The city was too far away, and the weather had been bad the last few days. She was unwilling to stray too far from the house or Wheatley today, but she needed to go out. They were in need of coal and a whittling knife, of spark plugs and washers and a new screwdriver, and she was amazed that she hadn't thought if it sooner. They were living in the middle of a suburban community, surrounded by several still standing houses. They lived in the middle of a fertile scavenging field! She'd mulled around the house most of the day, keeping her eye on the sky and fretting about whether or not she should go…
She grabbed her pack and reached for the front door handle.
"Where're you going?" he asked, suddenly aware that she was leaving. Despite his minor fear of being alone in a bad storm, his main concern was for her. He'd come to the conclusion that he was relatively safe inside. But humans, he'd learned were just as fragile as any android, maybe more, and that bad weather was a threat for both of them. He hated when she went out in a storm and left him to pace the hardwood and hope she comes home.
"I need a few things. Don't worry, I won't go far. I'll stay in the community." She reassured him with a smile.
What choice did he have? He knew that her scavenging was crucial to both their survival, and if she said she needed something, who was he to argue with her, when she was so brilliant at the staying alive thing?
He nodded, still unsure of her decision, and cast a worried glance up at the gray clouds that hung in the sky. He gave her a quick squeeze of a hug and watched as she left the house.
"Careful, luv. Hurry home."
It was frustrating, for Chell.
Most of the houses she went in were either in such a state of disrepair that she could hardly enter them, or nearly completely bare. Some of the houses looked like they had been broken into, with busted windows or popped locks, and many of those showed signs of looting, she thought, as she picked through the remains of a broken vase. There was evidence that it had been used as a hiding spot once upon a time – flecks of silver foil intermingled with the opaque ceramic pieces. She rose from her crouch and began exploring the rather well preserved house. This one looked like it had only experienced a minor break in, instead of a full fledged looting. This must have been a heavily protected property, she figured, and this was good for her purposes. She threw herself into a frenzy, knowing that there had to be something in the house she could use.
She took a step forward, and heard the distinct crumple of paper beneath her foot. Stepping back to release the papers, she knelt down and picked them up, two pieces of stationary with a sleek hand written in black ink. Some of the words were harder to read because of the wear of time and the ink splotches that had befallen the paper at some time or another, but she was able to make out most of the bottom of the first page:
"The Combine may be gone, the war may be over, but we're no where near out of the crisis. Humanity hardly has a leg left to stand on, and lo and behold, they left us a bit of a gift. The Green Flu has already taken the lives of millions, completely obliterating any semblance of government. Important political leaders all over the world have fallen to this mutation pandemic, and it has crippled major cities in every state, county and province. I fear it's only a matter of time before the Green Flu finds its way into the rural world. We're safe for now, so that's something. But things aren't looking good.
~S.M."
Chell could only stare at the paper, her hands trembling. The Combine, the Green Flu, the war – she didn't understand! Over the years, all she'd gotten were bits and pieces of the story – nothing she ever found told her what had happened to an entire planet. Her fingers clenched into a fist around the paper and moved on – there was nothing in this room for either of them.
She shouldered the next door open, stumbling into the bedroom and gagging. The smell was enough to make her want to vomit. She took a book from the desk and smashed the window open to air out the room. It helped, but only marginally. She took a look around: The walls were covered with pin ups of newspaper articles, dated far after the ones she was able to scavenge from the inner city. Her jaw dropped and her breath caught when she saw the pictures, freelance snapshots of the most massive spacecraft the Earth had ever seen, being followed by hundreds of smaller models. The caption below read "E.T., GO HOME."
She ripped the article from the wall, still suppressing her gag reflex, and read further. Her eyes scanned the faded page, taking in everything. Her heartbeat quickened at every word and she felt an unfamiliar choking feeling at the thought of what had happened to her friends and family. Perhaps she couldn't remember them, but she knew she'd had them at one point, and she couldn't say she enjoyed knowing what had happened to them.
She sighed, setting the paper clipping on the desk. Her eyes travelled over other papers scattered across the wood. She stopped. Big black letters were glorified at the top of the page. It was like a bad accident – she couldn't bring herself to look away. The letters screamed at her.
Black Mesa.
She could still hear every inflection of Cave Johnson's voice ringing in her ears. "Black Mesa can eat my bankrupt-"
Somehow, Black Mesa was associated with Aperture Science. Somehow. It didn't matter how. Black Mesa was responsible for the death of the Human Race.
There was a sudden, boiling, unbridled anger. It was Aperture's fault, it always was. Now that she knew, the words screamed at her from all corners of the room: Black Mesa, Portal Storm, Aperture Science Innovators—
She made a noise, more of a growl or a snarl than a scream, and nearly flipped the desk over, fleeing from the room. She forgot her search for the supplies, instead settling for lying in a crumpled heap at the house's front steps.
Alone.
It was frustrating, for Wheatley.
Oh, he wouldn't ever tell her, no. Because, when it came down to it, it really was a silly thing, because he truly was happy with her.
The door closed behind her. "Careful, luv. Hurry home." He called, though he was sure she hadn't heard. He was alone again.
Every time she left the house, he was reminded of just how alone he was. Sure, Chell would be back within a few hours, and everything would be right as rain again until they needed something – which, Wheatley thought, was more often than he liked. It wasn't so much that she wasn't good company, or even that she was away too often. He loved being with her, and he wouldn't have traded that for anything.
But there was still that nagging feeling of loneliness that he could never quite place.
He paced the house, trying to straighten things up. After a lifetime living in a facility that had literally been falling apart at the seams, he couldn't help but try to keep things tidy, often rearranging entire rooms just to make things more organized. Chell had persuaded him out of this some time ago, considering the fact that she was never able to find anything one day to the next, but there were days like these where he simply kept busy to keep busy.
Today was the living room.
He cleaned, straightened and made everything look absolutely spotless, and even that wasn't enough. Thoughts still nagged at the back of his mind and he knew he needed more, a new job, another distraction. His gaze passed over the entirety of the living room, trying to find something to do.
There was the closet.
He squirmed uncomfortably. The closet was hers, and he was rarely allowed to touch it. Things were organized by her standards in there – which was to say, not at all. And yet, she seemed to know where everything was.
Still, she had told him that even she had to admit that it had gotten out of hand, and that it was due for her to clean it out.
His hand touched the door handle and pulled it open.
This would keep him busy at least until she got home, and then everything would be just fine.
He made short work of the top shelves, since they were mostly boxes – old files and papers that Chell had collected over the years. Of course, they were all important to her, but to an outsider, they must have looked like they were selected at random. Perhaps they were. Honestly, he couldn't tell, but every time she looked through the small boxes, she smiled, so he figured that knowing wasn't truly important.
The lower shelves were a bit harder to navigate, though. They were full of loose items – things that she'd scavenged, thought that they might come in handy one day. Maybe they would; he had never had as much foresight as she had. But the closet was still a wreck. He carefully sorted everything, compacting it as far into the back of the closet as he could, fitting everything together like a jigsaw puzzle, creating space in the front.
He came across many odd things – giant mesh rackets that strapped to your feet, arrows and an extra axe, a box of assorted knives, a mesh rope net, and a nylon bungee cord – but it was one thing in particular that made him stop, half the closet strewn out across the floor. He tucked everything else away, but pulled the porcelain-like boots out of the closet, sitting on the couch with her Long Fall Boots in his lap. He ran his hands over every inch of them, the hard material unyielding under his fingers.
This was it, besides him. This was the last memento of either of them having ever been in Aperture.
He would never admit it to her, but even now there were times he hated being on the surface. It was great for her – she had been born up here, she'd been made for life up here. He hadn't, and to be brutally honest, it felt it, sometimes. She'd tried so hard to make him feel like he belonged up here, she tried so hard to make everything work… Sometimes, he didn't have the heart to let on that it didn't.
The door opened, and in came Chell, damp, frowning, and thoroughly disgruntled. Rarely did she come home empty handed, and when she did, he knew something had happened while she was out. He shoved the Long Fall Boots to the side and rushed to her.
She was in his arms in an instant.
He sighed. Of course, putting it that way sounded utterly miserable, entirely ungrateful and just wrong. It wasn't terrible. In fact, it was rarely even bad. But it was always lonely. The boots made him smile, knowing that he wasn't as misplaced as he might have thought. Besides – wasn't she almost as much of a product of Aperture as he was? She'd had to relearn nearly everything about daily life, she'd told him about her first two years out of Aperture. It hadn't been easy for her, either.
Robot or not, he decided, holding her close, he wasn't alone.
Chell buried her face into his chest. The day had been absolutely awful. If her discovery in that person's bedroom wasn't enough, she'd sat down on the steps and contemplated the whole ordeal. It didn't make her feel any better. In fact, it had made her feel worse, because she'd figured out what had made that terrible smell.
That was it, she'd decided. She truly was the last human on the Earth. The Green Flu had done a number on the Human race, obliterating them down to the few dwindling numbers that had died off years before she'd even woken from Cryo.
The world had never felt as empty to her as it had on those stairs.
And yet… here she was, now, tucked safely in his arms. This wasn't alone. This wasn't even marginally lonely. This was loved, and cared about. This was safe and warm with the person you cared about, the person you gladly would have given the world for.
Standing there, in the middle of the living room, she decided that being the last living human wasn't so bad, so long as he was there.
They had each other, and that was all they really needed.
