Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2018

So, here’s the thing.

Despite the overabundance of globe-shattering cataclysmic events that tend to gravitate around New York – he’s pretty certain that another Ghostbusters movie would have at the very least provided some scientific clarity or reasoning or whatever, but noooooo – Jake is still taken quite spectacularly unawares whenever one actually unfolds around him.

On the day that the giant hole in the sky had opened up six years prior above the city, he, like many of his fellow friends and co-workers at the Nine-Nine, had been caught ridiculously off-guard by it all, staring up and across the water at Manhattan, slack-jawed to a man, as the world's financial hub had been transformed from a high-rise commercial paradise to a bombed-out shell of a metropolis in the space of just an hour, complete with outrageously huge alien space slugs cavorting all over its shiny, smoking corpse.

He and the rest of his colleagues had been onto the island no less than thirty minutes after the explosions had finally come to an abrupt stop, picking through the particularly jarring silence, where the streets were littered with enough hi-tech retro-futuristic junk to make any otaku - he'd learned that term from Neon Genesis Evangelion back in college, take that professors! - positively wet themselves.

The whole thing had ultimately evolved into a month-long clean-up assignment, four weeks of painstakingly picking through the shattered windows and piles of debris, lifting survivors into the dusty sunlight, and then foraging for more, again and again and again. He had almost solely existed near-exclusively on coffee and hastily inhaled sherbet dips for the duration; the wild spasms and jitters he suffered from at the conclusion of the operation were not so much stress as they were copious over-caffeination and perpetual sugar-crashes.

The small three-stripe bar he, Santiago and Jeffords have sewn around the breast of their uniform pocket – Diaz and Boyle had been kept back in Brooklyn to pick up the slack by McKinley, Hitchcock had called in sick and Scully had been excused on the basis of a foot injury he sustained at the World Trade Center – is something he finds himself paradoxically proud of and troubled by. As a kid, he’d always thought an alien invasion would be, well, cool, but it’s pretty hard to reconcile those childish dreams with the reality of bodies hitting the street, cracked like spilled eggs over the sidewalk.

The thing is, when Jake stirs on that breezy late-May morning more than half-a-decade later, drowsily coming to from sleep, his arm wrapped around his honest-to-god new wife, peppering light kisses over the crown of her head as she murmurs quietly and reaches back around to gently swat at his behind, he has no idea he’s going to be blindsided by another globe-shattering cataclysm again and that this one is going make the other - and every other crisis they've ever faced - look like a damn soda spill.

It's also going to lead to the worst day of his life in just over twenty-four hours, but he does not know that then either.

In hindsight, it doesn't start great; the subway commute is pretty rough and jammed up, the pair of them squashed tight together even before the creaking cars judder to a screeching halt and a mechanical voice, tinted with an almost human sense of tired resignation, informs passengers that due to another extraterrestrial event unfolding on the surface, this service is now indefinitely delayed and they will not be offering refunds for any inconvenience caused, thank you very much for your understanding.

Being police officers, both Jake and Amy are able to force themselves out of the car quickly enough, cutting through the aggrieved noises of office workers and business-types groaning about cell service, and begin the – mercifully not far – trek to the precinct, both idly grousing about the fact their first day back following a Holt-interrupted honeymoon in Mexico would just be the day that E.T. decides to come back down from the sky and make the Big Apple his playground.

They sober up pretty damn fast when they emerge from the stairwell and see the size of the craft, a huge metallic donut-like contraption whirring aggressively in the sky. Vaguely, Jake spots the tell-tale repulsor red-and-gold flash of Iron Man zip by the underside, practically a speck in the distance, fragile enough to be swatted away at any moment.

It suddenly hits him like a freight train that, just as the Beatles before them, the Avengers broke up and that this really could be it. He does not know really want to think of that; it still seems such a strange, obtuse concept, the idea of a modern apocalypse, no matter how many times they've brushed up against it before.

By the time they make it into the precinct however, the craft is gone, vanished back into orbit, and though they all sit on tenterhooks for the better part of the day, it – or the sound of raining, fiery destruction to accompany it – never materialises again. Property damage appears to be minimal across the city and there are remarkably no fatalities, so Jake spends his first day back on desk duty tracking down a drugstore robbery with Charles that’s ultimately all wrapped up before dinner.

So after they’ve finished at Shaw’s for the evening, where Boyle had upended two bottles of beer of himself and Rosa had groused about how the hot wings were never quite hot enough - his mouth begs to differ, quite violently - and they’re back at their place, snuggled up in bed, with Amy's leg slung across his thigh as the big spoon, Jake just chalks it up to one of those strange could-have-been things that New York openly flirts with on an alarming regularity.

He’s therefore utterly unprepared to be sat in the break room with Amy the following morning, her wedding ring sat on the Formica table so she can polish it after smudging the diamond with ink during routine paperwork, when she doubles over unexpectedly, hoarsely croaks out she has a stomach ache, looks at him with rising panic in her eyes and just crumbles into dust.

Around him, behind the windows and throughout the bullpen – and though he does not know it yet, the rest of the universe too – other people are groaning, and then there is the sound of horrified screaming. Distantly, he hears Captain Holt’s baritone rising a couple of octaves, the unflappable calm of his voice pierced by a sharp panic he's never heard before, but it is just white noise to him in that moment.

All Jake can do is just sit in shock, simply stare at the spot where Amy Santiago-Peralta – the light of his life, the peanut butter to his jelly, his actual newly-minted wife – was only a moment ago, now replaced by a slowly percolating pile of ash.

He doesn’t remember much about the rest of that day – even years later, when his mind strays to it, the whole thing is a black-and-white blur, framed in monochrome and censored by his own brain, a dissociation he knows is less than healthy, but he'll deal with it.

The moments that do linger are smoky around the edges of their context, but crystal clear in their content; going through the motions as every light on the switchboard practically pops into existence, calls flying in left, right and centre, a city bursting into unmitigated terror, Rosa grabbing him by the shoulder, hands shaking, nails buried into his jacket, ironclad demanour cracked with something raw.

A lone silver-gold band, sat atop the stain of a now-upturned coffee cup, catching the strip lighting too brightly as it shines, too painful to even consider as it burns a hole through his heart and soul.

The sun has long gone down when Holt brings them all to a temporary halt, the night well on its way back towards daybreak. His shirt is unbuttoned, cuffs askew, as he regards them all from a plastic crate he has unearthed from somewhere, attempting to command their undivided attention.

At the end of it all, the Nine-Nine is down almost half in raw numbers, its survivors left to pick through the ever-increasing rubble of an event they themselves are still at a loss to understand or process.

There has been no actual crime reported all day. No muggings, no B&Es, no assaults, absolutely nothing, zero, zip. Just the cries of people who, like them, did not know what the hell was going on.

Jake detachedly wonders if they’re all gone - if, by some higher power, all of the wretched hive of scum and villainy have turned into vacuum-packed bags of microscopic debris too.

(He chokes back a retch, his mind spinning, because Amy is dust, Amy, Amy – )

But if they are indeed dust in the wind, they are not the only ones of course. When the nightshift – or at least, what’s left of the nightshift, given so many had already rushed back into action hours before when the call went out – have fully arrived, and he has all of them in their entirety gathered before him, Holt turns to ask Terry for a headcount and pauses, struck unnaturally dumb.

Because Terry’s not there. He’s not been there since that morning, when he dropped his yogurt spoon with an ice-cream headache and just swirled away into nothingness.

Hitchcock is gone, likewise vanished into the ether. Scully too. A whole host of others Jake passes by every day, from the beat-cops walking the streets to the tactical teams holed up in their corner for the next call, to the administrative staff scattered around the precinct that keeps them all running smoothly. They're all gone.

There is no rhyme or reason to it. No apparent favouritism, except for the fact that they’re surely perverse favourites of a warped kind, because why else would they be here? Why else would it be them left to pick up the pieces of something so senseless?

It’s him, Rosa, Charles and Holt. That’s it. Gina too, maybe, except she’s out of town, off with The Enigma at some retreat upstate, financed by one of her current lovers. Distractedly, he thinks he should call her, see if she's alright, but mobile reception has been fried all day, landlines suddenly the last bastion of the world's communication apparatus, at least while desperate demand dies down.

They didn’t even think Boyle had made it though. He wasn’t in the building when it happened, wasn’t even scheduled to be on desk for another two-and-a-half hours. Jake had been too distracted by... everything, to even notice that was missing, too wrapped up with the fact his wife – his wife – had simply turned into the human equivalent of chipped mortar.

(His wife, Amy, my God, Jesus Christ, what will he do – )

But Charles had stumbled in, ash-streaked and harried, but unmistakably alive, and in what could only be described as a course of uncharacteristically composed action for him, he had immediately plugged into the first responder switchboard without a word. He’d paused for breath once, to make a round of desperately needed coffees, which was about one pause more than Jake had taken himself since he’d been jerked out of bluescreen mode and forced to confront a horrifying new reality.

Now though, the noise of the phones ringing has faded into the background for the moment, as Holt shakes off the stare he had directed at Terry’s desk and counts the rest of them himself.

“Listen up, people,” he says after he has finished, and Jake can here the slightest wobble beneath that deep, rich voice and, honestly, it is an absolute fucking miracle that the man even has that much control right now. “We are still waiting for official word from City Hall on what the hell is going on. But day shift, you’ve done all you can for now. It’s three in the morning, you can –“

He’s cut off by Rosa,  hair frazzled around her face, leather jacket long since discarded in the frantic heat of the action. It has been a late spring day scorched by sunshine and grief, pooled with sweat and trauma;  what appears to be a solitary tear track clings to her cheek. “With all due respect, sir, I am not going any fucking place than where I need to be right now.”

On autopilot, Jake hears himself add his agreement. “Me neither Captain. You need all the help you can get.”

Holt eyes them both and for the first time today, Jake sees his shoulders – rigid, sharp, angular, pulled too tight – loosen ever so slightly, just by a fraction. He nods after a moment and turns to Charles. “Boyle, do you –“

He shakes his head immediately. “I need to make a personal call, sir, but I still have my Peruvian-Indian blend in the kitchen. I can go all week if needed on that.”

Holt inclines his head. “Thank you, all of you. The rest of you, if you wish to go home, you will hear no argument from me. If you wish to stay, then I highly appreciate your help too.”

Nobody trickles out. A few parrot Charles’ line that they need to make a call or two, but nobody moves. Despite all the horror clenched in his heart, Jake feels an uncomfortable mixture of pride and disgust rear its head. At the end of the world, they're going to stay standing - every single one of them.

Three long days later, sustained by cat-naps in the evidence room and a nutritional existence based entirely off Boyle’s nuclear-grade coffee and candy bars ransacked from around the building, Holt – who has not left the precinct himself either for the duration – hauls him, Rosa and Charles into his office and sits them down. They cram themselves onto the couch perched opposite the wooden desk, varied paraphernalia long since swept to the side. Several wastepaper baskets litter various corners, all of them brimmed to the lip and one or two spilling their contents onto the carpet.

“You three,” Holt starts, voice level. “I want you to know that, as with everyone else in this building, I appreciate your efforts more than you can possibly know.”

Jake simply nods. He’s hardly spoken a word outside of what’s needed to be said since what is now being informally called The Decimation - cable news never waits for a name - unfolded. Idly, he notices the television haphazardly set up in the corner, playing on mute. Matthew Ellis – whose return to the senate following his presidency meant that he was now back in his old job through the line of succession – is on screen, shirtsleeves rolled up as he walks and talks through the car-crash streets of DC, surrounded by reporters and bodyguards. He glances back at Holt.

“But the three of you have also been working almost non-stop for the past seventy-two hours,” his commanding officer continues, raising a hand to forestall any protest from Rosa, who has opened her mouth. “I am aware that I myself have also been on the go for just as long. I will be leaving this building in two hours after I have briefed the retired Captain Herschel, formerly of the one-four, who will be stepping into my shoes and assuming operational command on an interim basis for the next few days.”

He pauses, scanning the three of them. Jake glances at both of his friends, situated to his the left. They wear mirrored expressions of stoic tiredness, a double-look that, if the situation had not been so dire, would have likely wrenched an explosive laugh out of his throat, such was the typical disparity in their emotional bandwidth.

“As such, for my last order today, I am asking you all to go home,” Holt picks up after a moment, his tone still impressively firm. “I will broker no argument on this. You are hereby dismissed. I will be in touch to discuss when you will be next required.”

Rosa looks like she will protest further but holds her tongue when their commanding officer fixes her with a look, expression softened. “We all need the rest. We’re just going to fall over ourselves and collapse if we do not take it.” He swallows. "That is not what they would have wanted."

Distantly, Jake hears Charles’ murmured assent, followed a beat later by Rosa, as they stand up and shuffle out, the click of the office door shutting behind them, but he suddenly finds himself rooted to his chair, staring at Holt’s desk plaque, unable to move. He’s not been home since he’d left several mornings ago with Amy – Amy, Amy, oh God, why –

“Jake.”

He wrenches his eyes up to stare at Holt, who is fixing him with a look as open as he has ever seen on his commanding officer’s face. It strikes him how much older he suddenly appears. This is a man Jake has been through some crazy situations with over the years, a man who was on his actual honeymoon only a week ago.

And now, they are staring at each other in the wreckage of the looking glass.

“Forgive me for my presumption,” the captain begins and it jerks Jake back into reality. “But I gather you do not wish to return to the abode you shared with Amy.”

Again, Jake is idly struck by how rare it is to hear Holt use both his and Amy’s first-names, before the magnitude of the other man’s perception clatters in afterwards. It isn’t too surprising, of course; for all the robot jokes, Holt has an uncanny gift to read the room.

But he’s right. Jake hadn’t even thought about returning to his and Amy’s place – and oh God, he does not want to return to a place where they shared so much, a place so empty now, knowing that she’s never going to walk back through the door, laugh at his jokes, kiss him lazily on the couch, wash his hair in the shower, make love under the glow-in-the-dark stars because she’s –

Because she’s dead.

He hadn’t put the words together before, but they ring unmistakably true. Amy Santiago-Peralta is dead and she is not coming back anytime soon, or ever.

He bursts into tears.

For two men famous for their inability to deal with emotions, he is still taken by surprise when Holt rounds the desk, crouches down and pulls him into a weird half-bear-hug. He’s more surprised that he returns it, clinging on for sheer desperation, a low wail of agony working its way up his throat.

Jake isn’t sure how long they remain like that – long enough, probably, that Holt’s knees will ache painfully in the morning – but they eventually separate, Holt releasing him with a firm touch from both palms to his shoulders, before he sits back on the edge of his desk. He waits.

It takes a few more minutes, but Jake eventually feels like he can croak out a response.

“I can’t, Captain,” he somehow musters. “You’re right, I just… I can’t, it’s- no, it’s just not... I can’t go back and her not be there, not now.”

Holt watches him measurably, sympathetically – there’s not a hint of pity behind his dark eyes – and he breaks the silence shortly after.

“I summarised as much,” he notes quietly. “Which is why I would like to invite you to stay at my house for however long you need.”

Jake blinks, twice, tears tracking out of the corner of his eyes, not sure if he heard him right. “At… your house?”

“Yes.”

A mix of emotions storms through Jake’s chest; warmth, guilt, gratitude, fear. “I-I don’t think I should, Captain. It’s a very generous offer, but I don’t want to impose on you and Kevin –”

Something flashes across Holt’s eyes, his shoulders tightening ever so slightly again. Jake is a few reels behind the rest of the film, and suddenly realisation crashes into him with a horrifying clarity.

“I can assure you that you would not be imposing on me,” Holt responds quietly, after a moment. It’s all the confirmation Jake needs.

He had very hurriedly exchanged a call with his mother, the night of that first day when they'd all briefly ducked out for a solitary moment of respite. She had sounded tired, as worn out as him. She’d burst into tears on hearing his voice and he hadn’t been able to even bring himself to tell her that the other most important woman in his life was gone before his phone – in true Jake Peralta fashion – had died from a low battery.

He’d been dealing with distraught husbands, distressed girlfriends, heartbreakingly confused seniors almost non-stop down the lines for three days, with Rosa and Charles, coordinating responses further afield, kept close to the precinct by an unspoken need to be rooted to one place.

And yet he hadn’t even considered how the rest of his Nine-Nine family’s own families had fared.

Were Sharon and the girls still around? If so, did they know about Terry? What about Genevieve and Nikolaj? Had Charles been soldiering on here like him, with his partner and son lying in a pile of dirt on the hardwood floors of their place? What about Rosa’s parents, her sister?

What about Gina? He still hadn’t heard from her. Or – oh Jesus – what about Amy’s extended family, her mom, her dad, all her brothers and their wives and their children?

What about his own dad? Had he been flying a plane when it had happened? Had the plane crashed because he’d been dusted?

He feels Holt shove a wastepaper basket into his hands before he promptly dry-heaves, nothing coming out but the sensations of nausea still like a vice grip around his neck.

“When did you know?” he gasps out, before he can stop himself. It’s not the most insensitive thing he can say, but it’s close.

Holt answers surprisingly quick. “His office called. His assistant Charlene saw it happen.” He pauses. “In a way, it’s fortunate. It means I won’t have to spend my life wondering if he’s still out there.”

Jake feels himself numbly nod.

“My offer still stands,” Holt continues and Jake suddenly finds a pair of keys with a small diecast corgi dangling off the ring loop placed on the seat next to him which Rosa had vacated. “I will still be here for another few hours, but if you would like to, then you may let yourself in.”

Holt’s offer is both genuinely altruistic and yet may be born of a subliminal selfishness that Jake can entirely respect. Nether man want to be alone right now. That comradeship – born out in Coral Palms and so many other places across their career – is a thing to be treasured.

He finds his voice again. “In that case, thank you, Captain.”

Holt nods at him, his shoulders easing ever so slightly, and Jake wonders if it cost him a lot to have asked the question in the first place, one lonely man to another as the enormity of the situation sinks in again and again. “If you need a change of clothes, there is a trunk underneath the staircase from the last time my nephew Marcus stayed. There should be enough to fit you in there.”

Gratefulness washes over him again. Jake has realised many times over the years how much he has lucked out to have Holt as his commanding officer and his friend, and it pierces him with clarity once more.

“Thank you, sir.” Holt nods to him and returns to behind his desk. Under the lights, Jake can catch the glisten on his cheek, and knows that both men have bared far more than they ever thought they would ever have to with each other today.

Outside the office, he comes across an even more incongruous sight. Charles and Rosa are sat opposite each other, perched on the edge of their swivel chairs, both leaning forward, heads bowed against each other, their hands loosely joined like a two-man prayer circle. It is a shockingly intimate gesture - well, certainly for one of them - and it takes a moment for him to see both have their eyes closed, though the painfully rigid line of their bodies shows that neither is asleep.

The click of the door latch as it closes shifts them both, slowly, and he sees Charles quirk a small, almost desperately sad smile at Rosa as they both lean back. Her usually implacable expression is more open than perhaps he has ever seen it; there's a wounded quality to the set of her face, albeit lined with the type of quiet gratitude Jake has only ever seen from her after they had sat upon dead-of-the-night ruminations when at the end of their wits during the academy days.

“I don’t know about you two,” she says as he approaches, aware of his presence, and though the smallest tremor is there, her voice is robust, strong, in control. “But I really need to eat something that’s not come out of the back of a vending machine.”

The three of them end up settling a handful of blocks away, squeezed onto a small park bench with meatball subs from a little bodega they've frequented over the years. It feels like a wonder that it still is open at all, a testament perhaps to the human spirit.

Its typically boisterous owner had hiccuped through his tears as he served them, layering on the extra cheese just the way he likes it. The dust had been fine there, and Jake realises that even if people wanted to track down the remains of their relatives in the open, it would have been a herculean task.

The sun is going down, its rays playing across the streak of horizon, burnt-orange twisting towards blue-black. The three sit in a silence that has long since crossed over the line of awkwardness and wrapped all the way back around into a perverse form comfort.

When they finish, they stand, and, before Charles can do it himself, Jake wordlessly swings his arms out and pulls them both into a tight group hug, desperately clinging onto both like he might drown if he lets go. He feels one arm encircle him; a moment later, another, clad in leather, joins the circle, hesitant but firm.

For the first time in four days, for the briefest of moments, he doesn’t feel alone.

It takes some time, but the events of The Decimation – or as it becomes known in internet circles, The Snap – gradually come to light. It turned out that, in a way, the Avengers had reunited – and that even then, they had not been enough to prevent a catastrophe of previously unimaginable proportions.

Public opinion had been broadly divided over the world’s premier team of superheroes after the events that had unfolded in Leipzig, the so-called civil war as the media had dubbed it. The whole fallout had been particularly muzzled by Tony Stark’s army of impressive lawyers – Jake vaguely recalls from his time dating Sophia that she had been quietly terrified of attempting to match wits with a Stark Industries legal crusader – but the pertinent points had come out in the wash.

Suddenly, more than half of the six-man team promoted as the second generation of heroes had been branded as war criminals and of the remaining two, one had been paralysed for life. Colonel Rhodes had studiously avoided speculation that he had been a victim of friendly fire, but the low-key absence of the team’s last member, Vision, from any subsequent media press fronted up by Stark and Rhodes had been a glaring indicator that all was not right there.

Then, after two years of inactivity – where the most notable superhero on the block had been right under Jake’s nose in neighbouring Queens – the Avengers had apparently reassembled en-masse, first popping up in Scotland and then in the tiny African state of Wakanda. Fragmented glimpses on social media had confirmed the former; two months after The Snap, a press release from the Wakandan Royal Family, confirming the death of their monarch T’Challa, had inadvertently revealed the latter.

A few days later, Stark Industries had followed up with a press briefing of its own, fronted again by Colonel Rhodes. Jake and Holt, halfway through a bottle of wine – he would never be able to go back to the cheap stuff now, his boss was spoiling him with the good stuff – had sat, transfixed as the decorated Air Force veteran and War Machine pilot officially confirmed that a joint Avengers operation had unfolded on Wakandan soil, before revealing that the instigator of The Decimation, an alien warlord named Thanos, had been killed in a subsequent operation.

Two days later, President Ellis had confirmed that the government had both commuted the suspended sentences of and pardoned Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff, and that the United Nations had agreed to the temporary discontinuation of the Sokovia Accords. What went unsaid was that Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, Clint Barton and Scott Lang were not around to receive such remedial action.

A final Stark Industries conference, this time fronted by Virginia Potts, had announced that the Avengers Initiative would be restarted under Romanoff’s jurisdiction as a small non-profit response team and that they would initially be based out of Norway on a six-month secondment, to assist with the diplomatic construction of the New Asgard enclave.

Oh, yeah, New Asgard. Jake had kind of forgotten a bunch of Thor’s alien relations had all rocked up and taken over part of their – ancestral? – Viking homeland. He’d always wondered if Rosa had some Norse blood in her, but the television footage of the newly settled Asgardians had made her wonder if she was part-Aesir instead.

Potts had also confirmed that several original team members, including Rogers, would be retiring from public life to become private citizens, and while she had not said anything outright to confirm she herself would be taking a breather, the sloping curve of her obviously pregnant stomach had made it clear that she was set for a backseat.

What appeared to be a talking racoon wielding a massive, alien-looking gun had then escorted her away from the podium, but given that Jake had instead slumped into a blue-screen state of existence at the realisation he and Amy would never have children, it didn’t strike him as majorly odd.

The Avengers don’t next surface until a crisis involving a port hijack on the Argentinian coast two weeks out from Christmas, where it is revealed that Bruce Banner – last previously seen four years prior in Sokovia – is still on the scene if not particularly green – and that the lack of a primary-coloured player has been made up for with the presence of a bald blue-skinned babe who Rosa idly describes as “banging” when they catch the reaction news on MSNBC the following day.

So, on the whole, the broader changes to the fabric of international superheroism and the reveal that they tried – and failed – to prevent The Snap doesn’t impact Jake too much; at least, up to a point. Indeed, save a small minority, most people don’t seem to hold the Avengers’ failures against them; the more on Thanos that slips out from occasional comments, particularly from the racoon who appears to be a PR disaster waiting to happen, the more consensus forms that the huge purple bastard’s ability to rewrite time and space at his leisure meant that it would always be an uphill battle.

But the changes to Jake’s life run far deeper than who’s sporting spandex these days.

Gina doesn’t make it. Nor does The Enigma, or Sharon and her kids, and – in what feels like the most crushing beat of all – nor do any Santiagos outside of Amy’s father Victor.

Nor does Cheddar.

His dad doesn’t make it either – and Jake later discovers, in what could perhaps be considered twisted mercy, that nobody who was on a plane across the whole wide world, made it too. Apparently, when he snapped his fingers, Thanos had some peripheral control in the matter; while hundreds of planes crashed around the globe, investigators had subsequently discovered all of them were empty.

Jake isn’t sure how he feels that an alien warlord committed to destroying half of the universe was still considerate enough to ensure his approach to genocide took such matters into account. He tries not to dwell on it.

But his mom obviously made it, as does Holt’s, and his nephew Marcus, which Jake discovers when he rocks up a week after The Snap and finds the best friend of his ex-girlfriend wearing his clothes.

So too did Genevieve and Nikolaj, which with the benefit of hindsight probably explained why Charles had been able to hold it so well together across the immediate days that had followed the world going to hell. Jake did not begrudge him his slice of rare fortune in the slightest; Charles had been through so much over the years that for fate to bestow this crucial kiss upon him was something of a wonder.

But still. It hurts.

The small part of him that can’t quite comprehend it all still hammers loudly around his skull at night, asking why Charles’ love of his life had been spared and Amy hadn’t. He’s obviously biased in the matter, and he does a good job at trampling down the cracked jealousy that storms around him, but it sill rings so brutally unfair.

He doesn’t find out about Rosa’s family initially. After those first few weeks, her façade of impervious cool and focus slips back into place easier than anyone else’s, including Holt. But four months after it goes down, when they’ve decamped to the much quieter thrum of Shaw’s, she reveals that her mum was the only one who didn’t make it.

“It is what it is,” she says when he asks how she feels about it. “I told her all I ever wanted to. I’ve no regrets.”

The increasingly glassy look in her eyes as the evening unfurls and she sinks drink after drink tells him that she probably does have regrets – he remembers, sitting at a table with her as she came out to her parents, alternating between forthright frustration and flashes of insecurity – but he chooses not to pry. Ever since the academy, Rosa only opens up when she wants to, and he’s known for almost two decades when to not push the buttons.

When Holt comes down the following morning to find him curled up on the couch, he asks why he is not wearing his embroidered pyjama shirt instead of an old vest.

“Rosa’s in bed,” he groggily responds, before his brain catches up. “Not like that,” he quickly adds. Holt still raises an eyebrow and he amends. “She got super-wasted last night, captain, I couldn’t let her get back on her bike.”

“Am I to take it she is wearing your monogrammed silk nightwear?” Holt asks. (Jake had always assumed it was Kevin who had done the monogramming, but it had turned out that his commanding officer was a dab hand with needle and thread, presenting him with his own initialled pair two months after he moved in.)

“I am a gentlemen,” Jake replied, affronted. “What the lady wants, the lady gets.”

Holt made a non-committal sound and turned as Rosa stumbled downstairs, bleary-eyed. She temporarily froze upon seeing the captain, then seemed to remember that she was not in her own home.

“Detective Diaz,” he inclined his head. “I was just about to have some grapefruit juice and a solitary hard-boiled egg. Would you care to join me?”

Rosa eyed Holt with the sort of expression she generally gave someone when she was trying to figure out if they were tricking her, before she muttered under her breath and trampled through into her captain’s kitchen. Holt, entirely nonplussed at the disregard for his personal boundaries after living with Jake for more than a quarter of a year, simply follows and asks if she’d rather have a Bloody Mary.

Jake burrows back down into the couch and tries to block out the sun.

It’s around early December, just as the Avengers are clearing out Ushuaia, when Jake decides it’s time to move back into the apartment he shared with Amy.

He’s been back in brief fits and starts over the past six months, mostly to bring a clutch of essential stuff to the Holt-Cozner residence, but has otherwise mostly stayed clear of it. The bills are in Amy’s name, and the rent is on a rolling basis; he could have attempted to get it stopped, but he’s had more on his plate with work, picking up the slack left by Terry’s absence without fully stepping into the sergeant’s shoes.

(Rosa has mostly taken out what would have been Amy’s caseload, for which Jake is eternally grateful. The first time he had seen one of her open cases, a week later, he had been forced to remove himself to the filing room where Charles had found him hyperventilating a half-hour later.)

But he’s been crashing at Holt’s for six months now, and while his captain has given no indication that he wants him out, Jake feels that if he doesn’t make the effort to go back now, he never will. He’s still grieving, still raw, but half-a-year has passed and he’s just about stopped turning around in the bullpen to crack a joke with her, or twist on the couch to ask her takeout preferences.

(The pain will never go away, and he still gets sad whenever he thinks of her. But distance is slowly tempering it; he will always love Amy Santiago, but she would never want him to live his life in retrograde for her, whatever that means.)

So he sits down at Holt’s dinner table one night (dining at an actual table has become a luxury Jake never thought he’d find himself doing again during his working career), and over a leg of roast lamb and rosemary sauteed potatoes the pair of them had prepared together, he tells him that he’s going to move out.

He’s not sure how he expected Holt to take it, but is relieved that his captain gives the same nonplussed look he frequently gives from anything from a mug of upturned coffee to an attempted murder.

“That’s quite alright, Jake,” he responds, pouring a jus over his portion of meat. (It’s always Jake, not Peralta, in the house. It’s quite reassuringly domestic.)

“You’re not mad?” Jake fires back immediately. He doesn’t want Holt to feel like he has been taken for granted; that’s the last thing he would want, given how much being able to have companionship for the past half-year has meant to him.

“Not at all,” Holt adds. “In fact, I did expect you to bring it up earlier than now. Not many New York Police detectives live with their superior officer.”

“Not every New York Police detective has a superior officer like you,” Jake replied mindlessly and then paused. Holt had raised an eyebrow and he quickly stuttered in response “I, mean, when I say that, what I –”

“Thank you, Jake,” Holt cuts him off, saving him further embarrassment. His lips have quirked upwards with a tinge of amusement. “I’m quite touched.”

“Oh, cool, cool,” Jake babbles. “That’s alright then.”

“Eat your potatoes before they go too cold, Peralta.”

“Yes, captain!”

Moving back into the apartment is an emotionally tiring experience. He packs his stuff up at Holt’s into three large cardboard boxes and Charles comes to pick them up in the family car he picked up particularly cheaply a month or so after The Snap.

He leaves the monogrammed pyjamas. They’re a reminder that he will, as Holt tells him before shaking his hand as he returns the keys with the corgi attached to them, be always welcome.

“Help is always given to those at Hogwarts who need it,” Jake quips on reflex. Holt merely raises an eyebrow, in his best Alan Rickman impression, and drawls in response:

“Especially for rash, impressionable Gryffindors.”

It takes Jake half-a-minute to pick up his slack jaw from the floor and get into the car with Charles, still gawping as Holt waves them off.

It’s a cold, frigid Sunday in New York City, and they pick up Rosa en-route, who agreed to come help tackle what is sure to be a deep clean project. The heater is cranked up full but the three of them still have red noses as they hustle along the quieter streets.

With half the people in the world no longer here, traffic jams have become a thing of the past, more or less, and they make good time to the brownstone where Jake had called home at the start of the year. Looking up at it, Jake’s struck with the familiar sense of apprehension he’s been met with the past few times he’s made the journey over here, but he swallows and undoes his seatbelt.

The boxes are cumbersome and heavy, and they collectively decide that the best approach is to take them one at a time, two to a box. They’re up on the second floor, with a solitary neighbour that Amy used to describe as a sweet old Indian man, who had passed away peacefully in the spring.

Jake hadn’t seen any signs that someone had moved in next door to him in the brief visits he’d made, so him and Charles can only really gape when they reach the top of the stairs and come face to face with Natasha Romanoff.

The Black Widow is shorter in real life than Jake would have expected, a good few inches below him, and is absolutely not in possession of the sort of aura her reputation would suggest. Her hair, mostly blonde with a couple of inches of fiery red growing out of the roots, is swept up in a messy bun and her face has an unguarded weariness to it.

“Oh,” she says with a note of surprise that Jake would struggle to decipher as anything other than genuine, though he seriously expects that it is the most practised exclamation he’s ever heard in his life. “I didn’t realise there was anybody else on the floor.”

Charles beats Jake to the recovery of his wits and ceases to gawp like a fish first. “It’s my buddy here, it’s his apartment. He’s just been away for a while, you know, after everything.”

It’s astute work from Charles to not mention that he hasn’t been back for half a year thanks to the lingering spectre of his dead wife, Jake muses as he too regains his faculties. Guilt-tripping an Avenger was not on his bucket list.

“Yes, hello, sorry,” he babbles as he opens his mouth. “My name’s Jake Peralta, meet to nice you. I mean, nice to meet you, even.” He reaches over the cardboard box with an outstretched, mittened hand and Natasha Romanoff bemusedly shakes it. “This is my pal, Charles, he’s just helping me move back in today.”

A light of realisation appears to cross the Black Widow’s face, followed by what appears to be the expert schooling of polite features. If Jake wasn’t best friends with Rosa and hadn’t spent six months living with Holt, he might have missed the quick flash of regret.

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” she responds, releasing his hand and turning to shake Charles’, which he’d snaked under the box. She eyes the cardboard speculatively. “How much have you got to move?”

Jake gradually sets his edge down, rooting around in his coat pocket for his keys before growing frustrated and whipping his mitten off. “Just the three of them, miss.”

He has a brief beat to realise he just called the Black Widow miss and that he really didn’t want to die this way today, in a hallway while wearing mittens, but he instead looks and finds her smothering a small smile.

“I am so sorry, miss- I mean, no, that’s presumptuous to call you-”

“Is he always like this?” the Black Widow cuts across him to ask Charles, and Jake can vaguely feel the redness of his nose stretched all the way out to his ears.

His friend shrugs unhelpfully. “Usually he’s the cool one.”

This time, the Black Widow does chuckle and Jake kind of wishes that she had already killed him, there and then, because it is so not cool to be word-vomiting in front of an Avenger.

She takes mercy on him though, returning to face him with a looser, kinder expression and a small grin. “Miss is fine, if you like. I mean, it’s technically correct. If it’s less trouble, you can call me Nat.”

Jake feels himself goggle again. Did the Black Widow just invite him to call her a nickname? What crazy upside-down portal had he just wandered through today? Had he walked into some kind of Stranger Things-esque universe?

“Nat is cool,” he squeaks out, somehow. “Cool, cool, cool.”

“Cool,” replies the Black Widow and the parallels between her and Rosa are so uncanny, it’s unreal. Jake belatedly realises that Rosa might wonder what’s taking the pair of them so long, down on the curb in the backseat of Charles’ car.

He doesn’t even realise that Natasha Romanoff has taken up the slack of his end of the cardboard box, and is now holding it with Charles, who incomparably doing better than Jake – how is he doing incomparably better? – and is weighing it in her own hands. “Christ, this is heavier than I thought it looked. I’m surprised the box is holding.”

“We doubled it up,” Jake supplies helpfully, before registering that the Black Widow is holding a cardboard box with his ridiculous collection of letterman jackets in it. He belatedly realises she is doing so in order for him to find his keys faster and he hurriedly turns to jam the right one into the lock.

His and Amy’s apartment isn’t quite as bad as he feared it would be when the door swings open but it’s not much better. There’s at least an inch of dust on the doilies on the near side-table and he discovers that there’s no power when he flicks a switch to no response. He strides across the short hallway and into the living room, whisking open the curtains at the far side to let some light in.

Down on the street, he sees Rosa looking up at him, now resting against the passenger door, and giving the sort of frustrated shrug that, in Rosa-speak, promises pain for making her wait like a chump. He swallows and turns back to find Charles and the Black Widow – or Nat, as she apparently wishes to be known – slotting the box into a space behind the couch.

Charles stands up, and grimaces at an audible cricking noise in his back. Nat, whose tan long coat doesn’t look remarkably warm for the time of year, looks around with an interested eye, taking in the old oak bookshelves, the old-fashioned television stand and the booming poster of John McClane hung over one wall.

“Die Hard,” she says. “Good film. Alan Rickman’s fantastic in it.”

It takes all of Jake’s absolute willpower to not explode at this point, but he’s fortunately saved from having to focus too hard by Nat returning her gaze to him – he belatedly realises that she was probably cataloguing every possible weapon and escape route available, which terrifies him only ever so slightly – and points to the box.

“Are the other two you say you’ve got heavier than that?”

Jake still can’t quite believe that an Avenger is playing the good neighbour with him – wait, is the Black Widow now his neighbour? – but he manages to approximate a surprisingly even-keeled response this time.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of crockery and a few other things in the others.”

He had been taken aback at just how much stuff he had managed to migrate to Holt’s house, but before he can muse on this, Natasha Romanoff has nodded at him.

“One minute,” she says, turns on her heel, and vanishes out of the door.

Jake hear her footsteps head back down to the other apartment on the second floor, and as soon as he thinks she might be out of earshot, he turns to Charles.

“Am I tripping or did the Black Widow just turn up in my hallway?” he whisper-shouts at his friend.

“Dude, she totally did!” Charles whisper-shouts back. “The actual Black Widow!”

“Wait, she never said she was the Black Widow,” Jake quickly counters, immediately second-guessing himself. “She just said she was called Nat. It’s got to be a coincidence surely?”

Charles raises a doubtful eyebrow. “Jake, that was definitely the Black Widow! Like, did you see the way she scanned your room?”

“I knew it!” Jake whisper-shouts again, oscillating straight back to definite belief.

“But,” Charles continues. “Why is she in your hallway? I mean, aren’t the Avengers still based out of Norway?”

“They were in Argentina the other day,” Jake counters, his mind still running at a mile-a-minute. “New York is closer than Norway!”

“But why a brownstone in Brooklyn, Jake?!” Charles whisper-shouts back.

“Damn your devil’s advocate!” Jake whisper-shouts back, before the sound of footsteps jerks his head up and he finds Captain America is suddenly standing in his apartment.

“Gentlemen,” Steve Rogers says, completely at apparent ease inside a stranger’s home, with the sort of calm authority that makes Jake immediately want to follow him across Europe and back for the hell of it. “My friend tells me you’ve got some boxes to move.”

Because he’ll take whatever pleasures he can get out of life, and because Captain America still firmly believes in the art of chivalry, Jake finds himself with a front seat view out of his apartment window when the downstairs door opens and two Avengers appear trot out to meet Rosa at the car.

He wishes he’d had the foresight to pull out his phone and film it because her reaction is absolutely priceless.

A few minutes later, her equilibrium has recovered enough to stalk through the door into his front room and gesture, almost bug-eyed, a silent expression that best translates to what-the-fuck.

“Dude, if you’ve been holding out on me all these years that you know two Avengers, I am going to fucking spit-roast you,” she whisper-shouts, getting in on the collective action.

“Kinky,” Jake and Charles both respond on reflex before air first-bumping each other.

Steve Rogers walks through the door, carrying a cardboard box under each arm, both of them bulging at the seams. Natasha Romanoff follows him holding what appears to be the tape that was used to keep them shut in one hand and several socks in the other.

“Sorry, I think I might have popped one of them open squeezing around the staircase,” Captain America responds and Jake just stares as the Black Widow deposits his bright, waffle cone-emblazoned footwear onto the back of the couch.

“I’m sorry,” Rosa interjects bluntly, before anyone else can open their mouths, “but, like, why are Captain America and the Black Widow in a brownstone in Brooklyn?”

Bless Rosa and her refusal to conform to obvious social niceties, Jake muses. He and Charles are used to it by now, but he admires the cojones on her to simply ask two of the world’s most dangerous superheroes what the hell they are doing in his apartment building.

“Call me Steve,” Steve Rogers replies, and Jake is fairly convinced he is tacitly included in that invitation, meaning that he is now on first-name terms with a pair of Avengers he had never met in his life a quarter-hour ago. “And, well, I live here.”

There’s a beat for that to sink in and then it suddenly hits Jake that Captain America now happens to be his neighbour.

“You live here?” Charles repeats, and there’s a definite touch of a squeak there. Apparently he could handle the Black Widow just fine, but not Captain America.

Steve smiles ruefully and again, Jake catches the smallest flash of guilt under his particularly pleasant expression. “Moved in a month ago. I didn’t realise there was actually anyone else on this floor.”

“I’ve been away,” Jake replied on reflex again. “I mean, I do still live here, I used to with my wife.”

Something crosses the face of the two newcomers in the room and Jake realises that they must have to deal with that every time they speak to someone. There’s hardly a soul untouched by the events of May across the world and… well, it doesn’t take a psychologist to see that, even with these brief interactions, both Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff feel a crippling responsibility.

God, Amy would be so proud of him for using big words in his internal monologue, Jake thinks with a pang of absence.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Steve responds, and Jake realises he’s just got a personal apology from Captain America. He didn’t hold any grudges, but he’d find it hard to now. The man radiates a tired earnestness.

“What about you?” Rosa asks, turning to Nat. The latter shrugged.

“I just popped by to see an old friend,” she responded, running her gaze over Rosa in the way Jake assumed predators did in the wild, while David Attenborough sat in a nearby tree trunk with a microphone. “Had a bit of a mess to clear up in Argentina. We’ve earned some down time.”

“That doesn’t explain why you simply didn’t ignore these two weebs and helped them with their stuff,” Rosa counters, over Jake and Charles’ half-hearted squawks of protest at the semi-affectionate putdown.

“Well,” Steve interjected, and Jake can see why people compare him to apple pie and cinnamon rolls on the internet, he just exudes good vibes, “My mom always taught me to love thy neighbour. It’s the least I can do given me and Mr…” He pauses, turning to the room at large with a sheepish expression. “I’m sorry, I just realised I don’t know which of you is Jake Peralta.”

“That’s me,” Jake responded, raising his hand on reflex and then immediately dropping it when Rosa snorted.

“Charles Boyle,” Charles added helpfully.

“Rosa Diaz,” Rosa supplied warily.

“Steve Rogers,” Steve replied unnecessarily, drawing a snort from Nat.

“Everybody knows you,” she chuckles, before adding. “Everybody knows me, so no name here.”

“Point taken.” With that, Steve tugs the sleeve of his polo neck down – Jake reckons the man’s bicep is bigger than his head – and sketches a small wave. “Well, it’s good to meet you all. If you excuse me, I need to run to the deli for my dinner order. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

And with that, Captain America exits Jake Peralta’s flat. The Black Widow watches him leave and then turns back to them.

“I’ve got to head upstate too,” she directs to Jake, “but I’m sure as long as you and Steve are neighbours, I’ll see you around too.” She too throws up a farewell hand gesture and then she’s gone too, tightening her bun as she goes, to leave three New York cops in a form of almost stupefied silence.

“Dude,” Rosa interjects a minute later. “That was weird.”

“Oh, thank God, it’s not just me,” Jake hurries out, moving to shut the door and keep any further chill out. The temperatures seem to have plummeted further and the lack of power could be a serious problem if they don’t get a move on.

Rosa pulls her wool-knit bob cap further down over her ears. “Jake, Steve fucking Rogers is your neighbour.”

“Yeah, I know,” he quips back. “Think what a field day Amy would have with this.”

He pauses and looks around the apartment, at the doilies, the dust, the books, the walls, the downturned photo-frames he’d left so when he first came in mourning. He reaches over and turns one up; their celebratory bust shot after victory over the Vulture.

It stings, but somewhere in the back of his head, he can hear her voice. Wordless, smooth, leaning into him.

It’s going to be tough, but he can still feel her here. Her memories, her laugh, her love and affection.

She’d believe he could do this.

Christmas was never a big event to him, not in the way it was to Amy. But this year – his first without her in a long time – he finds himself out in New Jersey, at the old Santiago ancestral home.

It’s just him, his mom and Victor Santiago. It’s quiet, reflective, but not sombre in the way Jake had thought it would be six months prior. To his shame, it is the first time he’s really spent with Victor since, but then again, the man had asked for space when he had initially tried to reach out.

Now, the three of them, this makeshift family bound by the power of a clutch of vows hardly fulfilled, sit in company, the fire roaring around them, and gradually, they open up.

Karen entertains Victor with stories of Jake’s childhood, of exploits on the fire escapes and other such mischief. He returns the favour, with more stories of Amy scrapping it out against seven brothers and how – with none of them left to hear – she was always the apple of his eye.

Jake gets that feeling right at the core. It’s impossible to not think that Amy Santiago, here or gone, could be anything other than the apple of his eye.

She’s a presence everyday in his life, even without her presence. She always will be. They shared so much together, were going to share so much more.

He cries quietly on the way home, his mom driving, one hand on the wheel and the other holding his.

She drops him off at his apartment and he waves her off as the first flurries of snow begin to fall over Brooklyn, dusting the streets in the early Boxing Day hours. There’s no raucous celebrations, drunken rows or over-eggnoged fights spilling out. It’s silent, and the only thing he can hear if he strains, is the sound of an old gramophone, two floors up next door to his flat.

He thinks about knocking on Captain America’s door, stands for a moment outside, before he thinks better of it and returns to his own apartment, burrowing under the duvet as he watches the flakes drift past the window.

On New Year’s Eve, he and Rosa are invited to Captain Holt’s. Marcus is also there, but there’s no frostiness between him and Rosa, to what Jake admits is likely their host’s silent relief. It’s a muted celebration, again, but one filled with a quiet warmth and companionship.

He and Marcus drift asleep next to each other on the big couch, and he wakes briefly to find Rosa draping a blanket over the pair of them, as a lone firework explodes somewhere distantly in the horizon.

Chapter Text

2019

The letter is placed on his desk by Captain Holt three weeks into the year. It’s been both a hectic and quiet start to January. The criminals that are left appear to have declared that the amnesty is over, and cases beyond the more mundane have started to slowly creep up again, but compared to the same month a year ago, it is positively pedestrian.

He doesn’t open the letter until he gets back to his flat, and finds that it is from the governor’s office. Plans are afoot to erect a series of monuments in every major city across the country; towering metal monoliths, etched with the names of the disappeared. It asks Jake if there are any names he would like to put forward.

His first reaction is to throw it away. Amy was special, one-of-a-kind, a true original; to simply render her as a name upon a slab of metal, buried among hundreds of thousands of others, was too ordinary for her.

But then he remembers that the name next to hers would be another special, one-of-a-kind, true original, at least to someone else. Everybody whose name would be on these monuments would be because somebody wanted to remember them, wanted others to remember that they were not the only ones who had suffered and lost.

He uncrumples the paper, smooths it out, and writes AMY SANTIAGO-PERALTA in big, blocky letters. For the first time since Christmas, he feels the back of his eyes prick but the tears don’t come this time. Maybe last year, he cried them all out.

The new year brings new shift patterns, as the New York Police Department continue to experiment best how to put out their manpower. John Kelly – the man who beat Holt to become Police Commissioner – unexpectedly dies of a heart attack at the end of February. It’s a strangely sobering case for Jake; though he had no personal connection or deep love for the man, it made for the realisation that life keeps on, even after the cataclysm of the previous May.

In another world, Holt may have thrown his hat back into the ring for the post. Instead, he remains rooted to the Nine-Nine, an unflappable force as he ensures they remain one of the most diligent precincts in the state. It’s interim Captain Herschel, the man who stepped in throughout the previous year when Holt – and by extension, his best cops as Jake, Rosa and Charles adamantly refused to stop unless he did – needed to step back for a moment who ends up with the gig on a probationary basis. It makes Holt happy; Madeline Wuntch had been circling the role and even in a universe decimated by half, he was not in a hurry to make up and play nice.

At the same time, Holt brings in Frank Dillman, a former detective and colleague previously fired from both the NYPD and San Francisco’s department, which raises a few eyebrows. Jake, on the other hand, is only too grateful to have him; he never thought he’d see the day where he found stepping up to take over sergeant work frustrating, but is more than happy to cede Terry’s desk to the senior man, reinstated with the stripes to help tighten up Nine-Nine procedure. Rosa gradually peels back off Amy’s old beat and suddenly her, Jake and Charles are reunited as a trio.

Work was very much the saving grace after The Snap for Jake and he would readily admit that, without it, he would have crumbled even more than he did. But him, Charles and Rosa – they have a synergy that feels painstakingly natural now. Charles grinds out the leads, Jake works them out, Rosa proves the muscle. It’s a system and one that appears near unshakable; when they deal with an attempted subway hijacking in early March, and come out without a scratch on anyone, it’s easily the biggest professional high Jake has felt since… well, he can’t remember.

He goes home each night too, the apartment lingering with Amy’s ghosts, and whereas once it pained him to step foot in the place, nine months later it comforts him in a way he never realised it previously did. The angles, the surfaces; he’s changed very little, has re-adopted her systems, even taken up her binders to keep his affairs in order.

And when he goes to bed, he lies there and remembers how they used to read, her glasses perched precariously on the end of her nose, all scrunched up with a sort of awkward frustration as she pored over crosswords and he flicked through the Nets’ latest hits on Twitter, and they’d slide down as the lights go down and embrace.

It’s in times like these that he finds himself on the edge between nostalgic comfort and intrinsic loneliness. The memory warms him; the ultimately empty space under the sheets doesn’t. He moves a few of Amy’s old stuffed toys into the bed in early March, slapping himself as to why he didn’t think to do so before. They help, as much as anything could.

He speaks with Rosa about it a few nights later. They’re on a stakeout, in a battered old Camaro, parked on the edge of a suspect industrial complex where they believe a heroin exchange is set to go down the following evening. He’s fiddling with the radio hooked up to his dented iPod, skips over Taylor Swift – some things that still remind him of her, things that he can’t go back to yet – and settles on The Gaslight Anthem.

“Rosa, can I ask you something?” he enquires gingerly. She looks at him out of the side of her eye, from the passenger seat, but doesn’t respond for the better part of a minute.

“Yeah.”

Jake wanders over his words, working out how best to approach this one. In the end, he goes for the most simplistic manner he can hit on. “What do you do when you’re lonely?”

She stares ahead. “Who says I get lonely?”

That… was a very Rosa-esque answer, the sort of one he should have anticipated. “You most certainly do.”

“You’ve no proof of that.”

Jake chews his lip. “Not tangible, no. But then, this isn’t a case.”

There’s several beats, and Jake has known Rosa for long enough to simply sit it out for an answer.

In the end, she shrugs. In the half-light glow of the dashboard, her expression is tired. “I dunno, Jake.” She glances over at him. “Why do you ask?”

He grimaces. “Eh, idle curiosity.”

“Bullshit.”

He knows that she also knows that simply sitting it out for an answer always works with him as well.

“I guess,” he eventually starts again, slowly. He drops his gaze back to the iPod and picks at the corner of the casing, a habit he’s never shaken off. He can feel Rosa glance at him and then back to the warehouse. “I guess it’s not so much what to do when you’re lonely. It’s whether we can… not be lonely.”

He doesn’t need to say much more. He’s spoken about Amy to his mum, to Holt, to Charles and to Rosa almost exclusively. He tries to avoid it too often with all of them; he doesn’t want to be that burden locked into a one-track mind, no matter how none of them would hold it against him.

Rosa is about to open her mouth before movement catches both of their eyes and they drop down below the dash, peeking back over. There’s three men, two of them burly and seemingly packing, with the last one holding a briefcase. It looks like the deal has moved up.

Later, when all three are arrested, processed and shifted on from the holding cell, Jake forgets that he had engaged in some soul-baring with his friend until, on the way out, she slips into the elevator beside him and eyes him speculatively.

“Loneliness is never going to go away, Jake,” she says halfway down, out of the blue. He starts and looks at her, before she gives him a small smile, the rarer side of Rosa Diaz that cuts right to the core. “But being lonely reminds you there’s a lot to live for.”

She raps him on the shoulder, shrugs her leather jacket on and waves behind her as heads out, leaving him to muse her words before scrambling out of the elevator doors after they begin to close.

He has dinner once a week still with Captain Holt. It’s the least he can do, and it’s not like he has many people to impress with the culinary skills he acquired while under his superior officer’s tutelage.

He plumps for stuffed chicken, filled with basil, mozzarella and cherry tomatoes, accompanied by a pasta and rich arrabiata sauce, paired off with a red wine for his guest and a beer for himself, before he realises that it’s quarter past the hour, dinner will be ready in ten minutes and he has seen no sign of the captain.

He shrugs on a hoodie over the smarter shirt-and-jeans combo he had changed into upon arriving home, opens his front door, turns right and immediately collides with Steve Rogers’ back.

“Oof!”

“Jake!” exclaims Captain America, turning on a dime with an apology on his lips. “Man, I am so sorry about that.”

“It’s fine!” Jake wheezes, because, holy cow, Steve’s back hurts more than the time Gina pushed him into a brick wall in a shopping trolley. His neighbour looks terribly abashed, and around his broad frame, he can just make out Captain Holt’s concerned gaze, peering over his spectacles.

“Peralta, are you alright down there?”

“Fine!” Jake repeats, still trying to catch his breath, accepting Steve’s hand and letting himself be hauled back to his feet.

“I’m so sorry Jake,” Steve added again, before pausing. “Man, it’s been a while since someone ran into me and fell over though.”

“I can see why people don’t make it a habit,” Jake quips, or at the very least attempts to, because he fears he has cracked a rib.

It belatedly hits him at this point that Captain Holt does not know that Captain America is his next-door neighbour. At the very least, Jake has never told him; he, Rosa and Charles all agreed that the detail the nation’s number one patriot lived in his nondescript brownstone was to be kept strictly confidential.

“Wait,” he added. “Do you know each other?”

“We’ve met on several occasions, Peralta,” Holt smoothly responds. “Captain Rogers here has been a great supporter of the Police Benevolent Association since the Battle of New York. He has spoken at several of our gala meetings and has donated his time generously to meeting wounded patrolmen over the years.” He pauses, then adds, “At least the years when he was not a wanted fugitive for crimes he did not commit.”

Steve laughs, a small but nonetheless honest chuckle. “The A-Team. I got that one.”

“What I’d like to know Peralta is how long the two of you have been neighbours?” Captain Holt continued, giving his patented hard stare (Charles had called it the Paddington look once), albeit with a recognisable twinkle in the eye.

“Errrrrr….” Jake fumbled, before Steve, bless him, smoothly steps in.

“Long enough,” the captain responds, though he abashedly adds, “I’ve got to admit we’ve not talked loads though. I didn’t even know Jake here was a detective.”

“One of my best,” Holt responds, not without a touch of pride, and Jake suddenly feels like he’s floating, because Captain Holt just told Captain America he’s one of the best, and that’s a life goal he didn’t even realise he needed fulfilled just like that.

Amy would have probably gone through the roof, he distantly thinks.

“Well, it’s been fine to catch up, Raymond,” Steve interrupts his thoughts, reaching out grip Holt’s hand firmly. The pair shake and the former heads on past, towards the stairs, sporting what Jake now recognises as running clothes. “Jake, I’ll catch you later. Enjoy your dinner!”

The heavy footfalls gradually fade until the downstairs door is shut and then Holt turns back to Jake.

“Not to alarm you, but I can smell burning tomatoes.”

“Ah, shit,” Jake mutters, nonplussed, and he hurries Holt inside.

The memorial unveiling service is set for the last weekend in May, effectively a year to the date. Jake gets the notification in April, at the same time that Rosa, Charles and a dozen other officers have envelopes dropped into their hands.

Rosa’s does not surprise him – she will surely have nominated her mother, despite their differences – but Charles does take him unawares. His father and Gina’s mother have both survived, and promptly moved out west to Montana, wrapped up in a sense of co-dependent grief. He can’t think of anyone who he would have nominated.

“Eleanor,” he simply responds when Jake works up the courage to broach the subject at Shaw’s. Rosa flicks a surprised glance towards him.

“As in, your ex-wife Eleanor?” she ventures. Charles nods.

“Her parents were already dead, and Hercules got snapped too.” That was a relatively new term Jake had heard used a few times. Further information, from a Stark Industries server hack a month prior, had revealed that the mysterious Thanos had achieved his aims with some kind of gem-encrusted gauntlet that he’d been able to use to harness his reality-warping powers. Snapped wasn’t quite enough to convey the actual impact, but it had entered the lexicon as suitable shorthand.

Rosa was silent for a moment, apparently allowing Jake to nip in with the follow-up. “Why not Hercules too? Shouldn’t he have his name up?”

Charles shook his head. “He was weirdly very specific in his will, that if he was to die prematurely, he wanted his name to remain anonymous, because it would be remembered in the celestial heavens.”

“That definitely sounds like something Gina would say,” Rosa offhandedly remarked. Jake and Charles both nodded in agreement, and the three of them clinked bottles.

Jake had assumed that tangentially meeting two Avengers was enough for one lifetime, but apparently he was wrong, because it was a mid-April morning, racing from the subway to the entrance to his brownstone in an absolute downpour when he encountered a third.

The building itself was on the older side of such houses in Brooklyn and had been known to leak over the years, so it had never been a surprise when he had passed other floors to see buckets sometimes strategically arranged to catch the drips. Even so, it appeared the hallway on the second floor had taken a particular hammering that week; at least a dozen receptacles, from mugs to saucepans, were arranged along the length.

That was the first unusual sight; the second was that Natasha Romanoff was ducking in and out of the entrance to Steve Rogers’ door, quietly swearing as she fell over various items, spilling their contents and soaking into the carpet.

Remembering that the last time he had seen her, she had been gracious enough to carry his socks for him, Jake was not going to leave her in the lurch here.

“Hey!” he waved, dropping his knapsack and shrugging off his wet jacket, throwing it over the bannister. Nat looked up and an expression of obvious relief crossed over her features.

“Hey,” she fired back. “Lovely day for it.”

“Isn’t it just,” Jake returned. “What can I do to help?”

“My god, you’re a lifesaver,” she responded, pointing to a china bowl near his left foot. “Could you empty that into the saucepan there and then bring that through for me?”

Jake did so, kneeling into the sodden fibres near the entrance to his apartment, pouring the water between the two containers and then rising to following the vanished Nat inside Steve Rogers’ apartment.

To say that he heard the rustic sounds of old piano concertos and occasional soul music typically echoing from Captain America’s apartment, Jake found it paradoxically both exactly what he expected it to be and entirely different. It was mainly cut in warm mahogany shades with flashes of red and cream, a sharp contrast to the blues of his own abode. Distantly, he could hear two voices discussing something through a door to the left, in what was presumably the bedroom. He studiously tuned it out and followed his guide through to the kitchen.

“Thanks a million,” Nat said as she took the pan off him and emptied it down the sink. “If you don’t mind, could you run it back to the same spot?”

“Sure thing,” Jake replied. After all, it’s not everyday an Avenger asks you to help, and he was vaguely concerned that her readily spiking blood pressure could spell trouble if he refused.

He continued to ferry various households items to and fro for the next half-hour, before the rain outside lessened and the drips became less insistent. He returned to the main body of Steve’s flat and suddenly found that Nat had turned into a relatively diminutive looking man with a pair of round spectacles and close-cropped, grey-streaked hair.

“Oh, sorry, I thought Natasha was still in here,” Jake supplied, because he felt it was better than simply blurting out that he was six feet away from the incredible Hulk.

The man turned, polished his glasses on his checked shirt. “She just nipped in to see Steve,” he explained, apparently unruffled by Jake’s appearance. “She’ll be out in a moment.”

Jake nodded and then, for want of something better to do, outstretched his hand. “Jake Peralta, NYPD.”

Much as Nat had done all those months ago, the man took it with the bemused air of someone who didn’t shake many hands. “Dr. Bruce Banner, John Hopkins University.”

“Huh,” Jake replied, in the way idiots often do, before Nat swept into the room to save him.

“I see you boys are getting along famously already,” she quipped. Banner gave a cough and she distractedly patted him on the back as she rooted around in the cupboard behind him.

“I don’t know about famously,” Jake responded, his mouth having decided to beat his brain to the punch at the most inopportune moment yet. “I’ve not yet made the news for punching an alien warlord.”

Fate, presumably, had decided that it had been rough enough on Jake a year ago because Bruce Banner, instead of promptly turning green and hurling him through several walls to Harlem, simply raises his eyebrow and dryly responds: “I’m sure we can arrange that for you yet.”

Jake can only gawp at that, in the silence, before Nat lets out a surprisingly throaty chuckle and pats Bruce again, the latter’s expression shifting from poker face inscrutability into an almost mortified grin of his own, that he had dare to make the joke at his own space.

“You’ll find Bruce is an… acquired taste,” Nat responds as she moves back past the pair of them. She turns at the door jamb and says, “Steve’s up if you want to see him. His bark is worse than his bite.”

Jake whips his head around, caught by the statement. “Wait, what? What’s happened? Is he OK?”

Nat rolls her eyes. “The idiot somehow managed to break his leg doing the most Steve thing of all.”

“Collecting a cat out of a tree for a little old lady,” Bruce added from behind him, barely concealing a low-key mirth. “Honestly, I did not even know the man could break a bone to begin with.”

Nat shrugged, turning back to Jake. “He heals fast, like within the space of two days. But he just so happened to do it this morning on the one day his apartment decided to have a flood. So, here I am, roped in to ensure he doesn’t drown while he can’t move as easily.”

“In all fairness,” Bruce interjected again as he moved around behind Jake, the audible snaps of a briefcase closing before the doctor came back into his sightline. “He could still move on it, but it would be exceedingly painful. He’s trying to swear off such things these days.”

“Did you drive all the way down from Baltimore?” Jake asks, still slightly struck dumb by the fact that Captain America was on enforced bedrest because he had fallen out of a tree, of all things.

“Yup,” Bruce responded. He moved next to Nat, who was shrugging on the tan coat Jake remembered from the first time he met her. “For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, Captain America doesn’t want to take himself to the hospital – any hospital – and I’ve got the medical training.” He shrugs, a gesture that strangely makes the man shrink in upon himself.

“I was down in Baltimore too,” Nat adds as she plucks a beret from the coat stand and affixes it over her hair – shorter, than Jake remembers, with an extra inch of red rendering a fifty-fifty split with the blonde. “We both got the call at the same time. Right place, right time, I guess you could say.”

Bruce made a noncommittal sound of agreement as he fastened up his own coat. “Time to get back now though,” he concluded, before tipping his own hat in a surprisingly old-fashioned manner to Jake. “Nice to meet you, Mr Peralta.”

“Yeah, you too,” Jake dumbly added as the pair both hollered out farewells to the out-of-sight Steve and then ushered each other out of the door, clicking it shut behind them.

Jake became vaguely aware he was now standing alone inside Steve Rogers’ flat without having been invited in by the homeowner, but then Captain America called from the bedroom.

“You still here, Jake?”

Jake found his voice again. “Yeah. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Nah – actually, shoot, yeah. Would you mind grabbing my phone? It’s on the kitchen worktop.”

Jake spun around and, sure enough, discovered what appeared to be a rough approximation of an old Motorola flip-phone. The panels looked too curved to be the real thing, and when he turned it over in his palm, he discovered the Stark Industries imprint on the bottom-right corner.

Steve’s bedroom was a similar variation on the reds and creams of the rest of his apartment, if perhaps a few shades marginally lighter. The captain was sat up in bed, a well-thumbed paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in his hand and a steaming mug of black coffee on his bedside table. At Jake’s entry, he looked up and cracked a rueful grin.

“Thanks, Jake,” he said as he took his phone. “Pull up a seat if you’ve got time, I feel like we only ever see each other in fits and starts.”

“This is only the third time in five months of living next to each other,” Jake acknowledged, but he took up the offer and perched himself in a large wicker armchair position to the side of a chest of drawers. His gaze wandered over a clutch of four photographs, haphazardly arranged across the surface; an old sepia-tinted shot of a skinny Steve Rogers with a taller, similarly aged man; another black-and-white one of a middle-aged woman, with fair hair.

The two larger ones showcased different teams of Avengers, that much he could easily see. One was a more formal shot, Steve in uniform alongside Natasha and Colonel James Rhodes in his War Machine armour. The other three individuals were easily recognisable as members of the second generation crew; the bright-neon palate of the Vision, the red leather of Wanda Maximoff, the sleek metal of Sam Wilson.

The other shot was more relaxed, strikingly casual. It was on a stretch of sand somewhere, the sun dropping on the horizon behind the six figures. Jake assumed that even a druid living under a rock would have recognised the bulging build and flowing hair of Thor, God of Thunder, and even the most technologically inept being could identify Tony Stark, a self-assured grin beneath his sunglasses and with a brown-haired man in board shorts wrapped in a headlock in the middle of the shot. Slightly to the left where Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner, the pair under a sun umbrella, their expressions turned away from the camera, relaxed, unfocused.

“That one was about four years ago now,” Steve’s voice breaks his observations, and Jake glances away for a moment, struggling to breathe a little because he has a photo just like that in his own apartment, only it’s of the Nine-Nine at the beach house, and they’re bundled up against the freezing cold rather than all preparing to leap into the Pacific. “Monarch Bay, out in California. Perks of knowing a billionaire, I suppose.”

Jake imagined that it surely was. It still surprised him to see it. Though he’d made little public comment, it didn’t take a genius to realise that a major conflict of interest had brewed between Steve and Tony Stark, one that had ultimately torn the Avengers apart and seen the former branded a fugitive.

Steve appeared to read his mind before he could put his foot in it and ask the burningly inappropriate question. “We don’t talk much. I went to the wedding in January, but…” He lets out a small sign. “Water under the bridge now. Maybe we’ll reconnect one day. I don’t know.”

Jake isn’t sure what to say to that, but at the very least he has his answer. He studies the photo again, curiosity piqued by the other faces. “I feel it’s the most fanboy thing in the world to say, but what were they like?”

Steve looks momentarily surprised before his features relax, almost with a wistful edge. “True blue. You throw that many disparate ideas and personalities into a different place, you’re going to butt heads. But there’s not a single one of them there I wouldn’t have backed to have me covered in a firefight.” He chews his lip, and leans over, picking up the older of the two photos. “Tony probably feels a little different now, but that’s his prerogative.”

As he puts it back, Jake notices a fifth and final photograph. This one sits on Steve’s bedside table, near the mug of coffee. It’s sepia-toned, of a strikingly beautiful raven-haired woman. In a flash, it reminds him of another photo, just down the hall, on another bedside table, of another strikingly beautiful raven-haired woman.

Maybe he and Captain America have more in common than he thought.

Jake stays surprisingly late, to the point that Steve orders takeout for the both of them – apparently, the urban myths about Captain America eating enough to fill an entire regiment are somewhat true – and they make a date to meet up for coffee in a few weeks at the little cafetiere two blocks down towards the subway. It’s strikingly odd, and yet wholly natural. It’s been a long time since Jake feels he’s made such a firm connection so fast with somebody, for good or bad; in fact, the last time might have been Amy herself.

Due to concerns about overcrowding, he is not invited to the memorial where her name will be unveiled, based out of Prospect Park; instead however, he is called to help police another such event up in Manhattan, temporarily loaned out with Dillman from the Nine-Nine to assist. He catches the footage on the news when he is in a bar that evening with Rosa, feeling an involuntary shudder run through his heart as he thinks he glances her name among the rows and rows and rows of engraved letters.

Rosa pats him on the shoulder when he feels his eyes moisten and leaves her hand there for a whole minute until he nods. They bump shoulders at the exit and head their separate ways, late into the night.

“You gonna be good?” she asks before she splits.

“Yeah,” Jake responds. “Eventually.”

It’s hard to remember the last time Jake seriously laughed. He’s sure that he must have had a few that turned into spontaneously wrecked tears over the past year, but he can’t particularly finger one occasion. He hadn’t even burst into guffaws when he discovered Steve had fallen out of a tree, though the former Captain America had now vowed to only attempt to rescue animals from conifers when he had a ladder handy.

But the news that Charles will be teamed up for a sting with Lieutenant Peanutbutter is undoubtedly the funniest thing he’s heard in a long time.

It starts when Holt calls the three of them into his office and reveals that he is pulling Charles from their current B&E for a special operation. Naturally, the excitable Boyle reactions – again, many of which have been in short supply – make an appearance and Rosa rolls her eyes, which has most assuredly not been in short supply.

It’s a four-week assignment, out at Belmont Park, which really should have dropped an inkling to Jake that there was more than meets the eye. He can only assume that Holt had been suppressing a cackle of his own when it came to candidate selection, and props to the captain, if he had been in that position, he would not have been able to keep a straight face.

Somebody’s thought to be running drugs under the cover of the Belmont Stakes and Charles has to go undercover as a trainer. Holt tells him he will be assigned a one-of-a-kind partner, who he is to meet downstairs in five minutes, and after he sends him out of the office, he turns straight-faced to Jake and Rosa.

“I trust, that with Charles occupied on special assignment, I can count on both of you to pick up any required slack over the coming month?”

“Absolutely, sir, you can count on us,” Jake responds. “We’re a regular old Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Bonnie and Clyde were criminals,” Holt replies neutrally.

“And they got shot,” Rose adds.

“Alright, alright, jeez,” Jake mutters. “Regular old Woody and Buzz?”

He hears Rosa strangle a guffaw and then have the decency to look slightly mortified, which is what clues him in on his innuendo. “Wait, captain, that is exactly not what I–”

“Yes, the freestyle cowboy and the calculating space ranger,” Holt muses. “I like it. It fits you both to a tee.”

“Oh.” Jake blinks. Next to him, he can almost feel Rosa vibrating in her attempts to smother another laugh.

“You’re both dismissed,” Holt adds, “I expect the Fallon report on my desk first thing tomorrow, Diaz. Peralta, I also found one of your ties at my house. I can only assume you left it there when you moved out.”

“I did?” Jake blinks again as Rosa stands up.

“The one with the vehicular craft from that science-fiction series you so love?”

“Oh, the TIE Fighter tie!” Jake exclaims, suddenly elated. “I thought you’d burned that as soon I moved in.”

“Unfortunately not,” Holt replies neutrally. “I discovered it in freezer, amid a batch cook of gnocchi. I will refrain from asking why it was there and bring it to you tomorrow. Dismissed.”

When he leaves the office, Rosa is stood cackling at the window behind what used to be Gina’s desk, now occupied by their tech-wizard Savant, who refused to answer to any other name, except occasionally Tron.

“Oh my god,” she wheezed, and Jake was vaguely concerned that his inadvertent sex joke had tipped her entirely over the age. “Look out here, look at Charles.”

He’s got tiptoe to look over the edge, but it’s worth it for what he sees. Charles is stood, face to face with Lieutenant Peanutbutter, looking on the verge of a full-blown eruption at the poor duty officer who has brought them together. As he continues to start, Charles conjures a paper bag – the same one he’d brought his goats’ head soup in today – and proceeds to hyperventilate into it.

He’s gone. Jake Peralta is absolutely gone. He howls not unlike a baboon and Rosa, so often the stoic Rosa, joins in. It’s utterly, beautifully cathartic in a way he didn’t realise he needed until it happened, his side flaring up with actual pain at the size of the belly-laughs he is emitting.

Behind Rosa, he catches a glimpse of Holt, half-shadowed in the blinds, a small smile playing across his lips.

Eventually the pair of them stop howling like wild animals and head on down, to prevent either Charles or Lieutenant Peanutbutter from an inadvertent murder or manslaughter charge respectively.

Spurned on, perhaps, by the fact that he must work with his rival, Charles and Lieutenant Peanutbutter wrap the case up within a week rather than the expected four, bust several big name thugs with links to the Russian Mafia, and subsequently ride off into the sunset together for a happy-ever-after. (OK, Jake made that last one up, but Charles does indeed ride Lieutenant Peanutbutter through the streets of Brooklyn after the case is shut.)

The only problem? Two days later, the convoy which is transporting the perpetrators is ambushed in broad daylight. It’s in a blind spot in Queens after an unfortunate diversion, and when Jake crosses districts to get down there with Charles, they find that the four accompanying police officers have been knocked unconscious with some considerable force and that all five prisoners have been quite gorily murdered.

One is missing their head, which they five some fifty feet down the road, tucked into a bush.

Naturally, it makes headline news across the city, and indeed the country. Charles, as the key arresting officer, finds himself pushed in front of a microphone every other minute for a few days. Though some of the news dynamics have changed in the past year – kinder, almost, in a perverse way – the hunger for a particularly sensationalist story never dies.

Given Lieutenant Peanutbutter is, quite obviously, a horse, it does mean that Charles mostly fronts up the media duties and then tries to brush it off when the New York Post runs the headline HERO HORSE DUO VOW VENGEANCE ON VIGILANTE MURDERS. Rosa quietly frames it and slips it under her desk with what passes for a disarmingly fond look in her eye.

He’s seen his fair share of redball cases during his time, been involved in a few, but even with comedy newspaper headlines, this one is still a bit of a stinger. When he gets home that evening, he sits in silence in the apartment, lights dimmed as low as they can go, and scrolls through his phone.

He’s taken only a handful of photos since May last year; a few at Shaw’s, a selfie he’d somehow convinced Captain Holt to partake in, one with Nikolaj when he’d been round to visit Charles, a candid shot of a sleeping Rosa in the breakroom in mid-March, for blackmail purposes. The most recent is one that he isn’t even in. It’s a shot of the monument in Prospect Park, cast in shadow by the early summer leaves. Amy Santiago’s name is clear, to the lower-left side. Next two it are two more; her brothers, also based out of Brooklyn, named by their father.

He’d made the trip with Victor when he’d crossed over from New Jersey, silently shared in their muted grief. As Rosa said to him, the loneliness never goes away, but he’s learning to wear it now. It’s as much a shield as a spear; it protects him and drives him on.

Amy would want him to pick up his life and move on. Try as he might, he can’t always do that. But he won’t stop trying, as much for her as it is for him.

In early July, a small envelope is pushed under Jake’s door at the ridiculous time of four in the morning.

He should rephrase that. It is ridiculous for anyone except a police officer and the retired Captain America.

Jake only hears the footsteps as they retreat because he happens to have fallen asleep on the couch, doilies draped down over his head from where they’ve dropped down off the back. He grunts, rolls off and – because he is a grown man – army-crawls to the door to find a small square, cream and embossed with a scrawled typefont. JAKE, it reads.

He opens it and discovers that the envelope is the message itself, neatly printed on the inside of the card.

Dear sir/ma’am

You are hereby cordially invited to attend Steve Rogers’ 101^st Birthday Barbeque, this Independence Day, at 7pm sharp

Up on the Roof, with the plus one of your choice

Casual attire, please RVSP to the below number

Sincerely,

Steve Rogers

Drowsily, Jake realises he’s just been invited to Captain America’s birthday party.

More to the point, Captain America’s birthday is on July 4^th.

911, please, irony has been found dead in a ditch on the Jersey turnpike.

He’s touched though, frankly honoured. Re-reading it again, he remembers seeing that Steve’s apartment had roof access; presumably, he’d been up already to scout it out and had decided that it made for a suitable spot at which to host a suitably low-key bash. For all the fact that he has spent his life hurling a giant, star-emblazoned shield at various baddies, their increasingly frequent coffee meetups had revealed a man of shy, bookish subtlety who preferred to fade into the background.

He doesn’t bother to call the number, instead grabbing a pen and scrabbling that he’s in on the back, before pushing it back out under his door for Steve to pick up when he returns from his mid-morning run. With that, he crawls back to the couch, climbs up, and is out like a light a minute later.

He calls his mom later that day to ask if she’s got any plans for Independence Day – last year, she headed out west to see some friends – and to his delight finds that she is free.

“Well, I’ve got a little something I’ve been invited to,” he tells her down the phone as he attempts to juggle a bagel order for Rosa at the deli near the precinct, “and I’m allowed to bring a guest.”

He omits a few crucial beats, like who is hosting it, but his mother gamely agrees. He does a little air-punch as he walks back into the precinct.

“What’s got you so happy?” Rosa asks as she takes the proffered bagel.

Jake merely grins. “Just good ol’ July 4^th.”

Rosa snorts and spins around. “Alright, lame-o”.

His mom arrives half-six, never one to make a late impression, so that he can escort her to their destination. When he instead gesticulates out of the apartment window down to her, she gestures back a particularly rude shrug, at which point he rolls her eyes and caves.

“Aren’t you meant to be waiting like a gentleman?” she enquires when, cuffs undone, he unlocks the downstairs door.

“Well, yes – but in this case, no,” Jake responds, glancing up at the early evening air. The skies are blue, starting to hue on the horizon, with a clutch of cloud-wisps chasing it over the age. “Come on up.”

His mother is nonplussed but follows him nonetheless. When she enters the flat, it occurs to him that in the half-year he’s been back, she’s not been over once; he’d either always made the trip over to see her, or they’d met somewhere in the city, on the handful of occasions they’d seen each other since Christmas.

She keeps quiet on the unchanged décor, idly walks around the mantlepiece and on reflex twists the picture of the pair of them to the right. It was a habit Jake remembered her carrying ever since he was a small boy. Next to it, on the centre, she smiles softly at the wedding photo.

“You know, I don’t think when I apologised for missing your wedding, I’d ever realised quite how much more loaded it would be,” she quietly says. Jake freezes ever so slightly and then his mind sets the context.

His mom had loved Amy – she loved all of the Nine-Nine, but she had always had a special spot for Amy, along the one she had for Rosa from his academy days. And Amy had adored her too. The fact she hadn’t been able to make it to the wedding on the day had been a blow but not the be-all-and-end-all, because Jake had known that they’d be able to have the rest of their lives together to celebrate and commiserate.

Instead, Amy’s gone and his mom never got to see her look so beautiful. It’s one of the sadder thoughts that creeps in each day and he suddenly starts second-guessing himself as to whether bringing his mother to an event likely to include at least two Avengers was the smartest move he could have made.

His mother turns, catches a glimpse and sighs, walking over and embracing him. Distantly, he can feel a solitary tear tracking its way down his left cheek.

“It never gets easier, honey,” she says. “But it does get better.”

The sound of footsteps out in the corridor draws their attention as they separate and there is then a smart rap on his door. Jake and his mom exchange quizzical glances before he heads over to the door, and opens it to find both Captain Holt and Rosa standing there.

“Captain!” Jake exclaims, unnecessarily. “You look… particularly striking. Where did you buy that shirt?”

“From a novelty emporium named Big Willy’s Loud and Proud,” his captain replies, his expression so utterly unflappable that Jake can’t quite tell if he’s pulling his leg or not. Even when he was living with Holt, it was rare to see him outside of anything that could be described as sober. But now, he’s sporting a neon pink t-shirt emblazoned with the familiar logo of the Scooby Doo franchise, various words have been rearranged to spell a significantly ruder riff on the show’s catchphrase.

He’s teamed it with checked shorts, which is undoubtedly a crime against fashion, and yet Holt absolutely pulls it off. Jake is utterly convinced nobody else in the world could work it the way he is right now.

Rosa is considerably more sedate than their commanding officer, but distinctly louder by her own standards too, decked out in a red-and-black floral dress with short sleeves. Jake’s fairly certain he’s not seen her in a dress outside of operation reasons for five years and idly wonders whether it has enough pockets for her switchblades, or if she’s hidden them in her hair, pulled back in a curly bun.

It vaguely occurs to Jake that Captain Holt likely got an invitation too, and that Rosa is here as his plus-one. He idly wonders if Holt is attempting to spring the same look-ma-it’s-Captain-America!-style gambit he is pulling on his own mother – unsuccessfully, of course, given Rosa also knows where Steve Rogers lives – but before he can ask, Karen Peralta has spotted two of her favourite people in the doorway.

“Captain Holt! Rosa!” Jake sharply steps aside, having been on the receiving end of his mother coming through a doorway enough times to know when it’s safe, and promptly ensures that his mother has a clean line of sight on Rosa, who is tackled with a recognisable oof into a sturdy hug.

“Rosa! It’s been so long! You look beautiful! Have you grown your hair out again? It suits you, it looks lovely!”

Back in the academy, when they’d met on a handful of occasions, Jake’s mother has been one of a very few select people to elicit any response from Rosa Diaz not accompanied by the veiled threat of disembowelment. It appears that she has not lost the effect; still ensconced in the clutches of the older woman, his best friend is tinged a faint shade of rose, either from embarrassment or suffocation. Jake decides that she’s been glomped enough and gently extracts his mother, who proceeds to bear-hug Captain Holt.

“Wow, I always forget how affectionate she is with you,” he grins at Rosa who levels a mild scowl at him, entirely undone by the fact that Karen Peralta’s attentions were not entirely unwanted. Jake laughs and nudges her elbow.

“Did the captain tell you where you were spending your Independence Day?”

Rosa grins. “No. I’m guessing he’s expecting it to be a big surprise for me when Steve Rogers opens the door.”

“Would you consider faking it?” Jake counters rhetorically, but Rosa shakes her head.

“I mean, I could, but do you honestly think Captain America can keep a ruse up like that?”

“He’ll be quicker than you think,” Jake assures her. “I mean, he did spend five years beating up Nazis and then another five years beating up neo-Nazis and aliens. He can probably think on the fly.”

Their conversations – and indeed the element of initial surprise for Jake and Holt – are lost at this point, because a greeted exclamation of his name pops over his shoulder from down the hall and he turns to see Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner reaching the top of the stars.

“Hey there, Peralta,” the Black Widow says as she stalks towards them and Jake can only watch as his mother turns from Captain Holt, catches two Avengers in the hallway and lets out what can only be described as a small shriek.

The party that follows is one of the nicest evenings Jake has spent in the past year. After introductions have been made and his mother has sufficiently recovered to ask how on earth he knows two Avengers, he springs the surprise that he actually knows another one much better and that it’s his birthday, so please be nice, OK?

He actually isn’t sure how Tony Stark managed to fall out with Steve Rogers yet, as the man seems physically incapable of being anything other than low-key charming. His mother, not often moved by exquisite physical specimens – she did marry his dad, after all – holds herself back from swooning when he introduces himself at the door, calls her ma’am and welcomes her graciously into his home.

Jake doesn’t even manage that; he definitely swoons by proxy and can here both Rosa and Nat laughing at him from behind.

They’re not the first people there; a stocky Asian-American man, introduced as Jim Morita, is pouring sangria in the kitchen into red plastic cups and waves. Jake distantly remembers that a Jim Morita served with Captain America in the Howling Commandos; he can only assume this one is a descendent of the former, perhaps connected to Steve after the latter came out of the Atlantic freezer the better part of a decade ago.

Leaving his mum, a medical professional, in an engaged conversation with Bruce Banner, Jake volunteers to wait at the door while the rest of the party embark upstairs. Steve looks set to protest but Nat shepherds him through the hidden cutaway door behind the bookshelf that presumably leads to the roof, telling him to take his guests and make them comfortable, before she joins Jake in the lounge area.

“Been keeping well?” she asks. “I saw your friend Charles on the news.”

“That made it over to Norway?” Jake asks, but she shakes her head.

“We’re back in upstate New York now,” she responds. “We’ve kept it quiet. I mean, Pepper’s kind of our de-facto press agent by default, but motherhood’s apparently a bitch.”

Jake had forgotten that Virginia Potts had been expecting a child. It had been somewhat overshadowed by the gun-toting racoon at that press conference, who was apparently called Rocket. “Are you close?” he asked, curious.

Nat raised an eyebrow. “Me and Pepper?” She paused and appeared to give it some considered thought. “As close as people like me and her can generally get,” she concludes. “I interned under her as part of a cover. She wasn’t best pleased to be used like that, but she understood in the end.”

That was an interesting tidbit. From the way Nat spoke, Jake wondered how close she was to anyone outside of Steve or any other Avengers. Maybe, like cops, it was one of those things where your line of work pretty much dictated your friendships too.

“Your mom appears to have taken a shine to Doctor Banner,” Nat adds after a moment, a coy smirk. Jake groans. His mother could be particularly full on and the last thing he would want is for her to accidentally socially pressure the Hulk into an impulsive appearance.

Nat seemed to have read his mind, because she assuaged those fears the very next moment. “It’s fine, nothing’s going to happen. Bruce has got a handle on it. Or, rather, it’s got a handle on it.”

That was an interesting tidbit too. “That’s a weird way to phrase it,” he ventures out loud without realising it.

Nat makes a noncommittal sound. “Performance issues,” she quips and he smothers a snort. “Don’t let him here me say that,” she adds with a grin.

Before he can find himself drawn any deeper to the mystery of whether the Hulk suffers from erectile dysfunction, the door knocks with two sharp raps. Nat is closest to it, perched opposite Jake, and waves him down as she goes to open it, revealing a stern-looking, older African American woman.

“Natasha, darling!” she exclaims in a thick Atlanta accent and Jake has to smother another laugh as he watches the Black Widow get swallowed up by a hug the same way Rosa was almost consumed by his mother earlier.

“It’s good to see you, Mrs Wilson,” Nat responds with only a slightly fainted voice before she is released and gestures to Jake. “This is Steve’s neighbour, Jake. He’s with the NYPD.”

“Ah, the NYPD!” booms Mrs Wilson, sweeping around the armchair Nat was perched on and the coffee table in-between. Jake accurately reads that he too is about to be caught in a clinch and accordingly rises to meet the new guest. He can be hugged by strangers all day long; much weirder things happen to him on a weekly basis in the precinct.

“It’s a pleasure to meet your Mrs Wil-oof!” Jake says, as the wind gets knocked out of him. Maybe it’s just Steve Rogers and his friends who know how to take his breath away.

Mrs Wilson leans back and Jake belatedly makes the connection – because, who else could it be, really, with the pictures in his bedroom – that this must be Sam Wilson’s mother. He can’t say he sees a resemblance; he’s never met the man, and pictures tell only half a story, but the woman has a powerhouse presence to rival a prizefighter in the ring.

Natasha guides her up the stairs, which means Jake is on hand to greet the next guest alone and suddenly finds himself face to face with Colonel James Rhodes.

“Er,” says the aforementioned colonel, turning around. “I’m sorry, have I got the wrong apartment?”

“No!” Jake quickly says. “I mean, yes, I am normally in the other apartment, but no, you wouldn’t know that. This is Steve’s apartment, definitely Steve’s.” He sticks out his hand, as he frequently does in these situations. “Jake Peralta, I’m his neighbour.”

For once, an Avenger isn’t bemused to shake his hand, as a light of recognition passes immediately over Colonel Rhodes’ face – wait, does War Machine know who I am? What has Steve told him? – and he sturdily returns the shake.

“Colonel James Rhodes,” he replies, and Jake is struck by just how unnecessary it is for virtually every Avenger to ever need to introduce themselves, but he appreciates it nonetheless. Maybe one day, he’ll meet one whose new and yet to be revealed to the world, and then he can be allowed the pleasure of needing an introduction.

Colonel Rhodes is decked out in a polo shirt and shorts far more tasteful than Captain Holt’s, while his leg braces whir with the soft click of machinery. Jake does his best to not linger too long on them, and the Colonel gives no impression that he noticed if he did.

He also has a neatly wrapped box in one hand and Jake remembers that he left his own small present back in the apartment down the corridor and curses under his breath. He’ll have to duck out for it later, or perhaps alternatively just give it to Steve when he next sees him.

Nat returns at this moment and gives Colonel Rhodes a warm embrace before showing him towards the steps. Jim Morita has briefly returned from upstairs, accompanied by Rosa, and she does a small double-take as War Machine passes by her.

“Everything alright Rosa?” Jake calls back over his shoulder as he shuts the door. She turns and shakes herself, a slight shiver.

“Colder up there than I thought it would be,” she admits. “’I’ve come to help get the skewers.”

“You want the honey soy ribs,” comes the voice of Jim Morita, his head in the fridge. He emerges with about half-a-dozen tupperware boxes crammed with what appears to be various meat and vegetables, plus a large plate with at least two-dozen lamb-and-pepper skewers wrapped under clingfilm.

Nat clatters back down the stairs. “Steve says if anybody else is coming, they won’t be rocking up for another hour at least. He had a few maybes, so we might as well all come up.”

“One moment,” Jake calls back, gesturing to Rosa. Nat shrugs and comes to assist Jim Morita and his many boxes.

“Hold the door,” Jake askes as he opens it again, turning to Rosa. “I just need to grab something from my apartment.”

“Make it quick,” she responds without heat and he throws a little mock salute as he jogs back down the hallway to his own door. He slides the key in to flick the latch, then props it open as he switches on the side lamp and goes to investigate.

He left the small box, messily wrapped with a glittery present tag, on the kitchen side counter, but he deviates into his wardrobe first, pulling out his old academy letterman. He hasn’t worn it for a while, too tight across his shoulders, but it’ll do the job for now.

He returns with both present and jacket, and thrusts the latter into Rosa’s arms. She raises a sharp eyebrow and he grins sheepishly at her.

“No point catching cold on a night like this,” he says. Her expression softens slightly and she shrugs into it.

“Thanks,” she quietly murmurs before turning on her heel and heading back up the stairs. Jake watches her go before he turns and relatches Steve’s door, before following her up to the roof, the burnt-orange sky above it and the wafting smell of Jim Morita’s honey soy ribs.

August passes in a blur and, for the first time in a long time, Jake finds himself making the trek out with Charles to MetLife Stadium as the autumn rolls up.

He’s not the biggest football fan, and nor is Boyle, but with so much sport seriously disrupted last year – the soccer World Cup, out in Russia and won by a second-string England side forever destined to have an asterisk next to their name despite their knighthoods was pretty much the only survivor – he feels oddly like trying to cram what he can into his free time.

It’s the Jets, first round of the season, up against the Bills, and it’s a tight, messy game, the sort of match the neutral couldn’t really ask for more drama from. Jake knows some franchises aren’t back this time around – whole dynasties snapped away in the blink of an eye, the infrastructure and money to support them gone – so its’s worth his time to see the ones that have.

He muses over when the recession might hit hard on the drive back, lost in thought as Charles guides them over the George Washington Bridge. The government passed the sort of fiscal package that would normally make half the senate combust, but partisanship has taken a backseat so far. He’s sure the vultures, the opportunists, will all still come out of the woodwork, given time, but until then, they’re just a nation still riding out the aftershocks almost a year-and-a-half down the line.

It’s as they’re working they way through Manhattan that the newsflash springs up for a storm warning. Jake idly notes that he can’t remember the last bad one to batter the city in September but that it isn’t too surprising; the front has been moving across the coastline gradually. He feels the winds pick up as he bids Charles good night and heads up the stairs. He mulls about calling on Steve but thinks better of it.

Instead, he heats up some leftover chicken parmesan from the night before and settles down on the couch, flicking onto the next episode of Orange is the New Black. He’d always said he’d give the show a try with Amy, and it was just one that had been added to the ever-mounting pile of stuff they’d get round to, stuff that they ultimately never did.

That train of thought obviously lingers too close to the front of his mind because he can’t concentrate on the screen much beyond the opening five minutes and ultimately turns it off in frustrated disgust. His melancholy always seems to lean a little worse when the rain comes in. Amy loved the rain, particularly if she didn’t have to go anywhere in it.

He’s lost in his memories as he moves on autopilot to the sink, and that’s the best explanation he can subsequently offer for when he drops a particularly sharp knife and it lands, blade-first, in the middle of his right foot, through the canvas top of his Converse and into the limb below.

Pain floods through him and he lets out an absolutely animalistic exclamation. He beats his hand against the countertop, twice, slapping it hard and swears again, before he does so again, gradually increasing in volume until he’s screaming himself hoarse and tears are streaming out of his eyes.

God, he still misses her so much, this agony is nothing to how it can be.

His front door is literally ripped off its hinges a moment later and Steve Rogers, chest heaving but barely even breaking a goddamn sweat, barrels into his apartment calling his name.

“Over here,” he croaks, his voice now gone, a whisper at best between broken sobs.

Captain America rounds the corner and spies him. He curses quietly under his breath, then snaps into action, reaching down and gently lifting him up from where he had crumpled to the floor, carrying him around and through to the bathroom.

Jake only has a standing shower in this place, plans to get a bathtub extension ultimately unmaterialised, and it means that Steve has to prop him up on the toilet and pivot him around, elevating his foot so it is resting on the porcelain of the washbasin. He’s removed the knife and stripped the shoe off, critically examining the foot and with a roll of bandage between his teeth that Jake has absolutely no recollection of him pulling out from anywhere.

At this point, the pain – in his head and in his heart and in his foot – becomes too much, and he blacks out to the sight of Captain America attempting to bandage his foot.

He wakes what could be minutes or days, but is far more likely to be hours later, a dull ache in his extremities and a general wooziness to boot. A vague, disjointed scan tells him that he is in his bedroom; a secondary glance confirms that the old armchair in the corner he typically dumps his washing on is occupied.

But it’s not Steve. It’s Rosa, snoring ever so softly, left arm drooped over the edge with her right sprayed out across her lap, her phone firmly clutched in her hand. There’s moonlight, waning but strong enough, playing through the blinds and across her face, illuminating the bags under her eyes, the scar in her eyebrow, the healed piercing in her lip, all thrown into sharp relief.

For some reason, Jake’s mind plays back to the day the pair of them were sent to prison. He remembers, with the sort of clarity that he’d be happy to forget, turning to her next to him in the courtroom after the verdict was read as guilty, after he’d stammered a few words. He’d faced her and he’d known that the fear in her expression was reflected in his.

Looking across now, he’s struck by just how many such more moments he’s been afforded to see since then. Their bond, struck hard between overcompensated goofball and taciturn lone wolf, had been shifting ever since Captain Holt had arrived at the Nine-Nine, her sharper edges and black mischief tempered with the sort of understanding and gratitude she’d once balked at showing.

Rosa was still Rosa, there was no denying that. But she was a more fragile, human Rosa than he’d ever known before.

But then, so was Jake.

He shuts his eyes and drifts away again. When he wakes the following morning, his musings are long since gone, and so is she, replaced by a pile of Amy’s stuffed toys as he hears Steve potter in his kitchen.

The injury keeps him deskbound for the rest of the year, much to his frustration. It’s a stupid injury, sustained in a moment of stupid emotion, because he was all too stupid to hold ono the knife correctly.

(Holt informs him, at this point in his rant, that he will be docked a week’s pay if he calls himself stupid again, before adding that he will accept a solitary use of the word numbskull per day without further repercussions. It’s enough to halt his self-pity party spiral.)

Getting to and from the precinct presents its own troubles – trying to navigate the subway on crutches is about as fun as it sounds and it is times like these when he really wishes he had Jolene.

Charles offers to pick him up most days, but Jake is adamant that he does not want him to add an extra forty minutes to his drive. Rosa offers to do the same but on her motorbike, and while Jake isn’t actually sure how many extra minutes it would mean for her drive, he can also see a more long-term injury in his future if he takes up that proposal in his current state.

Which means, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s only a matter of time before Steve offers to take him.

“I’ve already told Rosa I don’t want to go on her motorbike,” Jake says one evening when he has hobbled over to Steve’s flat for a beer. They’ve only spoken a few times since the accident, but given that Steve had basically taken over his chores since while he’s at work, his presence is almost rivalling that of Amy’s spirit around the place right now. Jake’s not sure how he feels about that – anybody else might feel like walking over the metaphorical gravestone, but it is Captain America.

Steve raises an eyebrow. “I never said anything about you getting on the bike.”

Which is how, A Close Shave-style, Jake finds himself as the Gromit to Steve’s Wallace, strapped into a sidecar the following morning as the pair motor across Brooklyn, around the outskirts of Prospect Park. His driver has on a baseball cap and sunglasses, despite it being October and overcast – he’s assured Jake it’s a foolproof disguise to go unnoticed and he begrudgingly may have to give him the point – and he’s clinging onto the rim for dear life, because Steve Rogers apparently has the need for speed.

They stop on the north side and Jake realises that it’s still a whole half-hour before he’s meant to be in, but instead, they’ve reached the slate rise of the monuments.

Wordlessly, Steve kills the engine and kicks down the stand to stop them rolling away, before he smoothly dismounts. Jake’s own exit from the sidecar is a little bit more slapdash, wrangling with his foot and his crutches, but he’s eventually back on his own two feet as well.

The pair of them wander to the foot of the monument in question. By some quirk of fate, Amy’s name is eye-level with Jake, on the furthest outside row on the left. He never has to look up or look down to find her. She’s always there, right in front of him, just where he needs to see her.

He shuffles closer to the cut steel, coated in rustproof colouring up close, and leans forward, one crutch dangling, to trace the outline of her name. In the distance, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Steve wander over to a different monument, kneel down and place a small tin.

He turns back to Amy’s name and suddenly, he feels compelled to speak, like this is a sacred chance he can’t afford to miss. There’s no gravestone out in New Jersey near her parents’ house; there was nothing left to bury but scattered ash. This is the most concrete reminder out in the wider world that there was a beautiful woman who may have just been too damn good for it.

“Hey Ames,” he starts and then he pauses. He’s never done this before, talked to the dead. This isn’t The Sixth Sense where the signs are more muted; the etching of their double-barrelled married name ahead is enough confirmation that it doesn’t get more real than this.

He tries again. “Hey Ames. Um, I’m not very good at this. I guess if you’re there, I should start by saying sorry.”

He glances at his shoes. “I mean, yeah, it’s not my fault that this has happened, but still, I’ve not been around too many times to see you here and – man, this is weird.”

He chuckles nervously and looks around. Steve is still kneeled in the distance. The final dregs of the night sky have faded to grey. It’s going to rain again, surely, at some point.

“I’ve finally stopped looking for you,” he ventures eventually. “Wait, no, that’s not right. What I think I mean is that I’ve finally stopped expecting you. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop looking for you, even when I know you’re not there.”

He glances around the base of the monument. There’s a few bunches of slowly withering flowers, their petals scattered loose around the brown paper they’ve been left in. A few burned-out candles are situated in a small metal tray out to left, the wax spilled out and set across the silver.

“We were at the bar a few nights ago,” he recalls. “Charles and Rosa were playing darts. I mean, I couldn’t, I’ve screwed up my foot. But I remember the time you accidentally stuck one in Terry’s bicep with your arm.” He quirks a small smile. “You were mortified, wouldn’t stop apologising for ages. I think Terry strung it out for the fun of it afterwards.”

He paused. “Terry didn’t make it. Nor did Sharon, or their kids. Or Gina, or Scully and Hitchcock. I’m guessing your dad’s told you about the rest of your family. Maybe he hasn’t.” He swallows. “If he hasn’t, then I guess I’m telling you now.”

He feels a small hiccup escape his throat. “And Ames? They all suck. They suck more than the Charlotte Bobcats did back in eleven-twelve. They hurt, man. But they don’t hurt like you.”

He feels his voice break on the last word and then the floodgates open, and he’s word-vomiting again, all his fear and guilt and loneliness, all that’s percolated over the past year and that he’d felt he was finally getting a handle on, comes spilling out, like soda when the bottle’s been shaken to the point of eruption.

“I don’t know what to do sometimes, Ames,” he gasps through blotchy eyes. “I thought we’d have so much more time. I thought you’d graduate to captain, wear the dope-ass uniform blues, have your own precinct, I’d become the stay-at-home dad in five years when we wanted to have a kid, maybe two, we’d move to the suburbs, not the white-picket fence life, but enough where they could climb a tree in the yard if they wanted to.

“And I know you wouldn’t want me to put my life on hold for you – I know that if it was you who were here and me who was gone, I’d have wanted you to just remember me and get on with living – but it’s so damn hard. I didn’t even go back to the apartment for half-a-year, Ames, half-a-year, I just couldn’t –”

He hiccups again and feels the tears, holt and salty, tracking around the curve of his cheek, through the two-day stubble and down his chin. “I love you Ames, I’m never going to stop loving you. But I know the person who could help me through this best is you and you’re not here and that’s just so unfair.”

Another hiccup. “It should have been me.” It feels weird to say it out loud and he tries it again, the taste metallic, unfamiliar and tinged with a bleak self-loathing before he realises why it feels that way. “But you wouldn’t have wanted it to be. You’d have wanted it to be you. If it had to be one of us, you’d have wanted it to be you.”

He les out a hysterical half-laugh, half-sob. “Look at us, huh? Self-sacrificing idiots.”

The ghost of the wind suddenly plays across him and for a moment, Jake leans into the caress that plays around his head, ruffling his too-long curls. It’s the lightest of touches, the sort she gave him with barely concealed concern before and undisguised tenderness after they became a thing. It’s brutal in its nostalgic sensuality and if he closes his eyes, as he often does, he can almost imagine her standing there with him, in that storm-haze-yellow dress she always loved so much.

He feels the presence replaced by something more solid a few feet away, the pressure telling on the asphalt pathway ever so slightly to his left and realises that he is no longer alone. Steve is there, staring at the monument too, locked onto Amy’s name between that of her brothers.

The two stand in silence as Jake attempts to compose himself. It’s not the first time Captain America has found him looking like a mess in recent weeks but he hopes to avoid making it a regular habit.

“I had a dame, once,” Steve speaks softly, suddenly, and Jake is used to his occasional old-timey linguistic swings to know that he’s talking about a woman. His mind flashes back to the photograph on Steve’s bedside table. “It was brief, but I knew she was the one for me.”

“What happened?” Jake asks, attempting to steady his voice. If Steve was uncomfortable with the sudden, Rosa-like bluntness of the question, he didn’t show it, gazing steadily ahead.

“The war happened,” he replies. “The ice happened. When I came back up, I thought I’d lost everything that connected me to the world.” He pauses. “She was still around.”

Jake blinks, another tear tracking its way down. “Is she…”

Steve shakes his head. “Not anymore. She wasn’t all there anymore, at the end. I went to live down in DC to be near her for a while. She passed a few years ago.” He pauses again, then looks at Jake. “I still miss her everyday.”

Jake swallows and glances back to the monument. He traces the blocky print of the letters, hammered through with emotionless precision. He thinks her name should be flowing, cursive, the way she was when she was breathing.

“It’s like she’s still there, y’know?” he says, voice wavering, and Steve looks right through him with the piercing empathy of a man who has gone through the very same thing, is still going through it all these years later. He waits for Jake to continue.

“She’s in every room I ever walk into,” he half-babbles. “She’s in every laugh I hear, in every kiss I see. She’s just always there.”

Steve shifts ever so slightly. “She’s always going to be, Jake. That’s not even down to whether you’re a believer or not. As long as you remember somebody, they’re going to live forever.”

Jake sniffles. “Rosa once told me that being lonely reminds you there’s a lot to live for.”

“Well, she’s on the money there,” Steve replies and Jake is struck by just how lonely he must have felt when he woke up an alien future where, to him, virtually everyone he’d ever loved and known was gone.

“Loneliness is a burden we’ve all got to bear in our own ways,” Steve continues. “But it doesn’t mean we have to share it alone. That might sound like a fortune cookie, but sometimes, they’re the most simple and effective words you can ever say.”

It does sound like a cheap proverb, and yet the core of truth to it cuts through Jake in a way it never did before, even when Rosa patted him on the shoulder in the elevator all those months ago. Captain America has that effect, he guesses.

“Moving on, it comes in all different shapes and sizes,” Steve adds after a moment, the October breeze picking up the hem of his biker jacket. “But at the end of the day, moving on isn’t wrong. I’m sure your dame would tell you the same if she was here now. Grieve, and remember, but know that it’s OK to love again, no matter what that means to you.”

Jake nods, unable to gather the words again. If Amy was here now, staring at the wall with Steve Rogers, he would surely tell her the same things – and he’s struck with the clarity that he already knows them, deep down, too.

“Thanks,” he murmurs after a while, and Steve smiles kindly.

“C’mon,” he gestures and the pair head back to the motorbike and sidecar idling at the entrance of Prospect Park, as the first rays of sunshine break through the skies above.

Chapter Text

2020

The three months of desk duty, ably assisted by Captain America’s sidecar, pass in the sort of flash Jake didn’t quite expect and he finds himself ringing in the New Year exactly the way he’d want to after a dozen weeks chained to a chair; back out on the beat.

He’s with Dillman, the older man still helping Holt to pull some strings. New Police Commissioner Herschel, now in the role on a permanent basis, had been forced to slash some budget cuts across multiple precincts, with the expectation of an incoming recession, but the Nine-Nine had – possibly by a touch of unethical favouritism – remained untouched. Jake wasn’t complaining.

He expects a relatively tame first night, as muted firework displays – more adventurous than a year prior but still muted – light up Manhattan and Queens, and so is pleasantly surprised when the pair get the call over the radio for a major incident down by the East River.

He’s less surprised, more horrified when they get there and find a dozen guys in knock-off Armani suits and slicked back hair missing multiple limbs on the edge of a warehouse.

They’re all dead, obviously, and one arm has been arranged in a grotesque parody of a direction sign, pointing with a single finger through the door. Dillman clears it first as Jake secures the area, the sound of wailing sirens beating through the night air as they approach.

A strangled shout emerges and before Jake can move, a figure rushes out of the door, past him and straight into the East River. As he almost gets rushed, he can make out little beyond a black mask and the glint of – is that a blood-encrusted sword? – before he hears a splash.

He makes to move straight towards the water, body on autopilot, before Dillman shouts again and recaptures his attention from the warehouse door.

“Peralta, over here! Foil blankets from the car!”

Jake blinks but does as he asks, grabbing half-a-dozen from the backseat of the cruiser. He can only assume that there’s somebody in shock inside the warehouse, having seen the copiously gross display of bloodshed outside.

It’s worse than that when he gets in. At least twenty women, no older than their late teens and some as young as around eight, are huddled into two large metal cages pushed off to the side. Their hair is matted, their clothes are almost non-existent scraps and they all look utterly terrified.

The latches to the small doors at the front of both cages have been busted open – cleaved off, in fact, upon closer inspection. Jake does the math in his head – he’s getting better at it – and works out that whoever that masked figure was, it looks like he was midway through busting a prostitution ring, vigilante style, when he and Dillman stumbled in.

The arriving sirens let them know that backup has arrived and Jake flicks onto autopilot, throwing the blankets at Dillman’s feet before rushing out to get more. As he exits, two more patrol officers, flanking a pair of paramedics, pass him by on their own way in.

He accidentally steps in a pool of blood as he attempts to navigate the human chop suey underfoot and eventually gets back to the car, breathing heavily.

Something unusual has caught his eye about some of the bodies. The cuts, the limbs, the general precision. He’s no expert, but it bears a striking similarity to Charles’ case with Lieutenant Peanutbutter the previous summer.

Later, after he and Dillman have decamped to the hospital along with what feels like half the NYPD force, they’re asked to take a seat in an unoccupied conference room on one of the upper levels. Captain Holt, as their commanding officer, arrives shortly afterwards with the Nine-Nine’s legal liaison, before the four of them are then finally joined by two more figures, one decked out in an FBI windbreaker and the other in the sort of black suit that can only scream CIA to his pop-culture-addled mind.

His hunch is on the money, because while he doesn’t recognise the former – a tall, willowy woman – from his time at the bureau, he has quite accurately called the later, when the silver-haired man reaches across the table and shakes their hands one after the other.

“Everett Ross, Central Intelligence Agency,” he says neutrally. “This is my colleague from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Agent Stone. We just have a few questions for you about tonight’s incident.”

Jake feels a dozen dead bodies is more than an incident, but given that it is still obscenely cool to his nine-year-old self that a real-life spook is standing opposite him, he’s willing to let it slide.

“Captain Raymond Holt, of the ninety-ninth precinct,” Holt responds. “I’m sure we can help you in your enquiries.”

Those enquiries take the better part of five hours, grilled for every detail, and Jake is absolutely exhausted when they are told they are free to go. He never gets the sense that Ross is attempting to incriminate him, or anything ridiculous, but the man is utterly wasted as a CIA interrogator when he should assuredly be an endurance quiz master.

Dillman drops him back off at the flat and he’s surprised to find Rosa waiting on the porch stairs. She has her wool-knit bob-cap on again, the one he’s fairly certain he’s not seen since he moved back in well over a year ago and she’s looking utterly unflappable with a steaming bag and two coffees in a cardboard holder next to her despite the cold.

“You look dead,” she dryly tells him as soon as he staggers up to open the front door on the porch.

“I would muster a sassy comeback,” Jake admits. “But I’m fairly certain you’ve taken pity on me after my rough night back and brought me breakfast.”

“Holt called, said you’d pulled a rough one,” she shrugs. “You better eat quick, I’m on in an hour.”

She’s brought a box of chilaquiles and a pair of breakfast burritos, and Rosa is officially Jake’s favourite person in the whole wide world right now. She doesn’t stay longer than to basically scarf down a few chips and mainline her coffee before ensuring he won’t fall asleep into his and takes her leave.

When he eventually resurfaces the following day – Holt kindly won’t make him work a night shift again and slots him back on for the morning of the second – he drops a bagel at her desk without a word and earns an upturned twitch of the lips in return.

He’s hauled into court for a case as a witness to a B&E in late February and finds himself, unexpectedly, in the delightful company of Laverne Holt.

Jake likes Holt’s mom, but they had barely interacted during his six-month stay with the captain. They’d maybe seen each other twice, tops, and even they had been fleeting interactions; she’d been absent for the new year’s evening he’d spent at Holt’s. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d actually spoken in earnest.

Unlike Holt, who still seemed incapable of referring to his mother in anything other than her legal title, Jake is permitted to call her Mrs Holt almost immediately, and she treats him and Charles to a late brunch, their case wrapped up and all of them with enough time to kill before they’re required back.

It’s as Charles is desecrating his kippers at one end of the booth that Mrs Holt pops a question Jake probably should have expected.

“So, detective Peralta,” she begins, all no-nonsense but still with an underlying sympathy, “how have you found it moving back into your apartment?”

Jake pauses with his egg-speared fork halfway to his mouth and sets it down. At one end of the table, he sees Charles turn his ear ever so slightly.

To be honest, he’s still having up days and down days. On the former, Steve and Rosa’s advice rings pretty clear in his head. He’ll move stuff around the apartment, finds a peace of mind in the mundane. On the latter, he’ll try to avoid it; take long walks in the middle of the night, across Brooklyn and back, occasionally knock on Steve’s door and ask if he can take the stairs to the roof. He never turns him down.

He refocuses on Mrs Holt. “I think I’m getting there,” he says, and down the table, he sees Charles hide a small smile as he turns back to his smoked fish.

Ever since their sidecar rides, Jake has found that Steve probably sits in a particularly close circle of friends, but that doesn’t mean that he necessarily stops gawping when he encounters other Avengers, including the ones he already knows.

He’s not quite prepared when he knocks on his neighbour’s door in the early hours one morning in April after tossing and turning on the couch, and is met by a shirtless Bruce Banner.

“Ohmigod,” Jake word-vomits immediately, “you’re naked.”

Bruce blinks. “Pretty sure I’m not.” He checks his watch as Jake continues to gawp. “It’s half-one in the morning. Everything alright?”

“Um – yeah, I – wait, what?”

He’s saved from further embarrassment by Steve calling out from inside. “It’s fine Bruce, let him in!”

“The more the merrier!” crows a third voice that is definitely Nat and Jake becomes strikingly concerned that he’s walked in on the beginnings of a threesome. Bruce simply shrugs and lets him in.

The tabletop lamps are not the only source of illumination, as a largeish two-screen laptop system – far more complex than the old desktop Steve usually keeps in the corner – spills out a harsh blue light across the room. Steve and Nat, to his relief, both have more clothes on; they appear to be in their workout gear and the latter is fiddling with what looks like a tangle of medical wires.

“Come in, we’re just finishing up,” Steve tells him as Bruce ambles back to the armchair and proceeds to shrug back into a vest and button-down shirt.

“Am I allowed to ask finishing what up, or is this secret Avenger stuff?” Jake immediately quips, before realising that, yes, it very likely is secret Avenger stuff. He thought Steve was still retired; maybe the boredom on not being able to rescue cats out of trees had finally got to him.

There hadn’t been much on the news about the Avengers since the Argentina raid just before he met them for the first time; a couple of neo-Nazi skirmishes in northern Europe here, a brief diplomatic incident with New Asgard there and one fight down under in Australia, but that one hadn’t been in the public eye. Jake only knew about that one because Steve suddenly had a boomerang pinned up with a fridge magnet one day.

“Kinda, but not really,” Bruce responds, which draws a sharp, surprised look from Nat. He either doesn’t catch it or studiously ignores, but continues. “I’m sure Steve can fill you in if you want the details desperately.”

Nat – whose hair is now more red than blonde, though still platinum beyond the tips – eyes Bruce with inquisitive speculative, as if this sudden disclosure is news to him, but after a moment, she drops her gaze back to shutting down the laptop arrangement.

“You’re here for the roof, right?” Steve asks and Jake regathers his attention from his musings.

“Um, yeah, if that’s totes cool.”

“Totes cool with me,” Steve parrots back, drawing a snort from Nat and Bruce. “Head on up. I’ll come join you tonight if you don’t mind.”

Jake distractedly returns Nat and Bruce’s salutations as he slips the bookcase-door open and heads up the only brick stairwell, emerging onto the roof. He wishes he’d had the foresight to wear longer pyjamas tonight, but his long wool coat – a gift from Captain Holt the previous Christmas, in a show of still-unexpected generosity – went all the way to his ankles, so it wasn’t as bad as he could fear.

Steve pops his head up a moment after he hears the door swing shut behind him and gestures to him. “Hot or cold?”

Jake shivers into himself inadvertently without giving an answer and Steve chuckles. “Hot it is then.”

Two minutes later, a marshmallow and whipped-cream-topped monstrosity of a hot chocolate is being pressed into his hand, in a mug roughly the size of Jake’s head. He’d never really asked whether caffeine had an effect on Steve; alcohol certainly didn’t, given he’d seen Steve put away about a dozen beers without a second thought at his birthday the year before. He must just love the taste of Brooklyn craft lager, he idly thought.

“I feel now that an Avenger has given me permission to snoop into their private life, I need to ask,” he begins after a moment. “Why were they here? And what’s with all the technological gizmos?”

Steve is silent, sipping his own hot chocolate from the reinforced plastic lawn chair he had ordered after another one broke under the weight of his muscles. “How much do you know about Bruce Banner’s condition?” he finally ventured.

“Well, he turns into a giant green monster with rippling pecs and unbreakable pants,” Jake responds quickly. “And that he has rage issues. I always assumed he could turn it on-and-off when he wanted?”

“He could, for a while,” Steve admits. “He didn’t used to have any control over it, and things could get messy. Then we worked out a system, him and Nat. Then, after Sokovia, he cleared off. And then, when he came back, he had the opposite problem. He couldn’t get messy.”

A recollection of Natasha quipping that the Hulk had performance issues flashed across his mind and Jake almost snorted into his marshmallows, refraining himself at the last. “So how does that tie in to why he was here?”

Steve shifted, and looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, er, we’ve been… experimenting.” He grimaces and moves to quickly clarify before Jake can open his mouth on autopilot and ask if Captain America is low-key fucking the Hulk. “Not like that. Not me, anyway.”

That was a skilfully specific denial and it takes Jake a moment for his mind to catch up, before a lightbulb pops off. “Wait, Nat?”

He did not need to think about the Black Widow in the bedroom in any particular context, and especially not with a naked Hulk.

Steve looked over and he realised his expression – whatever it was – must have been a picture because Captain America had the temerity to laugh at him.

“I’ll let you put two and two together,” he adds after a moment. “They had a… thing… five years ago, before Bruce cleared out. It tore up Nat more than either of them realised; took a lot of talking for them to get back on the same page.”

“That doesn’t quite explain why the pair of them are… you know… bump-and-grinding,” Jake finishes lamely, realising that his innuendo game is so not what it used to be.

“The Hulk used to come out when his heart rate got too high,” Steve replies, taking a sip of his drink and coming away with a whipped cream moustache that he idly wipes off. “He doesn’t anymore. They’ve had to test all the metrics to see if anything still works and… well, I think the list of people even vaguely comfortable of being in the bedroom of a man who turns into a green rage monster extends to Nat and Nat only.”

Given that the Black Widow very much still appeared to be in one piece, Jake could safely assume that sexy times for Bruce Banner did not get the Hulk out these days either.

“Bruce misses him,” Steve adds, and it takes a moment for Jake to realise he’s talking about the Hulk itself, as a person. “The crux of the matter is that he’s still in there, inside Bruce. It’s hard to explain but…”

He trails off, before shrugging. “We were running some ideas off each other tonight, nothing more. Bruce’s condition has a commonality with my own. We were matching up data.”

Jake had never thought of Steve’s extreme buffness as a condition – a blessing is how he would probably describe it – but it occurred to him that Steve may have mixed feelings on the matter. He doesn’t pry however. Captain America seems pretty comfortable in his own skin these days.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Steve cuts through the bluster of the light winds. Away, ahead of them, Brooklyn and the East River stretch out towards Manhattan. Almost two years on, the city is beginning to reach the level of its old illumination, but there are still whole structures left in the dark, silent megaliths streaking into the inky sky. The reduced light pollution means there’s usually a great view for the stars up here, but cloud cover tonight is denying them the chance to gaze.

“Yeah,” Jake responds, rubbing his hands further around his mug. “But it wasn’t Amy tonight.”

“No?” Steve asks and he lets out a low grunt in response, taking another drink.

“No. I was thinking about the bust on New Year’s Day again,” he admits.

He’s talked a couple of times over this case with Steve, just struck by the hyperviolence of it. This wasn’t simply vigilantism in its base form; this was calculated, brutal, a real-life Batman if Batman was into dismemberment and the whole shebang.

Steve shifts uncomfortably again to the side and says, about as nonchalantly as he can, “I may have something to say on that.”

Jake glances sharply over at him. “Say what now?”

Steve looks back at him. “This stays strictly between us. Nobody else, not even Raymond.”

Jake is still a sucker for juicy gossip so he would swear on his Die Hard poster for this one. “Hit me.”

Steve sighs, as if thinking better of it, but then shakes his head and takes another sip.

“It’s Clint Barton.”

Jake blinks and then feels his jaw go slack. “Clint… Barton? As in, Hawkeye?”

Steve nods slowly, looking out straight ahead. A million – well, not a million, more like four – questions are racing though Jake’s head. Wasn’t Clint Barton dead? If not, why did he not go public again? Why he is on a roaring rampage through the New York criminal underbelly? Why does he have a sword rather than a bow and arrow?!

He doesn’t ask any of them, because Steve talks again and says:

“There’s an internal Avengers investigation ongoing, but… I know it’s slow.” He grimaces. “Clint is Nat’s best friend and… she’s not taking the suggestion well that he’s mowing down men across the globe left, right and centre.”

“Across the globe?” Jake parrots. “You mean, if it is him, he’s doing this outside of New York?”

“Sure seems that way,” Steve concurs. “Jim’s busy tracking him in his spare time, with help from Nebula. But Nat really doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

He takes another sip while Jake clocks that Jim must be Colonel Rhodes, unless he’s missed another James somewhere. It could be Jim Morita of course, who he met last year, but Steve had assured him he was simply an ordinary high-school principal and he couldn’t see any reason why Captain America would lie about that when all his other superhero friends were more than just open secrets.

He wasn’t too sure who Nebula actually was though. Presumably one of the pair of Avengers whose names were currently unknown. Perhaps it was a codename.

“Do you think she’ll come around?” Jake asks. He’s learned more about the Black Widow tonight than he ever thought he would and it’s taking some processing.

“I have faith she will,” Steve responds. “Nat’s a good person. So was Clint, when I knew him. Always had my back.” He chews over his statement and then speaks again. “I’m glad I’ve actually seen you tonight, because I don’t think I’m going to be here for a while.”

Jake turns his head back to the borough below them, stretching out to the water. “You’re going after him?”

He feels he knows Steve well enough to make an educated guess and the latter doesn’t seem too surprised. “Captain America isn’t here anymore. But Steve Rogers is, and this feels like something he has to do.”

He says he doesn’t know when he’ll be back, or if he’ll be back at all. They sit out the rest of their drinks in silence and when Steve escorts him to the door, he presses a small key into his hand. There’s no ring, no fob. Just a simple key.

“Go up to the roof whenever you want,” he tells Jake before he can protest. “It’s a hell of a place to think.”

He bids him goodnight and shuts the door. Jake won’t see him again until well into the autumn, but he will accumulate a handful of postcards during the following six months, friendly reminders that, for some reason, he’s never too far from Steve Rogers’ mind.

Charles gets shot in June. It’s not a life-threatening injury, but it’s more painful than simply a round in the buttocks.

Again, Rosa is involved, but this time Charles isn’t the one moving fast enough to take the hit for her. Instead, she’s too slow to take it for him. He gets clipped in the shoulder when they bust down a door, right through the joint of his tactical gear and through just beneath his right shoulder.

Jake isn’t there for this operation. Instead, he has the night off and has taken his mom out to a concert – one of the first major concerts in the city in fact for over two years. The live industry had taken a pounding, had barely recovered in that immediate twelve months that followed.

But, quite fittingly, Elton John is still standing, and for two hours, inside a Madison Square Garden that, for the first time in so long, is brimmed to capacity, Jake has an absolute blast of a night.

His phone is turned off, mostly because there’s no point when the signal can’t get out, and he forgets to turn it back on, which means he is blissfully unaware until he gets home that evening and finds Savant, of all people, perched on the steps of his brownstone.

“Savant?” Jake exclaims, initial surprise giving way to rising dread because there is absolutely no reason for Savant to be here unless something has happened to Rosa or Charles or Holt, and the other two are otherwise too occupied to come themselves.

“Turn your goddamn phone on,” is the response he gets, before he stalks out and throws his arm out. By sheer dumb luck, a cab arrives almost instantaneously and Jake finds himself bundled in as he sees the wall of messages from Rosa and Holt fill up his inbox, increasingly short and harried.

Charles has been taken into Brookdale and Jake is met by Genevieve in the foyer near the front desk, who throws her arms around him as he hurries in, scanning for a familiar face. Nikolaj is with his grandmother, leaving her, a panicked partner to find herself on tenterhooks as she waits for news.

He passes Holt on the second floor, his captain heading towards the entrance, and they almost collide into each other as they turn a corner.

“Peralta!”

“Captain,” Jake hurries out. “I’m so sorry, my phone was off, and I –”

“Enough,” Holt cuts him off with a hand “You’re here now. Detective Boyle has just gone into surgery.” Next to him, Genevieve lets out a wounded moan. “I suggest you escort Miss Mirren-Carter to the waiting room that adjoins the relevant theatre, at the end of this hallway.” He looks back at Jake. “I need to return to the precinct for processing. Detective Diaz is around there somewhere, I’m sure she will appreciate your presence. Savant, with me.”

Jake hadn’t even realised his minder had trailed him in, but he doesn’t turn to see him leave with his commanding officer, instead breaking off down the hallway with Genevieve, his mind running into overdrive.

They reach the room, and there is Rosa, and Jake doesn’t really remember the last time she looked like this, coated with dirt, her hair compressed into a frizzy bowl at the top from the tactical gear helmet. She’s still strapped into her Kevlar vest and her face is a rictus of calm, except he can see the tremble of her left fist, clenched to the point where she’s surely drawing blood with her fingernails.

He does however remember what to do in situations like these, and as Genevieve quickly latches onto the nearest doctor, Jake takes Rosa by the shoulder firmly and steers her one-handed through the maze of corridors, out and down the stairs, tracking the emergency exit signs until they emerge into the cool summer air, the sun long gone but disparate streaks of colour still hanging on the horizon, mingling with the streetlights below.

He looks around, prepared to usher any nearby staff or passing civilians away, as Rosa begins to firmly shake even more. Wordlessly, Jake – still in his nicest shirt and trousers combo for a pricey evening out – picks up the largest bag of trash he can find from the bins situated here behind the hospital cafeteria and nods at her.

She starts with a roar that makes him flinch and immediately lunges, connecting with the bag with her fist. Her other follows in rapid succession as he proceeds to pummel it, lashing at the double-strength plastic as she hollers. She adds a few kicks in for good measure and Jake feels himself edged backwards by the force of the blows, until his back is against the brick wall.

The bag splits and he immediately seizes the nearest one, smaller and less durable, and the blows hurt him a little more this time, their impact softened less. It too breaks after a few seconds of furious attack and he again picks up the next one, containing what feels like old bedding, and wordlessly waits for her to continue.

She does, but there is less effort in these hits, slower, gradually weaker until she stops, rests her weight against it for a moment and pushes away. Jake drops the bag and watches as she staggers over to the opposite side of the clearing, back towards the hospital doors, dropping onto the short stairs in front as she claws at her tactical vest.

Her knuckles are already bruising, something obviously harder than Jake had thought there would in those bags and she ultimately throws her tactical gear off to the side and spits off to the side.

“Thanks,” she grunts after a moment.

“No problem,” Jake replies, warily watching her. “One-thousand push-ups and all that.”

She barks a single dry laugh and then looks at him.

“I fucking had him where I wanted him, Jake,” she says, exhaustion creeping into her voice. “I fucking had the bastard.”

Jake keeps silent, slowly approaching a step at a time. Rosa drops eye contact and looks to the ground.

“And then, we’re having it all over again with Charles,” she scoffs, a jaded edge to her words. “Fucking hell, it had to be Charles.”

“For a man who doesn’t have a hero complex, he does seem to get shot a lot,” Jake quips on reflex but it falls flat, neither of them able to summon the gallows humour to make it any more bearable.

They’re silent for a moment, before Rosa wordlessly moves her tactical gear from the side, a silent gesture for him to sit. He does so, a good two feet of space between them both as they continue to exist without dialogue. Distantly, he can here the sirens as ambulances arrive at the ER room on the far side of Brookside.

“Can I crash at yours?” Rosa asks out of the blue. Jake starts. It’s not the first time Rosa’s crashed at his place – they used to do it in the academy all the time, and early on at the Nine-Nine – but she’s never asked to do so at his current apartment. She hasn’t done so since that time at Holt’s.

“Sure,” he says. He’s no reason to deny her and he wouldn’t mind the company. She grunts an affirmation and after another moment, dusts her hands off on her knees and stands up.

They weave their way back across the hospital and spend the rest of the early morning with Genevieve as Charles goes through surgery. The prognosis is good; it’s a clean through-and-through, no major arteries nicked by some miracle. He’s going to need a bit of reconstruction work and there is a chance that he won’t regain full mobility in his arm, but hopes are good that he’ll make a full recovery.

Jake feels himself wilt a little in relief at that, before he makes absolutely sure that Genevieve does not want either of them to stay. He and Rosa grab a cab out front as the sun comes creeping over the Atlantic in the far-flung distance, over Long Island, and then make the trip back to his brownstone.

He told both her and Charles that Steve had gone out of town for a while, and the two of them are too fare over the boundaries of all-night wired to sleep just yet, so he lets her into his apartment to shower, leaving out a pair of old sweats and a faded Sonic the Hedgehog shirt before he makes the short trip down the hallway, unlocks the doors and snakes his way up to the roof.

The sun is up in earnest, and he settles in Steve’s chair, now padded out with a cushion from his own living quarters. Across from him, a flock of starlings dart over the skyline. It’s peaceful, the distant honk of light traffic faded, gradually washing over him in a hustle-and-bustle lullaby.

He wakes to Rosa gently prodding him, her features scrubbed and her eyes gradually dropping.

“Hey,” she says, before she glances around. “Not been here for a year. Didn’t know you had access.”

Jake shrugs, still half-asleep. “Come here when the memories get too loud.”

She looks at him askew. “Do they often?”

He levels his gaze to her from the city. “Not like they used to.”

They head back down the staircase shortly afterwards, locking up as they go. Rosa throws herself over the couch, before he can even tacitly ask if she would mind taking it rather than the bed – his and Amy’s bed – and he drapes a comforter over her before collapsing on top of the duvet himself.

Here’s the things Jake knows about Rosa Diaz.

He knows that she’s the daughter of Oscar and Julia Diaz. She’s got two sisters and one niece, and all but her mum survived The Snap.

He knows that she had a thorny, complicated relationship with all of them, except her youngest sister. He knows they’re getting better.

He knows that before she settled on becoming a police officer, she trained as a dancer in her teenage years, and that she sometimes misses the life.

He knows that she can’t stand soup and Citizen Kane, but that she loves enchiladas and Nancy Meyers.

He knows that she’s a sucker for Gilmore Girls and that she can pick locks blindfolded, from her time living abroad.

He knows that she spent a year travelling after graduating the academy, when they fell out of touch, and she went to Osaka, Macau, Berlin, others.

He knows that she cried at reading Charlotte’s Web when she was twelve and that she absolutely hates such vulnerability in herself.

He knows that she owns a pilot’s license, that she can shoot a bow and arrow while riding a horse and that she briefly sold jewellery as a side gig at one point.

He knows that, if he was to be locked in a room gradually being filled with water by a James Bond villain and no apparent way out, he’d want her in there with him.

He knows that while he could trust anyone at the Nine-Nine, past or present – maybe not Hitchcock – to have his back in either a knife-fight or a quiz-night, she’d be near the top of his list.

He knows that, though she’d be hard-pressed to admit it, he’d be near the top of hers too.

He knows, from the weird rituals they assembled during their younger days, that she probably knows more about his life than anyone other than his mother and Amy did.

He knows that she’ll always be a non-judgmental listener, maybe through sheer dint of her I-don’t-give-a-fuck exterior, but secretly more through the fact that she actually does give a fuck.

She’s seen him at his highs and lows. He’s seen her with the same ebbs and flows.

He still remembers the first night Rosa – tall, dark, terrifying Rosa – had laughed in his presence. He’d attempted to ride a cafeteria tray down the metal bannister of the stairwell in their training dorm, and he’d actually succeeded, only to fly off the end, kung-fu style, and promptly put his foot through a door that should have been a lot stronger than it was.

Her eyebrows had creased, gradually, and her lips had trembled, and then she had laughed so hard that he’d starting howling by association, despite the rather spectacular pain and embarrassment of having wedged himself through two inches of wood.

He still remembers the first night Rosa cried in his presence too. They’d been at the end of a bar crawl, staggering back to the dorms, and she’d burst, highly unexpectedly into noisy tears.

Between snotty breaths, she’d confessed that she didn’t know if she was cut out for this, that everything she’d tried so far in her life, she’d never made a success of it and she was doubting whether it was worth simply quitting while the going wasn’t too tough.

Jake, somewhat plastered but at his most admittedly earnest and chipper, had given her a pep talk that he barely remembered the contents of, and the following day, he’d found a four-pack of Snickers in his locker complete with a note that simply threatened him with grievous bodily harm if he was to breathe a word of the previous evening to anyone.

It’s funny that Rosa had always maintained Jake was her best friend to him for a long time, mostly because it was entirely unreflective of any other major relationship in his life. It hadn’t been until they had been forced to confront the strikingly idiosyncratic way that they functioned by Soren Knausgaard and Agneta Carlsson – themselves a strikingly idiosyncratic pair – that Jake had started to really catalogue his and Rosa’s friendship as something to be treasured, no matter how it ebbed and flowed.

She was his best friend. And he was hers. Somehow, they slotted together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, clicking into place all the same.

He had never really thought much of what Amy had thought about their friendship exclusively. He had not had reason to – Amy and Rosa were friends themselves, and he’d never really wondered about what they got up to in their spare time, unless they were conspiring to prank him together.

But idly, later that day as he crossed back into his living room and found Rosa curled around two doilies and a cushion, he felt an unusual warmth creep into his chest that he hadn’t felt for a long while.

He studiously ignored it. As a tactic, that had always worked out for him in the past, right?

He’ll later reflect that there was a shift in the air that day, when she woke up, stumbled into the kitchen and gave him a bleary-eyed, unidentifiable expression over the rim of her coffee mug, but he’s nowhere near cognisant enough at the time to read it.

Steve’s absence – he was most recently in Kiev, per his postcard, and sure enough Jake finds week-old clippings on the internet that gives the rundown on a particularly grisly quadruple homicide – has left a larger-than-expected hole in his social calendar, and the long summer nights in Brooklyn leave him with a hankering to fill it with something more.

He ultimately decides to check how much holiday time he has accumulated and, wow, he’s due two months off per the record rolls.

He doesn’t need that much, but asks if he can have three weeks and the rest in extra pay. Holt has absolutely no qualms, but requests that he only take two weeks off consecutively. That’s fine with Jake and, five days later, he’s the proud owner of a second-hand, third-generation Ford Ranger.

It’s not the type of vehicle he’d have backed himself to take in another world – pickup trucks are not really his vibe – but for what he plans to do, it’s perfect.

He’s not been to California for a long time, never mind driven there, but as far back as he can remember, he’s always rhetorically spoken of going coast to coast if he could, his own personal Cannonball Run, from sea-to-shining-sea.

He leaves on the Friday, stopping off late in a motel on the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, before he spends the next two-and-a-half days on the road. He must cover ten hours a day, barely stopping save for fuel and food between sleep stops. He sends a picture to Rosa as he cross over near Joplin, into the Cherokee Nation on the edge of Oklahoma, snaps one in Amarillo for his mom and remembers that old Tony Christie song.

He can’t not turn off at Flagstaff and head to the Grand Canyon – an unspoken rule for his nine-year-old self. He’s been here before, oddly one of his earliest memories, with his dad. It’s one of the few truly untinged memories he had of Roger Peralta. As with Gina, he’d found his father’s passing less of a hammer-blow than he’d expected, but now, two years removed, any lingering melancholy is muted by the winds as he stands above it.

He snaps another two pictures and just avoids dropping his phone over the edge before gets back into his truck and rides the final stretch out to Los Angeles. He consults the map – old-fashioned, paper, a road atlas snapped up for a few dollars – and makes the run down to Monarch Bay Beach.

He hadn’t intended to end up at the place in Steve’s old Avengers photo when he’d set off but he’d become gradually fascinated over the journey of marking the end of his journey there. The hotel he wanders through, faded from its older grandeur, is still way out of his budget, but he orders a drink at the bar anyway, and wanders out, over the veranda, across the sand and down to the shoreline with his Coke in hand.

He toes off his shoes, steps into the surf and lets the water lap at his feet softly. The sun is dropping on the horizon, the reflections pooled as far as the eye can see. It’s hymnal, alluring, the cry of a few lone gulls distant in their clarion calls.

He thinks of Amy. He notes that while the melancholy sits firm in his heart, the stones that used to drop into his gut have lessened. Now, when he thinks of her, he doesn’t think about crying.

He thinks about smiling.

Far out, he spots the sight of a whale surfacing before it drops again. Half of all life means ecological systems have shifted dramatically. Jake knows that, to live in New York, and by the extension, makes him one of the luckier ones. Several countries around the world have not been so fortunate, civil wars sparking up in the kind of places you wouldn’t expect. The United Nations was getting a firmer hand on matters, but even so.

He spends another five minutes under the gaze of sundown before he drains the rest of his drink, picks up his shoes and returns back the way he came.

He spends only one night in LA. It’s noisier, more crowded than he expected it to be, and not the way that New York comforts him. He moves up to San Francisco, checks into a gem of a little hotel close to Fisherman’s Wharf. He spends the days exploring and the evenings wandering, occasionally ducking into a bar. He drinks only a couple, plays a frame of pool with a few locals, kindly but firmly brushes off the occasional advances he gets, including one redhead who reminds him as a bubblier version of Nat.

It’s a strange experience. Around him, the mood is muted but welcoming. It occurs to him, again, that there won’t be someone in the world who hasn’t lost a brother, a lover, a friend, somebody. And yet, the pieces are gradually picked up and life goes on.

He returns to his hotel on the last night to find a breaking news bulletin in the lobby; an attempted chemical facility hijack somewhere in South Wales has been foiled by a clutch of Avengers. Among the grainy news footage, he spots Nat’s red-blonde hair, pulled into a tight braid; he spots Colonel Rhodes, sporting dented armour, hauling two figures bodily by their heads and being trailed by that bizarre racoon again, with an intimidatingly tall – and bald – dark-skinned woman wielding a spear following up at the rear. It reassures him that the Black Widow definitely wasn’t hitting on him in California.

Speaking of familiar faces though, he does not expect, two days later, to run into Everett Ross at a truck stop in the middle of fuck-knows-where Nebraska. Everett Ross, conversely, seems like he totally expected it, and Jake just surely hopes that the expression of practiced placid recollection is merely a coincidence rather than a cover for him being trailed.

“Detective Peralta,” says the older man from across the forecourt “You can stop trying to hide behind the gas pumps. I can see you.”

Jake had thought he was being spectacularly sneaky, but apparently nothing gets past Everett Ross. He stands up and walks over.

“Agent Ross!” he says with the sort of cheerfulness that he imagines can be seen right through. “What a surprise to see you here!”

“I’m not following you, Peralta,” Ross deadpans.

“I’m one-hundred percent sure you would say that whether you were or not,” Jake counters and the other man shrugs.

“Unless you’re telling me I should be following you?”

“Um,” Jake says. “Nope. Definitely not.”

“Good.” Ross scratches the back of his ear distractedly. “If you must know, I’m heading out to Portland for a case.”

“Any luck with your warehouse man?” Jake ventures, because he is attempting to make polite conversation and isn’t really sure what else you say in these situations.

A constipated look crosses over Ross’ face, one smothered back into placidity too quickly for anyone but an individual schooled in the art of Holt-reading to spot. “Classified, I’m afraid.”

“Cool, cool beans,” Jake says, which he probably shouldn’t say about tracking a serial killer who happens to be a former Avenger. Does Ross know that it’s a former Avenger? He imagines he does. Not much gets past the CIA, expect in the movies.

Ross bids him farewell shortly after, stepping into the black SUV that screams stand-down-this-is-our-scene-now and speeds off west. Jake fuels up and heads back east, wondering if Steve is back in the country, perhaps even in Portland this very minute.

Charles asks him to be his best man in late October. Having previously professed contentment to simply avoid the ignominy of marriage – or rather, the ignominy of another divorce – previously, being shot three months prior has made him re-evaluate a few things by his own admission.

There’s never really any doubt about Genevieve turning him down, nor is there about Jake being asked to be best man, but nonetheless he finds himself caught in a mix of emotions.

It will be the first wedding he has been to since his own, well over three years ago – Charles has set a date for the following September, holding it to be closer to Nikolaj’s birthday – when he himself had been lucky enough to be the man standing at the end of the aisle.

He sits in silence at his desk for a while after he assures Charles he would be delighted and fails to respond when Rosa throws several wads of rolled-up paper at his head. It ultimately takes her rolling over and tipping the heigh pedal on his chair with her foot before he registers her.

“You good, dude?” she asks. “What did Charles want?”

Jake blinks. “He wanted me to be his best man.”

“Huh.” She leans back. “Congratulations. I guess?”

He nods slowly. “I think so. Man, it just feels… very weird.” Thoughts of his own wedding day, which he’s not focused on beyond abstract terms for a good few months, have swum back to the front of his mind.

Rosa stands and holds out a hand. Belatedly, he realises his chair has dropped low enough for him to assume hunched Hobbit proportions and he takes the proffered grip, wincing slightly as his knees crack as he is hauled to his feet.

“You wanna talk about it?” she asks. He shakes his head.

“Nah,” he responds, despite her softened expression. “I think I’m good for now.”

They’re both invited to Captain Holt’s house a few nights later, where Charles is hosting his engagement party. Nikolaj has unearthed the former’s old train set and is very happily set up in the spare room, the one Jake had lived out of when he had been here. When the youngster – though, at ten, he’s not getting any younger – heads down for a drink, Jake takes the chance to look around.

Holt finds him sprawled out on top of the bed a few minutes later, star-fished out and staring at the deep navy walls on the far side, behind the old oak vanity.

“Everything alright, Jake?” he queries. His eyebrow is raised to the level that typically indicates more than merely mild concern and it occurs to Jake that his friends expected he might have taken this worse than he has.

“Just fine, cap’n,” he fires back, but that doesn’t seem to necessarily satisfy Holt who lingers at the door. Jake props himself up on his elbows and stares at him.

“Honestly, captain, I’m fine,” he repeats, injecting some extra sincerity in there to see if it can help him pass muster. It possibly does, because after another moment, Holt nods.

“If you’re sure,” he responds neutrally. “Remember, my door is always open if you need it.”

Jake gives a murmured assent, before he realises he has probably spent too much time away from the social niceties downstairs to be considered polite and rolls himself off the duvet. “Let Charles know I’ll be down in a minute.”

Holt nods again and leaves the door ajar as he returns downstairs. Jake can hear the lively conversation trickling up to the first floor. He sighs, straightens his sleeves and returns to the party below.

His mind isn’t quite in the right place throughout the rest of the evening and it’s no real surprise when, having stuck to soft drinks for the night, he elects to bow out early. Rosa catches him as he’s going, that kernel of concern as increasingly prevalent as it has been this past year beneath her brows.

“You heading off?” she asks. He nods and she adds, “Can I get a lift?”

“You’ll have to tell me where you live,” Jake points out. Rosa shrugs.

“You can drop me near enough,” she responds. “It’s not like the weather’s too bad to walk.”

They both bid their farewells to the small clutch of guests and, having congratulate Charles again, the pair wander out to his Ranger. Jake dusts a few bits of trash off the passenger seat, into the footwell, and fiddles with his mirror as Rosa clambers in.

“Didn’t peg you as a Ranger guy,” she observes.

“A man’s got to have his secrets,” he responds automatically as he checks the road and pulls out.

They sit in companionable silence for ten minutes, before his music choice comes under fire again.

"Why are you playing 2000 Miles?" Rosa asks.

"Uh, duh, because I like it?" he replies and she snorts.

"It's nowhere near fucking Christmas, dumbass," she counters and he splutters indignantly.

"Look, I don't slag you off when you play A Spaceman Came Travelling on stakeouts, do I?" he fires back after a moment, and she groans.

"One time," she grumbles. "One fucking time, and you're never going to let me live that down."

"If Chris de Burgh is the worst of your crimes, then internal affairs aren't exactly going to get much on you," he quips, and Rosa lets out a dry chuckle at that.

Halfway back to his, he realises he hasn’t even asked Rosa where her place is and she is yet to supply it. He considers asking her, then decides that if she wants to supply the information, it’s her prerogative to do so.

The end result is that they pull up outside his brownstone and he finds him letting her into his apartment once more.

“You’re on the couch, again,” he tells her.

“Duh,” she responds dryly, already shrugging off her jacket and draping it over the empty umbrella stand. “Got any beer?”

He does, a nice craft six-pack, and they make decent inroads into it as they settle on some old Criminal Minds reruns. She sits at the far end and he settles in the armchair encrusted with doilies, as far apart as they physically can be and yet entwined in an unspoken emotional comfort.

He opens up when he’s at the end of his second can and she’s well into her third, Joe Mantegna chewing somebody out on the screen across from them. “I don’t know if I should I feel happy, sad or both for Charles.”

She eyes him and replies quicker than expected. “All three.”

“Technically, the third negates the other two,” he muses, ever so slightly lightheaded. He stands up and crushes his can, reaching over for the last one on the table. With a practiced surety, Rosa slaps his hand away and he exclaims. “Hey!”

“Split it with you,” she nonchalantly says.

“You’ve already had three,” he points out. She shrugs.

“You snooze, you lose, bitch,” she replies without heat and he barks out a laugh.

“All right, all right.” He goes and fumbles around for a tumbler, comes back and lets her pop a generous half from the can into the glass. He sits back down, this time on the couch, at the opposite end, and feels his arm slightly slip on the edge. Maybe he’s a bit tipsier than he thought.

“You love Charles,” Rosa adds after a moment, almost thoughtfully. “You want him to be happy.”

“As long as you mean in the platonically intellectual sense, then yeah, sure,” Jake responds, vaguely wondering where she’s going with this.

“So, clearly, his happiness makes you happy,” Rosa continues. “But, I mean, just ‘cause it’s been two-and-a-half years, doesn’t mean you can’t be sad too.”

Jake muses on that, and looks to the recently placed photo halfway down the bookshelf. It’s him and Amy, on that cruise where Doug Judy, the Pontiac Bandit himself, got away again. He found it a few weeks ago rooting though an old box, lodged in a small folder with two-dozen other snaps. He’d forgotten they’d taken a disposable camera; he hadn’t even realised Amy had got them developed.

“I just…” he mumbles. “It kind of sometimes feels like a betrayal? I mean, I know she’d want me to be happy, to celebrate other people’s happiness but… it feels like it’s tough to do that when she’s not got the chance to share it. And I try not to dwell on it, but something like this…” He gestures aimlessly and takes another sip

There’s movement at the other end of the couch and Jake sees Rosa pull her legs up underneath herself, her jeans riding up around the calves. She’s silent for a longer period this time and Jake does wonder if she’s fallen asleep, until she reaches over the table and swaps out her cans.

“That’s stupid,” she says. “But also completely normal, I guess.” She’s silent for a moment, before she begins again. “Every time I go out on a date, I always think what my mother would say and then it kills the mood.”

Jake swivels his head to the right to look at Rosa. She’s pensive, eyes boring a hole in the tab of her beer, as if it has personally offended her. He’s struck, almost hazily, of a memory of her sitting in the armchair in his roof, snoring quietly, bags under her eyes. There’s that vulnerability again, here and now.

“I know it’s dumb,” she continues. “And it never happens whenever it’s a guy. It’s just… ugh, it’s dumb. I can almost feel her judging me and it’s, like…”

She growls and crushes her can. Beer leaks out of the side and drips onto the comforter below before she sets it back on the coffee table where it slowly pools.

“It’s shame,” she finishes. “And I know I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, no matter who I choose to see. But she just never came around in the end, and I’ve always got this sense that she’s disapproving of me somewhere in the afterlife.”

There’s a hiccup, and Jake becomes aware that there’s a small number of tears tracking down Rosa’s face, a moment before she furiously rubs her arm across it. He unsteadily reaches his arm out and grabs her by the wrist as she drops it.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he interjects. “It’s not dumb.” He reconsiders his phrasing as he moves his head a little too quickly and the couch spins. “More, firstly, you’re right. You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Date who you wanna date, it’s nobody’s business but your own. And secondly, if she was still here now, with or without everything that’s gone on… your mom would love you for who you are.”

“You don’t know that,” Rosa counters, looking down at where his hand had encircled her wrist. “Don’t say things you don’t know.”

“Maybe I don’t,” Jake concedes. “But given your dad came around, I think she would have done. And even if she didn’t, she wasn’t going to stop loving you. She might’ve not liked it, but she’d have respected you.”

He pauses. “And even then – even then – if the whole world didn’t, we would, at the Nine-Nine. Terry would have, Gina would have, Charles would, the captain would, Amy would have. I would. We don’t care who you love, because we all love you.”

There’s a long silence that follows, and Jake’s pretty impressed, in his less-than-sober state, that he follows that heartfelt declaration without losing eye contact with Rosa’s scalp. He briefly wonders if she’s fallen asleep again, her head bowed, staring at the space where they’re linked.

But eventually, she rotates her hand upwards and clasps his own, briefly and tightly.

“Thanks Jake,” she murmurs.

They say nothing else for the brief remainder of time before they slip into darkness. When he wakes, he finds the comforter draped over him and the sounds of the shower running. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes, moves to the kitchen and sets about making the coffee.

Their heart-to-heart goes unspoken until she’s set to leave, and he grabs her by the elbow. She looks like the Rosa of old now, possibly half-a-second away from putting a roundhouse to his head for invading her personal space, but he looks her firmly in the eye, straight-faced.

“We mean every word, you know,” he says. “The Nine-Nine’s got you. I’ve got you.”

She smiles at him – small and genuine – and shows herself out.

Steve emerges two days before Christmas Eve from whatever part of the world he’s most recently been in, and it’s readily apparent, as Jake returns back that morning with the ingredients for a dinner he’s hosting for his mom, that he may have come off second best in a fight with Clint Barton.

“Steve!” he exclaims as he spots the familiar figure at the end of his hallway. Then he gets a second look and does a double-take.

There’s a long, diagonal gash from his left shoulder, across the chest and down to below the ribcage on the right. He’s sporting a black eye and is carrying himself with the suggestion of a broken shoulder.

“Hey Jake,” he says tiredly. “How’re you doing?”

He promptly then falls over and starts snoring on the hallway carpet, causing Jake to let out a little shriek that is particularly manly, thank you very much.

He’s never regretted not having Nat’s number more than he has now, and he’s honestly not sure what the procedures are for dealing with a medical emergency involving the former Captain America. He hits Rosa’s number as the first one that comes to mind, racing over to Steve as he does.

The phone rings six times before she answers. “’Sup?”

“Hey Rosa,” Jake says in the sort of falsely-cheerful, I-shit-you-not tone he often used when he had got himself into embarrassing situations. “Are you free?”

“I’m literally two minutes off shift,” she deadpans back. “Are you sure you need me?”

“One-thousand push-ups,” Jake immediately counters with, because damnit, Steve Rogers is bleeding over the carpets and while he’s fairly certain the man has super-speed healing or some such shit, he doesn’t feel that he alone can handle this matter, particularly when he would struggle to even get him to his feet.

He hears Rosa stifle a groan. “Ugh, fine. On my way.”

She gets there surprisingly quick, so Jake can only assume that she biked in today and ran a few red lights to get here. She visibly pales at the fact that Captain America appears to be slumped over with a gash across his chest, which is good news for Jake, because he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t overreacting in this instance.

“Holy shit,” she says, and she immediately drops to her knees, peeling off her gloves and running her hand along the wound. “What the hell happened?”

“Funny you should say that,” Jake says, belatedly recalling that Rosa, in her storied career, had also been to medical school, which was particularly helpful as he didn’t think his first aid experience would cover it here. “Help me get him inside.”

He fishes out his key for Steve’s apartment from his back pocket and together, they manage to manhandle the absolute giant of a man into his quarters. His sheer bulk means they have to settle for the couch rather than getting him to the bedroom, and Rosa immediately heads to the bathroom, presumably looking for medical supplies.

Jake however is fascinated by the fact that, in the twenty minutes since he first encountered him in the hallway, he can already see a marked improvement in the gash across Steve’s chest. Scratch super-speed healing, this is like regeneration out of Doctor Who.

Rosa returns and blinks, her composure somewhat restored. “He’s got more than the basics in there. What’s it look like?”

“Possible blood loss across the chest, no serious veins or arteries nicked,” Jake catalogues on instinct. “Possible head swelling, but think it’s just a black eye. Oh, and a broken shoulder.”

It is at this point that said shoulder moves an inch with an audible crack of its own accord and Steve shoots straight up with a shout. Jake leaps back at least two feet and falls over; Rosa, somehow, remains rooted to the spot and entirely unbowed.

“Ohmigod, ohmigod,” Jake gasps. “Jesus, Steve, don’t do that.”

Captain America himself initially ignores him, and Jake realises that his eyes are darting around with a foggy clarity. “You’re in your apartment, Steve, in Brooklyn,” he continues. “I’m your neighbour, Jake. This is my friend Rosa. You know us, Steve, you know us.”

Like that, Steve’s vision appears to snap to clarity and he groans. “Ah, shoot. What day is it?”

“December 22^nd,” Rosa supplies, setting the medical supplies down. “Did… did your broken shoulder just reconstruct itself?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” Steve mutters distractedly as he continues to scan the room. “It does that.”

“Nice,” Rosa says. “Or not. I don’t know.”

“Handy in a pinch but hurts like hell,” Steve responds, groaning again as he uses the back of the couch to pull himself up.

“How the hell did you do it?” Rosa asks. Jake flashes his gaze back over to Steve, who looks puzzled, then straightens his expression.

“Never bring your fists to a knife-fight,” he responds neutrally. “Especially when it’s a big knife.”

They get Steve into his bedroom shortly afterwards – he still seems not particularly cognizant of his surroundings – and he waves them off with the insistence that he’ll be fine. Jake reminds him that he has his number, if he needs him, and then, as he’s about to leave, realises that Captain America likely does not have Christmas plans.

“Do you have Christmas plans?” he asks, to be sure. Steve raises an eyebrow.

“Do I look like a man with any plans?” he responds dryly.

So, that’s how three days later, Jake settles down in his apartment to Christmas dinner with his mother and Captain America himself. Steve’s cooking skills have never been doubted, and nor have his mother’s, so he’s particularly delighted with the praise he gets for his sprouts.

The three of them watch It’s a Wonderful Life on cable as the evening wears on and his mom makes tracks before the first snow blizzard of the season makes tracks across town. He thinks about Amy, and for once on Christmas day, the thought makes him happy, memories of her snaffling the Yule log when she thought he wasn’t looking and trying to hide her guilty expression.

Steve produces an old vinyl player - not old old, but certainly one like the kind he's not seen since his dad skipped out decades ago - and a particularly outstanding bottle of scotch that he regards with a fond eye when it is just the two of them, and they dig through the handful of vinyls he has in a neat black case before they settle in.

He exchanges messages with Victor Santiago and feels oddly lighter than he’s done for a long time. He heads back into work on Boxing Day and works through the rest of the year with a slight spring in his step; he’s with Holt, in his office, when the clock strikes twelve to see in the new year, the sounds of fireworks – finally increased in numbers to what feels like their old levels – ripple out above Manhattan.

Jake doesn't know it yet, but there's a corner he's about to turn. But as he and his commanding officer - nay, his friend - stand together with mugs of double-strength coffee on the roof, looking out towards the Hudson, perhaps he can admit there is something in the winds of change.

Chapter Text

2021

It’s the first week of January that Rosa starts coming over every four or five days, but it takes Jake well into the spring to notice a pattern, particularly given that she studiously avoids crashing as she previously had done.

The first time is on the back of a truly dreary day at the precinct, five days into the new year, and Jake isn’t sure how many trips he can make to the vending machine to study its contents for nuts before it becomes a problem.

He’s surprised to hear his doorbell ring about twenty minutes after he gets back in. He’s only just out of the shower and is mulling over what to do about dinner when he hears it, and rather than click the intercom, he instead sticks his head out of the window.

The immediate chill reminds him that’s in January and stupid to open windows when only wearing a towel, but he spots Rosa down below, who flips the bird with one hand and lifts the other holding a brown paper bag.

“’Sup,” she says when he buzzes her in. “Why are you naked?”

“I’m not naked, I’m wearing a towel,” he counters. Rosa shrugs.

“Look pretty naked to me. It’s January.”

“Yes, I know it’s January,” Jake replies, affronted. “I was just about to get changed when you so rudely crash-landed my evening plans.”

“Fine,” she responds. “I’ll eat this cheung fun myself.”

Jake gasps in mock-horror. “You wouldn’t!”

“If you don’t put some clothes on, I will,” she replies smugly, before staking through to the kitchen, shrugging off her overcoat as she went.

He re-emerges a few minutes later, clad in a shirt that says STOP! YOU’RE UNDER A-VEST! on it and a pair of loose slacks, to find Rosa has plated up half-a-dozen small dishes with several scents that are absolutely heavenly after the day he has had.

“I don’t think you’ve brought me takeout since that horror-show redball a year ago,” he recalls as she wordlessly hands over chopsticks when they’re sat on the couch, forgoing the dining table for low-slung comfort.

She pops a spring roll into her mouth. “You’re paying next time,” she simply says in response.

He does indeed, the following week. This one isn’t a dull day; it’s a messy one. Jake initially gets sprayed with gutter-slush from the previous night’s snowfall when a cyclist speeds by him as he is about to cross the road to his car.

Then, he falls quite spectacularly into a puddle while chasing a suspect, promptly ensuring that Charles following behind him – in his first week back in the field after the better part of six months deskbound – also falls in.

Fortunately, he lands on his left side, sparing Jake from both the guilt of aggravating his injury and receiving a stern word from Genevieve down the phone. Rosa, sprinting past them both in chunky boots, collars the perp another fifty feet down the road, and then drags him back by the ear so she can laugh at him.

“You look like you’ve fallen out of the black lagoon,” she helpfully snorts. He’s less than impressed by her description, as apt as it may be, but he nonetheless takes her call after she gets off to tell him she’s coming round and it’s his choice.

He could protest, but he’d quite like the company after a day where he got soaked twice in the name of the universe and he hits up a Thai takeout, actually walking down to make the pickup himself.

He’s met with a pleasant surprise – and since when did he consider it pleasant? – to bump into Natasha Romanoff as he’s coming out. Judging by her own brown paper bag from the adjoining Greek restaurant, it seems they’ve both had the same idea.

“Hey Jake,” she says and he’s fairly certain her smile is genuine. “Long time, no see. Heard you had the luck of the draw with Steve’s latest injuries.”

He laughs and tries to recall. He doesn’t think he’s seen her since last spring, when he’d encountered the shirtless Bruce Banner at Steve’s door. “How’ve you been? I saw that bust in Wales on the news.”

She shrugs, almost effortlessly. Her hair is pinned back into a bob, masking the platinum tips that remain. “Refreshingly simple. Me and Rhodey are the only ones here now though. Everyone else is off doing their own thing.”

That is quietly alarming news to Jake, but then again, ever since Thanos, no alien army has attempted to pick off Earth. He can only assume that, with half of life in the universe gone, most alien armies have their own problems to deal with before they can even think about conquering shit.

Nat stretches and cracks her neck. “It’s good to be back, to be honest. I’ve spent a lot of the last year bouncing between Baltimore and Europe. It’s decent to be back in New York for a while.”

“Are you staying for now?” Jake asks and Nat nods.

“I’m rooming with Steve for a few weeks but then I’m going to move up north,” she replies. “Probably Poughkeepsie. No need to go too far.”

Jake wonders idly, as they round the corner and he spots Rosa pulling up on her bike, what had happened to Bruce Banner. He doesn’t realise he’s said it out loud until an odd look passes over Nat’s face.

“He’s…” She visibly struggles to settle on her words before concluding, “in therapy.”

Before Jake can enquire exactly what kind of therapy, they encounter Rosa, who greets Nat with a firm handshake, and the three of them exchange inane pleasantries until they split in the hallway.

Back inside his apartment, Jake sorts out the various dishes much the way Rosa did the previous week while she asks where the Black Widow’s been.

“All over,” he admits. “But I think she’s staying.” He felt that would make Steve happy. She seemed to be his closest friend by some margin, and he guessed they hadn’t crossed paths while he was out hunting Barton.

Barton. He put a container down and flicked his phone out, scrolling down Twitter. There’d been another clutch, this time in Toronto. Jake had noticed that the mob murders – because they were nearly always mob, or cartel, or mafia-related – tended to follow a certain path, presumably as the former Hawkeye worked himself around the globe. He’d have to keep his eyes peeled over the next month; there was just as good a chance that he could be back on Brooklyn turf.

He desperately hoped he didn’t personally cross paths again. But Steve might fancy a rematch, and Nat would surely have some words to say if she’d been convinced yet.

Rosa grunts and he looks up to see her giving him a questioning look. He grins and juggles the dish over to the table, where she’s set up The Intern.

“You good?” she asks as he slips her a beer.

“Totally,” he responds with a grin and clinks her bottle before he hits play.

He and Rosa have must have had the best part of a dozen more takeout nights before he twigs that they seem to have fallen into a routine as much as anything he’s had since almost three years before.

He probably wouldn’t have twigged it if it hadn’t been for the fire.

He heads off to work that morning, twisting his wedding band on the fourth-finger and slipping the chain over his neck off which Amy’s ring dangles. It had been Steve’s idea, when he had discovered last year that he still had the wedding ring, but Jake had only followed through on the suggestion earlier in February when he had discovered that the silver-gold piece no longer pierced him like a hot knife when he picked it up.

Now, it’s a talisman, and one he’s worn every day since. He wonders if it’s a good luck shield of sorts; he avoided the explosion of Charles’ emu pasta bake one day, escaped being slimed by a perp at a chemical waste facility the next. If he ever needed any proof that Amy was still looking out for him, it didn’t feel much more tangible than this.

So when he leaves his brownstone that day, he assumes that it’ll be another day where he dodges the flak. He’s technically correct, as when he gets the call to help attend a fire out near Prospect Park, it is not his apartment that is the one up in smoke.

It is however the ground floor one, and that spreads pretty fast to the one above it on the first floor. Though it fortunately gets no further – Jake is quietly certain that the swift extinguishment before the first fire truck actually arrived on the scene was something to do with Steve, but Captain America is nowhere to be found at his property when he screeches to a halt outside the smouldering property – it does mean that he is currently out of a place to live, while a week-long fumigation takes place.

He’s not allowed in, obviously, given the number of health and safety violations he’d be making just to take one step up the stairwell and Fire Marshall Boone – a little slimmer, a little greyer around the temples – is policing the area pretty sternly.

So Jake heads back to the precinct and explains to Captain Holt that he can’t return to his property, and it’s pretty darn fortunate that he happens to have several spare sets of clothes and a fine bomber jacket at his commanding officer’s residence.

Jake finds himself that night placing both rings on the old oak vanity before he slips under the duvet and idly acknowledges that he’s surprised to be back here. His apartment, echoing with ghosts for so long, is now a quiet sanctuary, the spectre of Amy Santiago lingering at the fringes rather than occupying every seat, softened in shadow rather that shattered.

Being back at Holt’s brings a different storm of emotions. These are the rooms where mourned, first and foremost, then slowly began to put himself back together with the help of his captain. He’d forgotten that he hadn’t even met Steve, or Nat, when he was here the first time. It almost seems another life, in another time. He guesses it was. It’s been over two years.

Rosa calls him after work the following day – he’d been on the early shift, she the mid-morning run – and asks if he fancies Japanese and that she’ll be over in half-an-hour, and he belatedly realises that he’s not told her about his current predicament.

“Um,” he says. “I’m not home. I’m at Holt’s.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Is this a work thing or…

“No,” he cuts across, drawing the syllable out, and he strangely realises he doesn’t want to give her the impression he’s brushing her off. “My apartment’s out of bounds. There’s been a fire.”

“…say that again.”

“There’s been a fire.” He pinches his nose as he toes on his slippers and wanders downstairs. Holt isn’t due to be back for another two hours himself, so he might as well make a start on dinner now Rosa has reminded him. “Not my apartment but the ground floor. We’re all out of there for the moment,”

“Oh.” There’s a beat of silence again. “Why didn’t you say today?”

“I mean, I saw you for barely five minutes,” Jake points out as he heads into the kitchen and begins the process of cataloguing what’s at his disposal in the fridge-freezer combo. “I didn’t think I needed to offload onto you that I was temporary homeless.”

“You should have said.” There’s something a little more unidentifiable to her voice there, not so much a change in the octave as a slight wavering. Jake realises, somewhat mortifyingly, that he may have hurt her.

“Hey,” he replies. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“It’s fine,” comes Rosa’s response and that’s definitely a clipped edge in her tone. Slightly frustrated, Jake sighs.

“It’s clearly not alright,” he says, and he wonders if Amy would be proud of the fact he refrains from following it up by countering with the suggestion that Rosa would likely keep it to herself if her apartment burned down too.

He gets his own pinched sigh parroted back at him from the other end. “No, it’s not,” comes the reply after a few beats, followed by, “but I’m sorry too. For snapping. Also for your place. That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does,” Jake responds. “And I’m sorry again. We good?”

“We’re good,” Rosa repeats and Jake feels himself loosen ever so slightly across the shoulders. “I’ll catch you tomorrow.”

“See ya,” Jake finishes, as the line clicks dead. He stares at his phone for a minute, before slipping it to the back of the counter and pulling the vegetable board and two knives towards him.

As he deseeds the peppers ahead of him, he counts back in his head to the last time him and Rosa had takeout at the apartment, when he’d picked up some Caribbean dishes and they’d celebrated with the fitting selection of Cool Runnings. They’d sunk a couple of beers each and Rosa had mumbled about how she wanted John Candy to be her dance instructor when she was younger.

Before that, they’d had Indian and watched Smokey and the Bandit, both the first and second after a day in which they’d wrestled a flasher in Prospect Park away from a gaggle of unsuspecting old ladies who, to their impressive credit, had simply responded by saying they’d seen better in their day.

Then there was the time before, and the time before, and the time before and Jake realises with a flash of clarity that they’ve been slipped into some kind of semi-domestic arrangement without them realising.

At least, he assumes she hasn’t realised. Has she? Jake can’t quite fathom that Rosa wouldn’t have realised – she’s one of the most dangerously observant people he knows – but at the same time, he’s at a loss at to why she would continue if she did. Didn’t she have other regular commitments? Other things to do in her secret life?

He ultimately shakes it off. They’re friends, and evenings with takeout is something best friends certainly do. He did it with Charles before he met Genevieve, he did it with Amy before they became an item, he occasionally does it with Steve, though that’s more a case that one of them cooks than head down to the local pizzeria.

Rosa’s just the latest one to be doing it, and if it’s the first time they’re doing it since their academy days and if they’re doing it to a weird sort of schedule, then that’s fine too. It’s nobody’s business but their own, Jake tells himself as he finishes the mince for the peperoni ripieni he’s prepared, and he’s plenty comfortable with it.

The front door clicks and he hears Holt shout a greeting. Jake calls back and, dusting his hands on his apron, heads away to meet his captain.

He drops a coffee from the shop two blocks down from the precinct on Rosa’s desk when he comes in the following day. Wordlessly, without looking away from her computer screen, she reaches down and produces a brown paper bag with a raspberry and white chocolate muffin which she thrusts towards him.

He smiles and takes it back to his own desk.

He’s glad to find that nothing’s been seriously disrupted in his place when he returns the following week. A few items have shifted, whether by the fumigators who were allowed access to his apartment or just through pure chance, but it’s otherwise pretty much exactly how he remembers it.

In a rare change of pace, he elects to call up Rosa instead to see if she would like to come over and instead gets straight through to her answerphone. That in itself isn’t too unusual; she’s very much one of those individuals who neglects to take incoming missives and who gets particularly frustrated when people do the same to her in return.

Instead, he takes the quick stroll down the hallway and raps neatly on Steve’s door. He hears a voice call and a few moments later, it swings open to reveal Nat, holding a spatula in the sort of way that suggests she’s used it to take it out a room of criminals before, no sweat.

“Hey Jake,” she says, slightly out of breath. “Steve’s out running. Did you want him?”

“I actually just came to see if he wanted to have dinner,” Jake replies as Nat waves him in, “but it seems you’ve beaten me to the punch. I thought you were meant to be gone last month.”

“Eh, the place didn’t quite work out for me,” she replies, stalking back to the kitchen where Jake can hear the sizzle of what smells like pancakes. “I’ve been down in DC this week with Steve while they were sorting everything out though. I’ve got another place lined up west of Gloversville, but I can’t move in until next week, and this is less hassle than a hotel.”

Jake wasn’t sure whether a hotel was less hassle than what appeared to be a major undercard fight between the Black Widow and a frying pan, if he was honest. The closer he got, he could see a stack of pancakes nestled in the oven, while another half-dozen or so sat on another plate to the side, blackened to the point where he wasn’t sure even Cheddar would have had them.

It had never occurred to him that Natasha Romanoff might not count cuisine among her skills, as he idly watches her curse under her breath and slide another burnt effort onto the side plate. Truth be told, it was quite entertaining as a spectator sport.

“Should I be alarmed that in the apartment fumigated only this week, I can smell smoke?” comes Steve’s voice from the door and Nat growls.

“Get lost, Rogers,” she barks back, and Steve rounds the corner into Jake’s line of sight with a true cat-meet-canary expression playing about his features, clearly delighted to be finding Nat wrestling with the cookware.

“Somebody’s having a stress-free time,” he quips, dropping the bag of what appears to be root vegetables on the counter. Jake takes a few steps back towards the communal living area, away from the breakfast bar, imminently fearing Nat might but that spatula to more creative use.

Instead, she slumps and hands it over wordlessly as Steve intercedes, swapping places with him as he paddles out more mixture into the pan and she starts unpacking several swedes and parsnips.

“One day,” she vows, a small, tired grin playing around her expression, “one day, I’ll not burn them.”

“You’ve been saying that since 2014,” Steve simply replies and Nat pulls a face at him. “Jake, it’s always a pleasure. What brings you here?”

“Dinner,” Jake replies. “But you appear to be one step ahead of me.”

“Well, the more the merrier,” Steve replies with a smile. “I’m sure we’ve got enough batter here to make plenty more and have enough for Yorkshire Pudding over the weekend. Pull up a seat, I’m sure Nat’ll get you a drink.”

“Given I need one myself,” Nat responded dryly. She roots around in the cupboard and emerges with three cans of cream soda, a bottle of vodka and what appeared to be a pack of glace cherries. Jake watched, bemused, as she unloaded them all on the countertop and produced a chunk of ice from the freezer.

“This is a little one I picked up in Chicago about twelve years ago,” she quips. “Two fingers over ice, top with the soda, let the cherry sit on top to stain it.”

Jake finds the nameless, relatively colourless concoction pressed into his hand a moment later. The scent of artificial vanilla wafts up, much the way it used to percolate around Coney Island. He inhales it, before Nat perches opposite him and clinks his glass.

“To old friends,” she says, peculiarly wistful. Jake catches Steve glance over but his expression is too fleeting to decipher.

“To old friends,” Jake repeats, before leaning back and taking a sip. He coughs and splutters a little as the bubbles go down the wrong way and Nat laughs, not unkindly, at him.

He spends the evening catching up in earnest with her – he’s never really spent sustained social situations with the Black Widow the way he has with Steve, and he discovers her to be a mischievous sort, underpinned with a wan melancholy. Sat next to each other, it’s easy to see why the pair of them – American, Russian, de-facto Avengers team leaders – have gravitated towards each other, gently teasing and occasionally ribald. He can sense the sadness beneath her more than he ever has before – more perhaps than he ever has with Steve. He wonders, over pancakes and an arrangement of flash-fried vegetables, if she’s come to terms yet with Barton or if it remains a sticking point between the pair.

But the company is good and the stories – snatches of downtime gone by, where one of them cracks the other’s expression wide open – are worth it. They touch on themselves as much as they do those who Jake has never met and who he never will; Sam Wilson figures in plenty of their scrapes, including one where the three of them had to apparently escape Marrakesh on an old tandem bicycle. Nat’s eyes are streaming with laughter at that one, and his almost are too.

When he gets back to his apartment, he sees he has a solitary unread message from Rosa. It’s short, to the point, and fills him with a mixture of feelings he again isn’t quite sure what to do with.

Heya. Sorry to miss.

Had date. Won’t be a second.

See you tmrw.

He falls asleep on the couch after he puts his phone down, a YouTube mix of synthwave cover versions slowly cycling around as he lulls himself off into a refreshingly dreamless night.

Jake struggles for some time to work out quite what to do about Charles’ bachelor party. His friend had outdone himself three years ago, and he was almost a hundred percent certain that he didn’t have the capabilities, patience, or particularly anal finer qualities to mount such an equal response with similar fervour.

At the end of the day, when he asks Charles if there is anyone in particular he would like to invite, he admits that outside of Jake, he was pretty short on guests. That in its own way worked out for Jake’s bank balance, not having to foot the bill for a dozen gourmet foodies or something along those lines, but it still felt like a rather sad state of affairs for someone who deserved much better.

Ultimately, he remembers an offhand comment that Charles made well over half-a-decade ago, that he had never been to Niagara Falls, and that there was a souffle restaurant there on the edge that used the spray to assist in creating the perfect rise, and Jake is eternally grateful that the word souffle is as inherently amusing and therefore memorable as it is to him.

They make a weekend out of it in late May, driving up on the Friday and dining at the restaurant – fortunately still here after all these years, not many were so lucky – on the Saturday. They see the sights, like a pair of old-fashioned tourists, and buy each other novelty shirts with waterfall-focused puns. Charles makes abstract reference to that episode of The Grand Tour where Richard Hammond stumbled up this observation tower on crutches, and Jake remembers Amy snorting against her professed will that she couldn’t stand Jeremy Clarkson when they’d watched it.

It’s one of the most relaxing weekends Jake can remember having for a long time but it also serves up a stark reminder just how little he’s done this with Charles since the world turned upside down. His friend had a long-term partner and a child to raise; he knew he’d been exceedingly fortunate for them all to survive as a unit, but it had meant that he’d gradually withdrawn from the rare handful of social events they’d thrown together in maudlin desperation during those initial six months and that, outside of their tight precinct bond, they’d just drifted to a point personally.

Jake vows to make more of an effort and so does Charles; they both know they’re a little bit at fault for the shift in their friendship, but they both understand why it’s happened. On the drive back down on the Sunday, they stop off in a small hamlet that’s pretty much boarded up except for one fresh donut shop, and they sit on the hood of his Ranger licking sugar off their fingertips as the early evening spring winds blow through the Mohawk Valley.

They’re set to go suit shopping the following weekend and Jake idly asks Charles how many bridesmaids Genevieve will be having.

“Three, including the maid of honour,” he replies, tying up his shoelaces before they head on down for a patrol shift. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you have any other groomsmen outside of me?” Jake enquires, and gets a shake of the head in response. “Why not? I’m sure Captain Holt would be happy to have been asked. Hell, even Rosa would have probably said yes.”

“Jake,” Charles replied with a slight strain in his voice. “Captain Holt officiated your wedding. Surely it would be a slap in the face to ask him to merely stand as a groomsmen at my own? He wouldn’t even be the best man.”

“OK, fair point, hadn’t thought of that,” Jake admitted, and he hadn’t. He had idly wondered why Holt wasn’t conducting the ceremony again, truth be told, but then again, Genevieve had no connection to the man. For him and Amy, he’d been a father figure as much as a commanding mentor; it had ultimately seemed a logical shout, given the circumstances. “What about Rosa?”

“What about me?” says Rosa, who just happens to pass by with a perp by the ear at that very moment. Charles looks slightly pained to be put on the spot and Jake, not seeing any serious impediment to the idea, speaks before his brain catches up.

“Would you be a groomsman if Charles asked?” he says and Charles squeaks. He turns and pats him on the shoulder. “See, buddy? Not that hard. Rosa’s not that scary.”

“I am fucking terrifying,” Rosa cuts across in monotone, but she looks thoughtful. “Sure, though. I’d be a groomsman.”

“Wait, you would?” Jake and Charles both ask at the same time, plainly surprised it had been that easy.

Rosa shrugs. “Yeah. I look dope in a tuxedo. I’d blow you both out of the water.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Charles concedes. “I tend to find my leg length is always spectacularly baggy.”

“Uh-huh,” Rosa responds, and Jake assumes she’s mulling over whether to withdraw her assent on the basis of that description. She tugs the grumbling criminal over the lock-up and prods him into the cell to half-hearted cries of abuse of power before she turns back to the two of them. “No black though. I don’t wear black to weddings.”

“I’m fairly certain you wore some black to my wedding,” Jake observes, slightly confused. Rosa’s expression softens around the edges.

“Black’s not too vogue anymore,” she amends and, well, he can fully concur with that.

He manages to convince Charles to work up the courage to ask Holt, because Jake is still a firm believe in equal numbers at the top end of the aisle if possible, and after the captain deploys his Paddington stare at Boyle for a full minute, he also agrees. Charles skips almost dazedly out of the office and promptly falls over a trashcan, landing on Jake’s rucksack and swearing loudly.

Come Saturday night, they’ve all been kitted out in tailored duds to put away until the big day. Charles is in traditional black, but per instructions, the rest of them are in deep shades of burgundy, deep and luxuriously warm. Jake spends at least a good five minutes just staring at himself in the dressing room. Even his own wedding suit didn’t fit this good.

He plucks an errant grey hair out of his temple as emerges to gushing satisfaction from Charles and the attendant. Holt is more reserved in his praise, but he too looks exceptionally debonair, every inch the black James Bond that Jake has occasionally harboured beliefs he once was.

Rosa’s statement about blowing them out of the water turns out to have merit too; her trousers cut closer at the ankle and the shoulders are more pointed than his own, but Jake unexpectedly feels his mouth go dry when she strides out, all killer poise and grace. Those thoughts he has parcelled off to the side with studious dedication the past few months – they’re still having dinner every few nights at his – knock on the front of his brain and he roughly shoves them back into the corner where they came from.

“Noice,” he quips and she rolls her eyes and punches him on the arm.

After they’ve paid, the four of them part ways. Jake heads down the subway and re-emerges at Prospect Park. In the hullabaloo of planning and preparation, he’d almost forgot to visit.

It’s been three years, three very long and gradually shifting years. Someday, Jake thinks as he idly fingers the ring below his shirt, he can’t tell if it’s got easier but not better, or better but not easier. He’s fairly sure it’s the latter; he doesn’t ever want it to be the former.

He tells her about Charles and his upcoming nuptials, and how he looks delicious in his burgundy tuxedo (him, not Charles, ew). He tells her how recently-minted Sgt Dillman has adopted her colour-coding operational systems for all paperwork in the precinct, admitting he’s never seen anything like it. He tells her that Holt has started wearing novelty ties on occasion and that is thinking of buying a new dog he intends to call Stilton.

He tells her that Rosa sits at the end of the couch every few nights, drinking his beer and roundly telling him that there is a limit to how many times you can suggest Die Hard. He avoids the further details of what creeps up around him when she barges open the door and walks through.

He wonders if he’ll be avoiding them for a long time. He’s said nothing about the near… expectation of their routine now. Nor has she. If she’s figured, it’s hidden behind that trademark Diaz poker-face.

He tells Amy he loves her and makes a slow walk back to his apartment, looping through the same four songs by The Horrible Crowes on his iPod.

Before he knows it, Independence Day has rolled around again and – perhaps not appreciating the desecration of his sacred invitation with glittery green ink two years ago – Steve extends his invitation this time around in person, by knocking on his door.

It’s one of his and Rosa’s takeout nights, the patatas bravas long since polished off and the pair of them midway through the live-action remake of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, playing a drinking game every time Glenn Close is sporting an outfit to make the eyes water, and he offers her a surprised look when there are three sharp raps from the hallway.

She raises an eyebrow. “It’s your apartment,” she points out when the knocks come again a moment later and he bemusedly hauls himself off the couch to go find out whoever has the temerity to do so at – he glances at his watch – quarter-to-eleven in the evening. Maybe he has his television on way too high or perhaps he had guffawed louder than intended when Rosa had accidentally stuck her hand in the meatballs.

Hey, maybe Rosa had put out a hit on him via text when he wasn’t looking. Stranger things had happened.

But in the end, it’s Steve, clad in his running gear, not even vaguely out of breath despite the significant sweat patches, and Jake just marvels again at what a beautiful human specimen he is. It’s about neck-and-neck between that and Steve as a person, which should tell him just how insanely at the peak of physical perfection the man is.

“Sorry it’s late,” the former Captain America says, breaking him away from his reverie, “but are you free Sunday?”

“I’m fairly certain I’m working early doors,” Jake replies, before his mind catches up with what Sunday actually is. “Oh, are you doing something this year?”

It goes unspoken that the only reason Steve didn’t do something last year was because he in Vilnius, attempting to work out just who Clint Barton had murdered this time. From the couch, Rosa shouts a greeting through.

“Hey,” Steve calls back before refocusing on Jake. “Yeah, sort of. How early will you finish?”

“About three, if everything goes to plan,” Jake reflects. “Up on the roof again?”

Steve shakes his head. “Up north. You know how to get to Kaaterskill Falls?”

Jake was fairly certain he did. He’d never been, but he’d passed a few signs on the way up towards Albany the other week with Charles. “What, are we hiking?”

“Only a little,” Steve admits. “We just needed something a little more secluded this year. Let me know if you can make it.” He looks past into the apartment, where his dinner companion is out of sight. “Ask Rosa, if you want. There’s only going to be a few of us.”

So, a few days later, Jake – and Rosa, who manages to swap out shifts so she can make the trek up too, given that it’s not everyday you get an invitation from Captain America – motor up the I-87 in his Ranger, for the two-hour drive north. They’re the only ones from the precinct; though Jake had asked Holt if he had been invited, the captain had revealed that he had been forced to gracefully turn down the offer this time.

They spend most of the time good-naturedly bickering about his song choices - "You can't play the Vengaboys ten times in a row and not expect me to refrain from twisting your ear," she tells him as he rubs the Chinese burn on the offending appendage - and that tendril of something quiet and content curls low in his chest once again.

They bump into Jim Morita at the gas station, albeit not with honey soy ribs this time, and the two of them tandem up when they turn off at Saugerties, trailing their way up to the falls. When they get there, Jake spots Steve, Nat and Colonel Rhodes alongside – to his surprise – a large Hummer with the Stark Industries logo attached to the side, which has a short-haired blonde woman perched on the hood.

“Jim, Jake, Rosa,” Steve says as they pile out respectively. “Glad you could make it.” The roar of the nearby falls almost drowns him out; there’d been a stormy downpour the night before and the water must be rapid. He indicates to the unknown woman. “I don’t believe you’ve met Carol Danvers before.”

“I don’t believe I have,” Jim Morita says, completely nonplussed, which is just as well because Jake has just but another name to the face and twigged that it’s one of the handful of new Avengers under Nat, and he’s slightly hyperventilating.

“Cool,” Rosa says, also apparently unruffled. “Hi.”

“Hi yourself,” Carol Danvers replies dryly. Her countenance screams cool in a different way, almost like she’d somehow preserved the aura of the nineties punk scene in aura form. Jake idly wonders if she’s ever been a band, before she was apparently plucked from obscurity to become an Avenger.

He’s not really seen what she can do in action on the brief snippets of the news, so he’s left a little slack-jawed when Carol jumps off the hood and single-handedly lifts the Hummer with one hand.

“Ow!” says a muffled voice from inside the Hummer that sounds like Bruce Banner and, ohmigod, is this Steve’s birthday wish, Jake muses, to have a hot woman through the Hulk over a waterfall in a car? It sounds ludicrous but he did used to date some pretty weird guys and gals back in the day.

“This everyone?” Carol Danvers asks Steve and he nods with the sort of military precision he can never seem to shake.

“That’s everyone,” he affirms. “We’ll see you up there.”

“Sweet,” says Carol Danvers and then she’s taken off like a literal human rocket, eyes glowing, flared trousers flaring and a Hummer in one hand like it weighs nothing more than a child’s novelty balloon.

“Shit,” Rosa says, in lieu of any other accurate expression, and Colonel Rhodes grins.

“Yeah, it gets like that,” he says with a note of fondness. Jake realises that he’s wearing the lower half of his War Machine suit, but not the top, shorn of all the heavy artillery that typically accompanies the man. He looks down at his own walking boots, barely worn, and hopes that the journey isn’t too far.

It’s about three miles in total, and Jake takes a surprisingly light backpack from the back of Jim Morita’s sedan while Steve and Nat lug a couple of large cool-boxes. Rosa somehow ends up carrying nothing, but she falls into an animated discussion with Colonel Rhodes as Jake takes the chance to find out a little more about Jim Morita.

He hadn’t even really thought too much about how much the education system might have change, but after the initial shock, it appeared to have rallied strongly. Jim Morita was principal of Midtown Technology, and they’d effectively amalgamated three more schools into their remit, teachers and students, to save on rising costs. He’d kept his spot, but admitted he was intending to take a sabbatical year shortly, to go visit some distant relatives in Korea and explore the Great Wall of China.

They eventually make it to a high clearing, roughly the size of a baseball diamond, caught under the canopy of towering trees, with a few jagged rock formations jutting out of the ground here and there. Carol Danvers and the Hummer are there, and the sound of movement can be heard clattering around inside the vehicle.

“Right,” Steve said, setting down his load and turning to his assembled guests. “As I’m sure you’ve all figured out, we’re here to camp. I felt like something a little old-school this year, so thank you all for coming. I know,” he said holding up a hand before Jake could interject, “that you’ll have work tomorrow, and I’ll ensure that those of you who need to get off can do so in good time.”

He pauses. “But we’re also here because my apartment is really too small for Bruce.”

“For Bruce?” Jake blinked.

“For me,” Bruce Banner confirmed as he emerged from the large sliding doors of the Hummer, dressed in what appeared to be corduroy and, holy cow, it’s the actual incredible Hulk.

Except it’s not the Hulk, as he’s wearing a shirt and glasses, his temples are greying and he has a five o’clock shadow and loafers and, holy cow, it’s actually Bruce Banner and the incredible Hulk.

“Huh,” Jim Morita says. “You’ve buttoned up your shirt wrong.

“Oh, goddamnit,” mutters Bruce Banner and huge green hands set around adjusting a shirt that, if not quite tent-sized in itself, would certainly function as an effective sleeping bag for Jake. The more he looks, he realises that the Hulk looks smaller than he ever did on television, and he’s fairly certain that’s not just the fact he’s wearing clothes.

Bruce-Hulk finishes rearranging his garments and waves. “I don’t quite fit too easily through the doors of Steve’s place anymore,” he sheepishly admits. “I can’t exactly ask everyone to redecorate on my behalf.”

“No, yeah, that would be hella expensive,” Jake replies, still slightly dizzy from the fact the Hulk is wearing loafers, of all things. “Is this a new thing?” He hadn’t seen Bruce in a long time, so he had absolutely no idea when this had become presumably the norm.

“Pretty much,” Bruce-Hulk shrugs. “I mean, it’s definitely the future. I’m not Bruce Banner anymore, and I’m not the Hulk anymore. I’m both.”

“I call him Professor Hulk,” Nat supplies helpfully, “despite the fact he repeatedly tells me he’s not a professor. Doctor Hulk just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“She calls me that only when she’s being particularly obstinate,” Bruce counters dryly. “Bruce is still just fine.”

“Huh,” Jim Morita says again. “I’d have packed more marshmallows if I’d known.”

It turns out the backpack does indeed include marshmallows and graham crackers – s’mores for the win, Jake thinks – and they gather the kindling pretty quickly. Carol Danvers shoots what appears to be a burst of concentrated heat out of her hand that sets it aflame, and Steve makes sure they have enough rocks to line the pit and prevent a wildfire out in rural New York.

The ground is still sodden and damp enough from the previous night’s rainfall that Jake does not think it will be a problem though. Nat produces half-a-dozen camping chairs from the Hummer which are duly passed around, while Steve sits cross-legged on the ground and Bruce-Hulk perches on a nearby rock formation, having now added an oversized hoodie to his attire.

It’s a lovely evening – high banks of cloud giving way to the evening summer sun, dappled through the trees and the roar of the fire warming them from the front. Jake is glad he’d had the foresight to tie a jumper around his waist before they set off walking and he wears it for most of the night.

He and Rosa are the first to head out, though, early shifts beckoning the following Monday too, and they bid their farewells after a good few hours of roasting sweets over the burning wood, the crackle fading into the sounds of the forest behind them as they make their way back down. It takes less time, the trip back downhill and the route familiarised the second time around.

It’s late when they’re on the road, Boom Boom Boom Boom lodged back on repeat to surprisingly little resistance, and as they approach the city limits, Jake can see her eyelids flickering, and tells her she can have the couch. She grunts, half-asleep in the Ranger’s passenger seat, in what he assumes is an approximation of a thank you.

The street lights play through her curls as they pass and he mentally slaps down the urge to reach across and run his fingers through them, to see if they’re as soft as they look like they are. They stumble through the door together, marshmallowed out, and she’s snoring away to herself, on top of the doilies, before he’s even got his boots off.

He’s not sure what it is he feels for her, nor is he sure when those lines became blurred in his mind. He just knows that they undoubtedly have.

He’s not blind; he will readily admit that, objectively, Rosa is a very attractive woman, strikingly so. She carries herself with a confidence that she knows it too, that feeds into it. He’s known she’s beautiful since pretty much the first time they met in a class where he’d stumbled in hungover, stepped on her foot and almost had his wrist broken.

But any interest Jake might have had in beyond the platonic sense had gradually dissipated throughout those training years. The hours were long, the studies were hard, and he had ruined his fair share of friendships at high school through casual hookups he didn’t have the energy to sustain. He saw absolutely no point even attempting to cross those boundaries – and besides, Rosa had displayed absolutely zero interest in anything of the sort herself.

Instead, they’d shared – or rather, he’d shared and she had darkly laughed at him with the occasional revelation of her own – weird sex stories, anecdotes of failed dates, who they might try their luck with next. Throw together a bunch of hormone-addled twenty-somethings into one large roof and things were bound to happen between some of them.

But he’d never had any further inclinations to get to know her in the, ahem, biblical sense. It had come up only once, in conversation before Holt had arrived at the Nine-Nine, when Charles had still been hung up on her, and he had fake-nonchalantly asked him in the breakroom while Terry was extolling the virtues of yogurt to Amy, whether he and Rosa had ever dated.

Jake had blinked twice, laughed and said something along the lines of valuing his balls above most other things. It had seemed to satisfy Charles as an answer, and Jake hadn’t given it any great thought since.

But as he stands in the dressing room at the hotel in Manhattan where Charles is set to be married in a small but fittingly gourmet ceremony, adjusting the cut of his burgundy jacket, he’d forced his mind to not focus too much on his own wedding and visions of Amy, lest he tear up when he does not want to, and it has ultimately alighted on Rosa once again.

Because Jake feels ready to admit to himself that he no longer thinks of Detective Rosa Diaz as simply his platonic best friend. There’s a different emotional tenor to his connection with her now. He’s sure Holt would have some accurate Latin word to describe the feeling, because it isn’t quite the adoration he had for his late wife.

But it’s certainly more than just a simple desire to see her crack a grin at one of his puns or hope that he’s got her coffee order for the day right when he drops by to pick them up on the way in. It’s certainly more than just being content to spend the evenings sprawled out at opposite ends of his couch, watching dumb thriller shows and Studio Ghibli.

She’s still a mystery half the time, but he feels he’s got the other half worked out, and it’s one that he finds himself missing on the evenings where she’s not showing up at his door with takeout. They do it every three days now, like clockwork, again with neither of them having said a word about it.

Jake knows that he loves Rosa. He doesn’t know if he loves-her loves her. In a way, that scares him on multiple levels.

It’s been three years, and he’s not seen anybody. He’s not wanted to see anybody; while the idea of dating has occasionally crossed his mind, he’s always talked himself out of it for one reason or another.

It’s too soon. It’s not right. I don’t want to do that to her memory.

Except he’s gradually come to realise that he’s filled the more domestic half of the relationship equation already in a way that has snuck up on him. Sure, him and Rosa aren’t going out for walks in the park, or to the movies, or anything else that he’d have constituted as old-fashioned date activity, but they’ve settled into a comfortable rhythm of their own not too dissimilar to a couple.

It’s different to the rhythms he shared with Amy, and perhaps that’s why he wonders that it has taken him by surprise. But he’s cognisant that him and Rosa have been doing this for almost seven months now, and he’s not sure, with his head feeling a little bit fuzzy every time she’s perched on the comforter, legs tucked up, how long it can go on like this.

A sharp rap on the hotel room door lets him know that he has likely dallied too long, and he finds Holt waiting outside. Unlike Jake, the captain is not staying the night at the venue, but still looks immaculately crisp in his matching getup.

“Ready, Perlata?” he says. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake sees Rosa emerge from her own room and his heart gives a double beat. She turns and nods at them both.

“Locked and loaded, captain,” he replies after a beat. “Let’s groomsman the hell out of this.”

He separates from the pair when they reach the reception hall, zoning his focus in entirely on Charles for the next hour as he soothes his friend’s frazzled nerves and the handful of guests begin to arrive.

But then the music starts, and Genevieve, likely beautiful in her flowing white gown, comes down the aisle, and Jake wrenches his eyes away, an odd twist in his gut.

He feels a hand slip into his and he looks down, surprised, at where Rosa, nails sharply crimson, is rubbing circles into his palm. It’s both immensely soothing and undoubtedly not helping in different ways, but he glances up to look at her staring back at him.

He sits next to Rosa almost daily, whether at work, in the car or in his apartment, but he doesn’t think he’s seen her features so up-close since the night she’d talked about her mother. Her gaze is steady, inquiring, comforting – but beneath the surface, there’s something darker, stormier, more unknowable.

He swallows past his dry throat and squeezes her grip in return. Her features soften further, but the thunder behind her pupils does not abate.

They keep holding hands until Genevieve reaches the front, releasing the other as Charles beams at his wife-to-be, his son bearing the rings on a purple pillow and the officiant begins to talk.

It’s the fifth song of the night – Roxy Music, always a favourite of Charles’ – when Holt turns to Rosa and asks if she would like to dance.

Both her and Jake start, before she glances at him, a curiously fleeting expression briefly passing over her as he returns her gaze with a touch of surprise.

“Sure,” she says after a moment, still staring at Jake before she drags her expression back to Holt. “Lead on.”

Holt holds out an arm and she takes it, the pair vanishing into the fairy-light encrusted murk of the dancefloor. There’s a glitterball above, and maybe only six or seven other couples out there. It’s a small party on the whole, no more than thirty-five people including the DJ and the officiant, who is currently perched at the far end of the bar nursing what appears to be a Long Island Iced Tea.

Jake watches them go, then turns back to his own drink. He’s not danced yet, a rarity at weddings, where he has in years gone by never been afraid to execute his solo funky chicken and, in his maturity, escort any number of older women in a slow waltz around the fringes. But he’s not been particularly feeling it tonight, lost in thought.

He doesn’t hear the song end but he does feel Rosa take up her seat next to him at the bar again, slightly flushed. She’s undone the dark bowtie – Jake’s own was stuffed in his trouser pocket not too long ago – and she shrugs off the jacket, slinging it over the back of her high stool.

“Where’s Holt?” he asks, not spotting where the captain has got to. Rosa wordlessly points off to the right of the dancefloor, where Holt appears to be escorting Genevieve’s mother out, as the strains of Curtis Mayfield billow out of the speakers.

The two sit in silence, nursing their beers. Jake draws his glance to the condensation dripping down the side of the bottle from the neck, dribbling down between his fingers. He takes another swig and avoids looking at Rosa, who is glancing askew at him out of the side of her eye.

If he’s being honest, there’s two people he’d like to dance with right now. One isn’t here, and the other is sat right next to him, but he’s got the sense – a premonition, an inkling, call it what you will – that if he opens his mouth and asks, it may be crossing an invisible line.

Of course, before he can talk himself in or out of whatever it is he’s trying to convince himself to do or not do, Rosa beats him to the punch.

“Hey,” she says, punching him on the shoulder. “Wanna dance too?”

He looks at her, and she rolls her eyes. “Geez, no need to look like a deer in fucking headlights, Peralta.”

Jake swallows and stands, setting his bottle back down at the bar and offering an outstretched hand. A brief look of surprise definitely flashes across Rosa’s features this time but it’s almost too quick to register before she’s deposited her own drink and taken his palm.

It’s the same one that she was holding, earlier, making sure that he wasn’t going to falter at the crucial moment. She’d done it again, beneath the table just before he’d made his particularly excellent best man speech, if he does say so himself, and he’d found it just as steadying then, a surprisingly soft presence grounding him in the moment.

He lets her lead him out onto the dancefloor as the song shifts from saxophones into blissed-out synthwave vibes. Jake doesn’t know the artist but he knows the song – There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – and it fills him with a throb of emotion again.

Rosa guides his hand to her shoulder and the other to the edge of her waist, held loosely against the band of her trousers, before replicating the same grip on him. It feels terrifyingly intimate and, he’s not afraid to admit, quietly exhilarating.

Dancing with Amy always meant getting squashed toes but his partner here trained for three years in ballet and her sense of rhythm is never in doubt. This time Jake is the novice in this move but Rosa has the patience for him to make the first move, to show where he’s comfortable. He takes a few steps to the left as the lyrics slowly unwind and she follows, unhesitant, sure-footed.

It’s not a melody or a beat that lends itself to anything particularly extravagant and that suits him fine. It apparently suits her too, the pair of them content to shuffle and sway around the edge of the dancefloor, Jake keeping his gaze just over her shoulder, behind her mess of dark curls, the twinkle of the lights playing in small spots across his vision.

Eventually, her own gaze becomes too much to bear and he snaps his attention back to her. She’s got a fine strip of eyeliner, ever so slightly smudged, the same colour as her trousers and her lipstick is only a shade darker. He darts his attention down ever so briefly and back up to lock eyes with her, wondering if she spotted.

She doesn’t miss much, Rosa Diaz, so it’s no surprise that her pupils give just enough away to say that she can read him like a pop-up book, pictures and all. They’re engorged, blown wide and roiling in a way that is utterly magnetic, the slightest hint of hesitation percolating within them.

He’s not sure if one of them moves first or if they just happen to lean in at the same time, but his eyes close and he feels the firm press of her lips on his. She tastes like beer and dark chocolate, and it’s confusing, conflicting, intoxicating, all rolled into a single gesture.

It’s particularly chaste and only a moment before they separate, leaving Jake with a maelstrom of different nerves and feelings firing off.

He refocuses on Rosa, and he can see the questions playing out in her dark eyes, her expression somewhere between unguarded and boarded up.

“Good?” she asks, quietly, her hand still held loosely around his midriff and the other resting firmly on his shoulder.

His brain screams at him, several different voices jockeying for position as he attempts to keep his expression firmly in place. He fails.

“I don’t know,” he admits, before he adds, “but I know I’m not bad.”

And he’s not. He’s many things right now, that mix of emotions waring with each other, but he is certainly not bad.

“I’m sorry,” he says on reflex and she shakes her head minutely.

“Don’t be,” she responds and he feels her grip tighten on his shirt. “Don’t be.”

He makes a half-strangled noise in the back of his throat. “It’s not you, it’s definitely not you.”

“I know.” They keep swaying and she drifts her hand down from his shoulder to his forearm. “You’re not subtle.”

Jake silently balks. “Well, you’re quicker on the draw than me.”

She mmmms in response. “That’s a given.”

They’re silent for another few minutes, as the song slowly winds down. He glances away, down to where his lower hand sits on the cream fabric of her shirt, slightly starched and spilling over the edge of her waistband.

“Can we just… stay like this for now?” he asks and he’s happy to hear that he keeps his voice level.

She looks at him for a beat and nods. Her expression opens up a little more and he takes the invitation to steady himself with a firmer grip. She does the same.

They sway for another half-hour, oblivious as the night wears on, unnoticed by friends, colleagues and strangers alike. They’re not quite the last to head on up, and he loosely encircles her wrist with his forefinger and thumb until they part, unspoken, in the hallway between their rooms. He turns and glances from the entrance to his room as she swipes her card and heads in; he catches a last glimpse of her jacket before the door swings shut.

The week after, Rosa drops him a text asking if he’s happy with Polish that evening for dinner. It’s the first message he’s got from her since the wedding; she’d be gone early the following morning, had landed with the luck of the draw on an earlier shift. Jake had the day off, had waved off Charles, Genevive and Nikolaj for the honeymoon trip to Calgary of all places, before dropping by to visit his mom.

He’d briefly seen Rosa in the following two days, kept on split shifts and only briefly crossing paths in the main bullpen on their way to different cases. She’s had a particularly nasty serial mugger to deal with – who she does so in typical Diaz fashion – and he’s been tracking down a spate of incidents that appear to be electrical sabotage on the subway.

So his mind has been kept busy enough to not dwell too much on the fact that he had kissed his best friend until he sees her name light up on his phone.

He promptly freaks out more than he expected to – but then again, perhaps exactly as much as he expected to – and before he realises he’s done it, his hands have typed a reply saying that he has plans with Steve.

Cursing himself quickly, he follows up with an addendum asking if she’d be happy to postpone until the following day. It’s a twenty-four-hour stay of execution for him to try and get his shit together inside his headspace.

She comes back pretty quickly with a one-word response – cool – and Jake breathes a sigh of relief. Of course, he realises at this point that, having been invited to his birthday party in the summer, Rosa may now have the former Captain America’s number and could conceivably figure out his face-saving ruse as bullshit, so inside a minute, he finds himself banging on Steve’s door.

He answers after a moment, wearing a Jets top that he fills out to the maximum threshold without the need for shoulder pads and looks politely confused.

“Jake?” he asks. “You alright? We’re not having dinner tonight, are we?”

“Actually,” Jake responds. “I’m hoping we would. Also, I want to ask for your advice. Specifically, girl advice.”

Steve stares, nonplussed at him for almost a whole minute, before he responds. “…girl advice.”

“Yup,” Jake replies, popping the word on the last letter. “You’ve gotta have some words to help a guy out, right?”

“Jake,” Steve begins, in very much the tone of voice of a patient man who may have been asked this before, “I’m not exactly Brooklyn’s foremost expert on love. Heartbreak, maybe, but not really the rest of it.”

That’s a pretty sobering thought, but he’s been shepherded to Steve’s dinner table before he can digest it. The smell of cream and herbs wafts through the apartment, the scent of roasting chicken mingled in somewhere. His host has a tea towel slung over his shoulder and he checks on a bubbling pan before he turns back to Jake.

“Go on then,” he says. “I’ll help however I can.”

And so Jake tries to best explain his situation. He explains the gradual shift of his emotions, the slowly awakened awareness over the past year, the changes in his and Rosa’s tempo together, the fact that he finds it weird if he doesn’t see her on the far end of the couch every other night these days.

He tells him about the wedding, about holding hands and swaying slowly, about one kiss and how it set off fireworks and alarm bells and the whole Salvation Army brass band behind his eyes and how he feels that any opportunity to move on into a relationship would be tantamount to desecrating Amy’s memory.

Steve holds his hand up at the last point, in part to wrestle some vegetables off a chopping board and to grab the chicken out of the oven, but mostly to make an interjection.

“Are you sure it’s a relationship Rosa wants?” he asks and, wow, Jake hadn’t even considered that far ahead. Did she? He didn’t actually have any tangibly solid proof as to why she kissed him, though he was pretty certain it was a sign of interest. There was no reason for it to be a declaration of gratitude on her end; she wasn’t the one who had need propping up throughout the whole ceremony.

Steve interrupts his thoughts by slipping a steaming bowl of creamy chicken and roasted vegetables in front of him and handing him a glass of white wine to go with it. Jake takes one look and drains half of it in a single gulp, earning a frown from his host.

“No refills for you if you’re going to skull it like soda,” he reprimands him and Jake has the grace to feel abashed, because Captain America doesn’t tell you off every day.

“I don’t know,” he admits as he spears a piece of asparagus and bites the head off it. Amy would be so proud that he was eating his greens without complaint. “I guess…”

Steve sets his fork down momentarily. “Do you think you love Rosa?”

Jake blinks. “Kinda. Sorta. Definitely in some way.”

“Then that’s part of your answer,” said Steve, returning to his chicken. “You need to tie down your own feelings first before you ask for hers. If you think you love her, then you need to be on the same page. You don’t have to blurt it out,” he adds, raising his knife as Jake opens his mouth to speak again. “But you do need to be on the same page, that this isn’t just something meaningless to her, particularly if it’s not for you.”

Jake is silent for a moment before speaking again. “It’s the first time I’ve kissed someone since… y’know.”

Steve grimaces – Jake has never asked him just how close he came that day to stopping Thanos, but he wonders how much of a burden it is that sits on his shoulders. He hurries to continue.

“I just laid awake afterwards,” he admits. “Thinking about what Amy would say. It’s… I dunno, I can’t tell if it’s better or it’s worse that it’s someone she knew and respected the hell out of too.”

Steve glances at him, and it’s that look of tired but earnest empathy. “If your Amy was even half as good as I hear she was, Jake, then I feel I can say that she would only want you to be happy. And if it’s Rosa that makes you feel happy, then she’d be over the moon for you.”

Jake realises he’s right. He’s known for so long that Amy would not want him to become a sober shadow of his former self, a virtual monk of self-sacrificial existence. She’d want him to live his life to the full.

He’d just felt that to do so was to be disloyal to her, but now he’s starting to realise that he would be just as culpable if he simply remained alone his whole life from now.

It strikes him hot, as a realisation, and he bursts into unexpectedly noisy tears.

Steve clearly didn’t expect to conjure that reaction, but having dealt with a crying Jake before, he proves well-practiced enough in what to do.

When he’s calmed down enough and babbled at least three apologies for letting what was going to be a lovely dinner go cold, Steve phones for a Nepalese and cleans the plates into the bin, insistent that it’s quite alright and the sauce wasn’t up to scratch for his usual standards.

He pulls out a dusty old chessboard while they’re waiting and proceeds to trounce him in nine moves, which oddly makes Jake feel better about himself, to know that at least he doesn’t have Captain America’s tactical smarts.

His resolve strengthened, he returns to his apartment late that evening, filled with curry and wine, and fires off a quick message to Rosa saying that he’ll wait for her after their shifts finish tomorrow. He gets a thumbs-up emoji in response and falls asleep to the sound of the early October rain drifting across the rooftops.

It’s a busy day, ultimately – a bust water main proves havoc out towards the edge of the East River, and for once, it results in the rare crosstown traffic holdup that requires some extra muscle. Jake and Rosa are both dispatched separately and are drenched by the downpour and the main itself respectively.

They lug themselves back to the precinct, sopping wet, encounter each other in the elevator and burst out laughing. Jake’s hair is plastered to his head and Rosa’s curls have frizzed up tufts or simply withered and died, clinging like vines to the hi-visibility jacket she’s yet to shirk off.

Holt takes one look at them, then studies the clock and tells them they can both beat a retreat if they want to. Jake is meant to be off in ten minutes anyway, but Rosa was supposed to have another hour and forty on the clock. Their captain tells them they can make it up later in the month when they don’t look like they’ve been for a dip in the Hudson.

Rosa says she’ll go back to hers first to dry off but Jake, in a gesture that’s bolder than he actually feels right now, holds her by the shoulder before she can shoot off at the entrance to the parking garage.

“Just change at mine,” he says. When she rises an eyebrow, he shuffles slightly. “You’re going to be coming over anyway, might as well save the hassle of two trips.”

She concurs with a nod and follows him down to the Ranger. (It’s a wonder that it fits down here in the garage.) She came in on her bike that day, and snags something out from underneath the seat that Jake doesn’t see before she slides herself into the passenger with a particularly disgusting squelching noise.

He’s no better, puddles forming under the pedals, and he’s inordinately glad when they turned the corner onto his street a while later. The rain is still crashing down outside, the light scatters of a few nights ago well on their way to brewing into a full-blown premature winter storm. The temperatures feel utterly frigid, as he and Rosa dash up the porch stairs and he wonders how long it will be before it turns to hail.

They trail water all the way to his apartment door and Jake hopes that it’s not any more than what will dry out of its own accord across the rest of the day. He shepherds Rosa in first and latches the door behind him, flicking the heating up to full.

Rosa’s stood there, shrugging off her leather jacket and holding it, slowly dripping into the carpet. “Anywhere I can put this?” she asks. “I’m guessing you don’t want me to throw it on the couch today.”

“That would be appreciated,” Jake acknowledges and directs her to hang it on the backdoor hook in the bathroom. “You can take the shower first, I’ll find you some dry things.”

She grunts her thanks and stomps away down the hall while he ducks into his bedroom and opens up his drawers. A few months ago, he’d spent the weekend boxing up Amy’s clothing and put it into a storage locker. He’d no desire to throw it away, but he’d gradually accepted that he had no reason to keep the majority of her clothes around the place either.

He hears the faucet turn on and the water start running, as he grabs one of the larger bathsheets and knocks on the door. It cracks open and Rosa’s arm snakes around, taking the towel along with the oversized sweats and the shirt emblazoned with the Born to Run album cover, only it’s Born to Add and it has the Cookie Monster playing Clarence Clemons’ saxophone on it.

She emerges fifteen minutes later, by which point he’s stripped off his own sopping clothes and dropped them straight into the washing machine drum. He’s slipped on his dressing gown to preserve his modesty for the moment, and he tries to avoid getting soaked again by Rosa’s jeans, which honest-to-god need to be wrung out over the sink, they have that much residual liquid in them.

He’s in and out in a flash, just enough to warm himself up before he shrugs on his own sweats, paired with a Serve and Protect tee, and finds her waiting on the couch, two beers and a flyer for a Polish place three blocks over on the table.

“Thanks,” he says, dropping down at the far end with a thump.

“No problem,” she replies, putting her phone down on the coffee table and taking a swig from her bottle. She’s pulled her hair back into a ponytail and he notes that it’s a rare look, one that suits her.

They’re silent for a few minutes, nothing but the sound of the rain beating a staccato rhythm on the roads outside and the clank of the radiator as it gets itself up to full-force. He turns his head after a point and profiles her. She does the same a moment later and their eyes meet in the middle.

“I think we need to talk,” Jake says, in lieu of anything else that really fits, and his heartbeat has sped up a little.

Rosa nods, tilting herself slightly to the left, further into the back of the couch. “Sure.”

Jake swallows and sets his bottle down. “I think we need to talk about the wedding.”

Rosa nods again. “Sure. Go on.”

Jake blinks. “Is there anything you’d like to say first?”

She shifts a little bit more, but keeps her gaze steady. “Not really.”

“Right.” He had hoped that she might have provided some further insight, but he shouldn’t be too surprised he’d have to broach the matter himself to begin with. “Well, the dance. I think I owe you an explanation why I kissed you.”

“We kissed each other,” she interrupts.

“Yes, well, I can’t give you your own explanation,” he points out, picking his beer back up so he had something to do with his hands, which had gone frustratingly clammy. “But, yes, the kiss.”

He drums his fingers and glances over to the mantlepiece, where his wedding portrait stands. Remember Steve’s words, it helps him further contextualise his thoughts.

“I didn’t know then how I felt,” he begins again. “But I think I do now, Rosa. Last weekend was… I’m not going to say out of the blue, because I won’t lie, I’ve thought about whatever…” he gestures between them, “this is for a while now. But I also don’t think I expected it then and there.”

He lets out a nervous chuckle and glances back at the picture. The chain with Amy’s ring on it is coiled next to it, placed there when he got in. He sees Rosa’s gaze drawn to the same spot, and she unexpectedly speaks.

“I miss her too,” she admits, voice pitched quiet. “I miss her stupid optimism, her sunny binders, her happy-go-lucky stickler attitude.” She pauses. “I missed how happy she made you.”

He turns back to fully face her at that. Rosa chews her lip, and Jake suddenly realises that maybe he’s not the only one sat here who’s nervous, that the woman across from him isn’t as unflappably cool on this as he thought she would be.

“I missed you,” she says. “I missed the old Jake, the one who cracked dumb and played pranks and always got gooey-eyed whenever they mentioned MacGruber on Saturday Night Live.”

“Rosa…” He’s quietly speechless. She doesn’t bare her soul very often and he knows he’s one of a very privileged few who get to see it at all. But this is different; this is him, and her, and Amy they’re talking about.

“So I started coming round,” she continues. “You used to light up like the old days whenever you were on the couch with a beer and crap takeout. It’s like you flipped a switch.”

“Hey, not all the takeout has been crap,”  he weakly protests, still too shocked to really offer anything constructive.

“And it felt good,” Rosa adds, almost like she could no longer hear him, like she couldn’t stop the words that were coming. “I’ve not felt good like that in… god, so long. I don’t think I’d realised I was that lonely until I was coming here and then I just didn’t want to stop.”

She looks at him again, for the first time since she began talking. “And you didn’t seem to mind. You didn’t seem to want me to stop.”

“I didn’t,” Jake quickly replies. “I just didn’t know if you’d hadn’t realised, or you did and you just didn’t care you were wasting your nights here.”

“They were never wasted nights,” Rosa replies promptly. She lapses into silence, looks away and picks up her own beer, taking a determined sip.

Jake sits, soaking in the revelations. He takes his own drink and sets the bottle back down, focus regathered, his heart still beating a double-snare rhythm against his ribcage.

“Why did you kiss me?” he asks, to the point. “At the wedding?” When Rosa stays silent for a minute, he picks up his own threads and expounds. “I’ve been thinking about how… domestic this has all been since the start of summer now. You’re here nearly every other night.” He pauses again. “I think we need to know where we stand.”

Rosa swings back her eyes to him. Even further away than the last time he stared deeply into them, Jake can still catch fragments of the same storminess brewing there.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she finally replies. “I don’t know if I can give it to you. But…” She flicks her fingernail against the top of the bottle, looks away again, “I don’t think I can say you’re just my friend anymore, Jake.”

It’s like a bolt of lightning; the one Jake had wondered on for many nights across many months now, his mind no longer able to boot his feelings into a filing cabinet and leave them there.

“I don’t know what you want from me either,” he admits, and she looks back at him, her expression questioning and tempered with an edge of vulnerability. He imagines his face shares the same look. “And I don’t know if I can give it to you too. But, I don’t think you’re just my friend anymore as well, Rosa.”

They stare at each other, eyes locked, emotions as bared as they ever got with each other. The sound of the rain, intensifying to a crescendo beyond the darkening windows and sky beyond it, matches Jake’s heartbeat.

He sets his bottle down. “The other night, I stopped because I didn’t know what page we were on and because I didn’t know if it was fair to Amy,” he begins again. Rosa’s gaze doesn’t waver from him.

“But I think I’ve finally come to realise that she wouldn’t want me to dwell on her memory and her memory alone,” he adds after a beat. “And I think that I know we’re of a similar mind.”

Rosa stares at him, her features still rendered bare. After a moment, she sets her beer down on the table. Jake does the same.

“I think,” he begins, as steady as he can, “that I would quite like to kiss you now.”

“Cool,” Rosa says, her voice ever so slightly wavering. “Me too.”

And then they meet in the middle of the couch, leaning forward slowly at the same time until they’re both kneeling and their lips come together. Unlike the first time, Jake allows himself to sink further into this one, one hand coming up automatically to steady himself on her shoulder, the other atop the back of the couch. Rosa repeats the gesture with his other shoulder and cradles his head with her free hand, far tenderer than he would have expected.

She tastes like beer and dark chocolate again, but there’s something else there, a spicier edge of something wild that lingers heavily, almost like burnt-black fire. He doesn’t press much further than relative chasteness and he’s oddly relieved that she doesn’t either, exploring the contours of how they meld together without slipping tongue beyond teeth.

They break apart after a minute for breath and then Rosa guides him back in, a little hungrier, a little more insistent. This time, she moves her hand down from his shoulder, along the side of his midriff and bunches the fabric there. He lets out a little gasp, quiet as a church mouse, and she makes a wordless, approving noise.

They separate again and he’s slightly embarrassed to note that he’s half-hard. Rosa is a little flushed too, but she releases him and leans back, a gesture he repeats with the convenient placement of a throw cushion a moment.

“Too late, I saw,” she grins and he groans theatrically. “I think that’s enough for now, or we’re going to starve.”

She’s right – he is particularly peckish, bordering on a touch famished if he’s being honest, and he doesn’t really want to go any further tonight, something that he senses Rosa seems to share. In another world, he might have been happy to go all the way to Sextown, USA, but that is not that world.

They default away from Polish in the end, opt for an Indian given the miserable weather outside, and they stick on The Dark Knight Rises. Jake can’t decide which he finds madder, that superheroes actually existed after being fictional concepts in comic-books for so long, or that Rosa prefers this one to The Dark Knight.

They don’t cuddle but Jake does find his hand loosely inching its way across the couch as Gotham is locked down by Bane and his army, and he’s quietly thrilled when she takes it without looking, holding it all the way through Bruce Wayne’s climb out of the pit and to the final reel.

It’s not too late when they finish and he suggests they put on some old Top Gear. They used to watch it back in the academy dorms and it’s enough of a leftfield suggestion that neither have gone back to in a long while that she agrees pretty quickly.

He notices that she’s drifted off two episodes in, as James May proceeds to fall off a plank somewhere in a Bolivian jungle. That’s about far as he gets too; when he next opens his eyes, the Netflix loading screen is asking him if wants to continue, the hum of the rain from outside finally lessened.

He leans across to Rosa’s still sleeping form, places a kiss on her temple with a smile and drifts back off.

Nothing really changes in their routine immediately afterwards. He’s seeing Rosa, and Rosa’s seeing him, but they initially don’t particularly change up their patterns.

She comes over every two or three nights now, and they more often than not exchange lazy kisses between ordering takeout and it arriving, never taking it far past first base. She skims her fingernails across the bare skin of his midriff when his shirt rides up occasionally, and he often tangles his hand in her curls, but they take it far slower than Jake would have expected them to in any other circumstance.

He invites her to spend Thanksgiving with him and his mom, half-expecting her to turn him down as it is one of the few Diaz family obligations she is typically obliged to attend, but she surprises him by accepting on the spot.

“Sure,” she says. “You better cook good turkey.”

He swats up on cooking turkey on the next night she’s not there, as it is a particular weak spot. He sets the smoke alarm off, of course, and Steve’s cautious knock on the door to ensure that everything is alright is just the icing on the cake.

But he becomes the master-baster – internal chuckles optional – and impresses himself with his efforts come the celebration. His mom gives him a surprised glance when he confirms that Rosa is joining them just before she arrives, a look that gradually morphs into a knowing, almost sad gaze throughout the evening.

After she’s gone, Rosa asks if he had told her about the pair of them and he shakes his head. She’s particularly content with that and pulls him in for a kiss as he passes her on his way back to the kitchen with the empty wine glasses, one that stays just the right side of indecent.

He’s particularly surprised then when, in early December a few weeks later, she asks if he wants to go ice skating.

“Ice skating?” he parrots back like a dumbass. Rosa rolls her eyes from his kitchen, where she is currently rooting around more a pair of beers.

“Ice skating,” she repeats. “You know, where you skate. On ice.”

“Yeah, I know what it is,” Jake responds, slightly affronted. His brain catches up momentarily. “Wait, as like in a date?”

“If you want to call it that,” she says neutrally, but he can spot her ever so slightly biting her lip.

“I’d love to,” he says honestly and watches her smother a small smile. “But I should warn you that I have not done it for three years and it’s one of the very few things I’m not good at.”

That’s actually underselling it. He decks it three times inside the first loop of the rink, and that’s with him clinging onto the wall with the sort of desperation he typically reserves for fighting to get the last war tip dumpling. Rosa just barks out a laugh every time she passes him, running quite literal rings around him.

She eventually takes pity on him, hauling him round slowly, their hands rested on the other’s shoulders, Jake’s nose a snot-runny red and Rosa’s hair bundled up under that wool-knit bob-cap she was so fond of. He wondered if he should buy her a new one for Christmas.

They grab plates of fried potatoes from a vendor in the winter market on their way back, huge metal snowflakes strung up above them, wrapped with fairy lights. She pecks him on the check, a rare display of public affection, when they walk under a bunch of mistletoe and she laughs at loud at the blush that spreads across his cheek, one that he blames on the cold.

They finish the evening outside his flat, and he gives her a more heated kiss in return, one that leaves him a little breathless and her slightly more composed, before they bid each other farewell.

She still doesn’t stay over if she can help it, only caving on the rare occasions where she can’t keep her eyes open. He doesn’t mind, but the following week, he starts looking online for a new bed. He can tell where he – and his – hesitation may be rooted.

He finds a new one, queen size at a double price, and has it moved in – with the help of Steve Rogers and his obnoxiously large biceps – one weekend, putting his and Amy’s old one in storage. Even though Rosa isn’t there, it feels like a definitive step between his old married life and his future. He knocks back coffees with his neighbour through the night, melancholic at best, and exchanges old stories to pass the time as the vinyl player crackles, Chris de Burgh's Spanish Train and Other Stories spinning deep into the grooves.

He spends Christmas out in New Jersey at the old Santiago homestead. He’s informed that it’ll be the last time he’ll be there by Victor; it’s a good property, but very much a ghost house for just one man. He’ll be downscaling and moving out west to Minnesota, where his brother lives. He gives Jake a sturdy hug as he prepares to leave with his mom, asks him to come visit one day. He readily agrees.

For the first time in a long time, Jake is in a bar when the new year rolls around. He’s on a sting operation, and just bagging up the two perps with Charles when the ball – for the first time since The Snap – drops across the river in Times Square. The patrons cheer, all a little lighter this time around, and in the spirit of the season – they are only petty robbers after all – he buys his criminals a pack of nuts each before they head back to the cruiser.

He looks up, as the fireworks billow over Brooklyn. Something’s shifting in the air and for the first time in a long time, Jake sees in a new calendar with something to look forward to.

Chapter Text

2022

Lo and behold, Clint Barton strikes again – and this time, he gets on the wrong side of an old friend.

Jake hears about it just a few days into January when what sounds like a light aircraft crashes onto the roof above him. He jumps half a mile off the sofa and spills his bowl of gummy bears, much to his chagrin. The sound of heavy footsteps creaking above him raises further cause for alarm; while Steve isn't typically the lightest man on his feet, the sound coming through his ceiling has more in common with a medieval knight, lumbering around in their armour as they come in for the final blow.

Vaguely concerned, he throws on his dressing gown, heads down the hallway and moves to knock on Captain America's door, but finds that it swings open before he can and he is promptly tackled to the ground.

“Spy!” hisses a voice in his ear and the cold edge of something very sharp is suddenly pressing deep into his windpipe and his eyes are streaming and he can’t breathe and oh god is this how he is going to go –

“Nebula!” comes Steve’s voice, as intense as the blade leaning on his throat. “Stand down. He’s a friendly.”

A moment passes before the weight of the metal recedes from his neck and then the rest of his body and Jake is doing his level best not to piss himself because that was easily in the five most terrifying experiences he has ever lived through, and he spent six months undercover with the mob trying to not shit his pants whenever a gunshot went off, thank you very much.

The figure – blue-skinned, bald, clad in a rust-coloured leather jacket and with what appears to be a gold visor framing one narrowed eye – looks at him in the same way that a normal person would look at a dead rat in the street, with a kind of overriding disgust tempered by a fraction of macabre curiosity. Jake belatedly recognises her as one of Nat’s new Avengers – though given they’ve been on the informal roster for over three years now, he guesses new isn't quite right. They are hardly fresh blood anymore, after all.

Steve stands towering in the door frame, worry etched across his chiselled features. “Jake, Jesus Christ, man. Are you alright?”

“Fine!” Jake rasps back from his place on the floor, still willing his bladder to hold steady. Steve glances at the blue figure who returns his gaze with a gesture that could only be kindly described as a shrug in charitable terms, before both of them separately extend a hand down to him.

He seizes the latter’s palm, not wanting to run the risk of giving any further offence by snubbing her – because it is most recognisably a her now he has had a moment to gather his wits about him – and lets himself be hauled up from the carpet. He’s about to thank her, bizarrely, but she has already turned and stalked past Steve into his apartment before he can get the words out.

Through the door, he can see Colonel Rhodes sprawled out on the couch, his helmet removed, particularly pale in the low glow of the standard lamp. The War Machine suit appears to have several deep gashes across the front, a clutch of wires exposed through the sheared metal, but there appears to be no other damage to speak of to the naked eye.

“You in or out?” Steve asks him, and Jake’s honoured to even be asked. He allows himself to be shepherded through as Captain America closes the door behind him and discovers that his neighbour has another guest too. Carol Danvers is stood at the kitchen counter, hair cropped short, superhero suit pockmarked with dirt, holding a bag of frozen peas to the side of her head. He wonders if Nat is around but she’s nowhere to be seen.

“Jake Peralta,” says the woman as she rotates the iced vegetables around what appears to be a bloody temple. Jake assumes it’s bloody, but the liquid is blue and he knows from plenty of experience that the phrase “blue bloods” is a metaphorical term rather than an actual scientific fact.

Colonel Rhodes lolls his head around to spot him and half-heartedly waves. The blue-skinned woman has moved to his side and is fiddling with several of the exposed wires in sullen silence, broken only by the faintest mechanical whir.

Steve is dressed in his pyjamas, biceps almost bulging out of the sleeves, which lets Jake know at least one of them has not been out brawling on the streets. The other three don’t look so hot in comparison though.

“Does he know?” Colonel Rhodes asks out loud. Jake isn’t sure to what War Machine is referring but Steve nods.

“Nothing gets past my neighbour,” he responds and a shot of pride runs through his chest, warming him through. “He knows about Barton.”

Ah, Jake thinks. That explains a few things.

“Great,” says Colonel Rhodes, though it is quite clear that any mention of Clint Barton is far from great to his ears right now.

“I don’t need to be told twice what Clint can do,” Steve continues. “But you were about to tell me how the hell he managed to get the drop on you.”

The other parties look particularly mulish at the implied question, and Jake wonders if he had provided a convenient distraction for the Avengers in halting the confession of what appeared to be a serious ass-whooping.

“We thought we had him this time,” Colonel Rhodes replies after a moment, punctured with a groan. The blue-skinned woman briefly glances up at him with an expressionless face before returning her attention to the wires. “Followed his trajectory, knew he’d have to clear out the Grimaldi family in Queens sometime around now if he was sticking to his modus operandi.”

“I take it you didn’t even bother trying to rope Nat in,” Steve says neutrally. Jake is morbidly fascinated to hear more tales of how the former Hawkeye was cutting through the underbelly of the world – at the most recent count, he was surely approaching four figures in terms of dead mobsters – but he feels like he could be intruding on the start of a more serious disagreement between his neighbour and former teammate, so he moves to the kitchen where Carol Danvers has now perched herself on the breakfast bar.

“Steve, I love Nat as much as you,” Colonel Rhodes replies. “But when it comes to Barton, she’s as blind as Beethoven.”

“Beethoven was deaf,” says the blue-skinned woman. Colonel Rhodes gives her a pained look.

“I don’t doubt that,” Steve continues. “But regardless, Jim, she’s the leader of the Avengers still. You surely owe it to her to keep her in the loop.”

Colonel Rhodes is apparently too tired to pick a fight, or maybe Steve’s point is too obvious to refute, as he moves onto the events that brought him to Brooklyn instead. “Well, we got there, at this construction company they used as a front, and found the Grimaldi top cheese run through with a katana or something, and we think we’ve missed him. Then he swings a girder into Carol’s head and it’s lights out.”

“He hit you with a girder?” Jake exclaims, turning to Carol Danvers. She blearily eyes him. “How are you not dead?”

“It takes more than a girder to do me in,” she mumbles back, quite clearly still not all with it. Colonel Rhodes shoots her a concerned look and she waves him off. “Keep on, Jim.”

“Right,” he says and Jake can here the scepticism from the other side of the room. “Anyway, he puts Carol out for the count with this crane, then he’s down from his perch and trying to shut me down too.” He moves an arm and taps his breastplate, earning a growl from the blue-skinned woman who gives up attempting to hotwire his midriff. “Got enough hits in and then made the run for it when Nebula arrived from the other side of the site.”

Jake had wondered for what felt like an eon just who Nebula was – he’d never asked Carol if it was her codename when they had gone out north for Steve’s birthday the year before – but now he had his confirmation. Apparently, she was a very blue, very dangerous piece of muscle for the Avengers.

“Jesus,” Steve says, shaking his head. “I mean, I don’t think he’d have killed you, Jim, but I’m surprised he didn’t try to run one of you two through.”

“He’s probably seen the news,” Carol groans, moving from the kitchen to collapse on the couch in the position recently vacated by Nebula. “He knew just where to hit me to get me down for the count. That’s some skill.”

“His skill is pretty sharp.” Steve acknowledges, before turning back to Jake. “Sorry, I never asked – are you here for the roof access tonight?”

“No, I just came to make sure you weren’t being invaded, actually,” Jake replies. He glances around the room, at the exhausted pair of Carol Danvers and Colonel Rhodes who appear to be on the cusp of falling asleep on top of each other, and glances very briefly at the menacing figure of Nebula who is now flipping a switchblade while staring intently out of the bay window. “I think I’ll take my leave.”

Steve walks him to the door, and before he shuts it, asks, “So, how’s things going with you and Rosa?”

Jake pauses. “Great, I think,” he admits after a moment, and despite the gradually blossoming bruise on his neck, he finds himself smiling. “I think it’s going great.”

Steve bestows a small smile in return. “I’m glad to hear it.”

They bid the other good night and Jake returns to his apartment, treading over gummy bears and wondering at what point in his life he can expect to see Thor. Surely it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

A particularly hectic first month of the year feeds into little variation in Jake and Rosa’s flourishing domesticity, but by the time February rolls around and they can both breathe a little easier again, he decides the time is right to repay her suggestion of ice skating from just before Christmas.

He plots it for the first weekend of the month, well before the hullabaloo that would accompany Valentine’s Day (he isn’t sure if they will have any plans on Valentine’s Day but he’s also a hundred percent certain they will have nothing to do with the significance of a commercial holiday Rosa has previously displayed open distaste for).

He hits upon a particularly unorthodox idea that he hopes she won’t object to, and brings it up when they’re having Chinese the following night.

“Hey,” he asks as nonchalantly as he can, “want to go see a show on Saturday?”

Rosa blinks, and gives up attempting to skewer a dumpling. “Like a musical?”

Jake gives a shrug that feels less at ease than he had hoped, and she narrows her eyes at him. “Eh, something a little more… exotic.”

He takes her – of all the things – to a burlesque bar. It’s The Slipper Room, and he’s only ever been there before on the occasional sting, but tonight, he’s decked out in his own duds rather than the more stylishly claustrophobic loans from the vice squad’s undercover wardrobe department. He’s gone for a thicker jacket than normal given the soft chill of the February weather, and immediately regrets it the moment he steps inside, the furnace-like temperature and humidity already soaking his scalp through with sweat.

Rosa, in an unorthodox swing, has gone for the black-and-red summer dress she wore to Steve Rogers’ barbecue all those years ago, paired with fishnet tights and boots that cut off below the knee. She slots right into the scene and he realises that he hasn’t even asked her if she’d been here before when he’d suggested it. She certainly looks at home.

Her poker face expression is shorn tonight though, and she looks about as delighted as she ever gets to be anywhere in all the time he has known her. They order a ridiculously large platter of bar food and make excellent inroads into it between them, topped off with a few beers each, as they watch a slew of routines. Jake has to admit that even if he trained every day for the next two years straight, he would not have the athletic prowess to remotely pull this off.

(He’s fairly certain Rosa would and tries to not think too hard about her doing so, lest he give himself an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction.)

They swing back via a couple of hipster bars afterwards, where they sink another couple of drinks and fleece some of the regulars at pool. In the corner, a jukebox dressed in old-fashioned mock trim seems to exclusively play songs by Modest Mouse, and he’s delighted when she unexpectedly manages to coax a turn out of it to play Mr Brightside, to an initial chorus of groans and an ultimately room-wide drunken communal singalong just before they leave.

They hail a cab and head back across to Brooklyn, tumbling out of the backseat outside Jake’s brownstone. It’s late, and they’re both on shift tomorrow and he’s debating tipsily whether he should invite her up or see her off when she grabs him by the lapels of his jacket and leans in to plant a particularly messy kiss on him.

“Stop dawdling, Peralta,” she says when she pulls away, swaying ever so slightly. “I’m crashing here.”

“Ten-four,” he quips in return, because it's not like she doesn't have the clothes there to get changed for tomorrow. Various items of her wardrobe have gradually migrated since last November into the lower drawer of his bedroom cabinet, discarded and left before she leaves in the early hours, or sometimes even simply handed to him without fanfare at the end of their shift; a vest here and a pair of jeans there, and that fills him with a strange little happiness. He doesn’t want her to move in – not yet, anyway – but he doesn’t mind her setting out her stall.

They stumble in through the apartment door, their footing a little less sure than he thought they would be, but he can recognise the gradual signs as they both begin to sober up. Rosa heads to the kitchen and pours them two large glasses of water while he drops Amy’s ring-chain on the mantelpiece.

They clink in the front room and she sinks hers in one while he sips more sedately, as she sets the empty, flamingo-emblazoned beaker down and wanders down the hallway.

She’s back barely a moment later, looking a little more flushed all of a sudden. “Have you got a new bed?”

It occurs to Jake that she probably hasn’t ventured into his bedroom since he made the change, given they so often simply crash on the couch together, and how seldom she will properly stay over. It feels odd that she wouldn't have caught a glimpse, at least, but it's not implausible.

He nods. “Yeah. Last December? Just before Christmas, I think.”

Rosa takes three steps towards him, grabs him by the shoulders again and pulls him in for an absolutely searing one. To say they’ve stayed on the more sedate side of make-out sessions for four months, by some unspoken understanding, this is heated; like, fire-pooling-in-his-gut-heated.

He drops his hands, briefly flailing in surprise, then reaches out to her side and clutches her hipbones, tight. He slips his tongue across, darting out and she moans into his mouth and if that’s not one of the most erotic sounds he’s ever heard, he doesn’t know just what would quantify.

He surfaces for air, gasping and she uses the opportunity to firmly tug him out of the front room, down the hall and into the bedroom, where he finds himself unceremoniously spun around and thrown onto his back, landing on the bed with a dignified oof.

She doesn’t waste a moment, peeling off her leather jacket with practiced surety and tossing it back out beyond the door before pouncing on top, leaning into him with her full body, pushing him deeper into the mattress as she kisses him firmly, greedily, dazzlingly.

It’s been a long time since Jake was in a position like this and he finds it surprisingly terrifying, beneath the overriding rush of exhilaration. He attempts to run a hand down Rosa’s side but she swings her own around to grip his and hold it above his head. He gets her idea and lifts his other arm to join it so she can clutch them both there. He’s not complaining.

She rakes the nails of her fingers across the edge of his jacket, diving in between the folds of the material and his shirt, alternating between light strokes and sharper near-scratches. It’s dizzying, and she doesn’t pause for breathe either as she continues to kiss him, her ministrations running in tandem with her lips.

He turns his head, peppering his touches along her jawline above him and she pants slightly, her grip loosening on his wrists, both of them slowing as he soothes her down from the initial rush of pure heady speed. She returns his next kiss with as much intensity but less pressure, marginally more languorous than before.

It’s at that moment that he catches the underside of his own arm and, boy, is he terrifically sweaty. He gently kisses Rosa one more time and slowly lifts her up to a sitting position, to a noise of frustrated protest.

“As absolutely breathtaking as this is,” he says, breathing heavily, “I’m going to have to pump the brakes on this one.”

“Seriously?” she says and he swears that beneath the stony eyebrow she raises at odds with her luminescent expression, there’s a little whine to her voice.

“Yep. Sorry,” he adds, “but I really need to go for a shower. That bar has humidified me out to exceptionally sticky levels, and if you want to go any further, I’m going to need this.”

“Ugh. Fine.” She rolls off him and lands spread-eagled on the bed next to him, stretching out her arms, dress hiked up as she pushes herself further across with her legs. Jake feels his pants grow uncomfortably tight at the sight. “Don’t take forever.”

He strips off his jacket as he goes, drops his shirt at the entrance to the bathroom, lobs the rest of his outer layers into the laundry basket tucked in the corner and jams on the faucet as he strips off his socks and boxers. The water runs cold for a moment but quickly grows hot, steam billowing out over the top of the cubicle as he slides the door open and closes it behind him.

He’s pretty hard and tries to let the pitter-patter of the spray soothe his libido for a moment, before he leans back his head, shakes the water out of his eyes and picks up the navy scrunchie hanging off the rack.

He’s halfway through lathering up his midriff, soap suds trailing down his navel, when he hears the bathroom door swing open and he does his level best to not scream in surprise. A raven-haired figure in a black-and-red dress is silhouetted against the frosted glass and before he can ask what she’s doing, the cubicle door is open.

She's shed her fishnets but is otherwise still decked out in full attire, a look of what can only be described as frustrated hunger cast across her features.

“You take too long,” she informs him, almost conversationally, as steps right over the threshold, still fully clothed, and slides the door behind her.

“What?” Jake says, because his mind is yet to quite fully catch up with the fact he’s naked and covered in bubbles, and that Rosa Diaz is currently being soaked through by the spray of his shower.

“You take too long,” she repeats, and pushes him firmly up against the tiles with everything she’s got, latching onto his mouth once more with sheer fervour. His hands come automatically and pull her to him, and he’s intoxicated by her presence, heady on her weight and feel and scent.

She leans back all too soon, pulling his hand with her to the back of her neck. He gets the hint and finds the zipper tag, pulls it down with two hard tugs, relieved to find no material for it to snag on. She slips it off her shoulders in one smooth move, revealing the black lace of her underwear as she balls it up and throws it over the glass wall, before immediately crashing back in to kiss him senseless.

He had been expecting that they might take things further then they ever had before, tonight, when she’d kissed him on the pavement, but Jake had to admit that he would not have called making out like horny teenagers under the shower as the first time they would see each other in all their natural glory. He drags his hands all over every inch of skin he can reach on her back, kneading his knuckles into her muscles as he goes, drawing out the knots with a long moan on one particular effort. She removes her hands from where she’s placed them either side of him, reaches back behind to guide his hands back to her clasp.

“I do know how to undo a bra, you know,” he murmurs and she bites down on his lip in response.

“Then fucking show me,” she growls, and he does, swiftly unhooking it with an ease that surprises him. Like riding a bike, it’s apparently a skill for life and one not forgotten in a hurry.

She leans back to remove it and hurls it behind her without looking. A clatter tells him it’s probably knocked his toothbrush over next to the washbasin but he can’t find it in himself to care because she’s lifting a leg to an almost impossible angle in the small space of the booth, then the other one and her lace briefs follow it to the other side of the glass partition, leaving her just as naked as he is beneath the rivulets of water cascading down onto them both.

She’s a vision, and Jake’s fairly certain he doesn’t need him to tell her that, but he does nevertheless.

“Wow,” he says, like the idiot he often can be. “I mean… wow.”

“Shut up,” Rosa replies with no heat, a small twitch of her lips threatening to break out into a smile and a faint dusting of red on her cheeks. She leans into him again, pressing up her full length against his and he feels slightly faint at the sensation of her breasts sliding across his chest.

They kiss again, slowly, the initial burst giving way to something no less passionate but strikingly more measured. After a moment, he continues to explore with his hands, stepping away from the tiles and he can feel her do the same, feel her hands raking over the curves of his back, down to his rear, cupping his cheeks. Determined to not let her have all the fun, he repeats the gesture and she lets out a half-moan, half-sigh into his mouth.

She pinches his buttocks and he squeaks, a noise that causes her to pull back and raise an eyebrow. She does it again and he can’t suppress the noise, resulting in her letting a rich laugh slip out that tinkles like music in the small confines. He pays her back by dropping his attentions to her collarbone, nibbling it as he brushes his fingers over her nipple, tearing a growl from her throat that’s matched with a burst of his name that fills him with an elated sensation.

He reaches for the scrunchie again, dropped to the floor of the cubicle, and soaps it up again, uses the chance to lather her up as a way to explore her body. He drags it slowly up from her calves when he kneels to collect it, tracks up the front of her thighs and skirts around her navel, gradually returning to his feet as he sweeps it over her abdomen, across the globes of her chest and finally over her shoulders, up the sides of her neck. She lets out a series of surprisingly high-pitched gasps as he does so, murmured appreciation in a voice recognisably her own and yet different in so many ways.

She returns the favour, repeats the route in the reverse direction, starting at the top and working her way towards the bottom. It’s hard to avoid him down below and she doesn’t, palming him gently as she passes by, forcing him to place both his hands against the wall to steady himself. She looks up from beneath the curls plastered to her forehead and offers him a sly grin but nothing more for now.

They rinse off together, loosely embraced as the water runs off them and the steam continues to swirl around them. When they’re done, she turns off the faucet while he steps out and cracks the window open, lest the condensation amassing on the mirror gain sentience. They’re hot and pink and glistening and Rosa’s expression is that piquant blend of storminess that sets his heart to skip a beat in rotation.

They towel each other off before they take each other by the hand and tumble back into the bedroom. The duvet has been pulled back and Rosa’s fishnets are draped over the end, the lights dimmed down. She leaves him standing and sprawls backwards, resuming the spread-eagle position she’d left him with over a half-hour ago, tracing her own fingers around the curve of her breast.

“Wow,“ he says again, apparently bereft of any other intelligent conversation as even more blood somehow rushes south. Rosa leans forward to pull him down above her, half-caged between his thighs but clearly still the one in control.

“Put that motormouth to better use,” she tells him with a grin, and boy, does he follow those instructions to the letter, as he drops to his knees on the side of the bed.

They go down on each other, him on her at first, then vice versa and then together, bringing themselves to the edge before pulling back at the last moment on each occasion, testing their limits as they go. By the time she’s swung her rear away from his face, his mouth hot and wet, he feels like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t take that final step.

She seems to be of the same mind too, because she’s hovering above him now, face to face again, and she leans down to taste herself upon him, luxuriating in it as he feels her palm him again, this time into position.

He doesn’t last long, but it’s longer than he expected to and perhaps surprisingly longer than she does. She crests a second time, eyes clenched shut, a loud cry swallowed up by his own lips when he comes, his hips stuttering upwards from where she’s ridden him to completion, and she collapses bodily on top of him, both of them breathing heavily, her heartbeat drumming double-time in sync with his own through where their pulses meet.

“Shit,” she says after a moment without raising her head. “That was good.”

“Preach,” Jake echoes, absolutely spent. He realises, as they come down from their high, that the sweat is pooling on them both again. So much for that shower.

They’re silent for a moment, before Rosa speaks again. “You should have told me you’d got a new bed. We could have done this a month ago.”

“It just honestly slipped my mind,” Jake admits. “I mean, you’re partly the reason I bought it. Dating you is one thing, banging you on my old bed was another entirely.”

“Mmmm,” Rosa responds, smothering a yawn. “Ditto. It’d be weird to do it there. It’s just… eh, you know what I mean.”

He does indeed. His brain belatedly catches up that Rosa hasn’t corrected the use of the word dating. He’s studiously avoided it previously, but wonders if now is the time to broach it.

So he does. “Are we… dating?”

She grunts. “Well, if we’re not, we’re just fucking for shits and giggles, aren’t we?”

Before he can ask if that’s actually what they are doing, she shuffles off him to the side, reaching blindly down for the duvet. “Yes, dumbass, we’re dating. Or at least we are to me.”

“Well, I’d kind of assumed,” he responds. “But to assume can make an ass out of me and you.”

“Fucking Dr Seuss,” Rosa mutters in response. She eyes him warily. “I’m not much of a cuddler.”

“I know you’re not,” he replies. Even so, after a beat, she shuffles back into his personal space and slings a leg across him as she curls up.

“Shut up,” she says. “I can hear your mocking thoughts.”

“Buttoning them down,” he responds with a chuckle and he can feel her grin through his chest where she’s rested her head. He drifts asleep to dreams of black lace, soap bubbles and quiet moans.

It’s not Facebook official – Jake’s fairly certain Rosa would never concede to the banality of such status-bragging and to be honest, nor would he anymore – but they’re definitely dating in the more traditional sense now.

There becomes an unspoken agreement to make every fourth night something different from takeout and Netflix on the couch – they visit the Botanic Gardens, head up to a rifle range on the outskirts of Queens, go to a roller-derby where he discovers he’s only marginally better on wheels than he was on skates. She takes him to an afternoon of kick-axe throwing one afternoon, which she’s exactly as terrifyingly precise at as he would have predicted.

She gradually starts to stay over too, maybe once a fortnight. There’s no particular rhyme or reason as to why and when – well, typically they’ve practiced their horizontal tango skills together but she’s just as likely to shrug her clothes back on and head on out, particularly if it’s still early.

But sometimes, after they’ve had their takeout, watched BoJack Horseman, edged together on the couch, she’ll slip under the duvet a while later and tell him that she doesn’t do cuddles, before draping her limbs across him like climbing ivy and dropping off with a melody of musical snores.

He’s not felt like this in a long while and tells her as much in late April, figuring that such a declaration will not end with him promptly being dumped in the East River.

She rolls her eyes as she is often prone to do, but there’s definite affection to the gesture. “Dummy,” she says, which is practically for Diazspeak that she feels the same too. She’s particularly tender that evening and, afterwards, kisses him lightly on the jaw as they drift off.

The following month represents another major step however when he finally ends up at her apartment. Now, Jake didn’t think he would see the day – he’d always imagined that hell would need to freeze over before he saw Rosa’s current place – but he had hoped that, given they were six months in, she might have thawed on the idea.

Ultimately, it’s taken out of her hands, because she falls ill with a late-spring cold the very week that Holt announces there will be a significant rearrangement of the bullpen structure and that he needs them to take their belongings home.

Jake could take Rosa’s stuff just as easily back to his own place, but then Holt has called him into his office, just an hour after she’d sent him a text insisting that she was fine and in fact not dying from flu, and presses a card with her address into his hand.

“Ensure Diaz gets all her relevant material before the builders come in tomorrow,” he tells him. “You’ll be working out of the seventy-second precinct for the next two days while work is completed.”

And now that he has actual physical proof of where Rosa hangs her metaphorical hat, and more likely her impressive collection of knives, he can’t not follow his captain’s instructions and head on over. He wouldn’t have done so if it wasn’t orders, honestly.

“Jake, the fuck?” says Rosa about a half-hour later, or at least he assumes it is Rosa as it actually appears to be a duvet monster with Rosa’s nose and eyes poking out from a small clearing near where her head should be.

“Surprise!” he says, stepping over the threshold and taking it as a small win that she doesn’t promptly fly-kick him back out the door. Maybe she’s even more ill than he thought, if there’s not even the energy to expand in booting him away for breaching her sanctuary. “I’ve got your things.”

She blinks slowly and he hastily amends his statement. “I mean, Holt asked me to bring them to you, what with the bullpen being reconstructed, and I was just going to take them to mine, but he specifically asked –”

“Ugh. Fine,” she cuts across him and shuffles back to allow him to squeeze past her into the apartment. He takes a good look around as he toes off his sneakers and follows her through to the living room.

A crumpled box of tissues and a wastepaper basket sit on the coffee table, next to what appears to be a small army of mugs and a packet of aspirin, but it’s otherwise particularly neat and orderly. The décor reminds him of Steve’s apartment in a week; deep creams and chocolaty browns, a pair of free-standing shelves on the side of the walkway through to an open-plan kitchenette.

Rosa settles herself back on the couch and Jake deposits the collection of trinkets, files and assorted paperwork in the corner, underneath a standing lamp.

“This is… much cosier than I expected,” he admits and Rosa shoots him a particularly feeble glare.

“Emily Goldfinch, remember,” she mutters in reply and, yes, now he does remember that Rosa keeps a particularly striking line between her personal and professional identities.

“I feel I should actually ask if you are called Rosa Diaz, but I am ninety-nine percent certain that you are,” he responds, scanning around.

“Duh,” she responds, more of a sound than an actually recognisable utterance, all blocked up. She looks oddly pathetic, huddled up beneath the bulk of her quilt, and Jake finds it spectacularly adorable, a word he’s not stupid enough to utter.

“I’ll make you some more tea,” he tells her and she attempts to glare at him again.

“Don’t you dare play nursemaid,” she grumbles, but she’s in absolutely no fit state to argue and doesn’t make even a cursory attempt to stop him when he switches out all her mugs for a freshly steaming herbal tea and some dry toast.

He sits, on the lone armchair – he’s not sure why Rosa has seating for at least four people in her home when she quite clearly indicates that nobody ever comes around at her own discretion – and they watch old episodes of Futurama. When her eyes begin to repeatedly drop, he tugs her up, duvet and all, and guides her through with small noises of protest to her bedroom, before he bundles her onto the bed and draws a throw blanket up over her.

“I’ll just be down the corridor,” he tells her and she grunts as he flicks out the light.

He drops Holt a text to let him know that all has been safely delivered and then looks round with a little more interest. Rosa’s apartment is less crammed with incidental detail and knick-knacks than his own place but it isn’t strictly showroom impersonal either. The amber glow spilling out from the standing lamp throws a little cluster of photos into sharp illumination and he wanders over to study them.

He’s surprised to see that she has a photo up from Charles’ wedding. It’s of him giving his best man speech at the small head table, sandwiched between her and Charles. He’s mid-sentence and looks particularly animated, but he’s drawn to his right hand instead, just out of sight as it drops below the table.

Her gaze is off-focus, somewhere between him and Charles, but it is a particularly warm expression, framed with that recognisable stormy eyes, even in distant still-life form. His own eyes are travelling down towards her, the curve of his lips turned upward as he presumably waxes lyrical about the groom. His words were surely all about Charles, but his attention looks to be entirely elsewhere.

He doesn’t feature on any other pictures but with a start he discovers that Amy does. It’s of her and Rosa, both decked out in paintball gear. He remembers that he missed this team bonding activity, embroiled in what had looked to be a Doug Judy lead that had turned out false, marooned in a cruiser with Hitchcock for the whole day while the rest of the squad had had a whale of a time across the state.

They both look flushed, covered in dirt and colour. Amy’s got the radiance of a job well done emanating like the sun from her, but now he can take the time and recognise a similar, far more understated sense of satisfaction from Rosa, the quirk at the corner of her lips so recognisably her shorthand now for low-key delight.

It fills him with a melancholic warmth, seeing the pair of them together, and he wonders if he should try and find one of the two of them himself to put up at his place. He drags his eyes away after a moment and resumes tidying up the table.

Rosa surfaces again late in the evening, when he goes to quietly rouse her and leave a cheese sandwich on her bedside table. He’s wandered through her apartment, examined the nooks and crannies, somehow found more knives than he expected and was oddly comforted by it.

“Hey,” he whispers, as he brushes back her hair from her head. She’s less clammy and her eyes, narrowed by drowsiness as they are, are more focused than before. “I’m going to beat a retreat. I’ll come round and check on you tomorrow.”

She grunts at him. “You tell anyone where I live, I feed you to the dogs,” she half-mumbles and he takes that as her assent. He presses a light kiss to her crown and beats a hasty retreat less she regain enough of her faculties to hurl a pillow at him.

He brings kimchi and fried chicken over the following day after he’s schlepped over from the seven-two, dropping by his favourite Korean restaurant en-route. He finds the door unlocked to her apartment and knocks as he enters, earning a slightly snuffled salutation in return.

Rosa has shed the duvet today, and in what he can only describe as the most paradoxical image his mind could ever conjure, she’s sat half-draped in a mustard yellow blanked, wearing pyjamas that have the little green aliens from Toy Story running across the sleeves and down the legs, and is very clearly sharpening a bowie knife.

“Uh,” he says and she glances at him.

“It needed doing,” is all she replies. “I’ve been out of bed for twenty minutes, before you say anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it while you’re holding an exceedingly sharp weapon,” Jake responds, very proud that he smothers his rising pitch before it can only heard by dogs. He empties the containers into chunky bowls in her kitchen and pops them in the microwave to give them a second wind before bringing them to the coffee table. She moves her sharpening block off to the side to make room.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, her voice still a little raspy. “You didn’t have to.”

“Hey,” he says, glancing over at her. “I can’t leave you to wallow in your own germs. You’d be insufferable.”

“Hark who’s talking,” she fires back, with the effect slightly diluted by the sneeze she bursts into straight after. He passes her a new box of tissues and she wordlessly snags it as he fishes around for her television remote.

The fried chicken is good, Kong: Skull Island is even better – giant monster movies and disaster films, in all their cheesy glory, are still a pleasure for them both despite all the very real trauma inflicted almost four years ago – and she falls asleep just as John C. Reilly’s marooned pilot reappears as the crazed hermit that he is.

He makes to go again at the end of the film, but her arm flashes out from beneath the blanket, an eye blearily cracked open.

“Where’re y’going?” she mumbles. When he gestures to the door, she shakes her head. “Stay.”

“I thought you were particularly against any presence but your own here,” he counters, and she shakes her head again.

“You know now anyway,” she murmurs, her grip tightening around his wrist. “You stay.”

So he spends the night at her apartment for the first time. Her bed is a king-size, dominating a bedroom it’s probably too big for, and he perches on the left edge when he gets in, caught between wanting to cuddle her and affording her still-ill body the space it needs. She takes the choice out of his hands when she pulls him in to be the big spoon and he’s particularly helpless to resists.

He realises that with every week that passes, he falls a little bit more for Rosa Diaz. The thought no longer terrifies him like it once did.

Jake heads out early, to double back to his own place to get changed for a mid-morning shift. She doesn’t resurface at work, off for one more day, and a prearranged evening coffee with Steve means that it’s too late to probably swing by afterwards. But she’s back in the following afternoon, the bullpen redecorated at the nine-nine, a raspberry and white chocolate muffin left on his newly refurbished desk which leaves him with a silly grin on his face.

It is the end of June when Jake discovers that Steve has been running a grief counselling group for the past three years. He’s a bit surprised, maybe even a little sad to have not known this nugget about his friend, but he’s not remotely taken aback by the fact that the former Captain America chairs such things.

He finds out because Steve asks if he would like to attend one out of the blue, when they have traded off their occasional dinners down the hallway and the spate of afternoon coffee meets to actually go out for a meal at an Italian bistro.

The place is over in Manhattan and they’re not the only two there; Jim Morita has also joined them, looking particularly tanned from his year overseas. Jake asks him how the Great Wall of China was and then busies himself decided whether he wants linguini or pizza when Steve asks him it he would like to come to one of his therapy sessions.

He slowly looks up the menu, feeling visible confused. “What?”

Steve scratches the back of his ear. “I wanted to know if you’d like to come down to one of my counselling sessions.”

“You do counselling?” Jake asks, a little taken aback. “Since when?”

“Since about… October three years ago?” Steve says, refocusing his gaze on his own menu. He looks back up after a moment. “Have I not mentioned them before?”

“No,” Jake blinks, “you haven’t.”

“Oh.” Steve looks slightly abashed. “I thought you knew. Jim’s been before.”

“You have?” Jake asks, turning to Jim Morita, who doesn’t raise his own gaze from the menu he’s flicking through with a well-practiced motion.

“Lost my wife and son,” he says without looking up, as if it is simply a conversational topic that his family turned to dust four years ago.

Jake blinks again. He hadn’t even realised that the relatively stoic, soft-spoken man next to him had seen his family ripped from him. He felt a sudden kinship with the older gentleman sat to his side.

“I’m sorry,” he says and Jim Morita looks at him.

“What’s done is done,” he says, his expression tired, and across from them both, Steve shifts a little bit in his seat. “We’ve just got to live our best lives to let them live on in our hearts.”

Given how good Steve had been for bouncing off his guilt and grief at points, Jake realises that it’s the sort of job he’s probably been doing for so long that it has become second nature. There apparently are no limits to the man’s selfishness.

“So,” Steve cuts back in. “Will you think about it?”

Jake mulls for a beat. “Sure,” he eventually says. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I’d ask,” Steve replies before returning to his menu.

The three of them have a particularly enjoyable evening that follows – Steve manages to spill Marianna sauce on the blonde waitress who serves them and is almost frantically apologetic, though Jake’s fairly certain he sees her slip him a number on the receipt later on. They move to the bar part of the bistro for a couple of drinks afterwards – he sinks a particularly strong cocktail that’s the colour of neon-purple – and they all walk home over the Williamsburg Bridge, swaying slightly.

When they get back to their brownstone, Jake turns to Steve as they separate in the hall.

“Hey,” he says, compelled to speak for some reason, “I’m sorry if I seemed… I dunno, accusatory or something earlier.”

“No, no,” Steve shakes his head. “It’s fine. I guessed you must have picked it up at some point, but it’s not something I talk about a lot. I try to leave it all in the room where it happens, so to speak.”

“Noice,” Jake replies automatically. “Hamilton.”

Steve grins. “I understand that reference.”

He doesn’t think about the counselling sessions for a few weeks, in part because Steve doesn’t press him on the couple of times they meet and in part because of a particularly hectic schedule. The soccer world cup – moved from the middle east after a series of political disputes and rehoused stateside – unfurls from the start of mid-June and with a clutch of major games taking place across the water in neighbouring New Jersey, he finds himself unexpectedly shipped out there for security detail on secondment.

It’s a relatively easy task, patrolling the outskirts of MetLife Stadium as Costa Rica get edged out by a last-minute Scotland winner – he can only be glad that it’s not Ireland, lest there be a second wave of St Patrick’s Day-level shenanigans – and he’s able to snap up tickets for another game between Mexico and England on the cheap. He takes Rosa, a firm if slightly under-the-radar fan for any sport including shorts, and they have a great afternoon watching the two sides play out a wildly entertaining 5-3 win in favour of the English, hungry to defend their crown.

After that, the majority of games move out to California or Atlanta and the Midwest, so he’s back to the nine-nine. It’s on his first proper day back at the precinct that he’s called to a potential B&E in progress and he’s fairly happy that it’s an open-and-shut case; he catches the perp, an old familiar fence named Tricky Roger, red-handed and he only has to chase the surprisingly spry sixty-something man two blocks before he trips over a paving slab and can’t escape him.

He’s in the process of slapping on the cuffs when he looks up and sees Steve exiting the YMCA across the road, chatting with an older woman and a teenage boy. The latter two are both shaking his hand, and he pats the younger one on the shoulder before the pair of them walk off.

“Can you handle this one?” he says to Charles, who has caught up in the cruiser. He nods and hauls Roger into the backseat as Jake jogs over the road to find Steve looking up into the sky, the sun just starting to dip towards the rooftops, shadows lengthening across the windows.

“Steve,” he says and the broader man turns to him with a look of surprise. “Is it fun to stay at?”

“What?” he responds, confused, before he glances back at the signage behind him. “Oh, the YMCA.” He doesn’t sign them as he says it and Jake will just have to be content to not savour that missed opportunity. “I’d say companionable. It’s where I run my meetings actually.”

“Oh,” Jake replies. He glances around. They’re a good few neighbourhoods over from their brownstone, well away on the opposite side of Prospect Park and he wonders quite why Steve had chosen here to settle, of all places. “Was it a good one today?”

“As good as they can be,” Steve says with a slight shrug. “The trick is to never think of them as bad ones, because they never are. If you’re there, and you’re happy to talk or even just listen, then it’s a step towards helping somebody, be it you or someone else.”

“Jake!” Charles calls from the side of the cruiser and he turns around to see his partner waving him back across. “We got another one on the radio!”

“I best not keep you then,” Steve replies as Jake twists back to face him. “I’ll see you later this week at some point, I’m sure.”

Then he’s off, strolling down the sidewalk, a baseball cap and aviator shades produced out of seemingly thin air and no-one readily apparent to the fact Captain America is among them. Jake is still not sure how that works, but apparently it does.

His mind cycles back around to Steve’s sessions when he’s getting ready for bed that evening. He’s stood leaning against the door jamb of the bathroom, brushing his teeth; Rosa is flossing over the basin, staring with the sort of expression typically reserved for interrogation into the mirror above it.

He’s not been back to her apartment since her illness, but it certainly seems to have triggered another shift in the dynamics. She stays over once a week now, sometimes maybe more; there’s still no real rhyme or reason to it, more that whenever the mood strikes. He’s not asked her to stay the night yet of his own accord; yet she reads his moods like a book, her own more pronounced, and the days she does settle in are always the most welcome.

She’s moved more things into his place now, namely her own key essentials for the bathroom and a few choice pieces of work attire, significantly more than the contents of a small travel pouch she’d dumped there last November after their initial heart-to-heart. She’s in loose sweats and a sports bra, and he’s trying not to get too distracted by the movement as she tugs her arms from side to side.

“I bumped into Steve while out with Charles today,” he says after he’s rinsed his mouth and followed her back through to the bedroom. It’s hot, the sticky heat of Brooklyn in early July permeating through the brickwork and even with the window cranked, the only thing the circular fan in the corner is doing is just pushing more warm air around. He thinks about flicking it off, but at the very least it’s providing a pulse to contrast the sweaty stillness.

She raises an eyebrow as she slides into what has become her de-facto side of the bed and picks up her phone. “Tricky Roger?” she enquires.

“Kind of,” he acknowledges as he pulls off his own shirt and shrugs off his own sweats. He doesn’t miss the appreciative side-look he gets as he does so, before he sits down next to her, pushing the pillows down to rest his head on them, the mattress dipping beneath him. “He was running a grief counselling session out at the YMCA.”

There’s a beat, broken only by the tap of Rosa’s nails as she scrolls through the Tumblr account Jake’s fairly certain he’s not meant to know she has. “Figures,” she replies after a moment. “Seems like his jam.”

“I know, right?” Jake ventures, settling himself in slightly further and, despite having done it at least half-a-dozen times before, debates whether he’s bold enough to run his finger down her side and into the band of her sweats. “I just kinda wish he’d told me he’d been doing it before. Like, he’s been doing it since 2019.”

“Fairly sure you’ve had one-on-one time with Steve more than anyone else in New York since,” Rosa responds, eyes still glued to her phone. Jake concedes that it’s a fair and likely truthful point; he can’t remember Steve ever having a guest over outside himself who isn’t an Avenger, Jim Morita or Mrs Wilson. Captain Holt had been over a few times, but neither him or Steve ever really discussed their friendship with Jake so he had no idea just how often they met up or exchanged words.

“Yeah, but still,” he concurs. He decides he’s brave enough and gradually drags a finger across Rosa’s midriff, next to his head, reaching up to catch his knuckles slowly down her skin. She remains silent but he can feel the little shiver that runs across her and smothers his grin.

“If you’re going to try and distract me, at least fully commit to it, you pussy,” she says, a slight catch to her voice when he’s circled her hipbone six or seven times. He takes the invitation and starts to shuffle her sweats off but she’s obviously impatient because the next thing he knows is that she’s torn them off herself, whipped his briefs away and hurled her own underwear an unknown corner of the room in what appears to be one single move.

“I have absolutely no idea how you did that and it has immensely turned me on,” he tells her in the most composed voice he can muster as she hovers above him, her hair tickling his chest.

“Good,” she replies smugly and kisses him.

Afterwards, where he’s got two blossoming lovebites imprinted into his collarbone and she’s lying parallel to him – it’s definitely too hot to even tangle their limbs in sleep again – he speaks on what Steve has asked him to do.

“Do you want to?” she replies, and there’s no judgemental edge to her voice. He hadn’t expected her to be, but it feels oddly relieving nonetheless.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I think I’m at peace with so much of it, it just feels that going might open it all up again.”

“Then don’t,” she says. “He’s won’t think less of you.” She rises gracefully off the bed and flicks the fan to rotate as she passes, headed out of the bedroom and turning presumably towards the kitchen.

She returns with two glasses of water and hands him one as he sits up. They drink quietly for a moment, before he breaks the silence.

“I think I will,” he says. “If only for Steve. I think I owe him that, as his friend.”

He catches the corner of her lips quirk but she doesn’t say anything else.

Steve bumps into him on the landing the following day, heading out for an evening run as he’s unlocking his door, and he tells him to let him have the date for his next meeting. A quietly grateful expression flits across his features.

“Thank you,” he tells him, all apple pie earnestness, and Jake has a flush of the feeling you get when you rub a golden retriever behind the ear.

He joins him the following Thursday, and honestly, it’s not quite what he expected. There’s refreshments, red plastic cups of juice and a selection of two-inch sub rolls and biscuits on the side, and people freely mingle beforehand, some more talkative, others withdrawn.

But when Steve claps his hand, the dozen-and-a-half of them all form a loose circle and introduce themselves one by one. They don’t have to give any more than their name, but they can say who they’re there for if they want to and several do.

Then Steve opens the group to discussion, and he goes round the circle one at a time to ask how things have been, what’s on their mind, where they feel like their going. Some are more reticent than others and it’s where Steve’s crucial grasp of empathy comes into play; there’s no pressure, no shame in choosing to keep things to yourself.

Jake doesn’t expand beyond his name himself, simply determined to observe and he gives a small shake of his head when Steve’s eyes drift over him.

It’s a sobering experience and yet… it is more than that too. Steve – who surely everyone here knows as Captain America, knows he was in the thick of it four years ago – possess such boundless compassion, such quietly understated belief that things can get better. Jake has always known that his neighbour was remarkable, but this feels like something different entirely.

After, they head on back, wind the walk through Prospect Park and stop off at the monument. He speaks quietly to Amy as Steve ambles away to another towering monolith and he waits on the path that runs between them to finish before they resume the short trek home.

“I’ve never asked…” he says, trailing off, but Steve knows exactly what he’s not attempting to broach.

“Sam,” he replies. “Wanda. Vision.” He swallows, the bob of his Adam’s apple caught in the dipping light. “Bucky. They’re all up there. They deserve to be up there, just like every other name.”

The rest of the journey is silent, but companionable and understanding.

The disclosure that Jake and Rosa are seeing each other becomes public knowledge among their closest friends and colleagues in late September.

He’s surprised it’s taken the best part of a year for it to come out in the open. He’d not been in any rush to share what had then been a newfound, nervous, exhilarating thing, and outside of Steve, the only other person to know was his mom, who he found he couldn’t lie to when she had point-blank asked in the early summer if he was seeing anybody.

Truth be told however, Jake had kind of assumed that Holt – through his shrewdly scary powers of observation – and Charles – through his Boyleness – were already in the loop, that they’d have spent enough time around the pair of them at work to figure out that the looks they exchanged were more charged than they used to.

(Having once prompted the fatal heart attack of a commanding officer while making out in the precinct, Jake had tacitly sworn off any sexy time misadventures within a hundred yards of the building, and Rosa’s general air of secrecy meant that what happened in the sheets stayed off the streets in her book, so to speak.)

So the slip-up is mostly his fault but also partially hers. They’re at Shaw’s, invited down on a rare equal finish for the four of them, to discuss Holt’s plans to adopt a new dog, after the better part of two years considering it.

“You want a beer?” Rosa asks from next to him, roughly forty minutes into a heated back-and-forth on the advantages of owning a pomeranian between the captain and Charles (“Pu-lease Boyle, you wouldn’t know a good taste in pets even if one bit you on the nose” is a choice exchange) and he nods in grateful appreciation, feeling he may need another one or maybe five to steel himself for the rest of this debate if it continues apace.

When she returns, two particularly crucial things happen.

One: automatically, in lifting an arm to accept the bottle, Rosa slides back into the booth and under it, so she is pressed up close to him.

Two: in reading the physical cues usually limited to either his couch or the bed, his mind decides to follow up her gesture with a kiss to the crown of her head.

Jake thinks immediately nothing of it, mumbling his thanks so as not to interrupt Holt and Charles before taking a swig, only to discover when he sets his bottle down that both men are looking at him with the kind of expression reserved for growing a second head.

“Did you,” Charles begins after a moment. “Did you just – I mean, did you just – wait, did –”

“Detective Peralta,” Holt smoothly cuts across, only the slightest twitch of his eyebrow betraying him in his slip back into office formality, “did you just kiss Detective Diaz?”

“Wait, what?” Jake’s mouth helpfully supplies as his brain attempts to scramble and catch up as to why anyone would be asking him that. Beneath his arm, Rosa has tensed.

“Jakey, you just kissed Rosa,” Charlies recovers. “On the head,” he adds helpfully.

“I did?” Jake replies, still attempting to process what the hell was happened because did he just do that in all seriousness?

He turns his head and looks at Rosa, who also twisted to stare at him with an unreadable expression, and he desperately hopes that after a year of gradually falling head over heels for her, she is not about to gut him like a fish on the table.

He wonders if his fear shows in his expression and that it is enough for her to take pity on him, because she sighs and her features become slightly pinched before she spins back to face their tablemates.

“Yes,” she replies, clipped short. “He did. We’re dating. Next topic.”

Jake flips his gaze back to Holt and Charles, both of whom are nursing the same expressions of impassive restrain and punch-drunk incredulity.

“You… and Rosa?” the latter asks, voice slightly rising, before he turns to her and adds, “you… and Jake?”

“How long has this been going on?” Holt asks and Jake feels Rosa tap him fairly sharply with his foot under the table.

“Long enough,” she replies neutrally. That does not satisfy Holt entirely, but his response is refreshingly expected.

“I’m disappointed that neither of you have disclosed this in precinct paperwork, to confirm that you have signalled your intent to begin an internal-or-inter-departmental relationship outside working hours,” he says. “Though given your disclosure record, Diaz, and your paperwork record, Peralta, I cannot say I am surprised.”

“Sorry, captain,” he says on reflex and Rosa definitely kicks him this time before he can make some godawful pun to follow up with, which is most unreservedly for the best.

“I expect to see it on my desk no later than Monday morning,” Holt continues.

“Fine,” Rosa clips back. “Now, you should get a spaniel.”

“A spaniel?” Charles parrots. “They’re pretty awes– ”

“A spaniel?!” Holt repeats with a far more outraged countenance than Jake anticipated. “You mean the floppy-eared degenerate creature and sworn enemy of the corgi at dog shows across the nation itself?”

Like that, the conversation snaps back entirely to dogs and Jake thinks he can quite happily take another two hours of Holt launching broadsides against nearly every breed of canine under the sun if it keeps further questions about sudden revelations at bay.

He would applaud Rosa’s genius-level display of redirection there but he is currently particularly fearful of incurring her wrath. He realises that he has not yet removed his arm from around her shoulders and he moves to do so but, like a cobra, she reaches up and slaps the back of his palm.

He leaves it there. It seems much safer.

They cut out of the bar another hour-and-a-half later when Holt and Charles – either entirely oblivious to the pair’s loose affections or too consumed by their significant bout of dog-bashing – agree in strong words to go to a rescue kennel together on their next joint free day. There’s a hint of rain in the air and they hail a cab quickly.

The ride back over to his brownstone is silent, which is not unusual between the two of them, but Jake is pretty certain that this silence is freighted with something different from companionable appreciation. Rosa stares out of the window for the whole journey, resting her chin on one hand the other conspicuously balled in her lap.

They disembark and she follows him up the stairs to his apartment door. He unlocks it and they shuffle inside, hanging his jacket on the hook under the jamb and watching as she walks through to the living room and drops hers on the arm of the couch.

He’s still not sure how to quite begin so he busies himself rooting around the pile of takeaway leaflets under the coffee table until the silence feels almost overbearing to him and he resurfaces.

“I’m sorry,” he says. She looks at him, and as she did in the bar, she sighs, longer this time.

“Don’t be,” she replies, slumping back and lolling her head to look at the popcorn kernels in the ceiling. “It was my fault too.”

“Are you mad?” he asks, as he perches himself down on the other end of the couch. She exhales noisily in response.

“Not really,” she admits. “Kinda stumped. Figured they already knew somehow.”

“Oh god, me too,” Jake adds. “Seriously, I am sorry though.”

“I know,” she responds, and she drops her head back down to look at him. “I just… I dunno, I didn’t want it to necessarily come out like that.”

“Would you have wanted it to?” he asks, realising that they’re tiptoeing along the edge of a different conversation altogether. She bites her lip and glances away, then looks back at him.

“I think so,” she says. It sounds unsure but she repeats it a moment later, more firmly this time. “I think so.”

A warm fuzziness increasingly found in the corners of his chest expands outwards and he can’t smother his grin. She spots it and her own lips quirk at the corners as they so often do.

“I get that you don’t want the whole world to know,” Jake assures her. “But it’s not so bad if our friends know.”

“Ugh, Charles might be insufferable,” she counters, rolling her eyes.

“He won’t be if I warn him,” he banters back. “I can put him on his best behaviour, don’t worry about that.”

She shoots a small smile at him, one that turns almost coquettish in the half-light filtering out from the streets, the sidelamps on his table yet to be switched on. “You still feel the need to apologise?”

“If you really want me to,” he replies. “I did kind of give the game away.”

She undoes the top button of her jeans and bores her stormy eyes into him. “Then come and make it up to me.”

He takes his time with his mouth on the couch and afterwards she returns the favour. They sit, tops on and naked from the waist down, sprawled out against each other while she calls for bao and dumplings, his hand idly twirling her hair as they press up against each other.

It’s peaceful and he thinks back to the time Steve asked him if he thought he loved Rosa Diaz. Back then, he’d assumed he kinda did, in one way or another. Now, unequivocally, he knows he does.

There’s a fire at a deli Jake knows his mother occasionally frequents in the first week of November. The last fortnight has been exceptionally dry by New York standards, and he ultimately won’t track down the actual cause of the incident officially for another month, in that it was accidental rather than intentional, but he still has a vision of panic as he hits the lights and him and Dillman barrel on down there.

Detective Fogle, Holt’s most recent promotion, who reminds him in so many ways of Charles from their early days together, has marshalled a gawping, onlooking crowd away from the burst of the flames, fortunately not fanned hugely further by a still day, but she herself is still gawping too, at what appears to be a huge, shadowy figure moving around on the first floor, wreathed in smoke.

Jake feels his phone buzz as he screeches to a stop, and seizes it with a hand far less fumbling than it feels like and relief pours into him and he sees the message from his mother, just arrived, telling him that one of her art-school kids has got paint all other her favourite Spongebob-print skirt.

Reality crashes into his brief moment of respite as he jumps out and involuntarily coughs, the smoke thicker than it appeared at first glance. It’s still far enough to require a mask, and Fire Marshall Boone is barking orders out to what appears to be a small legion of hosepipe-wielding subordinates. Dillman has already dashed over to Fogle, helping to corral the crowd further back when he hears an older man scream that his daughter is still trapped in the building.

There’s a split-second where Jake turns and, like the blindly idiotic man that he is, prepares to throw himself through the shrouded door frame at ground level before a crash of glass above draws his attention, and he looks up to see Bruce Banner leaping out of a first-floor window, a teenage girl and a small boy wrapped under his arms.

“Marshall!” calls out Bruce, who is most assuredly still the Hulkified version of himself Jake met last about a year-and-a-half ago on that campfire trip. “Lend me the big one!”

Jake doesn’t look to see if Boone is stupefied, or already complying, because Bruce has turned to him now, the nearest law enforcement official, and gestured him across. “Detective!” he adds firmly. “Get these two to a medic.”

He ushers the pair, ashen and tear-streaked, over towards the ambulance that has just pulled up, watching as the man who had presumably shouted from the crowd push his way through, earning a strangled cry from the girl who embraces him. A moment later, an elderly woman also finds her way to him as he reaches the back doors of the ambulance, and the small boy hiccups as he throws himself into her arms.

Satisfied they’re secured, Jake joins Dillman and Fogle in ensuring that the crowd, slightly restless and still panicked, are kept a safe distance as Bruce Banner rushes back into the building, wielding an absolutely enormous hose. Another fire truck pulls up and crews immediately add more and more jets to the flames and, over the next five minutes, they gradually bring it under control.

When Bruce re-emerges shortly afterwards, hose under one arm and a particularly disgruntled looking tabby cat, there’s a spontaneous cheer that feels entirely organic. Jake can’t blame them. The man just rescued two people, maybe more, and an adorable pet from a burning building without breaking a sweat.

The Hulk is particularly awkward with that response but doesn’t look unpleased, depositing the cat gently back in its owners’ arms before returning to discuss matters with Boone. Jake takes the opportunity, as Dillman encourages the crowd to disperse now in an orderly fashion, to duck back under the cordon and head over towards the fire truck.

Bruce finishes with the fire marshal as he approaches and turns towards him. “Detective Peralta!” he says and, up close, Jake can see the soot marks lining his forehead and shoulders. He’s shirtless, which in itself isn’t a particularly unusual thing for the Hulk, but he does look slightly self-conscious without it. “I thought that looked like you.”

“Last time I checked, most definitely still me,” Jake replies, a little bit of a buzz running though him. Sure, he’s met Bruce before, even in this form, but to actually see the Hulk close-up and personal in action? His ten-year-old self would have screamed if his ten-year-old self had been around when the Hulk was punching aliens out above Manhattan. As it is, it still feels unfeasibly cool.

“Mind if I grab a shirt?” Bruce asks and before he knows it, the Hulk has produced a duffle bag, from which he extracts a particularly large sports jersey, one that appears to be that of the Japanese rugby union team. It could undoubtedly house him, Rosa, Steve and Captain Holt’s new dog Camembert with enough room to turn around in and it remarkable hangs a little loose on Bruce too. Jake idly wonders if Japanese rugby union players are already built like the Hulk and decides to Google it latter to assuage his curiosity.

“I didn’t know you were back in New York,” he asked Bruce as he stowed his duffle bag in what most the largest back pocket he’s ever seen. “I thought you were still actually in Baltimore?”

“Uh, I’ve actually been in Oregon,” Bruce replies as he now produces a pair of what appear to be honest-to-god reading spectacles and slips them on. “Been helping fight some wildfires over there. I’m back for now at any rate.”

“Y’what?” Jake hadn’t even known there’d been wildfires in Oregon and echoed as much. Bruce shrugged.

“They didn’t cause too much damage, we kept them under control,” he replies. “It was good to get out and do something with the Hulk that wasn’t just smash-and-grab. Excellent for motor skills.”

“Huh,” Jake says, because truth be told, he’s not that close with Bruce and he’s really not sure what to say to that. The larger man pats him on the shoulder in a gesture that almost drives him a foot into the asphalt like a particularly squishy nail and then gesticulates to the cordon where several people are still loitering. Jake can see what appears to be – autograph books? – clutched tightly in the hands of a few younger children.

“My public awaits,” he notes sheepishly, “so this is it for now, detective. I’ll see you around.” And then he’s over to the cordon, kneeling down and speaking with what looks like a pair of six-year-old twins, one who appears to be on the verge of excitable combustion and the other with their face buried into their mother’s skirt.

“Huh,” Jake repeats, mostly to himself. The Hulk as a celebrity figure, popular with children. Of all the Avengers, who’d have thought it?

Dillman calls him over and he troops back to the cruiser to report in on the radio.

Thanksgiving this year is spent at his mom’s, and though Rosa is invited, she turns him down for the actual date himself; she has to spend it with her father and sisters this year, having missed them the last time around.

“I’ll come over on the Saturday,” she says, before deadpanning, “I have to go knife my way through Black Friday at Hot Topic. Keep the hipster emos at bay, y'know.”

“I’ll assume you’re joking,” he says as he picks up his jacket from the back of his chair. He throws a mock-salute to Holt through the half-shuttered blinds of the latter’s office and gets a stone-faced response in return. “But coolio, no worries. Maybe we can spend Christmas together.”

He doesn’t realise she’s stopped walking only when he gets to the elevator door and turns to find her with a strange mix of emotions bubbling under the surface of her expression.

Well, for Rosa at least. He's learned to read her cues a loooooong time ago.

“Or not?” he ventures after a moment, attempting to tamp down the sting of disappointment.

“No, no,” she hurriedly cuts across him, biting the corner of her lip. “No. I’d like to. I...really would like to. I just…” She trails off, picks at the threads of her sleeve before she continues. “I thought Christmas was for you and Amy.”

Jake blinked. It was true that he’d spent several festive holidays in the company of Victor Santiago over the past few years, but he’d never really picked up on the specificity of it as a particular day of remembrance.

“Maybe it is,” he says, as he walks back to her and brushes his fingers across the knuckles of her free hand, hanging loosely at her side. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be yours and mine too.”

For a moment, he thinks that Rosa’s eyes might have turned a little watery under the halogen strip lights but she blinks and it’s gone.

“Then,” she says after a moment, voice steady as she returns his light touch, “I’d very much like that.”

His mom announces over Thanksgiving a week later that she has plans to head away for the week around Christmas. She’s headed west out to Montana, off to see an old colleague from her teaching days who has invited her up to their alpaca farm for a winter break.

His surprise must show on his face, as her brow pinches and she asks if he’ll be alright while she’s out of state.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he assures her. “Rosa’s going to come over for the holidays.

“Oh, is she now?” She shoots him a slightly terrifying grin that he really doesn’t need to see. “Make sure that you don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, honey.”

He groans at her and throws a scrunched-up napkin across the table which she ably bats down into the bowl of cranberry sauce without blinking an eye. His mother’s possession of catlike reflexes makes him wonder sometimes why he still can’t tie a double knot in his shoelaces.

Jake has only exchanged small gifts with Rosa in years gone by, and even the previous season had seen them keep it relatively svelte - a new leather pistol holder for her, and a deluxe double-disc edition of Die Hard with a Vengeance for him respectively.

Before then, they'd generally just bought each other gift vouchers for Secret Santa, or novelty items haphazardly tossed into the bran tub with a manic grin. But they've moved so far along the line in this thing together now that he feels he can't just cut it with a whoopee cushion, a George Michael cardboard cut-out and some assorted junk.

He spends his last day off before the Christmas break, over a week prior to the date itself, alternatively browsing the wares at multiple small shops nestled in hipster neighbourhoods and scrolling furiously online in the hopes of striking inspiration. It's a much harder task than he thought it would be, and he's torn between hoping she finds it just as difficult for him, or that she's already nailed it down.

Eventually, he settles on what he hopes will be tried-and-tested recipes for success. Behind a gaudy window display where animatronic Father Christmases sing All I Want for Christmas Is You in reedy high-pitched shrieks, he discovers a neat little place, darkly baroque and a tad spooky, where he comes across a deep burnt-crimson jacket and a matching bear of hexagonal ruby ear studs.

He pairs it up with a vintage bowie knife from an army surplus store run by a friend of Holt's - a delightfully terrifying chap called Fat Barrie, who wears the gaudiest floral shirts known to man underneath well-worn camo fatigues - and a Bruce Springsteen-emblazoned thermos mug, replete with the Tunnel of Love album cover.

(Few people know of Rosa's surprisingly strong, and obviously hidden affection for the Boss, but he can trace it back to their academy days, where she used to mutter the words to Dancing in the Dark before target practice under her breath when she thought no-one else was listening.)

He hits on another winner two days later when he ends up able to snag a pair of pit tickets for Iron Maiden over at MSG, the metal veterans another one of her louder pleasures. He considers slipping them in a card with the lyrics to Teenage Dirtbag emblazoned alongside but thinks better of it in the end.

She’s over the following night again, and they run through plans involving their shift patterns for Christmas Eve. He’ll get off later than her and she asks if she wants her to wait for him.

“Nah,” he says, rooting around a little nervously inside his back pocket and producing the spare key he’d put there earlier. “You might as well let yourself in.”

She looks at it for a long time, her features stoically wavering, before she leans over and kisses him, accepting it from his outstretched palm as she does.

“Thanks,” she replies when she leans back, and her eyes are looking a little wet again for the briefest of moments, before she slips the cool metal into her jeans and picks up the takeout leaflet for their nearby Greek.

It’s a particularly easy final shift before he clocks off for the next forty-eight hours – they’ve both wrangled Christmas and Boxing Day off this year – and he’s both immensely looking forward to and a little bit terrified about it. Rosa’s reason for initial pause when he’d asked her had made him realise that, as so many little shifts in their relationship had been, this was a pretty big deal.

Still, he thinks as he wanders up the staircase, he’s happy to treat it just like any other night they’ve spent, although this is remarkably the first time they’ll share two on the trot. They plan to order in as usual, one last takeout before they immerse themselves in cooking dinner together the following day – which he realises with another small jolt will be the first time they’ve done such a thing.

He’s a little bit surprised to find that the lights are off when he unlocks the door and a feeling of befuddlement cross his face. He can see Rosa’s jacket slung in its usual place as he toes off his shoes and drops his backpack, so he knows she’s here somewhere.

“Hey!” he calls out. “Anybody home?”

He gets no answer but he does hear the sound of shuffling from somewhere in the direction of his bedroom. He makes to move in that direction but then Rosa’s voice rings out.

“Stay there,” she says, sharply. “In fact, on the couch. I’ll be out in a moment.”

Jake still feels oddly puzzled but he does as he has been asked, shrugging off his own jacket and scarf, looping it over the umbrella stand and wandering over to where the coffee table is surprisingly clean. He can still hear some rustling from down the hallway, but with no sign of Rosa yet, he flicks out his phone and checks for a text from his mother to confirm she’s safely arrived in Billings.

The sound of presumably his bedroom door swing open and shut draws his attention, and he tosses his handset to the far end of the couch as he cranes his head around to see Rosa stalk into the room.

He feels his jaw physically go slack and he’s later particularly impressed that his eyes didn’t fully bug out of his sockets and roll down between the cushions.

Rosa is decked out in a black leather corset, cut beneath the arms but above the bust, just rising over the curve of her breast. She’s sporting match lace briefs and dark suspenders that run mid-thigh-high. She’s wearing two-inch heel boots that look like they could put a hole through a man’s chest and, to complete the image, she’s holding what appears to be a long, flat riding crop.

“Oh,” Jake somehow gasps out. “My god.” He’s frankly astounded his loins haven’t just instinctively exploded upon catching sight of her.

Rosa grins, a lazy Cheshire Cat-like effort that pulls her deep-plum-coloured lips across her teeth with dazzling results. “You can call me that if you want.”

Jake knows he’s been as utterly turned on as he is right now on several occasions throughout his life, from his college days through married life and into the here and now, but his mind has been derived entirely of enough blood to remotely conjure any such occasion up.

He watches, slack-mouthed, as she stalks around the edge of the couch to the far side of the coffee table and turns to face him full, planting one foot upon the wood with an ominous creek. She reaches out with the crop and feathers the edge of his jaw, trailing it down the middle of his button-down plaid and further below.

“Safeword’s parsnip, bitch,” she growls as she rotates her wrist and, dear lord, he is fairly certain he is not going to remotely last even long enough to consider the need to even remember what stupid vegetable she’s chosen.

“Holy fuck,” he stammers. “I mean, like, shit, fuck, what.” He feels clammy and wonders if he’s gone pale because he’s feeling pretty lightheaded, bordering on exhilarated dizziness.

He guesses he has gone a little bit white because Rosa’s façade cracks from dominative sultriness into something a little more hesitant. “Hey, Jake. Jake.”

He manages to refocus on her and she’s biting her lip. “Is this alright?”

Jake nods, trying to muster a competent sentence. “Yes. Holy shit, Rosa, yes.”

“One-thousand push-ups?” she adds, her features flirting with concern, and he strangles a laugh that, of all the times to bring it up, it’s when she has a riding crop resting on his junk.

“Oh my god,” he manages. “Yes. I’m good. Ten-thousand fucking push-ups.”

That satisfies her, as her face settles back into assured provocation. She physically steps across the coffee table, pushing herself off it with a slightly ominous creak, and drags the crop back up his body until it is firmly resting under his chin.

“Merry Christmas, motherfucker,” she grins, teeth bared, as she places a knee between his legs, leans him and engulfs his lips with a fiery, drawn-out passion.

She takes him to the edge and back far more than once across the evening, alternating between authoritarian command and delicate gestures. He’s kept in a haze of pleasurable restraint, able to look but told he better not touch, boy, and he heeds her command for as long as he can. He almost comes the moment she’s unbuttoned his pants and pressed the head of the crop into just the right place.

When she’s had her fun, boot resting on this thigh, she strips off her footwear, pushes him deeper into the cushions and straddles his face. The noises she makes are at sharp odds with the authority she’s displayed so far, but it’s all wrapped in a hazy kind of blissed-out heaven he could lose himself in for hours if he let himself.

Eventually they move to the bedroom, where he takes his time rolling down her thigh-highs, allows her to strip him entirely, and he’s permitted to run his fingers all over her body again. They’ve never done this type of thing before, but the corset feels well-honed, and he vaguely wonders just how often she has worn it before, until her hand grabs him low and he groans as his mind goes blank.

She kisses him senseless, slow, lazy, sure-footed, sinfully delicious, and there’s fireworks behind his eyes and then he’s coming undone all over again. She twists her head a moment and looks back at him, eyes twinkling.

“Dude,” she says. “You can pay for this to be dry cleaned now.”

“Duly noted,” he gasps in response, as she leans back up and slowly, torturously, unbuckles it from the back. When it drops away, she’s revealed in all her glory again and he reaches up a hand, skirting his palm over her breast, slowly drifting up to cradle her face.

She looks like heaven, her expression electrifying in its affection, and Jake simply feels like this is the now moment.

“I love you,” he says, unvarnished, unwavering, as he tucks a curl of hair behind her ear.

A look of surprise crosses her face every so briefly, replaced by one caught between elation and tenderness. It’s possibly the most beautiful Rosa Diaz has ever looked to him.

“Duh,” she says, failing to keep the quiet delight out of her voice and he feels himself break out into a grin.

Later, when he’s flipped her and showered her with his own attentions, and she’s flipped him back and they’ve both exhausted themselves, they lie under the duvet, naked, their limbs caught in a tangle as they sprawl across each other. Outside, the first flakes of snow are gently falling.

He glances at the alarm clock on his bedside table, that rads 00:03 in big red letters, and feels another smile play across his lips.

“Hey,” he half-whispers. “It’s Christmas.”

“Yeah,” she mutters into his chest. “Happy holidays and all that crap.”

He grins again and she stretches into him, a full-body-length effort that feels strikingly more intimate than anything else they’ve done all night.

“Jake?” she says after a few more minutes of companionable silence.

He drops his gaze to her as she lifts her head and looks into his eyes. The storminess is settled for once; instead, it’s tranquil beneath those midnight pupils.

“I love you too,” she murmurs. His heart feels fit to burst, shot through with something he can’t name and doesn’t want to, but it feels wonderful and strong and overflowing with a spectrum of warmth he’s not felt this strongly for over four-and-a-half years.

“Cool,” he tries for nonchalantly and instead finds her reaching up with her thumb to wipe away a tear he didn’t even know had slipped out.

“Dummy,” she breathes again, and leans in to capture his mouth, thick with gentle emotion. Outside, the snow slowly settles, dusting the windowsill with a kind of swirling midnight magic.

They lie in the following morning, let the sun blearily rise on the horizon, before he kisses her shoulder, she slaps his rear and they shuffle out from under the burrow they’ve nuzzled themselves into. He calls his mom to wish her a merry Christmas as she takes a shower, watching her through the frosted glass; she reaches out as soon as he hangs up and yanks him in under the spray with her.

She’d had the generosity, before turning herself into a bona-fide dominatrix, to whip up a batch of batter the night before, and they flips pancakes with maple syrup and strawberries as the afternoon crawls in, just a couple each to keep them going as much as anything. They exchange presents shortly afterwards; she chuckles at the knife, lights up at the jacket and positively lets out a very un-Rosa-like squeak at the tickets.

“You better not have blown all your savings on this,” she tells him.

“Scout’s honour,” he replies and she slaps him on the knee with a laugh because she sure as damnit knows he was never a Scout, couldn’t even hack it in the Cubs. (She was a brownie, which endlessly amuses him to no end.)

She’s bought him a pair of Die Hard pop dolls, their heads bobbling precariously, which he naturally takes childlike delight in. There’s also a new plaid shirt, one he’d mentioned in passing a few weeks ago when he’d seen a stranger walking by them after they’d been out for a date night at the bowling alley, and, to his surprise, an old Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

“You better not have blown all your savings on this,” he reproaches her.

“It’s second-hand, mint condition,” she shrugs. “Also, don’t pretend I’m not going to beat your ass more than vice versa on this,” she responds and, oh, it’s definitely on now. He can tell already she’ll pick Wario just to spite him.

She has a present from his mom, too, and though Rosa is not one for jewellery outside of her studs, she falls almost dumbstruck in silence at the deep azure necklace wrapped in tissue paper. It’s small, but neatly formed; almost a crystalline collar more than anything else.

“Did you know about this?” she asks, and he shakes his head.

“No idea,” he admits honestly. “I knew she was going to get you something, but I just kinda assumed it would be something like artisan chocolates, maybe a scarf.”

He has one last present from her, and she looks a little nervous as he unwraps it. When he sees what it is, Jake lets out a roar of laughter and lifts up the olive-green wool-knit bob-cap, identical to her own, the gift ribbon still trailing off it. He slips it straight onto his head and grins at her.

“I look absolutely dope in knitwear,” he brags and she throws a wadded-up ball of wrapping paper at him with a small, relieved smile.

They tag team the turkey and all the trimmings afterwards, Rosa insistent that the leftover batter from brunch can be used to make Yorkshire puddings. It’s one of Jake’s weaknesses as both chef and customer; he loves them, but cannot get them to rise for love nor money. It turns out Rosa has the secret touch though; when he bites into them a few hours later, they are melt-in-the-mouth delicious.

She, of all people, suggests The Muppet Christmas Carol after they’ve cleaned away the pots (“Gonzo is exactly how I imagine Charles Dickens actually was,” she deadpans) and he realises halfway through the scene where Kermit-as-Bob Cratchit goes ice-skating with the penguins that he’s not seen it since his last Christmas with Amy, where it had been something of a tradition to watch.

He wonders just what traditions he and Rosa may build in years to come; he wonders how long this can last and realises that he can see far further into a future with her than he ever previously expected. He glances over at her, as the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Michael Caine through the graveyard to meet the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and wonders where they’ll be this time next year.

He fervently hopes it is together, wherever it may be.

Chapter Text

2023

Holt calls him into his office one week after he sees in the new year on a particularly quiet shift, and asks if he would like to be considered for promotion to a sergeant’s position. Jake initially assumes that the captain is pulling his leg.

He tells him as much. “You’re pulling my leg.”

Holt frowns. The pinch in his brow is well-worn and creased. “Why would I pull your leg? Firstly, your arm is far easier to reach from across my desk. Secondly, I have no reason to grab any of your appendages. I was under the impression that you had Detective Diaz to do that.”

Jake promptly finds himself engulfed by a coughing fit and tries to see through his streaming eyes if Holt’s poker face has slipped enough to tell him whether he was in full knowledge of the idiom, or if he is genuinely confused by the phrase. He gets nothing in return, which - even after all this time - isn’t exactly a surprise.

“Why me?” he asks, after he has regained his breath.

Holt frowns again, though this one is more readily decipherable in a are-you-shitting-me-Peralta vein that he does not see too frequently any more.

“Because you have the best closed case record in the precinct,” he states, as if it was obvious. “Jake, you’ve had the best closed case record for every calendar year since I came to the nine-nine. That’s a decade now. Even Amy couldn’t match your number of successful arrests, though I will note in deference that your aversion to paperwork does mean that you had less processed overall in both 2014 and 2015.”

“Huh,” said Jake. He scratches his ear, processing the words. “I mean, yeah, objectively I knew I was the best detective in town, but it’s always nice to hear someone else say it.”

Holt levels a look - this one is a your-ego-needs-a-reality-check-from-my-fist special - at him before he continues. “I’m sure you know we’ve had no need to fill our second position for obvious reasons over the past four years – and we still do not need to, in fact."

He shuffles some papers, and hands a thin file across the desk. Jake takes it and finds himself looking down at a photocopied image of Frank Dillman, grainy and undernourished. They clearly need to replace the ink cartridges. 

"But Sergeant Dillman has signalled his intent to apply for the vacant post of captain at the six-two," Holt continues. "I believe, according to Commissioner Herschel, he is the only applicant seeking the command; therefore, I find myself needing to find a new sergeant.”

Jake chews on his lip, fiddling with the cuffs of the plaid shirt Rosa bought him for Christmas. His mind is uncharacteristically blank despite the gravity of the request. “With all respect, captain, but have you asked the others yet?”

“Not yet,” Holt replies smoothly. “In part, because I wished to offer you the position first. You possess core… people skills that, as much as I respect, appreciate and admire the work of Detectives Diaz and Boyle, I do not feel they necessarily possess in order to get the best out of this position.”

“Which are?” Jake asks, curious.

“I fear Boyle would be a pushover and that Diaz would push everyone else over,” Holt admits. “Nevertheless, if you choose to turn down the chance to take the sergeant’s exams at my recommendation, I will ask one of them to do so. I intend to hire from within the nine-nine if possible; I do not wish to look further afield when I already have men and women I greatly respect working here.”

“Cool, cool, no pressure.” Jake sits for a moment. His brain has suddenly rebooted itself, and is whirring louder than the old  projector his grandma used to set up for home movies, beamed onto bedsheets hung across the stairwell door when he was a boy. “Would you be mad if I said I needed time to think?”

“Not at all,” Holt responds. “And nor do I wish you to feel under any pressure to accept the offer. I am sure that, if Detective Diaz or Detective Boyle are ultimately handed the opportunity, they would likely thrive and prove to be a credit to this precinct.”

He levels Jake with a look again, and it certainly feels like the fatherly appreciation he knows he has often craved from Holt over the years. “But I believe, even if we were to discard your case numbers, that you would prove to be the best of the three of you. I know you’ve spent many years wanting to be the sheriff of Brooklyn streets, Jake, but both you and I know that you’re far more than that.”

It’s possibly the most touching thing Holt has said to him since he was living under his roof the better part of five years ago – and man, so much has happened since, and yet time has vanished like grains of sand in an hourglass or candyfloss when dipped in Coke. Wait, he might have the wrong analogy there. Does candyfloss vanish when dipped in Coke?

“I do not know why you are talking about sugary fairground treats and carbonated soft drinks,” the captain intones, visibly confused, and Jake realises that his train of thought had made the leap from mind to mouth without him realising. One of these days, he’d blurt out something truly dangerous, or at the very least brutally embarrassing.

Another thought strikes him. “Erm, captain, when were you planning to have these chats with Rosa and Charles?”

“Probably not until I got an answer from you,” Holt acknowledges and then he makes a sound of realisation. “Ah, I see. You want to discuss this with Detective Diaz, but you would rather that she be looped into the conversation professionally before she is personally.”

“Is that too much to ask?” Jake queries and Holt makes a sound of concentration as he leans back in his desk chair.

“No, I don’t think so,” he concurs after a moment. “Send them both in when you re-emerge, I’ll discuss it with them both.”

He does so, earning slightly perplexed looks from both Rosa and Charles. He doesn’t get to see their subsequent reactions immediately as he is hauled out to a B&E with Dillman, and by the time he gets back to the precinct, they’ve both already headed off.

He has another two hours on his shift, so drops Charles a text and figures he’ll discuss with Rosa when he gets back to his apartment. Since the start of January, she’s spent only one night back at her own place, her access to his now attached to a little Eddie the Head keyring he sees the occasional outline of in the back pocket of her jeans.

Charles fires back almost immediately, and he’s relieved – if not hugely surprised – to see that Boyle really has no interest right now in taking a step up the ladder, even if it means an increased pay grade. He feels a little pang of trepidation at the follow-up message that indicates Rosa was more lost in thought by the news Holt favoured him over her for the position, adding that the captain had told her she was welcome to still apply either way.

He swings by the deli on the way home, gets some meatball subs for the pair of them as previously agreed, and enters his apartment to find her perched cross-legged in just a long, faded print t-shirt from his academy days and her underwear on the armchair, a dog-eared copy of The War of the Worlds in one hand and a beer in the other.

“Hey,” he says, dropping his coat over the couch. “Good day?”

“Mmmmm,” she grunts. “Holt told me. About Dillman.”

“I know,” he replies honestly, unsure if the captain would have clued both her and Charles in that he had asked for them to be kept in the loop.

“I appreciate you asking him to tell us,” she replies, which answers that question at the very least. She looks up after flipping her next page. “Are you gonna go for it?”

“I don’t know,” he honestly answers. “I felt we should talk about it.”

Rosa sets her book down and sighs. “Yeah, I figured.” She rolls her head around, cracking it, and revealing a particularly tempting view of her neckline. Jake controls his more primal urges with a twitch of his eye. “Do you want to go for it?”

“I…” He hadn’t actually thought too much about whether it was something he wanted to do. He knew that, for all his gung-ho, laissez-faire approach to certain aspects of his job sometimes, he’d be able to knuckle down and fulfil the duties of a sergeant without too much trouble. Amy had often told him he’d make a great one someday, after she’d earned her stripes, and it had been a thought that had occasionally wandered across his mind since. She’d have been prouder than anyone to see him take that next step.

“Maybe,” he admits after he realises he’s been lost in thought for too long. Rosa’s expression remains impassable, and he continues. “I guess it just would feel weird, in a way. I’ve been doing this so long without really thinking I would. I always kinda guessed after Amy, it would be you.”

Rosa is particularly poker-faced again for a moment and she then sighs and slowly unfolds her legs, stretching them out to touch the coffee table with the tips of her toes.

“I kind of did?” she ventures, oddly unsure of herself. “No offence to Charles, but it was always going to be me or you after Amy.”

“I don’t think he’d take any in the slightest,” Jake replies and she inclines her head.

“But,” she continues on. “But… I’ve grown away from it, I think. The way I’ve gone – the way we’ve gone,” she gestures between the two of them, “I don’t feel like I need to take that next step to feel further fulfilment.”

“Amy always had it as part of the plan,” Jake acknowledges and Rosa dips her head again, the edge of her mouth quirking.

“Of course she did,” she says, not unkindly, before running a hand through her curls. Jake ignores the itch to edge across the room and do exactly the same.

“I guess Holt telling me today that he wants to put you forward first stung a little bit,” she admits after a moment. “I absolutely know that’s dumb, that it’s not meant to invalidate my talents at all. But.” She shrugs. “Still.”

“I get that,” he says. “Just for the record, I think you would make a totally kick-ass sergeant, way more cooler than me.”

“That’s a given,” she snorts. “All the newbies would shit their britches though. Not sure that’s the best way to inspire loyalty.”

They’re silent for a moment. Outside, the snow – almost a constant, if only in light flurries, since that Christmas morning – is starting to fall a little harder. He wanders over and draws the blinds.

“Let’s say I hypothetically go for it, if you don’t want to,” he picks up as he turns back to her. “What then?”

“What do you mean, what then?” she counters and he works out how best to pick out his words.

“Like, what… comes next for us,” he finishes. “If I become a sergeant.”

“Would there be any difference?” she asks, eyebrow raised. “We’d still be working in the same precinct. You’d just have to wear a uniform more often.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he replies dryly. “But, maybe I feel like there would be a difference if I – or even you, if I decide not to – go for this.” He pauses. “Would you still go for it if I was going to?”

Rosa sighs again and rolls her head back once more. “I dunno. I mean, it’s only been sprung on us today.”

She taps her toes against the rim of the table before continuing. “My gut tells me probably not, if you did. I don’t want us to pit up against each other, especially if I get in ahead of you after Holt’s already told me he’d rather you have it.”

“Yeah, that’s…” Jake trails off, wondering if it was a good idea to ask Holt to basically profess his favouritism for the position towards the other candidate, the lesser one in his eyes.

“But if you don’t,” she shrugs again. “Then I probably do. He’s already said he wants someone from the precinct. It’s nice to be considered, even if it’s second-best, I guess.”

Jake mulls it over for a minute, slowly walking around to drop himself on the couch. He sits at the end closest to her in the chair and gradually reaches over to pull her feet into his lap, where he begins massaging the knots out. She makes no sound but her expression obviously loosens.

“Cheater,” she says with no heat and he snorts.

They’re silent for a moment, Jake’s mind turning over several things at once as he works the sole of Rosa’s foot with his thumb.

“Where do you see us in a year?” he asks eventually. She glances over at him.

“Probably on this couch,” she replies. “Maybe on the late shift. Maybe fucking against the window. Who knows.”

“Let me rephrase that,” Jake amends. “Where would you like to see us, in a year?”

“As in… relationship-wise?” Rosa confirms, and Jake just decides to hell with it and goes in at the deep end.

“Basically, in a very-not-subtle and probably not-effective way, do you want to move in together?” he asks. Rosa’s foot, previously wriggling in his lap, goes still quite sharply and very nearly smacks him one in his protected wildlife area.

She’s gone ludicrously, horror-movie-before-the-jump-scare-silent, in fact, and his nerve, as it often does in those situations inside the cinema, deserts him and he starts inanely babbling.

“I mean, you’re basically here at least five days a week, and you’re staying over more and more, and you have your own drawer in the kitchen for snacks –”

“Jake.”

“– and you run the vacuum around when you think I’ve got too messy, and your toothbrush shares a charging stand with me, and I know –”

“Jake.”

“– it just kind of feels like if I don’t ask now, then we’re going to be shifting around it for the next twelve months, but it’s cool, that’s cool if you don’t, if –”

“Jake!” she exclaims, slightly fractured this time, and he finally alights his gaze on her after looking anywhere else around the room. Her eyes are doing that watery thing they sometimes do when she’s processing very high levels of emotion, but this time she blinks and they’re still like lakes to lose himself in.

“Jake,” she repeats again, and the corners of her mouth have turned up with the kind of small tilt that is her equivalent of a blazing megawatt smile, the sort that can burn down suns with its intensity.

“What?” he says, aware he sounds a little bit frazzled, maybe a little bit desperate, but goddamnit, she was become one of the best things in his life, this wonderfully precious thing he never thought he’d be lucky enough to find again and he’s no shame in prostrating himself like this.

“Yes,” she replies and then an actual tear runs down her face. “Dumbass. Yes, I’ll move in with you.”

“Really?” he breathes and then she’s practically leapt off the armchair, tackled him into the couch. She hooks her chin over his shoulder and says nothing else, speaks louder than perhaps she ever could with the intensity of her embrace. He returns it, strong, sturdy, arms wrapped around her like she’s a buoy in the sea of life, and all he can do is cling on to her as they are rocked by the waves.

“Man, if I’d definitely known you’d have not kicked me out of my own window, I might have asked you earlier,” he jokes a while later, and she half-heartedly slaps him on the shoulder. He’s pulled the throw blanked over them both, horizontal on the couch, when he’d spotted the goosebumps along her calves.

She’s silent for a moment before she speaks into his head, resting on her chest after their clinch had turned into a slowly elated make-out session.

“I’d have said yes in September,” she murmurs into his hair. “When we outed ourselves. That felt… that felt like the first moment to me.”

He stares up at her, a little wide-eyed and dazed. “I love you,” he says, a phrase he’s still relatively cautious with the use of, but one he’s fairly certain will slip out with increasing regularity over the near-future.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grins, leaning down to kiss him. “Sap.”

Ultimately, he takes up Holt’s offer. He’s told he’ll sit his exams in late spring and spends the next four months cramming the details from Amy’s old textbooks. Rosa says she hasn’t seen him sweat this hard since that oral examination in their academy days.

He groans theatrically and hurls a cushion at her, which she ably dodges and raises an innocent eyebrow from where she’s trouncing some dweeb of a challenger named KorgRoxx69 half the world away in Europe on Smash Bros with Snake as her chosen fighter.

The weeks pass by a particularly feverish blur – he barely finds time for his coffee dates with Steve, who seems melancholily preoccupied more often than not but insists everything is swell, in his words – and before he knows it, he’s up before the board to prove his worth.

Jake thinks it goes well, though he naturally gets nothing in response from the adjudicators. He resists the urge to crack any inappropriate jokes throughout, which already makes it a major victory in his book, and he celebrates afterwards with a round of drinks at Shaw’s alongside his friends and a different kind of oral examination against the inside of his front door when he gets home.

Rosa moves in gradually across February, and Jake discovers that a lot of her stuff had already migrated without him truly realising. He’s glad that he moved most of Amy’s things out before, giving them the space to play around.

He goes to Prospect Park and the monument more than he ever has now. The first time he tells her name that he’s in a relationship – and in love – with Rosa Diaz, he feels a light warm breeze tickle his cheeks and takes it as a sign. He used to find it tough to stand in front of the monolith; now, he makes it an essential pilgrimage of his week, determined to ensure that Amy’s memory remains firm, that he stays true to it even as his old life fully cedes way to his new one.

Rosa sometimes accompanies him, sometimes asks for her own privacy to speak to Amy. He wonders what she says, but he never pries; she doesn’t ask what he spills from the heart when he’s alone and he won’t do the same to her. They’ll stand together, coffee in hand, gloves loosely touching at their sides and then shed entirely when the early spring chill gives way to something sunnier.

Holt pulls him, her and Charles into his office in the first week of June, and he stands there on tenterhooks. The captain flicks through a pile of papers on his desk with a nonchalant, unhurried air, and Jake finds the suspense is far more suffocating than he expected it to be.

“Well, there’s no use beating around the bush,” Holt eventually says after what has literally felt like an hour of him doing just that, and he cracks a smile. “Congratulations Sergeant Peralta. You’ll move to your new rank in one month.”

He’s almost caught in shock silence as Charles whoops and Rosa, never one for particularly public displays of affection in the precinct, slugs him in the arm with a grin. The motion jerks him back into life and he finds himself thanking Holt over and over again, who eventually tells him to get out of his office and stop wittering, Peralta.

The captain invites them for a celebratory dinner that afternoon however, as they finish their lunch break, and though Charles has to attend Nikolaj’s synth-harpsichord recital (“He’s like a regular old Mozart, or maybe Trent Reznor,” he gushes, which Jake can’t quite interpret as a successful compliment or something else entirely), he and Rosa make the quick trip back to get changed before heading over.

Holt asks how the two of them are finding domestic life together, and though Rosa gives typically short, non-illuminative answers, she does so with a note of affection in her voice and across her features that Jake can easily decipher. He feels warm and comfortable, as they switch through a variety of topics, and he finds himself tickling Camembert, the nosy West Highland terrier, under the chin with a gleeful addictiveness, the dog yapping whenever he feels he is not getting the attention and praise he is worthy of.

It’s towards the end of the evening, when Holt has informed Camembert that he cannot have any more brisket, that he turns to Jake and asks about Steve.

“Have you spoken to Captain Rogers at all recently?”

Jake blinks and exchanges a look with Rosa before turning back to Holt. “It’s strange you should say that. We haven’t actually for a couple of weeks; we went out a Starbucks but he seemed pretty preoccupied.”

“I was meant to meet him for a trip to MoMA this weekend, but he cancelled at the last minute,” Holt concurs. “He was very apologetic, but said he had to make a trip upstate at short notice.”

“Huh,” Jake muses. There were any number of reasons that Steve could make the journey upstate – to visit Nat, to clear his mind on his bike, to take in a little sightseeing. After all, the man was retired.

But Holt was right, it was unusual for Steve to drop existing commitments. He was particularly fastidious when it came to ensuring that he was at the right time and the right place when he was asked to.

“Regardless,” Holt continued, still attempting to stop his dog from climbing onto the table in pursuit of gravy, “he informed me that he is still intending to host a birthday celebration on Independence Day once more this year. It will be good to attend after missing his last one.”

“I’ll keep my eye out for the invite then,” Jake concludes and, sure enough, when they get home that evening, he stumbles over the cream card envelope tucked under the door in his absence. It’s addressed to both him and Rosa – a warmth expands outwards in his chest – and sets the date for July 4^th, back on his roof for the first time in a long while.

They’re at Madison Square Garden the day before however, for the Iron Maiden concert. Jake’s not really one for band tees, surprisingly, but he’s not in the least bit shocked to discover Rosa has at least two-dozen of them, virtually all in shades of black or incredibly dark mauve. They take the subway crosstown, get in halfway through the support act, and warm up for the main attraction with a spot of light headbanging.

Jake is far more nonplussed by the presence of Everett Ross in the queue for the bar however.

“Agent Ross?” he asks, too curious to keep himself from enquiring. The man turns, and it definitely is Everett Ross, greying hair and wearing a The Number of The Beast shirt underneath a denim jacket with honest-to-god patches sewn into it.

“Detective Peralta,” he says with that well-practiced placidity that’s a little terrifying. “What a surprise. I’m not following you.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Jake replies, “but now I sure do.”

He wonders about asking whether Ross is here on an operation – oh my god, is Hawkeye about to try and murder a collection of mobsters at an Iron Maiden concert? – but before he can put his theory out in the open, the man has already shuffled off to one counter and Jake is swiftly called to another.

He carries four pints in a cardboard tray back to Rosa on the edge of the pit, and they knock back their first quickly enough for them to double up the plastic cups and avoid spillage.

“I just saw the weirdest person I did not expect to see here,” he says conversationally, before any response is roared out as the lights go down and the sound of Churchill’s Speech echoes across the cavernous auditorium.

Later, when his clothes are plastered to him with sweat and his eardrums feel like they’ve had a chisel driven through them repeatedly in an oddly pleasurable way, he finishes his conversation as they amble out of the venue, into the twilight of a Manhattan evening, the respite of a mid-summer breeze particularly palatable to his forehead.

“Huh,” Rosa says after he’s finished. Then she shrugs. “Maybe he’s just got great taste.”

“A teenage dirtbag,” Jake says without much thought, and Rosa punches him on the shoulder lightly with a grin.

The following evening, Jake finishes buttoning up his shirt and lets Rosa know that he’s going to pop around early to Steve’s down the corridor, to see if he needs a hand setting up anything. She’s in the shower, that beautiful black-and-red summer dress hanging off the top of the door, and he hears her shout back her acknowledgement.

He knocks and finds Mrs Wilson on the other side, who despite having only met him once before and years ago at that, seizes upon him with a bear-hug strong enough to move boulders. He wonders if the older woman has secretly been juicing Steve’s DNA, because it is a hell of a squeeze.

“Detective Peralta!” she exclaims. “My, my, look at your hair!”

“What about my hair?” Jake responds quickly, running a hand through the still-damp curls. He guesses he has let it get longer than it has in a long while, in part because Rosa secretly loves running her hand through it as much as he does with hers.

Jim Morita appears and gently extracts Mrs Wilson from the situation after a minute of relatively inane hair-focused chatter and asks for her assistance in preparing the burgers, allowing Jake the space to breathe. He spots Colonel Rhodes coming down the stairs behind the bookcase that leads to the roof and figures that he’s been beaten to the punch for preparations.

Maybe he’s not the only friend Steve has got concerned in recent weeks.

Aside from the four of them downstairs, Carol Danvers appears shortly from the bathroom, waving a hello as she crosses by and idly rubs Colonel Rhodes’ head as she passes. The latter good-naturedly swats at her and Jake files that piece of information away.

Steve ultimately appears from the staircase a moment later. There’s a smile on his face but Jake can see that it doesn’t quite connect all the way through to his eyes, a little forced, ever so slightly rictus.

“Jake!” he exclaims. “And Raymond! Welcome. I’m glad you can make it.”

“Thank you for the invitation again,” says Captain Holt’s voice from over Jake’s shoulder and he spins around to see his commanding officer. He is sporting a far more sedate number than the last time he attended this event up on the roof, sporting loose khaki pants and a navy polo shirt. He looks distinctly relaxed and at ease.

“Would one of you mind helping Jim with the burger buns?” Steve asks and Holt volunteers before Jake can warn him of Mrs Wilson and her attack hugs. He rounds the corner and a distinct oof emerges from the kitchen.

Jake turns back around to speak to Steve only to find his attention drawn to waist-height by what sounds like a thick midtown accent, if the accent had been garbled through an industrial meat-grinder.

“And just who are you supposed to be, wise-ass?”

It’s the talking racoon, mercifully not wielding the very big gun, and Jake manages to keep his mouth from dropping open. Something tells him that even without the weapon, this racoon could kill him in a heartbeat.

“He’s a law enforcement official,” comes a deep, sullen voice, and suddenly Jake is face-to-face with the blue-skinned, bald woman with the significant metal tattoos – Nebula – again for the first time since she flicked a very sharp object over his throat.

“Oh, one of those guys,” the racoon picks up, rolling his eyes. He looks back at Jake. “You got a name, terran?”

“Um,” Jake helpfully supplies. “Jake Peralta. NYPD.”

“That sounds like a vegetable,” the racoon says, wrinkling his nose, but he lifts up a paw nonetheless for him to presumably shake. “Rocket, former Guardian of the Galaxy and Avenger for hire.”

Jake gingerly accepts the outstretched appendage and finds it particularly firm. “Er, a pleasure to meet you, I guess.”

“You guess,” the racoon – Rocket – replies neutrally, before scoffing. “C’mon Nebula, let’s leave this lightbulb to screw himself back in.”

He totters off on his hind legs, the woman shooting him a particularly blank look before following. Jake lets out a breath he hadn’t realised she’d been holding.

“Dude,” comes Rosa’s voice from behind him and he turns to see her, hair falling in waves and her lips a ruby-plum colour. “Was that the racoon from the Avengers?”

“I’m not actually sure he’s a racoon, on closer inspection,” Jake admits. “But yes.”

“Huh,” Rosa replies, also apparently perplexed by the oddity of the situation. Jake leans in and kisses her to wipe the befuddled expression off her face.

“You’re a drip,” she kindly tells him when he scoots back and he grins. A call from Holt for further assistance – likely extracting himself from Mrs Wilson – prompts him to peck her on the forehead, earning a surprisingly adorable, wrinkled nose, and head over to the kitchen to save his captain.

It’s another great evening on top of the brownstone, a little more crowded than the last time they were all there, but the food is great and the company is pretty good too. There’s two faces conspicuous by their absence however, and given Steve’s occasionally drifting features, Jake opts to pump Colonel Rhodes for Nat and Bruce’s location.

“Bruce is in Germany, giving a lecture,” the War Machine supplies, sipping from his bottle. He doesn’t say anything else, which Jake reads as the definite hint that Nat’s non-appearance and Steve’s mood may be more than mere coincidence.

Later, when most of the guests have made their exits – Colonel Rhodes and Carol Danvers had both shot off into the sky, suited and unsuited respectively, while Rocket and Nebula had left with the former complaining about there being no good parking spots for spaceships in this part of town – it’s just Jake, Rosa, Holt and Steve himself. His captain asks Rosa for a word downstairs if he may and shoots him a pointed look behind their hosts’ back.

So, it’s just him and his neighbour, sat atop the roof as the sun finally sets and the fireworks have faded from star-splashed extravaganzas to lone bursts on the horizon over Staten Island. He wonders how to break the ice on this one, but Steve speaks first.

“Thanks for coming,” he says quietly, his jacket hung loosely over his shoulders. “I know it’s got to be pretty hectic with the new job next week and all that jazz.”

“Hey, dude, no sweat,” Jake replies honestly. “It’s always cool to get asked by Captain America to his birthday party.”

Steve chuckles, but it sounds a little hollow, tapering off into the night. The pair sit in relatively companionable silence for a little while. From down below, Jake can hear the distant murmur of conversation between Rosa and Holt.

“I’m sorry,” Steve picks up again after a moment and Jake turns his glance back to him. “It’s been a strange year so far, I guess.”

“You want to talk about it?” Jake ventures and Steve lets out another hollow-sounding chuckle.

“Not really,” he admits. “And that’s part of it, I think. I spend so much time helping other people move on with their lives, telling them that they need to take the chances that come, and yet I can’t seem to do the same. It’s more than just hypocrisy.”

Jake isn’t too sure what to say that. He’d known Steve thought – likely every day – about the events of five years prior. He’d gleaned as much from conversations over the hundreds, maybe thousands of hours they’d spent ever since he carried those cardboard boxes into his apartment like they were as light as a feather.

But he’d assumed – wrongly, it seems – that Steve’s charitable nature, his desire to reach out and help others, had helped assuage those feelings since, that it had helped ground him with a purpose. Maybe it had – but now, he seemed more tired than he’d ever seen him before, almost bone-aching in his weariness.

“Nat’s not coping great too,” Steve adds after a moment. “I had to go up to the compound the other day, talk her down from doing something stupid.” He pauses. “She’s finally accepted it’s Clint. That doesn’t mean she’s liking it.”

“How close were they?” Jake asks after another moment of silence and Steve quirks a small, sad smile.

“She’s godmother to his kids,” he says, then amends himself. “Was godmother. They’re gone now. So’s Clint’s wife. All four of them.”

Jake’s throat is dry. He’s come to terms with his own losses, has done so with Steve’s help, but it still doesn’t make it easier to hear about the suffering others have had to go through. He’d thought he was one of the unluckiest men in the world when Amy had gone; he realises now that luck doesn’t even come into it.

“She’ll be fine,” Steve picks up, though he sounds unsure of himself. He turns back to Jake. “We all will be. We just… we’ll move on when we’re ready.”

They say little else for the rest of their stay under the sky, pockets of stars flicking out from behind the smoky haze. Eventually, they set their bottles down, pick up the last of the plates and head back down to the stairs to join their remaining companions.

It’s late August when, after six weeks pressed in uniform, Holt relents and tells him he can do away with the dress shirt if he wants.

“But no novelty slogans or Rambo references,” he warns with a finger. “I expected pressed, crisp attire for at least six months of this job. Then we will discuss further wardrobe amendments.”

“Thank you, captain,” Jake says, grateful. It’s not that he’s religiously opposed to his starched collars – indeed, they’re very much a bonus for the way Rosa tends to get a predatory glint in her eye when he walks back through the door of the apartment each evening – but he’s more comfortable in his own clothes, very much his own personal uniform.

“Yes, well,” Holt replies neutrally, then flicks through some papers. “I see that Detective Diaz has put in for a ten-day leave of absence at the start of next month.”

“She has?” Jake asks, surprised.

“Yes,” Holt responds. “She has also put in for the same for you. Ordinarily, I would expect you to file your own paperwork for holiday, but given that this is you we are talking about, I will let it slide on this occasion. I have granted you both leave from the second of September for eight days. Sergeant Dillman will cover your responsibilities; you will return on his final day to oversee transition.”

Jake is a little bit taken aback still, processing the first part. “Rosa has booked holiday time off for me?”

“She… has?” Holt’s voice lifts with a questioning tone. “Were you not aware of this?”

“No,” Jake replied. “At least, I don’t think so. I try not to forget what she tells me in case she puts me in a headlock.”

Holt regards him. “Well, I am not sure whether I have spoiled a surprise of some kind for you, so I would appreciate it if you showcase an expression of wonderment when she addresses you on this matter.”

Rosa actually tells him that very evening, when they’ve ordered in tapas and are settling in to wait for the delivery driver with an episode of old Top Gear. James May appears have been suspended in a tent on a crane jib above a river in some particularly luscious part of the world, and in his own words, is cocking about.

“Hey,” Rosa says. “Wanna go on holiday?”

“A holiday? With you?” he says, presumably too brightly, because she levels him with a look that can see right through him.

“Holt spilled it, didn’t he,” she says and he caves.

“Yes, entirely, definitely, absolutely,” he confirms and she shrugs.

“Makes it easier then. Sorry for booking time off without telling you,” she replies, turning her attention back to the television for the moment, sounding particularly unrepentant to his ears.

“Just to confirm, I am very down to holiday with you,” Jake moves quickly to assure her. “Though I assume if you’ve gone ahead and booked dates, you at least have a rough idea? Because I sure don’t.”

She mmmms in response, then chuckles as James May falls into a river, to the combined hilarity of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond. “Your passport’s in date, right?”

He blinks. “Yeah, but… this isn’t something stupidly extravagant, is it?”

Rosa shakes her head. “Nope. Just not here.”

She’s particularly buttoned up on just where it is they are going. A few weeks later, he’s in the process of cramming various pairs of boardshorts into his suitcase when she walks in and takes one look.

“Longer,” she simply says. “It’ll be colder than you think.”

Jake blinks, his vague notions of the Dominican Republic slipping out of his mind. “Really? It’s not Ontario, is it?”

She rolls her eyes. “No. Pack warmer.” She turns to leave, then spins back briefly. “And swimwear. That too.”

He’s left particularly perplexed on just where they are going until the taxi they’re in pulls up outside JFK and she leads him to the check-in desk marked for Icelandair.

“Iceland?” he says, surprised. “We’re going to Iceland? That’s not exactly mid-budget.”

Rosa turns to him and frowns. “I’m not going to ask you to pay hand over fist.” He still must look a little bit uncomfortable, because her expression softens and she takes him by the wrist. “If you wanna know, it’s come from my apartment.”

“Your apartment?” he repeats. When she’d moved in, she’d simply said that her place was already paid off – Emily Goldfinch could wrangle some good deals, apparently – and that she’d decide what to do with it later. “Have you sold it?”

“Renting it out,” she says, raising her shoulders. “They don’t know me, I don’t know them. All landlord calls are done anonymously. They pay, they stay, I make sure shit doesn’t break.”

“Huh,” he responds. “How long has that been going on?”

“April,” she replies immediately. That figures, he thinks; she’d fully moved in at the end of March. “I honestly thought I’d said,” she adds after a moment, brow furrowed.

“I don’t think you did,” Jake says, “and I’m going to maintain you didn’t, because otherwise I forgot and I don’t want to be tied to the outside of a plane across the North Atlantic.”

She grins and gives him his customary light thump on the arm.

The flight isn’t too bad – he watches The Blues Brothers and the in-flight meal is a surprisingly nice concoction, some sort of stew that goes down pretty easy with a Dr Pepper – and the sun is starting to dip when they emerge at the terminal in. Rosa waves him over towards a shuttle bus and the pair board, taking seats near the back.

The subsequent journey is the better part of two-and-a-half hours, by which point it’s almost dark when they pull up outside their destination. There’s snow-capped mountains as far as he can see, fading into the dusk, and directly in front of them is a lodge cabin. The closer Jake gets to it, the more he realises there’s something a little bit off about it.

“Wait,” he says. “Is that… a glass bedroom?”

Rosa grins. “You bet your ass it is.”

“Wow,” he says, dropping his suitcase and walking closer. At least a third of the building is simply huge glass panels, roughly fifteen feet high all told, with a large spacious double bed nestled within. The rest of the structure is wood, burnished logs with a black inlaid door, and outside is what appears to be an oak-panelled hot tub.

And then he looks up, and the Northern Lights are suddenly there. Glowing, pulsing, green, fluctuating, its tendrils whispering out to caress each and every star that pops into gradual existence around them, dipping above them and across the horizon.

“Holy shit,” he breathes. Next to him, Rosa murmurs her assent and slips her hand into his.

There’s what appears to be no-one else around for miles and the key is, almost quaintly, under the doormat. The majority of the inside, dressed in the rustic sensibilities of Nordic warmth, is open plan, the kitchen practically rubbing shoulders with the bedroom. A small bathroom is at the back of the cabin, with a white-tile modernist shower, and a warming rack of towels.

It’s gorgeous, but when Jake moves towards the bed, and the roof gives way to glass on every side, the magic is only further enhanced. The sky is blown open wide, split by the aurora borealis down the middle, illuminated in all its glory. It takes him a moment to realise that there are no lights on inside the cabin at this very moment; he’s simply just basking in the glow of nature.

“Full disclosure,” Rosa says, snapping him out of his slightly dazed reverie, “my dad knows the owner of this place.”

“He does?” Jake asks, turning back to face her. They’ve got their matching wool-knit bob-caps on and she removes hers, shaking out the tangled curls of her hair.

“It’s a guy he used to teach with,” Rosa replies, slipping her case in behind the door. “Good stock, or something. Moved out here a decade ago to run this place. There’s a few more over the ridge.”

“Have you been before?” he asks. She shakes her head.

“My dad came with my mom, once,” she admits. “They didn’t stay here, they were up in Reykjavík, but they came across to visit. He showed me the pictures and I just fell in love with the idea of it.”

“Why now?” he asks after a moment and she gives him a look that tells him it’s a dumb question, but it’s laced with understated affection, so he doesn’t feel like too much of a fool.

“Because I’ve never been this serious about anybody in my life,” she tells him, almost bluntly. “I mean, yeah, I nearly married Pimento, but this…”

She trails off and plucks at a curl of her hair, and Jake can tell when she’s a little embarrassed and it is ridiculously endearing whether she likes it or not. “This is something special,” she finishes, almost lamely.

He can’t hold back and, in what certainly feels like one of the smoothest moves he’s ever pulled, he sweeps across the short distance to where she’s standing, cups her face with both hands and pours every bit of affection and love he feels for this wonderful woman into the most searing kiss he can muster.

Not for the first time, he sees stars when he separates and he’s inordinately pleased that she visibly seems to be experiencing the same sensations too.

“This is wonderful,” he tells her. “You’re wonderful.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that,” she waves him off with a smile that he could almost call shy and he kisses her again.

They unpack for the week they have ahead, check the larder – it’s fully stocked, with a variety of local cuisines and a particularly eye-watering amount of fresh produce that makes him glad his skills with a pan have come on leaps and bounds – and then Rosa suggests a dip in the hot tub. He agrees and goes outside to ensure that it’s warm enough while she changes.

She emerges as he’s about to head back in her to say that it’s all good, and the form-fitting white one-piece is so strikingly not what he expected that Jake stares dumbly for about half a minute.

“Eyes up here, Peralta,” she says with a smirk as she slings a towel over her shoulder and makes the quick dart through the frigid air to where the steam is pearling away in spirals into the darkness.

He joins her a moment later, slipping himself into the water and it’s practically heaven on earth. There’s virtually no sound but the bubbles and the distant wail of the wind. It’s still, surprisingly so, and tranquil looking out towards the shadow-capped peaks.

“We’re definitely having sex in this,” Rosa announces suddenly and he whips his head round to her. She smirks again. “Not tonight. But definitely. Sex definitely in here.”

“I won’t even tell you how close that is to my all-time top favourite fantasy situations,” Jake inadvertently admits and she snorts.

“Bitch, please,” she counters smugly. “I’ve seen you in the shower. Of course this is top of your fantasy bucket list or whatever,” and, damn, if she’s not got him there.

They spend the better part of an hour out there, just caught in awe of the spectacle around them, before she extends a hand and they head back inside. The snap of the cold running to the door ensures that they do indeed need a hot shower to warm back up, and he takes great pleasure in peeling the straps of her bating suit down, inch by inch, peppering kisses across her back as he goes.

She returns the favour under the spray but keeps him on the edge until she’s turned off the faucet and they’ve towelled each other off. Then she takes him by the arm and leads him back through the door, to the kitchen, to the bedroom.

She shoots him a look that can only be described as darkly teasing and presses herself, front first, up against the towering pane of glass directly opposite the foot of the bed, spreading her stance a little wider and, oh my god, it is one of the most erotic things he has ever seen.

“If we’re talking fantasies,” she breathes, low and hot, “then you’re gonna get over here and make sure I can’t stand when you’re done.”

Jake obliges. After all, it is rude to spur a lady’s request, especially if it is to fuck her hard, spread-eagled and naked against a window in a lodge in the middle of the Icelandic wilderness.

The next seven days that follows are almost spiritual, hymnal in their own way. There’s no internet out here, no television, just a landline phone on which to call over assistance if needed and to confirm their pickup on the final day. It’s just him, Rosa and the world.

When he looks back on it, much later, there are fragments that always drift to that front. The first night, where after he’d made good on her hopes, they’d fallen into bed and made love under the ethereal green pulses above them, transiently cast in colour as they gently stroked the other’s face.

The day where they’d walked over what felt like two mountain ranges and been struck by the windchill above a fjord, a sight that robs them both of the breath to speak.

The smell of French onion soup, rustled up another evening, percolating steam around the kitchen and making her hair frizz up, much to her mock-consternation.

The night where she fulfils that earlier promise and she rides him in the hot tub, pressing him back hard into the seat as the jets hit him just so on the lower back, and the deep moans she makes as he drags his mouth across her nipple.

The moment where he manages to fall down a muddy incline, near a river while they’re hiking and they both fall about laughing, full-body physical exertions where she physically drops to the ground and rolls around, the most un-Rosa Diaz-like expression of happiness he thinks he’s ever seen.

Jake knows he’s one – maybe the only one – of a few people who ever have or ever will get to see her like this. It fills him to the brim with such appreciation, such affection, such regard for her. He hopes he’s brings her even half the joy that she does to him.

They doze intermittently on the plane on the way back, in-between snippets of Toy Story 2, and even the jolt back to the bustle of New York City can’t soften the spell they’ve cast upon each other half the world away.

She’s breathtaking, and he tells her as much that night in bed, curled up against one another. She half-heartedly slaps him on the arm, as she often does and groans about how she can’t understand why she fell for such a dumb sap, but then she bites her lip and smiles and the world just feels right.

Jake meets Tony Stark for the first time on the day he sees Steve Rogers for the last.

It’s mid-October, a particularly dry one at that, with the crunch of autumn let to fully take hold and a wisp of summer still in the air. Jake hasn’t been home long from his shift – Rosa is working the late one at the precinct, dealing with a particularly trying spate of thrift shop robberies – and he’s planning to get a start on the salmon he’s intending to make for tea.

Then there’s a knock at his door, a surprisingly timid one that catches his attention.

Jake frowns. The only person who normally knocked on his door was Steve, occasionally Charles, maybe rarely Holt if he was forced to swing by for some reason, but that was once in a blue moon. The rapping noise comes again, and he realises that it’s not at normal height, somewhere lower down the structure.

Confused, he opens the door and finds the wide expressive eyes of what appears to be a four-year-old girl in a yellow-striped jumper and denim skirt with long chocolate-coloured hair.

“Hello,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Do you live here?”

“Um,” Jake said. “Yes. I do.”

“Good,” says the girl, still particularly unruffled in the way small children often take things in their stride. “If you were a robber, I’d have to call the police.”

Jake blinks, then crouches down, instincts taking over. He’s always been particularly good with kids, a habit picked up from his mom and one which drove Amy mad, if only because she was notoriously hit-and-miss when it came to forming connections with pint-sized powerhouses.

“Well, you’d have to call me then,” he says with a grin, “because I am the police.”

The girl’s eyes widen. “You are?” she asks. Jake nods, still smiling. “But you don’t have a badge!”

“Oh yes, I do,” Jake counters and he’s very glad that his badge happens to be on the side table next to the door so that he doesn’t have to go looking for it, plucking it off the top of the nearest doily. “See?”

He hands it to her and she takes it with a precociously curious air, examining it with small chubby fingers. “It’s shiny,” she says after a moment. Then she looks up. “Do you fight bad guys?”

“Sometimes,” Jake says. “Only when they have to be fought though.”

“My daddy used to fight bad guys,” says the girl and that immediately sets Jake’s mind back to the question of just who this moppet is.

He gets his answer a moment later when Steve’s door opens and Tony goddamn Stark – the artist formerly known as Iron Man himself – sticks his head out.

“Hey, squirt,” he says. “Do you want to stop bugging the nice man and come in and play with your Auntie Nat?”

“Auntie Nat just wants to tickle me!” the girl replies, incredulous that such a thing would be suggested. “She won’t catch me! She’s too slow!”

“Oh, really?” says Tony Stark, before he turns his head back into Steve’s apartment and shouts in a singsong voice, “did you hear that, Auntie Nat? Morgan says you can’t catch her because you’re too slow!”

The girl – Morgan, apparently – squeaks and a moment later, Tony Stark’s shit-eating grin makes way for Natasha Romanoff, clad in sweats and a hoodie, to leap out dramatically of the doorway.

“Nowhere to run, little missy!” she says with a grin, and the girl squeals this time, tottering off as fast as she can down the far end of the hallway.

The Black Widow, obviously, is no slouch and beats her too it with long strides, pulling a rude face as she does. The girl makes another noise, turns around, and begins racing back towards Jake and the other end of the corridor, but before she can get there, she is seized upon and ruthlessly tickled.

“Got you!” says Nat, apparently inordinately pleased with herself as the small child in her arms squeals and giggles. She turns to Jake as she passes. “Hey there, stranger. Hope this one wasn’t giving you any trouble.”

“Nope, none at all,” says Jake, before he belatedly realises that the girl is still fiercely clutching his badge. He points at her. “I am going to need that back though, young madam.”

“Say the magic word!” is her response.

“Ah, yes, we have to say the magic word, don’t we?” says Tony Stark, who has strolled down to Jake’s door. He turns to him and raises an eyebrow. “It’s horseradish.”

“It is?” Jake asks. “Well, er, horseradish.”

“And there you have it, you little miscreant!” Tony Stark intones dramatically as he turns back to – who Jake now realises can really only be one person, because the glint in their eyes is the exact same shade of mischief – his daughter. “Hand it back, tyke.”

The girl mumbles something under her breath but sticks out her arm and extends Jake’s badge back to him. “Sorry,” she mutters under her breath and he laughs.

“It’s quite alright,” he says. “It’s not every day someone’s clever enough to get my badge off me like that.”

That appears to mollify her as she lights up in a shy smile and then Nat is carrying her back down the hallway, telling Tony that he’ll play with her on her tablet. The older man watches the pair go and then turns back to Jake.

“You must be Steve’s neighbour,” he says and he sticks out his hand. “Tony Stark, no autographs.”

“What is it with Avengers introducing themselves as if nobody knows who they are?” Jake says out loud before he can stop himself and Tony Stark raises an eyebrow as he accepts the proffered limb and shakes.

“Do they?” he says dryly. “I just do it to annoy people who used to confuse me with Tom Cruise.”

Jake blinks. “You look nothing like Tom Cruise.”

“I know! Mad, isn’t it?” Tony Stark exclaims, before he removes his hand and wipes it on the side of his jeans in a gesture that makes Jake wonder if he has exceedingly sweaty palms all of a sudden. “Thanks for not terrifying the kid, she’s just so darn inquisitive.”

“No, no, it’s fine, honestly,” Jake says, because you’re not really going to tell Iron Man that his daughter is a best, not when he’s constructed at least half of the world’s top-of-the-line military hardware and probably has something stashed on him right now for the purpose of a swift end to any threats. “Reminds me when I used to be that curious.”

“They always do, don’t they, huh,” says Tony Stark, before he kicks one heel into the other. He gives Jake an appraising look, calculating and not hugely comfortable to withstand. “Well, duty calls. Take care.”

And then he’s turned on his heel and gone, vanished back inside Steve’s apartment. Jake distantly hears the latter’s voice as the door swings shut but it is too quiet to hear what he is saying.

An hour later, he gets another knock on his door, much firmer this time around. When he opens it, he finds Nat standing on the other side, looking a little winded.

“Hey Jake,” she says. “You would not believe how much energy small children have.”

“Given I am still spiritually one, I’m gonna say I do,” he says in response and she gives him a tired smile. Her hair – now almost entirely red, save for blonde tips all along the back – is done up in a tight braid.

“I’m getting off,” she tells him, and he gets a proper look at her. It’s been a long time since he saw her – he realises it’s actually over two years, when he thinks about it – and he’s a little sad that their reunion is set to be so short-lived. “I’ve got to get back up the precinct. You know, Avengers stuff.”

“Was that why Tony Stark was in my hallway?” Jake asks and Nat looks strangely evasive.

“Kind of,” she settles on. “I’ve got a mission that’s a little bit further than normal. He’s helping out.”

Jake makes a sound of understanding and the pair lapse into silence. Suddenly, before he knows it, she’s pulled him in for a hug. It’s unsurprisingly firm, and he returns it hesitantly, only for a moment before she’s already releasing him.

“I want to say thanks,” she begins. “For Steve. He didn’t know many people when he came back here and a lot of them that he did aren’t here anymore. But you… you’ve been what he’d call there ‘til the end of the line.”

Jake blinks, and gets a foreboding sense. It’s a touching sentiment, but the way Natasha’s saying it, it feels like a farewell.

“Is he… leaving?” he asks slowly and Nat gives him that evasive look again.

“Take it at face value when I say that I used to lie for a living and you don’t want the answer from me,” she says eventually. There’s a honk from somewhere downstairs, out on the road, and she turns her head to look down the hallway.

“That’ll be Tony,” she says absently, a kind of fond exasperation playing over her expression. “I better not keep him waiting.” She turns back to him.

“Steve said he’d be over later,” she tells him. “I know he wants to talk. But, I’m not sure when you’re next going to see me.”

She reaches out and, in a very Rosa-like gesture, slugs his arm. “It’s been a ride, Jake Peralta.”

“Yeah.” He rediscovers his voice. “You too, Nat. Take care, wherever you’re going.”

She lets out another tired grin, this one a little more raw, and a little more authentic. It’s probably the most honest expression she’s ever displayed to him.

“I always do,” she says and then, with a wave, she’s gone, leaving Jake standing in the doorway of his apartment as he watches her vanish down the stairs.

It’s not until it’s almost eleven that evening, the sun long since vanished over Brooklyn, when he and Rosa are just preparing to head to bed that there’s a third and final knock for the day on his door.

“I’ve got it,” he tells her when she looks at him questioningly. “It’s Steve.”

“Do you want some privacy?” she asks and he mulls it over for a moment before nodding. “OK. I’ll be in the bedroom.”

He hears the click of the door behind her as he moves to open up and, sure enough, Steve is there. He’s holding two bottles of Brooklyn Lager, the condensation still dripping down from the neck, in one hand.

“Hey,” he says. “Mind if I come in?”

Jake wordlessly waves him through and takes the armchair as Steve settles on the couch. He watches him unscrew the caps off both bottles and accepts the one passed over towards him with a murmured thanks.

“Jake,” he begins after a moment, and as earlier, there’s something in the way he intones his name that something feels oddly definitive about what he’s about to say. He pauses, and seems to veer off for a moment. “Did Nat speak to you?”

“She did,” Jake confirms, looking down at his bottle. “She implied you might be going away.”

Steve is silent for a long moment, and instead casts his eyes around the room. Jake can remember him doing almost the exact same thing five years prior, cataloguing all the details, the way he would assesses a combat situation.

Except now, his gaze is filled with something else; not necessarily longing, but something akin to it. Jake isn’t quite sure what he would call it, but it speaks of a lonely burden, a desire for contact. It’s melancholy and tinged with regret.

“I’m back in the Avengers,” Steve picks up again. “So’s Tony. So’s Clint, actually; he finally came in. And Bruce. And Thor. And a few others too.” He picks at the cap of his bottle, resting on his thigh.

“Oh.” Jake should have figured that with Tony Stark – a man he had admitted to not being on close terms with anymore – was at his apartment with his daughter, there had to have been some sort of reconciliation. That, it seems, may have been the only thing standing in the way of both men remaining in active superheroism.

“What are you off to do?” he asks. Steve flicks the cap off his thigh gently, rolling it around in his palm.

“Something crazy,” he says after a beat. “Something that means it’s time to move on, whatever happens.” He takes a sip, then sets his bottle down on the coffee table.

“Jake, I wanted to speak to you before I head out tomorrow because, truth be told, I don’t think I’m going to be back this way,” he says quietly. There’s a sliver of emotion underneath his voice, but it is underpinned by a steely resolve.

“I owe you more than just a goodbye,” he continues, “but I’m also not at liberty to say why I’m going. But suffice to say, what I’m – what we’re all – about to do is dangerous.”

“Well, that’s being an Avenger, I guess,” Jake replies and he feels his own voice crack slightly, on the last syllable.

“If this goes wrong, I’m not coming back,” Steve says, looking directly into his eyes, and Jake finds he can’t look away from the fiery desperation – and dare he say, hope? – dancing in those blue irises. “And if it goes right… well, I’m not coming back too.”

“Nat said you say people go to the end of the line,” Jake supplies and he finds himself blinking rapidly, willing himself not to cry. Steve’s expression softens and he reaches out, places a reassuring hand on his knee.

“The last five years has been something I don’t think I ever dreamt it would be when I was growing up on these streets a hundred years ago,” he says. “But even though it’s been born out of something terrible, it’s been all the better for knowing you Jake Peralta. So I want to say, before I go – thank you for being my friend.”

It’s poignant, and heartfelt, and the next thing Jake knows is happening, he’s on his feet embraced in a strong hug, tears tracking down his face and into Steve’s shirt. He doesn’t release his arms from him for a long time, nor does he feel the grip around his own back loosen.

Eventually, he walks Captain America to the door of his apartment for the last time and he turns to face Jake once more.

“What’s it you say again?” Steve ventures, and he then grins. “Oh, yeah. It’s been noice, detective.”

He chokes back a watery chuckle. “Yeah. It has.” They shake hands once more, Jake trying to pour everything he cannot say into this final gesture. “Take care, Captain America.”

“Will do,” says Steve. He picks something up next to Jake’s door and with a start he recognises the central star and circular rings of his shield as he slips an arm through the straps.

“Still fits like a dream,” Steve murmurs. He heads, not towards his own apartment but the stairs, despite the hour. “I’ve got a few last farewells to make. See you down the line, Jake.”

Then he too is gone, the sound of his footfalls fading away as he vanishes down the stairs. Jake stands there for two minutes, hears the downstairs door slam shut in the autumn wind, then takes a big steadying breath.

He cries again later, curled up as the little spoon, silent tear tracks without wracking sobs. She still knows, pulls him close and traces circles over his stomach, easing him into slumber.

So, here’s the thing.

Despite the overabundance of globe-shattering cataclysmic events that he’s lived through – one day, long after he’s gone and the pain is no longer generationally linked, he’s sure there’ll be a film about the day half the world turned to dust – Jake is still taken quite spectacularly unawares whenever one actually unfolds.

A week after he bids farewell to Steve in a darkened hallway, he’s called out with a couple of beat cops to a B&E at a record store in the hipster district. It’s a long-running hotspot for vinyl lovers, one that first opened in the eighties, and had been owned by a fellow called Carl who had been one of the many faces immortalised on the monument.

Carl’s daughter ran the place now, and she had been the one to place the call in. The shop was currently closed for refurbishment, but builders weren’t due in until the following day, and while out for lunch with a friend, she’d wandered by the back entrance and spotted a figure with boltcutters attempting to force their way in.

Jake is on the scene in a relative flash, the crime not too far from the precinct building, and the support he’s got aren’t green either. It should be a relatively open-and-shut slam dunk of a collar; the figure is still inside the shop, he can see from the cruiser, and they’ve pulled up silently enough so as to not alert the perp.

Then, through the front window, he sees the figure suddenly turn and fall over. In itself, that isn’t too unusual – relatively untested criminals can often get spooked at the smallest noise – but then he spots a second figure in the shop. He frowns.

“Jansson, this is Peralta, do you copy?” he says down the radio and gets an affirmative crackle back from the bubbly officer. “Jansson, you’ve not seen anybody else enter the premises since you took up observation around the back, have you?”

“No, sir?” It’s a questioning reply and that further plants a seed of questioning doubt in his mind. He can see both figures now, and the second one – the new one, who appeared to have popped out of thin air – appears to be shouting at the first, who looks to be cowering near the counter.

“Alright, I’m going in. Give me twenty and come in through the back,” he tells the pair.

Half-a-minute later, the three of them burst in from different sides and holler at them to put their hands up. The first man – scrawny, with an almost comically terrified look on his face – drops his boltcutters immediately and raises his arms but the second instead whirls round to face Jake.

“What d’ya mean, hands up?” he said, particularly crotchety. “Hands up? I own this goddamn place, I don’t have to put my hands up!”

“Sir, I’m going to need you to put your –” Jake pauses, then blinks. “Wait. You own this place?”

“What do you mean I own this place?” the man fires back, clearly quite agitated. “Don’t you see the name outside on the goddamn sign?”

Jake exchanges a bemused look with Jansson and the other beat cop, Gregory, before he looks back at the man again. “Sir, with all due respect, you’re not the owner of this shop. The owner reported that she spotted a B&E in progress here around –”

“Not the owner?!” the man splutters and Jake is slightly worried, by the bristle of his moustache, that he’s just two steps away from a Vernon Dursley-style explosion. “Just you – where’s my goddamn phone –”

Jake vaguely registers that there appears to have been an increase in noise outside the front window behind him, but he thinks nothing of it, instead focusing on the first man, the perp caught in the act. “Jansson, cuff him and take him out to the cruiser. I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve wrapped up here.”

“You got it, sarge,” she says, twisting the guy’s arms behind his back and snapping the locks. He doesn’t protest, his face still casting the impression that he’s on the verge of losing control of his bladder.

“Ah, there’s the goddamn –” the man has produced his phone from an inside pocket, but is now starring in befuddlement at the screen. “Number disconnected? What in the name Jesus H. Christ is going on here?”

Jake eyes the model – an old, scratched up Nokia – and simply wonders if the man had forgot to charge it before he left his house that morning, to rob a record store or stumble into an in-progress crime or whatever.

Something definitely wasn’t adding up here and he turns to Gregory. “Hey, Phil, you definitely didn’t see anybody come in through the back, did you?”

“Nope, sarge,” he affirms. Increasingly mystified, Jake turns back to the man who is now attempting to pry the back of his phone case off.

“Sir, I’d like to ask you a few questions without being shouted at, if that’s alright,” he says, and the man looks up at him, affronted.

“Shouting, what do ya mean, shouting?” he says. “You’re the one who came in here all hollering at the top of your goddamn lungs, waving your –”

“Be that as it may,” Jake cuts across, attempting to corral the argument before it spirals out into another rant. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. If you did not come in with the other guy, then when did you enter these premises?”

“Enter these premises?” the man echoes, perplexed. “I’ve been here all day! I live above the goddamn store!

“You live –” Jake pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sir, with all due respect, we’ve been informed by the owner that the upstairs premises have been vacant since the previous owner passed away in 2018.”

“2018?” the man blinks, and then he peers at Jake owlishly, his anger suddenly dissipating into something more akin to avuncular concern. “Son, are you alright? Have you hit your head or something?”

“Wait, what?” Jake replied, taken aback. “No, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” the man asks, leaning back. “Because last time I looked, it’s 2018 and I’m still alive and kicking.

“Last time –” Jake stops.

He stands.

He thinks.

He wonders.

He dares.

He hopes.

He goes pale. Gregory is presumably not on the same wavelength as him, thinks that this guy is just another crazy old coot or a master safecracker or something but –

“Are you,” he says, irregular breaths gathering pace in his chest. “Are you Carl Denison?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” exclaims Carl Denison, who most definitely, according to all the records in the world, died five-and-a-half years ago when half the world turned to dust. “I’m Carl Denison!”

Before Jake can even say anything else, before he can further compute, a earth-shattering kaboom sounds somewhere in the distance. He spins, almost jumping a mile.

Jansson is suddenly there, her blonde bob spilling out from underneath the brim of her hat. She’s flushed, panting, eyes bug-wild. She still has the perp in one hand, dragging him by the cuffs, and he too appears to be in a state of shock.

“Sarge,” she manages to stammer out. “You better get out here. They’re coming back. They’re all coming back.”

They’re coming back.

He can’t think straight, can’t think beyond anything other than the fact he needs to not be in this cruiser now, Gregory with his foot plastered to the pedal, sirens wailing as they tear through the streets of Brooklyn.

He needs to at the nine-nine, he needs to be in the precinct, he needs to be in the breakroom, he needs to be in the room where it happened.

Around them, the radio is squawking, channels crosscutting over one another in a din of static and sound. His phone signal is down, as is that of his companions and the perp sharing the back seat with Jansson, the four of them rattling around as they weave around.

People are wandering in the streets, lost and dazed and absolutely sideswept by a world they no longer know, by the billboards that have gone, by the shops that are no longer there, by the sudden change from balmy spring to autumnal winds.

As they hurtle forward, Jake vaguely notices that individuals wandering too close to the flow of traffic are thrown back, moved as if on rollerblades by an invisible force, shifted out of the way of harm, helping to clear the path. To his left, as they pass by a stretch of grassland, he sees what looks like over a hundred aeroplane seats, spaced out over the shrub and scrub, people with eye-masks and aggressive Hawaiian shirts looking around frantically.

And above them, far on the horizon, well out past Manhattan but clear for miles, there is a mushroom cloud, black, ominous and crackling with lightning, forming somewhere well beyond the city limits upstate.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Gregory chants under his breath and Jake would reprimand but he feels exactly the same as his subordinate right now, his mind working the hamster in its wheel overtime to the point of exhaustion. He feels fried, strung out, both integral to and adrift from the fabric of existence.

Yorktown. When the world turned upside down.

They’re coming back.

They screech into the street where the precinct is, and various cruisers litter it, all haphazardly parked, thrown together with the air of similarly frantic pursuits. Even as he watches, he sees a clutch of other beat cops hurtle out of the door, piling into cars one after the other, burning rubber as they fly away down the streets of Brooklyn?

To the scene of the crime? To the place where lost things go? To the room where it happened?

He’s a sergeant now, and he’s got to set an example, so he’s the one to haul the perp out of the backseat, drag him through the door, barking orders as pandemonium continues to erupt around him. He’s moving fast, a man on a mission, but snippets of faces swim past his vision that he’s not seen in forever and the reality of it all crashes harder into him.

They’re coming back.

“Jake!”

He spins – and it’s Terry, Terry coming down the corridor, marching towards him, utterly confused, the mystification radiating off him in waves beneath his pinstriped shirt and bulging pecs.

“Sarge!” he gasps out. He almost feels like his body is on fire, short spasms running along his nerve endings as it all comes down, every detail, every strain, every moment of hope and despair over the past five years.

“Jake!” Terry shouts over the din, as officers continue to race around them. “What the hell is going on? Why is everyone going crazy? Why are you wearing a sergeant’s uniform?!”

Jake breathes and, because there’s nothing else for at this point, lets out a hysterical laugh. Terry looks at him like he’s having a fit.

“Sarge,” he gasps after a moment. “If I could explain all this, I would. But right now, I can’t.”

Terry looks like he wants to say something else, but then another voice rings out, this one far more immediate in Jake’s memory, and one he’s not sure he’s ever been so happy to hear amid all this unbridled madness.

“Sergeant Jeffords! Sergeant Peralta!”

Holt is sailing down the hallway, shirtsleeves rolled up, sweat glistening on his brow. Yet his expression is an oasis of calm, of control and refined poise. Jake realises that he is three steps ahead of the game.

“Captain!” Terry exclaims. “Thank god! What the hell is happening right now?”

“You died, Terry,” Holt informs him in the most spectacularly deadpan delivery of the century and now Jake is revising whether he really is as on top of all this as he thought. “But you’re now alive again, as is half the world.”

“…the fuck?” Terry uncharacteristically swears.

“Also, it is 2023 and Peralta has your old job,” Holt adds, almost as an afterthought, as he physically grabs Terry by the bicep and begins steering him towards the nearest stairwell. “That is momentarily irrelevant right now though. I need all hands on deck, sergeant!”

Jake follows the pair of them, barrelling up the double flight two steps at a time, emerging back into the halogen-lit strips of the bullpen. Outside, he sees the mushroom cloud expanding, skirting over the rooftops of Manhattan skyscrapers like a charcoal-coloured stormfront.

“Boyle, my megaphone,” Holt barks and suddenly Charles, as pale as Jake feels but admirably functional still, surfaces at his elbow with the requested item. The captain takes, it twists the rim and quite unexpectedly screams into it.

The whole bullpen, past and present faces, come to a screeching pause, the hullaballoo quieted in one power move. Jake would admire it, but his eyes are scanning desperately around, looking for her –

“Now that I have your attention,” Holt speaks, further amplified. “If you believe it is 2018, welcome back. You’ve been dead for five years and have somehow miraculously been returned to life. No, I do not know why. Yes, we have redecorated in your absence. To those who know we are in 2023, stop squawking like roosters. You are professionals. Please remain standing and await my further instructions.”

He drops the megaphone with a clatter. “Peralta, Boyle, Jeffords. My office.”

Jake wants to do nothing more than sprint around the precinct, looking for her, but Holt’s gaze bores into him and he snaps to attention, trailing after the bemused Terry and the wavering Charles, in past the shuttered blinds –

To where Amy Santiago-Peralta is standing at the edge of the desk, twiddling antsy thumbs and shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

She hasn’t aged a day, he notices. Her hair, pulled up in the professional bun she always favoured with her sergeant’s cap, has come a little unstuck but otherwise remains firm. Her uniform has a chalk stain across the left sleeve but is otherwise spotless. Her collar is undone, a loose button dangling from a thread there.

Her eyes are wide, deep chocolate pools and Jake Peralta thought he would never get the chance to stare into them again, not in a million years, had resigned himself to life, had moved on with his life, found love again –

He’d found love again.

Rosa.

“Jake,” Amy speaks, to him, for the first time in forever, and there’s a slight tremor in her voice, as if she’s struggling to breathe herself, as she moves towards him. “What’s going on?”

The world has faded away; their friends, the surroundings, the increasing rumble of conversation outside the office doors. It’s only him, and Amy and –

And Rosa, who like a vision in black leather, busts through Holt’s door, gasping, and it snaps his attention from the tunnel vision he has experienced and –

He can hear so many voices again, all of a sudden, Rosa, Charles, Holt, Terry, Amy, my god, Amy –

Jake’s mind shuts down and he goes with it. The last thing he remembers, as he loses consciousness and drops to the floor, is Rosa and Terry both darting towards him, Amy in profile between them, caught between confusion and terror.

He dreams of endless expanses surrounded by Icelandic mountains, of skies cast in the colour of incandescent green-and-purple hues, of dark eyes engulfed in the storm of love and affection, and wakes to find himself alone in his bed.

He’s groggy and sluggish, slow to come to and unaware of his surroundings at first glance, but it is undoubtedly his bedroom after he takes a moment. The wardrobe door that slightly creaks if not left ajar, the cornflower curtains drawn close to block out the weak autumn sunlight, the Die Hard pop dolls balanced precariously on the edge of the vanity, pride of place atop two white doilies.

The armchair in the corner is occupied. It’s Charles, thumbing his copy of The BFG, dog-eared and well-worn, one of those fifteen books he used to brag about reading to Amy. He obviously rustles the duvet enough because his head shoots right up and suddenly he’s at his bedside.

“Jakey, my man, are you alright?” he babbles, pressing his palm to his forehead. “You’re still not feeling too hot – I mean, you are feeling a little warm, but more that you’re not feeling too hot as in you’re not feeling too great so to –”

“Charles,” he mumbles and it is apparently enough to shut his friend up, who promptly clamps his mouth closed. His mind is still going through the gears, trying to get it up to speed. “Why am I in bed? Why are you in my room, come to think of it?”

“Terry put you there,” Charles replies, attempting to rein himself in to the key facts. “You fainted in the captain’s office, hit your head on the edge of the couch. Fortunately, it was soft, you’ve not got anything more than a bit of a bump. Amy almost put Rosa in orbit trying to get to you.”

“Amy?” he asks. “Rosa?”

Then the events of the day – from the callout to Carl’s Record Emporium, to the mad dash across Brooklyn, to the not-so-perfect reunion with his recently undead wife – comes flooding back to him like a freight train through his frontal lobe.

“Oh my god, Charles,” he says, attempting to sit up and promptly falling back down after the room spins quite violently. “She’s alive. She’s alive. They’re alive. How are they alive?”

“We… don’t know,” Charles admits. “I think we’re working on the assumption that huge mushroom cloud out towards Poughkeepsie might have had something to do with it but… Jake, this is happening all over the world.”

“All over the world?” he echoes, faintly, disbelief and the dare to dream still battling through his veins.

Before Charles can say anything else, there’s a knock on the bedroom door.

“Relief column, open up,” says Rosa and then it swings open to reveal Amy.

She’s been crying, even he can tell that in his semi-lucid state. Her eyes are rimmed red and though there are no signs of dried tear tracks, the ends of her hair have knotted, removed from her bun, falling loosely around her shoulders in small clumps, her lip still trembling.

Jake dimly notices Charles return to the door where he engages in a quiet conversation with Rosa, before the pair shut the door. She shoots him a look as she goes, a flash of unease and panic tempered by joy and affection captured in microcosm before she’s gone and it’s just him and Amy.

They’re caught in silence. Distantly, he can here fireworks bursting into existence across the evening air; presumed celebrations of the dead made mortal and alive once more, of the reversal of the very laws of nature, a second chance for the human race to pick itself up, almost whole again.

Amy moves, slowly, almost as if she is fearful to step towards him in case he vanishes. He wonders why; after all, from what he’s gradually piecing together, it’s been but a moment for those who have returned to life. To them, they simply blinked away five years; they didn’t leave through the world they left behind.

But then, the world they left behind has dramatically changed, he thinks. To suddenly turn around and discover that everything you known had changed, that the people you had cared for had changed, had moved on or gone –

God, he hadn’t even thought what it must be like for those who feel like they’ve simply turned around and discovered that their cherished ones have gone, just like that, maybe two, three years prior, or any time at all. It must feel like –

Like having your heart ripped away in front of your eyes. Now that he knows about intimately.

It’s enough to make him burst into tears. He doesn’t bother to try stopping them. All the highs, the lows, the full spectrum of what he’s lived since she was stolen out of their lives together; it bubbles to the surface and manifests itself in big wracking sobs.

In a moment, she’s there, as if on instinct, down on her knees at the side of his bed, throwing her arms around him. He grabs hold of the material of her dress uniform, seizes it and buries his face into her collarbone. He can feel her grip tighten, hear her sniffle and then they’re both crying, sobbing into each other, clutched at an awkward angle.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he manages to choke out, muffled into her clavicle. “I just… I can’t.”

She makes a stuttered soothing sound, one not too convincing through her own tears, running her nails along his scalp. “I-I know, right? I’ve n-no idea what’s going on Jake!”

Her own composure, whatever was left of it, seems tattered as he feels her chest shake even more beneath him. “Like, what the hell’s happened? My dad’s moved to Minnesota! There’s whales in the Hudson! You’re a sergeant!” She breathes in sharply. “You’re sleeping with Rosa!”

She says it with a sort of strangled, desperate disbelief. He doesn’t really know what to say to her about any of that, but he assumes that the latter woman in question must have told her for her to know.

“And I can’t blame you for any of that,” she continues, through her tears. “I can’t! I can’t even comprehend what you’ve all been through – you, my dad, Rosa, Charles, Captain Holt – I just can’t! But, for me, I’ve turned around a week after my honeymoon and you’ve been sleeping with one of my best friends for two years!”

She’s on the verge of hysteria and he wishes he could make it better, he wishes he could wipe the tear tracks away with his thumb and tell her that everything’s going to be alright, but he can’t, because he never expected this miracle and the emotional wreckage it would leave in its wake and he sobs even harder into her.

Amy seems to be spent, her words exhausted, as she too continues to shake like a leaf in his grasp. Eventually, their shakes both begin to gradually subside; he feels like he could cry forever but he genuinely has no more tears to give.

She makes to move and he raises his head to look at her for the first time, truly, since she entered the room. Her eyes are still ringed, her face a blotchy beautiful mess. Her expression though…

Like Rosa’s before the door has closed, it’s a veritable maelstrom. There’s hurt, jaggedly painful, and insecurity, nakedly transparent, written across her every twitch and flutter. But there’s also something else still deep within the liquid chocolate pools of her eyes, and it’s something he knows rings true as much as everything else, perhaps more so.

He knows because it’s in his own, every time he used to lock his gaze onto her and bore as deeply as he could into heart.

It’s love.

But she was gone – for good, he’d believed – and he’d thought he’d never be able to share that look with someone else again. And now, she was back, and his head was still spinning and he didn’t quite know what he could do.

He needed to talk with Rosa, to see how she was feeling. But she was clearly giving him and Amy the space that she felt they should be afforded. It was a nice gesture, maybe even the noble one – but all of a sudden, Jake wishes she was there too, that both of the women he loved with all of his heart were there and that he could hear their thoughts to see if it could help him make sense of his own.

Amy moves and at first he thinks she’s heading for the door. Instead, she rounds the foot of the bed and sits on the mattress at what was once her side, when they’d had the old bed. It dips down beneath her and she bends down, untying her shoes as he twists around to face her.

She slips under the duvet, still clad in her full uniform and opens up an arm to him. He doesn’t hesitate; their worlds may be toppling around them, but he’s never doubted his love for her, and he rarely ever did hers for him once she finally said those magic words.

He scoots over and they embrace, the only sound the creak of the bedsprings as they hold each other, looser this time, but no less powerfully. He doesn’t want to wrap his arms tighter again, not when his brain feels like it’s suffocating itself enough already.

He loved Amy; he loves her now, of that he’s pretty sure. But he also unquestionably love Rosa.

“I’m not mad,” comes a voice from near his ear after a moment, steadier than before but still wavering. “Well, I am.”

He lifts his eyes from where he’d diverted them to the buttons on her dress shirt, looks back at her. She’s starring at the wardrobe determinedly.

“It’s…” She exhales heavily. “It’s everything. It’s just… it’s just too much. It’s me, it’s you, it’s Rosa, it’s the captain, it’s my dad, it’s the city, it’s the world.”

He reaches up – dares to reach up because he’s not done it for so long and he feels he needs to – and gently turns her face towards him with his finger brushing the jaw. The gesture hurts so achingly in his bones; he feels the last few tears squeeze out of the corner of his eyes.

“I know,” he breathes back. “I know.” She shuts her eyes and he continues, mustering reserves of strength he sometimes forgets he has. “It’s gonna be weird. But…” He pauses as his voice cracks again.

“You’re here,” he whispers. “And that matters beyond belief right now. Amy, god, I… Hate me for moving on if you want, but know that you being here…”

“Jake,” Amy murmurs as he trails off, and she returns his gesture, tracing his five o’clock shadow. “Jake. I could never hate you.”

She shuts her eyes. “I just… it’s going to take time, and I hate that is, but this whole world’s moved on from me – from so many people – that it has to. The piece to pick up… they’re all going to take time.”

He understands, as much as his head still feels bruised and battered, because they all are going to need time to process this. It’s not a one-day fix – it’s barely even been a day, in fact, for her and half the universe. He and the rest of them have gone five years without waiting for a miracle to happen – and now, this reversal has taken the rug out from beneath them all.

He must drift in and out of sleep because the next thing he remembers is the door slowly creaking open and Rosa shuffling quietly into the bedroom, pressing it gently to behind her.

That expression – all those mixed emotions – are still there, fliting across her features. If she has cried at all today, he can’t tell; there are no red rims, no tears chased down her cheek. But she’s undeniably wrung-out and raw, and he wonders just how many of the same feelings are cartwheeling aggressively into each other beneath the surface.

“Hey,” he mumbles. He’s twisted to assume the little spoon position. Behind him, Amy mutters something in her sleep, her head buried behind the shell of his ear.

“Hey yourself,” she replies softly. She eschews the chair, moves over to his bedside table and crouches down. “How’s your head?”

He thinks, slowly. “Too loud,” he admits after a moment, knowing she’ll realise he’s not talking about the fall. “Yours?”

“Too silent,” she replies. On instinct, he slips his hand out from under the pillow and she claims it gratefully, firmly, with an ironclad grip. It might be cutting off the circulation but he really doesn’t care.

“I hope I’ve not caused everyone too much trouble,” he adds after a moment. Rosa shakes her head.

“I don’t think there’s anything the whole of the NYPD could do,” she admits. “This is… this is fucking wild, Jake.”

A flash of an unfamiliar face plays across his mind, distinct but not dissimilar to Rosa’s own; older, more careworn and lined. “Have you got hold of your mom at all?”

She nods, clutches his hand a little bit tighter if that is at all possible. “She was at home when it happened. Back there now. We’ve talked. But…”

She swallows. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not, but I’m not going anywhere but here right now.”

He wants to throw both his arms out, pull her into bed, hold her tight. She looks just as confused and terrified as he feels, a perverse mirror to their headspace of five-and-a-half years ago.

“Rosa?” comes a muttered voice near his ear and he realises with a jolt that Amy is awake again “That you?”

Jake feels his hand sharply dropped, and Rosa slips her own down to the ground. “Amy, I – sorry, dude, I thought you were asleep –”

“Was until you were talking,” Amy continues to half-grumble, still clearly caught in the throes of her slumber.

“Shit,” Rosa breathes. “I didn’t want to intrude on you both, sorry –” She rises and Jake feels a pang of loss and on instinct, his hand has shot out further and closed around her wrist.

“Stay,” he pleads, and Rosa has the look of a deer trapped in headlights.

“Jake,” she begins and there’s a little bit of desperation to her voice, like she knows she’s going to come off second-best here. and he gets that but he hates it –

“Stay, Rosa,” Amy echoes, still mumbling, and Jake feels the duvet shifted ever so slightly back, a clear invitation, and he’s filled again with such a burst of affection, cutting through the white noise, for both of these women.

“I don’t –” Rosa starts again with an anxious, sharp intake of breath.

“Rosa, so help me, get in the goddamn bed,” Amy mutters and that appears to break the damn, because suddenly she’s there, mauve vest and jeans still on, in front of him, expression caught up close between shock and tenderness.

“Good girl,” he hears Amy mutter distractedly and he feels her arms encircle him again from the big spoon position. “Too tired to think. Talk in the morning.”

He glances down at the hand placed, almost protectively, around his stomach, and back up to Rosa. She finally cracks a smile, that small quirk of her lips, faltering at the edges, and he open up his own arms.

She shuffles across and he’s suddenly sandwiched between them as Rosa blindly pulls up the covers with her free arm. He feels Amy press a kiss to the crown of his head and squeeze him; he does the same to Rosa, gently resting his lips against her forehead and feeling her hand snake around, over his midriff, to gingerly hold Amy in place too. There’s a murmured assent from behind him again and Rosa’s grip becomes firmer.

He drifts back off, safe, cocooned, his mind finally sinking into respite once more.

Chapter Text

2024

The next six months are weird. Good-weird, mostly, with a little bit of bad-weird, but also generally just pretty weird. After all, it’s not everyday your dead wife who very clearly shuffled off the mortal coil in front of you comes home to find you in your old house, playing the white-picket fence life with one of your – and her – best friends.

The thing about Amy and Rosa is that they’re both force of natures, in their own different way. They’re both capable of such rich, deep emotion, but one wears nearly all their feelings on their sleeve and the other typically attempts to kick them into a three-inch thick safe, though she’s getting better. They’re both exemplary professionals, albeit with one who is a by-the-letter stickler for every code and callsign while the other who seems to bend the rules to her will.

They’re both smart, intelligent, compassionate individuals, both with a sharply defined sense of morality, both firmly dedicated to their respective ideas and ambitions, both at their best when they can let themselves flourish as their truest sense of self rather than be restricted to what they can and cannot do by others. They’re both mature, grown women, maybe with a little bit of a petty streak apiece but nothing that is anything outside of something born from simple human nature.

They also are both very much in love with him, and it is the last part that he sometimes needs to pinch himself about.

When he wakes up the following morning after that first day, he discovers that his pillow and the back of his neck are damp, salty in the case of the former. Rosa and Amy are gone, and he briefly slams straight into panic station mode before he hears voices drifting through from the living room.

The rumpled impressions in the mattress they must have vacated recently are still warm and he stretches out into them, soaking in the scene of them both, before his shuffling makes an impression on the world beyond his door.

“Jake?” It’s Amy, voice pitched questioningly. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” he says groggily. There’s footsteps and then she’s appeared at the foot of his bed. She’s changed and it takes him a moment to realise that she’s wearing one of Rosa’s vests, his unzipped hoodie draped over it.

She has no clothes here anymore, of course. He still has them all but they went into storage years ago. He wonders if Rosa has told her that yet.

He sits up and hears a slightly musical tinkle from beneath his shirt, the cold press of metal against his chest. He pulls out his neckline and reaches down as he slowly swings his led around to the side, producing the chain with her wedding ring on. He hears her softly gasp.

“I had it put on here… two, maybe three years ago,” he murmurs, trying to recall the exact date. He turns to her. “It’s been my good luck charm ever since. It’s always felt like you were watching over me.

She whispers his name as he extends it towards her, taking it with slightly unsteady hands. Her eyes are still rimmed; he wonders how much she cried while he was out throughout the night, whether she even noticed.

“Do you still have yours?” she asks and he nods, moving to the pop doll he has of Hans Gruber on the side, his band hanging off Alan Rickman’s outstretched arm. She lets out a strangled laugh when she sees where it is.

“I used to wear it all the time,” he acknowledges, feeling honesty is the best policy. “But I kinda stopped when me and Rosa… it just felt a little bit uncalled for, towards you and her.”

She nods, her eyes dropping to her own ring. Before he knows it, she’s hooked the chain loop over her head and slipped it around her own neck. It rests just below the ridge of the vest, dangling loosely.

“We’ve made breakfast,” she supplies, a little unsure. “Want to come eat? You’ve not since… y’know.”

He feels the rumble in his gut and realises that she’s right. She slips out of the room and Jake follows her, softly padding though, watching her as she keeps her arms almost rigidly at her sides, fingers occasionally darting out at waist level to trail along the walls.

The small dinner table has been pushed up close to the kitchen counter, near the open hatch, and there’s three places set around it. Rosa’s sat at the side nearest the outside wall, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She’s pulled her hair back into the loose ponytail she occasionally favours. She looks tired, strung out, sleep still crusting around the corner of her eyes.

There’s a large bowl of grapefruit segments he remembers her buying, and a stack of toast haphazardly slung together. Amy doesn’t return to the table, instead heading into the kitchen and Jake can see her attempting to regather her bearings as she goes. He pulls up the seat next to Rosa.

“Hey,” he says and he reaches out his hand under the table, rests it on her thigh. She takes it and squeezes back, tight.

“Hey,” she says back and her voice sounds a little raspy, like she’s been raising her voice too often for too long. He didn’t notice it last night, but he feels he would have heard this morning if there had been a full-blown argument.

Rosa glances over to where Amy is opening cupboards in near-silence. She occasionally mutters, something under her breath that Jake can’t catch, the set of her shoulders still particularly agitated.

He looks back at Rosa, who squeezes his hand one more time then releases it.

“Eat up,” she says, and she pushes a still-steaming cup of coffee towards him. “We’re going to need to talk.”

And they do. After he’s put away half a loaf in toast, two more coffees and a fresh orange, Amy finally stops distracting herself, comes to the table and sits opposite Rosa.

It’s slow, but gradually, they all begin to open up. Their heads are all over the place; for two of them, six years have passed in which they found themselves in their grief, slowly learned to let the world back in, found new love to help move forward with the memories of the old one, not supplanted but supported, cherished.

But the other one, it’s an alien sensation; the world has shut them out all of a sudden, in what feels like the space of a catnap, her entire preconception of life shifted sharply on its axis, tumbling towards what feels like a precipice.

They’re all in situations they never expected to mind themselves in and their honesty – hesitant, gradual, never ultimately in doubt because Jake knows these are the best people he knows – starts them off and then opens the floodgates.

It’s Amy who says she needs some time apart. She hurries to amend, sees the looks that cross both Jake and Rosa’s faces, explains that she needs to go to Minnesota anyway, take her mom and her seven brothers and the whole Santiago clan to see where their father has rocked up.

“When will you go?” he asks her.

“Next week,” she says.

“When will you be back?” he asks her. She looks pained.

“I don’t know,” she replies.

It hangs heavy in the air, the pressure, the pain. Amy Santiago can talk the talk and walk the walk, but she’s not going to pretend everything’s alright, and Jake isn’t going to too. He still loves her so deeply, she’s still the same person he fell head over heels for all those years ago.

But he’s not the same man she tumbled into the gravitational pull of, and they both know it. He’s older, a little bit rougher around the edges, a little bit more worn down by the savages of time and a little bit more in love with somebody else.

And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? If Jake had remained single, supported by his friends but resolutely attached to Amy’s memory and nothing more, or if he had only engaged in casual flings, then this would be something different. It would still be two people picking through emotional scars alternatively fresh and long since faded, but it would be different.

But he hasn’t, and it’s not his fault, and nor is it Rosa’s. They’ve made a life for themselves after they scoured the rubble of the world for each other, gradually falling in as their bonds shifted like sand in the wind.

Amy knows that, but it doesn’t make it any easier for her to turn around and discover a man, off-kilter to the one she’d married a week ago in her mind, living in their apartment with another woman.

The lone unspoken concession the three of them make is to not discuss the future. Their chat is for the here, the now, the immediate what-comes-next. When Jake goes to the bathroom, he can distantly hear raised whispers between the pair of them.

It’s not just tough for him and Amy, or for him and Rosa. It’s tough for the two of them too. They were friends – not casual work colleagues, but friends, at least as close as Rosa let anyone get to her outside of himself. This is just as much of a paradigm-shifting event to their own relationship as it is to his with them.

He re-emerges and finds the two of them are standing behind the couch, heads bowed and touching across the brow, hands loosely connected. They both have their eyes shut and Jake feels like he’s walked in on something particularly raw and intimate, the emotional tides roiling beneath it almost palpable.

Amy leaves shortly afterwards. She’s going to a hotel in midtown Manhattan, where the rest of her family gathered. He asks her to let them know if she’d like to come back afterwards but she shakes her head.

“It’s not my place anymore,” she says, a watery half-smile on her face, and he hears the truth she feels but it still cuts like a knife. She loosely embraces him, and he pecks her on the cheek, before she nods to Rosa and exits, in a borrowed pair of slacks, through the door.

Jake stares at the latch long after it’s clicked shut, until he loosely feels a touch at his elbow. He turns to face Rosa, stood there, clearly trying to project an impassive façade and, by her standards, failing miserably.

“I was going to ask if you wanted me to give you guys more time,” she says hesitantly, and looks down at their hands. “But she asked me to stay with you.”

Emotion overpowers him again as she looks back at him and suddenly, his mouth is on hers, and hers is on his, and they’re tumbling frantically over the back of the couch and she tears off the tee he’s wearing with her teeth and it is fast and frantic and then they both come to a screeching halt, half-naked and aroused, and he feels the tears coming, sees her own eyes grow moist and then they’re clutching onto each other for dear life, crying and kissing, and it’s all too much and it’s not enough.

They don’t make love that day, or indeed for the next one or the one after that. But they stay as close to each other physically as they can, whenever they can afford it. Feathered touches in the bullpen, more concrete cuddles on the subway, hand-in-hand when they walk home. They’re both back straight into the beat the day after Amy leaves, the NYPD chaotic and disorganised as half of its workforce returns to the grind over half-a-decade behind the times.

Amy doesn’t return from Minnesota for a fortnight and it gives him the time to recalibrate, to bring himself round to the shift in the status quo. Five days after she goes, he enters Holt’s office with Rosa and the reinstated Terry to find the television on high. Colonel Rhodes is talking, speaking with a solemn weariness.

He tells the world that Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff and Tony Stark – Captain America, Black Widow and Iron Man – were brave people, fighters until the end, and Jake can’t see, has to sit on the couch to steady himself. He’d objectively known, deep down, that it could only be the Avengers. It couldn’t have been anybody else.

He’d also known, from his final conversations with Steve, that he wouldn’t be seeing him again. But to hear it made official – that he and Nat, and Tony Stark had made the ultimate sacrifice to undo what they saw as their mistakes of the past – it opens up another wound within him.

Across from him, Captain Holt is stoic and Jake realises that Steve must have been to see him the same night he told Jake farewell. He does not look surprised, merely tired. It strikes him just how much older he looks than he did five-and-a-half years ago. He wonders if he looks that different to Amy.

She calls him the day she lands back in the city, asks him to meet her. She’s being put up by the state and the government, like so many others, at hotels across the country as they look to suddenly cope with the population doubling overnight. She asks him to bring Rosa.

They clock off together, walk over the East River to calm their minds. Around them, traffic has already started to rise substantially over the bridges, and through the streets. Second-hand dealerships are going to see a boom.

She’s at the Wadforf Astoria, up on the fifth floor, and he knocks gingerly, then more firmly when they find the room. She opens up, towelling off her hair, presumably not too far from having cleaned off after the journey back herself. Her suitcase remains unpacked by the foot of the bed. She looks exhausted.

“Hey there,” Jake says. He half-moves to hug her, unsure if she would appreciate it, but she steps up quickly and he locks her into an embrace.

“My mom’s going to move out there,” she says, half-muffled. “She’d love to go back to the old family home but… she’s going to stay out there. My dad says you guys still talk.”

“Yeah,” he admits. Behind him, he hears Rosa shuffle slightly awkwardly, which prompts a tighter squeeze from Amy before she releases him.

She finishes with the towel as the pair of them toe off their shoes and then they’re stood awkwardly around the edge of the bed, slate-grey sheets framed with a deep mahogany headboard and warm cream walls. It feels almost like a therapy room. In a way, Jake guesses that’s what it’s about to be.

“Um,” Amy begins and then stops. She reaches up to push her hair back behind her ear. Jake flits his gaze to Rosa and finds her face impassive, save for the corner of her lip, which she is gently biting in an expression he recognises as nervous consternation.

“Um,” Amy tries again. “Do you both… want to… sit?”

“Sit?” Jake repeats. “Er, yeah, sitting would be good. Definitely down to sit.”

He ultimately sets down on the foot of the bed, Amy taking the opposite end, her back against the stacked pillows and Rosa perched, almost catlike, on the edge of the hard-looking armchair next to the floor-length curtains, pulled shut against the late autumn evening. The sun is already well below the horizon.

“I’ve had time to think,” Amy says after another minute of silence. She’s twisting her wedding ring, still on the chain around her neck. Jake has his own, in the breast pocket of his plaid shirt. He’s placed it there every day since he handed hers back, bereft without the weight of it against his chest.

“I’m not sure there’s any easy way to say this,” she continues, as she fiddles, her attention drawn, before she looks up at him and Rosa, her gaze wavering between the pair. “I still love you, Jake Peralta, and I don’t want to lose you.”

She sniffles, and the threat of tears – he’s not seen so many tears in so long – looms again, but she continues, turning her head further towards Rosa. “But I can’t ask you to simply… give up what you’ve got. That – it’s absurd. It’s just… absurd.”

She still sounds so tired, her eyes dropping again. Jake’s heart feels waterlogged, soaked in so much care and pain and confusion, but before he can speak, Rosa beats him to the punch.

“Amy,” she says and her voice is achingly soft. “I’ve said this before but I never –”

“No, I know,” Amy cuts across with a little hiccup, still somehow keeping her waterworks at bay. “And that’s why I can’t ask you either. You love him too. And he…”

Jake realises he’s never actually uttered the words to Rosa in front of Amy. He’s avoided it, determined to spare her, or maybe himself, from having to hear it. But he realises, right here, right now, it’s the truth and he owes it to both of them.

“I do,” he says, voice – as it so often has these past weeks, cracking on the final syllable. He stares at Amy, wills her to look at him and she does, after a moment, cheeks starting to blotch. “I love Rosa.”

He turns to the woman in question and she’s looking at him, her expression cracked with what looks like melancholic hope. “I love you, Rosa,” he repeats.

He turns back to Amy, finds her watching the pair of them with a quietly resigned sadness. “But I still know I love you,” he tells her. “I know I can love you again too.”

Amy, at this point, bursts into noisy tears, and both he and Rosa move on instinct. They reach out and envelope her, pull her close until they end up in a sort of sports-team huddle on the bed, gripping each other as she wails.

“Oh god, this – hic – this is just so un – hic – so hard!” she manages. “God, I know t-that we’ll – hic – not be the o-only ones – hic – in this situation b-but it’s just –”

She trails off, her sobs lessening, but her hiccups still flooding forth. “You know – hic – what? I w-wish nobody had – hic – to c-choose, h-had to sit with this dec – hic – decision. It j-just sucks!”

Jake pulls her tighter, buries his nose into her hair, and inhales. Almost distantly, he feels Rosa shift her grip, loosening an arm and bringing it up to his shoulder.

They stay like that for what feels like an eternity, Amy’s shudders slowly subsiding. He eventually moves his head, leans back so she has the room to breathe, as Rosa’s arms fall away too. He glances over at her.

Her expression is furrowed, set in thought, but there’s a spark of something playing around it, ringed in uncertainty but tinged with curiosity and an almost desperate hope.

“Maybe,” she started, and there is a lightness in Rosa’s voice that Jake has not heard since the day the world turned back time. Amy raises her head, ever so slightly still trembling and they stare at her together.

“Maybe,” she repeats. “Maybe we don’t have to.”

“Sergeants Santiago and Peralta, Detective Diaz, my office please,” Holt says mid-morning. Jake looks up from where he is studiously picking frosted sprinkles off his donut and attempting to flick them at the sleeping Hitchcock at the desk adjacent to him. Behind him, Amy turns to look at him, nonplussed, before adjusting her cuff and standing up from her chair.

He follows and trails after her, looking around for the third member of their requested party. He spies Rosa in the breakroom, talking with Charles, and he gesticulates as they walk by. It’s the latter who spots his wild arm movements and nudges Rosa, who twists to see him and raises an eyebrow.

After a moment, she sees his jabbing finger and understanding dawns. She sets her mug down with Charles and slips out into the bullpen. Amy has already gone in through the door, but Jake holds it open, because he’s a gentlemen, after all.

“Sergeant, sergeant, detective,” Holt says when they’ve all squeezed onto the couch opposite his desk. The captain is not behind it for once, instead leaning in front of it with his arms closed.

“Santiago, I’d like a detailed update on the McMillan case in a short while,” he begins. “See that you make the time this afternoon to pay me a visit.”

“Yes, captain, absolutely,” Amy replies hurriedly. She’s still not shirked her can-do attitude when it comes to her self-professed rabbi, and Jake can never quite decide whether he finds it endearingly irritating or irritatingly endearing, or just plain old endearing these days.

“Thank you,” Holt inclines his head. “However, I’m sure the three of you know that I have not called you in here to discuss case matters.”

“No, sir?” Amy blinks. Next to him, in the middle, Jake feels Rosa reach out to his knee to stop him from involuntarily tapping his foot. He had a little hunch where this one was going.

“Yes,” Holt says, blank-faced, slightly raised. “I have called you in here to discuss the fact that both Sergeant Peralta and Detective Diaz are yet to submit completed disclosure agreements with human resources for your internal-or-inter-departmental relationship.”

Annoyance flashes across Amy’s face and her jaw sets. “Is that so,” she says slowly and Jake feels himself cringe ever so slightly.

“That’s bullshit,” Rosa replies and they both blink at her language. Holt merely remains poker-faced. “I submitted the last of those stupid forms three months ago. Amy made sure Jake had his. Why are you telling us this now?”

“I can only relay what human resources tell me as and when,” Holt replies, expression slipping towards something that suggests a headache gradually brewing. “I was only informed yesterday evening as I prepared to leave. I would blame Gina, but given she has not worked here for six years, that excuse may have exceeded its limitations.”

“Honestly, captain, I did fill in something,” Jake pleads his case and he feels Rosa slug him on the arm in response. “What?” he says, turning to the two women next to him, both of whom are sporting near-identical expressions of scepticism.

“Be that as it may,” Holt interjects neutrally, “official NYPD guidelines state that two different sets of paperwork must be completed by each participant in a polyamorous relationship based within a single department, at least two for each partner. Both Diaz and Peralta have submitted only one set.”

“Wait, there’s two?” Jake blinks. Rosa looks perplexed next to him.

“You mean I have to complete the paperwork to be with Jake all over again?” she asks, particularly mulishly. “Why? We’ve already done it once before, and it was a drag then too.”

“Title of our sex tape,” Jake says on reflex, then takes stock of himself. “Wait, no, that is a spectacularly –”

“Peralta,” says Holt and that cuts him off before he can dig himself a bigger hole. At the other end of the couch, Amy’s irritation has given way to a look of slowly dawning mortification.

“Oh my god, I think that one’s on me,” she half-gasps, turning to him and Rosa. “Guys, I am so, so sorry –”

“Don’t sweat it,” Rosa replies, before a smirk crosses her face in response. “You’re going in the bunk tonight though.”

Amy’s expression goes from crestfallen to indignance in a complete one-eighty and she splutters. “No, wait, now hang on –”

“I don’t even want to ask,” Holt observes and Jake lights up before he or anyone else can stop him.

“You should see it, captain, it’s totally rad, we’ve got a single bunk hung above the double back home, Terry helped put it up for us, and it swings from the roof like the most badass square hammock I’ve ever –”

“I said I don’t even want to ask,” Holt deadpans to cut him off again mid-ramble. “Also, the use of the term rad in this context may be worth suspension of pay.”

Jake shuts up this time and he feels Rosa squeeze his knee. He looks at her, and she’s got still got that grin on her face. Beyond her, Amy’s annoyance has morphed into an expression he knows well as the one she wears when she wants to let him know that she finds him ridiculous but still loves him dearly.

“Craig Colton down in human resources will be able to provide the new forms as necessary,” Holt continues, glancing over at the calendar. “I believe the three of you all have tomorrow off and just Sergeant Peralta is in on Sunday? I expect them on my desk no later than close-of-play Monday. Dismissed.”

“Why did you have to tell him about the bed, Jake?” Amy groans as they walk out back into the bullpen. “Now the captain’s going to think I’m being chastised like a naughty kid or something.”

“Honestly, I think he’ll believe you’re being spoiled rotten,” Jake counters, “because which kid wouldn’t do all their chores to be able to sleep in a hammock-style bunk bed?”

“It is a pretty sweet bunk,” Rosa says. “Also, pretty sure Holt already thinks you’re chastised like a naughty kid in the bedroom.”

Amy, quite maturely, sticks her tongue out at her and Jake feels a rising blush coming over the edge of his collar. Then he hears Jansson call his name and he leaves the pair of them as he picks up the rest of his donut from his desk and heads on out.

Later, when he shuffles through the door of the apartment, he’s met by the aroma of fried onions and a small cloud of steam percolating through the air. He shrugs off his shoes and heads on through to the kitchen to find Rosa over the hob, hair pulled back and an apron bearing the phrase YOU WANNA PIZZA ME? splashed across the front.

“Hey,” he says, slipping off his jacket and leaning over her shoulder to press a quick kiss to her neck. He feels her involuntarily shiver and grins as he dodges her attempts to swat him with a wooden spoon.

“Hey,” she says. “Amy’s around somewhere. She went though to the bedroom when we got back.”

“Cool beans,” he says. He’s about to turn and head through but there’s a knock at the door. He exchanges a puzzled glance with Rosa.

“You got that?” Amy shouts from the bedroom. He replies in the affirmative, and wanders back over, his jacket slung over his arm as he unlatches it and opens up.

He’s not quite expecting to find Colonel Rhodes stood on the opposite side, dressed in a dark-cut business suit, his leg braces affixed over the pant leg cut.

“Huh?” Jake’s mind helpfully supplies as a question, and Colonel Rhodes replies with a tired half-smile.

“Yeah, huh,” he replies. He stands back from the doorframe and Jake takes the apparent invitation, stepping out into the hallway. Carol Danvers is stood at the far end, outside Steve’s door. She’s suited too, her short hair tampered down severely.

“Colonel Rhodes,” Jake says, not sure what else to say. He’d never really had a relationship to the man outside of occasionally meeting him at barbeques and the terrifying time his associate had attempted to slit his throat.

“Jake Peralta,” the colonel replies. “I thought you might like to see the view one last time.”

It takes Jake a moment to realise what the man means; the roof, accessed through Steve’s apartment.

“It’s been sold,” Rhodes continues and Jake can see the years hanging off him now in just about every movement and motion. “Some older lady, looking to downscale now the grandkids are all grown up. We’re here to move the last bits out.”

Jake swallows. “I…”

He trails off, because though he’s gradually come to make peace with Steve’s sacrifice over the past six months, it still haunts him in his dreams, the way it all does. Sometimes he wakes up sweating bullets in the middle of the night, and Rosa or Amy have to coax him back down, allow him to cling to one or the other or both of them.

Colonel Rhodes seems to read his hesitation well, because he reaches out and places a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“She moves in a week on Monday,” he tells him. He presses something into Jake’s hand and he blinks, recognising the key Steve had handed to him all those years ago when he’d set off around the world in pursuit of Clint Barton. He’d given it back to him after he’d returned, knowing Steve would always be there if he’d wanted to head on up to clear his mind.

He realises that since he and Rosa started dating, he very rarely ever did. Nevertheless, he closes his fist around the cold metal, feels it warm in his palm.

“Take your time,” Rhodes finishes and Jake looks back up the man. His half-smile has dimmed but it’s still there. “See you around, Jake Peralta.”

“Yeah, you too,” Jake half-murmurs in response as he watches the man cut back down towards the corridor. Carol Danvers opens the door to Steve’s apartment for him and together the two vanish inside. He stands himself in the hallway for a moment before he turns and lets himself back in.

“Who was it?” Rosa calls from the kitchen. Jake pauses for a moment, mulls it over in his head.

“Just a wrong address,” he eventually replies, slipping the key inside his jacket pocket as he hangs it on the back of the door. This feels like something he wants to keep to himself for now, something he might tell them later if he decides to brave the short walk into what will surely now be the ghost of a room.

He cuts down towards the bedroom now, spies the door slightly ajar. He pushes it open and finds Amy stock-still at the foot of the bed. They’ve redecorated the room, constructed a new walk-in closet with Terry’s help after affixing the bizarre oddity of a suspended single bunk above the double. There’s a spare room down the hall, one that Amy or Rosa take turns to use on the colour-coded timetable days they’re assigned, to afford the other some privacy.

It’s still weird, but it’s working for them. There are teething troubles – there was always bound to be, when none of them had ever tried anything like this – but so far, they’re muddling through with more success than failure.

He approaches Amy, reaches out to run a finger through her hair and notices she’s holding something quite firmly in both hands. He leans over her shoulders and freezes as he catches a glimpse.

“Jake,” Amy begins, and he’s relieved to hear that it is curious disbelief more than anything else in her voice. “Is this… a riding crop?”

“Um…” he replies. “Yes. Yeah, that’s definitely a riding crop.” At Amy’s feet, he can now see an open, shallow cardboard box, the lid askew to one side. The bodice of the corset is there and he feels slightly faint at the sight of it.

It is at that very moment that Rosa chooses to walk, drying her hands off on her apron, to find the pair of them both caught in a trancelike style. “OK, that’s in the oven and – huh.”

She sounds far more nonchalant that Jake considers he would be in the situation if someone had just stumbled across a riding crop amid your black leather undergarments. Amy turns, a little wide-eyed to them both and he steps back.

“Rosa,” she says, and Jake finds it quite cute that she is looking a little peaky, her complexion pinkening, “why is there a riding crop here?”

“For sex,” Rosa promptly replies, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. “Also, the corset. That’s for sex. Also for spring cleaning.”

Jake splutters and develops a coughing fit, to which Rosa promptly thumps him on the back with the side of her fist as he gasps for air. It doesn’t help too much.

“I’d figured that out, thank you very much,” Amy counters, still darkening in complexion towards a full, healthy red blush. She reaches up to scratch her neck and almost thwacks herself in the face with the crop in question, tossing it onto the bed when she realises she’s still got it gripped by the handle. “Have they been here ever since I moved back in?”

“Yup,” Rosa says, seemingly entirely indifferent as she pops the last syllable. Jake recovers himself enough to finally stand again, a little winded. “I’ve not used them since though. It’s a bitch to prep.” She snorts. “You look like you’ve never seen them before Santiago.”

“No, I have!” Amy replies hastily, and Jake very much wants to lean over and pepper kisses all over that adorable splash of red just growing and growing in her flushed cheeks. “I definitely have. I just…”

She trails off and Jake sees Rosa straighten up slightly. Her face has softened from untroubled insouciance into something a little more puzzled, a little more curious.

Amy has turned back to the bed, hasn’t seen the shift, and has picked up the crop again, running her fingers loosely over the length and up to the far end, still particularly ruby-hued. He watches her, then feels Rosa step up next to him, head bowed low to his.

“Don’t freak,” she murmurs. “I’m going to try something.”

Then she moves away from his personal space, and into Amy’s, who turns to face her, slightly taken aback by the sudden incursion towards her. She gently pries the crop from her hands, and lays it to rest back on the duvet.

She lifts one knuckle up and gently brushes it against the underside of Amy’s jaw, all the way up to the shell of her ear, tucking the loose hairs behind it. Jake sees her go wide-eyed, sees her shiver ever so slightly.

“Tell me to stop.” Rosa’s voice is questioning, gentle, soothing, pitched low. Amy makes no further reaction, so she repeats herself. “If you want me to.”

Amy breathes in, almost a tremble, and Jake’s pretty certain that in another time, another place, another world, he would find this incredibly hot. But instead, he’s gripped by something more than lust; it’s deep, aching, affectionate, powerfully so, and suddenly everything just seems to slip a little more into focus in his heart, a little more into clarity as Rosa leans in and softly presses her lips against her.

There’s no visible reaction from Amy for a moment and then she slowly lifts her left hand up, hesitant, unsure, but lifted all the same to cup the back of Rosa’s head. Her eyes have fluttered shut, but she still knows where he is to raise her right arm towards him.

He gets the hint, steps across and takes her outstretched palm, rubs circles gently across the back of it as she adjusts. Rosa moves her own arm, either hyper-perceptive to the gesture or just on a hunch, and he takes her hand too, clutching them both tightly as the two women he loves most in the world remain locked.

It’s not a particularly long kiss, and Rosa leans back after a moment, her own eyes shuttering as she pulls away. Amy’s gaze has gone glassy, her expression flustered but not displeased.

“Huh,” Rosa breathes again. “Well, what do you know.”

“Um,” Amy murmurs. “Yeah. Apparently.”

They’re silent for a moment, and then Jake breaks it in typically mouth-before-mind Peralta fashion.

“Well, I guess I’m in the bunk tonight,” he quips. They both turn to him, and he fears that Amy might beat Rosa to the punch and throw him through the wall, but neither do. Instead, they stare down at where he’s linked hands with both of them, then at their own free hands. Slowly, Amy inches hers out and Rosa takes it.

They stand there, the three of them, grasped together, and the world shifts under their feet. Jake realises that after standing on the edge of so many things in his life, he’s on the precipice again – and this one feels more thrillingly whole than any other before.

“I think nobody needs the bunk tonight,” Rosa says, and she squeezes his hand. “Amy?”

“Yeah, no, totes,” Amy half-stammers and suddenly she’s giggling, elated noises bubbling to the surface and then Jake’s laughing too, and Rosa’s got a grin that she’s struggling to keep under control, before breaking out into guffaws herself.

They end up tumbling onto the bed, chuckles slowly fading, a big three-way embrace sprawled out over the duvet. Jake feels the riding crop digging into the back of his knee and fishes it out, handing it back to Rosa. Sandwiched between them, Amy eyes it speculatively again.

“Do you think your corset would fit me?” she asks Rosa, who shakes her head.

“Nah, that one’s custom,” she replies, before running her eyes speculatively over Jake and her, before reaching over to ghost her fingers over her bare arm, “Though I’m sure we can find the right one if you’re interested.”

“Maybe,” Amy shrugs, the blush still spreading down her neck. Rosa suddenly has a hungry glint in her eye and Jake realises that he doesn’t want to intrude on the imminent consummation of this new facet of their relationship.

He makes to roll off the bed to the side but feels two hands clamp on his wrist and his shoulder respectively.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Rosa growls and Amy murmurs her assent, leaning up to kiss him as he turns his head back towards them both.

“Are you sure?” he asks as she leans in. Rosa nods fervently and Amy slides her hand from his collarbone down his chest as she captures his lips.

“Like the woman said,” she murmurs after a moment. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Yeah, Jake thinks as he lies next to the two people his heart belongs to, a grin slowly spreading from ear-to-ear, his soul brimming with a sense of contentment. I’m not going anywhere.