A/N: I struggled for a while on how to end this, then came up with the idea of Chell having a Vortigaunt friend. Actually, that had been an idea I've been wanting to explore for a while, but never really got a chance to, besides a really really stupid comic I made in Garry's Mod that I'd rather not discuss; it was that terrible.

Overall, I think this came out fairly solid, although I may have overdone it on the angst a teeny-tiny bit.

On another note, I've been watching Civil Protection, which is a machinima created by Ross Scott (the guy who did Freeman's Mind). It's great.

23. Destruction
Summary: Chell had destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that she had created?
Genre: General
Characters: Chell
Warnings: None

"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."

The painting on the glossy pages of the book showed a bearded, bespectacled man in an orange suit. He was holding a large, glowing, blue gun, a field manipulator, in front of him. He was facing a monitor, showing the face of the man who had betrayed Earth to an interdimensional alien race.

Chell sighed and closed the book. Dr. Breen's words had bit a little too close to home for her; at least Dr. Freeman had created hope. Created a future for the Earth.

And her?

All she had wanted was to escape, to be free of the testchambers. Instead, she had killed GLaDOS.

It was an act of self-defense, Chell often told herself. If she hadn't killed GLaDOS, GLaDOS would have killed her. But, another part of her mind also nagged, GLaDOS was a person. Not a human, but a person nonetheless. And Chell had destroyed her without a second thought.

Along with the facility, and ten thousand other slumbering testsubjects, all of them people, people with lives and memories and personalities ... All of them gone. Destroyed.

Wheatley had been another story. Despite his sometimes-annoying personality, inability to shut up, attempts to sound more intelligent than he clearly was - well, he had managed to endear himself to her. Despite her better judgement, she had liked him.

Not so much though, when she was laying at the bottom of an elevator shaft, wondering if her back was broken, watching a bird fly off with a potato.

She had vowed to destroy him.

And, with the help of GLaDOS, who had been trapped inside that potato, she nearly had. Instead, he had been exiled to outer space, a cold, lonely, empty place. A place that she had nearly ended up herself. She had no idea if he could survive out there, or whether he, along with that yellow space-loving core, had been destroyed.

After that had been a bit of a blur. Her vision had faded to black, and when she awoke, she was in an elevator, looking at those two little testing robots, who had seemed nice enough, but then -

"Caroline Deleted." Not just any person, but GLaDOS's conscience, a person who lived in GLaDOS' brain. It had been her fault, in an indirect way: GLaDOS would have never discovered Caroline's existence if it hadn't been for her own actions. Another life snuffed out. Destroyed. "Caroline Deleted." Those two words haunted her dreams.

The turrets - so many of them destroyed, exploded with lasers, dumped into pits of acid or dropped into a bottomless abyss - and yet they had sung a song of farewell to her. Even in the wheat field, the had pushed her way through, breaking the stalks, trampling them into the dirt, destroying them.

What had she created?

Nothing.

"The Chell appears to be unusually distressed today," Chell's Vortigaunt friend told her the next day.

Chell simply shrugged. She didn't need to say anything; the Vorts just knew. She hadn't been very alarmed when she re-entered human society to find Earth's new co-habitants: Vortigaunts, triple-armed, multi-eyed, mystics and poets, truly alien. In fact, she had gotten along better with them then the first couple of humans she had stumbled across. Vorts weren't the type to hold prejudices.

Chell's Vortigaunt friend coughed, muttering a few indecipherable words in Vortigese, before looking up at her again. "Our finest poet describes it thus: Gallum galla gilla ma.

"Our life is worthless unless spent on freedom."

It took Chell a while to understand what he meant.

Finally, she did. Chell was free of the testchambers. Free to create a new life for herself. After the Seven Hour War, Dr. Freeman had give the earth a second chance, and she was grateful for that. It was up to her to create her future.

Go make some new disaster - that's what I'm counting on.

And she would.