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"Turn."

Lister grunted as he made a mis-stitch. He put his knitting needles down and started to pick it out.

"Turn."

He glanced over at Rimmer, who sat on the other side of the small folding table they had erected in the sleeping quarters, reading an electronic book in voice-activated mode; the hologram's brow was knitted in concentration. Lister turned back to his knot of yarn.

"Turn."

Lister finally pulled the mis-stitch out, picked the needles back up, and resumed knitting. He supposed he would have to decide at some point what it was going to be; the action soothed him, but the result was getting to be an unmanageable multicolored blob.

"Turn."

Lister sighed and looked up. "You do have a hard-light drive, mate. Kryters said it even uses less energy than your soft-light drive. Yeh can turn your own bloody pages."

"I prefer it this way," Rimmer said shortly.

Lister looked up from his knitting. "Are you nuts? Yeh did nuttin' but whinge about never being able to touch when you were soft-light, and now you prefer it?"

"Yes. Turn."

Lister looked up from his knitting and studied the red-clad hologram a little more closely. There was tension around his eyes and shoulders that Lister couldn't reconcile with sitting and reading. He put down his knitting and walked around the table to stand in front of Rimmer. "What crawled up yer arse and died?"

Rimmer's head jerked up, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at Lister. "Nothing, miladdo." He jumped to his feet, converting to hard light with a soft fwup of energy as he did so, and slapped the door release button just before he stormed out, brushing past a startled Cat.

"Goalpost head isn't in on poker night?" asked Cat, pointing a thumb over his shoulder as he walked into the room. Kryten sashayed in on his heels.

"Guess not," said Lister, stashing his knitting away and pulling the deck of cards from under his pillow.

"No strip poker tonight, though, bud," said Cat, flicking his collar. "I couldn't bear to deny you the sight of me in this." It was a silver spacesuit he had salvaged from a dead crewman on a derelict, and painstakingly sewed by hand into a high-necked bodysuit. It looked dashing with a maroon smoking jacket over the top, but what of Cat's did not?

"Fine," said Lister. "Kryten always looses too quickly, anyway. For cigs or beer?"

"I have none of either, Mister Lister," said Kryten, "But I did find a large shipment of nitrous oxide on the last derelict." He pulled a bunch of colorful balloons from behind his back.

"Bru'al!" Lister grinned. "That'll do."


Three hours later, Kryten stepped into the cockpit. Rimmer sat back in his chair, putting down the book he had been reading.

"Changeover, sir."

"Nothing to report. How was the poker game?"

"I lost everything, Mister Rimmer." Somehow, the android didn't seem upset about this. He sat down at his usual station.

"Well done, Kryters," said Rimmer. He put in a bookmark, closed his book, and headed back to the midsection to continue reading.


Cat was sitting in the midsection, and glared at Rimmer with his teeth bared when the hologram walked in. The kitty must have lost a bundle to be in a mood like that. Discretion being rather a specialty of Rimmer's, he continued walking and headed for the sleeping quarters.


Lister looked up as the door hissed open and Rimmer walked in. "From the looks of the Cat, you cleaned up."

Lister cleared his throat and hoped that enough time had passed. "Not really." His voice came out as a ludicrously high-pitched squeak. Damn.

Rimmer stopped. "What the smeg is wrong with you?"

"Well," Lister cringed at the warble that came floating out of his mouth, "Cat and I both won big. We got all of the nitrous oxide that Kryten had salvaged, and thought we'd have a bash with it."

"And?"

"It wasn't nitrous. It was helium."

Rimmer sniggered.

"Oh, shut up, Rimmer." Lister realized that his comment sounded hilariously petulant in his high-pitched voice, and that made him only that much more sullen. He cleared his throat again, pleased that the pitch seemed to be dropping, and pulled out his knitting.

Rimmer walked across to the other side of the room, pulled his electronic book off of his bunk, and set it back down on the table. He switched it to voice-activated mode, turned to soft-light with a gentle whump, and started to read.

"Turn."

Lister dropped his knitting on the table. "Why do yeh do that, man? It's smegging annoying, and you don't have to."

"I don't trust you, Listy," Rimmer said, not looking up.

"You don't trust me? What are you on about?"

"The..." Rimmer stopped abruptly. "Nothing."

"Well, it obviously ain't nothin', so tell me!" Lister got out of his chair, grabbed the electronic book, tossed it back on Rimmer's bunk, folded his arms, and met the hologram's glare with a steady gaze of his own.

"Is your memory that short, Listy? Cast your twelve remaining brain cells back and see if anything comes to mind that could possibly cause just a little bit of mistrust, mm?" His eyebrows lifted.

"The psi-moon."

"Yes! Ten points to Lister! Now give me my book back."

"No." Lister stood his ground. "That wasn't me, man."

"What do you mean? Your psi-moon landscape isn't your mind? Care to explain that one?"

"It was, but it wasn't. It was of me, but it wasn't me. That's the problem with the psi-moon. It pulls out everything. I mean.." Lister flailed his hands in frustration. "I mean, you don't go 'round burnin' haiches into your head and electrocuting yerself. The psi-moon just brings out these nasty thoughts and urges that we all have, that we keep locked up in the back of our minds. It's not stuff we're actually gonna /do/."

"Ah, so you don't actually want to rape me."

Lister was becoming irritated. The concept he was trying to express was not simple, and Rimmer was not making it easy. "Look, man, I met your low on the low ship. He wanted to whip me and take me, OK? So you want to do the same yerself - at some level."

Rimmer folded his arms and looked down.

Lister dragged his chair over and sat down across from Rimmer, backwards, his hands folded over the chair back.

"A word's been missin' since that happened."

"All sorts of words have been missing since that happened."

"Nah, just one."

Rimmer looked up.

"Sorry."

"You're /sorry/."

"I'm sorry that happened to you, I truly am. And I'm sorry that I was, in some ways, responsible." Lister paused, shaking a finger at Rimmer. "But I didn't do it man, and that's important."

"Why?"

Lister sighed. "I don't want yeh to be afraid of me, Rimmer."

"Afraid?" Rimmer snorted. "I'm not afraid of you. I just don't trust you."

"Yeh, you're afraid I'll hurt you again. But I'm not going to, man. We had argued before we went moonhopping... hell, I can't even remember about what. But I was ticked at yeh. And so, some part in the back of my mind wanted to hurt you at the same time that I... want you." Lister barely choked out the last. Rimmer hadn't looked away, but his cheeks were flaming red. "That part shouldn't've come out the way it did, and it wouldn't've, if we hadn't hit that moon."

"Listy's correspondence course in psychoanalysis. Marvelous." But Rimmer's voice quavered slightly.

Lister sighed and sat down in his chair, his back to Rimmer. "I wish there was something I could do to make you trust me."

Only silence.

"Go to hard light, would yeh?"

Silence.

"Go to hard light, man." Lister swallowed. "Rimmer." He could feel that his own voice was starting to quaver. "/Please/."

After a pause, he heard that quiet whumph of energy that signaled the changeover. Lister turned around, and put his hand on the blue-uniformed Rimmer's cheek, for once wishing he wasn't wearing his bad-arse studded leather gloves. He could feel a muscle in Rimmer's jaw twitching nervously. "Trust me," he said, and leaned over the table and pressed his lips to Rimmer's. Very, very gently. They were soft, warm, slightly staticy, and tasted very faintly of mint. Lister had not expected them to be so delicious, and he would have loved nothing more than to suck them into his mouth and devour them. But he only pressed his own to them chastely for a moment, and then pulled back and let his hand drop. "You can trust me, man."

He pulled his chair back over to his side of the table and gathered up his knitting. To the side and behind him, he heard Rimmer get up, walk over to the bunk, pull out his book, and start to read - and he did not hear the sound of the conversion back to soft light.

Small steps.

And he discovered that the formless knitted blob served as a perfect hard-on concealer.