I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

Dooku knelt before Yoda, for the final time, and he wondered where things had gone wrong.  It had long been difficult for him to view his old mentor with anything but reverence, and perhaps that was it.  Something in the back of his head had always wondered how a Jedi could attain such status.  Didn't that approach...pride?

When Dooku was a boy, Yoda had already been ancient, by most standards.  According to his studies, Dooku learned that Wookiees had long lives, too.  There were other examples, doubtless.  Still, it had instilled that sense of reverence from the very beginning.  Yoda's small stature made it easy for new padawans to assume him to be one of them, and Dooku had made that same mistake.  He still smiled, privately, at the thought.

He had inherited the title of count from his birth parents, a role made meaningless the day he was accepted into the halls of the Jedi temple on Coruscant.  There were such temples elsewhere, but the younglings with the most potential were brought to Coruscant, and Yoda, and young Dooku had felt what he hoped was his last surge of pride the day he learned of his destiny.

Kneeling before Yoda now, knowing what he knew, he wondered if he had escaped pride after all.

For Dooku had a new master, now.  A man named Palpatine.  To the rest of the galaxy, a politician.  To Dooku?  Everything.  He had surmised quickly that Palpatine knew more about the Force than even Yoda, and that had been...too much.  Had there really been a choice?  The reverence Yoda instilled in him awakened something in Dooku, something that had gotten out of control.  Palpatine offered relief.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," he said to Yoda, now.  "I fear we may never meet again."

He had just accepted the assignment to shadow Palpatine, an assignment he'd campaigned for, an assignment he'd suggested.  No one, not even Yoda, knew why he'd requested it.  For all the Jedi Council knew, it was merely for Palpatine's role as Chancellor of the Republic.  Master Windu hadn't trusted him for even a minute.  But then, they'd never seen eye-to-eye.  If Dooku hadn't been Yoda's apprentice...

Of course, he would meet Yoda again, and they would fight, a reprise of all the sparing sessions they'd shared a long time ago, but with far greater stakes, the battered bodies of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in silent witness beside them.  "Much to learn have you," Yoda would tell him, and in that moment reveal that he had not taught Dooku everything he knew...

And that was it, too.  Dooku had known, had known, all along, that he never fully gained Yoda's trust.  And that was pride, again.  He tried to depict himself as so perfect a Jedi that he had to leave the Jedi Order to be one, a contradiction, the myth of the Sith, and yet...

He stood up again, and Yoda bowed, ever so slightly, toward him, the last sign of mutual respect they would ever share.  Was it, in fact, respect?  Or the farewell Yoda foresaw, the terrible future ahead of them?

Dooku foresaw a great many things, or at least he told himself he did.  Pride again, perhaps.  He foresaw Palpatine's victory, a resounding one, a definitive one.  He foresaw the galaxy brought to order, the kind of order the Jedi had never been able to accomplish.  He foresaw small minds trying to reject this order.  He foresaw the illusion of hope.  He foresaw its futility.  Men like Palpatine could not be denied, men with vision. 

He saw himself, in that moment, in front of Yoda, as the last of the Jedi.  And he bowed to Yoda in return, and he said nothing more, and that was that.  He walked away with a bad feeling about it, all the same...