Chapter Text
“No, stop, please don’t hurt him.”
“Shut — up, Michelle!”
“Dean, don’t —”
“I swear to fucking god, woman,”
“Eggsy, baby. Eggsy, run — ah!”
That’s the problem with marrying men who preferred to use their fists: to gain the upper hand in an argument, to make a point, to make themselves feel better. Sometimes they kill you.
Elizabeth Shwartz had a tight hold of her Pomeranians’ leash, and an even tighter grip on the cross that hung around her neck. She said a quick prayer — first for the woman in the body bag that the coroner was trying to be secretive about carrying down the concrete steps of the estates. Then for the bruised boy who’d been sat on the edge of a plater full of dry soil and dead plants as an emergency medical responder saw to the wounds on his face and arms.
The child was too still, she noted, too tense. He didn’t even flinch when the paramedic prodded the cut over his eye, and certainly didn’t smile when the men offered reassurance. That wasn’t right, she thought. He ought to be screaming and crying. Or at least shouting, like Mr. Baker had been when the police escorted him out of the flat in handcuffs.
But Eggsy was deathly still, as still as Michelle’s corpse, and Elizabeth wants to offer him candy. A hug. A cup of milk — anything, like she’d done when he’d fallen just outside her door last summer and scraped his knee. In the end, it had been petting Bindy that had made him stop crying. But Bindy was cowering in the company of the lights and beeping sirens, and something tells her that this time, it wouldn’t do the trick anyway.
They ask her for a brief statement — “I… I heard fightin’ and screaming. But I’ve always been hearing fightin’ and screaming from the two of them. I think she might have been cryin’…” — and shake their heads in grave distaste for the unnecessary loss of life. Then the officers start to disburse, and she sees one of them appear with a child’s duffle bag, hand it to the paramedic, and proceed to usher a numb looking Eggsy off planter and into the back of a police car.
“Hey,” Elizabeth (rather rudely and equally unabashedly) interrupts two of the police trying to coordinate who was going to stay and supervise the blood clean up. “Hey, what’s goin’ to happen to him?”
The square jawed woman rolls her eyes and walks away with her mouth to her radio, but the baby faced officer speaks with an unexpectedly gruff, uncultured drawl; like maybe he grew in these estates too. “Probably a group home. She didn’t have no close family.”
“What a pity…” she whispers to Bindy as the flashing lights fade into the distance. Elizabeth clutches the little dog to her chest and closes her blinds. She clicks her tongue and shakes her head accordingly, but this isn’t the first time this has happened. And it won’t be the last. “What a pity.”
That’s the problem with the foster system, too. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the state had a tendency to recruit families with much the same dynamic that’d landed their charges with them in the first place. Fists were usually involved. He’d be lying to say he hadn’t experienced his fair share of belts, too.
But it’s the truly creative punishment, the one involving a bottle of hot sauce and a spoon (with an additional backhand when he’d refused to drink any more after he threw up the first time) that has him caving; has his resolve cracking.
It’s at ten, with worn trainers and the crusty remains of a bloody nose drying on his upper lip, that Gary Unwin picks the land line receiver off the wall in the kitchen of his foster home in the dead of night. For once (and only if he excused what sounded like Jamal crying out in his sleep) the house was quiet; so quiet that even the electric beeps the numbers make when he punches them sound deafening.
“Customer complaints, how may I direct your call?”
“My mum told me to call this number if ever I needed a favor,” he mutters quietly, under his breath, and mindful of the stairs beyond the kitchen. If anyone were to come down them steps and find him on the phone, he’d get another beating for sure.
“I’m sorry love, I think you might have dialed the wro —”
“No,” he cuts across the woman on the other end of the line with an almost deceptively calm voice, not disclosing the mounting panic he’d felt in his chest when she’d tried to hang up on him. If the medal didn’t work — “She told me I had to say, um…”
Merlin takes his coffee with fat spoonfuls of sugar. The sucrose dissolves and gives lowly techs and his inferiors the illusion that he can down coffee as black as their new hires always think his soul his without so much as blanching. When in reality, his unsuspicious white mug held liquid diabetes.
Every so often, the man tried to ween himself away from the caffeine; tries to drink tea instead and ultimately fails. He usually almost breaks something (or someone; electronics, people, they’re all replaceable) unless placated with a cuppa. And since Harry’s been out in the field until late this evening, and doesn’t know the last time his friend injected himself with caffeine, he’s careful not to mix up their cups when he joins them in the tech room around 00:45.
Not that he receives much thanks for his gift.
“You shouldn’t have that in here.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thank you.” Merlin still doesn’t look up from the magnifying lens, poised over a tiny piece of a data drive, but Harry Hart thinks he sees a smirk playing around his mouth. He’s content to sit in silence and sip his own coffee — with a humble amount of sugar and a dash of milk — until his comrade is satisfied with his work, and looks up with a sigh and a hand on his stiff neck. “Don’t forget to file your mission report,” he reminds him, as if he could have forgotten about their post mission protocol after all these years.
Harry nods. “I’ve still got some writing to do. I killed —”
At that precise point in time, in his pocket, his cell phone started to ring. Deftly, and with a quick apology to Merlin, he extricates the rather bulky device with a smooth, practiced motion, and accepts the call. He’s fully prepared to say hello or some alternative polite greeting, but Harry quickly realizes this was one of the lines he’d had set up to be directly forwarded to his own cell, so as he could keep a pulse on whatever was being said on either end. It’s the operator line, he realizes, and then hears the voice.
“Oxfords, not brogues.”
Harry’d been keeping tabs on the Unwin’s on and off throughout the past five years, and he’s a resilient enough memory to immediately recall the code he’d given the two of them; to call on him if ever they needed a favor, help. Last he’d checked, Lee’s widows new husband beat her, had sent her to the A&E once. And while he had been itching to correct the uncouth slob about how one was supposed to handle another human being, it hadn’t been his place; not without that longstanding favor being invoked. And now the son — Eggsy, was it? — was muttering back and forth with Amanda from the tech department. And making dark requests.
“Can you kill my foster father?”
There’s the feedback that comes from someone on the other end breathing a little too hard, a little to close to the mouth piece, and Harry tightens his grip on the phone as Amanda undoubtedly shifts in her chair. But she’s all professionalism and curt tone when she responds — “Your complaint has been catalogued. And we hope we haven’t lost you as a loyal customer.” — and hangs up. Which, by proxy, hangs up Harry as well.
He drags his phone from his ear, numbly blinking at the wall beyond Merlin’s head, because the vehemence in that young boys voice…
“You alright, Galahad?”
Foster father clicks right into place alongside domestic abuse and multiple emergency calls that stand out on the file of Michelle Unwin, and he’s quick to assume that the woman was either dead or had been deemed unfit of a mother. Neither were happy thoughts, and Harry nearly shatters his coffee mug, he’s holding it so tight.
“Harry.”
He’d missed something. Again. And now the little boy who’d he met on the carpet all those years ago was in danger, was asking him to kill someone who he’d never met, but whom he already despised. His heart is heavy in his chest, and his feet almost carry him of their own accord to the private underground tube that would escort him back to the shop. But he pauses, nods at Merlin and the large screen just beyond where he at on a swirling chair.
“Pull up the Lee Unwin file for me, would you?”
“Again, Harry?”
“Yes, again.”