It wouldn’t be accurate to say it’s been the longest fortnight of his life. When one is being held in a lightless underground cell with the occasional jab from an electric shock baton just to check one’s still alive - for instance - the time really does drag on quite incessantly. Particularly after the more lurid hallucinations start. The hotel has certain advantages over Harry’s least favourite holiday spots, then, but it’s still nowhere near a walk in the park. The whispering ghosts are innumerate, and they are precisely chosen, and they are dedicated.
Harry is, whatever his colleagues might tell you, a human being. (Perhaps moreso now he has apparently reached beyond the end of his own lifespan.) He takes up his coping strategies where he can get them.
It’s a few days after Jack fails to die that they find themselves in the same bed again, and if he must be honest with himself, the hiatus has less to do with an existential crisis over anyone’s mortality and more about reassuring himself that there’s no more petty squabbling in the offing. (Eggsy really is a damned idiot of a boy if he thinks he would ever be anything less than Harry’s first and greatest concern, but — he’s a damned idiot of a boy who has no reason to believe that the older people in his life will be dependable, or consistent, or trustworthy.) Harry sleeps lightly, and very little, often waking to more exhaustion than he felt when he fell asleep.
He would guess that it’s the early hours of the morning when he stirs, a few undramatic blinks drawing him into consciousness. Two or three AM, perhaps. Jack, typically, is awake. He can’t see him in the dark but he knows the difference between a partner at rest and a man asleep.
“Is it that you don’t?” he asks quietly, the room so silent that his words need barely stir the air. “Or is it that you can’t? Sleep.”
Or is it that he won’t, but that’s another sort of question.
28th
Harry is, whatever his colleagues might tell you, a human being. (Perhaps moreso now he has apparently reached beyond the end of his own lifespan.) He takes up his coping strategies where he can get them.
It’s a few days after Jack fails to die that they find themselves in the same bed again, and if he must be honest with himself, the hiatus has less to do with an existential crisis over anyone’s mortality and more about reassuring himself that there’s no more petty squabbling in the offing. (Eggsy really is a damned idiot of a boy if he thinks he would ever be anything less than Harry’s first and greatest concern, but — he’s a damned idiot of a boy who has no reason to believe that the older people in his life will be dependable, or consistent, or trustworthy.) Harry sleeps lightly, and very little, often waking to more exhaustion than he felt when he fell asleep.
He would guess that it’s the early hours of the morning when he stirs, a few undramatic blinks drawing him into consciousness. Two or three AM, perhaps. Jack, typically, is awake. He can’t see him in the dark but he knows the difference between a partner at rest and a man asleep.
“Is it that you don’t?” he asks quietly, the room so silent that his words need barely stir the air. “Or is it that you can’t? Sleep.”
Or is it that he won’t, but that’s another sort of question.