Dawn { a javier peña fanfiction }

Chapter One - Tomorrow Never Came

A.N. Welcome to my new Javier Peña fic! (Do not fret, 'To The Light'  epilogue will still be out next week, just been excited about this for a long time and wanted to get the first chapter out.) Each chapter will be named after a Lana Del Rey song with a corresponding lyric (idk Javi is Lana coded to me).  I hope you enjoy <3

"I waited for you, in the spot you said to wait."

___________________________

Javier Peña, Javier Peña, Javier Peña, Javier Peña.

Mia had heard that name on repeat, in the confines of her head, for the past ten years— longer than that if she was being honest with herself— but now the sound of him no longer solely existed in her mind, it was everywhere.

Larga Vista was a blip on the map, sometimes not even considered its own town more than a neighborhood of Laredo, at least to outsiders. There couldn't be more than 400 people living within its borders, which meant that news spread fast.

And the return of Javier Peña was the biggest piece of news the town had seen since Daniel Flores, the local handyman, was arrested for laundering money nearly seven years ago.

She'd been at the market when she first heard his name, spoken aloud, in a hushed whisper echoing through the aisles from the produce department.

That Javier Peña is back in town. Saw him yesterday, fixing up a fence with Chucho near the river.

Her entire body had frozen; the pack of pasta she'd been holding had dropped from her fingers with a small thud.

Heard from Martin that he got kicked out of the DEA, or retired or something, imagine that, retiring at... what is he now? Thirty-eight.

Forty. He was forty. Had turned forty in April of this year.

Chucho is sixty-one, how do you think he feels about his son retiring so prematurely?

Just because he retired from the DEA, doesn't mean he isn't going to help Chucho out now that he's home.

I guess we'll see. I don't see that boy sticking around for long. He was always adamant about getting out of here. Couldn't even stick around to finish his own wedding, dios mío...

Mia had rushed out of the market, abandoning her cart in the pasta aisle, forcing herself to focus on her breathing in the confines of her car before she drove home.

She had not seen Javier since he left Larga Vista almost ten years ago.

Hadn't spoken to him in nearly the same amount of time.

I'll visit soon, Mia. Promise.

That was the last thing he'd said to her, on the phone, a little more than six months after his arrival in Colombia. He never did visit, or call, or write to her ever again.

Apparently, he had returned to Texas, briefly, sometime after Pablo Escobar died, but he was gone just as quickly, without uttering a single word to her.

She hated that he still had such a forceful effect on her, hated that just his name made her entire body all fluttery and weak. He certainly didn't think about her, ever, he'd made that clear over the past ten years, so then why was she still plagued by the memory of him, by those warm, brown eyes that had seen her when it felt like no one else had.

Even back when she was a kid, an annoying little shadow that would run after him and Richie through the corn fields after school, begging them for a measly bit of attention. Richie had been so mean to her back then, as was expected from an older brother who was oftentimes forced to watch her while their mother was at work. He would tease and torment her relentlessly— he spent a good three months when she was six convincing her that the chupacabra lived in her closet, when she was nine, he told her that she had been adopted from a family of wild pigs, and sometime between her tenth and eleventh birthday he developed an elaborate story about how there was a ship of angry pirates who sailed up and down the Rio Grande looking for little girls to eat... she stopped following them down to the river for a good year after that.