reddwarfslash | Fic: Reflection

Pairings: Lister/Rimmer
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Series VIII
Disclaimer: Of course I have no legal stake in this, I just do it for fun.

He’s gone now, back on the other side of the mirror. I feel like I’ve taken a boot to the chest. I mean, how is it possible for it to hurt this much? How is it possible to lose one person twice, to have two holes in my heart for one man? One’s feeling deep and sore, and now another’s there, a sharp, stabbing pain, like a bullet.

Stupid. I’m stupid. I was given a second chance, and I blew it. I deserve this feeling, this and worse. But I can’t live like this, so I really need some help. There’s no one that can help me, though. That’s why I’m talking to myself. That’s all this thing is, really. Just a microphone and a hard drive. It made sense for Rimmer, you know, when he was soft light, but I never understood why people bought the things otherwise. Maybe they didn’t have anyone to talk to, either. Maybe they had to confess to something. It’s not as good as confessing to a real person, but if you’ve got something really bad to say, you don’t want someone to hear, now do you? Cos you’re ashamed of what you have to say, but you’ve got t’say it, or else it eats you alive inside. At least, that’s what it’s doing to me. I’m a murderer, a twice over, smegging heartless bastard. I didn’t go back for him. I didn’t even try. I just… just left him in there. He’s not here, so he must have gone back, back to that mess where he left us. When you’re scared enough, maybe you believe that there’s nothing you can do, but I didn’t even try. I ran. Me. I never ran like that before. I think I understand, now… I understand a lot. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I blamed him for running.

When I first saw him, flesh and blood, I saw a chance to make it all better, and then he had to go and open his mouth, didn’t he? And it was nothing like I remembered. It was like when I first met him, scheming, conniving, insecure, nasty. But I missed him, see, so I treated him like he was mine. That’s when it happened. He started to act human. I think I resented him a bit, at first. I’d forgotten what he used to be like. He didn’t act like I wanted him to act, like. But I was lonely, and imprisoned, and that’s how I got to know him in the first place, back on the Dwarf. Maybe it’s because I’m older, maybe we got on a bit better, just a bit, and I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like if I had kept this one with me for the next six years, how much he’d have changed. How much closer I would’ve been to mine, if I wasn’t such an immature bum when we’d met. I was awful, wasn’t I? But he was worse. He was the worst! And that’s what I got when he came back to life.

You know, I never used to bother tryin’ to make sense out of anything. Then I got myself a new Kochanski, and a new Rimmer, and my mind was comparing them both back and forth and suddenly it mattered, like, I had to make sense of the universe because if I didn’t, those two people I loved would be swept under the carpet, so to speak. Rimmer was always obsessed with finding some grand, secret meaning to life, and Krissie was after the stuff that was more physical, secrets hidden in atoms and things like that. I have to remember all of those little details. If one person remembers, then those people are never lost. It’s like how Cat sings those off key songs about all those Cats that lived centuries before he was even born, and maybe he doesn’t care, but that stuff is important. All those other Cats remember them, too. Maybe there’s still someone left on Earth. Maybe if I find them, I can tell them all about Rimmer, and about Kris, and I won’t have to lie there at night remembering anymore.