The Scientist
He needs to go back, he just has to. So he does.
Time runs backwards up there, and it brings along the visions and the images, sliding on a constantly opposite orbit. In the long nothingness of space, the other side of the moon throws shadows on their surfaces, making him gaze harder in his memories. The line he marches on, however, is always the same, and one he can't forget after all.
He is always silent – there is not much to talk about these days. He should have talked in other times, when Aperture was quiet and belonged to someone else. But everything ended in a couple of heartbeats – the really important words flew away in the emptiness of the universe, escaping from the edge of his voice, while the desperate wind echoed how he would fix it all, by all means, in no time. It didn't work; no one would believe him. And while the two of them – the most unbelievable, the most perfect of matches – made his metal skeleton crack, he shook in the flow of energy, until he found himself with nothing at all to take care of.
He wanted this – all he can do, since then, is shut up.
Sounds die in space; he finds no words as he waits for everything to return, always the same way, caught in his eternal static movement. The beginning returns very often, but the Earth looks differently each time; and he, with a growing weakness in his glare, watches the desolate lands of mankind from that precise point.
It is not much of a distance from where he came from. But, oh, that never-ending circle is a long road anyway.
What has been left behind is far away – the eternal twin compasses close his circle on itself, and he, their resigned prisoner, struggles to keep the pace of what his memory is losing time after time. He rewrites the story in ever different words; and, one by one, fragments of his thoughts, as small as grains of sand, gets lost in the starry skies.
But – no matter how many handfuls of eternity pass – the growing blur of knowledge has steady points that your eyes can never lose. It is not that difficult in the end.
First of all, there was him, the core which almost made it out of the laboratories with a living human – there was him, he is not any more. Then there are the endless paths to the secrets of Science, carved in concrete and panels all along the facility. And in the end – the brightest, the shiniest point on the map – there is her.
She, the one and only who will ever know everything of Aperture; the one who, through the keys to survival, opened the deepest secrets of that place. She won for a reason – she never wished for anything but what she had already. And, most importantly, she never let it go.
He remembers this. Yet, after nonsense broke through, he has been learning nothing about what happens down there.
She might be dead. Was she worth it all?
He wishes he had had more time, more room, more silence. He wishes he had been able to read so many things in the air, so many ideas and feelings – she was a human after all, and only humans can fill the atmosphere with such wonderful incantations. The delicate shades of the soul – they must be so similar to the colours of the galaxies, to the wavelengths of light he constantly watches from there, so various and yet so detached from him. Robots will never really know.
He is a robot, she is a woman. There was no way they would find the same language in each other's mind – this is a fact, even though they will never know why science wanted them to be so equal and so different at the same time. What really counts is that they found each other once; and both of them, in some way, are now desperately craving for their own separate ways, for their compass in a world that seems to have forgotten the last hint of order in its inner structure. This makes them similar, equally saddened companions, with a single difference.
Her road forgets and goes on. His, on the other hand, stops here and struggles to go back to the start.
And if scientific studies tell the truth – if the flow of calcium and potassium and electric impulses can really create a wave of tears, a burning blush, a whole society with its complex arabesques – he knows that what he really wants do now is hold her hand firmly, telling her that the old days are not gone, that they are still friends, and that he has never lost her. Well, if only he had hands – if only those things were true.
The world of humans is so terribly difficult, so inaccessible to the same artificial beings it has created. Lies and truth have different values in each person's eyes – and these, he thinks, are the finest laws of injustice.
There is no real turning back, not even in the world of physics; for gravity is a flighty dancer, and vectors always point where they want to.
He sighs once more, resigned, and marches on. The strings of Science are such a burden.
Tell me your secrets
And ask me your questions
Oh, let's go back to the start
Running in circles
Coming in tales
Heads on a science apart
Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No-one ever said it would be so hard
Oh, take me back to the start
Coldplay - The Scientist
Dear old Wheatley is the only Portal character I'll always have my doubts on. I just can't make up my mind, I cannot choose whether I like him or not; because he is the Portal character who has the strongest contrast in himself, being a complete dumb cutie and then changing to the most bastard of beings. But well. I am sure he makes me laugh.
It is funny to notice that my relationship with this song is just as confused. The Scientist is a piece I can't stand from a musical point of view, but its extremely repetitive rhythm saved my sanity in very difficult moments; so I never removed it from my iPod, even though I listen to it once in years. XD And some days ago, when I put it on shuffle, I heard it again for the first time in forever, and I couldn't help thinking about Wheatley. This insistence on going back to the start and thinking in reversal...
I think he is apathic most of the time, but I can see him thinking all of these things in the worst moments of his space life. And although I totally don't ship Chelley (I have no pairings in Portal) I think Chell is a very important symbol to him, since she is the one human he interacted with in a long time and the one who sent him to space, as a consequence of his own mistakes. I think he does feel sorry and often feels the urge to tell her.
I hope you liked this little unusual fanfic of mine. :)