FicWad

Rimmer sat at a grimy port set into the cargo hold on Starbug. He looked through the grease-streaked plexi at the dim glitter of the starscape and thought about tachyons. He thought about superlight particles streaking through the void, not bound by the petty rules of physics and three-dimensional space. He thought about ships without dingy, ill-lit cargo holds and sticky spills of beer in the cockpit. He thought about ships without haughty mechanoids and smug cat-people and irreverent space-bums. He thought about impossible escapes.

An irreverent space-bum eventually interrupted his reverie. The hiss of an opening door and the clonks and muffled curses of Lister stubbing his toes on their badly stacked supplies drifted towards him, and Rimmer tensed. He could not escape anyone on this blasted ship. He just wanted a little time alone. A century or so.

"Rimmeh, man, where the smeg are ya?"

Rimmer squared his shoulders and pointedly looked out of the viewport as if he could stare a hole in it.

The banging and clattering grew inexorably nearer. "Ach, there ya are, mate!" the voice sounded directly behind him. Rimmer did not look around. Go, he made his body language say. Lister did not listen; he sat on a crate with a whump of expelled breath. "I was lookin' all over for yeh."

"Found, miladdo. Now off with you."

Lister leaned over Rimmer's shoulder to look out of the same viewport. Rimmer wrinkled his nose at Lister's beery breath, and sat back with a resigned sigh. Lister confirmed that the view from this port was the same starscape that was visible from the cockpit. He looked over at Rimmer.

"Whatcha lookin' at, mate?"

Rimmer considered any number of answers, from the truth to "Your mum's bare bottom." He chose silence, and crossed his arms while treating Lister to a thin-lipped stare. Lister looked a little confused. He had a Leopard Lager in his hand, and it didn't appear to be his first.

"Rimmeh, mate, we're celebratin'. No urine recyc. C'mon up." He grinned and waved his lager grandly.

Rimmer sighed and turned to stare very pointedly back out of the window. Lister's fingers grabbed the fabric over his shoulder and yanked. Rimmer turned to face him with annoyance.

"Look, man, are you just goin' to sit down here and sulk? Spoilin' the party. What, yer havin' a snit fit because your little hero act didn't work out? Stuff it. Come up."

Rimmer grabbed Lister's hand and pulled it off of his shoulder, flinging it away with two fingers as if it were a dead fish. "What, should I be delighted that it didn't work out? The one smegging thing I've ever done in my life that wasn't self-serving and cowardly? The one thing I have ever done /right/? Should I dance a jig that it was all for nothing? Don't you think there's a little lesson here?" He realized he was standing, and spitting hologrammatic saliva at Lister; it fizzled to nothingness before landing, which probably contributed to Lister's composure in the face of this outburst. Rimmer shut his mouth with a snap, straightened his uniform, pointedly pulling out the shoulder, and sat down again.

"Well..." Lister swallowed, "it wasn't technically in yer life, mate."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better, is it?" Rimmer snapped.

Lister was silent for a moment while Rimmer seethed. The hologram looked out of the viewport and thought of holoships with lovely, caring women on them. He thought about Captain Platini, and wondered if it were possible to break a soft-light hologram's neck if you were a soft-light hologram yourself.

"Look, man..." Lister said, awkwardly, "I'm sorry. It was a good thing you did."

"Thank you for your kind words," Rimmer grated. "Now if you want to round out your generosity, smeg off."

Lister drummed his fingers on the almost-empty lager can in a manner that Rimmer found particularly irritating. "Yer lonely, aren't ya." It was not a question.

"I am the exact opposite of lonely. I am sick to bloody death of every last one of you goits."

"Yeh, and yer lonely. We're all crammed in together, and it's pissin' us all off. Yer not the only one who's been wantin' to stick appliances up some folk's arses. I becher wishin' you had stayed on the Holoship, and ta hell with Nirvanah."

The red mist was only a temporary thing, Rimmer decided, because when he came back to himself, the surprised look on Lister's face indicated that he had only just grabbed the goit by the shirt. He counted to as much of ten as he could remember, let go, and sat back down again. Lister cleared his throat. "Oi, mate, no call fer that."

"No call for you to say a word about her."

"It's just..."

"Not. A. Word," Rimmer growled.

Lister sat and looked at him, chewing on the end of one of his long braids. Rimmer glared at him with annoyance that was becoming increasingly tinged with the melancholy that had driven him down here in the first place. He wished, dearly, that Lister would just leave. He wanted Red Dwarf back. He wanted endless stretches of deck and cargo hold where he could lose himself for weeks at a time, then come back to his shared quarters and bicker amicably with Lister. The balance was upset.

"We don't really talk anymore," Lister said, finally.

"We talk entirely too much."

"We bicker an' squabble an' argue. We don't talk. We hiss an' spit on duty, and then we just bugger back to our rooms when we're done. I don't think I've even seen your room here."

"Suits me fine, Listy. I see you too much as it is." Damn it, why did the man have to echo his thoughts so closely?

Lister looked down at his feet. "I know I piss you off, and that isn't ever goin' to change. And you piss me off, and that isn't ever goin' to change. But," Lister looked up and gave the cherubic smile that Rimmer wanted to punch, "my 'gerbil-faced optimism' isn't ever goin' to change, either."

Rimmer grunted and tried to look back out the viewport. But his eyes kept darting back to where Lister sat and gently smiled at him. Rimmer finally gave up and turned back to Lister.

"What do you want?"

"I want things to be better between us, man. I'll always be a bum, and you'll always be a git. That doesn't mean we have to be at each others' throats. I wanna do better by you. And I sure as smeg want you to do better by me."

Rimmer turned back to the window and bit his lip. He could have taken anything Lister had to give; his arguing and sniping skills were honed to razor-sharp precision, now. He had a retort for any occasion, a putdown equal to any he might have thrown at him. His verbal repartee was in Olympic trim. But the one thing he had not expected, that he had no answer for, was this understanding that Lister had thrown at him. As if this below-the-belt punch were not enough, Lister's gloved hand on his cheek was soft and gentle. It softly and gently turned Rimmer's head back towards Lister. Rimmer's capacity for surprise must have been completely exhausted by the unexpected sincerity of Lister's last statement, because the brush of beery lips over his own came as only a mild startlement. But that one kindness was one kindness too many.

"Don't," he croaked. "Please."

"Why no'?" asked Lister, quietly, and kissed him again, more deeply. Rimmer wanted to protest, but he simply did not have the emotional energy; the friction of this entire Red Dwarf chase on Starbug had stretched him to the breaking point, and this act of Lister's slipped under his carefully constructed Git Armor and snapped him completely. He closed his eyes and thought of Nirvanah, whose lips were not so full, whose breath was not so toxic, but who was, in the same way, /kind/. Lister's tongue was more forceful, forcing Rimmer's mouth wider and plunging deeper, as if it were trying to somehow slip below the neurotic mess that was the Arnold Rimmer he presented to the world, and dig out what lay underneath.

When he finally broke the kiss, Rimmer's head was swimming. "You're drunk, aren't you," he sighed.

Lister laughed. "Nicely drunk, mate, no more." He stood, slightly unsteadily, and pulled on Rimmer's arm. "Come up to the party."

Rimmer pulled the hand off of his sleeve, but gave it a squeeze before letting go. "I'd like to stay here. But..." he made the effort, feeling the Rimmer he had been for the past several months flare his nostrils and glare witheringly at him, "thanks," he choked out.

Lister leaned down and said, "OK, mate, but I want to bunk in your room tonight. I'm scared of the dark, you know."

"How will sleeping in my room help?"

"I'll have a little light next to me." Lister giggled as Rimmer rolled his eyes. He kissed the hologram noisily on the cheek and made his toe-stubbing, cursing way back out of the cargo hold.

Rimmer turned back to stare out of the stained port again. He thought about tachyons. He thought about temporal paradoxes.

He thought about not sleeping alone, and allowed some part of him to be disgusted by how much that thought appealed to him.