Hi there! I'm new to the fandom, but not to the fanfiction world. Though it's been a while since I've written something, but you can blame my latest addiction to Japril for getting me back on the saddle!
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Catherine Avery is a force to be reckoned with.
Jackson learns this from a very young age, fascinated as he follows her in the corridors of the Brigham, watching her scold interns and direct surgeons with complete confidence. People usually say "yes" to Catherine, and those who don't never seem to live to tell the tale. When his mom speaks, people listen: it's the natural order of things.
When his classmates tell him stories about their moms baking them cakes or organizing scavenger hunts in the park, he responds with stories of Catherine's groundbreaking surgeries and how his mom was the first Chief resident at her hospital that was both black and a woman. The other kids don't seem too impressed, but the one thing he always had was respect for his mother's career and her ability to juggle everything. Even though he sees more nannies that he could count and Catherine isn't always present for his parents-teacher conference, she never makes him feel unloved or abandoned, or like she doesn't care about him. She's always been very upfront with him about work and the fact that it was important and it took much of her time, and he never felt like he was second place. Later on, he even finds a new appreciation for her ability to manage everything, from his rebellious self to her duties as a surgeon while building and sitting on the board of a massive foundation and mentoring young students. Not that he would ever tell her to her face, but it's impressive, and he's grateful.
But though he knows, on some level – because he's sure Catherine has so many stories she never shared, many difficult choices she had to make but never complained about –, the sacrifices she made for him, and that she did a pretty good job as doing both her job and the one of his deadbeat dad, that she was always there, it doesn't prevent him from sighing and rolling his eyes every time she visits him or orders him to call her. They've been a team, ever since Robert Avery decided to pack his bags and walk away, and yet their relationship most of the time is more like water and oil, dancing around each other but quite never melting and forming a complete unit.
He could blame the fact that his mother is one of the most stubborn people he's ever met, but if he wants to be real, his own pride and stubborness doesn't help the matter.
Their fights are usually loud, screaming matches, because no one else can push his buttons like his mother, and it seems like she has a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing to him at the wrong time. He doesn't know if she's doing it on purpose or if it's accidental, doesn't particularly wants to know, but it's very effective at making him clam up and stop sharing with his mom.
It's funny how, for all her talks about being a Fox and only marrying in the Avery family, she's the one insisting on his legacy. From his point of view, his legacy went away with his dad when he was four years old, and nothing his grandfather could say about being an Avery ever made him want to change his mind.
For what he'd seen anyway, being an Avery wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Even funnier is the fact that he's expected to fulfill the larger-than-life Avery legacy, but that no one, not his mom, certainly not his grandfather, fully believes he has what it takes to become a doctor. The first time he tells them he wants to go to medical school after he graduates, he's 14, and he can still hear the laughter around the dinner table, the sneer on Harper Avery's face, and the way they dismiss his ambition. Pick something easier. You already don't like homework, how would you cope in med school? What patient would take you seriously, with such a pretty face? His mom later tries to explain that it's not that she doesn't believe in him, but that she thinks he would be more suited to follow another path. It doesn't sting any less that his own mother doesn't think he could do anything he sets his mind to. So he proves her wrong.
After boarding school, leaving Boston to go away to college is easy. He flies home twice a year, for Christmas and summer break, and finds out that even then they manage to fight. About him not telling her he planned on taking the MCAT, about his choice of med school, about how he doesn't call more often, about his reluctance to sit on the board of the foundation. He thought distance might make the heart grow fonder. Instead, it makes the fights grow much more dramatic. Which is why he doesn't get why, a few years later, his mom is so torn up about him moving to Seattle to start his internship and residency at Mercy West. The fact that he has a spot reserved for him at Mass Gen, courtesy of his grandfather, is not new, but he had always been honest with his family about wanting to do this his own way and not relying on the family name. It seems that it fell on deaf ears, because his mom acts extremely offended he would decide to move across the country and doesn't talk to him for a week.
It is not the punishment she thinks it is.
She then change tactics every few days. She menaces, she cajoles, she pleads, she scolds, she promises, and for a moment he even thinks she's just one second away from taking away his phone and sending him up to his room.
When it's time for him to leave, she concedes defeat (although he reckons she probably has something up her sleeve, but he figures putting 3000 miles between her and him will keep him safe for a while), tells him he still has a spot in Boston if he changes his mind (he knows he won't) and promises (threatens) to come visit him in Seattle as often as she can. He rolls his eyes, kisses her cheek before getting into the taxi that is driving him to the airport. Once the vehicle starts moving away, he looks behind him and sees the lone figure standing in front of their house. He's too far away to see her expression, but he hopes that somewhere beside her furrowed brow and the exasperated expression she always seems to wear in his company, there's a small hint of pride.
April Kepner is the most infuriating woman he's ever met.
She's hot and cold, fire and ice, she can make him smile or rile him up in just a few seconds, and it seems that lately, she's determined to drive him completely crazy and make him lose his mind once and for all. That's the only explanation he can think of.
He's in a hospital bed, his shoulder is bandaged and doesn't hurt as much as before, but his heart is pounding for a completely unrelated reason. In the space of a few hours, he witnessed his best friend get engaged to her dorky paramedic boyfriend in a stupid flashmob, had treated more patients that he could count with little to no electricity and medical supplies, ran into a burning bus to save a little girl, dodged an explosion, took a slight beating from a very small but very furious readhead, and listened to a declaration of... love? Want? Despair? from said readhead.
If his day keeps getting any weirder, he's going to lose it.
So when he has to officiate a freaking wedding for a patient, he reaches his tipping point, and kind of lashes out. April looks at him and he sees her almost recoils, as if she doesn't know who he is anymore. He's not sure he does himself, to be honest. He's not sure what they are, what she wants. At the moment, he doesn't know anything.
He doesn't know when things all went to hell between them. That one is a lie, he knows exactly when, where, why, the memory of her biting her lip and looking up at him in a hallway in a hotel in San Francisco, or of her on a bench saying "not pregnant" still fresh in his mind. A switch had been flicked, and no matter what they did, they couldn't go back, and now he doesn't know how to act with his best friend. His best friend, turned one-night-stand (okay, and one-bathroom-stand), turned friends-with-benefits, turned woman-he-had-strong-feelings-about, turned possible-future-wife-and-mother-of-his-child-for-a-day, turned... Acquaintance? Casual friend? Woman-that-he-tries-very-hard-to-be-just-friends-with-but-friends-aren't-supposed-to-make-you-feel-guilty-and-warm-and-aroused-and-confused? Yep, that's the one.
I just want her to be happy.
That's what he keeps telling himself. Even though she looks at him (or at least used to) like he's the only man on the planet, and the thought of her looking that way at someone else, especially a boring paramedic, turns his stomach. But he's not sure he can fly too close to April Kepner without getting burned, and dragging her with him all the way down.
I just want her to be happy.
That's what he keeps telling himself, even though he hates himself for not giving her a reason, for yelling at her and sending her back to her fiance, for breaking both of their hearts.
He usually prides himself of being good at keeping his emotions in check. But April pushes all his buttons and drives him crazy. Even when they were just friends, he had felt the need to shield her from anything bad, from all the Gary Clarks and Dr Starks and Alex Karevs of the world. So without any prompting, he had officially appointed himself as April Kepner's personal protector, and made sure that anyone knew that. And if people didn't get the memo, he was more than happy to remind them, be it by a few choice of words or by more direct action (Alex still sometimes massages his nose when he sees him, and he likes it more than he should).
He's not used to feel so much at once, to inspect and name his feelings, to be vulnerable with someone. He's cool, he's calm, he's a freaking Avery. Averys don't wear their heart on their sleeves. It's like April makes him feel too much, and the truth is, he's scared. He's been burnt before, and he has to protect himself. After the year he's had, he's not ready for the whirlwind of feelings that is April Kepner, though a part of him (that sounds a lot like his mom does, which is infuriating) wishes he could just open up, be selfish, realize what he wants and go for it.
He doesn't know it yet, but he will, a few months later, in a barn in the middle of nowhere, ready to burn his life to the ground, and Mark Sloan would have been such a proud dad and taken credit for the whole thing. It's a huge gamble, the biggest of his life, and he's pretty sure this will obliterate every effort he's ever made to be known as a good doctor instead of Jackson Avery, heir and pretty boy, now turned wedding interrupter, but hell if she wasn't worth it. It's freeing, doing what he wants, what he needs, what nobody expects him to do.
He discovers that getting the girl, the one, is the most amazing feeling in the world.
He loves her, and she still infuriates him sometimes, when she credits her God as the reason she's a good doctor, a good person when that is clearly all her, when she's putting herself down and doesn't believe him when he says she's amazing, when he tells her she's beautiful and she blushes and says she's nothing special. Nothing special? She can make his heart beat so fast by just looking at him across an OR, she makes him forget about all the pressures that come with being an Avery and chairman of the board of a hospital, she soothes him when he doesn't even know he needs to be soothed, she takes care of him even when he's being a giant baby. She makes him put his keys on a hook, cook healthy meals, do laundry, just for a chance to see her smile, and it's crazy. He's a man who once told an ex-girlfriend that he didn't believe in soulmates, and now he'd be ready to go to war for her, and he never saw it coming. It's dizzying, it's terrifying, and yet it's the most natural feeling in the world.
People say that opposites attract, and really, despite their obvious differences – in upbringings, in religious beliefs, in dealing with their emotions –, they are not that different. They are both competitive, they both see their job as a calling and a way to help as many people as possible, they both know what the other is thinking without talking. They have the same values at heart. They don't necessarily see the world in the same way, in the same shades of grey, but they navigate it together, growing together along the way, adjusting their outlook and learning, always learning.
Harriet Kepner-Avery is the cutest baby anyone has ever seen.
Sure, he may be a little biased, but he also has eyes, and a knowledge of genetics. In all objectivity, a tiny human being that is half-Jackson Avery and half-April Kepner cannot be anything else but cute.
She's cute even when she wakes him up at 3 am. She's not even crying: when he picks her up from her crib, she babbles, offers him her best grin, the one that showcases her dimple (courtesy of her mom) and claps her hands, as if 3 am was a perfectly acceptable time to get up and not, you know, the middle of the night. His daughter has a pretty powerful smile, and isn't afraid to use it. Especially at 3 am.
Only someone as cute as his daughter would make him get up at night without complaining.
He helds her as she snuggles comfortably into his chest, and he starts walking around, bouncing her a little, in the hope that she'll quickly go back to sleep.
He knows the probability is very low when she looks up with eyes wide open and lets out a shriek, looking like sleep is the last thing on her mind. And his daughter may not be a year old yet, but when she wants something, she usually stops at nothing to get it. And it seems that tonight, she wants to stay awake with her old man.
He would try to change her mind, but with his daughter having inherited the Avery pride and persistence and the Kepner stubborness, he doesn't stand a chance and he knows it. So he grabs a few baby books from the nursery and goes to the living room, getting settled on the couch with the baby on his lap. He's not sure she understands the stories her parents read to her, but he knows she loves hearing their voices and turning the pages, and he can hear his mom tell him it's never too early to help her develop her genius.
He remembers the panic and the warm feeling that filled him when April told him she was pregnant, back when they were newlyweds that couldn't get enough of each other. In the following months, he felt like he had experienced every feeling there was: he'd been anxious, overjoyed, proud, hopeful, and then, when they learned about Samuel's condition and the sky fell on them, terrified, desperate, angry, grieving, empty. Nothing about this first experience of fatherhood is what he expected, what he could have foreseen.
His second shot at fatherhood is much different, and yet still very confusing.
The first time he sees his daughter, he's still trembling with fear, hoping April will be fine and wake up to hold her. He spends exactly 47 minutes cradling her in his arms, trying to make up for the fact that he wasn't there for her first moments on Earth as he had planned (but since when did anything in his life go as planned?) and that his first thought when the ambulance doors opened had been for April. 47 minutes spent marveling at the miracle that was Harriet and hoping that she would be as lucky as he once was to be raised by a strong woman who would love her unconditionally.
When Bailey comes out of the OR to tell him April is stable, is alive, his relief is so freeing that he feels like his heart is going to burst. He nuzzles his daughter's cheek with his nose, finally letting the happiness wash him over. He has a daughter. He's a father (again), and he'd gladly give his life without thinking for her. He's met her not even an hour ago, and she's already taken up so much space in his life, in his mind. He had experienced a version of this with Samuel, hadn't let himself feel it, because so much of that was drowned by grief, but he knows without a doubt that along with her brother, the little bundle in his arms that keeps trying to open her eyes is the single most important thing he's ever achieved.
He soon becomes a walking cliché. He's always happy to hold her, to feed her, to rock her to sleep. Hell, he's even happy to change her diapers, and if someone had told him that a few years ago, he would have called them crazy, but he genuinely enjoys each and every moment he spends with his daughter. Every coo, every expression, every night-time feeding. He now knows they're not granted, and makes sure to savour every second. He applauds every new achievement, the first time she holds her head, the first time she rolls, and he almost cries when she directs her first smile at him. Averys don't cry, his mom would say, but he's never been your typical Avery, and what can he say, fatherhood has made him sappy, and that definitely breaks the Avery mould.
He loves watching her personnality develop, as the newborn becomes an infant soon on her way to be a toddler. He can't wait to help her become a free-spirited, curious little girl, with her whole future in front of her and so many possibilities awaiting. He's too well aware of the crushing weight of family expectations, and there's no way he's going to inflict it upon his daughter. He promises she will never have to be afraid to come to him with anything, and that she'll know she can become anything she wants, no matter how hard her grandmother already tries to push her towards medicine. He knows April is on the same wavelength on this, she knows there's no way he's going to repeat the past here.
He didn't know how he could put once again his whole life in the hands of someone else, of another girl in his life, but Harriet arrived literally by storm and didn't ask him. He laid it all for her, and he's never regretted it.
She makes a sound, pointing at an illustration on the page he's reading, and looks up at him as if to ask him a question. He chuckles and repeats the word he was saying, and she turns back, seemingly satisfied with his answer. Her small fist grips his shirt as she leans back into him, just like her mother used to do when she was tired, and his heart skips a beat.
He won't say his little girl saved him, doesn't want to put such a responsibility on her, but she certainly helps him every day remember who he is, who he wants to be, and he's once again struck by how much she still had to see, how much she'll be one day. And he can't wait to be with her every step of the way.
That was fun to write :)
English is not my main language, so please forgive any grammatical mistake. Reviews are more than welcome!