#canape yeet

[wafflebloggies]

A Step Too Far

The moment the doors shut behind him, the Captain turned on Alan with injured outrage in every nerve, and a small cube of pineapple cheese on a cocktail stick in his hand. The latter was inconvenient for the purpose of dramatic gesturing, but he barely seemed to notice.

“‘No?’” he hissed.

“No,” said Alan, watching him. This hallway, the main entrance to the American Adventure’s rotunda, was very wide, high-ceilinged, and ornate. It was a hallway designed to be thronged with guests and swept along by dazzling VIPs on their way to make an Entrance, and its emptiness now was enough to make any lone guest feel exposed and vulnerable. The walls were glossy marble, and every sound echoed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means the opposite of ‘yes.’”

The Captain struggled momentarily with thin air, drawing a complicated pattern with the pineapple cheese cube. “Don’t get smart with me, Alan! Do you even understand what she was saying in there? The guy has eight million subscribers, and if this gets out, they’re gonna collectively- lose their minds! You think I want eight million people mad at me? That’s like- almost half a Vsauce!”

“Technically, I think they’ll be mad at us, sir. I mean, I did write the scri-”

“Oh, come on,” said the Captain, impatiently. “They don’t even know you exist. You’re under the radar- and you know what YouTubers are like- I’m the one who’s gonna end up with my eyes pecked out like Tippi Hedren if we screw this up!”

“That wasn’t Tippi Hedren,” muttered Alan. “It was the farmer guy whose eyes got-”

“Don’t change the subject! We are supposed to be on the same page.” The Captain motioned back and forth from his own chest to Alan’s with the pineapple cheese. “There is supposed to be synchronicity. This isn’t synchronicity.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Good, I’m glad you-”

“But,” said Alan. The Captain stopped moving.

“‘But?’”

“But- but neither is me doing everything you say, just because it’s you saying it.”

There was a nasty silence, filled up by the muffled rise and fall of chatter in the rotunda. Eventually, the Captain breathed, gazed up at the ceiling, and composed his face into a picture of martyrdom.

“Look,” he said. “I get it. Really, I totally get it. You’re scared ‘DF,’” and he pantomimed quote marks, or rather, one set of quote marks and one pineapple cheese, “is gonna get all upset if he finds out we left him out of this, right? That’s not a problem. Even if by some crazy, wacky, super-unlikely turn of circumstance, he did find out, we’ll just say it was my idea, okay?”

“I’m not scared of-”

“He’s just some guy, Alan. Some guy, with a nice hat, and unknowable abstract powers of reality manipulation.”

“I’m not s-”

“What’s he going to do? Dream at you?”

“I’m not scared of him,” said Alan, loudly. His voice bounced down the hallway, and he winced and waited for it to stop before he continued. “But he’s my best friend, and I’m not going to lie to him. The point is-”

“Lie?” The Captain recoiled, looking cut to the quick. “You think I’m asking you to lie about this? Don’t be stupid. It’s not lying, it’s just not… telling him everything.”

“Yes, well, that’s also known as lying, sir. By omission. Please stop pointing that at me,” Alan added, eyeing the pineapple cheese, which was hovering accusingly about an inch from his nose.

With an echoing chonk, the double-doors into the rotunda opened a crack, and the worried face of one of the ushers poked around it.

"Hey, is everything cool out h-"

Without looking, the Captain put out his free hand. The heavy maglock bar at the top of the doorframe gave a startled beep and jumped to life, and the doors shut themselves smartly in the usher's face.

“You just locked everyone in,” Alan noted.

“You’re being deliberately obtuse!”

“You locked everyone in, and you’re still pointing that at me.”

The Captain was heedless, furious, advancing on Alan as he stood still. “Why, Alan?? What can the Dreamfinder do about this? How can he possibly fix this? What can he do, that I can’t?”

“How about listen??” Alan exploded, driving the Captain back a pace with the sheer shock. In the silence, he sighed, his hands creeping back to curl around his elbows in the nice tux that made him look very un-Alan-like, and in the moment even this touch of strangeness was huge, awful. He looked monochrome and tired and as immovable as a chess piece hemmed into a corner, rooted fast. “For… for a start.”

The Captain should have left it there. If he’d been a little wiser, or a little less angry- or a little less utterly staggered, panicked and infuriated by this sudden rift between himself and his human- he might have done, but he didn’t. Instead, he pushed forwards.

“I’m giving you an order, Alan-”

-thup-

The way the little pineapple cheese cube, stick and all, flew through the air and tumbled a little way across the marble was fairly undramatic, but the stark, steadfast, hurting look Alan fixed on the Captain as he smacked it out of his hand put it straight into the running for Most Dramatic Canape Yeet Of All Time.

“Sometimes, sir,” he said, “some parts of you... I wish they’d stayed in my imagination.”

The Captain took in a sharp, winded breath, but if Alan heard it at all he didn’t wait to hear anything else. He was already walking past him, head down, like somebody pushing doggedly on against a strong wind.

“Wait- where- where d’you think you’re going?”

“Back to the party.”

“But- you hate parties!” The Captain started after him. He still sounded furious, but there was a touch of desperation there too, a note of something that might have been indignation or wounded pride but also might have been just sheer bloody panic. “Alan! Don’t you turn your back on me- Alan!”

Alan didn’t respond. Reaching the door, he fumbled in his inside pocket for his guest keycard, swiped it, and pushed through.