Chapter Text
Stephen stared out into the snow, the field of wheat harvested for the year. He wondered how, wondered why he ever considered living in the dormitories, even for a short while. Aperture was cold and unnatural, dark. There was always something sinister in the air, he knew that much, but work was work and what he did was fulfilling - was being the operative word.
It didn’t matter, anyways. He wouldn't be there for much longer than a few weeks. He’d up and leave, find a job somewhere, anywhere else. Black Mesa was always hiring, and though it seemed like both places were quite the same, Stephen knew better.
Stephen.
Ever since his brief little chat with Caroline, this Stephen guy just would not leave his head. Wheatley figured out the broad sweeps of the story: He was a guy who worked a desk job for awhile, who apparently was pretty prone to bad ideas, who got crammed into a little sphere with a blue eye and was told to be himself.
Man alive, he couldn’t have been given worse advice. ‘Be yourself’ is advice you give someone worth their salt, ‘be yourself’ is advice you give to people like Chell, ‘cause when those people are themselves, the things they make and do aren’t total, absolute and utter disasters. The advice they should’ve given him was ‘be absolutely anyone and everyone other than yourself’ and if he was just slightly less of a total screw-up and followed that advice, he might just do something halfway decent… If he was lucky, at least.
But with this Stephen guy thrown into the mix? That was a whole new industrial sized barrel of worms. Wheatley was hardly sure which narrative tortured him more - the idea that he was always an A-1 dumbass, or that once-upon-a-time he was someone worth the advice ‘be yourself’.
The former was not only a fatal blow to his nonexistent self-esteem, but uncomfortable in the deepest sense - you can’t make dirt into gold, just as you can’t make worth out of worthlessness. The latter, however, was just a straightforward tragedy. Aperture, in their desperation, slammed whoever the hell seemed slightly scatterbrained enough to be an I.D Core into a ball, tweaked it until all it did was chatter, then slapped it on a supercomputer ten to the thirty thousandth times its size and told it to be himself.
The former made his idiocy a fact of the universe, the latter made his idiocy unfair, and neither was satisfying, so Wheatley, as dull in EQ as he was in anything else, chose to ignore it. It was the same logic that a dog hiding behind a curtain from a vacuum uses - if I can’t see it, it can’t see me, and that’s all that matters.
But that didn’t stop him from losing sleep over it.
No, he stared at the ceiling when he should’ve been asleep and just… Thought about it. From what he’d seen of himself, he was starting to get the sense that he was always just a moron - but that didn’t stop him from daydreaming otherwise.
Not in the slightest, in his mind Stephen was sharp as a tack, deserving of the Bagel Girl he figured was probably Chell, once, and when he did finally ask her out, he might stumble over his words, but he’d have gotten them out, proud and oh-so-brave.
Stephen was everything Wheatley wasn’t.
Smart, charismatic, funny, moral, compassionate, empathetic, and a wiz at the whole dealing-with-other-people thing. Oh, in his odd fantasies, Stephen was the king of it. Sure, he was hardly taciturn, and he may talk too fast for most people to really know what the hell he was saying, but boy-oh-boy did people like him.
Wheatley liked to think that when Stephen finally went missing that fateful day, everyone that knew him - even the guys that saw him in passing - mourned, in some way. The full-on black veils and crying would probably just be for the people that really gave a damn about him, but the folks that were only vaguely familiar with him probably would’ve gotten a little sad when they saw his empty cubicle.
“That’s a damn shame,” They’d say, softly, “He was a nice guy.”
He liked to think that Stephen was really good at something. Wheatley didn’t know what that would be, he didn’t seem to have any practical knowledge on anything aside from betrayal and regularly shoving your entire foot directly into your mouth, but he was certain that it came to him as naturally as swimming to a trout and flying to a sparrow. He wasn’t sure he’d be any good at that thing now, however, they’d gone through and fiddled with his brain so much he was probably unrecognizable to his old self - save for the voice and the body.
He remembered he was some IT guy, whatever that meant, but that didn’t feel quite right. He had a computer, once, apparently, but he was no good with that stuff, now. Did IT have anything to do with computers?
Intelligent Teachers… Irritable Tigers… Incompatible Triceratops’… Irreversible Transgressions- Oh-ho-kay, that’s enough of that. No need to keep going that-a-way, Mr. Wheatley, absolutely not. Not the time or place, really, we oughta… Oughta just put a pin in that one, come back to it when the mood seems right - which, mind you, it does not, right now. Probably won’t until a touch later - or, more like a long time from now, but pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, amirite?
He’d gotten better at that, nipping that nasty train of thought in the bud. He sometimes fell down that hole, the Maybe-I-Should-Just-Leave-All-I-Am-Is-A-Burden-And-An-Inherently-Bad-Person hole. Not the most eloquent title, but Wheatley wasn’t the most eloquent man. Nevertheless, that hole in particular was a bad one to fall down, ‘cause the second he started falling, Chell would always notice. It threw her off her rhythm, a little, since the time she normally spent being in that rhythm was time spent dealing with his absolute horse-shit.
The problem was, she could hardly ever argue with him, at least not in any way that convinced him.
For all intents and purposes, he was a burden, objectively.
He was a little bit of a burden on the townsfolk, who suddenly had to teach a full-grown man about everything from geese to genocide and he was not fast on the uptake. He was a burden on the circle of people he could call his friends just by being there and being so painfully awkward - he was pretty sure they didn't like him all that much anyways. He was a burden on Chell in every way imaginable. Worst of all, in his mind, he didn’t give anything back.
But for whatever the reason, be it pity or a strange misguided fondness, the people around him didn’t cast him out. He didn’t have anything to give, but they still wanted him around, nonetheless, they were all unfathomably strange in that respect.
He was pretty sure that, unlike Stephen, if he were to be nabbed mysteriously and never seen again, nobody would miss him, not properly. He didn’t think anyone would throw a good-riddance party or anything like that, but he hardly thought that anyone would really care that good ol’ Wheatley was gone, past the first few weeks. He wasn’t the kinda guy that someone thought of in a happy moment and went: “Damn, I wish he was here.”
Unlike the rest of the town, if he were to go missing, there would be no niche left unfilled. No bread would be left unbaked, no store left unstocked, no Foxglove left untampered with.
No stupid idea left unhad. He thought, a little bitterly.
Wheatley glanced to the door, then to Chell’s sleeping form next to him - moving to sleep next to her was probably one of his greater blessings, there was only so long he could spend hunched up on that couch - but despite everything, some distant, stupid part of him wanted to get up and start walking and never look back.
He supposed most parts of him were the stupid part, but this was about as low as it ever got.
There were few things about the world around him he really, truly, properly understood, but one of those things was was Chell. She was more than just his rock, unsurprisingly, she was the whole framing structure that kept him held up, but that was so painfully unfair to her. You can’t carry the weight of everything she’d seen and somehow still hold up someone else's world.
He knew, rationally, that should he walk out and not return, he’d die quick enough. Starvation, dehydration, illness, bears or whatever the hell was out there and hungry. He wasn’t particularly strong for his size, wasn’t really very nimble or graceful, he lacked the basic survival instinct that Chell seemed predisposed to, and it didn’t matter what the hell he did, he wasn’t very good at it, so it wasn’t like he’d find a place in some distant town somewhere - and that assumed he’d even get there.
He tried his damndest to shake the thoughts from his head, standing up slowly and quietly, meandering his way over to the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water, running his wet hands through his hair.
He was rather unimpressed with his own face, sometimes. His eyes were a just-barely-human looking blue, his hair a sort of dull sandy-hay colored mop that never seemed to have a handle on which way it wanted to part, and he was just too damn tall. He vaguely remembered seeing a picture of these gargantuan deep sea squids, with their long, eerie tentacles trailing mysteriously into the depths. They looked kinda like ghosts or demons, just floating there, staring, watching. He figured if there was a such thing as reincarnation, in a past life, he was one of those things - all noodly legs, to the point where it was kind of creepy.
Hell, the little girl was still half-convinced he was a monster.
He did act pretty monstrous, on more than one occasion. He wasn’t sure if how quickly he turned on Chell was something objective about him or if it was just a product of fear or power. Megalomaniac little bastard, he was.
He rested his elbows on the sink, and pressed his face into his hands. He always got like this, it felt like he didn’t control his own thoughts, they controlled him. He couldn’t help his frustration, though, he was useless, bloody useless and there was nothing he could do about but carry on and act like it didn’t feel strange to not be able to help the one person in the world worth helping.
He heaved a deep sigh, straightening out his back, feeling two vertebrae pop as he did, and slowly crept back into the bedroom, back next to Chell.
But the light was on when he returned, Chell was sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes.
“Sorry love,” He said, softly, joining her in sitting criss-cross on the mattress, “Didn’t mean to wake you. You need your beauty sleep, and all that - not that you aren’t naturally beautiful, it’s nothing like that, but you know, a lady needs her sleep, isn’t that right? Let’s get back to it, then-”
“You haven’t been sleeping,” She said. She shifted a little closer to him, putting a hand to his face and resting her thumb right beneath his right eye. She squinted at him, scrutinizing his face, but didn’t say anything else.
“Don’t you worry about me, ahaha…” He wanted to pull away but he was certain that’d look more suspicious than if he just stood stock still. “Just one of those nights.”
She narrowed her eyes further, lips pressed into a flat line. “What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing, love! Honestly, I’m right as rain, good ol’ Wheatley, healthy as an ox. What’s got you so worried?”
She let her hand drop from his face, letting it fall to the spot right next to him on the bed. “You can tell me when something’s bothering you,” She said, softly. There was an underlying emotion to it, some weird, unfamiliar mix of tired and worried, maybe an undercurrent of annoyance, but it came out the way all of Chell’s feelings seemed to - muted emotion soup.
She didn’t seem to feel the same unadulterated emotions he did.
“I know.”
She reached across his body and shut off the light, slowly and deliberately lying back down, burrowing herself into the warmth of the covers. “Are you gonna try to sleep?”
Wheatley nodded, slowly. “Yeah, I’ll try.”
“Good.”
He joined her, lying down and curling around her as he sometimes did. She grabbed his arm, slung it across her body, and relaxed against him, as though he was nothing but comfort and safety to her.
He wished he could actually protect her.
He actually managed to cut the thought off before it could develop, closing his eyes and keeping his mind on her, how small she was next to him, the strong, calloused hand holding his, and the slow, deep, even breaths of her next to him.
With that, he nodded off, and with some luck, would wake up feeling a little calmer.