If my life depended on adhering to an update schedule, I would be dead as a doornail. Another TL;DR-worthy author's note at the end. I suck.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
THE INTERMISSION (PART TWO)
Chell's understanding of "routine" was vague at best. She came by her ignorance honestly – since reaching adulthood, all of her waking hours had been dominated by the Enrichment Center, where the only routine to be found involved running for one's life at irregular intervals. Not exactly anything that could be lumped into the same category of "wake up, go to work, come home, pet the cat." Where she found herself now couldn't really be lumped into that same category either, but it was a routine.
And she liked it.
In only a few days' time, she and Wheatley had fallen into a schedule. They set up camp in Test Shaft 11, which afforded them a wide variety of surfaces and gels with which to practice. Mornings (or what she arbitrarily considered 'morning,' seeing as they had yet to find a clock) were spent on improving Wheatley's portal technique. Afternoons were spent on familiarizing him with the various mobility gels. Evenings were devoted to integrating his new skills together and working together as a team.
At night, as they lay alongside one another on a tarp Wheatley had found ("No sense in sleeping on the ground. I mean, we'll still be lying out on the ground, but on a tarp on top of the ground. See? Totally different than lying on the ground") with their heads propped up on their ASHPDs, Chell continued to drill Wheatley, employing the guided visualization strategies her dad had coached her through as a little girl.
"You turn a corner and see a red laser at the end of the hallway," she told him. "What is it?"
"Turret," Wheatley answered, his eyes closed and hands clenched into fists at his sides from concentrating so hard.
"What do you do?"
He hesitated, mulling over the options available to him in such a scenario. "Er. Well, talk to it, I suppose…?"
Chell hitched herself up on one elbow and stared at him. "You'd talk to it?" she exclaimed.
Wheatley opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. "Sure," he said with a shrug. "Why not?"
She just continued to give him That Look.
Huffing, Wheatley rolled onto his side and tried to articulate his rationale. "What?" he demanded as he propped up his head up on his arm. "It's not as though you've ever tried it. For all you know, they just want a – a good conversation! A chat! Nice little parley to break up the routine of spewing bullets at anything that moves. Or, or, think about this," he added, coming up with another idea. "Maybe they want to have someone ask 'em how they're doing for once, instead of them always having to be the ones to keep the conversation going. Maybe they feel like they're stuck at a bloody cocktail party with a bunch of gits who won't talk to them first."
"A chat," Chell echoed. She was still hung up on his first answer. "You're going to chat with a sentry turret."
"Look, if I'm gifted at anything, it's talking," Wheatley pointed out wearily. There was no way he was going to win this discussion. "I mean, I got you to talk to me, so who's to say I couldn't strike up a conversation with a turret?"
"You didn't get me to talk to you," Chell contradicted.
"Yeah, well, I got you to jump now, didn't I?"
She blinked, scowled, and then flopped over onto her opposite side with a mutter, ignoring the smug snickering of the jackass stretched out beside her.
Their progress continued. The pace Chell set was steady but slow, mainly due to Wheatley's lack of natural athleticism. He had no instinct for ducking, rolling, running, or aiming. His interpretation of defensive maneuvers consisted of freezing in place and squeezing his eyes shut. He was often prone to motion sickness, and his initial encounter with the repulsion gel ended in what can only be described as a catastrophic gastrointestinal event that he did not care to repeat ever.
But he took direction well, was not easily discouraged, and – quite unlike when he was a core – had a knack for thinking out of the box that more often than not proved advantageous, albeit a bit exasperating.
His glasses, for instance.
Wheatley was blind as a bat without his glasses, and privately Chell had serious concerns about what might happen if they were to get broken or lost, but trust him to come up with the most boneheaded idea ever: Ditching them completely and then scurrying off while she was asleep one night to see what came of it.
She woke up to the sight of him sans spectacles and bounding around on a swath of repulsion gel like a steroid-fed jackhammer. He fired off a portal at the apex of every jump and then came down singing, "I'm a lumberjack and I can't see," he'd jump again and continue, "but now a little vomit won't ever stop me!"
As he breathlessly explained to her afterwards, his nausea was vastly improved when the world was flying by him in a pleasant state of blurriness. His strategy wouldn't do for some of the more precise portaling maneuvers, of course, but Chell was more than proficient enough with the ASHPD to compensate. She gave him a hearty congratulation on his discovery, and then cheerfully threatened to cover him in bird seed if he ever again wandered away without telling her first.
Little did she know that she would have to make good on this threat less than twenty-four hours later.
"Oi, Chell! Come take a look at this."
Chell looked up from the filing cabinet she was digging through; the goal she'd set for Wheatley that day was to reach one of the offices, which he had managed to do after five tries, and now they were exploring their destination.
He motioned her over to where he stood in front of dilapidated desk.
"See it?" he said as she walked over to join him. He rolled aside the rotting chair to create some more room and then crouched down on one knee, pointing to where he wanted her to look under the desk.
Chell knelt beside him and frowned at what she saw. Propped up on the interior desk leg was another Borealis life preserver, half-hidden in shadows.
"Weird, huh?" he mused. "Wonder where it goes?"
Before she could grab him or so much as yell, Wheatley touched his hand to the life preserver and vanished.
Chell's mouth worked a few times but no sound came out. Finally her brain caught up to her vocal chords, and she managed a stammered, "Wh…Wheatley?"
He was gone.
No, she savagely amended a second later, he wasn't just gone, he was off God knows where, by himself, probably chatting up a sentry turret and asking about its day as it filled him chock-full of bullets.
The life preserver will be on the other side with him, she reminded herself, trying to stay positive. He'll realize what happened, touch it, and then be right back here.
Yup. She was going to kill him. No holds barred, honest-to-goodness, nothing more left of him than just a smear on a wall panel kill him. And then she would feed him to the birds. Slowly.
But in the meantime all she could do was wait, and plot.
Trembling, she dropped to the ground into a half-lotus, gripped her ASHPD tight and told herself that her hands were shaking from anger and not fear. But deep down, she knew better.
The longest fifteen minutes of Chell's life ended when the air before her abruptly contracted and expanded in an audible pop; Wheatley appeared a moment later, the life preserver still clutched in one hand, which he immediately dropped onto the floor. She was too wound-up to notice the troubled expression on his face, and he was too preoccupied to notice her coming at him like a battering ram.
Wearing a look that could only be described as an Angry Frown of the Highest Order, Chell launched to her feet and threw herself at him. His knees locked, keeping him frozen in place when she slammed into him and slid both arms round his waist, impacting him so hard that she almost knocked the glasses off his face.
Oh God, he thought as her grip tightened, vice-like. She's going to asphyxiate me.
Knowing full well that putting up any resistance was pointless, he squeezed his eyes shut and waited to die.
About thirty seconds elapsed. Finally Wheatley opened one eye, then the other and peered down to see the top of Chell's black-haired scalp, still pressed into his chest.
What was taking her so long? Because as far as asphyxiations went, this was a bloody pathetic performance. Not that he had any personal experience with being asphyxiated, unless one counted the time he challenged Jerry the nanobot to a breath-holding contest, which he didn't - count, that is. (It ended prematurely when Jerry had to go fix a blown fuse in one of the testing tracks, and later Wheatley remembered he had no lungs and ergo no breath to hold – wait! Did that mean he'd won?)
Still, there was something familiar about their positioning…
Oh! Could this be a hug?
Well, let's see. Girl (her), guy (that's him!), with the former's arms wrapped about the latter, and neither party protesting about their current state of affairs –
Man alive. Man alive. It was a hug! How many did this make? Three! Three hugs.
But…what was he supposed to do now? He'd hugged her back, the last time, but she wasn't angry at him then, and the occasion before that, it had all happened so fast that it was already over by the time he realized what was happening (that and the matter of her smacking him in the head, of course).
So. Here they were. Hugging. Half-ways, at least. And he could remedy that pret-ty quick if he had half a mind to do so.
But what if she didn't want him to return her embrace? He really didn't want to get smacked again. Or shoved off a catwalk.
Treading with care, he reached up to tap the top of her head. "Uh. Hello?"
A growled, "Don't…ever…do that again," met his ears, the words muffled from the owner of the voice speaking into his shirt.
"Don't ever do what?" he asked, confused. "Not fall down when you run into me? Right. Got it. I'll, um, tip over the next time you have aspirations of being a boa constrictor. Or battering ram."
When she didn't respond, he hazarded, "Or would – would you like me to fall over now…?"
Baleful grey eyes stared up into his; bloody hell, he'd missed the point. Again.
Then something clicked.
"Ohhhh…okay, sorry," he breathed slowly, realizing the problem at last. "Yeah, light bulb just went on in my head – although, really, in my case it's probably more of a flame than an actual bulb – and a pretty dim flame, at that. Envision a matchstick. Not even the proper ones, y'know, the kind that come in a box with wooden sticks, I mean the real cheapy ones you tear out of those little booklets and get from seedy hotels with people named Vera asking you to pen your name down in the ledger at the front desk…"
Chell took a step back from Wheatley, reached up, grasped the collar of his shirt and yanked him forward so they were at eye level.
"You're mad," he sputtered. "At me, specifically. 'Cause I did what you told me not to do yesterday – "
"We do not get separated," she hissed.
"'Kay," he nodded fervently.
"Do not ever run off like that again."
"I will," he insisted. "I promise! Er, I mean – I will not run off like that again. Which is to say, I won't. Run off. Or walk off, or jump, or engage in any other variety of perambulation without consulting you first."
She searched his eyes for a moment or two before releasing him and turning away, but a warm hand caught her wrist, stopping her.
"Uh. Where – um, where are you going?" Wheatley inquired worriedly. "And am I supposed to follow you? 'Cause I think I am, based on what you just told me. Reminded me, I mean, 'cause we talked about that yesterday. Or is this a trick question? Ohhh, this is a trick question, isn't it? Uh, then my answer is 'B.' Yeah, 'B.' Oh, or 'C!' For 'Chell!' Ha, yeah, 'C.' Final answer."
Chell gently twisted her arm away from Wheatley's grasp and continued walking, but this time he overtook her in two quick strides and made her stop.
"S-sorry, sorry, but I need to go back," he told her seriously. "Where I just was. With you, I mean, obviously, but I need to go back, now. 'Cause I remembered something, but I'm afraid if I wait I'll forget it, and I need you to see it, too."
The determination Chell saw in Wheatley's eyes startled her. Whatever he had just discovered was important, that much was certain.
"Okay," she said finally.
He gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and spun on his heel. She followed, wondering what it could possibly be that had him so eager for another trip via life preserver.
Shameless self-promotion: I've started another fic in the Thor fandom – You've Got Sucker's Luck. (Hmm, wonder where I got that title from…) Go check it out, if you feel so inclined! (Please please please please please feel so inclined 'cause no one seems to be reading it. Blah.)
TL;DR for what the missive below: I'm not sick but I'm not well (Flagpole Sitta, anyone?). I will be fine, but anticipate sporadic updates until my f*cking endocrine system stops being as oppositional as the rest of me. Oh and for what it's worth I have no problem spelling expletives out in full form but I didn't want to change the rating on the story. F*ck f*ck f*ckitty f*ck. And let's throw out a sh*t for good measure.
For those who want the full tale of woe…
I have a gloriously whacked up endocrine system that three years ago reared its ugly head and has been plaguing me since. As fun as it is to watch people react when they open the cheese drawer in my fridge looking for beer (it's a big drawer) and instead discover hordes of syringes, pre-loaded injector pens, and little glass vials of what ought to be liquid f*cking gold given their cost, my mental energy is running on empty most days of the week. And I can't even drink the beer.
None of this is life-threatening, we have health insurance, and I will be fine, but I am just plain tapped out. No matter how much I try to convince them otherwise, the plot bunnies in my head continue to hibernate, which is why I haven't been able to stick to a regular update schedule – my heart is absolutely in it but my mind is elsewhere a lot of the time, and I don't foresee that changing soon. (The majority of my Thor fic was written during a rare spurt of productivity after the holidays, prior to the contents of my beer drawer being valued at a mere "WTF" as opposed to "Oh, well, I didn't need that 401k anyway." Hence that story getting updated several times since I last updated here. It's also a lot longer. For some reason it's easier for me to write dialogue for a Norse god burdened with glorious purpose than it is for a personality core burdened with glorious neuroses.)
I said all that to say this: I'm goingto finish CDaSH. It will just take me longer than I originally thought. Right now I'm just looking forward to the day when I don't see quadruple-digit dollar signs each time I open the fridge. (You're on my list, EMD Serono, along with the rest of Big Pharma and all you other money-grubbing pharmaceutical whores – wishing you motherf*ckers to the seventh circle of hell is at least bad karma I can say I've actually earned.)
Anyway. Thank you, as always, for reading. I seriously cannot believe this thing is almost up to 100 follows.
And, to the guest user "amazing" – Thank you! The flattery of a positive review is a HUGE reward! (And a major pick-me-up on lousy days, which as of late have outnumbered the good ones :-D)
(Go read "You've Got Sucker's Luck!")
AN 2: Edited the chapter for typos and word choices that were bugging me.
