Work Text:
“I love you so much, too.. Ooh, I’m gonna get this.”
“Jake Peralta... this is Jimmy Figgis.”
“Oh, uh… hey, dog.”
“You and Ray Holt took down my operation. Now I’m gonna kill you both. Later… dog.”
Click.
“Uh… Captain Holt?”
In his dreams, everything is perfect. Perfecter than perfect. He sits at the bar with Amy and his squad —no, his family — and he drinks, aglow in the pleasure that he and everyone around him is currently feeling. The feeling at the bar is warm, Captain Holt is smiling and Rosa is too. People laugh. People congratulate him for bringing Figgis down. Captain Holt is proud of him. Amy is happy. Amy loves him.
That part, at least, was true. At one point, anyway. Jake holds onto that memory because he loves to see his friends happy. Because that was the last time he’d seen Amy in three months. He misses her, misses her more than he ever thought possible. He’d missed her while he was going undercover in the mafia, but this is so different. This is after I love you so much and we should move in together. It’s after a phone call, a threat, not knowing if he’ll even live long enough to see Amy Santiago again.
She must be spending time with Rosa. They’re in similar situations, after all. Rosa and Adrian Pimento were going to be married. He and Amy were going to move in together. Jake knows better than anyone that when those two really put their minds to something, they get stuff done. Only fools would dare cross Amy Santiago and Rosa Diaz when they were on the warpath.
He knows that they will get Figgis and finish the job that Jake and the Captain had started and failed. He knows that they will bring him and the Captain and Pimento home. But it had been three months. Longer, for Pimento. He believes in them, he really does, but he’s worrying now. He’s beginning to lose his trademark, unshakable optimism.
Jake Peralta has gone too long without hearing from the people who have become his second family. The Captain is there, but although they were neighbors, the police forbade them to talk to one another too much. He and ‘Greg’ exchange greetings with one another in the mornings when he would go to work and in the evening when he returns. That is basically the extent of their relationship and that didn’t help Jake deal at all. It’s almost painful. But he had to maintain their cover. The alternative is... no, he really doesn't want to linger on that.
His cover, Larry Stinson, had a job with a local newspaper. He’s a roving reporter, which is something Jake would have loved to do if he didn’t need to keep up a persona. If his life and the Captain’s life didn’t hang on him keeping up this persona.
Before witness protection, he would have loved the thought of a situation like this. From the outside, witness protection hadn’t seemed that bad to Jake. He had loved making up aliases for himself, considering it like acting, but more high-stakes. He had believed that he wouldn’t be in the program for long, that his squad would work hard together to bring everyone home. He hadn’t thought it would be too bad.
It is. He feels like he has been pulled up from his home and dumped somewhere else. He had a job, he had something to do, but it isn’t him. He’s always wanted to be a cop and it’s the only thing he can see himself doing as a career. It’s the only career he really enjoyed. Being a crime reporter is tantalizingly close but not anywhere close enough to being his dream job. There are no crime reporters in Die Hard. He sees the crime scenes, he talks to the police working the job, he ses clues and he sees potential leads but he can’t do anything because Jake Peralta is in danger and Larry Stinson is supposed to just be a reporter. He feels empty. He is empty. He has nothing but the vague hope that sometime soon, he and Amy will look back on this and laugh while they watch some nature channel documentary in the bedroom they would soon share.
Jake sighs, lying on his back on his bed. He had dreamed again, dreamed that Figgis hadn’t called and he and Amy had moved in together and he was standing at the front of the church as one of Pimento’s groomsmen. Rosa Diaz, clad all in black, walked down the aisle toward them and his little family was happy.
Instead, here he is.
Larry Stinson has to be at work in forty minutes. Jake Peralta has never been good at showing to work on time. But this is different. Larry Stinson is nothing like Jake, he is a responsible man. Jake thinks about Captain Holt and tries to channel some of his strength before he sits up in his bed and goes about his morning routine.
He brushes his teeth. Eats some yogurt for breakfast. Gets his newspaper and says hello to Holt, who is eating plain toast out on his porch with an oddly wistful expression. Reads the newspaper, spending a moment to analyse his own report. Too succinct, too much like a police report, yet again . He definitely needs to work on that. Brushes his teeth once again. Gets dressed in a neatly pressed suit and tie, thinking about Captain Holt again as his fingers tie the knot by instinct and feel alone. Gets in his little grey Toyota Corolla and drives over to the office.
He drives over to a crime scene in the afternoon. Gets a report from a police officer and holds back from pointing out details he only notices because of how long he’s been a cop. These people do well enough on their own. They didn’t need his help. He needs to do something, though. The cop inside him, the cop he’s trying so hard to bury, won’t let him just sit back and take it easy.
He drives back to the office, turning in his notes to an editor.
The editor is a young man, fresh out of college, who loves writing and who has a good eye. When Jake gets away, he’ll call this guy and have him edit his autobiography. The young man circles certain phrases and tells Larry to use them, circles other things and says to draw them out. He hands it back over quickly, not giving Jake or Larry another thought and goes back to something else. Jake sees that he is scribbling in red pen all over a thick stack of stapled copy paper. He doesn’t stop to ask about it. Jake would have liked this dude, but Larry isn’t Jake. Larry is no nonsense, no time for friends or shenanigans.
He types up a report on the crime, a nothing special, completely average B&E. He writes to shine up certain clues he’d noticed, hoping that if the police hadn’t already caught these, reading his article will nudge them in the right direction. It's the closest to real police work he's been in three months.
He knows the local police know him by name and by sight, knows that they like his writing style because he doesn’t take sides like the others do. He just states whatever facts he gets in a manner that engages readers. At least, he hopes it does. It’d engage someone like the Captain, but Jake would have hated it. He never speaks to the police officers except when getting facts he needs for report. There's a chance they will know, a chance that some of these people came from the NYPD and know of him, or of Captain Raymond Holt. Although, he knows no self-respecting police officer would willingly relocate to Florida. This entire place is like the sweaty armpit of America. He hates it here.
He stops on his way home at the store and buys some salad, wanting to cry at the thought of all the healthy food he eats now. He has an appearance to keep up, after all. He has a heart condition to fake.
He heads into his house with the food in a plastic bag, greeting Captain Holt as he heads up to his front door.
“Evening, Greg,” he says tiredly, fumbling with his keys. He hates this, he hates that Holt is so close but he can’t say anything real to him, can’t talk to Holt like he used to because if he does, he can get both of them killed.
He sees Holt, he sees similar pain in his own face. He remembers how the Captain got when Kevin was in Paris and knows this is infinitely harder. “Evening, Larry,” Holt replies, reading a crisp newspaper out in the front yard. Greg is an outdoors enthusiast, always on hikes and walks and eating his meals outdoors. Greg works as a surveyor, hired by big companies to check out land and give them a price estimate. Greg has no kids, no significant other, but has plenty of work friends and invites them over regularly, invites his neighbors too because he enjoys living near them.
Jake can see that the Captain suffers at least as much as he does, and the fact that his character is supposed to be happy-go-lucky and a people person just seems particularly cruel. Whenever Jake attends these parties —which is not that often to keep up his appearance as an emotionally distant yet geographically close friend— he sees that Holt has pain hidden deep in his eyes. He sees this only because he’s known the Captain for a while, and he’s gained the ability to read him. Not well, but now Holt isn’t trying to hide anything from Jake… most likely because this is the closest that he can get to talking to his squad, to his group of protégés and prodigies.
Jake watches nature documentaries all by himself now, eating healthy food properly at a kitchen table. He also catches the news by himself, and although Jake Peralta never watches the news, Larry loves it. It’s Larry’s livelihood.
Jake sees, with eyes that are dull and maybe a little bit glassy, that the police have caught the man from the robbery he’d written about a couple days before. Short, eyes bright and angry, figure clad in baggy, dark clothing and hair shaggy and curled slightly around the eyes. Jake is satisfied. He’d vaguely mentioned that the store, an electronics store, was filled with cameras... He knew that the police had picked up on that and gotten a visual, like he himself had, working a similar case with Santiago. But then he hears something.... Something that sends a chill running deep into his heart.
A voice from the TV. Head detective distinctly frowning, speaking hesitantly. But speaking, nevertheless. “We would never had solved this case so soon if not for the input of local crime reporter, Larry Stinson… ”
Jake stops listening. He freezes, fork halfway between his plate and his mouth. Their cover is blown, Jimmy Figgis is on his way down already, he and the Captain are going to die and it’s all Jake’s fault how could he be so damn stupid oh god what if he never gets to see Amy again what if he the Captain dies and Kevin has to live with that forever without knowing the truth and oh god…
He’s panicking. His breathing is coming fast and hard and his head is beginning to fog and his chest hurts. His breathing is labored now and he can’t focus and oh god he and the Captain are screwed.
Jake’s fork falls from tightly clenched fingers and he falls back in his chair, heart beating hard, in the midst of an oncoming panic attack.
He hears a knocking at his door and he screams on instinct, because it’s Jimmy Figgis and he’s about to be murdered and he’s afraid. He doesn’t have a gun, not anymore, but he goes to the door anyway, Peralta-style, because his cover is blown anyway.
It’s Holt at the door, a polite smile on his face. “Greetings, Larry. By any chance, do you have any baking powder? I’m baking brownies and I, sadly, am all out.”
Jake’s head is spinning. “Yeah,” he says, faintly, hardly daring to let his spirits rise because Captain Holt is there and there’s a chance their cover isn’t quite blown yet. “Uh, come in, I’ll get it for you.” He stands aside and the Captain enters, shutting the door and waiting until he and Jake are in the kitchen before turning to Jake and speaking intently.
“I heard your name in the news tonight. What did you do, Larry?” he asks, keeping an air of detached politeness and trying merely to sound curious as Jake pretends to look for baking powder. He has some, he knows, and it’s in his hand already, but he’s stalling because he can’t help it, and because they need to talk.
He tries to tell the Captain a lot in very few words. “Oh, nothing really. I was just taking stock of what was in the store that was robbed. I mentioned the cameras they had and wondered if any could have been taken. I don’t know what the police got from that.”
The Captain nods slightly. Jake is relieved. He understood. He hadn’t done much. The police just went a little overboard. Jake had gone a little overboard, too, but that’s alright. Jake will be more careful in the future. No more hints. He can’t afford for people to take notice of him.
He hands over the baking powder, regretting that they can’t talk any longer. We never talk anymore , he thinks, sounding in his mind like a middle aged mom seeing a high school friend for the first time in years. He smiles then, not quite Jake-Peralta-level goofiness but enough, then, to help diffuse the tension.
The Captain takes it from him and smiles widely, and if their situation wasn’t so tense Jake would be taking a picture. He’d never seen the Captain look so alien before, so out of place.
“Thank you, Larry. I’ll bring you over some of the brownies as a thank-you.”
The Captain would never do this, Jake thinks. But he knows Larry has to decline them, which is something Jake would never do either. Larry has a heart condition, according to the little bracelet on his wrist. Jake hates the little bracelet, but it gives his cover a little more authenticity.
“I’ll bet they taste great,” Jake says, trying to keep the disappointment out of his face and voice. “But I can’t eat them, sorry.”
Greg Weisman gives Jake a sympathetic look, that goes beyond just a sorry-your-cover-can’t-eat-sweets . It's everything they want to say to one another and can’t. It's everything that they had left unsaid to their loved ones, their families. It's a lot, and it's nowhere near enough .
Jake smiles sadly back, and watches Ray Holt head back into his house next door. He closes his own door and goes into his bedroom.
He pictures Amy, remembers her asking him to move in with her and lingers over the memory fondly. Remembers Charles, remembers that he and Genevieve are having a baby and that when he gets back his best friend will most likely be a dad. Remembers Terry, and wonders if little Ava Jeffords, his goddaughter, can even remember the distant man who’s supposed to be her godfather.
Amy and Rosa need to hurry up. He isn’t sure he can handle this separation that much longer.
Jake sighs deeply, unhappily, and tucks himself into his covers, falling asleep and dreaming of better times.
And in his dreams, everything is perfect.