She was supposed to see John, and now she is — not straying, that certainly wouldn’t be an appropriate word, but rather neglecting. This, she tells herself, as she feels the life within her slowly begin to rot and regrow, is the opportunity of a lifetime. She can do some good work here. The Icarus will carry her into success, into the thrill of exploration, slithering through the unknown and absorbing its entirety.
She can’t pass on this; if she does, she’ll regret it for the rest of her life. She has to go. She’ll be able to see John when it is all over, they’ll be reunited as quickly as her next breath if she believes enough in their connection. Throughout the distance that will be between them, they can inexplicably grow and transform into something closer—something merged entirely even when scattered on different sides of the universe.
The following are true about Anna Sheridan:
She is an archeologist, and she's good at her job. She's intelligent. She wouldn't be here if she wasn't; it's a given.
Her hands are rough. The sharp, uneven calluses always became more noticeable when John held her hand. The texture seemed to melt over her dinner with Liz. This is inherently connected to the fact that she is an adept archeologist--her work formed these calluses over her palms, sanding down over anyone who dared to cast a gaze of judgment. She feels her digs make marks on each of her fingers, uncovered artifacts lining the shelves of her mind's interior.
This is her purpose. She is more than archeology, more than tough flesh and dirt caked underneath fingernails, more than a hand to hold, but this is an inextricable part of her.
She likes to think she is dedicated. This is not necessarily the case.
Rewind - she is dedicated, and overflows with more dedication than the average person can bear. She’s simply drenched in it.
Rewind - she hasn't seen her husband in a year, and now she's elected to tack another several months onto this already-vast gap.
She cannot discern. It's difficult to manage priorities. John is staunchly a soldier, and she finds little comfort in Earthforce. To dissect and immortalize what was once lost to time, ancient and hidden — this is a blessing, this is divine. She sorts through her work and his work and their love with obsessive repetition, like building sandcastles just to knock them down with force, like flipping through the pages of a book trying desperately to find a message that just isn't there.
She loves and cares and aches for the wounded. When she finds a civilization that has crumbled in its entirety, with craters of dust where the heart should be, she mourns. She thinks of each little life that once existed in these realms, however long ago, and she talks to herself as she unearths the knowledge. Stories, theories, little bubbles of comfort. It's a rarity, these days, to be listened to.
She goes to Station Prime, and there is a man from New Technologies who both fascinates and unsettles her. There's something wrong with him; a wicked presence sleeps within him, a callus like the ones on her palm has formed over his soul and encased it in dead skin from the inside-out, his corpse preserved there as if in amber. He cannot connect to her.
She wants to fix him anyway.
They're going to be on the Icarus together for a while. They'll have time.
She wants to fix him, to see him resurrect, to save something valuable before it too decays into ruin, but this is a facade, a glamour to hide the truth from view. The truth: she really just wants to fix herself. If Dr. Morden can be rebuilt, even with makeshift, shoddy parts that don't fit in there quite right, she can find her way back to stability in the dark. She won't be feeling around the room anymore, reaching out into the darkness and praying that she can find her way through this labyrinthine dilemma solely by touch.
She'll have something to show for it. The Psi Corps want whatever they suspect the Icarus will find once they explore the planet, but they'd walk out of it together, polished now, changed entirely by this mission. She'll have helped someone, and that impact still lingers when everything else is taken away.
She is more than this. Compassion and fascination are the forces that maneuver her into action. She became an archeologist because she loves. She became this curious thing she is now, a thing dedicated to unraveling the hidden, because she loves. She loves all of it, enamored by each drop of existence. Linear time. Life is shorter than anyone can conceptualize, and disasters spread like vicious wildfires when you aren't looking; Earth could become a flattened world within moments under the wrong circumstances, indistinguishable from the worlds she visits on her digs.
There isn't enough time.