He sounded utterly familiar, and the movement of his eyes and the way he carried himself made dormant memories stir in her brain. The cadence of his voice, his vocabulary, the way he looked at her like he had something to say but was slowly convincing himself it wasn't worth her time, all of it was so close to someone she once knew.
But when she found the man, naked and shivering in an abandoned house, looking totally malnourished and like he had spent days crying, the name he gave to her was not that one.
He told her his name was Thursday.
She accepted it without question. She had seen weirder.
She took him in. Every time she did something, he would eventually shuffle into the same room, looking curious and ashamed of himself for looking curious. He would watch over her shoulder from a respectful distance like an overgrown ghost, and his hands would stay clasped behind his back. When she finished her task, he would drift out of the room again.
His face lit up whenever she fed him, gave him clothes, told him something new about herself or made an observation or laughed or cried. He was fascinated by her voice, and to tell the truth, so was Chell, because she had spent so much time holding it close to her that that she forgot what it sounded like.
They told each other stories, and laughed, and talked about nothing on the couch facing the big window in the living room.
She couldn't ever forget his reaction when she, after three years of knowing him, told him about Aperture.
There was a dread in his eyes when she made fleeting mention of it: "Something happened to me a few years ago."
There was joy when she described the robot that had followed her, how she had cherished his presence and voice.
Then there was a crawling emptiness in his eyes when she described The Fall.
And then she mentioned his testing, and in the hunch of Thursday's shoulders she saw guilt, guilt, guilt. He was not good at hiding his emotions, and it was all very strange to her, that he should feel this way. Thursday wasn't there, after all.
Empathy, maybe.
Self-loathing, maybe.
She patted his leg and told him that everything was going to be fine, because he was her friend and she loved having him in her house, and when he was around, the monsters of her memory went away.
"You're just saying that, love," he stuttered.
"No," she said, and turned back to the window. They watched the bare trees shiver in the wind. "I've never…really had a friend. You're good to me. I like you."
"Thank you." His voice was unsteady.
She looked at him, and upon seeing the shame and hurt in his eyes, she brought him close.
He sobbed on her shoulder.
In the early hours of the morning, someone's footsteps woke her up.
Chell laid still in her bed, her eyes shut against the Prussian blue light from outside.
She waited.
The footsteps approached her bed, and someone's hand stroked her shoulder.
The someone leaned in close.
"Sorry," Thursday breathed.
Chell sighed and pretended to be asleep.