It's six weeks before their wedding when Eddie turns up with her left ring finger empty. They've been ships passing on different shifts for four days now, and Jamie doesn't notice the blank spot on her finger until they've settled into the couch with takeout and his fingers laced with hers start to rub her ring finger. It's a habit he doesn't even realize he has until his fingers meet warm skin instead of cool metal. Something in his stomach sinks and goes leaden. Eddie always wears her ring at home.
Mentally, he runs through the last week, trying to pinpoint if something had gone wrong and he'd missed it. Other than the fact that their shifts and obligations this week have meant they've barely seen each other in seventy-two plus hours, he comes up empty.
"Eddie? Where's your ring?" There's a note of dread in his voice. He trusts Eddie to the ends of the earth, but his experience has taught him that a woman taking off his ring doesn't end well.
He's not sure if he's relieved or not when she pulls the chain she wears in on at work out from under her shirt and shows him the ring still dangling from it.
"I can't wear it right now."
"Why not? Eddie, if I—"
"Jamie," she cuts him off gently. "I said I can't wear it right now, not that I don't want to. You did nothing wrong. We're good. We're great" In fact, she's been planning this for weeks, waiting for a stretch of days when they weren't going to see much of each other so that she could execute her plan without detection.
"So, what then?"
"I did something I've been thinking of for a while. I think you're going to like it. I really hope you like it, because it's kind of too late to undo it now."
"Did what, Eddie? What did you have to do that means you can't wear your engagement ring?"
"I couldn't wear it," she tells him, "because this needed a few days to heal."
Turning her left palm over, she opens it close to his face.
There, etched in black on her ring finger, tiny and inconspicuous, is a tattoo. It's so small and placed just so that when she puts her ring on, it will be mostly covered. When a wedding ring joins it in just a few weeks' time, the pair may well hide it completely.
The shock of seeing a tattoo on that oh-so-familiar hand keeps him from really noticing what that tattoo is for a moment.
Inked on the inner side of her ring finger, tiny and precise, like a fragment of a ring itself, it says 12D.
Twelve David his mind reads automatically, the call sign still as familiar as his own name.
The stroke of the numbers matches almost exactly the shape of the collar pins that still sit in a box on his dresser. He's never asked, but he's sure hers are somewhere in her jewelry box, as well.
"Twelve David," he repeats aloud.
"For life," she tacks on.
He has to shift his awestruck gaze a few more times between her hand and her face, before he is able to respond with any levity.
"I think the current Twelve David might object to that."
"Too bad," she says, drawing out the syllables before looking at him earnestly. "You're my partner Jamie Reagan," she tell him softly. "And that was our beginning. This," she hold her palm up to him again," was our beginning. But it's also our future. We may not be riding in a car together anymore, but you're still my partner. For life."
When he doesn't respond immediately, her expression turns tentative. "Do you like it?"
In response, he twists his hand and laces his left hand with hers, pressing the base of his ring finger gently against the place where the tiny numbers lie on hers.
In lieu of an answer, he asks, "How do you feel about matching tattoos?"
Three weeks later
Jamie is puttering around the apartment divesting himself of his work gear and getting settled in for the evening when the doorbell rings. Not expecting anyone, his cop instincts instantly go on alert even though experience tells him that Eddie has probably just gone ahead and ordered dinner to be delivered so that it's ready and waiting when she gets there and she doesn't have to wait for it.
But, instead of the pizza guy, there's a familiar dark-haired woman outside the door when he opens it. Surprise holds him still for a moment before he swings the door open.
"Sydney."
She offers him a hesitant smile as he invites her in and gestures for her to sit. Jamie settles in the armchair while Sydney arranges herself on the couch, looking around and observing the changes to the apartment since she last saw it.
They're mostly through basic, somewhat-awkward pleasantries, when Sydney, having done a subtle ring check, finally comments: "You're not married."
"Not yet. But—"
His response is interrupted by a key turning in the lock and the door swinging open.
"Hey!" comes Eddie's voice, half blocked by the still-open door, "Can we order that stuff we got last week from—"
She's kicking her shoes off haphazardly and dumping her bag on the floor by the door when she looks up and catches her first glimpse of their visitor and halts mid-sentence.
Nodding her closer, Jamie makes the introductions.
"Eddie, this is Sydney. Sydney, this is my fiancée, Eddie Janko."
The two women exchange awkward hellos, neither quite sure how to respond at first.
Sydney finds herself suddenly looking around at the changes in the apartment with new eyes. There is a pair of running shoes by the door that are clearly too small for Jamie's feet, a pile of papers scattered far too haphazardly on the table for his neat-freak tendencies, a vase of week-old flowers and bottle of sweet white wine that he's always hated sitting on the counter, a pink sweatshirt tossed over a dining room chair, and a row of rom coms and Disney movies mixed into the DVDs in the entertainment center. The signs of a woman's presence aren't blatant, but they're hard to miss now that she's looking.
While she's assimilating Eddie's presence, Eddie and Jamie and pass a silent conversation back and forth. To Jamie's relief, Eddie's expression is more of surprise and amused curiosity than anything else, and her silent, wide-eyed question is met with a shrug and a quizzical purse of his own lips. Jamie excuses himself from Sydney to pull Eddie toward the hallway for a moment.
"You want me to run out and get some coffee somewhere, give you guys a chance to talk?" She asks him.
"No, don't. I might take her down to the café downstairs though. I'm not sure why she's here, but we should probably talk. That okay with you?"
"You're not going to go down there and then come back and dump me, right?" she jokes.
"Not a chance," Jamie says, smiling and running his hands around her waist. "I just think she has some things she needs to say and I should let her say them."
Eddie nods. It's been a long time now since she figured out that Jamie Reagan was not, in fact, hung up over his ex-fiancée, but she also knows that it might be good for him to hear that Sydney regrets leaving him, that she understands now what a good man she gave up, that she's unlikely to find his equal anywhere else. Eddie has no doubt that's where this conversation is going; the look in Sydney's eye is easy enough for her to read, even if Jamie hasn't figured it out yet.
Jamie drops a kiss on the top of her head. "We'll go grab a cup of coffee and I should be back in less than an hour. Order me something not entirely deep fried, please."
Eddie responds by rising to her tiptoes to press a swift kiss to his lips. She really has no concerns about Jamie—they've waited and wanted for too long, been too honest with each other for her to feel really threatened by Sydney's appearance, but she's also aware that Sydney is watching them and it can't hurt to stake her claim a little.
Jamie, entirely aware of what she's doing, just rolls his eyes a little and drops another kiss on her lips, amped up from hers by at least a factor of two. Touching his forehead to hers after, he murmurs, "I love you a whole lot," before turning to invite Sydney to join him at the cafe just down the block.
"Is she okay with it, your job?" Sydney asks ask they settle into a booth with their coffee a few minutes later.
Jamie has to suppress a chuckle. "She is."
"For now." Jamie raises his eyebrows at this, but she continues. "Does she really know what that means? What she's getting into?"
This time, Jamie does chuckle. "She knows. Eddie's on the job, too."
Sydney takes a moment to grasp this. "She's a cop?"
Jamie nods. "She was my partner."
"Of course." Years ago, before she left, he would have expected that statement to sound critical—like he couldn't possible care that much about anything that wasn't related to the NYPD. Tonight, it just sounds… understanding.
"I didn't understand," he ventures in the silence that follows, "until Eddie and I stopped rolling out together what it was like to be on the other side of that, how terrifying it can be to know that she's out there and I have no idea if she's okay or what's going on. I just… I want you to know that I get it now, and I'm sorry I didn't really understand back then."
It's a good segue into the conversation that follows, a quiet, somewhat awkward recap of their lives for the last three quarters of a decade.
Sydney, he discovers over the next few minutes, is a little lost. She'd left him for a world of high-powered and high-salaried attorneys, only to discover that power and money came with a cost, and that sometimes that cost was integrity and justice. For all her ambitions, Sydney had always been well-intentioned, and the intervening years have left her disillusioned. Along the way, she discovered that the men she met in her profession ticked all the boxes she though she wanted—wealthy, powerful, well-dressed and well-spoken, but they were all missing something. While some of them could be called good men, she'd found herself longing for the kindness and quiet integrity of the boy from Bay Ridge that she'd left behind.
What she hadn't counted on was that in those interim years, that boy had turned into a man and given his heart to someone else. Eddie's intuition hadn't been wrong. She's here tonight hoping that maybe, just maybe, that man might give her another shot and one ring on another woman's finger isn't quite enough to stop her from putting the idea out there.
"Engagements aren't marriage." She ventures eventually. "Things can happen. You and I are proof that sometimes an engagement doesn't go the way you planned. Maybe…"
Jamie chooses to not let her finish that thought.
"Not this time. This one is it." He tells her firmly. "Eddie and I may not have stood up in church and said our vows yet, but we made our promises to each other a long time ago."
Jamie turns his left hand over on the table between them, smiling down at it softly.
"You got a tattoo?" Sydney's shock is clear on her face and in her tone. The tiny 12D, small as it is on the inside of his ring finger, is so at odds with what she'd known of this man that it takes her a long moment to assimilate the new information.
The characters, of course, mean nothing to her. She was gone before Twelve David meant everything to him.
"What does it mean?" She ventures eventually.
"Eddie was my partner for five years. 12D—Twelve David—was our call sign. I guess you could say it's kind of a symbol now, a promise that we'll always have each other's backs, always be partners where it counts."
"Syd," he says gently. "Eddie is my best friend and my partner and…my entire world. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her and I can't wait to do it.
"When you left, it hurt and I was confused and a little lost for a while. It took some time to sort it out and move past it. But I did. If I lost Eddie..." he stops there, biting his lips, a muscle twitching in his jaw, even the beginning of that sentence hard to press out.
"The world would stop turning," he finally finishes after a long pause.
It might be a little unkind, he thinks, to tell her in not so many words that he loves Eddie more than he had ever known how to love her back then. His love for Eddie has had time to deepen and mature, through danger and darkness and self-denial into something solid and lasting and all-encompassing. It's not really fair to compare them. But, maybe telling her that will push her to move on for good, past this idealized memory she's holding onto of the boy she used to know.
Jamie's return coincides with the moment the delivery man with their food arrives at their steps, so he trades a handful of cash for their dinner at the door and takes the bags with him as he climbs the steps.
"She come to tell you she was stupid for leaving you and that she wants you back?" Eddie asks from the couch as he sheds his shoes at the door and hangs his jacket on a hook.
"Something like that," he concedes.
"And you said…?" She challenges, eyebrow raised as she moves toward him.
Jamie drops their dinner on the counter and catches her hand to pull her into him.
"I told her I have the partner I want."
Her grin back at him is somehow soft and bright and a little bit wicked all at the same time and he wonders, not for the first time, how she can be so many beautiful things all at once. "Damn straight, you do."
"Twelve David for life," he murmurs as he wraps both arms around her and links his fingers behind her back and smiles as she echoes it.
"Twelve David for life."
AN: Many thanks for your warm welcome into this fandom. If I can't respond directly to your reviews, know that I'm enormously grateful for them and for you taking the time to let me know what you think.
It's been my assumption that Jamie still lives in the apartment that he lived in when Sydney was around in season 1- it looks like the same one to me, and I don't remember any references to the contrary. If I'm wrong... well, then I'm wrong. Also, I realize that the NYPD has regulations on visible tattoos. I'm running here with the assumption that, like in the military, there are specific definitions of what constitutes a "visible" tattoo. For the purposes of my story, I'm pretending theirs are acceptable, though I really know nothing about the guidelines.
Most of you have probably guessed that the title of this collection comes from the song that Eddie and Jamie are arguing about just before their first kiss in season 4. My random Blue Bloods question of the day is: is this a real song? It's been bugging me. When I try to look it up, all I get are Blue Bloods references. If anybody knows the answer, I'd love to hear it.