Fic: Poorly - PG

[smaych.livejournal.com]

Title: Poorly
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own Red Dwarf or make any money from this.
Spoilers: Confidence and Paranoia; Legion
Notes: I blame it on being ill myself at the moment.



Lister is ill. Nothing serious, says Kryten, if you can trust a medical diagnosis from a droid whose loftiest lifetime ambition is to get Lister's underwear “whiter than white.” Apparently it's a mutated form of influenza picked up from a derelict and he should be back on his feet in a few days, nothing to worry about. And I'm not worried. However, seeing him sat there in the midsection wrapped up in a thick blanket while Kryten fetches him hot lager with croutons and other such revolting “home remedies” does dredge up some memories.

It was back in the early days of my death, or rather my early days as a hologram as technically I'd been dead for three million years by then. I was still getting used to being incorporeal, not that I'd ever been one of those girly touchy-feely types anyway. In fact, with the company I was keeping I wasn't sure that being unable to touch anything wasn't a good thing. Still, it was frustrating when he got sick.

There was nothing I could do. He lay there on his bunk, disgusting and sweaty, completely delirious. Sometimes the sweat would drip across his face, and I would start to reach out to wipe it away before remembering that I was a hologram now.

I have dreams sometimes where I'm soft light again. In them I'm surrounded by goits who won't do what I say and I feel as helpless and impotent as I did back then. I wanted to pull the stained blanket he clutched in his hands up over his shoulders, to make sure he was warm enough. I agonised over wanting to take his temperature again and not trusting the skutters to do it properly.

I could have left, smeg knows the ship was big enough that I could've avoided returning to that room for weeks, but at first I didn't. Holly was rivalled in uselessness only by the Cat, so I thought I should keep an eye on Lister. He'd already proven that he couldn't look after himself. I tried everything to distract myself - salutes, necrobics, but my attention kept finding its way back to the figure squirming around on the bunk and muttering in his sleep. When the solid hallucinations started I gave up, as I think a lesser man would have days before. Would things even have been different if I could have touched him?

It was all his fault. If he hadn't felt compelled to mope around in Kochanski's quarters, rifling through her things and reading her diary, none of it would have happened. Already molested my possessions enough, hadn't he? I suppose that's the worst of it right there: Her. He did this - put himself in danger, became ill, and dismissed it all, just so he could go curl up in her bed like a character from one of those sappy romantic films he watches. Pathetic.

What would we do if he became seriously ill one day? Just because Kryten can sew a patch on an old pair of trousers doesn't mean I'd trust him to perform surgery. Why is it always me that has to worry about these things? Every time I bring up the subject he dismisses it with that devil-may-care attitude, that blind optimism, just like he dismissed his illness two hundred plus years ago as just “a touch of pneumonia”.

Doesn't he think about anyone other than himself for a single microsecond?

Comments

[smaych.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting :) I agree that Lister is lucky - he's lucky to even be alive! That must really irritate Rimmer, who always feels that he's so unlucky.