Chapter Text
“Hey, nice pantsuit!” A nice, short-haired man calls, tugging at the lapels of his own and smiling brightly. It’s the same salmon and beige, Amy notices with a grimace, not hard to notice at all once the same man yells “twinsies!”
She gives an awkward thumbs-up in response.
Great, her first day teaching at this police precinct, and Amy’s chosen the same outfit as a perfect stranger. Why does it look better on you? she wonders wordlessly, scanning the Nine-Nine’s array of desks for Officer J. Peralta. Interdepartmental tutors don’t have easy work 一 Amy shudders thinking about her last client, a haughty detective who made her help a teenage shoplifter with his algebra II homework 一 but she needs the money, and it looks good on her transcript.
Amy Santiago, CSI and part-time NYPD tutor, finds her first client next to the panini press in the makeshift kitchen. He’s nursing a nasty burn, wincing and cursing only a little too loudly, when the man in the pantsuit rushes over.
“Jakey! What did we say about making food at work? Always wear oven mitts! What you just did was the culinary equivalent of … of unprotected sex!”
Amy meets bad-at-making-paninis guy over the din of a rather descriptive rant about the dangers of cooking food in the precinct, grinning as the client reaches over and shakes her hand.
“Yeah, I’m Jake. Jacob Peralta. Nice handshake, as if my hand hasn’t been through enough today. And you are?”
Amy smiles. “My fault. I took a seminar, and I’ve never been able to give a limp handshake since. Um, I’m Amy, Amy Santiago. I’m an NYPD tutor, and your captain hired me to give the officers a refresher course for the detective’s exam.”
She bites her tongue saying ‘refresher’; there are few cops who want to give up their valuable time to take practice tests and write essays. “Anyways, Captain Holt said you were the best in the precinct, so I should start with you.”
“Do I hear wedding bells?” The other officer interrupts, eager, a smile alight on his face. “I’m Charles Boyle, Jake’s best friend and, I don’t know, potential matchmaker? Wingman?”
“It’s good to meet you, too, Charles,” Amy responds, extending her hand a little gingerly. As awkward as she feels, Jake laughs at the sight of her nervous face, and it’s all worth it because he mumbles something under his breath and his ears turn a shade redder. Her gaze hinges upon this split second before time returns to itself.
“Um, we should probably get to work, Jake. Can I call you Jake?” she asks, hands pulling at the latch of her watch in an effort to find a distraction.
“Uh-” his voice falters. He leans an inch further back against the kitchen counter, glancing at the clock and then back at her. “Yeah it’s fine! That’s my name, after all. Should we get started?”
“Rosa, Rosa, take a look at this,” Gina calls, slouching back in her Winchester 3000 and pointing a manicured finger at Jake’s desk. “I’m telling you, kid’s smitten. Haven’t seen that look on his face since he met Vivian’s friend Bernice.”
“Really?” Rosa asks, leaning forward and checking out the new precinct tutor.
Amy’s pulled a swivel chair over to Jake’s desk, leaning over his shoulder as he writes a series of short answers. She looks a little lost as she makes her way through his handwriting, ‘t’s rarely crossed and the occasional spelling error dappling the page, but her expression fades into contentedness once she glances at him.
“See, you want to try and write as neatly as possible,” Amy murmurs, pointing at a half-scribbled sentence about interrogation techniques on page three. “What you’re saying is already really good, so you don’t want the grader to ignore anything just because it’s illegible.”
Jake sighs. “So you’re saying I should dot my ‘i’s, right?”
Amy grins. “That’d help, you know. Test graders like to see immaculacy. It shows dedication.” She turns to her teal binder and pages through the cascading tabs until she pulls a stapled stack of paper out, unclasping the rings. “Here, this is an example essay. You see the handwriting? It’s practically a font. The smudged ink is from the grading session. From all the crying the graders did.”
Jake rolls his eyes, unconvinced. “Alright, I’ll try my best, even if it may not be some shining example that evokes a sob sesh from the judges. Can I dot my ‘i’s with hearts like a second-grade girl?” he asks, absentmindedly toying with the soft cuffs of his flannel shirt.
Amy holds back a laugh. “No, plain and simple.”
“What if I have a crush on someone?” he objects, now doodling stars and clouds in the margin of his practice essay.
She scoffs. “You’ll manage just fine, Jake, without dotting anything with hearts. Trust me, the graders won’t need to know whether or not you like someone … romantic-style.”
“Romantic-stylez.” he corrects. “With a z.”
“Your loss, Jake,” Amy says coolly. “Just consider it. You know, this was my essay before I went to CSI school and turned my career around.” She shrugs, trying to act nonchalant. She waits a good ten seconds before glimpsing Jake’s face, envy evident.
He throws his (slightly burnt) hands in the air, turning around swiftly to gape at her. “You got a perfect score on the essay and decided to be a CSI instead?”
Amy laughs softly. “I liked the science more than the adventure, and it was safer this way. I know how hard the police have it, getting into brawls with mob bosses or, worse yet, panini presses.”
“Shush, the wounds are still healing,” Jake murmurs, gazing back to the kitchen and the caution signs Charles has posted around the different appliances. ‘Hands Off!’ reads the laminated page next to the gourmet coffee maker the Nine-Nine won in last year’s police auction.
(Gina has disregarded the message completely, and is on her fourth cup this morning.)
“By the way, Jake, for CSI practice, I analyzed the fingerprints on that essay when it was returned. You know how many graders saw it? Eleven. They all gave me a perfect score.” Amy stands up from her office chair, smug, and walks over to Officer Boyle’s side of the desk. “I’m off to meet with one of the other officers. You’re in pretty good shape, just remember handwriting matters. Dot your ‘i’s, and not with hearts.”
“Fine, I’ll work on it,” Jake begrudgingly says, but, when Terry picks up his report on the Murdoch robbery, he comments on how much neater it looks.
Charles’ gaze snaps from his multiple-choice scantron to his best friend’s face, and he mouths ‘soulmates’ rather obviously.
Jake mouths ‘shut it’ right back.
“So, Officer Boyle, the captain tells me you’re a good worker. Quiet, resilient, kind, a model for this precinct. He says you took a bullet for him last December?” Amy asks, writing her next client’s name at the top of a sheet of lined paper.
“Actually, it was for another officer, but the perp was after Captain Holt,” Charles admits, leaning back a little in his swivel chair. “Honestly, any one of my fellow officers would’ve done it for the captain, especially my best friend, Jake.”
“I’m sitting right here, you know.”
“You know, Miss Santiago, sometimes I can hear Officer Peralta’s voice, almost guiding me through life. He’s so … principled,” Charles continues, gazing wistfully into the distance (which, of course, travels as far as the clock above the elevator. Amy winces upon seeing it’s a full six and a half minutes behind.)
“I’m not dead! And that’s a lie!”
Amy chuckles. “You know, as fun as this is, you two have a life-altering, time-sensitive exam to take in two months.”
The rest of the tutoring session passes quietly, as Charles murmurs an apology and Amy excuses it with a wave of her hand. “It’s fine, really. I just didn’t expect to be set up on my first day at the Nine-Nine, that’s all. Now, onto your first lesson in essay-writing, you may want to cut back on the cooking-related metaphors...”
“But that’s the best part!”
“Do you really have to compare a hostage situation to a scrambled egg?”
Amy’s third client isn’t actually a police officer at all. It turns out that Rosa took the detective’s exam last month and, as such, has no use for tutoring.
“You’re getting promoted before us?!” Jake asks.
Charles turns a full 180 degrees in his chair. “And you never let us know? Why would you deprive us of the chance of throwing you a celebration? We could’ve had a motorcycle-themed party!”
Jake nods, pointing at his best friend. “Or leather jacket-themed! So many different options for the Pinterest page.”
Quit staring at him, Amy thinks, moving her hair so it covers one side of her neck, already a little flushed. She can’t let it give her away. For some reason, she keeps fixating on that crooked grin.
Charles and Jake’s voices are merely background noise. She doesn’t know where to look, so she gazes to the clock, seconds ticking away. She tries to tune everything out, head buried in the sand, and the charade continues.
Amy does her best to bury her feelings, but she’s got a suspicion that this crush’ll go on for quite a while.
Jake Peralta’s gallant and foolish and cocky and kind, brown-eyed and lanky and starstruck. Amy bites her lip as she watches him debate the merits of the new patrol car. Sergeant Jeffords insists that the cup holders more than make up for the lack of heated seats (“two cups! I could drink twice as many protein shakes every day!”), and Boyle is arguing about backseat space, and Jake-
Jake’s turning to look at her. He’s fiddling with a rubix cube, laughing, and the look on his face is electric. “Sorry we haven’t included you in this discussion so far, Santiago. Let me ask, are red or blue police lights more aesthetically pleasing?”
“Easy,” Amy scoffs, “blue.”
“Same!” He laughs. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got another supporter on my side! Screw you, red team.”