Chapter Text
Gordon Freeman shook as he tried to get the keys in the ignition, trying - failing - flailing, the keys falling to the floorboards. His hands shook as a sound - was it a sob? Was it something else? - came through his lips.
“Bro, just - just let me get the -” Benrey batted Gordon’s hands away from the center console, leaning over to pick the keys up off the floor. “I don’t understand why you’re so nervous. It’s your kid. Of course they’re gonna fukken - uh - fuckin’ love seeing you.”
“It’s been six months.” Gordon’s voice started at a normal volume and raised to a fever pitch, hitting some high frequency that made Benrey’s ears twitch.
“I still don’t understand this obsession you have with time, bro.”
“Listen - just because you’re an Eldritch beast that can live for millenia -” Gordon realized Benrey was holding out the keys, had been for a minute, and snatched them with his prosthetic hand, “Doesn’t mean the rest of us can, okay? I’ve got - I’ve got a little bit of time on this planet with my son, and I have already spent most of it away from him.”
“Dude - you’re, uh, stuttering more than me now.” Benrey turned his head to the window and burped into a closed fist, trying to be considerate. It was one of those Manners things the old men would rail him about. “Cringe, bro.”
“I…” Gordon took a deep breath. Somehow, comparing the way Gordon acted to the way Benrey existed in any way was able to make him do an about face. His hands still shook as he turned on the car, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. At least this way Benrey didn’t have to worry about being driven into a ditch. “I appreciate you coming with me.”
“Pog.” Benrey kept looking out the window. He used the reflection to keep a closer eye on Gordon; for some reason, Gordon would freak out if he just… Kept lookin’ at him, so he looked at the window instead. Reflections worked almost as well.
“I - I’m not worried about my son.” Gordon finally admitted about five minutes later. It was five minutes into a two-hour-one-way road trip. Barely one-twentyfourth of the way to wherever the blazes Gordon’s ex-wife lived.
“You’re, fucking, pulling my leg, dude. If you think I’m gonna believe that.” Benrey picked at his nose - he didn’t pick his nose, he picked at his nose, thank you very much - but apparently it looked gross or something to Gordon, who reached over and slapped his hand. “Fuckin-A, dude, can’t a - a fuckin’ gamer get an itch?”
“Use a napkin.” Gordon fluttered his hand at the door panel, where an absolutely absurd amount of absorbent paper products had been shoved in the nooks and crannies. Benrey shrugged and went to pull one out, picking for a plush white one in the middle - one of those thick fancy ones from good restaurants, not that he’d ever been. Wendy’s was about as far as he’d gotten.
He didn’t know if it was the deterioration of the material after being in the hot sun for the three months they dealt with Black Mesa’s bullshit or what, but the thing just… puffed in his hand. He reached further down and pulled harder, getting a bigger pinch. He pulled too hard.
“Jesus Christ, dude!” Gordon exclaimed, quickly rolling the windows up. It was like a fucking scene from Michael in the Corolla as napkins fluttered everywhere, but when the feathery bullshit died down with the wind, Benrey was still in the front seat. Shit, Gordon thought. He'd said it out loud.
“You think I’m some kinda angel? Some kinda holy spirit? I’ll get your wife pregnant, for sure, dude.” Benrey had been learning a lot more about humans since they got the fuck out of Black Mesa. Sure, G-Man had kept him locked up for a really long time, but he was cool now. He did his time, took his punishment, then he got out. He picked up all the napkins and shoved them back into their own purgatory, where they fucking belonged.
He could still feel the tingle of electricity. It was only fitting that he clean up the problem he caused. G-Man had made sure there was no way for anything else to come through. Made sure Benrey made sure. Benrey shook his hand and rolled down his window again.
Where was he? Oh yeah, religion. Learning that stuff had been a trip. He wasn’t sure he believed any of it - but nothing was weirder than accidentally subsuming the power of the universe and then getting bitchslapped by the only other being who had ever done it. Bubby and Coomer had gotten through most of the Abrahamic religions with him, and he was gonna start reading up on other, older religions when they got back. Probably. If Heavenly Sword 2 hadn’t been delivered yet.
“... Who told you I had a wife?” Gordon asked, and Benrey looked over. Oh yeah, he was in a car right now. He stretched a little bit.
“Coomer said that’s how most hhh, humans, reproduce, right?” Benrey took a deep breath, speaking over the increase in air as they reached the highway. “A nuclear family, elementary family or conjugal family is a family group consisting of two parents and their children - start parenthesis - one or more - end parenthesis. It is in contrast to a single-parent family, the larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple which may have any number of children -”
“Okay, I fucking get it.” Gordon ran his real hand through his hair and Benrey watched. He made sure to blink every once in a while. He had been told that was why Gordon didn’t like his staring, but he didn’t think it was staring. “Listen…”
“And I heard from Tommy that a man and a woman are needed for a - uh - bay-bee, and also that until recently, only men and women were able to get marred, so-”
“Married, and yeah, you’re right, but -”
“Which means that you had a wife, right?” Benrey was confident in his logic. Joshua was eight or nine years old now, which meant Gordon had scored some epic chick back in his college days, or something. How old was Gordon, again?
“You’re - fucking - speeding, dude. Living in the fassst lane.” Benrey pointed at the speedometer. Gordon tapped his breaks, mumbling under his breath. They slowed to the cruising speed, Gordon rolled up the window, put on the window lock. Benrey fucking hated that lock. He liked feeling the wind on his face. Tommy and him and Sunkist would all stick their heads out the window and breathe in the world, living life like it was meant to be lived.
“...Why did I bring you instead of Tommy?” Gordon muttered to the steering wheel. Benrey didn’t know why, it wasn’t like the car could talk - hell, Gordon freaked out any time it made an “unusual” noise, so it wasn’t like he wanted it to talk.
“Tommy’s got - uh - his second dissertation due in a few weeks, remember?”
“Oh, right. How’s that going?”
“Absolutely poggers. Crazy good gamer moments, all over the place.” Benrey turned back to the window. “Actually, he mentioned that he found one of your, uhh, old, fuckin’, research papers -”
“And that’s enough of that!” Gordon always got flustered when they brought up the papers. He wasn’t fucking stupid, so why was he embarassed about the shit he wrote? Benrey didn’t know what the fuck that was all about. “I’m glad he’s getting support from his dad, after being an orphan for so long.”
One of us fucking has to, Benrey thought, his eyes stuck on a distant wind turbine.
“Wait - what?"
Did he say that out loud?
“Just, uhh… Ditch, man, fucking ditch -” Benrey reached out and pushed the car’s wheels back onto the road, going back over the rumble strips. He was glad that Gordon had slowed so much everybody else was passing him like crazy - nobody around to see that. “Fail, cringe, bro. Epic fail.” He kept his hand on the steerage wheel and made sure Gordon was focused on the road before he let go.
Gordon was silent for probably a whole minute before he spoke again.
“What - and I cannot emphasize this enough - the fuck?! - did you just say?!” Gordon seethed.
“Pretty hot.” Benrey said, sending Gordon into another fit. He couldn't tell if it was laughter or coughing.
“No, no no no no no - You’re not getting out of this one.” Gordon hissed, giving Benrey a couple glances. He was focusing on the road for the most part, at least. Benrey considered that a win. “What the fuck did you mean by that?”
“Uhh. Just what I - what I fukken said, bro.” Benrey paused, looked out the window, back at Gordon. He didn’t - he couldn’t - say another word.
“No. You said ‘one of us’, like, something else like you.” Gordon’s left hand wasn’t as good at reaching his right temple, but he rubbed both sides of his head nonetheless. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means what it means.” Benrey smacked his lips.
“I - Am I getting this right? Tell me if I’m right or not.” Gordon had gotten better at reading when Benrey wasn’t able to actually talk about shit, which was great, because he wasn’t able to talk about this shit. “You and Tommy are both fucking - experiments from Black Mesa led by G-Man.”
“Epic take, bro. Epic story. Tell me again, bro.” Benrey grinned. Gordon wasn’t stupid.
“What the -” Gordon looked to his mirror and got over to pass the car they had come up on. Benrey looked at the other people in the car as they passed - just another shitty suburban family out for a drive, headed to god-knows-where. He made eye contact with a kid in the back and stuck out his tongue.
They - that little fucker flipped him off!
No fucking Manners, anywhere. Benrey’s jaw fell open and stayed open as they passed, staring at the kid.
“Hey, does your kid flip people off?” Benrey asked suddenly.
“What the fuck?” Gordon messed with his ponytail. Man, he was fuckin’ fidgety today.
“These kids have no fucking manners.” Benrey pointed out the window, but they had already passed the miniature vanagon and were pulling away.
“... You can’t distract me that easily. I’m on to your fucking tricks.” Gordon said under his breath, a small smile on his face. Okay, that was weird, but whatever. “Okay.”
He took a deep breath.
“So you and Tommy - and Bubby, and probably Dr. Coomer, are all experiments ran by G-Man in Black Mesa. And Tommy is the only one to get his blessing, for some reason?”
“He’s the only one who is exceptional, yeah.” Benrey said. “Fukken, some kinda racket. He creates this immortal dog and that’s not enough to catch G-Man’s attention, but helping you - uh -”
“Somehow, working with me brought him to G-Man’s attention. How the fuck…?” Gordon kept his eyes on the road, obviously processing everything. “So, wait. If you’re not human, and you’re an experiment…”
Gordon trailed off, but Benrey knew he’d given him enough hints, however unintentionally. He was smart, after all. “Dude, don’t get all, uh, cringe and shit, on me.” Benrey said, fiddling with the fan controls. The air conditioning didn’t work, but he could at least get some air flow since Gordon Controlman locked the windows.
…
It was about five minutes later when Gordon spoke up.
“Holy fucking shit. Bubby - we know Bubby is a test tube baby, probably cloned from someone, and there’s - like, he’s weird - but he’s not Benrey weird. And then Dr. Coomer’s from the outside world - he was out of Black Mesa, he got married and divorced - fuck, he’s just like me-” Gordon gave a little cackle. Things that made him similar to the Science Team were good. Things that made him similar to Benrey were bad. Benrey frowned out the window. “So Dr. Coomer is probably not too fucked up, but those clones - I wonder how the fucking clones figure into it. How old were they? Were they fast-grown? Where they... but Bubby - Bubby is less human than I first thought, and you and Tommy are pretty similar? To each other, not to Bubby.”
Gordon looks at him and the smile on his face takes Benrey’s breath away.
“... Right, Benrey? I’m getting warmer, right?”
“Pffff, no, I turned the - the fuckin’ fan on so it wouldn’t get hotter in here.” Benrey looked away.
“About the theory, not - not physically.” Gordon groaned.
“Oh, yeah. You’re pretty - pretty hot.”
“I’m gonna ignore the other connotations of that…” Gordon sighed. “So Tommy probably has powers like you and G-Man. I wonder if he’s working on those.”
“Poggers, bro.” Benrey looked back out his closed window and sighed. There weren’t anymore trees or buildings around for him to clearly see Gordon’s reflection, so he just stared at the two clouds in the distance.
“Shit - Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to -”
“No, it’s fine, Feetman.” Benrey said with a smirk. He kept staring out the window at those two clouds, willing them to come closer. Come closer…
“I’m not - fucking - don’t call me that in front of Joshua, right?” Gordon sighed. Benrey faintly saw him push a stray strand of hair out of his face.
Fuck, he was so beautiful.
“Anyway, that’s - that’s the fuckin - Family tree, there.” Benrey sunk into his seat.
Gordon nodded, silent. He was silent for another five or so minutes before speaking up again. They were almost one-fourth of the way through this ride. The first half of it.
Benrey groaned at the same time Gordon opened his mouth to say something, drowning out the quiet words. The clouds hadn’t come any closer - if he was right, he thought they might even be getting further away. Fukken power-sucking G-Man...
“I fucking hate G-Man.” He mumbled at the same time that Gordon tried again. “Wait, what? What the fuck is ‘trains’?”
“I’m trans!” Gordon shouted.
“Don’t have to shout, man, I’m right fucking ear.” Benrey rubbed his ears under his baseball cap. “What’s trans?”
“Okay. So.” Gordon was blushing. What was he embarrassed by? “What do you know about human - uh - genders?”
“I know what men and women are, bro. Cringe.” Benrey laughed. “What do trains have to do with that?”
“It’s not -” Gordon sighed. He took a second and sighed again. “I give up. It doesn’t matter.”
“Nah, dude, you can’t just blueball me with train knowledge. I wanna know the secret about trains-genders.” Benrey grinned.
“If you really want to know, I want you to listen. Like, actually listen. Because you’re being a rude piece of shit, and this is important to me.” Gordon said. He shot Benrey a glance. “Got it?”
“Aye-aye, captain Factman.” Benrey settled in for a lecture. He got a lot of these lately. He didn’t know why Freeman was getting so pissy about this topic in particular, but it had the same kinda stress and sharp to his voice that he had back in Black Mesa. That meant it was probably fucking important, Benrey guesses. He almost huffs.
“Okay. So humans are born with two different sets of -”
“Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.” Benrey quoted some movie from Gordon’s collection of shitty movies and gets a surprised laugh out of him. Good. “I’ve got a, hhhh, huge, fucking massive -”
“That’s great, Benrey, so happy for you.” Gordon grit his teeth.
Why the fuck had he agreed to let Benrey live with him?
Oh yeah, the massive paycheck directly from G-Man for “keeping an eye” on the errant Eldritch. Kept him out of the poor house while he tried to get back on his feet by other means. It didn’t hurt that he still lived close enough to Tommy and Dr. Coomer to pawn him off when he needed a break… normally.
“Anyway! Moving on. Yes, most humans fit into two gender categories based on their sex characteristics. But there are people who grow up and decide that they don’t like living their life as what they were told they were. They’re called transgender, or trans for short.” Gordon took a breath. It wasn’t the conversation he expected to have today, but he was gonna have it, apparently. He’d opened this can of worms, now he had to lie in it. “Growing up, I was told I was a woman. In high school, I met a man, thought I fell in love, and had a kid when I turned 18 - like, almost to the day. But the entire time - my whole life - I felt wrong. I thought that doing that would make me better, cure my - my brain. But it didn’t. It just made it worse. I divorced my ex-husband when I turned 19 and got into college. I changed my name before I was accepted to grad school and I’ve lived as a man since.”
“Gordo. You’re, uh, lookin… hella intense there, my man.” Benrey said, gesturing to his left hand. It was gripping the wheel so hard the knuckles were white; if the right hand had been real - or a better prosthetic - it would probably look the same. Deflecting normally gave him time to process - but Gordon kept going.
“Hehe. Should have known that wouldn’t faze you at all.” Gordon shook his head and sped up a bit. “I just - I - I was the one who had Joshua. I was his mother. And he’s - he’s grown up with me as a man since he was two years old. He’s the one that got me through the first two years of community college, and then I had to give him up -”
“Couldn’t take him to the crazy frat parties?” Benrey nodded, trying to keep up, but Gordon was going a bit too fast. His brain was made for processing threats quickly, not sensitive information like this.
“No, his - his dad - his other dad, my ex, fought for custody and… and won.”
“Custody?”
“The parent who lives with the kid. It’s called custody by the courts.”
“So…”
“The courts were - are - pretty fucking awful for trans people. I lost a lot of friends, my family sided with him -” Oh, fuck, was he crying? Benrey reached for a napkin, grabbing a shitty brown one. It would do. He put it in Gordon’s left hand, holding onto the steering wheel -
“That’s fucking shit, bro.” Benrey frowned, or as close as he normally got. His eyebrows got closer together. That was about it.
“Yeah. Pretty - pretty fucking cringe court system.” Benrey froze. Did he just quote him?
“We could always just kill -”
“We are not killing my ex.” Gordon sighed, but it wasn’t the laugh Benrey wanted. He readjusted himself in his seat while Gordon balled up the napkin and threw it into the back seat. “So. Yeah.” Gordon paused, giving Benrey a glance.
“Yeah.” Benrey let go of the wheel and sat back in his seat again.
He fucking hated Gordon’s ex. Hadn’t ever met him - but he hated him. Gave him hope, though. Gordon had been in a relationship before. Could probably be convinced.
God, this whole normie bullshit was awful. He used to worry about survival. Now he was worrying about heartbreak. Fucking shit.
They lapsed into quiet, ignoring the world as they drove on. Benrey almost focused on the clouds, but he couldn’t get his brain to latch. Everything slid off like water on silicone. He glanced around - wanted stimulation, needed stimulation, something for his brain to even out while he worked on this problem Gordon had given him.
“You thinking ‘bout Coolatta?” Benrey asked, and Gordon shook his head. “Probably should. Probably some - some weird shit, you know? You could figure out about him. Make a new paper or something.”
That got a weak huff out of him.
Gordon didn’t get angry at Benrey as often anymore. Benrey reached out and flicked on the radio, going for the oldies station he remembered from his time in Black Mesa. Eventually a warbling voice filled the cabin, giving his agitated brainwaves something to bounce against. He was finally able to focus a little bit -
“Eh! Hey, no -”
“I’m just turning it down a bit, Benrey.” Gordon said. “I have a headache.”
“Sorry, bro. Fukken - uh, shit fukken sucks.” Benrey pulled his hand back, looking at Gordon’s hand. He still wore a ring. Was it right or left that was romantic? He had no idea.
“Yeah. I think I’ll stop up at this next exit and get a soda or something to drink -” Gordon gave Benrey a glance, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t been one of the Science Team shits who ate things out of a vending machine like they were crazy starved.
Wait, had he? He couldn’t remember.
“Get some pain meds or something. I’ve got to get rid of this headache before we get to Joshie.” Gordon rubbed at his eyes again.
“Cool story, bro.” Benrey said, deadpan as ever.
“Do you want anything when I go in?” Gordon asked, looking over his shoulder and sliding into the other lane. Just a minute or two more - that meant that the trip was gonna be closer to five hours round trip, and Benrey mentally groaned. There was nothing fun to talk about with kids present.
“Maybe you can get me a Playsta-”
“No.” Gordon said definitely.
“I’m cool then.”
Benrey still let out a series of bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ’s when they got close to the gas station. It wasn’t the fun one - the one with like, gumball machines and shit. It had a dinosaur standing outside though. Benrey stared at the dinosaur.
“Come on, I can’t leave you out here alone.” Gordon said, pulling Benrey in. Benrey followed him through the aisles, pausing when he contemplated this versus that for pain meds, what soda he should get -
“Dude. Look.” Benrey pointed at the chip selection. “Poggers.” He grabbed a bag of Doritos and a Tootsie Roll.
“You have the worst tastebuds I’ve ever seen.” Gordon said, leading him to the cashier.
“Wait, bro, you’ve been inside my mouth and you didn’t tell me?”
“What? No, I -”
“I’m seriously wounded, man, I thought we were friends! Bros!” Benrey pleaded. The cashier stared.
Gordon ripped the Doritos and Tootie Roll out of his hand with a growl and pointed at the car outside. “Go. Now.”
“But bro -”
“ Now. ” Gordon pointed at the door this time. He could obey this one. With a smirk, he traipsed out the door, holding it open for a lovely couple who wandered in.
Gordon rubbed his eyes and set his items on the counter. “I’m sorry for my… friend.” He apologized.
“You kidding?” the cashier said, ringing up with the efficiency of years spent on the job. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. But if you don’t get him off the dinosaur soon, my manager will have a fit.”
“Off the…?” Gordon looked out the window. Then he did a double-take. “Fucking -” he threw his card on the counter and sprinted out the door, almost losing his prosthetic hand to the door handle as he dashed through. “ BENREY! GET OFF THE FUCKING BRONTOSAURUS, NOW! ”