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The world seems different the morning after.It feels, somehow, like Rosa has spiked his water with caffeine again—every sound is a little too loud, every color a little too bright. The red of the slightly wilting roses on the counter, leftover from Valentine’s Day, is positively jarring as he walks into the kitchen alone, rubbing his eyes.Every year, he bets Amy that those flowers won’t last past a week. Every year, she proves him wrong.It’s been two weeks, this time, and they still seem to have some life in them; if he isn’t careful, she’s going to break her record of twenty days, three hours, and two minutes. (That was the first year, when their relationship was still built on their unbridled competitiveness and the rest of it was still slowly forming around them).Her competitiveness, Jake knows, is backed by both an inability and a sheer refusal to fail—that’s what made their relationship so playfully argumentative to begin with, and it’s also what eventually made him fall for her. Her hatred of failure is supplanted by a meticulous attention to detail and a truly relentless work ethic, and it is that combination of things that makes her so formidable. Amy Santiago cares for a bouquet of roses with the same deliberate determination as she does a first-degree murder case, and it doesn’t even matter that she’s expending an ostensibly ridiculous amount of energy on something as trivial as flowers, because she succeeds at everything she does.It is only now that Jake realizes this is because, for her, there is no other option.As he stares at the time-defying roses on the counter, he wonders briefly how much of that is because of her old captain.His mind is full of the documentary he’d watched overnight, as well as the incessant Googling he’d done after. A litany of phrases and concepts he had never even heard of twelve hours ago are now clamoring in his thoughts (and court cases—if anyone asks him about Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins he is going to go off), but as part of his brain flips through the vocabulary another part is also rifling back through the last nine years of his time at the Nine-Nine.Jake slides a pan on the stove and starts beating four eggs almost mechanically, the fork beating against the sides of the bowl in time with his thoughts. Distinct memories move through his head, as if on a slideshow; he can clearly remember real, genuine fear flashing through her eyes on multiple instances where she’d thought something had gone wrong.As he pours the eggs into the pan, he wonders when that switch had flipped in her head. When failure had shifted from something merely undesirable to something unacceptable, something that could destroy her entire career and everything she’d worked for.He has a terrible feeling it was the night she’d run from the Six-Four.He’s in the middle of wondering how much of Rosa’s personality is shaped by the encounters she has had with men when Amy pads slowly into the kitchen, a soft yawn announcing her presence.“Hey,” he says almost timidly, turning towards her. “I made breakfast.”She hums softly as she approaches him, wrapping her arms around him briefly before taking the two plates from his hands. “Thanks,” she murmurs, yawning again before turning back towards the table. Jake doesn’t move, and she gets two forkfuls in before she notices, the sleep dissipating gradually from her eyes. “What?”“Nothing,” he says quickly, making his way to the chair beside her and pulling his plate closer. “Just—are you okay?”She chews slowly, swallowing before she answers. “I think so. I mean, it’s really, really terrible, but it’s just—it could’ve been worse, I guess.”“God, that is depressing.”She chokes out a laugh. “I mean, it hurts. I keep thinking about how Carrie got off relatively unharmed and she still lost her job and the money, and Seth might not even get convicted.”He nods, watching her eyes drop down to her eggs.“It’s just—women can never have it all. Everything is a trade-off, even when we’re in the right. She should be the one getting a promotion, and instead a man named Beefer is on top of the world while she’s packing her bags and logging into ZipRecruiter because a man decided to sexually assault her.”She stabs her fork at her plate, her voice growing more and more defiant. “Every time I think it’s getting better for women, something reminds me that it still really, really, sucks. Everything we do is still secondary to what a man does. We can spend decades building a career, brick by brick, and a man can just come through with a sledgehammer penis and tear it all down in seconds.”He doesn’t question the metaphor.“I just—I wish I could do more,” she whispers, shoulders suddenly slouching. “I wish we could have it all. I got into this job because I wanted to help people, and even though I’ve known for a long time that the extent of that is limited by the confines of the world we live in, it’s just—that’s never felt more real.”She slips another forkful of egg into her mouth, looking completely and utterly defeated, and Jake feels a wave of dismay rise slowly in his gut. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t—I didn’t even know—”“Jake,” she says quietly, “You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you.”“No, not that—I mean, yes, that, but it’s also everything else. I didn’t even notice the creepy coffee guy making a pass at you, I didn’t notice that guy on the subway getting too close. I was right next to you and I didn’t even see it. You have to be so hyperaware at all times, and I was just—just so blind—”She shakes her head, but she doesn’t say anything, so he keeps going.“And then I was just thinking, like, how what your disgusting captain did made you feel like you weren’t good enough, even though you actually are the best detective I’ve ever known, and I just got to wondering what else I haven’t noticed that might’ve really affected my friends. Like, is there any part of Rosa that would be different if she hadn’t had a shitty encounter with a man? Is Gina’s scathing self-confidence really just a façade that she’s constructed due to the fact that men can sense insecurity and are more likely to prey on women who don’t seem like they’d put up a fight?”“You’re definitely spiraling,” Amy says, her lip twitching. “I’m pretty sure Gina’s just like that, and you’re giving men a whole lot of credit if you think they could shape Rosa’s entire personality.”“That’s not—I didn’t mean—”“I’m mostly joking,” she says, smiling slightly. “I know what you meant. But it’s really—I mean, it sucks, but women are really, really strong. This stuff happens to us every day and we just—we just keep going. Because that’s the only thing we can do.”“Yeah,” he says softly, reaching for her free hand. “I just wish I’d been better about being there to stop it.”“Don’t,” she says, looking up at him. “Don’t do that. The fact that you care so much, the fact that you’re even trying to learn, makes you lightyears better than most men I’ve ever known.”“Is that a low bar, though?”She laughs, and the sound makes him smile for the first time in over three days. “It’s a very low bar. But you still cleared it by leaps and bounds.”He gives her a small grin and her eyes soften considerably as she speaks again. “Thank you, by the way. For being such a good support system the past couple days. I really would be a mess without you.”He shrugs, somewhat uncomfortably. “It’s the least I could do.”“No,” she says, shaking her head. “If we’ve learned anything the past few days, it’s that there is definitely a lot less you could’ve done.”“I’m not trying for the minimum, though,” he mutters, and she smiles, the affection in her eyes almost breaking his heart in two.“I know,” she says, squeezing his hand. “Trust me, I know.”The air around them doesn’t get any lighter as they wash their dishes and drive to work, but as Jake pulls into the parking garage and looks over at Amy to find her already looking at him, he feels a little steadier.They take a deep breath at the same time, exhaling shakily in unison. “Ready?” Amy asks, fingers working at the door handle.“Yeah,” he says, a soft smile toying at the corners of his lips. “Let’s do this.”The world is a messy, messy place, Jake knows, but as the two of them walk through the doors of the precinct together, a couple more things fall into place.He realizes, now, that there is very little he can do about the messed-up version of the world they live in. Things are going to hurt, and a lot of them are going to hurt Amy more than they hurt him.He’s just going to have to be there when they do.