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When in doubt, Amy tends to fall into a routine.
As a child, she would wake up early with rising sun and chime of her alarm clock, eat the breakfast her mother made that morning (fu fu if early in the week, and rice and fried eggs on Friday mornings), wash up, then put on the wrinkle-free outfit that she’d pick out the night before and arrive at the bus stop exactly eleven minutes ahead of its schedule.
Her first year at the Nine-Nine, Amy is out the door for her shift by seven, a hot cup of coffee in hand and a sense of eagerness to be the best blossoming in her chest. Her day consists of the following: meticulously proofread her recent case reports before submitting them, gleefully organizing and reorganizing her files until she’s satisfied with her progress, greeting the rest of the squad as they arrive, admonishing Peralta when he wanders in a quarter hour late (“but Santiagoo, it’s not like anyone but you cares”) and then subsequently ignoring him when he makes a joke about her grandma-like appearance or mannerisms until they report for a briefing, and she’ll suppress the small smile that threatens to creep across her face at the man next to her as he makes good-humored comments all throughout. Her nights are comprised of hot mugs of chamomile, spirited viewings of Jeopardy, and flip-flopping between going over old case files (that she has memorized—it’s illegal, of course, to bring them home) and curling up with a well-recommended book until she falls asleep.
Over the years, the first Thursday of every month she spends at the bar with her colleagues, and she can expect a text (almost always drunk) to ding at one in the morning every Saturday, typically riddled with grammatical errors and often accompanied with a picture of him shirtless with a variety of takeout foods (the next time she sees him, she can never help herself from asking him to rate the meal).
With Teddy, her routines are interrupted, but that’s okay because he’s sweet and a great cop and an even better boyfriend, and sometimes she’ll get a date night thrown in here or there and it’s great. After a few months, they fall into something easy; they haven’t moved in with each other or anything, but he’ll spend the night at her place and she can expect him to bring a six-pack of pilsners and no, she’s not bored, they’re just… comfortable.
She doesn’t like to think about how that all is disrupted when her partner goes undercover for six months and everything is thrown out of whack. Idly, she finds herself wondering what she’d do when (if, a small, terrifying, insistent voice needles in the back of her head) he comes back and she makes a reminder on her phone that Jake is fine and you are dating Teddy Jake is fine and you are dating Teddy Jake is fine and you are dating Teddy.
And when he’s across from her in the precinct and he’s smiling and joking around and Jake is fine, alive and standing just a few feet from her, her phone buzzes and she’s reminded of her loving boyfriend, she thinks she should get that tattooed on her forehead.
Amy and Teddy break up and she can’t write those four words (you are dating Teddy) on a pink post-it note anymore but she can, in big, bold letters, transcribe Jake is with Sophia and they’re happy and she attaches it to her bathroom mirror so that for the full two minutes that she brushes her teeth in the morning, she can keep her mind from straying to dimples and sneakers and plaid shirts until one day she overhears Rosa ask about the beautiful-funny-perfect lawyer and Boyle exclaims that she’s “out of the picture” now.
The morning after she kisses him and there’s something deep within her that sparks an electric white, doubt and worry and a certain feeling of anxiety that refuses to dissipate inks each and every one of her normally calculated moves. Quite frankly, it’s a little irritating, being so wrapped up in someone like this. And she doesn’t realize, until later when they’ve called their whole thing off (they literally killed their captain), that after she kicks off her boots and just puts on her kettle, that this is the point during the day at which she’ll call Jake and put him on speakerphone and rant for a half hour about a perp who wrinkled her shirt or these colorful gel pens she found on a small Korean stationary website.
And then, he has a drawer at her place and she has a few hangers in his closet with a spare pantsuit and salmon-colored blouse and her days often start curled up together, his arm haphazardly thrown across her waist and a sort of warmth spreading throughout her chest. Nights are spent tucked into his side with warm pad Thai and perogies as they watch HGTV until they drift off into something peacefully.
(They also have a lot of sex.)
(It’s really good.)
When he’s gone—the first time—she doesn’t stray from her (their) daily routine, trying to instill some sense of normalcy, but instead finds herself using his huge black and yellow Nakatomi Plaza for her morning coffee. Those times she’d normally spend laughing with her boyfriend and the advice she’d garner from her captain, she now spends researching and trying to find Figgis and get them out of wherever they were.
Moving in together is waking up with her head on his chest and the sun slipping through the window. Moving in together is sorting out shower-times (and unfortunately realizing that Charles’ suggestion on team-shampooing is relatively accurate). Moving in together is Jake actually eating real food for breakfast that has some semblance of nutrition, her utilizing the snooze button more often than absolutely necessary just for another five minutes in his arms, and brushing their teeth side by side in the small-tiny-miniscule bathroom that once harbored a whole gaggle of terrified Brooklyn detectives.
Moving in together is feeling like a vital part of her has been ripped from her the moment she goes home (three long nights spent on friends’ couches after guityguiltyguilty), and it’s sort of like a phantom limb, she guesses—sometimes, she’ll roll over at three thirty-two in the morning, expecting to hit a solid mass that smells a little bit like gummy bears and pine, and instead, she’ll reach a large expanse of empty space (she starts sleeping on his side of the bed then, an effort to connect with him even when he’s locked in a dark dirty prison cell over seven hundred miles away.)
It’s looking up from a mountain of paperwork and expecting to see his face, grinning, a quip ready at his lips to relieve her from the stress of it all. However, all that greets her is his empty desk and chair. It’s waiting in the car for an extra few minutes before remembering that no one is coming home with her. It’s even missing the cackle that comes from Rosa when Scully and Hitchcock do something very, well, Scully and Hitchcock.
She grabs lunch with Charles and Terry once a week, and attends a family dinner at the Jeffords’ household every other Saturday (the first time, she wants to cry when Cagney and Lacey ask with wide, confused eyes where their Uncle Jake is) because in all seriousness, Sharon is an amazing cook and she misses the noise that use to fill their apartment.
Babysitting Cagney and Lacey (and sometimes baby Ava) becomes a regular thing and so she has coloring books and games and laughter scattered about the flat and actual food in the fridge and cupboards for once and too often she catches herself—after one of the girls braids her hair while the other gleefully reads from one of her picture books—wondering if she’ll ever get this with Jake.
She decides that she will.
In between bites of her bagel she tracks each and every one of Hawkins’ moves. Every three weeks she’s flying back to South Carolina so she can hold Jake for twenty seconds and talk to him for a measly sixty minutes. During the sponsor breaks of Charles’ podcasts that she guest-stars on, she mentally goes through each step of the case thus far, and she spends one too many nights at the library (thanks to her VIP status), both doing research and stress-reshelving books (much to the chagrin of the employees).
And when he and Rosa are released, finally, every morning she thanks whoever the hell’s out there for giving justice to her two best friends.
When he comes home, their routine is simple.
They leave their shoes by the door—his beat up sneakers and her clunky boots—and try to open the curtains as much as they can to let in the beaming rays of sunlight. Jackets go on hooks above the shoes, and she likes to change into one of his baggy shirts (they have a few of Terry’s here that they both like to don) before they curl up on the sofa and watch shitty Netflix shows, and eventually his head will be in her lap, her fingers carding through his thick brown hair, and when she peers down at him, she sees that he’s fallen asleep with a small smile on his face.
When he comes home, their routine is simple.
They fall asleep, his head tucked into the crook of her shoulder, and sometimes when the nightmares overwhelm him (it’s his PTSD—“Prison-TSD,” he jokes one night) she’ll tighten her grip and remind him that she’s here, she’s always here, and in the mornings when he’s up before her (which is shockingly frequent) she’ll reach out for him and panic when there’s nothing but blue sheets, only to hear the shower running and she’ll relax. Her breath returning, she’ll kiss him when he emerges, and they’ll sip black coffee at seven am from their mismatched mugs while they talk about what’s been bothering them, and unsurprisingly often, the possibility of a sixth Die Hard movie.
When he comes home, their routine is simple.
They use every moment they can to love each other, even when they fight and their words are sharp and ugly, because they always end it together with her hands on his face, brushing her thumbs against the oft wet skin of his cheekbones.