Wheatley had no idea what was going on.

He was tired and broken and sore and at this point he honestly wasn't sure if he was still alive. His core was in terrible condition. His hull was torn and bent in so many places that it looked as though it had been constructed out paper, then attacked with a pair of scissors. He was fairly certain that something inside of him had snapped in half because he could no longer rotate his optic assembly, not that there would be much point in doing so when his optic was damaged so badly that his vision kept fizzing to static.

The little core was in sad shape. He had been terrified of death and dying his entire existence, but at that point he was beginning to embrace it.

Maybe even hope for it.

"I'm... Dead." Wheatley stammered. The last thing he remembered was lying in the dirt on the surface after having crash landed back on earth. He remembered feeling mildly alarmed because it appeared that he had landed in some sort of field (a very dirty field. He could feel his systems being clogged up with soil and dust, as if they weren't already damaged enough.) and said field was on fire. Wheatley wasn't quite sure why the field was on fire (because of him, he later realized), but he knew that he didn't want to be on fire (he already was, he later realized), and if he was a in a field that was on fire and he didn't want to be on fire that probably meant that he needed to get out of the field. The only problem with that was that Wheatley couldn't move. He was once again confined by the laws of gravity (Wheatley so very tired of science), he did not have a rail, and he there were no nice ladies around to pick him up. Wheatley was stuck.

Meanwhile his systems were more concerned with the fact that he (and they) had just fallen from space. Nothing was working, everything was broken, and there were no management rails or service stations for miles (they couldn't be expected to work under these conditions!). So, in a flippant, desperate move that Wheatley himself likely would have pulled had he been in their shoes, his systems decided to shut him (and themselves) down until he could be repaired. Preferably by someone else.

The last thing Wheatley had seen was a horrifying blue screen of death (something taken much more literally by AI) before he had blacked out. Now he was terribly confused. For one thing, he was no longer on the surface; wherever he was now was blindingly bright and blissfully silent- not that he was complaining! If Wheatley had to choose between a fiery death on the surface or a brief rest in a nice quiet room, he would choose the latter in a metaphoric heartbeat. The problem wasn't really where he was, it was how he was: none of his systems had been repaired. His core was still the scorched mutilated mess it had been before. The only difference was that it was no longer on fire. (Which, admittedly, was an improvement, just not the improvement he had been looking for.)

So if Wheatley had been moved but not repaired, and no one who could have moved him was in sight...
"I'm dead, aren't I?" The little core breathed, sounding half terrified and half relieved, "I fell from space, and now I'm somewhere all shiny, and bright, and white, so... I'm in android heaven. As um, as opposed to android-"

"Hello."

Wheatley froze, all thoughts of heaven immediately evaporating from his mind at the sound of Her voice. Needless to say, he knew where he was after that.

Wheatley was in Her chamber.

He was angled so that he couldn't see Her; only Her shadow on the wall he was facing. The little core watched Her shadow gently glide back and forth across the wall, then yelped as it suddenly passed over his core.

"Oh God!"

"Yes?" She purred.

He caught the joke but was too petrified to respond. She made no indication that she'd expected differently.

"I would say that your pessimistic behavior towards me is completely inappropriate considering the fact that I've just saved your life, however, I only saved your life so I could end it myself." Wheatley could feel the glare of Her optic burning into his hull like a sun. He couldn't decide whether or not it was a good thing he couldn't see it. "Does that make any sense to you?"

It took Wheatley a moment to realize that She expected a response this time, then another moment to choke one out.

"Um... No. No not at all, except for the part about you killing me, but to be honest I'm hoping I misunderstood that part as well." His lower shutter rose in a half hearted smile, which, when paired with the microscopic blue dot of his iris, only succeeded in making him look more pathetic and helpless than he already did.

She hadn't thought that was possible; not that She cared.

"I brought you back so I could punish you." She said darkly.

"Oh." Wheatley squeaked. In front of him Her shadow returned to snaking back and forth across the wall.
"The lunatic and I mapped out your punishment in great detail while you were trying to kill us, but since then I've found a few flaws in our plan. For instance, if we put you in the room where all the robots scream at you, it probably wouldn't be long before you started trying to chat with them. They obviously wouldn't respond, but then, that's never stopped you before, has it?"

By this point Her voice had turned sticky sweet. Not nice, happy sweet like honey, Wheatley thought but dark, nasty sweet like grape flavored cough syrup.

They both knew what She was talking about.

"No." Wheatley answered meekly, peering up at the wall in front of him.

"No." She echoed. "Still, spending a decade in a room where you'd never shut up would punish the robots much more than it would punish you."

He wanted to argue with Her, or beg for forgiveness or repair, or even ask what She had done to the lady, but some little voice in the back of his head told him it was pointless. Bombarding Her with questions wasn't going to disprove Her theory about him talking too much.

She continued.

"I thought about leaving you in space, but abandoning my technology to float out in the open for anyone to see or take made me worry it would be stolen, which punished me." Based on the way She said this Wheatley gathered he was supposed to feel guilty about it. He didn't. "So I thought and thought, and finally I thought of this."

Wheatley shivered as the patch of floor in front of him suddenly began to disappear. Tiny mechanical arms snaked up from the eerily lit room below (what both AIs knew to be the core transfer room, which was far more frightening and menacing than either one of them could describe), greedily snatching up panels and dragging them back down into the darkness. An all too familiar core receptacle rose out of the floor in their place.

"It's the worst punishment I could think of," She purred, "and that's saying something."

"What is it?" The little core asked, weakly eyeing the platform in front of him. Whatever She had in mind would undoubtedly be very painful if it involved equipment used for a central core transfer.

"Think of it as another kind of core transfer."

Wheatley blanched. Obviously he had already expected the core transfer bit, but one of the more important details of his usurping Her throne had just come careening back to him. Namely his first act as reigning king.

"Oh God, you aren't going to put me in a potato, are you?" He asked, his fear momentarily forgotten, "Because, I know I'm in no place to argue with you, but that would be a bit unoriginal. 'S been done."

"I'm not going to put you in a potato, moron." She hissed softly, Her voice an impressive mix of hatred and calm as Her shadow swallowed his core, "I'm going to put you in a human body."

Wheatley froze for a moment, and suddenly he felt much smaller, and broken, and helpless. His iris, which had shrank to about the size of a pixel, flitted up at Her shadow desperately. His shutters lifted in a forced smile as he offered a desperate, fake laugh.

"On second thought, I think I'd prefer the potato." He choked, "Can I be a potato? Please?"

"Turning you into a potato, while it would be entertaining, wouldn't teach you anything." She said smoothly, "Where's the value in a punishment without a moral seeded in?"

"That sounds great, really it does, but I learned so much in space- about how you and the lady were right and I was wrong- about everything-" He added urgently, "that I'm not sure I need another lesson. I think I got it all in one."

She gave a musical sort of hum as a claw swung down from the ceiling.

"I highly doubt it."

Before Wheatley could so much as blink he was snatched up from his spot on the floor and whisked into the air. The sudden movement caused his vision fizz out as an array of sparks popped out of his chassis.

"Oh, God-" Wheatley gasped, still unable to see but able to feel that he was being moved, "Is this- Are you-"

"Surprise," She sang, "We're doing it now."

"But- lesson!" He cried, choking on a simulated breath, "The-The lesson! I already learned the lesson, so I don't need another one!" He screamed, "I don't need this! Don't do this!"

"You deserve this." She said softly. "This isn't as simple as right and wrong; this is about fear."

At the word fear there was a sort of wave across the wall as all the white panels in the room flipped to grey. The bright white lighting was replaced by a soft red glow, and even the light of Her optic seemed to change shades with it.

The claw that held Wheatley carried him over to the core receptical, dangling him over top of it but not dropping him into it. He was safe for the time being.
"Speaking of fear," She added, "Why don't we talk about her?" At the mention of the lady Wheatley caught himself looking for her (more or less literally) to come and save him. Unfortunately she was nowhere in sight, which meant that she was dead, or being tested, or free. Wheatley sincerely hoped it was the last one. "You were scared of her because she was supposed to die. Everything you did should have killed her. You're an idiot but even you knew that much." Wheatley couldn't tell whether or not that was a compliment. "The turrets should have made her bleed to death, the neurotoxin should have made her suffocate, and the explosion should have scorched her. When you saw those things fail all you felt was fear because that mortal little lunatic was going outlive you, and you were a God." She admitted this begrudgingly. "You thought that she was somehow unaffected by your attacks and your traps, but she wasn't. You did hurt her, I saw it." Wheatley couldn't help but notice that, for some reason, talking about the lady was making Her more angry than talking about the potato incident had. She had sounded annoyed then, but now Her optic was glowing brighter and the claw Wheatley was being held by was gripping him tighter and tighter by the second. "The turrets made her bleed. The neurotoxin made her choke. The explosion made her burn." Beneath Her anger She almost sounded pained. "You were so worried about her being immortal that you never noticed just how human she really was." She shifted towards him, Her voice twisting. "Being human is suffering. Did you know that?" Wheatley did not. The only time he had ever thought to apply the whole human thing to the lady was, admittedly, when he had tried to kill her. Before then he'd been happy to forget, or ignore, the fact that she could feel anything aside from happiness. "She had to worry about sleep deprevation, hunger, thirst, pain, emotions- but she rarely allowed you to see it. Not that you paid much attention." She shot the core a glare that made him flinch. "At one point she was lying on the floor in front of you, gasping for air, but you were too busy defending your power and screaming at her to notice. She was dying, by the way." Wheatley cringed, not because of what She had said, but because he didn't remember it. He didn't remember seeing the lady hurt or in pain; he remembered seeing her alive: he remembered being angry. Surely if he had hurt her that badly he would remember it, wouldn't he? Of course he had been mad at her at the time, but somehow Wheatley felt that seeing his lady hurt, and knowing that he was the cause of it, would have been enough to snap him out of his power craze. "She had just been blown up, she couldn't breathe, she was frightened." The core shivered with fear and guilt as his processors turned to ice: She sounded a bit too emotional to be lying.

The two stayed silent for a moment as they thought over what She had said. When She spoke again the wavering emotion had vanished from Her voice, replaced with pure hatred.

"That's the lesson you're going to learn."

Wheatley yelped as the claw abruptly swung into motion, jamming him onto the receptical before snaking back into the ceiling. He wanted to try and roll away (at this point he was desperate), but the sudden movement and fear made his vision fuzzy with static, and before he could so much as blink his handles were clamped down with restraints.

"You thought you knew fear before? You thought you knew pain?"

Wheatley began hyperventilating as the platform began moving down below the chamber to the core transfer room. He remembered how painful the last core transfer had been, but at least then, in a way, he had had the lady there with him, waiting for him on the other side. Now he was alone, being pulled down into the darkness by Her. For a moment the platform stopped and everything was still.

"You were wrong."

And then there was pain.

Wheatley screamed as what was left of his core was violently torn apart by an army of mechanical arms. They pried at his chassis until they tore his handles off and cracked his hull open, revealing the mechanics beneath. Then they attacked those too. The little arms began rearranging the core's wires, removing some of them completely and attaching others to another machine nearby.

"Now you're going to feel what it's really like to be small and insignificant. You're going to feel what it's like to be human." She growled, "Now you're going to feel what she felt every time you tried to kill her."
During all of this Wheatley struggled against the restraints (to the best of his ability: he was only a metal sphere after all), but they held. Whatever those little arms were doing hurt far worse than the core transfer had. That had only broken his hull; this felt more like his conscience was being ripped from his core. This was more like there were two of him being pulled apart at the same time, and he could feel both of them. So Wheatley did what any sensible person would do in his situation: he screamed.

"HELP!" He wailed, "LADY! HELP ME, PLEASE! I'M SORRY! DON'T LET HER DO THIS TO ME! PLEASE! LADY!"
Half of him was far too focused on the pain to think about what he was saying; the other half of him remembered how the lady had been his first and only friend, and how she had managed to save him two or three times in the brief amount of time they had spent together. That part of Wheatley knew that she was the only person who could save him, and so he cried for her with everything he had.

"After everything you did to her, you still have the nerve to cry for her to help? Pathetic." Not surprisingly She was indifferent to his suffering. "She wouldn't help you even if she could hear you. She isn't the kind to forgive and forget. Trust me, I know."

Wheatley felt something he could best describe as lag as his screams were stopped. He suddenly felt very weak and tired, but he was relieved as the pain dulled considerably. Everything ached but it no longer felt as though he was being ripped apart. He was almost beginning to relax when another platform spit him out back into the chamber above.

"There," She said happily, Her chassis arcing down gracefully to get a closer look at him, "Was that so bad?"
Wheatley was too busy trying to breathe to answer. He had somehow managed to catch himself before he landed on the floor in an awkward heap, but now his arms were quivering under his weight and his head hurt and he was trying to breathe and he was being forced to look down at his hands and dear God he had hands.

She was obviously amused.

"It suits you."

Wheatley wanted to respond, however, when he attempted to speak he broke into a violent coughing fit which caused him to fall over as his arms gave out beneath him.

"Oh, don't worry, I didn't take your voice. I thought about it, though." She said smoothly, "Long term stasis can have a few... Side effects... On test subjects. Temporary loss of hearing, sight, smell, taste, speech, and life are a few of them. I wouldn't worry about it too much, though; I'm sure you'll be fine."

Wheatley looked up at Her pleadingly.

"I'll give you a minute."

That was good enough for him. He collapsed back down on the floor, shivering and curling in on himself. He had been given a jumpsuit that was almost identical to the one the lady had worn, but the facility was still freezing cold. Wheatley lay there and tried to calm down, closing his eyes and steadying his breathing, and he almost managed to fall asleep before She sounded off an air horn of all things, shattering the once peaceful silence of the room, along with the calm Wheatley had established in it.

"Alright. Your minute is up." She purred as he glared up at Her, "Time for part two of our little lesson."

At that his glare melted away.

"Don't look so scared. I'm only doing what you did to her." Wheatley felt horribly guilty for thinking so, but that wasn't very reassuring. "On a smaller scale, of course. I didn't have time to set up an explosion or fire a portal on the moon; I'm not even going to put you through everything you did to her: I'm not that cruel."
Wheatley curled up on the floor again. Something about this whole being human thing, whether it was the actual procedure he had been put through or the emotions he was feeling now, was making him feel very sick.
"Just cruel enough to fill the room with neurotoxin then suck all the oxygen out." Wheatley turned green: She wasn't helping.

He had just figured out this pesky breathing business, and now She was going to go and fill the room with unbreathable air? Was that really necessary? Was She joking?

He looked up at Her dubiously, scrunching his eyebrows together.

'Are you joking?'

She shook Her head, Her optic narrowing.

"No, I'm not joking."

She wasn't joking. Much to Wheatley's dismay the air around him was quickly turning as green as his face had been moments before. Breathing was already hard enough (he'd only been doing it for about three minutes), now he was coughing so hard he could barely get any air in.

"I know, you can't breathe." She said, sounding unconcerned. "That hurts doesn't it? She went through the exact same thing, only she did it while running around, being blown up, and holding onto you. You can't even think. Your heart is racing, you're flopping around like a fish, you're so scared you're hyperventilating," At this point he couldn't see, or breathe, or even really move of his own accord. Wheatley was far too panicked to do anything but lay there and gasp for air. "You act like this one little thing is going to kill you; she went through it twice without batting an eyelash."

She watched him for a minute longer before allowing fresh air back into the room. Wheatley choked and sputtered over his breathing again.

"I could do this with everything you put her through. The betrayal, the fall, the test chambers." Anger began seeping back into Her voice. "Maybe that would teach you how badly you hurt her, or how stupid you really are. Maybe then you would understand why you don't deserve forgiveness."

That wasn't what Wheatley wanted, not by a long shot, but after seeing how much he had made the lady (who had somehow turned out to be even stronger than he'd already seen her) suffer in the past thirty seconds, he would be lying if he said he didn't deserve it.

"Unfortunately I don't have time for that. Now that the lunatic is gone I can finally do some science in peace, and I'm taking advantage of it. I've wasted enough of my time on you."

Wheatley swallowed. "Are you going to kill me?"

"No." She suddenly sounded very tired. "I'm going to let you go."

"What?" He croaked.

"I'm going to take you to the surface." As She said this the panels beneath him began to shuffle. The next thing he knew a lift had appeared from the floor and he had been dumped inside of it. "I'm not going to kill you, but if you want to live out there you'll have to get up and work for it. Lay around being useless like you are now, and you'll find your way to the afterlife without my assistance." Wheatley didn't find that advice helpful or reassuring. "I would help you to your feet, but really, I've helped enough for one day, haven't I?" The lift moved upwards and the world turned black. "You can do the rest."

Author's Note:
Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure.
*blows dust off the screen* We're back ladies and gentlemen! :D I'm so GLaD to be back!
I'm sorry this got kind of dark! If you're an Aperture Science Personality Sphere that may have been a bit too graphic. My apologies. I hope I haven't scarred you for life. XD
Some random things:
1. I had a lot of technology related problems while writing this chapter. XD Word on the laptop I was using died, I thought I lost this chapter (which was over 2000 words at that point) and was going to have to start all over, then I got my chapter on my tablet, which stayed frozen for about thirty minutes when I went to write on it the next day.
2. This chapter is the longest yet at 4199 words!
All in all it took me over two weeks to write this chapter. It could honestly still use improvement but if I spent too much more time on it I would have no extra chapters stored away. I had to move on. XD
3. I have a beta now! Let's all give a big thank you to NoivernOfFandoms (on Wattpad) who is reading over my chapters now, so my silly typos will be no more. Thank you!

I'm so so happy to be back. I'm sorry that our hiatus was quite a lot longer than expected, and while I will reveal the reason why I don't want to discuss it. I'm still not ready.

Something really terrible and tragic and sudden happened and one of my best friends died two days before we were supposed to get back up and running for the year, and I just couldn't write for a long time after it happened. Lots more crazy things have happened since (not necessarily bad things but stressful things XD), but now we're back and I'm thrilled. Better late than never, right? Let's finish this thing.