Chapter Text
Amy comes to Jake’s apartment after leaving the precinct, right after getting the news.
It’s almost seven and he’s been home for a while now, wallowing on the couch, too caught up in his own stupid head to recognize the sharp edge of hunger slicing through his stomach or the rasp in his throat from the thirst that plagues him. He doesn’t really feel any of it, because his attention is focused on his phone’s tiny screen.
He flicks through picture after picture, pausing occasionally when one makes him smile. He’s pretty sure his whole life has gone to hell (okay, no, it hasn’t, but give him a break - he’d just kissed his partner twice the night before for stupid reasons, reasons that don’t fall anywhere on his List of Reasons Why Amy Santiago is His Favorite Person, not to mention the whole Holt’s-leaving-the-Nine-Nine thing Holt announced just a matter of hours ago). The new captain, Captain...what was it, Dozerman? Captain Dozerman made it abundantly clear within the first twenty seconds of setting foot into the bullpen that he was not going to try to fill Holt’s shoes.
He still remembers the tenseness rippling through his teammates (Dozerman just got there earlier that afternoon, after all), the way Charles’ breath caught in his throat, the way Amy bounced on the balls of her feet like she always does when she’s nervous, the way Terry’s weight shifted from foot to foot. He’d inhaled deeply when the elevator dinged and nearly coughed on the stench of cigarettes clinging to the air around Amy - she’d snuck out to the terrace five minutes after Holt left for good (which Jake politely pretended not to notice) and stayed there smoking cigarette after cigarette until Terry called her back in to meet the new captain - and when the doors opened, he released his breath.
Dozerman shouted, voice harsh and commanding, about working eight times harder than they’ve ever worked in their lives. He’d paused, hand rising seemingly unconsciously to rub his chest, but then he’d shaken his head and straightened up.
“Dismissed! Except, uh...you, three calorie female. You come with me to my office.”
“S-sir?” Amy stammered.
Dozerman marched past her. “Now, detective!”
Amy scurried after him immediately without a backwards glance, and the whole squad stared after her until the office door closed and the blinds drew shut.
Hours later, she still hadn’t emerged, and Jake slung his bag over his shoulder reluctantly. He’d really hoped to talk to her again before leaving for the day - because no matter what he did, something still felt off, wrong, and it sat like a dead weight in his stomach - but there was no movement beyond the door. His gaze flickered down to where her cardigan hung over the back of her chair to her phone next to her keyboard, and with one last sigh, he turned on his heel and left.
He unlocked his apartment and trudged inside, letting his bag slip off his shoulder and land with a thump and his jacket slide off his arms to pool at his feet. He made a beeline for his couch and threw himself down with a melodramatic groan, and hasn’t moved since.
His life could not get any worse.
His ma always used to show him old photo albums when he got bummed out as a kid (so mostly in the hours after realizing his dad was, once again, a no-show). Initially he thought it worked in cheering him up because it was a reminder of how good things used to be. But now, as a thirty-something year old adult, he realizes it’s because those photos are physical reminders of all the love and happiness he’s capable of feeling, and a promise of what he could one day feel again.
Unsurprisingly, he lingers on the rather sizable collection of selfies he has of himself and Amy. There are twenty-seven of them all clustered together - he’d made a bet with himself that he could take thirty selfies with her in a week before she caught on to what he was doing. She’s looking at the camera in about half of them, smiling in some, and in one in particular she’d leaned over to prop her chin on his shoulder while he took the picture. He swears he can still feel the warm weight of her on his shoulder.
There’s a knock on the door, which jolts him out of his memories. He sighs and haphazardly tosses his phone on the coffee table without bothering to lock the screen and hauls himself up to shuffle to the door. All the heaviness he’d felt upon arriving back home is back in droves, and he can feel himself literally sagging as he walks.
Amy’s standing on his welcome mat, head turned to her right to look down his hallway, and his breath catches. She turns to him and for a split second, he rejoices, because Amy’s here and this is just like all the stupid old romantic comedies Gina used to make him watch when they were teenagers...except, hold on, wait. Amy’s eyes are too wide and her brows are drawn together and her hands tremble as she twists them in front of her. She leans forward and bounces on the balls of her feet, and his stomach turns.
“What’s up, Amy?” He asks, voice rasping.
She releases a shuddering breath, brows drawing even further together, and Jake’s concern for the woman before him spikes to record-breaking heights. “Do-...Dozerman, he...it was random, Jake, he didn’t even pick me because he thought I was qualified, I was literally just the closest person to him, and he...I mean -” she stops, swallows thickly, and continues “- this hardly even counts as a notice, like, is this even legal?”
He shakes his head, bewildered.
“No, yeah, it is, because, because there were agents on the line, and a case file, and the commissioner, and -”
She’s babbling, he realizes, which is yet another one of her tells. He’s seen them all individually over the years, sometimes in pairs, but never all at the same time - shaking hands, bouncing, babbling - and it’s seriously freaking him out. “Ames,” he interrupts softly. This seems to steal the breath from her; she pants, head turned down to stare at her feet. “What’s going on?”
It takes another moment, but when she turns her head up to look at him her eyes are swimming in tears. His heart skips a beat. “I’m...going undercover.” His eyebrows shoot up toward his hairline. “The Fumero drug cartel.” She adds, voice more quiet than he’s ever heard. His jaw drops. “They want to start my briefing tomorrow, Jake. Today was my last day at the nine-nine.”
“What? What do you...what?”
She bounces on the balls of her feet again, a low whine that seems to originate from the center of her chest leaking from her lips. “I know, I know, but I don’t have a choice. I’m, I’m freaking out, Jake, I’m freaking out, this cartel is so dangerous and they...they want me to...engage in congress with one of the bosses.”
Amy’s chest is heaving, and Jake feels like a hole has suddenly been blown through his.
“I’m freaking out, okay, I’m scared to death, and I know...I know that things have been weird, with, with us,” her hand jerks between them, like she’s trying to gesture, but her muscles won’t cooperate smoothly, “but...God, Jake, I need to talk about this and there’s no one else I want to talk to about this stuff than you.”
It’s like being slapped in the face with urgency and knocked over the head with sense at the same time. She doesn’t actually say it, but he can see it in her eyes, her unspoken I need you. He practically leaps out of her way, stammering “come in, come in” with a weird flourishing gesture toward the interior of his apartment. Amy moves past him quickly, stepping over his discarded bag and jacket and heading straight toward his couch because she’s been here before and she knows where his couch is and oh God this could be the last time she ever comes here because she's going undercover.
He closes and locks his door quickly and rushes to join her. She’s perched right on the edge of the couch cushion, turned to the side, so that her legs are crossed beneath her at her ankles and her hands are clasped together tightly on her lap. Her shoulders slope down at an unfamiliar angle and her chin is tucked down close to her chest. Her eyes dart around the room quickly, like a caged, frightened animal searching for signs of danger, never lingering in one place for too long. It sets him on edge, even more so than he was before.
He’s still trying to think of what to say when he notices that she’s gone completely still. Her gaze is fixated on something on his coffee table.
His phone, screen still on, still displaying the selfie where her chin was on his shoulder.
His initial instinct is to dive forward and snatch the phone up to hide it, as if shoving it between his couch cushions will erase the picture - and the implications of that picture being on blatant display on his phone - from her memory. But he resists.
Amy came to him, after all.
So instead of lurching forward and doing something stupid, he holds still. He turns his head toward her, and a beat later she meets his gaze. For one endless second, they just stare at each other.
He’s not sure, exactly, which one of them initiates it; part of him thinks that maybe it was a divine intervention, like their guardian angels got so sick of watching them hem and haw that they stepped in and forced it. It doesn’t really matter, because Amy’s fingers are slipping through his hair and he’s got a hand grazing over the bend of her waist to curl against her spine and another slipping up between her shoulders to draw her closer and he’s kissing her with everything he has and she’s kissing back.
Little noises of desperation pass between them, their origins unclear, and Jake quickly maneuvers them so that she’s leaned back against the couch cushions and he’s kneeling between her legs. She’s just as soft and warm as he gathered the night before, and this time he’s not kissing Dora in some restaurant or his partner as a diversion, he’s kissing Amy. Soft, beautiful, warm, familiar Amy. This time, he gets to marvel at how well his hands fit between her shoulder blades. This time, he gets to appreciate the fact that her nails are the perfect length to comb through his hair. It's the best kiss he's ever had in his life by at least a mile.
Except...she’s trembling. He’s only felt her do this one other time - March of 2011, when they were chasing their perp along the banks of the Hudson and in the darkness she miscalculated the structural integrity of the riverbank and ended up tumbling into the water. She was only submerged briefly, but by the time he had their perp in handcuffs and had made it back to her, her lips were blue. He’d immediately ripped his coat off and wrapped it around her, and when that only improved her state by a fraction, he pulled her into a bear hug without a second thought. Her whole body pressed up against him back then, just like it did now as she arches her torso, and he’d quickly ran his hands up and down her back in an effort to generate some warmth.
He follows his own lead now, nuzzling his way down the side of her face until his lips are pressed against the crook of her neck. He burrows his arms beneath her and squeezes, hard and insistent enough that she knows what he’s doing, but not so hard that she can’t wriggle free. Her hands drift from his hair down his neck to scrabble along his shoulder blades and her chest quakes against his, brimming with harsh sobs.
“It’s okay,” he whispers against her skin, forgetting that just a second ago his tongue was in her mouth, forgetting why she’s here, forgetting why she’s panicking, forgetting who he is entirely. All of it goes flying out the window because Amy is crying in front of him for the third time in six years and it’s been his top priority to fix whatever is broken and hurting her since that very first time. “It’s okay, Ames, it’s all gonna be okay, sh…” The sobs come spilling out of her chest now, broken and hoarse, and her nails dig sharply into his skin through the thin material of his shirt. “You’re okay, you’re safe, Ames, you’re safe…”
The words feel strange in his mouth, but he presses on, because he knows just how much that simple phrase calms her down. He can already feel her racing heartbeat slowing down where it hammers against his chest, her gut-wrenching sobs deteriorating fractionally, and her death-grip on his shirt loosening to a gentle strangle-hold.
He keeps up his whispered reassurances until she goes still beneath him, limp and spent, and he eases away from her slowly. She’s staring up at him through bloodshot eyes, tear tracks still glittering down her temples. “C’mon,” he hears himself murmur.
She lets him pull her up off the couch and her arms loop around his waist loosely once she's on her feet. He throws his arm around her shoulder and presses a kiss against the side of her head as they shuffle toward his bedroom together.
He has to mentally shake himself as she sits on the edge of his bed. He refuses to let himself think that this might be the only chance he'll ever get to see Amy Santiago crawl into his bed.
“C’mere,” he says, gently tugging at her wrist until she follows his lead. She ends up on the right side of the bed, dark hair fanned out on the pillow beneath her, and once she stops shifting restlessly he leans down and presses a kiss against her forehead. It doesn’t escape his notice that she seems to lean into it, or that her upper body briefly leaves the mattress when he pulls away, like she’s chasing after his touch. “I’m gonna take your shoes off,” he says, smoothing her hair back from her forehead with one hand.
He perches at the foot of the bed and takes his time methodically unzipping each of her boots, rubbing soothing circles against her ankles with the pad of his thumb. He has a near-violent flashback to the summer of 2009 when she sprained her ankle and he ended up flat on his butt in an alley in Queens with Amy’s foot in his lap while they waited for an ambulance, gently poking and prodding at her throbbing ankle while she bit back grunts and moans of pain. She sniffles quietly now, which is a sharp contrast to that night.
The sun has set and his apartment is only dimly lit (thanks in large part to the fact that his main overhead light burned out two weeks ago and he just hadn’t gotten around to getting to the bodega for a replacement), and something about the long, bluish-purple shadows stretching lazily across his walls make Amy’s eyes glitter in the darkness. If he were himself, he’d make a joke about Zooey Deschanel needing her doe-eyes back.
But he’s not himself, because Amy’s laying in his bed and she’s leaving tomorrow and he has no idea when he’ll see her again.
If he’ll see her again.
He sheds only his shoes before climbing in on his normal side of the bed, dropping down on his left side so that he’s facing her. She turns her head on the pillow and looks at him, eyes wide-open, a breath-taking kind of vulnerability there. And his heart lurches in his chest, because Amy trusts him. It makes the primitive part of his brain - the part Gina (and later Rosa) spent years teaching him how to tamp out - roar to life, chest swelling and his throat closing up. She trusts him enough to be this broken and vulnerable and damn it he’s going to do whatever it takes to make sure she feels comfortable and safe enough to do that with him.
Amy rolls to her right side, her left hand landing on the mattress between them, and he reaches forward to lace their fingers together automatically.
“I don’t...I don’t want you to think that this -” she squeezes his fingers “- is a...a heat of the moment kind of thing. Because it isn’t. I...I really do, y’know...care. About you.”
Jake feels himself starting to shut down and recoil, because, you know, feelings, but he forces himself to snap out of it. These are Amy’s feelings. And he’d probably be willing to talk about that particular subject all day long.
“I just...I know that, in the restaurant, and again in the park, that was, like...that was heat of the moment. Sort of? It was, uh, self-...self-preservation, I guess,” she furrows her brow, swallows, and nods. “But this, this...this is more. It’s real. And I never...I never want you to think that I’m, that I came here expecting this to happen, like a, like a, um…”
“Like an end-of-the-world kind of thing?” he offers, and she nods. “I know. I know it’s not like that, Ames.” And he’s pretty certain that there’s a part of him that really did know that already, but seeing her nod of confirmation quells the little anxiety still clinging to him. He squeezes back, and a humorless smile that doesn’t reach her eyes flashes across her face. “I, uh,” he coughs, “I really like you.” He finishes in a rush.
Her face seems to relax marginally. “I like you, too,” she whispers.
He smiles, briefly, and steels himself. “I just, I’m...I’m really, like, this is -” he huffs and squeezes his eyes shut, “this is gonna suck. So bad. Would...I mean, you, you leave...tomorrow?”
She nods slowly.
He exhales like he’s just been punched in the gut (which he has, verbally) and shifts a little closer to her on the mattress. “Could...I mean, um...you don’t have to, obviously, but…”
“Ask me,” she whispers.
“Will you stay here tonight?” He says in one breath. “We don’t, like, we don’t have to do anything, like if we just fell asleep like this I’d be happy, I just, I - I need to be, um...I need you.”
She leans in over their joined hands and kisses him, and he feels his heart skip. She pulls away slowly, her forehead lingering against his. “Yes.” She says softly as his eyes flutter open.
She pulls away from him, retreats back to her own pillow, and falls asleep within an hour. He drifts off to the sight of her sleeping face and wakes an hour later to her body pressed against his, moving slowly and hypnotically. His lips find hers in the darkness and, after some half-asleep undressing and maneuvering, he gets her spread out on the mattress beneath him, doe-eyes bright and olive skin glowing in the moonlight. It ends far too quickly, their sharp cries muffled into damp skin, fingers curling and gripping and grazing and pulling, breath escaping in puffs between swollen lips in stolen moments between lingering kisses.
She ends up laying halfway on top of him, supported by one arm bent at the elbow near his shoulder, lips and teeth working studiously along the column of his throat. His hands travel up and down her body, touching, feeling, desperate to commit every detail of this moment - to commit every detail of her - to memory. His mouth is lost in the tangles of her hair and broken and half-whimpered praises tumble from his lips unhindered by filters of workplace appropriateness and embarrassment. “You’re everything, you’re ev- everything,” he hears himself choke.
In a flash, her lips are crushed against his again, her hands gripping either side of his face, a desperate whine slipping through from the back of her throat, and it all comes rushing back to him at once - she’s leaving. She came here to say goodbye, because she’s leaving, and she may not ever come back, and, and -
“Wait - mmoh -” he groans between her peppered kisses, “wait, no, Amy.” She jerks back, chest heaving, question somehow clear in her too-dark eyes. “We’re, we’re not doing this, we’re not saying goodbye -”
She lurches back toward him, swallowing whatever half-articulated argument he was about to launch at her, and this time her kiss is firmer and more in-control. Amy pulls away, lips smacking, and releases one laugh that sounds more like a bark. “Don’t be an idiot.” She says, voice low. And to an outsider listening in, it might sound like their typical banter.
But Jake knows better. He senses the warning, feels the implications -
Of course this isn’t goodbye -
- this is -
- a beginning -
- a declaration -
- a promise .
He doesn’t try to speak again after that, because he knows that he’s not capable of packing so much - so much - into four concise little words.
He shows her, instead. He’s always been more of a hands-on kind of guy, anyways.
They’re up well into the night, communicating without words, and by the time four o’clock in the morning rolls around he can’t keep his eyes open no matter how hard he tries. He curls an arm around Amy’s shoulders, pulling her in closer to him, the sounds of her deep, rhythmic breathing soothing him to sleep.
When his alarm goes off two hours later, he wakes to his arm stretched across an empty mattress. She’s gone, no visible trace left of her. Except for the cardigan he recognizes from the back of her desk chair, now draped over the arm of his second-favorite massage chair.
There’s a an unfamiliar key on his kitchen counter, and a note beside it: water my plants and get my mail, please ❤
He stares at the crudely drawn heart (Amy has never been able to draw hearts, it’s like, a thing that he’s been teasing her over for years now) and wonders if she drew it there as a clue, a wordless confirmation that she had indeed stolen his heart in the middle of the night, taken it out of his wide-open chest and tucked it into her purse before she left. Because his chest is open and gaping and he can’t feel his heart beating anymore, and this is the only viable reason he can come up with for it.
Tears come, but sobs don’t. So he’s just a naked idiot standing in his kitchen, staring at a poorly-drawn heart while salty tears drip down his face.
He doesn’t find her second note until he’s leaving his apartment for work, showered and dressed and numb all over. It’s taped to his front door, and when he sees it, his stomach drops to his feet.
Don’t be an idiot.
He’s got half a mind to pull it down, but he stops himself.
The drive to work passes in a fog. When he pulls into his parking spot it hits him briefly that he doesn’t really have a solid memory of driving there, but he guesses it doesn’t matter, because he got there. He got to work. Not like Amy or Holt, they’re not there. Because they don’t technically work there anymore.
This is going to suck.
He trudges in and barely manages to nod to the beat cops that greet him cheerfully by name, suddenly wishing he’d remembered his sunglasses. This ache, this pain in his chest, it seems to radiate through his entire body, and it’s worse than any hangover he has ever had. And, somehow, the idea of having some small shield between himself and the rest of the world so that he can tend to his wounds in peace sounds wonderful.
Gina stares at him over the distance between his desk and hers (half of which is measured by Amy's empty desk) for twenty minutes after he drops into his seat, one of her dainty eyebrows cocked. “What?” He barks after it finally unnerves him.
(It’s the first time he’s spoken since last night.)
“Nothin’,” Gina says with an innocent shrug. “I would maybe button that top button up, though, buttercup. You got a hickey playing peek-a-boo with the new captain.”
He flushes and immediately begins fumbling with the top button of his button-down, glaring down at his desk to avoid eye-contact. Except his hands are shaking and he can’t get the stupid fabric to just work right and -
Gina's suddenly standing over him; she swats his hands away from his neck and accomplishes what he can’t with far steadier hands. “There,” she says uncharacteristically softly, fingers smoothing his collar down.
“Thanks,” he rasps, eyes stinging. “It was, uh...a long night.”
“Glad you got to say goodbye.” She says, a vague smirk appearing for a moment on her face.
“T-to, uh, what?”
She sighs impatiently, crosses her arms over her chest, and taps her foot. He’s suddenly reminded of their second grade teacher, who used to pull that exact pose whenever he started in on one of his fantastical daydream adventures (or, as she put it, “slacking off in class while distracting the other kids” - potato, potato). He releases a breath and some of the tension he didn’t realize he was carrying in his shoulders goes with it.
“Yeah. Yeah, I...uh-huh.”
She touches his upper arm lightly with her fist. “You okay, Pineapples?”
He clenches his jaw. “No.” He says, and he kind of hates that he really wants to cry.
She makes a noise in her throat, an understanding hum, and pats his shoulder. “You’re gonna be fine, babe.” She says, and part of her almost believes her. “And I know that now’s probably not the best time for this, but I gotta say it.” She leans in a little closer. “Finally.”
He feels himself flush, and now Gina’s got this self-satisfied grin on her face, because apparently that reaction is all the confirmation she needs.
Luckily, before he can embarrass himself further, Dozerman appears in the doorway of the captain’s office. “You, administrative assistant! Back to your desk! Peralta! I need those case files completed and on my desk by noon!”
“Yes, sir,” Jake grumbles as Gina scurries away.
Dozerman is dead by eleven. Jake’s still not totally sure how it happened - all he heard was a fizzing rush of a soda exploding, followed by a ground-shaking bellow whose origins lie somewhere between Hitchcock and Scully, and then the sound of a body hitting the break room floor.
Even as EMTs rush the scene and the precinct comes to a complete stand-still, Jake finds his gaze wandering to the empty desk across from his, and the mostly-empty office beyond it.