AN: Hello all. First chapter posting in the new year, and I've hit a solid 2k words! Off to a good start I'd say. As usual, please review if you enjoyed the story and even if you didn't! With that said, read on!

Chapter Thirteen

Sophie dialed. Fingering a loose strand of hair—the same pale color as her father's—she waited for Ellie to pick up.

Somewhere from the other room, she heard Alex giggle. As shy as she'd been when they'd first met, Alex was far more of a chatterbox than Sophie would have given her credit for. Of course, it made sense; if she'd known Wheatley for any amount of time, it was likely she was a kindred spirit when it came to talking someone's ear off.

But the funny thing about it was just how precisely Alex picked around topics of conversation. She'd talked for hours about funny, inane, silly things, going back and forth with Wheatley about the logistics of a caterpillar knowing that it would be a butterfly before it had metamorphized. When he'd brought up something science related, however, she'd shut down almost immediately. She seemed eager to talk about anything that seemed to lack the hard edge of reality and experience, opting rather for topics that were soft and nebulous, residing entirely in the realm of fantasy or speculation.

"—hello?" The phone crackled a little, and Sophie quickly snapped to attention.

"Oh, hey, hi, Ellie—listen, I really need to talk to you," Sophie glanced out at the living room area to check that Wheatley, Alex, and Chell were still there before retreating to her bedroom with the phone.

"I need to talk to you too." Ellie's voice was tight with excited urgency. "I got another dream, and this time, when I held Linnel, I got a much clearer picture and its…well, it's a lot to take in."

"Wait," Sophie shut the door as quietly as possible, "you brought Linnel to college with you?"

"Don't judge until you've gone to college, Sophie."

Sophie grimaced on her end of the phone, "If that ever happens."

"Tch." Ellie made a noise in the back of her throat that had a distinct note of disapproval to it. "You can't think that way, Sophie. Besides, you've got more brains that almost anyone I've met. Any college would be a m—be stupid not to give you a scholarship. Plus, you're really sweet. I could see you being a great doctor."

"I guess so." Sophie picked at her fingernail. "What was your dream about?"

Ellie paused for a second, clearly displeased with Sophie's attempt to change the subject, but she went on regardless. "So, you'll never believe it, but I saw the person with white hair again, and this time, with Linnel's help, I could see her eyes. They were this sort of glowing blue color—"

"—blue?" Sophie sat up suddenly from where she'd been lying down on her bed. "But that doesn't make sense—why would her eyes be blue? They're a sort of white color—pale colored, if that's even a color."

"What are you talking about?"

"She's here, Ellie." Sophie stood up and began to pace. "The person you saw—the girl with white hair—she's here, in the house."

"What? Where did she come from?"

"Where else? I think she might have been a test subject also, since she was wearing a jumpsuit, but she said she found it after waking up from suspension."

"She's from…from down there?" Ellie swallowed, and Sophie could hear her fearful gulp over the phone.

"Yeah, and get this—She's here too."

"Her Her?"

"Yeah. I think She's switched off for the moment, but yeah, mom and dad were not happy about that."

"I mean, I can see why." Ellie paused. "But then the next part of my dream doesn't make any sense."

"Whaddya mean?"

"I could hear Her voice again, but this time, she said, 'She remembers'."

"Remembers what?" Sophie flopped back down on her bed, staring at the cracks in her ceiling. Her eyes found the familiar sight of lopsided duck near the corner.

"I was hoping you'd know." Ellie sighed, and the phone fuzzed slightly with the sound. "But it sounded like a piece of advice—like a warning. And She's not really the type to give sound advice, as far as I know."

"That's for sure." A muffled call for Sophie's name came through the closed door. She switched the phone to her other ear. "I need to go, but I'll call you later, ok?"

"Ok, but seriously, be careful. I don't know…I don't know how all of this will end."

"I will."

When Sophie reentered the living room, she was met with the sight of something that looked eerily like an experiment.

"Can you try jazz?"

"Sure!" Alex screwed up her face with a look of intense concentration, and the singular radio in the room buzzed and fuzzed as it rapidly shifted from station to station. After a minute or so, the sound of freely improvised saxophone and piano started streaming from the tiny speakers.

"Ha! Well done! That is impressive, isn't it? Oh, hey Sophie, come look at this!" Her dad quickly waved her over to the sofa, where Alex sat next to Chell with Wheatley sprawled out on the floor. Sophie carefully sat on the other side of her mother, who gave her arm a silent, loving touch.

"So, it turns out, funny thing really, bit of a coincidence there—Sophie can do that sort of thing too! She—what did you call it?"

"Technopathy." Alex supplied. Wheatley nodded in response, gesturing wildly as he continued.

"Technopathy! Right, right, yeah so Sophie here has a bit of a knack for this thing too, cause of this little robots, these little nanobots, pardon—and these little things let her talk to machines! You know, a bit like having a conversation I suppose."

"Well, that's not entirely true…" Sophie began to add to her father's statement, but she trailed off as he started off on another rambling tangent.

"Hey! I wonder if you could connect to Foxglove too, know that I'm thinking about it—we ought to go and, oh no, hang on, wait—no, it's nearly dark already, and not to mention you don't exactly have a coat either…"

"Maybe Alex could do with a haircut and some cleaning up first." Chell suggested, prompting a quick glance from Sophie.

No matter how old she got or how long she knew her mother, the times when she spoke would always surprise Sophie. Her mother's personality was the kind that made it easy to forget that she'd ever spoken at all, even if it'd only been minutes ago. As someone who had inherited her father's inclination to talk for hours on end, Sophie had found this demeanor off-putting as a young child. It'd taken literal years for her to grasp that her mother simply just wasn't the talkative type—something that wasn't reflective of her feelings towards Sophie, or indeed towards Wheatley. She just showed love in a different way.

"Oh yeah! Of course—capital idea—I mean, I'm sure you're dying to get clean, since I hate to break it to you," Wheatley shielded his mouth from one side with the back of his hand, as if telling a secret, "but you kind of, well, smell."

Alex laughed, a sweet, light sound. In that instant Sophie could suddenly see Alex and her father being friends, chattering away somewhere in the bowels of the laboratories and adding a bright sense of happiness to a place where such things didn't exist. In that fleeting moment, she caught a glimpse of stolen conversations and the rare snatches of unadulterated joy that they brought.

Alex was sniffing her own arm and nearly puked. "Yeah," she gasped, "that's pretty bad. I'd kinda forgotten how nasty it was when I first…well, when I first fell out of the tank."

"Well, that'd probably because after about three hundred seconds—"

"—the pons stop sending and your brain gets used to it, I know."

"Wait, how'd you know that?"

"Read it somewhere."

"Ah, yeah, that would make sense, since you really did—well, hey, maybe Sophie can dig out some of her old clothes for you—not literally you understand, it's not as if she's digging them out of some rubbish bin or something, she's just digging them out of storage, miles better smelling I can assure you, and I mean—no guarantees that it'll fit like a glove or anything, not that we've got any gloves at the moment, more like dresses and things—but my point is, we've got something, I'm sure, somewhere in your closet, Sophie?"

Somewhere in this butchery of what was commonly considered a reasonable sentence length, Sophie picked Alex up, propping her thin arms around her neck. Hefting the smaller girl higher, Sophie nodded to her father and took off towards the ground floor bathroom. She set Alex down on closed toilet seat and ran off to fetch the plastic lawn chair whose previous residence had been a decidedly unglamorous storage closet.

Alex frowned, listening intently as Sophie brought the plastic chair in with much unintentional scraping and thunking ado.

"What's that?"

"Chair."

"What's—"

"It's so you can sit on it in the shower. Your feet might be cleaned up, but they'll be pretty painful for at least a week or two. I think your left foot might heal sooner though, since the cuts were smaller and there wasn't nearly as much glass in that one."

Alex stuck her tongue out at the word 'glass'. "Very generous of those cameras, but I think I'll stick with original contents of my insides, thanks." The complexity of speech coming from Alex's small mouth—she couldn't have been more than eight or nine—contrasted so sharply with her distinctly babyish face and overlarge eyes that it made Sophie laugh, though the state of her feet had been nothing to laugh about.

Those had been a tense couple of hours spent by Dr. Dillon's side, handing her tools and standing by to shine a light or provide any number of other services that required a second set of hands. Sophie had never been fazed by blood or gore—even when she was seven and broke her left arm falling out of a tree, she'd been more fascinated than horrified at the bone poking through her skin—but Alex's feet had somewhat tested the upper limits of that cool-headed immunity. Though she'd seen the scars on her mother's arm and knew firsthand the kind of pain that the laboratories could dish out, Sophie had never experienced the kind of pain and injury like this; it was the same kind of thing her father might have gotten up to—the kind of disaster that results when blind optimism clashes with a sharp-edged world.

Except with Alex, there was a distinct note of pity attatched to Sophie's emotional reactions at seeing her shredded feet. With this child, there seemed to be this sense that as logical and reasonable as it was to expect disaster when you walked around a place like Aperture barefoot, it was tragic and piteous all the same to see disaster happen to a kid. It went against the grain of something deep within Sophie, something that said firmly, that's not how it ought to be. Children shouldn't be chucked in a tank like a goldfish bought on sale for fifty cents and then forgotten about as if they were about as dispensable. Yet they had been, and Alex was proof of it.

"Right, so pull the lever like this," Sophie demonstrated, then in a moment of realization, she physically took Alex's hand and guided her to the lever, "and then reverse to turn it off." She twisted the water back on.

"It's so warm!" Alex said with genuine wonder.

"Yeah, it'll probably feel good after all that—what are you doing?"

Alex had managed to hobble into the shower, jumpsuit and all, and appeared to be enjoying the warm water streaming down from the wet orange folds of her jumpsuit and from the nearly grey strands of hair. She tilted her head and smiled as she sat serenely on the plastic chair.

"Mmm." She hummed, and the whole of her wispy frame thrummed with the simple pleasure of sitting under the hot water. If a hot shower made her this happy, then soap would rock her world, Sophie thought with no small measure of amusement.

"…ok then." She responded, deciding to roll with it. "There's some soap on the ledge there, can you—"

"Yes," Alex's fingers found their way to the small alcove in the tiling and closed around the soap, "I think I've got it."

"Right…ok then, I'll be right outside if you need me."

"Thank you, Sophie." There was such a gentle emphasis on her name, as if it were the most important thing in the world at that very moment, and the sheer gratitude packed into those three words struck Sophie. A wave of protectiveness washed over her, surprising her with its strength. In a single moment, she knew that whatever happened, anyone who so much as dared put a foot wrong with this kid was going to have the ever-loving science punched out of them.

"You're welcome, Alex."

Sophie set off in search of clothing.