Archive of Our Own ^beta

Obviously man-made structures stretch out before him, bearing the tell-tale signs of Black Mesa's interference. An excess of plastic, that blocky, industrial sort of shape to every bit of metal, and, of course, their logo. Not often, that last part, but just frequently enough to remind Stark that yes, even here, there were other people. Probably not anymore, though. This place hasn't been safe for a second since he's arrived.

Stark takes out his MP5. The ammo for this doesn't hurt anything much, being very low-caliber, but with any luck, it will still be able to kill whatever unarmoured aliens are here. They shouldn't be too different from whatever's on Earth right now? Maybe they'll even be weaker, if the stuff swarming Black Mesa is all the strongest things here, as he'd expect an invasion force to be.

He enters the Survey Team's base. It's quiet and decrepit, betraying the fact that something must have gotten in at some point. He can still hear some sort of robotic whispering of this place's equivalent of the VOX. Is- Is that getting closer? Stark grimaces and raises his gun, turning on his suit's flashlight and looking about the room he's in. He takes a moment to check behind him, just in case. Nothing out there.

Turning back to the room proper, he listens carefully. A fabric sort of shuffling, and the scrape of metal on metal and plastic alike. It sounds almost like when he was ambushed... Don't linger on that. It's coming from straight ahead. He watches, in a sort of horror-filled patience, as some slow-moving shape gradually enters his flashlight's beam.

There before him is another human, clad in an HEV suit and bearing one of the headcrabs that's been plaguing him both here and on Earth. He shudders. Proof that those things could easily get him, too. The stuttering mechanical voice dies out as he levels his gun to the poor thing's head and shoots it down. Vincent looks around quickly, just in case there's more waiting for him. He knows better than to assume that one threat down means there aren't any more nearby. There aren't, though, and he goes to step over the corpse he's left in his wake before the realization hits him.

This is a member of the Survey Team. Or it was. They're in an HEV suit, same model as his, which means they had to have received HEV training, which didn't go to just anyone, just the physically fit scientists. No guards, no one too old. Thirty-year olds through fifty, usually. Vincent got HEV training right before he quit. So did Ramirez. Then Ramirez disappeared, not too shortly after he got that training.

Is this where he went? The borderworld? Would Vincent have ended up here if he hadn't quit? His breath catches and he's down on his knees by the corpse, carefully pulling the remains of the headcrab off of the body. The face is unrecognizable, and Vincent's own crumples. The hair, the thought hits him, and he follows through frantically. Check the hair- When he cleans off the worst of the crusted-on blood, it's black. Not Ramirez. Okay. Not him.

He lays the body back onto the ground carefully and stands back up. He can't rely on that for everyone here. Maybe Ramirez is alive, if he's really lucky, (Ramirez or Vincent..?) but given the state of the base, it's probable that no one or very few people made it out of danger. He can't rely on the hope that one of the people who survived is coincidentally his friend. God, does he want to, though.

The gun goes back in its holster. If there's anything other than the headcrabs and the dead, he'll take it back out again, but right now, he can't risk making it impossible to figure out if one of the poor Survey Team members is his friend or not. Crowbar it is, then. Stark can feel himself drifting into that hazy state he gets when he has to kill too many people too quickly. It's the state of mind that lets him make bad jokes while killing other humans.

He doesn't joke about this. There's an odd intimacy in how he carries on. A deadly seriousness, but the dead are predictable to fight, and he can hit them two or three times before needing to dodge, easily. None of these confrontations take long. He kills each one with a calm efficiency, checks each body, and moves on when they're no one he knows or cares about. There are a couple he knows. He refuses to pay them mind.

For a moment, the idea comes to him to kill the headcrab specifically, see if he can save the person underneath. There's not much hope to the plan, given that these people aren't talking, even when the parasitized humans back home kept talking and screaming the whole time. Maybe these people are too long-dead. Vincent tries anyways. The headcrab dies, and the corpse left behind seems no better or worse off than the others.

Stark sets his expression into a grim determination and refuses to think of the implications. He doesn't want to uncover his friend's corpse. Surely, there'll be someone still alive, even if they're horribly changed. Knowing Ramirez, he'd love a set of massive claws. It'd make paperwork too inconvenient to force him to do it. He'd be able to open any bag of chips in the world. He blinks hard, clearing the tears trying to build up. He doesn't need to cry.

There's still a chance Ramirez is still alive, after all. Not much of one. Almost none. But still, Vincent can't give up hope. If he does... In all honesty, Ramirez living or not doesn't affect what he came here to do. Find the thing holding the portal between this world and Earth open, and kill it. One more human won't make a difference, probably. Either Stark can kill that thing, or the world is doomed.

But Ramirez is his friend. Maybe there's a chance they can work together, get home together, and everything will be okay. Not okay for everyone, and maybe not even them, but it'll be better than this ongoing hell, maybe? There's a chance. That's all that matters.

He keeps going. What other choice does he have? He keeps killing the headcrabs. (Processing the undead into regular dead? Maybe he'd have made that joke a few days ago, when he was killing scientists he'd never met in his life. Not now. Not now.) Every face he uncovers fails to be that of Ramirez. This deep into the base, there's no light that he doesn't produce, save for the emergency lights slowly dying.

Sitting in the dark, waiting for his flashlight to recharge, Stark strains his ears and waits for something to jump back out at him. There's nothing but his own quiet breathing. He listens harder anyways. The hum of his HEV suit becomes apparent with this little noise to distract him from it. It sounds like fluorescent lighting. He turns his flashlight on and keeps moving.

Two more of the Survey Team fall beneath his crowbar. He pulls back the parasite from one of them. No one he knows. He turns to the next and repeats the process, breath catching at the blond stubble- But no. He doesn't know this person either. There's more pressing matters, now. Another corpse is in the room, this one not puppetted around by an alien. Instead, it's in two pieces that he can see.

A torso and an arm. Vincent pulls them together and hopes that he doesn't find the head. He takes a minute to let the air seemingly caught in his lungs gradually exit, and he thinks. Would this have been a better death than becoming one of those zombies? He doesn't know. In his heart, he knows it is, but there's no chance of coming back from dismemberment. There's a vague hope that someone could recover from a headcrab attack. He hopes.

It gets harder to find more of the poor Survey Team as time goes on. He finds one banging their head against a locked door, and when he makes his way to the other side, it continues to do so, even has he gets right up behind it. That's fine.

Stark dispatches of the poor creature easily with a few swings about the neck. They barely react as he does so, twitching a bit and slowly turning towards him, taking a couple swings. Oddly subdued.

Hands shaking as they have for every body before, Vincent peels back the claws from this body, purposefully not looking at how the gorget of the suit has caved in beneath his crowbar. He hopes it hurt the crab. He hopes the person inside of it was already dead and couldn't feel a thing. The front claws, the massive ones that hurt more when they sink into you, unlatch from the poor man below.

Vincent refuses to back away from this. He hasn't been this nervous about it before, why now? Is it just how many people he's found that aren't his friend? What if Ramirez never joined the Survey Team? What if he's safe on Earth? He bites the inside of his cheek, not really feeling the pain, but hearing the crunch of that slippery flesh under teeth. He looks at the face below the alien and drops the claws he'd been pulling away, hiding it again.

He gathers the body up in his arms as much as he can, just the torso and head, and sobs. The suit's too heavy to hold the entirety of it and the body within at once, and that hurts in its own small way, a papercut in a gaping wound. Both suits hum slightly, Vincent's far stronger. The grime over the shoulders of the other suit gradually thins out as he holds it.

A long while later, Vincent finally runs out of tears. He's got a horrible headache and his chest still heaves as he takes in massive breaths, but he isn't crying anymore. Dehydrated, he thinks, when he can tear his thoughts away from anything but an endless cycle of Ramirez's name.

Might be some sealed water in the base somewhere. He should try and find that. He lowers Ramirez to the ground and carefully extracts the headcrab. No matter the delicacy he uses, there's still hair and bits of scalp caught up in the awful thing's teeth and claws. Ramirez's expression once revealed, openly fearful and panicked even in death, sends him into a fresh round of dry sobbing. He closes Ramirez's eyes.

He has to keep going. No matter how much it hurts that the one person in this place that really cared about him is dead, and it does hurt, he's got a job to do. He can't just leave Ramirez here, though- In a literal sense, he can. He has to. But taking nothing to remember him by?

No. He has to have something. Anything at all. Vincent drains Ramirez's suit of power and funnels it into his own, finally quieting the dull hum, but that feels inadequate. He feels selfish at the thought. Taking the last of what should've protected his friend to protect him, and it isn't enough. There's nothing on the suit other than blood and damaged metal, and Vincent isn't entirely sure how to pry off any of that, or if he even wants to carry around a bit of Ramirez's suit that he damaged.

Instead, his eyes drift slowly to the dead headcrab, hair caught up in its teeth. That... It's morbid. It'll do. Ramirez's hair had clearly been growing out while he was here. Vincent carefully removes the hair and, kneeling because he can't cross his legs in an HEV suit, starts braiding the strands together. It's a small braid, and near the end it gets a bit difficult, but he manages.

Tying it around his wrist is a bit of a struggle with one shaking hand, but by holding an end of the braid in his teeth (ignoring the blood and grime and finding himself relaxing paradoxically at the texture) he manages it. It's a sturdy knot. Maybe if blood gets stuck in it, it'll stiffen up and won't be able to fall off all loose. It'll probably get blood in it.

Okay. Stark stands back up, sending a final look at Ramirez's body. It's time to go. He reattaches his crowbar to his side with the usual electromagnetic clamp from where he'd dropped it and gets moving. He can't feel the braid around his wrist, but the presence of it comforts him somewhat. A reminder that other humans are with him. Maybe not literally, but he isn't alone.