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santiagoswagger · 7 years

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In a world where soulmates exist, Jake and Amy are not each other's perfect match - but maybe that doesn't matter.

It all ends with a few thoughtlessly muttered words of anger and the loud, sharp bang of a slammed door.

What had started as an innocuous disagreement between two fraught, overworked detectives – over how messy his side of the closet was – eventually escalated into a full-blown screaming match. They both dug deep into their weapons arsenals, flinging weighted words across the room at each other like exploding grenades.

It’s not that hard to put your dirty socks in the hamper, Jake! It’s two feet away!

Yeah, well I bet my soulmate wouldn’t care about my stupid socks!

She didn’t come back that night.

The fact that they weren’t soulmates had always been an issue they skirted around, but it constantly simmered just below the surface. The symbols tattooed on their ring fingers from birth may not have matched but they were in love and they firmly believed destiny couldn’t get in the way of that if they didn’t let it. But Jake had hit a nerve tonight, throwing their missing connection in her face knowing full-well how badly it would wound her.

It had always bothered her more than it did him that they weren’t soulmates. Jake had never really believed in the concept, preferring to choose his own destiny, but he knew that as practical and logical as Amy was, she wanted to believe in it more than she would ever let on. Jake had never really looked for his soulmate; he had seen enough soulmate marriages implode, his own parents’ included, to know that even the perfect match couldn’t guarantee a lifetime of happiness. Amy had looked for hers but hadn’t come close to success. When they had fallen for each other, the mismatched symbols tattooed on their hands seemed so insignificant. He should have known the marks would be their undoing.

When Jake went into work the next morning, the dark bruises under his eyes apparent to anyone who could see, her desk had been cleaned out and she had requested a transfer to another precinct. The rest of the day passed by in a blur and he could barely think about anything but Amy – where she was, what she was thinking, why she was leaving the nine-nine. He got the answers he was looking for when he arrived at their apartment that night to find Amy standing in the middle of their now barren living room with bags packed and a few cardboard boxes stacked by the door. She wasn’t just leaving the nine-nine, she was leaving him too.

It isn’t working.

We’re just too different.

I love you but I can’t do this anymore.

He could barely hear her words over the buzzing in his brain. He couldn’t believe how badly he had miscalculated; he’d thought things were good. He knew they were good. Sure, they fought – even soulmates fought – but last night’s argument, harsh and vindictive, had been an anomaly born out of sleep deprivation and a frustrating lack of time alone together. He had taken things too far and he knew that, but he refused to let that be the end of them.

He began to bargain with her, realizing with increasing panic that she was about to walk out the door and never come back. He apologized over and over for the idiotic things he had said, told her he would clean his side of the closet and organize it the way she liked, promised to be a better man for her if she stayed. But her mind was made up; it was time they stopped pretending they could outsmart fate.

She hugged him one final time, the engagement ring he had given her digging into his shoulder, functioning as a niggling, painful reminder of what could have been. She took it off of her finger for the first time since that Halloween night and left it on the dining room table with a clack of finality. They stared at each other, both pairs of eyes searching the other’s face, and Jake was sure she was remembering the same things he was – the laughter, the tears, the separations and reunions – and then she was gone. For good.

He sat on the couch all night after she left, numb and shattered, staring at the beige walls and wondering how on earth they had fallen apart so quickly. It was hard to believe that three happy years could be undone so completely in such a short amount of time.

The next two years flew by in a haze. Jake threw himself into the job once again, convinced more than ever that work was all he had. If he was working on a case and trying to solve a difficult puzzle, his brain couldn’t be consumed by thoughts of Amy. But they always veered to her in the end. It’s wasn’t hard – she was everywhere.

Their lives had been so intertwined that he looked around wherever he was and saw her shadow hovering in places she once stood. She was in his car, laughing wildly as he blasted Taylor Swift from the radio and poking her in the shoulder until she begrudgingly sang along. She was all over the apartment they once shared: in the kitchen attempting to cook in her flannel pajamas, in the living room slouched against his shoulder while they watched Law & Order marathons, in the bedroom smiling up at him with dark eyes. Work was far worse; her ghost haunted him from every nook and cranny of the precinct where they fell in love. It took almost three weeks before he could even think of entering the evidence lock-up, and the sight of another body sitting at her desk across from him made him physically nauseous.

Amy keeps in touch with the rest of the squad and they keep him as updated as they think he can handle. She texts with Terry and Rosa every once in a while, and she sends Charles a long Facebook message six months after the break-up when he won’t stop bombarding her with desperate pleas to change her mind. Charles won’t tell him what the message says but Jake is too heartbroken to push the subject. He knows that she and Captain Holt have lunch at least once a month to continue her mentorship. Gina ignores her calls and texts in solidarity with her oldest friend, despite his protests. Amy never reaches out to Jake but it’s probably for the best – he’s not even sure he would be able to talk to her again without dissolving into a puddle of tears. But they’re still Facebook friends, the thought of severing all ties to her proving to be too awful to Jake. He thinks it might be for her too. That’s how he knows when she gets promoted to lieutenant, when her perpetually single brother Xavier finally finds his soulmate and gets married, and when she’s transferred to a new precinct in Manhattan.

That’s also how he finds out she’s engaged for the second time. This time, to her soulmate.

When the life event pops up in his Facebook news feed, accompanied by a picture of Amy and a handsome blonde man holding up their matching ring finger tattoos, Jake’s breath hitches in his throat and he feels the floor begin to crumble around his feet. He has to blink several times to make sure he hasn’t misread the words on his screen or mistaken her for someone else, but how could he? It’s Amy. He couldn’t forget her face even if he wanted to.

According to some pretty excellent social media stalking on Gina’s part, her new fiancé’s name is Brad and he is everything Jake believes to be wrong with the world. He’s an investment banker with a WASP-y last name, and probably the trust fund to match; but he’s on the board of a big children’s charity so Jake can’t totally hate him, as much as he wants to. Her new ring is significantly bigger than the small antique ring Jake had once given her. He wonders if that’s what she thought about as Brad slid the ring on her fourth finger, if she remembered that night in the evidence lock-up just as Brad got down on one knee. The petty, bitter side of him hopes she did.

Gina, Rosa, Terry and Charles all take him out that night and he gets drunker than he has in years. He pounds back shot after shot of whiskey, half of him hoping he drowns in the alcohol and never has to live in a world where Amy Santiago is married to a douchebag named Brad. After five straight days of coming into work hungover, Captain Holt summons Jake to his office and levels with him – shape up or ride the desk. He says it kindly and with more sympathy than Jake thought Holt was capable of, and that’s how he knows he can’t live like this anymore.

He had been unconsciously waiting for her without realizing, waiting for her to come crashing back into his arms and his life and regretting ever leaving him in the first place. But she was going to marry Preppy Brad and have his Preppy Children and it was time for him to accept that. He could only chase a ghost for so long.

Things are better for Jake after that. He tries to regain some semblance of a work-life balance and starts going to the gym three times a week instead of the bar. It’s there at the gym that he meets Sarah. She’s a pretty brunette teacher and they begin talking when she makes fun of his pathetically low speed on the treadmill from the next machine over. He jokes that he’s a world champion slow runner, relishing her laugh; he’d forgotten how much he loved to make people laugh. He stops obsessively checking Amy’s Facebook page after that.

Jake and Sarah start dating soon enough and he thinks it’s nice not to be alone anymore. She’s smart and kind and tells great stories about her ridiculous students. She’s funny too, making him snort with laughter sometimes, but she never fails to call him out when he’s being immature. He needs that. She’ll even watch Die Hard with him. When she gets pregnant after a year together, Jake proposes. He does love her after all and he can’t imagine not being there for his kid, not in a million years. The proposal is low-key, over a candle-lit dinner at Sarah’s apartment, a far cry from the last time he proposed. That memory seems disconnected now, like a still frame from a movie he saw as a kid but only remembered in scattered fragments.

They get married at city hall when she’s six months along. It’s a quiet affair but his parents are there, along with the squad, and that’s all he really needs. Charles cries but Jake can’t help feeling like he would have cried harder if it were Amy wearing white and standing next to Jake instead. But he doesn’t care as much as he would have a few years before. He finally feels like he’s moving forward instead of constantly looking over his shoulder into the past.

Before he knows it, he’s a father. When he sees his daughter for the first time in the hospital delivery room, it feels like he’s been building slowly to this moment all his life. There’s something broken in him that is pieced together when she reaches a tiny, chubby hand out of her blanket to grab his finger and hold it firmly. He cries and it feels a little like healing.

Holding Mia Peralta for the first time, Jake thinks that maybe his daughter was always meant to be the love of his life.

Life with Sarah and Mia is good, but Jake can’t help feeling like something unidentifiable is missing, and he knows Sarah feels it too. There’s nothing wrong with the marriage, but it never feels quite right either. Jake and Sarah love each other, and they love their daughter even more, but after five years they both decide to go their separate ways. You can only continue to choose the wrong person for so long before you have to give into your gut feeling.

Six months after the divorce is finalized, Jake is standing in Shaw’s bar on a Friday night waiting for Charles and Terry to show up for a much-needed guy’s night out. Jake has Mia most weekends so nights out with his friends have become a rarity. He’s standing at the bar trying and failing to get the bartender’s attention when he becomes aware of the woman shifting next to him, attempting to do the same thing. She’s a few inches shorter than him and her face is hidden by a curtain of long, glossy black hair. Jake’s heart lodges itself in his throat, as it always does when he’s reminded of Amy. He clears his throat to force the memories down and that’s when the woman’s head turns toward him. He knows it’s her before her head makes it all the way around.

It’s cliché, but time seems to stop and the chatter that fills the crowded bar is silenced when his eyes lock with hers. He hasn’t seen her in so long, almost seven years, it’s almost like seeing her for the first time all over again. Her hair is longer than it was back then and she has a few new lines around her mouth and eyes but she’s still the Amy he once knew, all brown eyes and bright smile.

“Jake,” she says. “Oh my god, it’s really you!”

She’s smiling, but he can tell she’s startled by his presence. Her eyes are widened slightly and flecked with panic. It reassures him that he’s as thrown by this impromptu reunion as he is. So, he does what he does best in any awkward situation: he turns it into a joke.

“Yeah, I gave my clone the night off. I was worried people were starting to like him better than me.”

That breaks the ice. The tension that had filled the air between them just a moment before instantly dissipated, replaced by their quiet laughter. Her shoulders lose their rigidity and the panic leaves her eyes, so Jake knows she’s feeling more comfortable around him now that she knows it won’t be awkward.

“What are you doing at Shaw’s?” she asks. “Oh wait, it’s your guy’s night with Terry and Charles, right?”

At his questioning gaze, she turns slightly pink with embarrassment. Her fingers clutch the highball glass in her hand like a safety blanket, her knuckles turning pale and white with the effort.

“Terry told me last week. We get coffee sometimes.” She looks sheepish. Jake thinks he’s never seen anything cuter in his life, inwardly cursing himself for the thought.

“Yeah? What else did Terry tell you at your super-secret coffee meeting?” He leans against the bar with his head turned towards her. She wants to say something, he can tell, and he’s going to make her spit it out.

She pauses, mouth slightly open and on the verge of speaking, and he can see her weighing her options internally.

She makes up her mind and ploughs forward. “He actually told me about your divorce. I’m really sorry, Jake, that’s awful.“ She lifts her hand on instinct, almost as if she was reaching for his hand, but she changes her mind and lowers it back down to the wood of the bar.

Jake smiles at her sadly. “Thank you, but it’s actually fine. I’ve got my daughter so things aren’t all bad.”

At that, Amy’s face breaks out in the most radiant smile, one that finally reaches her eyes. “Fatherhood looks good on you, Jake.”

He smiles right back, and he thinks that they must look like idiots, standing in this crowded bar and grinning at each other like mental patients. The spell is broken when a short, blonde woman comes over and taps Amy on the shoulder, gesturing vaguely towards the door. Amy nods at her and holds up an index finger: one minute.

She turns back to Jake. “I’m so sorry, but I have to go,” she says. “I told my coworker I would give her a ride home tonight.” He can’t help but think (hope, really) that she sounds disappointed.

“Sure, yeah, you should go. Drive safe.” Jake clears his throat, wishing he had a drink right now to keep his hands from reaching to hold hers. He awkwardly waves at her instead.

She smiles kindly at the gesture, mouth closed but lips upturned in amusement. She can see right through him. “It was good to see you, Jake.” She places her highball glass down on the bar and gathers her purse and coat, preparing to leave.

“It was good to see you too, Ames.” Her name feels foreign on her tongue, despite the fact that it runs through his brain more often than he would care to admit.

She copies his awkward wave, earning her an impressed laugh from him, and then she’s gone.

He finally gets a drink and sits at his favorite booth in the back of the bar in a daze, staring at the wood grains on the table in front of him. Seeing her again after all these years of what ifs felt monumental, like something in the atmosphere had shifted. But maybe he was romanticizing the whole thing – after all, it had just been two old friends running into each other at a bar. That kind of thing happened all the time.

His head and his heart are wrestling with each other when Terry and Charles finally arrive, shaking off the snow dusting their coats as they make their way over to Jake’s booth.

“Jakey!” Charles exclaims, hugging Jake in his signature death grip. Terry smiles and shakes his head in Jake’s periphery. When Charles finally releases him, Jake gives Terry a normal, non-lung-crushing hug in greeting before silently slumping back down in his booth.

Terry gives him a curious look, the mama bear in him flaring to life. “Jake, is something the matter? You seem down.” Charles whips his eyes away from the bar menu at the words, his eyes suddenly frantic and fraught with worry.

Jake contemplates lying and keeping his thoughts to himself, but he’s learned the hard way that bottling up his emotions never guides him anywhere worth going. He sighs and grabs his beer bottle, taking a big gulp before answering. “I just ran into Amy.”

Charles gasps dramatically, flinging the menu down on the bar and raising his hands in the air while looking up at the ceiling in pseudo-prayer. “Oh my god, it finally happened! You guys reignited your passionate love and got back together! After all these years, my prayers have been answered!”

Jake rolls his eyes in response, though not unkindly. “Relax, Charles. We talked for a few minutes and then she left. It was just two old friends catching up. She’s still married to Brad.” He gulps his beer again in an attempt to swallow his contempt for the name he never can bring himself to say out loud. “She seemed happy.”

Charles scoffs predictably, but it’s Terry who surprises Jake. “Actually, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.” He shrugs nonchalantly, like he hasn’t just uttered eight life-changing words.

Jake nearly spits out his beer, a little bit dribbling out of his mouth when his jaw slacks with shock. “What does that mean, Terry? What do you know that I don’t?”

Terry smirks. “She and Brad broke up last month. She told me last week when we met up for coffee. She’s single, Jake.”

Jake is stunned into silence for perhaps the first time in his life. He had been so caught up in seeing her again, breathing the air around her, that he hadn’t thought to look for her wedding ring, finally accepting of her soulmate marriage after all these years apart. He couldn’t believe it. He thought if anyone were to make it work with their soulmate, it would be Amy; she was too stubborn to let something that important fall apart, especially something supposedly commanded by the universe. The hopelessly romantic fragment of his heart begins to soar – Amy Santiago, the love of his life, is single again.

Charles, ever the cheerleader, excitedly smacked Jake in the arm. “Now’s your chance to get her back, Jake! Go to her!”

Jake smiled sadly at him, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “Charles, that ship sailed a long time ago. I’m sorry her marriage is over, but I can’t move backwards. I need to move forward, for my sake and Mia’s.”

Charles and Terry exchange a weighted look in the booth seat across from Jake. Terry nods once and a serious look takes over Charles’ face.

“Jake, I never told you about the Facebook message Amy sent me not that long after your breakup because I thought it would make things worse,” he says. “But I think I should tell you about it now.”

He pauses, waiting for Jake to react. Jake’s not sure what to think. Truth be told, he had forgotten about the message until now but he’d always been curious about it, especially since Charles was so emphatic in his refusal to tell Jake what Amy had written. He felt his heartbeat quicken and pulse begin to race, just like it did every time he was close to solving a tough case.

“It was a few months after your break-up and I was having a hard time with the news,” Charles continues. “I kept writing to Amy, asking her why she couldn’t be happy without her soulmate when you were clearly the best she could ever do, Jake. After a few messages, she finally responded. She said that she wasn’t sure if she would ever be happy without you , even with her soulmate, but she owed it to herself to try.”

Jake swallows harshly, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He’s not surprised – Amy was always a rule follower. If she were destined to be with someone, she would do everything in her power to be with that person.

“There’s something else, Jake.” Terry shifts uncomfortably in his seat, drawing Jake’s attention away from Charles. “Last week at coffee, she asked me about you, how you were doing. She asked about your wife, asked if you were happy.”

“Terry, it’s okay. She told me you told her about my divorce.”

“No, Jake.” Terry shakes his head and laughs. “We were at the restaurant for two hours and she only asked me questions about you. She barely even looked at the pictures I brought of my baby girls.” He lifts his eyebrows and stares pointedly at Jake.

And he finally gets it. The tiny glimmer of hope that ignited when he first saw her in the bar that evening bursts into flames in his heart. A goofy smile bursts onto his face. He can’t stay here anymore, not when he has a woman to win back.

“I have to go,” he manages to stammer, feeling alive for the first time in years, flinging his limbs from the seat of the booth and jumping to his feet.

“I’ll text you her new address!” Terry yells at his retreating form. Jake only vaguely hears Charles sobbing with joy behind him as he darts out of the bar and into the night.

He decides to take the subway to his destination, hoping the wait will give him time to piece through his thoughts and decide what to say. He spends the entire journey tapping his fingers against his knee, thinking about how long they’ve taken to get to this point.

As the train rolls to a stop, he runs out of the station as fast as his out-of-shape legs will carry him all the way to her apartment. It’s on a quiet, tree-lined street, not far from their old apartment. He double checks the address Terry texted to him to make sure he��s in the right place before walking up to the door and pressing the buzzer next to ‘Santiago’. He feels a hopeful flutter in his chest at seeing her maiden name again.

To his surprise, he hears the door buzz and click open without hearing her voice come over the intercom to ask his identity. The Amy he knew had three locks on her door and kept her service weapon next to her bed when she lived alone, but maybe this newly single Amy is still getting used to being alone. Cautiously, he enters the building and heads for the elevator to her third-floor apartment. He barely gives himself a moment to wonder if this is a disastrously bad idea before bringing his fist to the door and knocking three times. The door opens in slow motion and he steels himself.

“You’re not the Chinese delivery guy.” She’s there, staring at him with widened eyes and a hint of a smile. Well, at least that explains her lax security.

“No, I’m not.” He smiles, eyes crinkling. She’s wearing sweatpants and her hair is in a messy bun, so unlike the rigid bun she wears to work, but she looks like home. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” She steps back to let him in and he can hear her breathing deeply as he walks past her, almost as if she’s trying to slow her heart rate. He can relate.

The apartment is filled with half-unpacked boxes but still neat and tidy, covered with books, pillows and her beloved figurines – it’s perfectly Amy. He turns to take her in.

She’s staring at him with some trepidation, but he can see the resolve in her eyes too.

“Running into you tonight at Shaw’s wasn’t a coincidence, was it?” He cuts right to the chase and he can see her jump slightly in her socks at his candor.

“No,” she says softly, shaking her head for extra emphasis.

“Why?” He needs to know, needs to hear her say it so he knows it’s real.

She takes a deep breath, letting it out in a steady stream before answering. “Because I met my soulmate but I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about us. I thought I was doing what the universe expected of me by meeting my other half, but I couldn’t help feeling like the universe was wrong.”

They stare at each other for a moment before both moving to cross the distance between them in a few short strides, meeting in the middle of her living room in a searing kiss. Hands tangle in hair as they clutch at each other, kissing with seven years’ worth of emotion and desperation.

Kissing her gives Jake the most clarity he’s had in a long time. They have a lot to talk about, but talking can wait a little while longer. His relationship with Amy isn’t fate or coincidence; it’s a choice. It always has been. They may not have identical symbols on their fingers but they continue to choose each other time and time again. And maybe that’s better.

#i wrote a thing #jake x amy #b99 #fanfic #peraltiago fic #soulmate au #b99 fanfiction #fanfiction #jake peralta #amy santiago #brooklyn nine nine #peraltiago #b99network

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