Work Text:
The people in Mistden say you can always tell Fall’s arrived by how the air cuts up your face.
Rowan can’t really speak to that herself; having metal skin and wires for insides and nerves doesn’t provide the most (or any) accurate feel for the tactile changes of the seasons. But, according to her neighbors and the regulars face down in the bar, before the sky is suffocated by thick, dark clouds, or before the trees change shades and start dropping their leaves in mass all over the cracked sidewalk, the second you step outside, the autumn chill comes at you with a thousand tiny paper cuts, followed by a handful of tiny nails stabbed into your skin for good measure.
According to everyone else, Winter’s much worse. Because instead of some light pokes and paper cuts to chapped lips, Winter just rushes you with a knife to your face and leaves you frostbitten and bleeding on a frozen pond.
But Rowan can’t bleed. She can’t really freeze or get cold like Lachlan and the others. At most, if she gets too ‘cold’, her already fragile doll joints lock up more often, and she forgets where she puts her pointe shoes sometimes.
She didn’t feel the need to concern herself with grabbing extra wool blankets at night or fretting over the finicky heater in the far corner of the apartment, shutting off for the fifth time that morning like the others did. She didn’t need to, nor could she drink from the pot of spiced apple cider Ajax has had sitting on the stove for the past five nights to warm herself up after the day. Hell, she’s hardly stepped a foot outside the complex or the bar since she’s come home, so she doesn’t need to worry about slipping around in Orla’s hand-me-down rain boots and falling in a puddle or getting caught in the approaching rainstorms.
She isn’t like them. She isn’t real. She isn’t made from flesh and bone; she’s built from sheet metal and rebuilt from mismatched brass. She can’t get colds or flus; her fingers won’t fall off if they’re exposed to the icy air for too long – she isn’t real.
So, she can’t understand why there’s such a fuss about getting her a Fall and Winter coat for the season.