Ahh, about time I updated this! Now is a busy month for me, since there are finals and projects and all. I acutally got out of school early because of how hot it is!

This is an idea that I've had in mind for a fairly long time, and I thought that it could fit with this series. And so, I present to you, "born."!

Based on: Half-Life 2 (Valve)
Rating: K+. There's nothing bad in here, but I don't think that younger kids would really understand it so much.
Author's Notes: Just my thoughts on one of the posters. I hope you like it, I've been wanting to try out this idea for a while, now! It's actually pretty short, too--only a little over 1,000 words.

--

July 27th, 2018

I saw this piece of graffiti today, and I just couldn't keep staring at it. Its meaning is just something that couldn't stop me from drifting into thought. But it made me realize something...

-Alyx

"born."

That's all it said. That's all that poster said—just "born." Not even capitalized, not even written in any fancy styled lettering, not using any insane color scheme, nothing. Just four letters, written in some kind of dark red something—she didn't know if it was paint, marker, or what—put on the bottom of the white sheet of paper.

It was big. You could count it as poster sized, but Alyx didn't. It was just sort of…random—there were already plenty of posters and graffiti littering City Seventeen. There already were many scribbled names you can never read unless you wrote it, lists of events for things nineteen years ago, when City Seventeen actually had a name and wasn't ruled by these inhuman monsters, stickers and other things taped to the walls, pictures of forgotten rulers, that sort of thing. She's sometimes seen a couple of images of Breen's face, with the word "Resist" under in it big, bold letters, but she's never seen a poster like this before.

It was a hand, reaching up towards the sky—maybe even towards heaven. Its large, muscular fingers looked as though they were trying to grasp something, yet nothing appeared. The veins were popping out; it seemed as though the hand was struggling at this grasp-and-miss attempt.

Alyx narrowed her eyes as she scanned the poster once more. Right dead-center in the palm of the grasping hand was a lambda. It was bold, shaded, right in the middle of a circle—she had no idea why she noticed this last when it was obviously the point of the picture.

Nineteen years of experience and she had no idea what it meant. She automatically thought about Black Mesa, since that's where that hell-hole opened, and the lambda seemed important to them over there, for some reason she never knew. The same symbol—the lambda in a circle, she meant—was put on every HEV suit. She can hardly remember seeing them; her four-year-old memory wasn't really meant for being stuffed with information. But she was nineteen now and was still able to remember it, at least a little. She remembered her dad talking about a Lambda Complex back in Black Mesa that was all the way on the other side of the whole facility. Needless to say, she had never even been there, let alone hardly been inside the Black Mesa laboratories in the first place.

But just, for whatever reason, the rebels seemed to adopt the lambda as their own symbol. She never did figure out why. They'd leave the same symbol, the lambda in a circle, at some spot, made huge with some kind of yellow paint, supplies not lingering too far away from it. She thought she saw one of those close to her father's lab, now that she was on that topic. She didn't even know who put it there—one moment that wall was clean, next it has that on it.

Back to the point, though. It wasn't long before Alyx began to wonder who drew that hand, why they put it there. Doctor Kleiner's lab was only the hallway behind the hidden door over there; the only people that went down here were Barney and she, and possibly the Combine…but she highly doubted they would make that poster.

Alyx tapped her chin as she continued to ponder to herself. From what she knew, Barney wasn't an artist. She could draw blue prints and stuff like that, and her skills when it came to art were…ok, to say the least, but she already knew that she didn't make that poster. Hell, she didn't even know what it meant.

She didn't think that Doctor Kleiner was much of an artist, either…all the drawings she's seen littered around his lab were just ideas or brainstorms, sometimes even the final plans for some kind of machine or another. But her mind didn't really grasp that fact that he could have possibly made it.

Then she thought about the citizens that she and Barney help bring over here. She couldn't exactly recall anyone bringing a poster along with them—she was pretty sure that she'd notice that. Barney didn't really mention anything about some guy and a poster—his paranoia probably would have prevented that guy—or maybe even girl—from posting such a thing around here, anyway.

But what was the meaning? Who made it wasn't so important; why they made it was another thing. Alyx shook her head as she ran through possibly meanings for it. Was "born" the name of the artist? No, that wouldn't make sense. The period at the end of the simple word meant that it was sentence, a statement—they were trying to tell her something. But what, damn it, what?

Let's see…now that she thought about it, the rebels, and only the rebels, used the lambda as a symbol, for whatever reason she didn't know. She's seen some refugees before, but their outfits remained clear and clean of the certain Greek letter everyone was so fond of. That was odd.

Alyx went back to questioning the grasping hand. What was it trying to grab, exactly? A cloud? Air? Something out of reach?

Or maybe it was just something not meant to be seen?

She raised her hand up into the air, imitating exactly how it looked in the poster. "Born…" she whispered, letting her thoughts surround that certain word. Lambda. The rebels. How did they relate, exactly?

That's when it hit her. The rebels were free from the grasp of the Combine. You could tell apart a rebel from the rest just by the fact that they have a lambda somewhere on their outfit, one way or another.

Lambda. Freedom.

She finally understood. Her mind finally caught the meaning of the poster. The lambda was a symbol of freedom, in such a time as now. Born…they were born a rebel. They were born free.

"Born free, die free." Alyx let the words drift in the air as she stood there, her arm still imitating the poster, with her fingers still trying to grasp something.

It was then did she finally realize that the hand wasn't trying to grasp something; it was, in fact, already holding something. It was holding its freedom.

Alyx smiled to herself as she tapped the lambda in a circle on the poster. "Born a rebel." She tossed the poster a smile, before walking off towards Doctor Kleiner's lab.

Nineteen years ago…

I was born.