Things were never easy. Her life since the damn creature had come into it had made everything complicated. Once, she'd had a future. A future with her daughter, and a little fake garden on a rock or a station they called home. Ripley had imagined birthdays and shopping excursions. She wanted to show her worlds the little girl couldn't imagine. Of course, all of that was shattered back on Gateway Station, sitting in a hospital room with a view down to Earth.
Fifty-seven years in hyper-sleep. Burke told her it was the longest anyone had ever slept, and Ripley had made a joke about it being much longer for Jonesy in cat lives. Surely, the feline should get some kind of commendation for it. The picture of Amanda Ripley as an old woman broke her heart. Still continued to break her heart whenever she thought about it, so she tried not to. She put Amanda so much out of her mind that sometimes, it felt like someone else's life all together.
Maybe for the moment, Ripley could enjoy breathing the Earth's (mostly) natural atmosphere. Sure, the air was pumped through air conditioners and the ventilation systems, but otherwise it was completely unprocessed. She'd almost forgotten what that was like. Once the shock of this wore off, she wanted to spend at least a day outside in the sunshine, doing absolutely fuck-all. A couple of drinks, food that wasn't pretending to be something else, and no goddamn alien xenomorphs trying to kill everyone. That last addition frustrated her. It was only a year of her life, and now she had to tack that onto everything. Gonna take a shower without an alien xenomorph stalking her. Have a drink with Hicks -- Dwayne -- not a damn facehugger in sight.
Sure, he had bad news for her. Ripley was prepared for it. She was dead. He'd seen it. If she was dead, Newt probably was, too. The idea stung a lot, and Ripley had never been very good at hiding her emotions. She'd never had to, not until Weyland-Yutani and the aliens, and even then she was much more likely to go with anger. Anger was good when you were trying to keep the hurt out. Didn't matter what kind of hurt. A magazine down your throat, a punch to the gut, an elbow to the face, the loss of your daughter. Getting angry kept you alive, kept you moving, kept you from being nothing in a corner. No matter what, Ripley had never been nothing.
How long had she been standing outside his door? Too long in her mind, so a hand was raised and rapped against the heavy wood. It was a strange, deep sound so unlike knuckles against the tinny sound of metal. Ripley caught herself smiling as she ran the two fingers of her other hand across her knuckles. Felt different too. Same with the strange, soft clothes they'd given her on that golden planet. Asgard, they called it. She'd shown up in her underwear. Not wholly unpleasant in that place -- the sun had been warm enough -- but when surrounded with strangers who were trying to calm her, there weren't many ways to feel more exposed.