A/N: Less than a week after saying I'd be posting on Sundays and I'm posting on a Saturday. Go me! The reason being that tomorrow my time will be taken up with looking at sofas. Yes, my life is just that exciting. This is what adulthood is like, kids :D

Anyway, let's check in with Doug.

1999.
The Inevitable Pull Back.

Ever since leaving his not-an-internship in 1993, Doug hadn't been sure that Aperture Laboratories was somewhere he wanted to set foot again. Six years later, he still wasn't sure. But it was already too late. His application had been accepted, his interview was over, he'd agreed to his start date. They'd taken him on. Despite everything. Somehow, he wasn't surprised.

1993 was a year he would never forget. It marked the start of his relationship with Aperture Science and the beginning of his troubles. It was the year he was given a name to put to his problems, a name that carried a stigma he'd always have to live with. It was a stigma that proved too much for Lucy to cope with. She'd left him within a month of his diagnosis.

In his increasing cynicism, he hadn't been surprised, but it had sent him spiralling into a period of depression and indulgent self-pity. Only focusing on his exams had pulled him out of it, and even still, it had affected his grades. He'd passed, and passed well, but below the level his lecturers had predicted.

After leaving college, he'd drifted from one job to another, unable to settle. It took him a long time to adjust to his new medication, to the patronising therapy sessions, and the wary sidelong glances from people who knew. All the while, he was aware that people were more open-minded than he gave them credit for, aware that their reactions were twisted by his paranoia to seem worse than they were. Even awareness couldn't shake his opinions, however. For the first year or so of adjustment, he'd shut himself off from people.

Although they understood his need for self-preservation, his actions had hurt his family's feelings deeply. His parents, who still lived in the spacious home he'd grown up in in the city of Wyoming, had asked him to stay with them several times. He'd always refused. They never treated him any differently, but part of him feared they would start to if they saw him often enough. His elder sister, Julie, gave up calling after the first few stilted phone conversations, obviously picking up on his desire to keep their chats as short as possible. He'd convinced himself that she would start to resent him given enough time. Growing up, he'd always looked up to her. He hadn't been able to stand the thought of disappointing her.

Aperture didn't care that he had schizophrenia. Doug suspected that Aperture wouldn't care if he was a murderous psychopath, so long as science got done. Inevitably, he'd found his way back to the one place that was crazier than he was: a once-abandoned salt mine in the middle of nowhere in Upper Michigan. There was only one thing that made him feel okay with that: that he'd finally be able to get some answers regarding some of the more secretive projects that went on there. He'd be able to try and find out if everything was legal and above board, or whether, as he suspected, Aperture in fact encouraged out-of-the-box thinking that danced perilously close to being unsafe. What he'd witnessed in 1993, the incidents that had spooked him more than he cared to admit, had never left his thoughts. From time to time, he wondered if Chell still thought about it, or whether her father had given her some kind of explanation. He remembered her horrified expression as the British man had ranted before his disappearance, the way she'd stared at her father as if she'd never seen him before. Maybe she hadn't. That had been a harsh, cold side to Simon that even Doug had found jarring. He couldn't imagine how unnerving it must have been for the man's ten-year-old daughter.

He wondered if he would ever cross paths with Simon, or whether the robotics expert even still worked at Aperture. The facility was so huge, they might never meet even if he did still work there. Staff numbers reached the thousands. Doug was very much aware that he was about to become a tiny cog in a gigantic, eccentric machine.

On his first day in his new job, (which would be spent shadowing a senior scientist in the Vegetation Fuel Resources department), he sat in his car for a while in the parking lot, re-reading the paperwork that had been sent to him. He would start with a clearance level of three, (still two-point-five better than when he'd been a student), but would have a chance to work his way higher through every promotion. For the time being, he decided to simply try and work his way out of the Vegetation Fuel Resources department, which he knew was merely a sophisticated term for potato batteries and the like. The fact that the company was actually trying to harness vegetable power was as amusing as it was bewildering, but he knew he had to start somewhere. Maybe he'd find that it wasn't as silly as it sounded, but later, when he began root vegetable research, he couldn't help wishing that his interview at Black Mesa had gone better.

The elevator ride down into the depths was nauseatingly familiar, as were the grey-walled corridors and the subtle smell of cold. Doug wasn't sure how cold could be considered a smell, but it was unmistakably there. Heating had never been one of Aperture Science's top priorities. He made a mental note to wear more layers under his lab coat.

They may not have been too fussed about heating the place, but the company was willing to pay for and provide his prescriptions, something that he found rather unusual. When he asked Raj, his new line manager, he was told that Aperture provided all prescription and over-the-counter medication to its staff members to ensure that they were in top condition for work. Privately, Doug thought that that was a way of keeping sick days to a minimum while claiming it was for everyone's benefit. Still, he supposed he shouldn't complain. Anti-psychotics were expensive.

Within a month of working there, he felt absorbed enough in his work to grudgingly accept that he had made the right choice. He was still wary, still on the lookout for signs of what the company really valued, but he was content. For the time being, at least.

Within a year, he left Vegetation Fuel Resources behind him, settling more comfortably into the Image Formatting department, and for the first time he began to feel that he belonged there. The only problem was, he wasn't sure that that was a good thing.

A/N: Only a short one this time because I didn't want to cover more than one year in a chapter. I'll try and get chapter four up during the week to make up for it, but no promises.

Just as a footnote, therapy is tremendously helpful for a lot of people and shouldn't be dismisssed as patronising. Doug is simply feeling bitter about it, and although this is third person, it's still from his point of view. Later, he may find that it was helpful for him too :)