Taken: 2/5, 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 doesn’t surprise you that your captors are sadistic bastards.
It just makes the whole hellish experience that much more unpleasant.
You’re shoved into some kind of vehicle after they haul you from your apartment building, your token struggles casually brushed aside. You try to keep track of the turns they make, but lose count somewhere around forty-seven. Time blurs and you can’t say if either minutes or hours have passed when you finally stop moving. Someone grabs your arm, hauling you out and marching you forward, blind and vulnerable. You stumble, sometimes on accident and sometimes just to piss them off, but eventually they steer you into some kind of building where the heaters are on at full blast to combat the chill outside.
They tie you to a chair, binding your wrists and ankles and chest to the sturdy frame. You mumble curses and threats through the gag in your mouth, trying to dislodge yourself from your bindings, but they hold firm. After a while, frustrated and bored, you settle down. There is little sound apart from your own breathing.
And that’s when the hands come.
They don’t hurt you. You recall something Sergei said, about kidnappers not damaging goods meant for someone else. But that doesn’t make it any better when chill fingers suddenly stroke along the back of your neck. You jerk so hard you almost tip the chair over, and the raucous laughter that your shock elicits seems to be the whole purpose of the endeavor. They continue like that for some time: pokes and prods at indeterminate intervals, waiting until you’ve relaxed before doing it again. It keeps you on edge and stressed out, and when their attention is finally drawn away by the honk of a car horn outside, you slump in the ropes in exhausted relief.
Your captors return shortly, completing what seems to be their side of the transaction. Someone yanks the hood from your head, grabbing your jaw and tilting your head up. As your unadjusted eyes blink into the blinding light, you squint up at the man who ordered your capture. He smiles down at you.
Something icy cold and tight knots itself in the pit of your stomach, and, as the hood plunges you back into darkness, you understand that it’s terror.
-
The teller who snuck Nikolai and his captors onto the train was female, young, and not incredibly unintelligent.
“They took the #167,” she said in prompt reply to my questioning. Her eyes fixed on the gun I’d placed casually on the counter in front of her, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. “One guy was older, whitish-silver hair, kind of heavyset. He had a mustache. And there were three other rough-looking guys. The guy they took with them-I didn’t get to see his face, they had a hood on him. But they had to drag him on.”
Just hearing about Nikky-hearing that he was still alive, still fighting-had a rush of heady relief sweeping through me. I tried not to let it show as I fixed my glower in place, staring down the woman who had helped Nik’s captors get away. She wilted.
“Get me a ticket on the next express train to Moscow,” I ordered. “I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if you have to take someone off their trip to do it. Get me a ticket.”
The teller blanched, and darted over to her computer to arrange for my demand. As she typed frantically on the keyboard I retrieved my gun, slipping it back into my belt and pulling out my phone instead. I sent a quick message off to Igor.
-I’m coming to Moscow.-
His reply was short, terse, and typical.
-So I gathered.-
“Here.”
I turned back to the teller, who had my ticket and a miserable expression on her face. The next train left in fifteen minutes, and I had snatched the little slip and gotten two yards away before she spoke up again.
“I’m sorry-”
And intellectually, I understood why she had done it. Times were hard, the economy was awful and she had been given the opportunity to earn some extra cash. If she had refused, she would likely have been forced to keep quiet in some way, and a police report would have been far too late-there was no reason to turn down the offer. People were kidnapped every day, and she had no emotional involvement with the hooded young man who had been smuggled away. It was all very logical.
But this was my Nikolai, and all the logic in the world had been suspended the moment he was taken.
I cut her a hard look over my shoulder.
“If I don’t find him alive, you will be.”
The train was just about to leave when I got to the platform, slipping inside right before the doors closed. My ticket was actually first-class, a couch in a two-person compartment, and when I got there it seemed my seatmate wasn’t going to show. I didn’t know if the teller had arranged it out of guilt or concern for whoever would have had to spend five hours in close quarters with me, and I really didn’t care-but the privacy would be useful.
I closed the compartment door behind me, pulling out the phone I’d liberated from the mobster back at the bar. I turned it over in my hands as I sat down. It hadn’t been too long-they would still be en route to Moscow.
I tried not to think about it too much as I flipped the screen up, selecting the number that I wanted to call.
-“Hello?”-
Vladimir Plyushchev didn’t sound like the villain I had imagined. I was used to slick Russian crimelords who could talk their way out of-and into-anything; men with cultured voices who mingled with the wealthy and elite. The man who answered the phone was older, at least in his fifties, and his rough accent was from the southern regions of Russia-around Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. His voice rasped, like he was used to projecting and shouting.
The sound of it burned in my ears.
“You have something of mine.”
-“What? Who is this?”-
I inhaled a slow breath, trying to control the choking rage that surged up inside me.
“The young man you kidnapped. I want him back.”
Plyushchev was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, amusement colored his tone.
-“I’m afraid that he’s claimed goods, my friend; bought and paid for. His new owner is quite excited about the purchase.”-
-“I’m not a goddamned purchase-”-
-“Shut him up!”-
My heart stilled in my chest at the sound of Nik’s voice. It seemed like years since I had last heard him; since I had last seen him. Years that had passed in the hours since that phone call, when he had sounded so young and scared. Relief fought with anger and terror in my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe as the battle raged within me.
Plyushchev’s voice jolted me back out of my stunned suspension of coherent thought.
-“As you can see, he is quite a handful, no? I’m sure you can find better merchandise elsewhere.”
And something dark and cold settled in my chest.
“Listen to me,” I said softly. “If you let Nikolai go, right now, all of this will be forgotten. I won’t come after you. I won’t look for you. But if you don’t let him go, understand that I have spent my entire life hunting your kind. I will find you. And I will kill you.”
On the end of the other line, there was silence.
Then Plyushchev chuckled.
-“You can try, my friend. You can try.”-
The call ended. I clenched my fist around the phone.
I had five hours left in my ride to Moscow. Their train would be about an hour out from the city by now. By the time I got there, Nikky would have certainly been handed off. My only link to him would be the man on the other end of the phone; the man who had ordered him taken, the man who knew to whom he was being delivered. And what Vladimir Plyushchev didn’t know was that that city had been my domain for twenty-two years. From the end of the Cold War and through the rise of the Russian Federation, Moscow was my back yard; it was my playground.
I would find him.
And then I would find Nikolai.
I settled down on the couch, trying to make myself as comfortable as possible for the rest of the trip. It was dark outside the window, hours past midnight in the morning, and I hadn’t had a moment of rest since Nik was taken. But my nerves were still on a hair-trigger; my mind already miles ahead of my body.
I didn’t get much sleep on the train.
When we arrived in Moscow, I wasted no time in disembarking and making my way to the front of the station. But as I reached the entrance, I caught sight of a lone figure standing quietly amidst the bustling crowd. He had a jacket folded over his arm, a thick file in one hand and a holder with two cups of coffee in the other. As I approached, hazel eyes met my own with an affection that I had been hoping was unfaded.
Igor hadn’t changed much in the four years since I’d last seen him. He had a few more lines around his eyes and mouth, and his glasses were a few prescriptions thicker, but aside from those details he still seemed the same. A distinguished grey colored his temples, and he was clad in a simple pair of slacks and a polo shirt: he was off the clock, then. This would not be FSB business, but merely a friend helping a friend.
I was unable to help the hesitance in my step as I weaved through the crowd, and I saw Igor’s mouth turn up in that familiar wry smile. I stopped a few feet in front of him, waiting as he gave me a critical once-over. He raised an eyebrow.
“You look like shit.”
Dry; fond. I couldn’t suppress my grin, then. Igor’s eyes softened, and he stepped forward to close the gap between us. Then he greeted me properly: with a quick hug, a cup of black coffee and the best words I had heard all day.
“We found Plyushchev.”
-
You never were frightened of Sergei, even though you know there are many reasons you should be.
A few months into your relationship, when you were spending most of your nights at his apartment-sleeping or otherwise-you found yourself woken by restless muttering from his side of the bed. The sheets tangled around his body as he tossed fitfully, his forehead creased in an unconscious frown as he wrestled with his dreaming subconscious. You never did figure out what triggered the nightmare: if it was the thunderstorm raging outside the window, or perhaps the movers that had been thumping around upstairs all day, putting his teeth on edge. Even as he slept he ground his jaw, his hand fisting in the sheets so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Sleepy and concerned, you tried to wake him.
It took about two seconds for Sergei to flip you onto your back, knocking the air out of your lungs with a hard knee to your chest. Another two seconds and your wrists were pinned firmly above your head, bones creaking with the pressure he put on them; his eyes icy blue and unaware as they stared down at you. He stared past you, and the knife he kept sheathed in the bedside drawer pressed a shallow cut across your jugular. It scraped away a layer of skin before your brains gathered themselves enough for you to choke out his name.
You had never seen such self-loathing in someone’s eyes before. When Sergei came to his senses, shaking off the remnants of slumber, he scrambled off of you faster than you had ever seen him move. The knife clattered to the hardwood floor as he backed himself away from the bed. You knew he was about to bolt, the horror written clear on his face-where to, you didn’t know; it was his apartment, after all-and he would have gotten away had you not lunged forward, grabbing awkwardly for the waistband of his pajama pants. The desperate move overbalanced you, sending you lurching to the floor; and only Sergei’s quick reflexes kept you from faceplanting. He caught you as you fell, your body sprawled over his as tortured blue eyes stared up at you.
You didn’t say anything. Really, you didn’t need to. You cupped his cheek in your palm, tilted your head and offered him a hesitant smile-and that broke him more surely than any angry accusations could have. You pulled him into your arms, tears soaking your shirt as he whispered a litany of shaky apologies against your skin. He pressed his face into your neck as if to hide from what lay beyond the two of you; from what lay within his own mind. You held him close and reassured him that everything was okay-that you were okay, that the two of you were okay, and that you were pretty sure you were still helplessly in love with him. But it was the former, the first, which was most important to him. He only let you return to bed after bandaging your neck with a soft, careful touch, still so chagrined even though the cut had barely drawn blood. Still so remorseful for harming you, even if it had been unknowingly.
You never asked what he dreamed of.
You never felt the need.
-
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 doesn’t surprise you that your captors are sadistic bastards.
It just makes the whole hellish experience that much more unpleasant.
You’re shoved into some kind of vehicle after they haul you from your apartment building, your token struggles casually brushed aside. You try to keep track of the turns they make, but lose count somewhere around forty-seven. Time blurs and you can’t say if either minutes or hours have passed when you finally stop moving. Someone grabs your arm, hauling you out and marching you forward, blind and vulnerable. You stumble, sometimes on accident and sometimes just to piss them off, but eventually they steer you into some kind of building where the heaters are on at full blast to combat the chill outside.
They tie you to a chair, binding your wrists and ankles and chest to the sturdy frame. You mumble curses and threats through the gag in your mouth, trying to dislodge yourself from your bindings, but they hold firm. After a while, frustrated and bored, you settle down. There is little sound apart from your own breathing.
And that’s when the hands come.
They don’t hurt you. You recall something Sergei said, about kidnappers not damaging goods meant for someone else. But that doesn’t make it any better when chill fingers suddenly stroke along the back of your neck. You jerk so hard you almost tip the chair over, and the raucous laughter that your shock elicits seems to be the whole purpose of the endeavor. They continue like that for some time: pokes and prods at indeterminate intervals, waiting until you’ve relaxed before doing it again. It keeps you on edge and stressed out, and when their attention is finally drawn away by the honk of a car horn outside, you slump in the ropes in exhausted relief.
Your captors return shortly, completing what seems to be their side of the transaction. Someone yanks the hood from your head, grabbing your jaw and tilting your head up. As your unadjusted eyes blink into the blinding light, you squint up at the man who ordered your capture. He smiles down at you.
Something icy cold and tight knots itself in the pit of your stomach, and, as the hood plunges you back into darkness, you understand that it’s terror.
-
The teller who snuck Nikolai and his captors onto the train was female, young, and not incredibly unintelligent.
“They took the #167,” she said in prompt reply to my questioning. Her eyes fixed on the gun I’d placed casually on the counter in front of her, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. “One guy was older, whitish-silver hair, kind of heavyset. He had a mustache. And there were three other rough-looking guys. The guy they took with them-I didn’t get to see his face, they had a hood on him. But they had to drag him on.”
Just hearing about Nikky-hearing that he was still alive, still fighting-had a rush of heady relief sweeping through me. I tried not to let it show as I fixed my glower in place, staring down the woman who had helped Nik’s captors get away. She wilted.
“Get me a ticket on the next express train to Moscow,” I ordered. “I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if you have to take someone off their trip to do it. Get me a ticket.”
The teller blanched, and darted over to her computer to arrange for my demand. As she typed frantically on the keyboard I retrieved my gun, slipping it back into my belt and pulling out my phone instead. I sent a quick message off to Igor.
-I’m coming to Moscow.-
His reply was short, terse, and typical.
-So I gathered.-
“Here.”
I turned back to the teller, who had my ticket and a miserable expression on her face. The next train left in fifteen minutes, and I had snatched the little slip and gotten two yards away before she spoke up again.
“I’m sorry-”
And intellectually, I understood why she had done it. Times were hard, the economy was awful and she had been given the opportunity to earn some extra cash. If she had refused, she would likely have been forced to keep quiet in some way, and a police report would have been far too late-there was no reason to turn down the offer. People were kidnapped every day, and she had no emotional involvement with the hooded young man who had been smuggled away. It was all very logical.
But this was my Nikolai, and all the logic in the world had been suspended the moment he was taken.
I cut her a hard look over my shoulder.
“If I don’t find him alive, you will be.”
The train was just about to leave when I got to the platform, slipping inside right before the doors closed. My ticket was actually first-class, a couch in a two-person compartment, and when I got there it seemed my seatmate wasn’t going to show. I didn’t know if the teller had arranged it out of guilt or concern for whoever would have had to spend five hours in close quarters with me, and I really didn’t care-but the privacy would be useful.
I closed the compartment door behind me, pulling out the phone I’d liberated from the mobster back at the bar. I turned it over in my hands as I sat down. It hadn’t been too long-they would still be en route to Moscow.
I tried not to think about it too much as I flipped the screen up, selecting the number that I wanted to call.
-“Hello?”-
Vladimir Plyushchev didn’t sound like the villain I had imagined. I was used to slick Russian crimelords who could talk their way out of-and into-anything; men with cultured voices who mingled with the wealthy and elite. The man who answered the phone was older, at least in his fifties, and his rough accent was from the southern regions of Russia-around Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. His voice rasped, like he was used to projecting and shouting.
The sound of it burned in my ears.
“You have something of mine.”
-“What? Who is this?”-
I inhaled a slow breath, trying to control the choking rage that surged up inside me.
“The young man you kidnapped. I want him back.”
Plyushchev was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, amusement colored his tone.
-“I’m afraid that he’s claimed goods, my friend; bought and paid for. His new owner is quite excited about the purchase.”-
-“I’m not a goddamned purchase-”-
-“Shut him up!”-
My heart stilled in my chest at the sound of Nik’s voice. It seemed like years since I had last heard him; since I had last seen him. Years that had passed in the hours since that phone call, when he had sounded so young and scared. Relief fought with anger and terror in my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe as the battle raged within me.
Plyushchev’s voice jolted me back out of my stunned suspension of coherent thought.
-“As you can see, he is quite a handful, no? I’m sure you can find better merchandise elsewhere.”
And something dark and cold settled in my chest.
“Listen to me,” I said softly. “If you let Nikolai go, right now, all of this will be forgotten. I won’t come after you. I won’t look for you. But if you don’t let him go, understand that I have spent my entire life hunting your kind. I will find you. And I will kill you.”
On the end of the other line, there was silence.
Then Plyushchev chuckled.
-“You can try, my friend. You can try.”-
The call ended. I clenched my fist around the phone.
I had five hours left in my ride to Moscow. Their train would be about an hour out from the city by now. By the time I got there, Nikky would have certainly been handed off. My only link to him would be the man on the other end of the phone; the man who had ordered him taken, the man who knew to whom he was being delivered. And what Vladimir Plyushchev didn’t know was that that city had been my domain for twenty-two years. From the end of the Cold War and through the rise of the Russian Federation, Moscow was my back yard; it was my playground.
I would find him.
And then I would find Nikolai.
I settled down on the couch, trying to make myself as comfortable as possible for the rest of the trip. It was dark outside the window, hours past midnight in the morning, and I hadn’t had a moment of rest since Nik was taken. But my nerves were still on a hair-trigger; my mind already miles ahead of my body.
I didn’t get much sleep on the train.
When we arrived in Moscow, I wasted no time in disembarking and making my way to the front of the station. But as I reached the entrance, I caught sight of a lone figure standing quietly amidst the bustling crowd. He had a jacket folded over his arm, a thick file in one hand and a holder with two cups of coffee in the other. As I approached, hazel eyes met my own with an affection that I had been hoping was unfaded.
Igor hadn’t changed much in the four years since I’d last seen him. He had a few more lines around his eyes and mouth, and his glasses were a few prescriptions thicker, but aside from those details he still seemed the same. A distinguished grey colored his temples, and he was clad in a simple pair of slacks and a polo shirt: he was off the clock, then. This would not be FSB business, but merely a friend helping a friend.
I was unable to help the hesitance in my step as I weaved through the crowd, and I saw Igor’s mouth turn up in that familiar wry smile. I stopped a few feet in front of him, waiting as he gave me a critical once-over. He raised an eyebrow.
“You look like shit.”
Dry; fond. I couldn’t suppress my grin, then. Igor’s eyes softened, and he stepped forward to close the gap between us. Then he greeted me properly: with a quick hug, a cup of black coffee and the best words I had heard all day.
“We found Plyushchev.”
-
You never were frightened of Sergei, even though you know there are many reasons you should be.
A few months into your relationship, when you were spending most of your nights at his apartment-sleeping or otherwise-you found yourself woken by restless muttering from his side of the bed. The sheets tangled around his body as he tossed fitfully, his forehead creased in an unconscious frown as he wrestled with his dreaming subconscious. You never did figure out what triggered the nightmare: if it was the thunderstorm raging outside the window, or perhaps the movers that had been thumping around upstairs all day, putting his teeth on edge. Even as he slept he ground his jaw, his hand fisting in the sheets so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
Sleepy and concerned, you tried to wake him.
It took about two seconds for Sergei to flip you onto your back, knocking the air out of your lungs with a hard knee to your chest. Another two seconds and your wrists were pinned firmly above your head, bones creaking with the pressure he put on them; his eyes icy blue and unaware as they stared down at you. He stared past you, and the knife he kept sheathed in the bedside drawer pressed a shallow cut across your jugular. It scraped away a layer of skin before your brains gathered themselves enough for you to choke out his name.
You had never seen such self-loathing in someone’s eyes before. When Sergei came to his senses, shaking off the remnants of slumber, he scrambled off of you faster than you had ever seen him move. The knife clattered to the hardwood floor as he backed himself away from the bed. You knew he was about to bolt, the horror written clear on his face-where to, you didn’t know; it was his apartment, after all-and he would have gotten away had you not lunged forward, grabbing awkwardly for the waistband of his pajama pants. The desperate move overbalanced you, sending you lurching to the floor; and only Sergei’s quick reflexes kept you from faceplanting. He caught you as you fell, your body sprawled over his as tortured blue eyes stared up at you.
You didn’t say anything. Really, you didn’t need to. You cupped his cheek in your palm, tilted your head and offered him a hesitant smile-and that broke him more surely than any angry accusations could have. You pulled him into your arms, tears soaking your shirt as he whispered a litany of shaky apologies against your skin. He pressed his face into your neck as if to hide from what lay beyond the two of you; from what lay within his own mind. You held him close and reassured him that everything was okay-that you were okay, that the two of you were okay, and that you were pretty sure you were still helplessly in love with him. But it was the former, the first, which was most important to him. He only let you return to bed after bandaging your neck with a soft, careful touch, still so chagrined even though the cut had barely drawn blood. Still so remorseful for harming you, even if it had been unknowingly.
You never asked what he dreamed of.
You never felt the need.
-