Morning dawned on Palpatine's forty-fourth birthday. Sereine rose early from her own bed, alone, reflecting that here was one more reason she was thankful they hadn't ended it. She hurried through her morning toilette, braided her hair and tucked it into her usual working cloak, then assembled her gifts for Palpatine.
The brandy hadn't been that costly, and the speech a product of her own effort, but what was in the blue box, she would be paying for a bit longer. As soon as Sheev had revealed to her his greatest ambition, she had seen this gift in an ad and paid to have it reconfigured to match her specifications. It wasn't just the beauty of it; it was what it meant to him and between them that made it special, not to mention that once she had paid to have the jewels reset, there was nothing else like it.
And it would be very difficult to resell, which had distressed her all the time they couldn't figure out what to do with this relationship.
Now that was all over, and she carefully packed everything into her snug cloth bag and rushed out, determined to reach his office before he did.
She walked in before half his staff had even gotten there, which was also a good thing. Having people talk wouldn't be bad for his career, necessarily, but it would be suicide for hers.
She set the speech out, placed the bottle of aged brandy next to it, tied with a red ribbon, and the velvet box next to that. She snatched up a flimsy and a stylus, wrote Happy Birthday, and folded it and placed it like a placard next to the crystal decanter.
There was no need to sign it. She placed the datapad far enough from the other items that no one else would associate the three, but he would know who left them there.
How she wished she could be an insect on the wall to see him open these! But she had an early meeting with another client, one she had sorely neglected in order to work on this slavery initiative, and she had to leave.
At the door, she ran into Palpatine coming in.
"Why are you here? I was unaware we had a meeting."
"We didn't. I … left you something."
"Ah," he said. He walked to the door of his private office and nodded to her. "Come in."
Sereine followed him in smiling, her hands behind her back. Whatever she had brought him, clearly she was quite proud of it.
Sidious rather hoped it wouldn't be something insipid or overly romantic. He was in no mood to feign much with Sereine today. He spied the brandy bottle and found himself pleased. Hard to go wrong with that, depending on the brand. He lifted her little placard and said, "I see it must come yearly whether I will it or not," and gave her a rueful smirk. Nothing disturbed Lord Sidious more than being another year closer to death.
Then he lifted the decanter, admiring it. Real crystal, no doubt. He lifted the stopper and sampled the aroma. "This appears to be a very good brandy, Eder Chikia," he said, using the Naboo words for beautiful little thing. "What is it?"
She named it and gave the year. "A very good brandy, indeed," he said, replacing the stopper. "A wonderful choice, especially on the part of someone who doesn't like brandy. And what is this?"
He reached for the blue velvet box and lifted the lid. A sudden pang hit him in the chest, as if his body had some visceral recognition of the object before his mind could quite register what it was.
Sidious unpinned it, took it out of its box, and held it closer to inspect it.
She had taken the Insignia of the Supreme Chancellor and had it replicated in a pin, in diamonds and sapphires, with a sizable brilliant diamond at its center.
For once, Lord Sidious found himself speechless. He lowered himself slowly into his desk chair, studying it.
It was not an important piece; Sereine couldn't afford pieces of that caliber. In fact, even at her new asking price, he suspected she still owed quite a few payments on this one, given that she had only held premier status in the business for six months. But the detail was exquisite. He had never seen anything like it; he suspected she had had it specifically made and that it was one of a kind. The name on the box, on Coruscant, was second to none.
What an odd time for one's throat to cramp. Sidious swallowed, waiting for the strange sensation to subside, and then he looked up at her. She had her arms crossed in front of her, smiling a coy smile, with a sweet look in her velvet brown eyes.
He found that he had to whisper. "My. I don't think I have words for this."
"Happy birthday, Zoragarria," she said. Pronounced with a sort of cross between the z and the s sounds, it was the Naboo word for magnificent.
He needed to clear his throat. He opened his frock coat and beckoned her around the desk. "Come and pin it on me, my dear," he said, indicating a place on the inside of the coat. "I'm afraid it would be considered in bad taste to wear it outside."
She took it from him and bent to work the clasp. "Someday," she said.
He looked up at her. "Someday," he said. Then he stood and clasped her in a passionate kiss. Her arms snugged around his neck; her lips warmed his. Another, and another.
"I guess you like your gift," she said.
"I do," he told her, then turned to the datapad. "And what is this?"
"That's your speech, Zora," she said. "I beat my brains out over that. We're going to make your name with that speech, or we're going to die trying."
Sidious opened the pad, and scanned her beginning phrases. Clearly, at the front of the speech, she was trying for something that would prove a memorable epigraph in years to come. Then he reached the second section, and he had to sit again.
"Avyaya Shakta," slipped out of him quite without his volition, and he forgot where he was and raised his eyes reflexively to check that there wasn't a protocol droid around. Sereine would not know the ur-Kittât phrase, although she had heard it often enough in bed to have some idea of its emotional content.
Palpatine sat, staring at the desktop, reflecting that, from one perspective, Sereine's comment about the need to die trying was no stretch of the truth.
Because reading this in front of ten thousand Senators—no, in front of holocams for the evening newcasts—would be the same as disemboweling himself and examining lengths of his own intestines in front of the entire Galactic Republic. She might as well have written it in blood.
He pushed the datapad back across the desk at her. "This needs to be changed to the third person," he growled. "I won't read this."
Sereine walked the halls of the Senate Office Building on the way to lunch in the canteen with her young assistant director at her side. She had meant to work twenty-three-year-old Tomal Gilio with Palpatine more anyway, and not only was this an opportune time, but it was an important teaching moment, no matter which client it had occurred with.
"… and you'll know when it happens," she was saying, "because they'll be reading along, and all of a sudden they get this look on their face. And then they sit there, because they don't know what to say to you. And then they all do the same thing; they push the writing back at you, and they all say some version of, 'I can't say this.' Like Palpatine this morning. His voice got all low and vocal fry, and he went, 'I won't read this.' And he shoved it back across the desk at me."
"What do you do then?" said Tomal.
"It depends on the client and the situation," said Sereine as they got in line for food. "On the Mothma campaign—this was three months ago, and you weren't with me—I had to think fast, because I had made a terrible mistake and put it in front of her an hour before she was supposed to give the speech! I had no idea she had been—" Sereine stopped and dropped to a whisper. "I had no idea she had been sexually assaulted."
She raised her voice to conversational level. "The salad, please," she ordered, and then, "I mean, one would hope the client would say something, if she knows she has an engagement at that sort of clinic, but sometimes they don't and it blindsides you. I mean, she was due on stage in an hour, and she's crying in front of me. Apologizing and telling me it was just too close to home."
"Dios," said Tomal. "What did you do?"
"I just sat there with her and waited for her to stop. What else was I going to do? And she did; they're politicians, they get control of themselves pretty quickly. And I said, 'Do you want me to rewrite it? We can do something substantial here in half an hour,' and she was very brave. She said, 'No, it's good, I really do want to give this, just give me a moment with it.'
"And right there on the transport to the venue, she starts pacing back and forth and rereading it to herself. And I said, 'Are you sure you've got it?' because much less than twenty minutes, and you don't have time to do a damned thing with it. They all pick up on that well. If you ask them if they've 'got it,' if they say yes, you won't see any problems. And she went on stage, and I think that speech was the most effective she's given in her career. Her eyes were red when she was done, and I don't think there was a dry eye in the audience, but she got through it and she did a stellar job. And when she comes in to do her narration tomorrow, you know why I gave her the sex trafficking portion, because I know she'll do it from the heart."
She raised a finger at him. "And I know I don't need to tell you, this conversation stays below the line."
Tomal picked up a sandwich and a bag of crisps at the end door. Sereine paid. They stopped for their drinks and Tomal found them a couple of seats without too many people around.
They sat. "This just goes to show you," said Sereine, "that you never know what people's experiences are, or what's going to rattle people. So you try like heck, if there's anything that might be sensitive in a speech at all, to show it to them in plenty of time for revision."
She stabbed up a forkful of salad. "It's hard on a campaign tour. I let myself get behind, and that whole surprise with Mon Ane was my fault. Here, we don't even have dates assigned for this yet. I have plenty of time to address the situation, and it's a good thing, because, well … it is Palpatine."
Tomal unwrapped his sandwich. "He's not going to cry about anything. He's going to get surly and pitch a fit."
"Yes, he will."
Tomal pushed his mop of dark hair out of his brown eyes and took a bite of his sandwich. "What do you think is going on with him?"
Sereine sat, considering. The change in Sheev's face, the look in his eyes …
"I think something very bad happened to Palpatine. I have no idea what. I know he has nightmares … and you won't necessarily know that about a client, obviously, unless their family tells you. But whatever happened to Palpatine … it was very, very bad." She put her fork in her mouth and chewed, ruminating.
"What are you going to do?" said Tomal.
Sereine sighed. "I don't know. You have to weigh what you stand to draw out of them with whether you're going to keep the account next year." She swallowed and put her fork down. "I think if Palpatine will actually do it as written, we're going to get something very special out of him. But I can't push him into doing it. And yet I have to start working him with it, and if I give him something rewritten, that's what he's going to use. There won't be any arguing with him then."
She speared another bite of salad, chewed, and swallowed before she spoke again. "I think I'm just going to let him sit with it. I can't ask him what it's about. He won't tell me what the nightmares are, and you know I'm right there with him. If I don't give him anything else, he'll know what I want, and he knows why I want it. I don't want to push him any harder than that."