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The Knight for protection,
The Rook to strike fear
The Bishop gives direction
but he does not interfere
The Pawns' worth is none
although they are a lot.
The King is the one
who rules the whole lot
And the Queen, what about her?
She's the one with more power
The knock is soft but quick, denoting an urgency that still doesn't want to disturb. So it must be Adam, who would ask politely if he can take the door down even during a fire. Leo remains well wrapped in the soft blanket and refuses to answer, just because he loves to inconvenience Adam if he can.
Another knock, and then the door opens. Adam's tall figure makes his way inside the room hesitantly. The darkness is not so thick that he can't see the furniture, but his strong sense of propriety makes him uncomfortable. He doesn't like to enter the King's bedroom without his permission. He looks around, possibly wondering what he should do when Leo takes pity of him.
“He's not here,” he says.
Adam turns towards him, finally identifying him inside the cocoon of blankets, and frowns with all the disappointment he's capable of, which is a lot. “What are you doing here?” He asks outraged. Now that he knows Leo is the only occupant of the room, he marches towards the windows and opens the curtains aggressively. “Get out of the bed this instant!”
“Calm down, Adam,” Leo yawns, emerging from his nest. He's wearing nothing and he has no idea where all his clothes are, but he doesn't seem to mind at all. Only his circlet – the silver hoop he wears around his head as a symbol of his status – can be located on the nightstand, which is two times unacceptable in the eyes of Adam. Leo is not supposed to take it off unless he's alone and he certainly should not abandon it on the bedside table as any other piece of jewelry. “It's not like this is the first time you find me in his bed.”
“And every time I do I hope it is the last,” Adam says furious. “But you have no decency.”
“I don't understand why you get so upset every time—Ah! My pants,” Leo exclaims, detecting the piece of clothing on a pile on the floor. “I knew they must be here somewhere.”
“You should conduct yourself way better than you do,” Adam replies, angrily. “You are a bishop, assuming that you still remember what it means and what it entails!”
“How could I forget?” Leo walks around, looking for the place where he dropped the jacket. Shoes he never wears on principle. “It's only the one thing they have been telling me since I was born. The bishop gives direction—”
“But he does not interfere,” Adam finishes for him, the nursery rhyme ingrained in both their brains since they were toddlers. “And you do very little of the former and too much of the latter.”
“Now you're being unfair,” Leo says, buttoning his jacket, which survived the night with just a few wrinkles and a missing button. “I gave a lot of directions tonight and I have not interfered when they were followed.”
Leo's mischievous grin is welcomed by Adam's very serious and disgusted face. “You are a disgrace and I should report you.”
“To whom, exactly?” Leo looks at himself in the mirror. He tries to make sense of his curly black hair and gives up. There's nothing he can do for it with his bare hands. “I'm the person responsible for dealing with this kind of scandals.”
“And that is my whole point. You shouldn't be doing what you do or you shouldn't be what you are.”
“Should I at least exist,” Leo frowns at him, “or even that's too much?”
Adam groans. “Come on, you know what I mean! You are a very good bishop, but maybe being one doesn't work well with... this.”
Leo looks at him gesturing vaguely around the room, meaning – he supposes – his relationship with the King. “I can do both things,” he points out. “I've been doing both things for years.”
“But you shouldn't! You know that!” Adam insists, “You shouldn't even be in here.”
Interact, don't mingle. That's the refrain. As if you could do one without the other.
Leo has always found this rule, this confining people in very small boxes, extremely constraining. Be friends with only certain people, master only one discipline, be only one thing. He's been fighting with this his whole life.
And Adam, as deeply a Knight as he is, has always somewhat felt the same. He's just too fond of rules to admit it out loud, lest the world as he knows it breaks down into a million pieces. They grew up together, after all. The son of a bishop and the son of a knight, always side by side. So inseparable that when they both applied to work for the Anderson household, they had to pretend not to know each other to avoid any problem. Blaine called them out right away – the man knows how to read people – but that was precisely the reason why he kept both.
It would have been unusual for any other king, but Blaine is an unusual king.
As a society strongly divided in very specific castes, they have very precise roles, and even stricter rules.
From bottom to top there's a rigid hierarchy that demands obedience to certain social constructs and doesn't allow people to have relations outside their cast besides the bare minimum dictated by necessity.
Pawns are the lowest caste. They are common citizens, criminals, and disgraced people coming from upper castes. It's impossible to rise up from being a pawn, and death is preferable to losing your status and becoming one. They are mostly workers, cleaners, servants, the real backbone of a nation that would stop functioning without them cultivating and harvesting crops or doing maintenance on the millions of little gears that make the city run smoothly.
Knights are protectors. They are their special kind of elite, a world apart than everybody else. They are trained since early childhood to protect the household they work for. They are pathologically loyal to the master of the house, and anal about rules. They are also supposed to enforce them.
Rooks are special armed force. They are individuals with certain particular sets of skills that are used only when needed. Day in and day out they might have menial tasks inside the house – they are chefs, chauffeurs, bodyguards – but they are deployed for more vicious tasks when it matters. They make wonderful spies.
Bishops are highly educated. They have an aptitude for learning anything, but they are required to choose one single discipline by the time they are twelve. They are alchemists, doctors, technicians, historians, engineers. In a household, they act as advisors and they are held in high esteem because they are knowledgeable.
Kings are heads of households. They rule over their family and have considerable power over the city too. For this reason, Kings are constantly at war with one another, and they need Knights, Rooks and Bishops at their service. The more, the better.
Queens are rare, and therefore precious. They can't rule directly, bu they have power. In fact, they are power. A household with a true Queen is virtually unstoppable.
But Blaine doesn't believe in any of this. He is a king who makes his own rules, and always has. He has two bishops who are both masters of two disciplines each, and going for a third. He has two knights, and just one rook, and despite having the means to acquire more, he does not intend to. Also, he knows more Pawns than is safe for him to admit. His household is, to put it mildly, unconventional. Hence Adam's constant state of stress.
“Adam, I know you don't approve of me and Blaine. You made yourself very clear,” Leo hides his face in his hands for a moment, trying to find the strength to wake up completely, “but it's too early to have this conversation. Can it wait until after breakfast? I am famished. And you know how I get when I'm hungry.”
“Yeah, you get worse than what you normally are, which would seem impossible to anyone who doesn't know that there's no end to your awfulness.”
“Aw, I love you too, man,” Leo chuckles. “So, why are you here?”
“I was looking for the King,” Adam says, finally remembering that he had a task to accomplish in coming here. “Where is he?”
“Where it pleases him, as always.”
Adam takes a deep breath, one of those that precede another long tirade. “You know you shouldn't let him walk around alone,” he says, annoyed. “Out there it's full of people who are waiting nothing more than a chance to kill him.”
“First of all, nobody lets him do anything, you should know that by now. He always does whatever he wants. Besides, my friend, keeping an eye on him is your job, not mine. I can assure you I knew very well where he was last night.”
Adam groans, rolling his eyes so hard that it's a miracle they don't fly out of his head. “Forget it! It's impossible to talk to you when you are in this state. I'll find him by myself.”
He is already marching towards the door, fueled by the mighty power of his outrage, but Leo grabs his shirt and pulls him back. “Calm down, I have a thing,” he mumbles, searching something on himself.
Adam frowns at him. “What thing? I have a thing is what you say when you're about to start searching around in the mess you usually make of every space you occupy.”
“Yeah, that's what we're going to do this time too. Come on!” He gestures him to follow as he leaves the room.
“Leo, I don't have time for your toys.”
“They are not toys! They are highly technological devices that you can't use because you're dumb,” Leo glares at him. “And I know where this one is. I was supposed to work on it last night, but I got distracted.”
“If you say by Blaine I swear I'm gonna kill you.”
Leo chuckles, “No, there was a kitten in the garden. Jesse and I couldn't resist and we ran outside.”
“What are you two? Little girls?!”
“Hey! He was cute!” Leo replies, defensively. “We named him Cat-ion. You know, like cations and anions.”
Adam shakes his head. “You're two nerds. But you're not keeping the cat.”
Leo pushes the double doors of his and Jesse's lab and waltzes in. “Too late, Walker. He's here to stay!”
Initially, the lab was a spacious but normal room inside the house, as it was supposed to be. But in time, both Leo's messiness and Jesse's needs for an abnormal amount of very rare materials combined made it impossible for just one room to contain them. So, Blaine just emptied an entire floor of the house and gave it to them to do as they pleased. They colonized it.
As he enters the lab, Adam is assaulted by an awful sugary smell. “What is this stink?”
Leo makes a straight line towards his half of the room – which is very easy to spot because it's the one that looks like the site of multiple bombings – and grabs seemingly random things as he goes. “Oh, Jesse is trying to put together a coffee-and-cookie maker machine. I suggested that he'll need a software for that, but he got all prickly about it, said he wants to build a true all-mechanical machine, so I let it drop. For now the thing makes sugar balls that taste vaguely of one-week old coffee and motor oil. It's progress I guess.”
Adam walks warily around the sugar-sputtering machine and he follows Leo, looking around the huge open space, full of desks, discarded old inventions, monstrous balls of knotted cables and more computers he has ever seen all together.
“You can stop looking, Jesse's not here,” Leo says, with a tiny smile on his lips. He puts all the little things he collected here and there in a basket on his desk. One of those things buzzes a moment and then turns still again. “You should really ask him out, you know?”
Adam blushes and clears his throat, trying to act nonchalantly and failing. “I don't know what you're talking about.”
“I've seen how you look at him,” Leo goes on, as he opens one drawer after the other and leaves them all open. “Not that I blame you, he's stunning.”
“I don't look at him in any way!” Adam almost shouts. “Besides, he's a bishop! It's against the rules!”
“He would say yes,” Leo takes a quick peek at him. “I think he likes you.”
Adam turns to him. “Did he tell you that?”
Leo smiles and shrugs. “Let's say I know him very well,” he says, showing him a monitor not bigger than his hand. “Found it!”
“What is that thing?” Adam asks, jumping at the chance to change subject.
“We made a tracker. I wrote the software and Jesse built the case so Blaine could wear it on his wrist,” he explains. “I can see where he is with this.”
Adam looks at the device in awe. The monitor shows a grid and the layout of the surrounding area. A small green dot is blinking. “Is this him?”
“Yes,” Leo frowns, leaning his head to the side. “But it looks like, he's in...”
“The kitchen?”
Leo raises an eyebrow. “Well, at least he didn't get out alone?”
*
As Leo and Adam enter the kitchen – a relatively small but comfy space on the first floor that used to be filled with servants when Blaine's dad was in charge – they find the king sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea in Casey's company, his one and only rook.
“Ah kiddo,” Blaine smiles at Leo dashingly and gestures him over. Leo can resist very little in his life, but he can resist Blaine even less than anything else.
“What are you doing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night?” Leo sits next to him on the bench and almost purrs when Blaine kisses him on his head.
“Well, you know I like your company, but you're a very messy sleeper,” Blaine shrugs, apologetically.
“Sir...” Adam whines.
“I needed some quiet and peace,” Blaine continues. “And Casey was nice enough to offer tea and a chat.”
“And the count of the people who want him dead just this week,” Casey adds, nodding from behind his cup that, knowing him, is heavily corrected.
“One needs to keep count,” Blaine nods.
“Well, that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about!” Adam says, indignantly for some reason. “Sir, you can't just disappear on me like this! I'm supposed to keep you safe, but it's hard to do that when I don't know where you are!”
“The boys handcuffed me with this,” Blaine shows him a metal band he's wearing at his wrist. “Leo will give you one of his trinkets, so you'll know when I'm going to the bathroom.”
“That'll be wonderful!” Adam says with enthusiasm.
Casey looks at him, unconvinced. “Whatever floats your boat, man.”
“Now sit down you two, have some tea,” Blaine smirks. “Let's talk murder.”