"Now we pour in the sugar and mix," a woman in a flowered apron was saying, "but be careful; if you mix it too much, the cake will come out hard as a rock!"
"I know that," said the young dark haired girl with a hint of laughter in her voice. She looked to be around twelve years of age this time, and seemed quite at home in the small kitchen the two were in. "I haven't been raised in a hole!"
The two laughed—or rather, the older woman laughed, and the girl let out a small huff or two of air—and the dark haired girl stirred the cake batter as the older woman, who looked as if she was in her early thirties, added the sugar.
The two didn't look similar enough to be mother and daughter, and yet there was a something in their dynamic that marked it as just that. The way the older woman let the girl lick the batter off the whisk; the way she stroked her hair as if to say, 'I love you; I'll never let anything bad happen to you.' At any rate, the girl seemed to appreciate the message; as well as the chocolate cake batter.
The woman helped her pour the—still rather sticky—batter into two round tins, and the girl placed the concoction into a waiting oven and closed the door.
"And now," said the older woman, "we wait." The girl rolled her eyes.
"Tell me something I don't know, why don't you?"
The woman didn't seem upset at the girl's rather disrespectful words, and instead laughed and ruffled the girl's hair; giving the glossy brown locks a sprinkling of silvery-white flower. The girl's mouth turned up at the corner ever so slightly as she brushed off the top of her head.
"Well, at least you bake with me," said the girl, and a sudden shadow seemed to pass over her face. "Mom once offered to bake a cake with me once, but..." she left the sentence unfinished and chose instead to turn her attention to her left foot; staring at it with a glare so intense that it seemed a miracle her shoe didn't burst into flames on the spot.
The woman pursed her lips, and put a comforting hand on the girl's shoulder.
"My sister is an... interesting woman, and I'm told she is an amazing assistant," she said to the girl before her, "but her skills were always wanting where mothering is concerned." The girl nodded.
"She's an interesting woman, all right," the girl mumbled to her shoe, "and much, much more than that man's assistant—"
"Hey," the older woman said, and an edge of warning crept into her voice, "that's enough of that. Your mother may be... confused on that side of things, but that's no reason to be talking about her like that. If your father heard you speaking like that; heard anything that could make him suspect that his wife was—"
"Okay, okay," the girl cut in, "I get it; I can't mention mom and... whatever his name is, the CEO. Understood." The woman's face returned to all its former cheeriness at the girl's words.
"Thank you. Now," she said, and lifted the girl's chin, giving her a comforting smile, "let's set a timer for this cake, shall we?"
~ — — — — — — — — — — — — ~
Subject 3281 woke with a start, and pressed a hand to her aching forehead. What had just happened? Had it been a vision? A dream? A legitimate memory? She rubbed her throbbing temples as she tried to clear her mind for the day ahead of them.
Whatever it was, she told herself, it's gone now; time to get back to my regularly-scheduled reality. Her head throbbed once more at the conclusion of her thought; and she could almost hear the sound of a static ridden radio belting out an Italian opera, the kind her mother so loved to listen to on rainy days at the house while her father was away, and she herself wasn't needed at the Facility—
YOU ARE READING
Subject 3281; Chell's Story
FanfictionTest. That was what she did, and Subject 3281 did it well. She was the model subject, fit, strong, on time, and most of all... obedient. That's how she was, until one fateful day, when the higher-ups at Aperture Science figured that they could get m...
