Another cracky humor fic, this one written for a pic prompt on Tumblr. Many huge thanks to romibsauce for giving so much to our fandom!
Rated: T for suggestive humor?
Pairing: attempted Riario/Leo
Warnings: Crack and bad humor. Make sure you check out the original post for the glorious photos that inspired this nonsense. But I can't link it here on FFN because they suck.
Riario was running out of ideas, and he was growing more desperate by the day. He was known as the papal attack dog, the captain-general of the church, he ruled men and entire cities with the wave of his hand.
So why couldn't he attract the attention of the one person he wanted—the only individual in all of Italy who confounded and amazed him? Whilst leaving him shaking with rage and possibly some other unnamed emotion he was not keen to define.
He had tried blackmail, torture, threats and stalking.
And it had gotten him nowhere. He couldn't even properly explain his fascination with the hedonist artista, but Riario wanted his attention. He would do anything to get it.
He had nothing left to try but a blatant frontal attack that would demonstrate his strength.
So he waited until da Vinci was undressing one night, was shirtless and sweaty, probably at his most vulnerable, and he attacked.
"What the fuck was that for?!" Leo yelled after Riario broke in and slapped him. "What are you doing? And why are you not wearing a shirt? Or trousers?"
Riario had no good answer, so he undertook a strategic advancement to the rear and returned to Rome empty-handed. His bed was empty too.
Since his plan to provoke da Vinci outright had failed miserably, Riario was forced to try his last-ditch effort. He had been taught to never show weakness or capitulate to those lesser than him, but perhaps he could, indeed, catch a fly better with honey than vinegar. So he presented da Vinci with a special gift.
It had taken bribes and some more stalking to find out the artista really liked dead bodies. He either bought them from his reprobate acquaintance or found them himself. It alarmed Riario a bit just how much da Vinci seemed to like dead bodies, and he wondered if part of the reason that he couldn't attract the artista's attention was the fact that he was actually alive, but he chalked it all up to da Vinci's studies of the human body (oh, if he would only study his).
So Riario brought da Vinci a fresh corpse, rife with mystery, and waited to be invited to share in his autopsy.
He was sadly disappointed when da Vinci instead started holding a conversation with the dead man and got out a terribly large knife with a bright smile on his face. Riario backed slowly out of the room to let them have alone time.
Riario finally went to the one man who never had any trouble getting what he wanted—he asked Sixtus. True, he had picked a bad time, but it seemed as though his father was always in the bath or with naked young men or plotting war, so he cleared his throat and quietly asked if he had any suggestions for how Riario could gain the attention of da Vinci.
He didn't catch the smirk on his father's face as he told Riario that perhaps he wasn't man enough to master the artista, perhaps he had to show him his equipment to win him over.
The thought that da Vinci might think him lacking in any way was abhorrent and he remedied it as soon as possible. He was determined to show the artista that he had the biggest gun in Renaissance Italy and he certainly knew how to use it.
Leonardo would have to be impressed.
