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Jake’s first partner was a jolly old man with rosy cheeks visible even beneath a thin layer of grey stubble. He liked donuts and cop shows and was in every sense a stereotypical New York Cop, especially for (and perhaps mostly because of) the fact that he was unapologetically himself. At the time, he kind of drove Jake nuts. Really, Jake was glad to be rid of him the day Stevie transferred in. But he did have one piece of advice that managed to stick with Jake through the years:
“You’re gonna wanna watch yourself, kid. The academy didn’t teach you everything you need to know to do this job.”
And it’s true, Jake realizes. Because the academy definitely didn’t prepare him for what happens to a human being who has been frantically working a missing person case for three-and-a-half days (spoiler alert: he can hear colors). How any pretense of inhibitions are smashed beyond recognition, leaving the mind cracked open and flowing freely for any passerby to observe, after going so long with so little sleep or decent nourishment. How little things, things that generally slip by the conscience unnoticed on a good day, seem magnified a hundred times over when one’s eyes can barely stay open.
And, God, the Academy doesn’t offer any courses called What To Do When Your Partner Is The Most Annoying Person On Earth But Also Has Really Nice Hair And A Really Kind Smile.
Whatever, it’s been 86 hours since he’s seen his bed, give him a break.
The reality is that the situation at hand set him up to fail. It’s probably the work of Divine Intervention, except not from some Benevolent Guardian Angel - rather, from That Angel’s Second Cousin Twice Removed, Robert, Who Means Well But Kinda Sucks.
So, the situation: Jake’s in the briefing room, staring at the corkboard littered with photos and hand-drawn maps (all of it has blurred into one big mass of color but he can’t bring himself to lift his heavy arms to wipe at his eyes) and behind him is the steady, familiar click of sensible boot heels (because her tennis shoes are out in her car and apparently the walk to the parking garage just isn’t worth it) pacing against dingy tiles. Every now and then Santiago heaves a heavy sigh. The sound is usually enough to garner from him a quick glance back to guage her facial expression, but right now his neck is so stiff that he’s pretty sure it will snap if he turns his head, so instead he just glances at the neat stack of Santiago Work Clothes folded on the table in front of him. She’d changed two days ago, once it became clear that they were in this for the long haul; she’s in the clothes she’d packed in her gym bag now, yoga pants and an NYPD t-shirt. Her hair started off pulled back in a sensible ponytail right at the nape of her neck, but it’s become loose and wild as time has worn on. The little wisps that have escaped the elastic have started curling against her temples and she brushes them back impatiently when she tries to read through her grandma glasses (her contacts dried out after the first day).
She looks like a straight-up mess, but Jake’s heart still skips a beat every time she absently blows a a curl away from her eyes (for some stupid, unfathomable reason).
He can’t wait until his brain starts firing on all cylinders again. Also, he can’t wait to shower. And to sleep. For a week.
“Focus, Jake, we’ve got til the end of the day to find her.” Amy snaps (look, she’s said that every single day since the case first crossed their desks, but it never fails to snap him out of his involuntary day dreams). It registers in his mind only then that she’s been speaking to him; when he blinks, she’s standing beside him, brows raised expectantly.
“I’m sorry, what?”
She rolls her eyes and grits her teeth, and Jake winces. They’re crossing into that dangerous territory now, that one where every conversation devolves into a fight and nothing gets done. They used to live in this zone, back when she first started at the Nine-Nine and neither one of them knew what to make of the other. They’re light years better now (hell, Jake would even say they’re friends now) but every now and then, they slip up. Normally, it’s not that big a deal. One of them leaves, they both cool off, and then they come back and everything’s okay again.
“I said,” Amy starts, tone dripping with an exaggerated sense of calm, “we need to review the tapes from Georgia’s last known location again. I’m still suspicious of that guy with the toupee.”
“It’s a waste of time and you know it, Santiago,” Jake says. She blatantly ignores him, hurrying up to the boxes of evidence stacked beneath the cork board and rifling through one of them. “My money’s still on the boyfriend. He has the method - an extra-large truck with a covered bed that was literally bleached clean -”
“He’s an Uber driver, Peralta, they have to keep their cars at a certain standard of clean.”
“- the motive, Georgia getting accepted to Mizzou means breaking up with him -”
“He says they talked about it, and the breakup was amicable. Why is there a half-eaten burrito in here?”
“That’s where I left it! I’ve been looking for that since yesterday!”
Amy straightens, holding the burrito like one would hold a radioactive pair of boxers, and shoots him a grimace. “Really, Peralta?”
“I got distracted, gimme a break. Anyways, he has the method, the motive, and a paper-thin alibi - he went on a walk in the park by himself at midnight on a Sunday night -”
“The Uber records show him dropping people up at eleven forty-five and picking people up at twelve thirty -”
“Leaving a forty-five minute window, which is enough time to get from that park to the bodega she was last seen in and back to the park -”
“The first drop off was three blocks from that park, and the pickup was at a bar two streets away. It’s not a crime to take a break while you’re on the job. Look, Angela, the best friend, says Michael would never do anything to hurt Georgia, and I’m inclined to believe her.”
She’s digging through the box again, having hurled his burrito into the trashcan in the corner while he spoke, so Jake pushes off his table and strides toward the board. “You can’t deny what the evidence is telling you, Santiago.” Jake says, jabbing his finger toward the park Michael supposedly walked in the night Georgia disappeared.
Amy straightens with a loud, exasperated sigh. “Crime scene techs have combed every inch of that park, Jake, and they’ve found nothing to suggest that Georgia was ever there. Look,” she takes a step back and inhales deeply. “I just…I have this feeling. Okay? It wasn’t Michael. I just know it.”
“How do you know? What’s your proof?”
“It’s the way he looks when he talks about her. There’s just…I don’t know, I can’t explain it. There’s something in his eyes when he talks about her, or when he looks at a photo of her. He would never hurt her. It’s written all over his face.”
“Are you quoting two-thousand-nine Beyonce at me?”
Amy rolls her eyes again, but this time it’s accompanied by an exasperated grin. “Unbelievable.” She mutters, before she turns away from him and begins pacing slowly. “God, I’m just -” she lifts her arms over her head and stretches, all the way up to her tiptoes, and her shirt rises with her.
It’s a by-product of his lack of sleep, mixed with desperation to solve the case, and…well, hey, he’s human…that leads to what happens next.
He’s seen her skin before (duh, obviously). It’s just skin. There’s nothing special about it, really. Like, yeah, okay, it’s a little more tan than his and that’s kind of fascinating (especially in December when he looks like he’s made of porcelain and she looks like she just came from the beach). And sure, sometimes when it rains and she forgets her umbrella he stares at the water droplets that roll down her neck for a beat too long. But, like, c’mon. He used to watch water droplets race down the windows when he was a kid, and how different is that, really? Answer: it’s not. It’s not that different.
It’s not, dammit.
So when her shirt rides up, there’s just this tiny little sliver of flesh visible between the bottom hem of her shirt and the top of her yoga pants that just…grabs him. And man, if he was zoned out staring at the cork board before, it’s nothing compared to right now. And his brain, his poor sleep-deprived utterly fried brain, goes haywire. And there’s no Rosa here to punch him in the arm (in an effort to snap him out of it, like she’s done before when stuff like this happens to him around Santiago), there’s no Captain Holt to loudly call his lack of attention out in front of his friends, there’s no Terry to gently nudge him beneath the table, there’s just him. Him and his big, bulging eyes, locked in on Santiago’s waist. He may as well be staring at it through a scope for how intently focused he is.
So intently focused, in fact, that it honestly takes him a minute to realize that she’s turned back toward him and, upon finding his near-slack-jawed expression, has frozen. His gaze darts up to hers and they stare for a solid ten seconds before she quickly yanks the hem of her shirt down past her hips and Jake turns his gaze toward the ceiling.
“Okay, so we’re agreed that it isn’t Michael.” She says quickly, her voice in her high-pitched nervous range.
“Wait, no,” he forgets all previous embarrassment in an instant. She pauses in the midst of pulling Michael’s photograph down from the evidence board, brows furrowed and lips parted. “No, we’re definitely not agreed on that.”
“I already told you -”
“Yeah, alright, I get that you have a feeling about Michael - you sounded like Gina when she gets back from meeting with her psychic, by the way - but Angela kind of hinted that the breakup wasn’t as amishable as Michael made it out to be.”
Amy steps back from the board, twisting to face him head-on, and there’s a fire in her eyes that makes Jake’s stomach sink. “Amicable, Jake, it’s not that hard a word. Also, what the hell are you talking about?”
“The way she talked about it - her expression, her posture, all that profiling crap you made me take that seminar about - it was super tense. Like, it all contradicted what she was saying. Her words were saying one thing, but her body language was saying another.”
“Don’t phrase it like that.”
“Yeah, that felt really bad.”
“I just - I don’t want to pigeonhole this one guy as our guy when we have other suspects we haven’t done nearly enough research on -”
“Dude, seriously, what is with your hang-up on the toupee guy?” He stalks forward a step, leaning across her personal space to grab at the blurry still from the security footage outside the bodega. She lurches forward too, her hand closing in around his wrist just as he manages to rip the page down and crumple it between his fingers. He yanks his hand back but her grip stays firm, and then it’s an all-out wrestling match - they’re twisting and grunting and Amy’s actually leaping to get the photo back when he manages to get it high over his head and - God he really hopes Holt doesn’t walk in right now.
“Peralta!” She shouts, her voice strained and cracked with a kind of unchecked rage he’s never heard in her before. “Give it back!”
“Hey! Cut it out!” Jake shouts, and his voice booms. It seems to shock them both for a moment, though Jake manages to recover faster. Amy falls back to her heels, breathing heavily. “Look, I know what you’re trying to do. I know you want to find this girl. Believe me, I do too. But we can’t…we can’t waste time on people who aren’t viable suspects.”
“But he follows her -”
“- around one corner, and then they both disappear off security footage. That’s not enough evidence to support a case in court, and you know it. Listen, this situation…itsucks. But the best thing we can do for Georgia is to move forward and pursue an investigation against Michael.” Her chest is still heaving. “I’m sorry, Amy.”
It’s right as he says her name - her first name, for the first time in days - that the weirdest thing of all happens. Her eyes are big and wide like they sometimes get when she’s suddenly shot down from a high, but they flicker, for just the briefest second, to his lips as they form her name.
It’s so brief that he really thinks he imagined it. But the way his stomach drops out, like he’s just reached the apex of a towering roller coaster, just seconds from toppling right over the edge, that’s not something he just made up. That’s real. As real as the pretty pink blush that creeps over her face. He swallows, suddenly aware of the fact that her hand is still on his arm and he’s close enough to count the faint freckles he’s never noticed before where they powder her cheekbones and -
He’s not sure how or when it started, but he’s kissing Amy Santiago right in the middle of the briefing room. He’s keenly aware of the fact that he hasn’t showered in three days and that there’s an old chili stain on his shirt from Tuesday’s brief lunch break, but Amy’s hands are soft where they curl around the back of his neck and the quiet little gasp she makes when he slides his hand up between her shoulder blades and pulls her closer does things to his heart that he isn’t sure he’ll ever recover from. His other hand, still clutching the security photo, fumbles along her waist. The sound of crinkling paper and the quiet little half-moan that emits from the back of her throat when their tongues briefly touch are the only sounds in the room.
And, really, it’s the first moment of clarity he’s had since starting the case (because damn if kissing Amy doesn’t feel like the thing he was born to do). Which is why, later, it isn’t all that surprising that this is when The Epiphany™ happens.
He pulls away abruptly, and when he opens his eyes hers are fluttering open too. She stares up at him like she’s just been told she’ll have to dance a perfect foxtrot or else she’ll die, but her hands are still curled against his neck and she’s swallowing hard and oh, he did that to her.
But never mind that now, he’s just solved the case.
“It’s Angela,” he says, and his voice is shockingly hoarse. He clears his throat quickly and misses the pleased expression that flashes across Amy’s face (because hell yeah she did that to him) and glances at the board. “Angela’s the one who kidnapped Georgia.”
“Are you - are you sure? How do you know?”
“She’s been jealous of Michael’s relationship with Georgia from the start. I mean, look at it from her point of view: she’s probably spent the whole school year that Michael and Georgia have been dating feeling like she’s losing Georgia to Michael. And now that Georgia’s moving to Mizzou, and has broken up with Michael for it - and again, in her mind, Georgia’s closer to Michael than she is to Angela at this point - she’s gotta be freaking out that she’ll be next to get the axe. She’s the one who kidnapped Georgia, and she’s probably dealing with guilt over the fact that Michael’s been our main suspect - that’s what all the tense body language was about.”
“We could get a warrant -”
“It’ll take too long. We need to - we need to go over there and ask if she minds us looking around. She might not suspect anything. We just need to make her think we’re still working on Michael as a suspect.”
“We could go right now?”
And just like that, Jake realizes that his arms are still around Amy, that he can still feel the warm pressure of her lips against his, that his blood is still kind of simmering and that he can’t shake this nagging thought that he really wants to do it again. Amy seems suddenly aware of it, too; she’s got that wide-eyed expression on her face again, like she’s terrified of what’s going to happen next.
“Let’s go.”
Georgia’s tied to a chair in Angela’s basement, they discover forty-five minutes later. She’s at the hospital being treated for malnourishment and dehydration within twenty minutes, and is reunited with her family and Michael an hour after that. Captain Holt calls Jake and congratulates them both. “Take the next three days off,” he tells them.
And that’s how Jake finds himself freshly showered, fully-rested, standing on Amy Santiago’s welcome mat at 10:30 AM on Saturday. He balances the box of powdered donuts on his left arm (upon which a grocery bag containing a new, ice-cold bottle of orange juice is currently hanging) and, after two deep, steadying breaths, raps out a rhythm on the door. “Santiago?” He calls. “I have breakfast!”
He hears muffled footsteps approaching the front door from the other side. “It’s ten thirty, Jake,” she says, her voice laced with amusement.
“Yeah, sorry it’s so early. I should’ve called first. But, y’know, I was in the neighborhood and I thought, I wonder what my old pal Santiago is up to right now?” He hears the lock slide back and the handle turn and then the door opens, and she’s standing there in an NYU sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to free her hands and more yoga pants (damn it, how many pairs does she own?). He smiles, lifts the bag and the box, and says “breakfast time” as cheerfully as he can muster.
“What are you doing here, Jake?” She asks softly.
“I just…yesterday, things kind of…happened. Quickly. And I wanted to come over here to make sure that you and I are alright.”
Her nose wrinkles briefly, and his heart does that really annoying beat-skipping thing again. “Yeah, totally. We’re cool. We’re pals, right?”
“Right,” he says it slowly, and it kind of hits him all at once how much that word feels like a dirty sock in his mouth.
“And that kiss was just - it wasn’t really anything, we were delirious. It’s not - it’s so not a big deal. Right?”
And damn it, there she goes with the doe-eyes again. His automatic agreement dies in his throat as she looks up at him, waiting for him, waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting for him to set things back and to make things normal and the way they used to be, but -
But.
“N-nah. No. That wasn’t…that wasn’t nothing.” She’s not moving, and he kind of feels like he’s about to pee his pants, but the words keep coming. “I…don’t really know what that was. But it wasn’t nothing. For sure.”
Wow. Boom, there it is. Okay, he’s not really sure what it is, it’s sort of this…amorphous…blob…but. It’s there. Right there, out in the open, for her to pursue. Should she want to pursue it, of course.
She blinks rapidly for a second, before her gaze flickers down to the donuts in his hand. “Wanna come in and…figure it out?”
A crooked smile lights his face. “Oh, Amy, you know I love figuring things out,”
The orange juice is room temperature and the donuts are stale by the time they actually get around to eating them, but that’s two cases solved in less than twenty-four hours, thank you very much.