If you don 't do reversals and the card was reversed anyway, what's going on is that the card is shouting at you. It's trying to draw attention to itself any way it can.
It may also be telling you that the flow of energy between you might be reversed: the King Swords behaviours you might expect from your friend should it have been upright, might actually be how you'll find yourself behaving towards them, for whatever reason.
Kings Swords are about mastery of the intellect. They are highly intelligent people, and usually highly educated. If their life was such that they didn't pick up much formal education, they will have kept themselves well-informed anyway: watching documentaries, reading newspapers and educated books, building up informal bodies of knowledge.
In their friendships and work-relationships, the King Swords type will be an obvious mentor or trainer. They like positions of command, but not (like the King Wands) out of ambition so much, but out of a desire to show and share their intelligence and knowledge with others. They tend to build up clusters of acolytes around them, people who think they are marvellous, who hang on their every word. They are flattered by approval and don't really make good trainers because they enjoy the dependence of their acolytes on them, so have little or no motivation to bring them up to speed. they like to be the repositories of knowledge more than they like to be the enablers of others to find their own knowledge.
When a King Swords type is in a negative pattern, their thinking will be along these lines:
1) I know I am very intelligent.
2) I am more intelligent than most people around me.
3) Because I am more iontelligent, I k now better than them what is good for them.
4) Therefore they should do exactly as I say.
Along that line of thinking, the King Swords can stop being the ideal mentor that he is when he is positive, and end up being a controller, even an abusive controller.