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Jake never thought he’d be the kind of person that felt a particularly strong bond to his home. He never saw himself loving his home, or longing to return there in the evenings, and he’d made peace with it.
He had grown up with home meaning loneliness - an empty apartment with various paint supplies and action figures arbitrarily scattered over free surfaces, sometimes loosely grouped after a half-hearted attempt at tidying up. If his dad was home, being home had too often meant slamming doors and raised voices, fighting echoing through walls and stripping away what bits of safety Jake associated with his living quarters.
He had resorted to other places for a feeling of home - to his Nana’s apartment and Gina’s house, to any other place where a safer, better home had been created for him to borrow when he needed one. He’d seen the charm of a home in the snack-filled fridge and softly playing music of his Nana’s apartment, in the sparkling decorations covering near every inch of Gina’s room. He’d felt comfortable there, felt happy , but he still hadn't thought of it as his home - only the closest thing he had. A bonus to the home he rarely enjoyed spending time in.
His college room hadn't been much of a home either. It had been a place to stay, dump his school books and store his alcohol and learn how to sleep with the noise of his roommate Kyle’s sonorous snoring filling the room. He tolerated it, felt a certain kind of pride and self-fulfillment when he put up a cherished Die Hard-poster over his bunk, but he hadn’t thought of it as home . Ending the day there had been a necessary ordeal rather than a goal to look forward to.
He spent the odd weekend and breaks at his childhood home. In a way, it was easier to stay there now, where even one home-cooked meal was an improvement to his abysmal college eating habits and even a night of playing charades and watching TV soaps with his mom was better than a ten-minute phone call, but for every time he returned there, it felt less like a current home and more like a past one.
The first place that truly became his own was Nana’s apartment, given to him as a gracious rent-controlled gift after she passed away. He’d filled the space with massage chairs and mix boards and Dorito bags, put up Die Hard-posters wherever there was free wall space to be found and created something which closely resembled a John McClane shrine in the bedroom. As far as living places go, Jake was convinced this was the best one of his life thus far. There was no one to complain about the mess or insist he’d get rid of the life-size Bruce Willis cardboard figure, no other person telling him to go to bed or snoring like a chainsaw or stumbling in drunk in the middle of the night. It was his home and his rules - whoever else spent time there only did so because he wanted them to. In comparison to anything he’d had before, it was heaven. He supposed it had to count as a home.
After graduating from the academy, Jake quickly discovered a thing about the reality of police work which hadn’t quite dawned on him during his many years fantasizing about it - it was time-consuming . Slowly but surely as the late nights and early mornings piled up, more and more of his smaller belongings made their way from his apartment to his desk, his changing room locker, his car. He saw less and less of his mom and non-work friends, more and more of his colleagues. With the hours spent at work increasing, the ones spent in his apartment decreased in a rapid decline, and soon briefing rooms, worn-out desk chairs with at least one broken rolly wheel and snack machines felt more like home than his apartment ever did.
The day he got promoted to Detective was the proudest and most nerve-wracking moment of his career. Proudest because he’d achieved one of his life’s goals, most nerve-wracking because it meant leaving his desk and his work partner Steve and every ounce of familiarity Jake had found at the 78th precinct. He was going to the 9-9 now, closer to his apartment but unknown to him otherwise, and he was queasy with nerves when he first exited through the fourth floor’s elevator doors.
He hadn't known it then, but there had been no reason for him to be nervous. A short-grown, overly enthusiastic man introduced himself to him after a mere two minutes, and from that moment onwards, Jake Peralta had a new best friend in Charles Boyle. He worked his first case together with Rosa Diaz, his classmate from the Police Academy, and found himself getting along well with both the precinct’s Captain and Sergeant of the Detective Squad. He learned how to handle the temperamental microwave, how to avoid the men's bathroom right after detectives Hitchcock and Scully had been in there, and found an old toy police car in his room to place on his already messy desk. He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the break room, showered in the precinct’s facilities, and learned how to deal with the stank of the break room couch enough for occasional catnaps.
He barely noticed it happening himself, but when he went for a simple dinner at his mother's house and told her all about his new workplace, Karen had smiled and said: “Well, doesn't it look like you found your home?” .
Jake accepted that he had. After all, home was where your heart was, and his heart was firmly lodged somewhere in the cracks of the walls at the Nine-Nine.
When his poor financial skills forced him to exchange his Nana’s spacious flat for Gina's cramped starter apartment, he’d wondered for a while whether he would come to miss it. It had been his first own place, after all, but it hadn't ever felt like his home - more like a place he was borrowing for the time being. It was always someone else's place, lent to him but never truly his. Jake moved the belongings he kept to his new, smaller Cobbleditch flat, and in a few days, his living place was characteristically messy again. It still didn't feel much like a home or anything he looked forward to coming home to in the evenings, but he didn't mind. He had the Nine-Nine anyway.
The number of hours he spent in his apartment decreased further when he started dating Amy Santiago. Her apartment was bigger, cleaner and her shower had infinitely better water pressure than his own; it was heaven in comparison, however hesitant he was to admit it. He could see why Gina liked to make fun of Amy's taste in interior design, but Jake found it homely and comforting. It almost reminded him of what his Nana's apartment had looked like before he moved in, only better because it had Amy.
He never truly noticed the shift, but as the days and weeks turned into months, he found himself longing for the moment work was over in a way he had rarely experienced before. As much as Jake loved his job, he now lived with the knowledge that something - someone - waited for him when his shift was over. Evenings spent on a couch in front of Property Brothers with Amy there, her head leaned against his shoulder and her arm wrapped around his torso while laughing at his commentary of the program was a million times better than the evenings Jake spent alone. Evenings with her were something he wanted to come home to.
It was becoming clear to him before, more so for every night he fell asleep listening to the sound of his girlfriend’s breathing and woke up to the noise of her moving around in the bedroom, but it turned a salient, unquestionable fact to him during the time he spent in Witsec in Florida - he’d begun to see Amy’s apartment as more than a temporary place to stay. Florida was humid and foreign and wrong , Larry’s house was nothing like the comforting aura of his own or Amy’s apartment or even the Nine-Nine, he was in the wrong place and he wanted to go home . Seconds before the phone call, he’d been talking to Amy about taking the serious adult relationship step of moving in together and here he was miles and miles away from her, no clue of how she was doing or when they would next see each other. Jake had been further away from Brooklyn in terms of distance before, but he’d never felt further away from his home.
He came home from Florida with an injured leg, frosted tips, a head woozy from pain medication and a heart full of gratefulness about the fact that he had a place to call his home. Between the Nine-Nine, his own apartment and Amy’s place, Jake wasn’t certain where it was, but he knew for sure they were all paradises in comparison to the hellscape of Coral Palms. He fell asleep in Amy’s bed the first night back, being held close by the pair of arms he associated most with safety and love, and he woke up to soft kisses pressed to his cheeks, neck, nose - wherever she could reach. Reaching for her face so he could do the same without having to get up and put weight on his leg, he’d grinned wider than ever as he’d opened his eyes to her beaming smile. He’d known it then - this was coming home.
He moved in with her shortly before Christmas, rushing it once the decision was made. Jake had been reluctant to give up his apartment; the prospect of having it taken away made him think of it much more as a home and something he wanted to keep, but he'd eventually realized a substantial part of the reluctance was pure competitiveness. He’d understood it after he let her win; what items he truly associated with his home, like Die Hard merch and sneakers and his favorite cozy blanket with arms - a beloved Christmas gift from Charles - was stuff he could bring with him to Amy's place. He was sure they would even be able to find a place for the basketball hoop somewhere. What mattered was that he was moving in together with his girlfriend of one and a half years, earning himself more grown-up points than ever before while making a happier life for himself.
It was a weird change at first. They already spent most of their time together split between work and two apartments, but this was something else and something yet more intense. Amy was always around, and he loved it but felt unsure of how to handle it when she complained about his sneakers or tendency to forget taking out the trash. Likewise, he learned that Amy at least once a week tried cooking something that left their kitchen filled with a new abominable stench, and that she had a habit of moving his things away when he was just getting around to looking at them.
It took adjusting. It took a long, messy and wonderful month of adjusting for them both, but eventually, they had settled into a routine that suited them both. Amy learned to ask before she moved something of his, Jake let Amy write a post-it note about the trash to stick to the inside of the cupboard, and they made a deal about how often and under which conditions Amy could try her wings in the kitchen. It wasn't long before it felt so natural Jake wondered if this was the home he’d searched for all of his life; not just Amy, but also the space they shared. The one thing he knew for certain was that he wanted to stay forever. If he’d felt this way about the Nine-Nine, it was multiplied tenfold now.
The distance from home wasn’t the worst thing about prison, but out of the hundred-or-so things Jake could come up with, it was at least in the top five. He missed Amy, missed his work and his friends, he missed meals that didn’t taste like blended cat food and he missed home . It would hit him when he lay awake long after the sound of Caleb’s snoring began, the realization slamming over him like a militant wave, and he would force himself to stay silent but a few tears would slip out anyway.
He missed getting up in the mornings and finding his clothes quickly with the help of the organization system Amy had arranged in his closet. He missed making coffee for two and pouring them in matching mugs. He missed eating breakfast in tranquil silence, her reading a newspaper while he looked at his phone, both of them looking up at odd moments for a shared smile. He missed going to work together and he missed coming home at the end of the day.
Coming home soon became one of Jake’s most common daydream topics in prison. Not just getting out , but coming home , walking through the doorway and breathing in that particular home-smell he only sensed when he had been gone for a while. He never understood the charm of it when he was younger, never found enough sense of comfort in a place to desperately long for it, but in the murky darkness of his cell at 02.30 a.m., it was crystal clear. He wanted to go home. Not just to the Nine-Nine, but home home.
When the day finally arrived, it was nothing like his dream scenarios of golden limousines and tons of reporters asking him and Rosa questions, but perfect simply because Amy picked him up. A car ride, flight, and car ride later, they were standing outside the well-known red door.
“Are you happy to be home?” She had asked, and he’d looked right at her to confirm that he had never been more exalted in his life.
Prison did bring him a new level of appreciation for his home. Small details which had bothered him earlier, such as the volume of his girlfriend’s 6 a.m. alarm and their upstairs neighbor’s tendency to do workouts with lots of jumping late at night, were now things he cherished all because they were part of his home. After living most of his years questioning whether he’d ever find a home aside from his workplace, Jake promised himself after prison to be grateful for every day he spent in the Brooklyn apartment. Twice in his life now he’d been forcefully separated from it, and twice he’d been allowed to return. He would never take it for granted.
Instead, he was thankful for every day he got to come home and drape his jacket over a chair, try to prepare something edible for dinner or a snack depending on the time of day, and make himself comfortable on the couch. Most often with Amy, sometimes alone - the perfect chance to watch Die Hard without her complaints - and every now and then with Charles, who claimed Jake’s television was much better for Disney movies. He longed during slow or tiring days at work for a day off to sleep in, wake up next to Amy, convince her to stay in their bed with him a little longer. He was grateful for every family game night with the Nine-Nine even though it always ended with something breaking, every slow day off where he didn’t feel the need to leave the house, every occasion his and Amy’s combined efforts in the kitchen produced a decent meal.
He’d lost it all before, couldn’t know for sure he wouldn’t lose it all again, but until that day came - if it did - he would spend every day appreciative this was his home.
It was a home shared by two people, and then one day, they started preparing for it to be shared by three. A rainy November evening, Jake carried his sleeping daughter in the car seat over the doorstep, and from that moment onwards, it was her home, too.
He would make sure that she never associated her home with slamming doors and raised voices, but always associated it with safety and love. He’d promised this to himself before she was born, but repeated it to her the first time she fell asleep on him on the couch.
The Peralta-Santiago apartment adjusted okay to a third inhabitant, but began to feel just a little too crowded once the number was raised to four. They searched for months led by Amy and a thick house hunting binder, but eventually, they found the perfect object to buy.
Despite already being a married father of two when it happened, Jake had never felt quite as grown up as he did when they signed the papers for their new place. A two-story, four-bedroom house with a newly renovated kitchen and small garden in a child-friendly area was theirs , and they high-fived afterward, laughing together in disbelief.
Packing together with a four-year-old and an eleven-month-old proved a near-impossible challenge. Their oldest daughter could be some help if she was in the right mood or motivated by the promise of ice cream, but their youngest found the prospect of using the boxes to stand and then emptying out whatever items were in there one by one to be funnier than anything else. Packing became something they had to do late at night or with someone babysitting, making it that much more difficult to find the time. Jake thought it was practically a miracle they even got done before the new owners moved in.
He stood in the doorway for a minute extra before they left on moving day, holding his youngest daughter and thinking that she was the only one of them who would never come to remember this place.
This apartment had been the first place aside from the Nine-Nine where he’d found a home he was safe in, a home he loved and wanted to come home to at the end of the day. He never thought he’d find one, but he had, and it had changed his entire world for the better.
He was going to make a new home now - together with Amy and together with their daughters. Despite the pressure, he’d never been more excited.
A small hand, tugging at his shirt from behind, brought him back to reality.
“Dad”, Leah told him with a decisive glare. “Come on, we have to go.”
He’d smiled, taking one of her hands in his. “Do you think you’ll miss this place, Lee?”
The four-year-old had simply shrugged at that, not stopping for a moment of reflection. “No. You said we were getting a trampoline when we move and mom said I could maybe get a Moana wall. Let's go!”
She’d pulled at his arm and Jake had no choice but to follow, leaving their old home behind without a last glance.
Home is where your heart is.
They were getting a trampoline for the new place, after all.