Soli Deo gloria
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Brooklyn 99. Or Charlie Brown. Or Bluetooth.
"Charles, I have a terrible favor of you," Amy said, catching the detective with his coat in hand and gun on his holster coming into the elevator.
"Oh, no. It is terrible for me or for you? Probably for me," Charles said, sighing as he leaned against the elevator back wall, resigning himself to his fate. "All right, let's hear it. And hurry. I'm meeting Jake downstairs. We have an active lead on our harbor case."
Amy pressed the button for the ground floor before rounding on Charles. "Jake's and my wedding anniversary is coming up—"
"May 15th, my new favorite holiday," Charles said automatically, smiling a little.
"Okay, what?" Amy said, her eyebrows furrowing from being flummoxed. "Yeah, sure. Anyway, I wanted to do something nice for Jake—"
"Amy, what happens in the bedroom between you and Jake is not for my ears. Believe me, Jake has made that very clear," Charles interrupted her.
Again, Amy looked a little mortified. "No, the bedroom stuff does not need help. At all. It's what happens in the kitchen that I need help with."
"Ah," Charles said, nodding, like a light bulb had gone off in his head. "I see. Is it because you're a terrible cook who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near food except to consume it?"
Amy scowled. Nothing like trying to be perfect at everything and then have your failure at one thing get rubbed all over your face by a smug Boyle. "Yes, it is," she growled through gritted teeth.
"You've been married almost a year. How have you two, as a married couple, and even just as full grown adults, been eating all this time if you can't cook?" Charles wondered.
"Sexist of you to assume that I've been the one doing all the cooking," Amy said, just to get back at him for the whole rubbing-the-cooking-thing-in-her-face.
"No, I'm not assuming that at all. You're both not as wrinkled and dried-up as raisins, so obviously you're eating something. Jake can make like, two things, and they're just authentic Jewish dishes eaten specifically at Purim and Passover, so I'm assuming you haven't been eating those all year," Charles said. "I'm pretty sure Charlie Brown has a bigger cooking repertoire than him." Then Charles grew serious. "Amy, please tell me my best friends haven't been living off frozen pizza and takeout."
Amy wouldn't meet his eye. "Takeout's better than fruit gummy breakfast burritos," she hissed under her breath.
Charles had to calm himself by taking several deep breaths. "Here's the plan," he said, once recovered, "I am going to help you cook an amazing anniversary dinner for Jake, since that's obviously what you came to ask me in the first place—"
"Oh, really?!" Amy burst into smiles. "Oh, thank you, Charles, you have no idea—"
"But first, before I teach you high-level stuff, we are going back to the basics," Charles said. "Boiling water, scrambling eggs, that sort of thing."
"The water somehow never gets hot enough and all my eggs turn out as scrambled eggs," Amy said.
Charles sighed deeply. He looked like a man ready to enter battle. It was his duty; he accepted it fully, and would bear its burden manfully. "Really basic, then. But on one condition." He rounded on Amy and stuck a pointing finger two inches from her nose. "You are going to do everything that I tell you to do exactly the way you're told to do it. If this turns out as another lobster roll fiasco, ha ha ha," he shook his head and wiped his hands in the air, "I'm out."
"I promise it won't," Amy said solemnly.
"All right." Charles beamed. He knew he would never be able to watch these two kids have dinner together on their first wedding anniversary, but having his hand in the making of the meal would allow his presence to be there. That would be enough. The elevator door opened just as Charles said, "Deal."
Jake stood just outside the elevator doors and heard that last word, and also noticed that not-so-subtle businesslike handshake exchanged between his two partners. "What kind of deal are we making? Is it between floors or you two personally? Also, could I easily figure it out if I questioned the two of you separately for two minutes apiece? The answer is Yes, yes I can, but, regretfully, we don't have time for it right now. Boyle, we were supposed to be gone ten minutes ago!"
"I'm sorry! I had to finish draining my yogurt. There was still too much water in it," Boyle said.
"Are you making yogurt at your desk and getting away with it because you bribed Terry with the promise of a never-ending supply of homemade strained yogurt, again? Gross, super gross," Jake sighed. He turned quickly to Amy and kissed her quickly. "Hi, babe." Again, his lips against her little bit of lip gloss, "Bye, babe."
He hurried out the door with Charles on his tail. Charles looked over his shoulder and gave Amy a thumb's up, which meant 'He is none the wiser'.
Amy smiled and gave him a thumb's up as well before they disappeared behind the door. She turned back to the elevator with a deep breath. All right. Cooking lessons from a knowledgeable but technical and unforgiving Boyle. She could do this. She could totally do this. She was Amy Santiago. What couldn't she do?
Turns out she could not cook. And she could totally not do this.
"Turn the heat lower; you're going to burn the beans!" Charles commanded. His voice wasn't at a shouting pitch yet, but it was getting there.
"I'm stirring them—they shouldn't be burning!" Amy said defensively.
"Heat. Down. Lower!" Charles said. "This is rice and beans, plain and simple. This is one of the most basic Cuban dishes. Did you never make these with your mother growing up?"
"I did. And I burned them. So she just let me go play with the boys." Amy's eyes glazed over with an intense jealousy as she said, "David stepped in. He can make a five-course dinner without missing a beat."
"Be more like David, then," Charles said, not realizing that those were the exact words to not say to Amy Santiago. "Now, the water is coming up to a boil. Do you remember the ratio for the rice?"
Amy breathed in deeply, trying to focus and not let herself get carried off on the angry-at-David-train. "Two-to-one, water to rice," she said automatically, measuring it in carefully, like it was an answer to a test question a teacher wanted to know. (She was always the kid with her arm stuck in the air two seconds after the teacher stopped talking.)
"Good. What should your water taste like?"
"Salty, like the ocean," Amy said quickly.
"Ehh!" Charles howled loudly like a horn on a gameshow. "It's salty like the ocean for pasta. For rice, it's going to be half to a whole teaspoon for every cup of rice."
"Doesn't that make the water as salty as the ocean anyway?" Amy wanted to know.
"I don't know, Amy, are you the teacher or the student who needs to learn basic cooking skills so she doesn't end up poisoning her husband?" Charles wondered sarcastically.
Amy scoffed. "I'm a cop, Charles. I know a lot of better ways to kill my husband than to just poison him. That's way too traceable. Also, our eyes immediately go to spouses in domestic murder cases."
Charles let Amy rant about killing Jake just so he could say once she was done, "Your rice is boiling over."
Amy screeched and turned back to the stove. The white starchy water ranneth over into the gas, extinguishing the gas light under the pot. Amy hurriedly took it off the stovetop and threw it into the sink, running cold water over it so it wouldn't melt Jake's plastic kids' plates. "Well, that was a bit drastic," Charles said. "You could've just put it on another burner and let it lightly simmer for fifteen minutes until the rice was cooked through—"
"Yes, talking about what I COULD have done is a great thing to talk about after I've done it," Amy said sarcastically, turning off the pilot light. She sighed as she gazed over at her steaming sink with rice dumped all over her dirty dishes and slumped. "This isn't going well, Charles."
"No," Charles sighed, "it isn't. But hey," he perked up, "as least I've gotten better at not being so obsessive-compulsive over the little things. I didn't even break out into hives when you gave up on chopping that onion properly and cut it all up into different size pieces."
Amy gave him a look. "Yeah, great self-restraint, Charles," she groaned. She looked from the bubbling black beans to the steaming rice and said helplessly, "What's the point? How can I ever make a wonderful anniversary meal when I can't even make the basic dishes of my childhood?"
"You're trying, Amy, and that's what counts. Hey, if it makes you feel better, you haven't burned anything yet. When I was teaching Captain Holt how to make eggs, oh, it was such a disaster—!"
"I burned the beans," Amy said in a monotone voice. She stared at the pan of black beans which were even blacker than they were supposed to be. A grey stench rose from them and she didn't move to save them. They couldn't be saved. They were a car crash and she couldn't look away. They were too far gone. She stood back, as frozen as a statue, and watched them burn.
"Okay, this one we can dump unceremoniously into the sink," Charles said, taking control of the situation since Amy was making no move to. He poured the pan's contents into the trash disposal before running the pan under cold water and sprinkling baking soda on the hard black layer on the bottom. He leaned his arms against the counter as Amy sank into a kitchen barstool.
"This is stupid, and pathetic. I'm a grown woman, a police sergeant, and I can't cook to save my life! Seriously, if some criminal from my past took Jake hostage and said, 'Make scrambled eggs', Captain Holt would do better than I would!"
"Amy," Charles said, ducking into the fridge and, relieved, pulling out a couple of cold beers the Peralta-Santiagos' always had handy, "you can't be great at everything. I know. You try your hand at everything, expecting to always do it perfectly. But that's life. Life isn't always perfect. Sometimes you have your dream job and the best husband in the world, but you can't cook. That's okay. Two out of three ain't bad."
Amy sighed as she accepted the beer and Charles sat across from her. "I know I have a lot to be thankful for, and I shouldn't be so hard on myself when it turns out no matter how much I want to be good at something and try to be good at something, I'm . . . just not good at that something . . . but I'm not used to it. I go hard, work hard, party hard. That's the Santiago motto."
"I thought the Santiago motto was 'Be the best'?" Charles said, confused.
"Yeah, it is. My mother has that quote painted on a piece of wood that hangs over her fireplace, but that's her motto," Amy said.
Charles was catching on to her energy. "You're right. The Amy Santiago motto should be, 'Go hard, work hard, party hard!' Oh, and can you add 'Die hard', just for Jake's sake?"
"I'd rather not die hard right now, thanks," Amy said.
"Yeah, point taken," Charles conceded.
"Yeah," said Amy.
They each took a deep breath and a long swig of the beer and cast equal equivocal looks over the messy kitchen.
"Jake and I aren't the traditional married couple," Amy said suddenly, quietly. "I retained my last name, we work weird hours, we don't see a lot of each other at home. A lot of the time we don't sit down and eat dinner together when we're home. For just once, I wanted to be a little bit of a regular married couple and have a first nice anniversary dinner with him. But it's okay." She cheered up a little. "The food doesn't matter. As long as I'm with him, it's all good."
Charles retained that little speech in the back of his mind as he said, "Should we just clean this up and you order Cuban food before Jake comes home?"
"Yeah, that's a good idea," Amy said, nodding quickly before they sprang into action to clean up their messy actions.
Amy ran home the day of her wedding anniversary. She'd scored a shift that ended at four-thirty; she'd told Jake that they were going to meet up at eight at this super-fancy restaurant (cloth napkins and ice buckets for the bottle of wine = fancy); her real plan was to make him a super-fancy five-course meal at their apartment. He'd come home to get ready after his shift at seven and BOOM! Epic surprise of his life. She'd made a super-awesome, unexpected dinner and together they'd make dessert.
She was a hot mess by the time she fumbled out her keys at five-fifteen. The line at the supermarket was ridiculous and she felt like an idiot to not have ordered the filet mignon steaks from the butcher's weeks ago. All they had was skirt steak (skirt steak! Skirt steak, instead of filet mignon! A disaster). Now she wrestled with their apartment's door knob with a handle-less paper bag in the crook of her other elbow.
She opened the door and exhaled as she groaned against the door, letting the bag fall. Breathless, she had to start chopping the potatoes and bringing the cream for the creamed spinach to a boil and preheat the oven and make the mushroom stuffing and stuff the mushrooms (she should've enlisted Charles' help—but she'd let him go without telling him she was still continuing with this senseless dream—he would just scold her if he found out she was really sallying forth into the great unknown again, despite not knowing the way)—
She heard some romantic Italian opera playing on their Bluetooth speaker. Well, she hoped it was the speaker as opposed to Scully. She stood up, hand ready at her gun (she was supposed to be home alone and she was a cop, after all), and crept forward. All the dark except for the kitchen. Windows poured out golden hour light as aid to the candles functioning as the centerpiece of a romantic dinner. Their small kitchen table was decorated like a super-fancy restaurant—white tablecloth, real cloth napkins, silver candle-holders, actual silverware instead of disposable—the whole nine , more like ninety-nine yards.
But that wasn't the best part. The best part were the smells. Amy's nose tickled with the tantalizing scent of seared steak, garlic, butter, and onions. The kitchen counter was a bit of a hot mess, but the bubbling pots and pans told her a story—it was a really tasty story where the messy means justified the delicious ends.
"Ames." She looked up to see Jake grinning at her. He wore a pressed tux (swoon) and held out a bouquet of roses. "Happy first anniversary, babe," he said.
"What— . . ." Amy had no words, but plenty of tears.
Jake laced his arms around her. "I approached Charles about the idea of making you our first wedding anniversary dinner. I have never seen him so relieved; he told me what he and you tried to do. It was such a great idea, Ames. It really makes me realize how much you love me, since you'd go through all that effort just to make me happy. So I decided to go through all that effort just to make you happy."
"But it smells so good! Since when did you know how to cook?" Amy wanted to know.
Jake shrugged, like it was nothing. "Oh I can, when I put in the effort. I know a thing or two besides how to now boil an egg. I just called my mom to email me some of her best recipes and followed the recipes. You know, no big deal."
Amy wouldn't let that go all that fast. "So you followed recipes to the T, like reading the instructions through thoroughly and measuring each ingredient precisely and following all the cooking times exactly as they're laid out?"
Jake looked confused. "Yeah, I followed the instructions. Duh."
Amy let out a long breath. "Ohhhhh, Mama," she said.
"Hey, save it for after dinner, okay? I didn't make dessert," Jake pointed out.
"Oh, the food can wait," Amy said, dancing her fingers along his shoulders.
"Oh, actually, no, it cannot. The mozzarella tomato mini tarts need to come out of the oven in twenty seconds," Jake said, slipping out of her grasp as he slipped oven mitts on.
"'Mozzarella tomato mini tarts?'" Amy said, taking a seat as he rescued their appetizer. "Aren't those just homemade fancy pizza bites?"
"Hells yeah, they're just pizza bites," Jake said, grinning as he slid the sheet onto a cooling rack. "Well, there we go." Sliding his oven mitts off, he said, "Dinner will just be another five minutes or so, milady. If you'd like to freshen up, feel free to. Or don't. I think you look great. But again, you personally might want to change clothes and stuff—"
Amy kissed him and he forgot about the roast in the oven and the beans and rice on the stove (they were just on warm heat, waiting for their culinary debut) for a moment. When she pulled back, he said, "And, um, if things still aren't ready when you come back, there's peanuts to combat the snack attacks."
Amy beamed at him. Peanuts—a callback to their first date. Her hand held at his cheek. "Happy anniversary, babe," she said, beaming.
His face was seriously happy. "Happy anniversary, babe," he said.
She almost darted to raid her closet but first retrieved something from her spilled paper bag. "If you can provide the dinner, I'll provide the alcohol," she said, producing a bottle of wine.
"I will put it on ice. Oh, we're fancy people now," Jake said, laughing.
"I know, right?" Amy said.
This was better than what she'd planned. If she continued in her plan, she would've set the kitchen on fire by the time Jake came home. He made the dinner and she brought the wine. They balanced each other, adding their strength to the other's weaknesses and pulling the other up when they fell down. While Amy did not see Jake making cooking dinner every night a regular habit, she certainly looked forward to him teaching her a thing or two (turns out he could cook, if he followed instructions—and he had no idea how much she loved following instructions) so they could each cook a little more. They were certainly still the kind of people who bought frozen dinners while they grocery shopped together and argued over where to order takeout from, but tonight, while the food did matter, Amy was just glad she got to spend the rest of the evening with him.
Jake/Amy SO HARD Y'ALL. SO HARD.
I hope you enjoyed the domestic fluff. Thanks for reading. Review?