AN: I'm not dead! And back with an Interstellar AU! Heavily influenced by the movie (I have the screenplay out when I'm writing this), but seeing the movie is not a prerequisite. I hope I explained enough of the backstory for it to make sense. This does not have a beta, but I did proofread it several times. Enjoy!

"Sure, she was a farmer," A woman says. Her eyes are careworn, and she looks ahead with an intelligent delicacy and nostalgia of days gone by, "like everybody else back then. Of course, she didn't start out that way."

"Freidrick, what the hell is happening up there? Get your ass and that aircraft on the ground right now. In one piece."

The radio feed in her helmet crackles to life. She can barely hear it over the howl of the engines. Anna moves her hand from the controls, to her neck to flip the volume switch up a couple of notches. The craft immediately takes another flip sideways when she does so. Damn. That really wasn't the best idea, was it, Anna? Fixing your headset during the middle of a spacecraft crash? Get your shit together.

"Whitmore, I got this. I can-" Anna shouts, reaffirming her grip of the controls. She fixes her gaze forward, imagining herself physically reaching for the heavens above. The stars. She can tell that she's almost out of the stratosphere. Almost there... Just a few more minutes and I can save the mission. All I need to do is control the spin and-

"You failed, Freidrick. You took too long; you weren't good enough. Cutting the power in five.," Whitmore's voice growls through the radio again, but this time it sounds odd. Almost... Inhuman; there's no trace of emotion in his cadence.

"No!" Anna half-screams, "I need the power! I can get her down I sw-" All of a sudden, Anna's craft starts plummeting towards the Earth in a free fall. She tries to control the drop, but her controls appear to be stuck in place. Above her, the sky has turned into the blackest of nights and the stars all have taken on a demonic red glow.

She is falling,

falling,

falling...

Anna wakes up, sweat coating her face and body. Her breathing is erratic and heaving, making her chest pulse up and down rapidly. She swallows thickly, reaching for the cup of water she left on her bedside table last night. Anna's hands find purchase, and she quickly gulps down the refreshing liquid. This slows her heartrate down a little; it no longer feels like its about to leap out of Anna's chest.

"Anna? Anna?" She looks to her side to find her wife awake, icy blue eyes staring up at her with a concerned expression.

"Go back to sleep, Els," Anna replies tiredly, remaining in a sitting position, her arms wrapped around her knees and her back slightly hunched over those knees.

"It's just... I thought... Never mind, that's silly," The other woman mumbled to herself, not quite forming a coherent thought.

"What's silly?" Anna asks. She knows she shouldn't keep Elsa awake for much longer; her wife has work tomorrow. But, her curiosity gets the better of her and she asks anyways. Five more minutes, that's it.

"It's nothing. Forget I said anything about Murphy's ghost. Go back to sleep." Elsa mumbles this so quickly and quietly that she almost doesn't catch the mention of a ghost. Almost. Anna wants to press more, but she decides it can wait until the morning.

Anna lays back down, but she can't sleep. Her mind keeps wandering to the crash, and to what Elsa said, and what needs to be done on the farm. Oh hell, do things need to be done on the farm. She wasn't born for this. Anna wasn't born to be a caretaker, the supporter of other people. She's an explorer, a scientist, and engineer. Somebody meant to do something important. Anna stays awake in bed for a few more moments before slinking out of bed and over to the window. She sits on the sill and looks out over the farm. Corn, corn and more corn. Seems like it's endless, these days. It was really the only thing they had left. Wheat went bad a few years ago, and potatoes the year before. Slowly, crop by crop, this blight was turning them into zombies, desperate for their next meal. Sure, they still had corn and okra, maybe a few others, but that's all they have. All anyone has.

Small African countries were the first to go. What little places that could support crops, didn't support the right crops. People there either died or fled the continent. Most of them died. Asian countries were next. When rice was knocked out, half of the entire Asian population was knocked out. Every powerful country in the world was taken out, person by person, crop by crop until only the North American countries remained. They were the only nations that had enough diversity in climate to sustain farmlands, and what little harvest they bore.

But, after the food blight took place, another blight happened. A halt in progression. Up until about thirty five years ago, the evolution of human creation was at its peak, and growing still. New things were being invented seemingly every day, and creative genius was at an all time high. It was the greatest output of media, technology and art since the Renaissance. It was the New Renaissance. But then, everything changed. Wars broke out, seemingly out of nowhere. Everyone was being called to arms, and money was being depleted. All that gorgeous creation was put to a halt. Instrument factories were converted into ammo producers, and specialty parts production (like parts in MRI machines), were converted into weapons testing. It's like the last hundreds of years never existed, and the world went back to killing each other over frivolous things overnight. Of course, it wasn't really like that, but that's how fifteen year old Anna saw it when her band class was replaced with military strategy. That's how she saw it when her best friend, Kristoff was shipped off to war, like half of the boys in her class. That's how she saw it when over half of them didn't return after the war.

And now, she pays for the stupidity of the past by being a farmer. Anna has nothing against them, really, but the sheer repetitivity of it drove her absolutely mad. Plant the corn, nurture the corn, check the corn, harvest the corn, burn the corn stalks, plant the corn, nurture the corn and so on, every day, every season, every year. And if that wasn't awful enough, God decided to drop the damn dustorms on her doorstep as a thank you present.

"Dust. Just dust everywhere," she pauses and shudders, as if cringing at the thought of a memory. "In your ears, in your mouth, everywhere."

Anna didn't get any sleep last night. Nightmares could hardly be considered sleeping, and she woke at daybreak, which is synonymous for work time on a farm.

Anna sighs, tearing her gaze away from the window and to the interior of hers and her wife's room. It's simple and functional, just the way Anna likes it. Bed in one corner, dresser in another and a plain, colourblocked rug on the floor. Of course, all coated with a thin veneer of dust. She walks over to the dresser and opens it as quietly as possible. Anna likes the feel of the solid wooden handle underneath her hand. The chipped paint and hand-milled wood takes her back to a time when people actually took time and effort to do their craft. Nowadays, there isn't any time or any energy for anything to get done properly at all. In Anna's opinion, all the world cares about is trying to save a lost cause, this Earth.

"Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to die here," Anna mutters under her breath as she pulls on a white tshirt and a pair of jeans. Her Carhartt work jacket is slung on as she sneaks out of the bedroom as quietly as she can, with the creaky wooden floors.

The dust is always calmest in the mornings. For once, Anna can see the sunrise perfectly as she goes to tend to the harvesters she has rigged up to an automatic system. Anna inspects each one carefully, with a gaze as meticulous as a watchmaker's and hands as dexterous and steady as a surgeon's. This machine thing, this engineering thing, she could do. In fact, this morning routine inspection is the highlight of her day. When she's working on the machines, she can almost pretend like she's back at NASA; she can almost pretend that things on Earth are okay.

Anna spends another couple of hours tinkering before she's able to force herself to do the actual farming part of being a farmer. Her least favourite part. Anna sighs loudly, then makes her way towards the harvest storage.