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He really hadn’t meant for it to go down like this. He’d been banking on spending a sweet six months being the most amazing fired-but-secretly-undercover cop the FBI had ever seen, and then coming home triumphantly and picking up those romantic-stylez feelings right where he left them.
The Ianuccis and their maddening tendency to be rather vigilant about leaks and informants and amazing fired-but-secretly-undercover cops totally screw the pooch on that one. A new plan is quickly devised and he would like it noted, for the record, that it was not his idea.
On a bright summer’s day, seventeen weeks after leaving his job and his family and the partner he maybe kind of loves behind, the FBI blows his beloved car to pieces and Jake’s life ends.
Just not the way everyone thinks it does.
* * *
He’s permitted to call his mother on a secure line once a week from his new residence, FBI Safe House #417-D-8 in Southold.
“Now would you say the overall feeling was one of overwhelming tragedy, or more of a rueful acceptance of a hero’s completed journey?”
“Jacob, I’m not going to wax poetic to you about your fake funeral.”
“Because I can see it going either way, really. I think it comes down to the music.”
“Jacob.”
“What about Captain Holt? Did he—”
“Jake.” He stops. “It’s not a joke. It felt real. It was real, for everyone else there. Don’t forget that.”
“I know, Mom,” he says. “It’s not exactly all sunshine and roses on this end of it.”
“I don’t imagine it is, dear.”
He falls silent, supposing he should feel vaguely special for being one of the rare few people who can say they lived through their own funeral. He searches for that feeling. Comes up with melancholic instead.
“I gave Detective Santiago your letter and that strange bear.”
He swallows hard. More than the exploding car or the fake burial or anything else that’s happened to him in the past week, it seems real now. Jake Peralta, for all intents and purposes, is dead. He’s dead and all he can offer Amy is a stupid toy and a grammatically horrifying attempt at describing exactly how wonderful he thinks she is as his legacy. “How was she?”
His mother pauses just long enough for him to guess the answer anyway. “Tired. Angry. Coping. But… she seems like a good girl.”
“She’s kind of the best.” He exhales down the line. Regrets for the millionth time not kissing her the night he left. As it turns out, something bad most definitely went down, and he’s pissed at himself for not doing a lot more than saying something.
“This won’t last forever, Jake. It’ll be done before you know it, and you can tell her that you think so.” Her voice is soft, pacifying. Jake feels like he’s six again and home sick from school, his mom smoothing back his hair and reassuring him that his friends won’t forget about him while he’s away.
“Yeah... yeah. So. What else is going on?”
He leans his head against the wall and listens to his mother describe his life without him. He didn’t actually die, but somehow he’s still become a ghost.
* * *
No one told him how goddamn boring being dead was.
He’s been stuck on Long Island for a month now. He’s not allowed to leave the safe house, on account of the whole being dead situation, and he’s starting to feel a whole lot more empathetic towards the childhood goldfish that kept trying to jump out of its little tank.
A picture-perfect summer flies by and he watches it from a reinforced window.
He has a rotating roster of FBI babysitters, some of whom are more willing to indulge his whims than others. Chan watches Safe House with him at least once a week without complaint (they eventually switch to Olympus Has Fallen when he keeps asking Jake if he has a thing for Ryan Reynolds, and to Die Hard after that when he insinuates the same of Gerard Butler). Pulaski routinely kicks his ass at Wii tennis. Simmons teaches him how to properly play chess – he discovers that it’s nowhere near as fun without the added thrill of shooting things, but it does take a lot longer, and time is something Jake’s more than willing to waste.
He reads, and he gets through the entire series of Walker: Texas Ranger because it’s Chan’s favourite, and he manages 1407 bounces of a tennis ball against the wall before he misses a catch.
A little part of him begins to think that the aftermath of actually dying would at least be more interesting than this. He’s going to heaven, obviously – because, hello, valiantly killed in the line of duty – and there’re probably tons of boobs up there waiting for him. He’s willing to bet God would appreciate a good fart joke.
The worst thing is that he knows that this is partially his fault. The FBI gave him a choice. He could have picked a buttfuck-nowhere town in Nebraska as his purgatory, somewhere he could have actually walked around outside and gotten his own coffee and led something resembling at least a half-life, for as long as his real one was in exodus. But he’d wanted to stay close to his mom, to his other family. The farther he goes, the longer it’ll take him to come back.
He really wants to come back.
* * *
The weeks go by, the seasons change, and Jake’s life remains in its holding pattern.
One upside he finds to his extended break from being a productive member of society is that it gives him plenty of time to conjure up innumerable possible scenarios for seeing Amy again.
He thinks about the rest of the Nine-Nine team as well - about Gina, hoping that Floorgasm are doing well and that she’ll eventually forgive him for his web of lies; about Rosa and what special brand of revenge she’ll extract upon him for this whole debacle; about Charles and Terry and his girls and the Captain and Kevin and whether Kelly is Scully’s wife or his damn dog – but it’s Amy’s number that his fingers want to dial. Clarke is becoming far less gentle with his ‘your mother is your ONLY authorized call’ reminders as time ticks on.
Of all the things that suck about pretending to be dead, he thinks that a life without Amy Santiago in it in any way might be the worst.
The first scenario, the first time he tries to picture it, is just an abstract patchwork of colours and feelings. There’s crying. There’s her face, bewildered and smiling. There’s a sense of contentment. There might be the fleeting notion of a small summer wedding, because he’s not wasting any more time.
The second, fleshed out now, is a lesson in ultimate cool. He wanders into the precinct one morning, no warning. Slides his sunglasses down his nose, suave like a 50s greaser, and fixes her with a devastatingly handsome stare. Probably says something like “miss me, darlin’?” She’s so happy that she faints delicately into his outstretched arms.
The third is straight out of a romantic comedy, a genre he’s watched far too much of since Connors joined his team of minders the previous month. Tinkly piano music is playing. They run towards each other in slow motion after she spots him from afar, and he is inexplicably wearing a brown suede vest. Boyle will probably narrate.
(A lot of his scenarios are movie-based. There’s a reason they’re classics.)
In the fourth, in she’s mourned him for an appropriately brief period and gotten on with things. The world has not stopped turning round. He comes back, his renewed presence received not with a bang but with a whimper, and life goes on exactly as it had without him.
The fourth is the one he dwells on. It started as a dream he had and now can’t get out of his head. It’s no accident that it’s also the most realistic. Life isn’t a movie, he’s dead, and Amy’s had plenty of other things to think about in the past few months. She’s not waiting around for him.
He hasn’t. He is.
* * *
Jake’s birthday comes on a grey fall day, misting rain threatening to turn into a thunderstorm. Chan brings him a cake and a chunky woollen scarf that his wife knitted, along with a card drawn by his young son. He can’t remember the last time he was so grateful to people he’s never met. Most of his original babysitters have been taken off the rotation, but Chan stays.
The burning stir-crazy restlessness of the early months has mostly diminished, replaced by a compliance that equally unnerves him. He’s scared of getting used to being in limbo. He says as much to Chan, who nods in understanding.
“Just keep remembering why you’re here, man. Temporarily, I should add.”
“Because I turned out to be not so great at the ‘secret’ part of being secretly undercover?”
“Because some mobsters were about to make you fish food, and you had a life you’d eventually like to get back to. A bit of limbo, a bit of feeling impatient and pointless all at one, it’s worth that, right?”
“Wise words indeed.”
“Your girl Amy’s worth that,” Chan continues with an exaggerated wink.
“Alright, weird FBI Boyle, I should never have told you about her,” Jake grumbles, but he feels the weight of futility lift just a tiny bit. Chan claps him on the back and pops Safe House into the DVD player.
“Birthday treat, man, and then I destroy this disc for good.”
He calls his mother that night and keeps it light, discussing her job, her home repairs, her newfound love of power pilates. They rarely talk about him much anymore, because there’s only so many ways he can spin “still stuck in this beige-furnished wasteland with no end in sight” before it starts to upset her.
“Keep an eye on Gina, okay?” he says as they wrap up.
“I am,” she promises. “She nearly got engaged again.”
He chuckles softly. “Yeah, it would be about that time of year.”
“It won’t go on for much longer, Jake, you’ll be home soon,” but her voice is as weary as he is and he understands that they both stopped finding comfort in her platitudes quite some time ago.
* * *
It’s a bone-chillingly cold December evening when Clarke tells Jake that he’s alive again, and he moves on autopilot. He’s imagined the moment so many times that it’s become a memory his muscles invented. Throws his stuff into his bags and calls his mother from his real non-secure phone and doesn’t stop to think until he’s in the car and somehow tells the driver Amy’s address.
Right around Queens, he realizes that he’s scared shitless.
He hasn’t seen her in nine months, and she’s spent five of those believing that he died. He doesn’t know what’s going on in her life. He doesn’t know if Teddy is still around, or if there’s someone else. He does know, though, that it’s been 276 days since he saw her and really he needs to tell her that she was on his mind, in one way or another, for every single one of those days. He knows that he won’t make it to 277.
If only there was a Hallmark card for this. Super sorry for faking my death and not telling you but I’m back now and by the way I think I love you, which you might already have guessed because I kind of said it before I ditched you in a car park. Thinking of you?
Probably wouldn’t be a best seller.
The car pulls up outside Amy’s building, and he tries to still his shaking hands. Reminds himself that this is what kept him going. Getting to live again is why he had to go and die in the first place. She’ll understand. She might punch him first, but she’ll understand.
The wind whips around him as he climbs the front stairs and yanks open the external door.
Clarke is filling Holt in right now, and the Captain will tell the rest of the team in turn. They’ll be prepared for his homecoming tomorrow. But this? This he has to do himself. Needs to do. Wants to do. And so he finds her apartment, and he takes a deep breath, and he knocks.
After the longest fifteen seconds of his life she opens the door, and she looks like all the possibilities he conceived of and a million he didn’t.
“Hey, Amy.”
His life begins anew.
* * *
The next day, after he makes his return to the precinct in a commotion of hugs and high-fives and tears (it’s a little more belated than he’d planned, but it’s still pretty damn triumphant, so he’s counting it), he walks Gina to the nearest cafe. She’s barely let go of him since he walked into the bullpen, alternating between hugging and hitting him, and Jake’s known her long enough to translate the twenty minutes she spent gushing about faces with heart-shaped eyes as ‘I missed you’.
“I still can’t believe you’re… you know,” she says, waving her hands vaguely around in his direction as they slide into a booth. “Here.”
“I kinda can’t either, to be honest,” he confesses. “I’m really sorry for lying to you about the op. And then faking my death. And then lying to you about that as well. Wow, I kind of lied to you a lot.”
“I won’t pretend news of your various betrayals didn’t cut me to my core, but I suppose I can let it slide. Given the circumstances.”
“Very generous of you,” he says, regarding her with sincere affection, and she clinks her coffee mug against his own.
“And thanks for looking out for Amy. She told me that you guys hung out a lot, um… during.”
Amy had actually used the phrase ‘physically accosted me on multiple occasions with that creepy unicorn blanket’, but he can read between the lines.
“Oh, Santiago and I are besties now, lamb chop. I don’t even know if we’re gonna let you back into the club. Pretty sure your membership expired.”
“I’m serious, Gina. Thank you.”
She flashes him a genuine smile, and Jake sees a glimpse of the little girl in pigtails who brought him peanut butter crackers and walked home with him every day from school after his dad left. “You’re not an easy guy to get over, kiddo.”
They lapse into silence, and he wraps his hands around his mug to warm them up.
“I rented out your apartment,” she tells him after a while, with an apologetic shrug. “Cause you were dead and all.”
“It’s all good,” he says, thinking of warm brown eyes and months of longing and the look on her face when he’d appeared at her door. “I think I’ve got somewhere to go.”
* * *
There’s barely even a discussion. When he knocks on her door again that night, they both know he’s there to stay.
* * *
Amy tends to toss and turn next to him in her sleep, twisting the sheets around them both until they become a human burrito. She ends up clinging to him most nights, draping herself over his body like a second blanket, and her feet are ice-cold while the rest of her is like a furnace.
He needs these things. Needs the shock of her toes against his shins, her fingers splayed out on his chest, her hair in his face. They remind him that this is real. After five months of living as a dead man, he still startles awake in the middle of the night sometimes not wholly convinced otherwise.
He died (but just for a little while).
He left (but he got to come back).
He’s alive (and with Amy, and she loves him, and this thing they’ve got is for keeps).
He tightens his arm around her waist, hugging her closer to him as she murmurs through a dream, and he knows these things.