## Preface

whispering cosmos (talking right through me)
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/55322680.

Rating:
  Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
  No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
  F/M
Fandom:
  Babylon 5 (TV 1993)
Relationship:
  Mr. Morden/Anna Sheridan
Characters:
  Mr. Morden (Babylon 5), Anna Sheridan (Babylon 5)
Language:
  English
Stats:
  Published: 2024-04-19 Words: 670 Chapters: 1/1

# whispering cosmos (talking right through me)

by ToothpasteCheesecake

Summary

> And then she asks him the dreaded thing, the shell of his past he just cannot shed: “And you were really her friend?”

Notes

> Since this scene was written from Anna's POV and I always found Morden's actions there REALLY interesting, I tried writing it from his POV. Its 5am

## whispering cosmos (talking right through me)

At a time when they were both different people—too alien, too similar, too familiar, too far gone---there was a Something there. A force of energy that pulsated when she held his hand, an array of obstacles between their hearts that formed connecting pathways beneath the rubble. Dr. Morden had found this insurmountable.

There had been a Something. She walked into his quarters on Station Prime with an evolving mission, a determination to succeed in their trip to the Rim, a fascination with the boundaries of the unknown. Was he a dead civilization to her? One of many lost worlds to dive into, excavate, and study? Something so dangerous even after death that it can only be weaponized? On second thought, the weaponization was only on his shoulders, his work for New Technologies. Whatever lured Sheridan to dead planets---it was purer than he ever could be, purer than he would ever want to be.

Or was he something endangered, on the brink of extinction, something that she had to Save and Fix and Keep? Dr. Morden was never something to be kept. He refuses to entertain the idea that she simply wanted him to want him, that it was just her own loneliness that anchored her to his cause. It would make her seem human, and she is no longer human.

They are unrecognizable now, scorched beyond recognition and puppeted lifelessly over surgical tables like burnt corpses. Mr. Morden does not find this insurmountable—he doesn't feel anything at all.

He tells her about herself because he has to, because this is his inverted divine purpose, and because he is addicted to the striking, druglike euphoria of obeying. This Anna doesn't understand—she shivers when he touches her palm, she sees no value in the past, finds dead civilizations worthless. He sees the past now as something to learn from, to analyze, to figure out what kills and what doesn't and what factors lead to their ruin. It's, hm — important to understand how it happens, how things die out. Exactly when the body starves and suffocates and what it feels like to starve and suffocate and how the younger races can avoid—or embrace, in their stupidity—the same actions.

This Anna only questions him, and not in the way Sheridan used to question him; when this Anna asks for an explanation, she spits it out with vitriol towards the former resident of her body, unable to parse the person that Sheridan had been. Sheridan had been good, and his associates cannot translate the concept of good. He feels himself getting angry and angrier as the facts spill out of his mouth, spit out like broken teeth or rotten, rotten food.

Anna has the one thing his associates refuse him: the privilege of forgetting. And she thinks her former self a fool.

“It's not your place to make judgment,” he snaps, but something sick embedded in his mind forces him back into composure. “There's no point to it,” he finishes.

And then she asks him the dreaded thing, the shell of his past he just cannot shed: “And you were really her friend?”

Mr. Morden looks away, just as he had long ago under the harassing gaze of the ISN reporters—he cannot look at her. There had been a Something between them—something that turned them into nothingness, little organic capsules of void. They ruined each other, and now they must rebuild.

“Not a very good one,” he says, facing the wall and finally, finally looking back, “but yes, I was.”

They have to finish getting her ready for John. They have to commit now.

She asked him if humans can connect with each other the way she had connected to her machine. He must look at it the same way, he knows, to serve them better. They can influence him, but it doesn't matter now. All connection is machinery, clusters of glitching and sparking circuits that rest beneath both of their grins. It's all they have.

## Afterword

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