Star Wars AU work in progress: Becoming Love: I, In You: The Rise of the Clone Wars

[polgarawolf]

Second Half of the Seventh Chapter of a SW AU work in progress (broken into two posts because of the LJ’s troublesome word/character lengths)
Series Title: Becoming Love: I, In You
*Story Title: The Rise of the Clone Wars
*Tentative/working title only - subject to change, as I’m not sure I like it!
Pairing: Mainly Dormékin with some background

Comments

[polgarawolf]

Hehehe, yeah, I had fun writing the scene with Artoo and Anakin and a very sleepy Dormé. That little droid tends to have a better handle on what's going on than his humans do, so I figured he would've figured out that Dormé's the one for Anakin way before Anakin did.

Yeah, this is kind of maybe spoilerish, for those who haven't read the story I wrote about Dormé's mother for my You Became to Me AU series (a lot of which holds true for this Dormé's mother, too), but Dormé is extremely uncomfortable talking about her past. She's basically deflecting him (or trying to deflect him), by shifting the conversation there more towards Milady and/or politics in general.

See, Dormé's family wasn't exactly very loving or accepting towards her, mostly due to the fact that her mother was raped by an old childhood friend soon after marrying someone else and, when she later turned up pregnant (with Dormé), she refused to have the baby's DNA tested to see who the father was. Dormé never really fit in, and she was neglected by her parents and essentially tormented by her two eldest siblings for the first thirteen years of her life. She didn't quite run away from home to become a handmaiden, but she didn't exactly get a lot of encouragement over her decision to train as a handmaiden, either, and she hasn't really had any contact with anyone in her family (aside from a few brief meetings with her youngest brother, in the aftermath of the occupation of Naboo by the Trade Federation, one formal occasion in which her whole family showed up at court to honor her youngest brother's involvement in the resistence movement that sprang up during the occupation, and a few mostly awkward meetings with her baby sister, who became a handmaiden for Ellie, the then Princess of Theed, not too long after Naboo was won back from the Trade Federation) since she became a handmaiden, so . . . *Shrugs*

Anakin knows most of this (or at least the gist of most of it) and he doesn't have a very high opinion her family, which is part of the reason why he periodically tries to get her to talk more about it. It bothers him a lot that she's not more angry about it all, that she's so accepting of how bad her childhood was. Dormé has some serious self-esteem issues because of her childhood (her sense of self worth tends to be abysmally low) and that's something that's going to be surfacing again and again in this story, especially once they get to Varykino.

Oh, and by the way, that story I wrote about Dormé's mom can be found over at http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/115298.html and http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/114957.html if you're interested. You could probably read down to about . . . oh, maybe 60ish or so, out of the 75 numbered moments, without having to worry about anything holding true for that AU verse and not this one.