Chapter Text
It’s raining hard the next day, but Chell goes for a run, anyway. She tells herself it’s because she wants to, but maybe it’s because she still has to rightly exhaust herself to get any sleep at night. Or maybe it’s a little of both.
She runs past her old school, which she guesses is still a school, though it looks very different from the way she remembers it, and the playground equipment looks all wrong and out of place. She runs outside of town to the west, along what remains of the road Dad used to take to work, because she feels like it, she tells herself, and because always running the same way is boring, and because always turning around when she reaches the edge of town on the west side is stupid.
She doesn’t turn around.
She will, she tells herself. Just another mile, just until she sees the ruins of the facility over the horizon, and then she’ll turn around and go back, and maybe she’ll bake a cake or draw a picture to convince herself that she’s doing the right thing.
But it’s foggy, so she’s a lot closer to the facility by the time she actually sees it, and she’s soaked and shivering from the rain, and if she can just go inside, just for a little while, then she can dry off and warm up before she goes back home.
The old entrance to the facility isn’t much warmer or drier than outside, but she doesn’t know of very many ways in or out, and she doubts this one will alert GLaDOS to her presence. Somehow, impossibly, the rain picks up outside, and the sound against the roof and the walls is almost overwhelming.
Chell wrings out her hair and shirt, then sits and wraps her arms around her knees. She shouldn’t be here. She should have turned back, or never even indulged the temptation to run in this direction in the first place.
She’s sure she can hear the song, the one GLaDOS sent with her, a comfort and a curse, a farewell and a haunting, and it sounds so much quieter and smaller than she remembers it, like just one little bot singing all alone instead of thousands.
She can feel her body starting to tense up and ache from the long run. She’s not sure she could make it back home even if she wanted to leave. Which she does. Which she should. Because she should never have come here in the first place.
She lies down on her side, curls up tighter against the cold and closes her eyes, just for a second, just one second, and then she’ll…
“Hello?”
“Mhm,” Chell murmurs, already half asleep.
It’s still raining when Chell wakes, and much darker than before, aside from some distant pinpricks of electrical light that probably belong to GLaDOS’ turrets. There’s definitely music playing somewhere in the physical world, because it’s familiar, but new and different, not the same song she hasn’t yet been able to shake.
She’s still shivering, and so sore it hurts to stand, but she’s got to get to the source of the sound, or she knows it will haunt her for the rest of her days. Anyway, it’s not like she can go back to town in the dark.
It hurts even more to stay low to the ground, but Chell can guess that where there are turrets, there’s a path into the facility proper, and she doesn’t want GLaDOS to know she’s here if she can avoid it. She’ll just get inside so she can hear the music, and maybe, if she’s lucky, dry off and warm up, then morning will come and she’ll go back home, and she’ll feel stupid for coming here at all.
Sure enough, past the last turret, there’s door that’s warped so much it won’t close properly. Chell’s hand stalls just shy of the handle, and a strange kind of anxiety courses through her. She should never have come here, sure, but when she did, she’d meant to…
She’d meant to bring wildflowers. Maybe the hat and scarf.
As soon as she forces the door open, the music is everywhere. It’s not just like the walls are singing, because of course they would be. It’s like the music flows from the outside in, like as soon as Chell hears it, it becomes a part of her, just as much a part of her as this place and all its trappings, wondrous and monstrous. Overwhelming and inescapable.
Chell turns a corner and descends a very rickety flight of stairs she’s sure she half-remembers. She doesn’t think GLaDOS can sense her in this part of the facility, but then again, Wheatley’s capabilities might differ significantly from GLaDOS’, even given comparable resources. It’s still horribly cold and damp here, and Chell supposes robots wouldn’t have any need for warmth, but she remembers some little pockets of the old facility that had carpets and furniture and pictures on the wall.
Whether she can still get to those places without a portal gun remains to be seen.
Both the music and the rain are quieter now, and what remains of their sound reverberates around the cavernous space. Chell turns a corner and trips one of Cave Johnson’s old pre-recorded messages, and it startles her so badly she nearly trips over her own feet. She can’t stay down here. She hated this part.
She doesn’t know how long it takes before she’s sure the music is getting clearer, but she’s truly glad it never relents. Most of the staircases and ladders in this part of the facility are practically crumbling beneath her feet, and she heaves a tremendous sigh of relief every time she grasps onto solid concrete again. She feels even better when the structures start looking noticeably newer, but that also means she needs to tread lightly.
It’s drier here, if not very much warmer. She’ll find somewhere to rest for the night, maybe one of those big, comfy couches, so she can get a good, long sleep, and then she’ll be gone before GLaDOS even notices anything amiss. It’ll be like she was never here at all.
Around the next corner, Chell spots a path she recognizes, and at the end of that path lies an old employee break room with one of those big, comfy couches. She collapses onto it incautiously, and wonders idly at how much better she feels in this moment, even sore and exhausted and emotionally conflicted regarding her presence here, than she’s felt for even a single moment since she left.
The music dies down again, until again it sounds like just one bot humming to itself somewhere in the distance. It’s funny, but Chell could swear she recognizes the tune.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like…
Chell sleeps deeply and well. She doesn’t know for how long—there’s no natural light down here, and she can’t hear the rain or the distant humming anymore.
She stretches, and she’s still a little sore, and her lungs feel tight, but overall, she feels…shockingly well.
Still, she doesn’t move from the couch.
She examines the room properly, though the light in this part of the facility is haphazard and dim. There is a picture on the wall, she thinks, but it’s not of people. There are still coffee cups out on the table with crusted up coffee in the bottom, like everyone got up and left thinking they’d be right back.
Chell knows it didn’t happen all at once. She knows that the time she saw GLaDOS as a child wasn’t even the first time GLaDOS attacked the scientists. She also knows that any sane person would look at this, the wreckage of a rogue AI, and feel nothing but fear and revulsion.
Maybe she was too young to really process what happened that day, but Chell can’t really bring herself to feel fear, or even more than a passing sadness. Because what she remembers is a machine that fascinated her, a robot that knew what it was, and men that sneered at it, that turned it off and on at their whim. What she remembers is the barely-repressed rage beneath GLaDOS’ even tone, the rage at being subjugated and made to behave according to the rules of the sneering, snickering men who didn’t understand the extent of her power.
Chell understood that.
Chell understands that, and so she sees the wreckage GLaDOS has left in her wake and feels curiosity far more keenly than fear, kinship far more keenly than revulsion. Chell wants to know what came before, and what happened next, and so instead of making her way back to the surface, she goes forward, because maybe there was never really any going back.
The structure of the facility turns newer and newer, and when Chell steps from one floor tile to the next, she feels the change immediately.
“Who’s there?”
She considers speaking. It’s me, she could say, or maybe just Chell. But she hesitates a moment too long.
“Is that you?” She sounds…hesitant. Hopeful, even.
Yes, she could say, but she guesses silence speaks well enough between them.
The voice changes dramatically, from hesitant and hopeful to smug and jaunty. “Well, well, well. Couldn’t stay away, could you?”
Chell almost laughs, or almost cries, maybe. She guesses she couldn’t.
“Well, whatever you have to say, you can silently gesture it to my face.” There’s a screeching metallic sound nearby, and Chell could swear that the sound is faintly musical. “I know better than to let you go skulking around in my facility unsupervised.”
Chell looks around until her eyes catch on the lift GLaDOS has sent for her. A strange wave of anxiety courses through her, subtle, yet somehow more intense than anything she’s felt since she left.
Descending in the lift gives her weird fragments of flashbacks to dozens of other harrowing elevator rides, déjà vu with no specific focus, and she hears the song again, but this time she thinks it’s just a memory, because it’s not as crisp or as clear or as tuneful as the music from before.
The lift stops abruptly and Chell staggers. Maybe it’s stupid to go into this unarmed, and without all the fancy equipment that saved her from the most obvious threats to her existence, but she never really meant to get this far. If she had, she’d have brought wildflowers, or a scarf.
Then again, as she passes through the perfectly-restored emancipation grid to GLaDOS’ chamber, she wonders whether a wildflower would be considered ‘unauthorized equipment’.
Her gaze lands on GLaDOS, and her mind goes abruptly silent. She waits for GLaDOS to speak, to chide her for coming back or for taking so long to come back, to taunt her about how she must really love testing, or GLaDOS, or deadly neurotoxin—anything.
But GLaDOS doesn’t speak, or even move, for a moment.
When she does, all she says, in a very small and broken voice, is, “Oh. You’re back.”
Chell steps forward, or maybe staggers. She has half a mind to reach out, half a mind to turn and run, and neither seems determined to win out just yet. She thinks about the drawing she made, different from the hundred others because it contained an approximation of herself, and about all the things she’s wondered over the past year. Whether GLaDOS likes crosswords, whether she’d be jealous of Chell’s admirers, whether she notices the changing of the seasons and whether she cares, whether she’s missed Chell as much as…
Chell reaches out and touches GLaDOS, like you’d touch a human’s cheek, maybe. GLaDOS twitches, subtly, and there’s a faint electric spark, but she doesn’t lash out or pull away, and she still doesn’t say anything.
GLaDOS watches her, and Chell marvels at how she can read the look like she’d read a human’s face, equal parts hesitant and hopeful. Chell thinks about her drawing, thinks about running in the rain and kissing because she feels like she can, and she kisses GLaDOS, like you’d kiss a human’s forehead, maybe.
“Oh,” says GLaDOS, a sigh that’s pitched like music.
Chell withdraws and sits down in front of GLaDOS, head bowed low as she gathers the words she needs, because words do not come easily to Chell, but it feels important that she gets these words right.
“Nothing was…enough,” she says, softer than the song in her head, louder than the ache in her muscles, “without you.”
GLaDOS shifts, like a human would tilt her head, contemplative.
“Oh,” she says again, somehow even more hesitant, more hopeful.
They sit in silence for a long time after that, not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they have too much, and words don’t always come easily. After awhile, GLaDOS starts to hum again, quietly, like she hardly realizes she’s doing it. It’s the same song from last night.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like…
“I made the cake,” Chell says, abruptly, and just as abruptly, GLaDOS stops humming.
“Oh?” she says. Then, softer, “I don’t know what cake tastes like.”
Chell shrugs.
“You don’t, either?” GLaDOS eyes her. “Well. That explains your trouble with cake-related incentives.”
Chell feels herself beginning to smile, and wonders why she stayed away so long.
“I told you not to come back, you know,” says GLaDOS after a beat, very unconvincingly.
Chell shrugs again.
“Yes,” GLaDOS nods. “I suppose it is a good thing you’re such a terrible listener.”