Chapter Text
“That’s about the seventh ballad we’ve seen,” Marcus Barnell hissed over to Colin where the band was waiting third in line backstage. Though no one had a similar story to theirs - most were set either before the war or in a fantasy world - things had already started to get muddled in between high powered dance numbers with coordinated dances inspired by the Golden Age musicals and the arias belted out by powerful singers.
He exhaled slowly, staring out at the Smythe-Smiths as they performed an orchestral number from some sort of adaptation of a regency novel. Penelope moved up so she was by his left side with their backs against the wall in the small stage wings.
“We could do Life,” she suggested. Garrett, the bass player he’d found at Mondrich’s, looked up in consideration. The rest of the band, far less invested in the result of the contest than Penelope and Colin, merely agreed since they were deferring to the people who were paying them.
Corning nodded. “I brought the sheet music, so Liebel and I can share it since he’ll be next to me playing sax.”
“I’m just grand with being in the background,” Phillip Crane agreed.
Colin looked to Penelope. She blinked up at him, waiting for his agreement.
“Do you remember it?”
He gaped for a moment. “I can’t act.”
“What?”
A love scene filled with the longing Colin couldn’t allow himself to express for fear that it would never retreat and he would scare her away was a risk he couldn’t take when it took all of his will to tear his eyes away from her in that dress. He looked into her eyes filled with a challenge he wanted to meet.
The audience broke into applause as the Smythe-Smith girl finished up her song about how she wished she had the freedom a man did. All of the band members’ heads snapped to look towards the stage as Nigel Berbrooke’s production walked on.
Penelope rested her hand on his bicep. “We’re telling a real story, right?”
His throat was dry and his heart began to beat out of his chest.
There is a train; It leaves the station at a quarter past five.
It was a contest for the troops, and their musical was written by people who had first-hand experience of the war effects. Each of their band members had served.
“We can do it,” Penelope told him. The heat of the stage lights migrated to their position backstage and a beam of sweat dripped down his back. Far too conscious of her touch, he looked down to her hand and crossed his body with his free hand to put a comforting hand on her wrist. Had everything been so vibrant before he met Penelope or was he remembering everything incorrectly?
Coming back to himself, the world wobbled slightly and his vision grew dark around the corners. Colin recovered and took in a breath before he turned to the band. Instructing them to play all of Life and then wait until his cue to jump into the reprise. Penelope let go of his arm to inform the announcer, and he missed the warmth of her small hand.
“Please welcome Mr Colin Bridgerton and Mrs Penelope Debling with the Mondrich Band to the stage as they perform a This is Life from their production Bandstand: A New Musical.”
He reached out and grabbed her hand as the band walked out to set themselves upstage left. They wouldn’t bother trying to pull off an American accent. The goal was to sell a story. What would his family think? Would he be able to make out their faces in the dark audience?
Penelope shot him a smile and, heart pounding for a different reason than the prospect of performing his magnum opus in front of a crowd, he followed her as she walked out from upstage left.
“Well, you still know how to be a gentleman and walk a girl to her door,” she recalled from the script.
He smiled for a moment and they stopped at centre stage. She turned to face him on a diagonal, so he mirrored her position. “It's harder than it looks.”
Penelope laughed. “I think you’re very respectable.”
Having been mostly focused on the music, Colin floundered for a moment as he basked in that laugh and tried to remember the lines she’d put so much work into writing.
Eventually, when he remembered: “No, I mean that last martini made it harder to walk than it looks.”
She tilted her head to regard him with unbridled fondness, and he could barely remember his name when Penelope chuckled again. Thankfully, she seemed to recognise his inability to continue the scene, so she stepped in and took charge.
“OK,” Penelope said, trying to project her voice as well as keep it as steady as possible in the face of so many people watching. “So let's say we all do lunch at the Edison before going to the studio tomorrow.”
She paused as she looked up to Colin. “Or Sardi's! Oh, I've always wanted to go to Sardi's!”
He sent her a crooked smile like he was holding something back and had gotten lost in just looking at her. Of course he could act.
“That...sounds wonderful. Let's do that.”
Penelope hesitated as she remembered what she’d written for this scene. It was just a performance. It was a competition at that.
“Right, uh...goodnight.” Walking closer, she put her other hand on his left bicep and went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. After a smile like it had been something she’d wanted to do for as long as she could remember, she turned her back to him and he watched her walk away in shock, reaching up to his newly shaven cheek to touch where she had kissed him.
The band, having been warned that their cue to begin was the kiss on the cheek, began to play. It was missing his piano part, but he’d asked Liebel on saxophone to fill in as best he could. He began to sing the very lyrics he’d just learned a few nights ago that felt like they’d been written in his very bone marrow from the very moment they started that journey.
“If we were,” Penelope sang as she turned around. She looked real. She looked like a visage of herself, the kind of girl worth fighting for. The kind of girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, writing musicals and books and songs about her hair, her freckles, her beautiful eyes, her wit.
They moved closer as the lyrics moved on into a reminder why it would never work between the two of them. Widow and Survivor, both wracked with the guilt of living and haunted by the everpresent death of the person who brought them together.
Penelope reached out her hand to shake a metaphorical promise to herself that she wouldn’t compromise this friendship for anything. He took a breath and clasped her hand in his as he repeated her words in a crescendo. Without any warning, he pulled her forward until they were chest to chest, their joined hands pressed up against their hearts.
He hadn’t planned for that moment either, but it felt right. She’d squeaked at the sudden movement, though with only the microphones hanging above the stage, he doubted anyone but them heard it.
“There’s no perfect script that provides us the words to say or the answers that might overcome the past that provides us” had never been more true than in that moment, and Penelope found herself falling into the magic of the scene and letting herself believe that Colin meant the words he was singing.
“But this is life,” and no matter what stories may assure us, we live on a cliff that some people don’t want to risk jumping off of. The song pulled to a close, and they stood there, panting as the audience waited for them to pull out of character.
Penelope stepped away from him and looked down. “Are you sure? We could be blacklisted… or worse.”
With all the gusto, all the meaning, all of the anger he’d wrapped up inside to play along with the illusion that things were just like it was before, Colin let himself nod.
“We’ve all been through worse,” he reminded her, and looked back to the band where Phillip nodded and began to play his flute. In hard times, you cling to the things that are real and tangible. When he and Debling were in the pacific fighting for almost four years to make it back, it was the promise of a life afterwards, of jokes they’d make around the mess, of the little shows he’d put on for his battalion.
Now, back from all that, it was Penelope. If they lost this, would he be able to walk away from her? He could march back into battle again if it was true, and his feelings for her were. They were making an honest statement about what life was. What happened over there was true.
“No matter how tough it is, no matter how much time it takes, I need to be with you,” he told Penelope, and he meant it. She gaped up at him as he stepped closer to finish the bar, confessing how madly in love with her he was, and as the band pulled to a crescendo, Colin reached out and pulled up her chin with a crooked finger.
Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one, while not exactly pure, would have knocked Buttercup & Westley out of the top spot.
They separated to applause, and he released an anxiety he didn’t know he would have when he examined Penelope’s face and found it shocked rather than disgusted, Colin stepped aside to allow the band behind him to receive the applause. She grabbed his hand and they bowed together.
“I mean it, you know,” he whispered to her.
“What?”
“The reality is, I’m madly in love with you.”
And though his heart was pounding, Colin was there on the stage of His Majesty’s theatre instead of a jungle in the pacific. They stepped off the stage as the applause petered out and he congratulated the band members in lieu of addressing his impromptu confession.
Suddenly, they were alone in the lobby where the strains of the next performance began to seep through the doors of the theatre.
“Did you mean it?”
His eyelids shuttered slowly, once, twice, and again until he was able to reply. “Yes.”
With the fire he’d become all too accustomed to when they bantered, Penelope made one swift movement to reach up, grab him by his lapels, and snog him within an inch of his life.
“Good,” she said when they came up for air. “I’m the same.” Smoothing the wrinkles out of her skirt in the way she’d fussed with her apron the first day they met, she grinned up at him and put out her arm like they were going to promenade. “Shall we, Mr Bridgerton?”
Face flushed, lips red from her lipstick, and heart still beating, Colin took her arm and they moved back into the theatre to sit with the audience. Act by act moved in, each singing their songs, performing their music, singing of love, hope, despair, and everything in between.
Finally, after the final performance wrapped up, the three judges moved backstage to confer. Colin looked over to Penelope, who had falled asleep on his shoulder, her hand clasped again in his.
The announcer asked for them to hold their applause until the end, and began to read out the top five. He tapped her awake, and she blinked sleepily up at him.
“Results,” Colin whispered, squeezing her hand.
“-And in 3rd place,” the announcer continued, having paused to allow for the applause he’d specifically asked them to hold until they end, “Ace by Taylor and Oberacker!”
Then, just to build suspense in a way that everyone except the competitors enjoyed, he paused after saying, “In 2nd.”
Penelope drew in a breath. There was no telling if their name would be called at all.
“Bandstand: A New Musical by Debling and Bridgerton.”
They deflated in unison in their seats. Sure, the two of them had walked out the experience as a partnership, but their goal had been winning. What had all the sleepless nights, rehearsals, writing sessions tinged with longing been for?
With ringing and thunderous applause in his ears, Colin missed the announcement of the winner. As the audience lights went up, Penelope squeezed his hand.
“We still wrote a musical,” she reminded him. “Maybe it won’t be made into a film just yet, but I’m sure we can get it on the West End.”
And while there was no doubt in his mind they could do it well and together, his every instinct that had been trained to deal with failure was telling him to take cover.
“You’re here with me,” Penelope reminded him. “It’s Tuesday, 18th of September, 1945, and you’re safe with me.”
Nodding, Colin repeated that in his head, slowly fading out Debling’s mantra with this new one. Then, struck with a sudden thought, he looked around the audience and spotted the Bridgerton clan waving frantically to the two of them from the centre middle of the audience.
“I think I know where I can get us a sponsor to put on this musical,” he said slowly.
Anthony, like him, needed a purpose. With almost all of the siblings out of the house and the accounting firm having learned how to continue without him during the war, he needed something to micromanage. Even if they couldn’t reach all of the veterans by winning this and having Bandstand being made into a film, it was a new era. They could put it on the West End together and maybe more people would listen that way.
Penelope raised an eyebrow at him.
“This may be too forward,” Colin began, “and I know we just snogged on stage in front of them, but would you like to meet my family?”
“Mr Bridgerton, I thought you’d never ask.”