A/N: I've had this idea for a while now and I've been trying to flesh it out for a while now and I finally think I'm ready to post it. I'm quite a bit nervous as I'd never written Malcolm before but I literally could not get this AU out of my head. Basically, it's post-the Goolding Inquiry for Malcolm and pre-Last Christmas for Clara, following the idea that the Doctor never comes back for her. Yeah. Constructive criticism is highly encouraged. xxx

P.S. We're just going to pretend that Malcolm and Twelve are not played by the same actor. Yes? Yes.

"Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are."

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

When he was but a lad, green as green can be, he nurtured the very unlikely dream of a life in the industry of espionage.

To be fair, it wasn't a particularly rare dream. Everyone had them back in the day and kids always had them whenever there was a new spy picture in the cinemas. That much hasn't changed over the years. But it was the likes of the smooth and dapper as fuck Roger Moore, to the boy he was at that age, that one image he could not help but look up to.

Oh, to wear crisply pressed three-piece suits that were tailored to his figure to absolute perfection; to so manoeuvre a firearm as fluidly as a rolling tide; to have every dame and damsel fall to their knees just at the sound of his name from his lips, all cool and suave like he'd rehearsed it a million times before…

He knew, of course, that it was impossible. It was strictly a boy's pipe dream—but oh, dream he did. His dreams were never short of saving the world. He always wanted to make things better and he knew he could. He then imagined scenarios where he would be in Her Majesty's Secret Service; he would be the best among all of them. He could blend in better than a silhouette in a room full of shadows; he's been weaving tapestries of backstories that could make Penelope weep with envy since he was but a wee bouncing tot.

But James Bond wasn't Scottish and Messiah for-fucking-bid he ever turned fucking English for a fucking job.

Malcolm Dougan Tucker still had some pride left about him, after all.

This, he considered in hindsight, was just the next best thing to a double life.

He was still a master deceiver, of course. He made Machiavellian look good. And he was more than adept at handing out assassinations, of a kind, for the greater good when needed be. Damn himself for the good of the innocents; a regular John the Baptist, he was, as they'd already served his fucking head on a silver platter when they sent him off to serve at Her Majesty's pleasure instead, don't think he's either forgiven or forgotten.

And besides— James Bond was also a fucking misogynistic twat, he soon came to realise when he started thinking properly with the right head; for all of his sins, even Malcolm wasn't that bad.

This was how he liked to think of the strange turn of events that had transpired in only the last few years of his already drawn out life. And to think that he'd felt spread out thinner than America's Next Top Model in his shorter-than-expected stint in the slammer, just a missed meal short of his own space in the next Obituary column—who was to know that it was the perfect opportunity for a career change that was practically tailor fucking made for him?

And, as a matter of fact, it was.

See, unlike James Bond—that fucker never had to deal with fucking aliens. Who knew?

When he was back in the Lion's den that was Number 10, it was incidents involving extraterrestrials that were the absolute fucking worst. Everything always needed covering up and it would be needing statements from the Prime Minister himself – journalists and their coked up editors and all their shit about accountability and public safety like they gave fuck all about any of that – and they would all be fucking wetting themselves until Uncle Malc could come in with pacifiers and mobiles to make everything okay again, only to be shat and pissed on at first chance.

Cunts.

This, however, was quite preferable in comparison.

He had had no intention of dabbling back into politics or public relations, after the massive clusterfuck that was that fucking mistake of an inquiry, when he first meditated on it; this was before a blonde woman called Kate Stewart stormed in for all of two weeks into his sentence and plucked him up as a recruit for the service of Her Majesty—with the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, no less.

Fuck him if he saw that twist coming. Next thing he knew, he was acquitted of all charges, given handsome compensation following his exoneration, and there wasn't so much as a manicurist's whisper about the whole exchange.

Most days, it was easy to handle. Menial. Tedious.

It was basic monitoring of news feeds and every social media platform currently known to man, from all over the world. Of course, he had assistants for that sort of thing; they who took care of Google Analytics and alien propaganda embedded in lines of SEO copywriting and pretty basic cock ups like that. A man with talents and secrets like Malcolm Tucker was better suited to less than savoury tasks in this particular line of fire; that of which is exactly what he was here for anyway.

It was him keeping ministers of different governments in line, particularly their own as fucking aliens tended to gravitate to Great Britain for some reason (some conspiracy theorists on the internet with all their 53 to 11.6k followers on Twitter claim that its cosmic reparations for the Royal Crown's crimes to human history but he wasn't one to bite the hand that fed him when it wasn't relevant to the situation at hand; he, unlike his previous employers, had a certain sense of fucking loyalty, fuck you very much) – feeding them need to know information in order to redirect the people from mass panic to righteous rage at the imbeciles they voted for in the first place.

Call him Rumplestiltskin, spinning story strings of almost invasions into shit storms that the likes in Number 10 have never seen. Let them clean themselves up for a change; not his fucking problem, was it? He'd be lying if he said he didn't take some form of vindictive pleasure out of it—karma was fucking sweet sometimes, especially when it was on his side. He outranked the fucking Prime Minister now, technically. Sometimes. One could argue that he was more powerful here in the shadows than he ever was in the mighty spotlight of Downing Street.

He suspected Oliver Reeder probably shit his pants with his laparoscopically morcellated innards the first time Malcolm placed a call to give Number 10 the approved lines from UNIT after the Cubes incident. Oh, that was a good day—a good first major extraterrestrial catastrophe, averted. They were saved by the man called the Doctor, huzzah. It was just Malcolm's job now to make sure it didn't quite go in the public record.

McCombs and Shaw should come back to life just to give him a fucking blowjob for the empirical evidence that his years in the professional industry of agenda setting could provide.

Barely anyone needed a bollocking down here and for that he, and his blood pressure, were immeasurably grateful. He was now part of the blanket of shadow that tucked the public into bed at night and told them they were protected, without really telling them how they were doing that and what they were protecting them from. For the most part, it was better to let them keep their worlds small.

Some days, however, it was like it was the end of the fucking world. Take today, for example.

Hashtag planes have stopped.

Fuck.

He had been on the phone practically nonstop ever since the news broke out and UNIT had gone to phone up their specialist; he knew things were bad if they had to call in their specialist.

Malcolm hadn't had the time, in the thick of it, to notice that the specialist that they'd brought in was a teeny thing, not the Doctor bloke he'd been expecting, in heeled biker boots and a leather jacket. Clara Oswald, he knew from her records, but she was without the poofta with the chin you could land the presidential aircraft on or the stick insect who dressed like he was auditioning to be Val Valentino's 'where are they now?' photo. That was strange; the Doctor, he knew from the records, was always with one of his companions. And vice versa. That was how it worked.

What the hell was she doing alone?

It has been a few hours since it happened and the planes had started again since then; there were a few casualties, not caused by extraterrestrials (ironically enough) but that wasn't his mess to clean up. He was sat on his desk, massaging his temples as he's just about managed to calm down the fucking World Council, promising that they'll have their statements and meetings and explanations as soon as the Secret President of the World came back to base. He was given strict orders to remain for her briefing and it was all he could do to just sit by his desk and await further instructions.

It was then, in that temporary silence, that he pondered on the circumstances that brought him there.

Malcolm was lost in his own thoughts, jumped from pondering about his childhood dream of espionage (technically) come true to how much he would actually kill for takeaway curry and a fine bottle of scotch (single malt; only the really good stuff was allowed on a day like today), when he got the buzz in from up high that the Doctor-Regent (AKA the Companion) has just landed back from Spain. He got an email just as quick and was set to preparing the statements that would come from the basic reports.

Megalomaniacal alien—the same one from the Graveyard Cybermen incident—and stopped the Earth's air traffic just to get Clara Oswald's fucking attention. Details to follow.

Christ.