Part Sixty-Nine. The First Contact
GLaDOS then turned Wheatley's attention to a monitor filled with coloured dots, in front of which was a thin orange line that GLaDOS said marked the perimeter of the Enrichment Centre. "After this last meeting," she told him, "we go to war."
"War, luv?" Wheatley asked her quietly. Well, he'd known they were about to start battling a whole lot of bad guys, but war?
"Mm," was all she answered.
When the humans came in, she used the monitor she'd been showing Wheatley to explain to them where they were going to go. She organised them quickly into teams based on their abilities, and they were happy to go along with her for the most part. Many of the humans trusted her based on the sheer ability she had shown them as of late. One of them asked her how she knew where best to place them, though not in any way that suggested he was going to cause trouble. GLaDOS looked at him for a moment, gauging him to be sure.
"The… training you went through. I've been through all of the data. I know all of your strengths and weaknesses. Each and every one of you. If you would prefer a different placement, I would consider it, but I assure you I have analysed the data extensively and I believe I've developed the optimal configurations."
The man shrugged and did not look upset at all by this news. "You know what you're doing. I was just wondering."
GLaDOS was taken a little aback by this, stunned into a few seconds of silence. Then she gathered herself again and went back to outlining her instructions.
That whole operation took about an hour or so and when it had concluded, Wheatley realised there was an hour left on GLaDOS's clock. When he mentioned it, she nodded a little heavily.
"Hopefully an hour is enough time for the humans to sort themselves out."
"And… and if it isn't?" Wheatley asked, immediately regretting doing so. Of all the stupid things to ask…
She gave him a glance. "Then I'll have to… hurry them up, I suppose."
Hurrying the humans up did not usually involve benevolence from her, and he couldn't help but ask, "And… how would you be uh, be encouraging them to do that?" If it involved her usual brand of 'persuasion', he might have to come up with a plan dissuading her from that sort of action.
"I don't know. Offer them cake, maybe."
"Cake?" Wheatley asked, frowning, and when he realised the joke he had to laugh. She did too, a little, and he felt a little better to hear it.
"We'll be alright," she said, though not with much energy. "I estimate we can clear this up within seventy-two hours and then they can get the hell out of here."
"Seventy-two hours is… it's… two days?" he tried, forgetting quite where his calculator was at the moment.
"Three," she answered. "Clean up will take a few days more, but I don't care if the humans are around for that. They can go… do whatever humans do."
"You mean…" He couldn't bring himself to say it out loud so he instead whispered into her core, "interface?"
She started laughing and shoved him off of her, shaking her core. "If… that is their first thought, I don't want to know about it."
Wheatley kind of regretted bringing it up, because now he had to think about it a little, and he shook himself in disgust and thought about finding a subject to move along to. "That'll be nice to, to get them out of here."
"I can't wait," GLaDOS remarked dryly. "Then I'll only ever have to deal with your undying need for my attention."
"Oh, don't act like you don't want it," Wheatley scoffed. "You like it when people fawn all over you. It, it's the highlight of your day! Don't deny it, we both uh, we, well, it's true, anyway."
"Well," GLaDOS hedged, shifting a little uneasily, "I…"
But she couldn't say anything to that because it was true, so Wheatley just laughed.
When the hour passed and the countdown clock hit zero, GLaDOS used the monitor for more surveillance. Wheatley wasn't sure what they were looking at – it was a collection of numbers of some sort – but it held meaning for GLaDOS and that was all that mattered, really.
"They're holding off a little bit," GLaDOS murmured a few minutes later. "I wonder why that is…"
"Maybe they're… scared?" he ventured, though that mysterious man didn't seem to have been afraid of GLaDOS at all. Which was… very odd.
"No, that's not it. Where are the Striders? Where are the Hunters? This doesn't make any sense…"
"Luv, who… who was that, that guy who was in here? And what was he after, exactly? Why'd he think you'd make a deal with him?" It probably wasn't the best time to be asking, but he'd been holding off for quite a while now. She looked at him then, flicking her optic over him in consideration.
"I'm not certain who he is."
That was possible, for GLaDOS to not know who someone was?
"He's not human, that's all I know. Information regarding him has been frustratingly elusive. He wants the Borealis. He wants teleportation technology. With it, the Combine could destroy the rest of the humans and continue on with their goal of… moving in, I suppose you could call it." She was looking back at the monitor with the dots on it now, tracing and re-tracing the swiftly-moving dark pixels. "He thought I would help him. He was wrong."
"You said no to destroying all the humans." Wheatley could barely believe such a thing. Why would she turn that down?
"I thought he was human at the time. I was suspicious. What would he have to gain by destroying his own species? So I refused and sent the Borealis on its merry way."
"Hm," Wheatley mused. "And… and what is the Borealis, exactly?"
GLaDOS sighed a little, more probably than not exasperated at this line of questioning, which Wheatley had to admit was coming at a not-very-good time. "It's a research vessel. An icebreaker. With testing apparatus onboard. A lot of the original files were destroyed when the ship was lost, so I can't quite recall what the intent of the mission was, but I believe it had to do with seeing how humans performed tests in desolate environments with no possibility of escape."
"I can't imagine they'd do well," Wheatley remarked, remembering the test subjects he'd unsuccessfully led to freedom way back before the Incident.
GLaDOS only shrugged at this news. "Not that it matters anymore."
"What would that man want with, with an icebreaker, luv?" he asked, deciding that was a more important thing to inquire after than as to what an icebreaker was. She studied one of her screens for a long moment.
"It's not the icebreaker he wants. Some of Aperture's prototypical technology is on that ship; in other words, teleportation without portals. Aperture wanted a place to test this technology far from possible industrial espionage. Hence building a ship that is fully sustainable in a locale primarily consisting of inhospitable ice. It never happened, because I sent the ship away and no one was able to find it, but that was the original idea."
"Why doesn't he just… I dunno… invent his own… teleporting thingy?" Seemed easy enough.
It wasn't, based on GLaDOS's derisive burst of static. "Humans never do anything themselves they can steal from someone else."
This was true, Wheatley mused. He'd not met a whole lot of people, let alone humans, who did that whole 'innovation' thing. He rather thought that GLaDOS was possibly the only person who could do such a thing without stealing from other people. Of course, she probably did borrow formulas and theories and such, but he was confident she only did that to save time. If she wanted to rebuild Science from scratch, well, he'd no doubt she could.
The discussion lapsed after that, so he studied the monitors best he could and tried to figure out what he was looking at, but all he saw were numbers and dots, and that was about it. He decided to wait for a bit before bombarding GLaDOS with questions again. He was thinking about whether or not she actually needed him around, and if he could go peek in on Carrie for a minute, when she jolted back suddenly and whispered, "Shit."
Wheatley jumped a little and stared at her, optic wide. "Wha's going on?"
"They're running," GLaDOS said, nothing but disbelief in every inch of her, and though Wheatley again tried to find what she was looking at on that screen, he couldn't.
"What… d'you mean by that?" he asked hesitantly, not sure whether she wanted to discuss it or if she was just talking to herself. She stared at the monitor for a few more anxious seconds in silence.
"The humans on the west quadrant are running away. They're not doing their jobs. They're just… running."
Then without warning she brought the monitor to the floor with a sudden and violent crash, and Wheatley and the panels jumped collectively as the glass shards erupted from beneath the black plastic frame. She used one of the floor panels to shovel the whole mess into the abyss below her chamber, just as aggressively as she'd dropped the monitor and when he was over the shock of it and able to look at her, he realised she was shaking just a little. Why, he didn't know, but he resolved to find out.
"Well just, just let them go on their way, luv," he said in as calm a voice as he could muster. "We don't need them. They're just, the humans, they're only backup, right? To make things a bit easier? Not essential, not essential. They – "
"We can't run, Wheatley!" GLaDOS snapped, swinging 'round a little too close for comfort, and he instinctively pulled his core tight and backed away. "We don't have a choice! We succeed or we all die! I told them that so many times, and yet they decided to run anyway! It's about them, of course. They make everything about them. They destroy everything and don't face the consequences. They run away and leave someone else to deal with the mess. God, I hate them so much. I cannot believe this. Why did I ever decide that enlisting them was better than just doing it myself? That was stupid. This is all just… ridiculous. I'm of a mind to just abandon them. Let the Combine have their way with them. It would be no less than they deserve. Which isn't very much."
"You can't abandon Chell," Wheatley said in a small voice, well aware that he should just shut up and let her do what she liked at this point. But for all the humans that'd run away, he was sure there were some that would just not budge! He still didn't really like them either, but he'd spent a lot of meetings watching them. He'd seen them go from mistrusting GLaDOS to cheerfully doing whatever she asked. He'd watched a lot of them run through training tracks as well, and of course the ones who'd run had gone through the training – everyone had – but he knew just as well that many of them wanted to do something with what they'd learnt. "A-and Alyx, and Dr Kleiner, and Doug, and Barney, and… well, even Dr Magnusson, really. You can't just… the majority of them are staying put, right? And… - "
"You're right," she interrupted in a defeated sort of way. "I… overreacted. I didn't plan for that occurrence. That's all. It's something I should be able to account for, but it's not. I'm… I'm sorry."
Wheatley was so taken aback that she'd apologised that fast that he completely forgot about everything for a good handful of seconds. That was… unusual. And weird. She must really be bothered by everything that was going on. "'s okay," he told her, when he'd got his thoughts back in order.
"They had better not come back, or I'm going to kill them myself," she muttered, and he wasn't sure if he hoped that they did continue on their little impromptu journey, or that they come back and face consequences for putting a whole in GLaDOS's carefully laid plans. Maybe hating humans was not the way to go, but neither was abandoning your post when you had a very important job to do! Surely it was alright for them to be upset with the humans about things like that? He narrowed his optic plates in a grimace. Now that was a dilemma he'd rather not face.
He had to admit his sense of time'd been going a little bonkers lately; that's what happened when you stared at monitors for hours upon hours while trying to think of something to say that hadn't already been said. He would fall asleep at some point after nightfall, wasn't sure which, and so far's he could tell he always woke up at the same time. GLaDOS, however, had been awake as far as he could remember. And she was now. And she was overheating a little, despite her restoration. That could only mean one thing, which he was having trouble believing considering the circumstances, but this was GLaDOS. He took a mental breath and prepared to argue the truth out of her. And tried to think of how to convince her of how ridiculous she was being after he'd done that. All in all, not a pleasant set of future events.
"Did you even sleep?" he asked incredulously. He should probably've been nicer about it, but too late now. She looked at him for a long moment of silence, which told him everything he needed to know.
"Are you… c'mon. You can't be doing this again. It didn't work the last time, now did it! D'you just, d'you enjoy damaging yourself, or something? 'cause that's the only, the only explanation, the only thing that makes sense! And even that doesn't – oh, what does it matter. You aren't going to listen." He shook himself and made to leave.
This was what really got him about her, sometimes. She was funny. She was brave. She was beautiful. And above all, she was brilliant. But sometimes it was so hard to tell she was brilliant, because she would go on and do stuff like this, stuff that she should've already learned from!
"Wheatley, I do listen, but you must understand. They are literally on my doorstep. I must be vigilant. I –"
"How c'n you possib'ly be vigilant if you're, you're overworking yourself!" he shouted. "You can't! You can't be! So stop pretending you can! God, Gladys! Are you ever going to learn any better? B'cause at this point, I seriously doubt it."
"It's only until this is all over. Then – "
"Then you'll find some other excuse. The excuses never end, with you. You always, you always say you'll get rid of, that you'll banish your habits, or whatever these things you do are, and then you don't! You always say, I'll do it next time, I'll do it next time, and then you don't! God, Gladys, you just got, you've just been fixed up! D'you really want to, to run yourself down again so soon?"
"Wheatley, they are right there. Do you actually think I can go to sleep with them within throwing distance of my front door? Does that sound the slightest bit responsible to you?" She was getting angry now, and on top of that she sort of had a point, but that didn't make Wheatley any less angry himself.
"You could've asked me for help! What'm I doing here, anyways? I'm not helping. Yeah, yeah, there's the whole 'falling asleep' thing I do, but we could've, could've, I dunno, gone in turns or something! You could explain to me what's going on! But you just… you don't."
"You really think I could depend on you to –"
Wheatley wasn't sure what made her stop there. But she did, and he couldn't help but shake a little in rage as he returned in a low voice, "Don't you dare finish that."
And because he didn't want to know if she would, and he didn't want to hear her hollow explanations for continuing to think such a thing after all these years where he'd proven he could be depended on, he wheeled 'round and left the room.
He got it. She'd been working on this whole war thing for weeks, and now it was at its worst point, so she was under a lot of pressure. But they'd already been through this. And for her to even begin to say that… that he couldn't be depended on…
He sighed, and stopped next to a doorway, most of his anger already blown off. GLaDOS was GLaDOS, and as much as he disliked it, she was by-and-large habit driven. Some of her habits were easier to redirect, like getting her to hang out with Carrie when Carrie wanted to. That wasn't hard to do, because it happened every couple of days or so. But extreme overwork was a little rarer, and harder to change, because while he was not happy about it, the work still needed to be done. It was difficult to draw the line between how much needed to be done and how much she wanted to get done, because he didn't really know the full scope of all that she did. That short time he'd run the facility'd given him a taste of that life, so to speak, but he knew full well that he'd only done very little. But he could help, he knew he could do that. She wouldn't let him. He didn't know why, but she wouldn't let him.
He tried to find Atlas and P-body, hoping he could try to have a discussion with them about it – though they didn't speak the same language, so he wasn't sure how that was gonna go – but he was unable to. So he made his way to the corner of the facility where Alyx and Carrie were, with their little combat robots. Carrie didn't know entirely what Alyx was doing, but she was happy enough to chat with Wheatley for a bit. They showed him a little of the programming Alyx was working on, to make the robots better at fighting or something of the sort – as if the little human woman could improve on GLaDOS's work! – and though he vaguely recognised some of the words tossed around on the screen, it didn't mean a whole lot to him.
When he was bored of that he made his way back to GLaDOS's chamber, though he didn't even try to speak to her when he got there. They (or at least, he) remained in studious silence until Wheatley managed to fall asleep. It was not an easy or a pleasant one. Which was a new development. That had come at the worst possible time.
It was an odd feeling, and he didn't like it, and he also didn't like that he was thinking about it while trying to sleep. It was like being in this zone between sleep mode and being awake, where he was asleep enough that he couldn't move, but where he was awake enough to know he wasn't really sleeping. It sucked, that was all he could really say. It sucked. Big time.
All of a sudden he was staring at the floor. He stayed as still as he could, shocked. What'd gone on? Was something happening? But no; everything was the same as before. The room was dark save for the sickly orange spreading out of the monitors and across the panels, and silent other than for the intensive whirring of GLaDOS's hard drive. Which was louder than he recalled from… whenever it was he'd gone into that odd half sleep mode, and that was enough to make him cross all over again. He wondered what it was like to be partners with an AI that listened to your advice. Your very good advice. That had been proven right on more than one occasion. He sighed indignantly. Oh, the things he put up with for her! Really, he should –
"Wheatley."
He twitched in surprise. Though he shouldn't have been, of course she knew he was awake. She was a bloody genius, other than the whole listening to people who had perfectly sound reasoning as to things such as taking care of oneself –
"Do you want to… are you staying up, for a while?"
He shrugged as grumpily as possible, carefully studying the floor. "Dunno. Dunno why it matters."
"When you figure it out, I'm very tired and… and I would appreciate it if you could keep an eye on this for me."
Now Wheatley had a decision to make, and it was not an easy one.
He was still upset with her for what she'd said. Or what she'd meant to say. Not that there was a terribly huge difference in the long run. And he wanted her to apologise. She rarely apologised, and usually only did so if she didn't have all her mental faculties in order, so he knew it was a bit of a long shot. And now he was a bit more annoyed than previously because she'd just jumped straight into asking him to do something for her. Nothing about talking to him first, or acknowledging it was his idea, or any of that. Just went straight to, 'Hey Wheatley, old chap, can you spot me for a while?'. Okay, no, that wasn't quite how she'd put it, but that wasn't the point.
But at the same time… she was asking. And he couldn't deny that there was a lovely warm feeling that came of that, that she was both taking his advice (at long last!) and asking for help. So he supposed it was a matter of deciding what was more important: waiting to see if she apologised, and going back to sleep spitefully if she didn't; or acknowledging that she really was doing what he'd gotten upset over in the first place, and cutting her a break for now.
And because he was such a kind and generous and understanding partner, he got up and smiled at her and said, "Sure, luv. D'you want to uh, to let me know real quick what um, what I have to, what you need me to keep an eye on?"
She looked for a long time at the monitors, and he could hear her optic roving over them as she (presumably) tried to think of the least complicated way to explain it. After a while she sighed a little and said, "The monitor with the dots."
"Yeah?"
"The blue is us. The yellow is the Combine. Just… let me know if one of the yellow dots moves towards the orange line. Easy enough?"
"Got it," Wheatley answered, nodding firmly. She moved down into the default position, though it took a long while for the whirring of her hard drive to settle down. He realised that it must be difficult for her to hand off the work, whether she trusted him or not, merely because she did get a bit paranoid at times, and felt bad about being angry at her. He still thought she needed to apologise, but maybe he should've been a bit more understanding.
He did his best to study the one monitor, to keep track of the dots, and it wasn't that hard, really. They didn't move. He wanted to look 'round at the other monitors, to check if maybe he could figure one of them out and then report the happenings of them to GLaDOS – who would perhaps be impressed with his initiative! – but he was worried that one of the dots on the monitor he'd been assigned to would move, and he would miss it, so he only looked at the one next to it. That one he could keep reasonably within view. Sadly, it appeared to consist of programming instructions of some sort, and he could make neither heads nor tails of that.
As he watched, one of the little dots began to move towards the orange line, from the left side, and he froze and looked sideways at GLaDOS. It was one of the blue dots that was moving, one of the little blue ones, and he was trying and failing to remember which dots were theirs…
Blue or yellow, blue or yellow… he anxiously looked at the dot moving alongside the line, praying it wouldn't come too close. If it did, and he failed to warn GLaDOS, he'd've proven she'd been right all along, and that he couldn't be depended on –
Well! That wasn't true, wasn't true at all! He could be depended on, and of course the enemy was blue! He was going to warn her, and she would prevent that blue dot from doing whatever it planned on doing, and that would be that.
"Gladys," he hissed.
She lifted her core immediately, though she didn't really wake up for a few more moments, and she looked back and forth between him and the monitor a few times, her optic very dim. "What," she said, in the usual mechanical way she spoke during these sorts of times.
"One of the uh, the dots! It's moving, 'long the, the orange line," he said, gesturing with his upper handle. "Thought you might um, might want to have a look, there."
She stared at it for a long time.
"That's one of ours," she finally told him in the same dead voice. "A military android doing surveillance."
So… so blue was not the enemy, after all. "Oh."
She just went back to lying down.
"I… it won't happen again," he muttered, embarrassed. What a lovely job he'd done of helping out!
"Better safe than sorry."
He frowned at her, wondering what she meant by that and also wondering why she was not at all bothered by his incompetence, but he decided to leave her be and go back to work.
The military android moved up and down the line methodically three or four times, he lost track, and then returned to the left side where it'd come from. That was good! Meant nothing'd happened. But it was also bad, as well, because now Wheatley had nothing to keep him occupied. Stationary dots were pretty dull.
There was a clock, on the bottom left corner of the monitor with all the code on it, and he'd glance at it now and again just for variety, even though he could check his own with no trouble at all. Usually. On occasion he forgot where it was. But he'd been doing this for about an hour now, and honestly, what was GLaDOS so concerned about? It was night time! Even aliens tuckered out sometime! Nothing was happening, and nothing was going to happen, and –
And –
Something was happening. Something was happening right before Wheatley's staring optic, one of the blue dots was moving along the line from the right side, and not one of those sneaky little alien-things was gonna get by him, oh no! He nudged her a little bit. "Gladys."
Exactly the same as before, she raised her core and didn't come on properly for a few seconds. After she looked at the monitor, she moved back down again.
"Uh… Gladys, there's – "
"The enemy is the yellow."
Oh God, not again.
He wanted to smack himself, very hard, and then run off into a corner or something where he could be properly disgusted with himself for failing so miserably at something so simple. He was a moron, end of. He couldn't even keep two colours straight. Pathetic. Truly, truly pathetic.
Dejectedly, he went back to it, though he was no longer sure at all that he could complete the task as directed. It was so stupid, it really was, that he'd gotten all upset that she wouldn't let him help and then he'd gone and shown how overwhelmingly unhelpful he really was. He was an idiot. Couldn't even remember for an hour which colour belonged to who. Probably Atlas and P-body could do a better job. Might as well track them down and have them take over. It'd work out better. Probably.
Only two minutes'd gone by and he was already struggling to remember who blue and who yellow belonged to, and what dots had been the moving ones before. There had to be some way of remembering, there had to be! Blue, blue, blue… he was sure Aperture was blue, but how could he –
Well that… was not hard to remember, actually. His colour was blue. And Carrie's! And the portals – of course! Orange and blue were the colours GLaDOS always used! How had he forgotten?
Now feeling much better about his ability to sort through things, he settled down to watch the monitor again. He'd been at it for another hour or so when three of the yellow dots began to inch towards the orange line, from near the middle, and he whispered, "Gladys."
She came to and looked at the screen again and nodded. "An hour earlier than yesterday."
He nodded to that, though he didn't know what it meant, and looked at her while she brought herself up properly. She really was quite pretty, he thought. He didn't really know why he was thinking that – seemed to be an odd time, really – but his thoughts'd never really been straight anyway.
"Thank you," GLaDOS told him, bringing him more or less back to the present. "I'll be fine from here. You go back to sleep."
He kind of wanted to know what the little yellow buggers were planning, but then again, he wasn't going to be much use if he did that falling asleep thing during the day, when all the really important stuff happened. So he just nodded a little and engaged sleep mode, thinking before he did so that he hoped she'd be able to handle whatever was going on while berating himself a bit for ever thinking she couldn't.
When he was awake and looking at the monitors, trying to figure out what all the dots were doing now – which he couldn't, because they were moving too fast – she said in a flat, noncommittal voice, "Good morning."
He blinked. She was… trying to sound casual, that's what it was, not like she didn't care but more like she was trying to act normal about it. That didn't quite work, because that was not something she normally said, but hey, she was trying.
"Morning," he replied cheerfully.
"How are things," she went on, in the same voice, not moving. He frowned.
"Well uh… not much's gone on, see, since um… since I just, just got up, 'n all that, but uh… good for now, good for now. Mm… how… how's the… stuff getting on?" God, he felt stupid.
"They're fine."
"Did you find out what the um, the… dots from were,were getting up to?" he asked, thanking the God of AI that he'd pulled something somewhat intelligent out of thin air.
"They were checking the perimeter for weaknesses. They didn't find any." She laughed to herself, telling Wheatley exactly why that hadn't happened. He smiled.
"So you were of use after all. Congratulations."
"Thanks!" he said cheerily. A compliment out of her! Excellent. He'd not hoped for such a thing.
"And – "
But he knew what she was going to say next, and he was realising that he didn't want to hear it, and he interrupted her with, "It's okay."
She swung her core 'round to look at him, her optic narrowing in confusion. "Is it?"
He nodded once, firmly. "'s fine. Promise."
She scrutinised him for a few moments more, then went back to whatever it was she was doing. And he watched her for a minute. No, he didn't want to hear it.
He had. He had wanted to hear her apologise. And maybe she should have. But he knew that it was hard for her to ask for help at all, and, in a way, that was her apology. And quite frankly, he much preferred that over her regret any day.
"Is there uh… anything else I can help you with?" he asked, a little meekly, because that was an iffy question on the best of days, which today was definitely not. The yellow and blue dots were all tangled together a few centimetres from the orange line, and moving faster than he could keep track of. If she found something for him to do, well, kudos to her.
"Do you have the time," she asked.
"The… the time," he repeated, confusedly tilting himself a little and peering at her.
"Mm. This clock keeps resetting itself and I want to know if this is a widespread problem."
"Uh… no, no I don't." He embarrassedly closed into himself and looked at the wall. How he managed to lose his clock, he'd never know.
"It's fine. I'll fix it later. Hey. If you really want to do something, go see how Caroline is doing. I can't check on her myself right now."
"Sure!" He jumped up and moved towards the doorway, but then he stopped to turn and wave at her with his upper handle, which was a mistake.
It was a mistake because, while he was doing it, it suddenly hit him just how very pretty she was, and though he knew this was not a good time to be thinking that he couldn't help it. Not again! This didn't even make sense, it was so weird, it was –
Actually, it did make sense. He was thinking that because he was looking at his Gladys right now, he knew that without knowing why that she was feeling a little softer than usual, that was an odd way to describe it but it was best he knew at the moment, but it still was not a good time –
"What."
Well of course she's gonna notice if you stare at her for five minutes, he berated himself. "Nothing!"
"It's obviously something." He had her full attention now, and he didn't think he was getting out of at least a little bit of an explanation.
"I uh… well um… you just…" Why was it so hard, all of a sudden? Because it was the wrong time, probably. What a bloody stupid time to tell someone they were beautiful. Right when they were directing an army in what was quite possibly a battle to the death. What a genius he was.
"I just… you look really pretty, that's all." There. Now that was that, and he could gracefully exit –
"What?"
Or not.
"Why?" she continued, staring at him intently. "This seems an odd time to bring up such a thing."
He just looked at her helplessly. How could he ever explain it? 'Gladys, you look prettier when I can see the real you.' No. He couldn't say that. That was stupid. And really rather insulting. He wasn't going to say that. He was just going to shrug and mumble something and disappear. And that's what he tried to do, but then she said, "Are you sure it's all right that I didn't – "
"Yes!" He turned around again and waved his lower handle to stop her. "It's fine. Don't mind me. Don't. I'll be going. Off to do, to do what you asked. Gonna chat with Carrie. See how she's uh, she's getting on. And I'm going now. Bye. Yeah."
And the part where he'd made himself look stupid wasn't even the worst bit, he thought miserably as he headed through the darkened hallways. It was the part where she would be her authoritative self again, GLaDOS through and through was the best way to put it, by the time he got back. He had a sudden longing for the very young GLaDOS he'd once known, who had still been pessimistic and aloof but you could tell she had a heart just by listening to her for a while. God, it was taking such a long time to find her again. He knew he would get there if he was patient, and if he didn't give up, but… he felt like, with this whole war thing, that she'd taken a massive step backward. And she probably had. Gladys listened to his advice and played games with him at midnight and didn't need an explanation when he told her she was beautiful. GLaDOS believed she could only trust herself and had no time for anything but her 'directives' and understood nothing that couldn't get through her figurative (and probably literal) logic filters. He sighed a little as the room where Carrie and Alyx were came into view. Other than the first couple of days where she hadn't wanted him to leave her for anything, it felt like she was slowly sliding back into her old ways, before he'd tried to help her with anything. And it was honestly exhausting, just thinking of all he'd have to do to bring her back out again. He would never stop trying to, because he loved her and that was what she needed, but God, there had to be something for him, too, right? He couldn't be expected to keep working tirelessly for her and never, ever getting anything out of it? She realised that, didn't she? That he needed something back? She had, at one point, he was sure of it, but somewhere along the line she'd forgotten or put it aside or…
It must have happened when… when she had had no reason to remember.
What had happened in that year he'd been gone?
Author's note:
I'm on a roll here.
So… explanation, explanation… I felt Wheatley was being too patient so I made him start to get upset about GLaDOS. Then I realised I never had GLaDOS talk about the year Wheatley was gone (and I know they didn't really have time to do so at this point in the story, but I didn't include it in the future either) so I made it forefront in Wheatley's mind. So that I would remember about it.
I don't think it'll take overly long for Part Seventy but no promises.
Kauppafanit, just to let you know, I HAVE been answering your reviews; I don't know if you know that or not, but check your Private Messaging inbox in your account or check your email.