In some respects Wheatley adjusted better to their new world than Chell did.
The sights and sounds of the small town still had the power to overwhelm her months after she had first stumbled onto its streets. The strange environment was a controlled chaos, made up of parts she didn't recognize and had no hope of mastering, populated by people who understood everything with an ease that infuriated her.
She couldn't shake the anxiety she felt when the residents of the town stopped to watch her on her errands, held out their hands to catch her attention, tried to speak with her even when she bowed her head to stare at the ground and hurry away. The meager home she worked daily to keep was her only refuge from the weight of their eyes and their prying questions.
Wheatley, on the other hand, had much less to become accustomed to. She kept him well-hidden and he was more than happy to hide, never once daring to ask what lay beyond their doorstep. At first the core was timid and remorseful, but with time his confidence grew, and he seemed to accept his new existence, maybe even embrace it. His life was small and simple, and he was happy.
Sometimes she hated him for it.
Wheatley was offline when they were ejected from Aperture.
Chell spent the first few hours of freedom in a haze of disbelieving laughter and delirious tears. Lying on her back to soak up the warmth of the sun she dreaded the moment when she would wake up, her back stiff from the bed of another relaxation chamber, her head throbbing from another long sleep. But she never woke up.
Instead, she stood and stretched her aching limbs, her gaze falling on his battered form resting nearby. He hadn't said a word since the pair had been thrown out of the earth. Though he wasn't moving, the sight of him sent an unpleasant chill through her body.
She left him to rust.
Hours later Chell returned to the abandoned shack to find him still there, his optic and handles still half-buried in the loose dirt.
She kicked him in the side and he rolled away but gave no indication he'd felt anything.
She kicked him again, much harder, this time leaving a sizeable dent in his hull, but still he didn't stir.
She reached down to grab onto a handle and began to make her way slowly toward civilization, dragging the dead weight of the damaged core behind her through the dust and wheat.
He remained unresponsive for weeks.
By the charity of strangers Chell secured a place to live and a way to pay for it through physical labor. She worked and ate and slept, and in her free time she cared for him.
One day she wiped the dirt from his hull with a moist cloth, carefully cleaning each component until he shone like new.
The next day she took him outside and threw him to the ground, pushing him down into the dirt and rocks to dig the gritty material in through the seams of his hull.
For a moment she thought she could hear the core wailing, begging her to stop, but the illusion faded just as she paused to appreciate it.
Days later she brought him back inside and made a nest of blankets for him on the couch. He looked appropriately small tucked within the ample folds of cloth.
She settled uneasily into her new life, each day returning from work to sit near him in the silence of her home and wait until morning. To pass the time she watched him for any signs of activity, but he never moved and never spoke outside of her own terrifying dreams.
The thought crossed her mind to discard the obviously broken core but each time she carried him to the door she stopped, turned around, and returned him to the couch.
She wasn't sure what she was waiting for.
One evening, an unfamiliar voice interrupted the peace of her small living space with a brief and cheerful announcement that core repairs had been completed, and he woke angry and confused, screaming at her to let go of him, to fly off into space and just die already.
The core's voice faltered when he took notice of his location and her attire. He pieced together what had happened sooner than Chell would have expected.
The frantic apologies that followed sounded almost heartfelt.
For the next few weeks her nights were filled with his voice loudly broadcasting regret about every scathing remark, every despicable act he'd committed against her. He was sorry, he was sorry, he was so terribly awfully sorry, and would she ever forgive him?
Beneath the remorse of his words was a trace of poorly-hidden terror she found she rather enjoyed.
Wheatley knew as well as Chell did that he was at her mercy, and that his continued existence outside of Aperture would depend on his ability to inspire pity in her. She could drop him in the garbage or hold him underwater or tear out his internal components whenever she felt like it, and the unspoken possibilities tinged every lopsided conversation he initiated with her.
He flinched visibly whenever she moved closer to him, so she made a point to do so often.
She pretended to ignore him through his more tearful confessions—something about researchers, about her, about being alone and scared for so long—preferring to cycle idly through the television stations rather than give him the attention he seemed to crave so desperately.
She found it discouraged him when she increased the volume of the television to drown his voice out, and over the course of an evening discerned through trial and error the exact volume that caused him to give up completely.
From time to time she would turn off the light and left him alone in the room. Moments later she'd return to the doorway to watch the panicked darting of his optic in the dark and to savor his privately mumbled words of self-assurance that he was alright, that he wasn't in any real danger, that the lady would turn the light back on if he waited long enough.
She supposed his flashlight had broken sometime after his betrayal.
But she never did toss him out, or drown him, or disrupt the parts that kept him running, and in time his fervent apologies faded to leave only confusion.
Even if she could have responded, she wouldn't have had an answer to the meek question he posed one night—"Why didn't you leave me there?"—and the silence that followed it, so unnatural for Wheatley, seemed significant for reasons Chell couldn't place.
Whatever answer the core supplied to himself seemed to satisfy him, and his mood improved quickly in the days that followed.
He began to take an interest in Chell and her daily activities, chirping a cheerful greeting to her each morning and inquiring about this or that household object, seemingly untroubled by her lack of response.
He praised her incessantly in everything she did, no matter how mundane. The sound of his meaningless words strung so clumsily together became a constant in her life, a constant that she quickly learned to disregard.
He didn't like it when she left for work or to run errands—she made no attempt to correct his assumption that one day she would not come back for him—but he brightened considerably whenever she returned, welcoming her back home for the night and expressing a strong but politely-worded wish that she would stop leaving like that every day.
He learned to control the television remote with his handle when she accidentally left it too close to him one morning, and he became captivated by the pictures and sounds he could call forth to keep him company while she was away. She slid the remote beneath his handle some days after that, other days ignoring his requests and leaving it plainly visible to the core but out of reach on a shelf nearby.
He never complained when she did that.
Sometimes, when she was in another room or out of Wheatley's sight, he would seem to be seized by a sudden fear that she had somehow disappeared, and he would call out to her to make sure she was still there. She often waited hours to respond to his distress, sparing the stunned core little more than a glance when she finally reappeared in his line of vision.
One day, after an unusually long stretch of silence, Wheatley asked her to sit with him on the couch. She responded by leaving the room and closing the door to the sound of his hasty apologies. Through the wall she could hear him berating himself for offending her, for bothering her again, couldn't he do anything right?
His frustration satisfied her.
Wheatley was a monster, she knew, but now he was a monster with no claws and no teeth, a howling fury reduced to a barely-mobile sphere chattering innocently to her from a pile of blankets on top of a couch.
He was vulnerable and uncertain and she, only she had the power to make him feel that way. And she could do it whenever she chose, whenever the world outside made her feel small enough to need to prove that someone existed who was even smaller than she was.
But she held back. She didn't pry apart the plates of his hull and take a knife to the mass of wires within, or tear the bent handles from his frame, or enact any of the other torments that came to her mind as she lay in bed each night listening to his hushed narration in the other room.
Instead, she watched with a detached curiosity as his affection toward her grew, his comfort in his tiny new world of Chell and Television and Blankets insulating him from the difficulties of life outside Aperture. She told herself it was to maintain her power over him, to gain his trust, to make sure he would be unsuspecting if—when—she chose to break him.
His existence pressed blithely onward.
One evening, she returned home from a particularly rough day at work and was met by his voice excitedly calling out the name he had apparently decided was hers.
"Lady!"
She froze at the sound, an odd and alarming strain pulling at the muscles of her face, and she ran past him to the bathroom. Standing before the mirror to assess the damage, she quickly realized what was wrong.
She was smiling.
Wheatley had made her smile.
A few days of cold indifference toward him did not remedy the situation. Earplugs didn't cut out enough of his voice to fully protect her from it, and turning the core so that his optic faced the back of the couch resulted in mild indignation from him and yet another unwelcome smile from her, accompanied this time by a harsh laugh cut off somewhere in her throat.
Chell set him right again and sat back on her heels in front of the couch, staring into his questioning optic.
She wondered absently if the scratches on the split surface impaired his vision.
His gaze dropped and he muttered a quiet apology—her anger flared. What was he apologizing for, he hadn't done anything that time— she took hold of his handle and jerked downward.
His vocal processor tripped in a terrified stutter and he fell silent, waiting for the violence she was sure he could see in her eyes.
Chell's hand began to tremble.
She wanted to pick him up and shake him, to rattle the cracked optic in his frame, to wring more of that worthless, pointless remorse from him. She wanted to punish him for daring to make her smile again like he had so long before.
Her breath quickened, each beat of the rapid-fire pounding in her chest spreading like a jolt of electricity throughout her body.
She was bigger than he was. Stronger. She could crush him if she wanted to, drive the life from his circuits with a well-aimed hammer smuggled home from work, or simply smash his optic in and leave him to the darkness he seemed to fear so much.
She could break the core's unsteady trust just as he had once destroyed hers. She could shatter the illusion of safety and security and forgiveness he'd foolishly built around himself.
It would be easy, and nobody would stop her.
But she couldn't bring herself to do it.
Something was different, something was wrong—he was scared of her, completely powerless, unable to speak or fight back against anything she might do, but somehow the thought gave her no satisfaction.
Chell released his handle and laughed again in disbelief.
His optic closed tight at the sound.
She stood and moved toward the bedroom door, pausing with her hand over the light switch. After a moment's deliberation she left the room still lit.
Slamming the door shut behind her, she leaned back against it to consider her revelation.
He was a monster.
And she was one too.
She wasn't a woman exacting a deserved revenge on a vicious enemy—she was a bully picking apart a helpless robot.
Wheatley deserved it, of course. He deserved every ounce of uncertainty and pain she could wring from him. She could hurt him and keep hurting him every day until he lost function and it wouldn't be enough to make up for what he had done.
But if she destroyed him, would it change anything? Would it heal her wounds to inflict more upon him, to feed his cries of fear to that black pit he'd dug deep inside of her?
She suspected she knew the answer.
Maybe his apologies so many months before had been insincere and self-serving. Maybe every word he spoke was meant to protect him, to somehow make him worth keeping around for another day. But he was there and he was familiar, the only part of her new life that she had any measure of control over. Now that he held no power over her, his voice was the only sound outside of Aperture's walls that felt—absurd though it seemed—comfortable and right to hear.
And somehow, he had made her smile.
Chell turned and pressed her ear to the door, barely picking up the faint sound of the core struggling to calm himself down in the other room.
Wheatley was weak. She knew that in his reduced state he couldn't possibly hurt her—she'd known it all along. But as she stood straining to hear his nervously babbled words through the door, she was struck by a sudden and unexpected realization.
She didn't want to hurt him anymore.
Wheatley settled back into an uneasy calm over the next few days. He seemed to forget the incident by the end of the week and returned to his customary state of infectious optimism soon after.
Chell allowed herself a smile at the sound of his relieved greetings each night, a quiet laugh at each poorly-conceived joke he attempted to tell, and soon after she decided not to fight the pleasant flutter in her chest that sometimes came from hearing him speak.
In return, she left the lights on during the night and gave him the remote each morning.
She chose to sit beside him sometimes, rather than across the room or in the kitchen, and his whole body seemed to swell with a pride bordering on arrogance at the change, but coming from a badly-damaged core half buried in blankets the gesture was no longer threatening to her.
He told her every thought that came to him while she was gone, whether it was about the people he saw on television, or about her, or him, or even what had happened at Aperture. And she listened, sometimes long enough that she fell asleep beside him on the couch and woke hours later to realize he had never stopped talking.
Where her coworkers were abrasive and rude, and the people she passed on the street were so casually invasive, he was friendly and warm and endlessly appreciative of her presence.
It felt good.
Before she knew it had even happened, she found herself looking forward to hearing his voice greeting her each day after work.
As much as he'd taken from her at Aperture, he was giving her something else now, something she never would have expected herself to need. Though nothing he said could erase what he had done to her, his words had the power to calm her and to chase away the troubles of her days. She saw no reason to fight it, no reason to let the wounds of their past fester unchecked within her when there was still life to live.
He was hers to do with what she wished, whether that meant destroying him or enjoying his company, and she had more than earned the right to make that decision.
And to reverse it, she assured herself, if she ever felt the need to.