It started out as a kind gesture. No, not even that— just a helping hand. You had to do such things out there, cooped up behind a dumpster as the feet of Combine soldiers thumped by unanimously, like a machine sent out to sterilize a disease. You'd pass a canteen, bandage an arm.
She wiped his glasses.
"Dr. Freeman, I presume?" Alyx teased, her voice nearly tapering off into a chuckle.
She watched his heavy lids slide open and his green eyes connect with hers. They were veiled beneath a layer of dust on his lenses, probably settled there from the floorboards collapsing beneath him. If anything, she wasn't expecting him to be this young. Though, admittedly, she had only the vaguest details of what he was like. Glasses, goatee, tall. A penchant for silence. After all, the only physical evidence that Gordon Freeman had ever existed were both preserved in Kleiner's secluded lab: a group picture of the Anomalous Materials team, and a distinctive orange power suit. Their initial meeting was short lived, as the Overwatch Dispatcher droned, an alarm punctuating every other syllable of her voice.
"We'd better hurry," Alyx warned, pulling him up by his knobby hands. "The Combine can be slow to wake, but once they're up, you don't want to get in their way."
She gave a sharp kick to the helmet of a fallen metrocop for emphasis and made her way to the far end of the room, calling a lift to their floor.
"Dr. Kleiner said you'd be coming this way," Alyx said as the elevator rumbled to life— slowly but surely. "I don't think it occurred to him that you might not have a map."
Gordon did not respond though, choosing instead to gaze out the window as a dropship hovered just blocks away. He looked out of place. Superimposed, like a photomontage. A mixed-media collage. Despite donning the uniform of all other citizens, it looked like a costume against his features. Her mind flitted back to the photograph in Kleiner's lab. As dilapidated as it was, his features were rendered clearly. That was it, wasn't it? The man in front of her looked eerily similar to a photograph that had been taken nearly twenty years ago. Her doubts were interrupted too soon by the lift's arrival. Together, they entered the elevator silently, facing each other as the gates rattled shut.
"I'm Alyx Vance," she started up again, once they began to descend. "My father worked with you, back in Black Mesa."
Her words did nothing to remedy his confusion. Rather, he seemed even more perplexed, brow furrowed and eyes off in rumination. Way to make things worse, Alyx.
"I'm sure you don't remember me though," she clarified, glancing down and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. When she brought her gaze back up, he had shifted, and the glare from the passing lights illuminated the dust on his lenses.
"Here, let me get those for you," Alyx ventured, reaching out to pinch the right frame of his glasses, effectively pulling them at a slight angle from his face. His ears bobbed comically as the temple ends grazed them. With careful attention, she took the corner of her sweatshirt to wipe them clean. The lift shuddered to a stop, and all she could hear was the slight squeaking of plastic beneath her working hands.
"Man of few words, aren't you?"
But the next time was out of pity. Alyx couldn't help herself, really. He just looked so frustrated, leaning against a barrel as he took a breather from playing fetch with Dog. Glasses in hand, Gordon rubbed the lenses with his thumb as if the friction would vaporize whatever mildew clung to them. Under the warm light of the scrapyard, she could see the HEV suit sporting some new dents and lacerations, the mesh armor still soaking from the canals, the tired lines under his eyes.
"I got it, Gordon," Alyx assured.
His face lifted up and he silently watched her approach. Once she was at arms length, he handed over the spectacles. She wiped them in the same methodical fashion.
"I've had to do this for Kleiner every now and then, ever since I was a kid," she said, lost in reverie. "He always loses his handkerchief. You know how he is with keeping track of things. He probably thinks it's just a kind gesture, but honestly I'm more worried that he'd cause something to explode if he couldn't see straight.
"Not that I'm worried about you," she added, peering up to the stoic man across from her. "You seem to have a knack for the Gravity Gun already."
He patted the device that sat on an adjacent barrel, a small smile visible beneath his goatee.
"Actually, now that I think of it, your glasses are pretty similar to Kleiner's," Alyx said as she handed them back.
"Didn't you know?" Gordon spoke, pushing his frames into place with a tap of his gloved index finger. "That's how I got hired."
It was the first time he had directed any form of speech at her. Sure, she had heard his low, soft-spoken voice before, reunited with Kleiner and below her in the labs as he conversed with Eli, but she was genuinely surprised to receive a peep from him at this point. After the initial shock— which she hoped wasn't too visible— Alyx shook her head, chuckling a bit.
"Uncle Kleiner is always easy to impress."
The comfortable lull did not last. Of course it didn't. After all, nothing that day was going right. Every moment of respite had been rudely interrupted, as if the world had been goaded onward by some invisible force. Their next meeting was separated by a scramble for safety through an underground network and a bloody fight through an abandoned town, a long train ride and an arduous trek up the coast.
Whatever glimpse Alyx had of Doctor Gordon Freeman, PhD and former Black Mesa Scientist, it had been eclipsed. The man that now stood before her in the cool metal station of Nova Prospekt was spattered by blood, both human and alien, mixing into a revolting shade. His stance, the tension in his limbs, the alertness in his eyes; she recalled not a soldier, but an animal caught in the unending throes of survival.
"You hurt?" Alyx asked, eyeing him up and down.
Gordon hummed in his throat, mulling over the question for a moment. "Not my blood."
The reply did little to sooth her nerves.
"Well, it's only going to get worse from here on out." Alyx held her palm out. "Might as well make sure you can see what you're shooting."
He nodded, stowing his rifle. He pulled the glasses from his face and handed them over once more. Crimson stained the hem of her sweatshirt as she wiped the lenses clean.
"Just let me know whenever you need them cleaned, and I can take care of it," Alyx promised, presenting them back to him. "I got your back."
He regarded her for a moment, an eyebrow quirked— in intrigue or reluctance she couldn't be sure. Eventually he settled himself, his shoulders relaxing, looking more like a human and less like a cornered animal. He solemnly nodded.
"I got yours, too," Gordon said, hand clasping around the glasses held in her palm.
The contract was sealed.
Indeed, it was honored repeatedly as they cut their way through wave after wave of soldiers; were stretched thin across time; scrambled through the remains of a war-torn city; were pulled and separated and pulled again, as if they were borne forth on an invisible tide.
They found each other again in an apartment complex. Dead soldiers laid crumpled on the hardwood floor of the makeshift command center. In a corner, rebels hauled abandoned furniture from adjacent rooms, tending to the wounded on a menagerie of coffee tables and arm chairs.
Meanwhile, Alyx watched the security feed on a monitor, analyzing their next target: a generator placed precisely in the center of a town square. She pressed her knuckles against her pursed lips, parsing out their odds, considering their numbers and their ammo and remaining medical supplies…
As it turned out, Gordon had a habit of interrupting her ruminations. He leaned against the nearby console, the HEV suit yammering on about power supply. She chanced a glance at him, but honestly she could hardly tell what he was looking at— or if he could even see— considering the film of grime on his lenses.
Alyx let out an exaggerated sigh, rolling her eyes and definitely not letting on that she was more than happy to be distracted by something— no matter how small or mundane.
"Alright, smart guy. Hand 'em over." She beckoned for the glasses.
Gordon was more than happy to oblige, a faint smile stretched thin upon his lips.
She shook her head in admonition as she rubbed at the lenses. "Honestly, Gordon, I don't know how you manage to get these things so dirty in such a small amount of time."
He shrugged. "It's a talent."
"One of far too many."
"Speaking for yourself?"
The compliment caught her off guard, and she paused her work to shoot him a wily smile, before quickly handing them back to him and adverting her attention back to the monitor.
Gordon coughed. "I hope those will wash out."
When Alyx eyed him in confusion, he motioned to the hem of her sweatshirt. Indeed, it had almost been completely stained by her repeated efforts to clean his glasses.
"Maybe we'll find a clean rag somewhere," Alyx said cheekily. "I mean, c'mon, have you ever thought about keeping a handkerchief?"
Gordon pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, contemplating. "I borrowed one from Kleiner once, actually."
"Oh, really?" Alyx asked, amused.
But he wasn't smiling. A frown was carved deep in his face. "After the Resonance Cascade. Said I would probably need it more than him."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"It's alright. It was a long time ago, wasn't it?" Gordon asked the question like he actually needed confirmation, like he was in a dream.
Alyx remained silent, gut twisted. She was too paralyzed to answer, too afraid of poking and prodding at the shaky foundations of objective reality in fear of toppling it all down. Not wanting to prove her doubts.
"I kept it the whole time, and I meant to return it to him but I— guess I lost it," Gordon finished lamely.
Alyx rubbed her arm as she considered her options on how to possibly salvage their conversation. "I guess it's good he actually had it on hand for once, that day of all days."
He nodded, staring at the floor with his fingers entwined on his lap.
"Yeah…" he spoke quietly, almost too quiet for her to hear. "Maybe it was fate."
Once the generator was destroyed, the tide pulled them apart again, the waves unrelenting. Forward, always forward. Ultimately, they were deposited at the summit of the world, the apex of the Citadel. They were too late in stopping Breen as he made his escape, but their Plan B revealed itself, quite literally, as alien metal slid back to unveil a spire bathed in the warm light of the sunset, thrumming with enough energy to bore a tunnel straight to another universe.
Alyx tapped away at the console, fruitlessly. "I can't shut it down! Looks like he's turned over control to the other side. You'll have to go into the core and do what you can…"
The man beside her looked as if he was on a suicide mission. She could clearly imagine Gordon two decades prior: a lone figure standing before a blazing portal in the Lambda Complex. It was the same image she took in now, as he gazed at the dark fusion reactor. Weary and bloodstained— too young, confoundingly young— staring into an abyss he would not return from. She refused that finality. She always did.
Her resolve did little to settle the gnawing feeling in her gut as she cleaned his glasses for perhaps the last time. Alyx returned them with a frown, and Gordon accepted them with a frown. It felt like a goodbye.
And just like Black Mesa, Gordon went on his way, bearing equally the weight of the suit and all of humanity. He stood firmly in the glass elevator, his grip taut on the weapon she had first placed in his hands. But this time he was not going to disappear— not as long as Alyx had anything to do with it. She owed him as much. He had thrown himself headlong into danger for Eli's sake, for the Resistance's sake, for her sake, again and again. It was funny, in a way. A man so stoic and reserved being moved by seemingly boundless empathy. She needed him to know that he wouldn't be alone this time, and that was why she raced to meet him before the lift took him down into the heart of the core.
"Do your worst, Gordon." She touched the thin glass partition. "But... be careful."
His stance softened, just a degree, as he reciprocated her gaze. With a humble nod, he descended out of view.
Careful was in neither of their repertoires. After the core was destabilized and Breen careened down from his comfortable perch atop humanity to the destitute city below, she only had a moment to approach Gordon and watch the relief flood his face, realizing that it was all over, that they had won. It was a feeling mirrored in her own chest.
The moment passed, and the sight was bathed in the harsh light of a soundless explosion. She waited for the shockwave to come, to perforate her eardrums and pulverize her organs, but it did not. Instead, she heard the chanting of Vortigaunts, and the oddly nostalgic feeling of herself being whisked far, far away.
Alyx awoke at dawn with an iron paw patting at her face.
"Dog?" she groaned.
The two of them were stranded in a sea of rubble. Above, the Citadel loomed, the top burst open like a spent firecracker. A noxious storm swirled at the summit of twisted metal. Lightning spewed from the clouds, the billowing forms glowing with an orange heat. The color was familiar.
"Gordon?" She called out, her voice echoing above the debris. "Dog, have you seen him? Or Dad or Judith?"
The robot shook his head sadly.
"Alright, keep searching for them. I'm going to see if I can send out a signal for help."
It took her a precious hour, but she managed to find a portable Combine transmitter that was miraculously still operable. She hailed the frequencies of Kleiner's Lab and Black Mesa East, but received no reply. The third time was the charm. Calling White Forest, she was greeted by none other than her father, already safely tucked away.
Eli had been oddly insistent for Alyx to abandon her search, as if she was not rummaging through the ashes for the man who refused to abandon them both when all hope seemed lost. She promised her father that she would halt her search for Gordon within the next hour if he did not turn up. It was a bold-faced lie.
Daylight burned as she and Dog rummaged through the debris, the only sign of Gordon being the lonely Gravity Gun, which they uncovered together in the foundation of a collapsed building. She shifted through the rubble with renewed vigor after that, honing their search to the confines of the concrete walls. Surely, the owner was around there as well.
"Dog, I think I found something," Alyx called as she glanced over her shoulder. "Drop what you're doing and help me over—"
And there Gordon was: alive, battered and bruised, coated in ash and dust, staggering as Dog carefully placed him down on his feet.
"Oh my God!" she gasped. "Gordon!"
Alyx barrelled into him, locking her arms around his back and feeling the firm metal of the HEV suit press into her, confirming that he was real and not a mere illusion.
She broke away, the concern overwhelming her and the words tumbling out of her mouth. "I was so worried…"
Gordon said nothing— but he didn't need to. The dumbstruck look said it all, his eyes wide and face red.
Alyx chuckled singularly, at both of themselves in equal measure, a hand at her necklace and her eyes off to the side. When she peeked back, she saw that Gordon had removed his glasses, presenting them to her in his gloved hand. He wore a sheepish grin on his still rosy face.
Alyx obliged, wiping flecks of ash from the lenses. "You know, you're really lucky you haven't lost these things by now."
He looked different. For once he seemed a part of the world, rather than a misplaced variable. Content. Belonging.
And just like that, they settled into their routine once more.
Slowing the meltdown of the core was not an impossibly hopeless task as it had first seemed. The doomsday clock was set back once more, if only minutely, and they pressed on to escape City 17 before it inevitably struck twelve. An underground tunnel system served as their exit route, a dank and decrepit catacomb where the corpses paced aimlessly until being dispatched by the two survivors.
As Gordon paused to ration out their remaining ammo, Alyx continued rummaging for more supplies in the parking garage's office. Yanking open a locker, she gasped at the discovery she made.
"Look what I fouuuund," she sang, dangling the newly-found boon in front of Gordon's face.
It was a dark navy washcloth, frayed and threatening to fall apart, but intact for the time being. Gordon smiled, a silent thank you, accepting the gift and wiping his glasses with the rag. When he put them back on, his eyes were completely obscured by a layer of black soot.
"Oh," Alyx uttered.
Laughter ripped through the air, startling her. But sure enough, Gordon Freeman was laughing, the bootleg sunglasses still precariously perched on his nose. It was contagious, Alyx joining in. The joyous sound echoed through the tunnels until the sound of distant gunfire roused them to compose themselves.
Alyx swiped the dirty glasses from his face, a sly smile on her lips. She shook her head at herself, chuckles still tumbling out as she rubbed at the grime with her sweatshirt. "Well, it was worth a shot, right?" She paused to examine her handiwork. "Uh-oh."
Gordon approached her, concerned. Indeed the soot still stuck stubbornly to the lenses, regardless of her ministrations.
"It's fine!" Alyx assured. "It, um… it'll come out eventually!"
She went at the lenses with another, cleaner corner of her sweatshirt and with just a little more force. Of course, Alyx. You, of all people, are the one to spell the end for Gordon Freeman, exploiting his only weakness: nearsightedness.
A hand cupped her arm and nearly made her jump out of her skin. She turned to find Gordon leaning in close, a finger to his lips, hushing her.
"Do you hear that?" he whispered.
Above the sound of her racing heart, Alyx heard the distant tinkling of water. She nodded. They followed the noise to its source, discovering a collapsed section of the tunnel. Sunlight peeked through cracks in the rubble, illuminating a severed pipe leaking a stream of water down onto the concrete floor below. Gordon held out his hand beneath the water drip, watching it collect in his gloved palm.
"Seems clean to me," Alyx said, watching over his shoulder.
She rinsed the lenses, the dark residue finally washing away. As she dried them, Gordon began shedding his weapons and equipment, piling them in a corner. Returning to the steady stream of water, he ducked his head in, face skyward. The droplets raced down his cheeks, absorbing the dirt and blood, becoming dark streaks that darted between the stubble on his neck.
Alyx felt like she should look away, like she was observing something too personal and intimate— despite that the only bare skin exposed was his head. She held her gaze.
Once he stepped out from the stream, wiping his face with his palms, Alyx handed him his dried glasses.
"I suppose I could freshen up a bit, too."
She slipped her headband off then removed her gloves, one after the other. Finally, she unclasped her mother's necklace. She turned, trying to find a spot to place them, and nearly bumped into Gordon's outstretched palm in the process.
Alyx hesitated for a moment. Counting herself, her mother, and her father, no one had ever handled that pendant. She scanned his face and settled upon the pair of glasses. Like a gut punch, Alyx realized she hadn't been exactly aware of the importance of those spectacles; she simply yanked them from his face in their first meeting. It was the most practical thing to do, a gesture of hospitality. Still, they were probably his most important possession. Vital to survival, one of a kind, and yet Gordon let her handle them without objection, at the time when she was a total stranger. Now, they were several hours and many near-death experiences past strangers. She exhaled her trepidation.
"Thanks," she said, placing the articles into his hand. He nodded, almost gravely. He held them with the same careful attention as she did with his glasses. A mutual exchange.
Hands free, Alyx scrubbed the sweat and gunpowder residue from her palms. She splashed water on her face, wiping away the grime and working all the way down to her neck and collar bones. Gordon did not look away either.
Amidst a steady flow of ever-changing obstacles and threats, their established maintenance routine became a comfortable constant, barring a few off-hand comments from reunited friends.
"Why, isn't that positively domestic."
"You wanna mind your damn business, Barney?"
It was a reflexive jab, admittedly. The idea didn't bother her that much. Gordon did not seem shy about it either.
In the end, they had escaped City 17 in time, on a train bound for the outlying mountains. And yet that tidal wave of fate and destruction still obstinately pursued them as the Citadel ruptured in a brilliant flash of light that rent trees from the earth and flung the skeletal frames of cars into the air. Alyx yanked Gordon by his hand, pulling him into the train car, past the dilapidated seats, running further and further, feeling heat on her back, and then there was complete darkness and an unrelenting assault of thunder that crashed in her ears and bones.
They had survived, of course, just as surely as they survived the initial explosion at the top of the Citadel. They couldn't die. They had a job to do. That packet needed to get to White Forest above all else. The false sense of security was tantalizing, desensitizing. They were rudely reminded of their fraught battle with mortality when her own blood flecked his lenses, tiny red dots superimposed against eyes wide with shock and agony.
It had already felt like an eon ago when Alyx awoke, miraculously, with the wounds that tore her flesh clean through completely mended, leaving nothing but a dull ache and a set of scars. Together, the pair sat at the entrance to the mine, watching the convoy of Combine APCs and Striders pass by in droves on the bridge above. Their vortigaunt companion patiently regarded the scene, four eyes on the sky.
Meanwhile, Alyx worked at the new stains on his glasses. "I think this is the dirtiest I have seen them," she joked.
And this was the most silent Gordon had been. There was no coincidence.
Yes, he was never quite the talker, and maybe the less attentive person would be annoyed by his non-participatory behavior. But to the patient observer, it was clear how carefully he watched people, how subtly his throat would clasp and release as if formulating words he could never hope to say or express. Always listening and watching. It was the scientific method: hypothesize and observe before relaying the analysis.
Gordon was just sitting there, so Alyx stooped down in front of him and docked his glasses in place. But her hands did not recede. He was not even looking at her, just inches from his face; his eyes were off to the side, avoiding. Her shoulders lowered in worry and her fingertips slipped down his face, from his ears to the stubble on his cheeks.
"Gordon," she breathed, pleading for his eyes.
Those emerald irises had found her so easily before as he lay beaten on the ground. Just snap, connect. Efficient, like how an electric current relays more messages than a strain of vocal cords could ever hope to do. Yet he refused. In desperation she scanned the rest of his features: a lined forehead, a nose dotted in pores, ginger strands of hair poking up here and there in his goatee, a strong (and clenched) jaw, and lips spread thin against them.
But it's blurred, it's worn, it's something that had always been in front of her face and yet could never see clearly. She couldn't get a good picture of what was there. He would not let her. And just hours before she had been so close, watched it all come into focus, only for the detail to recede into the fog once more. What would she give to see him content again, and not in carefully subdued torment?
No doubt her brush with death was the catalyst for the abrupt change, and so Alyx swore she would bring him back, just as she had done before. Somehow, in the unremitting chaos that plagued White Forest that afternoon, she had found the time to procure a remedy, no matter how small it appeared to be. As Gordon trudged down the hallway, only a bit worse for wear after dispatching the assault of Striders, Alyx approached him with her hands behind her back.
"I didn't have a lot of time to rummage around, but look what I got." She presented the only clean rag either of them had seen in many, many days. "Ta-da!"
Gordon exhaled a relieved sigh, accepting the gift and immediately putting it to use as he wiped his glasses. "I knew you'd get tired of doing it eventually," he teased.
She rolled her eyes, giving the HEV suit a light punch in the arm. "I was just looking out for you. That's how we're all going to get through this. After all…" Her hand settled on the bloodstains at her abdomen. "You looked out for me, too."
Gordon's brow furrowed as he gazed at her healed wound. He languished only a moment before he closed his eyes and nodded, tucking the rag away for safekeeping. He then reached out to grasp her hand, tender and gentle. He looked down at her with a smile, however grim. "Thank you. For everything. It's been hard but… it's nice having someone to watch my back."
She caught a glimpse of him again, his soul bared. Just a moment.
Alyx returned the smile, squeezing the hand in hers. "Yeah, what would you do without me?"
If fate had been a steady current up until that point— forceful, yet predictable— it was now a ravaging storm.
Suddenly, it all made sense to her. Gordon Freeman, the photomontage man. A man plucked from the past. Plucked like she was, like an instrument, at the very start of the symphony that first echoed through the bloodied halls of Black Mesa. It was a song that Alyx had been deaf to all her life, now heard with absolute clarity as she was plucked again— by the deft, ghostly hands of a man in a pristine blue suit. Before her laid an inscrutable chronology: her father's demise, her father's resurrection. And herself? Far, far away from spacetime.
On went the orchestra, the void humming in anticipation. Now onto the final movement.
Gordon fidgeted on the couch, hunched over and fingers steepled. The HEV suit was off, away getting repaired as Resistance members reeled from the sudden chain of events. A rescue party had departed north in the meantime, leaving Eli and the vortigaunts to recalculate their next move and discern where or when Alyx could have possibly been spirited to. Gordon, for the most part, was left out of the loop as usual— not from a need-to-know basis, but for the fact that he had spent the past day in the infirmary. If it was for his own sake, so he could have a day of respite, it was a poor decision. His mind was too preoccupied to rest, his heart too weighed down by grief and guilt.
Now, he anxiously waited all alone in the auxiliary control room. Eli had invited him to finally discuss matters of their mutual friend, but had not yet shown. So he peered about the room, eyes moving across the array of CRT monitors and the geometric scrawl of ornate rugs, finally landing on a clump of clothing in the corner of the sofa. It hadn't been there before, forty-eight hours ago when the monitors flickered with the images of a ship lost in the arctic and a man with a briefcase. All at once, he registered the familiarity. Out of his pocket, he procured the rag Alyx had given him. Sure enough, they were the same color. He held the rag up to his face, determining its composition. A hem bordered a single side of the square, the three others cut hastily, probably with scissors. Curious, Gordon leaned over and unraveled the bunched cloth, revealing a t-shirt that was missing a sizable square chunk. It belonged to Alyx, no doubt. Perhaps her only spare. Ruined because he needed it more.
At first Gordon smiled as more than one realization hit him; about himself, about her. But sure enough he tasted cold salt on his lips from the tears he could not stop. He pulled his glasses from his face and buried himself in the rag— to dry his tears, to muffle his soft cry.
As it turned out, he did need it more, but not for the reason she thought.
Author's Note: This was written for Quantum Entanglement: A Freemance Charity Zine. A big thank you to Biomarker on tumblr for illustrating my work! While the collection period is now over, the full zine is now available for free, so be sure to check it out!