waterfall inquiry: chapter five {javier peña x reader}
pairing: javier peña x fem!reader
summary: a party, a kiss, a kitchen -- and lots of questions.
warning: intimacy, reader is described as being shorter than Javi + having dimples, allusions to period-typical sexism toward women
gif credit: @javi-gutierrez
a/n: *mulan gif* I LIVE!!!!!! thank you all for your patience as i have been dealing with fandom burnout and some serious irl things. as it’s been so long, feedback and reblogs are especially appreciated/encouraged. hugs <3
series masterlist | cross posted to AO3 (link in bio)
The two of you, in a place like this.
How strange, and yet not so.
No, he thinks, taking another sip of too-sweet champagne. It’s always been like this, for him, both within and without. Bubbles fizz on his tongue — rowdy incandescence. Always too much of something to be anything else, and yet labels stick to him like the bloodstains, invisible, that grace the palms of his hands. He cannot wash them off.
Hero. Asshole. Son. Life-taker. Savior. Forgotten.
Javier’s dark eyes seek you and find you — he that seeks shall find — and a rivulet of warmth seeps through him at the sight. The shoulders do not loosen, nor does his jaw lose its tense set, but something breaks through. A softness in his gaze, or perhaps even something more hidden (that of his heart).
It is now that the rabble of the crowd — carouses of politicians, military folk, they’re all the same, aren’t they? rolling dice with other people’s lives for their own petty livings — pierces him. Javi has forgotten until now how much he has grown to treasure the silence of your understanding. How quiet it is between you two; how unforced.
Someone, something brushes his shoulder and he turns, the glass leaving imprints into the delicate skin on his fingers. he’s more used to paper bullets these days. The sharpness, the noise, the lingering taste of fermented wine on his lips and the flash of fabric that he knows belongs to you from somewhere across the room is overwhelming in a grounded sort of way. It is enough, for now. The pounding in his head that for once has nothing to do with alcohol reminds Javier that he is still alive.
And maybe, he thinks as he hears your laugh ring out a tone above the rest, something for which to stay.
********************
two days earlier
Today — tonight? — the two of you are exploring somewhere new, temporarily disposing of the known in order to wade further out, to a solid sandbar in the midst of the uneasy slosh of routine.
It was Javier’s idea, presented for your consideration via post-it note taped to the inside of your desk drawer when you returned from a meeting.
Dinner at your place tonight? Walk by my office if yes.
P.S. I miss you.
It’s extraordinary, you think, the amount of missing one can cram into the hours between sunrise and noon.
The post-its themselves had started based on one your impulses, a residual effect of a reckless American youth that had been so denied to you (no mistakes permitted in the library, no spontaneity in the arms of a necessary lover).
There was so much wrapped up in your fingers the day you had penned the first neon-tinged note. Your fingers were shaking, trembling from the aching release of adrenaline and the wealth of knowledge that his kisses imparted to your lips.
Just hours earlier (but could it have been minutes) you had woken up in his bed for the second time, stirring awake to find his cock hard against your ass and his hand on your breast. Javier had taken you apart and put you back together again with methodical precision, filling you from behind with heavy strokes that made your thighs tremble, his steady palm (the calluses burned against your sweat-slicked skin) prying your legs open to keep the waves of pleasure at bay until he saw fit to release them.
And so it was with shaking hands and the taste of the two of you mixed together on your lips that you had scribbled a note, something silly about his tie, or his suit, or about the way he sounds when he says your name when he’s buried deep inside.
Discreetly fastened to the midsection of a report, you had dropped it off at his desk with a sly smile, ignoring Fiestl’s puzzled glance when you reminded Javier to read the entire thing, Agent Peña.
He hadn’t mentioned it in the days following, and anxiety, wet and clammy, had stolen over you. The fear — once so resoundingly set aside by the unavoidable occurrence of his lips against yours at every opportunity — doused you, trickling icy-hot doubt from the back of your neck to the small of your back.
What if he was what all of the replacements told you he could be? What if he was just the same, same, same as all the rest — and you were destined to be nothing more than their blip, a singular bright spot in rearview mirror as they went on with life without you? The wanting may have been sincere, but how can wanting be real when they never crave to stay?
The next day: another useless translation, another angry call from someone grumbling about the peace deal. As though you could do anything about it, you thought with a roll of your eyes. Pressing the phone between your ear and your neck, you nodded absently, assuring the person on the other side that you’re taking down their every word to pass along to the Ambassador.
That’s another joke, and not for the first time you wondered why they were calling you — you haven’t met with the Ambassador personally since you first arrived in this country without a savior.
A gentle chorus of mmhmms and of courses fled from your lips and you picked at an imaginary spot on the desk beneath you, fingers drawing a pattern vaguely reminiscent of some fabric you had seen a local wearing when you had stopped at the market on your way home from work the previous day.
It had been there when you hung up the phone: a post-it in a shade of faded yellow, words written by a distinctly male hand scribbled across the slim paper. It was a lucky risk that the words didn’t run off (blanching the tiny square) and mix with unwrit phrases of your own.
The sticky had adhered to the inside of your finger when you picked it up, realizing with a chenille thrill that although this was not the first time you had seen his handwriting, this was the first time his hand had moved the pen for you, and for you alone.
Your thumb rubbed the barely-dry ink, a small smile forming on your face as you imagined him bending over his desk, jotting down the first thing that came to mind before striding down the hallway to sneak the forbidden communiqué on your desk while you were unawares.
There's something sweet about that. something precious about how Javier had taken part in the little game, about how his handwriting was messy, as though he was compelled to take action before his rational soul outsmarted his heart.
(Javier’s heart, you know, is more than the sum of his losses).
But that he is here — now what? Here, in your heart, in the spot that takes up so much space. No one had warned you about that, but if they had, you would not have listened anyway. You don’t know this, but you and him color in the same lines. Is this why you are both so good at what you do? Two listeners who make no promises. It’s almost voyeurisitc, your jobs, and the self-conditioned selfish mind vaguely wonders if that’s something Javier would be into.
Javier. Post-it. Office. Dinner.
Oh, the things your mother would say if she could see you now.
You walk by his office, waltzing with one hand in fear’s clutches and the other on pride’s waist.
__________
“In another life, I live in New York, and I have this 1950s style kitchen. You know, checked cloth and white and chrome.”
“That’s ugly.”
You shrug. “Yeah, maybe. But it’s not about that. It’s the social commentary of it all — repurposing the housewife aesthetic into one for a working woman living alone.”
Dark curls fringe around the nape of his neck and his hair’s still damp from the shower. He likes to shower right after work, he told you tonight. Get the smell of the Embassy off of him.
The Embassy doesn’t smell, you’d teased. Maybe that’s just you. I’ll have to start addressing my reports to Agent Stinky.
It was a childish joke, one brimming with affectionate attention, but he’d still laughed. You like that about Javier. You feel young and old and precisely as you are with him.
In this moment, he leans against the counter. Lithe fingers fiddle with the glass in his hands, but only just.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks. Dark brown eyes dart between your face and the slightly undone buttons on your blouse. Weight shifts from toe to heel and back again.
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
The hum of discord or assent perishes in the vinegar ether of your linoleum kitchen as he turns away from you and back to his — your — stove, stirring whatever’s in the pot.
A sip of lukewarm beer and then — “do you always sit on the counter?”
“Why is it any business of yours?” you ask. You & him both are surprised by the impetuousness bursting at the seams of your painted lips; the wooden spoon stutters in its steady clockwise rotations.
He walks with an uneven gait: Javier takes the interruption of your youth in his perpetually off-balance stride. He does not run his hands through his hair (you wish he did). Javier rests his hip on the counter, a lopsided smile matching the rest of him in awkwardly beautiful symmetry (you want him to always gaze at you like you are the one who feeds him).
“Well, just wondering if this is okay.”
The kiss steals your breath not because your ankles hook behind his back and his hands are on your bare thighs and his tongue sweeps across your lip but because you are too conscious of reality for reality itself to be real. Javier is a child with a soda pop: he shakes you up until you’re fizzing fit to shatter from the pressure. You don’t believe in fate, but maybe you do when you whisper his name like you were born to do — like his name and your breath are all the same, both sign and symbol of your destiny.
And maybe Javier is really only a man in your kitchen, kissing you like a rom com lover. Any minute now, the ardor of shared desire will begin to burn,1 and he’ll pull away with sheepish shoulders and swollen lips. He’ll not stay the night, not wishing to tempt the lady beyond her exertion, and because he’s a gentlemen.
But rom com men don’t carry guns in the back waistband of their jeans. Rom com men don’t drown tumblrs of whiskey, seco. Rom com men don’t grind against women twelve years their junior in a film-covered kitchen counter government-issued apartment.
Javier Peña’s not a rom com man. So maybe he’ll stay the night instead, and take you right here on the kitchen counter until the neighbors — your officemates — make jokes about your very loud lover in the office tomorrow.
Maybe .
But what is real?
Is this okay? as his fingers trail the soft skin of your belly
Is this okay? as his lips claim your five sense with a kiss
Is this okay? as his weight pushes you further back on the counter
Everything is okay when you don’t know what’s real.
****
He’s eating the leftovers at his desk.
The intimacy of it all should be illegal.
Your tupperware, your stove, his desk. A triad of lessons learned in the method of loving a man. What can hold the nature of your love (questions of a child who loved too much for her body). Now you know that is the smallest containers, the throw-away things of post-its and plastic and behind-the-ear kisses that makes the tension in shoulders abate by just the slightest bit.
Where did he learn to love a woman? A lecherous part of your brain supplies an easy answer — it’s the all the prostitutes, of course. His body count is comparable to…oh, you don’t know whose, but you’re sure it’s anything but modest.
Of course, you try to to tell yourself as you listlessly add sugar to your already over-sweet coffee, not that it matters. He can have fucked the president of the United States and you wouldn’t care. He can do whatever he wants. It would be weird if he hadn’t, right? You should expect these things, when loving a man.
And then you remember. Leftovers. Tucking you into bed. Sending you home with one of his shirts after a weekend in his bed.
No, this is a man who earned a woman’s love.
He’s never mentioned a mother, a sister, an aunt or two. Not even a past girlfriend, although, you admit with a self-deprecating secret smile, he must have been quite the heartbreaker in high school.
You know nothing about him.
(You know nothing about him except the fact that he likes to shower when he gets home from work and owns an impressive collection of white t-shirts and feels guilty about not being able to quit cigarettes and not saving more lives and not going home when he should and works best in the midmorning hours and likes to kiss before saying good night).
Maybe, just maybe, you can be okay with that. How does one measure the making of a man? In years, in moments, in chronological order? Who gets to say what composes his tender, wrecked heart?
Fiestel’s sharp cough interrupts your thoughts. “Sorry,” he mumbles, hands stuffed awkwardly in suit pockets. “You’re uh - you’re blocking the coffee.”
Profuse apologies and sibilant expressions of embarrassment: you move aside to let the man gain access to the shitty coffee no one in your office can live without. You like Fiestel; he’s one of the one who still cares and someone never loses a softly acerbic wit. He’s a few years older than you, but not so old you can’t both commiserate about the dearth of promotions and trade idealisms.
“You going to that party in a few days?” he asks as he fills up a chipped navy blue mug. “Supposed to be quite the event.”
You raise one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Not sure yet.”
“You should,” he encourages, turning back around and leaning against the counter. “Get out and about a little bit. If you like,” he adds, gesturing with his mug, “you can come with me. My wife’s back in the States and I could use a friendly face with me to get through it.”
Frown lines carve a path between your brows. “Won’t she mind? You taking another woman, I mean?”
Fiestel smiles into his cup. “Nah. She’ll probably be happy she doesn’t have to do it herself, honestly. Hates these things.”
You take another sip, ignoring the assault of bitter coffee and acrid sugar on your tongue as you consider. It’s not like you could go with Javier, and you learned early on that it as always better to appear attached when attending these sorts of events. Even better that Fiestel has a wedding band, you mused.
“Yeah, okay,” you agree, matching his own expression of sagging relief. “Thanks, Fiestel.”
“Call me Chris,” he urges, pushing himself away from the counter. “And really, thank you. You’re doing me a favor.” He gives you another, more rueful smile. “I’ll catch you later, okay? Peña’ll have my ass if I don’t finish going through the latest Cali files by the end of the day.”
Peña.
Oh god. Javier. You had almost — but never fully — forgotten.
He’ll understand, you reason.
Won’t he?.
—-
The two of you are always interrupting each other:
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask first —“
“— it’s okay, baby, I promise —“
“ — but he needed to know and —“
“ — don’t want you by yourself anyway —“
“ — hope you’re not angry —“
“ — too many dirty old men at these things —“
“Dirty old men like you?”
Javier risks a kiss to your temple and presses his lips together in barely-contained mirth. “Very funny.”
You look up at him, a dimple appearing in your cheeks despite the tension gutting your stomach. “Thanks. I thought so.”
(The two of you, always interrupting each other in ways that make perfect sense).
He takes a step back you can regard each other properly. You miss the scent of him immediately: cigarettes and aftershave and starched shirts. You miss him when he is right in front of you; what kind of love is that?
You don’t know.
You don’t have time to be scared of that right now, though. You’ve only got a few minutes to steal in the storage basement before someone else bustles in and Javier’s already talking about how it’s fine and of course he’s not angry.
(He does not say he could take you in Fiestel’s stead, but his hands find yours and grasp them instead. What kind of man is this?)
“I have to go,” he finishes, taking a deep breath and sighing heavily. “Another useless fucking meeting — no, no don’t laugh,” he says, humor tiptoeing through the rough frustration in his voice, his shoulders, the leaden weight of the tie around his neck. “I’m busy with work the next few nights” he continues. “But I’ll see in at the party, okay?”
And then he does something bold: he kisses you, full and sweet, like a rom com lover. Like a rom com lover with nothing else on the line except the girl in his arms.
Like a liar, because Javier Peña is not a rom com lover and you both know it.
You wouldn’t want him if he was.
