FicWad

Red Dwarf Fanfic: Last Humans
Chapter 9: C-Tower

Rimmer stepped into the lift, keyed in an authorization code, and punched in C tower.
It wasn't the guards or JMC protocol that kept C tower locked off from one third of the convict population. It was the convict Mob. Officially, they were Convicts Union on-the-books dealings were only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of it was C Tower.

Rimmer had gotten the code from one of his innumerable death threat letters. It'd been a curt message: "I dare ya to cum down hear, ya ball-lez gimboid. No guards. No rules." He'd tossed it at the time, although he'd remembered the code. Strangely, it was the same as his locker combination in Junior D. The one Porky - his best boyhood friend and worst enemy - had told the entire school body during a morning assembly. Every letter and number had been seared into his memory by the sheer humiliation as Porky chanted them out and the entire assembly turned to laugh at Rimmer. Even the teachers.

The lift doors slid open.

The first thing Rimmer noticed was the smell. On the surface it smelled like the entire prison smelled, of tar and grease and something vaguely spoilt. A smell that got into the belly and sat there like a bloated lump, occasionally prodding out a wave of achy nausea. But underneath that it smelled of excitement. Rimmer's nostrils flared. Yes, that was it - excitement, chaos, disorder.

C-Tower was Floor thirteen's Id.

Underneath the excitement, Rimmer wailed in terror. He didn't like surprises. Particularly ones delivered with a closed fist. As his terror rose, the itch spidered up his shoulders. The itch itself made him start to panic more, and he had to catch hold of that quick before it became a positive feedback loop and he lost all control.

The gantry circling C-Tower was empty. Rimmer edged onto it. He couldn't afford being caught unawares. Not right then.

He walked along the railing, keeping alert, keeping his hands moving in a nervous twitch that, nevertheless, kept them ready for action.

He passed a series of burnt out cells. A few of them were littered with unconscious and barely conscious prisoners, some covered in fetid sores, others busy excavating deep holes in their arms and thighs.

Rimmer kept his thoughts controlled, dwelling on nothing that he saw. He couldn't recall where he'd learned how to be disciplined. A large part of his memory felt wobbly and if he probed it too far, he ended up falling in and passing out.

A skutter, draped in a leather trench coat with a dark gray fedora poised on its head and half hiding the claw that served as mouth and hand, whirred towards Rimmer. It offered a series of bleeps and whistles, then paused, waiting.

"I... er... I want to get some..." Rimmer leaned close to the skutter's claw and whispered the next word out of the side of his mouth, "meds."

It considered Rimmer's request for a moment, then nodded and spun around on its tracks. Rimmer had to half jog to follow it.

The skutter weaved through random bits of rumpled steel and blown out sections of the grating floor. A war zone. A snippet of history filtered up from Rimmer's shattered memories. He concentrated on it, blotting out the horrors around him.

In the late 22nd century, JMC leased part of its fleet's cargo space to the Space Corps Penitentiary System as a convict transport. But in the mid 23rd century there'd been a crisis of overcrowding in the Penal System. Eventually, the Space Corps realized that there was no real need to drop off prisoners at the prison colonies. They could just stay in the JMC cargo holds indefinitely. Of course, this made it impossible for prisoners to have any contact with the world outside. The Space Corps had effectively cut them off from their families, from any avenue of appeal, and of course from ever being released. Most of the convicts in the JMC mobile prison system ended up being buried under paralyzing mounds of back and forth port paperwork, their release dates lost or ignored. Without hope prisoner rebellions had broken out all over the JMC mining ship fleet.

Rimmer remembered reading a pulp novel set during one of the rebellions. Vicious, violent and long they'd been. He supposed the same thing had happened on Red Dwarf. C-tower as well, and the Union of Convicts had most likely been the direct result of negotiations between the Penal system and convicts. In the pulp, novel the convict overlord had been a nasty brutish man, his face tatooed with video-ink that shifted color and shape like a kalidascope according to his mood. Rimmer shivered.

The skutter turned left abruptly. Rimmer scurried to catch up. It lead him down a snaking hallway, ending in a large chamber. Air purifiers hummed gently, scrubbing out the stink of tar and grease, leaving a light citrus smell. The chamber was divided up by elaborate screens woven together out of compressed and dyed toilet tissue. Pillows made out of swaths of checkered fabric sporting the same color scheme as the convict uniforms, were piled all over the room. Here and there some of the younger, better looking convicts lay about half-naked, inhaling smoke from hookahs fashioned out of buckets.

The whole feel of the place, Rimmer decided, was Turkish harem on the cheap.

The skutter darted behind a screen and Rimmer followed. Behind the screen was a throne room. Some of the least deformed young convicts lay on rugs beside the throne. They were almost pretty, if one ignored the obviously broken and healed noses, the missing teeth and occasional missing finger. Two of the convicts stood by the throne, their fans obscuring Rimmer's view of the throne's occupant.

Rimmer stepped up and cleared his throat.

The fan-boys stepped away. Rimmer blinked. "Bob?" he squeaked.

The skutter on the throne was wearing the yellow ascot Lister had crocheted for him out of a Canary undershirt. Another boyish convict, this one quite fetching despite his facial twitch, massaged WD-40 into Bob's joints.

"Er... does Madge know?" Rimmer asked, inanely.

Bob whirred and clicked at him. At the foot of the throne, a pile of rugs stirred and a disheveled, heavily bearded head popped out. The owner of the head had been lashed to the throne via a collar and a length of very thick chain.

"His lordship requests you state your purpose," said the disheveled head.

"I'm here for... for..." Rimmer sidled up to the throne and leaned close to Bob, "Medical supplies."

Bob cocked his claw, considering.

"Er... ephedrine, to be specific."

The skutter clicked his claw.

"His lordship has deigned to help you, you lucky sod," the head replied, and ducked back under his rugs.

The masseuse gently lifted Bob from his throne and set him down at Rimmer's feet. Once there, Bob did a quick back and forth to indicate Rimmer should follow, and arced off behind the throne. Rimmer followed, almost missing Bob as the skutter slipped through a small exit way. Rimmer had to half-stoop to get through.

The exit way opened up to a chamber roughly the size of a two-man prison cell. It stank, overwhelmingly, of garlic. Rimmer sneezed and wiped his nose. He didn't like strong smells.

The cell was strewn with lab equipment, flasks, burners, pressure cookers, a makeshift distillery, and meters upon meters of plastic piping. A medium size hydroponics station was shoved against the far wall, four humming full spectrum fluorescents shining on the vegetation within.

Rimmer had never been inside a Section-1 lab before. But he remembered them being described in one pulpy drama or another.

"Uh," he said, feeling vaguely dirty from even being in a Section-1 lab. He wondered how many breaths he had before he started taking orders from a hallucinated spider-monkey the size of the Chrysler building. "I said medical supplies. Ephedrine isn't a controlled substance. Well, I mean, outside of a prison I could get it anywhere."

Bob finished assembling a packet of multi-colored pills and reversed towards Rimmer, offering the packet.

Rimmer wrung his hands, "No. I don't think you understand. That's... that's meth isn't it?" His voice had raised an octave. He swallowed. "I'm not a druggie, Bob."

Bob thrust his claw towards Rimmer, the colorful packet dangling.

Rimmer closed his eyes. The itch, fed by his sudden anxiety, was spidering all up and down his skin, making him hungry for more fear, making him less afraid of those pills, absurdly colored in kiddy primaries as they were, making him even more afraid, but of the itch...

Rimmer's eyes snapped open and he grabbed the packet. He didn't open it. He just slipped it in his pocket and it lay there, feeling far too heavy for a handful of Flintstone vitamins - which was what they looked like more then anything, really.

He wiped the sweat off his brow and followed Bob out to the throne room. Flintstone vitamins, good to chew! Flinstone vitamins, yabba-dabba-do! Rimmer hummed the retro advertising jingle to himself, distorting it till it sounded like a death march. Io had always gotten the crap end of advertising.

The masseuse lifted Bob back up to his throne. Bob clicked and whirred.

The translator popped his head out from under his mats, eyeing Rimmer with distaste. "Now we just have the matter of payment."

Rimmer's stomach contracted. "What?"

Bob snapped his claw open and shut.

"What skills can you offer in payment to his Lordship?" The translator pulled his shoulders and arms out from under the mats, clapping his hands, alight with joy at Rimmer's obvious discomfort.

"You don't ask for payment from Lister!"

The skutter considered this for a moment, then tapped his claw against the throne armrest.
"His Lordship says that Lister is a close personal friend and a fine man. You, on the other hand, are smeg, son of smeg." The translator grinned, his teeth looking like he had been chewing toffee and hadn't bothered to swallow.

"Look... I don't have anything to give you..."

Bob looked Rimmer up and down, his sanitizing eye valve wiggling suggestively. The translator mimicked Bob's gesture, and embellished with a lick of his lips.

Rimmer shielded his chest with his hands. "You can't be serious. I'm not going to... with a skutter!"

Bob's claw jerked back, he emitted a noise like a squealing servo.

"His Lordship says that he has no interest in humans. He does, however, have one or two tasks you might perform for him."


###


As Rimmer shaved his legs in the cramped men's room stall, he tried to decide which indignity was worse. The school girl uniform with the pleated skirt, sailor's collar and thin red tie, or the ridiculously fluffy and fake blond pig tails sprouting out of both sides of his mucho libre-style red spandex mask.

Finishing his legs he set down the razor and picked up his sheer thong panties. Looking at them from several angles, he realized he'd have to do a lot more shaving.


###


"Rimmer?" Lister was staring at him.

Rimmer ignored the man, stomped into his prison cell, and flopped his duffel on the desk.

"Rimmer, why'r you wearin' makeup and barrettes?"

He glanced up at his reflection in the mirror. "Smeg!" He bolted to the sink, scrubbing at his face with fistfuls of cold water.

"Did somethin' happen?"

"Lister. I'm nearly hairless, I stink, I'm wearing a pair of woman's pants, I've done unspeakable things with a riding crop... just leave me alone."

"With a line like that?" Lister popped out of his bunk and trotted over. "It isn't humanly possible, mate."

"I thought you were still pissed at me." Rimmer turned back to the mirror, snapping the barrettes out of his hair and tipping them into a glass by the sink.

"Yeah, I am. But I never let bein' angry get in the way o' some fun." Lister grinned.
"Well, miladdio, no fun to be had here." Rimmer pressed his hands against his back and stretched. "I'm going to strip and go to bed."

"Can I see them?" Lister's grin widened.

"What?"

"The kecks."

"No."

"I'm gonna see them anyway, when you get out of your kit."

Rimmer made a lunge for the shower. Lister was closer and stepped in his way.

"I'll just take it all off at once then." Rimmer sniffed and caught his lapel.

"Wha' an' be naked in front of me?"

Rimmer froze. Lister had never seen him naked. Not in all the years they'd shared a bunk. Now it was either naked or...

He bit his thumb. He really didn't want Lister to see either versions of him. A solution came to him. "Then I'll just sleep in my smock." Rimmer nodded and walked over to his bunk, heaving himself up and in.

"You'll 'ave to take it off eventually." Lister threatened.

"Lights!" Rimmer shouted and the cell was pitched into dark. He snuggled into his pillow, content that he was going to get a well-earned sleep.

An itchy stink crawled up his nostrils and sting his sinuses. "Lights!" he yelled again and sat up.

"Wha'?"

"Did you just pass gas?"

"Naw."

"Then what's that... gassy, garlicky, sulfury..." Rimmer trailed off, sniffing his lapel. "Oh, smeg." There was no way he could sleep smelling like he'd spent the afternoon trying to crush garlic cloves into garlic wine, taken a quick dip in a vat of rotten eggs then smoked two packs of Bentley's extra tar ciggies. "Lights!" In the sudden dark he scrambled at his smock zipper.

It took a few moments for Lister to catch on. "Lights!"

Lister's grinning face mocked him from over the edge of his bunk. Rimmer paused, his smock half off. "Lights," he commanded and pulled off his undershirt.

"Lights." Lister laughed.

"Lights!"

"Lights."

"Lights!"

"Lights."

Infuriated, Rimmer jumped off the bunk, grabbed Lister's lapels and shoved up against the wall. The scouce was breathless with laughter and the impact did little to quell his amusement. "Why?" Rimmer wailed.

"W-why what?" Lister gasped out, wiping his tears with the heels of his hands.

"Why do you do this? You know I'm uncomfortable and yet you persist and persist and persist!"

Lister stopped laughing abruptly. "What about you, why'd you sleep with Kris?"
Rimmer went still for a long moment. Then he let Lister go and turned around. "I was lonely."

"What'd you do to her man? I mean... how'd you-"

"I didn't. I don't know what came over her, but she threw herself at me." Rimmer squeezed the bridge of his nose.

Lister didn't answer.

"Why do you do things like this, Lister?"

"Wha'?"

"Things that make me think you're interested in me."

"Wha'? No..." Lister chuckled. "That's just silly."

Rimmer sighed and then slowly stripped his smock from his hips and pulled it from around his feet. "There." He threw his arms wide, not turning around. "Satisfied?"

Rimmer turned around, catching Lister's gaze and, not for the first time, he saw hunger there, which the man quickly transmuted into mirth.

"And people think I'm screwed up," Rimmer muttered under his breath, shaking his head, picking up his smock and folding it into a tight square.

"What? Aren't you gonna dash for your bunk?" Lister's voice sounded baffled.

"Why?" replied Rimmer.

"'Cause..." Lister fumbled. "It's what you do."

Rimmer slipped his smock into his dresser. His fingers brushed the bulge in his pocket. Dangerous stunts or drugs. What a decision. "Well, Listy. Life has a way of putting things in perspective."

"When did you get like this?" Lister tipped back into his bunk.

"Like what?"

"So... I dunno... resigned. You scare me, man."

Rimmer sat on Lister's bunk, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. He tried to grip a memory. It was crumbly around the edges and he felt faint, but it came this time. He remembered the moment he stopped caring about everything he used to care about. "You wouldn't know this place. It's called Tween. Short for "'tween heaven and hell, but closer to hell". It was a moon in an omnidimension. I was fighting GELFs, and I came across a corpse. It was Captain Platini. You don't remember him, but he was this pompous, boorish, arrogant hologram, and he was everything I wanted to be. His light bee was fatally dysfunctional." Rimmer shivered. "I don't know if you've seen many hard-light fatal dysfunctions but sometimes the bee... gets caught in a loop at the moment of death."

"Man..." Lister whispered. "You don't have to continue-"

Rimmer felt Lister's hand against his shoulder. He shook his head. "He was caught in a repeating pattern, reliving the moment of his death over and over. His clothes and skin charred near off. Choking on his own blood and stomach acid, oozing worse..." Rimmer swallowed. "I crushed his light bee. But I remember standing there thinking, 'I looked up to this guy, I wanted to be him.' And yet... there he was nothing more then a slaughtered animal with some git standing over him who was half-glad to see him brought down that far. Everything fell away at that moment. No rank, no respect can stop death. And the only people who really give a shit about those things are people like me who will stand there, gloating over another man's corpse because they used to feel jealous of his success."

Lister's hand fell away. "What a head-trip," he said eventually. "I think you're being hard on yourself," he added.

"I don't think so. They say you find out who you really are in war. I found out I'm more ugly inside then your GELF bride was on the outside."

"But Rimmer... we all have our petty moments, yeah?"

"You're right. Most people have petty moments, Lister. I have had entire decades worth of pettiness. I mean, other men experience the emotional trauma of war and have huge epiphanies about spirituality, the importance of brotherhood and seizing the moment. My epiphany was about my own craven smegginess." Rimmer blew out a breath. "I can't even do trauma right."

Lister leaned closer to Rimmer, wrapping his arms around the man's back. Rimmer's lips twisted but he didn't push Lister away. But then Lister laid his head against Rimmer's shoulder and Rimmer shrugged him off. The man had taken it too far.

"Ya know..." Lister swung his legs out of the bunk and sat beside Rimmer. "It's funny. Now there's over a thousand other humans alive, and yet... I get to touch people even less now. I used to have Cat, comin' to me for belly rubs and krispies. Now I just got you. An' you don't like it."

Rimmer stiffened. "Why do you say things like that?"

"Like what?"

"Things you don't mean the full extent of."

"I don't understand-"

"The smeg you don't." Rimmer stood and hoisted himself into the top bunk.

Lister stood, watching him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean why do you rub up against me when you really want to rub up against her?"

"It's not like that. We're just bein' mates."

"Go to bed, Listy. I never wanted to be your mate." Rimmer slipped under his covers. "Lights."

In the dark he heard Lister shuffle into his bed. The springs creaked.

Rimmer closed his eyes.

"You could take that two ways, yeah?" Lister said.

Rimmer didn't answer.


###


Rimmer sat on Lister's bunk. He flicked the packet Bob had given him between his fingers. He'd had a rough night and he'd woken up with that itch tracing his skin.

His left leg jittered.

Lister was gone. Most likely to breakfast. Bad timing, that. He could have used Lister just then. Lister, with his irritating habits, his passive-aggressive touchy-feely ways, his mind games that were all the worse for being completely unconscious on the smegger's part.
Rimmer kept his breath even and deep. He tried not to think of the 250-foot drop just outside his door.

Lister. Think of Lister.

Rimmer threw the packet at the table. It hit and skidded off onto the floor. He rubbed the back of his head, then lay down on Lister's bed.

After a moment, he turned over and buried his face in the pillow. It smelled like the smegger. Like too many onion sandwiches, like chutney and coconut milk. It fairly stank of that vaguely chemically fake ocean spray fabric cleaner Lister sprayed his clothes and blankets down in lieu of actually doing laundry. Rimmer's lip curled.

Something prodded Rimmer in the ribs. He fished under the sheets for whatever it was, and dragged out Lister's ballpeen sock hammer.

Rimmer looked at it. Cast iron, old splintery wood. An heirloom from Lister's Gran. What'd he said about it? She used it to kill mice in their ghetto shack. Rimmer was about to throw it away, when he felt something rising up through layers of brittle memory.
He remembered Lister using the hammer to break apart a pompadom he'd found under Rimmer's bed. It'd been ossifying there, undisturbed, for a year and a half.

A year and a half? There was something very important about that. Rimmer drew his brow, trying to squeeze the importance out. It danced away like a speck of lint floating in a bath, and Rimmer gave up. He sat back up, tossing the hammer onto the table and missing again. It hit the floor with a ear-splitting clang.

Lister's sentence.

Rimmer started. Eighteen months. The length of Lister's sentence. That's how long the pompadom had been oozing pestilence under his bed before Lister had found it again. And started breaking it apart so he could pop the ceramic hard shards into his mouth. Rimmer had told him he was going to cut the hell out of his gums. Lister had grinned and said his blood hot sauce level was so high his spit could disolve anything. Not even eighteen months in stasis could cool it down.

Stasis. He remembered being alive after Lister had gotten out of stasis. He remembered he'd waited months to tell Lister the bad news. Red Dwarf wasn't going to Earth for another two and a half years. Lister would be stuck on Z shift for a quarter of a decade more. His little scheme with the kitty hadn't worked.

Rimmer remembered feeling elated. He never examined why, but he wanted Lister to be stuck with him. He'd smarmed up to Lister's side, doing his little bobbing dance and he'd leaned close as Lister sucked on his pompadom shard.

And Rimmer had kissed Lister. The kiss had been followed by a brief internal monolog with his subconscious about why, exactly, he'd just kissed Lister. He remembered his subconscious telling him in an absurdly posh Ionian accent, because you always fancied him, all the chaps and I - your Id, your subconscious, and your pelvis - decided today was the day - didn't you get the memo, milad? And then he had somehow ended up on the floor with a ringing headache and Lister giving him very sloppy mouth to mouth. At least Rimmer had never remembered that much tongue being involved in his JMC regulation CPR classes.

Rimmer pressed his hand against his eyes. It must have been a dream or a fantasy. No. The reality wasn't Lister's warm face against him, his breath teasing Rimmer's ear, his surprisingly heavy body pressed into Rimmer's hips, and that long, thick... No. The truth was Lister's empty look of shock followed by a sharp, barking laugh that punctured Rimmer like armor piercing bullets as he said, as he said... "I'm not..." And it didn't matter what Lister was not, because it all was the same in the end. Not interested.
Rimmer's throat knotted. He pressed his fists against his temple and tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Pain flared up and down his neck. He settled his hands against his knees, looking up at the ceiling, trying to ride the pain to some sort of stillness.
He must have wanted Lister so much that he had made up an impossible memory.
Rimmer stumbled to his feet, kicking the ballpeen hammer across the floor. The pain teased at the itch and the itch snapped back and began to bristle.

He clutched his chest, suddenly wanting the itch to take over.

Rimmer walked over to the hammer and leaned over to pick it up. It had skidded to a stop beside Bob's packet. Unbidden, his fingers found the packet, lifting it, the hammer forgotten.

He flopped the drugs down on his table and sat, staring at them.

He gave Lister till a count of thirty to come in.

Lister didn't come.

Rimmer starred at the colored drugs, looking like a tumble of candy drops. Some part of him was thinking it all through logically. No matter how damaging the drugs, a 250-foot fall was worse and permanent. Although, next time, that logical part of Rimmer reasoned, he would try to ask Bob for something organic, something he could process more easily. Cocaine, perhaps.

Lister still hadn't come.

Rimmer picked up a pill. A purple one. He wondered if the colors meant anything. Then he wondered if skutters could see colors. And if so, how many? The usual ones or all the fiddly ones at the end of those pretty little spectrum charts that he never fully understood. He knew they involved wave lengths and things that couldn't be seen. Briefly he wondered if there were things in the room with him, right now, that he couldn't see. Perhaps they were staring at him.

Rimmer looked up at the door hopefully. He got up and opened the door and glanced down the hall, still hopeful.

No Lister.

He thought of soft brown skin, rasta plaits whispering against his cheek, and Lister's clever hands. And then that blank face, "I'm not..."

He popped the pill in his mouth and swallowed. It stuck in his throat. He walked over to the sink and poured himself a glass of water.

Rimmer was halfway through when it started to hit. That logical part of him started up again. It was unlikely he would have a normal reaction to the drugs Bob gave him, whatever normal was. His brain chemistry had been altered. Ephedrine would have given him a feeling of contented calmness. And meth...

It came on slowly, a shiny bright that crept up the sides of his vision.

He sat down at the table and realized that it loved him. He beamed back at it, rubbing it with his thumb, thinking about the differences between animal cells and plant cells and thinking, we can make it work, you and I, despite it all. He laid his cheek against the wood, stroking the table top with his palms.

The bright got a bit too bright and Rimmer felt himself slipping up and flattening out until he filled the room like a beam of light.


###


Lister balanced a Jalfrezi danish and a bowl of krispies in one hand, his other occupied with a tall glass of chilled madras sauce. The door to his quarters slipped open and he deftly guided his snack to a landing on the table. Sitting down, he picked up his favorite and only magazine and opened it up to a well-worn article on Jim Bexley Speed.
As he crunched down on his Danish, he slowly became aware of a creeping feeling, a sort of "being observed by a snake" sensation that had set his neck hairs on edge.
Lister put the magazine down.

Rimmer was watching him from behind the bunk.

"Hey, man." Lister waved at the krispies. "I brought you breakfast." He looked down at the bowl. "I forgot the spoon, though."

Rimmer slid further into the light.

Lister put down his Danish. There was something reptilian about Rimmer. Lister's legs tensed. A part of him, the part that unerringly prophesized danger, was telling him to go. Slowly and cautiously, yes. But now. The larger part of Lister, the part that always won out, replied, yeah, but how bad could it be?

Lister started to stand, just to relieve the sudden tenseness in his knees. "Rimmer, are you all right?" Rimmer slithered closer. Lister blinked. Yes, slithered. "Ehm. Did you want me to leave?" Lister backed away from the table, towards the door. "Er. I'm sorry about the spoon." Lister glanced at the door. "I thought you could... sip it, yeah?" He turned on the ball of his foot, streaking towards the door.

"Lock," Rimmer commanded.

Lister pulled up short at the door. It refused to open. He turned around.

Rimmer was closer then he had expected. Lister jerked back, banging his head against the door. "What's wrong, man?" He eyed Rimmer. There was something distinctly snakelike about him. Lister shuddered. "You're creepin' me out."

Rimmer leaned his forearm against the door and rested the back of his hand against Lister's cheek. "Lister," he said, and his voice had a flatness to it.

"Override. Open," Lister barked.

The door didn't respond.

"I outrank you," Rimmer said blandly, his fingers slipping over Lister's lips.

"Look, whatever you want, I can't-"

Rimmer struck hard.

Lister's head hit the door with a crack. His vision became stroboscopic. Before he could recover, Rimmer caught his dreads and yanked. Lister's back was arced, and he had to widen his stance to keep upright.

"Stop. Ouch. Rimmah!" Lister scrabbled at the man's arm. He could think of more effective moves, but he wouldn't consider them. He never would, not with Rimmer. "Let go, yeah?" Lister laughed weakly.

Rimmer wrenched Lister's locks. Lister grabbed at Rimmer's hand, trying to pull him off. "Look, no thanks."

Rimmer punched him in the stomach. Lister doubled over, gagging. Once he got control of his stomach, his anger took over. He straightened and kicked Rimmer in the ankle, hard. "I said stop!" An instant after he'd done it, Lister realized that was the worst thing he could have possibly done.

Rimmer's face went stiff. He lashed out with a fist.

Lister ducked and caught an elbow to the side of the face. His sinuses filled with blood. He coughed and stumbled away.

Rimmer pressed forward, catching his locks again and pushing him up against a locker. "You fuck around with me," Rimmer hissed.

"Wha'?" Lister gasped, choking on blood.

Rimmer answered by laying the length of his body against Lister. Rimmer's body felt fevered, concern and guilt threaded through Lister's fear and anger. "Man, yer burnin' up!"

Rimmer cupped his hand over Lister's mouth and stopped, panting. His pupils were dilated. Sweat ran down his cheeks, pooling at the corners of his lips and nostrils, dripping on Lister. Rimmer smelled dank and slick, like something coughed up. Or like a wet dog, or rain on fresh tar. Lister licked his lips. Rimmer breathing hard, stinking. Like some ugly beast in from scrounging, getting the kitchen floors filthy with greasy mud.
Lister grabbed at Rimmer and pulled him in, biting his hand. Rimmer dropped it and Lister kissed him. Bit his lip, bit his tongue, and spat blood.

"Is that what you need?" Lister asked, Rimmer's ears balled in his fists, his voice harsh.

Rimmer recovered and yanked Lister's head back, his teeth scraping against Lister's neck and shoulder. His hand slipped down Lister's stomach

"Wait." Lister pushed his hand away.

Rimmer shoved his shoulder into Lister's chest, hard enough to leave him gasping for air. "Shut up."

Lister swallowed as Rimmer's hand pressed past his pants elastic and wrapped around his cock.. Confused and frightened, he moaned.

Rimmer teased the tip of Lister's cock with his finger, running it along the underside and flicking. Lister hissed in pain.

Rimmer let go of Lister's locks and grabbed one of his hands, forcing it on his own hardon. Touching it was like completing a circuit. Lister pitched forward against Rimmer, his mouth open as he groaned into the man's chest. Rimmer's stink was harsh and Lister gagged on it. It made him sick and horny all at once.

Rimmer's fingers danced along Lister's cock and he tried to keep up, but he kept forgetting and stopping. Rimmer slapped him in irritation. He pressed his own cock against Lister's thigh, grinding against him as his fingers slipped over Lister's cock.

Rimmer came in a tangle of twitching fingers and Lister's shirt. Lister felt the warm slick of Rimmer's semen slide down the side of his thigh -- I've got another bloke's spunk all over me - and the feel of it sent him over the top.

He leaned against Rimmer for a few seconds, his breath short. Rimmer wiped his handful of come on Lister's shirt and pushed him away.

Lister blinked and trailed after him. He didn't want it to end. He needed to hold Rimmer, just a bit longer, just till he could figure it all out in his mind. He caught up with Rimmer, slipping his arms around Rimmer's waist.

Instantly, Rimmer spun and backhanded Lister hard enough to send him stumbling into the desk. He followed up with a kick that took out Lister's knee and sent him to the ground. Lister crawled back to his knees.

"Door!" Rimmer yelled, and kicked at Lister.

Lister scurried out of Rimmer's reach and got his feet under himself. He ran for the open door. It slid closed behind him and he heard the screech of metal against metal, then the sound of wood shattering.