GLaDOS and Me

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Wheatley's sleep was fitful. She'd quite literally gone dark on him, and as he drifted in and out of sleep he tried to puzzle out exactly what he'd done wrong. He tried to convince himself that she'd just gotten busy, and that certainly would have made sense, but he just couldn't do it. He knew (as well as he could know anything when he was half asleep) that it was something he'd said.

After the sun had been up long enough that he could justify getting out of bed even though he hadn't really slept, he staggered downstairs, not even caring that he fell down them, and sat on the couch. He stared at the darkened screen of his laptop for a long moment.

Maybe he shouldn't contact her. If she was really that upset... maybe she didn't want to hear from him. Maybe he should leave her alone.

Well... he had to figure out what it was, right? So he could fix it? He couldn't not talk to her forever. He knew that would be horrible. And it was best he figured this out soon as possible, right?

He pored over the messages after tentatively sending her the usual 'good morning'. It was not fun. His sleep-deprived brain could barely make sense of the messages, let alone what they meant, and after ten or twenty minutes of that he gave up and went into the kitchen for breakfast.

For the next few hours he slowly picked up the general mess that'd been left behind from several weeks of carelessness, checking his inbox every few minutes or so, but she did not answer. He was almost a little scared now. She'd never been so quiet for so long. Ever. He really must have offended her.

He forced himself to leave the house so that he wouldn't spend any more time pathetically sitting there staring at the little icon, waiting for a message to appear. He wandered a little dazedly down the street, somehow making it to his usual seat at the café without mishap, and was soon staring tiredly out the window at the heavy clouds forming overhead. It reminded him of home, which did not improve his mood any. Home. Where his mum and sister were. Where he knew how to act and what to do, and life made a little more sense than it did now. He was moping over the lack of messages from a supercomputer, for God's sake! That wasn't normal.

Though... if it'd been someone else he'd been moping over, it would've been... wouldn't it?

"What're you drinking?"

Wheatley felt a little like he'd been zapped with electricity, snapping around to find the source of the voice without really being aware of it. Standing behind him was a young lady, a handful of inches shorter than him with long reddish hair and a rather blunt nose. Wheatley blearily stared at her for a few moments before registering that she'd asked him a question.

"Uh... peppermint," he managed, blinking a few times to try to wake himself up. Why did he always find it hard to sleep at home, then practically pass out after he'd left? Usually Wheatley did not take peppermint away from home, something to do with strongly connecting it to home in his mind, but today he'd made an exception. He was feeling rather poorly, after all.

The lady climbed into the stool next to him, which was kind of a relief as he no longer had to crane his neck awkwardly. She glanced into his cup as if to prove it really was what he'd said it was, then put down her own drink. "English breakfast," she told him, nodding as if sharing a secret. Wheatley wasn't quite sure what the secret was, but he knew well enough by now to know that some Americans thought English breakfast was all Britons drank. He'd actually made a point of not drinking English breakfast since he'd noticed that, and remembered rather glumly that he'd meant to ask his mum to send him a new box of domestic teas. He was running quite low. He could see, however, that the girl's tea wasn't made properly; the teabag was still in the cup, for God's sake.