Chapter Text
A string of armed robberies, with three associated deaths, has kept Amy Santiago at the precinct for three days straight. Her hair is shiny with grease, and deodorant is no longer sufficient. She can feel the grime on her teeth – a travel toothbrush in Babylon isn’t cutting it anymore. At this point, she misses her high-power, customized electric toothbrush, sitting dry and unused in her bathroom at home, more than she misses the mattress she usually shares with her boyfriend.
Said boyfriend has been amazing, bringing her coffee and pierogies and fresh suits every day, but she can’t help but feel anger bubble in her stomach every time she sees him. Jake has probably been eating sour gummy worms in bed so that the sugar settles in her empty dent in their mattress. Jake has probably watched the episodes of Jeopardy! she DVRed without her. Jake has probably used her toothbrush because he thinks it makes a funny buzzing noise.
Said boyfriend hid behind her in the briefing room when the case was announced, while she raised her hand high and proud, begging for such a high-profile opportunity. God, she should have known he was the smart one.
Charles, meanwhile, unnoticed by her, had tentatively raised his hand from the table he was sharing with Rosa, who was staring blankly ahead, seeming totally ambivalent about this exciting opportunity to solve a tragic case.
So, instead of spending three days with Jake, whom she loves so much, or with Rosa, her secret best friend, she’s spent it with Charles. She’d even rather spend three days listening to insults from Gina. It’s not that she doesn’t like Jake’s best friend – she does. It’s just that he’s always a bit odd, and he’s been getting weirder.
The longer they’ve been together, the more he stares at her. Frankly, it’s getting a bit creepy. She knows her eyes are bloodshot and her glasses are straight out of the 80’s. She knows that Jake’s NYPD sweatshirt (her absolute favorite, which he dropped off in a bag the morning before when he came into the precinct) is baggy and stained, with holes at the base of the sleeves for him to put his thumbs through. She hasn’t looked this awful since Jake made that bad arrest years ago and she had to wear fat Terry’s old t-shirt.
It doesn’t help that this case has her more run down than she can remember being, maybe ever. It’s been an emotional week – one of the murders was an off-duty beat cop from the 99, who tried to stop the robbery when he happened to walk into the bodega near his building. Tensions have been high, and everyone’s been on edge, adding to the pressure to get this case solved quickly.
Still, Charles doesn’t need to stare so much, and he can stop looking concerned. She’s fine. Just a little feverish. And maybe a bit nauseous. But she’s fine.
It’s six in the morning, and her stomach is feeling awful, but she hasn’t eaten a real meal since lunch the day before, when Jake brought her take-out. The leftovers are still in the break room fridge, and she decides it’s probably time for breakfast. Maybe some food will help settle her stomach and make her head stop spinning.
Charles wakes up from his nap and walks into the break room while she’s putting the plate in the microwave. Before he can lapse into a zoned-out stare again, she decides maybe it’s time to talk about something other than the case (it’s been twelve hours since her last real conversation, and she’s getting desperate).
“So, how’s Nikolaj? Is Genevieve doing okay with you being gone this long?”
Charles perks up instantly. “Oh, he’s doing great. Genevieve knows it’s all part of the job, and it makes the hair-washing all the sweeter when we’ve had a few days to let things build up.”
Amy shudders. She’s not sure if she wants to know whether the buildup is sexual excitement or just dirt in Genevieve’s hair.
Charles doesn’t seem to notice, though. “And Nikolaj loves hearing about all the cop stories – I always find a way to make them a bit more interesting than this, of course. He’s at such a fun age, and Kindergarten is really going well for him! Raising him is such a joy!”
Charles is almost too earnest now, trying a bit too hard to sell how amazing child-rearing is, but Amy figures he’s just tired. She found herself talking to Rosa sometime yesterday about how much she misses the way that Jake cooks chicken nuggets, so she gets it.
“Wasn’t he getting bullied?”
“Ah, yes,” Charles seems to rummage in his head for a moment before returning to his previous enthusiasm for parenting, “but you see, it’s making him stronger! And he’s made a friend – Celia can’t smell, so she has no idea that the wolf-pee incident ever happened!”
At this moment, the microwave beeps. Amy eagerly pulls her plate out as Charles continues to talk about Nikolaj’s love of family cooking time and the beauty of having a third family member to join in their weekly farmers’ market outings. As she catches a whiff, her stomach lurches, but she grabs a fork and takes a bite anyway.
The first bite is great. The second is okay. The third is nearly impossible to swallow. As she tries to make herself cut a fourth, she drops the plate and sprints to Babylon, leaving Charles mid-sentence and making sure to lock the door behind her.
All four bites of “breakfast” come up almost as quickly as they went down. She thanks Gina mentally for the gently heated memory foam footrest that she insisted on installing – Amy’s sure that kneeling on the cold tiles retching would be one step short of hell, but this is at least bearable.
She hears Charles knock on the door.
“Amy? Are you okay? I knew Aladdin’s had bad meat! I should have warned you – they don’t even use grass-fed goat!”
“I’m fine, Charles,” she replies, her voice a bit scratchy. “Just coming down with something. Be back in a sec. You should run the data on the bills they stole again – something might have changed overnight.”
She hears him hesitate at the door, then walk back towards the bullpen. She breathes a sigh of relief, which sends her stomach into a tailspin.
A few minutes and lots of deep breaths later, she manages to get off the floor. She flushes the toilet, sprays some of the scented oils that Rosa added to their haven, and heads back towards Charles.
Charles, thankfully, doesn’t acknowledge the episode when she returns. He just turns around and tells her that the program came back empty again – no luck on any of the stolen bills. There’s a deep sense of frustration in his voice – they haven’t had a good lead in exactly 49 hours and 34 minutes. After a few minutes of discussion about their next moves and their strategy for the day, he tells her to go get some sleep – it’s his turn to pore over their limited evidence and her turn to nap.
Her wakeup, exactly 148 minutes later, is not gentle, but she can’t help but smile anyway. Her goofball of a boyfriend has bounced onto the couch just below her feet, causing the whole thing to creak, and started singing, although a more accurate description might just be shouting.
“Good mooooooorning, Detective Santiago, are your hands and face as clean as miiiiiine? Good moooooooorning, Detective Santiago, I hope you’re feeling fiiiiiine!”
She’s feeling much better than when she went to bed, and her head has stopped spinning. Her mood gets even better when she sees what her boyfriend is holding – a steaming cup of coffee from the coffee shop by their apartment. She could cry she’s so excited for another dose of caffeine.
She’s sitting up, reaching out to simultaneously grab the coffee and kiss him, knowing already he’ll lean away, pretending to be disgusted by her breath before leaning in and kissing her back. Three days ago, she would have been horrified by such a public display of affection. Now, though, she just wants to feel like she’s home for a few precious seconds.
As she props herself up, she sees Charles watching them out of the corner of her eye. Doesn’t matter, she reminds herself as she leans towards the man who is currently her favorite person on the planet – after all, he may be using her toothbrush, but he has coffee. Not even cold break room coffee – good coffee.
With her hand mere inches from the steaming cup of life-giving liquid, a squealing blur shoots towards Jake. She’s knocked aside, and she watches helplessly as the coffee clatters to the tile floor and the lid pops off. For a brief moment, the sleep-deprived part of her brain is considering trying to wipe it off the floor and back into the cup, but she shakes it off and turns back to Jake, who is now being given a koala hug by Charles.
“Jake! I missed you! Did you sleep okay without Amy? It’s been so long since you’ve seen her – oh, your reunion will be so sweet!” At that moment, he seems to remember what he interrupted, disentangles himself, and takes a step back. “Sorry! Carry on!”
“Charles.” Amy growls. She’s sure that her death glare in this moment is as scary as anything that Rosa could pull off. “You. Spilled. My. Coffee.”
“Oh, you thought that was for you?” Jake tries to sound surprised, but the crinkles by his eyes give him away, so she just punches him in the shoulder.
“Go away, Charles,” Jake says without looking away from Amy.
“Alllright, lovebirds,” Charles replies smugly, and he actually walks away.
Jake pulls his now-angry girlfriend into a hug and whispers, “Charles sucks. But don’t worry – I’ll get you more coffee on my break, okay? First chance I get.”
Amy looks up at Jake to thank him, but before she can form the words, he puts a hand over her mouth, gently forcing her face back towards his chest. “Dude, your breath is rank. That’s it – I’m bringing you the San-tooth-iago 3000 tonight.”
At ten that morning, Jake returns from an easy bust with another coffee in his hands. The moment the elevator opens, she can feel the tension in her shoulders relax. Then, as she sees what’s in his other hand, she almost wiggles in her seat with excitement. What can she say? She’s tired.
Jake Peralta, despite all his flaws and his penchant for messes and chaos, may be the best boyfriend on the planet because in his left hand, he’s clutching a bag from her favorite deli. She would bet her favorite toothbrush and her nicest cleaning products that it contains a turkey club, freshly toasted and ready to be consumed by a starving, miserable detective who hasn’t had a solid meal in 21 hours and 46 minutes (not that anyone’s counting).
Charles has looked up from his conversation, too. Scully keeps droning on – Charles had asked about a crime Scully had solved back in the 80s that has some strange parallels to the current string of robberies – but Charles has frozen. Then, he interrupts Scully and whispers something Amy can’t hear. Scully gets up and lumbers towards Jake, intercepting him mere feet from Amy’s growling stomach and caffeine headache.
“Jakey! You brought me a midmorning snack!”
“What? No! I bought this – get your own food!” Jake tries to pull the sandwich out of Scully’s reach, but it’s too late. Before he can really react, the sandwich is out of the bag and halfway into Scully’s mouth, wrapper and all.
Jake is frozen, jaw dropped, as Scully tears the paper with his teeth to get another bite. His bare feet are covered in peeling skin, and the smell, combined with the smell of the turkey sandwich wafting to her on the air conditioned air, is enough to make anyone gag. Amy swallows hard and notices that Scully has grabbed the coffee out of Jake’s other hand and is gulping it down like a college freshman chugging a beer – messy and way too fast.
The last time she saw Jake this confused was during the episode of How It’s Made where he learned that horse hooves are used to make Jell-O. Scully, meanwhile, is in hog heaven.
This whole episode can’t last more than ten seconds – then Scully is done, handing Jake back the bag and the empty coffee cup, lid removed.
Jake plops down in his chair and hands Amy the bag of chips Scully didn’t notice at the bottom of the bag. “Sorry, dude.”
“Happens to the best of us – we should work on your reflexes, though. You have to be able to beat Scully.”
Charles walks by, looking suspiciously happy and unapologetic. “Sorry, guys! I tried to stop him! Amy, when you have a sec, I think we might have an actual lead!”
“He’s getting weird,” Amy tells Jake with an eye roll. “Can I send him home to Genevieve for a while? I think all his weirdness is getting pent up and unleashed on me at random times of night.”
“Honestly, you might have to send him to Lynn for a few days – this might be too much for even Genevieve to handle. And what if Nikolaj is in the room? We can’t be responsible for scarring a child like that!”
Amy joins Charles in the break room, where he’s settled at the table so he can spread out all of the various papers outlining a string of B&Es from Scully’s early years on the force, all with the same calling card as the more recent armed robberies. Every single time, five shots in the wall in a perfect circle.
Before she sits down, she starts the coffee maker. It may be old, and the coffee may be weak and undrinkable, but it’s better than nothing.
Amy can only half-concentrate on the theory that Charles has outlined in front of her. She’s a caffeine addict at the best of times, and she’s now approaching a full day since her last fix. She feels her headache disappearing, however, as Charles keeps talking. Amy is getting increasingly excited as she sees that they have a coherent theory, and thus a list of suspects. Patterns begin to emerge, and only a few minutes later, they have a list of suspects and are beginning to work on possible locations.
When the coffeemaker beeps a few minutes later, Amy barely notices. She’s busy with a piece of scrap paper, scrawling out a list of connections between the locations and the small band of suspects. This was her first mistake.
Charles gets up to get it for her, and it’s only as his chair scrapes back that she remembers that he’s already ruined two cups of coffee for her today. She tries to protest, but it’s too late. Charles is pouring coffee into a mug when the handle snaps. The pot falls, glass shattering on the floor as coffee sprays across the room.
Amy shakes off the coffee droplets that hit her face, caffeine headache back in full force now that she’s been distracted from the work.
“CHARLES!” she screams. She hasn’t been this mad since her brother Mateo spray painted the walls of their shared room when she was six, getting flecks of blue paint in all of her dolls’ hair.
Rosa and Gina appear in the door of the break room, looking interested. “Ooooh, a quarrel,” Gina says. She pulls out her phone and begins filming.
Rosa crosses her arms as she leans against the door frame. “Damn, Santiago, what’d he do?”
“HE BROKE THE COFFEEMAKER.”
“Wow, Amy. I’m a little impressed – you’re almost intimidating!” Gina raises her eyebrows, seeming genuinely interested in how this plays out.
Charles, meanwhile, is looking terrified. Amy is sure she must look insane, but she can’t bring herself to care. She stalks over to him and grabs him by the shirt. Rosa cheers and Gina gasps as she glares down at her slightly shorter friend.
“I swear to God, Charles, if you ruin one more cup of coffee for me, someone will have to arrest me because you’ll. be. dead.” She holds onto his shirt for another few seconds and then stalks out, feeling only a little guilty as he squeaks and smooths out his shirt behind her.
Ten hours after that, they’ve made their bust. The robbers were hiding out in a closet on the top floor of a local building owned by the ringleader. Guns were drawn, but no shots were fired, and they’re finally done.
By all standards, it was a fairly routine bust. Even if Charles was unbelievably twitchy as they put on their Kevlar vests to go in and squealed out loud when a gun was pointed at Amy.
Amy’s last stop before she goes home to crash is Shaw’s, for a celebratory drink with the squad. Holt is visibly proud of her, which almost makes up for the sheer exhaustion that is clouding her head. He shakes her hand firmly and nods approvingly – enough validation to last her a month, easy.
Beer in hand, Amy leaves Holt and walks over to Charles to congratulate him. It was his idea to talk to Scully, a shockingly brilliant move she never would have considered.
Before she can open her mouth, he cuts her off. “Ooh, that’s my favorite kind of beer!” he exclaims, pointing at her drink. “Can I have some?”
“Charles, you hate the entire premise of beer. You always say it’s not worth downing piss when you could have a mojito instead.”
“Yes, but that beer looks great!” His voice is weirdly high pitched, and he squeaks as she takes a sip. She snaps and drags him outside, handing her beer to Jake as she passes him.
When the door to Shaw’s swings shut behind them, she turns to confront her boyfriend’s best friend.
“What is up with you, man? You’ve been weird – weirder than normal – for two days now, and I’m about to lose it!”
Charles is weirdly confident in the face of an angry friend on the verge of punching him. “Amy, you have to protect and nurture the rich broth of amniotic fluid being generated inside you at this very moment. Improper nutrition is like a bad herb – it ruins the whole thing and hurts the baby! You’d never put carrots in marrow broth!”
“What does my liquid consumption have to do with marrow broth?” Amy tried to follow, but she’s thoroughly lost.
“Amy, that sip of beer will be crossing the placenta in a few short hours! The beer is the carrots, and your baby’s about to eat that bad broth! And no caffeine or cold cuts, either! You have to protect that ute, girl, and you’ve broken basically every rule! It’s been up to me to keep baby Peraltiago safe, and that’s been hard! Do you have any idea how many times your eating habits and work decisions have put it in danger today alone? There were guns! And cold cuts!”
“Charles!” she cuts him off, disgusted. “How many times do we have to go over the no-talking-about-my-uterus rule? And the no-calling-it-a-ute rule?”
He stares at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to catch up with him. He can tell when it hits – her eyes go wide and her frown deepens.
“I’m not pregnant, Charles!”
“Mhmm…” Charles has relaxed his position, crossing his arms and looking self-satisfied as he does his best insinuating tone.
“I’m not! Trust me – I’d know!”
“Alright! Don’t trust your resident reproductive health expert, new mama. Your call!” He turns around and heads back inside, ignoring her as she calls out one more denial at his back.
God, he’s the worst, she thinks as she returns inside to convince Jake it’s time to go home and finally brush her teeth.
Holt gives Amy and Charles the next few days off, to rest up and return to normalcy. Jake and Rosa take care of the rest of the processing, tracking down a few stray accomplices and building a case.
When Charles returns to work, exactly seven days after he first volunteered for the hell case, he sees a pink sticky note on his computer. It contains only four words in extremely recognizable handwriting, which looks more like typeface than a real person’s script.
You were right. -Amy