Imperfect Circle (Part 2/?)

[tsukinobun.livejournal.com]

Imperfect Circle
Part 2/?
Rating: Still PG
Pairing: our!(Ace)Rimmer / holo!Listy
Beta: the unstoppable plotbunny breeder, dauphkantus 
Warnings: yummy mpreg!
Notes: I restate -- magic!holo!baby. That alone should be enough to get you to read it, I think.

           

Waking up with the sensation of another body pressed against him, Lister felt peaceful. He had missed this feeling. Even in the first few seconds of transition into consciousness, he hadn’t confused the other man’s form with Krissie’s. There really was no comparison; he would know her right away. And though this wasn’t her, it was a comfort to feel someone’s arms around him. Even Rimmer’s.

            Moving to sit up, his head pounded. Oh, god. He’d drunk so much last night. His memory wasn’t too clear, but judging by the state of undress he and his still-sleeping guest were in (and the tell-tale soreness he could feel around certain areas), he had a fair idea of what had happened. Rimmer looked quite sweet, quietly snoring next to him. Bizarre to think he was another version of the goit he’d lived with once, in this very room.

            He smiled slightly at the thought that if things had played out differently in this dimension, he and his Rimmer could have been lovers. Sharing this room might have been their cover, their sanctuary. Hell, it might even have been bearable! Arguing all day, fucking all night…

            But of course, Krissie.

            He felt guilty at having had such thoughts about Rimmer. His time with Kris had been precious. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. He was just speculating.

            Rimmer began to stir on the bed. His eyes opened, and fell on Lister’s face. They widened, then shut again as he quickly brought a hand up to his face.   

            “Smeg, my head is killing me…”

            “Yeah,” Lister grinned, moving to stand up. “Mine too. Must have been some wild sex, though, eh?”

            Rimmer shook his head like he was trying to wipe the filmy window of reality to see through it clearly.

            “I can’t remember anything.” He stated, his voice gruff with hangover regret.

            “Eh? That’s a shame, me either. But something tells me it was quite intense.”

            “Oh?” Rimmer asked, squinting up at Lister, who now walked across the room to pick up his boxers. “What makes you say that?”

            Lister visibly winced as he pulled the underwear up over his buttocks. He then turned to smirk at Rimmer suggestively.

            “…Ah,” Rimmer acknowledged, feeling a bit awkward. “Erm…sorry.”

            “Don’t be.” Lister said, simply.

            Rimmer wanted to say something more, but held his tongue and nodded curtly.

            “Let’s reset, and get rid of these hangovers, eh? Then we can go have breakfast. You still haven’t met our Kryten.”

            “I’m sure he’s delightful,” Rimmer said, with only an undertone of bitterness. He reached inside his hard-light torso, found his light bee, and hit the default reset code. His bee ran diagnostics within seconds and restored his bodily components to homeostasis. Ah, relief! His headache was gone. Suddenly he felt a lot more agreeable.

            Lister had reached for his light bee, too, but now stood looking puzzled. His hand pressed against the hard-light flesh of his solar plexus, but he was unable to reach the bee. In fact, he couldn’t breach his own hard-light at all. Strange.

            “Hol? What’s going on?” He asked, knowing the computer would be monitoring for his voice and appear on the vid-screen.

            “Morning, Dave,” Holly’s face said with a sly smile from where he’d appeared on the wall.

            “Morning, listen. I can’t…”

            “So what’ve you two been up to, then?” Holly interrupted, his smile giving away the fact that he obviously knew full well what had happened here last night. Hell, he probably had it on surveillance.

            “None of your business!” Came Rimmer’s reply from the bed.

            Lister ignored Holly’s question, knowing it was the best way to react. He let himself glance quickly at Rimmer’s affronted face and had to stifle a laugh. He gave Holly a look that said it all: “I know you know, now don’t embarrass him!”

            “Hol, I can’t seem to penetrate myself,” Lister explained, showing how his hand would not push through to his light bee.

            Holly grinned.

            “Well I’m sure Arnold could help you with…”

            “Hol!” Lister cut him off. “I’m serious.”

            “So am I,” Holly continued, undeterred. “From the sounds I overheard in here last night I feel very confident in suggesting that Arnold could…”

            “Holly!” Lister had to try not to smirk. It was pretty funny, but he knew instinctively that Rimmer would be sensitive to his joking about their exploits. True to form, the hologram on the bed made a noise that suggested he was more than scandalized by this talk.

            “Okay, okay. So what exactly do you need me for, eh?”

            “Well, why is it I suddenly can’t…get my light bee? I’ve always been able to before.”

            “Dunno.” Holly replied, unfazed by his own ignorance.

            “Is there any hard-light literature you have access to that might explain it?” Lister tried again.

            “Nothing, I’m afraid. Soft-light holograms, alright, yeah, some stuff. But hard-light is a totally foreign technology to me. I mean, you just sort of turned up from a derelict one day with it, didn’t you? Hell if I know how it works.”

            “Great. So if I malfunction, we have no way of fixing me?”

            “You could always turn to soft-light and then back again, see if that clears the glitch?”

            “Er, no Hol, I’d have to flip that setting on the light bee, which I can’t reach. That’s sort of the problem.”

            “Oh. Right. Well, then maybe it’ll just fix itself, you know? On its own, like.”

            Lister gave him an unconvinced look.

            “What? Stranger things have happened.” Holly defended his solution. “Some of them in here, from what I gathered around 2:16am…”

            “Thank you, Hol, that’ll be all.” Lister stopped him before he could recount details.

            Rimmer finally got out of bed and concentrated, sending a signal to his bee that clothed him in a new uniform. He preferred holo-clothes to real ones, unlike Dave. It meant they were easier to replace when creased or soiled. The remnants of his clothes from last night, which he vaguely recalled being ripped off his person and tossed away, had disappeared once outside the standard 1-foot perimeter around his hard-light skin. He was able to adjust that perimeter setting, but had rarely needed to. He found it much easier to just create new projections through his bee when needed.

            He approached Lister and tentatively jabbed at the other man’s torso, then pushed harder. There was no give. Perplexed, he checked the ease with which he could reach his own light bee again. No problem.

            “Strange,” Rimmer admitted. “Try mine,” he suggested, wondering if Lister would be able to penetrate his hard light.

            Lister’s hand met the wall of pressure that was his companion’s abdominal flesh. He held a shoulder for balance before looking Rimmer in the eye and gently but firmly breaking through the barrier. He carefully pushed through it with all his fingers (making Rimmer shudder) and touched the light bee before pulling his hand out again.

            “…Works just fine,” Lister said, with an unreadable expression.

            Arnold didn’t remember last night, yet accepted the fact that he and this other man had shared something intimate. It was something he’d never done with a man, even in all his time as Ace. Even so, having Lister touch his sensitive light bee seemed even more deeply personal, and layered with closeness. Had he really just trusted someone to hold his thrumming life source in their hand? Since waking, this was the first moment that he thought to question what he had done with Lister, and how deep he was already, inexorably, involved.

~~~

            “Mornin’ everyone,” Lister greeted as they walked into the drive room. Rimmer tried to look unassuming and pleasant, while inside he felt he’d rather have stayed in the bunkroom. Cat and Kryten hadn’t liked him much in his own dimension, it was hardly likely they’d feel differently here.

            “Well look who decided to grace us with their presence,” Cat greeted, a smile on his face so wide both men were sure Holly had spread the news. “The lovebirds,” he continued, proving their fears right.

            “Don’t be jealous, Cat, it doesn’t suit you,” Lister retorted playfully.

            Cat grinned wider.

            “No problem, bud, jealousy was the furthest thing from my mind.” He turned back to the data readouts on the screen in front of him. He then said, in a still-amused, but much more honest tone, “Good to see you smiling.”

            For some reason this made Lister stop smiling. Rimmer thought he understood. He was probably feeling guilty about betraying Kochanski.   

            Kryten appeared from the far entrance, having heard Lister’s voice from the next room, and at once descended upon the new guest.

            “Mr. Rimmer! I apologize for being unavailable for your arrival. How rude of me. I had offlined to clear up my unnecessary data files. Holly has filled me in on the nature of your preferences.”

            “My…er, preferences?” Rimmer repeated, hoping Kryten was not so blatantly referring to his buggering of their crewmate.

            “Yes, your dietary preferences, as stored in the crew’s files. I have prepared a lovely breakfast for you in the next room, complete with grapefruit juice and a side of kippers.”

            Rimmer winced slightly. He’d had enough of kippers for a lifetime.

            “Uh, thank you.” He managed to force out. He wanted to cultivate a more positive relationship with this crew than with the one he had left. Still, at every moment he expected them to throw him a snide remark, or in some other way undermine his existence. So far, though, they had been nothing but friendly. Well, except Holly. But Holly always was a git.

            “And for you, Mr. Lister, I’ve cooked up something special. I think you’ll like it, spiced sausage vindaloo with…”

            “Sorry, Krytes, but I’m not really in the mood right now. Can you give it to me for lunch?”

            “Sir! Are you not well?”

            “I dunno, really. Got a hangover I can’t get rid of. And I just feel strange. Think there’s something up with my bee.”

            “Strange how, sir?” Kryten asked, concernedly.

            “Not bad, exactly. Not sick, like. More…like I’m running on a higher frequency. I can’t really explain it.”

            Holly’s face appeared on a nearby screen.

            “Well, something’s off, that much I can tell you.”

            “What d’you mean, Hol?” Lister asked.

            “Your light bee is draining my power at a significantly higher percentage than usual.”

            “What? How much more?”

            “About ten percent more. What have you been up to that you need to drain my systems so much?”

            “This is really strange,” Lister said, speaking for them all.

            “Yeah, well I can just about handle it at this level. It’s annoying, but I can cope. Don’t get any funny ideas about draining me more, though, because I’ll start getting a bit worried.”         

            “I’ll do my best, Hol,” Lister said weakly.

            Rimmer looked at Lister and was concerned, but very glad it wasn’t his bee acting up. Of course, if it ever was his bee, he had quite a few replacements in The Wildfire. They were there, along with coffin-trackers and other Ace-centric needs, to make each change-over to the next one easier. Wait a minute…

            “I’ve got extras!” He said, kicking himself mentally for not remembering sooner.

            “Extra what?” Cat asked.

            “Extra light bees! We can just switch your malfunctioning one for a new one, easy as that! Lickety split!”

            “Eh? And you didn’t think to mention it sooner?”

            “Only just remembered,” he said truthfully.

            “Well let’s go get one!” Cat exclaimed.

            “Hold on. No.” Lister said, shocking himself.

            “Why not?” Rimmer asked, totally perplexed.

            “I…I don’t know why I just said that. I mean, it’s a great idea. I just…for some reason, no.”

            “So…for absolutely no reason at all…no?” Rimmer tried to clarify.

            “No! For some reason. I don’t know what, exactly. But…I just sense it. I don’t make decisions against my gut feelings, y’know? They’ve always served me well in the past.”

            “Your guts?” Rimmer was about to make a joke about Lister’s curried guts never being of much help to anyone else in the past, but then he remembered, different Lister.

            “Yeah.”

            No one knew how to argue with such superstitious logic, so they didn’t try.

            ~~~

            Walking back to the bunkroom after watching the others eat breakfast, Lister felt his untouchable light bee whirr unexpectedly, and he came over quite dizzy.

            Rimmer was beside him, and caught his arm before he swayed too far.

            “Something feels wrong,” Lister said, stating the obvious.

            “You’re going straight into bed,” Rimmer replied. He then helped him get there.

            Once lying down he was able to feel a bit better.

            “You know, my Lister acted like this before the boys were born,” Rimmer said conversationally.

            “Boys?” Lister asked.

            “Yes, Jim and Bexley. Nice kids,” he reminisced, his mouth turning up a little.

            “What?! We never met them.”

“No, they went back with their…er, mum. In another universe. Years ago. He was really torn up about it for months.”

“Me and Krissie always wanted to have kids,” Lister said, sadly.

            “Oh. That must have been difficult. What with you not being…”

            “Alive, yeah.”

            Rimmer was silent, leaving Lister to his thoughts.

            “I hope she’s able to have them now. With him.” It pained him to admit it.

            “What? You want her to have kids with Listy?”

            “Not really, no. But I want her to be happy. And if I’ll never see her again, I want her to be with him, and have kids, and do all the things she wanted to do in life.”

            His voice was incongruent with the sentiments being expressed. He sounded like he very much hoped she wasn’t romantically involved with the other Lister, and that she never, ever had his children.

            Rimmer heard all this, even the unspoken message, and contemplated silently.

            “We were even sure we’d have them someday, too.” Lister continued. “We saw a future echo back when she was first let out of stasis, when I’d first been resurrected. Well, we saw a few actually. But the one that stuck with us was of me, holding two little babies. I remember us being really confused at the time, too, because I was still soft-light. We couldn’t figure how I could be holding anything at all!” He smiled at the memory of he and Kristine discussing the implications of that moment, long into the night. Many nights.

            “Really? But a future echo…those aren’t arbitrary. That means it’s bound to happen.”   

“I thought so too; that the future was set in stone. But now I suppose it’s not. Maybe that would have happened. But it won’t now.”

Rimmer didn’t want to give the man false hope, so he didn’t respond. But he thought, to the best of his extensive knowledge, that future echoes were never wrong. Maybe misinterpreted, but never wrong.