Portal: Love as a Construct

Part One. The Dream

Portal: Love as a Construct

Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, Wheatley (WheatDOS)

Setting: Post Portal 2 (following My Little Moron)

Part One.  The Dream

Wheatley had an idea.

Even by GLaDOS's definition, which put five minutes at being excruciatingly excessive, a lot of time had gone by. It might have taken even longer, but luckily GLaDOS had been able to locate some of Wheatley's backup files from back when he'd been a Behavioural Core and they'd been able to pick up where they'd left off. Which was to say, pretty good friends. Kind of. It'd been a bit tense and rough at first, because The Incident was still very fresh in both their minds and neither of them were very happy about what had happened, but for some reason that had all gone away one day when GLaDOS had begun a very odd tangent of conversation:

"Do you ever wonder what happened to the test subject?"

"Sometimes," Wheatley answered, carefully moving one of his red checkers forward on the board with a manipulator arm that she had graciously provided. Almost immediately after he'd finished, GLaDOS moved one of her black disks over three of his own red pieces and removed them from play. He narrowed his optic plates thoughtfully. She was very, very good at this game. He was going to have to step it up, he was.

"How often would you say you do that?"

"Um..." Wheatley wasn't sure how to answer that question, since he did not keep a log of what he thought about like GLaDOS did, but he couldn't remember thinking about the test subject at all recently. "Not a lot, uh, I can't, that is, I don't remember thinking about her, uh, in the last little while."

"So she doesn't... mean anything to you?"

"Hm?" He looked up from the board and regarded her sideways. He was having trouble thinking of a good move and having this conversation both at the same time. "What d'you mean, mean anything?"

"You know." GLaDOS gave her approximation of a shrug and looked casually at the other side of the room. "As a... friend of yours. As an example."

Wheatley laughed and GLaDOS turned back to face him in one sharp movement. "Me? Friends with a human? Even I'm not that stupid, luv. Even I know humans always let you down, always, they betray you, in the end. Nope, I just wanted her help to get me out of the facility. Though I didn't, uh, didn't think about what I'd do after that, since um, since I'm pretty sure now that there are no management rails, uh, none of those outside Aperture." He looked down at the board again, but a new thought occurred to him and he flicked his optic upwards. "Why d'you, why d'you ask?"

"There doesn't need to be a reason for everything I do."

"But you just said last week that – "

"That was last week. Now take your turn. I'm getting bored."

Things went a lot more smoothly after that. They hadn't been overly horrible, or anything, they were just better. He was very fond of GLaDOS, and probably would have been even if he hadn't had his memory back, because he had discovered something about her that she probably didn't want anyone to know: she was not as bad as she first appeared. She was just very, very cautious. In fact, the more he got to know her the more obvious it was. If he asked her nicely and if she was in the right mood, she would sometimes tell him about her life before he had existed or the time in between where he had been off in the depths of Aperture and she had been controlled by the other Cores, and the more he heard the more he understood. Only once had she told him a story that happened around the time of her initial activation, and it had been short and lacking in description, as if she were embarrassed about it, or something, but he was always on the lookout for an opportunity to get her to tell him one of those stories again. She had portrayed to him in those short few minutes a state of mind that he remembered in himself from a long time ago: of curiosity and eagerness and a desire to please the humans. After she had finished it she had looked away from him for a long time and said nothing, and he just watched her, wishing the management rail was a little longer, or that she would come over more so that he could reach her. He had felt very close to her while she had told it, a strange, deep connection of some sort, and he had very much wanted to go up to her and lean on the side of her faceplate for some reason. He wasn't sure why he wanted to do that, but thought it would be rather nice, to be very close to her like that. Almost like in the olden days where he had been a part of her. Sometimes he would get very sad thinking about it. He tried not to remember those days because then he really did start to miss being on her chassis. Sometimes, if he went into sleep mode thinking about it, he would wake up at night feeling very cold and lonely, and he would watch her until he felt a bit better. Oftentimes her optic would flicker and he would suppose that she was dreaming, or remembering maybe, and he would wonder if that ever happened to him. He didn't think so. Wheatley had no recollection of dreaming since the day he'd been taken off her chassis, and when he had asked GLaDOS to check his activity levels at night she had confirmed it: when he was off, he was off. He had frowned, then turned to look at her.