A/N: I'm not dead! I had emergency surgery, school bullshit, an now exams! So I'm posting one of the things I've been working on forever!
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Pain. That's all his world consisted of. He was just about completely sure of it. It hurt to move, hurt to breath…bloody hell, it practically hurt to think. His chest felt hot and stick
Pain and darkness. Darkness? …Yes, there was darkness…everywhere; consuming him, eating him let him go…. Something was hot and sticky and all over him….and what was he doing here? More importantly…where was he? What was he doing? Why did it hurt so much? Stop, please…stop hurting him, what did he do wrong? He couldn't remember. Why was it so hard to think?
….And on the edge of his frayed consciousness, he wondered one final, disturbing question.
Who was he?
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Alfred F. Jones was so sore, it wasn't even funny. And even though his arm pulsed with pain, his lungs felt like they were going to burst from the sheer agony of breathing because of all the smoke, he knew that he was the luckiest of them all. He struggled to sit up, and looked around him. Devastation did not do anything to cover how his surroundings looked. Everything had been absolutely reduced to rubble.
….Where was he?
He couldn't place his surroundings, not with everything so completely destroyed. It sickened him to think that this had been a living, thriving city, possibly not even more than a few days ago. He pushed himself up into a standing position, and looked around.
Dead bodies that were hardly recognizable as his fellow doctors were strewn about, along with civilians everywhere. It looked like whatever army that had wanted to pass through had left ages ago, with some unknown soldiers with bullet holes through their heads. He would have felt sick, were this the first time he had seen all this. It was 1944. This war had been dragging on for ages, and he, who had once been a naïve boy, had become a man that had seen far too much in his time.
He looked past the bodies, and was rewarded. There was some medical supplies lying about ten feet from him that looked a little worse for wear. He stumbled over to where it was, and he picked it up. Bandages, opiates…some surgeon tools, and some things to sterilize anything. He blessed his lucky stars that he had found it.
Now then...Alfred looked around him. The first thing he had to do was get the hell out of the open. No one around him was going to be alive. But he checked anyway. Each and every one of them had their pulses checked, even if he saw the bullet hole in their brains. He had to be sure that he wasn't leaving someone to die without even trying to help them. But by now, all were cold and dead. Bodies limp. Some of them even had blood pooling in the parts of their body that touched the ground. It used to sicken him. But by this point in time….it was simply another given of this horrible war he had foolishly signed up for three years ago. Once he was sure everyone was dead in his radius, he started to walk over a hill that had likely been a house, once. As quickly as his tired, aching legs could carry him, Alfred rushed to a smoking beacon in the middle of a field. It looked like a plane, a British one that had been shot down, but had managed to land in the middle of all this chaos.
Meaning one thing that gave Alfred's heart a bursting leap of hope- a landed plane that was largely intact could only mean one thing….
There was a pilot in that mess somewhere.
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At what seemed a painstakingly slow pace, Alfred finally made his way to the plane, and hopped up using all the strength he had in him to look inside. The cockpit was smoking, the shield broken, but there was also one thing inside. A person was huddled in the seat, clutching weakly at his side which was bleeding profusely from an unknown cause. Alfred knew what to do from there. He punched the glass in, and reached in. At this point, he heard the pained whimpers coming from the man, and something inside him solidified. In a very soothing voice, even though it was likely the man couldn't hear him, he said softly, "I promise you. I'm going to get you out of here. I'm not going to let you die."
In a battle field of dead soldiers, this promise seemed useless. The man was unconscious, likely in shock, and probably so torn up on the inside he was going to die before the night was over. But Alfred was going to do his best to stop that. He wanted this pilot, who even though he was so badly injured, had managed to land his plane down safely. His hands touched pale skin. It was trembling slightly, beneath his army uniform in which he had probably proudly served the queen of his nation. Alfred pulled himself farther up onto the plane, trying to get a better look of the man's injuries. He didn't want to move him until he was sure the man was not impaled on anything.
Gently, very, very, painstakingly gently, he felt around the man's body, and found the source of blood, from a few shots to the chest. It looked like he had been shot down by a gunner when he had been flying low. The bullet wounds seemed deep, but it was more the bleeding Alfred was worried about. If he hadn't died by this point in time, it was highly unlikely they had managed to get any major internal organs. …Or, the bullets were simply stopping them from bleeding out entirely…which though gruesome, was also possible. He started applying pressure to the wound's, in an attempt to keep him from bleeding out. Alfred saw that the man was not attached to anything on the plane except for his mask and the equipment that kept him strapped in, which was easy enough to take off.
Once the man was free, Alfred had one of his arms snake beneath the pilot to lift him out of the plane. He heard a small little noise of discomfort, which comforted him. If he wasn't so far gone, and could still see differences in his surroundings, than he had a good chance of survival, and that comforted Alfred.
The man in his arms was lighter than Alfred would have originally expected, and definitely lighter than he liked. But there was nothing he could do about it at this point in time. Still applying pressure to the man's chest, he felt the man shudder in his arms, and Alfred noticed that he was shivering in cold and perhaps shock, trembling bad enough to put a leaf in the wind to shame. Alfred wasn't stupid, the pilot was chilled in the wind, and so, he carefully balanced the man with an arm and his knee, the other arm digging through his medical box to fish out the emergency blanket. The man's clothes were tattered, he noted, before pulling himself together enough to wrap the man as tightly as the American nurse could manage with the scratchy, but warm, fabric.
He was going to save him.