#cause i saw a post talking about who's fault Jango's death was (i think it was a poll?)

[notthestarwar]

@dukeoftheblackstar and heres another snippet from the same fic which i think gives a kinda sympathetic view to mace. i've taken this straight from my drafts so i'll leave the old tags there. now i'm gonna reblog some pro mace posts lol but i wont tag you in those cause i think i've probably tagged you in enough at this point lol

This snippet is from 'When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it'

It's from Chapter 7, ghost Mace is explaining to past Jaster what he knows of Jango's life, in the future. Here, he's describing the moment he killed Jango and his feelings in the aftermath.

In the midst of the battle, a man started shooting at me. We fought, it was a brutal thing, I was barely keeping up in spite of the Force. I did not know who he was or why he was shooting for me but I did know that if I ceded any space at all, he would take it and I would be dead.

In the end, I came out on top. I can't say I was intending for it, I was just trying to make contact in any place I could, but I caught him with my saber between his helmet and chest plate. He died, after I decapitated him and it wasn't until after the fact that I discovered that he was the one I had been searching for all those years before.

As a young Knight I set out to bring Jango Fett home, to right a wrong, but I was unable to find him. I had thought of him, often. The wrong I had not been able to right for my people. The man I could not save. And then, I stepped on to a dusty planet that I hardly knew, for reasons I hardly understood and I killed a man.

Jaster swallows. When Mace looks at him, honestly paints his face and regret curls at the edges.

"Quite without knowing it, I had killed the one I hadn't been able to save, years after the fact."

His son.

"I hadn't saved him but he survived all the same. He didn't need me to save him, he'd saved himself. I'd thought him dead but he lived to walk up to me all those years later. He survived that slave ship so that he might die at my hand years later."

The fact that he's sorry for it doesn't really cushion the blow. This is the man that killed his son. He is dead because of Jango but in a far off future, Jango is dead because of him.

How did he die? This Jedi? He had time to discover Jango's identity after the battle so he must have survived it. Did he later die of wounds Jango gave him? Jaster thinks not. None of this has been easy, none of this is simple. There remains a weight in the air, the burden of the remainder of Jango's story. An oddity considering it should end here.

He looks back to Windu, watching his face.

"I did not mean to kill your son Jaster. I meant to save him, but I was quite unable. The idea of him haunted me as steadily as any ghost and then, I killed him. I didn't know who he was when I struck and I did not know when he fell that he had already killed me, long before that day. It would be three years before my heart would stop but I was dead from the day Jango Fett landed on Kamino."

"I did not intend it, but I did it all the same. I am sorry that I killed him and I have to live with that regret even now, in death. I remain here knowing that I killed the man I was intending to save, the man who I had never forgotten failing."

Jaster is a warrior. He knows what a fight to the death is like. He has known the ferocity that an adult Jango would hold long before he knew that in a later time, the galaxy would know his son as 'The Jedi killer'. What a title. Jaster had not wanted this life, the one that from Mace's perspective has already passed, for his son. He wanted something kinder, easier, for him. It hadn't happened. Jaster had been unable to give that to him.

Mace didn't have any choice but to kill him but, all the same, as a father it is Jaster's right to hate him, just a little, for taking his sons life.

Jango deserved better than the galaxy that had delivered him to this Jedi on that day. He deserved better than the life that had shaped him in to the man that would attack this Jedi and lose. He deserved, parents that wouldn't die before he had finished growing, a second chance that worked out differently. He deserved everything and anything Jaster could give him and maybe, even that could not be enough. Could never be enough.

Mace looked at him. "Everyone in that hall is there because Jango is responsible for their death. I am not sure if the same can be said for me. Jango is responsible for my death but is that the reason I linger?"

The Jedi looks far away. "He haunted me far before he ever died and now I haunt him far before he ever killed me. He lined up the pieces of my death long before I met him in that arena. And I killed him long before he killed me. Time is not linear for the dead, but in the case of Jango and I it is even less so. The story of our haunting is a circular thing and in truth, I can not really say who of us is haunting who

He meets Jaster's eyes. "We are here to discuss why we haunt Jango. But it would be remiss of me to not tell you that your son has haunted me every single day since I left on a mission to retrieve him, to try and offer reparations for what my peoples neglect brought down on him, and came home empty handed."

"We thought him dead, but I did not forget him. From that day, I've carried the weight of what we did to him. I have often thought of him over the years. You hold no blame here, but we just might."

I love this bit. To me it's very clear that Jango's death was largely Jango's fault. In this fic, Mace finds himself on Galidraan with little understanding of why he's there, just trying to act in the moment to defend himself and other Jedi. Jango starts shooting at him, clearly shooting to kill. Mace knows that he's in danger, he knows that if he dies (because Jango intends for one of them to die. He will not stop until one of them is dead.) Jango will go on to kill more Jedi until one of them gets the upper hand, and so Mace acts in a way that is very understandable and defends his life with all he has. He's reacting rather than planning any of this, Jango is not giving him a chance to think about any of it, so when Jango is about to get the upper hand, Mace takes the only move available to him, and goes for his neck.

It's understandable, he had no choice, and yet, because of who Mace is, I think he'd find it very difficult to come to terms with having killed someone in that way. It's horribly violent (lightsaber deaths always seem to be??? Decapitation isn't quite bisection but it's not great. However, I think such a thing would be even harder for Mace to confront than it was for Obi Wan.) and I think Mace would struggle to accept that he really didn't have any choice, and anyone would have done the same.

And then!!! This Mace, is a Mace that has been metaphorically haunted by Jango ever since he 'failed to save him'. To know that Jango was out there to find all along and Mace just didn't manage it? That Jango didn't need Mace to escape, but that he suffered for longer thanks to his own rescue being left to him. That in that suffering, he became the kind of man, that would be in the arena, forcing Mace to kill him. That had Mace done anything about this constant reminder (was that a sign? From the force?) of Jango for all these years, he could have helped Jango. He might have stopped him doing what he did with the clones. He might have helped him process what had happened, so that Jango didn't end up on a suicide mission, determined to throw himself head first in to fights he can barely win, only so he can try and repent for not dying with the rest of them, the first time or the second.

Mace was a master Jedi, if anyone could help someone work through trauma, it was him. (His struggle to process it all himself is 100% not a sign of his ability. You can understand how to healthily process emotions to the n th degree, but it won't stop you being human and falling to human difficulties. He is the best person to help anyone else through this stuff, but when it comes to himself, he's too close. That's why Jedi help each other work through stuff.) But Mace wasn't there, because he didn't think Jango was out there. In spite of this constant lingering reminder at every step, he didn't look. And so Jango carried on, hating that he survived, living only to carry out this corrupted form of justice, until he finally met the end that he thought he should have met years before.

Mace couldn't help him, and then, he ended up doing the worst thing possible for him. He gave him this violent death, that in Jango's grief and pain, he was sure he deserved. I just think the more Mace learnt about Jango, after finding out he's just killed the man he thought had died thanks to his failure all those years before, going on to see the depths of what happened to Jango, what it made him, the more responsible he'd feel. If he'd only found him. What he went through on the ship. What the clones went through. All those years hating himself for surviving. Boba, who Jango wanted in spite of his self hated, who he loved so fiercely but could NOT do right by.

I think Mace would look at each part of it and a part of him would be like 'none of this had to happen. If you'd done your job, you could have saved him from that ship, from becoming this. You would have spared him from himself, but also the clones, Boba, everyone else he hurt.' I do think he would have known that this wasn't rational, and would have worked through it, been working through it, as he lived on and more and more things crept out of the woodwork to remind Mace of his one failure. Each revelation about jango is something else Mace might have prevented.

And then, Mace's death at palpatines hand. He speaks to the other ghosts and suddenly he sees. He sees the big picture. What Jango did to him, did to his people.

Mace has it completely right when he looks at this haunting as a circular thing. Who is haunting who? Time isn't linear for ghosts. He was haunting Jango from the start, but also, Mace didn't start haunting Jango till he'd already killed him. Mace not being able to forget that mission early in his career, the boy he hadn't been able to save. Was that bog standard guilt? His brain kicking up dust? Or was it the force warning him that Jango was out there, that he should look. Was it neither? As a force sensitive could Mace feel his future self, pulled back in time by his connection to Jango? Was the feeling of Jango haunting him, actually his own ghost, obsessed with the man he was tied to, the one responsible for his death.

He and Jango orbit each other before either of them are dead in a way the other ghosts don't. But it being uncertain who's haunting who? That's true of all the ghosts. Jango haunts them just as much they do him. They are ghosts because they can't let go of him and he can't let go of what he did to them.