Gravedigger

It is night.

Gordon, it seems, has succeeded.

They have succeeded.

Barney plunges his shovel back into the mud, the cold and the rain sending shivers down his spine as he digs the last grave for the night. The saddest one. The one he'd rather not dig.

The holes are ragged. Calhoun doesn't have a whole lot of experience, but knows generally how deep to make them so they don't attract wild animals. He digs to the light of White Forest, to the lamp light and sound of someone- he doesn't bother to find out who- nailing together crosses for the graves. They've won, but at what price? Hundreds of people are dead. The HEV suit is trashed. It malfunctioned, and Gordon suffered from that. It was a mistake, so why was he so angry?

Another shovel of dirt. More rain. There's thunder in the distance now, and he hopes it doesn't wake the recovering rebels inside. They needed their rest, as did he, although it was becoming increasingly hard to get a good night's sleep with his thoughts racing. That's why he had opted to dig graves; in a desperate hope that he might wear himself out enough to rest properly.

The sound of a nail being banged into wood in the distance stops, and Barney picks of the pace, muscles straining and almost giving way, fire in soul and fire in his fingers and fire-

"Hey, Calhoun. I'm finished, once you are."

The cross marker is held out to him. He doesn't read the name. He doesn't need to.

"Good, thanks. Just put it over there for now, I'll put it in when it- you know..."

He didn't mean to be so curt. This all- this whole thing, the thing that shouldn't have happened if they just bothered to build the HEV right- It was hard on all of them. Gordon was someone to rally around, Gordon was someone to burn a trail for them to follow, Gordon was a rock in this revolution, and now, he was...

Barney didn't want to think about it, and so, as he wanted to, Barney focused on the rain, and how annoyed he was at it filling the hole. Little things. Trivial things. How he was going to have to scrape the mud off his boots in the morning. How his bangs were clinging to his face, and he needed to trim them soon. Little things. Things that meant more to him back at Black Mesa. Comforting things. Familiar things.

There were so many people dead.

That thought mixed in with the thoughts Barney wanted, the ones about how he needed to clean his helmet and shave. He wasn't an angry person- in fact, he was one to describe himself has the exact opposite. Usually, these weren't the kind of things that he thought about. Things will happen. It wasn't anyone's fault.

But Barney Calhoun was furious.

That shouldn't have happened. The metal shouldn't have broken, the battery shouldn't have malfunctioned. The image of Gordon's back as Kleiner desperately tried to pry him out of his suit flashed before him; the charred shirt he was wearing underneath the HEV, the great, blistered expanse of burned skin covering his shoulders...

They knew within the first few minutes that his injuries would not heal well. The burns were just a small portion of the wounds he had sustained, but they wouldn't know that until they had successfully pried off the remaining pieces of destroyed HEV.

That night, when he would not wake, they realized that it might be a struggle for him to live.

In the three days since then, when his condition declined, it occurred to them that he wouldn't make it, that he had internal wounds that could not be repaired, that many of his wounds were deep and that many were infected.