Archive of Our Own ^beta

It all ends the same way it starts: with a phone call.

Gina lets her desk phone ring three times before she answers. Not because she wants to, or even because she’s too busy filing her nails; it rings three times because Gina is so focused on getting the four copies of this packet put back in order after the copier failed to collate the copies that she just doesn’t really hear it. Ring. She bets that idiot Officer Hunter switched it off collated again. Ring. He’s the one that used the last of the staples and failed to tell her the copier was out which resulted in a ten minute long lecture from Holt about the importance of administrative tasks to the smooth sailing of the precinct as a whole. Ring. God, Hunter is the worst .

She snatches the phone off the receiver and pins it between her shoulder and her ear so that she can continue trying to get these packets in order. “Detective unit, how can I transfer your call?”

“It’s me.” Rosa’s gruff voice filters through the earpiece. “I left the address on my desk. I know it’s Ross Avenue, but I can’t remember the house number. It’s written on that notepad. Will you text it to me?”

“You got it, girl. Hey, how murdered is this guy? Is it -”

“Super murdered. And yes. It was him. I can feel it.”

Gina feels her heart sink just a little bit in her chest. She’d looked at the initial crime scene photos over Rosa’s shoulder out of morbid curiosity. He had full lips, a long nose, warm brown eyes (or at least she guesses they were warm at some point), and a dimpled chin.

Come be the civilian administrator at my precinct, Jake said. It’ll be so much fun , he said.

It’s all starting to get just a little too intense for her.

“Okay. I’ll get you the address.”

“Thanks.”

Rosa hangs up before Gina can respond, so with a resigned sigh, she marks her place in her work and trots to Rosa’s desk. The surface is overflowing with work from the Figgis case, which isn’t all that unusual (since Rosa tends to get a little messy when she’s in the midst of a big case); what is unusual is the fact that her mess seems to have spread to the usually-empty desk facing hers. If Gina didn’t know any better, she’d think Rosa had just claimed the desk as an extension of her own. But she does know better.

She knows that the second desk is Amy’s temporary home, and has been for the last eight months. And the only personal item on either one of those desks is a dingy old Rubik’s Cube that makes Gina feel like crying for some unidentifiable reason when she looks at it for too long.

Gina scans both surfaces for the notepad in question and spots it half-buried beneath a messy pile of scribbled-on maps. She eases it out from beneath the mess, doing her best to not disturb whatever order the stuff may be in, and fires off a text to Rosa with the four digits scrawled across the top page. Five seconds later her phone vibrates with a reply: TY .

“Regina Linetti?” A masculine voice calls from the bullpen gate. Gina’s head jerks up from her phone screen, and her brows rise automatically in response to the fact that a male is calling her by her full name.

“Here.” Gina quickly retreats to her desk as a muscular man clad in a delivery uniform hefts a fairly sizeable cardboard box across the bullpen.

“What’s that?” Charles asks, suddenly appearing in the break room doorway with an empty blue NYPD coffee mug in his hand.

“Oh, Terry’s been ordering a bunch of office supplies to the precinct under my name. He thinks if I see my name I’ll think it’s something I ordered and I’ll open it faster,” Gina says dismissively as she scribbles out her signature on the delivery man’s clipboard. The delivery man eases the box down carefully on her desk, on top of the packets she’d been working on. “Rosa and Amy have been burning through so much ink we can barely keep up. He’s ordered bulk.”

“Ah,” Charles nods in understanding as Gina returns the clipboard. The delivery man reaches up to tap the brim of his baseball cap as a wordless thank-you, turns on his heel, and hastily crosses the bullpen back to the elevator. Gina doesn’t blame him; there’s a huge dude in holding who smells like three-day-old bologna (and yes, she does know exactly what that smells like, thanks to Jake) and the stench is starting to permeate the whole fourth floor. Gina fears she’ll never be able to wash it out of her sweater.

“Wanna help me move it into storage?” She asks.

“Sure! But, hey, I was thinking we could go get coffee for us and Rosa and Amy. None of the coffee flavors in the break room are really speaking to me today, and, y’know, they’ve been working such long hours with all these new homicides -”

“Charles, I would love to do that, that sounds so much more fun than putting these stupid reports back in order and hauling toner back to storage! Just let me get my coat.”

“Should we get one for Agent Larson, too?” Charles asks as he hurries to put his mug back on his desk and to grab his own coat, hung over the back of his desk chair.

Gina wrinkles her nose as she slips her arm inside. “No. That lady’s a straight-up bitch. I overheard her telling someone on her phone that Amy’s unorganized. Amy , our resident OCD queen . I’m not spending my good latte money on her.”

“Fair enough.” Charles says, nodding and shrugging agreeably.

Gina quickly grabs her purse out of the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet and rounds her desk to fall into step beside Charles. “Also, I know I’ve asked you and Genevieve this before, but Ellie has the perfect body to model baby swimsuits and I know a guy who would give you guys such a good deal on portraits -”

She’s interrupted by the sound of her desk phone ringing. She pauses and glances back at it before Charles grabs her elbow.

“It reroutes to a detective phone eventually, doesn’t it?” He asks.

“Yeah…”

“So let Hitchcock or Scully answer it.”

“Okay.”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Ugh, she’s not picking up.”

Rosa glances up at Amy, who’s pacing before a large bay window with her phone pressed to her ear and a permanent worried crease between her brows. They’re in an unfamiliar living room and Rosa’s crouched down above a man lying motionless on his back; her feet frame either side of his head. She returns her gaze to the single bullet hole in the victim’s forehead.

Neither one of them acknowledge the eery physical similarities between this victim and Jake. Amy had gone stiff when the pictures loaded on the computer, and Rosa heard Gina gasp quietly behind her, but no one actually said the words. And Rosa will be damned if she’s the first one to say something.

“Hitchcock? Are you seriously the only one in the bullpen right now?” Rosa rolls her eyes on Amy’s behalf but doesn’t look up from studying the body. “Fine, whatever. I need you to go downstairs. Down - no, downstairs. You don’t - no, you don’t have to take the actual stairs , you idiot! Just go downst- can I finish my sentence? ” Amy snaps, stamping her foot against the floor. “ Thank you. Go downstairs to the first floor and tell Officer Daniels that we need evidence baggies at the active crime scene on Ross Avenue.” She pauses, and Rosa looks up to see Amy’s brow furrowed even more than usual. “I don’t...I don’t care if you take Scully. Are you guys attached at the hip? Does Captain Jeffords know about this?”

Rosa shakes her head in disbelief and pulls a pen out of her back pocket. She uses the end of it to part the victim’s lips, and feels herself light up at the sight of a brown stem poking through his teeth.

“Oh my God, Hitchcock, I don’t have time for this. Just go downstairs and find Officer Daniels and tell him to call me. No. No. Tell him to call me . Where the hell is Gina? You’re so useless!” Amy hits the end button on her phone savagely, a growl slipping through her bared teeth. Rosa watches with a single arched eyebrow.

“You done?”

“Why are they even still on the force? Why don’t they just retire already and put us all out of our misery? All they do is sit around on their asses and watch cartoons on the precinct computers! They didn’t even notice Jake and Holt were gone until two months after they left!”

“...you done?”

She growls and stamps her foot again, before slowly releasing a sigh. “Yeah. What?”

“Look what I just found.”

“An apple core?” Amy asks, eyes suddenly ablaze with excitement. Rosa nods, feeling her own mouth twist up as Amy quickly drops to her knees at the victim’s side. “Oh my God, this is huge ! Look at him!” She quickly pulls a pair of rubber gloves out of her jacket pocket (Rosa has long-since stopped being surprised by the fact that Amy carries rubber gloves on her person at all times), slips them on, and lifts the victim’s left arm off the ground by his wrist. “No mutilation of the left hand,” she mutters as she lowers his arm back to the ground. She lifts up on her knees to coax the victim’s mouth open by gently prying at his chin with her thumb. “And the tongue is still in-tact. This was a quick one. He didn’t have time to finish. Rosa, we’re closing in on him!”

Rosa feels a swell of excitement (or at least, she thinks it’s excitement; it’s like a watered-down version of the feeling she had after busting the stupid Giggle Pig ring) and slaps Amy’s extended hand for a high-five.

“Which one do you think this is?” Amy asks as they turn their attention back to the victim.

They’re both hit at the same time with a sharp blast of cold air. “The victim’s name is Jorge Rojas,” Agent Larson announces beneath the thick scarf wrapped around her mouth from the doorway. Rosa and Amy turn to find the agent staring down at her phone, barely visible beneath her wool beanie and matching scarf and ridiculous puffy jacket, paused half-way through the motion of closing the front door. “He has no known association with Figgis or any of Figgis’ known upper-level dealers.” She says, finally glancing up to make eye-contact.

(Secretly, Rosa thinks it’s really quite fitting that this shrew’s entrance was announced by an environmental slap in the face; is a witch truly a witch without the bitterly cold winds of December carrying her broom?)

Rosa frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense. Figgis has been systematically killing off each of his upper dealers over the last two months. He shoots them once in the head, cuts off their left middle finger and cuts out their tongues, and then shoves an apple core into their mouths.”

“Yes, I’m aware.” Agent Larson says slowly, as if she’s insinuating that Rosa is stupid, and an unholy rage grips Rosa so fiercely she sees pure red for a brief moment. When she’d first met Larson, she thought maybe they could be friends, considering Larson is a hard-ass and has a strict no-bullshit policy. She even had hair crazy similar to Rosa’s; long and black and unreasonably curly and tapering down the center of her back. They could be friends, maybe.

That was eight months ago. Rosa learned two hours into the very first briefing (which started approximately thirty minutes after a plane carried Jake and Holt away to Florida) that Agent Larson was her Number Two Professional Mortal Enemy, right on the heels of Chief Wuntch (Larson is Rosa’s Number Seven Mortal Enemy Overall). She manages to fight the rage off (narrowly) and opts to narrow her eyes dangerously at Larson instead.

“If he isn’t one of the upper dealers, then who is he? And why did Figgis murder him?” Amy asks, her frustration clearly evident in her tone.

“We don’t know. I’ve got my team working on finding answers.” Larson heaves a heavy sigh and glances down at her phone. “It could take hours for them to find a connection.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes,” Rosa says shortly. “We’re out of evidence bags anyways.” She glances at Amy, who’s half-way through the process of rolling her eyes. “Any word from Daniels yet?”

“ No. I bet those idiots already forgot what I needed -”

“I’ll go back and get them myself.” Rosa snarls. She stands quickly and nods at Amy’s understanding grimace (Amy’s always been a bit better at handling Larson, even though that one night they went back to Amy’s place and drank two whole bottles of wine together after work four months ago, Amy spent twenty minutes doing a bitchy-but-accurate impression of the Special Agent that almost made Rosa cry from laughing so hard). Rosa extends her hand and waits patiently for Amy to hand her the keys to the car they all rode there in.

“Should I get enough to restock the supply we had in the trunk?” Rosa asks as she makes her way around Rojas’ body toward the front door.

“Might as well. Wait, actually, call Terry and see if he ordered more before you restock all of it! Last time we took too many and a different scene got delayed three hours in processing while they waited for the six-five to manifest some over.”

Rosa nods and snatches her coat from where it’s hanging next to Amy's behind the front door. “Got it.” she says as she slides her arms through the sleeves.

She waits until she’s alone in the car, grips the steering wheel tightly, and growls until she feels the edges of her throat rip raw. She takes two heaving breaths that coalesce like fog before her face, turns the keys in the ignition, and pulls her phone out to call Terry.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“I urge you not to take that phone call, Terrance.”

“Of course not, ma’am,” Terry says, fingers fumbling over the volume buttons to stop it from vibrating against Wuntch’s desk. He frowns down at the display; Rosa Diaz scrolls across his screen.

This is the second time she has ever called him in the nine years they’ve worked together. The first was to inform him that someone had accidentally set his desk on fire (in the midst of the Second Annual Jimmy Jab Games). He really hopes his desk isn’t on fire again (even though he knows the cause of the first fire is currently in Florida).

“As I was saying before we were rudely interrupted,” Wuntch casts a severe glare at Terry’s phone before shifting to lace her fingers together before her on her desk. “This case has become an embarrassment to the NYPD. Your team has had eight months and an unlimited pool of resources at their fingertips and yet...only twenty minor arrests have been made. Why is that, Captain Jeffords?”

Terry does his best to fight off the urge to squirm under Wuntch’s piercing gaze; he pictures Captain Holt’s face in his mind, and imagines the man mouthing the word fortify in that exaggerated way of his. “Well, ma’am, as I said in our most recent meeting last week -”

“I was in attendance, Terrance, I do not need a history lesson.  I’m well aware of the timing.”

“Of course. My apologies, ma’am. As I said in our most recent meeting, we are hunting one of the most prolific criminals in modern history and our core team is down one detective -”

“I have offered multiple times to fill the void left behind by Detective Peralta, you and I are both aware of how easily I can reinstate his previous position at a neighboring precinct when he returns to Brooklyn -”

“And I appreciate that, ma’am, but we aren’t ready to replace Ja- ...Detective Peralta.”

Wuntch purses her lips. “I must ask again if this refusal to acknowledge the very obvious handicap your team faces stems from your personal relationship with Detective Peralta.”

He’s half-way through the motions of yelling that of course his personal relationship with his youngest daughter’s godfather is clouding his decision-making skills, but he stops himself. Fortify. “Chief Wuntch, with all due respect, I know my team. The current dynamics would not offer a friendly climate for an incoming detective. So Terry must again respectfully decline.”

“Must you refer to yourself in the third person, Jeffords?”

“In a word, yes.”

She rolls her eyes, but thankfully does not comment any further. “Very well. You’re down one detective and you adamantly refuse to replace him. That shouldn’t stop you from making major arrests in this case.”

“We’re down one detective and all the major suspects we could be arresting have been turning up murdered all over Brooklyn over the last eight weeks, and we strongly suspect Figgis himself is behind all the murders. Detectives Diaz and Santiago are currently down on Ross Avenue investigating another murder, and we all have a feeling that Figgis is behind this one, too.”

“Regardless, the fact of the matter still remains: your team has had eight months and a pool of unlimited resources and a major arrest is yet to be made. It’s an embarrassment, a public relations nightmare .”

“Listen, Madeline - may I call you Madeline?”

“No.”

“...Chief Wuntch, you know as well as I do that in a case this size, there are many moving parts. We’ve tapped into the Organized Crime Unit and the Behavioral Analysis Unit and have employed SWAT teams on multiple busts of low- and mid-level dealers involved in Figgis’ ring. It’s slow, painstaking work, and my detectives have bent over backwards to make sure that we are doing everything we can to get to those major arrests.”

“I suppose you’re right, Captain. ” Terry’s heart sinks at the way her tone curls icily over the word. “I do remember what it’s like to be a detective working a major case, after all. But I’d like to remind you that this,” she gestures between them, “ will play a key role in the conversation to be had in the future about your abilities as a Captain. When the time comes.”

Fortify, fortify, fortify. Terry swallows hard at the lump that suddenly rises in his throat. “I understand, Chief Wuntch.” He says stiffly.

“Get me those arrests, Jeffords.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Dismissed.” She says curtly.

He waits until he’s around three corners and down a long hallway before pausing and leaning back against a wall to catch his breath. Tension ripples through his shoulders up into his neck, and he grips his fingers into a fist. He’s never wanted to go after a punching bag quite as much as he does in that moment, but he resists for fear of punching a hole through the wall. Instead, he curls his fingers tightly around the collar of his coat.

He isn’t sure which would look worse: punching a hole through the wall at the NYPD headquarters or making no major arrests in this case.

His phone starts buzzing against his thigh before he spirals too far down that dangerous trail of thought. This time, it’s Gina’s name scrolling across the display.

“What is it, Gina?”

“Hey, how’d your meeting go?”

“Fine.”

“Ooh, that bad, huh?”

“Did you need something?”

“Charles and I just ran to the coffee shop and we’re getting everyone coffee - and by everyone, I mean ourselves and Rosa and Amy. Do you want anything?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“‘Kay, your loss. Oh, another box of toner came in. I left it on my desk. I’ll get it unpacked when Charles and I get back from coffee, I swear.”

Terry’s head jerks upright from its’ leaned-back position against the wall. “Wait, another one came in?”

“Yeah?”

“I only ordered four.”

“A fifth one came before I left with Charles.”

“How was it delivered?”

“I dunno! A courier, I think. I don’t remember the name of the courier service though.”

Terry feels ice shoot through his veins. “Gina, the toners I ordered came through UPS. Only UPS. Whatever’s in that box isn’t toner. Are you sure you didn’t order something personal to the work address again?”

“That’s a definite no-go, Terr-Bear. I haven’t had the time for my usual online shopping sprees as of late.”

“And the box is addressed to you directly?”

“Regina Linetti, the one and only.”

His other line begins beeping in his ear; he pulls the phone away just long enough to see Rosa’s name flashing on the display. “Gina, I need to go, Rosa’s calling me. Don’t open that box! ”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Are you gonna get that?” Hitchcock asks. The officer, a young man with dark hair cropped close to his scalp and a small scar by the corner of his right eye glances up over the precinct lobby front desk at Hitchcock with an incredulous look on his face and points at the phone already pressed against his ear. “D’you want me to get that?”

It’s colder down here on the first floor than it is on the fourth, though he supposes it’s probably to be expected when the front doors are just a few short feet away. The officer, whose nose is red from the cold, shakes his head ‘no’ vigorously, and Hitchcock frowns.

“Hitchcock, c’mere,” Scully hisses. Hitchcock twists away from the officer and spots Scully perusing the pamphlet kiosks. “Did you know they teach horse-riding seminars?”

“ Really ?” Hitchcock crosses the distance between them as quickly as he can, grabs the pamphlet in Scully’s outstretched hand, and tears it open enthusiastically. “This would be such a fun Saturday!”

“Maybe we could get really good and race horses!” Scully says excitedly, pointing at a random place on the pamphlet. “It’d be just like that move Seahorse !”

“I think you mean Horsebiscuit. ” Hitchcock says knowingly, grinning at his partner. His partner of over twenty years, the one he knows almost as well as he knows himself. Definitely better than his wife; you just don’t go through the worst acid trip of your life with someone else and come out not closer than spouses. For a moment he’s overcome with emotion for the man before him; he lowers the pamphlet to his side, reaches out, and grips Scully’s shoulder tightly. “You’re a great partner, and an even greater friend,” he says sincerely.

Scully’s grizzled face folds into a grin. “I’m lucky to call you my best friend.” He says humbly, twisting to grip Hitchcock’s shoulder right back.

They grin at each other for a good thirty seconds before the moment is ruined by the single worst thing in the world - work.

“Hey, you two are detectives, right?” Hitchcock and Scully whirl around to find an unfamiliar beat cop standing before them, looking at them expectantly.

“Uh, well -” Scully starts.

“Yeah, you are, I’ve seen you up there before. Listen, there’s been a report of gunfire on Ross Avenue near an active crime scene. Officers en route are requesting investigators.” The officer says.

“Oh, no, we can’t -” Hitchcock says.

“You should go upstairs and get Amy to -” Scully says at the same time.

“There’s no one up there. I just checked. It has to be you.”

Hitchcock and Scully exchange a glance, and Scully shrugs. “I guess,” Hitchcock says uncertainly, reaching for the squad car keys in the officer’s hand.

“Hey, weren’t we supposed to ask someone about something about Ross Avenue?” Scully asks as they walk out of the precinct.

“Uh, I don’t know.”

Someone dressed in dark jeans and a light grey t-shirt steps into their path. “Detective Hitchcock? Detective Scully?” The man asks.

“Yeah?” Scully says.

“Who’s asking?” Hitchcock quips.

“Agent Berger with the FBI. We met a few months ago, I’ve been working with Agent Larson.” The man flashes a badge he pulls from his back pocket. “I need you both to come with me immediately.”

“Oh, we gotta go to Ross Avenue -”

“Your directive has just changed. Please get in the car.”

“Okay, I just gotta call my wife.”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“His stupid house phone has been ringing off the hook,” Amy says. To be honest, she only says it to fill the silence that has hung between her and Agent Larson since Rosa left six minutes earlier (well, six minutes and thirty-seven seconds to be exact, not that Amy’s counting or anything). Also, not that she’s ever shared this with anyone besides Jake, there’s something really tragic about a victim’s phone ringing in the midst of a murder scene. It makes her heart ache in a melancholic kind of way.

Agent Larson hums absently, completely absorbed in whatever is happening on her phone screen. “So Rojas might have been in a Krav Maga class with one of Figgis’ mid-level dealers, but that’s not really concrete enough to prove a direct tie -”

Amy hears a crack somewhere outside and suddenly the bay window explodes behind her. Shards of glass ride a wave of frigid air that blasts into the living room. She reacts instinctively and dives to the ground, ignoring the sharp pains in her lower back and dragging herself by her forearms to the hallway off to the side of Rojas’ front room when the bullets keep coming. She manages to crawl into the hallway and stops a few feet shy of the doorway, pushing up to huddle against the wall by pulling her knees up to her chest and curling in on herself. Bullets continue spraying into the front room, and when Amy finally manages to lift her head up from her arms enough to squint through the sheer terror gripping her body, she feels her heart stop.

Larson is on the ground, hands clasped over her left side. Even from the distance between them, Amy can see Larson’s hands are slick with blood. Her phone lies abandoned several feet to the left over Larson’s head. Larson’s mouth is open in what Amy thinks might be a scream, but the sound is lost in the roar of gunfire.

She doesn’t know how long it goes on, but it stops as suddenly as it starts, and the silence afterwards is so deafening that Amy truly believes she might have lost her hearing. But then she realizes that she can hear her own ragged gasps, she can hear her own thundering heartbeat and Larson’s gurgling moans, and she can hear her phone vibrating against the floor beside her.

It’s Rosa.

“- the hell am I getting calls about gunfire on Ross Avenue?” Rosa’s already mid-demand when Amy gets the phone up to her ear.

“Don’t come back!” Her voice is a strangled whisper. “Sniper, it’s a - a sniper, don’t come back, don’t do it! ”

“A sniper ?”

“Larson got hit,” Amy inches forward cautiously, carefully minding the doorframe should the sniper still be watching the house for movement, and tries her best to get a good look at Larson. Larson’s still moaning, still clutching at her side, and Amy sees the woman’s chest heaving. Blood is rapidly pooling beneath her lower back.

“The crime scene was a trap.” Rosa says darkly. “Jorge Rojas has no connection to Figgis. It was a trap .” Amy swallows at the lump in her throat. “He was trying to draw us out of the precinct and kill us.”

“Why just us? Why not the whole team?”

Rosa’s quiet. “Fuck. I have to call Terry.”

It’s just as well; Amy can hear sirens approaching. “Hurry,” she urges Rosa.

The phone goes dead, the sirens get louder, and her ears are still ringing.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“You’re sure he said he didn’t order more toner?”

“Oh my God, yes , Charles! I said it three times !”

Charles quickens his pace, trying to keep up with Gina, who’s practically running down the sidewalk with two lattes in her hands and her purse hooked around her elbow. He growls and lowers his phone, punching the end call button. “No one's picking up in there! What could it be?”

“I don’t know, but I know I want it off my desk as soon as -”

“Gina, can we just -”

A black SUV traveling the opposite direction as they are suddenly whips to the side of the road, screeching to a halt beside Gina and Charles. They both jerk to a stop as the driver’s side door swings open and a man in dark jeans and a light grey t-shirt steps out and quickly approaches them. It take a moment, but Charles finally recognizes him. “Agent Berger?” He asks incredulously.

“Who?” Gina snaps.

“Agent Berger. I work with Agent Larson,” he pulls his badge out of his pocket to display and shakes Gina’s hand with his free hand.

“We met him at the briefing, remember?” Charles says.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I was kinda distracted that night,” Gina says apologetically.

Weren’t we all, Charles thinks. “What’re you doing here?”

“We have reason to believe that your entire team is in grave and immediate danger,” Agent Berger explains as he tucks his badge back into his back pocket. “I’ve been assigned to getting you all to a safe location as quickly as possible.”

“Hold on, wait,” Charles shakes his head. “What’s your proof?”

Berger opens his mouth to answer but his words are lost in a sudden explosion from further down the street. Charles accidentally lets the lattes slip from his fingers, but he’s too numb with shock to feel the scalding beverage splash against his ankles; he watches in horror as the windows are blown out of the precinct down the street.

The windows on the fourth floor.

It wasn’t toner.

“ That’s why,” Berger says, voice strained. “Please, get in the car, quickly.”

Gina, who dropped both of her lattes as well, shoves Charles out of her way and rips the back door open just to rear back at the sight of Hitchcock and Scully already inside. “Ugh, what ?”

“Shotgun!” Charles cries.

“Like hell. ” She shoves him back again and quickly claims the passenger’s seat, the image of smugness at the sound of Charles’ tiny groan of frustration. He squeezes in and tries not to think about the fact that Hitchcock’s arm is touching his.

“Charles,” Scully hisses as Berger pulls away from the curb.

“What?”

“Why’d you drop those smoothies?”

“They were lattes, and we didn’t drop them on purpose.”

“Why’d you drop them?”

Charles blinks incredulously. “Seriously? Our precinct just got bombed ! Read the vibe!”

Scully furrows his brow. “You dropped them ‘cause of a bomb?”

“You owe each of us a smoothie.” Hitchcock says dangerously.

“Have any of you been in touch with Captain Jeffords recently?” Berger interrupts just as Charles opens his mouth to snap at Hitchcock and Scully to shut up .

“I called him about ten minutes ago. He just got out of a meeting with Chief Wuntch at the NYPD Headquarters.” Gina says.

“I’ll give him a call and let him know that we’ll be picking him up.”

The phone begins ringing over the speakers just as Charles’ chest vibrates with three more explosions. He twists around in his seat just in time to catch sight of the flames spewing out of the windows on all the floors of the precinct and tiny silhouettes running away from the building before the SUV rounds a corner and he’s left staring open-mouthed at stand-still traffic caught at the red light.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Hey, Greg, you wanna get that?”

“I’ll never understand your generation’s aversion to speaking on the telephone, Larry.”

Jake rolls his eyes and turns the volume on his television up (this time it’s a weather report - seventy degrees across the board for the rest of the week. The part of Jake that isn’t completely absorbed in getting back home is beyond appalled at the fact that his neighbor actually called seventy-five chilly yesterday) as Holt stands to answer the landline in the other room. His laptop glows on the coffee table before him, pulled up to a brief article breaking the news of yet another murder in Brooklyn on Ross Avenue. He’s been following the Figgis case for months now; his coworkers at Michael’s tell him he’s obsessed.

It doesn’t bother him, because they just don’t know.

This murder in particular caught his eye when he first found the article about it a few minutes earlier because it’s right on the edge of the ninety-ninth precinct, which means that at least one detective from the nine-nine is definitely going to be there investigating. He can picture them all so perfectly in his mind: Charles standing over a body, scribbling down meticulous notes while his eyebrows rise and fall expressively with each new bullet point on the list; Rosa crouched down at the head of the body, eyes roving the scene, probably trying to reconstruct the crime by imagining what the last thing the victim saw was; Terry standing in the doorway, frowning at the body, looking for anything that might be off about the scene itself before venturing further inside; Amy firmly directing traffic while slowly pacing the perimeter of the scene, scanning every last inch from every possible angle before actually moving near the body.

He lets his mind linger on that last image a bit longer than the rest, picturing her tucking her hair behind her ear quickly and absently the way she always does when she’s on a scene and she’s forgotten an elastic. He’d gotten into the habit of carrying one in his pocket at all times right before he left, and he’d had exactly three opportunities to utilize it before all hell broke loose in his life.

Any day now, he thinks, and he’ll be able to carry her elastics in his pockets every day for the rest of his life (assuming she’ll let him).

Holt appears in the doorway, landline still in hand. He frowns down at the phone before his gaze flickers back up to Jake. “There’s been an incident.” He says slowly.

Jake feels his gut sink. He straightens, hands falling from against his face to touching his knees slowly. “What kind of incident?” He asks uncertainly.

“Apparently, there was some sort of...shooting.”

“Where?”

“An active crime scene on Ross Avenue. Two of our detectives were there, but it is unclear which ones it was or if either are injured. Agent Larson was also there.”

Ross Avenue. The homicide he’s been trying to follow.

“How is it...unclear?” Jake asks, choking back the terror rising in his throat.

“Apparently Serg- Captain Jeffords was in a meeting with Chief Wuntch when the call came into the precinct, and the responding officers didn’t fill out the paperwork correctly. Agent Garcia can’t get in touch with Agent Larson.”

“Why?”

“She isn’t answering her phone. There’s a distinct possibility that she was injured in the gunfire.” Normally this is the part where Holt assures him that there’s no need to panic yet, but as Jake waits for the quiet reassurance, Holt simply begins to pace in tense silence. It does not help with Jake’s suddenly-racing heart.

“What- what- what do we do?” Jake stutters.

“We wait.”

“For what ?”

“Agent Garcia to call us.”

“Can’t we call him?”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Amy’s never noticed how similar the sharp blasts of an ambulance siren are to a fire alarm ringing the way she notices it now. It’s a weird intrusive thought that breaks through the haze of panic in her mind as SWAT team members and EMTs rush into the scene, faces pale and pinched against the frigid cold and the violence still evident in the living room.

“The area hasn’t been cleared yet.” A SWAT officer says to her. “We can get you out, but we’ll have to disguise you. Here.”

He thrusts an EMT uniform into her hands.

She changes quickly, fingers fumbling slightly over the buttons of her blouse. It isn’t until she peels it away from her torso that she discovers the glass piercing her skin in her lower back. An EMT has to quickly help her pluck the shards out, and she bites down on her palm hard to keep from screaming in pain. She knows her blood will likely stain the bottom of her borrowed shirt, essentially painting a bull’s-eye on her back, and she prays the ambulance is parked at an angle that will cover her back from the sniper.

“Good, go, go, go!”

She rushes outside in line with two other EMTs and is gripped by an unparalleled all-consuming terror that blurs the edges of her vision and makes her feel as though she’s running underwater the moment her feet cross the threshold. She’s so consumed by it that she doesn’t even feel the goosebumps that race down her spine violently in response to exposure to the cold. But before she knows it, she’s shoved into the back of an ambulance that immediately peels away from the curb. She can still hear the sirens outside, muffled now, and the second EMT that climbed into the back after her immediately begins yanking the hem of her borrowed shirt up to cover the wounds left behind by the glass with gauze.

“Where are we going?” Amy asks, and her voice sounds strange and a little garbled in her ears.

“Somewhere safe,” he half-shouts over her shoulder.

She doesn’t ask again.

The pull up outside of an unmarked building and the moment the car eases to a stop the back doors swing open. Agent Berger is looking up at her, his hand extended to help her out. “Detective Santiago.”

“L-Larson, she got shot, I couldn’t -”

“It’s okay. She’s in good hands now. I’m confident that the doctors will do the best they can to help her. What matters right now is getting you inside safely.”

Amy grits her teeth and takes Agent Berger’s hand.

He leads her into the building, down three flights of stairs, and through a set of double doors. The hallway is starkly white and it makes her feel very uneasy, especially because it’s lined with doors that have no windows. It’s eerily quiet, and it makes her think of that stupid asylum horror movie Jake made her watch once (and even he couldn’t get all the way through it without tucking his face into her shoulder and screwing his eyes shut). Her skin begins to crawl.

Agent Berger stops at the eighth door on the right side of the hallway and knocks. Amy clenches her fists at her sides as he opens the door, and steps aside, gesturing for her to walk in. Before she’s able to get a good look at the room itself, her vision is obscured by the sight of Rosa rushing at her, and she barely has enough time to brace herself before Rosa’s slamming against her in a fierce hug. Over Rosa’s shoulder, she sees Gina, Charles, Terry, Hitchcock, and Scully gathered around a round wooden table in the corner of the room, all looking pale sweaty and scared but as relieved to see her as she feels to see them.

The only other furniture in the room are two stacks of brown metal folding chairs leaned up in two rows against a far wall. The room is thickly carpeted with some awful maroon colored material and the walls are off-white and a little dingy; Amy gets the distinct feeling that the FBI uses the premises for training exercises, not unlike Tactical Village.

“What are you wearing?” Rosa sniffs when she pulls away. Amy glances down and grimaces at the EMT uniform still adorning her body. “There’s blood on this shirt. Berger, d’you guys have anything else she can wear that doesn’t have blood on it?”

“We should have something we give to cadets in training upstairs. I’ll go see what I can find.” Berger backs out and closes the door behind him, plunging the room into silence.

“The precinct got bombed.” Rosa says gruffly.

“ What ?”

“They came in disguised as couriers.” Terry says, shifting forward awkwardly until Rosa moved to make enough room for him to hug Amy as well. “They left packages for the administrators on each floor. The one on the fourth floor detonated first.”

Amy pulls away from Terry’s chest, feeling a slow-burning fear unlike anything she’s ever known creep over her heart.

“We need to sit down and figure this out.” Rosa says. She turns on her heel and marches toward the round table in the back corner of the room and drags one of the folding chairs leaning against the wall out to sit at the table and drops into it, glancing back over her shoulder expectantly. The others move to join her, and when Amy sits down beside Rosa, Rosa reaches over and briefly squeezes her hand beneath the table.

Her heart begins beating a bit more evenly.

“Let’s treat this like we would treat any other case,” Terry says calmly. Amy closes her eyes and lets his tenor voice wash over her, imagining it an octave deeper and a touch slower. It soothes her just enough to push her panic down and focus. “Start with what we know. We know the precinct was targeted and an active crime scene was targeted.”

“We also know the crime scene was a trap designed to lure me and Amy out of the precinct.” Rosa growls.

“We don’t know that. After all, the sniper waited until you left the scene to begin his attack.”

“He obviously thought I was Larson. We look a lot alike, physically speaking. And only physically speaking. God only knows what distance he was at when he saw me. He thought I was the FBI agent and he waited until Larson was gone to open fire on me and Amy.”

“That’s a theory. But we need to consider all the possibilities. Let’s start with the broader picture, here, gang: why would he bomb the precinct and shoot up a crime scene? Why not bomb both or shoot up both?”

“Tailor the attack to fit the environment?” Charles suggests.

“That’s a definite possibility.” Terry says, nodding and smiling encouragingly. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes, just as it hasn’t over the last eight months. Terry looks worn down, strung out, and exhausted.

Amy’s been avoiding mirrors.

“Bombs are so messy, though,” Gina says with a frown. “Not to mention super risky to pull off. He got lucky that I don’t care enough to know toners only come in via UPS, because if Terry had been there when the package got dropped off, he would’ve known immediately that something was off. So why risk dropping a bomb off to a police precinct? Or four , for that matter?”

“Bombs obliterate everything. There’s no telling how many people were killed in the blast alone, and that’s not even counting what’ll happen with the weakened infrastructure of the building possibly failing. He just wanted to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.” Rosa deadpans. “The bodies will be completely unidentifiable.”

Amy furrows her brow. “That’s not like him.” She says, staring hard at the tabletop. “He’s all about flaunting his crime. He mutilates all of his victims the same way and leaves them out in the open at crime scenes. He wants people to know it’s him. He wants people to be afraid of him. Bombing a precinct...that’s...that’s dangerous. And desperate. It’s not like him.”

“So we know that when Figgis kills, he kills to make a statement. What statement is he making by bombing the nine-nine, and who is he making it to?”

“Jake and Holt.” Charles says automatically.

They all fall silent, digesting the information.

“It’s not a statement...it’s a taunt.” Rosa says slowly. “Figgis probably thought we were all inside. He probably thinks we’re dead. He knows this will make international news, and...and that Jake and Holt will find out no matter where they are. They’ll think we’re dead.”

“How does the sniper play into all of this, though?” Gina asks.

“He knew Rosa and I would be at the scene,” Amy says. “And he waited until he thought Rosa was gone -”

“No, he thought I was Larson -”

“No, no, listen. You swore we had enough evidence baggies when we left the precinct earlier, right? And they just mysteriously disappeared? We left the trunk open. Someone could’ve easily grabbed them when we were all inside. He knew either you or I would be the one to go back and get more, and he took a shot, hoping it would be you. And it was you. He waited until he thought you were gone, back to the precinct, to kill me and Agent Larson . He kills Larson to cut off Jake and Holt’s contact with us. You were right,” Amy says as she turns to face Rosa, “bodies are totally unidentifiable after being in a bomb, but they aren’t unidentifiable after a dozen gunshot wounds.”

“Figgis is trying to draw Jake and Holt out of hiding by killing all of us off at once.” Rosa says slowly. “And...what, he wanted to rip Jake’s heart out by having the only identifiable body be yours?”

“That would absolutely wreck Jake.” Charles says solemnly. “For him to never really know for sure what happened to all of us, that would hurt him, but to know , to see with his own two eyes that the only confirmed death is the love of his life...it would completely destroy him.”

Amy’s too numb with shock to even properly react to the ‘love of his life’ line. No one pulls a face; even Gina looks consumed with pure fear. The enormity of the realization hangs in the room heavily, and when Berger walks in with clothes hung over his arm, he falters.

“Berger, call Garcia. Now.” Rosa demands.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Your drier is finished with its’ cycle.”

“I heard.”

“If you leave your clothes in for too long, they’ll wrinkle.”

“I know.”

“It is remarkably bad for your mental health to stay so closely involved in the news waiting for a breaking news story that may never come.”

Jake clenches his jaw. He doesn’t bother looking away from the television, because he knows the moment he does the story will come on and he refuses to miss a single second. He grips the remote a little more tightly and presses the button to increase the volume just enough for Holt to get the message.

Holt sighs, and Jake recognizes the length and decibel as Holt’s ‘I’ll drop it for now but this conversation isn’t over’ sigh, which sends a whole new wave of irritation through Jake. But it’s fine, it doesn’t matter, because the image he’s been waiting for has just appeared on the television - the Breaking News graphic.

“We’re now following breaking news out of Brooklyn where reports are coming in detailing an attack on a police precinct.” Jake furrows his brow. That’s not right, it wasn’t the precinct, it was a crime scene on Ross Avenue. “We do have raw footage of the scene. The following footage is graphic and may not be suitable for young children. Let’s take a look.”

The screen flashes to cell phone quality video, shaking and trembling as whoever is recording quickly lifts the camera from the street to the horizon. It’s been eight months and the video quality is grainy at best, but Jake immediately recognizes his precinct. Except for the blown-out windows and the monster flames dancing against the bricks, staining the light-grey arches pitch black. He can hear sirens wailing in the background, and then the camera turns to catch a glimpse of the fire truck screeching to a stop outside the precinct. He stares, unable to draw a breath, and listens to the cameraman swear under his breath.

“This is the police precinct,” the cameraman says. “Shit, there’s still people in there, man!”

He’s just barely finished speaking when suddenly the phone begins quaking so uncontrollably Jake starts to get motion sickness. The sound is unbelievably loud; it’s all just a roar of noise, no rhyme or reason to any of it.

Finally, the sound dies down, and the camera jerks back up. The cameraman has moved back several yards from the precinct - or maybe even further. The camera pans down the street but Jake can’t see the precinct anymore. Just a giant mound of bricks and steel and fire.

“Oh my God! Oh my God ! The whole thing just went down! Oh my God that precinct just collapsed !”

The cameraman’s voice is strained.

Jake feels Holt stiffen beside him.

“No,” Jake says.

The television flickers back to the anchorman, who’s watching the footage on a television off-screen with a furrowed brow. “It is unclear at this time exactly how many fatalities occurred, as investigators are being forced to wait until the fire is put out completely, but it is clear that very few survived.”

“ No, ” Jake gasps.

The anchorman’s lips continue moving, but there’s no sound coming out of the television anymore.

“ No! ” He lurches off the couch and Holt seizes the back of his shirt automatically to stop him from going...somewhere. He doesn’t know where he’s trying to go, all he knows is that he can’t sit there on that couch for another second longer. “ No, NO! NO! ”

Holt’s arms lock around Jake’s torso and Jake screams and strains against him. It’s completely incoherent and he isn’t even aware of speaking any language; it’s just pure grief ripping his chest apart. It can’t be real. It can’t be happening.

Eventually his broken screams morph into broken sobs and he stops struggling in favor of sagging against Holt, and Holt’s arms loosen just enough for Jake to move his own arms. A still image of the mountain of rubble from the video fills the screen, and Jake reaches for it, like if he could just reach far enough, he can travel through the TV and save his friends, or maybe he can travel and back in time and never ever answer that stupid, god-forsaken phone call that night at Shaw’s.

On the other side of the house, the drier beeps again.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Agent Brownstone is a man of few words. He sits at his desk and answers the emails that chime into his phone and fires off directives from his computer. He keeps his head down and does his job, and that’s that, really. He learned a long time ago to never question the orders handed down to him, and that has served him well over the years.

His phone dings three times with a new email.

Send word to Agent Garcia that the detectives are alive.

He recognizes the name of the agent who sent the directive as a member of Larson’s team - the ones handling the Figgis case. Agent Brownstone pulls up a new email. Something ticks in his memory.

A previous, conditional directive.

All communication with Agent Garcia must go through Agent Larson. Do not email Agent Garcia directly.

Agent Brownstone addresses the email to Agent Larson. He copies the newest directive word-for-word and clicks send. He considers getting up to heat up the other half of his chicken in the breakroom microwave, but his phone goes off with yet another email before he has the chance.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“What is that sound?” Terry asks nervously.

Agent Berger smiles kindly and reassuringly. “We have an intercom system hooked up throughout the building. It rings like an old church bell tower to signify the time. It’s intended to help cadets keep track of time while completing training exercises. It’s three o’clock.”

He scans the other detectives as Terry leans back, looking only marginally more relaxed than before. Gina reaches across the table to gently squeeze Terry’s hands splayed loosely on the tabletop as Charles, who is seated between them, reaches out to grip Terry’s upper arm consolingly. They’d all had to listen to him try to soothe his frantic wife over the phone, reassuring her that he wasn’t at the precinct, that he hadn’t been shot at, that he was in a safe location, that it would all be over soon and he’d be home in time to kiss the girls goodnight.

His gaze moves on to Hitchcock and Scully, who are huddled together in the far corner of the room, away from the other detectives. They’re speaking in hushed tones and every now and then Berger swears he hears one of them mutter something about horses. He’d always been a bit prejudiced toward the NYPD, and even though working with the nine-nine on this case has drastically changed his perspective, these two...well, let’s just say he wasn’t all that caught-off-guard by Hitchcock and Scully.

He has to turn his head to see Amy and Rosa. They’re standing in the opposite corner from Hitchcock and Scully, heads bowed close as they converse quietly. Rosa’s dark eyes are hard and calculating as they bore into Amy’s, and her fingers drift to gently brush against the gold pendent hanging from her neck periodically. Amy’s wearing old FBI cadet workout clothes; the shirt is the perfect size, but the shorts are a little too loose, and the hoodie basically hangs off of her thin frame. She has to continuously push the sleeves up to her elbows.

For how unsurprised he was to meet Hitchcock and Scully, he was absolutely blown away by Amy Santiago and Rosa Diaz.

“Berger,” Rosa calls, lifting her chin to get his attention. He raises his eyebrows. “D’you know what the media’s saying about the attacks?”

“There are no confirmed deaths yet. We’re keeping things intentionally vague.”

“Good.”

“Jake and Holt know we’re all okay, though, right?” Amy asks. If he’s not mistaken, he can detect a hint of fear in her voice. It’s a new side of her, one he’s never been exposed to. It makes the pit of his stomach shift uncomfortably.

“I sent the message along the wire ten minutes ago. They should be aware of exactly what’s going on.” He says, trying to subtly keep his voice slow in an effort to keep both her and himself calm.

“Good. Good. He might do something stupid if he doesn’t know.” Amy mutters as she glances at Rosa, who nods in grim agreement, and Berger wonders which one they’re talking about. He didn’t get the chance to meet Peralta or Holt.

“We might have a plan.” Rosa says, never breaking eye-contact with Amy. Amy nods, and Rosa looks back to Berger. “We’re gonna use Figgis’ stupid scare tactic against him. We’re gonna lure him out of hiding.”

“How do you propose we do that?” Berger asks.

“By using the same dumbass plan Figgis tried to use and the unlimited pool of resources Wuntch has been shoving down our throats for the last eight months.” Rosa growls. “How long would it take to find two guys who look like Peralta and Holt in your Florida branches? And how long would it take for them to be on board a flight to New York wearing protective gear?”

“I’ll make some calls.”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Agent Garcia doesn’t understand.

He’s tried everything. Calls. Texts. Emails.

And yet, no response from Agent Larson.

He sits in a sparse living room in Florida, hunched over three cellphones and a laptop, doing his best to focus on his work. It’s proving to be a much more difficult task here than it was in his motel room, given that Holt has been pacing the perimeter of the living room non-stop since Garcia got there and Jake - well, Jake is in the bedroom at the back of the house, but even with the distance and the closed door between them, Garcia can still hear him sobbing.

It makes his chest ache, makes him want to go home and hug his wife for the rest of the year. And it makes sitting here trying to get in touch with Larson a infinitely more difficult than it was back at the motel. And if he’s being really honest with himself, it makes ignoring that little niggling thought in the back of his mind that they need to go back to New York, now that much more difficult to ignore.

But at least being here with them has stopped their relentless phone calls.

“I can’t get in touch with Larson,” he says finally, letting his hands hit the table hard in frustration. Even he can hear the defeat in his tone.

Holt pauses. “Is there no one else you can reach out to?”

“We were put under very strict orders, Captain Holt. All of my communication must go through Larson first. She is our middle man.”

Garcia knows Holt well enough by now to know that the Captain understands, but Holt’s face still folds with a mixture of helplessness, frustration, and fear. He lifts his hand and pinches the bridge of his nose, and Garcia waits. “Agent Garcia, I...I need to know if my team was in that building. I need to know if my detectives were injured at that crime scene. I -” he’s cut off by the sound of a deep, guttural wail rising like a siren from the back of the house, “- we need to know.”

“I understand.” Garcia rasps. For some reason his throat feels dry and tight. “I’m doing everything I can, Captain.”

“I know you are. We knew this...was a possibility. We discussed it back in the beginning. We just never considered it would be this dramatic or that the confirmation would ever be so delayed in reaching us. It’s been four hours .”

Garcia grimaces down at his phone, another wave of concern twisting in his gut. Really, it shouldn’t be taking Larson this long to get in touch...unless…

He thinks of his Supervisory Agent. How he’d gotten the promotion for ignoring orders on a case eerily similar to this one, for making an executive decision based on a gut feeling to move his charges, and how that decision ended up saving countless lives when the unsub ended up getting caught wiring the original safehouse to explode. He grits his teeth.

“I’m gonna break protocol.” Garcia says, snatching his phone off the table and standing. Holt straightens, eyes bright, as Garcia dials the number to the Florida FBI headquarters. “I’ve got a feeling. A gut feeling. That you need to be back in New York.”

Holt’s nostrils flare, and for a second Garcia truly believes that he’s going to argue. “I’ll get Jake.” He says as the phone begins to ring in Garcia’s ear.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

A phone buzzes near-constantly in a hospital room at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, face-down on the bedside table. Its’ owner lies semi-conscious in the bed inches to the left, her curly black hair sticking to her sweaty face that lolls from one side to the other slowly. Her eyes roll in her head and a soft, whispered moan leaks from her parted lips.

Her mind is hazy. Thoughts rush through, scarcely leaving a mark.

She was at a crime scene.

Detective Diaz left.

There were gunshots.

Detective Santiago screamed.

Jorge Rojas had no connection to Jimmy Figgis.

Her whole left side exploded.

Detective Santiago is alive.

Detective Santiago fled the scene disguised as an EMT.

Detective Santiago escaped in the back of an ambulance.

EMTs hefted her onto a gurney and shuttled her into a different ambulance.

Detective Santiago is safe.

Detective Santiago is safe.

Another whispered moan bubbles up her throat, and Larson lets her head fall to one side and stay there. Detective Santiago is safe. Her objective is complete. Her phone won’t stop ringing, but her objective is complete. She can rest now.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“That means a plane is about to land, right?” Rosa asks the flight control director.

“Actually, it means a private jet has just crossed our airspace and is requesting to land on the third tarmac,” he says, pointing to a blip on the radar before them. Rosa leans forward, brow furrowed. The blip flashes and approaches the center slowly. “We buzz back to let them know it’s okay.”

“Is it them?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll be coming in on the third tarmac?”

“That is correct.”

She pulls her radio out of her pocket. “They’re coming in on the third tarmac, be ready to receive. Alpha team, wait for my signal.”

She thanks the controller and hurries out of the booth, racing down several flights of stairs before bursting out of the control tower. Organized Crime has already spotted an unmarked white van parked in the eighth hanger, well out of view of the control tower, but the back of her neck still prickles with anxiety.

It doesn’t really stop until she’s in the armored SWAT van, clipping her riot helmet on and consequently knocking elbows with Amy. “It’s almost over,” Rosa says to her quietly.

She feels Amy’s gaze on the side of her face, but she doesn’t meet her eyes. “What if he’s not in the van?” Amy asks, soft and fearful.

“He’ll be in the van. This is the end of it for him. He wants to be the one to put bullets in their skulls. He’s going to be in the van.”

Amy clenches her jaw and nods. “You’re right,” she says, and the words sound choked. “It’s almost over.”

Rosa tightens the strap on her Kevlar vest around her waist and turns to face Amy head-on. “We’ve worked our asses off. We’ve chased this guy for eight months. We’re gonna end this the way we started it: together. ”

Amy’s eyes harden. “Together.” She repeats like thunder echoing off a mountain range before a mighty storm. Rosa smiles.

They leap out of the back of the SWAT van and join the rest of the group. Rosa’s gaze flickers over Terry and Charles, clad in the same riot gear as her and Amy, wearing identical masks of intense concentration. Charles meets her gaze and his eyebrows raise slightly, and Rosa nods. We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.

They rush to the side of the control tower and crouch down in the shadow. Rosa edges closer to the corner of the building and peers around carefully; a low-flying jet is approaching on the darkened horizon. As she watches, it touches down and races along the tarmac, smoke bursting up from the wheels as it slows down. It gets closer, and closer, and passes them by before finally slowing to a stop a few hundred yards away.

The scene is still for a moment. Rosa breathes out, and tightens her grip around her gun. Fat white snowflakes begin to gently spiral down around her, clinging to the wisps of hair that have escaped her helmet.

The jet door suddenly pops open and slowly flips backwards, lowering the staircase from the jet to the ground. Rosa brings her radio up to her lips. “On my signal, on my signal,” she says quietly.

She sees a figure appear in the doorway of the jet, and she’s momentarily struck by exactly how similar this man looks to Jake. Granted, the distance is pretty sizeable and it’s getting hard to see through the snow coming down, but if she didn’t know any better, she’d think it really was Jake disembarking from the plane. Another figure appears as the Jake look-alike climbs out, and again, she could swear it was Holt.

She hears tires squeal somewhere off to her right. “Alpha team in position,” she mutters into her radio as a wave of adrenaline shoots through her veins. The white van suddenly whips into view; the windows are rolled down and she can see long black poles protruding from the inside. The Jake and Holt look-alikes pause on the staircase. The air is full of gunfire.

“Hold. Hold.” Rosa says through gritted teeth.

The Jake and Holt look-alikes fall pretty dramatically down the staircase, and the van screeches to a stop. The doors slide open and five men dressed in black leap out, brandishing pistols and shotguns. Their garbled yells echo across the tarmac all the way to Rosa.

One of them shoves the others aside, pointing a pistol at the Jake look-alike’s head, and pauses. She hears a strangled shout, sees the men look up and around in confusion. Exactly what she’s been waiting for.

“ GO! ”

Rosa takes off at a sprint, and from the edges of her vision she sees hundreds of other silhouettes wearing riot gear emblazoned with one of dozens of acronyms and wielding all manor of semi-automatic weaponry converging on the huddle. The men from the van jerk around in surprise, and when two of them lift their firearms up from being pointed at the Jake and Holt look-alikes, someone - and Rosa will never learn who - shoots them instantly. They fall in a heap as the others drop their weapons and raise their hands over their heads, including the one who’s had a pistol pointed at the Jake look-alike.

The one she’s been hunting for nearly a year.

“ Jimmy Figgis .” She roars when she’s within earshot. He’s breathing heavily, staring at her beneath a fringe of unruly black curls, and part of her falters because he certainly doesn’t look the way she imagined he would. But monsters take many forms; she’s been a detective long enough to know that. “You’re under arrest for so many fucking crimes that if I stood here and read them all to you, we’d all be here for the rest of our lives. Which, coincidentally, you’ll be spending rotting in solitary confinement.”

Amy rushes around Rosa and wrenches Figgis’ arms back and down, and Rosa swears she sees a satisfied smirk on Amy’s face when Figgis cries out. “You have the right to remain silent.” She snaps the first cuff on and her face twists for a second, clenching the cuff as tight as she can around his wrist, and Figgis grits his teeth in pain. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to an attorney.” Her face twists again, and this time a small grunt of pain slips through Figgis’ teeth. “If you can not afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

His chest is still heaving and his face is folded in defeat. “Fine. You win. Fuckin’ hell .”

Amy meets Rosa’s gaze over Figgis’ shoulder, and this time Rosa’s completely positive that it’s excitement roaring through the pit of her stomach; it makes what she felt in the bar at Shaw’s after the Giggle Pig bust feel like a funeral.

Terry ends up being the one to escort Figgis to the NYPD van. Rosa and Amy follow along behind, and when Charles spots them he rushes to walk on Amy’s other side. Terry shoves Figgis up the steps to the back of the van, and when the door slams shut behind him, Terry turns to face them.

Sirens are still screaming across the tarmac, which is lit up with red and blue flashing lights, and snow is starting to fall pretty thickly now. They’re surrounded by a flurry of activity, but the four of them stand still, facing each other, letting the enormity of what they’d just accomplished make the air between them feel weightless.

“Oh my God. ” Rosa says, and just like that, some magic spell overtakes them and they all burst into uncontrollable giggles. Rosa yanks one of Amy’s shoulders forward and throws her arms around her, and from the corner of her eye she sees Terry and Charles embracing excitedly as well. She hates emotions, like, so much , but this...she’s been waiting for this moment.

It isn’t terrible.

“Detectives!” They all break apart, silly grins still plastered to their faces, to see Agent Berger jogging toward them. “We need to take you back to headquarters for debriefing.”

“Should we stay and help process the scene?” Amy asks breathlessly.

“I think there are more than enough officers here to handle that.”

Rosa glances back at the others. Terry steps forward. “Let’s go, gang.”

“Someone needs to call Gina!”

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Jake is numb.

He isn’t sure if it’s a phone ringing or the pressurized silence ringing in his ears, and he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t.

Care.

He’s been floating through the last few hours. Disconnected. Disjointed. He doesn’t remember when he shrugged this coat on or how he got onto this tiny private jet, but he’s literally never cared less in his life.

And that’s really saying something, considering riding on a private jet is something he’s been dying to do since the first time he saw one in that one movie when he was a kid.

He knows Holt is watching him, knows Holt is probably trying to think of something to say, something that will convince Jake that everything will be okay, and he hopes Holt doesn’t speak, because he isn’t sure that he’ll be able to respond kindly.

(Well, it’s more like a faded shadow of the feeling of hope. And really, he isn’t sure if he’ll completely fly off the handle or burst into tears again, or a combination of the two. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.)

They’re gone.

It keeps coming to him in waves, keeps clenching tightly over his heart and stealing his breath away. They’re gone . How is it even possible? How could...how could this happen? It was supposed to be him . He’s the one Figgis was after. He’s the one who pissed Figgis off in the first place. He’s supposed to suffer.

Not them.

Investigators had only just started processing the precinct, but the K-9 unit came back with no survivors. None. Not a single one.

Two people were taken from the Ross Avenue scene on gurneys. Jake caught a glimpse of the grainy video on the news before they left the house; one was in a body bag. The other’s face was obscured beneath frizzy black curls.

They’re gone .

Holt and Garcia are talking, but Jake doesn’t listen. Their voices wash over him and he stares out the window, wishing more than anything that he’d been in that precinct with them. Or that he’d been in that house on Ross Avenue with them.

With her .

He gasps quietly and then immediately clenches his jaw to choke down the sob quaking in his chest. Hot tears drip down his face and it hurts . She’s gone and everything hurts .

He sees the flashing lights on the tarmac, blurry and surreal beneath the thick curtain of snow falling from the sky, as their jet approaches for landing. Behind him, Holt and Garcia pause their conversation; he feels them come up beside him to get a better view. Under normal circumstances, the sight of a dozen different law enforcement acronyms emblazoned on the sides of a dozen different vans would get his heart racing and adrenaline pumping.

Now, he doesn’t care.

The plane lands and the moment the door opens three snow-dusted FBI agents board. They’re talking loudly with Garcia, and Jake is distantly annoyed because it’s making his head buzz even louder than before. They yell and he wants to hide.

“Jacob. Jake.” Holt is next to him, knelt down to be on eye-level, his hand on Jake’s shoulder. “It’s time to get off the plane, son.”

He’s speaking gently and softly, squeezing his shoulder reassuringly, and Jake hates him for it. He hates the fact that Holt will go home and see Kevin and Cheddar and will get to sleep in his own bed in his own clothes tonight. He hates the fact that he won’t be able to walk into his old apartment that still smells like Gina to see Terry’s daughter’s drawings on his fridge or Rosa’s leather jacket slung over his dining room chair or Charles’ papaya in his fruit basket or Amy’s...everything. She’s everywhere in his apartment. From the pillows on his couch to the tiny rose gold wire figurine of a stick-figure cop that sits on his nightstand next to where he sleeps to the drawer full of her things in his dresser.

Jake hates that he’ll be going home to his mother’s house tonight, where she’ll gently pester him in that motherly way until he breaks down and sobs in her arms.

He stands, leg muscles burning, and moves forward in a dazed dream.

Garcia is waiting for them at the bottom of the staircase. “Figgis is in custody.” He says.

Something akin to relief flashes in Jake’s mind, but it’s like a short-lived spark.

They file into the back of a black SUV and Jake immediately leans his forehead against the window, trying and failing to focus on how sharp the cold feels against his skin. The cold. He hasn’t felt the cold in months.

“I’m taking you directly to the FBI headquarters.” The driver says, and his voice is harsh and loud in the silence of the car.

“Very well.” Holt says. He sounds properly subdued.

“Captain Jeffords mentioned you’d probably rather do the debriefing there rather than the safe house.”

Jake turns his head an inch. Holt has gotten very still.

“Captain Jeffords...is alive?”

Jake lifts his head enough to see the driver’s eyes flicker up to them in the reflection of the rear view mirror. “Yes?” He says it like they’ve just disputed a solid fact.

“We...were under the impression that he was in the precinct when -”

“No, no, Agent Berger picked him up from NYPD headquarters after getting Miss Linetti and Detectives Boyle, Hitchcock, and Scully. They’re all at FBI headquarters now.”

“They’re alive? ”

“Captain Holt...they’re all alive.”

Jake turns to Holt, who is blinking rapidly, looking clearly overwhelmed at this newest development. “We weren’t informed of this,” he says, lips tight over his teeth.

The car reaches a red light and the driver turns in his seat to face them head-on. “You didn’t receive word? Captain, we sent the directive - all of your detectives are alive. They’re all safe at FBI headquarters.”

Jake can’t draw a breath. He grips the door handle so hard he’s sure he’s going to break all the bones in his fingers.

“Two of my detectives were at a crime scene off of Ross Avenue that was attacked by a sniper.” Holt says, and then he pauses, like he can’t quite form the question they both desperately need answered.

“Detectives Diaz and Santiago. They’re okay.”

Jake doesn’t choke this sob down.

“We saw Diaz on a gurney and...and someone else in a body bag -”

“That was actually Agent Larson you saw. We had the news helicopter show an intentionally bad shot to make Figgis believe he’d successfully hit her. As for the body bag...that was the original victim, Jorge Rojas.”

“Amy and Rosa are alive?” Jake says, voice high-pitched and strangled.

“Yes.”

“And...and Charles and Terry and Gina and Hitchcock and Scully?”

“They’re all alive.”

For the next several minutes, all Jake can hear is white noise in his ears. Holt grabs his shoulders and spins him around and gets very close to his face. Holt’s mouth moves quickly, and a rare, face-splitting smile lights his face up, and something like joy makes his heart skip a beat.

They’re alive.

He sees Charles first.

Jake doesn’t remember getting out of the car or walking up the steps or even getting on the elevator; one second he’s in the SUV, the next he’s inside a government building looking at his best friend pour coffee into a black FBI mug. Charles is on the other side of a wall made up entirely of windows in what appears to be a break room, and as Jake struggles to inhale, Charles turns toward someone Jake can’t see. Charles nods and says something, eyebrows raising as he gestures with his mug.

“Charles,” the name leaves Jake’s lips harshly, echoing off the pristine surfaces around them, and Charles’ eyes immediately dart to Jake through the window.

The coffee mug shatters on the tile floor when it falls from Charles’ hand and Jake shoves his and Holt’s escort aside and they meet in the middle. Charles nearly topples over backwards when Jake throws his weight into the hug, stumbling back several feet, and he slaps Jake’s back hard enough to sting. They’re both mumbling, both heaving for breath, and Jake knows tears are positively streaming down his face. He feels a wet spot growing on his shoulder, though, so he guesses it’s all okay.

“Oh, man, you gotta go see Amy!” Charles says thickly. Jake’s heart shoots straight into his throat as Charles pulls away. Charles’ eyes are wide and he’s nodding excitedly. “C’mon, she’s down here!”

Charles starts running, and if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t know which room she’s in, Jake would have sprinted right past Charles and soared head-long into Amy’s arms.

Finally, finally, Charles skids to a stop and rips an unmarked door open. Jake trips inside, eyes darting quickly around the room. He barely absorbs the fact that there are several people staring at him; it isn’t until he hears a gasped “ Jake ” that he zeroes in on her .

Amy’s sitting on a couch against the wall on the other side of the room next to Rosa. She’s pale and she’s wearing some kind of FBI training uniform. Her hair’s up in a ponytail, her lips are parted, and her eyes are wider than he’s ever seen them before - though he isn’t sure if that’s because of the shock of seeing him or that she’s lost weight, or both.

He doesn’t care.

She launches herself off the couch and he bends at the knees to sweep her up in the tightest embrace his trembling arms can manage. Her feet leave the ground and her legs coil around his waist and his arms engulf her, anchoring her to him with one hand pressed between her shoulder blades and the other tightly gripping her ribcage. He feels her sobbing more so than he hears her; he feels her laboring lungs quake beneath his hands, feels her tear-soaked cheek pressing against his neck, feels her gripping fingers pulling gently at his too-long hair. He feels her, alive and breathing, and suddenly, he breaks.

He’s lucky the floor beneath them is carpeted because he drops to his knees so hard he’s positive his kneecaps would have cracked on any other surface. He feels her react to the sudden change in altitude, her whole body stiffening against him, but he tightens his hold around her and buries his face in the crook of her neck, refusing to let her pull away. He feels like his heart and mind are breaking apart, shattering into a dozen pieces, because he lost her. He lost her. And somehow, he’d been granted a second chance - a reprieve. Not even twenty minutes ago he’d been forcing himself to not think about the fact that he was going to have to attend her funeral ( their funerals) and now...he’s holding her and sobbing on the ground at the FBI building, surrounded by his team, his friends, his family.

He’s slow to come back to reality. He feels her stroking his hair and the back of his neck, her fingertips trailing and catching on the collar of his coat. He hears her murmuring something low and calming, but he can’t make out the words she’s saying over his own choking, heaving gasps for air. He isn’t sure when he started talking, but he can hear himself now, too, stuttering through syllables whenever his quivering lips will let him form words.

“...you were - you were - dead ,” he hears himself gasp.

He feels her go completely still against him. Her face lifts away from his neck, and his hands scrabble against her back, desperate to keep her from pulling away. “You said they would know.” Amy’s voice shakes with an emotion he isn’t used to hearing from her: rage. Her hand cradles the back of his neck, holding his head in place. “You said they would know we were alive, you said you told them, you said they knew! ”

“What the hell, Berger?” Rosa snarls. Jake feels the warm pressure of Rosa’s hand rest against the top of his head, and he screws his eyes shut, reveling in the closeness.

Someone behind Jake begins stuttering through an excuse, but Jake doesn’t care. He reaches over his head and tugs on Rosa’s arm until she sinks down to her knees and lets him pull her into a hug, and she doesn’t even grumble when he pulls so hard she ends up smashed against Amy. Rosa pats his back a few times, and his tears are renewed, because it’s the most physical affection she’s ever shown him.

Amy’s grip around him changes when Rosa leans away, grows harder and more insistent. It makes him feel small and safe and protected and loved more vehemently than anything in the world. For the first time in eight months, he feels his heart unclench, his shoulders loosen, and the tension drain from his neck. Rosa stands up again, hovering over him and Amy and letting her hand brush against the top of his head again, and then her hand disappears and Amy’s coaxing him back, too.

He pulls away just far enough for her to take his face in her hands and kiss him, and he reacts instinctively, just like he did the first time they did this in the evidence locker a lifetime ago. Her hands drift down his neck and across his shoulders and back again and he could honestly live in this moment for the rest of his life and be perfectly okay at the end of it all.

But she pulls away eventually, pressing her forehead to his a minute longer before leaning back to look him in the eye. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers, cupping his face with her right hand again.

He reaches up and grasps her hand tightly and smiles through the tears still dripping down his face. “I love you so much,” he sniffs, and a tearful smile dimples her cheeks.

Eventually, she pulls him up to his feet and he spends the next twenty minutes reuniting with the squad and watching Holt reunite with the squad, and no matter who he’s talking to he is constantly reaching for Amy’s hand, stroking the pad of his thumb across her knuckles, pulling her close during lulls in conversation and pressing soft kisses against her temple and forehead and nose and lips. And even though he knows she hates PDA (especially around the squad) she doesn’t appear to mind this one bit.

The debriefing takes two hours, but it flies by because he gets to keep his arm wrapped tightly around Amy’s shoulders and occasionally tilt his forehead down to rest against her temple and she always leans into him and closes her eyes when he does. Charles sits on his other side and excitedly flicks through pictures of Ellie, his phone hidden beneath the table and turned at an angle so Jake can see. Rosa sits on Amy’s other side and her shoulder brushes against Jake’s fingers every now and then because of how close she sits to Amy.

It’s a little weird, but he expected that. Dynamics change, especially in the situation they just escaped from.

It turns out the directive never reached them because of a mix up somewhere on their end. They’re still working on figuring out exactly what happened, but Jake decides he doesn’t care anymore.

At the end of the night, Amy leads him by the hand to the back of yet another black SUV. She climbs inside first and he gets in right after, pulling her back across the back row to sit in the middle seat when she tries to settle in the far seat. She laughs quietly, tiredly, and he hooks a finger beneath her chin and tilts her head back to kiss her.

The driver climbs in shortly after and Amy sinks a little lower in her seat to lean back against his chest. He’s practically vibrating with an unprecedented joy; he’s pretty sure the smile on his face is going to be permanent due to muscle damage from overuse. But he doesn’t care, because Amy’s alive and in his arms and he’s not even in Florida anymore.

The driver drops them off in front of an unfamiliar apartment building. “I had to move,” Amy explains softly when Jake looks at her questioningly. His chest aches for a moment, mourning the loss of the lives they both lead before, but she smiles and says, “It’s big enough for both of us.”

And suddenly it just doesn’t matter who they were before.

The apartment is dark, but even shrouded in shadows he recognizes touches of himself all over the place. His massage chair in the far corner. The blanket from the foot of his bed neatly folded and draped over the arm of the couch. His signed Die Hard poster she got him for Christmas a few years back now framed and hung over the television. The apartment is spacious and warm and when Amy starts flicking lights on he realizes that it’s probably served as a home base for his team because he sees mugshots and maps and all sorts of pages of research strewn about randomly. He’ll peruse it all in the morning.

Right now, he’s completely wiped out from the events of the day. He’s pretty positive he’ll never feel so much in one twelve-hour span ever again; it’s right and truly exhausting to bounce from one emotional extreme to the other. He just wants to sleep in his bed with his girlfriend in his arms. No, scratch that. He wants to sleep in his bed with the love of his life in his arms .

They go straight to their bedroom ( their bedroom, the one that they share ) and Jake looks around dazedly at all the photos of himself on the walls as he shrugs out of his coat and peels his t-shirt and jeans off. His gaze flicks back to Amy; her back is turned to him, and he automatically zeroes in on the large rectangular patch of gauze wrapped around her lower back. It’s dotted red from where blood has seeped through.

“You’re hurt?” He asks, and his voice is strained in his ears. He scrambles across the bed on his knees and holds her hips in place to better study the red stains.

Amy twists at her waist toward him, eyes wide. “It was nothing,” she says, shaking her head quickly. “Flying glass at the crime scene. I’m fine.”

He feels like he’s drowning for a second, but then he remembers what could have been. A little flying glass is nothing compared to that. His hands fall from her hips and she turns, takes his face in both of her hands, and kisses him soft and slow.

They crawl into bed and Jake hooks his arm around her middle to pull her against him, her back flush with his front. He slots his knees behind hers and noses his way through her hair, which she’d pulled down to go to sleep. He feels her side rise and fall slowly as she releases a long, deep breath.

“Never leave again,” he hears her mumble. “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too,” he murmurs against the back of her neck. He presses a kiss against her skin and pauses, giddy smile on his face, while she shivers beneath his arm. “I missed you more than you’ll ever know.”

She moves her shoulders back to press more fully against his chest, and he closes his eyes, exhaustion clinging to every fiber of his being.

“And I’ll never leave again,” he whispers. “Never.”

And he doesn’t. Not even when the alarm clock rings shrilly two hours later at seven AM.

Ring. Ring. Ring.