Outside
When she turns around again, the world is painted anew.
Her eyes get foggy, bathed in the colours of the afternoon sun; the more she stares, drinking them in, the less real they look. Then again, having spent an unknown amount of years trapped in fiction isn't making things any easier.
In any case, she is not running from anything. There will be no haste in this. First things first — and the chance of parting right from wrong will regrow on her, patiently, in time.
She skims through her memory at her best, despite the problems her last fight has left behind. A bitter lack of surprise fills her chest with every gaping hole she finds. Still, she was never one to surrender that easily; it takes her little energy to clench her teeth and lead on.
The first thing she knows for sure is that she is outside.
She didn't even remember what the word actually meant. She still recognizes it, in any case, as the opposite of something, and she discovers it faster than a heartbeat. It was lingering there all along, on the surface of her mind.
After all, staying inside had become her whole life. It is what she has just left behind, built out of concrete and paths and fake openings. The feeling of reaching a different place was always an illusion in there — no matter how far, how deep, how dark it went. It was still a prison.
This is certainly different, judging by the smell and the hue of the world. There is nothing hidden in the blue of this sky; she finds none of the boundaries that lay behind each wall, traitorous yet solid.
This is not inside. She is also pretty sure it is the opposite.
No redundant patterns, no sketches on the tiles. The fabric of reality is no longer arranged in sequences. She is not a number anymore — she is a scramble of colours and half-incomplete thoughts, a thing that lacks order to its most primordial state.
There is no goal to follow, her mind processes, slowed down by utter surprise and hunger. There is no path to carve. She is as flexible and vast as the golden mane of the field, and the wind caresses them both with the same love.
She compares her life in Aperture to the speed and direction of that wind. She had believed to be on her own, just like that — difficult to sway, impossible to tame. The truth was different; she had just been trapped in a tunnel of years, her only destination being the light of this day.
Now, warmed by that light, she must build a new horizon to chase.
The second and last thoughts overlap. One, there is one thing she wants, two, that thing is survival. She follows the softness of the clouds, white and purple with shadows, as she tries to make sense of that instinct.
It is the first time — her first time in a scarily long slice of her life. It is the first time, since she day she entered Aperture and never left, that she has no known pattern to imitate.
And she realizes, torn by the thought of her future, that the other face of the outside is being completely alone.
She curls against the wheat, small spot on the ground of an enormous world, swinging in the awareness of the two. Her mind floats idly, desperate and glad, just on the border of sleep.
By the time she sinks into oblivion, she cannot tell happiness from worry.
The weight of freedom is devastating.