New Game
What stands out the most, in the arduous path you are crossing, is that the place itself is one long reminder.
The certainty travels in your company, ever just a step ahead of you. Whatever is there for you to see, from broken glass to the branches which crawled in, is a token of change – a presence that wasn't before, and now cannot help being there.
You walk through a story of the past, and you are its core. Even Aperture, battered and torn as it is, bends in remembrance.
It could be good, you guess – if it weren't for the fact that, before the bed, you don't recall a thing.
For all you know, your life might as well have started there. Whatever comes first in you, sounds and light and everything, was spent in short vigils and long sleep. You could only keep bits and pieces of that – strange words from strange people, minimal exercise, no food. No water, all dust.
This is all you have. Such few memories, and not even colourful ones.
Your mind is lying to you, there is no doubting it. You are, after all, a grown human being; your body is enough to imply you had a past. If that is not convincing, you can lean on the little hints your senses drop – like how naturally this gun weighs in your hands, or the instinctive process you handle these tests with.
It is as if your limbs held mechanical answers. You wish you could decode them, to better serve your thoughts. Would it help some more?
It is not pleasant to be clueless, this is for sure. You are lost to this labyrinth, unable to reach out, in so many ways. But if nothing is left of you outside – if all your meaning and present is locked here, among four broken walls – you cannot say that is the case for Aperture.
It doesn't take you long to notice. Whatever is inside revolves around you.
How you shaped this artificial world, you come to know gradually. You start to wonder early on, when you play guessing games about what must have happened. When it all spirals down to a single figure, a tangle of choices which all lead to them, you have strong suspects.
The moment she talks to you (again), you are sure. Of what, you cannot tell in full. But you are so close.
And while the feeling of loss stays – while it shoves you down a pit, like a discarded rag doll – it does not last forever. The long walk you have to face is one of discovery of something that was lost, in any sense.
It is her, in the journey you share, to show you how chunks of life aren't always gone. They are merely misplaced – and she can help.
If neither of you is alone in this, you can work towards the same goal.
You do what she does, no more, no less. You put the shards together. Your feelings echo them from time to time, which calms you down more than you can say.
You two are the same. You can rebuild from nothing.
And if you found a way start over, that probably means you can also move on.
Amnesiac!Chell AU for Portal 2. Born as a metanarrative interpretation for first-time players who start from the second game, this idea is at least two years old. I gave it a shot now, in the light of… recent events that made me rethink it.