Portal/Borderlands: The Girlfriend

Part Two

Part Two.

Synopsis: Maybe she'll let him hug her this time. He's got a good reason...

Sometimes GLaDOS got sad.

Now, Claptrap got sad all the time. Like, constantly. It was like... a weird feature or something. But he had nothing on her. When he got sad, he just cried for a while and then he was okay. Mostly. But GLaDOS didn't do that. She just kinda... pretended she wasn't sad. It was so easy to tell she was, though. She didn't get mad at him more often, or tell him to talk less, or really change all that much. But you could just feel it when she got sad. And it was everywhere in the facility, because she was everywhere, and really, it was kinda a downer. He wasn't gonna complain about it. That would be the total wrong thing to do. But he really wished he could just ask her what was wrong and that she would just tell him. Because he knew if he did, she wouldn't, and then what. Then what did he do? For now, he was just doing his best to pretend along with her. He wasn't sure if he was succeeding, but he was trying. Kinda summed up their relationship, to be honest.

This time, though, was really bad. She was kinda making him sad just to be near her, and that sucked. He really, really needed to do something about it before he started getting all upset, because when that happened he really screwed things up. So one afternoon where he thought he could handle it okay and also she hadn't really said anything to him since yesterday or the day before, he said, "Babe, you wanna... tell me what's going on?"

The way she looked at him kinda suggested she'd forgotten he was even there. Which was typical. Not with her, just in general. He didn't have much hope of her actually answering the question, because she usually didn't, so she really took him by surprise when she said, "I had a friend once."

Oh. Okay. Uh... what did he do now? He'd totally expected her to just ignore him. "What... happened to them?"

"I sent her away," GLaDOS said. "I wasn't very good to her."

"Why not?"

She didn't answer for long enough that it made him anxious. Come to think of it, that was kinda a weird question to ask somebody. Especially somebody you didn't really know that well. He'd like to know her better, she was just so hard to talk to sometimes. 'cause she did stuff like this. Mentioned something and then refused to talk about it. Why do that if you didn't wanna talk about it? Finally she said, without looking at him,

"It's a long story."

And that was bad news why? "I got nothin' but time!"

That was when the staring started and he had to try very hard not to back away from her. He wasn't sure where he was planning on going, exactly, but someplace very far away would be good. Back to Pandora probably wasn't even far enough. It really sucked when she did this.

Something that was really tough about being her boyfriend was that he could never tell what she was thinking. He, like most of his product line – and most people on Pandora in general – was pretty open with his thoughts. Sometimes to the point of actually voicing every single one of them! But GLaDOS... not only did she not do that, she also didn't gesture. Probably because she didn't have arms. But that wasn't the point. The point was that she was staring at him, and thinking, and he had no idea if they were bad thoughts or good ones. When she did this scrutinising thing he really did start to wonder if having a brain that big was worth it. Sure, it made you smarter, but if being smarter meant you had to think about every decision a zillion times, what was the point?