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Twitter is a wonderful place, full of awful people, insane people, and clueless people. It’s where Fabi’s patience goes to die.
Today is a reasonably good day. He escaped a worse position in the afternoon’s round, and the first thing that pops up on his nightly doomscroll is not a report of a recent presidential inauguration, but a disbelieving Tata Steel tweet.
aclownsclown Vincent what deal have you made with the devil– 😭
Laughing, Fabi texts Vincent a link (no matter how much the kids like to tease him, he’s not that old as to be incapable of using or disseminating social media—yet) and captions it, What’s your devil’s contact? Does he do deals for the Candidates?
Then he watches, with mounting curiosity and a mild sense of nervousness, as Vincent’s typing bubbles pop up, then disappear, then reappear, then…
This goes on for at least a minute, which is decidedly strange. By now Vincent has usually either reacted with an emoji (one of the laughing, sobbing, or skull emojis, which are all apparently equivalent to his generation), or confessed the whole ridiculous story of what trouble he got into this time, and why it had to involve locking Alireza in a broom closet and ‘losing’ the key. (True story.)
Fabi’s just begun to wonder whether he should be expecting a ten-paragraph long message or a panicked call when Vincent’s reply arrives. Unfortunately, it contains more surprises.
[V. Keymer, 18:01] How did you know ????
What do you mean? Fabi texts back, now beginning to wonder if this is a prank. That would be a Vincent thing to do.
Another minutes-long pause. Then, with uncharacteristic foresight, Vincent writes:
[V. Keymer, 18:07] Ok wait I’m walking back to the hotel rn, lets talk when I’m there
Fabi sends a thumbs-up.
[V. Keymer, 18:08] I may or may not have actually made a deal with the devil
Fabi sighs.
This all reminds him of how his mother used to sigh at his antics and say, ‘Life’s never boring with kids.’ Never mind that Vincent is twenty. Twenty is still a kid in Fabi’s eyes—he must be getting old.
‘This prank had better be good,’ he warns Vincent as the latter lets him into his room. A faint acrid smell, not unlike sulphur and cigarette smoke, drifts out the door to greet him, but Fabi puts it aside. He’s more grateful for the intense warmth in Vincent’s room, which chases away the unwelcome Dutch winter. At first Fabi thinks it must be the heating cranked up to a maximum, but when he touches the hot-water boiler cautiously, it’s cold.
‘It’s not a prank!’
Fabi rolls his eyes. ‘Ha-ha, very funny. If it’s not a prank, where is your Devil, and how can I reach him? I want to broker a deal to win all fourteen of my Candidates games next year.’
‘Um,’ says Vincent, sounding a bit uncertain. ‘I don’t know if he’s still accepting contracts…?’
Fabi lets his incredulous raised eyebrows do the talking.
Vincent’s explanation doesn’t help. ‘I promised him a date in exchange for having a good Tata Steel. And I don’t really want to share my dates with him.’
‘All right, all right,’ Fabi says, laughing nervously. ‘Is this just so you can sneak out tonight? You know Gusti’s not here and I’m not your father, so you can go out without needing to ask permission, yeah?’
Vincent just shakes his head mutely, looking like he doesn’t know whether he should laugh or cry. That expression doesn’t come often—Fabi has only ever seen it twice: once at the Chess.com Christmas gift exchange when Wesley told him to sit on the Hans and Kramnik pillows, and another time when he and Pragg locked Alireza in that closet and couldn’t get him out.
Fabi leans closer. ‘Are you being serious?’
Still with the same frozen look, Vincent nods.
‘What the hell,’ Fabi mutters, rubbing his forehead. He knows he looks like an exasperated father of a rebellious teenager, but can’t bring himself to care. ‘Vincent Keymer, you are in so much trouble.’
‘How do you even meet the Devil?!’ Fabi demands as he paces back and forth, voice rising with each successive question. ‘How do you even get into such a situation that you end up meeting the literal personification of evil?! And then what happened, did you ask him out?! Why would you do that?! No, he asked you out? Why would he do that? And why on earth did you say yes?!’
A knock sounds. Not from the door. Not even from the window. Hell, Fabi would even take a knock coming from the inside of a vent.
None of that. The knock comes from underneath the fucking floorboards. Like in that Edgar Allan Poe horror story about the murderer who hears the heart of his victim beating in his floor. Except Fabi hasn’t murdered anyone, and he is pretty certain—though who knows, now that Vincent has apparently met and arranged a date with the Devil—Vincent hasn’t either.
‘What the fuck,’ Fabi breathes, regretting fervently that he will probably run out of expletives very soon.
‘Um,’ says Vincent, trying for a smile. ‘Speak of the Devil?’
The knock sounds from under the floorboards again, but this time that’s not it. The floor glows a faint red, like the embers of a fire. The sweltering heat pricks uncomfortably at Fabi’s skin. The fire dims and brightens by waves—some distant corner of Fabi’s mind breathes a sigh of relief that the furniture apparently isn’t in danger of burning—and a pentagram appears, and Fabi very nearly shrieks.
He settles for jumping a foot in the air and what he imagines to be a very, very mild shout. ‘Oh my God, what the hell is that?!’
A figure steps into the room, right out of thin air—right out of the pentagram, Fabi can only suppose. The Devil—so Fabi is told—is in the midst of dusting bitter-smelling ash from his neatly-pressed dress pants. Still occupied, he speaks without looking up.
‘Vinnie, are you ready? I had to make a lot of threats of eternal damnation in lakes of fire to get a reservation for seven, and I don’t want to be late—’
The sudden silence tells Fabi he’s been spotted, but he’s frozen. Which is very ironic, in a room that is a million degrees Celsius. But Vincent—did Fabi just hear the literal Devil call him Vinnie?!—is similarly affected.
‘Um,’ says the supposed Devil, unexpectedly mirroring his date just a few moments before. If before his voice sounded surprisingly normal, nothing like the harsh fire-and-brimstone scrape Fabi would have expected, had he had any time at all to form expectations; now he looks and sounds young and uncertain, like the awkward youth whose likeness he wears. ‘Hi. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself, Vincent didn’t mention he had a chaperone. He calls me Nodirbek. You can too, if you like.’
Apparently the Devil is a well-mannered boy with dark hair and darker eyes and an endearingly-awkward smile. Fabi doesn’t know how he’s meant to feel about that—wait.
‘Chaperone?!’ he and Vincent exclaim in unison, to which the Devil responds with a look of incongruously-innocent confusion.
‘You’re the adult in the room,’ the Devil, Nodirbek, says to Fabi. His voice lilts slightly upward in pitch in the last words, like he’s not quite sure about the veracity of his statement, but isn’t quite brave enough to ask the question.
Fabi stares. ‘But you’re the Devil.’
The boy nods quickly. Maybe Fabi should be unsettled by the way he seems to stand straighter and speak more formally at being questioned by an ‘adult,’ but he’s beyond that now. This isn’t unsettling, or horrifying, or even frightening. This is all just very, very weird.
The echo of silence is deafening. So too is the scuff of Nodirbek’s shoe on the floor, when he tries to stamp out the last embers of his pentagram-portal-thing. Fabi keeps half-expecting him to mumble an apology for the mess. Even though the fire, being magical, left no mess. And also even though Fabi suspects he could conjure a death stare cold enough to kill you.
Much to Fabi’s relief, Vincent recovers first. He gestures to Fabi, then to the Devil. Nodirbek. His name (maybe just the name assigned to this face?) is Nodirbek.
‘Fabi, Nodi; Nodi, Fabi. Fabi’s a colleague of mine, not my chaperone. And now that we’ve all been introduced…’ Holding out an arm for Nodirbek, Vincent smiles his signature dazzling grin. And somehow he even manages to get a shy smile back from the Devil. ‘Shall we?’
Fabi cannot believe he has to have this conversation. He cannot believe that he is having this conversation. Is this what having kids is like? Because he does not want to be arguing with the Devil.
‘No, Vincent—’ he looks between the innocent-looking boy who apparently made a deal with the Devil and the sweet-looking boy who apparently is the actual Devil, and the way the former is brushing a missed spot of ash from the latter’s lapel ‘—absolutely not. You are not going out with the Devil!’
Vincent’s face falls. Was he really intending to go through with it?! Was he excited for it?! ‘But Fabi, he’s cute!’
‘Cute?!’ Incredulous, Fabi turns to face him fully. ‘He’s the Devil!’
‘And he’s cute!’ Vincent insists. To make matters worse, he grabs Nodirbek’s hand. Nodirbek blushes, looking so much like the ordinary boy next door who studies engineering and plays chess on weekends that Fabi does a double take, and Vincent turns back to Fabi, a protective stubbornness in the way he half-shields his Devil from Fabi’s line of sight. ‘See? And it’s not his fault he’s the Devil.’
Fabi tries to remember from Sunday School lessons taken decades ago whether that’s true. But even if it weren’t, he doesn’t think Vincent would be moved by theological arguments. He found the Devil and made a deal with him on his own, after all.
‘Vincent,’ comes Nodirbek’s voice, quiet and a bit shy but tinged with amusement, ‘I’m having a hard time believing that he’s not your chaperone.’
‘He’s not,’ Vincent protests, but the look in his eyes as he gazes up—well, down, with how tall he is—at Fabi is pleading.
To hell with it. Vincent is twenty; he’s old enough to date the Devil if he so pleases. And Nodirbek, Devil though he may be, seems polite enough, and dare Fabi say it, sweet. And Fabi has this lingering suspicion that arguing with the Devil’s plans may be unwise. There remains therefore only one condition to be satisfied.
‘Vincent, are you sure this is safe?’
‘No.’
Well, at least he’s honest, Fabi thinks wryly. If not especially wise.
‘But he wrote in the contract that he wouldn’t do anything to “hurt or otherwise endanger” me,’ Vincent adds. ‘And since I won a lost position and survived two more, I think the contract is binding.’
No one but Vincent. Earlier Fabi had thought that no one but Vincent would voluntarily go, find the Devil, and set up a date with him. But on the flip side, probably no one but Vincent could make the Devil himself fall for him.
‘All right, then,’ Fabi sighs. When neither of the boys moves, he raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, what are you two waiting for? You’ll be late for your dinner reservation.’
Vincent’s grin is blinding. ‘I knew you’d come around!’
More reservedly, Nodirbek murmurs, ‘Thank you. I’ll be sure to look after him well, sir.’ He still sounds like he’s reading off an instruction manual detailing how one should speak to one’s elders.
‘Call me Fabi,’ says Fabi, thinking that he needs to sit down, pour himself a drink, and perhaps have a long talk with God, something he hasn’t done in many years. ‘And have Vincent home by midnight, please.’
The interesting couple is just outside Vincent’s room door when Fabi hears Nodirbek’s voice, soft but glimmering with a note of mischief: ‘Vinnie, are you sure you don’t have a chaperone?’
If he strains, he can hear Vincent’s huff and the fondness in his grumbling. ‘You’re lucky you’re so cute that I put up with your teasing.’
‘I wouldn’t tease you if you weren’t silly.’
‘If I weren’t silly, I wouldn’t have struck a deal to let you take me out. Checkmate, I win. I want a kiss as my prize.’
For a devil, Nodirbek’s laugh is surprisingly sweet. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that I let you win, so I have an excuse to kiss you?’
Even Fabi has to admit they’re quite adorable.
Ah, he thinks with an indulgent sigh, shaking his head. He remembers being like that too at their age, maybe a little older. Although not with the Devil—that part is all Vincent. Young love…