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It’s easy to forget that the outside world exists at all. Considering the hallways.
The military was a rude reminder: there are soldiers here with other orders, with a system of names and squadrons, and one of them is a college student, and he is experiencing all of this from his own wretched lens of the world, and it’s easy to forget that. Because a lot of other things are difficult, like- oh hey what a FUNNY example: Surviving! Surviving’s fucking difficult. He'd worked into sore, rew joints and sweat-wrought dehydration with how difficult surviving's been. And yet somehow the very last bit of it was all luck and nothing else. He'd just been in the right spot at the right moment to avoid getting smeared with a plummeting cement pillar or impaled by foundational rods.
Pale, unforgiving light cuts through the dust and wreckage. Someone’s digging down to them. A whole team of ‘someones’.
Surviving is difficult and breathing is difficult and keeping your eyes open is fucking difficult. So it was easy to forget Forzen was just some other guy, and that there are other guys at all. Easy to keep his understanding of the situation limited to a pinprick: Gordon’s own two eyes and one brain.
It was just him and four people stuck in something winding and endless and so far-detached from the real world that everything else must’ve stopped existing. Must’ve been put on pause so they could finish their grand journey through unforgiving and impatient terrain. Surely other people did not suffer Mesa. Surely other people were not worse off without their metal suits and their bionic limbs and their ability to take round after round of steel and come out cackling.
Now someone digs down to him. To them.
The grind of a cement plate being removed showers Gordon’s volunteer grave in chips of foundation. They clink off his suit and glasses like rain. What he wouldn’t do for some water now. His mouth isn’t dry, but his trachea is. His entire being is an uncomfortable hodge-podge of things that are chafingly dehydrated and things that are probably bloody or sweaty or still soaked in that strange, red muck.
He coughs. Someone shouts distantly: here, here.
Here.
It takes nine people to pull him out.
Five holding up the rubble and four dragging his body out, scraping its terrible metal chassis against a building no more. They are people- they are people from the outside world, real in their uniform and in their focused, dust-smeared faces. Yellow hardhats and red utility belts, and the only color that’s missing is green: go, go, go, traffic's off. They support his head and neck, can’t check for fractures under the suit, like every bone hidden by its metal sarcophagus might be already vaporized into little shards. Like Gordon will fall apart if they take it off him, trying to peel a living creature from a cocoon before it’s finished turning the cocktail of organs into a workable body.
He inhales ugly, dusty breaths, and mouths: “The others?”
They don’t know. They don’t know that the others Gordon is asking about aren’t all of Black Mesa’s unluckiest employees. He’s asking about one, two, three, four, where is Coomer, where is Bubby, where is Tommy, where is Darnold. Is the sky grey? Is the ground whole instead of shattered into islands? Is there something on the horizon that they hadn’t managed to kill?
They deposit him with the emergency responders. His glasses are removed, faced wiped quickly and efficiently with something that stings. These are not Black Mesa workers. These are not people that should be unpaused and awake to witness the desolate ruins of what was once an imposing, sprawling system of labs.
They must be government. Or maybe something conjured out of thin air to aid the situation’s plot- he needs to stop thinking like that. Plot. Arc. Act. Grand Finale. He needs to- he needs to keep his eyes open, breathe, answer what’s being asked- flashlight in his vision glaring like the sun’s personal little heir. Left eye, right eye. He’s being asked something in the language of a mouthful of cotton swabs. An oxygen mask's rubber nozzle is pressed to his face. They're still asking.
Oh, his arm. His arm. Gordon moves and it moves with him. He lifts it and cranes his neck, and everyone around him starts shouting and pushing his arm and his head back down, and all he says is I’m fine guys, I’m fine-
There’s shouting- no not theirs- or he realizes they hadn’t been shouting at all- the shouting had been someone else.
Gordon clanks his falsification of an arm against the gurney they have him on, draws the attention away from his head, and on autopilot rolls it over to look.
Blurry and far off and as grey as everything else is Bubby. Definitely Bubby. He’s shouting angrily at someone. With enough air in his lungs, then, to keep breathing.
Gordon catches a passing nurse by the shirtfront and drags them down with all his weight. Just so he can rasp: Find out if Coomer and Tommy are okay- Coomer and Tommy. If you don’t, I’m going to get up and do it myself.
He sees the moment of deliberation, the weighing of pros and cons, and then sees the nod. That’s all he needs.
With his head still lolled to the side, Gordon sees it. Doesn't hear it at all- but sees a line of red and yellow beam out from the wreckage: sweet voice, no longer Black Mesa. He blinks and maybe the blinks last too long- they're prying his suit open and when Gordon wakes back up, in the distance, they're prying the rubble open too-
He sees Bubby running. Sees him dive heels-first into the opening darkness of desolation's maw. Everyone else there pauses, unsure of who Bubby must be or if- Gordon blinks again- they try to roll his head back over, check for something- he fights it and turns to look again.
Coomer is dragged form the rubble, trailing sweet voice he so sparingly used. One arm too long, refusing to retract back to its normal length, exposing busted accordion folds of plestometal. Its hand drags along the floor limply, scorched boxing glove snagging on pipes and rods and glass.
His view is obstructed by someone- they lean down-
"Tommy's um- did you mean Coolatta?" It's that nurse.
Gordon says something that's lost in the oxygen mask- the nurse keeps talking, "He's the one that called us here- I don't know about the others, we've recovered over a dozen survivors already."
Gordon goes to wave them off- he's heard his fill: they're fine. His arms is uncooperative, his chest aching-
The nurse drops one last breadcrumb of conversation: "We'll do the best we can, I'm sure they'll be fine," and leaves.
If he hadn't seen Bubby and Coomer with his own two eyes moments ago, he would've called bullshit, would've howled it in despair at being lied to again by some mega-corp that's all benevolent smiles and then suddenly your world is gone and you're the only one left in its wake. Something pinches in his chest, and when they manage to pry the breastplate off him, his first real inhale is weak and stuttery.
Gordon screws up his face- feeling every scrape and every cut and every tender spot along his jaw where it chafed for days against the suit's neckpiece- he feels it all whine and complain and sting as he chokes on the inhale and lets it out in a wheezing cry.
They're alright.
He drags in another breath just so he has something to cry with- and it feels good, it feels so fucking good to finally break along the seamlines of his suit, lie there with his chest exposed as they're checking his heartbeat, his vitals, his breathing, lie there and cry, let himself wallow in it, let himself sink into the spiral of a really delicious breakdown.
Tears sting and catch in the outline of his oxygen mask, dip into his ears, hot and searing, and so fucking rewarding to finally let spill. No more wet eyes at the thought of how unfair things are, no more shaky practiced box breathing to come down from another panic attack. Just full-throat wailing with the full-throttle no-brakes space to do so. His chest expands, free and finally unconstricted, and Gordon cries.
They puzzle over his arm, leave it alone to tend to more pressing issues, unwrap him from his exoskeleton and reveal the soft, sweaty, lumpy mess of a man under it. He feels cold from all the revealed, raw expanses of black-clad body. The undersuit on him is soaked in sweat, reeks of days underfire, tingles with icy pinpricks now that it's subject to a light breeze. Gordon revels in it, like one might revel barefoot in morning dew on a grassy hill, watching a sunrise. He and cries and smiles and cries.
As they're preparing to load him into an ambulance, metal casing discarded and oxygen mask digging crookedly into his face, Gordon hears the distance shouts of 'another' 'another'.
He tilts his head as they're wheeling him to the car, bleary and tear-muddled eyes seeking the source of commotion.
They're pulling a limp and unconscious guard out of the rubble. Helmet, blue shirt, bloody- or otherwise red-soaked bullet vest.
The entire gurney jitters, its wheels folding out from under it as the ambulance's interior cuts all visibility and slides into Gordon's view with a gray and yellow wall.
Black Mesa hired dozens of guards. That could be anyone. Except other people weren't supposed to exist. And for the sake of plot, and because other people don't exist, Gordon hopes that it's a guard he knows.