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The fall isn’t enough to knock Gordon unconscious, but it does rattle his brain for long enough that the others have time to climb down the ladder and reach him before he can do more than roll onto his back, groaning. And of course, instead of asking if he’s okay, they go straight to razzing him, ignoring the fact that he’s still on the floor.
“In a hurry, Gordon?” Bubby jeers, still halfway down the ladder.
“I think it’s a very efficient way of getting to the bottom of this wall,” Dr. Coomer says.
“Nice fall, Freeman,” Benrey says from the base of the ladder, then perks up. “Freeman – more like Freefall, right? Get it?”
“Mr. Freeman, you – you might want to use the ladder next time,” Tommy says, faux helpfully. “You could get hurt or, or, break a bone or something.”
“Isn’t breaking a bone just a specific kind of getting hurt?” Bubby asks, his feet thudding to the ground before he saunters over to where Gordon is still flat on his back, contemplating his place in the universe and trying to get his thoughts back in order. The suit gave him a brief damage report, but it wasn’t anything major. Still, he’s tired of these crazy people who can run through fire in their lab coats not checking on him after a clear injury. He’d already half-drowned and all they did was laugh at him for coughing as long as he had. He’s pretty sure he heard Dr. Coomer talking underwater, and Benrey was doing tricks and shit and stayed under for way longer than the average person should be able to comfortably handle.
Then again, he already knows none of them are average. So maybe it’s time for some teasing of his own.
“What happened?” he groans, sitting up and putting a hand to his head. “Where am I? Who – who are you people?”
“Don’t be silly, Gordon, we’re your good friends, the Science Team!” Dr. Coomer says brightly.
“How do you know my name?” Gordon asks, pasting a look of confusion on his face. His head does fucking hurt, but the suit already administered a painkiller, so it could be worse. It still feels like he can taste metal, though, which probably isn’t great.
“Mr. Freeman, is – are you okay?” Tommy’s voice has some level of concern in it, now. Good.
“Who are you?” Gordon asks, and then has an evil thought. He goes to bring his right arm up like he planned to rub his face with it, then jumps and stares at the gun-arm in exaggerated horror. “What the – what the fuck is this? Why is there a fucking cannon on my hand?”
“Uh-oh,” a quiet voice says, but Gordon doesn’t have time to check who it was. He’s got to keep rolling with the act. He took an improv class in college because of some girl, but he ended up enjoying it a whole hell of a lot more than he thought he would, and this is just more of that kind of thing.
“What’s going on?” Gordon asks, frantically turning his gun-arm this way and that, then clawing at the place where it joins with the HEV suit, as if searching for a catch. “What am I wearing – what is this? Where are we? And why isn’t this thing fucking coming off?”
“Um,” Tommy says, and Gordon notices from his position on the ground that they’ve all gone very still. He needs to check where they are because of what he’s going to do next.
“Where the fuck is my hand?” Gordon asks, then fires the gun and yells wildly, letting his arm flail in a careful arc to avoid the others. They still scatter, shouting, and now he’s got their full attention.
“What the shit?” Gordon wheezes, trying to disguise his laughter as shock as the Science Team huddles on the other side of the ladder, staring at him in various stages of befuddlement and concern. “How did that happen? Did – is my hand inside this thing?”
“Calm down, Gordon,” Dr. Coomer says, holding his hands up placatingly. “We’re in Black Mesa. There’s been...a bit of an accident.”
“With my hand?” Gordon asks, injecting as much plaintiveness into his voice as he can without cracking up.
“With...well, with everything, I’m afraid. But yes, your hand is part of that. I wouldn’t – well, I wouldn’t clench that fist, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“That’s what fires the gun, Gordon.”
“Oh. Okay?” Gordon turns the barrels by rotating his elbow and glances down the length of them, letting the gun fall so it’s pointing directly at the group of white lab coats. Immediately, they scatter, sidestepping to get out of the way of the muzzles and clamoring warnings at him.
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing!” Bubby barks, and Gordon wants to laugh. They've never had an issue with Tommy pointing his gun into everyone’s faces before.
“Sorry!” he says instead, fake contrition heavy in his tone. “I just don’t – I don’t know what’s going on.” Now that he’s in this, he’s interested to see how they decide to explain things.
“Well, I suppose we should introduce ourselves, then,” Dr. Coomer says, and begins pointing. “I am Dr. Harold Coomer. This is Bubby, that’s Tommy, and our unscientific friend over there is Benrey.”
“M’not unscientific,” Benrey mumbles.
“You’re not wearing a lab coat, Benrey, and therefore you are not a scientist. Them’s the rules!”
Benrey looks pensive. “I could wear a lab coat.”
“It wouldn’t go with your accoutrements, I’m afraid,” Dr. Coomer says, pronouncing the word in an obnoxiously French way that removes half the letters.
“Okay, nice to meet you, I guess,” Gordon interrupts, waving a hand. “And I can see that we’re in Black Mesa, though I don’t recognize this area...” He turns to look around at the tall wall next to them, then across the open silo next to the ledge they’re standing on, with towering columns that spark with electricity and have several maintenance walkways cutting across and around them. “So what...happened? How did we get here?”
There’s a lot of shuffling and gesturing happening, and Gordon is finding it harder and harder not to burst out laughing as he watches them make wide-eyed expressions and jerk their heads this way and that at each other.
“Um,” Tommy says, then stops.
Dr. Coomer picks up the thread, which is probably a good thing. “You see, Gordon,” he says, not unkindly, “there was a bit of an...accident, like I said, which has resulted in some...damage, I would say, to the facility. This has also resulted in some strange – well, alien – creatures wandering the halls, which has in turn resulted in the deployment of the United States Military.”
“What?” Gordon gasps. “The army? Aliens? What – that doesn’t make any sense!”
“It does not, Gordon, but we persist!”
“This is stupid,” Bubby mutters. “He’s probably going to remember again in a minute anyway.”
“Head – um, concussions can be very confusing,” Tommy tells him. “It’s – we should be helpful.”
“I say he’s a liability like this.”
“That's rude,” Benrey huffs, then shoulders past Bubby and stalks up to Gordon, staring down at him for a moment with an odd look on his face before dropping into a crouch.
“Hey,” he says. “We’re uh...best friends.”
Oh, this motherfucker. Gordon almost breaks character over that egregiously incorrect statement, but reins himself in. He kind of wants to see where this will go.
“Are – are we?” he chokes out instead.
“Yeah. Best friends,” Benrey nods, then holds out a hand. “So, uh...come with me? Please?”
Gordon thinks very quickly as he looks down at the offered hand, then decides to go with it. They’ve got to move, anyway – they’d been running from a pair of bullsquids that had surprised them, which is how Gordon had tipped backward over the ledge when he’d been looking over his shoulder to check how far behind them the aliens were. Even now, he’s pretty sure he can hear them rumbling on the walkway above. So he bites down his instinctive rejection and instead carefully reaches over with his left hand and clasps Benrey’s wrist.
Benrey’s forearm muscles twitch under his grip, like he honestly wasn’t expecting Gordon to take his offer. Then he stands and pulls Gordon up in one smooth motion. Gordon stumbles a little, and it's only half an act – his head is still pounding from the impact with the concrete floor. The suit’s painkillers can only do so much. But he’s shocked to feel Benrey’s other hand carefully support his ribs before dropping when he straightens up fully. Benrey twists his wrist to break Gordon’s grip, then slips his hand down and presses their palms together, clamping his fingers over Gordon’s hand.
Gordon blinks down at their joined hands, then Benrey is tugging him forward. “C’mon, gotta – keep you with the group,” Benrey says, not looking at him, and Gordon casts a genuinely confused look over at the others, who seem utterly unbothered by this development.
“Excellent idea, Bo- Benrey,” Dr. Coomer says, and Gordon has the feeling he was going to call Benrey some dumb name but decided against it because it might confuse an amnesiac Gordon. Are they actually being...nice? What a prospect.
“Great, I didn't want to be a babysitter,” Bubby says before bounding away around the circular ledge that rings the room, heading for one of the maintenance walkways across. “Come on! Let's go!”
“Are you going to help me get this thing off my hand?” Gordon asks Benrey guilelessly.
“Uhhhh yeah, yep, sure, later,” Benrey says, hurrying after the others and yanking Gordon along. Gordon smirks internally. How is he planning on getting around that one?
He nearly forgets to freak out again when they encounter headcrabs, but remembers after everyone else has started shooting, partially because Benrey pushes him back against the wall behind himself, startling Gordon.
“Oh, shit – what are those?” He mentally smacks himself. He's supposed to be seeing aliens for the first time, here.
“Headcrabs,” Benrey grunts. “Don't worry, I'm, uh, I'll keep 'em away.”
Gordon doubts that. Benrey has been the least bloodthirsty of the group, which is ironic in its own way. But it turns out that “keeping them away” doesn't mean “killing them” when a headcrab lunges for them and Benrey hits it with a beam of red and purple sweet voice.
“What the fuck?” Gordon barks as the headcrab falls to the ground, twitching, before righting itself and scampering away. He probably sounds more angry than shocked – he'd had no idea Benrey could scare the aliens off like that. Why hasn't he been doing that the whole time?
“Oh, yeah, uh,” Benrey turns to look up at Gordon. “That's – that's normal. Don't worry about it.”
“How did you do that?”
“It's – s'all about breath control,” Benrey mumbles, turning back to keep a wary eye on the continuing carnage as Tommy shoots a headcrab out of the air and Dr. Coomer punches one into a wall while Bubby shoots at another that's charging down the hallway.
“Breath control?” Gordon nearly laughs. “How does breath control let you blow magic bubbles with your mouth?”
Benrey looks conflicted for a moment, glancing up at Gordon and then away again. “I'm...uh, I'm not human. S'okay, though,” he adds hastily, “m'not gonna hurt any of you. Don't – don't wanna do that.” And he glances down at Gordon's gun-arm.
Holy shit. Is he actually remorseful? This is great. Gordon's a fucking genius for coming up with this idea. Maybe he can guilt Benrey into actually apologizing, for once in his goddamn life.
“That's – weird, but okay,” Gordon says, not sure how else to respond in the middle of a fight. Benrey's shoulders drop a little and he turns to sing another beam of sweet voice at a headcrab that's getting a bit too close, sending it scrambling away as well. Bubby shoots it and yells something about laziness, and then there are peeper puppies, which Gordon has to pretend to be shocked by, and then they're running.
Benrey grabs his hand again before they take off, and Gordon can't think of a way to get loose, so he just goes with it.
Before he has a chance to catch his breath, they run into soldiers, and then another round of alien attackers, and then they’re swimming through flooded tunnels again. This time, Benrey tows Gordon after him, his hand cool and sure in Gordon’s grip as the water rushes by. Gordon doesn’t really know what to think about this, or how to feel, so he just keeps rolling with it. He’ll have to figure out damage control another time.
They hole up a little later in a lab, Dr. Coomer knocking over a cabinet to block the doorway. Then he spins around and pins Gordon with a piercing look, and for a second Gordon thinks he's been found out.
“You're taking this remarkably well, my boy,” Dr. Coomer says. “So, let me explain some more about what's going on.”
And then, wonder of wonders, he fucking does. They all sit down, cross-legged in a loose group, and Dr. Coomer regales Gordon with a recap of their journey together so far. He embellishes certain parts, and Tommy and Bubby jump in to interject additions that make them look better, or to include things that Dr. Coomer was glossing over, and Gordon's a bit shocked. They actually seem to be concerned with catching him up, and they're being surprisingly truthful, for the most part. Dr. Coomer even skips over who started the resonance cascade. Though Gordon maintains that the whole experiment was flawed from the start, they've been saying it's his fault this whole time, so it’s a refreshing change.
After a little while, he realizes they're slowing down, milking certain events, spending a long time on things Gordon's pretty sure are inconsequential. What could they be trying to avoid...?
Oh. Of course. They don't want to tell him his hand is gone.
He watches them struggle for a few more minutes, Tommy even going back to talk about some company event pre-resonance cascade, before he decides to choose the path of evil and twist the knife.
“That all sounds pretty wild,” he breaks in when everyone pauses for breath at the same time, then raises the gun arm and looks at it. “But how did this thing get stuck on my hand? And how do we get it off?”
“Ah,” Dr. Coomer says.
“Um,” Tommy says.
“Welllll,” Bubby says, glancing at Benrey.
Gordon's watching out of the corner of his eye, so he sees Benrey shake his head the tiniest bit at Bubby. Now, what could that mean...?
“Hey, Freeman, can I, uh, fill you in on some of the alien shit?”
Now, that's unexpected. “I guess?” Gordon says, and gets up to follow Benrey across the lab, where Benrey sits down on a lab bench and starts swinging his legs before patting the space next to him. Gordon hefts himself up and kicks his heels a little, too. It's nice to get the weight off his feet.
“So, uh...the resonance cascade did some shit,” Benrey starts, and Gordon almost gives himself away again. Benrey is being helpful? Benrey? Holy shit, he should have pretended to lose his memory days ago. Then again, it wouldn't have made as much of an impact if the others didn't know him as well as they do now. They've been through a lot of bullshit together at this point.
Benrey is still talking, explaining things about some place called Xen that Gordon is only half-following. He realizes that Benrey's picking up a conversation he'd been leading earlier, when he was dragging Gordon around by the hand. Gordon was concentrating so much on reacting correctly to things that he'd only had half an ear tuned into Benrey's words, but now he's realizing they were important. They are important. Benrey is giving him information on shit he had no idea to even ask for, and it's...invigorating. And confusing, because why couldn't he just say this before? Was there too much baggage? Did he not trust Gordon?
Well. Clearly there was a lack of trust, and now Gordon's wondering how much of it was on his side. Fuck, if Benrey's willing to offer this to avoid talking about Gordon's hand being cut off, how much more could he get out of him if he really corners him about it?
Unfortunately, he doesn't get to find out. One of the golem-apes starts trying to blast down the lab door and they have to break through a window in the back of the room to get out, Benrey grabbing Gordon's hand to pull him along again. This time, he barely notices.
This whole thing has gone too far, honestly, and Gordon's in over his head. He can't keep yes-anding this shit; he needs a way to get out of it – ideally without letting the rest of the team know he's been faking the whole time.
Luckily, because this has been their lives lately, an opportunity comes within fifteen minutes. The hangar they're in is full of aliens, and in the chaos it's the work of a moment to shake himself loose from Benrey and take a header off the closest ledge. He'd already checked the height as they ran by it earlier, so he knows it won't kill him. It's actually shorter than the fall that started all this, but hopefully no one will notice.
When he hits the ground, he does genuinely feel it rattle through him, but he was ready for it this time, and he prepped the suit. It instantly administers more painkillers and a neck support, so when he pops back up, nothing should look out of place.
“Shit – Freeman!” Benrey's voice sounds frantic. “Gordon!”
When he pokes his head over the edge, Gordon flips him off from flat on the floor, then hauls himself upright. “What the fuck, Benrey, did you push me?” he rasps, thinking back to the first fall. “Watch out for the bullsquids, man!”
“There's not – s'none of those up here,” Benrey says, frowning. “Whuh -?” And then he seems to get it, with Gordon glaring up at him from the base of the wall. His expression shutters, and his face disappears from the edge. Gordon can hear him yell something to the others as he moves over to the ladder and climbs back up.
By the time he reaches the top, they've decimated the remaining peeper puppies and are standing around staring toward him. Gordon wracks his brain for one last burst of improv before he can let this whole fucked-up experiment go.
“This doesn't look like the hall we were in. Where are the bullsquids? Where'd all these peeper puppies come from?”
“Gordon?” Dr. Coomer asks. “Do you know who we are?”
“Of fucking course I know who you are,” Gordon snorts. “Why wouldn't I?”
“Well, you lost your memory for a while, there.”
“What? That's ridiculous. How could that happen?”
“You fell off a wall like an idiot,” Bubby offers, and Gordon flips him off as well.
“This – that's Mr. Freeman, all right,” Tommy says, his voice full of relief. “Now things can go in – um, back to normal.”
“Great,” Benrey mumbles from behind him, crossing his arms and turning away.
“Oh, Gordon, we have so much to share with you!” Dr. Coomer crows, clasping his hands beneath his chin. “We had such adventures with you when you didn't remember us. It was terribly stressful for everyone involved, so I must say I'm glad you're back.”
“Yeah, you look super stressed,” Gordon scoffs, rubbing his head. It does hurt, again, just like last time. “Did we at least make progress?”
“Oh, goodness me, yes! We're at least fifteen minutes ahead of schedule!”
“What...schedule?” Gordon asks, but Dr. Coomer is already bounding off, Bubby following with a yell. So much for telling him about their “adventures.”
“I – I'm really glad you're back, Mr. Freeman,” Tommy says, before he, too, heads down the corridor.
Gordon sighs and runs his hand over his face, the gun-arm hanging heavy at his side. “What about you, huh?” he asks Benrey, still standing with his back to Gordon. “You happy I've apparently got my memories back?”
“No,” Benrey says. “You were nicer without 'em.”
“Yeah? Maybe because that guy didn't know you cut off my hand,” Gordon snarls, the stress of watching his every word for most of a day boiling over.
“I didn't do it,” Benrey mumbles. “Didn't do shit.”
“Yeah, you didn't do shit,” Gordon growls, stalking forward and grabbing Benrey's shoulder to turn him around. He swivels, but refuses to meet Gordon's eyes. “You just stood there and made stupid noises like the rest of them while soldiers sawed my fucking arm off.”
“I'm sorry, okay?” Benrey snaps, and Gordon is so shocked that he lets go of him. Benrey glares quickly up at him before his gaze darts away again. He tightens his grip on his arms where they're folded so tightly over his chest it looks like he's hugging himself. “I fucked up. I didn't think – I didn't know they'd, uh, do that. Not like that. Not to you.”
“Fuck's sake,” Gordon sighs, closing his eyes. Benrey is really good at being pathetic when he wants to be, but the thing is, he sounds honestly sincere, his voice a little uneven around the edges, like it's costing him to push the words out. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, bro. M'seriously sorry,” Benrey says roughly.
Gordon looks down at him and takes a deep breath. He probably gave the guy a fucking complex by pretending to lose his memory like that. Benrey must have thought he could start over with him. After all, this whole time he's seemed oddly drawn to Gordon – more than the others, at least. Gordon remembers the attempted kiss, and his own exhausted reaction. Leave the lovin' for later. Well, how much later is later? And why is this where his mind is going right now?
Gunfire erupts from down the hall and Gordon flinches. Benrey shifts his weight, like he wants to put himself in front of Gordon like he's been doing since the first fall, then halts the motion and looks upset.
And, okay. That's just too much. Gordon sighs and grabs Benrey's hand without thinking, prying it away from his arm and dragging it down between them to thread their fingers together. “C'mon,” he says, turning away without catching much more than a glimpse of the shock on Benrey's face. “Let's go help them out.”
“Yuh- uh, yeah, sure, okay,” Benrey says, and Gordon grins to himself at how flustered he sounds. Serves him right for putting Gordon through hell.
But he can worry about that later. Right now there are bad aliens to kill, and a debatably-good alien to pump for information when he gets the chance, which means right now contains Gordon and Benrey, running hand-in-hand down the hallways of Black Mesa, charging headlong into the next battle, together.