Decades later, in her memoirs, Aileen Macdonald would claim the day as her start in politics. Kayleigh'd been perched by the window, rapping her fingertips against the sill, Tara on the floor, playing video games on her tablet. Aileen, exiled to her bedroom so that the Bartletts could consult with their lawyer in the privacy of their dining room, was lying on her bed, bored out of her skull. (The twins, deemed too young to really understand the proceedings, had joined her exile out of stubborn solidarity.) Hours had passed, and she was sure she'd heard the lawyer leave, but since the army of volunteers administering her school hadn't sorted out basic things like truancy and the Bartletts were otherwise preoccupied with not getting hauled off to the Hague, she jealously clung to her rare afternoon of privacy and quiet. She'd remember with clarity, after so much else had faded, the rectangle above her bed where the paint was darker than the rest of the wall, where until very recently, the portrait of the Chancellor had hung, would recall how she'd wondered what would hang there next.

"Hey," Kayleigh said. "That car's back again."

"Eh?" Aileen rolled off the bed and went to look out the window. It was a black car, shiny, with tinted windows. Any distraction from the fraught purgatory that the Bartletts' house had become would have been welcome, but her heart caught in her chest as the car beetled up the long driveway to the front gate and stopped there, idling.

Kayleigh, even runtier than Aileen had been at her age, had to push herself over the tall sill to see properly; Aileen boosted her in time to see that two of the men emerging from the car had guns. She opened her mouth, ready to tell the younger girls to hide under the bed because it had all started again, when she caught sight of the last man, tall and whip-thin, dressed in a long black coat that flapped around him like a cape, and then the guns didn't matter.

She didn't realize she was shaking until Kayleigh tugged her arm and asked, "What's wrong?"

"I know him," Aileen said, which was more than she should have said this far behind enemy lines. The portrait was gone, but for all she knew, the bugs were still there.

"Of course you do, dickbreath." Tara had unplugged herself from the tablet to crowd at the window with her sisters. "He's on telly like every day."

"No, I mean I—" She stopped. Reconsidered. Lies and feigned ignorance had gotten Aileen and her sisters through the last three years, and just because the internet said that the new government was going to respect human rights and call elections didn't mean that the girls were safe. Aileen was pretty sure that Mr. Bartlett, as the Regime's regional commander for Leeds, had killed people during the war. That he and his wife insisted that they were family meant nothing; even family couldn't be trusted. (Especially family. There'd been rewards for information at school, posters and ads everywhere; more than once, the head had pulled her into his office to ask her what her parents—Regime loyalists right until the sorry, humiliating end—talked about at the dinner table.)

"Hey, I have to piss," she said, and grabbed Tara and Kayleigh by their wrists. "Come with me."

"Aileen?"

"Feumaidh sinn bruidhinn," Aileen murmured, breathless, the taste of brine at the back of her throat. Her lungs contracted in panic. It was only slightly less blatantly retarded to speak Gaelic in the enemy's house than to say something in Urdu or Arabic, but it was code to invoke their shared secret, to signal that they were to get away from hostile ears immediately and talk about the things that were, otherwise, off-limits to even mention. Louder, she said, "You're right, must have seen him on telly."

"Why're you acting like such a freak?" Tara hissed.

She ushered them both into the loo, locked the door behind them. Turned on the taps, the rush of water at once drowning her voice and taking her back to the ocean, the bone-deep chill and the copper spray of blood across her face, and she wanted so much to throw up the wall between before and after, the barrier of denial that had kept her silent but sane. "I do know him," she whispered, praying that her voice couldn't be heard above the taps. "So do you, and not from the telly, either. You two were probably too little to remember, but he used to come 'round the flat when we stayed in London. He was da's friend."

Tara made a face. "That makes no sense," she said. "Dad's with the old government, and that's the new government. Why would they—"

The surface, there and then gone, flashed before her, memories forbidden and buried behind a façade of perfect obedience. It wasn't safe to speak; she knew that, but she was convinced she'd burst apart if she'd come this close to salvation but was too frightened to say anything. "I mean our real da."

"You said not to say…" The end of Kayleigh's sentence was muffled as Aileen hugged the girls close to her, shaking, curled around them as if to shield them from the crash of the wave, to keep them afloat when she herself was starving for oxygen. "D'you think he's here for us?"

She made herself breathe. "No, twatface, he's only the guy who runs the entire country. Don't you pay attention to anything?"

"Oh my God," Tara said. "He's here to arrest the Bartletts."

Aileen said, "He must be," and Tara wriggled out of her arms to break for the door. "Wait—don't. We should be careful." Maggie at school kept saying that the new government was murdering people who'd been part of the old government. Aileen didn't think she meant kids, but she wasn't about to risk her sisters' lives on it. "But I think…I think we should go talk to him. I think we can trust him."

Kayleigh's eyes narrowed. "You're sure?"

Aileen shrugged. "We have to trust someone," she said, though it wasn't really true; it had been just the three of them for so long, playing spy games and reciting half-remembered Gaelic phrases that the Bartletts didn't understand, and they'd been fine. They'd lived through it all, which was more than most could say. "Eventually, right? He might get us out of here." She pushed herself up against the door, held a hand out to each of the younger girls.

"Is he even gonna remember us?"

"Probably not," Aileen replied. "But he'll remember da. They worked together." She opened the door the way she'd practiced, with her palm clasped around the knob as she pushed it so that it didn't make a sound, crept, her stocking feet silent on the polished wood floor. She'd forgotten to turn off the taps, but the voices from the dining room were already louder, and even her less-stealthy sisters were able to move unheard.

Through the railing, she could just see into the dining room; Mrs. Bartlett, seated at the table with her head in her hands, Mr. Bartlett, the light from the chandelier glinting off his bald spot, braced behind her. Circling them both, arms windmilling like he was preparing for takeoff, was Malcolm Tucker.

Three years was a long time. Long enough that she called Mr. Bartlett her father in public, and the twins referred to him as such in what passed for private as well. Aileen, who'd been too weak to save her family when the Regime had taken power, had grown up to be tough, just like her ma, in her dying breath, had told her to be. She could watch the suppression of a riot on the news and when Mr. Bartlett came home at night with blood on his boots, she could still smile sweetly at him over his wife's pot roast when he asked her to pass the salt.

Now, he was red-faced and blustering, and the two soldiers were watching him closely, fingers twitching at the triggers of their rifles, while Malcolm shouted and Mr. Bartlett spluttered helplessly in response.

She'd never seen her foster father afraid of anyone before, and that was enough to ensure that for the rest of her life, Malcolm Tucker would be cemented in her mind as Gandalf, Dumbledore, and the Doctor rolled into one, saving her from the monsters and whisking her off to someplace better.

"This is bloody bollocks and you know it. There's a dozen men up the pecking order who haven't been charged. I have rights."

Malcolm laughed, which was far more terrifying than his earlier shouting. "Do you now?"

"Is dad gonna punch him?" Tara whispered, and Aileen slammed a hand over her mouth, held it there until she was confident that neither of the twins was going to make their presence known.

"Look, ye half-rate zombie pig-fucker, this isn't a discussion, you're going tae move aside and let my men search the place before the kneecapping starts. D'ye think these two bricks with guns are here to protect me? They're here to make sure I don't rip your bollocks out through your fuckin'—"

Aileen had slid all the way down the stars and made her way down the dimly lit foyer and around the corner to stand at the entrance to the dining room. She was going to stride up to him—the PM's right-hand man and currently the most powerful person in Britain—and introduce herself and her sisters, the ghost of her old accent bleeding through her practiced RP, and say that they were the daughters of Jamie and Mary Macdonald who maybe he remembered from before the coup, and she was sorry to bother him but their parents were dead and they needed his help. And then, she hoped, he'd contact the right people and they'd be sent far away from the Bartletts to live with some distant remnant of the Macdonald clan who'd made it through the war and Maggie at school could claim to the others that they'd been murdered all she liked but it wouldn't matter because they'd have a real home again and be safe.

That was what was supposed to happen.

What actually happened was she stood in the square of light from the chandelier, and the indomitable Malcolm Tucker—who'd survived three years of imprisonment at the hands of the Regime, who'd been tortured and nearly killed but survived to overthrow the government and save the country, who'd lost everything and still come out on top—stopped shouting and froze where he stood. The fury fled him all at once and his face crumbled in on itself like a controlled demolition.

"Fuck me." His voice cracked in a way that it never did on the telly. "You've got his eyes."

Jamie stabbed the glowing red coal of his cigarette into the corner of the wall, his fingers already twitching for a second fag as his mobile buzzed for the hundredth time that night. Spears of rain slid down the overhang in a shimmering veil, prison bars that fenced him off from the deserted streets. He stood listening to the gunfire rapport of droplets slamming into the pavement and the dull throb of the music inside, contemplated another walk to fucking nowhere in the rain like a soppy heartsick twat through the dim skeleton of a dying town, and then surrendered to the lure of dryness and warmth, yanking the door open and slinking back inside.

The woman at the bar who'd been watching him play darts—flawlessly, another unforeseen consequence of all the killing—was still at it, and it was an option, if not an ideal one, to get blisteringly drunk and find out if she was enough to get the taste of Malcolm off his tongue. It'd been so long since he'd exchanged more than a few words with another person that he thought he might as well take Father Kelly up on the monastery offer otherwise.

He swung onto the stool beside her, bared his teeth in a threatening parody of a smile, decided, then, that he couldn't overcome his revulsion at her presence, at his own, ordered another beer. He tried, and failed, to ignore it when the Sevilla-Basel match broke for the News at Ten. As the presenter came on, stumbling over the teleprompter, Jamie felt the first grim glimmer of optimism he'd had in months—with practically every legitimate journalist in the country dead or in exile, he could walk into any newspaper office, any broadcasting studio, and be hired on the spot. Take that, Paxman.

And then Malcolm appeared on the screen, and it was useless to pretend that the fucker hadn't—as Jamie'd heard him threaten to do to others so many times—reached down into his throat with his spidery fingers and pulled out his still-beating heart and the rest of his guts and sinew and arteries along with it, hadn't left him, as always, to clean up the splattered mess left in his wake.

For a man who hated the spotlight as much as Malcolm claimed to, the cameras loved him, loved his sly smiles and charcoal Paul Smith suit and the pale blue tie that brought out the hints of colour in his eyes. He flitted between courting sympathy and commanding admiration; he was toying with the interviewer, and it might have been fun to watch if the LIVE graphic in the corner wasn't distracting Jamie to no end.

"Tha's as fuckin' live as cuntin' Lady Di," he muttered. The woman next to him arched a plucked eyebrow, and he realised he'd said it out loud. "The cast thing," Jamie said. "He had it off days ago. This is pre-taped, 's probably no' even in London." Which meant that Malcolm was up to something, some clandestine negotiations or whatever dirty work he did for Nicola these days, and didn't want anyone to know where he was.

"Why do ye care?" she asked, her tone bored enough to indicate that she didn't, either. Sometimes he forgot that their Byzantine games of backstabbing and assassination, literal and metaphorical, were completely irrelevant to normal people—at least until the tanks came out and the Molotovs started flying, and even then, how easy it was for the country to pick up and muddle on.

"I don't," Jamie said, and put his head on the bar. He was long past the point where he'd have denied that seeing him was like wanking with a fistful of Tabasco. The man on the screen, controlled and composed, his rage and passion ever-present but unleashed only in precise, tactical strikes, with his expensive suits and cropped hair, might have been the man Jamie'd fallen in love with all those years ago, but he couldn't help wondering what had happened to the wild-eyed, ragged revolutionary, the patron saint of lost causes who'd lurked beneath London's stifled streets. The one he'd actually gotten to touch, who had, however briefly, been his.

"What do you say to the criticism that the Repatriation Act is a shameless ploy to win votes for Labour?"

"'S a fuckin' shameless ploy tae win votes fer Labour," Jamie slurred into the sticky wood, not that the woman beside him caught his words, not that it wasn't a shameless ploy that he'd quite agree with if he were a) being honest with himself, and b) sober, one of those rare instances where good strategic thinking also happened to be the right thing to do.

"—presumptuous to suggest that at this point there's anything like a functional party structure, and listen, right, we are talking about British citizens here, people whose most fundamental civil rights were stomped on by the previous government, who were unlawfully deported and have as much a stake in this country's future as you or me. We can't seriously talk about holding elections, restoring democracy, not before they're home."

"The fuck are ye playin' at, y'cunt?" His eyes rolled up towards the screen, in time to cut from the reporter's inevitable question on Scottish independence, an issue Malcolm had been tactfully dodging for months, to a close-up of Malcolm staring squarely into the camera.

"Look, I know the country's gone in the shitter—sorry, am I allowed to say "shitter" on telly now? I did win a war for freedom, yeah?—anyway I'd ask of the people of Scotland the same thing I'm asking of everyone currently in exile and facing the decision of whether or not to return home. It's not easy to trust, or forgive, not after what's happened. But I'm asking—" He smiled, bright and mercurial, and Jamie thought, oh sweet fucking hell, he's not in London, he's fucking here, now, and slapped a tenner on the bar as Malcolm purred, victorious, "—give us another chance."

The woman at the bar reached for his untouched beer as the door slammed shut behind him.

By the time he reached home, his buzz had subsided into an incipit migraine, the rain had turned to a stubborn demonstration of Reaganomics. Dampness settled in cold constriction around his bones, and Jamie had worked out enough permutations of "fuck off back tae London, you massive fuckin' bawbag" to almost drown out the persistent and irritating fantasy of finding Malcolm on his doorstep and falling, like some dozy bint in a Hugh Grant movie, into his arms.

Malcolm, of course, wasn't on his doorstep. The door was locked—he had an alcoholic's lapse of fuck, where are my fucking keys—but the kitchen light was on. Fuel shortages being what they were, he was positive it hadn't been on when he'd left.

It occurred to him that the murmur above the rapid-fire pulse in his ears was the sound of voices from inside and it should have set off every defensive mechanism born out of life under a totalitarian state, but he shoved the thought into some cobwebby corner; all that mattered now was storming through his front door, grabbing Malcolm by the throat, and tossing him out into the rain. Which he had, muttering to himself all the way home, convinced himself he was capable of doing.

He could see the tall, unmistakable silhouette backlit in the glow of the kitchen's single bulb, and he boomed out, "I told ye I was fuckin' done, and did ye break into my fuckin—"

Which was when it finally registered that Malcolm wasn't alone, even as she stood up from the kitchen table, her round, blue eyes widening, rattled a precariously perched teacup as her hip bumped the edge and launched herself across the hallway at him, sobbing.

Jamie raised a shaking hand and let it hover above Aileen's hair, afraid that, if he touched her, she'd crumble to dust. He'd had this nightmare before, spaced between dreams of the ocean, had her returned to him a hundred times only to wake with her and her sisters still drowned.

She wailed, "I thought you were dead, they told us you were dead," her accent muted, practically unrecognisable, and that, of all things, was what convinced him, because he might have still been a bit drunk and mid-psychotic breakdown but he'd not have hallucinated his daughter suddenly becoming English, and his head bent into hers and he wept.

"Tara and Kayleigh are upstairs," Malcolm said, and Jamie couldn't process the thought that his weans had been dead, all three of them, and now they weren't, as if Malcolm had raised their corpses from the depths of the Atlantic and breathed life into them again by sheer force of will just so that he could have the last fucking word. As if he'd every right to tear Jamie to pieces and then sweep in like the conquering hero he claimed to be on telly and resurrect what was left. "They wanted to stay up and wait for you, but it was a long train ride."

"You were dead," he murmured into his daughter's hair. "I'd never have stopped looking otherwise. Not in a million years, y'hear?"

He felt Malcolm brush past him and, seconds later, the door opening and closing softly, leaving him alone in the house with his family.

The twins were curled back-to-back on what had been his mother's bed, Kayleigh completely buried in the folds of a quilt sewn by Jamie's Nan, Tara, having kicked the pile of covers off her feet, shuddering and twitching in a tangle of sheets.

The ghost of a prayer brushed across his lips. He couldn't decide if God or Malcolm had returned his daughters to him, or worse, if the two bastards were finally working in concert.

Kayleigh and Tara wouldn't know him, not really. He'd fucked off when they were eight months old, exactly as his own da had done, too young and ambitious and damaged to be a proper parent, and Mary'd dragged herself home to her family in Glasgow with her tail between her legs. Aileen was just old enough to miss him—to hate him, judging by his own childhood experience—but the twins had only grudging court-mandated trips to London to go on, hazy memories of being parked in front of the telly while he stomped around the press office shouting at blundering MPs. They were strangers to each other, the girls a curious collision of his features and Mary's, so beautiful it hurt to look at them, and all too grown-up in the three-year gap when they'd been dead to him. If he'd seen them in the street, he might not have known who they were.

And now he was the only family they had, suddenly a father after years of being that other, unnatural thing for which no word existed in any language, the parent bereft of children and deserving of sympathy no matter how rubbish he'd actually been at raising them. Mary had bled out, Aileen had told him, with Tara clasped in her arms, using the last of her strength to keep the child's head above water. What could Jamie ever be to them, next to that?

"I fucked up," Jamie told Aileen. Had he mentioned that already?

She was quiet, neither condemning nor absolving him, then asked, "Are you gonna cry again?"

Jamie rubbed at his burning eyes and apologised for the hundredth time, swore he'd dry out, atone, somehow make up to them the last three years, okay, their entire wretched, neglected childhoods, etc.; he hadn't managed a coherent sentence since he'd walked through the door. Aileen smirked, and it was like the sun had come out; she reached over and squeezed his arm. He thought she probably understood, was in the same weird position of having to reassure herself that he was real and not going to vanish, that the war—or at least their part in it—was finally over.

"It's okay," she said, "he cried too. And it's not like he even knows us." His brain chugged and stalled before he realised that she was talking about Malcolm, then blue-screened and fizzled out entirely at the thought of Malcolm crying. "Did he leave already? I don't think we thanked him."

Better not to have to explain to his brave, tough, miraculously back-from-the-dead fifteen-year-old daughter that she and her sisters were being used as pawns in one of Malcolm's innumerable demonstrations of overly elaborate bastardry. "I'm sure he hasn't gone far."

Long seconds of silence fell between them where she didn't move and he couldn't, and then Aileen mimed an exaggerated yawn. "It's four in the morning," she said, and he was probably imagining the undercurrent of so deal with your poncey shite already so I can get to bed; we didn't all sleep until noon in a drunken stupor. Probably.

"Will you, uh—" Not that there was any non-psycho way to ask if she was going to stop existing the moment he turned his back, and for fuck's sake, he was a grown man who'd brought a fascist dictatorship to its knees and he ought to have been able to manage object permanence. "—be okay?"

Aileen hugged him tightly. "I'll still be here," she said. "Promise."

Malcolm had made it to the bus stop across the street, a lonely shelter that was apparently inadequate for both the purposes of containing his caged-panther pacing and keeping him dry. Water trickled through the gaps between the Plexiglass panels, laced glittering beads over the black wool of his coat. If he had actually been crying—crocodile tears, Jamie reminded himself, and the redness around his eyes had been there for centuries—the rain hid it in an overall onslaught of dampness. Malcolm stopped violently assaulting his mobile for long enough to raise his bedraggled head as Jamie ducked against the rain and darted to meet him.

"This doesnae change anything." Jamie had to shout to be heard above the storm that battered the shelter's roof and walls. "And by the way, fuck you very much for using my fuckin' bairns just tae spin me. That's a new low even for you."

Malcolm looked to be vacillating between amusement and annoyance. "Check your mobile."

"What?" But time had not, as he might have hoped, dulled his reflex for following Malcolm's orders, and he unearthed it to see, scrolling down the already-wet screen, a lengthy stream of unanswered texts and voicemails from Sam, any one of which if opened would no doubt inform him that his daughters were alive and Malcolm was on his way to bring them to him.

"D'ye think I'd let you go a second thinking they were dead when I knew otherwise? That I'd not throw my not-inconsiderable power and influence at anything standing in the way of getting them back to you?"

Having adjusted his opinion on the level of Malcolm's cuntishness from apocalyptic to merely catastrophic, Jamie shrugged. He looked haggard; Jamie could easily imagine that he'd not slept in days, that he'd moved hell and earth to track down the girls, and if his ulterior motives weren't exactly a state secret, Jamie could admit to himself that he wouldn't have done much differently in Malcolm's place.

"Aileen wanted tae thank you, presumably for kidnapping them. Is this gonnae be a problem?"

"I kidnapped them back from a pair of Nazi cuntwipes who've just jumped the queue for war crimes prosecution. She's a sweet lass, by the way. She must have gotten it from her ma." Jamie wasn't fooled that this wasn't all part of the whole Kinder, Gentler, Having Re-Evaluated His Priorities In the Wake of Such-and-Such act that Malcolm pulled a lot these days, but he still had to stop himself from closing the last few inches between them. "I go to see Miriam Atherton every week," he said. "As her father can't. It's not exactly like she knows the difference. Abby says she appreciates it, though how she could—"

Jamie shifted from one foot to the other, the splash of rain bouncing from the pavement soaking into his trainers. "It doesnae change anything," he repeated, then shook his head, dragged a hand over the side of his face. They were both sopping wet and overtired and he was so shattered he didn't know if he was still even cross with Malcolm or for what. "What're you even doing out here, Malc? You'll catch pneumonia. Again."

"You could invite me inside."

Jamie pretended to mull over the prospect, and Malcolm, to drive home the point, shivered in his long overcoat, his hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched.

"You're on the couch," Jamie said finally. "I'll no' have my daughters exposed tae any of yer debauchery. When do you have to be back in London, anyway?"

"Monday," Malcolm said, and the expression on his gaunt face, so hopeful, verging on happy, was completely incongruous and disarming. "Not until Monday."

Jamie sighed and turned towards his house, not bothering to check behind him to see if Malcolm was following.

Jamie's resolve lasted all of twenty-four hours, almost to the second.

It didn't take a political mastermind to decode Malcolm's strategy. He stayed out of their way, inventing excuses to pick up takeaway at the corner or ring Sam or remote-bollock Nicola and her cadre for an hour each, all the time insisting that he had no intention of obstructing Jamie's wee tearful family reunion. It would have been entirely convincing if Jamie had never met Malcolm before. He stood back and watched wistfully as Jamie floundered and blathered his way through talk of schools and housing arrangements and probably years of therapy and other things he knew precisely fuck-all about, and should he even be thinking about these things now or just sit back and bask in the nervous giddiness of having everyone he cared about huddled under one (leaky, in as much a state of disrepair as everything else in his life) roof?

The drone, muted but insistent, of the television from downstairs woke him from fitful sleep, and he edged down the staircase to see Malcolm, folded in the armchair next to the couch where he was supposed to be sleeping but where, instead, Tara was stretched out under a tartan blanket. Jamie hung over the railing and, as he had so many times throughout the day, measured her breathing against his own, convinced himself that she was alive and real, and only then looked to Malcolm.

He was bathed in the blue light of the late-night news, the volume on the telly lowered to almost nothing, wearing a pair of Jamie's old track pants and faded Ultravox t-shirt (the 80s had been an awkward and unfortunate time for Jamie, all confused aesthetic sensibilities and tragic experiments with eyeliner). The clothes were too loose and too short on him, bunching across his shoulders and baring bony ankles. Jamie bristled. It was as contrived as every other aspect of Malcolm's Get Jamie Back On Side campaign; he might have left London in a hurry, but claims to bouts of memory loss aside, Jamie didn't quite buy that he was senile enough to have packed two suits but nothing to sleep in. He could have worn a clown suit and Jamie'd still want to fuck him, but the sight of him curled in Jamie's chair, guarding Jamie's daughter, and dressed in Jamie's clothes that didn't fit him properly, aroused strange, unwelcome feelings of affection and possessiveness.

"I don't forgive you," Jamie said.

"Good," Malcolm said without turning his face from the screen. "Because I'm not actually fucking sorry for anything."

"Where's it leave us, then?"

Malcolm lit up at "us," for whatever fucked reason, and Jamie wanted to smack him. "Keep your voice down. I've only just gotten her to sleep."

Tara's breath whistled softly in her sleep. It hadn't taken her long to graft on to Malcolm, in the way that all children were fascinated by monsters, and while it shouldn't have surprised him that her night terrors had her running to him—the man who'd rescued her and not the absent father she'd mostly only heard about—it didn't help drive away the overwhelming sense that Malcolm belonged here, and did approximately jack and shit to quell Jamie's kamikaze lust for him.

"It was bad, you know," Malcolm said, watching the girl just as closely as Jamie was, and almost certainly as restless as he felt. "For them. It's not my story to tell, and they didn't say much about it anyway. But it won't be easy."

He ignored whatever Malcolm was trying to imply. "What is it, exactly, that you want?"

Malcolm didn't miss a beat. "Come back to London with me."

"Malc."

Malcolm uncoiled from the chair and invaded his space, cornering him against the dusty 1970s drapes, suddenly manic, the energy crackling off his skin. "This is it, Jamie. We've a chance to run the country properly now. No more fuckin' soft-headed, boot-licking appeasement bollocks. No compromises. This is our moment." The tip of his tongue flicked out over his lips, and just like that was 1999 again, the Iraq War and 7/7 lurking only in some distant, unforeseeable future, and Malcolm was urging him to leave the job he'd only just taken at the Herald and come work for him. He'd just enough time to push down an impulsive, unthinking agreement before Malcolm said, "and I want you there" and Jamie remembered to hate him and London both.

"I dinnae give a shit about any of that anymore," Jamie ventured.

"I highly doubt that. Look, I'm so fucking bored without you." At Jamie's incredulous snort, he said, "I am, you fuck like you've invented it and you're all that's ever kept me sane, but if it's between you and the Party I'd choose the Party every time. Nothing personal. So. Don't make me have to choose."

"You're turning into a proper ponce in your dotage," Jamie said, though it was Malcolm's much-buried and publicly disavowed idealism, his obvious glee at the prospect of turning the world upside-down, that had made Jamie love him so fiercely in the first place. He let the words hang between them, the weight pressing down on both of them, and then finally, excruciatingly, brought his hands to rest on Malcolm's skinny shoulders. "It's no' actually that simple."

"It could be."

"It isn't," Jamie insisted, but moved closer to him anyway. He was fairly certain if, in the next few minutes, he didn't have his lips wrapped around Malcolm's cock, he was going to wither and die. "I've responsibilities now."

"You could have responsibilities in London just as easily," Malcolm said, the glint shining in his eyes that indicated that he knew he was about to annihilate someone in an argument. "Plus some additional, nastier responsibilities and vast minefield of solid fuck and a premature coronary, and quite a bit of fun." He traced a finger over the two days' worth of stubble that had colonised Jamie's jaw. "It was fun, though, wasn't it? Before everything went to shit?"

"Yeah," he gritted. "It was fun." A pause, then, "You could stay here with me and the girls."

"King and country call. Have you seen what happens when I'm no' around?"

Jamie shook his head, hoping it would somehow recalibrate so that he could make sense of the world, not that there was any chance of that happening with Malcolm apparently thirty seconds away from pouncing on him. Malcolm's hand slid around to cradle the back of his skull and leaned in, his breath hot and rapid; Jamie barely had the wherewithal to push him off. "The fuck are ye doing? My daughter is right here."

"She's asleep." But he rolled his eyes in the direction of the stair.

And so, for the first time in three decades, Jamie was tugging someone into his adolescent bedroom, a faded tribute to fast cars and Depeche Mode, a crucifix above the narrow bed that he flung both of them on in a messy sprawl of limbs and dirty sheets. He declared, his voiced hushed for the sake of his daughters, an intention to commit a number of acts that, until Nicola's interim government got around to repealing the Moral And Spiritual Purity Act, could—at least on paper—result in both of them being shot.

Malcolm grinned, and he wanted to add that it wasn't any sort of promise, or concession, or surrender, but the other man was already preoccupied with peeling Jamie's clothes off both of them.

Most of their fucking had heretofore been a rushed, furtive affair, squeezed between strategising and sabotage, hidden in dank, dusty corners. Now that Jamie had a whole twin bed to work with (his old bedspread, lint-speckled and faded to a non-colour somewhere between grey and brown, beneath them), he'd planned to lick every part of Malcolm's body until he squirmed and begged in a masterfully conducted epic inspired by some of the more exotic titles in his DVD collection. He had, naturally, underestimated exactly how loud Malcolm could be once discovery merely meant an awkward-as-fuck family discussion and not, say, a bullet in the head. (If pressed to choose, Jamie would actually have preferred the latter.) The near-pornographic noises from the back of his throat as Jamie licked a stripe up the underside of his cock would have made the priests down at the church reconsider their life choices and could very likely be heard by them as well. Jamie risked Malcolm's famously sharp tongue to stuff several fingers in his mouth. Malcolm sucked at them, then gave a hint of teeth enough that Jamie tugged them free, just in case.

"The girls will hear," he hissed, coming up for air.

"They already know." Malcolm replied, and Jamie would have had a heart attack but he added, "Or, Aileen suspects, and I dissembled. She's very much your daughter. We're no' going tae discuss your kids right now, okay?"

"Right," Jamie said, as if ensorcelled, and bent his head down again, hoping the walls weren't as thin as he remembered them being.

He told himself that it'd be the last time, that this was a man who thought nothing of murdering kids—of destroying Jamie's soul—if it meant winning, that it was only because the last time they'd been together, Malcolm had been near death and he couldn't just leave it like that, with the fever and starvation and sickness indelibly inscribed on his memory. Back in the tunnels, he'd promised them both it was over, and it was.

That said, it wasn't even the last time that night.

Jamie slept through the morning and woke to the sheets rumpled and abandoned beside him.

The girls are alive, he told himself. The Regime's been defeated. Malcolm—

Right. Malcolm. He swung his legs off the side of the bed, wiped the sleep-crusted drool from the side of his mouth, threw on another relic from his unfortunate boyhood closet, and padded downstairs to find Malcolm in his kitchen, directing his daughters in chopping and stirring with all of the efficiency, if none of the vitriol, that he used to unleash on the Press Office. Thick, spicy-scented steam rose from a bubbling pot on the stove and the pile of dosas that flopped over one of Jamie's ma's chipped serving dishes, and Jamie rubbed at his eyes, uncertain at first as to what he was actually witnessing.

"I love the smell of penitence in the morning."

Malcolm shot him a sidelong glance. "I told you I wasn't sorry."

"Those," Jamie declared, "are apology dosas."

"They fucking well are not."

Jamie sniffed the air. "Yeah. They positively reek of contrition."

"That's the garam masala in the curry, ye philistine. You've the guilty Catholic conscience, not me."

Jamie was about to spit back that Malcolm didn't have anything resembling a conscience at all, but Aileen paused from folding crepes to clear her throat and remind him that this was probably not a discussion to be had in front of his children and besides, it was the sort of comment Malcolm would almost certainly take as a compliment.

"Sit down," Malcolm said. "I'm catching the train back to London tonight." And went back to rhapsodising about ghee to Kayleigh as if Jamie wasn't even present, and Jamie, for lack of anything else to do with his hands, grabbed one of the dosas from the plate, used it to scoop up a gobbet of lentil mush fit to be deployed as crowd control, and considered for a very brief moment lobbing it at Malcolm's head.

"Are we moving to London too, then?" Tara asked.

Jamie put down the dosa mid-bite. "Did you—"

"Didn't say anything," Malcolm said.

"But that's it, right? That's what you guys have been fighting about all weekend."

"Tara, Kayleigh." Aileen sounded, to Jamie's ears, much older than fifteen and entirely too much like his ex-wife. "Why don't you take a plate of this and go somewhere that's not here?"

"We don't even get a say?" Kayleigh asked, and Malcolm said, "I'll go, you four talk it out."

Jamie was close enough to grab his wrist and pin it to the counter. "Don't you fucking dare. Look—" An awkward glance in Aileen's direction, then back at Malcolm. "I didnae actually think we'd make it through all that."

"That," Malcolm said, "is perfectly obvious."

"It's no' just me I need tae worry about," Jamie said, which was obvious too, and that Malcolm, whose marriage had lasted nanoseconds, who'd never expressed any desire for children, whose lifestyle was polonium-210 to meaningful human connections, had clearly realised it as well. "I mean." He swallowed, took in the sight of him surrounded by his kids, weirdly natural with them as though there was some part of him that actually contemplated an ordinary life. "—are we on the same page here? With…"

"Aye," Malcolm said. "Finish your fuckin' dosa. My train's at eight, and if I see you running after it, I'll forward the pictures I took of your bedroom wall to the Daily Mail."

"Your blackmail needs work, Malc."

"Exactly," Malcolm said, and wouldn't have been so forward to actually take his hand in front of the girls, though Jamie felt him twitch beside him. "—why I need you back in London."

Smoke filled his mouth, exhaled into the cooling night air. It had finally stopped raining, which Jamie tried not to take as overly symbolic.

He'd have to quit smoking, for the sake of the girls. He could rationalise a few bad habits when Mary'd been alive, but they'd lost too much for him to be irresponsible now. Accordingly, he savoured his last few puffs, calculating how long he could stretch the pack before he'd have to not buy a new one.

Malcolm kicked idly at his overnight bag that sat on the small rectangle of dry earth below the overhang. Crossed and uncrossed his arms. Every so often, he seemed about to speak, then apparently thought better of it.

"As what?" Jamie asked, finally. He hadn't wanted to ask, not with the girls around. There were one or two things he could still protect them from.

"What?"

"London. As what?"

Malcolm exhaled sharply. "Oh for fuck's sake, Jamie, you know by now how this works." Though he didn't, neither of them did, and that was the terrifying bit, wasn't it? While he couldn't exactly imagine them arm-in-arm at Buckingham Palace in fucking matching kilts, he was broadminded enough to entertain the possibility that the rules might have changed somewhat.

Still, he bit back. "Not that, I dinnae care, fuck, if you want to meet in back alleys and talk in smoke signals I dinnae give two shits as long as when you're done performing for the press pack, it's me that gets tae shag ye senseless." His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "And by the way you're a complete drama queen; this isnae the fuckin' 80s."

"Your décor says otherwise."

"I wouldnae marry ye anyway; you're not even Catholic." Jamie rocked on his heels, suppressing the urge to pace. There was nowhere to pace to. London had some advantages, at least in that respect. "I meant work, ye twat. Burying your bodies and rooting through bins. I was sick tae death of it when I left the last time, and that was before I'd actually killed anyone for you. If I go, I'll not tae be your fuckin' bagboy anymore, right?"

Malcolm laughed. "What, you want a fuckin' title now? Lord Macdonald of cuntin' Watling Street Estate? I could probably make it happen."

"I want tae do more than pull the trigger. You owe me that much." He saw it sink in; after months apart, he had a little leverage. The Party came first, but Malcolm's obsessions weren't mutually exclusive. "So. London. As what?"

Malcolm gave an exaggerated sigh and dragged his fingers through his hair, and Jamie was convinced he'd retaliate with something as flippant as it was caustic. Instead, he just looked incredulous, like he had in the footage of the Goolding Inquiry, faced with the prospect that he might not win this time.

"Oh, Jamie, Jamie." And bent around him, drew him closer with one arm while finding the cigarette and smashing it against the wall with his other hand. "As the wee box in the mountain fortress where I've hidden my heart from my enemies. That all right with you, you petulant cunt?"

Jamie cast a glance inside, at the light and movement within, and told himself that London would be better for the girls, anyway.

"As if I'd leave running the country to you, ye daft auld cunt," Jamie said, and grinned in the flash as the cab pulled up at the kerb.