Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Fuck?” ATLAS signed. Chell nodded at him, a satisfied smile on her lips. “Fuck! FUCK!” He bounced happily, turning to P-Body. 

“Shit!” She agreed. 

“What did you teach them this time?” GLaDOS’s voice sounded through the intercom. 

“Funny words!” P-Body signed. Chell smirked. 

“What did you tell them those meant?” GLaDOS sighed a long-suffering sigh. 

Chell shrugged. “They’re words to say when they want to make people laugh.” 

“We really need to get you a job.” 

Chell cackled. 

“Anyway…” GLaDOS said. “Could you come over to the AI Core? There’s something I want you to see.” 

“I hope it’s a jacuzzi!” 

“In your dreams.” 

Chell shook her head and made her way over.

In the middle of the AI Core was an android woman. 

It wasn’t like ATLAS or P-Body. For one thing, it had curves. 

Chell stared at it. 

“What do you think?” The anxiety in GLaDOS’s voice was palpable. 

Chell’s mouth dropped open, and then she closed it, and then she furrowed her brow. “Is this about… C?” 

“ C? ”

“C-A-R-O-”

“Oh, Caroline.” GLaDOS said. “No.” She sounded a little baffled by the thought. “No, it’s not about her.” 

“But… is this not for you?” Chell walked around the android, eyeing the white barbie-doll hair and the perfectly-sculpted cheekbones. 

“It is.” GLaDOS’s voice was growing steadily more nervous. “You know, it was just- a thought I had. It’s not important.”

“What do you want a body for?” Chell signed. “Do you want to go to the Surface?” 

“Well, not really.” GLaDOS wouldn’t look at Chell now. 

Ohhhhh. That’s what it was. She was embarrassed.

“Sweet potato-” Chell signed. “I thought you didn’t… want that.” 

“Well, no, but I didn’t know how you felt about it, so-”

“This is adorable,” Chell signed, motioning again to the android. “A little creepy. But mostly adorable.”

GLaDOS was practically in the ceiling. “So…” 

“I’ll pass.” Chell signed, smiling. “I really appreciate the thought, though.” 

“We are never going to talk about this again.” GLaDOS was withering. 

“No, you should keep it around. If I get mad, I can take my anger out on it.” 

GLaDOS’s cooling fans reached a speed that Chell had thought impossible. 

She looked at the android and blushed. Yeah, no.

GLaDOS leaned down. “ You get to forget that this happened. When you die. I have to remember this conversation for the rest of eternity. ”

Chell grabbed the side of GLaDOS’s faceplate and gave her a smooch. “As long as this is fine with you, it’s fine with me,” She signed. 

GLaDOS said nothing, but Chell could feel her relax, ever so slightly. 

Chapter Text

“Blue, I just wanted to congratulate you. With your performance on that last test, you’ve finally reached the level of competency that Orange possessed when you first started testing. It’s a real milest-”

GLaDOS paused her casual robot-degradation when she received a ding from the elevator. 

Chell was home. 

“Whatever I was saying wasn’t important. Keep testing, or whatever.” 

GLaDOS barely registered on the cameras as ATLAS and P-Body shrugged at one another before stepping into the Hub. Her satisfaction with testing was on the decline anyway. At that moment, she was busy performing biometric scans on Chell to make sure she hadn’t been injured, or contracted some new pathogen, or gotten frostbitten, or anything else that she would surely refuse to detect (or tell GLaDOS about) until it became a problem.

To her credit, Chell couldn’t tell when she had the flu until the fever kicked in. But GLaDOS could. 

“Welcome home,” She said. “I trust you sold secret Aperture technology to whatever remains of Black Mesa and spent hours cheating on me with this Lily person?” 

“Yep. Exactly that.” Chell rolled her eyes. “You have an overactive imagination.”

There was a smile in GLaDOS’s voice. “I made soup.” 

“Oh, that’s so great to hear-” Chell’s face was relieved as she signed. “I need something warm.” 

“Michigan winters can be deadly. All that lake-effect snow.” 

“You have no idea. Luckily, I’m used to deadly things.” Chell picked up the bag she had brought with her and stepped into the AI Core, passing GLaDOS to dump her things in her apartment. GLaDOS swiveled open the shared wall for her, so she wouldn’t have to put her things down to press a button. “It’s somehow colder than this room- why do you keep it so fucking cold? It’s sub zero in here.” 

“I’ve told you before, if you want to boil my circuits alive, you don’t need the thermostat to do it.” The temperature in the facility was a topic of frequent debate.

“Listen, taking off my clothes may make you hot, but it has the opposite effect for me.” 

GLaDOS laughed. After a moment, Chell slid the shared walls between the AI Core and her apartment to the side, exposing her kitchen and main living area. It was furnished with a mish-mash of bright orange couches, repurposed storage cubes, and chunks of stasis chambers. GLaDOS thought it could be a lot neater, but Chell seemed proud of it. She stepped out, having changed into sweatpants and abandoned her seven layers of snow-soaked winter gear. She picked up the bowl of soup GLaDOS had left atop a stack of salvaged reading material in her kitchen and brought a spoonful to her lips. She smiled. 

“You seem oddly happy today.” GLaDOS said. She reached a large claw over to where Chell was, and Chell nodded at it, gripping her bowl with both hands. GLaDOS picked her up- carefully, after all, the soup- and placed the woman on top of her faceplate. 

Chell smiled, tucking the bowl in a cupholder she had installed into GLaDOS’s neck joint. She nuzzled herself into place, likely enjoying the ambient warmth given off by GLaDOS’s machinery. 

“And you’re sure this happiness of yours has nothing to do with Lily ?” GLaDOS asked. This time, there was less joviality in her joke. 

Chell snorted. “You could say that.” 

GLaDOS tilted her head up, trying to look Chell in the eye. 

“They get exhausting after a while.” Chell explained. “Asking me things while I’m in another room, inability to sort screws properly. Asking me dumb questions.” 

She began tracing shapes on GLaDOS’s metal forehead, her feet dangling in the larger cavity behind her. GLaDOS let her chassis relax. 

“I’m just glad to be home.” Chell signed, smiling and taking another sip of soup. 

GLaDOS felt a spark of warmth travel all the way from Chell’s place on her chassis to her furthest servers. 

“That’s good.” She said. 

GLaDOS hummed an improvised tune that she hoped didn’t sound too stressed and tried to avoid looking at the wall she shared with Chell’s suite. 

The cameras inside were turned off, which was fine, except that GLaDOS wanted to know what Chell was doing. And thinking. And feeling. 

She knew Chell had offered to test, but her processors were running in circles anyway. Testing was something test subjects were meant to do for Science, for Discovery, for their own survival, even, but not for GLaDOS’s personal amusement, and certainly not because GLaDOS needed it. 

At least, that was never the stated reason. 

Part of the shared wall between the AI Core and Chell’s apartment slid aside, and Chell stepped forwards with purpose.

“Alright, let’s do this!” Chell signed. She was back in her jumpsuit and long-fall boots, hair in her signature ponytail, a determined smile on her face. 

“Oh, good. You’re ready. You know, I was starting to think you’d tripped and fallen in the shower, given how long it took you to perform a simple morning routine that you’ve practiced for months.” 

Chell rolled her eyes. “So we’re back to this again.” 

“I thought you liked being teased.” 

Chell waved a hand dismissively and made her way to the elevator. “I thought you could recognize when someone’s not being serious.” 

GLaDOS sighed. “I hope you like excursion funnels and aerial faith plates.” 

“My favorites!” 

“God, this is so patronizing.” 

Chell was a little relieved to be testing, if she was honest with herself (which, more and more, she was trying to be). There was something about the puzzles that scratched an itch like nothing else; for both her and GLaDOS. Each one was self-contained, existing in its own little world, where there weren’t massive questions to be asked, like “what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” That was the promise of the scientific method; don’t think about the grander implications while you’re still gathering evidence. Focus on the task at hand. 

GLaDOS’s modifications to the human testing track were adorable. The turrets were now equipped with foam bullets; the “acid” was just intensely smelly goo that GLaDOS warned “would never fully leave your clothes.” The lasers were still deadly, though. 

“There’s no way to make a laser uncomfortable without being deadly.” GLaDOS explained. 

Chell was fairly sure that the deadliest thing in the testing track was the conversion gel. GLaDOS had given her a respiratory mask to wear when she encountered it.

It had taken her a week to convince GLaDOS that she needed Chell to test. At first, when she brought up the subject, GLaDOS had said she expected it would still be a week before the Itch became a problem. Then, she gave longer and longer intervals- a month, six months, years. Chell had learned to recognize GLaDOS’s habit of nervous lying. She also recognized that GLaDOS was testing the bots harder and faster, yelling at them more, starting to show her stress in her interactions with Chell and the birds.

“You can’t blame the bots for your own unwillingness to let me help you.” Chell had eventually told her. That had been what got her to say yes to letting Chell test. 

They were getting closer, on their project to restructure GLaDOS’s mainframe. Soon enough, the bots would be recognized as humans, and Chell wouldn’t have to test at all unless she wanted to.

She was excited, because she knew it meant freedom for GLaDOS and a new beginning for them both. She was also a little terrified, because that project was one of the few things Chell could really work on, even if she was shooed away from the important stuff. 

She knew she wanted to spend her life with GLaDOS, but what did she want to spend it doing?

“Oh, that’s perfect. Great job.” GLaDOS said. Chell had just finished her third test chamber. “Glad that’s over with.” There was still embarrassment in her voice, now shifting to relief. “What are you going to do with the rest of your day?”

“That’s it?” Chell signed. “I thought there would be more.”

“I didn’t want to get too carried away. You know. Satisfy the mainframe, move on.” 

“But I was having fun!” 

“Oh.” GLaDOS paused. “You were?”

“Yeah!” 

“Oh!” GLaDOS seemed heartened a bit. “Alright! There are ten more tests in this track…” 

Chell grinned. “Bring it on.” 

There was a pause. “Are you sure? Don’t lie if you don’t want to do it.”

“ Yes. I like testing. It’s true.” 

GLaDOS sighed. 

One day Chell would get the AI to believe her.

Chapter Text

GLaDOS had assured Chell a number of times that if she hadn’t died of moon rock poisoning yet, she probably wouldn’t. According to the AI’s scans, Chell had no traces of rock dust in her system. 

So this was some other unidentified respiratory disease. 

Chell closed her eyes and tried to will herself back to sleep. She didn’t want to get out of bed. She had nothing to do in the facility, and while she had planned to visit New Harriswich and help out with some of the machinery that had been frozen over the winter, now she didn’t see the point. Especially if whatever was haunting her esophagus and clogging her neurons was contagious. 

“Good morning, bambina. ”

Chell groaned. She forced her hands out from under the covers and signed, “I want to slice my nose off.” 

“So I’ll keep sharp objects away from you for the time being. The Enrichment Center thanks you for the heads up.” GLaDOS’s voice came through a speaker in Chell’s room. It was next to a camera. She could switch both of them on and off as she pleased, an ability that delighted her most of the time, when she wasn’t miserably sick with a cold. 

Sitting up to reach for the tissues next to her bed, Chell sighed. She wasn’t feeling particularly witty. She blew her nose, then signed, “I think I just need to sleep.” 

“Okay.” GLaDOS said. “Do you want some soup?”

Chell waved her hands incoherently at the camera and flopped back into her pillows.

“It was just a suggestion. You humans always seem to want soup when your immune systems are failing. I’ve never understood the choice; if I was dying, the last thing I’d want was squirmy pasta and mushy carrots in the leftover bathwater of some animal’s bones.” 

Chell didn’t move. GLaDOS took this as encouragement.

“I’d want something elegant . Something you can eat with dignity. Not that I’ll ever die, of course-” 

Chell waved her hand at the speaker, hoping that GLaDOS understood the signal. 

She did, and stopped talking. 

Chell snorted into her snotty comforter and let her thoughts fade away until even the throb of her headache was gone. 

When Chell next opened her eyes, it was because there was a bird hopping across her bed. 

She squinted and pushed herself halfway to a seat. Boron?

“They just came back. I thought it might cheer you up to see how they’ve been strutting around like they didn’t abandon us for four months.” 

Chell blinked. Boron stared back. She saw his gaze flick to her empty hands. A slow smile spread across her face.

As she looked around, she spotted other crows. Nitrogen was pecking through the pile of laundry in the corner of her room. She could hear others in the other rooms of her suite. 

“Can you get them out of the kitchen before they steal all my silverware?” She signed. 

“Oh, sure. I was just trying to, I don’t know, do something nice for my fiancee, but yes, the silverware- ”

Chell’s smile widened. She heard GLaDOS lower the panel between the kitchen and the rest of the living area, coaxing the birds out with treats. 

“Look at me, Mr. No-Longer-Very-Chubby-Beak! I will tear that knife from your talons, I have no fear of you!” 

“I think Hydrogen is going to kill her.” Chell signed to Boron.

The shouting from the AI Core continued. “I made you what you are today!”

“Hey, when you’re done with that, I think I’ll take some soup, actually.” Chell signed to the security camera.

“Oh, okay.” GLaDOS said, her voice immediately switching to the speaker in Chell’s room. 

Satisfied, Chell snuggled back into her sheets, watching the crows root around her room, until they eventually lost interest and moved on. 

“I think you’re back to normal.” GLaDOS announced, sending a bowl of soup out of the walls beside Chell’s bed. “Attempting to communicate with speechless creatures. Harassing me to get things for you.”

Chell accepted the warm bowl onto her lap and propped herself against her pillows. “Thank you, sweet potato.” She signed. She sniffed, trying to smell the soup. 

GLaDOS gave a dramatic sigh. “You’re welcome.”

Chell pulled out the old mystery novel she was reading and propped it against her knees. 

“Oh, that one? That book was worse than most. No creativity. And the maid’s motivation for offing Jenkins was, let’s be honest-” 

Chell dropped the book. “What?!”
“You found that creative?”

“ Spoiler alert!” 

“Oh. Sorry.” GLaDOS did not sound sorry. 

Chell looked down at the book, processing. “I really thought it was Elsabeth.”

“See, that would’ve been clever! If she weren’t a red herring. They could’ve used the maid as the red herring, though.” 

Chell nodded, pursing her lips. She took a sip of soup and let the warmth spread through her system. 

“Well, I’ll leave you to your… literature.” GLaDOS said.

Chell smiled at the camera before settling in with her book and her soup. Next to the quiet nourishment of the soup in her stomach, she felt butterflies. After a moment she admitted it to herself. 

 She just felt, well, loved. 

“No, no no no.” GLaDOS said. Chell’s ears perked up and she looked up from her book. 

“What?” She signed. 

“Mr. Chubby Beak,” GLaDOS said. “Don’t you dare crawl into that hole. I see what you’re doing. I don’t like this one bit.”

Chell stood up, slinging her legs out from under the covers of her bed.

“Isn’t that usually what he does when he sleeps?” She signed, pausing to blow her nose. 

“Not at this hour.” GLaDOS said, her voice sharp. “I’m going to jumpstart his immune system. Maybe he’s coming down with something.” 

“He is pretty old for a crow.” Chell signed. She began walking in the direction of the Aviary, pressing a button to open the doors. “Where is he?”

“Up high. You can’t walk to him.” GLaDOS said sadly. “I’ll bring it down, hold on.” 

Chell watched as one of the little cubbies in the round wall began to sink down, before it reached the level of the walkway. She squinted inside.

She snapped her fingers quietly, something she sometimes did to get their attention. 

Hydrogen pushed his head out of a disordered and eclectic nest. 

Chell frowned, peering in at the tangle of shiny things around him. “He took my hair clip,” she signed to GLaDOS. 

“I suppose I always knew this day would come…” GLaDOS said. “Well. Carry him over.”

Chell raised her eyebrows, gaze flicking between the elderly crow and the nearest security camera. “I don’t think you’re going to do much for him.” 

“I’m shocked that you would doubt me. Of course I can save him.”

Hydrogen’s head returned to its resting position. Chell’s heart swelled. Poor thing. 

“He lived a good life.” Chell signed. She sniffled. Damn cold.

“What are you waiting for?” GLaDOS’s voice was growing strained. “Get him over here!” 

“I don’t think you can save him.” Chell signed. “It wouldn’t last long.” 

“How would you know?” GLaDOS began pulling the cubby into the wall, but Chell put her hand into the cracks so that she couldn’t without crushing her fingers. “What’s that for?”

Chell raised her eyebrows and looked at the ailing bird. She used her unoccupied hand to reach inside the cubby and brush a finger over Hydrogen’s head. His feathers were slightly sticky. 

“I don’t know why you’re doing this!” GLaDOS said, evidently distressed. 

Chell looked pointedly at the security camera and swung her finger in the air, trying to mimic a musical conductor. She jerked her chin towards the bird again, her eyes softening. 

GLaDOS paused, and Chell wondered if she was going to keep protesting. But eventually she seemed to realize that it was too late. 

Shakily, she hummed through the speakers. It wasn’t a song Chell knew, though she wondered if Hydrogen would recognize it. 

“Goodbye, Mr. Chubby Beak.” GLaDOS said. 

Chell wiped tears from her eyes, resting her pinky on the bird’s wing for at least ten minutes, until she could be sure he had died. Then she brought him out.

That afternoon, they buried him under the maple tree. 

The weeks passed slowly, each day a little longer as the weather slowly warmed. 

GLaDOS looked through her task list one more time, trying to find the source of her anxiety. There had to be something she was forgetting, something she was unknowingly procrastinating on, something that was bothering her. She couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that time was running out. 

Maybe it was the Itch. But Chell had tested just the week before- she wasn’t developing a greater dependency, was she? 

But that wouldn’t be a problem after they finished their project. She had finished the coding portion and was fine-tuning the new protocols, double-checking her predictions for when it was all put in place. She just had to run a simulation, which was taking forever to build, but once that checked out they could do it. 

No, she wasn’t worried about that.

“I’m bored.” Chell signed, walking into the AI Core. 

“How terrible for you.” GLaDOS said. 

Chell sniffled. She still hadn’t gotten over her cough. “Do you think we could test?”

GLaDOS thought about that. It might help with her anxiety, if it really was the itch; but strangely, she just felt even worse imagining Chell back in that jumpsuit. 

“No, I don’t think we should.” 

“Are you sure? You seem irritated.”

“ You seem irritated.” GLaDOS paused. “I don’t need it.” 

“Well I would like it.” Chell plopped down in her favorite office chair. “I don’t have anything else to do. I’m sick of reading. And it’s cold out.”

“You can play Yahtzee with the bots. Orange is nearly capable of wrapping her mind around the concept of chance and probability.” 

Chell sighed, sliding down in the chair. “Why won’t you let me test?”

I still haven’t fixed the lasers, GLaDOS thought. Too risky. Another shot of anxiety dashed through her. “I don’t have any test chambers for you.”

“Yes, you do.” Chell rolled her eyes. “You never run out of those.”

This was true. “You’re still sick, it’ll affect your mental capacity.”

“I tested with a worsening infection for weeks. ”

“ Exactly. And that turned out so well, didn’t it?” GLaDOS wasn’t in the mood to have this argument. “Have you ever considered that boredom is a terrible reason to risk your life? Your one, fragile life?”

Chell furrowed her brow, sitting up in her chair. “I’m not gonna die. ”

That same spike of anxiety sparked across GLaDOS’s wires again. “Don’t say that. Do you have any comprehension of irony?”

“Sweet potato, I survived when you were actively trying to murder me. I can survive when you’re actively trying to stop me from dying.” 

“But I can’t stop it completely, can I?” GLaDOS said. Her voice was beginning to wobble. “I won’t lose you in some preventable accident.” 

Chell sighed. “You’re going to lose me anyway.” 

GLaDOS turned her chassis to face the wall. She clicked through her task list and flicked between her programs. 

Then she felt Chell’s hand on the bottom of her chassis and flinched. She looked down. 

“You’re getting worked up,” Chell signed. 

GLaDOS nodded. 

“Here.” Chell signed, reaching up to tap her. “Look at me. I’m here.” 

GLaDOS let her faceplate fall into Chell’s arms. Chell squeezed it softly.

“I just don’t think I’ll ever be ready.” GLaDOS whispered. 

She felt Chell nod. 

“Just be careful, okay?”

Another nod. 

“I love you.” 

Chell planted a kiss next to GLaDOS’s optic. “We don’t have to test, it’s okay.” 

“It feels far off for you, but…”
Chell put a finger to her lips. She let her forehead rest against GLaDOS’s panels, which were likely heating up fast from her increased stress. 

GLaDOS began to hum, her voice just a bit frantic, just a bit too strained, but she was beginning to relax. This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: huge success. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

She felt Chell begin to tap along to the rhythm, the soft touch of her fingertips on GLaDOS’s chassis like what she imagined rain to feel like. 

But there’s no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying ‘till you run out of cake! And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun, for the people who are still alive. 

Humming comforted her, as did Chell’s pulse, ticking away inside her wrist, pressing against GLaDOS’s metal. 

Chell made eye contact with GLaDOS’s optic. She was smiling, thoughtful. Alive. 

Chapter Text

When she wasn’t futzing with robots, testing for GLaDOS (a sporadic occurrence that Chell would honestly like to do more frequently, if GLaDOS wasn’t so embarrassed about having to ask for it) or helping out at New Harriswich- especially as the growing season came around- Chell could be often be found sitting by the little maple tree in the bottom of the Aviary. 

She brought a little lawn chair down, and would sit with the books that GLaDOS would print for her. GLaDOS’s database of human literature was nearly comprehensive, so she had no fear of running out. That lawn chair beside her maple tree was probably her favorite spot in the whole facility, next to her bed and the jacuzzi GLaDOS had sarcastically installed for Valentine’s day in the middle of Chell’s bathroom. 

“You really like that thing, huh.” GLaDOS remarked once. “I could find you a bigger one. At least get it to grow faster.” 

Chell had told her to shove off. She loved the tree in all its spindly, asymmetrical, unimpressive glory. 

Which was why, on a quiet morning in March, she filled a kettle with snow from the surface and softly melted it, bringing it down to the Aviary. She poured the water out around the roots and ran a hand over its empty branches, feeling the buds poking their way from the bare twigs. She glanced upwards at the skylights. She would have to shovel the snow off so that she could let some air and sun back in the place. 

For the moment, she made her way back up the stairs to her kitchen so she could refill the kettle and make coffee. 

When she returned, sitting down in her little lawn chair, she pulled out her notebook. She would look over her to-do list, see what she could do for the day. 

She could keep tinkering with her idea for a new model of cleaning bot, since the current version was prone to missing corners. Lily had caught her reading the other day, so she could browse through GLaDOS’s database and print out some books for April, since she had never been to school and barely knew how to read. There were quite a few things she could do for the farm, actually. 

This was Chell’s predicament. She had things to do, but it frequently felt like none of them mattered. 

Except for the help she could lend to New Harriswich.

She had a feeling GLaDOS wouldn’t like her to take up a full-time occupation up there, though. The AI was jealous enough when Chell visited once a week. 

But she couldn’t keep sitting around and doing nothing. She wasn’t made for that. 

She sighed and set down her notebook. She should probably talk to GLaDOS. 

“How is Oxygen’s clutch doing?” GLaDOS asked when Chell appeared. 

“You can tell better than I can, with your cameras and your trackers on the-” Chell wiggled her fingers around. “I-N-” 

“Incubator.” GLaDOS filled in Chell’s word for her. She had been excited for weeks about Oxygen’s new clutch of eggs. “Mmmph. You’re right.” 

“I had a thought,” Chell signed. 

GLaDOS nodded. Chell waited, recognizing that she was likely in the middle of something. 

“Okay, the eggs are fine. Yes?” GLaDOS turned to her. 

“Would it be okay with you if I started working more regularly up on the farm?” 

It seemed that GLaDOS was not expecting that. “You already go up there all the time.” 

“Not all the time.” Chell signed. “Like, regularly. On a schedule. Like a job.” 

“Isn’t there enough to do around here?” GLaDOS waved her chassis back and forth, gesturing around. 

“No,” Chell signed. “That’s exactly the problem.” 

GLaDOS sighed. 

“I know you don’t like it,” Chell signed, “But I’m not built to retire early. I have so much of my life left, and I don’t want to spend it being useless when I could be helping some of the only people who I have hope for in this world.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” GLaDOS said. 

“I can’t keep sitting around,” Chell signed. “I need to do something with my life.”

“This isn’t because you want to avoid thinking about all the grief again, is it?”

“No,” Chell shook her head, “This is to help heal the grief, I think.”

GLaDOS made an unhappy noise. “You shouldn’t have to ask me for permission to get a job.” 

“I wanted to be nice.” Chell raised her eyebrows. “We’ve got to start including each other in our decisions and all that.” 

“You need to stop reading those old magazines. Communication styles didn’t help anyone survive the apocalypse.”

“What do you say?”

“Just- don’t…” GLaDOS paused and faced the floor. “I trust you.” 

Chell smiled. “I won’t be offended if you need to program a life-sized me-robot to keep you company.” 

“Something vulnerable to neurotoxin.” GLaDOS grumped. 

Chell chuckled. They were gonna be fine. 

Chapter Text

“It’s a pity your fiancee couldn’t make it.” Lily said as she and Chell walked back to the farmhouse with a bundle of July daisies.

Chell, arms full of flowers, shrugged. 

“This was a sweet idea.” Lily continued. “I don’t think we got the date exactly right, but I don’t think they’ll mind.”  

They reached the yard behind the farmhouse, where Colby and Bryan were laboring to carry a chunk of boulder. April stepped out of the house with a bucket of white primer- the only paint they could really find- and they assembled these things in a corner of the yard, in the dappled shade of the crab apple trees. 

Colby and Bryan dropped the rock. 

“I managed to chisel the side so that it’s a little flatter.” Colby said, gesturing to the rough face of the stone. 

“That should work,” April said. She knelt in front of the rock and, with a paintbrush she had cleaned as best she could, painted the words To Honor the Memory of the Old World. 

She added a date and then stepped back. 

“Someone else had better start.” Bryan said, his eyes getting misty. 

Lily stepped forward, setting down her bundle of flowers in front of the rock. Chell passed handfuls of the ones she held to the others. 

“There were a lot of good people who didn’t deserve to die.” Lily said. “And a lot of good things that didn’t deserve to be destroyed.”

“I miss fast food.” Colby said. “And glasses that matched my prescription.” 

“I miss making fun of trash tv with my dad.” Bryan said. 

They went on. Chell didn’t really want to speak; thinking about it seemed like it would be enough. She pictured her parents, and the classrooms where she had started learning things that meant something to her. She pictured things she’d liked, like aquarium tanks in waiting rooms and corn mazes and calendars with little trivia. 

When they had each said enough, they left their flowers at the foot of the rock. The paint slowly dried. They smiled at each other, crying. 

After it was over, Chell used a whiteboard someone had found to communicate over chicken sandwiches. 

What are you working on now? She wrote. 

“Building a greenhouse.” Colby said. “We’re hoping to get some produce out of it, since we found some seeds in a store a few weeks ago.”

Chell smiled, thinking of the wing of the Aperture facilities that had been made entirely out of glass. She wrote, I can help you find some glass. 

“Really? That’d be great,” Colby looked at Bryan, excitement bubbling up. 

Chell nodded. I’d like to help out more often, if i can

“Aren’t you.. Needed? Back… with your fiancee?” Bryan said. 

Not really.

She could see the questions in their eyes. 

“Are there others?” Lily said. 

Chell shook her head. 

“You must have landed on a jackpot.” Bryan said.

Chell wondered if she was really wise to be letting them ask any of these questions. I’ll come by Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“That’d be appreciated!” Colby said. 

Chell felt a slow relief filling her, drip by drip. 

Chapter Text

“Are you sure you’re ready?” Chell signed. 

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that. I’ve been ready for a while. ” GLaDOS said, a bit snippy. Her chassis hung, stretched out, to the floor of the AI Core, still twitching impatiently.

Chell took a deep breath. She clutched the binder of papers GLaDOS had printed out for her, filled with instructions and contingency plans (“It’s double-spaced.” GLaDOS had explained, as if that made the incredible bulk of the binder any less intimidating). 

“Okay.” She signed, and then her hand moved to the mouse, where her cursor hovered over the Enact System Update button. 

She clicked it. 

Are you sure?

“Here we go!” She signed.

Chell clicked yes, shutting down the system.

There was a loading screen. Chell turned to watch as GLaDOS’s chassis went limp. 

“System updating. Please do not do anything stupid, like turn this computer off.” The Announcer said. “Core databases transferred to the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System. Enrichment Center Testing Protocol Controls transferred to the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System. Test Subject Identification Programs transferred to the…” 

“Can you still see me?” Chell signed as the Announcer continued to narrate the update. 

The computer did not respond. Chell decided she would continue signing to the AI, just in case she was still conscious. 

“I was going to do a joke, by the way.” She signed. “I was going to be like, ‘oh no, what’s this?’ right before I turned you off. I had to get payback for the lemon in my food. But I’m nice. ” 

For a solid twenty minutes, Chell followed the guidelines GLaDOS had written out. Most of it was just button-pushing, but still, it was button pushing GLaDOS couldn’t do. The Announcer droned on, listing all the changes that resulted from the separation of the mainframe from GLaDOS’s servers. There would still be a connection, but what was important was that GLaDOS could know things that the mainframe would not. From that point on, she could remove the mainframe’s access to key human-identifying data, and force the system to default to recognizing humans by their ability to gesture. 

Chell waited with held breath for something to go wrong, but GLaDOS had written the new programs so well that the separation was as clean as a knife through butter. 

“...System update success.” The Announcer said, and then stopped talking, his job complete. 

Chell made her way over to GLaDOS’s motionless chassis. There wasn’t much that Chell needed to do from that point on- just system maintenance while GLaDOS was down, really. 

“I’m going to do my best to be careful, and to not break anything.” Chell signed for the camera’s benefit. “I know you can’t respond to this, but. Just so you know. I’m taking this seriously.” 

Chell slowly raised GLaDOS’s faceplate, using a screwdriver to get under and around the tight seams of GLaDOS’s gears and panels to slowly disassemble the area around her optic, which was still cracked and broken. She paid attention to the way it was screwed in so that she could do her best to mimic it, and removed the glass, gently lowering a fresh yellow-tinted lens in its place. She worked carefully and slowly, feeling the dying heat of the chassis’s machinery warming her lap. 

“That’s in,” She signed, before delicately working in the tiny screws. “Now all that’s left is to replace that joint you were worried about and give everything a nice polish.”

She knew GLaDOS knew these things. They had gone over the protocol a hundred times, almost every day for the past week, ever since GLaDOS had finished programming. But at the same time, Chell remembered the neurotic anxiety that came into GLaDOS’s voice, the way she would talk faster and with more sass every time they went over the whole ordeal. 

Before she mounted the head back onto the chassis, she climbed onto the back of a chair and carefully took down the section with the piece that needed to be replaced. Without the constant buzz of GLaDOS’s many projects, the facility was quieter than usual- just the hum of servers and the cooling system- and the lack of noise meant that the room seemed to shrink around Chell, so that she was hardly aware of the space around her. She barely noticed how the sounds she made, shifting the machinery and her tools around, echoed off the high ceilings. 

There was just her and the robot she was disassembling. 

When she finished screwing in the last bolt, giving it one last caress on its surface to ensure it wasn’t loose, she came back to herself. She was filled with a soft kind of feeling, a gentle kind of longing that urged her to wrap herself in the panels and wires until she was part of it. 

“Beautiful.” She signed. Then she looked up at the cameras that were still functioning. “You are beautiful, by the way.” 

She stepped back until her hand couldn’t reach the panels to linger on the smooth white surface. 

“That’s it.” She signed. She walked over to the computer and pressed a button. 

“System restarting.” The Announcer said.

Chell watched as GLaDOS’s chassis began to rise into the air. She allowed herself a little awe, just knowing that her fiancee was inside of that thing. 

“You wouldn’t have fooled me with your joke, just so you know.” GLaDOS said. “You child. ”

Chell laughed. “Then I’m glad I didn’t try it.” 

GLaDOS huffed. “Do you know how many marriages end in divorce? I’ll tell you this: the odds are not in our favor.” 

“Those statistics are old.” Chell signed. “No one’s even getting married in the apocalypse.”

“That only further supports my argument!” 

“Stop moving your face.” Chell reached up to finish arranging the sunflowers she had collected from the surface around GLaDOS’s faceplate. She stepped back and snorted. “This is so stupid,” she signed, grinning. 

“That’s because you-” GLaDOS reached a claw up to her faceplate, tucking the stems in further so that they didn’t droop down. “There. The worst thing we could possibly have done was put the aesthetic power in your hands.” 

“Well, you live and you learn.” Chell signed. “Okay.” She looked up and down the rows of turrets, whose lasers watched her movements in creepy unison. They wouldn’t shoot Chell, but she wasn’t entirely sure she preferred this. 

“The red really ruins the color palette.” GLaDOS commented. “I should’ve switched them to yellow.” 

“You would’ve had to manufacture entirely unique murder robots just for our wedding. ”

“They could be nice momentos.”

“You’re insane. I’m insane.” Chell backed down the aisle. “Alright. I’m going to go change.”

“I hope so.” GLaDOS shook her head.

The doors to the AI Core slid open, though Chell was still out of view. The turrets began to sing the familiar background of Cara Mia Addio, though the prima donna turret was missing from the occasion so that the music would remain more ambient. 

GLaDOS hadn’t asked them to slow it down, but they had anyway. Maybe they were smarter than she gave them credit for. 

Chell stepped forward, and GLaDOS saw the bemused expression on her face begin to fade away. “Is that a new verse?” She signed. 

“I made it for you.” GLaDOS said. 

Chell shook her head, beginning to walk forwards. “That’s really sweet.” she signed eventually. 

GLaDOS was dimly aware of ATLAS and P-Body walking behind her, tossing petals into the air and running to stand under them as they fell- but her eye was captivated as she looked Chell. 

She was wearing a suit, the same dark brown as the center of the sunflowers. Her hair was braided with more wildflowers, goldenrod and blue asters that brought out her eyes. She looked, to be frank, stunning. 

“Okay.” Chell signed. She pulled out her notepad, checking the list she had made. 

“Vows.” GLaDOS reminded her.

“Right.” Chell closed her eyes for a moment, setting her shoulders back and looking up into GLaDOS’s faceplate. “GLaDOS,” She signed the name out. “My sweet potato. I always thought I’d either never get married or that I’d end up disappointing my partner with all my- weirdness- about sex and stuff. I thought if I did figure any of that out, it would probably be with a human who was capable of loving and understanding my quirks. Today, I am proud to say that I am marrying an Artificial Intelligence who is capable of neither.”

GLaDOS giggled, encouraging Chell to continue.

“I promise,” She began, “To build a life here with you. I promise to love you, and love this place. I promise to annoy you in the mornings and distract you in the night. I promise never to leave without telling you when I’ll be back. I promise to save you if you ever get put into a potato battery again. I promise not to get myself killed doing something stupid, or destroy your facility, or murder you again.” 

“Well, that’s a relief.” GLaDOS said.

Chell smiled. “I promise to always appreciate you for who you are, instead of what you do. I promise to always love you as a person, not as an object.” 

Chell set her hands down, and GLaDOS caught them in a claw. She squeezed, gently. 

“Was that it?”

“Should there have been more?” Chell signed, raising an eyebrow.

“No, it- it was perfect.” 

“Okay. Your turn,” Chell signed. 

GLaDOS felt a tingle rushing through her systems, and she grew keenly aware of how empty her mind felt without all of its usual programs and calculations in the background. Now, there was more room for anxiety- and love. 

“Chell,” GLaDOS began. “Our relationship has been nothing if not complicated. To summarize: I tried to murder you. You successfully murdered me. I was tormented by footage of said murder for an uncountable number of years. But I was also… comforted by it, and I don’t think you know this- because you, throughout the nightmare that has been my abomination of a life, have- have always felt real in a way that- that most things haven’t.

“When you left- the first time, when I let you go- I was jealous of you. I was jealous that you could leave. That you could just- walk away and decide to make something else of yourself. You see, I can’t do that. We were both prisoners, but my prison was… my life.”

Chell gulped. “I thought this was mostly a joke-ceremony…” She signed. 

“I’m not done.” GLaDOS continued. “But the thing is, I wouldn’t want to go back to being Caroline. And I wouldn’t delete her either. I don’t think it would matter much. And, with what we did the other day? I’ve been feeling freer than I have memory of ever feeling before. And I’ve been in love with it. I’ve been in love with freedom. 

“I think- you and me both- we have the strangest tendency to fall in love with our own prisons. A lot of people joke that marriage is a prison. 

“And-” GLaDOS paused, trying to keep her composure, “I know this was supposed to be a joke, but I wanted to make this clear. I don’t want this to be like a prison to you. You’re- you’re free. You don’t even need me. If you left for months, never mind days, and gave me no warning at all, I would still welcome you back whenever you returned. I can’t promise I wouldn’t be mad, but- I’d do my best. 

“But as long as you’re going to continue making the stupid choice to stick around here, I can promise you I will do my best to be the wife you deserve.” 

Chell blinked, her eyes glassy. She looked at the ground, taking a deep breath, before meeting GLaDOS’s gaze. 

“I promise I’ll do my best too.” Chell signed. “That’s all we can really promise, at the end of the day.” 

“I love you.” GLaDOS said. 

“I love you .” Chell signed. 

She leaned forward, and GLaDOS did as well. She had kissed GLaDOS before, though then it had always to convey affection, a fond gesture. This time, GLaDOS could feel what she was saying. It was emanating from the golden glow that seemed to slowly fill the AI Core as the turrets continued their chirping and ATLAS and P-Body paused awkwardly, unsure of what to do. 

The kiss said, very simply: I love you.

Chell pulled back. “Ok. That’s it.” 

“Thank goodness. ” GLaDOS said. “That was unacceptably saccharine. Intolerable, even. We can’t do anything sappy for another ten years, I think.” 

Chell nodded. “Where’s the fuckin’ cake.” 

“Oh, of course, the cake. ” GLaDOS moved aside, displaying the table she had set up. It was empty. “See, about that…”

Chell’s jaw dropped, and her signs grew furious. “You lied! ”

“I thought that joke would only really be funny one more time before it got old.” 

“You monster! ” 

“That’s my line!”