jamie gets flu

Sam comes in with the coffee and the tape for last night's Paxman interview and a note, very shrewdly slipped in just before she walks out the door, that, by the by, Jamie's called in sick. He's been sniffly for the past few days, threatened Dodson from Health with biological fucking warfare via his snot when he mentioned it, but Jamie never calls in sick. Naturally, Malcolm is a bit (worried concerned) pissed off. He dispatches six increasingly nasty emails (Sent from my O2 Wireless BlackBerry!) over the next three hours and is extra mean to the fuckups over at DoSAC during his mid-morning bollocking just to make up for it. Then he goes through the rest of his itinerary.

At around noon with Sam to man the door and guard it with her not inconsiderably valuable life, Malcolm unlocks the desk drawer where he keeps his other BlackBerry (just like the other one, only off the books and not subject to any intrepid fucking journo's Freedom of Information bullshit). He dials Jamie's home phone and is not concerned when he doesn't pick up. To say that Jamie sleeps like the dead is to injuriously insult the vivacity and wakefulness of the dead. So he calls Jamie's other home (a number known to fewer people than who would have immediate access to the nuclear codes) because Jamie's done this thing where he's hooked up the telephone line to his fucking brain stem and can tell you if someone's trying to ring it from the other side of Siberia – except he doesn't answer that either.

Malcolm swears a streak so blue it'd make a sailor toe the ground and re-evaluate what he's been doing with his life. He can tell even Sam is impressed by the way her shadow leans slightly into the light under his doorway, because she's usually so good about the whole not giving a vehicular titwank about the human-shaped-maggots-on-the-other-end-of-h

er-boss's-line thing. It's one of the qualities Malcolm most values about her employment here.

He's got Ma McDonald's number, which he'd consider if the woman weren't so absolutely terrifyingly good at keeping him on the line for hours at a time; he'd call Sadie, except he and Jamie have an agreement over that - and anyway, Jamie wouldn't, fuck off.

But then Hopelessly Sackless from over at the MoD calls and Malcolm has things to sort, an actual government to keep from crashing its massively stupid and fantastically racist Minister of Defence into the neon 'fuck off darkies' sign he apparently wants installed along the Cliffs of Dover. By the time he's got around to having words with the PM about this twelfth colossal media clusterfuck his choice for incontinent-fatarse-in-charge-of-our-nation's-security has sprayed all over the walls of a BBC 2 broadcast booth, it's nearly 8.00 and it's a Friday, so Sam reminds him – he's allowed to actually go home on Fridays.

In the car he tries Jamie's numbers again; on the fourth ring, he actually picks up, staticky and mumbly like he's got his head sheathed in a cottonball. 'Whatever you have, you malingering twat, don't tell me you've actually died,' Malcolm tells him.

Jamie coughs and distils the world's capacity for patheticness into one syllable: 'No.'

The car pulls into Malcolm's neighbourhood then and Malcolm has the driver drop him off at his usual spot just around the corner (he's not being neurotic or paranoid, but Jamie's round on a Friday night and you can't trust drivers with information like this; some of them actually have eyes, and brains, and secret paycheques from The Sun). Jamie's still on the line, but he's not said anything else. If it weren't for the sniffling and wet hacking noises being made into Malcolm's ear every five seconds, he'd have thought Jamie'd hung up on him.

'Why haven't you picked up?' Malcolm demands just as he fishes for his keys to unlock the front door. 'I've been trying to call you since 8.00 this morning and –' The jaws of hell rise up from beneath the earth and yawn in his face. Malcolm blinks massively, shuts the door hurriedly behind him; he doesn't know whether to be mildly pissed off or incredibly relieved that Jamie announces his intention to hole up in Malcolm's place like this. It's better than demands for soup. Peeling off his coat and tie, pushing up his sleeves, he finds Jamie poured out onto the couch wrapped in a hoodie and a comforter, a pile of crumpled tissues nigh crumbling out of a wastebasket. He's scrunched up on his side, head pillowed on one arm and gazing glazedly at the 9.00 news. He looks up when Malcolm walks in, makes a little waving gesture with two fingers, the others clutched around the remote, which Malcolm confiscates with a mental note to have it disinfected or burned at expedience.

'Why aren't you home?' He takes the handset from him as well (to be burnt, definitely to be burnt, by the sticky sheen of it). Jamie squirms out of the way as Malcolm gingerly sits himself into the hollow where his spine is curved into the seat cushions.

He winces when Malcolm tries to reach for his temperature (which Malcolm has utensils for; he doesn't actually have to touch him, the plague-rat bastard) and mumbles something incomprehensible into the pillow which sounds like 'burn fart' but is actually probably closer to 'brain hurt.'

'Haven't been round to the new place since the middle of February,' Jamie says, considerately allowing Malcolm put his hand on his clammy, egg-frying forehead without any sort of warning. 'Went to m'GP's in the afternoon and couldn't remember where to send the cab to get back,' because trust Jamie to let himself get sick enough to where he doesn't remember where he fucking lives any more.

Malcolm, entirely unnecessarily, allows his fingers push the damp curls from out of Jamie's face before sitting back against his stomach. It's not compassion, it's just one fastidious man keeping his OCD in check. An eye on the latest developments in Iran's nuclear threats (cleverly disguised as dick-waving), he plucks up the white chemist's bag from the coffee table. There's a mess of pills inside, spilled out from the vial because Jamie apparently decided that getting the childproof cap off was challenge enough. 'When's the last time you took these?' Malcolm asks, studying the label. He's got anti-virals.

'When I got them, probably,' Jamie replies, taking the bag from him from him. It crumples into his pillow in one hand as he makes a flailing motion with the other that is apparently part of his routine to right himself. Malcolm pushes him back down with a finger to his sternum without looking at him and starts pouring, counting the pills as they clatter back into their container; then he continues reading the label.

'I'll get your fucking water,' Malcolm says eventually and Jamie looks bedraggled orphan puppy grateful for a home when Malcolm gets up and – god help him, if he doesn't stop that Malcolm's going to spike his soup with Nembutal and bury his stupid body in the garden (the vice foreign secretary of Switzerland owes him an enormous one; he could have it shipped in by tomorrow).

He comes back with a squat glass of juice which is probably more vitamin C than Jamie's consumed all year, no wonder he's grievously plague-ridden about to die. Jamie takes it when he hands it to him along with two of the little white-and-blue pills; his watery eyes have started eating up the top half of his face and Malcolm's never kicked a sick man before, but he reckons he wouldn't have to stoop too low to do it. 'Drink all of it,' he tells him when Jamie looks like he's going to stop. Jamie, who always, always does what Malcolm tells him, even in things he regards as unnatural like ingesting fruit (Jamie cites the bible very literally in some things, then not at all in others) finishes the glass in one swallow. His breath smells slightly less like illness and death when his sigh hits Malcolm in the side of the face.

'You don't have to stay here.' Jamie coughs, turning his face into his sleeve as he does so. 'I'll be fine, Malc. You know me.'

'You're in my fuckin' house,' Malcolm snaps. 'Where else am I supposed to go?'

Jamie nudges him with his knee and says pointedly, 'Germs.'

Malcolm elbows him back, much less gently. 'Why don't you fucking leave then? If you're so fucking concerned for my fucking health.'

Jamie must be sick, because he doesn't even get indignant, doesn't even say anything, but he ducked his head and avoids his eyes in a way that stinks of hurt and shame and penitence that Malcolm feels something suspiciously like guilt seize at his stomach and wring it until he gropes his hand around under the blanket for Jamie's hand and shoves them together. Jamie looks up in askance, but at least he looks up so Malcolm can stare him in the (blue, cautious, but not hurt, not thinking that he's unwanted) eyes and lie unconvincingly to him, 'I've had my flu shots.'

Jamie looks as if he's going to call Malcolm on this, not just the scientific facts of it, but the fact that Malcolm hates doctors and needles and when he has to let people (who are not Jamie) touch him.

'Okay then,' Jamie acquiesces, and they sit together and watch the news until Jamie falls asleep around him, the heaviest of blankets, and Malcolm's fingers are just as hot and sticky as his.

'I'm delirious; I can't think, what was I saying; wait. I hate you. I hate you and your stupid fucking eyes. Don't ever look at me again. You did this to me.'

'Shut up, Malc, you're not delirious and you're not going to die. Now just drink your organic fucking orange shite; I had to go all the way over to -.'

'I am too fucking delirious and I am going to die and- no, listen to me, the vice foreign secretary of fucking, fucki-'

'Shh, all right, maybe you are delirious, but you're still not going to die. Here, have a drink of this, there's a good girl.'

'What did you just call me?'

'Nothing, Malc, nothing, now take your pills.'