#anyway!! maia hi maia i hope you read all the way here bc i forgot to THANK YOOUUU <3 for sending this it was a lot of fun to write

[baodurs]

29 or 40 for sab and kent pls !!!

29. things you said in the rain

Sabrina is staring forlornly at Aeon’s rain-soaked parking lot, plotting a course around the puddles that will hopefully spare the cuffs of her uniform pants, when the drizzle picks back up into a respectable shower. With a sigh, she resigns herself to braving it before it gets worse, scowling ineffectually at the mist. She hikes her bag over her head, steps outside, and feels the rain hit her face anyway.

Across the parking lot is a figure also clad in Aeon’s black uniform, though they’ve wisely accessorized with a matching umbrella rather than a haphazard backpack. Sabrina, fearing that they might turn around and catch her watching them like an envious wet cat, ducks her head and strides quickly forward. It takes only a few steps for them to call out—

“Sabrina?”

The voice is Kent’s. She turns to find him still some distance away, umbrella raised in greeting and invitation. There are enough wet strands of hair clinging to her cheeks that his offer is more mitigation than salvation, but she jogs gratefully towards him regardless.

The way he leans forward, with one foot off the curb, to catch her beneath the umbrella just a moment before she would have reached it herself shouldn’t make her feel like a romantic lead in a period drama, but it does. When she notices that the umbrella has swapped hands, and he now holds it in his left to accommodate the side she’d approached from, Sabrina feels positively wooed.

Close as the umbrella forces them, she has to tilt her head back to say, “Hey,” and see his nod in response.

“On your way home?” She asks, and beams at him, relieved, when he nods again. “Good. Thanks for the escort.”

Another nod, this one a little slower. He looks both uncertain and amused. “I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t planning to walk with you.”

“Sure, but I didn’t know how far the offer extended,” Sabrina says. “Maybe it was only good for the parking lot.”

“Would it have mattered, then?” Kent raises an eyebrow. “You’d still have had to walk home in the rain.”

She laughs. “Not that I’m ungrateful, but it barely matters now.” It’s hard to judge the state of her uniform with its black fabric, so she gestures to her face instead, where a tilt of her head dislodges a stray droplet that slides down her nose, and her hair is already escaping its bun in wet tangles.

Kent’s eyes follow the raindrop’s path to the corner of her mouth. He’s suppressing a grin, she thinks, but it utterly, unnaturally vanishes when he meets her eyes again. “You’re right,” he says blankly. “See you.”

He maneuvers around her to step forward. He’s kind enough to pause, holding the umbrella back so it still shields her, but it does force her to concede the point and catch up with him.

“Fine, okay, I deserved that,” she mutters, and hears him chuckle. Sabrina winds up half in front of him, to conserve umbrella space, and though she knows the way home from Aeon perfectly well, his presence at her back and to her side, just in the corner of eye, feels like he’s steering her. He matches her stride and nudges her around puddles before they reach them. Belatedly, she jokes, “I thought I clarified that I wasn’t being ungrateful.”

“You did. And you’re very welcome,” he teases, and it takes effort not to turn her head to catch a glimpse of the smile she hears so clearly. “It’s my pleasure.”

They fall into silence for the rest of the walk. A few times, Sabrina pretends to drag her feet or step awkwardly over a puddle, just to see if he’ll fall out of step with her. He never does. She’s not sure what the point of these little tests is, but she likes that he passes them, whatever that means. She has given up by the time they reach his house, where her abrupt stop is genuine.

Sabrina sees the invisible boundary of Nick’s resting brainrange like a thick red line across the pavement. If he’s as close to them as possible while still being inside his house, she can only take one more step before he’ll hear her. She doesn’t know if he’s home—but that’s not the point. Today, she wants to linger on this side not for the privacy, but for the company.

She turns to look at Kent, and reminisces on that moment in the Aeon parking lot when she’d felt like an Austen heroine. Right now, smiling at him reluctantly, she feels trapped in a teenage romance, lingering on the porch after her first date, hoping for a kiss goodnight.

God, a date? She thinks. Really, Sabrina, he only walked you home.

Kent is staring at her, brow furrowed, and she sighs.

“Right,” she says. “Well, thanks again. I know I’m already soaked, but that walk would have been miserable without an umbrella.” She takes one step out from under its shelter, bracing herself for a sprint down the block, but pauses when she doesn’t feel the rain.

She blinks. It hasn’t stopped, though it’s diminished back to a tolerable drizzle. The culprit is Kent, still holding the umbrella over her head, having stepped forward to stay beside her under its protection.

“I said I’d walk you home,” he says.

“You said you’d walk with me.” Sabrina’s voice comes slowly. “And you did. And now you can go inside, and my house is just down there.” She gestures vaguely behind her, but doesn’t point out that the rain is hardly strong enough now to warrant an umbrella, for fear that he might agree.

And he does seem to agree, nodding decisively, though only to the last part of her sentence. “Good,” he says. “So I’ll walk you.”

“Okay. Good,” she echoes, grinning in spite of herself, like she hadn’t been arguing against it.

Neither of them takes a step at first. Sabrina looks down, running the toe of her shoe along the telepathic boundary. She watches herself cross it, and waits to feel different.

But there is Kent, right at her back. She feels him step to the side and instinctively follows, glancing back down to see a small puddle where she’d nearly stood. She was so distracted by her imaginary red paint that she hadn’t noticed.

“Thanks,” she calls over her shoulder. For guiding her just now or for walking her in general or for something else entirely, she isn’t sure.

The word feels final, so Kent lets it hang until they’ve reached her doorway. This is where she’d be kissed on the cheek, if this walk had been the romantic outing she’d imagined back by his yard. Instead, he follows behind her until he’s within umbrella-range of the doorway, and she’s close enough to duck beneath it’s shelter. She’s grateful for that, too—Sabrina isn’t sure she feels sturdy enough for a romantic overture just now.

But when Kent tilts the umbrella forward at just the right angle to save her from the thin sheets of water still sliding down the doorway’s frame, she thinks her heart could stop. When she sees him wait until she’s clear to swap the handle back to his right hand, she thinks it would have been kinder if he’d kissed her in the rain.

She stops herself from saying “thank you” again, and Kent leaves with only a nod, his grin as sharp as it is gentle. Sabrina watches him go until the black umbrella fades from view, then lingers in the quiet doorway.

She smothers a giggle against the still damp fabric of her sleeve, not wanting to break the silence he left. It feels like him, and it follows her inside like something familiar and warm at her back, guiding her up the steps.