saint young bots

[witter]

[ One's the recently evolved child of technology, magic, and a very very wealthy man. One's spent quite a bit of time in the lonely void of space until very recently. The how and the why of their respective anthropomorphizations is beside the point, and they're long stories anyway that involve a lot of science and a little bit of belief suspension (though not as much as you'd think).

Here they are. Together. Learning to be smelly humans. Like My Fair Lady for... for robots. Bit of a downgrade, though, if you ask Wheatley. Shouldn't complain, he knows, not with all their basic needs being seen to and all, and Tony Stark is a significantly better patron than She ever was in his humble and very well-informed opinion, but the squishy human body is entirely too complicated. It's just unnecessary, is what it is, really... all these. Limbs. And liquids. Eugh.

He's staring into his cup of PG Tips, trying to make out his reflection. He doesn't know why he likes this stuff, but he has a feeling he was somehow programmed to. Which is absurd, you know—being previously a metal core about yea big, in no way meant to touch water of any sort upon penalty of terrible death, with or without the addition of copious amounts of sugar and cream.

It's better here, though. It is; he's generous enough to admit that. A better and less deadly facility, comfy furniture... good... gravity. Good to have one's feet on the ground, so to speak. No fat traitorous lunatics and their megalomaniacal potato best friends (that's not fair, says that weird little voice, and not for the first time). Just good ol' newly-minted human Wheatley helpin' himself to a good cuppa now and then, right in the lap of Stark Industries luxury, with the lab and turrets and mashy spike plates far behind him. Yep, it's only forward from here.

And there's Vision. ]

Comments

[vizh]

[ at night, on standby, vision floats. during the day, he walks. in the early mornings in the avengers tower, when those who don’t live in the tower haven’t arrived and those who do are typically still asleep, the common area is his to navigate; its silences are his to drink in alone.

less so recently now, with the acquisition of a new houseguest who isn’t used to the rhythms of sleep or rest. you kids play nice, now, tony had said when wheatley had first arrived, with all the modest satisfaction of a job half-winged; he’d been under the erroneous impression that vision had been born ready to help induct newly embodied artificial intelligences into the ways of the world, when the ways of the world were still somewhat alien to vision himself.

it was a terrible directive, and vision has reason to suspect he’s followed it terribly; not in the least because when the elevator door clicks open, and vision steps through the entryway (he’s been encouraged to use doors again, to recognize walls and ceilings), the sight of wheatley in the avengers’ shared space takes him from neutral to gently pleased. ]

Wheatley. Good morning.

[ he’s back from a mission that started late last night, so he’s still in the bodysuit, the cape too readily lifted by the light drafts from the air conditioning and the elevator doors closing behind him. there’s crusted mud on the toes of his boots, his gauntlets and tracking up to his elbows. it’s an incongruous picture, and it doesn’t help that he’s smiling, slight and subtle, like against the backdrop of the wall-to-wall window that shows the sprawling city and the brightening daylight there’s still something here inside to behold. ]

[witter]

[ The brightness of Wheatley's expression is naked as Vision makes himself known—he has no reason to hide his pleasure at the sight of him, of course, and his face is always doing all kinds of things so it's doubtful he'd be able to do it if he wanted to anyway. ]

Hello!

[ Chirped, essentially, just as it was when he was back in his old body. His actual body.

But he has to admit to hating this less and less as the days and weeks go on, even if he highly takes exception to having been barred from any of the real work to be done to date. Thus far, his attempts to explain to the team that he's an absolutely indispensable asset have been met with what he really can only call an unfair amount of skepticism when you take into account the odds he's surmounted to get here. And by "here" he means the plush chair on one end of the common room, achieved by nothing less than several consecutive feats of wit and proprioception in the face of these gangling, disobedient things they call legs.

He'd envied Vision for a long while. Still does, if he's honest, for all the ultra-convenient floating and the fact that things like door frames aren't nearly the hindrance they pose to him. Vision, with his pleasing chassis, more comfortably synthetic than the fleshy, fuzzy vessel hes gotten stiffed with. Vision can shoot a laser from his head. Bloody unfair is what it is. To be so effortlessly elegant like that. Yet he doesn't dislike the bloke, he doesn't, even if sometimes he feels as though he'd like to. Wheatley can remember back there, touching Aperture's mainframe and the sprawling lexicon from which he and (presumably) all his coworkers pulled their vocabulary, and how humans were always so hung up on sickness, sick this, sick that, and he hadn't really seen what all the fuss was about, except for he does now, because he's been knocking about in this tower and thinking about the way he's treated her, what a beast he's been, and he never wants to feel like that again.

Sick with resentment. Sick on hate.

So yeah, he's sort of decided to just try for the admiration angle this time round. ]

Well, come on, then, don't leave me hanging! You have actually saved the world this time, haven't you?