Chapter Text
Chapter 1
"Worn out places, worn out faces"
Mad World, Michael Andrews
Jake Peralta had a system.
It wasn't a complicated system. It wasn't color-coded or laminated or annotated in the margins the way Amy's systems were. It was more of an instinct, really, a series of reflexes so well-practiced that they'd stopped feeling like effort a long time ago.
The system went like this: keep moving, keep talking, keep the noise loud enough that nothing underneath it could get a word in.
It had worked for years. It had worked through his parents' divorce and through Holt's initial hostility and through every case that went sideways and every person who looked at him and saw someone who wasn't quite serious enough to take seriously. It was a good system. It was, Jake had always believed, a foolproof system.
He was beginning to suspect it had a flaw.
The problem, and he was only willing to call it a problem in the muffled way he thought about things at two in the morning when the apartment was too quiet and the TV wasn't loud enough, was that the system required a certain kind of noise. External noise. Other people's voices and the rhythm of cases and the particular texture of the Nine-Nine on a regular Tuesday, which was chaotic and warm and full of things to react to.
Eight months undercover did not provide that kind of noise.
Eight months undercover provided a different kind entirely, the constant, grinding hum of being someone else. Of watching what you said and how you said it and whether the way you laughed at the right moment matched the way the guy you were pretending to be would have laughed. Of holding yourself at a certain angle, always, and never putting it down.
He'd been good at it. He knew he'd been good at it because the operation had worked, because Giggle Pig was off the streets, because his lieutenant had shaken his hand and said excellent work, Peralta in the tone that meant it was going in his file.
What his lieutenant had not said, what nobody had said, because it wasn't the kind of thing that went in anyone's file, was what you were supposed to do when you put someone else down and couldn't quite find yourself again underneath.
Jake had been back for three weeks.
The Nine-Nine looked exactly the same.
This shouldn't have surprised him. Precincts didn't redecorate for returning detectives. The bullpen was still the bullpen, same desks, same flickering overhead light that Facilities had been promising to fix since approximately the Obama administration, same smell of old coffee and whatever Scully had microwaved in defiance of everyone's clearly expressed wishes.
It looked the same, and Jake walked into it on his first morning back and felt, for just a second, like a very convincing replica of himself.
Then Boyle had thrown himself across the bullpen with the velocity of a man who had been physically restraining himself for months, and Jake had caught him and laughed — actually laughed, something real cracking through, and the replica thing faded enough to function.
"Eight months," Boyle had said, into his shoulder. "Eight months, Jake."
"I know, buddy."
"I made a spreadsheet of restaurants I wanted to take you to."
"That's—" Jake pulled back to look at him. "How many restaurants."
"Forty-seven."
"Boyle."
"Some of them closed while you were gone, so it's down to thirty-nine. We should start this weekend."
"Sure," Jake said. "Thirty-nine restaurants. Absolutely."
From across the bullpen, Rosa had looked up from her desk, looked at Jake, and looked back down. Which from Rosa was practically a parade.
Gina had spun her chair around, assessed him from head to toe, and said: "You look tired. But in a brooding way, so it works." Then she'd spun back.
That was three weeks ago.
The laughing came easier now. The jokes came easier. He'd slipped back into the rhythm of the place like a hand into a familiar glove, and most days it almost fit right. Most days he could sit at his desk and banter with Rosa and steal Boyle's lunch recommendations and roll his eyes at Hitchcock and Scully and feel like himself doing it.
Most days.
Today was a Wednesday, which historically had no strong feelings about being a good or a bad day, but which had apparently decided, for personal reasons, to be a bad one.
It had started fine. He'd been on time, which was already suspicious in retrospect. He'd gotten coffee from the good cart on the corner, the one run by the guy named Pavel who always gave him an extra shot without being asked, and he'd been feeling almost normal, which he was learning to recognize as a warning sign rather than an achievement.
The case file was what did it.
It was routine. A B&E on Flatbush, possible connection to a string of warehouse jobs they'd been tracking. Nothing extraordinary. He'd worked cases like this hundreds of times, knew how to read a scene like this in his sleep, and for a few hours he'd been fine, out in the field, moving, the system working the way it was supposed to.
Then he'd found the secondary exit. A basement window, painted over, small enough that whoever had used it had to have been planning ahead. And something about the angle of it, the dimensions of crawling out of somewhere that nobody was supposed to know about, had hit him somewhere under the sternum like a key turning in a lock he hadn't realized was there.
He'd stood there for about forty-five seconds.
Then he'd taken photos, noted it in his report, and gone back upstairs.
In the car back to the precinct he'd had the radio too loud and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and thought about Die Hard, the scene in the elevator shaft, because that was a completely normal thing to think about, very healthy, extremely fine.
By four o'clock the bullpen had settled into its mid-afternoon rhythm, which was a productive quiet punctuated by Boyle asking if anyone wanted to hear about his new mushroom supplier and Rosa saying no in a tone that closed the subject permanently.
"Boyle," Jake said, without looking up from his desk, "I want to hear about the mushroom supplier."
"Really?" Boyle's face did the thing it did when someone expressed genuine interest in his interests, which was approximately the face of a man who had just been told he'd won something.
"No," Jake said. "But Rosa's no was too aggressive and I felt bad for the mushrooms."
"The mushrooms don't have feelings, Jake."
"You don't know that."
"I actually do know that, I have a mycology—"
"Boyle." Rosa, without looking up.
Boyle closed his mouth.
From the other side of the bullpen, Terry looked up from whatever he was reading, glanced at Jake, and said: "You doing okay, Peralta? You've been at that report for a while."
"Doing great, Sarge. The report is great. Everything about this report is great."
"It's one page."
"A great page."
Terry looked at him for a moment with the expression he used for things he wasn't sure he believed but was choosing not to press. "Okay," he said, and went back to his reading.
Jake grinned at his screen, which was easier than looking at the Flatbush report he'd been failing to finish for the better part of two hours. The report was one page. He was aware the report was one page. He had, in his career, filed reports in eleven minutes while simultaneously eating a sandwich and explaining a cinematic reference to Gina. One page was not the issue.
The issue was the phrase suspect gained entry via secondary egress point, basement level, which he'd typed and deleted three times and which kept sitting there on the screen looking like something he didn't want to look at.
He typed it again. Left it.
Across the bullpen, Hitchcock leaned over to Scully and said something in the low conspiratorial tone they used for everything from actual detective work to deciding what to microwave. Scully nodded with the gravity of a man who had considered an important question and reached a conclusion. Neither of them appeared to be doing anything related to the cases on their desks, which was baseline.
"Peralta."
He looked up. Amy was at the corner of her desk with the expression she deployed for administrative concerns, organized, direct, the face of someone who had noticed a filing error and was prepared to resolve it efficiently.
"The Flatbush supplemental is due at five. The filing code changed while you were gone, it's 44-B now."
"Already on it," Jake said, which was not strictly true but was true in spirit. "44-B, got it, you're a genius Santiago, truly, the organizational backbone of this entire operation."
Amy looked at him. The efficient expression shifted very slightly, not much, just enough that someone paying close attention might have caught it.
"You okay?" she said.
"Phenomenal," Jake said, with full commitment. "Honestly, best day. Great case, great report, great company —" he gestured at the bullpen, "— except Hitchcock, obviously, but you can't have everything."
Hitchcock, from across the room: "I can hear you."
"That's the phenomenal acoustics in this building, buddy."
"Actually," Gina said, without looking up from her phone, "the acoustics in here are terrible. I've been saying that since day one. Nobody listens to me."
"We listen to you, Gina," Boyle said.
"You listen. The building doesn't."
Amy held the look for another half-second. Then something resolved in her expression, the efficient mode reasserting itself, and she nodded once and went back to her desk.
Jake went back to his report.
He looked at suspect gained entry via secondary egress point, basement level.
He saved the file. Closed it. Stood up, stretched in the way of a man who had been sitting too long and needed a break, completely normally, and said to no one in particular: "Going to get some air. Anyone want anything?"
"If you pass the vending machine," Scully said, "the ones on the left side are less stale."
"How do you know that."
"I've done the research," Scully said, with dignity.
"Cool. Great. The research is appreciated."
He took the stairs going up.
The balcony had become a habit.
Not a planned one. The first time it happened it was because the bullpen was loud and his head was louder and he'd needed somewhere to put himself that wasn't either of those things. He'd gone up to file something in the records annex on the upper floor, taken a wrong turn, found the balcony access door, and ended up standing outside for twenty minutes looking at the city like an idiot. It had helped, slightly, in the way that looking at something very large helped when the thing in your head was very small and very loud.
He went back the next night. And the one after that.
By nine o'clock the bullpen had mostly emptied. This was the part of the evening Jake had gotten good at, the transition point, when the last of the day shift finished up and the night shift settled in and there was a window of maybe twenty minutes where the space was neither one thing nor the other. He'd learned to time it. He'd say his goodnights — later, Boyle, yeah I'll eat something, Rosa don't look at me like that — and wait until the elevator doors closed and then take the stairs going up instead of down.
It became the part of his day he didn't tell anyone about. Not a secret exactly. Just ... private. His. After the performance of the shift, after the maintenance of being fine, after the last case note was filed and the last joke was made and everyone else had packed up and gone home, he'd take the stairs up instead of down and stand outside and let the city do its thing.
Three weeks and two days in, on a Thursday night at half past eleven, the bullpen was empty and Jake was on the balcony.
He had his forearms on the railing. He wasn't doing anything dramatic, he wanted to be clear about that, at least to himself. He wasn't standing on anything or leaning too far or doing any of the things that would have made this a different kind of moment. He was just standing, and the city was down there, all of it, enormous and indifferent and lit up like it didn't know or care that he was looking at it, and he was doing the math.
It was the math that was the problem.
It was the quiet arithmetic of a brain that was very tired and had stopped being able to reliably predict what tomorrow looked like, or the day after that, or the accumulation of days after that stretching out into a future that kept presenting itself as a very long distance to cover when he was already running on empty.
He wasn't going to do anything.
He was almost entirely certain he wasn't going to do anything.
It was just the math. The math happened sometimes and then it stopped and then he went home and turned on the TV and waited for morning.
He was fine.
He looked at the city and did the math and the city did not look back and somewhere behind him, he heard the door to the balcony open.
He didn't turn around. He assumed it was a janitor, or someone from the night shift, or anyone at all who was not someone he'd have to perform being fine for. He stayed where he was and hoped they'd see a person standing by a railing looking at a city at night and interpret it as exactly that and nothing more.
"Peralta."
Jake closed his eyes. Opened them.
Of all the people who could have walked through that door, Keith Pembroke was so far down the list that he hadn't made the list at all.
He turned around slowly.
he was standing in the doorway in his jacket, a folder tucked under one arm, with the expression of a man who had come up here for a completely different reason and was now recalculating. He looked at Jake. Jake looked at him. The city hummed below them, indifferent as ever.
"Pembroke," Jake said. His voice came out even. He was grateful for that.
Pembroke looked at him for a moment, the kind of look that took inventory without appearing to, and then he said nothing. He didn't leave either. He just stood there, in the doorway, with his folder and his jacket and the particular stillness of a man who had just understood that something was not right and was deciding what to do about that.
The door swung slowly closed behind him.
Jake turned back to the railing.
He heard Pembroke's footsteps cross the balcony. Not toward the door. Not away.
Toward him.
Pembroke stopped a few feet away. Close enough that Jake could see him in his peripheral vision, the jacket, the folder still under his arm, hands in his pockets. Looking at the city.
End of Chapter 1