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wafflebloggies · 2 years

Text

Disambiguated

“What do you mean, we’ve ‘swapped powers?’”

The Captain jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Alan, who flinched slightly, not at all happy to be roped into this discussion. “He doesn’t have any powers.”

“All right, then.” The terseness in Blair’s voice was a little out of kilter with his usual calm, not to mention his being the cause of the entire incident in the first place. “Alan now has your powers, and you do not seem to. Would you say that’s a more accurate way of putting it?”

“I’d say,” said the Captain, “that the most accurate way of putting it, is that this whole thing is your f-”

“Look, okay, it doesn’t really matter,” said Alan, hurriedly. “Because you can just reverse it, I mean- it’s not like it’s permanent or anything, right?” When Blair didn’t immediately answer, he hiked his eyebrows and tried desperately to catch his eye, to pull some kind of positive response from his friend. “Right?”

But the Dreamfinder was regarding the smoking Disambiguator, running his hands over the sooty metal, already half in another world.

“I suppose there must have been a weakness in the alloy. I wonder…”

“Hey, wonder on your own time,” snapped the Captain. “I’ve got a video to finish. I’ve gotta get back to the ship and-”

“How?”

The Captain opened his mouth, then closed it again. Blair, who seemed to have no idea that he’d asked an awkward question, continued to examine his damaged invention. He picked up a wrench and turned to the fascia of the control panel.

“Ellie?” suggested Alan, already reaching for his phone.

“She’s been having a busy time of it lately,” remarked Blair, as he started to work on the bolts. “Package run to… Andromeda, today, I think. She’ll probably be a while.”

The Captain glared at his back. “Great. Perfect. Amazing timing.”

“Alan could take you up!” Figment, who had been quiet up until this point, watching the conversation like a tennis match from the top of the Disambiguator’s spire, hopped into the air and swooped down. “If he has your powers now, he can fly too! He could give you a space piggyback. A...” He snapped his stubby claws. “A skylift!”

The look on Alan’s face veered immediately from unease into sheer panic. From the way he spread his hands flat on the bench in front of him, the unconscious bracing of his body, perhaps he thought that the mere mention of flight might somehow be enough to unstick him from the ground and send him hurtling into space. “Oh, no, I can’t, I, I, uh, I’m not- I’m not big on heights.”

“And he has no idea what he’s doing,” added the Captain. “You think just any yahoo can stroll into upper Earth orbit and achieve geosynchronous docking with a craft moving at seven-point-six-six kilometers a second? I’d like to stay un-laminated along the side of my own ship, thank you.”

“Well,” said Figment, thoughtfully, looking him up and down, “I could try, but you’re kinda-super-duper-heavy.”

Blair made a sharp coughing noise, but when the Captain looked around, he was sizing up bolts against each other with a perfectly bland expression and appeared to have no consciousness of the conversation.

“We’ll just have to try Ellie. I’m sure she’ll understand it’s an emergency.” The Captain pushed up his cuff and spent a good few moments staring at the bare silver of his wrist before he caught on to the fact that his communicator wasn’t about to materialize. “Oh, seriously? Alan, phone.”

With a peremptory snap of his fingers, he held out his hand. Alan scrambled to pass it across, and the Captain was soon pushing out through the workshop’s double doors, already dialling.

As the doors swung closed, Blair loosened the final bolt and held up his wrench to Figment’s waiting paws, then reached forwards to ease the panel out of its housing. He stepped back, setting it down on the bench, and sighed.

“That, uh… that didn’t sound like a good sigh,” said Alan, uncertainly, from behind him. He was fidgeting with the edge of the bench, picking at one of the deeper knots in the wood. Blair glanced over his shoulder.

“Call it a ‘might be more complicated than I thought’ sigh,” he said. “More to the point, how are you feeling?”

“Um, fine.” Alan hesitated. “Kinda bruise… y? If I had to guess, I’d say it feels like my component atoms probably didn’t like being, uh…”

“Disambiguated.” Blair drummed his fingers on the metal in his hands, thinking. “I suppose you can never really tell exactly how the human body is going to respond to undergoing changes beyond the realms of rational physical probability.”

“About that…” Alan swallowed. “I don’t really feel any different, and- and I was thinking, what if it just took the Captain’s powers away- you know, temporarily- and it didn’t actually do anything to me? I’m not saying it doesn’t work,” he hurried. “I’m just saying maybe it… exploded, before it had the chance…?”

Blair didn’t answer immediately. He looked at his friend, who was studying the benchtop as if there was a whole novel written in the scarred grain, edging his weight back and forth on his heels.

“It’s possible,” he said.

He felt guilt, sharp and needling, for his part in all of this. Before they had ever met, he knew that Alan had been frustrated by the path his life was was taking, unhappy, maybe, with the limits he saw in himself. For a few years, they had had that in common. Blair could still remember the maddening, miserable feeling that there was something different he should have been doing, a different life he should have been leading, if only his own choices hadn't led him to where he was.

Of course, with Alan this had been a perfectly understandable and commonplace case of ennui, whereas with Blair, they had all found out in a pretty spectacular fashion that his true self, the Dreamfinder, had been buried deep beneath Dean's passably normal shell, struggling to emerge.

Potato, potato.

"What?" said Alan, and Blair realised he must have spoken aloud.

"Oh, I was just... thinking about old times."

"The... nineteen-hundreds?"

"No- our old times. You and I, well... in a manner of speaking."

Alan picked an invisible splinter from the bench-top. "You... can fix this thing, right?"

It was a little hurtful, and Blair felt a little hurt. It felt as if Alan had shut down the topic without touching it, as if their shared experiences weren’t important or even relevant to the situation at hand.

Blair knew why, well enough. They had both passed the last three years as if this one thing- this one strange tangled knot of their shared past- didn’t matter, but sometimes, inevitably, it did.

This impasse again. Blair had always been unwilling to claim that he was Dean, that there wasn't enough difference between them for it to matter. He was wary, always wary, of being dishonest. Of lying to his friend, even out of a place of love, of not wanting to cause hurt. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He’d only ever meant Dean to be a mask, after all, a non-person with a fake past and a blank present. He had been colourless, invisible. That was how he had been envisioned and how he had been constructed, just a half of a person to hide in until it was safe to come back.

It hadn’t worked out like that, of course. Over time, Blair had crept into Dean from his place of hiding until it had become less than clear where one ended and the other began. Alan hadn't seen a colourless, invisible person. He'd seen Blair's masked qualities shining through and he'd been drawn on, one hidden constellation sensing another. Blair knew that Alan did not believe this part, but he did- he had always been good at believing tricky things, as long as they were true.

So the person Alan had known had been Blair, and had not been Blair, and had been lost forever and had never left, and somehow in this no-man's-land of bizarre circumstance and important conversations they'd never gotten round to having, their friendship had carried on. It was as if they'd both boarded a bus to a familiar place, and now it was completely off the road and hurtling into the unknown, and had turned into a totally different kind of vehicle around them, maybe something like a flying mechanical whale, but the two of them were still sitting inside, each wondering where in the world it was going to let them off.

Lying was abhorrent to Blair, but lying to a friend was worse. He cleared his throat.

“I had to do… something,” he said, slowly. Figment landed on his shoulder, small body braced, anxiously laying his snout alongside his neck. “I thought, if-”

The sharp rising beeping rattled into the space between them, making Figment jump and Alan start up, sucking in a breath that was nearly a yelp.

“It’s the- thing-“

He held up his hand, wide-eyed, more like an angler who’d hooked up an old hand-grenade than a person looking at their own arm. Out of a circlet of blue-white light, the Captain’s communicator formed from flickering squares and tracing lines and blinked into shape on his wrist, firetruck red and chunky, the screen flaring as the alarm tone rang out a second time.

“It’s on me- what do I do?”

“Answer it?” suggested Blair. Alan blanched, panicking, stumbling over his words,

“But he’s- he’s not here, I can’t just- I-I don’t-“

“Alan, for heaven’s sake, it’s on your arm!”

Whether it was Blair’s voice, frustrated in a way he barely ever expressed aloud and had been holding in for so long, or the shrill panicky summons of the alarm as it sounded for the third time, it was too much for Alan. Reflexively, he stabbed at the screen.

“He- hello- Oh, Ellie.” He sagged onto the bench behind him, face slackening in relief, his arm crooked awkwardly as the communicator traced a bright wireframe grid against the air before him. From the grid a miniature figure popped in sharp color- and a lot of it- Ellie’s bright clothes and the glossy dome of her helmet tucked under her arm, below the dark tumbling mass of her hair.

“It’s you.”

“Yeah, is everything okay?” As far as could be discerned in one-eighths scale the little Ellie looked puzzled. “I have like three missed calls from you, and I couldn’t get you back so I tried the Captain, but now it’s you, and- wait, is something on fire? I see… smoke?”

“Oh, no, that’s- that’s fine. Ellie, something’s come up, it’s kind of hard to explain- we really need you back here. The Captain needs to get up to the ship and he-” Alan swallowed, lowering his arm to a slightly more natural position as he sat up straighter on the bench. “He can’t fly. Right now. A thing… happened.”

“Hey Ellie!” called Figment, from Blair’s shoulder. Ellie looked up, and waved.

“Hi Fig, hi Blair! Lemme guess- crazy invention hijinks?”

“Well-” started Blair, uncomfortably, but Ellie was already pulling her delivery roster out of her bag.

“I’ve still got one priority package, but it’s my next stop, sooo… I can turn round, hit Galactic Two-Niner before the rush, probably be like… an hour?”

“Thanks, Ellie. I owe you one.”

“You owe me the full story,” she grinned, saluting. “Ellie out.”

Her shape flared into a bright grid and dissolved, but the communicator stayed. Alan poked at it, hunched on the bench, quiet.

“I’m sorry,” said Blair. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”

Alan looked up in surprise, then let out a sort of half-laugh. “It’s fine, I kind of need that sometimes... if someone isn’t yelling at me, I don’t-” He kept poking, aimlessly, at the device. “I- I won’t do anything. I won’t get anything done.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” said Blair, gently.

Alan touched his wrist again, and pulled his hand back sharply as a full half-circle radius of blue spread out, flicking up an array of different displays that hung in the air before him in a sort of messily-sequenced fan. It was pure chaos to look at, a collage of overlapping information, lists and scrolling data, times and places, a small map pulsing with radiating patterns of dots, everything askew, piled up in stacks like the worlds’ most congested computer desktop, clamouring for attention.

“What’s all this stuff?” said Figment. His wide eyes shone blue with reflections from the busy constellation above him, and he pointed with a claw. “Hey, look, it’s the ship!”

“That’s a camera feed from one of the satelloids…” Keeping his wrist level, Alan lifted his other hand, very cautiously, and touched the closest display, a small widget containing a number of international and intergalactic clocks. This time, he started a little less when the display lit up and sprang to the immediate centre of the choked-up scramble in front of him, then reached out again and gave it a small push, sending the time widget bumping off to the upper reaches. “This is all like… uh, I guess it’s a kind of overview of the Captain’s schedule?”

“Very organized,” remarked Blair, dryly. Alan hesitated, then touched and tapped a graphic like a shining blue padlock, fixing the display in place so that he could move his other arm. With both hands free, he started to pull the scattered screens into groups. Blair, watching, couldn’t help but notice that his friend’s energy was settling from the wrongfooted, anxiety-riddled jumpiness he’d been crackling with ever since the accident into the kind of steady, cast-iron concentration he worked with, worked best with.

“It’s not so bad,” he murmured. “It just needs a little tidying. It’s funny, I- I didn’t even know he-”

“Alan!”

Alan stabbed the padlock symbol and flapped frantically at the array of widgets. Some of them avoided his arm like startled flies, and Figment took off after them, a purple arrow chasing them into the rafters. The rest of the display collapsed back into the communicator, and Alan shook his arm in an attempt to get it to go away, realized very fast that it wasn’t going to, and with a frantic lunge shoved his arm up to the elbow into the control panel Blair had just removed.

“Ellie’s not picking up,” said the Captain, appearing back through the workshop doors, apparently in much the same fantastic temper he’d left in. “We’re going to have to…”

He paused. The tableau that met him was not one designed to quell any suspicions he might have had. Alan was leaning against the Disambiguator’s smoke-streaked side with his arm deep in the black smoky void of the missing panel, looking about as coolly natural as a store mannequin. Blair, hand half out as if to stop him, looked as if he’d just seen his own ghost. Above their heads, Figment, having only just cornered the last of the escaped widgets, had defaulted to his usual method of emergency item disposal and shoved them into his mouth. As he reclined super-casually on the top of Blair’s whiteboard, tail flicking with his hiccups, a small twizzle of blue static which used to be a To-Do checklist was still trying to escape from his lip, twitching like a crushed bug.

“Uh, you’ve got a little…” The Captain indicated his own mouth. Figment managed a big, guilty, difficult swallow, sucking in the fritzing blue remnant. The Captain’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“What was-”

“Ellie called me,” said Blair, loudly. The Captain forgot about Figment immediately, turning to the Dreamfinder, who had found his own phone in one of his many hidden pockets and was tapping at it in his usual slow, hen-peck manner. One of the odd functions of the phone was to make Blair, who had the eyesight of a hawk, squint down his nose at it like a grandfather in the wrong spectacles. He wasn’t wearing spectacles, had never worn spectacles, but the phone and its mysteries gave him the undefinable impression that he was, every time.

“She couldn’t call you back,” he continued. “She said she’ll be here in about an hour.”

“Okay…” And then the Captain looked past him, to where Alan was trying very hard to look as casual as it was possible to look when one was up to the shoulder in the innards of an unknown machine. “Alan, what are you doing?”

“Uh, I- I’m, I’m just-”

"What's in your hand?"

Silently, his eyes wide like a trapped cat's, Alan spread out his free hand. The Captain took a very slow, patient breath.

"Your other hand."

Some of the ridiculousness of the situation seemed to dawn on Alan, then. At least, a little of the air of a frightened kid caught stealing candy left his face, and he pulled his arm out of the Disambiguator's guts, communicator and all, and looked gingerly up at the Captain with an expression that, if it didn't exactly say 'defiance,' at least didn't entirely say 'I am about to fear-vomit.'

The Captain looked at the device on Alan's wrist for an uncomfortably long time.

"That's mine," he said, at last.

Behind him, Figment landed on Blair's shoulder and made a horrible coughing sound that travelled the entirety of his long neck and ended with the widget tumbling back out of his mouth like a cork from a pop-gun, fizzing wetly. Blair winced.

"It seems it's an integral part of your powers," he said. "Or, more accurately, control and access to it is. It's quite lucky, really, at least this way it's still possible to access all the information stored on it."

"But it's mine," said the Captain.

Maybe if his temper had been less poked, prodded and stretched to breaking point, Blair might have responded to the unusual note in the Captain’s voice, not at all like his typical self-assured tone- quieter, smaller. But Blair, with Figment still making muffled upset-stomach noises in his ear, with a few small fires still flickering out in the delicate machinery of his work of several months, with his best-human-friend still at his side with his whole body braced miserably as if facing a firing squad, had had enough.

"Evidently,” he said, deliberately, “not any more.”

#captain disillusion #sort of?#dream team #ellie fleet #alan amelik #My writing #i agonize about putting this stuff in the CD tag #because it's dream team and i don't know #who in the CD tag is really going to want it there to trip over #i just enjoy writing disconnected stuff like this #blep

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