#pbody!danny

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 9

Yaaaay internet! This chapter is dedicated to @i-am-avacado who wanted more Barry in this fic. I’ll just say be careful what you wish for ;) ;) ;)

“I just want you to think about this before you do anything rash.” Dan paced the length of his office, unable to sit still.

“I have thought about it,” Barry said. He sat in one of the plush chairs on the other side of Dan’s desk, seemingly much calmer. Between Barry and where Dan paced, sat a slip of paper on Dan’s otherwise entirely clean desk. A request form. A test subject request form with Barry’s signature already scrawled across the ‘participant signature’ line. All that was left was the signature of approval from Grump Laboratories’ CEO, Dan Avidan.

“Barry—“

“I know it’s hard for you, Dan. I know you don’t wanna do it. It’s hard for me, too.” Barry took a deep, shaky breath. “But I’m actually doing something about it instead of pretending nothing is wrong.”

Dan’s pacing fell still. He felt like Barry had physically punched him. The unapologetic tone, the firmness in Barry’s expression. It made Dan feel like garbage. But fuck, Barry was right. “I just—I don’t wanna lose you, too, Bear. You’re all I’ve got left.”

A bit of harshness fell out of Barry’s expression, but he still held his ground. “I’m tired of watching all these people go into the chambers like nothing’s wrong. Ross—“ Barry practically choked on the name. It’d only been a couple days now since Barry had seen the tape of what had happened. He decided to take a different, less painful approach. “I’m gonna go in there, finish the tests, and shut down BRIAN.”

Hands slammed down on the desk, leaving Barry startled. Dan’s entire body shook, angry tears brimming in his eyes, jaw locked in a grimace. “You’ll die! You’ll get fucking ripped to shreds like everyone else, Barry.”

Shaking off the surprise from Dan’s outburst, Barry stood himself up. “Then at least I’ll have tried something!” His own emotions jolted, leaving the two in a vicious standoff. “At least I won’t be a coward, like you.”

The entire facade Dan was holding up threatened to crumble as his lip quivered. But he grabbed a pen from his desk and violently scrawled his name across the form, almost ripping the paper in two in the process. “Then go! If you want to commit suicide, then fucking do it and see if I care!”

Barry snatched the paper off the table and stormed out of Dan’s office, leaving the other man to merely collapse into his chair. He laid his head in his arms on the desk, hiding his face completely, and he sobbed loudly and shamelessly.

“When we find Holly,” Ross was saying, his pre-programmed joviality shining through, “do you think we’ll find anyone else? Any other test subjects?”

“I don’t know, Ross,” Dan said. His voice was thick, his mind running through every single test subject form he’d ever signed. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if he found them. Despite the robotic filter, Ross already sounded too much like himself for Dan. He didn’t know if he could handle anyone else.

“Barry’s gonna lose his mind if we bring her back. If all three of us made it back together.”

Dan took a sharp breath, but said nothing else.

Above them, a massive industrial light flashed on, engulfing the pair in a single spotlight. “Ah, there you two are,” BRIAN mused. “This is not a part of the tests, but we can work with that.”

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 8

woooo cranked out a chapter before class yay! Sorry in advance.

AO3

“Do you think we could find her?” Ross’s voice was small in the forgotten corridors of the bottom floor of Grump Laboratories. His glowing eye illuminated the path as Dan carried him toward what they hoped to be an exit.

Dan wished he hadn’t heard Ross, but it had come through clear as day and Dan couldn’t help thinking he deserved an answer. “I think we’d be better off if we didn’t.”

“I came down here to get her.” Dan knew that. That was why he’d denied Ross’s original request to go down there, why Ross had to break into the lab in the first place. “I want to find her. Just—I want to see her one more time.”

It sounded familiar. After all, his own feelings had resulted in him becoming a test subject himself. But he also knew how painful it had been to come down here, see what BRIAN was and have all of his painful memories ripped back to the surface. He liked Ross, he didn’t want the same thing for him. He just wanted to get out of here. “You’re going to regret it.”

“I don’t care,” Ross stated firmly.

Unfortunately, Dan was a sympathetic man. “Fine.”

“Holly! Holly, where are you? Can you hear me?”

Ross blasted through test chambers faster than BRIAN could get out witty insults. It was particularly infuriating, especially considering the way Ross was blindly completing puzzles and yelling as he went. It defeated the entire purpose of the tests. Not to mention the lack of files BRIAN had on this subject. It seemed like he wasn’t even meant to be in the chambers at all.

“You know, these test chambers are designed for slow and considerate—“

Ross burst through the end gate of another chamber, pushing his way into the elevator and bouncing on his feet as it slowly took him down another floor.

“These tests are not meant to be rushed through,” BRIAN said, irritation obvious in his voice. At least he had a few moments with the subject while the elevator descended.

“I’m not here to do your fucking tests, I’m here to get Holly,” Ross demanded. His expression stayed stony and focused, just as it had been as the elevator lowered him down the first time.

“Holly Conrad, an interesting subject.” BRIAN’s tone became more of a gentle muse, as if deeply considering the files he was recalling. “A bit sporadic in her approach to the test chambers, but fairly good at solving puzzles nonetheless. It’s a shame she met such an untimely demise at the introduction to the turrets, she might have finished otherwise.”

Ross tried his best to merely focus on the information he was being given. This was no time to get emotional. He could find her. He could get her back. “Turrets. Where are the turrets?” Ross asked, his eyes searching the ceiling of the elevator as if he might see BRIAN up there somewhere.

The elevator had since stopped, the glass doors wide open and awaiting Ross’s leave, but he stayed still. “Ah, I see you’re finally willing to listen. As it would happen, this next chamber is the exact one that I was talking about. You’ve made it here in record time.”

The compliment fell on deaf ears as Ross bolted forward. Holly had last been seen here. This was where he was going to find her. He entered the test chamber frantically, his eyes scanning for the familiar mop of pink hair, almost entirely missing the mass of red lasers pointed directly at him.

“Careful,” BRIAN warned, though his tone seemed more amused, almost like a taunt rather than a warning. “It’d be a shame to lose two subjects to the same test.”

“Where is she, you son of a bitch?” Ross demanded. He managed to position himself behind a wall of glass before the turrets could fully lock onto him. Their small, almost eerie voices echoed through the room, overlapping with each other. “I don’t see her.”

“The chambers have been cleaned of unnecessary debris, of course. What kind of facility would Grump Laboratories be if we just left stray bodies lying around in the middle of the tests? Not a very good one, I would think.”

“Then take me to where you took her.” Ross was quickly working through the puzzle while BRIAN droned on. He took out turret after turret as quickly as he could, though a few bullets had come drastically close to taking Ross out completely. They were almost all gone now.

“To do that, you’d have to be dead. Unfortunately, I assume you’ll need to be alive to find her. Although I’m not sure how pleased you would be finding her in her current, un-alive state.”

The hopelessness of the situation was finally hitting Ross like a freight train. He’d reached where Holly would have been. He was supposed to find her here, but she was gone. The only way to find her was to be taken to where BRIAN stored the bodies that he hid away before the scientists could come in and retrieve them.

“Now, if we could simply continue forward—“

Ross clenched his jaw and placed two portals in particularly inconvenient spots. One next to where he stood, the other lined up perfectly with where the last turret’s laser sight hit the opposite wall. “Take me to wherever you took Holly,” he demanded, stepping through the portal with full certainty in his gait.

The turret open fired as soon as its censors picked up Ross’s presence. The sound of gunfire filled the chamber. Ross’s body fell limp, collapsing in on itself in a heap.

The chamber fell silent, Ross didn’t move. “While I’d love to reunite the lovers, I only accept authorized test subjects,” BRIAN said to no one.

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 7

Apparently I need to step up my angst game after Froggie and Blue wrote some Portal angst of their own. This was supposed to be a fluffy flashback chapter, but I have to give the people what they want!

AO3

Shards of glass and metal littered the dark, dank concrete ground of Grump Laboratories’ bottom floor. There were no chambers down here, at least none in the immediate vicinity, and, more importantly, there were no lights.

Tossed aside by the momentum of the crash, Ross had sparked and sputtered as he bounced against walls and floors, until finally rolling to a stop across the room. Though dimmer than it usually would have been, his single, blue eye still glowed, offering some clarity in the mysterious location. Still, the small robot was too disoriented to look around, or even to speak.

Dan lay on his back, having received the brunt of the collapse, as metal and glass lay scattered around and on top of him. Luckily, the pieces were small, none holding him down to his spot, though he did have many cuts adorning his previously clean flesh and tears along his testing uniform. The Long Fall Boots had saved him from an untimely demise, but at this point Dan wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing.

With a heavy groan, Dan pulled himself off the floor and sat up, a hand going to his head in hopes of nursing the headache that was currently forming there. The singular light of Ross’s eye allowed the test subject to survey his surroundings.

The room looked as though it might be some kind of storage facility, though it was now musty and had clearly been abandoned for some time. Dan shuddered at the thought of what might have been stored down here at one point, then tried to shake the thought out of his mind.

“Ross?” Dan called, earning a surprised shout from the bot on the other side of the room. “You okay, little buddy?”

“Oh, me?” The bot quickly pushed past any kind of short circuiting that may have been occurring in favor of answering Dan. “Sure, I’m fine. A little shaken up—if that’s even something a robot can be—but otherwise I’m just dandy!”

In all honesty, Ross’s internal drives were running mad. He figured something must have disconnected when he’d hit the ground. Or, judging by the visuals of experiences Ross didn’t previously remember having rushing past his internal processor, Ross thought maybe something had reconnected.

“Daniel?” The distress in the robot’s voice made Dan immediately hop up. Once Ross had been picked up in the Portal Gun’s anti-gravitational grasp, he nervously sputtered. “I think I may need some technical servicing,” he said, leaving his statement vague and unassuming.

“I don’t think you’re going to find any of that down here,” Dan said, still taking in the room. There seemed to be little concern in his voice for Ross’s technical issues, so Ross tried again.

“Do you—You wouldn’t happen to have any memories of a pink-haired human female, would you?”

Dan’s gaze fixed heavily across the room. His jaw clenched. His tone was low, completely desolate of emotion as he asked, “What do you remember about Holly?”

“You can’t just go in there, man, it’s not safe!” Barry braced himself against the wall of Aperture testing equipment protectively, particularly placing himself in front of the Portal Gun.

In front of him, Ross seethed, his chest huffing with each labored breath. He’d dashed all the way down to the subterranean level of the lab and Barry was the only thing standing in his way. “I have to go in there, Barry, I have to get her out!”

“Ross, she’s gone!” Barry yelled, perhaps a bit harsher than intended. He had to get through to Ross before it was too late, there was no time to regret his tone. “You can’t save her, you’re just going to kill yourself in the process.”

The vicious remark had left Ross a tad shaken. He shook his head, letting denial spike his adrenaline. “No, she’s not, okay? Holly’s down there and she’s lost and scared and I have to go get her! If I don’t—“ Ross choked back his words.

“I can’t let you.” Barry stood firm, though his brain screamed at him to have some mercy on the poor guy. Everything was just happening too fast. With a heavy, stoic breath, Barry said, “She’s dead. I can show you the tape of when it happened if you won’t believe me. You can’t save her, Ross.”

It was all Ross could do to keep the tears from streaming down his face. “I wanna see the body,” he demanded.

Barry wouldn’t meet his eyes. “We—We don’t have it. BRIAN—“

With balled fists, Ross pushed past Barry and grabbed the Portal Gun while the scientist’s guard was down. In a flash, he’d thrown the gun on his arm and dashed out of the room, making a beeline for the elevator to the test chambers.

“Dammit, Ross!” Barry hissed, breaking out into a run as soon as his legs allowed him to react. The entire hall had parted for the two maniacs sprinting toward the elevator, but by the time Barry had gotten to the end, all he could do was bang on the glass as Ross was lowered into the test chambers.

With a stony expression, Ross tried to steady his breathing and ignore the shouts from his friend.

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 5

The fic is back and better than ever mwahahaha~

AO3

No. No no no no no.

Dan bolted through corridors, knocking over disgruntled lab assistants and test subjects alike. For once, he didn’t care. His eyes were trained forward, legs flailing as far as they could go to maximize every step. There wasn’t time.

He practically crashed through the little section of cubicles that guarded Brian’s big, CEO office in the back. There were gasps and a couple shrieks as Dan flew through like a shadow, slamming all of his weight into the door at the end of the hall. Dan hardly registered the hit, only a brief moment of discomfort in his shoulder. He wrenched open the door to the office.

Empty.

“Dammit Brian,” he hissed. Tears were already burning at his eyes.

He was wasting precious time. He should have gone straight there. Everything was falling apart and he was going to miss it. All of these thoughts were driving Dan forward, pushing him past any kind of tiredness in his limbs, any kind of shortness of breath.

Dan almost fainted by the time he’d reached the presentation chamber from the lack of attention he was giving his body. He cursed himself for the brief moment he had to take to catch his breath. Assistants were already rushing over to him, trying their hardest to see what was wrong. They must have known. It must have been obvious.

An e-mail. A goddamn company-wide e-mail that BRIAN was going online today. Dan found out through an e-mail because Brian hadn’t wanted to tell him. Their wedding had been so beautiful, so happy, but Dan knew now that it was all a sham. Just a false hope that Brian had used to delay the inevitable.

But Dan wasn’t one to give up so easily. He rushed to the balcony of the presentation chamber, shoving aside investors and scientists. Down below him, his newlywed husband stood hooked up to a contraption that Dan could only assume was the source of all of his nightmares. Brian stared straight forward. He must have known.

“Brian!” Dan yelled, tears free-falling now. The entire room turned to him, even Brian, leaving all eyes glued to his display. “You can’t do this, you asshole! Please, please don’t do this!”

The physicist clenched his eyes shut. After a moment, he reopened them, tears now glistening on the edge of his eyelids. He turned to the frozen assistant at the controls of the machine. There were doubts in the underling’s eyes, probably some in Brian’s as well, but with the same firmness he always held, Brian uttered, “We have to do it.”

With shaky hands, the assistant placed his hand on the activation button. The coding was in. The technology was sound. He knew, he’d worked on it himself. This was his pride and joy, but the assistant could hardly stand to push the button, the background of the presentation only complemented by he pleading and begging of Mr. Dan Avidan-Wecht.

“Barry,” Brian warned, eyebrows furrowed. The doctor’s hands were shaking where they had been restrained for the conversion. Again, with the same firmness, “Do it now.”

They’d been friends once, Barry remembered. He thinks maybe they still are, but things had been different since he’d begun work on the development of BRIAN. With a stiffness in his finger that could challenge a statue, Barry wondered if he was making a huge mistake by doing as he was told.

Barry closed his eyes and pushed aside his morals. He heard Dan crying, screaming, fighting, as Barry’s finger pressed down the button. The last thing he heard was the vicious crackle of lightning and then alarms went off.

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 4

This one isn’t super angsty, so enjoy your little break.

Chapters: 1 2 3

It was a few days before Dan actually picked up the pace. Or, what he assumed to be days—it could have been weeks or merely hours. There was no way to tell the time in these test chambers and BRIAN wasn’t going to help him figure it out any time soon.

But it must have been a while, because as soon as Dan began to really enjoy the lack of backtalk from BRIAN, the speaker popped to life again. “I know that you’ve been enjoying all the time we’ve gotten to spend together—“ Dan sneered at the emotionless statement, “—but I’ve been informed that a new robot companion needs testing.”

A small section of the chamber’s wall opened up and out shot a sphere, plummeting toward Dan. The object whizzed by Dan’s head, crashing into the wall and bouncing to the floor. The strangest thing was the heavy groans the thing emitted as it bounced and rolled around the chamber, finally settling at Dan’s feet. A bright, glowing blue eye stared back up at the test subject.

“Uh, hi! Could you…pick me up?” the robot asked.

Though there was a brief hesitation, Dan obliged, lifting the robot off of the ground with the Portal Gun. Dan wanted to ask questions, but he still wasn’t sure what exactly to say. He had always thought BRIAN was the only one.

The thick silence must have set something off in the robot. “Right, you’re probably confused. Okay, I’m Ross and I’m here just to look out for you and make sure you’re healthy while you’re down here. Apparently there’s been some problems in the past…Oh, but don’t worry about that because now you’ve got me! Uh…You are…?”

“Dan.”

The robot seemed frazzled and giddy, entirely opposite to that of BRIAN’s cold, calculating demeanor. Dan wasn’t sure he was a fan of either, but if he had to carry around a robot, he was glad it was this one. It seemed friendly enough and it certainly wouldn’t be bothering him if it was meant to merely check his vitals and ensure that he didn’t work himself too hard. Dan took a deep breath. He could handle this.

“Now that the two of you have gotten acquainted, can we get back to the testing?” BRIAN sounded particularly cold now and Dan wondered if it was the new robot that was putting him on edge. He hated thinking that Brian’s feelings were still in there, affecting his robotic mood, but Dan couldn’t deny that Brian was not someone who shared the limelight well.

To be honest, though, Dan wanted to get back to testing as well. He wanted to blast through these chambers so he could get out of here as soon as possible.

Ross made the process a bit more difficult, though.

“So this is what it’s like down here, huh? It’s very…white! And there’s certainly a lot of lights. And…oh there’s a button over there! Wow, you know, this almost seems kind of familiar. Do you see it, too? Maybe it’s because it looks exactly the same as the last six rooms we’ve walked through. Well…not exactly the same, but I think you got it.” The robot paused, possibly noting Dan’s clenched jaw and furrowed brows. “Are you alright? Need me to check something for you? Blood pressure? Maybe your temperature?”

“I’m fine,” Dan said shortly. “I’m trying to think.”

“Right!” Ross chirped. “Makes sense. These are puzzles after all, you know?” He laughed nervously. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Just let me know if you need me and I’ll be here for you!”

The next few chambers went similarly. Ross just couldn’t keep quiet long enough to please Dan. It was starting to give him a headache.

“Oh, oh, do you want to hear a joke?” Ross tried as Dan headed for the elevator that would take him to the next chamber.

“Not really,” Dan said honestly. He’d tried being nice, but it was getting particularly hard.

“It’s a really good one, you’ll love it.”

“You know, maybe you should just wait in the elevator and I’ll come back and get you later,” Dan decided, dropping the sphere onto the ground by his feet.

“Well, if you think so…” Ross said, obviously dejected. He didn’t have much of a choice.

When Dan stepped out of the elevator again, the glass door slid closed, leaving the small bot inside.

“Leaving behind your new friend so soon? Bold choice,” BRIAN said. It was the first Dan had heard of him in a long while and he was almost relieved. “I always knew you preferred me anyway.”

[legendofgrump]

You Monster - Chapter 3

oh nooooo~ what have I dooone~

Chapters: 1 2

“Brian what are you doing?” Dan giggled as he was pulled out the backdoor of their wedding reception by his now-husband. “Somebody’s going to notice we’re missing.”

“It’s fine, I think they’ll forgive us,” Brian said. His grasp on Dan’s hand was gentle, but firm. Their fingers were interlaced and their voices hushed, just as lovers tend to do on late night rendezvous out into the moonlight.

Only the sun had just begun to set and there was an entire party of people waiting inside the building they’d just escaped, a party to which they were the guests of honor. Brian had decided that they would have at least fifteen minutes of solitude before someone came out looking for them and Dan decided to believe him. Brian was a genius, after all.

Their laughs collided in the air as Brian twirled Dan around in the garden. Their tuxedo jackets had long since fallen off, discarded over the backs of chairs like the ghosts of their presence, the only sign that they had attended the reception in the first place. It was much more fun in the orange light of the evening, dancing to the sounds of bird songs and sneaking chaste, loving kisses away from the wandering eyes of their friends and family.

“Have I told you how gorgeous you look tonight?” Brian said, their foreheads leaned together as they held each other close.

“Only every time you’ve seen me,” Dan breathed, eyes half-lidded in his calm euphoria.

“And it never stops being true.”

“We’ll never get these tests done if you keep standing around,” the annoyed bot called through the chamber. It gave Dan a headache how familiar the voice sounded underneath the cold robotic filters.

“Maybe if you didn’t give me so much shit…” Dan muttered. He was sure the robot had heard him, but the lack of response at least gave him a moment’s peace.

He’d passed through the introductory chambers with ease, quickly grasping the concept of the Portal Gun. He’d even stopped hesitating stepping off of high ledges, trusting in the technology that was the Long Fall Boots. But Dan wasn’t much of a puzzle person. He preferred information to just be laid out for him directly, so he was a little slower at solving the problems that made him think in an entirely new way.

Dan fired a portal. No, that wasn’t right. Another portal. No. Portal. No. Portal. No.

A frustrated groan fell out of Dan’s throat, his arms falling slack at his side and the Portal Gun almost hitting the ground. He just needed a moment to think it through. He needed time to—

“This is the best those idiots could send me? We’ll be down here for years at this rate. No, really, I’ve done the math, it’ll take you five years to get through all of the test chambers if you keep moving at this pace.” BRIAN seemed equally as frustrated, rambling on as Dan squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ve had so many smarter test subjects come through, you know, and look what happened to all of them.”

“Don’t,” Dan said weakly. He almost wanted to throw his hands to his ears, but it seemed too childish.

“All dead,” BRIAN said, not a hint of remorse in his voice, just disappointment. “Such a shame we have to use human test subjects, they’re so expendable.”

“Brian,” Dan warned again. It was the first time he’d let the name pass his lips since BRIAN had come online. It almost stung, especially considering it flowed so naturally in the terse tone in which he used it.

“That’s the beauty of robots, they can’t die. They exist fore—“

Dan whirled around, Portal Gun firing desperately at the source of the voice—a speaker planted on a far wall. “Shut up, you son of a bitch!” Dan yelled, tears falling heavily. Of course, the Portal Gun did nothing to harm the speaker or the robot speaking through it, but it certainly paused BRIAN’s monologue.

After giving up his fruitless endeavors, Dan collapsed to the floor in a fit of sobs. He was sure he’d make it farther than this before the tears started flowing so freely, but here he was, curled into himself, crying out Brian’s name in hopes of a familiar pair of arms wrapping around him.

But instead, Dan was met with a cold, hopeless silence.

[legendofgrump]

More portal. If Caroline!Dan was more mutual than "love", which it probably is, the close relationship is the main reason why Brian kept his consciousness. He didn't want to "live" forever alone. But when he turned into GaldOs!Brian, he lost a sense of humanity, and used Caroline!Dans subconscious as a coping mechanism, till he accidentally placed it Ina testing robot. Then he learns of this information, but doesn't change anything. For some reason. (This prob make no sense sorry)

Wait, wait, I think I got it. Brian kept Dan’s sentience without his consent is what you’re telling me? Which I’m sure Dan is NOT cool with because I feel like Dan would’ve been like “you know, I really don’t WANT to live forever in a robot like you do, please just let me die. I want to be mortal.” Because Dan’s always had that sort of...acceptance with his mortality and his eventual death and stuff.

But Brian loves him so he’s not just gonna let his love die. He’s gonna take that sentience and have them be together forever, which I’m sure Dan will be okay with once he’s used to it, y’know? Except he’s not. He already said he wasn’t and Brian went against that and now he’s double not cool with it.

[legendofgrump]

Ok but portal grumps when Brian finally figures it out but at this point Arin and Danny are so close and Brain has to choose between having Dan and letting dan be happy.

Oh shit. But is Brian corrupted enough by programming and many, many years of bitterness to really see the possibility of letting Dan go? Or is he still just a selfish prick of a robot, merely looking out for himself and his own goals?

Maybe a little bit of both? Let Dan go free but scrap Arin. After all, Arin’s just a menial robot, nevermind that Dan’s been teaching him to love or something and maybe there’s a little tiny scrap of sentience down in that brain of his--Dan isn’t sure yet--but there’s a chance.