For daemonmuses. Week 5.

[acts_of_gord]

You Know My Name, Chris Cornell
Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you / The odds will betray you / And I will replace you. . .

This song is inextricably bound up in my mind with the great betrayal in the original Half-Life: the moment when Gordon goes from trying to catch up with the G-Man, to seeing one of his fellow scientists joyfully running towards one of the Marines – who promptly murders the scientist and turns on Gordon before the other man's body even hits the ground. It's one long musical smirk in Gordon's direction from the G-Man, really.

Lungs, Lyle Lovett
Jesus was an only son and love his only concept / Now strangers cry in foreign tongues and dirty up the doorstep / And I for one and you for two ain't got the time for outside / Keep your injured looks to you – we'll tell the world that we tried

There's a point in Half-Life where I suddenly realized that, in spite of everything else he'd survived- maybe because of all of it- Gordon was looking at his situation and thinking, I am not going to make it out of this alive. I don't know how far I have left to go, or what else I have to do, but I fully expect to die before I get there. I'll keep trying, because I can't not, but all things considered I don't believe I’m going to live through this. This song wrapped itself around that mindset pretty firmly once someone introduced it to me.

Destination Unknown, Marietta
See a chance, got to take it, going to meet my fate / 'cause the last thing I ever wanted was to find out it's too late / No way out when you're in it deeper than the night . . . Never took this road before / destination unknown / Won't be coming back this way, gotta go it alone. . .

Part of the reason Gordon keeps going even in the face of all the unmitigated hell his world throws at him is that, very simply, he believes the only way out is through. When things start going to pieces around you, there's no point in arguing about it or running away, or trying to hide from it all. Whatever is going on will find you, one way or another. You don't get to stop until it's all over. . . but he also recognizes that what he's going through, what he has to go through, is incapable of leaving him the same man he was when it started. Whatever happens, it's going to change him- he might not like it, but he can't avoid it, so he has to hold on to the handlebars and stay in the saddle for as long as the ride lasts.

Who'll Stop The Rain, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Long as I remember the rain been comin' down / Clouds of myst'ry pourin' confusion on the ground / Good men through the ages tryin' to find the sun / And I wonder, still I wonder who'll stop the rain. . .

This one has a feeling of growing horror behind it, in Gordon's context. It's the slow and terrible realization that began with "You Know My Name". Not only is no one else going to save him and his fellows, nobody else is capable of stopping the situation around him. It's all up to him now, whether he wants it or not… To a lesser degree it also captures some of the sentiment of the second game, as he becomes aware of just how badly his world's been borked. And then comes the question- who'll stop the rain- and the unspoken assumption implicit in virtually everyone who speaks to him is that the answer is him.

Hero, Chad Kroger
I am so high, I can hear heaven / Oh but heaven, no heaven don't hear me / And they say that a hero can save us / I'm not gonna stand here and wait. . .

Bluntly put, Gordon does not consider himself a hero. Barney Calhoun, who not only survived the hell of Black Mesa but then went on to do a double agent's job for more than a decade, yes. Him? No. He just kills things, and manages somehow not to die.

Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne
Doctor, my eyes / Cannot see the sky / Is this the prize / For having learned how not to cry?

There's a certain level of inner exhaustion that you run into when you've been ass deep in alligators for as long as Gordon has. Sometimes he looks around himself and realizes that something that should've been wondrous or incredible, or at least anticipated and appreciated, isn't getting more out of him than a 'huh'. He dreads those moments.

Death's Door, Depeche Mode
I've been away so long / For so long it was strong / I've been away so long / I know that it was wrong / But I'm coming home / Well I'm knocking on Death's door / Will I take my rest? / Have I passed the test?. . .

As I noted up above, Gordon believes that the only way out is through. He's not going to get any kind of real respite until either all the hell that's waiting for him and his planet is at an end, or he is. He doesn't want to die, because there's too much out there that's too important to him- Alyx, particularly- but he isn't afraid to, because it means he'll finally get to stop.

Lightning Crashes, Live
oh now feel it comin' back again / like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind / forces pullin' from the center of the Earth again / I can feel it. . .

There is a feeling that comes when you're doing the right thing, the important thing, the thing that absolutely has to be done and you, yes, you are the one who can do it. That feeling has a tendency to sneak up on Gordon. It's a little terrifying to feel something that primally right. But it happens.

The remaining two are instrumentals, You're A Soldier Now from the Transformers score and To Victory from the 300 soundtrack, specifically the Sacrifice for Sparta remix. The last twenty seconds or so of You're A Soldier Now mark Gordon's transition from 'I am running and hiding and scrambling and fending for my life and maybe I’m not going to make it' to 'they need me, I'm capable of doing this, and even if I'm not capable I'm still going to do it anyway. Even if I die trying.' And To Victory has pretty much just lodged itself wordlessly in my brain as Gordon's overall theme song. Possibly it's appropriate, given that it has no words and the man never actually speaks aloud in canon.