Sometimes he wanted so desperately to give up, to allow death to overtake him and to write off his life as a failure in the end. Those were his bleakest moments, and they came far too often.
He was old...So old...And tired...so tired...
It would be easy just to close his eyes and never open them again...
He could become one with Qui-Gon and the other Jedi that were gone...But that would be doing the Force—and the galaxy—a great disservice.
The Dark Side was grasping; the Light Side was giving. If he grasped at death, then he would be a very poor Jedi indeed.
All hope was not lost, but it was hard to rest one's last hope on two small children. Children could be turned or killed so very easily...He had seen it happen, but oh how he wished he had not...If only he had been more forceful in insisting that training Anakin was dangerous...
How could two children hope to defeat the Chosen One, a man who had brought balance to the Dark Side of the Force? Oh, how the prophecy had been misunderstood...The Jedi had been blinded by their power and by their contentment with the way matters were.
Now the whole galaxy was paying for the Jedi's mistakes. And the galaxy's hopes rested on two children, especially the boy.
He knew the boy was strong—but was he strong enough? He knew that the boy's having grown up on Tatooine without real parents to love him would tug at what was left of Vader's heart—but would the tug be strong enough?
And then, if the boy could not bear the burden, would his sister be strong enough? Separating the two was what the Force had willed, was it not? The boy would then have fewer attachments—the somewhat gruff Owen would not hold his heart too strongly, and though Beru was kind she could never truly take the place that should have been Padmé's. Tatooine was not like Alderaan—it held no being's heart. The girl would surely adore both Alderaan and her foster parents...Such attachments were difficult for a Jedi to deal with—Anakin had allowed his love of his mother to destroy him. If the boy failed, would the girl fail, too?
Once, the Force had been willing to give him answers...Now, it seemed to be eluding him. Was it his age? Had he not yet gotten over his blindness?
He was too old to take on Vader, and Obi-Wan was unable to. Obi-Wan still felt a strong bond with Vader, though he tried to hide it, and he could no more directly kill Vader than he could the angry Anakin on Mustafar...He still loved him like a son.
Yoda could not grudge up the anger necessary for an attack without provocation...He felt no anger, just an intense sadness...The Jedi had fallen so far with their shining star, the Chosen One who was supposed to do something so grand that all would remember his name.
Yoda could not hate anyone, and so he could not attack.
And yet he did not want the boy to hate his father...That way seemed easiest, perhaps, but it would be no help for the Jedi. Hatred was simply not the Jedi way.
There was little Yoda could do but trust in the Force and put his last hope on two children, a boy being raised as a moisture farmer and a girl being raised as a princess.
Sometimes he really missed the first few hundred years of his life.
