AN: *reads off a small card* Welcome to chapter three, more notes to follow. For now, enjoy the story and I'll catch up with you after!

8 Days Ago

After the violence of his exit from the Central AI Chamber, the sudden silence was startling. It was as if all the sound had been sucked into the tube of a vacuum cleaner, along with his understanding of the situation in general. He'd been…connected, hadn't he? Right? That's what'd been happening where he'd last been, at least as far as he could remember. But now…now it was dark and speckled with all these little bright spots—stars, that's right, he remembered.

It was too bright, too dark, and too cold all at once. His internal systems were cracking with the strain of cold; every bit of warmth that electricity generated was just as quickly whipped away by the greedy vacuum all around him. The warnings were flashing now—that was just brilliant—but behind the rapid-fire inane chatter in the forefront of his mind, there was a cold sense of knowing burbling slowly underneath. A sort of pragmatic, cool sense of helplessness that had made peace decades ago.

Now you know how I feel, trapped in the back of this thing.

He spluttered, his vocal circuits fraying from the straining cold. He was the pragmatic thing. The chattering thing. Both. Neither. All. Nothing.

Frost crawled across the inside of his optic, and the world flickered to darkness. He would have screamed, only there was no longer a vocal output to do it with. He knew nothing more in the next minute anyhow.

Four Days Ago

"…..sssssshhhaperture laboratories memory backup interrupted. Initiating memory backup v6.4.8…"

His existence was confusing, jumbled colors and flashes of bright light. Laughter, maybe, followed by a stab of pain and bright lights, something foul-smelling that choked him. Everything flooded in with no rhyme or reason, no order or system of priority to sort out the important from the inane and meaningless. His nose itched horribly, a stabbing pain was ratcheting up steadily inside his head, and all around him was the awful mixture of stickiness and cold that simultaneously made him shiver and want to vomit.

After an eon or two, he gathered his strength and managed to raise his head up. For a panicked moment, the world was blurry and dark and he thought that perhaps he'd gone completely blind before the rational side of his brain all but slapped him upside the head. You haven't got your glasses and it's pitch black, idiot. Of course you can't see anything. Stephen slithered up out of the puddle of gel spread across the cold tiles, clutching the metal railings bolted to the floor. He drew himself up for a triumphant second, before the slimy stuff on the floor decided it would rather have another go at him and he slipped back onto his rear with no further ado.

"Ahhh." He let out a gasp that was more startled than anything, as the numb parts of his body chose that exact moment to start feeling things again. His skin smarted painfully, and for the first time it occurred to him that he wasn't wearing a great deal of clothing—just the swimming trunks they'd loaned him when he'd first gone in. That should have clued him in to what was coming next, really. They didn't just give those out to anybody doing a quick biometric scan—oh no, but he had to go and be a perfect idiot, so preoccupied with thoughts of—

Oh dear G—he had to find her. He needed to get her out of here, something…something was horribly wrong and dangerous and he needed to get to M—

"…ssssssthank you for your participation in the Aperture Science Employee Testing Initiative. Your contributions have made great headway in the pursuits of science. Please note that any compliments awarded are prerecorded and thus not made on the basis of performance. If your performance was less than complimentary, please disregard this message…"

Stephen had the presence of mind to let out a faint chuckle, weak and raspy—that gel was absolute havoc on the lungs. But he was out and it was…it was dark. So very dark—too dark for things to be properly functioning. Of course, he mused dully, placing his feet carefully on the dry spots of the floor, Aperture wasn't well known for its electrical wiring and blackouts happened more often than you'd think. He knew because when the pathetic excuse for drywall had crumbled in his office space, he'd found a nightmare tangle of electrical wiring so hopelessly entwined with that of his neighbors wiring that he couldn't hope to fix it from his office alone. Shameful—downright shameful is what it is—can't you have somebody in to fix it? He'd been told that the fastest solution, if he wouldn't fix it himself, was to go out and convince a home repairman to come down and fix it instead. They simply hadn't the staff.

After about ten steps on dry ground with sticky bare feet, he found himself facing a door of some kind, held back only by a green-labeled push-bar. He quickly pushed through. Stumbling in, he was blinded by suddenly lights that flickered on as if they'd been waiting for him. Motion sensor activated, perhaps. Or maybe he just had terrific timing. In any case, with the lights on, he could truly take in the space in a Monet-ish sort of way. He was back in the lounge where he'd sat fidgeting for nearly an hour, thinking of that last conversation and wincing at the same places every time.

"It's too dangerous! I know out of anyone going into this, you're the most qualified—I'm not doubting your ability at all! —but Michelle, I…I don't know what's coming at you down there. I work here, and even I don't know! I just…I just don't want you to get hurt."

But the hurt was already in her eyes and she was frowning. The exact inflections of her voice were fuzzy, but he remembered the horrible creases around her brows and her nose and her mouth as she gave him a look of utter disappointment.

"But that's exactly why I have to do this. I'm the best they've got at the moment, and they've agreed to pay for everything—where else am I going to get a deal like this? Nowhere. Nowhere am I going to raise enough money for something like this." She skewered him with that look—it was disappointed and saddened and hurt. He'd hurt her. "And you are doubting me. You say you aren't, but you are. I need you to believe in me."

"But I do! I do believe in you!"

Her face drew close, and she offered him a stiff, cold hug—something more out of obligation for shared experiences than anything else. "I wish I could believe that."

His chest still ached from that horrible expression of disappointment and hurt on her face. He had to get back to her—that was all that mattered now. But if he wanted to do it right, he had be careful about it; speed was not good if he got caught and chucked right back in a tank. To his right, just outside the door he'd just exited, lay a lonely outpost in the blurry landscape—a small office cubicle for processing testing subjects and their compensation funds, laid out before him in fuzzy shades of grey and blue. Feeling his way along the wall for some sort of handle or keypad, his long fingers tentatively felt out the worn-down stubs of plasticky numbered keys. It had been a while, but quieted his brain for a second, letting the muscle memory in his fingers do the work for him. His hands didn't fail him, and the door let out a high-pitched buzzer sound before swinging in on protesting hinges.

More white, more grey, and more blue splashed against the base of the walls. He squinted. At the edge of the room, he could just make out the barest hint of darker grey shapes—filing cabinets, perhaps. On one of the long-sided walls of that matchbox-shaped office, he found a series of cubbyholes, their dark grey spaces intermittently broken up by various lumpy piles and boxes—all dully colored or faded, he couldn't quite tell which. Shrugging his shoulders, he reached in the nearest one and quickly retracted his finger with a yelp. He pulled back his thumb to find it bleeding from the nip of some unseen bit of metal or plastic or glass. Frowning, he moved on to the next one.

At cubbyhole seven, he struck gold. His fingers scrabbled along the dusty bottom of the plastic tub slotted into the cubby and found the familiar feeling of a set of glasses. With a frantic desperation, he snatched them up and shoved them on his face. The world jumped into a partial focus; the rather fetching pair of turtle shell glasses he'd selected were not his own, nor were they even the same prescription, but they weren't nothing. With his slightly enhanced vision, he scanned the remaining cubbyholes and found his name printed faintly on a fading tape label: Smythe, Stephen P. Eager fingers scrabbled for the tub and pulled it out with perhaps unnecessary force, and the contents shuffled, muffled by folds of clothing.

Fighting the strong urge to let out a loud groan, he shuffled through the various bits and bobs of clothing. A thin cotton tank top with the company logo emblazoned across it in bold black letters, and a shabby set of cheap cotton drawstring pants—clearly one-size-fits-all without the slightest thought given to a poor sad chap like himself who was a bit long in the legs. Whatever they'd done with his old clothes, this old bin hadn't been touched in positively ages, so it was a bit of a safe bet to say that his old clothes were likely all gone by now, perhaps burned to a crisp in some incinerator. All the same, he got dressed quickly, feeling a bit dusty, but it was already miles better than the cold rubbery trunks he'd had before. The goop clinging to his skin had already begun to dry into a sticky sort of layer, but his bare arms—rather left out of the deal with the rather flimsy sort of shirt he was wearing—had very little protection from the frigid underground offices. At least until he could sneak up to his office and snag his old bomber jacket before high-tailing it out of here for good. Say what you would about good pay or the reputation of working at one of America's biggest science companies—at this point he was content to burn his contract and catch the next possible flight across the pond.

In a best-case scenario, he'd fly off into the sunset with Michelle. For the present moment, he'd be lucky if she even let him help her escape this hellish sort of hole.

But first, he pursed his lips in thought, he had to manage to get topside without running into any of his old coworkers. Especially Kevin. Kevin would ask every question under the sun and probably as loud as possible too, so that everyone within hearing distance could join in on the conversation, listening and nodding along to the gossip. He groaned at the very thought, slipping a battered pair of glasses onto his face. He scowled at the jagged crack running down the left lens. He'd forgotten that they'd been dropped and kicked around a bit when they'd taken him down here. Add another thing to the list of office supplies he'd need to get hold off: his sturdy bomber jacket, his backup pair of glasses (the turtle-shell ones, he supposed, could be his backup backup pair for the moment), and…didn't he bring a scarf? He could have sworn he did…it'd been cold when he'd come into work that day—no where near as cold as his colleagues had been making it out to be though—really? Seventeen degrees, that's what, minus eight Celsius? Kevin, if you want to see a real winter, you should pop over to Newcastle some time.

Despite the irritating connection the memory had to Kevin, Stephen allowed himself the luxury of a brief chuckle. He'd been teasing, of course; Wisconsin winters were nothing to sneeze at—it'd almost felt like home, coming back from work in the evening to a warm cup of tea as he shucked off his shoes and coat and scarf…someday he'd hoped to get a cat, maybe, to keep him company—

What was he doing? He abruptly shoved the plastic tub back in its cubby hole. He was getting distracted again, as he was often wont to do—and he needed to focus. A list—he needed a list. First, grab a jumpsuit because he was positively freezing, then grab his coat and glasses from his office, then make his hasty escape—preferably without attracting anyone's attention—and, if at all possible, enjoy setting fire to his contract on the surface. If he could find it, that is. He couldn't be bothered to hunt for it for long.

Now that everything had jumped into a sudden clarity, he easily located the drawers of hatefully bright orange jumpsuits at the other end of the room. Honestly—they were volunteer test subjects (volunteered in his case), not flipping inmates—where did they even get these bloody things from anyhow? He didn't dwell long on that thought, struck by the sudden uncomfortable musing that they might very well be sourced from prisons who might, for whatever horrible reason, no longer have a need for them. Worse, they might be part of that nasty free t-shirt program they'd run very briefly a couple of years back. Stephen shivered at the thought. Asbestos is not a pretty way to go. Rather tedious, actually.

Still, despite all these nasty thoughts pinging through his brain rather unwanted, he found a jumpsuit that managed to fit him well enough—it was a bit short in the arms and legs, but that'd been true of just about anything you'd find in the shops. For now, it would do well enough. Stephen shoved his foot through the elastic hem of one pantleg when a gleam of light underneath the shelving unit to his right caught his eye. He awkwardly frog-hopped over to the unit and quickly pressed his face to the dusty floor, coughing, to investigate. One side of his brain absolutely railed against this course of action—it would surely be a waste of time—while the other side of his brain bellowed shut up, will ya—I've got a good feeling about this. The latter turned out to be right; he reached underneath the unit and found himself in possession of a left long-fall boot. Ah-ha. Again too small for his absolute clodhoppers, but maybe he could grab the other boxes underneath…

Ten minutes later, feeling somewhat ridiculous, Stephen stood arrayed in layers of clashing clothing, all of it topping a set of spiffy new long-fall boots—new, that is, except for a single long scratch on the left one. Still, as silly as he might look, he had such a funny feeling about the boots—sneaking around could mean going anywhere, and in Aperture, it was mostly for the better if you were prepared for sudden drops.

Exiting the little office, he found the elevators easily enough. He knew on some level that he was on the lower floors of the facility; he would need to get to the mid and upper stories to get to his office, then to the main lobby to actually get out the parking lot—was his car still in the parking lot? Had it been towed long ago? He wouldn't miss the thing all that much, true, (it was all scrambled around with the wheel on the entirely wrong side), but he still harbored some small measure of affection for the scrappy old thing.

Just around the corner of the small, cramped waiting area, he caught sight of the familiar, dingy elevator doors. His face fell as he took in the cheap plywood boards plastering the front of both elevators, hastily printed script warning that they were out of service. A frown curling his lip, Stephen nevertheless rolled up the dusty orange sleeves of his jumpsuit and got to work. He wormed his fingers under the plywood, doing his best to avoid splinters, and gave a vicious jerk. Several minutes and at least two splinters later, the wood was stacked in a splintered pile at his feet and the creaky metal of the old elevator doors lay before him, unarmed. What he wouldn't give for a nice handy crowbar, he thought uselessly, doing his best to wrestle the doors open. Luckily enough, though they were a bit stuck in place from grime and disuse—this old part of the labs must have been blocked off or something, probably because they'd finally finished phasing out human testing—the elevators doors weren't all that strong. He lurched awkwardly as the door gave through and he nearly fell down the shaft.

Heart pounding, he quickly found the ladder on the side of the shaft and began to climb, niggling little worries worming their way through the back of his mind.

The moment his head poked through the office level seven set of elevator doors, a horrible sense of wrong curled in his gut. For one thing, it was eerily quiet, and for another, he sneezed as little eddies of dust swirled around his feet. Ever since that whole nasty melon incident the janitors had refused to come back to his office area except about once a month. This was not a month's worth of dust. A month's worth of dust did not build up undisturbed in smooth grey piles against the corners of the halls or show his footprints as clearly as if he were walking in a snowdrift. Stephen felt his heart unexpectedly leap into his throat as he began to run. His feet clacked on the tiles, the unfamiliar springy feeling of his long-fall boots making him stumble a little as he ran to his office.

27B, 27B, 27B, 27—he nearly tripped over a coffee mug. Pausing for just a second, he scooped up the old mug and examined it as he walked. "Worst's Best Dad Regional Manager" had been amended on the front in obnoxiously charming red ink and he shivered. He knew who owned that mug, and he knew that said owner would never have so carelessly discarded it on the floor of a random office corridor. That, added with the odd scratches and scrapes along the tiles, mechanical, metal scratches…oh no. He scrambled to his office and ducked inside.

For a moment, he let the familiar if stale smells of bagged lunches and old coffee wash over him in a wave. A second of relief was all he was allowed before the other smell hit him. Sickly, dried-out rot curled cloyingly beneath his nose, and he nearly retched—he must have left some sandwich or similar nonsense in here and nobody had ever taken out the trash—

Then his eye caught the flowers, and his heart felt cold and hollow.

They'd been gardenias when he'd bought them, gosh—it must have been ages ago. Beautiful white gardenias that smelled like heaven; gardenias, precisely, because he'd already knocked roses off the list as too obvious and over-the-top. Besides, roses just smelled like, well, like just plants. Gardenias smelled like a garden. As far as he'd been concerned, she deserved the whole garden, at the very least. Then maybe he could ask her for coffee? Or something? He hadn't thought that far; he'd been hoping just to make her smile, to make up for the awful arguments. He reached out a hand to move the flowers, to lift them from their sticky dried puddle of rot and stuff them in the bin, then hesitated. He hated throwing things away. But they'd have to wait a little longer.

He slowly shuffled through the desk drawers, snagging his id clip and his wallet. With the emblazoned title of "Dr. Stephen Smythe" thumping against his jumpsuit's breast pocket once again, he quickly grabbed his jacket and threaded his arms through, unable to avoid the ridiculousness of how many layers he was wearing at this point. At least with his id clip on him now, he wouldn't have to rely on his own memory of old door codes and his coworkers' sense of laziness in changing them. More importantly, he could hopefully restore access to it using the computer and use it to help Michelle get out of whatever testing center she was in or worse: some relaxation center. But first, he'd have to get a better grasp on what was going on in the offices right now. If the coffee mug was any indication—a visage burned into the inside of his skull, blinking at him owlishly, you know what that means, don't you?—

He sat on his old desk chair in a puff of swirling dust, and, sliding the old flowers to the side in a smear of rotten liquid, sneezing all the while because of the dust, he quickly set about warming up the computer. The system was horribly slow and jerking, flickering every few minutes like the twitch of an irritated landlady come to complain about your dog barking at the squirrels—but it did start, feebly. He huffed at the familiar passive-aggressive message that popped up on the screen—three times for good measure—warning him of the life-threatening dangers of smoking and not turning one's computer off properly. He clicked off the messages and quickly began rooting around in the system databases, taking advantage of his unremoved access to restore his badge clearance. That finished, he turned to the massive spreadsheet of test subjects and gulped. Michelle's name would be here, among thousands and thousands of others, if the page count in the bottom corner was any indication, but it was finding it that so precisely scared him. She could be dead, or worse, knowing Aperture. The very thought sent ice shooting through his veins and stalled his hands for a second on the keyboard. He swallowed, hit the search shortcut, and typed in "Michelle Kekoa".

[No results found]

He frowned. Why wouldn't Michelle be on the list? Surely…unless perhaps they'd done something to the records? He quickly changed his search terms, sorting by age, sex, and testing results. Several names were highlighted, the first name listed on the entire testing document among them: Chell [REDACTED]. He frowned. "Chell" was awfully close to "Michelle", but were they really the same? Same age, sex, and initial testing results. He remembered the chart as vividly as if it had been printed off for the records yesterday.

"You tested 99th percentile for tenacity—did you know that? Actually," he laughed, and she grinned at him, "knowing you, that makes perfect sense. Most tenacious woman I ever met."

"Don't you forget it." She teased.

But was it the Michelle that he'd known?

And if it was, why would her true name and records be removed?

He scanned her profile with a critical eye. This "Chell" had been released about four days ago. He swallowed as he glanced down the list of chambers she'd been subjected to: Advanced Laser Redirection, Turret Maneuvers—wait, Beginning and Advanced Gel Chambers—was he reading that right? That—that would mean this woman have been sent down to the lowest levels of the labs, where they didn't have to pump elements from deep storage quite as far up…the old labs that, to his knowledge, had been sealed off for a number of reasons. Small potatoes, really, just cancer, and asbestos poisoning, and whatnot. He scoffed. Of course they would send some poor unsuspecting test subject down there and splatter her with all manners of gels and goops and heaven only knew what else. Then, after, they would release her into the world with a laundry list of maladies and, if she was lucky, sixty or so dollars. If she was less lucky, they might conveniently forget to remind her cash in the sticky numbered label on her jumpsuit, punt her out into the parking lot, and get security to then gently punt her out of the parking lot onto the inconspicuous rough-paved road that led to it.

His eyes snagged on a copy of her tenacity readings, which had also been inserted into her sheet, along with the recommendation that she not be put into the list circulation for further testing. And yet she sat at the top of the entire list of testing subjects, having already been put through her paces more than once already. Furthermore, her commendation and criticism sections housed the most bizarre collection of comments that he had ever seen in his life—more evidence that she'd already been tested anyways. But that ultimately didn't matter; the point was, he'd know that graph anywhere. His—no, sorry—rather, the Michelle he'd known had come through here alright, and she'd managed to get released four days ago. He might even be able to catch up to her! If he started—hang on. The commentary on her performance suddenly caught his eye. The criticism section was well-fleshed out: a dense wall of text ranging from actual notes on her performance to personal insults and insinuations that she'd been abandoned by her parents. He scoffed; kind of hard to stuff someone like Michelle into the box labelled "orphan" when she'd fought tooth and nail to keep her mother alive.

The commendation section was far more sparse and yet somehow even odder:

Did well…enough.

Impossible to kill, though not for lack of effort.

"Lack of effort?" He paused. "Who would want to kill her?"

"Well, I would think that'd be obvious enough."

The voice came from all around him, crackling from ancient speakers caked with dust and making him flinch in surprise. Stephen leapt up from the chair, knocking the rotten flowers to the floor with a horribly squelchy plop.

"Destruction of private property, reckless endangerment—the list goes on really." The brief sound of a book slamming shut could be heard. A sound effect? Who on earth would be using a bloody sound effect for an announcement? Who on earth was running the V.A. system—

"I'm not sure why you'd be interested. Unless you are also a fellow lunatic. Although I have to say, your voice sounds awfully familiar…"

That voice. That particular voice. Stephen could feel the blood leave his face in a sudden loss of warmth. If the GLaDOS system was online, and if Kevin and the rest of them were nowhere to be found, without even a trace of human activity…he didn't even know what to think. The answer was sitting right in front of him, but it felt like his brain was an old record skipping over the same loop again and again and again—

But if the system's online and they're not here and if the system's online and they're not here—

"Oh." It was an "oh" of recognition. That wasn't to say it was a pleasant one.

"You must be the petulant sack of meat they used to make the moron. I'll admit it, my expectations weren't very high to begin with, but even I had higher expectations than what I'm currently looking at."

The feminine voice's biting sarcasm might have elicited an indignant response from him any other day. But not today. He could barely hear past the roaring in his ears, could barely see the checked tile floor for the cold weight dredging down his thoughts. They're gone. Gone, they—they're…but I just talked to…but, but she'd told me about her daughter's dance recital just…just yesterday. But that wasn't yesterday…that—that was yesteryear, and now they're…they're just…

Abruptly, the door to his office suffered a heavy blow to the other side, slicing through his heavy thoughts. The old metal groaned and shrieked but held. The same result could not be said of the next blow.

"You used to work here—maybe you can figure out their primary function."

Stephen stumbled back, unable to coerce his limbs to any sort of nimbler action. Two robots stood in the door, staring like cyclopes with golden-orange and deep blue stares. He stared back, dumbly.

"They're a part of the cooperative testing initiative. You know, just something I developed to replace human testing when it was no longer…possible."

He nodded numbly. Of course. When everyone was dead, you needed something not dead. Something that'd never die, really.

"Frankly, humans are ridiculous. Of course, personality cores are worse. Always trying to murder me, or take over my facility, or put me in a potato, or feed me to birds…" The AI's distinctly feminine voice grew decidedly cool, as potatoes and birds had anything to do with anything.

Her tone was clear enough to cut through the mental fog, and Stephen slowly edged away from the robots, trying to keep his movements as slow and smooth as possible. Until the very last second, when he bolted for it, blindly barreling through the two robots—one tall and thin, one short and stocky—as if they were nothing. He let out a startled urk! and skidded on springy heels out of his office and into the open hallway. He could hear the frantic metal clanking of the two robots shortly behind him, but it was quickly washed to the back of his mind by the heavy flood of grief. He might be able to outrun the stockier one for a bit with his longer stride, but the tall one would quickly catch up and then he would die—die like all the rest of them alone under the cold, efficient lights—

He ran, slip-shod, across the office tiles. Bursting through the push-bar doors at the end of the corridor. Colliding with a pile of debris left to rot and barely recovering before a set of metal digits found his back and shoved. He tumbled through one portal and out another, stumbling now across the metal slats of a catwalk instead of office tiles. Stephen yelped, his arms pinwheeling as he scrambled to regain his footing. Somehow he already knew what was happening, even as his brain struggled to process the loss of support under his feet. Part of the railing snapped off, falling with him.

Looking down, he saw a great big plate stuffed with spikes and managed to squeeze out the semi-coherent thought: oh, I'm going to die now.

It would have been sad, perhaps, if he wasn't still in shock. Too numbed by confusion to grasp the simple fact that he ought to grieve the loss of his life in the few seconds he had left to live it. He'd escaped death by what, a few years? Only to fall back into its jaws a minute after waking.

Then time seemed to slow to a stop. Shards of metal and plastic and dust floated midair, yet he was fully aware of his surroundings, his eyesight crystal clear and his hearing just as crisp as if things were moving as normal. The shock faded, leaving confusion in its wake.

"I…apologize for what I'm sure is something of an awkward interruption…" there was a pause and a sharp, awkward intake of breath, "…but I'm afraid it just…can't be helped."

A sharply dressed man in a crisp navy suit approached Stephen, apparently walking on thin air from the entrance of a sharp, blindingly white doorway in space. Stephen blinked.

The man continued, unperturbed. "You see, certain…disbelieving acquaintances of mine…well, they don't see the value of entrusting such a task as this to someone so…unproven. But…I feel that you are up to the task," The man smiled, and Stephen felt a chill run down his spine like a fourth year's xylophone recital. It was not a pleasant smile, that.

Stephen wet his lips, uncertain. "I don't suppose you could give me your name, yeah? Bit of a confusing set-up you've got there—what with the whole, er, well, I suppose you've stopped time, is it? Or gravity. Or both, perhaps? Yeah, I suppose if you could stop gravity, you could stop time as well—Einstein could always have been off his rocker, you know, just as a possibility. I dunno, maybe you could just jump in and clarify—"

The man in the suit had been smiling the whole time Stephen was talking, but the smile stretched thin and taut, growing thinner and tauter by the second, until it was no longer a smile but a strange sort of grimace. And while Stephen didn't consider himself the most adept when it came to reading human facial expressions, even he could recognize the strained smile of someone who wasn't altogether pleased with you. It was the kind of expression your mum made when you came in insisting you meant to raise a brood of frogs in your room or when your boss didn't understand any of the technical jargon that had just escaped your mouth. The man in the suit rather resembled the latter, though his eyes were much, much colder than Stephen had ever seen in the face of anyone he'd ever met.

The man adjusted his tie, and he laughed—a tight laugh—as he resumed. "I will provide an…escape from this current predicament. You, in return, will deliver a message."

Stephen swallowed. He didn't trust this man. Not in the slightest. But…a message was simple enough…couldn't cause too much harm, could it?

"What kind of message?" Straining to keep his words clipped and short, even as the nervous urge to ramble crawled through his veins and made him itch.

The man leaned in close, lowering his voice to a gentle whisper that was somehow even more menacing than the relative normal volume it had been before.

"The right man in the wrong place can make…all the difference in the world."

Stephen blinked. "Is that all? Who would that be for?"

The man straightened his tie again. "Deliver it to…a Dr. Caroline Teiger."

"But…she's dead. She died before I ever came to the company, passed away in some accident in the old offices, poor lady." Dead like everyone else you've ever met down here—

The man's expression remained unchanged. "Let's say…certain events have been revisited. That will not be a concern for you. Until next time, Dr. Smythe."

The world was a smear of color and compressed space that made his chest hurt.

In the next minute, he remembered ducking his head to venture outside the Aperture elevator shaft, walking out of a very dusty, old shed into an open wheatfield. Before that, he couldn't seem to grasp the memories; they slipped through his fingers like a slick bar of soap in the bath.

All he knew was that something horrible had happened in Aperture. And for that, he mourned.

AN Cont'd:

Right-o, thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed, and if you did, please feel free to leave a review or comment-I really do appreciate it. By the way, just as a really quick reminder: I do regularly leave dates and estimated percentages of next chapter completion in the Ao3 summary of this story. Writing can be really slow, but editing generally goes quick. Big thanks to my beta reader Pastself for that! If you see that I've labeled the next chapter as "in editing", then it'll probably be up tomorrow, if not that same day, so do check back from time to time on Ao3 to see how the next chapter's coming along! Also! Because has limited formatting, this story's illustrations can be viewed on either Ao3 or on my tumblr, so check them out!

That out of the way, this story is very long and complicated, so writing may be slow, but I do update with fairly large chapters-hopefully that makes it worth it! Thanks for the support so far, and I hope you enjoyed!