#hctag.

there was an option that could have left all three of them alive but the risk of failing the mission bc of injuries was too great for merlin to take the risk

so he instead he decides it for them and uses his own death to get a tactical advantage to the two agents with the best chance of beating poppy’s men

           and everything’s okay for the first couple of nights back in her childhood bedroom. Jaqi taking extra time to give her daughter hugs (which a rather painful for the young blonde) and feed her the best chicken soup the older blonde knows how to cook, but the nightmares start, and the screaming, waking up in cold sweats and not being able to keep her dinner down. of course she doesn’t tell her mother any of this. but her hands BEEN hurting like a bitch, her ribs are sore and she STILL has a massive cut on her forehead, which she can still remember the feeling of the sticky blood that lives underneath her skin. but she keeps telling Owen that she’s fine, that he doesn’t need to come home for her --- that he should focus on him and Claire, she’s not important.

           well not until she falls at work one day, panic attacks were not uncommon when she was a kid, but no where near as bad as the one she had about three months after the incident. she was taken to hospital and from there they found that she had a BROKEN hand and three fractured ribs. how none of the medics PICKED up on that was a whole other problem. her hand was set and she was given pills to alleviate the pain, while her ribs heal themselves. wearing gauze around underneath her breasts. she’s lucky enough if she can make it a full day (at work that is) without having to take extended lunch breaks, let alone to be alive right now.

so he doesn’t. he trusts the tech, his own experience after almost four decades in the agency, the protocol, and focuses on moving forward with the mission as quickly as possible, always going with the first valid option the data available seems to pointing towards, making his decisions quickly enough to give agents time to act on them with the added benefit of their own instincts guiding through what merlin can’t foresee --- and luckily, it works almost every time.

other times he puts an axe through the side of a whisky barrel, or sends his best friend solo to an openly racist church, expecting black man with rage-inducing weapons to be working with them, and definitely not planning anything.

Everyone who has ever seen Merlin pull up his sleeves or change clothes knows that Merlin has countless, mainly thin and long, burn scars dating back decades. Seeing as he was taught out of coyness at a relatively young age, the people fulfilling that criteria include, among a few others, all of the Kingsmen and a few of the Statesmen agents, so ‘Merlin has probably been through a lot when he was younger’ isn’t exactly private information anymore. Some with more attentive eyes or more time to study the scars may realise another pattern on them --- the tip of a fireplace poker --- and draw more conclusions from that, but the exact details of how those scars came to be are mostly unknown. When asked, Merlin will reply that he got them before he became a Kingsman and if pressed further, he will explain that he sustained them during his time in a secondary school that got away with a lot of secrecy by the virtue of having the image of a traditional Christian school. Anything more than that, and you really need to know how to make him open up in order for him to share.   ( heavy child abuse below the cut. )

obvious causes of post-traumatic stress syndrome are obvious

constantly flip-flops between “i want to live, i never want to die again” and “why am i alive i should’ve died”

is internally a bit freaked out by how well he accepted death and that he remembers a moment right before the survival instincts kicked in where he's not sure he was happy to be alive

at first, has trouble seeing his artificial body parts as a part of him, rather than tools and equipment. grows used to the hand quicker than the legs bc he uses it more

depressed. easiest to tell from how much less he smiles  ( which is to say, virtually impossible for anyone but a few people to notice ). combination of his own trauma as well as the realities of losing kingsman and everyone with it crashing on him

at first, can’t seem to make the new kingsman feel familiar -- the positive realities of being able to make kingsman what it should be on the 21st century only really dawn upon him later when the ptss eases

send me meta topics   /  accepting.