Work Text:
Sometimes he wakes to cold sheets and thinks he dreamed it all. All the dinners around her small table and secret glances in the squad-room, the mornings dropping Jesse to school and weekends chasing Billie around the playground. It’s hard to trust in happiness after this past year; whilst the world is still shuttered around them, fear and exhaustion in every set of eyes they meet. There’s scars that weren’t there 18 months ago, friends lost to this pandemic, relationships fractured by vaccine debates. So how could he have possibly - amidst all that, amidst the permeating darkness that has only deepened in their work lives - found happiness?
He watches her tower over perps, just a banged up table and two masks between them. He logs the way she rubs impatiently at her knee on cold mornings. And he’s there when she comes back from an arrest with sharp purple bruise forming across her cheekbone and dried blood beneath her nose. He knows about Messner, about her foolhardy threat, and he spends a minute at the start of each day checking the boys digital file. Because something’s gotta give. It can’t all be this easy.
After near a decade of fights and almosts and bad timing and guns to temples and abductions and threats and serial killers and ill-advised significant others, how could it all boil down to this? How could it after all be as natural as breathing.
They’ve been them for little over a month and it may as well have been a lifetime. The Rollins’ house adjusted to accomodate him without batting an eye; his clothes in half the cupboard, a photo of his extended family on the fridge, bedtime stories and routines interchangeable when one of them is inevitably called into work.
He and Amanda argue as much as ever on the job. And sometimes he finds himself at his desk into the early morning, sure she’ll turn him away, but she never does, never would. Every time she welcomes him with a tired smile and gentle kiss, “Work is work, Dominick.”
He just keeps waiting for the bottom to fall out.
Still, all the hurdles he’d envisioned fall in a great sweep, Amanda tackling each obstacle with a gusto that steals his breath over and over again. She doesn’t shy away, and the girls don’t react with confusion, and no one at work raises a brow. His parents share a not-so-subtle look heavily tinged with joy, hers pull too close (all things considered) with heavy insinuation and arm patting and one lingering hand too low on Carisi’s back.
Sir Toby Moore finally gets his due, Kat holds her tongue when a morning FaceTime reveals more than expected, Khaldun winds up becoming an unexpectedly good friend and occasional babysitter.
And one morning Carisi wakes up to shadows and humidity and a cacophony of breaths, and finally settles. Bille is somehow upside down beside him, her foot wedged firmly against his ear while Jesse clings angelically to Amanda’s side. Frannie Mae is half on his torso, her weight pressing squarely onto his kidneys, her claws scabbing dully at his legs as she dreams in huffs and whines. He can already hear the pipes warming as the neighbours shower, the slide of tyres on the slicked roads below, the low steady snore nestled between Jesse’s face and Amanda’s shoulder.
He stops waiting for the other shoe to drop, stops looking for the cracks.
After everything, these blonde beauties around him deserve something that comes easy. The world may be falling apart around them but this he can do - he can adjust the blanket so it’s not over Billie’s face, he can soothe Frannie with a scratch behind the ear, can pull Jesse’s shirt down where its ridden up her back, can loop them all together with one long hand warm around Amanda’s hip as he relaxes back into this home that is newly his. But is not actually new at all. And in the morning he can make breakfast and get the girls ready for school and send Amanda off with a lingering kiss and hot coffee.
And one day they’ll look at the future and see more than just uncertainty and projections. One day they’ll have dates circled on the calendar and events planned and real actual things to look forward to. But for now this is enough, to know mornings like this are the next chapter, that whatever stories come next they will involve Southern drawls and blonde pigtails and love.