Fluent in 'Tucker'
"I don't want excuses, Malcolm, I want it done. I want it done yesterday. I want it done before I phoned you in the dead of bloody 'All Hallows Eve' but seeing as we're a government distinctly lacking in time machines I'll have to settle for the morning news – preferably before the opposition catches a whiff of our rotting corpse wafting down Downing Street because it'll be your entrails wound around the gates like tinsel, Malcolm."
"Of course, Prime Minister."
"I mean it, make this go away."
The phone against Tucker's face went dead. He listened to the comforting silence for a moment, relishing the sheer nothingness against his ear for a change. Anything was better than listening to either the desperate begging of ministers or terminal errors that threatened to break free and feed off the newsprint.
Finally, he set the Blackberry on his desk and eyed his empty cup of tea.
"Sam... SAM!"
The second shriek of her name was entirely unnecessary. Sam always heard him the first time.
She pushed open his door carefully in case he was lingering behind it like some kind of vampire bat. It was late. The curtains were still pulled open but there was only a black sky and small array of ever-dying street lights beyond them. The TV he had mounted at the far end of his office was muted so that he didn't have to endure the drone of fifth-rate reporters catching up to yesterday's news.
"Tea..." he muttered tiredly at her. He wasn't being deliberately short or rude, Malcolm was simply so over this day that had been going for longer than he could remember. It hadn't even occurred to him that it was eleven o'clock in the evening and his P.A. was still at his side with a fresh cup of tea and short list of mobiles he could call and have a shout at when he needed. All these years that Sam had been enslaved to him and he hadn't noticed that she never left before him just in case he needed her. He always did.
"Biscuits?" she asked.
He nodded before lifting his head to hiss venom at the silent TV that was flashing unflattering shots of one of his ministers from a story he'd rather explicitly told them to can. He made a mental note to verbally kill the producer then started indexing the top ten most creative ways he could do it.
"Something wrong?" Sam returned with tea and a plate of biscuits. She found her boss on the couch in front of the coffee table, glaring at his Blackberry with eyes that could melt civilisations. "Not again..." she sighed, realising what must have happened. "When do you have to go on air?"
Malcolm leaned over and tugged a biscuit from the plate.
"About eight hours," he muttered. "I have mere galactic seconds to turn this absolute shit-fuck that our charming PM created on his way home tonight into nothing. I have to give it a new post-code so that the PM can fanmail it safely from his rosey island of cotton wool and bubble wrap. I'm supposed to make it disappear like a fucking magician with my hat and twatty stick. Fetch me a few rabbits preferably with detachable ears if it's not too much trouble! I want to go all Gothic horror on this one."
Sam sat. She had to move his feet ever so slightly on the couch so that she could fit between him and the silk cushions. Even now she couldn't repress a smile at the memory of him threatening to pin the face of every victim he'd fed to the press. He had a wicked sense of humour – quite literally.
He frowned when he saw her extract his laptop from the table, hack his password and start typing. "Why are you there?" Particularly there at the end of his couch.
"Someone has to draft your speech," Sam shrugged. "It's a darn sight easier than filtering out all the 'fucks' and 'cunts' later in the morning when we're short on time. Why don't you start speaking and I'll see what I can come up with?"
The hilarious thing about trying to filter Malcolm Tucker was that you didn't have to be the world's fastest typist to keep up with his stream of conscious. The majority of his thoughts came out in expletives so vivid and abstract that it was very nearly a second language. Indeed, Sam was fluent in Tucker but as the night went on he ran out of the energy, too tired to swear. Eventually he was flying a few half way decent thoughts around, all of which Sam expanded upon and moved into coherent sentences for him while he busily tore through the flesh of a few mandarins. As a side note, she'd noticed that eating fruit was a weird, coping mechanism. It gave his hands something to do that didn't include stabbing ministers to death with pens.
It took Sam a moment to realise that Tucker wasn't pealing his mandarin any more, or muttering death threats – he was asleep. His head rested against one of the cushions, tilted to the side and calm in a way that the world didn't often get to see him. He looked ten years younger simply by sleeping. In his hand, which was almost on the floor, was a half-opened mandarin.
Sam sighed. She didn't have the heart to wake him. If her maths was accurate, he'd been going for almost three days straight. Even though she was certain that he was some kind of super-human monster he had his limits.
Without any fuss or noise, she took his Blackberry and carefully went through the PM's requests for the cover story. Sam spent the remainder of the night on the couch eating his mandarins, writing Tucker's speech. She tossed in a few abrasive (but clean) quotes so that they'd know it was Malcolm, edited a few 'fucks' that she'd missed the first time round before finally printing it and leaving his speech on the table next to where he was sleeping. She'd pulled a soft throw over him during the night and put the only surviving mandarin safely back up on the table where it belonged.
Work started in an hour. Sam didn't see the point in going home so she retreated to the bathroom instead to change into one of the spare suits that she kept in the office for situations exactly like this. It said a lot about her job that she had enough supplies to live out of Downing Street for a week. Hell if there was an apocalypse she'd be the only one prepared. Not that anyone would notice. This place was the zombie hive. They strolled past her daily carrying whatever limbs Tucker ripped off them.
She gave her boss as many minutes rest as possible before returning to Tucker's office with a dry cleaned suit, laying it over his chair. He might look all peaceful and adorable, breathing quietly on the couch but the minute she woke him Sam knew that he'd unleash a storm of abuse on whomever was closest which reminded her, she really should re-organise his day so that he didn't kill off any of the small fish coming for their first meeting. Maybe she could throw in a few appointments with his least favourite examples of humanity – a good shouting usually got most of the hostility out of his system.
First up – Meet the Press.
Sam placed Malcolm's Blackberry in his hand without waking him then quickly evacuated his office. She sat behind her desk and dialled his number.
The phone in Tucker's hand vibrated. His fingers curled around it as though the device were an extension of his skin. The damn thing had been wired into his brain for the past ten years. When it woke, he woke.
"Tucker's knackery for MP's past their use by date..."
Sam lifted her hand to her mouth, hiding a grin. "You have a meeting in half an hour. Your car is outside and there's tea on your desk." She hung up swiftly, leaving him to rant apocalyptic buggery at his phone while she confirmed his appointment and politely told a few half-rate hacks to fuck-off about whatever may or may not have happened to the PM yesterday.
Hours later, Sam peeked around the corner of his office door carrying the world's largest skinny hazelnut latte.
"Watch your step – there's blood all over the floor..." Tucker muttered, waving at the remnants of his speech he'd left scattered over the carpet.
"But not yours," Sam replied, stepping over the discarded speech. She set his coffee down beside him and grinned. "He owes you."
"Yeah well, if Tom ever says anything remotely similar to what he allegedly said last night – in public – I will have it printed and embossed onto the doors of parliament my-fucking-self and nail his hands up beside it. It's an honest to fuck miracle that the universe let that one slip by."
"Ancient Rome – you really are upset." He reserved those insults for the lowest levels of the human order. "Shall I cancel the rest of your appointments or do you fancy a bit more exercise?"
"Sweet heart, nothing can exercise these demons out of this carcass." He sipped his coffee, not missing that she'd brought his favourite. She was probably trying to make him safe again for mortals to speak to. "But yeah, why not. Send something tasty you know – something I can chew a bit. Fangs get too long if they're not filed back."
Those few smiles he'd snuck in were as close to, 'thank you' as she would get but in Malcolm's world he'd practically sent her a card with little love hearts.
"I might even go out to eat," he added, before she left. "See if there's any lunch at DoSAC."
With the monster prowling the halls of DoSAC, everything was peaceful at Downing Street. Sam picked up the largest pile of complaints she'd ever seen and carried them over to Malcolm's office. Incredibly, these weren't complaints against him but rather useless, trivial whinges against people so boring she had to look them up in the database to put faces to names. Malcolm only insisted on keeping copies so that he could dig shit up on anyone who had ever been anyone at some point in the future. It was a work ethic that served him well. People joked that Malcolm Tucker knew were all the political skeletons were buried – they were only half right. Tucker knew where every skeleton that had ever been shed on the political stage laid and all their illegitimate baby skeletons too. Hell he even had a political pet cemetery somewhere.
"Shall we continue this somewhere more private – just, pick up your bloody stumps and drag them this way, to my office." Tucker could be heard miles down the hallway with some poor, terrified cabinet minister in tow. He thought it was odd when he sauntered past Sam's desk that his P.A. wasn't there to give him her usual private grin whenever he was about to make a kill. Some might go as far as to say that he over-dramatised events simply to get a rise out of her.
A moment later, he found out why.
Sound asleep, laid out on his couch was Sam, curled up to a cushion. Malcolm backtracked out of his own office so fast he nearly trampled the MP into the carpet. The last thing he needed was for anyone to see a young woman asleep in his office. Not even Sam could tailor his ass out of that story.
"Ah – second thoughts, I fancy a tea," Tucker said lightly, closing the door to his office before the MP could sneak a look. "Follow me to the kitchen, won't you, so I can pour scalding water over your limp cock, see if we can't give it a bit of a wake up because you're going to need balls the size of Miller's head to get yourself out of this mess."