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"Alyx? Alyx, honey, are you there?!"
Alyx's eyes slowly cracked open, greeted by a pale dawn sky.
"Dad?" she murmured, sitting up gingerly. She found herself in a deserted alley, the wreckage from the Vault in the distance, hunter choppers hovering above it. She briefly squeezed her eyes shut, pinching the bridge of her nose — her head was pounding.
"Oh, thank god," she heard her father's voice through the headset. "Are you alright? Where are you?"
"I'm… I'm fine," Alyx said, standing. Her body was sore from being on the move for however many hours it had been, and there were the partially-healed wounds she had sustained throughout the day, but she was otherwise unscathed. "I'm outside of the Vault."
When she began walking in the opposite direction of the Vault, Russell's voice crackled through the headset. "What did you find in there?"
Alyx froze. What did she find in there? She tried to remember, but her mind drew a blank. She recalled killing the strider, but after that… there was a conspicuous gap in her memory.
"Nothing," she finally said. She knew this wasn't the correct answer, but it was the only one she could give. "There was nothing there."
Her father kept silent.
In the days, weeks, months, and years after the Vault, in the quiet moments when Alyx was alone, her mind would wander back to that day. She would grope around in that blind spot in her head, digging, searching, but all she could find were shapes in the dark, too vague for her to discern what she was even looking at. There were nights when the events that transpired in the Vault invaded her dreams, but when she woke in a cold sweat, the memories would disappear in a rush, as if they had been swept up by a raging river.
She continued to aid the resistance in any way she could, however, acting as if nothing was amiss. After all, there were people who needed her — her father, Kleiner, Barney, Russell, and countless others.
Whenever she hugged her father, she held him just a little longer than she used to, though she didn't know what drove her to do so. Not once did he mention the Vault in the intervening five years.
When Alyx first laid eyes on Gordon, bruised and dazed from the metrocops that had cornered him, she was filled with an overwhelming sense of deja vu. It was a feeling that only got stronger when he donned the HEV suit in Kleiner's lab.
In the back of her mind, dread grew. It shouldn't have, because now the resistance had the fabled Gordon Freeman, then the Citadel was destroyed, then Breen was dead, then they were at White Forest and launching the rocket and winning the war.
But the dread didn't stop. It just kept festering like an open wound, until they were in the hangar, forced against the wall while her father was inches from dying to a Combine Advisor — in the back of her mind, she realized that the sight was all too familiar to her. A green light crackled in her peripheral vision, before the Advisor lay dead, scorched, her father freed from its telekinetic grasp.
Time slowed to a halt. She was no longer forced halfway up the wall, but she now stood, watching as the man in the suit spoke to her younger self.
She remembered.