Part 31 – Recorded History

It was two days later, and White Forest was still reeling from the loss of Eli Vance. Alyx had left with Freeman for the some important mission the day before, leaving the base under the smug command of Dr. Magnusson. Thankfully, Magnusson proved to be wrapped up in technological endeavors, and had forgotten to order around the Resistance soldiers.

Jane had tried to talk to Daria the day after the battle, but she'd been brushed off with a simple "I'm fine, really," and a change of subject. She knew she wasn't going to get anything out of Daria unless the Lieutenant wanted it that way.

The remnants of Grey Team found themselves sitting around their own personal fire, with a bottle of Vodka between them. Daria had healed quickly, owing to several huge advancements in medical science that had been borrowed from the Vortigaunts.

She grabbed the bottle, but didn't drink from it. Instead, she stared at the contents, lost in thought. After several quiet seconds, she began to talk.

"All those people... Billions of them. Dead. Dying. No one is going to remember. In a hundred years we'll either be extinct, or this is just going to be some chapter in a history book. No one is going to care about all the people who died. No one is going to remember DeMartino. No one is going to remember Jodie or Mack or Charles. So what the fuck is the point of even trying? So someone who doesn't even exist yet can have a better life?"

"Daria..." Jane tried to interject.

"Maybe the Combine are right. We're just a bunch of fucking apes, crawling around in a little pit of hormones and biological evolution. There's no point beyond making babies and killing the competition. You don't need to remember dead people when the point of your existence is to fuck."

Daria looked at the bottle in her hand, and dropped it in disgust.

"Fuck it. There's no damn point at all," she added as she rose to leave. "There never was."

As she walked away, Jane moved to follow her, but soon decided against it and sat back down, staring into the fire.

"Aren't you going to go after her?" Watts asked.

"I don't know what to do. I've seen her depressed before, but not like this. I've never seen her just give up. Usually she just gets mad and tries harder."

Jane's eyes welled up as she began to fear for her friend in a way she'd never felt before. Feeling Watts' arm around her shoulders, she buried her head into his chest and began to sob.

Ten fucking years. Ten years we fought back and every single time we would lose just a little more. It's pointless. It's all fucking pointless. Nothing I did will matter in the end. Nothing they did will leave a mark in our history. They died saving millions of lives and in a few years no one will even know their names.

Daria was pacing through the halls of the missile base. She didn't know where she was headed, or what she would do when she stopped. She just needed to keep moving before she took out her anger on something simply because it had been around her too long.

In a hundred years, this whole war will just be a story told to bored school children. Another one of the glossed-over lies we were fed to make the world sound better.

She passed an office, one of the few open doors she'd seen as the stalked through the base.

We'll still have wars with each other as if nothing ever happened. And more people will die unnamed heroes. No one will ever remember.

Daria stopped in her tracks, and ran back to the office. Inside, she saw a stack of lab notebooks on the desk. Opening the top one, she found it to be empty. After checking several more, she grabbed a pen from a coffee cup standing next to the notebooks and left the room.

I'll fucking MAKE them remember.

Jane awoke the next morning, still beside the fire which had long-since burned itself out. A faint tickle on the back of her neck reminded her that she and Watts had fallen asleep together, looking out over the valley below. His arm was still wrapped around her midsection, holding her close.

That's a feeling I never want to lose, she thought, realizing she'd never smiled while waking up until a week ago.

She heard a faint scratching noise from nearby, and craned her neck to investigate. A few feet away, Daria sat with a notebook open on her lap, writing as quickly as she could. Her look of concentration put Jane's fears from the night before at ease.

"What are you writing, amiga?"

"All of it. Everything I can remember since the portal storms. My family, Trent, the Resistance, all of it."

"And you're going to fit it in one notebook?"

Daria rolled her eyes and produced a whole stack that had been sitting on her opposite side.

"I found one better suited for sketching. I thought you might want to add your own spin to this," she added, holding up a significantly larger pad of paper and a pencil.

Jane gently removed Watts' arm from around her and sat up, taking the offered sketchpad. Sketching wasn't her favorite medium, but she decided that she could at least capture a moment to paint later after finding a proper canvas. She looked around her, trying to find the right subject.

Damnit, there's nothing. Just old bunkers and green trees and people walking around not knowing what to do with themselves. I need to be closer to the city, that's what needs to be captured. The broken Citadel, raging fires. That's what I need to record.

She closed her eyes, trying to call up the image from the day before of the broken spire protruding from the city, trying to remember enough detail to get into a painting. With her eyes shut, the sound of her environment began to seep in. The rustling of the leaves, the scribbling of her best friend. The slow breathing of the man she found herself caring about.

Daria's words from the night before began to ring in her memory.

"All those people... Billions of them. Dead. Dying. No one is going to remember."

Jane opened her eyes. After a few seconds of consideration, she nodded her head in agreement with herself, and stood up. She then stepped across the ashes of the night's fire, turned, and sat back down. Daria looked up from her notebook for a second to see what was happening, and immediately went back to writing.

As she put the pencil down on the page and began to draw, Jane began to feel the sense of all the events that had happened in her life. Her loneliness as a child, the friend she'd found in Daria, the loss of Trent... Years of service in the Resistance, fighting and bleeding and screaming as they held back against the Combine. Killing Grant, discovering her nature as soldier, carving out the front lines of the Rebellion with her own feet. All of it leading up to this moment, with a sketchpad in her hand.

Even though she'd worried about selling out, Jane had always wondered if her art would ever be on display in a museum. Now, she wondered if the world she saw before her was the scene she was meant - no, born - to paint. Would this sketch show up in a museum some day? Part of an exhibit on "Art from the War," perhaps. Something to be seen by everyone, a reminder of the hell their ancestors had been through to - quite literally - save the world?

With the scene before her beginning to form on the page, Jane Lane realized that she was right where she needed to be.