Connection Found

Setting: Immediately after 'AC/DC'.

Summary: After the events of AC/DC, Jake finds a way to open up to Amy: intense amount of morphine. Fourth in the 'Out of Range' series.

Recommended Listening: 'She's Got You High' by Mumm-Ra

From his hospital bed in Atlantic City, Jake held his chest x-ray up to the light of the window to examine the doctors' handiwork. He had to admit, he healed a lot better when he wasn't trying to patch himself up on his couch or with the help of some back alley Mafia doc. Maybe he should try seeing a real doctor more than once every eleven years.

A gasp from the doorway. "Oh my God, Jake! What did you do to yourself?"

Jake looked up. "Hey-y-y, Amy! Welcome to the party!"

And a party it was. After the exploratory surgery to fix his whole bleeding-on-the-inside problem, the doctor gave him a magnificent clicky button that let Jake control his own pain medication (within reason). The morphine had him feeling pretty good, so the smile he offered her was a bit wonkier than normal.

Amy stood in the doorway, holding a glass vase of white flowers with pink in the middle. He assumed they were for him; the arrangement was fairly feminine, but he was touched nonetheless. "And you brought flowers! I gotta say, I didn't picture it happening like this."

"I didn't picture it happening at all, but here I am." Amy said, pouting slightly as she shut the door behind her. She traded the flowers for his x-ray.

Jake buried his nose in the blossoms. They definitely smelled.. flowery. He glanced up at her, fluttering his eyelashes. "I Didn't Picture It Happening At All, But Here I Am: title of your sex tape."

Smiling faintly, she thwacked him with the x-ray and held it up to the light. Her amusement faded away as she counted fracture lines. "You broke, like, eight ribs?"

He scoffed. "Oh, hellz no. Three. The rest of those are old news." A few loose petals floated in the water of the vase. If he could fit his hand down there, he could scatter the petals around on the bedspread and pretend they really were at the Ravenna.

"Knock it off." Amy moved his grasping hand away from the vase and set it in his lap, moving the flowers safely to his bedside table. She settled into Charles' chair, moving it up by the head of his bed so he wouldn't have to crane his neck to look at her. Smort. "When did you break the other four?"

"When I was undercover, duh." Man, he was starting to get the hype about narcotics. Jake was sure he'd been worked up about having this conversation with her, but it was coming out way easier than he thought.

Amy wasn't making an 'of course, I should have guessed' face. It was more like a 'what the hell' face. "What the hell, Jake? What happened to you?"

Well, since she was being so grouchy, he'd be the bigger person and explain. He held out his non-splinted hand and beckoned for the x-ray. Pointing to his floating ribs, he explained, "Initiation." Pointing to a weird dent near his collarbone, "Job gone bad." Pointing to the damage in his esophagus, "Smoke inhalation." Pointing to a crack near his shoulder blade, "Baseball bat." Pointing to a hairline fracture near his sternum, "Bullet, but I was wearing a vest, so that barely even counts."

Jake set the x-ray down and waved his hand dismissively. "There's a bunch of other stuff, but most of it doesn't show up on x-rays. I'm all patched up now."

Amy's mouth kept opening and shutting like she was a fish trying to breathe on land. "Were you planning on telling me any of this - ever?"

Shrugging as much as he could without jostling his newly-broken ribs, Jake looked away. "I dunno. Figured you'd get all freaked out about it. Didn't want you to worry. But for the record, I did text you."

She let out an incredulous 'pffft.' "I'm pretty sure I'd remember a text saying, 'Hey Ames, my mobster buddy Paulie broke my ribs today. NBD, LOL.'"

Jake raised an eyebrow, lifting a hand to correct her. "Paulie never broke my ribs. Kinda fucked up my eye, though. Charles saw it. It was gross." He gestured vaguely towards his eye and made a face. "But guess who's totally in prison for the next hundred years? Hah! Peralta: One; Paulie: LIFE!"

"Way to go, justice system." Amy replied. Her expression was still sour. She was looking at him weirdly, like she could see all the cracks and broken bits and was wondering when he'd fall apart. "Seriously, when did you text me? I thought your handler didn't want you contacting any of us?"

Jake snorted, leaning back against his pillow. "Oh, I broke that rule like a thousand times. Whenever I couldn't sleep or got wrecked on a job or whatever, I texted you."

"Really?" She frowned, pulling her phone out and starting to scroll.

Jake grinned. "Yup! You remember Cat Facts?" (Trademark, he added mentally.)

Amy dropped her phone in her lap, her jaw hanging open. "That was you?"

He giggled at first, then kept giggling because it was fun. More fun than remembering what else happened that night. "Cat Facts was a good one. Marx figured it out pretty quick, though. An' he was ma-ad. I hadda get smarter after that."

She crossed her arms, caught between anger and pity. "I started getting a buttload of spam texts after you left. That was you, the whole time? And every time, you were-?"

"Laid up? Usually. Couple of'em were for funsies." The morphine was doing something funky to his stomach. He wasn't feeling nice and floaty anymore. More like sad and queasy. Jake looked away. "Yeah, I kinda meant to tell you right when I got back, but I could never find the right way to put it and then that whole mess with Teddy started. Least we already 'stablished that I'm an asshole."

Frowning, Amy tilted her head to the side. "When did that happen?"

"The last time I texted you." Jake fiddled with the edge of the blanket. His stomach churned and flopped about. Hmm, maybe this internal bleeding thing wasn't all it was cracked up to be. He'd started talking, though; he might as well finish up while the morphine made him brave and the hospital bed made him invulnerable.

"When was that?" Amy replied, resting her elbows on her knees.

Worrying his lower lip on his teeth, Jake mustered his courage. "I tried out a bunch of different spam personas texting you. Telemarketer, Annoying survey guy, Nigerian prince... but the last one went on for a lot longer than I thought. Drunk guy with the wrong phone number."

She wasn't the second-best detective in the precinct for nothing. Her eyes went wide, her voice breathless. "You're Matt?"

Lost for words, Jake nodded.

Amy put a hand over her mouth, stood up and walked over to the window.

He shut his eyes, putting a hand to his stomach. Great. Now he'd driven her away in two lives. Fake Matt and Fake Jake. He took a slow breath, hissing on the exhale.

When she finally spoke, her voice was small. Very un-Amy. "I looked for you."

"What?" He managed, looking down at the sheets. They were supportive and non-judgmental.

"Jake." At her insistence, he glanced up. Amy's eyes glimmered gold in the light that streamed through the window. That wasn't fair. She wasn't allowed to be beautiful when he was breaking her heart. "I thought you died. I-I thought the worst. I looked for you. God, I was so worried!"

"I told you not to." Jake replied, feeling about two inches tall. "Like I said, we've established I'm an asshole." Tension drew his muscles firm across his stomach, stretching and pressing in all the wrong places. He let out a tight breath, pressing his splinted hand more firmly against his middle. "Amy, I'm sorry. I promise I wasn't sitting around thinking up ways to hurt you."

Her eyes were wet. Shit. He was losing her all over again. "So you made up all that stuff about Claire - and your mom dying? How could you say something like that?"

Now, that was a sucker punch to the gut. Jake swallowed. Tried to steady his voice and failed. "Claire I made up. But the stuff about my mom, that was true."

Amy's head jerked up. She took a step towards him again. "What?"

Months later and he still could barely talk about what happened. Guess that's what he got for repressing the hell out of it. "Car crash, four months in. My handler said I couldn't tell any of you guys. The captain found out because... he's a goddamn wizard, I don't know." Jake balled his good hand into the sheets. "Marx wasn't going to let me have a service at all, but I pitched the biggest shitfit in the history of shitfits. So my mom's funeral wound up being me, a rabbi, and a bunch of mobsters."

He tried to play it cool, but the heart monitor betrayed how worked up he was getting. Looking out toward the lobby, Jake forced a laugh that echoed in every rib. "The shit I could tell you about the guys who put her in the ground." He tried to smile, a pathetic Peralta just-let-me-have-this grin. Somewhere between his head and his mouth the message got screwed up and his lip started trembling instead.

"Jake." Soft weight on the side of his bed as Amy sat down beside him. She put her hand on his quivering fist. "Why didn't you tell anyone after you back?"

His abdomen felt like it was full of angry bees. He let out an exasperated sound and glanced at the roof, frustration burning its way out from behind his eyes. He tried to balance the moisture in the corners of his eye sockets. Failed. "How the fuck does that come up in casual conversation? 'The Nets dominated last night, and oh, by the way, my mom died in a car crash a few months ago and I couldn't tell you till now.'" He pulled his hand back and carded it through his hair, swiping angrily at his cheek with his forearm. "Fucking awesome."

No use pretending now. Jake slammed his eyes shut, his breath hitching painfully with each inhale.

The bed shifted again. He felt the warmth of Amy's hip brush against his side. Her hand fell on his once more, her thumb stroking gently until his fist relaxed.

"I'm sorry we couldn't be there for you." She said, her voice low.

Surprised, Jake opened his eyes. "You were. That was the whole point." He took a steadying breath. Told his stomach to relax, damnit. "Every time I needed you, you were there - even if you didn't know it."

The comforting motion of her thumb halted, a cute little crease forming between her eyebrows. "But I didn't do anything. I said some pretty... unflattering things to the spam texts and gave you bad advice for how to date a girl that didn't exist." Amy twisted her grandmother's ring around her finger, conflicted.

From his spot on the bed, Jake could see the gears turning in her head. He'd bet twenty of Charles' dollars that she was running through a coping strategies checklist and chastising herself over all the things she hadn't done for him. But she had taken her hand away from his, and he wanted to capture those soft fingers once more. He moved his good hand to rest on the crook of her elbow. "That's all I needed. Just you."

Amy looked up, her pupils dilating at his words.

His face grew hot. That hadn't come out right, had it? Regardless, he rushed to finish the thought before his courage slipped away. "Knowing you were out there, I mean. Somewhere you were awake and responding, and that meant the world to me. For one part of my day I could talk to someone that didn't think I was the bastard I pretended to be."

Through the silky material of her gray dress shirt, he could feel her pulse quickening. Amy nodded. She spoke in a low voice, as though afraid excessive volume would break the spell that had them not questioning his hand on her arm or her hip against his. "So, why did you stop?"

His frustration had fizzled and left him cold. Guilt from the things he'd seen and done undercover hung over him like low-hanging clouds threatening to burst. Jake moistened his lips and looked away, his splinted hand tugging at the blanket in a vain attempt to cover himself.

Time for the understatement of the century. "I did something stupid." Jake said, almost reverently. "Took a huge risk and drew a lot of attention to myself. After that, I needed to keep my head down. Figured it wasn't worth leaving a trail from my monumental clusterfuck back to you."

Her other hand fell on top of his, tracing the spaces between his knuckles in a wonderfully distracting way. Her touch was sanctifying, washing away the memories of his knuckles split open by Paulie's jaw, drenched in Derek's blood, tearing at chain link in panicked fervour. They weren't the hands that had shot at children anymore. They were hands that Amy chose to hold.

Elsewhere in the room, the heart monitor settled into a more regular rhythm.

"Too bad. I missed Matt." Amy said. "I'm glad he came back okay."

The repetitive motion was hypnotizing, melting the tension from his abdomen and allowing him to breath a little easier.

"He'll get there." Jake hummed in agreement. He closed his eyes to bask in the moment of not-pain, then kept them closed because his eyelids were getting heavy. "He wasn't a bad guy, I guess."

Amy smiled. "Well, you're not so bad yourself, Peralta. Maybe not as much of an asshole as I thought."

"Little bit, though." Jake replied, then winced as his stomach twinged again.

"A little bit." Amy agreed. She patted the back of his hand. "What say I look through those texts while you get some rest?"

He hesitated, then nodded. "You goin' to be here when I wake up?"

Jake could hear the smile in her voice. "I've got no where else to be."

Charles and the Sarge came back from dinner to find Jake asleep. Amy had pulled her chair right up next to the bed. Her hand rested on his, her thumb rubbing against his knuckles whenever he started fidgeting. She was staring down at her phone, alternately shaking her head and chuckling quietly to herself.

contact. Jake Peralta
sent: 5:35 pm

Daily Cat Fact™: If your cat is near you, and her tail is quivering, this is the greatest expression of love your cat can give you. {Heart Eyes Cat Emoji}

contact. Jake Peralta
rcvd: 7:52 pm

so like

contact. Jake Peralta
rcvd: 7:52 pm

kitty twerking

contact. Jake Peralta
sent: 7:54 pm

Oh my God.

contact. Jake Peralta
rcvd: 7:56 pm

also thats my trademark. you owe me 25 cents.

FIN

notes.

It's been a long and tumultuous road for Jake and Amy. This chapter and the three chapters of Out of Range were written in one weekend, but I realized shortly afterward that there were other stories that needed to be told before Jake and Amy's story could be wrapped up. I took some extra time today to add an extra 600 words to this bit and wrap up loose ends.

Sorry if you were hoping for sloppy makeouts. I wanted to keep their relationship as close to canon as possible (despite the gratuitous license I took with Jake's undercover experience), and that means gradual escalation. I wanted to elaborate on the simple touches that get skipped over sometimes. And seriously, how cute are these dorks with their hand-holding? ฅ(*°ω°*ฅ)

Thanks for all your support thus far. If you enjoyed this series, let me know what you think in the reviews!

As always,

Don't write the story. Live the story.