A/N: So, this is based on a prompt I got on Tumblr. I won't say what the prompt was here because ~spoilers~ but anyway, that's where this came from. This is one of those "Chell and core!Wheatley are living together" fics, yeah. No Chelley though. I was going to write a backstory thing for how that happened but everything I wrote just sounded stupid and a backstory isn't terribly plot-relevant for this (not that it actually has much of a plot. It's more of a weird stream of consciousness thing), anyway, so I dropped it. Oh, and this is my first longish Portal fic that's not a crossover, so there's that.
There was generally so little noise in the tiny house, separated a long ways from the road by a narrow, snow-covered path, that even the slight creak of a cabinet door opening and closing late at night was enough to rouse the small, spherical robot from sleep mode.
Wheatley's optic shields cracked open, a faint blue light filtering out between them. "Huh—hello?" His voice was slightly slurred due to his vocal synthesizer coming back online.
There was no response.
He shook his optic, opened the shutters to their fullest extent, and raised himself higher on his makeshift management rail in a more alert position. "No, okay seriously, is anyone there?"
Something in his processor screamed at him to keep quiet, throwing out warning signs and all kinds of little red flags. See, this was exactly what the lady had told him about before. He got too nervous about things. There was nothing that could go wrong here, eh, was there?
"'s that you, Luv?" he called. "I think you've got the time wrong. It's still night out! The sun won't be up for, I dunno, a few hours at least... hello?"
There was a small noise from the living room, like the rustle of cloth or maybe a footstep, Wheatley wasn't sure. Slowly, he made his way down the rail toward it with the mechanics in his connector whirring. However, he stopped just before he actually entered the living room, blinking and roving his gaze around. It was pitch black in there. Too dark to see much of anything.
"Hello? Lady? You all right? Look, you told me yourself you need more sleep, yeah? And wanderin' around in the middle of the night isn't going to..." He trailed off at the sound of someone moving, just barely able to catch a glimpse of a shadow stalking toward him. He automatically pulled backwards a little. "I didn't- I didn't wake you up, did I? How did I do that if I was in sleep mode?" The shadow was still moving toward him.
Wait... if this was the lady, out of bed after hours, then...
...why wasn't the light on?
Immediately, Wheatley flicked on his flashlight, the glaring beam of white light falling full in the face of a man, someone he had never before seen in his life, standing directly in front of him.
He spluttered in shock. "Who the bloody heck are you?"
CRASH.
It happened in less than a second. Something took hold of his lower handle in a death grip and gave a tremendous yank, nearly wrenching the joints out of place; Wheatley let out a strangled yelp as his connector disengaged under the tension and he found himself in a downward swing toward the linoleum floor. The hand released him just as he made contact with a horrible crack and his flashlight cut out, plunging the room back into complete darkness.
There was a thump from the direction of the lady's room, followed by running footsteps and a door slamming open.
"Over here! Over here!" Wheatley yelled, optic darting back and forth as he desperately tried to see where the strange man had gone.
"Shut up!" an unfamiliar male voice hissed. White, fiery hot pain flared in Wheatley's optic as something smashed directly into it. He cried out, slamming his optic shutters over his eye while his voice synthesizer simulated little gasping sounds of its own accord.
A pair of hands closed over his frame and he felt himself lifted off the ground, rocking slightly back and forth as whoever had picked him up ran somewhere with him clutched in their arms.
"Where—are we going?" he choked out. The agony in his eye made it nearly impossible to speak and he found he still couldn't open it. The person holding him, without responding, stopped; Wheatley was lifted up higher, then brought crashing into something. Whatever it was gave the second he made contact with it and fell away like a waterfall of jagged, shattered glass pieces. Wheatley's handles clenched forward, pulling into his face, and his pained optic contracted with a twinge. He was almost certain he'd just been used to perform a forceful manual override on the living room window.
And suddenly he was dropped back to the floor. He struggled to open his eye and found that barely, just barely, he could inch the optic shutters apart, but the world was still pitch black.
There were more running footsteps and a door opening and slamming closed again. Then, after a moment, gunshots.
Wheatley pulled into his outer casing, ignoring his hurt optic and blinking rapidly. "H-hello? Hello, what's going on? Who's firing gunshots?! Are you okay over there?"
Silence.
"Lady? Lady!" His voice escalated several octaves. "Are you going to- are you going to put me back on my rail? Pick me up, put me back on the rail? What's going on? Who was that? Are you outside? You haven't been- you haven't been shot, have you?" He scrabbled his handles along the ground, not taking notice of the soreness in the lower one, but only managed to move himself about a foot forward. Why wouldn't anyone answer him? What was he supposed to do, sit here in the dark and wait until someone decided to come along and tell him what had happened?!
...Well, yes, he supposed. There wasn't much else he could do.
Whoever had intruded into her house had vanished.
Chell had rushed out of her room at the sound of Wheatley's cries, grabbing her seldom-used revolver as she went, and immediately taken up position by the front door to prevent an escape. So, naturally, the intruder had gone through the window using Wheatley as a battering ram.
She yanked the door open, running outside with her revolver clenched in one hand. A radius of a few feet in front of the door was illuminated by the dim porchlight and Chell could see that there was a line of footprints in the scuffed-up snow leading from the window and down the path toward the road. Without a moment's hesitation she took off running after them. There was a fleeting shadow ahead of her as the intruder ran away, and she shot at it. She missed.
Behind her she could hear Wheatley yelling something. She'd have to check up on him later. She had to find out who had broken into her house, and why. There wasn't any reason for it. She didn't have any money, nothing that might be considered valuable except what she had salvaged or stolen from that place, so why...
She skidded to a halt, throwing up a spray of snow and nearly losing her balance on the slick ground. Her throat seized up. It closed itself off just like it had in the old days when she'd so utterly refused to talk that it had taken a few months of freedom before she finally realized that she actually could.
The horrifying thought froze every nerve in her body. Could... She somehow have something to do with this?
Chell slowly turned back around, looking in the direction her little, run-down house. She'd actually run so far down the road that she couldn't actually see it anymore. There was no longer any sign of the intruder. He was long gone, and she knew it.
But, hah. Good luck convincing herself of it.
She looked forward again, the direction that the footsteps still led before fading off in the falling snow. She would have followed them. She would have gone on looking for this intruder if she had to ask everyone in the city if they had seen anything. But she couldn't, she knew she couldn't. She had to get back and see what, if anything, had been stolen. She had to repair the window. And as for Wheatley...
He'd been yelling as she left. What had he been yelling?
Whirling around, revolver held tightly in her hand, she raced off toward the house again, heart in her throat. It occurred to her that there might have been another burglar, maybe more, maybe using the first as a decoy...
When she reached her house once more she stopped outside the door, pausing to listen for a minute. There was nothing, not even Wheatley's chattering. Chell opened the door and stepped through, remaining as quiet as possible with her revolver poised to shoot.
It was dark. The only light was that of the moon's silvery glow leaking in through the shattered window. A spherical form was sitting underneath it. Wheatley. Chell rushed forward, leaning down and laying a hand on his hull.
"AHHH! He's got me again!" Wheatley yelped, his optic shutters clinking open and closed.
"It's only me," Chell said urgently. The core was covered in broken glass. She didn't know whether to try to wipe it away or not. What if it fell into the ports in his sides?
"You?" Wheatley's voice was shaky, panicked, but his relief at her presence was obvious. "I don't know—you wouldn't believe what happened! There was someone here, never seen him before, I thought he was you at first! But then I thought, 'Why would the lady be up so late and why hasn't she got the lights on?' So, so I went to check, and I turned on my flashlight, and there was this man… Don't know what he was doing here, but then he pulled me off the management rail, and then, then I think he-he slammed me into the window! Me! Into the window! I didn't even do anything! And he—where is he, anyway? Where did you go? I heard gunshots, and then not really anything, and… oh, oh, please don't tell me you've been shot, I don't know what I'd be able to do to… to…"
Chell gingerly picked him up, taking care not to slice open her fingers on the glass shards and doing her best to keep them from falling into his inner workings while she brushed them away. Reaching out one hand, she located the couch in the darkness and set him down on it. Then she made her way back to the front of the room and flipped on the light.
With the living room and kitchen illuminated she could see with a jolt just what had been done to her house.
Cupboards and cabinets were thrown open, some of the doors slightly askew on their hinges, the contents strewn out on the floor. She stepped around the small one-story building and saw that virtually the only places that had gone untouched were her own room and a couple of the closets that the intruder had apparently not had time to go through. If Wheatley hadn't woken her up and alerted her of the trespasser, they probably would have been next.
She went back to where she'd set him on the couch and saw that he was still there, only he'd tipped over onto his side.
"Are you okay?" she asked him, setting him back upright and admitting silently to herself that it was kind of a dumb question. He'd been used to smash open a window. He probably wasn't feeling that great.
"Agh… I… think so," the core replied, wiggling his handles. His optic shutters were so far narrowed that they were nearly shut. "Except for my- well, my optic- that definitely hurts. But, but I'm sure it's fine. Ah, you got rid of that man, right? Chased him off? He's not here anymore?"
"He's gone," Chell assured, going over to her cabinets to examine the broken window.
"That's a relief." There was the plink, plink of Wheatley blinking his optic shutters. "Could you- could you turn the lights back on, then, d'you think? It's still bloody dark in here and I can't get my flashlight to work."
Chell turned back around. "The lights are already—" Her breath caught in her throat. Wheatley's optic was open now, moving around as if he was taking in the surroundings, but not a shred of blue light shone from it. It was completely dark. Dead.
Moving closer, she knelt down and peered at it, wishing he would quit moving it. "Hold still," she said impatiently.
The optic settled on the area just to the right of her, twitching a little bit. "What's wrong? What are you doing?"
Chell closed her eyes and let a breath escape through her nose. Wheatley's optic wasn't just broken, it was shattered. Along with the enormous crack it had gotten back in that place, it now had several other jagged lines cutting across it, with thinner fractures spiderwebbing from those. An entire piece from the bottom right of the aperture was missing completely, exposing nothing but a dark hole.
"What is it?" Wheatley asked again, this time more frantically.
Chell wasn't one to mince words. She stood back up, looking down at him with an air of finality. "Your optic's broken," she said.
Wheatley gave a half-hearted laugh. "Very… very funny, Luv. I wouldn't have thought it was a good time for jokes, but- but maybe that's just…" He stopped, and suddenly faced straight ahead. The circular plating around his optic spun from left to right at varying degrees like it did when he was trying to hack something. Then he let out a horrified gasp. "Damage to photoreceptor ninety- ninety-six point seven per-percent…?" He was actually shaking now, vibrating so badly that one of the couch pillows toppled over. "Photoreceptor? That's not my… please don't tell me that's my—"
Chell turned away from him, going back to the cabinets and putting more of her things away with numb hands. There wasn't anything she could do to try to comfort him. She'd done a lot to repair him after she'd found him, but as for his eye… What was she supposed to do about that?
"I'm gonna be sick," Wheatley forced out. He paused. "N-no I'm not, I can't physically be sick. I- I feel like I'm gonna be sick…"
Chell continued working.
"I can't see."
With a sigh, she turned back around and went toward him, gently taking hold of his upper handle.
Wheatley jerked back. "WHO'S THERE?"
A muscle twitched in Chell's jaw. "It's me, Wheatley. There's no one else here."
His sightless optic darted back and forth. "Are you sure? Are you really sure?"
She picked him up again, ignoring his startled protests, and took him over to where the black connector hung suspended from the management rail she'd had set up last year. Carefully, she lifted him up and positioned his back port to face the connector. "Wheatley, the rail connector's right behind you. Can you reach it?"
The core was simulating ragged breaths and didn't seem to be in good enough shape to properly answer her, but after a moment he managed to connect to the rod with a couple of clicks. She let go, keeping her hands out toward him in case he suddenly dropped off of it. He didn't fall. He just hung there limply.
Chell went about her work in silence, cleaning up the house and putting everything back where it belonged. As far as she could tell nothing had been taken. (What on Earth had the intruder wanted?) She also duct-taped pieces of cardboard over the shattered window. By the time she finished it was well past four in the morning.
When she came back into the living room she saw that Wheatley hadn't moved an inch. By the look of him he wasn't planning to ever move again.
"I have to go back to sleep," she told him. He started at the sound of her voice. "I have work tomorrow."
"Couldn't you- couldn't you just stay up?" he asked weakly. "Stay out here? You can spend the rest of the night out here, can't you? With the light on? In case anyone else shows up?"
She just shook her head and went back to her room, closing one hand on the doorknob. She looked back at Wheatley, who was facing her direction with as desperate and helpless an expression as he could conjure with an unlit optic.
"Five more minutes?" he begged. "Stay up five more minutes. Please. That's- that's all. Just in, just in case."
"I can't," she said. Before he could say another word she retreated back to her room, closing the door softly behind her.
The next morning she found him still hanging in the same spot, staring dejectedly at the floor. Chell went over to him. "Have you been sitting there all night?"
Wheatley's only response was to lower his upper handlebar the slightest bit. He didn't even say anything. A sense of foreboding creeping down her spine, Chell went into the kitchen, fixing herself some toast and keeping one eye on the robot. Worry gnawed at her. Should she really just go off and leave him for the entire day? Alone? In that state?
…She sighed and looked away. Yes. Unless she wanted to lose her job, yes. She chewed her toast but barely tasted it and finished it off in a few bites. Then she stepped back over to Wheatley, reaching up and patting him on the side. He blinked and shifted his optic around as if finally realizing she was there.
"You'll be okay," Chell promised.
"How am I going to see where I'm going?" Wheatley demanded, narrowing his optic shutters. "I'm gonna- I'm gonna crash into something, aren't I? Who knows what I'll lose next?"
You're not going to crash into anything, you're on a RAIL, Chell thought impatiently, but didn't say it out loud. She left him, picking up her bag and heading to the door.
"What if I lose my hearing next?" Wheatley said behind her, though she didn't think that he was really talking directly to her anymore. "What'll happen then? Deaf and blind, haha, think about that. That'll be a laugh, won't it? I'll be nothing but a- nothing but a bloody football."
Chell shook her head and left before she let him say anything else. She couldn't… she just couldn't afford to stay home today.
Really, if he didn't think about it too hard, Wheatley could almost convince himself that someone had just neglected to turn the lights on. He'd been in the dark before. Plenty of times. Many of those times had been back when he'd refused to turn on his flashlight for fear of dying as soon as he tried to access it. There had been a few points when he'd almost tried it, too, but he'd stopped himself just in time.
"That's all it is," he said to himself, wishing with all the strength he could muster that the house wasn't so quiet. "It's just the lady, she just hasn't turned the lights on. Having a laugh, I suppose. She knew that- that the fall broke my flashlight, and now she won't turn the lights back on. Well, it'll be daytime soon, aaaaand what's she gonna do then?"
He wished he knew what time it was. Hours seemed to pass, though he couldn't tell where one ended and another began. It was just one big chunk of time, one big chunk of nothing.
Usually, when he was left alone at the house, he could sort of entertain himself by looking around in the rooms or watching outside the window, trying to identify everything he saw by the names he found stored in his database. Then later he would relate this information to the lady, who would smile and chuckle softly whenever he got something wrong. (Which, er, seemed to happen a lot. Maybe something was wrong with his database.) Sometimes he was left off the rail for the day with a book to read or the telly to watch. Today, though, there was nothing he could do but pace aimlessly back and forth on his management rail, trying not to think about the pain in his eye but inevitably thinking about it anyway. He would go only a few feet on the rail in either direction before bringing his connector to a screeching halt; then he'd turn and chug back the way he had come.
Once again he tried to turn on his flashlight. Once again nothing happened. Eventually he stopped, hanging down with his optic closed and activating sleep mode, hoping against hope that when he woke up his visual receptors would be returned to normal.
To him it seemed that days passed before he felt a hand brush against his shell. The contact jolted him awake and he shot backwards, processors whirling. "What was that?" he whimpered.
"It's me," a voice replied. It was just the lady. Wheatley struggled forward again, forcing himself to relax.
"I wish you wouldn't… Could you- could you stop sneaking up on me like that?" he jittered. "You're gonna give me a bloody heart attack, one of these days."
There was the sound of footsteps moving away from him.
"Wait, wait!" He motored forward a little before applying the brakes again and stopping with a shudder. "Where are you- I'm sorry! Don't, ah, don't leave, look, do…" His voice rose in desperation. "Please come back!"
The footsteps stopped. "I'm just going to the kitchen," the lady said, an impatient edge to her voice.
Oh. She was still here. The clinking of pots and pans reached Wheatley's aural processors, followed by the rush of running water and then the fwoosh of the stove being turned on. He edged forward, simulating a little nervous swallowing noise. "What're you doing?"
When there was no answer, he crept forward some more. "Okay, no, what're you… what're you doing? I heard water—"
The lady sighed. "I'm just making dinner. Spaghetti." He heard light footsteps coming toward him again and then someone was patting his casing beside his side port. "All right?"
"Okay," Wheatley replied. The hand pulled away and he sat for a moment, his optic twitching uselessly back and forth.
More clanking pans. Some gloppy substance being poured into the pan. Another burner turning on. Eventually, there was the rushing, bubbly sound of water boiling, and then the susurrus of uncooked spaghetti strands being poured into it.
The sounds were absolutely maddening.
"What are you doing now?" he asked.
"Still making dinner," the lady replied, and he wondered if there would come a point where she just stopped answering him.
He glanced away, then back when the sizzling noises of the burners stopped and there was a great rush of water into the sink. "What are you doing now?"
"I'm sitting down to eat," came the response, along with the scrape of a chair leg against the floor.
"And… now?"
An irritated clatter of silverware on the table. "Wheatley, let me finish eating. I'll help you after dinner."
Wheatley perked up in an instant at that. "Help me? You mean you'll fix whatever's wrong with my optic? That would be tremendous, man alive that would be tremendous." Excitedly he moved back and forth on the management rail, still not daring to stray too far.
He barely noticed the clinks and scrapes of the lady finishing her meal, leaving the table, and then doing something with running water again. Then her fingertips brushed him once more.
"I don't think I can do anything for your optic," she said, apologetically.
Wheatley blinked in horrified astonishment. "But you said—"
"I'll help you try to work through this," the lady broke in. "I can't fix it and I don't know anyone who can, so you're going to have to live with it for now. I'm sorry."
He narrowed his optic shields, pulling his handles toward him and fixating a disbelieving stare on where he assumed the lady's head was. "You- no, you can't be serious…"
"Follow the sound of my voice." The lady sounded fainter like she had moved off to his right. "You can still use your rail even if you can't see where you're going. Just follow the sound of my voice. I'm standing right under it."
Wheatley hesitated. "Er, actually, I can't," he said, moving forward in small little jumps that rattled his casing. "The rail is—it's directly wired into my optic, right, and if that's broken, then I can barelyyyyahhh you're right, you're right, I can. But still it's not- not the most ideal…"
A shaky, simulated breath racked his body as he crept forward, connector whirring. "Am I- am I still in the kitchen?" he asked.
"The rail's not going to change," the lady said tightly, like she was struggling to keep her patience. "I'm standing at the corner where it branches off."
Wheatley reached the end of the rail and felt the lady's fingers brush against him again. Right, so, this was the fork. If he remembered correctly the right branch led to the living room and the left led further into the kitchen, then dead-ended. Wheatley turned left, rolling down the rail until he had to come to a stop. Then he turned around again. There was no contact, no noise… Panic brimming in his processor, he quickly asked, "You—still there? Are you still there?"
"Try going in the living room," was the only response.
His upper optic shield dipped in a worried frown but he obeyed the lady's instructions, traipsing into the living room with all the speed of a lethargic slug. When he finally reached the lady he received yet another command, this time to find his way into the entryway. Exasperated, he complied to the best of his ability.
They spent at least an hour like that. The lady trailed along under the rail and Wheatley did his best to learn his way around in absolute darkness. He didn't remember the rail system in the house being quite this complicated; he found himself continuously getting turned around, mixing up the rooms despite having access to only about three of them, thinking he was in the entryway when really he was in the kitchen and such…
After yet another mix-up, the lady gave an annoyed groan. "The house isn't even that big—" she started.
"You're one to talk!" Wheatley whirled around to face the direction that her voice had come from, his optic and handles twitching horribly and his shutters narrowed.
The lady fell silent at once, shocked. But Wheatley continued.
"You didn't get slammed into the ground, kicked in the eye, and then used like a bloody battering ram to break open a window!" he shouted. For a single, fleeting instant, oh, how he wished he could see and relish the look on her face. "You've still got two good working eyes, haven't you? Yeah, two eyes. I bet you're having a laugh because I only ever had the one and now I don't even have that anymore. Why don't you try walking around with the lights off for a while? Wear a blindfold! Here's an idea, you could be blind for a while, and I'll sit here and watch you bump into things! Provided you fixed my optic, so I actually could watch you, but apparently you can't do that!"
"I'm trying to help you!" the lady said, her voice rising in one of the rare occasions where she let her anger get the better of her control over it.
Wheatley cringed, looking away, but making no effort to quell the anger that had flared up, from some distant corner of his mind that he barely knew he had. "Right, helping me! Leading me around the house like a clueless infant who doesn't- who doesn't know anything! Very helpful! Thank you for that! D'you know what'd be really helpful? Do you have a time machine lying about, somewhere? Go back in time to last night and bloody wake up before I get ripped off my management rail and thrown on the floor!"
He didn't even hear her leave. All he heard was the slam of a door and, mixed up as he was, couldn't tell whether the lady had stormed into her room or left the house. Well, fine. He didn't need her. He didn't need anyone, especially not her. There she was. Judging him again. Enjoying his pain. She'd probably been silently laughing at him this entire time. How could he possibly have known about it? Good old Wheatley with the single eye made of flippin' glass couldn't see anymore. Probably never would again. She was no better than Her—
His inner rant shuddered to a halt and his vocal synthesizer produced a garbled croak.
N-no. She… she wasn't. The lady was not like Her, completely different, totally different ballpark, there. Different ballparks, not even the same sport. But… but how could she have let this happen? Why hadn't she come to help him earlier? Why had she let that stranger come in the house?
Without even realizing it he was pelting down the makeshift management rail as fast as his connector would carry him, the air whipping through his casing and stinging his dead optic. He wasn't going anywhere in particular. Within moments he was even more turned around than he'd been before, but he didn't bother trying to stop. It wasn't as if he could get lost here like he sometimes had in the Facility.
The anger was still there. It was still there, burning. It was- it was just like what he'd felt when he'd been plugged into the mainframe… almost exactly like that, maybe not as strong, but that growing anger… he hadn't (and didn't) even properly know exactly who he was angry at… the hurt, the confusion, the fear, that irrational sense of betrayal… nonono, think about something else. Not that. Something else. Anything else.
A thought occurred to him. He'd heard stories of people getting conked on the head and later waking up with no recollection of who they were. Then, if they were hit on the head again, they'd suddenly remember everything. Maybe it worked the same way for blindness? His optic had broken when he'd been yanked onto the floor. So, well, logically…
Without stopping to consider this better, he rocketed around a corner, connector shrieking in protest, and accelerated even more. Finally, he disengaged his connector with two clicks and was flung far forward. For a moment, he felt he was hanging suspended in midair. Then he connected with the hard floor with yet another sickening crack.
Chell's pace slowed as she made her way down the path, away from the house and away from the idiot core. She scuffed her feet in the snow on the ground, hands balled into fists with her fingernails biting into her palms.
Who did he think he was? And what did he expect her to do, anyway? She'd told him she couldn't do anything for his optic. Every time he got angry like that was like a blow to the head, a loud and furious, "You idiot, you went ahead and BROUGHT this monster into your life!" in her mind, after what he'd done to her back at that place. The reasonable, logical part of her mind told her to just get rid of him, lose the aggravation once and for all. And it would definitely be a relief in some ways. That much was certain. But she wasn't sure she could live with herself. Outside of the Facility, Wheatley was helpless, completely helpless. Especially in his current state.
Maybe she shouldn't be so hard on him. She tried to imagine herself going blind, or enduring all the other crap that the core had been through, and felt sympathy wallow up through her chest. Yes, she herself had been through a lot, too. Horrendous things. And it hurt more than she cared to say when he disregarded her sacrifices like they were nothing. Which he did often, usually inintentionally. But shouldn't it work both ways? At least she hadn't been crushed half to death by a gigantic claw. At least she could still see.
She hoped he'd apologize, though.
Chell turned back around, trudging up the icy path and once again entering the house—only to stumble over something sitting right in the middle of the entryway and nearly fall flat on her face.
"AGH," Wheatley groaned, squinting his optic and rolling haphazardly onto his back port. "Who kicked me?"
No, Chell didn't particularly want to know what he was doing on the floor. Without saying a word she picked him up, holding him up to the rail connector and brushing his back port up against it. After a minute he finally latched onto it with a couple of clicks and stared dully at the floor.
"Thanks," he said. "I guess that, uh, I guess that… didn't work. Still can't see."
What had he tried to do, throw himself off the management rail? How on Earth would that have helped anything? He'd probably only made it worse.
Chell waited around to see if he'd say anything else, but he only continued to stare impassively downward. She narrowed her eyes. All right, if he was just going to sit there, sulking and refusing to apologize, then he could find his own stupid way around the house again. She was officially washing her hands of the whole business.
She picked up the latest book she'd been reading and settled down onto the couch, doing her best to ignore the core.
Eventually she heard a soft noise coming from the entryway. She carefully set the book down on the couch and crept to the room, peeking in. It was only Wheatley, muttering almost incoherently to himself. Or did he think he was talking to her? Either way, it unnerved her a bit, and she backed away from the doorway. Maybe it was time to turn in for the night.
The next day was, thankfully, a Saturday, and Chell was able to take a break from work and tend to things at home. The broken window still had that flimsy sheet of carboard that she had tacked over it; she'd have to call someone in to replace it or try to do it herself.
And there was Wheatley. He wasn't doing any better. Chell spent the day fixing up the house, reorganizing her meager belongings in their cabinets and then breaking out her laptop to research local window-fixing companies and better front door locks. Wheatley would occasionally wander from room to room, hopefully finally getting his bearings and learning his way around the management rail again.
"Um, hello, are you there?" she heard him ask softly from the kitchen. "I- I heard you over in this direction, earlier, and I- I think it's the kitchen. And you do spend a lot of time in the kitchen."
Chell stood up from her work and crept to the kitchen, watching Wheatley's blank optic open wider at the realization of what he'd said.
"Not that, not that that's a bad thing! Just means you like to eat, is all, which is actually really good for humans, brilliant, keeping you alive and everything. Terrific. It doesn't mean you're- you know, it doesn't mean you have… excess… body… mass… or, or anything of the type."
"Wheatley," Chell said tiredly. The core whirled around to fix her with a startled expression.
"Oh! There you are! Right, forget what I was just saying. Um, to the point. First of all, I'm- I'm sorry about what I said before. That was a little bit uncalled for. Second," and here he looked away, "…I was thinking. About my… current situation, and was wondering… if you really, absolutely couldn't do anything to fix my optic."
Chell closed her eyes.
"Maybe, y'know, glue the glass back together or something," Wheatley said hopefully, looking back up at her. "That sounds like it might work. Or replace the glass entirely! If, if you can. There should be a repair… place… around somewhere, yeah? I mean, humans have electric things and all the scientists are dead, so who repairs their electric things? Ding, ding, ding! The electric-things repair place! You can take me there! Aaaand then they'll fix me up, my optic good as new, maybe even without the giant crack in it! What do you say? Good plan?"
"Wheatley, I can't," Chell said, wishing he could just understand. She didn't have enough to pay someone to fix him. Not right now. She'd have to dig deep into her emergency savings just to find enough funds to fix the broken window. Plus she didn't know of anyone who could repair the visual center of an Aperture Science personality construct. She'd been lucky to find someone who could build Wheatley a functioning management rail, but that had used all of her previous emergency savings, and that guy had moved out of town. She had no idea where he was now.
Wheatley wilted. "Okay, then can't you just… I dunno, put up cameras around the house? Set up a video feed in my processor somehow?" He rolled his optic. "I don't know how that'd work, either, but it's something."
"I'm sorry," was all Chell could say.
Wheatley hunched in his casing and narrowed his optic shutters, looking more sullen than she had ever seen him. "Maybe you are just like Her," he muttered, so quietly that she almost didn't catch the words. But she did, and her mouth gaped in disbelief like he had just sprouted a limb and slapped her in the face.
Wheatley didn't say another word. He turned and left the kitchen, back to drooping from the rail as if eventually the connector would just give up its hold on him and he'd fall back to the floor for good.
The small, once upbeat and cheerful robot never spoke much anymore.
About once a day if Wheatley noticed Chell's presence in the same room as him he'd pipe up with a quiet, "Can you fix it today?" To which she'd reply, simply, "No."
Less than a week ago he was still offering suggestions to repair his sight, each one more ridiculous than the last. Then he asked the question without even looking at her and said nothing else after she'd given her regular answer.
Two days ago he'd stopped talking entirely. He never even moved.
No matter what Chell said to him, no matter how many times she reached up and tapped him on the hull, he didn't respond.
If he'd been human she would have thought he was deathly ill. Wheatley, not talking? It was like she'd fallen into a parallel universe. It was like everything she had ever known was a lie. There had been a constant in her life since she had first woken up in that place to a frantic knocking at her door, and it was that WHEATLEY TALKED.
A LOT.
She'd had a lot of things to worry about after gaining her escape from the Facility. Money. Food. Keeping her job. Maintaining her health after being exposed to all manner of toxic chemicals for as long as she could remember.
Nothing worried her more than bubbly little Wheatley keeping silent.
Chell returned home one night, looking around to see him hanging in front of the doorframe like he'd been for the past few days. He was stiff and still, with his optic shutters half-open so she knew he wasn't in sleep mode.
"How was your day?" she asked. She never used to ask him before. Wheatley didn't do much while she wasn't around and she was more likely to get a long-winded and somewhat pointless anecdote from him than a simple "Fine" or some other, more relevant answer.
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
Wheatley didn't react to her at all. By this point she hardly expected him to. She pressed her knuckles into her forehead, shaking her head back and forth as she tried to think of some solution to this problem, something she could do.
She reached up and grabbed his lower handle, her eyes blazing. "You're going to have to snap out of this sometime!" she said. "What do you want? I can't help you see again—you need to snap out of it!"
Wheatley closed his eye.
Chell drew her hand up with her palm facing forward, eyes sharp and focused, preparing to strike the stupid, insolent, pig-headed sulking treacherous moronic little—
Her hand closed and dropped back to her side. She let out a shaky breath. Then she turned on her heel, retreating to her room and snapping the door closed.
It was the last thing she could think of.
Chell wondered if Wheatley noticed her coming home later than usual that night. If he had, he didn't make any indication of it.
She gingerly sat down on the couch, lifting an old book from the threadbare bag she'd brought with her and running her hand over the cover. It was one that she hadn't gotten around to reading yet. Wheatley certainly hadn't read it. He'd probably never even heard of it before.
She glanced over at him; he hadn't even reopened his eye since last night, and she was sure that not even his handlebars had twitched once since he'd first stopped talking. If this didn't bring him out of his miserable torpor, she honestly didn't know what would.
Chell placed the book on her lap, let it fall open to the first few pages, cleared her throat, and began.
"Matthias cut a comical little figure as he wobbled his way along the cloisters," she read, "with his large sandals flip-flopping and his tail peeping from beneath the baggy folds of an oversized novice's habit."
She snuck another brief look over at Wheatley. He still hadn't moved. Chell gritted her teeth and looked back at the book.
"He paused to gaze upwards at the cloudless blue sky and tripped over the enormous sandals. Hazelnuts scattered out upon the grass from the rush basket he was carrying. Unable to stop, he went tumbling cowl over tail."
She watched the robot out of the corner of her eye. He wasn't moving…
He wasn't moving…
Except, wait.
Was it her imagination, or had his upper handlebar lifted just the tiniest bit?
Licking her lips, she continued. "Bump! The young mouse squeaked in dismay, He rubbed tenderly at his damp snub nose while slowly taking stock of where he had landed: directly at the feet of Abbot Mortimer! Immediately Matthias scrambled about on all fours, hastily trying to stuff nuts back into the basket as he muttered clumsy apologies, avoiding the stern gaze of his elder."
Whirrrr.
Chell whipped her head around. Wheatley had moved forward at last, blinking, his inner casing raised only slightly from its previous slackened position. Chell couldn't help smiling, her eyes drifting back to the page. Yes.
"'Er, sorry, Father Abbot. I tripped, y'see. Trod on my Abbot, Father Habit. Oh dear, I mean…' The Father Abbot blinked solemnly over the top of his glasses. Matthias again. What a young buffoon of a mouse. Only the other day he had singed old Brother Methuselah's whiskers while lighting candles."
A familiar voice stopped her in her tracks once again.
"What… what, er," Wheatley stuttered, drawing still closer. "What are you doing?"
Chell was quiet for a moment before replying. "I thought you might like to read another book," she said, shaking slightly. Her heart had grown lighter. Exponentially lighter. Wheatley was talking again.
The core paused, apparently flustered. "But I…"
"Shhh." Chell bent back over the book, her voice stronger and more confident when she picked up the passage this time. "The elder's stern expression softened. He watched the little novice rolling about on the grass, grappling with large armfuls of the smooth hazelnuts which constantly seemed to escape his grasp. Shaking his old grey head, yet trying to hide a smile, Abbot Mortimer bent and helped to gather up the fallen nuts."
Wheatley was almost directly over her head now, peering down at her even though she knew that he couldn't actually see her.
"'Oh Matthias, Matthias, my son,' he said wearily. 'When will you learn to take life a little slower, to walk with dignity and humility? How can you ever hope to be accepted as a mouse of Redwall, when you are always dashing about grinning from whisker to tail like a mad rabbit?' Matthias tossed the last of the hazelnuts into the basket and stood awkwardly shuffling his large sandals in the grass. How could he say aloud what was in his heart?"
She stopped for a moment, waiting. It was a long while before Wheatley said anything.
Then, "Why… er. In this book you're reading…"
Chell glanced up at him.
"Why does every character's name start with M?"
She laughed. And he gave an uncertain little laugh with her.
They spent the rest of the night like that, Chell reading aloud from the mouse book with Wheatley interjecting a little comment here and there. Sometimes more than a little comment. Actually, more often than not, she would barely finish three sentences before he went off on some other tangent. At those points she simply stopped reading and waited for him to tell her to continue. She found she didn't mind it much—it was the closest he had been to his old self since the break-in.
Eventually, she had to get up and get a large glass of water, then she sat back down and just picked up where she left off. By the time the sky was gray with predawn light and the sun was just beginning to show over the horizon, they had gotten through a large chunk of the book and Wheatley was chattering excitedly about the anthropomorphic animal characters.
"We got some of these things in the Facility, occasionally," he said, no trace of the usual fear in his voice when he said the word. Perhaps he was just too caught up in his own ramblings to think about it. "Not otters, or- or badgers, never even heard of either of them before, but rats, definitely. Mice, too. Sometimes. They never talked, though, and they never wore cloaks or carried swords. Who comes up with this stuff? I tell you, smelly as you humans are, your squishy brains come up with really fantastic, out-of-the-box things sometimes." He gave an amused laugh. "Mice! With swords!" Then he turned back to Chell. "Are we going to read it some more?"
He looked so happy that Chell bit her lip. She looked back at the book, then at the core, then sighed. And smiled. And she kept reading, even past the time when she should have been at work that morning.
Work would still be there tomorrow.
Wheatley cracked open his optic shields, though the darkness didn't change and he figured he may as well have just left them closed. His optic twitched, glancing around out of habit, and he couldn't fight the creeping sense of déjà vu that itched through his processor. He'd heard something. It sounded like someone was in the house.
What time was it? Where was the lady?
He wanted to call out to her, ask what was going on, but with as much will as he could muster he kept quiet and inched down the management rail as silently as he could. He kept his aural sensors tuned as high as they could go and searched through his processor, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he perhaps had some sort of motion sensor that didn't require the use of his optic. …Nope, no such luck.
He paused and listened closely again, just able to hear a door creak open. The closet door? But, as far as he knew, all that was in the closet were the lady's old long-fall boots. She wouldn't be walking around in the middle of the night to get those, would she?
There was a hushed, excited whisper (one that would have been inaudible if not for Wheatley's increased aural sensors) of, "Found them."
Wheatley motored down his rail and then braked, roving his attention around the room. Footsteps. The crackly sound of a piece of cardboard being ripped and pulled to the side. The lady had so far not had the time or money to fix the window. Someone was trying to climb out through the window!
"Hey! Hey, lady!" Wheatley yelled, hoping he was facing toward the lady's bedroom door. "Wake up! There's—there's someone in here again!" He zipped down the rail, as fast as the connector would take him, back to exactly where he knew the broken window to be and screeched to a halt, whipping his optic back and forth. "Over here! I heard him! I heard him—over here!"
Slam. The lady's bedroom door was thrown open and there were running footsteps. Had the intruder climbed out the window? A sickening feeling rose up through Wheatley's processor. He was too late, wasn't he? He was bloody too late, and the intruder had gotten away again.
Why couldn't he—
Clickclick.
"Don't move."
It was a low male voice, one he didn't recognize. At those words everything seemed to freeze, no sounds reaching Wheatley's heightened processors but the light breathing of the two humans in the room.
"…What's going on?" he asked, unsure since nothing actually seemed to be going on at all. Was the lady here? Why wasn't she doing anything? She had taken down Her, twice, surely she could—
"Wheatley," the lady said in something of a warning tone.
"Don't move, or I shoot," the same male voice said. There was no answer and fear began to choke Wheatley's circuitry. Carefully, he flexed his lower handle, and heard the soft clink as it brushed against a metal cylinder pointed straight at him.
…Oh.
How much could a gun hurt him? Really? He'd been crushed half to death, he'd fallen off his management rail who knew how many times, he'd gone through horrors of the core transfer, he'd already lost his sight… honestly, how much more damage could a gun do?
Well, it could kill him. That was something he'd very much like to avoid.
"I'm taking the long-fall boots, and then I'm leaving," the voice said. "Or maybe I'll bring something even better. I've heard you have a portal device. Where is it?"
"I don't have one," the lady said, her voice somehow infinitely colder than Hers had ever been. "I've never had a portal gun."
She was sort of right about that, Wheatley remembered. She'd lost her portal gun back at the Facility.
"Oh, Is that so? Well… maybe I should take the robot instead." Wheatley could almost hear the smile in the intruder's voice. "I'm sure it'll fetch a good price."
Wheatley felt a hand take hold of his lower handle, resulting in a sharp intake of breath from the lady, and horror seized him as he reared backwards. No, no, nonononoNO! He can't do this can't do this why can't I seewhy can't I see—
Something sparked in his visual sensor and he yelped in pain and surprise. His optic flickered. Once. Just the barest glimmer of blue, and his processor was suddenly receiving the dizzy, broken image of a man leering, pointing a gun up at his eye and reaching to pull him down.
Then it was gone. But, for a single instant, he could see.
He darted forward and spun one hundred and eighty degrees on his connector, disengaged from it on his own, and landed exactly where he meant to. Right on top of the intruder's head. Immediately he swung his lower handle and heard the satisfying clank as it made contact with the gun handle and the man's hand, followed by the clunk of the gun tumbling to the floor. Followed by Wheatley falling to the floor as well and rolling several feet in a daze.
Wheatley was immediately scooped up by someone and held protectively under their arm; whoever was holding him lunged forward, picking up something—presumably the gun—off the ground and standing back up.
"Stay still," the lady growled, her arm tense as she leveled her newly-acquired gun at the intruder.
There was the clatter of plastic and metal hitting the ground. The man had dropped the long-fall boots.
"Don't shoot," the man begged.
The lady twitched as if considering it. However, Wheatley felt her arm relax and lower slightly. She stepped around in a circle with the gun still facing the intruder, stopping by the wall on which the phone hung and bending down to gently set Wheatley back on the floor. "No," she said. "But I am calling the police."
While the lady recounted the situation to the line she had called, Wheatley simulated a quiet sigh. He'd known, as soon as it had happened, that that spark in his visual center had done more harm than good.
[Photoreceptor damage: 100%. Irreparably corrupt.]
With the would-be burglar's arrest, the money garnered to pay for the damages he caused was enough to fix the broken window with a little bit left over.
Chell welcomed the warmth it leant the house as she walked in the door and hung up her jacket in the coat closet. Winter was still progressing, and the snow was only going to get worse before it began to let up for spring.
"Hello!" a chipper voice said when Chell closed the closet door again. She looked up at the little robot that had greeted her, once again suspended cheerfully from his rail with his lower optic shutter raised in a smile.
She smiled back. "Hi."
Wheatley immediately started moving into the living room, rolling backwards so he could continue to face her. "You will not believe what I've started doing."
Chell looked up at him, waiting patiently for him to go on.
"I'm writing a book!" he said. "My own book, right in my head! You're probably asking yourself, 'Well, then, what's it about?' Well, I'll tell you what it's about. You remember that book you were reading, with the mice with swords?" He bobbed up and down excitedly. "It's like that! Only, only the mice don't have swords, they have Thermal Discouragement Beams. Lasers, you might call 'em. Because they're actually robots. Little… mouse robots, running around in a bloody awful science facility and trying to escape."
Chell stifled a chuckle, skirting around the couch (making sure to make enough noise for Wheatley to track her movements) and sitting down.
"There's a bunch of them," Wheatley continued, apparently on a roll. "Lots of little mice running around. There's a black and white one, see, and… well, she's more of a rat, really. Or maybe I'll turn her into a cat. Anyway, she builds mazes, with cheese at the end—mice love cheese, don't know if you knew that—and then she puts the orange mouse in the maze, telling that mouse that she'll get cheese if she finishes the maze, only, only, twist ending! The mouse never actually gets the cheese. Then there's this handsome little blue moue, runnin' around, only he's outside the maze, and he helps the orange mouse escape…" Wheatley trailed off. "Haven't- haven't quite figured out what happens after that. But I will tell you, it does end well for all involved. Except maybe the cat."
"And you're writing this?" Chell asked, one eyebrow raised. Wheatley bobbed up and down again in a nod.
"Yes! Well, you'll need to help me come up with names for the characters, probably. Any, ah, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is… purely coincidental. Oh! And!" He zipped around in a circle. "You could help me type it up! I'll sort of, give you the transcript, read it out to you, and you type it up with your nifty little fingers. Yeah? We can be co-authors. Ghostwriters. Co-ghostwriters with… pseudonyms. All that author-y stuff. Only my name can be first, since it's my story and you're only transcribing it."
She couldn't help looking down and shaking her head from side to side, trying to hide her smile. If Wheatley's writing was anything like his talking… well.
Wheatley blinked down at her, still smiling. "Well, anyway, enough about that. Have you got any new movies?"
Chell pulled a few DVD's out of the bag she was holding and followed him into the living room. "I thought we'd try these."
She had never much used the television before, but Wheatley had started to get a huge enjoyment out of watching movies with her and she found she liked it, too. So much so that she had gone ahead and used the rest of the window money to buy a cheap DVD player, bringing home movies every Friday for them to watch together.
Some of the DVDs came with a special option for descriptive audio, which narrated the scenes for the benefit of the blind. Whenever the movies didn't come with that option, Chell quietly narrated them herself to the best of her ability—not always perfectly, since most of the movies she was narrating were ones she had never actually seen before, but somehow it worked.
Tonight's first movie was an animated one with the descriptive audio option. She set it up on the TV and fixed herself a bowl of microwavable popcorn. While that was cooking she unlatched Wheatley from his management rail and sat him down on the couch, where he once again started talking about ideas for the story he wanted to write. After a moment she sat beside him, munching on her popcorn, and together they spent the evening absorbed in the movies.
For now, at least, it was almost like nothing had changed.
A/N: If you were wondering what the title means, according to a quick google search, it's "blind" in Italian.