A/N: Ohai everyone. :D Back with another wonderful chapter! Did you enjoy the cliffhanger? I bet you did. Onwards!

"Sooo. Does this mean that Cave Johnson and his little 'assistant'," I crooked my index and middle finger on both hands, bending them in quote marks. "Were basically together?"

Her gray-blue ever-icy eyes slid to glance at me, then back down the hall and into an elevator. I flattened myself against the wall absently as she stepped in.

"I'm not sure." she murmured quietly.

"Well, what's with this 'find Caroline' business? She's dead, isn't she? In her mainframe. She is Caroline!"

A statical sigh from the speakers echoed throughout the glass to remind us that we weren't alone. "I deleted her from my mainframe."

I scoffed. "That's a lie! A full-out lie! You always are lying. Lie lie lie. It's like a hobby for you!"

"One of my favorites," I lightly tapped my foot on the floor of the elevator, trying not to think about the walls closing in. "But that's besides the point. I want you to find Caroline. She's at the surface."

Silence.

Besides the hum of the sliding pod we were in, everything was quiet. Terribly awkward for all three of us, I'm sure. So I decided to break it like a chunk of ice.

"Ah – what?" It came out as a bubble of laughter, my accent thick with disbelief.

"You heard me, moron."

"Don't call me. A moron." That flare of anger that always sat quietly in my belly sparked again, making me take a deep breath and rub my temples.

Chell frowned lightly at me and sighed, hoisting the portal gun onto her shoulder. "The surface."

"Yes. The place that you killed me to get to, if only for three minutes and fifty-two seconds before you were dragged back and put into stasis."

I blinked, my eyes meeting the black-haired woman's. "You've... been up there before?" I pointed upwards as if to emphasize my question. I noticed the lift was going upwards as well. Was it really going to be this easy to escape? Chell nodded, slowly, looking a bit unnerved. "Ohoho! Man alive! What's it like up there? What's the sun like? The stars?"

"She was only up there for three minutes! She didn't see much besides parts of my body falling from the sky."

"Shh!" I scolded the AI, then turned my attention back to Chell. I gripped her wrists gently, beaming. "What's the surface like? You've got to tell me!"

"What I saw was years ago... I don't know what it's like now." she said. I wish she'd speak up, I can barely hear her!

"Come on, luv. I need to know. Please?" Her eyes narrowed slightly and she tried to tug her hands free. I kept my grip on them.

"I said I don't know." She grit her teeth and bared them, choosing to try and stomp on my foot with her pretty little boots. It didn't hurt of course, because I was wearing the same kind.

"How can you not know?" I exclaimed, throwing my hands in the air and letting go of hers. "You were the one that killed her! You didn't even tell me! You never talked! Why? Just because you're stubborn!"

She huffed and settled for kicking me in the knee. I gawked in pain and bent down to hold it while she mashed herself up against the far side of the elevator, holding the portal gun out like a shield. "Don't touch me again." she threatened, and I nodded, jerking to the side as the elevator stopped. Bloody mood swings.

"Don't try running away, either," GLaDOS said as a hatch opened up to reveal sunlight and a large... wheat field. "I have a tracker implanted in his skull, so I know where you both are at all times."

"Point." I murmured, touching my forehead again and stepping out into the world behind Chell.

Everything was deserted. We clambered through the scratchy wheat and sweated in the sunlight. Eventually we reached a point where the stalks seemed to go from yellow to brown. They must have died over time, but the flattened plants were easier to walk on.

"W-where are we going?" I asked Chell after hours of nothing but swishes of wheat to ease our ears.

"To find Caroline."

"But... this doesn't make any sense." I said, puzzled. Caroline was dead. GLaDOS was insane. I was now a human. "None of this makes sense!"

"Sh." she said exasperatedly.

I licked dry lips and followed, shutting my mouth for the time being.

The first thing I noticed was that the sun seemed to get redder and lower in the sky. Everything cooled down and became darker as well, and I was worried.

"Uh, Chell. What's happening?" I questioned, looking at the now pink sky.

"It's almost night. We have to find somewhere to stay." she answered, stepping out from the wheat and finally placing her feet onto something hard. I did the same, looking at the faded yellow lines that sat in the middle.

"What's this?"

"A road."

"And what are we going to do on it?"

"Follow it until we reach somewhere where we can rest."

"Brilliant."

And so we trudged on.

And on.

And on.

The field was on either side of us, dead and brittle little pipes broken and cracked. I felt sorry for the wheat. Poor wheat.

I felt sorry for myself as well. I would have been happy floating around in space. Forever. But now I was a human.

"...I'm a bloody human." I whispered into the night, my breath fogging in the cold air. I glanced upwards and saw the small speckles of stars. Tiny pinpoints of light millions of miles away. I blinked my non-mechanical eyes. Not eye.

Because I was human.

"Human. Mammal. Male. William." I listed off into the silence, ignoring Chell's troubled look. I touched my neck clasp, gently untying it from behind my head. Putting the little oval in my palm, I saw something reflected in it. A white circle. My eyes slid towards the sky again and I saw what it was.

The moon.

Suddenly, I heard a gentle humming out of nowhere. Someone was singing a lullaby. To whom, I had no clue. I remembered something about that song. It was eerily familiar.

"The stars, the moon...

They have all been blown out.

You've left me in the dark..."

"No dawn, no day," I mumbled, ceasing my trek along the road and staring into the endless distance. "I'm always in this twilight."

"In the shadow of your heart."

The world seemed to merge into one giant spiral, swirling and mixing until it was nothing but a black star-sprinkled jumble of confusion. I collapsed onto my back, but the ground wasn't hard like the pavement of the road. It was soft and seemed to sink me into it, like quicksand. The humming continued, floating along in the darkness and leaving behind it a trail of memories.

"And in the dark, I can hear your heart beat."

"I try to find the sun." I looked around, standing up and watching as giant screens of static appeared out of nowhere, circling me with the music. Each screen gave a 'pop' and images that I had never seen before replaced the jumbled static.

"But then, it stopped."

"Ten hours in the darkness."

There was a woman with dark brown hair, heels clapping down the hall as she ran to who-knows-where.

The same woman was holding a picture of a little girl and crying.

Another screen was mixed with a digital look, as if it were in some sort of computer mainframe. The woman in that picture looked like she was in some kind of cage. Numbers made up the picture, only adding to the frightening nature. It had an orange tint to it.

The next picture was one of William. It had to be. He sat in the corner of the cage, surrounded by a blueish hue that spread to whatever he touched. There was a laugh that went from a chuckle to an all-out power-hungry cackle and he winced, glasses cracking.

It was my laugh.

"So darkness you became."

The woman saw this and went over to the man, kneeling beside him and pulling him into an embrace. Her orange tint mixed with his blue and they were left in a murky color, but they didn't seem to mind. The music stopped for a moment and the screens froze with the absence. I did as well, wide-eyed and as confused as ever. The screens all suddenly exploded into spider-webbed cracks, and the glass rained down on me.

I was left spiraling back off into an even deeper, unconscious darkness as the humming resumed, carrying me with it.

"And I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too.

So I stayed in the darkness with you."

A/N: …Late chapter is late. And confusing. Please, please don't judge me too hard for where I plan to take this story. I bet you will judge me, but at least it'll be an original plot?

Cake for anyone who knows what song that was. :3