Part Ninety-Three. The Respect

"Uhhhh," Claptrap said as they returned to GLaDOS's chamber the next afternoon, "sooooo… y'know how you said we could go look at the mainframe?"

"I do, in fact, recall telling you how to get there not an hour ago."

"Well, funny thing," Claptrap said, tapping the tips of his hands together and not looking at her, "it kinda… how do I put this…"

"You blew it up," GLaDOS supplied, and Wheatley really shouldn't've been surprised that she already knew but he was anyway.

"Well, maybe. I mean, it looked kinda old so it coulda just been unstable. That carpet was so two centuries ago. Might've been the old girl's time to go! Just tired of workin' the old nine-to-five down in the cold, lonely basement – "

"I already know what happened," GLaDOS interrupted. "You got so excited when you saw the carpet that you forgot what else was in there, rubbed your wheel on it, told Wheatley to 'check this out' and then proceeded to touch the mainframe. The ensuing spark set the whole thing on fire."

"That's exactly what happened!" Wheatley exclaimed, leaning forward excitedly. "And it was bloody amazing!"

"No it wasn't!" Claptrap hissed, and Wheatley remembered that he had, in fact, obliterated GLaDOS's mainframe. Which was probably important. Probably.

"I mean uh… it was awful. Simply terrible. A tragedy, to see a classic like that go up. Sad, really. Unfortunate."

"Did I screw a lot of stuff up?" Claptrap asked, not really sounding like he wanted to know the answer, but GLaDOS shook her core.

"I purposely sent you to a section of the mainframe I can do without. It was only still running at all for legacy reasons, but setting up a virtual machine took care of that."

"You are one clever woman," Claptrap said, and Wheatley noted somewhat bemusedly that GLaDOS raised herself a little in self-satisfaction. "You're probably better off without that thing, anyway. It was old enough to be somebody's great-grandma!"

"You have no idea," said GLaDOS. "Also. While I have you here, we need to talk."

"Uhh… I'd love to! but I just remembered something I really gotta do! So… catch ya later!" And he turned around to leave, but was stopped when GLaDOS used a maintenance arm to pick him up and face him back in her direction.

"I'd say 'nice try', except that was the worst excuse I've ever heard."

"That uh… that's a neat trick you got there," Claptrap admitted, looking up to where the claw had disappeared into the ceiling. "Okay, I guess we can… talk. Look, I didn't mean to nuke your granny. Honest! It was a mistake!"

"My granny?"

"That mainframe!" Claptrap said, waving his hands in… Wheatley wasn't sure why he was doing it. He was still working out what hand gestures he used for lack of having a real face. "You kept it around because it was family, right?"

"What are you talking about? No, it wasn't family. The facility is just an endless tangle of redundancy that depends on ancient, increasingly terrible software. That's all."

"Okay, it's not that, so… is this about that secret facility thing? 'cause I still don't even know where it is. Don't I need that info if I'm gonna decide whether I wanna be the backup plan?"

"You'd have to ask Caroline about that," GLaDOS answered. "I don't know where it is."

It got so quiet all Wheatley could hear was the faint buzz of the systems talking to each other. And maybe Claptrap thinking. He didn't seem to have been designed to do much of that, so it was fairly audible at times.

"What," Claptrap said finally.

GLaDOS sighed. "I'm not going to get into the whole of it right now. Suffice it to say there is some mysterious annoyance playing a game with this planet, and it is a game I almost lost. I cannot leave and I will be his first target. Therefore, I cannot know where she is building it because that knowledge would put everything in here at risk, if the need to move everyone there should ever arise. I don't know and I can never know."

"But… babe, that means – "

"I know what it means," she interrupted. "But don't worry. You won't be chained down there. You can still gallivant on Pandora all you like. You just have to do your hardest to forget where you came from if anyone asks."

Wheatley expected him to make some remark about people not wanting to talk to him, or not being able to remember his own name, or something of that nature, but he just looked at the floor and tapped his hands together. Then he said, "You've given your whole life to this place, huh."

"I'm the only one who can."

Claptrap looked up at her suddenly, straightening. "Ohhhh. I think I got it."

She regarded him as sideways as she was able.

"Look, I… I'll let Carrie know I'm down to be her sidekick. Okay?"

"She'll be relieved to hear that," GLaDOS said, a little too casually, and Claptrap moved closer.

"I'll take care of it for you, baby." His voice was low, as though sharing a secret with her. And maybe he was, because Wheatley wasn't quite sure what was happening here. "Don't worry about it."

"I've already spent hundreds of hours doing so and will likely spend hundreds of hours more," she told him, sounding tired. "But that's not what this is about. It's… there's something I need to tell you."

"Oof," Claptrap said. "Doesn't sound like good news."

"It should be," she told him. "I wanted to…" Her glance at Wheatley implied his presence hadn't been part of the plan, but it was too late now. He wasn't going anywhere. "To tell you I was sorry for how I treated you when we were together before."

"What," Claptrap said disbelievingly.

"I was… cruel. I put the burden of the relationship's failure on you. I refused to take any responsibility for it. It was as much my fault as yours – probably more mine, while I'm being honest – and yet you ended up shouldering all the blame."

"Well, I am the only one around here who actually has shoulders."

GLaDOS's laugh was so cute Wheatley had to shutter his optic for a bit. "As true as that is, I took an us problem and made it a you problem. It was not fair and it was wrong, and… and I apologise."

"You're… apologising? To me?"

Wheatley had to admit that it was one of the more surprising things she'd ever done. He'd thought she was just going to keep on like it had never happened. Or perhaps mention it offhand sometime ten years from now. He'd never've imagined she'd bring it up on purpose so she could apologise for it!

"Yes," GLaDOS was saying.

"Wow." He was understandably awestruck. "I gotta say, babe. If I had written a list of all the people I ever thought would do that, you'd be at the bottom. In fact, you'd be so far down you wouldn't even be on the list."

"I know."

"Thank you. I… that means a lot."

"I know," she repeated, a little quieter. Wheatley was a little concerned about how subdued she seemed. She didn't need to be upset about any of it! Claptrap had obviously let it all go, so there was no reason for her not to. Claptrap laughed a little.

"I didn't think it was gonna mean this much."

"I didn't want to keep pretending nothing happened. If we're going to do it right this time, a lot of things that happened back then can't be repeated."

"I feel good about this!" Claptrap declared. "I think we got it this time, babe. And don't worry about any of that. It's all good! I wouldn't have come back if it wasn't!"

"Alternately it could have meant you really hate yourself. The odds on that are pretty even."

"Sometimes I do. But never because of you."

"You're making that up," she said bemusedly.

"Not at all! You're the only one who laughs at all my jokes. Does wonders for my self-esteem!"

"People who fail to see how funny you are are clearly inferior life forms who don't have any understanding of the concept of comedy. Don't worry. I get that a lot too."

"Humans, am I right? They never appreciate the irony of a good 'kill all the humans' joke."

"We should discuss that at the next 'kill all the humans' meeting. It's on Tuesday."

"Oh, you mean 'Kill-All-the-Humans' Day?"

"Yes. It's in the 'kill all the humans' room."

Wheatley didn't understand that one at all, but it seemed to be something of a private joke as they both found it very funny.

"Oh yeah," Claptrap said, "there was something I've been meaning to ask you! A serious question, too. Not one like 'why the heck haven't you hired an interior decorator by now?'"

"Because I'm totally colourblind and everything looks grey to me, so I might as well just keep everything in those shades. It's better than wasting paint I can't see anyway," GLaDOS answered. "Next question."

"What?" Claptrap and Wheatley said in unison. Claptrap raised himself to lean closer to her. "Really?"

"No," GLaDOS said, laughing. "I'm kidding."

"I'm not really convinced, but we'll talk about that after I show you the snazzy new designs I'm working on. No, the thing I really wanna know is what was up about you repairing my code."

"What?"

Claptrap rolled back and forth in front of her a few times. "Well, I've been trying to figure out why you went to all that trouble for me! I mean, even if you were just, I dunno, doing a good deed for some reason, that wasn't worth all the work you did. It was worth maybe a day. Mayyyybe one and a half. But four? Nah. Had to be something else."

"It was."

"Still looking for the reason there, babe."

"Because I love you," GLaDOS said, and Wheatley suddenly wondered if he'd actually been paying attention to this conversation or not. He wished he knew how to playback his memory. Here was something he really needed cleared up.

"I uh… sorry, babe, I'm gonna need you to repeat that," Claptrap said, and Wheatley frowned. Had they both misheard her say the same thing? "I think I stopped paying attention by mistake and started daydreaming or something. See, sometimes I do this thing where – "

"You heard me," GLaDOS said.

Wheatley still felt like he hadn't, because for her to come right out and say that was quite strange. While he was struggling to figure that out he and Claptrap just sort of looked at each other confusedly. Claptrap probably wanted him to explain this, but he had no idea! First she'd apologised for something she'd done years back, and now this? He hadn't any explanation!

"You're probably wondering why I'm being so forthright all of a sudden," she said, and Wheatley looked over at Claptrap to see if he knew what that word meant. He just shrugged, and GLaDOS sighed a little.

"Why I'm not making you drag all of this out of me like I usually do."

"Oh yeah," Claptrap said, and Wheatley nodded in agreement. "Yeah, I was wondering that."

"Because in the course of the development of the relationship between Wheatley and I, I made him do all of the work."

Claptrap lifted one of his curled hands a little tentatively. "I'm uh… is this about me being lazy? Because –"

"No," GLaDOS interrupted. "It's not about you at all. It's about the fact that, for far longer than was really reasonable, I refused to admit what I wanted. I refused to so much as think about it. I cannot repeat that. It would be… disrespectful."

"To me?" Claptrap asked incredulously, and that did make sense, but it was apparently the wrong answer because GLaDOS shook her core and said,

"No. To Wheatley."

"Me?" Wheatley squeaked. What had he to do with this? But GLaDOS looked at him and nodded once.

"What kind of person would I be if I did that all over again, this time knowing exactly what I needed to do differently but refusing regardless?"

"Sounds uh… like the kind of thing you'd do, to be honest," Wheatley said tentatively, hoping he wasn't messing all of this up. "You know, to be… to be stubborn."

"Some things I shouldn't be stubborn about. That is one of them." She was still looking at him, and it was getting a little intense, if he was honest. "And sometimes things don't get said. Because you kept making excuses not to say them."

Oh. Oh, was she talking about… how he'd died? Or about sending Carrie away? Or… or her mum, even?

Well… it was probably all of them. All of those things, and a whole lot of others as well. Mistakes she was trying to avoid making a second time by being as bluntly honest as possible right now. He immediately resolved to keep from being all strange about it. It was so good that she was doing this, and not just for Claptrap or even for Wheatley, but for herself. Maybe she didn't realise that. He might have to ask after it.

"I understand, luv," he said. He didn't mean to say it so softly, but there wasn't really a way to do anything about it now.

"I'm not trying to be a downer," Claptrap said, "but… are you sure you need me here? Because… never gonna get you like he does."

"I don't want you to," GLaDOS told him, finally looking away from Wheatley. "You'll reach your own understanding eventually. If you haven't already, and just don't know about it yet. But enough of all this. There isn't much more I can say about it that I haven't said already."

Oh, there she was. He'd been a bit worried there but no. She wasn't about to become all mushy, and while it would be nice if she were a bit more open about her feelings, that was a bit much. An apology and two confessions on the same day? Not quite her. Probably just her getting it over with, just putting it out there, but still. Wheatley would appreciate something of a warning next time, just so he wouldn't be caught so off-guard. He was going to need some time to really process all of that. Especially that bit about not wanting to disrespect his efforts. He was too confused to really appreciate what that meant.

"You know what you should do, Claptrap?"

"I'm open to suggestions!"

"You should tell us one of those stories you have."

Claptrap jumped up delightedly. "Oh, sure! Hey, did I tell you about the time I saved the human race?"

"Nobody opens doors at just the right moment quite the way you do, funnychips."

Wheatley had rather thought he'd be bothered if he heard her call him that again, but… no. No, it was in fact rather sweet. So he was getting used to all of this! It could be a bit confusing, the way she, for lack of a better word, dealt with them differently. He knew, of course, they were different people while also being similar, but it sometimes did get a bit hard to keep it all in mind.

"Before I wow you with my heroism, can I tell you something?"

"Go ahead."

"I'm glad we had this talk, babe," Claptrap said, with enough gravity that Wheatley looked at him in concern. He seemed to take no notice, though, his optic fixed on GLaDOS. "We should… y'know. Talk more often."

"We should," GLaDOS agreed. "I'm not very good at being a friend. So that's on me."

"You are terrible," Claptrap told her. "But it's okay! I still think you're the best. I'm – "

"I'm marginally fond of you as well," GLaDOS interrupted, and Claptrap laughed.

"You've got a wiiiiide definition for 'margin', babe. But back to the story! There I was: the first line of attack upon Handsome Jack. Oh hey, that rhymed."

"He's gone and, he's distracted himself already," Wheatley muttered to her, and it was not a very nice thing to say but Claptrap didn't seem to notice and GLaDOS giggled, which was quite adorable, so all in all he was going to count it as a good decision.

"Where was I? Oh yeah! I was totally gonna kick his ass alllll by myself. I was! Really! But then the unthinkable happened!"

"And what was that," said GLaDOS with great amusement.

"I did my noble duty and opened the Hyperion door! And behind it: stairs! My nigh vanquishable foe!"

"There was a hill behind the door, then."

Wheatley snorted, which caught her attention for a moment, but Claptrap spread his arms in an arc away from him, his palms facing down. "No, babe. No. There were stairs. Lots of them. At least a million."

"A million," GLaDOS said, laughing. Wheatley almost missed the next part because he was trying so hard to imagine what that many stairs even looked like.

"Nonono! Two million! And Handsome Jack put them there just for me! He knew he wouldn't be able to beat me mano a mano, so he built a whole lotta stairs to keep me from getting to him! You shoulda seen it, babe. So many stairs."

Wait so… so how many stairs had there been, again? Two million seemed a bit excessive, not to mention sort of inefficient…

"And then what."

"Well, it was right then that I remembered I'm allergic to pain! So I had to, y'know, skedaddle. I didn't want to! But it was just. Allergies. You know."

"Oh yes," GLaDOS said. "I can't count the number of times my allergies held me back."

"You've got allergies?" Wheatley asked, but she just shook her core and told him to hush.

"Exactly! Anyway, so because of my allergies I had to let the Vault Hunters take care of Hyperion, and I would have followed after that, but the stairs! My only other choice was to cry. A lot."

"Did that help?"

"Not really," Claptrap said. "But it all worked out in the end! And I was the real hero, even if nobody'll ever admit it."

"The efforts of even the most gallant of robots always go unappreciated," GLaDOS said. "Unfortunately, you missed your chance to show the world that even rolling trashcans are worth their weight in protons."

"I'm going to pretend I totally understood what you just said. I didn't! But I'm pretending I did. And also I'm gonna… I gotta take off for a bit. I'll be back! Don't you worry about that!" And he did, in fact, start leaving immediately, which left Wheatley scrambling to catch up on what they were even talking about at this point. He seemed to be trying to run away for some reason, and from GLaDOS's narrowed optic he figured out that she didn't really know why he was doing it either.

"Where are you going?" GLaDOS asked, confused, and Claptrap moved his hands into the shape of a triangle.

"Well uh… look. I kinda… gave up on anybody ever caring if I was still alive, let alone loving me. And… then you went ahead and just dropped that on me. And that's not a bad thing! I'm happy about it! I really am! It's just…" He shifted his chassis uneasily. "I gotta go cry about it for a while."

"You have to what?"

"It's all good!" Claptrap said, holding his hands up. "It was totally awesome that you said that! It's just a thing I gotta do, that's all."

GLaDOS looked at Wheatley, but he didn't know what he was supposed to do. Claptrap being his best friend didn't mean he knew everything about what he did.

"Well, you don't…" Oh, she sounded so confused. "You can stay here."

"Oh, I know!" Claptrap said cheerfully. "This is an alone cry, though."

"You are making absolutely no sense to me right now," GLaDOS told him, actually sounding frustrated, and Claptrap rolled forward and patted the side of her core with his right hand.

"No surprises there, right? Hey. Don't worry about it. I'll see you later." And he gave her a kiss and headed off, GLaDOS staring after him.

"I don't understand," GLaDOS said, seeming perturbed. "Why does he cry if he's happy?"

"Dunno," Wheatley shrugged. "Some people're just like that, I suppose. S'long as we don't um, don't make him feel strange about it."

"But why?"

"Sometimes people just, they just do things," Wheatley said, as patiently as he could. He had no idea if he could get through the figurative (or perhaps literal) logic gate of her understanding. "They haven't got to have a reason for them."

"That's stupid," GLaDOS muttered. "There has to be a reason."

He didn't really want to get into it right now. Not only was he unsure if he could explain it to her, but she was getting all tetchy, like she usually did when she'd had to talk about her feelings. And all that meant was she was getting in the mood to argue, which he was not in and did not want to be. So he just pretended he hadn't heard. That meant he got to thinking, though, and then he remembered what he'd wanted to mention earlier. He considered whether it would be better to try bringing it back up some other time or risk her getting angry now and decided on the latter.

"Gladys," Wheatley said after a minute, "you know that you should…" Oh, he didn't quite know how to put it.

"I should what?" She was snapping a little bit. Perhaps he could have phrased that a bit better.

"No! No, I'm not asking you to do anything. I just meant that… you said you wanted to… make sure you uh, to change the way you did things with Claptrap this time. Instead of… of how we did it."

Her optic narrowed. "Where are you going with this?"

He was still figuring that out, himself. He frowned at the floor panels. "Y'know it isn't… it's much easier when you just say things. You've got to… to be honest with yourself. Because when you're not, it just means that… that it takes a long time to get what, to find what you're after, because… well, I dunno if you noticed, but you are bloody great at hiding it." He raised himself to find her looking at him. "You said you didn't want to disrespect me, so you decided to do it all diff'rently. But you've also got to… to respect yourself. And you can't do that if you just, if you keep on pretending."

"It's hard," GLaDOS said. "I didn't want to do any of that today. Or ever, really."

"But now he knows!" Wheatley told her excitedly, leaning forward. "And it's done with! You haven't got to, there's not going to be any waffling about! It's been said!"

"I feel like I said too much."

"No," Wheatley said, shaking himself negatively, "no, you definitely did not. Said exactly enough. Exactly. The perfect amount. Of. Things."

"Even the…" She made a discontented electronic noise and moved away from him. Oh, damn. She'd hit her limit and he was going to have to guess. He shuttered his optic and did his best to run through what had been said earlier. He took a second to make sure he'd got it right, and then he said, as softly as he could,

"Yes, Gladys. It was good that you said you love him."

She didn't really react to that, and he didn't blame her, exactly. He wished there was some way to make all of this easier on her, but it was just something she was going to have to work through with herself. Still. Maybe he could give her another push in the right direction.

"He needed to hear that."

She sighed and lowered her core, and he realised it was possible he'd gone a little too far, considering the circumstances. He should probably leave her alone for a bit, before he made it worse. He'd only moved back a metre or so when she looked over at him again.

"Hey. You seem to enjoy thinking about feelings. Do you want mine? They're really becoming a hassle."

Wheatley laughed. "No no, luv. Those're yours. You'll figure them out eventually."

"I don't want to. They're stupid."

"Of course they are," Wheatley said in as sympathetic a way he could while trying not to laugh, rubbing the side of her core with his upper handle, and she said something to herself in binary but did not move or tell him to stop what he was doing.

Author's note

I was gonna put this in the last chapter but the note was too long so here it is now! If we recall the LaaC playlist, yes! it is still a thing. It has been reordered and the missing songs have been fixed. If you're interested in the playlist you can google 'LaaC Playlist' and it's the second one. Other side note: for those of you on who like the Claptrap/GLaDOS stuff, I do have some side fics about that, but I have to post them in the crossover section of the site so if you'd like you can check them out there (under Portal/Borderlands) or just click on my list of stories. I know it's long but they're near the top. One of them is a side story for LaaC and the other two are just for funsies.

This chapter took so long because a lot of my notes and stuff for it either were useless or stuff I moved around to earlier/later chapters, so what I did have was just a confusing mess that I didn't want to deal with. I had this whole long thing on my iPod for this chapter that didn't even FIT within the CONTEXT so I was just like ughhhhh don't wanna and where'm I gonna put THAT. But here we are. The next two have been written since 2014 so they should be faster.

The thing about the mainframe is kinda based on how a lot of businesses still run on Windows XP even though the OS is no longer supported by Microsoft and the programs on it look and run like ass. At my job I do some of the invoices and boy oh boy is the software for that whole system incredibly stupid and ugly. But it's too expensive to switch over/the businesses depend on software that isn't compatible with or doesn't exist for current versions of Windows. So the idea here is that Aperture's base software is dependant on really old mainframes and servers, etc., and it can't be fixed because it was just built stupidly and GLaDOS can build on top of it but she can't redo it from the ground up because her own development was part of that stupidness. A virtual machine is when you trick your current operating system into running a second operating system at the same time so you can run software that you can't on the current one. Like how Fallout 3 isn't compatible with Windows 10 so you could run a virtual machine to play it on Windows 7 or whatever. Virtual machines are often used on Macs to run Windows software; for example, Macs don't get a lot of PC games developed for them so you can use a virtual machine to install Windows on your Mac and play them that way. IIRC. I've only actually done a Windows XP virtual machine on Windows 10.

For a minute there I was really considering playing the colourblind thing straight because it would've been super interesting but I think it's way way way too late for that so I carried out the joke.