She's done.
Wheatley is screaming behind her and GLaDOS is screaming around her but their voices are nothing, not when she can barely hear them over the hammering of her heart and the ringing world around her. She's on her stomach on the trembling floor, a hollow, high-pitched whine in her ears and a white-hot pain in her right arm and leg and everything just hurts, more than it ever has before. And that's when it finally, finally hits her: She's done. She's done. Done, done, done, done, done.
After all this time, after all those tests, her drive to escape this crazy place with its crazy robots and its crazy ideas has shattered. She doesn't know how it broke, doesn't know why it gave out now, but there's just this crushing sense of finality that's firmly set into her chest and mind. She knows three things for certain: she's not going to get through this test, neither of them should be in that body, and neither of them deserve to get even a wrecked shell of Aperture to play with. And for once she isn't going to get up and try to change facts.
(Not that she thinks she can get up in the first place, considering how she nearly blacks out when she rolls over to watch Wheatley thrash and struggle as his stolen treasure crumbles around them all. That reminder of how far she's pushed her body helps seal the deal on the whole thing, unpleasant as it may be. The pain is too sharp to mean anything but bad news.)
The ringing's fading, but not fast enough for her to be able to make out any of the words in the vicious song of Wheatley and GLaDOS's battling voices. But there's something below the angry cries, something that she doesn't need her now-damaged ears to hear because she can feel the vibration of it in her bones. It's strong and bass and terrifying and it kicks her heart and breathing into double time because this it, this is finally it. No more tests, no more running, no more second chances. After all this time, she's finally going to see a permanent end to things.
What a relief, she thinks. But what a disappointment. And it is, to an extent—it's a disappointment that she has to trade her life to see this magnificent sight. But at the same time, she's not at all surprised. This is Aperture; she learned a long time ago that in this backward world her most beautiful victories come at the price of her most bitter defeats.
She forces herself to lay flat on her back and sees that the roof is collapsing above her, piece by piece. The metal tiles crash to the floor with thunderous bangs that are mostly lost in the fading ringing and growing roar. The building is tearing itself apart, wrenching panels from the walls and ripping lights from the ceiling as though the metal and concrete the facility is made of is nothing more than tissue paper. Aperture is falling to itself, and it occurs to her that perhaps self-destruction is the only way this place could have ever died.
One of the panels falls and leaves behind a metal framed window to the outside. She can see the glowing moon and inky sky around it. For the first time since this horror story restarted, there it is, the world beyond this nightmare, fifty feet away and tauntingly, hauntingly beautiful.
There's nothing to do but laugh as the rumble rushes up to engulf them all.
A/N: I wrote this when I was thinking about the insane amount of determination that Chell must've had to get through Aperture not once, but twice. I often wonder how she kept slogging through the tests and the escapes and the fights when the odds usually looked so against her. What if she broke? What if her legendary tenaciousness stopped being enough to overcome the physical and psychological hell that is Aperture? After what she's been through, it wouldn't be entirely uncalled for if she decided to finally just settle instead of reach, especially when her reaching involves her choosing between certain death by nuclear meltdown or possible death by neurotoxin/turret fire/life-long imprisonment.
Truth be told, I'm incredibly nervous about posting this. I'm worried that I didn't quite pull off the right mixture of despair, defeat, and exhaustion in Chell's characterization, all of which are necessary to put this on the side of "somewhat plausible AU" rather than "OOC mess." But I figured, hell, wouldn't know if I succeeded or failed if I didn't put it out there, right? So I'm pulling a Cave/Aperture and throwing it at the wall to see if it sticks. Best case scenario, the idea got translated clearly enough to where my explanation is redundant and bad form. Worst case, I know not to screw around with Chell's tenacity and move on to write her powering through everything. Either way, I think it's worth the risk; I really liked playing with the idea, if only to test my own ability to write characters differently.