Part Twelve. The Gesture

Wheatley rather loved his life.

GLaDOS continued to sleep in for the next little while, though not as long as that first day, and Wheatley would stay beside her as long as he could. It was never more than an hour or two because after that he simply had to get going, but when he was able to sit still he loved just sitting there in the darkness, listening to all the tiny little noises she made and watching the light from her optic flare every now and then against the floor. Now and again he would catch a bit of a dream. After a week and a half or two weeks - Wheatley wasn't sure which - she was back to normal, and he would have been lying if he hadn't said he was disappointed. Now she'd gone back to wanting to work, and not just play games and chat as she'd been doing all this time. Still, GLaDOS was GLaDOS, and if he was nice about it he thought she might do as he asked. He really liked having all of her attention and it was very flattering, really, to look up from the board to remind her for the millionth time to take her turn and see that she wasn't taking it because she was staring at him, for whatever reason she was doing that. He hadn't quite screwed up the courage to ask, but the idea of being able to hold her attention for any period of time excited him. He wasn't sure why. It just did.

He'd decided he was going to get her to let him lay rail in her chamber, though come to think of it he should've done it when she'd been so easygoing, but oh well. He thought of things when he thought of them. And besides. Just because she wasn't feeling casual anymore didn't mean she wouldn't listen. She might. No. Probably not. Ha! He'd almost forgotten who he was dealing with, there. GLaDOS would take nothing less than infallible logic and deft word choices, and Wheatley was just the Sphere for the job.

"So," Wheatley remarked, in as casual a way as possible, trying very hard not to swing back and forth on the end of the rail, "when're you going to let me uh, let me lay rail in here?"

GLaDOS glanced at him. "Why would I let you do that?"

Or… maybe not.

"Because I'd like to know what the, what the other side of the room looks like?"

"You already know what the other side of the room looks like. It looks exactly the same as the side you're on."

Okay, so that wasn't the most convincing reason. "Okay, new question: why won't you let me?"

"I don't have to let you do everything. And here I take the opportunity to remind you that I do, in fact, allow you to do almost everything."

"Please? Please, will you let me?" He tried to look as though she should do as he asked. He didn't know how one should look when they asked for something, but he did his best.

She looked at him for a long moment, finally sighing and looking away. "All right. Go ahead."

His chassis clenched in victory, and he fought the urge to cry out in triumph. That really wouldn't be polite. "Thanks, luv!" he said instead, and immediately went over to her. He'd actually meant to just go down on the control arm beside her and maybe look over her shoulder plate at what she was going to that turret down there, but he found himself circling the base of her chassis, never having seen it up close before. It was utterly fascinating, it was: there were even wires as thick around as he was, and when he looked up to see what was making all the racket he saw that there were spinning discs over top of her. He jumped up and down excitedly. "Oi GLaDOS, what're, what're these disc things for?"

"Those are my hard drives."

His optic widened in surprise. "But… they're so big. Mine's not, not anywhere near that size."

"You're younger than me," GLaDOS explained. "It's Moore's Law. Besides. My core programming and that of the chassis are a lot more complicated than yours. Although probably more inefficient."

He continued circling her, frowning at the dirt and the dust that seemed to have accumulated in every corner of her. Looked like she hadn't been cleaned off in years and, come to think of it, she probably hadn't been. It made him a bit sad, really, that she was so beautiful and yet covered in all this dirt. It seemed sort of… wrong. "Why do you say that?"

"My programming was written a long time ago, in a language no one uses anymore. And they don't use it anymore because it's inefficient. And slow."

He laughed. "You're not slow, no, not at all."

"No, I fixed that a long time ago. Although I do have to wonder what it would be like to be a quantum computer."

"A what?"

She shook her head. "I'm not going to be able to explain that to you, so I'm not even going to try. I'll just say that, when they exist, which they do not at the moment, they will be very small and very, very fast."

He finished his spontaneous inspection and dropped down beside her, peering down at the turret. "I don't think that'd be, that'd be good at all."

"Why not? If I were a quantum computer, I would be able to do so much more in a fraction of the time."

"Sure you would," Wheatley agreed, "but would you have the time to enjoy any of it?"

She looked at him, and he looked back at her. "What do you mean?" she asked, and he got the impression she actually didn't understand. He squinted, trying to come up with the proper words. "Well sure, you'd do stuff uh, do stuff a lot faster but uh, but say you were, you were testing, right? And you could build the – "

"I actually couldn't," GLaDOS interrupted. "I would be able to think a lot faster, but it would still take the same amount of time for me to build the chamber. The testing elements can only be put into place so fast."

"Oh. Well, uh, say you were um, say you were designing one, then. You'd be able to do that faster, sure, but you wouldn't be able to enjoy it, would you? 'cause soon's you finished that one, completed it, you'd want to get to the next one, and the next one, and you'd uh, you'd never be able to build all of the chambers you'd have time to, to create." He shrugged and looked back at the turret. "I dunno how you'd be able to enjoy testing, either."

She actually jumped at this, and he looked back at her in time to see her optic assembly retract in surprise. "Not enjoy testing? Why not?"

"Because it would take too long," he explained. "You'd have all these test chambers to build, but it would still take your test subjects, it would still take them the same amount of time to, to solve the tests. They wouldn't get any faster. You'd just be, just be sitting here bored all the time."

She appeared to think it over, gently pulling at what he supposed was the turret's motherboard, and he watched her with great interest. Sometimes she liked to poke around inside the constructs, why, he didn't know, but it was actually quite neat to see how their insides were arranged. He'd never been able to see it so close before.

"You know," she said finally, "I hate to say it, but I think you're right. It would be nice to be faster, but there really wouldn't be any benefit."

He shook himself in elation. "I'm right?"

"Yes, I admit it. You managed to be right, for once. Bask in that while you can. It won't last long."

He laughed and blinked a few times. "Doesn't matter how long, if it lasts long. It happened. That's good enough."

"Well, no benefit right now, anyway. In the future, perhaps."

"Why then?"

She looked up from the turret for a moment. "I'm getting old, for a supercomputer. We usually don't last too long, especially with constant use, and I probably push my capabilities harder than I should. The older I get, the slower I'm going to be."

"Oh," said Wheatley softly, chassis sinking a little. "Oh, don't say that, luv, that's, that's sad, that is."

"There are some computers that are very old but still in use, though that's because the humans don't know how to change the systems so that they don't lose their data. Well… there were before the Black Mesa Incident, anyway. As far as I can tell, there are very few computers left on the surface. Anyway. Most computers are out of date after about six years. That's not really a problem for me because I write all my own software and my own updates, but if the engineers were still here I'd probably have been replaced by now. Although… possibly not entirely because I was out of date."

"Well, they would be, they'd just be demonstrating how, how useless they are," Wheatley said determinedly. "You could never be replaced. Not by someone newer, or, or smarter, if that's possible, not even by a, by one of those quantum things. You just – you're irreplaceable, you are." And it really did make him sad to think that the engineers would probably have replaced her for something as silly as getting on a bit in years. They kept their old, shriveled humans around far too long; surely a supercomputer such as GLaDOS was deserving of being allowed to keep her job, no matter how slow or dusty or difficult she got, until she really couldn't do it anymore.

"Thank you," GLaDOS said softly, and Wheatley jumped. He hadn't expected her to say anything to that, except to change the subject, maybe. "You don't think so?" he asked.

"Everything is replaceable."

"Am I?"

She looked him up and down for a minute, then went back to the turret. "Obviously the engineers believed you were."

"But do you?" he pressed, well aware that he was getting into dangerous territory but very badly wanting to hear her say it.

She did nothing for a long moment, save adjusting and readjusting the motherboard in her claw, and finally she answered, "Are you really going to make me say it?"

"I'd appreciate it if you did," he told her, trying not to sound bossy or anything like that. He really did want her to say it, but he wasn't going to outright make her. Well. He wasn't planning to, anyway.

"No," she said, in a voice so quiet he barely heard it, and it made him terribly sad. Poor GLaDOS. She found it so hard to talk about how she felt. Like she thought it would make her weak, or something. He didn't think she was weak, no, not at all, and he never would. He wanted to lean up on her a bit, just for a second or so in a thank-you sort of gesture, but she lowered her core just then and went back to her turret. "Thanks," he said instead. She did not answer.

Well. Now he had to think of something to say to clear the air, so to speak. "So, so why're you mucking around with that?"

"There's something strange about it. I found it on the catwalks outside of Turret Quality Control. It doesn't respond to targets and it has a very strange series of vocalisation strings."

"It has what?"

"It says odd things."

"Such as…"

She looked up for a moment. "It knows about me. About Caroline. And this is probably me making something out of nothing, but… it seems to have predicted the whole incident with the potato."

Why did that keep coming up in casual conversation? He laughed nervously and said, "Well, fancy that. That's just… that's just weird, isn't it."

"That's why I'm looking at it. It doesn't make any sense. The turrets aren't that sentient."

"I'm going to leave you to it for a bit, then," he said, backing away from her.

"All right," she remarked absently.

He frowned as he left the room, still thinking about what she had said about old computers. He didn't know how old she was, or how old he was, for that matter, but he really didn't like the thought of her slowly wearing out, unable to really do anything about it. Surely there was something that could be done about that.

Suddenly he stopped. He'd just had the glimmer of an idea. It might not really help, but maybe it would, just a little, and besides, it was all the little things that added up to one big thing, right? Yes, he knew that firsthand, because all the little things he and GLaDOS did added up to how well their friendship was going. Well, he would have to figure this one out, because he was determined to help her, he was, and it wasn't like he was busy right now anyway…

He returned to her that night a bit nervous, as if she'd already figured out his plan and was going to prevent him from carrying it out, but of course she didn't. Even she couldn't read his mind. Well. Maybe she could. If she wanted to. But he didn't think she wanted to. Hoped she didn't. It would be a bit odd, to have her do that. Though he'd probably get used to it.

"Hullo!" he said cheerfully. The turret was gone, and she looked up at him in a disinterested sort of way. "Did you figure out, uh, find out what was up with it?"

"No," GLaDOS answered. "There's a lot of code to go through and I don't feel like doing it right now."

"Oh." Wheatley thought she seemed rather put out, but was having trouble thinking of a tactful way to ask about it. "Well, I'm sure you'll get on that when you can."

"Perhaps."

She put herself in the default position and he happily went up to her for his absolute favourite part of the day. It was so nice, to go into sleep mode with her like that. He always felt quite safe as well, even though there was probably no threat that would come to attack him and would actually probably attack her instead, but feeling safe was always lovely. Even if there really was nothing to be safe from.

"G'night, GLaDOS."

She didn't answer, but she often didn't. 'specially not when she was in a prickly sort of mood, which she was at the moment. That was okay, though. He was going to fix that, at least a little bit. Hopefully. If he didn't make her angry, that was.

When he was sure she was asleep, which he knew was when her brain was a great deal quieter than it was during the day, he cautiously got off of her and made his way back into the facility. He retrieved the bits of cloth he'd found after he'd left her, and after carefully putting a little bit of water on a couple of them he returned to her chamber. He took a shaky breath. He wondered if she'd be mad, if she woke up and found out what he was doing. He hoped not. He hoped she would understand and hoped even more that she wouldn't wake up, because he wanted it to be a surprise and didn't want to have to explain it to her until he'd already finished.

Taking one of the cloths, he made his way to the base of her chassis and looked at it, hesitating for a long moment. She really was quite massive. Would he even be able to get this done in time? If she woke up the next morning and saw him already on, she would know something was up. She always got up first. He had to do this quickly, but also do a good job and, if truth be told, the task felt a bit beyond him. But he had to try, right? GLaDOS deserved to have something nice done for her, and he was just the construct to do it. The only one, actually, since she didn't seem to have a maintenance system for this sort of thing. Didn't matter. He was the one who was going to do it, whether such a system existed or not.

He gently wiped her down as best he could with the maintenance arm and his cloths, trying to get all the corners and to shine up the metal bits as much as possible. It was really kind of fun, actually, to get the grime off of her and see what she looked like underneath. He rather thought it was nice, to be contributing to her preservation. He hummed to himself a little bit, very quietly, as he worked. He knew she wouldn't hear him, not unless he said one of her keywords. Or unless he broke something. But he wouldn't. He was being gentle.

It took him a long time just to get the wires done, which she'd had quite a bit more of than he'd thought she had, and he checked his clock with no small amount of trepidation. He hadn't even got that much finished, but it seemed time'd been going by a bit slower than he'd thought it was, which was good.

He returned to his task, hoping he was getting all of her. The overhead light was on, which she left on more out of habit than anything else, but it was still quite dark. He left her casing for last, and was rather disappointed when he discovered he could do nothing about the dark, spidery cracks that ran through it. They did lend an air of age and experience to her, but he would have liked to have made her as close to brand-new as he possibly could. Oh well. No use in moping over it.

He remembered at the last minute to clean out what she referred to as her rotator assembly, for lack of a better term, but he left the rest alone. One did not touch someone else's core. Especially without permission. It simply wasn't polite.

He quickly went over her chassis once more, trying to get the bits he'd left behind by mistake - particularly on those armlike things he had no idea of the function of - and moved back so that he could see her left side all at once. He would've done it from the front of her, but he didn't know if she would react when he turned his flashlight on. That would be a nasty way to wake up, blinded like that.

He turned it on and looked her over. He shivered a little in pride and smiled to himself.

She looked even more beautiful.

He quickly doused his flashlight, put the rest of the cloths back where he'd gotten them from, and returned to her chamber. He actually wasn't sure what he should have done with them, since they were pretty dirty now and probably couldn't be used for anything, but she wasn't likely to look for them anyway. He happily laid himself on the side of her core and couldn't help but rub up on her a bit. He hoped she would be happy when she found out what he'd done. He hoped she'd like his surprise. She really was even prettier without all the dust, he thought groggily. Like a princess. Or an angel, maybe. No. No, not an angel. She wouldn't like that comparison, definitely not.

He went to sleep trying to imagine what an AI angel would look like.

Why was he so tired?

He looked around blearily for a moment, and he saw GLaDOS staring at her turret again. She didn't seem to actually be looking at it, though.

"What is it?" he asked, slurring a bit since his speech emulator wasn't quite online.

"I… don't know. I…" She shook her head. "Something feels different, but I can't think of what it might be. All I know for sure is that my fans are at a lower RPM, which doesn't make sense. I'll have to run a diagnostic later, in case they're malfunctioning."

Wheatley blinked. Had he broken the fans? He didn't think he had. They'd looked pretty much attached. The ones he could see, anyway.

Oh. Oh, that was why he was so tired. Made sense now, it all made sense. He snuck a look at her. Yep, still just as lovely as last night. It was going to be a long day, but it'd been well worth it, it had.

Atlas and P-body came in just then. To get their assignment, he supposed. They came in person every couple of days or so. They looked a bit surprised when they saw her, chattering at each other and then turning to face her. Atlas gestured and told her something, and she jumped back a little.

"What?"

Atlas repeated the noises a little more emphatically. GLaDOS looked at him sideways as best she was able, as if he had contagious malware or something, then shook her head and spoke to them for a few minutes. They soon left, chattering to each other nonstop as they always did, and GLaDOS looked down at her turret again.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, genuinely concerned.

"They said something odd, that's all," GLaDOS answered, pulling one of the sides of the turret out and then putting it back again.

"What did they say?"

"They said that I… that I looked nice," she told him, and she sounded more confused than he'd ever heard her before. "But that doesn't make any sense. I haven't done any modifications. Why they would say that now, I have no idea."

He shrugged, not sure if he should tell her or wait for her to figure it out. He wasn't sure how she would, since she probably never, ever looked at herself, but then again she was dreadfully clever. "They're right, you know," he said instead.

Her head snapped around to look at him. "What?"

"You do. Look nice, I mean. Not just today, don't get me wrong, you looked uh, you looked nice yesterday too, but uh, yeah. You do. Look. Nice."

She looked at the other side of the room, chassis shaking a little. "What is going on here? Is there some secret conspiracy going on around here that I don't know about? There better not be, by the way. Secret conspiracies are not allowed. If there's a conspiracy, I need to know about it."

"There's no conspiracy!" he exclaimed. "None! Ev'rything's normal!"

"Ohhh no it isn't," she muttered. "Something's wrong here, and I'm going to figure out what it is."

Uh oh.

Maybe she would be mad, to know that he'd touched her without her permission. But surely she'd understand that he'd just wanted to surprise her! To make her feel special for a little while! Of course she would. She was reasonable. Most of the time. When she wasn't being unreasonable. Which was rather often. Most of the time, really.

"Are you going to be, to be poking around in that turret again?" he asked, more to change the subject than anything.

"Yes."

"How long's that gonna take you?"

"I have no idea. Why?"

"'cause I thought we could, thought we could play uh… play checkers, for a bit, but obviously we can't do it if you're uh, if you're doing that."

"It can wait," she answered. "I can look through the code right now instead."

"Tremendous!" he exclaimed. "That okay?"

"That's fine."

He set up the board better than he ever had and settled in, determined to play a good game this time, but he was surprised to find he was disappointed. She didn't seem to be paying attention. He wasn't sure if it was because she was trying to solve the mystery or because reading code took a lot of her resources, but when he saw that he had five pieces to her three he frowned in annoyance.

"Oi! GLaDOS! You in there?"

"Hm?"

"You're about to lose," he told her, rather louder than he should have, probably, but if you were hanging out with someone you should probably pay attention to them. "Which tells me that you're not uh, that you're not really playing."

She looked down at the board, optic flickering in surprise. "Oh. I didn't… I can still – "

"You didn't have to say yes. I would have waited."

She shook herself a little. "No. No, I… I'll pay more attention."

She took the rest of his pieces somehow in her next two moves, but Wheatley was far too annoyed to care. "Did you even want to play?" he asked her, putting his checkers back in the box.

"I did."

"Then why weren't you?"

"I was thinking about other things. I won't do it again."

He tried not to be upset with her, he really did. And it was his fault she was preoccupied, really. So he took a breath, closed his optic for a moment, and resolved to calm down. "I'll go for a while, let you finish what you're doing, and then I'll be back."

"All right."

It was probably his imagination, but he could have sworn she looked a bit sad as he left.

"Wheatley, tell me something: do I look different today?"

He looked up from the papers he'd been looking at, which were her blueprints for some robot or other, and thought about what to say. He was pretty sure she wouldn't figure this out on her own, but he didn't know if he wanted to outright say it.

"Yes."

"How?"

He sighed and put the papers back down. "Is it really that important?"

"Yes!" she said insistently. "I feel so different and I can't figure out why. It's bothersome. I feel like I've missed some crucial data point. Which is very annoying. And the diagnostics for the fans returned no errors. I'm running normally. I don't understand." She actually sounded rather upset. He started to feel a bit bad about keeping it from her. She'd had to go on feeling odd all day without knowing why. That would probably bother even him, let alone her.

"I… well I… I wasn't, I wasn't off for… for all of last night."

"I know that," GLaDOS told him. He frowned.

"How?"

"You've been edgy this entire day. That's not normal. For you."

He almost laughed. He was pretty sure she was referring to her own sporadic edginess, there. "So… so I was uh, was doing something. Last night."

"And that was…"

He turned to face her. "I was cleaning you off."

She moved back, and to his surprise her optic dimmed somewhat. "Why would you – why did you do that?"

"'cause you were dusty," he answered. "I only noticed when I looked you over. And then you were saying about old computers wearing out, right? So I thought I'd uh, thought I'd help you out a bit. Just uh, just cleared some of the crap off you. Not that uh, that you're crappy but uh, you accumulated a lot of uh, of stuff, when you were outside. And I just, just spent a bit of time y'know, just clearing you off a bit, help out with uh, with your maintenance, I guess. I prob'ly should have asked your permission first but um, I just, I wanted it to be a surprise, really. And you seem to be pretty surprised so uh, so I guess I succeeded."

She just stared at him for a long, long moment, then said disbelievingly, "You did that… for me?"

He shrugged. "I thought it'd be a nice thing to do for you, yeah."

"I can't… no one has ever… maintenance never even bothered to… "

Wow. She really was surprised, if she wasn't even saying real sentences. But was it a happy surprise, or was she about to get angry with him for touching her? He wasn't sure, because she was over there alternately looking at him and the floor, and he was actually a bit scared, since she didn't look like she knew what to make of it all and that was never good, when the most advanced supercomputer ever built didn't know what to do.

Then all of a sudden she'd practically jumped on him, and he would have backed away if he hadn't been so surprised. God, she was fast. She had her core on his hull and she was… she was… she was pulling it up the side of his hull very gently, she was rubbing up on him, just a little, just the tiniest little bit! He was so happy that she'd done it again that he forgot he should probably do something back.

Just as quickly as she'd come, she left, turning to face the floor on the other side of the room, and she was shaking her core and muttering, "Damn it. I said I wouldn't do that again."

Wheatley was delighted.

"Wait!" he cried out, determined not to have a repeat of last time. He shot across the room, accidentally skidding far beyond her position and having to back up. "Wait, GLaDOS."

"No, I - I didn't mean it, I, I, I – "

Okay, now that actually was scary. It was one thing when he couldn't form a sentence; it was a whole other thing when she couldn't do it. "Hey. Shut it," he said. "I'm gonna, gonna tell you something."

She stared at him, and she was quivering. She was scared, wasn't she, she was scared of what she had done and what his reaction was going to be. He had to make her feel better about it because it was so lovely when she did that, even though she'd only done it for literally two seconds, total. "Don't run away," he told her. "It's okay."

"I didn't mean it."

He thought for a second, then said, "I think it would be nice, if you did."

"It… would?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "Oh yes. It would."

She looked at the floor for a moment. "Assuming… assuming I did, and the first time wasn't an accident… why would you have reacted the way you did?"

"I was scared," he answered. "I didn't know what to do. I never expected, uh, never thought you'd do anything like that, and I was just uh, I just froze up. I didn't know how to fix it, either, but I wanted to. I really did."

"And this time?"

"Oh, I was still surprised," he told her. "But I didn't want the same thing to happen over again, ohhh no."

"So what would you do if something similar were to occur at a later point in time?"

He smiled in what he meant to be a mischievous sort of way. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see, eh?"

She actually giggled a tiny bit, which made him so excited he just wanted to jump up and down because there were few things he loved more than hearing her giggle, but didn't, since that would be inappropriate. He was trying to exude maturity and confidence, and jumping up and down didn't really help with either of those things. And then she came back, and she touched him for a whole three seconds this time and she said, very softly, "Thank you, Wheatley."

"You're welcome, luv," he whispered back, and he was so happy that he actually thought he was going to overload himself, it was that intense.

He thought it would be rather awkward if he hung around now, so he told her to go back to her turret and left her chamber. Soon as he got a few floors away, he found that he was whistling to himself, a bit. He hadn't figured on that reaction, but it was a pretty good one, all things considered… oh, who was he kidding? It was the best reaction ever! And now he did jump up and down, a little bit, and decided he would go and bother Atlas and P-body for a while. He felt like talking but had already resolved to leave GLaDOS for a while.

Who would've thought that wiping the dirt off someone's chassis would have resulted in the best day of his life.

Author's note

They're playing checkers because this was originally something like chapter five. YES THE STORY EXPLODED ON ME I'M SORRY ;.;

Pretty much what happens here is Wheatley figures out for himself that he finds GLaDOS physically attractive. With people, what we're biologically hardwired to do is find the most attractive person and try to attract them. Before you argue that it's about personality etc., not initially it isn't. Teenage girls don't gossip about which boys have the best personality, and they don't sit around trying to figure out how to improve their personalities so that boys will notice them. We do this because we are hardwired to look for the best reproductive partner. An attractive partner implies to us that they have the best possible genes, which in turn tells us that the offspring will be more likely to survive. However, that would be stupid for a robot to do. In Aperture, survival is obviously based on the intelligence of the construct, so I imagine that's what would initially draw Wheatley to GLaDOS. Afterwards, he would possibly be drawn to her personality, and the last thing that would attract him is her appearance [because in the grand scheme of things, GLaDOS actually has an undesirable physical appearance because she has so many parts; this demonstrates that she is physically fragile, and if something goes wrong with one of her components, that's it, she's done]. As for GLaDOS, yes, Wheatley's pretty stupid, but you have to remember that she doesn't actually have a whole lot of choice. We see eight different cores throughout Portal, and dumb as Wheatley is, he's shown to be the smartest of all of them. Insomuch as prospective partners go, Wheatley is shown to have some grasp on his environment and he adapts quickly and usefully [in his own way] to it. In contrast, Rick has a grasp on his environment, but he doesn't seem to be able to understand what to do about it [there's no point into going about a speech about non-existent black belts or waists when it's actually not helpful; when Wheatley goes on rants, it's usually while he's doing something else that needs done]. Wheatley is also able to plan and learn from both his mistakes and from other people's. Due to his disorganised nature, he can't plan very far ahead, but his plans are both coherent and effective. If GLaDOS had reason to look for a partner, either merely as a friend or romantically, as unlikely as it sounds, Wheatley is actually her best choice [other than building one herself, of course, which would in the end not satisfy her at all].

So he's beginning to realise, "Yeah, I like pretty much everything about this person", and so he's starting to understand a little bit just why he likes snuggling so much. GLaDOS is beginning to do it as well, with the unexplained staring behaviour, but right now she's only really doing it when she's got her guard down and she's not doing it on purpose, whereas Wheatley is.