I come before you, tired, angry, and slightly unhinged, to offer the Portal and Half-Life lesbian appreciators something:
(Is the ship name GreenDOS?)
[Skippable if you know who Colette is. The end of this part will be marked with “end” in this font]
I was binging Richter Overtime videos one day and his short on Colette sorta stuck in my head. Colette is, as far as the Half Life lore goes, barely a character. Despite her actually having lines when you play as her, due to Half Life Decay being a co-op game that needed built-in player communication, we have so little canon information about her that the Richter video is only about 6 minutes long, 1 of which is devoted to the Vortigauts you get to play as when you beat the base game. From the little of her in the Half Life 1 instruction manual she is an electronics and robotics engineer, and in Decay she starts laughing dementedly when she starts attacking and finishes off enemies.
I was just “woag hot crazy low poly butch” and the information sat in my head for a while until the next time I thought about Chelldos and Chellyx stuff. The comedic potential of Chellyx with GLaDOS being jealous about it is one of the things I like most about it. Then I thought “it would be cool if GLaDOS could get a rebound too. Or maybe Chell gets to be single and jealous. I don’t think anyone would go for shit like MossDOS or genericrebelnpcDOS tho and I don’t do ocs.” Then Colette activated in my brain
With “roboticist” and “crazy” being the only things we have on her personality, I think they make a good base for having her be with GLaDOS. Colette being a robotics engineer gives her and GLaDOS potential for:
If you play the games the way they’re “meant to be played,” Chell is quiet, unflinching, and just a little quirky with it, so I think someone who outwardly matches/exceeds GLaDOS’ freak would be funny to pair with her.
Since Colette has lots of room left on her slate, I will add a bit of headcanon to make things juicier:
Other than what I saw checking tags here, I don’t know how widespread the Gina Cross and Colette Green ship is, but I ship it. My take: They got romantically involved while working together at Black Mesa, and while they were very passionate when they were alone together, Gina preferred not to be very public with it. You can attribute it to Gina’s more proffessional personality if you want a slightly less heavy reason compared to the sadly more realistic one. This explains why the colorblind security guards try to flirt with both characters in Decay. Colette didn’t want to keep it secret, and it came out to a few scientists, who were all cool about it, but it caused strains whenever Gina was there to witness it and tried to divert the subject. With the events of Half Life 1 causing the events of Decay, the two were getting closer, until the game ends (I don’t really remember what their goal was but it was probably some weird shit that was added on to be important to what Gordon was doing in a convoluted way). I operate under the assumption that Colette survived, and remains in G-Man’s pocket dimension thing.
In Opposing Force, a corpse with Gina’s face model but a different colored HEV suit can be found in Xen; it is not explicitly stated in any games or official material to be Gina Cross herself. A writer years later claimed it was her on social media, but it’s subjective whether claims made that way should be taken as fact, and with everything in the gearbox expansions being in canon limbo anyway, most of what I’m discussing doesn’t really matter much if you’re “playing by the books.” Despite the discrepencies, I personally go with that being Gina Cross’s corpse, because one of the Half Life franchise’s biggest problems is that nobody dies and stays dead.
Whether Colette was aware of, or even personally witnessed Gina’s death is also unknown, so I guess whichever seems more appropriate for a given story will work.
Last headcanon: I’m not as dug-in to the Half Life side, but I saw someone else saying the automated female voice for all HEV suits was Gina Cross herself. The official voice actors are different, and they could’ve actually meant the training course in the tutorial, but I like the idea, and she is canonically the one who designed the HEV suit.
With all that said, here is the workings of a little concept that I had:
(There’s a version of this in my head that’s a full-ass AAA game, sorta like that cancelled ravenholm game with the opposing force guy, but with my motivation levels this thing will be lucky if it makes it to a single chapter of a fanfic.)
During an altercation involving the G-Man, some, or possibly all, of his assets have been randomly released from stasis. Colette Green is awakened by rain falling on her face, and finds herself on a cliffside dotted with the wreckage of a large facility. She has nothing to her name but her H.E.V. Suit, and after screaming into the air and punching several rocks, the suit’s automated voice tells her to seek medical attention. It’s Gina Cross’ voice, which just drives her crazier with grief. As she follows the only path there is, through overgrown parts of the facility, she is beset upon by Xen creatures, many being unfamiliar to her, and having cybernetic enhancements that seem almost parasitic*. She has to fistfight, evade, and use her environment to get past the critters, and once she finally moves into safer parts of the facility, she is barely standing. She begins scavenging for supplies, and discovers that this is Aperture Labs, a place she knew of only by reputation. With no HEV chargers and Aperture’s health and safety deficits, she is forced to modify her suit with whatever she can salvage. She notices that some of the security cameras still follow her, but after they don’t produce any meaningful reactions, she assumes they’re just tied to motion detectors. Her voice’s radio picks up garbled transmissions in certain areas, but none seem useful, even the clearly decipherable ones. At first she has to salvage supplies from office areas, storage areas, and loading bays, which offer some raw materials that she can patch herself up with and begin attempting to build a long-range communication device, and she finds a good melee weapon for use against the occasional small critter. After going through several papers, maps, and whatever computers still work, she chooses to head for a test track, and discovers a Portal gun. Of course she’s fascinated by the device, but her main objective isn’t to test, so she brute forces and walks right through some of the damaged tests, but finds herself getting into it when she needs to finish one to progress. Along the way, she meets the turrets, uses some broken ones to build her own “regular” gun, uses some to defend against the Xen creatures, and further modifies her HEV suit, now with long fall boot parts and other quality of life gadgets. Her loneliness is getting to her, and she starts hearing Gina’s voice in her head, so to distract herself she forcefully befriends a wounded turret, and carries them around on her back so they can shoot things for her.
Eventually, all of Colette’s physical needs are met, so now all that’s left to do is find out what happened while she was in stasis and find long-range communications. She begins snooping more actively, and as she pokes and prods deeper and deeper, she finds parts of the facility in pristeen condition, still operating cleanly, if seemingly a bit sluggish and directionless. To her frustration, there are no humans left, but as she gets closer and closer to the answers she seeks, she feels like she’s actually being watched now, and every room she enters seems to whir to life whenever she approaches. Still left with so many gaps in her knowledge, the rooms and walkways now begin to shift with a clear purpose and path, which she distrusts and avoids at first. The facility just tries harder and harder, and she begins lashing out at the paths, until she’s left with no options but to follow. The walkways lead her directly into some test chambers, which she is forced to solve. She’s great at it, even when the chambers begin to cheat. What’s strange is that with their increases in complexity, they contain less hazards than the earlier tests. The radio reciever in her suit starts to pick up sounds, fuzzy at first, but they become clearer as she progresses through each test. It’s a robotic female voice, that doesn’t seem to be speaking, just making very quiet “observation noises.” Humming, sighing, ohs and ahs, chuckling, and moans. Gilette finally calls the voice out by refusing to solve a test and shouting “Who the hell are you? I can hear your fucking moans!”
The voice is taken off guard, and sounds really embarrassed, then figures out that she hears her because of the HEV suit. Colette had learned the hard way that the emancipation grills fried Aperture tech that went through them, unless covered by another material that wasn’t listed for destruction in the grill’s system, so she had been avoiding them, breaking them down, and wrapping her valuables in abandoned jumpsuits. The test door opens, but Colette can see the grid flicker off and on again for a moment, suspecting it had been updated, and shoots through the glass of an observation window. She makes one halfhearted attempt to get completely off the path, but lets her rage set in and brute forces through several more chambers that are mostly just traps to get her through an emancipation grill, until she’s led into a fool-proof one with no way out but through it. She pieces together that her ability to test is what’s important to the voice, and begins bargaining.
“I know you can hear me. I know that you don’t want to kill me, because you would’ve done so already. I know you want me to keep doing these tests. Either come to me or let me come to you.”
“I kinda like doing these tests. I can tell you like watching me do them. We can work something out.”
“Alright then. I guess you don’t care about these tests.”
Colette puts her gun to her own head.
“I’ll just kill myself then. It’s easier, and I don’t exactly have much to live for. It’s been fun, lady.”
Colette squeezes the trigger
The voice frantically begs her not to
The emancipation grill turns off, and the next chamber has a portal emitter open for her to finally meet GLaDOS
Multiple Choice Question:
Once she meets GLaDOS, Colette Green decides to:
A: Demand answers to what happened during her stasis
B: Demand access to a long range communications system
C: Demand to know who and what GLaDOS is and what her intentions are
D: Make a mutually beneficial deal with GLaDOS to progress the plot and the yuri
E: Immediately get wet and sloppy with the robot
Voting ended onMar 5, 2025
Grades and answer sheet will be posted next week. This question will be on the test.
From there the toxic yuri builds up as these two awesome unstable freaks bring out the best worst most fun parts of each other. Two smart bitches telling each other exaaaaactly.
The things Colette will do to GLaDOS, with her masters in robotics and PhD in mechanical engineering, is beyond anything Chell could ever fathom. Gina Cross’ spirit is weeping. Colette basically buys Atlas and P-Body’s love with upgrades and cool stuff she scavenged, like a [gender neutral term for aunt/uncle] buying their [gender neutral term for niece/nephew] an xbox for christmas. GLaDOS feels deeply ashamed that she’s been getting it on with a Black Mesa employee but she likes everything else about Colette so far and eventually it turns into a kinky roleplay thing. When G-Man is done with half life 5’s plot or whatever he goes through the list trying to recapture all his missing assets, and when he sees a nude Colette clinging to Glados’ underside and pulling her wires with her teeth he figures it’s not worth trying to get her back. I can clearly see either of them holding a cigarette in bed after their first time and thinking “god I needed that”
Is my vison too niche or completely stupid? Idgaf it’s funny
*for the Portal: Rebound lore, the parasitic cybernetic enhancements on the Xen creatures are basically what regular aperture tech does when it’s left unchecked and evolves, like that movie Screamers 2. They evolved like earth animals do and gain basic instincts to first simply survive, then propogate, and eventually some parasites become sentient. Some parasites simply run off of their hosts’ energy, others begin altering and taking over their minds. Things get bad when leftover combine-altered creatures like gunships and striders get infected with parasites that lead to larger leaps in Aperture parasite evolution, and maybe even alerting the Combine themselves to Aperture tech. This is a half-baked concept because I just wanted to give Colette some new cool things to fight but once the lesbian shit starts it doesn’t matter to me
