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Shaak Ti is the first to Fall. How could she not be?
She stands above the training area and watches the men – no, the boys, fight and panic and stumble their way through their training, so young, too young, by their thousands and thousands, and she thinks we have an army of children.
She sees the bodies of the young ones, failed experiments, unworthy pieces of production, still in their death before their time. She feels them pass into the Force and knows that it is wrong.
You are mine, she vows to each identical child she sees take his first breath. You are mine, under my protection, my shelter. I am not strong enough yet to take you away from here, to shield you from your makers, but by the Force, someday, I will be.
~
Plo Koon is next. Again, how could he not? He sees in the troops he is given so many little padawans, so many younglings playing at being older. He sees them quickly gain the experience and knowledge of seasoned soldiers, or die. His heart breaks a little more each time one is gone, and mends a little each time one smiles at him, looks at him with hope in his eyes. Each time he hears the whispers of ‘the General will help’, ‘the General will come’, ‘our General can help you, really, go to him’.
He Falls the first time he overhears a trooper, one who was one of the first given to him, call him ‘General Buir’ when they think he can’t hear them.
I am your buir, and you are all my ad, he vows to them. I will end this war and we will know peace. We will be aliit.
He never regrets a moment of it.
~
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Fall is slow, painfully slow. He sinks with each death, each heartbreak, each report he reads of destruction and manipulation. He just wants it to end, and he wants to save everyone. To do that, he just needs to be better. To be faster, more skilled, more powerful, more capable. He needs to be everywhere at once and to care for everything. He needs to be perfect.
He knows he can do it, if he just learns how a bit at a time.
He doesn’t even realize it’s happening until it’s done.
~
Saesee Tiin Falls as the war goes on. He sees so much death. It’s too much. Too much duplicity and suspicion and betrayal.
He starts his Fall slowly, but embraces it near the end.
Why not? What’s left for him, for any of them?
~
The seeds of Luminara Unduli’s Fall are planted as she watches Knight Skywalker cling to his padawan after thinking her lost in the retaking of Geonosis. She was worried about Barriss, true, but she had been prepared to give her up as lost so easily. To honor her sacrifice and walk away without even looking. Only Skywalker’s – no, Anakin’s – determination to find their padawans had kept her there. He had been right.
For a moment she sees the cold thing she could become if she continues down that path, and recoils from it. She pulls Barriss into a startled hug and holds her tightly.
If the Code leads to that, I do not want it, she dares to think. That is not strength. That is cowardice. Weakness.
She thinks about that moment for months. She never comes to a different conclusion.
She begins to teach her padawan the same.
~
Mace Windu is the third to Fall in a moment, without a slow slide. Ironically enough, it’s not because of his troops, who he feels very protective of, or because of his friends. It happens when he looks a dying beast from the past in the eye and feels its pain. He hadn’t wanted to kill the Zillo Beast, just contain it, release it somewhere it could be happy and roam freely. But the Chancellor had ordered it brought to Coruscant, to be experimented on and locked up and eventually killed when it escaped, just as anyone with half a brain could have predicted it would.
What if the next time they found something that could aid them in the war, it was a child? Would the Chancellor hesitate then?
He won’t bet his life on it. His position as head of the Jedi Council is quickly becoming a position in name only, a mouthpiece for that same Chancellor. He’s in too deep and the only thing to do is somehow become more powerful than the cunning old man who holds their leashes.
He Falls thinking of the helpless beast, of the children in the creche, of all his friends and family in the Force who have been sacrificed to this pointless war.
No more, he vows. No more.
~
Kit Fisto’s Fall begins from the moment he is born. Always too passionate, always caring too much. He learns to hide those feelings, to temper them, to lock them away so they can’t be felt by others. But he keeps them alive, and learns to wield them as a sword and a shield.
When he is given command of his troops and leads them into battle, he finally has an outlet. He fights with his rage and his despair and his love, and disguises it as skill and bravado. Sometimes he feels like a hypocrite when he counsels other to be calm, but he knows that his ways won’t work for them. They haven’t learned how to control their emotions instead of having their emotions control them.
He never really realizes he’s Falling. It just seems natural to him.
~
People are always lecturing Anakin Skywalker to be careful that he doesn’t Fall.
He can’t.
He is the Chosen One, the One who will bring balance to the Force.
He can’t be wholly Light, just as he can’t be wholly Dark.
Anakin Skywalker is Grey, and he loves with all his heart and soul – his friends, his troops, his family. His Ahsoka and Obi-Wan and Rex. His Padmé.
And Anakin Skywalker grew up as a slave. He understands slavery intimately, in all its guises. He knows when someone is trying to lure him in, even if he doesn’t consciously realize it.
The Chosen One knows both Light and Dark, understands both how to be a slave and how to walk free. He knows how to be alive and how to mourn the dead.
Chancellor Palpatine doesn’t understand. He never will.
~
Quinlan Vos has always walked in the edges. For him Falling isn’t so much a choice as it is a necessity. The Light has nothing left for him anymore. It’s too cold and sterile. It’s chains around his wrists and on his door and sets of rules indoctrinated into his conscience, his soul. The Dark is chains around his ankles and the walls of his mind, fire destroying his carefully built home for his heart.
Above everything, Quinlan Vos has always valued freedom.
He takes what the Light and the Dark taught him with thanks and moves on to find life and hope and love somewhere else.
Falling, up and down at the same time, to him, is freedom.
Like Anakin, like Kit, like Obi-Wan and Luminara and Shaak Ti, Quinlan finds his peace most of all in the Grey.
~
Aayla Secura’s Fall is long and steady. She was tricked into Falling once, in hate and betrayal, and she climbed back up. This time, she Falls because of love, and it’s so much stronger. Love for her troops, for her fellow Jedi, for her mentors and friends and the padawans she tries to safeguard as the war rages around them.
Love for the people she sees as they flee the war, their homes burning and their families dying.
How can she stay indifferent to their pain?
~
Barriss Offee watches as the Republic gets more and more tied up in endless debates about morals and ethics and occasionally descends into a screaming mob.
She watches as the Jedi Council mimics it in miniature, and watches as it slowly begins to come to its senses. Whatever it is that’s changed about them, she thinks it’s a change for the better. If they hadn’t, she would have had to take matters into her own hands.
Her Master agrees, to her indescribable relief and happiness, when she finally works up the courage to speak to her about how she truly feels. And Barriss Falls, safe in the company of Master Unduli and with the confidence that she’s doing the right thing.
~
Ki-Adi-Mundi sees and participates in too much hypocrisy and deception as the war grinds on. He holds out his hope, his optimism, until the war engulfs even the padawans in its twisted games. He sees Ahsoka Tano, little Ahsoka, on trial, facing death for treason he knows in his heart she didn’t do, wouldn’t do, and something in him snaps.
This is not the Jedi way, he says to himself. Or is it? To be detached, to not care. How can we keep the peace if we don’t care about the people?
And something inside him whispers, that’s why it isn’t working.
~
Yoda Falls while training with the spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn. It’s not because of the darkness the Sith artifacts try to tempt him with. He Falls because he realizes he cares more about saving other people than himself. He loves them. He’s attached to them. But the Jedi Code says that that is forbidden.
How can it be wrong, when it gives me the strength to save them? he wonders. How can it be wrong to want the vision of the slaughtered Jedi, my family, my students, to be averted?
He’s spent eight hundred and some years following the Code and seen it slowly strangle the Jedi into stagnation. It’s time for a change.
He’s the fourth to Fall between one thought and the next.
~
Ahsoka Tano tried, she tried so hard to stay on the Jedi path. She Falls alone, after walking away from the Order. They tried to acquit her, but they couldn’t, because of the Senate and the Chancellor and politics. She didn’t want it, after the first burst of adrenaline was over. How dare they throw her away like that. She’s not a toy and not a droid. She can make her own choices, and she doesn’t want anything to do with the entire rotten government anymore.
She’s the only one to Fall because of rage and bitterness, and not because of love. She loses herself for a time, but finds her way back in the arms of her family, her Skyguy and her Padmé who she called Mom once and keeps almost calling Mom again. Her Grandmaster Obi-Wan who always knows what she needs when she’s upset and her best friend Rex who always has her back and her Master Plo who gives the best hugs whenever she asks and all her clone brothers she grew up alongside. They hold her close and don’t censure her for her outburst and it’s the best she’s ever felt.
Ahsoka Tano is the only one to Fall in the way of the Banite Sith, but all her Sith family is there to catch her and lead her home.
~
All the others, the members of the Council and of the Order, everyone old enough to know what they’re doing and make their own choices, Fall as well, padawans and masters alike. Some slowly, some in a heartbeat, some in a few hours of difficult meditation. Some Fall on the battlefield, some in the privacy of their quarters, some in the comforting dark of the barracks as they watch over their sleeping troops, some as they desperately try to heal what cannot be healed and blood runs over their hands.
No one tells anyone else. If they’ve Fallen, they must then be Sith, right? Even if they don’t want domination over anyone or the destruction of worlds or an insane amount of power. They just want their friends and family and lovers to be safe. They want to protect them. They’re being selfish, and that’s certainly not how a Jedi is.
They’re secret Sith hiding among Jedi, in the heart of the Jedi Order itself, and they’re too scared to let even a sign slip their shields.
There was a reason the Jedi were peacekeepers and never generals.