Chapter Text
1990.
Amy’s purple one-piece is a hand-me-down from her cousin Nina, but that’s okay. None of her brothers mind. David is laughing, unaware that the remains of a Captain America popsicle are dribbling down his chin (that’s the only way he’d ever allow it, Amy knows. He insists on bringing handkerchiefs everywhere, to all their brothers’ chagrin.)
David clambers up the steps of a five-foot diving board, his hair black and oily in the familiar July scorch. She can see the water droplets evaporate on the concrete, and Luis starts humming the Jaws song, bobbing his head up and down with the notes. Amy rolls her eyes, pushing a ripple of water in his direction.
Of course they all play waterbenders. What, like they’re going to ignore the perfect opportunity?
“Jump!” Amy calls to David. And, sensing an inkling of hesitation, “No one else has taken a dive yet!”
2005.
There’s nothing quite so different, so dangerous, as plunging your head under the current. It’s the last thought that occurs to Amy before her eyes are squeezed shut, lashes still dark as saltwater chips away at her mascara. The waves are bitter to her tonight. They’ve never been much for company, she remarks to herself, cynical as midnight tides crest around her.
Amy’s chest stings with the memory of hitting the water, like sparks flying about her body. Dry one second and drenched the next, she’d made a desperate thrash into the current, her hand still splintered from the last, perilous moments she’d clung onto the dock from below the planks. And then her fingers lost their grip, the water not only unfamiliar but unwanted. Amy comes to the surface, limbs outstretched subconsciously, memories always coming back to her.
She thinks about the summers she fears she’ll never get again. She empties herself out for the nostalgia.
The sea is wine-dark, calm with fog overhead. Mind deprived of every basic need, Amy nods off. Tangled among the waves, limp and unwanted, there she drifts, forcedly silent as the sky cracks open with the first vision of the sun.
Have you saved him this time? Is this the last favor you’ll have to do? A voice in her head asks.
And, after a second, for whom else would you have risked it all?
2011.
Amy Santiago doesn’t truly look at Jake Peralta’s face until a month into their partnership as hacker and thief. She’s glanced past him more times than she can count, taken head-to-toe inventories of his outfits and given a thumbs-up before he scales down a twenty-story skyscraper, but she never lets her gaze linger. He makes her nervous.
Jake Peralta came out of nothing, the whispers say. Rags to riches, grief to glory, brick by brick has he been brokenly molded. He doesn’t have a mugshot, only blurry witnessings and misremembered police sketches. No one can quite recognize him.
Jake Peralta is suave, and dishonest, and proud of the empire he seems to have built. He’ll steal your watch before it finishes ticking from one second to another, they say. He’ll choke the life out of your lungs and sell the oxygen for a profit. His fingertips leave scars when they scrape against someone else’s, callused beyond repair. People claim he prefers it that way, undeniably untouchable.
The moment Amy sets eyes on him, they’re walking back to headquarters with another case solved. She takes notice of the crease of his rare smile, the slight curl of his hair. He looks younger than he says he is. Innocent, even. Amy mumbles some throwaway observation under her breath, a bad habit from spending too much time alone, and Jake walks straight into a lamppost with a resounding clang.
Amy remembers the groan he lets out, the all-too-familiar crack of bone in the air as he hobbles to a park bench, eyes half-closed. She wonders if he’s used to hearing other people’s joints snap, rather than his own, before realizing the rumors have unraveled around him. Jake Peralta is not dangerous, and he is not dark, and he couldn’t possibly steal the rubies off of a Fabergé egg, as the gossip goes.
He tilts his head back to relieve his bloody nose and, through a grimace, asks, “You think I look young?”
““You heard?!” Amy exclaims, voice then dropping in volume as she covertly passes him a stash of tissues from one of her tens of pockets. “I didn’t know you’d hear that. Obviously, I was wrong.”
Jake groans, pressing a fistful of Kleenex against the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t think hackers could cause any damage just walking down the street.”
Amy turns to see his face, still a little pink with the sting of bloodflow. The capillaries in his skin look a little cracked, but she may be reading into things. “Didn’t think anyone suspected for robbery in three continents would miss seeing that pole. Aren’t you supposed to notice things like that?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
Jake has a nice laugh. She’s cautiously admired it under the guise of professional interest, pursed her lips to keep from appreciating it as much as she does. It’s difficult to ignore him, that’s for sure. People call him the shadow, illustrious and silent. They say he weaves words like spider’s thread. He has a captivating energy she can’t quite name; his name has run through her mind countless times; the stories turn to dust, the curtain drops, the legacy loses its glint.
Jake sits on that park bench, all rolled-up tissues and the occasional “there’s blood on my shirt!”, looking like a perfect mess. It’s endearing. That’s the first time she notices.
“Hey, listen, I ought to be embarrassed,” Jake says after a long while. He laughs, but only briefly. “I was wondering when I’d finally hear what you thought of me. Your reputation precedes you, Santiago.”
She’s heard the gossip, even if she ignores it.
The Santiagos are legends, all of them. Her family is grandiose and glorified, with knife-sharp wit. Their hands are never idle, and their spirits are never weak.
Amy went to a private school, uniform neatly ironed every morning, and her teachers wrote her college recommendation letters years in advance. Amy went to the library day in, day out, and she buried her head in books until the words tattooed themselves onto her. Amy went through the shortcuts, the twists and turns of the hallways, crossed the reading nook in the bookstore past the secret passageway.
Amy went all the right places until, one day, someone else decided her family needed a little payback. She doesn’t steal, doesn’t cheat, doesn’t even tell a little white lie until something valuable gets taken from her. Someone is more like it.
“You’ve heard about my brother, then, Peralta?”
Amy, they say, was a family disappointment, the daughter erased from the pages. They think she was a little too smart for her own good. Truth be told, she didn’t hate the phrase ‘the canvas is my canvas,’ and she didn’t start stealing priceless art or hacking into federal databases on some whim.
We want a ransom, a handwritten note slipped under the door says, and Amy puts her humanity down as collateral trying to pay the thieves back.
Clean-cut college girls don’t commit fraud without a good cause. Even the rumors know that.
2012.
Amy uses a fake name around her recently-found heist crew. What are they going to do, look her up? She’s their IT genius. Amy (well, Valerie) has all the control. She resolves to never tell the truth, leaving it behind in the dust. She now lives a life of getaway cars and spinning locks, eye masks and guns pressed in between shoulderblades. This is the revelation of a lifetime, and she’s basking in its light.
Lie number one: I started stealing paintings because I hated the phrase “the canvas is my canvas.”
Lie number two: Five of my seven brothers are dead. The answer’s actually four.
Amy hinges all her hopes on the flickering notion that David may still be out there, waiting for her, begging to be rescued and taken home. That’s why she’s in this business. Not for the greater good, but for the mere chance that his life can be redeemed.
2015.
Amy can’t tell who else has figured out her … history. That’s the thing about people, she thinks, a glimpse or two of regret shining through. You can’t learn what they know unless you remind them, and then you’re trapped in a catch-22 for longer than you’ll know. Computers are cut-and-dry, all protocols and perfect symmetry. Safes have passcodes, locks have keys. You need never mess with something longer than necessary.
But people? Jake Peralta, her best friend? Fiddly, finicky, difficult to the core. All emotions and no peace.
David was like that, independent since birth. Some days, Amy engulfs herself in his memory, and her throat wells up as she thinks about him. David never drank coffee. He’d always refused to see Hamilton, despite her insistence that he looked just like the playwright. He even had that smooth, ten-out-of-ten, wink-and-turn-your-head glance down cold.
And he walks through his sister’s thoughts over and over, leaving ashen footprints where he’s already been. Amy remembers David dearly. His name had been her first word, and their mother had been jealous for weeks. Both she and Camila had crumpled to their knees at his funeral, rosary beads leaving red, circular marks in their palms. Her mother had gazed to his empty coffin and pleaded to a higher power for his safe return. Amy had resolved to do something about it.
No, she hadn’t turned to crime because she’d hated the phrase “the canvas is my canvas.” It’d been the one to make Tony and Luis laugh, actually, and she fondly looks back on them. Bless their souls, but enough was enough. There were so many black dresses in Amy’s closet, she’d lost count. Amy was sick of startling phone calls, fed up with the five stages of grief, shattered on each heartbreak that dared to come her way.
She sells her car, cuts up her credit cards, and drowns herself in an attempt to pull her brother from the waters. Nothing else will do. She needs flesh-and-blood proof that David can be saved, that he isn’t just another unmarked grave or empty coffin.
2019.
First date.
This night is something else, Amy knows, her hands trailing along Jake’s sides, the white lies she told him about her family buried under the weight of the moment. His shoes slip to the ground. He fumbles restlessly for the zipper of her dress, until she murmurs it’s on the side. (He replies that he would’ve checked there next, if she weren’t quite so distracting.) Amy’s voice slips into an echo, then a sigh, then nothing at all. He follows her wherever she goes. Nothing safe is worth the drive, after all.
“So, we broke a rule,” Jake says, letting the silence ruin itself.
“Hope it wasn’t a mistake,” Amy replies, then laughs, turning over in bed to gently trace over Jake’s jawline with her thumb. “For what it’s worth, I had an excellent time making that mistake with you.”
“You’re so good at everything, Ames, how am I supposed to keep up?”
Jake gives her a signature grin, soft among all the jagged edges they’re hiding, and looks at her in a new light. She isn’t Amy Santiago, computer genius. She isn’t a persona, or a runaway, or a mirage. She’s just his girlfriend, and he breathes freshly, more easily, with that last thought.
“If you want, I can show you how,” Amy murmurs, lazily checking the time on her watch. “You know, they say practice makes perfect.” Her fingers run over the crook of his collarbone, newly and prettily bruised.
Joy, untainted, overcomes her. Forget the conspiracies and the thrill of the chase, forget the newspaper clippings and sticky notes covering the various charts in her storage compartments. It isn’t that she stops caring about her past, but she feels at peace with it in this moment.
“Not a bad idea,” Jake says, biting his lip. The bedsheets rustle as he shifts, cupping her cheek and moving to kiss her neck. “You okay with hickeys?”
Amy blushes under his touch. “Mm-hm, I’m more than okay. But just … lower down, you get my drift?”
“Here?”
She shakes her head. “No, try a little lower.”
Jake laughs, grips her hipbones, and waits for her subtle reassurance. His thumbs press into her skin. “You’re gonna be the death of me… but, oh, oh, what a way to go.”
2019.
In Amy’s dreams, it always goes like this: she and the crew, armed with courage and an extra dose of ambition, find David. His picture disappears from the Santiagos’ mantel in favor of the real thing. He still has annoying long eyelashes and goes on rants about how unrealistic Jurassic Park was, and he’s still her favorite (well, most tolerable) brother.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” Charles always coaxes. He’s very transparent about his son Nikolaj’s death, and how that led him to become the man he is today.
No, Amy thinks, she can’t. She has no clue whatsoever if the crew can even help her find David. Part of the agreement is that she can’t talk about him. So Amy lingers, left to her own devices, burning at both ends and pleading for her brother’s safe return.
In dreams, it goes like this: she wakes up every time, eyes dry.