Chapter Text
In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
-Louise Gluck
*
Prologue: 32 BBY
*
Some things cannot be changed.
“This is Master Sifo-Dyas, en route to the desert moon that orbits Oba Diah…”
They are what they are.
“… flying emergency survival capsule number seven-seven-five-five-one-nine….”
So plays out the great mockery of choice. What was always possible riding up under the edge of what will actually happen, continental plates shuddering against each other. The landmasses break apart and reform; a new world emerges in magma and gorge.
It didn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
It will never matter.
All of the shimmering alternatives collapse in on themselves like so many dying stars. There was only ever one true future: the tyranny of this present moment. Moon rising. Seer descending.
“–won’t make it out of this alive. If that’s the case, so be it.”
If the man Sifo-Dyas came to for help in his hour of need will instead be the instrument of his doom, so be it. If he had once loved that man, so be it. If his last, most desperate plan is betrayed to enemies in the vulnerable hour of its completion, so be it.
“But there are things that mustn’t be lost. This is what it’s come to– and I want … I want everyone to understand that I’ve done my best.”
It’s amazing how little one’s best can amount to, even if it cost every bit of a hard, unfair life.
“I made that decision. It may haunt me, and – or then again, maybe I won’t have to live with that decision very long at all.”
It’s a long way down to the impact site. And, oh, it’s lonely, lonely, lonely.
~*~
He never wanted this.
A refrain Dooku repeated once again to himself as he stepped from his ship into the dust of Oba Diah’s moon.
From a short distance away, the Pykes awaiting him looked like huddled scavengers. Beetles, perhaps, clustered in at the death, with their small eyes, smooth cloaks, and face masks glittering in the fading light. A posture of shifty anticipation. Beyond, the crash still smoked.
Easier somehow to loathe them than to feel anything else.
Dooku tried not to pick at the sentiment. And yet how had they mangled such a simple plan? Sifo-Dyas should have died in a single blast: a comet blazing in the sky over Oba Diah before dropping away into nothing. Dead before he knew to be gone, nerves vaporized before they could register even the slightest shiver of what had happened. His last moments should have been peaceful. The reassurance of his pending clone army: a long-sought-for safety net to protect his precious Order. Dooku’s embrace from their recent parting still lingering warm in his muscles’s last memories. He hadn’t known it was goodbye.
Not this. Not a brutal chase, hide and seek amongst Oba Diah’s bleak satellites. Not his ship blasted to pieces under his very feet and Sifo-Dyas riding the screaming remains of an emergency shuttle down to its inevitable, fiery conclusion. Terror, pain, and struggle.
No. He hadn’t wanted it like this.
You’re always looking out for me, aren’t you, old friend? Dooku could almost hear the gentle mockery in Sifo-Dyas’s voice.
An oily film lingered on the Pykes’ presence: fear or confusion, perhaps both. At Dooku’s approach, there was a general shuffling and throat-clearing. No one wanted to speak.
“I don’t see the body,” he pointed out. The obvious seemed a simple place to begin. There had been but one task he had asked of them, gruesome though it was.
“Lord Tyranus,” the sound of his new name still felt awkward in his ears, “there… there is no body.”
“There is no body,” another repeated, as if the first had not spoken.
There is no death. Odd, the parallel syntax to the Jedi code. A choked undertone of that same mantra.
“No?” Dooku tried to sound pleasantly interested. At his expression, multiple of the Pyke began talking at once.
“We searched the wreckage, but could find no trace–”
“The body must have fallen out on descent– we put a big enough hole in the damned thing.”
“No one could survive that. It amounts to the same, either way.”
Dooku could almost feel the sincerity wafting off these statements. The shining belief that they spoke the truth that any reasonable person could also see. He let Sifo-Dyas's would-be killers fade out of focus, looking instead off toward the T-6 survival capsule lying in pieces like a hawk-broken bird. Go away, the wreckage seemed to whisper. No one’s home.
Dooku had been a fool to trust a task this important to the likes of Lom Pyke’s goons.
Any mutt could corner a garden rabbit, but when hunting spinewolf in the dark forests north of Castle Serenno, the best hounds were those bred with a drop or two of that same blood. To move as silently as the very beasts they stalked, to confuse the quarry with scent of kin.
As one, the Pykes’ boots lifted, kicking and dancing in the dust.
Dooku walked past them. Their death agonies brought him no pleasure. They ought to have known the price of failure. He knew that same cost well himself. His throat still ached where his Master had choked off the bleating protests that had first bubbled from Dooku’s lips at this particular assignment. This little test of his. Willful, Sidious had called him, before putting him on his knees. Foolish.
Dooku understood at last. Hiring the Pykes had been a half-measure on his part, a cheat to bypass his own perennial weaknesses as concerned Sifo-Dyas. In a way, it should have come as no surprise that his initial plan failed, that he must now in a twist of irony, face the very task he had hoped to avoid. As Force had willed.
The Dark side required all of him, if he was to know its power. The gift of his old friend’s killing was no true sacrifice if he let himself look away when the fatal moment came, relying on hired butchers. His grief, his shame, his poisoned memories - all of this was what he must offer if he ever wanted to follow down this path he had started.
He must be sure to tell Lord Sidious how right he had been. Perhaps his Master would be pleased.
The shuttle lay on one side, its belly clawed open by the blasts that brought it down. Here, Dooku could feel more of that suggestive influence: a conversation drifting from across a room, irresistible to ignore. It would be the simplest thing to just leave and call the matter done. The thoughts niggled and insisted, betraying their true source. Dooku might have felt triumphant at placing together the clues, except for the queer urge to vomit up his breakfast.
There was only enough life left in the vessel to blink mute red complaints at him, the alarms having long since quieted. It was difficult for Dooku to find a place to even step. Compartments burst open and their contents shattered, melted wires disgorged from panels, and he smelled the stench of some burning fume. Hot and difficult to breathe. He understood the late Pykes’s reluctance.
A memory drifted up from over half a lifetime ago: Sifo-Dyas just stepped from a shower, distracted with toweling himself and not paying Dooku any mind. The casual intimacy of his nakedness as he bent to rub the cloth down his legs. The curve of his back, shift of muscle in his shoulder.
Obscene to think of that same shape lying broken here amongst smoldering, twisted metal.
Dooku exhaled. He reached for focus. As his old Master Yoda used to say, there were signs to see for those who knew to look. The empty chair at the controls, a body-less space underneath. A dark, wet smudge on the wall, as if someone had steadied himself there.
If Sifo-Dyas could move, Sifo-Dyas would not be waiting politely for him in this burning, reeking deathtrap.
Outside, Dooku made a circuit of the ship. He widened it further on his next pass, moving slowly, like one searching for a lost child in a snow. The shifting surface held his own footprints only for a moment before they eroded away under their own weight. Another, wider loop, and another.
He found him four circles out from the ship.
Sifo-Dyas had staggered or crawled as far as he could, which was not very far. The dust lay as lightly over him as a frost. He was facedown, motionless except for the smoldering of his hair.
He should be dead. He wanted so badly to tell him that.
How had everything changed, and yet so much remained the same? Dooku, dutifully following his orders, obedient to a new Master, if not the old one. And Sifo-Dyas: still impossible, breaking the rules of death itself. Always too defiant for his own good.
“Sifo-Dyas.”
Eyes opened. Dooku felt a spreading awareness that lightly touched the edges of his own, a sensation like fingertips brushing the underside of his wrist, almost tickling. Recognition. Pain.
A horrible realization occurred: Sifo-Dyas must think Dooku had come to help. Even now, he could still choose again. He thought of cradling his broken body against his chest, getting to see that wry smile again, the little one he always saved for him, even in the bleakest of times. The fine zaitin-e9 bacta tank back was waiting back on Dooku’s expensive ship, as convenient as a coffin. How easy to make it right, if only for one deluded moment.
He tucked the squirm of thought away; something to use to hurt himself later.
The sudden movement seemed to startle them both as Sifo-Dyas shoved upright. His chest heaved with unsteady effort. When he opened his mouth to speak, blood came instead, trickling down his chin to stain the dust between his knees. He fought on to his feet. His movements reminded Dooku of some small vertebrate struck a glancing blow by a landspeeder, the jerk and twitch of stricken animal, the instinct to flee outpacing a broken body’s inability to do so. Dying, yet too enthralled by the violence of the killing blow to know to lie down and finish.
Sifo-Dyas collapsed back to his knees. Everything grew still again.
The sudden cool blue of Dooku’s lightsaber cast a dream-like quality to it all: the dust, the shuttle, the helpless man he’d once loved at his feet. Not a dream but a vision, surely one Sifo-Dyas had once had, perhaps a long, long time ago. The way he was looking up at him now, those black eyes as dry as the hot wind that played in Dooku’s long cape and fluttered Sifo-Dyas’s hair.
Dooku remembered years when he could not stop finding that same dark hair on every possible surface: under his bar of soap, plucked off the shoulder of his white dress tunic by a smirking fellow Knight, and regrettably, far too often, inside his own mouth. Those stray strands seemed as uncountable as stars, and just as permanent; he’d noticed them long after Sifo-Dyas had stopped frequenting his small quarters.
Yet eventually, there must have been a last one, and no more after that. Odd, how rare it was in life to know that a single moment would be the last.
He could feel the Cosmic Force swelling around them, creeping up like floodwater. To return Sifo-Dyas’s energy to that great source, gathering him up like a favorite child. It would dissolve a lifetime of pain and struggle and terrible burdens. Perhaps this was his own last favor to his old friend. Not to be his rescuer, but his psychopomp.
The sandstorm struck Dooku hard, full in the face.
He reeled back, clutching one-handed at his eyes. He slashed out with his lightsaber in the other: a clumsy, wild chop. He knew the blow had gone wide just by feel. He glimpsed Sifo-Dyas through his fingers for an instant, sliding backward into swirling dust, pulled by the storm he had called.
Dooku plunged blindly after him. It was a chase now; something he knew. He knew the old initiate Shifting Sands meditation too, though here, the exercise was writ large. He tried to clear the closest clouds of dust from his vision, but his frustration made it hard to focus.
–How? Dooku had felt the very real agony blazing off Sifo-Dyas; the effort of keeping it inside his damaged body too much for even his fine shields. He had fallen out of the very sky.
Jedi have lived through worse. Something Master Kostana liked to say on dangerous missions when facing the worst case scenario. She always used that calm, matter-of-fact tone where one could never be sure if she was teasing or in earnest. But perhaps the old stories were true. Perhaps a Jedi truly could walk through immolating fire and keep fighting, if just for a little while. If anyone would know how, it would be Lene Kostana. And she had taught her only apprentice well.
They were ghosts of themselves in the gray dust. Their footfalls traced a map that erased itself and began anew with each second of blasting wind. Sifo-Dyas moved in and out of Dooku’s sight. His motions were as smooth as a dance, his hands tucked behind his back in an almost mockery of Makashi as he slipped inside the negative space of Dooku’s attacks. He did not even bother to ignite his own lightsaber. He merely stepped under or around the blows, bending and turning, letting his sandstorm stand in for parry and riposte.
Dooku’s swings felt heavy and cumbersome, with none of the poetry in a true Makashi duel. Of course. Even that joy would be stripped from him in this. He might as well be fighting a shadow. Fury and grief began to tingle in his fingertips.
Why must Sifo-Dyas always make everything so difficult? He never wanted this. He never asked to be part of any desperate plans. If he hadn’t come to him for help with his blasted clones, his old friend would still be safe from Sidious in the sanctuary of the Temple. The long years of their separation had once been an agony to Dooku. Now he wondered why they couldn’t have lasted longer.
Sifo-Dyas did this to himself. And to Dooku.
Lightning burst from his hand, bright and terrible as the light of distant, dead stars. A killing stroke aimed directly at the heart still beating within that cracked cage of ribs.
The dust ceased its swirling. It hung suspended in the stormbright air around them: a fog that reeked of ozone. Dooku nearly staggered with relief and loss so large his body could hardly hold it. Done. It was done, then. He made himself take another step forward; as little as he wanted to see that familiar, once loved body twisting in death throes, he needed to be sure this time.
He was not prepared.
Sifo-Dyas’s eyes squeezed shut, blood leaking from their corners, and his body trembled as violently as if the electricity coursed through his limbs in truth. He wrestled with something on the ground; it seemed he held a vicious, wild animal, one that fought him with bright claws. Not a beast, but a ball of shivering light.
There is no death.
“No!” Dooku had barely time to blurt the foolish word before Sifo-Dyas hurled the lightning back at him. He threw himself sideways, forgetting his lightsaber, all his fine new powers, the scraps of secrets that had cost so much. Gritty dust filled his mouth as he struck the surface hard. The lightning flashed over top of him and rolled out onto the featureless plains of the desert moon. Thunder boomed in its wake.
Dooku lay panting, reeling, too stunned to get up. Oddly…frightened? There was only one Jedi in the Order who knew of his talents with lightning - that cold, natural gift which fear had called to his fingers without his ever being taught. For the second time that day, he found himself thinking of Lene Kostana. She must surely be dead by now, having been old when she trained Sifo-Dyas a lifetime ago. The ability to deflect lightning was an anachronism leftover from the Sith Wars. No Masters still taught it. Had she foreseen a day when her student would need to defend himself against Dooku? Had Sifo-Dyas?
Dooku pushed upright, dragging himself up out of the distracting loops of thought. He threw another gout of blue fire, but Sifo-Dyas was already reaching out to block. Their palms connected at either end of crackling heat and pain and brightness.
It happened so fast. Dooku’s weight tipped forward. He jerked, as if the lightning were a tether, a chain to which Sifo-Dyas had just given a good, hard yank. The distance between them closed. Sifo-Dyas twisted to avoid collision, a short sidestep, as neat and contained as moves in a training demonstration.
Dooku’s left leg buckled first. Lightning fell all around him: sizzling white rimmed in azure that dazzled his vision. But the path struck oddly, there and then vanished, as if Sifo-Dyas had somehow cast it away. It did not even hurt yet. There was only a curious feeling of wrong.
The smell of smoldering cloth made him glance down. A hole smoked incomprehensibly in his chest. Dooku looked at it, still not understanding. He fell.
He heard Sifo-Dyas’s lightsaber hiss off. It slid from his hand to land soundlessly in moondust beside him. His body came next, swaying for the span of a single, shaky exhale before folding. His knees hit the surface first with a puff of sediment, and then the rest of him tipped, collapsing onto Dooku.
It hurt. Dooku wheezed at the sudden pressure.
At least in dying, Sifo-Dyas was obliging. He slid over like water running off toward low ground. He ended up beside Dooku, his head half resting on his shoulder. Moondust clung to his eyelashes and to the fresh, red blood painting his lips.
It did not seem like either of them would be leaving this place.
Dooku looked over at his killer, who was curling against him. Involuntary, he knew. The need of a person in agony to bend in on himself when no other relief was possible.
“That was well done,” he still found himself whispering to him, absurdly. “Lene would… would be proud.”
At the sound of his voice, Sifo-Dyas’s eyes opened, or perhaps it was his Master’s name. Dooku did not need to see the burn blisters on his lips to understand that he could not have replied. The Force had been with Sifo-Dyas to the last, but his body was broken; he had asked too many impossible things of it. Still, there was awareness in his gaze.
“Effective… use of the shiak point of contact,” Dooku swallowed. The lightsaber instructor in him died hard. The pain of the blow itself was strange; rather less than he’d expected. He supposed the heat of the kyber sword burned away the very nerves that should announce the damage in their dialect of agony. He still understood that he must be dying, felt the heavy, enveloping weakness pulling him down and down.
Perhaps it was the delirium of shock. Sifo-Dyas had never looked so beautiful to him, his eyes as dark and compelling as the secret at the center of the universe. It seemed those eyes understood everything. Sifo-Dyas saw the truth, as he always had. It had been his great gift. His great curse.
Dooku found himself telling him more things. Pointless, useless things.
“I-I never wanted this.”
Sifo-Dyas looked at him, and for a moment, it felt as if the years dropped away, and they were teenagers again: co-conspirators collapsed against each together shoulder-to-shoulder in the moment before some trouble was caught and punished. Sifo-Dyas, wincingly sympathetic about how angry Yoda would be with Dooku, though everything had been his idea in the first place.
“You should have never brought… those plans to Serenno…” Dooku admonished. “You were dead the moment my Master spoke the word. If I hadn’t told him, he would have only found out later, and it would be worse for us both. I tried to save you from a crueler death. I tried…to…”
Master? How could a man dying, unable to speak, his insides surely pulverized by the crash impact, be so articulate? Dooku saw the question cross his face and then answer itself.
“The Sith have returned, Sifo-Dyas. In truth, they were never gone. What Lene was hunting for all those years. She was right. They were closer than she knew. And they possess a power greater and more terrible than…” he shuddered; it was too much to speak, but he needed Sifo-Dyas to know. “Theirs is the only true power to change anything in this galaxy.”
More blood came, a darker stain on Dooku’s shoulder as he panted out his life. Dooku wasn’t bleeding; it wasn’t possible, the lightsaber wound cauterized. But Sifo-Dyas bled enough for them both.
Darkness crept in and descended. It grew bitterly cold. Perhaps it was the lifeforce leaving his body, or just some ordinary angle of the nameless moon, tilting them into lunar night. The fading heat that was Sifo-Dyas’s body became the only thing that was real to Dooku. Existence shrunk to the space between them.
Sifo-Dyas must have felt it too. He pressed closer and it was odd to realize that they were sharing warmth, even now, at the end of everything. They had destroyed each other as utterly as two people could, and yet, even now, the heat seeped through. Dooku twitched the spare length of cape toward Sifo-Dyas to half-cover him. He’d always run cooler.
Funeral moon. Like the ones circling faroff Serenno. Fitting, almost, that he should accidentally participate in the cultural tradition of burial on such a satellite. He imagined the wind picking their bones clean, the dust tucking away their bodies. Resting forever here together, clasped in eternal embrace. There was something fitting to it. He couldn't remember his life before Sifo-Dyas; it felt right that he should not exist after him as well. Maudlin, perhaps, but he hurt, and Sifo-Dyas’s breath was warm and close and smelled of blood.
Time grew muddy. He could no longer tell if Sifo-Dyas still breathed, or even if he himself did.
Dooku lifted his head. He thought of filling his eyes with the light of the stars he had spent his life chasing across for one last time, but they were fading now too. A faint orange smudge in the sky.
Dawn, perhaps.