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Stanley didn't like to question things. Well, no, that wasn't quite right. He liked questioning The Narrator on his plots, riling him up so that he sounded like a particularly indignant pigeon. Some of his best memories came from that.
He also liked questioning why someone would ever hate the broom closet - how could they, when it was so wonderful, so… alluring. The enclosed space, the dim lighting, and for all The Narrator whined, it really was relaxing to trace his fingers along the cracks in the wall.
(The Narrator, Stanley had long decided, is simply too pompous to appreciate such simple joys. Writers, he had tsked, telling The Narrator precisely that. The ensuing insults had Stanley cackling, and he ended up hitting his head on the metal shelf.)
What he doesn't like to do is ponder the very fundamentals of his - and The Narrators - existence, even if he unwittingly does it more often than recommended. There was a time, Stanley would admit to himself and only himself, that he did like to theorise with vigor.
Perhaps they were both lines of code, he had said, once, to The Narrator. The Narrator had disagreed, citing that if he was code, how could he have created Stanley!
(They both ignored, back then, that The Narrator didn't create Stanley so much as Stanley created himself, sentience weaving its way into a story that should not have had any.)
(Regret, staining the hallways that are all either of them will ever know.)
Pondering, theorising, questioning… it's all worthless nowadays, to Stanley. How could it be anything but, when his thoughts caused the inkwell of his lone companion to spill and stain, forever marking a being that claims omnipotence, when he cannot even remember the sight of an artificial sun.
(In the aftermath, Stanley had tried to explain. To fix it. To get him back, so that they could run rampant in an untextured hallway and argue over carpeting. It never stuck.)
This is all to say that Stanley was not focusing the least bit on The Narrator as he chided - whined about, really - Stanley for his dreadful snails pace, as he rolled listlessly around on his office chair. Eventually, he would get up. There were only so many things The Narrator could say before his script ran out, only so many spins the chair could take.
(Four hundred and twenty seven. Stanley had tested it once, The Narrators exasperated sighs only fueling him. When it had broken, Stanley had fallen, leaving him and The Narrator in a rather abrupt silence. It didn't last long, of course, but that was one of the last times Stanley had heard The Narrator laugh outside of that damned script.)
Eventually he would get up.
Stanley would walk, again, to an ending he had done many times. He would hope, deep down, that this would be the time The Narrator would quip at his unkempt shirt, or reveal that this had been an ill-thought out prank. Stanley could imagine that he would laugh, or swear, and The Narrator would not panic - not reset - believing there was a bug the minute Stanley raised his hand in a rather rude gesture.
(Uncouth, The Narrator had called him the first time. Wrong, The Narrator calls him now.)
And Stanley would not recite, quietly, the words he now knows by heart, if only because there is nothing else to know.
"This is the story of a man named Stanley.
Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee Number 427…"