Chapter Text
“Perm-mmph.”
“Sh.”
“Mm-mmm -”
“Shut up.”
What’s meant to be an indignant huff escapes her chest as a shivering, uneven exhale. Jake quickly tosses another blanket over her - and the couch cushion on which she sits dips down slightly beneath the weight of his knee, his hands steady-but-frantic as he haphazardly tucks the edges of the blanket around her.
Amy screws her eyes shut as another involuntary shiver wracks her body - and above her, Jake makes a quiet, strangled noise as he pushes off the couch.
“Finally understand why you have so many damn blankets,” he mutters, now behind her, likely emptying out the basket overflowing with fluffy throw-blankets. Her lips are still caught in the folds of the first cable-knit blanket with which he’d mummified her, and her arms are still essentially pinned to her sides, and when her eyelids flutter open and her jaw comes unclenched he’s standing over her again, knee-deep in blankets spilling across her floor. “It’s okay,” he tells her, all but wrestling with the king-sized blanket her brother gifted her on her last birthday. “It’s okay.”
His last name trips and stutters through her lips, muffled into the blanket to the point of being utterly unintelligible once again, and it’s like it feeds the panicked gleam in his eyes. Slowly, fingers sluggish and stinging with newly-restored feeling, she wriggles her left arm up to pull the blankets covering her mouth down to just below her chin. “Peralta,” she finally gasps.
It doesn’t escape her notice that her voice is alarmingly hoarse; it doesn’t escape her notice that he visibly tenses at the sound of it, his own hands shaking as they ball to fists in the material of the blanket he’s still trying to unfold.
“I-it’s fine,” she murmurs, resisting the urge to hunker down in her blanket cocoon as another chill races down her spine. “I’m-m f-fine.”
Another chill wracks through her, this one more powerful than the last - and she feels a rush of heat and air at her side. One cracked eyelid confirms that Jake has dropped to his knees at her side, seemingly abandoning the blanket. His left hand flutters uselessly over the lump where her knees are bent beneath the blankets he’s already thrown around her, and she feels his other hand ghosting over her shoulders, fingertips barely brushing against her snarled hair. “You’re still freezing.” he tells her.
“N-nev-ver n-not freez-zing,”
His quiet bark of laughter is humorless, and his hand finally curls over her knee; and perhaps if there weren’t eight blankets between them, she’d be able to appreciate the heat of his skin against hers. It’s quiet for a long moment, aside from her labored and uneven breathing.
Jake springs back up to his feet quickly, leaning over her to brace himself on the back of his couch as he quickly kicks his shoes off. There’s a new look on his face - she’d almost call it grim determination, or something along those lines - but he’s already climbing over her legs before she can ask, his hands gentle on her side as he wedges himself between her and the back of the couch, careful to keep from pushing her off the edge. “C’mere,” he mumbles, pushing and pulling until she’s turned on her side, burrowing into his chest.
The relief is instantaneous, though it does little to soothe the alarm bells ringing in the back of her mind. He’s pulling her in closer, one hand steadying the back of her head while the other rubs a broad, flat path up and down the expanse of her back. Somehow she manages to twist in such a way that the blankets between their bodies bunch up and slide down her back. He catches them before they can go and slip off the edge of the couch, yanking them up and over both of their bodies before worming his arm back under, fingers seeking her back. “Y-you don’t ha-have to do this-ss,” she whispers.
He huffs out another humorless laugh - this one decidedly quieter than the last - and continues rubbing warmth into her back. “You’re free to tell me to stop at any point,” he mutters, hand briefly leaving the back of her head. When all she does is nestle stubbornly closer, it returns, his fingers gently combing through the tangles at the nape of her neck. “God, Ames, you’re freezing.” She hums, eyes closed, reveling in the warmth spreading through her toes. “How’d you even end up down there, anyways?”
“Perp pushed me,” she mutters, balling her fingers into fists, snagging the material of his flannel where it rests over his belly. “Slope was too steep, too icy, and - and ankle. Couldn’t climb back up alone.”
It’s his turn to hum, his legs shifting restlessly, shin bumping against her bandaged foot sending a dull ache up her leg. Her brow his furrowed so hard she can feel the beginnings of a tension headache curling along her temples.
“We were worried,” he says, and it’s like the words are clogged, like there’s some filter of emotion she can’t decipher straining his voice. She feels his fingertips gently scrape against her scalp, twisting into her hair and tugging gently. “I’m - I’m sorry you were stuck down there for so long.”
Behind her eyelids she still sees it - the muddy slope, the hellacious white horizon, the fat curtain of snow whorling through the air - and for a second, she’s there again, so tiny and half-buried and forgotten. The echo of a frigid breeze winds its way beneath her skin, and Jake’s grip around her tightens, as if to stave off the trembling. “Was only half an hour,” she murmurs, tilting her head up until her nose presses against the column of his throat.
He hisses involuntarily, flinching at the contrast between her frigidity and his heat, but he doesn’t pull away; slowly, she feels the muscles in his chest loosen beneath her cheek. “Yeah, but it’s practically in the negatives out there,” he says, “and you get cold so easily - it could’ve been really bad.”
With the warmth’s slow advance comes a powerful wave of exhaustion, leaking the tension from her muscles like water from a faucet. “It wasn’t, though,” she mumbles. “You found me.”
He’s quiet now - aside from the sound of his heart thudding rhythmically against his chest - and if she could tilt her head back to look him in the eye, she might see something thoughtful in the recesses of his gaze. Something distant, something hopeful - something longing. The alarm bells are still ringing in her head, a screaming reminder of his declaration of feelings for her and her own muddled confusion about him, about what he is to her, but she gets the sense that none of that really matters to him right now.
“Thank you,” she sighs after an immeasurable silence, and the words themselves seem to melt against his chest.
He grunts softly, fingers now gently pulling her hair away from her face at her temple - the stroking movement lulling her closer to the edge of unconsciousness. “Go to sleep,” he whispers, his lips ghosting over the shell of her ear through a layer of her hair. “I’ll let myself out in a little while.”
She hums, words of protest only just beginning to form in her throat, but he’s rolling her head back to free up a little more breathing space and gently pressing his lips to her puckered brow and he’s warm and steady and comfortable and dark, dark, dark.