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He spends his 24th birthday in the basement of what was once a Norwegian diplomats house — before a small bomb had gone off upstairs and near leveled the entire building, that is.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Eggsy wheezes through a cloud of plaster dust and groans as he tries to pick himself up from the hard packed dirt floor; tries to shake the bits of ceiling off his shoulders, and brushing debris from his hair. Through the cloud of chalky destruction that hangs thick in the suddenly much shorter basement, he can see Roxy on her face under a thin player of cracked ceiling plaster. She’s groaning and barely moving, but she’s alive, and so is he. That’s about as much comfort as they can take from the current situation.
Around them, the whole house seems to groan, and Eggsy lets out a rather hysterical gurgle of laughter. There’s no use in pretending this wasn’t one of the scariest moments of his life; being a Kingsman wasn’t about not being scared ever — it was about how to take that helplessness and fear and doing something with it. Like getting the hell out of a slowly collapsing building.
“Right,” Eggsy goes on to grunt, ignoring the stiff pain in his neck and glancing around for some opening through which they could make a daring escape. “Have you got anything from Arthur?” Because his earpiece isn’t lodged in his head anymore and he’s not going to waste precious time looking for it amid the mess on the floor.
There’s no response from Lancelot.
“Roxy?”
And when he looks back at her, she’s still made no real attempt to sit up.
“Rox,” Eggsy hisses, crippling concern suddenly flooding his chest as he crawls across the floor on his knees to kneel in front of her. “Hey, don’t move. Are you alright? Right, dumb question, we’ve got a few tons of house over our heads. But — tell me where it hurts?” Her shoulders are shaking, and he feels like he’s been punched in the jaw (by an entire floorplan) because he can handle his own panic. He knows he’s being dumb and giving in to emotional instincts. But if Roxy’s freaking out, it’s really hard not to sign their diagnosis as ‘right fucked’.
“Hey,” he tries again, heaving the plaster off her back and trying to keep the rising hysteria out of his voice. “Come on, where’re you hurt? Roxy, you’ve got to talk to me —“
“I’m not hurt,” she sniffles against her arm, still not looking at him. And while her voice is some semblance of steady, the second she’s done speaking, the shaking in her shoulders redoubles.
“Well — fuck, what is it then?” He splutters, patting down her spine nervously anyway — half a consoling pat on the back and half a worried, impromptu field check up. “I can’t have you freaking out at me, yeah? You gotta keep your wits about you if we’re gonna get outtof here.”
Now Eggsy considers himself very good in a crisis — as part of that letting fear fuel you, not smother you mentality he’d practically been born with — and considers that tiny motivational speech to be quite solid and reassuring; it was honest and realistic, for one thing, and nothing quite seemed to ground Roxy Morton quite like well founded reason. She should sniff and pull herself together at any moment now, then they could put their heads together and figure out a way to save their skins.
Any… moment… now!
Except now she’s looking up at him with wet eyes and the resilience of her upper lip is wavering. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she whispers which, admittedly throws him for a bit of a loop.
“What, like, in the basement? Nah, neither of us is supposed to be — we should be in the fucking car.”
“I should be on a plane,” Roxy stressed, and Eggsy — call him bright — gets the distinct impression that he’s missing a huge part of the puzzle here. But also that, if he just shut up and kept his hand on her shoulder, she’d clue him in. And sure enough, when the fresh wave of tears subsides, Roxy mumbles like she’s got a bad head cold. “I’m not supposed to be here. It was supposed to be Kay, but he reopened his stab wound from Dubai and Arthur — he promised me it’d be simple, it’d be easy and it’d be quick. And, and now we’re going to die down here, and I won’t — I won’t even be able to go to my fathers funeral.”
Ah. So that’s it.
Roxy dissolves into a fresh wave of sobs again, and Eggsy now understands that they’re tears of grief, not terror. He hasn’t solidified a mental blockade thick enough to protect against what it feels like to lose someone close to you. Twenty years and hardly ever seeing the man before that may have numbed the loss of his own father, but the hole in his heart that was Harry Hart was poorly self medicated; still ragged and raw.
“Rox, I’m sorry. So, so sorry,” he tells her. And he means it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I wouldn’ta let Arthur ring you, I could have done this myself.”
There’s a crunch and a bang as the precious ceiling above them creaks, and a wooden beam crashes down across the room. It’s enough to jarringly remind Eggsy where they are, to jerk him away from personal empathy and focus Roxy so they can both survive this. He;s thinking of a halfway nice way to tell her to pull up her big girl pants and that he’d hold her hand while she cried on the plane back to UK HQ. But just airing her grievances aloud seemed to clear her head, at least fractionally, because Roxy’s sitting up and wiping a dirty hand over her tear stained face. There’s no marked improvement, but Eggsy smiles (albeit a little forcibly) when she points at the wooden beam across the small, caving room.
“We should get that and prop it up against the ceiling.”
It was good to have her back.
Naturally, he attends her fathers funeral with her.
He’d needed more room than most Kingsman agents on account of his mother and little sister. And while he wouldn’t, in a couple years when Michelle remarried again and moved in with her new husband, for now Eggsy couldn’t really complain. It was a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, with nice big windows that’d made his mum cry when she’d first seen them. There was a rustic kitchen and now a little doggy door for JB and a million pictures all over the walls. Eggsy really couldn’t complain.
Except that meant Roxy’d gotten Harry’s house.
And it’s not like he’s bitter or anything, but the first time he comes over and she’s changed things around, he acts like a bit of a prick about it. It’s unsubtle, his open disdain, and she’s sharp. “Would you rather I just leave it as is, Eggsy? Like some living monument instead of my own home?”
He wouldn’t. And physically deflates when she tells him that all Harry’s belongings are in boxes upstairs; that he’s welcome to take whatever he likes. That’s how he ends up with Mr. Pickle and a stack of newspaper clippings from The Sun in his attic instead. And they make it something of a tradition to meet up for a drink every time they’re both in town in order to make a dent in Harry’s pretentious-extensive-expensive collection of wine-brandy-whiskey-bourbon.
“You’ll get down if they start shooting, yeah?” he yells over the scream of the tires and the blaring honk of the truck he just cut off.
They’re driving — not backwards, not yet — and ducking through pretty fast moving traffic with four dark cars hot on their tails. It’s like something out of a movie, and the chase scene would be invigoratingly if Roxy would just sit down and buckle her fucking seatbelt.
“You’ll get down? Rox! Lancelot!”
But she’s twisted in her seat, clinging to the back of her headrest and ignoring his well meant advice in favor of shouting out specs she observes about the men — and women, goon was an equal opportunity position — on their asses. “They’re riding low on the bearings, probably armored or at least reinforced. But what they’re compensating for in protection they’ve sacrificed in speed. We should be able to lose them up at —!”
The glass in their rear window shatters in a spray of gunfire and shitty safety glass. Eggsy swears loudly, nearly swerves into a green four-door and barely manages to keep his eyes on the road. He’s a pistol in his holster and pulls it out with one hand still on the steering wheel. But he’s got to squeeze between a motorcycle and a bus — without killing the cyclist or the two of them — and can’t exactly twist around to return fire. He doesn’t complain when Roxy snatches the gun from his hand, and offers her a sharply approving — “Good girl!” — when there’s the telltale shriek of metal on pavement and the thunderous crashes of one of the cars flipping over after she shot the driver.
But when there’s another rat-tat-tat spray of gunfire from a second car, Eggsy fists his hand in her jacket and drags her down out of the line of fire.
When the world is at peace, minimum recuperative leave (fourteen days, sometimes less depending on who needs what where) stretches into maximum recuperative leave (thirty four days) or into Arthur, I’m fucking bored (four months). Instead of smacking him upside the head for crowding and nagging him, Arthur casually reminds Eggsy that life won’t always be this quiet and that he might consider the lull in large scale violent crimes as a prime opportunity to remind his family that he existed. Which isn’t much of a hint, but Eggsy takes it and commandeers Daisy from her primary school homeroom almost immediately.
They decide they’re going to the zoo. And pick up Roxy along the way.
Later, when they’ve got ice cream and his sister had already inhaled hers in record time, he finds himself pinned with the scrutiny of a seven year old and his heart drops a little before Daisy even opens her mouth. “Is she your girlfriend?” she asks, notably firm in her suspicions. On his other side, Roxy gives a rather noncommittal snort but doesn’t come to his aid, which leaves Eggsy scowling at neither of them in particular.
“Nah,” he tells his sister, then shoves his ice cream cone into her hand and ushers her off the bench to go see the zebras.
“Lovely cologne.”
“Thanks, love — picked it out just for you.”
Behind him, he can hear the thunk of deadweight on top of a tiny round dinner table, and the subsequent scream of their marks date once she realized she was sitting next to a dead man. Leaning on him, swaying with him to the music that abruptly stops when panicked chaos erupts in the restaurant, Eggsy can feel her shake her wrist to retract the second round of poisonous darts in her weaponized bracelet. When Roxy taps him on the back of the neck, he gets the message loud and clear: time to go.
Galahad is something of a fucking terror in the surveillance lab on a good day. And on a bad day — when they’re parked outside a tall hotel and Eggsy’s squirming because they’ve a live feed of Lancelot being kicked around by the guards of the man she’d been tasked to seduce and knock out — he’s the devil incarnate, scratching at the walls and talking over the important parts of the conversation happening in the other room, that Roxy’s microphone picks up.
“They’re killing her,” he hisses for the fourth time in the last five minutes. Arthur would be considerably more concerned if he didn’t know Lancelot could incapacitate the room full of disgusting men in a heartbeat if she wanted to. He also knew she could take a beating if she needed to, and that’s what she was doing right now.
“They’re hurting her,” he corrects, which does absolutely nothing to pacify Eggsy’s well meant dismay. Roxy screams as if on cue — because they are hurting her, and when being beaten there was no reason not to scream; there was no nobility in pretending your assailants weren’t hurting you because they knew they were (similar training was applied to prolonged, systematic torture, but thank god they’re not listening to that today). And if it helped her cope to let it all out, neither of them were going to think any less of her for screaming. They weren’t the ones who had just been hauled up by their hair and backhanded back to the carpet. The feed from Roxy’s glasses is crooked now, and he doesn’t have to look sideways to know that Eggsy has his hand on the door handle. “Easy,” Arthur growls.
On the disjointed video screen, he can see Lancelot stick out a hand. “Wait,” she pleads, and when her assailants laugh, their boss in the next room says those magical words — “… not paying £1,000,000 for biological weapons with less than an 80% mortality rate, Petra, shit!” — and Arthur nods despite the fact his agent can’t see him.
“Terminate them, Lancelot.”
“Yes, sir.”
The smirking men above her don’t even get enough time to realize they’re fucked. One second a beefy, balding man is laughing and the next there’s a hole in his head. None of them really know how she manages to hide weapons so efficiently on her person when all her missions like this always called for rather tight, rather revealing, (seldom bulletproof) attire, but she does. And Arthur is constantly (proud) impressed by his agents resilience and creativity. “Good girl,” a still rather edgy Galahad grunts to the right of him when Lancelot shoots another man straight through the heart before diving behind a couch.
There’s the blast of multiple, rapidly firing handguns and Roxy’s breathing heavily while she fixes her glasses and checks her ammo clips. In the car, they get glimpses of the room when their field agent pops around the sofa to return fire; they’re blink-and-you-miss-it exchanges of shots, that’s how fact she is. And each bullet finds a mark until the shooting has stopped and they can see the last remaining goon scramble through the door.
“Arthur,” comes her voice, composed despite the fact she limps past a wall mounted mirror and they can see her clutching her ribs. “One’s escaped. I’m in pursuit, I’ll —“
“No you’re bloody well not.”
He’s never taking Eggsy along on a mission again. But he’s got his mind (and heart) in the right place.
“Negative, Lancelot,” Arthur tells her sternly. Then slowly, thoughtfully turns to physically face Eggsy for the first time since they’d climbed into the car. “…Galahad.”
The man’s already halfway out of the car, gun drawn.
“Yes, Arthur.”
The mission report reads: terminated with extreme prejudice.
She’s not the first lady knight. There have, in fact been three other female agent in Kingsman history — two Kay’s and one Bedivere; all with tragically short lives and tragically under appreciated success. They’ve access to every old file (that Arthur deemed appropriate and keeps unencrypted, of course) and when she’s laid up on bedrest with a broken clavicle and heavy bruising all along her left flank, Roxy reads all of Kay (L. Maxima), Kay (D. Petrov), and Bedivere (S. Dimagio)’s files with the growing suspicion that very few other women made it past desk duty within the agency because of the short careers of these three impressive women. It wasn’t their faults, from the look of it. Their deaths in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s had largely been brutal, unkind, and at the hands of (men) enemies.
It makes her feel incredibly lucky to have escaped Serbia with just a few fractures, bumps, and bruises.
And yet still rather bitter when Eggsy visits her later.
“This is such a boys club,” she grumbles, and he gets a strange look on his face. She apologizes, of course; he’d had the same experiences in training that she’d had, being the odd one out because of prejudices rooted in gender and class. But where Eggsy could fake a rather convincing posh accent for a few hours at a time, there was nothing Roxy could do for her lower center of gravity and lesser bone density. There was no use really complaining.
Still, years later when Gaheris loses his leg and retires, and they have to appoint candidate to take his place, Eggsy makes sure to point out his recruit across the UK HQ green.
Lydia Gates has a good two inches on most of the boys; big eyes and bigger hair that isn’t being very successfully restrained by her headband. She’s got dark skin and a refined, demanding call when she stops doing crunches to tell of a snotty boy next to her for mocking the others’ form.
“Maybe a little less of a boys club now, yeah?” Eggsy huffs, obviously a little pleased with himself.
Roxy doesn’t have words for the little warmth in her chest, so she just echoes: “Yeah.”
The morning after his mothers third wedding, the morning after they fucked for the first (and last) time, he’s hungover and begrudgingly awake at half past eight. Roxy is sore, and her bruises are beginning to surface in spectacular shades of purple and blue. She’s drowning in his well worn dressing gown, but she moves around his kitchen with grace and the practiced ease of one who invited herself in through the back door fairly often.
And when she slides a plate full of breakfast between the arms he’s propped up on the table to hold up his head, Eggsy nearly hurls.
“Eggsy-over-easy.”
If not at the food, then at that comment.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” he tells her, but Roxy just snorts her bemusement and gets them glasses of tap water and antacid.