mmmm BIG yikes i don’t know if i have one honestly. like if we’re talking traditionally published books-on-shelves authors, i really don’t know if i have one that i’m like This Is The Best Author without question you know?? like every time i finish a good book i’m like THAT WAS THE BEST but that’s every book i love so i don’t even know if i have a favorite book lmao?? sorry that felt like a cop out
43. Are you an avid reader?
already answered :)
54. Any writing advice you want to share?
oh gosh. none that hasn’t been said before?? write the kinds of stories you want to read (and don’t feel weird for subsequently rereading them after you’ve written them)!!! there is never any pressure to post anything you’ve written!!! if writing/fandom/anything is making you feel more stress than pleasure, it’s okay to take a step back and not produce/engage for a while!!! invest some time in creating a system in your documents - it’ll save you more time in the future, TRUST ME!!!!! outlining longer fics really will help in writing them (but god they’re so boring, so make them fun - add ur own commentary on what they’re doing (i.e. “he decides to hide the evidence in his locker, you know, like an idiot”))!!!! if u wanna stay up until 4 am constructing a ridiculous impossible plot line around one random line of dialogue that hits u in the middle of the day THEN STAY UP UNTIL 4 AM CONSTRUCTING A RIDICULOUS IMPOSSIBLE PLOT LINE!!!!!!! you go glen coco you got this!!!
wanted to do one general compliment shout-out to everyone in the fandom, particularly the people who haven't gotten any. all of you are important and i appreciate everything you do for the fandom - whether it's discussing the show or reading fic or sending headcanons (on anon or off) or requesting things from gif-makers/writers/etc or making stuff yourself or just enjoying the show, that's chill too. all of that has value and the fandom wouldn't be the same without you
SHE’S EXACTLY RIGHT MY LOVES EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US IS IMPORTANT
“I thought I lost you” kisses please and thanks <3
“I thought I lost you” kisses: The breath is knocked out of both of them with the force that they collide with. Hands grip the back of t-shirts and palms are pressed up and under shirts, holding them close, feeling the warmth of their skin. Palms are pressed to cheeks, thumbs swiping away tears until their mouths collide messily, the world seeming to disappear around them.
It hasn’t been long since he’s seen her, not really. A few hours, at most. Less than a day. But it feels like it’s been years, millennia, epochs. Jake’s not even really sure what an epoch is. She’d know, and she’d lecture him for an hour about dinosaurs and some extinct plants and some third thing he’s never even heard of because it’s been dead for so long (and he just asked about freakin’ epochs). But instead of a lecture, all he’s got on the other end of the phone is Rosa’s voice, calling for backup as it cracks. He wants to call it static, a bad connection, but he knows better.
Chaos is whirling around him. It was supposed to be a normal day. A boring day, even. He was supposed to pick up his wife, get Rae from his mom’s, and listen to Amy make stupid noises at their daughter from the backseat as he drives them all home. He’d go ten under the whole way, his foot hovering, twitching over the break. He’s never quite gotten used to driving with everything holding him together in the backseat of a metal death trap (it’s the safest car they could afford - a silver crossover with the best safety rating in its class - whatever that means - but he’s still not convinced). They’d whine about the lack of sleep as they order takeout, and Amy would elbow him about the lo mein noodles that found their way onto his shirt while he slurped them. He’d say it was all just to make Rae giggle from her spot on the floor, watching them on her stomach with eyes as wide as dinner plates and a single tooth poking through her gum, but they’d both know he had no idea the noodles were there until she pointed them out. They’d go to bed early (they never make it to Property Brothers anymore), and wake up three hours later when Rae cried, and he’d go pick her up and rock her, already knowing in the back of his head that she was ready for a feeding and he’d need to get Amy.
Rosa’s voice cuts through his reverie, repeating his name more and more frantically through the speaker on his phone. He’s collapsed into a chair in the break room, his whole world crashing to a grinding halt, but around him, chaos is whirling. Charles is screaming, his voice drifting into the falsetto he reserves for road trip Streisand solos, and Jake’s pretty sure he’s saying something, shouting instructions, but all he can hear is a loud ringing and the pitch of Charles’ screeching.
And then Gina is slapping him on the cheek.
The sensation stings, sends his head sideways into his shoulder as his teeth clack together over his tongue. But the pain cuts through the panic, and all of a sudden, he can think again. Hitchcock is shoving a bullet-proof vest in his face, a surprising look of sympathy on his face. It registers somewhere in the back of Jake’s head that Hitchcock’s awareness of the situation, his leap into action, is just another part of this day going horribly, terribly, ridiculously wrong.
The front part of his mind, though, is suddenly, horribly analytical. He’s on autopilot, checking his gun in his holster for ammo, buckling the vest over his shoulders as he jogs downstairs to the waiting van. Charles is already there, with Holt and some beat cops. Jake should know their names, knows that Amy would. He’s sure they received a Christmas card from them last month, that a picture of their daughter in a Santa hat on a bench in Prospect Park is hung from their fridge or in a stack on their counter, but he couldn’t even pull out their names (see, this is why he needs her).
And then they’re sprinting down a street in a vaguely familiar neighborhood, and they’re following a dark, shiny track along the pavement. Jake knows what it is, knows they all know, but he’s doing his best not to think about it. The area’s been cleared of pedestrians - they’re on the border of the Seven-Eight, and they must have gotten there first. He knows Rosa’s smart, would have radioed for anyone in the area as soon as she got off the phone with them, and in that moment, a rush of gratitude for Rosa’s rationality, for the Seven-Eight’s closer precinct, for whatever patrol cops sped down, sirens blaring, spreads through him, warming his extremities so he can feel his feet pounding against the pavement as he follows a widening trail of blood around a corner into a dark, unfamiliar alley.
And Rosa’s dark head of hair, matted with sweat and blood, is whipping around. There’s a cut on her cheek, dripping blood down her face and off her chin onto the back of a man in tattered flannel, pinned to the ground with one arm held up behind his back under Rosa’s knee. Jake recognizes the hold, knows that if the man moves even half an inch his shoulder will pop out of socket, tearing tendons and ligaments in the process.
But he doesn’t have time to wonder how she fought someone into that position with rips in her leather jacket and holes in her jeans where her knees hit the pavement, doesn’t have time to marvel at the feral look on her face or the contrast it makes with the cold calculation in her eyes.
He’s too busy spinning in circles, growing ever more frantic. There are only two people in this alley - more counting the members of the Nine-Nine rounding the corner behind him - and the trail of blood ends a few feet from Rosa’s boots.
He knows whose blood it is, knows he’d recognize it, even if Rosa’s voice crackling through his speakerphone hadn’t briefed him in a whisper about gunshots and broken ribs and probable pneumothoraxes and telling him that she’d turned on location tracking but they’d better come quick. He’s seen it a billion times - from paper cuts and scrapes and an incident with a knife while she was trying to chop cilantro and one particularly scary moment in a delivery room. (He knows if she were still here - tries not to think about where she is now - she’d tell him he was being ridiculous. She’d laugh and poke him with one of her weird elbows and point out that all healthy human blood looks the same. And then all he can hear is healthy over and over again because they were healthy and they were happy and they started the morning with no holes in anyone’s chests).
And then Charles is shaking him, and Holt is cuffing the man in flannel and leading him to a squad car and he can’t hear anything but Charles’ grip on his shoulders means he can’t sprint back out of the alley, can’t try to keep tracking the trail that had led him in, can’t find her, and he’s losing ground in his mind, can feel the terror clouding his thoughts and taking over his headspace.
And then words start to cut through the fog. 911. Ambulance. Brooklyn Methodist.
And then he gets it. All at once. She’s not here. And then he’s crying, collapsed against the wall of the bodega blocking off one side of the alley. And then Charles’ arm is around him, and Rosa’s grabbing his hand (No Touching apparently long abandoned) and leading him to a squad car. He notices she limps a bit, treating her left leg with care as she lets him slide across the backseat.
And then they’re moving, and he can hear Rosa telling Charles the whole story. A drug bust gone wrong, with backup. Three subdued criminals, cuffed in the back room of a McDonald’s down the street, and then a fourth with a gun, and a bang and Amy’s going down, and Jake can see it all more vividly than he’d ever care to admit. Rosa half-dragging Amy out the door, down the street, the shooter knocked out for a few seconds by the butt of Rosa’s gun. An alley, where Rosa can put Amy down, call for backup, and crouch, springing to subdue him as he sprints around the corner after them, following the obvious track of blood falling out of Jake’s wife. A street fight, one that used the bloody knife Rosa is clutching with one hand, her gun dropped at some point in the skirmish, that ended with Rosa sitting on the shooter and trying to stem the blood flowing out of a spot just below Amy’s right shoulder.
And then the Seven-Eight had arrived, had taken the cuffed dealers back to their precinct for the Nine-Nine to pick up later, and had called an ambulance, had taken his wife to the emergency room.
And then they’re spilling out of the squad car, and Rosa keeps a hand on his shoulder. He’s not sure if she needs the support, or if she’s holding him back, preventing him from sprinting in and shouting at the receptionist. He’s not particularly concerned about which one it is.
Charles does the talking. And then they’re in a room. Amy’s in surgery - should be out soon. Her lung collapsed, and she lost a lot of blood. They’re saying she’ll be fine, but he’s not sure he believes them. Slowly, though, he can feel himself calming down. He can feel the pieces of his heart putting themselves back together, reassembling inside him. Holt arrives, waits with him while Rosa leaves to call his mom.
The knowledge that Rae is fine, that she’s napping and giggly and crawling and gnawing on a red crayon, is strangely reassuring. It grounds him. It makes the time pass faster. He finds his voice again, manages to tell Charles about the first time she babbled dadadada, while Rosa’s cheek gets stitched up in the next room. Charles has heard the story a billion times, but he listens again. He seems to know how much Jake needs to tell it (and it’s not like Charles has ever objected to hearing a story about Jake as a dad).
Before he knows it, a man in scrubs is coming in, is telling him that they’re “both fine”. The plural is confusing for a second, but then he hears Amy’s name, hears that she’s waking up, and he’s finding feeling in his legs to follow the nurse, previously unnoticed behind the surgeon’s left shoulder.
Amy’s surrounded by wires and machines, at least three of them beeping rhythmically, more than he remembers from previous hospital visits, from when Charles got shot in the butt or when Amy’s brother had his appendix out last year. But all he can focus on is Amy’s loopy smile, drowsy and a bit goofy but alive.
He’s falling into the bed, is collapsing on top of her, careful somehow of the tubes that entangle her. His arms are finding their way around her neck, cradling the back of her head, where her tangled hair finds its way between his fingers, while he sobs dryly into her shoulder. No tears will come (he’s sure they’ll make an appearance later, when she’s asleep, under the glow of the fluorescent hospital lights in the early hours of the morning), but his breath is ragged against her good shoulder while her fingers, trailing heart monitors and IV needles, dig into his shirt (he’s not sure when the bulletproof vest came off, not sure where he left it, but he doesn’t particularly care).
She’s shaking a little bit, laughing and crying and repeating she’s here and she’s okay and a billion other reassurances on loop and he’s hearing them but not really hearing them and then he’s pulling his face out of her shoulder so his lips can find hers and swallow her words.
His kiss is furious against her lips, and she returns the passion, communicating a million emotions with all the words they can’t quite seem to find. He’s moving his hands possessively, reveling in the life beneath his fingers and laughing into her kiss at the freezing fingers curling his hair.
And then his hands, roaming their way slowly down her sides, get tangled in a tuft of wires, wires that he’s accidentally yanking off before he can register that he should stop moving and detangle.
One of the machines at his back switches from a quick, rhythmic whoosh to a blaring siren, and Amy detatches, leans her forehead against his to laugh gently at his frenzied relief. Her breath warms the tip of his nose, and he’s never felt anything better. But then a nurse is tapping his shoulder.
“If you could move for just a moment, Detective Peralta, I need to reattach the fetal monitor—“
Jake’s breath hitches as he turns to his wife. “Fet—fet—fetal monitor?”
Amy’s eyes light up with excitement and playful laughter at the confusion in every line of his face.
“I’ve got some news, Peralta,” she whispers, with a giggle that turns into a cough.
“Are we—are you—fetal—when—“ he’s babbling as his wife slowly regains her breath. He knows the words coming out aren’t making sense, and Amy’s smiling, clearly enjoying the total shock on her husband’s face as he processes the information.
“Yeah. Guess my mom’ll get that second grandkid she’s started hinting about.” One of Amy’s hands has drifted towards her mostly-flat stomach, her almost-radiant happiness nearly blinding her husband as his jaw drops to the floor.
“Did you—when did—in the ER? Surgery?”
Amy immediately knows what he’s asking, knows him so well she knew what he’d ask before he even found his voice to start. “Nine weeks along. I’ve known since Monday, when I started craving peanut butter on pickles again. I wanted to wait until I was sure to tell you, but they confirmed it on the way to the OR before I had time to buy a pregnancy test.”
“I’m—a baby—Monday—pickles—“
“Don’t worry - he’s an idiot, but he’ll be fine as soon as he recovers,” Amy smiles at the nurse, fiddling with wires around her abdomen. And then there’s that whoosh again, and Jake knows that sound, now that he’s looking for it.
So he leans in for a kiss, more careful now, slower and sweeter. “I thought I lost you,” he whispers against her lips when she comes up for air.
“You aren’t getting rid of me that easy,” is her only response, as she recaptures his lips and one of his hands drifts down to find hers over the electrodes monitoring their baby’s swiftly beating heart.
for your favorite song + line request: "I know everybody goes to the same dark places / Sometimes in the dead of night when you think you can't make it / You might find I left a light beside the bed for you / Cause I've been there, too" - same dark places (jr jr)
“sometimes in the dead of night when you think you can’t make it, you might find i left a light beside the bed for you, ‘cause i’ve been there, too”
It’s the loneliness, he thinks, that is the most profound.
That emptiness in his chest, somehow all-encompassing and minuscule at the same time. All-encompassing in the way it seems to surge through his very bones, to pull at the tired bags beneath his dry eyes and the perpetually-tugged-down corners of his mouth; minuscule in its insignificance when considering the grand scheme of the universe as a whole.
It’s exhausting, frankly.
And yet, it persists.
For a long, long time, it festers in isolation. He drags himself to his daily obligations and drags himself back home again, and the world in general should count itself lucky that he somehow manages to produce the effort it takes to make himself decent every day. Because if he had it his way - or, more accurately, if it had it its way - he’d never don anything aside from a pair of boxers and a hole-riddled undershirt from the bottom of his drawer.
(Laundry’s already a challenge on a good day.)
But then she comes around, and she has this way about her. This starshine - this light - that ignites the deepest shadows. The darkness fights against her but it’s undeniable - its grip around him has loosened, and each day, he gets closer and closer to breaking its grip around him for good. Because of her.
He’s not quite there yet. But that’s okay - that’s what she tells him. It’s okay, as long as he remembers that no matter what, she’s here. She’s here, and she’s not going anywhere.
The darkness is cyclical, thankfully (and unfortunately). It comes in waves. Some waves are bigger than others - some are outright tsunamis - but they always, eventually ebb.
Perhaps the knowledge that it’s only a matter of when is what abets the movement of said ebb; either way, it never fails, so his concern for his own well-being never flairs much further than a passing thought.
The same cannot be said of his concern for her well-being.
Her darkness, while similar to his in so many ways (and it’s just like the two of them to be similar in this respect in addition to the laundry list of similarities unfurling further and further every day), is different in its approach. It’s sneakier - it’s meaner - it’s more unpredictable. While his sets on like a hazy summer afternoon, hers is sharp and unforgiving in its accuracy. His is triggered by the most innocuous things; hers explodes spectacularly, usually on the heels of an epic failure - or, at least, on what she deems to be an epic failure.
Because god knows that for all of their similarities, her measurement of her own failure is so much more harsh than his.
She’d probably string him up by his toes if she knew just how downright panicky he’s feeling about the whole thing. She’d admonish him verbally - maybe accentuate it with a gentle-but-firm smack to his upper arm - and then she’d retreat even further into herself, drawing ever farther away from him. Which would only serve to exacerbate his concern - and so on and so forth.
It’s a vicious cycle, and he’s helpless to it, left floundering on the shore to watch her struggle against the riptide.
He does what he can. Jokes like he doesn’t notice her hands shaking from sleeplessness and lost appetite, smiles like he can’t tell the answering quirk of her lips is twitchy and hardly even enough to be considered a grimace. He makes her favorite meals from childhood and orders her favorite takeout and sits beside her on the couch to gladly, excitedly watch the backlog of documentaries eating a hole through their DVR from the last month. Sometimes she holds his hand. Sometimes she tucks her blanket around her legs and crosses her arms over her stomach, ensuring no inch of her is in direct contact with him.
Sometimes she forgoes the couch completely to lay in their bed, her back to the bedroom door, staring out the window.
He pretends like he doesn’t notice the tear stains on her pillow case the next morning.
He’s trying.
And yet, it persists.
It leaves him listless most nights, scrolling through article after article on his phone, searching for the right answer. Because there is a right answer, here, he can feel it in his bones - there’s a way to strike that delicate balance between loving concern and being outright overbearing. There’s a way to coax her back without invalidating what she’s feeling, what she’s drowning in.
There’s an answer - he just hasn’t found it yet.
They’re due back at the precinct tomorrow morning - Captain Holt only gave them a week, and really, seven days just isn’t enough time to fully come to terms with how spectacularly her last case fell apart. He’s toggling back and forth between the fifteenth article of the night and the half-drafted, poorly-worded email to Holt asking for a few more days - when he hears her footsteps creaking down the hall.
He locks the screen and tucks his phone beneath his thigh.
“Hey,” her voice is hoarse, scratchy. She’s still partially hidden around the doorway, but he can see her whole face, illuminated by the lamp still blazing on the side table to his left and the neon lights pouring through the windows from the street below. She looks tired - she looks like hell - she looks one breath away from slipping into the abyss.
(She always says he’s got an over-dramatic streak; he always says that he gets it from Gina.)
“Hi,” he says, doing his best to keep his tone neutral, because he knows exactly how grating it is to hear that nurse’s how are you feeling tone of voice, how infuriating it is to feel like someone is coddling you, babying you, belittling you.
The line of her mouth seems to flatten for a moment, but then she’s glancing down, examining a chip in the wooden doorframe below the heel of her hand. “You comin’ to bed soon?”
He nods.
She purses her lips, glances around the room, and then looks back at him. “Everything okay?”
He hesitates. It’s obvious to anyone with even the faintest grasp on the situation that everything is most certainly not okay, but he knows that she knows that. The space between them feels heavy; the space between them feels insurmountable and impossible.
There’s probably an article out there about it.
He hesitates, and then he smiles. “Yeah,” he nods, hands tucked beneath his thighs. “Just - thinking.”
He sees the muscles of her throat work as she swallows, her eyes moving as she studies his face, and then she’s nodding, too. “Me too.” she confesses, voice small.
His heart is broken into so many fragile little pieces. Broken for the case, for all five victims, for her.
She shifts on her feet, pulling away, stepping back a few inches further into the hall. “I left a light on for you, whenever you come back.”
He clenches his jaw, digs the pads of his fingers into his thighs, and nods. “Thanks, babe.” he says softly.
The softest, faintest smile twitches across her lips. “You’re welcome.”
She’s gearing up to move again, he’s only got a half-second before she’s gone, and he’s grasping at straws, at moonbeams, at the grains of dust swirling through the shafts of light behind him and between them and the bottomless cavern threatening to swallow her whole. “I - I left one on for you, too,” he says, voice taking on that funny choked filter that only emerges with his most raw emotions.
She pauses, hand still clutching the door frame, nail beds going white beneath the force of her suddenly-tightened grip.
“I know you don’t wanna talk about it,” he starts, schooling his voice, forcing himself to stay low and soothing. “I don’t wanna make you talk about it. Not ‘til you’re ready. Not ever, if you don’t wanna talk to me about it. But I just - god. I love you so much, Amy, and it’s - it’s killing me, watching this eat you alive. I’ve been researching the hell out of this, trying to figure out what I can do to make it better, but…I should know better than that. I should know better, because I’ve been there, too. I know - I know.” He can only see half of her face around the door frame, and the way the shadows fall across her features makes it difficult to accurately gauge her reaction, but he’s fairly confident that her lower lip is quivering. “I’m not trying to push you into doing anything that you’re not comfortable with. That’s the last thing I want. And I’ll never bring this up again if you don’t want me to. But Amy - Ames - I love you so much. So much. And I need you to know that I’m always gonna keep a light on for you. Always.”
The quiver is undeniable now - it and the tears brimming in her tired, blood-shot eyes - and the next thing he knows she’s burying herself in him, body tucked haphazardly against his side, face safely hidden in the juncture of his shoulder and neck. And she’s cracked open, and the darkness is a rushing whirlpool all around her, he can feel its slimy tendrils licking at her skin - but his grip around her is tight, firm, persistent. She’s cracked open and spilling everywhere and it’s taking everything in him to not release some kind of primal war cry in a neandertholic attempt at scaring her demons away. It’s taking everything in him to keep the whispered stream of soothing nonsense steady against her hairline, to keep the salty tears spilling from his own eyes from slipping between his lips and her temple.
She clings to him like he’s her lifeline; he clings to her because she’s his.
And later, when they’re in bed and her face is pleasantly expressionless against his chest, he strokes her hair with one hand and finishes the email to Holt with the other. Because she deserves a few days to recuperate from the hell the last few days have been; she deserves a few days to adjust to this newfound peace, to even out the ripples still disrupting her existence, to settle back into herself and to stretch out the joints that are creaking and the muscles that are burning.
There’s a very good chance, his darkness whispers, that this peace won’t last. That sooner or later his darkness will return, that hers won’t be long after, that the two of them will sink into their own separate purgatories, helpless to save each other. There’s a chance he’ll fail again, there’s a chance he’ll fail her, there’s a chance that he’ll lose everything good, that he’ll no longer be worthy of her or the peace she offers him.
But he pushes that whisper away with little more than a tired, half-conscious hum. Because they’re both wrapped up in peace and in each other. Because that’s enough for now.
@fishycorvid, sy, your writing is gold, it has this gorgeous poetic quality i love, and i am constantly amazed by how much writing you manage to do and how all of it is SO GOOD. you're an evil writer (in the best, heart-ripping way) but you’re a nice person and chatting with you has been really fun. also you used corvid in your username which makes you 1000% times cooler in my book
@startofamoment ok so the first thing you gotta know about erica is that she’s an au master, like give her a crown pls, she deserves it, and i love hearing about her aus and world-building because it’s top-shelf stuff. the second thing is that she’s super fucking nice and she lets me yell at her about my aus and was supportive while i was applying for grad school (and also just in general) and is an all-around excellent person. thank you for everything, you're amazing <3
these beautiful descriptions that set the scene, small moments that give me the same warm feeling i get from wearing fuzzy socks, and lines of dialogue that genuinely make me laugh like i'm watching b99. also geese. i saw canada geese fly by while camping and i thought of you
listen i’m,,,i’m so glad that my writing has made you feel like fuzzy socks and that my descriptions resonate and my jokes make at least one person laugh. but more than anything,,,i’m so so glad i’m the Goose Girl
