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“Stalling won’t gain you any advantage, you know.” Megatron leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I disagree,” Prowl said, tapping intersecting lines to tell the board to add a white dot. “It gains me time to think.”
“Mm.” Megatron leaned forward, responding by adding a black dot to an adjacent intersection. “So have you thought about where you’d like to start, then?”
Prowl added a white dot to the opposite side of the board and said nothing.
Megatron placed another black dot next to the first white dot, beginning to circle it, and offered “Maybe with the injuries?”
Prowl blocked him from further surrounding the initial dot.
“Or the insurgents?” Megatron switched corners, bordering the other dot Prowl had placed.
Prowl added his next dot on a completely separate, third corner.
“Or perhaps with why Jazz felt the need to lie to me,” Megatron continued, following to place another adjacent token at the third corner.
“He did not lie,” Prowl retorted, almost immediately, returning to the first set of tokens and beginning to build out so he was beginning to surround Megatron’s unit, instead of the other way around.
Megatron sat in silence, refusing to play another piece until Prowl’s wings ducked in embarrassment. “In my experience he is more likely to omit certain things than lie.”
“Fine,” Megatron said. At least Prowl knew what he was getting into. He added a token to his first unit, playing out the maneuver. “In my experience, I sent off my best general on what was supposed to be a quiet vacation with the mech he’d been starry-opticked over since he was in his second upgrades and hung around in Polyhex while Optimus persuaded a castle full of extremely skittish mechs to explain the kind of abuses of power the previous king routinely committed.” Prowl made an inarticulate noise and switched to increasing the numbers of his second unit, allowing Megatron to press the advantage and capture the tokens of Prowl’s first unit. “When we arrived, your beloved conjunx was hauling you half-dead and utterly delirious down a mining tunnel and tried to rip my spark open for going near you. Report, Sir Prowl.” He placed a black token down in the center of the board, ignoring Prowl’s expanding second unit in favor of issuing a challenge.
Prowl held out his hand, hovering between countering Megatron’s challenge and returning to the expansion of his second unit. He went for the numbers game. “I did not discover until two megacycles into our stay that Jazz believed he had no choice in accepting my proposal.”
Megatron considered that and considered how he had barely heard Jazz string ten words together in the interval between the treaty and the coronation ball. “That explains more than it doesn’t.”
“Elaborate?” Prowl countered Megatron’s attempt to block his second unit in.
“Frankly, I assumed you were the only person alive willing to pine that long,” Megatron said. Prowl’s engine sputtered. “It made far more sense he was either out of prospects or trying to assassinate you.” Which had inspired Megatron to make sure Jazz knew how anything that hurt Prowl would not be...tolerated. Hm. In hindsight, Megatron was probably more than a little responsible for, if not the situation in the first place, Prowl’s ignorance of it.
“He—was not,” Prowl said, giving up on anything else.
“I did see that.” Megatron surrendered his pieces to Prowl’s second unit in favor of starting to claim another part of the board. “I apologized to him for my own role in perpetuating that idea. You kept insisting on it even while incoherent about everything else.” Clearly, he had been right to. Megatron did recognize when he had erred. He didn’t feel the need to beat himself into the ground about it. Unlike some mechs in this room.
“I stand by that insistence,” Prowl said. “Thank you.”
Megatron kept building out his claim. “So, he was there under duress, surrounded by guards, and he didn’t even try to assassinate you once. It must be love.”
“Have I ever told you how much I value your brutally frank counsel?” Prowl asked, setting off to claim the last unclaimed sector of the board. “It is not very much.”
“Your new conjunx is giving you bad habits. Don’t lie to my face, it’s unbecoming in a knight,” Megatron informed him. “Two megacycles in is when you sent away your guards. I assume they were related.”
“I made certain overtures to Jazz that he very firmly rejected.” Megatron was impressed. He’d thought Prowl would be too shy for that sort of thing. “A budget proposal for the city of Staniz.” And he’d been right, apparently. “He perceived it as an attempt to seize control of his properties and demanded an explanation. Certain things were made clear.”
Megatron knew that tone. “You crashed, didn’t you.”
“Only briefly.” Megatron wondered sometimes if he should have perhaps encouraged even a little more self-preservation in his most recent squire. “I recovered. I attempted to begin making amends for the situation. Getaway intervened.”
Jazz had already explained the plot of the insurgents during their initial trek through the old bismuth shaft. Megatron let Prowl give his version, neglecting to mention the conversation Prowl had undoubtedly not been in a processor state to retain. Prowl’s military-trained report was succinct and focused far more on numbers, control, and stakes than the prince’s had. Less on the very real threat to his own life.
“And then you tripped into a mineshaft,” Megatron said, when Prowl had concluded with Jazz choosing not to shoot him. “Or—how did you put it? You chose to die for Jazz and I should respect your decision?”
Prowl’s wings, one of them still missing a sensor panel, ducked in embarrassment. He didn’t look sorry enough, so Megatron said, loudly, again, “No, you idiot.” He finished blocking off one quarter of the board. “You always serve more good to the people you love alive than dead.”
“I know,” Prowl said, aggressively jabbing down the dot that filled the last empty space of that quarter of the board and surrendered all his tokens within to Megatron. “We have discussed this. Live and spite my enemies.”
“Live,” Megatron said firmly, and jabbed down his own token in the third unit Prowl had built, trading off his own surrender. “and seize the joy that would otherwise have been taken from you.”
They glared each other down for a moment before Megatron shoved his chair back. “You can’t lose to me. I forfeit.” The board cheerfully acknowledged his surrender.
“Why are you a sore loser even when you choose to lose,” Prowl grumbled.
“That’s all the fun of losing,” Megatron informed him. “Call Soundwave back so he stops messaging me demanding to know where you’re moving.”