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It was, despite Mace’s hopes, early in the war when he asked the question of Commander Ponds what most Jedi generals asked of their respective commanders; the question of what he would do after the war given the chance. Ponds didn’t meet his eyes, instead taking another drag on his cigarrel and staring off into the blasted wastes they found themselves taking cover in.
“Permission to speak freely, General?” the clone asked, flicking the cigarrel and wiping his chestplate when the ashes made their way upwind.
Mace waved him on, and Ponds said, “I doubt I’ll live that long, sir.”
Once upon a time, Mace had had aspirations for a mythical After, where all his dreams could come true and he and Depa would be safe from Venator crashes and B2-E Rocket Droids. Such aspirations weren’t conducive to things like smoking. But then, three months in, he was hunkered behind the decrepit remains of an AT-TE with his commander while the shells just kept whistling overhead louder than the screams of dying troopers. He eyed Ponds’s cigarrel with a brief flash of envy.
Less than five months later, Ponds was shot in the head by Aurra Sing. The only thing keeping him from drowning inside himself was Anakin Skywalker’s mechanical hand on his shoulder.
No Jedi or clone knew it yet, but that was the final major event of the first fifth of the war.
—--
Mace sat and watched the footage. He watched it again. And then a third time. Each time was the same; the instinctual response didn’t change. He wondered if this was the definition of insanity.
He wondered why he had ever agreed to this plan. It had been the chancellor’s idea, planting a Jedi within the criminal organization that sought his death. The only problem had been the lack of available Shadows. Nearly no one was available and those that were were all unsuitable for this kind of work.
So of course, Obi-Wan had to volunteer. They’d thrown together a ramshackle plan afterwards, one that would be effective but with an extraordinary cost. The word ‘attachment’ was tossed around like a ball between younglings, though Mace wondered what game, exactly, was being played.
His fingers tightened around the armrests of the chair as the footage played for a fourth time. A nearby police droid had followed the shots and captured the pursuit, the firefight, the sound like meat being hit with a tenderizer when the bolt impacted Obi-Wan’s chest, and the screams of a padawan watching his master die.
Could Mace put Depa through that? For the greater good? For the future of the Jedi and the Republic?
He stood next to Skywalker at the ‘funeral’ and nearly couldn’t walk straight afterwards. He’d felt many emotions unbecoming of a Jedi Knight from the young man over the course of his twelve years with the Order, but this was the first time he’d ever felt true, deep, Dark hatred. Mace knew after this he was due to see Obi-Wan, and for that he couldn’t breathe. He stopped by his quarters on the way to the Halls of Healing to retch and shower.
He told himself it was because Skywalker projected too much.
He wondered if that was true.
—--
Mace knew, as soon as Skywalker burst into the Chancellor’s office with only panic in his eyes, that there was exactly one way this encounter could end.
As the lightning strobed across the room, Skywalker begged, pleaded for his mentor’s life. For his wife’s life.
“He’s too dangerous to be left alive,” Mace had said. He’d tried to explain just how much power Darth Sidious wielded, but he knew it fell on deaf ears.
“It’s not the Jedi Way!” Skywalker shouted.
And as Mace looked between the weakened Sith and the young man, radiating his desperation into the room, he knew he would sacrifice the Jedi Way for the Jedi, as he had done over, and over, and over again.
Detached from his body, he struck and was struck, and plummeted miles from the highest point on Coruscant through the levels of gleaming skyscrapers and speeder lanes and slums and decay.
His hysterical mind flashed between thoughts and feelings, and he wondered where the Jedi Way had gone, or if it had died a thousand deaths when the Head of the Order sought to cut down an unarmed man, when they had manufactured trauma to sell a rumor, when they had taken part in the war at all.
Would the future look back on them kindly?
Perhaps the Jedi Way died on Tatooine, when they purchased a boy and left his mother to rot. Or perhaps it died on Galidraan, when Dooku and Fett performed upon each other unimaginable trauma. Or perhaps the Sith had eaten it up when they died a thousand years ago, pulled into the darkest depths as the Jedi wiped them from the face of the galaxy.
Just before Mace hit the ground, he wondered if it had ever existed at all.