After season 9 april and jackson get together (before the wedding and all that)
Maybe jackson broke up with stephanie after aprils confession and april and matthew broke up too and after that japril get together!
Thank you so much for the request! I’d been really wanting to explore a concept where April rejects Matthew’s proposal, and I combined that with this fic! Hope that you enjoy!
Everybody is staring at her.
Everybody is staring at her, and she is staring at Matthew, with a growing sense of unease in her stomach. She finds her eyes go up, for just a few seconds, to Jackson Avery’s face. April thinks he knows what she is thinking and what is about to happen, in front of all these people.
April doesn’t like to be the center of attention if she can help it. She doesn’t like being stared at, not after all the time she’d spent as ‘Ducky.’ This isn’t the way she ever pictured getting engaged to someone. She’d pictured just her and the person she loved, of being only looked at by one expectant gaze.
Not a hundred or so people.
She has been silent too long. People are starting to realize. April thinks she might vomit. What are they going to say about her now? For too long, she has dealt with commentary about her life choices, and she knows that her coworkers are going to have a field day with this.
But she doesn’t want to be married to him.
Not if he thinks that this is what she wants.
Not if she knows what she wants, and who she wants to be doing this.
It’s wrong. It’s so wrong. She shouldn’t have looked at Jackson, she shouldn’t have let this go on so long, she shouldn’t have gotten into this relationship in the first place. There are so many things that she has come to regret, but she can honestly say that this is the most evident moment she has ever had where she knows she has fucked up.
Some people, thank God, realize what is happening and step away, wanting to give her some semblance of privacy. April knows without looking that Jackson does not leave, but she cannot say that she is upset about that. It almost makes her feel more sure about what she has to do. She can’t marry Matthew when she is in love with Jackson.
“This is gonna be good,” she thinks she hears Karev say to Grey and Yang.
She is almost certain that she hears Cristina reply, “Fifty bucks says she gets back together with Avery by the end of the week.”
Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. She is not sure how she is not crying yet. It feels like everything inside of her has gone completely still.
Except it’s not, April is trembling so badly that she can barely stand. She thinks that she is going to fall on her face and make this even worse than it already is.
“A hundred says that she’ll get together with him by the end of the night,” Mer says to Alex and Cristina. At least somebody is delighting in this agonizing moment. “He’s going to see her crying and run to her immediately.”
“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?” Alex.
“Have you met him? He has no impulse control.” Cristina.
“Do you think he’ll be pissed at us if we make jokes about this?” Alex.
“What makes you think they’re not going to be banging for the next week? Once they get back to work, April will have had so many orgasms that she’ll be over the EMT.” Cristina.
As best as she can, April tries to avoid conflict. She tries to avoid drama, unnecessary arguments, and fights that can be avoided simply by talking through the problems. In the past year, that side of her had seemed to crumble. She figures that has come from all of the changes she has had in the duration of it. April is not the same person that she was when she was an intern at Mercy West, and she doesn’t think that she’ll ever go back to her.
She doesn’t think that she really wants to.
Acceptance has helped her immensely. Acceptance that she’s no longer a virgin. Acceptance that that doesn’t make her a bad person. Acceptance that she doesn’t have to be a version of herself that she’d always wanted to be, and that she can be happy being the person that she is now.
It had just come too late, and she’d lost Jackson in the process of it all.
And she’d tried, oh God, she’d tried so hard to move on from him. She’d wanted to be happy with Matthew. She’d wanted to at least resemble the person she was five years ago.
Except she’s not her, and she has already lost so much because of her own denial of this fact.
Matthew’s expression feels like a knife in her chest. She knows that he has every reason to be upset, but she wishes that he’d done this in such a way that they weren’t both so exposed. If he had just proposed to her at her place or his own, there wouldn’t be all of these eyes on them.
And maybe it makes her a terrible person to think this, but she wouldn’t have minded something so public if it were Jackson proposing to her.
Because Matthew isn’t the person that she wants to be with. He isn’t her best friend. He isn’t the person that she wants to talk to when something is wrong. He isn’t the person that makes her laugh and makes her feel like she’s the only person in the world and he isn’t the person that completely changed everything she was, for the better, in one night.
When she looks up at Jackson again, he almost imperceptibly nods, like he wants her to know that she’ll at least have one person that will support her, that will be there for her when she makes a complete fool of herself.
“Can we talk in private?” April finally asks out loud, and she has never been more mortified in her life. “Please?”
The ring box clatters shut, and Matthew walks off instead. He doesn’t need to say it for her to know that they are over.
She is already crying when she darts away, into the first on-call room she can find.
