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Today, their small group was joined by two men and a girl with a crooked red cross on her sleeve, seemingly written in blood. Barney didn't need their names to know: they were ready to fight for freedom until their last breath. The orange lambda on their clothes and the desperate determination in their eyes spoke for themselves.
The Citadel is just a stone's throw away. In the morning, Calhoun, Freeman, and the other Resistance members will deactivate the Birth Suppression Field. Many of them, if not all at once, will be dismantled into atoms. But that won't happen until tomorrow. For now, life flickers in their exhausted bodies, and hope in their weary souls.
City Seventeen was plunged into a shimmering, cold gloom, ripped apart by the harsh white light of floodlights. Gunships and dropships flew overhead, shaking their temporary shelter; Combine patrols chattered abruptly over the radio Barney had retained from his time in the Civil Protection. Breen's voice boomed over the loudspeakers, appealing to Freeman's "reason." The rebels, however, were practically silent, huddled around a barrel containing smoldering antique paintings and a luxurious mahogany chest of drawers. Some feverishly went over the details of their plan, others indulged in unrealistic fantasies about a bright future, and still others, on the contrary, floated in the ghostly soup of the past, remembering the days when their main problem was getting reprimanded by their boss for being late for work. And beneath it all, thoughts of death lurked.
Barney tried not to think about anything, sipping beer he had gotten from one of the dilapidated residential areas.
"Also a kind of suppression mean, huh?" he joked as the Earth Administrator's menacing speech began again.
Gordon looked at Calhoun with a heavy, impassive gaze, and Barney quickly looked away, feigning interest in the murky contents of his bottle. Despite all his outward bravado, he was a little afraid of Freeman. How could this young theoretical physicist be so knowledgeable about weapons and a true marksman? A shiver ran down his spine as he watched Gordon coolly, almost casually, load shells into a SPAS-12 or, with a sharp, confident motion, insert an energy cell into an Overwatch pulse rifle. The gravity gun and crowbar had become his third and fourth arms. He was the Deathbringer, punishing his enemies without hesitation, without fear.
Barney wouldn't want to get in his way.
So why does Gordon, a lone wolf, risk his life to help the Resistance? He cut off all personal connections and closed his accounts when he decided to seal himself away in Black Mesa, and now, twenty years after the Incident, almost none of his friends and colleagues remain alive. This isn't his war. Nothing stopped Gordon from collaborating with the Combine or escaping. With his suit back, Freeman wouldn't have to rush into the thick of things to rescue Vance from Nova Prospekt or pull Barney out from under sniper fire. He offered no motivation for his heroic actions, and was generally a taciturn guy. Calhoun recently asked Magnusson if he was mute, to which he received an ominous and cryptic reply: "I wish he was."
Of course, Gordon needed the resources and knowledge accumulated by the Resistance to survive, but something more was clearly at play here. A sense of duty? A desire to spite Breen? Or perhaps compassion? Calhoun couldn't shake the feeling that people were nothing more than furniture to him. Gordon Freeman had become a symbol for humanity, a guiding light, but it seemed he didn't care at all.
Barney glanced again furtively into the detached green eyes and saw there a predator stalking its prey. "There's no compassion there," Calhoun shuddered, once again experiencing the strange goosebumps that crawled deep beneath his skin.
The headcrab sizzled deliciously on the stick. Barney swallowed, rubbing his hands together eagerly. If you removed the beak and other inedible bits, it was quite a treat, still tastier than the bony crows he'd grown so sick of. Burning himself, he removed the creature from the fire and divided it among his comrades. He handed Freeman a leg.
“Would you like?..”
Gordon slowly shook his head and, still in his suit, sank down onto a dirty mattress they'd found in one of the rooms. He wasn't eating. He wasn't talking. He hadn't uttered a single curse word when he'd been hurt. This was beginning to really bother Barney.
"Come on, you'll need your strength tomorrow," Barney pressed, "Vortigaunts and bullsquids eat them in droves, so we can too."
Gordon snorted, and Calhoun perked up, pushing the meat toward him.
“Careful, Doc, it's hot.”
Freeman ate calmly, as if he didn't even notice the heat. Grease dripped down his black gloves and rolled along his elbows. Barney tried to follow suit and hissed.
"What a fucking superman!"
However, the pain in his burnt tongue did not stop him from continuing to chatter:
"Good thing Dr. Kleiner doesn't see this poor lil’ one roasted. Otherwise, he'd have a stroke."
Gordon nodded dubiously. Although Barney might have imagined it — the flames rarely, as if reluctantly, snatched his face from the darkness. He caught himself sneaking glances again. A damn attractive man. And damn silent. Even Alyx couldn't melt that emerald ice.
"And I can't compare to her beauty!"
Suppressing a disappointed sigh, he immersed himself in memories of the days when Barney Calhoun was a security guard at the American Black Mesa Research Facility, not a fucking Resistance veteran. He joked with his still-alive and healthy friends about "highbrow" and "four-eyed" scientists and didn't pay much attention to some other junior researcher. He wondered if Freeman had been as silent as he was now, before the utter hell of HECUs destroying everything in their path, hundreds of monsters, and walking corpses. Besides, Gordon had crossed the world of Xen alone, reaching the Nihilanth itself; and who knows what kind of effort it must have taken him to escape its mental net.
Having experienced something like that, Barney probably would have withdrawn too.
Having finished eating, Freeman lay down to sleep, his hands tucked comfortingly under his cheek. The other rebels also crawled into corners, seeking refuge from the drafts. Some were already snoring. They were all quite exhausted.
Calhoun settled down on the flattened cardboard boxes that served as his bed today. No one objected to Freeman's use of the only available mattress. Freeman didn't object either. Not a word had escaped his lips, not a muscle had moved in his face since Barney had met him on the platform. Even in the midst of the bloodiest massacre, his face remained untouched by emotion, and this was both captivating and disturbing in equal measure.
Breen's monotonous voice and a full stomach were doing their job, and Calhoun began to drift off. He felt quite warm in his battered CP suit, and Gordon's chiseled profile in his field of vision was reassuring.
"Everything will be fine".
Barney awoke in the dead of night to a vague, alarming sound. He cautiously scanned the unfading City Seventeen sky and rolled over, as if in a sleep. No intruders. The guard, a haggard African-American man in his forties, gave him a thumbs-up. Had he dreamed it?
The sound repeated itself. It was Gordon Freeman moaning in his sleep, dully, as if in pain.
“Don't…” the man winced, pronouncing the words clearly. “Off, get away from me... I don’t want to!”
Breen's hologram had just begun its thousandth sermon, drowning out Freeman's lamentations. Barney glanced at the rest of his comrades — they were sleeping soundly, while the guard had turned to the window, sucking on a cigarette butt. Taking advantage of the fact that no one was looking, he crept up to Gordon, crawling silently, like a snake, onto the moldy mattress.
He was taking a risk. Freeman was probably a light sleeper, just like him. Any minute now, he'd wake up and hit him in the forehead with the butt of his rifle.
He didn't wake up. He was wearing a fucking suit, constantly pumping him full of drugs. Back at good old Black Mesa, while picking up a Lambda Complex worker who'd fallen down the stairs, Barney personally heard an electronic female voice in the suit announce, "Major fracture detected. Morphine administered."
Calhoun, moved by a surge of compassion, hugged the shuddering man. Freeman's body was ice-cold — HEV 5 trapped all the warmth inside to keep him warm. Only his face and neck were exposed, and Barney, may his late, extremely religious mother forgive him, touched his nose to the soft skin, inhaling the scent of the Messiah. Bitter, adrenaline-fueled, masculine. Wildly arousing. Barney remembered how long it had been since he'd been huddled with some rebel who'd quit drinking the libido-suppressing junk handed out by Uncle Breen, who looked like an evil version of Santa. Barney forcefully pushed those thoughts aside, stroking Gordon's hair.
Calhoun felt Freeman's breath, tickling the top of his head, even out. He held him a little longer and rolled back onto his cold cardboard. A variety of emotions overwhelmed the man, but his military training allowed him to fall asleep quickly.
***
Barney couldn't stomach the cold beans at breakfast, so he handed the whole can to Doc. Freeman looked at him a little too intently, even suspiciously, but he accepted the food, wielding his fork with the same precise, lightning-fast movements he used with any weapon in this world or the border one.
Barney was quietly glad Gordon hadn't woken up after all. Otherwise, that fork with the missing tine might have ended up in his eye. Pulling himself together, he gathered the squad around the barrel for a final briefing.