Chapter 5: Dorme

Dormé smiled as little Katé skipped along beside her as they headed towards Sab's Lakeside Retreat house. While she herself had never truly been there before, she had been to Padm's nearby one and had a decent idea of where the place was. The door opened as Dormé started up the path and Sabé came out.

"Aunt Sabé!" Katé yanked her hand free from Dorm's grip and ran to Sabé.

The woman bent down and there girl ran into her open arms. "So did you have a good time on Alderaan?"

"Yeah! I got to meet Aunt Padmé! She looks a ton like you! Are you twins?"

Sabé laughed at her talkative niece. "No, she's just my really good friend who's like my sister, Kay-Kay."

Dormé smiled faintly as she came up the path herself in a timelier manner. Sabé looked up as she came.

"Dormé! It's wonderful to see you again. How have things been for you and Padmé?"

"It's nice to see you again too, Sabé. And Milady's been doing alright I suppose, as well as you can do adding in what's happened to her,"

Sabé nodded and gestured towards the house. "Well, let's get you settled and we can talk about this later."

Dormé nodded and followed the slightly younger woman inside.

"Kavin, Gars! Dormé here and she brought Kay-Kay back with her too!" Sabé said loudly as she walked into the kitchen.

Dormé smiled in greeting to the two men sitting at a table in the kitchen and they nodded in return.

"Nice to see you again, Dormé," Gars said. "Did my wife-" he left his sentence hanging.

Dormé smiled again and reached into her pocket, pulling out two datacards. One she tossed to Gars and the other she passed to Sabé. "Rabé and Padmé recorded messages for you two."

Gars nodded as he caught his message from Rabé and discreetly left the room to watch it. Sabé nodded as well as she took hers from Padmé and put it in her pocket.

"I'll watch it later," Sabé said simply.

Dormé nodded and took a seat even as Sabé did. At a glance from his wife, Kavin Hirota stood up, muttered some excuse about checking on Kellé and left hurriedly, taking Katé along with him.

"What do you have on Vader's search so far?" Dormé asked her fellow handmaiden.

Sabé took a long swig of caf before shrugging slightly, her face next to expressionless. "Not much. Eirtaé and Saché managed to send me occasional reports that consist of what information they know about once every month or five months," she frowned slightly, "I haven't heard from Saché in several months though, I'm a bit worried about her. She normally reports in every six weeks on the dot."

Dorm's own expression became a frown. "Don't you have some way or method to contact her?"

"Not one that I can be sure will go through to her. We have a system that I check every so often. It's a comm number on a far out planet, Kamino I think. We can leave messages for each other there."

"What about Eirtaé?"

"She sends communications through CorSec transmissions to the government here, coded of course."

Dormé opened her mouth to ask another question before closing it abruptly with a slightly sheepish smile on her face. "Sorry, you're supposed to be in charge. I just get very concerned over Milady's safety."

Sabé shook her head, dismissing Dorm's apology. "It's fine Dormé. It's good to know that someone's taking care of Padmé. You're giving up a lot for her and all of us so we can be with our families."

Dormé felt a slight flush come to her face before it disappeared a moment later behind her blank handmaiden mask. "Yané gives up just as much as I do, if not more. She's on that horrible desert world of Tatooine; I've at least got Alderaan to live on and Milady to talk to."

Sabé nodded and looked as if she were about to say something but had thought better of it. They sat there silently for a few minutes, the quiet only being punctured occasionally by Kat's laugh at some game or other that Gars was playing with her. Finally, Dormé decided to break the quiet.

"How have Jan and little Elsié been?" she asked. Jan Vorsay had been the husband of Versé Vorsay, Dorm's fellow handmaiden who had been killed, along with Cordé in an explosion meant for the Senator Amidala. Elsié, Vers's daughter, had been one at the time and therefore had never known her mother. Jan had become severely depressed at his wife's death and so the other handmaidens had taken it upon themselves to care for their fallen sister's family.

Sabé seemed to take a moment to think before replying. "Elsi's fine, a typical seven year old; happy, cheerful, energetic. Han, well he's still the same as he was four years ago. But I don't think-"

"That we should be talking about it right now, we should be talking about Milady," Dormé finished for her.

"Exactly." Sabé said nodding. "Let me brief you on what Rabé and myself have been doing here on Naboo then."

Dormé nodded and sat back to listen to the senior handmaiden's tale.

"You know all the basics I'm sure, so I won't bore you with them. Vader's still got that bounty on Padm's head and we get more than our fair share of bounty hunters here. When we do get word of an attack, I become Padmé and Rabé treats me as so." She frowned slightly. "We did run into trouble a year ago though when I was pregnant with Kellé, but we managed to bluff our way through those last five months. Through Eirtaé and Saché, we managed to set enough false leads on worlds such as Kuat, Corellia, Corus- Imperial Center, Thyferra, and so on to keep Padm's searchers running around like reeks with their heads cut off. Although I doubt that we could fool Darth Vader or the Emperor, I think that Rabé and I should be more than able to fool anyone the Empire can send against us. Luckily, the new Queen is sympathetic to our cause and so she turns a blind to us, much like the rest of Naboo. There is no love for the Empire here, not since we managed to 'accidentally' leak the fact to the planet that Vader is trying to kill Amidala."

Dormé nodded and let a smile peak through her handmaiden mask. "Oh so that did work after all. That was a good idea of Sach's."

Sabé nodded as well. "Yes, I think she's got a very good grip on how the public's minds will react to something and she doesn't let it interfere with how she actually thinks."

Silence reigned again for another few minutes, Dormé absorbing, processing, and filing away the information she'd just received from Sabé away in her brain and Sabé herself played with the datacard which held Padm's message. After a few more minutes, Sabé rose to her feet.

"I'm going to go watch this then," she said calmly, "If you need anything, just ask Kavin or Gars."

"Alright," Dormé replied, "But I think that I'll just look over that information you've got. It never hurts to be prepared."

Getting a general direction towards what Sabé jokingly referred to as her "jail cell of information," Dormé came to a halt in front of the only door in the house, or what she'd seen so far of it, to have a keypad lock. Glancing down at the scrap of paper she held, she punched in the five digit code and waiting a moment before the door hissed open.

Taking one last glance around, she stepped inside and almost at once, became absorbed in the surplus of information that was stored there and did not emerge for several hours, staying well past midnight.