Disclaimer: Square, square, and more square. Yeah, that's making me think of chess right now...
My Knight Queen
A good leader, Xemnas thought, would be impartial, would not play favourites.
But Xemnas was not a leader. A leader would stand shield-to-shield with his men, would listen carefully to their experiences, their opinions, and take them into consideration. A leader would be charismatic, and respected, even liked.
Xemnas was not respected: he was feared. He was not a leader, he was a chessmaster with a set of pieces with which to play.
Here, his rook, Lexaeus, straightforward, sliding in a straight line to face his foe (the man thought himself so cunning, but Xemnas could read him like an open book). Sometimes all he had to do was stand there, his mere presence blocking the path to the king.
There, across two spaces, a bishop, maybe Demyx – running all the way across the board just to take a pawn and then running back again, sideways, in between the cracks. Xemnas had always been poor with bishops, but they were ever so maneuverable.
But the pieces never added up. He needed to make a new chessboard, one where the board fit his pieces, one where all the spaces were black and he need not fear white. If he was to be the king, burdened by his own position into moving only one space at a time (one space was one hundred hearts, one hundred hearts closer) then he would need a piece better than a queen to work by his side.
In an empty white room with thirteen white pillars, the thrones were too tall to play chess. As the chairs began to empty, in Xemnas' mind the thrones became shorter and shorter until they nearly touched the ground. They also became closer together – he needed to bring them closer, let himself know he still owned them: there would not be anymore betrayals, no, there would not be any more of those. The numbers counted down but still he believed, yes, it was just the traitors being weeded out, those not strong enough to play on his chessboard. They were only pawns, nothing more.
There was one more left now, just one, and their chairs were so close together and so low to the ground that they could play chess together. Xemnas played the chessmaster then, being a bad leader, shapes that he pretended were squares on dark and light skin, bringing a dark hand to those pale lips and kissing the scar on the bridge of that white nose that divided the man's face into four squares he could place the his fingers upon – rook, bishop, knight and pawn all on the wrong spots, this wasn't strategically effective.
But this wasn't favouritism anymore – he led an army of two, and this army did not fear him.