I Like To Think That Gordon And Barney Were Together For A Good While Before The Black Mesa Incident,

I like to think that Gordon and Barney were together for a good while before the Black Mesa incident, just because of how complicated that would get in the future

Like, I love Gordon angst in Freehoun content too, but there's so much potential with Barney too

Think about it. The last time Barney saw Gordon alive was when a couple of soldiers were dragging him unconscious through a hallway talking about destroying the evidence. That's not exactly optimistic from his point of view. To him, that was the last time he saw Gordon alive, and he has to immediately hop in the back seat of a truck, exhausted, sore, probably covered in other people's blood and alien guts and too beat up with his own injuries to have the energy to fight a second more once the adrenaline starts wearing off. And he has to watch them drive further and further away. Imagine seeing your partner's last moments alive, knowing the rest would be spent in brutal agony, and all you can do is drive away.

To Barney, Gordon very conclusively died in Black Mesa. There would be no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And he probably didn't even have the energy to feel much more than numb and hollow at first after the emotional drain all that terror must have been. Hell, he was a mid-level security guard in his 20s, not a marine.

Imagine what Barney must have gone through after. He didn't even get time to begin processing such a loss or the weird cocktail of guilt and grief before the entire world went to shit around him. Everything he knew crumbled to dust before he got a chance to accept that Gordon wasn't coming back.

And then he spent 20 years finding his footing again. That's a lot of time to come to terms with things. He's had his time to grieve and to figure out how to stablize himself and his worldview again. No one would deny that it's hard in City 17, harder still when you're a combine mole, but everyone goes a long way in 20 years. It was a rough grieving period all things considered, but Barney's long since accepted that Gordon's gone, he's never coming back, but he's been smiling at the memories again instead of bursting into tears for a long time now.

Barney's moved on. He'll never forget the man he loved and all they did together, and he doesn't think he'll ever love like that again, but his hair hasn't been all black and his skin hasn't been smooth like that in years. So, it's okay. Gordon would've wanted him to smile at his memory again. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, right?

And then on a seemingly random day, in the middle of a pretty boring and arduous shift, the most strikingly familiar face appears out of the crowd, and he hasn't aged a day.

Just... imagine going through the grieving process, coming out the other side, moving on, accepting that they're survived through your memories together, and then 20 years later they seem to drop out of the sky as if the incident you thought was the last time you would ever see them just happened yesterday