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A Shift in the Force: Chapter Twenty-Four: Preparations For Departure

AN: We have officially hit 100K words on this fic, which makes me feel super-proud, especially since it's my fourth longest fic, close to over-taking number three, Tempest.

And this isn't the last of Asajj, there will be maybe one more scene with her and then we won't hear from her for awhile, but she pops up again towards the end of book two and book three centers on her, so you'll see her again.

Also: the Force knows what's up.

And just a short bit of annoyance: just because a fic hasn't been updated in a month doesn't mean it's been abandoned. -_-


"Why is everything so much simpler when you're younger?"

Sabé was resting with her head against the bar kitchen counter while Kit cooked something up for lunch and Aayla sat beside her, her legs propped up on the empty seat beside her as her eyes roved over the datapad in her hands.

"Probably because you don't have as much responsibility," Kit said sagely from where he was standing at the sonic stove. "Is this because that girl you're taking on for Jar'Kai training?"

"Asajj isn't terrible," Sabé had to admit, "in fact, she's taken to the style quite effortlessly. I don't think I've ever taught such a natural before, and that's including Talik."

Talik was adequate –for now– in the art, but she had originally trained with a single 'saber whereas Sabé had started with two. Adapting from one style to the next was hard work and sometimes it put you back, and when Talik found herself struggling, she then switched to the healing arts, that was something that came as easily to her as breathing.

Sabé could understand her frustration; she had felt the same way about training with Yoda. Yoda was a great teacher but there were a great many times that Sabé had felt frustrated by his lack of feeling, how he could cut himself off so easily. Sabé was a Jedi who felt deeply and profoundly and it wasn't something she could just stop. She was what the Force had made her to be and to have Yoda tell her to temper her emotions grated at her nerves.

"But compressing so much training in such a short amount of time…I'm not so sure how I feel about it," Sabé grumbled, "but it's better than the girl not knowing hardly anything about Jar'Kai and just waving around two lightsabers like a gundark with its head cut off."

Aayla snorted. "That's an apt description. Remember what you were like when you first started? Now that was comical."

Kit laughed with Aayla and Sabé furrowed her brow briefly, thinking she heard something almost flirty in the way Aayla had laughed with Kit, but she must have been imagining it.

"Oh, like you two were any better when you first started out with your 'saber training," Sabé retorted, her nose high in the air, but that only made them laugh more.

"So, how is the training going?" Aayla asked her friend in amusement. "It's almost done, isn't it?"

"Thank the stars," Sabé groaned, returning to her position with her head resting against the table. "A few more days and then she and Ky Narec are shipping off to Rattatak for a good few years and then I won't have to see her Jar'Kai form because you bet your ass it's not going to be as great as it could be if she'd had more time."

Aayla and Kit shared a glance. Sabé's passion for the two-bladed style was rather well known (if the whole Temple didn't know about it by now, Kit would honestly be surprised) and the pair had once see Sabé almost have a heart attack after seeing Talik try it for the first time on her own, mostly because Talik had nearly taken off her own head trying to do a complicated twirl that she'd seen Sabé do on a mission previously.

Sabé had had to come up with a list of rules about training in the Jar'Kai style, which had then spread to a set of rules that Talik had said were the rules of Sabé Amidala (Sabé had just rolled her eyes).

The number one was: do not use two lightsabers if you can't handle one.

Sabé had honestly lost count of how many times she'd seen fully realized Jedi Knights struggling to using two lightsabers instead of their usual one, falling in line with the typical misconception that using two lightsabers with a single lightsaber style would help in a battle.

What a surprise! It didn't.

It was one thing to use two 'sabers to your advantage, it was another to actually manage it.

"Hopefully no one else will come to me asking for help training in Jar'Kai," Sabé said, taking a long drink of her jawa juice. "Or, if they do, I'll just shunt them towards Keelyvine and hope she manages to scare them away."

"Ouch," Kit remarked in amusement, "that's cold."

It was a rather known fact of just how hard Keelyvine Reus was on those who ended up learning from her for any stretch of time. He recalled when Sabé would claim that Keelyvine's training was going to kill her, but she was perhaps the only one that hadn't given up on Jar'Kai simply because the master was tough.

Sabé seemed remarkably unconcerned. "Anyone that can't last against her shouldn't be learning it in the first place."

"And what about Asajj?" Aayla prompted. "Did she just get lucky?"

"Probably," Sabé said as Kit removed the food from where it was over the fire.

"Or as Master Mundi would say 'there is no such thing as luck'," Kit said, deepening his voice appropriately.

"Maybe luck," Sabé conceded, "maybe the will of the Force, but I guess we'll never know…but the girl's got talent, I'll give her that; she'll be a great master of Jar'Kai, I have no doubt."

The Force rang in her ears in both agreement and caution.


Pamina Prime rained constantly, which wasn't a completely terrible thing, particularly if you were someone that spent a great deal on a planet where there was no rain, which was to say Coruscant. Taria, however, was born on Ghaina and their rain was rare.

Sabé would have liked it better, she knew, the other Shadow had always liked moist environments, particularly on missions.

Taria wrapped her shawl around herself with a sigh, but it didn't do very much to help the chill. And she was holed up in a cave for a reason, she wasn't just doing it for kicks (though who would actually do that for kicks?).

And to make matters worse, Taria was starving.

And there were only mollusks to eat.

The problem was that Taria had a pile of blue-shelled mollusks with a green stripe and blue-shelled mollusks with a black stripe; she knew one of them was deadly, but Taria couldn't for the life of her remember which it was.

Oh, she should have done just a little more research on the subject before heading off on this mission, but that's what she got for rushing…and all because she'd wanted to see Sabé after learning she had been elected to the Council of First Knowledge.

But Sabé had stopped her before she could make her way out of the apartment, her eyes distant in that way that made it seem like she was listening to something that others could not hear.

"Just remember that the blue-shelled mollusks with the green stripes are the ones you need to watch out for," Sabé had said before Taria had left her alone.

Taria trusted Sabé's judgment, and she also trusted the will of the Force (because Pamina Prime wasn't the center of Sabé's interests and there was no way she would have known about it if the Force hadn't whispered in her ear).

So Taria took all the mollusks she had collected that that bore the green stripe and threw them out of the cave she was currently residing in. Removing them entirely was probably the better option, because Taria had a habit of moving around in the night, and the chances that she actually might eat a poisonous mollusk were actually surprisingly high.

She wiped her hands on her trousers, damp from rain, before pulling a vibro-blade from out of her boot to break the shell and get some food in her stomach.

This mission wasn't going as well as she would have liked but she could still sense a trace of the Dark Side of the Force on the planet, and she wasn't about to call quits until she found out what it was. And if there was one thing that Taria was known for being, it was determined.

So Taria wrapped her shawl more firmly around her shoulders, waiting the planet's sun to rise so that the rain wasn't nearly so cold, but she had a few hours yet until then, so she sat down and waited impatiently, hoping the new day would bear more fruits.


Sabé dreamed she was floating in darkness. It wasn't an uncomfortable feeling, nor was it something she wasn't used to; Sabé had lost count of how many times she had awoken to discover she was floating above her bed.

But in dreams it was very different and the times were very rare when Sabé didn't find herself plagued with increasingly befuddling dreams.

They'd only increased in number since she'd returned to Naboo and Sabé was starting to think that Naboo had a natural, calming effect on the Force and Coruscant was the center of imbalance in the Force.

Her feet made contact with something solid and she found herself standing before a mirror that reflected her as she was, despite the darkness. It reflected Sabé with her multitude of braids, her leather tabard over her robes, darker than most Jedi, but Sabé couldn't understand why the mirror was showing her as she knew she looked.

Sabé reached out a finger to lightly tap against the mirror's surface, only to start in surprise when it rippled under her touch, a new image her place.

The mass of braids were not their typical brown, instead they were dyed black and red –a color choice that Sabé would never in a million years have chosen– but it was the eyes that caught her the most. They bled yellow as lips smirked and Sabé felt a shiver go down her spine.

This Sabé wore Mandalorian armor that was a rusty reddish-brown with an odd gauntlet on one arm that was composed of five linked plates, each capped with a red gem encased with gold. And Sabé could have sworn she'd seen something like it before, but before she could recall, Not-Sabé had raised the helmet to encase her head before unclipping the thick cylinder at her side, clicking the activator button on, allowing the long red flexible tendril to spill out on the ground around her feet.

A lightwhip! Sabé's eyes were drawn to it with interest. The Jedi Temple possessed one that had once belonged to the Sith Lord Githany who had perished in the New Sith Wars alongside her fellow Sith on Ruusan.

Not-Sabé flicked her wrist, and Sabé watched how the red tendril moved with her hand before she gave a more forceful flick to bring the tendril up to shatter the mirror, leaving Sabé to bring her hands up to her face in order to shield it, but the next thing she knew, she was sitting up in her bed, breathing heavily and Arthree, sensing movement, activated with a few small beeps.

"Its fine, Arthree," Sabé assured him, knotting her fingers in the braids. "It was just a nightmare is all."

A terrible nightmare. Sabé doubted she'd be able to get the image of those yellow eyes out of her head, or that sickening smile.

That wasn't her. That wasn't her at all.

It took a moment for her to regulate her breathing, and once she had, she was pulling herself out of bed, grabbing some fresh clothes and heading into the fresher. It might have been a bit early, but the likelihood of Sabé actually going back to sleep was rather low, so Sabé decided to cut her losses.

A few minutes later she'd left a datapad for Talik, explaining where she'd gone off, before making her way out of the apartment.

It would probably be wise to consider getting her own transport –and by own transport, Sabé meant a speeder– but the chances of her getting a lecture for said speeder were incredibly high –seeing as Jedi weren't really supposed to have their own possessions, yet here Sabé was in an apartment that her father had paid for and an R3 unit she had rebuilt–, besides, where she was going, it wasn't the safest place to park a speeder. In fact, a speeder was more likely to end up stolen if she took it down here.

Sabé gave a nod to the ones working in the lobby as she made it down to the first level and they gave her a few waves of their own, far too familiar with her presence.

Coruscant's underworld wasn't nearly so difficult to find as some believed. The law enforcement of the planet liked to believe that the underworld had been shut down several years previously, but all that had been done was the underworld moving its location. Of course, the underworld was rather vast, being hundreds of levels stacked on one another, which made operating in an illegal fashion rather easy, because there were just too many places that the underworld could be. It was easier to pretend it didn't really exist.

Sabé flipped up the hood of her cloak as she took a few intersecting bridges, aware of the speeders flying around her. It might still be a bit early, but Coruscant was the world that never slept, so it came as no surprise that it was already so busy. She took a few back-end routes before finding the spot she was looking for. She looked around to make sure that no one was watching before she knelt to remove the covering over the large ventilation shaft that was one of the ways into the underworld.

It had been made to be easily accessible, which was why there was a makeshift turbolift rested inside, just large enough to fit Sabé without too much difficulty.

Sabé gathered her robes around herself and stepped inside, pulling the covering back in place before a scanner could come by and take note of the gaping hole in the ventilation shaft.

She pulled the lever down and hit the activation button. The turbolift gave a creaking groan before making its way down slowly before giving a sharp jolting stop, the tubing before her opening automatically to permit Sabé to exit into the underworld.

As always, the underworld was packed. There were stalls set up showcasing items, some of which were clearly stolen, others, not so much. But Sabé ignored them, weaving through the crowd with ease.

There were some vendors familiar with her –she had been coming to the underworld for years now, so that was unsurprising– and gave her grudging nods as she passed by, making for one door in particular. She keyed the appropriate code into the door and it swung open to allow her entry, though a large Besalisk blocking her entry. The Besalisk took one look at her before smirking. "Hey, Silon!" he called over his shoulder to the main room. "Looks like Dala's come for a visit."

Sabé didn't know how she'd ended up with everyone in the underworld calling her Dala, (from Amidala, obviously), but the name had stuck.

"Hello, Zigtu," Sabé smiled, shrugging off her cloak to hang up on one of the hooks. "Is there still a game going on?"

"Just about to start," Zigtu told her as the door shut behind Sabé. "Haven't seen you around in awhile, we thought you'd kicked the habit."

"Zigtu," Sabé smirked, "I hardly gamble enough for this to be considered a habit."

"Ah, my beloved star, Dala!" came a bolstered voice and Sabé rolled her eyes as Silon stepped into the dimly lit foyer. The Weequay looked just as Sabé remembered, his skin tough and leathery, darker than most of his race, with goggles fixed over his eyes.

"Silon," Sabé laughed before taking his cheeks in her hands giving him a fierce kiss before stepping back while he righted himself. It was amusing that he always ended up breathless after a single kiss from her, but it hadn't stopped that from being their usual greeting (it wasn't like Sabé was shy about her odd relationship with the smuggler). "You are as terrible a flirt as ever!"

He gave her a dopey smile that had her smirking. "Anything for you, my Dala."

"I hear there's going to be a game of Sabacc soon," Sabé said with glittering eyes, "got room for another player?"

She could use some money to come up with for Talik and Anakin's fifteenth, even if it would be a little while before then. Talik had only turned fourteen in the past month, and Anakin was a few more weeks out.

"Ah, Dala, you always end up stealing from my favorite clients," Silon remarked, tossing an arm carelessly over her shoulders.

"My dear, if this was an honest business you've got going, then maybe I'd be stealing," Sabé retorted and Silon pressed a hand to his chest with an audible gasp.

"I am an honest businessman, Dala, I assure you!"

Sabé laughed. "Still smuggling things out of Coruscant on your Millennium Falcon?"

The smile on his face fell sharply. "No, the Millennium Falcon has disappeared."

"Disappeared?" Sabé couldn't hide her surprise, but Silon waved her concerns away.

"Worry not!" he declared. "I will find a new transport! Now, come! Join us! There will be money made today, yet!"

His enthusiasm made Sabé smile as she allowed him to drag her over to the table and demand a deal for 'his Dala' before the game could begin. Sabé watched the other players size her up and she gave them the naïve smile that she used to throw others off guard, and then the game began.


"A wise choice it is to go to Dagobah."

Sabé was walking beside her old master –with Yoda being perched in his hover chair– with her bag tucked over one shoulder, into which she had stuffed her cloak along with anything else she might need for the next three months. "I think so, as well," Sabé agreed. "Talik has focused too much on her Force-healing, which isn't a bad thing, only she's let her Jar'Kai slip and I think it would be better for her to focus entirely on Jar'Kai for some time."

Yoda gave a small chuckle. "Annoyed, Master Che is, to be losing her most promising student."

"Well, she'll be coming back," Sabé couldn't help but voice dryly, "she'll just be coming back more skilled in Jar'Kai and who can complain about that."

Yoda didn't smile, but Sabé still sensed his amusement. "Inopportune, the Council of First Knowledge believes the timing to be."

Sabé pursed her lips slightly. "I informed Master T'un what I would be doing a week ago, and this training mission has been in the works for awhile. Perhaps what was inopportune was my election to the council."

"Indeed," Yoda said, "inopportune, only you would consider an election to a council."

Sabé gave a shrug. The election to the council had been a high honor, to be sure, but there was so much that went along with it that Sabé was still trying to wrap her mind around. But Sabé's first priority was training her padawan, ensuring they she could one day become a fully realized Jedi.

"May the Force be with you, Sabé," he said, his hover chair coming to a stop as Sabé approached the Temple's hanger bay.

"And you, Master," Sabé responded politely with a slight bow before heading off to the Starfighter she and Talik would be riding in. Ordinarily, Jedi on training missions didn't use Starfighters, mostly because they were equipped for combat, but taking into consideration the size of the Starfighters to the other starcraft that the Jedi possessed as well as the location of Dagobah, it was decided that that was the type of ship the pair would take.

Arthree let out a whirring beep and Sabé stared at him. The last she remembered, she'd left the astromech with Anakin with the promise to look after him while she was gone.

"Arthree," she warned, "I told you to stay with Anakin for a reason. Dagobah isn't a good place for droids." Or sure footing.

Arthree's domed head did a complete three-sixty and he beeped angrily.

Sabé let an annoyed hiss pass her lips. "That's the worst idea I've heard yet."

He gave a chattering response that had her rolling her eyes.

"Do you actually understand what its saying?"

Sabé turned to survey Asajj Ventress who must have come to say goodbye and was looking between Sabé and her astromech with interest.

"It's not that difficult," Sabé said simply as Arthree gave a shrill beep, "and he doesn't like being called an it."

"Oh."

Sabé nudged him with her foot. "Oh, all right, go get situated."

Arthree gave a noticeably more cheerful series of beeps at that, wheeling around the Starfighter to activate his boosters to fly up to the pouch made specifically for an astromech.

"Heading off to Rattatak?" Sabé surmised. "Rough environment. You and your master be careful."

"We will," Asajj said with certainty before giving a low bow. "Thank you for teaching me Jar'Kai."

"Don't worry about it," Sabé said, controlling the Force to allow her to land lightly on the top of the Starfighter. "Just keep working at it and I'm sure you'll be a master in no time."

Asajj gave her a smile before racing out of the hangar bay in search of her master, no doubt, leaving Sabé to fiddle with some faulty wiring that had been left exposed.

"Don't leave without me!"

Sabé looked up from the wiring to see Talik running forward, her lekku swinging wildly as she came to a stop, breathless and bracing her hands on her knees as Obi-Wan and Anakin came up after her at a more leisure pace.

"Talik, I'm not sure you're aware of this," Sabé mentioned, tucking her vibro-wrench into her tabard before sliding the durasteel sheet into place over the wiring, "but this whole training mission is for you…I would exactly leave the Temple without my padawan."

Talik's cheeks burned violet. "Well, you never know," she muttered in embarrassment, climbing her way up to meet Sabé.

"And here I was trying to get used to the idea of having Arthree around for the next three months," Obi-Wan added from the ground as Sabé pulled herself to stand upright.

"What can I say, the astromech's very convincing."

Anakin snorted and Obi-Wan's lips curled into a smile. The lighting of the room gave Sabé a faint halo where she was standing, making her radiant for a single moment before she crouched down again.

"Anakin, keep Obi-Wan out of trouble, will you?"

Obi-Wan pressed a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose as Anakin gave an eager affirmative. The pair of them were going to be the death of him.

And then both Sabé and Talik had disappeared into their respective cockpits, taking off a moment later, launching up and out of Coruscant's atmosphere, unaware that someone else would find an interest in their leaving of Coruscant.

AN: Ironically, I kind of modeled Silon and Sabé's relationship off of the one that Aurra Sing and Hondo Ohnaka have in the Clone Wars. They're not lovers, of course, I guess kissing buddies would be a better term…

You've got to love the slow burn in this fic, am I right?

Next chapter should be interesting, even if it is just training, because we all know how passionate I am about the Jar'Kai style as well as ancient Jedi history ;)

As always: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REVIEW!