JACKSON

You are a good father. You took us both in. You took care of her when I couldn't. And you haven't stopped taking of either of us since. Even with everything that's happened between us. You never bailed, and he couldn't do that.

The words that April had spoken to me this morning played through my head again.

Even after everything that had occurred between the two of us, even recently with the past that we had gotten into about her taking up for the position as interim head of general, she had never given up on me. She had never lost faith in who I was as a person. I'd said things to her that wasn't fair, and perhaps I had lost my faith in her, but faith was something that she had always been better at than me. She managed to keep it no matter what else was happening. That was a part of who she was, how she worked. I had been ungrateful.

Being a man of my word was something that I had prided myself in, once. I knew that I wasn't my father. Being able to face him after years of wondering and questioning had proven that.

But April had been there to push me along. I don't know if I would have been able to really confront him without her strength and encouragement. She put me as a whole before the pettiness that had occurred in the last weeks. She was looking out for me, taking care of me. Just like she had said I had done for her. I hoped that she gave herself enough credit because I hadn't.

Maybe she was giving me too much credit, though. She had so much faith in me and especially in the past few weeks with the whole Minnick debacle, I had been a dick to her. I regretted it now. Maybe I had made it obvious to her last night, I'd been able to apologize when buried between her legs and leave apologetic kisses along the slope of her neck and the curve of her spine. It was possible that she already knew. She was good at picking up on the things that I didn't say.

She shouldn't have had to, though. I could realize that now.

My mom's a wonderful grandmother, and you seem like a decent guy. But you're not a grandfather. You're not my father. And I figure, when you have a kid, you're making a promise. And I don't break my promises. That's the real difference between you and me.

The words spoken out loud to my father echoed through my head once more as I stepped outside of the diner, cold air instantly chilling the heat of anger that had been ignited.

April was standing outside waiting for me, toeing some of the snow on the ground. She looked up after a moment, seeming to sense my presence, and offered me a small smile. Her stare was intensely trained on my face, trying to get answers out of me before I could open my mouth.

"How did it go?" She asked, looking up at me expectantly.

"I said what I needed to," I let out a breath immediately after the words as my gaze rested on her. I wasn't him and I wasn't ever going to be him. Maybe I was divorced, but I still loved April, and I loved Harriet. Nothing would take me from them.

"Good. I'm glad." Her words were genuine, I knew that. "Should we head to the airport?" She glanced down at her watch as she asked and I nodded my head. Now, there was nothing left for me here.

April let there be some quiet between us in the car ride over to the airstrip, and for that, I'm grateful. Even if everything had been let out to my father, there were still thoughts playing through my mind. I would never understand what he did. Having Harriet in my life, and April, only made me even more apprehensive toward that decision of his. I loved them immensely. Both of them. In many ways, the divorce between April and I hadn't changed that. Harriet had only reminded me of the love that was still there between us, as had this trip.

"I got this." I grabbed her bag from the trunk of the car before she could, offering a small smile. But I only had to carry it for a moment before one off the attendants grabbed it to load it on the plane. "After you," I motioned her up the stairs of the plane.

"So do we get to have champagne this time?" April asked once she was seated across from me.

"Yeah," I chuckled. "Sure, whatever you want."

Each of us was served with a glass of champagne by Katie before we take off. I know that it's her favorite brand. Once upon a time, I had planned on us to take this very jet to go on some kind of honeymoon somewhere, the one that we had never gotten after our hitched wedding. Malibu, Hawaii, Nassau, Barbados. Where didn't matter as long as it was with her.

That had been during simpler times. Before Samuel.

I missed those days. Not just because things had been easier in all aspects of life before Samuel had come and gone, but because she had been my person. We had fallen apart but managed to grow closer again since she had moved in with me after giving birth to Harriet. She'd barely tried to move out once, and I was so glad that she hadn't. It had given us the chance to be with one another again, in one form or another. With her, something was better than nothing.

There were so many things that I had never said and done that I regretted now. I loved her. She made me happy, she made me a better person. Those were all things that she deserved to hear, but now, it seemed like it was too late.

Often I had to wonder whether it was too late for else. I felt like it was impossible for that. If that were true, she would have moved out when the opportunity had arisen the first place. We still lived together like a married couple, even though we were sleeping in different beds. Or at least, we had been prior to last night. I didn't know what her plans for the future were. I didn't really know what mine was, either. But all of yesterday, the surgery and the sex, it had been a reminder that no matter where we were or who we were to each other, it just mattered that we had one another at our side.

She was still my best friend – still my soulmate, my everything.

There was nothing that seemed capable of changing that. Even if we were divorced, even when we had fought like cats and dogs, she was still somehow my other half. We molded together. Maybe we had brought out the worst in one another sometimes, but we had brought out the best, too. Looking at her was a reminder that I could never stop loving her, no matter what. Maybe now, I would just have to love her silently. I couldn't ruin her life again.

"Harriet's going to be so happy to see us again," April commented, pushing up the window on the jet so she could see the clouds as we passed through them and ascended. "We've never been away from her for this long."

"I know," I nodded my head. "I missed her. It's weird to not be woken up in the middle of the night by her."

She laughed. "Yeah," she agreed. "I missed her too. So much."

I stared at her a moment, just watching.

"I'm glad that you came with me, April," I admitted after a moment of watching her, bottom lip rolling into my mouth. "I know that I didn't act like it at first and I've been a jerk to you the past few days, but… I'm really glad that you were here for this. There's not anyone else that I would have wanted by my side the past few days." I leaned forward just a bit, offering my hand to her.

"I'm glad that I could be here for you, Jackson." The smile that filled April's lips was sincere. Anyone could see that. "I don't know what you said to him and I don't need to know but whatever it was… it brought you some peace. I can see that." She reached forward and took my hand.

Turbulence shook the jet for a moment, and I took a slight pause before speaking again.

"It did," I breathed out, glancing out the window that she had opened up. "And it made me want to apologize to you, April. I know that you've said I've been there for you, but that's not as true as it should be. The past few weeks… I mean, I've known about my dad being there for them. And I guess that's why I reacted the way I did. You did what Bailey asked you to and all I saw was another person in my life going back on their word." I tried to explain.

The plane gave another unsteady shake around us and I let out a sigh. I didn't mind flying, for the most part. It'd been a little harder after losing Mark and Lexie, but I knew the chances of getting in a car crash were much better than that happening.

"I wish that you would have told me sooner," April murmured. "I would have been there for you."

"I believe that." She was just that kind of a person. "I just wasn't ready to tell anyone about it." Honestly, if she hadn't been here… no one would have found out. None of it was a conversation that I would have had with Meredith. She would have prescribed something negative, not pushed me into going and confronting him. Then there would have been no point in talking to anyone about it.

"That's okay." She squeezed my hand tightly for a moment.

The plane shook around us once again and I let out a sigh. It was odd. The sky around us with cloudy but no storm system was in sight. Flying wasn't normally a big deal to me. It had been difficult to get on a plane the first time after the crash had gone down, even though I hadn't been on it. Mostly, it was hard to push away the overwhelming thoughts about all of them.

"Thinking about Mark?" She asked.

Mindreader.

"Yeah," I nodded. I always did when I flew. His memory stuck with me clearly. "Hard not to, especially when the plane shakes like that." I shrugged a shoulder.

"I think of him and Lexie too," she admitted. "I used to think that, you know, if things had been different… Lexie and I would have been good friends, kind of like you and Mark were. We would have gone on double dates together and our kids would have been best friends."

I couldn't help but smile fondly at the thought. It hadn't crossed my mind before, but it was a nice one. Being with her, Mark with Lexie, the four of us happy in a way that we all deserved but had never quite gotten. All of us were good people, I thought. Maybe not as religious and devout as April, but still good. Surely we deserved something better than the short end of the stick that we had all received in our love lives, and for them, life itself.

"Would have been nice," I agreed with a small nod. "I wish he and Lexie had a chance."

April nodded sympathetically. I knew she hadn't been as close to either of them as I had been, that Lexie had occasionally been cruel to her with some of the bullyings in the same way that the rest of us had been. That was all the past now.

"Harriet will have a lot of friends, I'm sure. She must have gotten that popular gene from you, based on what the ladies in daycare say." She spoke. I let out a laugh, amused.

"Guilty as charged," I agreed.

When the plane shook again, I stiffened and noticed as April shifted in her seat uneasily, holding onto the armrest a little tighter. I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable too. Katie hadn't said anything, nor had the pilot over the intercom. I tightened the seat belt resting across my lap, uncrossing my legs and sitting up a little straighter.

"Are you alright?" I asked, eyes shifting over her.

"Yeah. I guess it's just making me a little uneasy too," April murmured. "At least it's not a long flight."

"Right." I wet my lips. "It's short."

It was tempting to fall quiet and try to ignore the ruckus that the plane was making. I kept my mouth shut. The plane dropped suddenly – how far, I'm not sure, but it's enough to jostle the both of us. April let out a slight yelp and I clutched onto the side of my seat, gritting my teeth.

"Still okay?" I looked at her.

She nodded, though she certainly looked far from it.

"I'm sure it's just some normal turbulence." I tried to reassure her.

Despite my words, the plane shook again. Looking out of the window, I could see us rollicking back and forth. We were still high in the sky, the only thing that I could see below us being a blur of green. No cities, no houses, nothing. This was too similar. It couldn't be happening.

The sound of an explosion popped my eardrums and we both flinched, far louder than that of a car backfiring. the smell of something burning followed as the plane jolted this time, and I don't look out the window again. I don't want to see what's happening this time.

"Jackson." I could hear the panic in April's voice as she said my name.

"We're going to be just fine," I stated firmly.

I didn't know if it was true. I wanted it to be true, desperately. The last thing I wanted was for things to fall apart when it seemed like the two of us might have finally started down the same path again, when we'd gotten along for the first time in weeks and fallen in bed together like it was the first time all over again. This time, we had so much more to get back to. We had Harriet. There was no way that anything could happen to either of us. Our daughter needed both of us.

If it had been safer, I would have gotten up and found Katie or knocked on the pilot's door to try and figure out what exactly was going on. But now that seemed like a poor idea. Too little, too late.

"Jackson–" April repeated my name with more alarm in her voice than before.

"Hey, hey, don't look out the window, okay? Look at me, April. Look right here." Maybe if I could calm her down, then I would be able to calm down some of the other thoughts that were going on in my head. Did Mark and the others know it was crashing before it was too late?

The cabin was shaking violently, the turbulence was unbelievably strong. April's knuckles had turned white with how tightly she was holding onto her seat. I wanted to reach out and hold one of her hands, pull her into my lab, but she was too far away and it was safer for us to remain seated, buckled. The last thing I would have wanted was for her to get out of her seat right now.

"We're going to be alright, okay? You've been through worse than this. You had a c-section on a kitchen table at Meredith's house. You were in a war zone. You can survive anything. You're April Kepner." I encouraged her, taking a deep breath.

"I'm scared," she whispered. I don't know if she meant for me to hear it.

"It's okay," I repeated. "But right now, we need to do the brace position, okay? Bend over. Hands over your head." There may not have been luggage to fall on us, but it was still for the best.

I waited until she had assumed the position before leaning forward into it myself, taking a deep breath. I knew that right now, she had to be praying inside of her head. That was the natural thing for any Christian to do in her position. I didn't believe in God – but if he was somehow out there despite my nonchalance on the matter, I hope that he cared enough to be willing to listen to April. I couldn't imagine a world without her in it. The world needed people like her. Harriet certainly needed a mother like her.

The plane slammed down, bounced up, came back down on to its nose and began to cartwheel.

I couldn't hold the brace position and I bounced upright with my arms over my head. Despite efforts, I can't keep conscious of everything going around. The noise was vicious madness on my eardrums and the only peace from it is when blackness washed over me.

There's silence when I finally begin to take in my surroundings again. I'm upside down, hanging in a contortion from the seatbelt was the only thing to keep me from landing on my head and cracking it open on the ceiling of the plane. There was smoke and something was still burning – maybe the fuel tank, maybe something else.

Plane crashes were always something that got media attention. When the plane with Mark, Lexie, and everyone else had gone down, it had been covering all of the news outlets for days, obsessively so. Reporters had come to the hospital to berate Hunt and anyone else that they could get their hands on to try and find out more about it, as if any of us would have any idea what had been wrong. When they had finally been found, it had been covered then, too. They called it a miracle that only one had died. When Mark had finally weeks later, barely a word had been spoken about him.

What would they say about us?

Divorced couple orphans their child after their private jet crashed.

Maybe they would speculate we were still together despite the divorce. Perhaps they would go and talk to my father. That would have infuriated Mom.

It would make the news. Even if it was a private jet instead of a commercialized airline company like Delta or United, I was sure that it would make the news one way or another. The Avery Foundation would be all over it, trying to control every detail of what was and wasn't released. I was sure that both of our faces would be released and our lives, together and separately, would be analyzed for a public display. Privacy would be gone.

"April?" I tried to test my voice. I don't know if any words came out.

It ached to take a deep breath but I do it anyway before looking over to my left. She wasn't there. I didn't see anyone. The plane had split open at some point after impact. But she should have been close to me. She should have.

Preparing myself to wince, I undo my seatbelt and fall to the ceiling of the cabinet. I pause for a moment to try and assess myself. My knee was dislocated. Maybe something had hit my leg in the tumbling of the plane. It was something fixable even if it was going to hurt drastically to try and walk on it. It was possible that there was something around here that could be used as a makeshift crutch. It needed to be immobilized but I couldn't deal with that right now.

A knee relocation was usually done by emergency or orthopedic doctors. The kind of thing that April would have been perfect for right now, but I needed to fix it myself before I could get up and try to find her.

The pain is inevitable when I align my lower leg and pop the joint back into place, yelling out though unheard by anyone. Things likely were worse than that, but at least I could limp.

Having on my jacket was luck. It was still cold outside. I didn't know where we were – western Montana, Idaho, or maybe eastern Washington. All of them were possibilities. I hold onto everything that I can to try and get out of the plane, but every step is agonizing. Pain was a good thing. At least it meant that I could still feel. I knew Arizona hadn't been so lucky with her leg injury in a plane crash.

I tried to call out for April again but I don't hear my own voice.

In the distance, there was more smoke. Crawling would have been easier but I try to remain upright, using everything in my path as a crutch. Everything was still quiet. I don't understand how anything could have been. There should have been screaming, yelling. But maybe there hadn't been enough of us on board for that.

Maybe everyone else was dead.

No.

I couldn't think like that. I couldn't afford to. Maybe the captain was dead and maybe Katie was dead and even if there was bound to be some kind of survivor's guilt at some point, I could learn to live with that. But I could not handle the idea that April was dead. I had nearly lost her those months ago when she had brought Harriet into the world, and that had been traumatic enough. I'd heard her screams for months when I had slept, but now, it was like when the screams had fallen silent and I'd had to question whether or not my wife ex-wife had just died in my best friend's hands.

Time passed in a long lull as I tried to make my way closer. I was hoping to hear some kind of helicopter flying overhead, some sign that there were first responders looking for us. Some kind of signal had to be sent out – there had been enough time for that to be done by the captain, surely.

Eventually, I come to more of the carnage from the crash. Although there was still smoke there were no clear flames. Perhaps whatever had been there had managed to burn out already. Squinting, I try to make out shapes beyond the bent metal.

Her hair was the first thing I saw.

When April and I had first met, I had never taken notice of her hair. Back then it had been dyed a dark brown to blend in and keep from drawing attention to herself, appearing as mousy as she acted back then. But the first day that she had walked into work with her hair a new shade of red, which I'd later learned was much closer to the natural hair color of both herself and her family, I had noticed. It was eye-catching and noteworthy. For the first time, I had looked at her as more of a woman than as just another coworker in the background. But this time, spotting it sprawled out across grass and dirt hurts.

Moving as quickly as I could physically manage to get to her, I fall down on my better knee. Her eyes were shut. Gently grabbing on her shoulder, I gave her a light shake, hoping that it would wake her up. I don't want to jar her around too much just in case there was something I couldn't see there.

I paused and let a few moments pass, taking an unsteady breath. Hazel eyes don't appear staring up at me like I want them too.

The sleeve of her black jacket was singed and burned off. Some of it had been burned down to her skin. This was the exact kind of injury that I would have treated in the hospital, but here, I didn't have anything I would have needed for it. April was the one who was creative with treatments.

It covered most of her forearm, nasty blisters already there. It was at least a second-degree burn, possibly a third degree. That would have meant numbness. Nerve damage. The kind of thing that would ruin a surgeon's career. Her arm looked slightly swollen and gently, I grabbed her hand, bending it and placing it over her heart so that her arm could be slightly elevated. This could be the reason that she was unconscious – shock. She wasn't particularly paler than usual, at least. Fittingly pale. That was something.

"C'mon, April." I don't know if the words are spoken or merely thought, but it doesn't matter.

Taking a deep breath, I pressed my fingers into her neck to make sure that there's a pulse there. It's a little weak but still there and consistent. Next, my ear hovered over her chest, listening to her breathing. It would have been easier with my stethoscope, but she seemed to be breathing fine on her own. Two good signs. It was possible she had just hit her head and was suffering from a concussion. Maybe she had been conscious earlier and blacked out now. There were a lot of questions but not many answers.

Unbuttoning her jacket felt wrong but I needed to make sure that she wasn't hurt. Cristina had only noticed the cardiac tamponade for Mark based on the bruising on his chest when he had been unconscious. I couldn't handle a repeat of that.

When I push up her shirt, there is some bruising. It's not high enough to indicate massive amounts of fluid around her heart, but it does indicate that there's some kind of internal bleeding. Palpating her flank only confirmed with the tenderness there. I was sure that if she ha been conscious, what I was doing would have at least made her uncomfortable, if not completely hurt.

God, don't let it be shattered.

Surgery was no longer routine for kidney lacerations and most patients with kidney injuries were treated with rest. But a shattered kidney without immediate intervention could be life-threatening. Urinomas, hypertension, infections… all of it was possible as long as we were stuck out here.

There wasn't much I could do hear. I fell back to sit on my ass, moving her arm once more to elevate it a little more and have it elevated higher. I placed my thumb down on her wrist, feeling for her pulse to check circulation. It was a little weaker than it had been at her neck, but it was still there. Things could be okay if we were found soon.

But that was a huge if.

It had taken them a week to find Mark, Lexie, Meredith, Cristina, and Derek. Some places disappeared without a trace, but it seemed unlikely that would happen to us. There was technology to send out distress signals – the plane was new, it wasn't outdated. Every aircraft had one. The FAA required it. But I knew there were things that could have prevented that from happening. I just had to hope that things were simple enough that this wouldn't be one of those cases.

"C'mon, April," I whispered to her once more, blinking back the tears in my eyes. My head ached and my knee was throbbing, my entire body was sore from being thrown around. I knew had some bruising from the seatbelt, at the very least. "C'mon."

I laid down next to her and waited.

Eventually, I passed out.