Fight & Flight
'Jackson, you wake up every night screaming because you have nightmares.'
– April Kepner, Superfreak.
The first week, she ignores it (she has nightmares of her own to deal with).
The second week, she gets up, walks down the hall, knocks on his door and waits (he opens it silently, she nods but says nothing and goes back to bed).
The third week, he stops opening the door.
She starts.
"Jackson?"
He sits upright, staring straight ahead, his arms wrapped around his knees. The muscles in his shoulders strain, like he might lose his grip on his own body, maybe his own mind if he doesn't hang on hard enough. "I'm okay," he tells her, and week three, night one ends with her leaving her glass of water on his nightstand because she can see the sweat on his back and knows he needs it more than she does.
She hears him scream names sometimes. Or 'no'. Or 'please'. He doesn't hear anything from her room, but he's receptive enough to only give her half an hour in the shower before he starts banging on the door, bitching about the hot water running out. They were never best friends before now, but now they are, so now he knows she spends too long getting clean, lathering and rinsing the same spots over and over.
They don't talk about it.
Just like they don't talk about his dreams.
Usually, she brings water. Sometimes, she comes in before he's fully awake and tries to stop it. Once, his flailing fist catches her cheekbone, and she lets out a rare curse.
"April!"
"It's fine."
"No. No, it's not."
Even though it's him she's there for, it's him who sits her down on the closed toilet lid, kneels at her feet. His surgeon's fingers push lightly against reddened skin which pushes back, the bathroom light too bright, the night silent but for their breathing. "It's fine," she says, because she's a surgeon too, and she's hit him enough times, out of mild anger or in play.
"No, it's not," he says again. He hit her. He hit her. He'd never hit a woman, and he'd never hit April. Maybe the shock of that stops him struggling so hard. He only wakes up shaking thereafter.
The night after that, she comes in a little too late, so he gets she still feels her cheek stinging. She doesn't tell him so, though. She sits down on the edge of the mattress, her feet looking strangely naked when the rest of her is swathed in flannel, and takes his hand. Their thumbs rest on top, lying alongside each other, different shades, different sizes, the whole damn thing more like a handshake than a handclasp.
"It's not fine," she admits, tucking up those bare feet beneath her.
"No," he agrees. "But it will be."
And she goes back to knocking, waiting, retreating.
And he goes back to not looking at the tender spot on her cheekbone, at the pretty angle of it.
They look straight ahead.
They don't look at each other (not in the way that matters, anyhow).
Fin.