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Amidala says no. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He should probably call have called Sidious right then and there to figure out how to get Grievous back and how to get rid of Skywalker, but…
Darth Tyrannus, more commonly known as Count Yan Dooku, is many things, but stupid is not one of them. He chances a glance at Skywalker’s mind, and, lo and behold, he finds his Master’s manipulations with ease (and he curses the way that the boy’s ridiculously strong shields seem to close up even tighter while unconscious, rather than loosen like they would on quite literally anyone else…)
Skywalker’s shields have always been ridiculously tight for the emotional disaster that is his Great-Grandpadawan. This is going to take a while.
(He could just kill Skywalker; he could kill him and be done with it, but, well…
Where’s the fun in that?)
He keeps Skywalker unconscious until they arrive. Tyrannus has at least 50 secret hide-outs like this, and about twenty of them that are unknown to his Master. (Even if he did know, however, Sidious could do nothing about this. After all, the Sith encourage undermining the competition.)
“Where am I?” Skywalker growls upon waking, and Tyrannus allows himself to smile.
“Somewhere that we will never be found until I allow us to be,” he says.
Skywalker looks hesitant only for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he says, “I think that we will be.”
Tyrannus decides not to wait to use his best card.
“Are you sure?” he asked, “After all, the trade Senator Amidala agreed to was you for General Grievous.”
And then he leaves.
(Three days later, Skywalker tries to escape, to call out for help. A useless endeavor, of course, any mental message that he could possibly get out would be garbled at best.
Ah! The wonderful joys of orbiting Force-inhibitors. They weren’t very strong, but they kept any bonds from being used…
And, of course, they weren’t particularly advertised, publicly.)
Tyrannus hates torture, and he will admit that that’s a strange thing for a Sith. Still, it must be done. Even at this pace it would take months to break Skywalker. He ups the game; he breaks through.
Uprooting his Master from Skywalker’s mind, however, is a long, slow process, and the smug satisfaction that he had felt upon first breaking through quickly turns into irritation at the complexity of the boy’s shields. It did not help that a Leach Bond was even more complex than even this insane mindscape, and Sidious had gotten everywhere.
(He still finds it ironic, the brash, emotional boy known as Skywalker with the strongest and most complex mindscape that he has ever seen…
Then, he starts working his way through the boy’s mind, and the irony dries out.
“Remember, Ani,” says Skywalker’s mother in one memory he rips away from Sidious, “Our thoughts will always be our own, but we can’t let the Masters see them, or you will be punished for them.”
It was, he admitted, an easy opening for his Master to manipulate.)
It’s much later that he breaks into a part of Skywalker’s mind that had been hidden from even the boy himself. He lets Skywalker think that he hadn’t seen. After all, it’s unimportant and impossible.
There’s no way that this boy could ever defeat him.
(He leaves much quicker, that day.)
It’s not too long afterwards that he rips the last bit of Skywalker’s Leach Bond out. He leaves, sends a message to the Jedi, and then contacts Sidious to receive his punishment…
He knows that it’s worth it.
Somehow, though, even without Grievous, the war continues. He sees Skywalker again not a month after he’d let the boy go. The boy is terrified of him, and it brings a sick sort of amusement to Tyrannus, especially because he knows that Skywalker isn’t a complete imbecile, and the boy must know the truth about the Chancellor by now.
(He is more terrified of the Apprentice than the Master. That, in and of itself, should be a sign of his Master’s impending demise, and Tyrannus finds himself wondering just what Skywalker is planning.)
“Fighting off the entire Jedi security force would have been a challenge,” he says, standing up, “But, now that they are gone…”
Tyrannus trails off, lighting his blade, and Skywalker’s flinch is unbelievably satisfying.
“...defeating you alone will be an easy task.”
Somehow, however, the boy’s overpowering fear and natural skill with a blade makes him a challenge to fight, the null in the Force around Skywalker throwing Tyrannus off-balance. Even so, however, he escapes with ease.
(Well, there goes this plan that he hadn’t particularly been invested in.)
After that, things continue on as normal for some time, but, then, the other shoe finally drops...
He’s alone when he feels his bond with Sidious snap. It’s a good thing, though, because his now-former Master had gotten into much more of his mind than Tyrannus had thought. It takes him over a month to properly change the mental scarring…
But, in that month, he makes some of his own plans.
The trick, of course, will be getting others to go along.
(He hopes that Skywalker will be as unbalanced as their last meeting.)