Chapter Text
Nicola Murray finds herself having the same thought over and over again. ‘Why the hell does she do this job’. At this particular moment she is thinking it as she is watching tiny bits of spit fly from Malcolm Tuckers’ mouth as he oral- verbally berates her for her apparent inability to come across like a ‘normal fucking human being’ on live television. It is not her fault that her mouth appears to act like a separate entity from the rest of her body. A fact, admittedly, when told to Malcolm only appeared to spur his verbal abuse on further.
“-rather have fucking the Blinky Eyed-fucking-Monster on the One Show spewing bollocks about this initiative than whatever the fuck your ‘moving forward and ahead at the same time two feet forward’ was trying to fucking talk about. And that's saying something, we only ever let Blinky McGee out on special occasions when we are trying to cover up a kidnapping, or you wearing a loud and inappropriate dress to a launch party.”
She stared at him then, not really considering that her wearing a so-called ‘loud’ dress really equated to a kidnapping, but knowing full well that Malcolm classed them on the same level.
“Are you finished, Malcolm?” She knew that was a mistake, but somehow she did take some sick pleasure from watching him turn bright red to an angry shade of purple whenever his rhetoric didn’t seem to faze her.
“I will tell you when I’m fucking finished, sweetheart, I’ll give you plenty of fucking warning before that happens okay?”
She blanched slightly at the overt sexual nature of that particular offront, if only for a moment.
“Well then how long roughly do you think you will take to finish off, because I have parents' evening in an hour, could I help you along?”
She smirked up at him, resting her chin on her clasped hands, enjoying the glint in his eye as he watched her.
“No, that's fine, darling, I’ll get there all on my own.” And with that stormed out of the room, barking at Ollie to ‘go and fuck that she-devil you call a girlfriend into giving you her new policy ideas from Mannion, that’ll make you semi-useful instead of semi-fucking-pathetic’
“Minister?” Terri hovered by the door, eyes darting nervously between where Nicola was sat with her head in her hands to where Malcolm was stalking about the DoSac office like it was his personal mission to make at least three people wet themselves.
“What is it Terri?” Nicola groaned from under her hands, while she liked Terri on some kind of women-in-politics-sticking-together kind of false way, she had absolutely zero patience for her at the present moment.
“Your car is just outside, for parents' evening. Thought I should let you know”
Her head snapped up, yes, parents' evening, being a mother. She could do that; surely it would be fine. Ella was doing fine. She was sure of it.
“And your husband rang, said something along the lines of a client shitting the bed and needing to stay late at the office so he’s sorry he-”
“Don’t bother, Terri, he just can’t be fucking arsed to come to parents’ evening, nothing fucking new there.” She said as she raised herself from her desk, putting her heels back on from where she had kicked them off under the table and reaching for her coat and her bag.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, try not to let Malcom The Tornado Tucker cause a catastrophe while I’m gone, please. I’d like to come back to most of the furniture intact. If he has to break something, make it Ollie's desk.”
She stalked out of DoSac, down the stairs and out into the cool spring air towards her car waiting outside. As suspected the press were there like vultures, she simply smiled and waved, a tactic whilst not making her look like the political animal Malcolm and really she wanted to be, did help to diffuse some animosity. For all she had going against her she did have a nice smile.
5:23PM. Nicola Murray Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship, was currently nursing a shit burnt paper cup of coffee and staring out into the sea of parents and teachers waiting to see what they would say about her lovely but slightly troublesome twelve-year-old.
She sat down in front of Mrs Greer, a rather severe-looking woman but with kind eyes, the sort of eyes that you looked into and instinctively trusted. What that said about her political savvy, she didn’t know, but she liked her all the same.
“Mrs Murray, thank you for coming tonight. On the whole, Ella is succeeding in Chemistry-”
Right. Mrs Greer, Chemistry. She knew that, she definitely knew that.
“Oh well, that's good-” Her amateur fucking attempt at pleasentries went swiftly out of the window as all of a sudden a wave of fear washed over her as she heard,
“Nics! Funny seeing you here!”
Malcolm. For fucks sake, what the fuck was he doing here? She spun around, facing the slightly crazed-looking Scotsman and was just about to open her mouth to say exactly that when Mrs Greer responded for her.
“Ah! You must be Mr Murray! Lovely to meet you, please have a seat!”
And before Nicola could correct that grave misjudgement, he was actually taking a seat and reaching a hand across the table to shake Mrs Greers.
“Pleasure to meet you.”
Nicola felt like she couldn’t breathe. Malcolm Tucker. The Lord of Darkness, Master of Spin, was currently pretending to be her husband and father of her children for some unknown but probably horrific reason, and it was taking all the strength she had to close her mouth and prevent herself from looking too goldfish in front of the woman smiling at them both.
“Right so, Ella. As I was saying, she is succeeding in Chemistry, however…”
She thinks she blacked out at the rest of the meeting, and when it got time to stand up again and move on to the next subject, she could barely move her legs and arms to shake Mrs Greer's hand and move swiftly off. What she could manage, however, was to firmly grip Malcolm's arm and manhandle him into the corner of the room.
“What in the actual fuck are you doing, Malcolm?” She spat at him through gritted teeth, giving him a look she believed would rival many of the teachers here on their best day.
“I think it’s more about what the fuck are you doing, sweetheart? I thought when you mentioned parents' evening, it was some joke to lighten the mood of the absolute shit storm you created from the press briefing. Not an actual fucking event you were going to!”
To an outside party, it may look as though they were having some kind of strangely heated marital tiff, not two government workers petty fighting.
“Contrary to popular belief, Malcolm, I am not actually chained to my desk, and I am also a mother, so whatever it is you are here to tell or shout at me, could you please get on with it so I can see the rest of Ella's teachers.”
“Yes, well, by the sounds of Chemistry, I think you’ve got the gist.”
She just looked at him then. If that was his idea of a joke, then he was having a seriously bad day.
“Fine. Look, if you insist on staying, that is your fucking prerogative right. That does not mean you can abandon your ministerial fucking duties whenever you get a slight inkling of mother hen guilt, okay?”
“What are you talking about Malcolm”. Nicola Murray was tired. So fucking tired.
“If you stay. I stay”
The dawning realisation that this absolute pisspot of a cover Malcolm had fashioned for himself would have to continue was enough to send Nicola into a free-falling spiral.
“Are you actually kidding. You have got to be kidding me. You aren’t my damn husband! One fucking Google and this entire parents' evening is going to know you are my fucking spin doctor and this whole thing will blow up to a massive fucking degree!”
“Getting possessive already, sweetheart, I see where your head is at. Come on, darling, let's do maths next. I want to see what you get when you minus 31 from 100.”
With that, he was walking away, why he was when he had absolutely no clue where he was going. Nicola didn’t know. What she did know was that it took her entirely too long to piece together the possessive comment, to which she got dangerously close to blushing, and that 100-31 was 69, something she did not prevent herself from blushing at. Wiping the smile that had unwittingly crept onto her face off she stalked after Malcolm, steering him in the right direction and praying to whatever god there was that this didn’t blow up in their faces.
“Right, that is Chemistry, Maths, English, Physics, Geography, History, Spanish, PE- which felt fucking pointless, 10 minutes of my life wasted telling me my daughter can run in a straight bloody line-”
“I think you’ll find that's our daughter, pet. That leaves Biology. The sexiest of the subjects”
She had no idea why parents' evening was turning Malcolm into this strange, domestic yet horny creature standing before her, but she was too exhausted to figure it out or complain.
“Oh, grow up. Finish whatever you were saying about Julius and his new idea to put speed cameras in the toilets or whatever he wants to do”
“They are efficiency monitors. Better known as hurry up and do that great fat shit so we can get onto some actual fucking work. It’s not his brightest idea, but it's keeping him busy and away from my fucking pantry.” Malcolm was standing at her elbow. The line for Biology appeared rather long, it seemed as though everyone had left this until last.
“That doesn’t seem fair. What about Tim, he has Chron’s disease, he physically has to shit, or he’ll die or something.”
“Well, don’t tell Nicholson that he’ll jump for fucking joy. He’s still mad about the time Tim snubbed him at the Christmas do.”
“What Christmas do?” Nicola absentmindedly picked a bit of lint off the arm of Malcolm's suit jacket. It had been bothering her since he arrived and his elbow was just at the perfect height for her to grab it where he was holding, no nestling his cup of coffee.
He looked down at his elbow as she picked it off, and she suddenly became quite self-conscious. This false domesticity they were adopting for the evening had slightly gone to her head. She thinks shes secretly always had a thing for Malcolm if she was completely honest with herself, something about the demanding shouting perhaps. Making demands. What he had done earlier hadn’t helped things either.
They were at Geography, third in, and it was making Chemistry and Maths look like fucking Christmas Day with their ‘a little less chatting and more completing tasks’. No this was taking the cake for the most amount of near-swears she’d ever heard from a teacher. It was Miss Heckett, an impossibly thin woman with an even more impossibly thin face was practically spitting out all the ways in which Ella had been disrespecting her and the rest of the class all term.
Nicola just sort of stared at her the whole time. Malcolm definitely wasn’t being of any use, in the swing of the whole ‘Nicola Murray’s husband’ thing he was muttering an occassional ‘wow’ or simply humming in the womans face, which to her and everyone else may look like an admission of genuine interest, but Nicola could see the glint in his eye that gave away his incredible desire to rip this woman a new one.
While she could admit that her child was a slightly difficult teenager, even she was slightly disbelieving at the level of horror she could inflict on one teacher. Drawing the line somewhere between the time Ella had apparently sung all the words to ‘Kokomo’ under her breath for 45 minutes and throwing a gluestick at Miss Heckett's head, she determined that her and Ella simply did not see eye to eye.
This realisation was obviously not apparent to Miss Heckett herself, who continued on her spew of anger for around ten minutes over the allotted time frame given to these meetings. In this time, Malcolm had become significantly more relaxed, letting his arm drape over the back of their adjoining chairs, and seemingly oblivious to the small, delicate circles he was drawing on her left shoulder. Each move of his thumb was sending sparks running down her arm, and if she wasn’t so concerned about Ella’s performance in Geography, she might have been more concerned about how the touch of the infamous, most dangerous man in politics was sending her into a frenzy she hadn’t experienced since uni, and if she was being completely honest, ever.
“This was pre Nicola Murray, or as I like to refer to it, the time in which I didn’t have to worry about dephiering a poorly executed joke for any semblance of the truth.”
“Okay, all right, thank you” She was tired and her feet hurt, and she’d spent the last hour and a half watching members of staff shake their hands and go ‘Mr and Mrs Murray’.
“Well, Tim and his shitty arse aside, someone needs to listen to Julius or he’ll go fucking mental and barge into the PM and attempt to tell him his ideas through force feeding fucking biscuits.” Malcolm looked at her, implying through that that she would need to be the one to listen to Julius fucking Nicolson
“Mr and Mrs Murray?”
They both jumped, looking over to where a slightly burly-looking woman was standing behind a desk, looking expectantly at them.
“Maybe not the sexiest of subjects” Malcolm murmured in her ear as they walked over, barely suppressing a giggle, she slapped him on the arm before extending her hand out to Mrs Stewart.
“Hello, I’m Nicola, Ellas' mum, lovely to meet you and this is-”
She was cut off from saying my husband by, “Malcolm Tucker, perks of the job then, babysitting ministers at their children's schools?”
They both just stared at her mouth open. How could they be so stupid? They were fucking politicians. Well, Malcolm wasn’t, and Nicola wasn’t fully convinced he was even human. They didn’t have long to spiral, however, as Mrs Stewart continued,
“My sister Terri really does talk an awful lot about you both. I was looking forward to meeting you, Mrs Murray. Ella really is such a delight, and when I heard your husband was here too tonight, well, I won’t say I was surprised; that would be harsh. Then I saw it was Mr Tucker here and well, let's just say if I don’t hear about it now I’ll be hearing about whatever has gone wrong tomorrow morning!”
Mrs Stewart just beamed at them then, Malcolm and Nicola were still too stunned to speak.
“Well. I think let's just talk about Ella and get out of your hair?” Nicola lowered herself into a plastic chair, not daring herself to look at Malcolm, knowing if she did, she might see something akin to a bolt of angry, explosive lightning, and that she did not want to see directed anywhere near her.
“That would be fabulous. Ella seems to be thriving…”
6:37 PM. Nicola Murray is standing outside her daughter's school with the one and only Malcolm Tucker, looking up and down the street to see if anyone is lingering a little longer than they should. It’s gently drizzling, a soft mist that she knows is frizzing her hair the longer they stand in place.
“Drink?” She speaks into the darkness, it's a cold spring night, and all she can think of is an obscenely large glass of wine from the pub down the road, and she thinks that they may as well after pretending to be married all evening.
“Maybe we should let you write your own speeches after all. That level of conciseness is unheard of in British politics” Malcolm grinned in her direction,
“Never from fucking you though.” She muttered, turning away from him, walking off down the road by herself, not looking to see if he was following, but knowing that he was.