Chapter Text
Screaming. That’s what you remember of that night, screaming as your home falls away around you. Nothing but noise, pressing in from all sides, totally inescapable.
And then a flash of white wings. Your father, escaping. Your father, leaving you alone with your mother’s body bleeding out on the ground in front of you. He had cupped your round face in his hands and had told you ‘Bátorság. El kell mennem, harcolnom kell, de visszajövök érted,’ Be brave. I need to go, I need to fight, but I’ll come back for you.
You remember these words, as you tell yourself that he had not flown away for good. He’ll come back, you remind yourself, as your wounds are patched up. He’ll come back, as you are sent away to America. He’ll come back, he’ll come back, he’ll come—but that was the last you ever saw of him.
Bangkok was hot. That was the first thing Florence noticed as she stepped off the plane. Bangkok was so hot in fact, that she was scared to take off her suit jacket lest the press get a glimpse of her sweaty blouse, and yet Freddie still flaunted her feather coat around his shoulders with that easy façade of comfort he always wore in front of a crowd.
He’d held it close to him on the plane, saying that he didn’t want it to get lost in their checked luggage. Florence understood that, she liked having it close too. She liked having it where she could see it, but that wasn’t her decision. It wasn’t her coat anymore.
‘Mr Trumper, how do you feel about finally making it to the world championship?’ one reporter asked, shoving her microphone in his face. They’d barely made it through customs, and already they were ambushed. Florence supposed that she’d better start getting used to this; with Freddie challenging for the title it was only going to get worse from here on out.
‘ Finally? ’ he scoffed, a hint of incredulity in his voice. ‘Do you hear that Florence? She’s treating me like I’m going to shrivel up any minute.’
Florence had heard that, and she’d sighed internally, with her media face remaining plastered on. More and more, her media face was becoming her Freddie face these days—she didn’t know quite how to feel about that. She’d known this was going to make Freddie grouchy and irritable, and it wasn’t going to be the reporters who were going to have to deal with that when they got to the hotel.
‘Please, no questions.’ Her cries were helpless when the reporters descended on them like a mob, and even more so as Freddie chirped away back and forth with them. If this was how he was when they’d only just arrived, she wasn’t looking forward to Walter Anderson joining them in the slightest. The fact that he’d been forced onto a later flight was a small mercy, even if Freddie had bitched about the airline doing that the entire twenty-three hour journey to Bangkok.
Florence forced her way through the crowd, and into a taxi. Looking through the window, she could see Freddie utterly in his element. He was being an asshole to the press like always, but she knew he loved it really. He lived for that controversy. She let out a loud sigh and let her head slump against the seat in front of her, eliciting a slight laugh from the taxi driver. These days, she was getting pretty tired of this. It was a girl who had carelessly given Freddie her coat. A girl, who had looked at him being so terrified that she would leave like everyone else in his life, and had given him her freedom to comfort him. Sometimes now, she wondered how on earth she had ever been so foolish.
It took a while, but at last Freddie decided to come and join her, tossing himself carelessly across the back seat. Florence felt herself wince a little as the end of her coat almost caught in the car door— his coat, she reminded herself, it was his coat these days and she would do well to remember that.
‘Right, let’s get to the hotel. I need to shower, this place is disgusting,’ Freddie drawled, and Florence resisted pointing out that he felt bad because they’d just been on a plane for a whole day—which was certainly not the fault of a city that they’d barely even stepped foot into yet.
‘I was waiting for you to hurry up so we could do that,’ Florence muttered under her breath. She could feel his glare on her. These days, she wondered how they had ever been so close. It had been loosening at the seams for quite some time, but now she reckoned that the only thing keeping her there was the sense of obligation. The sense of obligation…and the coat. He who owned her coat owned her freedom, and she would have done well to remember that. Giving it up had been a foolish decision, she realised that now. At some point, she was probably going to have to cut her losses and leave anyway, without it.
Without her coat, Florence would never again feel the wind in her wings, never soar high over the trees and into the sky in a place where she truly felt like she belonged. She’d left Hungary too young for that to really be home, and yet America had never felt quite right either. The skies had been hers, and she’d stupidly given it up for some bright-eyed, ambitious boy. He’d promised he’d take good care of it, and give it back whenever she wanted. He had thanked her profusely for her trust, and promised that he would never abuse it. Oh how foolish that girl had been.
Freddie was already on edge, and Florence knew it was going to get worse when Walter finally arrived. If Freddie was bad alone, Walter only served to encourage him, and even bringing up his name seemed to set things down the wrong path between them.
‘Come on Florence, he wants to help me, can’t you see that all these sponsors are a good thing, they’re paying your wages,’ he had snapped at her.
‘What wages? You barely pay me Freddie. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t given me a raise in years, ’ she had flung back, and he had stormed out of the room.
Now she lay there, slumped on the bed. He had taken her coat with him when he left, of course. Gone were the days when it would stay draped over the back of a chair, a comfortable sign of belonging between the two of them as they had exchanged sleepy kisses.
It wasn’t like they had been anything, not really. Not like that. What they’d had had skirted the lines between platonic and romantic and sexual, without ever quite settling firmly in one place. If you’d asked the Florence of three years ago—enamoured with a man who finally saw her for herself—she would have said they’d end up dating. Now, she was pretty sure that never would have happened.
They’d always been a little too antagonistic for that, something sweet souring as the years and stress had progressed. Friends didn’t seem like the right word either. Sometimes she wondered if they had managed to create something new entirely, fucked up beyond the boundaries of linguistic definition. That wouldn’t have surprised her, leave it up to Freddie Trumper.
With no idea when he would return, Florence decided to strip off the clothes that she’d been wearing for far too long at this point—they’d done their fair share of international travels for Freddie’s chess career, but nothing quite as far as Bangkok—and clambered into a blessedly cool shower.
She took her time brushing conditioner through her hair, and letting the cold water refresh her, it might be the only chance she had for a real moment to herself for quite some time to come if Freddie maintained these frantic stress levels. The luxury of the large hotel bathroom was only slightly eclipsed by the thought that she was going to have to share this place with Freddie for god knows how long, when they normally had a whole apartment to piss each other off in, but really, she tried to make the most of it.
Stepping out of the shower she peered into the steamy mirror and ran her razor over her face, even though she could barely see a hint of stubble starting to emerge. Hormones had made that more manageable, but at the rate Freddie paid her, she was going to have to wait a long time until she could afford to get electrolysis. Still, it felt easier than it had been in a long time—just about the only part of her life that was going to plan these days.
Her hair—blonde and ridiculously fluffy—was just about finished drying by the time Freddie returned. He too, seemed to have showered—he must have gone to Walter’s room next door—and the feather coat was slung around his shoulders.
‘You know, if you keep wearing that in all the press photos, then eventually someone reading the paper is going to see it and know what it is,’ Florence said. She’d been thinking about it for a while now. What had once been something shared between the two of them, something private and secret, had become something flaunted before the world. She only hoped he was ready for the consequences.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You said there were barely any of you left.’
Florence flinched at the reminder of what had happened to her family, her people, and Freddie instantly jumped onto it.
‘See, you want to beat those commies as much as I do. Don’t pretend you don’t.’
‘When did I say otherwise,’ Florence replied, for it was true. Though she didn’t always like Freddie’s attitude, she had to admit that watching him wipe the floor with the Soviets at their own game was satisfying.
‘You always complain. Becoming a woman made you act like my mother.’
Florence bit her tongue at that, not quite sure what to say. Most of the time Freddie was decent about it, the fact that she’d started her transition not long after they met probably helped, as he only really knew her as Florence, but occasionally he’d make comments that reminded her that he wasn’t quite as on her side as she hoped.
‘I found a position I want us to try,’ she said instead, trying to ignore his jab. They were there for chess, they should just play chess.
Freddie raised an eyebrow at that phrasing, but blessedly shut up as she set up the board. The feather coat slipped off his shoulders as he reached out to try a few moves. Still by his side, always by his side.
You are twenty-six years old when you make what is quite possibly the worst decision in your life to date; you give your coat to Frederick Trumper. He knows what you are, you had told him a couple of months previously when you’d moved in together. It was easy to hide it when you’d had your own apartment, but you’d decided that you can trust him.
That was the start of the bad ideas, for he does his research and confronts you with stories of freedom, of people who could leave anyone, at any time, abandoning families for the delightful call of the wild. You try to tell him that those are just the myths, that part of it isn’t real, but you suppose when you aren’t meant to exist, it’s easy for him to take the myths as fact.
After that, he grows steadily more anxious about you leaving, though he’d never admit it. You lie beside him, and comfort him when he wakes up from nightmares about his parents. You hold him when he cries, and continue to hold him the next day when he adamantly denies it. He gets so scared of things that he shakes sometimes, and yet he never wants to talk about it.
You suppose you think that the coat will reassure him, tell him that you have no plans to go anywhere. The gravity of what exactly you are doing does settle itself on your shoulders, but at this point, you think that you are going to be with this man forever. This man, who listens to you when you tell him that your name is Florence, and holds you when your body doesn’t feel like your own. He might have his own issues, but then don’t you all?
So you present the coat to him, and he gasps softly, knowing exactly what you are giving him—your freedom.
‘I promise I won’t leave. Here, take this, I don’t need it.’
‘You’re sure?’ he asks, eyes wide at the feathers against his fingers. You have never felt more vulnerable in your life but you close your eyes and take a breath.
You nod. ‘Take it. I promise, I won’t leave.’
You haven’t left; that much is true. You haven’t left; you can’t.