Mirror
Whether she liked it or not, Aperture was her mirror.
It wasn't just because she spun the cogs, molding the infinite walls in whatever shape she pleased. The place drifted in her wake by way its image clang to hers, flooding the acres of void all around, reminded her of her own resolve.
As she had none, the chambers built her beating heart – it was their maw to swallow the past in her stead, and their vents to shut in fear when the time came. In their cold panels, made of abandoned concrete, she struggled to enclose disaster.
Whenever she failed, of course, so did they.
Parallel to her ruin, Aperture declined into its own. She refused to see, shielded by her coma. She would not watch the outside world creep into its shell, vine after vine, to prove her she had lost.
The urge to sweep it all away had been born way before her awakening. The theater of her second murder was, indeed, spotless. Not a broken tile was to be found, among the ones which echoed her scream.
The moment the plunged downwards again, her home inevitably followed. She barely found the strength to look.
No, she was not fond of realizations. And years into the future, when it was all irreversibly over, her habit stayed unchanged. She cleaned all history off its face, relentless, forever terrified of her reflected wounds.
If she lied to herself, however, Aperture couldn't.
Rare, but real enough, were the moments in which she studied the leftovers of her personal hell. A burn in the floor, a broken switch, a cube. In those traces, and their immediate vanishing, she found a breath of relief.
There was no denying it, after all – the place was just like her. Broken, yet healing.