reddwarfslash | Fic: Months - PG-13

Title: Months
Pairing: Lister/Cat, Rimmer/Lister (implied).
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I still don't own Red Dwarf, I just borrow it. I don't make any money from this either.
Spoilers: Everything - set post VIII.
Notes: A follow-up to my Dark and

roadstergal's Big Man. Won't make a whole lot of sense without them. Written for the

fanfic100 challenge - my table is here.

“All right, then?” Lister walked into Starbug's mid-section, smiling a little awkwardly and scratching his neck, trying not to think about why it was itching. A rather sullen-looking Kochanski was seated at the table, legs and arms crossed. She glared at Kryten as the mechanoid stuck his head out of the kitchen area.

“Oh, there you are, Sir! I was beginning to wonder if you were going to miss breakfast.” Kryten's tone was cheerful enough, but he had never quite gotten the hang of faking smiles. The one plastered on his face at the moment was as unconvincing as his jelly-rubber lips.

Lister hesitated, glancing at Kochanski, who just met his gaze with a look of mild disapproval, before turning back to Kryten. Something was clearly going on, but it was obvious that Kris didn't want to be the one to tell him. “So...” he said, taking a seat, “anything happen after I... er... went to bed early?” Kris rolled her eyes. All right; yeah. Fine. She knew. And Lister knew she knew – hell - everyone knew, but they also knew Lister didn't want to talk about it. What was the problem? Couldn't a guy have guilt-ridden sex with his Cat and pretend he wasn't, without getting eyes rolled at him?

“Happen, Sir?” came Kryten's voice from the kitchen. “Of course not; what could possibly have happened?” Even from where he was sitting, Lister could hear the mechanoid's leg jiggling.

“Right. It's just I thought I heard something just as w... as I was about to fall asleep. Some kind of weird noise from down near the hangar bay, like something was trying to take off from there.” It had startled him enough to sit up in bed, abruptly, which in turn had caused a pair of feline incisors to dig deeply into his neck. The bite still stung.

The nervous sound of eggs being whisked was interrupted by a laugh as fake as the smile. “Goodness no! That was just the garbage canon mis-firing. I'll have it fixed first thing after breakfast. Why would anyone be taking off from the hangar bay in the middle of the night? Why, that would mean we'd had a visitor, and who could that possibly be?” Kryten laughed again, the “ha”'s and “he”'s drowning out in frenetic whisking.

Kochanski groaned, leaning heavily back in her chair. “For heaven's sake, Kryten, don't you think this has gone on long enough?”

Kryten's angular head emerged again, his smile – impossibly - even more forced. “I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Ms. Kochanski ma'am.”

Lister looked from one face to the other, confusion seeping into his veins like the bad whiskey that had started things off between him and Cat last night. “Eh?”

“If you won't tell him, I will.”

“But ma'am,” Kryten persisted, “there's nothing to....”

“Ace was here,” Kochanski interrupted, raising her voice. Kryten's ridiculous smile froze solid, which, in all honesty, was sort of an improvement.

“What?” Her words didn't seem to make any kind of logical sense. Maybe, Lister worried, he was still drunk?

Kochanski crossed her arms again, nodding. “Yes. I saw him as I was coming in for my cockpit shift. He was running like frightened emu, so naturally I went straight to Mister Tact here, and asked what on Earth was going on.”

Scuttling almost crab-like out from what he no doubt considered relatively safe confines, Kryten pleaded at her with his eyes. “Ms. Kochanski ma'am, are you certain this is a good idea...”

Lister was starting to get a bad feeling about this. A very, very bad feeling. “Kryten, what happened? What did you do?”

Kryten opened his mouth, looking offended, but Kochanski was quicker. “He told Ace you were sleeping with Cat.”

Kryten's jaw hit the deck. “Maa,” he cried out, bending down and pulling it out from where it had rolled behind a supply crate, “a dee noo suush theeg!”

“You what?” Lister jumped up from his chair and kept moving until his chest was pushing at a shocked-looking Kryten's breast-plate, forcing the mechanoid back.

Series 4000 mechanoids had trouble enough walking forwards, much less backwards while trying to re-attach parts of their face. Kryten's legs wobbled ominously as he finally managed to slot the jaw back into place. “Mister Lister, Sir...”

“Don't you Mister Lister me! You telling me he was here?”

“Well, yes, Sir, but...” Kryten looked worried and confused. That is to say; more worried and confused than usual. With a yelp of frustration, Lister gave him a half-hearted shove, and stormed into the cockpit. The mechanoid, after reclaiming his balance, followed uncertainly.

“' That was just the garbage canon mis-firing!' Smegging idiot I am.” Ignoring the not-too-subtle winks from a widely grinning Cat, who was already cheerfully in place, Lister leaned over his console and started poking at various instruments. A lever labeled 'find Rimmer now' completely failed to magically materialize.

“Sir?” A little warily, Kryten moved close enough to look over Lister's shoulder. “What are you doing?”

Lister bent his head underneath the instrument panel to see if there were any buttons or switches he might have missed. There wasn't. “Maybe he hasn't jumped yet. We could still find him if we could get a lock on his vapor trail.”

All other noises seemed, temporarily, to fade into the background as Kryten uttered a somber “ah.”

“Ah?”

“Ah.”

“Ah?” Lister swirled around angrily. “What the smeg is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, bud,” Cat volunteered, not taking his eyes of the viewscreen, “that Captain Smarm was here three months ago.”

Lister swiveled back, his neck hurting from the abruptness of the move. “Three months?”

“He's right, Sir.” Kryten sounded calmer now, perhaps relieved that someone else had broken the bad news. Still... it was all words; all a confusing mess. It didn't fit right in Lister's head, none of it.

“But I heard him take off.”

“Well, no, Sir. You didn't. That was actually the garbage canon misfiring. There was a little bit of a misunderstanding there, I think.”

“A little bit of a misunderstanding?” Lister swiveled again to face Kryten again. He was starting to get a case of motion-sickness. “You lying to me for three months, that's one hell of a misunderstanding! Why didn't ye tell me?”

Kryten didn't reply, turning instead to adjust some wall-mounted keyboards that didn't need adjusting. “I thought it might upset you,” he mumbled, eventually, into the wall.

“Yer smegging right it'd upset me! This is me,” Lister pointed at himself, “being upset!” He exhaled deeply, and leaned down with his arms folded over the instrument panel, just missing the alert-formerly-known-as-red-alert button with his elbow. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Cat licking his lapels clean. The sight of that pink, darting tongue made his already upset stomach knot itself even further. As he lay there watching, however, something struck him. He lifted his head up a little, eying the feline. “You knew?”

Cat snorted. “'Course I knew! This place stank of bacofoil and bad aftershave for days afterwards. Urg.” He shook himself, his nose twitching.

“Yeah, but...” Captain Smarm? Cat liked Ace, everyone did. “...you knew it was Rimmer, didn't ya?”

“Oh, we all knew it was Rimmer, Sir,” Kryten said almost cheerfully, pausing in his polishing of the port-side read-out screen. “I mean, that was rather obvious.”

Lister's mouth opened, as if attempting to reply without the guidance of his brain. Rimmer had been here. Kryten had told him Lister was sleeping with Cat. But Rimmer had been here three months ago, and he was traveling in a ship that jumped between dimensions. And everyone knew it was Rimmer and not Ace. And, he realized with some further development of nausea, no one had questioned why Lister was so eager to see Rimmer again. Did everyone know smegging everything around here except him? He sighed in frustration. “There has to be something we can do. Cat, can you smell where he was headed?”

Cat leaned over, preening. “Look, buddy. You know very well what this nose is capable of..”

“Not now,” Lister mumbled, interrupting.

“...but even I can't smell between dimensions. Even if we knew where he was when he made the jump, there's no way I could make that out.” Before Lister could stop him, Cat reached out with his tongue, and licked the tip of Lister's nose. Lister swatted at it, hearing Kryten make disapproving sounds in the background.

“So basically, we're smegged. Yeah?” Somehow, this was worse than not knowing where Rimmer was – if he was alive or dead, if he was all right. He had been well enough to want to come for a visit, and smeg knows what might have happened if Kryten hadn't... no. Lister should put the blame where blame was due. Kryten hadn't been the one who'd gotten drunk and slept with Cat. Thankfully. Lister shook that particular mental image away. It was all down to Lister acting like a goit, that's what it was down to. It was gone. Everything. He bit hard into the worn leather of his glove. “Is it too much to ask for one thing to go right? Just one thing, once? I get Kris back, but it's not my Kris, and now she's stranded somewhere she never asked to come to in the first place; we find Red Dwarf, but we get thrown in the brig until the ship gets smegging eaten up! What's that then, eh? You call those lucky breaks, 'cause I sure as hell don't! I mean, what're we gonna do? Go back to Earth? I'm afraid to, man! If we do, it'll probably turn out to be run by mutant cockroaches, or filled with molten lava, or hollowed out and used as a retirement home for rogue simulants!”

Cat and Kryten exchanged glances, and Lister glared at them. He was just telling the truth. So what if that hurt. A lot of things in this universe hurt, and ignoring them wasn't going to make them go away.

“Let's face it, there's no point. There's no point to anything. I give up. There's nothing we can do.” Lister leaned back, closing his eyes. His mind felt soothingly blank, which was a welcome change. He let numbness take him. Rimmer was better off without him anyway. When the smeg had Lister ever done right by him? He'd been wrong to come back in the first place.

A polite, rather feminine cough made him turn his head. “There is something we could try.” Kochanski smiled carefully. “Assuming we have the ship's hailing signature, we might be able to extrapolate how it communicates from the information embedded in that. We know it must be capable of communicating between dimensions, or its creators would never had been able to get any data back. It's just a matter of finding the right inter time-spacial frequencies. Their tech should be at approximately the same level as Starbug's. Once we have the signatures, it's just a matter of re-programming our own systems to transmit the right signals at the right frequency in roughly the right direction. Quite straight-forward, really.” She coughed again.

Lister blinked. Gibberish. Wonderful, fantastic gibberish. “You saying we could send him a message?” He leaned forward, almost falling out of his chair, and poked the console she was standing next to.

Her smile grew broader. “Yes, but I'd suggest we use the hailing-system rather than the navi-comp.”

“Smartarse,” Lister grunted, but it was all for show. They could call him!

“It's going to take some time of course.”

The downside. Always a smegging downside, wasn't there? “How long?”

Kochanski seated herself at Kryten's usual station, and crossed her legs. “Once we find the right frequencies, the programming itself shouldn't take more than a day or so.”

“That's not so bad.”

“Well, no.” Kochanski bit her lip, and looked to Kryten for support. Perhaps feeling slighted from their earlier confrontation, he ignored her, turning back to his polishing. She sighed. “The thing is, time works in odd ways between dimensions. If we send a message now, it might arrive instantaneously, like a text-mail, or it might arrive twenty million years from now. There's really no way to tell.”

Lister didn't quite know what to reply to that. He'd run out of reactions.

“Or it could arrive before we send it,” Kochanski hurried on, seeing his expression. He must look pretty bad, Lister thought, to have her this eager to please him. “It's worth a try. Do you have anything to send?”

Suddenly, every eye in the cockpit seemed to be focused on Lister. He shifted a little, that itch in his neck beginning to bother him again. In the poor lighting, Cat's eyes shone eerily with reflected light. Lister wasn't sure he liked what they were reflecting. “Yeah,” he said, eventually. “I do have something.”