Chapter Text
The first time Jake sees Amy after she’s gone undercover, he’s on a date.
It’s been a month since she left and even though the sight of her empty desk still sends a weird pang he doesn’t fully understand through his chest, he likes to think that he’s functioning well without his partner. He’s made three arrests since she left, which has kept him out of hot water with Captain Holt, and has filled most of his nights with heavy drinking and darts at Shaw’s with Rosa, Gina, and Charles, or else filled with pointless dates that he knows will lead to nowhere with an endless line of women. The leading nowhere part doesn’t stop him from asking pretty women out, though, because he knows that if he goes home alone he’ll be left with wandering thoughts that almost always lead to wondering about Amy. He assures himself that it’s normal to wonder about his partner of five years, to hope that she’s getting on alright undercover, to hope that she has somewhere safe to lay that head of thick jet-black hair that somehow always smells like strawberries at night.
Sure, it’s normal, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.
So he’s at this dumpy little Italian place with a very loud redhead whose name he’s already forgotten, a real hole in the wall three blocks from Times Square that is so ridiculously overpriced that he kind of wishes he’d gone to Shaw’s with Gina like she offered to instead after work. It’s all normal, and then it’s not, because suddenly he looks up and sees her.
Amy looks pretty. It’s obvious she’s put a lot of effort into dressing up for the evening. He can see she’s wearing a red blouse that makes her olive skin glow and her hair is down and done in cascading waves and her makeup is light and refined. She’s with some massive man who’s probably the same size as Terry in a tailored suit and Jake guesses he could fit at least three Boyles in the jacket alone. They’re seated toward the back, in a corner booth that just screams criminal activity. He recognizes the lilt in her laughs that drift over the crowd between them and the gleam in her eye; she’s playing this guy. He knows something, and she’s going to figure it out.
He’s halfway through the motions of pulling his phone out to prank call her when he suddenly remembers the reality of the situation.
Amy’s on a date with a mobster.
There’s a fact he never thought would be true.
His date is prattling on about something to do with pedicures or maybe dogs but his undivided attention is now fixated on Amy. She’s pretty convincing to the untrained eye, but Jake has extensive experience in staking out/ruining Amy Santiago’s dates, and he knows a bad Santiago date when he sees it. Hulk man is leaning toward her, but instead of mirroring his posture like she would if she was actually invested, Amy unfolds her napkin and busies herself by smoothing it compulsively over her thighs. It’s an endearing move, has been since the first time he saw her do it on that date with the guy who turned out to be a puppeteer three years ago, but it’s her tell. She’s nervous, and not in a jittery first date kind of way. She reaches up to straighten her eating utensils and he sees her hand tremble, but only for a moment. She tucks her hair behind her left ear and tilts her head to the right with a dazzling smile that does not reach her eyes.
By then Jake’s date has noticed that he isn’t exactly paying attention to her. She swivels around in her seat and, before he can stop her, says “Do you know her?” loudly enough that the entire restaurant pauses and turns toward them.
Jake immediately ducks his head and hopes his ears aren’t as red as they feel like.
“No,” he mumbles, “she just looks familiar. Like a woman I used to work with.”
This placates the redhead and she launches back into her tirade and Jake waits until the quiet chatter of the restaurant picks up again around him before slowly lifting his head.
Amy’s looking at him.
Her eyes are careful and guarded and he can sense the warning there. Don’t fuck this up for me, Peralta.
“Y’know, this place is kind of garbage,” he says suddenly over his date. She, for the first time all night, is speechless. “The food is bad and the service is worse and you’re an idiot if you honestly think this is the best Italian food in New York - which, I might add, is actually Sal’s Pizza joint over in Brooklyn. You’re boring and we have nothing in common but I want to sleep with you, so, you wanna get out of here and go back to my place early?”
“Are you serious right now?” Jake braces himself and, sure enough, she throws her water in his face. The redhead stands and grabs her purse from the back of the chair as he dabs his napkin at his eyes. “New York’s Finest my ass!”
It’s oddly satisfying to watch her storm out of the restaurant. He ignores the scandalized expressions on those surrounding him as he stands, smirking to himself as he throws his NYPD windbreaker over his shoulder. “Well, I better get outta here before I make an even bigger ass of myself,” he announces to the restaurant.
Jake spares one last glance at Amy before he leaves and her expression is unreadable.
The second time Jake sees Amy after she’s gone undercover, he’s casing a club.
It’s called Ooze and Jake literally hates everything in existence the second he has to step into that pit of despair. He’s starting realizing he hates a lot of things lately, especially the fact that Holt has decided to move Scully into Amy’s old desk as an experiment to see if it makes Scully and Hitchcock more productive.
(It didn’t. It just resulted in Hitchcock and Scully’s conversations echoing through the entire precinct and Jake “straight up brooding,” as Gina put it, about how unfair it is that Holt’s already trying to replace Amy just three months into her undercover assignment.)
The one upside, Holt reasons when Jake voices his complaints, is that it encourages Jake to get out of the precinct and work more cases. He’s in the middle of one with Charles and Rosa and that’s why he had to go in - Charles would have stuck out like a sore thumb and Rosa would have ended up punching someone in the face five seconds in for having the nerve to talk to her.
So Jake begrudgingly volunteers and spends most of his night hunched over in a booth on the edge of the dance floor, watching sweaty, scantily-clad bodies gyrate and slowly nursing a scotch on the rocks while looking for signs of any drug deals in the shadows. “You see anything, Peralta?” Rosa’s voice filters through his earpiece.
“Not yet,” he mutters back. It’s a huge crowd, even for a Friday night, and even though Jake has witnessed many bedroom-style activities going down on the dance floor that make him want to scrub his eyes with bleach, he hasn’t seen anything overtly illegal yet. The crowd parts briefly and he can see the VIP section, where half a dozen men are seated. And it’s across one of those men’s laps that Amy is currently draped. “Oh my God,” he says without thinking.
“What?”
“It’s Amy.”
"Santiago?" Rosa barks.
“Amy’s in there?” Charles suddenly gasps. “Oh, God, we might have bitten off more than we can chew, here.”
Something is happening in Jake’s chest, kind of like heartburn, only worse. It isn’t until he’s on his feet and moving toward her that he realizes it’s longing. She’s right there and it’s been almost 100 days since he’s gotten to talk to her and all he wants to do is hug her.
“Jake, you can’t talk to her,” Charles says. Jake freezes half-way across the dancefloor. “You’ll blow her cover.”
“Get out before she sees you,” Rosa demands.
But it’s too late for that. She’s turned her head to seek one of many drinks littering the table before her and her eyes drift up to the dancefloor and land on him almost instantly.
Jake turns away and makes a hasty retreat toward the bar. “She saw me,” he mutters.
“Get out of there, Peralta!”
He almost crashes into the bar, which catches the bartender’s attention immediately. “Scotch on the rocks,” Jake calls without thinking.
“Jake, no -”
He feels her presence before he sees her next to him, and he freezes, scared to even move his head. “Vodka tonic,” she calls in a perfect Brooklyn accent. Her go-to get-me-drunk-now drink, the one she pounded back the last time a guy dumped her and she went out for drinks with him and the other detectives. “Ya gotta go, Jake,” she says just loud enough for him to hear.
And for Rosa and Charles, too, apparently. “Listen to her, buddy.” Charles says.
“I’m heading out,” he says to Amy, keeping his gaze straight ahead even though he desperately wants to look at her. From the corner of his eye he can see that she’s still looking around the club and bobbing her head to the beat, showing no sign to anyone that might be watching that she knows him. And he’s standing stock-still like one of those street performers that pretends to be a statue. “You okay?” He asks as he sinks down to rest some weight on his forearms against the bar.
“Been better,” she says after a beat. For some reason that makes him irrationally angry, so he clenches his jaw until it feels like his teeth are going to crack. “Don’t make an ass of yourself,” she warns.
“Too late,” Rosa snickers in his ear. He loosens his jaw.
There are a thousand different emotions swirling through his head and even more people pressing up against him, trying to get to the bar, which buffets him into Amy. Before he’s able to get his bearings, he finds himself pressed up against her so that they’re chest-to-chest, and for the first time since that disastrous date two months previously, he has a chance to look his partner in the eye.
She looks drop-dead gorgeous. She’s got that smokey-eye thing that Gina talks about constantly and her dress is black and slinky and it clings to her curves in a way that basically demands he check her out. She’s wearing heels - which he knows she hates because she can’t run very well in them - that are so strappy he wonders how long it took her to figure out how to get them on. His tongue darts out to wet his lips nervously upon realizing just how shapely the shoes make her legs look. At first glance, Amy Santiago is unbelievably hot.
But as he looks closer, he starts noticing the things she’s likely worked very hard to hide from those who don’t know her nearly as well as he does. She’s got well-defined dark circles beneath her eyes and a cut above her right eye that both look as though they've been drowned in concealer. There’s a slice in her lower lip that’s just a shade darker than the lipstick she’s wearing but it looks like it’s well on the way to being fully healed. In the low light, they’re almost impossible to see, but Jake knows every nuance of her face so well that to him they stand out like neon signs. Her body presses up into his and she feels bonier than he remembers, like she’s lost some weight. Her eyes scan his face for a brief second, like she’s studying to memorize it with the photographic memory she’s always worked toward having, before she smiles cordially up at him and steps closer to the bar.
The loss of contact with her feels like the air’s been knocked out of his lungs.
“Scotch on the rocks and vodka tonic,” the bartender slides their drinks toward them at the same time and Amy deftly catches them both. She spins and thrusts his drink into his hand and, with a thoroughly convincing sultry wink, saunters back into the crowd toward her VIP section.
“Peralta, let’s go.” Rosa says in his ear. He throws the entire glass back in one gulp and he goes without looking back.
The third time Jake sees Amy after she’s gone undercover, he spots her through the scope of a sniper rifle.
He’s perched on a rooftop several buildings down from the auto parts manufacturing plant that’s being robbed and there’s something like excitement numbing the constant ache that has taken residence deep in his chest.
Scully long-since moved back to his old desk and Jake was left once again with the empty altar of a desk belonging to his absent partner, who has slowly crept into his every waking thought. Most of his sleeping thoughts, too, apparently; he’s woken multiple times screaming Amy’s name in a cold sweat at the mental image of her savagely beaten body being found in a dirty alley beneath a pile of trash.
Six months is a long time to go without having a partner and it’s affecting Jake more than he ever could have guessed it would. He can’t stand the smell of licorice anymore because the smell is so closely associated in his mind with Amy stress-eating the candy to avoid smoking that it makes him physically ache to see anyone else eat it but her (even though she eats it like a rabbit eats lettuce and that drives him crazy). He can’t watch CNN because they used to text each other every night about The Situation Room and Erin Burnett OutFront (and their texts usually consisted of insightful thoughts from Amy and jokes from Jake), and every time he sees Erin Burnett’s face on TV he has to fight off the crazy urge to text Amy.
“You ever think maybe you like Amy?” Gina posed the question at Shaw’s two days after the Ooze incident after listening to him recount the night for the fifth time that day.
“She’s my partner, of course I -”
“You know what I’m talkin’ about, doll,” she leaned across the table and tapped the end of his long nose with the tip of her finger. “I’m talkin’ about like liking her. Eighth grade style.”
Outwardly he denied it. “What? No. She’s my partner and my friend and I care about her. And I’m worried about her. She’s infiltrating an international drug smuggling ring. That’s all this is.”
Inwardly, he felt something scary taking root in his brain: feelings. Sans the z.
And those terrifying feelings just refuse to stay put in the corner of his brain where he’s repeatedly shoved them since that night, growing like weeds that just won’t die. It’s been three months since that night in Ooze and he’s ready to take a flamethrower to his head to get his feelings back where they belong - his mental repression box. They’d fit so nicely beside thoughts of his father and abandonment, if only they’d cooperate. The invitation to stake out the auto parts place is just too tempting to pass up on, so he readily accepts. Anything to get his mind off Amy.
He’s covering the back exit that’s partially hidden by an empty, unmarked white moving van parked in the alley and he’s starting to see some movement, which is getting his adrenaline pumping. He tucks his head down and peers through the rifle scope as his index finger curls around the trigger.
He sees a familiar head of jet-black hair cut to the shoulders amongst a group of men, all of whom are carrying armloads of stuff Jake will never care enough to learn about, and his heart stops. He isn’t sure until she turns her head toward the street and squints at the sun. His finger flies away from the trigger so quickly it’s as though he’s burned.
“Captain,” Jake says sharply into his radio.
“What is it?”
“It’s Amy.”
There are quiet murmurs as the rest of the team reacts. “Hold off,” Holt says loudly, and the line goes quiet. “Where is she?”
“South exit, near the moving van.” Jake never takes his eye off her. He watches her shout instructions to the men - who Jake now realizes probably work for her - and as they jog back inside the warehouse she crosses to the driver’s side. She has to pull herself up with the handle to climb inside.
The door closes behind her and she sits very still for a moment, her hands in the ten-and-two position Jake has always teased her for. But then they slowly slide down either side of the wheel and she sags forward until her forehead touches the top of the steering wheel. He can’t be sure, but it looks like her shoulders are shaking with sobs.
“Peralta, do you have a visual on Santiago?”
“Yes,” the word is broken in his dry throat.
“We’ve received instruction from her FBI handlers to pull back,” Holt explains. He sounds disappointed. “Everyone remain in position until the premises has been cleared.”
Jake watches Amy straighten up as her men hustle back out of the building. She hurriedly wipes her face when the last one exits and checks her reflection in the mirror on the underside of her visor.
One of the men joins her in the cab while the other five climb into the back and slide the door closed. Amy pulls away slowly enough that Jake’s sure the men in the back of the truck don’t stumble too much before pulling out onto the road and driving away. His radio is silent until she turns a distant corner.
“She’s gone.” Jake says, and his voice rings clearly with defeat.
Later, when he's out sullenly drinking alone at Shaw's, Rosa will appear out of nowhere and wordlessly hand him a picture of Amy from the crime scene, mid-stride. Her lips are slightly parted and her hand is blurred, frozen in the middle of reaching up to tame her newly short locks in a gentle breeze. Jake will end up propping the picture up against his lamp on his bedside table to be easily seized when he wakes up from the alley nightmare. After a month, he'll fold it in half and carry it in his pocket everywhere he goes like a talisman.
The fourth time Jake sees Amy after she’s gone undercover, he’s at the precinct.
They’ve just brought this guy in on a domestic violence charge who looks vaguely familiar and he’s screaming what Jake is sure to be violent obscenities in Spanish that make even Rosa squirm at literally everyone in the building. He keeps it up for a good thirty minutes, almost long enough for Terry to lose his cool and slam on the holding cell door hard enough to scare the guy into submission, when suddenly the elevator dings and the doors slide open.
Jake glances back out of habit and does a double-take.
It’s Amy, looking far worse than he’s ever seen her look in his life.
She’s got a horrible bloody black eye and her lip is split in two places. Her nose is bleeding and there’s a hand-shaped purple bruise on her throat. She’s pale, her cheekbones are protruding, and her eyes are sunken and gaunt. Even her collarbones are clearly visible against her skin, which suddenly looks thin and easily breakable. She’s in a low-cut shirt and cropped blue jean shorts that are dotted with what is likely her blood, and her hair is now dyed blonde at the tips, unlike it was two months ago at the warehouse.
And she looks pissed as hell.
“Why the fuck did you pigs lock up my Archie?” She shrieks at the nearest beat cop, and Jake suddenly realizes why the guy in holding looks so familiar: he’s the guy he saw Amy on a date with at that Italian place seven months earlier.
“Ma’am, we picked him up on two counts of public intoxication and domestic violence -”
“Domestic violence?” She repeats incredulously, her voice rising two octaves. Everyone has stopped their activity, turned to watch the debacle unfold. Jake feels like his heart and lungs are all being compressed in Charles’ VeggieVacuum. “Archie ain’t never hurt nobody! He ain’t hurt a damn fly!”
The officer raises a skeptical eyebrow as his eyes quickly drift over her obvious injuries.
“Eyes up here, pervert.” She snaps. “What’s his bail?”
“I-if you would just follow me this way -” the officer leads her away and Jake feels like he can’t catch his breath. He feels hands, Gina’s hands, on his shoulders, but he can’t rip his gaze away from where she disappeared.
“Archie’s lookin’ at you,” Gina hisses in his ear.
Jake immediately throws his attention back to his computer screen, trying to ignore the flush he feels rising up the back of his neck. He isn’t sure if he wants to kick the door of the holding cell down and deck Archie right in the mouth or if he wants to lock Amy at the top of a very tall tower guarded by fifty fire-breathing dragons so that no one can ever touch her again without his permission. Gina’s thumbs rub at the knots at the base of his neck, but Jake still can’t breathe.
His phone buzzes on his desk with a text.
From: Rosa Diaz
Pull it together Peralta
Jake clenches his teeth and flips his phone face-down on the desk. After a moment, he reaches into his pocket and pulls his picture of Amy out and stares at her face until his eyes can't make sense of shape anymore.
She’s gone for forty-five minutes and when she emerges there’s some kind of new-found understanding lighting the officer’s eyes. He leads her to the holding cell where Archie is already waiting by the door, looking smug.
“Thanks, baby,” he says as the door swings open.
And before she has a chance to respond, Archie has her swept up in a borderline pornographic kiss. Jake can feel his eyes bulging as Archie’s hands rake down her sides, but even through his sudden tunnel-vision, Jake sees Amy wince when Archie’s hands squeeze her ribcage. His vision goes red.
He’s on his feet before he knows what’s happening, ignoring Gina’s whispered protests and shoving the picture back in his back pocket. “Gotta get something from my car,” he announces loudly to no one in particular. The doors are sliding closed, but Jake manages to catch one with his hand. “Sorry, folks,” he says as he forces the doors back open. “Just gotta get something from my car.”
Archie looks unimpressed, but Amy’s eyes are wild with panic.
Jake gathers himself up in the far corner of the elevator as the doors slide shut and tries not to pay attention to the way Amy clings to Archie’s arm.
He hears three soft bumps. He glances up and Amy is gently tapping the back of her head against the wall of the elevator behind her. She looks at him from the corner of her eye and then taps her head again, twice, then three times in quick succession. He fixates his gaze on the doors in front of him as she taps out a pattern that sounds familiar.
They exit first and Amy shoots him one last glance over her shoulder before they part ways; he toward the parking garage and she toward wherever she slept at night.
It isn’t until he gets to his car and does a little research before he realizes she was talking to him in Morse Code.
It is almost over.
He goes to Shaw’s with the entire nine-nine and it only takes one scotch on the rocks before he’s fully in tears and choking out his newest truth to those who pat him consolingly on the back: he misses her so damn much and she might actually die before he has a chance to tell her that he like-likes her.