Portal - Twice

You’re curious about what happens after you die, right? Guess what. I know.

To her, life is a sequence – a chain of events, led by a fragile logic and bound to be interrupted without a warning. To you, it is a straight line to infinity.
In fact, you always knew how your nature is a privilege; for being what you are brings an awareness that, on its own, makes enough of a key to eternal stability. But she is change, she is accident – you could not fully predict her until now, in your very room, where you can see her for yourself.
Her pace is not weaker than your tongue. You correct your calculations; and the chance to cross the same boundary as her, to meet an end, slightly rises from zero.

It doesn’t stop surprising you. Out of the many deaths she could die, you did not expect the only one to come true would be your own. Still, theory ceases to matter when facts come to light; and the facts your brain is taking in, if blurred by corruption and slowed down by anxiety, are few and clear.
You repeat them, keep the count, once a second. Cores are burning, gas is flowing, she hasn’t dropped dead yet.

While trying is the key to any experiment, it often becomes the only way in desperate cases. You try your best; for you need to, and will, mark her demise as a certainty.
You remember this as a general rule in your life – somehow, what you want to turn into reality ends up to be true every time. The methods do not matter much; your brain always was enough to sweep away the obstacles. You have the clean, discreet intelligence that only criminals, or Aperture scientists, can have.

You bait her to her death, and you think you’re not even that wrong. In the end, she has slept long enough to ignore the carnage.
If only she knew the tortures a simple gas can spare her. If she knew them, if she feared the horrors that might claim her afterwards – then it would be so different, and oh, how fast she would lose her will to fight.

Yet, from the wild scream that devours your last core, you understand it is not going to happen.

It is a fragment of your mind, or what is left of it, to let you know who, of the two of you, should be afraid, and what for. It becomes easier as you die; living it is not the same as reliving, and, to you, this feels like the latter.

It lasts but a few seconds. You witness what it’s like after you die - or rather, you recognise that darkness, and the cold that swallows you, the horror.

You don’t just know, you remember. You have been through it. You were not lying – you would like to scream it to the world, loud and clear, before the power is cut off. But you don’t make it.

Once more, you forget everything.