Want You Gone

[Chapter Three: For Science. You Monster.]

    "Okay, I'm gonna lay my cards on the table: I don't wanna do it. I don't want to go in there. Don't... Don't go in there - She's off. She's off! Panic over! She's off. All fine! On we go." Wheatley stammered as the chamber door slid open. Inside of the room, was a mess of wires, metal, broken parts, water, mud, and overgrown plants. In the center the room, in the midst of the rubble, was her.
     I walked slowly into the room, eyeing her mangled robotic corpse. "There she is..." Wheatley gasped, taking in the sight as well. "What a nasty piece of work she was, honestly. Like a proper maniac."
     The words Wheatley used could not have described her better. I wandered along, studying the fallen discs that once held her to the cieling. Her name was once printed onto them neatly, but had brushed away over time. I could still see it clear as day, though. GLaDOS. Her name was an acronym, standing for "Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System." However, she seemed to have anything but life in her.
     "You know who ended up, uh, do you know who ended up taking her down in the end? You're not going to believe this. A human." My eyes widened. I looked back down at Wheatley. I know who took her down. "I know! I know, I wouldn't have believed it either. Apparently this human escaped and nobody's seen him since." Wheatley went on. I glanced away awkwardly, my eyes falling back onto the sad heap of metal that lay in front of me.
     "Then there was a sort of long chunk of time where absolutely nothing happened and then there's us escaping now. So that's pretty much the whole story, you're up to speed. Don't touch anything." Wheatley cut in right as I was about to reach out and touch the white metal that once made up the body of GLaDOS.
     I walked past her, not looking back, and strutting throgh the murky water that somehow made its way into the room. I reached an old incinerator, and behind it, was a staircase, leading down to a dropoff. "Okay, down these stairs." Wheatley narrowed his optical at the dropoff when we had come to it. "Jump! Actually, looking at it, that is quite a distance, isn't it?" I nodded, looking down at the ground below. It seemed pretty far away.
     "You know what? Go ahead and jump. You've got braces on your legs. No braces on your arms, though. Gonna have to rely on the old human strength to keep a grip on the device and, by extension, me. So do. Do make sure to maintain a grip." I held the portal gun, and Wheatley, tight, still considering.
     "Also, a note: No braces on your spine, either. So don't land on that. Or your head, no braces there. That could split like a melon from this height." He chuckled nervously. "Do definitely focus on landing with your legs." I backed away a bit. Wheatley, you're not helping. "Quick question: Have you been working out? Because there's no evidence of it. I'm not a plastic cup. We will be landing with some force. So a bit of grip. Just using grip. Classic grip." I huffed, backing up a little more. When would I have time to work out recently in my cryo-sleep?
     "Go ahead and jump. What's the worst that could happen? Oh. Oh wait, I just now thought of the worst thing. Oh! I just thought of something even worse. Alright. New, better plan: no imagining of any potential outcomes whatsoever. Just jump, into the abyss, there, and let's see what happens." Tired of his rambling on, I leapt down, before Wheatley could change my mind. He let out a loud scream, and opened his eye, realizing that we were now safe at the bottom, though my body hurt from the landing. Wheatley definitely was not a plastic cup.
     "Still held! Still bein' held. That's a great job. You've applied the grip. We're all fine. That's tremendous." He began scanning around as I entered a room with another metal catwalk. Below us, was a deep pit. "AH! I- Sorry, I just looked down. I do not recommend it." Wheatley looked up at me, then immediately back down into the abyss. "AH! I've just done it again." I rolled my eyes and continued walking. There were a few turns in the path, as I weaved around old tanks and metal.
     "I just now realized that I used to rely on my management rail to not fall into bottomless pits. And you're my rail now. And you can fall into bottomless pits. I'm rambling out of fear, but here's the point: don't get close to the edge." I took his advice and stayed in the middle of the catwalk. I wasn't very interested in falling either.
     Eventually, we made it to a breaker room. I looked up, to see hundreds of switches in a cylindrical room, leading all the way back up to GLaDOS's chamber. "This is the main breaker room." Wheatley pointed out. "Look for a switch that says ESCAPE POD. Alright? Don't touch ANYTHING else." I did as told and looked around, but the words seemed like a hopeless jumble to me. I squinted hard, but I could not make out what any of the brakers said. We're so close to escaping, I can't mess this up...
     As I looked around, Wheatley continued his Gabbing. I had gotten used to it by now. "Not interested in anything else. Don't TOUCH anything else. Don't even LOOK at anything else, just--well, obviously you've got to look at everything else to find ESCAPE POD, but as soon as you've looked at something and it doesn't say ESCAPE POD, look at something else, look at the next thing. Alright? But don't touch anything else or look at any--well, look at other things, but don't... you understand." He blinked at me. "Can you see it anywhere? I can't see it anywhere. Uh. Tell you what, plug me in and I'll turn the lights on." I plugged him into a large outlet that took up most of the room, and heard a loud noise. The lights came on and shone brightly down on us.
     "'Let there be light.' That's, uh... God. I was quoting God." Wheatley said quietly. He did something, and the whole platform we were standing on began to spin. "Oh! Look at that. It's turning. Ominous. But probably fine. Long as it doesn't start moving up...Now, escape pod... escape pod..." He turned the platform back and forth in search of the Escape Pod switch. "It's... It's moving up." I shot him a dangerous glare, trying to tell him to fix it.
     "Okay! No, don't worry! Don't worry! I've got it I've got it I've got it! THIS should slow it down!" A few buttons beeped, and the platform began rising quicker, flipping every switch in it's wake. "No. Makes it go faster." I took a defensive stance as the announcer's voice flooded the room. "Powerup initiated." Wheatley's optical decreased tremendously in size. "Uh oh. Okay don't panic! Alright? Stop panicking! I can still stop this. Ahh. Oh there's a password. It's fine. I'll just hack it. Not a problem... umm..."
     I panicked, completely ignoring him as the wires in the center of the room began to twitch, and alarms started blaring. GLaDOS's head began sparking and twitching, and was dragged back with a wire to reconnect with the rest of her large, mechanical body. My legs began to tremble.
     Wheatley began to take guesses at a password as her body violently thrashed and was pulled up off of the ground, attempting to re-take it's place, dangling from the ceiling like it had before she was destroyed. "A...A...A...A...A... Umm... A." A buzzer went off, signifying an incorrect password. "Nope. Okay. A... A... A... A... A... C." Another buzzer blared through the room. "No. Wait, did I do B? Do you have a pen? Start writing these down." I looked at the scene in horror.
     GLaDOS had been pulled back up to the cieling, and her metal body moved like it had more life in it. She no longer looked like a lifeless corpse, and I was petrified. "Powerup complete."
     "Okay. Okay. Okay listen: New plan. Act natural act natural. We've done nothing wrong." Wheatley said in a rushed voice, as GLaDOS spun to face us, her yellow eye in the middle of her semi-circular head sparking and flickering on. She flicked her head up and stared at us. "Hello!" Wheatley cheered in an innocent voice.
     "Oh... It's you." She began to speak. Her voice sounded less robotic since the last time I had encountered her, and sounded more... malicious. "You KNOW her?" Wheatley whispered. I put out a hand in front of his face to shut him up. "It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead. You know, after you MURDERED ME." She hissed, a pair of mechanical claw-like arms descending from the cieling. "You did WHAT?" Wheatley whispered once more, before being gripped by one of the arms and yanked out of the breaker plug. I was lifted by the back of my shirt with the other.
     The core cried out in panic. "Oh no! nonononono! Oh no no no... No! Nooo!" GLaDOS gripped him tighter with the claw, shutting him up. "Gah!" I looked down and realized that I had dropped my portal gun. There was no saving me now. She was surely going to kill me.
     "Okay. Look. We both said a lot of things that you're going to regret..." In the midst of speaking, she tossed Wheatley up a fraction of an inch, and brought the claw crushing down on either side of him, creating a terrible metal-on-metal noise. I watched in horror as his optical popped out of the front of his core, and slowly flickered out. He sparked, and GLaDOS tossed his now lifeless body aside like the plastic cup he insisted he was not.
     I let my eyes flood with tears for my friend. He was annoying, sure, but I had grown accustomed to him, and he was my only ticket out of this place...
     I snapped my head in GLaDOS's direction, eyes burning with rage as I struggled to free myself from the claw that held me. GLaDOS could not smile, but I swear I could hear a smirk present as she spoke, just drinking in my reaction. "...But I think we can put our differences behind us. For science. You monster."
     I thrashed against the mechanical arm, trying to get at her. I knew I didn't stand a chance, but she had killed my only friend. I had to make her pay... "I will say, though, that since you went to all the trouble of waking me up, you must really, really love to test." GLaDOS kept a calm, yet amused demeanor with me, and rotated, so that she was dangling me over the incinerator in front of the staircase Wheatley and I had jumped from just moment's earlier. "I love it too. There's just one small thing we need to take care of first." 
     With the end of her sentence, she let the claw release me, and I went down, into the abyss. I hoped the incinerator wasn't active. As I fell, I could almost hear GLaDOS mechanically laughing.

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A/N]
This is kind of a shorter chapter, but it's more packed with uh.. action I guess?

Can we get a moment of silence for maboi, Weatley? He was a good, good core. Now have a lil picture of what Wheatley would look like with tiny legs. (Picture does not belong to me ahdjfhah i just thought it was adorable)

Thank you for reading, if you've made it this far- Have a DELEECIOUS night!