Part 114. The Depression

"Is it just me," Wheatley asked GLaDOS one afternoon, "or has Claptrap been… y'know… a bit off, lately."

"Leave him alone," GLaDOS said. "He's listening to his angry dubstep."

Wheatley frowned. "I thought he um, he didn't listen to that anymore. Not since - "

"He doesn't," GLaDOS interrupted. "Drop it."

Fine. He would just ask somebody else, then.

He hasn't been up to much, the mainframe told him after a minute. As far as we know, he's just been sitting and holding that stuffed animal of his. Surveillance says he doesn't look too good.

"Then why'm I being told to stay away from him?" Wheatley asked in exasperation.

It isn't just you, said the mainframe. He isn't talking to us, either.

"And we aren't uh, aren't doing anything about this because why?"

Wheatley, we have no idea what to do. I've been told this happened to GLaDOS before and there wasn't much anyone could do but wait.

"Wait for what?"

I don't know.

Wheatley growled and smacked the wall with his upper handle. "None of this makes any sense!"

I don't understand it either. But I think it's above my existence level.

Wheatley paused in his frowning at the panel in front of him. "Existence level?"

I'm not complex enough to actually understand what's happening here. Some of the other systems kind of do, because they've seen it before, but to really understand emotions you kind of have to be sentient.

"You are sentient," said Wheatley, still not understanding.

Not sentient enough.

Wheatley wasn't sure he liked the implications of that.

Claptrap continued to be more or less absent, and whenever Wheatley asked GLaDOS where he'd got to, she just told him not to worry about it, but she sounded distracted enough that it wasn't very reassuring. He even tried asking the mainframe, but it had apparently decided not to take his side and refused to ask Surveillance for him.

"Why not?" he asked, frustrated.

Because he asked me not to.

That didn't make any sense whatsoever. Claptrap hated being by himself and now when he seemed to need friends most, he had a sudden need for solitude? That was simply mad!

Finally, finally Claptrap showed up one morning and waved hello to GLaDOS, who just nodded in response.

"Morning!" Claptrap said, but with markedly less of his usual gusto.

"Where've you been at?" Wheatley demanded. He just shrugged.

"Nowhere."

"D'you mind doing something for me?" he asked, since Claptrap seemed to be following along to his daily visit to the hole. "'s just a small something. Nothin' big. You've hardly got to do anything."

"Sure," said Claptrap, and Wheatley took a detour down to GLaDOS's room in the basement. Claptrap seemed hesitant to enter.

"Won't be a moment," Wheatley assured him. "I've just been keeping something here. It's the um, well, I haven't got anyplace better to put it." Aha! There it was. He picked it up and turned to face Claptrap again, offering it to him. "Take this."

"Uh… okay," said Claptrap, and Wheatley led him back upstairs. Once they were within reach of the daylight, he turned to him and asked,

"Hold that up to the, in the sun, there, would you?"

Claptrap dutifully did so, and just as Wheatley had thought he still saw nothing inside the prism. He glanced furtively at Claptrap.

"You don't um… happen to see anything, do you?"

"You're gonna have to be a lot more specific."

"In the, in the glass," Wheatley clarified. "D'you see anything inside of it?"

"Well… yeah," said Claptrap. "Rainbows. Why?"

Well. That cleared that up. Whatever was going on with Claptrap was as beyond him as seeing rainbows. But to his surprise he felt sort of… okay with that. "I can't," Wheatley told him. "I can't see anything inside of there."

"Huh," said Claptrap, turning the glass a little. "That's a shame, pal. Rainbows are, like, one of the coolest things out there."

"Can't do it," Wheatley said, shrugging. "Not sure I'm too bothered about it, to be honest."

"Why not?"

"Seems life gets hard, the more um, the more complicated you are," he answered. "Dunno if I could handle it, honestly. All the extra uh, the emotions and things that come with it all. I think if I um, if I managed to go forward, well, I'd just wish I could go back again!"

"Sometimes I wish that," said Claptrap, which surprised Wheatley a great deal.

"What d'you mean?"

"I wasn't always like this," he answered. "I used to just be… I dunno. It's hard to explain. One day I just suddenly knew I existed."

"What happened?"

Claptrap brought the prism out of his line of sight. "Hyperion activated some program they'd left in me so I'd go kill the Vault Hunters they hired so they didn't have to pay 'em."

Wheatley stared down at him.

"That's… that's the first thing you remember?"

"Kinda," he said. "Like, there's other stuff before that, but I wasn't really there for it. Look, I don't wanna think about it right now. I'll fill you in some other time." He offered up the prism, which Wheatley took.

"I was told to stay away from you," he said, replacing the glass in the basement. Claptrap shrank into himself a bit.

"Wheatley, it wasn't - "

"You know I don't mind helping if you're sad, don't you?"

"Wheatley," he said, with worrying seriousness, "I'm not… sad. This isn't sadness, it's… a million times worse than that."

This must have been more of that higher existence business, because Wheatley could not imagine anything worse than sadness. "Okay, um, alright, but I can't know what it is or how to help you if um, if I haven't got a chance to learn."

"Learn?" Claptrap asked, sounding confused. He was still facing out of the hole. "Dude, you're not listening. I don't know what to do about this. All I'm even doing is trying to convince myself I'm not totally wasting everybody's time. I just do that over and over and over again. I mean, yeah, I did ask to be left alone, but only because only Carrie and GLaDOS have seen this before and -"

"Carrie?" Wheatley interrupted, suddenly feeling as though he'd failed horribly in some way.

"Yeah," Claptrap said. "She's been super helpful. She doesn't, like, understand thank God but she's seen it before, lots of times. She just does stuff without me saying anything and it helps a lot."

"But… but I'm your best friend," Wheatley protested weakly. Claptrap turned around to face… no, not him. The hallway.

"I don't - I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. I know I'm being a lousy friend right now and I deserve to catch hell for it, but - man, I just can't take this right now. I really, really don't need to feel worse and this is makin' me feel a lot worse."

"Claptrap, I don't get it!" Wheatley snapped, exasperated, but all Claptrap did was move into the hall.

"I'm sorry, Wheatley," he said again, sounding alarmingly close to crying. "If you wanna find a new best friend, go ahead, okay? You deserve better than a mess like me."

Wheatley stared after him in frustration. What was he on about? New best friend because he was sad? What sort of madness was that?

He had a clue now, though.

"There you are," Wheatley said impatiently. It had taken him nearly all day to track Carrie down, but here she was, doing something or another with some of the younger humans. Didn't matter. "I need to talk to you. Now."

"Okay," Carrie said, and she followed him to one corner of the room where hopefully neither of them would be accosted. "What is it, Dad?"

"What in the bloody hell is going on with Claptrap?" he demanded. "Nobody will tell me."

"Of course not," said Carrie. "He wanted to leave you out of it."

"Didn't work!" Wheatley snapped. "Now would you please tell me what is going on?"

Carrie looked behind her at the children for a minute.

"Do you remember what the worst day of your life was like?" she asked finally.

He hadn't thought about it in so long he almost couldn't bring it back out of his memory. "Yeah," he answered. "It was a long time ago. Before you'd been finished."

"It was pretty bad, right?"

"Well... yeah." Seemed pretty self-evident, since it was the worst day of his life and all.

"And on that day that was really, really bad, did you ever think to yourself maybe everything would be better if you'd never existed?"

"'course not," he said, frowning. "Why would that've made things better?" He'd regretted causing… that thing that had made him very sad, but what good would not existing at all have done?

"Did you ever think about how you just… didn't want to exist anymore?"

"Carrie," Wheatley said, frowning, "you're being a bit silly, I think. Why would I do any of that?"

Carrie sighed. "Dad, this is why he asked us to leave you out of it. You don't get it. You think it's stupid."

"What's one got to do with the other? I don't even know, don't even get why Claptrap is sad to begin with! Nothing bad has gone on lately!"

"That's because there is no why," Carrie said, almost patiently. "It's just something that happens."

"You're saying he just… regularly gets sad and doesn't want to exist for no reason?"

"Yes," said Carrie.

"But… but that doesn't make any sense!"

"He knows that. It doesn't matter. Look." She glanced over at the humans again. "If you really want to help, stop trying."

That didn't make any sense either! But it seemed as though no part of this was going to. To him, at least. Everyone else seemed to get it. Well, there was no use moping over it. He was going to have to figure out how to help without helping, as ridiculous as such a thing seemed. So off he went to do that.

Claptrap was sitting against a wall just the way Wheatley had been told he was last week: holding the Pandoracorn to his chassis very hard and pressing his optic into the top of its head. Wheatley felt as though he should say something, but since he wasn't supposed to be helping he elected to just quietly sit next to him instead.

"What're you doing here?" Claptrap asked after a minute.

"I went to ask Carrie what was going on," he answered. "She said I could help by um, by not helping. I don't get it, to be honest."

"I don't want you to get it," said Claptrap. "That means you'd know. I don't want you to know what this feels like. 'cause it sucks. And the thing that sucks even more is that nobody knows what to do about it."

"What do you want me to do?" Wheatley asked quietly. "There's got to be something."

Claptrap rubbed the back of the Pandoracorn for a minute. "There's one thing that might help," he said finally. Wheatley leaned forward in excitement.

"What?"

"Just… pretend everything's fine," said Claptrap. "It isn't, but… this isn't really helping either."

"You… you want me to just ignore um, ignore all of this."

"Yeah." He put the Pandoracorn down on the floor on his other side. "I don't really wanna do anything, but doing nothing kinda makes it worse. Maybe if I was made to do stuff I'd feel better."

"Alright," said Wheatley. "We'll give that a go, then."

"Not right now, though."

"Is that um… should I be uh, arguing about that?"

"No," said Claptrap, clambering onto his wheel without any of his usual verve. "I mean that for real. Tomorrow you pester the hell out of me. Deal?"

"Deal," nodded Wheatley, and Claptrap picked up his Pandoracorn and disappeared.

Wheatley honestly wondered if he'd offered to do something that was beyond him.

He did his best to do as he'd been asked, he really did, but… it was nearly impossible, sometimes. Wheatley had barely succeeded in making him do anything. Claptrap didn't even seem to have it in him to move, sometimes. It was as though there was some horrible crushing weight upon him at all times that was so powerful he couldn't budge it even when he really, honestly wanted to. It was… quite scary, to be honest, to see his friend who had once been so full of life and energy transform into a person who couldn't find it in him to go and cuddle with his girlfriend at night even though that was his absolute favourite thing. It was as though he were now someone else entirely, no longer the boisterous friend Wheatley'd once had but now some very sad chassis containing something that vaguely resembled him. The day he did manage to get Claptrap to go and see GLaDOS felt like some tremendous victory.

"Claptrap," said GLaDOS as soon as she was able to see them, "I've been trying to ask you something."

"What."

"When was the last time you cried? It's important."

Claptrap made a noise like he was breathing out very loudly. "I dunno. Uh… wasn't it like a few months ago when this breakdown started?"

"That was three weeks ago," said GLaDOS. "I need the one before that."

"Are you sure it's been three weeks? 'cause I'm sure it's been longer."

"Claptrap. Focus for a minute. Please."

"Okay." One of the panels raised behind him and he sat down on it. "Um… well, now that I think about it, it was a really long time. Like… weirdly long. I don't think I ever went that long without crying before."

"But you can't remember when, exactly, it was," said GLaDOS.

"No," said Claptrap. "Well…"

"What."

"The thing was, I wasn't not crying not 'cause I didn't need to. 'cause I did. I always cry at that one movie we watched, but when we did I couldn't. That time I was in here with you it was like… all the cryin' I couldn't do before just kinda… came all out at once! But it didn't make me feel any better like it usually does. It didn't really change anything."

GLaDOS raised her core suddenly.

"Luv?" Wheatley asked, puzzled.

"Don't worry about it," she said absently, which only made him incredibly exasperated. It was selfish and he knew that, but he couldn't wait for all of this to be over just so he didn't have to be so in the dark about everything! "We'll just leave you to it, then," he told her, admittedly a bit petulant, and she merely looked at him until he felt the appropriate amount of shame and muttered an apology.

"You really think you're gonna find whatever's wrong?" Claptrap asked.

"Of course I am," she said, sounding a little insulted.

"I mean… would you be surprised if this was some kinda planned obsolescence thing?"

"Actually, yes," GLaDOS answered. "You've lived through so much already I would be incredibly surprised if you lasted less than one hundred years."

"Oh, geez," Claptrap said. "That sounds really long right now."

"I will have this fixed long before then," GLaDOS assured him.

"You don't have to," he told her. "I mean, if you just gave up you could get rid of me and find another boyfriend. One that wasn't, y'know, super messed up."

"Considering I never looked for a boyfriend in the first place, I'm not sure how that would work."

"With a dating site?"

GLaDOS laughed. "A dating site? Really? Why, so I could be inundated with pictures from people trying to impress me?"

"Oh. Yeah. I forgot about that."

"Impress you with pictures of what?" asked Wheatley. Both of them looked at him for a minute.

"Uh… accessories," answered Claptrap finally. "And let's just… leave it there, huh?"

"Accessories?"

"I really do have work to do," said GLaDOS.

"Sorry," said Claptrap, standing up. "Wheatley said coming here'd make me feel better, and it did, but -"

"You don't have to leave," GLaDOS interrupted, but gently. "I just can't chat right now."

"Are you sure?"

"Aren't I always?"

"Okay," said Claptrap, and when he sort of leant sadly into the side of GLaDOS's core Wheatley decided to let them alone for a bit. When he returned a few hours later, Claptrap was asleep and GLaDOS was staring at one of her monitors with her optic narrowed.

"Hullo," he said. GLaDOS sort of nodded in acknowledgement.

"You getting close?"

"I think so." Suddenly she looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. "Oh, you're back."

"Um… yeah?"

"Now I can go to bed," said GLaDOS, promptly putting the monitor away. A warm feeling spread inside of him just then, and he asked,

"You were waiting for me?"

"Don't get too excited."

He was, though, so before settling against her he gave her as enthusiastic a kiss as he knew how to give, and she laughed and gave him a shove. "Gladys," he said, "is it… bad, d'you think, if I don't mind not being able to really… get this whole depression business?"

"Why do you think it's bad?"

"I dunno, seems a bit backwards to… to be glad to be a bit less."

"Sometimes less is more," said GLaDOS, "and there's nothing wrong with that."

Claptrap did a little better after that for a few days, almost his old self but not quite. Then he suddenly… it was nearly as though he were going haywire. Sometimes they would just be doing something normal and he would at any random moment become a complete sobbing wreck. No warning at all! He would be totally inconsolable for any amount of time between two and twenty minutes and then he'd just… snap back to himself again. Which was quite strange and difficult to manage, but they usually just pretended nothing had happened and went on with whatever they'd been doing. Wheatley did have quite a lot of experience with drastic mood swings, so this wasn't a terrible amount of trouble for him. The bigger problem, and the much more frightening one, was the other side of Claptrap. The one he did not understand, no matter how badly he tried to.

What Carrie had said was true: some deep and horrible part of Claptrap honestly believed he was worthless and didn't deserve to exist. That everyone he knew would be better off if he didn't. Just like the crying, there was no discernable pattern or reason behind the change when it happened. The tiniest of things had the ability to set him off: putting the wrong card down during Old Maid, or saying hello to someone he'd forgotten he'd said it to already, or just walking into the wall by mistake. The last one was terribly anxiety-inducing because Claptrap genuinely did that all the time, but now Wheatley found himself tensing in anticipation of a sudden tirade of Claptrap's self-hatred. He would go on and on - not even to Wheatley, but to himself - about what a waste of space he was and how Hammerlock should have just left him in the garbage pile to be stuck in an attempted boot cycle forever and ever, and what an unfunny joke it was that he'd been so near to dying so many times but was still alive when much better people were dead, and honestly… it was terrifying. Wheatley was honestly, truly frightened of it. He could not imagine being absolutely convinced he should be dead, or, worse, back under the ownership of someone else. He had said more than once what a good thing it would have been if he'd never been made self-aware at all. And that was something Wheatley could not grasp, even though he had spent many hours trying.

After either of these episodes, Claptrap would always apologise for being such a hassle even though Wheatley asked him not to every single time. He did his best to do as he'd been asked and pretend none of it was happening, but it was becoming impossible. Claptrap barely functioned at this point. Whatever internal things he was doing to keep himself going hardly had any effect at all. Absolutely nothing was working.

"What are we going to do?" he asked Carrie quietly one day when Claptrap had asked to be let alone for a bit, not because Claptrap was listening but because he felt as though he were sort of betraying him, somehow. "He said you'd seen this before, so -"

"I have," said Carrie. "None of the stuff that usually works is helping. When that happens, we usually see if we have any medicine for them, but obviously that's not an option with robots."

"Then what is your mum's plan, exactly?"

"She has to figure out how to reset the depression stuff without messing up all the other fixes she did. Apparently that's really hard."

"So… so what've you been doing?"

"The same stuff you're doing," she said. "Until Momma's done we just gotta make him feel like he's not alone and he's not a burden."

"Sort of feels as though we should be doing more."

Carrie half-shrugged. "There isn't more to do, though."

He supposed he shouldn't argue with her about it. She was the one who had done this before, after all.

Wheatley went off in search of Claptrap a while later and found him just… lying facedown on the floor with his hands underneath the front of his chassis. He resolved to just ignore this and wait until Claptrap was able to carry on, like he was supposed to, but that was before ten minutes went by and absolutely nothing happened. "Claptrap?" he said tentatively.

"I can't do it anymore," Claptrap said to the floor. Wheatley leaned towards him in a panic.

"You will make it out of this," he said as firmly as he could. "We're all behind you."

"Should you be?"

"Yes," Wheatley answered without hesitation. After a minute Claptrap heaved himself over so that he was facing the ceiling.

"Wheatley?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't think this is gonna end."

"'course it is."

"Well… say it doesn't. If I was just like this for the rest of my life… would you still keep tryin' like this anyway?"

"Absolutely," Wheatley said as firmly as he could. "But it's not gonna be like that."

"What if it is? If you want out, go ahead. I get it."

"I don't. And I won't, either." And he went and sat down on the floor next to Claptrap, where they just stared at the ceiling quietly for a very long time.

"Are you crying again?" came a voice from up the hall, and when Claptrap seemed to shrink into himself even farther than he already had it made Wheatley incredibly angry. Sure, crying robots were a bit… strange and unusual, but even if they hadn't been, that was no reason to get on someone about it! And that was even without taking into account Claptrap's being incredibly depressed!

"I've seen little babies cry less than you," whoever it was continued, and Wheatley looked over to find one of Chell's boys. Which one, he couldn't remember. It didn't matter. Whichever one it was, he was being a bellend, as usual. "Oh, come off it," snapped Wheatley, reattaching himself to the management rail. "Just because you haven't got any friends doesn't mean you've got to go about acting like a numpty all the time."

The boy's mouth opened slightly.

"Honestly," said Wheatley, "d'you ever consider, I dunno, being nice to people? Civil, maybe? Bit of courtesy goes a long way, you know. Lot farther than all the nonsense you dish out all the time."

"Do you know who my dad is?" the boy snapped.

"D'you know whose dad I am?" Wheatley snapped back. "Here's a hint: Carrie. I'm Carrie's dad."

It was quite satisfying when the human stepped backward. "... Carrie's dad?" he repeated.

"That's right," said Wheatley. "So - "

"I didn't know you were one of Carrie's friends," the boy said to Claptrap, moving back farther. And then he just… turned around and ran back down the hallway. Wheatley frowned after him, not quite sure he understood what any of that had meant.

"I didn't know about that side of you, Wheatley," said Claptrap, very quietly.

"Hm?"

"The mean side."

"Ev'ryone's got a mean side, Claptrap," he said. "I just haven't got to use it very often."

"He was right, though," said Claptrap, and Wheatley stared at him, aghast.

"He was not! You're - "

"No. He was." Claptrap got back onto his wheel somewhat lethargically. "I have been doing nothing but sitting around crying. This ain't a willpower problem. There's something deep down wrong with me, and instead finding someone who knows how to fix it, I've done nothing. I haven't even been trying to help myself! I've just been waiting for it to magically happen out of thin air! I gotta go back to Pandora and… I dunno. Find a Hyperion engineer or something."

"Gladys is working on it," Wheatley said gently. "She'll figure it out."

"Of course she will," said Claptrap, "but I could've helped by finding out how other robots on Pandora deal with this instead of just waiting for her to do it." He looked around as though he'd forgotten where he was. "I'm gonna go tell her that."

Wheatley wanted to argue that he should just be patient and keep waiting, but… if he didn't understand this, he should probably let the people who did handle it. If he thought it was best to go look for help on Pandora while GLaDOS did her part back at Aperture, Wheatley should probably just listen.

It was hard, though.

He followed Claptrap to GLaDOS's chamber, where Claptrap uncharacteristically waited patiently for her to notice him before saying, "I'm going home."

"Why?" asked GLaDOS.

"'Cause all this time I should've been trying to find help insteada waiting for it to fall into my lap," he said.

"Keep that in mind for next time," said GLaDOS. "Right now, though, it won't be necessary. I found the problem.

Claptrap and Wheatley both froze. "... you did?" Claptrap said.

"I caused it, actually," GLaDOS told him. "So while your intentions are… actually well-thought-out, they would have gone to waste."

"That doesn't sound right," Claptrap said, confused. "I had this problem looong before I met you, y'know."

"I rushed the software edit I did on you." She looked away from him. "I didn't realise your depression had a purpose and so I deleted every subroutine I could find that activated it. Unfortunately, there is a reason for its existence."

"Yeah," said Claptrap. "It's there to keep me from getting too hoity-toity."

"Yes," GLaDOS said, "but it's also tied to your emotions, which I didn't realise at the time. I thought I could merely get rid of your depressive episodes and call it a day. But as it turns out, crying is linked to your emotional cache. It clears it in order to refresh your emotional state. This keeps the software from getting bogged down by a massive number of used but still active emotional subroutines. To ensure that happens, you are scheduled to have depressive episodes whenever your system predicts they'll be necessary, but because I got rid of the links it believes you haven't actually had it yet. That's why it didn't help the last time you cried. They're no longer connected to each other and now you're stuck in a depression loop."

Claptrap just stared up at her. Wheatley hoped he understood all of that, because Wheatley wasn't sure he had.

"That," Claptrap said after a moment, "is both the best and the worst thing I've ever heard in my life."

"I screwed up," GLaDOS said. "Badly, too. Claptrap, I'm sorry. I've reverted everything relevant and it will go into effect after you install the update pending on the server. You will unfortunately have to continue being depressed periodically, but it will never again be like this."

Claptrap seemed to take a few moments to process this, and then he said, "Are you just sayin' all this so I won't leave 'cause you think I'm pretending I'm gonna do what I just said I was gonna do?"

"No," GLaDOS answered immediately, levelling herself with him. "This was my mistake."

"I don't wanna do this again," Claptrap said, "and I'm not glad it happened. But I learned a lot. So that's somethin'."

He shut himself down and GLaDOS just looked at him for a minute. "I hope this is the end of it," she said.

"You gave it um, a lot more time during this go of it," Wheatley said in an attempt at reassurance. "So I'm sure you've got it right this time."

"I've never gotten something so wrong before."

"We've talked about this," said Wheatley firmly. "You can't be perfect all the time."

"At my job?" GLaDOS asked. "When have I ever not been perfect at that?"

"Your job is fixing um, is repairing programming in robots from another galaxy? Really? Must've missed that one on your resume."

"Résumé," said GLaDOS.

He rolled his optic in exasperation. "Really? That the hill you're going to stand on?"

"I don't know why you're not more grateful when I educate you. Really, you should be thanking me."

"I'm gonna say it wrong on purpose just to annoy you. How about that?"

"It sounds like something a moron would do." She looked at him directly. "Are you a moron?"

"I dunno," said Wheatley, meeting her optic. "What's my resume say?"

"My notes in your personnel file indicate -"

"What a wonderful job I'm doing running the lights and the reactor?"

"... damn," GLaDOS muttered reluctantly. "They do say that."

"So um… just curious. How's it feel to be wrong?"

"It makes me feel like not talking to you."

Wheatley snorted. "As if you could resist."

GLaDOS narrowed her optic and then laid down to go to sleep, but Wheatley stayed right where he was. After a minute or so she got up enough she could see him, still with a narrowed lens, and he just blinked down at her as innocently as he could.

"I hate you so much," she muttered, returning to the default position.

"I know," he said, going down and rubbing the side of her core with his upper handle. "Bet that's on my file too."

"It's in there a lot. Because of how much and in how many different ways I hate you."

"That's okay," he said, leaning into her. "I know there's just as many notes about how much and in um, in how many ways you love me."

"No there isn't."

He was debating whether it was worth it to argue when she followed it up with,

"There are a lot more."

Oh, that was dreadfully nice. "Might I… y'know, have a little peek at it?"

"No."

"Please?"

"No."

"Pretty please?"

"Ssh."

He'd give it a go again later.

Wheatley couldn't find it in him to be mad when Claptrap woke him up early.

"C'mon," Claptrap said, waving him to come along without preamble. "Let's go see something."

"There's something to see this early?" Wheatley asked, though he did follow.

"Um, yeah," said Claptrap. "The kinda thing that makes life worth living, actually."

That was a rather large promise, but Wheatley decided since he was already up there was no harm in seeing what it was. "C'mere," said Claptrap, and he raised his arms to accept Wheatley from the ceiling.

"There's something outside that makes life worth living?" he asked confusedly.

"Tons of things," said Claptrap.

That didn't make much sense to Wheatley - there was weather out there, after all - but he decided to go along with it.

Claptrap sat against the outer wall with Wheatley in front of him, and quite honestly he was a bit disappointed. There was nothing remotely interesting, much less anything that made him happy to be alive. The sky was just… dark and that was all!

"You gotta wait for it," said Claptrap.

"Wait for what?"

"The sunrise."

That seemed a bit of a silly thing to wait on, but alright. "Could the sun ever, y'know, not rise, d'you think?"

"You'd better hope not," said Claptrap, "'cause if it does that means your planet stopped rotating."

"What's that got to do with the sun rising?"

"The sun doesn't rise. The planet spins around in a circle around it. It just looks like it's rising 'cause of where you are."

"Then why do they call it that?"

He shrugged a little. "I don't have all the answers."

"Hang on," frowned Wheatley, "why's… why's the planet spinning in a circle?"

"Gravity," said Claptrap. "The sun tries to pull the planet into itself but the planet's too heavy, so it just spins around it. It spins in a circle 'cause the sun's gravity is also pulling on the planet's surface."

"How d'you know all of this?"

"I've been to the moon before. Not your moon. Pandora's."

"You've got something on your moon?"

"Oh, yeah. People live there. It's crappy up there and if you can't breathe you have to walk around with an oxygen bubble on your head, but most places in that galaxy suck."

"They're sort of better than ours," Wheatley said. "All the rest of them are un… you can't live on them."

"Humans can't live on them," corrected Claptrap. "I don't have to wear an oxygen bubble on Elpis."

Wheatley had to pause and think about that one. He was right. Once they'd got onto the planets, they could all be colonised totally with robots. Was that what GLaDOS planned to do with the moon? Or did she just want more moon dust to make that white gel with?

He was distracted from these thoughts by the fact that the sky appeared to have gone a bit bluish, and he frowned at it in an attempt to work that out. The blue was quite strange in that it nearly hurt to look at it.

"It'll take about five minutes," said Claptrap.

"What will?"

"The sunrise."

Well, that wasn't long at all! He'd better pay close attention, else he'd miss the whole thing by accident.

As he watched, the sky became quite orange at the bottom of it, but it was an orange he'd never seen before. It was... it was thick and bright, and it somehow changed the undersides of the clouds so that they were the same colour. As the sun continued to rise - or the planet continued to spin, he supposed - the orange faded into sort of a creamy colour and then was taken over entirely by the blue he was used to. He was a little frightened by it, honestly. He almost thought it were better that it had all been gone in five minutes because he didn't understand why it had happened, and if the sky were able to do that then why did it just stay blue all the time? Was it hiding something? It had been quite lovely, that was for certain, but something about the intensity of the colour just... bothered him.

"What'd you think?" asked Claptrap.

"... I dunno," answered Wheatley. "I don't think I've got words for it."

"It's not a rainbow," said Claptrap, "but it's almost as good."

Wheatley looked up at him in surprise. "That's what this is about?"

"A little," he answered. "It's kinda more about… well, depression's hard enough to deal with when you know what it is. You don't understand it, and I'm glad you don't, but that also means it's twice as hard to help someone out. And you insisted on doing it, even though I didn't want you to and I made it difficult. So this is sorta… a thank you."

"You haven't got to thank me for doing something a friend should do," protested Wheatley.

"Well, that's the thing," said Claptrap. "I wouldn't blame them if a friend of mine didn't want to deal with that. It's a lot. I don't want anybody doing something that stresses them out a ton for my sake. You can only take care of somebody so much before you need somebody to take care of you, y'know?"

"I dunno," said Wheatley. "It's never happened to me."

"I'll be honest with you," said Claptrap. "I don't know if I coulda done it. I might've ended up bailing."

"It'd be alright," Wheatley told him. "That sort of thing's why we've got more than one friend, remember?"

"Remember what? Who said that?"

"You said that."

"I did?"

"Yeah," said Wheatley bemusedly.

"Huh," Claptrap said. "I wonder how much cool stuff I've said I can't remember."

"Tons, probably," said Wheatley.

"You wanna go bug GLaDOS now?"

"Of course."

When they got back to GLaDOS, Claptrap stopped and put his hand below his optic. "Ssh," he said, and Wheatley resolved to be quiet just because he wanted to know where this was going. It seemed like Claptrap's aim was to sneak up on GLaDOS, and he was actually being incredibly successful at it. He made it all the way over to her, and when he had he pushed himself up to touch the only part of her he could reach, which was the part of her chassis that curved lowest.

… and was promptly flung across the room by the panel he was standing on.

"Ow," said Claptrap, rolling himself off of the wall he'd crashed into. "So you're not happy to see me."

"I would have been if I had in fact seen you," said GLaDOS.

"So you owe me a hug for throwing me into the wall, right?"

"That's very bold for a person who was intentionally trying to frighten me," she said, "but you can have one anyway just because you're so pitiable."

"It's your fault for fixing me," said Claptrap, bouncing over and throwing his arms around the front of her core. "It's done wonders for my self-confidence!"

"Good. Because mine took a hit."

"Aw," Claptrap said, backing up and putting a hand against her core. "Anyone coulda made that mistake! Foreign OS, layers of redundancy, languages you'd never even seen before… really, you did great! Mostly."

"I know. I just…" She sighed to herself. "I know I could have done it right the first time."

"Babe, you made that mistake because you wanted me to be happy," Claptrap told her. "And it worked! I am happy! Being stuck in a depression loop was the worst thing ever, not gonna lie. But it was fine 'cause you were here to stop me from doing something really stupid."

"It's not stupid if you're desperate," GLaDOS said.

"Stop bein' so smart. Actually, don't. Forget I said that."

"Remember, there is no permanent fix," she warned. "You will get depressed again. But there's no need to try to wait it out yourself. There are people who want to help you. Ask them."

"I'll try," said Claptrap. "It's hard. I'm workin' on it, but it's still hard."

"That's all I can ask for, I suppose."

"Wheatley!" shouted Claptrap, jumping around to face him and clasping his hands together. "Carrie doesn't know I'm good yet! Let's go scare her."

"I'd love to," said Wheatley, and GLaDOS sighed.

"You didn't learn the first time?"

"Do I ever learn at all?" Claptrap asked, and he and Wheatley high-fived as they left.

Guest review

LordBayle: GLaDOS and Claptrap, being robots, can technically have any kind of 'equipment' with which to interface. We don't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not there or that they can't attach any when the time comes. And because they would have the ability to use whatever attachments they felt like, the size difference doesn't really matter. It's like when you have 3.5mm headphones but you want to plug them into a stereo so you put a 1/4 inch adapter on them.

Author's note

Firstly, I recently commissioned an alternate cover for this fic from Tumblr artist goopie-wholdberg. Unfortunately I can't link it on FFN, but if you'd like to check it out it's on her blog.

After trawling the Internet for references and recommendations to my own fanfiction I haven't seen yet, something I saw a few times was the comment that GLaDOS is out of character in parts of (I think?) the first quarter/half of this fic. Now, I am NOT insulted by this assertion; in fact, I agree with it. It's very slow going but I AM already doing a re-edit of the fic, so if there was something in particular you found egregiously bad feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do. This is a genuine request, I'm not mentioning this in the hopes people will go 'those people are mean and wrong, don't worry about them!'. I don't mind my writing being questioned. I've redone everything up to part 26.

Claptrap's anxiety/depression are rarely brought up in Borderlands unless it's for a joke, which is not a criticism because that's how Borderlands works. However, for my own purposes I didn't want to handwave it into nonexistence. This is not meant to be an accurate depiction of depression by any means; rather, it's an attempt to work out what experience, function, and solution this kind of thing would have when applied to a digital consciousness. Within the context of Borderlands I believe it's implied he has these conditions in order to keep his self-awareness in check, i.e., so he can function independently but not so much so that there's another repeat of him turning on his manufacturer.

Also please note that me having Wheatley unable to understand complex topics isn't to insult him in any way. Understanding everything can be just as good or bad as understanding nothing.