The States

someone come and carry me home

David

"I hate these planes," David mutters.

Corey snorts. "Better than the ones from the last war," she murmurs. It's still disconcerting to see her short hair. At least it's grown out of the buzzcut a little.

Alfred had pulled strings with the higher-ups so that David and Corey ended up in the same place. From what David heard, Helena and Nate were on a crew together too, just on the opposite side of the world. Whatever strings Alfred had pulled hadn't been enough to get him and Corey pilot and co-pilot positions, though. Corey was the flight engineer and David was the navigator.

"Still. I'd feel better if I was piloting, at least."

Corey, surprisingly, doesn't call him a control freak. "I know."

David

Everything hurts.

David groans and even that hurts. There's the burn of accelerated healing sparking across his chest, his legs, his head. He hasn't felt this fucked up since- since that shell in 1916.

Memories flicker-flash through his brain. Falling, scrabbling for his harness, shouting-

Oh, fuck, David thinks. Corey.

He forces his eyes open. Alfred- Alfred had told him to watch out for Corey, because she was younger than him.

We were shot down, he remembers. His hands shake as he undoes his harness, and he slides out of his seat, landing on his broken leg with a scream only cut off when he blacks out.

~~~~~~~

David sets his own leg as best as he can, slams his dislocated shoulder back into place against the wrecked hull of the plane, and then he makes his way around the cockpit to where the radio operator and the flight engineer are positioned.

It takes everything in him not to be sick at the sight of it.

Because Corey hadn't had time to strap in.

David's seen truly terrible things before. He'd been in the trenches, he'd been in those civil war hospitals.

But this.

The once white fur lining of her bomber jacket is stained with blood that hasn't dried dark yet, and he can tell she smashed her face into something as they fell because there's a nasty gash across her temple and her nose is clearly broken, but the truly bad part of it all is her leg.

Her left leg is a mess of ruined flesh and blood and glints of white bone, trapped in the warped remains of the radio operations.

(David takes care not to look too long at their radio operator, even as he mourns him. He was one of Caitlin's.)

It takes too long for David to smash the radio operations up enough to get her leg free, long enough for the sun to start setting.

He doesn't know how long it took to revive. He doesn't know how bad Corey is. It's possible that she revived before him just to die again.

Her injuries are bad enough that it's more than possible, venturing into the 'likely' territory.

David pauses as he actually takes in the extent of the damage to her leg, and then he curses for a solid five minutes.

~~~~~~~

David does what he can. The first aid kit is relatively intact, enough that he can mop the blood off Cordelia's face and stick butterfly bandages over the gash on her temple. He splints his leg with a scrap of metal and gauze, resets Cordelia's nose.