Vignette - Sanity. PG.

[roadstergal.livejournal.com]

One more for the meme challenge. Set post-SMAC. Spoilers for same.


Rimmer had come to the conclusion that he had gone mad.

It was not surprising, of course. He had been forced to endure a whole host of smegged-up experiences in the past several years - any one of which would tend to drive one mad. He had died, for openers, and that one right there was a good excuse for not being all together, sanity-wise. He had been stuck on a ship and, later, a lander, with three people - if a bum, a cat, and a droid counted as people - who were not what his mum would call the right sort. He had been tortured by his own self-loathing made flesh. He had made love to a holographic woman more times than he had gotten the old in-out in his living years - which he had always assumed, with some justification, was the best time for sex.

No, Arnie J. could not be faulted for being a little soft in the old noggin.

It was a very good explanation for why he missed his old life. The one back on the lander, with the aforementioned not the right sort. Missing gurgling pipes and space weevil deep-fried in axle grease? No, there was nothing terribly sane about that.

There it was. He was utterly spare. Why, just the other night, he had taken the DJ ship to an alternate dimension that had a very Earth-like planet with a very London-like city on it. He had spent the evening in a cheap curry joint talking to a girl with an utterly foul accent and no sense of military history - simply because she wore fingerless gloves with cheap metal studs and had two dredlocks twisting down her back. She had, at the end of the evening, sucked a dollop of chutney off of her finger and asked, "Oi, govn'a, fancy a shag?" Rimmer had choked on his Perrier (and hell it had been to get in that place). The thought of bonking someone who looked vaguely like Lister, but had breasts and one of those woman-things underneath, was appaling.

Rimmer had dashed out of that pub - The Slug and Lettuce? The Wombat and Shamrock? The Farting Manatee? Something like that - and headed straight for his ship and out of that dimension.

Briefly, fleetingly, he thought about going back. Back to Starbug.

No. Lister had not done much with firmness or certainty in his life, but booting Rimmer out of the 'Bug had been one of those. Good riddance, anyway. The man ate crisps in bed and belched entire popular songs in one go on lager night. Which was every night. What kind of company was that, when he had the entire population of every single possible dimension to choose from?

But, in a very fundamentally petulant way, Rimmer wanted to go back.

"Computer," Rimmer asked, putting on his Ace voice. "Know any good shrinks, old girl?"