#i was born in the wrong generation i should have been a soviet KGB agent

[daenystheedreamer]

.theon coded btw. if you even care

[xtruss]

A Gulag Historian Returns to Prison

Acquitted of child pornography, Yury Dmitriyev now faces charges of sexual assault.

— By Evan Gershkovich | July 14, 2020 | The Moscow Times

Sofia Miroyedova

Respected Gulag historian Yury Dmitriyev has spent decades calling attention to one of the darkest chapters in Russia's history. He now faces up to 15 years in prison on sexual assault charges in a case his allies say has been trumped up to silence him.

The Moscow Times Profiled Dmitriyev in 2018:

Yury Dmitriyev normally hates Moscow. The concrete, the commotion, the pollution. As much as he can, he stays in Karelia, where he was born, raised and has spent his 62 years. In the northwestern region bordering Finland and the Baltic and White Seas, he can usually be found in the woods or in his study, writing.

Yet on a pleasant evening in mid-May, Dmitriyev, a prominent researcher of Soviet crimes, was happy to be in the metropolis. Accompanied by his elder daughter, Yekaterina Klodt, and his lawyer, Viktor Anufriyev, old friends greeted him with grins and tight hugs in a courtyard outside Teatr.doc, a progressive theater, ahead of a human rights awards ceremony.

One month earlier, Dmitriyev had been cleared of child pornography charges. Authorities had detained him in December 2016 after investigators found nude photos of his 11-year old adopted daughter; Dmitriyev said he took the photos to monitor her physical changes as she was prone to illness. From the outset, human rights defenders claimed that the case was fabricated to silence an outspoken activist.

If the arrest came as a shock to those who knew him, so too did his acquittal: Fewer than one percent of criminal defendants in Russia are cleared.

But authorities, human rights defenders now say, weren’t done with the historian just yet. Only a month after the awards night, a judge annulled the April decision, starting the trial anew.

Then, two weeks later, prosecutors brought additional charges to the table: This time they claimed that Dmitriyev had sexually assaulted his daughter. As of late June, the historian was back in jail facing another uphill legal battle, his freedom having been fleeting.

“The new charges are a chance for the prosecution to get it right,” Anufriyev said. “They failed the first time, so officials are giving them another chance to get the job done.”

Digging and Documenting

Two decades ago, Dmitriyev discovered a set of mass graves in a Karelian forest containing the bodies of more than 9,500 victims of Josef Stalin’s Great Terror. Poring over KGB documents, the head — and sole employee — of Memorial’s Karelia branch spent the next 20 years documenting each victim’s story.

“What makes Yury unique is that he combines both the digging and the documenting,” said Sergei Krivenko, a colleague of Dmitriyev’s at Memorial and a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council. “Some people work on compiling books of names, some people search for the exact locations of the killings. No one has dedicated themselves to both the way Yury has.”

“No one has dedicated themselves to both digging and documenting the way Yuri has.”

Those who know Dmitriyev say he toiled everyday. “He’s been doing this work for the past 30 years, and I’m 33,” said Klodt, his elder daughter. “I’m so used to it that, for me, his work is no different than a dentist’s.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians say, the state has supported them in locating and memorializing the burial sites of the estimated 15 to 30 million victims of Stalin’s rule. At the location Dmitriyev discovered — Sandarmokh — local authorities helped build roads and erect monuments and aided with an annual gathering at the site.

But in recent years, human rights defenders say, the climate has become less hospitable. Those who spoke with The Moscow Times pointed to a resurgence in Stalin’s popularity as a significant reason: In June last year, Russians voted him the “most outstanding” person in history. In second place was President Vladimir Putin, who has accused the West of “excessive demonization” of the Soviet leader.

Others pointed to a surge in nationalism since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and got involved in Ukraine. “There were many foreigners killed at Sandarmokh — Norwegians, Poles, Finns and Ukrainians, including around 200 intellectuals,” Krivenko said. “This is a very important place for Ukrainians especially, and a delegation would visit the site annually.”

Dmitriyev organized the memorial visit every year on Aug. 5. He invited foreign delegations and led discussions, Krivenko said. After the events in Crimea and Ukraine, the discussions often turned to politics.

“I think this is why they went after him,” Krivenko said. He also pointed to an October 2016 decision to add Memorial to a register of “foreign agent” organizations that receive foreign funding. “I think this gave the local siloviki” — officials with ties to law enforcement — “a signal that they could go after us.”

Two months later, in December, Dmitriyev was first arrested.

Prison as a Work Trip

The day after the awards night, Dmitriyev was invited to speak with human rights students at the Sakharov Center, named after the Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist.

Klodt had come with him and complained that she wasn’t feeling well. “Maybe they should put you in prison for a year too so they can toughen you up,” her father joked.

Quick to laugh, thin and slightly disheveled, Dmitriyev presented an unimposing figure. But when the subject of his work came up, he turned deadly serious.

“I don’t fight the system. That’s a dead end, and I’m already old now,” he told The Moscow Times before the event. “I fight for memory. I fight so anyone who wants to can learn about their relatives, regardless of whether the government wants it or not. These people existed at some point. They worked and loved and had children. I’m for protecting the freedom of private life and of those memories.”

Without those memories, Dmitriyev continued, today’s generation cannot judge whether their government is laudable or acting improperly.

“The people I dig up were in the same prison, walked the same halls and were behind the same bars.”

“When a person knows the history of their family for multiple generations, they can understand what our state is doing right and what it’s doing wrong,” he said. “Called upon by the state to do this or that, they’ll say, ‘No, my great-grandfather was summoned in the same way and it ended badly for him. So maybe it’ll end badly for me as well.’”

Dmitriyev shrugged at the subject of his time in prison. “I don’t make a great tragedy out of that year,” he said. “I just think of it as a work trip. I’ve gained a better understanding of what my heroes — the people I dig up and write about — were thinking. They were in the same prison, walked the same halls and were behind the same bars.”

More difficult, he said, was being separated from his younger daughter. Dmitriyev himself was adopted, and at some point he decided he wanted to care for an orphaned child too. He hoped he’d be able to talk to her again by the end of the year. “It’s a humane policy by the prosecutor’s office,” he joked. Then he turned serious again: “I can handle it, I’m a tough person. But what about the child? She thinks everyone has abandoned her.”

Into the Forest

After Dmitriyev was first arrested, the girl was taken in by her biological grandmother. Klodt said the family and the grandmother maintained regular communication. But when Dmitriyev was acquitted, Klodt said, the grandmother cut off all communication with the family. Then she sent a letter to the prosecution demanding the acquittal be overturned.

Anufriyev, Dmitriyev’s lawyer, believes that local authorities pressured her into writing the letter. He also says that the new charges of sexual assault are founded solely on a June 6 meeting between investigators and the girl during which, Anufriyev says, they coerced her into saying what they wanted. “They say they’re helping the child, but really they’re making her suffer,” he said.

Reached by phone, Tatyana Kordyukova, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, said she couldn’t comment on the case and referred The Moscow Times to the Investigative Committee. The Investigative Committee, in turn, did not respond to requests for comment.

On July 25, the retrial of the first case will begin. The Investigative Committee is currently researching the new charges, a process which could take months. The original charges carry up to 15 years in prison; the new charges up to 20.

This time, though, Anufriyev says Dmitriyev is better prepared. “After his last stint in prison, he now knows that we can fight and win this thing,” he said.

Klodt, too, is ready for the fight. “I’m not constantly hysterical like last time,” she said. “I understand that something needs to be done. I’m not giving up.”

His colleagues say they won’t give up either. When Dmitriyev was first arrested, human rights defenders, artists and writers across the country spoke out for him and wrote letters to Putin. Still, they are sober about the possible outcome.

“This is the atmosphere for us right now,” Krivenko said. He pointed to the case of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker accused of terrorism after he had refused to accept the annexation of Crimea, and Memorial colleague Oyub Titiyev, who is also in prison on charges widely believed to be fabricated.

“The only good thing from all this is that the president is showing us how it all happened in the 1930s — how people were blamed, how siloviki read signals from the top,” Krivenko said. “We used to study this in archives, now we see it in real life.”

During his short stint out of prison, Dmitriyev returned to work. Anatoly Razumov, a historian and one of Dmitriyev’s closest friends, stayed at his house from the night before the acquittal was overturned until June 19. The entire time, he says, Dmitriyev worked on a book he had to put off when he was first arrested.

In May, asked if he would return to his work or if he feared doing so would anger certain parties, Dmitriyev was unmoved. “If you’re afraid of wolves, you shouldn’t go into the forest,” he replied.

[deepfriedtwinkie]

Kingsman: A Trainee’s Mission (Pt. IX)

PREQUEL FIC, this section ~3,500w, ****THE BIG FINALE**** (choreographed violence set to 80s music ahead)

pt. I  | pt. II  | pt. III  | pt. IV  | pt. V  | pt. VI  | pt. VII  | pt. VIII

.

.

No one ever told them whereabouts in England the compound was located, despite how long it’s been their address. It was always shuttle here, shuttle there. Clearly it’s far enough from London to justify a plane ride, albeit a very short one.

They forfeit their altitude just as Harry emerges from the quarters in the back, clad tie-to-toe in Simons’s finished product. Every seam is flawless, as if he were born in it. His chest swells as he examines the mirror. Not only does he look his new part, but feels every bit of it, too.

Except for one thing. “Here,” Martin says, approaching with a small case in hand. “Put these on. And don’t ever be without them. They cost the devil’s own fucking ransom to replace.”

Harry takes the case, opening it carefully. Inside is a pair of glasses, these in dark tortoiseshell, in same style he’s seen all the agents wearing. Up to now, he’s just assumed they all had cataract problems.

A monumentally stupid assumption, he realizes, the moment he slides them on.

The whole world is enhanced. He’d thought his vision was already twenty-twenty, but through these eyes, he second-guesses everything he knows. The picture is sharper than any television—or reality, for that matter—is capable of. When he faces Martin, a green mess of boxy digits appears, framing him in binary code that rearranges into statistics. MARTIN TURNER. ALIAS: LAMORAK. 54. FRIENDLY. He blinks, and they pixelate, then disappear.

“These are the new model,” Martin says. “They’ll identify anyone they recognize, mark the rest as possible hostiles, and broadcast video directly to the control room. Calendar and calculator functions, too. And a crap version of Pac-Man. Engineers had a bit of a laugh with that one, I think.”

The cabin lights dim, signaling descent. Pulled from his astonishment, Harry pounces on one of the windows. There’s nowhere to land, nothing but city below, full of teeming crowds and police barriers. Every Englishman knows what day it is, except, apparently, for the pilot.

“Should we be concerned?” he asks Lamorak. It’s dialed back a bit, at that.

A good call on his part. Lamorak smiles. “You’ll see.”

Flying low, the plane does a loop, away from the path of the paparazzi’s helicopters. Half a mile away from the chaos in general, if not more. They make a pass above a dead-end road, blocked off to all traffic, between two commercial buildings with ‘CLOSED’ in nearly every window. ‘FOR LEASE’ in some.

When they pass again, the street itself opens like a mailing box.

Harry watches, enrapt, as they ease down the ‘runway’ and into the earth, then gives his mentor an impressed eyebrow. “No, I wouldn’t say concern is necessary.”

“I didn’t think so.”

They disembark into an underground hangar, identified only by a single circle-K beneath the plane. Markings on the mildewed walls identify this place as a now-defunct bomb shelter, left over from the second World War. It’s a long, continuous tunnel toward the center of the city, running directly parallel to the route the royal motorcade’s soon to take. Several more branch off down the way.

“You’d think there ought to be a police presence down here,” Harry remarks.

“There would be, I’m sure, if anyone knew about it. You’d be amazed the schematics you can vanish from city records with a little ingenuity.”

“And gadgetry.”

“That too.”

It’s a long walk ahead, and they keep up the pace. Lamorak stops only once, a minute or so in, leaning one-handed against a wall to pull something from the heel of his shoe. A spiral cord follows. It’s a phone. A fucking phone, for God’s sake. He’d left that one out on the tour.

“The glasses are a two-way radio as well, but there’s fuck-all reception down here,” he explains as it rings. Then someone picks up. “This is Lamorak. Landing secured. Approaching target now. Is the way clear?”

Harry knows the answer without needing to overhear it.

Largely because it’s speeding toward them on motorcycles.

“Oh, fucking bollocks.” The phone clatters to the cement as Lamorak grips his umbrella. “Shield up, Galahad!”

He’s on it before the words have even left his mentor’s mouth, raising the cane like a rifle and deploying the canopy. A greenish disc displays their assailants as if in night vision, slaloming to dodge the spray of bullets from Lamorak’s weapon. Harry joins the fire, and the motorists deflect that too.

“Don’t turn your back to them!”

It’s impossible; the three bikes fan out before they can take any cover, circling like vultures, making caged birds of the Kingsman. Lamorak only manages to take out one before another yells in Russian, and whirling his spent shotgun, catches Lamorak upside the head. He drops like a sack of flour.

“Shit!”

A second biker skids into the wall before Harry knows it was his bullet’s doing. The third, he catches on the next go, blasting him clean away from the beast he rode in on.

He drops to his knees beside Agent Lamorak, pressing two fingers beneath the left side of his collar. Then he scrambles for the dropped phone.

“Is anyone there?” Fuck’s sake, tell me someone’s there. Now would be a wonderful time for someone to be there! “This is Galahad; can anyone hear me? Lamorak’s been decommissioned, but he’s alive. We’ve been ambushed by hostiles, three of them, of unconfirmed origin, though one of them spoke Russian. Hello?”

If anything, he expects to hear Arthur. Or static, if he’s particularly unlucky.

What he hears instead is Hamish, panicked.

“Galahad, we’ve got a problem.”

Oh, have we? Do tell! I was just hoping for a problem!

“What’s going on?” Harry barks, eyes vigilant around the tunnel. “How the hell did Arthur miss those incomings?���

“He’s unconscious, that’s how.”

Oh, wonderful, that’s it, keep them coming! One isn’t near exciting enough! “What do you mean ‘he’s unconscious?’ Has someone infiltrated us?”

“No, there’s no breach. I found him on the ground when I got here. When I checked his pulse I found a medical ID. He’s fucking diabetic. I’ve called for help but Lancelot’s just left on assignment, I don’t think there’s anyone left in the whole wing but me.”

Well, then that’s going to have to be enough, isn’t it? I could do far worse.

Wish me luck, mother.

“We’re going to have to do this alone.” Harry fleetingly evaluates the three crashed motorbikes and picks the one least damaged—so not the one in flames, then—tilting it upright by the handlebars, swinging a leg over the side. There’s a gun holster on the panel that he co-opts for his umbrella. Meantime, in keeping the phone to his ear, he’s taken Lamorak’s shoe with him. He’d like a word with whomever depicted this job to be glamorous.

He tests the engine with a few revs over Hamish’s protests, partly because there’s little time, and partly because his friend sounds like this is the worst idea he’s ever heard, and that sort of negativity isn’t helpful at the moment. “You don’t even know the objective, Galahad. You don’t know who you’re looking for. And I’m not authorized to make any call yet without Arthur’s consent. We’ve got to stand down and wait for a senior agent.”

‘Stand down’ translates to ‘kickstand up.’ His hearing’s always been peculiar that way. “There isn’t time. Are you going to help me or not?”

The wait is under half a second, ended by the sound of some material object in motion. Harry knows it marks the donning of Merlin’s headset.

“Go.”

He’s off. The bike swerves beneath him as he rockets through the tunnel, unused to its carriage, making him hunch against inertia. His attempt to change the gear turns on the radio instead.

The winner takes it all The loser has to fall It’s simple and it’s plain Why should I complain?

“I’m in, I’ve found Agent Lamorak’s file,” Merlin shouts over the noise. “Take a right! Now!”

Harry barely manages to bank over without becoming a fascinating stain on the concrete.

“Two ahead, incoming!”

Up goes the Rainmaker. Four one-handed shots pick off the hostiles, sending vehicles tumbling. He rides an S curve around the wreckage.

“In case it’s on the agenda, a hint as to what the devil I’m doing would be marvelous about now!”

“It’s Margaret Thatcher.”

“I sincerely hope that came out wrong!”

“No—I mean, yes. She’s a guest at the wedding. Some vigilante offshoot of the KGB’s got plans to kill her the moment she arrives. They’re trying to start a war proper.”

He can’t spare the energy to hold his tongue at the moment. “By assassinating Margaret Thatcher? Wouldn’t Charles and Diana make more sense as targets, considering they’re actually liked?”

“They’re more heavily protected—look, the next time I take afternoon tea with Soviet renegades, I’ll ask, all right? Take a left!”

This time the bike curves obediently. It’s a relief he’s got the hang of it, at least until he sees what’s ahead.

Double doors of solid steel.

“Merlin, I can’t get through.” He races to scan. There’s no padlock, no keypad, no access point. “Open the doors. You can do that, right?”

“Hang on, I’ve got to unscramble the access code.”

Harry tries everything, but can’t get the bike to brake. There’s no room to either side to turn around. “Merlin, nothing’s happening. I can’t possibly oversell the urgency of the situation.”

“Will you give me a fucking minute?”

“I haven’t got a fucking minute to give!” he panics. “For the love of God, you have to–”

The doors pull apart just in time to slide unscathed through the opening.

“You’ve reached your destination.”

Now the brakes work. He unsticks them with a slam of his heel, pivoting to a clean stop, and turns down the kickstand, clearing his throat. “Fine timing, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And I’d just like to say you’re doing wonderfully so far, by the way.”

“Save it for headquarters, get a move on.”

“Right.”

The sound of ABBA recedes in his wake as Harry moves away from the motorbike, expanding the Rainmaker again, Lamorak’s shoe-phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He moves ahead with caution, eyes shifting to all sides.

“Switch the glasses to thermal. There’s a setting for that,” Merlin says. “Turn the dial in the frame below the right lens. Two clicks counter-clockwise.”

One click paints his vision all in technicolor. The next reveals sketchy red blobs of humanoid shape around the upcoming corner. Four of them. In poses that give away machine guns.

“Do you need an alternate route?”

This, he can handle without question. “Ask me again in a moment.”

Digging into his pocket, he comes up with a gold lighter. His thumb flicks the cap. Rearing his arm back, he pitches.

The explosion from the next room is a cluster of crimson through his lenses. When it dissipates, there’s none left whatsoever.

“Nicely done,” Merlin commends as Harry switches modes back.

“All in the written test.”

There’s no point in asking where to go from here. It’s obvious. The only way out of this room is a lift, just ahead at his ten o’clock. Harry hurries for it, closing his umbrella, praying to no particular god that he’s still on Lamorak’s schedule. Or, if not, that at least no one will be dead by the time he catches up. Lamorak and Arthur included.

“Is there any code?”

“Not that I’m seeing, no. It should op–”

It opens with a fist to Harry’s jaw. His glasses skew; Lamorak’s phone goes scattering across the floor. He stumbles backward. A second hit draws blood.

It’s the moment he’s grabbed by the lapels that his reflex decides he’s through with this.

Bashing the Rainmaker upward breaks his attacker’s hold. Then it breaks his teeth in. Both of them grappling for it, they stagger into the lift, closing the doors. It starts to move.

A sudden hefty twist of the cane rips at his arms; his back goes slamming into the wall, feet wrenched from under him. The ringing in his ears picks up tin music from the overhead speaker.

Crack that whip Give the past the slip Step on a crack Break your momma’s back

He’s up in time to dodge a kick to the abdomen, rounding on his attacker as the steel-toed boot gongs into the baseboard. A clutch of the man’s ear threatens to tear it off as he throws him to the floor. A leg sweep brings Harry down alongside.

“Harry!” It comes from his glasses. They must be aboveground.

Answering would spend the breath he needs; it goes to a snap-roll instead. On his feet, he digs the Rainmaker’s point into the enemy’s chest, opening to keep him down, then firing. A burst of blood fills the umbrella’s screen just in time for a gentle ding from the lift’s floor indicator.

“Just a bit of trouble,” he says to Merlin, heart pounding. “Hardly worth mentioning.”

“No time to rest,” Merlin warns. “I count five on the rooftop. Lamorak’s intel says they’ll be dressed like Scotland Yard, but that’s them. They’re the snipers.”

Five of them, Jesus Christ. He fights his breathing into check. “Anything you can do to level the playing field?”

“Not from here.” Then, just as quickly, he corrects himself, rapid clacking filling the background. “There’s one thing I can try, but I dunno if it’ll work. There’s a powered circulation vent on the roof.”

“What can you do with that?”

A few more clacks come over the line, the last more decisive than the rest. From outside the lift, Harry hears the erratic zapping noise of an electrical surge, accompanied by the very distinct screams of two men. Then two whumps of collapse.

“Oh, not much.” The smirk in Merlin’s voice is plain to hear. “How’s three against one sound?”

His jaw aches behind the smile that’s drawing on.

“Manageable.”

The lift doors slide open. One more time, Harry raises the Rainmaker to aim level, deployed at the ready. He creeps with careful sideways steps around the cover of a rooftop heating unit. Sounds of celebration float up from the streets below, hollering, whooping and cheering, and his peripheral vision catches the flutter of multicolored confetti. The crowd begins to sing “God Save the Queen.”

“Oh, shit—Galahad, the car’s approaching now.” The alarm has returned to Merlin’s voice. “I’m looking at the paparazzi’s video feed right now; that’s her license plate. She’s in that car. You’ve got no time at all.”

The thermal function of his glasses re-activates with the touch of a thumb. He’s not sure how it happened, but every bone in his body is perfectly calm.

“Harry, it’s got to be now!”

The red shapes that had flocked to their electrocuted friends begin to fan out. Two headed for the street-facing corners of the rooftop. The third moving backward, posing himself as a lookout.

No one notices when the third man disappears, dragged from the top of the unit with Harry’s tie around his throat. A twist of his chin, and his dead weight drops to the asphalt.

“They’re in position!”

Harry edges his way silently around the heating unit, sights set. His first shot lands square in the back of the nearest gunman, crumpling him in place.

He turns to take aim at the second.

Who’s nowhere to be found.

The crack of a rifle butt comes down across the back of his head. All at once his body gives out underneath him. He collapses like a ragdoll.

“Who the fuck have we here?”

The words filter blearily into Harry’s throbbing head. Another gruff Russian accent.

“Harry? Harry! What’s going on?”

Blinking away spots, he manages to turn himself over, glaring murder at the man with a rifle now pointed at his skull. He’s squinting down at him from under a portly brow, leaning slightly forward, inspecting him like a maggot in a pile of shit.

“Looks like some kind of dandy to me.”

The throngs still sing. “Oh, Lord, our God, arise;”

Below, the sound of engines is a block away, if that.

“Scatter her enemies;”

“How come you choose today to die, dandy-boy?”

“And make them fall…”

Bloody-lipped, Harry peels into a wicked grin.

“Actually, if it’s all the same to you, I was hoping you’d tell me.”

A flip of his ankles, one over the other, catches the man off-balance. He goes pitching to the side, arms pinwheeling in midair for a grasp that never comes, aim forgotten. Then a swift final kick sends him toppling over the rooftop’s edge, his short scream ending with a crack and a bang in the alleyway below.

Almost frantically, Harry crawls to the edge, peering over. The limp Russian lies at the bottom of a rusted dumpster, eyes open, blood pooled beneath his bloated head.

He looks left toward the motorcade route in time to see Margaret Thatcher, accompanied by aides, wave her way into St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Only then does he flatten to his back, heaving a sigh to end them all.

“Fucking spectacular!” Harry chuffs out a haggard laugh. He’d almost forgotten Hamish was on the line. “Well done, Harry! Well done Galahad.”

It’s incredibly likely he’s not catching his breath for weeks after this. “And you,” he tells his friend, wiping blood away from his lip. “Anything on Arthur?”

“The medics are here to help him now. He’s gonna be all right. And we’ve got transport on the way for Lamorak as well.”

All’s well that ends well.

“My turn to ask you a question?” Hamish queries.

He’s exhausted enough to let fair play win. “I don’t see why not.”

“How fucking hard is that head of yours?”

This time, there’s considerably more strength in Harry’s laugh.

“Very, I’ve been told.”

Simons redundantly proves his worth as headtailor when Harry finds a box waiting for him upon return. It’s a second tie, a clone of the one he’d garroted the Russian with.

Let’s do hope this one lasts longer than a day, sir, says the note enclosed. Fondly, -S.

Harry smiles. He’s not sure he can promise it won’t be a habit.

Then again, he’ll be here quite long enough to find out.

Debriefs, so they’re told, typically take place in the dining room. Today, in deference to Arthur’s health, they report to the infirmary instead. An unconscious Lamorak nurses his concussion in the bed adjacent, monitors beeping steadily that all else is well, while Arthur sits upright in his own, setting aside an empty cup of applesauce on his bedside tray.

“Two bloody hours,” he says. “Two bloody hours, and the two of you have already managed to completely defy every convention of order upon which the Kingsman operation depends.”

Standing at attention before him, arms folded behind their backs, Harry and Hamish trade a glance. This can’t possibly be a reprimand, don’t you think?

Arthur smiles. “Bravo.”

Ah, there, you see? I didn’t think so either.

Their new boss looks to Hamish first. “Merlin.” Harry is aware without looking of his friend’s immediate snap in posture, no matter how straight it already was. “I am quite impressed with your conduct this morning. Both in my own assistance and the navigation of Galahad’s mission. Three people are alive today because of your quick work. That’s something to be very proud of.”

He is. Harry can tell. He steals a peek, and the quiet way it radiates from him is unmistakable. It might be the most chuffed he’s been in his lifetime. It’s good to see.

“Thank you, sir.”

Your aunt would be proud as well, he thinks, making a mental note to tell him later.

Then Arthur’s focus is on him. “Agent Galahad.” He straightens extra in the same way, defiant of his injuries with pride. “You saw to the completion of your fellow agent’s objective, despite all reason to the contrary, and eliminated no fewer than a dozen immediate threats to not only national security, but the continued peace of the developed world. I had a feeling you were going to be a pain in my arse, frankly, and that you may yet turn out to be… But you should know that you have proven yourself more a Kingsman than any who’ve come before you.”

It’s more than he anticipated. More than he ever could’ve dreamt. He hopes the brimming of his eyes won’t be held against him.

“Thank you, sir,” he somehow manages at an audible volume. “I’m honored.”

You can’t possibly know how much.

Arthur levels his best authoritative gaze on them both. “Now. Since you’ve proven yourselves so capable, rest up. Tomorrow you’re to meet me in the dining room at oh-nine-hundred sharp. We will discuss your next assignment.”

Breaking into an insuppressible grin, Harry looks at Hamish, finding him returning the same.

Here goes the rest of our lives.

“Fall out.”

.