FicWad

Rimmer sat on his bunk, pointedly reading a book. He shifted now and then to enjoy the novelty of his silk pajamas sliding along his hard-light flesh. True, seen from a certain standpoint, they were not actually his, but in the absence of a terribly vocal protest from the science officer whose quarters he had nicked them from, he was prepared to call them his anyway. It was fairly late - scratch that, the clock had turned over, and it was technically fairly early - and he was tired and beyond ready to sleep, but he stayed awake, stifling his yawns with the side of his hand. He did not want to be rudely awakened when Lister staggered back from the two-person bacchanal he was laughingly calling a twentieth birthday party.

Snatches of singing became audible, growing louder, and Rimmer set his mouth in a firm line. He thought about it for a moment, and assumed Blank And Condescending #6 - eyes narrowed, line of lips broken with a slight purse, two horizontal lines in the brow. It would be wasted if Lister were as drunk as Rimmer expected him to be, but Rimmer was a perfectionist when it came to provocation. The singing grew louder, and became recognizable as an obscene ditty about finding naked women in a variety of implausible places in the space of an otherwise normal day, and having bits of produce on hand just by happy chance. Lister and Cat had gotten as far as the icebox and a papaya, each in his own favorite key, by the time the door opened and Lister staggered in. He bellowed a drunken farewell at the Cat, then hit the door close button. The boy leaned against the door next to it for a moment, swinging a bottle in his fist and finishing the last verse, which involved an avocado in a way that just did not sound physically possible to Rimmer. He looked firmly at his book.

Lister weaved his way over to the bunk. "Rimmeh!" he bellowed. "Yeh din' come to my partay!"

Rimmer sighed, put his bookmark in his spot, closed the book, set it on the floor, and turned his condescending look on Lister. "Three things, Listy. Firstly, I am three paces from you, and can hear you even if you don't bellow like a cattle auctioneer. Secondly, I am well aware that I did not come to your party, because I was here. Thirdly, going to a birthday party of yours ranks on my priority list just below getting tongue-kissed by our old family dog, who ate cat turds and licked his own testicles."

Lister sat heavily down on the bunk next to Rimmer, and grinned at the hologram. Rimmer wrinkled his nose as breath that had a higher alcohol content than most domestic beer washed over him. "Eh, don' be such a prude," Lister said, and giggled. He held the bottle up. "Have a dhrink."

Rimmer pushed the bottle away. "Not a chance. Now, if you need help getting back into your bunk, I'm sure I can rig up a catapult..."

Lister frowned. "I want you... to have a drink," he said, his voice a little clearer. He pushed the bottle more firmly at Rimmer, and Rimmer pushed it away more firmly. Lister sighed and put the bottle beside the bed. He then leaned forward and grabbed Rimmer by the edges of his pajama top, yanking and falling backwards onto the floor. Rimmer, startled, found himself jerked forward and sprawling atop Lister. He tried to push away and stand, but Lister rolled over, pinning him to the ground with one leg on either side.

"Get off of me, you damned presumptuous space-bum!" Rimmer yelped, pushing ineffectively at Lister's chest.

Lister swatted at Rimmer's hands with one hand, while with the other, he grabbed the bottle. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and spat it across the room, then leaned forward, pushing down on Rimmer's chest with one hand while he poured some of whatever was in the bottle over Rimmer's face. "I want you to have a drink!" he said, giggling.

Rimmer spat and sputtered, but some of the stuff made it down his throat anyway, and he started to cough. The stuff tasted like it was 3/4 alcohol and 1/4 drain cleaner. He hacked desperately, and Lister stopped pouring. "Y'all righ'?" he asked.

Rimmer regained control of his voice. "Of course I'm not all right, you..." he inhaled for a moment to let loose a string of insult to follow the 'you,' but Lister, with the cunning of the highly intoxicated, timed the next deluge from the bottle to coincide with that inhale. Quite a lot of the booze went down the wrong pipe, then made its way down the right one as Rimmer hacked. It was really quite potent stuff, and Rimmer put his head back for a moment as his brain started to do the backstroke. A warm tingling was spreading out from his stomach. I guess a hologram can /get drunk/, he thought, and something about that thought made him giggle.

"I knew you'd... have a drink," Lister said, giggling along. He set the bottle carefully off to the side, after taking another swig from it himself.

The synchrony of Lister's giggle made Rimmer frown. "That... was the rudest... most incon... inconsiderate thing. Totally worthy of you, Listy." The alcohol had rubbed the edge off of his tongue, he noted with regret. Instead of fruitlessly trying to think of a really scathing insult, he jerked and pushed, trying to get out from under Lister. "Off of me, you jackarse!"

Lister grabbed his wrists as he flailed and rode him as he jerked. The boy stopped giggling, but did not stop smiling. As soon as Rimmer paused in his jerking, Lister leaned down and started to lick the alcohol off of Rimmer's face. "Waste..." he sighed into Rimmer's ear, then flicked his tongue out again to sloppily lap off what had spilled over Rimmer's ear and into the gap of his neck and shoulder. He started to rub a very noticeable erection against Rimmer's hip. Rimmer was torn between extreme annoyance at this and the unavoidable fact that he had one to match. As hideously embarrassing as the mere thought of The Event of just over three years ago was, the one that was capitalized in both of their minds and never referred to, it nonetheless still had its alluring qualities, ones that percolated into Rimmer's head as it was swimming from that hideous booze. He reached his mouth out and tried to capture that licking tongue.

It slipped away as Lister pulled it back into his mouth, rocked back, and stood, the look of delight starting to ebb from his face. Rimmer sat up, feeling very petulant, and said, "Look, miladdio!" He stood, saying, "If you're going to..." and got no farther, as the alcohol shot his balance to hell, and he staggered backwards. Lister grabbed his pajama top with one hand and his side with the other, and they staggered about for a few moments in an odd little waltz, each regaining his balance just in time to have it thrown off by the other. Lister finally made the decisive step of offbalancing them as they passed by the bunks, and they both tumbled unceremoniously into Rimmer's bunk, banging bits on the sharp edge. Rimmer rubbed his shin with a groan.

Lister rolled on his side and grasped Rimmer's face with both hands. "Yeh... want this?" he asked. Rimmer blinked as his eyes began to stream from that fierce wash of toxic breath. But Lister's face was hypnotizing. Boy/, he had been careful to think of Lister as since The Event, and since then had condescendingly thought him as nothing more than the teenage bum he had appeared to be. But as the freakish adolescent hormones had released him from their grip, Lister's face had matured far more than three years could account for, and Rimmer's offensive comeback stuck in his throat as he saw almost a hundred and fifty years staring back at him from that young, almost cherubic face. He could only look on wordlessly as Lister leaned forward and pressed their lips together. Rimmer whimpered and put his hands on Lister's back, under his shirt, and stroked as Lister slid his tongue in, its prodding combining with the alcohol to make the room spin crazily. Rimmer grabbed Lister's back more tightly, tears leaking out as the intensity of three years of hopeless lust started to wash over him, and he closed his eyes and opened his mouth wider. Lister moaned into his mouth, raising his hands to the neck of Rimmer's pajamas and ripping down the seam at the back, and as much as Rimmer knew that he should be terribly annoyed at the ruin of the lovely pajamas he had /just found, all he could think to be annoyed about was the thought of who Lister might be thinking of - especially as it was almost assuredly Ace. It was not a helpful annoyance; it was not one that allowed Rimmer to maintain any kind of grip on himself as Lister slid the torn pajamas down his arms, kissing his cheek and then his chest as he pushed Rimmer down to lie back on the bunk.

Rimmer grabbed Lister's ears, almost choking on the longing he had not let himself feel since then, unavoidable with the man licking his way down Rimmer's stomach and tugging at his pajama bottoms. The man so like his Lister; the same soft cheeks, the same curly, dark hair, the same warbly voice. Rimmer let go and grabbed the bunk with one hand and the blanket with the other as Lister shook his head, grumbling something about tugging his ears off. Lister looked up as he slid the pajama bottoms down and off, and Rimmer was hit once more with a century and a half buried in a pair of dark brown eyes. He forgot to breathe as Lister threw the bottoms carelessly off of the bunk. No, it was not his Lister lying between his legs; no way in Jupiter's hurricane was this Lister with an impossibly old expression on his boy's face his Lister. This other Lister sucked two fingers meaningfully, then jammed them up Rimmer's bum, working and twisting as Rimmer gasped and moaned. The Lister who was not his let more spittle fall out of his mouth, rubbing it over his cock before pushing it inside. Rimmer gasped, the pain too similar to the first time he had ever done this, the fullness just as disconcerting. Rimmer grasped his cock with one unsteady hand and started to move, turning the pain into a bittersweet pleasure as this Lister pounded harder and faster than his Lister had ever dared, staring at Rimmer intently with his mouth half-open, his hands grasping Rimmer's thighs.

Rimmer had always preferred to come with his eyes closed, riding the sensation, but he could not tear himself away from the intense stare of this too-old boy, and jerked like a fish on a line as come dribbled onto his stomach, his orgasm coming in spasms instead of waves as Lister continued to pummel and stare. Rimmer pulled every shred of orgasm out of himself, and Lister still continued to thrust almost desperately into his sore rear. Rimmer dropped his hand, drunkenness and exhaustion tugging at him even as Lister's pounding tugged him the other way. He was being torn in two, but Lister, this Lister who had seen so much more than Rimmer, was holding him together, until he took his hand off of Rimmer's thigh and ran it through the come on Rimmer's stomach, rubbing it up the hologram's chest. He put that sticky hand on Rimmer's cheek as he finally drove once, hard, then again, and once more, dropping his head as he groaned through his teeth. He dropped his hands to either side of Rimmer's chest as he let out a long, drawn-out moan, gasping in a few more breaths as he rode out his own orgasm. Once his breaths evened out, he leaned forward and licked the inside of Rimmer's mouth, which hung half-open, stupidly, and he pulled his cock out, the head catching slightly and making Rimmer whimper.

Lister collapsed on his side, panting. "Hap... burfay to me..." he sighed, and started to snore.

Rimmer let his head fall to the side, sighing at the breath that washed over him. He wished he had not gotten drunk - he'd have a hell of a hangover later. He wished he had enough energy to fetch his pajama bottoms, or generate his uniform - anything to give his current position even the vaguest semblance of dignity. He wished he could pretend the person lying next to him was his Lister, a simpler man who respected, hell, adored Rimmer, who Rimmer could easily sleep with without it actually being anything. He wished the person lying next to him did not find it so easy to pretend he was someone else. Most of all, though, he wished that he did not want that man-boy lying next to him, the one who irritated him so effortlessly, the one he could not stand to be around and the one who he could not stand to have despise him as much as the man did. He wished the grotty, filthy, arrogant bastard did not evoke a feeling in him that was far too disturbingly close to what he had heard described as love.

His last thought, before falling into a troubled sleep, was that he had never gotten what he wished for in life, so why should that change in death?