Red Vanguard - Chapter IV: Whatever It Costs

The door opened the way Ivan Stanislav did most things: with complete disregard for whatever was on the other side of it. A great gust of wind blasted through his office, rustling papers and rendering the placards along the wall crooked.

He filled the doorframe of his office for a moment, still in his uniform. He stepped inside and didn’t close the door so much as dismiss it behind him.

“That stubborn, stupid son of a bitch,” he growled in Russian.

He said it to the room. He didn’t notice Alexei yet, or rather, he noticed him the way one notices furniture. He moved toward his desk, still muttering, replaying his last conversation with Chandler Tsonda behind his eyes.

Ivan’s knuckles whitened on the chair back. “That man speaks to me like this? In my house?” His voice dropped to a dangerous growl. “I offer him food, and he treats me like dirt?”

Alexei watched him from the chair across the desk, hat on, hands folded, with the expression of a man who had been waiting for this specific conversation for several days.

“What did you think would happen?” he asked.

Ivan looked at him properly for the first time.

“I thought…”

“You thought he would fall in line,” Alexei said. Not unkindly. Just factually. “You thought that bringing him here, feeding him, being friendly with him, that it would be enough. That they would simply adjust to the reality of being on your team and behave accordingly.”

Ivan said nothing.

“Chandler,” Alexei continued, “has never fallen in line for anyone. That’s why you picked him. And now, you’re surprised?”

“He is on my team…”

“He is on your team and he hates you,” Alexei said plainly. “These are not contradictory facts, Vanya. The question was never if Tsonda would comply. It was whether you could lead the man who despises you.” He shook his head. “Current results are not encouraging.”

Ivan glared at Ruslan and changed the subject, but not the mood.

“You rerouted our flights,” Ivan growled.

“I did.”

“You put them on my plane. You brought them here. To this place. I wasn’t ready.” Ivan gripped the chair in his hands, using it as a protective barrier between himself and the brown-clad stand-in for reality on the other side of his desk. “You didn’t tell me.”

Alexei cleared his throat and adjusted his tie. “Yes.”

Ivan clenched his jaw. “You can play games with them, but not with me, Alyosha. You had no right…”

“I had every right,” Alexei retorted, his voice rising slightly. “After what happened in Mexico City, you were more willing to put your fist through a wall than rally the troops you recruited. Someone had to act, Vanya.”

“That is not…” Ivan stopped. Reset. “That is not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

“The point,” Ivan said, “is that you made a unilateral decision without me, Alexei. In how many years, how often have you done that?”

Something shifted behind Alexei’s eyes. Not guilt, really. It’s hard to say if Ruslan ever truly felt such an emotion. But more of a man who made a difficult decision and made peace with it before it became known.

“I went around your front, Ivan. You just weren’t paying attention.”

“You…” Ivan huffed.

Alexei leaned forward. “You called their names in that ring and watched it explode on international broadcast.” He watched Ivan’s neck muscles tense. “Ten minutes. Tsonda at your throat, Hunter singing, Neptune on your back.” A tilt of his head. “Why choose them?”

Ivan said nothing, while Alexei sat back in his chair.

“Pride,” Alexei said. Not cruelly. Just factually. “You wanted Tsonda to have to stand behind you. You wanted Hunter where you could watch him. You wanted to pressure Neptune.” He settled back. “It is not strategy. It was ego wearing strategy’s coat.”

The fireplace in the corner crackled.

“So your solution was to strand them here?”

“My solution,” Alexei said, “was to put all four of you in a place where you could not walk away from each other. Because that is what this team needs. Not another microphone or Russia or speech.”

Alexei shrugged. “Why do you think I haven’t let them see me? Because the last thing they need is to see someone else they hate so much, while trying to build some sort of camaraderie!”

This did grant Alexei a moment to consider something.

“What?” Ivan snarled.

“Though… I could kill all of them in their sleep.”

They both stared at each other and considered this. For a long time. Before both, simultaneously, shook their heads.

“You think I can’t lead them, hm?” Ivan grumped.

“I think you haven’t decided to,” Alexei replied. “That’s the difference. You can’t impose your will on them, Ivan, even if you have beaten them in the past. First off, they’re stubborn. Second, they’re Westerners.”

Rain began to fall outside. It drummed against the roof of the building with an incessant patter. Ivan finally pulled out his chair and sat down, which groaned pathetically beneath him. He was quiet for a long moment.

“Lindsay Troy is the prize,” Ivan said finally. “That is all there is. Not the match. Not the team. Her. She is why this matters. To finally get my hands around her scrawny neck, properly. After all the insults and the offenses and everything else.”

Alexei studied him carefully. “So,” he straightened in his chair. “Under the theater of it. Underneath Tsonda having to bow to you, and Hunter under your thumb, and the boy in your shadow,” he paused. “It was always about her.”

Ivan growled. “I knew The Luchador would shield her from being my first pick. I expect him to get the Universal Title shot at the next event for his troubles.”

Alexei nodded slowly. “Probably. Battaglia is desperate enough to do so. Which means Troy is going to stay protected, and the only way to properly get to her is through this match.” A pause. “Which means you need them.”

Ivan said nothing.

“All three of them,” Alexei continued. “Because right now there is a higher chance they stand on Battaglia’s side of the apron and leave the match seven against one.”

Stanislav flared and thudded his fist on the desk. “Then I beat them all!”

Alexei stared at Ivan.

Ivan stared at Alexei.

And blinked.

“Tsonda is a competitor. He’s had his own issues with Troy. And Hunter has been living in the shadow of everyone else in Vae Victis. And Neptune?” Alexei considered the newcomer. “The boy already told you he’d pay whatever price. On the plane. You heard it yourself. Do not waste that.”

Ivan was quiet for a long moment, and then pushed back from his desk and stood. “If I go down there, I’m not apologizing.”

“I would not ask you to,” Alexei replied.

“I am not explaining myself.”

“Also unnecessary.”

“I am simply…” Ivan stopped, searching.

“...talking to them,” Alexei offered. He let the beat pass. “Ivan.”

Something in his tone made Ivan pause at the door.

Alexei held his gaze. “These men are staying, but they won’t follow you because of your rank or your size. They need a leader, not a commander.” He leaned forward. “ That’s what you didn’t expect. Having to actually lead them.”

Ivan stood with that for a moment.

“If this goes badly..”

“Then I’ll kill them in their sleep,” Alexei smirked.

Ivan almost smiled. Almost. Then he muttered to himself, “Whatever it costs,” and exited as quietly as a bear could. — He found them in the main room.

Neptune was nearest the window, peering up at the rainclouds as if searching for stars. Hunter was horizontal on one of the lodge’s heavy wooden couches, an arm draped over his eyes, possibly asleep, or perhaps hungover. Tsonda stood apart from both of them near the far wall with a glass of water, looking at nothing in particular.

None heard Ivan approach, or if they had, none chose to react. Stanislav crossed the room and lowered himself into the large chair nearest the hearth. The only piece of furniture in the building sized for him.

He sat forward, elbows on his knees, hands folded. He stared at the fire.

He had walked down that corridor with the full intention of saying something. He had not determined what that something was, and now, sitting here, with the fire and the rain and these three men arranged around him like a jury, he found that the words he had imagined having were not there.

He looked at Neptune. The boy who had looked him in the eye on the plane and refused to blink. He looked at Hunter, who exuded irrepressible aliveness. He looked at Tsonda. Tsonda, who would never give him anything easily, who would make him earn every inch of whatever this was going to be.

What could he possibly say to these three people?

He looked back at the fire.

And then, from somewhere he hadn't expected, something came.

“I was eighteen,” Ivan said finally.

It was a different kind of voice. Not the brash roar of the belligerent bear, nor the performative bellow of the communist mouthpiece. Not the voice he used for crowds or microphones or enemies. Just a plain, flat register of a man reliving a memory.

“August, 1980. The Army deployed us to the Greater Khorasan region. We patrolled outside Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north. I was enormous and inexperienced, and those two things do not cancel each other out the way a young man believes they do." A pause. "The Mujahideen weren’t the savages Moscow described." He turned his palm up, studying the lines. "Some of them younger than I was."

The fire settled.

“Spring 1981, we were ambushed. Two friends died. I fought until I fell. One Mujahideen, Farid, sixteen or seventeen, moved like water. He terrified me.”

Bobby shifted in his seat. He had served in a mass simulation of a war once, and just that was enough to scar him. He couldn’t imagine what the real thing would do to a man. He was keeping his distance from Ivan after their little chat. But now, he was listening anew.

“Two more tours followed. Six years in that hell. In June 1986, my brother Kliment, gifted pilot, was killed by an American missile before his chopper hit the ground.”

Nobody spoke. For Ivan, he didn’t even know if they were listening, nor did he blame them if they didn’t.

“I came home discharged, but with my own burden. In 1991, in a Grozny bar, I heard Pashto. It was Farid, older now, a scar from jaw to collar. We drank for four hours, his broken Russian and my worse Pashto. He showed photos of his two sons. I had only memories.”

The fire cracked.

“I thought of Kliment, of the men on that road, and I stayed. Three years later, I learned Farid had died. I read it in a report I should not have had access to. Alexei gave it to me. I think he thought I would be happy.” Ivan swallowed. “I grieved.”

Ivan looked up from the fire for the first time. His eyes moved across the room. Bobby, then Scott, then rested briefly, without flinching, on Chandler.

"I picked each of you because my ego demanded it. That is the truth and I will not pretend otherwise." He was quiet for a moment. The rain filled the silence. "But somewhere underneath that, perhaps, I thought you might teach me something. For a change."

He let it sit there exactly as long as it needed to, which was not long.

"Each of you has stood across from me and has not flinched. Hunter. Tsonda." His eyes moved to Bobby last. "And you told me on that plane that you would pay whatever price. You did not flinch either."

He straightened slightly.

“You do not need to like me,” he said. “I am not asking for trust I have not earned. None of that would be reasonable.” A pause. “I am asking only that you consider that men who have tried to kill each other have, on occasion, found reason to sit in the same room. To work toward the same end."

He shifted and the chair groaned beneath him.

“Battaglia’s team do not have what we must overcome. It is a challenge of my own making. Both in picking each of you, and our previous,” he glanced at Bobby, “and potentially future quarrels. We have no reason to be friends. There is no forgiveness necessary. I have put some of you in the unenviable position of having to fight your own friends. But we need, for just one night, to function better than they do.”

For a long time, the plane was silent. Neptune was the first to break the silence.

“For the past six years, I have been an indentured warrior for an intergalactic security company that served the highest bidder no matter the cost. Everyone was put on interspecies squads, no matter the political ramifications. I served on squads with Cadets whose entire planets were at war with each other. Still, they served. Because if they didn’t find a way to work together, they would be dead, and their planets would still be at war. Everything lost, nothing gained.”

He got up and began pacing.

“I never had to serve with someone I was at war with, until now. In fact, everyone on this plane is at war with you Ivan. Chandler and Scott, because of past differences. Us, because the first thing you did when I got on your plane was threaten me.”

He looked to Scott and Chandler.

“In case you two don’t know, if I win my match against Kenny, then the Red Army will destroy me. That is a price I’m willing to pay to save the Multiverse, but it does make me wonder, why should I serve a man who will one day come for me?”

His grey eyes found Ivan’s.

“But I will. Because at the end of the day, what would I gain from turning on you? All that would happen is I would take a beating, and we would still be at war. And if the Yalkarins and Formarians can serve on the same squad while their planet is locked in a millennia-war, then I can serve with Ivan Stanislav.”

He returned to his seat.

“And besides, I want the chance to fight alongside Scott and Chandler. Ivan, I’d hoped it would be an honor to fight by your side, too. Maybe somehow it still can be.”

Scott stood bolt upright all of a sudden. “I’ve been sitting here while all of you have been speaking, and I managed to listen to probably five or six percent of the words you said, which is a new record for me. So first of all, I’m very proud of myself. But no matter what any of you may have said, I would like to say this. Chandler, you are both the namesake of my favorite Friends character and the best dressed of all of us, and I think that is what I respect about you most of all. You can trust me to fight as hard as I can, because that’s all I know how to do, and when I say that’s all I know how to do, I literally mean it is all I know how to do. Everything else I do happens about two seconds after I first think of it. Bobby, I am enjoying hearing about all of your space travels, about the Andorians and the Klingons, who was better, Kirk or Picard, all of that, and I look forward to seeing firsthand what you can do in the ring. As for you, Ivan, you have promised that Alexei isn’t Simon Tillier, so I am choosing to believe you. Trust is important in a team environment, so I’m taking a leap of faith. I don’t trust you, and not just because you tried to pass off salty jelly beans as caviar in the other room, but because you have been, how you say, ‘pain in ass’ before. Still, I will do my best. I’m in.”

Chandler didn’t get up to address the group, but started speaking. There was no sign of the man who’d exploded at Ivan prior.

“The other four people in that match, they’re teaming together for the first time, same as us. Scott, Bobby, I’ve got your six if you’ve got mine. And you,” he said, and everyone knew before the head bob in Ivan’s direction. “I’ll save you if it helps us.”

The Model Citizen cracked his knuckles.

“Team wrestling isn’t who can play nice in the sandbox. It’s calling out chances for double teams, making sure the other guys see blind tags, never leaving one man alone against a disadvantage. Communicate early and often. Let’s win on tactics, and it won’t matter that we may not ever share a four-seater at brunch.”

Tsonda scanned the room, and his teammates.

“And, uhhh, ya know, clear eyes, full hearts, and all that. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Let’s make those fuckers remember Culture Shock 2026 as the night they didn’t know what hit ‘em.”

Ivan looked at the three comrades he had handpicked.

He had come into this room with a speech. He had not given it. These three men, one who challenged him, one who couldn’t take him seriously, one who had every reason to let him burn, had found their own way to the same place he was trying to get them. Without him.

Maybe that was the lesson.

He nodded. — Alexei remained in the office after Ivan left. He did not move immediately. He stood where he was, listening to the Retreat settle around him. The rain on the roof, the occasional groan of the old building adjusting to the cold, and somewhere at the far end of the corridor, the distant and indistinct murmur of voices.

After a moment, he moved to the window.

Outside, the Minnesota wilderness pressed dark and close against the compound. Rain stippled the glass, blurring the tree line into a smear of black and gray. He clasped his hands behind his back.

He had been right, of course.

He was right, as usual, and humility had never been his strong suit. They needed this isolation. No escape. No audience. Left alone, Ivan would have marched into Culture Shock flanked by three enemies and called it a team.

That’s not to say that Alexei wasn’t prideful. But he was also a survivor.

So yes. He had been right.

But being right had never been the point.

Somewhere down the corridor, Ivan was talking. Alexei couldn’t make out the words, only the register of the voice. Low. Deliberate. The voice Ivan used when he had decided to do something difficult and had chosen to do it anyway. Alexei knew that voice better than he knew most things.

He watched the rain.

He thought about a hospital in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1981. A soldier so large he barely fit in the bed, burning with fever, too stubborn to die. Alexei was barely twenty years old. He had been trained to assess men quickly and discard them just as quickly. He had looked at Ivan Stanislav and made a calculation that had nothing to do with training.

He had simply decided that this one would live. And then he made sure of it.

Forty-four years was a long time to be right about a person.

The voice down the corridor had gone quiet. There was a silence. Then nothing. Just the rain and the dark and the old building breathing around him.

Alexei did not know what had been said. He did not know if it had worked. Not entirely. Not tonight. These things did not resolve in a single conversation, and anyone who believed otherwise had never tried to hold together people with genuine reasons to hate each other.

But something had shifted. He could feel it the way you feel a change in pressure before weather turns. Something had moved in that building that could not be moved back.

He straightened his hat.

Whatever it had cost Ivan to walk down that corridor? Alexei would never ask. Ivan would never tell. That was the arrangement they had kept for forty-four years and it had served them both.

He turned from the window.

The rain continued its patient work against the glass. The tree line remained dark and indifferent. Somewhere in this building, four men who had no earthly reason to function together were going to have to find one anyway.

Alexei had done what he could do.

Whatever it cost from here, and whoever paid it, was no longer in his hands.

Battaglia’s team would not wait for them to sort it out.

It would have to be enough.