Archive of Our Own

Sometimes, Jake wakes up in the middle of the night, the weight of the world compressing his chest, convinced that he’s back in the six-by-eight room in the cold. That he’s going to have to go back to just existing. To constantly being on the verge of tears, wishing with everything inside of his body to be anywhere else in the world but here.

It usually takes him a few minutes to figure it out, by the soft bed and the smell of clean sheets, and the warm weight beside him, who shifts closer to him every time he wakes himself up with a shudder, like even asleep Amy knows that he needs her.

He used to wake up screaming, sometimes, and there was the whole flinching-when-someone-touched-him-unexpectedly thing, but then one day he gets home from work to find that his mom has forwarded him a TED talk about mindfulness. He thinks it’s dumb at first, because he’s ok, he really is, but the dark circles under Amy’s eyes persuade him to pick it up, because it’s hard work to make an actual person (especially, he thinks, with this particular person being half him) and she deserves for him to be better. He watches it on 1.5X speed and it teaches him about grounding himself, about counting the things you can see, and hear, and feel, and smell. Months pass and those things all change, but eventually when he wakes up in the middle of the night it’s just a shudder, like he’s dreaming of falling (which in a way, he guesses, he is).

There’s a ring on his finger now, and sometimes just twisting it around with the index finger on his other hand, feeling the shallow notches in the metal, helps him to concentrate on slowing down his breaths to keep in time with Amy’s.

Sometimes he’ll wake up and there will be a foot right next to his face, bare toes inches from his open eyes. Leo likes to sleep in the bed the wrong way up with all of his limbs spread out like a starfish, which is cool in his own bed but not so great when he crawls in at midnight after a nightmare and kicks his parents in the face. He’s a frequent nightmare sufferer too, and it kills Jake to hear him sobbing so hard that he can’t catch a breath, rubbing his brown eyes red with tiredness.

Sometimes, when he wakes up, he forgets he’s a dad of two (two!) for twenty seconds or so, and it feels like there’s something missing, something seriously and catastrophically wrong. And then he remembers the look in Leo’s eyes the first time they took him to the planetarium, and the shaky way Mia learned to take her first steps.

He’d never tell Leo, but actually, sometimes the easiest way to recover from a nightmare is to wake up to find your son holding onto your fingers with his whole fist, or watch him snuggling closer to your wife in his sleep.

--

On Sundays, they go out for breakfast. They eat cereal or toast or bagels on weekdays, but Sundays, they decide, are special. The truth is that they tried to make pancakes together when Leo started eating proper solid food, and they wanted to make him something special. But thirty minutes later and Amy had managed to get some of the mix in her eye, and two minutes after that and there were somehow flames in the kitchen. Amy had put it out in thirty seconds flat whilst Jake had grabbed the baby and stood by the open door, and then they had taken him to the hospital just to make sure that there was no smoke damage to his lungs. Amy insisted on getting three separate opinions that Leo was just fine, and then, several hours later and still not having eaten, they finally went out to eat on their way home. Thus, a tradition was born. 

This week though, there’s a blue line slashing right through the weekend on the big hanging calendar in their kitchen. They each have their own colour, all four of the pens stuck magnetically onto the fridge (high up on the fridge, out of reach of the babies. Jake’s learned from his mistakes. It was one time). Blue is for Amy, orange is for Jake, red is for Leo, green is for Mia, and Purple is miscellaneous. The green pen isn’t used very much on account of Mia’s quiet sixteen-month-old schedule.

The thing that’s scaring Jake now, looking at the calendar, is the big orange lettering, marking the box which is now only one day away. Jake’s last day. Amy wrote it, and Jake traces it with his index finger, jumping as the microwave beeps and Leo’s oatmeal is ready.

“Here you go, bud,” Jake puts the bowl down in front of his four-year-old, the ceramic warm to the touch. “Be careful. It’s hot,” he warns his son.

“I know that, dad,” Leo insists, placing his spoon into the bowl and then sitting back, waiting for it to cool down enough to eat.

“When did you get to be so smart, huh?” Jake asks, ruffling Leo’s hair as he walks past to get Mia’s breakfast ready. It feels like such a dad thing to do, ruffling his kid’s hair, that he’s smiling to himself as he strides over to the pantry.

“I’m four now. I know things,” Leo says, carefully straightening his hair out. “When’s mommy back?”

“Well,” Jake tips out some rice cereal out in front of Mia. She picks up a fistful, gurgling happily, and Jake’s heart feels so full that he has to lean down to kiss the top of her head. Her hair is dark and thick and smells like the sunshine. “Mom’s a lieutenant now, remember? We talked about it?”

“Oh,” Leo looks down at his lap, a little sad. “So she works all of the weekends now?”

“Not every weekend,” Jake explains, now pouring himself a bowl of Cheerios. He’d have Lucky Charms, but every time he has them Leo wants them too, and they don’t want him eating that much sugar. Leo doesn’t handle sugar too well. “It’s just busy right now. There’s a lot of things changing.”

The last time there had been a lot of change around here, in a work sense, anyway, he’d found himself kissing Amy Santiago in the evidence lock up, and he’s never been so thankful for change before because now he has all of this. This wonderful life, full of his wonderful people.

It’s just that maybe that was enough change, just the right degree of it. Because now it’s the kind of change which means his life is going to adjust monumentally, and he won’t ever, ever be able to go back to how things were. Sure, it was kind of like that when Leo was born. It was crazy, and exhausting, and he’s different now from what he was before. But really fatherhood was just adding two new players to his team, and it’s the best thing, being a dad. He’d never want to go back.

“Will you have to work all the weekends too, when you’re a sarnant?” Leo asks, concern in his voice.

“It’s sergeant, Lilo,” Jake tells him, using the nickname they had given him when he was learning how to string sentences together and they had watched Lilo and Stitch for the first time. Lilo! My name! He had been insistent that the two names were the same, so they kind of went with it.

“I know! I was just joking.” Leo says, reaching out to clutch his spoon. He’s so stubborn, and Jake’s dreading his teenage years.

“I won’t have to work all the weekends, and neither will mom. We’d miss you guys too much,” Jake says, smiling at the two of them again, a little anxiety curling in his stomach at the thought of being an actual sergeant.

He, Charles, and Rosa had taken the exam together a few months back, whilst Amy had taken the lieutenant’s exam. Jake had been unsure about whether or not he should do it, because just like Amy had been freaking out about the change when she took her sergeant’s exam, he had found himself back upon that roof on the night before the test application deadline. It had taken Amy all of twenty minutes to find him, and five of them had been taken up by stopping at the corner store nearby and buying a bag of peanuts. They’d spent thirty minutes talking, and trying to catch nuts in their mouths in between sentences. But then the sitter had called, and they’d looked at each other and realised how damn far they had come since the night of that first bet, and how much had changed even since the last time they were on the roof when Amy did her sergeant’s exam.

They had decided, together, right then and there that they could handle a little more change (or even a lot more, because they’re kind of surprisingly ok at this whole life thing). Jake had gone home and hugged the babies tight, and then promptly sent off the test application.  

The four of them had studied together, all feeling a little uneasy about what would happen afterwards, and whether they would be reassigned and scattered across Brooklyn, none of them actually speaking about it because promotion is supposed to be a big, exciting adventure, not something you’re scared you’re going to regret.

A week before the test and there had been some big scandal involving the Vulture and Major Crimes, resulting in his resignation and a shake-up of the whole department, and suddenly they were head-hunting Terry and the change had begun sooner than anyone thought. But Terry leaving meant that a lieutenant position had opened up at the Nine-Nine, along with the sergeant position vacated by Amy.

There was a period of six weeks, after they had all passed their respective exams, filled with interviews and uncertainty. Then Terry had called Jake to meet with him and the Major Crimes guys, and suddenly Jake found himself breaking the news to Amy that he would be leaving the Nine-Nine, and feeling his heart break just a little bit (ok, it’s a lot. He thinks he can feel pieces of it chipping away with every new person he tells). But Amy’s going to be staying there, taking up Terry’s old job, and Charles secures sergeant, and Rosa’s assigned to the Seven-Four to head up a new taskforce. And it’s all moving too quickly and his life is rearranging itself into something unrecognisable, and he finds himself sitting at the kitchen table after putting the babies to bed one night and looking through all of the old selfies on his Facebook page and he just can’t believe that this huge, wonderful, maddening chapter of his life is just over.

“Can we go now?” Leo’s voice breaks him out of his thoughts and back to the present, snapping him out of it to soggy cereal and a spilled juice cup courtesy of his daughter.

“Oh. Right, the park,” Jake scoops a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and then sets about cleaning up his children and the dining room table.

--

Just like how Jake grew up with Gina, his son is growing up with her daughter. Indigo Enigma Boyle-Linetti has long blonde hair, a collection of neon clip on fairy wings, and a fierce kick. Jake has a scar on his left shin from where her miniature biker boots had connected with the bone when he tried to rescue her from a set of monkey bars that she was about to fall off of a year ago. Indigo also has three moms.

If you’d told Jake, five years ago, that Gina would get pregnant with a Boyle cousin, and then break up with said Boyle cousin six months into the baby’s life, he would have been hesitant to believe you, and a little sad to hear that their relationship hadn’t worked out. But he wouldn’t have staked his life on it being a lie. What he would have staked his life on being a lie, however, was Rosa calling him five months later and asking him to help her move her stuff into Gina’s apartment.

It had been a month of sleepless nights, up at all hours of the night with a sick Leo, who spent most of his first year of life with a stuffed up nose, and when he had taken the call he was sure he had heard Rosa wrong.

“Aren’t you… aren’t you still with Pimento?” He’d asked, desperately trying to rub the tiredness out of his eyes.

“What? Jake, no, we broke up like six months ago,” Rosa had said, exasperation in her voice.

“What? Why did I not know about this?”

“Colic month,” Rosa explained.

“Oh. Yeah, that was a bad one,” Jake had grimaced at the memory. “But still, I feel like I should know, y’know, stuff about your life. And I’m – wait, wait, wait. Why are you moving in with Gina?” His eyes had scrunched shut, bracing himself for some hare-brained Gina-scheme.

“Dude. Gina’s my girlfriend.”

“She… what? Amy? Ames? Babe? Did you know about this?” He’d stood up, the blood rushing to his head, almost dropping the phone. “Ow. Ames?”

“I’m right here,” Amy had yawned, stumbling into the room, Leo whimpering a little as she held him in the crook of her arm.

“How did you get here so– never mind, more important things. Gina and Rosa. Did you know that this was a thing?”

“Uh,” Amy had squinted, biting her lip in concentration. “I did. I definitely did,” she’d nodded, certainty in her voice. Her hair had been in a messy braid, hanging across one shoulder, more loose strands of hair falling out of it with every head movement. It had framed her face just so, and he grew distracted for a few seconds by how pretty she looked, even after far too many sleepless nights.

“Did you tell Amy and not me?” Jake had asked the phone, bringing it back up to his ear.

“Jake. The phone’s upside down,” Amy had reached out with her free, baby-less hand to turn it around.

“Oh. You’re the best. I love you. I love you but I’m so tired – Rosa! You’re back.”

“I told Amy. And Gina said she wanted to tell you, but I guess she didn’t get around to it,” Rosa had explained.

“Ok. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool,” Jake’s brain had struggled to process the information that two of his oldest, and closest friends were actually together. “I’m really sorry I haven’t been switched on lately.”

“Don’t be. It doesn’t matter. Just come and help me move in,” Rosa had said. So he had.

He’d apologised properly later, after a real amount of sleep, and then he got to watch the three of them – Gina, Rosa, and Indigo, become a family, and that had been that.

A year after that and Milton had found a new long-term girlfriend, Alice, who loved Indigo too, and so she had found herself with one dad, and three moms.

--

They drive to the park with the windows wound down, letting in the spring air, and Awesome Mix Vol. 2 turned up to as loud as Jake dares with his babies in the car. There’s a mirror on the seat where Mia’s car seat is strapped in, so that when he stops at a red light he can look into his rear-view mirror and see her chewing on her stuffed giraffe. She’s got a pink sun hat on and he can’t wait to squish her cheeks when they get to the park. Leo’s got a picture book about the Jurassic Period from the Natural History Museum and he’s memorised the names of all of the dinosaurs, reciting them the whole way to the park as Jake listens, amazed by the smart little boy his son is growing into.

“Daddy. Which is your favourite?” Leo asks, as they pile out of the car once they’ve reached their destination.

“T-rex. Definitely.” Jake’s thinking about Jurassic Park, which he hasn’t shown Leo in fear that he’d have nightmares every night for the rest of his life. Leo might be smart, but he’s also scared of everything.

“T-rex is a large therapod. Did you know that?” Leo asks, the words lisping a little in his four-year-old voice.

“I did not know that, Lilo,” Jake admits, pulling Mia out of her car seat and into his arms. She can walk just fine, but she prefers to crawl, or sometimes to slither on her stomach. Leo was walking all the time by nine months, but Mia likes to take life at a slower pace. “Who taught you that?”

“Captain Ray,” Leo says as they begin walking towards the grass.

“He did, huh?” It turned out that Jake’s own father was as terrible at being a grandpa as he was at being a dad. So just like how Captain Holt had stepped in for Jake, he had stepped in for Leo and Mia too.

It had started with a couple of minutes watching Leo at the precinct, between Karen dropping him off from watching him, and Jake’s shift finishing, but they’d bonded, and the Peralta-Santiago family had become frequent visitors to the Holt-Cozner household.

“Can we sit here?” Leo asks, pointing to a spot underneath a tree a few minutes’ walk later. It’s relatively shaded and overlooks the playground, so Jake agrees and sets Mia down, pulling out the red striped blanket from the baby bag for them all to sit on. Mia has taken off and begun to crawl down the hill.

“Mia! No. You’re not allowed to go anywhere unless you can walk there! You can’t spend your whole life crawling. You’ll have terrible knees if nothing else,” Jake jokes, reeling his daughter back in by her soft grey shoes.

“Tia Rosa is here,” Leo announces, distracting Jake by pointing down to where Rosa is making her way over to them, Indigo on her shoulders. They couldn’t look more different, with Rosa dressed all in black, and Indigo in various shades of pink and purple, with the exception of some black fairy wings which are clipped onto her dress.

It makes a strange kind of happiness sink into his skin, watching Rosa, who kept a razor blade under her tongue for most of her life, smiling at Indigo as she lifts her to the ground. Leo looks at Jake for permission before running down to meet his best friend, and Jake watches them almost running headlong into each other before Rosa swoops in and lifts Indigo a foot off the ground to avoid them cracking their skulls together. Once Leo has stopped, Rosa puts Indigo down again and the four-year-olds throw their arms around each other. They’re both small for their age, with Indigo having a few inches on Leo at this point. Jake watches them go into the playground.

“Our kids are idiots,” Rosa says, voice filled with affection, as she approaches Jake. He’s still holding onto Mia’s foot, and she’s growing increasingly wiggly, trying to break free.

“My kid can name about eighty different types of dinosaur. I think you’ll find that was your kid’s fault,” Jake teases as Rosa sits down.

“Jake,” Rosa gestures to Mia, “your kid is about to eat a snail.”

“What?” Jake snaps to look at Mia, who has a large snail in her fist and is about to put it in her mouth. “Mia! No!” He lets go of her foot and lunges for the snail, prying it from her vice-like grip. “Mia! We don’t eat snails. He probably has a family, and kids. You wouldn’t want someone to try to eat your dad, would you?” Jake succeeds at setting the snail free, relatively unharmed. “Ok. Another sentence I never thought I’d say.” He lets go of Mia, his eyes glued to her as she crawls into the grass and sits down to suck her hands. Jake realises that there’s probably snail slime on them, and resolves to never tell Amy about what just happened. “So how’s things?” He asks Rosa, attempting to keep an eye on Mia whilst talking to Rosa at the same time.

“Gina told me to tell you she’s worried about Mia,” Rosa says, “It’s not gonna be a good month for Capricorns apparently,” she shrugs.

“What does that mean? Is it to do with the snail?” Jake asks, wincing a little.

“I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that last month it was supposed to be a bad one for Indigo, and now our entire home still smells like Wisteria. And our fog machine’s broken.”

“That’s a weirdly specific smell.”

“Yeah.”

“So aside from that? Things are good?” Jake guesses.

“Yeah, things are good, I’m just… our last day’s coming up, y’know?”

“Yeah. I do know,” Jake frowns. “I was staring at the date on the calendar for the full two-minute oatmeal cycle this morning.”

“Wow. The full two minutes?” Rosa deadpans, raising her eyebrows at him. “But, seriously. Did we make the right decision? Should we have just kept things how they were?” Jake considers the question, watching Mia begin to crawl towards him again.

“I think that we sat those exams for a reason. And that’s because we wanted a new challenge. Right?” He’s uncertain. Rosa absently picks at the grass from around the edge of the blanket.

Mia reaches them and stands up, stretching her arms out towards Jake. He lifts her into his lap and she snuggles against him. Every time one of them does that, or when Leo tells him he loves him, or Mia stops crying when she sees him, he feels something bad in his past get painted over. Like one hug from Leo and the pain of Graham Crackers going missing is gone. Or Mia reaching for him, still sleepy from her nap, and Eddie Fung ceases to exist. Jake kisses the top of her head again and the sunshine smell that he loves so much is stronger than ever. She’s watching Rosa like she’s waiting intently for her response.

“I guess so. It’s just what if it doesn’t work out?” Rosa’s voice is quieter than usual, and Jake’s surprised that she’s willingly talking about her emotions like this.

“Wow. Parenthood has changed you. Rosa Diaz, admitting she has emotions?”

“Shut up.” Rosa punches him in the shoulder, but it’s only lightly, so Jake knows she’s not really mad.

“If we hate it, we’ll just ask to be demoted, and then we can transfer back to the Nine-Nine,” Jake suggests, the idea making things sound a little less overwhelming as he voices it.

“They’ll fill our slots there by the end of next week, dummy. Some new kids, getting promoted to detectives.”

“Oh,” and the fear is back. “Well, I guess we just have to hope that somehow nothing goes wrong. That’ll work. We survived jail Rosa, we can do this,” he’s trying to sound confident, but a nervous laugh creeps in at the end. Mia picks that moment to stand up and start to walk away. “Oh, hey, she’s walking! Suck it, astronomy. She’s having a great month.”

“Jake, she’s looking for the snail.”

“What? Mia, no!”

--

They leave the park later, after an older boy teases Leo for being too afraid to climb to the top of the Jungle Gym so Indigo pushes him off the swings. Rosa is so proud that Jake thinks she’s about to tear up, but the older boy’s mom is pissed so they leave, Jake with a kid in each arm, Rosa with Indigo on her back, regaling the story of how she had pushed the boy off of the swing.

On the way home, Jake remembers that they have shockingly low supplies of food in the house on account of his forgetfulness and Amy’s crazy new work schedule, so they swing by the grocery store on the way home.

Walking around the grocery store with his kids is a strange experience. He remembers being a kid himself and grocery shopping with his mom, looking at the other kids walking around with their dads and feeling jealousy stab him in the gut. Back then, he’d never have imagined that his life would turn out like this, that he would be one of those dads traipsing around the aisles and making sure his babies don’t sneak extra candy in when he isn’t looking.

Mia sits in the seat at the front of the cart, legs swinging against the metal, and Jake has to watch her so she doesn’t grab onto random items from the shelf and pull them down, and Leo walks alongside, with Jake making sure that he keeps one hand on the cart at all times. He doesn’t want a repeat of their terrifying road trip experience in St. Louis. Or that time in the Smithsonian.

He and Amy are proud to say that they’ve, so far, only had two heart-stopping moments of sheer panic where they couldn’t find one of their children. They’ve both involved Leo, with Mia preferring to stay close to her parents. Amy calls Leo ‘inquisitive’, and ‘scientifically minded’, which most of the time Jake is super happy about. The first time he isn’t is in St Louis on a road trip they go on when they take a week’s vacation after solving a horrific kidnapping case, and they stumble into a store called Cloud Nine with eighteen-month-old Leo. They take their eyes off of him for two seconds, no more than that because he’s in his run-away-at-every-opportunity phase, but they turn their backs for some stupid reason that Jake can’t even remember, and then he’s gone.

Leo’s gone for six minutes, and Jake feels every single second, pulling the air out of his lungs. He has flashes of them spending the rest of their days working the one awful case of their missing son, of this day repeating on a loop in his head, soaked in anger and guilt and regret, until the day he dies. Amy’s frantic, yelling Leo’s name, and it’s only when she grabs a terrified-looking store assistant by the shirt collar that they find him, two of the six minutes later. Leo comes back holding hands with two of the staff; a dark-haired man and a short Latina woman, whose work name badges proclaim them to be named Jonah and Ivy, and Jake and Amy fall to their knees and pull Leo in tight and promise to never let go again.

Which is why they’re dumbfounded as to how they lose him, days later, in the Smithsonian. This time it isn’t staff members who help, but a blonde woman who Amy is sure she’s seen doing some kind of public speaking before, and her skinny husband who Jake swears he’s seen on some viral news clip on YouTube before (for some reason, he’s associating him with the words human disaster). They have a set of triplets, and the seven of them spend four minutes, shorter this time, frantically checking behind exhibits and in the bathrooms and then they find him in line at the help desk, standing calmly behind a family of six, looking as if he knows exactly what he’s doing.

They haven’t lost him since then, but they also haven’t forgotten the feeling of sheer terror which came with the, in total, ten minutes of Leo-less life.

--

Jake spends the hour between him getting home and Amy getting home sorting through some old boxes from the back of the closet with Leo whilst Mia naps. The radio is on in the background and the windows are thrown open, and Jake is picking through fragments from the history of him, explaining to his son how important each one of the pieces is.

“What’s that?” Leo asks, picking up a stack of Jake’s old tapes.

“Those are mixtapes,” Jake says, as Leo picks the top one out of its case and looks through one of the holes in the middle, holding it carefully up to his eye.

“Like in old movies?”

“Old movies? No! Not from old movies. Movies that are older than you. Not old movies,” Jake says, adamantly.

“But not new movies.”

“Well, maybe not.”

There’s some really cool stuff in the boxes, the ones Jake’s been meaning to sort through for ages. It seems fitting to do it now, though. And he’s got hope in his heart that he’ll find new boxes in twenty years’ time filled with relics that he doesn’t even know exist yet. That he’ll have a brain stuffed with new memories of new friends. And old friends too, of course.

“Why is mommy wrapped up in that?” Leo is laughing and holding up a photo.

Jake moves to look at it as his son holds it up with both hands. It’s the picture from the first Halloween Heist, of them all in costume at the end of the night. He’s wearing a crown, and Amy’s in the yellow police tape. The song on the radio changes and it’s Taylor Swift singing Long Live. He knows the lyrics by heart, but right now there’s a lump in his throat and he doesn’t think he could even whisper the words. They’re never going to have another Halloween Heist, not like that, not ever again. He remembers that year, remembers what it was like to be the version Jake who is wearing the crown, and how he used to sneak glances at Amy when she sat at the desk across from him. How he was sure of a thousand untrue things, including that he’d die alone.

“Babe?” Suddenly Amy is at the bedroom door, causing both Jake and Leo to jump.

“You’re home!” Leo drops the picture and runs to Amy. She catches him in her arms, lifting him up and kissing his cheeks.

“Of course I’m home! I missed you today,” she tells him. Jake smooths out the Halloween photo, trying desperately to squash the lump in his throat.

“Missed you too. We want to the park,” Leo says, beaming at his mom.

“You did? Was Indigo there?” Amy asks.

“Yeah,” Leo nods, “she pushed a big kid off the swings. It was awesome.”

“She what?”

“He was being mean to me. It was ok,” Leo assures her. Jake looks up, swallowing as hard as he can, watching two of his three favourite people in the world smiling at each other.

“Are you sure that’s what you’re supposed to do to people who are mean to you?” Amy asks, amusement in her voice.

“Yeah, I think so,” Leo replies.

“Sometimes it’s ok to get a little revenge, Ames. Or don’t you remember the time we cling-wrapped the Vulture’s motorcycle, huh?” Jake stands up, confident that he’s held off the tears.

“Don’t tell him about that,” Amy hisses. Jake laughs softly at her and kisses her on the cheek.

“How was your day?”

“Tiring,” she frowns, rocking Leo a little, like he’s still Mia’s age.

“I found a picture of you,” Leo says, pointing to the photo on the ground.

“What picture?” Amy asks, peering over to where Leo had pointed.

“You’re wrapped up in yellow,” Leo adds.

“It’s the Halloween Heist picture. From the first year we did it,” Jake explains, stepping back to pick up the picture. Amy examines it with a far-away look in her eyes.

“Feels like yesterday,” she muses. “Hey, was that before or after you became obsessed with me?” She asks, smirking now.

“I was not obsessed with you!” Jake protests.

“Hey, your words, not mine.”

“Ok, fine. Before. I think,” he admits.

“You had a crush on mom?” Leo asks, pulling a face like he thinks it’s gross.

“A huge crush,” Amy confirms. “How embarrassing for you, babe.”

“Ames, we have two children!”

“Guess it’s a good thing I had a crush on you, too then,” she says, glancing at Leo. “Oh hey. Captain Holt invited us to dinner tonight!”

“He did? So last minute?” Jake asks, surprised.

“Yeah. He said he wanted do something, before your last day,” she smiles, a little sadly.

--

Mia shrieks with happiness when she wakes up to find her mom home, and Amy comes back into their bedroom with Mia on her hip. Jake looks his daughter in the eyes and silently begs her not to somehow convey to Amy that she’d tried to eat a snail, and that Jake had taken way too long to wash the slime off her hands. Mia tilts her head to one side in response to Jake’s pleading eyes, as if she’s weighing up her options, and for a minute he’s terrified that she’s suddenly going to start talking, that she’s just been pretending she can’t talk yet. She doesn’t though, opting to crawl into their closet instead, picking up one of Amy’s shoes and running her finger along the ridges on the sole.

Jake, Amy, and Leo spend another thirty minutes sorting through the boxes, digging out forgotten treasures and lost items of clothing and sorting them into ‘throw away’, ‘keep’, and ‘donate’ piles. The donate pile is remarkably small, owing to the fact that Jake is mostly either sentimentally attached to the item, or else it’s broken. Some of the items fall into both of these categories, and Amy draws the line when Jake insists that he needs to keep a single crumpled playing card.

“It’s the ace of spades, babe!”

“You don’t need that, dad,” Leo interjects. “You don’t even play cards.”

“See.” Amy nods, putting an arm around Leo. “Listen to your son.”

“Traitor,” Jake says, tapping Leo on the nose with the card. Leo reaches out to take the card, and then places it into the trash pile.

A while later and the dust from the boxes is making Leo cough, and Mia has started to pull out the entire contents of Jake’s t-shirt drawer, so they pack everything away and get ready to go to dinner.

--

It’s one of those sun-soaked, relatively uneventful days which Jake usually logs into his memory banks to think about in the middle of the night when he wakes up struggling to breathe, or when he’s in the thick of a case and he needs to take five minutes to ground himself again. He drives them to Captain Holt’s house and Amy’s wearing a floral dress with her hair loose around her shoulders (he kisses her as soon as she steps out of the bedroom, pausing in the middle of tying his shoes, because he loves her in a way that he doesn’t have the words for). Mia and Leo are both happy in the back seat, and Jake’s driving through the city and nodding his head along to Sam Cooke.

It’s around the time of year when, five years ago, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and he finds himself wondering, on days like these, what it would be like if the second trial hadn’t been a success. The main thing is that Mia wouldn’t be here. Before he was a dad, he used to hear people who did have kids saying that they couldn’t picture what life was like without their kids anymore. Jake used to think that it was sweet, but it never made perfect sense to him until he was faced with the realisation that Mia almost just wasn’t. That there would be a gap in his life without his laid back, giggly, happy daughter. And the worst thing would be that he wouldn’t ever even know that she was supposed to have existed. In that universe, he wouldn’t be aware that another universe existed with an extra one of his people in it.

He wonders what Leo would be like, without him there. Would he be different? Would he even know him, or would a few visits to see his dad every month not be enough for that? Jake glances over at Amy in the passenger seat as she watches the world pass out of her window. She’d have been a single mom, effectively. She’d have been awesome at it, because of course she would, but it would have been so different, so much weight for her to carry. He smiles at Mia in the mirror and breathes in the smell of the tropical air freshener. It’s ok.

They’re just thoughts, and this is the universe that he lives in. The good one.

--

Captain Holt’s house is suspiciously dark when they pull in, and Jake side-eyes Amy as they walk up to the front door. She doesn’t notice because she’s busy trying to stop Mia from poking her in the eye. Leo reaches up to ring the bell before Jake can ask Amy whether what he thinks is about to happen is about to happen. The door opens and it’s Kevin, but he looks a little disappointed when he sees who it is.

“Oh. I was expecting someone else,” he says, stepping aside to let them in.

“Who?” Leo asks, stepping forward and beaming up at Kevin.

“Ah. A Mr. Gerald Chimes.”

“Huh?” Jake recognises the name from somewhere.

“It’s Gimes, Kevin!” Captain Holt appears from around the corner, arms folded, as Jake struggles to understand what just went on.

“Surprise!” And then there are other people too, pouring out of the living room.

“Oh my God! I knew it!” Jake’s grinning from ear to ear as he watches the people he loves appearing out of the room.

There’s Charles first, hardly able to contain his excitement, followed by Genevieve and Nikolaj, who seems to grow every time Jake sees him. Terry’s next, with Sharon and their three girls, and then Hitchcock and Scully leave the room with a bucket of chicken between them. Gina and Karen come out last, and then Jake’s turning to Amy.

“How long have you been planning this?” He asks, unable to contain his happiness.

“Not too long, actually. And we all kept it a secret from you,” she smiles back proudly.

“I totally suspected something outside, though. House looked too quiet,” Jake addresses the room collectively.

“It was Amy’s idea,” Captain Holt tells Jake.

“They’re here! Get back in the room!” Gina announces, and confusion hits Jake until he realises that Gina means the two people who aren’t here, Rosa and Indigo. Jake grabs Leo’s hand and pulls him along into the living room.

“So you were surprised?” Amy asks Jake in a whisper.

“Yeah! I even went grocery shopping today for dinner tonight. You know I wouldn’t have done that if I knew I didn’t need to!” He whispers back.

“We just wanted to do something to say thank you, and goodbye, and good luck,” she tells him.

“Nobody threw me a party when I left!” Terry whisper-shouts.

“You gave us like, two days of warning,” Gina reasons, throwing her hands in the air.

“She’s right. It was sudden,” Sharon backs her up.

“It’s ok, you can share my party,” Jake offers, and then the doorbell rings.

“Ok, so the name you’re going for this time is Emily Goldfinch, Kevin, can you do that? Emily Goldfinch,” Captain Holt briefs his husband.

“I think I can handle that.”

“Good. Now go!”

--

When they yell surprise at Rosa as she and Indigo are stepping in, she reaches for the gun she doesn’t actually have on her, and pushes Indigo behind her with the other arm, but then realises what’s happening and punches the person nearest to her, Charles now, in the arm instead.

Once she’s confirmed that Jake didn’t know about the party either, they all move to the buffet in the kitchen. Jake watches fondly as his mom helps Leo to make a plate, and Charles takes Mia so that Amy can fill a plate for herself. He’s taking snapshots with his eyes, storing the memories away for the cold moments when the world feels harsh and distant. He keeps taking the snapshots as the evening wears on, collecting them together like the stamps he collected as a kid. There’s the image of Gina’s head on Rosa’s shoulder with their plates on their laps, Indigo tucked into Gina’s side as they all sit on the white metal garden bench. There’s Captain Holt and Kevin trying to get Mia to walk across the grass, and Leo and Ava playing catch, even though it’s more like ‘drop’. There’s Scully handing the bucket of chicken around, and his mom and Genevieve laughing over glasses of wine.

Later, Gina pulls out a collection of nail polishes, and she and Jake sit cross-legged in the grass and paint the kids’ nails. They’re good at it from years of practice, sitting in the stairwell of Nana’s apartment block and whiling away the time by creating artwork on each other’s nails with Gina’s sticky polishes. She used to keep them in a sparkly blue pencil case, and they’d talk about school or their parents or the future, just the two of them in their own little segment of the world. Jake paints Leo’s green, and then Leo insists that his little sister get a turn too. Jake tells him she’s too little really, but Leo is determined about it, so Jake paints Mia’s thumb in purple whilst Leo gently holds her still. There’s another snapshot there; his babies, who don’t always get along, sitting together in the grass with pretty coloured nails.

“You think Nana would have been proud of us?” Jake asks Gina, painting stripes on his own fingernails in pink.

“Yeah. Mostly of me,” Gina says absently, focussing on Cagney’s nails.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, boo,” Gina shrugs, painting the edges of Cagney’s pinky finger. When she’s finished, Jake paints a pink stripe up Gina’s arm in retaliation.

Mia gets sleepy after that, and the temperature starts to drop a little, so they all retreat inside. Mia’s generally happy exploring the world on her own at her own pace, but sometimes when she gets super tired she does this thing where she wants both of her parents at once. Jake scoops a sad looking Mia up and finds Amy, and they squash on to the end of the couch with Mia across them, Leo sitting between Jake and Captain Holt. Charles produces an obscure board game from his bag and spends twenty minutes explaining the rules.

“Remember the first time you all came over to my place?” Captain Holt says to Jake as Charles is trying to explain to a confused Sharon about the difference between two of the types of cards that players can draw. Jake takes a second to think.

“Oh, the party?” He’s got images of an eight-dollar bottle of wine and of trying to find a copy of the New Yorker in their bathroom. “The one where we all handled ourselves like the adults we are?”

“I seem to recall finding you and Jeffords trying to stop Santiago having an allergic reaction to Cheddar in my en-suite.”

“Psshhh. That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”

“I only wish I had taken a picture.”

“Ok, but that was a long time ago. And I’m a responsible adult now,” Jake insists.

“Dad, you let Mia eat wild snails,” Leo chimes in from between them, his eyelids half closed with tiredness.

“No I didn’t! And how would you even know about that? You were in the playground!” Jake shoots a glance at Amy to make sure she hasn’t heard, but she’s arguing with Charles about one of the rule clauses in the game.

“That is…concerning,” Captain Holt says, his eyes wandering to a sleeping Mia. “But, besides the point. The point is, you remember the party. I hadn’t known any of you that long then. And coming to a new place, a place where I’d have my own command, was a dream come true. It was also intimidating, and I was terrified I’d do a bad job. It was a risk, but I knew I had to take it. And it paid off.”

“Is this a teaching moment? Where you somehow, magically make me realise that taking the new job was one-hundred-percent the right decision? And you manage to erase all doubt from my mind?” Jake asks, holding out hope.

“I can’t do that. Only you can know whether the decision you made was the right one or not,” Captain Holt reasons. “But for what it’s worth, I think it was. And what I’m trying to do is to tell you thank you. And that we’re all going to miss you, son,” he says, his voice losing a little of its deadpan quality. Jake smiles, and the lump in his throat is back, but he’s not going to start crying at his surprise party.

“Thanks, dad,” he says, his voice a little strangled, wishing that he could say something more, maybe something about the time he’d accidentally called Captain Holt dad in the precinct. “I have to go get a drink in the kitchen right now.” He stands up quickly, trying desperately to push the lump away like he had earlier on, sorting through the boxes with Leo. He just needs two minutes, maybe even just ninety seconds, to take a few breaths and compose himself again.

The kitchen’s quiet aside from a few notes of the soft music echoing through from the living room, and Jake pours himself a glass of water. He still hates the taste of it, but he tries to drink at least four glasses of it a day because he has kids now, and he doesn’t want to die young and miss out on any extra years with them.

“Hey,” Jake hears a voice behind him, jumping a little. It’s Amy, leaning against the door frame. “You doing ok?”

“Oh, hey. Yeah I’m good. Just conscious about my water intake, y’know?” He puts the glass down and walks over to her. “Hey, where’s Mia? Kid’s basically a ticking time bomb when she’s this sleepy. If she wakes up and we aren’t there…” he trails off, miming an explosion with his hands like it’s a doomsday kind of scenario.

“I left her with Rosa. I’m sure she can handle it for a few minutes,” Amy assures him. She steps forward and takes Jake’s hands in her own. “I saw you leaving and wanted to check up on you.”

Jake squeezes her hands and then lets go and pulls her close, feeling himself relaxing as she wraps her arms around him.

“I’m really ok, Ames. I’m just gonna miss this. Just all of the people in there, together.”

“It isn’t over. We’ll still all get together. Boyle’s having that cookout soon!” Amy reminds him.

“Oh, you mean his intestine showcase,” Jake shudders.

“Yeah. Intestines from six different animals. I’m starting to think we should eat at home before we go.” She pulls back from him and the song in the other room changes to something slower.

Standing here with her like this, Jake’s reminded of all of the times he’s danced with her, like in the dance contest when her dress made her look like the mermaids in Leo and Mia’s books.

“Stand on my feet,” he tells her, looking down at her blue socks.

“What? Why?”

“Just trust me,” he says, putting one hand on her waist and one hand in hers.

“Ok, weirdo.” She steps on his feet and Jake slowly starts to sway them around the kitchen.

“I wanted to dance with you. And I figured you were gonna step on my feet anyway, so we may as well start as we mean to go on.”

“Jake,” Amy laughs, but she’s looking at him in the way that makes his heart flutter, makes him feel like he can do anything he sets his mind to.

“I love you.”

“Love you, too. And you’re going to do a great job at Major Crimes. So you need to stop worrying,” she tells him as they sway. Her head drops to his shoulder.

“Everyone keeps telling me that.”

“Well, it’s because we all know you. And we know you’ll be great at this new job.”

“You’re gonna do great things at your new job, Ames.”

“Maybe,” he can hear the smile in her voice. “But no matter what happens, or where you go, I’ll be right here with you.” He squeezes her hand again in response, their fingers intertwined.

The last time he had danced with her like this was on their wedding day, when the night was wearing on and his mom had taken Leo home. Amy’s makeup had been smudged under her eyes and she’d taken her shoes off, feet in pain, and Jake couldn’t believe that he was married to Amy Santiago. That he would get to wake up every single day to see her face, until death do them part.

“Are your feet dead yet?” She asks.

“A little,” he admits. Amy kisses him quickly and then steps back.

“If it doesn’t work out, you can always be a stay-at-home dad. I know Leo’s at preschool now but Mia would love that.”

“Now that I would be pretty great at,” he agrees, as Amy turns to leave the room.

“C’mon. We’ve got a complicated board game to win.”

“Oh no, we’re playing teams? And I’m on your team?” Jake winces, suddenly fearful for his safety.

“Yeah, weren’t you listening to Charles explaining the rules at all?” She frowns.

“Uh… of course I was. You know I love the weird Boyle family board games, babe.”

“I bet you couldn’t even name one of the games.” They step back into the living room and Captain Holt stands up before Jake has a chance to answer (because he was definitely going to).

“There you are. I’d like to give a toast,” he says, lifting up his wine glass. Jake doesn’t have a glass but Kevin hands him his. All of the adults in the room stand, and Jake looks around at them, contentedness and warmth seeping into his bones. “To Jake and Rosa. Two of the finest detectives-slash-geniuses that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working alongside,” Captain Holt toasts, in a tone of voice similar to the one he had used when heading to work in the PR department several years earlier.

“We’re all so proud of you,” Karen chips in.

“And if you need anything,” Charles speaks, “you both know where we are. And Jake, don’t make any new best friends at Major Crimes. I will be checking your Facebook page to make sure.”

“Appreciate the sentiment, Charles,” Jake says, wondering what work’s going to be like without Charles around.

“To the Nine-Nine!” Captain Holt holds up his glass.

“Wait!” Jake stops him, putting his own glass down. He knows what he has to do.

He stretches his hand out in front of him. Charles is the first to catch on, reaching his hand out to put it on top of Jake’s. The whole squad catch on after that. Amy squeezes Jake’s shoulder and then puts her hand in, then Rosa, nodding once at him, Terry, Captain Holt, Gina, and then Hitchcock pulls Scully over to join them. Jake takes a second to look at each one of their faces before the tears finally swarm his eyes. All of these mismatched people who have somehow made a family. Who have fought criminals and bad days and breakups together and come out of the other side, a little bruised, but whole nonetheless. He loves every one of them with his entire heart.

“Ok guys. One last time.” Jake’s voice is a little wobbly, but he’s happy, and proud, and there’s nowhere in the world he’d rather be. No people in the world he’d rather have spent his years as a detective alongside “Nine-Nine!”

They all take a second before they repeat the words, realising that a whole shining era of their lives is suddenly over. A long and winding chapter coming to an end. They’re sad that it’s done, happy that it happened, excited for what’s to come next. They’ll face it, whatever it may be. Together. They all push their hands down a little before pulling them up and into the air. “Nine-Nine!”