Work Text:
Malcolm was not working late. That would imply he regularly got out of the building any fucking earlier than this. Still, it had been dark outside for hours now, and the density of cunts wandering the corridors had definitely gone down. Sadly, the lesser quantity of cunts that still remained were more than dense enough to make up the difference.
He'd finally succeeded in stamping out the worst of the day's fires. Tomorrow's had already begun to smoulder threateningly. Nicola Murray was scheduled to give a speech on adult education, which she would no doubt cock up in some creative new way even he couldn't anticipate. Transport's proposed statement on the fare rises was, fittingly, a trainwreck, and was going to require a thorough slash and burn before it was aired before anyone with the hard-hitting journalistic credibility of a Blue Peter presenter. As for Fatty, he'd gone suspiciously quiet on all this budget bollocks...
Malcolm scribbled a few notes and an unflattering caricature as he debated a pre-emptive strike with the Guardian. He'd already sent Sam off hours ago, with false promises of leaving soon.
Sadly, that meant his office was left undefended from invasion by wandering lunatics. There was a knock on the outer door, followed by the baldy bonce of one of his rare few nemeses who lacked the self-preservation to wait for a reply.
"Ah, Malcolm Tucker," Julius said brightly. "I thought I might find you here."
"Yeah? Well, well done for tracking me down to my own fucking office, Miss Fucking Marple." He scowled as Julius helped himself to one of the chairs and dragged it over to sit in front of him. "Oi, keep your hands off the fucking feng shui." He'd had that distance and seating angle finely calculated to provide the maximum sense of discomfort.
Sadly, Julius had a deeply infuriating way of completely fucking ignoring him when he felt like it. He settled himself primly in his chair, smoothing the lines of his suit.
"Now, I must confess, Malcolm, this does dovetail rather nicely with the purpose of my visit," he said. "I'm sure you recall my memo on the subject of work-life balance."
Christ, not this wank again. Malcolm pointed an accusing finger at him across the table. "Listen, Baldilocks, my work and my life are perfectly fucking balanced." Mostly on account of the fact they entirely overlapped. "I only stay this late when there's an emergency no one else can handle, which is every fucking second of every day." What he wouldn't give for a single cabinet minister who could be left unattended for a whole afternoon.
"Yes, well, I appreciate needs must when there are matters of genuine urgency, but that's exactly why I've been saying that we need my stress-relief programme to be implemented," Julius said.
AKA the biggest load of politically toxic drivel since the PM's last after-dinner speech. "Julius, the nation's taxpayers don't want to see their politicians being sent on fucking spa days to relax!" he said. "They don't even want them taking a five-minute break for a wee wank and a cry in the toilets. They want the government to be under more stress, preferably involving balls being in vices, and not in the fucking kinky way."
Julius refused to acknowledge that he knew what that meant, and possibly didn't. "You are just proving my point, Malcolm," he said, raising a placating hand and talking over Malcolm's efforts to interrupt him. "You are just proving my point. Now, in order to prevent dialogues becoming fractious-"
"Fractious?"
"Fractious," he affirmed with a nod, "I've proposed that we look into the stress-relieving benefits of massage therapy."
"Massage therapy? You mean fucking call girls," Malcolm said.
Julius gave him a reproving look. "Malcolm, that kind of unwarranted assumption is entirely unnecessary, and, dare I say, perhaps just a teensy bit prejudiced?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I meant fucking rent boys in your case, obviously."
"I shall not respond to that," he said piously. "Anyway-"
"God, why do you always have to phrase everything in the most wanky way possible?" Malcolm wondered, peeling his cheek off the hand it had been resting on as he straightened up. "Is it a class? Do they do classes on this at your weird swanky posh school? A-level fucking twattery? Bellendery for beginners?"
"Anyway, the point is that whether you like it or not, whether you like it or not, Malcolm, I have the PM's approval to float a pilot scheme, so-"
"You're going to float us right into a fucking iceberg!" he said. "Have you seen the fucking sad sacks we have around this place? Offering them late-night physical contact is a recipe for fucking disaster."
"You're being ridiculous, Malcolm," he said, standing up. Presumably the better to gesticulate, since sadly he didn't seem to be fucking leaving. "I'm aware you can be somewhat - only somewhat - old-fashioned in your attitudes at times..."
"I'm old-fashioned?" he said, leaning back in his chair. "What are you, down with the fucking youth?"
"But even so, I think you ought to be very impressed with the reductions in the stress index that can be achieved after a modest outlay on a two-hour training session."
"So we're teaching them to grope each other? That's even fucking worse!" Malcolm said.
"It is a perfectly harmless bonding activity," he insisted, coming around to Malcolm's side of the desk.
"Bondage? When did fucking bondage come into it?" he said. He belatedly realised why Julius was moving behind him when he rotated Malcolm's swivel chair so he could set his hands on his shoulders. He reared up indignantly in response. "Oi, what the fuck?"
"If you would just allow me to demonstrate..."
"No, I will not allow you to fucking demonstrate!" He was starting to get up when Julius's thumbs did something to his shoulder muscles that caused him to drop back into the chair with a sound like a dying whale. Jesus fuck, was that a muscle knot? He'd thought he had some kind of inherent deformity of the spine.
"You do seem a trifle tense, Malcolm," Julius noted, taking Malcolm's baffled loss of control over his spinal column as permission to keep trying to knead and roll muscles that were almost as rigid as Glenn Cullen's bathroom routine.
"That's because I'm being groped by a baldy weirdo with giant fucking hands," Malcolm said, a bit wheezily. "Anyone ever tell you you've got freakishly gigantic fucking hands?"
This was too fucking surreal. Who just went ahead and fucking massaged people? He blamed that entirely natural bewilderment for his failure to shove Julius away and escape from his chair. Well, that and the fact muscle stiffness had apparently been the only thing still keeping him upright. He sank lower in the seat with a suppressed groan, feeling like he was about to melt right off of it and collapse on the carpet. Fuck, did that walking testicle actually have a talent for something other than filling meetings with more wank than a boarding school dormitory, or was Malcolm just embarrassingly deprived?
Oh, he'd been right - this massage business definitely messed with your fucking head. As Julius squeezed at his loosening shoulders, the unaccustomed endorphins were giving rise to clearly insane thoughts, like that Julius wasn't so bad, really, compared to some of the wankers he had to deal with from day to day, and it had, after all, been a geological epoch since someone had touched him more intimately than a handshake or a quick back slap...
There was a moment of uneasy silence in which Malcolm was overly aware of his own ragged breathing. Uneasy on his side, anyway. No way of guessing what His Baldship might be thinking over there in blue-sky bollocks land. He'd never shown any fucking ability to read a room, and, besides, he'd gone to public school, where anything short of bumming each other on the housemaster's desk was probably considered perfectly fucking normal behaviour between bosom chums.
"You really ought to take much better care of your trapezius muscles, Malc," Julius chided, in a fondly musing sort of tone that was somehow less obnoxious than his usual sanctimonious whine.
"Yeah, well, I haven't had time to get up on my fucking trapeze lately," Malcolm said. "That's 'fucking' as an expletive, not a sex thing, by the way, before you get excited about inducting me into your wee swingers for beginners club or whatever this is."
Julius sighed in disapproval. "Malcolm, please. I'm sure you recall our discussion about how this kind of sexualised joshing can create the impression - and I understand it is just an impression - of a hostile work environment."
"Hostile? It's fucking World War Five out there." His attempt to swing round with a disbelieving glare coincided with the exact moment Julius dug his fingers into his trapezoid muscles or whatever the fuck they were, and he let out a groan that was, he had to admit, not the least he'd ever sexualised the work environment. "Oh, this is just getting too fucking weird," he decided. Touch-deprived or not, a man had to have some fucking standards.
He pushed his chair back to stand up, a plan which hit a snag when Julius kept his hands on his shoulders and tried to guide him back down into it. "Now, Malc, don't be unreasonable," he said.
"Unreasonable? How am I being fucking unreasonable?" Malcolm demanded. He tried to shove Julius's hands away, but he kept putting them back.
"You have hardly given it any kind of fair chance," he insisted, sounding a little out of breath as the situation rapidly threatened to turn into a slap fight.
"To do fucking what?" Malcolm said, flailing with increasing wild-eyed frustration. "Just let me get out of the fucking chair!"
"No, Malcolm, if you will just- if you will just let me-" Julius gripped his upper arms to try and restrain him.
"Oh, I'm a prisoner? I'm a prisoner in my own fucking chair?"
"You are not a prisoner, Malcolm, don't be ridiculous. I am just trying-"
"You're trying to molest me, that's what you're trying to do!"
"I am not trying to molest you," he said, voice going up in pitch with incredulous indignation. Was he fucking blushing? That looked like a guilty conscience from where Malcolm was standing, which was incidentally entirely too close. He could practically feel the heat of that fucking blush. And why did Julius still have hold of his arms? "There is absolutely nothing sexual-"
"Nothing sexual?" he said. "That's the biggest load of bollocks since they took King Kong to the vets to have his knackers done."
Julius was half-laughing in that way he had of trying to be above finding Malcolm amusing and failing, and, fuck, him pulling out one of his more tolerable facial expressions was not doing anything to de-weird the atmosphere. "I defy you-"
"Oh, you defy me?"
"I defy you to demonstrate any sort of evidence-"
In Malcolm's, all right, highly fucking questionable defence, he had no hands free, was in the wrong position to pull off a headbutt, and in the moment it seemed easier to go in for the kiss than articulate the true depth of his heartfelt desire for Julius to shut the fuck up.
Julius let out a surprised 'mm' in response - fuck, was that the same noise that he made when somebody broke out the fancy biscuits? That comparison was going to haunt him - but then clung on and kissed him back, which just went to prove that his protestations of innocence were all fucking lies. Plus Malcolm was fairly sure squeezing that particular location was not an approved massage technique, except in certain highly specialised establishments.
After a moment - all right, quite an extended moment, but it had been a while - Malcolm drew back to make this very salient point. Instead he got tangled with the chair he was standing over, tripped, and narrowly avoided headbutting Julius after all. He managed to elbow him in the gut instead, only very slightly on purpose. There was a brief pause where they both regrouped, panting a little for breath.
"That's nothing fucking sexual in your book?" Malcolm said. "What the fuck do you do to people you're actually hoping to shag?"
"I will admit," Julius said, "this is a bit outside the scope of our usual paradigm..."
"Oh, God." Malcolm cradled his weary head in his hands. The moment was dead. The moment was thoroughly fucking dead. If it had been a moment, which it definitely fucking hadn't. Maybe he could plead insanity due to exposure to DoSAC meeting minutes.
"But I think we have to look at the most significant precipitating factor here, which is, Malcolm, I'm sorry, but you started it!"
"Me?" he said in outraged disbelief.
"You started it, Malcolm!" he insisted.
"You were the one who was all over me, like Mr Fucking Greedy or whoever!" he said.
"Mr Greedy?" Julius frowned in confusion.
"Or whichever one it was that had the fucking spaghetti octopus arms, I don't know!" Malcolm said. "I don't read fucking children's books, okay?" Unless you counted the PM's daily briefings, which had to be pitched at a level that made 'see Spot run' sound like highbrow fucking literature.
"No, I don't think that was Mr Greedy," Julius said, shaking his head a little. "Mr Greedy was the one-"
"Whichever!" Christ. "Anyway, you were all over me, like Mr Fucking Handsy Bastard, and I was just making a fucking point." He spied an exit strategy that might get him out of this with some semblance of dignity intact. "I was proving my point, yeah? That there's nothing fucking innocent about coming up behind people and fondling their muscles while they're just trying to do their fucking jobs."
"Yes, well, forgive me, but you did appear to show a certain degree of enthusiasm for the act, Malc," Julius said, straightening his clothes.
"You take that back!" he said, outraged. "That was fucking method acting, yeah? That was fucking..." He didn't have to explain himself. "Just get the fuck out of my office. You're unbalancing my fucking work-life balance."
Julius gave one of those baffled, placating smiles that he pulled out whenever things weren't proceeding by the rules of jolly public school boy tea parties. "Malcolm, don't you think that we should talk-"
About fucking what? "Get the fuck out of my office," he repeated, more emphatically. He looked around for an appropriately threatening weapon, came up with nothing but a bowl of satsumas, and brandished one menacingly.
"There's no need-" Julius ducked away from him. "There is no need to start hurling fruit..."
"Out!" Malcolm chased him to the door. "That was a fucking demonstration, all right, of the kinds of things that would go on if you implemented your fondler's charter."
"If you say so, Malcolm," Julius said, which was somehow more infuriating than if he'd argued. "But we will be discussing this again."
"Now fuck off." Malcolm slammed the door on him and bit moodily into the satsuma. Then spat it out again, and even more moodily started to peel it.
So much for this massage bollocks being relaxing. His shoulders were right back up around his fucking ears.
He flicked through the disordered paperwork on his desk, but he was fucked if he could concentrate on it now. God, what a shitshow. This was exactly the kind of complication that he did not fucking need. Snogging in the office never went anywhere good, even when practised with less absolute twats than Julius Nicholson.
He was definitely blaming those DoSAC minutes. Dangerous levels of exposure to Terri Coverley's idea of what was information worth writing down. No wonder all his higher brain functions had fucking melted in self-defence.
At least he'd prevented things going completely off the map. A wee unwitnessed lip-lock with someone ostensibly working for the same side was survivable, just as long as he could trust Julius to be sensible and not get any half-baked ideas.
...Oh, fuck, he was in trouble now.