Chapter Text
“Oi! Michael! This is it!” The stale stench of blood, sweat, and the fumes of gunpowder slapped him in the face with the hot wave of the shells and gunfire raining down in the nearby field and into the next trenches. He tightened his grip around his rifle, knuckles white, shocked awake by the sudden light as the sun was making its first cringe on the horizon.
“Bridgerton.” The voice called out to him, and then: “Shit.”
He didn’t reply, blinking at the mass of huddled soldiers next to him in the trench and shook his head.
“Bridge!” The voice called again, and hands extended, palms down in a calming manner, as Colin spun, bringing his gun down to ready it.
Caked in mud, Alfred’s blond Cary Grant-esque moustache faded into his lips, and the dried blood turned his handsome face into something indistinguishable from every other soldier in the Pacific theatre. His helmet sat on his head, shadowing his eyes that had grown ever more weary the longer they were stationed in Oceana.
“Listen,” Sergeant Debling insisted, trying to tug him out of whatever haze he found himself in, stuck in the past battles and the fight-or-flight instinct of survival. “There’s a train, right? You remember me telling you. It leaves the station at a quarter past five. C’mon.”
He nodded, breathing heavily as the sergeant gestured to him to join with their backs against the trenches. “And it’s direct- that’s right,” Debling clapped him on the shoulder as his breathing slowed slightly and he stared out into the battlefield. The scent of mould and rotting meat conjured forth memories of his mother instructing he and his brothers to dispose of the dead squirrel Daphne and Eloise had found in the garden when they were young. He pushed that away, adjusting his grip. “From Kings Cross, right there in St. Pancras. A quarter past five.”
“Alright,” he grouched, trying to ignore the sounds around him. Debling grabbed a grenade from a pack without the same hesitation he’d had months before and handed it to Michael. Coming back to himself, Colin once again shook his head, releasing the stiff grip he had on his gun and adjusting his helmet. They crouched as a wave of heat passed over them.
“Morris! I need that cover,” Debling yelled, grabbing his own gun and popping up to check if the barbed wire lines were visible in the mist. “Michael, I need you, mate.”
He pointed to the Australian PFC who he had handed the grenade to. Michael nodded. Colin tugged at the collar of his uniform, glancing carefully at his friends’ bare arms in their white undershirts. He should have taken the same initiative in dealing with the heat of the islands.
“Grenade, on my go,” Debling ordered. The soldiers prepared themselves, adjusting their grips on their rifles and stepping onto the wood slats of the trenches as though they were ladders. All of them young, all of them far too old. Colin shuddered as he peered out into the mist, squinting into the distance. The 14th army prepared themselves. “Go!”
Michael pulled the pin, tossing it from the back of the trench. It sailed through the mist, landing only 3 feet away from them.
“Get off!” Colin shouted, but he was too late. Alfred had pushed him down and covered him with his body.
_________
“London’s BBC radio, with a special song to celebrate our victory!” the cool female voice announced over the tannoy playing music in the station. A women’s group, not unlike the Andrews sisters he remembered listening to before combat, began singing about the return. The heat from the train’s smoke hit the back of his neck, and Colin flinched, listening to the cheers and chatter of those around him as they reunited with their loved ones.
He watched a young man, no older than nineteen, reunited with a pretty girl- likely a sweetheart by the way he swung her around after grabbing her quickly to hide the stump where his left hand had been. The Union Jack flew proud and high in the station, and Colin felt as though he was being assaulted by all of the colours of the clothes. Had everything been so vibrant before he left, or was he remembering it all incorrectly?
“It’ll be just like it was before,” A soldier promised an older woman, kissing her on the side of her head and hoisting a young boy onto his hip. “Before you know it.”
Standing in the crowd of people, Colin shook his head again, adjusting the cap on his head and pushed through them to the entrance. Stopping by a corkboard posted by the entrance, he spotted an advert for a one-bedroom with reasonable rent. If he used the savings he had, Colin could live by himself.
He travelled to the address, which was only two blocks away from the station, and submitted his name for an application. Then, he made a trip to the bank to pick up the first and last month’s rent. The landlord, an older woman whose husband had fought in the Great War- though he knew they were now calling it World War One- spoke little and watched him load his things into the small room from storage. The London air still tasted of the smoke and bombs of the blitz, but it was a welcome transition from the ever-present stench of body odour in the trench.
“Finally home,” Colin breathed as he adjusted his writing desk he had inherited from his late father by the window. He sat down in the chair, relaxing his posture in the embrace of the familiar seat. It was more as though he was trying to convince himself as he said, “Finally safe. Finally free.”
He looked back at the rest of his things in boxes that he had packed up before being shipped out, full of hope for when he returned. Bending down to open the one closest to him, he opened it to find stationary and his pens, and placing them down on the desk, Colin could almost believe the words he said next.
“Soon,” he promised. “It’ll be just like it was before.”
____
“Good lord,” Will Mondrich chuckled, grabbing Colin’s hand when he noticed him in the dance hall. “It’s Colin Bridgerton! How long have you been back, mate?”
“Couple days.” Colin forced a puppet smile on his face, jerkily shaking Will’s hand and feeling quite out of body in the heat and music of everyone dancing around them.
“Place looks fantastic,” he complimented, remembering the small warehouse with which Will and Alice had started only five years before.
“How about my house band, eh?” Will chuckled, gesturing to the swing band belting out a loud Sinatra rendition. Colin wrinkled his nose at the choice of song.
“You need me up there on keys,” he said, pointing to the young piano player. Will’s face fell, he rubbed his nose and swung Colin around to face the bar in the back, looping his arm around Colin’s shoulders.
“I’ve got a friend who needs a piano player for a wedding. You still do that, yeah?”
Colin briefly recalled the dusty blue accordion he had lifted out of one of his boxes the previous night when he couldn’t sleep and the years of playing at weddings to make some money which he had hidden away to travel with when he was all grown up. He swallowed the bitterness and thought of those savings which would only last him so long. As the third son in a now mostly honorary titled house, he was on his own unless he could muster up the courage to ask Anthony for money, which would just encourage the juvenile image Anthony possessed of him. His brother would tell him that there was no need to live alone when they had a family estate, and then Colin would be forced to live with his mother and siblings again. He sighed.
“A gig’s a gig.”
“I’ll tell him,” Will said, a small smile coming to his face as he patted Colin’s chest. “Something will turn up,” Will promised, hands on Colin’s shoulders. “The cream always rises to the crop, man.”
That said, he clapped Colin’s arm once roughly and disappeared into the crowd. Colin ordered a whiskey on the rocks from the bar, thinking of the blueish nightmare from which he had woken up in a cold sweat and the image of Alfred’s face staring up at him that had haunted him since that day. Men still in their royal army uniforms danced with girls as their dresses twirled around them.
To think that Mondrich’s would become such a swanky club….
He shook his head, and took a swig, revelling in the sharp taste after months of drinking the rum that the Crown provided to her soldiers. Colin had supplied every band in the Swing Halls in London with their own original music and occasionally his talents on the piano if they needed a player by the age of seventeen.
He paused at the black wooden door of a stone building, eyes darting around the various Georgian decorations on the outside. The curtains at the window fluttered, and Colin lost his nerve, dropping his hand, shoving it into his pocket, and moving onto the next club.
Leaving the tenth club that had rejected him since he had returned just a month before, Colin passed by a Veterans UK post, and glancing around him on the street, quickly entered before he could talk himself out of it. After submitting his name to the woman at the front desk, he sat in one of the chairs by the wall, hunching in on himself and resting his elbows on his knees as his left foot bounced up and down. Straightening up, Colin rolled up the sleeves of his white button-down shirt.
“Private Bridgerton?” A woman called. “Colin Bridgerton, please.”
“Here.” He stood up, raising one hand in a wave. She pressed some forms into his hand on a clipboard.
“Fill these out, please. Both sides on that one,” the employee indicated to which form. “Signature there, there, and there. Back to me when you’re done.”
“Yes, miss,” Colin agreed and grabbed the pen attached to the clipboard. Sitting back down on the chairs, one of the guys next to him leaned over to check it out.
“What division?” The man asked, puffing on a cigarette next to him. Colin’s head snapped up, and gaped, taking a moment to process what he had been asked.
“14th. Army.” The man snapped the fingers of his free hand, tucking his newspaper underneath his arm.
“What was that? Hmm… Solomon Islands?”
“Yeah,” Colin replied, scratching behind his ear with the pen. “Boganville.”
The man didn’t look like he had served, with a pot belly and full head of ginger hair, face unmarred and freckled. Colin knew that appearances could be deceiving, and the man was in the Veterans office.
“Shite, mate. That must have been fucking hell.” Colin pushed his tongue against the inside of his lower lip. Why did this guy want to talk? What, did he want to compare war stories? Talk about how brave he was and how many medals he had won. He lifted an eyebrow at the show of sympathy.
“Something like that,” he agreed.
“When’d you get back?” Colin shook his head. The man certainly hadn’t picked up the ability to read people if he had served.
“Couple weeks.” He glanced up again at the man’s purple knitted jumper and tan trousers.
“You going to college or university after this?” He paused from where he was filling out his service record, thinking about it. Colin hadn’t considered university since he was a teen, thinking of what his father would want for him. Literature, music, and history had all appealed to him, but a career they did not make easily. His mother would have a fit about a Bridgerton learning a trade.
“Just need the money and the suit,” Colin replied, smiling tightly as he continued.
The man frowned, sitting down heavily next to him and placing the cigarette in his mouth, puffing out a breath of smoke. He opened his newspaper, adjusting his jumper as it bunched up behind him in the uncomfortable seat.
“Find something quick,” the man warned Colin. “I’ve been to three funerals this month.”
Colin froze. He, too, had attended the funerals he could for the men he knew overseas. It wasn’t out of the ordinary. Something in the man’s tone made him pause, though, and listen.
“Nobody’s talking about it because those lads came back fine a while ago.”
Was there a disease they had picked up while fighting? That wasn’t out of the question. Plenty of the men he had fought alongside had succumbed to trench foot or gangrene.
“What happened?” He asked, brow furrowed. The man looked at him for the first time since he had sat down.
“They wanted a way to make it stop.” The man stood up, rolling up his newspaper as the woman began calling another name. “Find something. Quick.”
Colin filled out the rest of the forms, stopping occasionally to check his surroundings: door, windows, people. Best way of escape, best entrance, and what to do if attacked. He saw this habit in the men around him, wearing the faces of the boy they had been before while the man they had become and the things they had seen hid behind the smile.
Collecting the 83 pounds he was allotted and the demob suit, Colin changed in the toilets out of the old trousers and button-down that had fit the eighteen-year-old who had left the UK. Checking himself in the mirror, he shook out his hand from where it had clenched into a fist and walked out of the Veterans Office, money in his pocket.