Chapter Text
Amy proofreads her arrest report thrice over before signing her name at the bottom. The finishing touch is sticking a little flag where the commanding officer's signature will go, even though she knows perfectly well that Captain Holt does not need to be shown where to sign. It’s just a habit she formed in the days of Captain McGinley and has not shaken off. She quickly locates the designated flags in her drawer, because of course she uses draw organisers, and her drawer organisers have sub-organisers; she is nothing if not a recursive vortex of order.
"Organi-ception" is what Jake calls it, since that time he rode shotgun in her car and saw that her glove compartment had been fitted with sub-compartments. (Her response was to point out that because of the movie, ‘inception’ had become commonly misconstrued to mean ‘thing within a thing’ when it actually means ‘the beginning’. Jake smiled and said, ‘You are so consistent.’ Amy beamed, and may or may not have felt a flurry near her sternum.)
Anyway. Mornings like this convince Amy that her routine is a well-oiled machine, and everything in her life fits into neat little squares.
Pleased that she has accomplished a task with four minutes to spare from the allotted thirty-minute segment, Amy glances across her desk. She sees furrowed brows, lips tightly pressed, brown hair ruffled as usual, and a navy tie slightly askew; Jake is deep in thought. He looks up briefly and meets her gaze, the corner of his mouth lifting just a tiny bit – really, no more than two millimetres – before his focus shifts back to the file he’s reading, and again, something stubbornly flits in Amy’s chest.
Okay, almost everything in her life fits into neat little squares.
What she feels for Jake Peralta cannot be contained in a box, nor in any receptacle within the known planes of human existence. It is an obstinate shapeshifting creature that she dutifully caged away when Jake was dating Sophia, and which had begun hammering forcefully against the grills following their breakup.
“Have you not had coffee yet?” he asks, his voice tinged with amusement.
She blinks. “What?”
“You’re kind of spacing out over there.” He doesn’t even have to look up.
Another thrum reverberates in her chest cavity. “Actually, I might’ve had too much.”
Amy clings to whatever semblance of order she can maintain in the hope that it will temper the maelstrom of emotion which surfaces whenever she thinks of Jake and what could have been. As far as she is concerned, it's crazy to think that they can still be a thing at this point. They've both been single for a while, and if it were still a possibility, surely he would have done or said something by now. After all, he'd dropped "romantic-stylez" when there was so much more at stake.
She sighs and goes back to work.
“It’s Amy Santiago, everyone!” Jake announces to no one in particular as Amy walks up to the bar later that night. Shaw's is pretty full for a Tuesday night, and thankfully no one pays much attention to Jake's antics.
“Ha. Dum-dum’s still high on dental anaesthesia,” Rosa murmurs over her drink.
“Peralta went to the dentist’s? Doesn’t he only go once every four years or something?” Amy says as she takes the seat next to Rosa, unable to mask her disapproval of Jake’s dental hygiene.
“Yeah, but one of the suspected dealers of the black market painkiller we’re tracking is a dentist, and he had to distract the guy while I searched his office.”
“This girl don’t need no dentists, y’all!” Jake yells gleefully, pointing at Amy. “She is a great brusher and her smile is beau-ti-ful,” he says, spacing each syllable with a jab. Amy isn't certain if Jake is complimenting her or making fun of her, but either way, there is a familiar prickling at the tips of her ears.
“O-kay, time to get you out of here,” Rosa says, sliding off of the bar stool, but she stops when she sees Marcus approaching.
“Surprise,” Marcus says, coming up to plant a kiss on Rosa’s cheek. “I thought maybe we could catch the last screening of The Intern.”
“Actually, I have to get this idiot home,” she says, nodding towards Jake.
“Heyyy Marcus, my man! I see you’ve come to bone with Rosa!” Jake calls. He adds in a stage whisper, “Don’t cha worry, I won’t tell Captain Holt.”
“Got him!” Amy interjects, dragging Jake by the shoulders to forestall his inevitable murder at Rosa’s hands. “You guys have fun. I’ll take care of Peralta.”
She steers Jake away from a fuming Rosa and a laughing Marcus, and manages to shove him into a cab.
Jake cooperates when they pull over outside his building, but the walk up to Jake’s apartment is a bigger struggle, what with his stopping to greet each person and object they pass.
Finally, they reach his door. Amy holds her hand out to Jake. “Keys?”
Jake fumbles in his pockets and produces a tin of mints. Amy rolls her eyes, and it takes Jake a moment to realise that she is still looking at him impatiently. When he finally locates his keys, she snatches them from his hands and all but pushes him inside once the door is open.
“You smell really nice, Santiago. Your hair. Apples. Shiny too. Always so shiny,” Jake mumbles. His chin rests on the top of Amy’s head as the pair stumbles through the doorway to the general direction of the bed.
“Didn’t know you were obsessed with my teeth and my hair, Peralta,” Amy teases as she helps Jake perch at the edge of the bed and remove his sneakers.
“‘M obsessed with everything about you,” Jake murmurs with closed eyes, appearing half-asleep. The words make Amy’s ears burn, and she has to remind herself that it’s the drugs talking.
With some effort, she gets him to lie down, although she’s sure his arms are at an uncomfortable angle and he’ll definitely wake up with pins and needles in his limbs and a crick in his neck.
“Wanna have a sleepover?” Jake says, eyes popping open as Amy straightens up and brushes her slacks down.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she responds.
“But you have the beautifulest smile and it makes everything better and I really like you,” Jake protests.
“That’s not even a word, Peralta. And you are so gonna regret this tomorrow,” Amy says, shaking her head. She has half a mind to whip out her phone and take a video of High-As-A-Kite Jake, because had the roles been reversed, that was most certainly what he would have done.
But a small, shameful part of her wants him to mean every stupid anaesthesia-induced word. She weightlessly places a hand on his cheek, ignoring how her heart races when he nuzzles into her palm.
“Good night, Jake.”
“‘Night, Amy.”
The next morning, Amy receives intel that Gregor Minsk, a counterfeiter she has been chasing for two years, has resurfaced.
Fuelled by her special hatred of criminals with no regard for correct spelling and grammar, she types furiously at her keyboard, piecing together everything she has on him so far. This is just the kind of motivation that she needs to take her mind off other... feelings.
She is so engrossed in pulling up Minsk’s old files that she doesn’t notice Jake come in until a hand sets a muffin down in front of her.
“Sorry for the trouble, Amy.”
Amy looks up to see Jake scratching lightly at the back of his neck, and she thinks he’s almost blushing. She wonders how much he remembers from the night before.
“Rosa told me I was saying weird stuff.”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Amy says. (It's a lie.) “Don’t mention it, Jake.”
He gives her a sheepish grin – a rare sight at the precinct – before he ambles off to the break room.
Of course she doesn’t mention that one, she has been hearing ‘obsessed with everything about you’ and 'I really like you' on repeat since her cab ride home last night, two, remembering the feeling of his pressing his nose and lips into her hair to take in her scent kept her awake for most of the night, and three, she came in nearly two hours early today, desperately needing a distraction. Now even the mental library she’d been building on Minsk has practically collapsed from the impact of Jake’s shy smile.
She looks at the pastry on her desk and tries not to read too much into the fact that he’s gotten her an apple crumble muffin. She’s seven minutes ahead of schedule and it’s time for a break anyway, so she grabs her mug and her muffin and follows Jake’s lead.
“You won’t need a plus one, will you, Jakey? Rosa says she’s not bringing Marcus,” she hears Charles say as she nears the break room, sounding disappointed. “I was rooting so much for him.”
“Lay off her, Boyle. She might not be ready for that kind of thing. But I most definitely am! And no plus one for me, ‘cause the one I’ll be slow dancing with is already on the guest list,” Jake says excitedly.
Amy’s feet turn to stone just outside the break room door.
If Jake is thinking of her, maybe it isn't so crazy to surmise that they could still be a thing. As if to match the hope rising in her core, the temperature in her ears begins to shoot up and –
“Jenny Gildenhorn will be at the wedding!”
– she is doused immediately with ice-cold reality.