Portal: Communication

Indiana

Characters: Wheatley, GLaDOS [WheatDOS]

Setting: Post-Portal 2

Synopsis: If they continue this way, it could destroy everything.

They'd been fighting. A lot.

Almost everything either of them said or did seemed to degenerate into an argument. She would stare at him coldly while she did it, which only made him angrier. He would get more and more visibly upset while she continued to become colder, and eventually after Wheatley had run out of patience the fight would end merely because he left the room. He didn't understand why he kept trying. Why he went back every night, even though every morning he woke up to some new problem or gripe or mistake. It never changed and she never changed and neither did he, and though it was torturing him inside he continued to return to her after he knew she was asleep. He hated having to be the one to try to fix things, but he knew all too well what her nature was. So the morning would be wasted with arguments, the afternoon wasted sulking in a corner as he tried to hide and cursed her volatility, the evening wasted with worrying over the creeping self-doubt that he would ever fix it so they could advance beyond this stage. The hour during the night he spent sitting next to her was the only part of his day he did not regret.

He had no idea how they started. He'd say good morning, and she would or would not return it, depending on her mood from the previous evening, and one of them would say something rather innocent for the most part. Somehow one thing led to another and the shouting started. Well, from Wheatley it did; GLaDOS's voice merely became more and more electronic-sounding, the temperature in the room seeming to drop in synchrony. She would become more stoic and calculating as his internal temperature approached critical, and if Wheatley had been an organic construct he would have left her chamber in tears nearly every day. No, he wasn't physically capable of crying, but he'd soon discovered feeling as though he needed to and being unable to do anything about it was one of the worst feelings in the universe. He just wanted to sit in one of his corners and cry, because he was sick and tired of the vitriol and the anger day in and day out and he didn't know what to do about it. He wanted to go back to normal life, where he made her laugh and talked her into playing games with him and she got a bit silly now and then if she was in a good enough mood. But most of all he missed the talking, the hours of conversation they'd had, that incomparable time spent sharing their thoughts, and he knew if he didn't get that back he was going to be very miserable indeed.

Today his desire for those normal days overpowered that of wanting to stay away from her, and so he took as much calm and serenity as he possibly could with him as he went back to her chamber. It was still late evening, and though it was possible she could have gone to sleep already he didn't find it likely. She loved schedules and her sleeping one in particular was not one she broke often. Sure enough, she wasn't sleeping, but what she was doing was a little bit confusing and something he'd never seen before.

She looked a bit morose, her body slung lower than usual, and she was holding a white flower Wheatley wasn't familiar with. With another of her maintenance arms she was very, very slowly pulling the… leaves? blades?... oh, that's right, petals off of it and letting them drift down towards the floor panels. He watched her, optic panels screwed up in confusion, and when she got to the last one she just stared at it. Instead of pulling it off she dropped it on the floor without looking at it, and as she turned away the panel receded into the floor to be replaced with another one.

Wheatley sat there for the next two hours, where she silently went on with whatever she was doing and he tried to figure out what that stuff with the flower meant, and this time he only waited ten minutes to make sure she was asleep before going in to settle beside her.

He tried. He tried really, really hard. But something he said tipped her off, which in turn tipped him off because he was trying so hard he thought he ought to get some recognition for that, and eventually he started shouting and she started condescending. So he stormed out and smacked his lower handle against a wall in one of his corners until he felt a little less frustrated, and he sat there until he'd calmed down. Then he turned around to try again, to end at least one day on a positive note, and when he got back to her chamber he froze out of surprise.

She was doing it again.

He frowned as she repeated it exactly the same way: very slowly pinching the claw around the tip of the petal, tugging at it very softly until it came free, and letting the stem with the one remaining petal fall to the floor without sticking around to watch the descent.

He soon discovered that she did it every single day, at the exact same time. He didn't ask her, obviously, but he knew well enough that he could take a look inside the video files without her noticing. He went back as far as three weeks. It was like watching the exact same day over and over again.

He wondered what it meant and decided to query the database. It distracted him from that day's argument, which he no longer recalled the origin of, as usual, and it took him much the rest of the day. He was terrible with database searches and it was normal for him to take hours to search up the simplest of things.

When he eventually did find it, he wasn't very happy with what he saw. He wasn't mad at her; no, not at all. He was frustrated with her, and with himself, but mostly he was just plain sad. She shouldn't be doing things like this. She should know and not have to play silly children's games with herself which weren't really that indicative of anything anyway. And yeah, half of this was her fault, but Wheatley -knew full well what she was like and he needed practice fixing things anyway, so he was going to take responsibility for this one.

He was quite nervous, so he didn't rush things; he watched her work quietly for a long time before she finally brought out the flower. She looked at it for a few long minutes, as if she didn't want to know which answer her game would give her today, and proceeded anyway.

When she got to the last one, Wheatley knew it was then or never and quickly entered the room, gently pulling the stem away from her with a hastily summoned claw of his own and went up close to her, whispering, "I do."

She actually jumped at this, her lens retracting into her faceplate, and out of the corner of his view he could see her quickly removing the panel even though it was pretty obvious he knew what she was doing. "What are you talking about," she asked, both of them knowing it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. But she had to save face, and the best way to do that was to try to cover it up.

He really hoped one day she'd know she didn't have to save face around him.

"We've a problem, here," he began, not really having worked out what he wanted to say, "and uh, and it's gone on long enough, I think. We need to um, to work this out because if, if it um, well you're pulling apart flowers and I'm uh, I'm sulking in a corner, well, we're not doing too well, are we."

"Not really," GLaDOS admitted, looking away. "I don't know what you want me to do. I – "

"Stop," Wheatley interrupted, which he did only rarely. "I'm not here to fight with you. I'm here because… well… 'cause I miss you, really. And… and I don't want to. Anymore."

GLaDOS went silent and continued looking in the other direction.

"What happened." Her voice was empty and desolate. "I thought things were going well and then… they weren't."

Wheatley shook his core. "I dunno. Wish I knew. Wish I did. We'd've been over it by now, whatever it is. If we knew."

"You don't know… and I don't know…"

Wheatley perked up a little; it sounded as though she were onto something! "Right!"

"But we should," she continued, lifting her core and narrowing her lens a little. "This is a problem."

"I've missed… I've missed talking to you," Wheatley said shyly, swinging back and forth a bit. "That's why I uh… why I decided to um, to give this ol' reconciliation thing a go. Even though I didn't – "

"Wait."

"Hm?" He tilted himself. By the sudden minor flare of her optic, she'd just gotten an idea.

"That's it, isn't it," she said, sounding as though her idea was a good one indeed. "We stopped talking."

"Uh," said Wheatley uncertainly, because he certainly remembered talking to her that morning. It hadn't been the best conversation, but –

"There's a difference between talking and what we've been doing," GLaDOS explained, lowering her core to look at him seriously. "There's been too much talking at and not enough talking to. We stopped listening. Well – okay. I'll – you started this conversation, so I – "

"GLaDOS?" Wheatley thought he'd been following along pretty well until she'd stopped completing her sentences.

"I stopped listening," she said softly, and Wheatley realised what she'd been trying to say was that she was taking responsibility, just as he had by coming in there in the first place. He grinned and jumped on her, nuzzling her hard because he'd not done it in many, many days, and she laughed and nudged him back. When he'd calmed down she continued, "This has been happening because we got caught up in who was winning the argument, but in doing that we failed to realise that we'd both already lost."

Wheatley had gotten a bit distracted from being so close to the welcoming curve of her chassis that he had to shake himself back into attention. "This uh, the last little while wasn't too fun, no."

"Let's not do it again," GLaDOS murmured, and Wheatley nodded vigorously.

"I'll make sure to uh, make sure I'm listening, from now on, alright? But um… if you uh, if you feel I'm not, y'know, contributing to the whole listening bit, feel free to prod me in the proper direction, eh? Don't just um, just keep going on like ev'rything's fine."

"Does that really sound like something I would do?" She was only teasing, a fact which was further proven when she gave him a rough shove, and before Wheatley went to sleep alongside her for the first time in too long he privately vowed to himself that he'd never, ever let it get that far again. No matter what.