Portal: The Best-Laid Plans

Indiana

Characters: Wheatley

Setting: Post-Portal 2

Synopsis: The longer he waits there, the worse it gets.

Wheatley had plans.

He had to. There was nothing else to occupy him, up here in the vast light-speckled black velvet of space. At first, he'd been complacent. He'd perfected his apologies, both to the lady and to Her. He'd told himself that he wasn't worthy to return to Earth, and gone over and over speeches to tell them how sorry he was. He'd told himself that spending the rest of his indeterminable life here in this emptiness, far away from everyone and everything, was just. It was his punishment. It was something he deserved.

But after a while of that, of blaming himself over and over again and telling himself what an awful, heartless monster he was, he realised something:

He wasn't the one at fault, here.

She and the lady had seemed enemies at first glance, sure. But really. There were far too many holes in that story. They'd clearly been working together the whole time, in order to make poor Wheatley the bad guy. The lady had obviously taken Her down on some secret mission below the facility. Seriously. How likely was it that the first thought he'd've had was to put Her into a potato? She'd left those instructions in the chassis after She had transferred Herself out – because there was no way She would leave something that required human intervention as part of Her system. Core Transfer, indeed. Stalemate Associate, as if. It was all a ploy, all a plot, to get someone to run the facility for Her while She went gallivanting 'round below the facility with Her chubby human friend. She'd wanted him to smash them both down there. He knew it. He knew She'd planned it all that way. She was too sly and too tricky not to have. She had had him do all that work so She could fulfill some secret agenda.

And the work he'd done! He'd kept the facility in tip-top shape, he had! Sure, the reactor had gone a bit off at the end there, but! Probably wasn't his fault, was it? Probably She had gone and mucked it up on Her little adventure, to make him look bad! That was what She'd done, he knew it, he just knew it. She'd set him up. She'd been jealous of his friendship with the lady and turned her against him, and convinced the lady to get rid of him. She'd decided that no one could have anything in Her facility that She couldn't have, and She'd stuck her giant bloody head in where it definitely didn't belong. Just to be an arse. He'd figured it out, oh had he figured it out! But too late. Far, far too late.

But it was all fine, it was all fine. It was going to be fine. He knew what he was going to do next. He'd had a long time to do that.

First, he would crash onto the surface of the moon. He'd seen some of the random things that'd come out of the portal with him end up down there. So far's he could tell, they hadn't broken. They'd bounced a little bit and then come to a stop. That's what he would do, someday.

After he'd landed on the moon, some humans would come up there. For exploration, or some such. That part didn't matter. The part that did matter was the part where they would find them, and he'd give them his sob story of being abandoned there on a space mission that he would make up when the time came, and he'd ask them to take him back to the home he so dearly missed. They would feel sorry for him, and take him with them, and on the way down he would talk mournfully about wanting to apologise to the person he'd hurt before he'd been abandoned. He'd go on and on about how sorry he was for what he'd said, and how he wished he could take it all back, and they would pity him and ask who this poor dame was. And they would take him to the lady, and the next phase would begin.

The lady would reluctantly take him in. She wouldn't like it, but she would. And he would appeal to her human compassion and would remind her of all the good times they'd had, and he would pretend something had broken when she'd let go and he'd been flung out into space. And out of that human sense of duty, as well as a healthy amount of guilt-tripping, she would take him back to the facility.

He would convince her that it was best that She not see him, and she would take him to a port. Once on that port, he would begin to delete things left and right, to get Her attention. While She berated him for being a moron – which he wasn't, and would studiously ignore any mentions of his being one – he would trap the lady and demand She initiate a core transfer. If She refused, he would kill her precious human friend.

When She did as She was told, which She would because he knew the lady and Her had a relationship that they both did a very bad job of hiding, he would be in control of the facility again. He would put Her into his old core, just to be insulting, and then he would force Her to build tests for him. Tests he would then force the lady to complete. He would keep a close watch on them, to make certain they didn't try to outsmart him – which they wouldn't be able to do, because he was smarter than they were – and when he had become bored of toying with them, he would kill them both. He would put Her through all the tortures She'd said She would put him through, way back when, and the lady… well, he'd force her to watch all the things he was doing to her precious AI friend, and then he would send her to the moon. She wouldn't last as long as he had, but that wasn't his fault.

And then he would have had his revenge, and the facility. He would have had everything. Everything would be the way it should be, because after all the pain and torture and prejudice he'd put up with his entire life, he deserved to have what he wanted. Him, more than anyone. He'd been betrayed, and abandoned, and crushed and insulted and banished when all he'd done was try to help and try to have a good time for once. Nothing that had happened had been his fault. It had been Her, and the lady, conspiring against him like the untrustworthy little backstabbers they were.

And it would happen, he told himself as he squinted at the dim grey surface of the moon, waiting for it to catch him in its inevitable embrace. He would hit the moon one day, and then everything would begin to go his way.

He would be the victor, in the end.

Author's note

I got tired of seeing stories where Wheatley happily takes all the blame for everything in Portal 2. So here, he does so initially, but then decides: "Hey. I'm the one stuck here, and they're having a jolly good time down there. So they must have put me here. So really, none of that was my fault. I'm the victim." And the longer he's up there, the angrier he gets, and the more he shifts the blame for the events onto GLaDOS and Chell.