Author's Note: Written in response to prompting at comment_fic on lj. Prompt was "lost in the rain"

Fic:

Sierra saw him sitting. His hair was soaked and water was running down his face. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cover him. She wonder what it would taste like to drink the rain off of him, sipping the drops off his forehead.

But all this motion, all those decisions -- they seemed so hopelessly complicated. She smiled and said, "Victor."

He looked up, surprised. "Sierra," he smiled back.

They were silent for a long time.

Finally, Victor, wanting to offer her words, said, "I'm sitting." He smiled, and the smile was large.

She looked at him and said the first thing she could: "I can sit too." She smiled back.

They sat next to each other then, occasionally looking at each other with happy eyes. After a while, Sierra giggled, "I'm cold."

Victor said, "I'm cold too." They were smiling still even though they weren't happy to be cold.

A silence again. "You have water on you," Sierra said then.

Victor patted himself on the shirt and then the face. "Water," he agreed, grinning back at her.

There was something in Sierra's mind then, something hard and difficult. Something stretching her, worrying her. Some memory of what it was like to have an idea.

Finally, she spoke again, this time afraid, wondering if she was doing something awful, wondering if Victor would still smile after she said it, but trying still to be brave, "Maybe if we sit closer, we won't be as cold."

Victor looked at her blankly for a moment. But then he opened his body, and somehow he knew how to spread his arms and make his chest accessible for her to lean into, and then they were wrapped around each other, tight and snug. And though the water kept falling on them, they felt better. Sierra noticed that Victor seemed to feel better too, just like she did, and then she felt startled and scared, because that was too much, the thought was too big, to think about what Victor felt and whether it was connected to how she felt, and it would be so much easier if she could just go back to "Warmer now" and not think anything else. But she looked at his face and Victor was still smiling at her, so she swallowed her fear and went back to feeling his warmth.

Finally, Echo came up to them. "Everyone's worried about you guys. We have to get you back," she said.

They smiled back at her and didn't move from where they were snugly holding each other.

She looked at them and something like regret passed over her features. But she said, "It's not safe for you to be here like this. I have to ask. Would you like a treatment?"

Sierra and Victor looked at each other then, connected with their eyes, and then turned back to Echo. "Yes, a treatment," they both said.

As Echo led them back to their handlers, she wondered about that glance between them, that hesitation where there was supposed to be the instantaneous yes. She wondered if they were checking with each other, whether they were considering something before making a decision. She wondered for a moment if they were learning something new.

Either way, at least they finally got some time to be alone together, Echo thought. It was comforting, oddly, for Echo to think this about two compatriots who didn't have the sense to walk out of the rain but still had the sense to put the other first. She was becoming... invested in their love, as if their love were somehow a sign that she - that all of them - were more than empty vessels. That Echo's fullness of selves was not a malfunction, but something harder and truer.

She thought about this as they walked back together. She didn't reveal anything then, of course; she just told Victor and Sierra to hold hands while they were walking. For their own protection of course.