This is a fill for a portal_kink prompt made three years ago:
"Wheatley (any form will do) succeeds in killing Chell somehow. Unfortunately for him, the Chell came back- as a ghost. And now he can't ever get rid of her."
I was originally going to make it a comedy, but I've developed a somewhat disturbing thing for torturing Wheatley (he deserves it, the little shit. I spent most of Portal 2 wanting to crush his little spherical shell.) He seems to get forgiven (and thus, faces little to no consequences) for his actions far too often for my tastes, so let's torment the little bastard. For the purposes of this fic, he's android!Wheatley, because it's easier to torture a humanoid than a ball.
For all Wheatley's spirited attempts at killing the Lady, his success had still come as a shock.
She'd dealt with the bombs and the neurotoxin as though they were nothing but a day's work, shooting her portals and leaping through them with all the grace of a dancer. He'd been too caught up in his own rage to realize it at the time, but she was beautiful, this small, fierce human who refused to give up, no matter what he (literally) threw at her. Her expression was grim and set, but her eyes were alight with determination, even now, even when she had to know that she didn't have a chance.
After all that, the Stalemate Button should not have brought her down: if she was going to die, it should have been in some far nobler fashion.
But it wasn't.
The force of the explosion made the entire chamber shudder, and he laughed when it threw her backward, laughed when she hit the wet floor with a terrible crack of breaking bone. The portal gun flew from her hand, clattering uselessly beneath his chassis, and he gave her a grin of dark triumph.
"Should've given up when you had the chance, luv," he said, advancing on her. His hair and clothes were damp from the sprinklers, but he'd never felt so warm, so powerful, so alive. He had done this - him. Wheatley. The moron. Couldn't call him a moron now, could they? He'd won. "Shouldn't have gone against me in the first place. You were supposed to be my friend." He rested his foot on her chest, but he didn't press down, not yet. He'd only get one victory over her, after all; he'd better make it count. "Guess I should've expected better from a brain-damaged primate."
She didn't say anything - of course she didn't. The brain damage, and all, which was a pity. Wheatley wanted to hear her acknowledge it, wanted her to admit aloud that she'd been beaten. Failing that, he at least wanted fear, but she wouldn't even give him that. In the end, she gave him nothing but pain.
Her body jerked beneath his boot, and for a moment he thought she was still struggling, too stupid to know when to fold. A shudder wracked her entire frame, and she gave one great, dragging cough that sent blood welling between her lips. He realized, belatedly, that he could smell it, a hot-copper stench that stung in his nasal synapses. It pooled beneath her when he applied light pressure to her chest, a deep crimson wave that faded to pink where it mixed with the puddles of water.
The sight of it froze him. He knew that humans...leaked...when they were injured, but he'd never seen anything like this. A jagged shard of metal had pierced her left side, wedged between her ribs, and the white of her shirt slowly wicked red around it. Stark horror overtook his triumph, turning it to ashes in his mouth.
His eyes flew back to hers, and he found her watching him. Their clear sharpness was dulled by pain, but they fixated on him before turning skyward. She was looking at the moon, he realized: it was the symbol of the freedom she'd fought so hard for, and which she would never have now. Before he could do or say a thing, the light in their clear grey depths faded, and she went still.
A truly terrible silence fell. The corrupted cores on his chassis stopped their conflicting shrieking; even the potato was quiet, her tiny yellow optic hellishly bright. It was like the Lady's death had pulled the plug on all of them.
Wheatley stared at her, suddenly unable to remember why he'd been so angry with her, why he'd wanted so very much to kill her. She was so small where she lay
tiny, he'd called her, tiny and insignificant, but oh, she wasn't insignificant, she'd been magnificent and now she was dead
and so, so unnaturally still. There was something, he thought dimly, different about a sleeping human than a dead one: the latter was infinitely more horrible.
Abruptly, he sank to his knees, ignoring the water on the floor. He reached out one hand, almost hesitant, and touched her face. She'd been warm, before - humans were, he knew, even if he didn't have much experience of them before - but she was already cooling, the chill of the skin beneath his fingertips enough to make him snatch his hand away.
She should have moved at that, should have shifted or even blinked, but her sightless eyes only stared, still fixed on the moon. Had she ever seen it before? He realized, far too late, that he didn't actually know much about her. Could she even remember her life before Aperture, if she'd had one? Or had the desire to escape been instinct, a thought that facing the total unknown of the outside world would be better than staying trapped underground?
He didn't know, and now he never would.
When the potato spoke, Her voice jolted him like an electric shock. "We're going to blow up, you moron," She said flatly. "She was our only chance."
Wheatley's eyes flicked up from the Lady, lighting on the potato. Somehow, though She was nothing but a brown lump and a small yellow optic, she managed to exude more than just disapproval or derision: She practically radiated pure loathing. There was a type of rage in Her tinny voice that he'd never heard from Her. She'd been angry enough when they'd ripped Her from Her chassis, infuriated and in no small measure afraid, but this...where was this coming from?
"I can fix it," he said, but he couldn't keep the bleakness out of his voice. "I can fix this. I just need the Any key."
"Did he seriously just say that?" It was one of the cores: the loud American one, Wheatley thought, but he certainly wasn't loud now: his voice was hushed, as though he were in a crypt. Which, Wheatley realized, he now was.
When the potato spoke again, something like disbelief had joined the loathing in her tone. "Every time I think you can't be even more moronic...just push a key. A. Or 'Enter'. Or even the space bar. Any. Key."
It took a moment for comprehension to hit Wheatley, and with it came the burning shame he was so familiar with. Moron, moron, moron, he thought, oh, they were right, they'd really done a bang-up job with him, hadn't they? He really was exactly what they'd wanted, the dumbest moron who ever lived.
He stood, slowly, and returned to the chassis, though he couldn't take his eyes off the Lady. Some wild
stupid
part of him kept expecting her to move, to sit up and mock him with the force of her silence. Thought you had me there, Wheatley, didn't you? Thought you'd killed me?
He wished she would. He wished she'd crawl to her feet and throw a bomb at him, that she'd open a portal beneath him and drop him down the same shaft he'd thrown her into.
But she stayed still. The pool of blood widened around her, lapping up against his shoes, and he recoiled before he knew what he was doing. He scrabbled at the keyboard, frantically smashing whatever buttons he could find, but he couldn't tear his gaze away from her. Funny, he'd never really noticed her breathing, not until she wasn't anymore.
The violent shuddering of the walls ceased with a suddenness that left him reeling. The alarms went quiet, and he felt, through his connection to the entire facility, a stillness not unlike the Lady's spread outward from his lair (his lair, how had he ever thought that sounded anything but stupid?)
"That might just be the only intelligent thing you ever did," the potato said, just as flatly as before, but the loathing was somehow even worse. It wasn't just that, though, was it? It was hatred, yes, but there was an undercurrent that he only recognized because he was so deep in the throes of it himself: grief. She was mourning the Lady - She, who had spent so long testing and taunting her. What right did She have to grieve?
When he said nothing, the potato continued, Her voice scathing. "She thought I was a monster, but really, I've got nothing on you. At least I never pretended to be Chell's friend."
Wheatley started at that, and stared. "Chell?" he asked, his voice so small it surprised him.
The potato somehow managed to bark an incredulous laugh. "You didn't even know her name," She said scathingly. "Were you too stupid to read it in her Relaxation Chamber file? Or did you just not bother?"
He stayed uncharacteristically silent, hot shame filling him. The truth was, he hadn't bothered. He'd just found the one remaining, living human, and woken her up. He'd needed help, and he hadn't cared from whom. He'd never bothered to learn the names of the other six, either.
It hadn't been his intent to kill her, not until the chassis took hold. He'd had every intention of letting her go, sending that elevator up to the surface as he'd promised, once he'd ousted GLaDOS from her throne. Yes, he'd lied about his plan (if you could even call it that), but he'd never, ever meant to hurt her. Use her, yes, but he'd be helping her, too, so it was all good, right?
No.
The thought came from some deep recess of his mind that he hadn't realized was there. It was, he suspected, some shred of human morality, programmed into him for God only knew what reason. You weren't her friend, it whispered to him, but she was yours. She trusted you, and look where that got her?
He was looking. He couldn't help it. It wasn't like he knew what else to do.
There was no question about putting Her back in Her chassis. She'd use every ounce of Her sadistic creativity to make what was left of his life even more hellish than it already was - if that was even possible. At the moment, he couldn't imagine how it could be. He was stupid, but even he wasn't that much of a moron. But if he didn't, what was he to do?
Now what?
"I don't suppose you have an actual plan," the potato said, scorn and sarcasm joining the horrible emotional cocktail in Her voice. Though it was impossible to tell, Wheatley had a feeling that She too was looking at the Lady. At Chell. "It's not like you have any more test subjects to torture, now do you?"
He flinched visibly at her word, 'torture', but that terrible whisper in his mind insisted that that was, in fact, what he'd done. He hadn't been in it for the science, not like She claimed to be; he'd just wanted the euphoria.
Rather than respond, he knelt by Chell again. Her congealing blood dampened the knees of his trousers, but he hardly noticed. Her blank eyes, now filmed over with some sort of pale cataract, seemed to accuse him, indelibly burning the memory of his betrayal into the immutable hard drive that powered him. There would be no deleting it, though he'd try until the day he deactivated. He tried to close them, hoping she'd just look like she was sleeping, as she'd done for so very long before he woke her, but it didn't work. They stayed open, fixed in an eternal, blind stare.
He had to do something with her. He certainly couldn't just leave her: even he knew that humans decayed once they died, and the thought of watching it made him shudder. But somehow, incinerating her seemed no better: he couldn't just consign her to a nameless grave with all the defective creatures this hell had produced. There had to be some better option, if only he could think.
What he did next was literally done on auto-pilot. Despite the potato's vehement protests, he'd put Her into sleep mode - some instinct he couldn't explain kept him from simply incinerating it. The defective cores were pried from the chassis and returned to their bin, and they protested even more viciously, the American core hurling abuse the entire time.
Which left him alone with Chell.
Yet again he knelt beside her, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face. Even now, some desperate part of him prayed for her to move, to breathe, to do anything.
"Wake up, luv," he said, very gently sliding his fingers into her hair. Even he could hear the despair in his voice. "I didn't mean it, not really. Just wake up, and let me take it back."
She didn't, of course. When he tried to close her eyes again, it actually worked, but she still didn't look like she was sleeping.
Leaving the chassis was literally like ripping off a limb, and even now, the dark, addicted part of him protested against it, but he told himself he could return once he was done. He really couldn't leave her there, but he also couldn't let anyone else take care of her.
When he lifted her, she was shockingly light in his arms, her form somehow seeming even smaller. Granted, he was monstrously tall, but still - he was certain, now, that she'd be little even by the standards of other humans. Had been.
A search of the database had revealed a cryonics wing, built for who knew what purpose. While part of him rebelled at the thought of shutting her away in the cold and dark, he couldn't just let her go, couldn't consign her to a grave even on the surface. Not yet.
The facility was eerily silent as he traversed the hallways. It had always been quiet, all the years since She was killed, but it hadn't been like this. He was always aware of the other bots, the turrets and even the cubes, which were, as She had said, sentient, in their own way. Now it felt like even they had shut down - and, for all he knew, they had. It was something he needed to check, once he was...through.
When he reached the cryo-wing, he paused, looking down at her. There was no way he could put her in cold storage with blood all over her, but his knowledge of humans didn't extend to how to properly wash them. It wasn't like they had hard casings to scrub. He'd have to do the best he could, and hope it was enough.
The tap still worked when he ran a towel under it, soaking through with very cold water.. At first the water was foul and rusty, and he had to wait until it ran clear enough to actually touch her with.
Wheatley hadn't been programmed with enough humanity to feel uncomfortable or awkward as he washed Chell. He winced, but it was at the sight of her injuries, not at the amount of skin exposed. Not all of her wounds were fresh: some of the scars on her sides had to be years old. Burn-marks, likely from a run-in with the incinerator, and two bullet-wounds in her side that ought to have killed her. She'd survived everything GLaDOS had thrown at her, but he'd managed to kill her where the supercomputer had failed. He was not proud.
Clean, she looked a little less obviously dead. He dressed her in a hospital gown, wishing he had something else to put her in, and ran his fingers through her hair en lieu of a brush. Her skin was cold now, leeched of the warmth that had always been peculiar to the living.
He debated saying something, before he put her into one of the pods, but there was no point. She wouldn't hear any apology he might make, and even if she somehow could have, no forgiveness he might beg would be anywhere near enough.
The stasis pods were little more than tables with angled glass lids, and when he placed it over Chell, he was reminded of something he hadn't known he knew, until now: a fairytale. Two, to be exact, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. For some reason, the thought made him shudder far more than anything else yet had, and when he turned on the coolant, he fled.