A/N: The idea for this seemed a lot better in my head and didn't really translate well to paper. It took longer than I expected. I've destabilized again. Rapid-shift mood swings (especially irrational rage) are not fun. Nor is wrecking my good knee so now I've got two bad knees and can barely walk. I have a hostility towards stairs now.

In my own headcanons, I don't think the coop bots really have this level of intelligence/emotions. So was an interesting to see if I could do that; didn't work quite as well as I wanted. You win some, you lose some.

16. Jealousy
Summary: The Cooperative Testing Initiative had been designed as the perfect test subjects, but nobody, not even She, had anticipated that they would have very human emotions. Including jealousy.
Genre: Friendship
Characters: Atlas, P-Body, Wheatley
Warnings: Atlas/P-Body?

The Cooperative Testing Initiative had been designed as the perfect test subjects. Created by her to phase out human testing (after all, ten thousand good test subjects were wasted due to the negligence of that moron) they were created to not have any of the common faults of human test subjects, namely the destructive, murderous streak of a certain [REDACTED].

Still, She could not have anticipated that from their very first activation, they would have very human emotions.

She hadn't been the one to first activate them, however. She had been far too busy trying to track down that dangerous, mute lunatic through the unmonitored, fully automated sections of the facility before her unwilling transformation into a potato. The two bots had actually been found some hours later, during a panicked search by the central core after almost losing his only test subject.

At first, the two of them had been placed in separate test chambers, but it didn't take Wheatley long to figure out that when he put them in together, they solved the tests more quickly, providing him the solution euphoria that he desperately craved.

For robots who had never even seen each other before, let alone feel human emotions, they had developed a bond rather quickly. And of course, such close bonds had a whole array of emotions to go with them.

Including jealousy.

The first time that Blue had noticed Orange stealing a glance at the core on the monitor, he hadn't thought much of it. Nor the next time. Or the next.

But once they finished the test...

Blue dropped one of those strange turret-cube hybrids onto the button.

"Oh! Brilliant! Well done, both of you. Oh-ho, that felt tremendous." The blue core's voice dropped to a languid, drowsy drawl and his shutters drooped half-shut as he let the euphoria wash over him.

Then, Orange looked up at the monitor, a look in her optic that Blue had never seen before, never seen for him.

And that made him jealous.

He wondered what exactly it was that she saw in the blue sphere, what exactly made her like that blue sphere more than him.

The next few testchambers sped by quickly. Orange's admiration of the core grew, as did Blue's jealousy. But after some time, the core stopped paying attention to them. He didn't seem to be talking to them, but didn't seem to know how to turn off the speakers, either. He was talking to somebody else, telling them that they were a jumpsuited rat and that nobody was going to space and then there was an explosion and lots of shaking and then a loud whooshing noise. After that, there was a new voice, a female voice coming over the speakers, telling them to hurry along to the central chamber.

When they got there, the blue core was gone; in place was Her semi-circular head, golden optic looking them over. Orange looked around sadly, wondering what had happened to the blue core, but she knew she wouldn't ever see him again.

Blue put a hand on her arm. She looked at him. She wished she could say that she was sorry for paying more attention to the blue core than to him, but all she could do was coo softly. He warbled a few sounds back, before they both turned to tend to the human girl laying on the floor.