Dawn { a javier peña fanfiction }

Chapter Two - Thunder

"You roll like thunder when you come crashing in.
Town ain't been the same since you left with all your friends."

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She didn't think it possible, that she could somehow think about him more incessantly than she had been, but ever since that surprise reunion in the parking lot of the school, he dictated the majority— if not all— of her thoughts.

It was his eyes she kept going back to, the vision of them cemented in her brain alongside the thousand images she had of them from before. She hated that the haunted quality of them made her stomach twist, made this heavy, viscous wave of dread slosh through her core. His eyes had always been her favorite part of him, so warm and soft in juxtaposition to the sharper details of his face— his hooked nose, his defined jaw, the impossibly broad breadth of his shoulders. His eyes were what made Javier, Javier— soft, kind, fair Javier.

Now, they looked hollow, a shade too dark, plagued by whatever it was he'd seen down in Colombia. She had a vague idea of what that might be, she'd be lying if she said she hadn't followed the Escobar case somewhat religiously. After he died, she thought— a fleeting thought like a leaf fluttering through the air before it resides permanently on the ground— that perhaps he would come back. But he hadn't. He'd turned his focus to the Cali cartel after that. The only reason she knew that was because Chucho had mentioned it in passing when she ran into him at the harvest festival a few years back. After she heard him say his name, she'd locked herself in the bathroom for a good twenty minutes, trying to catch her breath, trying to get her heart to stop throbbing and pounding away in her chest. She tried to be impartial at that point, tried to be apathetic, but she still found herself scouring headlines and newscasts for anything even remotely related to the cartel, just in case they mentioned him, just in case something happened.

But there never was anything about him, not in the local papers or the local news, or even the Austin and San Antonio papers that she riffled through at the library every couple weeks. Just horrific headlines that made her feel like everything was spiraling out of control, caused her to harbor a worry in her gut, so deep and forceful that at some points she thought something must be seriously and physically wrong with her. The doctor said it was stress, told her to try to remove things from her life that may be causing her to panic. She didn't know how to tell him that the one thing that caused her to worry most was already more than two-thousand miles away.

In that sense, she was glad he was back in Larga Vista, where it was safe, where the most dangerous thing that happened regularly was when Mr. Hernandez's cows jumped the fence and crossed Graneros Avenue to try to pasture on the other side of the street. She no longer had to worry about him being shot at, no longer gave herself panic attacks every night thinking about the possibility of him being captured or blown up or executed. Now all she had to worry about was seeing him— something she had desperately wanted almost every day for nearly her entire life— now a notion that filled her with dismay. The irony was not lost on her, though she did curse it, and him, as the vision of his face, those haunted eyes, flashed through her mind again.

She tried to push it away, shaking her head like she could knock it out of her skull as she focused on finishing her lesson plans for the following week. She'd been leaving the school late all week, to try to avoid Javier if he decided to show up again. She'd stay at her desk, tapping her fingers against the wood, staring out the window, trying to get some work done— papers graded, lessons finalized— until four or four-thirty, then she'd leave, nearly running to her car so he wouldn't be able to intercept her in the parking lot again. But so far, he hadn't shown up, or if he had, he'd left before she finally exited the campus. There was some rooted, buried part of her that was disappointed, that wanted desperately to see him, to memorize the new lines on his face, to try to bring back the warm quality of his eyes, but it wasn't enough to cancel out the rest of her, the part of her that was furious with him, profoundly hurt by his flagrant disregard for her, the part of her that thought she may never want to see him again, that she may never be able to stand it.