Chapter Text
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Something ugly and familiar slithered around low inside Colin's stomach as he stared at his phone, the caller ID at the top of the voicemail notification glaring back at him too brightly, too harshly, too taunting.
There wasn't really any reason for a voicemail from a solicitor's office to cause him such a visceral sense of dread—none that he could think of at least. But it snaked through his gut nonetheless, writhing and relentless, it's tendrils reaching up through his chest and winding around his heart to constrict and force the muscle into a furious, high-pressure beat.
If it weren't for his phone automatically identifying the caller through the magic of public information and the internet, he likely would've deleted a voicemail from an unsaved number without a second thought and without bothering to listen to it. But a solicitor? One with a knighthood ? There had to be some sort of valid reason for this, even if he couldn't think past the haze of anxiety enough to search his memory for any just cause.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and tapped the notification, hitting play before his anxieties could steer him away.
He listened for a moment as his nerves slowly tightened like piano wire being tuned whilst wrapped around his neck, until suddenly the wire cut, and his heart seemed to stop beating as all the blood drained from his skin.
“Hello, Mr. Bridgerton. This is Sir Walter Dundas, a solicitor for Pall Mall Family Planning and associated entities. This is a courtesy call to provide high-profile clients with advance notice of some issues regarding the clinic's record-keeping software, and with the organization of our storage facilities. To put it simply, Mr. Bridgerton, the genetic material you have banked with the clinic appears to have been...misplaced. We are not sure what happened, but it could have been mislabeled, destroyed, or...utilized in a fertility treatment procedure. You shall be receiving an official letter in the post within the next few days with more information. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.”
His chest heaved, breath shuddering as the voicemail ended. He pressed play again with his trembling thumb and listened to it one, two, three more times as the coursing waves of panic crashed and tumbled against the inner walls of his veins and arteries and spread from core to limb.
He snatched his suitcase from the conveyor belt as soon as it came into view, and started walking a bit too fast to be considered polite.
It didn't matter much to him if the sperm he had banked a little under two years ago had been mistakenly destroyed. He had saved the little swimmers in a moment of fearful uncertainty, and even then he had known he was getting a little ahead of himself. He knew now that freezing his sperm had been wholly unnecessary, and the last few years had dealt him enough blows to have realized that nothing short of divine intervention could enact the change of heart necessary for him to seriously entertain the idea of reproducing.
But now, with the third possibility that this Sir Dundas had listed being repeatedly screamed at him by whichever brain cells were cruel enough to make him capable of things like consciousness and thought , he could do nothing but seriously entertain the idea—albeit in a very different way than his past self would have done.
He weakly fought the rising tide of panicked rumination all the way from baggage claim to the exit of the terminal, his body somehow functioning on autopilot with the aid of the deeply-etched muscle memory of being a chronic vagabond. It wasn't until he stepped outside and breathed in a bit of fresher air that he gained a reprieve from the jumpy sense of overwhelm that was threatening to send him straight to the nearest airline service desk to book the next flight to anywhere beyond the North Sea. The anxiety and that messy tangle of unidentifiable emotions would awaken from their temporary torpor in no time, he knew, but for the moment, he could at least direct his energy with some degree of intent
So he took advantage of that brief window of calm in the eye of the storm and pulled out his phone, knowing he had to make a rather dreadful phone call that would likely shave a year or five from his oldest brother's lifespan.
“What do you need this time, Colin?”
Colin flinched at the already exasperated tone of Anthony's voice and felt the anxiety swell back up through his esophagus, drying his throat and tongue to the point that he may as well have swallowed sand.
“I...I th-think I need...c-can...can you...I don't...I don't know what to…” The panic was rising again. His voice was inexplicably hoarse despite his lack of any need to speak aside from a handful of polite words to flight attendants for the last twenty or so hours, and he was already at the point of thinking that he would give himself bald patches if he kept raking his hand through his hair the way he'd been doing
“Woah, hey! Breathe, Col,” his brother said. The exasperation was suddenly gone, replaced with something resembling genuine concern. That alone was enough to distract Colin a bit. He still hasn't gotten used to Anthony's fatherhood-induced capability for softness. “What's wrong? What happened? Do you need help getting home? I can book a flight, or just send the jet. Actually, I'll take the jet and meet you. Where exactly are you, again? You were somewhere in Colombia in your last instagram po—oh, I'll need to ring the hangar to inform—”
“Anthony Nicholas!” Colin nearly shouted, cutting him off. The silence that greeted him was borderline incredulous, and he imagined Anthony gaping like a fish while he did as suggested and ran through his breathing exercises for a minute before continuing, slightly less rattled by the recent atomic bomb sitting in his voicemail. “I just...I just landed, actually. At Heathrow. I was g-going to get an Uber but I...I should do that, actually, remind...remind me to do that when we hang up, yeah? Anyway there was...voicemail...I just checked my voicemail and there was…”
He stopped and breathed again while Anthony waited. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In, out. In, out. His jaw tightened, his knuckles turning white on the handle of the suitcase he couldn't seem to let go of just yet.
“I had a call...from a solicitor,” Colin said finally. “The...the sperm bank's solicitor.”
“...What? What on earth would they need to contact you for?”
“They've lost my sperm, Ant.”
He could practically feel Anthony's shock through the phone. Or maybe that was his own shock echoed back at him. He certainly hasn't recovered from it yet.
“It might have been...mislabeled or destroyed, they said,” Colin had underestimated how much effort it would take to tell Anthony all of this. “Or...or it might have been...used.”
“Used, meaning…?”
He wasn't sure if Anthony was asking for clarification of confirmation. He rather thought it was obvious, but if his brother wanted him to elaborate, he needed to try and get the words out. He wished the sun would peak out just a bit. But it was still technically spring for the next couple weeks, so the clouds hung thick and low over the city, threatening rain. Colin stared at the colorless sky and felt his eyes suddenly well with tears at the reality of the situation, and the weight of what he was trying to explain began to crush his internal organs.
“I mean that the clinic might have...might have accidentally used my sperm for someone's fertility treatment, Ant.”
“So you...so there's a possibility that your...that you…”
He knew that it was technically no more likely a possibility than any of the others, so he shouldn't let himself be carried away by the racing, bubbling, churning storm of undefinable emotions that was brewing inside of him. But something nestled snugly in the deepest part of his heart whispered to him with a certainty he couldn't shake, a whisper that echoed through the folds of his brain and the tiniest air cavities of his lungs, spreading through his bloodstream and spilling through every artery and vein. If he were to gain a bruise, the truth would sleep out from broken capillaries and leave his skin stained and tender the same way his blood would.
Colin didn't believe in much that couldn't be explained by science. He wouldn't call himself a skeptic, as that was a bit too resolute a definition for him, but he had never really believed in the Abrahamic God that his mother has stopped praying to after his father died, and by the time he was eight years old he had already stopped buying the idea of Santa Clause as a literal figure of jolly cheer who his young nephews and nieces still tried to catch delivering their gifts on Christmas eve. Nobody could convince him not to share his real name with strangers out of some fear that they might actually be Fae Folk, and the whole concept of astrology simply made him laugh.
But he believed in things like soulmates, even though he didn't quite fully embrace the notion that anything might have a soul (he chose to ignore the contradiction of this). He believed the young Cho children had that “twin sense” that everybody talked about. He believed that his mother truly had dreamed about him and his siblings and knew exactly what they would all look like at the age of five, the night before she confirmed each pregnancy. And he believed in intuition, especially in this moment when his was practically screaming at him. He wouldn't tell his brother this—Anthony was perhaps the most stubbornly skeptical of the lot, and that was saying something when compared to Eloise of all people—but as the silence settled between him and his brother on the phone, the last dregs of uncertainty evaporated, leaving only a sliver of itself behind to tumble around with the energetic mess of nerves in his stomach. One tiny sliver, just enough to beg the question of whether this was a case of “will be” or “already was”.
How could he dismiss it now as a mere “maybe”? He knew it in the very marrow of his bones that this was the only true possibility. He couldn't word it that way, though. Not to Anthony.
So instead of speaking in absolutes as he felt he should, he tucked that one sliver of uncertainty into the spaces between the syllables of the truest and most shocking words he felt he had ever spoken.
“It's...it's very possible that someone...someone out there might be p-pregnant with my ch—”
The last word caught in his throat as the storm of emotions in his chest swelled and surged against his heart, beating it with relentless force. He swallowed and raked his hand through his hair— god, he had done that a lot in the last half hour —and sucked in another lungful of air, as slowly as he could manage. "Someone might have already given birth to my child. Anthony, I…”
He forced the next few words out as he choked down a guttural scream
“I might be a father, Ant.”
“A father...you...oh,” was uttered in perhaps the smallest, most faraway voice Anthony had used since Kate's accident. There was complete silence from the Viscount for a beat, followed by the rustling of papers, the distant metallic chime of keys shuffling against each other, a muffled curse and whispering murmurs. More locally, there was some chatter from passing travellers, the occasional announcement over the loudspeaker in some practiced voice hired and trained to sound perfectly pleasant and
Colin breathed in slow, out slower. There was the scent of warm tarmac, a wisp of some cloyingly sweet perfume that he didn't care for, raindrops on concrete, and that nebulous something that was so distinctly London that it made his heart ache every time he came home, an olfactory reminder that he had not truly changed as much as he had hoped, that it would likely always be a useless endeavor to try to forget who he was and how little he actually had to offer the world.
Perhaps just as useless as trying to keep his heart from breaking every time he woke—with his cock weeping for the ruinous embrace of fluttering velvet heat, the ghosts of jasmine and ginger and sweet, warm mead lingering in the air and on his tongue, a fading echo of his name falling from kiss-bruised lips as a shattering keen—and realized that love was nothing but an unrequited dream.
Colin felt the rain soaking into his hair and the shoulders of his jacket as muffled voices filtered through the speaker of his phone. His heart continued beating wildly in his chest while his toes and fingers numbed, and he fought the urge to scream out all the heavy, sharp, fractured emotions that were building up pressure in his chest, like a kettle with a cork wedged in it's neck.
“Hello, Colin,” Kate's voice startled him out of his spiral.
“Kit-Kat?” he answered. It was the nickname he and Hyacinth had given her after noticing how often their sister-in-law wouid roll her eyes in a way that could only be interpreted as ‘Give me a break!’ . While originally playful and teasing, it had almost immediately been recategorized by his brain as one of those names he only used when he was raw and vulnerable and small, much like his habit of reverting to saying ‘mama’ instead of ‘mum’ when he got misty-eyed and tight-throated during conversations with his mother.
“Indeed I am, chhota bhai,” Kate replied with a light chuckle, her voice somehow soothing and reassuring despite the worry that laced it. Colin wondered if all decent mothers unlocked a variety pack of new voices upon giving birth for the first time. “Sounds like you've experienced some turbulence this morning.”
Colin let out a large breath, his body curling forward as his lungs practically collapsed with the force of it. His sister-in-law had a literally breath-taking way of making him feel like a child sometimes, but in the loved and cared for way, rather than the small and insignificant way he often felt in the shadow of his (ironically shorter than him). older brothers. She couldn't see the watery smile that appeared on his face, but he hoped it would show in his voice as it wavered.
“I can't lie, I'm kinda glad he handed me off to you. Is Ant...is he freaking out? I just dropped a pretty big bomb. I didn't mean to—”
“Oh he's compartmentalizing and prioritizing. Muttering to himself about shoddy record-keeping and inept facility management. You know how he hates a poorly-run business. Are you still at Heathrow, Col? Which terminal?”
“Erm...terminal two...why do you ask?”
“We're coming to pick you up. What's that, Anthony?” Kate paused for a few seconds as she listened to her husband, whose voice Colin could barely hear in the background, the auditory equivalent of a fuzzy shadow in the corner of one's eye. Kate hummed. “Colin, did that solicitor call you today, or was the voicemail notification delayed like some of the other notifications you've received?”
Colin blinked, the messy tangle of emotions now slithering around in his guts with renewed fervor. Without a second of hesitation, he scrolled through his call log until he found the name he was looking for and…
He wanted to scream again, so he laughed incredulously instead. “Two weeks...two fucking weeks! I didn't get the notification for two whole fucking weeks!”
Kate was chewing the inside of her cheek and sharing a look with Anthony. He could tell, somehow, despite the call lacking video. They were trying to decide how to respond to his sudden outburst. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did. Somehow his brother and his wife had mastered silent communication to such a degree, they could communicate about their silent communications over the phone. With other people. Silently. Colin pondered if he was actually going insane.
Finally, Kate spoke. “I asked because Anthony found a letter for you buried in the pile of unopened post on his desk. It likely arrived early last week. Would you like me or Anthony to read it before we give it to you?”
“I don't see why not...why d-don't you read it to me and Anthony while you're on the way over?”
“Splendid idea, Colin. Now tell me...are you hungry?”
It was a question he was rarely asked by anyone who knew him well, because it was almost always a safe assumption that he was at least a tad peckish at all times. There was no end to the jokes and teasing about the Bag of Holding that he'd been born with in place of a stomach, so whenever anyone within his innermost circle—and especially anyone within his family —deigned to inquire about the status of his hunger...well, it functioned more as a triage tool than anything else.
Colin drummed his fingers against the handle of his suitcase and tried to focus on wording his answer. Downplaying his inner turmoil was practically a reflex, one he had put a good amount of work into correcting over the last few years of therapy. He still wasn't very good at it, but the Viscountess had a way of piercing even the most durable of masks with her shrewd gaze and cracking them into pieces so easily, they may as well be made of sugar glass, rather than a fragile collage of decades of desperate self-preservation and people-pleasing like ye was. It would be useless, trying to lie to her.
He didn't want to cause any unnecessary degree of worry, however—he wasn't spiralling badly enough to require a ‘grippy-sock holiday’ or even an emergency zoom call to Dr. Quinn. But as anyone who knew him well would almost never bother to ask if he was hungry, it followed that anyone who knew him well would likely be worried enough to consider both of those options if he were to respond with complete, unfiltered, unsweetened honesty.
“You know me...my stomach is bound to start organizing a mutiny any minute now,” he finally said with a forced chuckle. Kate hummed in response and Colin continued, with as much honesty as he could muster. “If you're…if you're picking up food anyway, you can get me a normal human amount…not a normal Colin amount. Otherwise, d-don't stop on my account. I'll happily eat at home.”
Probably tomorrow, if he could get his nerves to calm down by then.
It seemed that Kate and Anthony weren't quite sure what to make of that response, but the Viscountess said her goodbyes soon afterward, the solicitor's letter forgotten. They could deal with that on the drive home, Colin supposed, although he still had half a mind to turn around and fly all the way back to Bogota.
His body seemed to have made that very decision while he let his mind wander, because he suddenly regained awareness as a blast of chattering noise and dry air socked him in the face.
He imagined a miniature version of Dr. Quinn sitting at stately wood desk inside his brain, much like a scene from that SpongeBob cartoon, rattling on about things like acute stress and dissociation and flight mode. He shook the image from his mind and stood off to the side of the doors before pulling out his phone again.
He had a new text.
From her.
His heart squeezed painfully at the name of the sender. He hadn't been expecting a reply to the message he had sent yesterday, and the fact that he'd received one was…almost as much a surprise as the voicemail that had turned his day—and his entire life—inside out and upside down.
It was too much anxiety to deal with at once, though, so he swiped the notification away, pocketed his phone again, and roughly rubbed his cheeks and eyes with the ball of his hand in an attempt to scrub away the sudden eruption of tears.
It was probably the worst timing of anything in his life, and somehow the most ironic as well.
He was going to be a father, if he wasn't one already. It was something that he had always wanted, honestly, but for the longest time that dream has been focused primarily on the idea of having children, followed by only idle musings about the sort of woman he might choose to mother them.
Then he'd decided to be a dumbass and made the mistake of falling in love.
She had ripped his heart out years ago and he still couldn't bring himself to want children if they weren't half made of her.
He dug the balls of his hands into his eyes and sighed, then pulled out his phone again to ask his sister-in-law for an ETA. Everything felt like it was crashing down around him. He thought of his mother. How she would think that at least some part of him should be happy to become a father, despite the strange way in which it came about. But he wasn't. He tried to be. He tried to dredge up even one dust mote of excitement and failed, over and over again. He kept trying long after his brother's car had appeared and he'd been squished halfway to the grave by an exceedingly rare bear hug from the least affectionate Bridgerton. He kept trying long after the concerned couple had deposited him at his flat in Bloomsbury with a promise to have some meals prepped and sent over from Bridgerton House, the burger and chips they had picked up for him forgotten in the back seat of Anthony's Audi. He kept trying until the afternoon had waned and the rain had stopped and the last light of day had faded. But he knew it was ultimately worthless to try.
Because no matter who the mother of his child was, he knew with absolute certainty that it couldn't be her.
He pulled out his phone one last time before he succumbed to the exhaustion of the day, and navigated to her Instagram before tapping the tab for "tagged-in" photos. The most recent one was just a few days old, taken at what appeared to be a garden party. She was a vision in a dusty pink dress decorated with green vines and white, nondescript flowers, looking at the camera with a smile, although it didn't quite reach her eyes. She was sat on a long garden bench between Sir Philip Crane and a partially cropped-out woman he didn't recognize, with the greenhouses of Romney Hall visible in the background.
His heart squeezed painfully as he closed the app and tossed his phone onto the charging pad before rolling over and burying his head in the pillows, half hoping that they might suffocate him in his sleep.
It would never be her.
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