Taken 1/5: AU, R, Drama
Title: Taken
Genre: Drama
Rating: R (violence and torture)
Players: Sergei Fedorov(POV)/Nikolai Zherdev
Summary: AU. Based on the 2008 movie Taken. An ex-KGB agent relies on skills he’d tried to forget in order to save his young lover, a hockey player who has been kidnapped by those who want him for themselves.
-
It’s pure instinct that has you calling Sergei for help. Whenever you thought of safety over the past eight months, only one person has ever come to mind. More than the police, more than any government branch assigned to enforce the law-you know that your safest future is in his hands.
They try to take you outside of your apartment. You’re just putting the key in the entry door when a flash of black intrudes on your peripheral vision, and only years of honing your reflexes playing hockey keeps your face from being smashed against the wall. You drop everything-your groceries, your bag of gear, even the jacket draped over your arm-and just fight: lashing out, thrashing and kicking and even getting a bite or two in where you can. One of the thugs jerks away with a screamed curse as your thumb catches him in the eye, and it gives you enough time to dart inside your apartment building, slamming the door shut behind you.
You know it won’t hold them long enough.
Your heart pounds as you skip the elevator entirely, racing up the two flights of stairs to your apartment. You lock and bolt the door, and shove a heavy couch in front of it before your shaking hands dig through your pockets for your phone.
Sergei orders you to tell him everything that you can. How many there were. What they looked like. If you heard any names, if they had any distinguishing marks; if you were able to leave a mark on any of them. He swears that he’s coming for you, tells you to stay calm; tells you that he loves you.
He tells you that you’re going to be taken.
You leave the phone on, lying open on your coffee table. They break through the door and even with Sergei’s words, you have to fight: the fear that strangles your chest leaves you no other option. You scream details, shouting out descriptions to him, but they overpower you with a terrifying alacrity.
They force you to the floor, and you can’t tear your eyes from your phone-your hope, your salvation-as they shove a crude cloth gag into your mouth. When they bind your hands behind you with coarse rope, one of them finally notices your desperate gaze.
The last thing you see, before a black hood is yanked over your head, is your phone smashing to pieces against the wall.
-
“You see,” I said, wiping the blood off my fingers, “I am in a hurry. So the longer you take to tell me what I want to know, the more I am going to hurt you.”
The man tied to the chair in front of me let out a high-pitched whine, his eyes rolling desperately in their sockets. He wasn’t at all important within Saint Petersburg’s deeply rooted mafia syndicate: just a smalltime thug who occasionally hired out his services to the highest bidder. In a past life I wouldn’t have spared him the least bit of attention, more focused on the bosses who actually ran things. But his most significant transgression was not that he was involved in the crime that ran so rampant throughout my adopted city; or even that he was little more than a goon for hire. I had no interest in whatever petty machinations he was up to.
No, this man’s mortal sin was taking a job that involved trade in people-and his downfall would be that he agreed to traffic someone I loved.
You really don’t have to be all that inventive when it comes to extracting information out of someone. At my old job, some co-workers had prided themselves on the new and elaborate ways they had come up with to glean intelligence. They extolled the joys of recently-developed acids, ingenuously engineered devices to inflict pain; different ways of contorting a human body. It was a gruesome game that I had never played-but, then, I always did like the classics.
When Igor had given me the location of those who had taken my Nikolai, I’d grabbed just two things before leaving my apartment. The first was the worn Makarov sidearm that had once been a permanent fixture at my hip; and which, for four years, had been locked away in a box at the back of my closet. It was now tucked safely away under the side of my belt, ready to be used if necessary. The second item I took with me was a small box of sewing pins. Five of them were now missing.
They currently lay deeply wedged beneath three of the mobster’s fingernails.
“Would you like another try?” I asked amiably. I rattled the box and his eyes bulged wide in terror, a keening wail filtering through the dirty rag I’d stuffed down his throat. His head snapped back and forth emphatically. I smiled and reached forward to tug the spit- and blood-stained wad from his mouth.
“P-Plyushchev!” he blurted, the words tumbling over themselves as they fell from his lips. “Vl-Vladimir Plyushchev. He contacted us for a job-he wanted this brat, some smalltime hockey player, said he would pay good money-all he wanted was for us to bring him the kid, we didn’t hurt him, we didn’t touch him I swear please-please stop hurting me-”
Desperate hope and terrified rage threatened to snap something unsteady and fragile in my chest. My hand shot out, fisting in the front of his shirt and hauling him-and the chair he was strapped to-toward me. The movement shifted the pins beneath his nails and he screamed, agonized and shrill.
The sound was not completely unsatisfying.
“Details!” I snarled. “Numbers; locations. How did he contact you? Where did you take Nikolai? What did he want him for?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know-he came by and took the kid, paid us in cash-there was no drop location, nothing-he didn’t say anything, he just-his number! His number is in my phone, please, take it-please take it-”
I dropped him back down, carelessly. The rickety chair teetered, wobbling unsteadily before falling backward and taking him to the floor with it. I ignored the ensuing gurgling cry in favor of snatching the aforementioned phone from the card table on which it lay. He and three others had been playing a game of poker before I’d entered the dark-lit, smoky room. Those three lay sprawled unmoving on the floor around me.
I scrolled quickly through the list of contacts, absently noting a few high-profile mafia names that popped up as I skimmed. But they were not my goal.
V. Plyushchev. 7-916-555-12-65.
My fingers were already dialing Igor’s number on my own phone as I looked down at the groaning mobster, offering him a cheery smile.
“See, wasn’t that easy? You could have spared yourself a lot of pain by just telling me that in the first place.”
He whimpered.
-“You have something?”-
I kicked the mobster in the side, once, before turning my back and striding from the room. He howled behind me, pleading for a release from his bonds that I just wasn’t feeling lenient enough to grant. The dingy bar that the room was a part of had long since cleared of its patrons, who were wise enough to leave when things started breaking: chairs, tables, bones.
Russians were pragmatic that way.
“Yeah, Iggy. I have the name and number of the guy who had him taken. Can you track it for me?”
-“Was that a scream I just heard?”-
I shrugged one shoulder, even though I knew he wasn’t able to see. On my way out the door I grabbed a pile of napkins from one of the still-standing tables, stuffing the wad into my pocket as I used one to scrub at the blood on my hands. The red flakes stuck beneath my fingernails were particularly irksome.
“Yes. The name?”
-“Go ahead…”-
I rattled off the information as I unlocked the door of my car, a nondescript silver Lada that bored even the most indiscriminate thieves. On the other end of the line I heard Igor typing away on a keyboard, entering data into programs that would give me insight into every aspect of Vladimir Plyushchev’s life. When Nik had called me, frantic and frightened, I knew that the person best able to help me get him back would be Iggy: my old friend and coworker who hadn’t even seemed surprised when I contacted him after four years of silence, asking him for a favor.
Igor Larionov was one of the mainstays in Russian Intelligence. He had been there when I was pressed into service for the KGB, and he had been there when I left its successor, the FSB. He and Slava Fetisov were a couple of the most brilliant minds behind the major powers in the Russian government-as well as the former Soviet regime. Amidst the years of corruption and repression they’d tried to keep some kind of integrity in the agency, and after decades of silent endurance they’d finally risen to positions of sufficient power where they could actually affect events. I had been broken of the job, eventually- but Slava and Igor possessed the willpower and determination to stick around to try to fix the world.
I was just too tired.
As I climbed into my car, settling behind the wheel, a sudden ache twisted in my chest. It took a few gasping seconds before I realized just what had hit me so hard: the innocuously familiar, rich smell of beetroot borscht. I had picked up lunch from Nikky’s favorite restaurant earlier. It was a little family-run business that Nik had come across during his first year playing for the SKA Saint Petersburg hockey team; he said that it reminded him of home. Our first real date had been there. The scents and warmth associated with that tiny restaurant hit me like a punch to the gut, and I clenched my fingers around the steering wheel, gritting my teeth against the helpless anger that rose in my throat.
I was going to find Nikolai. I was going to find the ones who took him.
And I was going to kill them all.
-“Vladimir Plyushchev,- Igor’s voice said, pulling me back to the world. -“Former Ak Bars coach, and he’s coached a couple of national teams since then. Off the ice, it seems that he has a developed taste for the younger players. But they’re usually much younger than your Nikolai.”-
I mentally shifted Vladimir Plyushchev to the top of my list of people to hurt.
“So this isn’t for himself, then. He’s getting Nik for someone. What else?”
-“I’ve pulled up his financials. One of his credit cards was used to purchase tickets on the #167 train to Moscow, just under two hours ago. He bought passage for five people, but the amount of money transferred looks like he bought off one of the employees as well. They probably got him to the train without anyone noticing he had a less-than-cooperative companion.”-
“Tell me you have a name?”
-“Don’t be insulting.”-
It would take a while to reach the station. I’d taken enough money from the poker table to bribe any officer that tried to pull me over for speeding, if it came to that, but I was intent on getting there as swiftly as possible. The train was long gone-but I had a name, a number, and a destination. I knew where they were taking Nikky. And I was one step closer to getting him back.
I would get him back.
I had to get him back.
-
You met at a bar during one of the worst snowstorms Saint Petersburg has ever seen-though you sometimes wonder how much of that night Sergei actually remembers.
You’d ducked inside to escape the cold, looking to put a little warmth in your belly before continuing the miserable trek to your apartment. You just finished ordering a drink when you spotted him across the bar, sitting quiet and lonely near the back. He sat on his stool with his shoulders hunched, as though the cold outside could still reach him; his head bent over a row of little glasses lined upside-down in front of him. His hands cradled the next shot of vodka as though it was the only salvation from the world outside his head.
And something latched itself into your chest when you caught sight of those soft, sad blue eyes.
You still aren’t sure what you were to him, that night. A warm body, perhaps; maybe a distraction from whatever it was that made him look so haunted. Either way, you were transfixed: drawn to him in an orbit you had no desire to break. The two of you ended up at his apartment, the lights dim and his bedroom so very quiet as snow tumbled past the window. You heard every rustle of cloth and every hitched breath he took; pulled him so close you felt his heartbeat through your skin. He was gentle and sweet, calloused hands treating you like something to be treasured, and any possibility of it being for just one night vanished with the soft touch of his lips on your own.
You had a game the following day, and Sergei’s apartment was a fair distance further from the arena than your own. It wasn’t your usual practice to remain after chance encounters, but with his chest pressed against your back and his arm draped over your hip, you just couldn’t find the willpower to slip from of his bed.
You stayed the night. Outside, it continued to snow; and inside, with Sergei, it was warm.
-
Genre: Drama
Rating: R (violence and torture)
Players: Sergei Fedorov(POV)/Nikolai Zherdev
Summary: AU. Based on the 2008 movie Taken. An ex-KGB agent relies on skills he’d tried to forget in order to save his young lover, a hockey player who has been kidnapped by those who want him for themselves.
-
It’s pure instinct that has you calling Sergei for help. Whenever you thought of safety over the past eight months, only one person has ever come to mind. More than the police, more than any government branch assigned to enforce the law-you know that your safest future is in his hands.
They try to take you outside of your apartment. You’re just putting the key in the entry door when a flash of black intrudes on your peripheral vision, and only years of honing your reflexes playing hockey keeps your face from being smashed against the wall. You drop everything-your groceries, your bag of gear, even the jacket draped over your arm-and just fight: lashing out, thrashing and kicking and even getting a bite or two in where you can. One of the thugs jerks away with a screamed curse as your thumb catches him in the eye, and it gives you enough time to dart inside your apartment building, slamming the door shut behind you.
You know it won’t hold them long enough.
Your heart pounds as you skip the elevator entirely, racing up the two flights of stairs to your apartment. You lock and bolt the door, and shove a heavy couch in front of it before your shaking hands dig through your pockets for your phone.
Sergei orders you to tell him everything that you can. How many there were. What they looked like. If you heard any names, if they had any distinguishing marks; if you were able to leave a mark on any of them. He swears that he’s coming for you, tells you to stay calm; tells you that he loves you.
He tells you that you’re going to be taken.
You leave the phone on, lying open on your coffee table. They break through the door and even with Sergei’s words, you have to fight: the fear that strangles your chest leaves you no other option. You scream details, shouting out descriptions to him, but they overpower you with a terrifying alacrity.
They force you to the floor, and you can’t tear your eyes from your phone-your hope, your salvation-as they shove a crude cloth gag into your mouth. When they bind your hands behind you with coarse rope, one of them finally notices your desperate gaze.
The last thing you see, before a black hood is yanked over your head, is your phone smashing to pieces against the wall.
-
“You see,” I said, wiping the blood off my fingers, “I am in a hurry. So the longer you take to tell me what I want to know, the more I am going to hurt you.”
The man tied to the chair in front of me let out a high-pitched whine, his eyes rolling desperately in their sockets. He wasn’t at all important within Saint Petersburg’s deeply rooted mafia syndicate: just a smalltime thug who occasionally hired out his services to the highest bidder. In a past life I wouldn’t have spared him the least bit of attention, more focused on the bosses who actually ran things. But his most significant transgression was not that he was involved in the crime that ran so rampant throughout my adopted city; or even that he was little more than a goon for hire. I had no interest in whatever petty machinations he was up to.
No, this man’s mortal sin was taking a job that involved trade in people-and his downfall would be that he agreed to traffic someone I loved.
You really don’t have to be all that inventive when it comes to extracting information out of someone. At my old job, some co-workers had prided themselves on the new and elaborate ways they had come up with to glean intelligence. They extolled the joys of recently-developed acids, ingenuously engineered devices to inflict pain; different ways of contorting a human body. It was a gruesome game that I had never played-but, then, I always did like the classics.
When Igor had given me the location of those who had taken my Nikolai, I’d grabbed just two things before leaving my apartment. The first was the worn Makarov sidearm that had once been a permanent fixture at my hip; and which, for four years, had been locked away in a box at the back of my closet. It was now tucked safely away under the side of my belt, ready to be used if necessary. The second item I took with me was a small box of sewing pins. Five of them were now missing.
They currently lay deeply wedged beneath three of the mobster’s fingernails.
“Would you like another try?” I asked amiably. I rattled the box and his eyes bulged wide in terror, a keening wail filtering through the dirty rag I’d stuffed down his throat. His head snapped back and forth emphatically. I smiled and reached forward to tug the spit- and blood-stained wad from his mouth.
“P-Plyushchev!” he blurted, the words tumbling over themselves as they fell from his lips. “Vl-Vladimir Plyushchev. He contacted us for a job-he wanted this brat, some smalltime hockey player, said he would pay good money-all he wanted was for us to bring him the kid, we didn’t hurt him, we didn’t touch him I swear please-please stop hurting me-”
Desperate hope and terrified rage threatened to snap something unsteady and fragile in my chest. My hand shot out, fisting in the front of his shirt and hauling him-and the chair he was strapped to-toward me. The movement shifted the pins beneath his nails and he screamed, agonized and shrill.
The sound was not completely unsatisfying.
“Details!” I snarled. “Numbers; locations. How did he contact you? Where did you take Nikolai? What did he want him for?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know-he came by and took the kid, paid us in cash-there was no drop location, nothing-he didn’t say anything, he just-his number! His number is in my phone, please, take it-please take it-”
I dropped him back down, carelessly. The rickety chair teetered, wobbling unsteadily before falling backward and taking him to the floor with it. I ignored the ensuing gurgling cry in favor of snatching the aforementioned phone from the card table on which it lay. He and three others had been playing a game of poker before I’d entered the dark-lit, smoky room. Those three lay sprawled unmoving on the floor around me.
I scrolled quickly through the list of contacts, absently noting a few high-profile mafia names that popped up as I skimmed. But they were not my goal.
V. Plyushchev. 7-916-555-12-65.
My fingers were already dialing Igor’s number on my own phone as I looked down at the groaning mobster, offering him a cheery smile.
“See, wasn’t that easy? You could have spared yourself a lot of pain by just telling me that in the first place.”
He whimpered.
-“You have something?”-
I kicked the mobster in the side, once, before turning my back and striding from the room. He howled behind me, pleading for a release from his bonds that I just wasn’t feeling lenient enough to grant. The dingy bar that the room was a part of had long since cleared of its patrons, who were wise enough to leave when things started breaking: chairs, tables, bones.
Russians were pragmatic that way.
“Yeah, Iggy. I have the name and number of the guy who had him taken. Can you track it for me?”
-“Was that a scream I just heard?”-
I shrugged one shoulder, even though I knew he wasn’t able to see. On my way out the door I grabbed a pile of napkins from one of the still-standing tables, stuffing the wad into my pocket as I used one to scrub at the blood on my hands. The red flakes stuck beneath my fingernails were particularly irksome.
“Yes. The name?”
-“Go ahead…”-
I rattled off the information as I unlocked the door of my car, a nondescript silver Lada that bored even the most indiscriminate thieves. On the other end of the line I heard Igor typing away on a keyboard, entering data into programs that would give me insight into every aspect of Vladimir Plyushchev’s life. When Nik had called me, frantic and frightened, I knew that the person best able to help me get him back would be Iggy: my old friend and coworker who hadn’t even seemed surprised when I contacted him after four years of silence, asking him for a favor.
Igor Larionov was one of the mainstays in Russian Intelligence. He had been there when I was pressed into service for the KGB, and he had been there when I left its successor, the FSB. He and Slava Fetisov were a couple of the most brilliant minds behind the major powers in the Russian government-as well as the former Soviet regime. Amidst the years of corruption and repression they’d tried to keep some kind of integrity in the agency, and after decades of silent endurance they’d finally risen to positions of sufficient power where they could actually affect events. I had been broken of the job, eventually- but Slava and Igor possessed the willpower and determination to stick around to try to fix the world.
I was just too tired.
As I climbed into my car, settling behind the wheel, a sudden ache twisted in my chest. It took a few gasping seconds before I realized just what had hit me so hard: the innocuously familiar, rich smell of beetroot borscht. I had picked up lunch from Nikky’s favorite restaurant earlier. It was a little family-run business that Nik had come across during his first year playing for the SKA Saint Petersburg hockey team; he said that it reminded him of home. Our first real date had been there. The scents and warmth associated with that tiny restaurant hit me like a punch to the gut, and I clenched my fingers around the steering wheel, gritting my teeth against the helpless anger that rose in my throat.
I was going to find Nikolai. I was going to find the ones who took him.
And I was going to kill them all.
-“Vladimir Plyushchev,- Igor’s voice said, pulling me back to the world. -“Former Ak Bars coach, and he’s coached a couple of national teams since then. Off the ice, it seems that he has a developed taste for the younger players. But they’re usually much younger than your Nikolai.”-
I mentally shifted Vladimir Plyushchev to the top of my list of people to hurt.
“So this isn’t for himself, then. He’s getting Nik for someone. What else?”
-“I’ve pulled up his financials. One of his credit cards was used to purchase tickets on the #167 train to Moscow, just under two hours ago. He bought passage for five people, but the amount of money transferred looks like he bought off one of the employees as well. They probably got him to the train without anyone noticing he had a less-than-cooperative companion.”-
“Tell me you have a name?”
-“Don’t be insulting.”-
It would take a while to reach the station. I’d taken enough money from the poker table to bribe any officer that tried to pull me over for speeding, if it came to that, but I was intent on getting there as swiftly as possible. The train was long gone-but I had a name, a number, and a destination. I knew where they were taking Nikky. And I was one step closer to getting him back.
I would get him back.
I had to get him back.
-
You met at a bar during one of the worst snowstorms Saint Petersburg has ever seen-though you sometimes wonder how much of that night Sergei actually remembers.
You’d ducked inside to escape the cold, looking to put a little warmth in your belly before continuing the miserable trek to your apartment. You just finished ordering a drink when you spotted him across the bar, sitting quiet and lonely near the back. He sat on his stool with his shoulders hunched, as though the cold outside could still reach him; his head bent over a row of little glasses lined upside-down in front of him. His hands cradled the next shot of vodka as though it was the only salvation from the world outside his head.
And something latched itself into your chest when you caught sight of those soft, sad blue eyes.
You still aren’t sure what you were to him, that night. A warm body, perhaps; maybe a distraction from whatever it was that made him look so haunted. Either way, you were transfixed: drawn to him in an orbit you had no desire to break. The two of you ended up at his apartment, the lights dim and his bedroom so very quiet as snow tumbled past the window. You heard every rustle of cloth and every hitched breath he took; pulled him so close you felt his heartbeat through your skin. He was gentle and sweet, calloused hands treating you like something to be treasured, and any possibility of it being for just one night vanished with the soft touch of his lips on your own.
You had a game the following day, and Sergei’s apartment was a fair distance further from the arena than your own. It wasn’t your usual practice to remain after chance encounters, but with his chest pressed against your back and his arm draped over your hip, you just couldn’t find the willpower to slip from of his bed.
You stayed the night. Outside, it continued to snow; and inside, with Sergei, it was warm.
-