2014-01-15 - SDR: Tell Me How I'm Supposed to Breathe With No Air

One never considers how absolutely silent true silence is; how dark true darkness is. How unnerving. How terrifying. How disorienting.

The interior of the SHIELD submersible was silent. There was no hum of electronic equipment. No whirr of air recyclers. No vague buzz of the LED diodes that had provided light.

Just the faint, faint sound of breathing, slowly, steadily, in the pitch darkness.

Natasha sits up, her hand moving to her head. She feels a sticky, thick dampness-- blood. Tentatively she feels around at the wound. Nothing too bad, only a surface gash near the hairline. She shifts slightly, mentally cataloguing the bruises and minor injuries she had suffered during the flight of the minisub and its subsequent crashing into the ocean, and sinking. Nothing too serious. She would be sore for a few days.

Wait. Sinking. She blinks into the darkness, listening. Nothing in the sub is working. No light. No air. She draws in a sharp breath. "Bozhe moi..." she breathes softly. She feels underneath her. The sub had come to a rest slightly angled. At least it was right side down.

She crawls through the pitch black towards what she thinks might be the front, and the control panels. Her grasping hands come in contact with a warm, cloth-covered form. Clint. Her hands move over him quickly, trying to check and make sure he was all right.

“Nnnnng,” Clint groans groggily batting at Natasha with a hand. “Adam, leave me alone. I need to sleep,” he murmurs as Nat checks him over. He’s bleeding from a head wound too, and otherwise looks like someone threw him into a washing machine during the spin cycle, with his collection of bruises and minor cuts.

The former Soviet spy compartmentalizes her emotions, shoving fear and concern aside. Time to worry later. Clint was breathing, at least, and speaking. Getting the recirculators back online had to be her highest priority.

"Wake up, Hawkeye," the Widow says quietly, in the no-nonsense tone she tends towards during extremely dangerous situations with a high probability of fatality. "I need help finding a light."

She vaguely remembers, through the throbbing in her skull, that there should be an emergency LED strapped to the bottom of one of the chairs. It wouldn't be very bright, but it would be, hopefully, enough for her to see the damage and perhaps repair the system that would allow them to breathe.

How long had they been out? How much air did they have left? She didn't know. She reaches inside her side pocket for her Avengers ID and phone-- to get the time and send out a distress call.

It is a dead piece of plastic and circuitry. She mentally flinches. The EMP. The very, very /painful/ EMP. She remembers now. No wonder the damn sub was dead in the water.

Clint’s eye blink open. “What?” he asks focusing on Nat’s voice. She shouldn’t be here, he was at home right? That’s what he remembered last. Or was it, no, they’d been on a sub. “Nat, where are we?” he asks as he tries to sit up. It doesn’t go so good and he lays back taking deep breaths. “And why do I have a concussion?” he asks, knowing this feeling all too well.

"Because," Natasha replies in the darkness, "you likely also slammed your head into the wall. Or the chair." It had gotten pretty chaotic in there for awhile.

Her voice is calm as she moves slowly across the sub, still on her hands and knees-- not risking standing, not moving too quickly. The last thing she wanted to do was impale herself on something if there was severe damage to the interior. She bumps slightly into one of the chairs, half knocked off its stand, and slowly feels around under the seat, her hand wrapping around the small light source.

"Do you have any other injuries?" she continues, fingers feeling for the switch. Click. A small, pale white light glows from her hand.

She turns back towards Clint, her hair a mess, a trail of blood bisecting her face from the hairline, across one eye and cheek to her chin. The interior of the sub was a mess, but thankfully not shattered. They could move safely around.

"Why'd we crash?" Clint asks still not trying to move. "This was supposed to be boring," he adds before he chances sitting up again. His head throbs, and he feels like vomiting but he keeps it down. "And I feel like I have a ton of injuries," he says and rubs his head. His hand comes back bloody. "A head wound, my left knee doesn't feel so good, and I'm probably more bruise than man everywhere else," he does look like crap, his face is pale, there is a bruise blossoming on his left cheek and his hair is stained red with blood over his left ear.

Natasha, for a moment, tries to recall the chaos immediately before the shock and the trip into darkness. She shakes her head. "We will figure out what happened after I get the air working again."

She moves to stand up, and staggers, dropping heavily back to her knees. Without her super-soldier serum, her recovery from these sorts of things isn't nearly what she is used to. She lets out a small stream of curses, then forces herself up again, lurching towards the controls at the front of the sub.

Clint nods. "'kay," he says easily and pulls a first aid kit out of one of his pouches and dry swallows some painkillers, and then applies a little of the Stark skin bonding solution to the cut on the side of his head. "When you've got us air, I have a first aid kit, and some decent painkillers."

Natasha is the best choice for fixing this sort of issue-- if it were a programming issue, or a computer hacking issue. But the control panel in the front is just... dead. Her attempts to restart it are in vain.

She doesn't speak as she yanks open a panel, fiddling with the wires inside, and then slamming the control array in frustration.

She moves back to the back of the small submersible, hands shaking as she pulls open the panel that reveals the air circulation system. She reaches in, futzing with the controls for a few minutes. Still nothing.

"There is no power..." she says finally. "None at all. I can't restart a system when there's no electricity to do anything." Her tone is calm, even. Mostly.

The noise of the repairs, quiet though it is, hammers around inside Clint's brain but he nods and stands anyhow during the process. "There's got to be a back up. There's always a back up," he murmurs coming to stand next to Nat, putting a hand on her shoulder. He closes his eyes and takes a slow steadying breath. He opens his eyes again and looks at the wiring and equipment for the sub. "Most of this is fried," he says almost at once. "But look," he says nodding to a row of batteries down at the bottom of the unit. "Chemical storage, the EMP won't touch those," he says.

He crouches down and studies the wires leading from the batteries to the rest of the equipment. "This stuff is shot, I think these are supposed to power the communications system, but I can wire it directly to the recirculators, just need to rip out some wire." He gets to work.

Natasha sinks back, letting Clint work, ready to offer assistance as needed, if requested.

The man knows his work. Several tense minutes pass as wires are 'borrowed' from other parts of the sub, but after Clint has done his magic, the soft whirring of the recirculation system kicks on, and the air becomes noticeably /better/.

The Widow draws in a deep breath, before looking over the system. "...it won't be working at peak efficiency," she says after a few moments of studying his work. "I would estimate it's only a third as effective as it should be, but at least it's /air/."

On a better day this sort of repair would have been nothing, but today, it's worn Clint out. "Sounds about right," he says as he steps back and then leaning against the bulkhead slips down to sit on the floor. "But yeah, air. Air is good. Shouldn't be too much longer before they come down and get us though. I mean we're right by the Raft, right?"

"Should be," Natasha replies, leaning against her own patch of bulkhead heavily. She closes her eyes, forcing herself to drag up and piece together the moments before they had been knocked out.

"...there was someone ripping open the elevator tube," she says finally. "You shot him." With the now no longer functional weapons on the sub. "And then everything started moving--" she pauses.

"Did... did the submersible get /picked up/?" she asks. "Or did I hit my head too hard?"

"I can't remember, it's all a blur. I just remember the weapons being ripped off, then, bam, nothing," Clint says. "Anyhow, sit down, we've got some time, and there's no sense making things worse."