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She looked so peaceful when she was asleep.
Wheatley didn't make a habit of keeping track of the amount of times he'd put troublesome humans back into their...confinement areas. It was a spare bit that he didn't have to spare, and GLADOS seemed to thrill in keeping humans that smuggled keys and broke locks. She certainly hadn't started as the worst of the children that had become test subjects. But every time he reset her DNA, cloned her body, reset the mechanics about her legs and...other parts, strengthening them so that her physicality was never a factor in the testing environment, she'd become slightly more goal-oriented, slightly less lateral thinking. Her test results were certainly indicative of that. He wondered why GLADOS didn't just shelve her and be done with it. She clearly wasn't really human any more. Perhaps that made his attraction a little less odd.
He went back to working on the wakeup cocktail.
He couldn't focus around her. It could have been something about his original programming, the original person he had been. He had some vague memories of that time: looking down on test subjects through one-way glass as they completed the tests, writing notes manually with strong, callused hands. He remembered watching a young Chell puzzling over her first portal gun, gleefully bouncing, all exposed skin covered with multicolored putty. He remembered patting her head as she completed task after task, the best test subject. He wished he could ask her what it was that she remembered, if anything.
He wished he had someone to talk to about any of the innate humanness about his programming, but the turrets were just chat-bots, and GLADOS was a harsh and unfeeling mistress - and busy. He was just a reintegration associate after all, what right had he to go to her for advice? She would probably just wipe him and then he'd be gone...or turn him into a testing machine. The thought of being destroyed over and over again made his circuitry physically shudder.
Chell stirred as the drugs began to rouse her from sedation.
"All subjects are required to undergo..." He stuttered from the pre-recorded message when he realised that Chell was staring up at him from the bed. Her lower body was covered by the usually tidy sheets. Her tank top was slightly askew, revealing a hint of pink beneath.
"Uh...Hello...Are you all right down there?" Wheatley asked, forced to use his own voice for the first time.
Chell stood up on the bed, slowly, and reached up to him. She couldn't quite reach, but insistently stretched towards him. He knew her well enough by now to see that she wouldn't give up on something she wanted, so he lowered himself from the rail as low as he could, camera facing her, recording the data from their interaction. She jumped, wiped a hand across him, and suddenly, his camera experienced a malfunction. What had she done, sliced it? Terrified, he withdrew, making sure to pour the appropriate cocktail into the room as she sat back down on the bed, grinning impishly.
Wheatley plugged himself into the nearest terminal to ran diagnostic after diagnostic, frustrated at the clean bill of health he received. The computer didn't seem to understand his concerns about the camera. How had she done it? Blasted girl, nothing but trouble.
If the computer thought there was nothing wrong with him, there was nothing that could be done. He went about his duties, relying mainly on his other sensors to get tasks done. He only registered how long it had been when it became time to rouse the test subjects again. He looked in on Chell with trepidation as she quivered awake.
She let him finish the recorded message this time, but throughout it all, her eyes were on him, the quirk of a half-grin on her face, the faintest hint of a blush on her cheeks. When it was all over, she gestured to him, asking him to come near. He shied away. "What is it exactly that you're planning?" He accused.
Her gesture was insistent.
If there was something ailing Chell, there would be no way for her to tell him, he reflected. He would need to run some diagnostic on her. He checked to make sure he had the appropriate access to that server information, and was surprised to find that he did. So, with little else to do in that situation, he detached himself from the rail, and invited her to pick him up.
She ran over to him, and brought him back to the bed, turning him this way and that. Finally, she turned the camera towards her, and hugged him to her chest. He monitored her heart rate. It was fine, pounding hard and strong. The machinations on her arms and other limbs were holding fine. She pressed him lower into her body, raising her knees so they touched one side of him, her breasts the other, a child holding a stuffed toy - a very hard stuffed toy.
"Look...if there's nothing wrong with you, I've got things to do." He grumbled. "You should put me back on the rail.”
She made no movement towards doing so. Muttering to himself in her embrace, he looked for a way to propel himself off of her, reattach himself to the guiding rail so that he could get back to work. As he scanned the room, he caught a glance of light in the glass pane on the one piece of art in the room, and it was bright enough that he could see his reflection in it. On his camera lens, a trail of dust or granite had been laid in the shape of a heart. Wheatley found himself paused, and gradually, closed his camera lens, simply allowing her to touch him.
**
Wheatley went about his rounds as per usual, humming slightly to himself as he did, until he reached Chell's room. The door was ajar. Certainly he would be blamed if anything happened to her. With a flurry of movement, he flung open the door and went along the rail into the room, terrified of what he'd see. The girl was there, awake, holding a ball shaped similarly to himself. He scanned the robot, and found it completely out of power. That was what happened when robots went off the rail, his programming told him. They died, became scrap metal, nothing more than something to be recycled. He reached out, and gently pried the hunk of metal out of the girl's hands, then primly brought it out of the room, closing the door, and activating the sleeping cocktail behind him.
He was just about to dispose of it, when the centre shuddered. An earthquake? He checked the computer, checked the dates. They didn't match up to his own diagnostics. He was sure that it was several years earlier.
The centre shuddered again.
Where was GLADOS? She wasn't logged onto the system. Her last log was insane, full of logic faults and test results unfit for publishing; most unlike her. While they'd both been glitching, things had been out of control in the testing facility, and in the containment boxes. Management was completely going to come down on him for being slack in his abilities. How could they not. He kicked his systems into overdrive, and began to check the rooms, starting with Chell's. Now that he thought about it, she had barely had the strength to resist his taking of the ball.
"Hey, are you alive in there??"