The Confederacy Six (HP/SW:TCW)

A riff on a Star Wars challenge that has DOM battle Harry appear before Count Dooku. I thought cool, but what if it's the Ministry Six as a whole? I like that idea.

42 BBY

20 years before the Clone Wars:

It was a desert like many others. The air felt slightly heavier than usual, the stars in the sky were different, but there was a moon, sand and a slight breeze that caused the camp fire to sway in the wind.

Around the campfire were seven figures- three teenaged boys, three girls and one wizened-looking old man with a sharply trimmed beard barely visible under a brown cloak. All seven sat in silence, with the old man staring at his young companions-and the companions in question staring back.

"What?" The old man asked with a tired smile. "Something on my nose?"

"Not really sir." A young man wearing glasses said, pushing the pair back into position. "More like… I-no, we-have a question."

"Mmm-hmm. That much was obvious." The man said brusquely, clearly irritated with the runaround he knew the kids were going to give him if he didn't put his foot down. "Out with it Potter. It can't be any harder than meditation lessons now, can it?" He asked.

"Well, uh, no, but it's still personal to you." Harry said, visibly squaring himself up. "Why did you leave the Order?" He asked.

The other five looked over to him with reproach in their gaze. "Harry, what did we say about asking him that?" Hermione asked. "It's barely been a month since he quit."

"And we've been travelling with him for three weeks Hermione." Harry retorted. "I mean, he's a Jedi right? You know, those people we know almost nothing about? Why did Master Dooku leave?"

Dooku's eye twitched minutely. "Speaking about people who are right in front of you as if they weren't there is rude children." He chided them. "Why do you want to know? What insight do you gain from asking me this? How does that further your own studies into the mysteries of the Force?" He challenged.

Harry shrugged. "Well, I just want to find out more about you… and about the Jedi in general. Nobody really knows anything about you guys." He pointed out.

"I would like to know because you don't seem like yourself." Luna said with a wince. "You feel… misaligned? Out of sorts? It's hard to put into words." She observed. "Talking helps." She said cheerfully.

Dooku looked at the six curious gazes in front of him and reached into the force. As usual nowadays, the Force felt slippery to him. It was harder than it had ever been before to find his balance within it, almost as if his point of equilibrium was subtly shifting around as his mind balanced itself and he gazed out. But he hadn't been a Jedi Master for nothing and soon was able to reach out to his sometime students and travelling companions.

There was no lie there. No deceptions he could detect. They really were curious about him… and worried. More worried than they let on. The Granger child in particular was nervous as she looked at him, her mind looking for signs of mood swings or telltale signs of impending violence. She wasn't worried for herself or her friends, but for him. She thought he was losing it.

And as his balance in the Force wobbled beneath him, he found her worries to be somewhat justifiable. He was less stable than he'd been before. He was having trouble letting go of emotions, especially ones that weren't considered positive by others. He did find himself doubting his own judgement more as time went on.

A part of his mind thought about the Dark Side and how it had started looming above him in his nightmares, but he quashed that thought as quickly as he became aware of it. He breathed in, grabbed hold of his emotions and let them out with a breath, casting them into the force as surely as he was casting his air out into the desert around them.

"I left…" Dooku began before pausing, the lie on his tongue drying up as a speck of dew in the glare of this planet's sun. "I left because I found out I was no Jedi after all." He admitted, finally voicing a truth he'd barely dared contemplate up until then.

Hermione leaned forward, her shock echoing his own at finally being able to confess to someone, anyone, what he'd been steadfastly refusing to acknowledge since he'd handed his former master his resignation from the Order. He felt confusion and doubt radiating off her in waves. "How is that possible? Aren't you a Jedi Master of some sort?" She asked carefully.

Dooku snorted. "Child, I sat on the Council. My former Master is the Grandmaster of the Order. I am the acknowledged expert in dozens of Force and lightsaber duelling techniques and have trained more younglings than you've met people. And yet I am no Jedi. Probably never was." He stated.

"Well how did you find that out then?" The redhead named Weasley asked as he picked a roasted hunk of meat out of the fire using a sharp stick. "Seems a bit… late to me." He said before wincing. "Yeah, that came out wrong. Sorry."

Dooku waved it off. "You make a fair point Weasley. In fact, it is an excellent one. You see, in order to understand my realisation you must first understand that the Jedi Code forbids attachments to others."

"Attachments?" Longbottom asked in-between bites. "Like relationships?"

"Yes and no. Attachment is a concept encompassing emotional connections to individuals and entities that go beyond the norm. Love, possessiveness, ownership, bondage, friendship and others are all essentially euphemisms for attachments and attachments affect a Jedi's judgement. Jedi are forbidden from forming attachments to anything."

"That sounds a bit extreme." Potter said, looking uncomfortable. "I thought Jedi were okay with love and other things."

Dooku shook his head. "There are reasons for it. A Jedi with attachments finds it harder to balance themselves in the force for one. If a loved one is in peril, for instance, then anyone would act recklessly to save them and experience extreme grief if they're unable to. They would react negatively if the things they valued came under threat by an outside party and defend them violently if necessary. And if they are betrayed by someone they love, they would be angry and upset at them. To you, such a thing may seem trivial. These are everyday perils you've doubtlessly had to deal with before and are often temporary."

"Not really temporary per se." Weasley muttered as Potter patted him on the back with a smile.

"But to a Jedi… hate. Anger. Fear. All these negative emotions and more affect the way they subconsciously interact with the Force. The Force has the ability to guide those that balance themselves on the Light Side. It empowers those who balance themselves in the Dark Side. All one needs is to reach out into the Force with a negative emotion or seek to force the Force into adopting a specific outcome to touch upon the Dark Side. And few Jedi have ever had the willpower to come back from that particular brink." Dooku cautioned. "It is something you are going to have to deal with as well if we take these lessons farther. I will not have another student of mine fall to the Dark Side if I can help it, so prepare for many lectures on this subject."

Neville nodded gravely, looking vaguely ill. "Got it." He said.

"I used to think that I 'got it' myself." Dooku said tiredly. "I believed myself free of attachments once not so long ago. I sat on the Council. I taught the younglings and Padawans looking for tips on lightsaber use. I researched the mysteries of the Force and went wherever the Force took me. I had few friends and no family. I had no possessions outside of what the Order gave me and no money of my own. I truly thought that I was a Jedi, free of attachment, free of temptation from the Dark Side, just… researching and studying. Until the day I was forced to kill my brother."

A horrible silence descended on the campfire.

"His name was Ramil. I had saved his life once, you know. Then, my sister pleaded with me to come back to Serenno to talk my brother out of his mad plans. I thought it would be easy, that my brother would listen to reason, but… it was not to be. He went mad, let Pirates pillage my home planet and forced me to fight him in a duel. He was dangerous, dangerous enough that, in the end, I had no choice but to take advantage of an opening when I found one."

"Oh no…" Harry said.

"I remember feeling his spirit join the Force and thinking 'My Brother is dead. I killed my own brother'." Dooku stated. "I had never thought of him as such before. Never once even considered it. But as soon as I thought it, I knew it to be true. I had killed my own brother in self-defence and… I found that I couldn't let go. I knew then that I was never truly fit to be a Jedi. I think part of me had known that all along. I just had never bothered to listen to it."

"What happened then?" Hermione asked quietly.

"I spoke to my former Master. We had… words. The likes of which we hadn't had in decades. At the end of it, he was little help. None of my friends were either. My decades of service to the Order, research into the Force, everything I'd achieved… it all felt hollow after that. In the end, I found that I fundamentally disagreed with the tenets on attachment, the rules surrounding asceticism and the sundering between the Jedi and their birth families. If I had been allowed to interact with my former family more deeply, I could have prevented my brother's death. I could have extended my mother's life. I could have prevented my sister's grief from overflowing the way it does now. I found that I could no longer reconcile my own feelings and findings surrounding the Force with the foundations of the modern Jedi Order. So, after a month thinking about it all and what it meant for me, I… left." Dooku finished more calmly than he himself felt. He'd only really talked about this with Sifo Dyas and, to a lesser extent, his friend Palpatine before leaving Coruscant. Both had advised him to go discover his own roots in an effort to regain some of the balance he'd lost after Ramil's death. "And then I discovered you lot falling out of a hyperdrive singularity of all things." He finished more cheerfully.

They all looked at him in a new light. Still somewhat anchored in the Force, he gazed upon them. He'd expected pity, but most of them looked at him with the kind of sympathetic understanding none of his friends had been able to muster for him.

"I saw a friend of mine die last year." Potter said sadly. "We'd been friendly rivals for a while, but he'd become a good friend to me. Then I watched him get killed by a rat of a man."

"My parents were tortured into insanity." Longbottom said stoically. "I visit them every time I can, but… all that's left are husks. I'm not even sure there's anything left. Sometimes… sometimes my mother gives me sweets wrappers. Because I gave her some when I first visited her after-after what happened."

"I was trapped behind a wall of rock while Harry was fighting the Basilisk." Ron said with a faraway look. "I remember hearing him struggling to breathe as someone called Tom taunted him about being bitten by the most venomous creature in the-in our world. I remember how the whistling, wheezing sound of his breath stopped suddenly. I don't know how long it lasted. All I know is that I thought that I'd lost both my sister and my best friend right then and there."

"When we were eleven, Harry crossed a wall of fire." Hermione confided. "There was a silencing charm applied to the doorway I didn't know about. After he crossed, I could hear nothing. I spent the rest of the night thinking he was dead."

"How often do these things happen to you?" Dooku asked Harry after a bout of silence.

"About once a year." Harry answered glibly. "This time was the worst though."

Luna looked at Dooku. "My mother died in my arms." She said simply.

Ginny shrugged. "I, well… I almost died when I was eleven. I thought I'd killed people too, so I, well…" She sighed. "I wasn't too upset at the idea." She finally admitted.

Ron hugged her.

"We all have our own scars sir." Harry said with a rueful smile on his face, pointing at the lightning bolt etched into his forehead. "Some are just more visible than others is all."

And just like that, Dooku felt some of the weight lift from his shoulders. And his footing felt firmer in the Force than it had in ages.