Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 108. The Kids

Part 108. The Kids

"Hey, Wheatley," Claptrap asked the next day, catching him as he left his morning look out the hole, "I forgot to ask yesterday. How close did we get?"

"Mm?" How close had they gotten to what?

"When we fixed up GLaDOS," he clarified. "You saw the OG version. There isn't a lot we can do about the ceramic, but what about all the other stuff?"

"Uh..." Wheatley frowned and attempted to dredge through the bottom of his memory. "I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't um, don't think about any of that very often. Let me take a look, here, and I'll see if I can find it for you."

"You gotta show me! It's like... bro code."

Wheatley had no idea what that meant, but he was pretty sure she'd looked quite lovely. Not that she wasn't now, of course.

It took him almost five minutes to track down the day he'd been removed from her chassis, and if he was quite honest he was a little taken aback. They had gotten quite close; as close as they could have, as Claptrap had said. And he had only seen her for about two minutes, that one time, so he could be forgiven for having forgotten how, exactly, she had looked back then. But at the same time... he was unsure how it could ever have slipped his mind how utterly beautiful she had once been.

If he had remembered, perhaps he would have made more of an effort to take care of all of that. It wasn't his fault, not really, but at the same time... he had managed not to notice when the difference had been so incredibly stark.

"Wheats?"

"Sorry," he said, shaking himself back to paying attention. "I'm sending it."

"Oh," said Claptrap, presumably once he'd received it. "Geez. You should've warned me she was that hot."

"I didn't know she was," Wheatley said truthfully.

"We did get really close," Claptrap told him. "We only coulda done better if we'd just replaced everything!"

"I'd forgotten she looked like that," Wheatley admitted.

"She was a solid nine," said Claptrap. "It's a shame nobody got to tap that."

"A solid nine?"

"Out of ten."

"And... and what is she now?"

"Now she's a twelve."

Wheatley was taken aback. "You think she's prettier now than, than when she was new?"

Claptrap shrugged. "What can I say? I like 'em older. I'm sure there's a limit to that somewhere, but she sure hasn't hit it yet."

"Is it... would it be bad to say I found her more beautiful before?"

"No," Claptrap answered. "She was closer to your age back then. The age you are now, I mean. That's usually how it is."

Wheatley didn't know anything about any of it, so he elected not to respond.

He went one way and Claptrap another, him back to GLaDOS and Claptrap to... someplace else. Which he was glad of, because he had something to ask her that he needed them to be alone for. Once he had gotten there he found himself pausing in the doorway just to look at her. He did this often, of course, but this time it was a bit different. And a bit confusing, also, because in his memory he was looking at the her then and his optic was looking at the her now, and... he couldn't decide between them. She hadn't been prettier back then, because she was just as pretty now, but at the same time the reverse was true as well! Oh, this was why he didn't bother with any of that. It was all so terribly confusing.