Portal: Love as a Construct

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.