It was only adrenaline that kept Harry walking as small, precisely placed wounds kept him conscious but in agony, covered in so much of his own coagulated blood that he was more dark red than flesh-colored. It was not by design that his hair covered the gruesome laceration that used to be his eye; instead, it was plastered to his face as his injuries tried to heal in the cold, concrete walls that housed him for the last several days. It could have been years as far as he knew, time was nothing but the pain in his joints as ropes contorted his body into odd angles, the ache in his knees from kneeling on the stone. It was as if they had all forgotten that they had trapped a KINGsman, that they had not only caught the tiger by the toe, they enraged it and now it was on the loose.
It was a gritty, dirty fight; Harry felt bones crack under his hands when he maneuvered them in just the right way, clawed his way to freedom with tooth and nail, the occasional gun when he could liberate one from his target’s security. There were no magnificent explosions, no one was walking away in sunglasses and a leather jacket; it was slow, calculated, a further torture for those that died using such primitive means and for the man that would have to live with the memory of blood on his hands, of the things he did to survive, but he always seemed to survive. Harry was shirtless and injured when he made it to a lobby, an elderly woman greeting him politely with such training in manners that she did not even acknowledge the state of him with an awkward look; she was the picture of professionalism. “Are you finished, sir?”
Always a gentleman, Harry nodded. “Yes, thank you.” He placed the bloody grip of the weapon he stole into the woman’s hand, staining it with no reaction from the recipient before he casually strolled--limped out of the front door.
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Swollen eyes opened and Eggsy looked up when he heard a phone ring. Consciousness was not his friend, but he clung to it desperately, tried to remember his training. Merlin would have been proud of his focus as he listened in on the faint voice speaking on the other end when one of his captors answered. There was someone familiar on the other end, but it sounded different, darker, exhausted. He did not know that Harry was found naked in a blizzard after his escape, that the weeks he spent missing were those that he used to heal so that he could re-enter the fray, that his stakes were so personal.
Eggsy wished he could cling to that voice, follow it back to the arms that always held him so tightly, the lips that always kissed him senseless, the warmth and comfort that was the polar opposite of what he felt now in the hands of an organization with a proclivity for torture. He could not make out much, but there was one thing he heard clearly, and it made his heart race, his head pound. Just one sentence and he felt nothing but dread.
“Me for the boy, even trade.”
@mannersmademan
