Circle Interrupted Chapter 8: Casa (With Excerpt)
Fandoms: Bloodlines & Vampire Academy Canon Divergent Fix It Fic - Post Silver Shadows Longfic: 73,000+ Words so far Rated T - Hurt/Comfort, Whump with a Happy Ending, Heavy Situations, Mental Health, PTSD, Guns, violence, (see tags on Fic) Sydney & Adrian Alternating POV , Sydney/Adrian, Jill/Eddie, Trey/Angeline, incidental Lissa/Christian, Incidental Rose/Dimitri
Chapter Summary:
Adrian's family gets a little bigger - but not like that. Also Angeline wins a classical linguistics award.
Circle Interrupted Chapter 8 Link
Excerpt:
We decided to switch it up and play Chess instead. If Dimitri was surprised I knew the rules, he didn’t show it. I wasn’t exactly a prodigy, but I usually won because people were apt to misjudge my skill level.
“You know, I might have to start timing the rounds,” Dimitri chuckled. I dunno if my focus surprised him but I guess I’d been taking a while analyzing the board between moves. So sue me for not wanting to lose after fumbling checkers so bad. Finally I moved my knight to F3, thinking I might be able to take his last pawn next turn. Unfortunately, he noticed and decisively replaced it with his piece. Now we had an even board: A King and a single pawn each.
“So Olive is pregnant,” he said. I looked up to see the corners of his mouth turned up slightly. Our pawns faced off directly, with the opposing king flanking only a square away.
“Seems that way,” I said vaguely. I picked up my piece to move it closer to his pawn. I hesitated in the air though. Why choose now to try and distract me? Some nagging feeling told me to move my king one square up instead, so I switched course and did just that. Then it was Dimitri’s turn to take his sweet time. I could almost see the calculations in his head as his eyes moved across the board. That smirk was gone, and he moved his king next to my pawn instead. I copied the move without thinking.
“You would put us both in Zugzwang?” He asked, an incredulous look on his face.
“Bless you?” I said. The word sounded more like a sneeze than anything.
“Zugzwang – Reciprocal Zugzwang?”
He kept saying it like it was supposed to mean something to me.
“I just figured… you know – you take my pawn, I take yours…”
“You don’t even know what you just did?!” I’d never seen the man so stunned. It was one thing to be outsmarted. Another, I guess, to being out-hunched. Dismally he flicked his king over.
“Did I just win?” I asked.
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