Chell was dead on her feet by the time they reached the final gel pump station. She must have been going for days without rest. Technically, she'd been knocked unconscious for a moment after falling down the elevator shaft, but no reasonable person would call that restful.
The adrenal vapor had (forcibly) kept her awake up in the modern part of Aperture, but though the chemicals present in old Aperture were numerous, adrenal vapor was not among them. She'd found herself forgetting what she was doing in the middle of tests, solving problems slower than she knew she was capable of, and brushing with death far more closely and frequently than usual, even accounting for Aperture being one giant death trap.
Being awake itself had been physically painful for a while there. Every joint and muscle had ached, and she'd been rapidly alternating between chills and sweating. Then she'd gone numb. She was doing everything she could to convince her body to keep moving, but the imminent nuclear meltdown was losing its persuasive power by the second.
She swayed on the catwalk she'd portaled to, then shot a hand out to the rusted railing to steady herself.
"Careful!" said the potato speared onto the end of her portal gun. Oddly, GLaDOS sounded genuinely concerned instead of scolding.
It said a lot about what Chell had become accustomed to that that was what her mind had picked out as hard to believe. An absurd amount of truly unbelievable shit had happened to her in the very recent past – her only friend had betrayed her, the most fearsome and powerful adversary she'd ever had the displeasure of meeting had been stuffed into a potato, she and said potato found themselves on the same side despite their long history of trying to kill each other, it turned out that GLaDOS had once been a human assistant – and the weird thing was GLaDOS having genuine concern in her voice.
(Granted, Wheatley's betrayal did feel kind of predictable in hindsight – honestly, what was Chell thinking, assuming someone in Aperture didn't want to kill her – but the point still stood.)
Chell very much wanted to lie down on this catwalk and never get up. She was upright at the moment through sheer stubbornness, although it was becoming a struggle to keep her eyes open. You're in danger, Chell reminded herself again, trying to get some natural adrenaline going.
"Let me take a look at where we are," GLaDOS said, her voice dragging Chell back from the darkness threatening to swallow her.
Chell complied, hefting up the portal gun and rotating it so GLaDOS could see the rest of the room.
"Can you get us into that control box over there?" GLaDOS asked.
Chell's eyes tracked lifelessly around the vast chamber until she located the box in question in the upper-left corner. Her brain sluggishly mulled over the problem. Yes, it looked like she could make it with some flinging. She nodded to GLaDOS, then jumped down to the ground. She tried to shoot a portal on the wall across from the control box, but her aim was off, and it bounced off a giant vat of gel instead. Frustrated, she moved closer to the wall and tried again, this time successfully. She looked down, and then paused. Her plan had been to put the other portal on the floor, but the floor she was standing on wasn't portalable.
As had been happening a lot in the past few hours, Chell's brain stalled out here.
Her head felt so heavy…
"There has to be a part of the floor you can put a portal on around here somewhere. If not, well…we'll have to get creative. Look around," GLaDOS suggested, the sound of her voice once again reviving Chell.
It was strange to hear GLaDOS talking like this, like they were a team. Chell had always had to rely on her own resourcefulness to navigate the test chambers and other parts of Aperture. She'd had Wheatley's help for a time, but his incompetence had ensured that she still had to do all the problem-solving. Just twelve hours ago, she never would have imagined GLaDOS giving her any aid at all.
Sure enough, Chell found a patch of portalable floor behind her after a quick glance around. She walked over, put the portal on the floor, and stepped through.
Falling through the air helped to wake her up a bit for a short moment, in time for her to process that she wasn't going to make it to the control box.
Obviously. No momentum.
She landed hard on her long fall boots and stumbled forward, just barely avoiding falling over – which was good, because if she went horizontal at this point, she wasn't sure she could get vertical again.
Normally, Chell would've placed another portal on the ground in mid-air to boost her momentum, but the floor she'd landed on was unportalable. She recalled a test chamber from her first miserable venture through this place with the same restriction, and the solution had been –
"I think you need to jump into the portal from the cat–" GLaDOS started.
Chell made an impatient gesture with her hand, having already worked it out and begun walking back to the portal on the floor. She shot the other portal above the catwalk to get back up there.
"Well, alright then," GLaDOS said, and then made a small huffing noise.
Chell couldn't help smiling at that. If she'd put her thoughts into words, she would have noticed she was smiling because she thought it was cute. It wasn't a thought that got promoted to conscious attention, though, so she was spared for the moment from having to contend with the notion that she thought an evil AI who had tried to kill her, multiple times and with gusto, was cute.
"Oh, you think this is funny?" GLaDOS asked. "I try to help you, and this is the thanks I get."
Chell was full-on grinning at the potato's grumbling as she replaced the portal across from the control box, reached the end of the catwalk, and stepped off. They shot through the portal with enough momentum to reach the control box this time, broken glass crunching beneath Chell's long fall boots as they landed. She glanced around to find their next move, but GLaDOS was already speaking.
"Wait, I've got an idea! That poster! Go look at it for a second, would you?"
Chell had her eyes on the obvious bright red button labeled HATCH OVERRIDE, but she obliged GLaDOS long enough to see what she was talking about.
Simply saying a paradox in front of an AI could kill them, or so the poster claimed. That would've been extremely useful information to have had before AIs had ruined her life in countless and, apparently, entirely preventable ways.
She punched the button in the control box with a little more force than necessary. Most of the lights in the room immediately went out, which wasn't helpful in her ongoing battle against the bone-deep exhaustion. The enormous vault door in the ceiling began to open and three huge pipes descended, connecting to the ones in the room, followed shortly by the now-familiar sound of the gel flow starting up. A rickety old lift started to descend toward the catwalk, so she jumped down to the floor and headed back to the catwalk stairs.
GLaDOS went on to explain her paradox-based plan as Chell stepped gingerly onto the ancient lift, tacking on caveats that it might not work as she went. Chell had never heard her sound unsure of herself until very recently, but Chell supposed it made sense. GLaDOS was usually the entire facility, and now she was tiny and helpless.
Chell felt the edges of the world growing dim and fuzzy as the lift slowly ascended. She was staying awake now solely due to her fear that the cables on this decrepit thing would snap and leave them with no way back up. Fortunately, they made it without incident.
Not-so-fortunately, Chell had taken all of two steps off the lift when her field of vision started shrinking. Her knees buckled.
"Chell?"
The alarmed-sounding tinny crackle of a voice was loud enough to jerk her back to full consciousness, just in time to stop the portal gun – and the potato attached to it – from smashing into the ground.
She gently laid the gun on the floor so that wasn't at risk of happening again. She tried to force herself back to her feet, but found she couldn't move from where she had fallen to her hands and knees. She had actually reached the point where her body was no longer listening to signals from her brain.
Then it registered. Chell. GLaDOS had said her name. Chell hadn't heard GLaDOS use anyone's name, with two exceptions: "Mr. Johnson," when she was involuntarily reliving a moment from before she was GLaDOS, and "Caroline," when GLaDOS was trying to figure out who the familiar woman was – and then that had kind of turned out to be her own name. Chell had interpreted it as a sign of contempt. Everyone was unworthy of a name in GLaDOS's eyes – merely a test subject, a monster, a tumor. Subject name here, that little idiot. GLaDOS had even referred to the one person she had claimed to like as that crazy man when she wasn't in the middle of a flashback. She hadn't even been sure GLaDOS knew her name. She looked at GLaDOS with awe.
"Are you alright?"
Her name and that question, perhaps the top two things Chell would have rated most unlikely to be spoken by GLaDOS twelve hours ago.
Chell nodded slowly, then raised an eyebrow as if to convey Are you?
"Oh, don't give me that look. I had to say something to stop you from accidentally killing me." GLaDOS paused. "You know, I wouldn't have expected the next time you almost killed me to be accidental," she mused.
Me neither, Chell thought, and then all at once, her elbows buckled too. Her vision winked out like an old TV switching off.
It felt like an instant and an eternity that Chell floated in blissful unawareness. The first thing she became conscious of was the hard concrete under her body – it might as well have been the most luxurious bedding she'd ever slept in for all she wanted to get up from it.
Then a voice drifted into her awareness, the voice, the one Chell would never forget as long as she lived, the one she'd been hearing for so long it had all but replaced her internal monologue.
"Look, I'm sorry. Is that what you want from me?" GLaDOS was saying. "Please get up."
Sorry. Please. Add those to the list of most unlikely things.
"You don't have to keep going for much longer. Just a little bit farther, and then you're free to do whatever you like, including sleep. I promise."
Chell could've expended the effort to open her eyes, to show GLaDOS that she was awake, but found herself feeling very curious about what GLaDOS would say if she just…didn't.
"I won't even kill you when you put me back in my body. I mean, yes, that was my initial plan."
Unsurprising.
"And if nothing had changed since you picked me up, it would still be the plan. But things have changed. We've been through something, you and I, haven't we? I have to admit, I didn't think about what things were like from your perspective until now. But now that I've experienced it, it's terrifying."
It served GLaDOS's purposes for the moment to say whatever she thought Chell wanted to hear. But she had no reason to lie if she thought she was talking to an unconscious body, and there was something raw and real in her voice that wasn't usually there. Despite herself, Chell found herself believing GLaDOS's words.
It made her feel the smallest bit better about GLaDOS to think that she was capable of sympathizing with Chell's experience.
"We were finally reaching some sort of understanding of one another," GLaDOS continued. "So you cannot be dead on the floor after all this, right before we take back control of the facility. We're so close! I can smell it!"
Chell always found it a bit unsettling when GLaDOS referred to senses like smell and taste as if she had them. Weirdly, though, she could smell it too…which confused her. What did that even mean?
"This isn't funny anymore. Get up! Chell!"
Chell's eyes snapped open. Hearing GLaDOS say her name was just as jarring the second time.
"Oh, thank god. You passed out for – well, that's just great, my internal clock isn't working. It felt like five minutes or so," GLaDOS said. How did a computer inside a potato feel the passage of time? "And here I thought I had a monopoly on fizzling out from thinking too hard."
Chell huffed out a silent laugh. She took a few deep breaths, feeling more restored with each one.
And then she realized why she had instinctively thought they were close. She'd been breathing musty, asbestos-filled air for entirely too long now, and it finally smelled different in this room. Sterile, tinged with the faintly acrid smell of adrenal vapor.
Like modern Aperture. They'd made it.
To be completely fair to Aperture, her time here hadn't been wholly devoid of happiness. Sometimes, Wheatley told her a terrible ghost story, or a group of turrets sang a song together, or GLaDOS shouted that a bird was evil and Chell should kill it. Still, those moments were rare.
This was one of them.
Grinning into the floor, Chell felt tears spring into her eyes for the first time in – hell, she had no idea. She couldn't even bring herself to care that her old enemy was watching her. When she had awoken at the bottom of that pit, she hadn't known whether she'd ever be able to make it back. She had actually almost given up, had gotten as close to it as she ever had in her life.
"I'm glad you're happy about…whatever it is you're smiling about, but we're still in trouble," GLaDOS said. "You need to get up."
Chell ignored her. For five seconds, she allowed herself to lie on the floor and relish the feeling of having clawed her way out of the somehow-even-worse condemned part of Aperture. Then she willed herself back into survival mode, which she'd been in for the vast majority of the time since she'd first set foot in this godforsaken place. Maybe one of these days she'd get to relax.
With a lot of effort, she pushed herself into a sitting position.
"Good," GLaDOS said gently. "Now –"
GLaDOS stopped talking as Chell wiped the tears from her eyes.
"Are you –" GLaDOS started.
Chell looked at her, waiting.
"…Nevermind. Do you think you can stand?" GLaDOS asked.
Evidently, they weren't going to talk about it.
Chell didn't enjoy the idea of not being able to stand, so she summoned all her energy and tried. Her legs were a bit wobbly, but she managed to stay upright. She picked up the portal gun when she was sure she wouldn't fall again.
For the first time since the lift had brought them here, she really took in where they were. It was a fenced-in area, beyond which there were gargantuan springs in all directions as far as the eye could see. It somehow felt very Aperture that the entire modern facility should be propped up by nothing but a bunch of springs.
There was a staircase to her right that looked like the only way forward. She climbed it, and after passing through a short hallway and an emancipation grill, she saw the confirmation of where they were: a tube-shaped elevator in a vent, the kind she'd gotten used to being transported in alongside other testing equipment prior to the disastrous core transfer. Chell never imagined the sight of that elevator would make her happy, but here she was.
Without thinking about it, she turned the portal gun around so GLaDOS could see too.
"Yes! I knew we were close!" GLaDOS said, sounding every bit as giddy with relief and excitement as Chell felt. "Now all we have to do is hit that moron with a paradox and get me back in my body."
Chell didn't think it would end up being that simple, somehow. Luckily, she had a plan B, C, D, and E, and they were all to wing it.
She took a deep breath, shifting her grip on the portal gun ever so slightly.
The gun had long since started feeling like an extension of herself. Adding GLaDOS had made her aware of it again in a way she hadn't been since she first started using it. She'd had to relearn the weight of it, adjust her aim from what was intuitive, carry it just a bit different.
In the time it had taken to climb from the 70s-era test shaft to here, though, it had begun to feel like a part of her again. A part she didn't have to think about, the warm glow of GLaDOS's optic at the end of it having become as familiar as the gap in the casing that spilled orange and blue light, the dings and scratches on its surface, the recoil from firing it. It was good to have made that adjustment before having to face their common enemy.
Feeling halfway to normal again, she stepped into the elevator.