Part Thirty-Seven. The Gift

                                    

                                          
Part Thirty-Seven.  The Gift
                          
 
                          
After that day, it was quite obvious to Wheatley that GLaDOS was making a real effort.  Not that she hadn’t been trying before; of course she had! she was GLaDOS after all.  But she was different.  She was trying harder.  And when GLaDOS decided she wanted something done, she did it.  So she was doing it.
                          
He could tell how hard it was for her.  Sometimes he’d trail Caroline back to her chamber and watch as she pleaded with GLaDOS to do something or another, and GLaDOS would look back at her monitor or her motherboard or whatever else she was working on.  To Wheatley it was crystal clear how badly she wanted to refuse.  How badly she wanted to continue with her work, to put Caroline aside until she was finished.  And some days the pull of completion won out.  She would shake her core and tell Caroline to wait.  It always hurt Wheatley a little to see that.  Not just because Caroline would come sadly back to him and he would have to deal with her feelings of rejection, but because of the struggle he was just realising GLaDOS went through.  Where she had to fight against her very nature and attempt to do something she was in no way designed to do.  She must have felt quite terrible as well.  It could not at all be a good feeling, to have to face the fact that she’d chosen work over her little daughter who so obviously wanted to spend time with her.  But Wheatley wasn’t mad at her, or disappointed, or any of that.  Just like he couldn’t keep his vocabulator quiet sometimes, neither could she let the work sit.  When she did though… it was great.  He never got tired of seeing the look on Caroline’s face when she realised GLaDOS had agreed to play with her.  It was priceless, it really was.
                          
When Caroline asked GLaDOS to play with her, Wheatley often kept off to the side and just watched them.  After all, Caroline spent most of her time with him or the co-op bots, so he could leave this as sort of special time to them.  He couldn’t ever bring himself to actually leave the room.  Caroline never seemed to notice anyway, and if GLaDOS did he’d give her a little wave with his upper handle and try to smile encouragingly.  He’d been meaning to work on those facial expressions but he’d not gotten around to it yet.  He wasn’t sure if she found his presence reassuring or intimidating.  He hoped reassuring.  She was still a little iffy on how well her parenting was going, after all.  
                          
Most of their time was spent with Caroline doing something and GLaDOS watching her, taking part now and again but for the most part just talking while Caroline actually did the playing.  Caroline was rather fascinating, so Wheatley thought he understood why she was doing that.  But at the same time he wondered why she didn’t just… participate.
                          
GLaDOS had spent most of that week working on something she said was an absolute secret and she could not tell him no matter what, which actually started an argument.  Before Wheatley’d quite started yelling, she’d looked at him very, very seriously and said, “Can you just… trust me on this?  I’m not hiding anything.  I just… can’t tell you.”
                          
Wheatley had immediately forgotten what he’d been about to say.
                          
He didn’t think she’d ever looked at him that way before.  She was so serious, as if whatever it was was simply life or death.  But even more shocking was the fact that she had asked for his trust.  He’d suddenly felt a little ashamed.  He was implying that he couldn’t trust her, by bugging her relentlessly about something she’d said she couldn’t talk about.  He had blinked and looked down at the floor, bouncing his handles a little to try and distract himself from the fact that he’d not thought, yet again.
                          
“Sure,” he had answered quietly.  “I’ll uh… I’ll leave you to it, then.”
                          
Out of the bit of his lens that wasn’t quite pointed downwards he had seen her move forward, almost close enough to touch him, and hold herself there for a few seconds.  Then her core had twitched and she had turned away.  Wheatley had stared after her for a good handful of seconds, trying to figure out what that’d been for.  He was still trying to figure it out right now, while Caroline was out for the rest of the afternoon.  What odd behaviour.  What in the name of Science did it mean?  Was she malfunctioning?  Had she seen something behind him?  Had she wanted to touch him but thought better of it?  Maybe one of the panels across the way had been talking to her?  Or he’d imagined it.  Yeah, he’d probably imagined it.  He was good at that.