There were times when Roxy loved her job as Lancelot.

This was not one of those times.

She stood in a warehouse that was a dark fetid oven, that stank of sweat, gun oil and upset animals.

To her left, there was a rickety table covered in weapons.

To her right, there was a rather emaciated-looking hyena chained to the wall.

Surrounded by a gang of blackmarket arms dealers, Roxy stood, outwardly erect and calm.

Inwardly, she was screaming foul epithets.

This mission had been fucked from the start, and had only gotten worse.

For one thing, she spoke very little Afrikaans. She could understand important words and phrases, like "yes", "no", the numbers 1-10, greetings, "shoot them", "kill them all", "spy", "traitor" and enough to know if they were trying to insult her to her face.

(Fortunately Merlin had an underling (code-named "Viviane") who was fluent, and so she was translating as much as she could into subtitles that ran across Roxy's glasses. There was however, a slight delay, so Roxy could not always rely on the translation to get her through tough spots.)

Then there was the climate. It was mid-February, it had reached 32 degrees celcius, humidity was at 71% and she was wearing a bullet-proof suit. The turn of phrase "sweating bullets" had never felt so apt.

Then there was the fact that Eggsy had been supposed to rendezvous with her twelve hours ago, but had for some reason dropped off the grid. Last she had heard, Merlin's team had been still searching for him, but apparently his captors either had anti-tracking tech that was good enough to disable Merlin's trackers (unlikely) or they had dropped him down some deep hole in the ground where there was no reception (probable, and Harry was going to go fucking ballistic if they had done something like bury Eggsy alive). So instead of having a fairly reliable partner to support her, she had been forced to make contact with the arms dealers solo.

And now, to put the cheap glace cherry on the shit sandwich was the fact that the group she was trying to infiltrate had decided that she needed to be tested, to see if she was a serious customer.

Apparently, their definition of "serious customer" was "one who is willing to test out the merchandise by shooting a person dead".

So here she was, sweat dripping down her back, standing in a darkened Johannesburg warehouse with poor lighting, surrounded by goons, being told that unless she shot the poor sod they were about to bring out to her, then there would be no deal.

And since "no deal" meant that the irradiated banknotes full of trackers would not end up in their hands, and the evidence that they had access to weapons from a particular old KGB stockpile would not be acquired, that would be mission failed.

(There was also the part where they would probably shoot Roxy, but she was at least 80% certain she would be able to avoid a headshot. Everything else was survivable (Kingsman Suits: Look Put Together Whilst Being Kept in One Piece)).

Roxy was officially not impressed with this shit.

The next time she saw Eggsy, she and him were going to have words about him not being here to back her up.

There was a bang on one of the side doors, and then it was opened. Two arms dealers dragged a half-dressed man with a bag over his head into the centre of the room, and deposited him on the ground, hard.

Their ring-leader, a beefy white Afrikaaner with a shaved head and bullet earrings, smirked at her.

"So, girly. You want to do business with us? Shoot him."

Roxy considered her options.

None of them were good.

"Pull the bag off his head," she said. "I want him to know who is sending him to hell."

In her ear, she could hear Viviane muttering as she prepared to do the world's fastest facial identification exercise.

This turned out to be unnecessary, as the bound man was revealed to be Eggsy.

Roxy smiled.

"Oh hello there," she said.

(In her ear, Viviane swore. "Roxy, if you're about do what I think you're about to do, then the other Galahad is going to kill you.")

Eggsy looked up, glasses hanging slightly askew, but miraculously intact.

He saw her expression, and cringed.

"Oh fuck me," he muttered.

The arms dealers looked perturbed.

"You know this fucker?" a particularly hairy one dressed in army surplus demanded.

Roxy nodded, still smiling.

"Aw c'mon Rox…" Eggsy whined. "Please don't shoot me…"

"Fucker failed to tell me the truth," Roxy said bluntly, snagging a shot-gun from the table.

She looked Eggsy in the eye and then loaded it with buckshot.

Eggsy whimpered.

"Lance? No! Please Lance!" he begged. "I'm sorry! I should have told you!"

Roxy turned and pulled the trigger, reloaded and pulled the trigger again, and turned his torso into so much hamburger meat.

Eggsy collapsed.

The armsdealers blinked.

"W-what should he have told you?" he asked, as Roxy walked over to Eggsy's prone form, nudging him a little with her foot, ostensibly checking if he was dead.

Roxy just smiled. "So. Have I proven my seriousness in doing business with you gentlemen, or did I just shoot an old friend for no good reason?"

Several of the armsdealers looked thoroughly unnerved now, but the leader just laughed, said something in Afrikaans that Viviane refused to translate ("we need him alive for a bit longer") and then proceeded to set up the trade with her— weapons for cash, both to be traded in twenty-three hours in a separate location – by calling his associate who was from a different cell of the same organisation.

His associate who, (Viviane transmitted,) would not be expecting to be in contact with the

Five hours later, Roxy was sitting in the safe house with her feet up on the coffee table, when Eggsy stumbled in, wearing a leopard print shirt that she seemed to recall seeing on one of the armsdealers.

It didn't do much to cover the fact that he was covered in blood.

"Jesus Eggsy, you look like you crawled out of hell."

Eggsy gave her an unimpressed look.

"You left me in a warehouse with a half-pound of buckshot in my chest and seventeen spooked arms dealers."

"And a knife," Roxy retorted, watching from the couch as he limped across the room to grab himself a cold beer from the fridge. "I made sure you were able to palm my boot-knife." She raised an eyebrow. "Which I'll be wanting back."

The knife in question landed two inches from her right foot and vibrated as it stuck into the coffee table.

"Thank you!" Roxy said, tipping her head backwards over the back of the couch so she could look at Eggsy and smile sweetly.

Eggsy snorted at that, but otherwise didn't respond. He came back from the fridge, and dropped into the couch next to her, beer in one hand, her beer in the other.

Roxy smiled and thanked him.

They sat for a while in silence, listening to the sounds of the city at night.

"I know why you had to shoot me," Eggsy says after a while, "but why did you have to go and shoot me the second time?"

"It's therapeutic," Roxy said. "Do you have any idea how long it took me to stop having nightmares about that first time?"

Eggsy grimaced sheepishly. "Yeah alright. I've only apologised, what, constantly over the last four years over that one."

Roxy shrugged, and took a sip of her beer.

There was another comfortable silence, as Eggsy ignored the pain of fragments of buckshot working their way out of their chest, and Roxy ignored the bouquet of sweat, exertion, cordite and viscera that was emanating from Eggsy.

"So," she said, "I noticed that you somehow managed to keep your glasses intact."

Eggsy shrugged, but smirked a little.

"Soooo," Roxy drawled. "On a scale of one to Budapest, how big a shit-show was it when you 'rose from the dead'," she made finger quotes, "and then started to fuck them up?"

Eggsy grinned. "I'll trade you a sneak peak of the footage in exchange for the location of where Merlin's hidden the 12 year old single malt on base."

"Hmmm, I don't know…" Roxy stretched, smug as a cat.

"And," Eggsy continued, unperturbed, "when Harry inevitably wants to see the footage, I'll distract him until you're a continent away."

Roxy winced.

Eggsy smirked.

Roxy caved.

"Done."