AN: This chapter's a bit shorter than usual, but given the relatively quick turnaround, am I off the hook? Anyhow, hope you enjoy, and if you do, please feel free to let me know with a comment/review! Getting comments on this fic is one of the highlights of writing, and I try to respond to most if not all comments. Until next time, and prepare for unforeseen consequences...

-Little Inkling

Eli was numb. Perhaps that was the best way to put it. Nothing else was knocking around his head at the moment, at least in the way of emotion. No—that was inaccurate. He was busy, and he was harried by the constant flow of movement around him and the movements that came from him, but somewhere in the dim corridors of his mind, he knew that the busyness wouldn't last. Sooner or later, the tasks at hand would end, his fellow resistance members would insist he rest, or his own traitorous body would betray him and beg for sleep with an insistence he couldn't ignore.

Then he would dream, and that was the worst of all.

It'd been eight days since Alyx had gone missing. Eight days too long. They should have been well on their way to the Borealis by now, if not already there, salvaging what they could from the wreck and burning the rest so that the Combine would have nothing to undermine their own efforts in teleportation. It was the single most effective edge they had against their would-be alien subjugators, and if they lost it…the idea didn't bear thinking about. No matter where his thoughts roamed, he always seemed to butt up against the ones that were simply too dark and too spiraling to allow himself to think.

He glanced up quickly from the blueprints he had been examining to cast a quick eye on Gordon in the other corner, quietly and methodically tinkering with the one of the helicopter's broken rotors. Bless him—mechanics was not his specialty, but he had accepted the task with a quiet kind of grace that made Eli infinitely grateful. Shortly after handing him his signature crowbar, Eli had been privy to a sudden bout of weakness on the part of the "One Free Man" as Gordon collapsed to the floor and proceeded to sleep for fourteen straight hours. In his desperation to rectify the loss of his daughter—his only family—he'd failed to noticed the haggard edges of Gordon's eyes. How, well, frayed, he looked. Eli could only imagine the toll recent events had taken on him, stacked on top of fading adrenaline and a severe lack of sleep.

Once he'd woken up, having shed the HEV suit courtesy of a considerate medic, he'd sat for a few moments, unable to talk or even look at Eli. Seemingly processing the impossible-to-process fact that Alyx was just gone. Gordon was not typically a very chatty man even on a good day, but in the past week, well…Eli would have been blind not to notice that he was no longer the only man in his daughter's heart. Something that both pained and elated him in equal measures. Perhaps more of the former considering recent circumstances.

Eli sighed. He was back on the subject again. Precisely what he'd told himself that he would not do. He shook himself, and Gordon glanced up at him, pausing in his task. Eli quickly waved a hand at the younger man, gesturing for him to carry on, ignore the old man in the corner with his spiraling musings. It felt impossible, having him here for more than a few hours. The last few times he and Gordon had talked (a one-sided conversation, to be sure) the younger man had been swiftly whisked away by one disaster after another; first in the original incident, and even now. It seemed incredible to think that all the while he and A—he and the resistance had been struggling to survive the Seven Hour War and then later on during the Combine's increased subjugation, Gordon had been frozen in place somewhere in the grand cosmos, not aging a day even as Eli watched his daughter grow up in a sunless world and felt his own bones begin to creak and groan with the weight of age.

Gordon had explained as best he could the experiences he remembered in low, quiet tones. At least, he'd gotten out a few scant words between long, thoughtful pauses, where his face took on an expression that came close to frightening Eli. It was in those moments when words slowed and Gordon's hands twitched that Eli looked and saw horror reflected in Gordon's eyes. They'd all faced horrors—that much was a given in the kind of world they lived in now—but Gordon…Gordon had crawled in the dark that the rest of them actively avoided when they could. He had waded through the sewage and rot of abandoned pathways when there was simply no faster way—feats that had afforded him a near-legendary status amongst the resistance, to be sure. But in those moments meeting Gordon's eyes for the slightest moment, Eli got the strongest sense of grim resignation on the younger man's part.

A man doesn't crawl through the deepest pits the dark has to offer and emerge unchanged. Gordon had seemed, at least partially, to have made his peace with that.

Eli sighed once more, rubbing his eyes. They had to keep working, he knew, but the machinery before him was a mess in the wake of the Advisor attack. The plain truth was, they lacked certain components to properly repair the helicopter. Until they could get a supply run in, they simply didn't have the means to just pick up and continue their mission to the Borealis. The attempts of the last week hadn't done very much to change that fact, and though Kleiner had been working in tandem to try and pinpoint coordinates to simply teleport them there as a sort of plan-B one way trip, he and Magnusson had been encountering strong interference. Whether it was from extreme weather in the area or still-functioning Aperture paranoia protocols, they weren't entirely sure, but either way, it was making their job a great deal more difficult than it needed to be. At this point, Eli doubted they'd even be able to—but no, they had to get there. There simply was no other option available to them.

Then Kleiner came running in, all in a tizzy as he was wont to do from time to time when he got excited about things. Gordon looked up as Kleiner entered the room and quickly offered him a smile; Eli had come to realize with a painful sort of awareness that for all that he knew Gordon, he lacked the history that Kleiner shared with the younger man. They'd been at MIT together for a time, when Kleiner had mentored him, but Eli had only met Gordon when they'd all been gathered together at Black Mesa. Ready to change the world—only nowhere near to the way they'd intended.

"Eli, E—" Kleiner was outright out of breath, something that made Eli pause. "—Eli, we've got a communication line with Redwood."

"Alright, Izzy, alright. What have they got to say—any news from City 19?"

Kleiner held up a finger and paused to bend over, raggedly catching his breath in choking gasps. He recovered in the next minute, and Eli saw his eyes brighten even as he fought off residual coughs.

"They just liberated Cam Novine—brought the whole thing down a few hours ago—and now they've got most of the prisoners hiding out at Redwood and waiting for further orders."

Eli felt his muscles relax. "That's good news. Tell them we need all the help we can get, after that last attack."

"That's not all. I've got a former Aperture Science employee on the line right now."

Eli's breath caught, and for a brief second, everything stopped. He turned to Kleiner and grabbed his arm, trying to ground himself and his colleague in the gravity of the moment. Because surely what Kleiner was saying was patently insane.

"Izzy, are you—are you sure? We haven't heard from Aperture since the initial portal storm. We haven't heard from them, period! Are you absolutely certain they're not just—"

"Eli—Eli, I swear to you I just talked to them. Just look at the monitor and you'll see."

"The Dr. Kleiner would do well to return with all swiftness—the communications array is unlikely to stay open much longer, and the Dr. Teiger is most anxious to speak with you." Uriah cut in.

Eli hesitated, then cursed himself. Even thinking of turning his nose up at help from Aperture was an arrogant fool's luxury—something that belonged to the world before, when they had the wealth and time to entertain such ideas. Now there was a great deal more at stake than mere government contracts and grant money. Now, they had to contend with the end of the world as they once knew it and the extinction of not only humanity, but their new allies as well. The simple fact was that they were no longer the only species with a personal stake in this fight; the Combine had conquered thousands of worlds and earth was only the latest in a long line. If they could successfully drive them from Earth's surface…well, it could be the beginning of something spectacular across the galaxies. If it weren't so grounded in reality—if they hadn't been so deeply entrenched in the fight for their very existence—Eli might have laughed at the cosmic absurdity of it all.

In the grand scheme of things, working with your old company's rival was hardly the thing you should be worried about. And yet he worried—

"I heard some commotion; any news?" Barney came into the room, his face smeared with oil—clear evidence that he'd been hard at work with the rest of the mechanic crews to repair their vehicles after the last attack. Yet another person who'd developed a soft spot for Alyx—yet another person who had been affected by her noticeable absence and the unanswerable questions that followed it.

Unforeseen consequences, his mind prompted unbidden.

"Er, some, Barney." Eli motioned quickly to Uriah to lead the way, and the Vortigaunt, Eli, and Barney quickly began making their way down the hall together. "We've just received word that Cam Novine has fallen, and that a good majority of the prisoners managed to escape."

"That's about as good as it gets these days." Barney gave a grin that was wide, if a bit strained, and they quickly entered the communications room. "I'm guessing we'll want to get them armed and stationed then—we need all the help we can get…" He trailed off very suddenly. So suddenly that Eli stopped to look at the former security guard and found himself looking at the face of a man dragged back in time.

Barney was staring at the communications monitor, unblinking, even as the woman on the other side of it tilted her head in confusion.

"C-Caroline. You're alive."

Chell looked to Caroline for their next move, even as she continued to stand at the communications array, awaiting the arrival of someone called Eli Vance. Even not facing her, Chell felt a sudden sense of awe at the older woman's ramrod-straight posture and confident stance. Her jumpsuit was ragged at the ends by now, and blood from some guard or other who had met the sharp-eyed end of Caroline's shotgun spattered up the side of one leg—yet despite all this, Caroline stood tall like a solider, unwavering. Backbone of the facility indeed. Chell shook off the memory, despising the sudden reminder of the recordings…of the place they came from. She shook herself and distracted herself from her unwanted thoughts by checking her equipment; despite coming through the fire—quite literally—mostly unscathed, she still had only a rudimentary understanding of how the portal gun truly functioned. Knowing Aperture, it was likely that the slightest wrong move could make the gun malfunction and create any manner of unstable singularity or who knew what else.

With slightly more concentration than was strictly needed to examine the device, she pointedly avoided the stare of the man with Wheatley's voice as she scanned the device's scratched plastic casing. By some miracle, there were no cracks as of yet, but she didn't hold out strong hope for the future. This device, for all she been through with it in her hand, had rarely faced heavy gunfire like she had only a few hours ago. She supposed it was some small consolation that the device could easily withstand direct contact with fire and extreme temperatures—something she knew well from her own personal experience. After looking over the portal gun and knotting it onto the end of one of her jumpsuit's free sleeves, she turned her attention to the handgun, meticulously reloading a new clip that Rovetta had hastily handed to her before turning to another pressing task.

Stephen grew impatient, she could tell, though he didn't actively press her. His presence pressed closer instead, waiting for her to finish and awkwardly staring in the meantime at the floor, the walls, the other rescued prisoners—anything and everything except her. At last, she was forced to finish wiping the gun clean with the other free-hanging sleeve of her jumpsuit and to tuck it into her waistband. Her eyes slowly, cautiously, coldly made their way up to the man's face.

It was an eerily familiar face, though she couldn't pinpoint the exact facial feature that made her think such a thing. She'd never met this man, she was certain, and yet…it bothered her that that thought wouldn't stick firmly in her head. His hair was a reddish hue with an interesting crispy texture that seemed to suggest that he'd wet it with something particularly nasty prior to it drying in the great outdoors. His nose was large and rounded, jumping out to greet you before the rest of his face caught up, and perched atop it was a set of circular-framed glasses that looked a bit worse for wear. Ginger brows hitched up high on his forehead in a worried, wrinkled contortion, but the look he gave her was not quite the worried one she'd been expected. Instead, it looked more…apologetic, if she recognizing it correctly.

"Michelle—er, Chell—"

She fought the urge to flinch at the sound of her name in that voice and failed.

"—I'm sorry."

She stared at him, baffled, though she managed to keep her mouth shut in a tight line despite her surprise. Sorry only now? Now, when she refused to speak to him again, when they were finally in an environment where she could so easily leave him behind and never see him again? Now, when they were not bound together in the same desperate circumstances, when she could finally look him in the eye and make him feel the same sense of desperate dread that had crippled her in the depths, following the loss of the closest thing she'd had to a friend in that place?

And almost without consciously doing so, something hard and cold and unfeeling in her chest slammed a door and locked it. She hardly listened to what he said next.

"…not the best of circumstances, and for that I am truly sorry. I can't tell you how much I regret leaving things the way I did. And then I didn't see you for God only knows how long—I've been a pretty rotten friend."

She nodded at that, because for once, he was entirely, utterly truthful. No fuss, no rambling—just the complete truth, unembellished. It surprised her, but she refused to be surprised by him any further. Surprises from that voice in the darkness were rarely good.

He came back for you.

The voice was quiet, peeping into her stream of consciousness with the same force of presence as a weak baby chick. It was a voice of some small measure of rational thinking—she knew that somewhere in her mind. In some small, infinitesimal way, it was logical and should have made sense. But it didn't. The cold thing in her chest refused.

He came back for his ticket to the high life. You were nothing but means to an end. And what does he have to say for himself after all that? A "rotten friend"? No, she shook her head, ignoring the man's confused look, and turned away. This was not—she wasn't—she wouldn't. She lifted her head, slowly, deliberately, and looked at the man, looked at Stephen.

With all the concentration she could muster, she snatched each word from the depths of the fog in her mind, releasing them out into the world like a flock of crassly squawking crows.

"Apology…not…accepted."

Eli stared at Barney, who stared at the woman on the screen—Caroline—who stared back at all of them.

"I…I'm sorry, remind me of your name? Do I know you?" Caroline tilted her head, to which Barney let out a sharp bark of strained laughter.

"No—no, no you never knew me, not in person—you knew Lauren. Dr. Lauren Calhoun. That name ring a bell?"

Caroline inhaled sharply. "Sweet merciful heavens, you're Lauren's brother. The security guard who worked at Black Mesa."

Eli quickly stepped inside the room, tentatively laying a hand on Barney's shoulder—a comforting gesture he would hope, though the man didn't even look at Eli. Barney let out a sudden, shuddering breath.

"Did she—is she still—"

Caroline frowned. "I don't know."

"How can you not know?" Eli tightened his hand on Barney's shoulder as the man tensed, his tone quickly bleeding into anger. Eli sensed rather than saw Gordon enter the room behind them, likely wanting to know what all the commotion was about.

"Barney," Eli warned in a hushed tone, "we don't have time." Barney didn't react.

Caroline's eyes flashed, but Eli didn't sense an angry heat behind them—more . "I would like to know as much as you if it's possible she survived. But I'm simply not in a position to find out."

"Listen," Eli began, more loudly, trying to wrest back control of the situation, "we don't have a lot of time, Ms.,"

"Teiger. Dr. Teiger." The woman corrected, her attention shifted to Eli now.

"Dr. Teiger, I have it on good authority that Aperture had special government contract to produce portal technology shortly before the company, well, disappeared."

"That's correct." Caroline gave a faint smile. "Lucky for you, both I and my friend Dr. Smythe over here both specialized in portal technology and we've got a working prototype to boot."

It was almost too easy, Eli thought, even as Kleiner let out a low whistle and Uriah made several jubilant clicking noises.

"Perhaps working is an exaggeration. It's a bit unstable at the moment, but it should serve well enough to—" Dr. Teiger cut off suddenly, and her face flickered on the screen. An expression of surprise-turned-to-fear crossed her features in glitching patches. "Oh G—I need t—gunships down—made them mad—what in heaven's name is—"

The warped sound of whistling Hunter fletchings keened from the speakers, followed by silence. Stunned silence that soaked in for a mere few seconds before the room burst into activity.

"Hunters for sure." Barney commented grimly, and Eli turned to see the man draw his gun and look the weapon over, readying for a fight even as he stood in the middle of the communications room far below the surface. His face was set harder than Eli had ever seen on Barney's fairly jovial face.

Of course, you could hardly blame him; to be so close to knowing what had happened to someone, when every version of human records had suffered irreversible damage…

"Barney," he began before the man could depart, "go and bring her back."

"That's the plan, doc." Barney's grin, more tightly wound than ever, had returned.

Eli returned the smile with as much enthusiasm as he could muster before glancing at Gordon.

"Just don't go alone."

Barney nodded to Gordon, and the two men quickly departed, Kleiner running ahead yelling something about the HEV suit's current charge. Eli followed them slowly. He could only hope they wouldn't be too late.