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Chell doesn't miss Aperture.
She doesn't miss the endless sea of metal and glass and certain death. Even as the roots and the ivy coiled and snaked though the cracks, filling the facility with life that it was never meant to house. To her, Aperture was and always has been nothing but a slaughterhouse for both the living and the never-lived.
She doesn't long for the mechanical lilt of the turrets, both their honey-laced songs and the ricochet of their bullets against the walls and her flesh still echoing through her mind to fill the silence she hasn't grown accustomed to yet. The ominous whir of their servos and the burning red gaze of their homing mechanisms did nothing but fill her chest with dread. Even now when she walks though the field of wheat with nothing but the chirp of crickets and the pale moonlight to fill her senses and her chest feeling emptier that it has in who knows how long. Because in the emptiness, she finds that her lungs are clear enough that she can breathe the air. Real air.
She doesn't miss the steady thrum of the portal gun in her hands, the device that was her anchor and lifeboat in the endless sea of metal and glass and certain death. The sheer power to rip though the fabric of time and space had been terrifying at first, but now that power is but a distant memory. The crackle of dark matter at her fingertips is no match for the slide of the cool morning dew as her fingers dance over the grass. Even when she finds her legs weary from traversing the fallen civilization and her mind maps out routes she would never be able to take.
And Chell certainly doesn't miss Her.
Perhaps if things had been different, she could have saved Her. If she had tried harder to retain Her humanity, tried harder to tell Her that She didn't need to suffer anymore, tried harder to tell her anything. But deep inside, they both knew that it could never happen. She might have once been human, but everything that had made her human had been ripped out of her soul just as her soul was ripped out from her body. Caroline might have belonged in the surface, belonged with the chirping crickets and the boundless wheat and the morning dew.
But Caroline is dead.
And GLaDOS belongs in Aperture. A kraken in the endless sea of metal and glass and certain death.
Just the same, the tenacious test subject belonged in Aperture. The only one to make it to shore after taking on its depths. But the tenacious test subject is dead. And Chell belongs in the surface with the chirping crickets and the boundless wheat and the morning dew.
She just needs to realize it for herself.