4My last Thomas & Friends fic for a while, sorry my fans.
:(
I just want to prioritize my more prominent and adored fics, which I have been ignoring for a while. Apologies to those who are waiting for those stories. I promise I will update them in due course.
This oneshot is based off a certain scene in Calling All Engines.
Warnings for really dark thoughts.
Fall
Fall.
That word had so many meanings in its seemingly narrow crux.
First of all, the season of Autumn, where harsh winds blew into his cold firebox. When the cruel and unsympathetic breezes pulled at his rusty couplings, the moist in the oxidised currents further corroding his mechanical parts. When they started disintegrating molecule by molecule, it itched slightly at first, keeping him gritty and miserable for all hours of the day, and robbed him of several hours of sleep. He would lie awake at night, tears falling down his sooty, grimy, humiliated face as silent whispers of pleas flew out from his smokestack and towards the faraway stars. Towards Heaven.
Then the corrosion started aching, and he, the once proud James, now drearily beseeched his keepers day after the day to keep him in better care. They'd laugh and decline his requests, leaving him to suffer dreadfully, his torment increasing with every passing week.
James remembered how he had scolded Henry, when the big green engine had moaned about his brethren's apathy towards his early plights of illness. Now as James disintegrated bit by bit as a fairground display, he feared so much for his friend's wellbeing. Those who remained out of the Fat Controller's original seven had not heard a word about Henry's status in years. The Maker, it seemed, was not going to play kind with their tomfoolery anymore.
Which brings up another meaning for Fall.
An irredeemable mistake which scarred one's life, sometimes seemingly forever.
How many times had he and his brethren acted like enemies to their own home state? Smashing up coaches, and other rolling stock. Ruining property by refusing to abstain from their own vices. Disappointing the humans who loved them by their petty squabbles and refusal of duties.
They weren't useful. Or reliable. Not even were they lovable now.
They had crushed the hands that had nurtured them, wrecked the system that provided for them, and now they were paying for it with their looks, their bodies, and ultimately their lives.
They had truly fallen from divine grace to the inescapable pits of condemnation.
The final meaning for Fall.
Doom. Despair. Derangement.
James knew they were all screwed, in all honesty.
The Fat Controller had been run out of business, run out of town, and himself had fallen out of grace with his own family, in particular tragic mention with his own grandchildren.
Stephen and Bridgette had not taken the damnation of the lives that they loved with all the purity of their childish hearts very well.
And so the Fat Controller had self-denounced his own knighthood, and had fled from the face of the world in shame, grief, and heartbreak. He had been wrong. He had always been wrong.
James' friends, his brothers and sisters, had disappeared one by one, or had simply lost their wills, their minds, or perhaps worst of all, their souls. Diesels now dominated the railway, and the red mogul engine was most cursed enough to be situated near his old line. Every day, those damned new-fangled machinery would pass by, jeering and hooting in barbaric and sadistic pleasure at their successful takeover of the railway, the world, and their finally complete and long-fulfilled genocide of the old steam engines. The beings who had hearts that bled steam and love were now just fairy tales and aging, fading relics of uncivilized eras long gone by. And it was horrible.
And it couldn't be further than the truth as well.
James and his family had treasured every day, every scuffle, every reward and success. They had given 100% effort to learn and to rise above their failures, with always the seemingly neverending hope always shining as a beacon of the day that would come to pass next. But no longer. Steam engines were disappearing – dying – far and fast across the Earth. They'd be nothing more than myths in another generation's lifetime.
And that made even the strongest minds snap.
James had thought it a cruel prank when kids of today's generation had come to him, laughing that the old blue, faithful Edward had spent his last few hours screaming profanities at everything and everyone in the world. That the classic old North Western had finally cracked his smokebox, and gave up even his honour and code to the demons of destruction to take apart and reap upon. And every day it hurt to think about, that even archangels and saints could abandon their ways to walk amongst the ever burning, ever agonising flames.
And so that reminiscing thought as he mouldered away another day was what finally made James – the once proud number 5 red engine of the Island of Sodor – snap.
He laughed, and screamed. And screamed and cried. And hooted and yelled and cursed and screamed. An endless cycle that signalled a nearing end for him. And so the scrappers came.
And through the barbaric surgery, the mechanical damnation and the technological euthanasia, the red mogul felt all of his metal limbs ripped apart, sliced and diced, and melted away to nothing more than crappy slag. And through it all, his psychotic laughs and tragic screams never once ceased.
Only when God's light took him to live amongst all of his brethren once more, from the first steam engine to the last one ever built, did James finally find the one thing he had always been missing from his life, and from the lives of those whom he had always held close to his heart dearly.
Freedom.
Freedom – from everything.
