Chapter Text
Later, when the histories of that tumultuous time were being written, most would record the first to Fall as Anakin Skywalker, Plo Koon or Mace Windu - the obvious candidates. A few would point to Bariss Offee, though she had lost her mind to despair and grief rather than Falling, but that was Force business.
Really it was Shaak Ti who Fell first. Her heart was large and warm, and she loved every one of the too-tall, too-old, too-young boys who passed through her care. Each and every last one. Down to the little embryos that the Kaminoans flushed into the sea because they were 'defective'. They could not sense, as she could, how as soon as the first two cells bonded, a little steady light bloomed in the Force.
She named each child, and whispered their name to them as they grew. Not once did she mistake one boy for another. They were all their own beautiful, different, unique, beloved selves, and she gave her heart to them unreservedly.
They had little else but themselves, and she gave them what she could. Her love, her pride in them, her confidence in them, their names. Each and every trooper who left Kamino after Shaak Ti arrived carried with him two things - a commlink frequency that linked to her own private comm at all hours of the day or night, and a little trinket that was special to themselves.
Shaak made her many many sons special. No one else had the same trinket. No one else had the same name. No one else was hugged in quite the same way. No one else looked quite the same. No one else thought the same way. She made them human.
Then they began to die.
Christophsis, Geonosis, Umbara, all the battles. She knew when her sons died. She heard their screams and saw their faces during the night, and she wept. A festering wound opened in her heart.
Hundreds of her sons died each day, and each day hundreds more were shipped off to replace them, as though they were machine assembled droids.
But they weren't. They were special, they were beautiful, they were her sons. They were dying.
It hurt so much when she felt the snuffing out of another bright, unique light. When she knew that she would never hear that voice that was just a tiny bit different from all the rest again. Oh, the Kaminoans would boast that physically they were all identical, but really, they were so very very different.
She did not even know why she loved her sons any more. What was the point? They would all die anyway. Attachment hurt her. But when she saw their beautiful lights for the first time, and saw the emotionless, scientific gaze of the longnecks, she could not help it. These beautiful lonely little people needed someone other than their brothers. What could she do but love them? What could she do but care for them? What could she do but mourn them?
Umbara was the breaking point. When she was told what Krell did, she lashed out. The lab she was in exploded, glass raining everywhere. If she wasn't so devastated, so angry, so bereft, she would have found the shocked faces of the Kaminoans laughable. As it was, she saw only their calculating eyes - the same ones that did not even flicker when they ordered hundreds of her sons to die before they could even live.
The glass shards sliced the longnecks into tiny shreds of pale flesh, oozing white liquid. Shaak did not even feel sorry for it. They had killed her sons with no regrets. They were worse than scum.
A mother would do anything for her children.
Shaak's eyes were as bright a gold as the fire that raged in her soul. A fire fueled by love as much as hate, and by justice as much as rage.
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Ki-Adi-Mundi was next.
His whole life, he had walked a fine line between attachment and neglect. He loved his wives, he loved his beautiful children.
Even before the war, he had been so close to just giving up his lightsaber and living out his days on Cerea with his family.
He was on leave. He was on Cerea.
It was supposed to be safe.
He had been given permission to spend a few weeks on his home planet after a disastrous campaign.
Cerea was a breath of fresh air - no droids, no technology.
It was his home, his sanctuary.
Grievous attacked Cerea.
It was a massacre.
Before the first attack, the Mundi family consisted of Ki-Adi-Mundi, his wives, their eight children and three grandchildren.
When the dust cleared, Ki-Adi-Mundi only had Mawin and Sylvn, who had been offworld.
He Fell quietly, holding Shea's dead body in his arms.
Lightening sparked from his fingers as he repelled the next attack.
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Kit Fisto and Aayla Secura Fell together.
Some would say they had been Falling slowly and quietly ever since they first saw each other.
Not-kisses and longing looks were the order of the day for years.
Neither knew quite when they agreed to stop circling.
One day they woke up together.
They never stopped.
Fear, of discovery, of death, of losing the other, was the tipping point.
One day they woke up, and fear had dragged them down.
They mastered fear, as they always did, but fear had mastered them first.
The next battle they fought in, several troopers in the mess afterwards swore that their eyes flashed gold.
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Yoda was the one that everyone expected to stay, a strong beacon of Light for all.
But he was so tired, and he could feel the Force weeping in a way that few could.
Even with his own shields, he heard the Force's reaction to the deaths of each of its beloved chosen.
It hammered against his mind constantly, an endless refrain of grief and loss.
Everyone thought that he was strong in the Light. Everyone forgot what that meant.
One particularly bad day, ten Jedi died within four hours of each other.
The Force's death dirge cracked through his shields, and he could feel everything.
So much death, so much pain, and for what?
For nothing.
Yoda's path to the Dark Side lay in despair.
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Mace had always been close to the Dark Side. Closer than anyone else in the Order.
So when it swelled with the Jedi Falling, it was quite natural for the boundaries to blur.
When the boundaries solidified again, Mace's eyes were gold, and the bounty hunter he was supposed to be interrogating was dead.
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Depa had a Padawan. Caleb Dume.
She loved him fiercely.
She would die for her bright little boy.
On the battlefield, a Muun officer in the Seperatist army shot Caleb.
Caleb would live.
Depa did not know that at the time.
All she saw was her little boy falling with a smoking blaster wound in his stomach.
The Muun went down with four hundred thousand volts of hate-filled lightening coursing through his body.
Depa was kind. Depa was gentle.
Depa had a smile on her face as the being who shot her baby boy writhed under the electricity arcing from her fingertips.
Depa could protect Caleb with power like this.
It was worth anything to protect her beautiful child.
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Anakin's descent was loud and chaotic and full of rage. That is to say, it was utterly natural, for him.
He was on the frontlines of the war.
He saw horrors every day.
He was helpless against them.
All he could do was rage, and channel that rage against the Seperatists.
At the beginning, he did not kill sentients if he could at all help it. Only battle droids.
Somewhere along the line, things blurred.
Somewhere along the line, he killed sentients.
Somewhere along the line, he stopped caring whether he did or not.
Somewhere along the line, Anakin Skywalker fell.
And he was loud, and he was angry, and his eyes flashed gold.
And no one noticed.
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Plo Koon didn't exactly Fall per se.
Plo Koon never went Dark really.
He just...protected his sons.
And if protecting his sons meant he needed to learn ways to heal things beyond Force Healing (which he was rubbish at anyway), well he was a Master of the High Council, and he did have access to the Holocrons.
Protecting his sons meant doing whatever necessary.
So he did.
It turned out that the Sith Holocrons were more useful than the Jedi ones.
As long as his boys were alive in the end, did it really matter how?
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To absolutely no one's surprise, Obi-Wan Kenobi never even realised he had Fallen.
Ahsoka noticed that he used more than Force Suggestion with particularly difficult politicians. But surely he wasn't making them agree with him - that wasn't the Jedi way.
Anakin could have sworn that his eyes flashed gold a few times, but he was tired and anyway, if Obi-Wan had a few secrets let him.
Cody went into battle with his General almost all the time, and was fairly certain that most Jedi did not crackle with white lightening the whole time. Of course, he could be wrong. But he was pretty sure it wasn't normal. He didn't mention anything though. The General seemed happy enough, and whether he knew or not, Cody didn't want to take the risk of breaking his bubble.
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Quinlan Vos didn't mean to Fall.
He was just curious.
After all, it was literally his job to look into shadows and reveal mysteries.
So was it really surprising that he decided to take a deeper look at a very large, very nasty, very dark mystery.
Quinlan Vos didn't Fall.
He just looked.
Until one day he did Fall.
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Ahsoka was pretty sure that being taught how to torture people wasn't strictly Jedi-friendly.
Still, it was interesting.
She rather enjoyed the more dubious lessons that had been added.
Particularly since Skyguy seemed to have less weight on his shoulders.
Rather more one way than the other, Ahsoka balanced precariously on the brink for several months.
Of course, when she really did Fall, she did it in style.
A civilian was killed by a misfiring battle droid.
Ahsoka decimated every single pro-CIS being within a mile.
Then she sang a hunting song she remembered from her childhood on Shili.
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The Head Archivist was always a little Greyer than most.
Constant exposure to Sith artefacts would do that.
Jocasta Nu was the Archivist during a war where Jedi died daily.
She was a dispenser of knowledge.
Everyone seemed to forget that she had to have learned that knowledge at some point.
Everyone seemed to forget that her creche-mate and best friend was now the leader of CIS.
She was no spy.
But she did share some of her friend's tendancies.
The Archivists were Greyer than most.