This is the first of two Star Wars AUs, this one is mostly because I profoundly wanted an AU where Cesare was literally a prince of an entire planet and also I wanted Lucrezia to have a lightsaber.  I am currently working on another one for @wildehacked in which everyone is in the much more obvious position of being Sith.

Cesare doesn’t expect a rescue, as he sits in his cell, back to the wall and one leg stretched out in front of him with the other bent close to his body.  The ceremonial robes of Alderaan are heavy, uncomfortable at the best of times and these…these are not the best of times. Deep red cloth rubs against his skin, raw and tender from a few rounds with a torture droid, and he ignores it. He told them nothing—he has no profound alliance to the Rebellion, but the image of the great and terrible Darth Sixtus wading through the endless dunes of Dantooine had amused him, and after their young general turned their weapon on Alderaan…

Well. Cesare is (was) hardly beloved of his people, raised by the stern and austere Viceroy of Alderaan, della Rovere, but that was his planet, and after it was gone, he denied the Empire information out of sheer spite.  It had been worth it, to see the towering dark figure of Sixtus storm out of the room in a rage.

Still, though.  His planet is gone, and they didn’t love their distant prince, and the Rebellion trusts him only on the weight of his adopted guardian, who was well known in the right circles for his totally ruthless devotion to the cause.  Cesare sent away the information he had been told to care for with the droid, a PA-L0 unit more willful than was good for it. It might make it to the Sforza woman della Rovere had intended it for, or it might not—either way, it is out of his hands.  The Rebellion won’t expend the manpower to send a rescue mission, and the Empire has a new planet-killer to play with.  He’s confident he won’t live long enough to find out whether PA-L0 made it or not.

It’s something of a surprise, then, when alarms go off and his cell door opens to admit the shortest Stormtrooper he’s ever seen.  

Cesare silently arches an eyebrow.  Princes grow up in the public eye, especially on bustling Core worlds like Alderaan, and Cesare prides himself on the ability to show no response to any disaster. He’d had to cultivate it, after the second time he was caught with someone who, perhaps, should have been off-limits.

“Are you lost?” he asks dryly, and the Stormtrooper reaches up to wrestle off their helmet, and Cesare’s mouth snaps shut in surprise.

It’s not the hard-faced man he expected.  Instead it’s a woman, a girl, really, with a youthful face and hair like sunlight pinned up in a knot, and she smiles at him, perfect tiny teeth a string of matched pearls behind her pink lips.  She looks about his own age, maybe younger.  There’s a sharp tug, like a cord anchored somewhere in Cesare’s spine is pulling him toward her, and he has the sudden inexplicable urge to brush her hair back, the wayward coils of spun gold escaping around her face.

“I’m Lucrezia Borgia,” she says, dimpling at him, and he tries to assemble words to reply. “I found your Paolo unit.  I’m here to rescue you.”

Cesare has made worse snap decisions in his life than take a rescue wearing the face of an angel, he concludes in under a second.  They run.

They find another false Stormtrooper, and this one is far more like what Cesare expected, a man with eyes like stone and a dispassionate expression under the smudged blood on his cheek.  Lucrezia calls him Micheletto, and Cesare snatches a blaster off a dead Stormtrooper to toss at him.

“My lord,” Micheletto says with a slight incline of his head.

“This is Cesare della Rovere,” Lucrezia says, as if Micheletto doesn’t know who he is. “He gives your orders now.  Take us back to the Condottiere, and we’ll find Caterina on the way.”

They do find Caterina.  Just in time to watch Sixtus cut her down.  

“I knew her brother,” Lucrezia says coolly as they crowd into the cockpit of Micheletto’s ship, the Condottiere.  It’s a bit of a wreck, but he pilots it like a master, as skillfully as he had cut down any Stormtrooper in their path.  “He was an unpleasant man, to say the least.”  She fingers the silver hilt at her hip—a lightsaber, she tells Cesare quietly, apparently once the possession of her father.  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t shed any tears over her corpse.”

“Of course,” Cesare says, and she smiles at him, and he takes it like a blaster bolt to the heart.

Some other highlights…

Lucrezia brings down the Death Star, her eyes closed and her X-Wing guided by something at the center of her chest, something cold and bright as a Tatooine moon.  When she lands, laughing and giddy with triumph, Cesare snatches her up around the waist and spins her around, and he smiles at her, and she thinks idly about kissing it off his lips.  Micheletto smiles his faint smile and kisses her cheek like she’s a lady of status.  Lucrezia gets an award.  Micheletto, a killer and a criminal and a bloody hand for hire, insists that he should not, and Cesare does not argue with him.

Cesare finds the leader of the Rebellion, an ex-Senator named Machiavelli, very much to his liking.  It is common knowledge that Machiavelli has something of an affection for the ex-Prince of Alderaan (it’s something Cesare asks himself often—is he still a prince at all, if he has no planet?), and Cesare is not above leveraging this to his purposes.

Lucrezia kisses Cesare on Hoth, after she almost dies in the cold, her skin still flushed from the incredibly hot shower she just took, and he clutches her to him like she’s as ethereal as sunlight.  Her golden hair hangs around them like a curtain, in her quarters, and the red lines her nails trace over his shoulders and chest sting bright and clean, and Cesare thinks that he has never loved someone like he loves this woman.

Cesare kisses Micheletto in an asteroid field, during an argument, and again on Cloud City, where an old acquaintance turns them over to Sixtus, and it’s harsh and bloodied and hungry.  They fuck in dark corners, still half-dressed and breathless, and Micheletto swears allegiance like he’s praying to a god, like Cesare is a force of nature, like Cesare is the Force.  Cesare leaves bruises shaped like finger-lengths and the curve of his lips, and they’re still there when Micheletto is frozen in carbonite by Darth Sixtus.

Lucrezia spends all of thirty seconds training with a withered old Jedi named Orsini before she rushes away again, not even pausing at his warnings as she takes flight for Cloud City.  When she arrives, there are terrible revelations about her family—Darth Sixtus, once Rodrigo Borgia, a power-hungry general from the Clone Wars.  On the Condottiere, she cries into Cesare’s shoulder, her severed hand aching, and he kisses her tears away, her sunlight curls spilling over them both.

Cesare saves Micheletto.  He does not care to be asked why he takes such a risk for a man he professes to be a simple instrument.

Lucrezia, with a new silver hand like a piece of art, discovers that there is another Borgia—there was a third, an elder brother gone missing as a small child, before the Death Star was destroyed, but the young general died with his weapon and now there is only one.  Her twin brother, Cesare Borgia, Prince of ex-Alderaan.

Cesare does not care.