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"what the fuck dude you just killed a guy. not cool."
Benrey's voice cut through Gordon's head like a knife, monotone as ever.
But when he looked at them, their nose wrinkled and their mouth slightly open, they looked genuinely upset with him.
But they were sitting in a diner and their weren't even any people there except the staff how the hell could he have-
Something twitched under his knuckle.
Oh.
"Benrey, it's just a spider." He scraped his knuckle on the edge of the table.
He used to be pretty icked out by bugs (and arachnids and crustaceans and what have you), but he was a man who'd plucked maggots out of a body and eaten them because he was desperate.
Spiders didn't scare him too much to kill them anymore.
"so?" Was all the whatever-he-was-now (alien? god? bank robber? friend?) said.
"So it doesn't matter if I killed it." Gordon shrugged.
"would you like it a giant monster crushed you to death?" He asked, like they'd never been a giant monster trying to crush him.
("i betrayed you, you killed me, so like, even-stevens")
"It's-" He laughed, that hoarse, breathy, trying-not-to-laugh laugh he gave Benrey. "I'm a guy Benrey. It's a spider. Everyone kills spiders."
"but would you like it? dude?" He repeated.
Tommy and Coomer had spent a long time explaining morality to them.
(Bubby wasn't moral and Gordon thought it was a waste of time.)
"I- No. I guess not. But it's a spider. Why do you care?"
They shrugged, beads of water(?) dripping from his hair and down their nose.
Their face twitched and a few bright orbs fell out of their mouth before they smashed them down against the table, popping them. (Being an alien after the alien apocalypse where all the aliens died just felt risky.)
Pink to a tan sort of color.
(What rhymed with tan? Van, can, ban- Maybe it was a different shade. Like khaki. Tacky? Gordon hated the sweet voice, he hated not knowing exactly what something meant.)
"you're like a spider." They shrugged again, wiping away the colorful mess with their arm, just letting it drip off the table.
He lifted his arm to lick the residue off.
"I am not-" Gordon was slightly offended. "Dude you're more like a spider than I am, freaky and dark and people are scared of you."
They paused with their tongue halfway up their arm, before finishing the job with a napkin.
"you're small and easy to crush." He said, like that wasn't an insult. "crushing little bitches like you is wrong."
That was an insult.
"Dude-" He got cut off, the waitress coming along. Though he couldn't imagine she'd give a shit if she overheard them discussing the morality of killing spiders.
Gordon had gotten a plate of eggs.
(He wasn't worried about food sanitation after all the literal shit he had to go through after the Cascade.)
"You're weird man." He shook his head when the lady left.
They'd gone from laughing when he lost his arm to getting mad when he killed a spider. In a pretty short time too, for such a drastic change.
"you're kinda rude, bro." They pushed their hair back, so it wouldn't get their food wet.
(Why were they always so wet? In Black Mesa he'd been soaked, and he'd started drying out after they'd all gotten out. They never answered when Gordon asked.)
They'd gotten a pancake.
"can't hurt you, but you can kill me and spiders. fucked up. favor-tism."
They folded the pancake up and just downed the whole thing at once.
"I- First off, we killed you because that was how to stop the Resonance Cascade, and you're fine anyways. And you can't kill people because they aren't spiders."
Maybe it was wrong to be bitter when they brought up dying in Xen, but they were fine, they came back like nothing happened. And they got him ambushed and made him lose a hand!
"are they less alive?" He asked, breaking Gordon out of his thoughts again.
"What?"
"are you more alive than a spiders?" It sounded like a genuine question. Their eyes stayed half lidded, but their eyebrows were a little raised and they didn't look away.
(He didn't know how he could see their eyebrows when they were in such a dark shadow, under a hat.)
"No, I- I'm not. But-" He didn't know how to follow that, so he just ate his egg instead.
"s'okay bro." They reached over the table, clapping him on the shoulder. Another few bits of color squirmed out of their teeth. (Sunflower to a kind of- Orange? Very vibrant brown?) "moral lessons is nothing to be embarrassed about."
They got up, and left him to pay.
Asshole.