The sky was so blue.
It was bright, pure azure, with an occasional tuft of soft white drifting across its span, stretching endlessly above him. He blinked and saw dark spots dancing in erratic patterns across the blue like epileptic birds.
He had a half-hearted urge to tilt his head to take a better look, but found that he actually couldn’t move.
Most peculiar.
It was oddly quiet, the muffled, artificial silence left behind by something loud, like an explosion or a gunshot. Apart from the odd, throbbing feeling on his left temple, he felt almost peaceful.
What had happened?
There had been a red haze of swirling rage, consuming him inside out, and he had acted on pure instinct, lashing out and killing everything in his path, until he was the last man standing.
Valentine had done something, and, as a result, people died. They had been despicable, bigoted people, yes, but they didn’t deserve to die. Not like that.
The odd ringing in his ears lowered slightly, and in a near distance, he heard someone calling out, frantic, ”Galahad! Galahad, respond! Harry!”
Merlin.
The last time Merlin had sounded like that, it had been August 1987 in Moscow where he had gotten shot in a dingy back alley not far from Red Square, and had been left behind a dumpster to slowly bleed to death —
Oh.
Blinking took a longer time, and it was harder to open his eyes properly. Everything felt so heavy, dragging him down. He felt old and frail, brittle like a parched porcelain doll. In a way, it was almost ironic that, after everything, it had taken one bullet to take him down. One, shot by a man who couldn’t even look at him as he pulled the trigger.
The sky was so blue, and he tried to breathe it in, suck it into himself, to take it with him. There was something unbearably beautiful about it, something achingly familiar that made his breath hitch.
It was the color of Eggsy’s eyes on a good day.
If he was being honest with himself — as was proper, considering he was dying, after all — Eggsy’s eyes often reminded him of the sky. They changed color depending on his mood and the lighting, going from bright, sparkling blue to pale grey to a peculiar shade of green he had seen in Aurora Borealis years ago on his way home from Finland.
He let his eyes slide shut.
He was being rather maudlin, but perhaps it was allowed for a dying man.
Oh, Eggsy.
He had been such a bloody fool, leaving the dear boy like he had: begging for a second chance, a way to redeem himself. Instead, he had lashed out, bitter and righteous, reveling in the hurt he had seen in Eggsy’s eyes.
They hadn’t been bright blue then.
His reprimand had tasted like ashes in his mouth, and he had been left wondering why. Oh, what a fool he had been. All this time.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Eggsy.
The frantic shouting in his ear faded to static and then into silence as his glasses powered down, not unlike his body, slowly bleeding out there in the front yard of South Glade Mission Church in Kentucky.
The sky was so blue, but all he could think about was what he had lost before he had even realized what he had.
And then he saw nothing more.
When he slowly came to, the left side of his face was numb, unevenly bandaged. He wasn’t sure why.
Above him, there was no sky. Instead, he saw a ceiling, evenly tiled with white plasterboards. There seemed to be a dead fly squished on one tile.
Everything smelled of disinfectant.
Whether this is Heaven or Hell, this seems utterly boring.
He let out a ragged breath and somewhere, a beeping sound picked up speed. To his right, someone let out a strangled sound, and then the familiar blue eyes swam into his line of sight. They were so blue, so bright, and gleamed wetly.
He blinked, and the blue brimmed, flowed over with a feeling he didn’t dare to name.
” ’Bout time, you fucking wanker.”