Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Tin Man 'verse. Nothing and no one. Because (at the moment) I'm playing only with the Sci-Fi original characters.
It was a little known fact, but Wyatt Cain hated the cold. Hated it nearly as much as he did Zero, or the Sorceress. And he grumbled silently about the fact that the journey into DG's past had led them into such a frozen wasteland.
Mostly he used his thoughts of the evils of cold to push away the thoughts of DG's true identity. He could live in denial, if only for a little while longer. He liked it there, it was warm.
The truck began to make odd squeaky, scratchy metallic noises then. Sounds no proper vehicle should make. On instinct he asked DG about the noise, she seemed far more comfortable with mechanical contraptions than he ever would be. Even pieces of junk such as this one, made of glue and toothpicks.
Unfortunately, she was as ignorant as he in this instance. He called over his shoulder to check on Zipperhead and Furball. He wasn't sure why he did it, he'd only sworn to protect DG. By all accounts the other two shouldn't even matter to him. So why did he check on their welfare?
Ignoring the nagging question, he ordered DG to stay inside the cab, and climbed out to assess the problem. He knew she'd follow his command, at least this once, but most likely only because she wouldn't want to brave the biting cold if she didn't have to.
His hat nearly flew off his head the instant he stepped out of the warm (by comparison) truck. He'd had to clamp a hand on the worn leather brim to shove it tighter on. And then he'd half walked, half clung to the truck, as he moved around the front of the vehicle. Of course at one point his foot went directly into the seemingly only slush puddle on the entire mountain, so now his sock was squishing inside his truck. Wasn't that just fantastic?
Glue and toothpicks! When he got back to Central City he was going to wring Demilo's scrawny neck and then send him to DG for lessons in proper vehicle upkeep. Wait, scratch that, there was no way in this frozen hell he was allowing the sleaze in the same room as her. Cain made a noise that was a mixture of a groan, a grunt and a roar, in anger and annoyance. And not just because he'd had to put his hands straight into the snow, and didn't have gloves. There was no way to fix a broken axle, without parts, tools or a jacking mechanism. Let alone on an icy mountain road in the middle of a blizzard.
He grabbed the icy pin that held the sides of the truck closed, and pulled. Doing his best to ignore the icy bite of frozen metal on his bare palm. Zipperhead and Furball stuck their heads out of their blanket cocoons, the former clueless and the latter all too knowing.
With a sarcastic growl of a statement he urged them to get a move on, they'd have to continue their trek on foot. And with a teeth baring grimace, he stomped up to the cab. He swiftly had DG out, and wrapped in a blanket he'd pulled from the nest in back of the truck. If his arms lingered around her a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary, neither he nor DG mentioned it. Nor did they mention the frisson of awareness that passed between them in the brief instant their eyes had met before he'd looked away.
Damn it, the cold wind buffeting them as they began their march was freezing valued areas of his body.