Helloooo! First of all, before you read, I have a confession to make… I owe you a huge apology. This is set to be the most awkward giant update ever. As I'm posting this on September 5, I am also replacing the original chapter one, first posted August 20, with a majorly edited version. I posted that first chapter in the middle of the night in what was obviously a fit of madness, and when I looked at it again the next morning, it was clear the thing I'd posted was a decent rough draft, but not a finished piece and definitely not something that needed to see the light of day. The new version is almost twice as long, so you probably want to have a look at it before you tackle this one.

I might be a huge fanfic noob, but I'm pretty sure this is terrible author etiquette. Rest assured it's not a mistake I'll make again.

Anyway. Onward to business! I can't give enough thanks to everyone who wrote me a review. This next section ended up going on forever, so I've split it into a two-parter. This one starts out a bit freaky. Just dive right in and it'll sort itself out, I promise. And er, if you find it incomprehensible after all, tell me. In a review.

BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 2.

Blue lips, blue veins.
Blue, the color of our planet from far, far away.
Blue,
The most human color.
- "Blue Lips" Regina Spektor

I'M STILL IN CHARGE AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THIS.

She's got the device trained on him like she's going to place a portal in his face, ha, the soft face full of teeth, and he moves the arms like they're suspended on wires just long massive arms into nowhere, into space. He can't hear the space voice anymore thank god or the other ones either, hearing is different right now and cupped and curved in three dimensions, but still the buzz and the itch like a neverending saw. The human's brief pictures are gone too the ones that said "this is a fruit fly genome" or "this is how you crash a bike" or "the woman you love bare breasts crying and yelling" or "glasses snapping under a cleat and laughter as you boil over". Nonsense. They are full of tricks these two. He is small and bleeding and weirdly long but in control, stood over her on the bleeding feet so crushable. There's still time oh plenty of time, ha.

Wait no, there's no time because she ran out the clock stupid little orange lab rat, cockroach, he could have been hacking and he would have had it shut off by now. YOU HAD TO PLAY BLOODY CAT AND MOUSE DIDN'T YOU. What a voice in this body so loud in the ears and he feels it in the chest, but never louder than the buzz and the itch. WHILE PEOPLE WERE TRYING TO WORK YEAH WELL NOW WE'RE ALL GONNA PAY THE PRICE. She's not listening, she's not listening, why does she never listen and why does nobody ever listen. He is in control could have fixed it given just a minute longer. 'CAUSE WE'RE ALL GONNA BLOODY DIE.

She looks past him as ceiling tiles rattle off, fake ceiling tiles for sure, she moves and her finger swift on the trigger it goes flitting past him blue. No, what?

Then from behind, it comes roaring AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH and everything goes flailing, all the parts tugging midair unbelievable suction on every inch and he's upside down over and over, confusing orange, blue until he buckles by the neck. Nothing. Stars. Space. SPACE! It roars but never louder than the buzz and the itch still creeping up the cables at the neck. The slack cables at the neck are just now taut, straining, and her sharp hands closing around the wrists pulling even tighter and he sees her blazing eyes. Parasite cockroach rat dangling off him by the wrists, he wrenches them uselessly in the wind but unable to shake her. Her feet stand on stars. Let her suffocate and die. LET GO WE'RE IN SPACE!

Her hands even sharper tighter. Then, flashing like individual film frames in one slow eternity he sees it: he sees the core, he sees himself, the sphere disconnected an empty shell of no color, no blue. It is leaving, it has left in the vacuum of space spiraling, it is far, far away and now he sees it is gone. And wordless rage pours out the mouth. Now what? He is here with the wrists in her grip the only wrists he's ever had. The glasses on his nose leave his nose they're gone too and space blurs out. Other cores rip through and disappear screaming electronic space.

LET ME GO I CAN PULL MYSELF IN I CAN STILL FIX THIS. His voice distorts in the blast of air into space terrible, why is space this unceasing hell second by second worse and worse? Let it end and the dead weight fly off and he will fix everything just let it end. But then. Her.

It's Her moving behind him and the back of the neck breaks free with a deafening sound, cables streaming around. The buzz and the itch are ended. Everything flips, pivoting around her small sharp hands, and he sees barely, blindly, inside the portal Her claw seizing tight the jumpsuit leg. Now she is secure and he dangles. Oh god, those tight hands around the wrists of his, her hands are all that stand between him and space, space in a body that freezes and dehydrates and depressurizes and dies. The blazing eyes narrow and again, he sees it: as she gets pulled back in she will let him go. Her hands twitch around the wrists like they want to loosen. He will die. "No no, please, GRAB ME GRAB ME!"

Her hands loosen. There in that second, he wants the body after all, six miserable elongated feet of meat to save him from space, and the body is slavishly amenable, it snaps to his command as her hands loosen around him, he makes a wild clasp and closes around her wrists this time, he hangs from her by the power of his hands. Dry-mouthed and triumphant, he smiles at her. "I think that's some muscle memory, love," he breathes at her soundlessly, and they drag inch by inch back through the portal. Granules of darkness scatter around his vision until he can't see her face anymore. His feet are inside and the portal closes, and as his brand-new cheek smacks stupidly against the cold floor, there's nothing else but black.

"Guess what, moron. It's time to get up."

The first thing Wheatley sees is Her bowed core head right in his face.

"Geah!" he says, thrashing like a fish – everything feels loose and bizarre, and what's happened to his hull? It aches in a way he never though possible, pain eroding straight through his circuits. Is he hanging in pieces?

Her ocular light tapers to a yellow slit and looms even closer. Without warning, a pair of filthy human hands fly up into his line of sight, shoving foolishly in Her direction.

"DAHHHHH! HANDS! Oh… hands. Right."

His lips and tongue curl and thrust over hard little teeth as he speaks. The hands come back down, clench and release and turn. His ugly feet are shoeless. Still in this prank-body? Shit.

"Very good." He hears a chittering from behind and twists his neck to look. (It can turn like a bloody owl's neck, this thing! Repulsive.) His eyes won't focus properly, though, and he can only make out two shuffling white forms against the pitch-black panels that line the room. He guesses it's those testing robots. Little cores nestled into shiny robotic skeletons. If She insists on giving him limbs, why not that kind of limbs?

He ought to be quaking right now, really, prostrate and sore and dangerously squashy on the floor in front of the tremendous computer. He is the traitor who ejected Her from the seat of power, forced Her into a potato battery, punched Her into a bottomless pit, and proceeded to eagerly, systematically destroy Her kingdom; now She hangs heavy like a big, blunt sword of Damacles (electronic bludgeon of Damacles?) over his broken-crowned head. Yet strangely, he can't summon the energy to feel anything but gloom and defeat. His circuits – nerves? – are hollow after the buzz and the itch of the central A.I. chassis. Maybe this body just doesn't do the whole quaking thing. Especially when it's busy feeling beaten half to death. He swallows and opens his flappy mouth again.

"Sorry, I think I've missed something. Why have you—"

"You'll be relieved to know," She cuts him off in a luxurious tone, drawing back until he can only see a white smudge, "I've checked out all your new basic functions. Everything works perfectly. As you fritter away each one of your remaining years on Earth, you'll be able to secrete and excrete all kinds of interesting things, right along with your clammy human pals. It'll be one big vomit party." He feels an alarming prickling on his forehead and back and realizes he's just broken out in a sweat, confirming Her words. "Keep in mind, though, you're not in mint condition. Don't throw out your back. You've already injured it once."

"I've injured—?"

"Interesting science fact for you, by the way: did you know that your personality was built entirely of the dumbest parts of this human's brain map? You can't remember it anymore, but this dope used to be you. So that's why I've made this glorious reunion possible for you. Surprise! How do you feel about being back inside the bag of meat where you really belong?"

His jaw drops open of its own accord before he shuts it again with a jarring clack. "Wh— now that's not possible, is it?"

"Oh, but it is." The yellow light twinkles at him, its shape indicating sheer glee. "To celebrate, I want to give you a present. Do you want to guess what the present is?"

"What is the present?" he says hoarsely, mind still playing back Her previous lines, dumbest parts of this human's brain map, this dope used to be you.

"I'm going to send you up to the surface, to someone who can teach you your first lesson about human survival – someone who already hates every last sweaty pore of your body. Someone who's doubtless the burliest, most cunning and barbaric human in the world, who will almost certainly cut you down on sight like the weed you are. So if you can survive that, you can survive anything."

That gets his attention. He's never visited the surface and now doesn't seem like a good time to start; neither does he particularly fancy being violently disassembled at the hands of some Viking beast of a human. Panic overcomes him and then on reflex, here comes the stalling, words tumbling over each other along the surfaces of his mouth: "Waitwaitwaitwait! How is that a good first lesson? Are you sure you don't want to… keep me here and… put me in a test?" Hearing himself say that, he suddenly sees what a terrible idea it is. Backtrack! "No, no, I've got it: you could put your own technological prowess to the test by putting me back into a shiny new core. Or an old battered one, whichever! And I'm sure you could do it easily, so there we go! Quick, easy validation of your genius! Why not do that? Let's—let's do that."

He stutters out as the curved hull lunges up to his face like a cobra again, silent and wide-eyed.

"You're right, of course. If you really want to stay here, I've got a lot of ideas."

Staring helplessly into Her cold eye as She purrs, he almost doesn't notice the pneumatic tube snaking around from the ceiling to hover over him.

"Unfortunately, you've got a ride to catch. And if you ever come back, I will take you on a very detailed tour of my very favorite parts of the facility before opening your feeble skull, sans anesthetic, and slowly lesioning you into a living soup. Chew on that, you weed."

Squinting up, he cowers in the growing stream of suction from the tube. There's nowhere to run. "No no no, wait—"

"Have fun. Oh, and one more thing – this was all her idea."

Her idea?

And with a ftthpp sound, he embarks on his second-ever ride through the pipe system. With limbs, it is the opposite of fun. He's a writhing mass of angles, knees and elbows and toes and nose scraping the seams of the tube with every corner. As he passes another perpendicular tributary, something flies out and punches him in the stomach: a blackened Companion Cube? He doubles over it to tuck in all his angles and ends up in a wild gyroscopic spin of the sort he might have enjoyed as a sphere, but which now feels like brain-rattling, gut-churning death.

Squeezing his eyes shut lessens the dizziness and over the rush of air in his ears, his internal monologue pipes up again: her idea, her idea. So it's her fault he's now a fleshy sponge in a suction tube destined straight for hell. All the torture she's put him through just wasn't enough. She never did succeed in killing him, so this is her final fatal campaign. He admits it's the most creative one of all.

The tube straightens out for a long stretch picks up speed. His insides float sickeningly. Before he realizes it he's bawling in terror, one long continuous sound until there's no breath left to sustain it and still it goes on until—

BANG!

"OW!" Pain shoots through the top of his head as it collides with some surface. His feet find ground with a sudden jolt but his noodly legs don't support him. Collapsing, he pitches forward and as if in slow motion the surface gives way, swinging open like a door to reveal a blinding expanse of blue and gold, a smell of openness and wind and heat that wrenches his chest in an entirely new way… and in the midst of it he sees her.

She's the one that's going to kill him after all.

He manages to stay upright for a second. Then his shins connect with the cube, which has ended up on the ground in the perfect position to send him tripping down nose-first into the hardest, grittiest dirt imaginable. Wincing, he gathers himself up and raises his head to look at her. Yes, that is definitely the face of someone about to kill him. Half of her dark hair has escaped its tie and swarms around her head in a corona of flyaways. Her eyes are wide and savage as she glares down at him, quivering slightly in her murderous passion. He quickly looks down again, not wishing to witness the descent of her tiny sharp fist as it delivers the blow that will cleave his head and end him.

How does it always come down to this? His entire existence has been a comedy of errors, a series of insults and cold shoulders, one long hemming-in and dressing-down, punctuated periodically by everybody trying to kill him. Every time something good has come to him, he's just waited on tenterhooks for the catch, the bolt from the blue that would ruin it all, and the bolt has always come.

And now, the final indignity: dying an animal, beaten down by fate, at the merciless hands of the woman who betrayed him.

Wheatley feels increasingly full of bile and other, unidentifiable liquids. Certain places behind his face, especially his nose, are getting all hot and crammed up like bubbling acid behind a dam. He sees her bare feet moving, changing stance to attack him. In sudden gasping desperation he kicks the cube in her direction, and the next thing he knows, there are fluids pouring out of what seems like every orifice in his head, leaving him completely blind and dumb and defenseless – not that he ever stood a chance against her anyway. Scalding, acrid tears spill into his mouth, which is already filled with the most horrid thick saliva, and there is mucus – mucus! – bubbling in strings inside his nose, and he can't breathe hard enough or fast enough, and it feels like a hot, cracked stone is crumbling in his throat and the pieces are landing hard in his chest.

Unable to stand this physiological onslaught without comment any longer, he hauls his head up defiantly and screams into her smug face: "This is disgusting!"

Oh, wait: she doesn't even look smug, she looks horrified. As she should. This is a pretty gross spectacle; death might be the final indignity, but it can't be much worse than mucus.

"Utterly disgusting, leaking everywhere! I—I can't even see out of this stupid oily piece of shit body! How could you do this to me?"

Was she always this small, though? Even as she stands over him glaring for all she's worth, she seems to shrink into herself, and even as his entire frame shudders with every breath, a hope flits into his mind: if he stood up all the way, would he be bigger than her? Could he actually fight in this body? Could he win? She makes for a compact little package, all dangerous eyes and ready posture, like a turret. Maybe get behind her and tip her over?

"So how are you going to fix this?" he snarls, wiping at all the phlegm with the back of one hand. "Do you even understand? This is the worst thing that could happen."

And that's when it happens. She doesn't move, but her eyes change; they remind him of bruises. Then the stabbing sadness in his chest changes, too, into a sadness that feels even worse, something that eats away at him, picking holes in his self-righteous fury until there's nothing left. He feels himself sagging under the weight of her accusatory gaze and suddenly he remembers the similar look she gave him from inside the glass elevator, the look that lanced clear through the storm of his paranoid rage, just for a second.

It's too much, so he just shuts off.

He flops down, cracking his stupid head on the ground again, and succumbs utterly to the agony of sensation, to oblivion and hell and feelings.

Some time later, as he lies in his heap of dirt and jumpsuit and tired bones and dried phlegm, he hears her stand up and her feet pad over. He ignores it and continues to examine his moist, fat palms, creased by a thousand wrinkles, until a shadow falls across him. He sighs and squints up.

She stands over him again, her face unreadable. He arranges his own face into an unimpressed mask and stares back. It's nice to have the sun out of his eyes, anyway. Although he doesn't rule out the possibility that she's about to kill him with a single well-placed stomp, it seems unlikely at this point. For at least an hour she has been sitting on the cube, silent as ever, her back to him – admiring the scenery, he presumes; humans love that kind of thing. Every time he's glanced over, her figure has been relaxed. Slumped, even. If there was a time for killing, it seems that time has passed.

Unfortunately, the alternative to dying in a human body is living in a human body.

While she's been doing… whatever it is she's been doing, Wheatley's been staring into the slow-drifting sky, muttering to himself over the endless whooshing of the wheat, debating the effectiveness of his body's defensive structures in order to distract himself until all the disgusting physical reactions died down. He has come to the conclusion that eyelids and toenails are dumb and has yelled this conclusion to her ("Hey! Eyelids and toenails are dumb! Hear me? Yours too!") without receiving a response. This still seems like a bad dream, but he isn't sure he cares anymore, so now that she's standing over him, seemingly waiting for something, he throws caution to the winds and levels his sarcasm at her.

"Well, now that we've had a quick glare, very productive, was there something you wanted to say to me? Telepathically or otherwise?"

Her eyebrows raise and he almost thinks she's about to crack a smile.

"Why did you do this to me?" he asks quietly.

A transient look of sadness crosses her face. Then she's pressing her lips together and shaking her head, a minuscule movement. She turns on her heel and vanishes from sight. A moment later, he hears her struggling to lift the cube, breathing in soft not-quite-grunts. He sits up, feeling a brief wave of wobbliness at the sudden change of position, and sees her walking into the wheat at a brisk pace, cube braced awkwardly on her hip.

"Wait a second, where are you going don't—!"

The terrified protest slips out before he even knows what he's afraid of. She turns and looks at him, continuing to walk backward without stopping, and although her face becomes more blurred in his vision with every step, he can make out her eyebrows raised again. Raised in expectation? Invitation? On an impulse, he scrambles to his feet and runs after her, feeling the curious swishing of wheat along his legs as he pushes through it. She stops to watch, and then he realizes what's just happened.

"Bloody fucking— do you see this? I can run! Ha ha! And walk too, can't I?" he crows. He walks around her effortlessly, forwards and backwards, laughing in delight. "Doing it properly, no falling!" He was right about the difference in their sizes, he notices: now that they're both standing up straight, he would be able to put his chin right on top of her head. Still beaming about his incredible feat of balance, he peers down closely at her face to catch her look of amazement. There is none.

Sighing, he pulls himself together and quickly improvises a reasonable explanation why he is following this woman – eschewing the underlying fact that he would just prefer not to be alone with himself, now or ever again.

"All right, let me just— I don't know how you manage it, but I can't see things in the distance very well. Because these eyes need corrective lenses, right?" Recognition dawns on her face, and she nods minutely, as if by accident. "So if there's some sort of attack," he continues, "like birds for instance, I'm not going to be able to see them coming. And we already know I cannot defend myself in an ambush of birds. For instance. And, I would appreciate it if… maybe you could let me know, maybe a signal or hand jive or something."

She gives him one slow, exaggerated blink. He feels a twinge of annoyance, the beginnings of a headache. She turns around and starts to stride off again, but then hesitates, sets down the cube, and climbs on top of it, craning her head first in one direction, then another.

"Oh, you don't know which way to go? That's two of us, then. Pick a direction. As they say, you can only walk halfway into a wheat field before you're walking out of it." She's already rustling off before he can finish talking.

This is what drove him nuts, he remembers as he crashes sullenly through the wheat after her: she's like a cat, a little flighty pet cat. If she's in the right frame of mind, if she needs something from him, she's all big dark eyes hanging on his every word. Otherwise, call and coax as he might, he may as well be invisible.

This kind of brushing-off is nothing new. Humans and robots alike have snubbed every idea he's had since activation. On the other hand, nobody has ever snubbed him this thoroughly before, especially in light of the fact that he's been doing this particular human nothing but favors since they met.

His thoughts fall easily, instantly back into this cozy, well-worn track of resentment.

She's never thrown him a fucking bone, not when they were partners, not when he was in charge, and certainly not now that he's a klutzy blind animal trailing her through a field.

Who kept her safe and smuggled her away to freedom, the last little popsicle in the relaxation center? He did. Who hacked through all the locked doors? Who lit the way for her in darkness, at the risk of his own life? He did. Who invited her to share in his newfound fortune, so hard-earned and so overdue, as he remade the facility into a playground for her clever little feet? And who, not an hour ago, lay cowering before her, his fortune ripped away, as she stood over him and sneered?

"Right," he says, feeling suddenly hot. They've just reached the end of the wheat and emerged into a field of tiny young soybeans. "Goodbye wheat, hello beans. While we're out here, turning over new leaves and whatnot, there's some stuff I wanna say to you. About what happened in the facility."

Now he has her attention, he thinks bitterly – she comes to an obedient halt, a look of surprise buoying up her features, as if he's about to make some confession she hadn't dared hope for.

"I just want to know, once and for all, why you dismiss, out of hand, every contribution I've made to this partnership?" Her face wilts at once – what was she expecting? "I know I've covered this back in the lair and everything, but you really don't seem to understand. It's been like this from the start and a little appreciation, a little acknowledgment even, would be nice. You know?"

Stony-faced, she rotates on the spot and walks away from him, each step steady and deliberate. He groans and pinches at his eyebrows as his headache erupts in full force.

"You— are you joking? Is this a joke? Because I'm telling you right now it's not funny." Her pace quickens and he jogs alongside her, getting angrier by the second. "Do you realize what you've done to me? Do I need to do a quick recap? You put me in a human body, all right, which I would not have even thought possible, and which is cruel and unusual, obviously. On top of that, you came this close to hurling me out into space, to die alone in space. And all this on purpose, as far as I can tell, and I think I deserve— would you listen to me?" He reaches out one long arm and grabs her roughly by the shoulder.

The cube hits the ground and her elbow smashes into his jaw. Teeth rattled, he reels back from the unexpected blow and goes down ass-first, immediately rolling over and pressing his violated face into the earthy-smelling soybeans. "Jesus bloody Christ!" he squeezes out. "Why would you— ughh." As he rolls around in the dirt, he hears her sigh. Craving retaliation, he claws around in midair, trying to grab her leg, but she just steps back out of his reach. Typical.

Eventually he comes up, filthier and smellier than ever, and they have another quick glare.

"Well, if that's your alternative to ignoring me, then never mind, I take it back. Ignore me all you want. Unappreciate me to your heart's content." He stands up, brushes himself off, and limps out into the soybeans.

He doesn't say another word for the length of the field, but as they come to a stand of trees and a paved road, the temptation proves too great.

When the road appears over the horizon, she lights up like a torch, making a beeline for it. He gets what the big deal is – humans, whoopee – but by the time he's caught up, her cheeks are blanched and her eyebrows drawn up tensely. She seems caught in some inner conflict. What could be that daunting about a slab of tar?

"Don't look so excited."

She gives him an appraising look. She smells terrible. He suspects it has to do with the sun beating down on them after running around Aperture sweating for so long, but excusable as all that may be, it doesn't improve his mood. Now that he's speaking to her again, he might as well complain. "You smell terrible, by the way. Don't get me wrong, we both do, but is there something we could maybe do about that? Like a special herb we could roll in to cover the stench, that sounds about right. What can we do?"

She raises her eyes to the sky in an attitude of I-don't-know. "Unhelpful. I don't know how you can stand smelling yourself."

The two of them follow the road; she shifts the cube from arm to arm periodically. On a roll now, Wheatley lists out loud every grievance he can think of about the human body, starting with the smell.

He hates the blunt little teeth stuck in his mouth like pebbles and the hideous feeling of his mouth squishing around them. There is nothing nice about having a mouth, really, and he keeps feeling saliva squirt out in a place under his tongue, which is absolutely the worst part about this body and the thing he hates the very most. The next-worst thing is not being able to see properly. He keeps giving himself a headache trying to zoom in. "Oh yeah, and headaches. Put that at the top of the list. Headaches."

Having fingers is possibly the only good thing, but fingernails are too weird to think about, though there is a fascinating animal quality about them too - like having tiny claws. He rakes at the air with them to demonstrate. Talking through a throat is not unpleasant, either, as he can feel it reverberating. That's a sensation he knows. "Vvvvvvvv. Like that." Anything that buzzes is all right, in his opinion.

"Okay, here's one: can you see the design flaw in the neck?" he says to her. "It's like you're just asking to be beheaded! I mean that's the most important part, the head! Why would you put it waving about up on a stalk? Just plop it down right on the shoulders, problem solved." She looks at him and presses her lips together in something like a smile, but not quite a smile.

There's more. He can smell every bad smell in the world without being able to turn it off. Walking is ridiculous: "Why are your arms even involved?" Having knees, elbows, and other angles is weird and often painful, as is being so long, such a distance from the ground. "But a sphere, a sphere is such a simple shape, isn't it? Elegant. Much better than this collection of lumps. You look like you've got more spherical bits than I do, though. That's a swiz." This one earns him another incomprehensible look.

All in all, he has way too many parts to keep track of at once, and some of them are so far away. They all seem to know what they are doing, though, which seems even more sinister. Also, how flammable is he right now? His heartbeat is so loud and inconstant and clumsy; he's used to the beautiful melodic murmur of his internal mechanisms. "You probably remember I used to make lovely whirry zippy sounds when I moved. Now it's only SQUISH, SQUISH, meats slapping together." He punctuates this thought by giving his own thigh a broad, contemplative slap. "Good ol' Meatley."

She stops.

He keeps walking, brainstorming other complaints, not realizing she's fallen behind until he hears an alarming wheezing sound. Jerking around hard enough to give himself whiplash, he sees her bent over in the road, trying to set the cube down gently and leaning on it with one hand. In a flash he is beside her.

"Wh—what are you, dying? Dying violently? No! It's botulism, isn't it? I warned you about that conversion gel!" His hands dance circles in the air around her arms. He's not sure what to do, what will get him elbowed in the face again. "Well, don't go dying now, you were so determined not to earlier!"

Still nothing but one staccato wheeze after another. She draws breath and lets fly with another round. This time there's some strength behind it – her voice? And all of a sudden, it hits him.

"You're laughing! Aren't you?"

She's laughing, and it sounds more like a real, recognizable laugh with every inhalation. She looks up at him almost bashfully with a huge open-mouthed smile. Her face is transformed by it, her eyes brightened, her coloring warmed. He stares, fascinated for some reason, and leans onto the cube across from her.

"Well then. I've only just spent a bloody week trying to get something like that out of you. It's about time."

But as he speaks, something in her face snaps shut again and her pitiful laughter dies mid-wheeze. And in one smooth movement, she puts her palm on his forehead and pushes him away, scoops up the cube, and walks away down the road, as if nothing had ever happened.

Next time: Wheatley discovers the horrible truth that underneath their clothes, everyone's NAKED! Aaugh! God, this story is silly... Anyway, the chapter's mostly done, so expect it really soon. Wanna write a review? You should! See ya later.