AN: I have impulse control issues when posting chapters, if you wish me to continue, please feed my addiction to writing with reviews, pretty please?
Chapter 34 - Death Watch
As Dooku walked through his palace, he breathed the mountainous air deep into his lungs.
Coruscant was the wrong place for the Jedi.
Serreno had mountains, oceans, forests, everything that the Jedi needed to flourish on their own. Serreno's cities were small, and the greatest problems they faced were their small populations.
Young Padawans would no longer be confined to the stone walls of a palace, there was no underworld for them to fall into, no political traps sitting in the buildings next store to tempt and threaten them.
A part of him thought of tearing down the palace to rebuild the Temple, the final act against his father's legacy.
"Brother!"
"Jenza," he greeted warmly, opening his arm to his little sister who ran into his arms.
She was of course a woman now, but her zest for life had never faded. She was always a rebellious soul. She had gone behind their father's back to keep in contact with him over the years, even when he had still been Yoda's Padawan.
She squeezed him tight before releasing him.
He touched her fair check, and reading the worry in her dark eyes, he asked, "What's wrong?"
"We have company."
He went very still, "Where?"
She stepped back, pulling on a dark curl she said, "The dining hall."
Dooku stepped around her, the sound of his heels, clicking on the marble floors, Jenza's shorter stride and quicker steps echoing after his.
At the head of the table sat a Mandalorian, helmet covering his face and his blaster resting boldly on the table.
Dooku didn't ask how he had gotten in.
He assumed the palace guards were dead.
A Jedi Temple Guard could have handled him, but not the mundanes that Dooku paid.
Pity, they had been decent enough men.
"Jango Fett," he drawled. "What do we owe this honour?"
Jango gave a low chuckle, "Count, let's not pretend it is anything but business between us. Or rather, blood."
It was then that Dooku noted the symbol painted jaggedly on his chest plate. "I never thought to see you join the terrorists."
Jango hadn't just joined Death Watch, Dooku suspected he was its new leader.
"Funny, that's what I would have said about the Jedi decades ago. We were both wrong, now Pre Vizsla is dead and so is your apprentice."
Dooku stiffened, tugging on his bound with Qui-Gon, his one with Rael was far dimmer but still there. "I'm sure I don't know who you mean."
Jango tossed two lightsabers clattering on the table.
The hilts were curved as his own.
Dooku felt the blood drain from his face, "Komari, you killed Komari Vosa?" She had never been Knighted on his advisement and the Council's agreement. Last he heard of her, she had fallen in with a Dark Sider cult.
Jango stood, his gloved hand trailing the table close to the blaster he left there. "Interesting discoveries I've made with lightsabers, I always thought them such inferior weapons. You would have to be mad to wield them." His other hand went to his hip, "But I've come around."
"You are no Jedi," Dooku said, though his voice was uncertain because something rippled around the Mandalorian.
Jango Fett was not Force sensitive, yet the Force seemed to tremble around him like a shadow cast in water.
"A Jedi? No, not that, never that," Jango said, a smile in his voice, "But the Force is wide and accommodating."
Dooku reached for his own blade, but Jango was impossibly faster.
The blaster on the table came to Jango's hand as if pulled on an invisible string.
Dooku's blade came humming to life a millisecond too late.
But the gun wasn't a blaster, it wasn't a beam of energy, but a little ball that made an injecting sound as it plunged into his sister's shoulder.
"Jenza!" he bellowed, catching her one armed.
Her brown eyes looked up into his and her back arched backwards over his arm, her iris's spiralling, a sickly yellow blooming around her pupil, the veins in the white of her eyes bursting as she seized in his arms.
As Dooku laid her on the ground, Jango shot at him.
Dooku's emotions were too high, his concentration not what it should have been. The balls were some form of droid, moving erratically so that even as he sliced through two another three and then a fourth struck him in the arm and chest.
At first, he felt only a liquid being pumped into him, finding his blood stream, and then…
And then the Force opened around him.
He had nearly tipped into the Darkness before, he had danced the edges between Light and Dark, beckoned the Darkness to him with sweet songs taught to him by ancient artefacts.
But nothing compared to this, this was drinking poison, this was Power.
The Force undulated around him, and he forgot about Jango and Jenza, he forgot where he was, who he was, and he Became.
Closing his eyes, he felt the Force swirl not around him, but through him. He became the Dark, and the Dark became him. His feet rose off the ground the palace around broke apart at the seams.
The Darkness was pain and sorrow, and thus, Dooku became pain and sorrow.
His sister was dead or dying, and his foe remained breathing.
The Darkness laughed.
Dooku laughed, the sound ending in a cry as he tore the world asunder.
Rey felt the disturbance in the Force before Obi-Wan did, but she was sure that any Force sensitive in the galaxy could have felt the chasm of Darkness that opened in the universe.
She dropped their ship out of hyperspace, and almost immediately received a transmission from Master Jinn.
"It's Dooku," he said without preamble.
"We'll go," she said at once.
Master Jinn looked at her mournfully, "You may have to kill him, Padawan mine."
"No!" she almost exploded, "He needs our help, something has happened to him."
"He might be beyond help," he cautioned.
"We won't know until we see him, will we?" she challenged.
Master Jinn looked at Obi-Wan, "I leave it to your wisdom, Obi-Wan."
Obi-Wan looked between Rey and Ahsoka and sighed, "I think we can risk it. If he'll listen to anyone, it would be you or Rey."
Master Jinn bowed his head, "Be careful, and may the Force be with you."
"And with you," they echoed, even as Rey was plugging in the coordinates for Serreno.
They had only just left Naboo, Serreno was not far.
Yet hyperspace did not feel fast enough as Rey pushed their craft to an inch of its existence.
"What do you think happened?" Ahsoka asked, voice soft.
Obi-Wan's face was grim, "Dooku fell."
"He hasn't fallen," Rey snapped, unbelieving. Master Dooku had come so far from when she first met him, she refused to believe he had been broken now.
The rest of the trip was passed in silence. It wasn't until they dropped into view of Serreno that Obi-Wan spoke again.
"The palace, Rey."
She wordlessly directed their ship downward at inadvisable speeds, but despite the warning lights, the ship landed unharmed.
The Serennian palace had been obliterated.
She would have said a bomb had gone off, but there was nothing exploded, no damage other than every single thing being dismantled into some sort of morbid composition.
It was as if each stone and wire, every motor and object, from computer to furniture had been torn apart and blown by a wind that cared nothing for the density of mass; only the pattern of a thousand petaled flower spun around a single point.
Obi-Wan cautioned her and Ahsoka as they picked their way through the debris, but his exact words only Ahsoka was paying any mind to.
Rey was focused on getting to the figure on his knees in the centre of this disaster.
"Master Dooku?" she asked cautiously.
She felt nothing from him in the Force.
He didn't move.
Not daring to touch him, she walked around him, to see the woman he bowed over. Rey saw that this must have been Jenza, his sister.
Her dark brown hair spread around her, her arms folded lovingly over her chest, her eyes were completely black, as if her pupils had dilated completely.
That black gaze starred up into the starry sky, reflective yet unseeing.
The dead were blind within their corpses.
"Master Dooku?" Rey tried again.
His head moved up slowly, his eyes too, were completely black, the irises blown as if he had been sipping death sticks.
Dark circles and tear tracks traced his too pale cheeks.
He looked defeated, remorse and grief drawing out his age and stripping away his power. His voice came low and broken, "I killed her… Rey, I killed her."
Rey dropped to her own knees across from him, "What happened Master Dooku?"
His gaze fell to Jenza, and he laid a hand gently on one of his sister's motionless hands as if afraid to wake her, "I don't remember…"
Obi-Wan and Ahsoka had reached them but Dooku didn't acknowledge them as he hunched in on himself. "I can't remember."
He closed his bloodshot eyes.
"I killed my own sister."
Obi-Wan laid a firm hand on his shoulder, and Dooku lost whatever strength was holding him together.
Obi-Wan wrapped his arms around the older man. Dooku appeared to cry, but he didn't seem to have any tears left to shed as Rey came around to help comfort him.
Rey didn't think Master Dooku had killed his sister, especially not as the smell of something like a strong herb or foul tree wafted off of the Makashi Master. Pulling back from him, she found the wounds on his arm and upper chest, raised idents as if he had been hit with needles or stung by something.
It took them a long time to persuade Dooku they needed to go back to Coruscant and that Jenza's body could not be given her final rights in flames until after they had seen a medical team.
Dooku was listless as they got him onto the ship. He refused to leave his sister, refused to rest or drink so much as a cup of water.
It wasn't until they arrived back to the Temple and Master Yoda commanded him to listen to the healer, did Dooku finally respond to them coherently. Neither Yoda, Master Jinn, nor Rey left his bedside for the days of his recovery.
But Master Dooku never recovered his memories, and whatever drugs that had been pumped through his system that had caused him to go berserk within the Force, that had killed Jenza with a single dose, remained as of yet unidentified.
The Council was worried, Rey was worried, and Master Dooku remained convinced of his guilt until Obi-Wan showed him a picture of what was once his palace.
"You destroyed everything, stone by stone. You dismantled everything with a strength that was felt across the galaxy," Obi-Wan said holding Dooku's gaze, his eyes had gone back to their normal brown, "But Jenza was at the centre of it without a single scratch. You did not kill your sister, the drug did. Even as you lost yourself to a power beyond reckoning, you had the presence of self to protect her."
"I was too late to save her," Master Dooku had said hollowly.
"Perhaps you failed her," Obi-Wan said without wavering, "But you did not kill her."
Rey had touched his shoulder, "From everything you've told me of Jenza Dooku, she would have forgiven you, Master."
He bowed his head, his shoulders slumping.
That was the first night Master Dooku ate of his own volition.
Rey was determined to discover who had done this to her proud grand-Master, and she would see that justice was meted out.
AN: Small chapters, rapid updates. Please, please review, it's how I judge if people are still invested in my work.