A/n:A request made by an anon on tumblr quite a long time ago is finally fufilled. c:
"Chell acknowledges the crayon-scribed name on the overgrown potato project and gets flooded with memories of how she came to be at Aperture."
Rated: K+
No pairings for once. :o
No warnings.
Enjoy?
That wasn't what she wanted. Or expected. Or predicted. Or anything even resembling knowledge of those tri-fold posters long since left to rot and decompose in the confines of Aperture. Chell had never wanted to see that poster again. All it did was remind her of chaos and uncertainty, and she didn't want any more uncertainty in her halfway miserable life. She didn't think she'd have the heart to take it.
Curiously, Chell dragged her hand down the wilting cardboard, feeling its roughness, bumps from water dribbles, and plastic lumps where the hot glue held the thing together precariously. In a way, that cardboard was Chell: unstable, ready to fall apart on a whim… abandoned and left to die away. She remembered the amount of work and time she spent crafting the tri-fold. Thinking it was the most artistic and beautiful thing in the world, a young Chell had spent just as many hours on the poster as she did constructing the potato battery. Ramshackle as the thing looked, the woman remembered a time where it was pristine and neat.
Even the runt of a potato she'd hand picked out of her mother's garden had changed dramatically. No longer small and insignificant, the tuber had grown to extreme sizes, reaching up to the ceiling and even breaking through at some points. Chell mused that it had succeeded in doing something she hadn't been able to properly: escape.
She was eight; maybe, with long and wavy pigtails, buckteeth, and a never-ending grin that was sunshine. Her father, scatterbrained as he was, had managed to get a job at a laboratory filing papers, doing coffee runs, menial things. Her mother was sickly, a tall willowy woman who for as much strength as she lacked, made up for it in doting and love. Chell was their only child, their pride and joy, and her father had been so proud and excited to bring her to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. He wanted to show off how smart and clever and beautiful she was and how she was everything he'd ever want or need in a little girl. Excitement soon turned into blind panic as neurotoxin had begun flooding the halls of Aperture.
Chell remembered people choking, yelling, crying, begging for help. She doesn't remember her father, though, and how he'd tried to shut off the ventilation so the fumes couldn't spread. All she remembered was absolute pandemonium. She was swept up in the masses of scientists, children, and AI's alike, torn away from her father as he frantically called to her. The last thing she recalled was her father's face, pale and terrified, and his strong hand reaching out to grab her away from the robots that were trying to escort her lower into the bowels of the laboratory.
After that, she only remembered a sharp smell followed by a sudden silence… and then, nothing, nothing at all, until she was awoken from her sleep by a strangely familiar and calming voice.
Wheatley's light zipped away from the project, throwing it back into absolute darkness and causing Chell break from her memories. She was supposed to move onto some unknown part of Aperture, to be help this bizarre android and to eventually free herself from the tainted science innovator's grasp. Though all she wanted to do right then was curl up near the only evidence of a calm and perfect life before Aperture, and stay there until her heart stilled.