INTERMISSION: KYOUYA

Opening: Queen on Colour

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When Kyouya comes home to find a wayward kouhai sound asleep in his bed, he sighs, smiles and shakes his head. After placing his briefcase on his desk, he goes to his wardrobe to fish out a pair of pyjamas.

Kaoru is drawn into a tight little ball as though trying to keep himself contained and protected. His things lie scattered on Kyouya's bed, and Kyouya gathers them up to put them away by his bag on the sofa at the lower level of the room. He catches a glimpse of what Kaoru had been doing on the laptop and feels a mix of emotions too soft and finespun to define with any precision.

Another sigh escapes him. Whatever will he do with this junior?

It is not that Kyouya doesn't understand love and attachment – it is that Kaoru hopes to survive the game without losing a single chess piece, and that, Kyouya knows, is simply impossible.

The other thing that Kyouya knows is this: for all that Haruhi is the commoner amongst them, she is not the pawn in the game – no, Kaoru is, because he has never wanted to be anything else.

Kaoru only wants to do what pawns do, which is to provide a blockade that protects the rest of them and to be the one that is taken first by the enemy while the rest of them advance towards victory. If he could, he would make enough copies of himself to form a fence that safeguards them entirely, keeping them where harm cannot reach them, exactly like the starting position of chess. Even given a choice, this junior wouldn't pick to be one of the more valuable pieces because he wouldn't want his loss to negatively affect any of their prospects. He's an overworked piece, constantly trying to defend everything at once.

They all have their places. Kyouya himself is not spared, for which human no matter how clever can choose to only be a player and not a piece at the same time? Life itself is the board, to be alive is to play, and Kyouya wants to participate and to win.

Of course, this means that he will settle for nothing less than the most powerful position on offer. Kyouya can't stand being helpless and cosseted – that's Tamaki's job – and he must have the largest, longest and widest range, be the most functional, be able to move aggressively and decisively yet have such value that all other pieces should be surrendered to the opponent before he is.

Already in the structure of the club, Kyouya knows he is essential to the king's survival. However, built into the very source of his power is his weakness: the damnable dependence on his king, for without the king, there is no game. In the end, the highest value amongst the pieces is still less than the infinite value of the king; in the end, even if he has scrambled and fought for the duration of the match, even if he has risked his life out in the open, even if victory comes from the fruits of his labour, the empire belongs to the king.

Perhaps it is this reason that had caused his fight with Tamaki over their succession. After he'd made the appointment unilaterally, without seeking Tamaki's opinion (apparently he'd been prepared to shut down the club and encourage their juniors in the direction of other extra-curricular activities), Tamaki had been so upset that he'd actually raised his voice at him, not in his usual boisterous manner that Kyouya gets an earful of everyday anyway, but in the way he had reacted towards those unfortunate D-class students that had made Haruhi 'cry'.

In the past year, Kaoru has alternately been stuck where he is or quietly moving forward to make way for the others to move forward as well – demonstrating an impeccable self-awareness that in shielding his twin and Haruhi, he also hedges them in and inhibits their progress. Again, his movements reflect those of a pawn – how did Kyouya not realize what Kaoru is until that day?

That day when the queen was so occupied with other concerns that she had come under threat without knowing it… and found a pawn in front of her defending her resolutely.

Pawns aren't supposed to make bold, dangerous moves – pawns shouldn't even have such mobility!

Shocked by his own oversight, he'd vented his anger at the pawn. A part of it had been sheer hubris, he knows – I am a queen, you are a pawn, how dare you move without my permission?

Not only had the pawn not called him out on it, the pawn had run away, cried, accepted culpability that was not his to bear, apologised, and made up for it through a lovely scarf that cost time and effort; when the pawn discovered that it had been manoeuvred as a pawn into the position that he now finds himself in, he'd smiled, with those eyes that apportioned no blame and brought Kyouya to the brink of guilt for foisting that responsibility off on him.

Why Tamaki had seen the need to enumerate the arguments against Kaoru becoming president is beyond Kyouya. The truth is that all four of them seniors know full well Kaoru's disposition and temperament – no, that's not right – Tamaki doesn't know what Kaoru went through, further weakening his ability to lecture Kyouya. He had not known that there was even a question to ask, much less what question to ask, whereas Kyouya had immediately extracted the whole story from Mori-senpai and Honey-senpai upon his return from the school trip to France.

Tamaki senses emotion but Kaoru cannot be understood by feeling alone because Kaoru is always compromising himself with his rationality – had Tamaki honestly thought that Kyouya would not give this matter the most thorough consideration? It is unlike Tamaki to underestimate him.

Obviously, then, it'd been something else Tamaki had not understood. Cannot understand, Kyouya would venture to say.

Tamaki is made for glory.

Since before they met properly, Kyouya has envied it. That emotion has been largely superseded and supplanted by others: respect, loyalty, fraternity. Vestiges of it remain, enough to spark a memory of how bitter it'd felt.

How can a born winner of the Actor in a Leading Role understand Kaoru, who is one of those people whose names are on the credits when most of the audience is leaving or have left the cinema? How can a king understand a pawn, especially one who moves like it has no idea that promotion is possible in the rules of the game?

Kyouya has witnessed it – Kaoru's willingness to accept the dregs if it means that those he loves get what they want. Ask him for the last sandwich when his stomach is empty and he'd say yes. Make him stay back to clean up while the rest are free to go and he'd say yes. Tell him to give up his exclusive tickets to the afterparty of a fashion magazine for the customers to bid on and he'd say yes.

Kyouya knows all of these for sure, for he'd been the person to make these demands.

So quite correctly he agrees with Tamaki: Hikaru could share the burden of host club leadership.

But.

Hikaru wouldn't be taking on half the burden. The actual proportion is probably something like a quarter or less. Better than nothing, right?

Wrong.

Looking at the redhead sleeping peacefully, definitely wrong.

Kyouya has a complete range of offense and defense – his contributions will not go without some form of accolade, like collecting Best Picture as a producer, or winning Best Director, or… both, really. Kaoru, on the other hand, will spend his life leading his loved ones to the red carpet and pushing them into the spotlight, allowing himself to shine if and only if they are also receiving commendation.

It boils down to this: there is no way that Kyouya will see Kaoru become queen to his brother in a new game, to let Kaoru's triumphs be fed to Hikaru, to take on that cursed fate of being the most powerful but still ultimately disposable in the scheme of things.

In this, he believes that he has his senpais' support though they have diplomatically refrained from taking either his or Tamaki's side explicitly. Certainly it must have caused them much inner conflict and grief for they both dote on Kaoru terribly, whether or not it is evident to other people or even to Kaoru himself. If anything happens to Kaoru as a result of this, will the three of them ever be able to forgive themselves, knowing that they set him on this path and knowing what this path may entail? Kaoru's intense devotion to them speaks for itself, for Kyouya isn't plagued by any doubt at all that Kaoru will forgive and excuse him.

Honey-senpai and Mori-senpai are so mighty that they cannot be contained in one piece each – they may not even be in the same game, or, as Kyouya suspects, like him they have surpassed the limitations of being a piece to become simultaneously piece and player, and while Kyouya is best employed where the action is at, they are better as observing players, intervening and not intervening as necessary.

Notwithstanding that, if Kyouya had to designate pieces to them, Honey-senpai would be bishop x 2 and Mori-senpai would be knight x 2.

… How curious. Kyouya may have just solved the mystery of why Honey-senpai and Mori-senpai appear to suffer from decreased effectiveness: ironically, because they make it their business to protect their juniors. As the sayings go, 'bad bishops protect good pawns', and 'a knight on the rim is dim'. Time and again Honey-senpai has moved to save Kaoru despite directly putting himself in disadvantageous positions, or he exerts control from afar to relieve the weight of Kaoru's responsibilities. Mori-senpai is always leaping to their rescue, literally and figuratively – a good chunk of that involves letting the juniors do as they wish, which means that Mori-senpai sidelines himself to give them space to learn their lessons and develop their relationships themselves. There's a secret there that no one apart from the two senpais and Kyouya know; maybe more accurately, Kyouya merely has an unproven theory of how much the seniors have willingly given up.

Someone must have done something to stop Hikaru from pestering Kaoru all this while… more challenging still, someone must have done something to stop Tamaki from hindering Kaoru's lessons. It wasn't Kyouya on either count and the process of elimination rapidly discloses the masterminds.

They must realise too that by virtue of age Kaoru is naturally subject to them, yet within his year level where it should have been a level playing ground, he picks to be the smallest, to rank behind his twin and Haruhi. By the very fact of being a pawn, his potential is the greatest.

This game is incredibly difficult because the other pieces on the same side have minds of their own. Regardless of how much they care for each other, they cannot help but have differing minor goals underneath their overarching main goal to stay together, and although they are all on the board and a few of them are capable of marshaling their combined firepower under a central command, none of them actually know what sort of chess this is going to be.

All they know is to be sharp, adaptable and fiercely protective. By himself Kyouya cannot succeed; he has accepted this, or Tamaki would have paid dearly for his interference. If this is the classic version, the three of them are long prepared and coordinated. They will strategically arrange the middlegame to set up a favourable endgame. A queen, two bishops and two knights far exceed the bare minimum material to force checkmate, especially as these minor pieces are probably super mutant pieces in a masquerade.

They will watch as Kaoru inches forward, step-by-step, accomplishing what sacrifice and determination can achieve. Who knows which point he will get to? Passed pawns often decide the game; outside passed pawns are positively deadly; reach the final rank and he may transform to tip the scales. Two queens are sufficient to force a checkmate without backing the opponent into a corner – meaning that Kyouya will need only one other to bring about a win, that is how strong Kaoru can become. In some variants of chess, a pawn can even be promoted to king.

For this glimmer in the distance, for this one promise, Kyouya will personally escort this pawn to the square where it will earn its crown, if for nothing else than to show his kouhai what a game-changer a pawn can be.

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Question

Just informally, can I know if all of you prefer (a) more frequent updates, or (b) longer chapters? I can split up each chapter into even smaller parts to churn them out more often. LOL it's a bit silly having like Chapter 5 a, b, c, d, e, f, g but to be honest I feel that my chapter lengths are getting a bit unwieldy and that the story suffers from the large gap in between chapter updates. :-/