Shift

A Revenge of the Sith AU

Disclaimer: The plot is mine, but everything else belongs to Lucas.

A/N: This is based more closely on the novel version of Revenge, than on the movie (as good as the movie was, the book was masterful).

There are theorized to be an infinite number of alternate realities, realities in which events are close, but not quite the same as those in our own reality. When something changes, or could change, in one reality, another reality is born from the shift. All it takes it one tiny change to affect the course of a galaxy.

With a shout of rage, Count Dooku gathered the Dark Side into a mighty force shove; sending his opponent, the Jedi Master Obi-wan Kenobi, hurtling across the vast expanse of Invisible Hand's General's Quarters. The Jedi's velocity increased as Dooku poured his malice behind the shove, until finally, with a sickening thud, Obi-wan smashed into the far wall.

As the young Jedi Master slid boneless to the ground, Dooku reached out with the Force and yanked part of the impacted wall down upon the still form, burying the Jedi in smashed pieces of the permacrete and metal.

Obi-wan had lost consciousness when his body collided with the wall, so he did not feel as the chunks of permacrete and twisted metal girders fell around him. He did not feel the minor (and some not quite so minor) bruises and cuts caused by the debris blossom across his body, and he most certainly was too far from consciousness to feel when the Force around him suddenly, quietly, shifted.

The shift was, at first glance, a small one. The kind of shift that happens when, say, a child decides to play with one toy, and not the other: a difference, to be sure, but not one big enough to be galaxy changing.

But this shift was only small at first.

Like a tiny pebble dropped into a calm pool, the vibrations and ripples in the Force caused by the shift spread outwards, and as they spread, they grew, expanding ever larger, until they where as a huge wave. A tsunami. A tsunami great enough that when it finally hit land it changed the land forever with its size and force. And with the Force ripple spreading, the land that was the destiny of the galaxy was to be forever altered.

But the four people at the center of the ripples felt none of this; one lay unconscious still, and the other three where too caught up in the lightsaber battle intensifying around them. If they felt the shift, they dismissed it as insignificant; the fight between Dooku and Anakin being far more important and momentous.

In their dismissal, however they where foolish, for the shift would have consequences that none would now see.

Because of the shift, all of their best-laid plans would be shaken, and the possibility was opened for a future quite different from what any of them imagined.

For when the permacrete and metal fell about the body of Obi-wan Kenobi, something happened that was not planned on, not anticipated. One of the wall's metal support struts fell not quite like it was supposed to. Rather than fall straight down to bounce off a large block of permacrete and land harmlessly off to the side of the unconscious Jedi, the strut slewed ever so slightly, only a few inches really, to the right, and so instead came crashing down directly on Obi-wan's left knee.

The strut didn't hit quite hard enough to dislocate the knee, or to break any major bones, but that didn't mean it didn't cause any damage. Because, on impact, a tiny sliver of bone splintered off deep within Obi-wan's knee.

Just one, tiny, sliver.

The effects of this shift, like the ripples in a pond, where neither felt nor noticed immediately by those nearby. When Obi-wan finally awoke, it was to find himself slung unceremoniously over his best friend's back. He did not feel any exceptional pain in his knee, did not feel any warning from the Force that something was wrong. For the duration of the fight on Invisible Hand's bridge, and in the days following their return planet side, neither Obi-wan, nor either of the other survivors of the battle in the General's Quarters, noticed that the ripples of change cause by the shift where expanding and growing.

But the ripples were growing, and they where about to hit shore with galaxy changing force.

TBC…