Author's Note: I was playing "Portal" the other day and kept dying in really, really stupid ways. So Chell may be tenacious, but man - sometimes non-gamers aren't the most intelligent of folks. After several such deaths I began to wonder about poor Rattmann watching all of this happen... which led to these little nightmare-snapshots. They aren't really canon, since (obviously) Chell doesn't die... but I hope they're still enjoyable!


I've watched you die a thousand ways in a thousand separate nightmares.

I've shaken myself awake with the echoed report of my own agonized screams as I realized that I couldn't ever pull you from the electrified water. I could peer down through its murky, poisoned depths and catch your lifeless silhouette, a grotesque inversion of whatever mess I've scrawled against countless walls . . .

I've cursed my own terror as I hid from the turrets, cringing at the damned childlike voices, their lasers, the terrible rhythm of their bullets clinking in unholy, calculated cadence against the floor. I've grown still - stiller than an animal or a stone - when the impact of those bullets came with a softened echo; when you who never speaks found voice enough to scream. Just once.

I've sought refuge behind the flickering, shivering particle field and watched as She's devoured you. The neurotoxin. Or the swiveling turret gun. Or - driven to exhaustion - you've found yourself the victim of the incinerator. One misstep, one foolish misguided leap -

Sometimes I'll see you wandering, emaciated ghost, with hollow eyes, demanding; why haven't I left you food? Why have I doomed you to starvation and thirst? Do I stand a chance of escape without you? Of course not. But the animal in me has pressed me to hide supplies away as I shiver in the dark and dream.

The ASHPD? You once caught your reflection through a portal; the operational end glared worse than Her eyes; blinded, you staggered and fell - gravity scattering your fragile limbs against tile stained smattered red.

Portals dropped you into infinity and often I found myself drawn through them, too, as if we were all pulled into a black hole. No escape after all.

The fires ate you, licking you up and leaving me no ashes.

Sometimes the heel-spring would snap with a fall and your ankle would give and -

Nightmares, all of them.

And the terrible thing that I can never forget, as once I scrawled your epitaph in blood - yours or mine, doesn't really matter - is that I don't know what's real. What moves these horrible visions in my head, inexorably and invisibly? The cacophonous symphony of the spheres!

I create this reality. It's true. But I don't know truth anymore and I'm too damned tired to guess.

The tiles are cold and unforgiving. The world - this place, this hell - whatever world we now know - is cruel. Wickedly, logically cruel. Bright lights are no substitute for sun; the flash of turret-fire poor remedy for stars. Too sharp. The walls too constraining to ever give birth to sky, though I've tried to paint them blue. My shallow hand and callous touch has trembled at the face of beauty and I've wronged it. You.

If you die, I won't be able to bury you. There's no soft earth to give us rest. No way to dig a grave but with rubble. No marker but gels or blood.

Awful, all of it. Nightmares. Waking, dreaming - real or not real? I don't know. Stopped professing to know a long time ago. Infinite whirling blinding time that's lost all measure.

So please, please - for your sake, for mine - don't leave me. Don't leave me.