Author: Regency

Title: Dare to Hope

Pairing: Mark Darcy/Bridget Jones

Rating: G/Everyone

Warnings: None

Summary: (Spoilers for BJB.) Mark Darcy is (probably) about to be father, but he doesn't know that yet. This is the moment he learns.

Prompt: Mark's thoughts when Bridget announced her pregnancy, before he realized the baby might be his.

Author's Note: Come flail with me about everything to with BJD (except maybe not MAtB because I'll cry) on Tumblr at sententiousandbellicose!

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from any incarnation of the Bridget Jones series. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

Seeing Bridget in the public gallery, considering the way things ended after the christening, is a happy shock. Getting to walk at her side again and chat with her, however uneasily, is a welcome reprieve from the cacophony of regrets that fill his idle moments. He thinks of her often. Her presences outshines his memory and his memory is impeccable. Something is different about her. His stomach drops. She's in love.

He was all but her husband for ten years, he knows love drunk Bridget. When he could get his words together and his priorities straight, he could put a smile on her face fit to overshadow Polaris. The warmth in her cheeks, the width of her smile, it's all like that. Bridget Jones is in love. And not with me.

This is not news to him. It cannot be news to him. She didn't want to try again because her heart was directed elsewhere. He lapses into silence for the remainder of their walk to his office to give himself time to accept this conclusion. Bridget tries in vain to engage him in more small talk to no avail. He can engage her or he can hide his feelings, he cannot hope to do both at once.

Bridget is fairly wittering with nerves by the time they reach his office. He's ordered his assistant to hold his calls and visitors for the next hour in expectation of whatever she has to say. He doesn't think he'll be fit for company for some time afterward, whatever it is.

"So...," he prompts when the awkwardness of staring at her gets to be too much. There was a time when he could stare at her for hours. These days it only reminds him that he can look but not touch, that privilege is someone else's now.

"So...," she counters. "Mark..."

"Yes."

Her eyes take on a hazy sheen that usually precipitates some declaration of affection or colossal social disaster. He isn't sure which he would find preferable, love for someone else or a mistake she needs him to fix. No, she doesn't need me anymore. She takes care of herself. She could always do that. She isn't in a Thai prison anymore. Daniel Cleaver is long dead. God, let him be dead and stay dead, for the sake of my blood pressure, if nothing else. He spoke to his parents just this week. Aside from their godchild, he isn't sure what else there is for he and Bridget to discuss. Nothing. Our roads have entirely, wretchedly diverged in a wood.

Bridget turns from him to stare out his bay windows at the gardens below. "The gardens look lovely. Autumnal."

"Yes?"

Mark allows himself to examine her further now that he can do so unobserved. She's glowing, yes, yet paler than usual. She's tense in all her wittering to fill the air before...what? Her hair is fuller than it was, though not as blonde, almost as though she missed a touch-up of her preferred colour. Bridget is meticulous about her appearance. Since achieving her goal weight she determined that her only beauty standards would be her own. Her style, her fitness, her diet, her choice. To see it slip is jarring, as it had been in their time together as constant as her diary.

"Is that a conker tree," asks Bridget with the rhetorical alacrity of someone who Googled trees to have something to talk about on a shit blind date.

Mark has no idea what sort of tree it is, but he'll agree to any ridiculous factoid of the arboreal variety to get on with this conversation.

"What about that one," she queries, pointing at another naked tree specimen that is in no material fashion different from the first. Stalling. He's beginning to remember why they would row from time to time. Her penchant for equivocating could aggravate a saint, and saintly Mark isn't.

"Bridget?"

She turns to him, sees he's had it, and...

"I'm pregnant." Her voice shakes when she speaks. It's the hallmark of a Bridget Jones verbal spew in fewer words. Her brevity does nothing to minimize the force of the blow.

This is the opposite of a happy shock. Well, no, not the opposite. He's happy for her. He remembers their attempts to conceive during the good years; she has wanted to be a mother for such a long time, he can't begrudge her joy at succeeding.

This was always going to happen, he reminds himself. Bridget is a lovely person, kind, compassionate, intelligent-beautiful. Whoever gets to share this happy event with her is lucky. Luckier than Mark can speak to. They had tried to conceive without success. Maybe I was the problem. He and Camilla hadn't wanted children together, so he'd never thought to be examined. No point now.

"Right..." He clears his throat. "Congratulations." I wish it could have been me.

Bridget nods, her hands twisted together.. She watching him with something like expectation in her eyes. Mark doesn't know what she expects. What more can he offer beyond his best wishes? Not my heart. She's had that. It's nothing she's shown any use for recently.

"And how can I help?"

Bridget sighs in understated exasperation that she must have learned from him. "I'm three months pregnant."

Mark knows what happened three months ago and what didn't. He had her and it wasn't enough. But, it seems, that not everything failed that night, absurd dolphin condom aside. "You mean..."

She nods.

The first impulse to zing down his shocked nerves tells him to kiss her. You're having my baby. We're having a baby. She's...He blinks rapidly as his worldview explodes outward. A baby. I'm going to be a father. Me and Bridget. A baby. This world, so cold and often cruel, is going to be that much more worthy of his defense because it's going to house someone made up of himself and the person he loves most. That's a world worth saving.

"Well." He swallows. "This is...Right...If you'll excuse me for just one moment." He finds it difficult to speak. His thoughts are in disarray. His hands have gone clammy. His heart beats in a too-rapid tattoo that would worry his already fretful cardiologist. He departs the room lest his restraint crumbles and he kisses her. How can he but act out his love when its object is in reach?

He slumps against his outside of his office door, grimly fighting down welling elation. This is not a reconciliation. This is...this is something else. This is a chance to be close to her again. To get even half of what we wanted together. He gave up all hope of fatherhood when their relationship ended. He'd been roundly soured on love and family with their failures. His businesslike marriage to Camilla is as much a product of that mood as inertia. There is nothing businesslike about his feelings for Bridget. However this ends, they shall never be strangers again. I don't lose her, no matter what becomes of our relationship.

He laughs, disbelieving, into his unsteady hands. He's had little cause to believe in miracles in his life, but this just might be the one to change his mind.

Don't be an idiot. Don't leave her in suspense. Don't make her wait to know how how you feel, not today.

With that bracing pep talk to himself, Mark hurries to return to his office. She hasn't moved. Bridget is, if possible, paler than she began. Her anxiety rattles his euphoria. That she could ever believe he'd turn her or a child of theirs away...You don't know me anymore, but you will. I'll prove it this time. I'll get this right. Believe in me. He would give her every reason to keep faith.

"So. I think... this is possibly the single, most wonderful piece of information I have ever been given in my entire life."

I love you, he projects knowing those aren't words she'll want to hear him say. I love you with so much of my heart I may burst.

Bridget's cautious response to his optimism cannot shatter his hope. Not given how readily she melts into his celebratory embrace, how comfortably she still fits in his arms with the the soft curve of her stomach unmistakable beneath her clothes. The past cannot be undone. Mistakes cannot be un-made. But there's still tomorrow and the months, the years to come.

Our baby, Mark thinks again, awestruck. He has the two people he loves most safe in his arms and he'll be damned if he surrenders them without a fight.

Not everything is lost. Not just yet.