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She hears Meredith squeal, and sees Cristina and Alex link their arms and bounce together, and she smiles. She doesn't need anything else to guess that the emails they got, just like the own she just read, started by "The American Board of Surgery is pleased to inform you that you've successfully passed the General Surgery Qualifying Exam." She wasn't prepared for how elated she currently feels, a warm feeling of satisfaction and relief taking over her whole body, from head to toe. Every sacrifice, every late night spent studying, every teasing remark thrown her way was worth it. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can spoil this feeling.
And then she sees that Jackson, who has his back turned away from her, is completely still. Not talking, not moving, and her first reaction is "no."
If she, April, insecure, rambling, not-top-of-the-class April, can pass her boards all while losing her virginity and having a religious meltdown in front of her examiners, then it's obvious that Jackson has this in the bag and is just messing with her.
But he turns and slowly raises his gaze from his phone to her face. He looks at her, and she knows.
The part where nothing could spoil her happiness? She was terribly wrong, and the warm feeling turns into a cold shower. She takes a step towards him, but Jackson shakes his head and walks away. She hears more than she sees Alex, Meredith and Cristina realizing something's not right, feels their gaze on her, waiting for an explanation, but she can't explain what she can't process. Not yet.
At first, he doesn't talk. When she comes back to the apartment they share with Alex, she finds him sitting on the couch in front of a game, a beer in his hand. He doesn't say a word. Not when she calls his name, not when she asks him if he's okay, not when she joins him on the couch and looks at him. He flinches when she puts her hand on his shoulder, and shakes his head again.
"Jackson, I'm sorry, I know it's hard, but–"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"It's not, it doesn't mean anything, you can retake them next year, and I–"
"April. I don't want to talk about it."
"But I just–"
"April." His gaze is imploring, pleading, so she shuts up and looks towards the TV screen.
And she gets it, kind of. Jackson will listen to her ramblings, he will calm her when she panics, he will go out of his way to make her feel safe, but when it comes to him? The man is a feelings-burying machine. Jackson doesn't do emotions on a good day. So on a bad one? Well, she already knows what happens. The nightmares, and the PTSD, and the pretending everything's fine. The "I don't need to see a shrink", "talking about it won't help, it's done", "let me take care of you so I can ignore my own pain", and these are the moments she kind of hates the Avery family, because she's pretty sure none of them are big about talking about how they feel.
So she keeps her mouth shut, grabs a beer, and stays with him until the game is over.
His next step is avoidance.
The next morning, he's gone before April or Alex wakes up, and even though she kind of gets it, she's strangely hurt by it. At the hospital, he takes advantage of the fact that it's a slow day to lock himself in the skills lab, pretending not to hear her when she knocks on the door. Mark comes by to try to talk him into opening the door, but the Sloan charm is no match against the Avery stubbornness. Mark is stern, Mark is comprehensive, Mark is cajoling, but the door stays closed, and the attending shakes his head before going back to his patients.
It's not a special treatment he reserves for her or Mark, though. Catherine Avery is the next victim, and in a sense, April gets it. Catherine can be a lot to deal with, and Jackson's worse fear was to disappoint her. However, him not answering her calls means Catherine has to find a new target, and the next time April looks at her phone, she sees a dozen missed calls from Boston, a few texts and one voicemail that she's not sure she wants to listen to. When her phone rings again, she gathers whatever courage she has left and answers. Catherine doesn't waste time greeting her and goes straight to the point.
"How is he?"
"I, I don't know, he's not talking much–"
"Can I talk to him?"
"He's in the lab, I don't–"
Catherine cuts her off and launches into a monologue about unfairness, legacy, hardships and life lessons, "and don't worry, I already gave Richard a piece of my mind about this," and April's not sure what Richard Webber has anything to do with this, but it's not like Catherine needs her to answer. She can read between the lines though, and Catherine's sighs and pshaws don't hide too well the fact that she feels guilty. Well, join the club.
When she finally hangs up, after Catherine half-promises, half-threatens to come to Seattle if Jackson doesn't answer his phone soon, she goes back to the lab and knocks again, to no avail.
The third stage of the ‘Jackson Avery failing his boards' response is getting drunk. They're at Meredith's house, at the party she's throwing to celebrate them passing their boards, and at first she doesn't get why he’s here. Watching people celebrate the exam you didn't pass cannot be good for you. But she sees him knock back three shots of tequila in a row with Cristina and she figures he deserves to let loose, to forget his problems for one night.
She manages to keep an eye on him from afar, ready to intervene before he suffers from alcohol poisoning, but she doesn't say anything until a few hours later. Maybe it's her own alcohol intake that makes her bolder, but she corners him in the kitchen and says she won't leave until he talks to her.
Jackson's "There's nothing to say, April" is met with an eye roll. She waits, and soon that statement is followed by the most un-Jackson-like rambling she's ever heard. She didn’t even know he could talk that much.
"And my grandfather, my grandfather is going to kill me. No, scratch that, he's going to disinherit me. Burn me off the family tree tapestry, like they did with that guy in that Harry Potter movie you made me watch, right? Leave a dark hole where my name should be on that tree, pretend I never existed and move on. I’ll be just like my dad. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and all that. Then he's going to kill me for soiling the good Avery name. 'Averys don't fail'. Yeah right."
For someone who has rejected his family legacy his whole life, he looks so broken she can’t help but takes a step towards him. She doesn’t know how to act with him anymore, doesn’t know if she can touch him, if he would welcome it, but she tries anyways and put her hand on his arm.
"I was already the quack of the family, the dumb one, going into plastics, but now? He'll probably say that I should just stop wasting everyone's time and just become a model or something. 'Something where you won't need to use what little brain you have, son.'"
He laughs, a sour laugh she never wants to hear from him ever again, a laugh that breaks her heart, takes a sip of his beer and keeps going.
"And my mom?" He closes his eyes and shakes his head, not even wanting to entertain the idea, but doing so anyway. "She's going to come yelling in the middle of the hospital, then do the whole 'I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed' shtick, and the worse thing is, she'd be right! I'm an embarrassment."
She opens her mouth to tell him that of course he's not an embarrassment, that he should never be defined by his grades or the result of an exam or his family name, but he moves away, making a beeline towards the drinks table in the living room, and she loses sight of him for the next hours. When she comes back to the apartment, he's already asleep in his room, and she doesn't have the heart to wake him up.
She feels guilty. She's April Kepner, so of course she feels guilty, but this guilt has a special flavor. While rationally, she knows that Jackson failing is not entirely her fault, she can't help but think that she has contributed to it, and it's not a great feeling to have. She's not vain enough to think that their romps were enough to throw him off balance (he was of course amazing, but she was losing her virginity, and he's the guy who lost his with two girls at once when he was a freaking teenager, so their trysts were probably nothing he’s never seen), but she knows she could have handled the whole "you made me break my promise to Jesus" a little bit better. And maybe, just maybe, she shouldn't have started the whole dirty talk in a bathroom just when he was telling her about his mom being in the exam room next to his. Maybe she should have spent more time making him feel better and less time... well, making herself feel good.
But the thing is, she can't even apologize, because it's not going to help Jackson. If she goes to him and says she's sorry, he's going to be all "you have nothing to be sorry for", "it's all my fault", because he's a good friend that way, and it is annoying. She can't make him feel guilty because she feels guilty. He's the one freaking out, he has earned the right. Because if she were the one failing her boards? She doesn't know how she'd react, but it would probably not be anything good. So she decides to take a page out of his book and to bottle everything up.
Or at least she tries.
She goes home that night to find him on the couch, again, alone. Alex has volunteered to cover the night shift, which should have been Jackson's, and April speaks enough Alex to know it's his way to look out for his roommate without ever uttering the word “sorry”.
"You're okay?"
He’s not, but she feels like she doesn't know how to talk to him anymore.
He shrugs, not looking at her, and she can't really blame him. She's heard from Sloan today that Emory, Penn and Tulane have rescinded his offers, because they want a board-certified plastics surgeon. UCLA is apparently still interested, but she remembers Jackson's reaction after that interview, and knows that offer has mostly to do with his last name. They should talk about this though, about his options. She's pretty sure he won't want to go back to Boston, but maybe there's a way he could stay in Seattle.
"I'm sorry, that was a stupid question."
He shakes his head, still not looking at her, and she's sworn she wouldn't do this, but he just feels so helpless and she has to do something.
"I shouldn't have jumped you the night before. I should have let you focus on the boards and helped you out, instead of assaulting you and then guilting you. You didn't deserve that, and I'm sorry."
That manages to catch his attention. He finally looks at her, and she's startled by the emotions swirling into his eyes.
"You have nothing to be sorry for."
"Yes, I have. I jumped you! And, and instead of listening to you, I kicked you out, and then I seduced you," she whispers the last two words, because April Kepner doesn't usually seduce men, "in a public bathroom!"
"April, stop. You didn't seduce me. You didn’t make me do anything I didn–"
"So I would get it if you'd hate me, I would, because I'm not a good friend, I'm not even a good person, so you have every right to be mad at me!"
"I'm not mad at you."
"Well, you should! It would be completely normal, and I would understand, I mean it is in part my fau–"
"April, shut up."
"And I know that sex doesn't have the same meaning for you that it has for me, but I still shouldn't have distracted y–"
She finally shuts up, because his lips are on hers, hot, fervent, demanding. He kisses her like he needs it to breathe, and she answers with the same fervor. She needs him to be okay, and he's not, so she kisses him like she could make the whole situation better.
The first time they kissed, it was soft, new, gentle. The next day, it was passionate, feverish, rushed. But this kiss? This kiss is desperate. It's full of I need you, of uncertainty, of longing. It soothes and hurts at the same time, it burns and swallows them both whole. She tilts her head when his mouth descends on her neck, and she moans softly when he sucks on her skin, when he slips his hand under her shirt, when he holds her neck to bring her even closer, as if he were afraid she’d leave.
It's when they start removing their clothes that her brain finally intervenes. Maybe we shouldn't do this, maybe we should tak about this, but he looks at her again, the way he did in that hotel room in San Francisco, and the next thing she knows, she's helping him remove his sweatpants and his boxer. I'm not taking advantage of him, he needs this, she tries to tell her guilty conscience, and then gets lost in him, his hands roaming her body, already knowing their way home.
She kind of needs this too.
The hospital is buzzing with anticipation, the residents making their final decisions for their fellowships. Everyone tries to guess who's going where, Meredith having already changed her mind twice between Boston and Seattle, and it's not rare for a "Good morning" greeting from an attending to be replaced by "So?".
So? April has no idea.
During a lull in the ER, her feet take her to the conference room, where Hunt has summarized the residents’ offers and decisions. The drawing board has never looked more menacing, and coming closer, she can see her name and a few lines coming out of it. UVA. Mount Sinai. Case Western. Seattle.
The name ‘Avery’, though, has a big question mark next to it.
Case Western had been her first choice, back when life was so much simpler and her focus was on studying and interviewing well. Back when Jackson was her best friend and she didn’t know the feeling on his lips on her, back when she was the girl who waited and never went first. But the jerk she punched at the boards had insinuated that maybe her skills weren't the only things she would be hired for, and now that the seed was planted, she couldn't ignore it. She had spent way too much time worrying about her surgical skills, about what people would think of her, and she's tired to do so, so just like that, Case Western is out of the running.
She knows there's no right or wrong answer. All three of her remaining offers are from renowned hospitals, with solid trauma departments, and she knows she’ll learn no matter where she goes. She could stay in Seattle. She could spread her wings and go to the other side of the country. She could go live the New York life, or try out something new in Virginia. She could meet new people, she could stay with old friends.
She can do anything she wants, and it's absolutely terrifying.
She feels him come into the room more than she hears him, and doesn't move when he comes to stand right next to her. He doesn't speak, looking at the white board that displays all these possibilities. She takes his hand and squeezes it lightly, her thumb drawing circles on his palm, because she figures being lost feels a little bit less scary when you're not the only one.