A year and a half ago, Dom would've never dreamed he'd be here.

Fresh on the run in Mexico, his family fractured and his heart ten kinds of shattered, he'd thought he'd never come home.

If he was smart, he would've ditched the Supra the second he got out of LA. But then, if he was smart, he would've done a lot of things differently. Especially now that he knows what he does.

He's not smart, though. At least not when it comes to him.

So, he didn't ditch it. He raced some cabrón in La Jolla that thought he was the shit for his Chevy Chevelle, and put the Supra in storage before he crossed the border. After that, it was just one long series of dirt roads and villas getting smaller in his rearview, until he ended up in a snake pit of a town south of Ensenada.

It was two months before he risked calling home.

He was just planning to check in on everybody, to see if Jesse and Vince were okay. Last time he'd seen the kid, he'd been lying on the sidewalk with a couple holes in him, and Vince hadn't been in much better shape when that helicopter had taken him away.

That was the plan.

Then Mia told him he could come home. She didn't even give him time to argue, just launched into explaining everything that had happened.

Jesse had survived the shooting. Mia had kept him stable, and Leon had gotten there in time to race them to the hospital. He'd saved Jesse's life.

Mia was doing well, too. She'd moved on, found herself a doctor. She told Dom he was smart, well-off, kind…he was good to her, and Dom figured that almost made him good enough for her

As for Letty, though…Letty had skipped town, Mia told him. Dom guessed he'd always known it would happen, just as soon as she figured out he wasn't what she wanted. He just wasn't sure if she figured it out before or after he figured out the same thing about her.

Part of him wanted to blame Brian for that, too. Because somewhere between Tijuana and Rosarito, he realized he'd figured it out. The way those crazy blue eyes had flashed after that first race; the way he'd grinned, cheeks flushed red and hair whipping wildly around his face when he'd smoked that Lambo on the Supra's test run; the way those lean, wiry muscles rolled smooth under his tan skin when the garage was just too damned hot for shirts.

He'd figured out what he wanted.

He'd just figured it out too late.

Brian was gone, Mia told him. In the wind. He'd skipped town right after Dom, and when he'd asked why, she'd told him.

He'd lost his badge. For letting Dom go that day, he'd lost his badge. And because the buster couldn't do anything by halves, he'd gone and gotten a warrant out for him, too. Aiding and abetting – and what the fuck is that, Dom thought, because he wasn't even a fugitive anymore.

Apparently, Brian had made sure of that. As if they hadn't owed him enough.

There hadn't been any prints on the Hondas; they'd all been wiped clean. And the truck driver wasn't talking, not after he'd plugged holes in a guy. Cops didn't tend to look too kindly on vigilante justice.

And Jesse and Vince…Brian had used his pull as a police officer while he still had it to get them priority treatment, and even if Dom wanted to hate him for being a cop, how the fuck could he do it when Brian used it to do things like that? And then to just throw it all away, to give him the keys and let him run…Dom thought he had to've known what would happen.

The fact that he did it anyway told Dom everything he needed to know about Brian O'Conner. He was family.

He is family.

And that's why, even though Dom's glad to be here with his team, getting ready to race a quarter mile of LA home turf, it feels like something's missing. Because something is. And the fact that Brian's the whole reason this is even possible, the whole reason his team is still together, isn't lost on Dom. He's keenly, painfully aware of it, and the mechanic in him as much as the man in him is screaming at him to fix it.

He needs to bring Brian back. He needs to make his family whole again, and fill that gaping hole that no one else seems to notice but him. He needs to make this right.

More than anything, though, he just needs to get his Buster back.