Work Text:
Jake Peralta is not allowed to die. Amy decides that– really decides it– when she’s laying in her hospital bed, holding her brand new daughter (daughter!) and Jake is holding her, and she’s pretty sure he’s asleep (same with Maya) and everything is so-so-so perfect-- she knows that it can’t ever change. Jake Peralta is not allowed to die.
Someone should have told him that. She should have waved a big banner in front of his face, you’re not allowed to die, ya hear? Losing you would break me.
But, he takes a goddamn cereal run at 9 o’clock at night. And there’s a drunk asshole who has apparently forgotten how to work a brake, and Jake’s car is older than God Himself and it has really, really bad airbags.
There’s a phone call. It’s a paramedic whose voice is shaking a little and it’s a horrifyingly frantic beeping sound in the background. Karen Peralta, smiling and asking what’s wrong, honey; you’ve gone all pale, but the only thing that escapes Amy’s lips when she tries to explain is a long, wavering whimper..
She can’t speak for a minute; she’s just hanging onto Karen and hyperventilating before she drops her phone on the ground and sprints out of the apartment to her car.
She feels cold all over. She’s shaking, and her brain won’t work. Looking back on it, she’ll realize that the only thing she could really feel was her heart, literally breaking. She can’t see while she’s driving because her eyes are all full of tears, and she parks in three spaces at the same time. She stumbles into the hospital and, god, she can’t freaking breathe, and a nurse asking if she’s alright and–
“Are you Amy Santiago?”
Then, there’s Jake, laying there before they close a blue curtain, and she could swear that she saw blood and someone is apologizing and telling her how hard they tried and that her husband was a fighter and that he’s in a better place and–
The rest is blurry. The rest is… voices. A nurse asking her who to call, and oh, god, I’ll have to tell his mom , and Rosa practically throwing her motorcycle down in the parking lot and running in and actually hugging Amy without knowing why, and everything is hazy and the room wobbles. Amy hears the words coming from her own lips– a muffled sob against Rosa’s leather jacket:
“ She’s barely three months old .”
“Christ, Amy, is it Maya? Is she okay?”
There’s the very sweet nurse who talks to Rosa. There’s the way that Rosa’s eyes kind of soften while the nurse talks, and then there’s the way that she presses her lips together and clenches her jaw-- not in anger, but debilitating pain. Amy feels the leather creaking as Rosa pulls her arms around her again, feels Rosa’s hands on her back, pressing . They’re both in pain.
Lastly, there’s the way that everything is numb. Her ears and her eyes and her fingers and her tongue; she can’t feel a part of her body. She can’t feel the muscles move in her legs as she walks, as Rosa guides her to the garbage can in the corner. She can’t feel her stomach turn inside out and the burning in her throat. She can’t feel the cold on her lips or the heat in her neck. She’s numb.
-
They stay in the hospital for hours. Long after he’s gone, Rosa and Amy are sitting in the waiting room, squeezed into one chair and not talking or thinking or feeling, even a little bit. Rosa hugs Amy sideways really tight when she notices her breathe too fast (or not at all), and they just exist for hours, in the ER with the pale, buzzing lights and the nice nurse who brings Amy some water (and eventually asks if she can call them a ride).
The days after that aren’t blurry at all. Amy remembers every single detail. She remembers how Gina had to excuse herself to throw up into the trashcan and how Karen cried and how the Captain’s face fell and his jaw dropped and how he asked if she was okay (the response to which was a stammered “N-o.”) and if she’d like some water (another “no”) and if he could have a minute to himself, and she knows that she’ll never forget how Rosa sobbed until morning on That Night, wrapped in a blanket on the couch of the Santiago-Peralta apartment.
-
“Jake.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s positive.”
“Holy shit-- are you sure?”
“This is the third test, and look at the little pink cross, Jake. I’m sure.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“I’m pregnant.”
-
Every time she looks at the pictures on the walls, every time she walks into their room, and every second that she’s in the apartment, she gets that weird empty feeling in the pit of her stomach and that weird pain shivering down her heart and it hurts .
Oh-- and she’s terrified. All the time. She has a baby , a little girl who’s three and a half months old, and she has no idea what to do with her .
The funeral needs to be big– she insists on inviting everyone he knew. Everyone whose life he touched– nearly everyone he met . Even Madeline Wuntch was invited (she politely declined so not to intrude).
There’s one other person that she has to tell personally– not over the phone, not through someone else– personally .
(Sophia’s eyes get really wide and her lips get really tight, and when she finally does speak, all she says is this really quiet, “ No .”)
Sophia keeps that same look on her face for the entire funeral: wide eyes, furrowed eyebrows, and pressed-together lips.
Amy doesn’t stay quite so composed. She cradles and bounces Maya and sobs onto Captain Holt’s shoulder before the service, and then the entire precinct (plus Ruth and Sharon and Kevin) squashes into the first row– the family row. She doesn’t want to remember it.
(“I won’t do it.”
“Amy-- don’t you just need a few hours with your laptop? I think-- I-- it’ll help you feel better, get closure or something--”
“I won’t write my husband’s eulogy , Rosa.”)
-
Ruth stays for a while and helps with Maya and it’s all very nice-- but then she leaves, and suddenly the apartment is very, very big and very, very empty and Maya cries so so so much.
(At least when she cries, there’s noise and the apartment feels fuller.)
Amy cannot leave her daughter at the apartment alone. She is unsure of practically everything in her whole life, but she is very-very-very sure of that. Her first day back at work is three days after the funeral and, even though Karen promised to watch her, Amy can’t stop thinking about Maya all day.
Work itself is strange. Charles is completely silent and Terry keeps looking at Amy like he thinks she might break down (although at this point, that is a very distinct possibility) and Gina doesn’t even bother to show up at all. The only time Rosa really raises her voice is when she a perp she arrests tries to cop a feel, and Captain Holt is in his office all day. Amy stays at her desk for the most part, fiddling with the drawers and filling out paperwork. (She doesn’t look at the desk across from hers. The one that everyone is afraid to walk near, let alone touch or clean out.)
By the time everyone– even Captain Holt– gets to work the next day, Amy has overturned a little table and solidified the edges with cushions and wood bars (courtesy of the crib that Terry and Sharon had so kindly given her and Jake before Maya was even born) and filled the makeshift crib with blankets. She has a nice little spot for Maya at her desk.
No one bats an eyes except Gina, who quietly walks over and gives Maya a hushed, mornin’, lil angel and returns every twenty minutes or so to say hi.
-
Amy is sitting on the couch in Captain Holt’s office because he asked her to. Gina is holding Maya; they’re sitting right outside the door, waiting. Holt is at his desk, and Amy keeps drumming her fingers on the couch’s armrest.
“So, is there-- I mean, why’d you call me here, Captain?” She stares at the bookshelf behind him. The various plaques, three different dictionaries, and one copy of The History of the Ladder .
“You’ve sent in an application to return to fieldwork, detective.”
“Yes. And?” She’s still staring at the bookshelf, looking panicked and tired and annoyed all at the same time.
“ And you have an infant at your desk, Santiago; you can’t return to the field. You know you can’t, and I know that you know that you can’t. So, I called you in to ask why you applied.”
“Sir, this feels like a personal--”
“Your husband, the father of your daughter, my best detective, your and my friend died a few days ago, Amy, so I already assumed that most of your motives would be personal for the next several months. Why did you apply to go back into fieldwork?”
“I can’t feel it, Captain. It’s supposed to crush me, but it isn’t. It stings. All that love, and it’s gone now, and I don’t feel a difference. He would feel it, if the situation was reversed--”
“Don’t say that, Amy--”
“He would.” Four dictionaries, not three. And a thesaurus.
-
“I’ve been thinking about names.”
“Yeah? Me too. We could call her--”
“Jake, if you name one action movie character, I’ll ban you from the naming process.”
“I was gonna say Maya . I think it’s pretty.”
“Not Karen , for you mom?”
“Nah, she’ll like Maya. Besides, if she’s really upset, we could always have another kid and name her Karen .”
“What?”
-
Days pass like minutes, and Amy works a lot . She works a lot, because if she goes home and she has to look at all of the framed photos on the wall, and the goddamn grocery lists that he kept leaving on the counter, and the fridge magnets spelling out JAKE HEARTS AMY , she won’t be able to pretend like she’s okay and that would be really bad .
She envies Maya and her ignorance. She’s jealous of her own baby, all because the it barely knew its own father.
Rosa steps in after a week because jeez, Santiago, your kid needs to spend some time at home. She drives Amy back to the apartment, and after she’s finished helping tuck Maya in, she sits Amy down on the couch and gets a blanket, and she turns a princess movie onto the old TV/DVD set.
Right as she’s falling asleep, Amy hears it:
“You know that he wouldn’t want you to be living like this.”
-
“My feet hurt.”
“That’s ‘cause you stood in line at the FroYo place today for half an hour, Ames.”
“That’s because your daughter is making me obsessed with those little cookie dough bits. Not counting Maya’s weight, I’ve gained ten pounds since before I got pregnant.”
“I think it all went to your boobs, hon.”
“Shut up, Jake.”
“I’m sorry. I swear, though, I hadn’t noticed. I’m betting no one has. You look beautiful. You always look beautiful-- even when your eyeliner is all smudged next to your eye like it is right now-- ow! I deserved that, right?”
“We should go to bed, or I’ll kill you tomorrow.”
“Okay. I love you. And I love you, Maya. G’night.”
-
Rosa comes over a lot after the princess movie. She smiles sometimes and she brings more Disney movies and she really, really loves Maya. After a while, she’s spending more time at the Santiago-Peralta apartment (door still clad with the pink post-it note reading, just married!) than at her own. (He would’ve loved to see how close they were.)
Gina doesn’t come over as much, and Amy kind of knows why, but Gina loves Maya a lot and she talks to her all the time at work– so, soon enough, days start to feel like normal. (He would’ve loved how good she was to Maya.)
Charles comes over with dinner at least twice a week. (He would’ve hated it.)
Terry and Sharon periodically bring over old baby clothes or crib mobiles (and one time, a lasagna) because Jake left her what little debt he still owed and money is kind of tight, but at least she won’t have to worry about buying new baby clothes every time Maya grows, right? (And Maya is growing fast . And he’s missing it.)
-
“Amy?”
“Yeah?”
“You got freaked out, right, when I said that thing about having more kids? Because, we don’t have to. This one wasn’t exactly on purpose -- and besides, we might have our hands full with her, you know?”
“Yeah, I got freaked out. But that’s just because you sprung it on me. I think-- at some point, when us and Maya are well-adjusted, we could have a Karen Jr., or something. Does… that freak you out?”
“Only a little.”
-
The little things go the fastest. That’s what she realizes, and it scares the living shit out of her, because she’s gotten so used to the squeezing feeling in her stomach when she hears the the opening bars to a Taylor Swift song, and the spastic changing of the radio station that inevitably follows. She’s gotten used to the way that she subconsciously won’t roll onto his side of the bed when she’s asleep, and she’s gotten used to seeing that cardboard box labelled PERALTA’S STUFF that’s been in the back of the briefing room since before he even died , but now everyone’s too afraid to touch it.
And yet, one day, when Maya’s nearly seven months old, Amy wakes up on Jake’s side of the bed. That’s when she knows she has to start moving again. It’s later that week that she takes home the PERALTA’S STUFF box, and she’s never been in a more deafening silence than the one she walked through as she carried the box across the precinct. (It takes three more months for her to force herself to sort through it, but that’s beside the point).
-
“Call my damn husband, Charles.”
“He’s already on the phone--”
“Put it on fucking speaker!”
-Amy?
“Jake! I’m having your kid; where are you?”
-I’m on my way, honey, there was an accident on--
“I don’t care, just please get here before I give birth .”
“Rodger. I’m five minutes away, okay honey?”
-
Maya is six years old when she sees her mom have a panic attack. She’s six, and Mom is breathing real hard and shaking whole lot, but all she did was ask what the pink paper in the kitchen drawer was, right? Except, now Mom’s holding it all tight and crinkling it with her fingers and she keeps saying she’s fine, but she isn’t, right?
Mom scoops her up and squeezes her all tight and cries for too long.
Maya is six years old and she never, never forgets.
-
Maya is eight and a half when she sees it again– and she can read, now! In messy handwriting (uncharacteristic of Mom, she thinks) (she just learned the word “characteristic”), scrawled across in Sharpie, just married! Maya is eight and a half years old, and Mom tapes the post-it to the fridge.
(Right over the magnets spelling AMY HEARTS MAYA).
-
Maya is eleven when Aunt Gina and Tia Rosa (and Uncle Terry and Uncle Charles and Grandpa Holt and– all of them) tell her about The Bet. They’re all huddled in the living room because it’s Mom’s birthday, only she hasn’t actually gotten home yet and it’s a surprise, Maya, so don’t tell her ( “But I tell her everything !” ), and so they’re killing time by telling old stories about Dad..
Aunt Gina says that it was legendary, hilarious, and, “the stuff of a damn fairytale– I mean, the stuff of a darn fairytale, because swearing is rude, Maya”. They’d just got to the part where Mom and Dad pretended to be engaged when Mom sneezes from the doorway.
She’s greeted with a halfhearted “ Surprise ” from Charles.
“That’s when he fell in love with me, you know,” she says, and, for the first time, her smile is genuine while she’s talking about Dad.
The story of the Bet continues, and it ends with Mom declaring that she “shoulda won” and “Jake cheated with at the last second”.
Maya is eleven years old, and Dad sounds like the coolest person ever.
(Maya is eleven years old, and Tia Rosa assures her that that is not the case).