Leia is good at what she does. She is adaptable and she is strong. If there is one thing that she has learned in her time, it is that nothing is permanent. Feelings, regimes, people. Planets. None of them will last. There one moment, gone the next. Breathe in. Breathe out. Move on. It will not break her.
She tells herself that loss the way of the universe. It is a natural part of the cycle of life, part of the Force. She can feel the awe of the people around her as they wonder and whisper, how can one woman lose so much and yet remain so strong, so constant. As if the accumulated weight of her loss doesn't cripple her every day, as if it doesn't steal her breath away.
Leia's life has been marked by loss since the day she entered the world. She considers her mother. Her birth mother. Gone before she could know her. Sometimes she debates whether she can really call this a loss, but usually comes to the conclusion that of course it counts. It is not the most painful of her losses, more of a dull ache, hidden deep in her heart. Memories that don't exist. A life that never was. It is easier to move on from something that she never really knew.
Looking back on it, she was still a child when she loses her entire world. The destruction of Alderan, the loss of her family, her friends, her people, hits her hard, although you wouldn't have known it to look at her. Her façade never cracks, but there is a light inside of Leia that was utterly extinguished in the moment it took to obliterate her planet and everyone who she had ever loved from existence. She dreams about it regularly for the rest of her life. Lost faces, places she can never return to. The sound of her family's laughter as her father tells a ridiculous joke at dinner. Gone. After Alderan was destroyed, she knew that nothing and nowhere in the vast expanse of the universe was eternal or sacred or safe. Everything she had ever known had been gone in quite literally the blink of an eye, and yet the world demanded that she keep marching on, shoulders straight, head high, blaster in hand.
Leia loses Alderan, but she gains Luke and Han. She gains these two men (boys, really, at the start of it all) who are so intrinsically intertwined with her soul that she can barely imagine existing before them. Luke and Han. It seems crazy that just being around these two can trick her into believing that the gaping hole inside of her has been filled, at least mostly. She loses one home, but she finds a new one with them. Still, the nightmares come, millions of voices crying out in the night, only now Han is there to soothe her back to sleep.
For a while, she loses nothing. She gains, and gains and gains until she thinks that she will burst from the joy, the glowing feeling of success and safety that she has built around herself. She has her brother, her friends, the new Republic. And then she has Ben.
Ben, her beautiful baby boy. Ben, who shines so strongly with the force that Leia does not doubt for one moment of his childhood that he will be the greatest Jedi of his era. Ben, who she will protect from loss, who she will shield with everything she has so that he will not know the suffering, the immeasurable weight that she has had to bear her entire life. Leia swears to her son that she will never be a ghost of a memory for him. She will be beside him always. A mother's blindness, she later realizes.
The Force works in ways that she will never understand, and gradually, Ben is gone. Gone away with Luke because he is powerful and needs to be trained, and gone because there is something tormenting him deep beneath his skin. Leia can sense it. Even Han can sense it. Luke will be able to take care of it, of Ben, Han assures her, arm around her shoulders. She nods in agreement but shrugs off his arm.
Never had she thought that she could experience a pain greater than she had when Alderan had been destroyed, but when she loses Ben to Kylo Ren, when her son, her beautiful baby boy, turns his back on his family for Snoke, she is engulfed in a relentless agony. It's the first time in her life that she cannot move on from her loss. She will not accept it, although she knows that at least for now, she cannot do anything to bring Ben back. There is good in him, and one day he will either find the Light, or someone will drag him slowly back towards it, as Luke had done for their father.
She loses Luke, too. At first, she doesn't care. She blames him. And then when she stops blaming him, she starts blaming herself, and wants her brother back there beside her. She needs him now, more than ever. But Luke is gone. She wonders if it is forever.
Han goes slowly, but she can feel it every day, as he slips further and further from her, and she from him. Every day she wants to scream at him to stay, and every day she tries to root herself firmly in their life together, but in her heart she has known from the start that there is nothing that she can do to prevent the inevitable; she can only prolong it. One day, he is gone too, or maybe it's her who gets lost. It doesn't matter whether she lost him or he los her. They lose each other, and Leia is hollow.
The hollow void is soon filled with a defiant fire, and she throws herself into the Resistance. There is nothing left for her to lose, when her son helps destroy the new Republic that she had worked so hard to create. She will end this suffering, she will stop her son, bring him back, and right the wrongs that her family has wrought on the galaxy for so long. She needs her brother, but Luke is gone.
In a miracle of miracles, Han is hers again. Perhaps she had been wrong and she had not lost him, at least not truly. Things are different. They always will be. But for an instant, as they embrace, she remembers all the years they have had together and thinks that even if nothing will ever be the same, she will not let those memories be tarnished. Han will bring her Ben and even if they are not the family they should have been, they are will still be a family.
A few hours later, her heart is torn out. The Light, she thinks, is fading.
When the Falcon lands at the base, she doesn't know who or what will greet her. Finn, that brave, brave boy is clinging to life and Leia cannot bear to think of losing a soul so untarnished by hate. Chewie looks broken. She will speak with him later, but for now she will give him space.
Everyone is gone now, besides the girl. Besides Rey. Leia doesn't know who this girl is or where she has come from, but she carries Luke's lightsaber and a weight on her small shoulders that reminds Leia of herself. This girl, she thinks, Rey, is the key. She is the key to bringing Luke back, to saving Ben, to restoring balance to the Force. Leia can sense in Rey both fear, and loss, but also a light and warm feeling of hope, and as she embraces the girl, she feels this new hope radiate throughout her body, stirring something deep within her. It dawns on her that perhaps this hope isn't new at all; it's just been buried deep within her, under all her years of pain. It's a hope that runs deep in her bones and Rey has awakened it.
She has lost everything, but damn it, Leia will not lose this hope.