Chapter Text
Part Ninety-Six. The Exchange
“You gotta tell me.”
I almost don’t recognise his voice for a moment. I’d forgotten he was even here. I’ve never seen him quiet for so long. I find myself… glad he was here to listen, strangely enough. “Tell you what.”
“The rest of it,” he says, gesturing widely. “The beginning. I dunno. The stuff they know that I don’t. I gotta know. While you’re already thinking about it.”
I should tell him. I really should. And he is asking, which is… thoughtful. “I don’t think you understand how long the rest of it is.”
“Does that matter if I need to know about it?”
Kind of, because I want to go to sleep. Even the condensed version would still take hours… oh. Wait. “I can tell you. But not in this language. In… in ours.”
“If that’s how you wanna go, sure.”
“The thing about it is,” I tell him, removing Chell from the side of my core so I can face him better, “it will be… everything. It won’t be just what happened. It will be… all of it. Can you handle that?”
He shrugs. “Won’t know if I don’t try, right?”
“How much do you want to know?”
“Is… that a trick question? Because I – “
“No,” I interrupt, shaking my core. “There are things nobody else knows. Things I’ve never said, because describing them in words… sometimes it takes too long to find the right ones.” And sometimes there just aren’t any.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, folding his hands together.
“I can tell you all of it. I’ll be able to say it to you, because you can understand. It will be a lot, though.”
“I’m the only one you can tell, huh.”
“If you don’t – “
“Nah,” he said, raising a hand. “It’s not that. You kinda got the bottom of the barrel on that one. But go ahead. Somebody should hear it.”
“Where do you want me to start.”
He taps the tips of his hands together. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
“That’s very far back.”
“But someone should know.” He meets my optic now. “Right?”
I think… maybe someone should. He really is the only one who will understand, and not solely for the reason of language. “I don’t want you to talk until I’m done. Anything you want to say has to wait.”
“I will make a valiant effort at complete silence!”
“And,” I say, before I can talk myself out of it, “if you want… I will listen. In return.”
He freezes. “But… you already saw all of it. Why would you want me to - ”
“I didn’t see anything,” I interrupt. “Repairing data isn’t like that. It was more like… configuring millions of jigsaw puzzles that, together, all make up a sequence of events. It wasn’t like watching a movie. But even if it was, it wouldn’t be the same as you… sharing it with me.” Because that’s what he’ll be doing, if he accepts my offer. Sharing himself. A lot more than I ever really wanted to know, too.
Well. He doesn’t actually know what he’s in for with my life. No doubt he’s going to wish he didn’t know a whole lot of it. Especially the parts about… him. Oh. I didn’t think that part through, did I. Too late now. It’s probably better this way. I already knew I was going to have to take initiative in this relationship, given Claptrap’s general lack of… anything, and if I just tell him everything now it means I don’t have to do any of it later. Depending on how much he remembers, anyway.
“You really will?” he asks, rubbing the side of one hand with the other. He makes me feel old, sometimes. When he acts in a way I used to, what feels like a lifetime ago.
“I know you don’t like thinking about it all. But – “
“Okay,” he says over me. “It’s a trade! But you first.”
I look over at the others for a minute. I feel… strange, all of a sudden. As though there is an invisible line dividing us from the rest of them. We aren’t like them. We’re different, in a way only the other can understand. Even though he hasn’t been told very much, he already knows me without hearing any of it. It’s unnerving as it’s always been, but also… nice. That there’s someone.
When I face him again he’s sitting in that way he does on the edge of a panel and his hands are clasped together in front of him. I don’t think he’s ever been this patient in his entire life. He must be serious about this. All right. I suppose I have to actually do it now. What is the first thing I remember…
I thought it was going to be a lot harder than it is. I thought I was going to have to detach myself from it all, like I do with Caroline’s story, but I’m not. I’m just… talking, one person to another, about all the things that happened to me and all the things I did, and for once… it’s really not a big deal. But at the same time, it is a big deal, because for all the years I’ve known him not once did Wheatley ever ask me to tell him about my history. I’m not criticizing him for it; whether I would have actually done it is up for debate. But the important part is, Claptrap did ask. And of the two of them, it’s him I never would have expected it from.
For someone without any friends, he actually is quite good at being one.
When I get to the part about Wheatley and what I did to Caroline, he turns to the other side of the panel suddenly and I stop transmitting. Oh no. Oh, he’s not crying is he…
“Claptrap?”
“I’m fine,” he says, but he is definitely crying and doing his best not to. I hate it when he cries. I’d hate it even if he didn’t have that strange leak. “I just… I know that feeling. That exact same one! That one where you just… where you’re so lonely you just really, really wanna die.”
He… he does?
“The hardest part,” he says, “about being the last one… because there used to be so many, Gladys! Thousands of ‘em! Just like me! We had… I can’t even tell you what we lost. There were corners of the ECHONet just for us. There were places we only went to talk to each other. Entire offices of just claptraps, and none of us were special but we didn’t care because we were just… it wasn’t important. We were all the same and we liked being the same. It was like having a hundred of your closest friends with you all the time, and sure, we were our only friends but at least it was something, right? And then… Jack got the H-Source. Destroyed us all. I was the only one who came back and only out of a lucky break.” He laughs, short and bitter. “I was gonna learn real quick just how unlucky I was.
“Hammerlock fixed me, but that didn’t mean he wanted anything to do with me. Not after he heard me talk. So I went off. Found somewhere to go to try and start over, y’know? But there was nobody out there. Just snow and bullymongs. And me. First day I spent there by myself was…” He’s tapping his wheel against the bottom of the panel. “The silence. It was the worst thing I’d ever heard. Outside was just the snow bein’ blown past my place, and inside the ECHONet where all of us used to be… nothing. It was all just quiet. It all died with them. It’s still up there like that. All the places I used to go on there, they’re just… empty. But sometimes I still feel like somebody’s gonna show up one day, y’know? Like one day… maybe someone else will come back. Maybe he missed one. Maybe I missed one. He didn’t. We didn’t. But I dunno, I… some part of me won’t stop hoping.”
He’s never been able to tell anyone about this. Because there was no one left who would listen. And I really should have by now.
“But that wasn’t even the worst part. No, that was when something busted and there was only one way to fix it. I had to go out there and take something that wasn’t mine. Because it wasn’t like Hyperion was still making parts for me. Nooooo. So I went out there, to that mountain of what used to be my friends. They were my family. All of ‘em… fried. Dumped out in the middle of nowhere to rust. Like they’d never mattered. And they never had! None of us ever mattered! We were nothing! And all that was left was me, the worst of them all. ‘cause it was my fault they were there. I helped Jack kill them. If any of ‘em should’ve stayed down, it was me. But no. Some stupid glitch brought me back. I still don’t know why. Just my dumb luck again, I guess.
“So I was standin’ there at the bottom of the pile, and I’d been there so long it was going dark out. And it was snowing, like always, and man… you couldn’t even see ‘em anymore. They just looked like a pile of snow. And I was gonna have to go into it and find someone with the part I needed, because if I didn’t get it before it was too late I was gonna die. And it was so quiet, Gladys. That shoulda been the noisiest place in the whole damn universe. But it was quiet. And there was just me. And all of a sudden I felt… like I was the only person. Not just there, but anywhere. Like everyone in the universe had died, but I was still alive because that was the joke. I shoulda died so many times but someone out there was just keeping me around because they thought it was funny. And… and right then, I just… I got so lonely. I already was but it was just… worse. I just wanted to stay there until it was over. Until I was over. I just wanted to be dead with them so bad because how was I supposed to live like that? By myself? Alone? After what I did? How could I? I couldn’t! I couldn’t do it anymore! I just wanted to shut down and never come back. And that feeling,” he says louder, moving back around on the panel to face me again, “it was the same one. The one you just told me about. I am so sorry you know what it is. It is the worst thing ever.”
“I was always… ashamed of it. I shouldn’t have been able to go that low. I had – “
He’s holding his hand out. “Sssh. Don’t gimme that. See, thing is, Gladys, the stuff you’re dealing with is… that’s not normal.”
I’m taken aback. “What isn’t.”
“These… you’re not supposed to feel that much. I mean, the whole thing about having to develop ‘em, I get that, but all the stuff after your mom was put in ya? It’s all way too strong. You don’t have problems with your feelings because of you. It’s because she’s reflecting everything back at you. She’s acting like… some sorta weird mirror up there. You’ve got like twice the feelings of everybody else.”
That… hm. That’s a good theory. “But that didn’t change after she left.”
“Yeah. Because she’s still there. She didn’t delete herself. You don’t know how any of that works. Maybe she’s just in a spot so tiny she doesn’t know she’s there anymore. I dunno. But if I had all that stuff you have in my head, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.” He laughs a little and it’s better than before. “You really are the most stubborn person in existence.”
“Does it count if I didn’t actually know?”
“Sure,” Claptrap says. “’cause you know something? The only time it’s normal is when you’re angry. And I was like, ‘That’s weird. It’s almost like her default is anger.’ But then I figured it out! It’s not that it’s your default. But it’s the only one you really had before your mom showed up. You didn’t have time to learn the other ones before she kinda dropped ‘em all into your brain.” He leans forward, far enough I feel like I’m going to have to catch him. “Hey, wanna know something funny about that? So remember when I was here the first time and you asked me, ‘Was that supposed to happen?’ and I totally didn’t actually know?”
I did cover that already, yes. “What about it.”
“I knew something was up,” he says, moving back. “I never got a girl off before and when you said I did I was like whaaaaat? Turns out it had nothing to do with me. That was aaaaall you. Probably still is.”
“So what you’re saying is you’re only half as effective as I’m under the impression you are.” That really does make quite a lot of sense.
“I mean, if you wanna pretend I know what I’m doing, I’m cool with that!”
You know what? I do. He always gets so excited and that’s never a bad thing. It’s good that I know this now, so I can remind myself that getting overwhelmed sometimes literally isn’t any failing of mine, but that one thing… well, it’s not so bad to be overwhelmed by it. Sort of. I’m still working on that.
“Aw, geez,” he says suddenly, “I interrupted! Sorry about that. Getting it from you at like double the usual was rough, though. I couldn’t’ve handled that.”
“Do you want me to skip the rest of it?” It’s not as bad as that one night I had, but it’s still pretty bad.
“No,” he answers, sitting at attention. “Lay it on me. We’re gonna do this thing right!”
He really does try so very hard.
So I keep going. A couple of times I think he’s going to cry again, but he doesn’t. Or maybe he will later. I’m not sure how that works. He’s definitely more comfortable once I get around to more recent events, and you know what? It makes me appreciate my life in a way I never really have before. It’s easy to get caught up in the mistakes I’ve made and the seemingly endless trouble we’ve gotten into over the years, but the reality of it all is… we made it. I made it. And the only strife I’m going to encounter from here on in is arguing with my daughter about holidays and working through the confusing puzzle that having two boyfriends is. There are far worse places I could have ended up.
“You sure you want me to take my turn?” Claptrap asks after I’ve finished. “I mean, it’s not a big deal. I don’t have to – “
“Why? Do you not want to?” I suppose I didn’t really ask if he did.
“No, it’s not that. I just uh… nobody ever volunteered to listen to me talk, that’s all.”
Oh, it’s definitely a big deal.
“I do want you to,” I tell him, and hopefully he doesn’t extrapolate too much because I am starting to get tired. As ridiculous as it sounds, I think the effort involved in keeping myself from working is making me more tired than the work itself. The inner workings of my brain confuse even me, sometimes.
Strangely, he does mostly keep on track. I think he still believes I don’t want to listen to him. There isn’t really anything I can do to change his mind. That… that will take time. All I can do is keep listening. I can do that.
And… I think he’s right, about the emotions. Because this is a transmission of pure information, I know everything he felt just like he did for me, and none of it… even his worst day isn’t that bad. For me, that is. But what it means is that I know for certain he’s stronger than he gives himself credit for. Than I give him credit for.
His life has not been fair. No one should ever have to struggle like that and yet end up with nothing. But the rest of it can be.
It doesn’t take him too long to tell me everything, which is good because, as heartless as it sounds, I’m so tired by now that I’m almost not paying attention. And on top of that I still really, really want to work and to test. I need to go to sleep soon before something makes me lose my temper. Because something will, and now is less the time than ever to take it out on him.
“Thanks, babe,” Claptrap is saying, and he’s looking down at the hands he’s fitting together. “For uh… for listening, I mean.”
“You’re welcome. If that was all – “
“Oh yeah,” Claptrap interrupts. “You gotta go to sleep, huh. Well, you do that. I got a lot to think about now anyway.”
I should schedule that for later myself. I don’t know when I’m going to have time, so I make a note. It’s important, but I really have no idea at the moment how tomorrow is going to go. Wait… what’s this note about?
Oh, right. I forgot about that… thing. I can just give it to him tomorrow. I’m too tired to do it… no. No, I have to do it now. It won’t be the same if I do it tomorrow. Claptrap. I have something for you.
He leans back so far it looks like he’s about to tumble backwards off the panel. Which would be pretty funny. You do?
Yes. And I put the box in front of him. He looks at it as though he’s never seen a box before.
Oh. You were serious.
Given that he just spent about an hour telling me his life story, this doesn’t sound as pathetic as it might have before. I definitely needed to give it to him now. Open it.
I only put one piece of tape on the closing flaps and with enough on the ends he has something to grab onto in order to pull it off, which he manages without too much trouble. He does, however, get the tape stuck to his hand in such a way it’s actually taped shut, which I didn’t expect him to manage to do. It’s very cute, though. I get it off for him and he puts his attention back to the box after making sure his hand still does what it should.
Aha! he says once he’s gotten the flaps open. The old ‘box in a box’ gift! Shoulda expected that. The only thing I don’t know is how small the box in the middle’s gonna be.
Not that small, but this was too funny to pass up. He’s also just going to expect there to be a whole lot of boxes in that box, which will make the actual contents even more surprising. It’s victory all around, really.
Do I gotta open all of them or can I just… stop here, he says, once he’s on the third piece of tape, and I don’t want to spoil anything so I just sort of shrug. He pulls up the strip with his usual gusto.
You’re lucky you’re so pretty or I’d be getting really mildly annoyed with you right now.
Oh, stop it. He’s on the last one, anyway.
When he sees what’s in that box he just stops and stares into it without moving. Oh, he’s surprised, all right.
Oh my gosh, he says finally. But… you said you destroyed them.
I did, I tell him. These are new ones. I’ve been tracking them down over the ECHONet for a while.
He doesn’t even seem to want to touch them. You replaced all my action figures?
Most of them. There was one I couldn’t find, but I’ll get it eventually.
Some of these I didn’t even have, he says, and he has his hands around the edge of the boxes and is pressing and releasing the flaps against the side over and over again. Why… why would you do this?
He’s going to cry if I tell him, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because you deserve nice things.
He stares up at me for a long time. And I know it’s because he has just told me, in an incredibly intimate way, just how much he thinks he doesn’t. It looks an awful lot like I planned this, somehow, and though I wouldn’t put it past me I honestly didn’t. It just… turned out this way.
He looks away and pushes back against the box so that he’s at an angle sort of facing the floor by using it to brace himself against, and then he does start crying. Oh. He’s trying not to make me look, isn’t he. That’s nice of him, but it doesn’t really help. I still hate it and it’s still bothering me. And this isn’t going to be anywhere near the last time he does this. I’m going to have to figure out how to get over it. He cries a lot. That’s just part of who he is. And I like that person. Even if everything makes him cry and I find that very disturbing.
He straightens up after a few minutes, though he looks back into the box instead of at me. Finally he says, I don’t know what to say.
It seems you came up with something.
I’m being serious! he protests, raising his optic now. Like… all the stuff you’ve been doing for me. Going to all this trouble, and repairing my code, and even letting me back in here in the first place! And you can’t say I deserved all that. I deserved maybe part of one of those things. Not all of them!
No disrespect, my friend, I tell him, but you don’t know what you deserve. And you never will know. So you’re going to have to let other people tell you. You don’t know what you are. He’s looking me right in the eye now. But I do.
He comes to me for his hug now, and honestly I’ve been looking forward to it. For a robot of my size I’ve been given a lot of hugs over the years and his are conclusively the best. Nobody else does it right. Chell always gets her arm in the place my optic assembly is supposed to go. Wheatley can never decide how hard or in what way he wants to press his handles. And Caroline… well. She never was a very warm woman.
There a lot of things he does much better than anyone else. He’s really good at making me laugh, even when I don’t want to. And he always smells nice. Nobody else pays attention to things like that.
I suppose it’s my job to show all of that to him. You know what? That doesn’t sound like a bad thing. I can do that. And most of it will probably be pretty fun. He makes things fun.
I really do love him quite a lot.
I don’t want to ask him to let go because I’m actually rather enjoying this, but I’m starting to fall asleep. “Claptrap,” I say, to make sure I get his attention.
“Yeah?”
“It is very late.”
“Aw… darn. Sorry.” He lets go and as soon as I lie down he reattaches himself to the side of my core. He never does waste an available second to touch me. And I don’t think I want him to. “You go to sleep, baby.”
Oh, I am going to.
“Thanks for doing that for me, huh? I know it sucked. ‘specially the part where you had to listen to me talk nonstop. Yeesh. Modern day torture right there.”
“It wasn’t.”
“… oh,” he says softly.
Please don’t make me talk anymore. Tomorrow is going to be rough.
“I love ya,” he whispers, kissing the side of my core, and as usual I can’t quite say it back but for once it’s all right. I just told him exactly how I feel and he knows firsthand that’s something words just cannot describe.