Work Text:
November 1975
The Interzonal is in 8 months. If Freddie is going to be world champion, he has a lot to do to prepare.
Far more important things than helping Florence move apartments, and yet, here he is, loading up a hand truck with boxes of books and taking them down a dingy elevator and shoving them into the back of an illegally parked U-Haul. Which Freddie also drove for her, because Florence can’t drive here. At least with all the physical exertion, he barely feels the cold.
“You realize we also have to unpack the truck, right?” Freddie asks when he gets back up to her apartment to find yet another new stack of boxes waiting for him.
“This is almost everything,” Florence assures him, setting another box on top of the stack. “I just have to pack up the fridge and then we can go.”
Freddie grumbles to himself about it, to make himself feel better, but honestly? It’s a little bittersweet. He can see her now-empty bedroom through the doorway. He’s spent a lot of time here over the past year, because Freddie’s place is dirt-cheap and pretty crappy and Florence hates going there (not that Freddie can really blame her). They’ve prepared for two US championships here. But now, Florence has a job, and she can afford to rent a slightly bigger room with a shorter commute. It feels like the end of an era.
Freddie drives the truck to her new apartment building, and they spend the rest of the day making the trip up and down, back and forth, hauling furniture and boxes and boxes and boxes, until Freddie doesn’t think he can feel his legs. And then he has to return the truck.
By the time he gets back, Florence has a couple of boxes of pizza sitting on the floor next to her mattress, the bed frame not yet assembled. They eat, and Freddie half-listens to Florence talk through how she might arrange her furniture.
It’s late, and Freddie feels an ache in every muscle in his body. He lies back on the mattress while Florence sifts through boxes for sheets and a blanket. “Have you seen the small box with the star on it?” she asks.
“It’s on the shelf,” Freddie yawns.
Just watching her makes him feel tired. Must have been nice, for her to have conveniently needed to finish packing while he was loading the truck. She grabs the box and pulls a few things out, setting them on the nightstand. There’s a clock and some knickknacks, but she mostly seems interested in the soap and shampoo.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says. “You can stay if you want, if you can find the air mattress.”
Freddie groans. He can’t even contemplate getting up and riding the subway home, but he also doesn’t love the idea of digging through boxes looking for the air mattress he now thinks of as his, even though she’d only bought it when her friend Joyce came to town a few months ago.
It takes a while, but eventually he drags himself into a sittings position. He can do this strategically. The heavy boxes, the ones by the bookshelves, are mostly books. The ones with clothes in them are already sitting in her tiny closet, and she’s labeled the kitchen things. That eliminates most of it.
He pulls a random box within arms’ reach toward him and opens it. Finding nothing of interest inside, he kicks it away. It accidentally collides with the nightstand, and the small box with the star on it tumbles off, its contents scattering across the floor. Freddie stares at the mess blankly for a moment, numb to his own pain and suffering. Then, he drags himself off the mattress to clean up.
He grabs a framed picture of Florence and her old friends from England, a half-completed Rubix cube, and some spare change before he comes across a worn-looking white queen lying on its side. Freddie grabs it instinctively, rolling it around between his fingers. The paint is worn off in a couple of places. It’s big, solid, probably hand-carved. It doesn’t look a thing like either of Florence’s sets.
She chooses that moment to return from the bathroom, now clad in pajamas and an oversized hoodie, her hair up in a towel. Freddie holds the queen piece out to her, between his thumb and forefinger. “Hey, what’s this from?” he asks.
Her eyes grow wide when she registers what it is, and she grabs it from him, squeezing it in her palm. “It’s nothing,” she says.
Freddie frowns up at her from the floor. “Okay,” he says flatly.
Florence looks away, then sighs and sinks down onto the mattress. She opens her palm to look at the queen piece. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she says. “It’s from my father. He gave it to me right before I left Budapest.”
“Oh,” Freddie says. He’s heard little bits and pieces of this story, but nothing very detailed. She doesn’t seem to like talking about it. And he doesn’t like talking about his past, either, so it’s a non-issue.
Except… she’s talking about it now. So it might be an issue.
“It was the last time I saw him, actually,” she says. “We were playing a game together right before his friends came to take me.”
Freddie pictures the probably long-gone chess set missing one of its queens, and privately thinks it’s a shame he couldn’t have given her the whole thing. They shouldn’t be separated. And then she sniffles, and Freddie realizes she’s started to tear up, and he feels terrible for thinking it.
“Hey,” he says, shifting to sit next to her on the mattress and awkwardly patting her on the back. He’s out of his depth here. “Sorry I asked. I mean—I didn’t mean to bring up any painful memories.”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just been a very long day and I’m tired,” she says, taking a deep, shaky breath and rubbing at her eyes. Freddie thinks maybe that’s the end of it, but then she keeps talking. “You know, I never found out what happened to him? When I was old enough, I tried writing letters. To the embassy, to the governor… I never got any responses. Of course they wouldn’t want to help a child find out what happened to a revolutionary.”
When Freddie was in elementary school, his class learned about the failed Hungarian revolution, along with all kinds of other horrendous communist-committed crimes. They’d passed around clippings of newspaper articles about it—about all the pain and death and destruction that happened when Freddie was only two years old, and it terrified him. It followed him home, along with everything else they learned about the Soviets, along with everything he heard on the radio broadcasts or the news station on the television. But now, trying to picture Florence as a child, young and vulnerable and alone, right in the middle of it all?
“Fucking communists,” he says.
Florence laughs wetly. “Right,” she agrees. “I remember when I realized no one was going to help me. It made me so angry. I would fantasize about flying back there and marching into the nearest government building and shaking and screaming at people until someone would tell me the truth.”
“They can’t keep it a secret forever, right? Someone has to actually know,” Freddie says. “Maybe the CIA.”
“Even if they did, why would they tell me? I’m not even an American citizen,” Florence says.
Freddie is, but he doesn’t think he’d have much luck, either. And anyway, the last thing he needs is to draw that type of attention to himself. He’d had to move once, because he heard quiet voices over the phone line before he’d even dialed a number, and in the intervening week while he looked for another place to live, he slept on the subway because he couldn’t bear to be there for any length of time without feeling like he was being listened to or watched. He couldn’t even handle getting all his things—he packed what was most important and left the rest there.
“Maybe we’ll get to go to Budapest someday,” Freddie says.
He regrets it immediately. He can’t—Freddie doesn’t think he could—
Thankfully, Florence doesn’t seem too excited by the prospect. “Maybe,” she shrugs, and wipes at her nose and eyes. “Anyway. Did you find the air mattress?”
They look through a few more boxes together before they find it and a couple of extra blankets. Freddie is sure he’s going to pass out before it finishes inflating, but he waits, and gets comfortable as Florence turns the lights off.
“Thanks for listening to me,” she says quietly once she’s back in her bed.
“Yeah. No problem,” Freddie says.
He lies there for what feels like hours, exhausted and sore, trying not to think about the faded photographs from the newspapers, with a tiny Florence in the middle of them.