Wheatley was sick of it all. He couldn't stand being human anymore, the constant, unyielding flood of mixed up emotions that he had no way of understanding. He hated being this imperfect being, an accident waiting to happen waltzing around on stilts. He hated being an idiot, being a burden.
That's all he was, wasn't he? A six foot problem no one cared enough to solve. He was useless; he couldn't control the too-big body he'd been shoved into. The guilt of simply wasting air and space was almost enough to kill him.
Oi, the guilt, the one human emotion Wheatley understood perfectly; it was the beast that was eventually going to eat him alive. And out of the whole lot of inexplicable, insufferable human emotions, Wheatley had decided that guilt was the worst by far. It was a flare that set up a cold pit in his stomach, made his insides twist. It made him itch, made his flash crawl, made him claw at his skin until he was red and raw.
He despised this. Being human was a curse. He missed the wires that use to run through him, the metal that shaped him as a core. He missed being a machine because he could delete the thoughts that upset him, because it was just so much easier to not have a function as a robot than to find a purpose as a person.
The human mind was a trap; it was vast, limitless; he couldn't just make all of his mistakes disappear, erase all the data like computer; no, he had to keep the memories, no matter how painful, had to relive them every time the quiet crept up on him.
The silence of the world was going to do him in if the guilt didn't; it let him think, let his mind delve into the deepest, darkest recesses in his psyche, into all the cracks and crevices where the worst parts of him hid; when the world held still, the monster that was Wheatley came out. He couldn't let that beast resurface, not after he fought so hard to keep it buried in the noise of his ramblings. But even he knew he couldn't keep up the fight forever.
Eventually, that monster was going to win.
And it was in the dead hours of the night, when not even a chirp of a cricket broke through the stillness, the doomed battles played out. That beast made him curl his knees in, like a taunt that he'd never feel the simplicity of being notion more than a string of numbers again; it made his fingers fight the tangled curls of brown hanging over his face; it made him want to pull off that human guise, made him to be the scrap metal ball he used to be; it made him lose hope.
There was nothing good left to believe in, it told him. The sun was never going to come up. He was going to be trapped in the darkness and stillness and that heinous thing was going to rule him.
"Wheatley?"
The monster flinched; its silence, its weapon, had been broken.
"Wheatley, what's wrong?"
Her touch wounded the monster, a warm and gentle human hand was its weakness; it receded back into the shadows, angry and injured. It'd be back, just not tonight.
His far-sighted, watered-over eyes blurred the world, mixed the moonlight with her pale figure, colored her clothes cream, melted the midnight that framed her oval face; her weight had shifted the corner of the bed down, a soft finger wiping at his cheeks.
"Ch-Chell?"
"It's alright. I'm here." She moved slowly, her hands unlocking his from his hair, clasping them loosely between hers. "Are you ok?"
If he didn't know any better, he would have called the blurry woman an angel. Maybe she was.
He couldn't make out her exact anatomy, and only heaven knew what the pining in his chest was making him do, but he managed to hang his arms around her neck and bury his head under her chin all the same.
"I'm sorry." He'd never been able to find a better word, and he doubted he ever would. Those two words would just have to make due. "I'm sorry."
The breath she let out was shaky, almost uneven. But, after a while, her arms came around him.
"It's alright. It's all in the past."
He couldn't find his voice to correct her. He wasn't apologizing for that one night all those years ago. He was sorry because he was going to hold on to her. She was the last ray of light in his world. She was his miracle. And he was going to cling onto that last good thing he had to believe in.