, you don’t have to bring supper as an excuse to talk, Jayce.”

“Really?” Jayce’s eyes go wide as though he’s truly surprised by this development. As if the last several months hadn’t been a steady rhythm of shared meals in Viktor’s lab, conversations winding from mission reports to geopolitics, past regrets, private jokes about the world leaders they would have preferred to not have saved, but their hands were tied as Kingsmen. 

“Then,” Jayce starts, always hedging around the question, because he was cautious like that even with his foot one step ahead of the world, “would you like to come over tomorrow?” 

It’s so innocent, so out of place, but somehow so perfectly fitting that it doesn’t have Viktor stuttering in place, but it’s enough to have him pause. Blink, once, twice, thrice. And in that flicker of hesitation, his strapačky nearly slides off his flimsy plastic fork onto the desk.

Jayce clears his throat, misreading the silence as he fiddles with his fingers, running his thumb over the edge of his nail as he often does as a nervous tick, “To my home,” he adds when Viktor doesn’t respond, just in case he wasn’t specific enough, “for dinner and uh, not dinner.” 

With a sheepish smile, he meets Viktor in the eye, gold to gold and aren’t those eyes of Jayce’s, just… brilliant . Raw and kind in the only way that Jayce could be, perfectly open and wary, hoping to please everyone, but oddly enough, wanting to please Viktor the most because their two minds after that first hurdle could go on for hours without stopping. 

It shouldn’t be possible, Viktor thinks, that someone like Jayce exists. So honest and bright in ways Viktor forgot how to be when the fleeting flavour of youth had long since abandoned him. And yet—here he is.

Matching Jayce’s sloppy grin, Viktor nods—there isn’t room for doubt or resentment. Those ghosts have long since left him, burned away by every shared hour, every conversation that unfolded like threads weaving into something new: this constant companionship. “Alright.”

Oh, and how Jayce beams further, his grin pulling from ear to ear. That fond, unguarded thing pulls at Viktor in a place he doesn’t have words for, that he doesn’t really quite understand yet. It makes him want to chuckle—not in derision, not in irony, but in that quiet, private manner when one sees a couple walking under a single umbrella, one leaning into the rain and sacrificing their shoulder so the other can stay dry. It’s the kind of fondness Viktor never believed he could have. Not because he didn’t think he deserved it, he had enough self respect for himself, but because he didn’t think he’d slow down enough to see it. 

And maybe, Viktor thinks as he watches that radiant smile—that foolish, selfless warmth—might be the solution to world peace.

It’s that very warmth that draws Viktor to Jayce’s townhouse nearly every night following. Every time Viktor arrives, he’s greeted first at the door by Jayce’s German Shepherd, Señorita Canelita Talis—yes, the full name, because Jayce insists her title be honored in full at all times.

Her paws scamper eagerly across the wooden floors which are a mercy for the steadiness of Viktor’s cane. Ever the lady, ever dutiful, she stops before him, dark eyes shining, tail sweeping in broad arcs against the floorboards. It’s obvious that Jayce had trained her well in the nearly four years he’s had her for. Even Rio, temperamental as she could be in her older age, tolerated Señorita Canelita Talis like an old aunt begrudgingly fond of a younger niece. They had, by now, settled into a peaceful truce, curled together on cold nights in a quiet harmony.

“Hello, Señorita Canelita Talis,” Viktor had long since learned to not chuckle around the length of the name; after all, every lady deserved the full dignity of her title. “Is your father home?”

“Kitchen!” Jayce very helpfully calls from the other room where golden light is pooling into the hall.

“Lead the way, little lady.” Nodding to the dog, Viktor leans against his cane as he walks, his left foot a little more inverted inwards as he traces her footsteps. Canelita moves at a careful pace, pausing every few feet to glance back at him, her patience unwavering, waiting for him to catch up.

Turning the corner, he reaches the kitchen where sure enough, Jayce is standing over the stovetop, stirring a large pot. Amber light from the overhead lights pools colour into the room, painting his silhouette in marigold. Dressed down from his bespoke suit, Jayce is in a pair of casual clothes that Viktor has grown accustomed to—a white button up shirt with the top few buttons undone, sleeves rolled carelessly to his elbows. A beige cardigan is pulled overtop it, dark brown buttons clasping over his torso. His trousers are an ashen colour made from an unassuming, loose fabric meant for evenings spent indoors, not out in the world. 

The comfortable look suits him, possibly fitting than some of Jayce’s best suits, of which, Viktor was partial to the navy pinstripe the most. And Viktor finds—unexpectedly, humbly—that it suits him , too. He’s no stranger to looking a little less gentlemanly, and a bit more domestic these days as well. Although his version of that mostly consisted of keeping his glasses off when he wasn’t working and removing the black tie knotted beneath his collar. His knit sweaters were hard to part with and were not something he’d trade for a mere cardigan, no matter how many times Jayce may ask to match. 

Jayce glances over his shoulder then, catching sight of him, and his smile blooms anew—bright and immediate, as though Viktor’s mere presence is reason enough to light up. And Viktor matches his smile in kind, although his is a little softer and easier on the face as he closes the distance and leans against Jayce’s back, propping the curve of his chin atop the man’s shoulder. 

In return, Jayce tilts his head into Viktor’s, the heat of them spreading out over the point of contact. “You’re early. Rio’s curled up upstairs on our bed.” 

At nearly thirteen, she was running a little poor on hearing, struggling to catch whenever he entered the front door unlike her much younger dog niece. With a small hum in response, Viktor tilts his head just so peer into the pot.

“What’s on the menu for today?” Inside, a rich orange stew simmers gently, its surface broken by pieces of tender chicken, cubed potatoes, flecks of herbs swirling in lazy spirals. 

In return, Jayce tilts his head into Viktor’s, the heat of them spreading out over the point of contact. “Sudado de pollo,” accent rolling off his tongue, homey and inviting in ways that only Jayce can be. “Called my mamá earlier and had me thinking of home.” 

Jayce’s mother was a kind woman in her late sixties whom Jayce was raised to have most of his personality from. Viktor had the privilege of speaking to her over the telephone on numerous occasions and she couldn’t be happier that her son was working for a ‘small eco-engineering firm’ in London rather than toiling his life away under one of those militaristic corporations in America. Even if that kept her son thousands of kilometres away from home. 

“Thank you for taking such good care of him,” she had told Viktor once, her voice thick with pride and affection, lilting and warm over the phone. “I’d love to meet the man who makes mi mijo so happy. Oh, I wish you could hear the things he says about you! You’ll come for Christmas this year, won’t you?”

Jayce had flushed deeply, flailing beside him, scrambling to wrest the phone from Viktor’s hands, hissing an embarrassed, “Mamá!”

And Viktor, warmed by it all, no longer so heavily chained by the brace to his back, to the crutch at his side, laughed into the speakerphone pushing Jayce’s flustered face gently away as he answered, “Of course, Ximena.” Because she insisted that Mrs. Talis is far too formal for someone she already considered to be family. “So long as work allows, I’d be honored.” Palm against the plane of Jayce’s cheek, he smudged his thumb under the man’s eye and broke into a smile, close-lipped, but there just the same. “And your son makes me very happy as well.”

But the past, even as gilded and golden as it is that has his chest burning like a summer sun, cannot be dwelled on too long; the present always calls. 

And here, in the now, Jayce turns his head slightly before placing an awkward, yet tender kiss to Viktor’s temple. “Go take a seat. Cutlery is already out.” 

With Señorita Canelita Talis leading the way, her footsteps matching Viktor’s stride, the two of them move into the dining room, a modest space with a table set for four rather than the more traditional six or eight. It was only ever Viktor who came to dine with him for the most part, although Mel and Caitlyn have joined them on more than one occasion when the relationship between him and Jayce deviated from after hours at headquarters to hours in bed. A surprising transition at first, but one that Viktor fell into headfirst with ease, because everything with Jayce happened to make things uncomplicated. 

Two chairs have been nestled side by side, rather than at opposite ends of the table. It allowed them to sit close, elbow to elbow during their meals  and more importantly—it allowed Jayce to intertwine their hands atop the wood as they ate, his left hand curling around Viktor’s right. Practical, considering their dominant hands. Sentimental, because it was Jayce.

Soon enough, Jayce emerges from the kitchen balancing two plates in hands—each with a nicely shaped scoop of white rice surrounded by a chicken drumstick, yellowed potatoes, and orange stew—and sets one down in front of Viktor before settling into the chair beside him. 

While Jayce is a good cook, and this is not an exaggeration by any means considering how Viktor had a stubborn palate for food and a lack for tact when it came to the kitchen, the plate tonight is unreasonable well put together, a cut wedge of lime tucked in the corner and the whole affair decorated with small shreds of cilantro to add a variety of colour. If Viktor was charitable, which he is when it comes to Jayce nowadays, he’d say it’s the best the man’s ever made. Even objectively, it’s the most appetizing meal to have graced this little table.

“Do you like it?” Jayce asks, more than a tad nervous especially considering wobbly his eyes are, watching Viktor’s every movement as a forkful of food meets his lips. 

It’s a silly question, really, but fair nonetheless. Even if Viktor treasured Jayce so and the man was listed as Viktor’s next of kin in the Kingsman database, he is a brutally honest man; a minor exception to the polished tenets of gentlemanly decorum which mandates that a white lie every so often to spare one’s feelings is an acceptable practice.

So when Viktor hums in quiet approval, four fingers pressed to his mouth as he chews, it’s only the truth. 

Instantly, Jayce’s shoulders—stiff with worry and drawn far too tight for just a plate of food—slump visibly in relief, as though he’s only now allowed himself to exhale.

Hands in his cardigan pockets, hiding them out of sight from their nervous habit, he glances up, eyes meeting Viktor’s, “Good, good.” He hesitates, teeth catching at his lower lip. “So, uh—there was something I wanted to ask you. Or, well. Say, actually.” It’s sheepish, the way he says it. Earnest and boyish, a little shy, as though they’re both being pulled backward in time.

And Viktor sees it too: the way memory flickers in Jayce’s expression, the way the edges of this moment trace the outline of another—of that first night over Thai takeout, when conversation stretched long and easy between them, unsure and hopeful and unspoken.

“Viktor,” Jayce shifts, barely sitting properly on his chair, one foot tangled around the wooden leg, the other braced flat on the floor as he leans closer. Taking Viktor’s left hand in his, thumb stroking across the back of his knuckles. “Mi amor. Do you remember how I told you I came to Kingsman to do good?” His free wrist waves casually in the air, like it often does, because Jayce is a man of movement, never wanting to be restrained and his smile similarly unable to be contained any longer either smears over his lips, lopsided. “I wanted to do something better with my life than build weapons of war for some big firm and profit off things I didn’t believe in. I mean, all my life, all I wanted to do was change the world. And now,” he chuckles, breathless, giving Viktor’s hand a soft squeeze, “I’m finally doing it. Every day even. But you—”

Golden eyes softening, Jayce’s hand cups Viktor’s cheek, running his thumb over the faint hollow beneath the eye. “You changed mine.” There’s a pause and Jayce looks as though he’s pulling his heart out from his chest one thread of muscle at a time. “We’ve only been dating for two years, I know. Maybe that’s not long, but my mamá loves you. Honestly, she probably loves you even more than I do, if you could believe that—”

Viktor’s thumb scrapes against Jayce’s pinky, pulling it in to silence the man. His lips curve faintly, almost indulgently, terribly endeared to the man’s poor habits, “You’re rambling, Jayce.” His voice comes light, amused with the knowledge that Jayce loved to throw himself into loops sometimes. “Really, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were reading me your wedding vows already.” 

It’s meant to be a joke, but Jayce’s eyes widen a little at that and then he nods his head, once, twice—the movement a little too eager, a little too transparent. Throat bobbing, he draws in a breath, working around the words trapped at his vocal cords. “Yeah. About that.” With a deep inhale, he looks Viktor dead in the eye with that reckless, full-bodied determination that only he ever seems to possess. “Would you marry me?”

The world goes perfectly still. Locks up like a gear seizing mid-spin. 

Yet, just as always, Jayce barrels forwards. “It could be for tax purposes, if that makes it easier. I checked the handbooks and there’s no protocol against marriage between two agents. I even cleared it with Arthur just in case you’re worried.” The corners of his eyes crinkling, the single chuckle that escapes Jayce comes out a little breathless, a tad nervous perhaps as his foolish smile has Viktor’s world folding in his hands. “It’s just that… if I’m going to keep saving the world, Viktor, I want to make sure you’re in it too.”

“I—” Viktor starts, his tongue failing him despite the answer being at the tip of his tongue. And oh, how easy it is to want something when you see it standing before you, offered freely in a pair of wide, hopeful golden eyes. “Yes.” Pulling both hands to cup Jayce’s cheeks, Viktor feels how the man's smile pulls taut at his dimples between his palms and leans in, his forehead flat against Jayce’s. “You sweet, sentimental man.” His lips curl into a smile that’s all his own, quiet and steady. “Yes.”

Jayce laughs—brilliant and uncontainable, a sound that spills between them like sunlight—and tilts forwards to meet Viktor’s lips. Their mouths press together, gentle, soft, just like how all good things start as, and then, Jayce’s hands wrap around Viktor’s head, carding through chestnut locks as the kiss deepens; the heat between them shared in one held breath, anchoring them to this eternity together. 

When they part, Jayce’s thumb drags fondly across Viktor’s cheekbone, his grin still loose and a little dazed, chuckling at some distant thought. “Would this be the second time your name’s going in the papers?”

A gentleman’s name is only in the newspaper three times in their lifespan: once at birth, the second when they’re wed, the last at their deathbed. Realistically, their names wouldn’t ever appear in the Sunday's paper; not because they weren’t gentlemen, but because they didn’t have any aristocratic upbringing—neither of them were notable men connected to the distant nobles still standing in England. But perhaps, tucked quietly on page sixteen of the Telegraph’s Wedding Announcements, their names could find a place.

“First, actually.” Viktor replies wryly, both thumbs stroking softly over Jayce’s cheeks. “They don’t tend to print the names of poor orphans in the paper.” It’s not a bitter thought, not in the least, but Jayce’s brows knit together anyway, before pressing a reassuring peck of the lips to the corner of Viktor’s lips. 

“Then we’ll have to make sure the groom looks his best popping his cherry.” Jayce’s teeth flash, exposing the sliver of a gap between his two front teeth, boyish and teasing, however his eyes gleam warm beneath the words, never one to be able to hide his intentions very easily. “Shouldn’t be hard. Considering what a right gentleman my soon-to-be husband looks every day.” The vocabulary isn’t foreign to Viktor’s ears by any means, but coming from Jayce, it sounds so bizarre, cumbersome even. 

Viktor blinks. And barks out an atrociously loud laugh, snorting into the crook of Jayce’s shoulder. Wiping an amused tear away into the soft knit of Jayce’s cardigan, Viktor’s words come muffled against his collarbone, “Have you been picking up British mannerisms?”

“Kinda. Been spending a lot of time with Cait and Mel prepping for tonight.” Jayce returns the sentiment, shoulders shaking as his head tilts back. “What? You like my wordplay? Do I sound proper Bri’ish?” He tacks on the phoney accent purely for the joy of it, because he can, because the man that Viktor is so hopelessly and entirely in love with, delights in making him smile, no matter how silly the effort.

“You sound like a fool,” comes Viktor’s reply, though his lips curve softer, affection rising in his throat and betraying his image. Pulling Jayce’s jaw back down, Viktor  peppers gentle kiss after kiss up the slope of the nose, finishing at the bridge between his brows. “A very handsome fool, at least.”

Cheeks flushed, Jayce’s already idiotic grin turns lazy and lopsided. “You’re marrying this handsome fool.” He leans in again, stealing another kiss, lips molding to Viktor’s in an easy, perfect fit. Both of them melt into the contact immediately, breathing sighs that exchange over their tongues. Hands sliding from Viktor’s hair to the small of his back, Jayce pulls the two of them together, just slightly, with just the right pressure to not irritate the brace at Viktor’s spine. 

Pulling away, Jayce, oh so lovesick teeters at the precipice of the world, but does not fear, for he knows that Viktor would have his hands and he stares at him, eyes crinkling, full of wonder, as if marveling that this is real, that this moment is theirs.“God,” he breathes, a quiet, awed thing. “I can’t wait to do that forever.” 

Blinking, a missing step finally pings against the walls of Jayce’s skull. His brow furrowed, realization dawning like a spark catching.

“Shit—” Tapping at his pockets, he mutters, fumbling inside his leftmost one. After a few clumsy moments, he pulls out a modest gold ring, worn and weathered, its filigree delicate beneath the lamplight. “Almost forgot,” Jayce says a little breathlessly as he turns it thoughtfully between his fingers. “This was my father’s. Mi mamá wanted you to have it. Her and mi papá were married eight years before he passed. It wasn’t long. But she talks about him like she still feels him everywhere.” 

His voice wavers faintly, a tremor threading through the words as he takes a breath to gather himself from the memory, pulling the words together like beads on a string.. “She told me… my papá knew the day he met her. That she was it. And I… I told her the same, you know? That I knew. That moment we talked, I just knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you.” 

Viktor watches the gold catch the light, a small gleam made brighter by the weight it carried, beloved by hands, treasured by years. 

“Do you know what she told me after that?” Rubbing his thumb over the ring’s surface, Jayce takes Viktor’s left hand, palm meeting palm with a breathless chuckle. “She said that if I felt that, then I should hurry up and whisk you off your feet. And that maybe my pa’s ring would bring more luck for us than it did for them.”

“I’m sure it will, zlato ,” Viktor murmurs, the endearment sliding smooth from his tongue, cocooned in the quiet, the intimacy holding them both steady.

And Jayce, soft and beaming, slips the ring onto Viktor’s ring finger like a promise carried home.

Two Years and Three Months Before Today

It was never easy to win Viktor’s favour though. Romantically at least. Wanting Jayce as a companion was one thing. Sharing takeout dinners in the laboratory, letting conversation drift lazily between tech specs and sarcasm, was easy. Manageable. Safe. But wanting what he couldn't have—touch, heat, hunger, all the volatile edges of desire—that was something else entirely.

Love, to Viktor, had never held much weight. He had scored high on his empathy aptitude during the Kingsman examination, but empathy and affection were not the same thing. Love was inefficient. Distracting. An experience he’d written off when he was still too young to understand what he was ruling out. It seemed a waste of time then—and time, for someone like him with a poor leg that never worked right and dedicating his early years to books when he believed he’d never escape the clutches of the orphanage in Czechia, had never felt abundant.

Why toil away chasing after the coattails of people who may or may not return his affections, when his resources and focus could be pooled into making a better tomorrow? Something concrete, something bigger than himself. So he decided not to want, to not be vulnerable, to not lick his hand against the blade of vices and make him susceptible to infection. The classic Kingsman approach. 

Do not want, and you will not get burnt. But sadly, it was very easy for Viktor to light the match, keep his hand on the stove and forget what it felt like to have flames crawling up his wrist. 

And on their fourth dinner at Jayce’s flat—because Viktor kept track of things like that, quietly, precisely, always in the back of his head—Jayce leaned in just a little too close after supper. Maintained one hand wrapped around the top of Viktor’s thigh, the touch warm even through the fabric of his trousers. 

“Stop me if you don’t want this,” Jayce said, so earnestly, so achingly open, it barely felt real. “Please,” he whispered, a plea caught on the edge of breath; it was only short of begging by the fact that he hadn’t dropped to his knees, “stop me before I fall too hard.”

And Viktor, whose heart was pounding in his chest, unable to catch the flighty feeling cauterizing any doubts in his chest after two glasses of wine, didn’t stop him. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Because he wanted it.

God help him, he did. 

Rather than stop the free fall, Viktor was the one who committed the crime first. Hands wrapping around the curve of Jayce’s neck, he pulled the man into his lips, fingers combing through those perfectly made locks. A moan slipped into Jayce’s mouth as their lips part, eagerly exploring every millimetre of space with his tongue. Spurred by a passion that he thought wasn’t his to control, Viktor carved the softness of Jayce’s lips, the heat of his mouth, the sweetly god-made gap between his two front teeth into his mind, promising to never forget in his barely drunken haze. But the taste of Jayce was intoxicating, pulling him deeper into a stupor, a decadent poison that could have killed a man, but for Viktor it was his salvation. 

And oh, dear god, he was lost. He’d been losing himself from the start, if he was honest. From the moment Jayce laughed in that perfect, reckless way that sent Viktor’s heart tumbling down a hill, his stomach plucking strings he didn’t know he had. From the way Jayce touched too easily, smiled like he meant it, carried warmth that Viktor didn’t realize was possible to hold. 

Viktor had told himself it was nothing. Had ignored the tug in his chest when Jayce brought him dinner after long nights in the lab and told himself he didn’t recognize what this inconveniently shaped thing between his was. 

And maybe that wasn’t really a lie; he forgot, sometimes, what it meant to be human. That when it came to Jayce, he could not just pretend that he did not want to be touched. He could not feign that he was satisfied with the few friendships he had. Not when Jayce insisted on sharing space with him night after night and truthfully, he never wanted that to end. 

Sometime during their time together whether he wanted it or not, because the heart would never obey the mind, Viktor had fallen in love. Not just with Jayce’s presence at his side, but with the closeness only Jayce could give. With a mind that, despite Viktor’s earlier, shortsighted assumptions, proved itself sharper, warmer, kinder than he ever gave credit for. With a man who understood Viktor’s ambitions, his obsessions, his relentless wanting for things that really shouldn’t be attainable in their short lifespans—but a man could hope. It was all so dizzying, too much for his body to handle, because Viktor was merely a mortal, with finite time, who hadn’t taken enough hours in the day to think this muddled and hazy feeling through properly. 

And so when he pulled back—when he saw the confusion washing over Jayce’s face, watched it twist slowly into a quiet, dawning hurt—something inside Viktor wrenched tight. His hands recoiled, retreating from Jayce’s soft hair as though he’d been caught red-handed, as though affection itself were a crime.

Chest heaving and thoughts scattered across the floor like shards of glass, Viktor stumbled from his seat, barely fitting his crutch under his arm as he stepped back, desperate for space, “I… I apologize,” voice strained, he caught one final glimpse of Jayce’s hazel eyes, a glimmer of colour that sunk a pebble into the lake of his stomach. “I have to go.” 

And Jayce—poor, helpless Jayce who didn’t understand the inner workings of Viktor’s mind—didn’t move, didn’t protest. He merely remained sitting there, blinking slowly, like the floor had given out beneath him and he wasn’t sure how far he’d fallen.

“Thank you for the dinner.” With a small nod, Viktor turned. One foot after the other, he did his best to run through the dining room, into the hallway, and out the front door before he could change his mind.

Because staying was too much. Because running—even with his spine, even with his leg, even with the Jayce behind him—felt like the only thing he still knew how to do.

Dear God, Viktor thought, eyes cast up to the overcast evening, slowly being swallowed to the awakening night. Which was rather silly to be honest; he didn’t believe there was a lord and saviour out there that would hear him, let alone spare him. Still, in the silence, in the passing twilight where traffic whispered past and the foot of his crutch clicked steady against the sidewalk, he prayed. 

Prayed for anything with power—divine or otherwise—to take this feeling from his chest and set it alight. To cauterize it clean. To burn out the stupid, aching want clawing at his ribs every time he thought of Jayce.

Love would only be a burden, a liability, and loving Jayce of all people was a punishment he would never crawl free of. Because he could take man out of love, but not love out of the man—and what a cruel, wretched thing it was to suffer for it, afraid not just of loving Jayce, but of losing him too.

So he prayed and prayed and prayed. Throughout the night, into the morning, and again during the briefing at Kingsman Tailors when their eyes met across the room. He begged silently, fervently, that Jayce Talis, his first love, would somehow be his only and last.

And soon, their relationship became, like how everything between them first started, a quiet thing that perhaps harboured a bit of resentment too. Their dinners together become a thing of the past, their conversations over late-night texts went unanswered. Communications were passed to junior handlers and assignments where Viktor was assigned for surveillance were shoved down to his other operators. 

Viktor did what he always did when something cut too close to the bone: he compartmentalized, filed his thoughts under U for unnecessary and unwise , stuffed the entire thing in a locked box, before tossing his desires out to sea in hopes that could be lost forever. 

Jayce noticed, of course. Viktor had expected that. But Jayce didn’t push, not directly. He simply stayed visible—leaving coffee in Viktor’s lab each morning, catching his eye during meetings with a quiet sort of question written across his face. He asked Caitlyn and Mel to pass along messages under the pretense of task coordination. He was present in all the ways Viktor tried not to be.

Viktor ignored all of it. Told himself it was for the best. That his small heart would not be able to grieve the loss of a lover when that cruel day came to pass and he would not play the role of a doting wife, waiting helplessly for her soldier’s safe return, powerless to stop fate from choosing otherwise. Because if he never held Jayce close, he would never have to grieve losing him. Not as badly at least. 

And eventually, with the distance, the complexity of what he felt before would be smothered before it ever grew sharp enough to scar.

It didn’t.

The mission that dragged them back together landed with too much heat and no time to prepare. For weeks now, someone had been systematically stealing experimental nanomedical devices, protein-based delivery platforms, and prototype neuromodulators—cutting-edge assets plucked straight from the world’s most secure pharmaceutical labs.

At first, it read like any other high-stakes heist, no different from a dozen other missions leaving headquarters that month. But the latest breach had left behind a calling card: matte black, stamped in the center with a gold K , encircled in a ring and this call to attention barreled itself to the top of the priority list. 

Naturally, the unauthorized use of the Kingsman insignia detonated through HQ like a bomb. Every alarm tripped. Every protocol kicked into overdrive.

Mel shut down half the agency under internal review before the sun rose. Operators were stripped of unrestricted access; every piece of gear pulled, disassembled, and triple-checked for tampering. Those closest to active operations were locked under rotation, and no mission left HQ without executive authorization, meaning that all agents—unless cleared by Merlin and then twice approved by Arthur—were grounded for the time being. 

Which is why, when she summoned both Jayce and Viktor into the boardroom—no preamble, no wasted time—and slid the folder across the table to Jayce without a word, Viktor already knew what she was going to say.

“Merlin, I need you on site with Lancelot,”Mel said, gaze steady, the command already written in the set of her shoulders. “You’re the only one who can handle the surveillance that I trust to be out there with him right now.”

Viktor wanted to object. Every part of him recoiled. But the job wasn’t about him. It never was. The world needed saving, and that would always take precedence over personal discomfort, even when it stung like this.

“Very well,” Viktor said, keeping his tone even. He didn’t let himself look at Jayce; didn’t let himself  acknowledge the way Jayce’s golden eyes caught him sideways, warm and steady behind his dark frames, pinning him like a nail through the temple.

Viktor could do this. Keep it professional, simple, and clean. That’s all this could ever be. 

Somewhere in Montenegro, Three Months After (Two Years and Ninety-Six Days Before the Incident)

Their destination was Žabljak Crnojevića in Montenegro, a forgotten hilltop ruin once capital of the Crnojević dynasty, now nothing more than stone bones overlooking the wetlands of Lake Skadar. But beneath its soil were a series of sealed tunnels once used during conflict and possibly where their target was hiding. While Viktor’s analysis had narrowed down the scrambled ping from a missing Kingsman transponder to a forty-kilometre radius around the ruins, the exact coordinates were unclear, a sign of interference. Possibly suggesting that their target had a subterranean laboratory buried in one of the many long abandoned escape routes, deeper than their satellites could pick up. But it was enough to justify boots on the ground.

For the first two days, Jayce and Viktor don’t speak much; the nights dragged on long and treacherous as the terrain. 

Jayce worked the field: brash, a little reckless, but effective. His movements were raw instinct layered by overtrained muscle memory; a man who fought with his whole body, elbows sharp, shoulders tense, always ready to crash through whatever stood in his way with too-much force. But it worked. It always worked.

Viktor stayed behind in their makeshift safehouse: the creaking spare room of an elderly widow who tended goats a few kilometers away from the fortress in an unnamed hamlet. The house was a patchwork of stone and crumbling mortar, the roof patched with mismatched tiles, but it sufficed for their purposes. She didn’t speak a lick of any of the languages that Viktor knew fluently, but he managed with just enough Serbian to barter a set of new fishing nets for a warm fire and a roof over their heads for the week. 

Kingsman training had taught him better than to trust strangers, especially in compromised zones. But after rigorous background analysis—or as in depth as he could manage with the poor record keeping in the area and needing to ask two other shepherds semi-close by—he doubted she was anything but exactly what she appeared: an old woman in an old place, her world no larger than the goats she kept and the land she still stubbornly worked.

From the floor of the spare room, bad leg stretched out awkwardly in front of him, Viktor hunched over his unfolded briefcase—a portable dual-monitor rig—and ran the operation. He fed Jayce only the essentials, limiting their conversations to nothing more than a series of thermal signatures, pathway clearances, environmental scans, and from time to time, weather updates if the wind shifted enough to matter.

But for the past fifty six hours, no banter passed between them; none of the quiet hum of camaraderie that used to fill the gaps, not even the low chuckles Jayce used to coax out of him with stupid made-up codenames. 

For their safety, for Viktor’s really, the line stayed silent on both ends. A quiet weighed down by the faint static hiss of Jayce’s breath. Occasionally, the radar let out a bored ping as a goat stumbled too close to a sensor, its blurry silhouette flickering onto the map before vanishing again.

Visually, the feed was just as dry. Jayce uncomfortably trudged through tall grass, his silhouette moving stiffly across the ruins, knocking the tip of his umbrella against weathered stones of the fortress ruins. Oxford shoes were not meant for rolling hills and damp soil and every so often the camera angle tilted downwards to reveal the scrape of mud across the polished leather, dragging more dirt with every step. 

And only because it was his job, because this was the hinge of Kingsman’s future, Viktor watched it all. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, eyes tracing every flicker of movement across the screen. He paused—just once—when Jayce slipped down a slope, the camera jolting hard as his footing faltered. Viktor’s throat seized tight. But Jayce caught himself with a muttered curse, upright again. Viktor didn’t sigh in relief; he swore he didn’t.

After another few hours of nothing substantial, he almost keyed into the channel to call Jayce back so they could relocate to the other bend of the lake. 

But then, without warning, the feed went black. An instant, jarring drop into total darkness, only broken up by a green blinking status tag: LANCELOT—INACTIVE.

Viktor’s jaw clenched, grinding against his molars. 

“Of course,” he muttered, hands flying across the keys as his pulse kicked up sharp. Foolish man making him worried for nothing. “Folded the damn glasses again.” Pulling up the override code for the glasses—a new addition he’d implemented to all Kingsman glasses over the last few months, Viktor flooded the comm line, barely hiding his frustration. “Lancelot, how many times have we been over this? Stop disrespecting my technology.”

No response. Even the override failed to produce visuals, blipping again as INACTIVE.  

Frown deepening, his hands pushed open the diagnostic windows, which flashed in right red: Abnormal. Jayce’s heartbeat climbed on the monitor. Rapid. Erratic. Jumping from 87 to 104 then to 153. 

A beat passed. Then another.

And then, suddenly, audio cracked through his headset, sharp, fractured, broken by interference.

“Merlin—!” 

Jayce screamed into the line, his voice raw. A far cry from the casual tone he used on most ops. It wasn’t even his field panic where the clipped edge of adrenaline sharpened each word. No, this was terror, a fear forgoing all Kingsman training and reducing Jayce to a man of primal instinct, desperate to survive. 

“Backup, I need backup— shit! I’m—” Words tripping over each other, they collided with the sharp bursts of static. Behind them: gunfire, the boom of an explosion. Each sound rattled through Viktor’s headset, vibrations crawling deep in his ears, tremoring against his skull.

Something heavy slammed on the other end—a dull, bone-jarring thud scraping brutal through the channel, almost tangible, as if the sound itself could bruise. 

Viktor’s chest ricocheted; his stomach twisted tight like a wire snapping under tension. And then, desperate, guttural, pulled from a place too deep, too human, too terrified, came Jayce’s scream: “Please, V!” 

The line shattered into jagged ugly static. 

For one long, merciless second, Viktor didn’t move. Lungs locked tight in his chest, his breath strangled between his ribs, unable to be set free.

Then everything happened at once. The headset flew from his head, clattering hard against the floor. His coat was already half-pulled over his arms as he grabbed his sidearm—the familiar weight of the Kingsman-standard pistol sliding into his palm like an old truth.

There was no time for a field team or authorization, he sent a single emergency signal to headquarters through his watch before charging out the door, crutch under his sleeve. The nearest agents were hours away, and Jayce didn’t have hours. 

The last location ping was already uploading to his watch as he moved. He limped faster than he has in months, refusing the brace locking at his leg, refusing the pain firing sharp against his joints, forcing his gait into a brutal, punishing pace. Because there was no time to respect his aches, not when Jayce had cried into the microphone in a plea, and Viktor would never be capable of forgiving himself if the sound went silent. 

Outside, the terrain was savage. Steep switchbacks snaked down the hillside in uneven cuts, loose rock skittering beneath his shoes, biting at his ankles. Sharp weeds scraped against his slacks. Each turn narrowed toward the ruins—what used to be an old tower of the fort, now reduced to crumbling rock spilling into marsh and thistle. Wind, sharp and cold, dragged the breath from his lungs, pulling heat from his body too quickly and instilling an ache in his joints as he fumbled to climb up the hill, cane helplessly dragging into mud. 

A hidden rock snagged his bad leg; he pitched forward hard, palms skidding raw across jagged stone. The sting flared bright across his hands but he pushed up, ignored it, kept moving.

He followed the trail by the signal first. Then by sign: bullet casings glinting dull beneath the grass which later became a flecked trail of dark crimson down a slope toward the fractured lip of the ruins.

He followed the trail first by the trail of bullet shells first, then the dark crimson splatters marking the grass, irregular and scattered, leading like breadcrumbs down a slope toward the collapsed edge of the ruins.

It was there, just over the hill, that he saw the wreckage.

A drone laid broken in the dirt, one rotor still twitching feebly. Debris scattered wide: torn equipment, the remnants of a detonated satchel, rubble from the long-standing ruins toppled into heaps. The acrid sting of chemical smoke burned his nose, clung to his tongue. Black scorch marks branded the stone walls, fresh wounds slashed across ancient rock. It looked like a cleanup. A battlefield already lost.

And then—by God’s grace or some crueler hand—he saw him.

Jayce.

Crumbled against a collapsed wall, his body slumped inward, folded tight like something desperately guarding itself. One arm cinched hard across his ribs, blood slicking beneath his palm. The other pressed weakly to his brow, fingers streaked red. His face was pale, shock-pale, the color drained from him; his eyes shut tight beneath lashes clumped with sweat and dust. The lenses of his glasses were shattered, frame cracked and wires unfurling like snapped veins at his temple.

He looked small.

He looked broken.

And Viktor, heart pounding so fiercely it felt like his chest might splinter beneath it, stumbled the last few steps forward. Cane clattering to the brick, Viktor dropped to his knees beside him, his brace grinding in retaliation. “Lancelot,” he rasped, voice breaking low. Dampening down a tremble, he pressed two frantic fingers to Jayce’s neck, searching. Searching. Please— There. Weak. Yet somehow too fast. Thready. Stuttering at every second beat. 

Relief cracked through Viktor, cooling the fear just for a moment. Swallowing hard, Viktor cupped Jayce’s cheek, his thumb brushing over the dried blood clinging to the man’s temple. “Lancelot,” he whispered again, forcing calm into his tone. “I’m here. I’m here. It’s going to be okay. Wake up.”

Heavy and uneven, Jayce’s eyelids fluttered at the touch. Golden eyes—glassed over and distant—opened a fraction, and somehow, impossibly, they found Viktor’s face. A weak, almost incredulous laugh scraped from Jayce’s throat, wet and quivering at the edge.

“You… you came,” he croaked, the words slurring, breaking off before he could finish the tail end, swallowed by the weight of exhaustion.

“Of course I did.” Viktor’s reply came brittled, close to breaking with the burn of his throat. “You moronic fool.”

Mouth twitching into a smile, because only Jayce could find it in himself to smile at a time like this, his bloodied fingers clawed weakly at Viktor’s coat, clumsy but insistent, curling into the lapel like an anchor. Like Viktor was the refuge of the shipwreck that was Jayce’s battered body. As if letting go wasn’t an option.

“I got his leg. The man—” Words catching as they slipped from Jayce’s mouth, they strained in the air, barely coming out. “He… ran east… you have to—”

But the words collapsed into a cough, wet and thick, followed by a shudder that folded his body inward, curling tighter into the wall. Shoulders rocky, his breath turned shallow, fractured.

And Viktor felt it then—the first fissure cracking straight through his chest. A fissure, small but deep, blooming outward in a quiet, helpless ache. The higher priority should be their target; he knew this. Even with a crutch, a brace, and a poor leg dragging behind him, Viktor could still pursue the man and collect enough intel for the agency to clean it up afterward. Kingsman’s mandate was clear: the mission always came first. This threat was a danger to the livelihood of the agency, and a risk for everyone they wore to protect. 

Every piece of his training, every ingrained instinct, told him: run. Chase. Finish the objective. Leave the wounded.

But Jayce was right here. Bleeding. Fading. And in that fractured, terrible clarity, Viktor realized: while the world might be at stake for his inaction, he couldn’t imagine one without Jayce in it. A world he saved, only to lose Jayce Talis, wasn’t a world worth stepping back into.

“Stop talking.” Viktor’s hands hovered, uncertain where to press without worsening anything. His gaze swept frantically over the mess of blood and torn fabric. “You’re only making it worse. Conserve your strength.” 

A shaky breath forced its way from his lungs as he checked the worst of the wounds. Although there were cuts and scrapes littering his skin, there were only two sites of active bleeding: Jayce’s abdomen and temple. The split at the latter was less dramatic but troubling in its own way; head injuries were unpredictable and even minor ones could spiral and internal bleeding would slice survival chances in half. “There’s… there’s Aegis Serum back at the safehouse,” Viktor murmured, more to himself than Jayce, a plan already assembling in fractured pieces. “I can get you stabilized. But you have to stay awake for me, Jayce. You hear me? You have to stay awake.”

He didn’t know if he was speaking to Jayce—or bargaining with the universe.

Leaning forward, Viktor rested his forehead against Jayce’s, closing the fragile, final space between them. Just enough to feel the residual heat beneath clammy skin. Just enough to feel the tremor rattling through him. “You’re not allowed to die on me.”

Exhaling shakily, a ragged sound from Jayce trembled over Viktor’s skin, barely held together as his breaths diminished to a slow rise and fall. “I missed you,” Jayce whispered, his words threading through the closeness between them, soft and broken. Just like him. Just like the man bleeding into Viktor’s hands. 

Viktor huffed a breath that caught halfway in his chest—somewhere between a laugh and a sob. If he ever looked back on this hour, he’d never be able to know; his throat clenched too tight to make the distinction and in the end, it didn’t matter.

“What did I just say,” he murmured, equal parts anger and frustration, a quiet plea folded inside the words. “It’s like—like none of you agents listen to me.”

Bracing himself, Viktor shifted his weight with effort, planting the crutch against the uneven brick as leverage. His free arm slid beneath Jayce’s, looping tight around his back. While Jayce might have been twice his size, physics was Viktor’s ally tonight and his crutch his lever as he hauled Jayce upright, steadying the man’s heavier weight against his own.

Jayce winced, a sharp hiss escaping him as his body folded against Viktor’s shoulder. His hand clutched harder at the bleeding wound at his side, but even trembling, even faltering, he didn’t let go. Not of the moment. Not of Viktor.

Hand slinking down to Jayce’s waist, Viktor adjusted his grip, steadying the weight that threatened to fold them both. The balance was ungainly, uncomfortable. The armrest of his crutch snapped cruelly into his underarm with every jolt and the pressure of their combined weight angered his braced leg and spine with a deep burn that threaded through sinew.  But through the discomfort—through the pain—Viktor held on.

He had no choice. No matter how hard he had tried to outrun this, all of this —the ache coiled tight in his chest, the wanting that he’d buried beneath duty, beneath logic, beneath every reason he’d convinced himself was enough—he couldn’t deny it anymore. He couldn’t pretend this wasn’t real. Not now. Not when every heartbeat pounded against his ribcage like a warning bell. Without a doubt, Viktor loved him. He always would. 

There would be no salvation from it. No mercy in it. No sparing himself the inevitable end. No hoping that time or distance would dull the edge, that Jayce might someday soften into a quiet corner of memory. No—Jayce would never be small enough to forget.

As they dragged their feet through the mud, Viktor understood something sharp and awful: one day, he would pay the price for loving him. One day, he would suffer the consequence—the grief, the hollow ache, the unbearable loss that emptied a man out from the inside. The day would come when Jayce wouldn’t be standing, wouldn’t be breathing, wouldn’t be in his arms.

But for now, for today Jayce was alive and Viktor could hold him together, could feel the warmth of him, the weight of him, could breathe in the scent of sweat and blood and dew tangled in his hair. 

There was nowhere left for Viktor to run. 

Love was his vice, his vulnerability, his undoing and Viktor no longer cared. 

Let it be. 

If loving Jayce meant holding him here another day, if it meant buying him one more breath, one more sunrise—then let it be his flaw. 

Let him carry the cost. Let him suffer the pain. Let him be so afraid of losing Jayce that he’d tear down the world to keep him alive.

Because truthfully, in a secret that he’ll say it eventually, whisper it under the covers so long as Jayce would have him, Viktor had missed Jayce too.

By the time Viktor reached the old woman’s cottage, night had swallowed the hills whole. It had taken him at least an hour to get back. An hour that Jayce didn’t have.

The climb back from the ruins had been hell. Each step, a negotiation between willpower and collapse. His crutch sank more than once into mud softened by the day’s rain, nearly pitching him forward. His bad leg seized twice, locking beneath him like a rusted hinge. But he forced it through.

Jayce’s arm slung over Viktor’s shoulders, his head lolling heavier against Viktor’s neck as his consciousness ebbed and flowed. There were moments Viktor wasn’t sure he’d make it. Moments where the gravel slipped beneath his feet and he almost went down, pulling Jayce with him. His arms burned, his leg buckled with every uneven step, and his vision wavered at the edges from the strain. But by some holy power, they made it; when the hamlet finally appeared—nothing more than a smattering of stone houses curled tight into the hillside like sleeping animals—Viktor thought, absurdly, of the first time he’d seen it. It had looked quaint then, almost picturesque in the warm light of early morning. Now, in the deep blue of evening, it looked fragile. Too small. Too quiet. Too far from help.

The old woman’s cottage stood at the lane’s edge, her goats penned beside it, quiet silhouettes in the dark. No smoke curled from the chimney. No lamplight warmed the window panes. She wasn’t home. Viktor wasn’t quite sure if that was a blessing or not, but he kicked the door open anyway; his shoulder braced hard beneath Jayce’s arm as they stumbled across the threshold, staggering inside the chill of the dark house. 

Easing Jayce down onto the wooden floor, Viktor guided him slowly until his head rested against a folded blanket abandoned near the hearth. Jayce groaned faintly under the movement but his eyes remained closed. He had gone half conscious sometime over the trip, feet dragging too much for Viktor’s liking.

Viktor’s back hit the wall with a hollow thud, barely keeping himself upright with his chest heaving and sweat clinging beneath the collar—just a moment to breathe, but not long. As much as his limbs ached, Jayce was burning out fast. 

“Alright, alright,” Viktor shook his head hard to clear the blur creeping in as he dragged . “We’re here. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.” It was just as much reassurance for Jayce as it was for himself.

Gold eyes failing poorly to the dark, Viktor’s hands fumbled blindly across a nearby shelf, knocking over old tins before his fingers closed at last around the cold brass of the oil lamp. Pulling it down with a rattling clatter, he frantically searched for the match tin beside it. His fingers were trembling so badly he nearly dropped the sticks over the ground. 

A strike. A flame. But too bright and he squinted against it, eyes shrinking away painfully. 

When the lamplight finally spilled across the floor, it caught Jayce’s face in its glow: pale, blood-streaked, the fragile curve of lashes casting faint shadows over his cheek. His chest rose. Barely. Shallow. Each breath a coin flipping in the dark.

“Don’t you dare,” Viktor rasped, crouching beside him again, tapping gently at Jayce’s cheek when he didn’t stir. “Not now.”

He dragged the low table closer with a screech of wood against stone, knocking aside the old woman’s clutter without a care. His satchel spilled open across it: gauze, antiseptic, coagulant patches, thread, needle, and the slim steel injector glinting beneath the lamplight.

“Okay,” Viktor murmured under his breath as he peeled Jayce’s shredded jacket off, layer by layer, each tug careful but urgent. “Okay. We’ve done worse. You’ve been worse.”

He was unsure if that was really the case. While Viktor had patched up more than one roughened agent before, Jayce was at death’s door, two feet in the grave and the dirt piling over him. This was far worse than any of Viktor’s injuries he had from the field barring the one that had decommissioned him permanently. But maybe, just maybe, he said it enough, perhaps the lie would hold. Maybe Jayce would believe it too.

Parting Jayce’s dress shirt, the undershirt beneath it was soaked through. Blood slicked dark beneath the fabric, wet and red to skin. Viktor swallowed hard, his throat tightening, a sour rush of panic threatening at the back of his tongue as he peeled it back.

The wound was worse than he’d hoped. A deep, jagged gash along Jayce’s side, ugly and uneven, like something a claw had torn through him. Flesh angry and raw, inflamed at the edges. 

Forcing focus, he grabbed a flask of water from the satchel, uncapped it with his teeth, and poured it over the wound to clear the grime. The water washed the blood fresh again, spilling hot and dark over skin.

Jayce stirred beneath him with a broken sound, his body flinching instinctively from the sting. Eyelids squeezed shut tight, weak fingers curled faintly at his side—at least he’s fully awake, good. 

“Easy.” Viktor pressed his palm lightly to Jayce’s sternum, grounding him. “I know. I know it hurts. Just stay with me.”

He reached for the coagulant patch, tore it from its sterile wrap, and pressed it down firm against the wound. While Jayce jerked under the pressure, his hand clawing against the floorboards, he didn’t push Jayce away. Wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve, Viktor blinked against the burn in his eyes as he reached for the injector.

The serum’s bottle gleaming gold in the lamplight: Aegis Serum: Mk. II. Completely unstable and experimental. A prototype for accelerated regeneration, rushed through Kingsman’s labs months ago. It hadn’t had the best success rate and most of the rats during the first clinical trials died within the first 24 hours from what Viktor remembered. But there was no way that a rescue team would arrive in time to stabilize Jayce before he slipped away. It was this—or nothing.

“You would hate me testing this on you if you were awake enough to argue,” Viktor murmured as he slid the needle against the crook of Jayce’s arm, thumb hovering over the plunger. “But you will have to forgive me for this.”

Teeth gritting together, Viktor pressed the plunger down and watched the gold slide beneath the skin, disappearing into Jayce’s veins.

For a moment—nothing.

Then Jayce’s breath hitched violently, a spasm kicking through his body that pulled his golden eyes open then squinting shut against the shock. His fingers scraped blindly at the floorboards, nails skittering over wood, searching.

Fingers trembling, Viktor set the injector aside as he reached instinctively for Jayce’s scrabbling hand. His fingers closed over it and Jayce’s grip answered with pinched nails digging into his skin before slackening again. The ache surged deep in Viktor’s chest, a barren hole that couldn’t be filled in the moment. He pressed Jayce’s hand between both of his, like he could trap the warmth there, hold it steady, hold him steady.

“You’re not leaving me tonight.” The vow came out quiet, sworn to nobody but the dark. “You hear me? I’m not—” Viktor’s throat closed up, words sticking halfway out. “I’m not…” With a strained gulp, he forced a breath out from his teeth, “I’m not burying you here. Please, Jayce. Don’t leave me.”

No answer. Jayce’s pulse beated faint beneath Viktor’s thumb—fragile, irregular, but there. Knees folded awkwardly, Viktor stayed beside him, head bowed into their hands, crutch abandoned behind him on the floor as he counted every rise and fall of Jayce’s chest to the flicker of the lamplight. Like a promise. Like a prayer.

Kingsman HQ, Two Days After (And Two Years and Ninety-Four Days Before the Incident)

The room smelled just like it had when Viktor was last locked within the confines of the walls. Incessantly white walls. Mocking. As preparing men who lay here to enter heaven’s pearly gates at any moment. Machines hummed softly in the corners, monitors blinking in slow, rhythmic patterns above the bed.

Jayce lay still beneath the thin white sheet of the bed, chest rising shallowly, skin drained pale beneath the faint wash of the monitors. His breath was there—soft, fragile, stronger than it was before—a thread that stitched him tenuously to the world. Wires and tubes wrapped around his body, taped to skin. Viktor sat slouched in the chair beside him, elbow resting heavily on the armrest, forehead perched tiredly in his hand while his thumb traced slow, absentminded arcs over warm skin. Warmer than it had been hours ago

They had to pry him from Jayce’s side when the evac team finally arrived. Unwilling to let go, to leave Jayce even for the medics who clamored for space, for access, for the chance to fix what Viktor couldn’t. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since then. Only that he’d followed the stretcher down every corridor. Only that he’d stood just outside every door. Only that he hadn’t left.

A knock came at the door, a two tap rhythm and with it, Mel stepped inside, an identification that Viktor only distinguishes by the click of her heels. 

“Mljet.” She said, cutting straight to it. “Small island off the coast of Croatia. We’ve got eyes on him now. Lancelot did a fine job planting that tracker.”

Lifting his gaze slowly, Viktor’s thumb paused against Jayce’s knuckles. Shadows pooled under his eyes, a feverish exhaustion wore down his limbs as his eyes met her face. 

Clipboard under one arm, Mel’s tan trenchcoat was draped across her shoulders, cutting over her dark suit, crisp as ever. Her hair was perfectly pinned despite the late hour, but her eyes betrayed her composure—Kingsman had been running itself ragged for forty-eight hours, picking up the fallout Viktor and Jayce had left behind.

When they first spoke outside of Jayce’s surgery room, Arthur hadn’t scolded him. Not even when she learned Viktor had abandoned the mission to save Jayce. She merely gave him a quiet nod, a secret between them, tucked away.

“We expect to take him into custody by morning,” Mel continued. “Galahad’s already en route with the Percival and Bedivere.”

Viktor pressed his lips into a thin line. His throat worked, tight around words he hadn’t yet decided if he was ready to spend.

Mel’s gaze softened as she stepped closer to the bed, her clipboard falling to her side. “He’ll pull through, Viktor.”

The doctors had said the same. But Viktor couldn’t trust it. Some part of him—the part that feared more than it dared hope—kept bracing for the worst. That Jayce would slip beneath, that his pulse would flutter out between Viktor’s fingers.

“Have you eaten?” Mel asked gently. 

Viktor blinked slowly, as if processing it took longer than usual, which it likely did—ignoring one’s appetite dwindled a man’s brain power. “No.”

“Viktor.”

With a shake of his head, his skull protesting with a throb at the sudden movement, his thumb resumed its slow pass across Jayce’s hand. “Later.”

“You need food. Sleep.” Tiredness shaded the corners of her voice. “I don’t want to have two agents collapsed in the infirmary.”

“I’ll be fine,” Viktor said quietly, tongue too dry, the breath sandpaper to his throat. He knew it wasn’t true. The fatigue was wearing him thin, but if Jayce could suffer worse, then he could shoulder his own discomfort without complaint.

“You’re not,” Mel replied, but there wasn’t any frustration in it. She didn’t push the point, didn’t needle him further; it was one of the things that kept them close, her respecting his own free-will to self-sabotage until he came to his own conclusions. Gaze softening, she looked between them—between Viktor hunched at the bedside, and Jayce lying still beneath the sheets. “It’s been hard watching the two of you the past few months. I hope you talk to him when he wakes.”

A flicker of a smile, hollow and brief, tugged at Viktor’s lips, a knowingness that only him and her happened to share in the moment. 

With a final glance, she stepped back toward the door, “If anything changes, call me. Galahad doesn’t want to engage until we have confirmation Lancelot’s awake,” and the door clicked shut behind her in a hush. 

Viktor’s shoulders slumped a fraction deeper into the chair. His thumb never stopped moving, tracing small, steady circles across Jayce’s hand as the machines hummed on, and the clock on the wall ticked uselessly into another hour.

Eventually, the movement beside him stirred Viktor from his vigil. A groan in that familiar voice, ragged and weak, slipping through the static in Viktor’s skull like a radio tuning back to life after too long in silence.

He lifted his head. Stared. And there they were. Those bright golden eyes, dull with pain, rimmed with exhaustion, but open. Alive.

For a moment, Viktor forgot how to breathe. 

Jayce’s gaze scraped over him, slow and searching. Took in the olive sweater wrinkled at Viktor’s stiff shoulders wrought with tension he hadn’t let go of in hours. His head tilted, drifting across the hollow shadows beneath Viktor’s eyes, down the sharpness of his cheekbones, over the faint tremor in his hands.

Olive sweater slightly rumpled, shoulders stiff with tension he hadn’t let go of in hours, Jayce’s gaze scraped over him, following the hollow of Viktor’s eyes, the cave of his cheeks from the dehydration, the exhaustion that clings to the line of his jaw.

“How long… have you been here?” Jayce rasped, voice rolled in dirt and roughened by disuse, by tubes, by blood, by whatever cocktail of sedatives they’d run through him.

Viktor didn’t flinch. His lips parted, words catching before they found shape. “You’re alive.”

Jayce gave the smallest huff of a laugh, more of a breath, really, thin, brittle—but so honest, so unmistakably Jayce. “Mostly.” He tried to smile, but it pulled too sharply on a suture near his mouth and his wince swallowed it away. “How bad is it?”

Viktor flicked to the chart at the bedside with his spare hand, though he didn’t need to read it again; it had ingrained into the folds of his brain, becoming a self-deprecating prayer that thought of the worst. “Mild concussion. Dislocated shoulder. Three cracked ribs. Gash to your abdomen. Couple stitches in your face.”

Once again, Jayce managed to laugh, shaky, but a foolish, idiotic decision—although it wouldn’t be him without that streak of defiant optimism threading through. “So our typical Tuesday.” Head tilting, Jayce looked at him for a long second, gold connecting to gold, heat seeping through the colour, “You came for me.” 

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Despite how his chest ached, despite how he swore to tell the truth, Viktor dipped around the truth. Carefully curbed around it because he hadn’t thought that this moment would come so soon, hadn’t planned exactly what he would say word for word—how could someone say something so grand with just a few words. How was he meant to explain that Jayce was the one person he would not sacrifice even if it meant saving the world? How could anyone put that into words? 

So instead, Viktor's thumb brushed lightly across Jayce’s knuckles. “Because we were out there together.” But the small motion that betrayed everything his words tried to keep simple. “I wasn’t going to let you die.”

Although Jayce seemingly knew Viktor better than Viktor knew himself now, because he shook his head, asking for more. “Is that the only reason? Why did you hold my hand then? Back at the safehouse.” He glanced at their hands locked together; even with the judgement, Viktor couldn’t bring himself to let go, still tracing that slow, looping pattern across the ridges of Jayce’s knuckles. “And now.”

Viktor looked down, partially in shame, partially because he needed to see for himself how his hand refused to leave Jayce. “Because… if you went under,  I wanted you to know I hadn’t left you.” It was terribly true, horribly honest, but Jayce still looked at him as though there was more to dig. 

Lips pressed together, the sutures dark at the corner of his mouth, Jayce tipped his head back into his pillows, eyes up to the ceiling. “You didn’t talk to me for three months.”

The shame of it burned, festered, blistered. “I know.” Came Viktor’s reply. 

“I kissed you. And you ran away.”

“I know.”

“Was it bad?”

“No.” The answer was immediate even if Viktor’s throat tightened, a dry ache fighting his vocal cords. “No, it wasn’t.” Far from it, really and the things that Viktor would do to be able to do it again. 

But, Jayce’s faint smile was tired, crooked, the kind that tried to hold up the ceiling with nothing but sheer stubbornness. “V…” he breathed, soft and weary, still head facing up towards the roof. “You know you shouldn’t lie to a dying man.” Self-pity never looked right on him and even bandaged, it still didn’t.

“It’s not a lie,” Viktor squeezed his hand, willing for his words, his faith to pass through the gesture. “And you’re not dying anymore.”

Head turning and gaze sharpening with that old flicker of determination catching behind the fatigue, Jayce searched Viktor’s face. For everything. “Then answer me one thing. Just one thing. For this former dying man.”

“Anything.”

A tired exhale curling between them, Jayce's thumb wrapped around his. “Why won’t you let yourself want anything?”

The question hit him right in the chest, a nail to the coffin that Viktor had built with his two hands. Mouth opening and closing, he knew that no words would quite be enough. “I already do. You know that I do.” And it’s true. Viktor allowed himself to want ever since Jayce first brought Thai takeout to the laboratory; he wanted to be an agent again; he wanted to still matter, to save the world; he wanted so many things. But at some point along the way, his desires had changed. Just like he had. And before recently, Viktor wasn’t quite sure if he could handle a transition like that.  

“It doesn’t seem like that.” Jayce’s voice cracked softly, seeing right through Viktor once again, digging into his chest where his heart was—a fleshy thing that beated and sobbed. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want me?”

Viktor’s breath shuddered out, ragged at the edges and thumb curled a half-moon into Jayce’s skin. “I do. More than anything, I do.”

Spare hand twitching against the blanket, Jayce’s fingers are hesitant, reaching without quite knowing how. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t let the moment pass unanswered. “Then why did you run?”

The truth sat before them, laid bare where Viktor stared down at his grip, his thumb tracing that same careful path across Jayce’s bruised skin. “Because I was afraid,” he admitted and as sour as it tasted in his mouth, he needed to say it even if it wasn’t as perfectly worded as he hoped it would be. “Because wanting something… means risking losing it. And I’ve already lost too much. I don’t know if my heart would survive losing you too.” Throat working around the rest, his voice thinned, pushing back the cloud of exhaustion that had plagued him for so long. “It’s hard… wanting, as a Kingsman. Complicated.”

“Am I complicated?” Jayce asked softly, like he really had to ask. 

Viktor’s lips twitched—something close to a smile, pale and frankly, a little off, but it was there. “Jayce… I think out of everything in this world, you might be the only clarity I have.”

Lifting his hand, Jayce reached over the bed, his limbs trembling, only to be caught by Viktor before his arm could fall, threading their fingers together like it was instinct. Like it was a habit they’d never learned how to break.

For a long while, they sat like that. Quiet, but together and it’s more than Viktor really deserved, but as Jayce’s eyes started to drift closed again, sedative dragging him gently under, he asked almost sheepishly, “Could I kiss you again sometime?”

“Yes,” Viktor answered, unhesitating. “I’d like that.”

Just before he slipped away, Jayce said, half-lidded and slurring, “You could kiss me now, if y’want.”

In return, as if answering his half-awake request, Viktor leaned forward, brushing his lips gently against Jayce’s temple, just beneath the edge of the gauze. “I’ll kiss you,” he promised, “when you can sit upright without groaning.”

“Fine,” he mumbled sleepily, his hold on Viktor’s hand weakening. “Stay… ‘til I fall asleep?” 

“I’ll be here. I promise I won’t leave you again.” And as Jayce’s breathing deepened into sleep, Viktor stayed right there—anchored, steady, unwilling to let go, not today, not tomorrow, for as long as they should stay together, for as long as the universe would keep them here. 

Somewhere in Midwest America, Two Years and Ninety-Four Days After — Present Day

The church rises from the flat stretch of prairie, a lone shape on the horizon. White and tall, its tallest spire reaches  up as if still trying to call heaven’s attention even now with the town behind it abandoned, swallowed by weeds, the single road that made up its mainstreet replaced with boarded storefronts with peeling signs. 

The town had been dying for the past decade; there was no particular reason for its eventual collapse, that’s just how life goes for these small places like this. A trickle of people leaving, a bypassed highway siphoning off the last thin flow of traffic, until one day, no one had a reason to stay.  And when the people left, the parish followed, folding quietly into larger congregations downstate. The diocese pulled out last season and three months ago, the church had been officially deconsecrated, leaving a hollow space stripped of its name, its sacraments, its claim to the divine.

It wasn’t Viktor’s first choice.

But it is Jayce’s.

“It’s Catholic,” Jayce had said when they first stood in front of it two weeks ago, boots crunching over gravel. His voice had carried a thin wistfulness undercutting the words, because unlike Viktor’s early memories of the church where he declared himself a non-believer, Jayce had fond childhood memories going with his mother every Sunday. “My mamá would’ve wanted us to be married in a church. Even if she can’t be here.”

She couldn’t come to the ceremony, of course. Families of Kingsman weren’t typically invited to large gatherings and having all active agents in one place made it too dangerous for Jayce to invite his mother. Not that she would understand if they told her that they had to be hitched in secret—to her knowledge, her son was working for a little engineering start-up in London, not saving the world as an agent for a century old espionage organization. 

So this empty church in a forgotten town is their compromise.  A way to respect her wishes and honour her even if she’d never get to see her son walk down the aisle.

The church doors are boarded over, long crossbeams nailed across them, but nothing a crowbar in Caitlyn’s hands couldn’t fix. “Seriously, Jayce, you couldn’t choose anywhere nicer to get married?” She wedges the crowbar deeper under a plank and heaves it free with a creak. “We could’ve gone to Santorini. Or San Marino. Or, literally anywhere with plumbing still.”

“But nowhere with this much charm.”

Caitlyn snorts, wiping her blazer. “Yeah. Real charming.” 

The last plank falls loose, and Jayce pushes the door open with a soft groan of old hinges.

Inside, the cathedral is quiet. Sacred in the peculiar way forgotten places often are, doubly so considering the sanctity of the building. Dust filters down from the rafters, swirling in shafts of light that fall through the fractured rose window. The pews are still present, and so is the church organ, so freshly abandoned that the music sheets for a hymnal are perched on its rack. 

Iron sconces clung to the walls, their candles cold and stubbed. At the front, the marble altar stood intact, though the crucifix had been removed—leaving behind a pale rectangle of cleaner stone, an absence outlined by dust. Small holes marked where icons had once hung, little voids where faith had been unscrewed from the walls.

It’s beautiful. In a haunting way and also in a rebirth manner, where new life could be breathed into lost spaces. 

Stained glass windows line the nave, tall and arched, their colored panes dripping rich reds, azures, and ochres across the flagstone floor, rippling colour over the room.

Viktor walks slowly down the aisle, his hand gliding across the worn backs of the benches. Ahead, Jayce stands near the front of the sanctuary, surveying the hollowed church with that familiar crooked grin—the one that says yes, this is exactly right —and something in Viktor’s chest aches, loosens, softens. 

“Isn’t it perfect?” Jayce murmurs as Viktor approaches, his arm sliding snug around Viktor’s waist, leaning into his side like he always does, like he can’t quite bear to stand apart.

Behind them, Caitlyn huffs, nudging Jayce’s shoulder with her elbow. “Move it, loverboy. Arthur’s only giving you two an hour, remember?”

Jayce rolls his eyes, not moving an inch. “We’ve got time.”

From behind them, Mel scoffs, the sound light but pointed as she strides past, heels clicking sharply against the stone. “No you do not.”

Viktor lets his head rest briefly against Jayce’s temple, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment before lifting again. “They’re right,” he murmurs. “But let’s make this hour count.”

Their small guest list files in behind Caitlyn: nine agents in total, each donning a slightly different shade of grey pinstripe, glasses perched at the bridge of their noses. Kingsman had afforded them the small gap in time—just this once. Mel herself signed the event off, a rare concession in the midst of perpetual churn of fieldwork. By sheer luck or stubborn maneuvering, every agent managed to make it. Some squeezed it between operations on opposite continents; others, like Caitlyn and Mel, commandeered a private plane and reshuffled entire schedules.

Now they gather in a scattered formation across the pews, polished signature Oxfords against the ground, weapons hidden beneath their jackets. If a stranger wandered in, they might mistake them for well-coordinated bodyguards at some clandestine affair. But here, in this forgotten church with no souls for miles, no one will ever know they were here.

Mel readies herself at the altar, straightening her silver tie before directing two hands towards the back of the cathedral to the door of the sacristy. “Fifty-three minutes left on the clock.” 

As Viktor passes her, cane clicking softly on the marble, she tips him a small nod—a smile lingering just beneath it. A token of approval from his closest friend of a decade.

Then the door closes behind them with a muted click, leaving the rest of the world hushed on the other side.

Inside the sacristy, Viktor leans into his crutch, exhaling slowly, the weight of the day settling into his spine. His gaze drifts to the mirror above the washbasin, where Jayce stands bent toward his reflection, frowning at his own stubborn hair.

Head tilted, brows furrowed, Jayce runs his fingers through the same curl over and over, trying and failing to coax it into place. There’s a crease in his brow Viktor knows by heart—the one that means he’s halfway between frustration and stubborn determination, and likely, the latter will win the fight. 

So this is happening , Viktor thinks—not with doubt, not with disbelief. But with an ache, soft and profound, spreading through his chest at the sight of him: Jayce, in his black tuxedo, bowtie slightly off-centre, shoulders broad beneath the sharp cut of his jacket. Handsome. Nervous. Earnest. His.

“You don’t need to fuss with it,” Viktor murmurs as he strides over and perches his head atop Jayce’s shoulder. “You look fine.”

Jayce catches his gaze in the reflection, flashing a crooked grin. “It’s the one day I get to fuss, isn’t it?”

Still, his fingers move with a touch too much nervous energy, adjusting the collar again, smoothing the lapel, thumbing at the silver cufflinks at his wrists—the pair of lion heads Viktor gave him years ago; they had been outdated as tasers effectively, but Jayce insisted on keeping them. 

Beyond the door, the muted echoes of Caitlyn and Mel’s voices drift faintly through the church. The small gathering outside waits. And in here, the air holds still, cocooning them inside this moment.

A subtle trace of Jayce’s cologne drifts between them—warm citrus, amber, the smoky undertone of resin. It curls soft around Viktor’s senses. “You nervous?”

Viktor’s lips twitch faintly, an almost-amused hum in his throat. “We’re Kingsmen, Jayce. We were trained not to be.”

Jayce huffs a quiet laugh, tilting his head just slightly into Viktor’s. “Doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

And maybe that’s true, but what Viktor feels isn’t nerves. The floaty sensation that overcomes all sense of doubt is something much more grand than that. A gravity that steadies his hands rather than shaking them.

Wrapping both arms around Jayce’s shoulder, his fingertips fuss lightly with his bowtie, adjusting it just so. “What is there to be nervous about? I’m marrying you.”

Jayce’s grin blooms wide, boyish, ridiculously fond. Without warning, he shifts his stance and dips Viktor, bending him backward with a playful flourish before pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth—gentle, grinning into it—before pulling him upright again, setting him carefully back onto his cane as he turns towards the door. “Should we go?”

“Ah… not just yet.” Catching Jayce’s sleeve, Viktor reaches into his own jacket pocket and draws out a thin leather cord holding up an irregular blue stone—polished smooth by time but imperfectly cut, its hue somewhere between sea-glass and river water. Not sapphire; Viktor had checked, years ago, out of idle curiosity. But it didn’t matter what it was. 

What mattered was that it was his. The first thing that had ever truly belonged to him. A gift from his mother, though the edges of her memory had long since worn down, her face blurred with time. This was the only proof she’d existed in his life—a relic of a family half-remembered, half-lost. A testament that, once, he’d belonged to someone. And now, he would belong again.

Alongside the memory, Viktor remembers another: Jayce’s voice, half-asleep on the sofa one quiet night months ago, confessing how he’d collected rocks as a child. Every pebble that caught the light in just the right way, even if it held no worth to anyone else. Pockets weighed down with small, ordinary things, treasured more than gold.

How quaint. Or maybe, how fitting. A rock collector. And a man who never meant to be one, but carried a single stone all his life.

“This is for you, zlato.” Viktor holds the cord between them, the gemstone spinning on its axis. “From what I understand, there’s a tradition in Britain where the wedded couple are required to have something old, new, borrowed, and blue for good luck.” 

The stone catches just the briefest slivers of daylight from the window—casting a small, wavering streak of azure across Jayce’s palm as Viktor presses it there, folding his fingers gently around it.. “And while this isn’t necessarily new… it is, eh, new to you.”

Jayce’s throat works around a quiet breath, his gaze dropping to the stone, then lifting back to Viktor’s, uncertain. “V… I can’t take this. You told me it belonged to your mother. It’s… it’s the only thing you have of her.”

Viktor’s hand closes lightly over Jayce’s fist, the cord pooling beneath their palms. “Then make sure it returns to me safely,” he murmurs. “Besides, after today—what’s the saying, what is mine is yours?”

Jayce holds his gaze, long and searching, before nodding once. Slowly, reverently, he slips the cord into the inner pocket of his coat. “I’ll take care of it. Promise.” That’s what they always do, isn’t it. Promising to each other, again and again. A chain of vows knotted between them, holding fast against the tide. And so far, they’ve held. 

Outside, the old bell in the tower tolls once, carried thin on the wind and from behind the door, Mel’s voice calls sharply: “Forty-five minutes! Don’t make me drag you out here!”

Jayce’s gaze flicks to him. “Ready?”

“Yes.” And for a fleeting moment, Viktor believes himself: that after a lifetime of pushing back want, of setting aside his own desires, he could hold this moment steady. That this borrowed hour could truly stretch long enough to count.

But Jayce had never been good with time, and when he plants a kiss to Viktor’s jaw, then to the corner of his mouth, he just has to cup Viktor’s face between both hands. Pressing their foreheads together, he smirks, wry and coy, “Mm, think Mel would mind waiting another five minutes, mi amor?”

Viktor opens his mouth to object, but they both know that he won’t. His hands are already reaching, already tugging Jayce down into a kiss. Tender and careful, their lips touch with a heat that’s more grateful than greedy and Jayce’s fingers curl into his hair, mussing the tedious work Viktor had done that morning. Viktor sighs into him, a quiet surrender, and Jayce’s hands—broad, warm, intimate—anchor against the back of Viktor’s skull.

Steadying.

Holding.

Tightening.

A little too tight.

Jayce’s grip harshly twists in his hair, earning a yelp, not a moan, from Viktor’s lips and confusion flares through him too late. With a violent wrench backward, Jayce’s fist pulls tight in his curls, ripping strands from his scalp. Viktor’s breath stutters, his head snapped back by the hair, spine bowing under the sudden strain.

“Jayce—?” he gasps, the name cracking in his throat.

But the eyes staring down at him aren’t Jayce’s. Any trace of warmth, the gleam, the glint, the sparkle—all stripped clean. The eyes that stare into Viktor are cold, glassed, a haze that doesn’t see him. Viktor’s crutch clatters to the floor, useless, hands scratching at Jayce’s sleeves, he pulls, claws, tries to pull him off, but to no avail. 

And with brutal, unforgiving force, Jayce yanks his head sideways—slamming it hard against the rough stone wall of the sacristy.

Stars burst white-hot behind Viktor’s eyes. The world folds in on itself, time and space and light crumbling to the room as the abyss swallows him whole. 

… What finds him first is the ache. Low and grinding, it pulses beneath the bone, like someone’s wedged a chisel into his temple and keeps twisting. Underneath his tongue hides the taste of copper pennies and grit. 

He blinks. Once. Twice. Willing the world to come back in crooked pieces. Light floods in—too bright, fractured by the mosaic of afternoon sunlight against the floor. World swimming, tilting, his ears ring sharp, then deeper, a hollow roar.

“... you’re fucking bonkers, Lancelot!” Someone shouts—is that Percival? 

Arms aching, Viktor pushes his palms against the floor. The stone is slick under his hand. Wet.

He looks down.

Blood.

Crimson pools into the floor of the sacristy as he drags himself his feet with his crutch where Tristan’s body lies sprawled out at the entrance, eyes rolled back, glasses flecked with blood and a splinter of wood speared straight through his chest.

Outside, pews lie shattered, overturned like corpses, jagged wood littering the tile. Bullet holes crater the walls. A hymn book lies soaked in a red smear.

“—UKHQ, this is Bedivere!” a voice barks from across the nave, crouched from behind a column near the front doors. “Tristan’s down, Galahad’s been hurt—we need transport out, now!”

Viktor’s head spins; his vision blurs, reels. 

Caitlyn. 

Hidden behind a shattered pew, her ponytail long gone, blood streams between her fingers as she clutches a hand hard over her left eye. Mel’s crouched beside her, murmuring something into the comm unit at her wrist. 

“Mel!” Viktor’s crutch eats at his underarm as he forces himself forward, yelling hoarsely across the chaos. “What—what’s happening—?!”

She glances back over her shoulder. Relief flickers in her expression—brief, fierce—before her jaw hardens again. “Stay back, Viktor!” she shouts, voice cracking sharp through the carnage. “He’s compromised! Do not engage!”

Engage? Engage with who? 

At the far end of the aisle, closest to the door, a figure steps into the holy light, Oxford shoes crunching over shards of glass. He walks slow, heavy. Off-balance. Something drags behind him: a jagged splinter of pew, gripped tight in one fist like a makeshift club.

Jayce.

For a moment, their eyes meet across the wreckage. The hollow shell of a man who was once the best of humanity greets him, blood smeared across Jayce’s face. A cold, dead shiver spears through Viktor’s spine, dripping between every vertebrae.

And then, unblinking, Jayce charges. Jagged wood raised high over his shoulder, steps pounding hard, closing the gap—

“Merlin!” Percival barrels into Jayce’s side from nowhere, slamming his full weight into him. The blow knocks Jayce sideways, sending him crashing hard onto the ground. “That’s your fucking husband, Lancelot!” Percival snarls, breathless, adrenaline-wired. “ Snap out of it! ”

A fist cracks against Jayce’s cheek. The sound lurches Viktor’s stomach. But the sight is even worse. Percival manages a few solid hits, but Jayce overpowers him easily. One brutal shove and Percival’s tossed off, his body rolling across the aisle. 

He scrambles, trying to rise—but Jayce’s already on him.

Hands fisting Percival’s collar, he slams his head into the ground. Once. Twice. A sickening thud. A third. A fourth. Each impact reverberates through the ruined hall.

Viktor flinches, his pulse hammering so loud it drowns out everything else.

Another agent lunges—Bedivere this time. Tackling Jayce from behind, she buys just enough time for Lamorak to drag Percival’s battered body clear from the fray. “Lancelot—Jayce—” Bedivere grits out, her teeth clenched, her face scrunched tight with dread as she levels her pistol at his head. “I really don’t wanna do this. Stand down!”

A warning shot whirs past Jayce’s ear, but he doesn’t flinch. As if all fear and  humanity had been cast aside. With no hesitation, he tugs the gun into his torso, wrenching it from Bedivere’s grip. 

She struggles, fighting for control with tooth and nail, but Jayce pitches her bodily into the nearest pew with a sharp kick and the bench skids backward with a screech. Slamming the butt of the gun to her skull, Jayce fires, once, twice, straight to her forehead. 

And bedivere’s body crumples. Still. Silent. Lifeless. 

“No.” Viktor’s breath knots painfully. “ No no no no— ” His stomach flips. His legs feel boneless beneath him. This couldn’t be real—Jayce wouldn’t, he would never, but the man doesn’t stop. He’s already pivoting, raising the gun again, aiming at Lamorak, who shields Percival in his arms.

“Jayce—! ” Viktor’s cry tears from his throat, raw and desperate before he even realizes the plea.

The gun wavers and Jayce's head turns, just long enough for Lamorak to scramble free, hauling Percival toward the chancel.

“Merlin! This is a direct order! Stand down—now!” From the sidelines, Mel barks at him, her voice fiercer than he’s ever heard her, but his feet are already moving. 

Dragging his cane, staggering forward, Viktor crosses the ruined aisle, stepping over flecks of blood staining the divinity of the cathedral. And for one ephemeral, infinitesimally short heartbeat—Viktor sees him. A flicker. A glimmer. A fragile splinter of something human trapped beneath the hollow of Jayce’s gaze.

Something that knows him .

“Jayce,” Viktor pleads, the grip on his crutch trembling, although he’s not quite sure if it’s fear or the acknowledgement of the descending madman before him. “I know you’re still in there. You have to be. Please—come back. Come home. ”

Gun clattering to the ground, for eight heavy steps, ones that Viktor matches, it almost looks as though Jayce is there, rationality bleeding back, the blind, bloodthirsty haze thinning into something dazed, haunted, sick with realization.

But then, all too quickly, it’s stripped away, and the man vaults over the wreck of a pew, bearing down fast from above.

Even with his lack of practice, Viktor’s reflexes snap together and he ducks back, crutch scraping harshly across the tile as he pivots. Jayce’s fists miss him by a hair. Viktor’s bad leg nearly gives—his brace locking with a painful click. 

“Damn it—” Viktor hisses, shifting weight, trying to stay upright, trying to stay mobile.

Jayce comes at him again, one foot forwards, fist clenched. 

Viktor can’t outrun him. He knows this. He stumbles back, swinging his crutch out in instinct, intercepting Jayce’s arm mid-strike. It connects sharply with Jayce’s wrist and while the man’s actions stutter for a moment, both hands immediately seize the crutch. 

“Jayce, listen to me— ” Viktor feels his grip slipping. But Jayce isn’t listening. Jayce isn’t here. “It’s me—it’s Viktor— ” 

The crutch wrenches free from his grip and is sent spinning across the floor.

One hand cinches around the front of Viktor’s jacket, hauling him clean off the floor like he weighs nothing. The other slides higher, closing around Viktor’s throat.

The pressure clamps down instantly. Viktor’s hands fly up, scrabbling at Jayce’s iron grip. Useless. Jayce’s arm is a steel cable. Knuckles pale with strain.

Viktor’s feet kick helplessly, inches above the marble. His vision warps at the edges, dark gorging on his consciousness fast, his pulse beating against his eardrums. He claws. Gasps. 

“...Stop—” Viktor rasps, each syllable dragged like broken glass over his tongue.

Then—a bullet whizzes past his ear, a slice so close it shears a strand of his hair.

Jayce’s head snaps back. A burst of red blooms from his right eye.

For a second, time stiffens, freezes, and forgets how to tick.

Jayce’s one remaining gold eye widens. Recognition. Confusion. Pain.

“V…” A whisper, hoarse, fragile, chipping away with one long breath.

Jayce’s grip loosens and Viktor drops. He collapses hard onto the stone, knees jolting against the floor, and Jayce crumples after him, body buckling, falling straight into his arms.

“ No— ” Jayce’s weight slumps against his chest, too heavy, too still. His hands scrabble uselessly against Jayce’s skull, pressing over the bleeding wound, trying to hold it all together. “No no no no no—Jayce— ”

His head spins, a sick dizziness clawing through his skull. His focus jerks behind him—wild, disoriented, unbelieving.

Arthur. The pistol in her fingers lowers. 

“Mel—” His tongue fails to hold her name steady. “How… why?”

Eyes closed, she turns away. “I… Viktor, you know that I had no choice.”

He knows. Of course he knows; his throat still aches, the fingerprints red against his skin. But that’s not what he wants to hear. Not now. Not as his bloodied hands fumble at Jayce’s pulse. Not as he shakes his shoulder, his blood-splattered collar. 

It feels like hours pass. Shock overriding the grief. Panic overriding shock. But it’s really only a few seconds before Gawain’s voice is slicing the silence.

“Do you smell that?”

“...Gas.” Caitlyn’s words are thin, edged in exhaustion but sharpened by horror. “It’s gas! Arthur—this church is a bomb!”

A tremor ripples beneath them. Dust rains down from the beams overhead. “We were set up! Kingsmen, out—now!” Nobody even makes it to the door. 

Everything happens so fast. A shockwave shatters the remaining windows. Colored glass showers from the ceilings in a thousand glittering knives. A high, ringing roar devours the air as they’re all thrown back. Fire spills in. It crawls through the windows in glowing tendrils, licking up the pews, reaching.

“Jayce? Jayce!” Even with his head splitting from the noise, his side drenched in someone else’s blood, Viktor finds him. Hauling his body across the floor, he curls over Jayce’s chest, shielding him with whatever’s left of himself.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, curling tighter, lying through his teeth. “I’ve got you, I swear.” Hands trembling violently, smearing red over Jayce’s quickly fading skin, he pleads, “Wake up. Please Jayce. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me—”

Jayce’s lashes flicker faintly. His lips part. But no words come. Only the escape of a frail, quivering breath. A ghost exhaling.

“Viktor! Where’s Viktor!” Mel’s voice cracks through the static, unsteady behind him. Her heels scratch, the nave burning a dark orange too quickly. “Viktor, we have to go! Leave him!”

“No! ” he snarls, shaking his head violently. “I’m not—I won’t—!”

The beams groan ominously above. One of them crashes down into the aisle behind them. 

Viktor swallows down a sob.

“He’s gone, Viktor! We need to leave!” Mel’s hands claw at the back of his collar, yanking forcefully. “Please! I won’t lose any more agents today!”

Viktor stares down at Jayce’s face. At the slow, uneven rise of his chest. At the welting from his socket. 

The flames surge higher and heat licks down from the rafters.

Mel hauls him back harder, and this time—he lets her.

He lets her drag him away.

Lets Jayce slip from his arms. Leaves him crumpled beneath the fractured glow of the burning stained glass. Leaves him as the fire curls closer, as the ceiling creaks and bows and begins to give.

And Viktor—staring back one last time as the church swallows the only man he’s ever loved—knows, in the marrow of his bones, that something in him isn’t coming back from those walls.

So this is what happens to men who want. 

Kingsman Tailors, Two Days After The Incident

It’s rare that all the agents were ever all in one place, or… however many were left. Even rarer that the decanter was used.

Today, the Kingsman briefing hall is silent, even if the absences in the room are deafening—an entity of its own. The air smells faintly of scorched wool, smoke clinging to their skins. A stain no soap could ever fully wash away. 

At the head of the table, Mel stands, her glass raised high, amber glinting under the lamplight. “To our fallen.”

Viktor—though his role as Merlin isn’t meant to stand in the lamplight, not privy to these sacred toasts anymore—still stands beside Mel, a glass cupped in his palm.

Caitlyn, the seat closest to Mel, leans heavily into the back of her chair, her wounded eye hidden beneath white gauze. And around the room, each agent wears their own bruises and while most are tucked beneath the silhouettes of fine tailoring, some bleed through: the fresh sutures crossing Percival’s brow and mouth, the deep purple bruising curling around Viktor’s throat, fingerprint shaped.

The room holds a breath, and the glasses lift higher.

“To Tristan. To Bedivere.”

Brittle seconds tighten, a silence that closes the throat with the name that haunts them all. 

“And to Lancelot.”

Glasses tip back and the brandy burns down Viktor’s throat like penance. Sharp. Bitter. A liquor older than any of them would ever live to be.

He doesn’t blink as the fire settles low in his chest. It rots there, never to be snuffed out—he can’t even manage to finish the glass and sets it down, hands shaky. 

Slowly, quietly, the room disperses. Some agents retreat downstairs to the tailor shop, taking the transport to UKHQ, pretending their grief can be sewn shut with double-breasted wool and the cold weight of a sidearm. Others slip outside, vanishing into the London mist, coats flaring behind them like ghosts. 

Viktor doesn’t join them. He stays where he is, head fogged and empty, eyes fixed on the street beyond the window, watching the cars and people and world pass by. 

“Merlin?” Familiar and gentle, Mel’s voice comes through the haze. Jacket draped over her forearm, her expression is carved from exhaustion, tempered by something softer. “Could we speak?”

Viktor doesn’t turn, gaze fixed on the glass, watching how rain begins to smear across the surface. “My husband is dead, Arthur.” The statement turns foul across his tongue. An acridness that festers without his permission. Words fraying, he manages to not sob into his breath. “There is nothing to say.”

“I know,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry, Viktor. I truly am.”

The apology feels genuine, warm even. But it doesn’t reach him.

Viktor’s jaw clenches.

She steps in line beside him, peering past the window alongside him, a quiet company—one that he doesn’t quite want right now. Still, Mel stays at his side, the way that they used to be together when they were much younger, silent for a few minutes, until she fractures his grief, “You didn't finish your drink.”

“I don’t see the point.”

“You’re supposed to drink,” Mel’s gaze flickers, a faint sadness pooling at its edges. “We raise the glass, and we let them go.”

And that nearly has Viktor crumbling in the spot, but he holds firm, holds tall, shoulders drawn back, hands tucked behind him. Even if he doesn’t feel like he is. “I know,” Viktor replies, though the sudden wariness in his voice betrays him. “But… I’m not ready to set him down yet. Please, Arthur,” at long last, he meets her eyes, the gold of his irises empty, faded to a tarnished bronze. “Mel. I just… need some time.”

Mel nods, a flicker of understanding warming her tired features.“... We’ll hold the line until you’re ready.”

Jayce’s Viktor’s Townhouse, Still That Day

The key turns in the lock with a click far too loud for the day. Viktor pushes the door open slowly and the townhouse greets him with not the smell of cooking and golden light spilling from the kitchen, but with stillness. A cold loiters inside the walls, spreading from the murky evening outside. The weight of the place— their place—presses down like a hand against his chest.

It’s heavier than it was yesterday.

But eventually, he has to move—he can’t stand here forever like a trespasser in his own home—so he does. Cane tapping lightly against the floorboards, he steps inside, the sound fragile against the hush. Every footfall feels cautious and unsteady as though the floor itself might give way beneath him. As though the wrong step might send him crumbling.

“I’m home,” Viktor says softly, his voice barely filling the space. “Rio. Señorita Canelita Talis.”

The silence stretches—then breaks, as the familiar patter of claws clicking against wood comes closer. From the living room they come: Rio’s amber eyes lift to meet his, and behind her, Canelita barrels forward, her tail wagging in hopeful arcs. 

They approach as they always do, like nothing’s changed. Because for them, nothing has.

He makes it down the hall—barely—until he sinks into the couch with a slow, aching groan of his bones. His crutch thuds lightly against the armrest as he lets it fall from his grip. 

As if sensing his distress, Rio noses at his thigh, her head settling atop his knee. Viktor’s hand drifts absently through her silky coat. Her amber gaze is steady. Patient. Knowing in a way that feels cruel.

Canelita however, huffs and scratches at his feet insistently, her dark eyes bright with expectation. Poor girl didn’t even know. Maybe… that is for the best.

A breathless, hollow laugh escapes him, sharp and wet, it pricks and stabs, a knife to the chest. “I’m afraid, little lady,” he murmurs, scratching beneath Canelita’s ear, “your father won’t be coming home.”

She tilts her head, ears flicking. Her gaze climbs up to him, shining with confusion, trust, an eager questioning that has his stomach lurching as she leans harder against his braced leg, waiting.

Waiting.

God—how is he supposed to tell her? Would she even understand that her father will never step through that door again? That no, he won’t take her on walks, won’t call her name, won’t kneel down to ruffle her fur or sneak her scraps from the dinner table?

Viktor always believed animals could feel grief. Science supports it, studies prove it. But this? This jagged, monstrous ache that swallows everything? Could she understand the depth of it? The shape it carves out of you?

And the pit inside him only widens, hollowing into the space where his heart should be—is—but he wishes it weren’t.

The world, in its cruelty, arranges the scene around him like a stage. Shadows from the falling afternoon stretch long across the room, pooling around familiar shapes.

A trench coat draped over the back of a chair. The half-drunk mug on the coffee table. The spare set of glasses left beside an open book, spine cracked, a pencil tucked between the pages. 

Jayce’s things.

All of it. Still here. Still his.

Viktor stares. His throat closes. He should clean. He should pack it all away. That’s what people do, isn’t it? They make space. They move forward.

But the thought of touching any of it—of folding that coat, of washing that mug—makes bile rise, hot and bitter.

“Should’ve been here,” Viktor whispers, the words barely a thread of breath. “... He promised.”

Did he? Viktor tries to remember. Can’t. Maybe out of all things they swore to one another, Jayce never promised to stay by his side at all. Maybe Viktor only imagined it—spun it out of need, out of hope, out of desperation.

But it feels true.

And the feeling of it, the ache of it, splits something deep and irrevocable in his chest.

He curls forward, his hand fisting in Rio’s fur, pressing his face against her head as if he could bury the fracture, as if the warmth of her could stitch it closed. But soon enough, muffled in her soft fur, the first, shaky sound that breaks loose from his throat. A sound that’s too small to carry all he feels.

Canelita shifts at his feet, pressing close, her muzzle resting against his ankle, a tether anchoring him here. 

The room hums around them. The distant tick of the clock on the wall. The echo of the city bleeding through the curtains. It’s too quiet.

Viktor stays there: hunched over, hands buried in fur, throat tight, eyes stinging. And—for the first time since the church—the sadness takes him. Quiet at first. Then shuddering. Then whole. 

It comes like a tide, slow and suffocating, pulling him under with a tenderness that feels cruel. In the stillness of their too-empty home, Viktor grieves. He grieves the promise. He grieves the could-have-been. He grieves the still-here of Jayce’s things. 

He always knew—he’d always known—that this was the cost of loving Jayce. That love was an inevitability with a price. That someday, it would come to collect its dues. But he prayed. God, how he prayed, so fervently he could’ve been mistaken for a devotee. That it wouldn’t be so soon.

He once told himself love wasn’t worth it. Told himself it was an equation that never balanced, a liability they couldn’t afford in their line of work. He remembered saying it aloud, once, in the lab—on a quiet afternoon during those few unpleasant months when Viktor had convinced himself that living without Jayce was safer than living with him. And still, that afternoon, Jayce had left a thermos of coffee by his station.

“Affection will only get you hurt,” he’d muttered to no one, or maybe to the memory of his own warnings, to the clinical logic Kingsman had trained into him.

He’d believed it. Truly, utterly believed it.

Until Jayce.

Jayce, who made him forget every calculus he’d built to defend himself. Jayce, who made him forget that love was a knife you handed over willingly, blade pressed to your own throat. Jayce, who made him forget that to love meant to fear. Fear of waiting for a call that wouldn’t come. Fear of the empty place beside him on the sofa. Fear of the jacket still slung over the back of that chair, of abandoned coffee mugs, of books left half-finished, of all the small, ordinary remnants of a life that had once been shared—and suddenly wasn’t.

And yet, despite it all, Viktor let himself have it. He’d let himself reach for it anyway.

Because Jayce was Jayce and he wanted —with his whole, reckless, radiant heart—for so many things. Because Jayce brought Thai takeout, laughed at Viktor’s sharp edges and somehow hadn’t been cut, and held his hand in the dark. Because Jayce told Viktor to want and—for the first time in his life—Viktor did. He wanted everything that would ever come with Jayce. Even knowing what it would cost. 

And now, he’s still here. But Jayce isn’t.

Love bruised, bloomed, boiled, and Viktor paid for it with every agonizing second he sits alone in that chair, listening to the clock count him forward into a future Jayce would never see.

Eyes stinging red, a cracked, broken sob claws its way out of him. He’d been right, after all. Love was a burden.

Rio presses closer at the sound, her warm weight leaning harder against him, as if she could shoulder some of it for him, as if she could hold him upright through the breaking.

But it was worth it. 

Viktor drags a hand down his face, palm catching tears he hadn’t even noticed spilling over. 

It had been worth everything. Because if he had known—if he’d seen this future, this loss, this room—he still would’ve said yes. Still would’ve let Jayce kiss him. Still would’ve let him laugh over dinner. Still would’ve let him inch closer, closer, closer.

Even knowing he’d be left sitting here, in the silence, with nothing but the dogs and the ghosts and a name he could barely speak without unraveling.

He’d choose it again. He would always choose it.

Outside, the city moved on without Jayce at his side. Inside, Viktor mourned.

And for the first time in his life, because there's so many firsts, he let himself feel the full, terrible weight of wanting something. And losing it.