Hello again! Here's a secret. I've been poking away at a continuation to my first one-shot, 'Disconnect' with the hopes of expanding it into a multi-chaptered fic. As it so happens, I was slammed by a prompt on the kink meme, and found a little piece of what I'd been writing could easily be altered in that direction. So, changed a few things, cobbled some other things together, and came up with this. I wouldn't consider this a canon continuation of 'Disconnect'—I'm still working on some other related things, after all-—but maybe just a little 'what-if'.
Some warnings! Language, sexual references, and character death. Thanks for reading.
As always, she is the first to awake. Steady snores permeate the damp morning air as she rubs exhaustion from her eyes and watches his scrawny, bare chest rise and fall.
It is so easy to forget, so, so easy to forget that the man in her bed is not a man at all, especially when he is doing something so human as sleeping. He is so pathetic and vulnerable and her eyebrows furrow just watching him, the tips of her fingers brushing that tangled mess of red hair, rubbing a smudge of dirt from a freckled cheek. She has to remind herself that no, this is not a human; this is the machine that tried to kill her, this is the robot that just the night before blamed her for his miserable, unhappy state, painstakingly catalogued everything he hates about humans, everything he hates about her. The automaton that, in a fit of rage, confirmed he'd rather she died on the Moon, let go so that he could live, so that he could fix everything, so that he wouldn't be trapped as he is now, in the organic shell he hates so much.
He inhales, exhales.
She pulls away, forcing herself to reiterate the excruciatingly painful truth. He is not human. He is not human no matter how badly she wants him to be one and no matter how convincing he is when he sleeps. He is not human. He is lines of code, a collection of protocols. He is a computer program.
And despite his near-constant litany of apologies (whether he believes she hears them or not), she is angry. Livid, even. The accusations from the night before have left a bitter taste in her mouth and she throws off the sheets, padding out into the sun. The path leads to the nearby river where she sheds her clothes and scrubs at the grime and sweat of the previous day.
Waist deep in water, she makes a list like the one she keeps for him. It is the list of everything she hates, but unlike his, it all boils down to one thing.
He is fucking nuts.
This is not a new revelation, rather, something she's vaguely suspected since meeting him, though with Aperture Technology it was always hard to differentiate between eccentric and insane until it tried to smear her across a test chamber. She'd pegged him as the former, though as they made their way through turret redemption and neurotoxin control rooms she couldn't stop the creeping, unsettling notion that he wasn't all there upstairs (whether designed that way or otherwise), that Her claws damaged him more than he was letting on, that maybe his charming anecdotes were really fabrications of centuries (presumably) alone on a rail, if he'd always been that way or if machines really could (slowly but surely) lose their artificial minds. In hindsight she probably should have thought more of it. Maybe she wouldn't have been so surprised when he revealed himself to be the computer equivalent of a psychotic manchild.
And he's a psychotic manchild of a person, too.
It occurs to her that she hardly knows anything about him—as much as he likes to talk, there are some places (dark places) his ramblings just don't go. In many ways, he is a complete enigma; everything about his past she's garnered from secondary sources, not all of them the most reliable.
There is one thing She did tell the truth about, she's certain of that much. Hidden amidst his deluges of regret are apologies for lying to her, lying by omission, withholding his formal designation. For some time she presumed he was content to exist in repression, bury any and all memories of being plugged into Her, but no. The engineers that designed him built in a curse, built him just smart enough to know his cognitive limitations. Somewhere along the line, he pieced together what he was made to be, then promptly devoted all his energy to proving the opposite, entering the perpetual state of denial and overcompensation that she knows so well.
And that makes his betrayal even worse.
Looking after him is like caring for a child, she decides, not that she understands anything about taking care of children. An excessively infuriating, exceedingly dependent, unstable, selfish, needy, delusional child, a child with a nasty temper who doesn't know how to shut his mouth, a child who whines and complains and sobs about nothing and can't control his emotions and (to ice the cake) has frequent panic attacks. A child in a body that's pushing forty with a mind that, until very recently, was literally and physically incapable of learning.
It's exhausting. He's exhausting and she doesn't know how much more of it she can take. If there is one positive thing that's come out of this, it's that in analyzing his various idiosyncrasies and eccentricities and anxieties (of which there are many), pouring over them again and again in her mind to better rationalize where they stand, she's become a decent armchair psychologist.
Part of this mess is her own fault, she knows. She complicated things. There was enough on their collective plate without their semi-recent upgrade to lovers, though she hesitates to use that word because the concept of love is beyond him, and she probably doesn't have the right idea either. All she knows is that touching another human (human in a physical sense, at least), running her hands over his bare skin, watching his face contort in pleasure (pleasure he hates to love), fucking him senseless, letting him fuck her senseless on a dirty mattress in an abandoned train car on an empty planet that doesn't care how loud he howls when he comes lets her feel a little less trapped in an unspeakably awful situation.
And he…he doesn't understand love, but he understands need, understands reward and punishment and has come to associate the act of coupling with apology. He hates human functions and hates sleeping with her but does it anyway because he can't find a better way to say he's sorry for everything he put her through and continues to put her through. And she…she's just repressed and angry and seeks him as an outlet for years of pent-up frustration, years of being imprisoned in a lab with only scientists until the scientists started dying and then there was no one left at all.
So he can apologize to his heart's content and she can use him for her own selfish, physical release, push their relationship in a direction he doesn't fully comprehend and they can be fuck buddies, or something. That's what the last two people on Earth are supposed to be, after all. Love's not involved when you're talking repopulation, ensuring the survival of the species. That's just basic human nature.
The thought makes her slightly ill, but they've been at it continuously for the entire summer and nothing's happened, so she wouldn't be surprised if all that cryosleep and asbestos and whatever the hell else they've been subjected to has rendered one or both of them completely incapable.
And that's more than okay with her, considering the current state of their interactions, but deep down, in the part that houses the primal need to procreate, she feels sad.
They—no, she, he's not human, not really—she is, and will be, just as she was in Aperture, the very last one. The human race might very well end with her.
She could leave. He won't wake up for at least another hour and he sleeps soundly enough for her to gather what supplies she can, follow the river until she finds something else, something different, maybe real humans. It's already occurred to her that they'll need to move south eventually, before the Michigan ice comes and buries them both—already the leaves are turning and soon it will snow. They're lucky enough to have found that crank generator and space heater, but she carries vague, childhood memories of winter and none of them are pleasant.
The water is cool against her skin, a sharp contrast to the already-warm morning. Warm for how much longer? She washes slowly, dragging fingers through the knots in her hair and enjoying the silence that seems so absent since he showed up naked on her figurative doorstep.
That's the problem. If she goes, he will most certainly die. Getting him to maintain himself properly is already hard enough, and without her he will surely waste away if the cold doesn't get him first. She's certain he would have starved or gotten himself killed three times over already if it wasn't for her. She takes care of him.
She could kill him herself.
It would be disturbingly easy, certainly easier than disappearing and perhaps the most merciful thing to do. Put him out of his misery. No worrying about leaving him to bite it, just get it over with and move on with her life. Stop the near-constant hurt that comes from wanting him to surrender to humanity only to be consistently disappointed because it's not what he wants and it's so unfair and confusing and she could do it because he's skinny and and sickly and probably wouldn't even fight back. Probably wouldn't even know what was happening until it was far too late. It would be so easy.
Her stomach churns as she tries to force the idea from her mind, but it only breeds more thoughts. Is she that desperate for companionship that she'd rather be gut-wrenchingly miserable than alone? Would rather watch him suffer endlessly than be alone? She's been alone her whole life—surely she could continue. And the more she ponders this particular course of action, the more she realizes it's quite possibly what's best for both of them.
She remembers how he used to simulate a human smile by raising his lower shutter and flashing that glowing blue iris. He doesn't smile any more.
Even if she cannot, in good conscience, kill another human, the mantra repeats over and over anyway as if it will change her mind, and she finds it working. He is not a human, he is not a human, he is a computer program; she's destroyed plenty of computer programs just like him, sentient, self-aware ones that thought and spoke, dropped them into incinerators, made them relive their forced shutdowns over and over and over again. He is not a human.
Maybe he was, once, before Aperture and its meddling hands and mindless devotion to science turned him into something horrible. Whoever he was before, though it certainly weighs on her mind, doesn't matter. The man they used to build him is gone, destroyed beyond repair, irrevocably altered into a strange, warped echo of a person. He is not a human, he is not a human.
And she is not a murderer.
She's not, but maybe right now she has to be. There are no words to describe how utterly unhappy he is, living with her, and it's clear that despite her every effort, there is nothing she can do. For the first time in her life, she has to give up, for his sake and hers.
When she returns to the train car he is still asleep and she, dripping wet, finds herself standing over him, her knuckles white, unable to stop her hands from shaking.
Fact: During asphyxiation, brain death occurs at four minutes.
She holds the pillow there for six.