As Chell moved towards the laboratory door, a thought nagged at the back of her mind.
She paused just short of the glass. This close to the hallway, she could very faintly hear Wheatley babbling to her. The glass muffled his words.
This was a part of the facility she had never seen before. Now, granted, there was an obscene amount of the facility she had never seen before, but labs were something different. The testing chambers were usually next to offices, not laboratories or anything even resembling a place where science was done. Probing her own memory offered feeble, fuzzy memories of decrepit rooms like the one Wheatley's test chamber had led into. More than once she had come across dim halls like the two just outside of this laboratory. But a laboratory proper? Absolutely not.
That was it, that was the thing that was giving her pause: Aperture Laboratories, despite its name, seemed to have very few laboratories, no benches or fume hoods or safety signs peppering chemically-stained walls. Unless you counted its test chambers as laboratories, this facility kept its rooms of science out-of-reach and buried behind hundreds, possibly thousands, of drab office rooms.
Surely this place could offer more than just a cure for her leg. It could offer a real advantage against him.
Honestly, all she wanted was to leave.
Maybe with him.
Maybe not.
Either way, this whole excursion has been a bad idea.
Chell turned and examined the laboratory again. There were two other doors, painted black, within the room. The first, against the left-hand wall and partially obscured by cabinets, was securely locked and wouldn't give.
The second door, on the right-hand wall, swung open easily when she tried it. The hall beyond it was dark save for some sparse red lights. It was silent: no hum of machinery, no buzz of electricity, nothing.
The scientists in this part of the facility must have forgotten to invest in proper lights. Either that or GLaDOS had never seen fit to light such a distant, unused part of the facility, and Wheatley hadn't, either, assuming he even knew where she was.
But this hall was better than returning to the test chamber from earlier, and so she moved forward and let the door swing shut and lock behind her.
Now that there were no outside sources of light, she could see that the eerie red light was coming from the wall; its glow only reached so far into the blackness. The smell of dust was strong in the air, along with a faint, cloying sent that Chell, stomach turning, recognized as the smell of human corpses. The hallway was completely clear, from what she could see, but still the stench of death persisted. She moved, wincing as she stepped on her casted leg, towards the source of the red light.
The source, she now saw, was a control panel in the left-hand wall.
Her eyes swept over the dusty metal, over the red lights and the lights that weren't even turned on, over dials and meters and levers and buttons, some of them labeled in languages she couldn't recognize, some labeled over and over in every language imaginable. Her hands, fingers twitching, hovered over the panel.
There was one blue light, among the red. It pulsed gently.
Like the glow in Wheatley's bare chest.
Just below the unlabeled light was one small button, set deep into the metal of the control panel wall. Chell leaned forward and peered at its tiny label.
In bright-orange capitals, it said: "SLEEP."
Chell staggered backwards. She knew this wall. Its exact parallel, albeit simplified and turned into the language of dozens of black wires (wires she herself had touched and explored, whose labels she had read time and again in thousands of quiet moments), was in Wheatley's back. This control panel, essentially, was his back, now that he was in the chassis.
So, then, this is what the scientists had used to manipulate GLaDOS. This exhaustive control panel had failed them. And now, standing amongst the lingering smell of their corpses, she had a chance to do what they had never been able to do: keep their facility, and its controller, from murdering her.
She hesitated.
Knock him out.
Oh, how easy that would be; she could simply take him and run. They could escape across the yellow, endless fields, back to their house, back to where they belonged, away from Here; she could throw his sleeping self onto the couch and collapse onto her bed upstairs and cry and not come out to wake him until her leg was completely healed.
And then what?
Her hand, its finger outstretched towards the SLEEP button, suddenly curled up and shook like a wounded animal. She thought, with a hollow pit in her stomach, that she'd rather escape without him than carry his lifeless body in her arms. She didn't want to wake him up again. She didn't want to hear his CPU boot up as he came to. She didn't want to re-bear those tense few seconds where she wondered whether he remembered her or not. And she didn't want to re-teach him gentility or what forgiveness was.
There was a lot she could do, but dialing back to square one was one thing she couldn't do more than once.
A hissing sound came from above her head. Chell looked up slowly, as if in a dream.
A mechanical claw shot down from the ceiling and grabbed her by the waist.
Chell gasped and struggled as the claw hefted her up. Clanking and hissing, it dragged her, as if she were a ragdoll, towards the other end of the hallway. As she fought against it, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the end wall opening up into a cavernous room. Its white light temporarily blinded her before her vision cleared and she could get a good look at her surroundings.
Wheatley had no screens here.
She felt the emptiness of the abyss below her, and turned her gaze to the ceiling, willing herself not to look down.
Wheatley's voice was coming through speakers. He was screaming.
"You let her go, mate! Wh-what are you doing to her? Where are you taking…?"
Suddenly, he grew quiet, and a change of inflection colored his voice a sinister sort of pleased with himself. Chell stopped pushing down on the sides of the claw. She desperately tried to take in more air. The claw had a death grip that was making her dizzy, but she didn't want to fall to her death. Not here.
Not with him watching.
"Oh, I see. Heh. You're bringing her to me, aren't you? You're…you're all very clever, doing this for me. I can deal with her."
Then a dark threat crept into Wheatley's tone, one that made shivers go up her spine even if her heart leapt at his words.
"B-but if you hurt her, I swear…you will be very, very dead. All of you. Dead. But especially you, mate. Especially you. Nobody will hurt her. You hear me?"
His voice dropped to a whisper. "Nobody."
The claw moved forward into another secluded hallway, and its grip tightened. She strained upwards, her hands pushing down on the claw; in response, she heard a hydraulic hiss from the ceiling to which it was attached. The white panels in the hall rippled, and the claw squeezed even tighter.
Black spots filled her vision. Her head felt light. The claw swerved around corner after corner, jerking her violently back and forth.
Just as she thought she was about to pass out, the claw tossed her roughly onto a hard tile surface, knocking the wind out of her. Chell gritted her teeth and struggled to push herself up. She was trembling.
"There you are, lady."
She slowly looked up, still gulping for air.
The claw had deposited her right in Wheatley's chamber.
The entire chassis turned to face her. Wheatley leaned back into the seat of its body, the wires behind him loosening. Chell could see that they were glowing faintly now, all of them, lit with that strange mixture of pulsing red and blue light. Wheatley's slightly upturned chin masked the swollen main wire she knew was feeding into the back of his head.
"I want to make a little deal with you," Wheatley said, steepling his fingers and smiling at her. "Something that won't hurt either of us. Sound alright?"
Chell's eyes narrowed as she struggled, panting, to her feet. Her head spun as she stood.
"This facility wants to kill you, love. It hates you. For whatever reason, it wants to see you dead."
He leaned forward towards her, and the chassis moved with him.
"But I don't want to see you dead. Obviously. I just want to see you better."
She saw his eyes slide to the cast. "And I see you've gotten that taken care of, so here's Part Two of what I want from you."
He turned from her, looking up. Chell followed his gaze upwards; the hole in the ceiling was almost gone. It was being rebuilt, much like the elevator had repaired itself. As she looked back to Wheatley, she noticed that the burn marks normally present on his skin were fading, too.
"This place is so much safer. You know I have control over everything. I just tell the facility not to kill you, and bam, we're fine down here. No mold, no need for food. Just you and me, safe and sound. Forever."
He turned back to her, the smile gone. Despite him glaring at her, and despite her instinctual, familiar fear of him, Chell thought she saw his mouth twitch, for a split-second, into a grimace.
"But unless you test for me, unless you're willing to get rid of this awful pain, get rid of t-this Itch in exchange for safety, a nice home, you're not getting anything. I'm trying to look out for you, love. Really. But I'll…"
And this time the grimace she thought she imagined came back and stayed on his face.
"I-I'll do something awful."
Chell slowly limped forward.
For a second, Wheatley recoiled, the entire chassis recoiling with him. But Chell continued to move forward, her face set, keeping eye contact with him.
Her progress was slow, and the chamber large, but as she approached him, she saw his face soften. Wheatley's eyes widened. As she got closer, he moved towards her. The chassis slowly lowered so that he was at eye level with her.
She pressed her lips together and kept moving until she was right in front of him. The entire facility was silent; the air pressed around her, ringing faintly in her ears.
Chell looked up at him. Wheatley was slumping forward slightly, his hands unmoving and loose in his lap. He was eyeing her with a small tilt of his head, his eyes still wide, gentle, apologetic. His mouth was slightly open; as she stood in front of him, she watched as he mouthed something before growing still again.
She reached out and caressed his face with both hands. The corners of his mouth twitched upwards.
Just as he was slowly leaning forward, reaching towards her waist, head tilting and eyes closing, she grabbed his shoulders and began to pull.
It took Wheatley a minute to discern what she was trying to do.
It was only when the first wire came free with a sickening pop that he began to scream and push back on her.
The chassis, combined with his already inhuman strength, made her go sliding back across the tile floor. She scrunched her face up and pulled as hard as she could, trying to bring him with her. She opened one eye to peer at him.
More wires popped out of his back, and he threw his head back and let out a howl of pain. Chell gritted her teeth, her breath coming in short puffs, and pulled harder, struggling to get proper leverage. Her grip nearly came loose as he leveled his gaze on her again, and she saw the frustration burning in his eyes, the anger, the pure hatred and resentment she thought, for a stuttering, frightening moment, that her stubbornness had induced in him. Maybe she had ruined him; maybe she had been the final straw after years of him being pushed aside. Maybe he hated her after all.
Then, as a few more wires popped out of him, genuine fear crept into his blue eyes as he stared at her, then a sort of desperation. She saw his eyes watering, and then his hands got a death grip on her wrists and he was using her to pull himself out.
"Chell, please," he whispered, his fingers struggling, and he locked hands with her and screamed,
"Manual override! Let me out! I don't want this!"
And with a bull-like roar, the chassis bucked, the last of the wires disconnected, GLaDOS's body spat Wheatley out, and he and Chell went flying, together, across the floor, where they eventually skidded to a halt.