A/N: Hello everyone! I hope you all had a happy holiday and a great new year! Sorry about the massive delay, but I got caught up with various things over the Christmas period and several other things during January. But I'm back now :) . Please accept this long chapter as my apology to you.

Chapter Four

A Small Misadventure

With several successful tests to his name, Mark had begun to feel a little more confidant in his cognitive abilities. The bruises and cuts that he had gained on the way would fade, but his sense of accomplishment would not, and that feeling alone was the one force currently driving him forwards. After all, he had quickly learned that he could not turn to his overseer for support or guidance.

But one question constantly plagued his mind: where were all the people?

On a handful of occasions now he had spotted the two friendly robots watching him curiously from adjacent observation rooms. Just watching and never allowing themselves to become involved. Perhaps his fellow humans would have been just as aloof, but at least they would have been human.

Mark couldn't quite shake the feeling that something had gone horribly, terribly wrong; and in this world of white walls, gels and portal devices some things could go very, tragically wrong. This point was illustrated further by his near-beheading-by-laser as he entered the next chamber.

Having avoided death, Mark immediately walked into another hazard – a bright ball of light that bounced from the ceiling and to the floor. He jumped aside with a yelp and crawled away to a small alcove where he promptly stopped to have an unnecessary rest in relative safety.

Another peculiarity; he just did not feel tired. He had not noticed this at first, and as he passed test after test Mark could only assume that it was pure adrenaline that had prevented him from succumbing to exhaustion. Now, however? Now he was not so sure. At the very least he should have felt weary.

Casting his eyes around the room revealed yet more dangers to come: acrid smelling goop, more lasers, moving platforms… His head spun. The other tests had been taxing, both mentally and physically, and each had taken him a long while to complete, but this one looked ridiculous.

It was as he sighed and made to lean his head against the wall that he noticed that one of the nearby wall panels was ajar – not so ajar that he could fit through the gap beyond, but one large enough for him to at least peek into the world beyond these chambers. It could have been a trap.

But perhaps he would see someone?

With a quick glance at the nearest camera and throwing caution to the wind, Mark shuffled towards the panel and peered out beyond the walls.

Disappointment punched him in the gut as he was greeted by darkness and an empty walkway, and his heart sank. The facility beyond was just as expansively sparse as he remembered. With a sigh of defeat he placed his forehead against the edge of the panel and was crushed by a sudden sense of finality; how long would have to do these tests? Would he ever be allowed to leave? Or was he going to die here, as he had begun to suspect?

Yet as he blinked he discovered something new. A brightness in the dark. From his new vantage point he could see a small slither of another white wall panel. It was duller in colour than that of a test chamber, but if he could just place a portal on it…

Taking up the portal device firmly in his hands, Mark angled the gun through the gap and shot a portal into the air. It missed, but he tried once again and landed a bright blue portal onto the wall beyond. Without a second thought, he pointed the device below him and fired the orange portal. The sharp tug of gravity pulled at the base of his spine, and as the world tumbled into falling colours and bright lights about him, he felt as though he were falling.

And fall he did, directly on to of a collection of hard, breakable objects that smashed under his weight.

"So, I see you escaped the test chamber." Mark froze as the voice of his overseer wafted from a nearby intercom. "Well done. We are all very impressed with your efforts. However, escaping is not part of the test. Once you have satisfied whatever curiosity has overcome you, please return to the testing track. I'm patient. I can wait."

Mark lay still for a few minutes, waiting to see if she would add anything further to this very one-sided conversation. She was not forthcoming with more snide remarks or terrible suggestions.

He had to move. He had to find other people.

Sitting upright very carefully, Mark looked around to see just what it was that he had landed on. Mugs. Lots and lots of mugs. Slowly and gingerly he stood, picking loose chippings from his clothes as he did. More bruises to add to his collection, no doubt, but none of the shards of pottery had managed to pierce his jumpsuit and embed themselves in his skin. At the very least, the orange crime against fashion had that in its favour.

Mark had found his way into a hallway alcove that opened into the wider, emptier enrichment centre areas beyond. He peered into the darkness and found more testing areas built of panels that were suspended in the air, held in place by the mechanical arms that also controlled their movement. Below the walkway was a sheer drop into what he could only assume were the old salt mines. He couldn't even see the ground below.

Turning away from the dizzying height, Mark adjusted his grip on the portal device and carried on into the hallway itself, passing through an automated door that slammed shut behind him. He approached the door again. It did not unlock and open. For the moment, he was trapped.

The hallway itself was full of doors leading into adjacent rooms, some of which had windows that betrayed just how devoid of life the facility truly was. Other doors were locked with keypads, and despite his best efforts, Mark could not open them with any of the codes that he could remember. Not even his senior management code could override the locks.

Continuing his path, Mark found more automated doors that should have allowed him passage into the wider facility, but each stubbornly refused to open. Was he really trapped in here? Panic quickly bubbled in his stomach, climbing up through his chest and to his brain, clouding any judgement that he was desperately trying to cling on to. He could not – would not – be trapped in here. He was Mark Johnson, damn it! This was going to be his facility, and he was not going to be a prisoner! He turned on his heel, heading deeper into the corridor at speed, barely registering the slow drop in light and the thickening of shadows. His feet collided with debris as he broke into a sprint, following the meagre light that the portal device could provide as darkness loomed all around him.

And then the light returned suddenly and in earnest. Dazzled, he caught his foot and found himself quickly sprawled out on the floor. The portal device flew through the air and smashed on the tiles with a sickening crunch and an unusual, ear-splitting, whistling echo. Mark looked up in time to see a small flash of purple-green light and a miniature explosion.

The portal device was gone, and in its place was a ball of the purest darkness he had seen, and it just so happened to be pulling him towards it at an alarming pace, as it was all of the junk and furniture in the hallway. It didn't take a genius to realise what this oddity was: Mark was at the mercy of a black hole.

'This is it,' he thought, desperately trying to dig his toes and his fingers into the floor, the walls, anything! 'This is how I die. Fuck, I don't want to die! Fuck!'

His thoughts travelled to just how painful it could be to have the life so suddenly crushed out him and time just seemed to slow, taunting him with his imminent demise. He could only watch, utterly helpless, as cans and chairs were swallowed by the dark. That would be him soon.

"Oh God! I don't want to die!"

The gravity pulling on him grew stronger and stronger until he could take no more, and as the world around him grew dark and dizzy so too did his head. A rush of blood, a sharp thrill of horror, and his consciousness was lost.

() -+- ()

Chell lay on her bed, savouring the peace and quiet that the closed door could afford her. Had she fallen asleep again? It was hard to tell. She spent so much of her time sleeping that she found it difficult to know when she was asleep or lost in a numbed state.

She stared up at the mattress above hers, taking a vague interest in one of the many stains. Sii-Hya had always advised her to focus on something physical if she could feel herself slipping back into whatever the hell kind of mess her brain had become. This stain, however, was not holding her attention as she had hoped. And she needed a distraction.

Her talk with Sii-Hya had not gone well. He had accused her of recklessness, not with malice or with spite, but with concern. He had demanded that she stay in the camp, under guard, to protect both herself and others. But Chell could not help but feel that, even with his best intentions at heart, Sii-Hya had sentenced her to yet more imprisonment.

Chell knew that she was important to both the Resistance and the Combine. If the Combine ever captured her, and somehow managed to pull Aperture's secrets from her head, it would spell disaster for the human race. She needed more safety than most - but at what cost? She snorted with thinly disguised contempt. Her freedom, of course.

Her freedom for the safety of human and vortigaunt kind.

But how did the Combine – and the Resistance - know of her importance? No one was sure, not even Sii-Hya. How did they know her, and what in hell did they want the Borealis for? Of course, Chell had a few ideas based on what technology had been stashed away on Aperture's scientific vessel, and all of them were more terrible than the last.

Yet another reason to feel trapped. The Resistance revered her, the Combine coveted her, and both feared her. Feared what she knew. Chell hated the attention.

Perhaps it would have been better if GLaDOS had not rescued her from the moon.

"Where did your life go so wrong?"

Chell froze. That voice. No, it couldn't be…

"Someday we'll remember this and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Oh boy…"

Looking wildly around, Chell first stared at her charred Companion Cube and then to the wider room. The little light that there was showed nothing: no bright, yellow optic. No laser lines firing from red eyes.

"Are you still there?"

Chell yelped and jumped at the seemingly innocent voice, banging her head on the bunk bed as she bounded to her feet. Her eyes darted around the room, scanning furiously for any sign of danger. And there, in the corner of her eye and just below the ceiling, was a moving red lens.

"I hate you."

Her breath hitched. She was being watched. She was always being watched. Her head snapped upwards, ready to fire a portal at the camera and loose it from the wall…

There was no camera. She wasn't being watched. This wasn't Aperture.

This wasn't home.

The door opened behind her, and in fell two guards who made straight for her side.

"Chell?" Asked one. "Are you okay?"

"We heard you scream." Said the other. Chell did not realise that she had made enough noise to attract their attention.

She held up a hand and forced a smile. "I'm fine," she said, her brain struggling to put words into sounds. "Honest. I'm fine."

Her guards begrudgingly left, but not without advising her to seek help if she needed it. Chell didn't need help: she needed a goddamn miracle. And the last thing she wanted to do was talk.

Talking was difficult. When she did speak it required a great amount of concentration to take the words contained in her head and transform them into coherent sentences. It had been a true struggle when she was a child due to her persistent stammer, but in her adult life she had learned to steady her voice through sheer force of will alone. It was exhausting, but sometimes it was necessary just to blend in - she already stood out enough.

Thankfully, Sii-Hya understood this. He didn't make her speak, but he instead held conversations with her through both thoughts and actions. She truly did appreciate this kindness as she genuinely preferred to be silent. Silence was easy.

Returning to her bed, Chell rested her head on thin pillows and glanced over to her Companion Cube with warmth. Sat atop the cube was a small list that she had written for herself, but instead of displaying letters from the alphabet it had upon it equations; these were no mere mathematical calculations but designs that in turn formed individual letters or full words. This was her equational alphabet, the alphabet she and her father had constructed together, as Chell could not read traditional English. Traditional English made her feel sick and made her head spin. Her equational alphabet came naturally to her. Her father had gone on to teach it to her mother who had taken to it quickly, but it was only he that had truly understood this alphabet as well as Chell.

The list itself was one containing the things for which she was thankful – yet another of Sii-Hya's ideas – but it was a very short list:

- Her parents (obviously)

- Aunt Sophia and Uncle Gregg (who were not her biological aunt and uncle, but they had been her parent's closest friends and, as such, had always been a massive presence in her life)

- Science (again, an obvious addition to the list)

- Wheatley

Her eyes paused over Wheatley's name and cold guilt immediately flooded over her. Even if he had betrayed her, Chell should have tried harder to save him from the vacuum of space. And she had tried. She had tried so hard to latch onto him as GLaDOS cut his last ties to earth, but she should have put more effort into saving him. She had failed her funny friend from England whom had been her childhood companion.

Chell could still remember seeing him for the first time, when his school had held an exchange programme with her own; he had been a tall thing with wild ginger hair and dark blue eyes, bearing glasses that constantly slipped down the slope of his nose. Out of all his classmates he radiated an air of awkwardness – and Chell immediately knew that they would be fast friends.

And now that fast friend was lost to space, not as the human boy that she knew but as a personality core. How and when he had become a core was an unknown variable to her, but that did not change what she had eventually done to him. Shooting a portal to the moon had been an enraged instinct and a last, desperate attempt to stop Wheatley from inadvertently destroying the facility through his own ineptitude. She had not once thought about the possibility of losing him to space.

Her best friend and her loving parents, all lost because of her.

() -+- ()

Mark's head throbbed painfully as the world came back to him in intense but short bursts of light and sound. He could barely make out the corridor and the small pile of trash before him. The black hole, thankfully, was gone, and he could not have cared for the reason why. He was alive, and he could continue on his way.

His whole body shook as he got to his feet, hands reaching out to the nearest wall for support. The immediate walls had been warped by the pull of gravity and several floor tiles were now missing, making his slow and uncertain walk more treacherous than it had any right to be. Eventually his legs strengthened and he was once again able to walk without the aid of the wall, but he no longer knew how much distance there was between him and the Enrichment Centre. The corridor had opened up into several more hallways, and in his haste Mark had forgotten to note which route he had taken. His chosen path eventually led to a dead end, but it was a dead end that deeply confused and unsettled him.

He was face to face with a huge and beautifully painted mural of his cousin, Chell.

The mural showed Chell in an orange jumpsuit, much like his own, and in her arms she cradled what appeared to be a Companion Cube. The Aperture logo circled her head like some kind of a halo or a crown, and behind her stretched a pair of wings.

There were words floating around her, phrased as though they were titles, and each new honorific was a little more disturbing than before. Chell, friend of the Cubes, said one. Future-starter and the best of us were two others. The last title was written in far larger text than its counterparts and was written into what he could only assume was a banner that hung beneath Chell's visage: The Daughter of Aperture.

"That's enough crazy for one day," Mark announced to no one before turning on his heel and finding another corridor to follow. The deadly tests had been bad enough, but now that he had nearly met his doom and found the only evidence of human life in a disturbing painting of his cousin, Mark had had enough.

Was his cousin alive? Was she here? The thought of her in stasis sent a thrill of trepidation down his spine. He should find her and wake her… or should he? If Chell was here, and if she were alive and awake, she would force herself into his position of power, he knew it. No offence to the girl but Mark believed that she had no idea how to run a corporation such as this, unless she had somehow enrolled herself in a business school sometime after her disappearance. It would perhaps be much easier to just pretend that he had never seen that mural.

Yes, as far as he was concerned his cousin was dead.

Mark made his way down several more corridors until he ran into the two robots, both of whom chirped and cheered upon finding him. He tried to resist their advances but the machines were faster and soon they had pulled him into a combined death grip that, he supposed, resembled a group hug. With little time to understand the situation, Mark found himself being hoisted above the robot's heads like a triumphant hero before they carried him back in the direction of what he could only assume was the Enrichment Centre.

"Don't put me back in those testing tracks!" He demanded, rage rising when the machines simply chuckled in response. "Listen here, I am to take control of this business, and I am telling you to put me down and to lead me to the fully staffed sectors of the facility. Right now."

More laughter, and from his laid position he could not escape the robot's grip. He had no choice but to see where he was taken.

Someone would answer for this when he took control of Aperture.