Chapter Text
Amy knew that silence was golden. She’d been known to spend hours in her apartment, or at her desk, with earphones playing nothing. Silence let her concentrate, organise, and relax.
She’d gotten better at enjoying chatter since dating Jake - he liked to emote and theorise into the small hours, replaying his day and moulding it into an entertaining, if somewhat fantastical, narrative. Now the silence was too loud.
The apartment had been way too empty since he went to prison. Their bed was huge, and the sound of her footsteps echoed off the walls to rap against her eardrums. Quiet evenings with a crossword puzzle had been replaced with empty newspapers, tapping pens, and a whirlwind of frantic imaginings. What were they doing to him in there? His brave face had never been convincing. She’d gone to bed every night, white noise blaring, dreaming of the day when his voice would finally replace it.
In the bar, he’d been full of life - or at least nervous energy. He’d moved between friends, an untouched beer in his hand (shaking just enough that she’d worried it would spill), clapping his other palm onto shoulders and hooting along with whatever conversation he’d dropped into. He never stayed in one place very long.
Hanging out with Rosa towards the end of the night had been more fun than Amy had expected - she didn’t talk much, but Rosa had a way of raising an eyebrow at the right moment and sending Amy into peals of laughter or a whirlwind of anxiety. She hadn’t elaborated on her time inside, and Amy quickly gave up on her gentle prodding. Instead, they nursed their drinks and watched their colleagues. Amy carried most of the conversation, but didn’t mind. In many ways, it was nice to let her words run away with her. With Jake in prison, she had felt the ball of worried pressure at the base of her stomach tighten more every day, a ball of yarn becoming increasingly knotted. Rosa’s gaze was steady and lacking in judgement as she listened to Amy finally begin to unravel her insecurities.
"...and sometimes it felt like I’d never see either of you again, and what the hell would I do then?”
“Yeah, that would suck, I’m hot.”
“What?”
“If you didn’t see me. It would suck. Because I’m hot.”
“That was clearly not meant to be literal, Rosa, though I have obviously noticed -”
Now, as she and Jake sat in the taxi on their way home, whatever force had been keeping him awake - joy, anxiety or demonic possession - had drained out of him completely. His foot wasn’t even bouncing. Silence.
Amy tried to fill the gaps. “Do you want to watch Die Hard when we get in?”
He looked at her with panic in his glazed eyes, his mouth slightly agape. Questions clearly weren’t the way to go right now.
“Never mind, we don’t need to decide now. Oooh, I need to tell you about what my dad said the other day -”
And so she launched into a story, half fact, half fiction, in a desperate attempt to keep the one-sided conversation going for the length of the journey. His eyes relaxed, though his shoulders remained tense and the smiles and nods he shot her way were tinged with sadness and shame.
Maybe he could hear the crack in her voice a few minutes later as her floundering spun out of control, because his eyebrows quirked into a frown and he lifted his hand, resting it on top of hers. His palm was warm and she felt it spread from the top of her hand and up her arm, rolling over her chest and massaging her heart into a less fatal rhythm. God, she loved his touch. He met her gaze for the first time in at least six miles, his lips twitching into some kind of weak pre-evolution of a smile. It was clearly all the comfort he could manage.
When they reached their apartment, they climbed the stairs in a daze, holding hands the whole way. It didn’t take long for them to get inside and get ready for bed, all thoughts of anything but the exhaustion seeping into their bones ready to be put aside for the night. Jake seemed to have no issues with going through his bedroom routine, his movements stiff and robotic but lacking in hesitation. She was glad she’d kept all his stuff exactly as he’d left it.
The comforter was cool as she slipped into it, the double bed as cold as every night that he’d been gone. When he slipped in beside her for the first time in six months, his icy feet were warmer than the sheets.
Amy turned towards him instinctively and he rolled in her arms, bringing her hand to rest against his chest as she wrapped around his back. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and breathed in his cologne. It was the expensive bottle she’d bought him a month before everything went down. He hadn’t worn it often enough for her to associate the smell with him, but it was for that reason that she’d been periodically spraying his cheap deodorant on her pillow and she welcomed the change.
---
Jake woke to a black room, the red digital face of his alarm clock the only light. His back was warm, but the soft press of Amy’s front against him was gone. His chest felt hollow and the mattress rose, letting him sink down as the air tickled his exposed skin.
Where did she go?
He was alone.
Still in the irrational state halfway between sleep and waking, when a dream world felt real and the impossible seemed plausible, he reached out. It was like his chest had emptied into his throat, which was seizing up with panic as he thrashed. His hands came into contact with only more duvet, warm like the rest of the bed.
He was so fucking alone.
Suddenly, a beam of light fell on him like an interrogation room lamp. Jolting fully awake, he scrambled backwards on the bed, his back pressed up against the headboard.
His darting eyes finally landed on Amy, glass of water in hand and foot frozen mid-step.
“Jake!” her voice was hoarse as she raised her arms in what was clearly meant to be a non-threatening gesture, but only served to cause the water she was holding to slosh out of its glass and onto her forearm. He watched it run down to her elbow, though she ignored it.
“I just got up to get some water. What do you need?”
Though he heard her question, and registered its meaning, there seemed to be no way to make his mouth move. His teeth were ground down to the point of pain and showed no signs of loosening.
It’s Amy. I’m home. She just got water. It’s Amy. This is fine.
But though he knew that he was safe, that Amy hadn’t left him in the night and he wasn’t back inside the prison to await Romero’s revenge, he couldn’t convince his trembling body that it was true.
Amy hadn’t moved any further forwards, though she had leaned over to balance the glass on a dresser. “Do you want me to come back to bed or do you need space, Jake?”
Hearing his name helped. Still not able to make his mouth work properly, he nodded. His movements were tense and jerky. Amy crept forwards, clearly ready to jump away at a moment’s notice. Slowly she crept into bed beside him, though she made no move to touch him. Jake rolled over to curl into the crook underneath her arm, resting his head on her chest. Slowly, she reached over to hold him properly.
“I’ve got you.”
---
Rosa liked a soft mattress. It was nice, she knew, to sink into something and feel your muscles unwind. It was practically impossible to carry tension in your back when it felt like it was floating on a cloud. Countless nights on a prison cot had left her aching to recline onto something gentle and sleep with both eyes shut.
That was a metaphor. Though she had tried many times, Rosa hadn’t yet managed to sleep with one eye actually open. One day.
This mattress was too soft.
It was the one she’d bought nearly two years before, with a larger chunk of her paycheck than she cared to admit to herself (and a far larger chunk than she’d ever admit to the squad). In her carefully decorated apartment, full of the colours and comforts she denied herself in public, it was her favourite piece of furniture. Now, it was too soft. Sitting on its edge, her skin crawled at the way her shoulders relaxed, at how long it would take her to stand up if someone came at her. Every millisecond counted in an attack.
Ignoring the pounding in her ears - she was better than this - she lay back slowly, stiff as a board and exhaling through her nose. This was fine. She was alone. When her back hit the pillow she swallowed the lump that rose in her throat, staring straight at the ceiling. Her arms buzzed, the hair standing on end and skin sensitive to every breeze.
An hour later, she hadn’t moved.
After ninety minutes, at least twenty of which had been spent thinking about how dumb it was that she couldn’t get to sleep on the Nicest Mattress On The Planet, Rosa heard a noise. She was up in an instant, hand reaching for her pyjama knife. She had just drawn it out of her waistband, gaze sweeping round to find her attacker, when she locked eyes with the culprit. A pigeon, head cocked to the side and eyes wide and guileless. She blinked. It blinked back. The bastard totally knew what it was doing. Resisting the urge to throw her knife at it, she stalked out of her bedroom.
Though it technically contained more spots for an intruder to hide in, the living room felt safer. Maybe it was the lack of bed - the fact that she wasn’t expected to be vulnerable there - or the open plan design that let her count the exactly zero people keeping her company, but her heart rate began to slow.
The clock face on her wall (a simple oval in black and white, she had been going through a minimalist face) showed that it had just gone one in the morning. If she wanted, she could definitely find a bar or a club to continue the party from the earlier evening. Some Scotch, a stranger or two and music loud enough to stop her from clocking every person’s footsteps might be just what she needed.
As quickly as the idea came to her, she pushed it away. All those bodies (significantly drunker now than earlier and probably pressed closer together), grabbing hands and heavy breathing sounded like Hell on Earth. Fuck that.
She could always ask Pimento to come over. He’d been desperate to see her ever since her release - or at least, she thought that was what the incomprehensible set of emojis he’d sent her meant. Either way, he was reliable in an unhinged kind of way, and might even be able to relate to some of what she’d been through, if she ever found the words to tell him.
Words seemed hard, right now. Maybe Pimento could wait another day. Working on an open case wasn’t an option either - she didn’t start back at work until the next week.
"Obviously, Detective Diaz, you can take as much time as you need to… heal… after your time away” said Holt, over a pint of something dark.
“Tomorrow.”
“Detective, I really should insist that you rest a while longer. What you’ve experienced must have been quite traumatic. It’s protocol. Besides, I need to file the paperwork to return your badge.”
“How long will that take?”
“Well, a few days if I sweet-talk Janine from HR, she falls for my killer charm every time, but-”
“Monday.”
“Detective-”
“Sir.”
“Fine. Desk duty.”
“Oh, Diaz is getting to come back to work on Monday? Caaaaptain, I want to come back too!” said Jake, coming up behind Holt with an empty margarita glass in hand. Hadn’t he been drinking beer a moment before?
“Now see what you’ve done, Detective Diaz”.
So casework wasn’t an option. Instead, Rosa fell back into the oldest trick in her book. The exercise mat she usually kept in a cupboard somewhere stood propped against her front door. It had a thin film of dust over it, picked up in a storage locker and not yet brushed away. Her outfit - the tank top and pyjama shorts she’d thrown on before she went to bed - was comfortable enough for her purposes.
She stuck to basic stretches at first, concentrating on her breathing as she grounded herself. It was nice to get her blood flowing from the light exercise rather than the anxieties that had followed her home from prison. Soon, she began to increase the intensity; it wasn’t long before one foot was behind her head. An intense burn shot up the back of her thigh, protesting the exertion after so many months of inactivity. Her gut twisted a little at the thought of how much work she had ahead of her. Ms Miriam, who had loomed over so many torturous ballet classes when she was a child, would be disgusted by how much she had allowed her flexibility to lapse.
Slowly, but not nearly slowly enough, she pulled the stretch tighter. The pain intensified, the burn spreading and the muscle beginning to twitch in warning of an imminent cramp. There was something satisfying about the way it took over her mind, all the other sensations she’d been keyed into before were overpowered by the insistent pain. There was a moment, stand-off tense, where she considered pulling further. How far could she go, before the tendon snapped or the muscle tore? How much pain would she feel, how little else?
She let go of her leg, lowering her foot to the ground with careful control. There was a pang of disappointment in the movement, but she pushed it aside and moved back into more gentle exercises. She wasn’t quite able to divorce the stretches from the shame ingrained by her dance teacher, dance lessons, dance culture, but she could mostly ignore the nasty gnawing at the back of her sternum and just focus on centering herself.
She wondered if Jake was having a better first night of freedom than she was. He’d certainly seemed to be in his element at the bar, once the initial jitters subsided. Maybe it was the alcohol. She’d only had the three shots she’d ordered, right at the start. Something about the dullness it left in her vision made the jumpiness worse. Switching to soda didn’t quite sit right with her - there was something so childish about sipping a coke - but it was easy enough to let people assume there was liquor in it.
Amy hadn’t asked either way, when she’d come over.
She liked Amy. She wasn’t sure when that had become the case - there was definitely a Before Time, when Amy’s rigidity and need for approval from authority had grated on her nerves. Maybe it had stung a little to watch Jake moon over her, even back when only she could see that’s what he was doing. It wasn’t that she was jealous, exactly; maybe envious was the better word. She wasn’t hung up on Jake, had never really considered him as a prospect back when they’d trained together - he’d been immature and egotistical in a way that always seemed dangerous. Still, he was the person at the Nine-Nine that she’d known the longest, and watching him pour his energy into antagonising someone else had rubbed her the wrong way.
Jake’s friendship with Charles had never bothered her quite so much. She decided that wasn’t worth examining.
Here, in the After Time - after enough shared cases, enough side glances over patronising men, enough comfortable silences - she liked Amy. She was clever, and driven, and fuelled by an intrinsic sense of justice that helped to alleviate some of Rosa’s doubts about policing. She was also weirdly insightful, for someone who seemed so often to put her foot in it. It had only taken a couple of rebuffed questions for her to get the picture that Rosa was absolutely not interested in discussing anything that had happened in the last six months. Instead, Amy had launched into a pleasant kind of buzzing ramble, chattering away without expecting much in return. She’d stood beside Rosa, backs both to the wall. She hadn’t expected her to move, and hadn’t stood in front of her or blocked her view of the other patrons or doors. It felt safe.
Amy felt safe. That was odd.
Sighing, Rosa folded up her yoga mat and sent a text to Pimento.