Prompt #16: What moment from your life do you wish you could re-live again? Character: Cesare Borgia Fandom: Cantarella/history Prompt: #16 – What moment from your life do you wish you could re-live again? Rating: PG *****
I cry you mercy; allow me not one, but two moments? They would depend on what version of my tale your prefer.
The first is a little more fanciful. Any maybe it's not so much a single moment I'd want to relive but a succession of ill-fated moments I'd want to undo.
Can you guess? It would be the moment, the half hour maybe, when I was too late in letting Michelotto go. I never solved those bands that bound us. My father held the silver and gold keys of the pontiff - the silver key to bind and loose on Earth, and the gold to bind and loose in Heaven - but when it was in my power to loosen... I chose not to.
He could have gone anywhere. Not Rome, of course; never Rome, and certainly not within a hair's breadth of Lucrezia. But other than that... I would have given him the world to roam. It would have been within my power, and yet I failed. So that when he fled, not once, but twice, it as good as killed me. Therefore, you see, I do not wish to relive, but to unwind the clocks and wind them up a different way.
As for the second, the real moment... That would be when I rid myself of the cardinal's purple. What a glorious instance that was - an unbinding and loosening all of its own, something you'll never be able to understand in its momentousness. It meant I was free, for the very first time, and my own man.
May I have a third? I'm known to be greedy. A stolen kiss in the garden. It might need a little cosmetic art, some of the almond paste and red the ladies are so fond of to make it presentable, and maybe it could taste a little less of drink and desperation this time? Thank you. That would be nice.