A/N: Updating on a Monday because yesterday was a mad rush of Christmas shopping and laundry, followed by a birthday dinner for my Mum. Hopefully no one minds too much :)

More Lab Rat material here, although I made minor changes to the dialogue to better fit the timing of events. Again, anything you recognise doesn't belong to me.

2010.
The End Times.

It had taken months of practice for Doug to detach, to stop thinking of her as Chell and refer to her as 'the girl'. She was not a woman he'd known for years, she was test subject number 1. She was not his friend, she was the one who would stop GLaDOS. In the increasingly-rare moments when he slipped and remembered who she was, he was surprised at how convincingly he'd forgotten her. He needed to, though, and that was why he could. He couldn't afford to remember how he felt about her, because if he did, he'd never be able to keep her on her path. His plan wasn't perfect. In fact, he'd say it was decidedly hole-ridden, with a very small chance of success. That chance - the only chance - was her.

He'd seen her so many times over the years. She was by far the most peaceful and the most welcome of his hallucinations. She would smile at him encouragingly, but she never spoke. When he stumbled across a lonely companion cube that had somehow escaped the incinerator, he understood why: the cube had stolen her voice.

"Why do you use it?" he'd asked.

"Because it was available," the cube had replied, as if that settled the matter.

Although it disturbed him a little, Doug didn't press it too much. He was too grateful to have a companion again, even if it was just a cube. The rational part of his mind remained surprisingly self-aware after his medication ran out. He knew that his friend was just a cube, he knew it wasn't really talking, but it didn't make it any less comforting or credible. Knowing that his hallucinations weren't real didn't make them any less terrifying either. And, of course, there was still Her.

Over the years, he had successfully avoided GLaDOS for months at a time. As he grew used to finding his way around out of her sight, he lived in relative peace away from her taunting voice. The food he'd stolen from the cafeteria expired after the first year. Now he was living mostly on tinned beans that he managed to heat up on modified computer parts. It was a decidedly boring diet that his body didn't appreciate much, but it kept him alive. Judging by the huge stockpile he had, it would keep him alive for several more years yet. He'd been lucky enough to find one of the store rooms, and it had kept him supplied with many essentials: beans, cartons of insanely-long-life milk, huge bottles of water that were meant for the coolers in the offices, soap, toothpaste and toilet roll. He also had a healthy supply of first aid kits for emergencies. He hadn't had to use them much, thankfully, despite the turrets that GLaDOS occasionally left around, presumably in the hope that he'd wander into their path.

For a man who was not a natural survivor, he'd done quite well for himself. He'd made a sling-like, long-handled bag that he used to carry the cube and his supplies on his back. It left his hands free for climbing, which he found himself doing most days, and allowed him to spread the weight evenly. He never went anywhere without it, not wanting to be parted from the cube, his precious Art Therapy book, or the girl's file.

He'd been imagining what it would be like, to have her free him and the others from GLaDOS. He'd discovered a small, empty room that he'd dedicated to murals depicting the A.I.'s rise and forthcoming defeat. Progress had been slow, but he'd managed to cover every wall but one. Even the ceiling had an image on it: a non-technical diagram of the phases of the moon.

"What will you put on that blank wall?" the cube asked him.

"I don't know yet."

"What about a portrait? You know, of the girl."

That idea did sound appealing, but he wasn't sure he wanted to attempt it. He wasn't confident that he'd portray her properly.

In his peripheral vision, he saw her step up to his side, leaning casually against the wall. Doug didn't look at her, didn't give the hallucinations the power to affect him. Even out of the corner of his eye, she was disturbingly real. She was leaning in the wet paint, however, a sure sign – if he needed one – that she wasn't.

"Maybe," he muttered, adding details to the portal device that a stick-figure version of himself was holding up. He didn't feel like painting himself accurately. He barely remembered how he'd looked back when...

Don't think about it.

A faint rumbling vibration spread across the floor and he straightened up, brush in hand.

"What's that?" the cube spoke up.

"She must be moving another room," he surmised. "Will she ever be finished enough to..."

A sound cut him off, faint rising and lowering of robotic, female tones.

"She's talking," he said stupidly, surprised.

"But," the cube murmured, sounding somewhat confused, "if she's not talking to us, then..."

"Then who?" Doug finished.

The girl moved her head, taunting him. He didn't glance her way, but her movement served as a reminder. A jolt shot through him and his eyes widened. "Could it be...?"

He dropped the brush into his lab coat pocket and hurried over to the cube. He threw everything but the book back into the bag, looping it over his head. Taking off running down the empty corridor, he jumped up on the desks he'd piled up, and nimbly pulled himself up into the ceiling. He had to slow down to navigate the pipes, but he went as quickly as possible, expertly making his way to Test Subject Observation and Care. He'd had three years to memorise his new routes, and he knew it all like the back of his hand.

Finally, he dropped down into what had once been Adam's office. Setting the cube down next to the desk chair, he jiggled the computer mouse, clearing the screensaver. The Aperture logo was still burned into the monitor, distorting his view of the screen. Fingers flying over the keyboard as he typed, he pulled up the details for each testing track in turn until he found one, track five, that was flashing up an 'in use' message.

Doug inhaled sharply, unsure whether to believe it. Had She finally woken a test subject? Was She finally satisfied with her facility?

"Let's go and look!" the cube suggested.

Doug ran a hand through the ragged hair of his beard, suddenly afraid that his mind was playing tricks on him. He didn't want to hope only to find that it wasn't real. But he had to know, and there was no other way.

"Okay," he said at length. "Let's go. Track five isn't too far. Part of it was in use before She was active."

He picked up his bag again and left the office, stepping out into the cold, grey corridor. He'd cleared it of cameras months ago. GLaDOS didn't have enough control there to replace them.

As they went, the cube piped up again, "If she really is here, where do you think she is? Could she have gotten to chamber three by now?"

"Hard to say," he commented with a frown. "She's not stupid and she's handled the portal device before, but she may be disoriented from the stasis pod. We'll just have to catch up."

Heart beating painfully hard in anticipation, Doug ducked into each observation office, cautiously approaching the windows that looked down into the test chambers. GLaDOS had many cameras in the tests, but he hoped that she'd be so focused on her test subject that she wouldn't notice him.

Chambers one, two and three had been solved. Some of them were in the process of being reset by robotic claw arms. When he entered the observation office for chamber four, however, his eye was immediately drawn to the orange-clad figure standing directly in front of him. She had her back to him, and was staring down into the pit in the chamber.

Real? he wondered. Or just my lying mind again?

She looked real, but so had the others. This time, however, she was exactly where he expected her to be.

Can she truly be awake after all this time?

A flash of blue briefly lit up the wall in front of her as her arms moved with the recoil of the portal device. It only had a minor kick, he remembered that. A weighted storage cube tumbled out of the orange portal on the wall to the right, and she turned to pick it up with the gun's magnetic field. She placed the cube on the button, turning to watch the exit door slide open.

"Once again, excellent work," came GLaDOS's voice.

"GLaDOS can see her too," Doug whispered. "She is real."

With eyes hungry for human contact, he shrank back and watched her cross the room to the door. Her expression was unmoving, as if she was trying very hard not to give anything away. Her posture was tense, and she wobbled a little on the leg springs that she'd been made to wear. She looked wary and afraid, but her jaw was resolutely set, her chin jutting slightly out in a small, stubborn gesture. Doug felt hope rekindle in his chest.

As she disappeared through the particle field across the exit, Doug spun on his heel and ran back down the corridor.

"The end is finally upon us," he shot over his shoulder.

"What do you mean?" asked the cube, its voice laced with confusion.

"You'll see. We have work to do."

Chell passed through the emancipation grill of chamber four, letting GLaDOS's words wash over her. She had schooled her expression into her best poker face, although to her, it felt a lot like scowling. Only her eyes were alert, taking in everything about the test chambers, searching every observation window for signs of life. It was all eerily quiet. But for the talkative A.I., of course.

It had felt like mere minutes since the stasis pod had gassed her into unconsciousness, then she'd awoken to brighter light than she'd left, accompanied by a bombardment of pale walls. Her relaxation chamber was exactly the same as it had been, but it had moved. The entire glass room had been relocated to a testing track. She'd recognised the decor from her brief time as a volunteer.

Groggily, she'd gotten to her feet, finding that a pair of Advanced Knee Replacements had been attached to her legs as she'd woken up. She'd been glad that she was already familiar with them, otherwise she wouldn't have known what to think. Fearing the worst, she'd looked around, taking in the empty observation office and the falsely cheerful song that was looping on the radio. Then there had come that voice: feminine, commanding, difficult to ignore. Although she'd never heard it before, she'd known immediately whose voice it was. GLaDOS was in charge. Doug had been right to be afraid.

She rested in the elevator between tests, mind spinning. She had no idea how she'd ended up actually testing, but she was glad in a way. She'd rather be awake than oblivious, even if she was dealing with difficult puzzles. Pacing the curved walls, Chell bit her lip, wondering what had happened to everyone else, to Doug, to her father, to her friends. If she could just find a way out of the test chambers, perhaps she'd find some answers. At the moment, she suspected the quickest way out was to make it to chamber nineteen, the last test according to the information boards she'd been reading.

The further she got on the track, the more she began to realise that that might be a harder goal than she'd anticipated. The tests were more dangerous than she'd thought, more dangerous than they'd been in the past. She knew this for sure, as Adam had once let her up to the observation offices to watch the testing. She'd seen chamber fourteen, which she remembered well. She'd laughed at him getting annoyed watching a test subject continually fail to jump to platforms that moved up and down out of a padded pit. He'd yelled repeatedly at the sound-proof glass, "You have a portal gun! Just portal to the other side!" They'd laughed, watching the poor test subject fall in again and again. Chell didn't laugh when it was her own turn, when she realised that the empty pit had been filled with toxic goo.

One of Hannah's recycling products? she wondered.

The further through the tests she got, the more the sight of the empty observation windows unnerved her. She was beginning to feel like the only person left in the facility. At the back of her mind, she knew that that was a very real possibility, but she refused to give credence to it. It scared her far too much.

Keep going, she lectured herself. Don't worry about that until you have to.

But that was easier said than done. She was haunted by the panicky look on Doug's face as he'd seen her to the stasis pod, and the way that his fear had fuelled her own.

It was GLaDOS, ironically, who gave her something else to worry about. When she stepped out into the short corridor that preceded chamber sixteen, she picked out only two words from the A.I.'s speech, words that had her heart beating fast in barely-suppressed dread: 'live fire'.

Chell had never been in close-contact with a gun in her entire life. Now she was facing a test chamber full of automated turrets, armed only with a device that made inter-dimensional gates. Feeling woefully out of her depth, she squared her shoulders and entered the room.

Unbeknownst to Chell, Doug had been running ahead of her, planting things in the old dens behind the test chamber walls, adding a few more helpful warnings to the graffiti that was already there. Most of it didn't make sense to his gradually-clearing mind, and he knew it wouldn't make sense to her, but he didn't have time to worry about it. She wasn't very far behind him.

He'd left graffiti in chambers sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, but it was sixteen that needed a few more additions. The girl would be up against turrets, and he was damned if he let her deal with it all on her own. From the den he'd once camped in, he rewired two of the wall panels to jut out, allowing access to the hidden room. Leaving the cube behind in the den, he scrambled up the back of the open panels, awkwardly balancing on the huge metal spoke that supported the top one. Using a screwdriver, he prised up a ceiling tile and pulled himself up into the space above. Balancing precariously on the grid the tiles were set into, he crawled several feet to the right, then tugged up a tile to see where he was. He had judged it well; he was almost directly above a turret. With caution, he lay down, spreading his weight. Tentatively stretching out with his right arm, he drew a wobbly cross on the ceiling with a thick red marker pen, exactly where the turret stood obliviously below. Then he replaced the tile and continued on.

Working steadily, Doug drew crosses above turrets wherever he could get to, hoping to make the girl's run a little easier. When he was done, he had only one thing left to do. In the alcove that contained the cube dispenser, located approximately halfway through the chamber, he dropped down to the floor, landing lightly on the balls of his feet. He was out of sight of the cameras, and the turrets were safely hidden behind walls and bullet-proof glass. As long as he didn't stray far, he'd be okay.

He plucked his screwdriver and a few other tools from the mostly-empty bag on his back, then stood on the cube that was sitting waiting. The dispenser was designed to only give out another cube if the first one got destroyed, but Doug knew that that would make the test much harder than it needed to be. It would be far better if there were a whole stack of cubes for the girl to use.

Aware that she was not many chambers behind him, he worked as efficiently as he could, loosening the screws that worked the mechanism on the dispenser so that it would be permanently open. The cubes were stacked in the glass tube above, so gravity would take care of the rest. The dispenser groaned as he worked, and he clenched his teeth as he focused. Then, with a startlingly loud crashing sound, seven or eight cubes tumbled out in quick succession, knocking him backwards off the one he was standing on. They were bizarrely followed by an empty mug that hit him directly in the stomach, making him wince, and a radio playing an upbeat Samba tune.

Mildly winded by the mug, which had miraculously stayed in one piece, Doug got to his feet, palm on the wall for support. When he moved his hand, he saw that he'd left a black, inky print behind. Not surprising, considering that several of his marker pens were leaking.

The dispenser was now gently sparking, opening and closing every few seconds. Doug set about stacking the cubes up so that he could reach his escape route in the ceiling. He left the radio and the mug there too. The more stuff that was available to be thrown at turrets, the better. Wobbling slightly, he clambered up, breathing easier when he'd slotted the tile back in place. He crawled back towards the light coming from his original route into the ceiling. It took him a few attempts to get back onto the open wall panels, but he managed it with the companion cube's encouragement. After re-securing the ceiling tile, he made his way down.

"Did you do it?" the cube asked excitedly.

"I did," he replied with a brief smile. "Should make it a little easier for her. I wish I could do more though."

"Doesn't she need something on this side of the room also?"

Doug's face fell. The cube was right. "Crap," he muttered. "How am I going to get two cubes over here?"

"I don't know, but you manage when you're carrying me."

"Good point. I'll have to go back then."

"Hurry!" the cube exclaimed.

Doug heeded its advice, making the fastest two trips there and back that he possibly could. He wedged the cubes in the gap he'd made between the wall panels to make them more noticeable. As an afterthought, he pulled out the red marker pen and scrawled HELP on the floor.

"What do you need help with?" the cube wanted to know, its tone implying that it would be raising a suspicious eyebrow if it could.

"I don't need help," he answered, pocketing the pen. "Well, I do, but... you know what I mean. It's for her. So she knows where to find help."

"Oh, I get it."

"We need to get out of here," he said, ducking back into the den from the other side of the panel. "She must be in chamber fifteen by now. I need to get to the locker too..."

"I still think that's a mistake," the cube muttered sulkily. "I don't think you need those things."

Doug nodded in acknowledgement, picking it up and putting it back in its bag. "I know you don't, but we're in a situation here."

"I know that," it said mournfully. "But even still..." It made a quiet huffing sound, like a sigh, then added, "What now?"

"We need to make sure she has a route to the main chamber," he said, slinging the bag on his back. "Most of it is pretty straightforward once she reaches the lower engine rooms, but it's getting her there. And getting her out of chamber nineteen."

As he talked, Doug climbed up the wire fence that separated the den from the stairs and door beyond. He'd cut and rolled back a section of stiff mesh to gain access, and he pushed it back in place once he was hanging from the other side. It didn't look like it had even been cut. Just as his fingers were beginning to protest, he dropped down. He'd become surprisingly agile during his three years in hiding.

He tapped his four-digit code into the keypad by the door. It beeped politely and he opened it, revealing the rusty gantry of the maintenance areas. Bracing the door with his foot, he unscrewed the handle on the den's side, removing it just in case the girl found her way past the fence. His hands shook slightly, as they always did when he was doing something that would keep her on the right path. He bit down another wave of regret, knowing full well that he was preventing her from escaping the potential death traps that were the test chambers.

"You have to," the cube reminded him. "You have no choice."

"I know," he murmured, closing the door, leaving the detached handle on the floor beside it. "But neither time nor repetition can make it any easier. She doesn't... She's..."

"I know," it said gently.

There was a pause as Doug pulled himself together. Then he looked thoughtfully left and right down the gantry, unsure what to do next.

"I'm a little worried about chamber nineteen," he mused to himself as he considered his course of action.

"What do you mean?" asked the cube. "Why worried?"

Doug shot it a look over his shoulder. "Well, we've never seen it, have we? We never found a way in. What if she needs help?"

"How will we get in now if we haven't before? Unless we go around and try from the finish line side?"

He nodded, already walking in the direction of the nearest office. "I think that's the only way we can do it," he stated grimly.

When they reached the office, Doug swiftly logged on to the maps of the areas around the test chambers. There was a way to the end of chamber nineteen, through a turret repair workshop. The thought of passing through that made him a little nervous, but at least there was a good chance that the turrets wouldn't work.

Route in mind, he started running, aware that the girl was catching up in the test chambers. The turret workshop was silent, each unit there deactivated, their sinister red optics dull and lifeless. It took him a few minutes to hack the keypad by the exit, but he got it eventually. The door opened out onto a sparse, industrial-looking platform, the left wall of which was made entirely of glass. But it was the sight beyond that that made him halt in his tracks, his mouth falling open in horror.

Chamber nineteen led directly into an incinerator.

A/N: Argh cliffhanger! Except not, because you know how this ends. But shh.