Angst drabble suggestion: Wheatley's 'step 5' works. Chell dies, but not before managing to press the stalemate resolution button. He's free of the chassis and its influence, and only has a few minutes to fully come to terms with what he's done before GLaDOS fully returns to power and decides how to deal with him.
((Under a readmore cause this got fREAKIN LOOOOONG))
The corruption was making it hard to think straight. Well, hard-ER. It had never been his strong point…
The chassis lowered him down so his feet planted on the ground. His synthetic breathing had become ragged with errors. He cocked his head and looked sidelong at the test subject. Wheatley’s vision fritzed and distorted, it was hard to quite get a good look.
"ARE YOU STILL ALIVE!?" He shouted over the rumbling of the facility, the fires, the sparks, the insane screaming of the three cores attached to the chassis. It was impossible to tell by sight… But she LOOKED pretty still.
He took one, long side-step towards her. “BECAUSE IF YOU ARE ALIVE, THEN YOU’RE ABOUT TO BLOODY WELL NOT BE!” He was beginning to feel something unpleasant. Well, he had for a while, actually. Something that, despite the pleasure and power of running the facility, that everything had spun far beyond his control. That he was in over his head. He reached out to toe Chell’s still form, when a familiar voice, almost barely audible, played it’s recorded message.
“Stalemate: Resolved. Fire detected in the: Stalemate Resolution Annex; Extinguishing.”
A spray of sprinklers doused the room, putting out the fire and washing away the gels.
“YES!” Cried another voice.
"Stalemate… No! No no no!" Yelped Wheatley. He whirled around on his heel, trying to find out WHERE they’d plugged in that stupid potato…
He suddenly found himself unable to move. He looked back and tried to yank his leg forwards, but it was of no avail. It was caught in a mechanical claw with a grip like a vice. Again, he tried to pull, half starting into a run, but now both legs were caught. He’d have fallen if not for the fact he was still plugged in.
Leaning at a near-perfect 45-degree angle to the floor he fought and flailed as more claws gripped his arms, wrist, neck, waist, and back port.
Nothing then existed but a high, loud, mechanical sound and blinding pain.
And then, there was the floor.
Wheatley blinked hard, and shakily pressed his palms to the ground to be able to get his face off the ground.
His mind was…
The quietest he had ever remembered it being.
No screeching cores, no testing drive, no angry red-light warning messages with no apparent solutions. The chassis felt almost like a dream. Huh. Had he really caused all this? Didn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d do. And to think he’d even tried to kill-…
Oh no…
Wheatley’s head whipped around, trying to find Chell amongst the much quieter wreckage. There she was. Still as he’d left her.
He scrabbled to his feet, racing towards her then stopping a few feet away.
"Er, heh… Sorry about that, earlier…" He said, trying to bring back his old chipper tone but failing. Badly. "I mean I… I have no idea what on Earth caused all THAT back there, I mean… Really?" He inched towards her with shuffling steps. "That was MAD! Must be something corrupt in the system because WOW… Good thing I’m out now, eh?" He now loomed over Chell, tapping his fingertips together.
"Okay, listen, you really should… I’d very much appreciate if you got up, right about now. Or maybe just… Gave me a signal, or something. Moved." He bit his lip. "Because you’re not… Dead…" His voice faltered to the point of giving in on that last word.
"Oh, she IS." Came a condescending tone. Now much clearer than before. “I have her vital readings right here. And they don’t have anything to display. Congratulations, you actually managed to achieve something for once. I never would have imagined you could do that.”
Wheatley kneeled down in front of Chell as GLaDOS spoke, reaching out to roll her over but flinching back several times. “Oh YEAH?” He snapped back. “I managed to run this whole place! And she’s NOT DEAD!”
"Take a look around you. The reactor core is melting down. Everything else is either broken or on fire. You didn’t run this place. It ran you, and you let it pull both of you into the ground. Thank goodness I managed to get back into my body, or you would have succeeded in killing the rest of us as well." Said GLaDOS.
And, despite himself, Wheatley DID look around. He pushed around some stray chunks of panel and glass that had been strewn on the ground. He looked at the twisted and warped Stalemate Resolution Annex. He looked up, where stray wires swung and sparked, pieces of panel tore themselves off and shattered on the ground, revealing a large, silver orb and a lot of tiny lights. The moon and stars.
Then, finally, he looked down. Chell’s eyes were half-lidded and glassy, her body was lying in a way Wheatley was pretty sure it was not meant to, and her hair was sticky with too much blood.
For one absurd moment, Wheatley rationalized that she was not dead, seeing as how dead people’s eyes turned into X’s and their tongues stuck out, for that was simply how the android’s mind WORKED. But, after thoughts scampered over hill and dale, finally brushing against the faintest bit of logic, he realized that that probably wasn’t a real indicator.
He splayed his hand on her chest. That one was true, wasn’t it? Any living human had a thumping heart where a machine like himself had a glowing Core Processor.
Except Chell didn’t.
He flinched his hand back and stared. The brief moment of peace he had had after being taken from the chassis was slipping and slipping further away. He quickly found himself overwhelmed, again, with too much of everything. Sensing the almost claustrophobic amount of precessing, his breathing picked up to try and keep everything from overheating.
No, no, no no no no no no. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t POSSIBLY be real. It was all wrong. They were only supposed to escape. To leave. Go. Never bother with this place again. Not… Why the hell had he STAYED? DESTROYED it? Incurred the wrath of the being he was MOST terrified of. And killed the only person who could possibly help him now.
Wheatley continued to sit there, staring goggle-eyed and hyperventilating, and hadn’t noticed a sudden pressure around his chest. In fact, it only took until he found himself lifted off the ground that he realized.
Though, it didn’t really do anything. He was far beyond panic now, and into the territory of impartial blue screens that listed problems and did not have any feeling. He had neither the ability, nor currently the will, to escape the huge metal claw. Blue optics met yellow. The pressure tightened.
"Fascinating. You actually seem to have comprehended something. And it appears to have broken your brain. Of course."
Wheatley blinked. He hadn’t been broken. He was still there, conscious, locked inside himself and lost and screaming, but hardly broken.
"I had planned on making things much worse for you…" GLaDOS continued. “But you seem to have gone catatonic. It’s a pity. I really wanted to see you suffer after all you did.”
Wheatley was lifted higher, higher. It was the longest silence the core had ever maintained.
"But you know what? I’m not without mercy. I had so many terrible things in mind before killing you, but seeing you like this, well, I’ll just make this quick. It’s probably better this way, seeing as how if I kept you alive any longer, you might come to your senses and destroy something else."
Wheatley looked down at the ground from his swaying position. Huh. The height wasn’t all that scary, to be honest. Nothing was all that bad, comparitively, compared to…
He spotted Chell’s sprawled form on the ground. The human. The test subject. The one he’d helped, helped him, he’d trusted, trusted him…
He’d betrayed. She’d fought for her very life.
"I’ll even give you the count of three." Said GLaDOS, relaxing her grip for a moment on his fragile Core. " One…"
"I… I…" Wheatley found his voice again. Oh god, he was going to die…
"Two…"
"Chell, oh CHELL…" Going to die, going to die a traitor and a monster beyond reconciling "I’m so, I am so, so so SO, sorr-…"
"Three."
Wheatley thought he heard an awful crunch and thought he saw a burst of static, but by then, there was no longer any Wheatley that existed to confirm it.
Carol freezes on instinct, reasoning kicking in a second later to tell her that he must be joking. But when the punchline doesn’t come, she just stares, blowing out a long breath when she remembers to breathe again. Right, she thinks. Broken condoms are exactly what this week needed.
“Shit.”
Phil stares down between them while braced above her on both palms, head jerking up to meet her eyes for a second as she curses. This is so not a thing he wants to deal with this week, not after just walking off a mission that morning that's been going for almost a month; he frowns really hard at the headboard for a long moment before peeling himself off her.
