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He decides to win.

He decides that Dooku should lose the same hand he took. Decision is reality, here: his blade moves simultaneously with his will and blue fire vaporizes black Corellian nanosilk and disintegrates flesh and shears bone, and away falls a Sith Lord’s lightsaber hand, trailing smoke that tastes of charred meat and burned hair. The hand falls with a bar of scarlet blaze still extending from its spastic death grip, and Anakin’s heart sings for the fall of that red blade.

He reaches out and the Force catches it for him.

And then Anakin takes Dooku’s other hand as well.

Dooku crumples to his knees, face blank, mouth slack, and his weapon whirs through the air to the victor’s hand, and Anakin finds his vision of the future happening before his eyes: two blades at Count Dooku’s throat.

But here, now, the truth belies the dream. Both lightsabers are in his hands, and the one in his hand of flesh flares with the synthetic bloodshine of a Sith blade.

Dooku, cringing, shrinking with dread, still finds some hope in his heart that he is wrong, that Palpatine has not betrayed him, that this has all been proceeding according to plan—

Until he hears “Good, Anakin! Good! I knew you could do it!” and registers this is Palpatine’s voice and feels within the darkest depths of all he is the approach of the words that are to come next.

“Kill him,” Palpatine says. “Kill him now.”

In Skywalker’s eyes he sees only flames.

“Chancellor, please!” he gasps, desperate and helpless, his aristocratic demeanor invisible, his courage only a bitter memory. He is reduced to begging for his life, as so many of his victims have. “Please, you promised me immunity! We had a deal! Help me!”

And his begging gains him a share of mercy equal to that which he has dispensed.

“A deal only if you released me,” Palpatine replies, cold as intergalactic space. “Not if you used me as bait to kill my friends.”

And he knows, then, that all has indeed been going according to plan. Sidious’s plan, not his own. This had been a Jedi trap indeed, but Jedi were not the quarry.

They were the bait.

“Anakin,” Palpatine says quietly. “Finish him.”

Years of Jedi training make Anakin hesitate; he looks down upon Dooku and sees not a Lord of the Sith but a beaten, broken, cringing old man.

“I shouldn’t—”

But when Palpatine barks, “Do it! Now!” Anakin realizes that this isn’t actually an order. That it is, in fact, nothing more than what he’s been waiting for his whole life.

Permission.

And Dooku—

As he looks up into the eyes of Anakin Skywalker for the final time, Count Dooku knows that he has been deceived not just today, but for many, many years. That he has never been the true apprentice. That he has never been the heir to the power of the Sith. He has been only a tool.

His whole life—all his victories, all his struggles, all his heritage, all his principles and his sacrifices, everything he’s done, everything he owns, everything he’s been, all his dreams and grand vision for the future Empire and the Army of Sith—have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of him, add up only to this.

He has existed only for this.

This.

To be the victim of Anakin Skywalker’s first cold-blooded murder.

First but not, he knows, the last.

Then the blades crossed at his throat uncross like scissors.

Snip.

And all of him becomes nothing at all.

Murderer and murdered each stared blindly.

But only the murderer blinked.

I did that.

The severed head’s stare was fixed on something beyond living sight. The desperate plea frozen in place on its lips echoed silence. The headless torso collapsed with a slowly fading sigh from the cauterized gape of its trachea, folding forward at the waist as though making obeisance before the power that had ripped away its life.

The murderer blinked again.

Who am I?

Was he the slave boy on a desert planet, valued for his astonishing gift with machines? Was he the legendary Podracer, the only human to survive that deadly sport? Was he the unruly, high-spirited, trouble-prone student of a great Jedi Master?