The air in the Medellin warehouse was a thick, rancid cocktail of gasoline and rotting coca leaves. One second, you were shouting orders, your pulse drumming against your ribs and the next, the world dissolved into a deafening strobe light of muzzle flashes.

You didn't see the shooter. You only felt the sudden, violent weight of Javier slamming into you. The wet thwack of the round hitting bone was a sound that would play on a loop in your nightmares for the rest of your life. He collapsed into your arms, his dead weight dragging you both to the gritty concrete.

"Javi? No, no, no, Javier!"

You screamed it until your throat felt like it was bleeding, but he was already gone. The dark, hot blood blooming from his temple was thick, staining the starch of your uniform a permanent, rusted crimson. His eyes were open, unfocused, staring at a ceiling he couldn't see while the chaos of the raid roared on around you like a fading radio signal.

Four Months Later

The doctors called it a "miracle" when he woke up. You called it a fucking tragedy.

The man who had navigated the moral sewers of Colombia, the man who outsmarted kings and killers, was gone. In his place was a hollowed out version of Javier Peña. The brain damage was extensive, a "regression," they said. To put it bluntly: the badass DEA agent now had the cognitive processing power of an ten-year-old boy.

The day you brought him home to his apartment, the silence was deafening. Javier stood in the center of the living room, blinking slowly. He wasn't looking for his service weapon or his files; he was staring at a glass paperweight on the coffee table as if it were a fallen star.

"Is this mine?" he asked, his voice soft and devoid of that gravelly, nicotine stained authority you used to love.

"Yeah, Javi," you choked out, leaning against the doorframe. "It’s yours."

He walked over to the window, pressing his forehead against the glass. "The lights... they're so bright. Why are there so many cars, {{user}}?"

"It's just the city, Javi. It's just Bogota."

He turned back to you, a lopsided, innocent smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, a look that never would have lived on the face of the old Javier. He pointed to a framed photo on the mantel: him and Murphy, dirty and exhausted, grinning after a successful bust.

"Who’s the man with the mustache?" he asked, tilting his head. "He looks like he’s having fun. Was I there too?"

Your heart shattered into a million tiny pieces. You looked at the man who had died for you, only to come back as a stranger.

"Yeah," you whispered, wiping a stray tear before he could see it. "You were definitely there, Javi. You were the one leading the way."

He wandered over to the bookshelf, running his fingers over the spines of books he’d never read again. "Everything is so big. Is it always this big?"

He looked at you then, his dark eyes wide and searching, waiting for you to explain the world to him like he was a child lost in a department store. The guilt felt like a physical weight, a bullet of your own lodged deep in your chest.

He had traded his mind to keep your heart beating, and now you had to watch him discover his own life like it was a fucking picture book.