#boco

A very happy holidays to you all, courtesy of Edward Rosemore, Bo "BoCo" Cortsen, Thomas Billington, and William (Bill) & Benjamin (Ben) Bagnall! <3 Because in my heart (and especially in my human AU), Edward will always have three sons, even if Thomas isn't always so thrilled to be legally related to the chaos twins LMAOOO (But hey, maybe they'll all warm up to each other someday, you never know ;P At least he tolerates them for Eddie's sake... sometimes lol) And as rambunctious as all three can be at times, Edward loves them all so very very much, as well as his loving and devoted hubby BoCo, and couldn't imagine life without any of them. ^^ My ramblings aside, I had a lot of fun w/this!! Eddie, BoCo and Thomas' designs are still a little rough (and might change a bit in the future), but I couldn't resist drawing them all together as a lil family for the holidays <33 So here they all are!! ^^ I hope you guys enjoy! And I also genuinely hope you all had a wonderful holiday season filled with all the things you love and enjoy! :D I had a nice, quiet and wonderful one with my family, and thanks to my amazing bestie (you know who you are <3) I now have both of my beloved bees hehe

Enough of the fleet, through sheer stubborn endurance or the chilling apathy of the Gilded Ague, managed to force their mutated limbs back behind their steel plating. The sheds are full again, the roads are populated, and the engines sit on their wheels once more.

But they are still changed.

They are still not trusted with passengers.

After all, who knows if they were in the last stage.

Their orange eyes burn like dying embers in the dark, and their jaws remain fixed in wide, watchful grinds. They do not speak of what happened, as almost tempting it is for some of them to not stay in their forms that were so much like their original ones—

—and they refuse to run at speed.

And then there's BoCo.

The big Metrovick diesel had always possessed a steady, unshakeable patience that set him apart from the frantic, boastful mainline engines. When the ague struck, BoCo had simply closed his eyes, let his diesel block cool to a heavy, sluggish idle, and forced his multi-jointed, fur-covered legs back into his underframe with a series of dull, sickening thuds. He had emerged back onto his six-wheeled and four-wheeled bogies, his green paint dull and streaked with dried oil, his orange eyes burning softly behind his grille. He was paralyzed by the same cold terror as the rest, but the work on Edward’s branchline was piling up, and someone had to clear the backlog before the rotting ballast claimed the track entirely.

The morning air was thick with a greasy, yellow fog as BoCo rumbled out of the Wellsworth sheds. Coupled to a long string of Troublesome Trucks, he felt the heavy, dead weight behind him. The trucks were unusually quiet today; even the most mischievous slate wagons had lost their mocking laughter, their wooden sides warped and groaning under the strain of cargo that had sat too long in the damp air.

They rolled down the branchline with a rhythmic, mournful *click-clack* that echoed off the grey stone cutting walls, passing through fields where the sheep stood frozen in the pastures, staring blindly toward the horizon.

BoCo kept his governor set low, his diesel engine humming a deep, resonant bass note that vibrated through the damp rails. He told himself it was just a routine shunt, a simple duty to keep the island from completely collapsing in on itself.

But as they approached the deep timbered stretch near the old viaduct—where the trees grew dense and pressed inward like a crowd of silent, watching spectators—the atmosphere shifted. The hair on the back of his driver's neck stood up, and BoCo’s internal sensors registered an immediate, unexplainable spike in ambient heat just beyond the treeline.

"I don't know about this old boy..."

Then, he saw red.

Half-hidden in the gloom of the dense pines, standing awkwardly among the ferns and rotting roots, was a shape that defied every standard classification on the railway. It was massive, hulking, and profoundly wrong.

It was an engine in... THAT form.

To BoCo's orange-tinted vision, the silhouette was terrifyingly familiar. It possessed a wide, flared coal bunker and a heavy, cylindrical boiler painted a deep, chipped red, but the lower half was a nightmare of biological distortion.

Fourteen thick, jointed legs, covered in matted ash-grey fur and tipped with black, curved claws, were splayed out awkwardly against the moss. Its faceplate was entirely obscured by a tangle of overgrown fur and weeping black grease.

The engine was huddled against the trunk of a massive oak, its front limbs curled inward like hands, clutching desperately at its chest plates as if trying to tear the heavy iron away from a heart that didn't belong there.

BoCo’s diesel block stuttered, his heavy frame shuddering as he instinctively slowed the train to a crawl. He stared through the fog at the towering red monstrosity in the woods, his brow furrowing as he tried to cross-reference every engine registry, every scrap heap, and every heritage asset on Sodor.

*I don't know you,* BoCo thought, a cold shiver running through his circuits. *You were never an engine on this line. Who are you?*

Before BoCo's driver could sound his horn or force his compressed air brakes to voice a warning, the creature in the trees jerked violently. The fourteen grey-legged undercarriage shifted with a sickening, wet crunch against the forest floor.

With a low, rattling wheeze that sounded suspiciously like a man sobbing through a broken regulator, the big red tank engine turned its hidden face away, scrambling backward into the dense thicket. It moved with frantic, desperate speed, crashing through the briars and disappearing completely into the weeping shadows of the woods before BoCo could utter a single word...

"The... The Fat Controller needs to hear about this..."

Next Morning:

Misty Island Logging Company No.4 "Ethel"

Mr. Logan Miller --the owner-- saw a great deal, but when he returned from overseas with a 4-4-0, the mechanical engineer put his head in his hands. "How are we gonna run that," he said, and then he pointed to the 70 ft radius curve leading out of the dockyard, "on that?" "Very carefully, I expect," Mr. Miller said. Ethel's was too fast for her own good. She, Ferdinand, and Gladys have perhaps the same tractive effort, but Ferdinand and Gladys can output that tractive effort at 2 or 3 miles per hour slogging up a grade. Ethel can not run 2 or 3 miles per hour. She'll stall, or she'll go faster, but she won't run that slowly. and with a comfortable speed of 40 or 50 miles per hour on tracks where you'd be very lucky to go 20 mph, she is definitely struggling. "hoist her boiler up on some trucks and run her number one driver as a flywheel. We need another geared engine," Logan said. "No, please," begged Ethel, "I'll try harder!" "I wonder if we could just make your wheels smaller," said the mechanical engineer. "Or maybe we could use a booster truck on your pilot or tender. That rickety old yarding crane might have some cylinders we could use."

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