Chapter Text
“And you, doc? One for you too?”
Gordon looked at the man behind the table, down at the box, and took a paper-wrapped package of dried apple slices. He didn’t want dried apple slices, sour and tasteless with a foam-like consistency and skin that stuck between his teeth, but the six people currently assigned to procuring and distributing food had worked hard on them and the other several dozen militia and noncombatant base staff had seemed pleased to have them.
Small, hard sour crab-apples, a hardy sport-type grown wild and self-seeded in the poor soil and cold forests, dried on a stove top and wrapped in the pages of an old encyclopedia. What he wanted was the taste of an apple grocery-store fresh, waxy-skinned and worm-free.
He took the apple slices and his portion of the cooked vegetable-grain mix, and retreated to White Forest’s periphery. Someone said it was February, to explain the general damp and darkness of the northern forest, but he couldn’t imagine the base and woods in any other season. Were there still seasons? Would summer bring clear sky and warm sun? Or would the heavy smoky overcast continue indefinitely, until humanity forgot what else was up there?
The bowl of hot food was cooling rapidly. Early spring night had set in.
“Hey,” Alyx, behind him. Of course she knew his preferred rooftop. He didn’t hide the mild annoyance, and she didn’t hide her sense of self-righteous assurance that she was exactly where she wanted to be. He handed her his packet of apple slices. She broke them into bits, tossed a piece in the air and caught it in her mouth. “Not to your taste?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“What would be better?”
That was not a yes-or-no question. He chewed on the tough boiled grain to delay his answer. He could leave the question unanswered, just ignore her or walk away and find some other place. He’d done that before, plenty of times, but it didn’t make the nights pass any faster or soothe the rough ache that drove him to places like this.
The other residents of White Forest gloried in these slow, dark cold days, as the fractured Combine withdrew from hostile woods and left the research station to patch its wounds and rebuild. But Freeman would have preferred a continued battle, or at least an impending research deadline or another satellite to launch or something to pit himself against, no more of this empty waiting and chewing on stale ill-cooked foodstuff, and at night only dreams of blood and cold void.
He would rather be in the void, back on the shelf, than left to dread it, he thought, but that would not be better than dried apples.
He signed “Coffee.”
Alyx grinned. “Still have never tasted the real thing. Every time someone finds instant or even really old beans, there’s almost a fight for it. My dad traded a complete set of Doyle books for twelve ounces of instant coffee last year. Said it tasted like the best tin can he’d ever drank.”
Freeman made a face at the comparison. Coffee, correct coffee, bore no resemblance to tin-can-flavor but he couldn’t explain that to her. He couldn’t describe what freshly-roasted freshly-ground coffee smelled like, or how the precise weight of press and coarseness of grind influenced flavor, or how that flavor differed depending on how long it sat or how it was poured, and not to mention milk. He had the vocabulary and knew the signs for it all but she wasn’t going to close her eyes and smell it by memory, the way he could.
Milk. Another thing he missed. Dairy products of any kind were nigh unheard-of in the Cities or outlying areas. There’d been rumors of remote hamlets with their cattle and goats hidden in the hills but who knew if they’d survived the influx of alien predators. Without the Combine to centralize population, and by extension food for the scavengers, in the Cities, the predator pressure on rural survivors would increase.
They’d done the right thing, closing the tear, scattering the Combine and breaking its chokehold on humanity, and they’d do the right thing again when they mapped the Borealis and teased out its significance to their planet and their war. And he’d do it all over, a hundred times, if he could only wake in a world he knew and understood.
Alyx ran out of apple bits to catch. “We find coffee, I’ll bring you some,” she promised. “But in return, if you find molasses, you bring it to me. Deal?”
He signed a question mark. What on earth did she want with molasses.
“Alright, so hear me out. Molasses, my dad said, you mix it with sugar and get brown sugar, right? And then if you mix brown sugar with margarine you get caramel. And then if you mix caramel with corn you get caramel corn, and that’s supposed to be delicious. We have sugar,” she ticked off on her fingers, “And Crisco, and a bag of corn, and the procedure notes with the temperature threshold from a book-“
“-Recipe,” he signed. “It’s not a lab procedure, it’s called a recipe when it’s for food.”
“Oh. Yeah. We have the recipe and all the equipment and stuff, but we haven’t gotten molasses in a while. So. You find some,” she lightly smacked his knee, “and I’ll find you coffee, and then we’ll make it and see if it’s good as they say it is.”
He finished the grain-vegetable stuff, gone cold and congealed, and set the bowl down. Caramel corn wasn’t exactly on his list of most-missed foods and he couldn’t explain to her that when they made it with twenty-year-old tinned Russian Crisco and corn not meant for popping it wasn’t going to taste anything like the bagged store-bought stuff people remembered and missed.
That’s what he didn’t like. Things looked correct, sometimes, or even smelled correct, or his brain just filled in sensory gaps with stored memories, and he’d anticipate something familiar. But it never, ever was.
One year, he thought. One year in a new place before things smoothed out, stopped feeling intrusive and a little hostile in their unfamiliarity. His first year at Black Mesa hadn’t been simple. His first year in grad school, much less so. One year here? If he were permitted that much, if he wasn’t thrown out of time again, life would be easier. He’d have developed a new baseline for what things ought to taste and feel like, calloused over the old wants as the rest of the population had.
No one else missed coffee quite the same way anymore; no one else had last tasted fresh, good real coffee only months ago. The plants were extinct, succumbed to a Combine pathogen released to knock down humanity’s food stability. The engineered plant pathogens had taken a lot of common food cultivars, and while there were probably immune wild-type shrubs growing in remote areas in the right latitude, it would be decades before coffee was exported world-wide as it once had been.
Decades before he tasted it again.
Alyx was looking at him; he didn’t need to see her face to read the pity there. Entanglement might give them both an edge in battle but he could have done without this shared inside knowledge.
He’d saved the world but not yet for himself. Coffee, and bacon that came from pigs and not headcrabs, and a pillow stuffed with real down and not chopped foam insulation, and tap water that didn’t run orange with rust. A bed that wasn’t a military cot, a sky with colored sunsets and clothing washed in scentless detergent. That’s what he wanted more than dried apple slices. He tried to put those memories, the wants, in a box on a shelf and close the door on them but they kept leaking through.
The bite of bitter dried apple when his tongue anticipated citric acid and cinnamon.
“Hey, you alright?” she asked.
He appreciated the courtesy in her question and shoved down his guilt. She didn’t have to be sitting on a dark cold rooftop with him and she certainly wasn’t up here for the view. He made a motion for both yes and no. Honest, for once. Not like she couldn’t feel the answer through their link, but signing it out between them meant something.
“Yeah,” she said. She looked away, out over the black evergreens. “Me too.”
Distant sky glow might have been fires, might have been other encampments or surviving Cities; he made a mental note to look at a map. So much of this world was still so foreign.
One year. One full circuit around the sun, all the ragged burned-out seasons in their turn. You hear that, he thought, as if the thing in the man-skin could hear him, one year. Give me one year. Let me make the world mine again.