reddwarfslash | Fic: Between Heaven and Hell - R/L

Title: Between Heaven and Hell
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister (implied)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Still don't own Red Dwarf. Still don't make money from it.
Spoilers: Most of series VII
Notes: A real quickie, written at the info-desk at the con I'm at. Inspired by

roadstergal's recent stories. Take it for what it is. ;) Written as part of the

fanfic100 challenge - my table is here.

You should not have such hellish dreams on sheets that felt like heaven, Lister mused groggily. Every night it was some variation of the same; Rimmer, unarmed (frequently naked), approaching him friendly and openly. And Lister would strike him down; hurt him, torture him even. Torture? Lister, who had always abhorred the idea, who could not even watch any kind of horror film were people were slowly agonized to death; that he of all people should have such dreams disturbed him to the very core of his being. It was hell.

Getting drunk helped. He never seemed to have any kind of dreams when he was drunk, except the odd, blurry sort of sexual fantasy. He could handle those. At least he never started chopping up the vague, Kochanski-like beings that tended to pop up whenever those came around.

He hadn't gotten drunk for a while though. Not, he supposed, since Rimmer's death-day party. And that had been before... Well, before. There just hadn't seemed to be time, what with the meeting alternate version of themselves, and crawling around in the ducts and whatnot. Yeah, heaps of fun they'd had. Not that shutting himself in his quarters and downing an entire bottle of brandy that he'd secretly taken from their last derelict raid could, perhaps, be classified as "fun", but Lister didn't really feel like socializing. He didn't quite feel like a lot of things these days, and parts of his brain was constantly trying to tell him he should be worried about that. He had been trying his best, this late evening and early morning, to drown them out with alcohol.

Even so, drunk as he was, sleep would not come. Perhaps he had come to equate the feeling of that lavishly soft linen with the nightmares; perhaps he was just not tired enough. Days seemed to be filled either with mind-numbing boredom or frantic action, and the former had just about begun to take over from the latter. Lister sighed, and clutched the empty bottle to his chest, climbing into bed with his boots still on, twisting the top of his long-johns off as he crawled under the blanket. Maybe if he screwed his eyes shut and tried very hard to think of nothing. Maybe so.

Stars, not the static kind outside, which never seemed to change, no matter how far they travelled, but the moving, swirly kind, danced underneath Lister's eyelids. No use. He didn't feel tired at all, not one bit. All that increased as his body twisted and turned on the slippery surface was a frustratingly insistenthorniness. He moaned, which turned into a sigh, which turned into a soft sort of sob as he turned on his stomach, the bottle rolling to the floor and underneath the bunk, the pillow muffling the further sounds escaping him as he noticed, with some sense of urgency, that he was not alone in the bed.

And it didn't matter that it was impossible (because who was to say what was possible, with everything they'd been through lately), and it didn't matter who it was; it only mattered that it was here and now and naked bodies and no pain and hurt or axes or swords or blood. Only the rush of blood and feel of skin, and someone undoing his boot-laces with their teeth, running fingers over the stiff hairs running down his stomach towards his groin, grasping his erection, then lips; lips everywhere, and soon, no words at all.

He woke up the next morning with the single, clear image of a face in his mind, took one look at the sheets, and tossed them into the incinerator.