TR Fic "Stalemate"
Their afternoon chess game begins without much preamble. He is white and she is black. It is the only time in their lives that they ever are. Even now, when the concepts of weaknesses and evasiveness should be as foreign to them as the home that they inhabit on this dreadful little island where the temperature is just one shade of Fahrenheit too high for the optimum growing temperature for the plants in her garden, they remain unable to change who they are.
So they wait and play chess in a hell of their own making. Waiting for what, they are not really sure. Waiting for Nikita to fail? Madeline is convinced that intervention on their part is not necessary for that to happen; and still recovering from his own fall from the tower, Paul is willing to defer to her judgment. So they wait on an island that should be paradise but feels like hell.
Paul’s aggressive use of pawns and the way he uses his queen as a battering ram rather than the carefully shaped knife that she is does not surprise Madeline. They have been playing for years, decades, a lifetime. His moves are as familiar to her as her moves are to him. Yet, even with all that they know about each other, the outcome is never quite the same.
When she finally pins his queen to his king with her bishop essentially capturing his most important piece with a relatively unimportant piece of her own, he studies her face for a moment before picking up his king and laying it on its side, refusing to continue playing a game that he believes that he cannot win without the aid of his queen.
She is a little shocked at his decision to give up rather than to play the game out to its conclusion. She knows that probability is still on his side and that while she possesses his most important piece, he still has the positional advantage.
For two seconds, she contemplates asking him why he forfeited the match so easily before she decides to clear the board and move on to something else. In the first second, she worried that the answer he would have provided would have confirmed her suspicion that the Collective feared her enough to bring him back alive, but the Collective did not fear her enough to bring him back whole. In the second second, she dismissed her fear and decided to do what she has always done. She will fix him and he in turn will fix Sarah… Section. He will fix Section, she mentally corrects herself, annoyed that she still has these lapses.
As she reaches to grab his fallen king, he stops her, taking her hand within his own. He doesn’t say anything until she looks him in the eyes. “When did you decide to make that move?”
While the moves that led them to their current predicament should have been fairly obvious to him, she decides to humor him, “I was not actually planning on pinning your queen. Though I knew that it was a potential possibility, the probability for the event was quite low. I was actually after…”
“Not the game, Madeline. I want to know when you made the unilateral decision to fake your own death and leave me to run Section alone. That is all that I want to know.”
Ignoring his demand, she responds calmly, “Wouldn’t the more prudent question be, ‘why did I fake my death and let you believe that I was truly gone?’”
“I already have some insight into that question. Now, all I want to know, is when did you start believing that it was over for you at Section?”
“I would not call answers from a hologram designed by a woman under orders to seduce you, insight.”
“Yes, well, if you tell me when you decided to fake your own death, at what exact moment you started planning for your inevitable end, then I guess I will know why you decided to exit the way that you did, as well.”
For a moment, Madeline considers tipping her king on its side and telling him that she had started planning her death the moment she had walked back into Section after he broke the truce with Red Cell. Because at that moment, Paul had done what Adrian’s psychological profiles had deemed he was incapable of doing, he had chosen the mission over her. And if she was no longer his weakness, she could offer herself up as the sacrificial lamb that Center would want as retribution without worry of what her death would do to Paul. But she was wrong about that, he was wrong about that, Adrian was wrong about that, and they were all wrong about a lot of other things.
She thinks about telling him about how they almost got out of their perpetual state of stalemate. When they are together, they are at their best and their worst; and when they are apart, they can barely function.
She thinks about telling him this; but on this island of limbo, nothing changes and no amount of confession will save them from who they are.
So they wait and play chess in a hell of their own making. Waiting for what, they are not really sure. Waiting for Nikita to fail? Madeline is convinced that intervention on their part is not necessary for that to happen; and still recovering from his own fall from the tower, Paul is willing to defer to her judgment. So they wait on an island that should be paradise but feels like hell.
Paul’s aggressive use of pawns and the way he uses his queen as a battering ram rather than the carefully shaped knife that she is does not surprise Madeline. They have been playing for years, decades, a lifetime. His moves are as familiar to her as her moves are to him. Yet, even with all that they know about each other, the outcome is never quite the same.
When she finally pins his queen to his king with her bishop essentially capturing his most important piece with a relatively unimportant piece of her own, he studies her face for a moment before picking up his king and laying it on its side, refusing to continue playing a game that he believes that he cannot win without the aid of his queen.
She is a little shocked at his decision to give up rather than to play the game out to its conclusion. She knows that probability is still on his side and that while she possesses his most important piece, he still has the positional advantage.
For two seconds, she contemplates asking him why he forfeited the match so easily before she decides to clear the board and move on to something else. In the first second, she worried that the answer he would have provided would have confirmed her suspicion that the Collective feared her enough to bring him back alive, but the Collective did not fear her enough to bring him back whole. In the second second, she dismissed her fear and decided to do what she has always done. She will fix him and he in turn will fix Sarah… Section. He will fix Section, she mentally corrects herself, annoyed that she still has these lapses.
As she reaches to grab his fallen king, he stops her, taking her hand within his own. He doesn’t say anything until she looks him in the eyes. “When did you decide to make that move?”
While the moves that led them to their current predicament should have been fairly obvious to him, she decides to humor him, “I was not actually planning on pinning your queen. Though I knew that it was a potential possibility, the probability for the event was quite low. I was actually after…”
“Not the game, Madeline. I want to know when you made the unilateral decision to fake your own death and leave me to run Section alone. That is all that I want to know.”
Ignoring his demand, she responds calmly, “Wouldn’t the more prudent question be, ‘why did I fake my death and let you believe that I was truly gone?’”
“I already have some insight into that question. Now, all I want to know, is when did you start believing that it was over for you at Section?”
“I would not call answers from a hologram designed by a woman under orders to seduce you, insight.”
“Yes, well, if you tell me when you decided to fake your own death, at what exact moment you started planning for your inevitable end, then I guess I will know why you decided to exit the way that you did, as well.”
For a moment, Madeline considers tipping her king on its side and telling him that she had started planning her death the moment she had walked back into Section after he broke the truce with Red Cell. Because at that moment, Paul had done what Adrian’s psychological profiles had deemed he was incapable of doing, he had chosen the mission over her. And if she was no longer his weakness, she could offer herself up as the sacrificial lamb that Center would want as retribution without worry of what her death would do to Paul. But she was wrong about that, he was wrong about that, Adrian was wrong about that, and they were all wrong about a lot of other things.
She thinks about telling him about how they almost got out of their perpetual state of stalemate. When they are together, they are at their best and their worst; and when they are apart, they can barely function.
She thinks about telling him this; but on this island of limbo, nothing changes and no amount of confession will save them from who they are.