Another drabble. Kinda cheesy but I think it's okay.

Caterina's POV

Caterina fidgets under the eyes of Maria. She was the mother of the four Auditore children, the damn matriarch of the house, and she definitely gave off a strong impression. Of all the visits she'd made to the Palazzo Auditore, the times she sat in their fine garden or sat under the shade of the loggia or lazed on the sofas in the drawing room, she never made any contact with Maria. Maria made no advances to speak to her, but since her first visit, when she was eleven, she felt eyes following her, the all-knowing glance of this woman who could read anyone like an open book, for some reason.

And now, Caterina feels under threat, comfortable, frightened and assured, all at once. Maria's gaze is unnerving and possibly unblinking, due to the fact she blinked only twice in the millennia she's been sizing Caterina up. She feels so shabby, like she's terribly underdressed, which she is. She darned her breeches, sewing a patch onto a small rip because she didn't want to throw it away, not yet, not when it was still cold and they were her thickest pair. Her cap lies beside her, as well as her scarf, stacked on one another. Her vest and shirt might as well have been a dirty toga. Everything about her felt so inferior to Maria.

There were traces of her youthful beauty lingering around her mouth and eyes. Her skin was a light color, like the coffee served with too much sugar and too much cream at the cafes scattered around the city, dark yet light. Her eyes are so much like Federico and Ezio's, a shining amber, smoky and enthralling all at once. She's tall, as tall as Caterina, just a head and a half shorter than her sons and her husband. But the upturn of her lips, the welcoming way she sits contradicts the analytical look in her eyes and the set of her hands, sitting stiffly atop each other.

"Do I offend you, Madonna?" Caterina finally asks shyly. She offers an apologetic smile. "I apologize, if I do. We haven't spoken before, and I'm a bit shy... awkward, I suppose. I know my breeches are horribly unfitting for a young woman..."

Maria smiles wider, letting out a soft chuckle. The girl still fidgets, sighing with some relief at the reassuring sound of the woman's laugh, but she still feels as though Maria was absolutely disgusted with her. Maria had maternal instinct; she knew that she and Federico had been together for a long while, if their soft shushes and muted groans of pleasure in his bedroom wasn't enough of a dead giveaway to the entire family.

"Do you love my son?" she asks now, blatant and forward. Her smile slips from her face, replaced with an expression of concentration, like she was trying to see through the flesh of Caterina's face, through her skull, to see what was happening in her kind. "No, that is an idiotic question. Of course you do. But yours is truer than that of the girls he leaves heartbroken and naked in their beds. No, this is what I meant to ask, I apologize. WHY do you love my son?"

Caterina has no answer. She's taken aback, nearly offended. What kind of a question was that? Why did she love Federico? She parts her lips, preparing an answer, but she finds none. Her face falls, and she furrows her brows, scratching her head in a frustrated curiosity. Why DID she love him? There were many reasons, but they all flew around one another, indistinct and jumbled up. She couldn't just pinpoint one.

"Because..." she begins. She licks her lips, eyes lifting from the rug, narrowing. "I'm not very sure. I just do."
Caterina is surprised to see the woman's lips flick up into a soft smile again, a knowing filling her eyes. She has no idea what she's supposed to say, what Maria was going to say. But she feels honest. She feels open. Like she understood all of a sudden. But it isn't a topic for discussion any longer, as Federico enters the drawing room, winded and flushed from his relaying of letters to his father's associates and contacts.

"Off I go, then," Maria says with a sigh, rising from the sofa and shuffling out of the room. "Have your own fun."
Caterina blushes and Federico flushes even deeper, looking like a little boy with his hands down his pants and a crude drawing of a naked woman in his sweaty palms. He looks towards Caterina, dark eyes apologetic, and shrugs.

She just loved him because she did, she realizes, with more clarity, as she pinpoints the little freckle on his jaw, the scar on his left hand from the time he cut himself with a knife meant to open letters, and the boyish grin that made her breath slip from her lungs, the right side of his mouth always lifting a bit higher than the right. She just loved him because she did.

Federico's POV

"Do you love her, or something?"
Federico looks towards his little brother, dangling his legs from the rooftop of the tower they were precariously perched on. Below them, the people of Firenze, citizens they bumped into when they were running through the streets, courtesans Federico had fucked, the doctors they went to for creams to disinfect the scrapes they sustained from trips and falls with the thieves. It made both of them feel like they were apart of something bigger, like they were above all of this. And, of course, there was the thrill of sitting so high up.
"Mama?" Federico responds with a cock of his brow. "Of course I love Mama. Claudia? She can be annoying but she's our sister. Who are you talking about?"
But they both knew who he was talking about. Ezio, fourteen years old and already more honest about these matters than his seventeen-year-old older brother, makes a face at Federico. Caterina. He was talking about Caterina, who was sitting on a rooftop a few houses away, leaning against the chimney and listening to the perverted comments Alfonso and Franco made about the girls they'd fucked in the brothels over the years. Her hair was pulled into a loose bun, with stray tendrils falling here and there in long, loose curls, dark in contrast to the creamy white of her flesh. Her white skin seemed to glow against the dark night. Nobody could believe she was from Sicily, if it wasn't for the differences in their dialects and her temper.
"Her, Federico," Ezio says, softer now. "Do you love her?"
Federico scratches his brow, looking at the girl, all the way over there, oblivious to the eyes on her. Her legs are crossed. She gives shouts that were inaudible to him, shoving Franco away from her with laughter as he immaturely stuck his tongue out at her and shrugged his shoulders. Her smile slips from her face, and her eyes begin to rove, finally finding the brothers on the tower. They were both so tiny to one another, but she was looking right at him, and he right at her.
"Si," he nods, without knowing it, as she jerks away from his gaze. "Si."
He hears the chuckling of his younger brother, which broke into laughter that echoed, laughter that would have given their position away to the guards that gave them multiple warnings for their rooftop antics. He laughs until the people below them begin to look up and think an angel was laughing down at them. He laughs until he can't breathe. Federico frowns, clapping a hand over Ezio's mouth, and the boy stills so suddenly, it was frightening.
"You're a lovesick teenage boy," Ezio says with a teasing lilt, flicking the older boy's ear. "But do you think she loves you, Federico?"
To that, he receives no reply.