Grown-ups

[felineranger.livejournal.com]

This just a little something that came to me the other day while watching Waiting For God...

Grown-ups by Feline Ranger

Age was important to Arnold J Rimmer. In fact, the older he got, the more important he found it. Back when he was alive he’d spent days at a time in stasis; not so much to preserve his youth as to extend it - to give himself as much time as possible to achieve the all-important goal of becoming an officer. The prospect of actually getting old had never bothered him. People respected their elders. As the youngest of four children, Rimmer had learned early on that nobody respected their juniors. In Rimmer’s family, people younger than you were there to be looked down on, bossed around and humiliated. It was how he’d been brought up and it was an ethos he had kept to faithfully. It made perfect sense, after all. Younger people were less developed, physically and mentally and it was important that they didn’t forget it.

Rimmer had always felt that his relationship with Lister was a prime example of the elder/younger cosmic balance of life. Take Lister – all puppy-fat and adolescent whimsy. The boy still had football posters above his bed, for goodness sake! No concept of discipline or responsibility; and his attitude to women was that of a fourteen year old in the middle of a hormone surge who’d just fallen in love for the first time. Look at how he’d mooned over that silly cow Kochanski. Ridiculous! He had always considered it his duty as Lister’s senior – by a whole six years, four months and eighteen days – to impress upon him the importance of this age-gap and his own inherent superiority. To him, Lister had always been a ‘laddie’, ‘that boy’, an irresponsible little ‘tyke’ and he had never shyed away from telling him so. Even as a hologram, he noticed that Holly had subtly manipulated his program, so that in image he always remained a few years older than the gradually aging Lister. It had probably been a wise move; it was an illusion that benefited the mental health of them both. But just recently, Rimmer had begun to feel that illusion slipping.

He’d noticed a change, slow but sure, that terrified him. It was nothing new for Lister to ignore his advice, but he’d started to do it out of more than sheer defiance. Somehow, without Rimmer noticing, Lister had gained a kind of authority on the ship. He’d started making the decisions, and to Rimmer’s growing horror and alarm, they were usually the right ones. Lister had started to take charge. It went against everything Rimmer had ever believed and stood for.

And then one day in the mid-section, something terrible had happened. Rimmer had been hovering irritably over the print-outs scattered across the table, trying his best to look as though he were vital to the running of the ship, and Lister had wandered in to make himself some tea. He’d paused for a moment on his way out to peer over Rimmer’s shoulder, dripping tea onto the readouts as he did so; “Whatcha lookin’ at, man?”

“I am trying,” Rimmer replied irritably, snatching the stained sheet out of the way of further drips, “To locate 300 cans of Spam that we raided from that last derelict on this mess of a supplies list. Who compiled this thing anyway? It’s a joke!”

“You did, Rimmer. Three weeks ago. Remember?” Lister smiled good-naturedly.

“I most certainly did not! I always use Arial Point 10 and this is clearly done in Arial Point 12, you gimboid! Can’t you tell the difference?”

“Whatever you say. Oh look, there it is,” Lister pointed a stubby finger at a sheet Rimmer had already looked at three times. “Right above where it says ‘This sheet was compiled by Arnold J Rimmer BSC/SSC on Tuesday 14^th of Geldof.” Lister grinned infuriatingly and Rimmer felt a red flush rising from the base of his neck upwards. “Will you get out of here, you fetid lump of rancid yak semen! You’re distracting me!”

He fully expected the insult to be thrown back at him, thus completing the circle of life – or life as he knew it, but instead something dreadful happened. Lister simply grinned and walked away. Rimmer was flummoxed. This was not how it was supposed to go. “I said, you’re a fetid lump of rancid yak semen, you grotty disgusting space-bum!” he shouted after him desperately, but Lister was gone. Rimmer looked down at his hands. They were shaking. This was not right. This was not right at all. Lister was meant to snipe back at him with some childish comment that would attest indisputably to Rimmer’s superior wit and character. Not walk away. Not – God forbid – be more adult than him.

Rimmer felt a pang of something deep inside that wasn’t just wounded pride. How old was Lister now? Thirty-four, even thirty-five maybe? Their lives were so repetitive that the idea of so many years having passed was difficult to visualise somehow. They had nothing to measure time against, no yardsticks or markers except for the occasional derelicts they raided. Now he’d looked at his bunkmate, really looked at him for the first time in...well, too long; and seen a ticking clock in his eyes. The boyish uncertainty had faded to be replaced with something else; something wiser, more confident. Something older.

Rimmer felt a surge of very raw, very unexpected emotion. A sudden powerful longing for the cheeky, irrepressible boy he had known. The boy who had left socks all over Rimmer’s neat floor and teased him about his underpants; who wore t-shirts idolising cartoon characters and was not above sticking his tongue out at a toaster. Oh, some things would never change – the appalling guitar, the daft moral idealism, the underpants; but something else had been lost forever. Lister was all grown-up. And despite the infinite number of times he’d said it, sighed it or even screamed it, Rimmer wasn’t sure anymore that that was really what he wanted.

Comments

[topsecretpr0nlj.livejournal.com]

There is some VERY cool stuff going on here. Rimmer being simultaneously jealous of and mourning Lister's mortality. I wish I'd thought of that. Also the very him structure of calling someone "all _____ and ______."

Good job and thank you very much for sharing that. Seeing a new post up made my evening.