FicWad

Legion paused outside of the human's room. His personality was fragmenting, re-adjusting to the available templates, and that left him disoriented and vaguely nauseated at the best of times. The mechanoid had finished cleaning and shut himself down to recharge; the rip of his personality from the combined had been far more abrupt than Legion was used to dealing with, and he reeled, mentally. The Cat was curled up on the pile of cushions in the middle of his room, and his dreams of milk and fish and half-nude Valkyries were giving way to oblivion. The human, as well, was succumbing to acute exhaustion, dozing off with the guitar across his lap and his boots tracking dirt on the coverlet. Legion let their components go, standing still as his personality readjusted, until he was entirely composed of the hologram.

It was as strange a personality as he had initially feared, and he poked through the veneer of high ego to sift layers of neuroses, self-doubt, and self-loathing. It was hideously uncomfortable. He finally conceived of a course of action that would assuage the latter and feed the former sufficiently to soothe the man's disturbed psyche, just enough to make the time Legion was going to have to spend as that man a little more bearable.


Rimmer paced nervously in his small room, trying to take comfort in the stark ordered-ness of the whitewashed walls, small, hard bed, and militaristic desk. He was failing. The situation was disturbing enough - trapped for eternity with a nutter in a green lycra bodysuit - but it was not disturbing him as much as it really should have been. He was far more concerned with his hard-light drive.

He had dreamed of corporeality for the entire time he had been a hologram, unable to touch, an impotent ghost of a man. He had not paused at any time during that dreaming to consider the ramifications of giving the sensation of touch to someone who had been without it for years. He was hypersensitive, his body screeching at him about the temperature of the room and the feel of the walls under his hands when he leaned in to touch them. His uniform, being part of his projection, retained some of the sense of feel, and he found that it was blunted just enough to make touch bearable. He therefore used his boots to feel the floor, and sat on the desk instead of running his hands along it. He ran along the paired high of finally! and low of just how long will it take to get used to this?

Well, however long it would be, he thought irately, Legion was determined to keep him there for that time.

He spun around as the door hissed open. His eyes widened as... he walked in. Well, an exact copy of him, as far as he could tell, from the shiny blue H to the black boots the copy's velour trousers were tucked into. Rimmer looked a little closer. Perhaps not an exact copy of him. This hologram's nostrils flared ridiculously, and his hair spat out frizzy curls in defiance of the part the copy had tried to impose on it.

"Who are you?" Rimmer asked, warily.

"I'm you, miladdio!" the copy said, brightly, striding into the room.

A number of thoughts ran through Rimmer's mind, starting with the cyberpark Legion had mentioned and ending with the possibility that the nutter had made a copy of the data on Rimmer's bee while he had been rummaging around inside of it. Rimmer then decided it was rather irrelevant how this other him had come to be. What was more important was that this other him was in his room. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, come now, Arnie!" it said, grinning and walking in as the door closed behind it. "Can't you guess?"

"If you're looking for the loo, it's two doors down," Rimmer muttered. He started to back up, then realized he was damned if he was going to back away from a copy of himself in his own smegging room.

The other-him laughed, still walking closer. "No, Iron Balls!" he chirped. "I just couldn't not come by. You're quite a fellow, after all. It's something any reasonable bloke can't help noticing. Quite a contrast to that space-bum and the kittycat, eh?"

Rimmer chewed his lip. The copy had a point. "Well, yes. Of course, a compost-spreader droid would be a contrast to those two."

The other-him shook his head in admiration. "Can't put one past you, you mad Second Technician," he purred, putting his hands on Rimmer's arms. Rimmer shivered, but did not pull away; the copy's touch was feather-light, perfectly matched to Rimmer's hypersensitive state. "You're too much," the copy continued, then put his lips on Rimmer's. Rimmer sighed, opening his lips slightly as the copy's moved on his own. He had never been kissed with such /sincerity/, after all, not even by the faux McGruder in the Better Than Life game. He therefore put up no protest as the copy's tongue, tasting pleasingly of the mint-peroxide toothpaste that Rimmer favored, pushed into his mouth, and the perfect not-too-harsh touch moved to the small of his back, pulling him inwards.

After all/, he thought blearily as the copy pushed him facedown onto the bed and started to remove his trousers, /it's good to know that /someone in this universe has the good taste to find me irresistible/.