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He takes your face in his hands the moment you're alone again with him.
The touch is... uncanny to experience. You haven't been touched in twenty years, even if it only passed in a few days. Your skin burns under his palms, raging against the numbness that's held you since the test chamber.
Your chest goes tight and you nearly want it tighter. The way he looks up at you: brows gently furrowed, cheeks aching with his smile. You realize that his touch is feather-light, in spite of how quick he was to take you. He wants to touch you, but he's too careful. His thick gloves just hardly brushed against your cheek.
So you stare at one another. For a moment. For moments that drag into their own lifetime, he studies you. Memorizes you.
It's hard to meet those eyes: his intensity. So you close yours. And with your eyelids, exhaustion finally falls over you. Muscles heavy. Your back, your neck, you ache. You drop your forehead onto his. Far less caution than the way he touches you, but even with the gentle 'knock' of your skull on his, he doesn't seem to mind. His gloves press into your skin, fingertips and thick padding massaging your temples.
It's funny that you're so tired — you're not the one who felt every second of those twenty years. Probably more. Those twenty years aren't your past: they stand before you. Stare you down. Dig scars into Barney's skin, burn wrinkles into the corners of his eyes, age the color out of his hair.
(It's too hard to say it suits him. But you'll come around, you know it.)
You lift your arm to sign something, but whatever is in your head just doesn't translate. Instead your hand lands on his arm, right in the crook of his elbow, against that heavy layers of armor.
"Gordon," Barney says, finally. A whisper, a rasp.
Your weight falls into him. You hold on tighter to his cold armor. Big hands take your side with more confidence. He always catches you. You let yourself squeeze his arm. Just to tell him you're alright, you're okay: you know he's here, you know he always catches you.
You can't tell if its his breath or yours that sways the two of you. He chokes on his next words.
"I'm not gay -"
(And this isn't the first time you've heard it from him. Always pushing disclaimers when you offer him something more than playful roughhousing. Never a condemnation, but a cry of defense. Planting a flag to later cite as plausible deniability.)
(And yet he contradicts himself time and time again. You never heard a defense for the way he takes your arms, pats your shoulder and holds on a little too long. You never got the chance to hear his defense for falling asleep on your shoulder. You wonder if he remembers. You wonder if he'll try to defend how he's been looking at you, here and now, in the present.)
"But -"
You didn't know that word could make your chest squeeze and sting in the way it does. There should be relief — and there is — but more than that, you're afraid. You don't want to open your eyes.
If he's dropping the plausible deniability, then yours is all you have left. You dig your fingers against his sleeve.
His hand slides along your jaw, up to cradle the back of your bandaged ear. His other curls around your back. His fingertips bury themselves into your cut hair, and you push your forehead closer — on purpose, this time.
"Twenty years," he whispers, slow, counting every letter, every year. His fingers press against the back of your head, he smooths his palm over your back.
You nod, partially because you're listening and want him to continue, hanging onto every word, but mostly because he's holding you. And whether it's been years or days, you are so tired. Your grip crawls up to his bicep, his shoulder. It's hard to dig blunt nails against Combine armor, but you try.
"Twenty years is twenty years, Gordon." He says it like you don't understand, like you couldn't understand. And he so badly wants you to. To know, to have been there.
You just barely begin pulling your fist toward your chest to apologize when he stops you. He holds onto your hand. He doesn't want an apology. He wants you to be here; to have you again.
So the two of you fall silent. Then he slowly lets go of your hand. He puts his own back on your cheek, and you let yourself melt. He pulls you carefully back into him, close, so his body is pressed to yours. Relief. The hand that cradles your head guides you to the crook of his neck, and you follow without protest. Your nose pushes into his shoulder, and the frame of your glasses must be jabbing into his jaw. He only makes it worse with the way he squeezes you. Neither of you have the will to care.
You close your eyes again. And you listen to him breathe. And you feel his chest rise and fall. And you think, about him. You think about his hands on you. The jump in your chest when he first pulled you in.
There was something so un-Barney-like in the way he looked at you — pinpoint focus on you, and not sorry for it. He drank all of you in, drinks you in now through the cushion of his uniform, in the shrinking space between you. A memory coming back into clarity. Something old and forgotten, again found.
Barney doesn't let go of you. Your arms have quietly snaked around him in return, given up on the chance of words. Instead, you just want to feel the way he breathes against you again, the way his heart pounds unevenly under his vest.
(Arrhythmia, you worry. Not that there aren't plenty of plausible causes. God knows your own body has been fucked over by the last couple days. There are so many more things that could be hurting him.)
You find your palm pressing into the back of his vest. Rubbing small circles, orbiting. You turn your head to rest your cheek against him; his soft and scratchy chin presses to your forehead. He squeezes you with his whole body.
The last pleasant smell you can recall is the greasy food you passed on the morning tram. You never got to wash yourself of that first round of sewage, and City 17 smells of ashes. It isn't that Barney is a sudden flowery respite, but he smells of sweat that isn't your own. He smells of sterile steel and smoke — not so different from Black Mesa, in theory. But his warmth makes it different.
You can't help but wonder if he'd smell like himself again after a shower. If you might smell like yourself too.
You breathe slowly, as if you can guide the stutter in his chest to calm. Lead by example. You aren't really thinking when you find your palm crawling higher up his back, finding the skin just at the nape of his neck. His chin presses closer to you, stubble scratching. You slip your hand from the back of his head, and carefully worm your way into the odd collar of the uniform, under its stupid layers, until your palm can press to the side of his neck, and your hand can settle right into the crook of his neck and shoulder.
He's quiet. Shivers under the touch, warm under a cold hand. But he doesn't protest.
(You can see the face he'd have given you just a week ago: stifled amusement, raised brow. Hesitation and curiosity at once. In your memory, he asks what's going on in your head. Instead he tips his head for you. Lets you touch as you wish. And he revels in it.)
Your thumb traces down a tendon near the back of his neck; back up again. Your fingertips find a scar weaving up the back of his neck — a burn, if you had to guess — concealed by the Combine's armor. You can feel him tense so slightly as your fingertips brush the tissue. You figure it's better to let it be.
One hand in a cramped space limits your communication. But, after another moment of silence, you make do. Letter by letter.
You tuck your thumb in front of your flat palm, and press it to his skin, giving him the time to feel it. And you feel a chuckle of recognition when your hand curls into an "A". His head tilts, his cheek squishes against the top of your head. You hold onto him just a little tighter as you sign: "R-N-E-Y".
And then, you don't know what to tell him. What happened to you, what you saw, where you were while he was in hell. You wish you knew enough about these things to tell him. You wish that you had clarity to connect the dots of your own experiences and what the world is now — you wish you could claim it all as your fault, diagnose the problem and fix it. You could put the world right back where it belongs.
His lips brush to your forehead, pulling you out of your head. It's casual enough that you should miss it, in the state you're in. But you don't: the scratch of his stubble is different from the scratch of his chapped lips.
His name is enough, you decide. If you open your palms again, it might be a confession.
You press your opposite hand against his armor as though you could reach right through and find his skin. You can use your words later, when your mind is clear, when your arms aren't busy. Letting go may be harder than anything else right now.
So the two of you stand there, slumped and curled together in a corner of Kleiner's lab, in the quiet of the evening. You dread the moment someone will finally, awkwardly, begin to pull away. When you'll make eye contact again, and you know you'll be the one to nervously break it. You'll pull your hand from Barney's skin, and he'll let go of you the same, and quietly brush himself off like he can shed the lingering warmth.
And after this, you won't be sure how to look at him or what to say: if you should acknowledge it or just let it be. You know this because twenty years ago, it was the exact shape of every goodbye in your dorm's doorway.
You were starting to resent his stubbornness, but that was a week ago. To be held without question, without explanation, is more than you could ever ask of him.