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And gradually, in the weeks and months following the take down of Scorpia, they learn to live again – really live, without the weight of ghosts on their shoulders.
Alex and Tom head back to school though Kyra point blank refuses to join them – “I told you, I don’t like institutions” – Alex does note, however, that she’s stopped finishing the statement with “and I don’t like people”… Instead, Kyra spends her days moving from coffee shop to café, scouting out the best wifi and working on a new cyber security project that she’s tried, and failed, to explain to them many a time.
His favourite evenings and weekends are when it’s just him and Kyra, curled up in front of a film, or meandering through the streets of London watching as first Halloween decorations and then Christmas lights get put up, or taking weekends away for a bit of privacy.
In early December, they take the train up to Edinburgh (Kyra falls asleep on his shoulder for most of the journey) and they spend a long weekend exploring both the city and each other. Alex makes her laugh and roll her eyes at the same time when he attempts to show how he’d scale castle rock to get into the fortress, and she indulges him by accompanying him to a Hearts game, even putting away her phone in the second half to actually watch the football. Though he has a sneaky suspicion that’s just because her hands had become too cold to operate the device. He doesn’t mind, he just likes having her there.
They get lost wandering the city, dipping into pubs when they need to warm up (she detests whisky, they discover, whereas he quite likes the way it burns and warms him from the inside). They climb Arthur’s Seat in a bitterly cold wind and talk about everything under the sun (she, reluctantly at first but then with increasing confidence, tells him about growing up in Singapore and he tells her about his uncle and all the amazing things they did together). But mostly, they spend evenings in front of the fire in their Airbnb, not caring about the cold because they have each other and all sorts of exciting ways of warming up.
They work out how to transition from friends to lovers, making mistakes and getting cross (the fights, like the two of them, are intense and formidable), but mostly navigating the change with ease because they are both just so glad to be alive and to have each other.
.
Kyra gets oddly quiet when Jack announces it’s time to pick up their Christmas tree. He doesn’t question it (he’s learnt not to question things when she gets quiet – she’ll tell him when she’s ready) but he holds her close as they wander into Bermondsey to pick up a tree at the pop-up Christmas stall that opens each December.
“What do we call it?” Jack asks, as they carry the six-foot tree home, Alex supporting the trunk and Jack dancing ahead with the top of the tree ‘balanced’ on her shoulder – she’s not taking any of the weight, she never does, even though she insists on a bigger tree every year. It’s their tradition and he loves it.
They always give their trees stupid names – they’ve had Greek gods and film characters, book heroes and monarchs. Last year, their last Christmas with Ian he suddenly realises, had been the year of Matilda.
“Most people will know her as the wife of William the Conqueror, Alex. But she was the one who really bought power to the relationship. She was a queen in her own right, educated her daughters as she did her sons which was rare for the time. History will tell you that men were the powerful ones; don’t be so naïve. Women hold the real power.”
Doesn’t he know it.
Kyra smiles at their antics as they make hot chocolate and put on stupid carols to decorate the tree. It’s a mess – as always – and that’s okay. It feels like home.
“So Kyra, you get naming rights this year,” Jack announces as Alex tops the tree with an angel he made back in primary school.
Kyra freezes and he is about to take pity on her when she purses her lips slightly and then- “Victoire?”
He squeezes her hand and pretends not to notice her slightly shaky laugh and watery smile as Jack beams and declares the name ‘completely perfect’.
She tells him later. Their trees in Singapore had only ever been set up for her dad’s Christmas parties. Stuffy and elegant, they’d exuded wealth and snobbery. “We rarely spent time with each other throughout the year, let alone to decorate trees at Christmas,” she explains. So the idea she could be part of a family, picking out a tree and naming it with an actual Christmas celebration to look forward to? Well, it’s… special. Difficult. Scary.
He holds her as she cries that night. For her parents, for her childhood, for everything she never got to have.
.
The four of them ring in the new year together – him, Jack, Kyra and Tom – sharing a bottle of champagne at home in their pyjamas, Jack pointedly turning away Tom’s amused face so that Alex can kiss Kyra as Big Ben tolls twelve.
“Here’s to a year free of evil people trying to take over the world,” Tom declares grandly, waving his champagne glass around recklessly.
They all laugh at this.
“I’ll second that,” smiles Jack.
Unsurprisingly they all agree.
“Here’s to… just living,” he finishes. Kyra gives him that shy smile of hers and he feels all warm inside, a feeling that has nothing to do with the champagne he’s just drunk.
.
When school closes for teacher training in February, they go hiking in Cornwall, taking a ridiculous number of trains and buses to get out to a shepherd’s hut in the middle of nowhere (“You know you could learn to drive” – “In case you hadn’t noticed I’ve had a few other things on my mind since turning seventeen!”) and then explore the coast, both wishing it was warmer so they could take advantage of the incredibly blue sea.
“We should come back in the summer,” he says to her as they sit on a rocky outcrop on the approach to Land’s End, eating Kit Kats and sharing a thermos of tea.
And she grins up at him from where she’s lying, head on his lap, eyes closed. “Okay.”
In that moment he almost dares to ask her about her plans for the future, if she’ll even be here with him come the summer, before he chickens out, as scared to ask the question as he has been every other time it’s crossed his mind.
Jack’s the only one who’s dared put into words what he’s been wondering since Kyra arrived in the UK all those months ago, finally confronting him one evening when Kyra’s gone out to pick up a new computer charger.
“Don’t take this as me kicking out your girlfriend, Alex,” (girlfriend… he’s still getting used to that…), “but what are Kyra’s plans? I mean, do her guardians know where she is?”
He shrugs, “I don’t think they care.” There is truth to his response but he also wonders if there’s maybe slightly more to the story that Kyra is letting on.
“Alex…”
He thinks about his answer carefully. He knows she hasn’t been to school since Point Blanc. She’d been homed schooled before that, she’d explained to him, and when her aunt and uncle were given custody of her she’d informed them she didn’t want or need her tutor anymore. He understands. She wants to work with computers and really, Kyra is far more intelligent, far more talented at computer programming than any teacher, so what is there for her to learn from them?
He knows she’s thinking about doing her exams and applying for university – she’s thinking about a few places in London much to his delight – but when it comes to timings she’s always been vague.
As for finances… He knows she doesn’t get access to her inheritance until she turns twenty-one – what said inheritance looks like he doesn’t, and doesn’t need to, know and she isn’t forthcoming on the matter. Both she, and her aunt and uncle, are given a small sum of money every month for her ‘maintenance’, however. Though what Andriy Vashenko and Nuo Chao considered ‘small’ he certainly doesn’t, and he knows that the average person could live very comfortably on her maintenance grant.
“They know where she is,” he replies to Jack. “She’s mentioned they’ve reached out a couple of times so they know where she is and that she’s safe. I don’t think they miss her.” This annoys him. Because who wouldn’t miss Kyra?
“And what about her plans? For example when – if – you go off to university next year?”
Alex almost laughs because he’d definitely need to improve his grades to stand a chance of getting into university – apparently there’s only so much school he can miss to save the world before it starts to have an impact…
“She’s thinking about uni too… but Jack, I don’t even know what I want to do next year.”
“Okay…” he knows Jack senses she’s not going to get anywhere with him and lets it drop.
He sighs, he hates disappointing Jack. “I’ll ask her, okay?”
She drops a kiss on his head and lets it go. “Thanks.”
.
While his favourite times are when it’s just him and Kyra, hanging out with both Kyra and Tom is a very close second. He loves watching his two best friends bicker – it sounds strange, but it’s always friendly bickering and they are both such funny people in such different ways that when they come together the result keeps him in peals of laughter evening after evening.
They argue about food, about television, about the right way to wash up, about politics (he’s with Tom on that one, sometimes Kyra is a bit too anarchistic), about the best computers (he’s definitely with Kyra on that one, though is slightly impressed Tom is willing to go head to head with her on computers. Madness), about… everything really.
Jack sometimes joins them too – especially when they are willing to cook for her – and he loves those times as well, loves sitting in the middle of chaos just observing his weird, silly, slightly odd family.
And then in March, Tom turns seventeen and he and Kyra welcome his best friend to a club they’ve been part of for months now, cheering him in with a slightly burnt cake with sloppy icing covering up the charred bits (Jack is particularly unimpressed at the state of the kitchen after they attempt, and fail, three times in their baking endeavours before finally coming up with a passable cake). It tastes… well… a bit floury. (“Well what did you expect? Neither of us have ever baked anything,” snipes a smirking Kyra when Tom dares to criticise it).
But they have a fantastic evening eating more pizza that four people rightly should. Alex gives Tom a box of sweets shaped like anchovies. Tom tries to flick them onto Alex’s pizza doing nothing but leaving a smear of tomato sauce on the sofa when the ‘anchovy’ rebounds. And they sit around laughing about life… and the fact that they actually have lives to live.
“It’s eighteen next and we’ll be adults!” declares Tom, beer in hand.
(Jack’s always been good about letting them have the odd drink for celebrations – she knows well enough they’d get the alcohol one way or another and seems to prefer them to drink at home rather than at parties where ‘God knows what’ (her words) gets added to the cup.)
Tom’s statement scares Alex a little because, well, what more will ‘being an adult’ require of him?
Kyra seems pre-occupied by the statement too and he wonders, not for the first time, what being eighteen will mean for the heiress of Vashenko-Chao, or more importantly, if she’ll finally have to return to Singapore… Then he shakes the thought away because that scares him more than anything.
Almost anything…
.
He still has the nightmares. He thought they’d calm down as he put Scorpia behind him but they come and go. They’re better when he’s really and truly exhausted and so he’s taken to exercising. A lot.
He runs three, five, sometimes ten miles every morning or goes for a swim on his way home from school, pounding up and down the pool for an hour or two before cycling back to the house, starving and exhausted.
He and Tom take long bike rides too, going up and down the hills of South London before grabbing breakfast at the café in Brockwell Park, a pint at one of the pubs around Peckham Rye or fish and chips at the top of Denmark Hill.
He keeps up with his karate but also starts Muay Thai, enjoying how demanding it is, how every session leaves him sore and aching but more satisfied than any of Scorpia’s lessons ever did.
He feels like now he’s training without the pressure of actually having something to train for. And the exercise has had an impact on his body – he’s felt it change, become more powerful and muscular. Kyra says she likes it, usually emphasising her point by running a slow finger across his increasingly well-defined chest and… well… he likes that a lot. And in addition to the muscles and strength he’s gained, his mind has felt sharper too.
But he knows it worries Jack, this new exercise regime of his. Sometimes he thinks maybe he’s actually becoming the agent The Department always wanted him to be and he knows Jack must think that too because she’s been nagging him about university – what does he want to study? Where does he want to go? Does he know he needs to get his grades up? – as if she’s scared that if he doesn’t go to university he’ll gravitate back towards The Department.
But really what helps with the nightmares is Kyra. His arms around her at night. Her arms around him. The soft sound of her breathing lulling him back to sleep after he’s woken up screaming. Her voice in his ear gently waking him up when he’s locked in a fear-filled world.
At first she’d crawl into his bed around midnight each night and then creep back to her own each morning before Jack could find them curled up together, but she gave up on that pretty quickly (he’s learnt from experience that Kyra is not a morning person…) and after an initial bit of shock and a raised eyebrow or two Jack has just let them get on with it. She always was a cool guardian (he doesn’t think Ian would have been quite as accepting of their sleeping arrangements…) and he thinks Jack is probably just grateful he’s getting some sleep, and at least is safely tucked up at home.
Tom’s been the worst, really. Mocking them incessantly and making wildly inappropriate comments at madly unsuitable times, and Alex can no longer count the number of ‘oy oys’, winks and ‘ooooooohs’ they’ve been subjected to courtesy of his best friend. But Alex knows that this is Tom’s way of telling them he approves of them as a couple, likes them together. Hell, Tom has been their greatest advocate from the beginning and Alex is pretty sure it would have taken a lot longer for him and Kyra to get together had it not been for all of Tom’s hinting in the background.
So really he’s bloody grateful for his best friend.
.
He’s tried to think about what he wants to do next, he really has, but, as Kyra said to him once, when you’ve gone from saving the world on a daily basis and almost dying it’s a bit difficult to go back to thinking about mundane things like school and exams and university applications overnight. He has to give himself time.
And luckily, amazingly, incredibly, he has time now.
Weeks and months and years of time.
To love and laugh and just… live.
At last.