Sadness, character death...you have been warned. Best expirience while listening to Christina Perri's The Lonely.
Tears
All he'd wanted, for almost as long as he could remember, was to apologize to her. He wanted, needed to beg her forgiveness; it didn't matter so much whether or not if she accepted (though, cards on the table, it'd be absolutely amazing if she did, impossibly, forgive him) as that he just got to say those words to her. After dragging himself out of the crater, he'd spent months in libraries, tracking down all the towns near Aperture, and then months searching in each one. He'd finally found her.
He was too late.
She'd been dead for mere hours, her skin still warm to the touch. She'd been trying to reach the next town, having cleared the last of food and given up on scavenging. If she'd set out a little earlier, when she still had supplies, or if he'd been faster, with the rations he'd packed for her when he found her…
He hesitated to touch her at first, small, paranoid, corrupt lines of code hissing about traps and hatred and human cunning. But his stammered greetings got him no response from the woman lying, face-down in the dirt, so he'd reached out to touch the back of her hand, thinking that perhaps she had heatstroke, or some such human fainting sickness.
It was lukewarm. His touch receptors cataloged a difference between her and the air that simply could not be. Laughing weakly and asking her to knock it off, he'd rolled her over.
Her eyes were closed. She looked like she was just resting.
He took her pulse, or tried to. He couldn't seem to find it.
He began to shake, whispering her name for the first time in his life. It jerked out in three syllables between his chattering teeth, refusing to be said correctly, stubborn as she was.
He gasped and choked, small, pathetic sobs wracking his frame as he touched her cheek, pulled her close, stroked her hair. He stuttered out his apology a hundred-thousand times to her, knowing she couldn't hear him. She was steady, though rigor mortis did not seem to have set in, a rock for him to cling to.
Eventually he managed to let go of her, to clean the dirt off her face and lay her gently back down in the grass beside the road. Getting up, the grief-stricken android searched the surrounding area he found the sort of spot he thought she'd have liked, if she could've picked. Wiping his nose on his sleeve (a useless gesture, as it didn't run) he set about digging her grave. At midnight, he'd lay her down in it, comment on the view she had from the top of the hill ("the, the pond, and the stars, and oh! Look, there's a forest right down there, that'll be pretty in fall!") wipe his nose again, and fill in the ground over her. By two he would come to the conclusion that nothing in the area would make a good grave marker, absolutely nothing.
But then, could he really walk away? She'd been his whole reason for remaining, for living through the pain of his guilt. She was the only thing that had ever mattered, really, when it came down to it. He couldn't just…leave her to molder in the ground, all alone. He wouldn't abandon her again.
He built himself a cottage nearby for when it rained, using materials he found in the woods. He tended to her and himself, adjusting to being alone again. Travelers would come and go, wondering at the place, the peaceful hermitage in by the road. Several would ask why he chose there, specifically.
He could never speak of her, his test subject, his friend, without crying. The guilt, the shame of his actions, the regret…those would never fade. His memory banks didn't allow for the glossing of time that an organic mind had.
But…at the same time…the pain of it seemed to lessen. He wondered if that meant that, wherever humans got after their frames die, she forgave him?
"Thanks, luv, but I think I need a bit more time. Can't quite seem to forgive myself, you see. Not, ah, not yet, anyway."
R&R