Chapter Text
When Gordon had been a child—young enough to not yet be in school, so from his earliest memories until about the age of five—there had been a giant jar of honey on the kitchen counter of his home.
His mother had maintained a cozy kitchen at the ideal of quaint domesticity, complete with hand-crocheted dish towels that were switched out to match the seasons and holidays and wooden decorative plaques with cute sayings and images of geese on them, and Gordon had grown up not realizing that this wasn't, in actuality, what most kitchens for young families looked like in Seattle at the time. Whenever he went to the homes of other children his age, he was surprised to see mismatched plastic plates and cups that had been part of some restaurant chain marketing promotion in the cupboards—and seeing regular use!—and menus for the local pizza delivery joint on the fridge, even, shocking as it was to him for a surprising amount of his life, cluttered piles of papers scattered around the countertops or tables in which the adults were sometimes surprised to discover things they had been looking for.
When Gordon grew up, he realized that his family's kitchen was not the norm and that, far from his childhood tendency to somewhat judge other families for their modern kitchens being the correct or reasonable perspective, a lot of these families were rather...puzzled by, might be the word, or slightly skeptical of, perhaps...his mother's Midwest-homemaker-style kitchen belonging to a family that was, ostensibly, young-ish and modern-ish, and living in the Pacific Northwest. These people, Gordon came to learn, held the same attitude toward the Freemans and their kitchen and what it said about their family as he had been imposing on them for theirs, although other people probably realized sooner than he had that this was an irrational quirk and a rather superior way to look at a household unit based on their decor. He also eventually learned, however, that in other people's cases, they were more likely to be justified in questioning his mother's kitchen aesthetic than he was in judging theirs, owing to the fact that his mother's kitchen did not at all fit the profile of a woman her age with a family of the age and personality of the Freeman clan.
As he grew even older, he had another kitchen-related revelation: the main center of domesticity in their house actually DID fit his family, and his mother's, profile. His parents had, frankly, been very staid, boring, average people, to a degree that was rather surprising to most people they met, and Gordon knew he was too, except for the factor of his remarkable intelligence and drive to use it in relatively ambitious ways, and he was quite aware, as he progressed through school and, later, and to a greater degree, in academia, that everyone, his parents included, were rather surprised that they had produced this brilliant scientific prodigy who was fascinated with teleportation and had the eye for it's potential beneficial applications to humanity that caused him to relentlessly pursue it's development. The Freemans were two simple, unassuming people, remarkable only for how very unremarkable they were, and for their happenstance raising of a child who had goals worthy of the great giants of science and the means to possibly achieve them. They had no understanding of teleportation or any quantum physics beyond what Gordon was able to convey to the average layperson, but were content that their son knew what he was doing and pleasantly surprised that they had somehow managed to create him and foster his love of science, then set a young man loose on the world who seemed destined for bigger things than themselves. Their son's personality, though, was definitely rooted in theirs—the unassuming humility (when it wasn't down to academics or bowling scores, at least), the quiet fastidiousness, the rather uninspired aesthetic and sense of un-style in everything he did that wasn't scientific—in short, Gordon Freeman was solidly a product of his upbringing, and the kitchen both contributed to and was reflective of it.
He suspected that that was something to do with why a particular memory, that of the honey jar, kept flickering into his mind lately. It was baffling—a honey jar, of all things, something mundane and never significant, but he had noticed it popping into his mind every now and then the past month or so. He could see it in his mind's eye, or his memory's, because the image was all framed from the point of view of his childhood self, and so he remembered it that way, from the height of the kitchen counter in relation to his stature at the time to the way he thought and reacted to things at that age. The honey was in a big glass jar, perhaps a quart in capacity, he now estimated, and had a lid that clamped on with a rubber seal to keep it fresh and protected from ants—and clumsy, misbehaving children—and affixed to the side with a decorative cord of some kind of rustic-looking twine was a honey comb, one of those round, notched doohickeys on a stick with a little rounded ball at the end that one used specifically for scooping up honey from a container, rather than a regular spoon.
His earliest memory of the honey jar was of being very young, about as young an age as his memory would allow him to travel back to, whining and wheedling at his mother to let him have some more of the sweet, golden syrup-like substance. He had already had some-his mother, being a young and inexperienced parent, had thought giving him a treat would be nice without yet knowing what the consequences would be-and he was now on the verge of a tantrum trying to get more. His mother had tried to reason with him that he had already had some and dinner was soon, but he was, of course, three, and trying to distract him with something else wasn't working; his single-minded pursuit of a given goal, the quality that would get him into and through MIT and had resulted in his current success as a one-man shock-and-awe team, was a trait he'd been born with. Little Gordon was getting himself to that dangerous precipice, the point of an oncoming tantrum where the original goal was no longer even the point, and simply getting his way or exercising some kind of power was starting to cloud out whatever had been the initial cause for the conflict, and his mother was sighing, "I should have known better. They always say, 'A taste is worse than none at all', don't they?" This, his young mind understood to be an ultimate refusal of some kind, and his temper had spilled over into loud, raucous tears then, prompting his mother to scoop him up and spirit him away to his room to be closed in for a time-out. After that, Gordon was carefully taught that the honey was a "sometimes snack", and that if he couldn't be content with just a small amount, he wouldn't get any at all. This, he supposed, had been one of the earliest lessons that had built his eventual rock-solid willpower and ability to delay gratification to which he credited his academic success and scientific career. It had been as if his parents were purposely inoculating him against failing the Marshmallow Test, and he took pride in his nearly godlike self-restraint.
So it was odd that, as of late, he would randomly see the honey in the jar very clearly in his mind's eye; the dark-golden, clear color of it, the way the light shone through it as the afternoon sun turned into evening sunset. He remembered well, too, that at some point, perhaps when he was six or seven, he had read a book about prehistoric animals and been captivated with the idea of insects perfectly preserved in amber, and tried to persuade his mother to let him make his own preserved insect with the honey and a dead spider he had found.
The book-a children's book with activities that tied into what it taught-had stated you could make your own preserved insect using clear nail polish, by setting the bug on a piece of wax paper and dripping on the nail polish in layers, allowing it to dry between applications and then dripping more on so you got an increasingly sizable lump of varnish with a dead bug in it that you could, once it was completely dry, then peel off of the wax paper and display or make into a necklace or god only knew what else-Gordon had never gotten that far. He had read this idea and the directions in the book, then spent about a week keeping his eye peeled for a good dead bug to use before finding an opportunity-because he couldn't just squish one himself, that would be messy and unpreserveable; he had to find one that had died on it's own and scoop it up before some adult saw it and threw it out in disgust. He managed to find a perfect specimen in the corner of the door-frame leading from the main part of the hallway into their basement staircase; it was a recently-dead wolf spider, he estimated, and not a big one, probably not full-grown, but big enough and, importantly, cool-looking enough to make a perfect science project-slash-craft activity.
He didn't want to use the nail polish, though; nail polish was for girls, even if you put a bug in it, and besides, it was clear, not amber. Gordon had alighted on the honey as being a better substitute for what the original directions called for, but by this point in his childhood, knew that it was better to ask permission than just go after the honey and get caught. He had explained to his mother what he was trying to do, and, ignoring her wrinkling her nose at his keeping a dead spider somewhere in his room—he had refused to tell her where so she couldn't throw it out on him—petitioned her to let him use the honey instead.
"See, amber is tree sap, and that's a lot like maple syrup, and maple syrup is a lot like honey!"
"I'll say, and it'll attract other bugs to it when it dries, just like the syrup will! You won't have just the spider inside the honey, Gordon, you'll have a line of ants going across the room to wherever you keep it trying to get at the honey!"
"But it'll be dry!"
"It'll still attract ants!"
"Then maybe I'll put the amber inside glass and-"
"Why can't you just use nail polish like the book says?"
"But Moooom, it'll be more real if I use the honey!"
Eventually, Gordon had lost the debate and had to use the clear nail polish his mom pulled from her vanity drawer instead. He grumbled about it, of course, and his father, coming home towards the end of the day in time to be informed of Gordon's inglorious defeat, tried to take the tack that clear nail polish really was useful for all sorts of things. The elder Freeman, a construction site foreman, had sincerely meant what he was saying and earnestly took up the cause of singing the virtues of clear nail polish and all the fixes it could provide for day-to-day problems, from sealing small cracks invisibly, to preventing a run in women's stockings from spreading, to affixing a string securely to this or that, et cetera et cetera, ad infinitum. Gordon's father was a problem-solver, and was happy to smooth the conflict for his wife while also extolling the efficacy of her solution to Gordon, and tended to get carried away when making a case for something harmless, like a solution to a puzzle like this. Gordon had grudgingly made his way to his room, cleared off his workspace-he already had a project table, at that age, of course-laid down the wax paper and the spider on it, and tried to make the nail polish work.
It ended up smelling so strongly and getting to his head so badly that even with the window open for ventilation-Gordon always took laboratory safety very seriously, a trait that had caused him some cognitive dissonance at Black Mesa-he'd still had to abandon the project, because in addition to the chemical smell of the polish, the sticky liquid was causing the spider's legs to all bunch up together and stick to each other instead of staying splayed wide like he wanted them for effect, and the twin obstacles were proving together to be insurmountable. His mother had been only too happy to throw the whole kit and kaboodle into the kitchen trash when Gordon capitulated and then took the trash out to the bigger garbage can outside, and Gordon's first attempt at insect taxidermy was a bust. His father, on the other hand, had convinced himself of the marvels of clear nail polish and, since his wife no longer wanted to use the remainder of the bottle she had given Gordon-"It's been dripped all over a spider and you know he was getting the brush all over that dead thing and then dipping it back in, the whole thing's contaminated!"-Gordon's father appropriated it for his own use, and for the next several years, always had a bottle of the stuff in his glove compartment or in various kits he would put together for himself as fix-it solutions to everyday emergencies. Gordon had been mortified, at the age of twelve, to find his father whistling loudly in an aisle of the local drugstore while picking out a fistful of bottles to replace his used-up ones, and been paranoid someone he knew would catch his dad in the nail polish aisle.
Childhood science experiments and embarrassing moments in parental innovation aside, Gordon was sure that particular memory had nothing to do with why the honey jar kept popping into his head as of late.
It was strange; the honey and the kitchen had never made any significant impact on him. There had never been any big, traumatic event or even a stand-out memory of something pleasant or meaningful in any way that he tied to that jar on the kitchen countertop of his childhood home. He just kept seeing it, as from the point of view of himself at about four years old, the jar on the counter too high for him to see all the way to the back of it, where the honey was, so that he had to back up towards the kitchen table for his line of sight to accommodate it. It would be several years before he was tall enough to look over the cornered edge of the counter from right up against it without standing on anything in order to see the back of the counter and the wall against which the big glass jar was kept, and he had known, at that age, that even if he were to stand on something and reach across the countertop toward the jar, his little arms wouldn't be long enough to reach without help anyway.
Gordon had always been too prone to self-analysis—and the irony that he knew it was not lost on him-and at this point, it was mystifying him both that he was frequently having brief, fleeting moments of this quart-sized jar of honey flickering into and then out of his mind throughout the day, as well as that he had noticed it, such was the frequency of these occurrences. They were happening often enough that he was noticing and analyzing them, so they were sure to mean something...weren't they?
It was inexplicable, especially as a way for his mind to distract him; because he was sure his mind was doing weird things-mildly weird, not breakdown weird, at least not just yet-because of the weirdness of his life as of late and the inner tempestuousness that was a slowly-acclimating presence, now, in his life. He knew he was, against all likelihood and his dearest wishes, getting used to fighting a war for liberation from Earth's alien oppressors, and unfortunately, even being a shock troop for that cause. He had never thought of himself, until Black Mesa, as a violent person, and initially it had caused him quite a lot of moral horror and turmoil to discover that he could be; but he was, slowly, in his own ways-ways he knew were not completely healthy and were merely psychological triage for himself, which would need to be dealt with further when the violence finally, if ever, let up—getting used to his bizarre new role. Grim and bitter as it made him feel, he was, to a certain degree, and more than he was comfortable with, coming to terms with being a warrior. He wasn't completely there yet, and he hoped he'd never be, and he certainly wasn't happy with it, even if being unhappy with it cost him so much of his peace of mind...but it was losing it's edge, at least the sharpest, nastiest parts of that edge.
And even that was not the most pressing of his mental woes at this point.
He was slowly processing Eli's death, and figured he was right about where he should be on that-a dull, deadened sense of something precious to him lost, and with the resignation that it wasn't coming back comfortably situated like some dour, uninvited house-guest at the table of his grief about it; unignorable and too satisfied with having secured a place at the table for itself to be moved anytime soon, and so he'd gone ahead and laid out a place for it, and refilled it's soup bowl when asked; no longer a huge imposition, but immovable and to be lived around nonetheless.
Alyx, too, despite a rough beginning to her mourning—as was to be expected, given how close she was to her father and the fact that she was an only child who had already lost her mother—was progressing as was to be expected; her occasional moments, in the weeks immediately after her father's loss, of staring off into space with a resentful look, as if directed at life itself, had given way to a deadened mood and a heavy, oppressive apathy, which had, in turn, given way to desperate struggles to return to normalcy interspersed with bouts of crying that had to be accommodated because they came on with the quasi-regularity and insurmountable force of a freight train at a railroad crossing, or a thunderstorm in the period between summer and fall that came on with slight precipitous grumblings in advance so you knew to start heading indoors and unplug the coffeemaker before it really started to come down. Gordon had been instrumental, he was proud to say, in helping her through those moments, and they had both taken notice of that. There had never been any thought or expectation of any kind of emotional collateral in exchange, and Alyx didn't ask for any on her part either; they had agreed, when the gut-wrenching loss had first happened, to be supportive of each other, and their mutual understanding ran deep; it was one of the few things in Gordon's life in the world of other people that had been easily intuited, and with such complete certainty, to the point that the ease of it startled him. Alyx was decidedly on the mend, her smiles having slowly—although sometimes with a timidity that was new to her—returned, and most days she was back to her normal self. Loss of a loved one changes people, and she would never, Gordon knew, completely lose the impression it had left on her being, but they both knew to keep an eye on it and check it's progress against what was healthy and what was not, and were both content—as content as one could be after a sudden trauma—with her progress toward healing. That healing, they both knew, had been a team effort, and Alyx was grateful to him for being exactly what she needed, while Gordon just felt humbled and grateful to have been able to be those things for her, and that she had entrusted him to do so.
He and Alyx had several perfect understandings between them. They both knew what the other needed and gave freely of themselves with no expectation of ever asking for anything in return, simply because it was enjoyable to give the other anything they could; the giving was the thing, and the recipient the indulger, generously accepting the bounty being bestowed upon them by the other out of care and a kinship of mind that fit like a single hand-made mitten randomly discovering it's mate. Neither asked for more, and neither was discontent. For the most part.
And maybe that was the root of Gordon's mental anguish.
Not the violence, not the death of a mentor, not the vicarious pain of watching Alyx struggle to come back from her father's death. Maybe, if he would allow himself to think it, the cause of his indeterminable angst was something to do with his refusing, his not allowing himself by a single iota, to be dissatisfied with something he knew to be a blessing.
Or maybe, to be a little more specific, it was to do with the mental gymnastics he was performing to convince himself that he was really satisfied. Lying to oneself takes a lot of mental energy out of a person, and he was determined to pretend there was nothing more than a comfortable kinship between two people cut from the same cloth between he and Alyx. He was hell-bent, despite himself, to edit out the memory he wanted to cherish and revisit over and over again, to expand upon and relish and spend all his time in instead of carefully closing it up behind a brick wall and cementing it over, like he had to do.
Self-deception takes a toll on the resources of the planet's most sophisticated, marvelous computing and sensory-processing mechanism; it's a lot like a computer running multiple processes at once. When those two processes compete against each other, like two gears in an engine whose goal is simply to grind at each other, they will succeed in wearing each other down, but at the cost of themselves and of the greater apparatus, and the vicious cycle takes more and more resources from the processor until the greater system cannot help but notice and begin to run some self-diagnostics. That endless feedback loop, like a computer virus, will simply keep feeding itself more and more, parasitizing a slowly increasing amount of the computer's resources, and little quirks will begin to show through the normal operations of the device. When that computer is the human brain and it's work is the cognitive product of consciousness, spare jolts of energy and wisps of wasted neural juices, byproducts of the over-processing created by this taxing loop, can begin to develop in the form of stray thoughts, seemingly random jumbles of spare code that clump together while being cast off from the main program as it spins and spins and spins those gears against each other in it's ever-increasing and self-justifying hog of precious space in the data banks.
The self-diagnostics might think, at first, that the cast-off jumbles of code are merely junk, that is to say, pure waste or useless byproduct, or that these wisps of thought are completely random; but if it keeps digging at itself, and is completely honest in reporting back it's findings, it is likely to find the spare, stray inklings and daydreams, worries and irrationalities to be somehow related to the virus-like process; namely, of course, the self-deception. Gordon was good at self-examination-or rather, he was relentless, but not particularly gentle with himself, often treating himself like his own hostage of a cruel scientific experiment-but those two gears, the want for more from Alyx and his need to protect her, were both mighty, iron-clad cogs in his internal clockwork, and while they would certainly wear each other down if he let them, the questions of which gear would hold up longer, whether Gordon would cease their mad destruction of each other and how long that might take for him to do, and what might be the effect on the rest of his internal processes, were all up in the air.
Sometimes a broken or buggy machine just needs a good square kick.