A.N.:

HELLO!

I have been looking back at some of your amazingly flattering reviews on Troppe Cose Non Dette, Mia Cara, and my heart was just inspired to rewrite it. I have grown so much as an author and a person and what I wrote does not reflect what I can really do.

Thank you so much for reading!

Chell's room was cold, as it always was. The mid-fall chill seeped through her cement walls and pricked the bare skin on her dark arms. The red numbers on her alarm clock read 3:00 am, but she hardly registered what they were blaring at her. She was focused only on the bright white full moon through the bars on her window.

Looking at it made her nauseous. It made her palms sweat and her mind race. She hated it, but its light never missed her eyes and she always found herself watching it as it moved slowly through the starry nights. And every night she had to convince herself that she was safe here, and that the thing that made her shake was unable to hurt her. She promised herself that she would never have to see him again. She figured that promise was the only thing that kept her alive these past five years, and it would be only thing that would allow her to bare those that laid in the future.

She was tired. She knew she was always tired. Tired enough to feel it but never enough to actually sleep. But she settled herself into bed anyway. It was a droopy thing and it shuddered and squeaked when she sat on it. It was better than nothing, she convinced herself. She set her head on her pillow and studied the cracks in the ceiling before they faded from her view. She did not dream in the asylum.

()()()()()()

She woke up to loud, blaring sirens out her window and a hard knock on her door. Everything seemed to wake her up these days.

"Stay in your designated living areas," A low voice instructed, muffled through her metal door."Do not leave the building. Do not go outside."

Chell had never heard a warning like this before and the gravity of it made her skin crawl. She peered out the window, the flashing lights and sirens came from ambulances and police cars at the hospital across the street. Dozens of people crowded the streets and ran about as the doors of an ambulance burst open. Three people rushed out of it, all with guns and tasers at their waists. Strapped onto the gurney that they pulled out was man. He was thin but that was the only thing that Chell could make out from the third floor of the asylum. She didn't quite understand what the fuss over him was, but she watched anyway until everybody on the street had cleared, her insatiable curiosity winning her over. The sirens ceased and the lights flickered out and she set herself back in her rickety bed.

()()()()()()

"Diane, get me a clean operating room, immediately!" A dishevelled, brown haired man shouted as he rushed along side the gurney, his doctor's coat flapping behind him.

The world was a blur.

Everything seemed as though it was a thousand miles away and he was watching it all through a pair of binoculars. People were shouting at him to 'stay awake' or 'keep your eyes open', but all he wanted to do was sleep. Nothing they were yelling meant anything to him. The only thing he wanted was for the pain to stop. He wanted to be able to breathe without feeling as though his insides were tearing him into shreds.

He should be dead.

After being nearly ripped apart when he was flung back into Earth's atmosphere, he knew that it had to be some sort of miracle that he was still in one piece. He didn't believe in miracles.

The doctors pushed his body into a bright white room. They all fumbled around him, pulling open drawers and pressing buttons. Grabbing his face tightly, one of them slung a breathing mask around his face. Another doctor, a tall woman with an unkind face, took a sparkling clean scalpel to his bicep. He couldn't quite figure out why she did it. Maybe his arm was broken. But as she cut further and further he felt nothing. He figured it was his repair system focusing on other things that weren't his skin.

She stopped, the blade falling from her hand as she looked at his limb. He watched her back away from him, then look him straight in his half lidded eyes.

"Oh my god. He- " She stuttered, hitting her back against the wall.

"Doctor?" another person at the end of the room said with a concerned tone, "Is everything alright?"

The lady shook her head slowly and backed away from the body on the hospital bed.

"Diane... Whats wrong?" A young man rushed up to the woman's side. He looked down at the incision. There was no blood and nothing that looked remotely like bone.

"What-what is... Oh God." He stumbled over his words as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at. The woman reached over and turned a black dial on a large tank on the floor and in a matter of seconds, everything went dark.

()()()()()()

"No! I don't know what he is!" The doctor yelled, throwing her hands up in frustration. "Never, in all my years have I seen anything like him. He's- it's like he's not even human..."

"Maybe... maybe he isn't." A short, younger woman said quietly. Diane turned to the other woman and chuckled cynically.

"Impossible, Gretchen." She looked back at the man. "It has to be some kind of deformity or something." She said, her brows furrowing. Gretchen walked to the doctor who leaned defeatedly over her desk. "No, Diane, It's not impossible. Remember the kind of stuff Black-Mesa had? I mean, we have military androids, who's to say we haven't got some like him?" She pointed to the bruised body that laid silently on a hospital bed. All of the doctors agreed not to go any further until they understood him as much as they possibly could. So far they were all as confused as they had been the minute they found him. They locked him in a quarantine area and decided to keep him there.

"He's not like any Black-Mesa android I've ever seen." Diane said in a low voice. "He just looks so... so human..." A thick layer of glass separated the doctors from the man, and they both watched him intently. He was quiet and still as death. But a whirr began to echo through the hospital room. It grew into a deep groan and they could see the man's fingers twitch ever so slightly. It was the first thing he had done in nearly 24 hours and neither of them wanted to miss what was about to happen.

As the doctors moved closer to the glass, there was a shriek louder than anything either of them had ever heard. A sound that boarded just on human and bled into something else entirely opposite. Diane threw her hands over her ears and the younger doctor backed away, tripping over a table and falling to the floor. She got up almost immediately and ran over to a microphone pressed a button, and talked into it.

"Sir. We need you to calm down!" Her voice radiated out of speakers in the corners of the room. The man's scream faded down into a heavy set of confused yells and cries. His head darted around and he eventually looked at the doctors through the glass.

"Sir," She continued, "Can you follow my finger." She lifted up a finger and moved it around in circles and the man's brilliant blue eyes followed it's every move

"Good," She said. "Now, can you tell us your name?"