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A crowbar wielded by two gloved, loud hands. It lays the groundwork for hope with each reluctant yet unavoidably deadly swing. That crowbar is the only evidence of Gordon they ever find- a trail of corpses and a half-destroyed science facility aside.
They don’t find his body.
Maybe that’s good, for what’s left of group morale, like maybe death doesn’t exist for the one free man. They can keep painting fast, reckless graffiti over posters of Breen’s rotten shell of a smile, words like resist, and rare artistic renditions of a man laden in metal, holding that crowbar over his head.
Half-finished sometimes and never returned to by the artist, be it out of fear, locked-down areas, or the death of who got caught ‘vandalizing’. But the art will stay seared into patchwork walls. Immortalized on concrete until the next paintjob or propaganda poster. Like maybe death doesn't exist for the one free man.
This is not the case.
In the untrackable hours after that first breach, Gordon Freeman had met more death than possibly in his entire lifetime. Intimately. At his own hands. And then he’d met something worse. It’s framed as a choice but it isn’t, and right from the doorstep of that tram, he is dropped into a pastiche of sleep, framed as such yet making death seem like a mercy.
They do not find the body of Gordon Freeman, and a small, rattled group of people at the epicenter of it all doesn’t know how to feel. It’s a much more personal hope for them, the thought that he’s alive. But maybe the closure a corpse can bring is better than preparing for his hypothetical return for twenty odd years. And not knowing if it's worth the gray hairs.
The walls are painted with a man in metal, saving the world with a crude tool, but little Alyx is raised on stories of a man who had come to work in house slippers not once but five times, because he’d keep forgetting.
“He ended up keeping extra shoes at work, cause slippers aren’t lab-safe,” Eli talks quietly with a smile as Alyx sits on his stomach and twists internal screws onto a bolt, along it, and then back off, a toy of infinite amusement in a world of very finite time for play. “Would show up at 7a.m. sometimes when we all knew he’d left the lab at 2. Coffee practically glued to his hands.”
So Alyx images a friendly man with a mug in one hand and a jar with a caterpillar in the other. Labeled Hedy. Barney tells her the latter story and tries to draw a caterpillar. To explain.
Alyx doesn’t really get it, and, too far down the line, it will cross her mind in the least appropriate of times: she will see a combine advisor, and her first thought will be of that drawing, done with care but little realism on the empty corner of a newspaper. Gordon had been in many an air-slashing argument, while wearing house slippers, about not killing bugs in the office.
She files this away. She catches snarks and smaller bugs as a teen and imagines the patient hands of an uncle she never met doing the same, with the types of bugs that existed before.
Caterpillars would hatch into butterflies. That one Barney never got around to drawing. The electricity had cut.
Her hands are careful with the extremely round, small insect, palms only slightly smudged with car grease.
Gordon Freeman is mourned the way dead people aren’t. He’s mourned by that small group as a friend that’s no longer there, but also as a friend whose image picked up its own personality long ago. They don’t recognize him in the heroic stories but smile along anyway. Anything for a little bit of hope. They build him an HEV suit. They never say it’s for him, in case he comes back, but when Eli applies the orange paint Alyx had dug up from hell knows where, everyone’s thinking the same thing: if the first one didn’t keep him safe enough, this one will.
Gordon Freeman wakes up never having fallen asleep. He cannot pin the point at which he’d stopped existing. Something in the world feels tangibly wrong. Or maybe something in him. Like a strangely polished vase in an abandoned building. He shouldn’t be here. Or rather: now.
For a moment he thinks he’d aged: his hands shake that bad.
He wanders the streets, dazed with the sun and some kind of residual haziness of being on pause while the world did its circles around the sun and left him behind. His bare fingers trace the peeling paintjob of a swingset and his joints ache, and without the HEV suit, he’s light enough to sit on the old swings and trust them to hold up.
The city smells of rust and the dampness of recent rain and even more recent smoke. He sits there and lets his back sag, breathes out, takes his glasses off and wipes them, and in them reflects a man who should be dead. Careful. He’s afraid he’ll snap them with the tremor of his hold.
He rests and hears no birds. The world doesn’t wait. People rush him through gutted flats and he’s still trying to wake up when the gas-masked soldiers get him, and Gordon desperately tries to sign coherently enough: where are you taking me, where are we going, and the soldier does look at him, but the eye glasses embedded in its mask reveal nothing. Gordon tears his own gaze away and lowers his hands-
The soldier’s fingers are dancing by his side, they sign upside down letters, as he walks, -f-e-u-r-s-a-f-e-u-r-s-a-. Before the full implications of this can settle, they’re in a closed room and the mask’s off. There’s no surprise on that face, but an infectious energy of he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive directed from both sides of the rushed conversation. It works better than coffee. Gordon’s running again soon, more buildings more flats stripped of any humanity, stairwells and elevator shafts and he’s almost back into the rhythm of it, maybe not as fluently as he’d like to be, because he’s still overpowered and cornered- and then the little kid he bounced on his knee both 20 years and no time at all ago is saving his ass and firing off pre-prepared witty quips. He signs thank you and she beams.
He recognizes the smile, she looks like her father after a long shift of monitoring the same twenty samples of highly ambitious thiophenes. Of course the secret door is behind a poster of that who they hide from.
Kleiner’s already talking, and it takes a moment for him to not just see Gordon but understand that he’s there. He throws his hands up in joy and launches almost immediately into the chummy rhythm of updating Gordon on… everything. It’s not enough, it’s rushed, but the pace of it is reeling Gordon back in by the fishing line of adrenaline, he won’t even protest getting sucked back into the world’s most defining moments. He studies the corkboard briefly and, as he stands in the teleporter, he thinks of the child’s drawing.
When Barney throws him the crowbar, Gordon catches it with far steadier hands. He feels less physically jittery and far more so emotionally. No longer racked by shivers, when he takes his first swing at a boarded-up doorway, but maybe the moment's just too fast to pause and notice things like that now. It’s familiar. He’s so awake. These swings carry him through the next devastating hours of taking up that mantel again.
By the end of it, his hands are rubbed raw. The HEV suit’s seams have chafed lines into his palms and he peels the gloves off with a sigh of relief.
It’s the first piece of the suit to go, and he sits on a crate, letting himself sag as much as the metal encasing him allows, and gestures a nonspecific I’m okay, keep going. It’s now two hours after the defeat of the combine. The youth of the world are about to storm Breen’s luxury web of a living space. It’s symbolic more than anything, and Gordon watches them run past him as he sits and rests, thumb tracing bullet dents on his leg, and some don’t notice him at all. The ones that do nod, grin, salute, and he realizes he’d lost track of his crowbar.
He’ll see it later. In the soon to be historic footage of a mob landing their first, resonant blow on Breen’s door, prying it open with none other:
A crowbar wielded by two gloved, loud hands. It lays the groundwork for change with each relentless swing, hammering nails into the coffin of the last two decades.
Powerful in the hands of none other than Eli’s daughter, there at the head of the crowd.
But for now, he watches the floor and the jogging shoes of passing people.
Barney materializes to his right, finally in civilian clothes, carrying a beat-up jug of water. They rinse the blood off Gordon’s hands.
The chafing will fade but he’ll feel those grooves forever.
They purge the paint from Kleiner’s windows, bathing the lab in fresh, bright light that stings their eyes. Eli passes Gordon a new rag for the glass and sees his bandaged hands, chuckles, “Guess that suit wasn’t perfect after all,” and there’s regret there, like somehow saving Gordon from countless bullets wasn’t enough.
Gordon frees up his right hand, smiles, and signs, “It’s what we needed.” He doesn’t use the sign that specifies who we. Because he doesn’t know. Was it the people who built it? Who needed that project to hold onto and polish for years, because what if? Was it just Gordon? The city? The world?
They wipe years of paint and old newspaper off the windows, let in the autumn sun.
Alyx and him patch up the roof: a mostly silent activity as Alyx has nails in her mouth and Gordon has more in his hands. It’s also loud as hell but neither flinch, until Kleiner pops up over the edge and waves to get their attention. He passes them their lunch with a broomstick and vanishes back inside to keep picking through old documents with Russell, figuring out what needs to be preserved and what can be recycled.
She asks him about a caterpillar in a jar and if there’s more to the story. He nods and huffs, having forgotten about that until now. It hatched into a moth and got out of the jar, scaring the shit out of Barney at night. Caused quite a ruckus. It’s Gordon’s turn to tell stories.
“Ya wanna explain why you’re the one called Doc and yet I’m the one patchin ya up all the time?” Barney sighs as he sits Gordon aside on the pier and cringes at where Gordon severely mishandled a fishing rod and got a nasty gash on the ridge of his palm for it. "Doc?"
With only one hand free Gordon approximates, deadpan, “Maybe it’s short for d-o-c-u-m-e-n-t.”
Barney snorts his chipper laugh as he’s cleaning the palm, “Yeah and Barney’s short for Barnacle- stay still.”
“You keep being loud and I’ll make it short for ‘banned’ cause I’ll kick you out,” Eli stage whispers at them without turning away from the water.
Barney wheezes and keeps working on Gordon’s hand as Alyx pipes up from where she’s lying on the grass, hat hiding her face from the overcast sky, “That wasn’t even good, dad.”
“They’ll scare the fish away,” he sighs but there’s a smile on his voice and he jostles her knee where it’s nearby fondly, “One can’t unfold a fishing rod and the other can’t keep his voice down, how’d we get this far?” He asks it jokingly and their conversation with Alyx continues in quiet banter, but the question rings too true. How? Barney finishes the bandage, pulled from inner pockets of med supplies he always has on himself, even if he claims to not be a medic. He’s staring at Gordon’s hands now.
Gordon doesn’t know if it’s because of Eli’s chastising or some semblance of privacy, but Barney signs, “You okay?”
It’s really too vague to know how to answer, so Gordon just counters, “Why?”
“Your hands are shaking,” all the signs are old-form ASL, none of these words have been repurposed for the new world and Barney pauses on shaking.
“Not too bad,” Gordon shrugs and it’s true. Stasis still wears on his joints and bones and it’s only the smallest of consequences. Barney traces the ridges of his left palm and the scars that never really left. His hold is loose though in case Gordon needs both hands to talk.
They find more survivors, and with them, they find rare, precious livestock. Someone managed to keep a family of goats alive up in the mountains, and for winter everyone finally drifts together, intact rooms are reinforced, old clothes are repurposed and resown, and this time Gordon is gifted soft, mostly fitting gloves. Not chafing, metal-plated ones. He fingerspells words like Christmas and Hannukah to Alyx and teaches her their signs over an old, busted TV they’re dismantling for wires. She says he looks like a raccoon with those gloves, later, and at his surprised response, shows him an old book of different animals she’d found: pictures of bears, foxes, hedgehogs, raccoons.
Spring means that after years of dormancy, gardening is about to make its grand return. Gordon studies the new callouses on his hands from the rake and shovel, resting after a long day of sweating through his shirt and getting a fucking farmer’s tan of all things. Barney’s going to get on his ass about it relentlessly once he gets back from the scouting mission. Gone with a team of other people, looking for that abandoned orchard one of the forest-dwelling survivors talked about. He can't wait.
Kleiner drifts into the room with water for both him and a similarly resting Alyx and rolls over a patched up office chair to tell them about tree propagation. Gordon cools his hands on the water and picks at the rough patches of skin against the tremor. Alyx later asks him what he’s grinning about, and Gordon really doesn’t know how to word the fact that - for once - his hands aren’t stained with blood or ill-fitting expectations but rather with hard-earned proof of labor. He tries, because she’s still looking at him with expectation and childlike curiosity, so he does his best. They get back to working the soil, swings familiar and methodical, and soon Eli and a complaining Russell drag over the buckets of saplings and boxes of salvaged seeds.
It’s really, really spring. Maybe for the first time in years.
The orchard expedition returns with mixed news and a guitar. They’d found the place overgrown and almost lost in other unrelated shrubbery. But they’d found a guitar that survived the seeping moisture of snow and rain, and Barney teams up with Eli for hours trying to get that thing back on its feet.
The first notes sound like shit and Barney waves Gordon away with a huff and a grin after being told so. They’ll get there. The first dinner around a fire with music makes several people cry. It’s passed around between those who barely remember how to play it, but Russell’s quick to find cord guides and they rifle through his archives of songs. God. Even Gordon had forgotten most of these existed.
He studies Barney’s fingers later, idly playing with his hand and listening to his heartbeat, he's alive he's alive he's alive, and the pads of his fingers are rough from the strings. He hadn’t wanted to stop playing once his hands remembered how. He learns up and props his head on Barney's chest to ask, “Does it hurt?”
“You chin sure does, so fucking sharp, roll over,” Barney wiggles a wheezing Gordon off to the side, then smiles, “Nah, nice to pick it back up again.”
“I remember you having the same c-a-l-l-o-u-s-e-s back in the labs,” Gordon manages to get Barney in the ribs with his elbow while he rolls off, almost on accident. “Thought it was cool you played an instrument.”
“Didn’t you play the flute?” Barney jabs him back and snorts, “Hid it from us for months.”
“Specifically for this reason,” but Gordon’s smiling, glasses mushed to the side. He doesn't remember when he'd stopped feeling guilty for an open grin. Been a while.
He knows Barney learned the guitar mostly for camping trips with a fire and for the coolguy points of being the ‘life of the party’ as he’d put it, even though back then and still now, Barney has a tendency to leave midway through gatherings. To either nap or just sit and watch the sky. That’s what they’re doing now, summer night on a rare evening that isn’t cold, open sky, stars, stars, so many of them after years of smoggy blanket of combine’s pollution. There’s a celebration going on downstairs outside still, hip hip hooray for the first harvest of their new lives, and they hear the guitar in someone else’s hands, chatter, laughter.
Barney presses his thumb into the pads of Gordon’s palm, watching the sky, “You’ve got callouses too.”
Gordon retrieves his hands and smugly flicks, “Who do you think works the gardens?”
"Alyx."
Of course the next fifteen minutes are filled with those farmer tan jokes he’d anticipated, and more in the same vein. Barney’s laugh is rough, like he’d forgotten how it goes, the same way he’d forgotten the chords to fucking wonderwall. But once you remember how, you don't want to stop.
The city is dark, but not in the way painted-over windows are. It’s just not densely populated enough yet, but there’s the flicker of an improvised campfire from downstairs and countless other dim house lights on, peppering the buildings where people live.
And it’s just enough to illuminate a mural scrawling the neighboring building's wall. One its artist had the luxury of time to paint.
It’s complete and there is something wonderful in its slightly non-geometric tilt, a circle, within which a gloved hand holds a crowbar. But the glove is drawn spectacularly vaguely, depending how you look, it could be fingerless. The paint glows faintly with blue, but only when you look away- like an optic illusion. Whosever hand is drawn, it’d come a long way from breaking-in the combine’s rule one swing at a time.
It is no longer chafed and scraped and dotted with the syringe pockmark of med stations. It’s roughened by the tending of gardens and by picking up a guitar and by welding tools and stained with ink and paint and plaster as renovations must be made to the city with eager smiles of we are taking it back. This is ours again. Maybe that hand isn’t a single person’s, now that Gordon thinks about it. Maybe it’s the hand of anyone who’d ever stood their ground, or made the right choice. Rome wasn’t built in a day. City 17 wasn’t reclaimed without blood. Yes, maybe they couldn’t have done it without the return of a symbol, but that symbol couldn’t have done it without his people too.
They’d found him wandering dazed in an unfamiliar city. They'd risked it all on a day already full of gambled life. Snuck him through tunnels marked by his own insignia: you are safe, you are safe, you are safe. Now downstairs people celebrate with bitter, but fresh tomatoes. And in a few days, another scouting trip will be made to the orchard. They'll get branches, propagate. Barney won't be going on that one, he's staying here this time. Alyx wants her family there for the first test-run of some sort of secret project she's been working on with Russell and Eli. Gordon highly suspects it's jetpack-adjacent.
Barney's warm hands find his again, and they watch the stars, watch the sky arch up, up, threaded with infinity. There are planets out there, but Barney lifts the arm that's not around Gordon to point out constellations instead. And somehow, those silly shapes drawn a long, long time ago by people who must've been incredibly bored - or just as enamored - matter so much more than the cold of space and its scarce, unseen inhabitants. Barney's hand is silhouetted and backlit and it traces the lines of animals and mythological figures, and Gordon gets a sense he's making up some of them.
But at the end of the day, all the ones before that have been made up by stargazing people too. And it gets a wheeze out of Gordon, and soon his own hand is carving patterns into the sky, fingerspelling their new names, and Barney's laugh shakes them both so hard, you wouldn't see if Gordon's hand still tremors or not.