Chapter Text
Black Mesa had been busy for a while when it came to Xen. The details were of a need-to-know basis, and not everybody in Black Mesa had those qualifications, but that didn’t change the fact that the survey team’s most recent yield of specimens came with an unexpected addition.
Could they call it a man?
It looked like a man.
Correction, it almost looked like a man: average height, a slightly notable stomach, some dark and greasy hair…perfectly normal from a glance.
This wasn’t a normal man.
Normal men don’t bare razor sharp teeth.
Normal men didn’t tank loads of bullets with anything less than a few bruises.
Normal men didn’t come back from the dead.
Normal men don’t spew orbs of color from their snarling mouth.
Normal men don’t have scleras the color of honey and irises that were some sort of horrible color out of space.
Normal men don’t scale walls and ceilings completely nude, their eyes, fingertips, feet mysteriously concealed by shadows with no discernible source.
This wasn’t a normal man.
This wasn’t even a human, masculine or otherwise.
This was something else.
This was something unworldly.
This was something familiar to Black Mesa, despite the shape it currently took.
This was something Black Mesa’s scientists hadn’t seen for a long, long time, and they were going to take advantage of that.
SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman, PhD.
CURRENT LOCATION:
Random County Middle School
Poastgame, New Mexico
TIME: Containment Failure + 1491 days, 5 hours
EMPLOYMENT STATUS: It’s complicated
Gordon sat in front of a desk, a stern, withered figure staring back at him from the opposite side. Both were obnoxiously business casual, although his interviewer clearly had something a bit out of date. He grinned at the older gentleman, who simply maintained his analytical glare.
“You say you want to be a…science teacher…Dr. Freeman?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s why I’m uh…that’s why I applied for the job here, yeah.” He nodded.
“It says here you graduated from MIT, very impressive.”
“Thank you” spills from Gordon’s lips without a second thought, his scrutinizing assessor briefly redirects his gaze from the paper back to him. It feels like an eternity before he switches focus once more.
“I am very curious about your previous employment, as well as the noticeable gap in your resume.”
Shit. Fuck. Damnit.
What could he even bring up as an excuse that didn’t break his confidentiality agreement?
There was so much shit that went on in Black Mesa: the shady business practices were just the start, the blatant coverup of alien lifeforms wasn’t exactly a reasonable excuse either, nor the multitudes of identical human men that were apparently illegal and wanted by the state of New Mexico, and he was pretty sure so much as whispering about the experiment that destroyed his workplace would paint a target on his back. Again. And he really didn’t need a repeat of last year’s ‘Ed Balls Day Celebration’.
That wasn’t even mentioning the complete disregard for OSHA safety regulations (he didn’t care if Tommy said it had been up to code, it most certainly was NOT in his eyes), the medical malpractice (he was pretty sure what happened in the mixology department counted as this, but he really didn’t want to throw Darnold under the bus considering how nice and genuinely helpful the guy was), the clear disregard of human decency that was the accursed laundry room and it’s wretched coin-guzzling dryers, the-
“Doctor Freeman, I am waiting for you to answer my question.”
Gordon stuttered, suddenly his train of thought failed to provide any sort of plausible answer. He deployed his most reliable excuse. “I’m uh, I’m kinda not supposed to say anything? Kinda supposed to keep quiet about what happened to the place. As for the gap…well…” Most people don’t like it when you tell them the reason you have a gap in your employment is because you spent two years attempting to mentally recover from the trauma of your last workplace, and even more people dislike when you tell them the rest of your gap has been from you trying to get a job and then failing, because the idea of anybody having such a long gap in employment is an enigma to anybody trying to hire, at least as far as Poastgame, New Mexico was concerned. Still, he couldn’t exactly lie about what he’d been doing for the past four years, so he told them exactly what was up with the gap in his resume.
As expected, it did not please the other man in the slightest.
Gordon looked deflated by the end of the interview, looking much like one of the numerous tweens currently outside the office, waiting to hear about their grade-school criminal records.
“Doctor Freeman,” the interviewer started, “this is a middle school, as you are clearly aware. You, good Doctor, are an MIT graduate. As far as I’m concerned, this job is way below your paygrade, and even if it weren’t-“
Gordon zoned out, replaying the interview in his head. He was doing everything right: the right clothes, a nice resume, being totally honest with the guy, didn’t accidentally swear like he did at his previous interview…What sort of arbitrary rules could he have been forgetting?
For a guy that had once ragged on his former co-workers, both living and deceased, about not being able to act like normal people, he was starting to feel like maybe he was a hypocrite with how much he struggled to follow basic etiquette.
Surely, the Resonance Cascade hadn’t ruined his social skills that much in just a week, but who was he to judge? This was the same guy that got nervous about making phone calls (It’s not even that hard! It’s talking to people! You love to talk to people!). Even then, he probably shouldn’t judge, Tommy got nervous about phone calls too, but Tommy seemed a bit more justified given his tendency to change his words mid-sentence.
If there was any factor of justification for Gordon’s awkwardness (and this was a pretty big one that even HE forgot about sometimes), then it was the additional matter that he was a video game character, one whose entire personality and backstory had been sculpted together by some person bumbling around their room in a VR headset for several hours. Now that the video game was over, Gordon had to rely on what was “taught” to him by the player, and that was more than enough to make him feel like a badly rolled DND character. He couldn’t even air his grievances to the Player, they had left not long after exporting their save file to whatever server was housing the Post Game. He did have an opportunity to talk to them, once, but trying to remember too many details of the conversation hurt his head; if he had any chance to tweak or change himself, it was that conversation, and clearly he had wasted it.
So, yeah, Gordon didn’t have an excuse. He was kinda stuck being the prime antithesis of a normal person, it seemed.
He nodded at the interviewer when he seemed to finish his speal, shook the man’s sweaty hand, and gave his empty thanks for the “opportunity” to speak to the man at all before making the drive back home. He couldn’t recall the details between when he left the school and when he got home, his memories always got fuzzy when he was driving by himself. He had enough video game knowledge to suspect it was Fast Travel. For a moment, he wondered if it was possible to turn off, but knowing his luck his attempt to do so would just end up turning his prosthetic arm back into a mini-gun, and then he’d have to figure out how to switch it back to normal.
He should have just asked the rest of the Science Team about the car thing years ago, but he had been putting it off after he decided it was preferable to being left to stew in his thoughts for the entire drive. And now he was suffering the consequences of his inaction, wondering only now if he could toggle Fast Travel and Mini-Gun Hand. Hell, maybe he had the power to toggle game difficulty this entire time and he wasn’t utilizing it, he would really like to switch Job Hunting to “easy mode.”
Whatever. Too late to find out now.
Gordon didn’t really need a job, anyways, given the hush money and all, he just needed some form of normalcy to keep himself from focusing on the events that got him here, thinking about that stuff for too long got him stressed, and bad things tended to happen when Gordon got stressed.
Needless to say, he was pretty sure the horrid little man sitting in the middle of his lawn was not a good omen of things to come, both for his stress levels and his attempts at normalcy.
He let out a long, irritated sound, similar to when one needed to be vocal about an upset stomach, and stepped out of the car. Benrey didn’t seem to notice Gordon quite yet, but he knew better than to let the smaller man be left unattended outside. He could call the police but…he’d really rather not on principle alone. He and the Science had all agreed that in case of emergencies, they would call each other first (against Gordon’s better judgment), and then either an ambulance or the fire department second.
Benrey…technically wasn’t an emergency right now. He was just a minor annoyance at best, and if for some reason the man did escalate into a greater problem, Gordon had the benefit of it being movie night at his place tonight. If something went wrong, and he couldn’t contact the Science Team for whatever reason, they would know, and they would raise hell at whatever was causing the problem, because at this point not even a second Resonance Cascade (god hope no such a thing occurs) would be able to stop those people from executing their weekly plans after four years of proper bonding time.
Gordon moved between his house and Benrey, keeping a good distance as he did so before engaging in any sort of conversation. He wanted to be as close to the front door as possible in case the non-human gave chase…not that it meant much since Benrey could noclip, but the idea of safety gave him comfort, even if it wasn’t ensured.
“What are you doing here?” He asked a bit too casually. He was sure his voice would better convey the confusion and dread he was feeling once his brain snapped out of what he could only best describe as a new stage of grief dedicated solely for rediscovering somebody who really should have stayed dead.
Bafflement, he was pretty sure what he was experiencing was bafflement. He wasn’t sure why, though. He’d seen Benrey come back from the dead quite a few times, but that had been four years and 31 days ago (and still counting). At that point you can’t help but reasonably assume somebody like that is going to stay dead this time, but apparently that was not the case for Benrey. That also wasn’t surprising, when he thought about it; the cheapest way to create a threat for the sequel is to just bring back the final boss from the first game.
Oh god, was Benrey going to be his Dr. Wily? Was Gordon going to be stuck defeating the same creep over and over and over again for the next 30-something years? He couldn’t do that, his body still hadn’t recovered from the first time he fought Benrey.
The other man tilted his head slightly to Gordon, as if wanting to acknowledge him but not quite processing he was there. “mm…ding dong…” He poked at Gordon’s thrift store garden gnome, its cheeky smile and unbroken gaze were something Gordon had looked deeply into a few times too many since he got it. He wanted to think the longing it exuded wasn’t just his imagination, but he had accepted by now that it was probably his lonely mind playing tricks on him. He was more willing to accept this as imaginary compared to the skeletons.
“Hey,” Gordon spoke up, “Hey man, I asked you a question.”
“…what?” Benrey looked around again, less sluggish than before, this time locking eyes with Gordon. The smaller man’s face was almost an inverse of the gnome’s, they shared the same vacant stare, but the rest of his expression gave him a more pensive look.
Unlike the gnome, however, Benrey’s face could actually change, albeit subtly, such was the case when it morphed into a small smile upon recognizing Gordon. “Yooo! What’s up! Been a while, man. Been like…” He stared directly at the sun, or at least appeared to do so, his eyes squinting not from the glare but from his trying to process something. “…four years, and a month! That one month is pretty, uh, important.”
Gordon exhaled slowly. It sounded like one of those terrible, pig-shaped noise makers Tommy and Dr. Coomer had bought at the Dollar Store last week. “Whyyyyyy? Why now? Why are you-?” He felt a familiar anger boil over, and suddenly his tone and body language had gone from exhausted to brimming with rage. The edges of his vision went slightly red. “Okay! Okay, I’m going to disregard the fact that you can apparently tell how long it’s been since you last harassed me simply by looking at the position of the stars in broad-fucking-daylight, WHY, OF ALL TIMES, ARE YOU BACK? RIGHT FUCKING NOW?!?!”
He could swear he saw Benrey flinch slightly at his outburst, but he wasn’t sure. The man almost immediately responded with his usual calm.
“I told you man, that one month was important. I got, uh, my PS Plus renewed. Played the whole time.”
Okay, that..sorta explained where he’d been for the past month, at least.
“Let me guess, Heavenly Sword?”
“Yeah!!!”
Gordon had the displeasure of witnessing the familiar sight of Sweet Voice spewing from Benrey’s lips. The man’s joy seemed to overflow at him remembering such a basic detail from his nonsensical monologue.
“It was so fun!” Benrey continued. “I got to play on a full server, throwing frags and shit at other people, really great cool stuff.”
The red faded from his vision. Despite wanting to so badly…Gordon simply could not stay mad at him. He was just sitting there, in the grass, blabbering on about Heavenly Sword like an excited child. Damnit, the man was even fidgeting with the hem of his shirt while he talked. Was Benrey even a threat, now? Did four years of whatever he was doing mellow him out?
Gordon’s brows furrowed, he should have been focused on the how and why of Benrey being in his front lawn like a sad dog, but for some reason his mind was derailed to the point of fascination by Benrey’s Adventures in Free PlayStation Plus.
“So you got PS Plus, were you, were you just doing that for four years? Were you just gaming the entire time?”
“Nah man, I was…sleep.”
“For four years? You slept for four entire years?”
“Yeah I got really tired after the uh, the heist. So I had a big sleep. I woke up though. That was kinda sucks.” That checked out, considering what happened after they had their heist in another world, but now Gordon was concerned about how Benrey remembered the heist; nobody was supposed to remember the heist except for Gordon, he vaguely recalls that he and the Player agreed to the Science Team forgetting the heist. Tommy kinda remembered, but only the parts where he had asbestos poisoning. Well, he supposed since Benrey didn’t count as a member of the Science Team, maybe him remembering wasn’t a problem, for now.
“They gave me one month of PS Plus after I woke up and came back. I like video games…can’t play video games in the other place though, so I agreed to the free month.” Benrey continued. He nodded and shook his head while explaining his story, always at the appropriate times where a head movement seemed necessary, almost like it was practiced.
“So you…” Gordon continued the conversation, trying to feel out if maybe he was being led into a false sense of security. “You played Heavenly Sword for a whole month without eating or sleeping?”
“Yea-no?? I ate…pigeons and…” He looked directly at Gordon, he was processing something again, “…tree rats.”
“Squirrels?”
“Yeah those.” His scrunched face changed to a neutral-looking smile.
He had seen Benrey eat pigeons back in Black Mesa, so he wasn’t too surprised the man had eaten squirrels; it seemed like a logical next step. It made sense, Gordon was pretty sure a diet consisting solely of cheese puffs and 7Up (he was pretty sure that’s what gamers ate) could kill even the hardiest of immortals.
Actually, Benrey didn’t mention eating any sort of fruit just now, did he just leave them out on purpose or, was he some sort of obligate carnivore? He probably should have focused on that more than on what he asked next.
“You cooked those before you ate them, right?”
“No. Sorry, I don’t have uh…microbe-wave.”
Gordon just stared at him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.
“Tastes better with the hair on ‘em anyways.”
“I’m not a medical doctor, but I’m pretty sure…that you’re gonna get a disease…” Gordon tried to choose his next words carefully. He really, really tried. But his brain was fried from the interview and the exhaustion was starting to catch up to him. “…Salmonella. You’re gonna get salmonella if you keep eating raw meat like that.”
It was Benrey’s turn to stare again.
“Oh, who am I fucking kidding?” Gordon threw his hands in the air, “You’re some sort of thing from another world, the bacteria probably just goes right through you!”
“There are…” Benrey paused, his face morphed into a mischievous, shark-toothed grin. “…yo there’s Bakugan in my meat?”
He laughed. Gordon laughed and laughed and laughed until he fell over drunk from the shock of Benrey’s statement, and then laughed until the tap ran dry and he was sober enough to wheeze a response. “No! That’s not-Benrey that’s not what I said at all. I expect that kind of joke from Tommy! Oh my god…”
All of the neighbors peaked over or around to see the commotion at this point. Gordon didn’t feel any need to acknowledge them any as he shakily pushed himself upright, they were used to the bullshit that followed him around by this point, they were just really nosy. They were gone as quickly as they arrived, by which point he was now sitting on the opposite side of his gnome. “Do…do you wanna like…come inside or something, man?”
“No, I don’t like the color beige.”
In his hysterical drunkenness, Gordon had almost been willing to invite Benrey into his refuge, but the hospitality had now been lost.
He was seeing red again. “How did you know my walls were-? Did you noclip into my house?!” He took his glasses off and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Fucking-! I keep getting fucking distracted! Dude!!!!”
Benrey watched Gordon gesture wildly with the hand not carrying his glasses around, directing every movement towards him.
“Why are you HERE?!” He screamed.
Benrey looked at the ground. “That’s uh, private information.” Slowly his head drifted towards Gordon again, he could faintly see the man’s creepy eyes follow the seams of his suit. “…Yo, we dressing up for movie night tonight?”
Gordon stiffened, standing back up. “How do you know about movie night?”
If Benrey knew about movie night, then either somebody told him, or…
“Tommy told me.” Benrey answered quickly, “Well, uh…he told his dad, and his dad told me. Mister Coolguy, Mister Govern-Mant, he got me the free month of PS Plus.”
Benrey fidgeted with the hem of his shirt again, sort of messing with it like he was messing around with a game controller while his mouth bubbled Sweet Voice and word salad.
“Like…he said he was going to buy more when it ran out, and now it’s been a month and my PS Plus ran out…twenty minutes ago.”
“We’ve been talking for about five minutes or something,” Gordon looked at his wrists. There wasn’t a watch on either of them, but it felt important to visually convey the flow of time. “So you’re telling me that your PS Plus ran out fifteen minutes before you got here, and you couldn’t wait another five or so for Mister Coolatta, for Tommy’s dad to renew it again? The PlayStation has games that aren’t multiplayer, you couldn’t play any of those for a while?”
Benrey averted his gaze. “I could but…”
He waited, but Benrey didn’t continue his statement. He was starting to consider the possibility that Benrey was lying out of his ass right now and that he had simply stolen enough information from the Science Team to keep Gordon preoccupied while they all died a slow, painful and permanent death before killing Gordon himself. He waited another two minutes before breaking the silence, hoping maybe that Benrey didn’t know that Gordon knew what he was planning. “But what? Why won’t you play single player games?”
Benrey looked at the ground again. “…I’d like to go inside the house now please?”
“Uh-?”
“WAIT! Can we go to my house instead? Pretty please?” He asked in earnest, pulling off a fucked-up alien version of ‘sad anime eyes’.
Well, if Benrey really was distracting Gordon to leave the Science Team dying somewhere, he did a scarily good job at hiding that fact. He must have been trying to get him into a secondary location to finish the job.
Hastily, Gordon tried to come up with an excuse while he put his glasses back on.
“Uh, sorry man. I wish I could, but uh, the guys are gonna be here in about…an hour, and I still need to change into some normal clothes and figure out what we’re eating for movie night. So-“ He twisted away from Benrey pulling something out and trying to force it into his line of sight, reminding Gordon of his various intrusive thoughts of being kidnapped in the past few years.
Benrey frowned. “Bro it’s paper.” He shook the parchment around for demonstration.
Through a partially-covered mouth, Gordon asked “Can you please not shove paper in my face?”
Benrey responded by wobbling the paper more until Gordon finally accepted it.
“Fine, what is this?”
“Mm…list. Food list.”
“Food list?”
“Food list.”
The paper that the list was written on had been improperly torn from a spiral notebook; you could easily see where the lower half of the page was simply ripped instead of following the tear-away lines. The handwriting on it, by contrast, looked incredibly clean, almost like it was typed out aside from a few blemishes of human error like scribbles over spelling mistakes or a long line from where somebody had made an order and then at the last minute asked for something completely different, much to the chagrin of the transcriber.
“…This is really nice handwriting.” Gordon admitted.
He felt his phone buzz in his pocket, prompting him to look over his messages.
One of them was an unflattering picture of him from a few minutes ago, dying of laughter in his front yard, sent by his neighbors from across the street to the neighborhood group chat.
‘This idiot can’t even comprehend the true form of Gnome Chompski’s attack. XD Ignore the guy in the back dunno who he is.’
Thanks Gina and Colette, very cool.
The other message was from Bubby, so maybe the rest of the Science Team wasn’t dead after all. At the very least, Bubby wasn’t dead.
‘You’d better be goddamn home by now. I’m changing my order again. I want a Sausage Melt, and I want my hash browns smothered and diced. Also, Harold wanted to make sure you added pecans to his chocolate chip waffles. If you forget those nuts again and he cries, I WILL make it your problem.’
“Did Bubby change his order again?” Benrey asked, his expression dead serious. He didn’t wait for an answer, apparently he could just tell from Gordon’s expression and considered that enough to snatch the paper from his hands and scratch out one of the orders with a pen he pulled out from hammerspace. “This fuckin’ guy, I can’t believe it. This is the THIRD time man.”
“I think I can handle the orders from here.” Gordon said. He got the list back without much of a fight, which was preferable to getting into a tug-of-war over a piece of paper.
“I will…see you later?” He slowly backed away from Benrey to get inside his house, tripping as the terrain switched from grass to concrete beneath his feet. “I’m going to go inside now and…do the stuff I said I needed to do!” His hand clutched the door knob, and immediately Gordon turned around to wiggle it open. His face paled with realization that his initial plans to bolt at the first sign of a threat would not have worked anyways, not solely because Benrey could noclip through objects, but also because Gordon would not have had the time to unlock his front door before Benrey did…whatever the fuck he had planned.
Just like in the horror movies.
Shit.
Gordon was a fucking horror movie protagonist and he wasn’t even one of the long-lasting ones. He was the final girl from the first movie that they kill off at the start of the second to make a point.
“Hey man, you dropped this.”
A key ring appeared in his peripheral vision. Gordon strained his eyes to meet Benrey’s line of sight, the man had that deceptively innocent smile from before as he held the keys out like a joy-buzzer.
He took his keys back with the speed and grace of a claw machine, unlocked the door, and just stared longingly at the interior for a minute.
“Inside? Inside for Benrey?”
“Yeah, sure thing man…” Gordon sighed and walked inside, letting Benrey follow behind. If he’s going to die, might as well get comfortable first.