Part Sixty-Eight. The Days Before

At some point GLaDOS had raised a good number of monitors in her chamber, all of them filled with all sorts of different data that Wheatley didn't understand. He didn't ask her about them because if she was putting out visual aids that meant she was trying to concentrate, but he hadn't the fuzziest what all those numbers and coloured dots had to do with anything.

The one bit of meaning he did grasp from it was that the time they'd been preparing for was soon. This was due in part to the fact that there were people coming into her chamber every hour or so. Chell came in several times, not really doing anything so far's Wheatley could tell, but GLaDOS seemed the barest bit relieved by her presence.

GLaDOS barely spoke to any of them, including Wheatley, and though that grated on him he did not say anything about it. When night came and the humans stopped visiting, he would sit next to her and just talk. He knew she wanted him to, and he did his best to think of things to say, but he hated that he could only talk to her and not with her. That day especially he knew a chat was out, given the events of that afternoon:

GLaDOS had been discussing some aspect of battle plans or some such, Wheatley hadn't been listening – and he tried, he really did, but it was just so dull – when all of a sudden her hard drive hitched and shocked him back into paying attention.

"It'd make things so much easier," one of the male humans had been saying. He'd had dark hair down to his shoulders, some of it tied behind his head with a rubber band. He had looked at his fingernails as he spoke, studiously ignoring GLaDOS. "Then there'd be no need for any of this. Just send out a whole bunch'a robots and smoke the bastards. No need to put us on the line."

"So," GLaDOS had said, even that one syllable cold and harsh, "you expect me to outfit you. Supply you. House you. And then, after doing all of that work to ensure you are of at least a modicum of use, you expect me to also fight on your behalf? With no contribution from you whatsoever? In a fight that you started?"

The human had looked up at GLaDOS boredly from beneath the heavy line of hair above his eyes. "That's what robots are for. They do stuff we tell 'em to do. That's why we build them."

"But you wouldn't be building them. I would be building them."

"Yeah but we built you so… we really are building them, by extension. You're wasting time. I hope you're building those bots while you're here yapping."

GLaDOS had emitted a burst of white noise at a frequency that Wheatley had been pretty sure was out of the audible range of the humans, and he'd made the snap decision to cut the meeting sharpish, before something happened all of them would regret. He'd moved forward, which caused GLaDOS to glance at him sharply, but she stayed quiet as he called out, "Um, I think it's time we uh, we went our sep'rate ways for now, y'know, so we can uh… can think about what we've just discussed. A'right? A'right. Off you go then!"

The humans had, a little confusedly to be sure, filtered out, and he'd gone off to find Carrie for a bit because he'd known GLaDOs probably wanted to stew for a while. She'd begged him to build her a set of testing tracks she could run through with that Dog thing, and he'd obliged cheerfully, making a few of them a contest and a few of them cooperative. For the competitive tracks, he'd carefully done his best to make sure she couldn't lose, but without being too obvious about it, and judging by how happy she was at the end of it all it seemed he'd succeeded.

And so when that'd all ended he'd taken his place next to GLaDOS and rambled on for a while, but to be quite honest he was getting bored of the sound of his own voice every night. He wanted to talk to her, for Pete's sake! – whoever Pete was – but there'd been very little of that going on lately!

"Wheatley," she said, and he yelled and nearly – well, no, he probably didn't nearly jump out of his case, but it certainly felt like that was what he was doing. He turned to look at her, aperture wide. Was he actually going to get a conversation out of her while she was working? Amazing!

"Uh… what is it?" he stammered, suddenly wondering if she was about to tell him to stop talking or go away or something like that. He hoped not. He didn't think he'd been overly disruptive, but it was not always easy to tell.

"Thank you for… defusing the situation, earlier," she answered, still not looking at him like she'd not really been doing the last while. "I-"

"'s okay," he interrupted, shrugging at the floor. "Gotta be of some use, haven't I?"

Now she was looking at him, he could feel it, but now he was nervous because he'd realised he'd just put himself down again and she didn't like that. Sure enough, she sighed, but didn't go any farther than that.

"This will be over soon," she said instead, and now he did look at her. "In approximately three days, the Combine will be within attack range. We will be ready. I'm tired of having humans constantly underfoot. I'm going to crush the Combine and send everyone on their way."

Wheatley smiled at her. "Sounds like a plan! I'd be glad to uh, to uh… to spend time with you, again."

She nodded and made a noise in agreement. "I'd like that as well, believe me. Working day and night for the humans again is not something I wanted to do. I know you don't like to be left alone for so long, but… I must be prepared."

He shrugged. He didn't really want to get into it, to be honest. He did his best not to think about it, because when he did he had to remember that he could not talk to her the next day. So he decided not to think about it, and began to talk to her as per usual. He'd been with her in that dreadful meeting for much the whole day, so there wasn't much to say other than that bit about gallivanting with Carrie – and that was the word he used, gallivanting, because he was quite proud of remembering such a word – and after he'd summarised that he moved on to making something up to talk about. It was, as it was often, something he vaguely remembered telling himself while he was in space. It was really stupid, honestly, about what he'd imagined might've been the purpose of all those sparkly bits in the sky. He'd imagined, on occasion, that it was the millions of tiny optics of the God of AI watching him and reminding him every day that he'd done something horrible he could never take back. On the other occasions, one of which he was recounting right now, he'd imagined he hadn't really been banished and was just taking part in an experiment of some sort. He'd liked that thought more than being scrutinised by the God of AI.

He'd gotten about halfway through when he realised… well, he thought GLaDOS'd stopped working altogether and just started listening. He didn't know if it'd happened just then or when he hadn't been paying attention, but she seemed quieter and colder than he recalled. He resolved to stay cool and continue on as if he'd not noticed. Though he probably sounded quite a bit more excited.

That didn't last too much longer, though, because as happened every night, he started to lose track of where he was due to that involuntary shut-down thing called 'falling asleep'. Usually he didn't mind too much, because GLaDOS wasn't talking to him anyway, but he cared now!

GLaDOS sighed.

"Go to sleep," she told him in a soft voice, as though there were any actual choice in the matter on his part. Maybe she thought there was. They'd never really discussed the whole falling asleep thing, just sort of acknowledged that it was a thing that was happening and leaving it at that. But, God, these small hours were the only time he got alone with her! And they weren't even very much, because she was barely even there during them, and it was just not fair, just not fair at all. He thought he made a staticky noise in frustration. He wasn't sure. Wasn't really sure of anything, anymore.

"Ssh," GLaDOS said.

She was awake when he went to sleep and when he woke up, and every day he asked her if she was tired. Every day she shook her core and said, "I feel like I should be, but I'm not. I feel fine."

This morning she'd put up a countdown clock to go with all her other monitors, and Wheatley suddenly got a terrible sense of foreboding. A countdown clock. That meant… that meant things were just about ready to go, didn't it? That… that there was gonna be a bunch of aliens swarming towards the Enrichment Centre to attack them all? He glanced nervously at her, but if she herself was anxious at all she did not show it.

"Find Caroline," she told him. "I'll give her that job she wants and get that over with – "

Before the sound had quite finished fading from her speakers, her chamber seemed to go quite cold suddenly. Wheatley narrowed his optic in alarm, pulling in his handles, as GLaDOS drew back slowly. "Luv, what just – is something – "

"Shut up."

Her voice was hard and, though he did not appreciate that, he elected to do as she wanted. She had some idea of what the problem was, and he did not. Though he would've, if she would bother telling him. Ah, now he was making himself annoyed. Bloody great.

"Everything… is going according to plan, my dear," came a faint and rasping voice, and Wheatley jumped, looking down to see a man standing there below him! A very, very pale man, who honestly looked more like a humanoid robot than an actual human, looking calmly up at GLaDOS with the strangest blue eyes Wheatley'd ever seen in a human's head. GLaDOS directed her core at him smoothly and somewhat carelessly.

"They are."

"The question is," the man continued, smiling the barest bit, "whose plan."

"You don't seem terribly eager to find out. You are taking your time, after all."

The smile crept wider. "I wanted to… give you one more chance. We go back a long way, after all. Don't we."

"If you want to believe that."

"Have you changed your mind… Caroline?"

Wheatley snapped his optic in her direction, but she seemed to have been expecting that and did not move herself. The only change at all was in the speed of her fans, and even that was barely noticeable, especially when he thought about how loud they'd been before.

"No."

He jerked his head to the left and raised his brows. "Give me the ship and I will… leave you be. Last… offer."

"No."

The man stepped back once, his face settling back into blankness. "In that case… be prepared to lose… everything."

GLaDOS met his gaze, remaining impassive and disturbingly calm. "I wouldn't bet on that, if I were you. You waited far too long. Your mistake. My advantage."

"I do not make… mistakes."

"Oh, but you do," GLaDOS told him, with a distinct air of amusement. "Three times now you thought I would make a deal with you. And for the third time, I'm refusing. So. Continue on your merry way so I can finally crush you and stop you from pestering me. Because that's getting remarkably annoying."

The man frowned and, right before the both of them, simply vanished into thin air! Wheatley gawped at the vacated panel on the floor, trying to figure out how such a thing'd possibly happened, when GLaDOS snapped, "Wheatley!"

"Wha?" he gasped, looking back at her.

"Did I not ask you to retrieve Caroline?"

"Uh… yeah. Yeah, you did. Um… yeah. I'll go do that." And he headed out before she decided to snap at him again.

Carrie was chattering with Atlas and P-body so he didn't interrupt, just waited until she noticed he was there and then told her why he was there. She gave a nod and followed him back to GLaDOS's chamber.

"Caroline," GLaDOS told her, almost as soon as they arrived, "I'm sending you to Miss Vance. She –"

"She's not fighting outside?" Caroline interrupted, and GLaDOS shook her core.

"She has experience in the computer sciences. So I'm putting her in charge of the military androids."

Wheatley frowned. "We actually have those?"

"No," GLaDOS answered dryly. "I'm sending the both of them to pretend to do something useful instead of actually having them do something useful."

Wheatley supposed he should have expected that and elected to shut up.

"Anyway. Since you two get along together so well, she's stuck with you. I don't know how you're going to be of help to her, exactly, but I'm sure you'll figure something out."

Carrie nodded quickly and smiled. "Do I go now?"

"If you like."

Caroline moved in to give GLaDOS a little cuddle, which surprisingly GLaDOS obliged to without comment, and when Caroline had gotten as far as the doorway GLaDOS called, "Do not leave that room, Caroline."

"Okay!" the little core said, and disappeared. She must've been really eager to be useful towards the whole thing.

Fishapedvanilla: you read it before in one sitting? That is quite the undertaking.

Author's note:

Just some preparations for the fight. I wasn't gonna bring the G-man back but I think I refer to him coming back in a later chapter so I put him back.