A/N This chapter happens in the spring when Autumn's 9. I decided to have her fall of her bike because I did as a kid, except the time I remember doing that, I was 7. When I was in high school, one of my friends fell off her bike and hurt her arm and so did a 5-year-old in a book I read. Autumn's kind of a mish-mash of all this, maybe, because I didn't hurt my arm in the same way as my friend and the book girl. Feel free to imagine what you like. I just scraped my arm, but the others each broke an arm. I have an old friend with kids who are autistic and one of them, the girl twin (she has a twin brother) cried when she hurt her ankle at a girl's club she and her younger sister attend.
It was a nice spring day, so Autumn was outside, riding her bike with her Thomas toy in the basket. Then, she hit a big stone and fell.
"My arm hurts!" Autumn said, pulling out her hanky with her other arm. She was sobbing, big tears coming from her eyes. "I need to wipe my eyeballs, because I feel the burn of tears.". She dabbed her eyes, then wiped her face and nose. Fresh tears welled up in her eyes, so she sniffled and sobbed into her hanky.
Autumn's mother found her daughter and asked, "Did you fall?"
"I-I h-hit a-a b-big s-stone w-with m-my b-bike," Autumn sobbed. "M-My a-arm h-hurts!".
"Where on your arm?"
"M-My w-wrist!"
Autumn and her mother walked home with her bike and her mother did what she could to comfort the girl until Autumn's arm was treated. When the girl stopped crying, she wiped her remaining tears, drying her cheeks and eyes, then blew her nose loudly, saying "I'm going to get the snot out of my nose.". She had switched her hanky for the tissue box when she got home because she could and it was really wet. Her face was all red from crying and her eyes were red and swollen.
Autumn stared dreamily at her Thomas poster and went to Sodor after her arm was treated.
Autumn landed on Sodor and went to Thomas. She gave him a big hug and said "I fell off my bike and hurt my wrist today. I was sobbing from the pain, so I needed my hanky to wipe my eyeballs and such. At least until I got home and had access to the tissues. I got my hanky really wet anyway. Last time, I came here I had a horrible cold, so I was sneezing and blowing my nose all the time, now I got a hurt wrist."
Thomas said, "I've seen you cry." He looked sympathetically at her. "The first time I cried in pain was when my wheels hurt after Gordon pulled me along. I cried my heart out from the pain, once I got to my shed. Driver dried my tears with a cloth and helped me feel better."
Autumn said, "I'm going on my rounds now."
Autumn made her rounds and found Rebecca in tears on a siding. "Driver, I just need to cry," she said, overwhelmed with emotion. Autumn heard and stayed close. Rebecca must be so unhappy, she thought. Look at those big tears in her eyes.
Autumn said, "I wonder what happened to upset Rebecca. It bothers me to know she's so down. She's weeping so hard her face is wet with tears."
Rebecca's driver knew how unhappy she was and comforted her. "There, there, Rebecca", he said, taking a cloth from his pocket and softly drying her tears. He gently rubbed her cheeks and wiped her weeping eyes. "It's all right if you need to have a good cry, so let yourself go.". He listened attentively to pick up on her cues, tried to understand how she felt, looked for anything around that might provide her relief and did his best to reassure her without being overbearing as he pressed the cloth to her eyes.
Rebecca said, her voice quivering, "Autumn's here.". She sniffled, long and loud, as fresh tears poured from her eyes and let her driver comfort her.
He said, as he continued to wipe her tears away, "Just cry, Rebecca. I shall patiently support you and give you empathy and compassion. You've got the right to feel very sad and cry, so I'm right here to dry your eyes and comfort you until you feel better. I know you feel very deeply, as I do. So, I know what it's like to be overwhelmed with emotion, as mine are powerful." He wiped all her tears away as best he could.
Rebecca continued to cry softly for awhile, until her emotions were spent. Her driver dried her last tears away, patting them from her cheeks and dapping them from her eyes. He went back to the cab with the sodden cloth as Rebecca smiled, feeling better again.
Autumn said, "What happened, Rebecca?". You cried your eyes out, she thought.
The yellow engine told her friend, "My brakes failed and another engine, a mean one, called me "You useless banana! I'd like to shunt you to the Smelter's Yard, you worthless waste of steam! You deserve to be scrapped. It made me so sad I had to open the floodgates and let tears fall like rain. I was happy before and now I've cried all my sadness out, so I feel better again. I shed a great many tears, but Driver was wiping them away as an act of comfort.".
Autumn said, "You had your driver to wipe your pain away. I can comfort smaller engines that way. I used to be limited to miniature and narrow-gauge engines, but now at 9, I can do it for tank engines, like Thomas when he lost his siblings. I came here 3 times during his grief, one just because I landed then and the other 2 just to dry his tears. He thought it might be too much for me to wipe his eyeballs, but I love to wipe his eyes. Because I come here by following the dream, I can land any time. I'm always happy when I'm here, except if I come here when something made me unhappy before. I'm moving on."
Rebecca said, "I've got to go to the Steamworks, because of my brakes."
Autumn finished her rounds, then went back to Thomas. "Rebecca was very sad, but her driver helped her feel better. I got there as he was wiping away her tears. After she had a good cry, she told me what made her sad. She's a very cheerful engine, I've seen from my rounds, but I know she can get very sad. Kind of like me."
Thomas said, "She and Percy are both easily upset. If one of our engine friends died, they could cry with me. Actually, any of my surviving friends could. Or if one of our human friends died, like Lady Hatt or somebody the Queen. I feel things deeply."
They said their good-byes and Autumn heard his whistle as she went home. She went through the rest of her day, including her bedtime routine and, after her bedtime story, fell asleep cuddling her plush Thomas.
A/N What Autumn said after crying comes from a video I watched, in which the YouTuber, Amala(her dad's from Nigeria) had a 1 million subscriber party and cried. Thomas's reference to his crying in pain comes from a fic I read here. Rebecca's tears are pure sadness, which is why she cries the way she does. The Sodor part's set at some unspecified time in the past after Thomas's siblings died, enough after for him not to feel it without a reminder, but before his country's queen died.