Work Text:
If anyone could have saved me
It would have been you
If anyone could have changed me
It would have been you
“Don’t call me anymore.”
He had meant it when he said it, disappointment and fury rushing through his veins in equal measure as he slammed down the receiver of his telephone with a satisfying clang.
He couldn’t keep holding out hope that a “maybe” would turn into a “yes” that the “yes” would turn into “I miss you too.”
And Beth was nothing but a great big pile of maybes.
Maybe she would come back to New York someday.
Maybe they would be a them when she did.
Maybe she shouldn’t have pissed off the christian commie haters and blown the money for their tickets so she would be scrambling to get to Moscow on her own and he would be rotting away in his apartment brooding about it.
Maybe is a loser’s word and he had meant that when he said it too.
He just hadn’t elaborated that he was the loser in the scenario, not the one who offered the maybe but the one who was dumb enough to want to over analyze it like one of their chess games.
Looking for meaning that didn’t exist.
Benny was a lot of things but he wasn’t dumb.
Not usually.
So he told her not to call him anymore and he meant it and hung up the phone and didn’t let himself pick it up again to take it back.
It was all very logical and the decision to order her to leave him alone had been made with not just his wounded pride but crucial self preservation in mind.
Still.
When his phone rings three months later, the day Beth is supposed to be leaving for Moscow, Benny answers so fast he nearly tears the cord from the wall.
“You should still open with the Sicilian.”
His abrupt comment is met with only silence and Benny thinks back to that night in his bed, thinks maybe he still hasn’t learned when the right time to talk about chess is.
“Beth?”
“It’s Harry.”
Benny freezes, the phone suddenly a lead weight dragging him down.
“Harry Beltick.”
Benny has met Harry only a handful of times at tournaments years ago, never thought much of the bland, boring Harry Beltick. Never understood why Beth had anything to do with him.
He certainly never gave the guy his number.
“I found your number in Beth’s things, I thought…I thought she would want…I thought you should know before it hits the papers.”
Then Benny’s world constricts, color fading away, black and white squares crowding in.
Queen sacrifices herself for no good reason, an adjournment that won’t end.
No maybe this time.
Benny has never been one for drinking.
Sure he indulges in a beer or two on occasion but he’s never liked the way it feels to be drunk , never liked the way that too much alcohol dulls the edges of his mind until he feels sluggish and soft and ordinary .
His objectively extraordinary brain was all that stood between him and being just some semi-successful gambling addict who lived in a barely inhabitable basement and used to be the US Chess Champion.
Used to be.
But after Beth di…after Beth he drinks.
He drinks a lot.
He drinks until the pieces on his abandoned chess board swim in front of him to the point that when a scarlet and peach blob appears on the other side he doesn’t immediately register it as anything all that strange.
Until it speaks.
“Why hello, Benny.”
He sucks in a breath that sounds more like he’s inhaling a sob, shakes his head until his vision clears just enough and…there she is.
Hair pulled back with a scarf, elbows on her knees, chin resting on her hands, that blouse he likes fluttering gently in a draft he doesn’t feel.
She looks just like he would expect her to if she were really there.
Except for the look on her face.
Hesitant. Scared. Apologetic.
Benny shudders and reaches for the closest bottle that still has some booze in it.
Beth Harmon never apologized.
Certainly not to him.
That was something his brain must have conjured.
Something sluggish, and soft, and ordinary.
And that wasn’t Beth.
The problem is she doesn’t go away.
Not even when he sobers up after sleeping for nearly fifteen hours and throwing up for another six.
His hallucination doesn’t even have the decency to give him privacy, hovering instead in the doorway to his bedroom or on the floor next to the toilet, that same guilty look adorning its face.
“You’re not real,” He croaks out once his insides finally stop trying to tear themselves out of him.
She shrugs and pulls her knees to her chest.
“I’m not sure,” She admits. “I’m definitely dead.”
Benny nods and leans his head back against the cold concrete of the wall.
“You’re definitely dead.”
“I guess I won’t need the air mattress then.”
Benny isn’t sure why a hallucination feels the need to make a joke at the expense of his past, oblivious self but he finds he doesn’t mind.
It’s better than the silence.
The problem is she still doesn’t go away.
He’s sober as a judge like she used to say, has had plenty of sleep and even forced himself to eat something, twice.
Beth Harmon is still staring at him from the folding chair in the corner.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” He tells her, earning himself a twitch of her lips, a sardonic smile that’s so her it makes his heart ache.
“Sorry to fuck up your world view,” She offers, her teasing tone her way of testing the waters, a familiar olive branch.
“Harmon, you fucked up everything ,” He snaps back, instantly regretting addressing her like she was a real thing.
Her face falls.
“I know.”
Benny ignores her the rest of the day.
She is awfully solid for something that isn’t real, having no trouble perching on what passed for furniture in his living room or collecting the bottles he left scattered around.
He hasn’t caught her passing through any walls or flickering out of existence.
He’s not sure if this is evidence in favor of her being a hallucination or a ghost.
Probably just evidence that he’s desperate for her to be there, with him, alive regardless of the particulars.
The mind is a powerful thing, his especially.
“I’m really here, Benny.”
Her voice breaks the silence and Benny adds one to the mental column in favor of hallucination.
How else would she know what he was thinking?
Only hadn’t their brains always been more or less in sync, even back when they were little more to each other than an intriguing obstacle?
“Beth sees things the same way I do.”
He shakes his head.
Turns away from the vision of her, beautiful and horrifying and more solid than she has any right to be.
“If you were a ghost you wouldn’t be here,” He tells the wall instead of her.
That much he’s sure of.
He had asked her to come back when she was alive and she had brushed him off like so much (dead) weight, his misplaced I miss you hanging in the air between New York and Kentucky until the disappointment threatened to swallow him whole.
She hadn’t wanted to be here, to be with him when she was alive.
He figured the after life, if it existed, wouldn’t be any different.
The next call he gets is from Townes, someone if it’s possible that he wants to talk to even less than Harry Beltik.
How did these Kentucky novices keep getting his number?
“The funeral is this Saturday,” Townes informs him, the reporter’s voice cautious like he expects Benny to break down at any moment.
Like he somehow knows exactly what Beth meant to him.
The thought of that would have pissed Benny off if he wasn’t already being wrecked by what Townes was saying.
“They haven’t buried her yet?”
Benny reels from this information.
“It’s been days, almost a week , what the hell…”
“There was a delay while they tried to figure out her next of kin,” Townes cut him off. “The orphanage had very limited information on any biological family and her adoptive father declined to be involved or contribute financially. Eventually Roger and I were allowed to step in and…”
Benny tunes him out.
Turns to face the girl…the ghost…the something with Beth’s face in the corner, her wide eyes staring back at him almost daring him to feel sorry for her.
Well he does.
He does feel sorry for her with her brilliant mind, and her fragile frame, and the world that had so many opportunities to be kind to her and instead kept just picking, and picking and picking away at her until there was nothing left.
But he also feels sorry for himself.
Sorry that he hadn’t been enough to save her.
Hadn’t been enough to make her want to save herself.
He doesn’t go to the funeral.
He packs a bag.
Digs out the one suit jacket at the back of his closet he’d been forced to wear to some Federation thing years ago, hangs it near the shower and runs the water hot and steamy in an attempt to get some of the wrinkles out.
Plans out exactly the route he needs to take, what time he needs to leave if he drives straight through.
He makes it all the way into the front seat of his car.
Grips the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles ache.
In the end he comes back inside, avoids the eyes of the version of Beth still taking up space in his apartment and searches for something to break.
Unfortunately he doesn’t have a lot of things to begin with other than chess boards and chess books, settles for one of the two mugs he owns then immediately feels regret when he stares down at the shattered pieces.
Beth drank out of that mug.
Complained that he only had two.
“You really should have at least four,” She had told him in that overly patient tone like she was the better part of a decade his senior instead of the other way around. “And better yet they should match. What if you have someone important over? Do you want to serve them coffee out of a chipped mug?”
“There’s only two of us,” Benny had countered at the time, the extra layers of meaning behind his words going un-examined though he had known damn well what he meant.
She was the only one who qualified as important to him.
The only one he would tolerate lecturing him about his mugs in his apartment.
Benny collapses to the floor, the effort it takes to stay standing suddenly seeming like more than he has in him.
Beth crosses the room, one of his cheap plastic chess boards tucked under her arm, sinks wordlessly onto the floor across from him, gently sweeps the pieces of the broken mug out of the way and then gets to work setting up the chess board between them.
“What are you doing?” Benny demands, his voice raspy and trembling a little bit more than he wants to admit.
“Let’s play chess,” She responds in a breezy tone that cracks something in him open even wider.
Beth sets up the pieces while Benny watches.
Lets him have the white pieces, inherent advantage and all.
“I’m supposed to be on my way to your funeral,” He reminds her. “Everyone important to you is going to be there. Don’t you want to go haunt them instead?”
Beth finishes setting up the game, raises those impossibly big eyes up to meet his.
“You’re here,” She says as if that is meant to explain something. “And I want to play.”
So they play.
Beth wins.
Of course.
She wins the next three games.
He gets her on game four though and she doesn’t see it coming if the way her forehead furrows is any indication.
“Didn’t think that would ever happen again, huh?” He tosses out lightly, his face falling when he sees her freeze slightly.
Oh.
He meant because she had passed him so decisively when it came to chess skill not because she is…gone.
Only she isn’t gone, is she?
Hallucination, ghost, lingering alcohol poisoning…whatever she is.
She is there.
Right in front of him.
For a moment he can’t bring himself to be anything but grateful for that.
“I’m going to bed,” He says, rising to his feet and heading toward his bedroom.
He pauses in the doorway, turns to find her staring back from her spot on the floor.
“You coming?”
She hesitates for half a second then she’s at his side, the space between them tantalizingly small yet obviously insurmountable.
She could touch his bottles and his furniture and his chess board but when he handed her his king his fingers brushed against the space where hers should be and felt only air.
He hadn’t tried again.
They lay on his bed facing each other and Benny isn’t sure how to be in bed with Beth Harmon without touching her.
Ever since that first time they had always defaulted to touch.
Or chess talk.
With mixed results.
He considers rehashing the games they just played.
Opens his mouth and something else escapes.
“Did you do it on purpose?”
“No,” She says quickly, shifting closer to him, fingers twitching like she wants to reach for him. “I didn’t take care of myself and sometimes I guess that was on purpose. I didn’t try as hard as I could have to quit drinking, the pills…didn’t let people help me when I knew they would have. But I didn’t want…this.”
Benny nods and she keeps talking, words falling from her lips like the constant drip of his terrible faucet, more words than he thinks she has ever said to him about anything important other than chess the entire time he’s known her.
“My mom…not Alma, my mom she…got sick. Or maybe she was sick all along. She was a mathematician and she was so incredibly smart but life just didn’t agree with her somehow. She thought she could make it through if she hid us away but it didn’t work. She crashed our car on purpose with me in the back seat. It’s how she died.”
Benny sucks in a surprised breath, knows his face must be absolutely stricken.
He had known she grew up in an orphanage, guessed there must be a sad story behind that but this…
“God, Beth…”
She shakes her head and he trails off.
“It’s fine…well, not fine but…just…I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t do that.”
It’s his turn to shift closer to her, less than an inch of space between them, close enough he can almost pretend he feels her non-existent breath on his lips.
“I believe you.”
He sleeps.
She doesn’t.
He wakes.
She’s still there.
His phone won’t stop ringing.
The Federation wants him to contribute to her in memoriam piece for their newsletter.
Chess Review wants a quote about the legacy of the woman who had taken his place as the best US player.
Even the Times wants his input for a piece they are working on about the short and tragic life of Beth Harmon.
He tries at first.
Pushes through his distaste for the interruption of his grief, for their shallow questions, for the way they’re all completely missing the point of how fucking incredible she was.
How it doesn’t matter that she hadn’t beat Borgov, because she would have, her crowning as the world’s best not a hypothetical but an inevitability, how she would have, she would have, she would have …
The Times article ends up being more of a blurb, a paragraph and a half on page 3, no photo.
Promising Female Chess Player Dead at Twenty
“If you’re not careful you’ll be washed up by the time you’re twenty-one.”
Benny tears the paper up into long strips, crumples them into haphazard balls and starts tossing them at nothing in particular across the room.
Beth joins him, challenges him to hit different randomly chosen targets, has much better accuracy than he does.
Of course.
“I’m taking the phone off the hook,” He says when they’ve run out of projectiles to throw. “Fuck em.”
Beth grins.
“Now you sound like me.”
Their life in his apartment settles into something routine and almost normal, not all that different from those crystalized weeks they had spent preparing for Paris.
They play chess and they talk about chess and at night she shares his bed even if the context of that is a little different by necessity.
Benny eats, because he has to, at least occasionally.
Beth doesn’t because she can’t.
He still finds himself grabbing things he knows she likes when he forces himself to venture out to the market, logic be damned.
Eggs and dark chocolate and that one cheese he can’t pronounce but always used to make her close her eyes in delight when she ate it.
He gets takeout from the Chinese place they both used to like and Beth swears she can almost smell it.
She can’t of course but it’s nice to pretend.
“Can you leave the apartment?” He asks unprompted one day in the middle of a game she is clearly poised to win.
“Why are you kicking me out?” She jokes, not looking up from the board.
Benny feels a bit sick at the teasing question.
He still isn’t completely convinced that she is real and regardless she’s dead .
When the one girl you’ve never gotten over being a ghost that haunts your apartment is the best case scenario you know you are well and truly fucked.
But none of that changes the fact that he is absolutely, inconsolably desperate for her to stay.
Just like he has always been.
And to think he used to have a reputation for being obsessed with no one but himself.
If only they knew.
“Aren’t you sick of being in this basement?”
He moves his pawn and Beth immediately takes it, moving dangerously close to his Queen with an opening he never should have given her.
“It’s not like we ever really went out,” She observes, eyes still focused on the game though they narrow as she takes in his idiotic move.
“I should have. I should have taken you out.”
That does it.
Beth’s eyes shoot up to meet his and there’s that look again.
Hesitant. Scared. Apologetic.
“We were busy, Benny,” She points out carefully. “I was here for a reason. And it’s not like we never had fun. With your friends or…just us. We didn’t need to go out.”
Benny feels a familiar rising panic, a sense of usually well hidden inadequacy nearly punching him in the face.
The same feeling he got when his parents had exchanged a look that said they didn’t know what to do with him anymore, the same feeling he got when Borgov had completely wiped the floor with him from almost the first move, the same feeling he got when he said I miss you over the phone and Beth changed the subject.
“I still should have taken you out,” He says, his breaths becoming labored, the chess board forgotten. “You were so young…you’re still so young…you always will be…fuck. You barely got to do anything. And other people…other people who feel…like I…they would have…”
“Benny.”
Her voice is so forceful it shocks him into silence, his breathing quieting slightly as she reaches out for him.
She can’t touch him of course but she doesn’t withdraw her hand, just lets it hover over his until he swears he can almost feel it.
He can’t of course but it’s nice to pretend.
“We’re not like other people.”
She says it with a half smile and despite everything he lets a weak chuckle escape at her observation.
If that isn’t the damn truth.
They never had been, even before she was a ghost or a hallucination and he was the haunted or the insane.
Two chess prodigies that saw things the same way, a way even all the other geniuses they met never could seem to.
She finally retracts her hand.
Drops her eyes to the board.
“Now let’s finish the game and I want you to focus. That last move was beneath you.”
So they play.
She wins.
But it’s close.
He wakes up one morning to the sound of the radio, the staticky voices of Simon & Garfunkel drifting in from his living room.
Benny hardly ever uses the thing since the subterranean status of his apartment means that the reception is always fairly shit.
But as he emerges from his bedroom to see Beth spinning in joyous circles, her hips swiveling tantalizingly to the beat, he is suddenly very glad he never got rid of it.
Her hair fans out as she dips her head, arms outstretched as she twirls and catches sight of him, her face lighting up like she can’t believe he’s there.
As though this isn’t his apartment and his radio and his sleep she has just interrupted with her early morning shenanigans.
He grins back.
Moves across the floor to meet her between his folding chair and the abandoned chess board from last night’s game.
Stops himself at the last minute from reaching for her waist.
Settles for matching her movements, letting the music, and the joy and the Beth of it all wash over him.
They have enjoyed music together before, singing in his car in between bouts of mental chess, Beth’s voice never quite on pitch but pleasing to his ears all the same.
Benny has a good voice, certainly passable for singing in church when his parents used to make him go or along to the radio when he wanted to impress a girl.
Although honestly Beth was the only girl he had ever really tied himself in knots trying to impress.
He’s glad he’s missed the verse implying Mrs. Robinson is being checked into a mental institution, glad he can slip right into softly singing the chorus as he and Beth dance closer and closer together, smiling almost obnoxiously into each other’s faces.
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Benny doesn’t know about Jesus, has never believed in anything he couldn’t make sense of with his intellect (including ghosts though he was in the process of making an exception) but he knows Beth Harmon is loved more than she would probably ever know.
More than she will probably ever let herself know.
By the obnoxiously good looking Townes, and the almost unbelievably guileless Harry Beltik, and the thousand little girls out there who have probably taken up chess because of her.
By…he doesn’t even let himself think it.
Doesn’t mean it’s not true.
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
His hands ache to reach out and hold her, to draw her in close and then dip her back dramatically like one of those romantic heroes from the movies he never found the time to take her to see.
Should he be hoping that Beth figures out whatever is keeping her here and finds her way to her place in Heaven?
Is that what he is supposed to be doing?
Helping her finish her unfinished business and sending her on her way?
It is infuriating to be trapped in his own apartment with the perfect manifestation of all the things he has never let himself believe in.
Ghosts.
Heaven.
A life with Beth.
“Hey!”
She speaks for the first time since he joined her in the living room, forcing his attention back to her as the song starts to draw to a close.
“It’s not polite to daydream while you’re dancing with a girl,” She says it teasingly but he can tell she knows whatever she’s pulling him back from is heavier than he can put down alone.
Benny manages a smile, brushes his hair out of his face and wishes she was doing it instead.
“My apologies,” He says. “I’m known for my politeness.”
Beth rolls her eyes, doesn’t manage to hide the fond smile tugging at her lips.
“I think you mean you’re known for being a pretentious asshole in a cowboy getup.”
Benny takes that one on the chin.
“And I think you mean a brilliant pretentious asshole in a cowboy getup.”
She doesn’t deny that just goes back to dancing and Benny tries to hold on to the happiness of the moment without considering the inevitable.
Unfortunately he’s a chess player, a damn good one even if she does wipe the floor with him more than half the time.
His brain is conditioned to see how things will play out countless moves ahead.
And the game he’s playing?
There’s no winning this one.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose
During the long nights spent in his bed (nights they can very much not spend touching) she tells him more about her life before he knew her.
She tells him about her mother trying to drop her off at her father’s house before the…well, not accident.
Incident.
The horror show that had practically started out Beth’s life.
She tells him about the orphanage and her friend Jolene and the Goddamn pills they stuffed down her throat with no care for what they were setting in motion.
She tells him about Mr. Shaibel and discovering chess and how it was like her life finally came into focus.
She tells him about being adopted, about her adopted father’s malicious indifference to both her and her adopted mother.
About her adopted mother’s flawed but very real love, about the drinking, about finding her staring lifelessly at the ceiling after losing to Borgov.
Benny doesn’t say much while she talks.
What the hell can he say that she doesn’t already know anyway?
He does let his hand rest next to hers on the mattress though, their pinkies almost brushing against each other, close enough he hopes she understands he would hold her hand if he could.
He tells her things too.
He tells her how his father had taught him chess on a lark, expecting it to be a hobby they could enjoy together after dinner, how his face had become confused and drawn when only a few weeks later six year old Benny was beating him handedly.
He tells her how his parents had certainly loved him, had supported him as best they could, hauling him around to tournaments and posing awkwardly with him in photos for the papers.
But he also tells her how it became clear to him very early on that his parents would have preferred a child who was not a chess prodigy, a child they could teach, and raise and understand.
A child a little less brilliant and a little more likable.
A child who was easier.
“Chess keeps churning out prodigies but I never once played anyone even close to my own age back then,” Benny tells her in a hushed tone. “Nobody took me seriously even when I was beating them. Some were indifferent and some were downright cruel. I started dressing to feel impressive and cool and too tough to mess with. Only problem was I was a little kid so my idea of cool was…”
“A combination of a cowboy and a pirate?” She fills in with accuracy that would be offensive from anyone else but just makes his heart swell with affection for her.
“And as you can see it kind of stuck,” He agrees. “And now it is cool because I made it that way.”
“Hmmm,” She hums in not quite agreement, closing her eyes though he knows she can’t actually be drifting off to sleep.
Still.
He likes the illusion of her feeling comfortable enough to sleep next to him even when they haven’t just had sex or exhausted themselves with an all night game, when they’ve traded words and trust rather than touches or chess moves.
Benny closes his eyes.
Sends a prayer up to no one that she will still be there when he wakes.
They talk about their lives after they met too, generally when one of them is irritated with the other for some reason, bringing up one of the gaps in their knowledge of what the other had been doing over the course of their…acquaintance.
“Why do you keep asking about Harry?” Beth huffs out in irritation, her eyes on a game of chess neither of them has been giving their full attention for the better part of an hour.
Benny resents that she says it like that, resents that she’s right , resents the way his hackles go up whenever he so much thinks of the Kentucky master who somehow managed to be Beth’s live in something for awhile.
He’s heard enough gossip at various tournaments to know that Harry had moved out of Beth’s place and then moved out of the entire world of competitive chess so it wasn’t like he had no idea what happened.
He can’t resist the self destructive impulse to try to get Beth to tell him herself though.
“I just wouldn’t have invited you here the first time if I had known you were spoken for,” He says with false casualness as Beth slams down her knight.
“I wasn’t spoken for,” She rolls her eyes. “Harry and I were never whatever you’re implying and what we were was over well before that. Besides, weren't you the one who swore sex was off the table when you invited me?”
Fuck.
She had him there.
Like always.
“It’s your move.”
Benny forces his eyes back to the board.
“What about Cleo?”
He can practically hear a cartoon style confused record scratch in his head.
“What about Cleo?” He asks, forehead furrowed in confusion.
“I mean were you two still a thing when you invited me to New York?” She continues. “She’s clearly in love with you. When we were in Paris she said…”
And that’s news to him.
“You saw Cleo when you were in Paris?” His tone is sharp, realization settling over him like an uncomfortable blanket on a too hot night.
She must realize she’s given too much away because the indignant frustration drains out of her, her face suddenly looking much more vulnerable, and nervous and young than he can let himself acknowledge.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“It wasn't important.”
“She encouraged you to drink. Kept you up all night. Got into your head about me and who knows what else, clearly. Fuck, Beth.”
“Forget it, Benny,” Beth insists, reaching across the board and moving a rook for him before returning to contemplate her own pieces. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. Like I said.”
Benny’s not so sure about that.
Not so sure that in the end, for all his righteous anger at her for getting drunk, and throwing the game with Borgov, and slinking back to Kentucky and her booze instead of him…
Not so sure now all of that hadn’t been his fault too in a roundabout way.
They finish the game.
Avoid each other for a few hours.
Come to a silent truce when he turns the radio on for her even though the song blasting through his apartment is one he hates.
They sink back into a careful equilibrium of chess, and smiles and companionship and nothing goes wrong between them.
Until it does.
A few weeks after Beth di…arrives in his apartment he realizes that rent is due and he’s woefully short.
Invitations to chess competitions have been piling up in the corner but he hasn’t felt the slightest temptation to accept one when the only opponent he cares about is already so easily accessible.
He hasn’t gone out to play poker either.
He isn’t sure if that second part is because he doesn’t want to risk leaving Beth unless it is absolutely necessary or because he doesn’t want to see the knowing look in her eyes if he announces he’s going out at night.
He’s not ashamed of his gambling habit, not really, not the way he would be if it was booze, or pills or any of the other vices Beth herself has plenty of experience with. He’s good at poker, his memory, mind for strategy, comfort with taking calculated risks based on his confidence in his own skill, all of that transferred over perfectly from his mastery of chess.
And he’s made a lot of money from that crossover of talent.
The problem is he’s too smart not to notice that what also carries over is his need to win, the rush that comes from feeling like he’s the best (Beth Harmon and Borgovs of the world notwithstanding) at something.
The belief that if he just examines the problem, learns from his mistakes, puts in the work a good outcome is inevitable has served him well in chess.
It’s come close to ruining him after a string of bad games of cards.
Luck isn’t really a thing in chess which is good because his has always been a bit shit.
He can’t say the same for poker.
He has been down on his luck and down on his back, some club promoter or muscle for one of his high value opponents he owes money to standing over him fists flying one too many times to pretend that his habit is harmless even if he does still manage to rationalize it.
Until he can’t.
Usually when contemplating explaining it to Beth.
“What’s with the knife?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean why do you carry it around?”
“This is for protection.”
“From what?”
“From whatever.”
He wishes it really had been good for whatever and not just occasionally coming in handy to scare off his creditors, buy him a little more time.
Wishes his knife could have cut out the parts of Beth that ate away at her.
Wishes he could out the parts of himself that had never really stopped being a too smart for his own good, fucking terrified little kid.
“I’m going out tonight.”
Beth greets his unprompted announcement with a frown.
“To gamble.”
She says it so matter of factly like he’s so easy to read and of course it’s true but he hates how well she knows him in this moment.
“To a poker game that’s going to pay our rent,” He corrects, focusing on shrugging on his coat and not on the girl (ghost) with folded arms in the corner.
It’s a ridiculous thing to say he realizes belatedly, as if ghosts could be counted as roommates, as if his money predicament had anything real to do with her.
He supposes if he gets thrown out onto the streets she can probably just go haunt that sister of hers or Townes or God forbid Harry Beltik.
Hell, she could go haunt Borgov and get some good games out of it, better than she got out of him these days.
When she speaks again though she makes no reference to his slip.
“I thought you stopped that.”
Benny reaches for his hat, needing all of his armor for this conversation.
“Well, I still need money to live so.”
It’s perhaps a cruel thing to say given that she isn’t in fact living anymore but again she pushes on without acknowledging the implications of his words.
“You could accept one of those tournaments you’ve been invited to.”
He rattles off all the reasons that plan isn’t an option.
“It takes money to get there.”
You wouldn’t be there.
“Most of them the winnings are shit, remember?”
It would be too easy to win without facing you.
“I need the money tomorrow.”
I can’t stand the thought of leaving not knowing if you will be here when I get back.
“You could have gotten a regular job,” She huffs, leaning heavily against his kitchen counter, her non-existent weight making no sound at the contact. “You could have done that before it came to this if you didn’t want to go to the tournaments. Honestly Benny…”
Benny feels bile rising in his throat.
Thinks for half a second he might be sick but it is only words, angry and targeted, that escape when he opens his mouth.
“As if you would want anything to do with me if I had a regular job,” He snaps. “If I wasn’t here all day to play chess whenever you want and keep you entertained and tell you how incredible you are. If I wasn’t interesting . I’m never going to be normal, Harmon and news flash, neither the fuck are you. If that’s what you want go haunt Harry fucking Beltik.”
He yanks the door open, steps outside his coat tails swinging dramatically, slams the door behind him and lets the cool New York air bring his temperature down just enough to let semi-rational thought return.
His hand lingers on the doorknob.
He considers going back in.
Apologizing.
Trying to make her understand he needed the money to protect what they had, needed the rush of a win to make him feel like something other than a failure.
A son who had made his parents proud but had failed to make them actually like him.
A washed up former champion who had failed to beat her at chess when it counted.
A not quite ex-boyfriend who had failed to save her from her demons.
He lets go of the doorknob.
Braces himself against the wind.
Heads for the high stakes game he knows should just be getting started.
Would you forgive me for
Everything I haven't apologized for
I killed a part of who I was to
Keep you on my side
He returns hours later just as the sun is peeking over the horizon with a black eye and $600 in his pocket.
The $600 was from a last minute win, all in, luckier than he had any right to be with the Queen he needed appearing in his hand just when he needed her.
The black eye was from the guy he took the $600 from.
Luckily it had been some young, trust fund schmuck who hadn’t cared enough to try to take the money back from him but had cared enough about his self image as a wannabe tough guy to take a swing at Benny himself rather than let the big guy he employed do it for him.
He hadn’t even needed to go for his knife.
Benny could take a punch from the likes of that kid.
He could take a lot worse.
He takes off his coat and hat, kicks off his shoes and deposits the money carefully in the box on top of his bookshelf.
He almost forgets to look for Beth until he’s collapsing still fully clothed onto his bed and there she is, staring at him expectantly in the semi-darkness.
“Did you get it?”
He nods, doesn’t miss the way she shifts closer to him, mirroring his position until their knees are almost touching and her hands are pressing into the mattress next to his.
“I still want to drink.”
He reels at that, his exhausted mind nevertheless knowing exactly what it’s costing her to say this to him.
He moves his head across the pillow they’re sharing until their foreheads just brush though he feels nothing.
“And the pills. I still want those too. It’s ridiculous. I physically can’t take them anymore. I don’t even have a body to go through withdrawal but I feel it anyway. Some days the need for them settles inside me and I think it’s going to burn what’s left of me away.”
“Beth…”
Her name is barely a breath escaping from him.
“But then I look at you and it gets a little better. Sometimes I can even forget, for a little while. What I am. What I’ve done. What I didn’t do.”
“Beth.”
He says it again, stronger, clearer this time.
“Poker isn’t just about the money,” He admits, one hand coming up to trail against the air that looks like her cheek.
She nods.
“I know.”
Benny lets the heavy weight of exhaustion pull him into sleep, doesn’t wake up until afternoon, groggy and uncomfortable, still in his jeans.
Beth is still laying beside him when he does.
Something inside of him unfurls when their eyes meet.
He pretends he doesn’t know what it is but that’s a loser’s lie.
He knows.
He knows that illogically…irrevocably…it’s hope.
Months pass and Benny eventually returns to the tournament circuit.
Just the ones in New York or the ones he can drive to and be back within a day even though some of them he would have considered beneath him before.
Ranking be damned.
He needs the money and Beth wants him to play chess, doesn’t want to be the reason he doesn’t anymore.
So he plays.
And damn if he doesn’t still love it.
Most of his opponents are known to him, easy wins against mediocre players who follow him around with that hero worship bullshit he used to feed off of before the high he got from one ghost’s approval displaced it.
But chess is a fast moving game and there’s always some new up and comer, nobody worth worrying about just yet, but a few who give him just enough of a challenge, just enough intrigue to warrant replaying their games with Beth when he gets home.
He loves the way her face lights up when they think out a particularly interesting scenario, the way she bites her lip and glances at the ceiling when he asks her what she would have done in his place.
“Do you ever go over games in your head? When you’re alone? I mean play all the way through them.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
They had considered Beth coming with him in the beginning, considered trying anyway.
She had demurred eventually before they got that far.
Joked that someone needed to keep an eye on his place, joked that it would be too tempting to feed him winning moves when his opponents couldn’t hear her.
He had tried to hide his equal parts disappointment and relief.
He hadn’t wanted to go without her.
He hadn’t wanted to risk her dissipating into nothing when she tried to cross his threshold of his apartment for the first time.
So he had just joked that he didn’t need her moves to win.
It’s true as long as he’s not playing her.
Or the Russians.
But needing Beth isn’t about winning at this point, isn’t about him winning his games and certainly isn’t about him training her to win hers.
He just does.
Need her.
So he goes to his tournaments.
Brings home the prize money, and games to analyze and sometimes even updates on the lives of her friends Mike and Matt or Townes or Harry Beltik from someone or other who knew them from the old days or has a home base in Kentucky.
Despite what he had said to Beth during their fight things start to feel normal, as normal as possible for two former chess prodigies, one tanking his ranking with abandon and one an impossible remnant of a life cut short.
“This might be happiness,” He thinks to himself in a moment of almost unbearably embarrassing sentimentality as he watches Beth move the pieces around his board, showing him where he went wrong in a match he had almost lost to one of the upstarts at last week’s tournament.
“Are you paying attention?”
He smirks in response and nods, gesturing for her to go on.
Thinks if this is his life from now on he will have to revise his appraisal of his own lack of luck.
Benny doesn’t stop feeling guilty that she’s stuck in his basement.
Tries different things to bring the world to her.
He uses a frankly irresponsible portion of the winnings from one of his tournaments to replace his broken television set.
She chastises him for wasting the money but she puts on all the variety shows, the ones she told him she used to watch with Alma, and her laugh fills up the space in a way that would have been worth a lot more.
After that it just makes sense to save up for a couch, long running joke about his initial pitch to get her to New York aside, so that they can watch sitting next to each other, his solid shoulder pressed up against her insubstantial one.
He lets her pick the color, gets Levertov and Wexler to help him move the emerald green monstrosity down two flights of stairs and around a tight corner, knowing they both think he’s lost what’s left of his mind.
He knows it’s one of the first times they’ve seen him smile since they got the news about Beth though so they don’t complain.
He gets into the habit of bringing her home some small offering every time he leaves the apartment.
Copies of Chess Review, even the ones where he’s not on the cover.
Fashion magazines too, watches her flip through them with a focus he’s only seen her apply to chess, pausing to dogear the pages with outfits she particularly likes.
Chess books, whenever he can find something they don’t have.
“We definitely have this one,’ Beth remarks when he tosses her one of these finds one day.
“Yes, but you see this one has a new introduction and updated footnotes,” He counters, flopping onto their couch which he has to admit is both comfortable and convenient to have.
She rolls her eyes.
“I hate reading the footnotes.”
Benny just smirks, moves his arm to rest behind her on the couch, takes note of the way she instinctively leans towards him despite the fact that she can’t actually make contact.
“All the best stuff is in the footnotes, Harmon.”
He brings her home less practical things too.
One day he’s on his way back from the market, paper bag full of things Beth won’t eat clutched in his arms, when he spots something in the window of the shop he usually walks by without giving it a second glance.
It’s a little ceramic bird, bright robin’s egg blue (Tiffany blue Beth would probably say), delicate wings raised in anticipation of flight it hasn’t taken yet.
He can’t explain it the way his heart lurches at the sight, the way he somehow immediately associates it with the girl waiting for him, forever waiting for him in that basement.
Something about how fragile and beautiful it is.
Something about the power contained in its tiny form suggested in the way every ceramic feather stretches upward.
Something about the way it is frozen, exactly as it is, no way to tell if it would succeed in leaving the ground or not.
But Benny’s not a poet, he’s not versed in metaphors and similes and flowery ways of saying what could be said with a lot fewer syllables.
He’s a chess player and any greater meaning to life and the beauty inherent in it has always been found in the game for him.
In the game and in her.
So he buys the bird and he brings it home, places it gently on the stool serving as a bedside table, the one by what had become her side of the bed, watches the way she gently traces its wings and hopes she understands what he’s trying to say anyway.
When she looks up at him over dinner (him eating, her criticizing his cooking on visuals alone) and fixes him with a look she usually reserves for a particularly inspired move in the endgame of a round of notably excellent chess…he thinks she just might.
The US Championship sneaks up on Benny, the invitation slipping through the mail slot in his door one morning as he and Beth are absorbed in a game.
His haphazard schedule of play over the last seven months means that he would start the tournament seeded decidedly lower than he was used to but he was still invited.
Was still probably the favorite to win now that Beth wouldn’t be playing for obvious reasons.
Benny resists the urge to crumple the envelope in his hands but barely.
He wants to be the US champion again, of course he does.
He’s still Benny Watts and winning still feels fucking great, being labeled the best feels even better.
Except the idea of being called that only because of Beth’s gaping absence gnawed at his insides until he felt vaguely sick.
She appears at his shoulder, always able to sneak up on him even before the weight to her steps evaporated along with her life.
“We need to start looking at the games of anyone that could give you any trouble,” She says, her voice all business. “I don’t think Brown should be too much of an issue but that Campbell kid gave you some trouble last month…”
She notices his lack of enthusiasm, the way his hand trembles around the paper it holds.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know if I want to go.”
Even a few months ago he would have said it differently.
Less honestly.
Would have made some excuse.
Nobody there will be on his level anyway.
He can’t be bothered.
He’s going to take a year off and then really catch them off guard when he returns out of nowhere the following one.
He no longer feels he can fool her with a lame excuse and a cocky grin.
If he ever could.
“You have to go,” Her tone is incredulous bordering on angry. “Benny, it’s in New York this year, practically right down the street.”
“Lincoln Center is not right down the street,” He argues, torn between amusement at her still completely subpar understanding of New York geography and frustration that she can’t just let this go.
Not that Beth has ever let anything go in his experience.
It’s one of the things he…
Well.
Long story short he goes.
Lets Beth lead him through endless repetitions of all the games he’s played against his most concerning challengers, lets her read to him from his own chess books (skipping the footnotes), lets her straighten his hat as he prepares to head out the door on the day of the tournament.
Tries to ignore her bittersweet expression, the pride and the hope and the regret all so clearly visible on her face.
Tries to ignore the almost unbearable urge to gather her into his arms and kiss for her luck.
There really isn’t luck in chess.
And there’s really nothing there to kiss.
But the urge remains.
He makes it to the final, the fight to get there more strenuous than it would have been had he spent the year doing his usual, elite circuit, but he makes it all the same.
He’s facing off against Robin Campbell, a twenty-two year old college student from San Francisco, not quite young enough to be called a prodigy but good enough and young enough to cause a stir anyway.
The kid puts up a good fight, starting out hesitant but building in confidence as he goes, executing a particularly aggressive and impressive sequence in the middle that Benny can’t help but admire even as his mind is occupied playing out the next five moves in his head.
Plus the little corner he reserves for thinking about what Beth would do in his shoes.
In the end his defense holds up, buys him enough time to sweep in with a decisive victory in the end, the kind of slow, inevitable march towards a win Benny favors in this type of tournament, so different from the instinctual speed chess he plays when given the chance.
He shakes the kid’s hand.
Recognizes the look on Campbell’s face.
“Tough game,” He offers, ignoring the memory flash of a devastated redhead with watering brown eyes that almost knocks him out of his chair.
He is surprised to find that among all of the talking heads and blind followers in the audience he has a whole contingent of supporters of a more personal sort.
Not his parents who haven’t been to a competition since he got his driver’s license at the age of sixteen.
But Levertov and Wexler are there and incredibly so are a gaggle of faces he recognizes from Kentucky, Townes and Matt and Mike.
Harry Beltik, grinning and waving at him as Benny makes his way over to the odd assortment of people waiting for his attention.
They praise the game, ask him questions about particular moves, pat him on the back and offer to buy him a drink.
He turns them down, demurs that he’s tired, promises to take them all out for lunch the following day before they head back to Kentucky.
Finds himself catching Harry Beltik of all people by the arm just as they turn to walk away, tilting his head in and practically whispering his question out of some habit that makes being seen to care feel dangerous.
“Why are you all here? Really?”
And Harry fucking Beltik, the man he has always hated a bit not because of his annoyingly bland personality or his subpar chess but because he knows for a fact that Harry left Beth while Beth had left Benny, offers him a smile completely devoid of backhandness and claps Benny on the back.
“Even if she wasn’t playing Beth would have been here. For you. To watch you kick Campbell’s ass.”
Benny feels himself shaking slightly but forces himself to stay and hear all of what Harry has to say.
“Beth loved you,” Harry says with a shrug like it is simple, like it is that easy, like he knows . “And you loved her. So did we. After everything…it would be a shame to let that be the end. We’re here for you, Benny.”
Beltik leaves him there in the lobby of the Empire Hotel, struck dumb with the realization that maybe somehow this bunch of Kentucky novices, no… Beth’s friends …have become his friends too.
That maybe in another life he would have gathered up the lot of them into a room, spent every penny he had on an international call to Moscow, would have offered up to her every ounce of brain power between them, offered up everything .
That maybe love didn’t disappear just because it was unspoken or because it led to you getting hurt, or even because the person it was directed at was dead.
It transferred and evolved and ricocheted around like an arrow sharpened on the stone of every single moment in life where you had ever felt like you weren’t enough but it never went away.
Benny wasn’t perfect.
He was forever playing at self-confidence, chasing some approval that would never come, all the while denying others the grace he so desperately needed.
Beth wasn’t perfect.
She was haunted long before she became a ghost, quick to anger, quick to attack her opponents and herself and too stubborn to make the first move unless the game was one she set up.
Not to mention she’s dead and gone despite her presence in his apartment.
Doesn’t matter.
He loves her.
Thinks impossibly that she might love him too.
And suddenly he feels the weight of every wasted second from that night of speed chess in Ohio to now, every moment both before her reappearance in his basement and after rolling through his mind like a grainy film reel of missed opportunities.
Benny is a lot of things.
But he isn’t dumb.
Not usually.
So he tears out of the hotel like a man on a mission (he is) and makes it back to the door of his apartment faster than should have been strictly possible (Lincoln Center is not in fact just down the street).
He allows himself half a second of hesitation then grips the doorknob with shaking fingers, pushes open the door, crosses the threshold to the home that has been theirs for a year.
Longer if he’s honest.
He plans to be.
Beth rises from that green couch, hurrying to meet him in the middle of the apartment, her eyes searching his face with a nervousness he’s rarely seen her wear.
“You won?”
She frowns when he doesn’t immediately confirm her assumption.
“You lost? Benny, what’s wrong?”
He pulls his hat off and tosses it aside, lowers his forehead until it hovers just at the edge of where hers should begin.
“I love you.”
He’s not a poet.
He doesn’t know how to imbue that sentiment with an explanation for why it’s taken him so long to say it, why the words are inadequate, why he had never believed in the concept of soulmates until she showed up and…how did she put it?
Fucked up his world view.
He’s not a poet, he’s a chess player.
What he knows is how to attack even when the odds are against you.
So he closes his eyes and says it again.
“I love you, Beth.”
She doesn’t say it back.
Not right away.
Not in those words.
“The night I died…”
Benny’s eyes snap open and he steps back just enough to see her properly.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I really didn’t. But in the end…the very end…I knew. I could feel it.”
He wants to hold her hand.
He wants to pull her against him and protect her from this, from everything .
But that’s not how it works.
That’s not what she needs.
And it never has been.
“I was lying on my floor and I couldn’t move and I knew it was over and the last thing I thought was…I wish I was in New York. With Benny.”
He sucks in a shaky breath, forces himself to remain quiet, to remain still.
“Then I was gone. Dead.” She says, her voice quiet but steady. “And the next day I was here.”
“I love you,” He says again because he can’t think what else to say in the face of the magnitude of what she’s just told him.
Because he can’t stop saying it now that he’s started.
Because it’s true.
Beth shakes her head as though physically clearing it, fixes him with a fierce look that almost has him laughing in spite of everything.
“But did you win ?”
“Yeah, Harmon,” He chuckles, fondness nearly stealing what oxygen he has left. “Of course I won.”
The next day he ends up convincing everyone to come over to his apartment for lunch and despite the joking complaints about their promised big city meal they all show up.
Beth flits around the apartment looking nearly incandescent with happiness, tuning into different conversations and making comments only he hears about the quality of his cooking and groaning when during the requisite speed chess someone makes a move she disapproves of.
She’s not quite part of things, no more than a whisper of a draft to the rest of them.
But it’s something.
It’s good.
When it’s time for everyone to leave Benny finds himself genuinely sorry to see them go.
Not just Levertov and Wexler but Matt and Mike and Townes and Harry fucking Beltik.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Townes tells him as they leave.
“I won’t,” He promises.
Surprises himself by meaning it.
Then it’s just him and Beth.
It’s still early, way too early for crawling into bed but they do it anyway.
They lay facing each other, bodies curled as close as possible, the blurry borders of her fading into his hands and his head and every part of him he can give her.
He can’t feel her.
Not really.
But he swears he almost can.
Doesn’t even have to pretend.
“I love you,” He whispers, the words not having lost their novelty yet.
He doubts they ever will.
She smiles, bites her lip, clearly pleased.
“Yeah, you said,” She teases.
“Do you think…”
He trails off.
Sucks in a shaky breath.
Starts again.
“Do you think we would have made it here? If I had called you. If you hadn’t…if that night hadn’t happened. If you went to Moscow and I helped you and you beat Borgov. Do you think we would have found our way back to each other?”
It’s a painful question, at least he thinks so, all the shattered possibilities that could have let him feel her breathing in this moment.
Beth is five moves ahead of him though.
Obviously.
“Of course we would have,” Beth says in the same tone she would have called out her next move while they played chess in his car.
Confident.
Focused.
Intense.
“You were always going to be my shot at a happy ending, Benny. I saw it as clearly as I’ve ever seen any endgame and even when one or both of us was fucking it up I always believed we’d end up here if I had a choice.”
And she had.
She had chosen him as her last wish even as the darkness closed in around her, even as he sat in his apartment pissed at her, not calling.
“I love you.”
She laughs,
Rolls her eyes.
“Eventually you’re going to have to say something else.”
Benny lets his eyes drift shut even as a smile stretches across his face.
“Yeah. But not today.”
“Are you alright? You’ve been awfully quiet today.”
Beth looks up sharply from the board between them, her frown distinct enough that he knows it is not her usual one he associates with concentration.
It’s been a few weeks since the championship, since I love you, since whatever wall remained between them had crumbled satisfyingly to the floor.
Nothing much had changed since then.
Everything had.
He had never been so happy even though she was still out of reach.
Even though she was still dead.
“I’m fine,” She insists though she immediately reaches up as though to clutch at her head, managing to catch herself just in time and redirect her hand to one of her pawns.
“Beth,” He says sharply, a fear he hasn’t felt since she was living and out of his sight washing over him.
She sighs, sits up, fixes him with those big eyes of hers.
“Something doesn’t feel right. It hasn’t all day.”
Benny feels his heart hammer in his chest.
“What do you mean?”
“My head hurts,” She admits. “And it almost feels like…like something’s trying to pull me away.”
Benny feels all of the blood drain out of his face as he quickly pushes the board out of the way over her protests.
He reaches out as though he can press his hand to her forehead as though he can test for a fever she can’t possibly have.
“Benny…” Her voice is soft, too soft.
It reminds him of when she had first appeared in his apartment.
When he thought she was a hallucination.
When she looked hesitant and scared and apologetic.
“No,” He interrupts, not knowing what she’s about to say.
Not wanting to know.
“Benny,” She says as sharply as he had said her name moments ago. “It’s been a year since I showed up here. A year today.”
He hadn’t realized but he also doesn’t understand the significance, understand why she’s choosing this moment to tell him about their strange anniversary.
She speaks to him slowly, like she’s explaining to a child, and he feels like a child , like the six year old Benny Watts seated in the too big chair at his first tournament while adults whispered about him.
“I think maybe…I think a year might be all we get.”
“A year,” He thinks numbly. “An eternity and no time at all.”
Three minutes.
The amount of time he spent speaking to her at that tournament in Cincinnati.
A tournament he had driven ten hours to not to play but to scope out her specifically.
“Aren’t you that kid from Kentucky that wiped out Harry Beltik?”
Two minutes.
Their first conversation in Las Vegas.
A conversation where he pretended not to remember her.
What a joke.
“Set it up. Think it out.”
Two hours and four minutes.
Their match that same weekend.
What would turn out to be his last major win against her even though he could barely focus because the way she played was so beautiful and the look on her face when she saw the game slipping away from her was so God damned tragic.
“Tough game.”
Three days.
Their time in Ohio when he finally stopped pretending not to be besotted with her, even if at the time he had only been able to admit to himself that he felt that way about her chess .
She beat him.
He hated it.
But not quite as much as he should have.
He first saw a glimpse of her drinking that weekend but he saw a first glimpse of something else too.
“I like your hair.”
“Sure you do.”
He brought her home with him like the most talented stray dog the world had ever seen, convincing himself that he was the one doing her a favor.
Eight weeks.
The amount of time they lived together.
The first time.
When he first fell in love though he had been miles away from being ready to admit that.
“Nobody has done that to me in fifteen years.”
“Not even Borgov?”
“Not even Borgov.”
Six months.
The time he spent hoping she would come back to New York.
Exchanging phone calls like prayers.
Wanting to believe she was staying sober but knowing she wasn’t.
Wanting to believe she was his in a way he had never actually got around to asking her to be.
Throwing his heart out like a sacrifice.
Silence in return.
“I’m managing. I miss you.”
Protecting himself the only way he knew how.
Regretting it immediately.
“Don’t call me anymore.”
Three months.
Time they don’t speak.
Waiting to see who would break first.
Waiting to see how she would fare in Moscow.
Finally a phone call.
“You should still open with the Sicilian .”
Harry Beltik.
One year.
Their adjournment in his apartment.
A ghost.
A boy.
An unexpected run down of their play clocks.
“I love you.”
Checkmate.
He wants to rage and break things, wants to go into the cabinet and dig out his one remaining mug just so he can feel it shatter but instead he sits.
Lets Beth pull the board back between them.
Lets her reset the game, swivel the board until the white pieces are his.
“I want to play,” She says, emotions at least temporarily in check. “I want to play and I want it to be the best game we’ve ever had.”
It feels impossible.
It feels cruel to even ask it of him.
It feels like exactly what he would have asked her for if the situation had been reversed.
He reaches up, swiping roughly at escaping tears he doesn’t want to acknowledge with his arm, his eyes already focused by the time it drops back to his side.
“Alright, Harmon. I won’t go easy on you.”
“I would expect nothing less from the great Benny Watts.”
They play.
It’s the best game they’ve ever played against each other, grueling and intriguing, filled with moments where one or the other looked like their victory was inevitable only for the other to claw their way back into a position of strength.
He can tell whatever she’s feeling is only growing in intensity, can see it in the way she grits her teeth and closes her eyes periodically to gather herself, center herself, convince herself she’s strong enough to stay until she’s seen this through.
His heart aches along with every other part of him but he forces himself to stay focused on the game.
He owes her that much.
It’s Beth’s turn.
It’s been 48 moves and as Benny stares at the board he has a sudden revelation.
He sees the moment it hits her too.
Neither of them are getting out of this one on top.
The most they can do is…
Beth looks up.
Offers him the barest hint of a smile before extending her hand for a handshake she knows damn well he can’t complete.
“Draw?”
Benny nods.
Reaches out to let his hand curl around the nothingness, around his everything.
“Draw.”
Their hands drop and Beth’s act seems to drop with it, her form curling in on itself as she looks up at him helplessly.
“Don’t look.”
It’s what her mom had said to her, little Beth Harmon in the backseat of a car, the one person who was supposed to protect her throwing her life away just like that.
The advice not to watch it happen all the woman could bring herself to offer.
That’s not them.
“I’m right here,” He insists, fiercely, tears choking his voice but not removing any of its bite. “It’s you and me until the end, Harmon.”
Her face crumples.
“I love you.”
She says it for the first time.
Last time.
It’s enough.
It’s more than enough.
“God, Beth…I know, ok? I know.”
“I’m not scared,” She tells him. “But I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you t…”
She’s gone.
And just like that Benny Watts world constricts again.
His Queen’s Gambit nothing more than a strategy to buy some time before the inevitable in the end.
Hold your tears for another day
You can’t save someone who can't be saved
He doesn’t get up from the floor.
He doesn’t see the point.
He doesn’t get up to go to bed.
He doesn’t get up to go in search of booze like the last time.
He doesn’t even get up when, after eight hours of staring at the ceiling playing through their last game the way he always caught her doing and thinking of nothing else, the phone rings.
It rings for several minutes.
Pauses briefly.
Rings again.
Off and on for twenty minutes before it finally goes silent.
Benny rolls on to his side.
He’s run out of chess to serve as a poor distraction.
All that remains is the way his body aches from his hours on the floor and the agonizing thought repeating on a loop in his head.
He’s lost Beth.
Again.
Forever.
Eventually he hauls himself shakily to his feet long enough to visit the bathroom then allows himself the small comfort of collapsing onto the couch rather than the floor when he returns.
Must drift off into a fitful sleep at some point because the next thing he knows he is startling awake to a loud and persistent knocking on his door.
He ignores it.
It’s probably his landlord after the rent.
Could be Levertov and Wexler trying to coax him out for speed chess in the park.
It’s not the one person he wants it to be.
The one person it can’t be.
Only when the knocking pauses and a voice…an impossible voice calls out…that’s exactly who it is.
“Benny! Benny open the fucking door!”
It’s impossible.
It’s impossible, it’s impossible, it’s impossible …
But their year together, Benny Watts and the ghost of the greatest chess player (not quite) alive, had been impossible too.
Benny staggers to his feet, makes it to the door in a few shaky steps, wrenches the door open, equal parts hope and dread taking root in his chest.
And then…
There she is.
Beth Harmon.
His Beth.
In the first new outfit he has seen on her in a year, a cream skirt and a black blouse (memories of him chasing her across the green in Ohio skittering through his mind), black movie star sunglasses pushed up haphazardly on her head.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” She demands and faster than he can register what is happening she is on him, hitting weakly (but not that weakly) at his chest. “I called you as soon as I woke up and you didn’t answer and I thought something happened to you. So I bought a ticket and I got on a plane to New York and then I had the whole flight to think and I worried that it had all been some drunken dream, that none of it ever happened! Only I wasn't even drunk! And you didn’t answer the phone!”
Benny catches her arms, halting her attack, registering somewhere in the back of his stunned mind that he is touching her .
“Beth…Beth you’re…how…”
He feels dizzy.
He feels confused.
He feels like he could fly .
“You were just here yesterday,” He points out, unsure of when his voice became this trembling thing. “You were a ghost yesterday.”
Beth is already shaking her head by the time he finishes his sentence, sinking into him even as he maintains his grip on her arms.
“It feels like that was yesterday to me too but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Benny frowns.
If Beth really was a hallucination surely this was a sign that his mental health was reaching a new alarming low.
Hallucinations escalated to tactile and nonsensical.
“It’s December 1968,” Beth withdraws from him to rifle through her handbag for what looked to be a hastily torn piece of newspaper.
She holds it up in front of him and sure enough the date matches what she’s saying.
“This was on my doorstep when I woke up,” She tells him hurriedly. “This is today’s paper. I’m supposed to leave for Russia tonight .”
Benny has always had an extraordinary brain, a brain that moves several speeds faster than almost everyone else around him, but it currently feels like it’s crawling through molasses.
“You’re supposed to leave for Russia tonight…” He repeats, the words finally sinking in. “Harry called me and told me you died the day you were supposed to leave for Russia.”
Beth nods, her eyes wide and unyielding as they lock on his.
“Jolene found me that day when she came to see me off. They think I overdosed the night before only…none of that happened. I called her and she had no idea what I was talking about and Harry…he suggested I see my doctor…and I’ll have to, I will Benny because I’m alive and this body is still a drunk and an addict and I’ll do whatever it takes to stay this time. To stay with you.”
Her words dry up finally and he knows it’s his turn to say something.
His turn to put that brain of his to good use and try to make sense of all of this, try to figure what the hell he has ever done to deserve so many second chances, to deserve Beth Harmon, beautiful, brilliant, alive on his doorstep.
Instead he allows himself to do what he’s been wanting to do for a year (longer) (always) and reaches out to grasp her face gently between his hands, tilt her head up just enough and press his lips to hers.
They separate when she runs out of air (air!) (she’s breathing!) and she grins up at him and he can’t help but say it (again).
“I love you, Beth.”
She reaches up, pauses half a breath away from his mouth.
“I know.”
They kiss.
They touch.
They make a mad dash to the airport, money provided by Beth’s Jolene having secured tickets for both of them to Moscow.
It’s a tough competition, days of grueling matches against the best in the world, each relentless in their desire to show the young upstart from the US exactly where her place is.
But each night they talk strategy, go over every possible scenario, play as a team , Russian’s and their presumed exclusive claim to teamwork be damned.
They share their bed and their brains and their bared souls, raw and hopeful and terrified.
And it works.
Beth keeps winning.
Before the final match Townes shows up.
Then during the adjournment Harry calls. He and Matt and Mike and Levertov and Wexler all gathered to offer their evaluation of possible scenarios, their support, their friendship.
Beth teases him for being nearly as touched as she is but he demures, not ready to admit he sees something like a family taking shape.
Then she wins.
Just like he knew she would.
And they go home.
Together.
Just like he hoped.
They make the most of their no longer borrowed time.
They take comfort in each other in all the ways they hadn’t been able to during their year in his apartment and all the ways they had too.
Chess.
Music.
Conversations whispered in the dark of his bedroom.
More chess.
They touch, and touch and touch.
They don’t know exactly where life will take them from here.
Beth still has a house in Kentucky, friends who are worried about her despite her incredible showing in Moscow, bottles of little green pills taunting her from a far away medicine cabinet.
Benny still has to figure out who he is outside of the flamboyant chess prodigy, outside of being the worshiped US Champion, outside even of being the love of Beth Harmon’s two lives.
Maybe they will live in New York.
Maybe he will follow her to Kentucky.
Maybe they will get married and have four kids.
Maybe they will continue exactly as they are, striking fear into the participants of every tournament they show up to together.
Benny is finally realizing that it’s not just Beth as much as he had wanted to lay that at her feet.
Life itself is a great big pile of maybes.
Possibilities and choices and beautiful, painful, awe inspiring pathways spreading out in every direction too big to be contained even by the world of 64 squares where he and Beth have always been most comfortable.
He thinks he’s finally ok with that.
“Thanks for coming back,” He whispers to her one night while they lie curled together in his bed, the novelty of touching her again something he doesn’t think will ever wear off. “After everything.”
“Thanks for wanting me to,” She echoes, her fingers curling a little bit tighter around his. “After everything.”
It doesn’t have to come out as an I love you this time.
They see things the same way after all.
They hear it just the same.
It should’ve been you
It should be you now
It could be you now