I've noticed a hefty overlap in the Leviathaneers here and on deviantArt, so I assume most of you know what nonsense I've been up to :) For those of you who don't, and like stupid crack comics, there's a link in my profile.

Conceived while watching Passchendaele in summer school. I have never been so bored by a movie with that much sex in it!

Disclaimer: Scott's chars :9 I'm just f*cking with them.

She had never intended to find herself on the ground, up to her waist in mud, swimming with rats, with dead bodies. But that was where you ended up when your airship was diced like a fancy piece of cheese. On the ground.

Deryn Sharp reloaded her gun, trying not to fumble as the downpour slickened her hands and the black metal. A barrage of bullets skimmed overhead, one of them grazing and knocking from her soaked hair the helmet she'd been hastily issued not minutes ago, still nauseatingly warm from the previous owner's head.

She ducked, trying to remember to breathe, trying to quell the tightening in her throat. She wanted to curse and scream and be anywhere but this hell. She did not want to kill! She'd never desired such carnage, only freedom and flight. Forget that this was no place for a woman; this was no place for anyone.

"Sharp! Snap out of it!" the officer barked, firing off another round. It was down to him and her in this stinking hole in the ground, and the Germans were now approaching on foot to finish them off. They were literally like fish in a barrel.

Several men lay dead around her, some hardly older than she, some her fellow crew members from the magnificent ship the Germans had slaughtered.

They'd arranged their bizarre planes like pairs of strafing hawks, strips of sharpened steel strung taught between them, and using the Darwinists' own tactics had reduced the Leviathan to a shredded mess. She could hardly even take satisfaction from the fact that the first two planes had met enough resistance to send them careening into each other, or gratitude in the fact that the merciless downpour had delayed and weakened the resulting explosions.

Down they'd gone, and Deryn had landed hard along with more of the luckier sods right on the fringes of battle. They were then scooped up by the approaching relief—those of them who could fight, anyway—and thrown into the trenches to help dispose of the remaining Huns. "It won't be long now!" they were assured. "An easy clean-up!"

Man up. Do your duty. She was almost sick of it.

"Sharp! Fire!"

But like a proper soldier, Deryn shut it all out and stuffed it all down, positioned her gun and fired.

.

The intention was to book it to the nearest village, and it may very well have been fulfilled if Bauer's broken leg had not proven to be quite a hindrance. Volger had snatched Alek by the wrist and dragged him into a slippery sprint, but the prince could not flee while Klopp and Hoffman struggled under the dead weight of their companion.

"Run, young master!" Bauer had hollered. They all had. "Run! We'll be fine!"

That was when the shells hit.

.

The Germans were on them like that. Bullets kicked up the water on Deryn's sides and she heard the metallic clang of her floating helmet taking a hit. Shaking rain from her face, gritting her teeth, she hoisted herself up just slightly to get a better angle at her attackers—for all her height, she was still shorter than most of the soldiers down here. She pulled the trigger.

BLAM! Through the head.

BLAM! The chest.

BLAM! BLAM! Lungs. Chest again. Two-legged creatures were reduced to their vital points in her mind. They fell.

BLAM! Her shoulder. The impact knocked her off the lip of the trench.

BLAM! BLAM! Her stomach. Her ribs. Her thigh.

She went under, muddy water and silt flooding her riddled body in a sharp intake of breath. She came up spluttering, swearing, dizzy and alive with pain. Every cough wracked her frozen body and sprayed blood from white lips.

Deryn Sharp waded in agony to the trench's edge, expended the remaining bullets in her gun and fell face-first into the mud. She had had enough fighting.

.

Though an absolute bedlam, the flurry of red activity and the cacophony of groans and orders and assurances in the medical tent were almost peaceful compared to the trenches. Deryn's nurse was painted with blood and had no time to be particularly gentle. She had Deryn's shirt torn open before the wounded girl could fully come to.

'Careful tailoring' all for naught, the nurse quickly made sense of what she was seeing, gasped quietly, and reflexively yanked the blood-drenched cloth back over her patient's exposed body. She met Deryn's bleary eyes, which at the moment showed only the vaguest semblance that she had any idea what was going on around her. "Don't tell," Deryn breathed, barely audible in the din.

A groan to her left managed to catch her attention. It was a boy, his face and hair smeared and matted with congealing blood. His pant leg was partially sheared off to reveal an alarmingly large shard of shrapnel lodged in him, his piloting jacket was pared and drenched in blood and rain, his face contorted in agony, his every breath shallow. He was lying on the once-white sheets with no one attending to him.

The nurse was positioning Deryn to remove the bullet from her abdomen. Suddenly wide awake, Deryn swatted her hand away, gritting her teeth at the fresh wave of pain the sudden movement dealt her. "Get your barking hands off me! Help him!" She pointed with her good arm at Alek.

"Please stop moving," the nurse ordered. "He'll be dealt with once we've done what we can for our own."

"No! He'll be dealt with now!" She felt hot tears rising to the backs of her eyes, whether from blind rage or the pain of her injuries she didn't know or care. Deryn twisted her head to the left and saw a sight that stopped her heart. The groaning had stopped, and his mouth had gone slack. Alek was out cold.

"Alek! Wake up, you sod! WAKE UP!"

"Stop, soldier, please. He'll—"

"He can end it! He can end all of it! You have to help him!" In her frenzy she'd forgotten to mind her voice, and it was going all feminine and shrieky on her. "Don't you dare die on me, you insufferable Clanker sod! Don't you dare barking die! Do you hear me, Dummkopf? Saukerl? Wake up, you stupid sodding fuck! GET UP!"

"Soldier!" the nurse shouted.

"If you die, I swear to god I will kill you!"

In the end, Deryn Sharp had to be sedated.