Chapter Text
In her dreams, she stood in a room full of Russians.
Sometimes, she hated her own mind and the things it did. Subconscious intimidation, tigers coming from the shadows even when she slept. The masters didn’t inspire any tangible fear - the most they got was anger, rage rightfully put to work as she cornered them and made attacks of her own. But some part of her was still an eight-year-old in a basement, no matter how many times she imagined ripping the skirts and tearing up the floorboards and denying the establishment the submission befitting a proper little girl. Sometimes, in the early hours after midnight, she found herself wanting to shave her head, maybe to cut away a weed that still lingered.
Fear was a fucking weed and it followed her to her dreams.
The room itself wasn’t of particular importance. The walls were dark. No other discernible details. It was the people who surrounded her that stuck in her mind until morning. These weren’t nightmares, not exactly, but they inspired a sort of psychological thrill that sent ice daggers straight to the center of the soul. Shivers as you awoke to a cloudy morning. The Russians all had different eyes and different faces and different clothes, but they all had the same patient stare, eyes that waited for her to enter the battlefield. They had the weighted presence of rooks - powerful, as if she were merely a pawn. Catch the queen, they chanted, and she felt nothing akin to royalty as they pressed inward, waiting for her to make the move, make the move, make the move.
In Mexico she’d convinced herself she could defeat Borgov. In the end, it was his silent patience and the methodical artistry of his plays that brought him to victory, and his face took its place in the room of her dreams. Suddenly all the Russians wore suits and ties, silver cufflinks, satisfied smiles. Miss America wore lace dresses and red lipstick and dagger eyes. She was small and impermanent. She spent time with her head in the clouds while the masters read books like hungry lions and walked on marble floors in grand hallways. Moscow was the king that could never be captured. Why the hell did her mind think she was so afraid? Her wine glasses could shatter and she could slip into fatigue but there was no presence to be broken apart; her bones had never shaken and her mind had never faltered. Hardly anyone else could picture the chess boards and play the games in dream worlds. Sometimes, the pills didn’t even help her do it anymore. She was forged of her own kind of steel. Yet the Russians kept standing in her dreams.
One night they held a dinner party. White tablecloth, silver platters, assigned seats. She sat at one end and Borgov sat at the other, and not once did they look at each other. It was enough to know that he was confident and she was wrathful, stabbing at a mystery meal with that little silver knife. The rest of the masters lined the sides, Luchenko, Laev, Duhamel, a list of names that sent electricity to her very fingertips.
After she crushed them all in Moscow, Beth stopped having the dreams.