Chapter Text
She’s looking everywhere, and he’s just looking at her.
Nicola’s taking in every bit of the house as if it’s her first time here, as if they were building their relationship from scratch instead of reviving it, and Malcolm can see her eyes linger on certain minutiae like that one consistently creaky floorboard and the front window curtains he’s had since before they were together. He rifles through the Rolodex of Nicola Murray Memories he had tried (but sometimes failed) to leave untouched in the recesses of his brain for three years, and he’s fairly certain he can hear every thought and see every image running through her head the moment it does.
He realises that she must have been roundly barraged with many of the same memories three weeks ago when she came here by herself at her own insistence, when the odds of rekindling what they had still appeared far below zero.
Guilt rises in the back of his throat. She put herself through that for him after he was a right horrendous bastard to her at the hospital. Vitriol wasn’t even a sufficient self-defense mechanism; he’s not proud of any of the shit he said. And he still handed her his house keys at the end of it.
But the ensuing chain of events had culminated, less than an hour ago, in Malcolm and Nicola snogging each other senseless on Westminster Bridge after dredging up their messy history with an especially inflamed version of their standard-issue shouting matches, not giving a flying fuck that they were surrounded by passersbys who did not ask for this spectacle on their evening commutes.
The photo she’d left in his jacket pocket wouldn’t have sent him literally running back to her office if he hadn’t still fucking loved her, and they both knew it, but he’d still been loath to swallow his pride and admit it until she’d yelled at him to just move on from this or she’d stop waiting for him. He hadn’t realised she was. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. He hadn’t wanted to glean any hope from her decision to rush to the hospital at the behest of Wendy and Sam.
(Bloody intuitive Sam. More than a decade has passed since it was her job to know what Malcolm needed without being asked. Old habits don’t die hard. Oftentimes they don’t die at all. He probably owes Sam a thank-you and a bottle of riesling, though. He doubts his sister, on the other hand, will let him get a word in edgewise once she finds out about this.)
He’d stanched Nicola’s rant with a desperate kiss, daring to consider for the first time since their separation that putting themselves back together was a real possibility. Or rather, putting each other back together, because they’d tried it individually and just wound up worse for wear — physically in Malcolm’s case, but emotionally in both their cases.
Once he’d taken the leap of faith that came with kissing her, there was only one logical next step, and that too had rested on him.
“Come home with me, pet.”
“Home?”
“Yeah, home.”
She’d rewarded him with yet another kiss before taking his hand and pulling him back in the direction of Westminster, a place that, much like Nicola, he’s never been able to shake off despite his best efforts.
Before they got into his car, Nicola had called Gillian — and made Malcolm talk to her as well — to let her and the rest of the staff know that she wouldn't be back in the office until tomorrow morning but not to worry, everything was fine, she and her ex hadn’t murdered each other. Neither of them told Gilly they were no longer exes, possibly because it was still so fresh, and Malcolm is ninety-nine percent certain Nicola’s staff immediately proceeded to place bets on the status of their relationship. After all, his own colleagues had bet on the length of his sick leave and whether he would survive it, and they’re not nearly as tight-knit as the senior staff of the Department of Health and Social Care. If history holds up, Malcolm guesses, Cathy’s probably the most likely besides Gilly to rake in the cash from their proverbial pool, and Chris and Andy will probably have to empty their wallets.
Office crisis averted, Malcolm and Nicola had proceeded to head straight to his house — no, their house, because it never stopped being theirs in either of their minds — and while it was far from their handsiest or their most impatient car ride home, there was a familiar yet new and earnestly buzzing energy between them the entire time. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him, as if she were afraid he would vanish if she looked away. He had kept his right hand on the steering wheel and his left on her knee, reacclimating his fingers to the shape of it, not that they’d ever fully forgotten. The necessity of keeping his eyes on the road aside, he hadn’t shared her anxiety that this might be a joint hallucination. He hadn’t felt this present, this real since before he ended things with her.
She took off her heels the second she came in and deposited her coat on the sofa like she’d never left. Without the coat, he can see the darker of the two freckles on her collarbones peeking out from behind the collar of her blouse when she turns a certain direction. Nicola hadn’t thought much of those freckles before they were together, before he made a point of worshipping them with his lips every chance he got. Now Malcolm wonders if the sight of them in the mirror has been tugging at her heart for three years.
The guilt hasn’t subsided, and it doesn’t appear to be heading that direction. He finally allows himself to hate that he hurt her, even though she hurt him first. He’s sick of justifying it. If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, what does a heart for a heart do? For Malcolm and Nicola, it just left each of them with gaping holes in their chests that only the other could repair, and even after everything they’ve put each other through, Malcolm’s at a loss for why he ever thought otherwise.
He returns to more pleasant thoughts and lets his gaze linger on the magenta pencil skirt he told her was “way too fucking loud” just for old times’ sake in her office. Then wasn’t the right time for him to start admiring her arse again, and now isn’t ideal either, but he’s never really been able to stop himself and she never really minded once they were together. He hopes those are stockings instead of tights underneath that skirt. She used to wear the former exclusively because she knew he greatly appreciated them on her and even more greatly appreciated taking them off her. He has no reason to expect that she’s wearing them now, or that she still wears them at all. Maybe they remind her too much of him. Fuck.
The overhead light catches a few of the grey hairs poking out from the camouflage of the dye job that needs an update in the same shade of brunette she’s always been. He noticed them on the bridge but wasn’t in a position, like he is now, to wish he’d seen more of the evolution of those greys. Surely she has more to cover up now than she did three years ago. He wonders what her hair will look like when she just lets it go silver, and he’s suddenly enormously glad he won’t miss out on that. She won’t initially believe she can pull it off, but he’ll do his best to convince her. She’s not ancient yet. She’s only fifty-eight.
(He’s approaching sixty-five, and his coworkers thankfully have enough self-preservation not to mention the word retirement anywhere in his vicinity. He hopes his recent hospitalisation hasn't made anyone brave enough to risk that particular bollocking.)
As she traverses the house that he’s all but told her is officially theirs again, she keeps glancing at him to make sure he’s still there, still watching her. When he’s certain she’s sufficiently distracted by the selection of books on his bookshelf, which has hardly changed since they broke up, he lifts a hand to his right jawline and brushes it with his fingers, prepared for the residual sting.
He deserved that slap she dealt him on the bridge. Not just for how he’d spoken to her, or for his decision not to speak to her for ages. She didn't throw his scheming that caused her humiliating resignation back in his face just for the hell of it. He’d been good to her for eight years, but before and after that he’d been utterly awful. It wasn’t right, and it’s about fucking time he cared that it wasn’t right.
Nicola’s (hopefully) stocking-clad feet pad into the kitchen, retracing well-traveled paths, and Malcolm's eyes again follow hers around the room. The faucet that burst more than once, to their mutual exasperation. The magnets on the refrigerator door that used to hold grocery lists, phone bills and other mundane fragments of the Murray-Tucker household that once was.
The countertop just to the right of the stove where twelve years ago, just days after the Goolding inquiry and his arrest, he’d wordlessly pressed his body against hers and kissed her.
She had expected nothing of the sort when she barged in and cooked dinner for the Cassius to her Caesar, all better judgment aside, but she had kissed him back, and for a few sweet seconds they had no reason to hate each other. Their first kiss had been years earlier, and their first kiss that meant the same thing to both of them wouldn’t come for another year or so. But their brief encounter here in the kitchen was still their first kiss in this house. In their home. The home in which Malcolm somehow kept living among all these memories, maybe just to spite them, by himself for three years.
In the first year after the breakup, he thought more than once about moving but always dismissed the idea as letting Nicola defeat him. Even when they weren’t speaking, he still felt sometimes like they were at each other’s throats.
So he stayed among the infernal memories and fought them every day to the point he almost always won. He would normally take pride in his own apparent strength, compare himself to fucking Hercules, but guilt and weariness have replaced that pride. Besides, if he remembers his mythology correctly, the mighty Hercules killed his wife, Megara, in a fit of madness (that soppy Disney film be damned).
Nicola’s eyes make their way back to Malcolm, who can’t help but think she belongs in his — their — kitchen again even if her facial expression indicates she doesn’t yet feel that way. The corners of his mouth turn upward before he breaks the silence.
“It’s been too fuckin’ quiet here without yeh.”
Her face softens a bit: noticeably less anxious, but still in need of reassurance. “Has it?” she says almost timidly.
“It has.” He can't remember the last time he spoke this gently, but he’s willing to meet her where she’s at. “I used to listen to yeh sing in the shower.”
“I know,” she replies. “I still do that sometimes.”
Sometimes. The implications of that word make his heart twinge, and his almost-smile threatens to falter. “Course yeh do.”
He gave her a fair amount of space as she explored, but after they didn’t stop touching between their frenetic lip-locking on the bridge and the second they shut the front door behind them, having a few metres between them now is starting to feel awkward.
Nicola shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and Malcolm senses she is about ten seconds from taking a few tentative steps closer to him. He decides he needs to get something off his chest first.
“You were right.”
She stops fidgeting. “When?”
“On the bridge. When we were shoutin’ at each other. It was—” He takes a deep breath and repeats her words from earlier. “—deeply fucking personal when I forced yer resignation.”
She gives him a slight raise of her eyebrows that urges him to keep talking. He does without a second thought.
“And now look at us. We repeated history, didn’t we? 2012 all fuckin’ over again. You let me down, I retaliated and twisted the knife so fucking hard we both ended up sufferin' for it, except I had the brilliant fucking fortune to end up in gaol the first time and in hospital the second. And you—”
He’s not ranting or bollocking her or raising his voice, but he feels strangely out of breath. The past three years, the eight before that and the four before that have all been catching up to him continuously over the last few weeks, and he can’t run from them anymore.
He can categorise his life into distinct phases since Nicola Murray MP sauntered into the DoSAC office in the summer of 2009 wearing a vivid floral dress that he actually liked on her, even though he never told her so. Not once has she actively tried to alter his life so profoundly, nor has he ever seen it coming. They’d both been none the wiser that she was instigating phase four when she marched into his hospital room.
This one better fucking last, he thinks.
“You came back for me both times, even though I’d thrown yeh to the wolves.” Verbalising this reality is something close to a catharsis. It’s not something Malcolm has felt often in six and a half decades. “Even though yeh had every right to hate me for it."
Nicola crosses her arms and examines the tiled floor. "Not every right. Not the second time. The other way around, actually."
Of course she’s decided to argue with him, the familiarity of it and her own guilt acting in unison. Christ, was it really less than a month ago that still knowing her so well made him feel nauseated, and it wasn’t just the ulcer talking?
"And look where that fuckin' got me, darling. Gaol was shite, but at least I didn’t almost die there.” He looks away from her momentarily and runs a hand over his face, willing himself to articulate what she unintentionally forced him to acknowledge three weeks ago. “That’s not even my point here. Look, yeh showed up at my two lowest moments. Yeh showed up when I needed yeh. I wouldn't've admitted it at gunpoint, tried to convince yeh otherwise both times, but it was still true. And you knew that when I didn’t."
Nicola looks back up at him, and he pauses in case she has a response. She doesn’t. She knows he’s not done. She knows his rare moments of vulnerability make him long-winded despite himself. She knows him just as wholly and completely as he knows her. Three years apart diminished none of that, hence the nagging little voice in his head that’s been trying to tell him since the hospital how sodding foolish he was to think he could just let her go and be done with her forever.
He was foolish. Now he’s tired. He’ll more readily admit the latter out loud.
“Pretending I didn’t need yeh or love yeh anymore was just fucking exhausting, pet. I didn’t know that ‘til just recently.” He remembers something from his first day back at the office that feels like much longer ago than a handful of hours, and he lets out an almost humourless guffaw. “Today at work I caught myself thinkin’ I was gonna come home to yeh. Little did I fucking know.”
He defies his own expectations and takes a step toward her. She finds her voice as he does.
“You’re preaching to the fucking choir, Malcolm.” Nicola’s voice falters over his name as if she’s getting used to saying it out loud again, and her emerald eyes start to glisten with the beginnings of tears. Those eyes, damn them, have appeared countless times in Malcolm’s dreams since he left her, and he would wake up more miffed each time because why wouldn’t they just leave him the fuck alone already and he could not, would not admit he missed them dearly, just like everything else about this relentless catastrophe of a woman.
“I tried to — pretend, too, but I stopped,” Nicola continues, stumbling over words she has undoubtedly kept bottled up for too long. “I don’t know when. I just accepted at some point that it wasn’t fucking working and it wasn’t going to fucking work. I mean, sure, I knew I didn’t have the right to still love you after what I did, but I’d already paid for it, and—”
Malcolm has been waiting for the floodgates to open since the moment he threw caution to the wind and kissed her on the bridge. She’d managed to hold herself together impressively until now, when the weight of the past three years seems to come crashing down on her. A sob escapes her, a hand flies to her face, a few tears form on her lashes, and Malcolm Tucker will be damned if he doesn’t catch her when she’s falling.
He closes the distance between them in two strides and enfolds her in the arms that should never have let her go. Without her heels, her head doesn’t reach his shoulder, so she settles it against the center of his chest, her right ear pressed to his sternum just like in happier days. She doesn’t stop sobbing, and Malcolm figures too late that hearing his heartbeat might be the opposite of comforting, instead a reminder of what she almost lost forever. But she responds with a viselike grip he has no intention of loosening just yet.
He feels like he should say something, but she’s always had the unique ability to render him speechless. He instead runs a hand up and down her back soothingly, and a soft “Nic’la” slips from his mouth involuntarily.
They’re not picking up where they left off. That’s never been an option. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to Malcolm, and probably to Nicola as well, that starting over isn’t an option either. Not after all this time.
Not when it’s still so easy to just hold each other like this.