Chapter Text
When he signed up to teach new recruits, Javier had never imagined that he would be traveling for work again, especially not to countries known for their drug activity. But at the end of the day, it turned out that the DEA was finally getting him down to Mexico after all.
In an effort to spare resources, the agency was attempting to implement a new system, using US training programs in satellite locations throughout the world. And lucky him, Peña drew the short straw and got to be the new program's first instructor. At least this time, it was to lend his experience to a field office full of new agents, not to do the field work himself, and the chances of him even seeing a sicario on this trip were almost zero.
Even better, that meant that he got to bring his wife along.
“It's not the Caribbean,” he conceded as she packed excitedly for two weeks across the border, “but at least it's warm.”
The Virginia winter was getting to him a bit this year, and as much as he'd tried to hide it, he knew his Dulce Roja never missed a thing. Even as she folded a light blouse she'd selected from their closet, Letty's gaze was sympathetic, her bright eyes filled with the empathy Javier loved so much about her.
“It'll be nice to be in the sunshine again,” she said instead of pointing out how frequently his mood seemed to match the dreary days. “I do wish my Spanish was better.”
“You'll do just fine, mi amor,” he assured her, stepping up behind her and resting his hands on her hips before bending to press a kiss to her shoulder. “Don't forget to pack some of those dresses I like. Can't wait to see 'em again.”
“I wasn't planning to bring a garment bag, Javi, just the one big suitcase. They'll get all wrinkled in there.”
He let out a groan, tipping his head back for a moment in what he knew was a very dramatic reaction.
“Come on,” he whined, “don't make me wait another three months to see you in those sundresses. I won't make it.”
Letty giggled, reaching down to rest her hands over his and turning to shoot him a cheeky look over her shoulder. Three months was a stretch, and they both knew it; the weather always warmed up enough for at least a few days in early spring that she could get away with wearing a dress on one of their date nights, and it was already February.
Two months at most. But it had been a long winter.
“Well, maybe they'll have an iron at the hotel,” she reasoned, and he darted in to steal a kiss, his thumbs dipping beneath the edge of her shirt to stroke across her hip bones.
“Who cares,” he muttered, “they always get wrinkled on the floor anyway.”
“Javi!”
He ducked in for another kiss, nipping at her bottom lip and laughing at the little squeal the action pulled out of her. She swatted one palm indignantly against his chest, but he noticed that she leaned into the next kiss, noticed the way her body arched up into his as his fingertips crept a little higher.
They didn't get the packing done until the next day.
* * *
The Tamaulipas field office was a lot nicer than the one Javier remembered from Bogota, though maybe that was just a matter of perspective. The locals wanted to make a good impression, especially since the Americans were the source of the higher quality weapons and technology they currently had access to, and he had a feeling they were keeping him away from any of the less than savory parts of the old building.
Still, it seemed like a decent place to work for the next couple weeks, and the significant police presence meant that the immediate area was unlikely to see cartel violence. That also meant that Letty was safe while Javier couldn't be there with her during the day, that she could fill her time doing volunteer teaching at a nearby orphanage without causing him excessive worry. And the rest of the time, she could simply relax, until he was through for the day and they could spend their evenings enjoying the first adventure of their marriage.
After they'd tied the knot in Laredo the previous fall, Javi had warned his father that they wouldn't get a chance to see him for awhile, but it looked like they'd be able to make a quick stop at the ranch before they headed home. Chucho was audibly pleased to hear, already asking about grandchildren and announcing that he would have the horses ready for a ride.
All in all, it was shaping up to be an excellent time, and maybe he should've known better. His field work never went well for long.
When they'd first decided to go on this trip together, Javier's biggest worry was Letty getting too attached to the kids she was planning to work with and begging to bring them all home with her. He heard her stories about them every night when he got back to their hotel room, comforted her when she lamented the conditions in which they lived and their loneliness and the way those precious babies clung to her like she was the first kind face they'd ever seen. But she was holding out better than he'd expected, and by the end of their first week, she was coming to terms with doing everything in her power to help and leaving it at that.
“Come have lunch with me tomorrow,” he murmured as he held her in the pale cast of moonlight filtering through the bright curtains. “Take a break, Roja.”
“Are you sure that'll be alright?”
“Of course, I can do whatever I want. I'm the gringo of honor.”
She smacked his chest in retribution for the bad joke, and he just laughed at her petulance, catching her wrist and pulling her hand to his mouth to press kisses across her fingertips.
Eight days in, and Letty saw the satellite office for the first time, bringing some of their newly discovered favorite takeout from a nearby food truck. Javi greeted her with a hurried kiss and greedily snapped up the bag holding his lunch, leading the way to the desk that had been set aside for him. She dragged a second chair over before he had a chance, waving away his protests before diving into her own meal.
Letty got a good laugh out of watching her husband devour his lunch, almost entirely ignoring her until he'd filled the gnawing hole in his belly.
“S'not funny,” he announced with a mouthful of food, the words nearly muffled beyond recognition, and she just giggled again.
“Looks like I picked the right food for my favorite glutton,” she teased, and he pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes and shot her an impressive glare for someone with his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk.
Then the first gunshot exploded through the air, and Javi's food hit the floor as he lunged to grab Letty out of her chair and drag her under the cover of his desk.
More shots rang out, closer this time, right outside the precinct, and people were shouting in Spanish and Javier was hissing out a curse and wrestling his gun from his shoulder holster, and Letty's blue eyes were wide with terror.
“What's happening?” she whimpered, and he was so glad he'd been too lazy to take his tac vest off after that training drill right before she arrived. A short pause in the shooting, then it started up again, the rapid pop pop pop of automatic gunfire countered by the occasional return of a few rounds from a standard issue sidearm, and he didn't have an answer for her.
“Put this on,” he urged, peeling off his vest, “and stay here.”
“No, Javi, you need your vest!” she protested at once, her hands trying to fumble his away, and his grip snapped around her wrist so quickly that she froze, wide eyes locked on his and mouth agape.
“I'll get another one,” he promised, and he knew he was gripping her too hard but he needed her to listen. “I need you to be safe, baby. I have to keep you safe.”
He'd always loved Letty's pragmatism, the way she could set everything else aside and see the logic and facts of a situation without losing any of the tenderness from her beautiful soul, and this was the moment when that tendency was tested to its limit. He could see it in her gaze as time seemed to slow to a crawl around them, the internal war, the way she fought against the desperate need to make sure he came back to her and the knowledge that he couldn't focus on whatever lay outside these walls if he wasn't absolutely certain she was safe.
“Okay,” she finally whispered, letting him wrap her up in the vest that was far too big on her smaller frame. “God, be careful Javi.”
“Stay under here,” he ordered without further hesitation, urging her tighter beneath his heavy desk. “Keep your head down and covered until I come get you. I love you, querida. I'll be back for you.”
And just like that, he was gone.
* * *
One of the other officers was the one who came to tell Letty it was safe to come out from under the desk. By then, her legs were burning with pins and needles and her joints were stiff from remaining huddled in one position for so long, but at least everything had gone quiet outside. The young officer didn't speak much English, but when she repeated her husband's name for the third time, he finally seemed to understand, and with some pointing and nodding, managed to reassure her that Javier was alright.
It was nearly ten more minutes before he was able to break away and come to where she'd been shuffled into a chair, a cup of cold coffee clutched in her hands. She tossed it into the garbage still full the moment she saw her husband, fairly sprinting the half dozen steps or so it took to reach him and leaping into his arms.
There was a distinctive lack of Kevlar protecting his torso, and the moment he finally got his fill of holding her again and lowered her feet back to the floor, she slapped one hand angrily to his chest, protected only by the terrifyingly thin barrier of his shirt.
“If you tell me you're gonna get another vest,” she said shakily, fury and fear and desperation trembling in every limb, “you better show up wearing a goddamn vest.”
His hands moved at once to cradle her face, thumbs brushing away the fresh tears that streamed down the dried tracks on her cheeks. Closing the tiny distance between them again, he bent his forehead to hers, their eyes slipping shut in tandem as they took a moment just to breathe together.
“Alright,” he murmured, an apology and a vow all at once, and then his arms were around her again and the dam finally broke. She sobbed in his arms for longer than she wanted to, unable to wrest her emotions back under control once they fought their way free, blubbering about how worried she was and how afraid she'd been that he wasn't coming back.
And he whispered reassurances, explaining that it was alright, it was just a small-time local gang trying to make a statement by firing on the precinct, and the only people that had been hit were some of the dealers, and no one had died today. For all the noise and chaos and uncertainty, it almost seemed unfair to have ended in such an anticlimactic way, but the relief that washed over her was enough to turn her legs to jelly and make her head spin.
“Let's get you home,” he said softly, and she turned tear filled eyes up to him and wished he meant their real home, their little house in Virginia, not the hotel that was too hot and too noisy and too exposed for her to feel anything but vulnerable.
But Javi didn't drive her back to the hotel. As soon as he cleared it with the locals in charge, he drove her straight to the airport. Not a word was spoken between them the entire time, their hands tightly linked between them and his jaw set so tightly she was sure it had to ache by now.
With shock beginning to settle in, Letty was puzzled by their arrival for far too long, until he was telling her to wait for him and walking away, and she snapped back into action. She couldn't stand the thought of being separated from him again, even if it was just while he went to the ticket counter. Lunging to catch his arm, she latched on in abject desperation, tears threatening to build in her eyes all over again.
“Wha...what are we doing here, Javi?”
“I'm sending you home,” he reminded her softly, reaching up to stroke one hand across her hair. “I'm never gonna let something like this happen again, mi amor. You need to get home, or even just to dad's if you want, where you can be safe.”
“I'm safe with you,” she insisted, still clinging to his arm. “I need to stay with you.”
“No, baby, I need you to go,” he nearly whispered, still stroking her face and hair as if to soothe himself as well. “Please. The whole time I was out there, I just kept thinking...I can't do it again.”
He couldn't even finish a thought, and it was clear that he was frustrated, the muscles in his jaw flexed and his shoulders tight. She could understand that, could relate to it even, because she was sure that similar thoughts had been racing through her mind all along. But as frightened as she'd been, as much as she'd wished in those few moments to be anywhere but under that desk, she couldn't imagine being thousands of miles away while he was fighting for his life.
“Either come with me, or take me back to the hotel,” she decided, her spine straightening and determination settling over her. “I'm not leaving you, Javier. We're in this together, for better or for worse, no matter what.”
Like that moment when the shooting first started, time seemed to slow, and his hands were cradling her face again, his eyes locked on hers and a thousand words passing between them without either of them saying a thing.
“Just when I thought I couldn't love you more,” he said, and then she was in his arms again, and the next thing she knew, they were back at the hotel, and it didn't feel quite so scary anymore.
It was in those tenuous moments, when it seemed that their entire future hung in the balance, that she came to a very important conclusion: if they could get through this, they could get through anything, and they could do it together.