#twelveinch

-

At first, she thinks things might not be as bad as they look.

“Steve fucking Fleming,” she sneers at the television, determined to be angry since Malcolm cannot be. He is beyond anger, having travelled to some more remote psychological peak. But she is merely mortal, flat-footed, here on the ground. Radiantly, righteously pissed. “Who does he think he is?”

He doesn't respond. His eyes are glued to the screen, where the ticker scrolls past spewing bullshit about his resignation. As if anyone on earth would believe that.

His body is a harp string, pulled so tight that it might snap at the smallest pluck. She reads him loud and clear, like he's wearing a big sign that says Do Not Touch. He'd been hounded by the press on the way in, probably bumped and jostled and while it boils her blood, she knows him. Knows he needs a minute alone.

At a loss for anything useful to do, she falls back on what she knows. The solution to any crisis, at least in the Tyler household.

Tea.

Water splashes into the kettle with probably an unnecessary degree of violence and noise-making. Malcolm likes his weak, bag out with lots of milk, so it'll hardly take a minute, she tells herself. Then she can go to him. Hug him, hard. Tell him the truth, which is that she loves him and fucking hates his job.

She taps the fingers of one hand on the countertop, her thumb ring clicking impatiently against the side of his mug with the other.

“I give it a week,” she calls out, eyes tense on the hissing kettle. “Maybe less, before they’re begging you to come back. You’ll see.”

Then: “Who's the bald one you hate so much? Julius? Well, there'll be a shitstorm anyway, with his report, and—and you know he'll come crawling on his hands and knees, asking you to clean it up. Do you…?”

Her voice gets lost in her throat for a moment, making her wonder if she should even ask this. If he'll even bother answering.

“Will you, when he asks?” Her hesitation is painfully obvious. “Will you go back?”

Nothing.

The only sound is the kettle, her thumb ring, the tinny voice of a reporter coming through the television speakers. And out the window, she thinks she can hear paparazzi—camera shutters clicking, animated voices in the street.

“Vultures,” she spits, like the word is poison.

She's interacted with the press since she was barely more than a baby, off and on, the relationship as rocky as the one between her parents. Pete Tyler, the mogul. The wunderkind. The absent. But the papers were always there, reporting on every jet ride to far off places. Every time he left them behind. Until the one time he didn’t come back.

The water boils, and she fixes Malcolm's tea, then hers. She wants so badly to run back into the living room and gather him all up in her arms, even though it makes no sense. He's not a wounded bird. He would hate the very thought of her pity. So she picks both mugs up carefully, tells herself this will help.

Until there is a large thump.

“Malcolm?” she says, feet frozen to the floor for a whole three seconds. “Malcolm.” Did he throw something? Certainly not. Drop something?

Instinct draws her from the kitchen, where the first thing she sees is the TV screen: on it, the Prime Minister, standing outside 10 Downing Street surrounded by dozens of microphones. His voice carries through the living room.

“...terribly sorry to see him go, but Malcolm Tucker has our full support in whatever he chooses to do next. We respect his decision to step away from politics, and are eager to begin this new—”

“Bollocks,” Rose spits, a fraction of a second before she notices the space where Malcolm should be standing is empty.

And he’s just lying there, face down.

On the floor.

Two mugs hit, a second after.

-

They won't let her ride in the fucking ambulance.

So she has to take his car. Which means she first has to find the spare keys—his must be in his coat pocket still, which he was wearing when they carted him off on a fucking stretcher—and by the time she does find them, the paps, who had only just begun clearing off when the ambulance showed up, are back in force. She can barely edge the sleek, black BMW out of the driveway without taking out some camera guy’s kneecaps. Honestly, she almost slams the gas anyway.

By then, the flashing lights of the EMS are long gone, so she has nothing to clear her way. It takes ages—a lifetime, a trillion lifetimes—to make it to the hospital, and the whole time she keeps thinking, What if he's dead? You're looking at a ghost, darling. What if he's dead? On and on and on.

Her head is a traffic jam all on its own, leaving her unconscionably distracted while she finds a parking space. But she musters up a little dignity for the walk into A&E.

And yes, of course, she can already see the zombie horde waiting outside the doors, eager to get their teeth into the fearsome, famous Malcolm Tucker, so recently fallen from grace. It’s one hell of a story—a surprise resignation gone so awry that it put a former political colossus in hospital. And while it isn't likely they'll know what she is to him, she doesn't want to risk making a bad situation worse.

She pulls up the hood of her sweatshirt and plunges through the gathered mass, making straight for the door.

But she must have used up all her luck finding a place to park.

“Is that—?”

“That's her!”

“Rose?” one of the more aggressive paps shouts. “Rose Tyler?” Her hands ball into fists, and she shoves them in her pockets.

“Are you visiting a patient? Rose!”

Instead of shouting back—I don't know, you fucking pigs!—she just forces her way forward. The sight of an irritated-looking nurse jamming his head out the door is a lifeline above all the bobbing heads and enormous camera rigs.

“Rose,” cries another zombie-vulture-waste-of-space, “is it true that Malcolm Tucker left the government to work for your father's company?”

“Unless all of you are going to admit yourselves into this hospital, clear off!” The nurse is the one shouting now. “You are interfering with the care and safety of our patients!”

That, of course, sets off another round of shouted questions about Malcolm's condition, about Pete Tyler’s condition—what a laugh—and Rose despairs of ever getting through until the nurse notices her—perhaps her pink hood, or her horror-struck eyes—in the midst of them.

His own gaze sharpens, and he pushes the door open wider.

“Clear a path, or I'm calling security,” he says, voice heavy with threat. “Back off.”

It's not terribly intimidating, but it's enough for the frontmost row of hacks to back down, leaving just enough room for her to be spat out in the entryway. She stumbles a little, and the nurse catches her.

“You're not one of them, are you?” he asks, hesitating for just barely a second—but then she swipes off her hood, and his uncertainty vanishes.

He nods, eyebrows lifting, then slams the glass doors shut behind them. It quiets the paparazzi to merely a dull roar.

“So, the rumours are true.”

She knows what he’s seeing right now; it's the same thing everyone sees: Pete Tyler's apparently estranged daughter, the long lost Vitex heiress who came back out of nowhere—read: the Powell Estate—a year ago, after nearly a decade out of the limelight.

And, allegedly, Malcolm Tucker's scandalously young paramour.

That's always been the worst of it: the way people look at her as if she's a toddler, not twenty-seven years old. Pampered little rich girl. As if she hadn't been just as surprised as anybody when her parents reconnected, remarried. Reintroducing her to a small but overwhelming world, one where he happened to exist.

Everything had changed, and then it changed again the moment she descended that giant staircase outside the reception hall, still dressed in her ugly, frilly, Jackie-selected bridesmaid's gown—and there he was. Smirking at her behind his hand, the bastard.

He changed everything.

She sets her shoulders, trying to look like more than she is, and stares down the nurse—his badge says Rory, with a little smiley sticker next to it.

He isn't smiling at all, sensing her intentions. “I’m sorry, but only family are allowed to—”

“I'm his wife,” she interrupts with a lie, bald-faced and glaringly desperate. She doubles down. “Rose Tyler. We're married. It was a… secret thing. Family only. ‘Cause of the press, yeah?” The way she says press is positively vicious. “And my parents, you know, they had this huge wedding and it just seemed impractical to have two in a year. Such a waste of money…”

She's overcomplicating—babbling, in fact, making her story less believable with every word. Surely the paramedics will have left a record of her prior statements, panicked pleading between sobs. But in spite of Rory's dubious look, he seems inclined to take pity on her. Her heart hammers as he considers for an eternal moment, blinking several times in what looks like an effort to clear his head.

“Please,” she says. Her voice breaks. “I've got to see him.”

In a tone of utter resignation, he tells her the room number.

-

She doesn’t need the room number, in the end. She just follows the shouting.

“—unless you want me to fucking shove that syringe up your cockhole and wiggle it around like an X-rated re-enactment of the Very Hungry Caterpillar, you'd best remove this fucking IV—”

So, he's awake.

A gaggle of nurses are lingering either in or around the doorway, watching the shitshow like it’s a particularly engrossing episode of Hospital, and Rose has to clear her throat to get through them. Her pink hoodie stands out like a beacon among all the scrubs.

“How is he?” she pauses just long enough to ask, voice low under the roiling stream of vitriol pouring from the room. “What's happened?”

One of them, a woman with a badge that says Hame—adorned with yet another smiley face sticker—looks at her sheepishly.

“Are you—?”

“His wife.” The lie comes more fluidly this time. So fluidly the nurse doesn't even blink in surprise.

“He woke up in the ambulance,” Hame offers, “and he's been… like this… ever since he arrived.”

Rose's lids momentarily flutter with the effort not to roll her eyes. But the relief comes fast on the heels of irritation. All the blood which had been pounding through her legs, prompting her to run, dissipates; she can only give a dizzy nod in return and stumble through the doorway.

“—you fucking deaf? I’m fine, I feel fine, as I've been telling all of you for the last half an hour! Look, I was test-driving my new Victorian fainting couch and fell a little to the left, that’s all, no big fucking deal. I'm absolutely fine!”

“Malcolm,” she says.

And he looks at her.

His face—God, his face. It’s waxy, pale as the moon, and his hair is sticking up like he's been running his hands through it, or like he's been in a pub fight. This impression is further supported by the blooming discolouration on his right cheekbone. It must have been from the fall. The fall she missed, because she was making fucking tea.

He doesn't look small on the gurney, doesn't look weak or unnaturally still or withered or any of those things she's heard people say about visiting their loved ones in hospital. But he looks like he's gone ten rounds with something much, much stronger than he is. The whole world, maybe, has beaten him.

Her chin wobbles.

“Oh, not you fucking too!” His eyes, marginally sunken, get wide all of the sudden. “I'm just fine, Rose—lot of fuss over nothing, all right? Just—no, darling, don't you do that, don't—”

But it's too late.

Tears break free of her waterline as she lurches toward the hospital bed. She barely has the wherewithal to mind the IV—still attached, which he’s thrilled about, no doubt—as she wraps herself around the nearest piece of him she can reach. Which happens to be his arm, warding her off.

She pulls the pale limb to her chest, feeling its warmth. Letting it saturate her. She hides her face in his bent knuckles and lets out a watery, choked noise that's struggling not to be a sob.

“Can you just—Rose—fucking give us a minute, all right? You can get on with the anal probe or whatever the hell you plan to do to me later, just all of you get out of—yes, thank you, thanks a fucking bundle. All of you, scram.” Malcolm's voice sounds like it's coming down a very long corridor, echoing wrongly in her skull. She can't feel her knees, which is a strange thing to notice, because she's not normally aware of them at all. “Rose? Rose, come on, darling, you're making a scene.”

He reels her in by bending his arm, which moves stiffly. She holds it tighter, breathing deep. Trying to swim back to some kind of surface. “Sorry,” she mumbles.

“S’all right. Hell of a day, isn't it?” he says, sounding more normal. Or maybe her ears are working right again. “Couldn't have come at a better moment. Seems I'm about to have quite a lot of time off.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not the one blubbering, now am I?” counters Malcolm. “That's enough, all right, save it for the funeral.” He seems to recognise that's the wrong thing to say just a beat too late, when her shocked gaze finds his.

“That's not funny,” she says. “That's not even remotely funny.”

Some of the force leaves him, rounding his shoulders. “I know.”

She goes on, refusing to let go of his hand. She's speaking directly into his fist, and she doesn't care. “Damn you, Malcolm, I told you! I said, ‘This job is gonna kill you,’ and look where we are!”

“I'm not dead yet,” he insists. “And, if I might point out—it was losing the job that nearly killed me.”

That's it—her knees can't take it any more. They just sort of go out from under her, and she's lucky she's close enough to collapse into a seat beside the hospital bed.

“You scared me,” she manages to say. “I don't—I'm not even sure what happened, I just heard this thud, and then you were there on the floor!” He makes a soft shushing noise, which she ignores. “You have to let them look after you, Malcolm, you can't just—”

“All right,” he interrupts, vocally reluctant. But the hand against her chin finally opens, fingers searching out her face. “Fine. Fine, Rose, but I'm sure it's nothing.”

She gives a watery laugh. “Yeah, just your life. You've only got the one, you know.”

“I know,” he nods. But she can't be sure if he really believes her—if it even matters to him.

(You're looking at a ghost, darling.)

-

It's not nothing. Of course it's not.

It's a myocardial infarction—a bloody heart attack. Mild, according to the doctor, but nothing to joke about. Rose doesn't want to budge from Malcolm's side, and she’s heard people are supposed to take notes with this sort of stuff, so she gets her phone out and starts typing out anything she can make sense of, anything that sounds even tenuously important, anything she can spell. She tries to ask questions.

Malcolm keeps shooting glances at her while the doctor coolly, calmly explains that this should be a wakeup call.

“Cardiac events of this nature are often a warning sign that other, more concerning events are incoming, such as another heart attack or a stroke,” he says, “unless serious changes are made in regards to health and stress levels. Your heart is functioning normally—for now.”

His emphasis makes Rose's own heart thump painfully.

“But we'd like to keep you overnight for observation, and in the morning, we will discuss a health management plan.”

Malcolm seems inclined to buck against authority, as he nearly always does, and Rose doesn’t mean to, but she squeezes his fingers so tight she can feel the bones shift. And he nods instead.

“All right,” he says, eyes sliding towards her. They look pale, bleached by the fluorescence. “One night.”

She doesn’t want to make a scene again, so she runs to the ladies room. But when she gets there, she can’t cry anymore. She can only face her reflection in the mirror.

She's the one who looks like a ghost.

-

When Malcolm finally falls asleep that night—a feat which seems nearly impossible with nurses coming and going—Rose slips out into the hallway and dials a number she's been avoiding for hours. Maybe longer, if she's honest.

“Hullo?”

It's—it's too much.

She sniffs, and realises her airways are so tight, swollen by all the tears still left to shed.

“Pete?” she creaks out.

The shift is instant. “Rose? What’s wrong, love?” She can imagine him sitting up straight in bed, probably patting around trying to get her mother up.

“Don't wake Mum.”

“All right, what's happened?”

“It's Malcolm. He…”

“Oh, God. Rose, I'm—I got the call, but I didn't—I’m sorry, love, it just seemed…”

“Like bullshit,” she flatly fills in the blanks for him. Impossible. Like something that would never, ever happen, not to him. “I know. But it's not. He had a heart attack.” Voice low, her eyes scan the hallway, dimmed for the night shift; even now, she fears the click of the camera shutter, of being seen. Of compounding the problem. “I’m here with him, and he's… He's not taken it well.”

Pete snorts, and she would laugh, too, except that she can't.

“I can imagine. Is there anything you need? We can come down, but—”

“The press, yeah,” she sighs. “No, there's no need. Visiting hours are over anyway. I just wanted to ask…” The excess energy, the nerves build up like static until she's tapping her foot to try and let some of it out. “Look, I know I said I didn't want any money or favours or…”

“Anything, Rose. You know we’ll do anything.”

There's not a trace of blame in his voice, that's the worst part. Not even an ounce of bitterness.

He's always understood, ever since he came back into her life, that it might be too little, too late. That this—their non-relationship relationship—is not something to be solved by his money or his access. In fact, she’s sort of suspected he admires her decision to have nothing to do with Vitex, nothing to do with his public profile, regardless of how much it could benefit her. But…

Tears trail down her cheeks. It’s not for her, so it’s different.

“Two weeks at the lake cottage. Would that be—?”

He doesn’t even let her finish. “Of course.” She hears shuffling, rustling like he's gotten out of bed and started rooting around his nightstand. “I'll call Graham tomorrow, get it set up for you.”

“He can't do anything strenuous,” she adds, “and I don't want to leave him alone, so we'd have to order in for most things.”

“I'll take care of it,” Pete replies smoothly. “There’ll be fresh wood for the stove, too, if the temperature drops.”

Her voice comes out barely a whisper. “Thank you.”

“When do you want to go?”

“As soon as he's released.” There's a clutch in her chest, twin sensations of guilt and horror digging their hands in. She’s never planned more than a birthday present behind his back. “I’ll clear it with his doctor first, but I don't want to give him time to argue with me, and if we stay home—I mean, the paps'll be all over us. He won’t get a minute’s rest.”

If her father notices her misuse of the word “home,” he doesn't mention it.

“I'll handle travel arrangements,” is all he says. “D'you need someone to go and pack for you?”

“No, I can do it.” She sniffs, trying to gather herself. “Seriously, this is—I just want you to know…” But her voice dissolves.

“I know, love. I do.”

“I've got to go,” Rose manages, seconds or minutes later. The tears have slowed, and she can breathe again, and all she can think of is crawling back into that awful hospital bed beside Malcolm and falling asleep with his heart beating safely under her ear. Now that she’s got some sort of plan, she thinks she might have a shot at rest.

There’s just an instant of hesitation, then her dad says, “Rose? You know, Malcolm… he's been on his own a long time, love.”

That almost makes her scoff. As if she doesn’t know.

“Been making a ruin of his life, if you ask me, but he's always been self-sufficient. And if I’m honest, I don't think…” He trails off. She can sense that he’s searching for words, and presses her impatient lips together. She owes Pete that much, at least. “I don't think he knows how to let someone love him. Understand?”

Weakly, she answers. “Yeah.”

“So he might try to act like he doesn't need it, but he does. ‘Cause the way you love him—love, he'd be a fool to leave all that on the table.” There's urgency in his voice, an undercurrent of something she can’t identify. And then he says, “He's lucky to have you, Rose,” and she feels the words pressing into her heart, touching some aching place she's been pretending doesn't hurt. But it does hurt. “So lucky.”

It’s never stopped hurting.

“Never forget that.” The words come to her thick with tears, and she wonders if he’s been hurting, too. All this time. “All right?”

She squeezes her hand into a fist and wishes like she used to when she was just a kid. Wishes her father was here, with his arms around her.

This isn't that, but it's as close as they've been, maybe ever. As honest.

So she says, quietly, “All right, Dad.”

-

“Everythin’ okay?” Malcolm mumbles blearily. He’s blinking at her before she can even climb back into the hospital bed. And here she’d been all worried about waking him. But in second, his washed-out gaze is wide and alert—a shadow of his normal self—his hand lifting to make room for her beside him. “Thought you might've gone home.”

Home.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she shakes her head. “Don't be stupid.”

She wishes she could stop the renewed flow of tears, but she's too tired to turn them off—to do anything but curl up against him and let them soak his hospital gown.

“Not going anywhere,” she sniffs out.

Malcolm hums, but says nothing. Just strokes his hand up and down her arm. He's cooler than he should be, veins filled with foreign hospital fluids, so she nestles in, sharing her body heat. Their combined weight sinks them into the mattress, closer to each other. It's like a small pocket of shared gravity, belonging only to them.

“I called my dad,” she says, she doesn’t know how long after.

His hand pauses. “Oh, yeah?”

“You know I love you, right?” Talk about a non-sequitur.

There’s shifting against her, and she looks up, easing her weight off him in case he's uncomfortable. God knows he's got no chance of escaping, so at least she can not crowd him.

But he’s not trying to move. Just settling. “Rose,” he says, holding her gaze, “where's this coming from?”

She blinks.

“My heart, you berk.”

“I know that,” and he rolls his eyes, lids fluttering. “I mean, where is this leading to?”

“Well, I'm gonna ask you to do something I know you won't want to do, and before I ask, I just—I dunno, thought it would be important for you to know.” She almost pouts at his unchanging stare. “That I love you.” Nothing. “And that I'm asking because I love you.”

He answers too quickly. “No, I don’t think we should open things up to a third.” Quippy, light. The effort of it hurts her head.

“Jesus, Malcolm.”

“I know it works for a lot of people,” he blithely continues, ignoring her narrowing gaze, “but I’ve already sowed pretty much all the wild oats I want to sow.”

“Malcolm.”

“And we’re not getting a dog either.”

“I want you to take a break.” She meant to finesse it a bit, but no, she’s just blurting it out now and he’s just staring at her. Chin tucked, like they’re just curled up on the couch and she’s telling him she wants chips for dinner, again. “A holiday,” she presses on. “Two weeks. My dad’s got this place near Windermere, it’s called Rose Cottage—I know,” she adds, before he can even open his mouth to comment, “Rose Cottage, horrendous. He’s still getting the hang of apologies. But he said it’s ours if we need it, everything’s set up. It’s quiet, peaceful, but not so boring you’ll go mad locked up there, I think. Plenty to see in close walking distance. There’s a lovely garden and a library, and we can just take the train, and—”

She is rambling.

And he just watches her do it. Watches her dig this hole right in front of him. Possibly he’s trying to think his way out of the situation.

“I mean, if you don’t want me there,” to see you like this, god, please don’t say that, “if it would be better, we could hire a nurse and you can go by yourself. The important thing is you need to rest, but I didn’t think—I mean, it’s not just about you recuperating either. I guess I thought… we could…”

She shakes her head, wishing it would clear. Wishing she could say things in a more helpful way. But all she’s got is this endless stream of, Don’t go back, don’t go back there. Don’t go back to them.

“Can you take pity on me for, like, five seconds and say something, maybe?”

“All right,” he says. “C’mere, shift.”

He waits for her to resettle, her head in the curve of his shoulder, her arm poised carefully around his waist. She’s never been surprised by his capacity for gentleness, or his overt affection, though she’s sure it would shock the shit out of practically anyone else. Maybe not Pete. But to her, it always made sense. There’s the side of the moon you see, and then there’s what’s hidden beyond. Smudgy and impossible unless you look from a different angle.

Malcolm loves like that.

He lets her breathing regulate before he speaks again. “I don’t want to do that.”

Even laying down, her shoulders sag a little.

“I don’t want to turn off my phone, stay in some quaint little middle-of-nowhere called Rose fucking Cottage, doing nothing for two weeks while the world moves on. While my party makes a fucking laughingstock of itself—which,” he adds, “—I know they all will, more than likely already have. Fucking disaster waiting to happen.”

For a moment, there’s a flicker of heat in his voice. The energy that is essentially Malcolm, his constant belief that the world should be better than this, that it’s always letting him down with its many varied incompetencies. But it fades back into something slower.

Sadder, she thinks.

“I don’t want to end my career notorious, with a heart attack that nobody’s happy I survived. Almost nobody,” he corrects when she moves to argue. “I don’t want a holiday, Rose. How you can even call it that when we both know you’ll be playing nursemaid—shuffling my sorry arse around, ordering takeaway and doling out probably a whole rainbow of little colour-coded pills… Jesus. It’s miserable, and humiliating, and frankly, it’s hardly a holiday at all. But it’s one I particularly don’t want to take without the woman I love.”

She blinks again, her eyelids feeling so heavy, mind so slow. But her heart lurches in her chest like it’s lighter than air. “Really?”

“Yes, darling. So I guess you’d better come along, if you think you can stand it.” He must feel how relieved she is. How every bit of her begins to unspool.

“I can.”

His lips land soft against her head, breath gusting out over her rumpled hair, and his hand resumes its steady path up and down her arm. She thinks that’s the end of it. Until: “You know, the doctor said something funny earlier, when you were out of the room. Called you my wife. ‘I’m glad your wife is so serious about your care,’ he told me.”

Oh, god. Honestly, she’d forgotten, in the midst of everything else. The lie she’d come up with in the heat of the moment, in her desperation to see him. She should’ve known it would get back to him somehow. It’s either very good or very bad that she’s too tired to react with appropriate embarrassment.

“He seemed to think quite highly of you. All your notes and questions. And I thought, ‘Now that’s interesting.’ ‘Cause I didn’t want to correct him.”

She can’t help it. Her arm tightens, her whole body burrowing closer. Ribbons of warmth trail through her, centralising around her heart. “They weren’t going to let me see you,” she says. It’s all the explanation she feels she needs.

“I didn’t want you to see me either.”

“That’s just stupid. I always want to see you.”

His chest judders with a silent laugh, and then he sucks in a short, pained breath. But he doesn’t let her squirm away, just holds her tighter. “I know,” he says quietly. “I have come to discover that I’m a very stupid man.”

“Well, I’m bloody brilliant, and I have a plan to get you better and keep you around for a long time, so don’t—you shouldn’t even bother arguing with me,” she says, going for some measure of authority. She can’t take her eyes off the machines at his bedside. Numbers blurring in and out, back and forth. Thinking, You’re not a ghost. There, look—your heart’s beating. “And even if you do, I won’t listen.”

It’s mine to keep.

“I’ll try not to.” She hears the smile in his voice. Smiles herself. It feels like a good stretch, muscles that need to be tended to after an endless tense day.

“You fight everyone,” she says. “You don’t have to fight me.”

He answers in a whisper, close. “I know.” Nobody else would believe it.