Prompt Post Round 1
Prompts go here! This will be closed and a new post made at 3000 comments. Please link all fills to the Round 1 Fill Post.
This post is closed to new prompts! Post prompts at Round 2! Fills and comments can still be posted here.
This post is closed to new prompts! Post prompts at Round 2! Fills and comments can still be posted here.
When the sun rises, and not a moment later, he begins talking to her again, a bag of pretzels from the mini-bar serving as his breakfast.
“I’m sorry for eating your food,” he tells her, “but you don’t really need it right now. The stasis program takes care of all that for you. It slows your aging, too, so no matter how long we’re in here for, you’ll stay almost exactly as young and pretty as you are now. Not that-I mean-well, you probably don’t want to hear that from me, do you? I’m probably old enough to be your father. The important thing is that you’re totally taken care of in here, even if I’m not. Which is why I’m eating your pretzels. And really, you deserve being taken care of. You’re…you’re a hero. A heroine. They’ll probably write books about you, when you get out of here. You’re-”
“Don’t make it awkward,” the Cube advises from under the bed. That’s easy enough for it to say, it’s much better in social situations than he is.
“Y-yeah,” he stammers in agreement. “What I mean to say is, thank you. I hope I’ve been helping. I hope I am helping. I know it’s not much, but….” He trails off, running a hand through his hair nervously. “I think trying to help you have some nice dreams is the least I can do for you right now. I’d wake you up, if I could, but this…this is the next best thing, I think.” He leans in just a little bit closer, as if telling her a secret. “I’d just about do anything for you, at this point. You killed her, and you saved us. So, if you ever need anything, I’d be…I’d be honored to help.”
“I said don’t make it awkward,” the Cube interjects.
“I’m not,” he replies. “Am I?” He thinks about it for a moment. “I just want to let her know. It’s important.”
“Just don’t overdo it.”
“You’re right,” he nods. Of course it’s right. It’s always right. “Let’s talk about something else then,” he says softly to her, as if she’s been participating in the conversation. “Something that’ll make for good dreams.” He glances out the window, at the milky blue sky with heavy, light-tinged clouds. “Let’s talk about the sun.”
“Oh, this should be educational,” the Cube declares delightedly.
“In the technical sense, it’s a star, ninety-three million miles from Earth, and it’s the closest star to us, so all the planets in the solar system are pulled in by its gravity and orbit it. And what makes it so hot are chemical reactions; mostly it turns hydrogen into helium, which gives off light and heat, which reach Earth eventually through space. And it’s so huge it could fit about a million Earths inside of it. And in terms of stars, it’s not even all that big. Can you imagine?” For the first time in a long time, he thinks he might be smiling. “It’s almost impossible for the human brain to visualize how big the Earth really is, much less the sun.”
He shifts in his chair slightly, before adding, “But that’s not important. As fascinating as all that is, it’s almost completely inapplicable to real life. What’s important about the sun is…well, it’s constant. It turns up in the sky every day, even if the clouds in Earth’s atmosphere are blocking it from view. And it’s warm,” he adds with a sigh. “There’s nothing that can outdo the sun, for warmth. Especially on a spring day, when it’s so bright and so warm, sometimes you feel like you might be glowing just from sitting outside. It gets inside you.”
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“Lilacs, those are good ones. They’ve got these…sort of small bushes of a hundred or so tiny little blossoms. They’re usually light purple or dark pink, or blue, or white. And they smell like….” Describing the scent is always the biggest challenge, especially since she probably can’t recall the smells of anything outside the laboratories and the test chambers. He tries his best, though. “Their scent is really strong, but not overpowering. It’s subtle. If there’s a lilac bush nearby, you usually catch whiffs of it on the wind, and want to just…inhale it all.”
After exhausting the topic of flowers, he moves on to other living things, organizing them by kingdom. Never in his life has he spent so long talking about fungi before, not least of all because he’s not a mycologist and never even cared much for mycology, but for her, suddenly he’s an expert.
He tells her about animals from the mid-afternoon to well into the night, until, eventually, he feels his eyes closing of their own accord in the middle of describing cats. He tries to stay awake, his descriptions of various breeds coming in short, sporadic, bursts, but soon he’s just as quiet and peaceful as she is, slumped over in the chair by her bedside.
His breakfast the next day consists of a granola bar that tastes like there might be wood chips in it, and he notes that the mini-bar has been restocked overnight. There’s probably a robotic maid or something, he thinks. Maybe just a partially-sentient maid cart, for that matter. That seems like the sort of thing he might have been tasked with designing back before her. It would probably have one of those frilly lace crown things on top, so the occupants would know it’s a maid. That sounds sufficiently ridiculous to be an Aperture product.
“Good morning,” he says with a calm cheerfulness over a mouthful of what purports to be grain and raisins. “Have you been sleeping well?” Of course she doesn’t answer. The Cube does, though.
“It looks like you have,” it notes, sounding surprised. “I think talking to her has been almost as good for you as it has for her.”
“Maybe it has,” he replies. “It’s not as hard as it was alone.”
“No need to tell me; I remember what you looked like when we first met,” the Cube reminds him. “You definitely seem better off since then. Excluding the…incident with the incinerator, anyway.”
“It’s much harder without someone to talk to,” he agrees, deliberately ignoring the remark about the incinerator. “Especially in my case. Being left alone with your own thoughts...it can take your mind. And mine was on the verge of wandering off to begin with.” Still, though, this is the closest he’s felt to sanity since he stopped taking his medication. Not that he had ever actually felt sane since his diagnosis, but he feels closer.
“It’s a good thing you’re here to talk to her, then,” the Cube says with what sounds like a smile, if the Cube had a mouth.
“It’s a good thing you’re here to talk to me while I talk to her,” he tells the Cube, definitely smiling this time.
“Oh, stop,” the Cube replies bashfully.
“It’s true. Right?” The question is addressed to her. “Don’t you agree about the Companion Cube being a good friend?” She lies there impassively, as she has been the whole time, her breathing just as measured as ever. “When you wake up, you and I can be friends, too. And maybe you can talk to me for a change, and we can keep each other company. If you’d like. You don’t have to.”
“I’m sure she will,” the Cube reassures him. “She seems nice.” He nods, and for a moment, the room is silent.
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He briefly considers shifting the topic to history, but he decides against it, as he doesn’t want to upset her, and the human tendency to be terrible to each other would probably not make for very good dreams. Instead, he moves on to what he knows about meteorology. It occurs to him that she probably doesn’t remember rain, and so he spends a few delighted hours detailing the exact sensation of being caught outside in a storm. As soon as he finishes that, he immediately repeats the process over again with snow. It isn’t long after the snow explanation before he begins to feel like drowsy, and this time, he goes to sleep without much of a fight, bidding her goodnight before curling up in his chair and closing his eyes.
So it becomes a daily routine: he wakes up each morning, eats something, and tells her all about something. The Cube enters the conversation on occasion, as well.
First, he runs through as much science as he can. It’s what he knows best, and what he’d spent the most time of his life talking about before all hell had broken loose.
When he begins to feel like he’s repeating himself with the science lessons, he starts telling her stories instead. Some of them he makes up. Some of them he adapts from books and movies and other such works of fiction. Some of them are true. All of them, he tries to recount with the same sense of wonder he’d given the science. The Cube seems pretty fascinated by them, at least.
Some days, he ends up feeling somewhat creatively bankrupt, and can’t really make the stories work. On those days, he sings instead. His singing voice is far from beautiful, and probably far from even decent, but he knows she needs something to keep her mind going. His off-key renditions of obscure songs and Christmas carols are better than nothing, he figures.
Sometimes, he thinks he can hear her humming along in her sleep. He’s not sure if it’s real or not, and this breaks his heart a little.
“I wonder if you know,” he murmurs to her, one night. “Did you know I was still alive, that I was watching? Did you know you saved me? Or did you think I was helping your from beyond the grave?” He smiles sadly. “Maybe I was.” Someday, he thinks, someday she’ll wake up, and he’ll tell her everything.
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“We don’t want to make it awkward,” he replies.
“That’s stupid,” the Cube retorts. “You saved her life just as much as she saved yours. Just tell her that, and we’ll get out of here. All three of us.”
“She can’t. Not in that state.” He fiddles with the shower curtain a little. “I wish she could.” A minute or so of silence passes, and he decides she must be sleeping again, and emerges from the bathroom with the Cube on his back.
“Did you enjoy the art and the music?” he asks her sarcastically, reclaiming his seat next to her. When he gets a proper look at her face, though, he chortles: her messy hair had somehow ended up strewn across her face when she climbed back into bed. “Let me get that for you,” he offers, and gently sweeps the dark strands from her face. He lets his hand linger on the side of her cheek for maybe longer than he should. When he pulls his hand away, he not only immediately wants to put it back, but wants more than anything to lie down next to her and just put an arm around her.
He doesn’t. Instead he curls up in his chair, holding the Cube tightly in his arms.
“Good night, Chell,” he whispers.
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Better than that, it’s exactly how she had dreamed it would be.
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Thank you for this fill.
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Rattmann...*sniff*
Oh, god. I need a hug.
Thank you, anon. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
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people are crying because of something I wrote? Like, people I don't know in real life? This is like the biggest compliment I have ever received, ever. Seriously, I should be thanking you guys, for real.
And if it makes you feel better, you guys can do what I'm doing, and just decide that Rattmann survived on minibar food for all 99999- and he hid in the bathroom again when Wheatley showed up and ANY MINUTE NOW he's going to run into Chell in that field and they'll openly weep with joy and eat all the cake.
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...this is my headcanon now. o ,o
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