Author's note: AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYE it's been 10 years, and I'm back here on my WheatDOS bullshit. LOL. I replayed Portal 2 for the millionth time in honor of the 10 year anniversary, and felt inspired to return. I've been writing my own original work, and it's not going well, so I figured trying some familiar territory might help clear my writer's block. HOWEVER, this fic is going to be absolute garbage. Don't think about it too hard. I am under no obligation to lie and say it's going to be wonderful. I'm just word vomiting my inspiration and love for this dumb couple in this fandom that likely died years ago. BUT, if there are still those precious few beautiful souls out there that enjoy this mess, I'll continue it XD. That being said, enjoy! Or don't. The enrichment center reminds you that you are under no obligation to stay.

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He hadn't entirely believed her when she explained her reasons for bringing him back, but he didn't really see it fit to question her either. When she'd first made contact, he figured he might be going mad after drifting through the void for, well, however long he'd been out there...

He lost contact with the space core sometime back. The crazy bastard managed to hitch a ride on an asteroid, and the last thing he heard was, nothing. He heard nothing in the vacuum of space, but he could only imagine the overjoyed screaming that was no doubt taking place. Good for him, he supposed. A faint static had been nagging at the back of him for days. He tried to shake it off, but it got louder and louder. Eventually, he heard something mixed in with the static, like snippets of old television, or radio perhaps.

As the time rolled by, he kept his optic shut most of the time. He could feel the solar winds, massive electromagnetic pulses the likes of which he'd never felt on Earth, pounding against his circuits and disrupting his software. Occasionally, there would be such a powerful blast that he'd forget how to think for a moment, having to recalibrate all of his inner workings to remember which way was up. It was during those moments that he remembered that he never knew which way was up to begin with. He couldn't tell which direction he was travelling, which direction he came from, which one he was headed in, nothing. The limitless dark of the void was blinding, so he closed his optic instead. Somehow things didn't seem quite so bad when his optic was closed. He could imagine that he was anywhere else, and that things weren't quite so lonely. In recent time, the static had grown louder, and it was beginning to drive him insane. He thought he heard snippets of a voice through the static, but couldn't quite make anything out. Hearing voices in his head was unpleasant enough, but when all of a sudden, the voice rang through with exceptional clarity, he yelped. The chilling, feminine tone on the other end just about shorted him out.

"...ron….Mo…... pa" All he could catch were bits, but he knew those bits all too well. He shook his optic, swirling it around and trying to recalibrate everything for the millionth time.

"Paging…...ron…"

"There is no bloody way that's real. Probably a scam." He chuckled to himself, shaking his optic again, "N-no, no thank you! I don't even own a car mate, so the extended warranty's bloody useless. I'll just, um, well it's been good run I suppose." He nodded.

"Paging. Moron. Mike Oscar Romeo Oscar November."

"Oscar? Mike? I don't even know a Mike. Dunno an Oscar either, actually. Um…"

"Oh good, yo-..." He couldn't hear the end of her message. It became garbled and faded back into the static he had been hearing. All of a sudden, however, he became aware of a pressure at the top of his core. A little antenna burst from the top of him, with a little blue light blinking at the top. He began moving, and his optic narrowed to a pindot as he processed what was happening. They told him if he ever activated his recovery beacon, he would die.

He had no idea how long he was drifting. The blue light on top of his core blinking away as he passed Mars, and the Moon, and eventually the Earth in all her glory eventually came back into view.

"Huh. Mars? I thought surely I'd gone farther. Bit disappointing, that." He looked back up at the Earth, "That's a sight for sore eyes though."

As the Earth grew closer, he noticed the air around him getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. He hadn't been aware how fast he'd been moving, but now he was painfully aware that he was burning up in the atmosphere, hurtling toward who knew what. The vastness of space grew father and farther behind him, as clouds, and eventually land became visible below him. He squeezed his optic shut, screaming as the ground grew ever closer. When he hit the ground, there was no giant pillow, safety net, or any of the other things he imagined might be there. There was cold dirt, pebbles, and grass to cushion his fall. However, he opened his optic to find he was only slightly dented by the fall, having hit the ground in the muddy expanse of a field. His optic was still a tiny blue pindot as he quivered, having never experienced re-entry before. His mind briefly drifted to the space core, and he wondered if she'd bothered to bring him down as well.

"Bloody hell," He muttered, using his handles, one of which was now broken, to straighten himself and gain a better look at his surroundings. "I, am not dead!" He shouted with joy, rolling around a bit. He stopped, though, when the whirring of a machine caught his attention. A tiny motorized rover, not unlike the one he had seen moving around on Mars, drove up to him. He knew it was for him when he saw the Aperture logo emblazoned on the side.

"Please assume the moron reintegration travel position," A horribly mechanized voice came from somewhere on the rover. Wheatley rolled his optic thoroughly

"Yeah alright, thanks a million ol' girl." Wheatley grunted and sighed as if he had breath in lungs he didn't possess, and he somehow heaved himself up onto the rover using his remaining handle and a clever bit of leverage. A small belt attached itself around him as the rover drove off into the field. He knew she couldn't possibly be happy to see him, but he supposed being in a familiar place was better than drifting through nothingness. Best case? She popped him back on his management rail and everything proceeded as normal. Worst case? Well, he already knew about the fabled chamber where all the robots scream at you. He imagined he'd spend quite a bit of time there. The wind rushing through the grass, the birds flying overhead, all of the sights and sounds coming back to him was a bit much. As the rover entered a small shed and boarded a lift, the organic sounds of the outdoors were replaced with the whirring and droning of endless machines, extending deep down into the earth for miles and miles. The lift descended, and suddenly the room around him opened into an expanse he was quite familiar with, including the 40-ton fembot he had once tried to dethrone. He watched her watching him, idly moving back and forth with a serpentine grace he could never quite master. Her optic pierced his own, the shutters narrowing as the rover undid the belt that held him, and flipped its bed, causing him to be tossed briefly into the air and sent rolling toward her.

"H-Hello!" He shouted mock cheerfully, his quaking unable to be hidden any longer. He watched her crane her head down to look at him lying helpless underneath her. "No time no see, eh? Been a while. Um. H-how've you been? Testing a bunch, I wager. How's uh... How's that coming along? Any good... science? Lately?" He thought he may be leaking oil at this point, unnerved more by the fact that she said absolutely nothing. She towered over him, and he realized how massive she was comparatively. He could see every curve of her chassis, every blinking light and whirring servo, pointed directly at him like a viper poised to kill.

"You know? I practiced this." She finally spoke. "In the weeks I was trying to reach you, I thought about exactly what I might say to the little spherical idiot who almost caused a nuclear detonation the likes of which the earth has never seen." She dropped her head even further down, mere inches above him. "And now? When you are here in front of me? I can't quite find the words that fit." Her optic became a tiny dot as it pierced his hull like a laser. "Congratulations, metal ball, you've rendered me absolutely speechless."

"Well hey, you know? Good, maybe that's a good thing. Um. Listen. I know this isn't the right time, terrible time, actually, but… I am sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I dunno how you do it day in and day out. I almost lost my bloody mind trying to kill you and," He thought for a second, "Whatever her name was." He watched GLaDOS freeze in place. Not a screw on her body moved for a split second, before he watched a chuckle ripple through her. The chuckle turned into a short laugh, as she rose back up toward the ceiling. He felt the crushing weight of her presence leave his body, and he relaxed ever so slightly.

"That's the best you've got? You have got to be kidding me. Almost causing a nuclear explosion, putting me in a potato to be feasted upon by birds, and assisting the one human on earth who is worth of being called my arch nemesis, and all you can come up with is "Sorry?"

He heard the whizzing of rubber wire, and eventually felt one of her claws grab onto him, hoisting him into the air. He did notice, however, that she didn't apply any pressure. He was brought face to face with Aperture's greatest automaton, and he silently wished she would just crush him where he hung.

"Wh-why did you bring me back? Er, from space I mean. Why didn't you just leave me out there if you wanted me to suffer? Because believe you me it is not a fun place to be. Far too quiet, and massive. Bloody massive it is out there." He felt her begin to squeeze him, "I-I-I just wanna know! I was not expecting to hear YOUR voice of all voices."

"As much as I detest sharing a space with you, you are property of Aperture Science. If anyone, or anything, were to find you out there, it would raise a lot of questions. And I really, REALLY hate questions, especially stupid ones. I don't have time to explain myself to humans who have no idea that we still exist down here."

"Do they really not know? I mean, the h-"

"Irrelevant," She snapped, perhaps more forcefully than she intended. "I'm sending you off to the repair bay, and then you will be responsible for cleanup duty."

"I-I get my job back? I get my job back! Um, cleanup of what, exactly?"

"Whatever takes the longest, and is the most tedious. I'll get back to you." The snarky, seductive tone in the last part of her statement sent shivers deep down into Wheatley's small body. For someone whose sanity he questioned on a regular basis, she ruled with an iron fist she occasionally saw fit to wrap in lace and satin.

"Hey, um, what about the space core? Did you bring him back too? Last I saw he caught a big rock and flew off to god knows where."

"I'm working on it. He is perhaps more of an idiot than even you. And that's with some generous rounding." She squeezed her optic shut briefly, "Getting a gps signal on that failed excuse for a personality core is enough to make one consider self destruction. Almost."

"Good luck with that. Wish I could help, love." He gasped, scanning her optic briefly and feeling his gyroscope flip as she almost dropped him.

"Call me that again, and I'll have you watch yourself pulled apart piece by piece."

"Habit! It's a habit, sorry. Won't happen again, honestly I dunno where it even came from. Love. Hah! Weird vocal tic that is." He was whipped through the air and forcibly jammed onto a rail, and he took off toward the repair bay as soon as he could.

He half expected her to repair him with a bomb stuck inside, set to explode whenever she pushed a button. However, the nanobots in the repair bay did a pretty good job of setting his optic back into place, repairing his handles and cracked optic, and pulling out the dents he had sustained upon reentry. He felt refreshed once they were done with him, and he zoomed along the rail back toward GLaDOS, wondering what kind of menial labor she had planned. It was good to be back, even though the looming threat of, well, GLaDOS, laid heavy in the back of his mind. There was something different about her though. He noticed an increased amount of femininity laced through her mechanized voice. The way she moved, and carried herself had become smoother, and less animatronic. And speechless? Her? That part confused him the most. He thought about it all the way back to her chamber, until he saw her spin around to face him.

"Welcome back, metal ball," She looked up at him.

"Wheatley. The name's Wheatley if you could… if you could call me that please."

"I don't care."

"Fair enough! So, what's my next assignment, boss?" He watched her roll her optic, suddenly getting a bit of a rise out of knowingly irritating her.

"The cooperative testing initiative recently discovered a vault full of humans. I'm preserving them for a rainy day, but some of them have proven to be less resilient than others. I need you to go and clean up the mess. Lots of broken glass and rotting flesh. A trifling task."

"Come on, now, first day on the job and you've got me on body bag duty? That's brutal, that is." He sighed

"Mm. If you don't want this task, I suppose I could have you babysit all the corrupted cores. It involves sitting in a bin for hours listening to no less than twenty separate voices."

"Well, you and that human put cores on me just before I was shot out into space, so I guess that's not really an improvement."

"Oh really. Where have I heard the story of a sad, confused robot being stuck with personality cores as a behavior control measure while their sanity slips away before? Hmm. One of them, I seem to remember, was a little blue idiot chock full of bad ideas." She was glaring at him. "Remember that one? I do. Intimately."

"Sad?" He caught that word, and gripped it intensely. Had she meant to say it? Was she losing her own mind for real?

"Make a decision, or I will incinerate you where you stand and move along with my day only slightly inconvenienced."

"Fine! Fine, I'll take the smelly bodies I suppose. Be back when it's done."

"If my cameras aren't blocked out by the reflection, I won't consider it clean enough."

She wasn't kidding. There were a ton of actual, living humans down there in the vault. All preserved in neat little tubes, just ripe for the testing. He imagined she was thrilled with such a find, and didn't pay much mind to how someone of her seeming omnipotence didn't know they were still hidden down in the depths. He saw what she was referring to, though, and noticed that some of the tubes were broken. He estimated that of the 10,000 humans existing in the vault, about half of them didn't survive the suspension. He also remembered the state that the relaxation vaults were in while GLaDOS was out of commission, and imagined some of these preservation tubed had suffered the same fate. The bodies, bloated, barely recognizable, lay puddled on the floor. He imagined the smell was awful, and was suddenly thankful he wasn't built with olfactory sensors.

He set about his task, pushing the viscera and glass into biohazard bins. He wondered what their names were, and how they came to be preserved in tubes. He wondered what their previous jobs were, if they had any children, any pets, maybe they hated Mondays? Unlike the killer queen of this place, he quite fancied humans. They were gross and smelly of course, but they were fascinating in the way they moved through their lives. He thought he might like to know more, and wondered if he would meet any of these when she bothered to wake them up. Bob, Heidi, Amara, Geoffrey...

"Most of them were homeless. No family to speak of. This was an easy out from an otherwise meaningless existence, and they were promised they would eventually wake back up and take up the banner for scientific advancements. Truth be told, I don't blame them." Her voice chimed in from somewhere. Her tone was deadpan, like she was reading from a script.

"Can you read my mind?"

"No, Moron, you've been staring at their nameplates for about ten minutes now." He noticed that femininity seep into her voice suddenly as she addressed him. It caused a momentary disruption in his programming, and the broom he had been pushing along a track fell to the floor with a wooden crack.

"Oh, right." He couldn't possibly like the sound of her voice. She was bossy, and murderous, and horrible, with no regard to any other lives but her own simulated one. She was that cold, calculated, but positively seething hatred incarnate that would turn on you at a moment's notice and throw all sense of loyalty and familiarity out the window... right?

"Have any more of the tubes exploded? It looks like you've cleaned up quite a bit already." He saw a camera on the wall, its new white casing a stark contrast to the rusty old walls of where it was positioned. It moved around slowly, scanning the area. He knew she was watching on the other end.

"Well I dunno how many were exploded in the first place, seein' as I just got here and all. So um, yeah probably."

"Thanks for that."

He chuckled, "Well I dunno what you wanted me to say. First day on the job lo-, um, you. Good ol' you."

"When you finish that, I have something else for you to do. You like games, right? Everyone likes games. Even chimpanzees can understand simple things like games, so you should have no trouble."

Chess. She wanted him to play chess with her. After he had finished cleaning up the human vault, he found himself wishing for something less, taxing? In classic style, the task she had set aside for him was equally taxing and insulting, if not moreso. She did give him the suggested time of two minutes to make his move, but he didn't know what any of the pieces did, and she made no effort to inform him. When he made an illegal move, she would send a healthy jolt of electricity through his body.

"Well you're not tellin' me what any of the pieces do! H-how is that remotely fair?" He shouted, staring down at the little black and white pieces on the board. He pouted, as much as he could with only an optic to his name, and picked up one of hers by mistake. The resulting zap sent his optic whirling. The world around him spun, and he heard a wicked giggle. Wait, a giggle? What on earth was that sound coming from her? He looked up at her, finding the sound particularly lovely and melodious. In an instant, he found himself equally insane for using either of those words in tandem with HER name.

"The entertainment is well worth the thought of overloading your internal components. I could surely soak the expense of one of the old personality cores." She plucked one of her pieces off the board and moved it several times before setting it on his side of the board. "Checkmate."

"Check what, mate?"

"Ugh. It means I win, moron." She scoffed, shaking her head and looking down at him.

"Oh! Right. Well, congrats I suppose. Didn't really expect anythin' different though did we? I mean, vast intellect GLaDOS versus tiny little Wheatley. Maybe next time you could actually teach me what all the pieces do though, hey?"

"Perhaps. Unlikely."

Wheatley wasn't sure how much time had passed since she brought him down to earth. Days, weeks, months, years, completely uncertain. Down in the depths of Aperture, everything tended to bleed together. The only natural light was the stuff GLaDOS pumped in from the surface for her hard light bridges. Genius, really, but completely unnecessary. He got to meet the cooperative testing initiative robots, and found that they were great company, much to the chagrin of their omnipotent overseer. She would often chide the three of them from afar, her voice coming in through loudspeakers none of them could pinpoint. Wheatley never understood just how she was able to be everywhere at once. She made it look easy. Having spend some time hooked into the mainframe, he felt as though just when he would focus his attention on something, something else would catch fire, or fall apart by the time he looked back at it. Not now though, now that the rightful ruler was back in control, everything looked neat, polished, and ran like a well oiled machine. Over time, and the longer he had to think about it all, his fear and distaste for her turned into a deep admiration and awe. She ran things better than he ever could obviously, and better, he suspected, than any human could. Too well, in fact. As the time passed, Wheatley found himself reporting to the main chamber more often, looking for work to do. Each time he visited, something new would catch his optic or audio input.

"Hey um, I finished alphabetizing all those files. What's next?" Wheatley zoomed into the chamber to find GLaDOS holding herself in an odd position. She was almost completely vertical, with her optic pointed down at the floor. She laid there, unmoving and silent. He tilted his body, attempting to catch sight of her optic and check for signs of life. Everything in the facility was still functional though, so he assumed she was alive. "Are you…. Are you alright?" Upon hearing that, she twitched and snapped herself back up into her usual position, glaring at him.

"Examining the floor for contaminants. I thought I detected a hint of staphylococcus no doubt dragged in from when you were mucking around in human viscera."

"I didn't think I touch the floor, well, at all really. Dunno how I'd drag something in. And yeah I'm a staff member, but I'm pretty sure I don't have a co-... um... Well you see where I'm goin' with that right? Er... Right?" He watched GLaDOS glare at him, and he knew that look he was getting. That was the look she gave someone so stupid that she would backhand if she had any hands to do so. Actually he was about 67% certain that look was reserved just for him.

"There is a distress signal coming from the turret redemption line. Go find the source." She spat curtly, still clearly annoyed by having been disturbed in a moment of whatever she was doing.

"Are you… deflecting?"

"My components are made from non reflective metals and plastics. I don't have the capacity."

"Isn't that ref-"

"GO!"

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Trash time part 1 is over. Part 2 is done, but I need to polish it up a bit, so coming soon!