AN: Just a short oneshot based on The Borgias, of Lucrezia and Cesare (who I am complete trash for), based loosely in the early stages of their intimate relationship as seen on the show. This is a little different from what I normally write, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. :)
Impossible Loves
Her mother had always preached to her, long before her father, that you do not kiss and tell.
As a child the advice was hardly necessary. Lucrezia Borgia paid little mind to the boys that clambered and ran the streets outside her childhood home, and little more to the men she would later witness inside the Vatican walls once her father was named Pope of Rome. Except for one, that is.
She realized, as time passed, as suitors were presented, as her childhood became a distant memory, and marriage a political duty for her to fulfill, that there was one boy that never left the orbit of her thoughts. There was one man, always lingering in the shadows of the Vatican, always lingering in the shadow of her waking hours, and sleeping too. Cesare, her dearest brother, her fiercest protector, was never far away in body or in heart.
Lucrezia wondered, often, if God made siblings so that love would be abundant even in places you would imagine it might suffer and dwindle and die. She witnessed such things, the loss of love, the havoc it could create when confined in the cage of the heart. She had seen widows cry at the Vatican steps, drowned by their sorrows and the death of their husbands. She had seen her own mother, widowed by the church and the man who once loved her, fall into an irreparable despair.
She could not imagine such an ill fated heartbreak, so long as Cesare was near. Her brother was the center of the only universe she had ever known, a bright sun in the abyss of darkness that surrounded their existence, her constant—and sometimes only—source of joy.
In the garden of their mother's home, sitting alongside the fountain where they once played as children, away from the responsibilities of their new life inside the Vatican and the looming shadow of her pending marriage, Lucrezia would indulge herself in this singular joy.
Her hand would wind through Cesare's, and his would tangle its way into the endless locks of her golden curls, like they had done a thousand times before. These were the moments she would remember always, his smile like the sun, his eyes like stars—her entire world encompassed in the mortal body of one man.
Yet mortal as Cesare may be, God made the mistake of endowing him with both indomitable spirit and love. And though it made him impossible to love in turn, it was the very reason Lucrezia loved him so.
Impossible loves. I am very much afraid they can become an addiction.
So it became, and would be, her brother's words forever the Gospel of her life, deciding her fate before God ever could. Perhaps she had doomed herself from the beginning, vowing that there would be no greater love than his, nor her love for him. Perhaps she had doomed them both with the blasphemy of their affections, to be punished by God for their sins of indiscretion. Yet that first stolen kiss from her brother's lips, so sweet the sin, would end and start her world anew.
No, she would never kiss and tell, lest it be to tell Cesare to kiss her again.