I have to find things to think about other than mortality, Leia chided herself, as she sat back in her study aboard the battleship Aldera. Below, the icy orb of Rukjavel turned slowly. She frowned at her cluttered desk. It's not like I haven't plenty of other things to do.
But the matter stole up on her more and more, and nowadays it wasn't just from viewing casualty lists. She had begun to accept, if not the certainty, then the unpleasant likelihood that she would not live to see the end of this war.
Doctor Kalonia had been worried about it when she'd finally managed to run some proper scans after Crait. Void exposure should have killed her like it had Ackbar and the other senior officers – Leia bowed her head at the thought, so many cumulative years of heroism and experience gone in a single salvo of torpedoes. The war, she found herself thinking, seemed altogether crueller nowadays.
Having escaped what should have been death, Leia nonetheless found herself dogged by leaden fatigue and shortness of breath, which had failed to abate entirely even six months later. What she'd once hoped was a quick recovery turned out to be a temporary reprieve. Her condition was capricious, receding for days or weeks at a time only to return with a vengeance later on.
How easily it had all come to this unthinkable situation. Well, not all unthinkable; some of it she'd been warning against for years. She had suspected, and made her suspicions clear. That what the First Order was doing in the Unknown Regions went far beyond what most people were willing to believe. That they were building a military machine to rival and exceed anything the Republic fielded. That they were doing so for coercion or even outright conquest.
But the Starkiller and the atrocity it had wrought had been beyond anything she could have imagined. As had the rest: finding and losing Han in the space of a mere day, the passing of her brother and the rise of her own son to the First Order's throne. Ben Solo, setting himself up as the would-be ruler of the entire Galaxy, setting his legions to burn and blast world after world into shattered submission. I thought we could free him of Snoke, and bring him back. But when he freed himself, he did it only to make everyone else his slaves.
That so much of it had been down to the late Snoke, and that he had been slain by his apprentice, was little comfort.
She'd talked with Rey about this, the fleeting, separate hopes they had held for him, and how those had been cruelly dashed to pieces. Now her hopes lay with those who had, in so many cases, stumbled into the Resistance. The ones who had suddenly found the weight of the Galaxy descending upon their shoulders.