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Gordon's been out by the lake since sundown, doing his best to walk or run himself into a state of exhaustion advanced enough to let him sleep for once. It didn't really take, so he's come inside, a bit damp from the usual Scottish weather. It's not all that different from the weather he used to slog through at home, a fact which may have inspired an idea or two. He migrates over to the Bar and says, "Excuse me. Do you have back issues of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in stock?"

A napkin materializes with one word on it: Yes.

"Good. May I please have an issue from..." He drums his fingers on the bartop a moment, thinking. "The first week of September. 1982. I- oh."

After riffling through the Local News section he adds, much more quietly, "Any chance of the WSU alumni newsletter and a pair of scissors?"

That, too, seems to have worked. He looks for a moment as if he might ask for something else; then he goes silent and heads in search of a place to sit. His guns can wait. For now, this is more important.

[Tinytag: Gordon Freeman, Wilbur Whateley, Alyx Vance. Open until it scrolls off the front page.]

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Hey, Gordon.

*He glances at the newspaper.* What'cha doing?

"Family picture, sort of," Gordon says. He puts down the scissor and slides the Local News section in Andrew's direction, open to page B-3. A good portion of the page above the fold is taken up with an article about a particularly stubborn family court judge named Barbara Freeman, including a photograph of her with a caption indicating the dressing-down she's giving to a man two years behind in his child support payments.

"Lost my wallet back at Black Mesa, and everything in it."

*Barbara. Gordon. His spine prickles.*

*Coincidence.*

That's your ... mother? *he hazards.*

Gordon nods. "One of the longest-serving judges on the King County family court bench," he says, and there's more than a trace of pride in his voice as he says it. "As of 2001, anyway. This-" He taps the paper. "I was eight years old when this happened. I took the paper to school for my current events article that week."

Family pictures, *he repeats, getting it now.*

And the other thing?

He flips through the newsletter until he gets to the section about the newly hired football coach. The picture is of a cleanshaven man who rather resembles Gordon sans glasses, albeit considerably broader in build.

"My brother Jay."

*He studies the picture thoughtfully.*

Older or younger brother?

"Older. By a few years," Gordon says. "He had a daughter, but I doubt there's any accessible pictures of Ellie out there."

I've got an older brother too. Haven't seen him in ages.

*The idea of Tucker having kids, maybe, someday, is ... a disquieting one.*

"Jay was being scouted by the pros, but he blew out his knee," Gordon says ruefully. "Hence the coaching job... I owed him a phone call, now that I think about it."

*A beat.*

Owed?

*Past tense?*

Gordon starts to speak. Stops. Thinks for a moment.

"I've been back to my world. Have I filled you in on that?"

*Andrew shakes his head.*

*He's got a bad feeling about this.*

"'Been back to' may have been the wrong phrase," says Gordon. "It implies volition. Something teleported me out of my room in my sleep."

The Son of a Bitch doesn't merit a someone.

"I woke up on a train in my world twenty years and change after Black Mesa."

Twenty years?

"Plus a handful of months, but yes," says Gordon quietly. ""During which time the resonance cascade not only kept depositing aliens all over the world, but another group took notice of us... and drilled a portal to Earth from their own dimension in order to expand their empire. The Combine conquered the planet in seven hours."

*Andrew breathes a curse in Klingon.*

*There doesn't seem to be much else to say, just yet.*

Gordon's mouth twists a little as he says, "Nothing like getting off the train and being told you've been relocated to 'one of our finest remaining urban centers' to wake you up in the morning. The place looked like Detroit after the riots."

*He's slowly realizing the implications of Gordon's collection of family pictures.*

*This is all that's left.*

So this 'Combine'.

What's their deal?

"Officially they call themselves the Universal Union," Gordon says bitterly. "They're a race of dimensional raiders who move from one universe to another via dimensional portals. They conquer the worlds they reach and start modifying the native lifeforms into appropriate cyber-modded tools for whatever campaigns they might happen to have in mind. Synths, they call them- different species, different capabilities, but it's all the same. When they got to Earth they imposed some kind of energy field that stopped the human reproductive cycle and turned off our reproductive urges so that there wouldn't be any more humans born until they'd decided whether we were worth adding to the arsenal, or should just be allowed to go extinct. It's been sixteen years since a human child was born, and everywhere you go, there's Combine Overwatch soldiers with more chips in their head than a damn Pringles factory."

*Andrew's mouth is hanging slightly open through most of this; finally he swallows, and his lips press tight.*

Frell. I --

I don't have the words. I just ... that's horrific.

"The only mercy we have is that they can't teleport within a universe. They don't have the technology for that," Gordon says. "Once they're on a world, they have to work with what they've got, and it doesn't look as if they have space travel, either. But that's about it."

"Fun part? Everyone I've met who wasn't a Combine collaborator seems to be under the impression that because of what I did at Black Mesa, I'm going to be able to fight the Combine down and put it all right somehow..."

Twenty years and they still remember what you did, *he murmurs.*

"Yeah." Gordon slides a hand under his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. "There was a race of aliens- I told you about the different species at Black Mesa, right? The hunched over greenish-brown ones, with the red eyes and the ability to throw lightning? They call themselves Vortigaunts. They'd been enslaved for millennia and lost everything as a species. When I killed the thing that was supposed to end the resonance cascade, it didn't- but it set the Vortigaunts free. They're our allies now."

( Your song we sing and shall sing for eternity, no matter the consequences of this struggle. You have brought us grief and jubilation beyond measure. )

"They remember it even more than the humans do."

Edited 2008-09-21 06:05 (UTC)

Allies. Against the Combine. So there's a, a resistance?

*Of course there's a resistance. There's always a resistance.*