Work Text:
💜
For a brief moment, you feel guilty as you look at Svetlana Sergievskaya behind the television camera. Anatoly had told you that their relationship wasn’t what it once was, and you had believed him. It’s clear to you though, as you watch how her lower lip trembles, that Anatoly probably hadn’t been telling the whole truth. Maybe it had been over to him, maybe the relationship had been straining at the seams, but all you can think about for that split second that you cast your eyes over Svetlana’s face is that you have done this to her.
A second emotion, one that almost makes you feel worse, is the dawning realisation that even dabbing at her puffy red eyes, she might be one of the most beautiful women you have ever seen. Her dark skin is painted with freckles, and her curls frame her face just so—behaving in a way that you envy, your own hair has never been so easy to manage, especially not in the humid Bangkok heat. You shouldn’t be thinking about her that way, it’s wrong on so many levels. So you push it all down and get on with the chess. If Anatoly wonders what you are dreaming about that leaves you waking up so flustered, well. that’s for you to know and him to find out.
💛
Florence Vassy is actually very wrong about you, Svetlana Sergievskaya (hello! 👋 finally getting to tell your own story). You are a good actor. A great actor even, one who can put on convincing tears at just a moment's notice. She had not seen you perform to adoring crowds in university (this had won you over any girl you wanted 😚, and the attention had been rather thrilling indeed). It’s been a while since those days, but you still have it ☺️. Molokov had given you the role of your lifetime, and you had stepped up most admirably. Maybe you will return to some kind of award. Maybe you can finally be dragged away from your monotonous life as a chess player’s wife, and into something greater…🫢 Oh, don’t let yourself get carried away Svetlana. You still have to fulfil your mission: bring Anatoly home. Then you can fantasise to your heart’s content. You will be a hero of the Soviet Union!
…if only the process didn’t involve making such a pretty girl feel so guilty 😔.
💜
You keep seeing her around the hotel, and you wonder if she is doing it on purpose. At first you reckon that you are just ending up at the same places at the same time—there is only so much to do here after all, it is not surprising that she wants to make use of the hotel facilities given that she must rarely have any opportunity to leave the Soviet Union—but the way that her eyes keep meeting yours makes you nervous.
She makes you think about things you aren’t meant to want, about every ambition you have suppressed to be where you are, every time you have rolled over and taken it, accepted the lack of control that you have in this life. When Svetlana Sergievskaya looks at you however, with that glint in her eye, you want to burn it all down around you. Fuck Frederick Trumper, but fuck Anatoly Sergeivsky too, they’re both just as bad as each other, you’re starting to realise. He fights with you; arguments so loud you are sure that everyone can hear you through the hotel walls. You are so angry about how he lied about Svetlana, about how he pretended everything was fine, just so he could have you.
Next time you wake up with his wife swimming through your head you don’t even glance over to check that he’s still asleep before reaching a hand down the front of your pyjamas and bringing yourself over the edge with her name on your lips. You are past caring about what Anatoly Sergievsky of all people might perceive as betrayal.
💛
Something about Florence has changed, you’ve noticed over the past few days 👀. A good actor has to be observant of people, to learn how to be a mimic—and you are nothing if not a good actor. At first she had seemed shy around you (you know she wants you, it’s obvious on her face, and you are used to being wanted by pretty women 🤭) but she had grown steadily more confident over the past few days, blushing and grinning when you winked at her in the pool. Today though, she seems to have gone back to her previous shyness as she encounters you sitting at the bar after the chess game. You wonder what could have possibly triggered this change (and you make it your personal mission to find out 🙂↕️).
She tenses a little as you sit down beside her—yup, definitely skittish tonight…
‘Svetlana,’ she says it like a question, as if she isn’t sure who you are. That’s a good instinct to have actually, given your ability to slip personas on and off as easily as clothes (which! for the record are a rather handsome suit jacket and a blue shirt tonight, you thought that she might like the more masculine look 😚). She’s a smart girl that Florence, you’ve heard she went to Yale even.
‘Florence,’ you reply, a little sing-song. Your role as the demure wife is over, you decide (take a bow🙇♀️—it’s been a good one). For Florence, you are going to need to be something else entirely. You think about your husband—maybe a little like him, but not too much, you can see how he frustrates her 😔. At this point you put Anatoly, and what you are here to do, to the back of your mind; the Soviet Union can have its hero back later when she isn’t flirting with pretty girls at the bar.
‘It was a good game today,’ you continue. You barely know how to play chess—Anatoly had tried to show you a few times, but it had been far too boring 😶—but Florence doesn’t need to know that. She just needs to know that you want to compliment her, and you feel like this would go down better than a compliment on her personality or appearance.
‘Thank you,’ she says, still shy. ‘It was Anatoly who played though. You should congratulate him perhaps.’ She seems a little unsure of how to mention your husband, so sure that you are upset by this whole affair. You decide to indulge her with the truth.
(Will this sabotage the larger reason you are here, if she knows that you don’t care for your own husband anymore? Maybe. Most of the time you are a little more calculated than this but well…she really is very pretty 🤭. Pretty girls always make you throw caution to the wind, what can you say.)
‘You know Florence,’ you lean in so close that you can feel her curls against your face. ‘What you saw the other day, for the television…it was all an act. I don’t actually love Anatoly anymore, so don’t feel so bad about this, okay?’
She lets out a soft gasp at that, and the look of shock that crosses her face makes you want to take a photograph 📷💥—capture and freeze it in time for all immortality.
‘You aren’t just saying that, right?’ She still seems concerned. ‘It’s okay if you are upset. You seemed pretty upset the other day.’ Her brow furrows a little in concern, which just makes you smile more.
‘No really, I mean it,’ you repeat. You tell her about your acting career, which seems to placate her a little, as well as spark her curiosity as you regale your greatest roles. ‘I don’t have anything against you Florence. In fact I think I like you quite a lot more than I ought to.’
She smiles, and lets you buy her a drink, 🍸. You are quite pleased with how this is going.
💜
Now that Svetlana has let you know that she doesn’t think you’re an awful traitor, you’re starting to have a lot of thoughts that really do make you feel like an awful traitor—only to her husband this time. She buys you a drink, and compliments your chess playing, all things that have worked on you before.
The thing is, you can’t tell if she’s just being friendly, or if it really is flirting. It’s more complicated to tell with women—you’re into both, but have somehow found yourself only dating men, maybe in part because you find all of this so much harder with girls. Men hit on you plain and simple, with women it’s much harder to distinguish flirtation and kindness.
That is until she leans in and places a hand on your thigh.
‘I think the bar is about to close, you know,’ she says, and you can barely focus on her words because you feel like your entire body is about to combust under her touch.
She looks at you in a way that she doesn’t even have to say anything for you to get what she’s implying.
For a moment you pause, weighing it all up in your head. Then you reach out and take her hand, praying that your own hands aren’t too sweaty with nerves.
‘Shall we?’ you ask, your voice coming out with a confidence you hadn’t expected. Part of you knows it’s wrong. A far larger part of you would do anything for her to touch you, and besides, what’s one more married partner?
💛
You lie there, grinning, as Florence breathes heavily beside you. Well 🤭, that was certainly very nice. You can see why your husband had gone for her. She seems to be lost in thought, or maybe just with a completely empty head after what you have done to her 😶. You have always enjoyed making girls melt like this—your husband had been but a small impediment to that, and it seems that you very much still have it.
‘Why were you so nervous?’ you ask her, wondering if maybe she had been anticipating this moment, if you had not been the only one with pre planned intentions.
‘Earlier?’ she asks, and those slightly flustered nerves are back again. ‘Um,’ she shifts a little, seeming uncomfortable.
‘Oh, we don’t need to talk about it,’ you say, though secretly you are desperate to know 🙂↕️. As an actor you have always been curious about people, and what makes them behave how they do. If anything, you think what you do is a study of responses.
‘No no, I guess I’d just thought about this before,’ she says, turning her face away from you. ‘I knew you were married, and I still wanted you. I felt bad about it.’
So that’s what it was. You wonder just how much she had thought about this 🫣.
‘Do you have a thing for married Russians, Ms Vassy?’ you ask her, and she laughs, but you wonder if you have hit the nail on the head regardless (yes! you are just her type, you think, you can make this work, perhaps in a different way than you had originally planned).
‘No no, nothing like that. You are just…very pretty.’
You preen under her praise ☺️, it is nothing that you are not already aware of, but it is still nice to hear her say it.
‘You are pretty too Florence,’ you tell her. ‘And very intelligent. Far more intelligent than those silly men that you concern yourself with.’ So this is what you are going to do, you decide, as she seems receptive. Maybe Svetlana Sergievskaya is not going to become the Soviet hero you had been envisioning 😔, but that’s okay. Suddenly, after one night in bed with this woman, your plans have grown to something much greater than the scope of your country alone.
You think that perhaps, despite all his faults, your husband had the right idea about some things. Notably Florence Vassy of course, but something else too—defection 🥳.
💜
Svetlana had managed to somehow be everything you had expected her to be and still so surprising and unexpected with each playful kiss and touch. You had thought that you understood her, and yet when she turns to you, you are in no way expecting the words that come out of her mouth.
‘Would you do it again?’ she asks, and you aren’t sure what she means by that. Sleep with her?
‘You mean this?’ you ask, and she shrugs, shaking her head a little.
‘No I meant everything else, with my husband. Would you do it again?’
It feels like a loaded question—of course because she is Anatoly’s wife, but it feels like there is something more beneath the surface as well.
‘I don’t know,’ you say. You really aren’t sure. The other day in the television studio you had felt so much regret, watching her cry, but that had all been fake, and now you have gone and betrayed Anatoly Sergeivsky too. You don’t know what, or who, you want, and it’s starting to show. For so long, you have existed as a second, as a shadow. You did what Fredde needed and that was it. Then, Anatoly and the defection—it had felt like a fresh start, but it had oh so quickly slipped right back into all those old routines. Svetlana, at least, does not play chess.
‘Would you do it again?’ she asks again, and you wonder if your answer had been unsatisfactory, before she continues. ‘The defection, the ‘abandoning your life and running away’ part. All that, would you do it again?’
‘What do you mean?’ You aren’t sure you understand her, but you get the impression she isn’t talking about Anatoly anymore.
‘I mean with me,’ she says, with a grin so delightful you think she could convince you to do just about everything. Your heart is fickle and needy, and it is oh so easy to be swayed by it.
‘With you?’ You really hadn’t expected this. ‘But you seem to be, well, the model citizen. That’s what Anatoly always said to me anyway, unless…’
She grins. ‘All an act.’
‘All an act,’ you repeat softly. ‘And now you want a way out?’
‘I was perfectly happy to play the dutiful Soviet citizen and wife as long as it served me,’ she says with that enigmatic smile. You are not quite sure you will ever be able to tell the act from reality with her, if such a thing even still exists.
‘And now it doesn’t?’
‘I think we could be a good pair Florence,’ she says, avoiding the question. ‘I mean, just think how brilliant you could be, without those stupid men in your way. I think you ought to have been the one playing last night really. You deserve it more than anyone else.’
You are aware that she barely even knows how chess works—unless that too is an act—but the words she says are nice, things you haven’t heard in so long, things that make you think back to when you had bigger dreams that didn’t involve Frederick Trumper and Anatoly Sergievsky. Maybe that’s why you sit up, and search around for your bra on the floor, pulling all your clothes back on efficiently before turning to face her—with the covers still pulled up around her, she looks content.
‘Okay. Let’s do this.’
💛
You leave before the next match, abandoning Anatoly to play out the rest of the tournament alone 😌 (maybe you should feel bad about it, over the years though the initial spark has faded, a fondness for him has remained, but really it’s hard to think about Anatoly when pretty Florence holds your hand the entire way to the embassy 🥰). Your flight through the city is secretive, furtive (it makes you feel like a spy 😏) but before long you have proven your acting skills very effective on the consul 🙂↕️.
‘Are you nervous?’ Florence asks, her big brown eyes full of concern. You think you could swim in them 🥹.
‘Maybe a little,’ you say, though you don’t think you’ve ever felt nervous about anything in your life. It just hasn’t been something that’s served you, so why bother. You don’t like flying though, you will admit that, and you feel very little shame about leaning into Florence as the plane takes off, letting her hold and comfort you.
It’s exciting, a whole new life 🥳, there is no need to think too much about what you are leaving behind.
‘I think you should start registering for tournaments when we get home,’ you say to Florence as the plane hits a little turbulence and you cling a little tighter to her side. ‘No time like the present, and you need to get out there, make your own way.’
Florence seems to take this on board, nodding a little apprehensively. There, you think you are going to be good for her (maybe this can be your new mission, Florence Vassy 🫡, anything to make such a pretty girl happy).
‘Okay,’ she agrees. I think this can be a new start for both of us.
You agree very much indeed!
As the plane touches down, you are excited, no nerves in sight here 🙂↔️. It’s just you and Florence Vassy, and you finally have a new story to write.
(For once, it is your own 🥳)