This is an alternate universe one-shot wherein Borgov is a younger, unmarried USSR Chess Federation World Champion. I have never read the book and basically watched the series in one sitting, so all of the minor details will be made up as I go. None of the details here are canon. Enjoy!
The Scholar's Mate
by Reveri
All his life, Vasily Borgov had been a scholar. Raised with wealth and credence, he was fortunate enough to have been born into a family of Russian affluence. As the firstborn of the family, he had even been expected to take after his father's steps in banking and finance as soon as he graduated from the university – and he surmises that, soon enough, he probably would. But then at age four, Dmitri Borgov, his grandfather, had taken notice of his proficiency for mathematics, reading, and memorization, and introduced him to the glorious world of chess.
Chess was a zero-sum game to him. There was a single point to be won or lost. Never in between. If one had perfect recount and understanding of all the previous movements, all possible results could be predicted. And amongst those possibilities Vasily selected the best to ensure his well-calculated victory.
He grew with chess. It was a world he understood. A world of familiarity, of unfeeling drama colored in black and white. His mind worked in the same way chess birthed its algorithm – slow, cruel, merciless. Papers and articles on him went as far as to say he would never be beaten in his life, and his proficiency with chess would be his unblemished legacy.
And then he met Elizabeth Harmon.
It was at the Mexico Invitational – she was a newly-deigned Grandmaster at fifteen who defeated Georgi Girev, a protégé he had taken to tutoring himself. Vasily was nineteen then, young, like her, but a two-time World Champion nonetheless.
She sat across him with palpable anxiety. Her eyes nervously darted around the audience as they engaged in a match, and later he realized she may have been looking for her mother. A pillar of support.
He destroyed her like all the others before her. He wasn't a one-trick player and, to be honest, he felt offended that her attention had been divided. She would learn her lesson, or she would never face him again in the podium.
Chess was a zero-sum game.
It was at the Paris Remy-Vallon Invitational that his rage grew. He'd learned not long after his win in Mexico that she'd spiraled into addiction following her adoptive mother's demise. That at Paris, she had undergone training with other rankers in preparation for her match with him. He held no expectations, but she delivered a perfect winning score until she sat across him again. She refused to meet his gaze and he knew immediately that she was out of it. Hungover. Dehydrated. And from the look in her eyes, empty. She smelled of vodka and lime, and his dissidence of her flourished. Would she never sit across from him as an equal? Would she always be griefed by life when facing him? Would the world not grant him a fair challenger at least once?
She lost to him. Again. Horribly.
The darkness settled in her eyes when she shook his hand, and at that moment he was sure he would never see her again.
To everyone's surprise, Elizabeth Harmon comes back. Again and again, she comes back. And this time, she greets the world with open arms.
At the Moscow Invitational – he was 21 and she was 18 – she came alone. According to his sources, her friends and peers had abandoned her the year before. And yet, in all practical senses, she seemed calm. Strong. Different.
When she bested Laev in twenty-seven moves, he was thrilled. She had learned, hadn't she? Or she was learning. Sober. She was trying to meet him on equal grounds, but he had to make sure. Following her adjournment with Luchenko, he'd humored the former World Champion with careful advice. That night, they even played simulations in preparation for Harmon's possible counters. But despite her time and attack disadvantage, Harmon found a decisive victory against Luchenko the very next day.
He was relieved.
She was serious this time. Finally.
Flento had tried his best traps, but all it had done was draw out his inevitable defeat into four hours of grueling roundabout tactics. If I can't beat Harmon, Flento had told him, I'll make as hell sure she won't be able to stand straight after our match. Perhaps Flento had thought he was doing him a favor by exhausting the American. But Borgov didn't need his team's interference to win, no matter what the Soviet Federation liked to think – all he needed was a worthy opponent, and Elizabeth Harmon, sitting across him, prepared and unflinching despite her fatigue, was more than enough. She was lucid, strong, and sober. That alone had earned his respect. Sometimes life was hard, and to Harmon it may have been very well needlessly unforgiving, but she came back, she always did.
It was then he understood that like chess, talent was not enough to survive life, and more often that not, grit was what allowed survival.
When he loses to Harmon, he is surprised that the country doesn't ostracize him. He fully expected the backlash of the nation the same night of his defeat – not the post-conference phone call from the director of the USSR Chess Federation.
"Do you think Harmon will be willing to migrate?" The director asks him, completely serious. "We're told the Americans did not sponsor her fully for the past few years."
"How would I know?" He drawls. And more importantly, "Why?"
"After your match, she went straight to Sokolniki park. Played for hours, still is. Reporters found her." The director paused thoughtfully. "Did you know she could speak fluent Russian?"
At that, Vasily clicked his tongue. He'd called her an orphan and a drunk to her face then.
"What a woman," the director continued. "The nation loves her."
He agreed. "A fearsome thing."
They meet at the championship dinner after, and Elizabeth Harmon is, as usual, late. This time, they sit her next to him at the end of the table. She is out of breath when she arrives, tripping over her words, trying to make conversation with him as civil as possible. He barely even registers the presence of the rest of the players at the table as the dinner drones on, least of all the Federation officials who keep throwing them glances, and for the first time in the longest time, he feels unsure.
"How I wish I could live near Sokolniki," she told him. "There's no better place for ruthless chess. I played grandfathers the whole afternoon and they always suggested I meet their grandsons for a date after I beat them."
"I don't doubt it," he responded. She had always been beautiful in her manner of breaking and playing and winning and losing. He notes that she hadn't taken even a single sip of alcohol that was hers for the taking at the victor's table. And because she hadn't brought up the subject of her win over the course of the dinner, he was the one curious enough to ask, "How does it feel, Harmon? To have beaten me?"
"I… Please, call me Beth." Harmon blinked at him twice, dumbfounded. "Well, to be honest… I never really thought about it as beating you." She said, after a long moment of consideration. "It was more about defeating myself. You know?"
At her admission, deep laughter rumbled from him. She startled and he laughed even more. He rose from his seat and told her, "I can take a loss, Harmon. But a complete disregard? Unacceptable." She recognized his teasing tone and she chuckled in response. "I'll make an example of you the next time we meet."
"I don't doubt it, Mr. Borgov."
"Call me Vasily."
After the dinner, they make their way to their private rooms, and the tension in the elevator would have been stifling (given the guards hovering behind them) but Beth's quiet conversation pays them no mind. Beth tells him things he already knew – her orphan story, that she was a woman lost in space and time, with chess being the only reprieve in the world she understood nothing about. Vasily considers that she must be the sort of person who couldn't lie. After all, she was brutally honest with her chess, her open tactics, with people, with her issues and emotions and, ultimately, herself. She tells him she used to be a drunk, and that she was winning her latest battle with sobriety.
He thought about the bottles of vodka beside his bedside. How nice that must be.
They part at the threshold of the seventh floor. She heads away first, leaving him staring at her back for a few seconds before going on his own way.
His guards have left him alone by eleven to wallow in his misery. Oddly enough, this loss didn't sting, and he'd expected to lose himself to self-hatred that night, but it ended up with him going over the recently concluded match in his own chess set on the coffee table of his suite until well past midnight.
Three soft knocks on his door shake him out of his reverie.
"I know this is very out of the blue," Beth begins to say, draped in one of the softest pink satin slips he has ever seen on slender skin. "But the pawn you had set up mid-game – you were setting me up for an endgame Bishop's draw, weren't you?"
He blinked down at her.
She rambled on, "Because I was studying the game just now and — I just, realized… I didn't realize and — I could have lost."
"You didn't take the pawn," He said simply.
"No." She affixed her gaze at him. "No, I didn't."
He stared at her, silent for a long moment, before asking, "Would you like to play another game?"
The answering smile on her face was blinding. "Winner gets ten bucks?"
He smirked, stepping aside to let her in. "I'll be collecting my winnings then." Beth snorted. "I'm feeling very vengeful, you see."
"Oh Vasily," she bowed her head to hide her smile. He still saw it though. "Let me have tonight to gloat, at least."
They ended the match two games to two, with a fleeting kiss on the edge of his cheek as she rose to go back to her suite.
"You're wonderful, Vasily," she tells him in Russian. "When I play you, I feel like I am playing myself."
His eyes soften. "I feel the same." He pauses. "It's very unsettling."
"Isn't it?" She laughs under her breath and waves shyly, before running back on the carpeted corridor floors barefoot. She gives one last look before going into her room and he wonders if he ever knew her at all.
Four months later and fifty handwritten letters between them, the international chess community has been prying and speculative about the nature of their relationship, but nobody is genuinely more clueless than Vasily Borgov himself. He knew Beth and him were friends, yes, but their correspondence barely went beyond platonic, more frequently competitive, and the next time they see each other in the Vienna Chess Classic Open finals, he decides to be aggressive.
"I'm beginning to think he'll never let me win again," He hears Beth say to the journalists. "We've had a couple friendly matches outside of tournaments and he never lets me get past him. Not even once. He's ruthless. It's amazing."
They turn to him when he passes by and he nods. He offers plainly, "Harmon is a challenging opponent. I only give her the match she is due."
Beth smiles at that.
A reporter raises his hand and asks directly, "Is it true Mr Borgov and Ms Harmon are pursuing a romantic relationship?"
Beth frowns at the reporter, and Vasily keeps his face straight.
"My grandfather would like nothing else," he tells them after a brief pause. Most of them know of the local story that Beth had coincidentally played Dmitri (his grandfather, and the man that had taught him chess) right after she had bested him at the Moscow Invitationals at Sokolniki chess park. The reporters laugh, but Beth's puzzled look is what drives him on to say further, "I would like nothing else."
The laughter dies out, and the two of them on the press podium can see the frantic hands of the reporters as they scribble the next day's headlines onto their notepads. Camera lights start flashing when they turn to face each other.
Your move, Harmon, he says wordlessly.
Beth is the one who breaks the silence. "Tell you what, Borgov," she says contemplatively. "30 moves. If you win, I'll agree to a date."
He snorts and huffs under his breath. "Is that all?"
Camera lights keep flashing. Beth raises a brow at him. "Oh, I'm going to enjoy your defeat so good."
29 moves is what it ends with. They agree to a draw. It's the best match anyone has seen in centuries and the chess world is in awed uproar. Their moves were heartless, succinct, and deliberate; and Vasily finally understands why chess is a game of love and perfect information and why, even then, a grey area of draws and shared championships existed within it.
They're in an elevator again, on their way back up to their suites after their match, right next to each other just like the last time.
"It would have been nice to have gone to a chess school," Harmon muses aloud. "Younger me would have loved it."
"Maybe not the soviet chess school," he says and goes on to tell her of his first-hand experience with the rigorous, fast-paced hell of a curriculum he'd been subjected to since he was five years old. The lack of friendships and amusement in his life. "A rose like you would not survive."
She rolled her eyes at him. "There you go again, Vasily."
He frowns, realizing how scandalous the press conference may have been for her. "About that date…" He should probably apologize. "The press conference, I mean."
She sees the look on his face and she nudges him with an elbow. "You didn't win in thirty," she reminded him with a tentative tone.
He opened his mouth to reply, then paused, brows pushed together when she carried on.
"But we could probably go to the park, or the ice-skating rink. I've never been," she says, eyes alight with humor at his slackened features. They stop in front of her suite door. "But it is most definitely not a date, since you didn't win."
A slow, pensive smile grows on his face. Ah, so she could be vengeful, too.
"I'm beginning to think you'll never let me win," he says huskily. She unlocks her door and tilts her head at him.
"Well..." She shrugged, and then finally asked, "Would you like to play another game?"
He nods once. "I'll be collecting my winnings," he promised. Beth laughs under her breath as she guides him into the room, and he realizes he has known her forever. He recognized her in her tenacity, in her troubles, in her losses and victories, and he has deemed her as an equal ever since he has met her. He was her and she was him.
He was setting up the luxurious board set on her game table when he heard her clear her throat. Looking up, the sight of her coming out of the bathroom made his mouth dry.
"I usually don't do this," Beth says nervously, fumbling with the lace hem of her maroon slip. "But I feel as if I've known you for a long time, Vasily. And I don't want to regret this in the morning—"
Vasily crosses the space between them with large strides. One of his hands make its way to cradle the back of her neck and the other around her slim waist. He pulls her to him and their lips are a breath away.
"I would give you the world, Beth," he whispers, their gazes affixed. "All sixty-four squares."
Her eyes leave his, only to take a quick look at his lips, then back again. "I don't want to regret this," she tells him again. He can feel her heart thudding against his chest. The palms of her hands settle on the front of his crisp, linen shirt then make their way up his shoulders, then around his neck. "I want us to last."
"If you kiss me now, I am yours," he says, giving her an opening. He felt vulnerable, but so, so strong. "It is your choice."
He doesn't feel nervous. He doesn't see hesitation or regret when Beth tiptoes to capture his lips in a soft, open-mouthed kiss.
"All my life I feel like I am learning, looking, or lost," she whispers when they finally part. "But with you it feels like instinct." Her breaths fan hot against his skin. "Do you know what I mean?"
He smiled and dove in to catch her in another liplock. "Yes, koroleva, I do."
He was a scholar, and she was his mate. A queen's gambit for all the world to see, and he would accept her offer shamelessly.
He would study her for the rest of his life.
Ten Years Later
A camera flashes. "Mr. Borgov – how does it feel to be at nearly equal odds with Mrs. Harmon after all these years? Your current standing is 28-30, 20 draws, in your favor."
"I fear that my wife will be most merciless at our game tonight," he replies dryly. The room of reporters erupt into chuckle. He meets the gaze of the redheaded prodigy next to him. "You can expect a phenomenal game, as always. I'm told she has prepared the worst chokehold for later. That even Bobby Fischer would be astounded."
"I have," Beth confirms into the mic with a wink thrown his way. "He definitely won't know what hit him."
Vasily couldn't help the smirk that showed on his face. If only she knew.
Notes: Koroleva is Russian for queen.