Archive of Our Own ^beta

On the first March 28th, Amy’s hungover.

She can barely muster up the energy to turn off her first alarm when it blares in her ear at 6:15 AM, has to pause and groan seated on the edge of her mattress when her head throbs in protest, has to stop herself from smashing her other two alarms before either one goes off. Her senses are dulled, her stomach churning, and she drags her feet all the way to the shower.

It was that last damn whiskey she had last night, she thinks as the warm water sprays across her shoulders. She was doing fine up until then, solidly at over-confident Amy, but then Jake slid that whiskey tumbler across the table with a wink and a challenge and she went and made the world all blurry.

Damn Jake and his stupid, tempting smile.

The morning passes in a hangover-induced haze; it’s not until she’s trudging into the bullpen that she really blinks out of her stupor.

“Whoa,” Rosa grunts from her desk, paused in the act of polishing her helmet. “You look like shit.”

“Feel like it, too,” Amy salutes before dropping into her seat with a loud sigh, her bag falling from her shoulder to land loudly on the floor at her feet. “Why’d you encourage that last night? You know how I get after six drinks -”

“Yeah, mopey and sad. It was fun watching Peralta try to cheer you up when you started crying.”

“I cried? Why?”

“You lost your napkin.”

She groans and leans forward, pressing her forehead against the cool surface of her desk. It’s a tiny relief to the barrage of general grossness plaguing her; she doesn’t look up again until she hears movement at the desk across from hers.

“Damn, girl,” Jake says (hoarsely, she notes with some sense of satisfaction). “You look like shit.”

“Screw you, I only look like this because you tried to give me alcohol poisoning last night.”

“You had six drinks, you wimp, don’t act like I poured a whole handle down your throat!”

She groans and screws her eyes shut at a particularly painful throb in her temples, lifting a hand and holding it out toward him. “Sh, no screaming.”

“Here,” she opens her eyes to find him setting a paper coffee cup on her desk, the words Fart Monster scrawled in Sharpie over the familiar blue label. “I do feel bad for the hangover, so I grabbed an extra one this morning.”

She makes a face, but snatches the coffee and downs half of it before coming up for air again. “Thank you.” she breathes as the warm liquid fills her belly.

He grins and drops into his own seat. “No problem, fart monster.”

On the second March 28th, Amy’s still hungover.

“Just gets harder and harder,” she mutters as the first alarm blares in her ears.

Of course, she’s so hungover that she doesn’t realize it’s her second March 28th until about 8:34 AM.

She’s just dry-swallowed two Asprin when the elevator doors slide open and she trudges into the bullpen, too absorbed in her emails on her phone to take in the bullpen right away. She hears Gina’s tinny speaker blasting from Holt’s office, the copier working overtime, the chatter of perps in holding and uniforms bustling toward the staircase - the usual den of the bullpen in the morning.

“Whoa,” Rosa’s voice sounds over the noise, “you look like shit.”

Amy scoffs and glances up for the first time - to find Rosa frozen, halfway through the motion of wiping polish across the dome of her helmet.

“Hey,” Amy points slowly toward her helmet, ignoring the pulse of pain in her temples. “Didn’t you just polish that yesterday?”

Rosa leans back in her seat, brows furrowed. “No. It’s the twenty-eighth. I only polish my helmet on the twenty-eighth of each month.”

Questions about her polishing schedule bubble up Amy’s throat, but they’re only a faint wave against a tsunami of confusion overtaking every other thought. “Twenty-eighth?” she repeats. “Isn’t it - I thought it was the twenty-ninth?”

Rosa barks out a laugh, reaching for the bottle of polish near her computer monitor. “Damn, Santiago,” she says, “you got so drunk last night you forgot what day of the month it is. Pretty sure that’s the Santiago equivalent of forgetting how to speak English.”

“Last - we didn’t - I was home watching Jeopardy last night -”

Rosa looks genuinely confused now. “No, we went to the bar last night. You got super drunk. Started crying because you lost your napkin. It was hilarious. Did you completely black out or something?”

Amy can barely hear the end of Rosa’s question over the blood suddenly pounding through her ears. Adrenaline and nausea and something else, some odd cross between dread and excitement fills the pit of her belly and explodes through her veins all at once -

She’s reliving March 28th.

Which means she now officially has feelings for her soulmate.

“Thanks,” she mutters, turning and quickly moving toward her desk. If Rosa responds, Amy doesn’t hear her; she’s far too focused on pulling her laptop out of her bag and quickly opening the internet.

She’s heard of this, of course. Most recently, from her brother Tony - he relived January 17th a grand total of 274 times before he and his soulmate, Danny, officially fell in love. He’s also the current record-holder for most repeats, for which he has been endlessly teased over the Official Santiago Sibling Group Chat ever since.

(The record for lowest number of repeats goes to stupid David and his stupid 63 days. Leave it to him to nearly halve the collective average.)

Already she can feel her fingertips tingling as familiar competitiveness takes root inside her mind. She has 62 days to figure out who her soulmate is and to make them fall in love with her.

And, you know, to fall in love with them, too.

Details.

She’s got a good working list by the time 9:15 rolls around - names of people ranging from that one guy at the gym she always catches checking her out in the mirror when she’s lifting weights to the cute guy who just moved into the apartment above hers - but she glances up when she spots the familiar shape of Jake stepping off the elevator, two coffee cups in hand.

“Mornin’,” he calls cheerfully. “I got a coffee for you.”

He sets it down on the corner of her desk - turning it so that the Fart Monster on the label faces her - and grins, smug and self-satisfied.

She stares at the label a moment, before shooting him an unimpressed look. “Thanks.”

“Anything for you, fart monster. You working on a hit list over there?”

She glances down at her list, heat igniting her ears almost immediately. “Uh - um, no, they’re - it’s a list of suspects. In a case. That I’m working.”

His eyes narrow, but he drops into his seat. “’Kay, freak,” he says, before turning his attention to his computer screen.

She waits a moment - until she’s sure he’s really absorbed in his computer and not just waiting until she looks away to lunge across the desk and steal the list - before allowing herself to breathe again.

And when he stands to make his way into the briefing room, she quickly scribbles Jake Peralta at the bottom of her list before shoving the whole notepad deep into her bag.

On the third March 28th, Amy’s still hungover.

“The one day I forgot to take an Asprin before going to bed drunk the night before,” she grumbles as she crawls out of bed.

She spends most of the morning trying to subtly peruse Facebook on her phone under her desk. She does feel a certain level of guilt for not working, but, she reasons, it doesn’t really matter - there’s always the fourth March 28th, or the fifth, or the sixth. Besides, technically , she did all of her work on the first and second March 28th; surely it won’t be the end of the world to spend one March 28th focusing on Operation Soul Mate.

(It does feel a little silly to call it that, but it’s so much more convenient to think of it that way rather than Operation Make Someone Fall In Love With Me And Also Make Me Fall In Love With Them.

Right. Love . She’s totally ready for this.)

She’s about halfway through her list - now converted to a note on her phone so as not to alert any passing, prying eyes - before she realizes she might be in a little bit over her head.

“Damn it,” she mutters, exiting out of Dan Feldman’s ninth-most recent profile picture. He’s as cute as she remembers him being when they met at code camp all those years ago (about five minutes before she met Teddy, actually), but she’s pretty sure he has a girlfriend - considering the last profile picture he uploaded without a girl in it was nine profile pictures (and four years) ago.

“You lose another round of Scrabble or something?”

She looks up for the first time in an hour to find Jake staring at his computer, intently typing; she knows without having to ask that the question is directed at her.

“Something like that,” she sighs as she deletes Dan’s name from her list. Jake glances at her - sympathy and amusement alike filtering his gaze - before returning his attention to his computer.

She stares a moment longer, before tentatively typing his name into the search bar on her phone.

He’s got the same profile picture he’s had since the day he first sent her a friend request nearly six years earlier - goofy, crooked grin, unruly hair particularly mussed, face flushed, dimples stark in the camera’s flash. She’s fairly certain the blurred head over his right shoulder is Charles, forever frozen half-way through passing behind Jake. She recognizes the background, could probably pinpoint the exact seat in the exact booth he was in when this picture was taken in Shaw’s; after a moment of staring, she glances up at the real Jake.

He’s still absorbed in what he’s doing, a tiny furrow of concentration developing between his brows, the corners of his lips turned down. His jaw moves with the motion of him chewing the inside of his cheek, and he glances down at a file spread open by his left elbow before returning his gaze to his computer screen once again.

She’s not blind. She knows he’s attractive. It’s a fact she’s been aware of - though not always willing to admit - since the moment she met him. Of course, the cocky attitude and the obnoxiousness and the immaturity kind of drowned that out for the first year or two (as it still has a tendency to occasionally do, even now), but she’s always had a basic, objective admiration for his attractiveness.

A fact he will never, ever know.

“I’m thinking of ordering Sal’s for lunch,” he says without looking away from his computer. “If I offer to share, will you stop staring at me?”

“I’m not staring at you,” Amy snaps, locking her phone and setting it face-down on her desk as quickly as she can. Jake peers at her without turning his head; the flat line of his brow tells her he definitely doesn’t believe her. “I’m not! I was - there’s a perp in holding who looks like my cousin.”

Jake swivels his seat around and cranes his neck toward the mostly-empty holding cell. “You have a cousin who looks like Murray Vulcano, known drug dealer? Or - or Dotty Hyde, the woman Charles booked this morning for taking a dump on the subway?”

“Vulcano,” she says with as much conviction as she can.

Jake swivels back toward her, a brow arched. “I wanna call bull, but I don’t want to sit for an hour while you go home and gather what I’m sure will be hours worth of family photo albums.” She rolls her eyes and sticks her tongue out at him. “You weren’t staring, but seriously, do you want lunch? My treat.”

She considers him a moment. “Okay, yeah. Thanks. Just - no display temp.”

“That’s the proper way to eat pizza, Ames, all the real Italians say so.”

By the sixth March 28th, Amy’s frustrated.

Partially because of the fact that her hangover is just as strong as it was on the first day, but mostly because she’s no closer to figuring out who her soul mate is than she was on the very first day.

Or…second day.

Second repeat?

Whatever.

She’s gone through her list three times, added names and taken names away, even went through every Facebook friend she has - and still, she has no idea who she supposedly has feelings for.

Who also has feelings for her.

(She’s pretty sure Daniel Craig doesn’t know she exists.)

She even tried working backwards from March 27th - or, what she remembers of March 27th. She doesn’t have any particular memory of a romantic epiphany, or any kind of epiphany, really, except that Six-Drink Amy can’t feel her face in addition to being sloppy and sad. The whole evening after that sixth whiskey is little more than a smudgy, unfocused mess, actually; mostly just blurry twinkle lights, spinning like a carousel, and laughter ringing in her ears.

It’s not even the Uber driver.

She’s running out of time.

At 1:57, Amy heaves a sigh and exits out of her email. In approximately two minutes, Rosa is going to call her over to her desk, asking the same questions about the same insurance form as she did on every other repeat of this stupid day, and Amy’s beginning to lose patience for it. It’s not Rosa’s fault, of course - namely because Rosa has no idea she’s already asked this question five other times - but Amy’s been fantasizing about just marching over and taking the form to fill out herself before Rosa even has a chance to ask.

Her brothers have said that on certain repeats, they’ve done similar things. Apparently when Edward was in the thick of his repeats, he even texted the group chat to vent - according to him, she was understanding in her responses, if a little condescending.

Of course, one person’s condescending is another person’s knowledgeable.

“Hey, Santiago?” Rosa calls, snapping her out of her reverie. “You got a minute?”

“Yeah,” Amy stands, pressing her knuckles into the small of her back and exhaling with each pop of her spine before reaching back and grabbing her half-drunk coffee. “What’s up?”

“I actually was wondering if you could help me with something in the evidence lockup.”

Amy pauses halfway between their desks. That’s new. “Oh, um...sure?”

Rosa stands without further comment and leads the way down the hall toward the evidence lockup. Amy’s practically bouncing with curiosity (and, if she’s being honest, excitement, considering this is the first new thing that has happened in nearly a week), but she manages to keep her expression mostly schooled when Rosa glances back at her.

“What’s going on?” Amy asks when the door swings shut behind her.

“You tell me.” Rosa says coolly.

Amy shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re -”

“You’ve been acting weird all day. Or, well, weirder than usual.” Amy rolls her eyes. “Seriously, you’ve been fidgety and impatient all day. You’ve sighed really loud, like, eighty times. And you and Peralta ate lunch at your desks.”

Through her heartbeat pounding in her ears, Amy feels herself frown. “Why - we eat lunch at our desks sometimes -”

“Only if you’re working a really killer case, which you aren’t. You made Peralta eat that nasty-ass pizza at your desks and you scrolled through your phone the whole time. Why?”

“Scully ripped a massive fart in there -”

“That didn’t happen until the end of your lunch break, and you barely looked up when Gina started screaming, so that can’t be why you didn’t go in there to eat. Unless -” she stops suddenly, eyes widening a degree, and Amy’s heart skips a beat. “Unless you knew he was gonna fart.”

Amy scoffs, ignoring the cold sweat breaking out along her hairline. “How could I possibly know that?”

Rosa’s pointing at her, the gears almost visible where they’re spinning in her mind. “You ate your lunch at your desk, and Scully dutch ovened the break room. You moved all of your files from the right corner of your desk down into a drawer, and two minutes later Charles spilled a bowl of pea soup on that corner of your desk. You pulled an Android phone charger out of your purse five seconds before Gina’s speaker died, and you started cleaning your desk up like you were about to leave it right before I got to the line on my insurance form that I was gonna ask for your help with. Santiago,” she says slowly, “are you reliving today?”

She’s tangentially aware of the fact that her mouth is hanging open as she scrambles for some viable excuse - some cover for what will surely be an embarrassing admission to be met with ruthless, borderline cruel teasing from the leather-clad woman before her - but after a moment, the fight leaves her in a loud sigh. “Yes,” she mutters, jaw barely moving.

A broad grin cracks across Rosa’s expression as she crosses her arms over her chest. “How many times has it been so far?”

“This is the sixth time I’ve gone through today. I guess that makes it the fifth repeat.”

Rosa’s brows raise toward her hairline. “Still pretty early,” she grunts. “Took my sister four-hundred and twelve repeats to get things right with her husband.”

Amy groans and brings a hand up to her brow, briefly pressing her thumb and middle finger into her temples. “I don’t think I can do this for a whole year,” she rasps. “I keep waking up as hungover as I was the actual morning after we went to the bar, but I don’t even have the benefit of having had fun the night before anymore.”

“Last night,” Rosa says quietly. “Is that when - I mean, did you trigger it? Did you start - I mean -”

“I don’t know,” Amy interrupts her floundering, “because I barely remember anything after that sixth whiskey.”

“Damn,” Rosa breathes. “That’s shit luck, dude. And you don’t have any idea who it might be?”

Amy shrugs, dropping her gaze to her feet. “I had a list of potential people, but I’ve gone through every name, like, ten times, and I’ve gotten nowhere.”

“You tried asking them?”

“What? No !” Amy cries, feeling her face heat up. “That’d be so embarrassing!”

“ How ?”

“Well, what if I ask them, and they say no?”

“Then you’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be today again and they’ll have no memory of it whatsoever?”

“I’m not - I’m not really the type to just - ask that kind of a thing.”

“So don’t ask. Tell.”

“I’m not a blunt person, Rosa. Not with this kind of thing. Besides, even if they don’t remember, I will.”

Rosa’s chin lifts, a look of understanding flashing in her dark eyes. “Rejection’s a bitch,” she murmurs. “Well, alright, so...you’re just stuck at square one, then?”

“Yeah, I mean I’ve gone through all my Facebook friends, I’ve looked around my apartment building, I’ve gone to all my regular places, and I haven’t really found anyone who sticks out. I don’t know what to do.”

Rosa seems to consider her a moment. “Have you thought about the most obvious option?”

The way she asks the question seems careful, almost cautious; immediately, Amy feels her defenses rising. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, the most obvious option ,” she repeats slowly, before casting her eyes down.

To the coffee cup in Amy’s hand.

The coffee cup with the words Fart Monster scrawled in Sharpie across the label.

“Peralta?” Amy asks incredulously.

“Don’t act like it’s such an out-there idea. You guys obviously get along really well, and it wasn’t that long ago that he was, like, head-over-heels for you.”

“He was not head-over-heels, that’s an exaggeration -”

“Maybe he didn’t act that way when he did his little confession, but you didn’t have to hear him crying about it at two in the morning.”

“Wait - what?”

Rosa does look a little sheepish - maybe a little regretful - but instead of backtracking, she just heaves a heavy sigh. “I’m only telling you this because I’ll forget I told you when it’s all said and done,” she says sternly. “So if you tell him I told you, I won’t remember, and I’ll think you’re lying. Basically...it was that day you left work early to go meet Teddy’s parents. Jake was all mopey and angsty after you left, so Charles and Gina and I took him to Shaw’s to get him drunk and distract him. Only he got so drunk that he basically turned into six-drink you - started going on and on about how he missed his chance and how he’ll probably never have another chance with you again. Charles reminded him that Teddy isn’t your soulmate, obviously, but that only made Jake sadder, since his parents weren’t soulmates but they got married anyways and it ended so bad for his mom. He was basically crying for the rest of the night, and after Charles got him all loaded up in his car to take him home, I bounced.”

Amy knows she’s gaping - she can feel her tongue going dry - but she can’t seem to remember how to work the muscles of her jaw. Rosa’s just watching her with a single brow raised, seemingly amused. “He cried ?” she finally manages.

“Not, like, full-on weeping like you were over the napkin last night. Or, uh...the night we went to the bar. But he was definitely shiny when Charles finally got him out of the bar.”

Amy nods, gaze shifting out of focus as she processes. His had been the first name to be deleted from her list - she’d figured he was still hung up on Sophia, considering the breakup had only happened two weeks ago and he’d spent the majority of those two weeks openly stalking her social media accounts. And it’s about finding the person she likes who also likes her - confusing and mildly entertainment-oriented crushes on coworkers aside.

She blinks, and finds that she’s been staring down at the coffee cup in her hand.

“Guessing I hit a nerve, here?” Rosa asks quietly.

Amy glances up for a moment, before refocusing her attention on her coffee cup. “Seems a little too easy,” she murmurs. “I mean...we’ve known each other for six years. Why start the repeats now?”

“You weren’t ready for each other at first.” Rosa says with a shrug.

“And now we are?”

“He’s not the same person he was six years ago.” She seems to hesitate, gaze flicking down the length of Amy’s body, before landing back on her face. “Neither are you.”

The beginnings of a smile swell in the apples of Amy’s cheeks, but she tamps it down before it can truly blossom. “What if he’s still caught up on Sophia? I mean, they just broke up, like, two weeks ago -”

“He’s never stopped liking you, Santiago. He may not realize it, but he’s always carried a torch for you. It just...took a back seat while he was with the lawyer.”

Guilt winds its way up her spine, but it’s largely swallowed by the confusing (or...getting-slightly-less-confusing) sense of satisfaction simmering in her veins.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Ask him out.” Rosa answers automatically.

“Rosa -”

“I’m serious. He’s not gonna ask you out again - not because he doesn’t want to, but because he thinks you don’t feel that way about him and he’s trying to be respectful and honor your boundaries. So you’re stuck in neutral until either you ask him out or you tell him to ask you out. Either way, you have to make the first move.”

Whatever satisfaction she was feeling evaporates immediately as dread floods her belly. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she mumbles.

“You don’t have to do it right now,” Rosa says with an understanding nod. “You can wait for tomorrow. Or the day after that. You’ve basically got the rest of infinity to wait, since you can’t get out of this time loop until -”

“ Fine .” Amy interrupts sharply. “I’ll ask him out. Just...stop talking about infinity. I’m gonna get an ulcer.”

Rosa gestures toward the door with little more than a smirk, and Amy heaves one last sigh before leading the way back out into the bullpen.

Jake is still at his desk when Amy rounds the corner; he glances up and smiles when he meets her gaze. It’s a distracted smile, but it’s still warm - and Amy’s heart flutters in her chest.

Okay. Yeah. That’s not nothing.

He’s stifling a yawn behind one hand when she sits, eyes a little bloodshot and watery as they flit across his computer screen, and for a brief moment Amy’s consumed with doubt. Because Jake has not faltered in his absorption in his computer, not for a single one of these repeats. He’s followed the same patterns, made the same general jokes, had the same timing. And if he really is her soulmate, he would be doing things differently each day - right?

Then again, despite his chaotic exterior, he does typically stay within his personal ruts throughout the day. He’s definitely ordered the same pizza from Sal’s every single day in a ten-day period before. He’s certainly worn the same flannel shirt for the same number of days in a row before. He’s smart as a whip and observant to boot in so many situations - except when it comes to keeping time, or his personal hygiene.

It’s definitely possible, then, that he could be reliving this day, too, without even realizing it.

It’s definitely possible, then, that he could be her soulmate.

Oh, god.

She clears her throat before her anxiety can get the better of her. Jake’s eyes automatically flick up over the top of his computer screen, curious and questioning. “You busy?” she asks.

He glances down at his computer screen, and then back up at her. “Not really,” he says. “What’s up?”

“I was just wondering, uh, if...if you wanted to, um, go get a drink? With me? Later?”

He leans back in his seat, a grin splitting across his face. “What, was last night not enough for you, Santiago?”

Maybe he’s not her soulmate.

“Uh -”

“I mean, I know they say the best way to beat a hangover is to stay a little drunk, but you don’t seem like the type to drink a bar dry two nights in a row in the middle of a work week -”

“Alright, this was a mistake -”

He laughs brightly, eyes twinkling with mirth, and Amy’s heart skips a beat. “Shaw’s again? Or did you have somewhere else in mind?”

She shrugs - she’s doing that a lot lately - and shakes her head. “Shaw’s, I guess, I don’t know. Does that work?”

“Yeah, Shaw’s sounds good. What time were you thinking?”

“Just - after work. Unless you have something to do -”

“Nah, free as a bird. You’re off at five-thirty, right?”

“Yep.”

“Cool.”

She nods, inhales, and angles her seat to the left, toward her computer.

A beat passes. “So I guess I’ll ask the rest of the squad, then?”

Her heart thuds heavily inside her chest, not unlike the final pounds of a hammer in the last nail of the coffin. “Oh, um...okay. Sure.”

Her gaze remains fixated on her computer screen, making her oblivious to the confused furrow in Jake’s brow.

Later, when she’s back at Shaw’s for the first time in six days (or twenty-four hours, depending on who’s asking), it takes everything in her to not just up and leave.

Jake’s been flitting between Charles at the dartboard and Gina and Terry in a booth for the vast majority of the night and Rosa’s gaze has been steady on the back of her head from where she’s hunched over a pool table for as much time and Amy’s fed up. As good as it had felt when she’d gotten everything off her chest earlier, she’s starting to regret ever telling Rosa - namely because it led her here, to this dead end, to another repeat wasted. David had already confessed his feelings for Amber by his fifth repeat, and Amy’s not even sure who her soulmate is supposed to be - she could be home right now, she could be working on her evidence cork board-turned-soulmate hunter, working through new possibilities, rehashing old ones she’d prematurely dismissed.

Instead, she’s sitting in a barstool, nursing her third moscato in as many hours, completely alone.

Except for Rosa, who’s suddenly at her right elbow.

“Y’know,” she mutters in Amy’s ear, “when I told you to ask him out, I kind of meant just him. He hasn’t even talked to you yet.”

“I’m aware,” Amy says tersely over the rim of her wine glass.

It’s quiet for a beat. “Sorry,” Rosa finally says, and Amy turns toward her automatically, caught off-guard by the genuine regret in Rosa’s voice. “Kinda feel like I’m a little bit responsible. I should have said no when he asked earlier.”

Amy swirls the wine in her glass around a few times, before glancing up at Jake - now back at the dartboards, seemingly in deep conversation with Charles. “You don’t have to apologize,” she finally says. “It’s just - I don’t know. This feels like a complete failure. Like...like a rejection.”

“Don’t give up on him yet. He’s like Sherlock when it comes to solving cases, but he’s a complete moron most of the time. Especially when it comes to feelingsy stuff like this. Keep asking him out, and I guarantee he’ll figure it out. Eventually.”

“I’m gonna be stuck in this day for the rest of eternity, aren’t I?”

“You could just tell him what’s going on.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then, yeah, you’re definitely stuck for now.” She raps her knuckles against the bar a few times, her expression sympathetic, before the bartender slides a fresh bottle of beer into her hand. “Tell you what. If you really start going crazy, just pull me aside in the morning as soon as you get to the precinct and tell me what’s going on. Can’t guarantee that I’ll go willingly at first, but if you tell me it’s important, I’ll hear you out. Will that help?”

Amy considers it a moment, before smiling. “Yeah,” she nods, gripping the stem of her wine glass a little tighter. “I think - yes. Thank you.”

Rosa knocks the counter twice more before pushing back with her forearms, pulling a long swig from her beer as she makes her way back toward the pool tables.

Amy feels a presence slide into the barstool to her left before she has a chance to right herself again. “Which Amy do I got, here?” Jake asks, so close his voice is practically rumbling in her ear.

She turns toward him with a half-hearted smile, swirling her wine around in her glass again. “Technically, this is my third. But I’ve been going so slow I’m not even tipsy right now.”

He feigns disappointment, but it doesn’t touch his eyes - those remain bright. “And I was so looking forward to Dance-Pants Santiago’s repeat performance of last night’s breakdancing routine…”

They both laugh, but hers is nearly lost beneath the cacophony of the general mayhem in progress around them.

She pulls a slow sip from her glass, and from the corner of her eye, she watches him study her face.

And she ignores the heat rising faintly in her ears.

Talking to Jake is absurdly easy. It always has been. He just gets her. He may make fun of her mercilessly at times, but beneath that, at the base layer, he understands her in a way she seldom feels understood. She’s never used terms like confidante or supporter when thinking of Jake, but here and now - through the filter of three glasses of moscato and six repeats of this god-forsaken day - she finds herself wondering why.

Why she’s never noticed how eyes eyes look flecked with gold beneath the strand of Christmas lights wound around the wooden ceiling beam over their heads. Why she’s never realized he seems to know what she’s thinking before she says anything out loud. Why she’s never thought about how warm his hands are when his fingers brush against hers while passing her the fourth glass of moscato from the bartender.

Why she’s never fully appreciated the way his whole body moves when he laughs a genuine belly-laugh at something dumb she’s just said.

She wonders for so long, in fact, that by the time she has the wherewithal to glance around for the rest of the squad, she finds that they’ve all left.

Aside from Jake.

“Rude of them to leave without saying bye, right?” Jake asks as they make their way out onto the sidewalk outside of Shaw’s, his hands buried in his jacket pockets, eyes squinted against the cool breeze ruffling both of their hair. The streetlight over their heads is flickering and the neon sign behind them is buzzing, lights catching the errant individual hairs sticking off of his head in a metropolitan halo that has her heart skipping beats.

“Yeah,” she mumbles, distracted.

His gaze falls from the street over her shoulder down to her - and for a moment she’s paralyzed, speared in place by what can really only be described as a smolder.

A curious smolder, of course, but one that grows increasingly less curious as the seconds tick by.

She hears car brakes squeaking on the street behind her, and something shifts - like a spell breaking, like a bubble bursting. Jake steps back, elbows locking as his arms straighten out for a second (a tell-tale sign of Nervous Peralta) and he nods toward the street. “Wanna split it?”

“Um…” he’s studying her face and she’s pretty sure her heart is about to explode out of her mouth at the thought of being alone in an enclosed space with him. There are emotions she doesn’t even recognize screaming in her mind and churning in her gut and he’s watching her with those gold-flecked eyes and that ethereal neon halo. “I’m...no, no thanks.” she says - and she could swear his expression falls, if only infinitesimally. “I just - I parked around the corner earlier, and I don’t really want to leave my car here overnight.”

(Not that it would matter at this point, but still .)

He’s nodding in understanding, smiling in such a way that she knows he knows she means it. “I’d hate for someone to break in a steal your collection of Dave Matthews Band CD’s,” he says with a wink.

“It was one CD and it belongs to my brother, are you ever gonna let that go?”

“Absolutely not.”

They both laugh - and this time it’s easy to hear the way they perfectly mingle and harmonize.

The taxi honks, sharp and loud, and Amy jumps away from the sound, hands rising automatically -

- to brace herself against Jake’s chest.

To her credit, he moved instinctively, too - of course, he moved toward her, and his hands had also shot upwards, finding purchase on her elbows.

For a split-second, they remain motionless, staring at each other, eyes wide and bewildered. In that split-second, Amy absorbs two things:

First, Jake’s chest is far more toned than she was expecting. There are no bulging muscles like Terry’s, but there’s a definite firmness there that surprises her, considering how many gummy bear fruit roll up burritos she’s seen him eat over the years. It’s surprising - it’s actually kind of pleasant.

Second - and far more pressing - Jake’s heart is hammering beneath her right palm.

He releases her elbows and steps back, face flushing as he coughs awkwardly. She yanks her hands down to her sides as though burned, flames engulfing her neck and face, and as he coughs and scratches his ear, she briefly wishes the sidewalk would open up and swallow her whole right here and now.

“Right, well I’ll...I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says as he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“Yeah. Tomorrow.” He nods, and she nods back, and then she’s turning her back toward the corner around which her car is parked, backing away from him slowly. His smile is a little less awkward now; she makes it four feet before one of his hands emerges from his pocket, raised in a non-moving wave goodbye. “Have a good night, Santiago.”

She smiles as she waves.

She doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the night, even when she lays down in her bed.

And maybe, she thinks just before she falls asleep, maybe he could be her soulmate after all.

She gets to the precinct before 7:30 on the seventh March 28th.

Her hangover was little more than an annoying blip on her radar when compared to the overwhelming determination that seemed to possess her the moment her alarm first blared in her ears that morning.

It’s all so inconsequential, considering she’s at least 73% sure she’s figured out who her soulmate is.

She gets to work early and paces in the breakroom until 7:42, when the elevator doors slide open and Rosa comes trudging into the bullpen with her helmet hanging by the chin strap from her crooked fingers.

“Rosa,” Amy calls, and Rosa’s shoulders raise - the only outward sign of the fact that Amy startled her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to -”

“It’s cool,” Rosa grunts, reaching up to lower her sunglasses with her free hand. “Damn,” she says, “you look like shit.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know - I need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

Rosa backs away, already reaching for the edge of her desk. “Kinda got a schedule for this morning, Santiago,” she says, setting her helmet down on a crooked stack of files. “Can it wait?”

“Not really. But polishing your helmet can definitely wait.”

She doesn’t freeze like Amy’s expecting her to, but her movements do slow significantly; it’s not until she’s pulled her sunglasses off and carefully set them in her top drawer that she finally meets Amy’s gaze again. “Alright.” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s up?”

“Can we go to the evidence lockup? It’s...kind of personal.”

Rosa’s upper lip curls slightly in distaste, but she nods all the same.

And the moment the evidence lockup closes, Amy loses all pretense of secretiveness. “I think Jake’s my soulmate,” she blurts.

This time, Rosa does freeze. “Come again?”

“I said that I think Jake is my soulmate,” Amy repeats, ignoring the explosive feeling of her heart in her throat.

Rosa continues staring, face contorted in confusion, before understanding suddenly softens her features. “You’re reliving today, aren’t you? That’s how you knew I was planning on polishing my helmet this morning?”

Amy nods.

“Damn. How many times has it been?”

“This is the seventh time.”

“Still pretty early -”

“You said the same thing yesterday.”

Rosa’s brows raise in surprise. “You’ve told me already?”

“Actually, you figured it out yesterday. I didn’t do a very good job at hiding it.”

Rosa nods, gaze drifting out of focus for a moment, before suddenly snapping back to attention. “You said you think it’s Jake?”

Amy nods again, a cold tingling in her fingertips. “After you figured out that I was reliving yesterday, you might’ve...suggested that I consider Jake. And at first, I wasn’t going to, but after last night -”

“What happened last night?” Rosa interrupts.

“I - well, I kind of - I...asked him out.”

Rosa lets out a loud, nasal laugh. “Didn’t think you had it in you!”

“Don’t get too excited, he ended up inviting you, Charles, Gina, and Terry, because apparently I wasn’t obvious enough when I asked him and he thought we were just hanging out as friends.”

“Oh. So what happened that made you change your mind?”

“Well he hardly talked to me for most of the night, he was at the dartboards with Charles or else talking to Gina and Terry, but, like, an hour before we called it quits, he came and sat down at the bar next to me and we talked for the rest of the night, and we walked out together, and right before he got in the cab to go home, we kind of…”

“Kissed?” Rosa finishes, voice disproportionately deadpanned.

“No! No. It was more like...okay, the cab driver honked, and it scared both of us, so we both jumped, and…”

“You...grabbed each other’s asses?”

“How would that even work?”

Rosa shrugs, grinning gleefully.

“No, we just - it was kind of like a hug, basically. Except I...um...touched his chest. And he was, like, holding my elbows. It was an accident.”

Rosa arches a brow. “That’s it? You touched his chest and he grabbed your elbows? I thought something actually happened.”

“I felt his heartbeat, and it was beating really fast. Like, really fast.”

“Well...yeah. You said the cabby scared you guys, right?”

“It was a moment , Rosa, I’m not an idiot! I know what I saw, I know what I felt, and that was definitely a moment.”

“Alright, so you had a moment. You think he feels the same way that you do?”

“I’m almost positive he does.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well, you, mostly. You told me about the night you, Gina, and Charles took him to the bar and he got so drunk he started rambling about missing his chance with me.”

Rosa pales a degree. “There’s no way in hell I told you about that, I swore to him -”

“I’m not planning on telling him that I know about that night, so don’t worry about him finding out. I think the only reason you told me was because you were trying to convince me to at least consider him.”

“Huh,” Rosa grunts, “didn’t know I cared that much.”

“I think it was more that you felt sorry for me,” Amy says carefully. “I was really frustrated yesterday and you seemed to pick up on that. You did say that you’d think I was lying if I ever told anyone that you told me about this, though.”

“That sounds like me,” she admits thoughtfully. “So...are you gonna tell him?”

“Maybe. I’m...just worried about what would happen if I’m wrong. Like, if I tell him that I’m reliving today, and I think that he's my soulmate, but it ends up not being him.”

Rosa nods. “I get being scared of rejection,” she says softly, “but...he’s not exactly the type to be a dick about it if he ends up not being your soulmate, you know? Whether it’s romantic or not, Jake does care a lot about you. He’d never purposely hurt you.”

“I know,” Amy says, relishing in the fact that she really does know. “It’s less about the way he’d treat me if I’m wrong, and more that...I’m just scared of being wrong.”

“I understand.”

“I’m gonna ask him out again tonight,” Amy says after a beat of silence. “I’m pretty sure he’ll invite everyone else again - say yes if he does.”

Rosa arches a brow.

“I want to recreate last night as closely as I can, which means everyone needs to be there at the beginning of the night.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

Being at work earlier than she has been in any other repeats means Captain Holt calls her into his office before the morning briefing to go over the paperwork from her most-recently completed case rather than after; by the time she makes it back to her desk, Jake has already gotten there and gone into the briefing room before she so much as sees his face. There’s a coffee cup waiting for her on her desk, though -

- and the name Amy is scrawled across the label.

She can’t wipe the grin off her face as she strolls into the briefing room, coffee cup in hand.

Things have only gotten more intense by the fifteenth March 28th.

She’s only told Rosa a handful of times - mostly out of curiosity about what affect her knowing has on the way the events play out - but somehow, she’s managed to figure it out on her own each time.

It’s of little consequence, really, considering the night always ends the same way: with Amy’s head tucked beneath Jake’s chin, her ear pressed over his racing heart.

So maybe she’s gotten more bold as the repeats have worn on. And maybe she’s cared less and less about him noticing the little physical clues like her burning ears or her own heart hammering away inside her chest.

And maybe Jake’s hugs have gotten a little tighter, lasted a little longer with each repeat.

But there’s a problem, now, a new problem she didn’t see coming - which is to say, discerning what’s real and natural and not just an environmental response to her own evolving bravery.

She still hasn’t found the stones to tell him, despite Rosa’s encouragement to do so. And there’s a part of her - an immature part - that wonders why he hasn’t said anything. Because if he was really her soulmate, he’d be aware of the situation, too; he’d have some amount of accountability for the way everything’s playing out. So if he’s not gonna say something, she’s sure as hell not gonna say something, either.

You have to make the first move , Rosa’s voice echoes in her mind.

Shut your damn mouth , Amy thinks each time it echoes.

There’s also the little niggling doubt in the back of her mind, the overthinking overworked obsessive part concerned with the fact that she hasn’t truly explored every possible avenue laid out before her. It’s just not like her to not be completely thorough, especially when it comes to such major decisions as this .

This. Love. Soulmate.

It’s easy, when she’s alone, to start panicking.

It’s easier to forget about that when Jake’s hooded, gold-flecked gaze is tracking her every move.

Things have only gotten more intense by the fifteenth March 28th, but the next shift happens that night.

He’s started spending more and more time with her one-on-one as the repeats have gone on; by the fifteenth, he’s spending his entire night with her, tucked away in the back-most booth, oblivious to the rest of the squad spread across Shaw’s. Over his shoulder Amy’s caught Rosa looking their way a few times, and Charles a few more times, but for the most part they’re ignored.

Which is good, Amy thinks, considering how heavily they’re flirting.

His arm is slung around the back of the booth - not quite touching her shoulders, but close enough that she can feel the heat of his skin though her blouse. He leans toward her each time he laughs, bicep brushing against her shoulder, and she lets her hand land and linger on his knee for a beat each time she finishes a sentence. She lets him catch her watching his lips move as he talks, and the tip of his tongue wets the corner of his mouth as she talks.

And the inevitability of their colliding paths settles as a secure weight around her shoulders, moments before his arm does, too.

Their hands brush as they make their way out of the bar later, and Amy bites down on the inside of her cheek, trying and failing to fight off a smile. Jake seems to be doing the same thing; his lips are pursed and turned to the side, even as his cheeks swell and the corners of his eyes crinkle. He waves down the same cab and turns toward her as it pulls up to the curb, his expression one of mixed resignation and expectation. “Wanna share?”

“Thanks, but my car’s parked around the corner and I don’t wanna leave it here overnight.”

He’s already nodding in understanding before she finishes speaking.

It’s becoming easier, with each passing repeat, to throw caution to the wind and step into his embrace. What started as awkward and uncertain has quickly evolved into something both thrilling and natural, as effortless as breathing. His arms sweep up her back as she balls her fists into the excess material of his shirt; the scent of his aftershave overwhelms her, made all the more intense when she closes her eyes. His heartbeat is strong and loud and steady beneath her ear, drowning out the distant sounds of Brooklyn traffic, and the rhythm is soothing and familiar.

What is unfamiliar - what sends her heart skittering in her chest - is the undeniable press of his lips against her temple.

She’s paralyzed, struck dumb, and his expression is unreadable as he slowly steps back. “Goodnight, Ames,” he whispers.

His arms linger around her waist a moment longer; when they fall back to his sides, a frigid cold surges through her veins. She swallows thickly as he shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his hoodie, watching him back away toward the cab.

He keeps his gaze fixated steadily forward, never once glancing back, and she remains frozen in a daze until the cab has rounded the corner.

And as she reaches up to gently touch the place where he kissed her, a smile slowly spreads across her face.

It still permeates her every sense on the sixteenth March 28th - and with it comes a calm, deep-rooted resolution.

He’s not in yet when she arrives at the precinct the next morning, so she finds herself rooting around her desk aimlessly, looking for busy work with which to burn time. Rosa greets her the same as every morning, but Amy hardly hears it; only seventeen minutes, now.

Her heart shoots into her throat when the elevator doors open twelve minutes later and Jake steps out, looking tousled and wind-swept, two coffee cups in hand.

“Hey,” she says as he approaches.

“Hey. I got you a coffee -”

“Do you want to go to dinner with me tonight?”

He blinks. Gina’s phone rings behind them. The elevator dings, and Murray Vulcano yells an obscenity in Spanish in the holding cell. “Um, yeah,” Jake finally rasps. “Yeah. Yes . I definitely - yes.”

Amy smiles, and Jake grins right back.

He hands her the second coffee; the name Ames is scrawled across the label.

They’re both smiling - be it more nervously - later that evening, seated side-by-side at a table in a restaurant that is far more fancy than she ever would have expected him to choose. He’s bouncing back and forth between compulsively straightening his silverware beside his salad plate and adjusting his napkin where he’s folded it across his lap, and as she watches his fingers smooth the folded edge a little flatter over his thigh, she feels the ghost of that same hand pressed against her lower back when he pulled her chair out for her when she first arrived.

It’s a little weird, how stilted and awkward this feels, considering she was practically sitting in his lap at Shaw’s the night before.

He straightens up his butter knife for the fifth time and then leans back with a huff, plunging them in a silence only punctuated by the clinks and quiet conversations of the diners around them.

“This is weird,” she finally says.

He lets out a laugh that cuts off too quickly, nodding, seemingly struggling to swallow. “ Way weird. Good!” he says quickly, and she nods. “But definitely...weird. How - how do we make it not-weird?”

She bites down on her lower lip, casting vaguely around the restaurant, and catches sight of a waiter emerging from the kitchen with two cocktails in hand. “I know,” she says, leaning forward to touch his arm. “Let’s get super drunk.”

“God, Santiago, you brilliant bastard .”

Five minutes later, their waiter is dropping off their order - eight kamikaze shots - and Amy forces herself to exhale evenly as Jake slides four shot glasses closer to her. “This is good,” she says, meeting Jake’s determined expression with a smile.

“This is the best idea ever. In all the history of ideas, this one is the best.”

They each raise a shot glass toward each other in a silent cheers , and his eyes never flicker from her face as they each throw the burning liquid back in tandem.

Heat pricks at her ears.

The conversation flows far more easily after that, as if the alcohol eviscerated the awkwardness right out of both of their systems. The laughter picks up at once, and it travels down the scorching path left in the wake of her second shot.

The heat in her ears has spread down to her chest - following the path of her fourth shot - as Jake’s hand finally shifts from grazing her knee to full-on tracing circles over her kneecap with the pad of his thumb.

The heat is scorching through her entire body, consuming her like a roaring, raging wildfire, by the time she stumbles backwards into Jake’s apartment, gasping for air as his teeth nip lightly over her pulse point.

He mumbles something unintelligible into her skin and she bites back a whine as his nose brushes against the hollow behind her ear and his palms skim up her sides. The front door shuts and her back connects with the wall to the left, his thumbs sweeping experimentally back and forth and up, up, up her ribcage.

His lips connect with hers again, a towering wave crashing along the shore, and as her fingers card through the soft hair along the base of his skull, she catches herself thinking it’s like he was made for this .

And he might actually be made for this, she realizes in the slim corner of her mind not short-circuiting. He might actually be her real-life, made-for-her, bonafide soulmate.

But then again, he might not.

Her stomach drops down to her toes.

“ Shit !” she gasps, rearing her head back so fast it bumps loudly off the wall.

“Oh, god, Amy -” he presses his palm to the back of her head, the other automatically closing gently over her bicep. “What’s wrong? What just happened?”

His voice is low and frantic, his face contorted in concern, and she’s struggling to remember how to breathe. “I’m - I can’t -”

He yanks away from her at once, his entire body separating from hers, until his back hits the wall opposite of her. “Oh my god, Amy,” he gasps as he roots his fists in his hair, “I’m - I’m  so sorry, I’m so sorry , I just - you’re, you’re so pretty and - I’m a little d-drunk, I didn’t mean to - god -”

“No, no, no, that’s not what I - you didn’t do anything wrong, Jake, you didn’t do anything wrong at all!”

His chest is heaving, his lips dark and kiss-swollen, but his expression is shifting from purely distraught to a sickening combination of distraught and confused. “Okay,” he says slowly, “so...so what just happened? ‘Cause I thought - I mean, it seemed like it - things were going...like, really well -”

Her eyes are stinging, her vision blurring, and she presses her hands against the unbearable burning in her cheeks. “It was ,” she says, voice dangerously high and warbling around the knot in her throat uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, I’m - I need to go -”

She hears a strangled noise escape his throat as she bolts toward the door, but she doesn’t look back; she couldn’t if she wanted to, not with the tears streaming down her face.

Outside of the intensity of his smoldering gaze, she finds her anxiety ebbing to a slightly more manageable level. It’s not that she didn’t want to, she thinks miserably as her Uber idles at a red light. Quite the opposite, in fact - she can’t think of a single thing she wants more.

Except the guarantee that he’ll remember it the next day.

Which she decidedly does not have.

She’s 95% sure that he’s her soulmate - but that last 5% of uncertainty hangs heavy around her neck, and she can’t imagine a more horrifying, soul-destroying idea than having that with him, just to be the only one to remember it.

She falls asleep slowly, fitfully, her tear-stained face illuminated in the glow of her phone’s screen, her blurry vision fixated on Jake’s contact information.

On the seventeenth March 28th, her hangover feels much, much worse than any other repeat before it.

“Whoa,” Rosa grunts when Amy trudges into the bullpen. “You look -”

“ Shut up .” Amy snarls before she can finish.

Rosa shuts up.

Amy’s careful to keep her head down for the duration of the morning, pretending to be focused on the same stupid file she’s completed sixteen times already, tapping her pen absently, anxiously. She can hear Charles murmuring something to Rosa - perhaps concerned about the iciness emanating from Amy’s very soul - and Amy ignores them, gritting her teeth against the desire to flick them both off.

All the blood in her body seems to race directly to her face when she hears the elevator doors slide open at 9:15.

She can’t bring herself to look up at him when he approaches. She can hear his sneakers squeaking along the tiled floors, can hear Charles calling out to him in greeting, can hear his messenger bag hitting the floor, but she can’t look at him.

So she doesn’t.

He stays quiet, too.

She taps her pen against her file.

He stands and walks away at 9:22 and Amy breathes a little easier, head lifting for the first time all morning. She can see him in the briefing room, his back to the door, and something like longing pulses along with the regret threatening to drown her all at once. She can’t shake the feeling that something’s changed again - for the worst this time.

She heaves a quiet, resigned sigh, and pushes back from her desk.

Her pen and notepad are right where they always are, and she moves to grab them, but doesn’t walk away.

She’s missing something.

She studies her desk, finding nothing out of place, nothing screaming out to her.

She’s missing something.

She glances at Jake’s desk in spite of herself, and her gaze lands on a familiar blue coffee cup.

One familiar blue coffee cup, with the name Jake written on the label.

And it hits her with the unstoppable force of a careening freight train.

She drops her pen and her notepad on her desk and strides forward, seizes his coffee, turns on her heel, and marches off toward the evidence lockup.

Only six minutes pass before he follows her.

He slinks inside with his head down and his hands shoved deep in his pockets, looking every bit the troublemaker called to the principal’s office. He looks up at her through his lashes, his gaze only staying on her for a second before dropping to her feet, as if maintaining eye-contact with her is an impossible feat.

It only serves to convince her further.

He stops a few feet short, and the distance between them feels like an impassable chasm. The seconds tick by, the silence grows heavier.

You have to make the first move.

She lifts his coffee cup a little higher, and he follows the movement. “You didn’t bring me one,” she says quietly.

He rocks forward to the balls of his feet and bounces slightly, before falling back to his heels. “You didn’t ask for one,” he says brusquely, his lightness forced and paper-thin. “If you’d texted me this morning I would’ve -”

“You’ve brought me a coffee every other morning except this one,” she interrupts, unperturbed, and he falls silent. “You’ve had them write Fart Monster and Amy and Ames, and you’ve brought sixteen of them. But today, you didn’t. Why?”

His lips are parted, his breathing visibly growing more labored. She sees his hands flex inside his pockets before he removes them, letting them fall to his sides.

She clenches her jaw and leans to her right, setting the coffee cup on the nearest shelf. “Jake,” she says as she straightens again. “Are you awake right now?”

He tries to smile, but looks as though a frog has gotten caught in his throat. “‘Course I am,” he mutters, “not sleepwalking or anyth-”

“Jake.”

He catches his lower lip between his teeth and slowly, slowly nods. “Yeah, I’m awake,” he rasps.

A beat passes. “Are you my soulmate?”

He releases a shaking breath through his nose, and his hands clench to fists at his sides. “Yeah,” he breathes. “I...I think so.”

It settles over her like a warm blanket, the edges billowing out on their slow descent downward, blowing all sense of tense awkwardness and doubt away. “Well,” she murmurs, “that’s...good.”

A cautious, almost timid kind of confusion flashes in his gaze, mingling flawlessly with the undeniable hope blossoming faster than spring’s first bloom.

She launches herself at him without another word.

His entire body responds in a split-second - as if an automatic response - the pillar of his body stopping her from falling forward on her face, his arms slung around her waist stopping her from toppling backwards after the fact. He makes a quiet noise when her lips collide with his but she’s almost certain it’s one of combined joy and relief - relief at the familiar contact, no longer filtered through the combined lenses of drunkenness and social convention. His kiss is just as warm as she remembers it, his embrace just as invigorating, and she doesn’t even try to restrain the groan that rattles through her chest as his fingers root through her hair. He echoes that groan a moment later and angles his head to better sweep his tongue through her mouth, and she pulls him as close as she physically can with her arms slung tight around his neck and his shoulders.

And if there was any residual doubt left in her system, it’s washed away by the effervescent glow coming off of him in broad, sweeping waves.

The moment their lips part, she captures her lower lip between her teeth; her eyelids flutter open a half-second before his do, affording her the perfect image of him, of his face, contorted in what she can only describe as sheer passion . He swallows audibly as his eyelids finally lift to half-mast, and his hands sweep broad and flat and warm down her spine before slowly sliding around her hips and off of her completely.

She catches them in hers before they can return to his sides.

“How long have you known?” she whispers.

He pulls back the last few inches necessary to properly look her in the eye, and for a moment all he does is study her with open, unabashed wonder. “Uh, I - um. Whatever - whatever day it was when you asked if I wanted to get drinks.”

Despite the tantalizing, tingling feeling of a confirmed soulmate found, Amy feels herself rear back in disbelief (and faint, faint outrage). “You’ve known since day six ?”

He does have the decency to look sheepish when he nods in affirmation.

“Why - why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to pressure you,” he shrugs, gaze dropping down to where their hands are still joined. “It seemed like you didn’t really know yet, and I didn’t wanna, y’know - make things take even longer by scaring you off on the sixth day.”

Jake’s biting back a grin when he meets her gaze again, and she’s suddenly aware of the fact that her mouth is agape and her head is shaking. “So, what, you’ve just - you’ve been waiting around on me for, what, fifteen days ?”

“I mean, I was dropping some hints. Like, bringing you coffee every morning, or offering to share my lunch with you. It’s not my fault you didn’t pick up on them. Or, that you didn’t pick up on them right away.”

“You always offer to share when you order from Sal’s for lunch, how was I supposed to know that this was any different?”

“Because I ordered half with grilled chicken and spinach like a complete dweeb - hang on, wait,” he tilts his head to the side and narrows his eyes in suspicion. “How long did it take you to figure out you were reliving today?”

“As soon as I got to work on the second day,” she says, ignoring the self-conscious heat prickling up her spine at the smug and teasing grin spreading across his face. “How long did it take you to figure it out?”

“Oh, not ‘til lunch on the second day, but that’s pretty impressive considering I barely ever know what day of the week it is unless it’s Friday since Charles brings donuts. I am shocked and appalled that it took you longer than three seconds to figure it out since you have at least thirty-seven calendars in your bedroom alone.”

She rolls her eyes as he snickers, and his thumbs swipe out over her knuckles as if on impulse. “Yeah, well, I had the world’s worst hangover on the first March twenty-eighth - and every other March twenty-eighth since then, might I add - so I think I also have a pretty valid excuse.”

He laughs a quiet, appreciative laugh, and there’s anticipation thrumming in her veins.

It’s all but drowned out by the tsunami of regret rearing up inside her gut. “I’m so sorry about last night, Jake,” she mumbles, eyes suddenly fixated on their toes.

He quickly shakes his head, squeezing both of her hands impulsively. “It’s okay,” he murmurs; her eyes open to find him already looking down at her, nothing but patience and understanding in his warm gaze. “Did you know? Last night, I mean?”

“I was...I was almost positive, but...not one-hundred percent.” He nods and his thumbs are still stroking; she focuses on the rhythm, and the anxiety ebbs. “That’s why I left - it wasn’t that I didn’t want you, I was just scared of - of having that with you and then finding out that I’m the only one who remembers it. Plus, that would’ve been so disgusting and wrong of me to do if we weren’t - you already know this,” she shakes her head, willing herself not to drown in the warm liquid of his eyes just yet. “I’m sorry I just bolted like that, I just - I was drunk and scared and I didn’t handle it well, like, at all. It wasn’t because I didn’t want you. I did want you. I - I do .”

A look of pure wonder, bordering on disbelief, has mingled with the affection and understanding, and she’s certain if it was possible to suffocate in someone’s facial expression she’d have done so twice over by now. “You want me?” he breathes, as if afraid of speaking the words too loudly. She nods, biting down on her lower lip in a futile attempt at hiding her smile. “You - you’re my soulmate?”

“I’m your soulmate.”

“Amy Santiago is my soulmate,” he mumbles faintly - seemingly to himself - and this time she allows herself to smile, broad and bright. “I can’t believe this is real.”

“Me either,” she admits with a quiet laugh. “It still feels really surreal -”

“That was a hitlist you were working on!” he interrupts. “Oh, my god, wait - how far down on the list was I?”

“Honestly? You were the last name I added and the first one I crossed out.”

He drops one of her hands to flatten his over his heart, expression one of contorted pain. “Um, ouch ?”

“It wasn’t - I mean, I assumed you were still kind of hung up on Sophia, and I wasn’t sure if you were even interested in dating in general, so…”

“Hm,” he grunts, still feigning disappointment, and Amy rolls her eyes. “I dunno, Santiago, seems like a pretty crappy excuse.”

“Well, I’m so sorry that you were the last name on my list. How can I ever make it up to you?”

“You could start by playing hooky from work today to hang out with me.”

She gives him a deadpan look. “You’re honestly suggesting that we just blow off work so we can hang out?”

“Yeah, why not? There’s always tomorrow, right?”

She falls in love in pieces, in moments, in waves.

It’s odd, she thinks, how quickly all the things that mattered to her become arbitrary in the wake of them . How the idea of reliving the same boring, utterly dead day of work becomes unbearable when the alternative is spending time with her actual soulmate.

Her soulmate who also happens to be her best friend.

Jake teases her for it endlessly.

His combined gratefulness and affection is unmistakable where it pulses like a low tide beneath the mirth.

The pieces, as they fall:

The lights, in all their unfocused, twinkling glory, where they blur through the tears of laughter one evening as they walk hand-in-hand down the sidewalk. It’s a picture-perfect image - his face, scrunched in laughter, eyes crinkled with such merriment they’re practically closed, and the lights draped down from a fire escape up and to the right cast a soft, ethereal glow over his ill-tamed curls. Deja-vu strikes like a bolt of lightning - she’s seen this, him , like this , before. Here, on this sidewalk, beneath these lights; here, with this smile, with his heart so blatantly on his sleeve. It makes her heart feel full and stuttering at the same time.

The spinning, spinning and spinning like a carousel, when he takes her hand as they make their way down a sloping paved path along Central Park’s outer periphery. They’re walking and he’s bumping her shoulder every now and then, and then they pass by a guitarist busking near an entrance to the park and he stops, a most peculiar look on his face. She barely has time to cock her head and laugh before he spins her. She lets out a laugh - bright and earnest and full-bodied - and then she’s falling into him, hand skittering up his chest to curl over the top of his shoulder, and his arm slings low around her waist to keep her steady. They fall into step in near-perfect synchronization (despite her concentrated efforts, she’s yet to really make any great strides in the way of graceful coordination), grinning at each other like fools, and when he steps back and spins her once, twice, three times in a row, and again she’s nearly paralyzed by deja-vu. They’ve done this before, too - not here, but on a sidewalk, to the sounds of a busking trumpeter. Dancing and laughing and spinning and spinning and spinning.

The laughter ringing loud and long and true, the way they mingle and overlap and harmonize and crescendo to something beautiful and breathtaking and fierce. It emanates from every facet of her existence now, and she didn’t know how deep the loneliness clung to her bones until he came around to fill in the lonely spaces. And every fluttering heartbeat in her chest is punctuated by his laughter rumbling in his chest, slipping through his teeth, dimpling his cheeks. It’s hard to imagine a future without him in it now - everything about him just fits .

And his laughter pours through her like liquid warmth through her veins, lighting each nerve ending like fireworks suspended in time.

The moments, as they pass:

Jake surprises her on the twenty-fourth repeat; through the haze of her twenty-fourth hangover from hell, she registers the familiar scent of bacon, distantly punctuated by the sizzle and pop of grease in a pan. She emerges from her bedroom, only tangentially aware of the fact that her hair is a tangled rat’s nest atop her head for how broad and proud his grin is. “Breakfast,” he says simply, and all she knows to do is sidle up behind him, snake her arms around his waist, and plant a kiss against his cheek.

It’s him who suggests that they make it a point to fall asleep in their own beds each night - if only because the idea of falling asleep beside each other just to wake up alone again seems too cruel a fate for either of them. He doesn’t say it out loud, but she knows they’re both thinking the same thing: by choosing to split up each night, it gives her some semblance of a feeling of control, which is in itself soothing. Of course, that doesn’t stop her from pouting each evening when he sighs and mumbles something about needing to get going; he always makes it a point to plant one last lingering kiss to her forehead before stepping backwards over her threshold. The small, knowing smile on his face through the peephole makes her feel like a schoolgirl let in on some grand secret.

He takes to whining about her cold feet - she develops a habit of tucking them beneath his thighs while they’re watching Netflix on her couch. She knows he doesn’t mean it - not really, at least - but he does pull a blanket folded in the wicker basket by the arm of the couch over her legs, tutting pseudo-dramatically as he tucks the edges in all the way up to her hips. But there comes a night - one quiet and a bit sluggish after spending the day on Coney Island - where she’s too tired to find some warm harbor for her feet, having chosen to use his chest as a pillow instead. It’s on this night that she falls asleep against him; it’s on this night she’s roused from said sleep mere minutes later to find herself far more horizontal than she was before, the feeling of something soft and warm sliding over her frigid feet, of a steady and familiar hand rubbing gently along her shoulder blades.

And his kindness, so thickly concealed in all the years before now, is like a beacon of light in the coldest, darkest night.

The waves, as they crash:

Her suggestion that they start going back to work is met with one very long, very loud lamenting wail; she watches with one brow raised as he drums up his best puppy-dog pout, complete with a full-on quivering lower lip. “We don’t know when this day will stop repeating,” she reminds him, and he drops his forehead to the table loud enough that the corresponding thunk seems to echo through her entire apartment. “We - I don’t want Holt thinking we’re so irresponsible as to skip work for - for this.”

Any other man might take offense at that - thinking she’s belittling something so monumental as falling in love - but the understanding in Jake’s gaze quiets whatever flickering fear of that she harbors. “Fine,” he agrees - tone reminiscent of a scolded child. “But I’m gonna have to screw with Boyle. It’s the only way I’ll survive.”

“Deal.”

They pick up with their normal work routines on the very next repeat, and not for the first time since this mess started Amy wishes her repeat fell on a Friday or Saturday - any day, really, that would mean she gets the next day off. She’s worked weeks in a row without a day off, but she was always propelled to do so, motivated by a complicated or interesting case. She’s never had so many days of sheer nothingness all in a row.

Soon, a little voice reminds her.

Jake is, for all intents and purposes, utterly shameless on their first day back. Exaggerated winks, suggestive brow-wiggling, standing much too close to pass off as platonic. Each hour that passes has Charles looking closer and closer to spontaneous combustion, and every time Amy tries to scold him, Jake shoots her an unimpressed look and a long string of heart emojis.

And what’s most compelling about it all is the fact that Amy absolutely does not mind it one bit.

She could do without the PDA (relegated to holding her hand under the table during lunch and hip-checking her in the hallway outside the bathrooms). And the blatant lip-biting when she walks by their desk pod. But overall, it’s actually kind of...nice.

Kind of...perfect.

She doesn’t dare say it out loud.

The forty-fourth repeat finds them strolling through the parking garage well after the rest of the squad has gone home for the evening, meandering arm-in-arm, taking all the time in the world. Jake chuckles when she tucks her face into his shoulder to avoid inhaling a cloud of exhaust fumes in the wake of a passing car, and she subconsciously squeezes his arm a little tighter, folds herself in to walk a little closer. “So, I’m kind of sick of Chinese,” he says once they’ve both recovered. “And I’m not really in the mood for pizza, either.”

“ What ?” He looks concerned for all of one second before registering her sarcasm - all at once his expression falls flat. “Are you terminally ill ? Were you abducted by aliens? Wait -” she jumps back, eyes wide, and he continues walking without her with nothing more than a roll of his eyes and a shake of his head. “Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?”

He seems to falter for a moment, before pausing altogether to look back at her over his shoulder. “Boyfriend?” he repeats.

There’s a curious smile spreading across his face, almost as quickly as the heat spilling down her face; she quickly reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ears, averting her eyes down to his blindingly colorful sneakers and her sensible, slightly scuffed boots. “Uh, um - yeah,” she glances up at him - he’s still smiling, but it’s less curious now. The affection pulsing through his expression is the definition of softness, of openness, of vulnerability; all at once she’s filled with a boldness she can only assume originates somewhere in the overlap between Rosa and Gina’s personality traits instilled within her. “Yes,” she says, louder than before. “That’s - that’s what you are. Right?”

“Yeah,” he rasps, like he can’t quite believe her. “I’m - I’m your boyfriend. I’m Amy Santiago’s boyfriend.”

She’s fighting a smile of her own, now; slowly, she approaches, watching his eyes dart over her face so quickly they’re nearly blurred. “You are,” she confirms, and he reaches for her hands. “And I’m Jake Peralta’s girlfriend.”

He laughs - nervous, disbelieving. “Amy Santiago is my girlfriend.”

“Jake Peralta is my boyfriend.”

They forget dinner.

She wakes up on the forty-fifth March 28th just as miserably hung-over as ever - but right away, she knows this one will be different.

It’s pretty unremarkable - if one could call the forty-fifth repeat of a random Monday in March unremarkable - but she finds herself savoring it. It’s an odd feeling of faint melancholy, to know their little bubble of solitude is coming to an end in a matter of hours.

The promise of what’s to come - of what lies beyond that looming clifface, the yawning valleys and rolling hills and rivers running deeper than she’ll ever comprehend - keeps that melancholy at bay.

He is, for once, unaware of what she’s thinking. She manages to watch him rather surreptitiously for most of the day; he only catches her twice, answering her smile with a wink.

She’s ready.

“Let’s go get a drink after work,” she says later when he passes by her in the hallway outside the bathrooms.

“Okay, wanna go back to that weird microbrewery in SoHo?”

“No. I wanna go to Shaw’s.” He arches an inquisitive brow. “With the rest of the squad.”

The other brow rises, but the corners of his mouth twitch skyward. “Weird date idea, Santiago,” he says as he gently bumps her shoulder with his own.

“I’ve kind of missed them, or whatever,” she says, and he rocks back on his heels, equal parts amused and understanding. “Besides, it’ll be kind of fun to pretend like we’re all the way back at the beginning again.”

His face flushes a delicate shade of pink, but he appears otherwise unaffected. “Okay,” he says after a moment of apparent deliberation. “I’ll ask around and get everyone on board.”

And later, when they all spill into Shaw’s, it does feel nice to be back into a somewhat regular routine - but she finds herself thanking her lucky stars that Jake seems to only want to hang out with her.

“We can’t become that couple who only hangs out with each other,” she tells him when he slides into the booth beside her with their second rounds in hand. “Like, obviously I like you a lot and I love hanging out with you and spending time with you, but I want you to feel like you can still go and hang out with Charles or Gina or Rosa - whoever, y’know? Like, you’re not obligated to spend all of your free time with me.”

“But I like spending all of my free time with you,” he says, somehow lofty despite the new beer stain on his flannel shirt. “You’re awesome and I really, really like you. Plus when I hang out with you, that usually means I get to make out with you, and I would so much rather do that than watch another Disney movie with Charles.”

She smirks into her wine glass.

Their solitude is spoiled soon enough - Charles up and drags Jake over to the dartboards, apparently too hopped up on his own excitement at their sudden (to him) public closeness, and Rosa and Gina invade the empty seats around her booth to pepper her with questions of their own. Amy merely smiles; from across the bar, she catches Jake watching her over Charles’ shoulder, shooting her a smile of his own.

They walk out together, and in clear view of the squad, Jake takes her hand and squeezes.

“Do you remember anything about the night before all of this started?” he asks suddenly.

They’ve walked three blocks by then, mostly in silence, and for the first time all day Amy’s caught off-guard. “Uh - pieces,” she answers honestly after a moment of processing. “Very, very blurry pieces. Why?”

“Well, I’m just - I know what I remember, and - it’s the night you, y’know, started - that you started to like me. Like, like me, like me. The way that I already liked you.” His blush is prominent in the bluish glow of the neon sign over their heads. “I’ve just been curious, is all.”

The pad of his thumb sweeps up over the sensitive skin of her inner wrist, just barely brushing against her pulse.

“And...and I lied, before. When you asked me in the evidence lockup about when I figured out that it was you. The truth is, I knew the second I realized I was reliving today.”

She feels her brow furrow as a faint drum roll starts up in the pit of her chest. “How?”

“Because - because you told me, the night before. Or, I guess technically it was, like, two AM on the twenty-eighth - that’s why we’re reliving today.”

“Hang on - I told you ?”

He nods, looking a bit sheepish. “You were really drunk, Ames,” he says softly. “I was pretty drunk, too, but not as bad as you - both our phones died and neither of us could drive or afford the cab ride back to your place, and I didn’t want you to walk all the way home alone when you were that drunk, so...I walked you home. And you were dancing the whole time -” she feels her face flush violently “- not, like, crazy dancing or anything, it was more like ballet? You were just kind of floating around the sidewalk and I made sure you didn’t go out into the street or anything. And we walked past this guy playing the trumpet and you wanted to stop and really dance, except neither one of us is very good at that on a good night so I was mostly just spinning you around and you seemed to really like it, ‘cause you laughed so hard you started crying, and then we finally got back to your place and I walked you up to your door and right before you went inside, you stopped, and you hugged me, and you told me that you like me romantic-stylez.” A fond smile has spread across his face, staving off whatever embarrassment is brewing in her gut. “At first I chalked it up to you just being drunk, but when the repeats started, I just...I knew.”

She shakes her head slowly - affectionately - as he glances down at their entwined hands. “I do mostly remember that, now,” she says softly. “Little moments have brought some of that back. Not all of it, but some. Enough.” He’s watching her through his lashes, as if afraid she might up and bolt at any second. So instead, she squeezes his hand and steps in closer, so that her cheek brushes against his shoulder. “Come home with me.”

She hears the breath catch in his throat. “We said - we said we wouldn’t -”

“Jake,” she interrupts, pulling back enough to meet his uncertain gaze. “Come home.”

He stares a moment longer, before nodding in agreement.

On the morning of March 29th, Amy wakes to the sound of a shrieking alarm to find her face tucked against Jake’s neck.

He whines, loud and hoarse, and flails a sleep-heavy arm around her bedside table until he connects with the snooze button. She’s already wide-awake - wired both at the faded hangover and the fact that it’s morning and he’s still here - but Jake, ever the heavy sleeper, seems to already be settling back into sleep’s warm embrace.

“Jake,” she whispers, flattening her palm over his chest.

He hums.

“It’s March twenty-ninth.”

He hums again.

She prods him in the chest, and a crease appears between his brows. “ Jake .”

It takes a moment longer before his eyes pop open so quickly they practically bulge from his head. “It’s March twenty-ninth?”

She grins and nods. “It’s March twenty-ninth.”

He sits up quickly, so quickly she practically topples off the other side of the bed, drawing a surprised laugh from her chest. “Oh my god,” he mutters, raking his fingers through his hair. “It’s March twenty-ninth. It’s March twenty-ninth! The repeats are over, they’re finally over , which means -”

All of the excitement seems to evaporate at once, leaving behind only tension; he remains frozen in his animated position, as if afraid to meet her eyes. “It means,” she says softly, “that I - that I’m...I love you.”

His hands drop heavily into his lap, his whole expression one of dumbstruck wonder. “I love you, too,” he whispers, and absurd tears spring up in her eyes. “I love you, I love you, I - I love you .”

He might still be saying it, she isn’t sure - the words buzz unintelligibly against her lips, lost to the cadence of their mingling laughter.

“Oh, my god,” he says suddenly, pulling back so fast she falls into his chest. “Amy - Amy .”

“What?”

“We beat David and Amber.”

She blinks, before it dawns on her. “I beat David?”

“You beat David.”

“ I beat David? ”

“ You beat David! ”

“Oh my god, I love you !”

His laughter cuts short when she launches herself at him, his smile smothered against her lips, his hands cupping her jaw. “I love you, too!” he whispers, pressing his forehead against hers. “I love you, I love you, and I think I’m gonna go call Charles so he doesn’t pee his pants when he sees us at work later, because I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to stop saying that all day today. You should call your brothers and rub it in David’s face!”

She laughs as he bounds out of bed and tosses her phone to her from the charger on the other side of the room, and as he quickly dons his boxers and digs through the pockets of his jeans for his own phone, something more earnest swells up inside her. “Hey, wait, come back. I love you.”

“Oh, my god, I love you, too,” he breathes as he returns to her at once, climbing up from the foot of the bed until he’s hovering over her, littering her face with kisses. “Been waiting - so long - to say that - out loud.” he murmurs between each kiss.

She closes her eyes, momentarily overcome with sensation. “You - you have?”

He pulls back so that he can look her in the eye when he nods, and then he’s kissing her properly, all slow and thorough and gentle. “I dunno when it happened, exactly,” he admits when he pulls away, voice suddenly gravelly. “I just know I went from thinking, ‘there goes Amy, the girl I really like’ to ‘there goes Amy, the love of my life.’ And I haven’t really looked back.”

She bumps her forehead against his and smooths her thumb over the stubble risen on his cheek, hoping her eyes can convey the maelstrom of emotions roiling in her veins, as words seem too inadequate a medium by which she can convey them. “I love you,” she whispers.

It seems to be more than sufficient; she’s never quite seen this level of intense adoration in his gaze, in the way he studies her face, hands rising to gently touch her shoulders, her neck, her jaw. “I love you,” he says, slowly and earnestly.

She has no other choice but to believe him; she can’t fathom a reality in which she’d ever consider an alternative.

And this is it , she thinks to herself as she watches him move out into the living room to field Charles’ thousands of questions. This is love .

She never looks back.