Bricolage: (n.) Construction or something constructed by using whatever materials happen to be available.
Auggie coughed to clear the dust from his lungs, trying vainly to collect his thoughts and rationalise the situation again. His brain immediately fixated on one topic, not allowing him to concentrate on anything else. "Annie?" he called out hoarsely, his ears straining.
"Auggie?" Annie replied, her voice just as ragged as his and a loud bout of rough coughing came from a few feet to his left. He stretched out his arm, fingers dancing across cold concrete and small pieces of loose rubble until they finally found warmth and softness. Annie's wrist. "Damn it, they must have known we were coming."
"Are you hurt?" he asked carefully.
"Just some bumps and scrapes, nothing serious," Annie said, sliding her arm in his hand until she could grip his fingers and squeeze comfortingly. "You?"
"The same, I think," he said, shaking away the dull aching coming from his ankle where he'd tripped getting away from the small explosion and the forming headache in his forehead where he'd hit the floor. Pain stung through his torso as he rolled over onto his back and sat up, using his free hand to feel around him. "What's the situation?"
"I think they collapsed the building on top of us," Annie said. He could hear her shifting and then she drew closer, sitting down at his side. "I don't know, I can't see anything, it's too dark." Her breathing was shaky and shallow beside him. "Auggie, I think we're trapped."
"We'll be fine," Auggie said, methodically like it was a preprogrammed response. Which wasn't far from the truth. "We just need to find a way out. Do you still have your phone? Maybe we can contact Langley, let them know what's happened."
There was rustling and then a tinny beep that he assumed was the mobile. "It's still in one piece but we're not getting any reception," Annie responded, and he could hear her moving around in an attempt to find some signal.
He pulled his own phone from his pocket and when he opened it the robotic voice said, "No available signal." Cursing in his head, he pocketed it again. He should've expected as much. They were in an old concrete fallout shelter beneath hundreds of pounds of rubble. Not exactly a place to pick up on that already spotty cellular reception.
"Okay, let's just search around this place and see if there's any way to get outta here," he said in the direction of Annie's frustrated muttering. His voice sounded oddly flat and hollow in the stale, musty air. "There might be some sort of escape tunnel that leads out of here." He crawled across the ground, his fingers gliding over the uneven surfaces in search of anything that might be a hope of getting out of this place.
On the other side of the shelter, he could hear Annie's laboured breathing and the scrape of her hands over the concrete. Auggie's own breathing was starting to feel a bit shallow and he didn't want to consider what that meant. Trouble breathing meant thinning air, which meant that there wasn't any new oxygen coming in to the shelter. Which meant the likelihood of there being an escape route was very slim, because a tunnel would bring in at least a little bit of a draft. Without it, well, he didn't want to think about the dimensions of the room and how much time they had left before they had used up the remaining oxygen.
"I can't find anything," Annie said and he could hear the anxiety in her voice. Was she thinking along the same lines as him? He hoped not. "What about you?"
"Nothing so far," he said, not wanting to sound like he'd given up hope already. At the same time his mind was pedalling, trying to come up with another plan of action. This was his forte, this was what he was good at. It's what made him a great agent, even blind. He could think on his feet, always have a back-up plan. "Do we have anything useful in here? Anything on these shelves we might be able to use?"
"I don't know, I can't see," Annie said, a bit shortly.
Auggie allowed himself a small smirk. "Neither can I, what's your point?" he asked playfully. He heard a muffled noise of amusement from the other side of the room.
"Right, sorry," she said and there was more scratching noises as she browsed through what must have been the contents of the shelves on the other end of the room. Auggie scooped down whatever he could reach on his side, setting it on the floor at his feet, cataloguing things by touch. Annie's steps were shuffled as she drew closer and she stubbed her toe against his leg, something slipping from her arms and landing on his head with a dull thump. Auggie groaned and rubbed the spot as she apologised.
"It's fine, it's fine," he muttered, finding the discarded object and pulling it into his little pile. He felt its contours with his fingertips and then smiled. "More than fine, actually. I think you brained me with a torch."
"Really?" Annie asked eagerly. Auggie fiddled with it for a moment, finding a small crank on the side and rolling it between his fingers. There was a mechanical whirring noise and then Annie let out a small gasp. "It's working."
"Here then, you keep that," Auggie said, holding it out in the direction of her voice. "Doesn't do me any good. So give me a run down, what do we have here?"
"Some canned vegetables, dried foods here, a first aid kit," Annie listed off over the sound of the shifting objects as she pawed through them. "A kind of rusty Swiss Army knife. A box of… oh they're batteries. Some books printed in Portuguese. Why would the Russian cartel have books in Portuguese? Um, an old wireless radio. A pretty nice wool blanket. That's pretty much it."
"Gees, didn't even leave us a shovel. That's not very sporting," Auggie remarked sarcastically and heard a small laugh from Annie. His mind was racing, putting together the pieces into some devisable idea. He suddenly straightened up and a minute grin slipped onto his lips. "That wireless have a lot of copper wiring inside of it?"
"What are you up to?" Annie asked even as he could hear her fingers prying at the backing of the radio.
"I think that if I can wire the extra batteries to one of the phones, I can boost the signal enough to get a message out to Langley," Auggie explained, already pulling his phone back out of his pocket and opening the battery compartment. "How's the wireless looking?"
"Extra wirey," Annie said and he could hear anticipation in her tone. "Alright, what do you need me to do?"
Auggie set to work immediately. Using the pocket knife, which he had Annie open for him and arrange in his palm, he set to slitting the plastic coverings off the copper wires she tore out of the radio. He cut his fingers more than once, but when Annie had made to comment on it he'd interjected, "Least of our worries right now, dear," and she reluctantly agreed with him.
Once he'd freed all of the wires, he began threading them around the nodes of the spare batteries from the box, using the flat of the blade for extra leverage when his fingers couldn't bend the wire tighter alone. Some of the batteries were so old that the outsides had split, acid now coating their sides, but he managed to salvage at least half of them. It still wasn't a lot of power, but it was something. "Okay Annie, I need you to key this in for me," he said, handing her the phone. "I'd do it but we probably can't afford a typo right now. W-A; Orange. And then the address of this place, I really hope you remember it because the numbers are a little fuzzy to my memory."
"I got it," Annie assured him, the metallic beeping splitting the air almost shrilly as she typed in the message. "What's the W-A orange mean?"
"Walker, Anderson, code orange," Auggie explained shortly. "Orange is technically a hostage situation but I can't think of the colour code for 'buried alive inside a Cold War bomb shelter beneath an old DC house by Russian drug dealers.' I must have missed that class." Annie laughed, but it sounded quiet and Auggie could tell she was feeling it too; that distant blurriness in their heads from the thin oxygen. "Alright, thread these two wires into the back of the phone, right against those copper patches as securely as you can get them. Use the knife if you have to, just make sure they are in there."
When Annie took the wires from his hands he felt around for the other end of the circuit, left open for the last crucial piece. "And I'm gonna need to use the torch to do this," he said. "I need it to get the charge moving through the circuit. The screen from the phone should stay lit so you won't be completely in the dark though."
"Least of my worries," Annie murmured in reply and he smiled shortly, accepting the torch as she pressed it into his palm. He pried the battery compartment open, felt around until he found the wiring connected to the hand-crank generator, and then carefully wound the line of batteries into it. "Alright, it's finished on my end," Annie said. "What now?"
"I'm going to turn this crank and try to build up enough power for the cellular to reach some sort of outside connection," Auggie explained, his grip tightening unconsciously on the little torch. "You watch the phone. The moment a flicker of a signal reaches it, you press the send button. If we're lucky it should be able to send the message out before any of the pieces of this poor jury-rigged mess give out."
He felt Annie's grim determination in the air, perfectly mirroring his own, both of them trying not to consider the possibility that they wouldn't be lucky. "Ready?" he asked apprehensively.
"Ready," Annie replied solidly.
Nodding shortly, Auggie began churning the handle of the torch as quickly as he could. His wrist was complaining about the awkwardness of the circle as the inner workings of the rechargeable torch ground unsteadily, but he ignored the feeling. All he cared about was the humming noise that it was making, and he hoped that it meant that the machinery was supplying power through the wires to their last hope.
It felt like Auggie's arm would fall off before anything happened, but then suddenly Annie made a short surprised sound that was immediately followed by a dull beep. He kept going, harder than ever before, praying to every god that he had ever heard of and a generalised one to those that he hadn't that this would work. Annie shouldn't have to go like this, trapped like an animal in a cage. He was used to the feeling, being trapped inside the darkness around his body at all times. But not Annie; bright, lively, free Annie. As long as this worked to get her out, that was all he asked for.
"I think it worked," Annie said. Auggie's hand slipped from the torch, letting it fall to the concrete floor with a loud clatter. His entire arm was aching, but it was relief that he felt. "It said 'message sent' and then the screen went black. Do you think it worked?"
"Of course it did," Auggie said, trying to sound confident. "I told you it would, didn't I? That was the plan. The battery just overloaded from the effort of sending, that's all." He took a deep breath that still left him feeling breathless.
"Now what do we do?" Annie asked uncertainly.
"Now we wait," Auggie said simply, easily guarding his own nerves. "The cavalry will be here soon enough." He stretched his sore muscles, biting back a grimace as ignored injuries twinged painfully. "Where was that blanket you were talking about? It'd be nice to get off this concrete."
He could hear fabric shifting and a draft of musty air as Annie spread the blanket across a bare stretch of floor, and then she took his arm and led him to it. She was right, it was rather nice wool. Itchy but thick and warm. He laid down and patted the spot beside him pointedly. A moment later he felt the warmth of a body, even if her hands and forearms and cheeks felt a little too cool for his liking, against his side. It surprised him that she was so close, expecting her to just lay down next to him, but she had curled herself into his side, one arm resting lazily on his chest. Without even considering it, he wrapped his arms around her, bringing her closer.
They were quiet for a while, both of them tense with expectation, even as Auggie's thoughts started drifting off on nonsensical trails he couldn't really follow. And then Annie giggled quietly, prompting him to ask, "What?"
"You know, Aug," Annie started in a slurred voice that showed she was having as hard a time staying lucid as he was, "that thing with the phone and the torch was pretty amazing. You're like – like a blind MacGyver, you know?"
Auggie chuckled appreciatively and could feel her smiling into his shoulder where she'd nestled her face. "Yeah, pretty much," he agreed, too out of it to come up with anything wittier than that.
After some time – they no longer had any way to track the time so he couldn't be sure how long it had been – he felt Annie's body relaxing languidly against his. "I'm getting tired," she murmured and her hand gripped at his shirt for a moment anxiously. "That's bad, right?"
"No, it's fine," he told her, fighting against his own weariness for the time being. "Go ahead and sleep. It'll lower your heart rate so you won't need as much oxygen. Sleep, Annie. I'll wake you up when they get here."
"Promise?" Annie asked with all the hopefulness of a child.
"I promise," he whispered back. She nodded against his chest, and very soon after her breathing slowed and her muscles uncoiled.
Well, Auggie thought distractedly, let's think of it this way. Of all the ways to go, going sleeping with a beautiful girl in your arms ranks pretty high up there. And he let sleep finally carry him off.
. . . . .
Five days later, Auggie was getting very restless in the hospital room. He had slept for the first two days straight, recovering from a serious case of oxygen deprivation, but even after that had been fixed they had confined him to another few days of bed rest to give what had turned out to be a sprained ankle and two broken ribs time to heal. They'd been feeding him daily reports on Annie's progress, and apparently she'd made it out better than him because beyond one scratch that had needed a few stitches and the lack of oxygen thing, she'd been fine.
He would've been okay with hearing that if he'd actually gotten to talk to her, but he had yet to get any word from his best friend and it was making him extremely antsy.
After spending most of the day planning possible methods of escape to get out of the hospital room and find Annie – none of which he thought he'd actually be able to pull off, even with his skills – he was feeling rather short-tempered. The door opened and he snapped at the nurse, "Unless you're coming to sign my release papers than I don't want to hear it."
"Oh sorry, I'll leave then."
"No, wait," Auggie said hastily, because he knew that voice, and it wasn't the voice of Mary the day nurse. "Annie, that's you?"
"How are you feeling?" she asked and he heard the soft squeak of her trainers on the linoleum floor as she crossed to the bed. He sat up quickly, hesitantly extending a hand, and a glorious sweep of relief filled him when he felt her fingers in his.
"Much better," he said honestly. "If they'd let me out of here I'd be fantastic. How are you?"
"Fine," Annie said and he could hear her smile. "They just released me this morning. I would've come straight here but Joan called me in to be debriefed and then I had to sneak home for a bit to clear up my cover story with Danielle so she didn't start panicking or something." A quiet settled, and then she squeezed his hand. "Joan's really impressed with what you did, you know. I am too. You saved our lives in there. She said if we hadn't gotten that message to them she would've assumed we'd just detoured the plan or that we were already dead. They probably wouldn't have found us until it was too late."
"It – it was nothing," Auggie said, feeling an unusual sense of modesty curling in his stomach, at odds with his normal personality. Somehow it was just harder to be cocky when he was being so sincerely thanked for saving their lives. "Just trying to think on my feet."
"Well it was amazing anyway," Annie said. "And I wanted to get you something to show my thanks."
She took his hand and pressed something into his palm. Curious, he ran his fingers over it and recognised the general shape. "A pocket knife?" he asked in surprise.
"It's the pocket knife," Annie corrected. "The one from the fallout shelter, that you used to put all of that wiring together. It was recovered during their rescue and I snuck it out. For sentimental value. And there's something else." She took the knife and laid it in her own palm, and then took his forefinger and laid it against the surface of the plastic. Now that she had brought it to his attention, he could feel a line of familiar raised dots, spelling out an even more familiar word.
Anderson.
"I figured if you're gonna play MacGyver, you'd best do it right," Annie said with a light laugh.
Auggie curled his hand around the pocket knife, awed at the intense meaningfulness behind the seemingly silly gift. And then he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her into a tight hug. "Thanks Annie, this is – it's fantastic," he said honestly. When they broke apart he sat back and fingered the Swiss Army blade, opening and closing each little device.
Then he looked up with a crooked grin that prompted Annie to laugh before he could even say anything. "Just one question," he said and she hummed to show she was listening. "If I'm MacGyver, does that mean I have to grow a mullet?"
