A/N: I've never played any of the Half-Life games, so I decided to put this story in a vague, post-apocalyptic setting. Also, the title is Italian for loneliness.

He didn't really remember how he woke up on Earth. The last memory in his files was of orbiting in the great void of space, and the next thing he knew, he woke up in a field of waving grass, in a humanoid android body.

At first he wasn't sure how to move. Sure, he'd seen humans do it plenty of times before, but no one warned him about the strange jointed nature of things like limbs and fiddly-bits called toes and fingers.

But once he got the hang of it, he did the only thing he could really think of to do with his new found freedom.

Walk.

He didn't know how long he wandered through the endless grass. But as he did, he stared out across the fields, marveling at the blue sky stretched for miles. It was even more breathtaking than the pictures in his programming told him. It almost seemed to glow, and the clouds weren't just white, they were smoothed over with shades of blue.

Wheatley finally stopped his journey when he came across a brown, slumping house. Based on the flecks of paint that still clung to it, it had once been white, but time had weathered that all away. He couldn't keep wandering forever—well, technically he could, not needing food, but he didn't really want to—so he decided to make the abandoned place his home.

—

The door had been locked, but he'd been able to get it open with his advanced hacking techniques. The splinters of wood from the door had been a bit annoying to clean up, but even professionals made a mess every once in a while.

Wheatley spent the day wandering through the house, pulling open drawers and cupboards, sifting through the various items. In the kitchen he found somewhat blunt utensils that he turned over and twirled in his hands.

FORK, the text scrolling across his vision told him after detecting confusion in his thoughts.

"I knew what it is! Don't just jump to the assumption that I don't know what these things are. Yes, I can see that it's a fork. Used for eating. Humans use it to stab their prey, obviously." He huffed at the presumptuous text.

Next he moved through the bedrooms scattered throughout the house. Within them there were boxes, covered in dust and cobwebs, jammed under beds by the previous occupants in a panic over whatever had caused them to vacate.

The boxes mostly held clothes, shoes, and photographs. The items were all strangely used. Some had tears and grass stains on them, the exact opposite to the sterile items placed for humans in their Relaxation Chambers, which were always starch white and perfect.

He moved to inspecting faded photographs of nameless smiling people. In one, a family laughed together, mouths gaping wide. In another, two friends had their arms slung over each other. Something twinged inside of him as he looked down at them.

He didn't know what that feeling meant. Longing? Sadness? He wasn't sure. It seemed like a design flaw, because who built artificial life so that it could long for something? Or feel sad?

He turned away from the photographs and put all the items back into their boxes, and shoved them back under the bed.

—

When the weather became a bit warmer over the next few days, Wheatley noticed that lots of little yellow plants began to dot the yard.

He thought they were quite lovely, and so he put them in a vase on the coffee table in the front room. They brightened up the house quite nicely until their tops turned seedy and gray.

—

The previous owners of the home had shelves of brilliant books, all of which he totally understood. Even that one called UIysses. Especially that one.

One of the books he read was called Frankenstein. It was all about a University student named Victor who made a creature out of dead bodies. It was a bit macabre, but science had to start somewhere.

Wheatley felt quite bad for the creature. It wasn't as if he had asked to be made. And Victor was a bit of a rubbish father, abandoning the creature just because he was ugly. Honestly, who did that? It went against all the rules in that parenting book Wheatley had read.

But as the book went on, the creature became more violent, eventually killing several people close to Victor. Wheatley didn't really want to read more after that. Victor hadn't been the best person, but killing people—well, that didn't really solve anything, did it?

It only caused hurt feelings. And possibly death, if one were efficient about the whole killing thing. But if one weren't, then, well…hurt feelings could leave just as many lasting scars as someone's death. Best not to think about that, though.

So Wheatley put it back on the shelf, the bookmark placed several chapters before the ending.

—

It turned out that the former owners of the house had been quite an origami enthusiast. Wheatley found the concept amazing. Turning pieces of paper into plants, animals and all sorts of things? It surely couldn't be that hard. When he tried to make a flower, it didn't come out too badly. The stem was a bit thick, and the petals were slightly different sizes, but that was all right.

Next he tried to make a fish, but by the end it resembled little more than a wad of paper with a long bit sticking out of the end of it. It didn't match the picture in the book, but Wheatley thought that the abstract nature of his creation added an artistic flair.

—

Often during the nights Wheatley entered sleep mode. The world wasn't as interesting at night. And besides, he didn't particularly want to get a look at the moon.

But one night as he was laying on one of the beds, headless of the dust covered the crumpled sheets, his programming jolted him awake.

ORGANIC LIFE FORM DETECTED, the green text scrolling across his vision informed him. AUTOMATIC WAKE UP PROTOCOL INITIALIZED.

"Yes, thank you for asking me whether I wanted to be woken up or not. Really, it's probably just a raccoon or something," he grumbled.

Still, though. Surely it wouldn't have woken him up if it wasn't something important. And even if it was just a raccoon, he didn't want the little beast chewing up his things. He slid off the edge of the bed and wandered out of the bedroom, scanning the narrow hallway.

One of the nice things about this android body was the night vision. It gave a wider field of sight than a flashlight, and it also had the bonus of making him feel a bit like a spy.

The hallway he stood in showed no signs of life. It was as dark and empty as always.

Wheatley walked down the stairs and into the main living area. The coffee table, piled with books and crumpled bits of origami lay undisturbed. The window cast a deformed square of light onto the carpet due to the warped window frame.

But then, there it was. Quiet and almost imperceptible at first, but the floor near front the door, beyond the kitchen, creaked only in the way that could be caused by the weight of something substantial.

Like a human.

But maybe not. Raccoon were pretty big, right? If not one of those, perhaps it was just a dog.

He tried his best to sneak into the kitchen, but with him still not being used to a gangly human body, combined with his natural awkwardness caused him to bump his hip against a drawer.

The floorboard near the doorway whined again.

He bit his lip. He glanced at the counter, searching for something that could help him fend off the intruder. There was the curved edge of a spoon. No, that wasn't stabby enough. But there, in the corner, hiding in the shadows beneath an old coffee maker, was the straight outline of a butter knife.

He grabbed it. He looked up just as a dim human form stopped at the doorway of the kitchen. It was far enough away that he couldn't see the face or the gender of the person.

"S-Stay right there! I can see you! Yes, I can see you with my night vision. And…and…I am armed! And dangerous. Very bloody dangerous. I was trained in karate, you know. I could chop you in half, like a block of wood."

Wheatley hoped that the butter knife looked more dangerous to fuzzy human sight than it did to his enhanced vision.

The person took step closer, arms at its sides.

"No! Don't you come any closer! I'll stab you if I have to!" He raised the knife higher in a hand that he tried to stop shaking.

But the shape kept coming closer and closer, feet hitting the loose boards of the floor, causing the house to moan and squeal like a frightened creature. He stood where he was, jaw set, ready for whatever was coming. He scanned through his memory banks, hoping to find some sort of information on fighting moves.

The shape stopped a foot in front of him. It was clear now, outlined in silver by the half-moon shining through the window. The light showed him the wide, surprised familiar gray eyes of the woman standing before him.

Eyes he'd spent time looking into when he was a twitchy, metal sphere.

He dropped the knife with a dull clatter.

"Y-you?" he said, half to himself, endless babble of words stopped.

"No," was all she said, with a shake of her head.

Those were the first words he had ever heard her say, and that somehow made them all the worse.

She whirled away from him, dashing for the open door. He thumped after her, all the apologies he had written in his heads running through his mind. Every scenario he had worked over hadn't prepared him for it actually happening.

"Wait! Wait! I'm not going to actually hurt you or anything! I just want to talk, to explain things!"

Wheatley tripped over a loose board that threw him onto his chest with a gasp. The Lady's feet pounded away, and she was gone into the darkness of the night.

—

The morning after his brief encounter with the Lady, he realized something.

He was lonely.

He supposed it had been there for quite a while, in an ambient way that faded into the rest of his environment. Wheatley didn't really have anyone to talk to at the facility beyond the occasional encounter with another core.

But the facility had been something familiar and sure, the place he'd lived in his entire life. But now that he had freedom and the ability to go anywhere and do anything, the loneliness had been growing, slowly and surely, a vast emptiness yawning inside of him. All that wide open world, and no one to share that experience with.

Maybe that's what this was about. Maybe it was some kind of punishment from Her for everything that he had done. Give him what he wanted, but deprive him of what he needed.

—

That afternoon, he decided he needed to clear his head. Wheatley took the path he had discovered a few weeks ago behind the house that lead into what seemed to be some kind of small human town. It was abandoned too, but all the different places gave him plenty of things to explore.

The scenery on the walk to the settlement was much the same as everywhere, just grass, occasionally punctuated by the golden face of a flower.

Soon Wheatley stood at the edge of the town, feet planted on the cracked, splitting pavement. Abandoned cars sat hunched in the middle of the street with fractured headlights and flecking paint. Overhead, a streetlight flickered and buzzed.

Where was it getting the energy to do that? As far as he knew, there was nothing to provide a power source.

Shrugging, he just walked on, looking into the black, shattered windows of storefronts. He paused for a moment in front of an old records store. In the broad window, the browning, water stained sleeve of a Beatles record looked up at him.

Sometimes he thought it would've been nice to see this town in its heyday. He didn't actually know what some of these weird human remnants were for, but just seeing people doing their people things, well, it just would've been nice. This place was almost like looking at a graveyard. You saw names and dates, and clues as to what this place had been, but never the full picture.

Wheatley kept on walking, turning around corners, and cutting through alleys until he came to a row of small warehouses on the edge of town. He hadn't gotten around to looking at what was in them yet.

Food, probably. Humans were big on that kind of thing. Funny, though. The doors to one of the warehouses was cracked open. Either a heavy wind or an animal had managed to pry it open, or something decidedly more human had.

Maybe…

But no. He shouldn't. Not after what happened last night.

But wasn't it worth a try? Just one more time?

After struggling against indecision for another moment, Wheatley walked up to the front of the off-white warehouse, with its door propped open like a half-lidded eye.

Well, no time like the present and all that. He attempted to be stealthy again and move parallel to the door, but he only managed to get through a few inches before his elbow had bumped the door and sent it slamming against the outside of the warehouse.

Inside, something clattered. Giving up any pretenses of stealth, he walked into the darkness, switching on his night vision. Near the back of the room stood the Lady, a can of something sticky dropped at her feet, a slimy pool spreading outwards.

Wheatley took several steps towards her, but her narrow, dagger-like gaze stopped him. She never had needed to speak when that face did all the talking for her, did she?

Figuring he couldn't make things any worse than they were, he simply walked over so that he stood in front of her, feet in the sticky contents of the can. The Lady made no move to leave or strike him, she just continue to scrape him with her hard eyes.

"Look, I'm not following you around on purpose, though; I understand that is what this looks like. Or, it could look like stalking, which sounds worse than 'following'. Forget I said any of that. Focus on what I'm saying now. Or—er, what I'm about to say. I just…I just want to get a chance to talk to you."

The Lady's eyes flicked to the hand that he had stilled on her arm against his own volition during his spiel.

"All right. Say what you want to."

He opened and closed his mouth, still surprised to hear her talk. So, this was the moment, wasn't it? The moment to say his piece and try to make everything right. Only, everything he had wanted to say suddenly left his mind, as if his hard drive had suddenly been wiped. So, he simply started talking.

"Listen, I just really wanted to say I'm sorry. I was awful. More than awful, really. Cruel and inhuman, is more like it. Well…I'm not really a human, th-though that's not an excuse! I'm very human in my programming, which means I should've known what I did was completely wrong. And I'm sorry I tried to…well, kill you. After we had worked so hard to get out, I go and do that? But…anyway, I'm just…really sorry."

Still, she said nothing. But her hard eyes and the thin, pinched line of her mouth told him all he needed to know. She shook off his hand and stalked away.

Wheatley stood, shoulders hunched as the door to the warehouse squealed. Something tightened in his chest like a fist.

—

Everything had gone wrong. Why had he even tried to apologize? He had even managed to muck that up. But what had he expected her to do? Forgive him; tell him that everything would be fine? And then they'd what, go off and find civilization together or something? Foolish. Stupid.

But still, he wanted to try to at least mend that train wreck of an apology. Then he'd leave her alone to do whatever it was that she needed to do to survive.

So he wandered in the knee-high grass until he had gathered several blue flowers. In a book he read, a man gave his girlfriend flowers after they fought. The Lady wasn't romantically involved with him, but she was a girl, and…well, they had been sort-of-friends once. Giving her flowers seemed like the right thing to do, was all.

Once Wheatley had gathered up the flowers, he searched the house until he found a somewhat blank piece of paper. It was actually piece he had torn off from the bottom of a bloody long shopping list.

He then devoted the afternoon to writing a note in his messy, shaking handwriting that turned out to read:

Lady,

I understand if you don't want to forgive me. Honestly, I do. I hope you like these flowers, though. I mean, they're quite nice, and the place you're staying is awfully dark. I won't bother you anymore. Unless that's what you want? Not bothering, I mean. Just seeing me. If you ever want to. Anyway, have a nice day.

—Wheatley

He looked down at the slanted, cramped note. Hopefully she wouldn't be offended by it. But then, he would never know, would he? Not unless she returned the torn up scraps of the note. With nervousness weaving its way through his circuits and wires, Wheatley walked back into town with flowers and a note clutched in his fist.

He hadn't thought through how he might find her. She wasn't likely to find a light in a house, not with all the electronic things gone on the fritz. So he dropped them where he'd last seen her, and where he hoped she would return.

He stood there for a moment, looking down at his pathetic offering. The warehouse door was closed tight against the light breeze and his presence.

Wheatley turned away and walked home.

—

The next day he found a speck of blue outside the front of his house. A small pile of flowers sat at his sagging doorstep tied with a thin, yellowing string. A note was bound to them. His hands began to shake as he fumbled with the string and unfolded the note.

Wheatley, it began,

Thank you for the flowers. They were very nice. By the way, my name is Chell.