#wheatley!ross

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.

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.

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.

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

Chapters: 1 2 3

After the extreme failure of attempting to test with human specimens, Aperture Science switched over to robot test subjects. An extremely cooperative (and voiceless to prevent backtalk) pair of robots were designed and put through test chambers at breakneck speeds. The two models, 3G0R4PT0R and 53XB4NG (or Arin and Danny, as they were soon nicknamed) were the pride and joy of the facility. Of course, disaster struck and soon the lab was left with no one to run it. With no orders to follow, the prime directive to test became obsolete and the robots shut down until further instruction came along.

Years later, with the entire facility in ruins, the power was turned back on by a couple of lost adventurers (*cough*Link!Arin*cough*). The pair of robots were reactivated in the surge of power, but as they searched the facility for tests that needed to be done, they found that they might have been the only fortunate ones. Even the extremely volatile and intelligent super robot with the sentience of a certain physicist seemed to be shut down for good.

After surveying almost the entire facility, the pair finally found a small shred of life: a bucket of discarded cores that still seemed to be sparking and lit up. One o them being the vaguely dangerous core, Ross, that had temporarily be placed in charge, only to be removed by a rebellious human. Among the rest of them, the only operational cores seemed to be the curiosity core, Suzy, the nature core, Holly, and the technology core, Barry. With the bit of compassion in their robot hearts, Arin and Danny gathered the bunch and set out to find some bodies for the spheres to inhabit.

Soon, there was a small band of (mostly) clueless cores following Arin and Danny around. Of course, Arin and Danny only have one prime directive: test. And so that’s what they set out to do.