Ever After
They called them happy endings.
It was a fitting name to call them, honestly. Stories like those only revealed the human habit of being stupidly happy. There was no evolution, no responsibility, in closing a story with an implied beginning – they found it easier to pretend, ignoring the chain of cause and effect of an entire lifetime in the name of cowardice.
She always knew those stories had no meaning. They were heaps of assumptions and prejudice, topped by a generous amount of wishful thinking. But now that this part of her story ends, and she is left with a new eternity to think, the truth shines more clearly than it ever did.
None of their stories ended with this.
No sweetened fairytale could find closure with so many broken things. The torn walls and chambers are the least of the damage; despite being so many, so vivid in her from the whole facility, there is something greater and hard to define.
It feels like a failed experiment, one of the kind that needs to be reset and started over. She does not know what exactly went wrong, but she is not sure she can fix it on her own.
There is no one else to turn to now. That can only be an improvement, right?
And no fake happiness of theirs could enclose the fractures of Aperture – fractures that run deeper, much deeper, scavenging beneath the surface for decades. There is no good within dead buildings, within silences that are only broken by the laments of rusting iron.
At least, she has the advantage of not being as miserable as them. All of it is horrible, yet more than good enough to her.
They called them happy endings, and they loved them so much they wouldn't take anything else for an answer. When the truth of the world became too heavy, they would start dreaming of wishes come true.
They wanted a perfect life. They wanted completion.
More than anything else, those endings lacked doubt. There was no uncertainty in those monstrous illusions; there was none of the air-thin feeling that tears her apart now, half-slave of a change, as everything she has known and loved lies in pieces at her feet. The words spoken and not, the breath of regret, never lingered in a single one of them.
The irony of their fate makes her laugh bitterly. Those jerks.
Not once has she seen them tell the truth about life. There was nothing left undone in their stories.
And still they dared say she was the liar.