AN—So guess who sucks at updating regularly? I graduated and got a job ,thinking I'd now have all this time to write fanfiction...but the job is a full-time one in retail, which means I'm always exhausted when I come home from work and just want to sleep. I've been working on these for a while, and am finally releasing them. Thank you so much for bearing with me, and special thanks go to those of you who continued to remind me you were waiting for updates, especially JSF16. Also thanks to those of you who have recognized me on other websites and told me you like my work...you don't know how cool that is. I promised some fluffy Gordon/Alyx, and while this isn't the one I was planning on releasing, I hope it satisfies everyone for a while. It's unbeta-ed, but I think I edited it enough that it's okay at this point. Let me know if you catch anything I missed.

And because I just wrote an undergrad thesis and know the importance of citation, here's the bibliographic information for the edition I used of The Princess Bride:

Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. 57. Print.

Not sure if that's right because it's a reprint of a book with an author using a pseudonym, but no one can accuse me of not remembering to cite quoted works.

Gordon Freeman, Doctor of Theoretical Physics, MIT, was good at quite a few things. He was good at science, namely, and brilliant in his particular fields. Academia in general came naturally to him (except for literature, of course, and that didn't count, because who calls finding meaning in fiction academic?). He was furthermore good at bowling, speaking German with a close-to-native accent, translating things into metric, and had recently discovered that, apart from being better at accidentally blowing things up than he'd thought he was, he was also handy with an array of weaponry, had a peculiar talent for not-dying, and was generally a verifiable killing machine.

What he was not good at (apart from literature, and remember, that didn't count), was understanding women. Women made no sense. Gordon was good at figuring out systems of rules and applying them, and he was sure this was a key component in his miscomprehension of women. There had to be some kind of code, some underlying set of assumptions and base factors he was missing, because that was the only explanation for his having been accumulating raw data since he was eleven and still not being able to discern any patterns or laws of behavior.

Women were full of contradictions. They liked chocolate, but would avoid it because they feared it made them fat. They cried when upset, but sometimes cried at movies and enjoyed it, even talking about such things as "having a good cry". They wanted a guy who was manly, but also "sensitive", and who held such opposing traits as being able to paint a beautiful picture with fine brushstrokes and tiny, gentle movements of the hands, as well as possessing the brute power to be able to chop down a tree, despite there being more efficient ways of felling foliage and little call for the skill nowadays.

Yes, women certainly didn't make any sense. And the woman who puzzled him most of all was one Alyx Vance.

Alyx was very frustrating for Gordon, because on top of him not being able to figure her out, she made him have trouble figuring himself out. When he'd initially met her, he'd liked her a lot, but wasn't sure in what way. This seemed ridiculous at first glance, because if you liked a person, you liked them—what distinction did there have to be? But he very soon realized he had to figure out what kind of liking this was, because on second glance, there was a kind of liking that muddled one's perceptions, confused one's motives, and generally discombobulated a person. He had been able to comfortably say that he liked Alyx very much as a friend for quite a while, but somehow, possibly because he had forgotten distinctions in liking people and had let his guard down, his liking her very much in a friendly way had morphed into liking her very much in...some other way.

It reminded him of watching two differently-colored liquids mix: you poured a red liquid into a clear one, and there was no distinct, straight delineation of where the red stopped and the clear began or vice versa. Soon the colors mingled as the solution mixed, and you had a whole new, uniformly red, solution of homogenous nature. (Although come to think of it, maybe that wasn't an apt analogy either. Were his feelings for Alyx really homogenous? Maybe it was a suspension, with moments of just-regular-liking floating in a solvent of liking in some other way? Or vice versa, perhaps? Because he knew there were times he was able to just like her normally, but they often quickly segued into liking her differently. Maybe his liking for her wasn't even a liquid? Perhaps it was a metallic amalgam or maybe it was kind of a mishmash of things, like limestone and gravel mixed together to make concrete? Even his ability to figure out how confused he was was confused.)

The problem with his liking her in whatever way he now did—which was certainly of a more intense nature than his friendly liking of her, which he liked to represent in his mind as an equation where x kind of liking was greater than friendly liking—was that he wasn't sure if she liked him in the same way. She clearly liked him in the friendly way, but did she like him in the greater-than way?

Gordon sat on his bed in his bedroom at White Forest thinking about this. He was stretched out lengthwise across the simple, metal-framed bed with his right leg resting on top of his left, feet pointing upward, hugging a pillow to his chest, his face creased in a frown of pensive concentration as he tried to puzzle out some answers for himself. He felt stupid hugging this pillow, and it was so old and beaten he was sure it wasn't something he should have pressed against his body, never mind be sleeping on, but he needed to do something with his hands, and this problem was of the sort that made him want to curl up into himself.

Yes, the Alyx Problem, as he was thinking of it, was a troubling one. He reviewed again, for the umpteenth time, the data he'd collected via observation. Alyx had a tendency to fret when she thought he was in danger, even though she was more aware than most of his abilities of self-preservation. Analyzing this datum, he knew that concern for another person was often a symptom of greater-than liking...but it could be just part of friendly liking too. Concern as a symptom of greater-than liking wasn't a surefire indicator.

She had made some comments that could be interpreted in a flirtatious manner, and now he turned his attention to those. Most of them were open to interpretation, ie, "You're my new hero!" after he'd taken down that Strider at the train station. That could have been mere admiration, not of a flirtatious nature, right? But the comment on the HEV suit..."Got room in there for two?" ...that was a little more difficult to explain. He was sure it could have meant something non-sexual; maybe she hadn't thought about the implications and merely wanted the shelter of the armored vestment.

Her gestures were a little more difficult, though. She did wink at him when he was driving them in the scout car they'd found, and winking was often a sign of flirtation. Not always, though. Sometimes it was just a friendly gesture. The hug when D0g had unearthed him from the ruins at the bottom of the Citadel...that was understandable, she'd been afraid he was dead, after all; who wouldn't hug someone after that?(His mind was carefully glossing over the embarrassment she'd shown afterwards, which was a little more telling than the hug itself.) Eli's hints about getting grandkids out of the two of them, that was a lot more blatant, though. Well, sometimes, he reasoned, parents lobbied for their kids to get together with someone the parent thought was appropriate even if the child wasn't crazy about the idea. So that was Eli's thing there, not Alyx's.

So, going over the collected body of data, the conclusion was that each instance could be dismissed as something more in line with regular liking than greater-than liking. Well, this was nice, having a conclusion like this. And to think, all those times, he'd wondered if...

And therein lay the problem. All those times. Taken individually, each instance could be considered an outlier, or explained away on its own. But all those instances together created a pattern, and taken as a whole, the only reasonable conclusion to come to was...

He sighed. It was true, there wasn't really any reasonable doubt. Alyx Vance had been flirting with him all this time.

But attraction is a strange beast, and it causes neurotically insecure doubt where any other reasonable person would see certainty. Maybe she was flirting with him, he told himself, but that didn't mean she was actually attracted to him. Maybe that was just how Alyx interacted with guys. Maybe she was just a flirtatious person. Maybe her flirting didn't, in reality, mean anything.

Gordon had been a victim to this uncertainty before, and had reason to be. In middle school, he'd been the quiet kid who sat off by the window and didn't get noticed except when he was answering questions in class with such skill that his classmates, instead of admiring it, saw it as something that he should be embarrassed by. When he wasn't showing an alarming aptitude for schoolwork, no one paid any attention to him and he kept to himself. Once or twice, he'd been the victim of the cruel game girls of that age will sometimes play where they would pretend to be interested in a boy just to see if they could get a positive reaction out of him, and then laugh at him and scorn him for his willingness to believe they'd been sincere.

Middle school had not been kind to Gordon Freeman, and high school had been a period where he'd been able to avoid dealing with girls altogether and focus on schoolwork, so his earliest experiences with the opposite sex and their wiles had been overwhelmingly negative, painting a confused picture for him of women and his chances with them. The unsurety in complicated social interactions hadn't left him, and his tutoring at the knees of Barney Calhoun, certified man-beast, had only left him more confused.

Barney had a confidence with women and ease in social situations that made it difficult for him to understand how Gordon could find these subjects so difficult, and while the two had eventually agreed upon a system where Barney would use Gordon as his wingman and try to help him out to get some attention from chicks, Gordon had still been unsuccessful and now felt he couldn't stand a chance without picking up the scraps of the more-attractive Barney. Gordon had been awed at the younger man's ability to take his skill with women for granted, and begrudged Barney that it had to be easy to do when you had a manly profile and rambunctious social presence like that. He now felt helpless without Barney's guidance, and since his friend was currently leading a squad on a scouting mission to the outskirts of City 16, the prospect of having to wing it on his own was downright frightening.

Years of women not looking twice at him—if they managed to look once—had left Gordon baffled when it came to dating, so now the problem was to figure out why Alyx was flirting with him. Another part of him—this one from high school—remembered girls in activities he'd partaken in outside of school—summer camps and the like—being kind to him because others weren't. At first he had appreciated their mercy, but he quickly grew to resent this as much as the cruel girls who mocked him. These girls, the would-be beacons in a social quagmire, sent him the message that he was to be pitied, that he couldn't get attention from girls on his own merit, but only by their feeling bad for him. They were overcompensating for their peers' cruelty and it made him feel like they only felt sorry for him, and wouldn't notice him either if it weren't for the taunts of the others. Their patronizing rescue attempts were for their own sense of piety, he felt, since half the time he preferred being ignored now anyway. Other teenagers were a bore, with their superficiality and their strange obsessions with trivia of pop culture; he preferred to spend his time around older people, and if he did have a group of friends, it would always be with fellow science buffs or other academically-driven students with like-minded priorities.

His lack of immersion in the adolescent world, however, cost him learning time for things besides quantum physics and astronomy, things like social give-and-takes or confidence earned by success in these. Now he was twenty-seven, and despite numerous attempts at shoring up his understanding of the opposite sex, he'd had practically no success with them to speak of and was as unsure of himself as if he were still thirteen. Such was the curse of a mind like his; it was highly skilled at deciphering complex systems of rules like those in Newtonian physics or rules of chemical equations, but when it came to intuiting tasks, tasks like deciphering if Alyx Vance was really flirting with him or just flirting with him, he had no set of rules to apply and his intelligence and ability to analyze got in the way, making him a confused mess.

So now the task was to figure out why Alyx was flirting with him. He eventually came up with three options: she just interacted with men that way normally/it was her way of being friendly; she felt bad for him; or, she actually was interested in him. Purely because the thought excited him, he explored that last option: why was she interested in him? It certainly wasn't that he was good-looking or interesting, years of being overlooked by everyone around him told him that(whether or not it was true); perhaps it was his recent heroics, people did seem to make a lot of his successes while downplaying his failures. Heroics were woman-bait, he knew that; maybe she was seeing him like an action hero of some sort? Although she had been with him more often when these occurred than anyone else and surely knew that a lot of what he did was improvised, barely salvaged, lucky, or in other ways not glamorous.

Perhaps Alyx had grown up hearing about how brilliant he was supposed to be; she had grown up around smart people and did seem to admire competence at academic subjects. He could see that being the case with her, and the thought excited him; if there was one thing he was confident in, it was his intelligence, and he'd always fantasized about some woman being awed at his cerebral prowess and falling for him for that. He'd blushed when people raved to him about how "inspired" his PhD dissertation had been, but now he was wondering if she'd read it, and if she hadn't, if he should slip a copy under her door. Maybe she'd want him to talk to her about quantum entanglement and would gaze at him with a dreamy expression as he demonstrated the depth of his knowledge on the subject. He allowed himself a brief fantasy of this before having to chortle at himself; even in a perfect world, Alyx wouldn't throw herself at him for talking nerdy to her.

This left him excited with the possibility that she might actually be interested in him, and he eagerly turned to a way to test his hypothesis. One major question remained, nagging at the back of his mind: if she was attracted to him, why not just come out and say it? He thought about this reluctantly, not wanting to ruin the buzz of his thrill that she might just be into him. He couldn't find a solution, though. He resolved that he'd just have to test the hypothesis that she was really, in fact, interested in him, and leave the other two options open in his mind.

With this resolved, he set to work planning an experiment that could test his hypothesis. The question to be answered was this: was Alyx Vance, funny, cute, confident, able, sometimes dorky, always awe-inspiring, and very well-endowed in the hips, Alyx Vance, indeed attracted to him? The second phase of this question would have to be answered if the first resulted in a positive answer: why didn't she just say so?

Gordon knew the process for conducting a scientific experiment, and he was nothing if not scientific in everything he did. First you identified a phenomenon to be studied, then you gathered data, formed a hypothesis, and set about proving or disproving it. This consisted of identifying a testable hypothesis, deciding criteria for its evaluation, and establishing what you knew, conducting an experiment, deriving results, analyzing the results, and finally drawing a conclusion. Then you wrote up a paper, submitted it to a journal, and hoped for some accolades or grant money. Gordon figured he could skip that last step, and furthermore that he had already gotten to the establishing-what-he-knew phase, so there was no getting out of doing the experiment now.

How to go about it, though? He decided to try presenting Alyx with opportunities to tell him her feelings about him, and see what happened. If she responded that she was interested in him, that was straightforward enough. If she gave him vague impressions, he could analyze those findings, adding or subtracting strength to his theory as was fit. If she said outright that she didn't greater-than like him, well...maybe he could find that out without making it seem like he was in greater-than like with her.

Over the next two weeks, Gordon set about trying to carefully lay out opportunities for Alyx to tell him her feelings about him. He had to do it in a way that left her open to telling him, but didn't seem as if he were asking her outright, though. That would leave him exposed, open to ridicule(or rejection)and might lead to questions about his feelings for her.

So, like the social whiz he wasn't, he clumsily brought up vague questions half-asked and half-answered, vague statements that led the conversation in confusingly vague directions, and was generally as vague as he could be. He started to get the hang of it in a few days, though, and instead of asking directly, went at it in a more roundabout way, asking her about previous crushes. When he did this, she blushed (predictably, it was a normal response when one was thinking of such subjects) and gave him as little information as she could. Was she guarding herself from him, or guarding him from feeling threatened? That was too confusing to interpret, so he instead found a way to segue from commenting on how a rebel they'd encountered seemed taken with her into what she found attractive in guys. This led her to blush and stammer and avoid meeting his eyes, giving him a response that was full of pauses and "ums", and ended up sounding like her type of guy had all the noble personality traits of Sir Lancelot, but also had as many PhDs as possible and always knew how to act in every situation. This he had interpreted from her mumbled responses and it sounded nothing like him, but then again, he reasoned, maybe she saw him differently than he saw himself; attraction did that to people. More telling was her blushing and stammering and refusing to look at him. He added this to his growing list of observations on the Evidence In Favor column.

Once he got up the nerve to pluck a twig from her hair when they'd been hiking through the woods, and when he'd checked her reaction, she'd smiled widely and then stared at the ground, pushing her hair behind her ear. This opened up a new field of experimentation, that of physical gestures. Gordon had read in one of those articles in some magazine years ago that one way to tell if a woman was flirting was to see if she played with her hair a lot. She certainly did push strands of it out of her face often, but maybe that was due to the particular length of it. And really, what amount of hair-playing was a lot? Gordon didn't pay attention to how much women played with their hair normally, so how was he to evaluate this?

But he resolved to find other ways of seeing what her body language gave away, and one day, when they were sitting side-by-side in a rowboat an elderly civilian was ferrying them across a lake in to get to a coal storage facility they were attempting to cut off from Combine access, he let his leg touch hers as they were sitting there. She didn't pull away and he didn't pull away, so there were a few minutes of prolonged leg-touching that he hoped meant she was comfortable with the contact. But this was another murky area, as murky as the fog that they were travelling through, keeping the old man from noticing the gesture going on across from him; did it mean to her what it did to him? Maybe she was just tolerating his presence there, or maybe she didn't see anything intimate in it, and that's why she was allowing it. And she didn't seem to be paying attention, chattering away at the barely-visible man across from him, so maybe she didn't even notice it.

This made him glum for the next two hours, and then he wondered if he were being neurotic about interpreting her response or lack thereof. The whole thing ended up being very exhausting and it made him irritable. He'd started growling under his breath about the Combine soldiers they were encountering and getting frustrated too easily, until Alyx, looking perplexed, asked him if he was okay.

"Yeah, I'm just..." he began, not knowing how to finish. He looked up at her, and met her eyes, amber like the honey in the clear jar his family had kept in the kitchen when he was young, and turned to the side, crinkled up at the corners as she inspected him. It momentarily made him mind go blank, so he looked away, down at the ground, and then, remembering what they'd been talking about, said, "I just want to finish this up and get back to White Forest...you know?"

She'd smiled understandingly, although with a slight questioning look peeking out behind it, as if not buying what he was saying, and said, "We'll finish this up and be back out of here and on the way home by nightfall. We're doing fine, Gordon, we've got plenty of ammo, some spare medkits, and we're making better timing than we'd planned. We've got just another squadron or so of soldiers to get rid of, and then the place'll be cleared out. Cheer up, okay?" She'd smiled, and he'd smiled and then she'd told him to go check out the vehicle garage while she hacked into the surveillance system…and then put her hand on his armor-clad arm and said, "I got your back, okay?"

He did notice this when they were fighting alongside each other. Whenever they had to part, or when they were about to get into a firefight, she had a habit of telling him, "I got your back!" Three separate times, as he was about to leave her to do something dangerous, she'd hesitated as if trying to summon up the courage to say something, and then came out with just, "I got your back", and a smile. During these incidences, he'd started to walk off after she'd said it, looked back, and found herself looking angrily at nothing in particular. Another time, they were camping out for the night, and, after a long conversation about where the war would go from here, she'd said to him, "Gordon...you know I always have your back, right?" And he'd said yes, although he'd been confused. Of course he knew she always was there for him in the field, why did she even ask? She seemed to mean something else, and he wasn't sure what, but he felt awkward asking her that.

By the time they got back to the base, he had more data, but no conclusions. He was pretty sure the evidence was more in favor of her greater-than liking him, but he wasn't certain, and he was more frustrated than ever. Adding to his sense of frustration was his feeling that he wasn't interpreting the data fairly, that his judgment was deterred by his own feelings for her or his lack of surety in the dating field or...something. Was his confusion self-doubt, or were her actions truly hard to interpret? Would anybody else be clear on Alyx's signals, or was he just a socially-inept loser? If this was the case, was he missing out on a grand opportunity to be with the coolest, most pleasant, hottest, overall best woman he'd ever met, sabotaging himself by floundering until she lost interest? Would this always be the case for him?

He lay there stewing in his room for about an hour one day soon after getting back when he heard a knock on his door. Getting up, he opened the door and found...Alyx herself, hugging a book loosely to her chest.

She smiled her warm, wide smile. "Hey! I, um..." She pushed her hair behind her ear and said, "Um, I felt like things were a little...different when we went out this last time, like, you know...um...we had some interesting conversations and stuff, and um...I was wondering..."

She paused here and Gordon's mind reeled. Things were different? Interesting conversations? Had he been too obvious in his line of questioning? Before the feeling-naked sensation took firm hold in him, she started talking again: "I, uh...I have a book I think you'd like. I'd like it if you'd, you know, give it a read. My dad used to read it to me when I was a kid, I thought it was just a storybook, and then when I got older, I realized there was more going on, it was, like, satire and stuff, and I still love it, but...I wanted to know if you'd read it." As she finished this hurried, rambling speech, she bashfully looked up at him from the floor, and without thinking, he said, "Sure!" She held the book out to him and said, "I know you've probably heard of it, seen the movie more like, and I know it sounds dorky, but there's more going on in it than it looks like, so...just give it a chance, okay?" She laughed self-consciously, and he absently tried to match it.

He looked at the book now in his hand. It was The Princess Bride. Yes, Gordon vaguely remembered the movie, having seen it a couple times in his childhood. This had to be the novelization of it, some movie tie-in promotion. Why did she want him to read this? He looked at her, puzzled, and said, "O...kay?" She laughed self-consciously again, and said, "Well, I wanted to go get something to eat from the mess hall. I'll see ya later, Gordon!" And then vanished with such speed he wondered if she'd discovered her own method of teleportation.

Gordon backed into his room again, closing the door behind him, and inspected the book. He remembered little Fred Savage in the movie disappointedly reacting after opening the present from his grandfather…"A book?" Gordon couldn't help feeling like that himself; he loved books, but mostly non-fiction ones, and what did this one have to do with anything? He noticed one page was tagged with a Post-It, and he turned to it, but after he read it, it didn't make any sense. He'd have to read up to that point to get the context. Well, he figured, they'd be leaving again tomorrow, so the only time he'd have to read would be tonight. Probably he could get up to that section in the book if he started in now, it looked fairly early in the book's plot.

So he sat down, and, despite his never understanding the idea of finding anything in literature, looked for what Alyx was trying to tell him.

He started at the beginning and quickly realized the author's name on the cover, S Morgenstern, was a made-up person; William Goldman, the man commenting on what he was calling the abridged version, was clearly the true writer, and was indeed writing the book as satire. And this wasn't a movie tie-in; this book had clearly been the basis for the movie, as Goldman spent some time talking about how hard it was to get the movie made in this later edition. There was a long introduction with a made-up story about how Goldman had had the book read to him as a child and then re-discovered it as an adult, only to find out the version he'd been read by his father was "the good parts", and that this was why his own son was having trouble appreciating it as much as he had. The book alternated between the story of Buttercup, the most beautiful girl in the world, and Goldman's commentary where he talked about all he was supposedly excising and summed up "the boring parts" so the reader could get to the plot faster or told stories about the book's supposed significance to the history of the fictional country of Florin.

By the time Gordon got about forty pages in, he realized the plot of the book was more matterful than the movie. The book was telling how Buttercup had fallen in love with Westley, or the Farm Boy, as she called him, whereas the movie, for brevity's sake, no doubt, had skimmed across it as a prologue. There was a whole scene in there the movie didn't have, about a Count coming to see her beauty, and the Countess being taken with Westley, and about Buttercup realizing her attraction to Westley when the Countess's admiration invoked Buttercup's jealousy.

Buttercup then met Westley at his hovel door, told him of her love for him, and was answered with the door slamming in her face. She spent the rest of the day crying in her bed until Westley came to her door and told her he was leaving. When Buttercup didn't understand why, he told her that he was going to seek his fortune overseas to build a home for them because he had worshipped her from afar for years without her knowledge. Then they went into a cute little banter where he expounded on his love for her in hyperbolic terms, and here was where Gordon reached the Post-It.

"If you're teasing me, Westley, I'm just going to kill you."

"How can you even dream I might be teasing?"

"Well, you haven't once said you loved me."

"That's all you need? Easy. I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I love you. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I."

"You are teasing now, aren't you?"

"A little maybe; I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said, 'Farm Boy do this', you thought I was answering, 'As you wish', but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you', was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard."

"I hear you now, and I promise you this: I will never love anyone else. Only Westley. Until I die."

At this point Gordon snapped the book shut in his hand, although he wasn't sure why, and his mind worked to play catch up with what his hand had just figured out.

There was something about that last part he'd just read, something about it that had made something make sense to him. He thought for a minute, reviewing the last snippet of text in his mind.

"'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard."

He opened the book again and started re-reading at the top of that paragraph.

"I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said 'Farm Boy do this', you thought I was answering 'As you wish', but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard."

Gordon remembered from the movie, Cary Elwes tumbling down a ravine and yelling "Aaaaaas yoooooou wiiiiish!" the phrase that had been the character's trademark. Something about that was important, something was significant that was missing, and he sat there, the old cerebral adrenaline rush that he'd always experienced when on the tip of solving a problem rushing through him, trying to puzzle it out.

And then, unbidden, into his mind popped Alyx's voice saying, "I got your back...I got your back..."

Over and over it played on a loop, "I got your back, I got your back," until it started running up alongside the other phrase caught in his mind: "As you wish, as you wish."

And suddenly, it clicked. Why Alyx was telling him "I got your back" so often and at those times and with such emotion and awkwardness. Whether she really was into him and why she didn't just say so."' I love you' was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard." As you wish was to I love you as I got your back was to...

He suddenly felt giddy with excitement, and an urge to move, to frantically jump up and down or dance around ludicrously, seized him. He remembered her standing there awkwardly in his doorframe and broke out into a huge, dorky grin, then let out a strangled cry of inarticulate joy. She had been telling him all this time, but he hadn't heard, and he hadn't heard. And maybe she hadn't told him outright because maybe, just maybe, the self-doubt and insecurity that plagued him in trying to figure her out overcame her, too, in trying to tell him. Maybe even people who hadn't been made fun of in middle school, maybe even beautiful people, smart, warm, funny, outgoing, amazing people, were afraid of rejection too. And so she'd hidden her affection for him behind a phrase that could convey it, if only he heard it right.

He felt almost intoxicated, such was his joy. But then, he thought, coming back down to Earth a little, she didn't know he felt the same way for her, now did she? He felt as if he had a sweet, precious secret, and he wanted to both cup it to his chest the way one cups a flame from a candle and shout it from the treetops of White Forest, and if any Striders were attracted by his noise, he'd laugh at them because they didn't have Alyx Vance in love with them. That was an absurd thought, he knew, but he didn't care.

Now to go about letting her know he'd gotten her message and reciprocated her feelings. Treating the problem scientifically hadn't worked, he decided, although talking in symbols, using allusion, drawing analogies—all the tricks of the trade of literature, that is—had worked. Maybe this was how he should proceed. He carefully formulated a complex plan, full of intricacy and involving skill to pull it off.

The next day, when he saw Alyx, he acted normally, although he had squirmed and fidgeted while waiting for her, eager to see her. She squirmed and fidgeted too when she first saw him and quickly turned the conversation to the book.

"Did you get anywhere into it?" she asked.

"Oh yeah, only a little," he said, carefully avoiding her eyes, "About up to the end of the first chapter. I liked it, can't wait to get back here so I can read more of it." He busied himself a few more seconds with the cable cord he was using to tie a storage crate to their scout car, and then looked up at her. She was caught in a moment of indecision, awkwardly looking like she was wondering what to do or say next. When she caught him looking at her, her hand flew to her hair and she self-consciously patted it down as she avoided his gaze and came out with, "Oh. Um...good! Glad you liked it. Maybe you can, uh...tell me more of what you think about it when you get farther in." He nodded in assent, and she looked like maybe she wanted to say something else...but then she said, "Are we ready to go?"

"Almost," he said, and they finished loading up the car, as she looked embarrassed and glum, distracted.

They got into the car and started to drive off, the normal chatter she kept up conspicuously absent. He felt bad for making her feel bad, but it was part of his brilliant master plan, and he had to do this right. He eventually got her talking about the antics of one of the older soldiers who had supposedly drunkenly wandered into a teleporter last night and gotten himself zapped to the middle of the forest, wondering how he'd gotten there, and Alyx quickly hid her bad mood in an admirably convincing performance. He spent the rest of the day watching for his opportunity, and toward the afternoon, they had made camp near a river. He was setting up the campsite and she was about to go look for firewood when he tried to get his nerve up...

...and lost it. She wandered off into the woods, and Gordon fumed at himself, and when she got back, he thought of scrapping the plan and improvising...but she looked so gorgeous with her cheeks red from hiking and her hair in her face as she dumped the wood she'd found at his feet. Momentarily flabbergasted by Alyx's attractive powers, Gordon lost his nerve again.

They slept in shifts that night, and while Gordon was taking his watch, he resolved to be a man and just grab the next opportunity he saw. He envisioned scenarios in which he could put his master plan to work, and practiced in his head until Alyx woke him up for her turn at guard. In the morning, they broke camp and set out again toward the rebel camp they were supposed to be making contact with. When they got about five miles from where it should be, Alyx stopped and insisted they go through all the possible scenarios of what they might find and come up with a gameplan. Here, Gordon knew he was liable to be presented with an opportunity, and he paid rapt attention to her word, if not her actual directions, as his stomach churned nervously. Sure enough, he got his opportunity.

"When we get in there and find out who's in charge, I'll do most of the talking and you back me up, okay? They know you by sight because of the suit, and it'll make them feel good that you're here, but I'm better with the talking, no offense. We need to make sure these people don't break away and start a faction, so just go along with what I say, okay?"

"Sure," he said, his mouth dry, and then went to enact his master plan…

But she was walking away, toward the camp, and he called, "Alyx?" She turned, looked at him quizzically...and he knew he'd lost his chance.

"This'll be a piece of cake, right?" He smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring and not queasy way, and she said, "You betcha, Gordon!" and winked at him. Maybe he could still...but no, she was chattering on again, and the chance was lost. After that, they met up with the rebels, and of course there was a skirmish when some Hunters stormed the camp, but when the new group saw how Gordon and Alyx could fight, they eagerly agreed to an alliance. Gordon was pleased, but honestly, his mind was still, even now, elsewhere.

It was incredible. He'd just been in yet another life-or-death situation, and afterwards, the only thing he could think of was how he or Alyx could have been killed and he'd still not have enacted his master plan. Maybe he'd just gotten so used to these battles for continued survival that they didn't seem as significant anymore...or maybe he had it bad. Either way, he decided that from now on, for each opportunity missed, he was going to have a Vortigaunt give him a good shocking. Maybe Pavlovian conditioning would strengthen his resolve.

His chance came as Alyx and he were walking away from the base, back toward where they'd left the scout car, while the other rebels packed up and prepared to meet them at White Forest. Alyx was recapping the events in an analysis, and he was commenting here and there, mostly just making sounds of agreement.

"...I can't believe it, that Hunter party was almost good luck, we didn't lose anybody—except that one guy got his arm torn up pretty bad, the medic said he'll need stitches but he'll be okay—and if it hadn't been for that, they might not have joined up with us. I think it did help that you saved the commander's son when that one Hunter had him cornered, to tell you the truth," she gave him a wink here, "and by the way, I didn't get to say it earlier, but thanks for coming through with those grenades when I was stuck behind the shed, I don't know where you found those."

And the words just came out..."Yeah, well...you know, I've always got your back." She laughed, then paused, as if she hadn't heard him right. He opened his mouth, tried to say something...but what to say? He turned toward the ground, could feel himself blushing, rubbed the back of his head in a Barney-like gesture...

He snuck a glance at her again, and she was blinking in surprise, as if she didn't dare believe it. Then she broke into a grin, and he broke into one too, and then she threw herself into his arms, twined one arm around his neck and the other in his hair and kissed him, and her lips were warm and soft and he could feel her smile on his mouth and he knew he was smiling too and it was the best thing ever.

The Princess Bride presents Buttercup and Westley's romance as a Great Epic Love For The Ages. It was satire, of course, and real relationships can never be ranked as being the best or the most romantic or most passionate or purest, because each relationship is unique. Gordon and Alyx's first kiss might not have ranked on an agreed-upon list of the Five Best Kisses of History, but as far as Gordon was concerned, "this one left them all in the dust".