Once, there was an android who escaped his nightmares and ran to freedom.
Once, there was a woman who left the only place she had ever known to find a world of emptiness and a dearth of living souls.
Once, there was a woman who had been stripped of her humanity and forced into a computer that turned bitter and merciless over time.
This is their story.
It begins with Wheatley the android finally escaping GLaDOS and running to the surface
He runs for days and days until his joints almost freeze and his legs almost wear out
But he can't stop
He has to see her
He has to say something to her anything to her
Finally, after days and days he sees her, walking alone in an abandoned wheat field with her face turned towards the sky
He's an android. It's not physically possible for him to get a lump in his throat or butterflies in his stomach, but every single coherent thought he's ever had comes crashing down at the sight of her
She hears him coming. It's obvious from the way she cocks her head and turns just enough to see him standing there, his bright blue eyes illuminating the otherwise dark and empty surroundings
All he can do is stand there, mesmerized at the sight of her whole and clean, without her ribs showing underneath that wretched jumpsuit and without the dark circles under her eyes or pasty skin from lack of sunlight
She looks good, healthy, beautiful his robotic brain thinks before he can stop the thought from emerging
All he can do is whisper a quiet, "love" to her as she stands there, clearly as dumbstruck as he is
A beautiful brief shining moment exists as they stand whole and together and quietly, crickets singing in the distance and above them the omnipresent moon
He can't tell if it's a smile or a grimace on her face, but she's wiping away tears and she's trying to catch her breath
She walks up slowly, carefully, as if she expects him to attack her. He doesn't blame her, of course. And he can still see the glisten of tears on her lovely perfect face as she reaches out, fingers light as the wings of a butterfly, to rest on his cheek and feel the pulse of electricity and the thud of machinery underneath his simulated skin
And before he can do anything but breathe a silent sigh of relief, she's gone
She's running at the speed of a bullet from a turret, leaving a trail of displaced wheat strands that he has to stumble through to follow her
"LOVE! WAIT! PLEASE, J-JUST WAIT! I'M SORRY, I'M SO DREADFULLY TERRIBLY SORRY"
She stops in the middle of her run, muscles tensing and pulsing and he doesn't know what to do when she turns around again and runs to him and takes him by the collar of his makeshift jumpsuit and crushes him against her in a mind-blowing, synapse-melting kiss that shatters the pleasure sensors on every millimeter of his lips and sends his brain awhirl in a happy dance
All too soon, it's over and the hold on his jumpsuit is a different kind of passion when she hits him, harder and faster every time and his brain doesn't know how to react and his brain sensors go haywire trying to stop her and stop the pain
his arms hang like dead weights at his side and he just can't move because some part of him knows, just knows that he deserves this, deserves every outpouring of her pain and betrayal and the damage he caused and her heart breaking every time she had to say goodbye to the android she had come to love, the android who had somehow become more of a human in her perfect blue eyes
After far too long, she stops, breathing and heaving and crying and shouting and another part of him screams at him to help her, to /fix/ this because it's his fault all of this is his fault but just like every other time he can't. He just can't
She slowly sinks to the ground, sobbing with every exhale and inhale as she falls apart in front of him and it's just another thing he can't fix
He crouches down next to her, attempting to put a friendly hand on her back when she seizes him in a wild desperate embrace that somehow tells him that she still needs him, he doesn't know why, but he makes a silent promise to himself that he will never make her cry again
And his lips press to her forehead, attempting to say all the things that just wouldn't come out before
He whispers quiet apologies and confessions for what seems like hours under the waning moon
while he holds her and she cries
She calms just as the sun begins to show over the horizon, and her chest rises and falls in the unmistakable pattern of sleep
He carefully, quietly rearranges her so that she is sleeping on his lap instead of on his metallic shoulders and he covers her with her jacket that he found next to her in the field
And they stay there, Wheatley busy with thoughts of how he can redeem himself, how he can make her happy again, how to make her smile
as Chell dreams for the first time in a long time of love and of not being alone in an unfamiliar broken world
but then under the hard yellow gaze of the sun
the gears and robotic bits in Wheatley's head begin to turn and rebel against the compassionate beautiful terrible thoughts of their owner
And as Chell sleeps, Wheatley's eyes begin a slow transformation from their natural sky-blue optics to a colder, pitiless gaze
a cruel smile replaces his penitent gaze and his bright blue eyes turn a terrible pitiless cold yellow
No happy ending is permanent.