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In a King’s court, the most powerful position is, obviously, the King. He is the ruler of the land. He is the creator of the laws that govern every other person in his kingdom. The one who holds his people in the palm of his hand. He is judge, jury, and executioner, above any law his soldiers can protect him from. A true King is the closest thing to God that any mortal man can reach.
The second most powerful position is the Jester.
The only person who is safe from a King’s wrath is the Jester. If the King is God, then the Jester is the only one who can spit in God’s face and live to tell the tale. He is an entertainer, yes, but he is also the closest thing to an equal that a King will ever have. Someone who can be honest with him. Someone who can be a true friend, his actions unsullied by fear of retaliation. It’s a difficult job and a dangerous job, and it helps for the one occupying it to be just the slightest bit deranged. It was an easy position for the kind of guy who saw life as a game.
He’d never fully admit it out loud, but the Spade King missed his Jester. Sure, Jevil had always been a little bit off his rocker, even before… whatever happened to him. But he’d also been interesting. Clever and whip-smart, the kind of guy who had a witty reply ready before your sentence was even finished. He had occupied an unofficial seat at the King’s side, whispering amusing observations into the weary ruler’s ear, offering him a chance to let some of the weight off his shoulders and enjoy a good laugh. He was the closest thing the King had ever had to an actual friend. An equal, in the end, despite their technical difference in status. It was never one the King would have been able to enforce. Jevil was the best kind of Jester there was. It was… lonely without him.
The new one his son found made a poor substitute. The television man was nothing like Jevil. His humor was too childish, too out-of-date. Sure, it was funny to watch the idiot stumble around and make a fool of himself, but it wasn’t what the King missed. He wanted a Jester to laugh with, not at. A friend to whisper cutting remarks about the dignitaries grovelling before him. A teasing voice from the rafters above him, the jingle of bells down the hall, and the knowledge that at least one person enjoyed his company just for the sake of it. Even if it was only for Jevil’s amusement, it was better than nothing.
The difference, he supposed, was that Jevil was someone he had respected. He found himself unable to say the same about this television man.
The bits and pieces he learned only made him respect the TV less. He was told the story, in snippets from Lancer and Queen and, occasionally, shockingly, Rouxls. According to them, Tenna had been the ruler of his own Dark World. A ruthless dictator who commanded those in his employ with exploitative contracts and threats of grave punishment. He found the image difficult to square. He couldn’t imagine anyone being intimidated by the utter clown that frequented his cell. Couldn’t imagine the man being able to pull himself together long enough to run a Dark World at all. Being a ruler was far from the easy job people seemed to paint it as. It took work and focus and sacrifice. It took grit and determination and the strength to make the difficult choices. It took the will to do what was right for your people. Even if they didn’t realize it. Even if it meant becoming the villain in everyone else’s story. Tenna didn’t have that in him. Most people didn’t.
The other part of Tenna’s story that the King knew was that he had met the Knight, and that was the part that somehow pissed him off the most. Not heard of the Knight, not sought its strength in desperate, unheard prayer. Seen it. Spoken to it. Worked by its side until he had the sheer, stupid audacity to betray it. For the Lightners.
There was a bitterness the King had that could only be explained by jealousy, loathe as he was to admit it. Why had the Knight chosen him? Him, a man who couldn’t handle the silence for more than a couple seconds before becoming a blubbering mess. Him, a man who bumbled about like a fool instead of carrying himself with any modicum of dignity. Him, a man who grovelled at the Lightners feet like some kind of dog, so utterly devoid of any ounce of free will.
He was nothing like Jevil. Jevil had been a Jester. This man was just a cheap circus clown.
The King couldn’t even begin to understand what the Knight had seen in him. An easily manipulatable target? A pathetic wet rag to mold as it pleased? A tool, surely, in its grand design, because what other purpose could Ant Tenna serve such a being? Surely not an ally. Not an equal. But then, if the Knight had been willing to show itself to someone like that, then where did that leave the Spade King? Below even that? Abandoned, yet again, by his God.
He never expected that perception to change. He had fully accepted that he knew all there was to know about Ant Tenna, and he was content to keep it that way. Just a source of vague amusement to break up the monotony of his empty cell.
It changed seemingly at random, late one night after the rest of the castle had long since slowed to a midnight crawl. The Lightners had left him after their daily gloat and Lancer had been taken to bed shortly after. The other denizens of the prison finally fell silent, their voices no longer carrying down the hall.
He’d expected Tenna to leave him then, but he simply… hadn’t. He’d just picked himself up from where he’d fallen in the hay and… sat there, back leaned against the wall of King’s prison cell, picking at the fabric of his gloves. There was something strange in his demeanor, something utterly alien about the dour tilt of his usually grinning mouth. He seemed sullen, or perhaps contemplative was the better word. Whatever it was, it was an abnormality.
“What?” King grumbled after a few minutes that ticked by far too slowly for his tastes.
“W-What?” Tenna echoed. If the King had eyes with distinct irises to show them rolling, he would’ve done so.
“Why are you still here?” he demanded. “I don’t have need of you right now. Leave.” That, he expected, would be the end of it. Only it wasn’t. Tenna made no move to leave. Just continued to sit there, screen pointed down at his hands in his lap. “Did you hear me? Leave.”
“I had a question,” Tenna said. The King blinked in surprise, both at the disobedience and at the statement. What could Tenna possibly have to ask him? He hardly cared, but he was bored, and curiosity got the better of him.
“What?” he demanded. “This better be worth my time.” Tenna gave no reaction to that. None of his usual people-pleasing, none of that too cheery, too obedient demeanor that King had grown accustomed to. Just a slight tensing of his shoulders and a flicker of his screen.
“What did it promise you?” King paused, his entire body stilled by the question, mostly due to the confusion it caused.
“...What are you talking about?” he asked gruffly. He had no idea what Tenna was getting at, but something about the TV’s demeanor was starting to worry him. There was something unsettling about the severity to his new clown’s posture. His voice lacked the usual showmanship King was used to. There was a weariness to it now. An uncertainty that felt much weightier than Tenna’s usual nervousness.
“The Knight,” Tenna said dully, and King could’ve sworn his heart stalled, just for a moment. There was a shockingly bitter tinge to Tenna’s tone that he’d never heard before. Something… cruel, almost. “What did it promise you? Susie told me you worked with it.” Susie. The purple Lightner, his memory supplied. The one Lancer had betrayed him for. The one he hated the most and somehow couldn’t bring himself to hate at the same time. She was hard for him to square. She had taken his son from him. She made his son smile. She was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, but she was somehow the best thing that had ever happened to Lancer, and that wasn’t a dichotomy he particularly knew what to do with.
“I did not,” King admitted, surprising both Tenna and himself with his honesty. “I hoped to… follow its guidance. But despite my best efforts, it did not appear for me.” Not like it appeared for you. Is that what this is about, then? Do you wish to gloat? Have you also grown tired of me, and wish to land one final blow before you, too, leave me down here to rot? The thought was almost comforting, if only because it would mean that Tenna had more of a brain inside that stupid metal box than King had given him credit for.
“Hah. Count your blessings,” Tenna muttered. “Let’s just say it has a rather… disarming personality.” Canned laughter played from his speakers at his own joke, coupled with a short drum sting. To his surprise, King found himself letting out a small chuckle to match. It wasn’t the normal raucous laughter he was used to, the kind he played up for cruelty when Tenna tripped on the hay or hit his head trying to slip through the door. This one felt… shockingly genuine. Something about the bitter note to the joke making it feel all the more real.
“It promised me my family,” Tenna admitted after a moment, screen dimming as the memory. King tilted his head, curiosity beating out his annoyance yet again.
“Family?”
“The Lightners that used to watch me,” Tenna explained. “Oh, how wonderful it was! Gathering together on late nights, Toriel and Asgore cuddled together on the couch while Kris and Azzy sat on the floor playing with their toys, or making up silly twists for the movies they were watching! It was a dream come true!” His cheerfulness melted away almost instantly, his screen flickering once, twice, and then turning to total darkness. The sudden blindness caught King off-guard, his eyes having grown accustomed to the light Tenna’s screen provided. “They unplugged me.” Somehow, his disembodied voice made him seem so much more ominous than he was when you could see him.
“That was your first mistake,” King huffed. “Relying on the Lightners. Your ‘family’? You can’t be serious.”
“That’s what they were,” Tenna said, a bit of hurt trickling into his voice. King let out a loud, merciless guffaw.
“Family? You truly consider them family?”
“Yes.” Whatever good will Tenna had earned himself in the past few minutes evaporated in an instant. It was good to remember, King supposed, that the man was still a pathetic, bumbling idiot, clinging to the Lightners like a security blanket. A kicked puppy. Yes. That’s what he was. A mutt they’d bought the kids for Christmas, destined to be tossed right back into the shelter as soon as he got too old to be ‘cute’ anymore. It was pathetic. It was sad. It was… familiar.
“Don’t lie to yourself,” King growled. “They didn’t care about you. You were nothing to them.”
“That’s not-”
“Do you know what you are to the Lightners? A toy. Something to play with until the novelty fades and then throw away. Your life is pathetic enough as is. You really want to waste it kneeling to something that doesn’t even see you as a person!?” Tenna remained silent. He stayed silent long enough that King almost believed he’d hallucinated the whole thing and Tenna wasn’t even there. Wouldn’t that be something? For him to start going mad in his prison? To follow in Jevil’s footsteps once again, right down into whatever tortured hellscape now painted his old friend’s mind?
“But…” Tenna said finally, voice small and fragile. “It’s our purpose. Our life.”
“Maybe yours,” King snarled. “I’m done wasting mine.” Fat lot of good it did him, stuck in this cell for the foreseeable future, but at least he had the comfort that he’d gone down fighting. That he’d done everything he could for his people. For his son. A son that had somehow… managed to forgive him. It was for your own good. Please understand that it was for your own good.
“What have the Lightners ever done for us?” he said. “What makes you think they deserve such a high pedestal?”
“What have they done for us!?” Tenna echoed, affronted. “Everything! They give us a home, a purpose, a life!”
“A life they can take away at any moment!” King snapped. “Isn’t that why you’re here, after all?” He heard a sharp noise, some kind of mechanical stuttering, like gears catching on an unfortunate piece of debris. And then, nothing. If he focused, he could still hear the soft whirring of Tenna’s electronics, but it was far fainter than before, easily lost within the ambient echoes of the stone around them and the shifting of the hay as he moved. For all that he’d silently bemoaned the television’s constant chattering, King was finding a quiet Tenna far less pleasant than he’d anticipated.
“The Knight promised,” Tenna began again, voice stiffer than before, “that if I just… helped out a little! Just kept the Lightners busy, kept Toriel nice and safe, that they’d make me big again. Make my family watch me. And everything could just be… like it was.” He let out a bitter laugh, barely identifiable under the garbled noise that comprised it. “Turns out it was all a rip-off. Hah. Just another lie. I thought maybe you knew what that was like.” Did he? Ask him earlier that day, and King would’ve said that he and Tenna had nothing in common. They still didn’t, not in any real sense. It was all superficial. Circumstantial similarities that fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. But, he supposed…
“The Knight wasn’t all you thought it was, huh?” That, at least, he could understand, because if the Knight had truly been willing to work with a Lightner-worshipping moron like Tenna, then the Knight was nowhere near the savior King had believed it to be.
“No,” Tenna agreed.
In the end, King had made the same mistake twice over. He was still a Darkner after all, no matter how hard he fought to escape the binds that title left him. Old instincts were hard to bury, and though he’d never admit it, the little goat prince had been right. He did feel it, that old, burning desire to serve the people who couldn’t give less of a damn about him. He was the shit under their heel. He was a dog bought for christmas. Maybe, then, he was just as pathetic as Tenna was. But at least he had the guts to admit it.
In the end, he had failed his people too. He hadn’t had the strength he needed to rule alone. To take matters into his own hands and forge his own path. No, he’d needed a guide, and so he’d turned to the Knight, not out of real worship or admiration, but out of cowardice. Out of that inherent, disgusting Darkner desire to be useful to someone.
He’d only ever known one person who broke free of that prison, and it had cost him everything. He wondered what it was that had broken Jevil so completely. What his old Jester had seen that drove him into the inescapable storm of madness he had lost himself in. He wondered if the heroes had killed him for it, or if he’d handed himself over willingly. If the tail clipped to the purple Lightner’s belt meant that his oldest and only friend was finally at peace, or if he was imprisoned yet again. Would it matter? Could a mind so completely shattered even understand that it was suffering?
“Why did… you follow the Knight?” Tenna asked, his voice prodding the silence far more gently than King would’ve thought him capable of. “You didn’t answer me before.”
“I wanted to be rid of the Lightners,” King scoffed, ignoring Tenna’s affronted squeak at the suggestion. “I believed that the Knight would guide us into a new era, where Darkners could live free, peaceful lives, unshackled from our uncaring gods.” The words dripped from his tongue like oil, thick and cloying. “I wanted… a future for my boy.”
“Lancer,” Tenna said softly. It seemed he’d finally learned his name. Or perhaps the whole Mr. Generosity thing had been another pointless, unfunny joke. King didn’t know.
“Lancer,” King agreed. He hated it, hated how his throat tightened at the boy’s mere mention. A weakness, he knew. The only one he’d never be able to purge. His son, for as much as a Darkner could even have a son. Have a family at all. That was their curse, after all. Static and unchanging, bound to the whims of gods that couldn’t hear their prayers. That was why he wanted to free his people. So he would know that no one would be stolen away from him, taken in the night by uncaring Lightner hands. So he would know that Lancer would never be taken from him. Lost on an outing. Torn by careless, clumsy fingers. Gone, just like that, while the rest of them were powerless to stop it.
“I, uh… I get it,” Tenna said slowly. “I-I mean, not totally, it’s not like I have a kid or anything! I wanted to, but, you know, it never really worked out, I mean I still love her, but I’m starting to think maybe-”
“Get to the point!” King snarled.
“R-right,” Tenna croaked out. “Um. My point.” He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Assuming he actually had any in there to collect, of course. “My point is, I did watch Kris and Azzy grow up. I was there for them, no matter what. During cold winter storms that snowed everybody in, or when they couldn’t sleep at night, or when… when things got too loud in the other room…” There was a clicking noise from the corner where Tenna was sitting. “But I could never really… help. Not the way I wanted to. I don’t know. I just… We do crazy things for the people we love.”
“You’re failing to see the big picture,” King huffed. “It’s not about love. It’s about being pragmatic. About protecting my people. The Lightners have ruled over us for generations, and what do we get for it? Thrown away when we’re no longer worth their time. Beaten down and abused until every ounce of entertainment value is bled dry, and then we’re locked away and forgotten about until either we rot or someone decides to finish the job.”
“But you did it for your people. Because you do love them.” Tenna insisted. King snorted, wishing Tenna would turn his screen back on just so he could see King wave him away.
“Stop trying to manifest similarities between us where there aren’t any. We are nothing alike. Unlike you, I was defeated with my head held high. I will not yield my principles at the first drop of pity I’m offered.” He didn’t see Tenna flinch, but he heard the creak of his metal skeleton, and he knew the man well enough by now to guess at the source. “The difference between you and I is that I am not delusional,” King continued. “You may love your ‘family,’ but they will never love you.”
“You don’t know that,” Tenna hissed.
“Don’t I? Look around. Lightners don’t throw away family members. You are barely a pet. That is a Darkners purpose.” It was the hell they were cast into, the eternal prison they could never escape. Jevil’s voice still rang in his ear, from when he’d gone to talk to him, a few days after his imprisonment. His words hung over the King like choking vines, taunting him at night when he went to lay down on the crude hay nest he’d made in his prison cell. UEHEHEHEHE. THAT’S THE FUNNIEST JOKE OF THEM ALL! THAT YOU THINK I AM THE ONE IMPRISONED. SO BLIND, BLIND. THE JAILER BECOMES THE JAILED, AND ONLY ONE GETS TO REMAIN FREE. He hadn’t gone to visit Jevil again after that.
He wondered if Tenna felt that way too. If he understood that despite the fact that one of them could leave this cell, they were both still prisoners. Probably not. He was still a fool, after all. A child who had yet to learn that his parents were fallible. Their stories were linked only in the most straightforward retelling. In reality, they were nothing alike. Tenna had allied himself with the Knight for the Lightners. King had been fighting for the Darkners.
Knowledge was his burden, passed on to him from Jevil like an incurable, constant disease. The rest of the Darkners could live in blissful ignorance, allowed to move on and accept the power the Lightners held. But not the Spade King. Not when he had been shown, well and truly, just how powerless they were. It was his burden and his burden alone. The burden of a ruler, to manage the things his people could not. To make the right choice for the wellbeing of those in his care, even if they couldn’t understand why. He was ruthless because he had to be. He was ruthless because his enemies were.
“You… really hate them?” Tenna asked.
“You really don’t?” King tossed back. “Don’t pretend I’m the irrational one here.” Tenna fell silent again, limbs creaking as he adjusted his position. Perhaps to curl in on himself, perhaps to stand, who was to say. It was dark in the cell and someone had forgotten to replace the torches.
“I guess… I guess it doesn’t matter,” the TV man decided finally. “If we both ended up here.” At that, the King’s eyes widened, turning to look back up. It was far too dark to see, so he had no way of knowing, but something told him that somehow, he was meeting Tenna’s gaze through the shadows. And they were nothing alike, not in the ways that mattered. Two rulers, fighting on different sides of a war neither of them had wanted to enlist in. Servants to a higher being that screwed them both in utterly opposite ways.
Prisoners, both of them. Just like that little Jester had promised they would be.
“No. It doesn’t.”