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There are many, many universes where Mace Windu dies, trying to arrest the Sith Lord. This is not one of those.
In this universe, Mace Windu lives.
He does not owe his life, as he so often does, to an Organa or a Veers. Not in this universe. Instead, Mace Windu is saved by Padmé Amidala and, arguably, the Skywalker twins.
—--------------------------------------
In this one universe, Padmé Amidala goes into labor early. She is being rushed back to her apartments by her security team when the Jedi falls past them. She orders her pilot after them immediately.
The catch is narrow and the Jedi is unconscious, but this is how Mace Windu lives.
(Leia is born first, and when Mace holds her in his arms so Padmé can hold her son, he knows his future padawan saved his life.)
—---------------------------------
There is no Mufastar confrontation, and so Vader does not wear a suit.
Anakin Skywalker supporting the Empire brings men in droves to the recruiting booths.
(The fact that the Hero With No Fear supports genocide drives just as many defections several months later. Lieutenant Maximilian Veers is one of them.)
—---------------------------------
Padmé drains her slush fund on Nar Shaada and uses it to fund the fledgling Rebellion. She and her handmaidens are the basis of the Rebellion’s spy and logistics divisions.
Padmé, with Master Windu’s permission, posts the footage of the Temple Massacre on the holonet alongside the Alliance’s Declaration To Rebel Against Intolerable Imperial Tyranny.
(After Declaration Day, for every three men that join the Empire, two defect.)
(It is very hard to say that a room of dead children deserved to be slaughtered when you have to reconcile it with an image of too small corpses. Cadet Kallus can’t and doesn't. He slips quietly out of the Imperial Academy with all the skill of its most promising ISB student.)
(Padmé doesn’t think about the warning signs with the Tuskens, doesn’t think about how the hopeful young Jedi who wanted to free all the slaves became the greatest enslaver of them all.
She doesn’t.
She doesn’t.)
(Because if she does, she will falter and the Alliance cannot afford her faltering. Her children cannot afford her faltering.)
(It is easier in the universes where she and Rex and Obi-Wan can believe Anakin Skywalker is dead.
They do not have that luxury in this one. Golden eyes burn out of a familiar face on every holonews site.)
—---------------------------------------------
It is messy, when Ahsoka Tano and Mace Windu meet after Order 66. She screams at him, blames him for the Jedi’s fall and Anakin’s, blames him for the vote to condemn her to the Senate’s mercy in that sham trial so long ago. She cries as she shouts.
He denies none of the accusations, just stands and listens with a stoic face that she HATES.
(Because kriff if he doesn’t believe all these things himself, just a little. If he’d maybe just tried harder, fought harder, protested a little more…)
(It wouldn’t have changed much.)
Obi-Wan Kenobi is the one to intervene. “We all failed- we all failed Anakin, Ahsoka. And- for your trial,” he pauses here. Runs a hand over his beard. “The decision to expel you wasn’t unanimous, Snips. There were three votes against it. One was mine. One was Plo’s. And one was Mace’s.”
Ahsoka looks outraged, makes to step forward. Would have if Rex hadn’t put a hand on her arm. “How can you say that?! He’s the one who expelled me!”
(Mace’s face doesn’t change. There are people who would think this cold. But they do not know that Mace Windu’s soul is a torrent of wrath and grief, they do not know that he is hanging onto his serenity by his fingernails.
Depa would have known, if she was still alive.)
(Obi-Wan suspects. He has personal experience with this kind of misunderstanding.
Maybe, he thinks, if he had been a little more open.
Maybe Anakin wouldn’t have done this.)
(He would have.)
“No,” Obi-Wan says, and his voice is tired. “He is- was the Master of the Order and that makes him the mouthpiece of the Council’s decisions. He didn’t agree with all of them.”
(Ahsoka Tano and Mace Windu get along a little better after that. She still spends most of her time away from the main base, running supply missions and training fledgling cells.)
—-----------------------------------------------
Kallus is on Lasan, helping the Honor Guard train members of the resistance cell there when the massacre begins.
He fights the Honor Guard member who sold them out. As they die, they give him their bo-rifle. And when they escape, Garazeb Orrellios teaches him to use it.
(There are very few universes where Alexsandr Kallus doesn’t end up with a bo-rifle.)
He drags Kanan Jarrus to the Rebellion. He’s spent enough time with Windu to know how he worries for his grandpadawan.
(He can’t help but feel as though there’s a person missing, a gap for them to stand in, when Windu and Jarrus hug.)
This is the start of Ghost Team.
—--------------------------------------------
Windu and Vader duel, purple and red sabers clashing in the midst of a storm of anger.
It ends in a draw. Mace strikes the shatterpoint in Vader’s arm, destroying the prosthetic and the saber hilt it held beyond repair. Vader unleashes a torrent of Sith Lighting with the other hand that leaves Mace spasming on the floor.
(Because this is true. Vader can only use lightning in the universes when he doesn’t wear a life support suit.
You can only channel lightning through living limbs.)
Captain Veers of the Rebel Alliance nearly dies getting General Windu to safety.
(He ends up needing a prosthetic arm and eye. Rex walks him through recovery, based on the things he remembers Wolffe saying.)
(The memory of his ori’vod is painful. He’d killed himself as soon as he’d woken up from his chip and realized what he’d done. Rex hadn’t gotten there in time to stop him.)
—----------------------------------------
As part of their treaty with the Empire, the Hutts demand control of Axxila.
The only obstacle? The Anti-Pirate Fleet.
Lieutenant Piett stares in horror as the Imperial Star Destroyers drop out of hyperspace and start firing into the fleet alongside a large number of Hutt ships.
(It’s excessive, even by Imperial standards. Perhaps it would surprise no one to learn that the operation had been led by Tarkin.)
At the end of the massacre, Piett is left as the highest ranked survivor of the fleet’s 12 remaining ships. They regroup and meet. Piett becomes Admiral at twenty by the sheer virtue of there being no one else left.
He folds his hands behind his back and tilts his chin up, exuding an aura of command. The others straighten their spines in response.
(And if when he goes back to his cabin later, his shoulders slump and he puts his head in his hands, weeping for his planet and the losses of his fleet, none of his men are there to see it.)
The remnants of the Anti-Pirate Fleet become the Axxilan based rebel cell, fighting to take Axxila back from the Empire backed Hutts.
(They call themselves the Reclaimers and fight with guerrilla techniques repurposed and refined from tactics favored by the pirates they once hunted.)
(The Empire refuses to call them a rebel cell. The Reclaimers are portrayed as pirates to the galaxy at large.)
(They are not.)
—----------------------------------
Leia runs her hand over the Hurikane crystal she procured during a desperate flight away from a discovered Rebel base. Then she tosses it up to join the other swirling parts above her head.
She closes her eyes, meditates. Lets the pieces of doonium and quadranium she picked up along the same horrific flight circle her head and click together according to the Force’s whims.
When she turns the blade on, it burns purple like her master’s.
—----------------------------------
Leia inherits her temper from her mother. It burns righteous and passionate and targeted. Carefully banked and reserved for the deserving (for the most part). She holds on to her anger, but she can let it go if she must. She can hold herself back.
(And that is why Mace teaches her Vaapad when he refused to teach her father.
Because to use Vaapad is to take your fury and your opponent’s and harness it, only to release it when it can serve you no longer. To use Vaapad is to enjoy battle and victory, without taking joy in death or reveling in another’s pain.)
(You must know yourself and your emotions.)
(And Anakin Skywalker, as he was in this universe, was not capable of it.)
(You must have exacting control over yourself and your emotional reactions, for you walk upon the knife’s edge of Falling everyday. To stay in the light is a choice and a struggle, always. You are not tested once in your life as some are, but rather in your every breath, every step, every flash of your blade.
To know what anger you can hold on to is vital. To know justified anger from indiscriminate wrath is a necessity.
You must acknowledge the Dark Side as it flows through you and dismiss it every time.)
(Or you will Fall. As Sora Bulq did. As Vos did. As Depa Billaba had.)
(You either master Vaapad or it masters you.)
—----------------------------------
Piett rebuilds his fleet. Slowly, carefully. They raid Empire and various syndicate ships. He sets up a new chain of command.
The Reclaimers nearly succeed in assassinating the Hutt in charge of Axxila. The agents in charge of the operation are only barely stopped by Boba Fett.
This is when, to maintain the Empire’s treaties with the Hutts, Palpatine sets Thrawn to hunting down the Reclaimers.
Thrawn studies the knots painted onto the sides of the ships. Twisting and endless, looping back upon themselves. The Saidéol, for endurance, remembrance, and unbroken bonds. Saidath, for protection on the battlefields and perhaps the desire to act as protection for others. Saidhia, the tie of the Divine Trinities.
He looks at the records of engagements with the Reclaimers, notes the deliberately minimized civilian collateral damage. Notes that they strike hard and fast and ruthless at the worst of the injustices.
He studies the Axxilan Anti-Pirate Fleet’s captured records, Piett’s in particular.
Thrawn draws Piett out of hiding by targeting civilians. The encounter ends in a draw.
(“Have you ever played Axxilan chicken before Admiral Thrawn?” Piett asks after Tharen’s demand for his surrender.)
(Thrawn adds “values his life less than those of the people he is trying to protect” to his collection of notes on Piett after the Goddess’s Blessing missed the Chimera’s bow by 83 kilometers after Thrawn readjusted to avoid collision.)
(It had also changed his firing vectors, clearing a path for the rest of the Reclaimer fleet to jump to hyperspace. Piett’s flagship had jumped to hyperspace from directly the spot where the Chimera’s bridge had just been.)
(He looks up Axxilan chicken later.)
(Despite himself, he is impressed.)
———————————
Mace Windu knights Kanan Jarrus. They both spend the entire time thinking about who should actually be cutting the braid.
(She’s watching them from the Force, has been for years, trying to comfort and congratulate them or even just talk to them.
They never hear her.)
—--------------------------------------
Luke Amidala is trained in technique by Ahsoka Tano and philosophy alongside Leia by Mace Windu.
(Neither Padmé or Obi-Wan quite trust him to train another Skywalker when they both can see golden eyes in their nightmares.)
—-------------------------------------
The Old Ways begin to make their way back into Axxilan culture. Not the religion, that had never been forgotten. But in the two centuries since the Dúbna Bea, when the Hutts had been driven from Axxilan soils for the first time in the thousand years of their occupation, the knowledge of the hidden tunnels under the slums (the old slave quarters) had died out. The community Elders had stopped training the Stargazers with no slaves to guide to freedom and the Stargazers had faded into legend, techniques lost to all but a few of the mostly stubbornly dedicated families.
And while they may call themselves the Reclaimers, to the Children of the Old Ways, they are the new generation of Stargazers.
The crown constellation of Rerridre goes up, well hidden on walls, to guide Stargazers to safe paths and safe places.
(As they all pray She will guide them.)
There are people to free the slaves, people to hide them. People to remove their chips and collars, people to get them off world, or train them to be Stargazers themselves.
(Piett had looked to the stars as a child and known he would spend his life among them. Is it any wonder he has a crown of stars around his throat?
Piett the protector? Piett who loves his ships so?
Who else but the goddess of stars and souls and guardians for him?)
On the Sun’s Day, the first day of summer is spent in dance and song, tales of the proud warrior nation Axxila had been, a thousand years ago. Scraps of the old fighting styles are still preserved, if only in the dances meant to honor Belall, god of the sun and patron of warriors. Massive bonfires are lit at dusk and last til dawn, as they are gradually broken down to light the hearths of the revelers.
Miniature suns go up in good ambush spots and spears where weapons are stored.
(Axxila was not always named Axxila. This is something that is not generally told to those who are not Children of the Old Ways and is not even well remembered among the Children themselves. It was once called Aiccial and when translated into basic, meant something along the lines of the spirited land.)
(The current name (which the Hutts forcibly renamed the planet to when they took over centuries ago), when not spelled by Basic’s conventions, translates to something like the resilient land.)
(And now, the people of Axxila are preparing to show the galaxy why exactly both of those names still hold true.)
—-----------------------------------------
Colonel Veers crouches in the trees taller than even the Imperial AT-ATs. He signals and his teams drop near silently onto the backs of the lumbering machines. They blow the hatches simultaneously and take control of the walkers.
Two blazing hurricanes of violet battle their way toward the walkers from the other side of the battlefield.
Veers slides into the pilot’s seat of the walker and takes to the controls like he’s driven one all his life. Commander Fox slips into the gunner’s seat next to him and rakes the AT-STs with laser fire.
Veers’s Liberating Herd rumbles forward toward the Imperial enemy for the first time.
“Well done, Colonel,” says General Windu.
“Thank you General,” he says.
(Each of the three walkers they manage to claim gets painted with both a massive purple firebird.)
(And an assortment of art in the style of the old Clone Wars nose art. Mace Windu stands, bold and proud, caught mid strike. There is a caricature of Veers telling the men that they are not allowed to die without his express permission and a cartoon of Leia kicking Vader’s ass.)
(As is only right. Hurricane Battalion is Mace’s after all.)
—----------------------------------------
Thrawn and Piett meet again and again. Their battles, most often, are stalemates, if only because Piett has become terrifyingly effective at escape routes and traps.
The Empire calls him (in whispers) Thrawn’s Bane.
But with each near miss and escape, Thrawn comes closer and closer to the Reclaimer’s networks and learning of the existence of the Stargazers. He puts increasing amounts of time into hunting Piett.
(Piett had known this was a possibility and planned accordingly.)
He begins baiting Thrawn, pulling attention grabbing missions apart from the majority of the fleet, deflecting Thrawn’s attention away from the more vital operations.
(He starts grooming a replacement, because the stratagem wouldn’t hold forever with a mediocre strategist.)
(Thrawn is not a mediocre strategist.)
And eventually, even this tactic begins to fail.
In a final bid to draw Thrawn’s attention away from the Axxilan cell, Piett leaves to join the main rebellion.
(It works.)
Admiral Lyne quietly takes over the Reclaimers.
—————————-
With Thrawn set to hunting down Piett, Tarkin is the one sent to handle the Lothal cell. He is much more brutal about it then Thrawn is.
(He is also easier to evade.)
Kallus stalks through Imperial compounds in an ISB uniform and a stone face and it gets him almost anywhere he needs to go. Unlike the rest of the Specters, Specter Seven rarely leaves Lothal. He has been trained to be an ISB agent, he has learned disguise and infiltration from the Handmaidens.
The rest of the Ghost Crew are idealists.
Kallus is not.
He weaves through the streets of Lothal and while the rest of the Specters may be heroes, he is the bloody ghost that travels in their wake.
(He is still the man who could have spent a decade as a top ISB agent if he hadn’t seen those pictures of those dead little kids.)
(He is also Lothal’s Fulcrum.)
He dismantles traps that Tarkin sets. Stormtroopers go missing from the streets. Officers turn up dead in their rooms.
(Sometimes it’s a knife in the dark. Sometimes a bomb. Sometimes poison in a drink he watches them sip as he wipes down the counter of the bar he uses as his cover.)
Sometimes he cultivates informants among the officers on base. They generally only last three months before they either are found out or have to be extracted.
Sometimes (usually after a particularly spectacular bit of sabotage), he sets up other people to take the fall.
(His crowning accomplishment is framing Pryce.)
But even the best agents are not infallible.
(Eventually Wullf Yularen is called in and he sets up a particularly devious trap. It is to catch Ghost Crew, yes, but that is a side benefit. A bonus.
This trap is meant for Fulcrum. For the Seventh Specter, the Wraith of Lothal.)
(Kallus blows his cover wide open to save the rest of Ghost Crew, as Yularen predicted he would. He moves to save them, even though he is compromised, even as Garazeb Orrelios pleads with him to stop, to hide, to go to ground.)
(He saves Ezra and Hera and Sabine. Battles his way through three squads of stormtroopers. Fights an inquisitor and wins even as his bo-rifle is sliced in half by a lightsaber. He gets every other Specter safely aboard the ghost.)
(Alexsandr Kallus dies three feet from the safety of the Ghost’s ramp, shot seventeen times in the back. The broken halves of his bo-rifle clatter to the tarmac to the sound of Zeb’s anguished scream.)
(Kanan gets to meet his son. They name him Alec Syndulla.)
(Alec Syndulla has a very overprotective namesake watching over him from the Force. Every time Alec is about to do something dangerous, Kanan feels a pressure on his shoulder that rattles him slightly the same way Kallus used to when he had to tell Kanan something urgent.)
—-------------------------------------------------
Riyo Cuchi barely gets Jedi Shadow Cheran Shen off of her ship after Scarif with the Death Star plans before Vader boards.
Tarkin asks her to give up the location of the Rebel base in exchange for the lives of her planet. She tells him she doesn’t know. He presses. She tells him Cophrigin V.
Tarkin destroys Pantora anyways.
(In every universe, no matter how accurate the information, Tarkin always destroys the planet he threatens.)
Cuchi is executed four hours later.
Cheran Shen manages to transmit the plans back to the Yavin base. Then he turns his ship back around and tries to rescue his friend.
He dies on the deck of the Death Star, cut down in an attempt to save a woman already dead.
(The tragedy of it all is that she really didn't know.)
—-------------------------------------------
Firmus Piett becomes an Admiral in the Alliance.
He paces the deck of the Champion and gets to know the rest of the crew of General Windu’s flagship.
He and Thrawn continue their deadly game of cat and mouse.
(And as Thrawn’s attention turns away from Axxila, the ancient war drums beat just a little louder. The Reclaimers become just a bit bolder.)
He leads the fleet to Scarif and buys Chuchi as much time as he can. Piett orders a retreat in the opposite direction as he sees her ship jump to hyperspace.
(He wonders later if Cuchi and Pantora might have lived if he had followed her instead.)
—------------------------------------------------
General Veers will not evacuate Hoth. He insists on staying until the last transport is about to leave, to ensure that as many of his men will get out as he can.
(The men of Hurricane battalion all know that there will be no escape from Hoth for them. And yet, they all stay to the last man.)
(They know that their General will not ask them to do anything he would not do himself. They know he intends to die on the ice with them. This cannot happen. They will not allow it.)
Fox knocks him out and leads the Liberating Herd in his place.
They die. Every single man.
(But they buy the evacuation so much time.)
And as the bombardment from the Executor slams into the rebel walker line, Fox tilts his head up and smiles, ever so slightly.
(General Veers wakes up weeping on General Amidala’s ship. He does not need to be told. He already knows.)
(Fox’s helmet is tucked in the crook of his elbow.)
—-------------------------------------------------
Padmé Amidala is the one to kill Darth Vader in this universe.
He has Rex on his knees in front of him, forced and held there by the Force as he raises his crimson saber above his old captain’s head. “How could you betray me Rex?” he asks mournfully, golden eyes staring out of his face. There are bodies of Rex’s chipped brothers, some of the few remnants of the 501st lying dead on the ground around them. “How could you betray me?” he asks again angrily as Rex says nothing.
(Rex has a punctured lung from where Vader had thrown him against the wall with the Force earlier in the fight, before he had killed General Kenobi and cut off one of Ahsoka’s montrals and one of Commander Amidala’s hands.)
His face hardens in a furious snarl. Padmé’s slug goes through his heart.
(Because the Force works the way Anakin Skywalker thinks it should, just a little bit. To Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala could never be a threat. And so it does not warn him.)
—---------------------------------------------------
Mace Windu and Palpatine duel on Courscant. They are a maelstrom of cruel rage and righteous fury, a feedback loop of violence, a near impenetrable globe of red and purple light.
Then Windu staggers. Sinks to a knee, a trembling hand coming up to his sternum. “Good soldiers follow orders,” CC-6454 says, smoke curling up from the muzzle of his blaster.
Palpatine gloats. “Do you remember your dear Commander Ponds, Master Windu?” he asks, running a hand down CC-6454’s pauldron.
Mace Windu looks up and sees Palpatine’s shatterpoint come just a little closer to cracking. And he smiles, a small curl of the lips. “Yes,” he says.
And then the Force cloaking Ahsoka Tano had wrapped around his padawan unravels as she stabs the Emperor through the heart with a purple blade, in the center of the Imperial Palace, where her master’s council chair had once stood.
Kanan, who has just arrived from fighting the red guards, knocks CC-6454 out with a wave of his hand. Then he and Leia both drop to their knees beside the dying Jedi.
(Rex doesn’t manage to prevent this brother from killing himself either. In the Force, Mace Windu puts firm hands on both of Ponds’s shoulders and pulls him in for a keldabe as his commander murmurs ni ceta over and over. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says as many times as it takes for Ponds to believe it.)
A flex of his fingers has Mace Windu’s blade skittering into his fingers. He cuts off Leia’s padawan braid to the sound of his own ragged breathing. “Very well done, Knight Amidala,” he breathes.
“I couldn’t save you,” Leia says. “I had to choose. I wanted to save you.”
“But you did your duty,” he says.
“I don’t want to be knighted because I killed a Sith Lord,” Leia says (because she saw what that did to Obi-Wan, she’s heard stories).
“You weren’t,” Mace says, eyes flickering closed. “I knighted you because you were faced with a choice between saving billions of lives and mine. Perhaps Palpatine could have been defeated if you’d saved me first, but you put your duty to the people of the galaxy ahead of your affection for me. There are times- There are times when it is possible to do both. But a Jedi must know when they cannot.”
“Alright,” she whispers. Then she curls his hand around her severed braid.
(She wants to heal him. She wants so very badly to heal him but her Force reserves are too low. Far too low after her fight with Mara Jade. She cannot heal him. Not without touching the Dark Side.)
(And she wants to save him. But she knows that she is not like her father. She knows that there are lines that she cannot cross, not even for love of a master. She also knows that he would rather die than see her Fall. And so she does one of the hardest things for any Skywalker.)
(She lets a loved one go.)
Kanan has been holding his grandmaster’s hand the entire time, weeping silently.
“Don’t cry grandpadawan,” Mace whispers. “I will be one with the Force soon and the Force will always be one with both of you. As long as the Force is with you, I will be with you.”
And then his chest goes still. For a brief moment, Kanan and Leia think they can see two ghosts embrace with the fervor of a parent reunited with a lost child.
(Depa wraps her arms around her master in the Force. Then they settle in to watch over their padawans together.)
(Kanan names his daughter Depa. Leia names her first son Mace.)
—---------------------------------
The galaxy doesn’t magically fix itself after Palpatine’s death.
It takes another five years for the New Republic to root out the Hutts from Axxila. Lyne gives Piett back the senior Admiral position so she can run for a governmental position. She ends up as the President of the Freed Cabinet.
She and Admiral Piett work together with ruthless efficiency to excise the rest of the gangs and slavers from Axxila again.
(The cartels of the Rim learn to fear the blue skinned twi’lek and the short human tearing apart their operations with a terrifying competence and a vendetta against slavers and Imperial remnants.)
Padmé Amidala throws herself headfirst into rebuilding the Galactic Senate. Between her, Bail Organa, and Mon Mothma the reforms they make stymie corruption until Starkiller base destroys the Hosnian system.
General Veers spends another two decades rooting out Imperial remnants in Wild Space and the Outer Rim. He never married but he adopts a young orphan boy, who he names Finn Veers. Eventually, Finn surpasses his father’s abilities as a strategist.
General Veers is on Hosnian Prime when Starkiller is fired.
Thrawn returns to the Ascendency.
Ezra Bridger ends up training Mace Amidala, who inherited every bit of Skywalker recklessness and Amidala stubbornness.
(Mace Amidala gets into even more trouble than Ezra ever managed. Kanan laughs as his former padawan complains. Then he teaches his grandpadawan the best pranks to play on his master. Ezra never knows peace.)
Kanan trains Alec Syndulla and Leia trains Depa Jarrus.
(Depa Jarrus becomes an even better healer than Leia and has the best track record at getting Piett to listen to medical advice.)
(Alec Syndulla takes after his namesake and becomes a Jedi Shadow.)
Ahsoka and Rex go on missions until they are killed in the first major battle with the First Order.
(Rex had honestly been surprised he lived that long.)
(When he opens his eyes within the Force, he realizes that his brothers have been waiting on him to march on. He greets Wolffe and Fox and Cody and Ponds with a smile as they begin walking together.)
(He was in no hurry to die but now he almost races forward. He has to hurry now that he's dead. The 501st is waiting on their Captain after all.)
—---------------------------------
The heroes of this universe know hardship and tragedy. This is not unusual in the multiverse.
But despite the grief and the loss and the heartache, none of them shatter beneath the weight of their lives. They straighten their shoulders and stand tall.