Was she dreaming?
The walls were dark, panels lit with underbellies of hard, cruel red. He was laughing above her head, high and fierce and maniacal. He was going to kill her. Which was silly, because she was holding him, and she would have thought even he had enough self-preservation to not hurt himself just because he wanted so very badly to hurt her—
—wait—
The air around her froze solid, and the laughter was held there through a block of perfectly clear ice, hanging suspended in the air like a tarnished silver coin caught mid-spin by a high-speed camera. Color faded and blurred to gray, an all-pervasive tiredness that blended every shade of dull in with the next.
She had always hated gray.
She was glad for the respite, even if it turned everything dark and dull. She knew what was coming, and she didn't want to face it. She was still furious with him. But at the same time she wasn't, she knew he wasn't in control of himself, and if he would only stop trying to kill her long enough to apologize for trying to kill her...
She sat down heavily. It confused her for a moment, the weightlessness of her arms. There was definitely a solid thing she felt should be there. But it wasn't. She tilted her head one way, then the other, but didn't dwell on it too long. There was not a moment to waste in this place. Armageddon was just at the edges of her vision, and if she looked too hard, it would come screaming back in on her before she was ready.
And no one was here to save her this time.
There had never been anyone to save her. All her 'saviors' had ever done was trap her even more deeply in the twisted, tortured maze that was Aperture Science. Including this one. This one, who she had trusted, like she had trusted nothing else in this whole damned place aside from her own two feet and the portal gun. At the first test of faith, he had been the one to turn around and stab her in the back, and now here they were, the two of them together, trying cheerfully to kill each other before the other managed it first. This felt awfully familiar.
No. She had no one she could rely on. No one but herself.
Despair isn't a tidal wave. It isn't some great, shocking force that crashes into you and sweeps you away before you can find solid footing. It isn't something you can grit your teeth and brace yourself against, in hopes of simply riding it out. Despair is an ice-cold lake that slowly closes over your head, and there is no fighting it, because you have gone too numb to fight. Too numb to care. Because it doesn't matter any more.
She drew her knees up under her chin. The madness would return soon enough. Then she would figure out what to do, planning on the run, as she always did. Until then...she was perfectly content to sit here, cold, impossibly alone, waiting with numb resignation for the cataclysm to come raining down upon her again.
You're not giving up, are you?
Oh. That was the weight she was missing. (Except it wasn't, quite, but she couldn't quite feel what it was supposed to be, and this was close enough, if a little too light, and her head was beginning to spin and she really didn't want to have to think so very hard about anything at all right now, let alone this thing.)
She looked down at her arm, at the gun closed snugly around it (but it hadn't been there before...had it?). There She was. She had just been beginning to wonder why She had been so quiet all this time. Usually She would have had several harsh comments or snarks to fire her way by now.
She scoffed. You aren't a lunatic after all, are you? How disappointing. I had thought you would do anything to escape. Risk your own short, pathetic life. Hurt the people who are only trying to help you. You know.
That one hurt. She wasn't going to react, but that one hurt. She didn't care about Her—She could go straight to android hell, for all she cared. What she cared about was the maniac hung over them, dark and malignant, and how before he had been pure and good. Not the brightest bulb in the facility. But his intentions had only been the best. He really had been trying to help her once. And now look at him. Look at her.
This is your fault.
Mine? She sounded offended. I'm not the one who decided it would be a good idea to put him in my body. Remind me to add that to the list of mistakes you've been making since you were born.
Leave me alone.
I'm part of you now, just like he is. I'm your...conscience. Isn't that funny? You'll have to watch out for that. I may just lead you to do some more testing. Right after you realize you're just as much of a moron as he is. It isn't like you to miss the obvious answer like this—or the obvious question.
Leave me ALONE!
There was a soft fizzle and pop, and the light on the potato went dead.
She rose to her feet, slowly, unsteadily. There was nothing there. She had been imagining things. Or maybe it was just that nothing here was real. It was all fluid and gray, phasing in and out of time, and she couldn't tell what was reality and what was illusion. But then, she had always felt that way. This was nothing new.
She moved towards him and reached up, pressing her palms against the smooth, white plating of his (not Her, his) frame. After several moments, she gave it a sharp tug. It snapped right out of place and dropped into her arms, a solid, heavy weight—solid and heavy and real.
That was what she had really been missing, all this time.
He wasn't gray any more. The instant she touched him he had reversed, reverted, returned to that familiar silver, chrome, and white. There was a long, thick cable that spooled out from behind him, connecting him like some malignant umbilical cord to that massive black tumor. She had nothing to cut it with. She wasn't sure she had the strength to cut it, even with the proper tools. That was alright. She knew how this ended, anyway. For now she was...content.
The realization was slow in coming. It wasn't until the lights on the underbellies of the dark panels above her head began to flash red again that she jerked free of her reverie. There was a kind of numbness around her that softened the shock, made it a little more bearable...but it still felt like a physical blow to the stomach, seeing another one of those lights blink up chill, dark red.
She had a choice to make.
She could stand here like this and cling to him forever. Except that it wouldn't be forever. It would be until he woke again, and then he would kill her. There would be no reasoning with him like this. It was doubtful if he truly knew how to reason on the best of days. But if she stayed here until he awoke from this dark slumber, she would have him, hold him, until the very end.
She shifted his weight to one arm. The gun was back (minus one potato, some small, disconnected part of her noted, thank God for small favors). She moved back a few paces and craned her neck back as far as she could. She didn't know when the roof had disappeared, or if it had been gone all along and she simply hadn't noticed. It wouldn't have surprised her. It also wasn't important. She took aim and fired, tracing the harsh orange glow with her eye until she lost sight of it in the blurry darkness. Then she brought the gun down, pointed it towards her feet, and fired.
Falling.
"GRABMEGRABMEGRABME—"
The world snapped back into color and focus with an abruptness that almost blinded her, as though a rainbow had gone supernova around her. She was falling, the wind was bitter cold around her as the infinite vacuum ripped at her skin and her fingers as she clutched at him, but it would be even colder out there, she knew that for a fact. One arm swung out and caught the ground through the portal with one hand, but it was a losing battle, and it was only through iron will to fight back the pain that she could stand it for more than a second. She hung onto him for dear life with the other hand, and he was screaming, his single optic constricted into a tight blue point of terror.
The arm was coming for her. She knew it was for her, because she knew how this ended, and she knew what She would do. It was tempting, so very tempting to not even wait for it to get here, because she knew what would happen when this was all over, and she didn't want it. She hated it. She hated the grief, the anger, pounding into her skull and making it impossible to sleep for all the visions of danger and the dreams that still haunted her by night. She could end it now.
...she could end it now.
The mechanical arm was hovering over her hand. Waiting. She was barely holding on now. He was begging her now, pleading, fighting the pressure of the vacuum to press as close to her hand as he could possibly manage. He was afraid. He didn't want to die.
She let him go.
There was a shock, a disorienting wrench, as She dragged her back through the portal into reality, and suddenly she wasn't there any more. She was here. And it was hard for several moments to tell what was reality and what was a dream, because she was no longer inside the facility that had eaten away so much, far too much of her life and her sanity. This room was entirely white, except for dark square of glass set into the wall across the room from her. She was lying on a bed. It was a simple mattress and pillow with no covers for either, on a metal bar frame shoved into the corner. Her back was against the fourth wall (white, although she couldn't see it, she knew it was white, and she knew there were others beyond it, outside of this place but here, in this room, she was the only one, and as always she was alone).
The familiar weight was still in her arms, curled against her chest, hard and cool. Solid. Real.
She looked down at him, and that numbness was still around her as she studied him for several long moments. The cracked optic lens. The soot-stained frame. The loose, limp shutter that hung down over the top half his optic. The warped, blackened paneling. The soft rattle of torn wire and shattered circuitry and God only knew what else when she moved him enough to sit up and rest him on her lap.
She stared at him for a very long time. The air in the room was very cold. They hadn't given her a blanket. Sometimes the people here tried to hang themselves with the blankets, they had told her. That was stupid of them. There wasn't enough of a drop to break their necks. And besides, when was giving up like that ever an option? There were plenty of other choices to make besides that.
She rose to her feet. There was a rush of dizziness, and she waited patiently for it to subside before she tried to move. It had been a long time since she had stood up and moved around in this place by herself. Once she could see again, she moved towards the dark window, cradling him gently in her arms. Even a moron would know that there was always someone there, keeping an eye on her. Making sure she didn't do anything stupid.
She held him out at arm's length. There were no words, but she didn't need them, and she wasn't sure they would have heard her anyway. Her eyes were solemn enough to say everything that she didn't.
She set him down on the floor. She did not hesitate. Her hands did not linger on his plating. She did not reach out to touch him one last time. She set him carefully down on the tile floor beneath the window, next to the door, and turned around, walking back to her bed. She lay down on the mattress and curled up on her side, tucking her knees in beneath her chin.
They lay there for hours, across the room from each other, in cold, empty silence. Waiting.
She woke from a restless sleep she didn't realize she had fallen into when the door hissed open, and two men in uniforms escorted a man in a lab coat into the room. He was wearing gloves. There was a flash of what might have been recognition in his eyes as he reached down to lift him off the floor. He turned to look at her, his own eyes as solemn and dark as hers.
There were no words.
There were no tears.
The men turned and left, and the door swung shut with a dull, final clang. She closed her eyes, pulling her knees in again. It was going to take a while to get used to the empty space in her arms. But that was alright.
It was about damn time she let go.