#now if we could only free ourselves from the blue eyed industrial complex* [*I say as my brown eyes ass stares deep into the eyes of cas

[sunforgrace]

I appreciate we’ve since freed ourselves from the shackles of One Blonde One Brunette since we’ve left the 2010’s behind. two brunettes should be able to kiss sloppy

[sweet-christabel]

A Trusted Friend In Science

FF.net: (x) AO3: (x)

Chapter Thirty-Four - 2035. Ship Overboard.

If Chell, for whatever reason, had ever been asked to draw a mad professor, she suspected that she’d have drawn someone like Dr. Kleiner. His pale complexion almost matched his lab coat, his eyes looked permanently wide beneath his square-lensed glasses, and his few remaining wisps of white hair stood out like fluff on the back of his otherwise-bald head.

Of course, it was possible that his eyes looked wide not just due to the glasses, but in surprise at seeing Gordon Freeman on his doorstep. There was a nervous touch of guilt in his manner, and he couldn’t seem to help shooting a quick look at the large building nearby.

Gordon and Alyx greeted him warmly, however, convincingly sounding like they had dropped in on the way to somewhere else. They quickly introduced Chell before spending more time presenting Doug. Alyx drifted back to stand beside Chell as Gordon and Doug skilfully engaged Kleiner in what Chell had secretly named ‘Science Speak’. Kleiner lost some of his edginess as Gordon continued to play the part of friend-catching-up, soon chatting away with some of the boundless enthusiasm that Angela had mentioned. He was eccentric, to be sure, but seemed harmless otherwise.

Alyx and Chell listened silently for several minutes, awaiting the time that they would choose to plead a smoking habit and disappear outside. Kleiner, however, made it easy for them to slip away, dragging Gordon and Doug down to the basement to see his blueprints for some experiment. Alyx laughingly told them to go ahead, stating that she and Chell had an important discussion about shoes to get back to. Gordon couldn’t quite hide his smirk at that.

As soon as the three scientists had vanished down the stairs, Chell and Alyx were out the front door. Kleiner’s simple, wooden-slatted house sat in the shadow of an ugly building resembling an aircraft hangar. With no other buildings in sight and a healthy dose of logic on their side, the two knew it was where the ship was being housed. This did not stop Wheatley helpfully pointing it out, however.

Chell was wearing him like a backpack, a couple of ropes tied to his handles. She was pleasantly surprised that he’d listened to her and hadn’t drawn attention to himself while they were talking to Kleiner, but she supposed that he had the threat of GLaDOS looming over him.

The five of them had come up with the plan on the way, and they all knew their parts. Gordon and Doug would keep Kleiner out of the way while Chell and Alyx explored the hangar. Alyx would ensure that the place was free of scientists so that Chell could follow instructions from GLaDOS via Wheatley to send the ship on one final journey. It was a simple plan as plans went, but there was one huge flaw that Chell was convinced no one else had noticed. She let Alyx jog off to do her part without mentioning it, following the signs to the bridge.

The ship rested at a skewed angle in a clumsy-looking dry dock. It had obviously been hauled upright by Kleiner’s workers in order to build the structures around it. A handful of workbenches formed a makeshift lab alongside the ship, lit by single lightbulbs that swayed on cables from the curved ceiling. Everything about the hangar told the story of its hasty construction. Although it looked able to house a generous handful of workers, the place was mercifully empty. Still, Alyx was adamant about making sure, and Chell wholeheartedly agreed. They entered the ship via the rickety-looking wooden ramp, then parted ways.

The ship bore the wear and tear expected of the years it had spent half buried in ice in the Arctic. Chell had learned that it had been found by a friend of Alyx’s father’s, who had managed to send them enough information to locate it before she had been discovered and attacked by the Combine. Although the ship was largely intact, the exterior hull was badly weathered. The Aperture logo had partially flaked off, but not enough to prevent Chell’s stomach doing a little flip of remembered anxiety when she saw it.

Inside, the industrial-looking corridors were dark and narrow, all indistinguishable from each other apart from the helpful signs on the walls. Once she had found the bridge, Chell retraced her path to the exit several times, trying to ingrain it in her memory. She was acutely aware when her movements passed beyond rehearsal and into the realm of delaying tactics, so she squared her shoulders and forced herself to enter the bridge. It was clearly where Kleiner spent most of his time. The room was largely free of dust and clutter, and there was a mixture of new and old technology where he’d tried to expand on the original workings. Chell eyed the bundles of trailing wires warily, hoping that he hadn’t messed things up too much for their plan to work.

There was a dated-looking console that dominated the room, where the navigational controls would have been on a regular ship. She set Wheatley down on the top of it, carefully so that they didn’t accidentally press any buttons. His optic lit the dimness a bright blue, gazing at her with open expectation.

“Have you connected with GLaDOS yet?” she asked him.

“No,” he replied at once. “Won’t take a moment.”

“Wait.” She shot out a hand, resting her fingertips on the top of his casing. “Do…do you trust her?”

Wheatley blinked at her, sparking gently and making her withdraw her hand. “Um…that’s a bit of an odd question, if I’m honest.”

“I mean…” She huffed, thinking. “Has it occurred to you that we’re potentially handing ourselves to her on a plate?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she hates you,” Chell stated bluntly. “I’ve only got her word that she kind of considers me an ally now, and we didn’t exactly part on good terms. I mean, she expressly ordered me not to come back. Now…we need her to help us destroy this thing, but we’re following her plan.”

Wheatley cottoned on to what she was saying surprisingly quickly. “You mean she could tell you to press any sequence of buttons and you wouldn’t know what you were pressing?”

“Exactly. She says she’ll tell me how to program in a time delay, but…if she doesn’t, how am I going to know? Do you see what I mean? We need to trust her, but I still don’t know if we can.”

Wheatley’s optic narrowed suspiciously. “Why are you telling me this? You’re only going to follow it up with ‘we don’t have a choice’.” His voice turned falsely high in a poor imitation of hers. “If you’re asking me whether I wanna stay here and potentially die, then I’m sure it’s going to come as a tremendous shock to you that no, I don’t particularly want to do that.” He shifted a little, emulating a throat-clearing. “I, uh, was being sarcastic there. Just in case you’re confused about why I’d think that would shock you, I don’t. Okay? Act…actually I would be shocked if you were shocked by that, to be honest.”

Chell managed to quirk a smile. “I know, I got it.”

“Bit of self-deprecating humour there,” Wheatley added. “Being as I’m such a moron and all. Ah, sarcasm. Love it.”

“Can we get back on topic?” Chell asked with mild exasperation. “We are actually talking about something serious. Avoiding it isn’t going to help.”

“I wasn’t avoiding it,” he said defensively, “I just…I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t want to die, but you probably figured that out already. You’ve always been really good at figuring things out. If you’re asking me whether I trust…Her…then no, I don’t. She wants to kill me, she’s said as much, but…I don’t know. You two got really chummy while she was a potato, so who knows where you stand now.”

“Exactly,” Chell muttered, drumming her fingertips on the console.

There was a long moment of silence while she weighed up her options, steadily watched by an edgy Wheatley, who was broadcasting his nervousness clearly in his twitchy optic movements. Eventually, decision made, she sighed and opened her mouth to speak.

“We have no choice,” Wheatley interjected before she could get a word out. “The ship has to be destroyed because we don’t want another disaster like this war that everyone’s always going on about. We’re the only ones who can do that because we need instructions from Her, so we have to stay put. It doesn’t matter if we die in the process because humanity will be saved. It’s all for the bloody greater good, which apparently makes it all okay.” He fixed her with a steady look. “Is that what you were going to say?”

Chell stared at him for a moment, curbing her surprise. “Pretty much. Minus the ‘bloody’.”

“Knew it,” he mumbled. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a hero complex?”

Chell’s reply was cut off by Alyx appearing in the doorway. “What do you mean you might die in the process?” she said sharply, frowning.

“There’s a slight possibility,” Chell told her. “But you’ll be outside, you’ll be safe.”

“Are you saying that there’s a chance we might teleport this thing to the bottom of the ocean with you still aboard it?”

“If our informant chooses not to program in a time delay, then yes, that could happen.”

Alyx sent her a troubled glance. “There are other ways to deal with this. I’m sure we can rig up explosives from stuff in the lab.”

“No,” Chell said quickly. “We don’t know what kind of materials are in here, it could trigger something worse if we try and blow it up. Draining the fuel and teleporting it away is the best solution.”

“Not if it kills you!”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said truthfully. “When I weigh up the facts…but there’s always a strand of doubt. Particularly considering…our past. So, you need to go and wait outside where it’s safe, and hopefully we’ll join you soon.”

Alyx looked highly sceptical, but she nodded. Chell was surprised by how quickly she backed down, but then she remembered that Alyx must have lived a harsh life with the resistance movement. Self-sacrifice had most likely been a frequent occurrence.

“Does Doug know about this?” Alyx asked her, eyebrows pointedly raised.

Chell shook her head. “I don’t think it’s occurred to him,” she admitted. “If…if it goes badly…” Her mind flooded with hundreds of things she wanted to say to him, but she settled on what was truly important. “Don’t let him go back to Aperture,” she said finally.

Alyx nodded, the corners of her mouth lifting in a tiny smile. “Consider it done.”

“Thank you.”

“The place is clear,” Alyx reported, business-like. “I’ll be out by the lab. You’d better come join me soon.”

Chell smiled tightly. “We’ll do our best.”

Alyx sent her a respectful nod, then left the bridge. Chell listened as her quiet footsteps got quieter, then turned her attention to Wheatley.

“Connect to GLaDOS,” she ordered softly.

“You can’t make me,” the core told her, not snappishly, but rather as if he’d just come to the realisation himself.

“I know,” Chell acknowledged. “But if you don’t, I’ll just have to try and figure this thing out myself. In which case, we will almost certainly die.”

Wheatley rolled his optic in response, but the lack of a deluge of words made her think that he was actually doing as she’d said. It wasn’t long before he reported that GLaDOS was on hand.

Without either of them giving away their concerns about being left on the ship, Chell and Wheatley followed her instructions. For Chell it was a matter of pride, but she suspected it was fear that kept the talkative core silent.

GLaDOS was surprisingly good at giving clear, concise directives, for all that she’d apparently enjoyed being deliberately difficult while Chell had been in the test chambers. Wheatley was obviously repeating everything word for word, as he offered no additional comments or any touch of his own personality. Chell found herself grateful for that. It would only have convinced her even more that she was woefully out of her depth.

She toiled steadily, unscrewing the panel on the front of the console’s stand, revealing the bizarre inner workings. GLaDOS was following the original blueprints that she’d allegedly located in her databanks, and Chell hoped fervently that Kleiner hadn’t messed around with things too much. Considering his lack of progress, she thought it was unlikely. At GLaDOS’s behest, she freed a large glass cylinder of syrupy yellow liquid, tugging it away from the console.

“You need to pour it all out except for an inch or so,” Wheatley reported to her. “That’ll be enough for one trip.”

“What is this stuff?” Chell couldn’t help asking, cringing as she carefully tipped it into a nearby empty coffee mug.

Wheatley parroted her question, paused for the reply, then said, “It’s a concentrated fuel substance that powers the portal-maker thingy and lets it make portals big enough to transport a vessel of this size.”

“Portal-maker thingy? Is that a technical term?”

Wheatley managed to look disgruntled. “She said she put it in layman’s terms because we won’t understand otherwise. Um…personally, I think she’s probably right.”

Chell couldn’t help snorting in response. “Probably.”

Job done, she carefully put the cylinder back in place, gripping the console to get back to her feet. Wheatley passed her the next set of instructions, and she found she could follow them quite clearly thanks to GLaDOS taking the time to describe each button she needed to press. In any other situation she’d have been suspicious of the helpful behaviour, but she knew that GLaDOS didn’t mess around when it came to Aperture inventions and their reputation.

She had to actively force herself not to hesitate while she programmed the console, but she was reassured by the fact that – to her amateur eyes – it looked as if GLaDOS was keeping to her promise. The old-fashioned monitor flashed up a location in the middle of the Atlantic when she typed in the coordinates, and when she gave herself a full minute to get out before it activated, a comforting 60 appeared at the side of the screen.

“All you need to do now is press the green button,” Wheatley told her. “So, uh…go ahead and do that when you’re ready, I guess. She’s disconnected now.”

Chell exchanged a long look with the personality core, but he offered no more of his opinions on the subject.

“We’re doing the right thing,” she spoke up. “You know that, right?”

“Will that make me feel any better if this all goes tits up?” he asked.

His tone made her smile against her will, and she offered him a shrug. “I don’t know. It might.”

“Great,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “That’s…so good.”

Chell didn’t allow herself to think of Doug, knowing that it would be too big a test for her composure. Instead, she lifted Wheatley off the console, gripping him by his top handle, and said softly, “Ready?”

“I suppose so.”

As she hovered her finger over the green button, the core made an additional noise that almost made her jump.

“Actually,” he began, and Chell inwardly groaned. “No, I’m not ready. But…I’m never going to be ready. Gotta just…y’know…do it anyway. So…so go ahead and press the button. You’ve always been a compulsive button-pusher, haven’t you? So go ahead and press it, and then use those legs of yours to get us out of here. Okay?”

“That is the plan,” she told him wryly.

Before he had time to answer, before she could overthink what she was doing or debate whether she should have told Doug, Chell jabbed her finger on the button.

She stayed put in the bridge just long enough to see the lights on the console flicker to life. The number 60 had just become 59 when she started running. Under her breath she recited the list of rights and lefts that she’d memorised, but the console had drained all available power, leaving the corridors in half light. It was more disconcerting than Chell had considered, resulting in a few near misses with the turns.

Finally, however, she was running down the long straight to the door. Except…the door wasn’t there.

Skidding to a halt, she hissed a frantic curse.

“Left!” piped up Wheatley. “Go back and turn left!”

Fresh out of back-up plans, Chell spun on her heel and did as she was told. Wheatley yelped more directions at her until she found herself back on the route to the door. This time, she could see it standing open in front of her.

Her internal countdown had gotten horribly skewed during her lapse in concentration, but she guessed she had single digits left.

The ship was humming around her, powering up its systems in preparation to jump. Wheatley kept up a steady stream of panicked babble that Chell tried to block out. Then she was out, stumbling across the unsteady wooden gangplank as a fierce wind whipped around her.

“It’s opening the portal!” Wheatley hollered at her. “Get out of range of the pull!”

Ahead, Chell saw Alyx clinging on to a girder on the far wall of the hangar. Gordon was beside her, bodily restraining Kleiner who was clearly trying to reach the Borealis. They were shouting, but she couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the ship.

Doug was much closer, keeping a white-knuckled grip on a ceiling support strut, and she fought to reach him. The tug from the opening portal snatched at her hair and clothes, making her progress slow. Too slow.

Doug’s outstretched hand was too far away. With a desperate lunge forward, Chell threw out the arm holding Wheatley. Doug grabbed his lower handle, his expression tight with determination. Wheatley yelped in shock.

There was an explosion of noise behind her, and Chell found herself dragged off her feet, her back damp from the spray of the Atlantic that was spilling through the portal. She clung on to Wheatley, eyes wide and terrified. With a spike of panic she was reminded of another time, not too long ago, when she’d been in a similar position, body out in the depths of space, the frantic personality core her only lifeline.

“Let go! Let go! I’m still connected, I can pull myself in!”

Doug’s voice cut through her memories with a yell. “Don’t let go! Do you hear me, Chell? Don’t let go!”

Wheatley added his own shouts to the mix. “Aarrrgh! I wasn’t designed to be used like this!”

If she hadn’t been busy being terrified for her life, Chell would have shot him a glare.

“You’d better bloody hang on!” he yelled. “I don’t want you damaging my handles for nothing!”

“Not much longer!” Doug added. “Hold on!”

As much as she desperately wanted to obey them, her hands had other ideas.

“I can’t!” she gasped in alarm. “Doug, I can’t!”

“You have to!”

With a cry, her numb fingers slipped from the handle, and she was tugged backwards.

“No!” she heard Doug shout. “Chell!”  

A blinding flash of light filled the hangar, and she screwed her eyes shut against it, curling herself into a ball. Fists clenched, she waited for the inevitable embrace of the freezing water and the cold blackness that would follow.