2770: Wheatley x reader (portal fanfic) – Oneshot

Title: Wheatley x reader (portal fanfic)
Author: 100fanfics
Media: Video Game
Topic: Portal
Genre: none given
URL: Chapter 1
Critiqued by Ghostcat

 

 

Hello, dear Patrons!

So, do you remember how I mentioned taking a quick look at DeviantArt when the author of my previous fic mentioned having a DA account?

Well … I might have found something. And it’s a Reader fic! You can tell because the title is literally just “WheatleyXreader”, which doesn’t speak well for the rest of the fic. And, since DA doesn’t have fic summaries, we can just dive right on in!

If strawberry blond was blond with strands of pink and red, then he was a blueberry blond.

That is not what strawberry blond means; it is simply a light shade of blond hair. There’s a pretty broad range of ‘red hair’ so it is helpful to use more descriptive names like strawberry blond, ginger, or auburn. I assume this description is meant to be applied to someone with blond hair that has strands of different shades of blue in it, but all I can focus on is how odd that definition is.

He had a sharp chin, black framed glasses for his eyes

Instead of having glasses for his knees, I guess.

which he felt were now too weak, too unfocused.

Yes, those are reasons why people are prescribed eyeglasses. Gold star for you, my dude.

His mind couldn’t comprehend the change, by human standards he didn’t actually need them.

But by squirrel standards he was considered legally blind in the state of Delaware.

His eyes were bright blue, as if an artist poured paint straight onto them, rimming them with a deep and dark black which made him much more attractive, and almost surreal.

I will give the author some credit for trying to use very … evocative language, even though all it did make me wince at the idea of having paint poured into my eyes. And considering this was posted on the Internet, I would have probably avoided using the word ‘rimming’ at all costs. As a delightful bonus, putting this fic in the Library guarantees we’ll get more sketchy comments for our spam filter to sort through.

You held his hand like you had nobody else. He was your companion, after all the cubes.

Based on my sentence structure, I think I might have taken a cube to the noggin.

You had been stored away as a test subject for years- you had no idea how many.

I’m not really sure what this is based on, but it certainly feels very portentous.

You had been on the edge of insanity- or maybe you were insane.

‘Tis a narrow rope I walk most days.

When Glados made Wheatley come ‘alive’, your only friend who wasn’t trying to emotionally break you down at Glados’s level, you wanted to be with him even more.

It must have been the accent; he really didn’t have much else going for him.

You had nothing else in that science facility, just cubes and a core who followed you around before you made him follow beside you.

That actually sounds like quite a lot. Oooh! Did I have LEGOS?!?

He knew you were a broken human.

Not really broken, just a bum knee and a bad back.

So he didn’t say anything. He spent an hour on his knees across from you on broken rubble, slowly sorting out strands of your hair.

Why is my hair in a pile of broken rubble? Did this paint-eyed cretin shave me?

He decided if he fixed it the way you did, it may make you go back to ‘normal’.

I really hope he’s not supposed to be my love interest, because this sounds like the sort of behaviour a child might exhibit.

You had such a strong mind, you lasted so much longer than all the others.

I would make a joke about superior stamina, but I shall refrain because I am a lady. Or so I assume, it hasn’t really been made clear what my gender is supposed to be.

But in the end you had fallen like all the other test subjects. But you couldn’t be placed back into storage, all of that was destroyed.

I’m the reason we can’t have nice things.

He was disconnected from the burning mainframe, he had no method of getting information.

The reason he doesn’t have access to information is because he isn’t connected to the mainframe, not because said mainframe is apparently on frickin’ fire, which is a feature absent in most working mainframes?

Right. Okay.

This android form was the only way he was still alive, if he had been like the other cores or turrets, he’d be dead.

That would mean that all of the other cores and the turrets had some sort of remote yet incredibly vital connection to the now on-fire mainframe that has been severed. All those sophisticated AI-controlled devices are little more than a thin client system.

He never expected this to happen. Nobody did.

I doubt that; no one may have expected the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone expects the machines to rise up and overthrow humanity.

But you had somehow managed to make an emancipation grid explode and swallow the entire facility whole.

It wasn’t me, you can’t prove anything, I was nowhere near that blender, and beside that we needed to replace the outlets in the break room anyway.

It turned out Wheatley now counted as biological material, he wasn’t really sure how his new body worked.

He’s an android, a robot with a humanoid appearance, yet he somehow registers as biological? I would say that doesn’t make any sense, but this is Aperture after all.

“Can you be fixed? Should I fix you? Or is this what humans call dying? Because I can dig you a hole if you want- that’s what people do, isn’t it? Dig holes or incinerate their broken kin. Just like robots?”

If the entire facility is gone, including the portion several miles below the surface in an abandoned salt mine, then there’s already a hole available. Probably quite a bit of fire around as well if you want to cover all the bases.

Wheatley expected a response from that. None came.

I’m the strong, silent type.

So he stood up and slowly looked around, seeing the sky, a bright blue, non-artificial sky. He would get there, first.

He’s going to the sky? How do this?

Outside the complex, and then he would fix you.

It might be a good idea to check the complex first, just to see if there are any medical supplies that could be useful. The sky isn’t known for having a lot of bandages.

He was surprisingly mute outside of his usual smug comments.

…I don’t think the author knows what ‘mute’ means. There’s a reason why that feature on videos turns off the sound completely instead of just lowering it.

He looked determined as he held you on his back and brought you into a field of some sort of grain.

Do I get to pick which grain? I want it to be amaranth; it’s pretty and functional.

He laid you down on a stamped down patch, watching your eyes bore into the sky.

Dude, get my eyes out of the sky! I need those.

They seemed to soften, become more intense.

Those are two very different things.

As if you were finally focusing on something.
On him.

Nuts to him, I want to see the amaranth.

You reached out and placed a hand on his cheek, knowing it was him almost instantly

Didn’t he just carry me some unknown distance? Did I not wonder who he might be, or question anything that was going on?

(it was hard not to recognize him with his manner of senseless chatter).

HIs famously mute chatter.

“We’re free.” Wheatley didn’t understand human laughing, why it sounded sarcastic and desperate and not at all happy like people says it does.

Wheatley seems to have a selective understanding of complex emotions.

But maybe it sounds like freedom, a messy place to be in but something which says it should be happy. Freedom was good, even though it may make you suffer more. Right?

The phrasing for this just looks slightly wonky to me. It’s more along the lines of something you’d see in a first or second draft, before the author had a chance to refine their ideas, rather than a finished work.

He wasn’t sure as he picked you up on his back and began walking, wondering if he would ever be able to bring you somewhere you would like.

I like kittens, or maybe try the Natural History Museum.

Maybe with humans, maybe to your family.

Depends on which part of the family; I’ve got a rabidly racist and homophobic cousin I’d rather avoid if I can.

Maybe a place with food so he wouldn’t have to bury you half way.

Nandatte?

I don’t understand the correlation between food and burial in the same sentence. Is the food for me? Will I starve to death without it and require burial? Why would I only be buried halfway? Am I halfway to starving? The guy dragging me around is an android, so presumably he doesn’t require food.

And hey, maybe he’d also laugh.

I hear there’s a subroutine for that.

Because he could feel the way picking you up strained his body and the damage his ‘body’ had taken by the complex crumbling over them.

I feel vaguely insulted by the implication that an android injured himself picking me up.

He wanted to laugh because he didn’t want freedom and now he had it.

I’m reasonably sure a good bit of the game involves around Wheatley trying to escape the facility; that changes when he gets put in charge, but with everything all exploded now there’s nothing for him to be in charge of so he should be back to wanting to be free.

He almost didn’t realize he wasn’t actually talking, this body seemed so much better at keeping thoughts inside rather than out. Any other time as a core he would have rambled that out loud.

That’s right, just hold onto all those feelings. Push ’em way down deep inside. That’s how you know you’re just like a human.

But soon he was laughing himself, wondering if this was madness.

Kind of seems like it could be.

It felt glorious, it felt free.

Yeah, you’ve gone full crazy. What I’d like to know is where am I during this mental breakdown? Have I died yet?

Maybe, just maybe, freedom would be a good thing.

That is the general consensus, yes.

He had you, after all. His own personal companion cube.

I assume that means I’ve died somewhere in the last few paragraphs and he’s just going to carry my decaying corpse around until it falls apart.

Ewwww.

So that is the fic, such as it is.

Unlike many of the fics we see in the Library, this one actually has what I think is an interesting premise; two characters, one a recently created android and the other a dying human, escape a dangerous facility and make a run for freedom. That is a decent foundation, but the actual fic is built with all the stability of sand and spit. It is very dull and vague, and the intermittent use of second-person perspective really doesn’t help matters much, either. This fic would be heaps better if the second-person was scrapped completely for third-person; this might even be one of the rare instances where first-person would work well, since Wheatley’s perspective as a confused ‘newborn’ could be very compelling. The metaphors need tweaking as well, as the whole paint in the eyes thing was just very odd. It is good to have a compelling opening but there’s a difference between hooking your audience and squicking them out. Unless you’re writing horror, of course.

 

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