JACKSON
It's hard to say whether or not I get lucky.
The early morning meeting between myself, Dr. Webber, and Dr. Riggs is kept brief. The security cameras in the hallway validate exactly what April and myself had said when I had gone at him swinging. Granted, it also showed that just yelling at him probably would have been enough and I didn't necessarily need to speak with my fists as much as I had. But it's a slap on the wrist. Riggs has a shiner on his eye that wasn't going to disappear quite as easily as he probably wanted it to. Maybe I'm just a little bit too proud to see that there, but it wasn't like he didn't deserve it. If I was sure of anything, it was that. He had damn well earned that.
There is a verbal slap on the wrist about not letting my anger get the best of me, but I'm not worried about that in the future going forward. This was a one-time occurrence of range and protectiveness that circled around her. I was pretty sure of that much.
Very predictably, the word about what happened between Riggs, April, and myself traveled around the hospital completely by the time that we're all at work the next day. If I couldn't hear the whispers about everything that had gone down and of course, the natural way that gossip twisted things to sound more dramatic, then I could feel the stares from nurses and orderlies as I made my way through the hospital. It was hard to know whether they thought I or he was right – he had been here a lot longer than I had, he was an attending and I was just a resident. Riggs pretty much had all of the pull that he could have wanted with this kind of situation and I had none of it, just the truth. But for some people, that didn't always mean a whole lot. Stories were often better than reality to spread.
Hopefully, both of us would just be able to keep our head down and make it through the day. Once the bruising on his face had gone down some, it would be a lot easier to forget. I figured none of the three of us was going to forget about it any time soon, but I was already ready for it to die down from the hospital gossip and it had barely even begun. I had never been a fan of any kind of gossip, even if admittedly, I had never actually tried to stop it from happening.
Elevator doors open with a ding as it reached the burn unit floor, and I let out a breath of relief. Even if the nurses here might keep up with the gossip, they would at least be courteous enough to not do it when I was around. Sloan would just confront me directly about it, and well, there wasn't a lot of busyness on this floor aside the two of us coming and going. Fortunately, since Karev had lost interest in plastics, and well, Sloan hadn't been interested in teaching him in the first place… this was a nice place to get away from everyone else when I needed to.
"Glad to see you're not carrying around one of those shiners, Avery. Doesn't look good for plastics." Mark remarked with a chuckle, clapping me on the shoulder.
"Very funny," I replied with a roll of my eyes.
"Hey, I'm one-hundred percent serious." He said but there was still a clear hint of amusement in his eyes. "Gotta keep the faces around here nice and pretty. Although, I guess the ladies wouldn't mind hearing that you got it defending your girlfriend. Probably just make them fawn over you even more."
"April isn't my girlfriend." Now. Anymore? "She's just a friend." I clarified quickly.
Mark snorted in disbelief. "You sure don't act like she's just a friend," he pointed out. "You moved in with her the second that you broke up with Sydney and now you're going around, throwing punches at anyone who's touching her. That definitely sounds like something you'd do for a girlfriend, not just a friend. You can't deny that." I could and would, actually.
"It doesn't matter what it sounds like," I sighed out. "We're just friends."
"Why the push to suddenly live together and the punch then?" Mark asked.
"Because I needed somewhere else to live and I saw Dr. Riggs throwing himself at her when she very clearly didn't want it." I folded my arms in front of my chest. "Anyone should have done the exact same thing if they saw it."
"Well, I didn't take Riggs as being that kind of asshole – but I guess you're not wrong about that." He remarked. "You still treat her like a girlfriend, though."
"I don't." I countered.
That much was true as far as I was concerned, at least. I wasn't treating her like a girlfriend. If the two of us were together, I would have treated her like a goddamn queen because it was exactly what she deserved. Dates, farmer's markets, all of the kind of stuff that she liked – I would have made up for the ten years that we hadn't known each other and given enough memories to fill all of that time. But there's no sense in getting into that history, or lack of history, between us with everyone else. It wouldn't have refuted what he thought.
"You do." The insistence continued. "You realize everyone thinks you're together, right?"
"What?" I questioned.
"Yeah. I mean, you can't pull a stunt like that and have people think otherwise." Mark shrugged. "Everyone's talking about the two of you banging."
A sigh pushed out. "We're not." My hand came up and pinched the bridge of my nose.
"You say that now, but the way that the two of you are acting, definitely seems like it's going to end up there…" he commented, amused with a shake of his head. It's not like I would've hated that. No, the exact opposite was true. I wanted that. But it was frustrating to have it being talked about so casually, just another round of gossip when it wasn't the truth.
"Again, we're just friends and roommates." I clarified, clearing my throat. "Isn't there some work to do? Or do I need to go scour the E.R. for a case?" I questioned, shifting topics quickly.
"No, come on, there's plenty to do up here," Mark replied.
Relieved to no longer have to talk about that with him, I put on a clean gown and a pair of gloves and follow him into the room to get focused on working. There was enough to do and talk about that I don't have to worry completely about him harassing me over April.
Of course, the two of us did spend a lot of time together. Mark's warning – or advice? – doesn't stop that.
There was an ounce of truth to the suggestions that he had made about the two of us certainly seemed like we were together, whether I wanted to admit it out loud to Mark or anyone else. We did act like it and it had gone beyond just the two of us living together. We went to the grocery store together, the movies together – pretty much everything we did had the two of us attached at the hip again, just like when we were kids growing up together except this time there was no need for any kind of outside supervision. Falling back into old habits had happened too easily and without thinking. It doesn't occur to me that it was anything other than ordinary merely because the two of us had always been this attached at the hip from the beginning.
It doesn't really occur to me until the two of us are stretched out across the couch together with our living room decorated for the fall season, legs tangled together and a Charlie Brown Halloween movie playing on the television that it seemed like there was a lot of truth behind the rumors. I didn't know if April had heard all of them.
I don't have to doubt that for long.
The seven of us were gathered around one too small table outside, trying to enjoy the fact that it was sunny outside for once and there wasn't a sign of rain in the sky even if we had to bundle up in jackets. We barely all fit together and we were all elbow to elbow, April's thigh pressed right up against mine as she sat pressed against me. She was on the end of the bench and I wanted to make sure that she wasn't at a risk of falling off. Beneath the table and sight of where everyone could see, my arm was wrapped around my waist and resting on her hip, ensuring that she stayed right there.
"Jesus, could you two be any closer?" Reed remarked, eyeing the two of us.
"We're all this close," I pointed out with a furrowed brow, motioning around the table with my fork before shoving pasta into my mouth.
"Yeah, but we're not screwing." Karev snorted loudly. Meredith and Cristina both laughed.
"Neither are we." April's voice jumped up an octave.
"Neither are we," Cristina mocked her pitch and timbre, making a face.
I rolled my eyes, chewing and swallowing. "Some people are actually capable of sleeping in the same house and not with each other. Not sure the rest of you know about that." I chimed in.
"Well, maybe one of you would lighten up if that was the case," Meredith said.
"Be nice, guys." Izzie chimed in as the honorable and neutral voice of reason, falling into that role quite easily. It seemed like the more stressed that the rest of us got because of work, the more that she had to fall into that role and make sure the rest of us didn't tear out each other's hair.
"Jackson and I are just friends," April stated firmly, straightening her spine. "A boy and a girl can live together and just be friends. It's not impossible. It is super possible."
"Maybe if one of them is a nun," Karev mumbled with a roll of his eyes.
"Or a virgin," Reed smirked. There's a slight pause before she yelped in pain. "April! Jesus, don't kick me." My head turned toward her quickly in surprise.
"You're a virgin?" Meredith questioned with wide eyes. "Makes sense."
"What does that mean?" April replied quickly, her own hazel eyes almost comedically wide.
"Explains the stick up your ass." Cristina looked far too amused with the turn of events. "I don't know how Jackson hasn't popped that cherry of yours, because you desperately need it."
April's cheeks were almost as red as her hair and she was at a loss for words.
"This isn't funny," I spoke up, voice a little louder and trying to demand attention.
"Says the guy who's probably bitter he hasn't slept with her yet." Karev interrupted.
"Again, not funny," I said quickly.
"Jackson's right, guys, it's not," Izzie spoke up firmly. "You all get tired when people do nothing more than talk about who you've been sleeping around with, so why do we do it in our group? It's not fair to each other. Meredith, Cristina, you were both sick and tired of it when no one would stop talking about the two of us sleeping with attendings." She reminded them.
"At least we were sleeping with someone," Meredith mumbled under her breath.
Before the conversation can progress any further or get heated, the sound of pagers going off stopped all of us as we paused to check who's was actually going off. Mine, April, and Cristina's. I was glad that at least the two of us were getting out of there.
It was a partial building collapse that demanded all of our attention. Cristina was in a surgery separate from April and mine, and I was relieved for that much. Hunt seemed to have taken a liking to April – or at least some kind of trust had been established between the two of them because he was comfortable enough to let her take the lead of the surgery without an attending in the room. It was just us and some of the scrub nurses taking care of the patient's injuries. That meant the two of us would actually be able to talk freely.
Neither one of us brings it up initially. As we scrub in and get the patient on the table between us, we move pretty easily around one each other with what we have to work on. Even in a case like this, the two of us managed to be pretty in sync though hour specialties couldn't have been more different. Chaos was her specialty. Making perfection was mine.
"Do they really all… think that?" April asked so quietly that I nearly didn't hear her.
"What?" I questioned.
"I mean, I don't know… do you think they hate me?" She glanced up at me briefly.
"No, it's not that," I shook my head quickly, making eye contact with her briefly before focusing on the patient again. "They don't hate you. They just don't like change, and… none of them want to be the weakest link. They think it's you because they haven't seen you in the O.R. like I have," I offered up. "I don't think any of them, except for maybe Izzie, are used to being around genuinely good people. They're all jaded."
"Yeah," she breathed out in quiet agreement at the end of my statement. "Jaded is a good word to describe it." She murmured, shaking her head. "I don't know. It's hard to wrap my head around, I guess. Everything feels so awkward now and I thought Reed was my friend."
"She still is, I think," I offered up optimistically. "She just wants to fit in, that's all. She doesn't have a best friend who's from this hospital." I suggested.
"I'm lucky to have you." The crinkle around her eyes made it clear she smiled beneath her mask.
"I'm the lucky one." I smiled back at her.
The two of us focus on the patient on the table after that and she seemed a little lighter now, some of the tension that was previously in her shoulder having sunk away. It takes a couple of hours hunched over the table but the patient managed not to code again and gets transferred to the ICU for a few days of stay there while he recovered from the surgery.
Rounds have to be done on all of our patients again before we could go home for the day. The burn unit is quiet which only meant that no one was being worked on – there were some things that we merely couldn't do anything for between the combination of human anatomy and what medical technology we didn't yet have. It was a painful wing of the hospital to have to stay in. I make sure that everyone is straightened up and taken care of for the night before heading back to the post-op rooms to check on a few other patients that I had there. I pass by Karev and Cristina, resisting making a comment to them about earlier. They manage to do the same. That was probably a good thing. Riggs' black eye was barely gone and I didn't need to get into any more trouble.
Granted, not getting into more trouble shouldn't have been my top priority. I knew that. It still was, though. Avoiding Dr. Riggs like the plague did help that quite a bit. It was probably better for both of us.
Given that my interest in cardio had died rather quickly upon actually starting my surgical residency and getting a hand in things beyond the legacy of my last name, it's not so bad. it's only running through the E.R. and the post-op rooms that I have to worry about him, but usually, Cristina dealt with things on the latter. April didn't blame her, so I had talked myself out of blaming her, too.
Most of the time, at least. It's harder when she was cruel to April.
"Oh, god–" A female voice swore.
A face hit my chest as I rounded a corner, tearing my gaze away from my phone screen before I realized that it was Stevens running face first into me.
"Shit," I swore under my breath. "Sorry, Izzie." I apologized.
"No worries, I wasn't paying attention either," the blonde brushed off my apology quickly with a wave of her hand. "I take it yours and April's surgery went well?" She questioned with a raise of her brows.
"Yeah," I nodded my head and motioned to the room that the patient was currently still sedated in. "He'll need a couple more days to recover here but he should be fine overall," I answered. "He got pretty lucky. If that beam had fallen a little bit higher, it would have completely crushed his sternum and killed him on the spot."
"That's good," Izzie nodded. "Couldn't have had better timing, too, with the way that lunch was going." A slight chuckle slipped past her lips conversationally but I knew that she didn't find it funny either.
Sighing, I nodded my head in agreement and ran my hand over my face and the back of my head. "Yeah. Seems like they really like going after April like that." That was putting it mildly. I did my best to defend her and she was getting little more vocal about standing up for herself, too, but it never stopped them from trying in the first place.
"You really care about her, don't you?" Izzie asked.
"Yeah, I do," I answered honestly. She was probably the only other person that I could really be open with, without the worry of some kind of backlash. "We've known each other since we were in diapers, pretty much. She was my best friend growing up and I didn't get to be that to her for years. She hasn't told me a lot about it, but it seems like she kind of had a rough time during those years and… I just want to make up for it and make sure that she doesn't have to deal with any of that kind of stuff again." I explained, giving a slight shrug of my shoulders and tucking my hands into the pockets of my lab coat.
She placed her hand on my arm and rubbed it gently. "I can tell," she admitted. "And I think the others can, too. That's why they all think that the two of you are together. Honestly, I kind of suspected that you might have been and you just didn't want to tell anyone about it. I wouldn't blame you if you were – especially after all of the nasty stuff that happened with Dr. Riggs."
"Yeah," I breathed out. I hadn't even thought about what might happen id her and I went public in relation to Dr. Riggs. The breakup was clean now, even if it hadn't been amicable on his end. Certainly not in the way that Sydney and mine had been. "It'd just be nice if they wouldn't harass her about it."
"They'll get bored of it soon," she offered up with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Fingers crossed." I nodded in agreement. "And thank you. For sticking up for both of us and being a good friend to her. I know that she appreciates that." I smiled down at her.
"I don't mind," Izzie said. "April's not. I mean, don't get me wrong, Mer and Cristina are still my friends. We've all been through too much together for them not to be my friends and they were there for me through the stuff with Denny. But April's nice. She's different from the two of them and a lot more like me. And I like that."
"You guys are quite a bit alike," I agreed with a chuckle. "It's definitely a good thing. We could use more nice people."
"Well, we do what we can." She chuckled in response. "I've got to go check on a few more patients. Have a good night, Avery."
"Alright, you too," I replied with a social nod of my head.
I really was grateful that April had managed to find a friend in Izzie because of how alike the two of them were. Truthfully, before the hospitals had merged and she had ended up here, I hadn't thought a lot about the blonde. Because she was nice and a little more on the passive end, she hadn't stuck out quite as much next to Meredith and Cristina. Sure, I'd always known that she was nice and good at what she did, even if the thing with Denny and the LVAD wire had been nothing short of absolutely insane.
But I guess that we had all done a few crazy things.
Once I was done checking up on all of my patients for the night, I headed downstairs to the lobby. April and I had driven separately to work this morning because she had an extra early morning for rounds for some reason – I was pretty sure that she had told me this morning, but I had still been half asleep and hadn't actually picked up on much of what she was saying other than coffee was in the pot already.
Dark had already fallen on the drive home but the lights of the apartment are still on when I pull into the parking lot, easy to see from the street. It wasn't actually that late, it was just the fact that we hadn't hit the time change yet and now things were always dark when we finished work.
Pulling into my parking spot and shifting the gear of the car from drive into park, I sit there for a moment and stare up at the window. I can't see her or a shadow of her silhouette there, which just meant that she wasn't in the kitchen at the moment. There wasn't a lot that you could actually see in, which was something that I knew she liked. But I sat there and waited for some hint of life regardless of it being unlikely. I couldn't get my mind off of all of the harassing that I'd dealt with – not just today from the rest of the surgical residents, but even a couple of weeks ago from Mark. That hadn't been the only comment that he had made about April and I theoretically being together. He had made plenty of comments to me which were definitely in the realm of harassment, which was just kind of his signature. As long as April didn't overhear them, I didn't let any of it bother me.
But all of them, they kind of had a point.
April and I already lived together and did pretty much everything together even though our time at work was split between the different specialties that we had chosen. Physically, we were very comfortable. We didn't hold hands like we had when we were younger, but there were nights where she fell asleep on the couch with her head on my lap and used me as a pillow. I had carried her to bed. And there had been nights where I had wanted nothing more than to get in it with her. Fuck, I was still completely and utterly in love with her.
Grabbing my bag from the passenger seat, I let out a sigh as I got out of the car and locked it, heading upstairs to join her. It's not like it was a surprise that I was in love with her. The only real question was if I had ever actually stopped, or if I had just buried it so deep inside that I had managed to convince myself I had.
"Hey," I called out as I walked in, shutting and locking the door behind me.
"Hey," her voice carried easily across the apartment. "You're later than I thought you'd be."
"Sorry," I apologized with a shrug. "Didn't realize the time had gotten away from me."
Dropping my keys on the table in the foyer and setting my bag on the floor, I took a deep breath. The candles must have been lit already given the smell of pumpkin already wafting through the hospital. Fall had been her favorite season when we were young and Halloween had always been my favorite holiday – hers was Christmas, I assumed that much hadn't changed.
"Smells nice," I commented as I shrugged off my jacket and hung it up before joining her in the living room. Law and Order: SVU was playing, a rerun from one of its many seasons more than likely. She always had some kind of background noise going, whether it was music or some television show that she had seen a hundred times. Like this one.
"Thanks." Her hands were wrapped around a mug of something dark. "It's my favorite Yankee Candle."
Joining her on the couch, I lifted up her feet before setting them back down on my lap and leaning against the arm of the chair. I propped my head up with my arm and elbow so that I could turn to old at her, mostly uninterested in whatever monologue was being delivered on the screen. As much as I don't mind reruns, most of the episodes were the same to me – someone got hurt, Benson was a badass, and the other characters blurred together more or less.
"So, today was kind of a day, huh?" I prompted her.
"Yeah," April agreed without hesitation. "I… I don't even know what to say to them sometimes, to be honest," she murmured. "They like to push my buttons and it seems like no matter what I do to try and be friends with them or to try and make them like me, they just keep doing it." Her head shook with frustration.
"Maybe you shouldn't try so hard," I shrugged one shoulder. "They're going to keep doing what they're doing no matter what you do. Till they get bored of it, at least. Just… be true to who you are and they'll come round eventually, you know? I did."
"Well, you're actually one of the good ones," she poked my stomach with her foot gently. "You're different."
I chuckled. "I'm not, really," I disagreed. "I've just known you for a lot longer. That's all."
"No, you're one of the good ones." I set my hand on her foot as she spoke. "You really are. I don't know what I would do here without you, to be honest. A merger is hard enough on its own and so many people got fired and I know that you weren't exactly thrilled to see me at first but I'm really happy with how things have played out, Jackson. Having you back in my life like this again is wonderful." A smile rested on April's lips as she looked at me, beaming at me as if I was the most magical thing in the world. I wasn't. She was.
"Pretty sure that's half of the reason that they tease you, though," I reminded her gently. "Because they think that the two of us are sneaking around behind closed doors."
If only that was what we were actually doing.
"That's…" she started to speak and shook her head, waving her hand as if to dismiss the topic. "I don't know. It seems like sex and relationships are the only things that they think about when we have a lot of other stuff that we should all be worried about given that we're trying to find and define our careers right now, you know? I don't know how that's the only thing that they manage to focus on. Even when I was with Nathan, I wasn't like that."
"You've always been smarter than everyone else." I reminded her with a pointed look, grabbing both of her feet between my hands and giving them a gentle little squeeze. "And wiser, too."
"That's so not true," she said with a laugh.
"Yes, it is." I countered with a huff of my own laughter. "You're the smartest person that I know."
Her eyes rolled at me and I watched with amusement, unable to hide my own smile on my features as I did so. April had never been good at receiving compliments even though I had been trying to get that little bit of her to change as long as I knew her. She was stubborn, most of the time in the best of ways, but this was one exception. I wished that she would give herself more credit.
"Well, I already know what you think about me." She stated declaratively. If only she really knew the truth. "I just wish there was a way to try and shake up what they think about me. Get them out of all of their preconceived notions."
"Does it bother you?" I questioned, brow furrowing. "That they think we're together?"
"No, that doesn't," she clarified. "Not at all."
"What if we were?" I blurt it out before I could talk myself out of it or before she could change the topic.
Doing it quickly and impulsively was the only way that I would be able to get the question out of me in the first place. It would be easy to ignore it for even longer and not put myself out in the open like this. Being emotionally vulnerable was something that I had learned to do with her and then unlearned in her absence, buried myself in ignoring how I really felt and keeping my chin up on the day-to-day. She would be capable of seeing through it at some point or another, I knew that. It was just a matter of whether she would pick up on it first, or whether I would cave first. Tonight, it was the latter. That was a rarity. I had to follow through on this. There could be no going back now.
"What?" April questioned, brows furrowed as she looked back at me.
"What if we were together? Secretly or not – just, together, you and me?" I asked.
"Wha…" she stared at me with wide eyes as she tried to comprehend what I had said, even though I had made it as clear as I could. At least, as clear as I could without blurting out every little feeling that I had for her. "What exactly are you asking me, Jackson?" She was tenser with her confusion, no longer laying back but instead sitting forward, leaning toward me.
I took a deep breath. It was too late to try and bury down the rush of feelings that she brought upon me. I knew in my heart that I wanted her, that she was my other half on some kind of spiritual level – even that stuff was more her area than mine.
"You're my best friend, April. My favorite person." I expressed earnestly. "I loved you then, more than anything else in the world, more than I think I even knew. And now with all of these people talking about us being together, secretly or not, and throwing the possibility out there… I can't stop thinking about it, April. I just can't." There was no point in beating around the bush about it anymore. I had to get it all out in the open. "I love you. I still do. I don't think that I ever really stopped, even if I convinced myself that I did. And I want you more than anything else. I want you to be mine. My girlfriend. There's nothing else in the world that I want."
My heart pounded in my chest as every word spilled honestly from my lips and for a moment, I felt like her – rambling uncontrollably and spilling out things that I wasn't sure I would have otherwise been able to get out of my head. Exposed. Vulnerable. Taking a deep breath, I seek up to find her gaze and hope that I wasn't imagining everything between us.
Silence and wide, hazel eyes stared back at me.