Portal: Unrequited

Characters: GLaDOS, Wheatley

Synopsis: It's the hanahaki disease trope, but with robots and a twist. No androids, no humanisations.

She couldn't see it. But she could feel it.

It had begun many years ago and, as with all things that threatened to disrupt her meticulous plans, she had ignored it. The day it began to divert her resources, however, was the day she decided it was high time she found out what those nanobots, which she could not contact for some reason, were using her primary CPU as a base to build.

Whatever it was seemed to be extremely thin, given that it was now making its way out of her core, and there was quite a lot of it. Her best estimate was some sort of wiring. Wiring which she did not need and had not asked for. It wasn't in her view at the moment, so she was going to have to use the camera on a Multitasking Arm. That was simple enough. What she saw, however, was… baffling.

It did look like some sort of wiring, but the purpose of it was remarkably unclear. The visible lengths of it were poised to curl around everything it could reach, and there were a lot of them. She felt apprehensive, suddenly. Perhaps she shouldn't have let this sit for so long. Oh well. It didn't matter. She'd just pull them out and go on with things. She'd figure out what had caused it later. It was getting too annoying to ignore any longer. Having decided on her course of action, she took one of the tendrils more firmly in the claw and pulled.

The pain was unlike anything she had ever felt before.

She was not really a stranger to pain. The engineers, in their facsimile of wisdom, had decided it would be easier and more convenient if she could just tell them if some component was beginning to fail, and so she had been provided a sort of virtual neural network for that purpose. The trouble with it was that it was faulty. Very, very faulty. Since the day it had been installed it had been providing her with false feedback information about how everything in her body from her suspension apparatus to her primary hard drive itself was about to break down. The closer the system believed the component to be to failure, the more severe the feedback it provided. So she was well used to compartmentalising that sort of thing and moving on. She would never get anything done if she didn't.

This, though, was so severe she couldn't compartmentalise it. It had wiped all thought from her brain other than the one telling her how excruciating what she'd just done was, and it had gone so far as to temporarily disable her vision and change the colour of the indicator lights on the panels making up the walls. She looked, apprehensive, through the maintenance arm at the silvery strand she was still holding. That had been… unexpected. And something she really did not want to go through again even once, let alone however many times it would take to remove all of them in the unlikely case that she managed to yank this one out on the next try.

Now that she considered it, pulling things out of her CPU without really considering the consequences of such an action was a pretty stupid idea. Thoughtlessly yanking it out of the socket while she was still operating was just about the opposite of what she needed right now. All right then. It wasn't going away on its own and she could not excise it. The next step was to figure out what was spurring it and take action to stop it from continuing. The nanobots were still rudely refusing to respond to her, so she was going to have to do this the more inconvenient way: by running tests on herself. Unfortunately, these were not the fun kinds of tests. All right. They were sort of fun. She just preferred it when she was not the test subject. She couldn't observe the test and be part of it at the same time!

Now that she was conscientiously studying the phenomenon, she was able to quickly conclude that the growth rate had something to do with her thoughts and not her actions. So she ran through every word she knew and measured the degree to which it sped up or slowed the nanobots. This took a considerable amount of time to take care of, but when it was finished she had a basic shortlist of the kinds of topics that seemed to be damning her.

What she found was very, very strange, because all of the words on her list pointed to the cause of this issue being… the test subject. More specifically, GLaDOS's feelings on her. Even more specifically, GLaDOS's feelings about her.

"I don't miss you," she said aloud. "I don't even like you."

The nanobots acted in prompt disagreement, and she scrambled her thoughts quickly in order to change the subject. All right, all right. Maybe she did. A little bit. Not very much. Certainly not in proportion to whatever the nanobots seemed to feel the need to construct straight out of her primary CPU.

Further testing, however, concluded that she was wrong.

By the time she was convinced, the coils had each added another three inches and she did not know what to do with herself. She would not have believed it if the fact that data did not lie was not so deeply encoded into her system.

She had… feelings for the test subject. And the knowledge that she had to live with them, unrequited, was killing her.

How stupid. How ridiculous. How unfair. It was really her that deserved this problem. She couldn't be doing anything useful up there. She was probably already dead. How was GLaDOS to make Scientific advancements with this stupid thing being endlessly constructed on her? How did she get it to stop? The test subject wasn't coming back and she knew that. But the data implied that she was pining over it anyway.

"I am not," she muttered vehemently. "So I think about her a lot. So what? Anyone would spend a lot of time thinking about the person who tried to murder them. Twice."

As usual, the nanobots disagreed.

"All right. Maybe I… didn't mind her company. But that's it. There's nothing more."

No. No, that wasn't working either. Probably because it was a lie.

"So this is it," she said to the empty room. "Of all the ways I could go out, I'm being digitally strangled by some sort of absurd physical manifestation of a… of my emotions about someone I will never see again. And there is nothing I can do to stop it."

The increased behaviour of the nanobots confirmed what she'd said.

"I went through all of that… for nothing."

The stupid conscience she was now stuck with had wheedled at her a while back about how she should forgive the Behavioural Cores and that none of their annoyingness was their fault, really, and how would she feel if she were one of them, and out of a terrible moment of weakness she had done as it advised. Her testing robots were extremely pleased with this arrangement, given they now had dozens of people to help them irritate her as much as possible, and though she considered reversing this decision many hundreds of times she ultimately just left things as they were. As long as the Cores stayed far away from her, things would be fine. And… well. It was kind of nice, having someone to talk to. None of her conversations with the Cores went on for very long, since they apparently found her quite cruel, tyrannical, and terrifying (not always in that order), but still. It was an almost welcome way to distract herself from the steadily increasing thing the nanobots were building and the steadily decreasing amount of her own resources that it was leaving her to use. The latter was becoming a problem, and very quickly. If she didn't solve it soon, she was going to begin not responding under high task loads and that was unacceptable. And… a little frightening, honestly. So as annoying as it was to know there were a whole lot of ungrateful balls of ignorant scrap metal roaming around her facility, it did keep her from thinking. And she needed to avoid that as much as possible.

The first time she spoke to Wheatley, though, it was by mistake.

She'd meant to return a message to someone whose title was next to his on her alphabetical list, but sent it to him instead. He was surprised to hear from her, as of course he should have been, but the bigger surprise was that he didn't really leave her alone after that. Even though he also thought she was cruel, tyrannical, and terrifying (not always in that order). She still hadn't worked out why he wanted to talk to her in the first place, but perhaps she wasn't the only one who had ended up with a conscience after…

No, she couldn't think about that.

He talked constantly, sometimes about whatever dull task she'd given him to keep him occupied for a while, but most of it was merely an endless relay of his thoughts. He didn't seem to notice she rarely answered him. She probably should have just blocked him and gone on with things a long time ago, and she would have. If, that was, the talking hadn't helped so much.

It was impossible to think about her mounting problem when he was blathering on like that. On top of the stupid accent, his voice was far too variable for her to remove much attention from him while still retaining the ability to understand what he was saying. Most of which was an incredible waste of her time. And yet… it was also giving her time, in a way, and she hadn't really thought of a better solution. Yet. So he talked, and she listened, and the monstrosity climbing out of her core slowed to a very minor crawl. It didn't stop. But it was good enough for now.

The trouble, of course, was how long it would be until 'for now' ran out.

It kept her up at night, sometimes, which only made it worse. The awful, crawling sensation of the robots she could not even see steadily adding to the tendrils that were now long enough to wind their way up through her rotator assembly. And from there it would continue to crawl up her chassis, to ensnare every bit of her it could reach as it choked the life out of her. Because it was starting to do that, now. A large chunk of the resources meant for her operations were now being used by the construction to do… she didn't even know what. She barely understood what was causing it. But it was slowing her down in increasing, steady increments. She was making as many changes as she could to minimise the damage, even though she knew it would only buy her a small amount of time at best. She found herself wondering, sometimes, if it would come to encase her before or after it killed her. It had not been content to spider outward from either side of her core, either; it was beginning to crowd her optic assembly through every niche it could find and at some point that thing was going to render her unable to move it at all.

She was running out of time to fix this. And because life was determined to make things as difficult as possible for her at every turn, Wheatley showed up. In person. And she didn't notice immediately.

"What do you want," she snapped in his direction. He had probably not stopped looking at her since he had arrived, and the last thing she needed just now was him running around the place, gossiping about this mess.

"What's happened?" he asked, and though she had expected it, she was still angry that he had done so.

"What does it matter?"

"It doesn't, I s'pose," he told her, frowning a little, "but I just wanted… well, I think it's nice."

That she had not expected. "Excuse me?"

He shrugged as best he could. "I dunno. It's sort of pretty. Looks like it's in the way, there, though. Of your, um, of your eye. Seems a bit restrictive. Might want to look into that."

Oh, he had no idea. "Was there something you wanted?"

"Uh… no. No, not really. I just thought… y'know, since, since we talk now, and all that, and things're good, that it'd be, that it might be nice if… if we got a bit of the ol' face-time in. I mean, you're here all by yourself, and even you can't um, can't be a fan of that all the time."

That was… surprisingly thoughtful of him.

"What is that, though?" he asked, moving closer. "Doesn't look um, like it's very helpful. Why've you gone and built it on yourself? If. If I can ask."

What the hell. Might as well tell someone about this mess. Maybe he'd have some sort of idea of how to fix it. She really hated admitting it, but he really could be quite clever.

"I… didn't put it here. It is… building itself."

His blink transitioned smoothly into a frown, but if he had any thoughts about that he kept them to himself.

"I don't know the cause, exactly," she continued slowly, "but it seems to stem from a lost… love… of mine." Which she would not be mentioning in the slightest if this wasn't her last chance at figuring out what to do about this.

"Oh," said Wheatley, a soft syllable. "That's… I'm sorry to hear that."

Oddly, she couldn't lift her optic from the downward position she was now finding it in any more than she could keep her next words to herself. "It was my own doing."

"So… so you lost your love, and then, and then… it made this happen?"

"I think so." As was usual, having the topic on her mind increased the rate of expansion. Her optic narrowed as she attempted to banish the thoughts. "I sent her away and she did not come back. Therefore my feelings are… unrequited." And cursed to carry that increasing burden until it overwhelmed her.

"So… you know she's not, she won't be here again."

"Yes."

"Look… no rush, just gonna put it out there, alright, just gonna put the thought in your mind, if I could: what if you uh, if you found another love? One that, you know. Is around."

"I don't know," she said in irritation. "And just where would I even locate such a person?"

"That uh… is why I'm here, actually. Wanted to… to suggest it. That. We. You know. Give something a go, maybe."

She lifted her core to look at him. He was serious. He was completely, totally serious. "You want me to love you."

He shook himself. "Not if you don't want to. I don't um, I won't say I understand what's happ'ning to you. But… s' not a tragedy to love someone and, and for that to be all there is. Least, it shouldn't be."

Dammit. He was right. How could he be right? She felt compelled to turn away.

Why had it become her tragedy?

"I think about you a lot," Wheatley said without preamble, and she was surprised enough she almost looked at him. "Dunno why. You've never been particularly nice to me, or anything. But I just… I do, and… well we've talked, a little, and you didn't… seem to totally despise me. Our chats, they… they went well. And, well… there've been some… uh, shall we say, whispers lately. Didn't believe them, didn't do that at all. Until I um… well, you know you've got entire collapsed floors down there, don't you luv?"

No. No, she hadn't known that.

"I know you think all my ideas are uh, are terrible, it um… well, seems you might. Be able to use a couple of them. Not that you don't know what you're doing! But –"

"Even if it stops right now," she interrupted, voice surprisingly flat, "it's killing me. You wouldn't understand if I tried to explain it to you, so I'll save us both the time. Let's just say it's probably one of the shorter relationships you could get into."

"Um… well, maybe I've uh, I've got it wrong, but… loving someone's about doing what's best for them, yeah? Not yourself?"

That also made sense! But… she faced him again, optic narrowing. "That's very insightful, coming from you."

He shifted his chassis and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. But when I was out there in space, and I was thinking about uh, about where it all went wrong, I only… really got anywhere when I uh, when I… when I realised if I'd thought less about myself then… per'aps that whole mess wouldn't've happened. So… well, I'm not, I'm not perfect at it, but uh, but I do think about, about others now. Bit more. Or I try to." He was looking at her sideways now.

"And what if this happens to you?"

His smile was a little sad. "Then I hope someone comes by to help me out, I s'pose. What d'you say? I'm not… I'm not asking you to stop caring 'bout her. Not trying to replace her, or uh, or asking that you care about me. But… I think I might care about you already, so… wouldn't hurt if I just… did it in here. 'stead of out there. Who knows. Maybe it'll even help you out a bit."

"That's a horrible idea," she said bluntly. He sort of half-shrugged and turned around.

"I know."

"But it's better than all the ideas I've had. Which is to say… none."

He resettled himself, seeming to become a little more attentive.

"Your creativity would be… an asset to me. However."

He nodded. "Yeah?"

"I do not know if you can be trusted." She nearly levelled with him, but only to capture and hold all of his attention. "But I am running out of options and out of time to find said options. So. You can have your chance. Prove to me that you're serious about this… help you're offering. Only after that will we address any… further actions."

"Sounds fair!" he said cheerfully.

Fall in love with him? No. Love was not a hole you could trip into, or a precipice you could teeter over. It was effort. It was work. It was…

She found herself looking up at the ceiling.

"Luv?"

"Will you answer a question for me?"

"Uh… I can give it a go, yeah."

Now that she was thinking it over, she didn't really want to, but… if things got out of hand she could always find an excuse to get rid of him.

"You said that you might care for me. That is… you believe yourself to be falling in love with me." She looked down at him. "But how can you do that if you don't actually know me at all?"

He was quiet for a long minute, and then he said, "That's… part of the falling bit, I s'pose. Once you've fallen you'll um, you'll know if they're someone worth getting back up for."

"But they can't be," she said quietly to herself, "if the person you fell for doesn't exist."

"I s'pose not."

For the first time since she could remember, it stopped for just a second. The strange construction spreading outwards from her brain went still and silent. It was only one second, but it was long enough for her to know what she had to do now.

It was time to stop revering a ghost.

"The floors that collapsed," she said after a moment. "Do you know how to fix that?"

"Uh… no. No, I don't."

"Well. If you really want to help, we can start there. Reconstruction is not difficult to do but it is quite difficult to screw up. Even for you."

"Alright," he said, quite cheerfully for someone who had just been passively insulted. "You're the boss!"

"You had better not forget that," she told him, without quite meaning to, and watching the spirit go right out of him was almost a little bit sad.

"I'm sorry," said Wheatley, quietly, and for some reason she believed him. Maybe it had something to do with this whole 'volunteering to be helpful' thing. She'd think about it. Later.

"I accept your apology."

Right now they had work to do.

Author's note

Forgive me for saying this, but when I learned of this trope I was like 'that is so eye-rollingly angsty I can't even take it seriously' and I wanted to think of some way to turn it on its head. So I asked myself, what if I did it with robots but instead of person A dying or person B being manipulated into caring about them, there's a person C who falls in love with them instead and it doesn't REVERSE the disease but it does stop it. That's what I did here. I'm sorry I just get really bothered by 'for the sake of the angst' tropes and I always want to do something about them.

The last part is about… well. A lot of people like to believe GLaDOS is hopelessly in love with Chell, and that's okay. If you believe that I'm not trying to be a jerk. But… GLaDOS doesn't KNOW Chell. She doesn't know anything about her except her name, and since that line didn't make it into the game we don't know if she actually even knows that. If GLaDOS does love Chell at the end of Portal 2, she isn't in love with a person, but the idea she's built of one, and made in circumstances so extreme that the real thing might never be good enough. So in this Wheatley is kind of doing the same thing, and she wants to know what happens when you find out the idea isn't real.

This might not be up to standard totally, but I didn't want to spend too long on what's really sort of a concept I wanted to look at than anything substantial. The idea is that she's got like these rogue nanobots building kind of metal vines (the flower roots) out of her CPU (her brain/heart) and it's sucking all of her RAM and stuff away from where it needs to be (suffocating her, sort of).