Chapter I: Numb
"Get going! Head for the roof!" A man, draped in the denim outfit that seemed to pass for the standard uniform for citizens, yelled at Gordon as he bolted through a doorway on the top floor of an apartment complex. The door slammed shut with a loud bang as the stranger put all of his weight against the door, the sounds of pursuing footsteps drawing nearer.
The scientist didn't stay to watch before moving up a nearby staircase onto the roof of the sketchy apartment building he'd been unwillingly forced into. A quick glance revealed a gigantic hole in the wall, and it was one that Gordon moved to without hesitation. A quick jump to a nearby building ensured that he could still keep going to whatever end he was presented with. Gun fire could be heard just as the young physicist started to climb to a higher part of the apartment's adjoining roof. The noise was quickly followed by sharp cracks as the discharging 9mm rounds impacted into the building's cement surface.
Not needing any further encouragement, Gordon scrambled up his select section of roof. A small ledge, on what looked like an abandoned hotel, promised to be an escape and it was one the unwilling soldier hoped would be kept. Small wooden boards connected his downward sloping section of roof with his target. Wary of putting his trust into a material that looked like it would break on contact, the scientist jumped once again. More bullets began tracking his movements, not just the authorities on the roof, but there were now those at street level firing at Gordon's location on the fourth floor.
The physicist scrambled across the ledges, more discharging rounds tracking his position. A sharp pang in his shoulder brought an involuntary wince from the scientist, his probing hand coming away slick with crimson liquid. He didn't need a PhD to know he'd just been shot in the left shoulder. Another dose of searing agony shot through the nerves of his left leg like fire, the strength of it almost enough to bring Gordon to his knees.
He managed to keep himself standing upright, however, only the snarl on his face giving evidence to the pained yells he suppressed. The sight of an open window frame offered the physicist shelter from the continuing hail of bullets and so he quickly climbed up and hurled himself inside, barley biting back another wince as he landed on his injured side. Gordon surveyed his surroundings; the sounds of fading gun-fire replaced with movement below let him know that the forces on the ground weren't going to give up so easily.
Gordon was on the top floor of an unknown building, the only viable exit seemed to be a small staircase that looked like it would take him a floor below. Knowing time was everything, Gordon quickly moved down and into a small corridor with two doors at either end. Opting to take the first one, the scientist moved to the one on his left; only to back away as the door violently swung open, revealing one of the strangely garbed police the physicist had met earlier, an electrically active baton clutched in his hand.
Gordon quickly avoided the metro-cop's first swipe, side-stepping as the electric device swiped through the area where his torso had been moments ago. The reluctant soldier quickly stepped forward, grabbed the metro-cop's baton and twisted the weapon back so that the electric payload coursed through the body of the wielder. The CP convulsed a bit before collapsing, his partner behind him swiftly stepping in to fill the gap. Gordon was about to jab the baton into his next target when a searing pain coursed through his back. He felt himself going weak and his vision became blurry. The MIT graduate felt himself slipping unconscious, only managing one last swipe with the baton before the action was reciprocated and he felt himself slip into darkness.
Sometime later, Gordon could hear faint voices. The noises quickly became louder as his mind gradually returned to conscious thought patterns. A female voice called out, a sound that was accompanied by the noise of combat. Three screams were heard before the scientist was able to weakly open his eyes. A beautiful woman entered his field of vision, a smile framing her face as she gazed down at him. "Doctor Freeman I presume?"
Gordon managed a nod in reply, making the woman smile just a bit wider before her eyes darted to the right, where a sharp klaxon echoed in the distance. "We'd better hurry," the woman said with a frown as she helped him to his feet, "The Combine can be slow to wake but once their up, you don't want to get in their way."
The physicist looked around to see several metro-cops unconscious on the cement floor. Nodding absentmindedly at the woman's sentence, Gordon took note that his escort was moving to an elevator and he followed as quickly as he could, the wound in his leg sending sparks of pain through his system with every step.
"Doctor Kliener said you'd be coming this way," The young lady said as she pressed a button that let the lift doors slide apart. A brief laugh escaped her lips, "I don't think it occurred to him that you might not have a map."
Gordon only offered another nod at that as he stepped into the lift alongside her where she quickly keyed another button, sending the lift into a descent.
"I'm Alyx Vance," she said, her form turning to look at Gordon. Upon seeing his confused expression, she quickly elaborated, "My father worked with you back at Black Mesa?" She steeled herself back when she realized how excited she sounded, tucking a stray strand of brown hair back behind her similarly coloured headband. "I'm sure you don't remember me though."
The scientist remembered her all right, but as a five year old girl. Looking at her now, Gordon wondered if it was really possible for this woman, clearly in her twenties, to be the five year old he had only met several times before; the last of which had only been a week before the Resonance Cascade.
His thoughts instantly turned to his 'employer,' the ominous presence known to him only as the G-man. He recalled the inhuman abilities the G-man possessed, abilities that had allowed the two to be seamlessly teleported to various areas in the galaxy- from Xen to a Black Mesa tram moving through nothing but blackness- during their first encounter. The entity's strange speech pattern and cryptic statements regarding government employment had only served to reaffirm Gordan's suspicions of alien origin.
The last thing he remembered was being given the illusion of making a choice, one to either live by serving the G-man, or to be teleported back into the very facility he had just escaped from, where the unknown life-form ensured only death would result. 'Anti-climactic', the G-man had deemed the decision to remain. A mild adjective in Gordan's mind, as it did nothing to accurately label the sheer mixture of rage, hopelessness, and frustration the scientist had been feeling at the time. He had escaped an obstacle course worth of traps, only to be entangled in a web.
With the strange abilities of his employer in mind, he no longer harboured any doubts that the woman in front of him was, indeed, an adult Alyx Vance. The acceptance alone brought forth a surge of disconcerting scenarios. Given what he could assume of Alyx's age and the abilities at his 'employer's' disposal, it would mean he had been away for some time. Where exactly that was, however, and why he couldn't remember anything after entering the G-man's portal, Gordon had no definite answer.
His most prominent theories were either a period of suspended animation; it would help to explain why those he knew looked so much older, or else he had simply been moved somewhere into the future. The last was the more ridiculous of the two and, had it been three days ago, he wouldn't have hesitated to discard the hypothesis. Now, however, after witnessing everything he had seen during the Resonance Cascade, he found that he couldn't disregard it as simply as he would have liked.
"Man of few words, aren't you?"
Alyx's rhetorical question brought him out of his thoughts, redirecting his gaze from the elevator door to the woman at his right. Her smirk turned to a look of confusion as the physicist only offered a shrug in response, mentally cursing himself as he did since the wound in his left shoulder was still very much prominent.
Even though he hadn't made a single sound in response to the flaring of his neurons, Alyx must've noticed the stiffness in his movement for she looked at him with concerned eyes. "You okay?"
He only nodded an affirmative. He'd learned the hard way not to show weakness to anyone, particularly not to those with friendly demeanours. 'There's daggers in men's smiles,' Shakespeare had wrote, a sentence the scientist found all too true.
The young woman looked at him doubtfully but made no further comment as she turned around and headed out of the lift. Gordon followed, consciously attempting to lessen the pressure on his left leg. Alyx led the former Black Mesa employee through a hidden hallway behind a poster of Doctor Breen, where the Resistance member punched in a series of numbers into a nearby keypad. "It's funny," She said, turning her gaze back to Gordon, "You showing up on this day in particular."
The physicist only kept silent, not bothering to ask what she was talking about. Alyx continued walking forward, "We've been helping citizens escape the City on foot," She continued, jumping over a guardrail to land on the floor only a foot below.
Gordon had no desire to do the same and waddled over to the short staircase close by. He stopped right on top, not knowing how he was going to walk down the steps with his current injury. Deciding to just wing it, the scientist managed to hop down the stairs on his right leg, catching up with Alyx as she continued speaking. "It's a dangerous route to my father's lab, through the old canals." She paused to look back at Gordon. "Today we're finally on the verge of having a better way."
The physicist came close to emitting a frustrated groan. That had been all the answers he seemed to ever get out of people since the Resonance Cascade, vague explanations and general directions. At Black Mesa, he had made his way through an immense complex he'd never even seen half of, following a scattered trail of advice from security guards and colleagues, all of whom never really provided any definite answers.
It seemed he would be doing the same thing here.
Alyx led him to what seemed to be a dead-end corridor. If it had been a stranger, the former Black Mesa employee would have believed exactly that, but this was Eli's daughter. That fact alone made him stay silent as the woman made a quip about 'buying him a drink' as she stood next to a vending machine selling cans of Doctor Breen's Private Reserve.
He wasn't very surprised to find the front end of the machine swing outward like a door, Alyx standing next to it with a smile. "Oh, and by the way, nice to finally meet you."
Once again, a nod was the only response as Gordon moved into the newly revealed room beyond. He briefly put too much weight on his injured leg, triggering an agony so intense even the Black Mesa veteran couldn't help but let out a hiss. He swiftly adjusted his gait, moving to a point inside what he recognized as a laboratory. Diagnostic boards, consoles, a computer, and a lab-coat garbed individual were the first things to meet Gordan's surveying gaze.
Since the person looked to be the only one within the room, the physicist headed in that direction. He didn't get very close before the individual let out a curse. It wasn't that which put a stop to Gordon's approach, however. It was the voice. One he hadn't heard for a couple of days, the voice of his mentor at MIT, Doctor Issac Kliener.
"Oh Fie, where did she get to!" Kliener's shouts increased in volume as he stuck his head into what looked to be a small kennel. "Lamarr! Come out of there!"
"Everything alright Doctor Kliener?"
Alyx's voice pulled Gordon's attention away from Issac and to the young woman in question, who regarded him with a smirk as though he already knew what was going on. But he didn't.
Kliener spared a glance to Alyx, before removing his head from the kennel. "Hello Alyx," He spoke offhand. "Almost alright, Lamarr has gotten out of her crate again. If I didn't know better," Kliener continued as he started to turn around, "I'd suspect Barney of trapping…" The scientist trailed off once his eyes locked on Gordon, a wide smile splitting across his face. "Gordon Freeman! It really is you, isn't it?"
Despite the buried feeling of elation coursing through his mind upon seeing his old mentor alive and unharmed, Gordon only returned the enthusiastic greeting with a slight inclination of his head.
Not that his lack of expressed feeling was noticed by anyone, Kliener was so caught up in his own thoughts that Gordon didn't even think it would have mattered if he had made the biggest emotional display possible.
Alyx's attention was focused on Doctor Kliener, with only a brief smirk directed at Gordon. "I found him wandering around outside, bit of a troublemaker isn't he?"
"We owe a great deal to Doctor Freeman," Kliener said in dismissal, though he looked at his pupil briefly, "Even if trouble does tend to follow in his wake."
A grimace shot across Freeman's expression, the casually spoken statement dredging up a memory Gordon wished he didn't have.
/
"Shutting down…..attempting shutdown."
"It's not…it's not."
A flash of energy discharged from the scanning array like lightning-
/
"Sit."
The simple command brought the physicist out of his memory before it could completely reach its deadly end. He looked up to see Alyx motioning to a crate near what seemed to be the laboratory storage room. His questioning expression bore into the young woman, despite the presence of her demanding tone.
"You're injured, I can tend to it."
The physicist was unable to prevent a flicker of surprise from appearing on his face, he found it hard to believe he had been that careless with letting his weakness show. Alyx only rolled her eyes in response, "I noticed the blood on your uniform in the elevator shaft." She retrieved a med-kit from one of the many boxes stacked behind Gordon. She rolled up the sleeve on his left leg while the Black Mesa veteran did the same on his left arm. A look of concern fixed on her face when she took in the extent of his wounds. "Oh my god, I was starting to think you had only cut yourself on something with the way you were moving." She brought her intense gaze up at him, "Were you even planning on letting us know you'd been shot?"
The scientist returned the look with a blank expression and a shrug, an action which took Alyx completely by surprise. Unable to think of a response to such an apathetic display, the woman only blinked at him a few times before slowly returning to her work. She grabbed a vial of a specially designed healing fluid the resistance had liberated from the Combine, one that promoted the body's natural regeneration rate, allowing wounds to heal seemingly instantaneously.
"This is going to hurt," She said in warning before pouring a small amount of the liquid on the wound. Only a few seconds passed before the flesh could be seen mending back together. Alyx repeated the process on his other injury, after manually extracting the bullet still lodged inside. She watched Gordon's face the entire time, searching for a reaction. To her great surprise, his features retained their neutral look. He never deviated once, making Alyx's brow knot in worry.
She knew from experience that even the toughest person found it impossible to bear such treatment in silence. If she hadn't already seen him moving about, she would have suspected nerve damage to be the cause. The fact that she knew he could only made her concern grow, part of her thought that something else might be wrong with him.
Before she could even voice such concerns, however, Doctor Kliener, who had been relatively silent during Alyx's medical treatment, immersed in his own thoughts as he consulted his computer, took that moment to speak to his pupil. "Gordon, I must say you've come at a very opportune time. Alyx has just installed the final piece for our resurrected teleport!"
"I…can't take any credit for the breakthrough Doctor,' Alyx said slowly, brown eyes still watching Gordon as he merely stared at the far wall, eyes unfocused as though he were deep in thought.
She'd heard stories of Gordon Freeman from Barney, Doctor Kliener, and her own father. They'd always described him as a fun, mostly easy going guy, with a passion for science, a man who had practically single-handedly neutralized the threat posed by the Resonance Cascade. Because of that, Alyx had always pictured Gordon Freeman as a hero in every sense of the word.
Now, looking at the very person she had always wanted to meet, she was puzzled. The physicist seemed to retain some of the qualities she had imagined, but he was still vastly different from what she had pictured. For one, the air of confidence Alyx would have thought he would project was non-existent. It was that quality alone that made him seem less of a hero and more of just an ordinary man.
"Nonsense," Kliener admonished Alyx's modest reply in a playful tone, "Your talents surpass your loveliness."
She laughed lightly at that, Doctor Kliener was one of the few people who knew how to cheer her up. "Let's just see if this thing works, okay?"
Any possible rebuttal from Kliener was cut-off when Barney came bolting inside the room, his eyes frantically scanning the area. "Well, is he here?" He answered his own question when he caught sight of Gordon sitting on the crate at the far end, an audible sigh of relief escaping him as he gazed at his friend. "There you are. Man Gordon, you stirred up the hive!"
Barney moved to a security station, quickly flipping through the video feeds to make sure he didn't have a tail. "We can't keep him here long Doc," He said to Kliener, "It'll jeopardize everything we've worked for."
"Don't worry," Alyx said with a placating gesture to try and ease Barney's mind. "He's coming with me."
That was about as much as Gordon bothered to listen to, the rest of the conversation not even being processed by him as he turned his attention to the lab itself. Even the prospect of his mentor having created working teleportation technology again no longer held any real interest to him. He'd seen the disastrous turn experiments could take, the deaths they could bring. He no longer wanted to be a part of it.
Now he just wanted a quick history lesson, answers to help him fill in the gaps between what happened at Black Mesa and now. Unfortunately, a search of Doctor Kliener's lab left Gordon with nothing to provide such information and so he found himself tuning back into the conversation between the other three occupants of the room.
"Doc, since he's not taking the streets you might as well get him out of his civvies."
"What?" Kliener's befuddled expression only lasted a moment before he shook his head, "Right, I almost forgot. Barney, I'll give you the honour."
A small smile stretched across the former security guard's lips. "I've got to get back on my shift, but okay."
Barney caught sight of Gordon and motioned for him to follow as he led his friend to a storage room next to the security station. A quick inputting of numbers into the nearby keypad allowed the metal slat door to open, revealing a piece of equipment Gordon didn't think he'd see again, an HEV suit.
Even though Gordon's surprised expression didn't last for very long Barney must've caught sight of it, for he shot his friend a smile before moving over to the console next to the containment chamber where the suit was stored. The room became shrouded in a yellow hue as the lights snapped on, revealing more than just the corners of the area. A slight shriek could be heard, its origin emanating from the shadowy outline of a creature on top of the storage chamber. It was a sound so recent in Gordon's mind that it instantly set him on high alert. The veteran's hand moved toward his right side where he normally kept his crowbar. He checked the movement, however, when he remembered he no longer had such a melee weapon at his disposal.
The shriek was followed by Barney's shouts, forcing Gordon to focus on his friend, only to find him wrestling with the very creature he expected to be present, a headcrab. Gordon's eyes searched for a weapon he could use, his gaze finally falling on a cluster of books on top of a nearby locker. Acting fast, the physicist snatched one of the literary works up in his hands and moved towards the disgusting creature, fully intent on beating it into a paste.
He brought his hands up and was just seconds away from doing just that when a pair of slender hands gripped his own. The grip wasn't meant to be strong, there was just enough pressure behind the gesture for him to turn his attention to a nervously smiling Alyx Vance. "Hold it Gordon," She urged, "This isn't your typical headcrab."
"She's right about that," Barney said, throwing the headcrab that had been trying to attach to his face toward the ground. "This one's worse." The parasitic organism jumped onto the very locker where Gordon had retrieved his improvised weapon, seeming to sit on its back legs. "Go on Gordon," Barney urged, motioning toward the headcrab. "Have at it."
"You will do no such thing," Issac Kliener shouted, shooting Barney a sharp glare as he approached the creature. "Never fear Gordon," Kliener said as he looked at his pupil, speaking in a comforting tone once he noticed that the veteran hadn't yet released his hold on the book. "She's de-beaked and completely harmless. The worst she might do is attempt to…"
"Have its way with your face?" Barney supplied helpfully, a hateful glance exchanged with the headcrab.
"Couple with your head," The doctor corrected sharply. "Fruitlessly," He assured, the added adverb spoken more for Gordon's benefit.
As if noticing Barney's glare, the headcrab rocked itself back into a standing position, a slight growl seeming to erupt from the creature as it took a step toward Barney. Gordon raised the book back into a striking position automatically, his grip tightening and his posture tense, just waiting for a reason to revert to his original intention and grind the alien into the floor.
Once again, however, a gesture from Alyx made Gordon lower the book. He dropped the object a few seconds later when he realized that he wouldn't be able to murder the hideous creature, despite the strong compulsion to do just that.
"Get that thing away from me!" Barney yelled, crouching into a defensive stance.
Kliener patted the top of his head, drawing the headcrab's attention to him. "Here my pet, up, up."
The creature ignored its owner entirely, however, jumping through the storage racks to crawl into the lab's ventilation shaft. "Oh Fie," Kliener said, swing a fist across his chest in annoyance. "It'll be another week before I can coax her out of there!"
"Yeah," Barney said, turning to whisper to Gordon, "Longer if we're lucky."
Alyx jokingly commented that he must not be an animal person, to which the security guard only shivered and let out a groan of disgust.
"Here you go Gordon," Barney proudly declared after letting the doors barring access to the suit slide apart. His triumphant look transformed to a confused frown when he noticed that his friend was staring at the ceiling. The confusion evaporated, however, when he followed the scientist's gaze to the spot where Kliener's pet headcrab, Lamarr, had vanished. "Nothing's stopping you Gordon," Barney said, knowing Gordon was considering whether or not to follow the creature through the air-vent and put an end to the parasitic menace.
The physicist brought his gaze down to Barney, a slight eye motion toward Doctor Kliener being a silent expression of the only thing holding him back.
The frown was back on the former security guard's face, "Well, there is that, but I'm sure he'd get over it eventually. Besides, I'd distract him for you."
"Don't," Alyx warned, her eyes focusing on Gordon briefly before flicking between the two friends. "C'mon Barney, stop joking around about that."
"Who's joking?" Barney replied, speaking with such seriousness that it gave Alyx pause.
The former security guard had seen the horrors the aliens could unleash countless times, both in Black Mesa and other parts of the world. Some of the victims had been his own friends, each one either turned into a zombie or killed during the conversion process. It was his respect for Issac Kliener, and the man's expressed desire to try and learn how the creatures functioned, that kept Barney from killing the headcrab on first sight.
After the creature had been de-beaked though, the doctor had grown fond of the alien, to the point where he had proudly declared it to be his pet. At that point, it was only the respect that kept Barney restrained. Countless attempts of having Lamarr try to jump on his head, however, were starting to wear him thin.
Gordon noticed the pain and hatred reflecting in Barney's eyes and stepped toward his friend, placing a hand on his shoulder and squeezing lightly to bring Barney's attention away from his thoughts. A slight smile stretched across Gordon's face when his firend looked up to regard him, portraying an emotion he wasn't feeling at all. It was all Barney needed, however, to bring himself out of his memories. He reciprocated the gesture with a completely genuine one, slipping back into his familiar joking manner as he encouraged Gordon to hurry up and don the suit.
The veteran did just that, glad that he could pull Barney back from his gloomy thoughts. Just because he was numb, didn't mean others had to be.
This story will follow Gordon Freeman from a persepctive deviating from the norm.
No doubt you already have questions about how he got to be the way he is. Don't worry, they'll be answered in time.
I'll be jumpning through the chapters in Half-Life 2 and revisitng events in Black Mesa, exploring Gordon's past, relations between characters (one in particular), interactions with others, things like that.
I feel like its been awhile since I've written anything, so let me know if this was a good read or not.