Work Text:
She would be alright. She was only sleeping. The burns across her skin looked more serious than they had been, and the crash had caused no more than minor fractures. She had done far more damage to the fighters giving chase than they had to her. She had been well enough to squabble with the medics, demanding to be let free or at least given a drink while they prodded at her.
But Leia still worried.
Anais was young. Only twenty-two - older than others, older than Leia herself had been, but looking at her now, small and bruised and weighed down by loss beyond her years, Leia wished not for the first time that the galaxy had been kinder to her. To all of them.
As the general she couldn't play favorites, but perhaps she did anyway. The Dameron siblings got away with far more than anyone else might have, and in her quietest moments Leia could admit to herself why: they reminded her of her family. They were not her children but sometimes she wondered what might have been if they were, the both of them so like Han, like Luke, like herself.
She had lost too many people over the years. She was in no danger of losing Anais now.
Still she sat at her bedside, watching her like the mothers they had lost all those years ago, unable to shake the fear of what ifs. If Anais had not survived the crash. If she had to meet Poe's cheerful smile upon his return and tell him with a broken heart and a calm face that his beloved sister was gone.
It had not come to pass today, but one day it might still.
And Leia would have to face her own failures costing her her family again.