Work Text:
Amy
Amy can't pinpoint exactly when she decided she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Jake. And it's not that she can't remember a time before this feeling, because she can remember, all too well, back when Jake was the annoying guy who sat across from her and wouldn't stop tapping his foot, and when he was just her best friend, and when she liked him and didn’t know what to do about it.
The scariest thing about relationships is that, once you're officially with someone, there are only two potential outcomes. The first is the only thing that Amy knew before Jake. It's watching everything you fell in love with about a person turn on its head until you start to hate it all. The laugh that you thought was cute turns into a grating sound that makes you want to rip your own hair out, the personality quirk that was endearing becomes plain old weird. Option one always ends in flames. Sometimes they’re slow, curling into your heart and translating into scathing glances and picking up extra shifts so you don’t have to spend so much time with them. Sometimes the flames burn white hot, and express themselves in slammed doors and tear tracks burning their way down your cheeks. Sometimes they’re ignited by pilsners and one-thousand boring conversations.
The second option, whilst simpler, and much happier in theory, has terrified Amy since she was in the tenth grade, watching her friend Caroline writing her own first name with Zac Baker’s last name, encircled in hearts. The idea that at some point in her life, she’s going to love someone enough to want to spend the rest of her entire life with them. Because option two is not breaking up, ever. It’s going on dates and making each other laugh and falling in love and then that’s it. You spend every day with them as a part of you until, inevitably, one of you dies. Hopefully when you’re old, and surrounded by grandbabies. Option two didn’t seem daunting as a child. It seemed like a given. Amy had always assumed that, at some point, there would be someone who tilted his head and smiled at her, in the same way her dad looks at her mom when she’s doing something completely mundane. Sometimes she’s cooking, brow heavy with beads of sweat in the July heat, or else she’s laughing at a movie, head thrown back. Amy’s pretty sure she realises her parents are soulmates when she’s nine, and her mom has the flu, and her dad brings a bouquet of yellow flowers and whispers that she’s beautiful when he thinks no one’s listening.
Option two becomes terrifying when she’s old enough to realise two things. The first is that it isn’t, in fact, a given. That she might go her whole life wondering about it and attending her friend’s weddings, watching her brothers raising families of their own, and she could live her whole, entire life alone. The second thing that she realises is that it might be about to happen, on the path to eternal happiness, matching robes, forehead kisses and wedding rings glinting in the sun. It could all be lining up perfectly and she could screw it up. She could tip a vat of battery acid on her own happiness, and break the heart of someone else in the process.
That idea terrified her still, when she realised that she liked Jake, and maybe a little when she realised she loved Jake. But they’re cops, and Amy’s lost count of the amount of good colleagues she’s known who’ve stepped out for a normal day of work and never made it home. Life is never one-hundred-percent predictable, and nothing has felt as right to Amy as being with Jake for a long, long time, maybe not even since she started at the police academy. So Amy stops being terrified of option two, of this whole forever thing, and starts to look forward to it, to plan it, to dream it.
The problem with spending the-rest-of-your-life with someone is that it isn’t supposed to be put on hold as many times as this. Florida is bad enough, but at least Amy can picture Jake standing on a beach some place with Captain Holt. Prison is a whole other breed of terrifying. Prison means Amy sleeping five hours, maximum, per night, and dividing her waking hours between work and trying to free Jake and Rosa. Prison is late night talks on Jake’s illicit cellphone, long journeys with Charles to visit Jake, meals for one from the bodega. It’s loneliness and sadness and longing.
But it comes to an end.
It comes to an end after months of fighting, of grappling against Hawkins with every fibre of Amy’s being. It comes to an end after a long second trial, with a verdict that none of them dared to hope for. It’s anticlimactic, if anything at all. The weather is chilly and grey, the court room is quiet, and the immense feeling of relief that Amy is expecting to hit her as soon as they know the verdict never comes. Instead, it’s hours of paranoia, certain that they’re going to announce that they got it wrong. It’s holding too tightly onto Jake’s hand, never letting go, certain that she can prevent anyone from tearing them apart again.
After the trial, there is paperwork, and sitting in the back of Terry’s minivan on the way back to the precinct to share a bottle of Champagne that Captain Holt had been saving for a special occasion. There’s Captain Holt telling Jake and Rosa that he’s proud of them, that they did the right thing. Throughout it, the hours of in-between, where none of them can settle, they cling to each other. Jake rests his hand on the small of Amy's back, or Amy twists their pinky fingers together, or they sit with their knees pressed together. Amy's half convinced that if she drifts away from Jake, stops touching him for a second, he’ll be snatched away again. She’ll blink and a guard will be yelling at them to separate.
Later, much later, too much later, they make their way home. Terry drives them, insists upon it, and Jake collapses against her the moment they're seated. His head rests against her shoulder, arm wound tightly around her waist, pulling her close. Neither of them says it, neither of them needs to, but they can't stand to let go. It's been too long, without this.
When they finally reach home, Amy's pretty sure that Jake doesn't believe it's real. He keeps a solid grip on her hand, eyes capturing the sight of their furniture and the pictures on their walls, their books and the clothes in their closet. They put on pajamas, changing in the dark, the half light of the street light outside the window.
“Oh,” Jake wiggles uncomfortably as soon as he climbs into bed. There are fresh sheets, the soft grey cotton ones that they bought together at Target the weekend after they moved in together.
“What?” Amy asks, concern evident in her voice. She's hoarse from lack of sleep, from laying awake for the past two nights and painstakingly cataloguing every single potential scenario for after the trial.
“The bed,” he shuffles further down against the pillows. Amy's cocooned in the blankets already, the cotton wrapped around her bare legs and Jake's t shirt, which she's taken to wearing to sleep. “It's so soft,” Jake says, frowning a little.
“It is?”
“Prison beds suck Ames,” he shuffles closer to her, and she meets him in the middle, hands searching for him beneath the blankets, legs tangling together.
Amy has a million things she’d like to say. She wants to ask Jake if he's ok, if he needs anything, if there's anything he wants to eat right now. She wants to tell him that the one-hundred-forty-two days he was gone were the longest of her life, and that even if she hadn't been crossing them off of her calendar she's sure she would have known the precise amount of time passing, because she felt every day like a physical pain.
“I missed you,” is what she settles on, words spoken into his t-shirt. He’d been looking uncomfortable in his court clothes, and Amy can't imagine how nice it must feel to put on a soft pajama t-shirt after months and months of prison uniform.
“I missed you too,” he utters, into her hair. His arms tighten around her waist, pulling her closer, until there's barely enough space for either of them to breathe. It still isn't close enough.
It's dark outside, an early October bite in the air, and there’s a steady backdrop provided by the sound of the traffic from the street below. Amy wonders what the background noises were in prison, whether Jake has really had a good night’s sleep in one-hundred-forty-two nights.
It still isn’t hitting Amy, that he’s here, that he’s really free , that this isn’t some kind of nightmare that’s going to tear her awake. They could do anything they want to do right now. They could go and eat at the fanciest restaurant in the city, or get wasted on the kitchen floor. They could hail a cab and head to the airport, buy a ticket to Europe and wake up in Paris. They could order pizza, or climb into the fountains in the mall. Or they could just lay here, side by side, in the warmth, tangled up together. Tomorrow is theirs, to sift through cases of emotions or go shopping or buy bottles and bottles of orange soda. There are loose ends to tie up, compensation paperwork to complete, people to visit and hold close. But there are days, and days, and days to do those things. A lifetime of potential, a blank slate to fill up however they choose. And tonight, Amy’s freezing cold hands are knotted in Jake’s shirt, and there’s nowhere in the whole world, no place else in the universe where she’d rather be.
The tears come, some indeterminate amount of time later. They wash in with rain, bouncing off of the windows and mixing in with the street sounds, and Amy hasn’t cried since after the first time she visited Jake in prison, when she had bottled the tears up, containing them until the moment she was through the front door of the apartment and then allowing them to cascade into her hands, drip onto the floor, suffocate her.
This time they’re quieter. A stinging at the back of her eyes, a lump forming in her throat, and then she’s shaking with the weight of it all, like her feelings and her thoughts and her whole self has been on lockdown for almost five months, and now everything is pouring out along with an overwhelming relief that this is over .
“Amy?” Jake pulls back from her, tipping her chin up with his index finger, gentle, as if he's afraid to break her.
“It's fine, ” she insists between body wracking, quiet, sobs. She pulls one hand free of Jake and swipes at her tears, angry at her body for choosing this particular, peaceful moment to have its breakdown.
“What is it?” He asks softly, brushing her hair away from her forehead.
“It's just… it's just over. It's over,” she chokes, struggling to catch her breath. “It's ok now,” she nods, “you're here. And it's like…” she tries her hardest to steady her breathing. “It's like I can breathe again.”
“You sure about that?” He asks, and he's joking, at a time like this. There are tears shining in his eyes but he's smiling at her like she's his everything, and Amy didn't think she’d be capable of loving him more, but now it's like her chest is constricting with the sheer volume of it.
“Shut up,” she pokes him in the side, and she's smiling through the tears, and it's ok, it's ok, it's ok.
“I love you,” Jake says, peppering kisses on her forehead and her cheekbones and the tip of her nose. “I love you, and I’m so lucky to have you,” he leans back a little to observe her, the corners of his lips turning up into a smile, laden with tiredness. “Some of the guys in prison had some real… messed up relationships. But I got to come home to you .”
Amy leans forward to press a soft kiss to his lips then, her hands pulling him closer. The kiss is damp with tears, a little salty, but perfect nonetheless. She owes him a thousand kisses, she thinks. Or maybe, more accurately, one-thousand-four-hundred-twenty. Ten for every day he was gone. They won’t erase the pain or the longing or the sadness, but maybe they’ll help a little. Or at the very least, provide a distraction.
“I love you too,” she tells him, breaking away slowly. “So much.”
“So much,” he agrees.
“I don’t want us to ever be separated again,” Amy says, and Jake runs his thumb underneath her eyes, one after the other, pushing away the tears. Then he pulls her close again, and Amy takes a deep breath.
They lie together in silence then, the sounds of rain and traffic and their steady breaths mixing together and echoing around them. This is the rest of their lives, Amy realises. Days like this, coming home from work, eating takeout at the kitchen table. This is it, right here.
When she looks up at him again, he’s looking back, a softness in his eyes that, for just a second, rights all of the wrongs in the world. Amy’s not sure that anything bad can be happening at the same time as this. Maybe, at this moment, they exist in their own bubble of soft sheets and softer eyes, of feeling at home in the arms of another person, of knowing that no matter what, you’ll always be loved.
“Marry me?” He asks, his voice filled with certainty again.
Amy’s pretty sure she stops breathing for a second as she processes Jake’s question. She’s known, ever since she was little, that at some point in her life she wants to get married. It’s a part of the life plan, and before Jake went to prison, he had drawn a tiny smiley face beside it. Amy had found it two days post-sentencing, and anger had foiled inside of her, wondering whether it would ever get to happen now. Whether any of the stuff on her life plan would get to happen, whether any of it mattered any more.
She hasn’t had time for it to sink in that actually, it can now. There’s been no time between leaving court and this moment right here to think about it. And if she’s being honest with herself, the doubt that any of this is permanent is sharp in her mind.
Life’s unpredictable, she knows that. The doubt in her mind could be right, for all she knows, and Jake could get taken right back to prison tomorrow morning, because of a malfunction with the paperwork or something equally ridiculous. Next week, something terrible could happen, and one of them might not come home from work ever again. In six months, a freaking zombie apocalypse could break out, ravaging the whole world and changing everything forever. (Amy knows that’s irrational, but two months ago she got a little drunk with the squad which somehow led to her doing random google searches about the odds of surviving zombies. Things didn’t look good.)
What Amy’s muddled, bullet-train speed thoughts amount to is that nothing is certain, except for the fact that she wants to go through life with Jake. Whatever’s thrown at them next, she wants to hold his hand through it all.
“I wanna promise you,” Jake begins, pausing to kiss her nose, “that I’ll never leave you again.”
“Yes,” she tells him, without any further hesitation. “ Yes ,” she says, and she’s smiling wider than she’s smiled in months, tears still hot on her cheeks, shaky laughter bubbling up in her throat.
“You will? You wanna get married?” Jake sounds like he can’t believe she’d ever say yes, like he hadn’t dared to hope.
“ Yes ,” she’s nodding, “I’ve never been so sure of anything else.”
“You haven’t?” His voice is wavering, like he’s maybe on the verge of tears again. Amy kisses him, determined to make him believe it. “I don’t… I don’t have a ring or anything,” he tells her, “I just got back from a long trip, so…”
She laughs, “I don’t need a ring. I don’t need any of that. Let’s get married, Jake.”
In the morning, they go grocery shopping. A comfortable kind of peace has washed over them, and Jake’s eyes light up as they pass dogs, and babies, and an old man yelling at the sky. Jake buys a pack of peach gummy rings, pushing one carefully onto Amy’s ring finger in the parking lot, sunlight tangling in her hair.
Jake
Jake’s crush on Amy snuck up on him. One day, she’s just his partner who he tries his hardest to annoy, and the next day he’s watching her squinting at a case file and catching himself marvelling at how cute she is. He’s always known she’s pretty, in an objective sort of way, but after the initial shock of realising that he likes her, he feels like he’s noticing her, really noticing her, for the first time. He notices the way her eyes light up when she smiles, and how her hair frames her face when it tumbles out of an updo after a long day.
When she gets with Teddy, Jake waits. Mainly, he’s waiting for his crush to dissipate, for him to get over this and find someone else to fall in love with. A distant, buried part of him is waiting for Amy and Teddy to break up. Not really though, because Amy’s beautiful, and smart, and brilliant, and if dating Teddy makes her happy then that’s a good thing. Watching Amy Santiago smiling, for whatever reason, is the best thing.
The problem is that the crush, or whatever the hell it is, doesn’t go away. It grows and grows until it’s a physical ache in Jake’s chest, and then he’s going undercover for six months and he couldn’t live with himself if something bad went down and Amy Santiago didn’t know how he felt. It’s imperative that he tells her, so he does. And then he misses her. Oh God, he misses her. Being undercover is a big challenge, and he’s on high alert most of the time, falling into bed exhausted at the end of each day. But in between it all, when he’s waiting for the coffee to brew in the mornings, or sitting by the phone waiting for an important call to come through, he thinks about her. He thinks about brown eyes and her perfect smile, and hopes that somewhere, not too far away, she’s doing ok.
By some miracle, a year later, they make out in the evidence lockup, and it’s the start of something, and Jake can’t believe how lucky he is to be the one who gets to love Amy. They go mattress shopping, and go on a cruise, dog-sit Cheddar, and his mom loves her. Jake’s happy.
Days with Amy are cotton-wrapped, soft kisses, laughter, and falling asleep tangled up together. Days in prison are paranoia, fear-soaked, disgusting food, and endless hours of never-ending boredom. The shining light which gets him through is visiting day, once every few weeks, where he gets to sit across from Amy and hear her talking about what she’s been doing, and wrap her up in his arms once at the beginning and once at the end. He gets through prison on a steady diet of illegal phone conversations, visiting days, and trying (and frequently failing) to stay out of trouble.
When it’s over, it doesn’t feel like it’s real. When he steps out into the street, fingers locked together with Amy’s, the rest of the squad surrounding him, he’s certain that he’s going to be hurried into the back of a police van and taken back to prison, made to change out of his court clothes and back into the itchy prison uniform. Instead, they go to the precinct and Jake sits on his old chair at his old desk, all of his old photos and trinkets still lining it. Amy stays by his side, and there is champagne, and when she laughs it makes his heart feel full.
He wants to marry her, now that it’s over. He doesn’t want to live another day without asking her.
So he doesn’t. He asks her when they’re home, when he can’t hold it in any longer. He’d been thinking about where to buy a ring, what kind of proposal he should be planning, but then suddenly he can’t any longer. He’s watching her breathing steadily, head on his shoulder, hair shining in the street light from outside, and he wants her to know that they never have to be apart again.
Amy says yes, and Jake smiles so much that his cheeks hurt, and the next morning he puts a peach gummy ring on her finger because, yes, he probably should have bought a ring first, but he didn’t. Amy eats the peach ring, and it isn’t enough. None of it has been.
Jake sits on a stack full of plans for a solid twenty-four hours before he enlists help. He isn’t back at work yet, signed off for two whole weeks before he goes back. He’s assigned a psychologist again and he visits the office twenty-two hours post-peach ring, when Amy’s at work. It’s a different one to the one he visited after being undercover, and a different one still to the one he had to be cleared by after being shot in Florida before he could return to active duty. This time it’s a peppy young brunette who makes Jake listen to a CD of whale noises and then write a word cloud on an A3 piece of paper about what it makes him feel. He isn’t sure what it makes him feel, because seventy-five-percent of his brain is currently taken up by proposal ideas, but thinking about the ocean kind of makes him want to pee at any given moment. By the time they’re done with the session, Jake’s itching to leave, already mentally cataloguing the supplies he needs to get. If he’s going to spend the rest of his life with Amy, he wants to start it off the right way.
The thing about being exonerated is that there’s a great deal of paperwork to be done. There are visits to One Police Plaza and his attorney’s office, and the bank and the DMV. There are long email chains and hours wasted on hold being passed between different departments. It’s a slow, frustrating process, and all of his bank accounts are still frozen so he has to take the attorney to the bank with him to withdraw enough money for an engagement ring.
Jake spends a lot of the time with Rosa, because they’re frequently going to a lot of the same places together, signing release documents and following trails to reclaim their lives. Between them, and a host of secret phone calls and illicit meetings with the rest of the Nine-Nine, they’re ready to go three days post-peach ring.
Jake, Rosa, and Captain Holt pick out the ring together, Holt leaving work early with an excuse about a meeting with the Commissioner. It takes three hours to pick, because Jake knows the ring has to be perfect. Jake asks for Rosa’s advice but her response is to point at the closest one in the first store they enter and tell him to pick that one, and Captain Holt spends twenty minutes talking Jake through ring type options with the sales assistant at the first chain store they go to. The assistant looks to be around eighteen or nineteen, and blushes bright red every time Captain Holt corrects him, eventually just fading into the background and leaving the display rings with the three of them. They weave through the stores in the mall, visiting chain stores with rows of gold and silver rings, and antiques stores with everything from a beaten up copper band to a diamond studded silver ring that the shifty antiques dealer insists was found in the wreckage of the Titanic.
They wind up in a small boutique store only a few streets away from the precinct. Jake worked a burglary there a year or so ago with Charles, remembers the crazy display of multicoloured earrings. He’d gone back at Christmas to buy a pair for his mom.
“Peralta,” Captain Holt gestures to him after two minutes of browsing, calling him over to a display in a vintage cabinet on gold claw-feet. “The cut on this emerald is…” he leans back to admire the gold ring with the green jewel, “quite something.”
“It’s good quality?” Jake checks, nerves flooding his system, as Captain Holt hums his approval.
This is a big decision. If everything goes to plan, and he’s somehow lucky enough to live a long life with her by his side, then she’s going to be wearing this ring for the rest of her days. It’ll be glinting, catching the soft overhead lights in the candid pictures with the squad at the bar, dancing with sunlight in their wedding photos, and maybe, one day (he almost doesn’t dare to think about it, living in terror of jinxing it and being separated from Amy again), reflecting the harsh, hospital lights in the pictures of her holding their newborn.
“These are dope,” Rosa calls from across the store. There’s no one else browsing right now, just the store clerk polishing a display of necklaces behind the counter. Jake’s pretty sure that if Rosa is taking an interest in something here, then it must be special. It might even be the store.
The rings Rosa likes are in a polished black cabinet, which Jake makes a mental note to tell Amy about at a later date because it looks like it came straight out of Harry Potter. They’re in shades of silver and rose gold, a rainbow of stone colours beginning with rubies on one side, and ending with amethyst.
The one that catches Jake’s eye sits at the back, a single pearl in the centre, with a few smaller white stones lining the rose gold band around it. It seems to stand out more than the others, and Jake can instantly picture it on Amy’s ring finger, where the peach gummy ring sat the morning after Jake got out of prison.
“Cap’n?” Jake points at the ring display. “Opinions on these?”
Captain Holt and Rosa are the only ones who know that, technically, Jake and Amy are already engaged. They’d decided to hold off on telling people for a week or so, until Jake and Rosa had both regained their footing, until everyone had time to celebrate with them. Looking at the ring now, Jake’s flashing back to when he and Amy were Johnny and Dora for the night, undercover at the fancy restaurant. The night that everything changed also happened to be the night that they were fake engaged, and Jake can’t believe that the next time he and Amy go out to eat together, it will probably be as a celebration of getting engaged for realz . The irony of it is that on that night, they had told the hostess that the restaurant was where they had been on their first date, and now, in a way, that’s true. Neither of them are sure whether that counts as their actual first date or not, but Jake’s thinking that he could book a table there anyway. Maybe, without that restaurant, without almost being caught by Augustine when he stopped to talk to the chef, neither of them would have had the courage to change things between them.
“An excellent finish,” Captain Holt agrees, finishing his inspection of the ring that Jake’s picked out.
“You think that’s the one?” Jake wonders aloud.
“That’s really your call to make,” Captain Holt says.
“Did you pick? Can we go now?” Rosa wants to know.
“I think I- oh my no ,” Jake hisses, looking at the price tag on a small white tag stuck behind the ring. “That’s evil. Evil . They draw you in and then they do this .”
Rosa peers behind the ring to see the price. “It’s fine, we’ve got compensation money on the way,” she reminds him, punching him lightly in the arm.
“Not enough compensation money,” Jake squeaks. “We were gonna go to Paris.”
“Is everything ok?” The store clerk is somehow behind them, jingling a chain full of keys.
“Uh…” Jake looks around, unsure of what his next move should be.
“Yes,” Captain Holt takes charge, “we’d like to see this ring more closely,” he points at it, sitting in all of its expensive glory at the back of the case.
“No problemo,” the store clerk responds, beaming at them. Rosa rolls her eyes and grumbles something about going to wait outside at the exact moment that Captain Holt’s phone rings very loudly from his pocket.
“Ah,” he frowns at the caller ID. “I have to take this, excuse me,” he heads outside after Rosa, leaving Jake alone, holding out his hand for a very expensive piece of jewellery that he’s pretty sure will mean the wedding is cancelled if he buys it, because Amy will kill him.
“Here it is. She’s a beauty.” The clerk tips the cold, light ring into Jake’s palm, and it’s even more beautiful up close.
He can see it on Amy’s finger even clearer now than he could before. Not just for the big days, not just for the photographs, but leaving indents in his own fingers as they hold hands walking down the street, and winding through her hair as she runs her fingers through it before bed. He can see it tapping against the desk as she concentrates hard on a difficult case, can picture it wrapped around her coffee mug in the morning, voice dappled with sleep.
“What are your thoughts?” The clerk asks, tilting his head to the side like there’s nothing he’d rather hear more than Jake’s thoughts on this very ring.
“Well, uh,” he reads the clerk’s purple name badge, “Christopher. Can I call you Chris?”
“You may.”
“Chris. I love it, and I think it would be perfect for Amy - she’s my fiancee - and… y’know, I’ve never called her that before,” Jake realises, learning for the first time how the word tastes in his mouth. “I just… she deserves the world, and we’ve kinda been through a lot together. There was a thing with Florida last year, and…”
Captain Holt steps back into the store twenty minutes later, Jake waving him over to the counter where he’s leaning against it with tears in his eyes.
“So, did you choose one?” Captain Holt asks. “Apologies for taking so long, it was an unpleasant conversation.”
“I picked one, yeah,” Jake’s choking back the tears, and Chris has tears pouring down his own cheeks. “The one we saw before.”
“I thought that one was out of your price range?”
“Oh, there was a discount,” Chris waves his hand vaguely. “Jake here was telling me about their story, and it’s beautiful , and oh Ray, they’ve been through so much, did you realise that?”
“How do you know my-”
“That ring was dropped on the ground once, so there was a discount,” Chris says defiantly, and Jake holds up a small white paper bag with a watery smile.
Jake proposes, properly this time, at sundown. He’s chosen their rooftop as the spot for it. The rooftop where they wound up conducting a stakeout in the middle of the fake date, and where they found themselves three years later when Amy was freaking out about everything changing before writing the Sergeant’s exam. It’s kind of their place, and Jake can think of nowhere better to do this. Terry brings the flowers, and he and Sharon go up an hour before to set them all up, Rosa strings lanterns up in strategic locations, for a truly Nancy Meyers look, and Captain Holt brings a few bottles of fancy drinks from his house, insisting that this occasion is special enough to crack open a thirty-year-old bottle of whiskey and an ornate bottle of French wine. Charles brings the music and a box of cupcakes (Jake had insisted on vetting the recipe first). Gina facetimes in and makes Jake promise that he won’t say the wrong name like in Friends. He points out that firstly, this isn’t a wedding and secondly, there’s really no one else in the world who he’s going to be thinking of when he’s proposing to Amy Santiago.
It’s Charles’ job to get Amy to the rooftop, under the guise of needing to use it for a stakeout again and wanting to take her along because she knows it so well. To avoid suspicion, Jake sends her a well timed selfie of he and Rosa at the lawyer’s office, taken earlier that day, telling her he thinks they’ll be there for a while longer. And then they wait on the rooftop, watching the sun sink lower and lower behind the New York skyline, a backdrop the city, ready to rise on some other part of the earth.
“Should I sing something?” Scully offers, as Jake’s pacing and mentally rehearsing what he’s about to say. Rosa and Captain Holt are admiring the view, and Terry and Sharon are queueing up the music.
“Maybe after,” Jake tells him, “I just don’t think that’s the vibe we’re going for right now, y’know?”
His chest is tight with the fear that something, somewhere here, has gone wrong. That something’s about to catch on fire, or he’s going to forget how to speak, or Amy isn’t going to show up. Or that she’ll say no. He knows, rationally, that that’s ridiculous, because she’s already said yes. But she could change her mind. What if she’s been looking for an opportunity to tell him that she’s decided against getting married, decided against him ? What if he’s going to grow old sad and alone? What if really, his deepest, darkest fears come true, and he’s no better, as a person, than his dad? What if -
“They’re here! Boyle just texted!” Terry waves his phone at Jake, smiling wider than Jake’s ever seen him smiling before. “Terry loves this!”
“Ok. Ok that’s great. That’s cool. Coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool,” Jake claps his hands together and tries to calm his thoughts, tries to decide where to stand and where to look and how to start his spiel.
“Jake,” Captain Holt catches his eye. “You’re going to do great. She loves you, and you love her, and that’s all you need.” There’s a lump in Jake’s throat.
“You think?” He asks, trying to remain composed. He’s cried enough since leaving prison.
“I know,” Captain Holt claps him on the back.
Jake takes a deep breath, and then the door is opening and Amy’s stepping through. She’s watching the ground at first, carefully stepping out onto the roof, and then she hears the music and looks up. Confusion crosses her features first, a crease appearing between her brows, mouth downturned, and then she sees Jake standing in the middle of the roof, surrounded by most of the people they love the most, and she presses her hands over her mouth in shock, eyebrows arching in surprise.
“ Jake ,” her voice is muffled through her fingers.
Jake drops to one knee in front of her. “Amy. Hi,” he reaches up with one hand, pulling the ring box out of his pocket with the other and propping it open. She catches his free hand with her own, and now there are tears in her eyes just like there were at the first proposal. “I wanted to do this properly, because that’s what you deserve. You deserve the whole world, Ames. I’ve known that for a really long time, probably since before I even realised that I had a crush on you, back around the time of the fake date right here on this roof. You’re something special, and even though things haven’t been easy for us, you’ve stuck by me. You’ve supported me no matter what, through killing our Captain, to being in witness protection in Florida, to getting thrown into prison for a crime I didn’t commit. Sometimes, it feels like our lives are a series of events designed to tear us apart,” he stops to look up at her, watching how her hair gets caught in the breeze in the way he loves.
Watching her watching him like it’s just the two of them. Like she’s seeing him for the first time all over again.
“The world keeps trying to tear us apart, Ames, but we don’t let it. You just keep holding my hand through the bad stuff. And I can’t ever thank you enough for that. There aren’t enough precious jewels in the whole world, but I thought I could start with one,” he gestures at the ring in the open box, the pearl shining gently. “Amy, I love you. And I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the next day, but I know that I want you to be there for it. I want to laugh at stupid jokes with you, and cry with you, and make sure you don’t poison yourself with your terrible cooking,” she squeezes his hand a little too hard at that, “I just… I just love you,” he continues. “So. Amy Santiago. Will you marry me?” He holds up the box, and leans forward to kiss her fingers.
“I can’t believe you did this,” she laughs, looking around at all of their friends. “You didn’t need to. The peach gummy ring was great.”
“You ate it, Ames,” Jake laughs with her, overwhelming joy bubbling up in his chest.
“I won’t eat this one,” she says, studying it.
“So you’ll marry me?”
“I’ll marry you, Jake. Yes. Of course I will,” she nods, and Jake beams, pushing the ring carefully onto her finger. It’s a little too big, but they can get it resized. It doesn’t matter right now.
All that matters is that she said yes, again, and Jake’s throwing his arms around her neck and kissing her face all over as their friends clap, and Scully starts singing some high pitched type of opera.
All that matters is that they’re surrounded by family , and they’re together. That they're here on a rooftop at sundown at the start of forever.