The world had changed.
It shouldn't have surprised her, really. And, besides, it was the same in the essentials. She shopped at the supermarket, worked at the corner store and lived in a rental apartment just two blocks away. But it was the other things that jarred her; things that reminded her that time- that most precious commodity-had been stolen from her. When she had arrived only the elderly seemed to remember anything about a company once called Aperture Science.
"They used to make shower curtains," an old lady at the hairdressers said once, her bluish curls held in rollers, "but I heard they went under. The owner or what have you- he was rather ill, you know." And that was all that anyone could remember.
Thousands of people disapeared and no one had noticed.
Her (adopted) parents were dead: her father had chocked and died on neurotoxin in the original takeover of GlaDOS. And her mother? She had grieved herself into an early death and now had a tombstone in Memorial Park; put into the Earth to rest with her family only three years after Aperture was sealed. Chell struggled at times to remember much about her parents, but she knew her mother had never been old.
Androids were common now and could be seen in any shop or in any home.
"Tired of folding laundry?" The flashy commercials cried, "Get the latest android M23 and you'll never have to do it again! What a deal, what a steal…" and in the middle of the night Chell would wake screaming to the whirring of her neighbours android as it charged in an outlet on the other side of the wall.
She still had dreams. Sometimes they were nothing but light and sound and the distinct impression of being trapped, but at other times there were lasers and portals and a childlike voice sending shivers down her spine, Are you still there?
Some nights she awoke in a blind panic and could remember nothing until the daylight peeked into view and assured her she was in fact outside. The fresh air sweeping her face as she lay halfhazzard on her balcony. She didn't like to be inside too much.
According to her doctors she was suffering from an extreme case of acute stress reaction, or, simply put, shock. Eventually her voice came back, eventually her tears did too.
When her words finally came they were stilted and short and to everyone else her story seemed absolutely preposterous. They assumed it was another coping mechanism associated with post-traumatic stress and handed her another prescription.
She cried a lot at first.
Was any of it real? She would ask herself from time to time. The frightening part was that she wasn't sure. So rather than think (because, God, she didn't want to think) she worked, and she shopped and she dropped her head from time to time and baked a cake and knew that this, at least, was not a lie. This at least was fully hers and fully real.
Yes, she thought, the world had changed.
AN: This is shorter than what I had origianlly intended to write, but I liked the idea of taking just a glimpse at what life would be like after escaping the Aperture facility without making a complete story out of it and without including the Half-Life timeline, so I guess this is also somewhat AU. I found Portal 2 to be a very fun game, but also somewhat unsettling. The horror of the situation sat really heavily with me and I wanted to try and capture that.
This is the first thing that I have written in a long time (and posted anyways) so if you could leave a review I would greatly appreciate it. Either way, I hope you enjoyed reading it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Portal, Portal 2 or anything to do with them. Obviously. :)