Chapter Text
Time was a funny thing.
You could try to keep track of it for a while. Count the seconds until they became minutes. Count the minutes until they became hours. Count the hours until you lose count, then you start all over again. Eventually you think it’s been a few days. Or weeks, maybe. After a while you stop caring.
Everything becomes nothing. It’s all emptiness as far as the eye can see.
This had actually turned out a lot worse than Benrey thought it would, and they had already expected it to go pretty bad.
Dying, they could handle. Benrey had died a lot of times. Not, like, permanently. Just little deaths. Sure their heart hit the pause button and their brain stopped working temporarily, but they always had enough juice to restart themself. It was easy. Painful, sometimes, but doable.
That was before Xen.
God, Xen… Benrey never really expected to be going back. Never really wanted to go back, but they did. And they had hated it, almost being part of that world again. A couple of years ago, maybe they wouldn’t have minded it. Maybe they would have even wanted to go back. Back to where it was… well, maybe not safe, but at least there weren’t fucking scientists.
Xen didn’t have tests and procedures. They weren’t an experiment on Xen. They were part of something bigger than themself and there was something comforting about that. Knowing you had a place in your world.
But it didn’t have Josh. It didn’t have Jefferem. It didn’t have soda or videogames or road trips. Xen didn’t have free thought or laughter. You were Xen, and that’s all you were. After escaping confinement, Josh and Jefferem had helped them see the better parts of Earth, even if it was just within Black Mesa’s walls.
Benrey couldn’t go back to being nothing after that. Not again.
And they wouldn’t have had to go through that stupid portal at all if Gordon had just fucking listened.
Benrey blinked in the dying light. Or something like light. It was their life, they were pretty sure, and they were watching it fade away. Had been for a while.
They tried to reach out and grab it, keep it close, hang on to life for a little while longer, but their body had long since become nebulous and definitely not something they could control. Or feel, for that matter.
So they watched. And they waited. And they thought. Mostly about Gordon.
Humans were stupid. Especially Gordon Freeman. Except, not really, because Gordon was a 27 year old theoretical physicist who’d been working in Black Mesa for three years. Benrey knew all the scientists in Black Mesa, and they had never seen anyone as young as Gordon working there, aside from maybe an intern or two. The guy was a certifiable genius.
If Gordon was so smart , then why didn’t he listen? Benrey knew what they were talking about, why didn’t Gordon trust them?
Probably because you got his hand cut off, a voice outside themself mused.
Oh yeah. They did do that, huh?
Well, it’s not like they meant to do that.
Although, it didn’t really matter that they hadn’t meant to. It still happened. It still sucked. It still hurt Gordon.
The military wasn’t supposed to hurt Gordon; they were just supposed to… take him away. Away from Black Mesa and away from that stupid portal. Because Benrey knew what was through that portal, and it wasn’t good, and he didn’t want their friends going there.
Though, they supposed the Scientist Team never actually considered them a friend. Tommy did, maybe, for a while. They doubted he would still want to be their friend after… all that. But it didn’t matter who considered who friend, Benrey still didn’t want them going to Xen. Because compassion or some shit.
Also, Nihilanth wasn’t fond of visitors.
Nihilanth, the center of the hivemind. Nihilanth, the baddest bad on Xen. Nihilanth, who would have hunted down the Science Team and slaughtered each member until they were dead and gone and there was nothing left, and humans didn’t come back.
Not even an HEV suit could save Gordon from something that could control an entire planet of enemies.
The plan had been to get close to the room, sneak away from the group, and destroy the portal. Then it looked like Gordon might be a little bit more than they could handle, a little more stubborn. They wouldn’t be able to do anything with him around. So it was Plan B.
Plan B had seemed pretty solid, at first. The military wanted to take Gordon away, Benrey wanted Gordon to be away. Handing him over and then destroying the portal seemed like a good idea at the time. They could’ve gotten Gordon back afterwards, if he didn’t manage to escape himself. Knowing Gordon, he probably could’ve pulled off an escape.
Obviously, Plan B didn’t go so fucking great.
They were back to Plan A: sneaking away and destroying the portal. Except they couldn’t sneak away because everyone was suspicious of them, and never let them out of sight. Which was fair, probably (definitely), but that just made their job harder.
Maybe if they had told everyone about Nihilanth… maybe if they explained what they knew, then the Science Team wouldn’t have gone through the portal. Maybe annoying Gordon into turning back wasn’t the ‘incredibly smart gamer strategy’ they thought it was.
But would they have trusted Benrey? If the Science Team found out they were an alien--and not just any alien, one of the aliens from Xen… would they have listened?
Didn’t matter now. Plan C had worked, so it was worth it. In the end, everything--even dying --had been worth it.
They made the Science Team turn around. They made Gordon go back to Earth. That was all that really mattered, right?
See, the trick wasn’t that they hadn’t annoyed Gordon enough into turning around. They just hadn’t scared him enough into turning around. Benrey could do scary. After all, they had scared all the scientists in Black Mesa real good, hadn’t they?
Scary enough that the scientists wanted to study them out of morbid curiosity alone. Scary enough that when they escaped, not a single one of them bothered looking for them. Scary enough that Black Mesa would have rather let an alien walk the Earth than go after it.
All those smart people in one building… you’d think at least one of them would have thought to check right under their noses. Earth was never going to be safe for someone--some thing --like Benrey. Why would they ever leave Black Mesa?
Oh well. Maybe they should just be thankful Black Mesa was full of oblivious assholes. Shapeshifting came in handy when you wanted to blend in with a bunch of humans, and no one even questioned the ‘new security guard’.
Shapeshifting came in handy for other things too. Nihilanth may have been the baddest bad on Xen, but Benrey didn’t need to be baddest bad. They just needed to be the bigger bad.
And it worked.
It was fine, at first. Fighting their sort-of friends had been… less than pleasant. But it’s not like they actively fought back. It was all mostly just for show. Especially since taking a form that big sapped a lot of energy anyway, not to mention trying to heal themself after every shot.
Benrey had a lot of power, but there was still only so much they could take. That Devil Gun had just about done it, too. Almost wiped them out completely.
Thankfully, they had time for one last show. One last big exit from the final boss. The explosion had probably looked so fucking cool, not that the Science Team had stuck around to see. Couldn’t blame them for that, really. The explosion probably would have killed them too.
In any case, they were pretty sure it destroyed the portal. Right along with their stupid body. It’d taken whatever little bit of power they had left, but hey. What’s a little death between friends?
Now they were here. Wherever here was.
… where were they again?
They were beginning to realize that permanent death was a lot more than they were bargaining for.
The question ‘Why?’ kept flying around their mind. Or whatever was left of their mind. The whole horrific trip through the alien-infested Black Mesa, they kept wondering why? They were really trying to avoid answering it.
Why travel with the Science Team? Why help Gordon Freeman? Why stick around for so long? It was pretty obvious no one likes them. Gordon had even said it. Several times. So why?
Maybe because it was because of the friendly ‘howdy’ he gave everyone when he walked through the halls. Or maybe it was the way he had laughed at their jokes and bbbbbb -ed back at them. Or maybe it was because Benrey secretly delighted in the fact that he wanted to be a streamer.
Maybe it was just Gordon.
…
Benrey wasn’t stupid.
They weren’t smart, by any means. They didn’t know anything about theoretical physics and they wouldn’t be able to tell you how gravity works and they had no idea what colors were made of, but they weren’t stupid.
Maybe Gordon didn’t always hate them, but he definitely did towards the end. Benrey knew. He shot them in the head. A lot. And screamed something about how much he wished he could kill them.
They were lucky they were operating on almost full-power that day, otherwise they might not have been able to fix those as seamlessly as they did.
There were definitely a few that didn’t heal up so nice. On the days they weren’t feeling so great, had a little less power to work with, too tired from teleporting or coming back from the dead. They didn’t always have the energy to do a seamless fix.
You didn’t get experimented on for years and then survive an apocalypse without getting a few scars out of it.
Sometimes you just didn’t survive the apocalypse at all.
That light was really starting to go now, wasn’t it? The longer they stared, the dimmer it got. It scared them to watch but they were too afraid to look away. Which was stupid. The light would go out eventually, no matter what they did. Whether they watched it happen or not didn’t matter. It would disappear, and they would too.
Oh.
They were dying.
Like, actually dying.
Benrey wasn’t sure why it was just hitting them all at once, but it was. And, honestly, it was pretty overwhelming. Feelings weren’t exactly their strong suit, mostly because any and all emotions they displayed got studied by a flock of white-clad scientists. Jefferem had called it repression.
Man, they really missed Josh and Jefferem…
They missed Tommy and Bubby and Coomer. They missed Sunkist, the best dog. They didn’t really even know Darnold, but they missed him too.
And they missed Gordon. Probably more than they should.
“Benrey?”
Hm. That was weird. They were sure that there wasn’t anyone else there but them. Probably wasn’t too important, since they were dying. Light was almost out.
Were they supposed to be this afraid?
“Benrey, is that- is that you?”
Why was that voice getting closer? Couldn’t they just die a miserable death in peace? Wasn’t it enough that they were watching the last flames of their life flicker away right before their eyes? Now there was some voice just yelling at them.
It was vaguely familiar, though…
“Benrey!”
Something latched on to their arm. Which was odd, because they couldn’t even feel their arm a few seconds ago. Then they were pulled backwards, almost painfully, just as the last of the light faded out.
Then a new light flooded their vision. After being stuck in the dark for so long, it looked so bright and foreign and, fuck, that hurt.
Actually, everything hurt. Their head hurt and their chest hurt and they could barely stand on their own two feet. Their eyes adjusted enough to make out two figures, one holding their barely conscious body, and the other just kind of standing there. Two pairs of very familiar electric blue eyes.
Tommy and G-Man?
“… what?”
That was pretty much all they managed to say before their consciousness slipped from them.