reddwarfslash | The Time Of Your Death - R/L

Title: The Time Of Your Death
Rating: Mild R (mostly for implications)
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister
Disclaimer: I do not now, nor have I ever, owned Red Dwarf. Nor do I make any money from this fannish venture.
Notes: For

madlovescience, with happy birthday wishes!

Trying desperately to muster some sort of interest, Rimmer turned the pages of the brochure in his hands. The soft-light object meshed badly with his hard-light body, flickering in and out of existance at the edges. It felt almost like a tickle.

Felt. That was the problem. Barely two weeks had passed since he’d achieved corporeality, and Rimmer still hadn’t gotten used to what manifested itself, after years of muffled sensory imput, like an onslaught of sensation; a ruthless, neverending tidalwave of FEEL. It wasn’t just touch, though that was perhaps the worst offender. No, it was everything; sight, smell, hearing, even taste; it was, in a very real sense, like being born again.

Rimmer hated it.

Lister wasn’t exactly helping. The grubby little man had no respect whatsoever for personal space, and whenever they were stuck together somewhere cramped, like the hallways of the endless derelicts they were forced to raid for supplies, his hands seemed to be everywhere. On Rimmer’s shoulder, pushing him in the right direction, cuffing the back of Rimmer’s head when he said something not to the goit’s liking, just ghosting against the back of his uniform, not realizing, of course, that the uniform was as much a part of Rimmer’s body as his face or hands. No. Rimmer shook his head, closing his eyes. This couldn’t go on. He needed a break. Just a little time off to himself, somewhere away from all this endless sensation. Flicking back to the front cover, he read the title of the brochure again. Time of your Death Travels – JMC-approved holographic holidays for the long-term deceased.

Rimmer snorted. ‘Long-term deceased?’ Cynical bastards. Corporate holograms weren’t meant to last very long. Continuous holographic brain-and-body-simulations cost tremendous amounts of run-time and money, and were entirely the property of their caretakers. You did what they told you to, and as soon as someone more important needed to be resurrected, you were terminated without ceremony. Well, there was usually a round of tea and biscuits at lunch time, but on the whole, those who had lives just went about them. “Congratulations,” Rimmer read aloud, “after three years of service, you have un-lived longer than the average JMC-holographic staff member. By this time, it is usually recommended that you take some virtual time off.” He frowned. Three years? He’d been operational now for… he did a quick mental calculation… at least five, if not six. He was well overdue! He read on. “Our specially designed simulated holidays take place in a manner of minutes to an outside observer, but your electronic mind will be able to perceive it at the intended pace of two full weeks.”

Two weeks! Two weeks without Lister, without that interfering android; without that bumbling feline! Rimmer sighed, happily. Bliss. If only he could figure out how to activate this thing… He’d found it by accident, looking through Starbug’s file archive. There was a small section on staff recreation, with an even smaller sub-section about the welfare of holographic crewmembers. There was a verbal command he was supposed to utter; one which would trigger the holiday subroutine. Getting the brochures had been simple enough; he’d only had to downloaded it into himself from Starbug’s database. His wireless uplink took care of that. He’d assumed that the command would be in there, somewhere, but it didn’t seem to be. He was a little puzzled by the fact that the brochure was soft-light, but then again, Kryten had never been able to explain with any degree of satisfaction how Rimmer’s new bee actually worked. Perhaps the brochure code wasn’t entirely compatible with Rimmer’s new hardware. Perhaps you needed more than just a hard-light bee to project a hard-light hologram; smeg knew what exactly it was that Legion had done to him.

Frustrated, he threw the brochure onto the table, where it got stuck half-way through one of Lister’s smeggy coffee-cups. A little bit of text poked through one side, in cheery yellow letters. “Pff,” Rimmer groused, “Fun in the Sun indee…”

The world collapsed, and with a ‘tink’, Rimmer’s bee fell to the floor.

“Go on then; do something!” Lister plonked the light bee onto the medi-bay table, and looked up at Kryten, expectantly.

The mechanoid blinked back at him, forlornly. “I’m sorry, sir – there’s really very little I can do.”

“You’ve fixed him before, haven’t ye?”

“His bee, yes. This is a software problem.”

In the corner, Cat paused in carefully applying a hardening agent to his nails. “A what-now problem?”

Kryten shifted, uncomfortably. “If Mister Rimmer were a person…”

“He is a person,” Lister protested, “specifically, a bastard.”

“A biological human being if you like, sir,” Kryten corrected himself. “If he were, I would have said that there was nothing physically wrong with him. The problem is all in his mind.”

Cat blew at his newly polished nails, looking unimpressed. “There’s something wrong with light-for-brains’s head? I could have told you that.”

“Look,” Lister brushed a box of gauze, and some confusing-looking instruments to the side, and sat down on the table next to what was, for the moment, Rimmer. “Don’t bother dumbing it down, just tell it like it is. I’m a seasoned space-traveler now; I know my way around the insides of a computer. Give it to me straight.”

Kryten blinked. “Very well, sir. I believe what has occurred is a run-time error caused by a backwards-compatibility conflict between Mister Rimmer’s new hard-light code and the soft-light code in the holiday program. Combined with the corruption of the time-away-subroutine which must, naturally, have occurred after years of storage, I’m sure you can appreciate that this problem is a bit of a pickle.”

“Wow!” Slinking closer, Cat pointed at the dormant bee with his polish-brush. “So what you’re saying is that unless we all run backwards, Spandex Thighs is going to turn into a pickle?” He grinned, eagerly. “What happens if we all run forwards? There’s a treadmill in the gym!”

“No,” Lister snapped, “he means… erm… ” he hesitated, glancing at Kryten, pleadingly.

“In short, sirs, Mister Rimmer tried to run an incompatible program from an outdated system on himself. While there is nothing wrong with him, that doesn’t mean the program will work properly.”

“So,” Lister said, impatiently, “where does that leave him?” Kryten looked back at him, clearly nervous. Lister leaned in a little closer. “Spit it out,” he mumbled.

“Erm… best case scenario, nothing happens.”

“Well, we’re pretty sure something did happen, aren’t we? Worst case?”

“Worst case…” Kryten shrugged awkwardly, his shoulders being the wrong shape for it. “It crashes him, causing irreparable damage.”

Between them on the table, the bee rolled to and fro.

This jungle was nothing like the swampy, murky depths of the psi-moon shaped by Rimmer’s mind. In fact, it was nothing like a real jungle at all – not that Lister had been to any, but he was pretty sure that in actual jungles, you didn’t find completely identical-looking parrots in completely identical-looking trees every five meters. Proper, actual jungles probably didn’t smell like ‘tropical breeze’ air-freshener and pineapple, either.

It wasn’t unpleasant. It was a bright summer day, though when Lister looked up, he could see no sun, and a mild, cooling breeze seemed to be wafting in from every single direction. Pushing aside some of the foliage, none of which was barbed or sticky or even damp, Lister peered out into what appeared to be a clearing. “Rimmer,” he yelled, stepping through, looking around nervously. According to Kryten’s calculations, five minutes of holiday-program run-time equaled two weeks of subjective time experienced for the hologram running it. Rimmer had been running the program for just under an hour, which meant that, from his point of view, he had been lost in this scenario for almost six months. There was no telling what he might have gotten up to.

The clearing was actually the beginning of a beach, Lister saw now, a long, too-white, too-perfect beach, with too-blue waves washing over the far-too-glittering sands. Steadying himself against a palm-tree, Lister peered out towards the water. The next moment, he was pressed up against the swaying trunk by what felt like a blue hurricane, hitting him right in the solar plexus, and wrapping its arms around him. And now it was taking hold of his cheeks, clutching them in desperation, and prying his lips open with an eager mouth and tongue.

Hang on, Lister thought Rimmer? No. It couldn’t… but who else could it… Rimmer??

“You’re not real!” the hurricane cried, grabbing Lister’s waist and kneading the soft flesh there, “I can’t feel you; you’re not real; none of this is…”

Lister kissed him back. It didn’t feel like much. The whole experience was muffled, like a badly made copy of a holo-vid. Still, a snog was a snog, and he leaned into it, giving it his all. If Rimmer wanted a tongue-lashing, Lister would smegging well show him how it was done!

“No!” Rimmer pulled away, stumbling backwards, wide-eyed. “It’s not real; it’s like the castaway virgins all over again! It’s not fair – I’m not a bad person, I haven’t deserved this – why am I still here…” His voice faded away into a pathetic croak as he fell to his knees in the sand.

Gently, Lister walked over to kneel beside him. “It’s the program,” he said, reaching out to put his hand on Rimmer’s shoulder, instinctively. He jumped a little when Rimmer grabbed it and pressed it closer. “It’s set to run for the amount of holiday time yer due, and yours was three million years worth and change.”

Rimmer looked up, blinking through reddened eyes. “Lister?”

“Yeah, man, it’s me. Really me.”

Rimmer squeezed his hand harder. “Get me out of here.”

“We’re working on it. Meanwhile, I checked in to see how you were doing.”

“Not great,” Rimmer mumbled.

“Yeah, I could tell.”

Lister stood there, holding Rimmer’s hand until the world faded away.

Bright, blinding light; the sudden smell of stale shipboard air hitting him straight in the nostrils. The roaring, thundering sound of engines humming. Rimmer gasped, feeling himself materialize in his hard-light body. “Oh, god.”

He could feel. He could feel the hull beneath his boots. He could feel his boots! His entire body thrummed with relief , and need, and longing; all at the same time. Then; a voice. “Y’all right, man?”

Rimmer blinked until the blindness faded away, revealing Lister’s worried, peering face, still with the AR-helmet on, visor up. He was just close enough to grab, so Rimmer did, pulling him in and breathing in the scent of sweat and skin and hair and a very human body, pressed against his. He knew that in a few seconds, Lister would start struggling, and pull away, and Rimmer would realize what he was doing, and feel ashamed and annoyed with himself, trying desperately to hide the erection he could already feel asserting itself. They would glare at one another, and Rimmer would run back to their quarters, getting himself off quickly before anyone would question why the door was locked, lying in Lister’s bed and breathing in that same, solid scent. Life, or death, would return to normal, and they would never speak of this again. That was a few seconds away, however, so for now, Rimmer allowed himself to enjoy the moment.

Lister would start struggling, now.

Any moment now.

Any moment.

Smeg.