WARNING: Contains character death, depressingness, alternate ending.
Death
The room was burning. The potato was screaming. It sounded like He was crying.
And she was dying.
Chell lay on the floor, a broken, bleeding doll. Her breath came in short, ragged breaths, her vision blurred beyond hope. Her mind, always organized and linear, broke each part of the experience down to the most basic components of each. She couldn't see. Her left arm was most definitely broken. She couldn't feel anything blow her waist, a fact she was deeply grateful for. She could still hear everything in agonizingly perfect detail.
She vaguely remembered that hearing was the last sense you lost before death. She didn't know how they'd measure that, but she seemed to be proving it to be true.
Of course she'd seen the thick black thing wrapped around the base of the button; she'd even paused to assess how dangerous it might be. After deciding it was nothing but a loose cable that had probably simply fallen out of the ceiling panels when he'd installed that ridiculous metal grate, she'd stepped through.
This was Aperture. She should have known better.
The force of the blast had thrown her back through the portal, bounced her off the bottom of the chassis, and thrown her up against the grate. From there she'd simply melted onto the floor, a small, quivering pile of screaming nerves and muscle.
He'd said something about her being still alive, and she'd managed to roll her eyes at the reaction.
Yes, but not for long.
She'd flopped onto her back after the ceiling gave in and He'd commented on the moon. It was her first and last look at the night sky, something she knew from vague impressions of Before had always been seen as coldly beautiful. She agreed with those half-memories, and added the silent note that it would still be beautiful after she died, either bled out on this floor or was vaporized by the exploding reactor core.
"Well, this is it. This thing is broken and I have no idea how to fix it!"
Yes, Wheatley, I picked up on that. She opened her eyes (she hadn't even realized they were closed…that couldn't be good) and let her head roll to the side. She could just make out the black and white shapes that made up the Central AI. He was dangling from the chassis, looking straight down, pulled in on himself like he'd been when they first met. Small bright flashes ran over the space between him and the enormous body, over what she assumed were damaged wires. He continued to make small, choking noises, as though He was crying.
Her good right hand reached out towards him. She knew what was going on; the one thing he'd always been terrified out of his mind of was dying. This was the third (…fourth?...) time she'd brought him so close to Death, but this time the dark god was going to take them all for it. She wished she could speak, make her amends with the two robots before those final moments came to their inevitable end. She wanted to comfort him, she wanted to be friends again when the end came. She wanted to be able to smile and wave, she wanted to walk over and give him a hug goodbye, but nothing was responding.
He looked up at the moon, still making those horrible sobbing noises. "I'm sorry. I never meant for any of this, I swear! I wouldn't have…I just wanted to make everything better…" The way he squeezed his eye shut told her that the additional "for me" he'd added on earlier was probably not true.
"Well, as pointless as this is, I suppose I'm glad I got to travel a bit before I died. Again. By the way, Moron? When we get to Android Hell, I am personally going to tear you apart before the monsters get to us. Promise."
The human's eyes drifted shut again and she sighed (though it was probably indistinguishable from her gasping.) I'm sorry for doing this to you, Wheatley. And making GLaDOS face her past. And I forgive…you both.
I'm probably not going to Heaven. I've been practically homicidal down here towards you two, after all. So I guess we'll all see eachother in Hell, won't we? Thinking back on her prior experiences, an unconscious smile twisted her lips. Do you suppose that means we'll just wake up back at the beginning of this little adventure? That would be…fitting, having to relive this awful series of events over and over…
Let's assume that's the case.
Next time, I'm catching that ball.
The robots felt a small tremor before the reactor core ended the world. Chell was already gone.
...Please Read and Review. I have nothing else to say.
