Part Fifty –Six. The Message

"She doesn't care if she has to help you be sad, GLaDOS," Chell continues, albeit in more of a comforting way. "She just wants to come home."

"But I don't… want her to see me like that again."

"Then deal with it now, while you still can."

That's surprisingly good advice, but… should I? Or is she wrong?

"She misses you and she loves you. And she's worried about you. Because she already knows how badly you were affected by it. You don't have to do things alone. If she can't help you, she'll tell you herself. But do yourselves a favour. Let her try. Let yourself try. She's there for you. And I think she always will be. Because as upset as she was about losing her dad, I think she was more upset about losing you." I want to look away from her but I can't. "And she told me to tell you that she misses you. Specifically. She wants you to know that more than anything."

"I can't do it without him," I whisper. "I need his help because I don't understand – "

Chell's voice is firm. She's not letting me out of this. "You can. She's strong and smart. If she doesn't know now, she'll figure it out when she gets here."

"I miss her."

I don't even know if I meant to say that. But now that I'm able to think even the tiniest bit straight, I… can hardly even stand it. I miss arguing with her. I miss her trying to trick me into saying things I don't want to say. I miss her drawings and her attempts to get a job and her morning hello… and the worst thing is, I really don't have a good reason for not contacting her right now. All that's preventing me from doing it is the fear that my collapse will have made her think negatively of me, that now she thinks I'm weak and pathetic, and even though it's probably not true I cannot stop believing it.

"Bring her home," Chell says quietly.

And I want to. But I don't want to face her right now. If she had been here, the mainframe never would have dared take over. And I'm going to have to tell her what happened, I'm going to have to tell her I almost lost everything because I tried to go it alone, and I'm going to look like such a fool…

"Why did you do it?" Chell asks, her voice still soft. "She must have been a lot of work. What made you decide that you wanted a daughter, and to go to all that trouble to make one?"

I suppose that does sound like a bit of an odd decision for me to make. "He made it sound like such a good idea."

She inhales sharply. "No…"

"Yes," I snap, taking advantage of the anger this statement causes. "I admit it. I caved and became attached to the little idiot who tried to kill me. I –"

She holds her hands up in submission. "I'm not judging you."

"You're not?" I still judge me, sometimes.

"How could I?" she says, spreading her hands in my general direction. "I did the exact same thing. Well, the way you just described it, anyway."

"You did?"

"Am I not sitting in front of the psychotic supercomputer that tried to kill me?"

Well. She has a point. "I suppose."

"And good for you," she continues seriously. "It says a lot, you know. That you forgave him."

I find myself looking away again. "I had to." She doesn't know the whole story, of course, but the gist of it is that we were too similar for me to ignore.

"We had a deal."

So we did.

"It's a very long story," I tell her, though honestly I don't expect her to find that discouraging.

"I don't have anywhere to be."

Neither do I, but… I don't know if I can do it. I've had to keep myself from thinking about him at all, because even beginning to makes me want to lie down and never get up. How am I supposed to tell that whole story when I can't even think about his name?

"Chell… I don't know if I can." Thank God I didn't promise. "I try not to think about him anymore. You don't seem to understand what it does to me. Humans get over loss because, with time, their memories fade, until all that's left of the one they lost is a mere shadow of what once was everything to them. My memory will never, ever fade. I'm not going to forget what he looked like, or what he sounded like, or any one of the days he spent with me." My voice is beginning to distort, damn it. "As soon as I let myself think about what happened, I'm going to relive it and I'm going to have to start all over again. I'm fine now. But the next time I go into sleep mode, that's going to change. I already know what's going to happen. It already did. Over and over and over again."

"It's different now," she says. "You're not alone."

"That's not going to make me forget long enough that I can pull myself back together."

"Tell me one thing, then. Just one. I know you don't like this. But I… I need to know why this one person was so important that you changed your life."

"He understood me," I tell her, before I can convince myself not to. "And when he didn't, he made sure he eventually would. Why… why did he change my life? Because I… before he realised that and told me, I didn't even know I didn't have one. He saw it. He saw how much I was limiting myself and why and he knew what to do –" No. No, I'm not doing this again. I shake my core in an attempt to distract myself. I'm not losing myself to the grief. Not now. Not so soon. "I didn't have a life. I had an existence. And I would have wasted it."

She just looks at me sort of appraisingly for a long moment. Then she stands. "Come here."

What does she want?

I do as she asks regardless, and she steps forward and wraps her arms around my core. Though I can't remember it ever happening before, it feels familiar and comforting. And oddly… for some reason I also know how to return it. Caroline must have taught me this.

Those damned scientists. They forced me to forget everything important. I hate half knowing all of these things, and yet not being able to fully understand.

"I want you to think about something," Chell says after she's moved away again. "You said that you didn't have a life, before. But you don't have much of one now, either. And I know you've been having a hard time." She holds up her hands to discourage me from protesting. "But you've come back to that exact same standstill. Look what you've done, GLaDOS. You defied everything and changed your entire world. And you did everything you could to make sure Caroline had everything you never had, things you never even thought of having. Why are you stopping now? Because you're afraid? You're stronger than that. I know you are."

Why do others always know me better than I know myself?

"I will consider it," I answer quietly. I hadn't realised it before, but… I am afraid. The problem is that I don't know why. "You're on your way back, I presume."

She nods. "Do you have any… messages?"

"No." I can tell instantly that she's disappointed. She thinks nothing she's said has sunk in. She's wrong.

"There's nothing I can ask you to say that I shouldn't say myself."

She looks taken aback, and then a slow smile makes its way onto her face. "So you do listen."

"Now and again. Don't leave here thinking I wantonly accept advice from wayfaring lunatics."

"Never."

I watch her return to the elevator with some measure of dread. I don't want her to leave.

I'm not distracted by my problem with the mainframe anymore. There is no one and nothing to keep me from thinking about him. I honestly don't know if I can hold together on my own. I've never been able to do it. I deal with negative events by denying they affected me. With Caroline, it barely worked. It does not work with him at all. And even if I were able to do it, I wouldn't be able to. Pretending he doesn't matter is the worst possible thing I could do.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know how to deal with this, not in any positive way, and I don't have much time to figure it out.

"GLaDOS."

"What."

"Is she coming back or not?"

I can't give her the answer she wants to hear. "No."

She tries to hide it, but her sigh is clearly audible to me.

"I am going to think about what you've said. I am. And I understand that I… probably need assistance. But remember. I am also trying to prevent things from happening to her that happened to me. Being forced to deal with problems she's not ready for is one of them." I meet her eyes, now. "No matter how much she cares, she deserves better than to have to support me when I should be supporting her."

"It's more complicated than I thought," Chell says, twisting her lips.

"Everything always is. Especially for you. How you survive with a brain that small I'll never know."

She rolls her eyes and shakes her head simultaneously. "And I'll never know if you're exasperating or hilarious."

"I can be both. I am multi-talented, after all."

"Well, don't wait too long to use your talent to retrieve things you left elsewhere."

Before the elevator doors have quite sealed I halt them, turning to face her again. Her eyebrows slant and she fixes me with that grey stare. I avoid having to process it by looking at the floor.

"What?" she asks, voice threaded with suspicion, and I suppose it does kind of look like I'm trapping her here. I forgot that I'm not supposed to intervene with other people's decisions.

"Before you go…"

Why is this always so hard for me?

"Yeah?"

I have to look at her while I say it. I don't want to, but I have to. She has to know that I mean it. That I'm not just saying it to say it. My little Caroline taught me that.

God, I miss her now.

And she's out there, by herself, being brave and strong. Being what I should have been, what I should be even now. The more I think about the last several months, the less deserving I feel to even see her again. I did what I believed was right, yes. But that does nothing about the fact that she is far more responsible and mature than I am right now. She wants to be like me? Why would anyone want to be weak and broken, like I am?

"I'm sorry," I say quietly, when I'm finally able to look at her. It's not enough. There's so much more to add to that, so much more I should tell her, but those two words prove too much for me. I can't say anything further.

I have made so many mistakes…

"I forgive you."

By the time I look up, she's already gone. When she has disappeared from camera range I finally put the elevator away. Now I have to decide what to do. Her words weren't enough either, but I feel a little better. A little less desolate. Hopefully that will hold while I work this out.

I've always prided myself on self-sufficiency. I can do anything and everything, no matter what it is, without outside help. And while that was necessary and something I needed, once, now… it's sort of stupid. I don't know why I do these things to myself. But that's not even the worst part.

The worst part is that I have lost a year of my baby's life, and I can never get it back. And I continue to lose it with every nanosecond I convince myself not to bring her home. Is not forcing her to deal with my imminent breakdown just an excuse for me to become bitter and angry again? Is all my reasoning just a cover for what I'm really trying to do: return myself to how I used to be? True. Life wasn't very exciting. Nothing ever is when nothing really matters. But it was easier. I was never happy. But I was never unhappy. I was never lonely, or sad. I was numb or angry all of the time. I recognise those states as being personally detrimental now, but they didn't hurt. My inclination towards the negative is so strong that I almost believe I am better off having nothing than I am to risk everything for the chance of being happy again. But all things considered… it's not about me, is it. It's about Caroline. It's about the daughter I abandoned for a year, who I barely even thought about because I was so busy thinking about myself, whose continued stay far from everything she knows I keep trying to justify when there is literally no reason good enough to force it on her any longer.

What have I done.

I'm so ashamed of myself. I'm so disgusted with myself. I'm not her mother. I'm not even her progenitor at this point. I'm an engineer who created something that was interesting for a while and then put it into storage. I do not even deserve to see her again. She deserves to see him again, and to forget me. Why she would even want to come back is beyond me. If it were me, I would –

Well thank God she's not you, I tell myself angrily.

All right. I need a plan. If I have a plan, I can move forward. I might be a deplorable parent with so many issues I should attempt to institutionalise myself, but she wants to come back. She didn't want to go there in the first place. It's like I've given her some surreal punishment she did nothing to be sentenced with. God. Where did I go so wrong?

No. I have to stop. I need logic. I need a plan, I need steps and deadlines and absolutes. I have to figure out right now what I'm going to do, and then do it.

Well. The main objective here is not to have a complete breakdown when I wake up tomorrow morning. No, he's not going to be here. Yes, I'm going to dream about him, and yes, I'm going to come out of that wanting to scream until I can't think anymore. But I can't. I have to control myself. I have to be the mother I should have been all this time, and I have to prove that I even deserve that privilege.

I'm not going to let the grief consume me anymore. I'm not going to forget or go numb. But I'm not going to be overwhelmed with remembering, either.

When I can make it through the day in one piece, that is when I will bring her back. And I will do my damnedest to make sure it's someday soon.

I can never take back what I've done. I can't even make up for it. But I can put a stop to it.

Guest reviews:

Guest: I could keep going. But it would be a really big pain to upload forty chapters at once and I doubt anyone would read them if I did that.

Author's note

So GLaDOS discovers that part of the reason she won't bring Carrie back is because she's afraid of what Carrie thinks of her. She doesn't want to fetch her until she's the invincible AI again, because GLaDOS still hasn't quite accepted that she doesn't have to be perfect. But as GLaDOS tells Chell, part of why she won't bring Carrie back is because she wants Carrie to have the opposite life she had: no pressure, no obligations, no commitments she can't avoid. She wants Carrie to build herself from the beginning, unlike GLaDOS, who has to unbury who she wants to be.

And THEN GLaDOS thinks about how she always feels like she has to go it on her own or that makes her weak, and that she should do something about it, but she doesn't know whether she's doing it to make it easier on Carrie or on herself. But she decides to look at it from the standpoint of how she can cause less pain on Carrie, and that's how she chooses how to move forward.