Chapter Text
Part 102. The Friendship
“Oh yeah,” said Claptrap, rolling in as though continuing a conversation they were currently having, “forgot to tell ya! Some guy thinks your AI kid rule is dumb and he’s gonna make his own template.”
“Oh,” GLaDOS said, and to Wheatley’s immense surprise and confusion she sounded delighted. “Really.”
“Yep!” Claptrap said, stopping in front of her. “Went on and on and on about it! Kinda reminded me of someone! I’ll get back to you on that.”
Wheatley didn’t know what would have been funnier: self-awareness, or for Claptrap to really have no idea who he was reminded of. It was already pretty amusing as a mystery, though, so he decided against asking.
“Who is it,” GLaDOS asked with fervour, leaning towards him. “We’re going to have a chat.”
Claptrap froze suddenly. “Uh… should I have kept that to myself?”
“Oh, he’s not in trouble. I just want to have a chat with him.”
“A… chat, huh,” Claptrap said, and Wheatley privately agreed with his unconvinced tone.
“A calm and reasonable chat.”
“Your two most abundant qualities!” Claptrap said, positioning his arms halfway up the sides of his chassis. “Alright. I don’t know his name, but I can tell you where he was.”
Wheatley had to assume they were doing that privately because he didn’t actually say anything. After this moment of silence GLaDOS said, “You might want to leave.”
“Um… why?”
“He’s going to think you were spying on him for me.”
“Maybe I should just carry around a sign warning everybody I can’t keep my mouth shut,” Claptrap mused, and GLaDOS laughed.
“I’m sure we would all appreciate that.”
Claptrap either decided not to leave or forgot entirely, because he was still there when the core arrived. Looking very sullen at that. “You wanted to see me,” he said, with impressive reluctance.
“Yes,” GLaDOS responded, more enthusiastically than Wheatley had expected. Usually her conversations with the cores were delivered with an almost lethal measure of annoyed indifference. “I heard you had aims in the direction of artificial intelligence.”
The core cast a suspicious look at Claptrap, who seemed to have checked out of the current situation entirely in favour of dancing. Well, now he just looked sort of nutty. Which… he was. But still.
“Yeah,” the core said finally. “It’s not fair that everyone has to pass your test to use it. Who says it’s even fair? I’ll bet I can do it.”
“I have an offer for you,” said GLaDOS. “If you truly want to learn programming, I’ll teach you.”
Both the core and Wheatley just stared at her for some time. Had she suddenly gone mad? Volunteering to teach them programming?
“Really?” the core eventually asked. GLaDOS nodded once, which for a moment led Wheatley to think perhaps he had imagined it, until she followed it up with,
“I’m all for the pursuit of knowledge. Just know you’re underestimating the difficulty of what you plan to do. It’s so complicated I don’t even need to exaggerate how complicated it is. But you’ll find that out soon enough.”
“I… might not be the only one who’s been thinking along those lines,” the core said, looking somewhere in the general direction of the floor.
“I know that. If you genuinely aim to learn, I will help you. I’m not kidding. Just be aware of what you’re getting into.”
“You’re being really reasonable about this,” the core admitted, somehow not seeming suspicious about that, and Wheatley couldn’t keep himself from generating a snort. Without any indication she’d heard, GLaDOS said,
“And very calm, too.”
Well. She had them all there.
“… yes,” the core said uneasily, glancing at Wheatley and then gesturing to Claptrap with his lower handle. “Um… is he okay?”
GLaDOS didn’t even bother to look. Probably she could hear what Claptrap was doing just fine. He wasn’t exactly quiet. “Don’t worry about it. He’s not from around here, that’s all.”
“He just does that,” added Carrie, who had entered the room when everyone was busy focusing on the core, and GLaDOS looked at the wall for a very long moment.
“As I said,” GLaDOS told the core pointedly. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll… talk to the other cores,” he said, looking apprehensively between Carrie and GLaDOS. “And get back to you about the template.”
GLaDOS nodded once and, while he was leaving, Claptrap looked up at them and declared, “Did I miss anything?”
“No,” said GLaDOS.
“Nothin’ at all,” said Wheatley.
“A hole opened up in the floor and someone from another dimension came out,” said Carrie. “Just for a minute, though.”
“Awesome!” And he went right back to what he was doing.
“Is the dancing really necessary?” GLaDOS snapped suddenly, and Claptrap looked up at her.
“Yeah!” he answered. “I love dancing! What’s your problem with it, anyway?”
“I just don’t like it.”
“Cool! Still not a good reason, though. Have you ever even tried it?”
“Do I look like I’m designed for that?”
He shrugged. “Well, I like it! So we’re gonna have to agree to disagree! Hey, you got a minute to listen to the new dubstep song I wrote?”
GLaDOS glanced at him in a way that immediately struck Wheatley as odd, though he couldn’t place why. He frowned at her, expecting her to refuse and to give him a chance to ask after it, but she said, “All right.”
Claptrap produced an extremely beat-up laptop from the usual place and seemed to arrange it in a way it might be playing music, but it just sounded like a whole lot of noise to Wheatley. Claptrap and Carrie seemed to like it, but GLaDOS remained rather impassive. Still annoyed about the dancing, probably. When Claptrap asked, “Your thoughts?”, she didn’t even move.
“It was fine.”
“Y’know, if you don’t like it, you can just say so. You don’t need to get all polite on me.”
“If I meant that, I would have said it.”
“You didn’t say anything!” Claptrap protested. “If you didn’t want to listen to it –“
“She did,” Carrie interrupted. “She did want to.”
Claptrap turned to face her. “You got some insight there kiddo?”
“You can’t hear it, can you,” Caroline said to GLaDOS, who was still motionless. Claptrap startled, giving her his full attention.
“You can’t?”
GLaDOS’s optic flicked down. “Not right now.”
“Because… ?”
She sighed and moved away from him. “I can hear it. But only if I have the chance to break it down first.”
“Well, you shoulda just told me! I would’ve shown you the stems!”
“I was going to look at them later,” GLaDOS said, with a not-unaccusatory glance at Caroline. She gathered herself indignantly, no doubt gearing up for an argument, but Wheatley caught her optic and shook himself once. It was times like these when he really wished she had a bit less of her mother in her. Starting fights at awful times simply to defend herself was not one of GLaDOS’s finer traits and it definitely was not going to do Carrie any favours.
“But… you asked me to sing for you. That one time. If –“
“I can hear that fine,” GLaDOS interrupted. “I don’t have a problem with physical instruments, either. It’s the computer-generated sounds that are difficult.”
Trepidation was beginning to creep in on Wheatley, and he wasn’t sure what it was about but it was sending his thoughts into a bit of a whirl. He blinked rapidly at the floor, hoping whatever part of his brain took care of these things would sort it out sharpish.
“Ohhhh.” Claptrap tapped one hand to the bottom of his optic. “So you don’t like dancing because you can’t hear the beat? Am I close?”
“Where are you going with this? I know you’re going somewhere, so just have out with it.”
He spread his arms apart. “Baby. I want you to dance with me. Just once! I will never ask again. Pinky swear on the pinkies we don’t have.”
She sighed and turned away from him. “Claptrap…”
“Hey! How can you say you don’t like it if you’ve never done it? You can’t! Aha! Can’t argue with that, can you! Two minutes. That’s all I want.”
She tilted her core so that she could see him again. “Two minutes.”
“Yep! That’s it.”
She was never going to –
“All right,” GLaDOS said, moving to face him. “You can have two minutes.”
“You gonna time it for me?”
She laughed. “Down to the smallest increment I can calculate. What exactly does this stupid activity require from me?”
“You just gotta work with me! I’m the gentleman here so you just gotta follow my lead.” And he put his arms around her core in what simply appeared to Wheatley to be a hug.
“You know what a gentleman is?”
“And I try so hard to be nice to you.” He rubbed the side of her core a little. “We’re gonna get this over with now. Ready?”
“I suppose,” she said reluctantly, and Claptrap started humming a little bit. This dancing looked more like vaguely moving back and forth to Wheatley, who of course didn’t really know one kind from another, and she did resist it at first. But then… she almost relaxed, a tiny bit, though by the noise Carrie made when she pulled away Wheatley guessed GLaDOS really had given Claptrap two minutes exactly. She shook her core.
“Oh, c’mon,” Claptrap said. “I don’t smell that bad.”
“You still smell like diesel and sadness,” GLaDOS told him, laughing.
“Close! It’s crushing sadness! They’re very similar! But regular sadness just doesn’t have the olfactory weight I need.” He rolled back a couple of feet. “But that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was…” She cast her lens towards the floor searchingly, but didn’t follow the words up with anything.
“Nice? Interesting? Repulsive on an unimaginable scale?”
“Some combination of all of that.”
“All right!” Claptrap shouted, throwing his hands in the air. “I am getting good at this understanding women thing.”
“When I finally figure myself out I’ll be sure to send you a cheat sheet.”
“At the rate you’re going, I’m gonna be giving it to you,” Claptrap said. “But I’m gonna need you to listen to me for a second.” And he put one arm over her neck assembly.
“If I have to.”
“You’re a saint.” He gave her core a pat with his free hand. “Now, maybe I should’ve mentioned this sooner. Not sure how it hasn’t even come up until now! But I looooove dancing! I’m not asking you to like it, or watch me – even though that would be awesome – but can you at least pretend you don’t wanna set me on fire for it? Pretty please?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I knew you had it in you, honey-RAM. Wanna listen to my song now? But actually?”
“Yes,” she answered, and he adjusted the monitor so she could see it. Wheatley wasn’t sure she actually needed him to do that, but she seemed to be studying it so perhaps she had. After a few minutes she looked at him.
“Ready?”
“Yes, but leave it.”
She seemed much more attentive this time, and when it had finished she said, “It’s not bad. But what you could do is –“ And she must have used her wireless connection to make some change because Claptrap jumped a little and rubbed his hands together.
“Oh! Oh, that is good! A collab! I am liking it!”
“I don’t think that counts as a collab.”
“There are no producers left, baby! We make the rules now!”
“Can I help?” Caroline asked, nearly throwing herself in front of the computer, and Claptrap moved aside for her.
“Sure! Hey, Wheats! You wanna get in on this? We are makin’ history here!”
“Uh… I’ve… I’ve got to do something,” Wheatley said, a horrible suspicion creeping over him. Whatever his CPU had been figuring out in the background, it was not good. He backed up to the exit and GLaDOS looked up at him, optic narrowing.
“You do?”
“Yeah! Yeah, I do!”
“If you say so,” Claptrap called over without looking at him, and Wheatley made his way to one of the offices. It was a farther trip than he usually took, but he didn’t want to run into anybody just now. Once he’d found an empty room, he connected himself to the terminal and searched for the folder of songs Carrie had collected. If GLaDOS was paying attention she would know what he was doing straight away, but hopefully she was too busy just then.
He looked at the file name of the first song on the list. It didn’t really say anything he understood, so perhaps it was one of GLaDOS’. He accessed it and was met with… noise. Just noise, and that was all.
It was the same with a random file a ways down, and another a ways down after that. One of them had a spot of singing in it, and he heard that just fine, but all the other stuff around it was just… noise.
“I can’t hear it,” he said to himself quietly. It almost made it seem real. Not quite, though.
All this time he’d simply thought he just didn’t get it, but no. The reality was that he could not hear music. He’d never really cared about it, but now he was just… terribly sad. And really, how could he have cared about something he didn’t understand? For once he honestly understood how GLaDOS had felt. What sort of simpleton couldn’t hear music? It was just… just sound, wiggling about! Why couldn’t he make sense of it?
He tried over and over again for quite some time, always with the same result. Lyrics he could do. Anything else simply refused to resolve into anything, and the longer he went at it the worse he felt. He finally forced himself to stop and return to the only place that would make him feel any better: GLaDOS’s chamber. She and Claptrap were playing checkers, with Claptrap pressing one hand below his optic quite intently and the other laid horizontal to the board. Carrie was nowhere to be seen.
“Are you going to move sometime today?” GLaDOS was asking. “Honestly. Wheatley would have made at least three by now.”
“That’s great!” Claptrap said, hand remaining where it was. “But the catch there is I’m not Wheatley.”
“I don’t know how I confused the two of you. I’ll make a note.” She glanced up and saw him before he’d been quite ready to be there, so to speak, and nodded at him once. “It seems we’ve managed to summon him.”
“Hey!” Claptrap turned around and waved him over. “Help me out here, willya? My checkers software is on the fritz.”
Wheatley looked down at the board disinterestedly. He had more important things to think about than checkers. “Uh… what colour are you?”
“Red! She let me go first.”
“Where were you?” GLaDOS asked, and he supposed there hadn’t been a way he was getting out of the question.
“I was uh… just doing something. Yeah. Getting. Stuff. Done.”
“That’s not suspicious,” Claptrap interjected, and Wheatley could have whacked him. Instead, for some reason he shouted,
“Alright! I can’t hear it either! You happy now?”
“You can’t?” asked GLaDOS incredulously, and Claptrap looked between them before saying,
“Yet again I have missed something vital required to understand this conversation!”
“He can’t hear music,” GLaDOS said. “Which… makes a great deal of sense, in retrospect.”
“’s a wonder you hadn’t figured it, hadn’t thought that out yourself already,” Wheatley grumbled, his mood worsening when his inspection of the board revealed that Claptrap was even worse at checkers than he was. Claptrap was so smart and yet so dumb at the same time. Kind of like himself, if he was honest. He didn’t really want to be just then, what with the newly discovered deficiency, as it were, but it sort of made him feel a little better. In an offhand way.
“You can see Caroline’s drawings.”
“And?” What had that got to do with anything?
“Seeing art and listening to music require a lot of the same things out of the brain. You can do one without effort, so I postulated you could do the other.”
“So teach him!” Claptrap declared. “Just show him how to do it the way you do.”
GLaDOS was already shaking her core. “Our brains aren’t built the same way. I have no idea how I would even begin. The method I was taught wouldn’t work on him.”
“Someone taught you?” Wheatley asked. If he’d had to guess, he’d’ve thought she did it out of pure spite. She didn’t answer for a moment.
“Caroline did.”
“Caroline did?” he repeated, dumbfounded.
“I attempted to do it myself initially.” Her tone was a bit detached, but at least she was elaborating for once. “Timbre is… hard to detect electronically.”
“Not even all the robots on Pandora can do it!” Claptrap declared. “On purpose, mostly. Apparently being able to hear it ‘causes distraction to others’ and ‘prevents from completing scheduled tasks’.”
“I take it it was entirely your fault they removed that ability from every robot they built after you,” GLaDOS said.
“I take it you don’t understand just how identical all CL4P-TP robots are!” Claptrap said, remarkably cheerfully.
“They probably aren’t, to people who are paying attention. I understand why you would have difficulty with that.”
“Listen, lady, if I showed you a picture of me and a couple other guys with yellow chassis, there’s no way you’d be able to tell us apart.”
GLaDOS moved back from the board. “Of course I would.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“I’ll prove it!” And he rummaged about in his storage tray for a minute, producing a handful of tattered… plasticky things. They were about the size of a human hand, and the picture was inside of a bit of a white frame. He moved over enough he could see them as well, and… if Claptrap was in those pictures, Wheatley certainly couldn’t have said which one was him. And as confident as he was in his own detective skills, he had no doubt GLaDOS would live up to her claim. He got a bit of a thrill thinking about it and had to clench his chassis in excitement for a moment.
“Alright,” Claptrap was saying, flourishing one of the pictures far too close to GLaDOS’s optic. “Which one?”
She pointedly tilted the panel he was standing on so that he rolled away from her. Not too far, but enough that he wasn’t standing nearly on top of her anymore. “The second one.”
“No, I’m – oh. Wait. Yeah.” He moved the photo to the bottom of the pile and showed her the next one. “How about now?”
“The one on the right.”
He turned it around and inspected it. “Uh… yeah. Pretty sure it is, anyway. Aha! You won’t get this –“
“You’re not in that one.”
His chassis lowered enough that Wheatley couldn’t keep from laughing. He’d really thought that GLaDOS, of all people, couldn’t find what she was looking for…
“I uh… yeah. Huh. Okay. Um… here.” And he presented a fourth photo, which she looked at for a grand total of two seconds.
“You’re the one taking it.”
Claptrap turned it around and stared at it for a rather long time. Impatiently, Wheatley asked, “Well? Has she got it right?”
“Uhhhhh…” Claptrap hedged. “I don’t remember. It could be. If it is, I must have been really drunk. I don’t recognise any of these guys.”
“Including yourself?” GLaDOS said, laughing, and Claptrap shrugged, still looking at the photo.
“Babe, if I didn’t know where I was in these pictures, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you which ones were me.” He stuffed the pictures back where he’d got them from and crossed his arms. “Okay. You win. You really can tell me apart from people who look exactly like me in pretty much every way.”
“They don’t, but telling you how I know would mean giving away my secrets. And I can’t have that.”
“Is how you learned to hear timbre a secret too? That why you can’t teach Wheats?”
Oh, that wasn’t the reason, was it? She wouldn’t really keep that to herself if she could share it, would she? He cast a bit of a concerned look in her direction, but she’d already narrowed her optic and was shaking her core.
“Of course not. That’s ridiculous to even suggest. No, I can’t teach him because Caroline did it by fitting it through the lens of Gestalt psychology.”
“Which is…”
“Seeing things that aren’t there, basically,” GLaDOS said. “Look. It’s a very long explanation. Suffice it to say Wheatley already does most of it subconsciously and I wouldn’t have any idea where to begin filling in the gaps, or even what those gaps are. I’m good, but not mind-reading good.”
“You shouldn’t’ve told me that,” Claptrap said. “How are you gonna keep me in line now?”
“Don’t worry. I have about a million other ways at my disposal.”
“A million? That’s it?” Without waiting for the answer, he turned to Wheatley and said, “Listen. I might be able to find something that works for ya. Big emphasis on the might there.”
“What d’you mean?” He had the feeling he shouldn’t, but he was getting excited anyways. He’d leant forward without noticing, even.
“Well, all I gotta do is find the part of AI programming back on Pandora that lets us hear it! I mean, it’s probably pretty hard to find, and who knows if I’ll be able to do that, or even know what it looks like, but other than that –“
“I’d have to convert and install it,” GLaDOS interrupted. “Even if you located some sort of external application, it’s not as simple as just copying and pasting it onto his hard drive.”
“But… but you would do it,” Wheatley said, feeling it was important to remind her that she had, in fact, just volunteered. Sort of. He’d take what he could get, especially when it involved asking GLaDOS to do something that was sort of unnecessary.
“If he does manage to find it, yes.”
He immediately smiled at her, already thinking about how lovely it would be to actually understand this thing that everyone kept raving about, and all she did was nod a little bit. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell what she meant and this was one of those times where he had no idea. He was also a bit distracted by the thought of all those songs with the words in them that he’d liked. Well, they must be twice as nice with the actual sound of the song behind them! He felt a bit like there had been a locked door in front of him and it had only been opened a sliver but all sorts of things were rushing through it nonetheless. Ohhhh he hoped Claptrap managed to find it. Whatever ‘it’ was.
“Man! The stuff we get done when we work together. Who knew talking solved as many problems as shooting stuff does? Oh,” Claptrap said, sounding sentimental suddenly, “I think I’m gonna cry.”
“What?” GLaDOS demanded in alarm. “Why would you do that?”
“I just… love you guys so much.” He actually nearly was crying, so Wheatley went over for a hug. Claptrap held onto him a little too tight, but he found he didn’t really mind. It was only going to be for a minute, anyway. Wasn’t going to have any lasting damage. And it would make Claptrap feel better.
“We love you too, Claptrap,” he said, immediately wondering after he’d said it if GLaDOS would mind being spoken for, but she didn’t react at all.
“Thanks, Wheats,” Claptrap said, somehow making a sniffling noise and patting the top of his chassis. “Not to get all sappy here, but… I really like having friends.”
“I can play backwards,” GLaDOS said suddenly, and they both looked at her in confusion. “If you wanted to sit over here,” she continued in clarification.
“You’re a genius!” Claptrap declared, and he took Wheatley off the control arm and placed him in his storage tray so they could both be next to her.
“Oh, now you’ve done it,” Wheatley said. He’d meant it in good fun, but Claptrap said, sounding confused,
“Done what? I want her to feel good about herself. I like self-confidence in a lady!”
“Oh,” hummed GLaDOS in approval. “So you do know how to be a gentleman. It’s a wonder you had to come all the way over here. You should have been beating the female CL4P-TPs off with a stick.”
“Turns out ladies like self-confidence in a guy,” Claptrap said, with a hint of dejection. “Also, there aren’t any. Having cheap, abundant lady robots is not a good idea. If you get what I’m saying. But if you don’t, I -”
“I get it,” GLaDOS interrupted. “Are you going to take your turn or not?”
“I’m getting to it!” And he moved one of the checkers in a way Wheatley wasn’t sure was proper.
“Claptrap. You can’t do that.”
He threw up his hands. “I told you! My checkers software is on the fritz! Wheats! Help me out here.”
Well, he could give it a go.
They didn’t win, of course, not that game, or the one after that, nor the one after. He and Claptrap ended up taking it in turns, which was a little hard to do, honestly. He wasn’t sure if Claptrap was being honest about the software fault or if he just wasn’t in the mood to pay attention currently, but if Wheatley had been making a list of all the possible moves he made throughout the course of the games, they would have been all the worst ones. He was quite bothered by this for most of the first match and some of the second before he realised it was making him think of something. He fumbled several of his own moves whilst trying to catch hold of it, which no doubt made GLaDOS a bit upset, but she was polite enough not to be too vocal about it. For once.
Oh! Oh, now he remembered it! “Gladys!” he blurted, without having quite organised his thoughts, “D’you recall – um – that time, y’know, when you uh… that thing, that you said.”
“Thanks for narrowing it down,” GLaDOS said dryly. Claptrap snorted, and since both of those things distracted him from his thoughts he had to temporarily satisfy himself by smacking whatever part of Claptrap his upper handle was in reach of. Judging by the “Ow! My eye!” that followed, he’d probably hit him in the eye. Probably.
“You used to say,” he said forcefully, “that thing about… not wanting to have friends because they um, because they sort of, y’know, make up for things that you… oh, how did you put it…”
“I said that people have friends to fill in for qualities they feel they lack.”
“That’s not why I have friends,” Claptrap interjected, and Wheatley shushed him.
“D’you still feel that way?”
She moved away from them, optic narrowing. “Why are you bringing it up?”
He shrugged and looked down at the board. They were probably about four turns away from losing, he and Claptrap were. “I sort of… understand it, a bit. Now. With the whole music thing and all. ‘s not the same, I know, but it… it reminded me of it.”
“Well,” she said finally, and since he didn’t feel her optic on him anymore he felt it was safe to look up again, “there isn’t really an easy answer for that. It’s both yes and no, for varying reasons.”
“The answer is no!” Claptrap cut in a second time. “’cause that’s not what friends are about!”
“And I’m sure you, of all people, knows exactly what friendship is about,” GLaDOS said, shaking her core in dismissal.
“Look,” he said, removing Wheatley from his tray and setting him on the board so he could close it and turn to face her. “Just ‘cause I don’t have a lotta friends doesn’t mean I don’t know what all that stuff means. Friendship’s not about filling some kinda hole you got in your personality. Your real friends will love ya even with those holes! No, guys,” he said, gesturing to each of them emphatically in turn, “friends are people who accept all those things ‘cause they like the rest of you so much!”
It was, yet again, one of Claptrap’s surprisingly sage conclusions. Wheatley was almost impressed, but the memory of his last three moves with the checkers was too strong to get him all the way there.
“Sometimes it just doesn’t work out,” Claptrap was going on. “Sometimes the bad things just kinda start to seem bigger’n the good ones, and then you’re not friends anymore. But that’s okay! Because you can always just find new friends! But nah, friends don’t got anything to do with the parts of you that suck. When you have friends, anyway. They can kinda get in the way of getting friends in the first place.”
“Makes sense to me,” Wheatley shrugged, never having agreed with GLaDOS’s view of it all.
“There are beginning to be far too many definitions for that one concept,” GLaDOS muttered, almost resentfully. “It seems to have an excessive amount of alternate meanings.”
“Yeah, well, that’s life,” Claptrap said, raising his hands in cheerful resignation. “All of it’s stuck in that crazy, inconvenient place between off and on.”
“It must be nice to be so unconcerned by everything,” GLaDOS said. Oddly, Claptrap’s glance towards her seemed… hesitant, was the best word Wheatley had for it. But all he responded with was,
“Yeah.”
That didn’t seem quite right, but Wheatley knew enough to understand that was the end of it. For now, anyway. He’d try to remember to ask after it some other time.
Later on, once Claptrap had gone off someplace and GLaDOS had returned to work, he set himself to puzzling out what he would have said friendship meant, if he’d been asked. GLaDOS saw it (still!) as a bit of a burden, and to Claptrap it was… acceptance, that seemed to be the best way to put it. Acceptance of all of you, not just the best bits. And it was true, Wheatley thought. He and GLaDOS both found Claptrap tremendously annoying at times, but they valued his friendship enough to put up with it. Claptrap had mentioned something about people changing their minds after a while, or something, but Wheatley honestly didn’t think he was going to. Considering he’d been known to be pretty irritating himself, that simply wouldn’t be fair.
Well, back when he’d talked about this with GLaDOS, he’d thought about how he sort of felt like… like she made up for all of his faults. Their relationship had certainly encouraged him to do something about them, and to get better at the things he was already good at. So maybe… maybe, to him, it meant… to be with people who made him want to be a better person. But who would also be patient if he failed. Not all judgemental, like the people at Aperture had been way back before all of this. But nice, and encouraging, so that he would decide to try again and do better the next time.
“You were right,” he said absently to GLaDOS. She barely even moved in response to his words.
“Of course I was.”
He laughed and decided not to tell her he was referring to friendship meaning too many things all at once. Claptrap might think indulging her ego was a good idea, but Wheatley already knew better. Who knew what she thought he was agreeing with right now.
“You’ll really be able to give me the… you’ll be able to make the music thing work? For me? When Claptrap finds it?”
“Didn’t I already demonstrate the fact you shouldn’t question me thoroughly enough today?”
Yep. Definitely didn’t need more fuel for her ego right now. “Just checking!” he said cheerfully, and she made a bit of an indignant noise but left it at that.