Chapter Text
“Oh, fuck,” Jake exhales, tugging at the sleeve of his shirt after putting it on in an impressive four seconds. The tag’s significantly scratchier than should be, and, given his barefoot stance and misplaced pager, it’s a wonder nobody’s called him out on this mishap.
The distant echo of ‘code red’ comes ever closer with every passing second. Scampering footsteps and familiar, frantic slang make their way to room 699D, famous for its distance from the rest of the hospital (not to mention what people like to do, given that distance.)
A few inches away, Amy sits up in bed and shoots her boyfriend a desperate glance. “I think we took on too much too fast. And no sex jokes.”
“So nothing was up?” Detective Pentworth asks, walking alongside Jake and Amy to the ICU. She glances at their hands, dangling in midair and just waiting to be held, and wonders if anything’s up. She frowns. “He walked in and died?”
“That’s right,” Amy replies, keeping her lips sealed. She doesn’t dare draw attention to herself.
“Seems like he should’ve knocked,” Pentworth remarks. Her partner, Detective Levitt, silently takes note of Santiago’s messy hair and breathless manner. Amy must really be shaken up about all this, he thinks.
Upon walking into Dozerman’s room, Levitt probes for a pulse before Rosa crosses her arms and shakes her head slightly. “Should I have called the M.E.?” he asks, eyes flicking to the clock.
“If you haven’t already,” Rosa sighs, frowning at the flatline on the black monitor, “do so now. He woke up before we got him on a gurney, but there was another incident before we could even scan his heart.”
“Incident?” Pentworth repeats, raising an eyebrow. “Anything suspicious going on here?”
“Sorry, forgot you two aren’t regulars around here,” Rosa explains, wincing. It isn’t every day she has to explain how the hospital may have killed its own employee. “Dozerman’s pretty easily set off. When he found out he couldn’t work the front desk because of his close call, he got so upset his BP rose significantly. The man went into V-FIB and never came back.”
“Were his vitals and time of death monitored?” Levitt asks, pushing the frame of his glasses up his nose.
Rosa swipes a piece of lint off of her lab coat (“I hate wearing white all the time; I can’t tell if I got bloodstains from surgery or just regular old Brooklyn!”). “Of course. Hospital protocol, Detective. We’ll be sure to give you the records anytime you need them.”
Pentworth fishes her cell phone out of her pocket upon hearing its buzz. “Actually, Dr. Diaz, could I get those files right away? This looks pretty open-and-shut and, even if it isn’t, we’d still like them for the record.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rosa replies. “We’ll send all our evidence right over to your precinct. It’s the Nine-Nine, right?”
“That it is.” Levitt flashes his badge in Rosa’s face (she frowns uncomfortably, probably not the reaction he hoped for) and walks away, clipping it back onto his belt.
“New bet!” Gina calls, reaching into the oversized pocket of her scrubs and pulling out a faded wallet thick with credit cards and Polaroids. “Since the hospital insisted on calling us all the way to 699D before blockading the door with yellow tape, let’s play. Dozerman’s cause of death. Winner gets it all.”
“Isn’t it a little soon?” Terry grimaces, finishing off the last of his mango froyo. “The man’s not even cold yet.”
“That’s a figure of speech,” Rosa retorts, checking her watch. “He was legally dead an hour and forty-five minutes ago. The authorities came an hour and a half ago, and left after a good twenty minutes to get the medical examiner. That’s plenty of time to cool to room temperature.”
“I’m leaving. This is getting morbid.” Charles stands up, unclipping his hospital ID card. “But, uh, before I go, I’d be willing to put ten bucks on heart failure.”
“Any theories?” Gina smirks eagerly, holding her hand out. “C’mon, you’re the only so far. Might as well be specific.”
“Hypoplastic left heart syndrome!” Charles blurts, pointing a finger at nobody in particular.
“Boyle, the odds are so low,” Gina mutters. “I’m the one that’d know, anyhow. I’m dating a cardiothoracic surgeon.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that dating me meant you got my education too,” Rosa taunts. She swipes at the lapels of her white coat for good measure, only partly to show off the black thread embroidering her name and title on the right. Doctors didn’t spend their twenties in med school so nurses could make all the calls, meandering around hospital halls like the ones in charge. They were a team, not a monarchy.
“Guys, you’re getting all worked up about this. We barely knew the guy. Obviously, it was natural causes in some sense of the word. Just bet!” Terry says, exasperated. “I’m putting five bucks on a brain aneurysm. It’d explain his mood swings.”
“Fine,” Rosa spits, pulling out her empty tube of chapstick (“Gina, it’s a hiding place!”) and removing a twenty from inside. “Congestive heart failure. Any bets from Doctor Linetti over here?”
“Make fun of me all you want, babe, but I’m not the one still paying off her student loans. I’d say it’s a brain aneurysm, and all his fidgeting and yelling made it worse.” Gina takes Rosa’s money, coupling it with a ten-dollar bill of her own (“pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?” she’d joked at the bank, before the teller glared at her like she’d committed a crime. Rosa threatened to withdraw ten thousand dollars, in all pennies, to shut him up. She wishes she could frame the look on his face.)
“Do you think we make bets a little too much?” Rosa frowns, wordlessly swiping Gina’s wallet from the pocket of her scrubs and counting a thick wad of bills from their last, still pending bet about Jake and Amy.
“Nah,” Gina murmurs, taking the money back in one easy motion and tucking the new bills into a new pocket. “Keeps things interesting around here.”
“We’re still not telling anyone, right?” Amy smooths out her scrubs as Jake steps into the elevator with her, pressing ‘door close’ as they travel to the first floor.
A nervous grin pulls at his lips. “I mean, if you want everyone know that we scared a guy into dying by having sex, by all means, go ahead.” His hands haven’t quite stopped shaking. “I’m in no rush to get convicted of manslaughter for getting … walked in on.”
“We’re not going to get convicted!” Amy hisses, lowering her voice. Ahead, the lights of the elevator travel down from six to five to four, the elevator opens again, and nobody steps in.
“That’s just the sort of thing that convicted people say,” Jake says back, turning his neck to look at his shoulder. He’s trying to make sure his clothes aren’t on inside out.
“Stop it! What I meant to say was that we’re not going to tell anyone about us dating, right?
“Of course.” Jake sighs, locking his knees and removing his hand from Amy’s. “We’re not in the wrong. We just might want to think about stepping back from each other for a bit. Already, Charles has broken into our place, and a man died because of us. Death is a pretty glaring sign.”
“That makes sense,” Amy muses, eyes flicking to the numbers alight overhead. It’s only natural to get nervous on elevators, she reminds herself. It’s just the claustrophobia talking. Despite all this, she breathes a sigh of relief when the doors successfully pull apart. Jake straightens out his clothing (“I’m the farthest thing from straight,” Amy imagines him joking) and steps out in silence.
“See you around, Ames,” Jake says, not waiting around for the inevitable protest that they live together. Guilt weighs his heart down evenly, settling across his entire chest and turning his breaths into thin air. He doesn’t mean to miss her, he swears he doesn’t, but everything feels a little heavier in Amy’s absence.
Jake spends the rest of his day pacing the halls, trying not to let his eyes search for Amy the way they always do. They’ve held entire conversations with shrugs and smirks, mouthed inside jokes to each other across anything from a cafeteria table to an autopsy. It’s only natural to be a little bit lonely, he reminds himself.
The words loop in his head like a broken record.
7 PM turns to midnight as the hospital’s parking lot empties and red-white-red-white ambulance sirens glitter the path to the ER. Midnight turns to 4 AM as birds fall asleep in the trees outside Jake and Amy’s apartment, and a thin blade of frost lines the window. 4 AM turns to 7 as Amy pulls her hair into a tight bun against the nape of her neck. It hurts, but she ignores it. Doesn’t have the time to do anything about it, after all.
Amy irons her lucky light-blue scrubs with the side pocket, she pours her heart-healthy cereal before finding out they’re out of milk, and she ends up cursing Quaker Oats out as she dumps her cup of coffee into the cereal bowl.
Maybe the scrubs weren’t as lucky as she thought.
“Hi, good morning! So I take it we ran out of milk, and then you promptly lost your mind?” Jake remarks, walking into the kitchen as he notices Amy dredge up a spoonful of black coffee with cereal flakes.
She sticks her tongue out. “Shut up. It’s, uh, an invention of mine. It makes for more efficient mornings, and I’ll save a lot of time that way.”
“Oh, of course. How could I have been so ignorant? Waiter, I’ll take one cup of that cappuccino monstrosity, please.”
Amy looks ridiculous, trying not to grimace at mouthfuls of coffee and oat bran, and then she breaks into a laugh. It’s the first good thing that’s happened to her all morning. Her face scrunches up and her cheeks go pink for a second, and Jake is reminded that he loves her; one of those mundane, by-the-way, you’re-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-me asides.
“Shows what you know, this is mocha” she says, pointing at her disaster of a breakfast. Jake doesn’t respond, so Amy pauses. “You alright?”
He leaves the reverie then. Jake can’t photograph the moment and he can’t say that he adores her after five dates and twice as many goodnights, so he remains quiet. The incapacitation of a fearsome ’i love you’ passes him by, and he brushes it off with a cheap “Sorry. I got distracted.”
“Oh, okay.”
They handle the remainder of the morning gently, but it feels freer than the day before.
No one ever learns how Seth Dozerman died. The doctors and nurses take up a collection for his family, and Gina opens her wallet and inserts the money from the Jake-Amy bet. Rosa catches her hiding a fifty in her palm at the time, and glares until Gina forks it over. “How could you? It’s for his widow.”
Gina groans. “You never even met Seth Dozerman! Heaven knows you never met his wife.”
“So that makes it okay for you to deprive her of money? Money she deserves after losing her husband?”
“I’m Rosa. I’m ethical,” Gina sours the tone of her voice and puckers her mouth up into frown. “I respect people after their weirdo husbands pass away in freak accidents. Even if I never get another date from my girlfriend. Or another text message.”
Rosa snickers. “Threatening me? You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Or another orgasm!” she hollers.
“Fine. Keep the fifty bucks, mastermind.”
Rosa shrugs. She’ll can just steal it back the next night, anyways.
Jake shrugs off his suit jacket as soon as he steps into the apartment. Seth Dozerman’s funeral had just ended and the whole hospital had been sweltering outside, dressed in black from head to toe. “Is it bad that I’m not sad about losing him?”
“I feel kind of bad too, but…” Amy shakes her head softly. “It’s one thing if you were his friend, but you barely met him. All you did was steal his timer that one time in the lobby.”
“I inconvenienced a dead guy!”
“I mean, I’m sure death inconvenienced him more than you ever did. Compared to that, your involvement was minimal at best.”
Jake swats her while he undoes his tie, hanging heavy against his chest. “No jokes,” he insists, but he grins all the while.
“Listen, if you want a distraction from all those misplaced feelings, you could always take my dress off.” Amy toes off her heels one by one, then sidles up to the bed. “It was so hot out there, and you looked pretty good in your suit today.”
Jake raises an eyebrow. “Is sexy funeral banter a thing for you? Because I once dated a medical examiner and, to put it lightly, I’m never going near that again-”
“Nope,” Amy murmurs, pulling gently at the clasp of her necklace before she lets it drop into her hand. She proceeds to take her watch off next, and pulls her hair out of its ponytail. “Just the sight of you in that collared shirt and black tie, rumpled and wrecked, it kind of does things to me. Can’t help it. Now, if you could help me...”
“With the dress? Well, I better know where that zipper is, after I spent half an hour checking you out in it,” Jake murmurs. “Wait, this is kinda working. Is sexy funeral banter a thing for me?”
Amy laughs. “Get over here and find out.”
The hospital finds out that they’re dating slowly.
It begins with trace glances and kisses ghosted onto cheeks, thumbs running over skin and hoodies stolen from each other. Jake spends his Sundays in Amy’s company, giving his attention to her documentaries and Russian for Beginners tapes. And that’s commitment, the alphabet has 33 letters and Alexei the Russian tutor goes way too quickly over pronouns. Besides, Alexei has a beard that’s about six inches past redemption, and before he can move onto verbs-
“Six Inches Past Redemption, called it! My future punk rock band name,” Jake brags, and Amy elbows him.
Amy crosses her arms. “Alexei worked hard to teach us about his native tongue, and if you don’t shut up soon-”
“Teach Me Your Native Tongue is my backup band name, in case the first one doesn’t work out.” His smugness comes across as youth, and he’s got that lip-bite thing going for him again.
“You don’t even play an instrument! What are you going to do onstage, strum your air guitar?”
“You’re an air guitar!” Jake blurts, then makes a note to seriously revise his comebacks. “Besides, I’m not the only one who can learn an obscure talent. Betcha I can learn guitar before you learn more Russian.”
Two months, seventeen YouTube videos, and a drive to the music store later, Jake is holding a ukulele in his hands. It was a lot cheaper than a guitar, in his defense, and he has limits. (Thanks, crushing debt. As if a meet-n-greet with the original Die Hard cast counts as an ‘unreasonable purchase.’)
Jake begins by plucking his hands on the strings, yet he picks it up soon enough. Chord after chord pours out. He tries to croon Russian songs to Amy, but his accent is abysmal and he sounds like a Hawaiian tourist lost in the embassy in Moscow. Jake makes her laugh with the sorry trill of his ‘r’s, and he loves every second of it. Amy weaves him a lei out of chamomile blossoms (“look! It’s the national flower of Russia, Jake!”) and the petals fall into his hair as she places it around his neck.
“You know, this isn’t very punk rock of me,” Jake objects, but Amy grins and brushes white chamomile off his shoulders.
“You look cute.”
He pouts. “It’s like you don’t even believe in the alternative, dyed-hair, grunge aesthetic of Six Inches Past Redemption!”
“You’re playing the ukulele. I don’t think your aesthetic would’ve gotten you very far,” she murmurs. “And besides, your Russian in that last ballad was kinda lacking. Here, you’ve really got to focus on the accent marks...”
So it’s due to Alexei, technically, that everyone at the hospital figures out Jake and Amy are together. Gina and Rosa are crowded around the frozen yogurt stand in the cafeteria, stealing raspberries from Terry’s abandoned cup, when it happens. Amy strolls by with a Russian lesson book in her hands, pointing at milestones on a blotchy map.
“See, there’s Novosibirsk, and up there’s Volgograd, and then you can trace the path down to Kemerovo…”
Jake’s laughing. “Why do you need to know this?”
“Well,” Amy defends, a grin pulling at her lips, “if ever I were kidnapped and taken to Russia, I would know where I was.”
“Oh, of course. I know my Russian kidnappers always give me a textbook with a map and homework questions so I can figure out my location.” Jake smirks, leaning over Amy’s shoulder to read her notes. He points at a spot on the left page. “Uh, you misplaced a comma there, babe.”
Gina’s head lifts so abruptly, the vertebrae in her neck crack. “Excuse me? Babe?”
“He slipped up,” Rosa hisses, still clutching a raspberry between her manicured fingers. “He slipped up!”
Jake turns away from Amy to face Gina, local conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, in the eye. She still claims that she was the one to invent the Avril Lavigne clone idea. “Um, excuse me, there are plenty of platonic nicknames you can give to your friends-”
“Not to mention that it was probably a slip of the tongue,” Amy adds.
“Slip of the tongue, title of your guys’ sex tape.” Gina sits up straighter. “I saw what I saw. You two are dating, aren’t you?”
Amy holds her breath over her map of Russia, looking Jake in the eye. “Well-”
“That’s a yes,” Rosa says, her smirk evident. “She’s nervous, you can tell by that lilt in her voice.”
“And what if I am?” Amy says, shifting in her seat. Everyone stills around her, attention hinged upon the bite in her tone. “He’s my best friend.”
“Ames, you’re nervous. It’s only ‘cause you care,” Gina replies, satisfaction in her smile. She leans over to rub her friend’s shoulder. “Jake, you better not make her watch Die Hard too many times. And, uh, I’m happy for you two, I guess.”
“Hey!” Jake retorts.
Gina groans. “Um, I seem to remember a certain someone on my block who had a Nakatomi Plaza birthday party seven years in a row, complete with a dramatic showing of Die Hard 1, 2, and 3 every time.”
Amy frowns. “Three movies? How long were these parties?”
“Girl, they were sleepovers,” Gina says. “When his mom insisted on turning the TV off, Jake would act out Die Hard with shadow puppets along the wall.”
Amy grits her teeth. “Yikes.”
Rosa sputters, hiding a laugh behind pursed lips. “Dude, how did you ever get a girlfriend?”
Jake holds up the map, an array of colorful blotches spanning eleven time zones. “My girlfriend listens to Russian tapes in her spare time, so she’s in pretty good company, nerd-wise.”
Amy glows, her dimples so deep that Jake’s certain it must hurt at least a little. She responds with something in short and broken Russian, shyly knocking a shoulder against his.
“Really?” Jake blinks.
“Mm-hm.”
He gives a Russian phrase back, the words misshapen by his accent.
When Charles finds out that his two best friends are dating, his reply consists of hyperventilation sounds and a lot of “oh, the sun and the moon have shone down favorably!” blubbering. He marks the date down in his calendar and, for years, proceeds to send Jake and Amy ‘Peraltiago Day’ gifts.
“Awww, he shouldn’t have,” Jake remarks, putting down his new homemade candle. “Wait, how did he manage to get your lavender perfume in here?”
Four years later, Amy gives birth to their daughter in room 699D. Maya Rose, they name her, although Jake wants to make her middle name Rudolph (“come on! like the SNL star!”)
“And you can never, ever tell her the Dozerman story, you promise me?” Amy murmurs, puffing up her cheeks up to see if Maya will open her eyes and smile. She doesn’t, not yet. “She can never know what we did in this room.”
“You mean the death part or the before part?” Jake whispers, dangling a hand in front of his new daughter to see her grip his fingertip. It’s a simple reflex, the baby books all said, but he still gasps.
“None of it. I want her to think we’re model parents,” Amy whines, cradling Maya in her pink blanket.
“Parents,” Jake repeats. “We’re parents!”
“Yeah,” Amy says, gentle. “You and me.”
Maya Santiago-Peralta grows up in a hospital with white walls and blue floors, vending machines lining the hallways and a frozen yogurt stand in the cafeteria. Maya catches the oddest, rarest morsels of Russian thrown around the house, tossed about during ukulele duets. Spanish is set aside for bedtime stories and murmured i love yous, and English for dinnertime conversations and dad jokes. She grows up loved. It’s in the smiley-face sticky notes hidden in her lunchbox, in the way her mother braids her hair before she figures out how to do it herself.
And, when Maya turns sixteen, she accidentally lets it slip how Seth Dozerman actually died, and she looks around curiously as Aunt Gina pumps her fist and demands a good $500 from Aunt Rosa.
“Why?”
“Well, honey,” her father explains, shrugging, “The bets keep things interesting around here. It all started when everyone was wondering whether your mom and I would get together.”