First Fic. Not sure about how it's going to go yet, but I've been pestered into starting, so we'll see. The idea is to put some thoughts and feelings into the otherwise mute protagonist of Half Life Two, and see what can be made of his story.

Here's the first few hundred words, and with luck, more to follow.

Enjoy

It was dark. I don't know how long I'd been there, but it only felt like a short time. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was wading through hell, fighting monsters that felt like they shouldn't exist. Soldiers too, anonymous faces, and the little bastards in black and then...a monorail car, and a man...if that's what he was, with a suit and a briefcase and strange voice that made me an offer that I didn't feel I could refuse.

The man in the suit...who was he? He looked like a spook, possibly some government type... But how could he do all the things he did? Controlling time and space the way he did...As I hung in the void, his voice began to sound in my ears again. For a moment it felt like a memory, but then he started saying things that I didn't think he had said before.

"Rise and shine, Mr Freeman, rise and shine."

A momentary confusion of ideas occurred. What the...His face appeared in my sight, but it didn't look like he was actually there. Perhaps an illusion, or part of his seeming ability to distort the fabric of space and time.

"Not that I wish to imply ... that you have been ... sleeping on...the job. No one is more deserving of a rest, and... all the effort in the world would have gone to waste, until..."

His visage seemed to flicker around, shifting perspective and flashes of events in my past. The resonance cascade, the fighting, and some giant storage building...alien and harsh, full of what must have been transport railings and containers that...I had no idea what they were for.

"Well... let's just say your hour has...come again."

His speech patterns were stilted, as though he was either thinking very carefully about them, or perhaps not speaking a language he knew well.

"The right man... in the wrong place can make all the difference... in the world."

A vision appeared in front of me, distorted, but it looked like a room.

"So wake up...Mr Freeman. Wake up and smell...the ashes."

The light returned, and for a moment, I was blinded and all I could sense was cold air, and...the sound of a foghorn, or something like it.

I staggered for a moment, released from the invisible bonds that had held me. The room I had seen had become a train car, some kind of passenger transport, but I couldn't tell where. For a moment, I flashed back to the start of my last day at Black Mesa before...it all went to hell. The memories of the lives lost, and the hours of avoiding death from aliens and machines gone wrong, and then the military who came to close us down permanently, and eliminate all witnesses. The last vision I had of the place was jumping through into the alien world, looking for a way to close the portals down. I shook off the memory. Now wasn't the time. I had to work out where I was, and what the hell the G-man, for want of a better name, meant by the "right man in the wrong place". Where was this place? Where was I?

There were two other people in the car, and I approached one of them. Before I could say anything to him, he eyed me suspiciously, commenting that he hadn't seen me get on the train. I thought to try and explain, but I couldn't honestly do it. How do you tell someone a story when you don't know what happened? And even if I did, he didn't look like he would believe me, even if I made something believable up. The fear pasted across his features spoke of years of mistrust and fear, and resignation. He eyed my quiet despair, and closed me out. I decided not to try again.

I tried to approach the other man on the train, but he didn't respond to my approach. His glassy-eyed look, and the way his head hung made him seem almost zombie-like. What could have made this happen? I'd been on commutes, and seen the studious way in which people ignored each other that way, but this was different. I decided not to bother him, and grabbed a seat. Wherever we were going, it wasn't like I had any way of influencing events without trying some death defying feat. Not that I hadn't done those recently, but not having the HEV suit made them a bit more...hazardous.

The urban landscape we were travelling through seemed very uniform. It was a city, but that was all I could say about it. The brickwork could have come from anywhere on earth, and given what had just happened, I wasn't even sure that's where I was...It wasn't until the train started slowing that I even realised we had entered a station. It was basic and decrepit and concrete, smelling of diesel and covered in a layer of grime that looked like it would take a month to clean off.

The train pulled up and the doors opened with a hiss of escaping. The man who had spoken before spoke again, his shoulders sinking in a deep resignation.

"Well...End of the line."

I got the feeling he wasn't just talking about the train.