Portal oneshots

error.

Very self-indulgent rain world AU in which chell is a slugcat and Wheatley is an iterator named Blue Betwix the Wheat. This is kind of more of a rain world fic than a portal fic but eh. It's MY wattpad account i decide what fanfiction goes here. Also this hasn't been proofread. Sorry for redundancy or spelling errors this has been in my drafts for months and I honestly just want it out and finished lol

TW for descriptions of pain and injury as well as minor body horror*
*bioengineering/involuntary prosthetics. Metal bits attached to a living animal.

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It was very rare that Blue was right nowadays. It seemed that every action he made lead to failure in one way or another. He could work efficiently, that was without question. He could run calculations in an instant with as much effort as a simple thought. He could play god if he so desired, creating creatures and companions to do as he wished like so many of his fellow kin. Yet in the end, his actions had dragged him to failure. Like they always had. Like they always would.

It was an accident.

It started when he noticed a failure in one of his drainage pipes. Then another, then another. In a single cycle almost 20 pipes had failed, and he had no idea why. All readings came back with positive results, and no creatures had passed through the underside of his structure in eons. So, he decided to write a simple set of keys to re-program any faulty protocols. It was such a small thing, in retrospect. The amount of data in that process could fit into a single pearl. So Inconsequential, a single puzzle piece slotted into place among millions. And yet, failure had found a way.

In reflection, he should have sent it to her first. She always knew when he was wrong. It was her job, after all. A group senior is meant to recognize faults. They are the beating heart of a local group, their insight a pumping flow of lifeblood keeping a group above a flatline. At least, she kept him from flatlining. Even if it meant that sometimes he would have to be tried against her harsh, callous spotlight, his errors dissected with needle-point accuracy and gored and gutted until what was an issue once now became little more than a once-plagued carcass. His glaring mistakes and flaws backlit by his incompetence, by her efficiency and rapid success. It was never pleasant, but it needed to be done.

But in the moment, hasty and impatient as he always was, he had neglected to wait for seniority approval before starting the small program. He began to feel something wrong almost immediately. From the roots of his structure that dug deep into the metal covered earth, to the windswept peaks of his desolate metropolis. He had made a mistake. A grave mistake.

His exterior had gone numb.

He had spent a few cycles trying to correct it, and when that didn't work he tried everything else he could think of. Rewiring the nerve refractors, running as many slag keys and rejuvenation protocols that his structure could handle, sending overseers to transmit codes to exterior modules, at one point he even made a purposed organism to sever the electrical connection to the underside of his structure. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No feeling, no reception, no feedback. It was like trying to move a severed limb. Cold, distant, dead.

His legs had started to fail 10 cycles after the initial incident. He could feel the tremors from all the way inside of his puppet chamber by then. It terrified him. He had heard rumors of these sorts of things happening. If connections to a water supply are cut all processes will seize, slag clogging the pipes of the unfortunate iterator until the superstructure fell underneath its own weight. He, however, had cut his connections outside of his internal chambers entirely. No water intake. No steam release. No slag cycles. No inclination periods. He knew he was operating on gifted minutes, and he spared himself the hell of wasting them on fear.