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A Shift in the Force: Chapter Thirty-Seven: Depths Within

AN: I see Sabé's return is causing a lot of excitement, don't worry, we're nearly there now!


Retrospectively, it was a terrible idea, Sabé had known it, but she'd still done it. Her eyes fluttered slightly before she forced them open, feeling an exhaustion that weighed on her whole body. Then she had to frown in confusion.

She was back in the room that was off of Master Yoda's, the one she'd had when she was still a padawan.

"Master Yoda?" she called hopefully, sitting up in the bed that was far too small for a grown woman. She could see her old clothes still hung up in the closet, a few stay datapads on the desk in the corner, almost as though she'd just left.

Sabé swung her legs over the bed and pulled herself upright, pressing the button beside the door in order to slide it open.

The small apartment that she had shared with Yoda was empty and silent, almost startlingly so.

Sabé eyed the sliding door that led out into the main hallway, wary of what she would find there. Her finger paused over the button, inches away from pressing it, indecision flickering across her face.

But then she stubbornly set her jaw and pressed it, stepping out into the hallway, only to find that it was as empty as the room she had just left.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Sabé murmured to herself, her worry heightening as she moved, her eyes catching the blackened burns smudged along the walls and the floor, like there'd been some kind of battle within the walls of the Temple, and Sabé had never heard of such a thing.

Her fingers trailed over the blackened areas on the walls, a frown deepening the soft lines of her face.

Something was off, something was very off.

Sabé didn't realize just what until she reached the end of the hall and found Etain Tur-Mukan leaning against the wall.

"Etain!" Sabé breathed in relief at the sight of her friend, only to recoil sharply when she rounded the corner to look at her completely. Her eyes, green and flecked with amber, had once been so lively were devoid of all life, sightless and blank.

"Etain?" Sabé murmured, crouching and lifting her shaking hands to cradle Etain's cold cheeks, the freckles so stark against the pallor. Sabé leaned her forehead against Etain's, struggling to keep her emotions in check.

"This is a lie," she murmured. "It has to be…this is all in my head."

The Force remained silent.

Sabé swallowed thickly, closing her eyes briefly as she gathered herself before releasing Etain's head and resting her hand against the wall in order to drag herself upright.

And it was only then that she took in the gravity of the situation, when she took in the entirety of the main ziggurat and all that lay within.

There were bodies upon bodies and blaster burns and slices into walls and the floor that could've only been made by a lightsaber.

It was a nightmare.

It couldn't be real, it just couldn't be.

Her heart raced in her chest as she descended the stairs, her eyes catching a very particular shade of blue-green hair. Her feet moved quickly as she murmured, "Taria."

Her friend and fellow Shadow was lying on the ground with her face turned downwards which was almost a blessing because Sabé didn't know if she could handle looking into her eyes and knowing she couldn't see her.

Sabé leaned her hands heavily against her knees. Etain and Taria…she didn't think she'd be able to handle it if—

Her heart stuttered in her chest as she saw them.

Aayla's body was curled in front of Kit's, like she'd been guarding him before she'd fallen and Sabé's feet raced through the sea of bodies to reach their sides, the tears that had clung so desperately to her eyelashes had fallen, leaving tracks down her cheeks.

"No, no," she murmured, falling to her knees, clutching at Aayla's shoulders, leaning down to press her ear to her friend's chest, sobbing when she heard no trace of the heartbeat that fuelled Aayla's laugh and her smile and the brightness in her eyes. "Please, no," she begged, her words echoing in the tomb that the Temple had become. "Aayla –Kit—"

Sabé had never experienced a loss like this before, not even when Korinth'Kel and Siri had died. Aayla and Kit…they were so much more. They were the first people Sabé had considered her family, they were the first people that Sabé really loved.

The Temple was unforgiving and Sabé had to find Talik.

Hope had left her now, as she abandoned Aayla and Kit, feathering lingering kisses to their brows.

She was slower now, the sorrow weighing her down like lead as she went further into the Temple. Nowhere she looked didn't have a corpse present.

Was this what she had to look forward to? This carnage? This massacre?

Then she pulled short, staring at the figure leaning against the lift that led up to the High Council Spire, the single living and breathing person, a child.

Yellowed eyes shifted to look at her with interest and Sabé took a step back, recognizing the shape of those eyes, the curve of those cheeks…but the girl couldn't have been more than ten.

"At last we meet, Sabé Amidala," Carina said, casting an amused smirk her way. "You're not quite what I expected…the Jedi That Felt Too Much."

Sabé frowned.

This version of Carina wasn't nearly as terrifying as her nightmares were, but there was something terrifying in her youthful face, something that set Sabé's heart racing.

"It must be strange stuck in your own head," Carina mused, looking around at the bodies with interest, "though not quite what I'd been expecting…I'd expect something like this with a Sith." She cast a significant glance towards Sabé. "Maybe there's more Sith in you than I originally thought."

"There isn't," Sabé said with what she thought was certainty, but it wavered.

"We'll see," Carina said, eyes gleaming. "And we will meet again."

She moved past Sabé and Sabé turned to watch her go. "How can we?" Sabé called before Carina could descend the winding stairs. "You're a figment of my imagination, my nightmare."

Carina paused, flexing the fingers of one hand before turning to look over her shoulder with a superior smirk. "You'll figure it out eventually," she said, before leaving Sabé alone.

Sabé pressed the button on the wall and the lift open and she stepped inside, rubbing her hand over her metallic wrist as it shot upwards.

She stood outside the doors to the High Council, wavering and afraid, so very afraid. The Force murmured warnings in her ear, trying to coax her away.

The doors opened and Sabé stood frozen where she was, tears welling in her eyes as she bit back the bile rising in her throat, a hand pressing against her mouth as she stepped forward with difficulty.

She had seen the young padawans strewn through the halls with the other Jedi, but here there were Initiates, too young and too small to be riddled with blaster bolts and lightsaber burns…positioned before them, clearly the one that had tried to shield them from harm before she'd been struck down…was Talik.

Sabé fell to her knees, cradling her beloved padawan in her arms, her eyes too dry as she held Talik, pressing her cheek against the top of her head, rocking Talik back and forth with soft murmurs.

This will be your failure, the Force warned in her ear, and in that moment Sabé wished nothing more than to not be a Jedi.


When Carina woke, it was to daylight pouring in through the openings in the ziggurat. Her eyes flicked open and the first thing she did was look down to her arm first. There were three round circular burns along her skin, but it was clear that they were healing and Carina knew they'd been much worse in appearance the night before.

Her metallic fingers brushed against her chest where she'd been hit and she winced, gritting her teeth slightly.

"It's probably not a good idea to move," a pleasant voice mentioned next to her and she turned her head so fast that it nearly cracked in order to take in Obi-Wan Kenobi.

"What the Sith?" she demanded.

"I'm flattered," he said, "but not quite."

"Just what I needed in my life," Carina growled, "another Jedi." The scorn in her tone when she said the word Jedi couldn't have been more obvious. "Don't you people have other things to do than bother innocent Sith Lords?"

"Sith Lords aren't innocent," Obi-Wan pointed out with an arched eyebrow. "You kill people for a living, Carina."

"My finest quality, I assure you," she said coolly as she sat up with a wince and Obi-Wan reached out a hand to help her, only to have it slapped away with a glower.

"I'm not here to hurt you, Carina," he said, "much less kill you."

"You wouldn't even be able to manage that, Kenobi," Carina said shortly, rolling her eyes for good measure. "I nearly killed your padawan, remember? And you couldn't even come close."

"And you couldn't even come close to killing us, either," Obi-Wan interjected and Carina frowned.

She couldn't explain that, and it was vaguely irritating, but also not. She wasn't fond of very many things or people, but there was something about Obi-Wan Kenobi…

"I'm guessing you can heal," she said instead, flexing the hand of her burned arm, "not very well, though."

His eyebrow twitched. "You could be dead," he countered.

Carina was rather unperturbed at the prospect. She shrugged and winced as she considered him. "Since you didn't come here to kill me, what did you come here for?" If that had been his intention, then he'd wasted an opportunity while she'd slept; then he'd wasted an opportunity in healing her.

"To talk," Obi-Wan said simply and that took her by surprise.

"I was generally under the impression that Jedi were the type to leap first and ask questions later," Carina said dryly, "that's why there are so few of the Sith compared to the Jedi."

She had never sounded more like Sabé and it made his heart hurt.

"You would've gotten on very well with a friend of mine," Obi-Wan said instead. "She was a Jedi Shadow with very unorthodox views." He didn't say her name. Carina was already under the impression that her own master was Sabé Amidala.

"Sounds like my kind of girl," Carina said, "but I can't imagine a Jedi Council approving of someone like that at any point in time."

"They were constantly at odds," Obi-Wan agreed, a faint smile lighting his lips. "She had unique perspectives they didn't approve of."

Carina snorted. "Of course not. Imagine a Jedi thinking for themselves."

That made his lips thin into a line.

"Fine, talk, Kenobi," she sighed, rolling her shoulders slightly. "I've got nowhere to be."

"I want to know if you ever experience memory loss."

Carina looked at him with befuddlement. "That's an odd thing to want to know."

Of course, the whole situation was rather odd, if you asked Carina. Her on the planet, him saving her life when she'd tried so hard to kill him before…maybe Kenobi was a masochist.

"I'm curious," Obi-Wan said, but there was something behind his eyes that Carina wasn't sure she liked.

Carina's eyes narrowed. "Say that I did…what interest would it be to the Jedi?"

"Not the Jedi," Obi-Wan corrected, "just me."

A crease formed between her eyebrows before smoothing into a mask of indifference. "You have your answer," she said shortly before pulling herself up by the wall to stand in the dimply lit ziggurat, raising a hand to her ear where her comlink was still lodged. "Jay, pack everything up, we're leaving."

"I will begin packing," the droid agreed in her ear.

"But if you wanted a real answer to your memory loss," Obi-Wan added, "you could come back with me to Coruscant, to meditate with Jedi Master Plo Koon."

Carina actually laughed. "Go back to Coruscant? Are you kriffing with me?"

The odd look pulled her short. "Wait…you don't know…do you? The Jedi live on a planet for more than a thousand years and don't even notice the taint of the Dark Side? W-o-w, now that's sad."

"But why would that keep you from going back?" Obi-Wan shoved the implications her words had brought to light, but he'd worry about it at a later date.

"Stay away from Coruscant," her master had said, tapping a finger to her temple and Carina took the warning to heart.

"That's my business," Carina said curtly, "now, I've got to run…things to do, people to kill, that sort of thing…the sort of thing that no Jedi approves of."

"I'll hunt you down again," Obi-Wan returned easily, and a slow smirk spread over Carina's face.

"I look forward to it…that is, if you could actually manage it, something I very much doubt," she replied, always ready to have the last word and Obi-Wan had to loosen the robes near his throat.


"Why'd you let her leave?" Anakin's brow was furrowed as they watched the transport disappear into the sky. "We came all this way for nothing."

Obi-Wan gave him a look.

"Well, not nothing," Anakin acquiesced with a wince, "but she's still not coming back."

Anakin had avoided her when she'd walked out of the ziggurat, her yellow eyes only meeting his briefly before she'd ascended the ramp that led into her transport with the security droid lumbering in after her.

"Maybe," Obi-Wan said and Anakin cast a surprised expression in his direction.

"You think she will?"

"I think you can't kill an idea," Obi-Wan said decisively. It was clear that whatever she thought of Coruscant, she liked it about as much as Sabé had. Sabé barely liked living on the planet as it was and she enjoyed just about any other planet other than Coruscant and if missions on other planets were extended, she was almost positively ecstatic.

Still, Obi-Wan had catalogued her expressions carefully when he'd brought up the issue of memory loss. Clearly it was significant enough for her to notice that it was an issue to be corrected. Maybe she needed some time to mull over the idea, especially since she had barely any allies within the Temple itself.

Getting her to come back of her own volition, that was going to be the harder part.

"Should we chase after her?" Anakin probed.

"Maybe we give her a head start?" Obi-Wan suggested. "Did you hide a tracker on board?"

"Yeah," Anakin said without shame, even though Obi-Wan hadn't asked him to do so, and the amused look that his master tossed in his direction caused a sheepish smile to morph onto his face.

"We'll have to keep an eye on her…she's still got Githany's lightwhip." It hadn't been immediately noticed that that particular artifact had disappeared from storage, but Obi-Wan had caught her on holo-camera a few times wielding it in her Mandalorian armor. It was a fearsome weapon.

At least she hadn't used it against them. A lightwhip was hard to combat without Jar'Kai.

Maybe luck was on their side…if Jedi believed in luck.


The planet Shotem had a rough terrain, which also explained why the lightsaber crystals found within its caverns were much stronger than the ones on Ilum, or the synthetic red ones that Carina had made for that double-ended lightsaber that she'd had to leave behind after the near-assassination attempt.

Carina was still lamenting about that.

It'd been two weeks since she'd crossed paths with Obi-Wan Kenobi and she was starting to wonder if he was trying to lull her into a false sense of security; it would be like a Jedi to do that.

Still, the crystals in Shotem's caverns were worth a fortune, and a girl needed to eat, especially since she was trying to figure out if the hit placed on her head had come from a leak in the House Renliss.

"Shall I inform you the dangers involved in attempting this?" Jay-Seven asked as Carina fit a harness around her legs and her waist.

"Don't bother," Carina said, rolling her eyes as she clipped a lit glowrod to her hip and moved slowly back until she went over the ledge with only Jay-Seven's grip on the cord keeping her from falling to her death, something Carina should've probably been a bit more concerned with, but she wasn't.

The glowrod swung wildly on her hip even as she kept her feet braced against the wall as she watched the light glance off of crystals embedded in the cavern walls a bit further down.

She tugged on the cord and Jay-Seven loosened his grip slightly, allowing Carina to journey further down before calling up to him: "That's good enough, Jay."

Carina twisted the top off of the cylindrical flask at her waist before bringing out a pair of prongs in order to pry the gems from the wall.

"Are you going to go back?" Jay-Seven asked her through the comlink.

"Where?" Carina retorted, working on her fifth crystal.

"Coruscant."

"Why would I?" she asked shortly.

"The Jedi said another Jedi there could help you with your memories," the droid pointed out and Carina dearly wished that he hadn't been listening in on that conversation, but of course he had; she'd tasked him with keeping her safe and he had.

"Kenobi can kiss a Bantha for all I care," Carina replied, focused on her task, but they both knew she was lying.

"The statistical likelihood that you are lying is at an all-time high," Jay-Seven said with about as much sass as a reprogrammed security droid could muster and Carina had to roll her eyes.

It was true that her memory loss was quite significant, perhaps more than she was willing to admit. It wasn't anything recent, her memory was clear of the past year, but her past with her master, her past with the Jedi…that was a bit more iffy. What she'd previously been so certain of, she wasn't anymore, and what she did remember seemed more fabricated than real.

And she hated that feeling, like she was missing something.

Carina went back to prying crystals out of the cavern wall. "Coruscant holds nothing for me," she said finally.

"Coruscant is where you were raised."

Carina almost banged her wrist on the wall and she scowled up at Jay-Seven. "Just because you were raised somewhere doesn't mean you owe that place any loyalty. The Jedi…" She ground her teeth together. "I don't owe them anything. I didn't fit into their ideal, anyways."

"How so?" Jay-Seven asked.

"Among other things," Carina grumbled, "I felt too strongly about things."

Emotions had never been something that the Jedi were very well known to have. They could've been replaced with droids and she didn't think the galaxy would know the difference.

Having emotions, after all, would lead you down the path to the Dark Side, like love and anger and sadness. Carina thought that was the one of the first things that made her turn against the Jedi.

The Jedi weren't worth it, that much she was sure of.


Maz Kanata of Takodana was an odd sort, if you asked Carina, but she didn't mind her too terribly, but she did pay very well for five of the crystals Carina had unearthed from Shotem. Still, she was just a bit too…eerie for Carina's taste.

She almost thought that the short orange-skinned alien was a Jedi with the way she talked, describing dark and light warring inside her with a certainty that Carina had never seen before.

So Carina had taken her money and left as quickly as she'd come, almost bumping into someone on the way out and into the market outside.

"Why, Carina, fancy meeting you here."

Carina's eyebrow twitched where it was hidden behind her helmet as she turned to face the congenial face of Obi-Wan Kenobi. She was starting to become very familiar with that beard and those pair of hazel eyes.

"Do you have a life, Kenobi?" her modulated voice inquired. "Or do you stalk other women relentlessly?"

"I don't think this is stalking—"

"Stalking, by definition, is the repeated following and harassing of an individual, and if that doesn't fit you, I honestly have no idea what does," Carina responded dryly, a thrill curling up her spine at the flustered expression his face had taken on.

"Where's your padawan?" she mentioned before he could come up with a way to defend himself. "Figured it would be a good idea to hang back?" She grinned underneath the helmet, tapping a finger against her own throat and that made Obi-Wan frown.

"He's not exactly looking forward to a repeated experience," he said in an almost evasive manner.

"Shame," Carina said, "I hear some people like that kind of thing."

Obi-Wan's eyebrows rose high on his forehead as the realization of what she meant dawned. It was humorous to watch.

"Is this your new plan to get me to come to Coruscant?" she asked, resting a hand on a cocked hip. "Annoy me to death?"

"You think I'm annoying?" He quirked an eyebrow.

Carina canted her head to the side thoughtfully. "I haven't decided yet."

He was a befuddling conundrum and remarkably resilient, which was saying something. Carina didn't think anyone had actually tried as hard as he had to find, so she had to give him credit for that.

"I'm going to find that tracker you put on my ship," Carina warned.

"I'm sure you will," he responded agreeably.

It was vaguely disconcerting.

"You're a very strange man, Kenobi," she decided before weaving through the crowd of people, forcing him to follow after her if he wanted to continue their conversation, what little of one it was. "And I'm not interested. Coruscant and I don't mix very well."

And then he did something that surprised her.

"All right," he said and Carina paused with her back to him, gritting her teeth together and narrowing her eyes.

"Do all Jedi play mind games now, or is it just you?" she asked, whirling around to face him, the hilt of her lightwhip banging against her side as she did so.

"I don't know what you mean."

She didn't like the gleam in his eye. "Like hell you don't," she sneered. "You chase me halfway across the galaxy and then, what? You just give up, just like that?"

"You don't seem very receptive to the idea," Obi-Wan felt the need to point out, amused by her heated response.

Her expression soured behind the helmet and she could've sworn that he could see her face.

"Say, theoretically," she had to pause to make sure that was clear, "I was to go to Coruscant with you…for my memory loss…how would it be fixed?"

He smiled and Carina hated it. "The Jedi Master I told you about? Plo Koon, he specializes in this sort of thing. You need to meditate with him, he can find the way to unlock your memories."

"Or erase them completely," she grumbled, crossing her arms, unimpressed.

"I thought you were all about taking risks?"

"You don't know me," Carina said coldly.

"Or…maybe I do and you just don't remember," he suggested and the very thought couldn't help but startle her.

And that was her last thought before the hiss of a blaster bolt shooting through the air distracted them both.

AN: Obi-Wan using reverse psychology gives me life and Sabé's not having a very good year stuck in her own head, is she?

One more chapter and the Carina Arc is done, guys!

As always: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REVIEW