Work Text:
“Prince Leona, I'm glad you made it,” Kifaji said with the same grace he'd always carried himself despite the slight tremble in his voice.
Leona swallowed heavily. He was used to the arid smell of death that pervaded through the hospital halls; it didn't bother him, he was used to it after all.
It shouldn't bother him.
But today, today it settled uncomfortably into his lungs like heavy smog. His legs couldn't bring him further into the room so he stood uselessly in the doorway.
“King Falena said you might not come,” Kifaji continued casually as if he was simply giving him the morning report. “It would be treason to say I'm glad his Majesty was wrong, but I suppose that no longer matters, does it?” He chuckled.
Leona's stomach lurched so violently at that that it jolted him into action. Finally, he walked briskly towards Kifaji's bedside and dumped the chessboard he brought with him on his lap.
“If you can talk, you can play.”
Kifaji looked down in surprise. A shaky hand picked up a piece, the same hand responsible for making it. He rolled it around with a nostalgic smile on his face. “Very well, young master. Let's play.”
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــﮩ٨ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
“Are you still seeing that boy you met in high school?”
Leona grunted in assent.
Rook to E4.
“Good, good…” Kifaji nodded while moving his king. “He always had a good head on his shoulders. The Kingscholars have always had good taste in that sense. I still remember the day your brother brought Safiri to the palace.”
Leona snorted, boy did he remember. Falena had practically carried her around the whole palace showing her off like some lovestruck idiot, until she had had enough of being tugged around like some paradise bird and firmly told him that if he didn't let her go to her room she would throw him into a horde of wildebeest.
She had gotten Leona's respect then and there, despite being the nail in the coffin for his hopes and dreams of ever becoming king.
Knight to G3.
“It puts my mind at ease to know you found someone like that too,” Kifaji continued with a fond smile on his face. He chuckled, “after all, His Highness has always needed a little push every now and then.”
Knight to F5.
Leona knew what Kifaji was trying to say, and he firmly ignored it, just like how he ignored the ache in his fingers as he moved the next piece, and the next piece, and the next piece. He just wanted to play. Nothing else.
Pawn to H4.
“You've gotten a lot better since we last played.”
Rook to G6.
“Check,” Leona mumbled.
Kifaji moved his king away patiently, seemingly unperturbed by Leona’s lack of contribution to the conversation. It wasn’t like they had anything to discuss, anyway. Surely Kifaji knew that. What was there to say? ‘I’m sorry you wasted such a large part of your life on a prince who didn’t matter.’
Knight to H6.
“Check,” Leona repeated numbly, his eyes slowly losing focus while his hands moved on autopilot. Knight to G4, pawn to H5, rook to E6, knight to H6.
“Prince Leona,” Kifaji said in a soft raspy voice. “Who do you think taught you?
Leona’s hand froze, he looked up. His ears flattened at the tone in Kifaji’s voice. Ridiculous. He wasn’t a kid anymore, but he still felt like he was being scolded by this old man.
“What now? You want credit for my skill?” he grumbled. “Sure, why not. You taught me everything I know. I’m eternally grateful to you, what would I have done without you. You practically raised m–”
He stopped. Or rather, he couldn’t continue. His throat wouldn’t let him. He ducked his face down. Fuck.
The hospital clock ticked away in the background as Kifaji waited patiently. As if this was yet another one of Leona’s many tantrums.
A familiar, yet too light, weight settled on his head. It shouldn’t be this comforting.
“Leona… you won ten moves ago.”
No.
“It's time.”
Wait.
The hand moved from his head down to grab one of Leona’s.
“Leona, out of all the princes I’ve raised… you were the proudest, the unruliest, the moodiest...” Kifaji rasped, clearly struggling now, “and the brightest.”
“Take it, it’s yours... pass it on for me, Your Majesty."
Kifaji’s hand fell away, revealing the king in Leona’s palm.
“Blasted old bird…” he muttered, ignoring the drops that fell on the handcrafted piece Kifaji had carved out for him 20 years ago.
Rook to G6.
“Checkmate.”
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ