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Erik can’t pinpoint the exact moment when things stopped being just fun and games, but he has no doubts about the reason why. One morning he wakes up and realises the world sits heavier on his shoulders, and has been doing so for some time. He notices the times they come an inch too close to death, every instance they take a risk too great, and every near-impossible stunt they pull off by the skin of their teeth, and the adrenaline that shoots through him makes him whoop with thrill less than it makes a cold sweat prickle along his back. Now, the darkness he sometimes feels spiking in Charles’ mind on missions start to make sense.
Charles notices, of course, and presses light kisses to the side of his mouth when the shadows creep in on the edges of his vision.
“How do you do it?” Erik asks once, late at night, when they were curled up in bed. “Going out there with the knowledge that if you screw up, your friend dies?”
The question he’s really asking - what if I screw up and you die - goes unsaid.
Charles tenses at the question, and Erik wants to smack himself. He knows the story. Every agent does. He knows he inherited his title from a man who heroically sacrificed himself to save Charles' life, along with the lives of three other Kingsman agents. Charles rarely speaks of him, but it doesn’t take much to figure out that they had been friends. It certainly doesn’t take someone who knows Charles as well as Erik now does to realise that despite everything saying otherwise, Charles blames himself for the tragedy. Erik opens his mouth to apologise, but Charles presses a finger to his lips.
“Because if I don’t, it won’t just be friends who die. There is good in the world, Erik, and it’s worth protecting.” Charles’ eyes are more serious and more open than Erik has ever seen them, and staring into them, he can’t do anything but nod. He lets the moment drag on, but Charles cracks a smile and taps him lightly on the nose. “Hey, just because it’s not all fun and games, doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy ourselves.” He reaches up to finger the Silk Tie conveniently draped over the headboard. It’s a feeble attempt at a distraction, but they are already pressed close, arms wrapped tightly around each other’s shoulders. Erik can’t help but laugh back.
But just because they barely acknowledge it, doesn’t mean it weighs any less on Erik’s mind. They fight about it exactly once, when Erik submits his transfer request right after Arthur has finished congratulating them on yet another successful mission. He cites emotional compromise, but Arthur just flat out rejects it, and Charles yells at him for hours. He’s weirdly thankful, in a way, because he doesn’t want a new partner, he just doesn’t know what else to do.
Erik shoves the uncomfortable awareness of his, and Charles’ (because who is he kidding, call him melodramatic, but he’s said it once, and he’ll say it again - he’s as good as dead if Charles is), mortality to the back of his mind, and he succeeds, for the most part. It is not always easy though, especially when their cover’s been blown, and they’re being shot at by angry Russians with the illegal rocket launchers they were there to seize, while scrambling along a mountainside. He throws up a magnetic force field around them both as best he can to keep the shrapnel at bay, but there’s nothing he can do about the snow, except hope desperately that it doesn’t collapse under the barrage.
It’s a bit of a strain, however, keeping his mind on everything happening at once. In the corner of his mind that he’s labelled ‘Charles’, he feels a little mental post-it note being put up - Suggestion to Hank: pocket-sized magnetic shielding device.
“Who the hell is Hank?” Erik shouts over the explosions.
“You’ve threatened him five times and you still don’t know his name?” Charles shouts back.
“Oh, Bozo?”
There is a loud mental sigh before he hears Charles’ voice again. “Stop listening to Percival! Hank is incredible. Who do you think puts in all the extra upgrades on your favourite umbrella?”
Erik opens his mouth to reply, but of course that is the point when everything goes to shit.
There is an ice-covered rock, hidden in the snow, and Charles slips. He rolls far down enough the slope that he’s out of Erik’s protective bubble. He is back on his feet soon enough, but Erik notices a second too late, and before he can extend his cover, barely three feet behind Charles, the ground explodes in a shower of snow, ice, and metal.
Erik watches in muted horror as Charles is thrown forward by the force. Time slows around him as Charles’ back curves in a graceful arch, even as he throws an arm up to break his fall. He’s hit the ground a good six feet away before Erik gathers his senses about him enough to react. Charles has his hand pressed hard against the small of his back, and as Erik reaches to turn him over, he can sense metal underneath it. It’s small, but it’s sharp, and when Charles pulls his hand away, it comes back red.
Erik’s hand is shaking but the shard is steady as he draws it out through the small rip in the fabric. He has made mockeries of firearms and weaponry for far too long now that the scrap of metal cradled in his palm feels too much like betrayal. It’s no wider than two of his fingers, but it is pointed, and ugly, and stained with failure, and Erik can’t hold back the burst of rage in his chest.
He only notices he has his hand outstretched when Charles pulls weakly at his wrist. That’s enough, he hears, they’re gone now. Charles has two fingers pressed against his temple, his face taking on the slightly pinched look it gets when he feels someone die in his head. Erik is still shaking.
There’s a section on the next ridge over that has entirely collapsed, leaving a smoking dent in the landscape. He glares at it for a moment longer, but the crater remains silent. Even as the sharp-edged focus of fury slowly drains into fear, and the sorry remains of the terrorist outpost gradually fade out of his senses, as far as he is aware, there’s nothing of the stockpile left there bigger than the size of his palm. They’ve failed their primary objective to secure and contain, but the outcome is the same. The destruction was unnecessary and excessive, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it never existed, and it never will, as it should be. Good, he thinks, good. He spares no thought for the men who were there.
It’s barely even an injury, as injuries in their line of work go. A two-inch deep puncture wound to the erector spinae muscle just off to the left of Charles’ T12 vertebra is a mere scratch compared to the flavour they were more familiar with, of point blank shots to the head or being sliced in half from head to groin. Charles will be back to charming the pants off everyone in HQ within a matter of days, the doctor says. Erik is so relieved he doesn’t even bother countering that the only pants that Charles is going to charm off is his own.
Erik doesn’t tell Charles how his world ground to a halt when he saw him fall, nor of how it righted itself when Charles gingerly got back up to his feet. He says nothing about how he has to shake himself out of the what-if scenarios plaguing his mind - scenarios where Charles had been a centimetre further left when he was hit, or if the Kingsman issue suits hadn’t been bulletproofed - but Charles being Charles, he suspects he already knows anyway. He sees it in how Charles doesn’t snap at him for hovering when he fusses and demands every detail from hospital staff. And when Charles receives a surprise delivery from R&D a month later of three newly reinforced suits plus matching sets for Erik, as many pairs of experimental cufflinks - each with a different function, too many boxes of Charles’ favourite chocolate chip shortbread, and an oversized apology card signed by the whole department, he doesn’t even question it, just drags Erik in for a kiss and a whispered ‘thank you’ against his lips. (He doesn’t say anything about how he brought the torn jacket down to R&D and shouted until half of them cried, although he did return the next day with cupcakes to apologise.) He’s just starting to see how everything can go right, and still go completely wrong.
He’s also maybe beginning to understand what Charles had been yelling at him about. It’s not his job to protect Charles - he probably doesn’t even need protecting. His duty is to the world, but when Charles and his world are one and the same, he’ll be damned if he doesn’t try his very best. He can’t guarantee he won’t fuck it up, he just prays that when he does, it won’t be too late to fix it.
For now, he has a job to do.