Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars
A Shift in the Force: Chapter Fourteen: Return to Coruscant
AN: To new followers, welcome! And to the person who said I made them ship Sobiwan, I'm really flattered, especially since this fic has barely begun.
On a side note, we've hit 50 reviews, so thanks for the love!
A special thank you to Windschatten for your review, it made me smile.
As always, enjoy the chapter!
"Is Talik going to be okay?" was the first thing out of Anakin's mouth once they entered Hyperspace once more to continue their journey to Coruscant.
Sabé flicked on the autopilot with a finger, frowning lightly. "She should be," Sabé said, "both of them should be."
Her eyes, which were usually bright, were dark and Anakin could see at least a dozen emotions swirling within their depths. He'd watched her and Obi-Wan paste the other Jedi and Talik with bacta patches before they'd taken off. Garen was far worse off, but there was nothing on the ship to help with his blood loss.
Sabé and Obi-Wan had done what they could with the supplies that were available, but both would have to spend some time in a bacta tank in order to recover completely.
Her eyes fluttered closed and she released the emotions roiling inside her to the Force.
There is no emotion, there is peace, she thought, exhaling a breath and opening her eyes again.
"The Jedi Temple is setting aside two bacta tanks for Talik and Garen," she said before giving the boy a small smile, "I believe Talik will have no scars from her encounter." Though it was likely that Garen might have a few, given the deepness of his wounds.
Anakin nodded, the tension leaving his shoulders, and Sabé relaxed in the pilot's seat.
"Is Obi-Wan getting some rest?" she asked, turning in the seat to spread her awareness outwards, blanketing the ship as she sought him out.
"He said he was," Anakin said, though there was a dubious expression on his face that said he didn't quite believe his new master.
Sabé sighed. "It seems he's meditating." Sabé meditated as much as she could, yes, it was something she was particularly preferable to, especially when she was younger.
"Is that bad?" Anakin asked.
"Not necessarily," Sabé conceded, "but Obi-Wan is…he never liked meditation as much as, well, me."
But he had been doing a good bit of meditation lately. Sabé frowned; perhaps it had been brought on by Qui-Gon's death? It had only been a few days since the Knight's passing, and though sometimes it seemed as though he was unaffected, Sabé knew better.
"What's the Temple like?" Anakin asked, eyes bright with an interest that clearly could not be sated and Sabé –who could tell something was a distraction when she saw it– spared him a small smile.
"In what way?" she inquired.
"What was it like for you?" Anakin reiterated, his lips pulling nearly into a pout as he looked to her. "Growing up at the Jedi Temple?"
"It was…difficult," Sabé admitted, her thoughts clouding over her eyes. "Some days I felt like I was drowning."
"Really?" Anakin's eyes were wide as he listened. The way Obi-Wan had described the Temple, however briefly, to Anakin, it had always been with a note of fondness in his voice; clearly he enjoyed being there. "Why?"
"The Force complicated things for me," Sabé said, pulling out the rose-shaped bead that her sister had given her, pulling a braid around to undo it about a quarter of the way, spinning the bead into her hair before plaiting it once more. "I was very in tune to it…like it cloaked my person constantly…my dreams were intense. I sometimes felt like the Force was screaming at me."
She raised a hand to her temple, smoothing her fingers over it in a soothing circle, an action she had done almost constantly in her youth. Some of her fellow Initiates had thought it a nervous tick that showed when she was attempting to use the Force during class; it was almost amusing how wrong they were.
"All I wanted was quiet," Sabé sighed, "so, for a time, I cut myself completely off from the Force."
"You can do that?" Anakin goggled at her. He had never felt what she was describing, something akin to drowning, he had always found the Force as comforting as a blanket, if he had noticed it at all.
"It's not something I would recommend," Sabé replied dryly, her eyes looking out of the reinforced glass, but focusing on nothing in particular.
"You're still pale," Aayla Secura told her best friend in accented Basic. "Maybe you should see a med droid."
Sabé blew a raspberry, sighing and grimacing at the pain of blocking her connection to the Force. The slow throb was increasing as the minutes dragged on and she soon found herself whimpering softly.
Aayla's face appeared as a blue blur above her. "I'm getting Master Yoda; Kit stay with her."
A cool hand replaced hers, and a green blob took its place above her.
"Does it hurt?" he asked. He didn't really need to, since her skin was so white it was almost grey, sweat drenching her skin, and tears leaking from her eyes. It was a very bad attempt to distract her they would both admit later.
Sabé inhaled sharply, her grip on his hand strengthening. "Like you wouldn't believe," Sabé said through clenched teeth as she pressed her head further into her pillow, her free hand fisting the sheet beneath her.
She cried out in pain suddenly, her body curling inward as a spasm of pain rocked through her.
"Don't worry," Kit said, his voice filled with worry, "Master Yoda'll be here soon."
"Wonderful," she muttered, only jumping slightly as a claw-like hand pressed against her arm.
"Let go, you must, Initiate Amidala, or death you will surely feel," Yoda spoke kindly to the child.
Several different complex emotions clouded her irises. "It will destroy me, Master," she whispered. "Please don't ask me."
"Leads to the Dark Side, fear does," Yoda told her almost soothingly. "Seek to offer guidance, visions do, but only for those that listen."
Sabé's eyes slid shut and her carefully constructed mental wall broke. Behind her eyelids a multitude of images flashed, both the good and the bad; a girl who looked much like her with double-bladed red 'sabers, a young man with blue eyes and blonde hair laughing with an older Obi-Wan, Aayla becoming a member of the Jedi Council, Kit becoming a padawan...a pair of Sith-yellow eyes, a man in a hood cutting down younglings, Aayla taking a blaster shot to the chest, Kit being taken down by a red lightsaber. The emotions were overwhelming; pain, sorrow, love, hate, disgust, panic, fear, shame, happiness. And she took it all in, the Will of the Force, all that could come to pass, all that could be changed in a single instant…what could be. And she did not awaken for many days, and when she did, she would find a new braid in her hair, much smaller than her other ones, the braid of a padawan.
"Chosen I have," Yoda told her as she slumbered, unaware of his presence, "my apprentice, you shall be."
"It nearly killed me," she said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. "My friend Aayla would say that the Force considered me too important so it beat against my shields until I broke them down…that the Force demanded my attention."
"But you don't?"
Sabé shrugged her shoulders. "I am no more important than the next Jedi. I could never imagine myself to be greater than my fellows."
And it was those words, perhaps more than several lessons that Obi-Wan tried to instill in his Padawan over the years, that Anakin would remember most clearly.
Sabé was back in the medical bay, replacing bacta patches when Obi-Wan left his meditation to meander to the same area.
"How are they?" he asked quietly, so as not to startle Sabé, but he needn't have bothered; she had sensed him long before he had spoken.
Her hand hovered over her Padawan's injured face, her eyes closed and her brow creased as she focused.
Force-healing had never been a specialty of hers and she preferred to leave healing to the professionals, which was to say the Jedi Healers. But, at least, she knew how to help the healing process a little, and she'd spent more energy on attempting to heal Garen's wounds than her own Padawan's.
"They're lucky," she spoke decisively as Obi-Wan came closer to check on his childhood friend, attempting to heal him in his own way, but he was about as good as Sabé, which was to say not very good. "If we had arrived an hour or two later its possible Garen would have been dead."
When she drew back her hand from her apprentice's forehead she was shaking, not from restrained emotion, but from the strain of force-healing.
"You're going to exhaust yourself," he couldn't help but remark.
She turned to give him a smile. "Well, what else am I supposed to do? The Falcon won't be coming out of Hyperspace for a few more hours."
Anakin had gone off to catch a few hours of sleep, and Sabé couldn't really blame him; Hyperspace could be incredibly boring.
"Madam Jocasta Nu sent us a bit of information on Hoth," Sabé added, pulling out the spare datapad she had found in the commons area that she had loaded the information onto, handing it to Obi-Wan who accepted it with interest.
Jocasta Nu was an older Jedi –Madam was the preferred title for Jedi as opposed to Master– who was the chief librarian of the Jedi Archives. Sabé had seen a great deal of her when she was younger, as she'd spent a good deal of her time in the Jedi Archives. The older woman had once joked that Sabé would take her job from her.
"It seems the creatures that attacked Talik and Garen are called Wampas," Sabé continued as Obi-Wan's expression became a grimace as he read the information concerning the creatures that had delighted ripping into their fellows.
"Why couldn't an ice planet have less carnivorous creatures on it?" he sighed, and Sabé shrugged in reply, her eyes focusing on her Padawan's face. Obi-Wan could see Talik's eyes moving feverishly behind her shut eye lids.
Sabé squeezed the Twi'lek's hand with her own before turning back towards Obi-Wan. "Was there anything else you needed?"
He was struck by how tired she looked and his tongue was thick in his mouth as he tried to put the question into words that would leave his mouth. He didn't honestly know why he wanted to know the answer, it didn't really matter, Qui-Gon was already dead.
But…
And Sabé stared at him impassively, waiting for him to open his mouth.
"Did you dislike Qui-Gon?"
She had always been a bit stiff towards his master, referring to him as either 'Obi-Wan's master' or 'Master Jinn', never anything else, at least, never anything else in his presence. And Obi-Wan had always gotten the feeling like they were magnets of the same polarity, and thus preferred to be far away from one another.
Brown eyes blinked and then Sabé's shoulders sagged as she ambled slowly past him. "I'm tired, Obi-Wan, maybe lat—"
Obi-Wan reached out, his fingers catching her artificial ones, feeling the cool plating of metal and she turned back to meet his eyes, her own wide and startled, her cheeks pink. Obi-Wan considered letting her hand go right then, but the Force was singing and he wanted to know.
"Please," he said, his eyes imploring her and after a moment of internal resistance, Sabé folded.
"I didn't necessarily dislike him," she corrected him, "but I didn't like him either." A small frown drew her lips down. "I felt he was far too reluctant to take on the Padawan that the Force wished of him. Master Yoda had to force him into a corner in order to get him to take you on…because of what happened with Xanatos."
"You blamed him for that?" Obi-Wan asked, perplexed.
But Sabé shook her head, her braids swinging. "Oh, Obi-Wan," she said sadly, "I blame him for you, because I know you never could. Because you are too kind and too forgiving."
Obi-Wan looked on her in a new light, though it could hardly have been surprising; Sabé had a steadfast loyalty to those she called friend.
"Now, goodnight, Obi-Wan," she said, "I'm going to try to get some shut-eye."
And there was an air of finality in her voice that warned against crossing, so he released his grip on her hand and she swept out of them room.
He did not see how she held the hand close to her chest or hear how her heart fluttered.
Talik slept restlessly, though whether it was caused by her injuries remained to be seen. She didn't feel the pain whilst she slumbered, her thoughts drifting to where it had first begun for her at the Jedi Temple; when Sabé had taken her on as her Padawan learner.
"I heard a Jedi Knight's going to be watching us in lightsaber class!" a gleeful Rodian said, bobbing on his feet excitedly at the prospect of gaining a master.
If there was one thing that Initiates would fight for, it was the ability to be chosen to be a Jedi Knight's Padawan. If they weren't chosen by the time they were thirteen, they were to be shipped off to Jedi Service Corps; make it or break it, as the Initiates liked to say.
But those in Talik's grouping were only ten. It was rare that they would gain a master at their age.
A humanoid girl scoffed at the Rodian's words. "No one's coming to the class," she said, rolling her eyes and voicing Talik's thoughts. "We're ten! Rosii, no one takes on a ten year old Padawan!"
"Master Yoda did!"
There were murmurs following that, murmurs of agreement. Sabé Amidala was a topic of interest, especially to the Initiates. The Grandmaster didn't just pick anyone for his Padawan learner, and Sabé had the highest midi-chlorian count in the whole Temple!
"I heard Knight Amidala passed the Trial of the Flesh when she lost her arm to a Dark Jedi!"
"Idiot! It wasn't a Dark Jedi!"
Talik ignored her fellows, gathering her datapads together. Padawans were expected to complete several trials before they could be considered a full-fledged Jedi Knight, and the Trial of the Flesh tested one's ability to overcome great pain. Sabé Amidala had lost her arm and had to relearn her lightsaber skills with her cybernetic limb; Talik couldn't help but be awed by her resolve.
And she was a practitioner of the twin-bladed style, Jar'Kai, of which Talik was sure there were only a handful in the Temple that practiced it actively.
But she shoved those thoughts aside, replacing her datapads in her bag and rejoining her classmates.
None of them could wait for lightsaber class to begin, but Talik focused on her own studies; if they wanted to act like fools during the class taught by Master Yoda, that was entirely up to them, but Talik wouldn't.
And then the time for the class came around and Talik followed her fellows to the class, pausing briefly when she sensed a subtle presence fading into the shadows of the room, closer to the door than where they would be practicing. But then the presence vanished and Talik continued on.
Talik very much doubted that Sabé Amidala was the presence sinking in the shadows, content to be unseen. The Nabooan female had only been made a Knight a few months back and she was hardly ever on Coruscant –or in the Temple, if rumors were to be believed, that she possessed an apartment paid in full by her birth-father whom she had met all of one time–, searching for artifacts of the Dark Side as Jedi Shadows did.
But the presence lodged in the back of Talik's mind, warm and comforting and rooting deep in her soul. Talik didn't know what to make of it, so she opted to focus on the sparring matches until Yoda had called her forward.
She was sparring against a particularly aggressive humanoid male named T'Iedga with training 'sabers that were low powered enough to only sting if they hit against flesh.
"Begin, you will!" Yoda said once they'd tied the blindfolds over their eyes and activated their 'sabers, positioning their bodies, preparing to begin.
And then they rushed forward, unaware of the brown eyes following their movements, watching the Twi'lek as she moved through her forms, blocking and parrying despite the lack for sight.
The girl had potential, and she was very strong in the Force, more noticeably than her other year-mates…and the way she called to Sabé…A smile twisted her lips as she watched the fight.
Talik wasn't breathing nearly as hard as her opponent when they were stalled by Yoda, which went to show that her practicing the lightsaber forms on her own hadn't been a complete waste of time.
They both drew the blindfolds from their eyes and Yoda made a gesture towards someone that none of the Initiates could see, and, to Talik's surprise, out of the shadows had stepped Sabé Amidala.
Talik had never seen her in person; she had always been a shadow of rumors.
Her brown hair was caught up in a multitude of plaits that seemed unlikely to unravel at any point in time. Her cloak was darker than the Jedi were known to wear, but it wasn't completely black, the same could be said for her tunic, leather jerkin, and trousers.
The twin sabers hooked to her belt bounced as she walked and Talik's eyes fell to them, examining them silently with wide eyes. Sabé Amidala's lightsabers were odd in how they were nothing like any other lightsabers. The silvery hilts bore the pattern of leaves and flower petals, but beauty had no place on a weapon of practicality.
Yet Sabé Amidala was a Jedi Guardian with proficient 'saber skill.
"Master Yoda," Sabé Amidala said, giving her former master a reverent bow.
"Knight Amidala," Yoda's eyes held a light glint that earned him a smile from his old Padawan who clearly knew his thoughts like the back of her hand.
Organic or durasteel. Talik's eyes flickered towards the arm hidden by the thick black glove.
And then Sabé Amidala's eyes were on her with such an intensity that Talik found herself rooted where she stood.
"What is your name, Initiate?" Sabé asked and Talik could sense the jealousy bubbling in the air.
"Talik Shala, Knight Amidala," Talik said, giving her a polite bow.
Sabé Amidala considered her with a veil of interest that gave Talik the unsettling feeling that she was being tested.
Then the Knight unclipped one of her 'sabers and held it out to Talik, whose eyes widened in surprise.
You doubt my skill, the words whispered in her mind and Talik knew they came from Sabé Amidala, even though her lips had not moved.
Talik squared her jaw and gritted her teeth, an action that only served to amuse the Knight at the sight of the rebellious nature she was struggling to keep in check.
And then Talik took the 'saber, stunned at the feel. While the hilt may have seemed simple or delicate, it had a grip to keep it from sliding out of its wielder's hands. She could feel the grip on the edge of the leaves that spun around hit and on the leaves veins. She could feel the activation button by its roughness, even if it was not clearly seen.
She thumbed it on and a brilliant violet blade appeared, darker in color than Master Windu's.
My Padawan, you shall be, the woman promised.
"Master!" Talik cried out in her slumber.
I am here, came the presence, warmth enveloping her, lips brushing against her brow like a mother's. And Talik fell into a deeper sleep, though more restful that it had been previously.
It was lucky the Jedi hangar was so large or Sabé wasn't entirely certain they would have made it in to land. Flying through traffic had been chaotic enough without having a place to land.
But Sabé expelled an audible sigh of relief once they'd touched down. Naboo had been nice, but Coruscant was her home, and at least at Coruscant she wasn't rushing around worried about battle droids or playing decoy to her younger sister by a good decade.
When the ramp had descended, a familiar form had climbed up it.
"Kenobi, Amidala," Master Vokara Che spoke with severity as she considered them both, "what chaos have you brought me?"
Vokara Che was the Chief Healer of the Jedi Temple and such was her prowess in healing that her name was spoken with reverence, even by those who found her a bit harsh and blunt. Sabé had lost count how many times she had ended up in the Temple infirmary and under her care (only to escape when she wasn't looking and be dragged back to her bed).
It showed just how worried both Sabé and Obi-Wan were that they didn't offer any remark to her blunt question, instead taking her inwards to where the two lay.
Vokara Che's lips thinned into a line as she took in the states of Garen Muln and Talik Shala, and then she took great care to have them removed from the ship as gently as possible.
"You've done what you can, now let us do the same," Vokara Che said diplomatically, her head-tails twitching in agitation as her gaze swept over them; Sabé pale from lack of sleep and Obi-Wan similarly tired, cradling his new Padawan in his arms as Anakin slumbered on.
"Sit down, girl," she added to Sabé, "you're about to keel over."
But Sabé took a few steps forward, her eyes focused on her Padawan's lavender form as she was taken away.
"Your Padawan is in capable hands," Vokara Che promised, grasping Sabé's arms tightly, her blue eyes earnest as they locked on Sabé's tired brown.
Obi-Wan wasn't sure why her grip was so tight until a moment later Sabé leaned her head forward, resting her chin on the Twi'lek's shoulder as her whole body sagged as though a weight had been lifted.
"Leave the healing to us," Vokara Che murmured with a note of fond exasperation towards her often most difficult patient before summoning another repulsorlift stretcher to bear away the exhausted Jedi Knight.
Then Vokara Che turned towards him and Obi-Wan took a step back, which was probably a wise decision.
Anakin mumbled something, curling his head more into his shoulder, his fingers digging into his master's tunic.
The Twi'lek's blue lips twitched faintly in amusement. "You'd better come along to."
And Obi-Wan, at least, knew better than to argue with Vokara Che.
So he followed the stretcher bearing his friend and with a warm weight on his arms, just grateful to be home.
AN: So, everyone's back in one piece, yay! Vokara Che I find to be a bit like Madam Pomfrey and I only just read about her today from Wild Space (which had several lovely Obi-Wan-Anakin BROTP moments that I loved, because I'm all about their brotherly-ness).
What Sabé did when she was younger was actually similar to something I read about Ben Skywalker, who closed himself off from the Force because of the pain of the war at the time.
Sabé's lightsabers were drawn by the lovely Abyranss and can be found on my fanfic-related tumblr: greygryffindor dot tumblr dot com, above my terrible sketch that includes the symbolism behind her 'saber designs.
As always, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REVIEW!