Title: With a Stolen Blade
Fandom: Borgias (Showtime)/MCU
Rating: Teen
Length: 431 words
Content notes: A villain dies on-screen, as it were, but it's a death that happened in canon
Author notes: Part of my Secrets In Crimson AU, wherein Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, and Ascanio Sforza, are immortal (among other things, but this is the relavent aspect of the AU)

Summary: Choosing to court Cesare Borgia was more a mistake than Pierce had thought when he got the courier back in a box. He should have realized it would be fatal sooner.

The short sword is a gift, steel alloyed with something he can't figure out, and which the courier who'd brought the gift could not tell him. A courting gift, of some sort, to entice him to the side of whoever has sent it. A gift that has Lucrezia shaking her head, and Ascanio reaching for a rosary he hasn't used in earnest for centuries.

Cesare keeps it, though. Sends the courier back in a box once he's coaxed an address out of him that would take the shipment. It's a fine sword, after all, and he won't throw away something useful, even if he does reject everything else that comes with it.

Two years later, he has to abandon one life for another when someone - likely, he thinks, the one who gifted him the sword - sends an assassin after him. A good one, one he'd have preferred to recruit if he could have convinced him it was a good idea. He hasn't had a good assassin in his employ since Micheletto had left him.

Fourty years after that, he is grinning at the man in charge of the organization that had sent him the blade, the sword in one hand, and a gun in the other.

"Your first mistake was courting me with a stolen blade." He lifts the sword, bloodied from the bodyguards who'd thought they'd be able to take him on in close combat. "Your last was threatening my sister."

"I never threatened your sister." Alexander Pierce is watching him with amused unconcern. "I merely made an offer to you and your little family to join us. To be allies in achieving both our ambitions."

Cesare fires three shots before stalking closer, looking down at the man starting to choke on his own blood. "Your ambitions. I will rule the world on my terms, not yours." The last bullet goes into Pierce's skull.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you saying you were going to rule the world, Borgia." Fury is watching from the podium where he and Romanov had spilled the secrets of SHIELD and Hydra alike to the world. Cesare knows some of those will effect Lucrezia and Ascanio and even himself, but they're not ones he needs to keep now.

"Do what you want, Fury." Cesare doesn't care how long it takes to draw the world together under his rule, and if he needs to wait until Fury is dead to do so, he can wait another half a century. It's not like he hasn't the time. "I have all the time in the world."