Title: Selfish

Rating: T

Pairings/Warnings: Rattmann x Chell, Wheatley x Chell, Rattmann x Morality Core. Implied sexual situations, but devoid of detail. It's important to know who Rattmann is and also to have completed Portal and Portal 2.

Disclaimer: It's Valve's

Douglas Rattmann had always been a selfish man. Every last second of his existence had been to preserve his own life, to escape and most importantly, to cajole his guilty consciousness into facing one more day. When it came down to it, he hadn't in fact been able to take the cocktail of chemicals that would have finished him and somehow, his body had managed to repair the injuries he had sustained, forcing white blood cells to stop and scab over the scars and lacerations against his will.

It had been an effort to wake up, but he did. He tried to instill a sense of purpose in himself, desperate to feel like his life had been spared for a higher purpose. Each day he found some new reason to convince himself that his body had not yet healed to strive for his goal, his mind was too fragile and of course that he had been lucky, that simple biology was his reason, not some omnipotent deity. If there was a 'higher power' in Aperture, it was dangling from a ceiling somewhere deep in the bowels of the facility, preoccupied with tormenting the sacrifice he himself had offered up to it. Her.

Instead he resumed his routine of flitting from hidey hole to hidey hole, content to leave someone else to finish off the mistake that he had helped to create, drawing pictures on the walls and pretending they would stand for something or that they might save a life. Always lying to himself.

There were so many things he could have done that would have been more heroic: given real aid. Helped to solve the test chambers. Treated her wounds. Dismantled the party escort robot. When the claw-like structure had grasped hold of her and dragged her prone form back into the depths, he had scrambled for safety. He vividly recalled blocking out everything but the tandem pounding of his heart and footfalls, blindly crashing forward without any thought given to direction or destination besides 'away' and had finally fallen with his lungs burning and his sweat matting his hair to his neck and scalp. He slipped into sleep, shuddering in a quiet pile beneath his companion cube and wondering if this was finally his well-deserved end.

He couldn't help feeling sorry for himself when he awoke (of course) and took in his first glimpse of the world into which he had escaped. He was, if not the only man left on Earth, then most assuredly the only living one for miles. Still, he kept trekking, looking for sanctuary; for his next rat's nest to coil up in, use up like tissue paper and abandon when the value of it declined to nothing.

This was what he would have done too, had he not seen the glowing orange portal open up onto the moon one quiet night. He wondered if he'd imagined or dreamed it, but he pinched himself and bit his tongue and the portal remained.

The crackling laughter that burst from him at the sight surprised the companion cube as much as himself. "Well, I know. No thanks to me, right, but it means she's out here. Do you think she sent the DOS core to the moon?" He didn't wait for a reply because he did not need one. "I…I knew I was right! She's gotten out! Way to go Chell!"

The cube had acquiesced anyway and the brief exchange had set the wheels in Doug's brain in motion, started the process of self-absorption in reverse.

The first idea that had come to him was that there was a whole other world out there. Everywhere from Hawaii to China to Australia. No matter what might or might not have occurred in North America, there could be a pocket of humans out there. There could even be people who remained untouched by whatever crazy things had happened, right here and reasonably close by. In Canada maybe, or as far away as Texas.

It was the first time he had ever thought of his continued survival to be unimportant on his own terms. What if there had been disease? He had survived this long and might be immune. The fact that he was still living meant he could help. Find an immunity perhaps.

What of her, though? What of Chell? He hadn't exactly painted a difficult trail to follow which she might if she was smart – and if she had figured out the connection with conversion gel and moon rocks, she was definitely smart.

She would need someone and for the first time, he was not going to deny her that point of human contact.

This part of Michigan seemed to be well-forested if anything. There were a number of cabins close by, ranging from spartan to well-furnished. Holiday locations, it seemed. There was no trouble or resistance offered when he broke in and he was able to use what was in most of them to his advantagee, stock piling from the ones with the items he required to the one with the sturdiest structure. He shaved his face and he was even able to turn on a pump in the one he decided would become his base camp. There was a lake around most likely as those pipes had to be sucking water from somewhere. He shaved his face.

"You look a lot nicer without the beard." The cube had pointed out.

He'd thanked it for its opinion.

A few of the nicer places boasted laundry machines but as their power supply was long dead, his clothes were just as easily cleaned in a laundry tub and a few days of scrounging around yielded not only the lake but some clothes that were close to his sizes.

The animals had never been hunted and of course did not seem threatened by his presence, making them potentially easy targets. Nonetheless, his first attempts at hunting were disastrous. The rabbits and squirrels he managed to snag with his lousy aim were so riddled with bullet holes by the time he was done with them there was nothing usable.

It was back to the cube which set him straight and not even this length of time away from a proper lab was enough to empty his mind of mathematical formulas. Traps soon replaced his lamentable marksmanship.

The end result was almost laughable: he had become a weird sort of mix of bushman and what the people on the base had called 'pencil pushers'. He laughed for the second time as he caught sight of himself in a mirror, dressed in clothes that their previous owner would no longer require: a stupid-looking argyle sweater thing of some sort and khaki trousers that were a shade too large. His hair was uneven above it with nicks and cuts and a rather fierce rash of razor burn covering his cheeks and neck. He wondered what sort of man had used this space. Maybe he was right and it had been a wealthy accountant or a lawyer. Something jogged and stuck in his memory of co-workers bragging about vacation houses.

At any rate, he felt he did not look too bad. The cube, ever as faithful as its title of 'companion' made it out to be agreed that it was a far cry from his filthy mane and beard. He was grateful to the cube, it drowned out the silence, made it easier to stick to his resolve not to be selfish. It was a good friend to him. Perhaps the problem had been his medication all these years. It had not been silence he desired or even needed.

When she finally showed up, ironically the first thing that became of their meeting was was silence. She bit her lip, looked away painfully shyly, was so clearly torn between taking his hand and shoving him as far away from her as she could, but he persevered.

"I have something I need to show you." He'd returned, carrying the cube.

Her eyes lit up and he knew he'd done the right thing. Yes, she understood who he was and what he represented. He didn't draw anymore but he could all but see her making the connection or at best a working hypothesis.

She pointed a finger at the ground in a gesture he almost immediately understood. Stay here.

"Okay." He acknowledged but his attention was suddenly bending down to touch the cube which was humming in a strange way. A way he had never heard before. It had always made consistent noise, even when he wasn't conversing with it, a funny kind of static-on-the-television white noise mostly.

He could hear her rustling in the bushes and she came back with her items one-by-one. She had stashed them there while she was trying to figure out whether to trust him, he realized, in case she had had to make a speedy escape.

He knew she had been smart, and he was already working out what praise he would give her as each item was deposited: long fall boots, her portal gun. It was all so increasingly gratifying. That was, it had been until she arrived carrying her own cube, charred and damaged and scraped. It took him only a moment to work out what had happened to it and he was glad that her position and the size of her burden obscured their faces from one another. He knew what his face must look like and the rage he felt was almost overpowering.

"How dare-" he stopped himself, reminded himself of his resolution, once, twice before he dared to speak again. "You…couldn't know. I guess."

She looked at him, a bizarre mix of shock, fear and dawning comprehension in her face at his sudden disapproval.

The cube was humming, louder than before.

He raised his voice to speak over it. "I'll show you how to clean it up."

She nodded and if she noticed the increase in the timbre of his voice she ignored it. He couldn't tell if she could hear the cubes. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to ask. They spent the morning scrubbing the dirt from the sides of hers, polishing it and removing every trace of abuse from each little crevice until he allowed her to slip off to take care of her own body and he located food to feed his own. Recalling suddenly that she was there, he began tipping food into a pot to take to his fire pit outside. Stew was one of the few things he could consistently make out here that could easily feed them both.

"It really wasn't a problem you know. For me, I mean." The cube hummed pensively.

"I agree. It wasn't a problem at all." The second one added. It had a different quality to its voice, somewhat more masculine he supposed than his own cube's was. "We're together now and that is all that matters."

He paused, the lid to a tin of preserved carrots dangling half-way off the can as he turned to look at them. He wondered if it was a trick of the light or perhaps their recent polish but the protuberant hearts seemed more prominent than usual, the pastel pink seeming to glow. "Do you mean all of us?" he asked.

The cubes hummed. "Does it matter?"

Just like that, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he and she would help restore the population. It wasn't selfish. They were together, they had escaped Aperture and they understood eachother. Before all of this, Doug had been interested in other people, women, he supposed, he'd never thought of anything else but he'd always had a sort of penchant for your standard pin-up calendar type. He'd met a few females who met that aesthetic consideration in his time, even occasionally come up with a good opening line and not been instantly repelled, but it had always hurt that those women also had become bored and frustrated and ultimately turned themselves off when he began speaking of his life's work, facts that interested him about the science of robotics or chemistry. Some of the ones that didn't turn off had frustrated him too, perhaps they were too aggressive, not smart enough or apparently insincere in their reasons for displaying interest in one of the top scientists in the Aperture Corporate Hierarchy.

There had been a girl once who had been perfect. She was smart, sincere to the point of downright near-religious morality. She fit his tastes too, maybe a little off true, but apart from the fact that Doug had never looked for total perfection outside of the results of his experiments, Aperture had a way of altering you, it was part of them stripping you down and putting science stuff into you, or however that went.

The problem was that they did not understand eachother, or rather, he had not understood her. She had fallen in love with someone else entirely. He had of course been selfish and so had come up with a way of separating them easily. Two cores, one sent to guard a Neurotoxin button but the other, as punishment for his cruelty – the only one that had never spoken words but stared at him with that hideous purple eye that was only a mockery of what her living pair had been.

He wondered what had happened to that other shell of a former human, the one who had been sent to the furthest reaches of the facility he could ever imagine. Guard this button. Check on these humans. Most of the successful ones had been tried out to placate GLaDOS, left on in multitudes as each new one added to the stretch of time before She tried to murder them all. His own Morality core had been the last to be attached to his knowledge but it had not been enough. That was when he had been taken off the core project and told to start something completely asinine with exploding fruit.

It still gave him a certain satisfaction to know that blithering annoyance of an Intelligence Dampening core was probably shut down or shoved in the defective core bin with the other failures.

Now, staring into the flames that licked the bottom of his pot and doing nothing more terribly scientific than willing his dinner not to burn he finally realized that none of these things mattered anymore. Not more desirable rivals or who loved who or whether he liked blondes or brunettes or Miss November. It was the fact that he and she were together and they were two people understood eachother and, as the cubes in all their wisdom had expressed, that would be enough.

When she came looking for him, he was ready for her. "I'm sorry about earlier." He knew he'd been right when she spread her hands in understanding and he continued. "GLaDOS gets to you like that. Especially in the beginning. It doesn't feel like she'd have a reason to misguide you, but I…you have to understand I helped design Her."

He might have been digging his own grave, but she shook her head.

"It's nice that you're willing to forgive me, but it's not necessary. I was one of the lead scientists on the team. I wasn't a very…I was a very good scientist, actually. I designed a lot of GLaDOS and Her programming. Cave Johnson was a persuasive boss, even when he was ill. He was very ill near the end and our contracts couldn't break through that. He had excellent lawyers."

She nodded. He hadn't expected her to really know, but it made sense then, the Portal on the moon. Somehow she had located the old recordings. With no voice, he might not ever learn how, though the scientist in him screamed for some answers. How had the puzzle been solved?

She held up a finger and picked up a stick, pointed at him and pointed at the point beside her.

He watched, interested as she started to draw crude things in the dirt. Again he was impressed by her problem solving abilities. It was one thing to creep through a solved chamber, another to watch her mind actually put things together. "You know the drawings, the ones on the walls of the facility?"

She pointed at him and mimed drawing with her stick and hands. The message was clear. She knew his what his role for what it was worth had been in her escape attempts. She frowned and tossed her head to one side, tracing a pattern in the dust and then scraping it over. I'm not as good.

"It's okay. I think I'll understand."

She drew and he talked himself through it with her nodding or clarifying his questions as best she could. They paused briefly through the long tale for their dinner, eating in silence.

The first problem came when she arrived at her first showdown with GLaDOS. When she explained how she had detached the cores and then, the awful, despicable, murderous girl – had thoughtlessly dumped them into the incinerator. His stomach turned over but before he could hide that something was the matter - the observant, understanding, remorseful girl had noticed.

Blackly and viciously he told her what he had done, leaving out the romantic interplay. Nothing that would incriminate him of course, explaining how the cores had once been human, painting himself just a little more kindly, spinning it so he might not have known everything.

She vomited at the end of his tale and he was glad and doubly glad that the cubes were inside and not able to see what had happened or heard his almost-lies. He patted her back and shook his head and promised that he'd forgive her and she smiled just a little. He had had to make more broth for her to eat but she refilled her stomach and seemed to be able to continue. He expected nothing less from a woman who had taken on his creation twice and survived both encounters.

He understood much better by the conclusion of the second half of her story, the one that cumulated in her escape and tracking him to this spot. She could accept forgiveness for what she had done to him only because it seemed to pale in comparison to what he had unwittingly done to her.

It had not been GLaDOS who had been sent to space, it had been that old ID core and she had, like his old love, fallen in love with it, only to deliberately rip it from herself so that it would no longer haunt her, no longer have power over her. Separated them both, silenced her voice, burned in an incinerator, sent to the moon.

It wasn't that night and it had taken awhile for it to be so, around plans and future ideas and overlaid with help from the cubes, but when they finally did sleep together for whatever lofty goals they devised together about helping the population or future travel plans to Canada and maybe Europe if things were too decimated over the entirety of North America, their first night spent in eachother's arms, he had buried her head in her neck, dreaming of violet eyes and pale skin and blonde hair and he knew that over his shoulder, she was looking up at the moon.

He'd been right. They understood eachother.

They were both selfish.

That was enough.