lathori asked: I hate you so much. As per our conversation, you absolute heathen: Borgias Star Wars AU Cesare as Leia Lucrezia as Luke Micheletto as Han Fucking go. I hate you so much.
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.
