Chapter Text
Amy’s had some type of anxiety for as long as she can remember. It’s a fact of life for her: Detective Amy Santiago is 5 feet 4 inches, enjoys wearing gabardine pant suits and is often anxious.
It’s not debilitating, mostly. She manages it, generally. She relies on a combination of pills and therapy and Jake Peralta to keep her anxiety under control, and it’s been working for her. She’s one of the best detectives in her precinct, certainly the one most likely to be recommended for a leadership position (other than Rosa, but she isn’t really sure Rosa even wants to be a Captain). She’s got a killer mentor, is reasonably well liked, has friends even. She tells her therapist that her anxiety isn’t even in the top ten of what she deals with on a daily basis. She forgets she even has anxiety, honestly.
She lies to her therapist sometimes, but that’s not important right now.
So yes, maybe she downplays the anxiety, but it’s not like she’s panicking all the time. Sometimes she’ll wake up in the morning and she’ll feel it deep inside, the nausea and the knowing that today is going to be a bad day, maybe even the worst.
Before, she’d call her parents or Kylie. One or all of them would talk her through the shortness of breath, encourage her long distance to put one foot on the cold floor and then the other, to walk into the bathroom and splash water on her face. To eat some breakfast, put on her favorite pant suit and walk into the precinct with no one the wiser.
This all changes the day she breaks down in front of Jake.
It’s about a year into their partnership: they’ve just started to understand each other, figure out quirks and inside jokes, establish coffee orders and where to draw the line between their respective desk areas. She likes him, against her better judgement. She trusts him to have her back, but if she could go back she wouldn’t have had him find out this way. Then again, she doesn’t think she would have had him find out at all.
He does, regardless of what she wanted. In the future, she’ll look back and be thankful. Right now, she wants to die.
Or at least be absorbed into the comforting depths of Mother Earth. That’s a thing, right? She’s a little woozy when hyperventilating. She’s sitting in the corner of the evidence lockup in the aftermath of a shoot out. The inside of her brain has flattened into the sides of her skull, she can’t concentrate past the mistakes she thinks she must have made. She wants to throw up. She can’t breathe.
She can see Jake standing in front of her, gaping as she tries to get some semblance of control over her breathing patterns. Amy wants to yell at him, wants to wipe that expression off of his face, wants him to leave her alone to die from how little oxygen her brain is getting right now. Instead, she can feel tears starting to trickle down her cheeks, which seems to bring Jake out of whatever trance he was in. He snaps into action, goes to lock the door before kneeling in front of her. He holds his hands out, asking if she’ll let him touch her. She isn’t sure yet. He nods, and places his hands a little above her arms, hovering until she gives him the ok.
“Hey Santiago. Look at me, alright?” he mimicks a deep breath, exaggerating his inhale. She tries to copy him, and fails. More tears.
“Hey it's ok, you don’t have to get it right on the first try we’ll try again, it’s okay Santiago, relax,” she hears him rambling distantly and it’s strangely comforting, this side of him that seems to know exactly what to say. Amy knows that Peralta has built up a reputation as one of the better negotiators on the Force, that he’s gotten calls from other precincts to help them talk a jumper off the ledge. She’s actually heard him do it, talk someone down over the phone while the two of them were on a stakeout.
It’s one of the reasons she hasn’t transferred. Jake Peralta is a good cop, and despite all his efforts to mask it, a good man as well.
She tunes back into what he’s been saying, looks at him in the eyes and tries to pay attention. It’s hard, and she wants to tell him that she isn’t ignoring him on purpose, opens her mouth to apologize.
“It’s fine, I know it isn’t easy to focus right now,” he says. “Do you think you can try that deep breath now?” She nods, and grabs his still outstretched hands. She breathes with him, in-2-3-4-5-6-7. They hold their breath for another seven seconds. Exhale for five. They repeat the cycle over and over again, until Amy’s mind starts to clear a little. She notices that his hands have moved, that they’re stroking her arms in time with their breathing.
After a couple more minutes, she nods and he moves away. She thinks he’s going to leave, and is both relieved and terrified about that prospect until he takes a seat next to her against the wall, shifting so that they’re connected from shoulder to foot, a comforting presence without being too overwhelming.
They sit in more silence than she thought Peralta was capable of, listening to Amy as she tries to get herself under control. She closes her eyes, tries to visualize shoving all of her anxiety some place else, or unraveling the ball of tension inside her gut, any of the images she’s picked up over the years that never seem to work.
“It wasn’t your fault Santiago.” He’s still using The Voice, quieter and full of a depth he doesn’t let anyone else see, and she barely resists the urge to curl up into his body like she wants to curl into his words. “Sometimes shit happens, you know?”
Not to her. She makes plans so that shit doesn’t happen, because she knows this is going to go on her record, and it's going to be hard enough to make Captain as Latina and shit like this is just going to make it harder, and she’s starting to breathe faster again--
“Come on Santiago,” he gets up and puts his hands out to pull her up. “We’re getting out of here.”
He says them as statements, making the decision for her. Usually she’d balk at this, protest at him thinking he knows what she needs to do. Right now, she can’t think straight so she decides to follow him, as long as she can leave whenever she wants. Jake doesn’t seem like the type of person to force her into anything.
He leads her outside of the evidence locker, holding her hand as they walk out of the precinct to his car. He unlocks the door, opens it and gestures for her to get in. She doesn’t look at him the whole time he drives back to his apartment, only raising her head when he’s opened the door for her to exit the car. They walk inside together, and Amy barely has time to recognize that she’s never been in his apartment before he’s leading her to the couch. They sit.
She doesn’t know what to say, or how to start. Fortunately, he solves the problem for her.
“Depression. Anxiety too.”
She blinks. Does he mean her, or...
“The anxiety started after my dad left. I’d think that everyone around me was leaving, everytime my mom walked out the door I’d start panicking that she might never come back.” He’s talking into his hands, voice not much louder than a whisper. She moves a little closer to him. “The depression...sometimes I just can’t get out of bed, you know?”
She does. She really, really does.
“Everything just hurts, and I can’t muster the energy to bring my legs over the side of my bed.” She frowns, because her experience with getting up is different, but similar. “I just...I’m empty sometimes, and I try to fill the gap by making other people feel for me, feel happy if I can manage it.”
Many things about Jake Peralta are starting to make a lot more sense. She takes a breath, holds it for seven seconds and exhales before she starts speaking.
“I’m always....anxious. I’m just so worried all the time about everything in my life and it's just so overwhelming, you know? I just don’t know what to do when I’m not in control.” She snorts, “The OCD really doesn’t help.” He smiles, giving her enough courage to continue.
“I’ve been trying to keep it under control, but I can never really see the big picture: just the millions of small details I try to keep track of and make them all perfect,” she starts tapping her fingers against her knee. “And I just obsess over everything until I’m hyperventilating and everything sucks.”
He laughs at that last one, and agrees. He gets up, beckoning for Amy to follow him as they walk into his kitchen. She takes a seat on his countertop, as he rifles through his cabinet and pulls out two mugs. He searches for something in the back, muttering as he pushes things aside, and swears when he bangs his head on the inside of the cabinet. Amy giggles.
Jake smiles when he pulls his head out, hand gripping a bundle of packets. Chamomile, she reads on one of them.
“It don’t put me to sleep,” he explains, “but I like it. ”
Amy, too, likes chamomile tea. It’s not a preference she thought she would share with her partner, but in light of everything else it makes sense. She gets up, takes the mugs and fills them with water before heating them in his microwave for two minutes. When the timer chimes, she takes the mugs out and carries them to the countertop and lets him dunk one satchel in each cup. They watch the tea steep for a moment, and take a seat on the countertop. Jake’s brought a bottle of honey and placed it in between the cups along with a silver spoon. When she’s judged that the tea has been steeped long enough she tells him to throw them away while she mixes exactly one spoon of honey into each mug and stirs until she knows that every sip will be perfectly sweetened.
Two perfect cups of chamomile tea. She feels better already.
They settle next to each other on the counter, Amy swinging her legs from her seat while Jake just leans against the cabinets, both of them sipping their tea in silence.
When they’re done, Jake takes her empty cup and puts them both in the sink grabbing her hand and tugging her with his tea-warmed one as he walks back to the couch. They sit again, but closer together than before. There’s a feeling in the room that if they start talking they might never stop, that this could be the start of something neither of them feel prepared for. In that moment she knows that opening her mouth would signify taking a step with Jake Peralta, and she doesn’t know that she particularly wants to take that step right now.
So she doesn’t. Instead, she asks him what his favorite cop movie is, knowing that he’ll get distracted at the prospect of sacrificing another victim at the altar of Die Hard. It works, and they spend the rest of the night watching all four movies, taking breaks to drink more cups of chamomile tea and argue about whether or not any one man really could do everything Bruce Willis did. No, like really.
They agree to disagree while he drives her back to her apartment, and when he stops in front of her building she places a hand over his on the steering wheel.
“Thanks Peralta,” she says. “For the tea. I enjoyed it, surprisingly.” He smiles.
“No problem, Santiago.” He looks at her, his eyes serious despite the grin. “Come over anytime.”