A/N Will probably be written through the Winter Hiatus :D I will see how it goes!
I do not own Greys Anatomy or any recognizable characters or scenes, they all belong to ABC! I take no credit whatsoever
They say life throws your curveballs, they say life throws you all sorts of things you aren't prepared for. They also say how you deal with these things is what defines you but never do they say what type of person you become once you get out. That bit is up to you. Happiness is like a glass that is on the edge of a table, a little push can break it into a million tiny shards. And the sad thing is, you don't get to choose when your glass is going to break, but when it does? Dear God, I hope you're prepared.
"What is this about?" Jackson asked staring Stephanie down. Stephanie clutched the tablet closer to her chest, the scans buried in her lab coat. How could she have been so stupid?
This morning she had done an ultrasound for her ex boyfriends' wife and now the said ex-boyfriend had overheard her announce his unborn son's death sentence in the worst way he possibly could have.
"Um, Jackson I am really not the person you need-"
"Stephanie. Listen to me. Was that my child you were speaking about?" He asked calmly.
What scared her most was the fact was that he wasn't even mad. He was calm but his voice shook, he was a scared man. "Jackson, like I said I cant-"
He gripped her arms and spun her into the nearest on call room, he let her go to lock the door before rounding on her again. "Show me the ultrasound." He spoke commandingly but she could see the tears pooling in his eyes, she looked away.
She couldn't bear this. She handed the tablet over and watched his expression carefully, it went from fear to confusion. "The- the baby is breached so what that doesn't mean-" he broke off and looked up at her, realization dawning.
"That isn't the problem is it?" he whispered.
He handed back the tablet and sat on the bed, he held his head in his hands. Never in her life had she seen him so frail and so, so vulnerable. Her hands shook around the cool metal as she locked the screen. April Kepner and Jackson Avery were not her favourite people at Grey Sloan but she would never wish this on anyone, not even if he left her at a wedding for the bride. April Kepner was one of the happiest people at this hospital and she sure as hell did not need the rug pulled out from under her feet.
"Stephanie, the baby is gonna die isn't it?" he asked, his voice sounded thick with unshed tears. She stared back at him, not saying a word. She couldn't. After what he heard she couldn't be the one to confirm his worst fears, she couldn't be the one to tell him that the baby his wife was carrying would not grow up, the baby wouldn't have its sweet sixteen or graduate college, hell it might not even see its first birthday.
Her silence was answer enough for him,
"What is it?" As a surgeon, she knew he needed to know, to run the prognosis in his head even if it was futile, even if one of the best foetal surgeons had already signed off on this, he needed to.
"OI. Type 2 or 3" she whispered.
Jackson's eyes widened and Stephanie was near tears. This was the worst case scenario and God dammit that's not what they were meant to get, they were meant to get a type where there was hope, where there was a chance. Sure, they had messed up a lot, but they were GOOD people.
He looked down at his hands and shook his head, "My baby" he whispered, "My baby is going to die"
People had died around him before. He had experienced loss. As a child, he had lost his father, as a resident he had lost his best friend. He had stood at the side of a casket and done the typical thing everyone at a funeral did; looked for who was most affected by the death and looked at how they handled it. Never did he think the most affected person would be him.
He had asked Edwards to leave him alone, he needed to think. He needed to think how he was going to tell April. The thought alone made him nauseated. This was going to break her. She had been so worried about the baby to the point where he thought that she was being slightly neurotic and he had been the one to constantly assure her that it would be fine, their baby would be fine. Except now their baby wasn't going to be fine.
He didn't know how she would take it except that she would be beyond heartbroken. He remembered when Reed died and April tripped over her dead body, he remembered the look in her eyes when she had seen him for the first time after the shooting. Losing a child was ten times worse than losing your best friend. He didn't want to imagine what this would do to their relationship, he didn't want to consider the directions it would take but he especially didn't want April to blame herself.
Being a surgeon, he had seen so many parents lose children and spiral due to guilt and heartbreak. They would always repeat the same things "There must have been something I could have done" or "This is all my fault" . From a medical perspective, he knew that there was nothing a human could do to prevent science. Science defied all odds and this was how Jackson was raised. He, unlike April, was not raised in a church but rather amongst a family of cardiothoracic surgeons who discussed heart procedures around the Christmas Dinner table. But right now as he sat with his head in his hands, he found himself praying to a God he didn't believe in, that somehow, his baby would be alright, although he knew that it wouldn't.
It was late by the time Jackson found the courage to clean himself up and go home, he didn't know where April was but he assumed that she was running around the ER. She liked to take advantage of his late days when she could work extra hours.
Jackson took the stairs one at a time when he saw her bright red head updating a chart at the Nurse's Station. She laughed at something one of the Nurse's said as she handed back the tablet. Jackson frowned. He didn't want to be the one to have to break that, he didn't want to be the one to take the smile off her face because he had done it so many times before, they had finally gotten to a good place, the two of them. They had finally gotten through all the drama of unrequited love and sex in bathrooms and breaking promises to Jesus. But now they were just going to regress.
Jackson turned around before April caught sight of him and bounded up the stairs and into a broom closet. He couldn't tell her. He reached for his phone with shaking hands and scrolled through the contacts. He pressed the green call button. She answered on the first ring. "Jackson! Baby, how are you?!" she exclaimed, Jackson's inhaled a few times, a few shaky breaths. His mother instantly knew something was off. "Jackson? Jackson honey what happened?" Jackson shook his head, "The baby Mom, the baby is going to die"
You can never be prepared for your glass breaking. Nor can you put it back together, once a glass breaks there is always a shard in the wrong place, a shard not sticking together properly. You can't do it yourself. When people break, the immediate thought is therapy, to sit in the plush chairs of a therapist's office and let them tell you how to glue the pieces of your glass back together. But to fix it you almost always need someone else, someone with a steadier hand, a better eye, someone who knows how to fix what broke. Coming out the other end the a better person than you were at the beginning is bullshit. You come out scarred, bruised and beaten, you just seem better because you went through hell. You don't get better, you adapt and you move on.