AN: Hello all. I know this is a bit late, being on a saturday and all, but at least it's here. Really getting close to the end here, and I honestly can't wait. This has been a fun story to write. Thanks for the support so far, and I hope you enjoy. Please feel free to review/comment and let me know your thoughts. With that, read on!
Chapter Twenty-One
Chell knew something was wrong from the moment she opened her eyes. Perhaps even before then. It was something of a sixth sense that she had developed years and years ago. Honed by the search for scribbled messages tucked away in corners and the incessant, relentless pressure to perform perfectly, else you were, simply put, dead. Although in a place like Aperture, dead usually meant three or four times over for anyone else. To put it shortly, if the fall didn't get you, the leaking radiation, possibly poisonous gel, or asbestos would.
She shifted under the covers, peeling them back with the greatest possible care not to disturb Wheatley. With a fleeting look of rare tenderness before she turned away, she padded into the hall and closed the door. Ears keenly alert, she made her way softly down the stairs. A quick glance at the clock told her that it was still the wee hours of the morning; not quite early enough to be unholy, exactly, but early enough for her to be up and about in the kitchen.
On a normal day, that is.
Exhaustion tugged at her eyes, but she shoved the feeling down. With a heavy feeling in her chest and a numb sort of resolution, she resurrected the steel trap in her mind and shoved the exhaustion and worry into it and locked it shut. Trusting her gut had kept her alive and saved her life more times than she could count, but she had to be critical about this. She had to be thoughtful.
If that meant dusting off that steel box after all these years, then so be it.
Something was off, her gut knew that much, but other than complaining to her calculating mind about a general feeling of worry, it couldn't tell her why she was so apprehensive. So she told it to shut up until she could get a proper grasp on the situation at hand. If there was a situation.
Chell crept softly to her daughter's bedroom and gently prodded the wooden door. It swung open without resistance, revealing an empty bed with twisted, wrinkled sheets. Beside it lay an even emptier pallet, where Alex had been sleeping in case she needed something during the night.
A cold shiver ran down her spine, and she quickly ran to the kitchen, now heedless to the racket her pounding feet made. As she suspected, the dusty spot top of the fridge where they'd been keeping Her core was desolate and empty. The cold feeling in the pit of her stomach solidified into an icy, dead weight.
She ran to the stairs to find Wheatley already making his way down, rubbing his eyes under his glasses.
"What's—"
"Sophie." He stilled, and she clarified. "She's gone. So is She. Alex too."
"Where did they…oh g—" Wheatley broke off and fumbled to the door to grab his coat, only to find it was gone. Sophie's was missing too, so Chell could only assume that Alex was wearing the other one.
"At least they're warm." Wheatley muttered as he ran to grab warmer clothing. Chell quickly knelt on the kitchen floor and unlocked a rather lonely cabinet close to the floor. Breathing deeply, she willed her shaking hands to still as she reached for the boots. Their crisp black-and-white lines were clearly visible, even in the shadowy interior of the cabinet, and she did her best to block out the memories as she pulled them out.
Her fingers remembered far too easily pulling the boots on, tucking her loose pajama pants in, pulling the black straps tight and secure around her calves. She stood unsteadily, wobbling back and forth a bit before muscle memory clicked back into place. Despite this, she found herself gripping the edge of the kitchen counter for support as her body shook.
Once upon a time, she'd had the mantra that her own survival was the only thing worth caring about between dodging turret fire and calculating puzzle solutions. Then Wheatley had unceremoniously crashed (quite literally) back into her life, turning her whole world on its head. A few years further down the line, she'd become a mother, shaking her world upside-down once again.
The old mantra had died years ago, replaced instead by a sense of responsibility for her own little family, her little paradise atop a hellish underworld. And now, once again, her mantra trembled and wobbled in the face of this wretched creature, this little girl Alex. Her age-old instincts—razor sharp and cold as ice—told her that Alex was beyond her own personal concern. She was just another unfortunate victim in a long list of many that Aperture had dragged asunder in their quest for the sake of science.
Perhaps it was fortunate that Alex had gone with Sophie and Her; at the very least, Chell didn't have to choose between following her instincts and indulging her more maternal side. The thought of being forced to decide made her sick, and she breathed deeply, trying to banish the unwelcome, warring thoughts.
"Chell, luv?" Wheatley was watching her, holding out her warm red sweater as he keenly watched her expression. She took the sweater with shaking hands and pulled it over her head, not daring to meet his gaze. She felt his warm presence at her back as he moved behind her, however, and she closed her eyes for the barest second, leaning against him.
No words passed between them, but she felt, somehow, that he understood.
"Let's go get 'em, yeah? And then ground Sophie, for sure. Definitely going to be a part of the agenda."
As it turned out, they didn't have to look far to find Sophie. Sometime during their hurried trot to the shed, they spotted a distant figure banging with futile fists against the metal door.
"Sophie!" Wheatley, with his long legs and sense of urgency, was the first to reach her. He took her by the arm. "What on earth were you bloody thinking?" He yelled, all the while pulling Sophie into a tight hug.
"We," Sophie was crying, but they were rage-filled tears, "we—Abbi's in trouble, and—we went down to fix every—" she choked for a second, sliding an arm free from her dad's hug to wipe her face, "—but now Alex started acting all crazy and said it was all her fault, so she sent me back up and went by herself."
The mother in her ached to put arms around the both of them, so she did. But they also needed to figure out what to do. After a second, Chell pulled back and grasped Sophie's arm.
"Is there anything else we need to know? What exactly did she say?"
"I don't know! Something about it being all her fault, I suppose, because she thinks she woke Caroline or whoever up—then she chucked me in an elevator!" Sophie's tears began to slow, but her voice grew thick with anger.
"I can't believe she just took Her and—"
The metal door of the shed opened with a sharp bang, startling the three of them back a few feet. From the dark interior, just past the massive manual wheel crank, three particularly round optics gazed back with surprise, one blue, one orange, and one yellow.
It took less than a faction of a second for Chell to recognize GLaDOS's core and vice versa. Her yellow optic went wide, then narrowed, as if She had suddenly realized that for all her destructive tendencies, Chell was once again in a position where her hatred for Aperture equipment was perfectly suited for Her own purposes. Somehow, in that short silence, all of this passed between Chell and Her, and Her optic flicked upwards, as if to say, "do what you must."
The silence broke in a flurry of movement. Wheatley gave a mighty cry and tackled the orange-eyed robot, becoming a wild tangle of long limbs, flesh and metal alike. Chell joined him in the fray, focusing on the blue-eyed robot with a swift kick to the legs.
"Ow! You dropped me!" Her indignant voice warbled as She was violently knocked from the stocky robot's arms and rolled wildly on the concrete stoop.
Chell paid no notice, instead laying into the stocky, blue-eyed robot with ruthlessly efficient blows. She'd learned from experience that these testing robots of Hers were weak at the joints, and so she doubled and redoubled her efforts there.
The blue-eyed robot was squealing with the most horrible, frantic modulation Chell had heard yet; it had abandoned hitting early on and was now vainly trying to block her punches. Sophie dove in, pinning the robot's right arm firmly down as Chell wrenched the portal gun out of the left.
Chell rocked back on her haunches—portal gun in hand—and the blue-eyed robot eagerly scuttled away. Getting to its feet awkwardly, it sprinted headlong into the metal door, the sound of vibrating metal filling the early morning air. It shook off the jolt and dove headfirst into the empty elevator shaft. Shortly after, the orange-eyed robot followed, sans an entire arm. Its sparking socket threw faint patches of light onto the metal door before it disappeared from sight.
After the sound of metal scraping against the elevator shaft had faded, only then did Chell catch her breath. Wheatley walked over, awkwardly cradling the other portal gun and the long robotic arm attatched to it.
"Oh my g—you didn't have to damage Orange that much you m—" She quickly cut off, as both Chell and Sophie sent Her respective murderous glares. "Alright, alright, fine. Look, let's just get back down there. I've got a pretty good idea of what that thing plans to do, but we'll need to take a two-pronged approach if this is going to work."
Chell gritted her teeth, grinding them together unpleasantly. Anything to distract her from the fact that that voice was speaking, ordering, commanding her once again. Unfortunately, from what little she knew, She was the only one who had the most up-to-date information on the situation. If anyone was going to come up with a plan, it would, regrettably, have to be Her.
It still didn't change the fact that Chell far from trusted Her.
She seemed to sense this, turning Her cold yellow optic in Chell's direction.
"Look. I know this all seems very suspicious, but you saw what that, that thing did. She's taken over the cooperative testing initiative, and she has control of the facility that goes as far as this shed door, so she's managing to get around the system."
"Why would she need to get around it?" Wheatley asked, still trying to shake off the robot arm from his portal gun with a rather uncomfortable expression.
"Because, m—okay look, she's a virus, I am more than certain of that. As to why she calls herself Caroline, I have no idea and I couldn't care less."
"The point is that she's in control of the system, but the system doesn't recognize her as a proper core." She dragged the word "core" out doubtless for Wheatley's discomfort, and Chell nearly smacked Her. "The system is rejecting her."
"But why Alex? Why would Caroline or whoever she is want her?" Sophie cut in quickly.
"That little project has CEO-level admin clearance. God only knows why, but she has it. That little virus needs proper admin clearance to bypass the system and keep it from spitting her right back out."
"So…now what?" Sophie asked.
"Now, you're going back home, young lady." Wheatley, finally having got the robot arm free, now used it to gesture vaguely in the direction of Eaden. "You shouldn't have been anywhere near here, and you know that. Your mum and I will handle this."
"What?"
"Actually, we need her." She sounded as if the words left a foul taste in Her metaphorical mouth. "Your…offspring will need to carry me to the alternate chassis room. Again. That way I can purge the virus from the system and fix this whole mess while you and the m—the other one go distract her."
"Yes, yes exactly! I can do that. Please, mum, let me help." Chell glanced at Sophie's eyes and was forced to look away. She was using her father's patented puppy-eyed look on Chell, unfortunately, to great effect.
Still, Chell hesitated. Why did they have to go down, yet again, into that hellhole of a place? What was to say that Alex couldn't resolve the issue on her own, given her rather apt abilities? Why did this thing, this horror, this swelling fear in her throat, again fall to her? It went against the very grain of fairness, against justice that she was once again staring into the depths, knowing that she must descend.
But did she really, honestly, truly have to?
Wheatley seemed to sense her hesitation.
"You know, it's funny, when she found out about the whole, er, employee testing thing, you know what she told me?"
Chell shook her head.
"She said something, she said, 'You know they're pretty horrible, but even I wouldn't wish that on 'em.' Point is, she hated them, but she tried to see the good bits in everybody. If anybody deserves saving down there—besides you of course—it's that kid."
"I would strongly disagree with that statement. For multiple reasons."
Chell almost smiled at that. She thought briefly of Alex's face creased in joy at the simple pleasure of running her fingers through her newly cut hair. And she'd thanked Chell. Willingly. Gratefully.
Meeting Wheatley's eyes, she nodded. They descended.
