Chell gave a relieved smile as she ducked down into one of the many dens that were sprinkled throughout the facility. She always looked for the cozy little alcoves tucked off to the sides of test chambers: tiny little niches that her guide had used before her. He always left her supplies on the floor and murals on the walls, but for Chell that wasn't the best part of the dens.
Knowing that he had been there made her feel safe. It made her feel like he was there with her: like she wasn't alone. The dens were the only places in the facility where she truly felt safe.
But there was something different about this one.
Cans of food did line the floor but all of them were closed. The jugs of water were sealed. All the walls were bare. In one corner of the den the floor was littered with an assortment of multicolored pens, chalks, brushes, and paint tubes.
'He's still using this den. He'll be coming back.' Her crystal grey eyes widened as she put the pieces together.
Relief washed over her like a wave, the first bout of calmness she had ever felt in Aperture. He was coming back. For the first time in God knew how long she wouldn't be alone. She could finally hear the voice of a another person, could finally find out what had happened and how she had ended up in this mess in the first place.
'But what if he doesn't come back in time?'
The last time Chell had spent too much time in one of the dens GLaDOS had started to fill the room with neurotoxin on an attempt to smoke her out.
It had proved affective.
Chell resolved to stay inside the den as long as she was allowed; she was just afraid that might not be long enough. She sat down against the back wall of the den, absentmindedly fingering one of the pens sitting next to her on the floor as she thought.
'Maybe we don't have to meet to communicate.'
She picked up one of the markers, leaning toward the wall as she marked the clean white panels with careful strokes.
First came the words. He always spoke to her in short little poetic phrases tangled up in metaphors. Chell herself wasn't overly creative when it came to art (now destroying homicidal supercomputers was another matter entirely), but she loved poetry and she still remembered a few of her favorite lines from her life before Aperture. She would leave him those.
She wrote the lines in fluent cursive script that she wouldn't have recognized as hers before today. The message by itself looked nice, but she thought she would add a little more.
After all, he always left paintings with his messages.
The background she drew from memory of a world she hadn't seen in years. The concept was simple enough but she wanted it to be perfect: accurate and incredibly detailed. She spent a great deal of time just staring at the wall, attempting to remember the patterns that had once been etched into her mind. They returned to her in pieces and she outlined them in light pencil. Once Chell had planned out where everything went, she traced her previous sketches in black pen before filled in the remaining white space with black paint. Finishing it took her much longer than she'd like to admit.
It also dried up the black pen she had borrowed.
A few lines of poetry and a simple background were too easy for Chell. She wanted to add more than that, and besides, she was staying here until GLaDOS kicked her out. She still had plenty of time.
In the bit of white space left on the right side of the wall Chell carefully outlined a familiar silhouette with another black pen. Once again she took her time in adding as much detail as possible, but she had no reference aside from her blurred memory. At its lowest point the drawing reached just below the last line of poetry, leaving Chell a tiny bit of extra space to play around with. To fill this empty space Chell added the effect of light emanating from the drawing by leaving a white outline around the figure and filling the surrounding space in with more black paint.
Which finished off the black paint she had borrowed. Hopefully her benefactor wouldn't mind.
Now all that was left to do was sign it.
Her guide never signed his but before today he had also been the only person to draw on the walls of Aperture. Now Chell had added her first mural to the walls and she wanted anyone who may see it afterwards to know that she had drawn it.
Along with the untouched pieces of chalk and pens, a few extra tubes of paint sat on the floor. Chell eyed them mischievously for a moment before picking a new color and squirting some it out into the palm of her hand. She spread the paint around until her hand was evenly coated, then she carefully fanned out her fingers and pressed her hand to the wall in the last blank space she had left.
As an afterthought she repeated the motion on the wall next to her.
After Chell finished her art she stood and brushed her paint stained hands on her pants. She frowned at the side effects of her art, having heard of suffering for art before but never having to experience said suffering herself.
The sticky feeling the paint left on her hand made her regret her choice of signature. She reasoned that at least she had had the foresight not to use her trigger hand. Her arms and legs were stiff from being squatted in her awkward drawing position for so long. Hopefully that wouldn't interfere with her testing capabilities once she returned to the track.
The side effects her art had left her weren't going to be fun to tolerate, but the end result was worth it.
Chell smiled to herself as she backed away to get a better view of her work. The mural had turned out much nicer than she had expected; she just hoped her guide wouldn't be mad at her for using up some of his supplies.
After the completion of her mural Chell didn't stay in the den for very long. She ate one of the cans of food he had left on the floor (she felt terribly guilty for doing this but she also knew that he left her at least one or two cans of food in every den) and drank a microscopic bit of water from one of the jugs before Her voice penetrated the silence of the room. At that Chell took one last look at her mural before reluctantly leaving the den. It really was a shame that she hadn't gotten to meet her guide, but at least she knew he would get her message.
About twenty minutes after Chell left the den Doug returned. His arms were full of computer towers and cans of food and styrofoam cups- things that had taken him hours to find- but he nearly dropped everything at the sight that lay before him when he entered the room.
Everything had been rearranged.
One of the cans of food he had left behind was now empty, sitting forlornly by the back wall of the den with a black pen and paint tube sitting inside it. The seal on one of his new jugs of water was now broken. It had also been moved to the back of the room.
"She was here." Doug breathed. "She was here, and I missed her."
Doug, Cube whispered,
"I could have seen her. I could have told her."
Doug, Cube repeated,
"I could have apologized. I could have told her everything. She deserves to know-"
Doug, listen, Cube exasperated, It looks like she left you something.
She had left him something. On the back wall of the den there was a message written in black ink: that's what she had done with the ink pens. She had left him a message. She had left him a mural.
He approached it slowly, cautiously, as if it were alive and might disappear if he got too close.
The words flowed in ribbons of flawless cursive writing haloed by white outlines that made them look as though they were floating out of the wall. They read:
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
At first glance the wall behind the words seemed to have been simply painted black, but when Doug looked closer he noticed that the inky black darkness was penetrated by little sparks of light: stars. She had used the wall to draw a map of the night sky, complete with beautifully detailed drawings of the constellations.
"She's perfect." "She... She had to have drawn this from memory. And not from recent memory, obviously. She had to remember all of this from decades ago. It's been decades since she's seen the night sky, but she drew it and it's absolutely flawless."
Don't get too gushy. You're not done yet.
On the right side of the wall the stars faded away into the darkness the quote had mentioned. Another white outline revealed a silhouette stretching down from the top of the wall to the bottom.
Her.
She hung limply from the ceiling like a dead snake, the light of her optic cutting sharply through the stars.
"Darkness cuts through the light," Doug murmured, carefully tracing his hand along the white border, "But she illustrated Her darkness through light."
I don't understand you when you speak in metaphors. What does all this mean?
"It means that she's going to escape again." He said softly. "Her freedom means too much to her to let Her get in the way. She isn't afraid."
He pressed his hand to the delicate print she had left on the other wall, biting his lip as the paint came away at his touch.
"At least that makes one of us."
Happy Valentines Day! This was written sometime last year but I've never really had a good time to post it until now.
I did not come up with that quote and I do not own it. It's from a poem called The Astronomer and His Pupil. I think it's really pretty but I also think it summarizes this pairing perfectly.
Both Chell and Doug have been in dark places but that doesn't necessarily make them bad people. They both want out. They both want to be better. They both have darkness in them, too. To put it bluntly Chell is tenacious and homicidal and Doug is insane. One of them telling the other I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night is kind of another way of saying that they love them and the good inside of them enough to push past their darkness to see the real them.
As Chell uses the quote in her mural it means that she's going to escape from Aperture because she loves her freedom too much to be afraid of whatever it takes to get it back.
One last thing: I've set up an Instagram so I can post updates and answer questions about my writing since there's no real way to do that on this site. It's ThePortalPanda on Instagram. Please go follow it! Thanks!