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Mei Helen Rider is born at 12:36 on the 18th May 2044.
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It takes a long time for Kyra to agree to have a child. A long, long time. Five, ten, nearly fifteen years after they graduate university and move in together – officially move in together, that is; Alex likes to think of the time that the two of them spent living together with Jack in his childhood home as ‘good practice’.
He has always wanted a family, children with her, but she has always been reluctant.
“I like it just us.”
“I’m not a mothering type.”
“So much could go wrong.”
“You know it’s not good for the environment.”
“I need my sleep.”
“Our lives are too dangerous.”
“Why can’t you be happy with what we have?”
And so he doesn’t push it because she is right, they have each other and that’s all they need, and despite all the odds, they have survived and thrived as a couple.
.
Kyra leaves London to head back to Singapore just before her eighteenth birthday and the time they spend apart is tough, some of the hardest weeks, months, years of his life. But, as Jack says to him when he grumbles about missing Kyra, “if your relationship can survive this, it can survive anything”. Turns out she's right…
Yes they end up taking more long distance flights to meet each other in remote locations than an eighteen-year-old couple rightly should, but they do survive.
Kyra sorts out what level of involvement she wants in Vashenko-Chao – minimal, it turns out, not surprising either one of them – and wraps things up in a way that even if isn’t what her parents might have had in mind, certainly makes him very proud of her.
In return for the freedom Jack gives him to meet Kyra regularly in far flung places, he comes through on his promise to study, take his exams and get good grades.
He gets into the London School of Economics and Political Science to study politics – feeling that after having saved the world so many times he now wants to learn more about how it continually gets into a mess to begin with.
And a year after he starts at LSE, Kyra returns to the London to take up her place at Imperial College to study computer science. It takes about three months before she is helping the university re-write its entire computer science curriculum.
.
They both end up working for The Department.
Inevitable? Jack certainly thinks so and berates them both for even considering it when the offer comes in. But when it ultimately does happen it is their choice and it gives them a purpose. And, as Kyra said to him when they discussed, at length, whether or not to accept Mrs Jones' offer, given that they experienced such danger and excitement as teenagers, is it in any way surprising that they both became adrenaline junkies of a sort?
And they do enjoy it. Kyra runs rings around Smithers, completely overhauling the tech team and ultimately taking over when he retires, becoming, Mrs Jones quietly informs Alex, the youngest Head of Tech that The Department has ever had. Kyra grins when he informs her of this and then tells him she’d already worked that particular fact out for herself. She has access to all the files now, she points out.
Alex starts as an agent, again, slowly learning the ropes – officially this time – and even branching out to do missions with some of the other agents before eventually becoming a Mrs Jones to her Alan Blunt. He wonders if his dad would have been proud of him. Or Ian. He thinks yes. His mum? Probably would have despaired as much as Jack does.
But luckily, apart from several small injuries and a few not so small injuries (the grief he gets from Kyra and Jack when he returns home from the south of Spain with three bullet wounds in his shoulder is immense…), he manages to complete his missions relatively unscathed. He thinks in no small part because he has Kyra at his back.
.
And then, on his 35th birthday, she says yes. Yes, she will try for a child. Yes, she does actually want one. No, she has not been replaced by an evil clone. Sorry, she knows they aren’t supposed to joke about evil clones. Yes, she is actually being serious. About the child, not the clone. Yes, she does realise how happy this makes him. No, she really, really isn’t joking. Yes, she’s happy. But yes, she has conditions… one condition really.
No more spyboy.
She will not, under any circumstances, consider bringing a child into the world with him if they both still work for The Department.
And he gets it, he really does. He’s seen, or rather knows, what trying to be a family under the gaze of a life of espionage did to his parents and he doesn’t want that either.
And so he makes a decision that is eerily similar to the one his father made all those years before and chooses to leave The Department to focus on family. And when it comes to it, it’s not a hard decision. In fact it's the easiest decision he's ever made.
.
They begin to wind down the 'spyboy' part of their life. It isn’t as though they haven’t done any good – in fact they’ve stopped plots, brought down criminal groups, prevented thousands if not millions of deaths and, for nearly fifteen years, they’ve had a purpose. They’ve made The Department a better, more honest, more impactful organisation. And, to his great pleasure, he’s seen The Department, if not the world, truly realise the brilliance of Kyra Vashenko-Chao.
She starts up her own company dealing in cyber security, finally realising a project she’d started many, many years before. She employs predominantly female coders and grows the business from two employees in the first year to eighteen in the second. He has never, ever been so proud of her.
He takes more of a side step, becoming a civil servant and moving into the Ministry of Defence into a job that requires less active duty but also seems to require more from him because the whole set up he arrives into is a mess and he has been given the challenge of overhauling it.
In the years they have worked together he and Mrs Jones have developed what was at first a tentative, and then a genuine friendship (she now even occasionally pops around for dinner much to Jack's irritation - his old guardian has never quite been able to get over what Mrs Jones and The Department put them through!), and he knows his new job is one he never would have got without Mrs Jones laying the groundwork with the Secretary of State for Defence. And for that he’s grateful. But he’s also proud of what he is doing, making the country a safer place without constantly having to risk his life.
.
And so they try for a child. And as fun as the trying is, it's frustrating too because it takes time. But they remind themselves that if it doesn’t happen then they have each other, and that’s enough.
But eventually, it does happen.
And it’s terrifying.
He first finds out they are having a baby when he comes home to a positive test sitting on the edge of the bath and a house conspicuously missing his partner. It takes him couple of hours to track her down, eventually finding her on a bench outside Gabriel’s Wharf on Southbank.
It’s a warm late September evening and she’s staring out at the Thames, hugging her knees to her chest, head resting on them. Her muscles are tight under his hand as he gently rubs her shoulder.
“I thought we wanted this?”
“We did. We do.”
He sits down next to her, taking her hands in his. They are cold for such a mild evening.
Her voice cracks. “I’m scared.”
“Hey, hey, come here.”
He pulls her towards him, as always amazed at how much peace simply holding her can bring. “I’m scared too.”
“Really?” she tucks her head into his neck as she always does.
He chuckles at that. “Of course I bloody am. You don’t see as much crazy as we have and not feel a little scared at the idea of bringing new life into the world.”
She laughs and he feels a sense of giddy excitement at her next words- “I am happy as well. We’ll… we’ll be a family.”
He laughs more, choking back tears because when she says it like that is sounds so fucking incredible – a family. Two orphans, two broken, scared souls have together made something unbelievable.
.
Kyra hates being pregnant. She’s not good at having others control her and her own baby is no exception.
The sickness. The utter, sometimes debilitating, exhaustion, particularly in the first few months. The changes wrought upon her body that feel totally beyond her control. And, once she stops throwing up constantly, the mood swings and cravings – he’s never seen someone eat so many Cornettos with so many odd sides or toppings. Then there's poking, the prodding, the constant checks and scans and people trying to touch her growing stomach.
She finally snaps and so they conclude that only two people are allowed to touch the bump. Him and sometimes, if she's in a good mood, Jack. And he loves it, loves the feel of the kid growing daily. He loves talking to the baby, reading to the baby, feeling the baby kick. He knows Jack adores it too, joining them for dinner several times a week to plan and read baby books and feel it move.
Kyra is less a fan of the kicking – it had terrified her at first – and as Peanut (neither wanted to find out the gender and so ‘Peanut’ became their go to) continues to grow, the movements become “downright disruptive”. Her words.
As he said, Kyra hates being pregnant.
He tries to be supportive, he truly does, but really he just loves the sight of her pregnant, loves catching a glimpse of a little foot poking at her from within, loves what pregnancy does to her body.
.
There are moments that will stick in his mind forever, like photos pinned up inside his brain.
The first time they hear the baby's heartbeat and it's suddenly fucking real and Kyra looks at him, terrified but in awe, and the emotions on her face mirror how he is feeling.
The night they tell Jack and they are all celebrating and then Kyra is looking longingly across at Jack's wine and then glancing down at her stomach to mutter "you better be cute".
Tom spinning a confused Kyra around, shouting "you did it! You made a Kyrex!" before Alex has to intervene and ask his best friend to please be careful with Kyra before he catches both Tom and Kyra rolling their eyes at him in unison and suddenly he's so happy all he can do is laugh and hug them.
Feeling Peanut kick for the first time and realising that they've somehow created a human.
If there’s one thing being pregnant has not changed in Kyra, however, it’s her night owl tendencies, and when he finds her awake at 2am trying to code while occasionally having to stop to stroke her bump and beg “please, please stop doing that baby, Mamma needs to work,” it is so beautiful it makes him fall in love with her all over again.
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The baby is late and Kyra is close to a total meltdown when she finally goes into labour on the 17th May. It’s bloody and visceral and seeing Kyra in so much pain is one of the hardest experiences of his life, bringing to mind old nightmares he thought he’d got rid of when he used to see her screaming, being punished at the hands of his enemies and begging them to stop. It's all he can do not to descend into a breakdown, but he knows that whatever he's going through it's worse for her. They will never be free of their ghosts.
She had categorically refused to give birth at the hospital, her dislike of medical institutions, something that Point Blanc instilled in her all those years before, still strong, and so a midwife comes to their small south-London house, keeping her distance and allowing Kyra to pace the familiar rooms and feel somewhat safe, despite the pain and the fear.
But not for nothing she is the strongest person he knows and, after fifteen hours of labour while their child’s undisputed godparents – Tom and Jack – wait in their kitchen surviving on coffee and buttered toast, slices of which they occasionally bring to Alex, Mei is born. And she is perfect.
Utterly and completely perfect.
.
The discussion over names had been long and intense. Alex had wanted to acknowledge his parents but they had both agreed that they wanted their baby’s first name to be original, entirely their own and not the bequeathment of a dead person.
Alex hadn’t been bothered about keeping the surname ‘Rider’, but Kyra had refused to name their child ‘Vashenko-Chao’.
“My parents only gave me that name to make it easier for me to inherit their company. My child will not be named for a legacy, but for who they are. And we are not going to triple barrel.”
She also said that because she had been named for her Polish/Ukrainian grandmother, that she felt that the Singaporean side of her heritage should get a look in when it came to their child’s name.
And so, with several names in mind, they had chosen to wait to meet their child before deciding.
And now, staring down at the soft pink skin of his baby daughter as she lies in Kyra's arms, his finger gently stroking her downy dark brown hair, he knows that giving her a name that means ‘beautiful’ is without a doubt one of the most honest decisions they have ever made.
.
Mei absorbs every moment of their lives from the second she enters the world. And not just their lives; Jack and Tom seem equally besotted and even Mrs Jones comes around to meet her when Kyra is feeling up to it and sheds a tear holding Mei, giving Alex a rare smile when he draws attention to the fact that his former boss is basically crying.
Tom, now a producer at the BBC, films every step of Mei’s life, and while Kyra moans that her daughter is only two months old and she has already had to buy three new external hard drives to save all of the videos he’s taken of the baby babbling at a jungle themed mobile, they all know she doesn’t really mind.
Smithers sends them a collection of baby clothes that contain tracking devices. Kyra laughs, then looks at them suspiciously and puts them straight into storage. Alex doesn’t blame her, Smithers is eccentric at best and dangerous at worst, though he does later get the parcel out of storage; if there’s one thing being a father has taught him it’s that the fear of losing his child will always be with him and the idea of being able to keep track of his daughter is, quite frankly, very comforting.
And it is with this thought in mind that, after only a week of life with Mei, he fervently apologises to Jack for all the things he put her through.
Jack strokes his cheek as she bounces the baby against her. “Oh Alex, just you wait till this one is a teenager. With you and Kyra as parents I can’t imagine what chaos she’ll get up to.”
Oh God.
The thought is utterly and completely terrifying and he scoops his daughter into his arms to whisper nonsense in her little ear, begging her to stay safe.
As for Kyra, Alex thinks that motherhood has both mellowed and intensified her. She’s more at peace with herself, happy to just watch their baby girl sleep, but at the same time having Mei has brought out this fierce protective instinct in her, something that in the past Alex has only seen directed at him. He loves it. Loves her. Loves their daughter. Loves, loves, loves their family.
.
It’s another warm evening in September and they are sat in their tiny garden, the gentle scent of jasmine around them, a pot of fresh peppermint tea on the table in front of them, and a beer in Alex’s hand. The baby monitor faces them both and Kyra is alternating between flicking through her phone and glancing at the image of their sleeping daughter.
Alex can’t blame her; he’s finding it difficult to concentrate on his book as his eyes keep drifting to look at Mei every few minutes.
While life is peaceful now, until Mei wakes up that is, he knows that in the long run their lives will continue to be complicated…
Someday they will have to explain to Mei how her parents met, why they met. Why Daddy has nightmares. Why Mummy has them too. Why her parents are so overprotective. Why she doesn't have grandparents. Why her immediate family isn't technically related to her but instead consists of a nerdy film producer, an American human rights lawyer, a scary spymaster and a secretive hacker. Why her heritage is wonderful and brilliant and exciting... but complicated.
But it's a challenge he knows he will relish because, given what he's been through, this is one that's full of love and comfort and family.
And anyway, their story is now Mei's story which means, despite the pain it has caused them, it is a good one. Finally.
He rolls his shoulders back, stretching slightly and wincing - the damage those three bullets did to him, not to mention the lingering pain he has from many a broken rib, torn ligament or fractured bone will never leave him. But that's okay. He’s turning 40 tomorrow. There was a time when he didn’t think he’d turn 17 and now… now he’s got a partner and a daughter and a family and a job he loves and while life isn’t perfect, he is pretty sure it’s as bloody close to it as it could possibly get.
He nudges Kyra with his foot. “Love you.”
She gives him that close-lipped, beautiful smile that he will never, ever get tired of. “I know.”
And then, “love you too… spyboy.”