A/N: Chapter title is Tony Blair's, Malc and Nicola are the BBCs, the rest belongs to my crazy mind.
Do enjoy!
3.
"Jesus Christ, Peter, what a misjudgement."
Of all the people in his life who Malcolm Tucker expects to find on his doorstep tonight, Nicola Murray is arguably the last on the list.
"Look! The Glummy Mummy's come bury Cesar. Fuck off, Nic'la, I'm not in the mood."
Nicola ignores him and pushes past him into his house. "You've just been fucking arrested, Malcolm, I don't think this is the right time to pick a fight."
"You don't get to dictate when I fucking pick fights. Oh, and by the way, get the fuck out of my house."
"Have you eaten anything?" She asks, breezing through his home like it's hers. Malcolm hates how at ease she is in his space. Malcolm completely fucking hates that useless Nicola Murray, whose life he's just utterly fucked over, is breezing through his house like she's going to fix things for him. Most of all Malcolm utterly fucking despises what the sway of her hips elicits in him.
"I'm not joking around here, Nicola. Get out of my fucking house."
"No." Nicola replies calmly as she pores through his pantry. "Because this is the point where you finally fucking implode and someone needs to be here to make sure you don't fucking top yourself in the process."
"As if you give half an ant's shit." Mumbles the Scot darkly.
"I do, actually. I mean, Christ knows why..." Nicola's voice trails off as she examines a packet of pancake mixture that is no less than seven years outside its used by date with a frown. Truth be known, Nicola has spent so little time in her own kitchen since she became Secretary of State all those years ago that she could have far worse.
"What are you in the mood for?" She queries, closing her hand around an unopened packet of linguini.
"How about not being fucking charged with a crime?"
"Yeah, well, you fucked my career, so sadly I have no power to help you in any way that isn't culinary right now."
When she fills and flicks on the kettle, Malcolm finally resigns himself to the fact that she is not going anywhere, regardless of any protestation he may make. They are no longer engaged in a professional relationship, and he has nothing to hold over her anymore. He has no way of manipulating her out of his house short of calling the police, and really, he's had more than enough dealings with the Met this week, and he expects the frequency of his interactions with the police will only increase after today.
Malcolm's kitchen is orderly, aside from the presence of old produce. It is arranged in the most logical manner possible. A woman has not been near it for almost two years, and Nicola is sure this level of organisational precision would have taken place after Lucille left and not before. Lucille's sense of order was more arbitrary than Malcolm's. Alphabetical rather than practicality of access, that sort of thing. Nicola is grateful of the order. It means at no point does she need to ask Malcolm where anything is located; an infinitely helpful fact when the person one is attempting to cook for is currently pondering the best way to remove you from their house. Opening the fridge she discovers that at least he has butter, which surprises her somewhat. He has no cheese that she can see, but he has a healthy supply of Fanta. In fact, he is drinking a bottle of Franta at present, and Nicola can't help but wonder if perhaps there's a dose of vodka in it too. Malcolm has had a day that surely warrants alcohol.
"So far we're up to buttered linguini. Sounds appetising." Nicola remarks with a grimace. Malcolm wants to rail at her, but today he feels like he's had a Hoover attached to every one of his fingers and his fighting spirit has been sucked clean out of him. Maybe most of him has been sucked out. Maybe there was nothing left of the real Malcolm Tucker to remove anymore. Malcolm feels weak and depleted. Malcolm feels that he has spent his life in pursuit of power, considering only the getting of it, the keeping of it, and now he has lost his own. Malcolm wants to curl up in a ball and let himself rest for the first time in more than a decade, but he's worried that years of politics will mean he's incapable of something so... normal.
"I'm not sure I can do this, Nic'la." The words make her jump. He is too soft, too broken. He is unsettling like this, and Nicola doesn't know how to handle Malcolm Tucker when he's being earnest; he so rarely has been with her over the past five years.
"It's just pasta, Malcolm. It's not going to kill you. Believe me, if I wanted to kill you I'd do it with my bare fucking hands right now."
"I don't mean the fucking pasta you daft giblet, and by the way, I'd like to see you fucking try. You'd probably end up attacking yer own reflection."
Nicola drops a fistful of linguini into the now boiling water and flicks her eyes over her shoulder, taking in the fatigue in his face. The last time she remembers seeing him quite like this is when Steve Fleming first came back to Tom's office, and that concerns her. Nicola had watched him inches from total self destruction, had borne the emotional brunt of his sacking. Nicola would never voice it in these terms, but her life and Malcolm's have in many ways revolved around one another's for the past two years, and seeing him like this, even though she utterly fucking despises him right now, is complicated for her. Complicated in much the same way it was complicated when he talked her into turning down her job at Yale. On one hand, Nicola wants to find the crashing demise of Señor Malcolm Tucker something worthy of celebration. On the other, she has worked so closely with this man that sometimes she forgets he is a political assassin - let alone her own political assassin. That second hand is the one that makes her feel badly for him, the one that brought her to his door. Those two hands are currently engaged in an arm wrestle between throwing scalding water on him to have done with it, and trying to find something to make the pasta less drab.
"What then?" She asks, crossing back to the pantry in search of herbs or tomato paste.
"I can't fucking be normal again, Nic'la. Christ, I barely survived being out of the loop fer two days when that cunting little ferret Fleming came back."
Nicola considers him evenly, fingers closed around a shaker of parmesan cheese.
"Malcolm..." Her tone is soft, gentle. Malcolm wonders what he's done to earn it after all she's been put through for the last few weeks. "Look, maybe we should worry about trying to keep you out of gaol before we start talking about how you'll cope without an official BlackBerry?"
"Oh, I'm fucking going to gaol, darlin'. Even my three-grand-an-hour wanker of a lawyer isn't changing that turd shaped factoid."
"Yes, that's what I'd assumed, actually."
"Aren't you even goin' t' ask if I did it?"
"No. No, I'm not." Her gaze is trained fixedly on his condiments now. "Because if you did it then I actually will fucking kill you and if you didn't then I'll have such a breakdown over the injustice of the legal system that I won't be able to cope. And if you did I don't fucking want to be here and for some reason I actually do want to be here, so let's just leave it, okay? And just by the way part of me doesn't care either way because my fucking god, Malcolm, the kind of karma you must have been accumulating over the last seventeen years was bound to catch up with you at some point so maybe you just have to take this. This parmesan is like fucking sand."
Nicola tips her hand and lets the solid little grains of now very dry cheese tumble to the floor, brushing her fingers over her palm to rid it of the last few granules.
Malcolm studies the former Leader of the Opposition silently, processing her comments. A few days ago she was the alternate Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. A few weeks before that, he was still trying to work out how to get her there. Professionally Malcolm feels no guilt at affecting her destruction. Personally something clenches in the pit of his stomach when he thinks about what life would have been like had she actually managed to get there - if he had actually managed to get her there. Of course it's nonsense to think that she ever could have led the fucking nation. Jesus, Malcolm's never even seen her lead a body of staff for fuck's sake, but the part of him that has a tiny glimmer of personal regard for her, the part of him that doesn't hate having her here in his kitchen to make sure he doesn't drop dead from hunger, that part likes to think she would have stepped up to the job. And if she had managed to step up to the job, then he has robbed her of something.
While he's considering all this, Nicola's hand closes around a jar of tomatoes. "Thank fuck," the brunette mumbles almost inaudibly. In her younger days she was well adept at tossing pasta together from basically nothing on those rare occasions when there was a cock up booking a babysitter and she would have to rush home to feed the children, but there was no promise whatsoever in buttered linguini. Malcolm doesn't even seem to possess a lemon that isn't more mould than skin at this point.
Thankfully, Malcolm's passion for curry means he has a well stocked spice rack, so Nicola is able to locate enough fillers to make what is now effectively going to be linguini tossed in butter with lightly sautéed tomatoes at least vaguely interesting in flavour.
Malcolm watches as she stirs an assortment of herbs and spices through the makeshift sauce she's creating. He's surprised that she has any sense of complementary flavours; she has always seemed to be someone with no instinct or predilection for cooking whatsoever. It's not like he's tasted it yet, of course. It may well be as much of a fiasco as everything else Nicola Murray turns her hand to. In fact, he's not sure why he gave her the benefit of the doubt in the first place. It's something he's found himself doing over and over again over the past few years, and it never ends with him pleasantly surprised.
"Could you get me some bowls, or would that be too much to ask?" Her tone is dripping with disdain. She is still grappling with how much of her anger she's allowed to work through tonight versus how much time she should spend being supportive. She is worried for him, despite her best efforts not to be, but her fury refuses to be totally dismissed. It's an odd mix of emotions for Nicola. She is used to being angry at the males in her life, used to being disappointed by them, but somehow this has hit her harder than anything before. Harder than the metric fuck-ton of lies James has dumped on her over the years, and that's something that concerns her deeply. What concerns her more is that she's reasonably convinced that the underlying reason for it is the simple fact of trust. Regardless of a long and complicated professional history, Nicola has always trusted Malcolm. She doesn't always agree with him, can't always justify him, but she trusts him. Having him betray her so thoroughly and easily was utterly devastating.
His eyes bore into her back, but whether she can feel them or not he is unsure. She fishes a teaspoon from the drawer to her right, and he watches her tongue flit out to catch a drop of sauce before it falls to the bench. Maybe it's because he's overtired (more so than usual), and he's probably going to gaol, and his entire life is basically fucked - maybe it's because all the people in the wider world or just the people in his wider world have totally abandoned him, but for some reason, Malcolm can't help thinking that Nicola Murray is not a totally unwelcome presence in his kitchen. In fact, he's finding Nicola's invasion quite comforting. But, god, she pisses him off. How fucking dare she barge in here and fucking feed him like he's an infant? And why is his treacherous brain reminding him of useless facts about how she felt underneath him that night at Conference, how her tongue was wicked even when she was trolleyed. It's been years since Luce left and it's been almost that long since he really stopped to care, but every now and then that night at Conference still pops into his head. Every now and then he remembers how long it's been since he's had a mojito.
Silently Malcolm ghosts up behind her, reaching for the bowls in the cupboard above her head and to the right. While he does so, his left hand trails down her waist and over the arse has so admired for all these years. Nicola tenses under his hand and spins in his grasp. Malcolm manages to set the bowls down to his right before Nicola knocks them from his hand with her sudden movement.
Nicola's eyes, well known to be malleable in colour, are currently blazing green; indignant, confused. Malcolm does not smile as he runs his hand down her leg and attempts to hook her knee around his hips. Before Nicola can quite work out what's happening, Malcolm is bending his head and dropping his lips to hers. He is not smiling, there is not the levity of the last occasion. The first time they kiss when they are both sober, each wishes they'd had rather a lot to drink.
Nicola's brain is normally a swirling mess of fire trucks trying to get around a traffic jam, but right now there are police cars and ambulances thrown into the mix too. Half of her is screaming that this is Malcolm Fucking Tucker, the man who has just completely fucked over her career and basically her life, while the other half is caught in a vicious loop of oh-god-hands-mouth-fingers-Malcolm-oh-god-hands-mouth-fingers-Malcolm. She is seething with rage at everything about him, at the mere fact of his existence. She has exhausted herself with hating him, which is perhaps the only reason she found it within herself to come here tonight. She is still trying and failing to process the events of the last eight days, and having Malcolm Tucker's tongue invading her mouth is really not helping her in this endeavour. Since that night all those years ago Malcolm has pondered in his rare idle moments what she might taste like when she hasn't spent the night ingesting rum like it's oxygen. Even though this is definitely not the circumstances he expected to surround such a discovery, Malcolm is comforted to find that she tastes exactly how he's always imagined she would. She tastes like an omnishambolic frump he finds inexplicably endearing. She tastes exactly as she should, and for no reason Malcolm is glad she does; it seems fitting that at least something in the last fortnight has been at least vaguely predictable. Malcolm's free hand caresses her cheek, her hair which he has so often professed a fondness for. His eyes slip open again, attempting to take in her face at such close range. Her name falls from his lips, a gentle "Nic'la" laced with a kind of exhausted longing, and the sound of it finally breaks Nicola's cycle of Get Malcolm The Fuck Off You versus Oh Fucking God, Malcolm, Yes. Her hands fall from his face (and oh god, when did she put her hands on his face?) and push him from her by his hips. Nicola wishes she had the ability to summon some kind of coherent words, but she does not. She is too busy trying to decide why her heart is pounding and the taste in her mouth is so intoxicating to do so. Almost instantly Malcolm misses the warmth of her body against his, the feel of her leg under his fingers, but he can't say he's really surprised. After all, this is not the first time Nicola Murray has run wordlessly from him at a significant moment.
Calmly, Malcolm turns off the stove, drains the pasta, and dumps it unceremoniously in a bowl. There's no point in letting it go to waste now and he is rarely a man to turn down a free meal. For the first time since his testimony at the Inquiry, Malcolm Tucker's head is not filled with the spectacular shards of his once brilliant career; it is filled with every tiny detail of Nicola Murray he has absorbed this night. Malcolm muses over the temperature of her body and the texture of her hair, the smell of her skin and the taste of her mouth while he picks idly at the pasta she's made. In accordance with his earlier contention, she does have a sense of complementary flavours, and for no reason this makes the ghost of a smile touch his lips.
Malcolm will spend years trying to replicate this pasta. He can never quite get the balance between oregano, turmeric, and chilli right, but he is content to undertake his culinary experiments in the hope of recreation. Years later, when he first pushes a spoonful under Nicola's nose and asks for her opinion on the accuracy of his recipe, he is rudely informed that she has "no fucking idea, because you decided to fucking kiss me. I only had a teaspoon of it."
Even if the memory of the pasta becomes hazy and imprecise as time strides past while him juggling two mobile phones, Malcolm can always rely on Nicola Murray's mouth tasting of her own special brand of omnishambles. He will always take some comfort in this fact.