A/N-You know what? Writing is hard. The point of my writing fanfiction is to practice for a writing career, and I sure am learning that it is actually hard. People say the proofreading part is very difficult, and I get it now. I hadn't had the experience before of it being very self-doubt-inducing, and having trouble knowing when to add something new and when to take something out, and knowing you can't, in good faith, change what you publish after it's out there. And I started a serial fic to be released over a length of time in order to challenge myself, but I hadn't realized I'd get insecure about whether people would be okay with a direction I was taking the fic in if it wasn't something they wanted to see, and wanting to please your readers is something I really get now.
So that's why Cabin In The Woods is taking so long. I basically finished the whole thing in November for NaNoWriMo, but the editing is what's tripping me up and making me realize how much of the act of writing itself is psychological. I'm indeed working on it, but I know people are getting worried I've abandoned it, so I'm giving you all this little short, fluffy piece I also did recently to try to hold you over and show I am, indeed, writing and working on my fanfiction.
This is something I wrote during NaNoWriMo too. I had a day where I had to get in my 1,667 words, but nothing for Cabin wanted to produce itself and I was getting sick of working on Cabin ALL MONTH and ugggggh...I wrote this little dude to keep up with my writing goal for the day and to try to keep my discipline up. It's an idea I've had bouncing around my head for quite a while, so I finally wrote it down and I hope, while it's not my most impressive work or anything, that you find it cute and fluffy and short and sweet. Without further delay, then!:-)
The irony of it all was that he had been scheduled for an optometrist's appointment the next Thursday to get contact lenses.
The Thursday after what ended up being the Resonance Cascade, that is. The day of the Resonance Cascade was a Monday (of course, because that was just how Mondays went), and had that day not included the blowing of a hole in the fabric of space-time, and the intervening week had not involved all of Gordon's time being consumed by running, shooting, being shot at, pumping himself full of chemicals to stay alive, avoiding falling into chemicals to stay alive, and just a general mishmash of adrenaline-fueled frenzy, he would have traded in his heavy, bulky frames for nice, weight-free, invisible contact lenses.
But of course the world had blown up, and then it didn't matter that his healthcare plan had finally allotted him a decent enough vision plan with this new job that he could swing for the contacts he'd been angling for since undergrad. In his line of work— that is, working with anomalous materials that were likely to explode or at the very least required goggles to handle—it was a real detriment to have a bulky pair of thick-lensed glasses on all the time to correct his vision.
But as a student, and then later with his fellowship in Innsbruck, he simply hadn't been able to get contacts until the weird constellation of money and healthcare plans and jobs that provided them and time to go to the doctor had all aligned and finally fallen on that Thursday. And whether it was the same weird little fate-manipulating gremlins that got people their optical health taken care of that had made the Resonance Cascade happen on the Monday before the Thursday he had his optometrist's appointment, or if the Big Heavy Life-Changing Things fate-gremlin got to overrule the carefully-laid plans of the healthcare fate-gremlin, Gordon didn't know.
He just knew he was stuck in a post-apocalyptic mayhem world that didn't have a Lenscrafters anywhere and where he was pretty sure contact lenses were no longer manufactured. Maybe glasses weren't anymore either, for that matter. He lived in fear that the things would finally give out somehow and he'd have no way of repairing them or replacing them; maybe he'd lose just one lens in an explosion of fiery toxic waste barrels, and he'd have to go around like some ridiculous pirate, with only one eye able to see and the other having to improvise somehow. It would surely add to his mystique as The One Free Man, and he was sure the citizens would all be very impressed with the battle-worn look it would give him (hopefully—it was more likely he'd just look pathetic and stupid),but he didn't really want that weird awe they all had of him to increase.
And Barney would have no end to the fun he'd have making jokes about a nerd cyclops or Blackbeard the Fearsome Physicist of Seattle Bay, or whatever Barney would come up with (Gordon very often couldn't fathom Barney's mindset, and he could never, with any degree of consistency, predict his sense of humor. This, however, he was okay with, as it seemed to him that Barney had a more...unique and less...sensical...view of the world, at times, than Gordon did).
And Alyx...ugh. His stomach squirmed as he thought of Alyx's reaction. She'd feel bad for him, no doubt, and probably give him looks that suggested he was sweetly pathetic...like a puppy that's gotten it's head stuck in a bucket and can't figure out how to get it out. That would be Alyx's generous but genuine reaction, he was pretty sure, but he did not want Alyx thinking of him that way.
He'd like Alyx to think of him as strong and capable, and suavely solid, maybe with just a touch of masculine charisma...but he was confident, very confident, actually, that this was not at all how he came across. He hoped desperately to the contrary, but his instinct told him that his constant last-minute saves and improvised solutions probably did not inspire feelings of competence or reliability, and that his clumsiness and tendency to blank out at the wrong moments probably precluded any chance of his being considered suavely masculine by anyone.
This was how he saw himself through Alyx's eyes, at least. Or rather, through Alyx's eyes filtered by his own eyes.
Which required Poindexter glasses big enough to put actual Coke bottles to shame in order to see his own hand more than about eight inches from his face.
The moment he'd been dreading came when they'd stumbled unexpectedly upon a troop of Combine soldiers while out hiking by a crumbling concrete building of some sort in the middle of the wilderness. They'd snuck up on the soldiers so suddenly they'd been as surprised as the trans-human alien lackeys had been themselves, and quickly scrambled for cover, pulse rifle shots whizzing by them as they threw themselves behind a crumbling concrete barricade of the type once used for blocking off road traffic from construction.
"How many are there?" Gordon wheezed at Alyx, trying to formulate some kind of plan or strategy or just a basic picture of what they were up against. Alyx, however, was just as surprised as him.
"I didn't see, I just ran for cover!" she lamented. Gordon peeked the tip of his head over the top of the barricade just enough to try to get a glimpse of their opponents. They were Overwatch soldiers, better-trained and more committed than the Metrocops they ran into closer to the cities, and this was a squadron of maybe eight of them, now starting to fan out behind a series of concrete barriers like the one they were behind. The three barriers were staggered a few feet apart horizontally and a few body-lengths apart going back from Gordon and Alyx's position, so the soldiers had a distinct advantage; Gordon and Alyx had overcome being outnumbered to this degree with little trouble in the past, but they were trapped behind one barrier, and it meant they had three different angles that were all bearing down on their one, unmovable position.
Gordon quickly picked out a point nearby, a rusty, ancient truck of some sort that was so dilapidated he was sure gunfire wouldn't cause any risk of explosion. He was sure he could make it there in a few seconds by sprinting, and then he and Alyx would be able to split themselves as a target. He knew the soldiers would probably prefer to aim for him, and so that would draw fire away from Alyx, at least until she started shooting at them once their priorities shifted. He'd basically draw them out for her.
He'd made this assessment in the space of about a second and a half, and ducked back behind the concrete barricade now, relaying this to Alyx.
"I'm gonna sprint for that truck over there, it shouldn't be volatile at all"—he realized he'd just once again conversationally used a word people don't normally use in conversation, but Alyx was used to this habit of his and never laughed at him for it, so he kept going—"Do you think you can give me some covering fire?"
Alyx took a brief break from reloading her Magnum to look where he was indicating.
"Okay...be careful, alright?"
"Gotcha," he said, and, a break in the firing coming as the soldiers overcame their initial surprise and tried to re-assess Gordon and Alyx's situation, he dashed out from behind the barrier.
He heard Alyx's powerful handgun fire off two closely-timed shots as he angled his trajectory toward the truck. Another second and he'd be there, and—
OOF.
What the—?!
Gordon went tumbling to the ground, weirdly thinking, as he put out his hands mid-fall to catch himself, that this did not look suave at all, and that he hoped Alyx didn't see it. As he hit the ground, his sense of priority returned, though, and he spun around to see the Overwatch soldier who had apparently charged him while he was making his run, regaining his own balance after falling to his knees from colliding with Gordon. The soldier was well-trained, though, and was quickly reaching for his gun, an Overwatch pulse rifle, which had flown from his hands in the process either of interrupting Gordon's path of trajectory or of experiencing an equal and opposing reaction to hitting him.
Gordon reacted on instinct. Instead of going for one of his own weapons, he grabbed the soldier's leg, tripping him from his half-standing stance as he reached for his pulse rifle. The soldier hit the ground and flipped onto his back to see. Gordon was aware that the head of the squad of soldiers was issuing some kind of command in his mechanical voice, but whether it was relevant, he didn't really know or care to put any effort into thinking about, as he was reaching for his 9mm handgun and keeping his eye on the soldier laying right next to his right side.
The soldier, seeing Gordon go for a weapon, did something both smart and very foolish then, and reached up and punched Gordon on the side of the face.
Gordon did not like that. Despite his nerdiness, he had never really been beat up as a child and had never actually been punched until the Black Mesa Incident, and it had been a shock to him then. He resented the Red Berets there playing dirty, as he saw it, and really, he was a grown man and a science professional with a PhD, and didn't you at least give an adult you were attempting to murder the decency of just cleanly and impersonally shooting him point-blank if you got that close, or at the very minimum using a melee weapon and not making it so much of a personal affront? Being hit not only summoned up his indignity, but also got his adrenaline going, making his fight-or-flight response decide that the flight option was stupid and for wusses and this person needed to be dealt with painfully. Those who had seen Gordon fight knew that the surest way to die an angry, violent death in a firefight against Gordon Freeman was to punch him...so this soldier, unbeknownst to himself, had just eagerly forfeited any right to go on living.
Gordon was no longer reaching for a gun. He kept his crowbar in a separate holster, and now it was coming out. This guy was going to get the honor of actually being crowbarred by the famous weapon of Dr. Freeman himself.
But as he was raising the crowbar and the soldier was—with some panic and desperation, Gordon noted with satisfaction—grabbing blindly behind himself for his pulse rifle, Gordon was dimly aware that one of the soldiers, probably the one giving orders again, was shouting, "CAUTERIZE, CAUTERIZE!"
He didn't know what was meant by that, but the next thing he heard was Alyx shouting his name and to get out of the way, and so he tumbled sideways, away from the soldier, used the crowbar to help push himself back up to his feet, made it halfway up and was already continuing to move, and then—
BAM!
Eeeeeeee...
The ringing sound Gordon's ears made when he'd just narrowly dodged a grenade was nagging at him, but he wasn't in pain, mostly just startled, and definitely alive. His HEV suit was letting him know he hadn't taken any damage to himself, and the overeager thuggish soldier who'd been attempting to get promoted to squad leader by playing Muhammed Ali had been killed by the friendly fire, so apart from the nerve cells in his ears, the grenade had been a zero loss and even a gain in eliminating the immediate threat.
What was troubling, though, was that his vision was cloudy. Had he taken an injury to the head? He reached up to feel if all of his original body parts were still there, and no, he didn't have brains sliding out of his skull, nor did his fingers come back wet with blood at all, so he had to have just been a little stunned or dazed or—
He reached to adjust his glasses, as was his instinct when he wasn't seeing clearly enough, and—
Oh no. No. No, no, no.
It had happened. It had finally happened, curse everything to Zen and back. He'd always considered it miraculous good luck that they'd never fallen off before, but now they had, and he had the eyesight, he had been told, of a manatee, which was an animal that lived in murky water and whose primary sense was tactile; in other words, he couldn't see for crap.
A bullet whizzed by his head so closely that he could hear it, and he dropped to the ground for cover.
"ALYX!" he hollered.
"Gordon!" she cried, evidently unsure of what had made him hit the deck, "Are you hurt?!"
"No, I—" he covered his head as the soldiers started aiming nearer to his new position. They hadn't hit him yet, but they were pinpointing where to aim more closely now. "I lost my glasses!"
"You—? Oh—" Alyx let off some kind of obscenity, he was sure, but another rapid-fire burst of pellets was noisily dancing toward him and he rolled backwards, trying to keep them guessing about his movement, and then slithered as best he could sideways, feeling around desperately for the thick frames and lenses that would make sense of the blotches of color and chaos surrounding him.
"I'll cover you!" Alyx hollered back, and started letting off cover fire. He knew her gun wasn't made for it, though, and she only had so much ammo, and really, he wanted to tell her, what he needed more than covering fire was for some help in finding his glasses because that was always the irony of eyesight like his, needing one's glasses to see well enough to find one's glasses—
-but BANG! A pulse orb went off somewhere too close to where he'd just been, and no, Alyx was right, and he was stupid, he did need cover fire. He had a brief idea of using the gravity gun to try to pull his glasses closer to him, but he'd need to know where to aim—
"Subject appears to have visibility impaired. Repeat: Anticitizen One is vulnerable. MOVE MOVE MOVE!"
"Gordon, fall back!" Alyx yelled, and he thought he detected a tone of annoyance in her voice, as if he should have known to already do this WHICH HE SHOULD HAVE NO NO NO STOP SHOOTING CRAP CRAP CRAP! The soldiers had figured out why he was crawling around and were aiming all their guns on him, pulse rifle pellets battering the ground near him and a few lucky shots grazing his body as he scrambled as quickly as he could to his feet and retreated behind the barricade.
As he collapsed behind the concrete barrier, Alyx ducked back behind it and gasped, "Are you hurt?!"
He pressed the lambda hatch on his chest in response and it cooed placidly at them, "Health...at...EIGHTY-THREE...percent." So he'd taken a few bullets, but he wasn't far from where he'd been before the firefight, and he was certainly not dying.
"Quick, gimme your SMG," was Alyx's reply, and he fumbled to get it and the strap that was holding it around his shoulder off of himself and hand the gun to her. Alyx poked her head up over the barricade in a moment of stillness from shooting and fired off a quick batch of bullets. Gordon heard the beeps and electronic squelching sounds that meant she'd just taken out two of the soldiers, before she ducked back under the barricade just in time to avoid a retaliatory volley.
"Okay", she panted, out of breath, "keep down and out of sight and I'll handle them. As long as they don't charge us, we should be fine."
"Take any of my other weapons you need," he offered, and started unholstering and unstrapping weapons from their various holding places on his person.
"Sweet, gimme the pulse rifle."
He put the off-white alien weapon into her hands-or would have, if her hands had been about six inches to the left, but that was what happened when you didn't have your glasses on—and she recovered for him quickly and grabbed the pulse rifle. Mounting it on her shoulder, she waited for a lull, then stood up, and after a half-second's time to aim, shot off another pulse orb. Gordon heard one or two more death-beeps—he wasn't sure—and she fell back behind the barrier again.
"How many more?" he asked.
"Uhh...four? Four," she confirmed.
"Dammit, they're still picking us off. Move in, move in!" they heard from across the expanse of no man's land. Alyx hissed a wordless sound of frustration, quickly fumbled at her belt...and chucked something over the barrier. Gordon realized she'd hurled a grenade, and within seconds he heard the bang and series of "AUGH!" sounds coming from the remaining troops.
"Leave unit AT-556, move in!"
"Two left, one wounded," Alyx reported before unslinging her own Magnum again, standing up, and, as he watched, she carefully followed with her sight and then followed with two precise bangs. Two loud beeping squalls replied, and then Alyx took aim again, taking the last, wounded soldier out of his misery—and any chance of being a threat.
"Coast is clear," she said, and he saw her extend her hand. He puzzled for a moment as to why, and then, once it was closer to his face, he saw she was offering to help him up, and he took the offered hand and clambered to his feet.
"You okay?" he asked her.
"Yeah, not a scratch...now what about your glasses?" she immediately wanted to know.
"They just went flying off, I don't think they broke...at least I don't think so."
"Whereabouts?"
"Uh..." He cautiously moved back to where he had been, stumbling over an opportunistic rock that was sticking partway out of the ground in the process. The dead soldier, the punchy one, was a good landmark that was visible enough for him in his naked-eyed state, and he began feeling gingerly near the body for any popped-out lenses, or broken-off glasses arms, or...
His mind was conjuring terrible images now, of frames twisted beyond repair by some kind of heat, or maybe the lenses had somehow broken after all, or something...and then his mind started accompanying these with horrific scenarios. What if he simply couldn't find them? What if the fact that there would probably be no way to repair them was irrelevant, because they were just gone, and he'd have to follow Alyx back to the base pronto, his hand on her shoulder to guide him like a blind person because—actually, Alyx could have her hand on his shoulder any time she wanted, and if she wanted to do more leading around, he'd be fine with that too.
He looked sideways, and saw her actually examining directly around the body for his glasses while he searched the ground nearby. It struck him that he had no issue with her leading him around or doing anything for him while his eyesight was weakened, even if he were completely blind. She had seamlesly covered him and kept him—both of them—from being hurt and turned what could have been a surefire disaster into a non-incidental one-woman clean-up job. And she'd barely broken a sweat.
"Here they are!" she cried jubilantly, and Gordon could see she had...something in her hands. He stood up and she handed them to him.
"Alyx, you are the best. The best." He gingerly felt the frames and lenses, then the arms, to make sure everything was there. As far as he could feel, things were alright, but he'd have to put them on to be sure.
He did so, and...wait, there was something wrong. A big blotch was covering his right lens, and while there didn't appear to be cracks or scratches on the lenses at all, praise be to governmental grant funding, he still couldn't see adequately.
"Oh...Gordon!" Alyx giggled, "You've got blood on your glasses!"
She said this as if it were adorable instead of horrifying, but the next moment, she had said, "Here", and his glasses were gone again and the blurred edges and blotches of reality were back and...
Trust Alyx. She's just cleaning your glasses for you, and she won't let anything happen to you while you can't see.
He blinked hard to watch her, as she actually went ahead and took a fold of her own sweatshirt to clean the blood off his glasses with. How that didn't faze her was beyond him, but it did something to him that made his insides feel warm and melty, even though they should be curling up into themselves out of revulsion to the blood.
She carefully, clumsily, inched the frame back toward his face, and slid the arms over his ears. He adjusted them briefly, and then...
Sweet, sweet, merciful sight returned, blessed accurate vision, and once his eyes adjusted again to having them on, he beamed happily in gratitude at Alyx.
"Thank you so..."
She was looking at him with her mouth hanging open slightly, the corners of it upturned just a notch, her eyes wide and locked onto his. She broke into a grin as he was able to see her clearly again, and then blushed and looked off to the side, smiling to herself as she tugged on her sweatshirt sleeve.
What was that about? It was cute, but what had she...?
He realized he was enjoying watching her, though, and shut his mind up then and just took in the sight of her, restored by the magical little lenses now perched back on his nose.
"Oh, you...you've got something in your hair..."
He reached out instinctively to take it out for her, trying to chuckle lightly, which quickly turned awkward as he realized, "Oh, it's...shrapnel...are you...?"
But she wasn't horrified by the fact that part of a grenade or something had come close enough to her scalp to do damage like he was. She was turning pink on the tips of her cheeks, having turned her gaze back to meet his, and her eyes were big and shining and so very pretty...
She laughed a self-conscious, half-present laugh as she ran her hand through her hair herself, either out of awareness of the shrapnel, or awareness of herself, or of him, or...
"Thank you," he said, in what he was finding to be a lower voice than he normally spoke in. He didn't know why his voice had done that, but he was focused on Alyx right now, telling her, "you really...you really had my back there, Alyx. Thanks."
"I-I mean..." she blinked, then smiled again at him. "You're welcome."
They stood there, gazing happily at each other, half an arm's length apart, and then she said, "Can…can I try something?"
"Yeah," he said without thinking about it, knowing he didn't have to think about it.
And she slowly, hesitantly at first, then more confidently, reached up to his face, laid her hand on the stubble of his cheek, leaned into him, and...
Right now it didn't matter that he couldn't see, because his mind exploded into bursts of color as her lips delicately touched his. He quickly responded that he wanted her to go ahead with this by leaning in more and putting his hand on her hip, and...wow.
She was happy about this too, as she made a soft little sound in the back of her throat, and put her other hand around his HEV-suited neck. But his life-saving, Alyx-revealing glasses were now smushing into his face, and while he started off ignoring it, as they held the kiss, the frames pressing into the bridge of his nose got more uncomfortable until...
He pulled away only far enough to be able to speak, "Hang on just a sec."
He took the glasses off again, this time willingly and without hesitation. Because he had Alyx now, and as terrifying as it might be to be without his glasses, it felt okay with her around.
And he couldn't make out with her properly with them on.
Folding the glasses closed and gently grasping them in his free hand, he leaned back in and they happily resumed.
A/N—There. Not my most eloquent one, I think, but for the aim of short-and-fluffy, I think it hits the mark.:-)
That little image of Alyx cleaning the blood off of Gordon's glasses and him picking the shrapnel out of her hair has been floating in my head since early on when I first got into the fandom. I had a friend on DeviantArt draw it for me under commission, but I don't think will let me post the URL here. Just search Commission-KRSONMar by Skellagirl and you should find it...it's cute and she did a really nice job with it!:-)