Work Text:
“One nine three, Shinobi.”
“Two four three, Duke.”
“One seven five, Cannon.”
“Nine five two, Cavalry.”
Click.
Click.
Click.
Pause.
Shaiapouf looks up from his reading.
The girl is still here, kneeling across from the King. They’ve stopped playing.
(For a moment, Shaiapouf had hoped that he would look up and she would be dead.)
“Pouf.”
Shaiapouf is immediately on his feet. “Yes, sire.”
“Komugi is tired.”
Today is day five of the King’s obsession with this game. By now, Shaiapouf has learned his routine. “Yes, sire. I will escort her to her room right away.”
Today is day five. The King will win soon. He has to.
“Oh, supreme leader, I’ll be okay on my own,” the girl protests, because of course she does. “I don’t want to trouble your guards over something as trivial as a walk back to my room.”
The King doesn’t hesitate. “I don’t want to win when you’re tired. You will go with Shaiapouf and rest.”
The girl thinks for a moment. “Okay,” she says. She’s remarkably pliant when she wants to be. Perfect for a subject, but not for someone this close to the King. “If you insist, supreme leader.”
She slowly lifts herself up, using the gungi table as a crutch to rotate herself in the right direction before standing.
Shaiapouf doesn’t help her.
“Are you ready?” he asks, once she picks up her wooden cane. She nods.
“Goodnight,” she says to the King, casually, nonchalantly, as if they are friends, and Shaiapouf’s neck prickles. This girl should not be acting so friendly towards the King. She should not be doing any of this, really, except fulfilling her duty to help the King improve in gungi or shogi or whatever game this is now, and teaching him the skills he needs to crush her. Her purpose is to be crushed, ruined, abandoned in his wake. She is nothing in comparison to his infinite power.
He is not her friend.
Shaiapouf glances back at the King. His expression remains neutral, but Shaiapouf can tell that something has changed.
Right before they leave the throne room, he hears it.
“Goodnight, Komugi.”
The walk is silent after that.
The corridors of the palace at night are long and cold, lit only at the edges by a row of small torches. Out here, the girl looks like nothing at all, a pale smear, a ghost, the white of her clothes swallowed up by shadows the moment they pass between the light. The tap of her cane against the stone floor is the only proof she exists.
“You don’t have to walk so slowly,” she says. “I know the way by now.”
Shaiapouf scoffs. He hasn’t slowed down.
And even if he had, it wasn’t for her sake.
“The torches,” she continues, “they’re warmer on the left side of the hall. That means the wall curves there. After the third curve, it’s forty-three steps to my door.”
Shaiapouf says nothing. He’s not interested in talking to her.
She’s clever. He hadn’t wanted her to be clever. He had wanted her to be skilled at her little game and nothing more, useful in one dimension and hollow in all the others, the perfect tool. But tools don’t count footsteps. Tools don’t say goodnight in that easy, unthinking way, as if the word costs them nothing, as if the King is simply someone they know.
“Pouf-sama,” she says.
Shaiapouf’s jaw tightens. “Please do not call me that.”
“Sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry. “Shaiapouf-sama. May I ask you a question?”
“No.”
A pause. The cane taps twice. Then: “Do you think he’ll win soon?”
The question is so direct that it almost stops Shaiapouf in his tracks. He looks at her sideways. Pale, upturned face, ruined eyes, small furrow between her dark brows. She asks the question without assumption. She asks it the way she asks everything, as if she has forgotten that some things should not be said aloud.
“He will win when he decides to win,” Shaiapouf says simply.
She considers this. “That’s not what I asked.”
Forty-three steps, she had said. If she’d counted right, they’re almost there.
“You should rest,” he tells her when they reach the door. “You need to be in top form for the King.”
She finds the door handle without fumbling, which shouldn’t surprise him by now. “I know.”
The door clicks open, but she stops in the doorway. Shaiapouf watches her in silence.
“He said goodnight,” she says, quietly, not quite to Shaiapouf, but not completely to herself, either. “He didn’t need to do that.”
“No,” Shaiapouf agrees, and the word tastes like something rotting in his mouth. “He didn’t.”
She nods, and something in her expression shifts, like someone who keeps finding coins in a coat they thought was empty.
“Thank you for escorting me, Shaiapouf-sama.”
The door closes behind her.
Shaiapouf stands in the corridor, alone with the torches and the cold and the forty-three steps back to the King, and allows himself, privately, to give shape to his fear: that this will not end the way it should. That the King will keep saying goodnight. That the girl will keep counting steps and finding her way in the dark, and that somewhere in the architecture of this plan that should have been simple, something has already begun to change.
He turns and walks back. He doesn’t count his steps.