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Later, when she wakes up at noon buried beneath miles and miles of cable-knit blankets, the realization of just how odd it all is will hit her hard. She’ll roll to her back slowly and blink up at the ceiling, the weight of his head and arms and legs and the way they all fit against her still fresh in her memory. And it will be weird.
But that’s later. Now, in the moment, it isn’t so weird.
She’s been a detective at the nine-nine for three months, and it has been an adjustment. The air itself seems to be tinged with ridiculousness; sometimes she feels like she’s working on the set of a sitcom rather than a bustling police precinct. She’s fairly certain ninety percent of that feeling stems from her partner. Her irresponsible, childish, flake of a partner who’d dance with a suspect in the interrogation room and call it a questioning technique.
(Nevermind the fact that he got the confession ten minutes later, that’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing.)
She’s still trying to figure out what, exactly, their dynamic is - what started off as pure competitiveness has given way to a weird, hyper-competitive friendship that she doesn’t understand at all. She still doesn’t know a lot about him (other than Boyle is is best friend and he seems to speak whatever language Rosa speaks (mostly grunts)), and he really doesn’t know anything about her (other than she was top of her class out of the academy - something she reminded him of repeatedly during their strictly competitive phase). He seems to genuinely enjoy her company, though, despite the frequent eye-rolls and the light jabs.
They’re still competitive, and every now and then it turns into a weird sibling-like bickering fight, but for the most part they tolerate each other.
He’s been particularly annoying lately, though, flicking all his empty gum wrappers at her (rather than the customary half) and referring to her by all manner of stupid nicknames and she has had it. It’s stupid, and childish, and the epitome of sinking to his level, but it’s all she has. She volunteers them for a stakeout. An overnight stakeout.
The six-hour shift they receive by email is almost worth the absolutely crestfallen look on his face.
The store they’re supposed to watch doesn’t have an official name, and when she drives by on her lunch break it looks remarkably similar to a pawn shop (if all pawn shops looked like something out of the background of a cheesy eighties movie). Supposedly it’s a front for a small-time drug dealer, thought to be the owner, Marco Antkowski. Reports of suspicious activity in the area always come between three and five o’clock in the morning, but Captain McGinley sticks them on a twelve-to-six shift. Just to be safe, he rumbled, eyes never leaving his computer screen.
Jake, in an attempt at being petty, refuses to agree to use his car. Like, straight-up crosses his arms over his chest and gives her the silent treatment until she throws her hands up in defeat and stomps away. The only reason she’d even driven by the store earlier is because she’d been operating under the assumption that Jake would insist on using his rolling dumpster of a car for the stakeout like he has on literally every other stakeout she’s seen him go on. They can’t use hers; what if Antkowski saw her drive by earlier and recognizes her car? She would compromise the whole stakeout.
She remembers an hour later that the nine-nine has a small collection of vehicles for undercover missions and stakeouts, feeling only mildly stupid as she hurries off toward the first floor.
The car she chose from the lot has a bench-style front seat - it’s the only thing about the vehicle that doesn’t fall under her definition of sensible (Jake vehemently disagrees, considering the car is devoid of his secret hidden snacks, his secret hidden pillow, and his secret hidden blanket, and is thus the most not sensible car she could have possibly chosen). The extra padding taking residence where the center console would normally go is nothing short of a tempting tease for her partner, which he makes sure she knows the second they both slide inside.
“C’mon, Santiago, it’s like you want me to fall asleep for the whole shift,” Jake drawls. It’s midnight, and they’re approaching the car parked just outside the precinct with the keys clutched tightly between Amy’s fingers to disguise the slight tremble in her hands. She’s been a cop for six years, a detective for three months, but this is somehow her first stakeout.
“Sleeping for the whole shift is against stakeout procedures.” She tells him, her voice both lofty and quivering. She notes that Jake shoots her a hard, studious glance, but he must dismiss it as a byproduct of the thirty degree chill racing down her spine, because he says nothing.
“First stakeout with the new partner,” he says in a sing-song voice once she pulls away from the curb. He leans forward and fiddles with the radio knob, and after a few seconds of static, the sounds of The Cure fill the car. “Co-pilot always gets to pick the soundtrack.” He says through an impish grin.
“That’s fine.” She says absently, because it really is. She knows him well enough by now to know his taste in music is pretty much identical to her brother Manuel’s and she developed an uncanny ability to completely tune it all out by the age of thirteen.
He seems satisfied, a familiar smirk gracing the slopes of his face, and for a moment Amy really believes that’s the end of it.
But of course it isn’t, because he’s Peralta, and she’s pretty sure he was genetically engineered in a lab somewhere for the sole purpose of driving her absolutely insane.
He starts singing - no, that’s too generous a word. He starts shrieking along to the song. Except it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t actually know the words, so about seventy percent of the time he’s just making baby whale-esque noises between slurred words that are most definitely not the right words. And to add insult to injury, he’s not even in the right key.
Somewhere on the other side of Manhattan, Manuel jolts awake in a cold sweat.
“Could you - could you not?” Amy half-shouts over the commotion. Jake feigns deafness, still bellowing whale noises, and Amy tightens her grip around the steering wheel to keep from hitting him in the throat. Not hard or anything. Just enough to shock him into silence. “Peralta!”
“Shut up, shut up, this is the best part!” He swats her upper arm lightly and she grits her teeth.
Amy’s not really one to be a doormat. She bends over backwards to please those in authority over her, but with her peers she definitely knows how to hold her own. An unintended side-effect of growing up in a house with seven brothers, she supposes. She’s definitely not afraid to speak up when things don’t go according to plan, or when people have crossed the line into offensiveness, which is part of the reason she even got this stupidly awesome promotion.
But for some reason - some unfathomable reason that she still can’t really put into words - she never says anything to Jake. Well, okay, that’s not totally true. She snapped at him on her first day in the precinct when he jokingly called her “señorita rookie.” But he approached her later alone in the breakroom, awkward and blushing furiously, and stumbled through an apology. And…and something about the earnestness with which he spoke, the trembling conviction in his eyes, well…it made her go soft.
Something she sorely regrets now, sinking back into her seat with a low grumble, reluctantly resigned to her fate.
He keeps it up for three songs, all the way to the stakeout location, while Amy simmers in her own futile irritation. He only stops when a song he doesn’t like starts filtering through the speakers.
For the next five minutes he flips through the radio stations compulsively. The sounds grate against her ears, rattle in her brain, which, she’s pretty certain, qualifies as torture. A strangled shout for him to knock it off is just welling up her throat when the radio suddenly cuts off and a jarring silence hits her head-on.
“There’s nothing good on,” Jake tells her. His voice suddenly sounds much louder and deeper than she remembered. “Why do radio stations suck so much after midnight?”
“Because no sensible people are listening to the radio after midnight.” Amy says quietly.
“Terrible people, terrible tastes in music. Smort, Santiago.” He readjusts a little in his chair, gaze fixated on the horizon. “Do we have any idea what this store sells as a front for this operation?”
She scans the storefront in question. “Car parts? Technology from the eighties? I dunno.” She watches for any movement near the single emergency light on toward the back of the store, before sighing and sinking a little deeper into her seat.
“You think they have VHS players in there?”
“I…what do you need one of those for?”
He shoots her a look, eyebrow arched. “For viewing VHS tapes, duh. I thought you were supposed to be, like, top of your class out of the academy.”
“I was top of my class out of the academy,” Amy says through clenched teeth, “I was just confused because we’re in the twenty-first century and I don’t know anyone who has used a VHS player since nineteen-ninety-nine.”
Jake snorts. “You’re funny when you’re annoyed.” He says off-handedly.
Heat rises up in her cheeks, and she quickly sheds her thick-knit scarf, wondering when it got so warm in the car.
(Years later, when they talk about this night, he’ll tell her he actually meant to say cute. She won’t be surprised.)
“Five bucks says this ends up being a complete waste of time.” Jake declares five minutes later. Amy chances a glance over at him. He’s leaning against the window, arm curled as a makeshift pillow between his face and the glass.
“I’ll take that action.” Amy says after another moment’s deliberation. Jake perks up a little, eyes half-lidded and lit with intrigue simultaneously.
“I knew you were secretly cool,” he says. “Quit holding back on me, Santiago.” He reaches across the bench to shake her outstretched hand. She wants to be annoyed, really, she does, but an exasperated smile is the only thing she can manage. “So, I take it from your perfect posture that you’re taking first watch?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Wake me in an hour.” He says, voice low and rumbly as he shifts further down in his seat. His legs bend awkwardly, just a hair too long to stretch out comfortably, and he tilts his head back over the edge of the seat. He’s snoring within two minutes.
“Unbelievable,” she says softly, because he actually somehow falls asleep faster than her twin brothers and she had no idea that was even possible.
She really does intend to wake him up after an hour. Honestly. But Jake’s a pretty violent sleeper (granted, that might have something to do with sleeping in a car, and, no, she’s not trying to imagine what he might be like sleeping in a bed, shut up) and somehow he’s managed to kick and punch his way across the bench, inching closer and closer to her, until the folds of his leather jacket brush against her arm with each of his exhales.
Exactly fifty-seven minutes after he falls asleep, his head slowly descends onto her shoulder.
Amy freezes.
She doesn’t know why. Normally she’d have no problem taking an exaggerated inhale, one that would lift her shoulder up several inches and accidentally jostle him out of sleep, but…but he’s making these weird (cute, she’ll admit to herself later that they’re cute) sleep noises that she has only ever heard come from her nieces and nephews when they’re toddlers and he’s actually nestling closer to her so that his frigid nose is pressed against her exposed neck, and suddenly she just doesn’t have the heart to wake him.
Also, the car is getting unbearably cold and it’s hard to think straight anymore.
Damn it, why did she have to do this in November?
She resolves to give him another half-hour because she knows he’s been working late every night and when he comes in in the mornings he looks like an actual zombie up until the coffee from the breakroom first hits his tongue and, okay, yeah, she feels bad for him.
Amy Santiago feels bad for Jake Peralta. What has the world come to.
She resolves to wake him up in exactly thirty minutes, but her plan is foiled by none other than Jake himself (funny, all of her failed plans from the last three months seem to be tinged with a distinctly Jake vibe). She really should have just woken him up, because before she knows it his arms are locked around her waist - how does someone who’s not even conscious have a grip like this - and he’s got his left leg curled beneath him and his right hooked over her knee, foot dangling between her legs - oh God, oh God, she’s so not gonna be able to make eye-contact with him tomorrow.
What are you doing? A voice that sounds suspiciously like her eldest brother’s demands sharply in her head. She blinks a few times, trying to come up with a solid answer, but nothing’s really coming to her. She blames whatever cheap drugstore cologne Jake’s wearing. Obviously the fumes have compromised her cognitive abilities. You’re here to do a job, Mimi.
But it’s so cold, a different voice says. It’s familiar, but new; it takes her a minute to realize the voice is stupidly, ridiculously similar to Jake’s. Sharing body heat is just common sense, Ames.
Ames? Ames? Amy shakes herself (slightly, so as not to wake Jake). Kylie is the only human being on Earth who calls her Ames. She doesn’t even…Jake has only called her Amy once before, when they were in a crowded bodega run by an old man who shared her last name and continuously responded - loudly - every time Jake shouted “Santiago” over the buzz. She’s mortified that her mind would even conjure such a phenomenon, up until she glances at the tiny digital clock on the dashboard.
3:46 AM.
She always has been a bit odd after 3AM. Also, she suddenly understands why there’s such a thick layer of frost slowly creeping in from the edges of the windows. She’s been sitting here for nearly four hours.
Disjointed and delirious relief washes over her. She’s exhausted. It makes sense that her brain would go to funny places, because she’s been awake for almost twenty-four hours, inhaling Jake’s noxious cologne for the last three, and she really can’t be held liable for her current mental state.
Jake burrows impossibly closer, arms tightening and leg hooking further, and Amy’s head drops until her cheek rests against the top of his head. His hair is surprisingly soft. She pulls away when she feels her eyelids grow heavy (heavier, really, because they’ve been heavy since she got in the car).
At 4:07, a man dressed in black with his hood pulled down to cover his eyes appears, trudging out of the alley to the left of the storefront. Amy’s body reacts instinctively, straightening up from the forced slump she’s been in, and Jake stirs feebly. The man stops just beyond the door, hands buried deep in his pockets, bouncing slightly to generate some warmth. His head turns back and forth up the street.
He’s clearly looking for someone.
“Peralta, Peralta,” she whispers, wiggling the shoulder his face is still pressed against. He groans, sounding remarkably like a seven-year-old, and Amy tuts impatiently. “We’ve got activity.” She hisses.
This rouses him. He pushes away from her, foot hitting the floor with a dullthump when his knee slips from hers, rubbing his eyes blearily, apparently still not aware of their close quarters. He yawns hugely behind his fist and then blinks, staring out the windshield, trying to get his bearings back about him. “Hoozat?” He slurs.
“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “He just got here.”
He hums and rubs his eyes again rolling his neck and shoulders. He huffs when his hands drop to his lap. “Wha’ time izzit?”
Amy doesn’t answer.
From the corner of her eye (because her gaze is still intently focused on the newcomer) she sees him lean forward toward the dashboard. “Four…wait, is it four AM?” He turns toward her.
She doesn’t react.
“You let me sleep for four hours?” He demands incredulously.
“Sh,” she points toward the newcomer, who is now looking down at his phone. The light is faint, and she still can’t make his face out, even when she squints.
“I told you one hour, Santiago!” He hisses, quickly scooting back across the bench to his original seat. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Again, she has nothing. “I don’t…it was cold,” she trails lamely.
He scoffs, air hissing through his front teeth in a tch sound. “What does that mean? Why would that -” he suddenly cuts off, and when she glances at him, his face is bright red. “Wait, did I…did I…koala you?”
She purses her lips in an attempt to hold in a laugh - she isn’t sure if it’s an embarrassed laugh or a mocking one - and nods. Once. Curt.
He groans. His humiliation radiates across the bench.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s…it’s a weird, like, habit? I don’t…I’ve done it since I was a kid, okay, I can’t control it, I, like, almost choked Gina todeath in our sleep once when we were kids, I’m -”
“Peralta -”
“- wanted me to go to counseling about it, because she thought it was abandonment issues from my dad ditching us when I was seven, and -”
“Jake.”
He goes quiet. Dimly, she realizes that this is the first since meeting him that she’s called him by his first name. He stares at her across the bench, apprehension written into every line on his face. Some kind of lump she doesn’t understand rises up in her throat, but it disappears quickly.
“It’s fine. Really. I don’t mind.”
She can tell he wants her to keep talking, but she really doesn’t know what to say. After a moment, he nods stiffly and returns his gaze forward.
The tension is palpable, and not only because their guy has just taken a phone call; Jake’s leg bounces and jiggles, obviously spurred by his anxiety, and the whole car quakes just a little bit because of it. She knows he’s waiting for her to break the silence, and she really wants to. The whole abandonment thing is new information to her, information she desperately wants to delve into, but…it seems like the kind of conversation to have on their next stakeout.
So instead she steels herself and says, “Koala?”
“Y-yeah, y’know, like,” he lifts both of his legs, bent at the knees, and his arms, hooked around an invisible tree. “Is that…isn’t that what I -”
“I just meant, like, you…you have a name for it?”
He groans, and she snorts. “Yeah. Well, my grandma called it that.”
“Did she call you koala?” Amy teases.
“No, she called me Pineapples.” He answers automatically. They both freeze, Amy’s mouth half-open, Jake’s face the brightest shade of red she has ever seen naturally in another human before. “Any chance you didn’t hear that?” He asks quietly.
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“You’re in luck, though, Pineapples,” she says gleefully, “because Antkowski just got out of that car.”
They both lean in toward the center of the bench at the same time, entirely focused on the meeting in progress outside the storefront. She sees the man in black press a flash of green paper into Antkowski’s palm, and then she sees a small plastic bag travel the opposite direction, and even though she’s reaching that not-human level of tired, she lights up with victory.
She ends up chasing the guy in black down the alley and tackling him into a puddle of what could only be loosely described as greasy dumpster water, but even the dark, smelly stains on her pant legs aren’t enough to dampen her delirious victory. She marches her collar out of the alley just in time to see Jake jogging toward her, breath coalescing in a fog that trails over his shoulder. Her gaze automatically drifts to the back of their car; the shop owner is sitting in the back seat, behind the driver’s seat. “Got ‘em?” Jake asks.
“Yep.” She produces the small bag of cocaine she dug out of the perp’s jacket pocket with gloved fingers and dangles it between them. “I also found this.”
“Nice.”
He reaches for the collar’s arm, and Amy lets him lead the guy toward the car.
“You smell like a dumpster, Ames,” he says after he closes the back door on the two perps.
Amy freezes, hand half-extended toward the driver’s side door. “What did you just call me?”
He looks up at her in bewilderment over the top of the car. “Amy. Or, uh, Ames? Did I say Ames?”
She nods slowly.
He grimaces. “Sorry, it’s four AM. Brain’s fried.” He taps his temple. “Won’t happen again.”
“N-no, no,” she hears herself stammer. “I don’t…mind. You can, you can call me Ames.”
He arches an eyebrow. “You sure it doesn’t bother you? Because you looked exactly like I feel when people call me Pineapples.”
She laughs a little breathlessly. “It just caught me off-guard, is all. It’s fine.”
“Whatever you say, Ames.” He says. Both his brows are raised now, an experimental smile on his face.
“Just get in the car, Pineapples.”
“I’m gonna regret that for the rest of my life, huh?”
If it were any other hour besides four in the morning, she might fixate on the implications of his wording - that they would always be in each other’s lives from that moment on - but it is four in the morning, so she can’t quite identify why there’s a little blossom of warmth in the center of her chest.
So instead of dwelling on it, she smirks, shrugs, and says “Yeah, probably.”
Yeah, it’s definitely weird when she wakes up the next morning, but it’s also kind of nice. She’ll roll to her side and grab her phone off her bedside table, and there will be a new text from Jake Peralta:
From: J. Peralta
im off the hook 4 the $5
She’ll snort and quickly tap out a response:
To: J. Peralta
Why exactly??
And despite the fact that his initial message was sent over twenty minutes earlier, he’ll respond almost immediately, twice in a row:
From: J. Peralta
i told u about PINEAPPLES, ames. were even
From: J. Peralta
possibly 4 lyfe
Amy grins. It’s definitely nice.