I woke up in a closet, staring at the ceiling, legs tucked under me in an uncomfortable position.
I was back in my orange jumpsuit.
I had been given a new pair of boots.
And a portal gun lay next to my shotgun and machete on the bed.
My ammo belt had been neatly placed on a hanger, the leather straps brushing my face.
The world was still blurry with the aftereffects of the sedative, and I stood, stumbling, ankles shivering like tiny twigs.
But where was Wheatley?
The last time I had woken up here, he had come, knocking on the door briskly,
"Anyone alive in there?" He had said, that happy, chirpy voice, the first one I had ever heard.
Where was he?
I holstered my shotgun, slid the machete into its sheath. I flinched as the cool metal of the portal gun curved around my hand.
It was ugly and heavy and wrong. But I held it anyway.
I kicked the door open with my boot.
My cell swung slightly. The rest of the rooms did too.
The cells were connected by thin metal grid work, like the catwalks were made of. The closest cell was a few steps away.
I opened the door wide.
A giant bulge of metal lay on the bed. Stepping closer, the bulging metal more resembled a suit.
Nothing like any suit I'd ever seen.
I went over to the front of the person, but their face was encased in a leather gas mask. I stared into the glowing eyeholes, which held no mercy or even an inkling of feeling.
I brought the heel of my free hand down with a clunk on their head.
They jolted up, hands searching for something to hold. They weren't tall enough to be Wheatley. I brushed that aside and helped them up off the bed.
"Shephard?" I whispered.
The suit nodded.
"Finally, the little lady speaks." I resisted the urge to flip him off and I walked down the hall a little ways, opening doors and searching rooms and getting slightly more agitated and worried each time because he wasn't in any of the rooms and what if he was dead, what if Caroline had killed him and even as he died he was angry at me?
I couldn't live with that.
Finally, in the last room at the end of the hall, Wheatley's shard of glass lay next to another portal gun.
I found him keeled over in the closet, legs curled up under him like he always slept, even in unconsciousness trying to make himself as spherical as possible. I knew he hated this body. I knew but I didn't care.
Even curled up, he was too long for the floor. His head was up against the wall in an awkward position. His glasses lay a few feet away on the floor. One of the lenses was completely gone, the other shattered beyond repair. I tucked them into my back pocket.
He was garbed in a stratosphere blue jumpsuit matching mine and long fall boots. His other clothes were nowhere to be seen. I could only wonder how clumsy he was wearing these stilts.
He started to stir, sitting up, rubbing his bleary eyes.
He was alive.
I launched myself forward, wrapping my arms around his neck, burying my face into his shoulder. My breath seemed torn from my throat, and the hot pinprick of tears started behind my eyes.
"I'm sorry." I whispered.
His hand flew up, stroking my back.
"Me too."
I huffed out, a quick breath, all my pent up fear and rage and confusion dripping from my body, spilling from my every orifice.
It spilled out of me, staining the floor with ugly red.
I wanted to be numb. I didn't want it to hurt.
I slammed my lips to his, hunting for something, anything to wash out the pain.
I dug my fingers into his collar, hauling him upwards.
After a minute, he kissed back, moving his lips softly with mine, but I didn't want that. My fingers tangled themselves into his hair. I was breathing hard.
We slid apart, gasping like beached fish.
He tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind my ear.
My anger and hurt dissolved. He was too sweet and too kind and I didn't deserve him but I had him and I was going to do the selfish human thing and hold on to him until the world collapsed and the stars shattered like glass and rained on the earth and everything turned to barren cosmic dust, scattered by the winds.
But for now I had a portal to Hell to eradicate.
Even so, I sat there for a few more seconds, like maybe everything might go away.
It was perverse of me, just over a week ago, longing for something other than surviving.
Longing for Here, My mind whispered, but I ignored it. And now that I had it, I wanted to forget it. I wanted to just sit here. Forever.
"If you want, we don't have to do it. We can just sit here. Forever." I whispered to him. He recognized his own words and chuckled.
"Sounds nice." He whispered back. And I wanted to so badly. But whenever I closed my eyes, the image of Harriet's little face as she spelled, fingers flying, screaming without words:
MOTHERMOTHERMOTHER
My eyes snapped open. I stood up so fast I banged my head on the ceiling of the closet.
"Let's go." I muttered.
And so we did. We walked to the lift at the end of the thin metal walkway, crammed in, three of us, shoulder to shoulder.
The doors ground shut with an ugly screech.
The lift moved upwards at not quite its usual pace.
But my heart stayed down there, in that closet to gather dust. In my mind I was just sitting there forever with him until we both rotted away like the biological organisms we are.
01101111 01101000 00101100 00100000 01110011 01110111 01100101 01100101 01110100 00100000 01100011 01100001 01110010 01101111 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100101 00001101 00001010
Her voice boomed all around us yet again.
Your first test is an easy one. Find their weakness.
The elevator screeched to a stop.
A few humanoids looked our way, drawn to the sound. Quiet hissing slithered out from under their helmets. I loosed a shot into where its heart should be. The bullet left a tiny hole, but no blood leaked. I shot once more, into the leg. Nothing.
By now, they were bearing down on us, hissing getting louder, eye holes glowing through the masks, unnatural and fearsome, bleeding light and power.
Eye holes.
"The eyes!" I shouted. Shephard nodded and fired. His entire body clenched from the formidable kickback of the gun he held, but he held still and the bullet smashed through the glass, and ugly yellow-gray liquid spilled everywhere.
The goo hit the thing's chest with a sizzle.
I fired, killing the other eye. The thing twitched, flopped, fell.
The other one slid to its knees, hands grabbing the fabric of the other one, staring off into space in front of it. I rotated a bit, fired. The shot lanced through its head, and its entire body convulsed a moment, skin moving in unholy contortions before falling still.
Before I could even think about what had just happened, my thought process was blasted to shreds by her voice.
Well done. Move forwards. I want you to enter the room in front of you. Turn on the gel. Turn on the lights. And find me a white disc.
We did so. I felt like a damned puppet, like I had before, impotent, useless, and Caroline sat at al the strings, my mother as I knew her now, smiling and watching us launch ourselves into danger.
I didn't want her love anyway. I hated hated hated her. It was already decided in the back of my mind: I would blow this place to shreds before I left to make sure it couldn't return to haunt me.
I flicked switches, watching panels' light up and shine, turning on the lights, returning power to Her. I didn't have a choice. I slid the disc into the drive. A screen flicked open with string after string after string of luminous data, flicking past so fast I couldn't read it, but I wouldn't understand it anyway.
A shot fired, shattering the computer screen to tiny shards of glass that rained down onto my hair and arms, a particularly big chunk whizzing past my cheek, slicing it open.
Shephard blew away the smoke, spun the pistol around his finger, and aimed again. This one was at the light, shattering more glass and plunging the room into darkness. I hit the floor hard, not caring that the glass all around me sliced and chopped and slit my wrists open.
I gritted my teeth through the pain and stared up at his dark figure as he clomped over to the drive, ejecting the disk with a push of his thumb. He slid the white circle into a slot on the suit.
That thing was some serious metal. A bullet wouldn't penetrate it.
My entire body went cold. Where was Wheatley? I was so tired of dragging him out of danger. I fired one, two shots at the leather of his gas mask.
The bullets didn't bounce off. They sunk in, leaving a tiny green-grey hole.
And now, in the dark, I could see the eye slits of his helmet glow.
Something cold settled in the pit of my stomach, but there was too much betrayal today, it just fell down onto a pile of Caroline and my father and everyone else and it didn't really matter because nothing mattered except saving Wheatley and getting out and healing my heart.
And right now a Band-Aid didn't seem so bad. I'd take anything I could get right now while my heart lay in tiny shattered pieces and I couldn't trust anybody and I had to save the damned world again, but this time my world was bigger. If all he had was a band-aid, a little sorry, I'd take it.
But his sorry meant more now.
It meant more now because I loved him.
The realization made my wounds and bruises hurt less, all my pain was fuzzy and far away. I felt my face settle into the determined grimace that had always felt glued on my face here.
I shot into his eyes. But I didn't stop there. I pounded his head full of lead, didn't even stop, not caring how many bullets I wasted, I had plenty more in my sack, I just wanted to make sure that no-good, betraying bastard was good and dead.
I fired another parting shot, right into his forehead.
I smirked, watching that ugly blood taint the ground.
I stood up, lifted up a nearby table to find Wheatley, cowering under it, slowly becoming more spherical. He lifted his head, looked up at me with those big blue eyes. I smiled and held out a hand to help him up.
A hot brand of pain shot through my ribs. I could feel the foreign, toxic thing settling into my body, dragging agonizingly through my muscle and tissue, and out the other side, shattering a table leg. And the pain, right on its heels, a hot, precise pain that made me simultaneously gasp for air and contract my ribs in hot waves so I couldn't breathe.
My knees buckled and I crumpled to the ground, my fingers tenderly probing the place where the bullet had exited my body. I tried to breathe, couldn't, and the world was blurring at the edges as I gritted my teeth and fought for consciousness. It was an uphill battle. In the mud. And it was raining in my eyes.
And I had a bullet hole through my body, surely puncturing a lung, filling it with blood. I coughed and spat, seeing only red. Maybe it was because a filter of red had been laid over my eyes, the world throbbed and beat with my heart.
I dragged myself on my elbows, wrapping my arms around his neck, trying to shield him. If I was going to die anyway, he sure as hell wasn't going to.
"Chell." His voice sounded like he was calling from the top of a deep well.
"Stay awake. Just stay awake, okay?" He sobbed. I turned my head with much agony, watching Shephard slowly, blindly, reloading his gun. Wheatley snatched the shotgun from my bloody fingers and fired. He missed, shattering a window. But he reloaded like he had seen me do a million times, prepared for the punchy kickback of the gun, and shot again.
He shot right through his head. But he kept going, he kept moving with at least two dozen bullets in him.
He fired again, but the kickback bruised him and he skidded backwards, and the bullet hit his hand. He riddled his body with bullets, tears moving faster and faster down his face, and he was screaming, until the monster that we might have called Shephard fell back down.
I couldn't have been prouder of anyone in my life.
And now I wouldn't.
I could feel the blood spilling from my body at a faster and faster rate. Once again, the crimson running out of me was transfixing in its ugliness, and my mind wasn't unable to wrap around the fact that I was going to die and I would never see him again and we'd never kiss and I wouldn't see his smile. So a numbing blanket of calm and acceptance fell over my thoughts.
Maybe it was all okay.
Maybe dying wouldn't be so bad.
But he rolled me over onto my back, hands pumping faster and faster, trying to make me breathe, but black spots swam in my field of vision and I just gave up. He pressed his lips to mine, trying to make me breathe, and I let him.
It was the least I could do, right? Give him a goodbye kiss.
My breaths slowed. I closed my eyes.
Death was like sleep, right?
The Long Sleep.
I was just going to fall asleep.
Forever.
When I die, I want it to be with you.
And his voice, calling to me from the top of the well:
"Stay conscious! There's got to be something around here, hang in there, love, please just stay awake, stay awake." He was sobbing, and his words were snuffled and mangled.
A tiny tinkle of glass. I didn't even have the energy to lift my head.
He gasped.
"Thank you." And I was lifted up, something spritzed into my wound, setting it aflame again. But the pain meant I was alive, meant I was still fighting because I had something to fight for and I wouldn't just lie here forever, sleeping my life away.
I wasn't going to die. And he lifted me up, and I gasped, feeling fresh pain lance through my body. I screwed my eyes tighter shut.
The pressure of linen was wrapped once, twice, three times around my torso, just like I had done for him. The blood stained the fabric quickly. I could feel the wetness spreading. But he cursed, wrapped more, and set me back down, pumping my chest and breathing into my mouth. And I did it. I breathed, coughing back all the fluid in my lungs.
I leaned against his chest.
He didn't just have a band-aid to help me.
He had given me wounds, but bandaged them and much more.
And he pressed a kiss to my hair and let me rest my head on his lap.
Right before I fell asleep, not for good, but only for a little while, He noticed the cut on my cheek.
A tiny blue cotton band-aid was tenderly placed there. I knew without looking it was an Aperture brand, with the silver logo and 'get well soon' written in loopy cursive writing just like every other one in the first-aid kits they gave you.
I smiled.
