milliways_bar | (no subject)

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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Rhodey glances up. "That's me," he says, and for a second, he can't figure who the man is or what he wants -- and then he realizes. He gets up. "And you're Dr. Freeman, I'm guessing." He offers a hand.

"That's me." Gordon shakes the offered hand. "Good to finally meet you. I've been stuck here a while, so I've been trying to keep busy."

He looks, more or less, pretty ordinary. Six foot two, relatively thin build, reddish-brown hair, glasses. It takes a little looking to spot the curved shrapnel scar across most of his forehead, or the thinner, older ones near the hairline.

"Remind me to update our list. Dr. Vattic and I were speculating about the number of MIT graduates around here who turned out to have dangerous careers."

He half-laughs, sitting back down and gesturing to the empty chairs at the table. "Go ahead and take a seat, Doctor. I don't know how dangerous my job is these days, unless dealing with reporters counts as hazardous duty."

(Rhodey might think it does.)

A little amused at the idea of the census: "I used to be a test pilot and I flew in Desert Storm, though, if that helps you out."

"That's something, yeah," says Gordon with a half-smile as he sits down. "Dr. Vattic went on to a psy-ops military unit himself at some point, and me- well, my whole world went dangerous on us. That's close enough, I figure."

"Can I buy you a drink? Least I can do to make up for the paper chase."

He shakes his head. "I'm still technically working, so I'll have to take a raincheck. Thanks, though."

A pause, but then, hey -- it's not like it's a secret (thanks a lot, Tony Stark), and Tony's certainly been telling the entire world, so ... "Friend of mine also went to MIT and comes around here, and they're calling him a superhero in the press now."

(Rhodey still stubbornly refuses to do so. Sure, Tony wears the Iron Man suit and he blows stuff up and pulls kittens out of trees and all that crap. But in the end, he's still the guy who talked Jim into drunken karaoke in college and got him in trouble for playing the Top Gun theme song in a military aircraft.)

"So there's another one for your list."

"Four of us, then," says Gordon. "Superhero, huh?"

He's thinking more along the lines of Vattic's psychic powers than anything else; he only met Stark the once, and that was a while ago. It could easily be another MIT graduate.

With ass-kicker powers.

And a round trip ticket to the end of the universe.

"The statistics are starting to make my head hurt," he murmurs.

He half-grins. "What, four for four? It is pretty weird, when you think about it. It is when I think about most of the people I went to school with at MIT, anyway."

Rhodey's classmates were not really the badass type, typically.

"The same here," Gordon says. And then, because he's made something of a point of not believing his own hype: "Up until a couple of months ago I wouldn't've qualified either, honestly. Even if they did insist everyone in the high energy labs learn to use automatic weapons."

Operation Eyebrows Rise is a go.

"What kind of labs were you working in?"

"Black Mesa officially worked on high energy quantum physics experiments, including NSA-grade quantum cryptography work and research into quantum teleportation," Gordon says dryly. "They also had nuclear disarmament contracts from the Pentagon and some biology labs in the area of the facility I wasn't cleared to enter. Turned out they were xenobiology labs."

Anybody who graduated from MIT, Gordon figures, is probably smart enough to recognize the prefix.

"Not that we knew that. We mostly thought it was a case of the security chief not being able to leave Vietnam behind."

"Xenobiology," Rhodes repeats. "What, like aliens and stuff?"

"Afraid so," says Gordon. "I didn't want to believe it myself, but-"

He shrugs; he doesn't much care if he's believed or not, because he, for one, knows it's true, and therefore has nothing to prove.

"And that would be why they wanted you to be able to fire a gun," he finishes. "Makes sense."

Beat.

"You know, for a given value of making sense."

Gordon's mouth twitches. "I'll tell you- I remember when logic and sense governed the world, several months ago. Gosh, I miss those times."

"I'm guessing stuff went bad?" he asks, and it's a little wry, because he's also guessing that 'stuff went bad' is a pretty big understatement. Freeman's a physicist, not a Marine. Scars like the ones that Rhodey's just noticing aren't exactly general issue.

"Pretty bad, yeah," says Gordon. "I don't think the labs on the premises would've been a problem if our last teleportation experiment hadn't overloaded the machines. There's such a thing as something working too well."

"What kind of a problem were they?" he says. "If that's something it's okay to answer."

Or to ask.

"There's no one left to object," Gordon says. "The last experiment was supposed to be an analytical run. Supposed to be. What it did was amplify the effect we were generating to the point where it couldn't be controlled. Spacetime got torn apart like an ugly tie in a paper shredder, and things from the dimension the top-secret boys'd been raiding started teleporting in all over the place."

Spacetime, teleportation -- not really Rhodey's specialty. Not really Tony's specialty, either, but if he were here, Rhodey figures he'd probably know all the right questions to be asking.

Rhodes, on the other hand, is a straightforward mechanics sort of a guy. He pulls something of a face; it's half startled, half resigned to being startled, and maybe a little extra '...ugh.' "That -- sounds pretty incredible," he says, and 'incredible' is clearly not meant in a positive way.