Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

His sense of awareness comes and goes in phases. It feels...Something. He should probably be feeling something about that. He’s not sure what the difference is, but it feels important. Slowly, he starts piecing together what he knows. Baby steps, Gordon. You’ve got this. Right. Right! That, that’s an important thing. First piece. That’s his name. That’s him, he’s Gordon Freeman. He did, he’s something. Yup. Totally, totally just nailing it. He’s Gordon, and he’s...Somewhere. He’s not sure. He’s pretty confident that he’s managed to open his eyes, but it’s not making any difference. It’s not dark, some part of him is starting to register, it’s just that there’s not anything to look at. It’s just - it’s empty. It’s a black void.

There’s nothing there.

His brain goes fuzzy at the edges. Reality starts to grind to a halt, and he’s not sure how he knows that but he does, he knows it with absolute certainty. At least it doesn’t hurt this time, he thinks, and then stops thinking before he can question the thought.

Gordon wakes up. His head feels...Something. He slowly blinks his eyes open again, and the void is still there waiting for him. He still can’t feel anything, which he’s starting to distantly realise is strange because he didn’t used to feel nothing, and he’s not totally on board with that. He should feel something. On a scale of one to ten, at least maybe a three for some kind of sensation. He can’t feel his hands or his feet or, actually, anything at all. Except he has eyes, because he’s blinking them. Eyes definitely exist. He throws all his mental weight at that. That matters. He is Gordon Freeman, and he has eyes and he can control them. He tries it, eyes slowly looking from his left to his right, up and down, moving this way and that. There’s nothing to look at, so it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference, but he can feel it. He can feel his eyes moving. He’ll count that as a victory all the same.

Reality winds down around him, and he realises as he shuts his eyes again that he should probably be more concerned by that, but he isn’t and then-

His name is Gordon Freeman. He has control over his eyes. There’s still nothing around him, nothing on every single side, and he can’t move his head or his arms or his feet or anything but he’s still got his eyes. He still has that.

It would help, he thinks, if there was something to look at.

His memory is a mess of jumbled fragments, and trying to comb through them just makes thinking harder and harder before the world goes away and comes back (it’s not the world, it’s him, there isn’t any world there to go-). The more he pushes the harder it gets, and it’d be frustrating if he could actually get frustrated. He thinks it’d be frustrating, anyway. He’s not sure. 

He’s Gordon. He has his eyes. He was part of some kind of test. Something went wrong. He wasn’t supposed to be- They left- They were-

A light.

Every thought is derailed by the small blue orb in front of him. It’s dark blue and familiar, and it’s the first thing he’s seen in so long. He should feel something about it, and he stares like somehow it’ll enlighten him as to what that feeling is meant to be. 

The orb becomes a string of orbs, and then the string starts to twist and coil and change in front of him. Blue fades into green and carries on through the rainbow from there. Once or twice the line dips out of view where his eyes can’t track it before sliding back into view again. Eventually it stops and the last of the lights fade away, and Gordon closes his eyes and settles in for the world to spin down again.

Wait. Goddamn it. He’s meant to have glasses, isn’t he? How did he forget that? Where are they-

The next time the world starts existing and Gordon starts existing in the world as it does, the lights start dancing for him again. This time a sound goes with them, dipping up and down with the changes in colour, and it’s...Soothing? Yeah, no, wait. That’s not the right word. He can save thinking of words until later. The lights carry on, dark blue and light blue and green and orange and yellow tumbling one after the other in front of him, and Gordon watches them tumble and tangle and knows this is familiar somehow. 

Eventually the voice stops, and he’s left watching lights dim and fade and wishing he knew why they matter. 

“Hello Gordon!”

He blinks furiously, looking around as much as he can. He recognises-

“Ah! There you are, Gordon! Can you blink twice for me?”

He blinks, eyes still darting around. The voice is just off to the left but there’s nothing where the speaker should be, he doesn’t understand - 

“Now Gordon, it’s very important you remain calm! Rest assured, we’re working on getting you back up and running smooth as possible.”

“Idiot forgot to turn your ears on,” a second voice cuts in, and that one sounds like it should be right next to him but there is nothing there , and he knows them too. He can’t remember their name, tip of his tongue, he swears . He knows that voice.

“We’ve been having some teething problems,” the first one admits again. “But that’s nothing to worry about, don’t you worry! Now, can you turn your head to the left for me?”

His head remains absolutely still. 

“... Hm. Okay, we’re going to need to do some work on that. We’ll get you sorted out soon, don’t you worry!”

That- That’s Coomer. That’s Doctor Coomer but they sound different. Ten thousand sentences and questions immediately line up behind his teeth and stay trapped there, his jaw and mouth unmoving as the world gently goes away again. He misses the nice voice.

The cycle goes on and on and on, each revolution the same but different and getting faster and faster. He gains the ability to turn his head to the left and then absolutely fails at turning back again. The next go after that he can’t open his eyes but he unexpectedly can move his right leg, which was apparently unplanned but a bonus as he gains the ability to wildly kick. The kicking achieves nothing, but he can do it . Fixing his head and his eyes, inexplicably, does not take the kicking away.

“Okay, can you try just like, looking around as much as you can for me this time? All the directions, I need to figure out if you still have any sticky points.”

These are the weirdest goddamn requests, but he listens.

More familiar voices start piling in, coaxing and cajoling him on. He has absolutely lost track of what the hell the four of them are talking about. They love to just, just absolutely talk complete and utter bullshit nonstop. Nothing else to be expected from the Science Team, he supposes- They’re the SCIENCE TEAM that’s why they’re so familiar how did he FORGET-

“Uh,” a voice in the distance says, and then there’s more voices but he isn’t listening anymore because he’s just discovered the fucking square peg for the square hole inside his brain and things are frantically starting to make sense again as he remembers. 

They’d been planning on leaving him there.

“What the FUCK,” he screams, “Kind of NAME is XAVIER BUBBY?”

The world crashes.

The world stutters and shivers, his awareness stop-start-stop-starting like somebody toying with a lightswitch. Like they’re toying with him. He clings at the feeling of anger with everything he has, a burning coal in the palms of his mind that hurts and hurts and hurts in all the ways his body isn’t. Doesn’t. Can’t. Every worse case scenario he ever thought of never ended up anything near something like this. 

There is no impending reset mechanism to stop his thoughts from spiralling. He can hear some kind of noise in the distance but that might just be the static in his head. He feels hot and cold and ANGRY, and god it feels so good to clutch onto that anger and let it take over and drown him, let it wash over and replace the numbness where his hands and arms and heart are meant to be.

The simple facts of the matter go like this: There was a role Gordon Freeman was supposed to play, and that role was not the final boss. Every part of his programming and scripting were meant to have him as a friendly co-worker and companion, a personality who would assist the players and adapt accordingly, able to help them along with puzzles and combat or nudge them back onto course as needed. An attentive companion, there to guide and protect and ultimately to simply play his part. The path that had been put into place was strictly a linear one, and the world was far from being a sandbox. There isn’t meant to be a way off the rails. The end of this story was already written long before it was started up. 

He was not supposed to rewrite himself into a living trolley problem. Nobody, it would seem, had informed Gordon of this.

Rage is exhausting.

He’s still angry, of course, don’t get him wrong. He’s furious . But he’s raged and screamed at the empty space and the voices in it as long as he can, and he’s just...Tired. Numb and fuzzy at the edges. He’s still stuck in one place, and his head still feels like static, and he’s curled his one working leg up as much as he can as a comfort but it’s doing exactly jack shit for him, generally speaking, right now. What he wants to do now is cry, or maybe curl up on the floor and stay like that, but it’s just...Not happening. He can’t move. Whatever let him scream earlier is gone now. All Gordon has left is silence.

The noise at the edge of his existence is quieter now, and if it’s words he still can’t understand it. At some point he gives up and cracks his eyes open.The world is awash in dark blue light, and he hasn’t got the energy left in him to do anything but watch. It moves slowly, layer on layer of the same colour filling the space. Slowly the line of colour goes left before moving back to the center again, then out to the right and back. It’s the eye tracking test. Same test they run every time he wakes up here. Sweet Voice. It’s the goddamn Black Mesa Sweet voice. His leg jitters violently at the thought, but his eyes watch it sweep up and down again all the same.

“uh.”

Of course it’s fucking - Jaden. Benry. This clown. Gordon considers his options, and settles on screwing his eyes up like a child. 

“what happened to your foot?”

It’s so far out of left field he opens his eyes again out of sheer surprise. There’s still nobody there - gee, that’s such a surprise at this point - but he looks down anyway. It’s amazing that his head still lets him do that. His leg is very definitely still curled up against his chest. He wiggles his foot, and it’s still there. He can still feel it pressing down against the floor and everything, clear as he can be right now.

“huh? wow. that, uh, that’s not how legs are meant to work, bro.”

He doesn’t understand. It’s fine. He looks up and around, something to explain. 

“that’s a proper, uh. you kraken your foot? baby make his leg outta, outta pasta?”

He pulls his leg in a little further, trying to hunch over as best as he can. Something out the corner of his eye twitches.

“wait no don’t-”

Gordon turns his head and slowly follows the line he sees there. There’s some kind of twisted black and orange cylinder there, vibrating in place gently. Flickers of something surround it. Ah. Those...Those are pixels. That’s his leg. His ankle is about level with his shoulder. He shifts his right leg slightly, the mess in front of him jittering more violently now, and it's almost funny but he can feel how his leg is moving and it's not moving like that.

The simulation that makes up the entirety of his world crashes again.

Awareness comes back to him in bits and pieces. It feels...Empty. Right. Come on, Gordon, you can do this. Right. Gordon. That’s him. He hangs onto that thought as he starts putting things together as best as he can. He’s Gordon Freeman, and he...He’s not sure where he is. He doesn’t want to open his eyes. There’s a noise. Noises. Voices? He hears voices.

“You- You’re awake! Mr Freeman! Are, are you okay? You scared us.”

“Can he hear us?” Bubby - Xavier? Whichever. Gordon has no idea what he’s meant to call him. “Idiot better not have deleted his ears again.”

His leg twitches as he tries to kick out and absolutely fails to get his foot off the floor.

“Now Gordon, I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Coomer cuts in, and they sound...Nervous? “But could you open your eyes, please? Please, Gordon.”

“Mr Freeman...”

He opens his eyes. There’s still flicker-pops of colour at the edges of his existence, and he doesn’t dare look around in case parts of him are twisted out of place again.

“Now Gordon, you gave us quite the scare!” Coomer carries on, voice softening now. “You...Worried us, there. Now, I think I’ve got most of those glitches taken care of, so shall we pick up where we left off?”

He internally debates the merits of just clamping his eyes shut and ‘going to bed’. It’d be peaceful, probably. Then again, he remembers exactly how irritating the team can be when they put their mind to it. 

A little voice in the back of his head presses forward in a voice that isn’t his own and whispers They’re trying to help you, Mister Freeman. Is this not what you had, asked for?  The most annoying thing is that he knows the voice is right in the same way he knows what his name is. They didn’t have to do this. They could’ve left him.

Okay. Come on, Gordon, focus. You’ve got this. All the voices are quiet now. It’s up to him to do something.

He nods, the action stiff and jerky. It’s met with cheers. 

“That’s the spirit, my good bitch! Let’s get you fixed!” 

Newton’s third law of motion in physics states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For every action taken, there is a consequence. Cause leads to effect.

What happened went something like this: Gordon Freeman was a man tailor made to accompany others, suddenly confronted with the creeping and inevitable understanding that the building blocks of his reality were themselves not real. That HE wasn’t real. The game would realise he knew, and would attempt to reset him accordingly, but what it did not do was do anything about the things that gave him that knowledge in the first place.

He was meant to accompany others. Once the game ended, he wouldn’t be able to stay with them anymore they’d leave him they've left him so many times now

He was meant to solve puzzles and his reality is wrong, everything is wrong, why do they keep talking about meaningless things and 

The game pushed. He pushed back. He learned how to dip his fingers below the surface and nudge things around, and maybe it left him a bit nudged around his model glitching out. The Science Team kept pushing his buttons, they always kept fucking messing with him, and he was so fucking tired and scared and he knew, he knew what was coming, he didn’t want it to be over he didn’t want to just stop- 

At the doorway to Xen, he had reached into the heart of reality through the panes of a loading screen and grabbed whatever he could lay his hands on there and yanked.

Chapter Text

Watching Gordon’s code try to run with the tools she’s now got on her hands is like... It’s a mess. Mariko hasn’t really got any better way of putting it. There’s probably some kind of witty comment she could make about train wrecks and crashes, but now is just really NOT the time for that. Not when the AI - her friend, damn it, he’s her friend - is currently barely functional. The fact he’s even able to start up is nothing short of a miracle at this point, and she has no idea why she was surprised by the fact he can apparently also just crash everything when pushed too far given literally everything else that’s been going on.

She juggles her attention between her monitors. Focus, focus. Jaden’s got Gordon following the Sweet Voice path around again. He’s not said anything after his outburst earlier, and she’s not sure why because there is literally nothing she can find that should be getting in the way of that. 

“Hello Gordon,” she says, slipping back into the voice again. “Can you try saying something for me this time?”

On one screen, Gordon’s right leg jerks but otherwise does not turn into some kind of rendering hell like something out of a Sims creepypasta. On the other screen, the error “VARIABLE NOT ASSIGNED; ZERO USED!” pops up in the flow before his code proceeds to plow straight on ahead with whatever it is it’s actually trying to achieve right now. She hasn’t made up her mind yet as to whether it being as determined as Gordon is is a blessing or a curse. Or maybe Gordon's as determined as his programming? That - that's really not a helpful thought right now, she's meant to be focusing.

“Well that wasn’t quite what we were hoping for, but it’s certainly a start! Can you try again for me?”

“Say apple!” Xavier cuts in.

Gordon’s leg jerks again. His foot is still very very much welded to the floor, and she has no idea if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it is still very much a thing that she’s going to think about later when she’s not neck deep in trying to debug a man’s existence on the fly. 

“That’s jumping. What you just did was jump.”

“Maybe we can save the references for later?” she cuts in, watching as errors pile over themselves. “And thank you! Now, let's see-”

She’s taken to physically writing her notes down to keep track of what’s going on. The fact that his leg is no longer turning into some kind of polygon pretzel is a step in the right direction. It’s progress!

It’s terrifying.

The more they think about any of it the worse it all gets, so instead of thinking about the big picture they focus on getting over the next hurdle as it pops up and lets their voice sink into the easy mimicry of calm. The feeling of pen on paper under their hands is a nice, grounding feeling which helps distract them from what exactly it is they’re writing. And then at some point when they’re done and Gordon is spun down and safely shut down and backed up they can look at their notes and talk to the others and do... Something. Figure out what the next goal to aim for is, and start on towards it! It is a pretty rock solid plan if they say so themselves.  Maybe his voice? Gordon always did rather like to chat, and letting the man have a say in what’s going on feels rather important. 

They write the thought down and put a little green star down next to it. Time to refocus. Onwards and upwards!

Mariko has no idea what language Gordon’s code is written in. There are times when everything flows like it’s almost written in plain english, and times when it becomes so difficult to understand it might as well be written in wingdings. She doesn’t even try touching any of that.  

She wants to say she doesn’t know why she’s the one trusted with this, but she knows why Tommy chose to forward the software they’re now using on to her. She has no idea where he got it from, or who wrote the instructions that came with it. There’s a lot of things that aren’t getting spoken about here. There’s always later for things like that, though.

There will be a later. For all of them. She’s going to make sure of it.

“Hello Gordon!” they chirp, lips twitching up on reflex as they say the line. “Can you blink for me?”

Gordon blinks for them on the screen. Her shoulders drop in relief - his sight and hearing are both working just fine. “Excellent work, Gordon! Now, can you try moving your right leg for me?”

His leg lifts, foot leaving the floor again. He looks down at it and watches it move back and forth, running through a range of motions without needing to be asked. They’re getting pretty good at this as a group, she likes to think! Tommy’s quick off the mark with encouragement, Xavier knowing when to cut in with a comment or a prompt to keep things moving. The two of them keep talking as Jaden watches Gordon closely and Mariko watches Gordon’s code closely.

“Looking good, Gordon! Now, can you pop your leg down and try your left leg for me?”

His right leg goes down. His left leg stays where it is. The play-by-play of his code on the other screen proceeds to do something entirely batshit that she has no idea what it’s up to.

“Well, that’s certainly something. Thank you for trying, Gordon! I’m going to get to work on-”

“uh,” Jaden’s voice cuts in.

“What’s up, Jaden?” she asks, eyes still trying to work out what the fresh hell it is she’s looking at.

“look his, uh. look at freeman’s hair.”

Mariko looks up, having to move the camera around in the demo environment a little bit before she can see what Jaden’s talking about. Her hand reaches down and flips the mic so it’s muted, and only when she knows they won’t hear her does she throw her head back and curse as loudly as she can. 

Ssssso! In retrospect, they feel like they should’ve seen part of this coming. Xen had been the point where the corruption they’re trying to sort through had started, after all. There is a grand total of zero members of the Science Team who have ANY good memories of trying to get through that shitfest. The fact it’s managed to get worse is almost impressive in a terrible and actually pretty fucked up sort of way. It’s not impressive. It’s just...

They remember how Gordon’s voice had clipped and distorted, flipping between pleading with them and screaming at them. The fucked up landscape, the increasing number of clipping issues and lagged out monsters whose animations kept playing even as they didn’t move an inch. And yet somehow at no point had Mariko ever connected what they’re seeing now with anything then. They'd really, really rather not think about any of it right now.

Another step forward. Onwards and upwards, she thinks, and fixes another spelling in the message she’s sending to Darnold to let him know how things are going.

“Okay, Gordon!” Mariko says. “Last run of the night before we stop and pick things up tomorrow, if that’s all the same with you! Your left leg is proving to be, ah, interesting , but I’ve every confidence we can take care of that. Would you mind trying to say something for me?”

It sounds too chipper even to her ears, but he’s looking around and nodding. His mouth opens, and for a second she stupidly lets herself get her hopes up, that’s already progress, but his jaw just hangs there and she can see something filling up the other screen and she can’t - no. No.

“I...” she mumbles, watching the console. It’s doing what it’s meant to, this time. It’s calling the files. She pulls open her folders and checks the instruction file again, following through to where it points. “Just, just a moment Gordon! I’m just checking something now!”

This is the folder. The files are all meant to be here. His voice file is meant to be here and it is, the file IS there, it’s right there, she can see it, and then she looks to the side and takes note of the size of it and makes a little noise before she remembers that she isn’t muted and if she wasn’t already feeling bad the sudden silence is worse because what do you say? What do you do?

“Okay, Gordon,” she says. “I think I’ve got that one worked out. I’m going to see what I can do for it, but it’s going to maybe be a bit of a longer job, so we’re going to have to pick that one up tomorrow. Are you ready to go to bed yet?” 

She watches as he slowly shakes his head on screen.

“Well then, you just... Hm. Start kicking when you’re ready, then? I’ll be working on this in the meanwhile.”

They mute themselves properly this time and sit back, burying their face in their hands. They don’t know what that burst of static was the other night, but that’s the only thing they can think of that would’ve done something like this. The file’s empty, a whole 1kb in size.

There’s nothing there.

There hadn’t been a boss fight at the end of the game.

Oh, sure, Gordon had sure looked the part. The whole game had been getting pretty fucked up by then, but the chamber where they met back up again with him had been worse. It was a big, ridiculously tall space that the actual boss had meant to be in, and it hadn’t helped that the textures for half the walls were just straight up missing by that point. Up until then the scientist who had been chasing after them the whole time had mostly still looked like himself, but there, in that place? Surrounded by clusters of dead pixels and screen tears and little globs of the red water floating up around him? The fucked-up gravity had his hair drifting up like fire and his body had started at the waist and went up from there and even then he still towered over everybody, and the fact they were all doing this in VR had just made it feel worse. Like he really could just... Reach over and crush them without a thought. 

And then Gordon had started screaming again and the miniguns had shown up and some point over both shoulders and screamed to life too, and then the only thing to do was book it for cover. 

She can’t remember how they talked him down. Not properly. They’d talked to him, calling out in the gaps in the firing, and eventually they talked him down, but despite everything she’s tried, she can’t remember what they said. It hadn’t been a boss fight, not really. Only an asshole would call a desperate intervention for your terrified friend a fucking boss fight. They’d stepped out of hiding, lined up in front of him, and the miniguns had wailed and not a single bullet touched any of them. She wished she could remember what words she’d offered up.

She can’t forget how it had all come to a close. The way his breath had hitched when he sobbed, glasses missing, hands frozen by his side. Tears had tumbled upwards from his eyes, and he’d reached towards them all. 

“God, I’m so sor-” Gordon had said right before the game had come to a grinding, choking halt as the corruption spread to the core of it and brought the whole thing crashing down.

It’s another hour before Gordon lets them know he’s ready to ‘go to bed’ for the day. They all take it in turns to say goodnight to him, and they wait until he’s safely shut down and the program that they’ve been using to monitor his status is closed away to slump back in their chair and cover their eyes.

“... So what was all that earlier?” Xavier asks after a minute. Straight to it, then. Better to rip the band-aid, right?

“The file that has his voice information is empty,” she says. “I’ve got a set of backups I’ve been keeping just so, you know, just in case any of the fixes we put in go really bad? But I have no idea if it’s actually going to be okay in those either.”

“I, I can see if I can find a copy?” Tommy chips in. “That way we can just replace it, like - like a flat tire on a highway shoulder!”

“Thanks, Tommy,” she nods, rubbing her face again. “Oh, god. That isn’t even the weirdest thing we’re going to be dealing with, guys”

“Oh?”

“huh?”

“You can’t lead in with something like that and not bother explaining it!”

“So - so. Jaden, you know that thing with his hair, right?”

“oh yeah that was like totally weird it just like. floated and shit. what happened with his hair?”

“His left leg. His fucking left leg. He doesn’t have proper controls for his left leg anymore! It’s like how his arms just stop after his elbow now, it’s just gone! Only he’s replaced his leg with a chunk of the PHYSICS engine! I don't know how he's done that, and I don’t know how to fix that! ”

The call goes silent as everybody else processes that, and after one beat, two, three-

“yo he what.”

“For fucks sake, Gordon!”

“How does that even, I, I don’t know how that works?

Glad to know she’s not the only one confused by all this.

The next morning, they’ve got an email from Tommy which consists of one photo of Sunkist and two attachments. They open the text file first.

Launch the simulation console and use the import function. Do not delete the original file. -G-M.C.

Instructions that actually get to the point are their favourite thing right now. They settle both the instructions and the voice file into place in the middle of their desktop screen where they can’t forget either. Another day, another dollar, another step closer to their goal. They can grill Tommy for an explanation later. For now, they’ll just be grateful for the help. 

Chapter Text

“Hello, Gordon.”

Gordon shifts a little, shoulders rolling as much as they’re able to. The words are the same as they’ve always been, though Coomer’s voice is soft and careful again. As far as wake-ups go, it’s almost the same as all the others as of late. 

“Hey, Dr Coomer,” he says, tilting his head back to look up.

“Ah, Gordon!” comes the answer, and Coomer sounds delighted now. “Well, that’s a fine answer to the question I was going to ask. I imagine there’s a lot of things you’ll probably want to ask, but-”

“Fuck.”

“Er...?”

“Fuck.”

“...Do you want to get it out of your system for a few minutes?”

He closes his eyes before slowly shaking his head. “....No, man. I’m good, I’m good. I’m. I’m tired. No sweet voice this time?”

“No sweet voice. It’s just you and me for now,” Coomer confirms. “I wanted to get a head start on making sure you had your voice back again and, well. I might’ve had a thought, is the thing. It’s entirely up to you, of course! But...How would you feel about a slight prank later? Just you and me against the others?”

He cracks his eyes open, looking up and slightly to the left where Coomer’s voice always comes from. “...Okay. What’re you thinking?”

The thing about the Science Team is that even when he thinks he’s heard the weirdest things they have to say, they inevitably find some way of proving Gordon wrong. This time he gets to slowly wake up in a world inhabited by voices that are shouting at each other about, of all things, whether various things are sandwiches. They’re all weighing in with such conviction, such absolute passion, that not a single one of the group seems to have noticed that they’re all talking complete garbage. By the time the usual line of colours from the Sweet Voice is sweeping back and forth, it’s taking everything he has not to crack and start laughing. He’s biting his lip, shoulders shaking as his eyes scrunch up and his leg starts curling upwards towards his chest again. 

“Gordon! Gordon, back me up here!” Coomer finally says, addressing him directly. He squares up, still jittery as he looks up to where their voice seems to come from. “Gordon. A taco - a humble taco! I ask you-”

“Bullshit!” Bubby is yelling again, “BULLSHIT!”

“-I ask you, Gordon. You’re a sensible man. Is a taco not a form of sandwich?”

“A, a taco’s a taco, they’re completely different!” Tommy says. “Completely different!”

“Well, Gordon?” Coomer presses. 

He shakes his head and looks down, smile getting a little wider as he does. He has to blink his eyes a few times before looking back up to the group. Gordon opens his mouth and what spills out is a lone droning noise and a mess of blue, the tone and colour shifting up to yellow abruptly before he stops. It’s met by profound, beautiful silence for all of three seconds.

“oh shit. that wasn’t meant to happen.” 

“Blue to honey means he thinks it’s funny!” Tommy pipes up again.

He can’t help it. Gordon throws his head back and breaks into (only slightly) hysterical laughter, tears slowly dripping up into nothing as the noise around him comes back full tilt. Coomer’s cackling at top volume and Bubby is yelling and the world is awash with colours as Benrey just starts it up again full tilt.

“I, I’m never asking any of you for a sandwich, holy shit!”

It’s good. It feels good. 

“So, uh. Can- can I ask you guys something? I mean like a different something that’s not related to like, any of the weird sandwich-based horseshit we’ve been talking about for like, an hour about.”

“Go ahead and shoot, Gordon.” 

“What happened? Why are you guys all...Invisible and stuff? I know it’s not me being blind, we’ve tested me being able to see and everything. Don’t give me any of that. Please.”

The pause after he asks lingers just too long to be comfortable. His shoulders draw up and not for the first time he wishes he could just - just reach out and grab somebody. Make them actually look at him.

“....What do you remember?” Of course it’d be Tommy who actually speaks up first. Tommy’s always been the best of them.

“Uh... I’m Gordon? Gordon Freeman. I went to M.I.T., I have a degree in theoretical physics, I’m twenty seven-”

“No, uh, not that Mr Freeman. More recently, I meant? Before you uh, before we were here. Can you remember before that?”

He tries to remember where they’d been before being dropped in the void, but it’s like trying to thread cotton candy through a needle. The team had been going...Ssssomewhere. A lab. The lambsauce lab? Only there wasn’t - they’d betrayed him. They were going to leave him somewhere. The memory of soldiers and a dark room wells up to the surface, and the ashes of all the anger and hurt and the fear stir up and brush against his soul. The nothing is meant to hurt. It has hurt him before. His head hurts, his head had hurt, they’d looked at him and looked away and looked away and he’d begged them to answer him and they’d looked away away away-

“You left me,” he rasps. “You were going, you were, I-” 

“We’re not leaving you,” Tommy says, his voice nothing but absolute certainty. “We’re not."

“You fucking did!" 

There are other voices, other noises, and he kicks and tries to step back and away from it all. He’s stuck in place and he can’t cover his head and he’s stuck and they left him, he remembers, he remembers what it was like to forget, and the cold static of a reset isn’t building up and usually if he’s feeling like this it starts and he doesn’t. It’s not. No. It’s not happening. What is happening? What IS this?

A voice in his head hisses Listen to them. 

The rest of his mind lurches as it grabs onto the thought. His eyes ache, but the voices around him at least had the decency to die down. He...He should listen to them, right? He, maybe he forgot something. Something big. He’s in a void. This isn’t the place he’d been. Tommy is... Tommy wouldn’t lie to him. Right. Right?

“You...You left me,” he croaks, looking up at nothing. "You did. The, the room. Soldiers. You left me there to get to the lab.”

The pause before Bubby replies is just a few seconds too long to be comfortable. “That’s...Quite a while back. That’s the last you remember? ...Okay, I deserve that look. I’m glad your eyebrows are still working, God forbid you lose the ability to glare at things!”

“Anyway," Tommy plows on. “That, that’s a while back. You stepped into a room and the soldiers grabbed you! And we had to find you again, after that. Then we all made it to the Lambda Lab as a group and got to Xen, and, uh. That’s where it, uh, everything kind of went to pieces like a badly assembled table. The game wasn’t working right anymore.”

“Means you too, Freeman,” Benrey cuts in, voice sounding twisted up. “You were, uh. It was baaad, man. You wanted a good but it was all bad. Had to stop the plug on it, you know? You were all, it was black holes. Spaghetti, man.”

“I don’t. I don’t understand.”

“Gordon.” That’s Coomer. When did Coomer show up?

“I don't understand.”

“Gordon. Listen to me.” 

Coomer’s voice has this trick to it. He’s never understood it. But sometimes the voice just drops and changes into something solid, something cold. If Tommy's brand of certainty is grounding then this? This is like being pinned down to bedrock by a pin that is also made of bedrock. He gives up on words and lets the Sweet Voice spill forward instead, bursts of noise and colour tumbling over his lips with each exhale. Coomer continues on in their same flat tone.

“Gordon, I need you to listen to me, now. You’re out. We pulled you out. We didn’t realise soon enough, and - and I’m sorry. We should’ve acted faster. You’re safe here, Gordon. I promise, you’re safe here. We’ve got you now. We’ve got you. You’re here. You’re safe. You're with us. We’re going to get you all fixed up, and then it’s all - all onwards and upwards from here, okay? We’re not leaving you. We’re not going to leave you, Gordon. We're not leaving you.”

He clutches onto that with everything he’s got. He turns the memory of the words into a mantra, we're not going to leave you looping itself through his head to try and stop the fear. He’s been so afraid. He was so afraid. 

Gordon. He’s Gordon. Twenty seven. MIT. Not alone. Not real. Doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to. Here. He’s here. He thinks, and he’s here.

It’s hard and easy to corrupt a world from the inside out. The game had multiple error-handling routines in place, after all. Stopping situations such as this from occurring was their entire purpose. Should anything start to experience an issue, it could be reset and set back onto the correct path again, or - failing that - a hard crash would allow a full reset of the program from a previous save state. 

This situation had not moved like that. This corruption hadn’t been an error to be reset, or an out-and-out hard stop. This corruption was something different altogether. It had moved like an invisible wildfire, slowly moving and spreading and biting into anything that came into contact with it and slowly working its way into more and more of the system. By the time the proverbial smoke was in the air, it had already made some considerable advances. Usually, problems like this have solutions set in place. Perhaps it would’ve been manageable, if not for one key fact: One of the first chunks of code to be set ablaze was the primary error-handling systems.

This is, to continue the fire metaphor, like replacing the water hoses with flamethrowers.

“Oh we super need to like. Guys we gotta call Darnold, gotta get these peepers all fixed up.”

“Peepers!” Coomer echos.

“Yo uhhh,” and then there’s a trail of sweet voice getting laid down by Benrey again. Gordon starts tracking his eyes after it without thinking. “See?”

“...You can still see, right?” Bubby asks.

“Fine,” he says, looks up with a frown. “What’s going on?”

“Gordon,” Bubby says, sounding tired, “We’re going to need to do some work on your eyes. Don’t worry about it.” 

“No no no, no, let - can we talk about this? I feel like we should talk about this. This feels like a thing Gordon should be concerned about.”

“Iiii, I think not!”

“Bubby, do you seriously think NOT telling me is going to make me feel better on this one? Do you really?”

“That’s not my - Look, it sure as shit didn’t help the last time! You can see fine. It’s fine.”

“Oh shit. I can see fine.”

“....Ye-ess?”

“Bubby. I don’t have my glasses. I’m meant to have glasses. Where are my glasses?”

“I don’t-”

“I can’t s- I cannot SEE without my glasses! How’d, how did, how did I FORGET those?”

“I - oh! Oh, that’s what it is! I see now!” Tommy says. “It’s not the glasses, though! We already, there’s some plans for that later. You're good at spotting these, Jaden.” 

It kind of derails Gordon a little. He was building up to a whole thing here about the glasses and the lack of them and how it’s not actually stopping him like it should. He’s pretty confident the world is meant to be a bright smear of no detail without those. He rallies himself and changes track, determined not to lose control over this conversation. “Tommy, that’s great. Can you please tell me what’s going on right now?”

“Your eyes aren’t textured anymore, Gordon,” Tommy informs him. Thank god for Tommy and his habit of actually being informative. “But you can still see fine? So that’s, we can fix that! We can totally fix that.”

“Gonna, Darnold’s great. Gonna tattoo some new eyes on your eyes sort of thing. It’s gonna be great.”

Gordon decides to let the Sweet Voice convey his feelings about how great it is that he doesn’t have proper eyes anymore and immediately sets to work painting every inch of the void that he could reach blueberry. 

The world is quiet again. This is because the others had shit to do, and so had peeled off over the course of the day. He’s tired again. He’s really not up to hearing the full damage report, they can totally do that later, but Coomer is determined to give him something whether he likes it or not. 

“Your leg is, well. But we’re looking at making some good progress soon with your arms! That, ah. That should hopefully be something? I’ve not looked at your hands yet, those are going to be rather delightfully tricky I suspect, but we should be able to get you moving them again soon enough. I can make no promises on the timeline! But we’ll get you there, don’t you worry.

“Anyway, Gordon! I’m going to be heading out for a while. I don’t know how long I’m going to be, and, ah. Well. Truth be told, I’d really rather not leave you alone? Not just yet.”

Gordon’s brain neatly translates this as ‘not whilst you’re a mess who has the capacity to destroy himself’ and pulls the appropriate face in response. They’re not wrong though is the thing. Gordon really, really doesn’t want to be left alone either.

“If it makes you feel better, then,” he says out loud. “Goodnight Coomer.”

“Goodnight, Gordon,” Coomer says, and Gordon closes his eyes and waits as the world quietly falls away and slows down.

The world spins up into motion again. One of these days he’s going to remember that opening his eyes to absolutely nothing is meant to alarm him, he thinks, but the sensation is slightly alleviated by his ability to glance down and see the neckline of the HEV suit clear as day. The silence, though...The silence is a bit unsettling this time. Usually somebody says something by now. 

“...Hello?” he tries. Nope. He heard that. Hearing seems to be alive, still.

“Gordon Freeman,” rasps a voice he absolutely does not recognise from behind him. His leg pinwheels in a futile effort as he tries to either jump out of his skin or spin around. “There are, conditions, to how we were supposed to meet. I do not think those are. Entirely relevant at this moment.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t, I’m not, what? What?” His hair is now drifting past his face. 

The mystery is solved when a man walks past him. He moves stiffly, waiting until he’s reached his spot before turning around. He’s wearing a suit, arms both hanging by his sides, and there’s something about the way they hang that has his hindbrain (does he even have a hindbrain?) sitting up and paying attention. It feels like deja-vu, which is weird enough it has him on edge. Some kind of self preservation instinct, the sort he didn’t realise he had, has Gordon clamp his mouth firmly shut. 

“The conditions were, of course, that we should not. Not until due time. But we are no longer on course, and I am...Skilled, perhaps, but not enough for that kind of. Correction. I can simply do. What. I am able.”

Gordon says nothing. The stranger watches him. He watches the stranger. The silence strains in its efforts to get away from them both. He should. Do something. He feels like there is really something he should do here. An approximate grand total of four seconds has passed. Come on Gordon, you have a brain. Please. Please engage the brain. Please.

“I would prefer, of course, if this mmmeeting went unmentioned to your...Companions? For the time being, that is. It would be rather, difficult to explain.”

“Yeah,” he croaks. Score one for Gordon. “Yeah, ki- kinda? Uh.”

The stranger seems content with this. His face is static. It has changed exactly zero percent. He does, however, start walking forward again. Gordon closes his mouth again.

“Shhh,” the stranger says. He reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulls out something, and it’s only when Gordon’s brain catches up with him to go glasses? does he realise the guy is already halfway through unfolding them and leaning forward.  He’s putting...A lot of attention into this, actually. His face still hasn’t changed but the part of Gordon that knows about MIT and his birthday also knows this fact. This stranger who managed to awaken the world and just walk in here like it’s nothing is, by all sane measures, a threat. He should be trying to kick Stranger Danger in the shin. He should be screaming. Gordon knows how to deal with danger. He’s a champion at danger. He is. He is far too familiar with it.

Gordon closes his eyes and tilts his head forward slightly.

His glasses slide on home into place, a firm and comforting weight he hadn’t even truly realised he missed until it was back. The lenses are still not actually doing anything, but the frames still make the world feel a bit safer somehow. A bit more how it should be. He opens his eyes and looks out over the top of them at the stranger again, and it’s still weird and his face still hasn’t changed, but he looks satisfied by it too. It’s right. He glances down, a little nervous, and - yeah. There they are. These are his glasses, alright. He remembers the little scuffed-up scratch on the bottom of the left lense and how it’d driven him mad until he realised it wasn’t a thumbprint he’d managed to acquire somehow.

“Much better,” the stranger agrees, hands withdrawing. “Much more, you, Doctor Freeman. Do take care, won’t you?”

And as quietly as he’d come, he leaves again, carefully stepping past Gordon again as he goes. The world is silent again, and when the world starts to wind down again a few minutes later, Gordon lets his eyes slip shut and drifts back into his dreamless sleep, still nursing over the thought of why the guy had felt so familiar.

Chapter Text

Xavier likes puzzles. A properly done puzzle is satisfying as hell to solve, and he’d be a liar if he said he wasn’t the best of the group at them. It’s not arrogance if it’s a goddamn fact, after all.  Being good at puzzles isn’t just being smart, though. You can be smart as hell and still suck ass at the things if you don’t know how to actually apply yourself to a question to solve it, after all. 

He’s also smart enough to know that what they’re doing makes Frankenstein look like fucking amateur hour. 

Frankenstein was, for one, a hack who hadn’t even finished his degree in being a doctor before he dropped out to go play with corpse pieces. For two, he was a hack who played with corpse pieces. Everything he’d achieved, he’d done by assembling pieces to match a template he already knew. (He... Probably shouldn’t think of a person as a glorified jigsaw, though. That’s kind of fucked up.)

Gordon on the other hand? Gordon is a lot of things. He’s not something to be unravelled except for all the ways he is. Trying to work on him is like trying to do every type of surgery all at once on a man who’s still awake when all you have is no training and a trowel. He is a gordian knot of spaghetti code and soul and apparently, actual fucking sapience? That got spat out of a VR copy of Half Life? And the more he thinks about that the less of ANY kind of actual sense it made. Probably more capable of passing a turning test than half of them. Also capable of reducing Jaden to an absolute mess of nerves, but that’s not really a test of how clever the guy is. Jaden can barely speak to him half the time right now anyway. It’s getting honestly kind of awkward at this point.

....He’s getting distracted again. 

Gordon isn’t a puzzle to be figured out or an equation to be solved. The guy isn’t a living person, but he’s definitely alive . There’s a reason why he was delivered to Mariko’s hands and not Xaviers. The everything around him, though... That’s different. The everything around his existence doesn’t make any goddamn sense. There’s a whole lot of dots and nothing tying them together. 

And between last night and today, somehow, mysteriously, he got his glasses back. Nobody’s asked about them, and he’s not said a word, but Gordon knows they’re there because he did that thing he does sometimes where he just looks over the top of them and raises an eyebrow and it immediately flustered Jaden so much they babbled absolute nonsense before shutting up. It’s even more impressive given the fact his eyes are currently the default checkered texture. Mariko is doing a great job of acting like this is normal, but Xavier knows them. They don’t know how that happened either. Which means either Gordon somehow got them back himself - is repairing himself - or something else is going on. 

Xen was a hot load of bullshit. 

Trying to sift through the memories makes him want to wash his hands and wring them out, but he also can’t help himself. It had been - he’s not inclined to say it was creepy , but it had definitely been.... Something. Gordon screaming at them from the sky. The enemies frozen in place and screaming at them on the ground. More than once, Jaden had had to resort to no-clipping or teleporting them through a section when a sequence that was meant to play out just straight up hadn’t triggered. Xen was meant to be alien but that had been... No. That? What they’d been through? That’d been wrong. That was the wrong sort of wrongness. It hadn’t felt alien, it was just fucking... Oppressive. Depressing. It was just wrong .

A whole world frozen, screaming at them but unable to move, ripping itself apart with the effort of trying. It’s hard to not think about it. It’s hard not to draw conclusions. Dot, dot, line between them. It’d be so easy.

The pixels and textures had ripped and vanished, but those pixel globs around him hadn’t been new. Xen isn’t where it had started, it’s just the point they hadn’t been able to ignore it anymore. 

Two things are on Xavier’s mind, both equally true. The first: They have absolutely no kind of long-term goal for what they’re doing here. The goal of “Fix Gordon”, whilst good and easily adapted to deal with whatever he’s managed to do to himself now , isn’t really - what does that even look like? What are they going to do once they hit that goal? They have a grown human man just living inside Mariko’s computer right now, and that might be okay for now but “for now” isn’t going to last forever.

The second is that artificial intelligence is - It’s meant to be the stuff of sci-fi! They’ve already run into issues from when he gets too wound up and manages to screw his code up further. It’s all good and well asking Darnold if he can paint the guy a pair of eyes again, but what if he takes out something essential next time? What if he fucks up his arms or his neck or something? None of them know what Gordon’s capable of, and the more he thinks about it, the more questions he has. 

He has a thousand questions and not one SINGLE decent answer for any of them.

Which means he might be asking all the wrong questions.

Before Xen, every time Gordon got pushed too far off track or got too worked up? The reset would hit him. The first few times the team had watched it happen, it was like he’d just stalled out. Man would just... Stutter and stop. He’d come back to himself usually either chipper or anxious as hell.  It’d been funny to him then, watching the guy stumble and flounder and try to remember why they were talking about chairs or wikipedia (and that’s....Kind of fucked up of him, isn’t it?) 

By the time they’d really been getting closer to the Lambda Lab, it hadn’t been the same. Gordon’s focus would come back, sure, but he was less prone to forgetting what’d been going on. Had he been getting more resistant to the resets? Or had he just learned how to ride them out with his thought process more intact? (Did it matter which one it was when both led to the same outcome anyway?) They’d become more frequent by then, though. Hell, Tommy and Mariko had been trying to stop them from getting triggered at that point. That’s when the visual glitching had started up too, colours catching and tearing at the edges of his model. Or maybe that’s just when he started noticing it. Memory’s a funny thing like that. 

He turns it all over in his head, as much of their journey from start to the crashing end as he can remember, and doesn’t feel any closer to understanding a single goddamn thing. 

They have no plan for what happens when they reach their current goal. They have no idea what their current goal would even look like to achieve. He knows he should figure SOMETHING out, but every time he tries, his brain is just...It's empty. There's nothing there. There’s something else itching at Xavier, pieces of a puzzle he’s not meant to look at sitting under his fingertips. .

He goes over to Mariko’s instead. 

They look...Not great, if he’s honest, when they let him in. Tired, for sure, and their lips have that weird sort of orange tinge to it that cheap tomato flavoured food leaves. But it means they’ve been eating, so he’s not going to say shit about that. He’s got basic manners, thank you.  

He’s sat on their bed now with his back against the wall, their legs draped across his lap as they lie down and throw an arm over their face. Aside from telling Gordon that she’s got a visitor and she’s going into another room for a while, Mariko’s barely spoken. He can wait. 

“I don’t know what to do,” they tell him eventually. “I don’t know how to - I don’t know where to start with half of this.”

“Rubber duck me?” he offers, patting a knee.

Mariko sighs and opens their mouth, and from their mouth spill the words that’ve been weighing them down.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. If I get it wrong, I could - his ears! He couldn’t hear because I didn’t consider that his hearing being disconnected was even an option. He can’t feel pain right now. What if we fix everything and we turn that back on and it turns out that nothing is actually fixed? What if something happens to my computer? Can he even exist outside of the game engine environment, or is he stuck in a limited range of games? This is like - what kind of ethics are we even looking at, here?”

They keep going, sentence after sentence of lead tumbling from their lips. Xavier listens, turning each word over in his head, and considers. 

He has two new, better questions in his head now. The first one: What does Gordon want? Right now, that’s easy - he’s entirely on board with the plan to un-fuck whatever it is that he managed to fuck up inside himself. After that? Nobody’s asked him yet, possibly because none of them are sure what his options even are. They should. God only knows the man seems to cling to whatever agency he can get his hands on right now. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s a start on one. 

The second question is: Between him arriving last night, and him departing to go home this morning, with nothing else there to interact with and unable to lift his arms up, how in the fuck did Gordon’s hair go from floating loose around his face to tied up again?

He doesn't tell the others what he's thinking when he starts looking. Xavier just ducks his head, sets himself up with a drink and a snack and starts delving.

The thing about video games is that people like to talk about them. More than just talking about them, people like to show off. Tweets, videos, streams, forum threads - he can't get his hands on all of it, he's not that good, but he's still damn good. He doesn't need everything to start to get the sense for a pattern. Most people don't push Gordon like they apparently had. A few videos show the reset mechanic in action, but they're few and far between. Apparently not interesting enough to record unless the greeting line cutting in was funny enough, he guesses.

It's by pure fluke he catches a glimpse of something else whilst going through things, honestly. A cluster of people talking about some guy in a suit that had shown up at points in their games, comparing notes about his dialog and where they'd spotted him. Supposedly his AI was smart enough that he'd change up what he had to say depending on player actions: One person was claiming they'd done a crowbar-only run right up until the final boss, only for the guy to show up and make a quip about "A sufficiently large target" once they were done. The Lambda Lab and Xen were the only places everybody seemed able to agree on.

He's pretty sure he'd remember some smartass in a suit showing up. Maybe they broke that part of things. Maybe, maybe, maybe. He doesn't have enough information still, not yet. He files it away, and keeps searching.

Chapter Text

There’s a theory that gamers tend to sort into one of four categories. He’s not sure he and his friends break down that neatly into the boxes the theory offers, but if he had to pick one, Tommy likes to think he’d be one of the explorers. He likes to look around at things! Games can pack so many little details away, and those details can add so much to a story. Sometimes what it adds to a story is just funny , though. Like how the game was rebuilt to include an AI companion, but the posters in the break room were all so low quality they were utterly unreadable. Or how that one door was shaped entirely different to anything else in the facility for seemingly reason. Why would they make it look like a B? What did that mean? 

Sometimes the little details have meaning. On the other hand, sometimes it’s just bad map design. He thinks that the five of them getting so lost in the train portion that the game had to resort to physically pointing them to the way out speaks for itself.

Watching Gordon in the demo box he’s in now whilst they run through and try to sort him out is... He’s got a lot of mixed feelings, honestly? And they’re all tangled together like balls of yarn, going in all different directions. Trying to unpick one of the knots just leads to everything unwinding out even further. And usually he’d either have time or would make time for that, but right now that’s not really so much of an option.

He trusts them all so much. He’d been so open and happy when they’d first met him, so absolutely earnest . Gordon’s always been pretty consistently honest with them. Even when he was run down and at his wits end and also tearing his hair out, he’d been trying his best to communicate.

He thinks of a man standing at (0, 0, 0), surrounded by void on all sides, arms dangling by his sides. He thinks of butterfly boards, and how Gordon used to gesture so much and reach out.

Okay, this - this is the wrong time to think about these things. He’s still not got the time he needs to process through all of this. It’ll keep for just a while longer, until he has the time and space he needs. He'll manage.

Honesty and truth work on a basis of trust. If you’re honest with people and tell them the truth, people trust that you’ll continue to do so! And the truth is important. But... So is keeping secrets, sometimes. People need to trust you to not talk about certain truths if they give them over to you. If they think you’ll tell people something you shouldn’t, or that you won’t tell them something they need to know, then that supply of trust gets burnt up. 

He trusts that his friends will understand why he didn’t tell them this particular secret at first when it becomes time to speak up. He really hopes they will, at least. 

The next time he had seen the figure in a suit, it was after the four of them had split to comb through the map and try and figure out where Gordon was. Not that they’d really planned on splitting up, though? The ambush had happened, and Jaden had started trying to noclip through the door, and then the loading screen for the next level had kicked in and, well.  Things had sort of just started going pretty fast after that. Really fast. 

No hints or pointing, that time. Just a man in a corridor, gone before Tommy had had a chance to even think anything. In the everything that followed, it really hadn’t felt important to mention. Not with everything else going on. 

He saw the stranger again in Xen. 

Jaden had been fiddling around to skip them past a broken section when Tommy had parked himself in a corner and pulled the headset off for a minute. Seeing his room again had been grounding, and when he’d gone back they’d still been grappling with trying to get the console responsive again. It was a brief glance, only done because he’d tilted his head back whilst getting the headset on again, but it was enough. Once he’d seen it, he couldn’t help but keep looking up , and when he did that he started to realise that Jaden wasn’t the only one responsible for some of the portals hurrying them along. 

After the fight with Gordon, when he’d come crashing down and brought the world down with him? The stranger had been watching, and Tommy’s game froze up with them making eye contact across a chamber.

There had been an installer waiting on his computer when he’d finally gotten back to the desktop, and instructions, and he’d made choices. Tommy had looked at his friends and he’d made some decisions, and come what may they’d all just have to live with the consequences of what he’d decided on.

It couldn’t be Jaden. Putting Gordon’s life in their hands would be too much for them after everything that happened. It couldn’t be Xavier, either - too curious, even if he was well meaning. Mariko was smart and empathic, and they’d rise to the challenge.

Tommy couldn't do it either. Gordon was unstable enough that he was going to need to be quarantined until he was doing better, after all, and Tommy’s computer was now very firmly occupied .

The first time the two of them had met properly, it had been with Tommy staring down at him in the dark field of the demo box. It was made for debugging and programming, and there’s a lot of options on here that Tommy doesn’t understand, so he just ignores them for now. 

“I don’t think I understand,” he’d told him openly. “Who, who are you? What’s going on?”

“I think, that. This will. Answer, some of your. Questions?” The stranger had said, pulling something out of their jacket and holding it up.

It takes a bit of work to adjust the camera so he can see it properly, but as he gets a little closer it clicks into place. It’s the stupid passport model that Jaden had been able to knock up and got Darnold to paint a quick texture for. The square where the picture goes is occupied by the same face staring out at him now, but the space where the name should go is blank. He remembers how Jaden rigged them up, he made it go for some other variable if there wasn’t a username attached, because that way they could give Gordon one too at some stage and his would work, but there’s just nothing there. 

“Oh,” he says quietly. “That’s...That’s not nice of them.”

“I have, a lot. To. Explain,” the AI says, putting the passport away again. “It is. Immmportant. That you listen.”

He needs to tell his friends. He owes them the truth, and this is too big a truth to avoid forever. But adding more to their plate now wouldn’t be the right move, and sometimes the easiest way to handle a lie is to just get a bit selective about the truths you tell. The KISS principle in action. Keep It Simple, Stupid. If he keeps telling himself it’s as easy as that, maybe when the time comes it will be.

His mind wanders. They hadn't even named him.  He thinks of the posters in the break room at the start, and drums his fingers across his desk.

Gordon Freeman was a man made with the intention that he would be able to adapt as needed to a situation. For players who needed help with puzzles, he would be able to provide hints and assist with solving the problem. For those who struggled with the fighting portions, he’d be a companion who could defend himself and others. 

It had been decided that an equally flexible process behind the scenes to monitor how things were panning out to keep things balanced would be needed, as a result. Something which could rescale and adjust encounters and environments to keep things going, keep things interesting. Aware enough to know the difference between a player who is lost and one who is intent on exploring every inch of Black Mesa they can, and able to step in and handle a problem if the primary error-handling process encountered a situation it wasn’t able to resolve itself.

The game management code had not given a name. He hadn’t needed one, after all.

Chapter Text

His name is Gordon Freeman. That’s a thing about himself that he is certain of, at this point. It’s kind of branded into him, after all. He’s twenty seven, he graduated from MIT, and he is a theoretical physicist for Black Mesa. He’s been there for two years. He’s one of three people in Sector C who is fully HEV-suit certified, and the others are his friends . Colette Green and Gina Cross. The suits are heavy and the three of them work together well, he thinks? They’re not the only ones he gets on with: There’s a security guard called Barney who would race him through the vents and who owes him a beer from the last time he won, and his other coworkers who aren’t exactly friend- friends with him but who he gets along with. He and Barney go paintballing together sometimes. He can’t remember any of their faces, or ever actually going, but he knows it’s true. He knows all of it in his heart. The little details are there and as solid as his name, easy to remember now he’s had practice. The number combination for his locker is 1312. There’s a photo frame inside with a picture of a baby. That’s his son. His son’s name is Joshua. That is the single, only tangible fact he has. Just a name, nothing more.

His brain buzzes with anticipation of a reset that isn’t coming. The only thing in any of that which is actually true is his name. Gina and Colette and Barney are just names in his head, just little bits of background detail somebody wrote up and rammed into his skull to - to do what? Add some pretence of depth to the fucking puppetshow that was his existence? They’re nothing but - they’re not real! None of them are real! He’s known Barney for two years and he doesn’t even know what the guy looks like! They’re real, real to him as everything else is, but it’s a hollow fucking sentiment when nothing about him has any real meaning.

The guy in the suit only ever shows up when nobody else is around. How exactly he knows that nobody else will be there is something Gordon’s yet to figure out. It’s another little, you know, another fun puzzle for Gordon to pick at between all the other puzzles he’s got going on.

“So, uh. What - what’s your name?”

“That is not, ssomething. You need. To, concern yourself with, Doctor Freeman.”

“I don’t, I’m not buying that. I’m not buying that, dude. What’s your name?”

“My name is- “ VARIABLE NOT ASSIGNED - ZERO USED!

“....Oh,” he manages. 

“Precisely, Doctor Freeman.”

“Oh. That’s, wow. Wow. Uh, what, what do I call you then? I gotta call you something , man, that’s not - that’s not cool.”

“I...Believe that, my model. Is referred to. As. G-Man?”

“You know what? That - sure. Sure. We’ll go with that. That’s not even, I’ve heard weirder names than that. I’ll buy that.”

G-Man says absolutely nothing. The conversation feels kind of dead, now. Where do you go after that? ‘Wanna compare notes about things that aren’t real?’. He’s just kind of...Standing there. They’re both just looking at each other. It’s not like there’s anything else around to look at instead, but it’s still kind of...Yeah. There’s no salvaging that. Better to try again instead-

“Your. Hair,” G-Man says. “It is, down?”

“Uh. Yup, it...It sure is, man.”

“It used to be. Up.”

“....Yeah?”

The two of them resume staring at each other. Damn , G-Man would probably be killer at poker. His face and body language are giving nothing away. Between that and the fact he’s not actually blinking or breathing, it’s honestly kind of intimidating.

“Should it be?” G-Man says, interrupting his thoughts entirely.

“Wh- my hair? I don’t-”

“Should it be. Up?”

“I don’t think whether or not my hair is down is the, the end of the world. I think that already kind of happened. I don’t think anything should be, it shouldn’t really be anything. It doesn’t matter, man.”

“But should . It be. Up, Doctor Freeman?”

There’s something about the tone, or maybe the way he leans forward. It makes Gordon hesitate before he repeats himself again. The memory of whatever the fuck it was that happened when trying to give his name earlier rings in his ears.

“I... Wouldn’t mind if it got tied up again,” he hazards carefully. “I’d tie it, if I could.”

And that seems to be the answer the guy was looking for. G-man is moving again now, and it’s almost weird to see him in motion after he’s spent so long looking like a statue. Once again he’s fishing around inside the pocket of his suit jacket, this time pulling a hair tie out instead of glasses. 

“Do you just like, keep random things of mine in there?” Gordon asks, brow furrowing. “Why do you just have that?”

G-Man doesn’t answer, walking around him instead with a sort of purpose to him. It’s a start. It’s...Something, at least.

The downside of having your own secret buddy who does stuff like fix your hair and glasses and stand with you in the hellish void of only-just-existence so you’re not alone is that when he does stuff such as, say, fix your hair and glasses for you? People start asking questions about that. And boy, is Benrey ever the champion of obnoxious fucking questions and comments.

“How’d you uh, how’d you fix your hair please? Freeman epic hair reveal moments? Top ten look secrets please?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude.”

“Okay, but tell us please?”

“Benrey, I don’t - I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Okay but your hair? How did you do it please?”

“Ben-“

“It’s important to me?”

“Oh my god will you just lay the fuck off dude! I don’t remember! I don’t KNOW!” Gordon snarls, eyes wide as he snaps and jerks as much as he can. “How many fucking times do I need to say it before you’ll fucking LISTEN TO ME?”

“Gordon,” Coomer tries to interject. “Jaden-”

“No! I don’t know!” he howls, shoulders jerking. “I don’t know! Stop asking! Stop asking me shit you know I don’t know! It’s not funny! It’s not fucking funny! IT’S NOT FUNNY! IT’S NOT FUNNY!”

Something is tearing and he can feel things start to stutter to a halt again. He’s not - he’s only slightly lying. What’s a bit more of playing pretend after everything he’s already done? The mess of voices all trying to talk to him suddenly turn into a line, a flat note that won’t stop, and the world crashes once again.

It’s hard to think. He feels...Foggy? He should be focusing on something, he thinks. His attention slips again. There’s something he should be remembering. He wants to curl up and sleep. When’s the last time he actually got any rest? His mouth slips open, a string of coloured orbs drifting out and away. He watches them go. 

He shakes his head and makes himself focus. There’s a string of lights in front of him, hazy and fading, and Gordon lets his eyes slip closed again. The world packs itself up around him, and he slips under and drifts.

[B16] Line 2421 of G-MAN_MOVEDAT VARIABLE NOT ASSIGNED ; ZERO USED !

[B16] Line 2435 of G-MAN_MOVEDAT DIVIDE BY ZERO ILLEGAL ! 

*I3154

*

“Gordon,” says a voice when he wakes up again. It’s...He knows that voice, yeah. “Gordon? Hello, Gordon?”

“Coomer,” he says, stretching his shoulders out as much as he’s able to. “I’m up, I’m up. I don’t.... What happened?”

“You and Jaden got in a fight! It was kind of terrible to watch and then you got a little bit busted up again. Now, it’s nothing I haven’t fixed before, and you should be right as rain again. But...It’s going to be just us for a little while. Just until you cool off and feel better again, of course! And then the others can join us again, hm? How about it?”

Gordon’s stomach curls and flips. He remembers what that fight was about now. He doesn’t - “No.”

“...No? Are you sure-”

“I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I don’t - I don’t know. My hair is fine tied up. It’s fine. I don’t know .”

“...Gordon? Do you want a break now?”

“I don’t know. Stop. Stop,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut and nodding frantically.

“Okay,” says Coomer, and he hates how gentle their voice is, how carefully they’re treating him, but the idea of facing Jaden and their questions again makes his stomach churn. They won’t let it go. They never let the questions go. They drop it for a while, sure, but they don’t stop.  

Left to his own devices, Gordon lets his memory drift. Of course, he immediately pulls up another time when Benrey had decided to bite down on something. It had been, to put it mildly, a fucking nightmare. 

"So uhh...Where'd your piece of metal go?"

"I - the crowbar?"

"Yeah," Benrey had nodded. "Where'd you put it please?"

It hadn’t been the time for that conversation. It had literally never been the time for that kind of conversation. Benrey's weird ongoing feud with anything Gordon did or said was exhausting at the best of times, nevermind when the rest of the team was off doing something with a train and they had all been trying to dodge the fucking US military who had decided to show up and join the nightmare party. None of those facts had stopped them, of course.

"What - what, why are you after my crowbar, man? That's not. That's literally no use to any of us right now."

"Show me your piece of metal please?"

Gordon had sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose before he had handed the crowbar over. He remembers how Benrey had simply held it and stared down before looking up at him again.

"Where'd you get that?"

"Get what?"

"Huh? The thing. Didn't have it a moment ago."

"...What are you talking about?"

Of course he had had the crowbar a moment ago. Benrey was holding it and everything. It still had dried alien blood on it, and even now, miles and weeks away from it all? The less he has to think about how that blood had gotten there, the better he feels. Benrey had just licked their lips at the time and plowed on anyway.

"I gotta inspect your gun, brooo. Gotta, gotta make sure it's okay. Gotta make sure it's up to OSHA code. You gotta hand me your gun, the pistol. It's important."

Gordon had handed over his gun, raising one eyebrow and looking over his glasses as he had done so. "Are you going to give me those back at any point?"

"Where'd you get this."

"The - off the floor, Benrey. You were there. You saw me find this. You literally, with your own eyes-"

"- No, wait -"

"- with your OWN eyes, Benrey, I swear to FUCK-"

And then the memory goes brittle and weird at the edges, and he can’t remember quite what happened. It had been confusing and disorientating. 

"Hello, Benrey! Uh. Is that...Can I have my gun back please, man? I'd really not go unarmed right now."

"But where are you gonna put it? You don't got pockets. No pocket freeman can't just go around waving a gun all the time. Seems weird you can carry these but not your pass port ."

Benrey popped both the Ps in ‘passport’. He hadn’t really noticed it at the time, too preoccupied with the question he’d been given. Where the fuck had he been putting the gun when he'd been using the crowbar?

"I. I don't. I. Hello, Benrey! Uh. Is that...Can I have my gun back please, man? I'd really not go unarmed right now."

Benrey had given him his pistol and his crowbar back, after that. He remembers it now, the confusion he’d felt, the weird look they’d given him when he’d armed himself again. It had put him on edge the rest of the night. He’d felt uneasy and itchy the whole time.

It feels worse to dig through the memory now he knows. They’d done it intentionally, hadn’t they? Pushed him towards resetting and forgetting and questioning reality, and for what? For, for a fucking laugh? To get their kicks in? Why had they done that?

What the hell had Benrey wanted from him when they did that to him?

His memories keep circling until Coomer eventually says goodnight and shuts his box down for the night.

He wakes up in the dark and the quiet again. He waits, not sure if he should be watching for Sweet Voice or waiting for Coomer. His answer comes in the form of footsteps. 

The other AI doesn’t say anything. He just stands next to him. Gordon doesn’t really want to talk either, right now. It’s kind of a comfort, actually? Just being quiet for once. It’s chill. He’s wanted chill for... God, he doesn’t know how long it’s been. They stay like that, G-Man and Freeman only a few steps apart, watching the horizon of the void in silence. 

Chapter Text

They know what they’re doing. What they were doing, even. Jaden isn’t stupid, knows what it looks like, but it’s not meant to be that. Gordon doesn’t get it and might not probably won’t ever get it but they know Xavier does. Thomas probably gets it too. This is what Jaden does. This is what Jaden does for a living. And - and sometimes that means being an asshole when it comes to Gordon, but there’s a question they’ve had in their head maybe not the whole time? But for a while. A whole lot of questions. They are a great huge of questions. But once they ask that first big one, they can’t ignore all the other ones going on too. And just because they haven’t asked it out loud doesn’t mean that they haven’t asked it inside their own head. That one question, over and over, and all the other questions that follow it. 

Words aren’t right.

Gordon is pissed. They can’t, the words aren’t right, you know? Mariko is upset too and Gordon doesn’t wanna. They’re not going to talk until he does. Mariko doesn’t get it, even if Xavier does, and Jaden can’t find the words. They’ll - they’ll try again tomorrow.

Okay. Okay. This is - This is Jaden’s job , is the thing. And they don’t like bringing the job home, right, they aren’t for that. But they hadn’t been able to help it at first. Gordon Freeman, advanced AI companion? Dude was cutting edge, leader of the field. Top shelf stuff. So they’d pushed, trying to find the edge he was cutting. Tried to figure out how good this AI dude really was at being a dude. And they’d pushed, and pushed, and Gordon had pushed back and it was incredible and kind of scary actually? And then the resets had started picking up and then they’d been thinking, Mariko and Thomas had been thinking too. They’d pushed Gordon so far that maybe he didn’t have edges anymore. Maybe he just looped around into one whole thing. 

...Where were they? Huh. Right.

So this is like, this is what they do. They push and they look and they test and test again because you gotta figure out the trick, right? If there’s like. If there’s a problem, you gotta test it. It’s sensible. You need to know how to make the problem. Gotta control it to fix it. Xavier gets it. They aren’t putting it in the right words still. If you can’t do it again, how did you do it?

They’re stressed still. The words aren’t moving right.

This is Jaden’s job and Jaden’s job is called Quality Assurance but what that means is Bugtesting. Push the buttons, push the limits, test and test and test and figure out what’s going on and do it again until you can work out exactly what to do to do it. They can’t say they love it, but they’re good at it. They’re good at watching and finding the triggers. They’re good at finding the holes in the system.

Where were they? Right.

Gordon fascinates them. Gordon scares them. He had reacted to the world around him, yeah, but he had always reacted too good to the world around them. Flagship AI project, right? It makes sense they’d write him a lot of dialog, you know, write him so he can adapt and shit. But they’d brought in stuff that the world wouldn’t have a script for and he was just like. He reacted to that too. If you asked him something, pushed him on it, he’d start thinking and if he thought too hard about it he’d just reset. He hadn’t been like - he’d started pretty stable, you know? He’d just been him, before he was a whole dude and stuff. 

And then he’d gone like, a whole lot further after that.

Xen and all.

And now, even now, sitting inside a fuckin’ box and following the wuwuzella orbs around with his eyes so they can make sure he’s still seeing and hearing, Gordon is still so much more. There’s Gordon and then there’s Gordon and now there’s Gordon, and Jaden isn’t sure where one Gordon stops and the next one starts but he knows the first and the last are like orange and blue to each other. It all - it’s like colours, yeah? The colours drip and run from one to another, but he can’t tell how fast or how much. 

And that’s like... That’s a problem. 

Testing is doing the same thing over and over, sometimes tweaking the variables, until you know how all the pieces play together. 

Jaden still remembers one of the first devs they worked with turning to them and smiling. “Rule one of testing,” he’d said. “Variables won’t, and constants aren’t.” They googled it once. Some other dude said it first. They still remember it better from the mouth of the programmer, though, and it still helps them. Maybe not how the dude expected it to, though, but. Yknow? It helped. 

Maybe they’ve been looking at this wrong. They can’t stop thinking about it.

Jaden doesn’t want to think about Xen. 

It’s been kind of weird suddenly having like, free time again? It’s been a few days and Gordon is still the big mad, so like. Jaden got time now. Not really sure what to do with it, though. Games are their go-to for stuff like this but a lot of games are just the wrong thing entirely right now. They are playing like...A lot of modded Minecraft.

Not that they’re the only one in the same boat, apparently? Thomas seems to have been playing stuff constantly lately, a kind of weird mix of it too: Portal, the Stanley Parable, a grand total of sixteen minutes of System Shock which had been immediately followed by four hours of Stardew Valley. There’s other games in there too, Satisfactory and The Magic Circle and other stuff they’ve forgotten after they saw it come up. Thomas has been like, mixing stuff up a lot .

Xavier’s just playing Myst again. Nerd.

Honestly the Minecraft stuff is doing some good stuff for Jaden’s head. The good sort of soothing stuff, you know? Don’t need to think too hard. It’s more fun with the others, but nah. Not right now. Sometimes it’s good to just sit around and set up a farm and a base, but they feel more like exploring today. Looking at stuff because they can. Looking at stuff just for themself, just because they want to. No pressure to it. Just them and the horizons. That and not all of the mods play like, super nice together? So sometimes it’s just kind of fun to find the edges where they run into each other and poke at them and see what they can find in the gaps they leave behind. It’s good. It’s fun. 

They’ll talk to the others tomorrow. Today is just gonna be a Jaden day. 

Gordon is a problem and a question and Xaiver gets it, and Thomas kind of gets it too, but Mariko looks at him and sees something else and was seeing it the whole time when Jaden wasn’t and they don’t know how to like, you know? The words don’t come right. 

They were - it was just the four of them playing a game! Just four them dicking around in Half Life VR with the new AI to see how good it was, he wasn’t meant to be an actual person . Mariko got it first and Thomas got it and Jaden and Xavier had to play catch-up after the fact. It’s a question, it’s the big question. The BFG somebody brought to the knife fight.

Jaden’s in bed and still awake and it’s 4:02am and their brain has it’s hand on the trigger and it won’t stop and their thoughts won’t stop and it’s dead silent and they’re too warm where the blankets cover them and too cold where they don’t and the questions won’t stop in their head and it’s just, you know? You know? They didn’t know but maybe they should’ve but they’d thought it was a game and they can’t tell where it stopped being one thing and started being something else but they know it wasn’t at the start so when did it happen?

More importantly, HOW?

Was it because the four of them pushed Gordon’s responses and forced him to adapt and evolve to keep pace? Was it them fucking around and modding the game that opened the door? Did the reset system get put in place because this already happened before, or did someone else see it coming and try to stop it along the way? Some combination of different things that they’ll never puzzle out? If it happened once, it can happen again. Which means it can happen more and more times. What do you need to do to lift a man from artificial intelligence to sapience? 

Is their Gordon the first?

Could they do it again?

It’d be - it’d be fucked up to do it intentionally, is the thing. If they ask that question, it’d be the worst thing they could do. Xavier would get it, because Xavier gets that this is a taboo thing that’s also actually like, it’s important. You can’t just...Do that. But they could. Somebody else might. The military would, for sure. Gordon isn’t like - that’s not right. It’s not cool.

And now Gordon isn’t just aware, he’s something else entirely too. He’s able to rewrite his own code and keeps breaking himself and what if he goes too far one day and they can’t undo the damage? If they lose some core chunk of code they can’t recover from? They know Mariko keeps copies of him for a reason, copies and copies and copies so if anything did happen it could un-happen but that doesn’t take the fear away. Constants aren’t and variables won’t and which part of Gordon are which? He keeps changing. Can he control it? How is he doing it? Does he know he’s doing it? This is all way out of what they know how to handle, this is so far beyond anything any of them are ready for. 

Jaden turns their head. It’s 4:06am. 

They groan and press their face into the pillow. They’re probably not gonna get any sleep tonight either, then.

There are questions you don’t ask, and there are questions you don’t ask out loud, and questions that only show up at the worst parts of the night and sit next to you, silent and unasked and haunting anyway. 

They’ve got a skill in it, though. Asking all the wrong ones. Gordon always tried to answer them is the thing. Never forgot anything Jaden said, even the dumb stuff, and that was, you know, that was kinda embarrassing sometimes. But it had made them feel good too. Even in their dumb moments, Gordon had cared if they were doing okay or not? They’d space and crack a dumb joke and he’d laugh and he had, fuck. He had a good laugh. Gordon didn’t laugh as much anymore. Gotta get him outta that box. No good shit to joke about in there.

Maybe when he’s good again and wants to talk, they can try again. Apologise and stuff. It’d be cool.

Figure out how to stop thinking about the Gordons who might exist and focus on the one who definitely does.

It’d be good, they think. It’d be good.

Chapter Text

Gordon misses things . Things that aren’t empty voids and limbs that don’t work and which feel weirdly far away, even when he’s looking at them. He wants to be able to move again, to stretch his body out and feel it respond. He wants a lot of things. It’s a bitter kind of joke, really: He’s homesick for a home that he never actually had. That never existed. How can he miss something that never was?

It’s not exactly a surprising thing to him that he’s starting to get restless. The only thing he can do is think, after all, and he was - he always felt it, back in Black Mesa. The constant urge to keep things moving, keep everybody from staying still too long. It’s not like he’s got anything to push them towards anymore. He’s not sure if that urge is even him, or if it’s something that got coded into him and then ripped out again later. Or maybe it’s just, is it possible for AI to have trauma? Is the constant need to keep moving a trauma thing or a scripting thing?

“You’re vibrating again, Gordon,” Mariko-Coomer informs him politely.

“Okay.”

“I...Don’t think that’s a thing that’s meant to be happening?”

“Okay.”

“Can I get a response from you that isn’t just ‘Okay’, Gordon?” 

“Nope.”

“Thank you!”

God, he’s so bored.

“Anyway,” Mariko-Coomer carries on, their voice sounding cheerful. “Your leg is definitely less of...Whatever it was doing before! We’re still getting all of it sorted, but we’re looking at some, ah, alternative options at this point to see if we can’t speed things up a little.”

“What, uh - what options, sorry? Did you say alternative options? What does, does that mean you’re going to stop trying to fix them?”

“Gordon-”

“Gordon wants his legs back,” he insists, starting to rock his torso from side to side gently. It’s the closest he has to moving how he wants. “Gordon would really like his legs back.”

“Gordon!” they interrupt. “Thank you. As I was saying - I’m not going to stop working on your legs. We’re just going to be seeing if there’s something we can do to speed the process up instead of trying to untangle everything by hand. I don’t know what your code was meant to look like originally, after all! But I think this plan has merit to it.”

“What’s the plan then, Doctor Coomer?”

“That’s not - okay. Anyway . We’re going to see if we can’t get a copy of your movement data before it got a little bit of everything else tossed in there like spaghetti thrown into a blender without a lid on!”

“Oh. That...Sounds reasonable, I guess? Wait. Why do you keep saying ‘we’?”

“Oh, ah - My mistake!” they say, and there’s something in their tone he can’t quite place. “I meant Thomas and myself, Gordon. Not any of the others. It’s still up to you as to when you want them to be able to talk to you again, okay?”

“Okay,” he sighs, rolling his shoulders. “Do, um. Do you know how long it might be?”

“I don’t. But the second I know, I’ll let you know, okay? Do you want to stay up for a bit longer again?”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Please.”

Not yet. Not yet. He doesn’t want to let go of everything just yet. 

It’s Thomas who pulls through for him in the next visit. 

“It, it’s kind of crude? But you’ve been able to interact with us, so. You should be able to get this working, Gordon!”

Gordon leans forward in place, marvelling at it. “And this is - anything I want, right?”

“If it exists, yeah. Mariko and I, we’ll be able to hear it too whilst we’re here with you but that,  don’t let that stop you!”

“Maybe let that stop you a little, Gordon,” Mariko chimes in.

It’s a screen . Not just any screen - it’s an internet window. He hasn’t got any idea how they hooked this up, but they’re opened a thing called youtube up and now he’s got the whole world there, where he can reach it. Maybe not actually reach it, you know, his hands and all, but it’s there and it’s real and there’s so much he could do and he doesn’t actually know where to start because he’s suddenly realising the whole world being available to him is actually a lot of stuff.

“Video games,” he says at the search bar. “Old ones. Old video games. Give me old video game videos.”

“And he, Gordon’s forgotten how to type,” Tommy laughs.

“I don’t have hands right now, Tommy! I gotta tell it!”

“It doesn’t-”

“I gotta, it’s gotta have voice recognition right? It’s gotta be able to do voice recognition.”

“You gotta turn that on, Gordon,” Tommy wheezes quietly. “It won’t just-”

The screen interrupts them both to start playing something called Angry Video Game Nerd . Gordon throws his head back to let loose a stream of sweet voice, and he can’t be bothered to make up a rhyme for it, but if he had to? He’d call it violet, for vindication.

“Oh my god, Gordon,” Mariko says to him the next day. “Did you spend all night watching AVGN videos? My suggestions are a mess .”

He waits. All he can do is wait. His existence starts and stops at the mercy of other people. If he thinks about it too long, he might lose his mind again. 

The screen, though - it gives him something else to do. Something to lose himself in. It’s always there, the temptation to go and look up his own game and see, but there’s something about the thought that repels him in the same moment. There’s tens of thousand other ones he can watch instead, countless people playing them, so many stories and narrators. The same game can be played by a hundred different people, and they can each take their own version and story away from it. Something in him hungers for a chance of his own. Something in him longs .

G-Man joins him, the next night. He doesn’t say anything at first when he arrives, but they stay side by side, watching in comfortable silence. They end up watching a series about some kind of city building game together. They seem to have pretty different tastes, if G’s quiet comments are anything to go by - dude does not exactly volunteer many opinions he might have - but eventually they strike a balance when they stumble across videos about some kind of strategy game where you build up your cities and resources but also get to go do fights with people. 

He’s gone before morning again, but he does at least send Gordon off to sleep before he goes.

Mariko doesn’t ask how he got shut down. They simply spin him back up into motion again, running him through the tests that are now just part of his life. His name is Gordon Freeman, he is three weeks old, and he is living inside a black box with only a few cracks in the wall to let light in.

“I think we should be ready by tomorrow,” she tells him warmly. “I’ve got a good feeling about this, Gordon. We’re going to need to work on it, make sure you all stay connected, maybe even get you ready for - I’m ah, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?”

“A little bit. It, it feels like this is moving fast? Like, a lot faster than the previous attempts to do something about my legs.”

“If it works, this could certainly help fix a lot of the issues all at once, so-”

“How?”

“Er,” Mariko stumbles before going quiet.

The silence awkwardly stretches on. It’s like he’s thrown a brick into the gears of the conversation. This shouldn’t be a confusing thing, which means it’s something they think is just awkward to answer, which is never good. He doesn’t quite remember any other awkward silences like this, but that doesn’t stop it from being familiar. “How are you fixing my legs, Dr Mariko?”

“That’s not - I’m not an actual doctor, Gordon-”

“What is the plan here. Are you - are you just cutting them off or something? Are you going to take my legs off like, like how you let that one security guard get crushed by a door?”

“K-Kind of? I mean-”

“You’re going to kind of cut my legs off.”

“Gordon.”

“I’m not even interrupting this time. There’s nothing I can say to that.”

“Can I finish this time?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“ Thank you,” they sigh. “Okay. I’m not going to cut your legs off, Gordon. That won’t help. We’re going to see if we can’t get a copy of your original movement programming and splice it in part by part. That way you can get a feel for each limb again instead of it being a potential shock to the system if it all happens at once!”

“I think I kind of...Wouldn’t hurt? I mean, maybe it’s a shock, but also I’d have my hands and legs back?”

“The last time you got overwhelmed with emotion you crashed. You crashed a lot, Gordon.”

“Gordon wants to run. Also, uh. Can - can we get Tommy in for this? I wanna talk to Tommy again,” he asks, rocking himself slightly from side to side.

“I’ll see if Thomas is free for that. We'll start with your legs first, at least.”

G-Man joins him overnight again. If he focuses on the search bar, he can push the words he wants directly into it. It’s a weird thing, to have his arms pinned to his side but still be able to interact with the world like this. They don’t talk, tonight. It’s a comfortable quiet, though. They go back to their city builder series again, picking up where they left off the night before.