There was something about the smell of a fresh deck of cards that took him back in time. He remembered the day he learned to play durak, which was a lot later in his life than most would think. It was also an Afghan that taught him.
Amid was, for all intents and purposes, Sasha's best friend. If his team was his family, then Amid was the closest thing to a brother he had. They had picked the Afghan up during a tour in the middle east. After storming and laying waste to one of the many bases of a nefarious extremist group, they had found the pitiful excuse of a human being in a cell towards the back. He had been tied to a chair, obviously beaten and tortured, and left there to die. Rats had taken several large chunks out of his ankles, and they seemed eager for more. When they entered the room, Sasha had been sure they had found a gruesome murder. But yet the man was somehow still alive.
Sasha was known to have a soft spot every once in a while. He couldn't stand helplessness, and this man was definitely helpless. He convinced his team that it was a good idea to take him with them back to their base and fix him up until they could get him somewhere safe. The team medic, a Frenchman named Bernard (he was a story for another time), hadn't been too thrilled to be given a lump of flesh to work on. A good "shut the fuck up" and a "do what I say" got him a little motivated.
Several days of around the clock care and Amid had made an amazing come back. He spoke fairly good English, and told them that he was a member of the Afghan army who had been part of an attack on the extremists. That attack, obviously, hadn't gone as planned. Sasha offered to take him back to his people, but Amid found their group more interesting. He wanted to join them and repay them for saving his life. In long run, Sasha was glad he did. Amid proved his worth time and time again.
He was a bit on the short side, standing at 5'5" if you included his curly hair. He was muscular, but the lean kind. He was, overall, a pretty unassuming looking man. People tended to look past him, which gave the mercenaries an upper hand when they didn't want to draw attention to themselves. He was very smart, and better yet, good with a gun. A few years down the road, and the Afghan was something of a right hand man to Sasha.
It had been Amid that taught Sasha how to play most card games. Sasha had never given them much thought before, but after Amid would walk into a casino and walk out considerably richer, he thought he should maybe give it a try.
The day he learned to play durak had been a darker one in his life. They were in Brazil, hunting a big time crime boss who's bounty had recently doubled. The man, who went only by "Rusco" had near militia-like forces under his command. He'd bought the police, he practically owned the city he lived in, and he ran drug and trafficking rings across the world. How one guy got so much power was a mystery to Sasha.
Their mission had been the usual golden plan: get in quietly and leave as loudly as possible. They had captured one of Rusco's lower goons and convinced him to give them a rough layout of the mansion this asshole lived in. It seemed to serve as a base of operation. The amount of people guarding it was ridiculous. Sasha and his team managed to get in without much trouble. They were working their way towards the game room where the man supposedly played poker every night at 7pm. Then all hell broke loose.
They were spotted by one of the guards and the next thing they knew, they were swarming like angry hornets. They were too close to just give up, so Sasha insisted they fight the numbers off. There were a lot of soldiers, but his team had much better training. They managed to get backed into the game room. They procured Rusco, but now found themselves trapped. Amid threatened to cut Rusco's throat out if he didn't call off his dogs, which worked pretty effectively. They inched out of the room, the air tense, with a very large knife held to the crime lord's neck should anyone decide to try some shit. They were out of the base and shoving Rusco in their vehicle when the guards started swarming again. Sasha, who had been bringing up the rear, told them to get in the van and get the hell out of there. He jumped on the back bumper and held on for dear life, using his other hand to spray bullets at anyone who got too close. They were almost to the main road when Sasha was hit. The bullet went straight for his gut, slipping perfectly in between the plates in his vest. He fell off the van and hit the dirt hard enough to knock the sense out of him.
The van stopped, but Sasha yelled at them to keep going, lest they all get roasted by the soldiers. Sasha vaguely remembered getting up on his knees and putting his hands on his head in surrender. He remembered looking down and seeing the blood quickly soaking through his armor. He barely remembered being dragged back towards the base before losing consciousness.
When he woke up, he found himself in a very uncomfortable position. His arms were tied above his head, chained up to a rafter with his toes barely scraping the ground. His ankles were zip tied together. And for some reason, he was naked save for the bandaging over his bullet wound. Rusco's second in command, Liam, stood before him, waiting for him to fully come to and realize how badly he'd fucked up.
They went back and forth cursing and shouting at each other. Liam wanted to know where his boss, and his paycheck, had been taken to. Sasha told Liam to stick a rifle firmly up his ass and pull the trigger. The torture that ensued made that remark slightly less worth it. He was beaten like a pinata until his pale skin was almost completely purple. When Sasha still didn't tell them what they wanted to know, they mixed together some boiling sugar and water and poured it all the way down his back. The pain was indescribable. His skin blistered and melted almost instantly, and when the sugar dried into a hard coat, they ripped it off and did it again. When the puddle of blood and boiled flesh beneath him grew to a considerable enough size, the torture finally stopped. They would give him a few hours to 'think about it', and they would be back. They left the last batch of sugar napalm dried to his back, effectively stopping him from bleeding out.
Sasha spent most of that time unconscious. He didn't remember much about his rescue. He remembered a lot of shouting and gunfire, and the white hot pain that came went he was taken down from the chain. He spent most of the ride back to their base, which had been moved after Rusco had been turned in, crying with relief. They didn't talk about that part.
That night hadn't been a fun one. Bernard and Amid tended to his injuries. Amid took a warm, wet cloth and slowly dissolved the dried blood and sugar on his back. The flesh was raw, with several chunks missing out of it. Sasha was pretty sure that Bernard had given him some kind of intense narcotic to keep him from waking the dead with his screaming. When it was all over and Sasha was dressed in fresh clothes and several miles of bandages, they sat down to play some cards. It helped put his mind at ease. He didn't remember, but Amid had later told him that he'd spent the better part of the night trembling and looking over his shoulder.
He didn't sleep at all, even though he probably needed it desperately. It was after everyone else had gone to bed and Amid was the last one staying up with him that the Afghan brought up durak.
"What do you mean you don't know how to play durak? Just what kind of Russian are you?" Amid had said incredulously.
"Not a very good one, I guess," Sasha said, managing to find a smile. They had stayed up until dawn playing, until Sasha was slumped over in his chair asleep.
As Sasha sat in the game room at this hell he now called home, remembering the days when he had friends and a family to look out for him, he was overcome with a crushing feeling of grief. Was all that gone now? Where was his team now? Was Amid still looking for him? Did they think he was dead? Would he ever see them again before this place made him disappear for good?
He was pulled out of it when Xander, the local smart mouth, spoke to him from across the room. Sasha looked up.
"No," He said, his tone sounding pretty serious, but his statement sounding otherwise. "I'm not a very good Russian."
