Chapter Text
"You're back?"
"You're alive."
A smug, raspy voice cut through the open air, sliding smoothly along the ancient stones of Vatican City.
Leonardo stood before him - before the man who had willingly returned to the claws of the beast and begged for forgiveness; the man who had been tested by fate and still chosen to come back to his beginnings. Before the man who had shown him the rawest depths of both their existences, and somehow decided that none of it was worth remembering.
"I'm not sure which of us is the worst for wear." The words spilled from his mouth before he could stop them. He had unconsciously wanted to match the cockiness he was being met with. It was wrong - seeing Riario standing tall beneath those stone walls of accumulated lies. Seeing him again wrapped in false dignity and deliberate hypocrisy, draped in the cloth of so-called religion. The Count was back.
"That would be you," Girolamo spoke again. His voice slid gentle as a blade wrapped in the finest silk, though Leonardo could have sworn he heard something close to sincerity beneath it - as close to warmth as the Count was capable of mustering. "I was spared the horrors of Otranto."
Da Vinci held his gaze directly. He could have sworn he saw something shift in Riario's eyes. Was it really-?
"Nice thing, too."
Leonardo turned, dragged out of the trance. He cast Zoroaster a long, measured look.
"Would have messed up your fine little outfit there." And just like that, they were back. The New World might have cast its spell on lesser men, but the particular hatred between these two ran far deeper than any ocean crossing. Leo had not expected otherwise - he hadn't expected Zo to suddenly deify the Count - but this was not the moment for their familiar, barbed exchange.
Their purpose here was clear. Whether Zoroaster wanted it or not, they had no choice but to reach out to every available source. Even if that source happened to be the damned Vatican treasury.
"We need them."
"No," Zo cut him off. "You need them. Nothing to do with me.”
Leonardo did not answer immediately. He let the silence settle the way it does after a blow - not the silence of emptiness, but the kind that has substance, that finds the spaces between the bones and rests there.
He had not expected gratitude. He had not even expected agreement. But there was something particular in being refused by the man who had stood beside you in the dark - who had seen the full measure of what you were and what you were not, who had held ground with you when the ground itself was on fire - and who now was looking at you with something very close to betrayal and resentment, as though the matter belonged to someone else entirely. As though the events of Otranto were a dream they had each dreamed separately and need not speak of again.
Zoroaster had not moved. He remained in a saddle with his jaw set and his eyes still fixed on Leo - the precise posture of a man who has made his decision and intends to be a wall about it.
Leonardo looked at him for a long moment. Long enough to memorise it. The stubbornness of the silhouette. The familiar, immovable line of the mouth he had seen curse and laugh and go quiet in the worst of places. He had crossed seas with this man. He had bled beside him.
He did not say any of what he was thinking.
"You should go," he said instead.
There was nothing sharp in it. No accusation, no appeal. Just the words, set down gently, like something he was no longer willing to carry.
He turned toward the gates.
The stone arch rose above him - vast, indifferent, built in the particular way of things designed to make men feel small and grateful for it. The afternoon light came in at a low angle and gilded the facade into something almost forgiving. Leonardo walked at an even pace, unhurried, the way a man walks when he has already decided and grief has not yet caught up with the decision.
He did not look back.
Instead, he glanced briefly at Girolamo, nearly as if trying to find something. Reassurance maybe. Some reaffirmation that he was making the right choice.
Riario stood at the edge of the entrance, positioned with the casual precision of a man who arranges coincidences and calls them fate. Still. Composed. Gaze set on Zoroaster. Wearing that particular expression of his - the one that sat across his features like the last note of a song you cannot place, familiar and distant at once. That long-rehearsed amusement, sharp at the edges and unreadable at the centre.
Leonardo passed him close enough that the silence between them had texture.
He said nothing.
But in that narrow corridor of shared air - that brief, involuntary intimacy of proximity - something moved between them that had no name and asked for none. Not warmth. Not its opposite. Something older than either. The recognition that passes between two people who have seen the worst of one another and survived it, and now find themselves, absurdly, inevitably, standing on the same side of the same locked door.
The Count did not move.
Leonardo da Vinci walked through the gates of the Vatican, and the stone closed the light behind him like a sentence ending.