They come together in a less than charming way.
(Or, rather, Freddie thinks himself quite charming – and Svetlana, clearly, does not.)
It seems that nobody knows what to do now that the tournament has ended so abruptly. Florence, disappeared, and Anatoly still standing in line after line at the embassy, trying desperately to find some way not to have to go back to Russia. He hasn't so much as looked his wife in the eye since she's been here, and their hotel rooms are on the same floor.
Freddie's is on that floor, too, but he won't let Anatoly pass him by without eye contact. It's the least the bastard can do.
This, of course, results in several extremely awkward moments of silent staring during the week following the championship match. Freddie endures it with some bizarre, grim satisfaction. He likes that he can get a rise out of the Russian.
Well. One of them.
That's really what started this whole one-sided cat-and-mouse game, Freddie muses later. If Svetlana had only given him a smile, a glance even, in passing, he wouldn't have become so maddeningly obsessed with earning one.
There's nothing to do now, while they wait for the flights to be arranged and the politics to draw to a close, or for the Chess Federation to boot them from their rooms. Freddie doesn't even really appear on the news anymore, not after the closing ceremony, so all he's doing is sitting around and twiddling his thumbs – and idleness had never been Freddie's strong suit.
So, he makes a game out of it. They had, after all, worked together for a brief moment during Walter and Molokov's games, and they had got along well enough.
(He refuses to acknowledge what role Florence's absence may be playing in all of his brooding. He does not miss her. Does not.
She'd made her choice, and he could live with that.)
Svetlana looks through him, expressionless, when she passes him grumbling at a vending machine, trying to shake his quarters back out of it when it doesn't dispense the candy bar he wants. He stops what he's doing and watches her pass, opening his mouth as though to say something, then shuts it.
Incredulity wells up in his chest as she descends the stairs. What the hell?
Was he not even worth a nod? A "hello, Trumper" in that soft, occasionally deadly voice of hers? For crying out loud, he wasn't a criminal! He hadn't done anything to piss her off. Had he?
He decides to find out.
Svetlana does not want an apology. He hadn't done anything wrong. She tells him so, when he asks (demands, really) when he catches her – quite literally having hunted through the entire hotel, practically with is nose to the ground like a bloodhound, as Walter would describe it sardonically to him later – in the hotel restaurant later that afternoon.
For some reason, that's not enough for him.
She looks at him impassively from beneath those near-white eyelashes and although there is no emotion unconcealed there, it does funny things to his heart.
Perhaps it's not her disinterest, then. It could just be that he's not as unaffected by feminine wiles as he'd thought himself all these years.
Or maybe it's just the idea of winning where Sergievsky had failed.
It clicks, then, the third day, when he slides himself into the booth across from her with a smooth smile he'd learned during his first internship at a broadcasting agency, back in college, when he'd had organized ambitions and no one to hold him back. And there is no one to hold him back anymore, now, is there? Not Florence, not Walter, not even Sergievsky, who had stolen his title and his partner and a year of his life.
Yes, he thinks, with a curl of vindictive pleasure at the base of his spine. It will be nice to see the look on his face.
But for that to happen, of course, he has to woo her before they have to leave.
His mind whirs, already five moves ahead, and her eyes search his face warily, as though she recognizes his expression.
She'll expect him to be like her husband – chessmen's brains operated in startlingly similar ways, after all. Except for his.
He won't be like Anatoly. Oh, no.
He leans forward on his elbows and widens his smile. "Is this seat taken?"
She leans back in her seat, calculating. "… No," she says eventually, and he finds himself overly pleased with the lack of hostility in her tone. "But I don't recall inviting you."
"People rarely do." He nods, and his grin is genuine now. White moves. Now, all he has to do is wait and see whether or not she's willing to play.
Svetlana stares at him for a long time, but in the end she only shrugs, eyes returning to the menu. She doesn't offer to share it with him, but when she's chosen her dish she does place it carefully down and nudge it in his direction, gazing out the window.
The game begins.
It goes on for another week like that. Svetlana never seeks him out in return and Freddie is irrationally bothered by that, as though he really expects his irrational, overzealous interest in her to be returned when he has done nothing but pester her at mealtimes and sometimes before bed, if he can catch her on her way to her rooms.
Despite her careful façade, he learns quite a few things about Sergievsky's wife.
For one, she doesn't particularly want her husband back, for all that she'd argued with him about it. The quiet relief in her eyes said it all, but even more interesting was that she said it deliberately, out loud, to a man she owed less than nothing to.
"I can't have children," she confesses one night, as casually as if it meant nothing, but Freddie's eyes are sharp and he catches the bitter set of her jaw, the way her knuckles whiten around her silverware. She has two menus delivered to her table now, whenever she dines. He wonders what she does when he doesn't show up.
Does she miss him?
Why does he care?
This game is getting both interesting and disturbingly intimate, and Freddie is torn between the urge to sprint in the opposite direction and the impulse to reach across the table and stroke her hair back from her face.
Christ, it's Florence all over again.
But Svetlana isn't Florence. She doesn't know chess, doesn't know business. She only knows family, and loyalty, and the sting of betrayal… and that –
Well, that, Freddie can certainly understand.
"I suspected that he simply was not trying, but the doctors, they confirmed it. I will never bear a child. Not his or anyone else's."
This conversation had started out light, their usual banter, his usual oily, pseudo-charming small talk. He can't remember when it had taken such a sharp turn, but it's affecting him, and he's having a hard time denying that to himself.
His throat feels strangely tight. "You could adopt, maybe? There are surrogates. Options."
"Not while I am married to that mudak," she murmurs, and her eyes drop to the table. Like that, the conversation is over.
Freddie would normally badger her until she talked, or snapped, at the very least.
Now, he doesn't know what to say.
What did he care about having children? He certainly wasn't fit to raise a child, God knew that. He never would be. He'd hardly had good role models for that sort of thing –
And that's when he decides a change of topic is in order.
By the time their food has arrived she is snorting with laughter into her glass, and Freddie is grinning smugly at his small victory. Bump in the road forgotten.
But he thinks about it that night. Her face. Her voice. Her hands, trembling.
Resentment for Anatoly is not something he's unused to in general, just… recently. But it's not unwelcome.
Freddie stares at the ceiling, arms folded behind his head, and wonders if he has any strings left that he could pull to bring Sergievsky's life crashing down around him even more disastrously than it already was.
Once, he had entertained the idea of friendship with the man.
Now, he knows that he'd never deserved any of their attentions.
Not his. Not Florence's.
Not his own wife's.
The day comes that Svetlana receives word from the Russian party that they will be returning to Moscow, with haste, and that she should pack her bags if she intended to return with them.
Freddie stares at the letter wordlessly, wondering what it is she expects him to do with this information. There's a strange buzzing in his ears. The text begins to blur and bend before his eyes, but he doesn't dare to so much as blink and chance missing something, anything.
He doesn't realize that his face has gone stony until Svetlana taps her fingers, blue eyes boring into his skull, as if in challenge.
Her lips are so delicate to look at. He loves to know that they can speak harshly. One would never expect it. She would make an excellent chess player.
"I will be departing at three," she tells him, and though her voice is soft, it's laced with some insidious emotion that Freddie fumbles trying to name. He's not used to this – to being implored, searched, read as though he's an open book, and he feels uncomfortably as though he is, now. Years of carefully cultivated indifference, and now his mask is gone without a trace.
His tongue feels too big for his mouth. What does one even say to something like that?
"You need any help packing?" he asks, strangled, and she starts. Laughs.
"Perhaps," she offers, and for the first time her lips curve into a truly unguarded smile. It's something Freddie hasn't seen from anyone in his life for years, since his friendship with Florence had gone sour, corrupted.
"I was hoping, though, that you might talk me out of it."
He stands abruptly, holding out a hand as he'd imagined all those weeks ago. His eyes are blazing.
"I can do both."
And as she takes it (and God, her skin is soft, and God, he tingles, and he knows that people are watching them now and he'd never been one for public displays but this is so different and she is so different, and he likes that) he thinks to himself that this was no stalemate, nor a loss, for either of them.
No. They had both won this mental match of his.
He had fumbled, and spluttered, and made an ass of himself for two weeks, but somehow Svetlana does not seem to mind, internally indifferent to his antics. Somehow, somehow, he must have stumbled just the right way.
This wasn't what he had strategized, but then, there had never been a foolproof plan. And privately he's much more satisfied with this prize than the indistinct, irrational goal he'd had before, to simply flirt and toy and tease.
It was definitely more fun when the toyed would tease back, as he found when those soft hands abruptly grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the hotel room down the hall from his, several minutes later.