[Part 10]

Wheatley awoke with a start, his head throbbing with pain.

As the familiar ache refused to subside, he realized with growing unease that he wasn't sure exactly where he was.

Wherever it was, it was dark—but not the familiar partial darkness of the facility's countless abandoned rooms and walkways, always lit by the chance piece of operational equipment or the occasional functioning light bulb. This was a darkness more profound than any he had ever experienced; it was the complete absence of light, a black void that enveloped him entirely, seeping into him as though it were a living thing. As hard as he strained he could see nothing, and the longer he tried, the less certain he became that his eyes were actually open.

Unnerved, he tried to use his flashlight to chase away the darkness only to remember that he no longer possessed it.

The situation reminded him of those few times when he had been shut off long, long before. Those stretches of blind paralysis, during which nothing but his sense of hearing and his panicked consciousness remained, had continued to haunt him long after those who had forced it upon him had died and the only humans left were asleep themselves. But even during those periods of total shutdown he had at least been able to hear the world around him, to listen to the conversations of the engineers and their more technical—and often heated—debates about how to proceed on this project or that experiment. Though he could neither see nor move nor plead to be brought back into existence, Wheatley had at least felt comforted by the fact that he wasn't alone.

But he could hear nothing now.

His mind still hazy from sleep, he struggled to remember how he had gotten to this strange, empty place. He knew where he had been before this—tucked snugly in the warmth of the bed Chell had put him in—but he could no longer feel the blankets against his skin, or the bed under his back, or the pillow against his face. Where there had once been sensation feeding into his brain from every inch of his body there was now a near-total lack of input.

He could feel that he was no longer horizontal but seated somewhere, his head tilted back to rest against some unseen support.

His first thought was to move, to find his footing and run away from whatever this was, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't move his legs, or his arms, or even his head. He struggled to operate the limbs he knew were there, but there was no response, his body remaining still, heavy, and useless beneath him.

A terrible twisting anxiety settled in his gut—he had grown so accustomed to being able to move on his own during his few days as a human that the thought of returning to utter helplessness terrified him. The panic rose slowly, its familiar prickle invading the edges of his conscious thought, gradually swelling to a dizzying throb as his drowsy mind fully grasped the reality of his situation.

He was blind, he was deaf, he was immobile—and he had no idea where he was.

But more importantly, he had no idea where Chell was.

The worst images flashed unbidden through his mind—images of her trapped somewhere herself, lost in her own darkness, terrified and weak and exposed. The thought tore at him, fear and anger rising in his chest.

He should never have let her leave the room, he should never have even let her out of his sight. He could have made her stay. He was stronger than her, he knew that now, he could have kept her from leaving if only he'd made the effort, but he hadn't wanted to offend her or make her angry and now because of his own cowardice she was simply gone.

He had let her down again. He'd sworn to help her escape but he'd let her slip away. She could be dead already for all he knew—

His frantic train of thought halted abruptly as a voice, dark and familiar and impossibly loud, rang painfully through his head.

"I had very nearly resigned myself to waiting for the rest of my functioning years for you to wake up."

Wheatley froze at the sound, at once relieved to hear anything and chilled to the core at what it was. Almost predictably, a low chuckle followed, seemingly echoing off of walls far closer to him than he ever would have expected, its deep, lilting tones surrounding him from all sides.

His mind swam with panic, his breaths short and shallow and fruitless, his head light from the lack of oxygen. She was here. Wherever here was, She was here. With him. And he couldn't move or hide or run away and She knew he was here, and She was laughing at him and laughing was never, ever good, not for him—

"It's been quite a while since we've last spoken. How have you been?"

—She seemed in good spirits, at least, he decided, noting with unease the warm cordiality of Her voice.

Maybe, he thought hopefully, maybe She was simply checking up on him to see how Her punishment was going, to ask him how terrible it was to be human. And he could answer quite honestly that it was, in fact, rather terrible, and that the human body was slow and inefficient and painful and confusing, and that it was often disgusting and acted of its own accord, and that really, the negative sensations quite outweighed the good—

"I asked you a question."

He snapped to attention, noting the sudden change in Her demeanor. Her voice had shifted from warm and welcoming to frigid and impatient with alarming swiftness. He began to reply—to babble, really, because he honestly had no idea what he could possibly say to Her—but very quickly realized that he could not speak as he willed the voice to rise in his throat only to choke without making a sound.

"It was a rhetorical question, of course." Her voice resumed, a cruel smirk buried within its acidic tone.

His eyes darted from side to side, blindly searching the pitch black space for any evidence of Her presence but finding none.

"You didn't think that I forgot about you, did you?" She continued. "Or that I'd just… set you free, in my facility, to do whatever you pleased?"

He would never admit it, but he had, actually, thought both of those things at different times, eventually deciding that not thinking about Her at all was the best course of action. It had worked fairly well for him so far.

"Of course I didn't forget you. How could I ever forget the vile, greedy little imbecile who nearly destroyed my life's work?"

He winced inwardly, his ears throbbing at Her voice as it steadily rose in volume.

"I can understand why you might be confused about my actions. Especially taking into account your… subpar cognitive abilities. After all, you took my body and I gave you yours. It doesn't quite add up, does it?"

She let out a bitter laugh.

"Did you really think that that was your punishment? To be given arms and legs and the ability to feel?"

He had to admit, it hadn't made much sense to him.

"Of course, to be human is to be cursed with a short and meaningless existence fraught with pain, loneliness, and uncertainty, and I do appreciate that fact," Her withering narrative continued, voice dropping to an impassive murmur. "But I don't think that is a quite sufficient punishment for… what you did."

Unable to do much but listen in frozen apprehension, Wheatley waited for Her to continue, to describe how She planned to pull out all of his hair or strip the flesh from his body or chop his fingers off or—he shuddered—slowly crush him under a spike plate.

Why the hell had he even made those?

Unexpectedly, though, She changed the subject, again adopting a more genial, conversational tone.

"I do hope that you are not so naïve as to have thought that meeting… her was merely a happy coincidence."

Her words slowly sank in, redirecting his thoughts from his own gruesome fate.

She knew about Chell?

Of course, She had to know that she'd escaped from Her again—however that had come about—but She knew that Chell had found him? Why hadn't She pursued them, captured them, killed them by now? How could the AI have passed up the chance to destroy them when they were both so weak and so lost?

"When I jammed her elevator near the relaxation facilities, I had so hoped that she would find you there," She continued, voice rich with satisfaction.

He struggled to comprehend the meaning behind Her words, but none of it made sense to him. It was impossible—She had sabotaged Her own equipment to set Chell free? He couldn't believe it.

"Believe it."

He paused, puzzling at the similarity between Her words and his own thoughts. It was uncanny, the way She seemed to echo him, Her deafening voice projecting from seemingly everywhere at once.

"As a brief aside, I would like to state that if you think I would transfer your consciousness into a new body without taking full advantage of the opportunity, you are far more moronic than I ever imagined."

Full advantage? Wheatley nervously pondered the phrase. What did that even mean?

"Oh, it's nothing special. Really. I simply installed a few microchips into your body that have allowed me to observe everything you have done over the past several days in addition to hearing your every last pathetic thought."

An odd mixture of fear and satisfaction gripped him. So he'd been right. For once in his life, he'd been right about something—She had been spying on him back in that first room and everywhere since, just not through cameras, but through… himself? Had he heard her right? How was that even possible?

"Like I said, it's not much, really. Only the pinnacle of modern technology. A few subcranial implants here or there. It has been an informative experiment," She concluded smugly.

So that was it. That was why he hadn't heard from Her for so long. During his transformation, She'd tampered with this body, planted her own devices in it, and… watched him for the past few days? It wasn't quite as sinister a plan as he'd expected. For one, it didn't involve nearly as much pain as he'd anticipated.

"I don't expect you to understand my motives in doing this. To be honest, that's part of why it's so enjoyable. Your infinitesimal brain can barely even comprehend the meaning of an erection—" She paused, seemingly picking up on his confusion. "—yes, that is what that is called, and no, you are not using it correctly."

At Her offhand comment he was struck by the full meaning of Her words. If She had been watching him and listening to his thoughts for days now, that meant that She knew… everything. She knew about the thing on the front of him and the trouble it had caused them both, She knew about his sudden and uncomfortable fixation on Chell. She'd heard each strange thought he'd had about her body—She likely had even been witness to the images his mind had conjured of her to help himself achieve that toe-curling end…

"And frankly, I am unimpressed." Her tone was flat and emotionless.

His face felt very warm.

"You see, I've studied humans for quite some time. Between observing them, testing them, and killing them, I've learned quite a lot about them. Enough to know humans for the selfish and destructive animals they are. But you? You take the cake." She finished with a quiet chuckle.

He wasn't sure quite what she meant. He hadn't taken any cake that he knew of.

"You've already proven yourself entirely incapable of handling whatever body you are placed in. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that in the few days in which you've been human you have already managed to ruin your own life. And hers."

Ruin? Life hadn't been easy for either of them for their brief time together, he knew, but he wouldn't say that it had been ruined.

"Oblivious, as usual. I should have expected this." Her voice was tired now, weighed down with an exasperated sigh. "You really don't see it, do you? The way she looks at you."

He had, in fact, closely studied the way she looked at him. He'd nearly memorized every line and angle in her face.

"She hates you."

He was stunned. She hated him? That was a rather strong sentiment—

"She thinks you're ugly. She finds your body repulsive and she wishes that you would stop touching her."

—that much, at least, he had already suspected, but it did nothing to soothe the sting of Her words.

"You don't think she's forgiven you for your betrayal, do you? She hasn't forgotten what you did to her. When she looks at you, all she can think about is how you tried to murder her," the AI continued with a laugh.

Wheatley swallowed thickly. He hadn't quite expected that.

Following their violent meeting, she had seemed to forgive him, had shown no signs that she held any grudge against him. But reflecting upon their short time together, he felt a flicker of doubt. She had shown no overt signs that she held a grudge against him, but most of the time when she looked at him, she seemed so angry, and she almost always avoided being near him, and she hurt him so often…

"And why shouldn't she? You're the reason why she's still trapped down here. She was almost free, and you took her future away from her. At the very. Last. Second." Her voice was low and quiet.

His chest ached. It was true, it was all true, and he knew it. It was his fault that she was still at Aperture, still in mortal danger. But after his difficult apology, she had held him, her arms wrapped gently around his shoulders, her fingers lightly threading through his hair to stroke his head reassuringly. She had waited so patiently with him until his emotions were under control and he could walk again—didn't that mean that she'd forgiven him?

He heard a derisive laugh.

"She just wanted you to stop sniveling like a miserable child. You were annoying her."

He felt a stab of something hot and unpleasant in his stomach. He had been crying, uncontrollably, just as that young test subject had so long before—how could he have behaved so poorly? What must she have thought of him, a fully grown human barely in control of his own emotions, weak and confused and leaking like a child?

But if she really hadn't forgiven him—which he quite honestly would not blame her for—nothing else she'd done made any sense. Why had she taken him with her if she hated him so much? Why did she lead him out of the relaxation facility if she couldn't stand the sight of him? Why hadn't she just left him to die there?

"She doesn't trust you. She didn't leave you because she believes you will betray her again."

His heart sank. It made sense. It hurt terribly, but it made sense.

He had torn up an enormous research facility simply to find and destroy her—and he'd gotten so horrifyingly close. He felt a twinge of belated anxiety at that thought, even though he already knew the outcome, the images of her daring escape from him returning to his mind's eye. She'd been dropped, shot at, burned, and berated by him. She'd been mere inches from those spike plates several times, and at the end he'd screamed at her to just lie down and die.

How could he ever expect her to trust him after that?

He'd tried so hard to explain it to her through his tears, but she could never understand just how the chassis had changed him, how swiftly he'd lost control of himself, how overpowering the fleeting euphoria and steadily mounting rage had been to his unprepared, already-damaged processors.

"Please." Her sneer interrupted his thoughts. "It wasn't the chassis that made you try to kill her—it was you. You were under your own control the entire time. The only difference was that you were, for a brief moment, granted the power to do what you had always wanted to do."

A flash of indignation swelled within him.

She was wrong. He had never wanted to hurt her, not once, not until the unending surge of input from the chassis had overwhelmed him, feeding those terrible, sinister impulses into his consciousness. All he'd wanted was to escape from the relaxation center that had almost instantly become a mausoleum with the depletion of the facility's backup power. He'd received the first warning message minutes before the facility failed, and with nobody there to guide him, to tell him what to do, he'd been helpless to prevent what followed.

He'd discovered her chamber, still partly functional and still indicating the presence of a living occupant, while frantically searching the center's reference files for information on how long a human could survive without oxygen. He'd quickly decided to find the human, to guide her out of the facility and to escape, leaving the lost test subjects and his burning guilt far behind.

But his plan had failed miserably, nearly resulting in the human's death by his own metaphorical hand.

He had only ever had the best of intentions—sure, he'd planned to use her as a means of escape, but it seemed a fair trade for his guidance and support. And when he first saw her there, her eyes hazy and confused, wild hair framing her frightened face, he'd wanted to help her, the poor thing, trapped just as much as he was in the facility.

"You are the same now as you've ever been."

But he didn't feel the same. Not in this body. Within the chassis he'd felt rage at her very existence, but now he felt like he had before, as a core—he wanted to help her escape. To keep her from harm. He wanted to see her freed from this awful place so she could finally live the life she deserved.

He didn't want to hurt her, not at all, the thought had never even crossed his mind since his transformation—

"You can't tell me that you haven't noticed how similar they are. The testing euphoria, and… the other euphoria. Don't you remember how good it felt to hold her completely under your control? To force her to solve tests all day?"

It had felt good. Incredibly good. It had begun as an indescribable rush to his processors, a throbbing pulse of crackling energy building from deep within the chassis. Spreading swiftly through his mainframe, the pulse had radiated outward from his core, spilling out from his chamber to dance along the surfaces of the entire facility, comprising the full extent of his inconceivably large body, his walls and panels and doors jerking and shifting restlessly as he, the writhing center of more power and pleasure than he had ever imagined existed, rode out the aftershocks of the euphoria response.

It had felt so good that he had barely even noticed her tiny form still in the chamber, dodging his twitching, erratic panels, hiding from his gratification until it was safe for her to move to the next test.

"And how does it feel now when you touch yourself to the thought of her?"

He hated to admit it, but it had felt familiar from the start. That sensation, distinct and unmistakable, was almost identical to that which the chassis had fed to him—but this human body was different. He was almost in complete control of it and he had felt no violent urges toward her, had heard no insistent, disembodied voices in his ear urging him to crush her flat.

So far.

"And yet you've already begun to hurt her. She knows that you still feel the itch—she could see it in your eyes the moment she found you. She pulls away from your touch because it frightens her that you still feel it."

He felt a terrible clenching in his chest, guilt flooding into his mind. That would explain quite a lot—her rapidly shifting moods, her angry glances, her impatience… she had known what he had felt toward her all along, even before he knew it himself. He couldn't blame her for being so angry with him, for being disgusted with him.

"Whenever you look at her, that destructive impulse drives you to take from her. Your body still wants power and control. The only difference is that you want something else from her now as well."

She was wrong. He didn't want anything from her at all—he only wanted to help her and protect her. He had hoped for her forgiveness, but never truly expected it. He had hoped that she would accept his offer for help, which he thought she had. What else could he possibly want from her?

"What indeed."

He racked his brain frantically for the answer. What was it this particular body desired whenever he felt that urge? What did she make him feel?

It was a strong and irresistible pull, a yearning toward her that he could not define. She was beautiful and good, and he wanted to be near her. He wanted to touch her, to hold her in his hands, to press his lips against her skin and feel her body move beneath him. The very thought of her made him warm all over, made his hands itch to reach out and capture her, to pull her close to him, to possess her.

He felt numb. It really wasn't any different, was it?

"And you even went so far as to attempt to satisfy yourself using her body." A low chuckle. "I've met some degenerates during my time, but honestly, that tops it all."

His heart caught in his throat—the corridor. He had been too close to her and that damned urge had swelled up within him and he had tried in vain to relieve it, not understanding what it was, only succeeding in angering her. That was why she'd reacted so violently, why she'd been so furious—he had been using her, just like before, forcing her to give him what he wanted.

How had he not seen it before?

"Why are you doing this?" he burst in a strangled cry, voice thick and shaky with emotion. He bit his lip, stunned at the sound of his own voice, at the sensation of his hands clenching into fists, seemingly freed from their paralysis.

The AI paused for a long moment before replying.

"You are my punishment for her."

He felt sick at her words, wrapping his arms around his own shoulders, his mind racing. Of course, that had to be it. She hated her, She hated her even more than She hated him. This wasn't about him at all, none of it was. It was all about her. She'd made him into a monster and engineered their meeting, knowing Chell wouldn't trust him enough to leave him behind, counting on him to return to his old ways.

Anger rose within him at Her deception, his throat choking painfully as the tears sprang to his eyes. He quite honestly hadn't cared when his own life was the one in danger—after all, he deserved it—but he could not let GLaDOS hurt her. He would not. He realized with a start that during GLaDOS's speech he'd forgotten entirely about her, that he still had no idea where she was being held. Knowing Her, it was nowhere safe.

"What have you done with her?" he growled.

There was no reply, the taunting, dead silence of the dark chamber nearly driving him mad.

"Where is she?" He lurched forward to stand, his feet tripping over something small and soft. His legs folded beneath him and he fell to the ground beside the thing. He reached out blindly to identify the obstruction, his heart racing at the sensation of cold skin under his fingertips—skin and hair and cloth—

"Across the hall."

He shot upward with a strangled cry, nearly blinded by the dim light of the dormitory. He held back a sob, tears running freely down his face, clenching the covers tightly with his fists.

A dream. That was all it had been—a dream. Like the others, but much, much worse.

The knowledge did little to comfort him as he sat upright and panting in his bed, the silent emptiness of the room seeming far more threatening than it had before. He was gripped suddenly with the realization that he hadn't seen Chell in—he didn't know how long. The thought unnerved him. He stood unsteadily, legs trembling, and crossed the floor to stand before the door. He had no idea which room she'd picked to stay in, but he knew he had to see her, if only to make sure that she was still there, still breathing.

Across the hall.

He swung the door open and crossed the corridor to the opposite door, tentatively turning the doorknob as gently as he could, pushing it inward and peeking inside. He breathed a sigh of relief. She was there, sleeping soundly, still breathing, her chest lifting and falling steadily. He stood in the doorway for a while, willing his pulse to slow down now that he knew she was safe. He soon noticed that her covers were askew, only barely covering her body, and he wondered if she felt cold. As quietly as he could manage, he stepped inside her room and drew close to her bed, gripping the sheets with his hands to mimic the way she'd tucked him in. As he grabbed hold of the heavy cloth, he noticed something strange.

Though she still wore the Aperture-labeled shirt he had seen her in before, her pants were missing, replaced instead with a small triangle of white fabric wrapped around her hips. Her legs were bare, and spread slightly in her sleep, allowing him to see a fair bit more of her than he had before. He stood frozen over her bed, sheets in hand, studying the sight closely, before a twinge of something—bad—led him to drop the covers and back away from her quickly.

He'd felt it. Again.

It had only been a dream. GLaDOS had not really spoken with him, and this strange thing that he felt was something else, something different, something that would never drive him to hurt her. Dreams were not real and if She wanted to hurt them, she would have done it ten times already. Despite this reassuring mantra, however, he still felt uneasy at the all-too-familiar shiver running through his body, a sensation he couldn't help but associate with her. He felt guilty, ashamed at his body's unrelenting betrayal of his own desires, frustrated that he was powerless to stop it.

He watched her from afar, her exposed skin holding his attention. Ignoring the strange impulse to climb into bed with her, he continued to move backwards toward the door, his eyes never leaving her form. During his retreat, he backed heavily into a dresser, a number of picture frames toppling over—he saw her head move, her body shift still half-beneath the covers, and turned around and fled, sliding the door shut behind him.

Safely outside, he leaned against the door and slid downward to come to rest in a sitting position, his face cradled in his hands.