“Thank fucking God,” Gordon moans, all the tension draining from him in one fell swoop. His crowbar falls with it. “I can’t believe you’re here! Somebody’s actually here! And they don’t wanna kill me!”
“The feeling’s mutual.” Alyx smiles wryly and holds out a hand. It takes an embarrassing amount of time for Gordon to realize that she’s offering a hand up, and not just a handshake. “I didn’t know if I’d find you in one piece. We haven’t heard anything in days.”
“Days?”
That’s not— That can’t be right. He’s only been strapped in for a few hours. But she says it with such sincerity and worry that he can’t help but believe her, at least a little. He rises from his defensive crouch. She’s, uh, she’s awfully strong, he notes, nearly popping his shoulder from his socket.
“Yeah. I… oh, God,” she trails off, laughing and pushing her hair back in a way that suggests stress more than amusement. “Haha, I— sorry, Gordon, I just— it’s been a really long day. I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Please don’t tell me you’re being held hostage, or something.”
“Uh, no? That’s the weird thing, actually, I haven’t—”
“check this out,” Gordon hears behind him. His heart sinks. “found a bunch of pineapples and… uh… what’s— who this.”
“Oh,” says Alyx.
It’s a strange kind of “oh”, the kind that’s gravid with meaning despite its existence as a single syllable. Gordon doesn’t know what to make of it. After a long, awkward pause, he clears his throat and says, “Hey, yeah, so this is— This is Benrey. Don’t shoot him! Christ, I should have said that first. Uh…” He rubs the back of his head. “Benrey, this is Alyx. She’s my friend, okay? Don’t shoot her either.”
“wasn’t gonna,” sulks Benrey, folding his arms.
Alyx looks between the two of them, but ultimately focuses on Benrey, and steps closer to get a better look at him. Benrey tenses under her gaze. Like he’s done something wrong. Is he… sweating? “Benrey, huh,” she says quietly. “So you’re the guy Gordon’s been running around with.”
“How do you know that?” Gordon asks at the same time Benrey does. Although in his case, it comes out more like, “excuse me, that’s classified information”.
“The Combine have eyes everywhere,” she smiles, a dry inflection to her voice. She waves her fingers in an arc next to her, as if to demonstrate. “Breen’s broadcasts were the only way we knew if you were even still alive. And your friend here sticks out like a sore thumb.”
“Oh, uh, he’s not my friend.” Benrey huffs at that, offended. “He’s… uh… it’s complicated, but he’s not—”
“we’re best friends,” Benrey insists.
“That is a very generous description of our relationship—”
“Guys,” Alyx interrupts, “I hate to interrupt, but this isn’t the best place for a heart-to-heart. We’ve really gotta get out of here.”
Gordon swallows his words, and does his best to do the same with his embarrassment. It still leaks out against his will, flushing his entire face a faint pink. “No, yeah, that’s— that makes sense. Combine outpost. Torture chamber. Big fucking tank.” He can take a hint. “And… pineapples?”
Next to him - and a lot closer than he anticipated - Benrey idly tosses something from hand to hand. “pineapples,” he says helpfully. It’s only when he stops and holds that round little object out for their inspection that Gordon realizes it’s a fucking grenade.
“Oh. Okay. Cool. Two things: one, where did you get that, and two, stop throwing it around!”
Turns out there’s a whole chest full of them, a drab olive and conveniently marked with a picture of a grenade spray-painted on the front. He feels kind of stupid, not knowing how in the world he missed it. He’s been doing pretty good at picking up environmental hints so far, he thinks. Inside, it holds a mountain of grenades, all loosely piled up like they’re so many abandoned toys, and Gordon stuffs his metaphorical pockets with as many as he can hold. He doesn’t even squawk too loudly when Benrey says, “catch,” and tosses one last grenade at him.
“Just one question,” Gordon says at last, turning back to Alyx. “How exactly are we getting out of here?” He jangles the airboat key in front of himself. “We got one airboat and three people, and the math wasn’t looking too good to begin with.”
“tie you to the fan. blow the stink off you.”
“Wh—”
“Oh. You guys got the airboat,” Alyx breathes. It’s distinctly not an answer. She pinches the bridge of her nose, deep in thought.
Guilt trickles down the base of Gordon’s skull, though he’s not sure why. Then it hits him as she mutters potential plans of action to herself: it’s his fault there’s not enough room for everybody, because he was the idiot who told Benrey to hop on board! He could have solved, like, three problems at once, but instead he took Benrey at his word, and now his real Player 2 just showed up and he’s gonna have to figure out the high-tech dystopian equivalent of the boat crossing problem. How the hell do you ferry a wolf, a sheep, and a head of lettuce to Black Mesa East when time’s at a premium? And which one of them is the sheep?
“kind of a… stupid thing to worry about,” says Benrey, jostling him from that train of thought. “not like it’s goin’ anywhere.”
“Yeah, we’ve run into a little problem,” Gordon starts. He scratches the back of his head. “It’s a gate. We ran into a gate. With the boat. And I was really hoping we’d find a switch somewhere in here.”
The furrow in Alyx’s brow deepens. “When it rains, it pours,” she mutters. Then, like somebody’s flipped a switch in her, she stretches her arms over her head and shakes off her burgeoning bad mood. “Well, if it’s not in here, there’s only so many places it could be. One step at a time.” She speaks less like she’s talking to them and more like she’s trying to reassure herself.
Gordon blinks at her, the gears churning in his head. “Wait, so does that mean— Are you gonna help look for it? You’re coming with me?” he says, voice brightening tentatively as he speaks.
“You say that like I was just gonna sit back and let you do all the work.” She grins. “Not a bad idea. Go on, I’ll kick back, grab a nice cold glass of water…”
“No, hey, come on,” Gordon half-laughs, half-pleads, “I could really use a hand—”
“you already got two of ‘em,” Benrey’s voice cuts in. There’s a surprisingly dark undertone to it.
“Yeah, now I do! No thanks to you, man.”
Across from them, Alyx fails to tamp down a puzzled laugh herself. “Seriously, though, it’ll go faster if we work together. We don’t want to be stuck here once Civil Protection sends its units back to their posts,” she says.
A weight lifts itself from Gordon’s chest, one that he hadn’t realized was there until it wasn’t crushing him flat anymore. He takes a deep breath, then lets it out, relief coursing through him as he does. Things are going back to normal. He doesn’t have to navigate all this shit on his own. And Alyx seems like she’s actually going to be helpful, unlike some AIs he could name.
“Okay. Well, if you wanna split up, maybe you could take that side of the outpost, and I could take this side—”
“i already checked over there,” Benrey grumbles. “’s just a bunch of fuckin’ toilets in there. for you. to stick your head in.”
“Awesome. Great. I’ll just go with you then, Alyx— is it cool if I call you Alyx? You’re not, like, secretly Doctor Alyx, are you?”
Benrey makes a loud, disgusted noise.
“Uh.” Alyx looks between the two of them again, this time with a distinct expression of confusion. “Yeah, no, I can just—”
“Don’t worry about him,” Gordon says quickly, “he’s just, like— he was made wrong as a joke, I think. You have no idea how glad I am to talk to somebody normal for once.” He heads for the nearest door on her side and swings it open, waiting for her to go first. “And— and helpful! And you haven’t tried to kill me yet! That’s a plus!”
There’s a loud clatter from the other side of the room, and then a series of leaden thumps. Gordon whips his head around: Benrey’s hurled one of his newfound grenades at a glass wall, and it’s bounced off harmlessly onto the floor, pin thankfully intact. But Benrey’s storming off in its wake, snarling under his breath.
“What the hell—”
“don’t fucking talk to me,” Benrey hisses, not looking back at him. “fuckin’, stupid… stupid… i’m going away forever, by the way. if you even care.”
Gordon watches him stomp off to the exit and slam the door shut behind him, totally nonplussed. After a moment, when the room’s gone well and truly quiet again, he turns back to Alyx and says, “Well, I don’t know what that was about, but you know what? It’s not my problem.”
“I feel like I'm missing something,” she starts, confused and, if Gordon’s being honest, a little judgmental. “What did I walk in on?”
“It’s not even anything. He just does this shit sometimes.” He sighs and closes his eyes for a moment. “I’m sure he’ll be back. Whenever he feels like it.”
Benrey proceeds not to be his problem for all of a minute, sixty seconds that he spends poring over a bank of inscrutable switches and dials before the faint (but all-too-familiar) sound of fan blades chugging bleeds into earshot.
“I thought you had the keys,” Alyx says slowly.
“I did!”
He doesn’t think to pat himself down for them. Instead, he bolts for the exit door, just in time to see Benrey steer the prow directly toward the sealed canal gate and floor it. His heart jolts - he’s gonna crash, he’s gonna wreck the fucking airboat and splatter his stupid brains all over the lock and not even give Gordon the satisfaction of doing it himself and Alyx is gonna be so pissed off at him - but none of his fears come to fruition. Benrey just passes clean through the gate like a hot knife through butter, and the boat with him.
Just then, Alyx comes up behind him. “What’s he—”
She stops herself, having caught sight of Benrey miraculously jetting away on the other side of the gate. She stays quiet for a long, long moment, then looks up at Gordon, and, man, he feels so goddamn huge compared to everybody else in this game. It’s making him feel kind of self-conscious.
“Tell me I’m not going crazy, Gordon.”
“You’re not,” he says, suddenly tired. “Like I said. He just does shit like this.”
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, but it’s a little too strung out to count, he thinks. “You’re telling me he just… I don’t know. You guys said you were stuck on this side. So how is he—”
“It’s a long story,” Gordon interrupts. “A really long one.” A shadow passes overhead, a vaguely-avian silhouette accompanied by a far-distant whir, and he shrinks back into the doorway. “Something tells me we’ve got bigger things to worry about right now.”
She glances up at it, too. “Shit,” she whispers. It’s the first time he’s heard her swear like that. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go for plan B.”
He’s been lucky enough in the twenty years since the invasion that he’s not seen much combat. In fact, the thought of violence rarely crosses his mind; he has always been too wrapped up in figuring out inventive new ways to avoid the enemy instead, since stealth is one of the few advantages he reckons humanity still has. In fact, the shotgun he kept under his desk in his former lab was at Barney's suggestion, always the realist, the cynic, who insisted that it was the right thing to do.
Kleiner had people to protect, after all. He still has people to protect. Even if it doesn’t feel like it anymore.
But that weapon had always felt weighty and cold in his hands, terrifying in a way that he has never been good at putting into words. It felt too heavy, too real, like the last of his humanity was stripped away and replaced with this: a gun, instead of a pen. Some horrible attempt by his own confidant to take away the last shred of his morals in a way the Combine could not.
It felt a lot like Barney’s baton does now.
He ruminates on this as he shuffles along, hardly inconspicuous with the load he’s having to carry. A box of notes threatens to fall from underneath his left arm while Lamarr squirms in his right, squawking in complaint with every step. The stun stick he was meant to use to defend himself is awkwardly thrust into his trousers, for lack of a means to actually hold it, making his gait ungainly and stiff and beating a bruise into his thigh. It's more of a concession to his old friend than anything else. His glasses slip dangerously close to the edge of his nose, and he prays they don’t hit the ground; finding the right prescription after the end times would be next to impossible, and he’d hardly even be able to find them amidst all the litter on the ground.
Torn fliers. Milk jugs. Discarded things that don’t have a meaning anymore. The fast food bags with metrocop faces printed on them are new, though, and Kleiner feels an unfamiliar pang of anger. Those scallywags had no right imitating something so unique to the human experience. Thousands of years of convenience - from ancient Egyptian stalls to greasy McDonald’s fries – had no right being replicated by extraterrestrial tyrants.
They likely didn’t even understand what made it so great in the first place: the spur-of-the-moment memories made when grabbing a quick bite to eat after work, gathering up the coworkers to go to Big Tony’s Pizza, sitting around a grease-covered box while the monorail buzzed past and a cool breeze whipped up from the reservoir. Himself and Gordon and Barney, talking about their most recent adventure with misplaced keys, Gordon quietly contesting Barney’s claims of victory with a polite little half-smile that drove their old friend mad. Barney, red-faced and laughing but feigning indignance as Gordon claimed that he won the race through Kleiner’s vents on some obscure, outrageous technicality—
Kleiner stops. He swallows. The baton in his waistband suddenly feels heavier.
“I think I need to take a breather, Lamarr,” Kleiner says, panting. Lamarr wiggles in his grip, and he isn’t sure if that’s a positive or negative reaction. He sighs in response. In the back of his head, he can hear Barney urging him to just turn her loose, let her go, to hell with her, and it’s all the incentive he needs to straighten his shoulders, steady his upper lip, and center his thoughts.
He can’t leave Lamarr out in the cold, dangerous world alone. She’s debeaked! She can’t survive out there, all on her own, tainted by Resistance meddling, singled out by her own kind. Without anyone to protect her, without anyone to have her back. What if the other headcrabs figured out who she was? What she was? Who she worked for? What if the other headcrabs turned on her, guns blazing, and…
His resolve begins to waver. It’s best to just quiet the thought for now. All that matters is that Lamarr is safe with him. She’s safe, he’s safe. And Barney is only a couple of hours behind them. He has to be.
“We’ll only be a moment, now. No need to act so petulant. One moment for this old man to regain his strength, and then onwards on our triumphant march!”
With his last remnants of energy, he gingerly sits his box of notes on the ground and shoves them along the cracked concrete with his foot. The alley he’s in is cramped and dirty but thankfully empty otherwise, with nary a soldier nor city scanner in sight. There is only the distant sound of bird wings as Lamarr lets out another frustrated churr, which jumps into a comforted squeak when Kleiner gives her a little squeeze.
“You’ll be eating watermelon before you know it,” he tells her, determined to sound fond instead of worried. For her sake.
Kleiner squeezes his box between a big rusted dumpster and a chain link fence, noting how snugly it fits in the gap. Then, he squeezes in himself, taking a precarious seat on the edge of his notes, careful not to crumple up the surviving papers. He holds Lamarr to his chest and takes a deep breath, ignoring how strange it feels to have her kicking and wriggling against him. He wonders dimly how many people have felt the exact sensation of a struggling, hungry headcrab pressed against them and lived to tell the tale.
His stomach sinks, so his brain quickly changes the channel. “Just another day or so. And it’ll be you, and me, and Eli. Barney, too. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see you.”
He feels the weight of the baton. He sees Barney in his mind, stern and angry. Their last discussion had been such an angry one. He doesn’t like this thought, either. He changes the channel again.
“And I’m sure he’ll see the folly of his ways when he sees just how important all of these notes are! Oh, won’t he feel so silly, Lamarr?”
The broad plane of the dumpster, still clinging to bits of green from its original paint job long ago, is nice and cool against the side of his head. Kleiner lets himself close his eyes for a moment. He has only to keep going, follow this long-abandoned path to its source, and he'll be safely out of City 17. From there, though… who's to say?
Another deep breath. The smell is less than appealing, but the stiff line of his shoulders starts to sink. Such is the nature of scientific progress, he thinks. A fumbling, endless foray into the dark.
Part of her almost can’t believe he’s real.
She’s not prone to distraction as a general rule. She prides herself on being keen-eyed and alert, somebody who can keep up with the intensely intellectual conversations between her father and his peers with minimal struggle, but now she finds it hard to focus on what he’s saying. What Gordon Freeman’s saying. The more important thing to her is that he’s still alive to say it. The bright orange of the HEV suit keeps drawing her eye, standing in stark contrast to the cruel blue light around him.
It’s not the same as the one they sent him out in - this one’s marred with scuffs, spattered with flecks of blood, the carbon-fiber undersuit frayed in parts and totally split open in others, revealing his vulnerable underbelly. The gash in his abdomen gets her the most. Alyx had stress-tested that suit over and over, preparing for a day she’d once thought nothing more than a pipe dream, and the force it’d take to shred those stiff abdominal panels makes her blood run cold.
“…Hey, uh,” Gordon’s voice cuts in, “are you good? Did you— did you get stuck on something?”
“Oh. Sorry, Gordon. I was just thinking.” Alyx forces a smile to reassure him. It seems to relieve some of that tension in his shoulders, so, mission accomplished. She hops onto a steel banister, an aged, creaking thread between the top and bottom of a worryingly-wobbly staircase, and slides down with ease. The heavy clomp of Gordon’s boots behind her is growing more familiar by the minute. “This way. There’s an access tunnel that cuts underneath the canal. We used to bring people to Black Mesa East through this footpath, at least, until Civil Protection got their hands on it.”
“That would explain the tanks,” Gordon mutters.
“Yeah. I wish I could say we have something like those, but…”
The lower they descend, the cooler the air becomes, chilled by meters of soil, sediment, and reclaimed water above their heads. It’s no less humid, though, leaving a clammy feeling on her skin. The walls themselves almost seem to perspire, water beading at weak points in their structure and slowly oozing down to the floor, years of vivid bacterial growth - decades, even - fanning outward from those persistent leaks like the rings of a tree. A living history. You could trace back to the days before the end, if you looked closely enough.
“How did you get through here, then? Is it— did you, like, go all Kill Bill on them? Like before? Are we gonna run into a bunch of knocked-out Combine somewhere, because let me tell you, I’ve got a lot of pent-up energy and I could really use an outlet—”
“What? No,” she laughs, surprised. “Nobody’s manning the guard stations out here, Gordon. They’ve all been called to the city, looking for Barney.”
That clomping stops. Alyx stops with it, turning back to face Gordon. “What? Why? What happened to Barney?”
A moment passes, in which Alyx takes in the scrunch of his eyebrows, the disbelief in his eyes. “Oh, you’re serious,” she finally says, unable to keep pity out of her voice. “You… do know who you’ve been running around with, right?”
“What, Benrey? What’s he got to do with anything?”
“He looks just like Barney, Gordon.”
Realization fails to dawn on him.
“And the surveillance drones have been recording you ever since you arrived in City 17,” she elaborates. “You and Benrey. Barney was convinced that Civil Protection would crack down on him as soon as they realized who you were with, and, well…” She searches for the words. “I guess he was right. We haven’t heard from him since.”
“That… explains a lot, actually,” Gordon says slowly. “The whole level’s been totally empty ever since we got the airboat. I thought maybe I’d missed some kind of trigger. But like… Why are they— Why isn’t anybody coming after me anyway? What’s the point?”
She blinks, not able to make sense of what he’s saying. Maybe it’s not clicking. Kleiner and Barney had mentioned that he’d been acting a little off; Alyx wonders if stasis had messed with his head. Frankly, she thinks it’s a miracle that he’s still here, as fresh and young as when they'd last seen him, so the temporal equivalent of a concussion doesn’t irritate her so much as it fills her with worry.
“Well, they don’t exactly know where you are right now. All our comms are down, so even if they were sniffing our broadcasts, it’s not like they’d get anything—”
“No, no,” Gordon cuts her off, “I mean, like… I’m the main character, right? Why is all this shit happening in the background? It doesn’t make a lot of sense, uh, narratively.”
Alyx genuinely doesn’t know how to respond to that. Her eyebrows rise, but she doesn’t say anything, stunned silent for the first time in… ages, honestly. A sinking feeling settles in the pit of her stomach. A strange dread.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she says at last, tempering her words with concern.
“I— Uh— Look, can I just— Can I just talk to you? One-on-one? Mano a mano? Because I’m gonna be honest with you, I haven’t had a real conversation with anybody in way too fucking long, and I’m kind of at my breaking point. You don’t even have to say anything, just— just let me talk. And don’t, fucking, try to shoot at me or set me on fire or something.” His voice is strained and hoarse, almost desperate. Under the dim emergency lighting, single bulbs strung intermittently along the walls, the bags under his eyes stand out in stark relief, and it’s only then that she realizes just how haggard he looks. And now that she thinks about it, it’s not like he looked much better when they first met.
“We can talk,” she tells him. “But we gotta keep moving, okay? I don’t know how much longer we’ll have until the Combine come back to their posts, and you look like you’re in pretty bad shape. No offense.”
“None taken,” Gordon manages.
Alyx leads him to a door that she’d left open, one that leads into a cramped maintenance room bracketed with rumbling pipes and valves and dials, and a single dead monitor against the far wall. She locks the door behind her, the deadbolt thumping into place. It wouldn't hold against sustained fire, but she thinks it'll be a good, long while before that poses a problem. Her greater worry is what might lie in wait ahead.
“It’s too much,” he starts. “It’s getting to be wayyy too much. I haven’t had a lunch break in, uh, a couple days? Maybe? And I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. Or, uh, whatever passes for horses here. I don’t think I’ve seen a single normal animal in this whole game.”
“If you can hold out for a little while longer, Louie cooks a mean casserole.” She smiles back at him, deliberately paying no mind to everything else he’s saying. Maybe he’ll feel better once he’s got some real food in him. Fresh water. The works.
“Great. Uh. You know, I— I’m not even supposed to be here. I tested Craig’s stupid fucking program, okay, and now I’ve been stuck in here so long that I’m talking to you like it’s gonna help anything. Like you’re even listening.”
Despite all her earlier insistence that they get a move on, the sheer rudeness of that last bit gets Alyx to stop in her tracks. She slowly turns to face him, squinting, mouth parted in disbelief. “Excuse me?”
His eyes go wide. “Uh.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because—”
“I risked my life to come find you,” she cuts him off, anger simmering to the surface. Her mouth sets in a hard line. “And you’ve been talking to me like I’m not even here.”
Gordon’s hands fly up in a defensive gesture. “Jeez, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t— I didn’t think you’d care. Nobody else has been scripted to - to - to get mad at me, nobody besides—”
“What do you mean, scripted? I’m trying to talk to you like a normal person! And all you keep talking about is programs and scripts and I swear, sometimes I wonder if Dr. Mossman was right about you—”
She pauses, catching herself before she explodes, and lowers her hands from where she’d started to fiercely gesture. A deep breath. In through the mouth, out through the nose. It’s not productive to snap at him like this, not when it’s starting to sound like something’s genuinely wrong with him. She can’t imagine what it’s been like - trapped in that awful limbo, every neuron and every cell and every potential impulse suspended in time for years upon years, stuck at the cusp of being like he’d stepped too close to the event horizon only to be yanked unceremoniously into their time.
Was he awake? Was he thinking? Did he feel the drag of every second between then and now, or did he snap into consciousness like he’d never left it? She can’t ask - not now, anyway, not when she’s still working on getting him back in one piece - but she’s been wondering. Whatever the truth is, it’s left him a mess, she can say that much for sure.
“Okay. Look. Why don’t we try to get on the same page,” she says at last, having smoothed the tension away from her forehead. There’s a practiced gentleness to her voice. “What do you think is going on here, exactly?”
His irises flicker back and forth, trying to get a read on her. But he doesn't respond.
“No judgment. I’m just here to listen.”
All those defensive bristles start to fall away, and his shoulders fall with them, leaving him sagging where he stands. He looks so much smaller like this, even with the full head of height he’s got on her. And, more to the point, he looks exhausted.
“Okay,” he starts, “but you can’t— I haven’t— I haven’t had a conversation where somebody hasn’t been yelling at me or making fun of me or jerking me around in so fucking long, man, so just—” He stops himself to take a deep breath, like he’s uncertain of what to say next. Then he continues, “I… am Gordon Freeman. Like, in real life. I-I have a Ph.D, I work at Black Mesa, I have a plain old desk job and I spend most of my time sending emails, okay? But Craig - he’s my coworker - he made this… training simulation, or whatever. We were supposed to start running some tests next quarter, some really dangerous shit, and he— and upper management wanted us to be ‘prepared for every eventuality’,” he puts on a mocking, derisive tone, “so they strapped me into the haptic feedback suit and had me play his little pet project for a few hours. No biggie, right?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, uncertain.
“Yeah. Except, uh, he totally fucked it up! The AI was busted, the experiment took a fucking nosedive as soon as I stepped into the testing chamber, he made up this whole Resonance Cascade scenario where I’m shooting aliens and shit, and I had to play through the whole goddamn thing before they would let me take off the headset! And Benrey, fucking— oh my God—”
He pushes the loose hairs back from his forehead with both hands, then starts waving them around with a renewed vigor as he speaks—
“He cut off my arm!”
Alyx looks at the arm in question. Then back at him. His face darkens, blushing under the cold light.
“Yeah, I know, it’s back now. It was— it was just a simulation. But it hurt like the real fucking thing! And so did him, like, turning forty feet tall and slapping me around in the world’s dumbest boss fight! That was the whole point, right, that if you fucked up, you’d get zapped like a rat and you’d learn not to do it again,” he says in one rapid burst.
“Makes sense,” Alyx says slowly. “So it was… a simulation. The Resonance Cascade. And now…”
Gordon looks at her with a quiet desperation and says, “I was supposed to take it off. But I can’t. And now I’m… now I’m here.”
She doesn’t immediately respond, letting the ambient sounds of dripping water and the dark thrum of the pipes fill the space between them. For a long moment, the outside world and all the threat it holds fade into the periphery. It’s not like she knows what to say, anyway. He speaks with such a gravity that she can’t help but believe him, or at least believe that he really, truly believes it himself. And, if she’s being perfectly honest, that stunt Benrey pulled earlier does give her pause. She’s struggling to explain it. Not that this does, necessarily, but it’s a signifier that there’s something she’s missing.
Then he breaks that dreamlike silence with a shake of the head and a laugh. “God,” he mutters, “it sounds stupid when I say it all out loud. Like, I— I’m having a total mental breakdown over a fucking video game.” He meets her eyes, face bent into a crooked approximation of a smile. “You can laugh. I won’t even be that mad about it.”
“I’m not gonna laugh at you, Gordon,” she says.
His smile falters.
Alyx chooses her words carefully. “I may not get it,” she starts, “but it feels real to you, right? It is real to you.”
“That’s because it is real! I— okay, maybe I’ve had a really bad track record with getting through to you guys, but this is— this is—” Gordon sputters, unable to find the words.
“’You guys’?”
“You know, you, Tommy, Bubby— well, I guess Coomer figured it out near the end, and I’m gonna be honest, that made me feel pretty fucking weird,” he rambles. “And, uh… Benrey.” Something lights up in his face. “Benrey! If only he was here. You’d know exactly what I mean… he’s busted,” laughs Gordon. “They did a way better job on the AI in this one. You almost seem like an actual person.”
“That’s because I am an actual person,” she says with a small smile. “We all are.”
“If you keep talking like that, I might start to believe you.”
She claps him on the shoulder, the one that’s not currently bandaged up. “That’s a good start. Just, uh, try to treat me like one, okay? And I’ll treat you like one, too. Deal?”
Gordon stiffens. His ears go pink. “Uh. Deal.”
“Feel any better?”
“Weirdly enough, I do,” he says. “It’s— it’s nice. Talking to somebody. Without being jerked around.”
Alyx smiles, full and bright. He makes an attempt to match it.
As she leads him through door after door, she recalls that there used to be more paths like these: a sprawling spiderweb of disused access tunnels, convoys of covered trucks masquerading as livestock transport, hand-bored crawlspaces just wide enough for a person to crawl through so long as they held their breath. But they’ve been winnowed down through a months-long concentrated assault, stripping their network bare of medics and radio operators until it suffered a breakdown so catastrophic that they lost track of Gordon Freeman, a man who couldn’t be more conspicuous if he came with bells and whistles.
And now Alyx leads him through the path she’s had to carve herself. They’d used these tunnels before, of course, the ones that thread from the water treatment facilities to the electrical substation that kept them afloat, but not since the Combine had overrun them and taken the entire plant for themselves.
Gordon’s easily distractable - a little like a dog, she thinks, where he pauses to sniff every suspicious pool of blood and discarded milk crate on the way back. Once, she’s even caught him literally sniffing. The way his ears go bright pink under scrutiny makes her laugh.
They come to a dead end in short order, and when Gordon shoots her a confused look, she points up. Above them, a metal grate hangs limply from the edge of a ventilation shaft. Her handiwork, naturally.
“I don’t think I can jump that high,” he says, and Alyx snorts.
“There’s stuff around here we can use to get back up. It’s how we used to get through to the other side.”
She’s already scanned the hall for crates and boxes, accounting for worst-case scenarios even as she made her way to Gordon. She can’t say she was expecting Gordon to have gotten this far with both him and his mysterious companion intact. But she can improvise.
Here, she finds a handful of milk crates; there, Gordon rolls a creaky wooden spool from an adjoining room, and lays it on its flat side for her to stack things atop. It’ll get her up there, that’s for sure, but Gordon eyes her tower warily and shifts from foot to foot, visibly uncomfortable.
“Okay, so, I didn’t wanna say anything earlier and, you know, harsh your vibe,” he starts, “but IIII don’t know if I’m gonna, uh. Be able to get up there? Like, this suit is heavy as shit, and I’ve had a real bad track record with busting things and fucking up puzzles and—”
“Whoa, where is this coming from?” Alyx interrupts, a surprised laugh on the edges of her voice. “You’ll be fine. I’ll even go in behind you, push you up. If you want.”
“No no no no no,” Gordon says rapidly, “that’s not a good idea. If I crush you, your dad’s gonna kill me. Assuming I can even get to him without you.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Gordon, you’re not gonna crush me—”
“I’ll figure it out! I’ll figure it out.” His voice comes out a lot louder than she thinks he meant it to, judging by the way he winces.
Alyx does not, in fact, push him up. He insists on following behind, like he’s been doing the whole time, although it does take a bit of cajoling to actually get him up there. It’s like Gordon thinks he’s a solid 6 inches wider than he actually is: his shoulders draw together, he holds his breath, and he flinches when he so much as grazes the sides of the vent. In fairness, though, the sound of metal on metal makes her tense up, too. Less because she’s worried about him getting stuck, and more about the echo, the steady clunk-clunk of his knees hitting stamped aluminum rattling down the corridor.
Not much either of them can do about that. She just takes it slow, peering through the slats underneath them whenever she gets the chance. The vents are nearly pitch-black, navigable only by feel, and those glimpses of light below are the only semblance of progress they’re gonna get. More importantly, however, she’s keeping her eyes peeled for movement. Shadows shifting underneath.
She stops at a fork in the vent, deep in thought. If they headed left here, it’d take them longer to get around, but they’d bypass a junction between the mill and the hydroelectric station. A junction that had found itself unexpectedly humming with traffic, last she saw it. Even if that was a long time ago, she doesn’t want to risk another unit passing through at the same time they do.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Gordon whispers behind her, as she finally decides to steer them around.
“Pretty hard to find a ‘wrong way’ around here. I’m just taking the long way around,” Alyx reassures him. “Stay quiet. I’ve got you.”
She almost doesn’t expect him to listen, but she can practically hear his mouth snap shut in the suffocating dark.
Down here, all is still. The only sounds she can hear are their own shuffling, their breath just before it’s whisked away by the flow of cool air. The halls are empty beneath them where she can steal a glance, although grates like that are few and far between. The faint reek of mold hovers insistently around them, refusing to be dislodged even by the air circulating past.
Alyx pauses for a moment to shove her head into the collar of her shirt. Just to smell something less like a sewer and more like a human. It’s starting to give her a headache.
Just ahead, the darkness is broken by faint, diffuse shafts of light from a grate at the bottom of the vent. And then they move, flickering out one by one before snapping back into place. Alyx’s heart skips a beat.
“Wha—?” she hears behind her.
“Shh!”
She stops still, and Gordon’s forced to do the same, the rhythmic thump of his knees going quiet. She doesn’t know if it’ll be enough. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody down this way, there hadn’t been in ages, but when she strains her ears against the atmospheric hum, she can make out the familiar clack of boots on concrete. Then they slow to a stop.
Alyx holds out a finger, a signal to wait. And she hopes Gordon can even see it.
Below them, a mechanical garble filters upward, too faint for the words to be distinguishable but still distinctly Combine in nature. A bead of sweat trickles down her forehead.
The shadows shift. She can’t make out much more without moving. Another voice. Lower than the first, clipped and curt. That bead slowly rolls down her face, clinging tremulously to her chin.
A sound, not unlike a laugh. It falls, splashing on the dusty aluminum, and it echoes much louder in the enclosed space than it has any right to. The voices abruptly halt. Her heartbeat roars in her ears.
One.
Two.
Three.
After what feels like an eternity, counting her thundering pulse and locking all of her muscles tightly in place, the garbled voices resume their conversation; she catches the barest whisper of a complaint about leaks. But it’s not until they pass underneath and are long out of earshot that she lets herself breathe. Her shoulders slump, and she presses her forehead against the cold metal.
“Are you okay?” Gordon whispers.
Alyx takes a deep breath through her nose, trying to meter it so she doesn’t end up panting like a dog the way she very much wants to. Then she raises her head again and shoots Gordon a thumbs up.
Gordon’s shuffling sounds more muted behind her when he starts moving again, but he’s going a lot slower, too. Watching his footsteps. Or… kneesteps. It’s a relief to know that he’s got some kind of sense of self-preservation. That sounds more uncharitable than she intends, but she was really starting to worry about him. The way he was talking suggests a serious disconnect with reality, and she doesn’t know how far down it goes.
They continue on undisturbed. It’s slow going, now that they’re taking extra care to accommodate Gordon’s armor. He’s doing his best to be catlike, hands and knees gingerly padding across the metal, and she bets she’d laugh if she could see what he’s doing. But she’s the lead. And besides, it kind of hurts her neck to keep glancing back at him so much.
Their surroundings remain quiet save for the distant rumble of the heat pump, the footsteps of Combine grunts long behind. She’s not caught sight of anything moving underneath them in a good, long while, and they’re deep enough into the HVAC system that she’s pretty sure they’ve passed the worst of the opposition.
Suddenly, the groan of struts and rivets underfoot begins to intensify, first slowly and then all at once.
Alyx halts, and Gordon does in turn. A sound like a bow drawing across the lowest-pitched string of an enormous bass ripples through the ventilation shaft, under them, around them, and she can’t help but whip her head around in an attempt to catch Gordon’s eye. Their eyes widen simultaneously. The thought of “oh, shit” flits through their minds as one.
A ping rings out in the darkness. And then another. And then thunder cracks through the air, a rusted support at a crucial junction giving way at last, and the panel beneath her drops before she has time to scream.
She lands hard on her shoulder in the room below, all the breath instantly sucked out of her. Gordon’s close behind - he yelps as he slides down against his will, and lands with a painfully metallic thump. Alyx curls into a loose approximation of the fetal position on reflex, hissing in pain. Then she looks up.
A startled Civil Protection grunt stares back.
She acts before the information fully registers in her brain - her leg kicks out, sweeping under theirs and clipping their ankle, dropping them to their knees - then another kick, one to the knee, one to the skull -
Gordon groans and hefts himself up, onto his hands and knees, then shoulders the grunt to the ground -
A gun skitters across the ground from the impact. The Civil Protection officer wheezes, then gurgles, recoiling from the impact of an HEV suit-clad elbow to the face. But their fingers still manage to curl around a baton on their belt, whipping it up to crack Gordon square in the face -
“Gordon, stay down!” Alyx shouts.
He’s too busy swearing to give an affirmative response, but stay down he does, face covered by his arms. Alyx fumbles her pistol out of its holster, closes one eye, and lines up a shot through the bulk of the grunt’s body, so wherever it ends up, it ought to be somewhere in a nice bed of flesh, and she hopes against hope that it doesn’t ricochet and she fires!
Once, twice - they collapse on the floor, dead in a heartbeat. Gordon peeks up.
“Good shot,” he croaks. “Jesus, I thought I was gonna piss myself.”
She pants for breath, but a laugh catches her off guard and makes it harder to breathe. “Oh, God,” she gasps, “okay, new plan. As soon as I get back up.”
They’re not far from where she had planned to hop out, anyway. That ventilation shaft was supposed to continue all the way down this narrow corridor, spitting them out in a closet a ways ahead, but years of disuse (and an unexpected load) left it dangerously unsafe to traverse. Which they’ve now found out first-hand. She’s not even fully certain how this soldier got down here; when she stands again, she nudges them with her foot to make sure they’re well and truly down. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This one’s separated from the rest, and worse than that, they’re way, way too close to Black Mesa’s rear entrance for comfort. And yet, it doesn’t seem like they knew it was there, let alone had a plan to infiltrate it. It’s like they were just spit out here to keep the two of them on their toes.
She’s not sure how to square that away, so she doesn’t. It just lingers in the back of her mind like a rock in her shoe.
Alyx guides him to the closet, and then through the false vending machine inside, a similar get-up to the one in Dr. Kleiner’s lab. It’s a clever trick, and it’s served them well. She types in the access code and gives it a few perfunctory slaps. Behind its facade lies a door, four inches of solid steel that she trusts more than most people, and a twist of its handle gets it to creak open with some reluctance.
Once safely inside, they wrest the massive lock bar on the other side downward, grunting with the effort as it slides into place with a satisfying thunk. She glances at Gordon, arms still outstretched, and smiles in between heaving breaths. He shoots a grin back in turn. His hair’s coming loose from his ponytail in places, somehow both frizzy and matted with sweat, and his face is streaked with dirt and blood, but there’s still something about the way he looks right now that keeps her grinning longer than she means to. Something… confident. Down to earth. Like he’s less of a mythical figure and more of a proud dog with a big stick in its mouth.
Warmth slowly creeps up her face. She wrangles her mouth into a less insipid expression and swallows, hard.
“We made it,” she says, short of breath. “Almost.”
“Almost?”
“Just a little further. Technically we’re inside the compound, so unless something really bad happened while I was gone, we should be safe.” Alyx slaps the door and takes some relief in the muted metallic sound it makes. There’s a solid four inches of steel between them and the outside world, and she trusts it more than she trusts most people.
At that, Gordon laughs nervously, rubbing the back of his neck. “Ha! Knock on wood, right? Or, uh, steel?” He knocks on the door himself.
“I’m kidding, Gordon.” Her smile takes a crooked bent. “Everything’s fine. You’re safe now.”
Gordon tries to muster up another laugh. Halfway through it, though, something in him crumbles, all that eager vitality draining out of him as his shoulders fall and he slumps against the door. She swears his eyes look a little… shiny. Wet.
“Oh,” Alyx murmurs. “Oh, jeez. Are you okay?”
“No, yeah, I’m— Don’t worry about it, I just— I-I’m having kind of a moment,” he says, words tumbling out of his mouth in a rush. “You know, I— I haven’t— Nobody’s said that to me in, uh, in a really long time, and I think it’s kind of, um, it’s getting to me? I’m being gotten at. By it. And I’m having a really hard time standing up right now.”
He slides further down, metal scraping against metal, until he’s sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out in front of him. Alyx doesn’t know how to react - first she extends a hand, as if to pat him on the shoulder, or maybe help him up, but then thinks better of it, leaving her fingers hovering awkwardly between them until she drops it at last. Failing that, she opts to take a seat next to him instead.
Gordon sniffs, but stares straight forward, not even blinking. Like he’s trying to keep himself from crying. “I know I’m being a little bitch, you don’t have to say it,” he says defensively.
“I wasn’t.”
“It’s just,” he continues, as if he didn’t hear her, “I’ve been shot at and yelled at and pushed around for days and days and I haven’t slept in so fucking long and now Benrey’s not even here, and do you know how not-safe all this shit makes me feel? I’m still convinced that, like, a Combine’s gonna blow the door up any minute now, or something.”
Alyx draws her knees closer so that she can rest her arms on them. “Can I ask you something?”
“Huh?”
“What’s up with you two? You and Benrey, I mean.”
That defensiveness hardens into a thick shell, visible in the way he tenses up and shrinks himself. “What do you mean, ‘what’s up’? There’s nothing ‘up’ with us,” he insists, baffling her.
“Whoa, there. I didn’t mean to strike a nerve,” Alyx says. “I’m just having a hard time understanding what’s going on. I didn’t even know you had somebody else traveling with you. Nobody did, until Barney saw the surveillance footage… and now we don’t know where he is, either.”
He blinks. “You don’t? Didn’t he and Dr. Kleiner stay back at the lab?”
“That was the plan. But we haven’t heard from either of them since Barney called. Honestly, things have been in crisis mode ever since you showed up,” she says with a wry smile. It’s edging into ‘melancholy’. “Louie’s having a nervous breakdown, and the rest of the Vortigaunts aren’t doing much better. You know, with the hivemind and all…”
“Yeah,” Gordon says faintly. “The hivemind. Right.”
She continues, “And my dad’s working himself to death trying to figure out how you even got here in the first place. I figure you being here might give him some peace of mind… I think he’s just going a little stir-crazy, not being able to do anything to help. We all were. That’s why I decided to go looking for you. And Benrey, too, I guess.”
Gordon’s eyebrows draw together, a storm gathering underneath them. “Yeah, well. I don’t know what’s up with him, either,” he mutters.
“I thought you two were… friends?” Alyx asks. She’s uncertain of what word she should use, exactly.
“You’re asking the wrong fucking guy. He just— He— He’s not even supposed to be here! I thought he was dead!” Both of his hands attempt to push back his hair out of sheer frustration, but it just dislodges more strands and leaves his hair an even bigger mess.
Alyx stays quiet, giving him time to compose himself and keep talking. She wants so badly to probe more - where was he supposed to be? How did he get here with Gordon? Why did Gordon think he was dead? - but there’s a strange tension strung through him, and she worries that if she pushes too much, he might snap. After all, she thinks, they’ve gotten this far. It probably wouldn’t be a great idea to badger the long-awaited Resistance figurehead into a nervous breakdown before he even got to talk to his old colleagues in person.
“I thought I killed him,” he continues quietly. “He was the bad guy. The final boss. I mean, he wasn’t always the final boss, but he spent the whole fucking game messing with me and trying to fuck me over and I thought that I— that I— that I was finally done with all that shit. But then he… he showed up again,” Gordon says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Out of fucking nowhere!”
She bites the corner of her lip and frowns. “Wait, so… is he a bad guy?” Alyx snorts, catching herself by surprise. “Sorry,” she says, “it just— it sounds childish when I put it like that.”
“Well, yeah,” Gordon insists, then doubles back and says, “Kind of? Benrey’s, like… he keeps saying shit like he’s my ‘Player 2’. Like he’s trying to help me. But then, you know, he pulls a fucking knife on me, so you could say he’s a little fucking hard to read!”
Her frown deepens.
“I don’t know,” he groans, burying his face in his hands. “I really don’t.”
“I’m gonna be honest, Gordon, I’m kind of lost.” Gordon peeks at her from between his fingers. Alyx leans back fully against the door, feeling something in her spine crack with satisfaction. Then she heads off whatever he starts to say next with, “But look. The more important thing is, what do you want us to do? If you don’t want us to let Benrey in, we don’t have to.”
“What? No!”
It bursts out of him, surprising even himself, it seems. Gordon’s ears quickly turn a bright red. Alyx’s eyebrows shoot up in response.
“No?”
“He’s— It’s— It’s not like it would even work,” he stammers hotly. “He just does whatever he wants, you know? So you might as well just say he’s with me. Because he is. I guess.”
“If you say so. But he’d have a hard time getting past Dr. Mossman, I can say that much,” she says with a small grin.
That gets a weak laugh out of him. “No, it’s— it’s fine. Like… I don’t know. I kind of— Okay, this is gonna sound weird, but I’d rather have him here than not here, okay? Like, um,” he trails off, still shuttering his face behind his fingers, “I think it stresses me out more when I don’t know what he’s up to. And I’m really stressed out right now.”
She studies him for a long moment. If anybody’s hard to read, she thinks, it’s not Benrey. It’s Gordon. At least Benrey’s behavior was pretty straightforward, from what she saw of it, anyway. But the way Gordon talks, she doesn’t know if she should consider the guy a friend or a threat. And she’s starting to suspect that Gordon doesn’t fully know, either.
That said… if Gordon trusts him, to whatever extent he trusts him, that’s good enough for her. This Benrey guy got him this far in one piece. Whatever else might be going on between them, she figures that puts them all on the same side.
“Okay,” she tells him. “It’s your call.”
It takes him awhile before he drops his hands and gets to his feet again. He’s shaky, like something newborn and learning to use its legs for the first time, but he manages on his own. Now that they’re almost back home - for as much as Black Mesa East counts as ‘home’, anyway - the adrenaline’s wearing off, her stomach’s making its emptiness known, and a deferred exhaustion finally settles over her shoulders where it belongs. Alyx can only imagine they’re both in the same boat.
But they’re only a short distance from the security access tunnel, where she knows a guard should still be awaiting her return, and she’s so close to a hot shower she can almost feel the water beating against her skin. Keypads in sequence section off one room from the next, failsafe after failsafe, each room otherwise just barren, poorly-lit concrete. They function not so much as places of defined existence and purpose as liminal spaces, interlocking defensive barriers to ward off unwanted visitors like layers of nacre. She knows their codes by heart and makes short work of them. Gordon just trudges along behind her.
At long last, she reaches the innermost sanctum, a nondescript room with a wide, double-paneled vault door at its end and panels of glass inlaid along the near wall, separating them from a dark, featureless observation panel. Until one of the lights inside flickers on, that is. A guard that she can't quite recognize from this distance peers at her from under his helmet.
“I’ll be damned,” comes a staticky voice through an intercom. “Is that Gordon Freeman?”
“The one and only,” Gordon says weakly.
“I’ll radio Ops and let them know he’s coming. Glad to see you back, Alyx.”
She bows a little, hand extended to the side. Just to be cheeky.
Gears slowly grind behind the walls, pneumatic pistons churn and thrum, and massive, unspeakably old locks part ways, cylinders forced into alignment for them one forearm-sized pin at a time. Those enormous doors groan like they’re alive, their concrete housing shuddering around them as they slowly, deliberately slide apart. Gordon shields his eyes against the shaft of bright light that emerges from between them; Alyx faces it head on, having long since gotten used to it.
“Welcome to Black Mesa East,” she says with a wide, sweeping gesture. Then she grins. “We’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Freeman.”