Chapter Text
Sam has an irreducible core of pragmatism (something she doesn't always like to admit, and which she's definitely inherited from her mother). In the aftermath of Malcolm's departure (she will call it neither a sacking nor a resignation), after the initial shock is over, she considers her options. She could oh-so-easily find a better position. Better pay for shorter hours and less grief. Leave the whole bloody lot of them to stew. (It's not, she thinks traitorously, like we'll win the next election anyway.)
After an hour of working with Steve Fleming ('Call me Steve' he says, and Sam immediately resolves that she'll call him nothing but Mr Fleming), Sam realises that it won't be enough for her simply to leave. She wants to destroy him. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be Malcolm.
~*~
Deep down, Sam had known Malcolm was going as soon as Fleming walked in; her hands had started moving almost before she realised. There's a protocol for this, even if she devised it herself and circulated it to no one except Malcolm. She had transferred the contents of several folders onto the spare external hard drive, which had then been placed in her bottom desk drawer, behind a pack of Always and a spare pair of shoes. She'd called Frankie and quietly informed him that she Fleming was instigating a coup. Frankie had sworn as only an angry Scotsman could and abruptly rang off.
Sam then had nothing to occupy her. Fleming had left the door open, the bastard, and she'd watched Julius hurry through. He had given Sam what might have been meant for an apologetic smile, but the overpowering aura of smug had made it hard for her to be sure. Malcolm's raised voice had drifted down the corridor, followed almost immediately by a distraught Nicola Murray, who'd scurried past Sam without a backward glance and fled the building. Suddenly, deathly silence radiated out from The Room.
Sam, reluctant to leave her post, had pulled up the BBC's online live news feed. Malcolm Tucker resigns. She'd felt nothing but an empty, hollow shock.
Two men she vaguely recognised had barged in to stand either side of her, in an attempt to be threatening that worked quite well. One had started rattling off a list of things "Steve" was going to need in the next ten minutes, while the other looked over her shoulder at the open files on her desk and the open windows on her computer and waved to a third, who had started pawing through her filing cabinets. Malcolm Tucker resigns. They began to talk over her head, deliberately, swapping stories and rumours they'd heard about Malcolm Tucker. It was the vicious glee in their tone that had finally got to her and, to her lasting shame, she had burst into tears. Malcolm Tucker resigns
They had simply laughed and told her to just get on with her new fucking to-do list, darling.
She'd been able to tell the moment he entered the room, and not just because the two goons had fallen silent. He'd made it over to her desk in two short strides, coat flowing out behind him.
The need to escape, to get out, had been written all over his face, yet he'd stopped to shout them off. Sam's confident that she was the only person there who could tell how close he had been to breaking down completely.
It is, she thinks later, like the moment when Holmes goes berserk and threatens to kill whoever hurt Watson; a brief reassuring revelation of affection.
Then he'd left, and she had started to make Mr Fleming's calls.
~*~
Fleming leaves relatively early on his first day, strewing cliches in his wake. Fail to prepare and prepare to fail. Early to bed and early to rise (makes a man a sad fucking loser, Sam finishes in her head), a healthy work-life balance benefits everyone (from what Sam's heard, this would be a balance between work and having a grubby affair with your children's nanny before running off with said nanny and leaving the children with your ex-wife).
Sam goes into Malcolm's office (Fleming locked it, but she has a key) to clear everything away. The last thing Malcolm is going to need is to come back and clear his desk under Fleming's piggy little eyes. It feels uncannily like the time she went with her mother to sort out her late grandmother's house. She wants to stick little red stickers on everything Steve fucking Fleming isn't allowed to have (which would be everything).
Instead, she bundles up anything that is definitely Malcolm's. A lot of his personal effects were presents from Sam (coasters, bought when she saw his wince as a coffee cup went down on the dark wood of his desk; mugs; several notebooks, full of lists sprawled in his angular writing). Others she barely knew were there (there's a dusty photograph album in the back of the bottom desk drawer, filled with pictures apparently taken at the height of the party's sweep into power - Malcolm grinning on election night on the arm of a tall woman with black hair, Malcolm in the background of the Prime Minister's first speech, Malcolm at Conference singing The Red Flag). She closes it quickly and then wipes it to remove all trace of her fingerprints. She feels slightly silly doing so, but she does it anyway.
She carefully removes his niece's drawings and has to stop for a moment when she sees the childish writing on the back of one. (To Uncl Mallcom, this is you and me playing in the sunshine on the beach last summer. Mummy says I shud tell you what the painting is about because grownups are bad at telling what children draw. Love, Iona and a sprawling mass of pencilled kisses).
They all go into boxes, packed carefully and methodically to avoid any possibility of breakages. His spare suit, shirt and tie she keeps in the wardrobe-cum-cupboard of her own office; the spare cufflinks have always lived in her top drawer.
Sam retrieves the spare Blackberry (all settings exactly emulating those on Malcolm's own, right down to the ringtones) from her desk, together with one of several spare chargers. She pauses for barely a moment, then spends an hour on the phone to Vodafone, transferring Malcolm's number to the new phone. She transfers the backup of the old SIM (phone numbers, call register, addresses, emails) from her computer to the new SIM and places the new Blackberry at the top of the box.
Malcolm, she is fairly sure, is not going to want to see her, so she writes him a short letter (mainly to explain about the Blackberry) and sends it all round to his house in a taxi.
The next morning, a bunch of flowers is delivered to her house before she leaves for work. There's only the shortest of notes, apologising for sending it to her home but what little there is of Steve's mind is really nasty. Sam can hear the 'fucking' that Interflora refused to print.
~*~
It takes Sam several hours to notice that she is never alone in her office for the first full day of Steve Fleming's reign. One of what she's always privately thought of as the Black Watch always seems to be around, picking up photocopying, asking inane questions, just passing through. It takes a further hour's thought (to be fair to her, she's distracted by Fleming's constant calls of 'Sammy!') to realise that Malcolm's put them up to it. She doesn't call him, some guilty part of her doesn't want to hear him, so she calls Frankie instead (thankfully they're all on contracts that mean Fleming can't just get rid of them) and patiently explains that she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
'Yes, I know, but Malcolm is not here and I am, and I'm more than capable of screwing up your day if you doesn't comply and then complaining to Malcolm that you upset me.'
This seems to take care of it.
It becomes rapidly clear that Fleming is not going to trust her with anything important. Whether this is because he believes her to be Malcolm's creature, or because she's only a PA ('secretary' he calls her, until she frostily reminds him) she doesn't know. She answers the phones and books meetings and schedules interviews and seethes.
~*~
Fleming seems undecided whether Sam was cold-heartedly sleeping her way to the top or suffering Stockholm Syndrome and insinuates both whenever he forgets to be nice (which is often). He gives her an obviously-rehearsed little speech about emerging from dungeons, blinking in the sunlight, scared but hopeful. Sam listens politely while filing her nails (if Fleming wants to treat her like some fucktoy secretary, that's what he's going to get). Privately, she thinks a more appropriate anecdote might be that time a friend-of-a-friend offered her a lift home after a party, because it "wasn't at all safe for her to walk home alone", and promptly took advantage of the opportunity to feel her up in the car.
~*~
By the third day, Sam is fielding calls from secretaries across the building. She has always, somewhat unwillingly, been something of a spokesperson and a figurehead for them. They gather in clusters, around water coolers or kettles or in the ladies loos and whisper about Steve Fleming and how utterly odious he is.
Towards the end of the third day, Sam's private line rings and she takes a call from Nicola Murray, who wants to know if Sam's heard from Malcolm. She also, it transpires, wants to give a halting confession of her involvement in Malcolm's sacking, to which Sam listens as sympathetically as she can. Three days seems to have been just long enough to persuade Nicola that Malcolm isn't going to firebomb her house, but long enough for her to start worrying that he has an even more diabolical revenge in mind. With as much tact as she can muster, Sam suggests that Malcolm probably has bigger fish to fry at the minute.
Sam gets the distinct impression that there's something else that Nicola wants to say, but between the facts that Nicola can barely finish a sentence and that she keeps trying to make jokes, they never seem to get to it.
~*~
Things get progressively worse. Dan Miller is stalking the corridors1, smiling at any movement that might be a camera and quietly refuting any suggestion that he wants to be leader2. Fleming is firefighting as best he can, but several politicians and even some journalists are proving surprisingly loyal to Malcolm (more to do with Malcolm's very special file of photos and leaked internal memos than personal loyalty) and not being as helpful as they might. And Fleming is still refusing to allow Sam to help with anything important, which is a shame, because she could possibly have coaxed the Scottish mafia to do some work. Nicola Murray has apparently caused a minor incident at DoSAC by having a full-scale yelling match with Fleming, in which she expressed her opinion that he was an incompetent tosspot and don't fucking call me Nicky, you repulsive twat. Sam approvingly adds Murrray as the third person on her list of people who'd walk through fire for Malcolm.
She still hasn't heard from Malcolm, which worries her. She had expected him to be in contact by now, ready with a list of instructions for her to bring down Steve fucking Fleming once and for all and, preferably, sort out the Dan Miller situation. She has now sent him several emails briefing him on the situation with the Dan Miller Band (as the cabal has inevitably been termed) and there's been no reply. Sam even tries calling him, twice, but it goes straight to voicemail each time (which would previously have been a sign that he was dead).
She is very close to tears again. It's at this point that the youngest and least threatening of the Black Watch taps gently at her door and asks her for a word.
1 Sam cordially detests Dan Miller, whom she knew at Oxford. He cheated on one of her closest friends with most of the first VIII (men and women's first VIII) and then, once she ended it, amused himself by fucking half of OUCA1.5.
1.5 the Oxford University Conservative Association
2 The universally recognised British political code for 'I want to be leader'