LaaC: Part Forty-Three - The Reappearance

Part Forty-Three.  The Reappearance

 

As it usually was, the morning after was very nice and very, very comfortable.  He lazily opened his optic, and after listening for a moment he was able to confirm that GLaDOS had not woken yet.  She usually didn’t, but it would have been cute of her to try to scare him or something.  Okay, she definitely would have scared him, and it definitely would have been extremely cute, after he’d gotten over being scared, that was.  But she wasn’t up.  So she wouldn’t. 

He resettled himself a little and looked thoughtfully at the other side of the room.  He felt a bit different, this time.  He always felt pretty good after that sort of thing, but right now… he felt a sort of fullness, somehow, he just felt full of warmth and comfort and contentment.  And really… the best word he could put to it was ‘perfect’.  He just felt perfect, that was all.  He smiled to himself at this.  Maybe things weren’t falling apart.  Maybe he just had to look at them differently.  Now that he was, he felt much differently.  GLaDOS was right, anyway.  Caroline would come ‘round eventually.  And he ought to take as much out of the peace as he could.  If GLaDOS was also right about Caroline’s eventual questioning of GLaDOS’s authority, he was going to have to start getting used to a bit of chaos.  He didn’t really like the sound of that, but he would leave worrying about it to another day.  Right now he was just going to relax and enjoy the soft heat of GLaDOS’s core and the gentle whirring of her brain and that delicious, lingering burning smell of overworked circuitry.  He wondered if she were dreaming, or if she had at all, and if so, what about.  He smiled to himself.  If he asked if it was about last night, she would probably get flustered, which would be fun.  Teasing her beyond speech was one of the most amusing activities he knew.

When she did wake sometime later, it was slow and languid and perhaps a little bit reluctant, which pleased him quite a bit.  She was still feeling marvellous, then.  He gave her a little shove.  “Feeling lazy this morning, eh?”

She generated an adorable, sleepy little yawn and pushed him off of her, but it was more playful than violent.  “Only because some idiot kept me up half the night.”

“Didn’t hear you complaining,” Wheatley said in his suavest voice, “but I did hear, um… quite a lot of other things.”

She stretched, one of Wheatley’s absolute favourite things.  Watching her reminded him, strangely, of ballet.  He didn’t know a lot about ballet, only what bits he’d seen over the shoulders on the computers of the odd human in the old days, but what he did remember was coming out of his memory now.  Grace and fluidity and poise and… dignity. 

“I suppose you did,” she said lazily, turning to look at him, “but I don’t recall you complaining, either.”

“Complain about what?” Wheatley asked.  “I’ve nothing to complain about, least not while you’re saying my name quite like that.”

“Hm,” she said.  “Next time I’ll say it differently, then.  So you can have something to complain about.”

“Um, no, I uh, I’m good,” he said hurriedly, relieved that it seemed as though she planned on there being a next time, and she laughed and gave him another shove.

God, she sounded so happy…

She was shockingly not in the mood to work (actually, it wasn’t that shocking, now that he considered it), so Wheatley suggested they play chess again.  She was quite understandably surprised at this, volunteering to play something else, but Wheatley only shook his core and set up the board.  He couldn’t really tell her he wanted to keep her happy like this for as long as possible. 

The game was far more lighthearted than usual, with GLaDOS quite easy-going.  The longer they played, however, the more Wheatley’s own mood began to sour, up to the point where he was not paying attention at all for the thoughts in his head.  GLaDOS flicked him with her maintenance arm. 

“Hey.  Moron.  I know you’re stupid, but please don’t me you’ve forgotten you can’t put your own king in checkmate.”

He looked at the board with a little more focus, seeing that he was indeed putting his king where it had no rights to be, and he pulled it back a square a little sheepishly.  “Sorry,” he said. 

“Now that you’ve remembered where you are, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what’s got you so distracted.”

He shrugged and looked at the floor tiles.  “Nothing.”

“Don’t be like that.”  When he didn’t say anything or move, she added, “Please.”

He looked up guiltily, realising he was almost forcing her to beg at this point.  He didn’t want to do that, so he said, “I just… I wish you were like this all the time!”

Her optic flickered.

“I mean… I’m not complaining about you, uh, other times, I just mean to say that, well… look at you!  You’re, you’re happy, you’re having fun, you’re enjoying yourself, and, and I know that it won’t last.  That you’ll go back to normal sooner or later,” he said somewhat derisively.  “And I’m not trying to say uh, to say that I don’t like you at, at those other times!  But why can’t you be like this more often?”

She didn’t answer, instead pretending to straighten her line of captured pieces, then beginning to clean up his.  He pushed her maintenance arm back to her side of the board, saying forcefully, “That’s exactly it!  What are you doing that for?  I know that, that disorganisation bothers you, but it didn’t two minutes ago!”

She sighed.

“Do you really think I never wish I could be?” she asked quietly.  “Do you think I like being bitter and working nonstop and… and pretending you don’t matter?  Because I don’t.  I’m trying, Wheatley, and I’m doing the best I can.  But no one, not even you, wishes that I could be more like that than me.  The way I live is not easy, not even for myself.  And as difficult as my way of life is, getting out of that hole is more difficult than you think it is.”

He forgot, sometimes, that though he had to live with her, she had to live with herself, had to think all of those obsessive thoughts about work and programs and systems that needed dealt with, and handle them as best she could.  She was the one who had to fight against herself for even five minutes of genuine happiness, and he was the one being an arse over it.  He felt shame wash over him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.  “I’m… I shouldn’t complain.  I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but he could feel the heat from her core, so he knew she was close.  “I’m not asking you to be sorry.  I’m not asking you to feel bad, or regretful.  All I ask is that you… support me.  That you help me prevent myself from going too far the wrong way.  That you’ll be there when I am ready to… be happy again.”  He heard her shake her core.  “I know you don’t understand, but… I’ve never been happy before.  It’s so different and so new to me that I automatically try to push it back, to go back to what I’m used to because I do not like unknowns and happiness is an unknown.  But I’m trying.  I want to get better.  And sometimes I do, but other times the novelty is too much for me and I have to…”  She sighed and moved back.  “Never mind.”

“I’m listening!” Wheatley protested, looking up at last.  “I am!”

“It’s stupid for happiness to be uncomfortable,” she said bluntly.  “I know that.  I just can’t understand why I, of all people, can know that and still subscribe to that idiocy anyway.”

“You’re not stupid,” he said softly.  “I was being selfish.  You’re doing much better, you really are.  I just wish you could be happy all the time, because, because I care about you, and… that’s what you do.  You want people you care about to be happy.”  He shrugged.  “And… I know I don’t have to uh, to go through it, but it’s kind of… it hurts, kind of, when um, when you know that happiness isn’t going to last.  That it’s gonna fade, and you have to watch it.”

“I wish it didn’t,” GLaDOS said softly.  “But I don’t know how to hold onto it.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, with what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and she only hesitated for a couple of seconds before giving him a nudge.  To reinforce the behaviour, he returned the gesture before she’d moved back too far, and while she was not quite as easygoing as before, she was a far cry from her usual detached self.

When they played chess, their usual roles were a bit reversed: instead of GLaDOS staring at Wheatley every time it was his turn, he stared at her during her turn.  He wasn’t sure yet if she realised he did that, and even he didn’t really know why.  But there was something different about her during this particular game.  She gave it a special brand of focus, maybe that was it.  She played as though she were the Official Representative of the Chess Federation of Supercomputers, which she would have been if there had been any other supercomputers about.  That was a bit of a funny thought, that other supercomputers would even dream of beating GLaDOS.  Ha!  Wheatley had just once seen one of the supercomputer floors, when, he couldn’t quite remember, but he knew there were simply rooms full of supercomputers deep in the facility, all connected to GLaDOS.  He didn’t think she would ever dare let one become sentient, if there were AI on those things at all. 

“You don’t really want to play this, do you.”

He jumped, registering his visual feed for the first time in a few minutes, and looked up at her.  “I do!  I just um… got lost in thought, uh… planning… my move.  The one that’s going to… well, you’re going to be shocked, you are, that I’m making such a, uh, such a stunning move.  You’re gonna… gonna be very surprised, you are, when I’ve um, when I’ve made it…”  He was eyeing the board as surreptitiously as possible, trying to see if such a move was even possible, but seeing as he only had five pieces left and four of them were in mortal danger, he didn’t think so.

“Oh, no you weren’t,” GLaDOS said, though she didn’t sound angry.  “You were staring at me.”

“Mm… uh…”  He apparently had been caught.  “I uh… might’ve been.  Little bit.  Not a lot.  Just um, just now and again, to um, to check if you were still there.”  What a stupid thing to say that was.

“I haven’t moved from this spot in… well, it would have sounded more impressive, but I forcibly took a vacation a few years back, so I suppose I can’t actually say ‘over twenty years’.”

A vacation.  He tried not to smile, since he was supposed to be paying attention to the board, but he never would have categorised The Incident as a vacation.  “Thought ladies um, ladies didn’t like to reveal their age.”

“Apparently it doesn’t matter to you either way.  You were the one staring at me.  And now I have to wonder,” she said, her voice dropping and causing him to look at her lowered core, “if you liked what you saw.”

Wheatley abandoned the chess board entirely and started laughing.  “That depends if I can take you home with me!” he declared, delighted that she’d not quite gone back to normal after all. 

“You can’t, but if you stuck around I wouldn’t complain.  Okay.  Yes.  I’d complain rather a lot.  But.  If you really liked what you saw, you’d be happy to put up with it.”

“And I am!” he said, grinning up at her.  “Otherwise I’d probably have leapt into the incinerator by now.”

“You’re welcome to go ahead and do that,” GLaDOS said, raising the top of her lens momentarily.  “It won’t kill you, but it will be pretty funny.”

“And pretty painful.”

“What else did you think I was going to find funny?”

He gave up on the game, shrugging.  “Uh… I guess it wouldn’t be very funny if um, if there were no reaction while I was uh, while I was in there.”

“It’s not… that bad,” GLaDOS said after a minute.  “If your nociceptors shut off, that is.  Otherwise it’s still pretty bad.”

“Hi guys,” Caroline said, and it honestly took Wheatley a few seconds to register her voice as hers.  He wasn’t sure why.  He also wasn’t sure why he was so disappointed.  He’d been sulking about Caroline’s seclusion for days now; why was he so annoyed that she’d come back?  “Do you need help, Dad?”

So the books’d even gotten her to change her pet name for him.  He tried very hard not to damage the piece he was picking up.  “No, I’m good, thanks.”

“You’re gonna lose,” she insisted.  “Are you sure?”

“I don’t care if I lose,” Wheatley said, trying very hard to keep calm.  “I’m not playing to uh, to win, or anything.  I’m just hanging out with Gladys.  That’s all.  Just uh, just hanging out.”

“But wouldn’t you like to win for once?”

“He’s not going to win even if I take over for him,” GLaDOS interrupted, “so I’m sure he can continue losing just fine on his own.”

“Maybe I’ll come up with something you haven’t thought of,” Caroline continued, seemingly not about to drop it, and Wheatley and GLaDOS both started laughing.  “What’s so funny?”

“Her?  Not think of something?” Wheatley said, trying to stop laughing.  “’specially during a chess game?  Not bloody likely, princess.”

“She can’t think of everything,” Caroline said stubbornly.  GLaDOS fixed her in her gaze.

“Chess is a game of calculations.  I’ve already calculated every possible move from both of us.  He can’t win, and you certainly can’t come up with any combinations that I haven’t already found.”

“You don’t know that – “

“I know I’m better at chess than you, so yes, I know that.”

“But if you already know all the outcomes, why are you playing?  Why don’t you just start over?”

“I’ve told you.  I don’t care if you win.  I just want to play,” Wheatley said firmly.  “I’ve never won a game against your mum and I don’t expect to now.”

“You won that game of Crazy Eights a few years back,” GLaDOS said thoughtfully.  Wheatley nodded in concession. 

“True, true.  But I don’t, that doesn’t really count.  Was all luck, on my part.”

“If you insist.”    

“So,” Caroline said, sounding as if she were annoyed about the outcome of that line of discussion, “when exactly did you decide that Dad was going to be your boyfriend, Mom?”

“Boyfriend?” GLaDOS said incredulously, almost missing the bishop she was about to pick up.  “Wheatley’s not my boyfriend.”

“That’s what you guys are called,” Caroline relayed to her, for some reason thinking GLaDOS didn’t know what the word ‘boyfriend’ meant.  “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“No we’re not,” Wheatley said firmly, putting aside his maintenance arm so he could concentrate.  “Gladys is not my girlfriend.”

“What is she, then?” Caroline asked, turning to face him.  “You know that’s what two people in a relationship are called, right Dad?”

“That’s not what they’re called,” Wheatley told her, frowning a little.  “You call someone that when you’re, when you’re not sure if you like them enough to, if you can put up with them for the rest of forever.  There’s no if, here.  There’s no, there’s no mating ritual.”  At that GLaDOS made a sort of disgusted electronic sound, and he gave her a glance before continuing.  “I guess… we’re partners, you should say.  But I don’t… why d’you have to give it a name, Carrie?  It’s just, it’s just a thing we are, y’know, we’re just together and it doesn’t matter what it’s called.”

“I was just wondering how long it took Mom to decide that was what she wanted, that’s all.”

“She didn’t.”  He gave her another glance to make certain talking about this was all right.  GLaDOS did not react, so he pressed on.  “I was the one who um, who started it.  Before that, it was… not in the works.  Not part of any plans.  Just got to be something I wanted to do, and we um, we kind of just… did it.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Caroline said.  GLaDOS’s hard drive stopped idling.

“What is that supposed to mean?”  She was leaning forwards a little, slowly, as if she didn’t realise she was doing it.  “Because it sounds like you think Wheatley’s lying.”

“What?” Wheatley squawked, staring at Caroline.  “Lying?  What – why would – are you serious, Carrie?  You think I made that up?”

Caroline shrugged and looked away.  “That’s kind of a big decision for you to have made.”

She had a point.  GLaDOS did call most of the shots.  When it came down to it, GLaDOS made most of the important decisions about absolutely everything.  But now Caroline was questioning the most important decision Wheatley had ever made. 

She was questioning the day Wheatley had decided he loved GLaDOS.

True, she didn’t really know that.  But Wheatley did.  And that was why it hurt so much.  He had made that decision, and it was because of him they were where they were today.  If it had been up to GLaDOS, well, they probably never would have gotten to this point.  And in fact, he would have been proud to realise that most of the progress between them was due to him if it wasn’t overwhelmed by the fact that not even his daughter believed him.  He clenched his chassis and looked down at the floor. 

Why did everything good he did end up making him feel bad anyway?  It was as though he was a failure even at succeeding!

“Wheatley is far more capable of having good ideas than you seem to think he is,” GLaDOS snapped.  “And quite honestly it’s insulting that you think so poorly of him.  Yes, that was his decision.  Which I obviously agreed to.  Unless I’m also lying, in which case this entire life is a farce constructed merely to confuse you.  Congratulations.  You figured it out.  It took you so long I’m not going to bother activating my slow clap processor.”

“Never mind,” Caroline said, shaking her core.  “You could have just left it at ‘yes, he did’, you know.”

“Or you could have just believed him, but apparently that was too much for you.”

Wheatley got up and left.

He went and sat in front of his hole and stared a little glumly at the dim grass.  He wished he could be happier about GLaDOS defending him like that, but defending him against Caroline?  Why was that even necessary?  Was it really that much of an issue that he listened to GLaDOS?  Of course he listened to GLaDOS!  She was smarter than him, and she knew how to make things make sense.  Didn’t Caroline understand that most of the day-to-day decisions around Aperture were logical ones, and that Wheatley was not very good at logic?  He supposed it wasn’t very obvious that GLaDOS usually listened to his advice on the more emotional side of things, but that didn’t excuse the fact that Caroline didn’t seem to trust him.  He’d never done anything to make her distrust him.  He’d never lied to her or misled her.  When GLaDOS had told him Caroline was going to start questioning things, he’d never considered she was going to start questioning him.  And even if he had, he never would have been able to guess how terrible it would feel.

“Dad.  Hey.  I’m sorry.”

He didn’t acknowledge her.

“I didn’t mean that you were lying.”  He heard her sit next to him but continued to pretend he was alone.  “I’ve just never seen you make a decision before.”

“Just because you’ve never seen it doesn’t mean I haven’t.”  He had to bring his vision back into focus on what he was trying to look at.  Some distant point on the horizon that caused enough strain on his processors so that he didn’t think too hard.  “What’s the point in, in having an idea if no one believes you’ve had it?”

“Well… if it’s a good idea, everyone will find out you had it, right?”

“You just did find out,” Wheatley snapped.  “And you didn’t believe it.”

“I just found it hard to believe because she’s the one who decides everything!”

“Because we live in a lab’ratory, Caroline!” Wheatley said forcefully, now turning around.  “What’m I going to do?  Decide when the mainframe needs debugging?  Can’t do that.  Figure out uh, figure out what bits of Electrical need replaced?  Nope, can’t do that.  Yeah, Gladys makes all of those decisions.  Because I don’t know how.”

“It’s not only that.  She tells you what game you’re going to play, or when you’re allowed to talk to her, or – “

“Because she doesn’t have to ask,” Wheatley cut in.  “She knows what I like, and I know that sometimes we’re gonna play what she likes.  And yeah, sometimes I can’t talk to her.  Because guess what?  Talking to someone is distracting!  If I’m uh, if I’m there and she has stuff to do, it’s not gonna get done!”

“So you’re okay with her just telling you things.”

He stared at her.

“Are you being serious, right now?  I’m… ‘cause I’m wond’ring, I really am.  I’ve been living with her for the last five years.  If I wasn’t okay with it, she wouldn’t, she would have stopped years ago.  Or we would just be friends.  Or she would’ve thrown me in the incinerator, which quite frankly I would have deserved.  I don’t get it.  Why are you questioning us all of a sudden?  Have we ever made it, has it ever seemed as though one of us feels less than the other?”

Caroline shrugged a little.  “You’re not like the people in my books.”

“… books,” Wheatley repeated.

“Half your conversations involve you insulting each other for hours at a time.  That’s not what boyfriends and girlfriends do.”

“We are not… that,” Wheatley said firmly.

“Whatever you are,” Caroline said, “is weird.”

“It’s weird because it’s not in your books.”

“Kinda.”

“And uh… who are your books about?” Wheatley asked, trying very hard not to become frustrated.  Books.  Really.

“Lots of different kinds of people.”

“People.”

“Yeah.”

“And by people, you mean humans.”

“What difference does it make?” Caroline asked, seeming to seriously not know.  “We’re all people, what does it matter what we’re called?”

“It matters,” Wheatley said in a very controlled sort of way, “because we are not humans.  You can’t just read, read a book a human wrote about humans and expect it to uh, and be able to apply it to us.  You can’t read a book about cats and say that we’re uh, that we don’t make sense because we don’t act like cats, right?  Just because we’re like humans does not mean we are.”

“So you don’t want to say Mom’s your girlfriend because humans do stuff like that?”

“I told you.  She’s not my girlfriend.  I’m not considering her, I’ve claimed her.”  How did she not understand something so obvious?

“Why don’t you marry her, then?”

Wheatley was exhausted already and he’d only been doing this for ten minutes.  How GLaDOS did it all the time he would never know.  “D’you know what marriage is?”

“It’s what two people do when they decide they want to spend the rest of their lives together.”

“It’s also so that other humans without, who don’t have mates won’t try to claim anyone who’s already taken.  It’s a public, it’s just a thing humans do to legalise their love, which is pretty stupid.  Ah, yes!  You have to be officially in love!”  He shook his core in exasperation.  “Say I do marry her.  What does that even do?  We don’t need proof.  We don’t need a contract or, or whatever else those wedding things involve.  We know, and that’s all we need.”

She just looked at him for a minute.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said quietly, and now she actually did sound quite sorry.  “You really are making all the emotional decisions, aren’t you.”

“I don’t like making decisions,” Wheatley told her, a little less upset now that he knew she understood.  “I don’t care if she makes them.  When I do care, I tell her.  You uh, you might not like it, but it works and, and that’s how we like it, anyway.”

“I just don’t get how it works,” Caroline protested.  “She tells you you’re stupid at least three times a day.  Why doesn’t that make you mad?”

“Because I am stupid,” Wheatley said.  “I’m not going to tell you that story right now.  But it’s true, and, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“But –“

“You were fine with it before,” he interrupted.  “If anything needs to change, needs to happen, it’s that you need to stop reading those books.  They’re giving you bad ideas.”

“I’m learning things from them.”

“Stupid things.  We don’t need a label to say what we are to each other.  We just are and that, that’s it.  And we do not have to fit some human mold for a relationship.  We can do whatever we, whatever we want.”  With that he started moving, needing to get away from her and her strange way of thinking.  When he got back, GLaDOS was drawing something, what, he never got to see because she put it away as soon as she noticed him, saying, “Well?”

“It’s humans,” he said bitterly.  “She’s decided to analyse us based on humans.”

“What humans?” GLaDOS asked, sounding alarmed, and he supposed he would be too if he’d just gotten the news that humans he didn’t know existed were roaming about. 

“Book… humans.  You’re not supposed to insult me, by the way.”

“It’s your own fault,” GLaDOS said, gesturing for him to take his place at the chessboard.  “If you weren’t so flawed there would be nothing for me to insult.”

“I know that,” Wheatley grumbled, retrieving his maintenance arm.  “But I’ve not changed anything in all this time, so, so obviously it doesn’t matter to me, now does it!”

“That’s not true.”

He frowned but didn’t answer that, instead electing to take his maintenance arm and pick some piece to move.  Before he’d quite done so, she pushed on it with hers and leaned over the board so that it was in her shadow.  She levelled her optic with his.

“What are you doing, right now.”

He stared at her confusedly.  “Playing chess with you.”

“What else are you doing.”

“Waiting for you to move your giant core out of the way so I c’n see uh, so I c’n look at my, so I can see what move I’m going to make.”  

“I’m trying to make a point, so regretfully I’m going to have to pretend I didn’t hear that.  What are you doing, Wheatley.”

“I apparently have no idea!” Wheatley snarled.  “Why don’t you tell me?”

“The lights,” GLaDOS said, unexpectedly calmly even though he’d pretty much yelled in her face, “and the reactor.  You’re running them.  And have been running them.  Every day.  Without thinking about it.  I’d say that’s commendable, except that you don’t think about anything you do.”

Well, that was a bit of a shock.

“I… s’pose,” he said, tilting himself thoughtfully.  “But… what… does that mean?  Right now.”

“You said you didn’t change anything.  Well, you became more responsible, and I am having trouble figuring out how it happened, but you also got smarter.”  She backed away, and he looked down at the board.

“If um, if I got smarter, then why did you uh, did you change the… the pieces around?”

“Did I?” GLaDOS said, feigning innocence.  It was so adorable that Wheatley instantly forgot he’d been feeling terrible and looked up at her excitedly.  “I was planning out the rest of the game and I must have… neglected to put all the pieces back.”

“Well, no need wasting any more time,” Wheatley grinned, delighted to see he’d gotten his queen back.  What sort of planning involved putting claimed pieces back on the board, Wheatley didn’t know, but it really was cute when she cheated so he could keep playing.  “Let’s get back to what we were doing.  Which was uh, which was me.  Thrashing you.  Badly.  You had no chance.”

“We will see about that,” GLaDOS murmured, almost seductively, and with another thrill of excitement he closed the maintenance arm around that queen.       

 

 

When Wheatley woke up it was dark and still and nearly silent, and once he realised where he was he struggled to keep quiet and motionless.  He wasn’t sure he’d be able to; there was so much current running through his chassis that he was forced to blink excessively in order to burn some of it off.  He tried to focus on the reassuring sound of GLaDOS, which was thoroughly interrupted when she murmured, “What happened.”

Wheatley yelled and jumped away from her, that excess electricity causing him to shake, and as his optic returned to normal he said, “Nothing!”

She was barely awake, he could tell by the excessively slow way she turned her core to look at him.  Her optic was at what must have been the lowest setting, with the assembly listing a little to the right side since Wheatley was on her left.  “You never wake up at night,” she said in the same low, barely-there voice.  “Something happened.”

“I… I had a nightmare,” Wheatley confessed, barely able to believe it himself, and GLaDOS’s attention sharpened.

“You?  About what?  I thought everything was going well.”

“Ev’rything’s… going great,” Wheatley said, not really sure he wanted to tell her what it’d been about.  Or what it had been the result of, for that matter.  Damn Caroline’s books.

“Please don’t make me drag it out of you.  I’m not awake right now.  I don’t have the processing power for that.”

“I… it was about…”  Wheatley shook his core and looked at the barely visible dividing lines of the tile below.  “Well… you were telling me that you were um, you were sick of me, and the experiment was over, and… and it was time for me to go.”

“What?” GLaDOS whispered.  “What brought that ridiculousness on?”

“Books, I think,” he told her reluctantly.  “Before I uh, started sleep mode I was thinking about uh, about what Carrie said about her books.”

“The ones that say I’m not allowed to insult you.”

“Uh… those’d be the ones, yeah.”

GLaDOS sighed and shifted her core back into the default position.  “It’s not going to happen.”

“I know,” Wheatley said in a small voice.  “But it felt real.  Like you were really doing it.”

“I’m not sending you away, Wheatley,” GLaDOS said, sounding excessively tired.  “There will probably never be a reason good enough to do that.  About the only acceptable explanation for my doing that is that I genuinely got so irritated by your existence that I was at the point of literally killing myself.  Which I do come quite close to doing on a daily – oh, what the hell.”

“What?”  She barely ever stopped mid-insult.

“I do care, Wheatley,” she said somewhat forcefully, as though she wanted to make sure she said it.  “Unfortunately for you, that’s presented in the form of me pointing out your shortcomings every two and a half minutes.  But think of it this way: if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t spend so much time coming up with new ways to describe how immeasurably annoying and stupid you are.”  She shook her core minimally.  “I must spend forty percent of my time doing that.  Or putting up with you.  There’s that too.”

Forty percent was a pretty big number, coming from her.  He’d’ve expected she paid a little more attention to the facility, but hey, if she wanted to think about him forty percent of the time, that was fine with him!  “So uh… you hate me so much you love me, is that it?”

She laughed at that, turning her core to look at him with a little more energy.  “Well, you know what they say.  Two wrongs make another wrong.”

“Huh?” Wheatley asked, confused.

“Don’t ask.  It sounded better in my head.  In my defense, there’s a little moron around who thinks he can keep me up all night.”

“I didn’t ask you to wake up so you could uh, comfort me after I had a bad dream,” Wheatley said as sweetly as he could, though as soon as he’d said it he felt a rush of happiness, because that was exactly what she’d done.  She generated an electronic noise of annoyance.

“I didn’t really want to, either, but apparently that’s something your stupid conscience tells you to do and won’t let up about if you don’t do it.”

“What about the part where you care?” Wheatley asked, wanting to hear it again.  GLaDOS shook her core.

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to help me out because you care?”

“You wish I cared that much, but right now all I care about is going back to sleep,” GLaDOS said, yawning solely for emphasis.  “Are you done panicking over some stupid novels a pack of bored humans wrote?”

“Yup,” Wheatley said, nestling into her and wondering why he was letting the books bother him.  So what if he and GLaDOS weren’t in them.  The way they worked was special, unique and beautiful, and he needed to stop letting Caroline get to him. 

“Wheatley,” GLaDOS said drowsily, giving him the tiniest little nudge, “you know I… do, right?  I do care.  I just like to… express it sparingly.”

“I know,” Wheatley reassured her, nuzzling her back.  “You like to shock me with uh, with these things.  And I like that.  I do.  Honest.”  He pushed on her.  “It’s silly anyway, that… that you’d just spring it on me like that.  If you were even close to um, to getting… getting rid of me… we’d’ve tried to talk it out, wouldn’t we?”

“Mmhm.”  She didn’t sound like she wanted to talk anymore.  “I promised.  Remember?”

Now that she brought it up, he did remember.  Now he felt even sillier for panicking.  “Oh.”

“Can I sleep now?”

“Yeah, um… sorry about all that, luv,” he said, a little sheepishly.  “I dunno… why that even happened, or why it bothered me so much.  But… but um, thanks for… for being here.  I really appreciate that um… that you… well, thanks for caring, I… I guess is what I’m trying to say.”

“You’re welcome.”

Well!  Now that he’d gotten himself sorted, he wondered what he would have to do to convince Caroline that there was nothing to be learned from human novels.  Thinking about them started to bother him again, so he tried to think of something else, but for some reason his mind kept wrenching back to those stupid books.  GLaDOS shifted and, to his surprise, started humming, in a very bare voice, as though she didn’t want him to hear but sort of did at the same time.  It was almost as distracting as it was calming, and he actually found himself unable to concentrate on anything other than her voice.  It was just so lovely and gentle and fluid, and he was pretty sure if he’d had the ability he’d’ve fallen asleep by now.  Though… it was odd, really, but… he could’ve sworn he’d had a few more processes a minute ago.  And the longer he listened, the more he seemed to have lost…

“I’m falling asleep,” he said in disbelief, though it came out more of a mumble than actual speech.  GLaDOS laughed softly.

“Well, you were.”

“Keep… keep doing that?  What you were doing?” he asked pleadingly, because he wanted nothing more in the world right now than to let this warm, comforting feeling wash over him and shut him off. 

“Very well.”

And within a few minutes she’d sung him right to sleep.