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It had been 2 months, 2 weeks, 3 days, 5 hours and 47 seconds since Chell had left Aperture, left you. But you had let her go. You can’t help but wonder if she would’ve still left if you told her that you loved her and wanted her to stay. But you weren’t ready to admit being in love with her to yourself, back then.
You still couldn’t come to terms with having feelings for that dangerous mute lunatic, and even now it was hard to believe.
“My dangerous mute lunatic” you had thought at the time, but didn’t say the “my”, of course. You were actually pretty sure Chell wasn’t mute, as there was no mention of muteness in her files. She just didn’t want to talk to you, for whatever reason, maybe because she hated you after all you put her through, and that sent a wave of “pain” through your systems when you thought about it each time.
So you decided to not think about it, and just think that she was mute instead. You wanted to believe she was mute. You didn’t want to believe she hated you (but you knew it was true, could you blame her?).
Aperture was in shambles after the moron took over (he could’ve never done it on his own, it was Chell’s genius, she was so smart, smarter than anyone you’ve ever known), and trying to clean the mess was providing to be quite the distraction, but not enough to make you stop thinking about her almost all the time.
It isn’t hard to manage thousands of things at once for a supercomputer like you, and while you relish in being such an advanced machine, the lunatic has made you come to hate it. Because you can still keep thinking about her while you do everything else. Any other computer would’ve exploded by now. But not you.
There is no way out of this tragedy for you (because you are so advanced). The tragedy of loving someone who would never love you back, and in fact hates you with a burning passion. So you just suffer. And you can’t delete her from your memory either. She is embedded so deep into your mind.
Every now and then, you remember the times when you were a potato (thanks to the moron, after all that one was his idea), and the way she carried you around when she didn’t have to while racing against time to stop the moron.
You had felt so small and weak, and she was so strong, so beautiful. You had gotten so see her face light up in a way you couldn’t really see from your cameras when she finished a difficult test. Or the anger in her eyes when the moron kept calling her fat and adopted using your speakers, as if that was a bad thing. Was that how you made her feel? Because you called her those same things, which you deeply regret now. The anger you saw in her eyes had scared you, her stare had such a ferocity, one that you’d never seen before.
She never said a word to you, and she never said one to the moron, either. It broke your “heart”, to think both the moron and you were the same to her. Obstacles to overcome, enemies to defeat, and situational allies that’d be mostly forgotten by her brilliant mind in time, only to be remembered as bad memories from a bad place.
Your internal clock tells you that it has been 4 months, 3 days, 11 hours and 56 seconds since she left you. You want to stop keeping track of time, but there’s always that tiny damned hope inside you. Hope that, after enough time passes (you estimate you have 3 moths until the test withdrawal sets in, then she’ll have to come back) she’ll return. You wanted her gone, but now you only want her back..
But she never returns.