Work Text:
Ten minutes after his workday has already started on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, Jake Peralta rushes into work only to find an envelope sitting on his desk.
He looks at it for a couple seconds, something buried in the back of his mind under years of junk and bad decisions asking if it’d really be wise to open an envelope without even telling anyone else about it first, and then discovers his fingers already tearing it open and resigns himself to another chapter in Peralta’s Poor Impulse Control: An Autobiography.
To JAKE PERALTA:
You are formally invited to the wedding of Ms. Gina Linetti and Ms. Rosa Diaz on Tuesday, March 15th, beginning at 3:00 PM and concluding no later than 7:00 PM. Your instructions for attendance of this event are as follows:
→Dress code is strictly work attire. Any bowties, ties, and suit jackets not previously worn within the precinct will be removed with force.
→Please make all wedding gifts as payments in cash, preferably unmarked bills of no less than twenty dollars. Do not bring food. Do not bring clothes. Do not bring appliances. Do not anger Ms. Diaz.
→There will be a mandatory twenty-minute dance routine performed by Ms. Linetti. Bathroom breaks are forbidden during this time.
→Charles Boyle is forbidden from giving toasts at any point within 24 hours of the wedding. Please report any expressed intent to toast to the brides.
In order to receive the details of location for the wedding, please RSVP with Ms. Diaz. Responses directed to Ms. Linetti will not be acknowledged nor remembered.
We look forward to seeing you in attendance.
From GINA LINETTI & ROSA DIAZ, Brides-To-Be
Jake blinks. He blinks again. His coffee cup slips between his fingers and smashes on the floor with a painfully sharp sound that makes Amy Santiago whirl around in her chair.
When she sees the crisp black-and-pink card in his hand and the Folgers stain at his feet, she rolls her eyes and turns back around. Never one to let any scrap of attention pass him by, Jake and the offending object are at her desk almost immediately; always one to hear his complaints with an exhausted but good-natured sigh, Amy glances up at him like his spontaneous teleportation was exactly what she’d been expecting.
“I think Diaz is going to bus us off to a remote location to kill us,” being the first words out of his mouth seem to surprise her even less.
“She’s not, I think the two of them are serious,” Amy says, scrunching up her nose. “Just because nobody — nobody — knew about it doesn’t mean they’re not getting married.”
A realization dawns on Jake in the same second an atrociously self-satisfied grin blooms across his face. “You didn’t know they were even dating. Amy Santiago, master detective, co-worker and self-declared best friend to both brides, didn’t even know!” Clearly annoyed that he could hit the nail on the head so quickly and with such expert precision, she pushes herself to her feet. Her arms are folded so tightly that Jake wonders if she’s going to snap herself in half any second.
“How was I supposed to know they’ve been together this whole time?” Amy demands. “It’s like someone handed me a Charles Dickens novel and an Ernest Hemingway short story and told me to isolate the — the number of times Hemingway achieved the same expressed intent as Dickens in exactly fifty words less!”
“Okay, one, I don’t know what that means. Like, at all.”
She fixes him with her sternest glare.
“Two,” Jake continues, “They’re probably totally messing with us. I don’t know what we did, but Gina is the most unpredictable person in the world. Probably even the universe. I don’t know what I did wrong, but Diaz clearly does, and I think we’re witnessing the birth of the most dangerous supervillain duo ever.”
Before Amy can get another word in, her face goes pale. Jake eyes her stiff-lipped panic for a few seconds longer before heaving a sigh of his own.
“Hey, Rosa,” he says over his shoulder. “You really have to stop doing that to Santiago. It’s going to kill her.”
Leaning in with her own unbroken cup of coffee from where she’s apparently materialized directly behind Jake, Rosa raises a carefully manicured eyebrow, the faintest edges of a smirk starting to form. “Is that my evil superpower?”
There’s a beat where Jake allows himself to be silently but obviously delighted that she’s playing along with his joke and doesn’t seem too annoyed about it, his grin wide enough to make the sides of his face sting, before Rosa nods at them both and strolls off to go be a consummate badass somewhere else.
Amy lets out a breath Jake didn’t know she was holding. By the look on her face, she probably even didn’t know she was holding it, Jake thinks.
The two of them watch Rosa make a casual beeline to Gina’s desk and perch on the edge of it, offering the cup to her with a toss of the hair. Gina immediately turns her phone off to lean in and take the drink from Rosa, a gesture that makes Jake wonder if he’s ever seen her do that for literally any other human being before in her life, and Amy’s hand goes to her mouth when Rosa settles her hand atop Gina’s free one.
“They do look happy,” Jake admits. Something Rosa says just outside of their earshot makes Gina laugh, bright and delighted. He’s known for a while that the two of them gel better than he’d ever thought they would have. This wedding is only out of left field for how much Jake had never considered the possibility of their odd, dysfunctionally balanced personalities being something that would let them consider the other the perfect person to marry.
“I guess I never really thought about it,” Amy says, tension leaving her shoulders. “Not seriously. The two of them are just so… You know?”
He nods. Eyes wide, both detectives watch Gina rummage in her cluttered chest to produce a bedazzled phone case with carefully-arranged beads that read BAD BITCH ROSA, no doubt a handmade Linetti Creation™, and wiggle her eyebrows at her apparent fiancée as she holds it up.
Rosa accepts it gracefully and swaps out her old case — a simple black OtterBox — for the new glittering abomination without a second of hesitation.
“Yeah,” Amy says, “We definitely shouldn't have doubted that this wedding was real.”