WHO: Natalia Romanova, Maria Hill WHEN: Day 5 WHERE: Cave A / Fallout shelter WHAT: keeping an eye out for supplies TRIGGERS: Hunger Games
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It was weird to think about survival in the arena, but for 5 days, their little camp had been doing just that. If anything, Maria had to think they were almost thriving. They had a steady source of food and water, hadn't run afoul of anything larger than a mysterious and possible dog (Natasha might have), and now had found some amount of variety in their diets in the form of ancient canned peaches and ovaltine--and an actual toilet--Maria could say they were pretty successful.
Even if it part of her knew it might.
There was evidence others had been here, through the long trek of sewer with discarded traps to the paths through the dust that covered the fallout shelter like something out of a movie. But they had either left supplies--food, water, beds--which meant, she supposed that they could be trapped, or the arena occasionally replenished itself.
Which almost made this place nice enough to consider staying. But there was something unsettling, the shadows on the walls were more monster than man and moving like an ominous shadow play that cut through the hazy light. The windows (why did a fallout shelter have window anyway) were frosted over and hard to tell more.
But as it was the closest to an exit any of them had seen yet, Maria had moved a shelf and climbed on top of it to try to peer out through the edges as Natasha moved around the shelter.
"Is this radioactive fallout do you think?"
Natasha wouldn't be surprised if the place replenished itself. It would certainly put any tributes off, wondering if someone had gotten trapped in here and never made it out. If something or someone came for them. There was no evidence of foul play — not of that sort anyway — plenty of evidence of vandalism though, possibly meant to look this way.
It also didn't surprise her that there were hidden caves beneath it. American. Russian. British. French. It didn't matter; people liked their secret tunnels. Natasha thought about the calendar with its date. She imagined a family hiding down here. The perfect nuclear family. Mother, father, two kids, two dogs. While hiding, they discover a sewer leading from their perfect bunker and decide to explore.
Maybe Maria was right, and this was fallout. They'd started succumbing to it. Meanwhile, the shadows were once their friends and neighbors. They desperately tried to find a way out, to go deeper. The sewer was a bonus.
Or maybe they just never made it here at all.
"It could be. Radioactive fallout tends to have a slightly different effect on most people in our worlds. They usually get turned to superheroes or villains." If there was amusement in her voice, that had to be Maria's imagination. Natasha Romanoff would never make a joke in the face of danger.
"Yeah but most of that's blocked by concrete." Maria said absently as she stood with her body behind concrete, and her head not, trying to peer through much thinner glass. The jury was still out on low dose exposure to fallout through glass anyway.
Maria pressed on the corners of the window, trying to test how firmly it was inserted into the panel. It wouldn't open like a normal hopper--that probably made sense for a nuclear bunker, but if they could wiggle it free--or break it-- maybe there was something outside the shelter--maybe they could get out. And then… do something. The pipe dream of escape hadn't actually gotten that far, but the idea of an open sky was as enticing as the thought of a real meal.
"There's something out there." Maria could swear she was seeing movement on the other side of the glass, she just couldn't make out what it was. Maria steadied herself on the window ledge, rose to her toes and leaned all the closer to the window.
"I wouldn't trust glass from the 1950's. It wasn't exactly state of the art." It struck Natasha as odd the first time she'd been here, but she hadn't given it too much thought. At the end of the day, it meant nothing. They could try and open the windows, but she was much more concerned with that light streaming in through the cave with the bats. If they could find enough rope, there might be a way up.
Natasha began shredding sheets with her knife, cutting them into strips into case they needed bandages. They were covered in the same amount of dust, but they could take them back to their cave and wash them there. At least get the dirt and grime off them. She should have thought of that when Murdock was around. Bandage his head up.
She glanced over her shoulder at the wall where the shadows played. Down in the dark, even in this flickering light, the idea of finding something — rocks mostly likely — to try and shatter the window was a prospect, but they would have to rig something to be able to utilize it. If it was meant to withstand nuclear bombs, then it was going to be thick glass. It would take some incredibly heavy rocks to get through it. It would never work.
Natasha paused, hesitating only for a split second before she asked, "Have you thought about it?"
Maria wasn't interested in finding a rock to break the window, though the shelves seemed sturdy enough that they might be able to be used. She agreed absently, rapping along the glass to feel for any weak points. She realized she didn't exactly know much about analyzing glass, finding it all kind of sounded the same from one spot to the next.
She moved sideways across the shelves, gently rapping on the pane as she moved from one to the next, It seemed the shadow she couldn't really make out was following her. Rap move. rap move. rap move.
"Thought about...it?" She figured out what Natasha was asking as she repeated the question. She had thought about killing the blonde woman nearly any time she sat still for more than two minutes, which was why the normally active, would-be spy had tried to keep as busy as possible here, to the point of inventing work, like cataloguing glass thickness. rap. move.
"No." She lied, almost believably. rap. "Should I have?" rap.
Something rapped back.
"The first kill is always the hardest, no matter the circumstances." Natasha wasn't judging her; she had no room for judgment in this giant room filled with all the murders she'd committed. Some of those were while under the Red Room guidance, but to be honest, she still didn't have much compunction when it came to assassinations after the fact.
But she'd been built that way. Worked from the ground up as a small child until she felt almost nothing when she watched a life being snuffed out. Maria hadn't been stolen as a child and created.
Once the sheets was shredded and folded, she balled them up and shoved them into the pack she'd gotten in the Cornucopia. Then she began rummaging through broken cabinets and underneath the cots for anything else she could find. She flicked her light on for searching in dark spots. "It's easier with a sniper rifle. You can pretend you're watching the television, even as you're pulling the trigger. It's more difficult to ignore when it's hand to hand."
The last rap caught her attention from across the room. Natasha glance to the shadows on the wall, her eyes adjusting from flashlight to flickering overhead. The shadows were enormous now, almost filling the entire wall in front of her. "Maria."
"Maybe it was better--up close." It made sense in a way, though if she made it back--which she still wasn't ready to admit she wouldn't--would it be any different watching her kill on a replay? Maria was exceptional at Call of Duty. The Maverick's dorm was much more into FPSes than the rest of the academy's dance dance revolution machines--and video games were meant to desensitize kids to violence. But maybe it wouldn't have been as real if she hadn't felt the spear which was currently leaning against the shelf tear through flesh. Maria was trying not feel bad about it. It was probably what Nick Fury would have done, but she wasn't Nick Fury. She almost said as much, when the other side of the glass knocked again.
"Yeahh…" Maria looked over her left shoulder at Natasha, kind of reaching the same conclusion as the older spy. And that was when it happened.
With a clattering of glass something burst through harder than a stone and grabbed at her face. Maria let out a shriek of alarm that gave away just how young she was, more than her self-disciplined mannerisms generally did. She might have been lucky that she had been looking away, but she couldn't stop the ragged and skeletonizing human arm from scratching deeply across the right side of her face. Her hand scrambled for the spear, but instead knocked it down with a clatter.
Unfortunately, she didn't fall with it. Rather, she was frozen in place.
There was no time to say anything. No witty banter or self-deprecating remark about survival. Natasha's entire body lurched away from the cots to bolster herself across the room to Maria's aid. She'd spent more time here with Murdock and the damn things didn't crash through the window. Murdock spent more time in here, and didn't mention anything attacking. Just the noises and the shadows.
In another world, with the slight enhancements she had, that thing never would have gotten a hold of Maria, but they didn't have any other world than this one. She reached between the thing and the SHIELD agent and snapped the wrist on the arm currently flailing around. She didn't have time to inspect Maria, but instead gave her an elbow hard enough to shove her backwards away from the danger.
Maria wasn't without her instincts, even if she was still semi-in-shock. So she managed to fall back to the ground almost ready to get back up. But not quite.
Maria pressed her hand to her stinging cheek to stem the bleeding, but also to try to help focus the eye on that side. But try as she might, she couldn't quite, which meant this went deeper than just a cut. It meant depth perception changed, shooting would change. Perception of the dark--would probably was about the same. She only hoped it was temporary.
She wasn't getting up so Maria managed to grope along the ground with her left hand for the spear which she rose perpendicular to the ground to toss at the fray.
"Natasha!" She called out as warning, suddenly (more) grateful she took weapons classes from and idolized a one-eyed man.
The arm didn't stop moving. It didn't stop trying to reach for whatever purchase it could. Every time the fingers snarled, the wrist crackled and popped where she'd broken it. It flopped. That was all she had to explain it: it flopped, but the fingers and everything else attached to it still moved as if nothing had happened.
Natasha ducked, grabbing the spear. She spun it in her hands to get a good angle. Assassination was a waiting game: stake your territory, settle in for a good long while waiting for the time to strike. Once it was done, you got the hell out of there. So she waited until the thing breached its head through the window. It took more force to crack a skull than it did a wrist; Natasha put way more force than necessary. That's what it deserved.
It stopped moving, stopped that awful groan and hiss. When it hung in the window, completely lifeless, she jerked the spear from its head and turned to Maria. She dropped to her knees in front of Maria, and for the first time she was in the arena, she let herself feel some real emotion about the situation. "Let me see it."
Maria watched in awe as Natasha took on the creature she had seen only really in shadows. If she hadn't been caught by surprise, she could have been fighting it herself rather than injured with nothing to show for it.
But the truth was, she probably couldn't have done it like that .
When Natasha now moved in front of her, Maria moved back on her heels. She had spent nearly a week hiding the weakness of her wrist--or trying to--to the point it was nearly functional again. She still tried to hide her bloodied face behind her splayed hands.
But she couldn't hide it. She finally lowered her hand, unsure which of the spiraling and increasingly fatal questions coming to mind she should voice.
"It stings a bit.." she offered instead of am I going to become a zombie?
The noise from the window grew louder, and more shadows gathered against the wall. Natasha kept note of that out of her peripheral vision, something that Maria seemed to be lacking at the moment. The zombie had scratched the hell out of the side of Maria's face, all the way into the eye and its socket.
"It's not that bad," Natasha answered. She yanked several of the torn bed sheets from her belt and dunked them into the water. After scrubbing as much of the dust off them as she could, she handed one to Maria, then used another to gingerly dab against the side of her face, checking for how deep the wounds were.
Behind her, the body wobbled in the window frame before a loud moan seemed to fill the room. For a second, it seemed like it was coming back to unlife, but inch by inch, something tugged backward. "Can you see?"
Maria didn't mean to flinch, but she couldn't help as the water infiltrated her wounds. As the fabric soaked pink, the wound showed itself to be thin angry lines that had looked worse than they were--which meant something as they were fairly serious. But they were superficial save for their unfortunate placement.
Maria looked down so as to evade answering the question they already knew the answer to. She wasn't completely blind. That would have been darkness. What She saw instead--if you could call it that--were lights and shadows--blurred images and she thought movement behind Natasha's head.
"Not yet." She pressed her lips together and nodded beyond Natasha and her ministrations. Maria held up one of the strips of sheet and draped it over the eye. She reached behind her head to tie the cool and makeshift bandage around her hopeless and failing braid. Maria told herself it was just to cut down the distractions. But it was likely now part of her arena look.