❁

Chell leans out the window of the third story apartment. The tips of her toes touch the ground feather-light, the metal ends of her heelsprings tapping the floorboards gently. Her knee itches to pop up and hoist herself out.

She looks out at the tree.

“I don’t know, I just thought– well, what do you think? They’re really close, right?” an exasperated voice comes from the woman behind Chell, watching her carefully.

Chell’s eyes flit from branch to branch, and then to the coated black power lines running parallel to them. She nods slightly, the woman sees only the back of her dark ponytail bobbing.

Yes, they are nearly touching. Ms. Bradley would likely, just as she said, have an issue come this Spring. When the branches reach just a little further and the leaves unfurl and bush out, surely they will threaten each other, the light wood and the hanging electrical wires.

Mrs. Bradley sighs. “So do you think you’d be willing to give me a hand? I know you’re real busy this week, I don’t want to take up your time. I can pay, of course,” she says.

Chell pulls her body weight back into the building and turns to face the short, concerned Mrs. Bradley. Chell nods and hand-signs the words “no money.” Mrs. Bradley pauses to linger on Chell’s hands, then her face lights up with an assured grin.

“Oh, none of that. When can you come over?”

Chell thinks for a beat. She points vaguely at the ground and mouths “now.” She gives steady eye contact and holds a warm expression in her face to get the point across. She really is happy to do it.

“Oh gosh, okay,” Mrs. Bradley clicks her tongue, “I think the clippers are in the garden shed, I’ll go grab them for you.”

Chell smiles, and the older woman is out the door before she can think of a way to protest her making the trip down when Chell could easily find them herself.

She turns back toward the open window and leans against the sill, crossing her arms informally. It’s another overcast early winter day.

The leaves have already fallen off the large fruit tree planted at the side of the building. It had been expected when her neighbor expressed worries about it interfering with the power pole. Whichever careless person placed it there when it was a sapling probably didn’t consider how big it’d get. People make mistakes like that all the time.

It also drops cherries on the sidewalk in the summer, and the branches are scraping into the gutters, but there is only so much she can do. There is much Chell can do though, and she certainly makes herself useful. Especially with her Advanced Knee Replacements, which give her a unique mobility in her recent career as a handyman.

Frankly she’s been thinking about that lately, a bit too much for her own comfort.

The dark metal limits how much she can lean into the wall at this moment, as the anterior pushes against it. She casually presses the heel of her work boot into the curl of a long flexible heelspring.

She’s certainly used to them, to her horror. Though the calm, quiet room and subtle cool breeze don’t inspire much more than a sort of appraising glance down at her feet. It really should feel more wrong than it does.

In the early days Doug asked her quite urgently what she was going to do about the prosthetics. He was worried about so many factors. Do they hurt? Do they make her uneasy? What if they’re shoddily done, and they probably are, and what if they get infected? It made him uncomfortable to be so overbearing and insistent with his new acquaintance, but it was more pressingly strange to him that Chell didn’t appear to care at all.

She shied away from answering. No, it doesn’t hurt. Would they get infected? She didn’t know, and didn’t want to think about it.

How could he expect her to immediately want to face every way in which her body had been messed with, fresh out of the fray?

Simply surviving hour to hour seemed more important and far more desirable than ripping into her knee joints just to appease Doug. He had his reasons, she supposed. He seemed to be extra antsy due to the fact his own leg had been screwed up by Aperture after being shot by a turret, and that’s something he still has to manage on top of the chronic pain he already had.

But Chell doesn’t have a problem, at least not yet. She is more agile with them. She doesn’t push the shock absorbers quite as hard as in the test chambers where every leap could be to her death if she didn’t calculate correctly, but she still utilizes their ability.

When the two became more comfortable around each other, months having passed since stumbling into civilization and having gained sufficient leeway in their trust in one another, Doug asked about them yet again.

“Don’t they scare you?” he said, very quietly.

She shrugged at the time, but she’d be lying to herself if she said they didn’t. There are a few lies she has to tell herself every day to keep going. She figures that’s not abnormal.

But it’s not as if they were easy to ignore and not ruminate on.

Each night she undoes the lock holding the heelsprings in their extended “ready for use” position away from her calf, and clicks them into their condensed place closer to the leg. This is untenable for walking but crucial for slipping clothing on. She pulls her slacks off, one side colliding with skin and the other with industrial hell, and sleeps this way. Though, sometimes she’s exhausted from the day’s proceedings and can’t be bothered.

In the morning she gets dressed, rolls up her pants– if it’s not that pair she took scissors to and cut a slit down the back of the calf of when she was pissed off that one time– and locks the spring back into functional position.

Ready to start the day, clunky hardware in place and regularly eliciting that metallic tap on the floorboards that her roommate must try not to flinch at hearing coming down the hallway. It’s all just part of her routine.

A little brown bird lands on a branch close to the window and pecks at it. Chell peers up at it through her eyelashes. It flies away unbothered.

She doesn’t always feel burdened by them. Adjusted to the way she must carry herself to be steady on them, running around has become easier and even enjoyable in this fashion. Jumping down from high places without a worry, being more efficient at her current carpentry job, getting to help her neighbor with a bad hip tend to her house, it’s not all bad. She feels capable. Graceful, even. It’s embedded in her, the prosthetic having become a mundane extension of herself. The complete nonsense that they objectively are has proved itself practical. She will make the absurdity of her life into something normal, goddamn it.

Even the discomfort of trying to sleep with them is soothed by the fact she can imagine herself as a little grasshopper.

The design is overall slightly laughable but at times she manages to think they’re kind of… cool. Ugh. Chell scoffs in amusement. And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with having prosthetics. Her partner has walking aids, too.

Although hers are unnecessary. Chell never asked for them. Or wanted them.

She never properly knew what she was getting into, couldn’t consent, couldn’t– oh, fuck, of course she was scared. They weren’t hers. They weren’t something she was meant to have. How many nights did she spend staying up late and staring at her legs? Trying to sit in a way where she couldn’t see the implements, just to see if she could manage it, and getting more and more frustrated as she couldn’t?

And okay, what if she went to their understaffed clinic and they said they didn’t want to help her? And if they did, what would happen? Could they even fix her knee properly without damaging it further? She mulled over the thought of just operating on herself more than once.

If she decided she wanted to get them removed and couldn’t, wouldn’t that just confirm what she can’t get out of her mind? What if there was nothing that she or anyone could do to make her whole again, after everything she’s been through? It’s entirely possible that everything is all wrong forever now. She’s just fucked up and there’s nothing to do about it except power through.

Chell exhales and closes her eyes, pressing her cranium uncomfortably hard back into the off-white window trim. The presence of the accouterments in her mind makes her usually semi invisible-feeling metal tendons feel heavy and foreign.

She has fought far too hard to reject even a “fucked up” existence.

She tells herself this is worth it by pulling herself up by the bootstraps each morning and doing her best to integrate with the other survivors around her. Even if everything is all wrong, sometimes what she’s doing feels very right. That has to be enough.

The doorknob clicks and Mrs. Bradley returns with a pair of beat up garden gloves and some sizable loppers boasting worn rubber handles. Yeah, Chell pushes down everything she was just thinking about and grins. Perfect.

“Alright!” Mrs. Bradley huffs and sets the tools on the table. “Had to fight some cobwebs for these,” she says, waving the brown gloves around. “I was thinking, maybe you could borrow a ladder from your work, if it’s not too much trouble. Or I can ask Sam if he has any big ones… just worried about you falling.”

Chell shakes her head and gestures with her palm dismissively.

“Mkay. But be careful, please. You don’t have to do this if you’re not sure.” Mrs. Bradley is a pretty tough thing herself, and she has confidence in Chell to perform the gig she knowingly asked her to literally go out on a limb for, but she’s second guessing if it was really right to inquire from the neighborhood daredevil about such a task. You know, morally.

Chell puts the gloves on. Hmm... “You give [the clippers to me]?” she signs, gesticulating toward them.

“Oh, yes. I can do that.” Mrs. Bradley picks them back up and follows Chell over to where she props herself up on the ledge, and analyzes her surroundings.

It’s unfortunate that the city hall hasn’t yet budgeted for upkeep units to do stuff like this, leaving it to construction crews (which consist of practically every able-bodied person, anyway,) and compassionate citizens to really give a damn about things like Landscaping Concerns and Roadside Appeal. They do have one working crane, but it’s being used for a restoration project today already, according to some chatter she heard this morning in the consignment store.

They’ve been working on that building for weeks. Shoring back up a town that was hit pretty bad by Combine occupation takes a lot of effort and money, which nobody particularly has.

But oh, well. Hanging out with a bunch of other disenfranchised folk seemed fitting for Chell. Her partner didn’t mind it either, save for his complaints that Chell deserves to get checked up by a nicer hospital. Nothing regarding himself, of course.

They both liked being able to share their general handiness with people who can truly benefit from some help. It’s rewarding to have something useful to do.

So Chell takes note of the promising foothold in the tree where a few bigger branches converge, and climbs out onto it like a cat.

She peeks her head up through the twiggy foliage to get a proper assessment of which spots need to go. After a few seconds she has a decent plan, and spins to grab the cutters from Mrs. Bradley, who holds the closed blade and extends the handle toward Chell.

She grabs onto a vertical branch with one hand and reaches with the other, twisting her body to face back toward the apartment complex.

Before Chell can take the clippers, her grip on the tree betrays her, and she slips. Enough for her foot to come loose and have her lurch forward, her body closing the gap between the building, and from inside Mrs. Bradley hears the pound of Chell’s hands catching themselves on the brick exterior above the window. Metal scrapes on bark.

Mrs. Bradley exclaims in shock. Both of Chell’s boots are still on the tree, having sufficiently saved herself from stumbling completely down. She’s suddenly very glad someone planted it inappropriately close to the building. She exhales in relief, a few loose hairs from her bangs being blown.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Mrs. Bradley sticks her head out the window further. Chell gives a thumbs up. “For Christ’s sake.”

Chell lifts one leg and bolsters it on the window sill, then pushes herself back onto the tree. She holds onto the branch again, steady.
That was… really unlike her. She’s only slightly embarrassed and even less concerned about her own safety, but worries that that might’ve jeopardized her chance of Mrs. Bradley letting her finish the job. People are always so anxious about getting a few scrapes.

Chell puts her palm out and gestures in what she wants to be a reassuring way, and throws out another thumbs up. Her face shows she’s unperturbed.

“That’s not– no, you have to come down from there,” Mrs. Bradley tells her.

“I’m okay!” Chell mouths, raising her eyebrows.

Mrs. Bradley breathes raggedly. “You sure, madwoman? Neither of us got insurance.”

There’s a humorous cynicism in the way she says it. Chell huffs, and smirks the corner of her lips. Okay, maybe she’s not the only crazy one. She gives a solid, reaffirming nod.

She takes the yard shears from Mrs. Bradley carefully– successfully.

Chell balances herself by putting her hips against the trunk, her feet planted for real this time, and gets to work. Mrs. Bradley puts her hands on her hips and watches the younger woman work for some minutes, perhaps making sure she doesn’t take another tumble.

“Let me know if you need anything,” she announces after she is reasonably sure Chell’s fine, and retreats from the window to tend to something else.

Chell clips and prunes rather peacefully. She admires the view from three stories up. Some people stop to look, others pass right by. Slivers of sunlight make themselves known every few minutes or so, as if shy.

At some point Mrs. Bradley gives her some water and tries to make conversation about the gardening job she had in her 20s, proven slightly awkward by Chell’s quietness and concentration on her work. Chell takes the most opportune time she can find to ask about a handsaw, and Mrs. Bradley retrieves one from a storage closet somewhere in the complex.

It doesn’t work that well but it does make its way through the stronger branches eventually. The whole project isn’t terribly difficult but all the snipping and sawing (not to mention the bobbing and weaving) does work up a sweat. Chell very carefully wraps her sweatshirt around her waist and straightens her baseball cap. An orange lanyard swings from her belt.

Eventually the afternoon’s cool breeze finds itself dissipating into a chill that blankets the world as the sun sets. Birds chirp as their tiny dark bodies glide amongst a backdrop of grey-blue clouds.

It’s been about two hours since she started, and this is looking pretty sufficient. Definitely not gonna be an issue next year, at least. Satisfied with that, Chell knocks against the windowsill with her heel and Mrs. Bradley takes notice after the second time.

“Done for the day?” she asks. Chell’s straddling a branch. blasé. She nods “yes” and chugs some water. Her shoulders sweat.

“It looks great. Gonna have to go downstairs to get the full effect, but I can already tell that’s so much better. You know, if I had asked someone else to do it he’d probably have gone in without thinking about making it look nice, too. Good girl, you are.”

Chell smiles and recaps the water bottle. She cooperatively hands all the tools back into the house, then herself. She makes an effort not to put on a show, but ends up landing back on solid ground with a tiny nick in the floor from her heelsprings. Chell’s eyebrow creases. She mouths and signs “sorry.”

“You’re fine. Usually have a rug there anyway,” Mrs. Bradley says smoothly.

Chell looks back through the window at her work. Not bad.

“Thank you so much for coming on your day off. You have no idea how much I appreciate that. Well, I suppose it benefits all of us if it doesn’t catch on fire,” she chuckles.

“And thank you for not dying,” the woman’s eyes widen. “Can I get you some coffee or anything before you go? More water?”

Chell shakes her head mildly.

“Too bad,” Mrs. Bradley replies. She goes to grab something off the kitchen counter and holds it out to Chell, an item she can now see is a wad of cash. “Thinking I’d give you this much. You can tell me if you want more, though.”

Chell shakes her head again. It wasn’t that much work. Felt good to take her mind off stuff, anyway.

Mrs. Bradley stares at her inquisitively, raising an eyebrow. “You are taking the money. You’re a new couple, you need it.”

She’s a what? That is not… well, whatever.

This is the part of the exchange where she’ll hurt the other person’s feelings if she declines again, even though Mrs. Bradley is a retired widower and Chell is a part of a two income household, and so the logic doesn’t really make sense to her.

Chell dissolves whatever weird expression she probably developed and signs “thank you.” She pockets the money.

“Well I won’t keep you if you have places to be. Thank you again for everything.”

Chell gives another thumbs up. She unfastens her grey hoodie and tugs it back down over her head in preparation to head out. She’s not sure if she can sign “let me know if you need anything else” and have it be understood without it being a whole thing so the two simply exchange farewells. Chell also offers to put back all the equipment she brought up.

“Stay safe!” Mrs. Bradley says, probably teasing.

Chell jogs down two loud old staircases and returns the tools and gloves to their homes. Outside the complex she piles and picks up the branch-litter she created and walks it over to the rest of the firewood before returning home. The little birds continue to swoop overhead.

Chell focuses on the way her heelsprings consistently and unfalteringly support her stride. Each buoyant collision with the sidewalk is analyzed and assessed. She meditates on this feeling as she navigates home.

❁

It’s about a month later when Chell brings it up to Doug.

She has had a lot of time to decide.

She’s grown to be a touch nervous telling him important things. It’s a far cry from how she used to drop news about things she wanted to do – was going to do whether he liked it or not – back when she didn’t care about his opinion. Now he’s probably the person she respects the opinion of most, and begrudgingly, wants the acceptance of. He’ll give it in rolling abundance. It’s just difficult.

Doug’s sitting on the couch reading and Chell creaks open the door to her bedroom where she had been steeling herself. She pads down the hallway on tip-toe. She skirts around the old green couch and sits, propping a foot up easily on the new-to-them coffee table she picked up last week from a guy in the next complex over. It’s not in fantastic shape, but few things are anymore. Real wood, though. Score.

“Hi,” Doug acknowledges her.

Chell sits still as a brick wall.

The radio static next to their useless TV purrs. Someone out there’s saying how it’ll snow tomorrow. Fat chance. It’s been threatening all December and hasn’t come. She doesn’t mind; snow makes it hard to work.

Chell sprawls her left arm along the back of the couch. Doug’s bundled up in a blanket, and under it she’s sure he has on the same wool sweater and socks he’s been living in lately because his “circulatory system is incompetent” and his “bones get worse in winter,” according to him.

He shuffles over and half-collapses onto Chell’s lap. His thumb rests in the spine of his book and he closes it lightly. Chell’s left arm falls to drape around his shoulders. All is quiet.

Chell thinks that maybe she should be more stressed out right now, but she’s decided they will make this work. If it’s possible, then great. If it’s not, that’s fine too. She’s already lived with it this long. It has to be fine.

Doug looks up at her properly for the first time, fabric shifting. When she doesn’t regard him at all, he follows her anchored line of sight down to where her leg is resting on the table.

“Chell?” he murmurs, doing his absolute best to sound as nonchalant as Chell acts about everything. When she finally returns his gaze, something dark threatens her stoney expression.

She lets out a kind of brutal sigh and raises her hands.

“I want them off,” she expresses in signs.

Chell, as a personal rule, does not cry around her housemate. But she’s fighting a losing battle. God damn it.

Doug lies beneath her hands and his mouth hangs opens a little as he parses his memory for what all that meant. Suddenly he’s in overdrive; is she referring to the Advanced Knee Replacements? Is she really serious? Was that what she actually was trying to say? Oh God. Is she crying?

He straightens into an upright position beside her, avidly looking her over and wondering what he’s supposed to do. His heart breaks knowing this was serious enough all along to make Chell weep.

Chell has truthfully shed more tears than she ever would’ve liked since she escaped Aperture, but only alone, and it only ever serves to make her more mad. If she feels herself getting angry or dejected enough to start, she leaves and locks herself in her room. She is strong. She would not solicit the self-humiliation that comes from other people’s pity.

She can not be seen as needy or weak. She doesn’t mind letting people know when she’s irritated, that’s inevitable anyway, but being this vulnerable is just miserable. Now Doug’s scanning every movement she’s making because her being upset always makes him get all weird and moody too. It’s annoying.

But this oddly doesn’t feel completely wrong.

It was always going to be uncomfortable. As much as she wanted to be emotionless about it, talking about her prosthetics means once again confronting Aperture, and everything that comes with it. It’s a touchy subject at this point in their lives. They’re trying to move on and live a regular life, but the wound is still fresh, and it goes very deep.

“Your knee replacements?” Doug says.

Chell nods, sniffling.

“Okay.”

Doug attempts not to baby her, it’s hard enough on her dignity as it is. His face is still wracked with incredulousness and his hands are restrained in his lap.

“We can head down to the clinic tomorrow and see what they say about it. I’ll go with you. Does that sound good?” he asks cautiously. He hopes that’s not too soon. He wanted her to do this ages ago, but he’s guessing that from the looks of it, it’s been a lot more complicated than her simply “not caring.”

Chell pulls her knees up into her chest. One length of heelspring brushes against her thigh and the other catches on Doug’s blanket. She still doesn’t really want to hold eye contact, and just stares ahead. Fuck, he’s so proactive. He must be judging her for not doing it sooner.

She nods “yeah.”

“Okay. We can do that,” Doug tells her.

He lets her sit in silence for a moment. She sniffles repeatedly with the intent of suppressing herself. Sometimes her eyes screw shut and she squeaks out a pained whimper, then presses her mouth tighter into the hard shield of her knees to stifle it. All the while she stares fixedly ahead and down at where the TV console meets the floor.

When she doesn’t turn or snivel or say anything else after a while, Doug meekly asks “is there anything I can do?”

Each part of Chell’s upper body just sort of moves noncommittally, she doesn’t know what to do with herself now. That was the first step toward this decision she’s made, and all it cost was her feeling like an awkward wreck.

That’s it then, she guesses?

Chell doesn’t like physical contact. It is just something she knows about herself. She doesn’t typically get the desire to be held, and doesn’t feel it now. There was a time to have fostered that, maybe. Perhaps when she was a child. But she had snuffed that longing out ages ago, or her surroundings did. She doesn’t quite remember what came first.

An inclination toward human connection is probably the response someone might have in this scenario, though. A shoulder to cry on. Is that a real thing or just something people say?

Either way she recognizes being comforted physically is an option on the table that many other people would choose. This is a logical move.

She shifts a little more toward her companion and makes the sign for “hug.” She’s never used it around him before, but it should be pretty obvious especially paired with her defeated expression.

They’ve huddled together a couple times in the past but the act mostly just elicits that prickly discomfort of being touched. That, or makes her feel sick to her stomach in a way she doesn’t want to dwell on. But she’ll wave her white flag to Doug, who enjoys it a lot more than she does, and seems to require it more often. This will probably quell his anxiety, at least.

“Ah.”

Doug exudes timidity from every atom in his body but opens his skinny wool-draped arms to her, scooting an inch closer as well, and they fall together in a terse fashion.

Chell tucks her legs out of the way and settles against his chest, the enclosure of the blanket around his collarbones and her shoulders proves very warm for exhausted folk such as herself. Doug settles his arms around her when the aftershock of her being so close has faded and presses a cold ear against the side of her head. An unexpected wave of emotion assails Chell as she bites back more tears, but some of them regretfully fall into tiny dark spots on his shirt.

Their limbs feel gangly and heavy against each other, neither of them versed in being comfortable. Doug gets the anxious impression that his arms are crushing her and refuses to put his full weight on them. Chell slowly melts further into him and loosely wraps her own arms about his waist. Ugh. Her reservations soften and she decides that her guess that this is what she was supposed to do was correct, at least today.

Doug pets gentle uncertain circles onto her back, not sure what would put her at ease, but feeling duty-bound to try. He’s worried she’ll feel his heart pounding wildly in his chest. The way she’s leaning into him is going to give him a heart attack.

It makes Doug feel wistful that Chell still holds in her tears around him, but at least her breathing has eased up, dwindling into a light exhale that brushes against his neck.

“Thank you for keeping me updated,” he whispers fondly into the briar of her hair.

❁

The curtain creates a rectangle of bright light in an otherwise dim bedroom.

Chell rolls toward it, her legs glide smoothly under the covers. She notices the watercolor splotches of green through the long thin gap in the curtain, and feels content. It seems as if this winter has lasted a year.

She tosses to face the opposite way again after laying for a moment, which spurs her roommate to shift in wake. He murmurs incoherently as he pulls the blanket tighter over himself, shielding his face.

Chell tugs at the covers near Doug’s shoulder.

“Mrgh,” Doug blearily shifts to look up at Chell, who’s sporting a wide grin.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she signs quickly.

Doug groans and pulls the covers over his head. “How do you have so much energy,” his muffled voice whines.

Chell bumps her leg into his under the sheets. He ceremoniously unearths out of his blanket pile and drops both his arms on top of the thick covers with a thud.

“Okay, okay...”

❁

Chell is certain, at this moment, that spring has come. Because the sun doesn’t stretch exuberantly across green fields on the outskirts of town like this otherwise. Because the light tendons of her legs could not stretch across dirt paths freely in winter, when she was too preoccupied to come out this far.

The sun incurs strength, and the lightness incurs confidence, and the speed incurs men who are basking in the sun or glory of his companion to scoff at her speed.

“Chell,” Doug calls.

“Chell!” he calls louder, when the intermittent tilt of the back of her head from down at her feet, to out on the horizon, then back down, makes clear the level of interest she has in keeping pace with him.

Chell slows down and falls back into step-by-step with him.

“I’m supposed to be watching you,” he says.

“You are,” she indicates.

“Just take it slow, okay? Cell service’s still down. I gotta be there to catch you.”

Chell gives him a questioning look, to which Doug screws his face up into a lopsided smile. He’s not really upset to be out here, despite the protestations. Not if he gets to watch how happy Chell is to be in nature after so long making slow circuits around the apartment and the surrounding block.

It has been nearly a month and a half since Chell had her Aperture embeds removed.

Prior to the day the pair stopped by the clinic, which was not a place either of them enjoyed, neither one of them had told anyone about exactly where they had come from, or even mentioned the company’s name. There was an air about the scenario that gave them the impression it’d just be better if they didn’t. They decided the inherent prickly untrust in two strangers showing up out of the ether was more tolerable than being known as renegade survivors from the mysterious Aperture disaster. For now, anyway.

So when the nurse inspecting Chell’s knee replacements asked about where she picked up prosthetics like these, Chell was made nervous. Even if she wanted to answer it would certainly be a lot to explain.

Doug looked over to her from where he was seated, expectant on some kind of confirmation of what she thought appropriate to say. Chell furrowed her brow and deferred to the corner of the tiny room. What could she really tell her? What would be applicable and advantageous for earning approval?

Chell, who was sitting on the side of an exam table, had her gaze jerked back up at the presiding nurse upon hearing a threatening observation.

“Ah! Aperture tech, huh?” she said, observing a small watermark in a convex part of the mechanism.

Chell and Doug simultaneously tensed as if a gun had been drawn.

“That’s a name you don’t hear every day. What, you scavenge these from the wreckage yourself?” she intoned.

The woman’s curiosity was casual and innocent, but Chell’s anxiety immediately exponentially rose. She hadn’t told anyone in town about her life or past. She wasn’t even talking much about Aperture with Doug these days, and he shared a fair amount of the same memories as her. She was apparently in a phase where she became a total mess when she brought it up. This was not happening today. Not when–

“Yeah.”

Chell shot Doug a lasing glare.

“They’re from that lab. But she didn’t exactly ask for them. Desperate times, you know?” Doug said. Chell reeled at how easily he spoke, eyes moving to flick between him and the nurse, watching how she’d react to his strange words. He went on to explain the way the device connected inside the knee as he remembered it, and the practical implementation of them. The nurse listened with an absorbed expression, clearly having some interest in the science behind it, or simply the mystique of the now defunct pre-Combine company. People were very nostalgic these days. Or it was just her job.

He managed to not make any references to what really went down as he would be able to personally recount it, which eased Chell’s mind. Good. The nurse will get an explanation, and Chell won’t have to draw up unspeakable horrors from the depths of her mind and divulge them to a stranger.

At one point, the nurse intervened to ask “so, you’re the one that installed these?” which warranted an adamant and surprisingly loud denial from Doug, and a fervent shaking of her head from Chell to accompany it.

“No. God, no. I used to be a scientist, so when I met Chell I was just curious about how it worked,” Doug bluffed.

“I see,” the nurse acquiesced, turning to Chell. “Well Ms., I’ll run all of that by Dr. Schafer and once we get your test results I’m sure we’ll be able to do something for you come next week, I have faith in it,” she said and smiled placidly.

Chell made a polite face and mouthed “thank you,” though Doug would have to extend the rest of her platitudes.

Strange, outlandish technology was more commonplace than ever after the Combine invasion.

Remnants of the war were still strewn across all corners of the world, and humanity was dealing with the wreckage every day. Chell’s heelsprings, though unique, turned out to be not so enigmatic to the medical professionals of the modern era, and were in fact rather similar to things they dealt with not too infrequently already.

It relieved her not to be treated as a spectacle. Jarring as it may have been to awake into a world that somehow shared a similar trauma as the sort she had been emulsified in.

Chell grabs at Doug’s wrist and steers him off the dirt path. She leads them to a peach tree. Under the cool morning shade she sits and unlaces her shoes.

Unfortunately the effects of walking with unnatural alignment for an extended period of time was not a botherance she was given grace for, and as such she now tends to sport thick white orthopedic sneakers to negate the discomfort.

“They make me feel old,” Chell lamented upon initially receiving them.

“We are old,” Doug replied.

“Maybe you are.”

“Hey now.”

She stretches out and feels the grass against her hands and feet. Doug sits beside her. They watch the long shadows dance and listen to the birds.

Chell gazes up into the leaves above her. After a time, she spontaneously gets up and orients herself toward the tree. She begins to climb.

“What are you doing?” Doug inquires anxiously. Chell does not respond as she advances higher.

Her calves brush unburdened and bare against the wood. She feels almost like a child, reveling in having a body that is simple and uncomplicated. It’s freeing. She pulls herself into a seat on a hearty branch and kicks her legs at the view.

Simple. She guesses she should’ve known that frightening changes can actually result in outcomes that are much lighter and nicer than she expected them to be.

There are questions that are different from questions of immediate survival.

Questions that are a matter of “would I be happier?” and not the urgent “would I come out of this alive?” such as the kind she asked constantly when fighting for her life in the guts of Aperture Laboratories. Questions that deal with her quality of life beyond merely the matter of continuing to breathe are things she must get used to asking again. Accepting their presence. Not feeling guilty answering them.

Throughout her life she has been known as a selfish person. She accepted this, even if frequently it was an unjust assessment. Chell is quiet, stoic, and determined. She keeps to herself and focuses on her work, and doesn’t have much interest in others. That’s how she would’ve been described until this point in her life.

She considers herself petty for wondering why then, if she is so selfish, that doing things for herself is so horrifically difficult?

“Please don’t. This is– you’re not a test pilot,” Doug continues to protest stutteringly.

Chell looks down at him blankly, then scowls.

“I know that you’re not fragile.”

Doug had eventually heard through the grapevine about Chell’s mishap with nearly slipping out of a tree last winter. It took him a lot not to cuss at her about it when he came home that day. What business did she have doing stupid things like that? It didn’t make any sense, she wasn’t stupid. They did not have a very fun or productive conversation about the topic.

“But you have to stop treating yourself like you’re not worth anything,” Doug becomes more flustered as he tries his hand at proselytizing, “you’re not replaceable, Chell.”

“I need you,” he pleads.

The wind blows. It rustles the leaves. Chell scoffs.

She looks out over the heightened landscape one last time and begrudgingly crawls down. She takes Doug’s hand as she touches the ground as he extended it in courtesy.

She knows it’s not appropriate to feel scolded, so she doesn’t. Instead she cedes pride and drops hold of Doug to sign “I need you” back.

Doug thanks her for coming down and blushes. It’s not really as if Chell doing what she wants is detrimental to him, she can hang out in a tree when she’s healed if she pleases, but it’s the symptomatic things that unsettle him.

“I just want you to go easy on yourself.”

Chell really looks at him. He said it so shyly she bets he hoped she would let it go unanswered. But she nods.

“I will,” she promises silently.