The sun hangs high in the sky, glinting off the shimmering, technicolor plane of wastewater below. How they’d managed to pollute this much water this badly remains a mystery to Gordon - a wretched smell rises and curls lazily above its putrid banks, almost visible in its thickness, and it doesn’t get any better the further they drive. The airboat skips off the unnaturally dense surface like a stone. She pilots a bit like a cow; a streamlined, surprisingly swift cow, sure, but a cow nonetheless, not fond of making turns on anything but its own clumsy terms.
Calling it an ‘ocean’ wasn’t the most fitting choice, he realizes, as that seemingly-endless horizon narrows. That implies a level of freedom he does not have, and from the way things have been going, won’t have any time soon. Concrete walls quickly rise from the horizon’s bounds and cordon them off. But this time, instead of a sprawling metropolis just out of reach, there’s nothing but rolling hills beyond those walls, sparsely blanketed in grass and spindly, barren trees. And around the edges, sediment has piled high, the tailings of a water level once much higher, if the lingering waterstains on the concrete are any indication. Now its surfaces have parched and cracked in the sun.
A corrugated gate sits flush with one of the walls. Two access platforms, maybe a few feet high, bracket its sides. Gordon slows to a stop as he steers closer, eying a nearby handwheel just out of reach. It’s bright and shiny and red. He sighs.
“Hang on, I gotta turn a fucking wheel again,” Gordon says.
“sound a lil’ more… excited about it, maybe.”
Christ. It was easier to ignore Benrey sitting right behind him - underneath him - when he wasn’t talking. But now his voice is barely a foot from Gordon’s ear, close enough for breath to warm his skin, and it visibly startles Gordon. Just a little.
“Well,” he starts, hopping out of the airboat with so much force that he nearly trips over the cabling at his feet and eats shit, “it’s not like it’s a real puzzle or anything. You get out of the boat,” he says as he scales the platform, “you push the lever,” and he does, “and you’re done. I don’t even know what the point of this was.”
Benrey watches him the entire time, eyes shifting back and forth under the brim of his helmet. “tryna keep people out. dirty little thiefs,” he suggests.
“Wh— What do you think anybody’s going to steal around here?!” Gordon looks around. “That busted fridge?”
“you can get, uh… mega moolah for those on the black market.” Benrey grins crookedly at him.
The absurdity of it stuns Gordon into laughter.
Benrey latches on tight as he’s forced to take his seat yet again, and he can’t help the way his whole body tenses in response. Tactile sensation is nothing new, but for the most part, Black Mesa’s chosen to use that power for less-than-pleasant ends. Like making it hurt really goddamn badly after he takes a tumble from too high up. The only non-threatening physical contact he’s had in a good long while is his own doing, actually: grabbing his coworkers’ shoulders to get their attention, shaking hands with all the hoity-toity government officials, beating off…
Well, not exactly. That last one got helped along a little by the HEV Suit Mark Whatever’s, uh, unsanctioned secondary functions. Or, more accurately, the neoprene jumpsuit he’d been fitted into before he put on the headset. It was jampacked with sensors and electrodes to emulate all the possible stimuli he’d find in the real-world complex, with up to 640 layers of sensory quanta. In layman’s terms, it boils down to ‘shit really hurts’. Great for immediate feedback on whether or not you’ve fucked up one procedure or another. Naturally, though, the boys down at the Haptic Feedback lab saw a virtual reality sensory jumpsuit and decided to make it suck their dicks like a champ.
…And he’s getting off track. The point is, it’s fucking weird. All the touching is fucking weird. He’s used to being the one in control of that kind of thing, if not by his own choice. But there’s been, like, altogether too much grabbing and poking and face-squishing for his tastes lately, and he adamantly refuses to let himself relax.
A low-ceilinged corridor awaits. Through here, the stagnant water quickly dries up, leaving a trail of mud that the airboat skims across with surprising ease.
If Gordon had to take a guess, he’d say that this was some kind of underwater tunnel between the two bodies, or at least it was, before the water dried up. Like a lock, or something. He can’t say for sure; it’s not like he knows the first fucking thing about waterways. He steers the boat around the occasional wooden pallet or abandoned appliance left half-submerged in the sediment. Then, when they get to be too numerous, he swears and throttles through them, full speed ahead.
The wood splinters easily under the pontoons. Gordon lets out a laugh, high and raucous.
“hey, speed racer,” Benrey calls out over the roar of the fan. The rest of his words get swallowed up.
Gordon cranes his head around to hear better. “Huh?”
“goin’ down!”
“What— Shit!”
When he turns back around, the corridor ahead rushes up to meet him, its open path suddenly headed off by what appears to be a solid wall. He slams his foot on the brake - or tries to, anyway, before he discovers that airboats don’t have brakes! His eyes slam shut - he prepares for the worst -
—And his stomach drops out from underneath him, abruptly in freefall. Gordon howls like fucking Goofy as the airboat careens through the air, narrowly clearing the ceiling’s steep drop.
It bounces and jostles on the landing, almost hurling Gordon clear of the driver’s seat if not for the stubborn little fucker behind him holding him in place. Who lets out a deadpan “wooo,” just as the boat settles into place. Gordon very firmly makes a note to himself: eyes on the road. Water. Whatever.
Speaking of which, the water down on this level isn’t the same foul sludge he’s been trudging through for the past hour. Puddles merge as he skips over them until they coalesce into a single, crystal clear body of water. He can almost see his face in the reflection. It flows out of the corridor and into another expanse of open blue sky at last.
Marshy reeds and grasses flock the banks. Denser thickets of trees rise from those rolling hills around them, still just as black and bare as the last. And up ahead, jutting out from the hillside, stands a bright red barn, with a platform and a crane mounted to its foundation high above the surface of the water.
Benrey stiffens behind him. “…the hell?”
“What?”
“there’s a frickin’… there’s a— there’s some kinda pervert over there. watchin’ us.”
Gordon squints up at that high platform, but sees nothing. Then he snorts. “C’mon, man, I’m not falling for that one. Like— hey, look over there! A collector’s edition of Knack 2! Looks like it’s in mint condition!” he says, pointing somewhere to his left.
“wha? where?!” Benrey strains forward, one hand moving to shade his eyes for a better look. Gordon doubles over, cackling. He didn’t expect that to work.
Whatever Benrey was talking about, he can’t see hide nor hair of it as he cruises the airboat over to the small dock just underneath the barn. It’s as quiet as quiet can be: no gunfire, no radio chatter, not even the sound of helicopter blades chopping through the air. You’d be hard-pressed to think that the Combine were chasing him at all. Even the water is remarkably still, the wake that peters out behind them the only sign of life.
Gordon kills the engine and takes a ginger step onto the dock, as if the painful grind of his heels on the concrete will prove more of a disturbance than the sound of the fan on their way in. When nothing leaps out from the shadows, he lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
There’s a single ladder up to the barn itself. Gordon scales it without waiting for Benrey to catch up.
A wooden platform wraps itself around the front of the barn; the rear is laid into the hill itself, built into a man-made recess that crawls halfway up to the ceiling. The front entrance lies wide open, no door to be seen. Inside, the only light comes from high windows, and dust dances in the sunbeams that pepper an otherwise oppressive darkness. Gordon hesitates to step into it, waiting for something to see his silhouette and start shooting.
Nothing does. Still, the creak of rotting boards underfoot doesn’t do much for the nerves.
Bare, pale, strangely-shaped patches on the floor mark where farm equipment must have lain once, and barrels of fuel clutter the walls around them. They’ve rusted and begun to leak. But other than that, the place doesn’t really have the farm vibes that he expects. No hints of hay or animals or what have you. The barn’s been gutted, repurposed into an outpost with more trappings of a residence than a storage shed: mattresses along the far wall, tables and chairs in disarray. Its walls are cluttered not with tools but with maps, sepia-toned and marked with arrows, circles, inscrutable nomenclature.
Gordon studies them for a moment. It’s… impossible for him to tell where he is. But he has a few guesses. The arrows spill out of City 17 from a host of different points, some following the curves of the terrain, others cutting across it as if these hills were nothing but a mild inconvenience, but all, he supposes, delineate Resistance footpaths.
One thing in particular catches his eye: a series of concentric lines radiating outward from the coasts, dotted here and there with squares and crosses. Boats? Underwater caches? He’s not sure what to make of them.
The floorboards groan softly behind him. Gordon huffs through his nose, a pleased little laugh.
“Took you long enough to get up here,” Gordon says, turning to face him. “Check this shit out—”
That’s not Benrey.
Gordon yelps - a hulking, shadowy figure screeches at him in turn, lurching and lunging -
He fumbles for his crowbar, narrowly avoiding its scabbed claws, and swings! A streak of blood whips across the floor from the impact, and the thing gurgles, gnarled hands clutching at its… its face, if you can call it that. The light catches on the outline of a headcrab where a face should be.
“Fucking— Die already!” he snarls as he winds up another shot. The telltale thump of steel on flesh and bone sings up his arms.
The zombie lets out a throaty, warbling howl that rattles the windows. And, to Gordon’s horror, two— no, three— oh, Christ— answering howls echo in turn, scattered across the barn, the loft. Figures rise from the shadows, their slow shambling more unnerving than if they’d just sprinted and clawed his fucking head off in one go. Like this one’s trying to do. A decisive boot to the chest downs it with a gruesome crunch.
“Hey, Benrey,” he shouts, voice warbling, “we’ve got a situation up here!”
There’s no response. Of course there isn’t. It’s only when he could actually use the help that Benrey vanishes into thin air, taking a smoke break or scratching his balls or whatever it is he does when Gordon’s not looking. Gordon’s mouth hardens into a flat line.
This was always the problem with these half-baked AIs, he thinks bitterly, yanking his SMG from his shoulders. You can’t count on ‘em for shit. In that sense, maybe they were a pretty good simulation of the real deal: when push comes to shove, most people panic. Shut down. Like they’re chickens with their heads cut off, waiting for the information from their brainstem (or lack thereof) to make it down to their spasming muscles. Gordon renders a zombie’s head into a fine mist with a half-dozen pulls of the trigger. It, too, staggers along on residual nerve impulse alone, before slumping over and falling.
He knows this. Knew this. So why is it freshly disappointing every single time?
An inhuman groan bubbles up behind him, catching him off guard. There’s undead at his front, his back, and he elbows one with his gun to drive it off, but that just leaves room for another to clutch at his shoulders, roaring in wet agony—
“excuse me, sir,” he hears distantly. “you can’t be here. i’m gonna have to ask you to leave? thank you?”
And he cranes his neck just in time to see a headcrab zombie burst into flames.
“What the fuck— Ow!”
Distracted as he is, Gordon doesn’t notice sharp teeth gouging divots into his armor until it’s too late, tearing into the carbon fiber undersuit and the flesh beneath. He hisses epithets under his breath as he riddles another wretched flesh-thing with holes, and then another. His aim might be wide, but his bullets are plentiful.
Benrey just continues speaking as if he’s talking to an unruly guest and not, you know, a horde of squirming, ungainly, headcrab-piloted bodies. “you’re in violation of the, uh, fire code, sir. hands to yourself, please?” Another erupts nearby, howling in pain. It’s so close that Gordon can feel the heat rolling off the flames in feverish waves. “sheesh. i’m just doin’ my job. gotta get that paycheck,” Benrey drawls, the last syllable clicking harshly.
Finally, one last body drops from the rafters in a desperate gamble, but it lands with a meaty thump a solid yard away from Gordon, and the zombie doesn’t seem to have the heart to so much as crawl towards him. It just moans and feebly stretches its arms in his general direction. Gordon kicks its stupid, toothy head until it stops.
“Glad you could join the party,” Gordon pants at long last. “What was that all about?”
Benrey just makes a confused noise.
“The— The pyrotechnics, man! Jesus! You scare me sometimes, you know that?”
“fire code violation is serious business,” Benrey says, as if this explains anything. “a fire could start anywhere. any time. and you wouldn’t even know it. it’s, uh… silent but deadly… the hidden killer. the worst nightclub fire of all time happened in boston in 1942—”
“Why do you know that?”
“i read wikipedia. for the articles.”
Gordon wheezes. But not from smoke exposure, thankfully. “As opposed to what?!”
“all the lurid pornography,” Benrey says matter-of-factly.
Okay, he’s not going down that road. Gordon rights himself. All the ruckus must have flushed the last of those zombies out of their cover, because nothing so much as stirs. There’s only the crackling reek of burnt flesh and wood smoldering around them. Thankfully, Benrey’s little stunt didn’t catch the barrels around them, because in Gordon’s expert scientific opinion, the place could’ve been blown to fucking smithereens.
Idly, he brings his fingers to the gash on his arm. It stings, and he hisses on reflex. Those teeth tore right through the black fabric, small, jagged tears parting to reveal shallow wounds.
“You don’t think this zombie shit is contagious, do you?” Gordon asks. Even though he’s pretty sure it isn’t.
“huh? oh yeah. big time. gordon’s gonna turn on me any minute now.”
“Why did I even ask,” mutters Gordon, though he can’t resist chuckling under his breath.
“might have to put you down. for, uh, public safety.”
“Come on, I was joking!”
The hand strumming a tuneless rhythm on Benrey’s holster doesn’t inspire any confidence that Benrey knows he was, in fact, joking. Gordon raises his hands, palm out, because he’s also not sure whether or not Benrey’s joking, either.
“This isn’t some kind of zombie apocalypse thing, okay? Reason with me here. We haven’t seen anybody shambling around without one of those headcrabs on ‘em, and they must have been airdropped for a reason beyond being kind of annoying. As long as I don’t start wearing one like a hat, I don’t think anything’s gonna happen. It just kind of hurts.” When Benrey doesn’t respond, Gordon snaps, “Seriously, can you take your hand off your fucking gun already?”
Benrey hums, like he’s not totally sold on the argument, but mulls it over and does as Gordon asks. Distantly, Gordon’s aware that Benrey’s gotta just be fucking with him again, but tension leaches out of him anyway.
“Jesus. Anyway, there’s gotta be something around here, right? Some kind of first aid kit? I mean, this clearly used to be an outpost, so I figure…”
Benrey, for his part, pokes around the abandoned refuse as if he’s actually trying to help. Gordon doesn’t point out the fact that his investigation amounts to kicking around empty boxes. It’s the thought that counts. Probably.
For Gordon’s own efforts, he’s rewarded with a glowing blue canister of potion, or health juice, or Baja Blast, or fucking, whatever it is. Jury’s still out on that one. Alongside it, he also finds a strip of bandages - nowhere near sterile, but clean enough - and a lone box of ammo. The canister he cracks open at the top, like it’s a can of soda, and it goes down just as easily, with pins and needles racing all the way down to his toes. He shudders.
“i can do that,” Benrey says abruptly.
“Do what?”
Benrey crouches next to him and picks up the bandages, wiggling them demonstratively. “i saw the tutorial. got the tips ‘n’ tricks.”
“No offense, Benrey, but I don’t think I need a tutorial to heal myself.” He snatches them back. Benrey’s face falls, almost cartoonishly. “Like, you just gotta…”
Gordon trails off to shove the roll awkwardly at his injured arm. To his surprise, it doesn’t do anything. His attempts to hit some kind of button to activate it don’t do anything, either; he just flexes his fingers around nothing. Gordon’s muttering grows all the more heated and frustrated, all the while Benrey leans on his elbow, a smug grin slowly unfolding.
“you don’t know what you’re doing, do you.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
He doesn’t.
“benrey can do it. i saw the guy…” He makes a gesture in the air, a pinching motion up and down that Gordon can’t parse. “put you all back together. easy-peasy. and there’s not even any guts comin’ out of you this time.”
Some distant memory flares to life, with a chill like he’s just stepped into a cold shower. Vision swimming. Tunnels circling down the drain around him. Pressing his palm against some burgeoning, wet, downright alien thing. He was half-convinced he’d been hallucinating, distrustful as he is of his own senses when he’s been having a days-long nervous breakdown, but Benrey’s words pop the stitches on an old, forgotten worry.
“…What do you mean, ‘put me all back together’?”
Benrey points at his abdomen, as if this should be obvious. “got my hands all up in you, bro. like a buncha fuckin’… peeled grapes and spaghetti.” The way he clenches his hands in the air - a crude simulacrum of that old Halloween party trick - makes Gordon cringe. “matt’s my new best friend now, by the way. i know all about wrestling now. he told me the same thing happened to x-pac, except it was his taint zone, his, uh, grundular region, and his balls got—”
“I don’t wanna think about that! What’s wrong with you?!” Gordon yelps.
He doesn’t wanna think about any of this stuff, frankly. The idea of having Benrey’s rough, grimy, nail-polished hands inside of his literal fucking body makes his stomach do flip-flops. What kind of sick freak decided to turn a piece of industrial training software into Surgeon Simulator 3?
“well do you want me to do it or not.”
“Fine! Whatever! I don’t— I don’t even think it needs stitches or anything, man, but if it’ll get you to stop talking about taint catastrophes—”
To his unending relief, Benrey does stop talking about it. In fact, he goes quiet altogether as he lifts Gordon’s arm to inspect the damage.
There’s a neat row of four parallel gouges, shallow enough that the bleeding’s gone sluggish already. Benrey turns his arm this way and that, playing doctor, before pulling a little green canister of his own from his back pocket. Gordon briefly wonders where he picked that up from before it’s being opened and doused over the wound. It stings and tingles and throbs all at once. But it worked last time, or at least, it felt like it did, so Gordon acquiesces to it with a minimum of fuss. Then Benrey ties the bandages around Gordon’s upper bicep and laces the strip tight.
“good as new,” Benrey says at last, slapping him on the arm. The bad arm.
“Ow!”
The barn yields little else on the ground floor, but a ladder hangs smack dab in the middle, tempting them toward the rafters. There’s gotta something more up there, some kind of clue. Or maybe even a battery for that defunct radio, Gordon thinks, unnecessarily optimistic. He swallows and makes a valiant attempt not to look down. Man, he never used to be this scared of heights, but something about that terrifying slide down Black Mesa’s sheer canyon cliffs twisted his brain the wrong way and it hasn’t figured out how to untwist itself. Like a prion. The rafters creak under his weight, step after ginger step.
Benrey’s close behind, muttering, “better be careful, silly boyyy. better watch your step,” with a playful lilt to his voice. If Gordon didn’t think he’d fall off and have to climb all the way back up here, he’d take a swing at the fucker.
A shaky breath bursts out of him the moment he clears the gap and finds himself on solid ground. Or, uh, solid wood, as it were. The platform up here overlooks the whole of the canal, giving Gordon a bird’s eye view of the waterway from the treatment plant all the way to the locks beyond.
“this thing looks busted,” Benrey says, and Gordon turns from it to face him.
He’s looking at a pulley system the size of a man, rope looped around its metal wheels and a barrel jammed into the mechanism, preventing its load - a large wooden crate dangling from the end of the crane outside - from dropping. Honestly, Gordon’s not sure how the whole thing hasn’t given way yet, or why it’s been jammed in the first place. But, more pressingly, he doesn’t like the way Benrey’s eying it.
“Don’t touch that,” he says preemptively.
Benrey’s face twists into something Gordon can only describe as a pout. “i wasn’t even doin’ nothin’.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just saying. The airboat’s parked right underneath that thing, and I don’t wanna find out if it’s breakable.”
“why’d you park it underneath a big fuckin’ box?”
Gordon shrugs. “I dunno, man. Why does anybody do anything,” he says, throwing his hands into the air. “If you want, I can just move the boat out of the way before we go. And then you can go crazy. Okay?”
Benrey blinks at him, face impassive. Then, after an uncomfortably long silence, he mutters, “dope.”
That settled, Gordon steps closer to the edge, circling the perimeter of the high dock. He keeps thinking he’ll find something - a key item, a conspicuous splotch of worldbuilding graffiti - but the platform remains stubbornly barren. At least the view’s nice, he supposes. It’s expansive, and despite his certainty that somebody’s gotta be tailing them, he can’t spot anything moving on the horizon. There’s a muggy stillness to the air. A wetness that clings to the tarred wooden beams and threatens to rot them from the outside in. And yet they’re still standing underfoot, sturdy as houses.
The edges of the waterway sparkle under the sun; it’s gone balmy and yellow as it crept toward the west. An impressive bit of rendering. Gordon’s taken by the urge to just sit and watch the water for a while. So he does.
“Ambassador Breen.” A sharp intake of breath. “I told you, I need just a little more time—”
“No, no, of course. Work of this magnitude cannot be rushed. I had a different purpose in mind for this communique.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
The camera on the other end swivels away, then refocuses, revealing a dark cell. In the center sits a singular figure, pale and bruised.
“What… is this?”
“It’s no Dr. Freeman, of course, but I think you’ll find he’s quite the character. Who would have thought… Gordon Freeman’s right hand man, hiding in plain sight.” His voice takes on a pointed character. “A traitor in our midst.”
Through the grainy transmission, the figure’s head moves, tilting up. And the face of Barney Calhoun glares back.
Next to Gordon, the wood creaks. This time, it really is just Benrey, taking a seat next to him, legs dangling off the edge of the dock much the same as Gordon’s. He doesn’t say much. Just kicks his feet idly, hands planted at his sides, occasionally glancing at Gordon from underneath the brim of his helmet.
If asked, though, he’s not noticing it. Not even out of the corner of his eyes. He stares at the distant high-rises cresting over the hillside instead.
Benrey, for his part, stays quiet. Save for a brief burst of teal-colored Sweet Voice that seems to surprise even himself. It’s kind of nice, actually. High and light. Until Benrey clamps his mouth shut, anyway.
After an interminable moment, Benrey elbows Gordon, breaking the silence. “hey. uh. didn’t you wanna… like… scrub behind your ears, bro?”
Gordon fails to process this. “What?”
“bath,” Benrey says simply.
The gears turn fruitlessly in his head.
“you said… you were talkin’ about… bein’ all nasty. gordon reeks. and there’s no combos or whatever, sooo…” He shrugs. “splish splash.”
Oh. It clicks. You just let me know if you see one around here. “You thought— You thought I was serious about the bath thing?” Gordon laughs, loud with surprise. “That was a joke, man. I’m… uh… surprised you remembered,” he trails off, voice softening.
That’s unusual for him. Benrey’s not the type of guy to remember something Gordon said five seconds ago, let alone… whenever the hell he said that. Time’s been stretching in his brain like putty. Gordon looks over at him, then quickly looks away when he catches Benrey’s eyes, as if he was expecting not to be caught.
They’re dark. Always so dark. Like there’s no spark of life behind them.
“suit yourself,” Benrey says. He stretches his arms experimentally and grunts with the effort. “i’m gonna take a lil’… dunkeroo. wash this hair… then that one… then that one… spend some, uh, quality time with the boys…”
Gordon snorts. “Oh, yeah. Of course. I forgot about your commitment to cleanliness. I’ll keep that in mind next time I see you swimming around in all that radioactive waste.”
“just ‘cuz you don’t take baths doesn’t mean i gotta live that way,” he sniffs.
Benrey unlatches the helmet strap, just under the chin. Gordon shouldn’t be transfixed as suddenly as he is, but he can’t help it. It’s very, uh, detailed. The animation, that is: black nails pinch and tug and woven fabric tenses and loosens in equal measure and the straps fall away to dangle at either side of his face, jostling when Benrey pulls the helmet up and off. And underneath, he’s got… hair. Black hair. Short, greasy hair, like it’s been trapped under a fucking helmet for the better part of a week. He shakes it out like he’s a dog.
“How did they do that,” Gordon mumbles to himself. Barney’s hair was practically shellacked into place in comparison. But this… it’s like he could reach out and ruffle it himself.
“huh?”
Gordon blinks, then shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. Uh, hey, completely unrelated question: Can I see your helmet?”
“what? why?” Benrey’s voice comes out slow and a little incredulous.
“No reason. Just, uh—”
He grabs for it, but Benrey yanks it out of his reach just a moment too soon. “excuse me? that’s mine? hands off?”
“C’mon, man, I just wanna see! Lemme get a quick polycount or something—”
Gordon lunges for it again. This time, however, Benrey doesn’t just pull the helmet away, but hurls it into the canal below, where it lands with a distant splash.
“What the fuck, Benrey?”
“that’s classified informa-ti-on. pal.”
“Classified—” Gordon stops short, reluctant laughter spilling over. “Whatever, man, I don’t care. Do what you want.”
“awesome.” Benrey opts to peer over the edge of the dock before shooting Gordon a little salute, then jumps off, legs tucked up into a cannonball.
Gordon’s seen Benrey do stupid shit often enough that it doesn’t worry him anymore, but he still leans over to watch Benrey hit the surface of the water. Which he does with aplomb, the spray catching Gordon’s legs all the way up here. But just barely. Gordon laughs again, and when Benrey waves up at him, Gordon waves back.
The corners of his mouth are starting to hurt.
It’s… disorienting. The back and forth. An endless tug-of-war, it feels like, each trying to yank the other to the ground. One moment, it’s this: goofing around, laughing at Benrey’s jokes, trying to hide just how much he’s laughing at Benrey’s jokes. And in the next, it’ll be something like—
Like—
That throbbing headache, the adrenaline dripping down to his fingers, a predatory response dialed consistently to fight when it’s Benrey pushing his buttons— wanting to club his stupid fucking helmet in until he doesn’t get up again— yelling at him, shaking him down for answers that won’t come, choking down the sweat and the rabbit’s pulse that makes his hands shake. Wishing more than anything that his contractually-obligated piss break would kick in already just so he could get a moment’s peace.
And— and the knife thing. Whatever the fuck that was about.
His smile falls. He just doesn’t get it. Why does Benrey have to be so— so fucking funny? It’d be a lot easier to keep up a hate-on for the guy if he wasn’t always cracking jokes, Gordon thinks desperately. Or doing shit like hollering at Gordon to 'jump in, it’s as clear as a fine spring morning'. Shit that keeps Gordon on his toes.
Benrey… doesn’t like him. He said as much. And Gordon doesn’t like him, either. He’s made that abundantly clear. Maybe it’s some 4D chess thing, you know, playing nice so it sucks worse when Benrey fucks with him. Like a good heel would.
Yeah. An ordinary person probably wouldn’t be comforted by this, but Gordon Freeman just gets to his feet and shouts down at Benrey that he’d better watch out, because Gordon’s aiming for him. He’s a physics object in freefall, baby, and he’s intent on doing damage!
And so he splashes into the water, hollering the whole way down.
Benrey leisurely bobs out of the way, but he takes a face full of water anyway and gags. Gordon emerges from the surface, gasping, crystal-clear water sluicing down his face, and he laughs and splashes Benrey even harder.
“bro!” gurgles Benrey, in theory. In practice, it’s accompanied with a lot more coughing and spitting. And a halfhearted attempt to fend Gordon off.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t be a baby,” Gordon grins at him. Somehow, even with the HEV suit weighing him down, he floats with minimal effort. “I’m helping! Gotta make sure you get behind the… ears!”
He shoves another great crest of water at Benrey, who flails backward and topples under. When he pops back up, his hair lies flat on his head, and he looks for all the world like a soaked dog. An indignant dog at that: there’s playful offense writ large on his face, a wide-eyed expression that makes Gordon snort.
Then he splashes back. His hands slap the surface with a loud crack, spraying Gordon in the face. Oh, it’s on now, Gordon thinks, spitting.
They gambol in the water like otters, splashing and yelling, Gordon tackling him and met in turn by Benrey burbling and shoving him under the surface. A beam of Sweet Voice trickles out, orange-pink, like sherbet, only to immediately dissipate and be carried off by the waves. Gordon swears the water almost tastes like sherbet, too. Just for a moment. He bursts into the air again, sucking in a deep breath, before diving back in and yanking Benrey down with him.
Strands of Gordon’s hair float around him, suspended in place. He shoves Benrey further down. Doesn’t let him drift back up. A fierce, fiery grin lights up Benrey’s face, visible even through the distortion of the water. Gordon could keep him there. Wait for him to choke. And Benrey seems like he’d invite the challenge, the same ugly delight radiating from him as it did when Gordon was smacking him around with his crowbar. Tackling him to the ground in a disused shipping container. He’d like it, wouldn’t he? If Gordon held him down here, his face twisted with pleasure, fury, an intoxicating vinaigrette of both, shaken up until he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins—
A chill jolts through Gordon with a nauseating abruptness, as if somebody’s just shot ice water into his veins. Instinctively he gasps for breath, but chokes on water instead. So he pushes Benrey away and kicks off for the surface.
After shaking himself off like a wet dog (and waiting impatiently for Benrey to get bored and do the same), Gordon peels out from under the barn, leaving a blistering wake behind them. The water thins underneath them, in some places shallow enough that Gordon could reach down and touch the sediment beneath. Glorified puddles. Wooden bridges, once connecting the hillsides, now hang in tatters above their heads, their lonely beams standing as monuments to a farming commune that has since been shelled out. A great, squat water tower looms in the distance until they’ve come right up beside it; it, too, has seen better days. Less rusty ones, maybe. Its metal struts groan as if to welcome them. Gordon speeds past it just a little bit faster, to be on the safe side.
Despite this, however, all else on the waterfront remains eerily quiet. They veer past the industrial buildings that dot the hills, squat rectangles of concrete and steel, and yet nobody seems to occupy them. No one peeks out the windows or ducks out for a smoke break. And nobody seems to be tailing them, either, not anymore.
Gordon steers through hairpin turns with ease, suspecting that this might actually be a challenge if he were being chased, or something. He just doesn’t get it. Something should be happening. Shit’s been happening nonstop since he woke up here. Somebody’s been following him, shooting at him, telling him where to go and what to do and why he’s supposed to be God’s gift to City 17. And right now it’s like the whole of the Combine took a lunch break. He gets the feeling that they might be the only ones around for miles.
It was nice, you know, getting the opportunity to take a breather, but now he’s almost… bored. And Benrey is, too, judging by his intermittent groaning and whining. More than that, though, Gordon’s unnerved.
Did he miss some kind of trigger? Why hasn’t anything spawned in to make use of all those conspicuous orange barrels, lined up nice and neat on the intact bridges overhead? Why is it that the only thrill he gets is the swoop of his stomach as he guns it over a ramp, the quick surge of adrenaline, the whooping and hollering and careening through the air, the way Benrey’s arms tighten around him, holding him steady as they bounce back down to Earth—
Okay, no, scratch that last part. He’s had enough of that.
Finally, after tooling through the water for what feels like hours without incident, Gordon finds himself at an impasse. An empty lock, a good fifteen feet or more in height, blocks them off. The first gate lies open, but the second gate’s been barricaded shut by an intimidatingly solid wall of organic detritus.
They make short work of this particular puzzle, however. Gordon finds out the hard way that he wasn’t supposed to scour their surroundings for a control panel when Benrey hurls a bright blue plastic barrel at him, obviously bored. It’s more bark than bite, being filled only with air. But it rolls into the shallow basin of the lock and under some kind of diving bell-type contraption, where it lifts a boat ramp up just the slightest amount. And it gives him an idea.
Several barrels later, a wobbly sheet-metal ramp juts from the water, and Gordon can only close his eyes, hope he’s got enough clearance, then gun it before he loses his nerve.
He flies over the dam with a shout. The underside of the boat grazes the top, but bounces off, and they careen into a canal of algae-choked wastewater runoff on the other side. Christ, his brain’s rattling around in his skull.
“touchdown!” he hears behind him. He’s too dizzy to formulate a response.
The canal wraps around to the left, where the natural hilly banks meet a neat, manmade oval curve and a chainlink fence along its length. Transmission towers stand proud over the walls, and grated pipes from all across the facility terminate here in this arterial waterway, but they haven’t seen throughput in quite some time, he thinks; sandbars stand high and dry in front of them. In some places, those mounds of dirt have accumulated into proper hills, simultaneously a bitch to navigate around and a blast to ramp off of. Just depends on his angle of attack.
Worse still is the debris that’s been knocked into their path from the processing plants above. Empty storage tankers, crushed refrigeration units beyond repair, the works. Gordon gives them a wide berth, not wanting to find out what happens if one of them turns out not to be empty.
The boat wends through another series of hairpin turns, narrowly avoiding a colony of barnacles clustered under a low steel bridge. And by ‘narrowly’, he means ‘still catching one of their slimy fucking tentacles down the back of his neck’. If pressed, Gordon would insist that he did not, in fact, ‘scream’, no matter what Benrey’s laughing at.
The buildings along the edge of the water have steadily grown more modern, more stern concrete and hanging lights and less centuries-old wood, leaving their surroundings in much better condition than at the start of their trip. Yet it’s all still remarkably empty. Easy goings. So much so that it comes as a surprise when Gordon hits an actual wall, a colossal gate large enough to block the passage of even the tallest of cruisers. There’s no way he’s getting over that thing. Or through it, he comes to find. It resists the force of the airboat’s hull in a way that almost feels emasculating.
Gordon feels Benrey rock with the impact, then he says, “whyyy did you dooo that.”
“I-I don’t know,” Gordon answers, suddenly abashed. “I thought it might do something!”
He gets better results by tooling around, looking for some kind of switch or button. No luck, but he does come across a door set into the concrete, with a small lip jutting out at the water’s surface for somebody to stand on. It stands at the base of a looming building, an operations center of some kind with chainlink-lined balconies that thread past that giant gate. And it’s unlocked. Score.
Gordon mimes a few hand gestures he’s picked up from Call of Duty, wordlessly telling Benrey to be quiet and on full alert, because he’s going in on three. Benrey, however, doesn’t pick up on it at all - he just scrunches his face up and mouths, “what?”
So, whatever. He tamps down the embarrassment and carefully pushes the door open.
It’s just as quiet inside as out. Dark, too. A blue-tinged fluorescent bulb hangs from the ceiling, like an afterthought, and casts the rest of the room into cold shadow. Underneath it stand storage racks, mostly empty save for a few containers of ammunition, and a floor-length window facing into the next room, with a desk and two metal chairs standing in front like he’s looking through a police station’s one-way mirror. And there’s a half-empty mug of coffee, too. Gordon gives it an investigatory sniff.
Smells burnt. But not old, and that’s what worries him. Whoever ditched this place must have done so not too long ago.
Gordon’s fingers curl around his crowbar preemptively as he steps into the room opposite. It’s larger, appearing to be a central hub, but just as barren and poorly-lit. A single shaft of warm yellow light creeps out from an open door across the way, a beacon in the darkness. And with it, the faint hiss of speech. He raises a finger to his lips, the universal signal for “don’t say a fucking word,” and Benrey promptly imitates zipping his mouth shut in turn. Crowbar raised, he tiptoes around the doorframe, and peeks his head around to find…
…Nothing. Nobody’s there.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Just under the single dangling bulb, a body sits limply in a chair that looks suspiciously like a dentist’s, footrest and all. It doesn’t stir at his approach. Which makes sense, since the poor guy’s got less of a face and more of a… more of a “steak tartare” thing going on. Blood pools at his feet, under his head, and darkens the wall behind him, making Gordon’s stomach sink. He’s starting to get a pretty good idea of just whose outpost he’s walked into.
That distant speech, too, resolves itself into Breen’s tinny voice, dribbling from a loudspeaker in the corner.
“…We now have direct confirmation of a disruptor in our midst, one who has acquired an almost messianic reputation in the minds of certain citizens,” Breen dictates, condescension layered thickly between the words. “His figure is synonymous with the darkest urges of instinct, ignorance, and decay…”
“wuh— why do all these guys keep talkin’ about your figure,” Benrey mutters, his voice strangely dark. “i don’t… i don’t think that’s any of their business.”
An unwarranted heat blossoms up the back of Gordon’s neck. “I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about, man! Shhh!”
“And yet unsophisticated minds continue to imbue him with romantic power,” continues Breen. Benrey’s disgruntled stare only intensifies. “Giving him such dangerous poetic labels as the One Free Man, the Opener of the Way…”
Gordon shoves past him, not looking him in the eye as he ditches that makeshift interrogation room. He keeps his posture low, on edge, feeling all the more justified in his caution as his eyes alight upon a giant fucking tank parked in the corner of the central hub, near a corrugated metal door to the outside.
That voice follows him, spilling from identical loudspeakers along the walls, “Let me remind all citizens of the dangers of magical thinking. We have scarcely begun to climb from the dark pit of our species’ evolution! Let us not slide backward into oblivion, just as we have finally begun to see the light.”
Suddenly, a shaft of daylight breaks through the gloom. Gordon freezes where he’s crouched next to the treads.
“If you see this so-called Free Man…”
Footsteps. Small, then heavy. Accompanied by the groan of metal.
“Kill him.”
A figure rounds the corner, gun pointed directly at him. Gordon raises his crowbar defensively, squeezing his eyes tight.
“…Gordon?”
He squints through one of his eyes in disbelief. Then they both fly open.
”Alyx?”